#sorry just a lot of irl stuff decided to come together to kick my ass all at once

[cellgatinbo]

woo awesome fun yeah great time for like everything to go wrong 👍

[wesimpforxiao]

My Backstory (IRL)

Before I begin, if you want nothing to do with hearing about abusive relationships, possible eating disorder, anxiety disorders/depression/suicide, sexual assualt, manipulation, gaslighting, sexual harassment, etc, SKIP THIS POST.

So, I would like to start off by saying the NSFW content I *try* to write always falls stale, 1. being because I get embarrassed or ashamed by my writing my own thoughts, and 2. because of the rest of this post.  So the Albedo NSFW may not happen, but I asked just in case (i have some of it written out, but it is very stale).  And also because I may or may not have accidentally triggered a trauma response as I was writing the Albedo post (oops...)

To begin, freshman year of high school, 14 yrs old, (I’m 20 and in college now), I started dating this guy that was in my grade.  I have an anxiety disorder, so when we started going out, I immediately stopped eating because I constantly felt sick to my stomach.  It wasn’t because I thought I was fat or anything, I just felt sick.  Think butterflies in your stomach times 10 and ALL the time.  We dated for a month before he broke up with me.  During that time, he had suddenly brought up the idea of me sending nude or bra/undie pics to him.  Him and his friend (who was in the call with us) tag-teamed and said that it was normal and asked when I would be ready to send pictures.  Both of them asked that.  Red flag number one.  I said 3 months just to please them, not that I was actually going to do it.

Once he broke up with me, I was DEVASTATED. I feel A LOT, and it was my first ‘relationship.’ Exactly a month later, he texted me, saying he wanted to be friends.  I said okay.  He never acknowledged my presence at school, often avoiding my eyes.  Sometime into that he had asked me what I would do if he had asked me out again, and when I said I’d say yes, he immediately texted back and said “i am so sorry, my friend [insert name] was texting you on my phone and I didn’t know until now.”  Red flag number two.

Then, after we had stopped being friends, a month passes.  He texts me again, this time saying “It’s been 3 months.”  Yeah.  Did you read the part where I said I’d consider sending pictures at 3 months? That only applied if we were dating for that long (and I still wouldnt do that), so where is his logic?  Now, I don’t know why I even got back together with him, but I did.  For a week.  And just like the first time, I felt sick to my stomach.  I always look back on this as a warning from God.  And this time, he wasn’t hiding his intentions.  He was CONSTANTLY making sexual jokes, sending inappropriate emoji ‘jokes,’ and asking for nudes.  He did not stop asking even when I told him to, and even when I told him it made my stomachache worsen.  I did not trust him, but I stayed for a full week of hell.  Eventually I slightly caved, showing him on facetime me in my bra and underwear (My thinking: he couldn’t save pictures that way).  He covered his camera.  Did he take screenshots or something? I don’t know.  It was awful.  I kicked him to the curb the next day, still feeling like *I* should be the one apologizing.  He eventually “tried” to apologize thru text, but was too much of a coward to apologize in person when i requested that.  He says he had cancer or something, I honestly don’t care. His actions were inexcusable and it was pathetic that he used it as an excuse.

I hated him so strongly for the next 3-4 years, but the story doesn’t end there.  A new guy, senior, 17 yrs old.  End of my freshman year.  We get together.  He didn’t properly ask me out, just assumed we were dating after we confessed our feelings EVEN THOUGH I told him my dad said to wait 3 months.  Red flag number three.  So, by the bf’s standards, 6 months into the relationship, I stay over at his place for New year’s.  I will admit that we did stuff over the phone prior to then, but I consider to be fine with that timeline.  At some point while we were planning to do stuff (if ya know what I mean but NOT full on hoo-ha stuff okay) for New year’s, he said “Who knows, maybe we’ll get carried away ;)” Red flag number four.  This immediately made me uncomfortable, and I was not fully comfortable when the day came either.

We were making out (consensual, but I feel like i was forcing myself a bit), I let him touch me down *there* (which he sucked at lemme tell ya) (also it was fine when he touched me before this day), and then he asked to touch my chest.  *Previously, he had stated if i wasnt sure, hed touch over my bra first and go slow.  He did not do either, instead immediately slipping his hand under my bra.* That is when something inside me snapped, and I felt number than I already was. Red flag number five.

I didn’t stop him because I wanted to feel something, anything.  I got nothing.  And then came the time when he decided to say “Now its your turn,” grabbed my hand, and put it down his pants, ignoring me, who was saying “I don’t know how to, I’m not sure I want to.”  

I felt nothing for a few days, and then depression set in.  It didn’t feel connected to that incident, and i didn’t connect the dots until later.  It got so bad I had almost decided to kill myself three months later.  My anxiety was through the roof, and every day my trauma manifested itself in the question “Do I actually love him?”  It was a living hell to be inside my head all the time.  He at one point asked me “Are you sure you were okay with what happened on new year’s? You’re acting like you’ve been raped.”  When I said I wasn’t, he said “oh.” and we never talked about it again.

The relationship continued for another year despite my obvious depression and anxiety that revolved around him. He lied to me on several occasions, disregarded my boundaries (i.e. continued to make sexual jokes even though they clearly bugged me after the assault), and refused to get a job so he could smoke weed all day.  My parents urged him to prove himself (he was out of high school by this time), and when I eventually took their side and gently nudged him along, he said “You are in a relationship with me, not your parents.  Its either me or them.”  Red flags six through ten right there.

When I managed to break it off with him, a ‘friend’ apparently took his side.  This is the girlfriend in the “His Reaction to Your Ex(es)” post(s).  This friend was actually an adopted cousin of mine, and we were not on speaking terms at this point because she had taken my first bf’s side, saying that *I* had to forgive him and that I was in the wrong for not wanting to talk to him or accept his half-assed apologies. (She was not at our school during the time me and that guy dated so she literally knew nothing).  I cut her off because of that.  Turns out she had a massive crush on the dude and he was already taken by someone else.  

So, this same chick sides with the second bf, telling people that I’m the one who hurt him and whatnot.  I come to find out that him and her are now dating and honestly, it is hilarious.  Even I think she deserves better.  He has no future, and I came to realize that, knowing that if i stayed with him longer I would have 100% actually killed myself, or died spiritually.

So yeah, that’s my story, hopelessly in love with fictional characters now because I am too traumatized by what they have done.  I cannot be touched sexually without reverting to a depression or an anxious mess.  Even if I did manage to be in a relationship after that, I don’t think I’d ever be able to have sex with someone. And finally I cannot have a healthy relationship, because what is that, really?  I’m just gonna live alone with some goats LOL.

[neshabeingchildish]

Hensley & Char: Friends or Whatever || Part 6

I have to warn y’all, this chapter has some sadness in it. I tapped into 15 year old me and how I was trying to navigate what I thought back then was me being bi, which IF someone calls me bi, I am not opposed to the able, even being technically ace, but for that time and for my feelings/experience and the language I had access to, that’s what I was considering myself as, but nobody knew that (though I was rumored gay by several people in high school, despite never seeing me in any relationships and me only ever speaking about male crushes to others) LOL, yes, Mama used to have male crushes irl, when I was a kid. But, I tapped into some of myself, but made it more Charlotte-like and leaned on the gay. Idk how well it will or won’t resonate, but I hope that I at least did Charlotte justice in her experience with looking inward, though her results may be disappointing, I hope that they at least come across as realistic, if not relatable or understandable. @just-a-j-reallly @junknstu1f @henryharts I’m not in a rush for feedback, as I know everybody has things going on. Hopefully my tags work out. A lot of people never get notified of them.

Also, as a heads up, the next chapter, whenever that might come, might also be sad too. I’m so sorry. 

The Jasper Juxtaposition

They had been trying to get Jasper into the fold of their outfit for a while. Ray wasn’t having it. Even whenever Charlotte basically throw her pride into a burning bin, seeping with trash juice, to pretend that she was secretly dating Hensley, but that they couldn’t tell anyone because, “Charlotte’s not out of the closet.” At this point, Charlotte was very heavily debating this ruse. 

There was an element of “people shouldn’t lie/joke about being in the closet,” which she strongly and firmly believed in… But… She went along with it anyway, because as she did her backstory for this test on Jasper, she found that she comfortably created the guise. 

“I can say that I’ve been curious about my sexuality for a while, and seeing you out of the closet, living your best gay life inspired me to come to you for advice on how to navigate figuring it out and in the process, we fell for each other and started dating secretly.”

Hensley laughed in her face and said, “It’s Jasper, Char. You don’t have to say all of that. Just be like, “We’re gay together, Dude.” He’s gonna accept it and be super chill about it. I’m not convinced there’s a pile of homo rattling around in him, if we’re being honest. PLUS, he thinks we’re both hot. He’s gonna get a kick out of us kissing and stuff.”

“I’m not kissing you!” Charlotte squealed.

Hensley turned up her nose, “What? Ew. No! Of course not. Ugh. This incites disgust, to think of it.” She shook her head, “Kissing a straight girl… in the mouth? I don’t know where your mouth has been. On boys, probably. I don’t want boy kiss transfer.”

“You kissed Chloe all the time!” Charlotte argued, unsure of why that was her response instead of arguing that she didn’t want to kiss Hensley (and hadn’t been kissing any boys, unless you counted kissing Jack Swagawitz at camp… which… she didn’t), and furthermore…

“Chloe was different, though. I really liked her,” Hensley said.

“You went out with Bianca as soon as you had a window,” Charlotte muttered.

“You told me to go for it! What? Now, I gotta stop listening to my smarter half?”

They bickered up until the moment that Jasper came over for them to feed him the lie. Whoa, were they bad at lying together… Fortunately, it was Jasper. Who, Charlotte was very disturbed by his fascination with the thought of them kissing. “Jasper is fetishing us, and I don’t like it,” she told Hensley.

“He’s not fetishizing you. He’s fetishizing fake lesbian you. It’s different.”

“Yeah, but… He’s… fetishizing lesbians!”

“He’s a dude. Dudes do that,” Hensley said, waving a hand. Charlotte didn’t like that explanation and it was often Hensley’s excuse for a number of sexist and problematic things that happened on her watch. Maybe it was for the best that Jasper didn’t pass the test. Then she’d have a problematic Hensley, and ANOTHER problematic guy at work. Ray was alright. He was nice, enough, but he said stuff sometimes that made her uncomfortable and he didn’t really listen whenever she pointed these things out. (Something that she had no idea would get worse over time, but that’s another subject.

Currently, the subject is Jasper. 

It took a while before Jasper came on board with the team. It took a while before he was ready for this secret. From the time that Hensley and Charlotte “broke up” until then, there were a lot of adventures that Hensley and Char saw together that made them really close in a way that Charlotte and Jasper were not, and even that Jasper and Henry were not. And in a way, for Charlotte, it was a lot like the fabricated story that she had spun - their secret involvement and the connecting together that nobody knew about… Also, since then, she had really been thinking about how easy it was for her to think of that, and how… relatable it felt, how natural it was to even imagine herself, keeping that sort of secret because she couldn’t tell people that she maybe… well… she didn’t really think it was so much a maybe these days… liked girls. 

More specifically, she maybe (and this WAS still a maybe), liked Hensley. Her hopeless heroine who she helped on a daily basis, and loved being so close to, even when she complained and fussed at her about the things that she deserved to be fussed at about. She would probably NEVER let her live down almost getting killed by Jasper’s crazy ex girlfriend, and she was so tired of Hensley always coming to her to get her out of stuff that she warned her about prior to the decision - like when she tried to go to the dance with Chloe as Kid Danger and Bianca as herself… STUPID HENSLEY! Charlotte decided, right around Jasper Dunlop Day that she wasn’t doing this anymore. She was going to explore her options and see what felt right. 

She bought a project board, some cards, and a science journal and she set up, literally in her closet, a little experiment center. She decorated the board, and across the top, had lettered, “Am I Gay?” Her hypothesis?: “I might be gay.” Procedure: Well, she supposed, she had to talk to some people, go on some dates, maybe kiss somebody? She shuddered. The amount of germs in saliva was terrifying to her. In fact, whenever she kissed Jack, she had threatened, “If you slip me any tongue, I’ll slip my fist right into your ribcage!” Needless to say, he slipped her no tongue.

But, her “experimentation phase” generally was not very successful for a number of reasons. 

First and foremost… meeting people? She wasn’t a fan. She joined the Student Council as a means to help her with a bit of self diagnosed social anxiety, but cared a lot about issues, so that she genuinely stayed in it to do community stuff and be a helpful member of the club. She met cool people, too! It was one of her things away from Hensley and away from Jasper, and wasn’t primarily academic, so she held it close to her heart as something for herself and decided against using it, and the fine people she met in it as lab rats for her orientation exploration.

Then, there was the little problem of personal space and unnecessary touching. There were very few people that she allowed into her bubble. Her parents, Uncle Roscoe, Hensley, Jasper, Piper, and Ray, and even with Ray, she tensed up for the longest time whenever he entered her bubble without warning. Even with that select amount of people who could be in her bubble, the only people that could casually touch her were her parents and Hensley. Sometimes Piper, but Piper had the respect to not touch her for no good reason. Unlike Hensley, who she simply had to get used to the fact that the girl was simply GOING TO just stand close, throw her arm around her, hug her, pick her up, play with her hair, tug on her backpack, or whatever she felt like doing at the time, and saying, “You should get permission before touching people,” just became background noise for Hensley, after a while, so Charlotte simply stopped saying it and adjusted. 

Jasper still sometimes got elbowed. It just wasn’t the same thing when a dude just touched you casually, she had initially thought. Maybe that wasn’t it at all and she just didn’t mind girls touching her as much, because she liked them? But… in order to figure that out, she’d have to let people in her bubble and let people casually touch her and see how she felt about it. 

So often, when it looked like somebody was getting too close, she stepped away, creating the distance of comfort for her and also, very clearly letting them see where it was. To the point that everybody who knew her knew not to get too close and everybody in her extracurriculars always did stuff like, “Hey Charlotte, I’m gonna take this lint off of you, okay?” (to which, she’d tell them to show her where it was and get it herself) or “Hi, Charlotte, do you mind if I sit here, or is that too close for you?”(To which she’d tell them to go ahead, but she’d move over more). She’d have to start telling people that being near her was okay, if she wanted to see her reactions to boys and girls and others in her proximity… And nowadays, they didn’t even ask anymore.

Even Mitch Bilsky would take one look at her and say, “UGH. The only space is by the queen of “don’t stand so close to me?” He’d then still do it, and even purposefully make her squirm, but she would resolve to ignore him and he’d get bored and move along.

But, she didn’t have very many times to test this out, and had to eventually rule out trying to get close to people (or let them get close to her) to see if she might feel a little flutter or not. 

Lastly, in addition to not being a people person and not wanting anybody in her personal space, The Man Cave was a whole ass full time job to maintain. She began to wonder what happened to people who previously worked for Ray/Captain Man? Even the ones that were there when she got there, and ones that would pop in and out for little assignments… after a while, she just didn’t see them, and she either was assigned their jobs, or took it upon herself to do them for worry of things going terribly wrong if she didn’t. Things went wrong in general, and she often felt like if she didn’t step in whenever she did, they could be downright disastrous. This job basically became her life. She never signed up for another marathon after dropping out whenever she thought the Super Volcano would kill them. She still had StuCo, but that was school related and when push came to shove, she only forsook the Man Cave for educational purposes, unless it was an extreme emergency.

In fact, she completely gave up on testing it all out and just let it bother her beneath the surface. Her conclusion: I’m more confused than ever, but technically… going to consider myself in the closet.

Imagine if I was as comfortable with myself as Jasper is…

You couldn’t tell that boy nothing. He protested stupid Swellview laws, jumped into hero mode to get his own hero day, wore belly shirts to everyone’s chagrin, was willing to go to tremendous lengths - sometimes extremely embarrassing ones - to get girls, and he overshared weird facts about his body with great excitement that just let you know that he adored these things about himself… 

She couldn’t even with certainty say that she MIGHT like girls, which, she was sure that she absolutely did, but she could hardly admit it to herself, much less out loud. What if it hurt her? What if it affected how she was seen by people on college boards or in the job field, once she left Swellview. Sure… there were YEARS before this happened, but Charlotte had been thinking ahead since she was small, and the moment she felt an inkling that her feelings may be… counterculture, she began to research related laws and statistics. 

Swellview didn’t have a big Black population. In fact, the demographics indicated that there were a lot more lgbt citizens than there were people who weren’t white, period. So, in Swellview, perhaps it wouldn’t be anything to be open about her sexuality… but… what if it was different for her, like a lot of things were. It was often different for her as a girl to be accepted in some spaces, to be listened to, to be respected. And it was frequently double different for her as a Black girl. Even the “good” people made her feel things that she often didn’t want to complain about, because they ALREADY thought she was an angry girl, when she couldn’t think of very many instances in which her anger was not justified. Research told her that was a common issue for Black girls and women. She didn’t have enough around her to touch base with, and was frustrated that she had to consider all of these intersections to even consider whether she would be free enough to have a sexual identity. 

Even with her academic record, immaculate articulation, and non-threatening appearance, Charlotte didn’t have many friends and didn’t have the best reputation. She was a nerd, but also, unfriendly. A Black girl in a male dominant world, in a white dominant city, and to possibly also be gay… she just… she couldn’t just toss that out there and have it attached to her name without knowing, and she felt like a coward for feeling like that. 

What would be the big deal, Charlotte? If that’s who you are… what would be so wrong about that? People be gay all over Swellview… but then again… everyday, she would see people be able to freely do things that she previously thought she WOULD never do, but as she got older realized that she wouldn’t do certain things, because she COULD never do them… not without possibly losing something. Chances? Respect? Heck, in certain areas of the world, her life. But, thinking this hard about it and not coming up with anything to push her to believe that she was indeed a straight girl, despite all of the reasons that it would be SO easy, and she loved easy things, despite her knack for tackling hard things. Why wouldn’t she just accept that she was straight, if that would make all of this anguish and confusion go away? She could just tell herself that she was straight and get it over with and move on… IF she was indeed straight. And if she wasn’t, no matter how much “experimentation” and hypothesizing she did, nothing would make her feel those feelings that she sometimes felt around Hensley, for some boy. 

So… She just sat with it. In her closet. She didn’t experiment and she didn’t hypothesize. But, in her science journal that she had previously been writing all of these things in, she scratched out her conclusion and wrote. 

Conclusion: I’m gay. 

But, she tore the page out and wadded it up. Then, she felt bad, straightened it back out, and slid it back into it's space. She tucked her cards into it and stuffed it into a lock box where she kept keepsakes and stuff, locked it in and got rid of her project board in the Junk n Stuff dumpster. 

She had been handling Kid Danger’s secret for a couple of years now and planned to hold on to it forever. She had time to figure out what to do with her own.

Besides… by the time Jasper got in on the secret… Things changed a lot, anyway.