#survivorhood

[bipolarsupernova]

[deereelis]

The Company You Keep Defines You

There’s a saying in Spanish that goes, “Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres.” Translation: Tell me the company you keep, and I’ll tell you who you are. I’ve been thinking about this lately & how my circle of ‘friends’ evolved over the years as I outgrew parts of myself. For the most part, most of my friends have grown and evolved with me, but there are other friends from my darker youth…

[stealingpotatoes]

Does this mean Clan Wren is alive in your AU? And by "Clan Wren", I really mean Tristan, since I ship him with Ezra.

very very little of clan wren's alive, could be like 4 ppl tops who knows, but i think its unrealistic every single clanmember died. ON TRISTAN i've been flipflopping between yes and no since the show started. bc on the one hand all of sabine's family being dead works rlly well narratively, she's lost every mandalorian she loves and her whole culture and home planet and has some severe survivors guilt bc she should've been with them instead of her other (also half dead) family and she's dealing with it by being in her fleabag girlfailure era and trying to completely ignore the fact she's mandalorian at all. plus i don't want to disregard ALL of canon gotta keep some things.

on the other hand that's sad and also trizra

[gatheringbones]

one of the reasons I advocate for reading as many survivor stories as possible is because of the way it impacts your ability to leverage your self hate and self contempt against you and your survivorhood.

sometimes it goes the wrong way, sometimes a particular survivor’s story will fill you with contempt and the need to distance yourself, but compassion is a muscle it needs conditioning.

[tapioca-puddingg]

Why GoWR Valhalla Is Important

Hey. It's me again. This time I'm not yelling about Kingdom Hearts or Drakengard, but I wanted to talk about God of War Ragnarök: Valhalla today and why I think it's important in trauma-centered narratives. This isn't a detailed analysis, just me spitballing.

SPOILER WARNING: There will be spoilers for God of War Ragnarök: Valhalla, so please proceed with caution!

EDITED: 2/26/24

As a brief summary, Kratos spent almost the entirety of GoW 2018 refusing to talk about his past. His guilt, shame, and trauma deeply affected his relationship with his son, to the point where he didn't want to be around Atreus bc he was terrified of being a bad influence on him. It was only when Atreus' life was in danger did it force him to finally admit just a sliver of the truth. Now I don't mean to say that Kratos revealing his godhood wasn't a big deal because it absolutely was, I'm just saying that it's just one piece of a MUCH bigger story. Anyway, he recognized his past mistakes, but the shame was too much for him to openly acknowledge it until damn near the end of the game.

Come Ragnarök, Kratos was pretty much an open book. He had grown SO much in those short years of fimbulwinter: He openly talked about his trauma to Mimir and Freya. He worked so hard to be a good father and a good support system to his friends. He went out of his way to make amends with Freya and restore their friendship. And he fought to restore peace to the Nine Realms.

But come Valhalla, Freya wants to recruit Kratos to be the new God of War of the nine realms, or at least to be a part of the new peacekeeping council that she's putting together. Kratos is extremely hesitant to take up the mantle. He doesn't feel worthy or deserving enough to hold this position given all that he's done. He and Mimir (and later on, Tyr) are constantly going back and forth about it. Both perspectives are completely valid. Valhalla is about Kratos facing his past in a more literal sense; parts of Greece have been manifested from Kratos' memories of it, so it's like he gets to be there in real time again. This is about helping him process what happened and to add some nuance to the conversation. It's like free therapy for Kratos.

It's funny too bc you have both opposing viewpoints being represented. On one hand, you have Mimir and Tyr being the supporting/validating voice, and Helios is the contrarian. Since he's a manifestation of Kratos' memories, he represents the doubts that Kratos has about himself. The harsh voice to show how hard he is on himself, and not without good reason.

The reason why I think Valhalla is so important is bc in media, survivor narratives are often linear. The character just "gets over" their trauma and then that trauma isn't addressed again. It's presented more as a hurdle than a lifelong battle. I guess this goes to show how misunderstood survivorhood is. But that isn't how healing works. We regress sometimes, and sometimes we still mull over the things that have happened to us. We might heal, but that trauma does leave emotional scars. So even after the many leaps and bounds Kratos has made, he's not "over" his past, far from it! It still haunts him every day and every night. Valhalla is Kratos still processing everything. From my own healing journey, I've learned that it takes a long, long time to fully process your trauma, if there even is a "fully", anyway. It takes a long time to learn and understand all the complexities and how it affects you in current day. And it takes even longer to process such a complicated history like Kratos'.

Generally speaking about the idea of processing trauma, I said earlier that survivorhood is extremely misunderstood by the masses. Imo, our society is very anti-victim/anti-survivor. So with that in mind, from the perspective of the audience, some might perceive the processing trauma bit as repetitive or "milking it". These are mediums of entertainment after all, so ofc I understand wanting to put out an engaging story where the audience doesn't lose interest. But screw those ppl lol. We have to understand why we do what we do if we want to do better, and it's amazing that a video game is willing to have these conversations. Being more open about all the nuances of processing trauma, grief, healing, etc will go such a long way.

Even the roguelite gameplay style perfectly reflects this theme. Processing this stuff is slow. It doesn't happen overnight. Unless you're in Valhalla, I suppose.

Okay I said this wasn't a detailed analysis but I lied. I'm a liar now

[bottlecap-press]

From Han Raschka's chapbook, Enamel, available from Bottlecap Press!

[thedreadvampy]

I was talking to my friend yesterday about how much I miss academic writing. Like one of the most fun things I've worked on in my life was my undergrad dissertation and I was sooooo bitterly disappointed that my MA didn't have a dissertation portion and the academic grade was all short form writing. I don't read a huge amount of nonfiction without a specific purpose but I do love the form of essays and academic explorations (and the absence of a reasonable venue for academic writing does explain why you guys periodically have to tolerate me writing unedited 2000 word posts about the hermaneutics of gender or some shit)

anyway my friend was just like I mean dude you could just write it anyway. do you think you could expand your undergrad dissertation into a book?

And I was like noooo I mean probably but that's not so much where my head's at now. My undergrad dissertation was about the depiction of women in comic book art and how it works to undercut the presentation in the writing of them as active agents, and most of what I put in that was solid enough but it was also very much 2013 and I was very much 20.

but I would be really interested in making space to write something about the depiction of gendered violence and survivorhood in popular visual culture. basically I would like to expound on the idea that there's a fetishistic focus on the experience of trauma, and on healing as a moving-away-from, and pick away at the difference between an image of a person who is a survivor of gendered violence vs a vessel for gendered violence.

I don't know how I'd come into that though. but if I had the time and drive I would love to write something around like the semiotics of gendered trauma, and I think that would provide some space to look at gender as a multidimensional identity, like unpicking some ideas about the degree to which gender is internal vs social and how it overlaps with oppression, sex and sexuality, and systems of violence.

like there's room in there to explore the symbolic "woman" as a relationship to patriarchal power and social experience and how that intersects with and often overshadows the literal woman as a human person, and to connect that to the idea that in depicting rape and trauma as part of people's lives, the symbolic meaning of Rape overshadows the ongoing experience of survivorhood.

I am gonna reblog this with a very approximate outline in case I wanna come back to this. soz.

[downontime]

"Come on, motherfucker, you survived, you gotta give yourself a break"

That lyrics from Everybody Lost Somebody by Bleachers has been stuck in my head for a while now. Almost got it made into a wooden plague before I remembered my finances.

On February 9, 2024, I was diagnosed with Stage 3 Hodgkin lymphoma after suffering with symptoms and misdiagnoses for over a year prior. And on November 4, 2024, I was declared to be in remission.

The entire process was hell. Every two weeks, I would go in for an infusion of nivo+AVD for two and a half hours, followed by five days of dealing with poison. The body pain, the nausea, the weight gain, the fatigue, the cognitive decline. I hated it all. For a while, I was mentally okay as I just had to focus on getting through chemo week. But the monster of self-doubt and self-loathing mixed with the stress of the ordeal. Was I even really suffering? I only had Hodgkin lymphoma, one of the most treatable cancers where I live. And I was on immunotherapy plus chemotherapy, a less severe alternative to straight chemo. And I lived an unhealthy life. So maybe I deserved it. Maybe I deserved cancer.

Evil fucking thoughts in an evil fucking time. Shit that I am ashamed to admit. Shit that I am scared to share with people. But they were mine, and it made an already soul-scathing year even more relentless.

So here I am in survivorhood. People have told me that survivorship is not the end of it all and now I fully understand what they mean. The fear of relapse, how every symptom could be a sign of recurrence. The grief of losing almost a year of my life to cancer, not to mention the other health issues treatment has brought about. The burden of those around me knowing what I am now, the feeling that they feel I am no longer capable of much. The knowledge that they are right. I am fatter and dumber than ever and I have so much shame and self-hatred around all of it. And why I quoted that song in the title: the feeling that I should and need to just move on and be normal.

I am still unemployed. I am still poor. I am still in massive debt. I am still professionally pathetic. Nothing stopped when I got my diagnosis and treatment. I initially took my remission as the permission to live normally, but I can't get back to that normal. I am not the same person I was a year ago. I have trauma, I have fear, I have limits. I'm slower in every sense, less capable, and now less forgivable.

I don't know what it would mean to process things or get better. I have spent too long looking up ways to get my brain back only to not remember or stick to any of it. I incorporate workouts and diets only to struggle with losing the massive weight I gained in just one year.

But I need to be normal, or at least act it. I need to be capable. I need to get a job. I need to get smarter. I need to be reliable again. I need to be respectable again. And I needed to accomplish all of this yesterday.

Something in me wants to listen to my therapist making the same push that lyric is. I have been through a lot. I need to recover. I need to process. But I don't have the time or, as it feels at this point, the capacity. And the shame of my diagnosis still lingers in here, too, feeling like I do not deserve any rest. I did not really suffer. I am just lazy and incompetent.

Motherfucker, it was stage 3 cancer! Is that not enough!?

Apparently not to me.

[thequibblah]

i just caught up to come together and i am in an absolute reading slump now….. i can’t stop thinking about mary macdonald and her journey of survivorhood and rumors and her casual fling with sirius as a coping mechanism for trauma and her relationship with david and her relationship with the girls….. she is on my brain nonstop thanks to you!!! :’)

:~) shes on mine too

[bigskydreaming]

LOL and even with all of that I still managed to somehow leave out one of the most key points I was aiming to make with the super long return post - DAMN YOU ADHD - but its edited in there now and if by chance you've already read it and understandably are not looking to reread the whole thing looking for it but still want to know what it was (it was part of the under the cut portion), the edited-in portion and the paragraphs directly before where it now goes and directly after it are under this read-more here.

Its just....the existence of privilege and how that differentiates most experiences in a gendered society matters, and thus.....it needs to be part of the conversation rather than just treating all responses to rape and survivors as agendered, just because rape itself can and does happen to people of all genders.

There's actually a fair amount to get into when it comes to differences in a lot of mens' disclosures vs womens' in my experience, but just as an extension of what I'm talking about here, one of the specific elements in my experience is that men often don't have a problem being believed about having been raped or abused.....but one of the predominant responses is society is heavily preconditioned to view male rape and abuse survivors as almost inevitably feeling they need to exert a similar power over someone else in order to claim back their own feelings of pride and safety in their masculinity. Effectively.....most every male rape or abuse survivor I've ever talked with at length shares a similar experience of being believed when they disclose about being a survivor....but noting a clear and direct shift in how whomever they disclosed to interacts with them....with subsequent expressions of anger or outrage - particularly in the matter of our rape or abuse - treated as evidence of us being ticking time bombs who are inevitably primed to explode and take out what happened to us on someone else.

There's being cautious around cis white men, for example, because we're cis white men, which I totally get and am not expressing an opinion on. I'm just saying even with that acknowledged, there is a SHIFT in how people interact with me after I've disclosed to them personally, in how they....scrutinize me, for lack of a better way of putting it, in very noticeable ways and areas. Like, its consistent. And think about how its not totally true that media doesn't portray men as being capable of being raped or abused, typically. Think about how often you've seen procedurals where the backstory of the rapist or abuser of the week is specifically THAT they were a rape or abuse survivor themselves, usually in childhood. Its NOT that society doesn't believe or accept that men can be raped too. Its that society is primed to default to viewing the very act of men being raped as an indicator of the shift from them being a man to being a man who is likely to become a predator themselves.

Rape appears all the time in regards to male survivors in media. Its just it usually just appears in the context of men who arent presented AS survivors, but rather as predators or aggressors themselves, and their past victimization treated as a catalyst rather than a trauma. This is not to excuse any such character or depiction of course, its simply to emphasize that the very angle from which male survivorhood is approached in most contexts is different from that of other survivors. Just like the angle from which their survivorhood is approached is different from that of male survivors. And thus the issue most men have with disclosing in my experience is NOT that we're afraid we won't be believed....its that we're afraid once we disclose, we'll be viewed as inherently more dangerous because our victimization primes us to be that much more likely to inflict ourselves on others in some attempt to reclaim our masculinity.

And its categorically NOT about any group of survivors having it better or worse than others, which is why I LOATHE people saying variations of 'you wouldn't say that about this if it happened to a woman' because anyone attempting to pit male survivors against other survivors en masse is NOT doing so for my benefit or with my endorsement. The point is just that each way society and rape culture interacts with a different group of survivors presents different problems and issues that need addressing, and aren't interchangeable.

There is a REASON why the subject of Dick Grayson's anger - usually in the context of things that have happened to him - is so important to me, specifically in terms of ensuring that its treated as something he's allowed to have....rather than an indicator that he's going to messily explode his life in a way that impacts everyone around him negatively.

Now.....if you've never considered that aspect of rape vs rape culture and how it can differently affect and shape the experiences and recovery of cis male survivors versus trans male survivors and nonbinary survivors and survivors who identify as women.....I ask that you consider what else my perspective might be able to add to actually productive, meaningful conversations about rape, rape culture and survivorhood, that you never would have thought TO think about before, without male survivors bringing it up based on it having played a role in personal experiences.

[thistlecatfics]

I just read your post about incest and survivorhood and I have to admit some of the things you describe are not things I ever thought of as incestuous. Which is not to argue or assert that they aren't, it's just that they're not something that was ever framed that way for me, and I encountered some of what you talk about experiencing in my own family. I've never spoken about that not out of shame but because it simply didn't feel relevant, it didn't ping my frame of reference for abuse.

I don't entirely know what to do with the information, but I do have a therapist and a range of good coping mechanisms for emotional regulation, so I'll work it out. It's just certainly an experience to see something I hadn't thought about in a really long time vocalized as something that shouldn't have happened to me.

I wanted to say I appreciate you speaking openly about it because it may explain struggles I've had with desperately wanting to form intimate relationships -- romantic, sexual, or platonic -- but being functionally unable to. Which in the end may help me get better at it. You are doing good work in speaking out.

Thank you <3 (post being referenced is here) (honestly didn't expect anyone would actually ever reblog it but here we are!)

It's so crazy that despite pretending to be all self-confident about my experience my initial reaction to the first couple paragraphs of this was that this was going to be a message telling me what I experienced doesn't count as incest! like truly the spell of unreality/the insistence that incest lives in the realm of the unreal is so intense!

I'm sorry that those things happened to you, and I totally get the feeling that they're just normal and don't belong in an abuse conversation - or even a 'mildly bad childhood' conversation. I felt that way for a long time. Thinking that way is some good self-protective brain stuff, but eventually, hopefully we can look at those experiences differently so we can try to live our lives differently.

(I so, so feel you on the difficulty with intimate relationships thing. So very much.) (My goal for this summer is to stop feeling so much contempt for the part of me that really longs for connection and intimacy lol.)

Depending on your therapist's theoretical orientation, they might be more likely to use the term "enmeshment" to describe these types of experiences rather than "emotional incest." I also think "enmeshment" feels a lot safer as a term so that might be a worthwhile starting point. For me, the word incest feels really important because of the disgust-icky feeling it evokes and because of the explicitly sexual experiences, but I've definitely used enmeshment to describe my relationship with my mom to friends.

Please know I'm sending you all of my very best wishes and healing energy and deepest courage from afar <3 <3 <3

[finalgirlsamwinchester]

psych survivorhood manifesto but it's just a sam winchester meta

[stealingpotatoes]

hello! first up love your art sm it's so sweet.

secondly, would you mind explaining the logic/appeal behind the ashoka x bariss ship? i mean it would be super cute but like. the betrayal. did bariss never betray ashoka in your canon or do they overlook that/have her get better? sure, she did it for *sorta* fair reasons but she still almost sentenced her to death like...if it were me i wouldn't look past that. ty!!!

aw thank u!!!well first of all, childhood wish fulfillment; I wanted Barriss and Ahsoka to date when I was a small child but I didn't know girls were allowed to kiss so I was just sad this wasnt a possibility until i learnt what gay was

second of all, attempted murder and framing just adds a bit of spice to a relationship <3 but I think it'd only work Quite A Few Years after o66 when the old jedi are long-gone and they're both filled with more grief than either of them could've imagined at 16 and that shared grief for the order they both left is way stronger than the long dried-up bad blood between them. ahsoka's a jedi, even if she insists she's not, and she's come to understand and forgive barriss bc she can't live w that hate. and yeah its not perfect, yeah they need to sort a lot of shit out, but to each other they represent the old past/future they grieve for and this new present they've found themselves in and that's just smthn nice. its built on cobbled together survivorhood and nostalgia ig. and also yk, slightly toxic yuri

[gatheringbones]

queer romantic storyforms I gravitate to:

one or more partners grapples with how survivorhood and dissociation and wound sites from prior domestic violences interferes with their current network of loving connections through the use of radical love and honesty

one or more partners becomes/identifies/transforms into what which was once reviled; the transformation of that revulsion into radical love and honesty

one or more partners enters into a relationship dynamic that they were conditioned to attach to, whose relationship to that conditioning evolves over the course of that story (through radical love and honesty)

[plaguery]

going through my old top songs of the year spotify playlists and i came across your love is killing me by sharon van etten and i started crying. i cant believe i forgot about this song its so raw in the way i love like. totally different genre and sound but it has the essence of survivorhood that lingua ignota has. if that makes sense.

[theofreakingbell]

thinking abt how a lot of the songs I clung to as I was first figuring out my survivorhood are stuff I don't even wanna look at anymore because of the horrific stuff the artist did and I cannot find the same sort of catharsis and strength in them and want nothing to do with her is uh. ow