#the love of not being traumatized by myself =)

[superdillin]

The Time We Have

The Time We Have campaign ends soon and I REALLY want as many people as possible to experience this game. I also wanna talk about my experiences playing it!!

I've played this game twice so far. Once was private, with my friend @rowanzeoli, and once on recording for One Shot, with @morebluebs

I have brothers, but I didn't grow up with brothers, and there's the whole "raised a girl" thing so I was a little worried that the dynamic would be too unrelatable for me to truly get the most out of the game. OH! I was wrong.

I would never lay all my emotional cards out on the table for public consumption, because goodness knows that's not healthy to do. Trust me, the game Elliot and I played is emotional, and real, but still has a thin filter of the public boundary layered over it. But in that private game with Rowan I really, really did put it all out, as did she. I sat locked inside my bathroom with Rowan on the other side, and realized that I was playing through a scenario I spend a lot of time thinking about as a chronically sick person - saying goodbye and knowing I'm leaving people behind. Rowan was playing my little brother, someone who felt like I already had abandoned him when I left him home on his own with our homophobic parents. And then, in that moment, I'm leaving again forever, and won't be able to protect him from the horrors outside.

Gang, in all these years being sick, I've gone to so much therapy about confronting mortality, and how to cope with those anxieties. Sitting in that closed white room and playing out my own end of life with someone I love so much took a blacklight to all the unseen critters that I did not realize were crawling through the sheets of my subconscious. And of course that's not enough, because games aren't therapy*, but those are things I now talk about, with my loved ones, with my therapist, with myself. And when that door re-opened and I hugged Rowan we were 10 times the friends we were before. We sat on my couch with a drink, pulling on all the loose threads that the game experience made us aware of and unraveling them with each other. Identity and love and unfinished business and how we are all burdened by each other and why that is beautiful. I learned her life story, she learned mine, we shared insights and wisdom and every so often we kept pointing back to something that was said in that game that lit that part of our real self up.

Playing through themes like this is something that a few years ago, I would never have touched. I came into the hobby a little traumatized and green and I just wasn't ready to use games in this kind of deep and existential way. It was all escapism, no introspection. This game in particular makes me feel so grateful that I've gotten to a place where games can be as deep and as uncomfortable for me as they have the capacity to be.

I think this game is a little window to Elliot's enormous heart, and it speaks directly to mine, and I hope others will love it all the same.

Go back the game please:

*games are like, a little bit therapy. I know that's taboo to say, but like. Lots of things are therapy. These things are not so black and white. I could say more but that's not what this is about.

[clown-eating-pig]

Jmart is just like squidbob but if squidward was the main character and spongebob had parental issues and suicidal depression

[angelnumber27]

It’s so embarrassing and heartbreaking being in so much pain over losing someone while knowing they don’t give a fuck if you live or die. Your favorite person becoming a stranger is a special kind of hell.

[mumblingsage]

Since making this post, I've found myself swinging like a pendulum between "I was too absolutist in the OP, there probably are some people who have gotten some form of trauma through reading or watching a movie" and "I still don't believe anyone has been traumatized through reading or watching a movie because I haven't seen any evidence of that happening, nor an explanation of how it would happen." Certainly, if someone stumbles away from a book/movie/podcast/etc with trauma symptoms, they deserve full support and recovery. But from everything I know about trauma (I am not an accredited expert and don't know everything), that isn't likely to happen. I'm not convinced our brains don't make clear distinctions between being in life-threatening danger and sitting in a comfortable chair with our eyes on a page or screen. The edge cases I've been presented with have usually had a pretty clear real-life culprit aside from, or at least in strong addition to, the book/movie (abusive family won't let you turn the horror movie off-->this is a context for trauma even if the movie was a comedy).

Nobody owes me information about their personal health and if, after reading my post, someone goes "Yeah, we shouldn't use 'traumatized' as an exaggeration or term of condemnation for media, but I really am traumatized after reading Bridge to Terebithia and I'll keep using that word," more power to them. Several people, though, have responded with more general claims, as you have, that amount to "But fiction can cause trauma," without backing this statement up. (This is the part where the hornets' nest swings back: don't worry, I'm a swarm of very lazy and pedantic hornets.) To tell me, in effect, "Your brain can't tell the difference between watching 2012 and surviving an actual earthquake," you're asking me to make a pretty big shift in my understanding of how brains and people work, and I'm not willing to go that far just because someone tells me so. There's a chapter early in The Body Keeps the Score where Bessel van der Kolk talks about brain scans he did with two survivors of a car accident to measure the physical impact of PTSD, and at this moment in time, I don't believe the same brain rewiring has ever happened as a result of reading about a car accident.

(Someone brought up vicarious trauma, but all the examples I can find of vicarious trauma relate to media coverage or secondhand experience of real-life tragedies. To speak very briefly from personal experience, a loved one's sudden death can cause/be a vicarious trauma even if you don't witness it firsthand. Reading Bridge to Terebitha isn't equivalent to having a real person in your life die suddenly. It's actually very significant that when you close the book, your friends and loved ones are still alive!)

I'm wondering if, as a society who cares about vulnerable people, we could stop saying "traumatize" when we truly mean "upset"?

I am sick of hearing sad books or movies "traumatize" their readers. I simply do not believe that happens. A traumatic experience might be adjacent to books (I have vivid memories of books I was reading around certain experiences and even how the contents of those books affected my processing of the experiences). But it's not caused by the book. And, y'know. The weather is Christofascist Censorship Attempts outside.

Meanwhile from the other side I continue to be surprised at just how badly people fail to understand trauma and traumatic experiences in general. Watering down the term isn't helping. Find other hyperbole to express that The Bridge to Terebithia gutted you, chewed on your heartstrings, and made you cry your first pair of contact lenses right out of your preteen eyes.

[solivagantingrebel]

hey guys who wants another round of tmi

[musashi]

.

[mutantfactor]

Ashes Of Love Run Yu

[softerwider]

Response: I need help. I have to think deeply and I do not know anybody who will help me. It is uncomfortable to think, and especially so when one must make oneself vulnerable to do so. But here it is: I'm trying to be vulnerable and explain myself clearly; writing my thoughts. I'm reposting this here because it gave me hope. It gave me pause. It spoke to me deeply. It is kinky--but it really carried a level of introspection about the nexus of kink and shame and power and disgust and pain and pleasure and arousal. Paperfeedee laid a finger on how these all share in a close connection to one another. Her post describes perfectly the insane network of social signifying practices and intuitions that I have, and that I always imagine other people have. Not everybody as I am. I mean to say that this post of hers was, is, and shall continue to be enlightening. I have been a part of the feedist kink scene since some time in the early 2000's. Scary to think of myself wandering all over the internet like that. But anyway, even so, all this never once thought that I have internalized fat phobia. And, just like is described in Paperfeedee's post, there are elements of my kink that I am now realizing that I might have to disentangle from that fearful place. I caught a glimpse of what that might be like. There's a complex story about why my kink is closely tied to fat phobia, and maybe I'll get to speak it someday, but I have always wanted to gain weight. I've always considered myself a feeder switch, but I've had some v e r y intense sex dreams about being fed and fattened--none have been about feeding others. And yet, for as much as I enjoy overeating, indulging in fattening foods, and the idea becoming fatter and fatter, I've never been able to do so. I've blamed my bad (very efficient) metabolism; I've blamed my inability to buy enormous quantities of fast food on the regular; I've blamed my partner for being unwilling to be my feeder. I never looked to myself. Each of these things (enjoy overeating; love fattening food; want to be fat) is also tied in significant ways to formative, stressful, and traumatic times in my life. I won't get into them now. Suffice it to say that each thing, for as desirable as it is, is also overloaded with shame, discomfort, and is incredibly connected to my libido. Here is the nitty-gritty. I do not want to demonize anybody, least of all myself, for having the particular flavor of fetish that they do. I think that shame, discomfort, and arbitrary over-significance play crucial roles in the way that I experience sexual pleasure. Fear and helplessness is singed onto the texture of my jouissance. But what I think is most salient about Paperfeedee's post here is that it makes the case for the way that identification in phobia is sustained by the fascination it makes of the object of its fear. Identification is a process whereby a relationship between more than one thing and itself is defined, sustained, and elaborated. So, when I see someone in the store buying groceries and I notice how fat they are, that they have a lot of junk food, and my mind goes racing as it is wont to do about what an unrepentant glutton this person must be (etc.), I have participated in the process of identification. Phobia is a kind of identification that places the thing that is desirable at as far a distance from the self as possible. This distant relationship is a relationship nonetheless. The "Subconscious Hint" that Paperfeedee mentions here indicates precisely the way that this distance is a relationship, and one of the most intimate kind. My most intense sex dreams (or maybe just all my sex dreams) are about getting fat. Yet I'm afraid of what people will think if I get fat; frustrated that I can't do it; worried for the consequences; don't have the right body for it; etc. SO I think that I have been afraid of getting fat. I have neglected to examine the ways that my interest in feedism and fat fetishism have sustained these fears. I have never looked at the way that these fears could sustain the fetish.

I think that I have gleaned something about how the 'subconscious hint' leads to the inversion of the phobic dynamic in my personal case. I PROMISE that I will be thinking about this post for a very long time to come. I'm sorry if you are already tired of hearing me go on and on about this shit, because I am going to be on this for...ever? But to come back to the main point of this thread: I need help. I would like to use what I've learned here in order to examine the way that I sabotage my weight gain. I may try to gain weight, I may just allow myself to identify with the fear-object in a way that is emancipatory and also erases the fear from the relation. I can let someone else be afraid of my fat ass! I can hear that shitty fat-phobic comment that someone makes about how much I am eating and feel butterflies or go find a room and jerk off about it. I have become that which I rejected. I have embraced the part of myself that I shunned. I do not want to use my fetish as an excuse to sustain fat phobia. The point is that I will need help in thinking about this. (And also maybe tell me I'm looking fatter.) Thank you, and have a good night.

back when I was still thin and had yet to discover the whole "really into making myself unrecognizably fat" fetish, I still had like, a preoccupation with fat people that usually alternated between being super judgemental and being terrified that I'd get fat, which was like, definitely some kind of subconscious hint at like, man, I'm going to find out something crazy in a couple of years, but anyway

I distinctly remember grocery shopping with one of my friends in college, and seeing a woman who was pretty fat buying like, little debbie cakes and whatnot and just like, could not stop talking about it to my friend, could not let go of it, could not stop harping on "how does a person let themselves get that fat? how can you be that fat and not be trying to lose weight? how are you not embarrassed to be that fat and be seen buying those?" Even my friend had to ask like, what is your damage with this random woman?

anyway, obviously that wasn't cool of me and I've clearly gone on my own ✨️journey✨️ with confronting internalized fatphobia since then, but like knowing now that I have fully become that woman in the grocery store is like, part self actualization, probably part karmic retribution, and all like, getting to live a peak horny fantasy for me now, and I'm so here for it

(especially since my favorite grocery store is right next door to this really big, really nice gym, so it's just me and all the Lululemon wearin ass pilates baddies at the grocery store together)

[sluttish-armchair]

Ok but thinking back to how I was in elementary and middle school: I had such disdain for other kids who broke the rules, that I irrationally hated a whole bunch of kids — kids I would have made good friends with — all because I couldn’t stand the fact that they engaged in conflicts with, and affronts to authority figures or standards.

It even went as far as internally mocking a kid my age — calling him “Mama’s Boy” in my head — over the fact that his mother whispered comments into his ear, which he mumbled unintelligibly into the mic, and then would fall asleep as if dead on her arm. I perceived his inability to give comments on his own, and his sleeping, as moral failings of both mother and child; because I wasn’t raised like that. And maybe, those feelings also came from jealousy. I was expected to fight off sleep all the time because I could read at a college level in third grade, and could theoretically understand the material presented at the meetings despite it still being inappropriate for my age group.

I was so far deep into the “bad associations spoil useful habits” mindset that it made me hate my fellow neurodivergents — kids I would have been friends with — who maybe couldn’t hide it as well as I could. That is beyond fucked up. Now, I work with those very kids I disliked so much as a child, and guess what? They are my absolute favorite people to be around; and many of them remind me of myself.

[novadreii]

If your life circumstances have always required from you an abnormal amount of strength and resilience, I see you. If your inner child lets out a small sob anytime someone compliments you on that strength, I see you. If that strength translates to you being some form of domineering/abrasive because you learned early on that your lot in life was to take care of yourself because nobody else ever did, I see you. If you are so fucking angry all the time and can't pinpoint why, I see you. If you've had to watch as people you care about continue to abandon you in adulthood because you grew up to be type A, controlling and assertive, I see the fuck out of you. It's not your fault that nobody ever gave you a soft place to land so that you could be your true self. And I won't inundate you with condescending platitudes about how you'll find your person/people one day.

Some of us are lucky, but to depend on external sources for your well being is a crap shoot. I won't tell you to keep looking for your home in other people. Home is where you are. Take that strength you've painstakingly cultivated since you were a child, and quadruple it. Become bulletproof, unbreakable. Don't let anyone else find a fault line in you to exploit ever again.

[scatterpatter]

I HAVEN'T DRAWN MY LIL EDGY BOY IN SO LONG... I MISSED HIM...

alt version with less effects under the cut!

[viktortittiforov]

SIGH you know what's so frustrating????? i keep being stuck on that nsfw viktuuri fic (or like i keep writing it in tiny bits bcs i just can't get a good writing flow going) and i think what would rlly help me would be having sb read what i have so far and like!! consult it w me and give me encouragement and stuff. but. the yoi buds i do have are either not into nsfw stuff (totally fair) or i'm not close enough with to ask for something like that AND ALSO I AM SO AFRAID OF BEING JUDGED ESPECIALLY SINCE THE THING IS JUST A DRAFT THAT I KNOW NEEDS FIXING IN A FEW ASPECTS

[teknikolor-walters]

the urge to overshare on the internet vs. the fear of being a burden to my friends and worrying yall

[calamitys-child]

FUCK. I hate having to make adult financial decisions.

[shilohtx]

i know I must be pretty normal cause my last two and most significant long running relationships ended with one of us in the mental hospital + one of us in jail. respectively

[sillimancer]

stopping my bg3 shenanigans for the night but I stopped at a VERY good/interesting spot Durge-wise and need to think about my next move