#the brain is very susceptible to suggestion... everything we see and experience will remain with us in some way

[biblically-accurate-dca]

KILL!!!!!!!!!

[bubonickitten]

Fic summary: Jon goes back to before the world ended and tries to forge a different path.

Chapter summary: The process(es) of resigning from a terrible, no good, very bad assistant position.

Previous chapter: AO3 // tumblr

Full chapter text & content warnings below the cut.

Content warnings for Chapter 22: discussions of eye-gouging/eye horror (not graphic); brief mentions of spiders/arachnophobia; anxiety/panic symptoms; lots of dissociation/dpdr; Peter Lukas being a manipulative shit; Lonely-typical content (including fear of abandonment & some abysmal self-esteem on Martin’s part); allusions to police violence & Hunt-related themes (re: Daisy’s past actions); swears. SPOILERS through Season 5.

Chapter 22: Resignation

Georgie paces in a slow circle, alternating between biting her nails and picking at her bottom lip – entirely immersed in her own thoughts, judging from the faraway look in her eyes. Jon hasn’t seen her this overwrought since the last depressive episode he witnessed. Just watching her is enough to make his chest tighten with vicarious unrest.

Wary of contributing to a vicious feedback loop between the two of them with his own customary pacing and handwringing, he forces himself to keep his knees locked and hands at his sides. Still, he can’t help rubbing his fingertips together and rocking minutely on the balls of his feet.

“Why don’t we sit?” Jon finally interjects, wincing when it comes out more curtly than he intended – more like a command than a suggestion, but luckily without any accompanying static.

Be mindful, he silently chides himself: being on edge like this only makes him more susceptible to accidental compulsion.

“What if something goes wrong?” Georgie whispers. Jon doubts she even heard him beneath her nervous refrain. “What if –”

“Georgie?” Jon tries again. No response. He steps into her path and places a hand on her shoulder. “Georgie.”

“What?” Georgie raises her head, but she isn’t looking at him so much as she’s looking through him.

“I think you should sit down?”

“What?” Georgie says again, sounding utterly lost. Her eyes are darting around the room now, as if she doesn’t recognize her surroundings.

How the tables have turned, Jon thinks grimly.

“Come on,” he says, taking her hand and guiding her to the nearest chair. She offers no resistance, trailing behind him like a flagging balloon. When he presses on her shoulder to coax her into a sitting position, she goes easily. Keeping hold of her hand, he drags another chair closer to her and takes a seat.

Okay. Now what?

Jon jiggles his leg as he wracks his brain for the right thing to say. She deserves more than handholding and awkward silence, but soothing words have never come naturally to him.

“Do you, ah… do you want to talk about it?” Jon cringes at his faltering delivery. “I’m sorry, I’m – I’m still not very good at this,” he adds with a self-deprecating laugh – then immediately shuts his eyes, kicking himself. Why are his attempts to relate to others always so clumsy and – and weirdly self-centered? “I mean –”

“I’m scared,” Georgie blurts out.

“You… what?” Jon tilts his head. “But I thought – you don’t feel –”

“Fear?” Her clipped, brittle laugh dies in her throat. “No, I don’t. And that’s exactly the problem, isn’t it?”

Jon strokes the back of her hand with one thumb, but remains silent. She always elaborates on her own time, given some space to order her thoughts.

“I don’t feel… terror,” she says slowly. “After I had my… encounter, I did a lot of research on how the brain works. Trying to understand what was happening to me, you know?”

Jon nods. He’s intimately familiar with that urge. As a child, he went through a spider phase, as his grandmother called it, obsessively seeking out any information he could on them, hoping even then that he could conquer his fear if only he could see the world through a detached, academic lens. There were plenty of academic odes to the spider to be found; no shortage of enamored arachnologists waxing poetic about the wonders of evolution and the vital role that arachnids play in their particular ecological niches.

Unfortunately, a phobia – especially one arising from acute trauma – tends to be resistant to reason and reality. His obsession only ever yielded heart palpitations and lucid nightmares. Despite that failure, he never stopped clinging to that idea that if only he could know everything there was to know about a thing, he could finally scrape together some semblance of control over his fear.

In many ways, that fixation is exactly what drew him to the Magnus Institute.

Unless the Spider really was pulling the strings all along, he thinks, and then: No, we are not going there.

“As far as I can tell,” Georgie continues, “my sympathetic nervous system still functions. I can still experience all the physiological aspects of sympathetic arousal – and fear is only one possible trigger for those sorts of responses. What’s missing is my capacity to interpret those responses through the lens of fear. To emotionally process or identify them as fear.

“I can still experience anxiety, to an extent – or something close to it. But mostly in the context of worrying about others, being scared for them. I mean, I can feel apprehensive about the possibility of experiencing pain or loss or failure myself, I have a stake in my continued existence, I can recognize danger, but sometimes it feels… I don’t know – mechanical, almost? There’s just always the feeling of something missing. Something important. And there are times when I feel that void more acutely.”

“Like now.”

“Yeah.” Georgie looks away, chewing her lip in silence.

“I’m listening,” Jon coaxes, sensing that there’s more she’s holding back.

“It’s just… hard to feel like a full person sometimes, you know?” Georgie says helplessly. “I worry sometimes that it – I don’t know, does a disservice, I guess, to the people I care about? Like no matter how much I love someone, it isn’t… complete? Or – genuine, in the right way? It’s – hard to find words that actually describe it. There are times when it feels like I’ve lost something vital that made me human, that made me me, and it’s… difficult to reconcile who I was – who I could have been – with who I am now.”

“That I understand,” Jon says softly.

“I know.” Jon wishes he was less familiar with the sad smile she gives him just then. “It’s just… I remember a time when I would have been terrified of all this. Not just worried, or upset about someone I care about being hurt, or devastated by the prospect of losing someone I love. Terrified. And knowing what I should be feeling – what I would have felt at some point – is… it’s unnerving. There’s a void there that shouldn’t be there. It’s like… having part of you gouged out and left hollow. An absence that’s so present it’s almost visceral.” She frowns. “Does that make any sense?”

“In my future I had a Flesh Avatar reach into my chest and wrench out two of my ribs, so… yes, actually.”

Georgie blinks several times, then laughs breathlessly. “Do I even want to know?”

“Probably not.” Jon returns a cautious smile, but the levity evaporates after a few seconds. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think that you don’t have to have access to the full spectrum of human emotion in order to count as human. And I don’t think any of this makes your concern for others any less heartfelt, or – or comforting. You might not be the same person you were before you were marked, but that doesn’t make you any lesser as a person.”

“You should try applying that metric to yourself sometime,” she replies, not unkindly.

“It’s –”

“Don’t say it’s different,” she cuts in. “Just… keep it in mind, okay?”

“I’ll, uh… I’ll try.” Georgie nods, but says nothing. Jon grips her hand a little tighter. “Listen, I – I know you’re worried for Melanie, but I think it’s going to be alright? I can’t predict the future –well, I have knowledge of one possible future, but that’s because I lived it. I don’t have any precognitive abilities, or anything like that. But… it turned out okay last time.”

Until I jump-started an apocalypse –

Jon reins in the thought before it can gain momentum. Georgie doesn’t need his brooding right now.

“Melanie is a fighter,” he says instead, offering a tentative smile. “And she has you.”

Georgie shakes her head. “I can’t believe you came out of the apocalypse sappier than you were when you went in.”

“Side effect of traversing a post-apocalyptic wasteland with a hopeless romantic, I think.” That gets another little chuckle out of Georgie. “I mean it, though. I think Melanie will be okay, especially with you looking out for her. Not to mention, the Admiral is a perpetual serotonin generator.”

“You really miss him, huh?”

“Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve pet a cat, Georgie?” Jon practically whines, playfully dramatic. It manages to keep the amused smile on Georgie’s face, he’s pleased to note.

“Maybe I should bring him by sometime.”

“Absolutely not. This place doesn’t deserve him.” Georgie snorts. Although Jon is reluctant to ruin the temporary shift in mood, this is as good a time as any to broach a subject he’s been dreading. “Also, I, ah… I don’t want you to feel obligated to continue visiting here.”

“What?” Georgie says, eyes narrowed.

“If you have to take a step back,” Jon says carefully, “I’ll understand.”

“I mean, I might not be able to come by as often as I have been, especially while Melanie is still recovering, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be around at all.” Georgie’s frown deepens. “I’m not about to cut you out of my life, Jon.”

“I know. And I don’t want you to. But – no, listen,” Jon insists, seeing Georgie about to protest. “What I’m trying to say is – I know Melanie wants to put as much distance between herself and the Institute as possible. If it turns out that you staying involved in all of this is too close to home, then… well, I don’t want her to feel like she’s still trapped in the Institute’s orbit, is all.”

Or mine, he doesn’t say. He doesn’t want to be a reason for Melanie to feel unsafe. In the past, he has been – and that’s not who he wants to be.

These days, Melanie has come to view him more as a fellow captive than a complicit enemy. Lingering resentment still sparks to life from time to time; she still struggles with her anger, and once or twice, she’s had to leave a room for fear of that rage boiling over. Overall, though, she no longer directs the majority of her ire towards him. When they do butt heads, it hasn’t gone much further than bickering – and even that feels comforting in its familiarity and mundanity. Almost companionable, in its own way.

Most significantly, ever since their talk, Melanie hasn’t once likened him to Jonah Magnus. Jon doesn’t know if that’s because it’s no longer an automatic association at the forefront of her mind, or because she’s consciously watching her words around him, actively taking care to avoid tripping that perpetual trigger. Either way, Jon is grateful.

But Jon also knows that he’s inseparable from the Institute. Despite his intentions, and regardless of whether or to what degree the others hold him personally responsible, the fact remains: he’s embroiled in something unspeakably evil, and that poses a danger to anyone who stands too close to him.

Georgie doesn’t immediately respond, instead taking the time to seriously consider his words. He’s always appreciated that about her, as uneasy as these moments of silent suspense can make him.

“I’ll talk to her about it,” she says eventually, “once she’s recovered enough to have that discussion. I don’t know how she’ll feel about staying in direct contact herself, especially at first, but… I doubt she expects me to cut you off. And I imagine she’ll still want to know how everyone is doing, even if she doesn’t want the details.” She glances up to meet his eyes. “Anyway, regardless of how often I visit in person, I’m still going to be checking in with you, so answer your damn phone, will you?”

“I do answer my phone,” he says defensively. “I just… forget to answer texts sometimes. And I don’t get service in the tunnels –”

“Well, come up for air and cell service from time to time.” She wrinkles her nose. “Honestly, I don’t know how you can tolerate being down here for hours on end –”

Jon startles slightly as the trapdoor creaks open above their heads. Georgie stands as Melanie makes her way down the ladder, hurrying over to fold her into her arms. Basira follows behind, closing the trapdoor behind her as she goes.

“Mission successful, I take it?” Jon says quietly as Basira approaches him, giving Georgie and Melanie a moment to themselves.

“Uneventful,” Basira says with a shrug. “A few sidelong glances, but otherwise, none of the library staff even acknowledged us. Definitely didn’t seem keen on asking why we were rummaging in the repair supplies.”

“They probably didn’t want to know.”

“Yeah.” A small, rueful smile crosses her face. “Some of them used to talk to me, you know. Nothing personal – we weren’t close – but… when I returned a book, they’d ask what I thought of it, give me recommendations, that sort of thing. Now, though…”

These days she prefers to wait until everyone has gone home for the day before visiting the library, Jon Knows. He also Knows that the library staff are well aware that she’s the one pilfering research materials in the dead of night – and that they have no plans on confronting her about it. She never leaves a mess, after all, and always returns items to their proper places once she’s finished with them, which is more than can be said for many of the students who make use of the library’s resources.

“You know, I don’t think any of them have looked me in the eye for months.” There’s a distinct note of regret in Basira’s voice. “They just watch me out of the corners of their eyes when they think I’m not looking. I don’t know if that’s because they’re afraid of Lukas disappearing them for fraternizing, or because everyone is leery of the Archives these days, or because I’ve just become less approachable. Maybe all three. Suppose it doesn’t really matter.”

Jon knows the feeling well. Before he can answer, though, Melanie clears her throat. Jon looks over to see her facing his direction, one hand clasping Georgie’s tight enough to blanch her knuckles.

“This is it, then,” Basira says solemnly.

“Yeah.” Melanie closes her eyes and breathes a long, shaky exhale. “It’s time.”

“You’re sure you don’t want me there?” Georgie asks.

Melanie shakes her head. “I don’t want you to see that.”

“But –”

“She won’t be alone,” Basira says. “I’ll be right outside the room.”

Melanie faces Georgie fully, taking her other hand as well. “The plan hasn’t changed. Basira will call 999. I’ll make it quick, and – once it’s done, Basira will come in and sit with me until the ambulance gets here.”

“I have a general idea of what the response time should be like,” Basira adds, looking at Georgie. “If we time it right, Melanie will have medical assistance within minutes. I can come get you when the paramedics get here, if you want to ride in the ambulance.”

Georgie nods and tightens her grip on Melanie’s hands. “Is that okay?”

“Only if you want,” Melanie says haltingly. “But – maybe try to avoid looking too close, if my eyes are uncovered? It’s just – it probably won’t be pretty.” A stressed laugh claws its way out of her throat. “Potential trauma fodder, you know? I don’t want to worry about you remembering me like that every time you see me, even after I’ve healed.”

“Okay,” Georgie replies softly.

“It shouldn’t take long. Just – wait here with Jon until then, okay?” Georgie nods again, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth. “Speaking of which –” Melanie glances at Jon, as if just now remembering his presence. Startled by the sudden direct eye contact, he reflexively straightens his spine and stands at attention. “I guess this is goodbye, huh? For a while, anyway.”

“I, uh. I suppose it is.”

“Right. So, um… good luck, I guess?”

No disclaimers or ill will tacked on this time, Jon notes privately.

“You too.” He forces a smile, but he suspects that it comes off as awkward rather than reassuring.

“Try not to die.”

“Yes, ‘not dying’ is relatively close to the top of my to-do list.”

“If I come to find out that you’ve gotten yourself killed and broken the eldritch employment contract binding us all to this place after I’ve gone and gouged my eyes out, I’m going to be livid.”

“Well, we can’t have that,” Jon says wryly.

“Seriously, though.” Melanie’s smirk melts away, taken over by a somber, quiet sort of intensity. “Either beat Elias at his own game, or get the fuck away from this place the instant you find an out. Whichever comes first. Preferably without any of the self-sacrificial bullshit.”

Fractious as its delivery is, the demand is oddly touching, coming from Melanie.

“I, uh… I’ll do my best?”

“You’d better.” Melanie nods – a curt but cordial dismissal – and turns her attention back to Georgie. “Hey,” she says, her voice going measurably softer, releasing one of Georgie’s hands to reach up and cup her face. Her watery smile belies her mental state: resolve warring with trepidation. “Look at me?”

For a long minute, she studies Georgie’s face, clearly enraptured. Jon forcefully tears his gaze away from the intimacy of the moment.

“Okay.” Melanie takes a deep breath in and releases it slowly. “I’m ready. I’ll see you soon, okay? Or – well, I won’t see you, but – you’ll see me, and I’ll…” She huffs, rolling her eyes. “Oh, whatever – you know what I mean.”

Georgie lets out a tearful chuckle, and Melanie relaxes marginally.

“I’m sure about this,” she says. “I promise. This is what I want – a life with you, away from all of this. And if this is the price I have to pay, then… I’m okay with that. Really, I am.” She stands on tiptoe to give Georgie a peck on the cheek. “Love you.”

“Love you too,” Georgie says, leaning down for a return kiss, smiling weakly against Melanie’s lips. “See you soon.”

When Martin first heard the bustle outside his door – coworkers venturing outside their solitary offices to trade whispered questions and eager gossip as word of paramedics in the archives made its way upstairs – his stomach gave a little lurch: a combination of horror and wonder. He hadn’t expected Melanie to change her mind – he knows how determined she can be once she’s settled on a course of action; how desperate she was to extricate herself from Elias’ – Jonah’s – schemes. Still, though, faced with the reality of it, he found himself in awe of her nerve.

That was yesterday. Martin didn’t get much work done, preoccupied as he was. He isn’t having an easier time of it today: his attention keeps slipping away to linger in remembrances of sterile hospital rooms and muted hallways, thoughts drowned out by the ghosts of sirens and beeping machinery.

“Well, this is an unexpected turn of events.”

Martin jolts in his seat, heart leaping into his throat. It only takes an instant longer for his alarm to mutate into aggravation.

“Peter!” Martin spins around to glower at the man. “How many times do I have to–”

Peter flaps a dismissive hand. “To be honest, Martin, the drop in temperature tends to tip most people off. The only reason you continue to be surprised by my arrival is because you’ve become acclimated to the Forsaken.”

The revelation is slow to sink in, a stark chill blooming in Martin’s chest and snaking its roots outwards. Only now that it’s been brought to his attention can he feel the nip in the air.

“Here I was certain you were becoming estranged from our patron, but it seems I needn’t have worried.” Peter’s smile is laced with malice. “Or should I?”

Martin says nothing, eyes wide and stinging from the now-conspicuous cold. Peter sighs, folds his hands behind his back, and begins a meandering back-and-forth pace.

“Our success is dependent on your voluntary isolation, Martin.”

“Yeah.” The word turns to fog as it touches the air, and Martin finds himself transfixed by the sight. “You’ve said.”

“It seems you need a reminder.”

The condescension dripping from the words is enough to drag Martin back into the present moment. Heat rises in his cheeks, contrasting with the temperature in the room and making the chill that much more noticeable.

“You still haven’t told me your plan,” he snaps. “You keep expecting me to just – go along with whatever you’re scheming, no questions asked.”

“You ask many questions, Martin –”

“Yeah, and you never answer them! You’re so – so bloody cryptic about all of this.”

“Martin, Martin,” Peter says, placating in the most patronizing way possible. Martin bristles: he hates the way Peter says his name. “There’s no need to get so worked up –”

“If you want me to be a partner in – in whatever it is you’re planning, you can’t expect me to go on blind trust!”

“I’m still conducting my own research,” Peter says mildly. “I would rather not confuse you with extraneous details before I have all the kinks worked out.”

“I’m not an idiot –”

“Rest assured,” Peter interrupts, “if I was capable of stopping the Extinction alone, I would. Unfortunately, it will require someone touched by the Beholding.”

“Why?”

“Because it requires this place, and this place” – Peter’s lip curls in distaste – “is the Eye’s seat of power. The One Alone has no dominion here.” Martin crosses his arms, unimpressed. “You are the only one who can do this, Martin.”

“Why?” Martin repeats.

Judging from the muscle ticking in Peter’s jaw, his limited supply of patience for conversation is precipitously depleting.

“No, really,” Martin presses, “why me? I mean” – he spreads his arms out with a scornful chuckle – “look at me. I’m not exactly hero material, am I?”

“That really depends on you. I can’t force you to cooperate. It won’t even work unless you’re a willing participant.”

“And what makes you think that your plan is the only way? You – you keep going on about how it’s my choice. Well – what if I choose to work with the others? It can’t hurt to have more eyes on the problem –” Martin rolls his eyes at Peter’s unconcealed revulsion. “Yeah, I know. No one would ever accuse you of being a team player, obviously. But I can be the liaison; you don’t have to interact with anyone at all.” Would prefer you don’t interact with anyone at all, Martin thinks. “I mean, that’s already my role, isn’t it? Dealing with people so you don’t have to?”

“Martin,” Peter says, low and dangerous.

“I’ll do it off the clock, even. I’ll isolate myself in my office during the workday, or whatever” – Martin gives a flippant wave of his hand – “and continue researching the Extinction.” And practically running the whole damn place on an assistant’s salary, he grouses silently. “After hours I’ll pursue my own research with the others.”

“Part-time isolation will not suffice to equip you with the power you’ll need.” Peter presses his lips into a pale, rigid line. “Be reasonable. Are you really willing to risk an apocalypse, just because you can’t appreciate solitude?”

“If it starts to look like there’s no other option, I’ll reconsider.”

“And if the Extinction emerges while you’re wasting time searching for an alternative that doesn’t exist?”

“Based on the limited information you’ve given me, I don’t think the Extinction is going to just… emerge overnight. I’m still not even convinced it’s going to be worse than any other Fear. I mean, the Flesh is relatively new, isn’t it? And it didn’t… leave the fear economy in shambles, or whatever.”

“It isn’t about competition, Martin.” Peter releases a slow plume of fog through his nose before continuing, voice cool but simmering with pique just under the surface. “The Extinction is different from the other Powers. It is defined by widescale eradication. The other Powers may seek to change the world, but none of them strive for a world without us.”

“But what makes you so sure the Extinction would?”

Peter’s eyes narrow. Ignoring him, Martin runs his thumb along his bottom lip as he replays Jon’s impassioned conjectures on the matter: It thrives on the potentiality of a mass extinction event, not the fulfillment of one.

“What’s to say it wouldn’t be just fine with the world as it is, like the End?” Martin says, more confidently now. “People have been prophesying about the end of the world for – all of human history, probably. I doubt we’ll stop anytime soon. Maybe at its core the Extinction is just… the fear of an uncertain future. And a particular future doesn’t have to be realized in order to inspire fear, as long as the potential is always there. It’s about the suspense – the ‘what ifs’, the unknown, the – the lack of control in it all.” Martin laughs. “In a way, that’s… that’s what most fears boil down to, isn’t it?”

“The stakes are rather high to gamble on a thought experiment, don’t you think?” The temperature plunges a few more degrees as Peter speaks. “I think that the most important ‘what if’ you should concern yourself with is what if you’re wrong?”

“And what if I’m not?” Martin counters. “You act so authoritative, but aren’t you also just speculating? When I agreed to work with you, you told me you would provide me with evidence to support your theory. So far, I’m not convinced. You’re going to have to give me more to go on than just ‘trust me.’ I mean – if it’s between trusting you and – and trusting Jon, and the others? You can’t really be surprised if I choose them over you.”

“Oh, Martin,” Peter tuts, shaking his head with derisive, disingenuous pity. “Since when has the trust you’ve placed in others ever been reciprocated?”

“I trust him,” Martin says defiantly.

“But does he trust you?” Peter pauses for effect. “Of all the times you’ve allowed yourself to form attachments, has anyone even once genuinely returned those affections?”

Jon did.

Whatever expression Martin is wearing brings a sneer to Peter’s face. Martin clenches his teeth and ignores him.

Jon does, he corrects. Present tense. He said as much.

Martin still can’t fathom what Jon could possibly see in him, but Jon wouldn’t lie about something like that, right? He wouldn’t.

…would he?

No, he wouldn’t, Martin chides. You know he wouldn’t. Trust him.

“Sure,” Peter persists, “you may open yourself up to the potential for something more, but you know as well as I do that it won’t last. Is the inevitable loss really worth the risk?”

“I don’t know,” Martin says. He tries to ignore the slight quaver that insinuates itself into the declaration. “But if I never take the risk, I’ll never know, will I?”

“I think you already know the answer.” Peter’s pale eyes glitter with spite. “Remember what it felt like, languishing at the Archivist’s deathbed. Recall the state you were in when you first came to me.”

The words are incisive, sliding under Martin’s skin and lodging there like shrapnel. He can feel his confidence waver, the conviction he stood fast on only seconds ago splintering underneath him like thin ice.

“How many times do you think he can court death and survive? He all but died stopping the last apocalypse; he was willing to bury himself alive for a woman who tried to kill him. How do you think he’ll react if you tell him about any of this? You think he’ll listen to reason? Trust in your judgment?” Peter fixes Martin with a smug, hungry look. “Or will he throw himself in front of the first bullet he sees?”

He already knows about all of this, Martin reminds himself. Jon isn’t about to sacrifice himself on account of the Extinction. Moreover, he seems to be genuinely committed to working as a team rather than striking out on his own.

But he also sees himself as a cataclysm waiting to happen, says the nagging doubt skulking in the far corners of Martin’s mind. As much as Jon insists that he doesn’t want to die, he’s already lived through one apocalypse. Martin has no doubt that Jon would sacrifice himself to prevent another, if it came down to it.

Jon is a powder keg of fear and guilt, and there is no shortage of potential ignition sources waiting in the wings. It only takes one untimely spark to set an archive ablaze.

“I trust him,” Martin repeats to himself, but the statement is rendered feeble by the leaden, frozen knot unfurling in his chest.

“Can you really weather another round of grief?” Peter continues, triumphant. He knows he’s found a gap in Martin’s defenses; all he needs to do now is twist the knife. “You’ve already done your mourning, cut the infection off at the source. Let him back in, and you only open yourself up to more pain. Better a numbed scar than a wound that never heals, don’t you think?”

“No.” There’s something off about Martin’s voice – as if it doesn’t belong to him; as if it’s originating from outside of himself, faint and frail and faraway, smothered by the cold, empty fog clogging his lungs. “N-no, I…”

“Connection is a fleeting, fickle thing,” Peter persists. “It’s a lie people tell themselves. The truth is that we are all alone. In the end, all we have is ourselves. Think about it.”

Unthinkingly, Martin shrinks away as Peter steps closer.

“You asked for more evidence.” Peter slides a few statement folders onto the desk. “Take some time to yourself. Consider whether you’re willing to wager on the fate of the world.”

When Martin looks up, he is alone.

“It’s so loud,” Daisy mutters heatedly, stalking to and fro like a panther in a cage. She scratches furiously at her forearms as she goes, blunt fingernails leaving faint red stripes on pale skin.

“Daisy,” Jon says evenly, “I think maybe you should –”

“Itch I can’t scratch.” She pivots on her heel, retracing her short path in the opposite direction. “Feels like fire under my skin.”

“I don’t think clawing your skin off is going to help.”

Daisy barks a laugh. “With what claws?” She stops short and brandishes the backs of her trembling hands, fingers splayed to highlight nails gnawed to the quick, ragged cuticles stained rust-brown with dried blood. “Dull now.” Her eyes go unfocused, staring vaguely at her hands as if she doesn’t recognize them. “Too dull.”

“I’m sorry,” Jon says, and he means it.

It never gets easier to witness her like this, frenetic and fraying in the throes of the Hunt’s compulsion. These spells have a way of making her features look sharper, her mannerisms more animalistic. She’s all protruding bones and sallow skin, but that seeming frailty does nothing to tame the violence thrumming in her veins. If anything, that all-consuming hunger only makes her more fearsome.

Jon’s strict rations have given him an underfed, pinched look as well, but at least he has something. Not enough to put meat on his bones, so to speak, but enough to stave off starvation. Daisy, though…

When Jon takes a step forward, she rounds on him with teeth bared and a snarl in her throat. Jon flinches at the sudden movement.

“You’re afraid of me.” Daisy exhales an exhausted rattle of a laugh, as if vindicated. “Good. You should be.”

“I’m not afraid of you,” Jon says. “I have an overactive startle reflex. Always have, really.”

“You’re lying.” Daisy breathes heavily through her nose, fists clenched at her sides now. “Admit it.”

Jon knows what she’s trying to do. She wants him to lash out, to bite back, to make her bleed. He’s uncomfortably familiar with that craving. It’s like looking into a mirror.

“I’m not afraid of you,” he reiterates.

“Liar,” Daisy hisses, fixing him with a baleful glare.

He’s seen her like this many times before, hunger-ravaged and swamped by bloodlust. She’ll doggedly bash herself against the nearest witness to her shame like a ship crashed against a jetty, driven forward again and again by cresting waves of guilt and self-loathing until she’s free-floating wreckage. Every time, it gets more and more difficult to gather up all the debris and repair the damage. Jon fears that one of these days, the storm will pass and there won’t be enough pieces left to put her back together.

“I’m not a knife you can cut yourself on, Daisy,” he says patiently.

Daisy looks positively mutinous, mouth opening and closing several times before erupting: “Why wouldn’t you be afraid of me?”

“I used to be,” Jon admits, leaning back against the tunnel wall to take some of the weight off his bad leg. “Before the Buried. I was terrified of you. Dreaded every moment I had to be alone with you. Thought it was only a matter of time before you finished the job.”

“It was,” she rasps out – and with that, her shoulders slump and her fists relax to hang limply at her sides, fingers jumping and twitching with the last dregs of her agitation.

“I know. But then you changed. You were different, after the Buried. As afraid of yourself as I used to be of you. As afraid of yourself as I was of myself.” He looks her in the eye as he speaks. “I looked at you and saw my own fear reflected back at me. There are so many things to be afraid of. You were – you are trying very hard not to be one of them.”

“If I’m afraid of me, you should be, too.”

“Are you afraid of me?” Jon asks, shaping each word carefully to keep the compulsion at bay.

She pauses, considering the question.

“No,” she says eventually. “Afraid for you, sometimes.”

“As I am for you.” Jon’s tentative smile fades after a moment. “I’ll admit, I do have… reflexive reactions, sometimes. There were a few incidents where I walked into the breakroom and you were holding a knife, and my fight-or-flight response kicked in before my conscious brain could catch up with reality.”

Daisy squeezes her eyes shut, wrapping her arms around her middle.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. When she opens her eyes, the look on her face isn’t pleading so much as it is resigned. She isn’t asking for forgiveness. Jon doubts she ever will.

It’s just one more thing they have in common.

“I know,” he says quietly. “To be clear, I don’t feel unsafe with you, as you are now. It’s just… flashbacks. They can be – unpredictable. And if I’m already feeling on edge, or – or not quite present, it doesn’t take much to set me off. But,” he adds, giving her a serious look, “I don’t want you walking on eggshells around me. That only puts me more on edge.”

“Fine. But will you tell me if I do something to scare you?”

“Yes.” She made the same request last time. “But I’ve never had to. You could always feel when I was afraid. From a few rooms away, even.”

“Yeah,” Daisy says with a choked laugh. “Your blood is – very loud sometimes.”

“And now?”

These episodes tend to be capricious. Sometimes, what seems to be the calm after the storm proves to be only a lull before a second wind. If the way she’s wobbling on her feet and favoring one leg is any indication, Jon suspects that the worst of the flare-up has passed for now, taking her adrenaline surge with it. Still, he waits for her confirmation. Daisy takes a minute to mull over the question, head cocked slightly to the side as if listening.

“Quieter,” she says.

With that, Jon lowers himself to the ground and sits with his back against the wall, beckoning her over to take a seat. She hesitates for a moment longer before following his lead, slumping down next to him with a labored sigh.

“Sorry for growling at you,” she says sheepishly, rubbing the back of her neck.

“Don’t worry about it.”

Daisy tilts her head back to stare at the ceiling. “You said I ended up going back to the Hunt last time.”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“September. But – but that doesn’t mean it has to happen again,” he adds hurriedly when he sees her face fall in a mixture of anguish and resignation. “It was – sort of a perfect storm of extenuating circumstances. Like I said before, if you didn’t let the Hunt back in, you and Basira would likely have been killed. But I think you knew you wouldn’t be coming back from it. Before you changed, you made Basira promise to hunt you down and kill you.”

“And did she?”

“She lost track of you in the chaos. You gave chase after one of the Hunters. Once you killed her, the other Hunter started hunting you. For revenge.” Jon’s voice drops to a low murmur. “A few weeks later, the world ended.”

Which makes it sound far more passive than it actually was, but Jon isn’t in the mood for a scolding should he opt for an ‘I’ statement.

“And then what?”

“You were a full-fledged Hunter in a – a perpetual fear generator of a world,” Jon says grimly. “Do you really need to hear the details?”

“Tell me,” Daisy says. “Please.”

Jon understands the need, but recounting the apocalypse never gets any easier. He closes his eyes, breathes deeply, and takes a moment to gather his thoughts.

“When I opened the door and let all the Fears into this reality,” he begins, “the world was divvied up into thousands of different domains, each belonging to a different shade of terror. With few exceptions, most people were confined to one domain – usually whatever aligned with their deepest fears. Avatars and monsters were subject to the Ceaseless Watcher, but otherwise able to exercise control over the humans in the domains of their patrons. Most seemed to stake out territory and settle in one place – customizing their own little spheres of influence, creating playgrounds of their own making. But some got around. You were one of the ones that traveled.”

“What was –” Daisy grimaces. “Who was I hunting?”

“Well… in that place, no one got what they deserved, only what would hurt the most. And people are rarely afraid of just one thing. Most were magnets for multiple fears. The more nomadic Avatars and monsters would gravitate towards whatever individuals were most susceptible to their power, so to speak.” He bites his lip. There’s really no tactful way to phrase this next part. “In your case, you had a roster of specific targets that you were tracking. Former prey. Whether you were drawn to them because of their own fear of you, or because some part of you judged them to have ‘gotten away,’ so to speak… I’m not entirely certain. It may have been a bit of both.”

“I see,” Daisy murmurs. “Guess it makes sense that I would rank high among some people’s greatest fears.”

“Basira was tracking you when we ran into her. We were with her when we found you.”

“And was I… still me?”

“Yes and no,” Jon says hesitantly. “You were you, in a way, but only a small part of you. The Hunter. Everything else was buried too deep. Drowned. Even if I could have brought you back, it would have killed you. You – you didn’t even recognize me, or Martin. You recognized Basira – saw her as pack, wanted her to join you in the Hunt – but…”

“You were prey,” Daisy says quietly.

“Yeah.”

“You never did manage to grow a self-preservation instinct, did you?” Daisy squints at him. “I went full monster on you, and you still want me to sit next to you now.”

“You had sharper teeth then,” Jon says drily. Daisy scoffs and nudges his shoulder with hers. She doesn’t draw back after making contact, and when Jon doesn’t pull away either, she leans into him.

“Basira kept her promise?” Daisy asks after a minute.

“Yes. She didn’t want to, but…” Jon swallows thickly, the memory of Basira’s heartbreak bringing to mind his own. “It wasn’t an easy decision.”

Daisy rubs at her chest with one hand, as if to soothe an ache. “It wasn’t fair for me to ask that of her, was it?”

“Maybe not,” Jon sighs. “It seems fair choices are hard to come by, for most of us.”

“I… I don’t want her to have to make that choice this time.”

“Neither do I.”

“It’s never going to stop, is it?” Daisy glances at him, allowing her head to rest lightly on his shoulder. “It’s only going to get worse.”

“I’m sorry.” What else is there to say?

“Melanie got away,” Daisy says, a tinge of bargaining in her tone. “She managed to purge the Slaughter. And break away from the Eye.”

“Her situation was… different from ours. She wasn’t as far gone as we are. The Slaughter hadn’t fully claimed her, and the Eye never took her as an Avatar. But you’ve been living with the Hunt for most of your life; I signed myself over to the Beholding the moment I became the Archivist. We’ve become… attached to our patrons, dependent on them for survival. Symbiotic, in a twisted sort of way.”

“You really don’t think there’s a way back, then.”

“I don’t know for sure. I’ve seen it before, in my future, but – the world was different then. During the apocalypse, I was able to, uh… shift a person’s status from Watched to Watcher. I – I mean, technically everyone was Watched – the Eye had dominion over everything – but I could give someone control over one of the smaller domains. Create new Avatars, for lack of a better term.

“But turn a Watcher into solely the Watched, and they would typically unravel. I don’t know if that’s because the full focus of the Ceaseless Watcher’s gaze just happens to be lethal – particularly for Avatars aligned with other Powers – or if an Avatar is simply unable to survive being cut off from their patron regardless of the means of separation. I do Know that I wouldn’t have been able to survive being cut off from the Eye unscathed. I was… too much a part of the Eye in that reality. Not sure about now. For either of us.”

“That’s a roundabout way of saying ‘no.’”

“I’m not saying no, I’m saying that I don’t know. Supposedly escaping the Buried was impossible, and here we are.”

“Apples and oranges,” Daisy says sullenly.

“Maybe. I think it’s all too complex for clear-cut categories. Even the hard-and-fast ‘rules’ are only as strong as our collective belief in them. Almost like our expectations shore them up. I’ve witnessed all of reality being rewritten – all physical laws and supposed universal constants reshaped to center the Eye.” He reaches one hand up to tug on the hair at the back of his neck. “After all I’ve Seen, it’s difficult to conceive of anything being categorically impossible. Between all the dream logic and reality bending, there’s plenty of space for firsts and exceptions to the rules.”

‘I don’t knows’ are where the hope lives, Martin said once. At the time, Jon teased him for being a hopeless romantic, but truthfully, Jon was just as hopelessly endeared by Martin’s belief in such things.

“Have you talked to Georgie yet today?” Daisy asks, apparently ready to change the subject.

“Oh, uh – yes. This morning.”

“And?”

“Melanie was out of surgery and stable, but she wasn’t awake yet. Georgie promised to call tonight with an update.” Assuming nothing major comes up before then, a worried voice in Jon’s head supplies. He shakes his head to jog the thought loose. “Speaking of Georgie… have you given any thought to her suggestion?”

“What,” Daisy says, drolly skeptical, “playing a video game?”

“I realize it’s… somewhat out of the box, but it might be worth a try. Like Georgie said, there are multiplayer games where you can, uh… hunt down other players.”

Daisy plucks absently at her collar, glowering at the opposite wall as if the bricks there committed a personal offense. “It’s not the same.”

“A simulation might not come close to a real hunt, no, but – you might still get something out of it? Maybe?” Daisy directs her scowl up at the ceiling. Jon only digs his heels in, undeterred. “There are even some that have a survival horror theme. An aesthetic that already puts players in the mindset to be frightened, you know?”

“People play those games for fun, Sims.” She finally looks at him, eyes narrowed. “It’s about thrills, not mortal fear.”

“Sometimes genuine fear can sneak through. Haven’t you ever been so creeped out by a horror story that it stayed with you after nightfall?”

“Not really?”

“O-oh. Well, some people have that experience.” Jon gives an awkward little cough. “Anyway, under the right circumstances, a game can get the adrenaline pumping as well as a chase can. A fight-or-flight response doesn’t necessarily require a real physical threat.”

Daisy raises her eyebrows, transparently cynical. “Do you really think the Hunt is going to be satisfied with jump scares and – and low-stakes adrenaline rushes filtered through a screen?”

“No,” Jon admits. “But it might take the edge off. Sort of like reading old statements does for me. Not enough to stop you starving, but maybe enough to distract from the hunger pangs. At least temporarily. If nothing else, you did say you need a new hobby, and it’s not like this place is overflowing with viable entertainment options.”

“I guess,” Daisy sighs. “I mean, it’s not like I’m paying rent. May as well squander my paycheck.”

“If that’s the case, you should see if that eBay listing for that vintage The Archers board game is still up,” Jon says drily. “Last I checked, it was £2 with no bidders.”

“Yeah, and £30 shipping.”

“Sounds like £32 well spent, if you ask me.”

Daisy snorts and bumps her shoulder against his. “You, Jonathan Sims, are an absolute menace.”

Adrift and thoroughly divorced from the concept of time, end of the workday passes Martin by without his notice. Once again, he wonders whether Peter deliberately assigned him an office with no external window, not only to put another wall between him and the rest of the world, but to make it easier for him to lose track of time.

For an interminable stretch of time he sits catatonic, mind peppered with sporadic sensory input: Dead-weight limbs, listless and foreign-feeling. The brush of fabric resting against bare skin, every point of weightless contact a violation. The distant ticking of clockwork, rote and irrevocable.

Stand up, comes the thought, detached and intrusive: an instruction he cannot parse; empty phonemes wafted into a vacant mind, abandoned there to echo and disperse until they lose all meaning. A fragment of a signal from brain to nerves to fingers presses numb fingertips to thumbs, a cautious test yielding no sensation but for the vague, spongey give of flesh.

Then the body ostensibly belonging to him is on its feet, the connection between floor and soles disturbingly incongruent with unreality. Walking now, every footfall jarring in its impact; every step stretched and blurred like a botched time-lapse photograph; every molasses-sluggish forward motion met with invisible resistance, like swimming against a sludgy current.

He does not remember how or when or under whose direction he arrives in the Archives, swaying at the threshold of the Head Archivist’s office. Empty and still. Silence so pervasive it’s almost tangible. Viscous and inexorable. Trapping him like a fly in honey. Drowning.

When next he becomes aware of his surroundings, he’s wavering at the bottom of a ladder. Walls curving up and over his head, a brickwork warren stretching on and out into the murk.

Standing in place. Hovering like an afterimage. Rootless and incorporeal. Searching for… staring at… calling to…

There: something real.

“Martin?” Jon’s breath fogs the air as he speaks, but the way he says the name… his voice seems to cradle the word, shielding it against the cold. He sits up straighter, keen gaze sweeping the area like a lighthouse beacon. “Martin, is that you?”

That’s me, Martin thinks, and then, wonderingly: He says your name like it’s something precious.

At that thought, Jon’s eyes land on him like a searchlight.

“There you are.” His soft smile immediately falters, brow furrowing in concern. “Are you alright?”

He’s sat on the floor with his back against the wall, one knee drawn up to his chest, and Daisy pressed up against his side in a mirrored position, sharing a pair of corded earphones. Daisy is already thumbing at the screen of her phone, presumably pausing whatever it is they’re listening to, as Jon removes his earbud.

Martin opens his mouth to speak, but the air in his lungs has turned to viscid fog and the confused tangle of half-formed thoughts in his mind refuse to coalesce into actual words. Jon exchanges a glance with Daisy, who is already moving to stand. Martin wants to object – she doesn’t have to leave on his account; he can see that they’re busy; he’s fine; he’s just overreacting – but before he can cobble together a protest, she’s halfway to her feet, gripping the wall for support.

“I’m alright now,” Martin can hear her say.

“You’re sure?” Jon asks in a low murmur.

“Yeah.” She winces as she straightens her spine. “Knowing Basira, she’s still pouring over the same statements as she was this morning. She could do with an interruption.”

“Can you manage the ladder?”

Daisy stretches her leg out, testing her mobility. “Think so.”

They give each other another long look, a shared nod, and without another word, Daisy staggers her way to the exit and mounts the ladder.

As it does every time he witnesses these displays of unspoken understanding between them, an ugly pang of jealousy burns in Martin’s chest – some combination of envy, inadequacy, longing, and loneliness. Possessiveness, almost – and an instant later, the shame sets in.

But then the trapdoor closes, Jon looks Martin in the eye again, and the sincere, tender warmth sheltering there is enough to leave Martin reeling. It’s hard to comprehend anyone – let alone Jonathan Sims – looking at him like that; difficult to reconcile requited affection with a lifetime of fruitless want. Martin can’t shake the feeling that it will always be this way – and that his inability to trust in unconditional love is precisely what makes him so unlovable in the first place.

Jon clears his throat and pats the floor beside him. He’s seated on a blanket, Martin just now notices, folded over several times to cushion the hard ground.

He’d better not be napping down here, Martin thinks to himself.

“Martin,” Jon says, in that impossibly soft tone he’s taken to using around Martin these days, “I’d like you to come sit, if you’re amenable.”

It’s such a Jon way of phrasing the invitation, and the familiarity it engenders has Martin accepting without a conscious thought. He settles himself beside Jon, close but not touching. Those few inches of distance manage to be simultaneously loathsome and assuring. Martin lets his hand rest in that vacant space, fingers clenching around a fistful of blanket.

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Jon’s hand twitch, as if fighting back the urge to reach out and touch. Instead, he starts to rub the fabric of his trouser leg between his thumb and forefinger.

“What do you need right now?” Jon asks.

“I…” Martin pauses, unsettled by the sound of his own voice, grating and almost unfamiliar to his ears.

“Take your time.”

It takes a minute for Martin to wrap his mouth around more than one syllable.

“Nothing,” he says, the weight of the word nearly pinning his tongue in place.

“It doesn’t sound like nothing.”

Several more minutes pass before Martin is able to construct a full sentence.

“I’m just being stupid.” The words seem to echo faintly in the tunnel, despite how quietly he says them.

“What do you need?” Jon asks again.

“Nothing,” Martin repeats dully. He doesn’t need anything.

Jon doesn’t immediately respond. Martin can feel himself go rigid, anticipating… what – aggravation, impatience, disengagement? But Jon only runs a thumb along his jawline, a thoughtful frown on his face.

“Okay,” he says eventually, “what do you want, then? What would – what would help you feel better right now?”

“I… I don’t know,” Martin says in a voice so feeble it’s nearly inaudible. He flexes his fingers uncertainly, chasing after any physical sensation at all, only to find them numb and deathlike. The helpless sigh that shudders out of him wants to be a whimper. “I just – didn’t – don’t – feel real. Feels like I’m not really here.”

“Hmm.” Jon looks at him – really looks at him, taking his time to study Martin’s face. “Well, I can confirm that you are here.”

“You… you can see me?” Martin asks meekly, pleadingly, dreading the answer.

“Yes.” Jon pauses. “And if you’re agonizing over being a bother, don’t, because you aren’t. I always like seeing you.”

He should trust Jon – he does trust Jon – but it’s still a constant struggle to drown out that Lonely part of him that insists that isolation is safer, more dependable, and far more habitable. Unthinkingly, Martin reaches over, hand trembling in the air above Jon’s, fingertips just barely ghosting across scarred skin.

“Would you like me to hold your hand…?” Jon ventures.

Martin’s fingers curve inward as he pulls back slightly. “I, um.”

“You can say no,” Jon reminds him.

“I… I want it, but I – I – I don’t know if I can handle it right now, and I –” Martin draws back entirely, flapping both hands in frustration, trying to relieve the pins-and-needles sensation prickling through his veins. “I hate this. I hate being like this.”

Martin grimaces at the outburst, but Jon doesn’t seem to be judging him. Instead, he’s looking off to the side, a crease between his eyebrows now, as if he’s working through a problem.

“No skin-to-skin contact,” he says to himself, and then he looks to Martin. “Pressure helps me sometimes, when I feel like I’m not real. You could… lean against me? If you want.”

“I…”

“You don’t have to,” Jon rushes to reassure him.

“It’s – not that I don’t want to. I guess I’m just…” Martin can feel himself flush with embarrassment. “It’s daft, but I’m worried that I’ll be – I don’t know, incorporeal, or something.”

“I distinctly recall you telling me that you’re not a ghost.”

It takes a few seconds for Jon’s deadpan humor to sink in. When it does, Martin nearly chokes on a surprised laugh.

“I still can’t believe you thought I was a ghost,” he says, cracking a smile. The tight, bitter-cold knot in his chest yields just a little, like ice disintegrating under a spring thaw.

“In my defense, I was quite distraught at the time.” Jon’s eyes wrinkle at the corners and Martin is struck by overwhelming fondness. He doesn’t pull away when Jon reaches out, open palm hovering just above his shoulder. “May I?”

Cautiously, Martin nods.

“Hmm.” Jon applies the lightest touch at first, watching Martin’s face carefully. He waits until Martin nods for him to continue before he presses down more firmly. Before long, Martin can feel the warmth of Jon’s hand through his jumper. That warmth carries over into Jon’s smile. “Feels solid to me.”

The confirmation comes as a relief, as foolish as that makes Martin feel. He braces himself and leans against Jon’s side, releasing his held breath when his body meets with tangible resistance. At first he worries that Jon, scrawny as he is, won’t be able to support the weight, but he doesn’t budge when Martin melts against him. After that, it’s a struggle for Martin to keep his eyes open.

Jon must notice, because he whispers, “You can rest. I’ll be here.”

Martin doesn’t even have the strength to nod, let alone the energy to argue. He allows the steady rise and fall of Jon’s chest to lull him into an almost meditative state, his mind still floating somewhere outside of himself, but now tethered to the ground.

Then the silence starts nipping at his heels.

“Too quiet,” he mumbles. “Talk to me?”

“What about?”

“Anything.”

“Did you know that highland cattle have a double coat?” Jon says after a minute of consideration. “It insulates them against the cold. The outer layer is long – the longest hair of any cattle breed, in fact – and oily, which helps ward off the rain. Underneath is softer, almost woolly hair.”

Once Jon gets started, those little scraps of trivia soon progress to a nearly encyclopedic lecture. It doesn’t take long for Martin to lose himself in the rich timbre of Jon’s voice as he goes on about various Scottish breeds of cattle. Although he doesn’t fall fully asleep, Martin manages to drift in and out of consciousness enough that he loses track of time once more. This time, though, it’s a comfortable daze: there’s someone to keep him from straying too far.

At some point, he unthinkingly seeks out Jon’s hand. Jon presses his thumb into the center of Martin’s palm, rubbing small circles there, coaxing Martin further into peaceful relaxation.

“Sorry for interrupting you and Daisy earlier,” Martin murmurs groggily into Jon’s shoulder.

“Oh, we were just listening to The Archers.”

“Are you taking the piss?” Martin asks, opening one eye to scrutinize Jon’s expression.

“Unfortunately not.”

“You like The Archers.”

“Good lord, no. Blame Daisy.”

“Daisy likes The Archers,” Martin says, even more dubiously, sitting up now to squint at Jon.

“There are stranger things.”

Martin snorts and nestles into Jon’s side again. “If you say so.”

“Feeling better now?” Martin reflexively snuggles closer. Jon laughs softly, a little puff of a breath that rustles Martin’s hair. “I’m not going to deny you cuddles if the answer is ‘yes,’ you know.”

“Cuddles,” Martin whispers, the word dissolving into a clipped giggle.

“What?” Jon tilts his head. There’s a puzzled scowl on his face, as if he’s trying to decide whether or not he should take offense. It’s impossibly endearing.

“Cuddles,” Martin repeats, in a poor approximation of Jon’s voice this time. “Not a word I ever expected to hear from you.”

“Quiet, you,” Jon huffs, but he can’t disguise the way his indignant pout cracks into a smile under the weight of his own amusement. He almost seems to preen, as if pulling a laugh from Martin is a victory on which to pride himself. He reaches up with his free hand, pausing just above the top of Martin’s head. “May I?”

At Martin’s affirmative, Jon begins to comb his fingers through Martin’s hair, fingernails lightly scratching against his scalp. For the briefest of moments, some primal fragment of him recoils from the contact, instinctively unnerved by the vulnerability inherent to such closeness. Martin spurns that voice, breathes through its fit of angst and panic, and leans into the touch.

Little by little, step by step, he’s acclimating. He just wishes that it wasn’t such a process each and every time he lets his guard down like this.

“Bad day?” Jon asks once Martin settles.

“Something like that.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really,” Martin groans. “But I should.”

“Only if you want to.”

“No, you should know, I just…” Martin heaves a wearied sigh. “Peter’s back.”

Jon gasps like he’s had the wind knocked out of him. The hand stroking Martin’s hair abruptly stills; the other, still clasped in Martin’s, constricts like a death-grip.

“Did he hurt you?” The question is steeped in an artificial, fragile sort of calm, but Jon can’t quite mask the intensity buzzing just under the surface: fear, protectiveness, and desperation all intermingled and reinforced by that ominous inkling of power that, despite his intentions, lurks behind every word.

“He didn’t do anything out of the ordinary. Just… trying to get me to recommit to the Lonely.” Martin scoffs. “And of course he was trying to do it in a way that would make me feel like it was my idea. Get me to convince myself that it was what I wanted, rather than something he was pressuring me into.”

“Of all the Powers, the Lonely is one of the most insidious, I think,” Jon says quietly. “It seeks out victims who already have one foot in the Lonely, reinforces those fears, promises kinship – a paradoxical form of it, anyway – and then it just… waits. Spend enough time disconnected from the rest of the world, and it doesn’t take long to start telling yourself the lie that it’s for the best. That it’s what you are; that it’s all you’re meant to be.”

“And I fell for it,” Martin mutters.

“Anyone would, subjected to the right conditions.” Jon waits until he catches Martin’s eye before he continues. “It isn’t your fault. This is what the Fears do. It’s what they are. They find an opening, they sink their hooks in, and they pull you under. They don’t let go until either you drown or you learn to breathe fear. The only way out is for someone to throw you a lifeline, and even then, the odds aren’t great. And the Lonely in particular – one of the first things it does is make it difficult to even conceive of a lifeline. It’s hard to catch hold of one if you never think to look for it.”

“I thought you hated convoluted metaphors.”

“Yes, well, unfortunately the Powers That Be tend to elude any sort of straightforward, concrete discussion,” Jon grouses. “Just one more reason to begrudge them, really. My point is, the Lonely is an insufferable liar and so is Peter.”

“What do you know, they’re perfect for each other.” The remark succeeds in putting a lopsided smirk on Jon’s face, much to Martin’s delight. “Anyway, Peter said his plan won’t work unless I’m voluntarily Lonely.”

“He’s right, although his plan has nothing to do with the Extinction. He needs you to choose the Lonely because those were the terms of his bet with Jonah. He poaches you out from under the Eye – gets you to pledge yourself to the Forsaken – and he wins, with the Institute as a prize. He fails to convert you, he loses, and he does what Jonah wants, which is for me to be marked by the Lonely.”

Jon says that last part so nonchalantly. As if it’s a foregone conclusion; as if he’s become so accustomed to dehumanization that it doesn’t even give him pause. Martin grits his teeth, biting back a surge of anger on Jon’s behalf.

“Yeah, well,” he says tightly, “Peter bet on the wrong horse.”

A sharp intake of breath leaves Jon sounding strangled when he says, eyes wide and lips parted, “Oh?”

“I mean, he can’t just sic the Lonely on me like he would any other victim, right? That wouldn’t count as a win. He needs me to choose it. And I’m not going to do that.”

“Yeah?” The expression of unguarded, cautious hope dawning on Jon’s face makes him look years younger.

“Yeah,” Martin says, feeling increasingly emboldened. “The funny thing is, I don’t – I don’t think I ever chose loneliness. I never wanted it – that was just a lie I told myself, and the Lonely just – echoed it back to me. S-so Peter’s out of luck, because if there are other options, then the Lonely will always be involuntary. Because it’s not what I want.”

“You – you mean it?” Jon brightens, leaning forward.

Martin’s heart skips a beat and flutters hummingbird-quick against his ribs. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen Jon smile – not like this, that is, beaming and uninhibited and altogether breathtaking. Immediately, Martin decides that he wants more. It seems wrong for something so exhilarating to be so rare.

He doesn’t know which of them moves first, and it doesn’t matter, because Jon is in his lap, and Jon is nuzzling into his shoulder, and Jon is here and solid and so, so alive in Martin’s arms, breathing warm and steady into his neck, smiling against his skin, hands scrabbling at his back to cling to his jumper. Martin’s fingers seek purchase of their own, and then something clicks.

“Jon,” he says, leaning back just far enough to confirm his suspicion, “is this mine?”

“Are you just now noticing?” Jon asks, devastatingly fond. “Martin, I’ve been wearing this jumper off and on for the last several weeks.”

“You have?” Martin all but squeaks, heat creeping up his neck and to the tips of his ears. “No. No, you –” Jon’s grin is widening, leaving Martin increasingly flustered. “I – I mean, yes, you have, obviously, I know that, but I – I – I –” Martin gulps, mortified, as Jon finally fails to contain his suppressed laughter. “Look, I didn’t recognize it until just now, alright?”

“Well,” Jon says, ducking his head to chuckle softly against Martin’s throat, “it’s mine now, and you can’t have it back.”

Which is fine with Martin, really, because he would be lying to himself if he said he wasn’t helplessly charmed by the newfound knowledge that not only is Jon an unrepentant clothes-thief, but apparently also an insatiable cuddler.

End Notes:

To address Martin’s concern: Jon does, in fact, nap in the tunnels sometimes. Listen, with Jurgen Leitner (derogatory) in absentia, there was an opening for the position of Beleaguered Tunnel-Haunting Hermit and Jon has all the necessary qualifications.

So anyways, who else thinks Peter’s bio on a dating app would probably just be that “every living creature on this earth dies alone” quote from Donnie Darko? I bet he thinks 'survival of the fittest' means 'every man for himself'. What an insufferable clown.

No Archive-speak in this chapter to cite.

I wanted to make a joke about a The Archers-themed Monopoly, so I asked duckduckgo if it was a thing. Sadly, it is not. There IS, however, a 1960s The Archers board game, and yes, there ARE eBay listings for it.

The first section of this chapter was written before eps 190-192 dropped. I think it still lines up well enough with what we saw of Melanie & Georgie’s characterization in these most recent episodes, with the qualifier that things have gone very differently in this AU compared with canon. (Also, I took some liberties wrt Georgie’s not-feeling-fear thing, obvi. Some of it matches with the most recent episodes, some of it not so much, but I decided to keep it anyways.)

Oh and I think I might have given myself cavities with the last section of this chapter. (I’m aro-spec; it’s hard to tell when I’m going over the top, but hopefully it’s fluffy without being overly cloying.)

[thegraysquirrel]

Self-Promotion Sunday

For self-promotion Sunday from @mouseymightymarvellous , I would like to bring the following to your attention:

*scrambles to search for anything useful to promote* 

Oh! There was that one time I was making a promotional speech for Obito in the hypothetical situation of Obito in his prime (no Rinnegan though) fighting Shisui in his prime in hopes of convincing people to vote for Obito instead of Shisui! Below the cut, you will find all 3600 words of it... Because go big or go home.

(If I knew how the hell I would put this on AO3, I so would. But. Tags? Format? okay format would be easy probably I have no idea how to get this on there. Title? I know how to jump literal hurdles but I draw the line at figurative hurdles.)

One last thing! You might be asking, “Why?!” and I would shrug. In reality, I don’t like that Shisui’s Kotoamatsukami is regarded as unbeatable in the Naruto ‘verse. Everything should have a weakness and I just exploited my love for Obito as a character to throw him at Shisui and it worked remarkably well.

I will title this: 

Why Obito (who fell through literal cracks and out of reality as he knew it while regarded as dead last and then dead first) Would Beat Shisui (the legend, the martyr, the Uchiha genius that seemed to have it all in terms of skills and abilities)

Okay so I have thoughts and I have to live up to my “commenting disaster” name so here goes. If you ever wanted to know how authors could feel when they got a comment from me, then buckle in. (wow this turned out to be about 2 full AO3 comments, yes, this is exactly how writers will feel upon seeing my comments in their inbox!)

I think it’s a wild guess that Shisui would have been able to manipulate the complete Uchiha clan through Fugaku.

SHISUI’S JUTSU AND WHAT I THINK OF IT

SHISUI’S LIMITATIONS AND LACK OF EXPERIENCE WITH KOTOAMATSUKAMI I don’t think Shisui’s ability has ever been countered or met his match in the short time he spent on the pages of the manga. Shisui doesn’t know how to tell if someone is fighting the manipulation, and he CAN’T know for sure that no one could. Considering he could use it once every ten years and he is younger than Genma, he hasn’t even got a lot of practise with it. He’ll have used it, what, once? So let’s say he used it twice, since he’s got two eyes. 

That’s TWO instances in which he used it—are you honestly telling me that his technique is unstoppable because he used it twice with no one countering? I’m not buying this. We don’t know the limits, and Shisui sure as hell doesn’t either. 

(I’ll admit, maybe it’s 10 years because the crow does not share the Uchiha blood. We can say Shisui could not use it for 2 years for the sake of Shisui, y’know… being able to build a reputation with it. I think Shisui had his Kotoamatsukami when Itachi was 5 years old, so he had it for about 8 years = 8 or 16 attempts, IF he spams his technique the second it comes off cooldown like us gamers do. Otherwise, he used it TWICE at most)

PEOPLE SAY “THIS JUTSU IS IMPOSSIBLE TO BEAT/THIS DEFENSE IS MORE SOLID THAN A ROCK” AND WERE PROVEN WRONG Do I think everyone has the potential to beat Shisui’s genjutsu? Hell no. But we CAN’T just buy the people’s words for it when we have so little data and they actually have little data too. The people Shisui used it on probably weren’t even a challenge in the genjutsu department. Here’s my thoughts about when people say something about a jutsu being *waves hand* without weakness. 

Gaara was said to have Absolute Defence and Sasuke managed to penetrate it when he was a Genin and everyone was like “Whaaaat he got through the Absolute Defence how is that possible??”

In chapter 257, Kakashi says “There is no cancelling the effects of [Itachi’s Tsukuyomi],” but Sasuke still managed to do so later with an ordinary sharingan. Kakashi’s sharingan prowess in dealing with Itachi’s mangekyou sharingan were inferior to that of this particular Uchiha. Sasuke did it by putting a genjutsu on himself to break free of the former genjutsu.

I’m sure there are more instances when jutsus are called “impossible to defeat” only for someone to go in and say, “bitch, watch me prove you wrong.” Naruto did it with the 3rd Raikage, in a way. “Impossible to defeat” means nothing. 

The only thing we have for Shisui’s eye-technique to be unstoppable is his and everyone’s beliefs that it’s flawless. But really, if Itachi’s powerful Tsukuyomi could be broken by an individual Uchiha, then why can’t Shisui’s have flaws that can be exploited (by another Uchiha)? When fighting an Uchiha and it’s one on one, flee, is Chiyo’s advice—unless you are also an Uchiha, I amend, even if your eyes are still basic instead of the premium version. 

CLOSER LOOK ON SHISUI’S VICTIMS Follow me on this wild speculation. (If you’re still reading, you rock!) It was said that a different person would need to question the one under the genjutsu for them to even consider the possibility of being manipulated. Let’s also list off the people we know or assume have been under Shisui’s eye’s manipulation:

Bloody Mist ninjas

More Bloody Mist ninjas

Probably ninjas from other villages they were at war with (I honestly don’t know)

Probably the Elders via Danzo (I’m vague on the details, but very likely right?)

The Daimyo via Danzo (wow that was really a challenge to influence him. Someone without ninja skills.)

Mifune via Danzo

Edo Tensei Itachi via crow instructed by Itachi (well, the eye was instructed by Itachi)

If I look at the list, I’m not seeing anyone who would give Shisui (or the holder of Shisui’s eye) a challenge, especially as Itachi got under control willingly. Just like Kakashi had no trouble fighting Sakura, Sasuke, and Naruto in the first bell test, Shisui is on a level most people will never be able to reach.

The last one is the only one we know used on an Uchiha. We can’t actually conclude much or anything from it because Itachi orchestrated the Kotoamatsukami, but it was Itachi himself to make note of the manipulation. He was aware of the genjutsu. So the manipulation was noted.

MY CONCLUSION ON SHISUI He’s got the greatest genjutsu, but here’s the thing—he doesn’t know how to fight against other geniuses of genjutsu. It’s the same with eSports, when you are the best by far, you don’t get the experience against the people who match your skill, and that means you get rusty (YES I stole these words right from of a player in the LCS of League of Legends, be happy that I didn’t throw KICK a soccer metaphor at you) and since this tournament I’m arguing for is a knock-out, any mistake can cost you the tournament. His genjutsu is revered as the best, that it can’t be broken, but other jutsus that have been called flawless have been shown to have flaws that could be exploited. Shisui doesn’t have enough experience to have found them out himself. Shisui will win if his Kotoamatsukami works 100% on the enemy, but it’s less sure if the enemy breaks (partly) free.

But who could possibly have a chance of breaking free from it?

*RECORD SCRATCH* (In my document I had the following in a very big font. I miss my big font. ;-;)

MY ARGUMENTS FOR WHY OBITO CAN BREAK FREE FROM KOTOAMATSUKAMI (And why he can win it)

GENJUTSU AND MANIPULATION Obito is not just passing with genjutsu, he’s GOOD, because he was able to even control Yagura—a perfect Jinchuriki, someone who has a built-in pacemaker, but then a pacemaker for when the brain zones out of reality and needs to come back. He managed to somehow convince everyone that he was Uchiha Madara and he double-crossed the actual Madara too—this dude knows how manipulation works, even if that alone obviously won’t help him against a genjutsu of manipulation (it’s a good thing he’s got his own mangekyou sharingan, otherwise he’d definitely be toast). Still thought it worth mentioning. 

I hear you say, “Madara manipulated him!”

Actually, no, I don’t think he did?

Hot take: (I don’t know enough of the general consensus to know if it is a hot take) Obito was NOT manipulated by Madara.

Madara manipulated the situations, but Obito remained true to himself in reacting to them. Whether it would have been Madara’s super evil plan to kill Rin or if it had been The Leaf’s own incompetence at sending kids into dangerous territory (resulting in the deaths of said kids because the system is SHIT), Obito would have reacted the same. 

Yes, Madara is evil for playing with people’s lives like a kid does with blocks to build a structure, but Madara’s involvement isn’t important to the outcome. I think that Madara was unable to “genjutsu bullshit” his way into Obito’s mind, otherwise Madara would have hella secured Obito’s actions already. If Obito could have been influenced by “genjutsu suggestions”, no way in hell would Madara have simply kept asking Obito angrily, “Bring me to life, Obito, I hate being dead. I can’t become the Juubi’s jinchuuriki like this, Obito. Bring. Me. To. Life. (Wake me up.)”

Madara, feared by the world, didn’t use genjutsu on Obito from what we saw. He fell back on manipulating the circumstances for Obito, and the only reason I can think of that is because Obito isn’t susceptible to Madara’s suggestive genjutsu. 

Every time I watch the Obito and Madara episode, I just see Madara spouting words and Obito indulging the old man until he can get out of here. In my interpretation, the words have nothing to latch onto. When Obito returns, it’s his own choice. Madara’s and Obito’s interests aren’t aligning as much as Madara would like, and as such, Obito remains more than just Madara’s pawn.

OBITO IS HELLA STUBBORN (OOPS AND MANIPULATION AGAIN) ANYWAY, if ANYONE would be able to find a flaw in Shisui’s eye technique, Obito would. HECK, he even managed to keep his mind sound when the Juubi was driving him crazy. Like, that anime sequence when his limbs were torn apart? That thing. This dude got willpower and a stubbornness to follow the path he wants to take even if it’s really a dumb path. I might be easily swayed and manipulated, but Obito is not. Shisui wouldn’t even need his eyes to sway me, but on Obito he would need to give his 100% and, again, I’m not sure Shisui has ever been pushed to his limit, and he ALSO thinks that he’s impossible to beat so he’s not even going to give it his 100% (he might think he is, but you’ll only know how fast you can run when you’re chased by something you really don’t want catching up to you or if your alarm went off too late and you really need to be on time). Against Obito, it’s a flaw for Shisui’s ability that it’s about manipulating his decision, because Obito is a master of manipulation himself. He knows what Madara did to him. He fought the Juubi. Obito would walk into a tree rather than change his mind about what path he should walk.

OBITO HAS EXPERIENCE Obito at his prime also has a lot more experience with his ability, he knows his own limitations and how to use it as a part of himself. He can use it multiple times, he can use it in ways Shisui would not expect... Shisui would need to figure it out fast, and I think Obito at his prime (TWO Kamui sharingan) just has too many tricks up his sleeve for even Shisui of the Body Flicker to keep up with. 

MY SLEEP DEPRIVED CONCLUSION ON OBITO What I think Obito has: he got the stubbornness + sharingan skillz for weakening Shisui’s genjutsu on himself enough or maybe even completely repel it so Obito can actually still do things + Obito’s own mad skillzzz with Kamui. Shisui loses. 

TO CONCLUDE

I’ve got a lot of fanon thoughts (or maybe just my personal fix-it for canon) on Obito that I won’t unpack here (it’s that Obito is actually a genius himself even if it never showed clearly in his years pre-sharingan) because, hey, people don’t like reading 1k of random shizzle when they just want to vote for their boy Shisui! But please give Obito a chance because I feel he actually has a chance!

TL;DR 

Shisui has never been challenged in his abilities (especially not by an Uchiha). He won’t know what his all-out is for this, so he won’t go all-out 

Abilities have been called flawless before only for someone to be “hold my beer” and fuck them up. Case in point: Sasuke practically made Gaara cry

There’s been precedent of an Uchiha with normal sharingan getting out of what is hailed as one of the best genjutsus whereas no one without     sharingan would be able to do that alone (or at all)

Unlike Sasuke at that point, Obito has been a master of genjutsu and has a mangekyou sharingan at the point of fighting 

Obito knows what manipulation is and has even kept to his sanity* when the Juubi was tearing him apart. He has manipulated practically everyone, including a perfect jinchuuriki. He will be able to find a flaw in Shisui’s jutsu because he’s too stubborn to change his mind enough about yeeting (parts of) himself to his Kamui dimension when there’s danger

Obito knows his own ability like the back of his hand, including limitations, so Shisui will have a hard time fighting Obito if his own Kotoamatsukami isn’t winning the fight for him. 

*Okay, so maybe Obito isn’t completely sane, but Sakura wasn’t either when she fought off a jutsu working on the mind. I think Obito’s instability even gives him a cookie point

PLEASE GIVE OBITO A CHANCE I EVEN TALKED MY POOR SISTER’S EAR OFF DURING DINNER BECAUSE OF THIS

LET HER SACRIFICE NOT BE IN VAIN

 ---

(Counterarguments with my own reply I put in that document)

Honestly Great Argumenter for Shisui: my counter argument: Shisui is known as the ultimate uchiha genjutsu master. And hes also the best looking. ;)

         Me: In reply to greatest genjutsu master-- Would you say that Itachi was a greater genjutsu master than Sasuke? Because Sasuke broke free from ITACHI'S genjutsu. I'm not saying that Obito would put Shisui under a genjutsu--it's just that Shisui's genjutsu wouldn't hold as well as it normally would, and that might be enough already.

         HGAS: Shisui would still be faster than obito if we take genjutsu out of the equation completely Minato was able to almost kill obito due to speed so that can't be discounted. Obito had to retreat from his fight with minato.          Me: How old was Obito? 14? (Kakashi and Obito are both 31 at the end of Shippuuden, and Naruto’s birthday is in October, so Obito would have turned 32 in the following February of the war, and THIS means that Obito was 14 during the fight against Minato too, because Kakashi was 14 at the time of Naruto’s birth but Naruto timelines are terrible) I hardly call that his prime! And against Shisui, Obito will have two Kamui, whereas against Minato, he only had one. The fight would be different, I feel.

---

YO BECAUSE I STILL GOT TIME HERE I WILL ADD TO THIS. I warned you, if you feel confused where this is all coming from, you’re probably feeling the exact same things Mumma does at some of my Konoha Files comments. This is how I roll. AND PLEASE IF YOU WANT TO TALK KONOHA FILES HIT ME UP because I’ve got a lot more thoughts on that than on Obito vs Shisui!

EXPERIENCE Shisui graduated any age between 6 and 12, but we know that about two years later, he met Itachi who was 5, and 8 years later he died (I think he died when Itachi was 13 because there was more time between Shisui’s death and the other Uchihas’ deaths). Shisui died when he was between 16 and 22. (I am not familiar with the book canon!)

This means Shisui had at most 10-11 years of experience as a ninja. Yes, one year after graduating he got the Kotoamatsukami, so he got 10 years TOPS with his Mangekyou Sharingan which had a freaking long timer of usage in between, regardless of how many years we put it as; 10 years, 2 years, Shisui would have kept that ace up his sleeve so he would not spam the ability the second it came off cooldown.

Obito graduated when he was 9. At his prime he was 31 years old. That’s 22-23 years of experience for Obito as a ninja! He got his mangekyou sharingan when he was, what, 14 (at the end of shippuuden he is 31, and Kakashi is 31 too, so they might have been the same age—and then the Kyuubi summoning was when he was 14)? That’s 17 years of experience with his Mangekyou sharingan. 

Obito will have had way more battles with his ability than Shisui, way more opponents that would challenge his way of using his ability so Obito KNOWS what his flaws are. He knows what it will be like to fight against someone with kamui! He fought Minato and knows how the Flying Thunder God/teleportation can be used against him (and that was when he had his Mangekyou sharingan for less than a year!). In his battles, even when he was mostly forced to stay in the normal dimension because he needed to get his hands on someone, he has shown that he can slip body parts into his dimension even when he is attacked from all sides. His reaction time is solid (even if he is not because... dimension stuff).

Conclusion: Obito has more years of experience than Shisui at fighting with his mangekyou and more moments of figuring out his own limits and flaws and adjust his fighting style to minimize them. Obito has also had more momentous fights to test out his own abilities, including The 3rd Mizukage, The Fourth Hokage, Copy Ninja Kakashi with Kamui himself, other Uchihas during the Uchiha massacre (they count), Konan, Naruto and Killer B. Seriously, he’s more well-rounded than Shisui!

---

THE MIST Shisui fought ninjas, soldiers of the Mist and was feared by them. Obito won from the strongest ninja of the Mist, the Mizukage who was also a FREAKING PERFECT JINCHUURIKI and kept him under his control for YEARS. I know which feat I think is more admirable. 

SPEED Shisui is hailed for his speed, but the Body Flicker is said “To an observer, it appears as if the user has teleported. It is accomplished by using chakra to temporarily vitalise the body and move at extreme speeds.” Obito has FOUGHT Minato, who actually is able to teleport. This was 17 years ago!!! Obito has improved because he was just a fledgling who even had to figure out how his new arm worked!!! Yes, Shisui is faster than Obito, but Shisui will not be fast enough to pulverize Obito. Don’t forget, the kamui sharingan has the added benefits of being able to predict the opponent’s movements, see chakra, so Shisui’s speed advantage is diminished against any Uchiha.

OBITO’S TECHNIQUE Shisui has no idea what Obito’s technique could be and honestly, passing through him mid-fight is already a scary thought, just think how disappearing from sight and appearing could be. Heck, Obito could probably even be in his own dimension, spit fire, and then long-range Kamui it back to the dimension where Shisui is. The precision of it can be worth speculating, but if Obito can appear on a branch of a tree, then he sure as hell can know where exactly he’d send his fireball jutsu. He just does. He’s got the spatial awareness of the overlap between his own dimension and the one Shisui recedes in. And how would Shisui counteract this attack, huh? He can’t body flicker to Obito’s dimension.

Even if Obito stays in the dimension Shisui is in, Shisui won’t be able to exploit the weaknesses. It took Konan a long time to know what the timer for Obito’s ability was, and Konan had her own ability to exploit that weakness. From what we know of Uchihas fight styles, I am having a hard time figuring out what Shisui could do to exploit Obito’s timer—and that’s only if he can figure it out, which he won’t. No one but Konan has found out about that particular tid bit, to my knowledge.

Let’s say Shisui got a hit on Obito. A hit means contact and he gets sucked to the other dimension. Afterwards, Obito would return to the dimension with food and eat while Shisui starves. Win. I’m a bit fuzzy on the details, but the people who have managed to get a hit on Obito when Obito could use kamui (Remember! Obito could not use kamui when he was the Juubi jinchuuriki!):

Minato with his Flying Thunder God move when Obito was new to kamui, to his arm, and only had his right eye kamui and not his left

Kakashi but that was when he was in the other dimension while Obito was still fighting Naruto. Since Obito vs Shisui is a 1v1, this won’t happen

Kakashi because he used his OWN kamui to get a kunai to Obito. Uhuh, Kakashi got a lot of hits mostly because Kakashi had kamui.

Kakashi again, but that was because it would be hella stupid to phase out to the dimension that had a war going on.

Konan (she was so badass)

I honestly don’t remember more, do you?

Shisui is amazing with his body flicker, really, but Obito can dodge left and right. Shisui won’t get a hit on him unless Obito allows it, because Obito got the damn experience!

With two kamui’s, Obito’s transportation (himself and of others he holds on to) is faster, as we’ve seen when Obito and Kakashi worked together to move Obito to his own dimension. Obito’s speed has increased with two kamui’s. 

SHISUI’S TECHNIQUE Shisui is a softy. I’m sorry, but he is. Aoba lived to tell the tale because Shisui wanted to scare them off with his genjutsu instead of killing them. Danzo was put under a genjutsu by Shisui and Shisui thought it was enough even when the genjutsu was done (and then Danzo managed to take an eye of BODY FLICKER SHISUI, so hey, his speed ain’t gonna be the end of it all). Shisui relies on his genjutsu deterring people—that’s obviously going to be his go-to move, and it means he can be caught off-guard when it’s not as effective.

He’s good at Taijutsu (or at least, he would win every spar against Itachi but Itachi was 3-9 years younger, so…), but even Taijutsu master Gai didn’t manage to land a hit on Obito when he used his nunchucks--would Shisui really be able to do what Taijutsu master Gai could not? 

Another TL;DR

Shisui simply doesn’t have the tools against an Uchiha as experienced as Obito. Obito’s ability is a different kind of OP than Shisui’s because Obito knows how to use it as a part of him, whereas Shisui’s ability is something he has relied on very heavily because no one has countered it yet. Obito will find the weakness in Shisui’s “strongest” genjutsu and be able to win from Shisui because of all the battle experience against talented individuals Obito has had. Obito managed to unite the five nations all on his own, he was THAT powerful.

We’ve said before that Shisui is on a different level from practically everyone, but honestly?

Obito stares down on Shisui from his god tier level 

*mic drop*

[rama-baktha]

The Atman (Soul)

The Atman (Soul) is the living one. More specifically, it is the Inner Self or the Everlasting Self that, according to the Vedas, is present in all things, from the greatest to the lowest. The Upanishads define Atman as immortal, blissful, transcendental, indestructible, spiritual, pure, limitless, wise. It is also the real self but is susceptible to the impurities and alterations of Existence. Because of them, people can not know their own Selves and stay deluded and unaware. Atman is the heart or the nature of everything. Ego is the exterior case or cover from which creatures establish their personality and distinguishing features. According to the Vedas, understanding the inner self is the highest aim of human existence, which contributes to freedom from the process of creation and death. The following essays shed considerable light on the fundamental essence and meaning of Atman and why it is vital to meditate on the Self in order to calm the mind and become lost in the Body. Get the Law Of Attraction - 20 eBooks Package

The Concept of the Atman

The Atman (Soul) is the divine component of our physical life, the real self, which is concealed in every entity of development, including the human being. It is the microcosm that reflects the macrocosm in each one of us, imparting to us spiritual virtues and opportunities, and granting us awareness and purpose to live and feel the pains and pleasures of earthly existence. Atman is Brahman Himself, the very Being that descends through the elements of Nature by being-projection or representation and engages individually in the game of self-induced delusion and utter joy. But bound by the senses and constrained by the ego, connection, duality, and perceptual intelligence, we, the jivas, do not perceive the reality. We go out, get interested, and overlook who we are in the end. It's like a human who journeys to distant lands under a spell and forgets his origins, his heritage and his homeland.

Atman is the invisible companion

You never peek in as you glance about. When you are actively interested in the environment, you lack self-awareness and get lost in the job at hand. It's how Nature has built your mind and body to hold you attached. "The non-existent Lord invaded the senses to make them transform outward. Therefore, we gaze to the outside universe and see not the Non with us." The Soul is the invisible companion of all our actions and encounters, the creator and the indweller of all the incarnated creatures. The essence can not be properly clarified or represented in human language, since it is outside the senses and the mind. "There the eyes can not travel, nor speech, nor mind. Nor do we know how to explain it to the disciples. It is different from the known and beyond the unknown." It can only be experienced when all sensory activity ceases to have an impact on the mind, when the mind itself is freed from the movement of thought and sense objects, and from the torment of desires, which are the primary cause of all human beings. The awareness of the Self emerges, "When the consciousness and the five senses are still and the brain is still they claim that Yoga is the total stillness in which one reaches the condition of Oneness."

Atman has no physical or mental dimension

While represented as a light, the size of the thumb, which is supposed to occur physically between the eyes, or psychically in the centre, its exact position is unknown. It has no physical or mental dimension as well but as a pure representation or understanding of the mind's intellect. But unquestionably He remains, and He alone is real. Anything else is fake, or an idea that withers away, crushed by the weight of sins, the deterioration of the earth, and the burden of time. We are instructed, "The Adorable One resides in the heart and governs the air of creation. Even the senses pay respect to Him. If He steps out of the body in liberation from the chains of the flesh, what else remains? This Being is Supreme." We are often instructed, "The soul is beyond the senses, the brain above the spirit, the conscience beyond the conscience, and the unmanifested cause above the Brahman. Whereas the basis of Atman is truth, permanence, and happiness, the essence of the ego is delusion, impermanence, and pain. The conscience of a human entity is forever saturated in despair and misery, and the indwelling Atman wants to be saved from everlasting destruction and damnation. The ego is a distorted representation of this. Katha Upanishad describes the relative position of the two selfs in this manner, "There are two selfs, the independent ego and the indivisible Atman. As one grows above me, me and mine, Atman shows Himself as the true Self."

Atman described in the Mundaka & Kena Upanishad

The Mundaka Upanishad is more explicit and poetic, "Like two birds perched on the same tree, intimate friends, the ego and the self, dwell in the same body. The former eats the sweet and sour fruits of life, while the latter looks with detachment." This symbolism is further extended in this verse of the Katha Upanishad, "Know the Self as the Lord of the Chariot, the body as the chariot itself, the budding bud. "Here, no eye can penetrate, no speech, no spirit. Neither do we know whether to grasp or preach it." Throughout the Kena Upanishad, the instructor describes the challenge of understanding the Self to the students in the following terms, "If you believe you know the Self you don't know." And the student says, "I don't think I know the Self, nor can I claim I don't recognize Him." The problem is further explained in the Kena Upanishad, and the way to reach the Atman (Soul) is also suggested, "The ignorant one thinks that the intellect can know the Self, but the enlightened one knows that He is beyond the duality of the knower and the known." Thus, intelligence can give you wisdom and discernment and pave the way, but it can not give you the experience of the pure Self. The concept that is inferred or indicated in the Upanishads is that Atman can not be understood by ordinary consciousness, when the senses are involved, and when the mind is dysfunctional, and buddhi, intellect, is under the control of impulses, delusions, and duality, which interfere with the cycle of understanding and discerning the reality and the correct wisdom. There can be no knowledge of the Atman (Soul) while there is a gap of "knowing" between the knower and the learned. He who knows it (as an object) doesn't really know it. Mind and the senses The mind and the senses are between the two polarities of the knower and the understood, or the subject and the object. We keep the being from recognizing and understanding Atman as his own Self. The subconscious is an incomplete device with the intrinsic failure of Atman to grasp and distinguish. "The essence of the Self can not come to him, who has not recognized that he is the Self. His intellect can not disclose the Self to him, outside his duality of subject and object." How can one know the Atman (Soul)? Which is the answer or the mechanism that renders Atman self-evident? The Upanishads are rather simple.

The self

"The self can not be identified to a person who does not refrain himself from wrong ways, who does not regulate his senses and holds his mind, and who does not practice meditation or abstinence," Yama describes to Nachiketa in Katha Upanishad. He also says, "This enlightenment that you have learned may not come from rationality and education, but from near interaction with a recognized instructor." Nevertheless, a pure connection with a spiritual leader will not be quite beneficial when there is an inner and profound devotion and desire to learn the transcendental Self, the Atman (Soul). "The Self can not be understood through the analysis of the Bible, not by intelligence, nor by educated discourses. Only those who desire the Self will obtain the Self. However, the Self shows itself to them." Establishing a relation between the outer and the inner realms is neither simple nor clear and straightforward. One must progress through several intermediate phases and levels, conquer several barriers, eliminate many impurities, mute many noises of mind and body, eradicate unfavorable attributes and destructive behaviors to achieve the final target. The Self is immune to the perception of conditions in the physical realm. The Mandukya Upanishad teaches us that the soul is fourfold: the waking Vaishwanara, the Supreme Male (the ego), the sleeping Taijasa, the enjoyer of the intangible artifacts and the God of the luminous spirit, (the astral), the enigmatic Prajna, the one who resides in deep sleep and who is the God of Knowledge Atman, the infinite, the incommunicable, the origin of the world, and really Brahman hisse. Universal realities and planes of awareness We travel through these four states every day, so we don't realize who we truly are, even like we confuse the ego for the Self. Our minds have little integrity or power to learn transcendental realities or the fundamental realities of our own life outside our empirical knowledge. The inner path is challenging and enigmatic, and we are insufficiently prepared to distinguish the existence of the Spirit inside us or its limitless realities. There may also be other universal realities and planes of awareness between our waking and deep sleeping states, which we will never learn. But nothing can be done regarding the true understanding of self-knowledge? What's going to happen when a seeker gets there? No one appears to recognize or explain explicitly what occurs when an individual falls into union with the Self or Brahman. By the knowledge of many, we realize that the state of self-realization is outside the capacities of the human mind and can not be adequately converted into any human language, because terms that belong to the realm of the conditioned mind do not hold the force or the luminosity of transcendental realities. Mysticism itself is a vague area, and mystical encounters are much more vague. Around the same moment, we realize that deep in the recesses of our own minds there is a tangible mystery. We realize it's there because we can sense its existence in a deep moment. We realize that we are different because we are quiet and profoundly contemplative. And for all the obstacles that the universe provides, the joy of the Self can not be kept indefinitely in the hidden caves of the head. In the vast phases of the spirit, in the sumptuous phases and sublime moments where you feel linked to the universe or Existence, and in times of immense distress where you feel lonely or powerless, the happiness and passion of the soul flood through your waking consciousness like the thundering sounds of a wild river and awaken you to the reality of the Self. Discover The Secret To Increased Productivity And Happiness - Endless Energy Soul who is the everlasting witness Therefore, the Atman (Soul) who is the everlasting witness does not fully forsake you. If you excel in reflecting the best of human existence if you have kindness, affection, empathy and equanimity, and if you conquer the forces of your own subconscious, you can gradually feel linked to him and see the universe through his eyes. You will still require the help of God in the path towards self-knowledge. In Isa Upanishad, we see an ambiguous reference to it when the seeker prays to Brahman in the following terms, indicating the value of devotion. "The face of reality is concealed behind the golden cover, O Pusan, may you lift the lid so that I may see the golden Reality!" As the appeal is rendered and the Truth that he was searching reveals itself, he draws an undisputed conclusion in a state of ecstasy and exclaims, "In fact I am He." Self is the greatest mystery of human existence. Understanding this is the ultimate aim that a human may be expected to accomplish after multiple births by gaining great merit. In him, the process of life completes its full circle as it finds the Reality that is concealed behind the golden shield. Although people suffer and fail in the mortal universe with abstract yearnings and unfulfilled wishes, a handful manages to create the nearly unlikely vision of realizing who they are. And the planet is worshipping them. Useful blogs to read: Bramha SutraVedic View Of The Universe Disclosure: “Bear in mind that some of the links in this post are affiliate links and if you go through them to make a purchase I will earn a commission. Purchasing via an affiliate link does not cost you any extra, and I only recommend products and services I trust. It helps me support the blog/channel/group to make quality content and recommend products for you." Read the full article

[aleesblog]

My Foreword for Hardy Tree by J. Warwick Sweeney the story of Doctor John Dent

                     During my final year of medical apprenticeship at The London Hospital, Whitechapel I entered into a Mephistolean pact with William Seward Burroughs. The ‘Pope of Dope’ agreed to leave me alone until I had qualified provided I paid attention to what he had written about bad doctoring, dangerous scientists and institutional corruption. Later he became an invisible mentor in my quest to find a cure for the shaking palsy.

                       In April 1956 William Burroughs had arrived in London hooked on synthetic opioids. It was his good fortune to be referred on to Dr John Yerbury Dent, a medical practitioner who had gained a reputation for the treatment of alcohol dependence. When Burroughs knocked on the door of 34 Addison Road, in West London he was at the end of the line and desperate for a quick fix for his junk sickness Previous detoxication attempts in Tangiers had all ended in failure. At their first meeting Dent persuaded Burroughs to be admitted for treatment to his clinic at 99 Cromwell Road for apomorphine treatment.

                   Apomorphine was first synthesised in the middle of the nineteenth century by Matthiesen and Wright two English chemists working at St Bartholomew’s Hospital by heating opium with hydrochloric acid in anaerobic conditions. Despite its structural similarities to morphine it had negligible narcotic properties but was a potent emetic. It was first used by veterinary scientists to treat behavioural vices in farm animals and then introduced into medicine as a treatment for acute poisoning. It was later employed as a sedative, a treatment for palpitations, chorea and hysterical seizures and at the beginning of the twentieth century it had been used to treat delirium tremens. In France up until the nineteen seventies it was marketed as a treatment for sexual deviation including homosexuality and later was licensed in Europe and the United States as a treatment of erectile dysfunction under the trade name of Uprima.  

                      Dent’s two nurses injected apomorphine into Burroughs every two hours round the clock. He was also permitted heroin injections and alcohol during the first two or three days of acute opioid withdrawal and given very small doses of insulin. Dent also used suggestion to reinforce the pharmacological effects of the drug. Within a week his patient was ‘clean’ and ready for discharge. Before Burroughs left London he continued to see Dent who made it clear that the onus of travel beyond a tomorrow free of pain and junk lay firmly on his patient’s shoulders.

                            On August 3 four months after Burroughs had left 99 Cromwell Road he wrote to Dent from Venice;

 Dear Doctor,

Thanks for your letter. I enclose that article on the effects of various drugs I have used. I do not know if it is suitable for your publication. I have no objection to my name being used.

No difficulty with drinking, No desire to use any drug. General health excellent. Please give my regards to Mr…… I use his system of exercises daily with excellent results.

I have been thinking of writing a book on narcotic drugs if I could find a suitable collaborator to handle the technical end.

 Yours truly,

William Burroughs

      Opioid withdrawal and apomorphine facilitated Burroughs dream recall, retrieval of the lost subconscious and formative memories and created a vividness in his perception that is reflected in some of the phantasmagorical imagery that bears a remarkable similarity with Bulgakov’s Master and Margerita and Coleridge’s opium fuelled word hoards..Burroughs became a champion of the ‘junk vaccine’ and hoped to get the ‘shrinks’ at the Federal Medical Center in Lexington interested in the treatment. Much later he wrote that without Dr Dent’s help he would never have managed to assemble the contents of Naked Lunch. Apomorphine remained a Schedule 2 drug in the State of California until 2010 (drugs with established medical use but with a high potential for abuse, with use potentially leading to severe psychological or physical dependence).  Although ending up on a methadone programme in Burroughs wrote that maintenance therapy was like treating an alcoholic with whisky and that apomorphine was a far better approach.

                   Five years after Dent’s death apomorphine was shown to stimulate dopamine receptors in the brain but despite growing evidence apomorphine treatment faded away as its last advocates in Scandinavia and Switzerland died or retired. Science had confirmed Dent’s hunch that apomorphine was a metabolic stimulant with actions on the hindbrain and that it was not an aversive therapy for addiction like antabuse. Despite mounting evidence that the dopamine pleasure and reward circuits may be an important final common pathway in the neurobiology of addiction by the late nineteen seventies apomorphine had faded away in its last strongholds of Scandinavia and Switzerland

                      By this time the honeymoon period of L-DOPA was long over and many of my patients were experiencing a chaotic roller coaster ride, which some of them incorrectly attributed as a tolerance to their medication. Through the nineteen eighties I intensified my search for a cure for this incapacitating ‘on off syndrome’ that was ruining lives. I   re-read Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness where Burroughs had described the ‘algebra of need’ and how apomorphine had helped him kick heroin. A few nights later the structural formula of apomorphine floated by me in a dream.

                        This triggered a series of experiments at the Middlesex Hospital, Mortimer Street first on myself and then on volunteers with Parkinson’s disease that now looking back I consider my most lasting achievement in medicine.  Delivery of apomorphine by a mini-pump smoothed out the patients’ oscillations and returned their independence. A man who was barely able to walk or speak for six hours each day told me that apomorphine had turned the clock back five years. Not long after our paper had been published in The Lancet apomorphine returned once again to the British Pharmacopoeia.

                             It was around this time that I was contacted by two of Doctor Dent’s daughters, Ann Rubinstein and Jane Sweeney. On our first meeting Ann handed me a copy of her father’s book Anxiety and its Treatment first published in 1940 and an article written by one of his patients, the Macmillan publisher Alan Maclean, brother of the Russian spy Donald which began:

 I’d heard of an eccentric elderly doctor called John Dent who was said to offer a swift chemical treatment with no psychiatric strings. He’d successfully treated the film director Anthony Asquith, the uncle of Mark Bonham-Carter, who’d been observing my drinking habits with increasing alarm. At least he didn’t sound like the pin-striped proprietor of some expensive torture chamber with panoramic views across London from Harrow-on-the Hill. So I rang him up and got my head bitten off. When I mentioned Asquith’s name he said he didn’t discuss his patients. Who was I? and What did I want? I said help was what I wanted and that at last seemed to be the right answer

               Dent opened the door in his braces. Short, portly, shaggy white hair and moustache to match, he wore a Savage club tie loosely knotted halfway down his front. He looked like an old dog… and had ‘the loudest laugh of any man in London’.

                   I joined Ann and Jane in their campaign to encourage more research into addiction and a re-investigation of their father’s notion that very anxious people were particularly susceptible to substance dependence. Echoing Dent, Burroughs had drawn comparisons between the need of diabetics for insulin and junkies for dope. There were also similarities between the treatment approaches we were using to help Parkinson’s disease and those our colleagues in endocrinology were using to help brittle diabetics. Unfortunately the highly conservative and politicised world of drug addiction remained unresponsive to our campaign despite the fact that success rate in the treatment of alcoholism remained low and the use of methadone as maintenance therapy was involved in the death of hundreds of heroin addicts.

                   Twenty years later I met two of their children Warwick Sweeney and Antonia Rubinstein, both of whom were as passionate as their mothers had been about the lack of progress in the management of alcoholism and drug addiction. Warwick told me, ‘For me it goes much deeper still. I am interested in the politics of addiction.  I also share my grandfather’s taste in literature. All his books filled my home growing up, Sterne, Swift and Wells. Everything is environment. It was inevitable that he rubbed off on me.’

Antonia later confided in me over a drink at the Groucho Club in Soho that within the family Warwick was considered John Dent reincarnate, sharing both many of his views and his physical appearance.

                        When I was writing Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment I entered into an intense and fruitful epistolary exchange with Warwick and learned a great deal about his grandfather, some of which I included in my own fanatasia. In a world where inebriety was a shameful weakness, gay sex a criminal offence and abortion illegal  Dent had been  prepared to treat individuals at the point of need using a ‘Robin Hood’ business model to run his practice before the National Health Service was founded.

Despite his lack of political nous and distaste for public office he had also served dutifully as the Secretary of the Society for the Study of Addiction from 1944-47 and was in the middle of a second term of office when he treated William Burroughs. He had also been the Editor of the British Journal of Inebriety since 1941 (now the British Journal of Addiction).

He believed strongly that the British Government’s decision to severely restrict medical practitioners using heroin to treat addiction was wrong. In 1955 he wrote:

 .....if doctors are forbidden to prescribe heroin or prevented from obtaining it very soon they will not be able to treat their patients except with medicines prescribed from Whitehall. or the American Bureau of Mr Anslinger’ (the first commissioner of the US Treasury Department’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics and an advocate of the prohibition and criminalisation of drugs).

 If alive he would also have condemned the 1968 policy change that put an end to the unique ‘British system’ that had allowed GP’s to keep addicts away from dealers by prescribing them hard drugs.

                      I feel sure he would also have supported the work of the Welsh psychiatrist John Marks whose prescription of heroin on a Home Office licence in his drug dependency clinic in Widnes between 1982 and the early nineties markedly reduced crime, prostitution and drug related deaths including those from AIDS on Merseyside . His harm reduction approach also reduced the actual number of addicts and killed off the pyramid selling schemes. Marks received support and protection from prominent members of the Drugs Squad including Bing Spear, the Chief Inspector of the Government’s Drug Inspectorate but eventually the Government manoeuvred him out and like Dent’s apomorphine his successful experiment was expunged from the history books.

                  Both men were at the end of the line when Burroughs consulted Dent. Burroughs was hooked on junk and unable to write while Dent was denigrated by his profession as a maverick. Almost all Burroughs’ previous consultations with doctors had been disappointing. The New York psychiatrists who had misdiagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia and then tried to straighten him out with Freudian analysis and hypnotherapy were well meaning frauds while the ‘croakers’ who had supplied him with dope on the upper west side of Manhattan were no better than drug pushers. Dent and Burroughs were both iconoclasts with a strong distaste for consumerism and globalisation. They fed on one another, exchanged stories and discussed subjects of mutual interest like the Maya civilisation and cats. Although Dent’s approach to Burroughs was formal it was fraternal and less patronising or unequal than most of the consultations he had experienced up until then. Most importantly Dent’s approach was non-judgemental. The two men shared a fierce integrity and brutal honesty as well as a moral indignation at the vested interests of corporations, drug cartels and Big Pharma that profited from stoking anxieties. Dent was also a good writer who had published two books so was in a position to advise and encourage Burroughs in his writing.

In the end Burroughs, at a pivotal moment in his life, came to trust and like Dent.

                     Anyone who has read Willliam Burroughs’ books will know that they are full of frightening doctors who epitomise power and control. The amoral Doctor Benway in Naked Lunch may have been Burroughs’ revenge for the corruption that he felt defined contemporary doctorhood:

 Now, boys, you won’t see this operation performed very often and there’s a reason for that . . . You see it has absolutely no medical value . . . I think it was a pure artistic creation from the beginning’.  

      And from the legendary sketch with Dr Lymph in Naked Lunch:

You young squirts couldn't lance a pimple without an electric vibrating scalpel with automatic drain and suture. All the skill is going out of surgery, all the know how and make do. Ever tell you about the time I performed an appendectomy with a rusty sardine can? And once I was caught short without instrument one and removed an intrauterine tumor with my teeth. The was in the Upper Effendi and besides the wench is dead.

Then there is Dr Tetrazzini who starts his list by throwing a scalpel across the room into the patient and then making his grand entrance like a ballet dancer. The discovery of a tumour throws him into a temper’, fucking undisciplined cells’ he snarled advancing on his target like a matador.

               Whether Dent ever told Burroughs medical anecdotes is unknown but Underhill the incompetent honorary visiting surgeon at Dudley Guest Hospital during Dent’s training has close similarities to both Benway and Tetrazzini:

Underhill peered into the man’s abdomen.

‘NOW, what’s this, eh?’

‘A kidney, sir?’ suggested Dent, astounded at what was unfolding.

‘Are we sure?’

‘Quite sure.’

‘And this?’

‘The other kidney, sir, most definitely,’ said Dent. Dalton cursed under his breath.

‘So, this is the appendix?’

‘No, sir,’ said Dalton, ‘I think you’ll find that that is the spleen.’

‘The spleen. Good God! What the devil’s it doing here?!’

‘There’s the appendix,’ indicated Dalton, pointing to a perfectly healthy organ.

‘But can we be sure? London?’

‘There’s no doubt about it, sir; Dalton is correct, that is the appendix.’

‘Wonderful, SO, my boy, we’ve located the offender and now the punishment. We’ll cut the blighter out, right out! Save this poor man, in the nick of time by the look of it. Scissors. SCISSORS, Nurse, come a-long!’

    Burroughs was hypochondriacal, adept at self-medicating and frequently advised his friends and acquaintances on medical matters. His relationship with doctors was complex and ambiguous. He saw himself as a sort of healer among his associates and had enrolled for a medical degree at the University of Wien in the hope of one day becoming a psychiatrist.

            Much of John Dent’s medical career occurred before the formation of the National Health Service. Doctors had far more power and professional freedom than is the case today. The main pre-occupation of the General Medical Council was with breaches of confidentiality rather than medical mistakes or incompetence. Dent was prepared to break convention if his conscience told him he was doing the right thing. He was a charismatic persuasive force for good and also a cute judge of what he could get away with. He believed in what he did and also why he was doing it and there can be no doubt that this rubbed off on his anxious and addicted patients who desperately wanted and needed him to succeed.

                         Driven by opportunist Members of Parliament, a series of scandals and the media, doctors now find they face opprobrium and a degree of regulation that is neither logical nor necessary. Growing distrust of the medical profession has led to a number of undesirable complications including an increasing reluctance by patients to accept ‘a wait and see’ approach often leading to over-investigation. ‘Do no harm’ has been replaced by ‘Watch your back, cover your ass and harm be damned’. A growing disrespect for medical science and the institutions of medicine has also encouraged alternative practitioners, government officials and the fourth estate to feel comfortable attacking doctors even to the point of perversely further undermining medical care. The new breed of NHS doctor will be well trained in communicating but only able to provide formal, contractual services, from an agreed menu of options, as requested by the consumer patient. Creativity and imagination will be displaced by a system of smiling doctors working to protect their contractually defined interests rather than rebelling against the indignities of disease.

          In the current climate and despite his reputation as being one of the ‘best around’ for treating alcoholics Dent would have been given a hard time by the new incumbents at the Home Office. His use of diminishing doses of heroin during the acute withdrawal phase would have probably involved him going for a period of retraining (‘brainwashing by ‘The Maudsley Mafia’ as he would have called it ) and he would be forced to submit to a paper mountain of mind numbing red tape.

                  Alcoholism kills millions of people every year and iatrogenic synthetic opioid dependence has reached epidemic proportions in parts of the United States yet Western governments continue to shy away from investigating alternative non-maintenance approaches to the management of addiction.  Although John Yerbury Dent was considered an outdated fossil by the new medical establishment his ability to communicate on an equal footing with his patients about their illnesses and its management and his willingness to go that extra distance if he felt it was in his patients’ interest put many of them to shame. He also merits posthumous fame, even though he would never have sought it, for his early warning of how medicine was in danger of being corrupted into an instrument of social control, a view shared and promulgated in Naked Lunch by his most famous patient William Burroughs. Hardy Tree is a book of contemporary relevance. It reminds us that medicine is a calling not a business and an art not a science.

[keneerike]

“It IS You, Not Me.”: 4 Love Truisms You Won’t Find on a Hallmark Card

On the eve of Valentine's Day, four romantic proverbs to keep you sane:

1) Guard Your Heart.

Proverbs 4:23:

"Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it."

Life isn't a Disney movie, where following your heart always leads to a great musical number.  

"Guard your heart"---letting wisdom and reason take the helm in times of uncertainty---is a best practice for life in general. When you walk into situations with eyes wide open and emotions in check, you are less susceptible to bad actors and foolish decisions.

You need not suffer through a toxic relationship yourself to appreciate this advice. The world is littered with people who've been damaged by matches they thought were made in heaven. History is replete with tales of misfortune that arose from carelessness. The bible itself has a few prominent examples (see: Samson, a seemingly-unstoppable force literally blinded by love.).

There's nothing wrong with a desire for true romance; that's natural. It's reliance on visions of love---to the exclusion of everything else---that brings trouble.

It starts when your newest dating prospect hits the scene: You like what you see and begin imagining what the future might look like. Along with visions of creating your very own magazine-perfect coupling, you can start quieting those very-real questions of "When-are-you-going-to-get-married?". In a bid to hold on to that dream, you silence the voice inside of you screaming that something is not quite right. Friends and family who disprove of your new beau? They're just jealous and judgmental; they don't know him like you do.

"Billy works hard all week. It's fine if he drinks a beer---or ten---to take the edge off."

Without the right safeguards, you become prematurely emotionally-involved and reason falls by the wayside.  

90 Day Fiancé: A series dedicated to those who did not guard their hearts.

We want to make choices by design, not roll with the tide because it's the path of least resistance. Objective decision-making is a tall order when you've already tossed the keys to your heart to someone---or something---else.

Decide what you must have from a potential partner (Religion? Level of education?) and what you will not tolerate (Is "social smoker" a real designation or just a euphemism to keep critics at bay?) before you even consider courtship.

Note that this is not a suggestion to create your own 100-point "Must Have" dating list. In lasting relationships, It doesn't matter what color your spouse's hair is or whether you like the same music.

But that's another discussion for another time.

"Guard your heart" doesn't pertain solely to affairs of the heart; It's solid advice in all matters of daily living.

The best type of learning is education by proxy, absorbing knowledge from the experiences of others. You soak up the benefits without having to endure the pain of experimentation or sport the scars of error.  

We'll see more of that below:

2) “It IS You. Not me.”

"It's not you, it's me."

Sometimes, that's true. Most of the time, it's not.

When someone doesn't want to see you any more, it probably is you.

I tackled that one here. A few other common mistakes, too.

People like you for what you can give them: Companionship, pride of accomplishment, financial comfort etc. Your romantic appeal is a direct function of what you have to offer.

The sooner you realize that it just might be you, the faster you can get to becoming someone more people want to hitch their wagons to.

3) Leave Your Pen at Home.

Hallmark has cards for every occasion, so I'm sharing expressions that hit multiple bases.

This is a phrase from one of my favorite websites, LivingStingy. Run by a former patent attorney. you'll find a range of topics there that touch all corners of life.

"Leave your pen at home" is simple, yet profound: 

You can't lose, if you don't play.

This is not an ode to fear or a suggestion to run from opportunities because you cannot stomach risk. It's a warning to avoid situations where you're likely to get less than you bargained for. You can't be snookered into signing on the dotted line if you don't bring your pen to the table.

Before your heart (and wallet) get involved in important decisions, your brain needs to perform due diligence. Triage ruthlessly. Choices need to be made with sound mind before the magic of marketing takes hold.

You will not mortgage your future if you shut the door on opportunities to do so.

Whether it's co-signing a loan, buying a [car/house/big-ticket item], or signing a marriage certificate; you protect your present and future by thinking ahead and keeping the end goal in mind.

Let's walk through an example: buying a car:

95% of the legwork should be done before you even consider going to see a prospective purchase. Price range? Clean title? Carfax? The specific model/class/year you've settled on? All done before that new car euphoria sweeps you into trouble.

If all checks out, go see the car. If the seller isn't shady, the paperwork is in order, and you can hammer out a good price, great.

But you're not done there.

Before you agree to buy the car, have an independent, trustworthy mechanic examine the car.There may be hidden defects below the surface. You should be able to get a work-up of the car for $100 or so.

If an extra $100 is too big a hit to your budget, you probably can't afford the car.

If you're following the advice to get your homework done before the quiz is given, you shouldn't be inspecting a dozen cars.

Even so, there are ways to mitigate your costs here. As much as you want to buy the car, the seller wants to offload it. Put a contingency in the deal stipulating that, if you agree to buy the car, the inspection fee will be folded into the purchase price.

Is the seller going to balk at $100 off the price if it leads to a sale? Probably not.

Life is a negotiation.

All of this seem like too much work? 

You can always skip steps and hope for the best. Worst comes to worst, you can rant on the internet about the shyster who took advantage of you.

There are forums for that.

Again,a lot of times when things go awry, it is you. Take accountability and stop blaming others for preventable mistakes.

4) Stop Trying to Get Something for Nothing.

This is a corollary to #2 and a continuation of the "removing barriers to good decision-making" theme.

Good things come to those who deliver value.

The world is not a fixed pie: More [insert value you care about] for me doesn't necessarily mean less [insert value you care about] for you. Get what you want by giving others what they want.

On the romantic front, you get the partner you're looking for by becoming the partner they are looking for. You want a man who's 6'3" with an athletic build and makes six figures a year. Are you the type of woman he'd go for? If not, what are you doing to get yourself there? Are you quick with excuses to justify complacency?

"It's who I am on the inside that counts."

We resent people who want something for nothing. Everyone wants value.

Ever play a game of basketball or soccer with someone who only wants to shoot the ball? They never get back on defense and asking them to pass the ball is akin to insulting their mother? It's infuriating, right?

The business world is full of these metaphorical ball hogs.

Multi-level Marketing (MLM) companies are habitual offenders. Low barriers to entry, business education, promises of an easy-to-follow program: it's an attractive business model to the masses hunting for financial flexibility.

They skirt the government's definition of a Ponzi scheme---and the jail time that comes with it---by offering a product of some value. And, to their credit, there actually are MLM companies that do have quality products.

Alas, their biggest money-maker remains recruiting and recruitment-related education. The more membership ranks swell, the more money there is to be had by the people calling the shots in the organization.

Before our buddy Chris Hansen was showing us what a "predator" looked like, he was asking hard-hitting questions to businessmen who purported to know the road to financial freedom:

"That's a year at Harvard."

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5xu6bIFSeE

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc4-34V75SQ

Eons ago, I actually spent a few months in a well-known MLM company. The recruiting process; countless diagrams that don't quite explain how the business works; pressure to get all your friends in on the "good deal": I've seen it all.

Every now and then, I run into someone who attempts to sell me on some MLM program. I spot the tells---patterns in their behavior, well-worn phrases designed to stoke curiosity---that let me know what I’m dealing with. Sometimes, I'll even humor them by discussing their business and what they can offer me.

Maybe even show them a better way to get people listening.

Most of the time, when you point out flaws in something someone is deeply-invested in, it falls on deaf ears. Those true believers will shout you down and resent you for it.

"It's not a pyramid. It's a diamond."  

The leader is good! The leader is great!

Bottom line: Sustainable businesses deliver real value. 

If you cannot describe what a business is in less than ten seconds, it's probably not a real business.

Yes, you can build a business that rewards you with growing autonomy over time. 

No, you cannot do it without putting a ton of (the right) work in.

Passive income is a pipe dream, a siren song that lures many well-meaning folks to ruin. Real business is not a game of Monopoly, where you can kick up your heels on Boardwalk and watch the dough roll in. Customers don't care about your "4-Hour workweek".

I'll have some passive income. And a side of fries.

There are all sorts of obstacles to contend with in the market and even those who have a vested interest in helping you succeed need to be monitored.

I’ve been there.

Life isn't a game of Three-Card Monte, where the only way to get ahead is to cheat the mark in front of you. If that's your mentality, you're going to squander a lot of opportunities. Play it straight and you get the added benefit of being able to sleep at night, free of fear of reprisals.

Create value and you'll be taken care of. Stop shoving your hands into everyone else's pockets.  

Enjoy your day. And send me your comments.

[ionecoffman]

The Recurring Puzzle of an Illness That Paralyzes Children

As the summer of 2014 gave way to fall, Kevin Messacar, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Colorado, started seeing a wave of children with inexplicable paralysis. All of them shared the same story. One day, they had a cold. The next, they couldn’t move an arm or a leg. In some children, the paralysis was relatively mild, but others had to be supported with ventilators and feeding tubes after they stopped being able to breathe or swallow on their own.

The condition looked remarkably like polio—the viral disease that is on the verge of being eradicated worldwide. But none of the kids tested positive for poliovirus. Instead, their condition was given a new name: acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM. That year, 120 people, mostly young children, developed the condition across 34 states. The cases peaked in September and then rapidly tailed off.

“We didn’t know if it would go away,” Messacar says. “Unfortunately, it came back.”

After just a few dozen new cases the following year, AFM returned in force in 2016, afflicting 149 more people. The next year: another lull. And in 2018: another spike, with 62 confirmed cases so far and at least 93 more under investigation. Parents have described their children collapsing mid-run like “marionette dolls,” or going to bed with a fever and waking up paralyzed from the neck down.

This third wave confirms what many doctors had feared: AFM wasn’t a one-off, but likely a new biennial normal. It’s still rare, affecting just one in a million people, but that’s little comfort for the roughly 400 children who’ve been affected, many of whom are looking at lifelong disability or paralysis. “It’s exceptionally frustrating to see it again this year, when we know how much people’s lives are overturned,” says Priya Duggal from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “We don’t really know much more than we knew in 2014—but we’re trying.”

AFM is a new term, but not a new syndrome. Its package of symptoms can be caused by a wide range of factors including, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes, poliovirus, West Nile virus, environmental toxins, and genetic disorders. The question isn’t what causes AFM per se, but what is specifically behind the biennial spikes that have appeared since 2014. (There was a small peak in 2012, too, before the condition came to national attention.)

That has proven to be a tough problem to crack. In this era, it seems that scientists could easily grab tissue samples, sequence the genes of everything in it, and pinpoint some consistent microbial culprit. But that hasn’t happened—so far, no single germ has shown up in every case. Despite all the tools of modern science, new diseases, especially rare ones, can be very hard to understand.

AFM is uncommon enough that a hospital might get just a handful of cases in a given year, if any. Many centers must join forces to pull off a rigorous study—and that’s logistically complicated. The condition is also geographically unpredictable. Some places had cases in 2014 but none this year, and vice versa.

More importantly, it’s too risky to take biopsies of the actual affected tissues—the nerves of the brain and spine. Instead, doctors have mostly drawn and analyzed samples of spinal fluid, and there’s no guarantee that whatever causes AFM is actually there.

So far, most of the signs point toward a virus as the cause, and specifically some kind of enterovirus. Unlike influenza, which circulates in the winter, enteroviruses are infections of the autumn, which is when AFM cases peak. They mostly infect young children, and the average AFM patient is 4 years old. Enteroviruses need a large enough population of susceptible hosts in which to circulate, so many lie low after waves of infection and crop up in cycles of two or three years—just as AFM does. And although many enteroviruses circulate widely but have little effect, they have a track record of occasionally infecting the spinal cord and causing paralytic illnesses.

“It’s not too far of a jump [to suspect them],” says Roberta DeBiasi, an infectious disease chief at Children’s National Health System.

One particular enterovirus, known as EV-D68, has emerged as the lead suspect. First discovered in 1962, it seemed rare and unexceptional. But in 2014, it caused a huge surge of respiratory illness throughout the U.S. That year, “our hospital was the busiest it’s ever been,” Messacar recalls. “The floors were packed, and we hit capacity.” And when paralyzed children started showing up at the same time, he put two and two together. He and others noted that in 2014 and 2016, EV-D68 was the most commonly identified virus in people with AFM.

[Read: How will Trump lead during the next global pandemic?]

But it’s not in every patient. So far, the CDC has only found the virus in the spinal fluid of a single child, and in fewer than half of the stool samples or nasal swabs they tested. “I am frustrated that, despite all of our efforts, we haven’t been able to identify the cause of this mystery illness,” said Nancy Messonnier, who directs the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, in a recent press briefing. The agency notes on its website that “the cause of most of the AFM cases remains unknown.”

Messacar thinks that the case for EV-D68 is stronger than the CDC is admitting. Certainly, caution is commendable; the wrong viruses have been blamed for perplexing illnesses before. But “I don’t think AFM is as much of an unknown as it’s portrayed,” he says. He is frustrated with its billing as a “mystery illness.”

Enteroviruses, he says, are not like typical nerve-infecting germs. They can move through nerves directly, so they don’t always show up in spinal fluid. And EV-D68 isn’t even like typical enteroviruses. Unlike other members of its family, it is quickly destroyed in the gut, and doesn’t show up in stool. It mostly thrives at the back of the nose—a place that few doctors thought to examine when AFM first showed up. Why look inside the respiratory tract of a child with a neurological disease?

Even when doctors did take nasal swabs, their odds of finding EV-D68 were low. In many neurological infections, the worst symptoms aren’t caused by the virus itself, but by the body’s disproportionate immune response. That response can continue even after the virus has been cleared, which means that patients often test negative for whatever first triggered their illness. All the researchers I spoke to think that AFM likely behaves in this way, especially since there can be a seven-day gap between the condition’s initial cold-like symptoms and the severe paralytic ones. By the time parents seek medical help, their children could be suffering from their bodies’ misplaced attempts to fight an enemy that’s no longer there. “The expectation that you’ll find a pathogen in every case is unrealistic because you’re already behind the clock,” says Messacar.

As a workaround, researchers could take the complicated steps of analyzing the bodily fluids of AFM patients for immune cells or antibodies that specifically recognize EV-D68. Their existence would at least suggest that the virus was once present. But even without such confirmation, there are other lines of incriminating evidence.

After the EV-D68 epidemic of 2014, a few hospitals, including Messacar’s, started actively searching for the virus in nasal swabs taken from patients with generic cold symptoms. Their surveillance showed that the virus disappeared in 2015 and returned a year later, coinciding with the second AFM wave. It vanished again in 2017 and returned this summer. When the latest AFM wave hit, Children’s Hospital Colorado actually saw it coming.

There’s also compelling evidence from laboratory studies. Last year, Alison Hixon at the Colorado School of Medicine showed that EV-D68 strains from the 2014 outbreak can paralyze mice by infecting and killing the movement-controlling neurons in their spines. When Hixon isolated the virus from those neurons and injected them into another group of mice, those rodents also became paralyzed. That fulfills all the traditional criteria for causality. It falls short of a slam-dunk case only because the experiments were done in mice.

Another enterovirus, EV-71, has also been implicated in AFM. It’s endemic to East Asia, where it infrequently causes a similar polio-like illness with the same two-to-three-year periodicity. Messacar’s team detected it in Colorado this spring, and they’ve found it in 11 patients with AFM. Several enteroviruses could be behind the AFM cases.

But even if that’s true, it doesn’t explain why the disease suddenly became a national problem in 2014. Conspiratorial corners of the internet were quick to suggest that immigrants had imported a mystery virus—a ludicrous hypothesis, since EV-D68 was first identified in California five decades ago.

It’s possible, though, that the virus has changed since then. In one experiment, strains from 1962 didn’t paralyze mice in the same way that those from 2014 did. This would hardly be the first time that long-known viruses suddenly became more dangerous. Zika virus, for example, was thought to be innocuous when it was discovered in the 1940s, but only recently acquired a mutation that seemingly allows it to cause severe neurological problems.

“For me, it’s not really about the viruses,” says Duggal. “I’m really trying to figure out what causes the paralysis.” Much like polio virus, which paralyzed just 1 percent of those it infected, it’s likely that AFM is caused by widely circulating viruses that only lead to problems for a small, susceptible minority. That’s why you don’t hear news reports of entire schools coming down with AFM. The disease doesn’t even sweep through entire families: Whenever an affected child has had a sibling, Duggal says, that other child has always been always healthy. In one dramatic case, scientists isolated genetically identical strains of EV-D68 from two Californian siblings, one of whom had AFM and the other of whom had the sniffles.

Duggal is now sequencing the genes of people from 60 affected families, to see if the ones with AFM have any unique mutations. Other factors might be relevant, too. Gut bacteria, for example, can affect an animal’s susceptibility to polio. And since humidity and temperature affect the global circulation of enteroviruses, Carlos Pardo-Villamizar from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine wonders if the world’s changing climate is influencing the new trends in AFM.

To an extent, every disease behaves like this. No germ sickens every person it infects. Instead, the outcomes of encounters between pathogens and hosts almost always depend on their respective genes, and other factors like climate, diet, the microbiome, and more.

The point is: Diseases are complicated. If anything, scientists have been lucky to study many viruses—flu, Ebola, smallpox, to name a few—that are potent enough for their consequences to be clear, regardless of other variables. But there’ll be many instances in which the threads of cause and effect are harder to untangle. Epstein-Barr virus, for example, infects half of Americans before they get to middle-school, and 90 percent of them by adulthood. It usually does nothing, sometimes leads to mono, and very infrequently causes cancers.

AFM is similar, and its emergence provides a new opportunity for researchers to confront age-old questions. How do you prove what causes a disease? When does your evidence become strong enough? And while you’re collecting that evidence, what do you do for the people who are affected?

“In 2014 and 2016, there were only one or two cases of full recovery,” says Duggal. This year, for whatever reason, the children in Colorado infected with EV-71 are recovering more quickly. But at least one child has died, and some are facing long-term disabilities. Every patient immediately gets intensive physical therapy. If that fails, doctors have tried antibody infusions and plasmapheresis (a process that filters blood) to reduce inflammation, but it’s unclear if these do any good. “There’s no proven efficacy, but also little risk,” says DeBiasi. “Once you get to other therapies, you’re starting to go up the risk equation. It’s not a cookbook approach.”

There’s no clear line on prevention, either. With uncertainty lingering around viral causes, the CDC’s advice is generic: “It’s always important to practice disease prevention steps, such as staying up-to-date on vaccines, washing your hands, and protecting yourself from mosquito bites.” Basically: do the stuff that prevents other diseases.

Messacar would like them to be bolder. By all means, he says, be open to changing evidence and continue looking at other possible causes, but in the meantime, proceed as if EV-D68 is the actual culprit. That means two things. First, begin developing vaccines, a process that could take years. “It may seem early to start thinking about that, but if we don’t do the groundwork, and AFM comes back in a bigger way, we’re going to be years behind,” he says.

Second, Messacar says, public health workers should actively search for the virus in the same way that they do for flu. The CDC does have a surveillance program for enteroviruses, but it’s a passive system that relies on clinicians sending in samples. A more active program, of the kind that only a few hospitals do, would specifically test for EV-D68 in the noses of any child who gets admitted with respiratory problems.

A month ago, after the third wave of AFM had started, Pardo-Villamizar began convening a nationwide group of colleagues from hospitals that were seeing cases. Their goal is to share as much information as possible on how best to study, diagnose, and treat the illness. “We always depend on the CDC, but they’re designed to establish surveillance for diseases, not management and diagnosis,” he says. “We, as clinicians and scientists, should be doing that.”

For Messacar, the most important step is to take the disease seriously. “Right now, it’s very uncommon compared to polio in the 1950s, which caused tens of thousands of cases a year,” he says. “But I don’t want to downplay this as a rare disease, because of the long-term consequences. It’s jumping up the list of public health priorities, and it deserves increased funding and attention.” A fourth wave is likely to hit in 2020. He wants the country to be ready.

Article source here:The Atlantic

[emlydunstan]

Find Life Balance in Long Term Addiction Treatment

I think at some point, long term sobriety comes down to achieving good balance in your life.

Sure, there are other important factors as well. But I think the point remains that if you get too wrapped up in one aspect of your life in recovery that the resulting imbalance can make it so that you are not as likely to remain clean and sober.

I can remember being in very early recovery and I was attending meetings and also groups to learn more about recovery. At the time I only had a few weeks of sobriety under my belt and I was heavily focused on the idea that spirituality was the entire key to my recovery.

At that time I went to a group in a treatment center and the whole point of this group was “balanced lifestyle.” They were trying to get across the idea that we should seek balance in our life if we want to be successful in our recovery efforts. At the time I thought that this was wrong because I figured that I needed to focus heavily on spirituality at the expense of all other things.

So really what was happening was a timing issue. In very early recovery, my belief is that the newcomer needs to focus heavily on meetings, AA, rehab, and seeking spiritual growth. In long term recovery I believe that balance becomes much more important. But to teach balanced lifestyle to a newcomer can be a bit confusing, because really the newcomer needs to avoid balance and instead zero in on just the basics, and they need to dedicate their entire life to recovery in the beginning.

The shift towards more balance should come as the newcomer finds their footing and they start to become more and more stable on a daily basis. If you feel like you might relapse today if you are not careful then that is NOT the time to be seeking out balance in your life. Instead, you are still very much a newcomer who needs to focus in on the basics: Going to AA meetings, going to treatment, seeing a therapist, and devoting all of your waking hours to recovery related programming.

No, the time to seek balance is when you “have a grip on your recovery,” and you are not in imminent danger of relapse on a day to day basis any longer. You have to be strong enough and stable enough to know that you can experiment and explore a little bit in order to find the right balance in your life.

I can remember that there was a time when I was going to AA meetings every single day, and if I skipped going to a meeting it made me feel strange, as if I was more susceptible to relapse. I was very early in my recovery and I was quite fragile at that time. This is not the time to seek balance.

Later on I decided that I wanted to eliminate the dependency that I had on daily AA meetings, and so I set out to find a number of alternatives that I could use in my life that would keep me clean and sober with or without AA meetings. As I started to build this new life for myself, I realize today what I was really doing was achieving some balance.

So what did I do? First, I started a physical exercise routine. This is not something that many people in early recovery really want to hear, because it sounds like a lot of work and a lot of commitment. But I found that getting in a vigorous workout every single day was the equivalent–for me–of hitting an AA meeting and sharing about my innermost feelings. Which is another way of saying that I got a lot of emotional and mental relief from a 45 minute vigorous workout, so much that I noticed the difference that it made for me immediately, and throughout the rest of the day. Honestly, regular physical exercise did so much in terms of mental and emotional relief for me in my recovery that this is the one suggestion that I absolutely would not recommend you skip. Check with your doctor first, of course, to make sure it is safe for you to get physically active. But I would urge you not to dismiss the idea that a vigorous workout can boost your chances of success in recovery, and it also stacks up a lot of additional benefits in the long run that are difficult to quantify or convey to people.

Second, I started writing in a journal every day, just spilling my thoughts out onto the page with no real agenda for the writing. To me, this is equivalent of a “brain dump.” If I had anxiety or something that I was mentally obsessing about, putting it down on paper let my brain “off the hook” from worrying about it constantly. I noticed that if I wrote in a journal and I put everything down on the page then it freed up my mind to be much more calm and relaxed.

Third, I found ways to connect with people in recovery outside of the meetings. I definitely believe that we need some support systems in our lives in order to recover, and this is true whether you are going to AA meetings or not. In today’s world there are plenty of alternatives to the 12 step circuit, and I would argue that you can find this kind of support without going to organized groups or meetings at all if you are creative enough. For example, I got a lot of support and benefit from my jogging partner early in recovery, and that substituted for the kind of sharing that I would have been doing in AA meetings.

At one point when I was fairly early in my recovery journey, I was focusing heavily on going to meetings and working on my spirituality. At the time my sponsor suggested that I go back to work and get a job. I was hesitant at this because I believed that working would cause me to want to relapse. He argued back that I had to do something eventually and I could not just “drift” forever in limbo; I was going to have to earn money somehow. So I went back to work and it turned out that I was able to cope with a working environment without resorting to relapse. This added balance that was needed back into my life at a time when I did not think that I could handle it, but my sponsor could see that I could. I am glad now that I listened to my sponsor back then.

The same thing happened when my therapist encouraged me to go back to college. I did not think that I could handle all 3: Recovery, work, and school. It’s all too much, I thought. Some people are superstars and they can juggle all of those responsibilities but not me. Well, I was wrong again. I did go back to school and I figured out how to take just enough credits and work just enough hours at work to have some sort of balance in my life.

I think for the most part I had to be willing to experiment and try new things that people were suggesting to me in order to find the right balance in my life. So my therapist and my sponsor would make suggestions, and I would attempt to incorporate their ideas into my life, and if it was working out for me then I continued to do it and I then adjusted the rest of my life around the new change. The other thing that I did was to take a look at my overall life in recovery in terms of my health: Physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and social–and then I would determine which area was most lacking right now in terms of personal growth. Then I would try to focus on that area for a while in order to bring myself back into balance. Good luck to you on your journey!

The post Find Life Balance in Long Term Addiction Treatment appeared first on Spiritual River Addiction Help.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8241841 http://www.spiritualriver.com/addiction-treatment/find-life-balance-in-long-term-addiction-treatment/

[journalingthisjourney]

Find Life Balance in Long Term Addiction Treatment

I think at some point, long term sobriety comes down to achieving good balance in your life.

Sure, there are other important factors as well. But I think the point remains that if you get too wrapped up in one aspect of your life in recovery that the resulting imbalance can make it so that you are not as likely to remain clean and sober.

I can remember being in very early recovery and I was attending meetings and also groups to learn more about recovery. At the time I only had a few weeks of sobriety under my belt and I was heavily focused on the idea that spirituality was the entire key to my recovery.

At that time I went to a group in a treatment center and the whole point of this group was “balanced lifestyle.” They were trying to get across the idea that we should seek balance in our life if we want to be successful in our recovery efforts. At the time I thought that this was wrong because I figured that I needed to focus heavily on spirituality at the expense of all other things.

So really what was happening was a timing issue. In very early recovery, my belief is that the newcomer needs to focus heavily on meetings, AA, rehab, and seeking spiritual growth. In long term recovery I believe that balance becomes much more important. But to teach balanced lifestyle to a newcomer can be a bit confusing, because really the newcomer needs to avoid balance and instead zero in on just the basics, and they need to dedicate their entire life to recovery in the beginning.

The shift towards more balance should come as the newcomer finds their footing and they start to become more and more stable on a daily basis. If you feel like you might relapse today if you are not careful then that is NOT the time to be seeking out balance in your life. Instead, you are still very much a newcomer who needs to focus in on the basics: Going to AA meetings, going to treatment, seeing a therapist, and devoting all of your waking hours to recovery related programming.

No, the time to seek balance is when you “have a grip on your recovery,” and you are not in imminent danger of relapse on a day to day basis any longer. You have to be strong enough and stable enough to know that you can experiment and explore a little bit in order to find the right balance in your life.

I can remember that there was a time when I was going to AA meetings every single day, and if I skipped going to a meeting it made me feel strange, as if I was more susceptible to relapse. I was very early in my recovery and I was quite fragile at that time. This is not the time to seek balance.

Later on I decided that I wanted to eliminate the dependency that I had on daily AA meetings, and so I set out to find a number of alternatives that I could use in my life that would keep me clean and sober with or without AA meetings. As I started to build this new life for myself, I realize today what I was really doing was achieving some balance.

So what did I do? First, I started a physical exercise routine. This is not something that many people in early recovery really want to hear, because it sounds like a lot of work and a lot of commitment. But I found that getting in a vigorous workout every single day was the equivalent–for me–of hitting an AA meeting and sharing about my innermost feelings. Which is another way of saying that I got a lot of emotional and mental relief from a 45 minute vigorous workout, so much that I noticed the difference that it made for me immediately, and throughout the rest of the day. Honestly, regular physical exercise did so much in terms of mental and emotional relief for me in my recovery that this is the one suggestion that I absolutely would not recommend you skip. Check with your doctor first, of course, to make sure it is safe for you to get physically active. But I would urge you not to dismiss the idea that a vigorous workout can boost your chances of success in recovery, and it also stacks up a lot of additional benefits in the long run that are difficult to quantify or convey to people.

Second, I started writing in a journal every day, just spilling my thoughts out onto the page with no real agenda for the writing. To me, this is equivalent of a “brain dump.” If I had anxiety or something that I was mentally obsessing about, putting it down on paper let my brain “off the hook” from worrying about it constantly. I noticed that if I wrote in a journal and I put everything down on the page then it freed up my mind to be much more calm and relaxed.

Third, I found ways to connect with people in recovery outside of the meetings. I definitely believe that we need some support systems in our lives in order to recover, and this is true whether you are going to AA meetings or not. In today’s world there are plenty of alternatives to the 12 step circuit, and I would argue that you can find this kind of support without going to organized groups or meetings at all if you are creative enough. For example, I got a lot of support and benefit from my jogging partner early in recovery, and that substituted for the kind of sharing that I would have been doing in AA meetings.

At one point when I was fairly early in my recovery journey, I was focusing heavily on going to meetings and working on my spirituality. At the time my sponsor suggested that I go back to work and get a job. I was hesitant at this because I believed that working would cause me to want to relapse. He argued back that I had to do something eventually and I could not just “drift” forever in limbo; I was going to have to earn money somehow. So I went back to work and it turned out that I was able to cope with a working environment without resorting to relapse. This added balance that was needed back into my life at a time when I did not think that I could handle it, but my sponsor could see that I could. I am glad now that I listened to my sponsor back then.

The same thing happened when my therapist encouraged me to go back to college. I did not think that I could handle all 3: Recovery, work, and school. It’s all too much, I thought. Some people are superstars and they can juggle all of those responsibilities but not me. Well, I was wrong again. I did go back to school and I figured out how to take just enough credits and work just enough hours at work to have some sort of balance in my life.

I think for the most part I had to be willing to experiment and try new things that people were suggesting to me in order to find the right balance in my life. So my therapist and my sponsor would make suggestions, and I would attempt to incorporate their ideas into my life, and if it was working out for me then I continued to do it and I then adjusted the rest of my life around the new change. The other thing that I did was to take a look at my overall life in recovery in terms of my health: Physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and social–and then I would determine which area was most lacking right now in terms of personal growth. Then I would try to focus on that area for a while in order to bring myself back into balance. Good luck to you on your journey!

The post Find Life Balance in Long Term Addiction Treatment appeared first on Spiritual River Addiction Help.

[haileyjayden3]

Find Life Balance in Long Term Addiction Treatment

I think at some point, long term sobriety comes down to achieving good balance in your life.

Sure, there are other important factors as well. But I think the point remains that if you get too wrapped up in one aspect of your life in recovery that the resulting imbalance can make it so that you are not as likely to remain clean and sober.

I can remember being in very early recovery and I was attending meetings and also groups to learn more about recovery. At the time I only had a few weeks of sobriety under my belt and I was heavily focused on the idea that spirituality was the entire key to my recovery.

At that time I went to a group in a treatment center and the whole point of this group was “balanced lifestyle.” They were trying to get across the idea that we should seek balance in our life if we want to be successful in our recovery efforts. At the time I thought that this was wrong because I figured that I needed to focus heavily on spirituality at the expense of all other things.

So really what was happening was a timing issue. In very early recovery, my belief is that the newcomer needs to focus heavily on meetings, AA, rehab, and seeking spiritual growth. In long term recovery I believe that balance becomes much more important. But to teach balanced lifestyle to a newcomer can be a bit confusing, because really the newcomer needs to avoid balance and instead zero in on just the basics, and they need to dedicate their entire life to recovery in the beginning.

The shift towards more balance should come as the newcomer finds their footing and they start to become more and more stable on a daily basis. If you feel like you might relapse today if you are not careful then that is NOT the time to be seeking out balance in your life. Instead, you are still very much a newcomer who needs to focus in on the basics: Going to AA meetings, going to treatment, seeing a therapist, and devoting all of your waking hours to recovery related programming.

No, the time to seek balance is when you “have a grip on your recovery,” and you are not in imminent danger of relapse on a day to day basis any longer. You have to be strong enough and stable enough to know that you can experiment and explore a little bit in order to find the right balance in your life.

I can remember that there was a time when I was going to AA meetings every single day, and if I skipped going to a meeting it made me feel strange, as if I was more susceptible to relapse. I was very early in my recovery and I was quite fragile at that time. This is not the time to seek balance.

Later on I decided that I wanted to eliminate the dependency that I had on daily AA meetings, and so I set out to find a number of alternatives that I could use in my life that would keep me clean and sober with or without AA meetings. As I started to build this new life for myself, I realize today what I was really doing was achieving some balance.

So what did I do? First, I started a physical exercise routine. This is not something that many people in early recovery really want to hear, because it sounds like a lot of work and a lot of commitment. But I found that getting in a vigorous workout every single day was the equivalent–for me–of hitting an AA meeting and sharing about my innermost feelings. Which is another way of saying that I got a lot of emotional and mental relief from a 45 minute vigorous workout, so much that I noticed the difference that it made for me immediately, and throughout the rest of the day. Honestly, regular physical exercise did so much in terms of mental and emotional relief for me in my recovery that this is the one suggestion that I absolutely would not recommend you skip. Check with your doctor first, of course, to make sure it is safe for you to get physically active. But I would urge you not to dismiss the idea that a vigorous workout can boost your chances of success in recovery, and it also stacks up a lot of additional benefits in the long run that are difficult to quantify or convey to people.

Second, I started writing in a journal every day, just spilling my thoughts out onto the page with no real agenda for the writing. To me, this is equivalent of a “brain dump.” If I had anxiety or something that I was mentally obsessing about, putting it down on paper let my brain “off the hook” from worrying about it constantly. I noticed that if I wrote in a journal and I put everything down on the page then it freed up my mind to be much more calm and relaxed.

Third, I found ways to connect with people in recovery outside of the meetings. I definitely believe that we need some support systems in our lives in order to recover, and this is true whether you are going to AA meetings or not. In today’s world there are plenty of alternatives to the 12 step circuit, and I would argue that you can find this kind of support without going to organized groups or meetings at all if you are creative enough. For example, I got a lot of support and benefit from my jogging partner early in recovery, and that substituted for the kind of sharing that I would have been doing in AA meetings.

At one point when I was fairly early in my recovery journey, I was focusing heavily on going to meetings and working on my spirituality. At the time my sponsor suggested that I go back to work and get a job. I was hesitant at this because I believed that working would cause me to want to relapse. He argued back that I had to do something eventually and I could not just “drift” forever in limbo; I was going to have to earn money somehow. So I went back to work and it turned out that I was able to cope with a working environment without resorting to relapse. This added balance that was needed back into my life at a time when I did not think that I could handle it, but my sponsor could see that I could. I am glad now that I listened to my sponsor back then.

The same thing happened when my therapist encouraged me to go back to college. I did not think that I could handle all 3: Recovery, work, and school. It’s all too much, I thought. Some people are superstars and they can juggle all of those responsibilities but not me. Well, I was wrong again. I did go back to school and I figured out how to take just enough credits and work just enough hours at work to have some sort of balance in my life.

I think for the most part I had to be willing to experiment and try new things that people were suggesting to me in order to find the right balance in my life. So my therapist and my sponsor would make suggestions, and I would attempt to incorporate their ideas into my life, and if it was working out for me then I continued to do it and I then adjusted the rest of my life around the new change. The other thing that I did was to take a look at my overall life in recovery in terms of my health: Physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and social–and then I would determine which area was most lacking right now in terms of personal growth. Then I would try to focus on that area for a while in order to bring myself back into balance. Good luck to you on your journey!

The post Find Life Balance in Long Term Addiction Treatment appeared first on Spiritual River Addiction Help.

from http://www.spiritualriver.com/addiction-treatment/find-life-balance-in-long-term-addiction-treatment/

[jaylazoey]

Find Life Balance in Long Term Addiction Treatment

I think at some point, long term sobriety comes down to achieving good balance in your life.

Sure, there are other important factors as well. But I think the point remains that if you get too wrapped up in one aspect of your life in recovery that the resulting imbalance can make it so that you are not as likely to remain clean and sober.

I can remember being in very early recovery and I was attending meetings and also groups to learn more about recovery. At the time I only had a few weeks of sobriety under my belt and I was heavily focused on the idea that spirituality was the entire key to my recovery.

At that time I went to a group in a treatment center and the whole point of this group was “balanced lifestyle.” They were trying to get across the idea that we should seek balance in our life if we want to be successful in our recovery efforts. At the time I thought that this was wrong because I figured that I needed to focus heavily on spirituality at the expense of all other things.

So really what was happening was a timing issue. In very early recovery, my belief is that the newcomer needs to focus heavily on meetings, AA, rehab, and seeking spiritual growth. In long term recovery I believe that balance becomes much more important. But to teach balanced lifestyle to a newcomer can be a bit confusing, because really the newcomer needs to avoid balance and instead zero in on just the basics, and they need to dedicate their entire life to recovery in the beginning.

The shift towards more balance should come as the newcomer finds their footing and they start to become more and more stable on a daily basis. If you feel like you might relapse today if you are not careful then that is NOT the time to be seeking out balance in your life. Instead, you are still very much a newcomer who needs to focus in on the basics: Going to AA meetings, going to treatment, seeing a therapist, and devoting all of your waking hours to recovery related programming.

No, the time to seek balance is when you “have a grip on your recovery,” and you are not in imminent danger of relapse on a day to day basis any longer. You have to be strong enough and stable enough to know that you can experiment and explore a little bit in order to find the right balance in your life.

I can remember that there was a time when I was going to AA meetings every single day, and if I skipped going to a meeting it made me feel strange, as if I was more susceptible to relapse. I was very early in my recovery and I was quite fragile at that time. This is not the time to seek balance.

Later on I decided that I wanted to eliminate the dependency that I had on daily AA meetings, and so I set out to find a number of alternatives that I could use in my life that would keep me clean and sober with or without AA meetings. As I started to build this new life for myself, I realize today what I was really doing was achieving some balance.

So what did I do? First, I started a physical exercise routine. This is not something that many people in early recovery really want to hear, because it sounds like a lot of work and a lot of commitment. But I found that getting in a vigorous workout every single day was the equivalent–for me–of hitting an AA meeting and sharing about my innermost feelings. Which is another way of saying that I got a lot of emotional and mental relief from a 45 minute vigorous workout, so much that I noticed the difference that it made for me immediately, and throughout the rest of the day. Honestly, regular physical exercise did so much in terms of mental and emotional relief for me in my recovery that this is the one suggestion that I absolutely would not recommend you skip. Check with your doctor first, of course, to make sure it is safe for you to get physically active. But I would urge you not to dismiss the idea that a vigorous workout can boost your chances of success in recovery, and it also stacks up a lot of additional benefits in the long run that are difficult to quantify or convey to people.

Second, I started writing in a journal every day, just spilling my thoughts out onto the page with no real agenda for the writing. To me, this is equivalent of a “brain dump.” If I had anxiety or something that I was mentally obsessing about, putting it down on paper let my brain “off the hook” from worrying about it constantly. I noticed that if I wrote in a journal and I put everything down on the page then it freed up my mind to be much more calm and relaxed.

Third, I found ways to connect with people in recovery outside of the meetings. I definitely believe that we need some support systems in our lives in order to recover, and this is true whether you are going to AA meetings or not. In today’s world there are plenty of alternatives to the 12 step circuit, and I would argue that you can find this kind of support without going to organized groups or meetings at all if you are creative enough. For example, I got a lot of support and benefit from my jogging partner early in recovery, and that substituted for the kind of sharing that I would have been doing in AA meetings.

At one point when I was fairly early in my recovery journey, I was focusing heavily on going to meetings and working on my spirituality. At the time my sponsor suggested that I go back to work and get a job. I was hesitant at this because I believed that working would cause me to want to relapse. He argued back that I had to do something eventually and I could not just “drift” forever in limbo; I was going to have to earn money somehow. So I went back to work and it turned out that I was able to cope with a working environment without resorting to relapse. This added balance that was needed back into my life at a time when I did not think that I could handle it, but my sponsor could see that I could. I am glad now that I listened to my sponsor back then.

The same thing happened when my therapist encouraged me to go back to college. I did not think that I could handle all 3: Recovery, work, and school. It’s all too much, I thought. Some people are superstars and they can juggle all of those responsibilities but not me. Well, I was wrong again. I did go back to school and I figured out how to take just enough credits and work just enough hours at work to have some sort of balance in my life.

I think for the most part I had to be willing to experiment and try new things that people were suggesting to me in order to find the right balance in my life. So my therapist and my sponsor would make suggestions, and I would attempt to incorporate their ideas into my life, and if it was working out for me then I continued to do it and I then adjusted the rest of my life around the new change. The other thing that I did was to take a look at my overall life in recovery in terms of my health: Physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and social–and then I would determine which area was most lacking right now in terms of personal growth. Then I would try to focus on that area for a while in order to bring myself back into balance. Good luck to you on your journey!

The post Find Life Balance in Long Term Addiction Treatment appeared first on Spiritual River Addiction Help.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8241844 http://www.spiritualriver.com/addiction-treatment/find-life-balance-in-long-term-addiction-treatment/

[violetsgallant]

Find Life Balance in Long Term Addiction Treatment

I think at some point, long term sobriety comes down to achieving good balance in your life.

Sure, there are other important factors as well. But I think the point remains that if you get too wrapped up in one aspect of your life in recovery that the resulting imbalance can make it so that you are not as likely to remain clean and sober.

I can remember being in very early recovery and I was attending meetings and also groups to learn more about recovery. At the time I only had a few weeks of sobriety under my belt and I was heavily focused on the idea that spirituality was the entire key to my recovery.

At that time I went to a group in a treatment center and the whole point of this group was “balanced lifestyle.” They were trying to get across the idea that we should seek balance in our life if we want to be successful in our recovery efforts. At the time I thought that this was wrong because I figured that I needed to focus heavily on spirituality at the expense of all other things.

So really what was happening was a timing issue. In very early recovery, my belief is that the newcomer needs to focus heavily on meetings, AA, rehab, and seeking spiritual growth. In long term recovery I believe that balance becomes much more important. But to teach balanced lifestyle to a newcomer can be a bit confusing, because really the newcomer needs to avoid balance and instead zero in on just the basics, and they need to dedicate their entire life to recovery in the beginning.

The shift towards more balance should come as the newcomer finds their footing and they start to become more and more stable on a daily basis. If you feel like you might relapse today if you are not careful then that is NOT the time to be seeking out balance in your life. Instead, you are still very much a newcomer who needs to focus in on the basics: Going to AA meetings, going to treatment, seeing a therapist, and devoting all of your waking hours to recovery related programming.

No, the time to seek balance is when you “have a grip on your recovery,” and you are not in imminent danger of relapse on a day to day basis any longer. You have to be strong enough and stable enough to know that you can experiment and explore a little bit in order to find the right balance in your life.

I can remember that there was a time when I was going to AA meetings every single day, and if I skipped going to a meeting it made me feel strange, as if I was more susceptible to relapse. I was very early in my recovery and I was quite fragile at that time. This is not the time to seek balance.

Later on I decided that I wanted to eliminate the dependency that I had on daily AA meetings, and so I set out to find a number of alternatives that I could use in my life that would keep me clean and sober with or without AA meetings. As I started to build this new life for myself, I realize today what I was really doing was achieving some balance.

So what did I do? First, I started a physical exercise routine. This is not something that many people in early recovery really want to hear, because it sounds like a lot of work and a lot of commitment. But I found that getting in a vigorous workout every single day was the equivalent–for me–of hitting an AA meeting and sharing about my innermost feelings. Which is another way of saying that I got a lot of emotional and mental relief from a 45 minute vigorous workout, so much that I noticed the difference that it made for me immediately, and throughout the rest of the day. Honestly, regular physical exercise did so much in terms of mental and emotional relief for me in my recovery that this is the one suggestion that I absolutely would not recommend you skip. Check with your doctor first, of course, to make sure it is safe for you to get physically active. But I would urge you not to dismiss the idea that a vigorous workout can boost your chances of success in recovery, and it also stacks up a lot of additional benefits in the long run that are difficult to quantify or convey to people.

Second, I started writing in a journal every day, just spilling my thoughts out onto the page with no real agenda for the writing. To me, this is equivalent of a “brain dump.” If I had anxiety or something that I was mentally obsessing about, putting it down on paper let my brain “off the hook” from worrying about it constantly. I noticed that if I wrote in a journal and I put everything down on the page then it freed up my mind to be much more calm and relaxed.

Third, I found ways to connect with people in recovery outside of the meetings. I definitely believe that we need some support systems in our lives in order to recover, and this is true whether you are going to AA meetings or not. In today’s world there are plenty of alternatives to the 12 step circuit, and I would argue that you can find this kind of support without going to organized groups or meetings at all if you are creative enough. For example, I got a lot of support and benefit from my jogging partner early in recovery, and that substituted for the kind of sharing that I would have been doing in AA meetings.

At one point when I was fairly early in my recovery journey, I was focusing heavily on going to meetings and working on my spirituality. At the time my sponsor suggested that I go back to work and get a job. I was hesitant at this because I believed that working would cause me to want to relapse. He argued back that I had to do something eventually and I could not just “drift” forever in limbo; I was going to have to earn money somehow. So I went back to work and it turned out that I was able to cope with a working environment without resorting to relapse. This added balance that was needed back into my life at a time when I did not think that I could handle it, but my sponsor could see that I could. I am glad now that I listened to my sponsor back then.

The same thing happened when my therapist encouraged me to go back to college. I did not think that I could handle all 3: Recovery, work, and school. It’s all too much, I thought. Some people are superstars and they can juggle all of those responsibilities but not me. Well, I was wrong again. I did go back to school and I figured out how to take just enough credits and work just enough hours at work to have some sort of balance in my life.

I think for the most part I had to be willing to experiment and try new things that people were suggesting to me in order to find the right balance in my life. So my therapist and my sponsor would make suggestions, and I would attempt to incorporate their ideas into my life, and if it was working out for me then I continued to do it and I then adjusted the rest of my life around the new change. The other thing that I did was to take a look at my overall life in recovery in terms of my health: Physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and social–and then I would determine which area was most lacking right now in terms of personal growth. Then I would try to focus on that area for a while in order to bring myself back into balance. Good luck to you on your journey!

The post Find Life Balance in Long Term Addiction Treatment appeared first on Spiritual River Addiction Help.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8241844 https://ift.tt/2KEXk6v

[nancygduarteus]

A Map That Shows You Everything Wrong With Your Brain

The woman who would be mapping my brain, Cynthia Kerson, had tanned, toned arms and long silvery hair worn loose. Her home office featured an elegant calligraphy sign reading “BREATHE,” and also a mug that said “I HAVE THE PATIENCE OF A SAINT—SAINT CUNTY MCFUCKOFF.”

Kerson is a neurotherapist, which means she practices a form of alternative therapy that involves stimulating brain waves until they reach a specific frequency. Neurotherapy has a questionable reputation, which its practitioners sometimes try to counter by putting as many acronyms next to their names as possible. Kerson comes with a Ph.D., QEEGD, BCN, and BCB. She’s also past president of the Biofeedback Society of California and teaches at Saybrook University. Even so, somehow it was the tension between those two pieces of office ephemera that made me instinctively want to trust her.

Kerson used to have a clinic in Marin County, where she primarily saw children with ADHD, using neurotherapy techniques to help them learn to focus. But she also worked with elite athletes who wanted to improve their performance, as well as people suffering from chronic pain and anxiety and schizophrenia and a host of other disorders. These days, she’s so busy teaching and consulting that she no longer runs her individual practice, but she agreed to bring out her brain-mapping equipment for me: snug-fitting cloth caps in various sizes; a tube of Electrogel, a conductive goo; a black box made by BrainMaster Technologies that would receive my brain’s signals and spit them out into her computer.

I’m the kind of person who procrastinates with personality tests; I’m susceptible to the way they target that place where self-loathing and narcissism overlap. I suppose it stems from the feeling that there is something uniquely and specially wrong with me, and wanting to know all about it.

So I’ll admit that I was thinking of this brain map in overly fanciful terms: It would be like a personality test but scientific. I kept thinking about this line I’d read in a book by Paul Swingle, a Canadian psychoneurophysiologist who uses brain maps to identify neurological abnormalities: “The brain tells us everything.”

Kerson placed the cap on my head and clipped two sensors on to my earlobes, areas of no electrical activity, to act as baselines. As she began Electrogelling the 19 spots on my head that aligned with the cap’s electrodes, I was nervous in two different directions: one, that my brain would be revealed as suboptimal, underfunctioning, deficient. The other, that it would be fine, average, unremarkable.

* * *

EEG tests, which measure electrical signals in the brain, have been used for decades by physicians to look for anomalies in brain-wave patterns that might indicate stroke or traumatic brain injury. The kind of brain map I was getting used a neuroimaging technique formally known as quantitative electroencephalogram, or qEEG. It follows the same general principle as EEG tests, but adds a quantitative element: Kerson would compare my brain waves against a database of conventionally functioning, or “neurotypical,” brains. Theoretically, this allows clinicians to pick up on more subtle deviations—brain-wave forms that are associated with cognitive inflexibility, say, or impulsivity.

In neurotherapy, qEEGs are generally a precursor to treatments like neurofeedback or deep brain stimulation, which are used to alter brain waves, or to train people to change their own. Neurotherapy claims it can tackle persistent depression or PTSD or anger issues without resorting to talk therapy or pharmaceutical interventions, by addressing the very neural oscillations that underlie these problems. If you see your brain function in real time, the idea goes, you can trace mental-health issues to their physiological roots—and make direct interventions.

But critics argue that neurotherapy’s treatments—which might take dozens of sessions, each costing hundreds of dollars—have very little research backing them up. And although the mainstream medical community is starting to pay closer attention to the field, particularly in Europe, in the U.S. neurotherapy is still largely unregulated, with practitioners of varying levels of expertise offering treatments in outpatient clinics. At the most basic level, not everyone who’s invested in the technology that allows them to do qEEG testing is able to correctly interpret the resulting brain map. Certification to administer a qEEG test—a process overseen by the International qEEG Certification Board—requires only 24 hours of training, five supervised evaluations, and an exam, with no prior medical experience.

As Jay Gunkelman, an EEG expert and past president of the International Society for Neurofeedback and Research, puts it: “It’s a Wild West, buyer-beware situation out there.”

All this is to say that while skilled interpreters can pick up all sorts of information from an EEG, these tests are also “ripe for overstatement,” according to Michelle Harris-Love, a neuroscientist at Georgetown’s Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery. That’s worrisome since, in recent years, EEG technology has gotten cheaper and more widely available. A qEEG brain map can cost as little as a few hundred dollars, which means more people are taking a peek at their brain waves, not just for diagnostic purposes, but also with optimization in mind.

“People will come in for optimal training,” Kerson told me as she adjusted the sensors in my cap. “But what often happens is we’ll find something a little pathological. Which I guess depends on your definition of pathological.”

NeuroAgility, an “attention and performance psychology” clinic in Boulder, Colorado, for instance, brainmaps CEOs and then uses neurotherapy to help them “come from a place of action, rather than reaction.” Other clinics promise to use the technology to help athletes and actors get in the zone, as Kerson did in her private practice. “There are business executives who want to reduce their obsessive-compulsive traits, or athletes who want to tune up their engines,” Gunkelman told me. “At Daytona, they’re all fabulous cars, but every single one of them gets a tune up three times a day. No matter who you are, if you look at brain activity, there are things we can do to get you to function better.”

* * *

For the first five minutes my brain was being mapped, I sat with my eyes closed. My mind felt unquiet; I was thinking about what it felt like to have a brain, trying to describe to myself the feeling of having thoughts. “Your eyes are moving around a lot underneath your lids,” Kerson said. She suggested I put my fingertips on my eyelids to keep my eyes from shifting. I sat like the see-no-evil monkey for the rest of the test, trying to remain thoughtless and keep my jumpy eyes still.

When the first half of the test was done, I spied my brain waves on Kerson’s computer screen: 19 thin, wobbly gray lines stretching across a white background. My brain activity looked like an Agnes Martin painting. Kerson had me turn the chair around for the second, eyes-open half, in case watching the real-time brain waves made me self-conscious. Her software program chimed out a warning every time I blinked, which turned out to be a lot. “I’m going to turn off the sound so you don’t get frustrated,” Kerson said.

When we were done, she scrolled through the 10 minutes of brain waves. Two of the lines looked alarming—every few seconds they jolted all over the place, like some sort of seismic indication of an internal earthquake. Kerson told me not to worry; the EEG also picks up on muscle movements, and those were my blinks.

“So there’s one thing I see right off the bat,” she said. “We’d expect to see more alpha when you close your eyes. But it actually looks pretty similar whether your eyes are open or closed. That tells me that you might not sleep well, you might have some anxiety, you might be overly sensitive—your brain talks to itself a lot. You can’t quiet yourself.” This was all accurate, if not news to me.

Kerson continued to scan through the test, selecting sections that weren’t compromised by my blinks, trying to gather enough clean data to match against the database. She ran the four good minutes through the program, which spat out an analysis of my brain waves that looked something like a heat map, with areas of relative over- and under-functioning indicated by patches of color. By most measures, my brain appeared a moderate, statistically insignificant green. “You’re neurotypical,” she said, sounding minorly disappointed.

Kerson nonetheless recommended vitamins to beef up my neural connections, since my amplitudes were a little lackluster. “Meditating would be good for you, but you’re going to need something else for meditation to work,” she told me, noting that I should consider some alpha training, which would involve putting on headphones to listen to sounds that would get my brain waves into the right frequency. I should also probably change out my contacts if I was blinking that much.

Kerson began folding up the electrode-studded cap, and I realized with a slight feeling of deflation that that was it. “It was nice to meet you,” she called out as I pulled out of her driveway. “And it was nice to meet your brain!”

* * *

A qEEG may not be anything like a personality test, but it still left me with the same unsatisfied feeling of being parsed and analyzed but still fundamentally unknown. My mind had been mapped, I had seen the shape of my brain waves, but I didn’t have any new or better understanding of my galloping, anxious brain, or what happens on those afternoons where I lose hours to online personality tests. Instead, I was just left with the vague sense that in some deep and essential way, I wasn’t performing as well as I could be.

I decided to seek out a second opinion from Gunkelman, whom several people had described to me as the go-to guy for interpreting EEGs. Gunkelman worked as an EEG tech in a hospital for decades, he told me. “In the early 1990s, I figured out that I had read 500,000 EEGs,” he said. “And then I stopped counting.” When he looked over my results, he grumbled about not having enough data to work with; for a proper brain map, he needed at least 10 minutes each with eyes open and closed, he said. But he nonetheless zipped through the EEG readout with the confidence of someone who’s done this more than half a million times before.

Like Kerson, Gunkelman zeroed in on my alpha. “When you close your eyes, you expect to see alpha in the back of the head, and we’re not really seeing that,” he said. That meant that my visual processing systems weren’t resting when my eyes were closed—the same inability to quiet down that Kerson had noticed. He also saw evidence of light drowsiness: “With an EEG, we can tell exactly how vigilant you are,” he said. He was right; I had been sleepy that day.

Then, perhaps to throw my drowsy, overactive brain a bone, Gunkelman noted some nice things about my alpha, too. “The alpha here is 11 or 12 hertz, a little faster than average,” he said, which generally correlated with better memory of facts and experiences. But if I wanted optimal functioning, he agreed with Kerson that some alpha training would help teach my brain to chill out so I could sleep better and be maximally alert during the day.

There had been something appealing to my anxious, over-alphaed brain about having yet another way to think of myself as an underperforming machine that could be tweaked and tuned up. But in the end, hearing Gunkelman describe my brain waves in such clinical terms had the opposite effect. I felt protective of all the ways my brain was still a mystery to me, and everything the brain map couldn’t show.

I’ve kept one of my brain-map images as my desktop background. I’m not sure why I feel attached to it; I couldn’t pick it out of a lineup of other brains, and I didn’t really learn anything new about myself from the experience—the map is not the territory, as they say. But even so, I still like looking at it: my speedy, drowsy, neurotypical, not-quite-optimal brain.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/06/this-is-your-brain-on-qeeg/532035/?utm_source=feed

[ionecoffman]

A Map That Shows You Everything Wrong With Your Brain

The woman who would be mapping my brain, Cynthia Kerson, had tanned, toned arms and long silvery hair worn loose. Her home office featured an elegant calligraphy sign reading “BREATHE,” and also a mug that said “I HAVE THE PATIENCE OF A SAINT—SAINT CUNTY MCFUCKOFF.”

Kerson is a neurotherapist, which means she practices a form of alternative therapy that involves stimulating brain waves until they reach a specific frequency. Neurotherapy has a questionable reputation, which its practitioners sometimes try to counter by putting as many acronyms next to their names as possible. Kerson comes with a Ph.D., QEEGD, BCN, and BCB. She’s also past president of the Biofeedback Society of California and teaches at Saybrook University. Even so, somehow it was the tension between those two pieces of office ephemera that made me instinctively want to trust her.

Kerson used to have a clinic in Marin County, where she primarily saw children with ADHD, using neurotherapy techniques to help them learn to focus. But she also worked with elite athletes who wanted to improve their performance, as well as people suffering from chronic pain and anxiety and schizophrenia and a host of other disorders. These days, she’s so busy teaching and consulting that she no longer runs her individual practice, but she agreed to bring out her brain-mapping equipment for me: snug-fitting cloth caps in various sizes; a tube of Electrogel, a conductive goo; a black box made by BrainMaster Technologies that would receive my brain’s signals and spit them out into her computer.

I’m the kind of person who procrastinates with personality tests; I’m susceptible to the way they target that place where self-loathing and narcissism overlap. I suppose it stems from the feeling that there is something uniquely and specially wrong with me, and wanting to know all about it.

So I’ll admit that I was thinking of this brain map in overly fanciful terms: It would be like a personality test but scientific. I kept thinking about this line I’d read in a book by Paul Swingle, a Canadian psychoneurophysiologist who uses brain maps to identify neurological abnormalities: “The brain tells us everything.”

Kerson placed the cap on my head and clipped two sensors on to my earlobes, areas of no electrical activity, to act as baselines. As she began Electrogelling the 19 spots on my head that aligned with the cap’s electrodes, I was nervous in two different directions: one, that my brain would be revealed as suboptimal, underfunctioning, deficient. The other, that it would be fine, average, unremarkable.

* * *

EEG tests, which measure electrical signals in the brain, have been used for decades by physicians to look for anomalies in brain-wave patterns that might indicate stroke or traumatic brain injury. The kind of brain map I was getting used a neuroimaging technique formally known as quantitative electroencephalogram, or qEEG. It follows the same general principle as EEG tests, but adds a quantitative element: Kerson would compare my brain waves against a database of conventionally functioning, or “neurotypical,” brains. Theoretically, this allows clinicians to pick up on more subtle deviations—brain-wave forms that are associated with cognitive inflexibility, say, or impulsivity.

In neurotherapy, qEEGs are generally a precursor to treatments like neurofeedback or deep brain stimulation, which are used to alter brain waves, or to train people to change their own. Neurotherapy claims it can tackle persistent depression or PTSD or anger issues without resorting to talk therapy or pharmaceutical interventions, by addressing the very neural oscillations that underlie these problems. If you see your brain function in real time, the idea goes, you can trace mental-health issues to their physiological roots—and make direct interventions.

But critics argue that neurotherapy’s treatments—which might take dozens of sessions, each costing hundreds of dollars—have very little research backing them up. And although the mainstream medical community is starting to pay closer attention to the field, particularly in Europe, in the U.S. neurotherapy is still largely unregulated, with practitioners of varying levels of expertise offering treatments in outpatient clinics. At the most basic level, not everyone who’s invested in the technology that allows them to do qEEG testing is able to correctly interpret the resulting brain map. Certification to administer a qEEG test—a process overseen by the International qEEG Certification Board—requires only 24 hours of training, five supervised evaluations, and an exam, with no prior medical experience.

As Jay Gunkelman, an EEG expert and past president of the International Society for Neurofeedback and Research, puts it: “It’s a Wild West, buyer-beware situation out there.”

All this is to say that while skilled interpreters can pick up all sorts of information from an EEG, these tests are also “ripe for overstatement,” according to Michelle Harris-Love, a neuroscientist at Georgetown’s Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery. That’s worrisome since, in recent years, EEG technology has gotten cheaper and more widely available. A qEEG brain map can cost as little as a few hundred dollars, which means more people are taking a peek at their brain waves, not just for diagnostic purposes, but also with optimization in mind.

“People will come in for optimal training,” Kerson told me as she adjusted the sensors in my cap. “But what often happens is we’ll find something a little pathological. Which I guess depends on your definition of pathological.”

NeuroAgility, an “attention and performance psychology” clinic in Boulder, Colorado, for instance, brainmaps CEOs and then uses neurotherapy to help them “come from a place of action, rather than reaction.” Other clinics promise to use the technology to help athletes and actors get in the zone, as Kerson did in her private practice. “There are business executives who want to reduce their obsessive-compulsive traits, or athletes who want to tune up their engines,” Gunkelman told me. “At Daytona, they’re all fabulous cars, but every single one of them gets a tune up three times a day. No matter who you are, if you look at brain activity, there are things we can do to get you to function better.”

* * *

For the first five minutes my brain was being mapped, I sat with my eyes closed. My mind felt unquiet; I was thinking about what it felt like to have a brain, trying to describe to myself the feeling of having thoughts. “Your eyes are moving around a lot underneath your lids,” Kerson said. She suggested I put my fingertips on my eyelids to keep my eyes from shifting. I sat like the see-no-evil monkey for the rest of the test, trying to remain thoughtless and keep my jumpy eyes still.

When the first half of the test was done, I spied my brain waves on Kerson’s computer screen: 19 thin, wobbly gray lines stretching across a white background. My brain activity looked like an Agnes Martin painting. Kerson had me turn the chair around for the second, eyes-open half, in case watching the real-time brain waves made me self-conscious. Her software program chimed out a warning every time I blinked, which turned out to be a lot. “I’m going to turn off the sound so you don’t get frustrated,” Kerson said.

When we were done, she scrolled through the 10 minutes of brain waves. Two of the lines looked alarming—every few seconds they jolted all over the place, like some sort of seismic indication of an internal earthquake. Kerson told me not to worry; the EEG also picks up on muscle movements, and those were my blinks.

“So there’s one thing I see right off the bat,” she said. “We’d expect to see more alpha when you close your eyes. But it actually looks pretty similar whether your eyes are open or closed. That tells me that you might not sleep well, you might have some anxiety, you might be overly sensitive—your brain talks to itself a lot. You can’t quiet yourself.” This was all accurate, if not news to me.

Kerson continued to scan through the test, selecting sections that weren’t compromised by my blinks, trying to gather enough clean data to match against the database. She ran the four good minutes through the program, which spat out an analysis of my brain waves that looked something like a heat map, with areas of relative over- and under-functioning indicated by patches of color. By most measures, my brain appeared a moderate, statistically insignificant green. “You’re neurotypical,” she said, sounding minorly disappointed.

Kerson nonetheless recommended vitamins to beef up my neural connections, since my amplitudes were a little lackluster. “Meditating would be good for you, but you’re going to need something else for meditation to work,” she told me, noting that I should consider some alpha training, which would involve putting on headphones to listen to sounds that would get my brain waves into the right frequency. I should also probably change out my contacts if I was blinking that much.

Kerson began folding up the electrode-studded cap, and I realized with a slight feeling of deflation that that was it. “It was nice to meet you,” she called out as I pulled out of her driveway. “And it was nice to meet your brain!”

* * *

A qEEG may not be anything like a personality test, but it still left me with the same unsatisfied feeling of being parsed and analyzed but still fundamentally unknown. My mind had been mapped, I had seen the shape of my brain waves, but I didn’t have any new or better understanding of my galloping, anxious brain, or what happens on those afternoons where I lose hours to online personality tests. Instead, I was just left with the vague sense that in some deep and essential way, I wasn’t performing as well as I could be.

I decided to seek out a second opinion from Gunkelman, whom several people had described to me as the go-to guy for interpreting EEGs. Gunkelman worked as an EEG tech in a hospital for decades, he told me. “In the early 1990s, I figured out that I had read 500,000 EEGs,” he said. “And then I stopped counting.” When he looked over my results, he grumbled about not having enough data to work with; for a proper brain map, he needed at least 10 minutes each with eyes open and closed, he said. But he nonetheless zipped through the EEG readout with the confidence of someone who’s done this more than half a million times before.

Like Kerson, Gunkelman zeroed in on my alpha. “When you close your eyes, you expect to see alpha in the back of the head, and we’re not really seeing that,” he said. That meant that my visual processing systems weren’t resting when my eyes were closed—the same inability to quiet down that Kerson had noticed. He also saw evidence of light drowsiness: “With an EEG, we can tell exactly how vigilant you are,” he said. He was right; I had been sleepy that day.

Then, perhaps to throw my drowsy, overactive brain a bone, Gunkelman noted some nice things about my alpha, too. “The alpha here is 11 or 12 hertz, a little faster than average,” he said, which generally correlated with better memory of facts and experiences. But if I wanted optimal functioning, he agreed with Kerson that some alpha training would help teach my brain to chill out so I could sleep better and be maximally alert during the day.

There had been something appealing to my anxious, over-alphaed brain about having yet another way to think of myself as an underperforming machine that could be tweaked and tuned up. But in the end, hearing Gunkelman describe my brain waves in such clinical terms had the opposite effect. I felt protective of all the ways my brain was still a mystery to me, and everything the brain map couldn’t show.

I’ve kept one of my brain-map images as my desktop background. I’m not sure why I feel attached to it; I couldn’t pick it out of a lineup of other brains, and I didn’t really learn anything new about myself from the experience—the map is not the territory, as they say. But even so, I still like looking at it: my speedy, drowsy, neurotypical, not-quite-optimal brain.

Article source here:The Atlantic