#their mom similarly has only met the grandma a few times

[fiveminuterice]

every time my white coworker tells people they’re asian an angel loses its wings

[snezfics-n-shit]

Home For The Holidays - An AA fic that’s way too long

I’ve been thinkin bout that post that’s like “character with the kink is sneezing a lot and their partner who usually indulges them is having fun with How The Turns Have Tabled” so now I give you a Wrightworth + snzfcker Phoenix fic based on that exact premise. In which Phoenix re-introduces Miles to Mama Wright, Christmas is celebrated for 2 months straight, and disaster man Phoenix is back on his bullshit.

Tbh if I kept this lying around I’d just keep editing and it’d never get done oof but please enjoy

          Phoenix’s mother had clearly purchased a new doorbell. The tune echoed from behind the door at the press of the button; this year, it was much louder and played Jingle Bells a month too early. Speaking of a month too early, other than a rather articulate variant of a ‘no soliciting’ sticker, the decorations on the door were Christmas themed as well, completely skipping Thanksgiving and likely put up the day after Halloween. That was just how Mrs. Wright was: a major Christmas enthusiast through and through.

Just as expected, she greeted her son and his family while sporting a comfy Christmas-themed sweater. Cats in Santa hats, a design that had Trucy in awe at how cute they were. Christmas and cats, two of Mrs. Wright’s joys in life. Mrs. Wright had little contact with family members other than Phoenix and Trucy, so she resolved a lot of the resulting loneliness by adopting cats. The cats she adopted were a lot like her, having few blood relatives around and finding a home in a found family.

“Phoenix! You’re early!” Mrs. Wright looked up and down at her son, assessing just how many extra pies she would need to make; he was skin and bones since he had been disbarred! “You didn’t have to shave before you came, dear. The holiday is this Thursday, so you have time to make yourself look nice.”

“You tell me that every time I visit, mom.” Phoenix chuckled. “Today, I have a good reason to look nice. There’s someone I’d like for you to meet.”

“Well, I know I’ve met your adorable daughter before.” Mrs. Wright leaned down to give Trucy a big hug. “You have no idea how happy I am to have a grandbaby to spoil!”

“You tell me that every time, too.” Phoenix stepped to the side, showing off Miles, who had done a spectacular job at hiding behind him before the big reveal. “This is my boyfriend, Miles Edgeworth. I’ve been meaning to tell you since we started dating, but only now does he have a day off where you can finally meet in person.”

“Wait, Miles?” Mrs. Wright blinked a few times. Miles was certainly as well dressed as the boy she remembered Phoenix bringing home so many times, but was he the same person? “That sweet boy who would always help me with the dishes when he stayed over? This is him?”

“I believe so, Mrs. Wright.” Miles hardly remembered his youth well enough to give a definite answer, but that sounded like something he would have done. It sounded like something he would do even now, actually.

“Sounds like you found yourself a keeper, dear.” Mrs. Wright held the door open wider to let the trio in. “It’s awfully chilly today. Come inside before you catch a cold.”

The walls were lined with framed pictures of Phoenix, with unsurprisingly many of which being of him celebrating Christmas. The trend continued even with pictures of Trucy that Phoenix had sent to his mother. While there weren’t nearly as many, there were a few notable photos of Phoenix’s parents: the pictures taken when they renewed their wedding vows and when Mrs. Wright got her associate’s degree after Phoenix started working with Mia, for example.

“Ah, now I remember.” Miles looked a little uncomfortable with the holiday-centric décor. “Your mother’s Christmas obsession.”

“Be nice.” Phoenix whispered. “It’s something she really likes; it’s not hurting anyone.”

“I love Grandma’s reindeer!” Trucy lifted herself with her tiptoes, eager to see the skillfully crafted wooden reindeer lining the shelf above the shoe rack. “Rudolph’s my favorite! Because he made everyone real sorry for making fun of him!”

“He did, didn’t he?” Phoenix slipped off his shoes and hung up his and Miles’s coats on the coat rack. “I like him, too. He had a talent that really turned Christmas eve around.” That sounded much like how he used to be in the courtroom. He missed that courtroom a lot.

“I’m gonna go find Buster!” Trucy ran off. Buster was one of Mrs. Wright’s cats; his big personality quickly made him Trucy’s favorite. Phoenix, however, was more fond of Doily (formerly Dollie), a friendly and relaxed cat who was happy as long as she had somewhere to sit. There were three more: a senior cat named Gerald, a gray tabby named Della, and a new kitten named Harvey. While it seemed like a lot of cats, the home Phoenix’s parents resided in after Phoenix left for Ivy University was specifically picked to be spacious enough for even the most rambunctious cats. 

“I believe you told me you wanted to introduce me to your parents’ cats, correct?” Miles followed Phoenix to one of the living room couches. “And you’re sure they’re not aggressive or anything?” While Miles knew dogs had a history of being working and companion animals, he couldn’t exactly say he had read any solid proof of cats earning a similarly high status. Even the nicest cats he had met always seemed more interested in leaving as many scars on his hand as possible than being friendly with him. 

“I can vouch for all but Harvey, since he’s new, but my mom has always been something like a cat whisperer.” Phoenix yanked a tissue from the end table next to the couch’s arm rest. “I’m sure they’ll like you a lot.” He smiled before blowing his nose softly. “My nose must be thawing out.” He chuckled.

“I told you to bring your scarf when I called you.” Mrs. Wright called out from the kitchen. “Now you’re catching a cold, aren’t you?”

“No, I feel fine.” Phoenix rubbed the bottom of his nose with the tissue folded in half. “Just part of warming up.”

“I’m surprised you’d forget your scarf for someone who claims going out with a wet head spells ‘pneumonia.’” Miles hummed. 

“Hey, you know it’s not scarf weather.” Phoenix chuckled and tossed the tissue into the trash bin, impressed that he made the shot. Miles found it amusing that Phoenix completely ignored the wet head comment, likely because he really did tell Miles and Trucy that all the time. “It is the perfect weather for mom’s homemade stew, though.”

“I’m eager to try it, considering you’ve been talking it up since she called to invite us over.”

“It’s really good!” Phoenix repeated the claim he had been making for weeks. “I can’t wait for you to try it.” He pressed his knuckle against his nose. “Hopefully it’ll be dinner soon.”

“That won’t be for a while, I’m afraid.” Mrs. Wright carried some glasses of water to the living room. “Your father is working late tonight.”

“What does he do?” Miles leaned forward.

“He works in construction. He’s very proud of his work.” Mrs. Wright smiled as she placed the glasses of water on the coasters sitting in front of Miles and Phoenix. “Before Phoenix was born, where he worked didn’t earn him nearly enough to support us. He’s been much happier ever since he’s found somewhere that lets us live comfortably.”

“Where did he work before, if you-” Miles was cut off by the sound of Phoenix blowing his nose again. “If you don’t mind me asking, of course.”

“He worked with his father and other members of the community he grew up in.” Mrs. Wright explained. “It was actually looked down upon to earn the income we needed, or to even have a dream job. That’s why we’ve been so supportive of Phoenix pursuing his dreams; if he wanted to change his major a second time, we would have gladly let him.”

Miles couldn’t imagine being actively discouraged from achieving success. He assumed that pressure was always the other way around. He wasn’t able to lose himself in his curiosity, though. Phoenix’s deep sniffing made sure of that. 

“Phoenix?” Mrs. Wright cocked her head. “Are you sure you’re feeling alright?”

“Yeah, really.” Phoenix waved his hand as if to dismiss any concerns. “I’m sure this’ll stop before dinner.” His breath hitched for a second, but nothing came of it other than an exhale through his mouth.

“If you say so.” Mrs. Wright stood up and left for the kitchen. “I’m going to work on the desserts, so you two just relax and drink your water. I think you need eight glasses a day.”

“Daddy! I found Buster!” Trucy cradled the fluffy orange cat like a baby, Buster’s favorite way to be held. “He let me hold him this whole time! He’s so nice!” Phoenix gave Miles a reassuring smile, pointing to Buster as proof the Wright cats were much friendlier than past cats Miles had met.

“Hey there, Buster.” Phoenix beckoned Buster to sit on his lap. “Wow, he’s really liking me today.” He blinked a few times. “Normally he just walks away when I ask for him to sit next to me.”

“Maybe he can smell that you’ve been spoiling Pess,” Miles joked, “and he wants you to spoil him as well.”

“Cats are pretty smart. Ah!” Phoenix reached for another tissue, squeezing his eyes shut as he blew more heavily than the last time. “Guess I wasn’t done.” He laughed, dabbing the corners of his eyes. “But yeah, I think you’re right.”

“I hope he’ll like me as much as he likes you.” Miles reached to pet Buster and was shocked to hear the loud purrs the cat made. Buster was so soft, Miles thought he could pet him forever; there weren’t even any claws out. “He’s actually letting me pet him.” 

“I told you so.” Phoenix sniffed. “Buster is really friendly. My parents have had him for almost as long as we had Doily. She’s my favorite. I’d show her to you but she’s probably asleep right now.” He pressed the back of his wrist against his right eye, putting on some pressure as he rubbed absentmindedly. Dropping his hand revealed the area around his eyelid to be a tad pink.

“Are you tired from the trip, love?” Miles removed his hand from petting Buster to caress Phoenix’s cheek. “Maybe you should lie down for a while.”

“Yeah, I usually do that when I visit mom alone, actually.” Phoenix gently picked Buster up to gently place on Miles’s lap, laughing softly as he watched Miles light up in fascination with Buster’s sociability. He disposed of his tissue before poking his head into the kitchen doorway to find his mother and Trucy taste-testing desserts. “Uh, hey, mom?”

“Yes?” Mrs. Wright looked up from the tray of finger food desserts. Quite a few were already gone, but knowing her, there would be more by the time she brought out her famous pumpkin pie.

“I’m going to lie down for a while. I should be up for dinner, though.” Phoenix directed his attention to his daughter, whose whipped cream decorated cheeks were proof she had her share of the desserts. “And Trucy?”

“Yes, Daddy?”

“Try not to eat too many sweets or you’ll spoil your appetite.” 

“Okay.” Trucy nodded and proceeded to put another small dessert in her mouth.

“Go ahead and get some rest, dear.” Mrs. Wright sighed at the sight of Phoenix’s face. “You do look pretty tired. Your bedroom should be ready, but you might need to convince Doily to let you have some room on your bed.”

“Doily’s always been my sleeping buddy here, so I don’t mind.” Phoenix assured. He made his journey upstairs, sniffling once or twice and noting he needed to blow his nose again. The sight of only two twin sized beds in the guest room was disappointing, but considering Miles was a surprise additional guest, it was more Phoenix’s fault for not allowing his mother more time to make the appropriate accommodations. Maybe he and Miles could alternate between the bed and the living room couch while Trucy kept her bunny themed bed throughout the week of their stay. 

As predicted, Doily was sleeping on Phoenix’s pillow and needed just a gentle nudge to let him have somewhere to put his head; not enough to chase her off the bed completely, just enough to make some room.

“Hey, Doily. Did you miss me?” His vision grew slightly blurry and his eyes felt wet. Phoenix didn’t remember yawning, but he must have been really tired. “I could use a nap, too, so I’d like you to… hh… to-- Hh’TTCCHHHhh!” He kept his tongue at the roof of his mouth as if that would quiet the sound. Despite his efforts, he scared Doily off the bed completely. “Ngh… Sorry.” He sniffled with his hand pressed under his nose. Maybe he was coming down with a cold after all. 

He slid himself under the blanket, admittedly afraid of how he would be feeling whenever he would wake up. If he was getting sick, maybe it wasn’t completely bad, considering he was staying with his mother. His mom was good at that sort of thing, even long after he moved out on his own. 

When the back of his head hit the pillow a deep, aggressive itch attacked the back of his eyes and sinuses. How was he supposed to sleep like this? No matter how hard he pressed, alternating between rubbing his eyes and nose, it only seemed to get worse. Was that his pulse? Behind his eyes?  

“A’aschhHUUH! Aa’SSCHHHOOUuh! T’TTCHHuuh!!” He sat up, only just having a moment to get some air before he started again. “T’SHCHUUH!! TT’CHHHOOUH!!”

“Sweetheart, sorry to disturb you, but--” Miles stopped in his tracks at the sight of the state Phoenix was in. “Are you… feeling alright?”

“This has to be the weirdest cold I’ve ever had.” Phoenix squinted as he sniffled thickly. “I just wedt to lie dowd ahd-- Hh’TTTCHHOOH! I cad’t stop sdeezi’g.” 

“I see.” Miles kept his mouth shut regarding how this was the exact sort of thing he’d tell Phoenix to make him flustered. He did, however, thought it would be amusing to see Phoenix’s face when offered a handkerchief. “Here, you could use this.” Phoenix didn’t look flustered at all, simply desperate as he took the handkerchief and sneezed thrice into it. What a shame. “You were fine when we left home.” 

“That’s what’s so weird about it!” Phoenix aggressively rubbed at his face. “Dot to bedtiod everythi’g itches.”

“That doesn’t sound like a cold, love.” Miles wiped some of the tears from Phoenix’s face with his thumb. 

“I feel pretty sick.” Phoenix muttered before blowing his nose again, unsure why he was even bothering at this point.

“I imagine you do.” Miles kissed Phoenix’s very wet cheek. “Poor thing. Do you have any ideas on what’s making you feel so bad?”

“Nope.” Phoenix shook his head. “I kinda just started a little bit when we got here and-- Aa’SSHHOOUH! T’TSSCHHOOUHh!! *snf* I can’t stop since I came upstairs.”

“Maybe you’ve developed an allergy to cats?” 

“Don’t even joke about that!” Phoenix scolded, taking offense. “They’re my family!”

“I’m not joking. It’s a genuine possibility.” Miles made a small gasp and looked at his hand. “I touched your face after petting one of them, too. I’m so sorry.”

"Don't be sorry because I'm not allergic to cats." Phoenix huffed. He pushed the blanket off his lap and stood up, not wanting to discuss the topic further. “I’m going back downstairs.”

“Alright.” There was no point in arguing. If Phoenix was going to be so stubborn about this, then Miles just needed to make the best of the situation.

Miles followed Phoenix down the stairs, briefly interrupted when Phoenix needed to stop halfway so he could sneeze again.

“Bless you, sweetheart.” He thought saying that might push the envelope a little.

“Are you baki’g fud of be?” Phoenix glared at him through red, damp eyes. 

“I wouldn’t dare.” Miles answered sincerely. “You just sound so awful.” Okay, maybe he was having a little fun, nudging Phoenix to hopefully see the amusing irony of his circumstances.

Phoenix grumbled something as he dragged himself to the kitchen, clearly still annoyed with Miles for what he had said earlier.

“I thought you were napping, Daddy.” Trucy looked up from a tall glass of chocolate milk. “Did you have a bad dream?”

“He couldn’t get any sleep, from what I can tell.” Miles leaned against Phoenix’s shoulder. 

“I’m pretty sure I’m getting sick.” Phoenix scratched the back of his head. 

“Oh, I knew you’d catch a cold standing out there without a scarf.” Mrs. Wright gently pushed Phoenix on the way to the living room. “Rest on the couch and I’ll get you some blankets.”

“I told you, it’s just a cold, really.” Phoenix made eye contact with Miles the whole time as he blew his nose with a fresh tissue. 

“Perhaps you’re right.” Miles lied and kissed the top of his boyfriend’s head. “I certainly hope you’ll feel well enough to join us for dinner on Thursday.”

“Of course I will.” Phoenix insisted just before Mrs. Wright draped a large blanket over him. While Phoenix thought nothing of it and the intense itch that followed, Miles needed to hold his tongue as he watched short hairs floating around in Phoenix’s general direction. “T-Thanks.” He stuttered as he fanned his face with his hands, truly a sight Miles wished he could comment on with honesty. “Aa’IIISHHHUUH! T’TCHHUUh!! Ugh. Ow.”

“Your poor nose.” Miles cooed. “It must be so tiring, sneezing like that.”

“It is.” Phoenix furiously rubbed at his eyes. “Agh, my eyes, too.”

“They’re really bothering you, aren’t they?” Miles played up his sincere concern. “Driving you crazy, I bet.” He dropped a hint, hoping that extra pink in Phoenix’s face wasn’t just more released histamine. In the corner of his eye was Doily, who was staring intently at Phoenix. “Hey, little one.” Miles leaned over to pet the cat. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to stay here like that.” He whispered, not wanting to further offend Phoenix.

Doily, being hardly fluent in human suggestion, hopped onto Phoenix’s lap anyway. 

“Doily, did you come to check up on me?” Phoenix could hardly keep his smile in place before he started sneezing again. “Gh… Sorry, Doily.” He scratched behind Doily’s ears; the sound of his sniffling accompanied her purring.

“Um, sweetheart?” 

“I know what you’re about to say, and I still say no.” Phoenix pet Doily with both hands, almost out of spite.

“No, that’s not exactly--”

“Daddy! You found Doily!” Trucy stared at Phoenix and the purring cat for a while. “What’s wrong with your arms, Daddy?” Miles took hold of Phoenix’s right arm.

“Hey! You’ll scare her away again!” Phoenix protested, not even paying attention to what Miles was doing. Just as he warned, Doily was startled by the sudden movement and ran off somewhere else in the house.

“Hives.” Miles observed bluntly. “Trucy, dear, could you ask your grandmother to find some benadryl?” Phoenix raised no objections to that, which Miles hardly minded at all. 

“Okay, Papa Miles!” Trucy ran off to find Mrs. Wright, leaving Phoenix and Miles alone to hopefully reach an agreement.

“Well, what happens now?” Phoenix looked down. “Do I just never visit my parents again?” Was that his way of saying Miles was right?

“Of course not, love.” Miles massaged the blotchy areas of Phoenix’s arm. “You’ll just need to be more careful, which you’ve been failing to do a lot lately. Feels like everyday I need to pull you out of trouble.”

“I can’t eat mom’s cooking if I’m asleep, though.” Phoenix let his head hit the soft back of the couch.

“Then we’ll pick up something non-drowsy while you’re resting this evening.” Miles made it sound so easy. In fact, everything he had been saying recently sounded just so… so… Oh.

“You’ve been talking like this on purpose.” Phoenix accused, punctuated by a thick sniffle. There was that flush Miles was looking for. “Is that what I sound like?” He hid his face behind his hands.

“I took some creative license.” Miles smirked before kissing Phoenix’s cheek. “I was starting to get worried when you said you ‘couldn’t stop sneezing’ with a straight face.” 

“Don’t remind me.”

“And miss out on all this fun? I think not.” 

“So is this all-- T’TCHHHOOH!” Phoenix pressed his hand under his nose, giving his voice even more of a nasal quality. “It’s all just payback, huh?”

“Not quite.” Miles held Phoenix’s free hand with both his hands. “You always make me feel so attractive even when I’m looking like you do right now.”

“That’s because you can pull it off.” Phoenix finally managed to chuckle. 

“And so can you.” Miles didn’t let Phoenix protest that, shushing him with an index finger pressed to his lips. “I may not know one hundred percent how you see me, but I’d like you to feel every bit as special.”

“Miles!” Aha! Now Phoenix was very red in the face. Mission successful, if Miles said so himself. “Maybe when I don’t hear my mom’s footsteps coming down the stairs.”

[kaspmatic]

How would you say you relate to Eddie?

BIG FUCKING OOF –ok, I hope you guys are ready to go on a wild ride with me down memory lanehere. there is quite a bit that I can cover on how I relate to Eddie – soplease bear with me and if you read this then; kudos, brownie points, goldstars, all of that shit to you. I’m going to put my actual answer under a read morebecause I know this is going to get lengthy. And honestly, probably a littlepatchy and I might jump around a bit so I won’t force this shit on anyone whowon’t intentionally click that read more for the deets. LOL.

OVERBEARINGFAMILY - REPRESSED HOMOSEXUALITY

To lay a little backgroundon everyone, I grew up NOT knowing my biological father. I lost himat a young age and spent a lot of my younger years growing up with a singlemother – my mom worked in a hospital, so every little thing that happenedbecame a giant issue; I had a cough? go to the doctors. I was always cold? goto the doctors. I sneezed funny? go to the doctors. (I think you guys get mydrift with where I’m going here). as a child I spent a lot of time in and out of thehospital because of this, now I’m not saying my mom has Munchausen Syndrome byany means, she definitely didn’t force diseases onto me. I justrelate and understand that pain of always having to go to the hospitalfor the most trivial of concepts. As a child, however, I did spend quite a fewyears toting around an inhaler that I didn’t even fucking need. Call it a baddiagnosis or whatever you will – but it was still something that I had todo that I didn’t even need.

Not having my dad aroundlead for a lot of weird and one-sided views in my mind throughout my youngeryears of life – for a long time I had only the woman’s point of view onevery aspect (at least until my mom remarried years later - I was in myteens by that time).

To continue talking aboutmy overbearing mom – she still tries to be to this way alongsideher husband to this very day (hi, I’m fucking 32 years old here – just tothrow out my Grandma age on tumblr so you aren’t shocked in a paragraph or two).Everything has to be done a certain way or its wrong – they thrive on avery myway or the highway look of things, and this has been something that Ihave constantly had to push back against in more recent years - because I havefound love and support from those who are willing to tell me that its fuckingOK to not be the person your parents want you to be.

Like Eddie, I’ve lost partsof myself throughout life appeasing my family with moldingmyself to fit what they thought I should be - what I needed to be. The biggestissue being homosexuality. I grew up with a Catholic Grandmother who wouldat anychance and drop of a hat find any reason to bitch about the gaysin the most hate speech and closed minded filled way I have everheard in my entire existence. I grew up believing that I couldn’t come out –that I couldn’t truly be who I wanted to be because my family wouldn’t be onboard and I was terrified that they wouldn’t understand or support me and Ibelieved wholeheartedly that if I DID comeout, that I would lose each and every family member that I had becausemy Grandma and other members of my family have very strict views on it - andneed I repeat, are overwhelming overbearing and controlling. When I was firststruggling with the idea that I was part of the queer community, oddly enough,I was 13. By this point in time I was used to listening to my Grandma bitchabout the LGBT+ community for years. I remember one instancedirectly with my mom; we were on a vacation and I remember asking my mom what shethought of the LGBT+ community and she told me flat out that I wasn’t allowedto be Gay.

That right there told me everythingthat my young mind needed to hear. That no matter who I was as a person, that myfamily wouldn’t support me – even over something so simple as lovingsomeone of the same sex. I spent the next 17 years hiding who I was, just toappease the ideals that I thought I had to adhere to. I dated strictlyboys and it landed me in unhappy relationship after unhappy relationship– ultimately my last relationship with a CIS male was a completelycontrolling and abusive one. One where they wanted to control everyaspect of my life - much like how Myra does to Eddie once he’s given in andfallen to Sonia’s whims and has told himself that he has to take the easy wayout. I was miserable in the relationship and everything had to beapproved of by him. It was some of the darkest times in my life but thatrelationship was one that defined me and really made me realize just how unhappyof a life I was leading just by appeasing those around me.

Granted, my repression andcloseted sexuality doesn’t end there. I got out of that relationship when I was22 and spent years recovering from the sheer amount of abuse I was taking fromhim – all the while I was still so tightly wound into the clutches of myparents. I traded off from one controlling household, to a new controllinghousehold, and back to the one in which molded me.

I spent the next 8 yearsgoing through a lot – all the while I was being medicated on anything andeverything under the sun just to right me as a person – because obviouslythat’s the answer here. I spent a lot of time in and out of hospitals due tobad reactions to medications, medications not mixing well, just generallytrying to get myself back to WHO I was. I was just a shell of myself duringthese years, I was in college and struggling even more so with myself and mysexuality as a free bird – so to speak. I tried dating around and nevertold my family when I was with a woman because I didn’t know how. I didn’t knowhow to tell a family so openly against it that’s who I waswith. So, I continued to lie and appease and struggle.

The entirety of my closetedyears – those 17 years – I struggled with every sexual thought Ihad toward a woman. I hated myself. Told myself I was wrong and that it wasn’twhat I was supposed to do. It took me a long time and some reallyfucked up situations to really start to love myself for me. To understand thatno matter what – whether my family love me or accept me – that I am who Iam and NO ONE can fucking changethat.

Granted this story at thevery least has a happy ending, unlike Eddie’s, I met Ari and finally came outat 30 – much to part of my family’s dislike – but my parents wereaccepting and my Mom ultimately didn’t even fucking remember the trauma she hadinduced when I was young. BUT I DIGRESS….

 EMOTIONS - DEALING WITHEMOTIONS

Eddie and I both similarlyshow our emotions – and it’s not always in the best light. I struggle withsomething called Emotional Overwhelm which I actually have a headcanon for I’vebeen meaning to write up for Eddie for fucking weeks since I went and saw ITChapter 2’s early release. It’s something that I recognized in Eddie and reallystruggle dealing with in day to day life. Emotional Overwhelm is an instancewhere things kind of pile the fuck up – everything,even if it’s something small, can feel like a deep wound. People whostruggle with emotional overwhelm feel things differently than normal – anoffhanded comment that could make one person laugh and blow it off will feellike a stab to the heart and a betrayal to someone who deals with it. Strugglingwith this kind of an emotional issue causes me to lash out at unnecessary timesand can be rather debilitating in relationships if your friends, family, oryour partners don’t understand it. It’s worse when you feel a sense of being “gangedup on” (at least for me) so during times of joking around I can easily lash outand take a simple joke as a complete attack.

My chest constricts – mybody will not allow me to breathe easily and if I don’t force it – and ithurts deeper than it should. My anxiety runs high during these times and that panicsets in deep. I can’t fathom emotions if there are too many in place, my mindwill refuse to address them so they pile up. During this time, my mind will fogand I can’t even process anything being said – for instance; if I’m in asituation where issues are being listed off to me and I start to hit thatemotional overwhelm peak – my mind is still focused on exhibit A while theperson is already listing exhibit E. My mind will not allow me to process situationslike this as a WHOLE not in a rapid-firesuccession. The buildup can be excruciating and takes a toll on my body that itall will spill out in a sassy, feisty, and – for the lack of a better word – kindof a shitty outburst. 

Having these outbursts stemfrom growing up in a household where I wasn’t appropriately taughthow to handle my emotions. My family were not people who would discuss emotionsor situations where my emotions got “out of control” – it was always a “stophaving emotions” type argument. I was gaslighted, manipulated, and bullied intothinking any and all emotions were bad. Plain and simple. I wasn’t allowed tocompose my emotions into words as this was not a thing that would everhappen with my family.

Much like Eddie, I tend tohave my emotions out there regardless of what I was taught – regardless ofbeing able to recognize those emotions I hate talking about them. It’s a viciouscycle. Discussing my emotions brings out my emotional overwhelm and it’s justan all-around messy situation at that. So, I try my best to hide my emotions– I clench my jaw, I go silent, I refuse to talk about it, I completelyshut down – I’m stubborn. It takes someone remarkably special and someone Itrust completely for me to really level with them – to be raw and showevery little bit of emotion that I have. Someone who is tolerable of it andunderstands what I’m going through, how I process my emotions… So needless to say,I have only ONE person who I feel comfortable with being this raw andvulnerable towards given my home life. So, a lot of the time my emotions– if every questioned by anyone will mostly be met with anger, because itwas the one emotion I was used to receiving growing up. It’s easier to lash outthan it is to make yourself vulnerable.

When I’m not having a terriblytraumatizing day and my emotional overwhelm hasn’t taken over, I tend to hide myemotions behind my sass. If I magically have a day where I’m notcompletely losing it and on an emotional overload type of day, my hurt showsthrough real quick sass and sometimes it’s not always tasteful. My brainto filter usually shuts off when I’m hurt and I feel like I’m being come for.

 UNDIAGNOSEDADHD - MENTAL HEALTH

Ok, this is another headcanonsituation I want to write up – mostly because of instances between Chapter 1 andChapter 2 that I picked up on. But I’m a firm believer that Eddie has undiagnosedADHD – take for instance the entire scene where they’re first introduced to TheClubhouse. Eddie’s reaction and the way he bounces from subject to subject withhalf sentences, his reaction to the paddle ball with Stan, his rapid fire nearlystumbling speech. I wholeheartedly believe that Sonia wasn’t concerned in theleast about mental health issues, only concerned for issues that would harmEddie physically and more in the realm of physical health issues.

Much like this, my Mom wasadamant that I didn’t have ADHD and refused to have me tested by any means. Istruggle with half sentences where my mind will be moving faster than my mouthor fingers – I notice this more when I’m typing, whether it be having adiscussion on discord or responding to replies. I don’t know how many times Ihave gone back to proof read and somehow, I’m missing portions of sentences andeverything is nearly a half thought. My mind processes things too quickly andone moment I’ll have my attention in one place and within a second something elsewill catch my attention. It’s always fast and catches nearly everyone around meoff guard that don’t really understand what’s going on.

To kind of wrap this backaround to my abusive situation and the lack of HELP in the metal health realm where the Mom’s are concerned. WhileI was dealing with these issues I dealt with a lot of mental health ailments(ptsd, manic depression, insomnia, and major anxiety/panic attacks to name afew.) these were all situations that required a lot of help through doctor’s,psychiatrists – you name it. But my Mom (and her husband) were always inthe realm of thought that a mental battle can be won without the use of medication– and this is honestly how I feel Sonia Kaspbrak thought and took mentalhealth issues. That they weren’t as big of an issue as say “health” issues areconcerned. That they were easily bypassed and just a “phase” that could begrown out of. Considering Sonia, who is a woman suffering with MunchausenSyndrome – mental health issues don’t get you the same attention as say asick and suffering child would with an actual sickness or disease that can beSEEN. And that is the biggest difference and I think why Eddie was nevertreated for having ADHD.

It’s seen, but it’s not onethat would necessarily bring about any sort of sympathy from others or keepEddie bound in her realm of control that she preferred to rule. 

[purecamp]

Hi, I have a question about your mamma mia au! Is Pat dead on Here I Go Again? Because I was thinking that if she passed away before higa, Sharon and Willam would attend the funeral right? Wouldn't Sharon bring Trixie too? Wouldn't Willam go talk to her and get suspicious about Trixie? Is this me subtly asking you to write an oneshot about it just because I'm not ready to let go of this universe and also wanting you to write more Shillam? 😂

ahaha anon this tickled me tbh. first of all thanks for the love (!!!), so i’ll try to answer in parts

-unfortunately she has passed before higa because she would be 113, which is possible but... unlikely ahaha -ive been debating this since waaaay before u asked me bc its something i thought about a lot, like would sharon bring trixie or not? would she even go? lots 2 think about, decisions decisions -i would write oneshots for you in a second. plz feel free to request them at any time omg

anyway, i guess i’m gonna give it a go here! 

She was a good age, Sharon knew that. Spritely in nature right up until her last moments, Patricia Belli passed away in her retirement home at the age of ninety six.

Her letter had arrived in the post; a short and not-so-sweet note letting Sharon know that if she received this letter, then she had died, and the nursing home staff had actually honoured her request of them to send it to her. Somewhat of a doting grandma - owing to the fact that Sharon had no idea what Pat would be to Trixie if she even was related - she had attached some plastic-wrapped sweets and lollipops.

God, this was going to be difficult. On top of having to close the hotel, at least for a day whilst she attended the funeral, Sharon was going to have to explain the concept of dying to her three-year-old girl, who thought the world was nothing but sparkles and sunshine.

And that was without slotting in time for her own grief. In four years, Pat had transformed Sharon’s life, and she owed her everything.

Times like these were when Sharon wished she had a little bit of help. She needed to cry and sniff and weep into somebody, to wallow in the horrible feeling of finally being alone in the world with herself as the only adult to rely on. She needed to continue working in order to stay alive, and keep her home paid for and her daughter fed. She needed to sit down and explain to Trixie than Nana Pat was gone, and she wouldn’t be coming back. She needed someone else to bundle her up for once and tell her it was all going to be okay.

“You alright?” Maria broke her out of her thoughts, tapping her as she went past behind the bar to fetch a few more bottles of ale.

Sharon grabbed a rag and continued drying up the glasses - Maria had offered to extend the hotel into her bar, meaning Sharon now managed a hotel and taverna in one. “Yeah, just... Can’t believe she’s gone, you know? I always felt like Pat was gonna live forever.”

Maria nodded. “It will be strange, we miss her around here. She was regular for many years at this taverna. Party held here after the service, in her honour.”

“She’d like that. Everyone getting drunk for her.” She sighed, her eyes filling with tears. “I don’t want to have to tell Trix. She’s only young, after all.”

Shrugging, Maria offered a kindly smile. “Brave and strong, like her mother. Even if teeny tiny.”

Despite her heavy heart, Sharon laughed.

---

“Mama! You’re here!”

The same cheerful greeting that Sharon was met with every afternoon came at her once again, lifting her low mood a little. A flurry of pink shot towards her, Sharon noting a smudge of blue paint on her face and some scuffs on her shoes from a day of playing before she was tackled in a huge hug.

“I’m here, little pumpkin. Did you have a good day?”

“The best!” Trixie trilled. “We did painting, and running, and I played dolls with Kimmy and Pearl showed me how to draw hearts!”

Ever-suffering, her preschool teacher was stood by the door to the classroom, her gaze tired but still warm as her last student clung to her mom. It wasn’t too often that Sharon was last to pick up her little girl, but it happened enough that she knew to just sit Trixie down with some colouring and leave her to it. Today, the grief had slowed Sharon down, and she was behind on most of her maintenance.

“Sounds fun! Now, are we walking out of here or is mama carrying you all the way home?”

Trixie took a moment to think about it, before smushing her face into Sharon’s neck. “Mama carries me home.”

Sharon sighed, figuring that she needed to keep Trixie happy if she was going to deliver such bad news. “Okay, just this once. Say bye bye, now!”

“Bye bye, Miss Coulée!”

Just Sharon’s luck, the walk was roughly long enough for them to discuss the subject. She was careful not to let her own emotions influence Trixie’s too much, knowing that a sobbing little girl would be much harder to console when she herself wanted nothing more than to break down in someone’s arms. Curious and a little confused, she asked a few questions which Sharon tried her best to answer, all while avoiding the term “Heaven”. It felt like she’d done an okay job, all things considered, but the fact that she had to do it alone meant she was more than nervous. This wasn’t going to traumatise her into therapy as an adult... she hoped.

“Will she miss me?”

Fuck, this kid was tugging at every single one of Sharon’s heartstrings. It didn’t seem possible that she had been the one to give life to something so goddamn cute.

“Nana Pat? I’m sure she will miss you, baby. And we’ll miss her, too.” Sharon took a deep breath. “But she’s still with us, isn’t she? Because we remember her, and we always have our memories.”

Trixie nodded thoughtfully. She had begged and begged to sit on Sharon’s shoulders, so now she idly played with loose strands of her hair, the messy bun practically ruined from the day’s work anyway.

“But she won’t come back because she’s too old.”

The child-like ability to make the most innocent and heartbreaking of things funny was one that Sharon hoped Trixie held onto forever. Even with her own heavy sadness, she giggled slightly.

“That’s right, bubba.”

A pause. “Are you sad, mama?”

Sharon nodded infinitesimally, trying not to trigger her tears. “Lots of people will be sad. When we go to the funeral on Saturday, there will be lots of sad people wearing black who all love Nana Pat very much. Will you promise me to be a really good girl and just sit quietly with me? We don’t want to disturb anyone.”

Trixie leaned forwards, pressing her lips to the top of Sharon’s head in an awkward, well-meaning kiss. “I’ll be good.”

---

She was golden. Sharon had done all her crying in the morning, before Trixie scrambled into her bed, and she was relieved at how easily her toddler had gone along with everything. Getting herself dressed had been a breeze; she even tried brushing her own hair, which was unsuccessful but nevertheless touching. Trixie then scampered off to play whilst Sharon got ready, giving her a few more moments alone.

Smoothing down her skirt, she examined herself in the mirror. An uncomfortable possibility had dawned on her that night, as she tried to sleep, and it made her unbelievably nervous. After all, he was her great-nephew...

She didn’t look that different than the day they met, surely? But yet, staring at herself, Sharon started realizing how little she resembled that girl already. Only four years had passed, near enough, and at twenty one and a mom, there was almost nothing to anchor this version of herself to the similarly-burdened yet unrealistically carefree seventeen-year-old that Willam had known.

Her hips were wider now, one of the few permanent modifications that Trixie had given her, and for all her low income meant a reduced diet, there was still the remains of a post-baby pouch that stubbornly remained. Black dresses were slimming, Sharon reminded herself, not that the rest of her needed it, but she hoped it was enough that if Willam did see her, he wouldn’t notice anything different.

That being said, he was a man. The little things didn’t matter. The living, squirming three-year-old, however...

Sharon sighed and relaxed, not bothering to try and suck in her stomach like she had before. Willam definitely wouldn’t notice it, he’d be too busy staring at Trixie. The human that he might’ve helped her create. That she had opted not to tell him about. Even though she had an easy way to do so via his now deceased great-aunt.

Fuck.

They made their way up to the little old chapel on the island in good time. Pat knew and loved her home more than anything, so relatives had been flocking from around the world to a tiny chapel on a tiny island out in Greece. It was a difficult walk, and with every step Sharon had to face that she really was in this alone now.

Not wanting to intrude in spite of her invite, Sharon slipped into a pew at the back and bowed her head, clutching Trixie in her lap as more of a comfort than anything else. Thankfully, as more and more people filed in, Trixie seemed to sense that her mama was upset, and quietly played with her flamingo teddy.

He was one of the last to walk in, of course - he would have to make an entrance. Swaggering in, his expression mostly calm, and his sheer confidence was highly inappropriate for a funeral and god if Sharon didn’t sound like her fucking mother. He was young and hot and the swagger seemed to be a Belli thing, because no one paid him any attention. Somewhere, whether in heaven or in her coffin, Sharon knew Pat was cackling with laughter.

And, of course, he just had to speak too. Sharon lifted her head a tiny bit to watch him, trying to ensure his gaze didn’t flicker onto her.

“So many kind things have been said about my dear great aunt today, and whilst it has warmed my heart I’m here to undo it all.” Willam started, filling the room with soft laughter. “Rest in peace, Granny Pat. You were old as fuck, but we’ll miss your rottenness. She had an ego bigger than mine and a liver bigger than Dad’s, and she was the life of the party. We love you, Pat.”

Everything about him was so familiar. Sharon tried not to think about it, but her mind was flooded with him. He didn’t look different at all, but she supposed LA had treated him well. Tanned and charming as ever, he seemed to woo his family as easily as he had seduced her into bed with him... or at least, that was how Sharon chose to remember it.

This was going to be a long day.

---

In all honesty, Sharon didn’t go out much anymore. It came with the territory of being a full-time parent and hotel owner-manager-chef-bartender-maid, but she was tired almost all the time. When Raja and Jinkx came over she made exceptions, but on a day-to-day basis, once Trixie was in bed, Sharon was exhausted from exerting herself to make sure she could even be finished and home in time for Trixie’s bedtime story. So, being out in the taverna in the late evening?

Unbearable.

As soon as everyone came in, Maria offered to take Trixie and keep her entertained behind the bar - which probably wasn’t the most responsible choice Sharon had made as a mom, but she knew Maria would take good care of her as she always did, and insisted she needed to mingle.

Mingling was the last thing on her mind, but she reluctantly grabbed a drink and tried to remain casual in a room full of strangers. After all, none of them knew who she was. None of them knew what Pat meant to her, and everything the daft old woman had done for her. None of them knew that without Pat, it was likely that her beloved daughter would’ve been given up for adoption and Sharon would’ve had to return home to her mother with her tail between her legs. Pat had made it possible for her to live, and as rough as it was, it was nice to be self-sufficient at twenty one.

“Hey! I thought it was you! Hi blondie!”

Sharon clutched her glass a little tighter and turned around slowly. “Forgot my name already?”

There he was, right next to her, having made his way across the room with bright eyes and a shiny grin. LA really had treated him well.

“You’re unforgettable, Sharon, don’t play me like that.” Willam teased. “Good to see you again. I knew goodbye wouldn’t last forever.”

Sharon scowled, but it didn’t last. “Hence why I said we wouldn’t have one.”

“Good point.” He gestured to her glass. “Vodka?”

She shook her head. “Just coke.”

“Pffft. Boring. Pat would want you to have some vodka. Or gin. Or both.”

Rolling her eyes, Sharon took a sip from her decidedly non-alcoholic drink. “I have responsibilities to take care of, I can’t just get drunk.”

As she spoke, her gaze went searching through the throng of people, praying Trixie wasn’t about to run over and squeeze her legs in a damning cuddle. To her relief, she was that she was balanced on Maria’s hip, happily giggling away with her out of Willam’s eyeline.

“We’re twenty one, Shar, and you haven’t seen me forever. Live a little!” Willam encouraged. “Seriously though, it’s good to see you. I didn’t know if you would still be here or if you still saw Pat around. It’s nice to see a face that I know she’d be happy to see, too. She hated most of the people here.”

God, the past tense. Sharon tried not to well up.

“You’re the only face here I know.” She admitted, her voice thick. “I feel a bit lost, honestly. If I didn’t have work, I’d be doing shots to loosen up.”

Willam laughed at that. “Right! I’m glad you know my face, at least. Familiar face, familiar arms, familiar chest, familiar d-”

“Stop!” Sharon shrieked, giggling in spite of herself. “Your great aunt has just died and you’re talking about our teenage sex? You’re disgusting.”

He shrugged. “I’m a Belli, it runs in the family. All this nonsense about her living to a ripe old age... please. She wasn’t ripe, she was rotten. It’s why we love her so.”

Sharon chuckled appreciatively. “I’m gonna miss her.”

“Me too. She’d be glad to see us brought back together, though.”

“Yeah. Although I’m not gonna sleep with you again.”

Willam’s laugh was a little too loud, attracting some disgruntled murmurs from surrounding family members. “Welp, there goes my weekend plans.”

It was surprisingly nice, talking to Willam. As much as Sharon had been terrified that the first topic of conversation would be them, and it would inevitably lead to a confession, they fell into a fleeting friendship as easily as they had four years ago. Determined to keep things light, Sharon steered away from her work or home life as they talked, but it was still nice to catch up.

That being said, she also kinda never wanted to see him again. Nothing personal, just... for Trixie’s sake, she had closed that chapter of her life and under no circumstances would she be reopening it. Not now, not in twenty years, not ever.

“I assume you’re breaking into stardom in Hollywood, right? I’ll be seeing you on movie posters?” 

He laughed. “A star is born, baby. Keep your eyes open. And you, are you taking to the stage now you’re away from your bitch of a mom?”

Sharon shook her head. “Nah. I don’t... I don’t have time anymore. And with the girls gone, too...”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t need them. And we should sing together again sometime, too.”

At that, Sharon sighed. “There’s nothing keeping you here, Willam, not now she’s gone. We had fun, but... there’s no point holding onto that. I got over my exes, I have to keep living and so do you.”

Willam nodded. “A goodbye without a goodbye. I get it. It’s difficult, but we have to let go.”

Yeah, Sharon told herself. In more ways than one.

“It’s not a personal thing, you know I care about you as a friend-”

“I know.” Willam told her. “I care about you too. But I get it.”

He pulled her into a hug. “Needles, take care of yourself. You’re skinny, take advantage of the free food. Fall in love. Make music. Do things to make you happy. You deserve that.”

Speechless, Sharon could only nod as he held her. “I can tell you’re ready to leave, so I’ll say goodbye now. You’re a one of a kind, okay? Keep going, angel thighs.”

Pfft. The old parody nickname - trust Willam to remember that.

“Thank you, Willam.”

---

Trixie was fast asleep in Sharon’s arms. Her warm weight had settled comfortably into her as she walked home, and Sharon relished in the way her sweet daughter could fill her aching heart so perfectly. Her blonde curls were messy, just like her own were as a child, and she was completely tuckered out.

Her adorable girl had little outfits, a bedroom of her own and a roof over her head all thanks to the love and kindness of one foul-mouthed, gin-loving lady. As the sun started setting, Sharon realized she owed another Belli a lifetime of gratitude.

“Thank you, Pat.”

[sage-the-mage]

Sometimes the littlest things that happen when you're young can have massive impact on you when you're older.

So I've been thinking a lot lately. About my childhood, mostly, trying to figure out why it is that I am the way I am.

I'm nonbianary. While I've never really felt like much of a girl, it took me until this last year to fully realize it. And even now, I'm hesitant to tell people. On here, I have no issue being who I am and proud of it. But irl, very few people know. My wife knows, obviously, and a few of our friends know too, and all of them use my preferred name, Sage, instead of my birth name. A couple other people met me after I'd come out to my wife and friends, and they know me as Sage, but not that I'm nonbianary. And no one really ever uses the right pronouns, and I'm always too afraid of upsetting everyone to correct them. I mean, my wife tries when she remembers. One of the friends I told is just bad at remembering, it was honestly a bit of a struggle to get her used to the correct name. And the other two I remember telling don't see us as much to get used to it, on top of never hearing the right ones.

No one in my family, or my wife's, knows. Her grandpa, who we live with, is older and we know wouldn't really understand it, so I never really intended to tell him. He's out on the road a lot so it's not a big deal anyway, plus as everyone's gotten used to calling me Sage, when he's home everyone seems to use that and Meg interchangeably, so he's sorta picked up on that and will call me that sometimes. My mom and my grandparents and all the rest of them still know me entirely as Meg though. And I want to tell them, I really do. They're my family, they raised me, they're honestly a tolerant bunch, especially considering the area we live in. But the idea causes me anxiety.

Just like the idea of telling anyone at all did.

Just like deciding on a new name did.

Just like the idea of telling anyone that doesn't already know.

Just like how as much as I'd like to throw a stuffed animal and pout at anyone referring to me as she or girl, instead I sit back quietly because I'm afraid of stirring up trouble or causing any upset.

But, why am I like this? My mom was my best friend, I used to tell her everything, surely I should at least be able to tell her? And if any of my siblings ever have gender identity issues, I'm sure having a sibling that understands would help them immensely. I've had these thoughts running through my head for ages, but only now am I really acknowledging them.

For as long as I can remember, I saw most things as either boy things or girl things, with very few things that both were allowed to like (silly bands being one of the few "both" things.) I thought that girls weren't allowed to like boy things, and same for boys with girl things. I thought it was an actual rule, too. I don't know how or why exactly this got started, but I'll bet it had something to do with always being taken to the girls section for toys and clothes, to the point I didn't think I could go into the others.

I repressed a lot of my likes and interests. Sure I liked Barbies and playing with them and a lot of most of my other "girl" toys, but I would've loved playing with toy cars, not that I'd have admitted it then. I liked climbing trees and getting dirty, and yes I thought those were boys activities. I wanted to play sports. I did wind up playing basketball in third grade when I found out there was a girls basketball club, and around fifth grade I did climb trees and stopped worrying so much about getting dirty after I saw girls my age playing like that. By then I'd started realizing it wasn't so clear cut.

I said I hated superheroes, despite my favorite show being Kim Possible, a superhero/spy type. And, once I discovered it, I loved Teen Titans, and my excuse for why was because there were two female heroes as part of the main characters. I adamantly denied liking any other superheroes until I was thirteen and saw Danny Phantom and Iron Man Armored Adventures. After that I finally gave up the pretenses of hating superheroes, at least to myself, and to others a few years later.

In forth grade, I found a show, Bakugon I think is what it was called, probably spelled entirely wrong, that I wound up loving and watched before school. When it stopped airing at that time though, I didn't look to find out when it did, because I was afraid of my own mother judging me for liking boyish things, even though I knew she had said stuff before about parents judging their kids for liking stuff commonly associated with the other gender being wrong and stupid. To this day, this is the first I've told anyone about this, aside from maybe mentioning it once to my wife, if that.

Over the years, I've collected a fairly big wardrobe, a few things I've gotten myself or my mom got me, most of it coming from my grandma though. And it's all highly feminine, because while I did and do like that it was expected for that to be all I liked. Some days the thought of wearing my hyper feminine wardrobe was so off putting I'd stay in my pajamas all day, because at least that didn't involve effort. Other days, I'd find some skinny jeans and hope I still had a fairly plain t-shirt to wear, because that was a pretty neutral look. Or I'd stay in my work clothes. Or I'd be feeling like looking feminine and make full use of what I did have.

The thought that I wasn't really a girl was always there. For as long as I can remember, at the back of my mind was the nagging feeling that, while I liked enough feminine things and I certainly wasn't a boy, I didn't really feel like a girl. I would cringe when people would say I was such a cute girl, such a beautiful young woman, I'd grown into such a wonderful lady. Because that's the sort of thing I'd hear from people, any compliment for some reason needing to bring up my gender, as though that was important. Why couldn't I just be called cute, say I've gotten so big or mature, a beautiful young adult? And, furthermore, why was it always pretty and beautiful used for girls and women, but handsome was reserved for the boys? Maybe sometimes I want to be called handsome, or at least feel like it's a possibility to be called that. I always preferred being referred to as a kid, my mom's child, one of the grandbabies, instead of daughter or anything like that. Niece never bothered me so much, mostly because I don't really know much of an alternative,(similarly, I'll probably be called Aunt by my siblings' children) and I could go either way with sister vs sibling, because sister sounds a touch more personal but sibling is neutral like I'd prefer, and not that impersonal sounding. And I'm sure I'll be Mommy or Mama or even just Mom to my kids because calling a parent parent sounds fucking weird, though I might go with Ma because it's not as commonly used anymore and that's among the first sounds a kid makes anyway, or make something up or maybe people will have a gender neutral set of parent tiles like Mom and Dad and the variations of those by then, I mean I can hope right. Wow this got off track but my point is I've never felt like girl was the right thing for me to be called, for as long as I can remember it's felt wrong, but up until just a few years ago I didn't know that neither boy nor girl was even an option, and until earlier this year for those thoughts to really edge their way to the front of my mind to make me confront them.

And I'm happy I've found an identity that fits me, I really am. But I'm so terrified that everyone that doesn't know would judge me if I told them because I'm supposed to be a girl, I've always been a girl, and basically those childhood thoughts my family accidentally brought forth by always taking me to the girl sections and buying me girly things and never even walking me through the boys sections until my first brother was born, when I was 10 and already deep in the mindset, those thoughts and fears just won't leave. And I can't help thinking that maybe the reason why the people who do know rarely use the right pronouns because they don't believe me, they think I'm lying or something because I still show feminine interests, I wear mostly feminine clothes because I can't afford to get rid of most of my wardrobe and buy new stuff that's more neutral and balanced like I'd like it to be, and my fear of that along with the days when I don't look feminine kicking in has lead to me wearing my wife's sweatpants and shirts a lot. And it certainly doesn't help that large boobs run in my family, and I can't even afford or know where to look for a binder to keep them down, so I rely on too small sports bras and baggy jackets and hoodies when I'm not in the mood for them. I mean I don't want them gone entirely, for when I'm wanting to look feminine, but I'd like them a lot smaller so they for one don't hurt my back, and for two they'd be easier to hide with a slightly loose fitting shirt and a sports bra that actually fit or something for when I don't want to.

Wow this got really long but like. There it is. This has been on my mind for days now.

[bisluthq]

I don’t want to sound rude, but it’s kind of unbelievable to me that people have now explained to you and your anons multiple times that Harry’s relationship with his dad was always close and you guys still don’t want to believe it.

Harry literally said he had a happy childhood and was close to his father. He wasn’t asked about it, he volunteered that information. He had hard times financially, like most middle class families did in the late 90s and early 2000s in England, but other than that, he is close to both parents.

Most kids whose parents divorced around that time live with their moms, the model of 50/50 split custody is relatively new, so of course he’s closer to his mom and lived with her. Also Harry’s dad moved to Liverpool when he married his new wife, so it’s a bit of a trip to get there. He hardly ever goes to Manchester to visit his mom and he has a ton of family there, it’s not exactly weird that he visits Liverpool less sporadically.

Harry said that growing up his dad had a year pass to Manchester United and would go to most home games with him. They also had a tradition of going to their games on Boxing Day every year until recently (I think COVID made it harder the past few years).

Harry talked about how supportive his dad was, that when he hosted the Met Gala his dad complimented his outfit and said “I loved that dress/suit you had going on”. He sang happy birthday to his dad last tour even though he wasn’t there, and Olivia filmed it on her phone. Then his dad did go to the last show with Gemma and Michal (Gemma’s boyfriend) and was seen hugging Olivia.

Harry wrote a whole ass song about his grandma, Des’s mom, after she passed away. Walking In The Wind. And Des said that Harry was incredibly sweet to his mom as she was passing away.

Also, I think you might be conflating his ex stepfather (Anne’s second husband, John Cox) with Des in terms of what articles said about him only coming back after 1D. I can’t remember a single tabloid article saying that. The fandom always assumed that because Robin was a lot more present that his dad wasn’t, but that’s not the case. It’s similar to what happened to Zayn. His mom and dad were still married and his dad, Yaser, was very present, but since he wasn’t in the 1D documentary and didn’t have social media people assumed he had a abandoned the family. Similarly, people didn’t even know that Niall’s parents were divorced. 1D’s fandom is not very perceptive of this sort of thing lol.

Robin was more visible because Anne has a very active social media. Des never had instagram and the only social he had, twitter, was barely active. I just think it’s unfair to continue this narrative that Harry’s dad abandoned him in any way or that they’re not as close when it’s simply not true.

By all intents and purposes Des seems like a good guy, a good father, and someone Harry loves a lot.

Dude I believe you idk what you want me to say. All I said is I’d read his family struggled financially after he left which y’all say apparently was to do with the recession not him skimping on alimony (which wouldn’t make him some super evil dude lmao like lots of guys skimp on alimony especially if they have a new family) and then obvi Robin was better off financially so things got better again. Cool.

[homaikaike]

Misplaced Hawaiians: Introducing the Myth of a Nonexistent Diaspora

Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Final (Whole Project)

Hawaiian Studies 343: Myths of Hawaiian History | October 2020

In 2016, I recall a young boy saying “look mom it’s the Hawaiian people!” with the most innocent excitement in his voice. I was competing at a wrestling tournament in central Texas, talking with a few of my friends from around the school district. “I like y’all’s tattoos!” the boy said as he passed us. Who I assumed to be his mother waved at us, then took her son out of the gymnasium. I waved back. My friends and I had already gotten our first tattoos in high school. Similar as back home in the islands, the often called “Polynesian style” markings worked as a sort of identifier for us Hawaiians and other Pacific people out in the diaspora; on the continent. Being Hawaiian has been and will always be something I am incredibly proud of, however not all ethnic Hawaiians are as accepting of the diasporic identity. 

My grandparents met in Texas. Native to Lāhaina, Maui and Pahoa, Hawaiʻi, both my tūtū[1] lady and tūtū man had enlisted in the military right out of school, left their home sands, and coincidentally met at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio after one pāʻina[2] with a bunch of other local Hawaiian folks stationed there. During their time in the military, Hawaiʻi was made a state. They had two children, my mother and my aunty, who were then raised in Texas. Back in the 70s, it was much easier (affordable) to go back and forth from Texas to Hawaiʻi, so my mom and her sister were lucky to have a large part of their lives in physical relation to Hawaiʻi, as well as knowing hula, how to pound poi, throw net, and make lei. However, buying a flight to Hawaiʻi and staying there all summer and all winter had become a luxury, so my brothers and I--the second generation of diasporic Hawaiians--had to find other ways to connect with what we were taught to see as our “homeland”.

My grandma prefers to use the term “misplaced” when people ask what Hawaiians like us are doing, living in Texas. “Are you lost?” they joke when she walks around wearing kukui nuts and a muʻu muʻu[3]. “Not lost, just misplaced” she says. She explained that she uses “misplaced”, because being “lost” would mean we don’t know where we are, where we come from, or where we’re going; being misplaced means to just not exist in its original place. We were never lost, and as our tūtū lady, she makes sure to teach us all about where we came from so that we never will be. Still, when she gets comments from people like “where’s the lūʻau[4]” (in which they pronounce it “loo-wow”), she maintains that we—those in diaspora—are simply misplaced Hawaiians, never lost. Non-Hawaiians and others outside of Hawaiʻi being surprised to encounter Hawaiians away from the islands, is just one side of the myth that Hawaiians do not exist outside of Hawaiʻi.

As my cousins, brothers and I were growing up in Texas, we were always known as “The Hawaiians”; my mother sent me to school with lei wili[5] tied around my hair when she couldn’t tame it any other way, my cousin packed spam musubi in our lunch sacks, and we all carried kīhei[6] in our backpacks “in case we got cold”. We were lucky enough to have learned hula from our family, and how to string lei using the plumerias my grandma was able to grow in the backyard. We were proud Hawaiians, living as we were taught to, in the middle of Texas. This Hawaiian-ness was second nature, and though we knew Hawaiʻi as our motherland, Texas was still home. However, this Texas-made Hawaiian pride I had grown accustomed to was suddenly lost upon my moving back to Hawaiʻi for college. It was as if my Hawaiian identity was lost, because all I became to local Hawaiians in Hawaiʻi was Texan. I had grown up in Texas, not Hawaiʻi and therefore to them I was not Hawaiian. This is a product of the myth that, not only do Hawaiians not exist outside of Hawaiʻi, but that they cannot.

Unlike a large majority of the continental United States, calling myself Hawaiian is a reference to my heritage, not to my state of residence. Though I also consider myself a Texan, I am Hawaiian by blood and throughout my genealogy. Hawaiians are defined by ancestry, which is an important place of origin in any discussion of Hawaiian identity[7]. In this logic, as well as the case for any largely emigrated ethnic background, the place of your upbringing should not and does not change your race. For example a kanaka being raised in Houston does not make them less Hawaiian than a kanaka[8] being raised in Kāneʻohe. Similarly, a kanaka who has lived in Hawaiʻi their whole life is not any more or less Hawaiian than a kanaka who has moved abroad from the islands. While the landscapes can drastically differ, the fact of having any level of Hawaiian blood, is what makes a kanaka Hawaiian regardless of where they are from, where they live, or where they are moving.

Though it should go without me saying, there are pockets of Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders all over the globe, with heavy American concentrations in the states of Washington, Utah, California, and Texas. According to 2018 Census information, there were approximately 21,463 Pacific islanders in Texas alone, 6,038 of which self-identified as Native Hawaiians[9]. Hawaiians made up the greatest concentration of Pacific Islanders in Texas, with 4,615 others identifying as Guamanian or Chamorro, 5,748 as Samoan and 5,062 as Other Pacific Islander[10]. In my personal experience, gatherings such as paddling workshops, national-franchised restaurants like L&L, local spots like Aloha Kitchen and Big Aloha, reggae concerts, and festivals such as the Texas Alamo Aloha FiESTaval, are just some of the ways Islanders have created spaces in diaspora to connect and knit a tight community within the southern American state. Growing up in central San Antonio put me in the opportune spot to grow up in this kind of environment, with plenty of islander friends in and outside of school, accessible “local” food, and a diasporic Pacific atmosphere. However, being part of the diasporic community in Texas, I was able to learn about the different factors that may have driven these families away from their homelands. Upon my return to Hawaiʻi, I then recognized the stark differences between the Pacific community within Hawaiʻi and those in Texas.

At this point in my research and experience, the myth that Hawaiians do not exist outside of Hawaiʻi is seemingly perpetuated by Hawaiians living locally in Hawaiʻi. Though I have always found Maui to be my home, when my cousins and my aunties there introduce me to neighbors, they always say things along the lines of “Oh, I didn’t know there were Hawaiians in Texas”, “Texan Tourist” or “Texas girl”. Though none of these are particularly offensive, I’ve returned to Maui on a monthly basis for the past three years and they still remember me as the girl from Texas when I in fact live on Oʻahu, and they’ve met me after I have already moved there. I have had similar encounters on campus as the University of Hawaiʻi with the cliques of Hawaiian students in administration, classes, or events. That question, “where you from?”, suddenly made me ashamed of my hometown because of the follow up questions and the premonitions of how little I had to know about my culture and heritage because of where I was raised.

I can still remember times when, after refusing certain kinds of foods, such as ake (liver) or ‘ulu (breadfruit), being asked, “You no eat ‘ulu? What kine Hawaiian are you?” At least for Natives today, our attachments to culture are indications of our identity as significant as ancestry, although ancestry—that is, some kind of Hawaiian blood, however minute—is also a necessary precondition to being Hawaiian.[11]

In the same way that colonizers deemed blood quantity being directly related to the level of Hawaiian someone is, the birthplace has become representative of identity (or lack thereof). While I have many answers as to why Hawaiians can and continue to exist outside of Hawaiʻi—military affiliation, career opportunities, affordable housing and quality of life—I have yet to find out the reasons why the perspective toward diasporic Hawaiians is often to undermine their ties to their culture and heritage. There is a substantial opportunistic advantage domestic Hawaiians have over diasporic folk to find accessible cultural experiences, such as working in a loʻi, hearing Hawaiian music and seeing hula all the time, or having a close relationship with the ocean. But the work in debunking the myth of a nonexistent diaspora, and dispelling and unreasonable assumptions comes in researching the reasons why Hawaiians move away from Hawaiʻi in the first place, and the systematic differences between domestic Hawaiians and those in diaspora. Is it the notable difference in cost of living between Hawaiʻi and the continental U.S? Is it the different travel opportunities that come with the affiliation with military forces? Hawaiians historically traveled all around the world, so it’s just learning about the point in time which the point of view had changed and what caused it.

--------------------------

Notes

*all pictures used above are mine, courtesy of me*

[1]Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel H. Elbert, Hawaiian Dictionary: Hawaiian-English-Hawaiian, Rev. and enl. Ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986), 178: Grandparent.

[2]Ibid., 303: Meal, dinner, small party with dinner.

[3]Ibid., 256: A loose gown.

[4]Ibid., 214: Hawaiian feast.

[5]Ibid., 201: A garland that is not strung; the leaves and flowers are entwined about each other.

[6]Ibid., 147: Shawl, cape, cloak.

[7]Jonathan Osorio, “What Kine Hawaiian Are You?”, (The Contemporary Pacific, 2001), pg. 361.

[8]Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel H. Elbert, Hawaiian Dictionary: Hawaiian-English-Hawaiian, Rev. and enl. Ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986), 127: Human being, person, individual.

[9]U.S. Census Bureau, ACS Demographic and Housing Estimates, 2018 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates Data Profile (2018).

[10]Ibid.

[11]Jonathan Osorio, “What Kine Hawaiian Are You?”, (The Contemporary Pacific, 2001), pg. 362.

sources

Osorio, John Kamakawiwoole. “‘What Kine Hawaiian Are You?" A Mo'olelo about Nationhood, Race, History, and the Contemporary Sovereignty Movement in Hawai'i.” The Contemporary Pacific 13, no. 2 (2001): 359–79.

Pukui, Mary Kawena., and Samuel H. Elbert. Hawaiian Dictionary: Hawaiian-English, English-Hawaiian. Honolulu, HI: Univ. of Hawaiʻi Press, 1986.

U.S. Census Bureau. ACS Demographic and Housing Estimates, 2018 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates Data Profile, Table DP05; generated by Isabella Park-Roberts; using American FactFinder (26 July 2020).

[ariellynn14]

An Unexpected Love Chapter 5

Started 7/17/17 Finished 7/31/17 (Sorry for such a long wait for chapter 5!!!) ~~~~ Rating: T~ mature Fandom: Touken Ranbu Relationships: Izuminokami Kanesada x Fem! Horikawa Kunihiro, Yamatonokami Yasusada x Fem! Hachisuka Kotetsu ~~~~ Summary: Four Kingdoms, three princes and one princess. The fate of the kingdoms relied upon the marriage of the princess marrying the chosen prince of her father's choice, but will she fall in love with his choice or will she end up hating him instead? ~~~~ As we walked up the staircase to the main floor I noticed Kashuu was fiddling with the necklace around his neck with a face full of worry. It made me wonder what he was thinking in his mind as we walked. “Hey, are you OK? You seem worried about something.” I asked him as he kept staring at the necklace just giving me a head shake as an answer. “Princess, its best not to ask him about it. He's, how should I put it, hard to handle, when it comes to his past.” Yamato stated as he put an arm around Kashuu’s shoulders and looked me straight in my eyes with the deadliest look I had ever seen. “I was only trying to help however. I know how he gets as well since I've known him practically my whole life. I've helped him more than you ever have despite you being the adoptive brother. That's why he lives in the cottage just outside of the castle's walls. He always told me his problems and I helped him solve them. So giving me a deadly stare like that isn't going to scare me. You can try your hardest to protect whatever power it is that he has but it's certainly not going to work too well. I'll do everything I can to get it out of him so he doesn't sulk and become a hermit over the issue.” I strongly replied as everyone continued to walk in front of us and just me, Yamato, and Kashuu stood there, alone, in the cool yellow lighted stairway. “Look…...its nothing to be worried about this time Hori. I know you mean well but it's nothing really. The design on this necklace is just too pretty that I can't help but stare at it with worry since I fear it will rust out one day.” Kashuu finally looked up at me with a dead look in his eyes and no smile or emotion for that matter. That made me remember what the potential threat could be. “Vampires……….the power is vampires? Isn't it? The Kiyomitsu name has been in countless vampire story after story so it only makes sense that the Kotetsu’s would be scared of them and get on their bad side easily. Vampires, according to legend can get very bored of their so called friends after a while and kill them once they aren't needed for their specific purpose anymore. That might be how their grandma died…...not by the impact of being bitten but being bitten when she was young. She might've fell in love with a Kiyomitsu in her teen years and that said partner could've bit her for her blood one day and caused her death many many years later. However that's just a hunch. I could be talking about a completely different family for all I know.” I stated as Kashuu and Yamato both looked at me with two different expressions, one of fear and one a death glare. “Have you ever noticed that Kashuu’s eyes glow when he's around you when it's dark or the weird sparkles he gets in his eyes every so often?” Yamato asked me as his face looked a little less scared than the previous moment. “Y-yeah?? Why??” I questioned now thinking back on what I had said. “What if I told yo……..” That's when all the torches that were lit in the hallway went out randomly and all that was seen was a pair of ruby red eyes glowing where Kashuu stood. That's when I scrambled to my clutch and find my miniature flashlight inside. That's when I realized that that might have been a bad idea and decided to look up at Kashuu instead. “RUN!!!!!!!!!” Yamato screamed as I could barely make out Kashuu turning around and grabbing him by his shoulders. I then bolted up the stairs not thinking what might be happening to Yamato and quickly met up with the others. -------- “So you're saying the power is that the bloodline is made up solely of vampires? But Kashuu’s mother is a human. I know that for a fact.” Hachisuka stated as she handed me a glass of cold water after I had ran up the stairs in fear of whatever Kashuu might have done to me if I stayed any longer. “I always knew something was up with them when they were allowed out of their cells……” The blonde haired boy stated as I remembered he never introduced himself or was called by his name yet. “That's because they are kept in a dark and damp place for most of their days and nights. I don't think I'd feel to well if I was them either Urashima.” Nagasone said to the blonde boy as the question of asking him his name was erased from my mind. “Kane, did you know about this or are you clueless?” I looked over to him as he gave me an uninterested look. “Yeah. It's not like Kashuu has red eyes for a reason. He's a half as far as I know. His dad was supposedly a vampire where as his mom wasn't. He's not only just a screw up to the normal royal bloodline, he's a screwup to the whole Kiyomitsu family blood line. The first half human I believe. I've heard half human vampires are even worse than the real deal. I had a huge vampire phase when I was a kid. It's all my mom read to me as a kid and I'm thanking her for keeping me awake at night for countless nights at a time now.” Kane replied to me as I walked over to him as close as I could so that our noses were almost touching. “Are YOU part of that bloodline??” I asked him as I put emphasis on the you. “Through marriage. Other than that no. I mean I am related by blood, but only from Kashuu’s mother, who isn't a vampire.” He replied to me as he backed me up slightly and flicked me in my forehead after he had finished explaining shortly how he was related to Kashuu. Shortly after that the whole room then fell quiet and all eyes were either on the floor or looking at the various paintings on the walls. That is until a soft feminine voice spoke up that startled us all. “By the ways…….where is my husband??” We then heard Hachisuka question as loud and fast footsteps could be heard coming from the staircase below. No sooner the steps were heard a figure appeared and fell to its knees. It just so happened to be Yamato. “So…..I kinda made Kashuu mad by triggering the princess……” Yamato slightly looked up as a scratch mark was visible on his left cheek. -------- “So…...if your dad has brown eyes and your mom has red eyes, wouldn't she be the vampire and your dad not?” I asked Kashuu as he sat down on a couch in the tea room Hachisuka and her brothers has directed us to. “No, my mom's human. She just has red eyes I guess. My dad was different all throughout his childhood. Being the only vampire in the village with normal colored eyes made it hard for him as a young prince to grow up. He wasn't born with his powers similarly to myself. He had to find them and he didn't find them before his time. His eyes would've been red or another color assimilated with vampires but he didn't experience a life changing event until two years after his deadline. I just happened to experience my life changing event when I was a year old so I ended up growing up with red eyes. As for my mom, I have no clue why she has red eyes. Maybe my dad changed her. It's possible for a human of pure blood to change to a vampire. If that was the case then it is a huge taboo that could end up in execution of both the vampire and the human involved in the accident.” Kashuu messily explained as he looked at me with a determined look rather than the emotionless look he had shown earlier. “Why is it taboo though. Is it really that bad when a human is changed to a vampire?” I asked him as Yamato faceplamed and Hachisuka looked at him with a concerned look. “In normal cases it's not considered taboo, but since my dad comes from a royal family and my mom from a poor and human family it is basically a huge crime. I wouldn't think he just changed her because he couldn't live without her, something had to happen, other than that I think she'd still be human. Mom and dad come from two different backgrounds and lives. I just can't put it together with why he chose her and why he himself never got his red eyes even after his time. It's possible to get them after your time if the event is really that bad. Besides we are the only three left to the original royal southern family. The rest have either been killed or fled the country in fear of the Kotetsu’s. Maybe he changed her during the war, I'll never know I unless I ask. Mom didn't have red eyes last I knew when I was with her last. I remember that, no I remember her being human last I was in her care. Everyone might say I was just a baby but I can remember being in the castle when I was older…...but then again I could just be making things up and they could've all been dreams……..” Kashuu messily spoke once more as Yamato looked at him with a knowing look, the Kotetsu’s with a slightly freaked out look, and me and Kane with a confused but interested look. “So you do remember more than you say you do. You remember it all then I take it? How much do you truly know and what are your ties with the Northern country?” Yamato asked him as Kashuu looked at him and his red eyes showed yet another glisten that I had never seen before. “Not here and not now. Let's just find an inn where we can stay. We can't stay at the castle, well you could, but we can't. They might kill me if we do stay here tonight. I'll reveal more tomorrow if I'm willing to.” Kashuu stated as he gave a Yamato a glare that showed he wasn't very willing to talk about his past or really any of his life before he became my servant and bodyguard. ~~~~ Ah how was this?!? Once again I'm very sorry its so late and the writing is so spaced out. I've been very busy lately and haven't really had any time to write the story. Please send me a message letting me know how I did! Chapter 6 might be out in the next few days or the next few weeks, it all depends on how busy I am. Until then please check out my Twitter, 14arilynn14 , for more KaneHori, Anmitsu, and other TKRB content while the new chapter is under construction!! Also check my watttpad, EvartsArielLynn14 , for more of my fanfanfictions if you like my work! Hope you enjoyed!! ^°^ Please remember to check @touken-danshi 's original au idea on their tumblr also!! **REBLOGS AND SHARES ARE APPRECIATED!! THAT LETS ME KNOW YOU ENJOYED THE CHAPTER!**

[thaitung]

Why Is Vietnamese Food in America Frozen in the 1970s?

Forty years after the Vietnam War, many Vietnamese restaurants in America are still a tribute to a time and a place that no longer exists: 1970s Saigon.

I thought I knew Vietnamese food until I met the dish banh trang nuong. As a Vietnamese-American, I’ve always clung to the nostalgic idea of Vietnamese food as a way to connect with folks back home. But when I first saw banh trang nuong in a YouTube video documenting street food, and then in real life at Brooklyn restaurant Di An Di, I faced a moment of crisis. The dish, dubbed “Vietnamese Pizza” on the menu, consists of a circle of rice paper crisped up on a grill and topped with cooked egg, shrimp powder, pickled chiles, ground pork, and hot sauce. The idea of there being a Vietnamese dish that I didn’t know about was distressing, to say the least.

I can’t speak Vietnamese. I can’t fit into any off-the-rack ao dai. But at the very least I can taste for good flavor balance in any pho broth, or assemble a bite of banh xeo, lettuce, and herbs without explanation. Very few Vietnamese menus have ever thrown me a curveball. I know that when I see hu tieu on a menu, I can expect a brothy pork soup with whole shrimp arranged neatly on top of rice noodles. But the banh trang nuong made me realize just how much my knowledge of Vietnamese food relied on a static, South Vietnam–leaning snapshot of the cuisine from 1975, when most of our folks left the country.

You can see it in the way pho is almost universally expressed in the United States: It’s the South Vietnamese style, which includes tableside garnishes like basil, sliced chiles, and hoisin sauce. In the North, they prefer their pho without such last-minute additions. Though pho only came to the South in 1954, when Northerners migrated that way en masse in response to the country’s partition, Southern chefs used the soup as a base to showcase the flagrant potency of their region’s herbs and chiles. Like any other cuisine, food in Vietnam has evolved and expanded in the last four decades—banh trang nuong was only one example of the myriad innovations and trends that have arisen from street vendors and chefs since the 1970s.

Nevertheless, the enduring image I have of Vietnamese food is only what my parents and grandparents could piece together in their own kitchens. My grandparents and their children cook what is nostalgic for them; in turn, their memories of the past are what I myself crave. The mom-and-pop restaurants I frequent as an adult have rarely challenged this narrative: We all remember and fill in the gaps together.

So what dishes did Vietnamese restaurant owners bring to the U.S. with them, and why did they choose them? I asked Barbara Tran and Anna Pham, whose families opened some of the first Vietnamese restaurants in the States (in Queens and Houston, respectively), to share their elder family members’ thought processes with me.

“In short, yes, the menus had everything to do with nostalgia,” Tran, a poet who resides in Toronto, told me via email. Cementing that point, the front of every menu of hers featured a map of Vietnam, hand-traced by her father, who had previously been secretary to the South Vietnamese ambassador to the United States. Sensing that the situation back home was getting dire, he’d sent for his wife and children to join him here just before Saigon fell. “I imagine that my father had this idea that he could educate people about his home country,” she wrote. But Tran’s mother, Marie, was the principal guiding force at the restaurant in Queens, serving as the chef there and, later, at Cuisine de Saigon, the spot Barbara’s elder sister Khanh opened in Greenwich Village in the mid-’80s after the Queens location closed. It was Marie who scoured the city’s markets for the ingredients she needed for a Vietnamese menu.

“Over the years, she was constantly searching for rice paper that met her standards,” Tran explained. “She missed herbs as well. I recall her saying dishes weren’t quite right because they were missing certain herbs. She also missed things like mắm nêm, not something you could just pick up at the store.” The ultra-fermented fish sauce Marie missed is still a rarity on restaurant menus in the United States, though it’s much easier to get at your average Vietnamese grocery nowadays. In the ’80s, Craig Claiborne, similarly stricken with nostalgia for Vietnamese meals he’d had decades prior in Paris, lamented the lack of options in New York City while praising Cuisine de Saigon’s chao tom (sugarcane shrimp). He wrote, in the New York Times, “This specialty was prepared to perfection, broiled and served with rice paper and fresh coriander.” The dish continues to be ubiquitous on Vietnamese-American menus.

Nostalgia was also a factor at Anna Pham’s family’s restaurant, Mai’s, which opened in 1978 as a 24-hour pool hall. Mai’s served as a means for Pham’s grandparents to provide for their eight children as well as serve a community center for Houston’s growing Vietnamese population. All of their children and grandchildren, including Pham, have worked there in some capacity since childhood. The food at this venue was simple family fare. “My grandma had recipes from her parents that were meant to feed your kids, spouses, and your kids’ kids, so they were easy and scalable,” Pham, who now owns the restaurant, told me during our phone conversation. That mostly meant things that could be assembled efficiently in a small kitchen for a lively crowd, like banh mi, pho, and hu tieu.

Soon enough, the family realized that food was a bigger draw than pool, and they relocated within Houston’s downtown and expanded the menu to include more Vietnamese dishes, like goi cuon and cha gio, as well as more rare dishes—the deep cuts—like lau ech, or frog leg hot pot. “The restaurant originally wasn’t intended for anyone beyond the Viet community,” Pham admitted. In the ’80s, an experimental and short-lived Chinese food buffet that featured a $2.90 price tag and free iced tea did bring some non-Viets in, but they only rarely dug into the extensive Vietnamese food options. “We’d get some Anglos coming in rarely, and I’m sure it was all really new to them. But after a while, my grandma and mom developed a sense of pride in showing them how to eat banh xeo and cha gio.”

Still, Pham is proud of the notion that Mai’s has never truly Westernized—preserving, as best it could, versions of what her family ate in Saigon in the ’70s, before the war ended and the city became Ho Chi Minh City. Through food, they could, like many Vietnamese restaurant owners, remember Saigon, even if maps didn’t show it.

When Anthony Bourdain visited the restaurant back in 2002 for an interview with the Houston Chronicle, Mai Nguyen, who inherited the restaurant from her parents, concluded his meal by brandishing a whole, fresh durian at the table. Bourdain picked up his spoon and went to town. Afterward, he declared that Mai’s “will always be the taste of Houston—the first really authentic, just-like-Saigon Vietnamese I’d had in America.”

- Soleil Ho (TASTE)

[ionecoffman]

Being Black in America Can Be Hazardous to Your Health

Image above: Kiarra Boulware and her niece at Penn North, an addiction-recovery center in Baltimore

One morning this past September, Kiarra Boulware boarded the 26 bus to Baltimore’s Bon Secours Hospital, where she would seek help for the most urgent problem in her life: the 200-some excess pounds she carried on her 5-foot-2-inch frame.

To Kiarra, the weight sometimes felt like a great burden, and at other times like just another fact of life. She had survived a childhood marred by death, drugs, and violence. She had recently gained control over her addiction to alcohol, which, last summer, had brought her to a residential recovery center in the city’s Sandtown neighborhood, made famous by the Freddie Gray protests in 2015. But she still struggled with binge eating—so much so that she would eat entire plates of quesadillas or mozzarella sticks in minutes.

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As the bus rattled past rowhouses and corner stores, Kiarra told me she hadn’t yet received the Cpap breathing machine she needed for her sleep apnea. The extra fat seemed to constrict her airways while she slept, and a sleep study had shown that she stopped breathing 40 times an hour. She remembered one doctor saying, “I’m scared you’re going to die in your sleep.” In the haze of alcoholism, she’d never followed up on the test. Now doctors at Bon Secours were trying to order the machine for her, but insurance hurdles had gotten in the way.

Kiarra’s weight brought an assortment of old-person problems to her 27-year-old life: sleep apnea, diabetes, and menstrual dysregulation, which made her worry she would never have children. For a while, she’d ignored these issues. Day to day, her size mostly made it hard to shop for clothes. But the severity of her situation sank in when a diabetic friend had to have a toe amputated. Kiarra visited the woman in the hospital. She saw her tears and her red, bandaged foot, and resolved not to become an amputee herself.

Kiarra arrived at the hospital early and waited in the cafeteria. Bon Secours is one of several world-class hospitals in Baltimore. Another, Johns Hopkins Hospital, is in some respects the birthplace of modern American medicine, having invented everything from the medical residency to the surgical glove. But of course not even the best hospitals in America can keep you from getting sick in the first place.

It was lunchtime, but Kiarra didn’t have any cash—her job, working the front desk at the recovery center where she lived, paid a stipend of just $150 a week. When she did have money, she often sought comfort in fast food. But when her cash and food stamps ran out, she sometimes had what she called “hungry nights,” when she went to bed without having eaten anything all day.

When I’d first met Kiarra, a few months earlier, I’d been struck by how upbeat she seemed. Her recovery center—called Maryland Community Health Initiatives, but known in the neighborhood as Penn North—sits on a grimy street crowded with men selling drugs. Some of the center’s clients, fresh off their habits, seemed withdrawn, or even morose. Kiarra, though, had the bubbly demeanor of a student-council president.

She described the rough neighborhoods where she’d grown up as fun and “familylike.” She said that although neither of her parents had been very involved when she was a kid, her grandparents had provided a loving home. Regarding her diabetes, she told me she was “grateful that it’s reversible.” After finishing her addiction treatment, she planned to reenroll in college and move into a dorm.

Now, though, a much more anxious Kiarra sat before her doctor, a young white man named Tyler Gray, who began by advising Kiarra to get a Pap smear.

“Do we have to do it today?” she asked.

“Is there something you’re concerned about or nervous about?,” Gray asked.

Kiarra was nervous about a lot of things. She “deals by not dealing,” as she puts it, but lately she’d had to deal with so much. “Ever since the diabetes thing, I hate hearing I have something else,” she said softly, beginning to cry. “I’ve been fat for what seems like so long, and now I get all the fat problems.”

“I don’t want to be fat,” she added, “but I don’t know how to not be fat.”

Kiarra resolved to get healthy after visiting a diabetic friend in the hospital who’d had her toe amputated. Kiarra’s own diabetes is already causing her vision to blur. (Jared Soares)

Kiarra’s struggles with her weight are imbued with this sense, that getting thin is a mystery she might never solve, that diet secrets are literally secret. On a Sunday, she might diligently make a meal plan for the week, only to find herself reaching for Popeyes fried chicken by Wednesday. She blames herself for her poor health—as do many of the people I met in her community, where obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are ubiquitous. They said they’d made bad choices. They used food, and sometimes drugs, to soothe their pain. But these individual failings are only part of the picture.

In Baltimore, a 20-year gap in life expectancy exists between the city’s poor, largely African American neighborhoods and its wealthier, whiter areas. A baby born in Cheswolde, in Baltimore’s far-northwest corner, can expect to live until age 87. Nine miles away in Clifton-Berea, near where The Wire was filmed, the life expectancy is 67, roughly the same as that of Rwanda, and 12 years shorter than the American average. Similar disparities exist in other segregated cities, such as Philadelphia and Chicago.

These cities are among the most extreme examples of a national phenomenon: Across the United States, black people suffer disproportionately from some of the most devastating health problems, from cancer deaths and diabetes to maternal mortality and preterm births. Although the racial disparity in early death has narrowed in recent decades, black people have the life expectancy, nationwide, that white people had in the 1980s—about three years shorter than the current white life expectancy. African Americans face a greater risk of death at practically every stage of life.

Except in the case of a few specific ailments, such as nondiabetic kidney disease, scientists have largely failed to identify genetic differences that might explain racial health disparities. The major underlying causes, many scientists now believe, are social and environmental forces that affect African Americans more than most other groups.

To better understand how these forces work, I spent nearly a year reporting in Sandtown and other parts of Baltimore. What I found in Kiarra’s struggle was the story of how one person’s efforts to get better—imperfect as they may have been—were made vastly more difficult by a daunting series of obstacles. But it is also a bigger story, of how African Americans became stuck in profoundly unhealthy neighborhoods, and of how the legacy of racism can literally take years off their lives. Far from being a relic of the past, America’s racist and segregationist history continues to harm black people in the most intimate of ways—seeping into their lungs, their blood, even their DNA.

When Kiarra was a little girl, Baltimore was, as it is today, mired in violence, drugs, and poverty. In 1996, the city had the highest rate of drug-related emergency-room visits in the nation and one of the country’s highest homicide rates.

Related Event

On June 13, tune into Healing the Divide: An Atlantic Forum on Health Equity, where the author, Olga Khazan, will discuss health disparities in Baltimore.

With her father in and out of jail for robbery and drug dealing, Kiarra and her mother, three siblings, and three cousins piled into her grandmother’s home. It was a joyous but chaotic household. Kiarra describes her grandmother as “God’s assistant”—a deeply religious woman who, despite a house bursting with hungry mouths, would still make an extra dinner for the addicts on the block. Kiarra’s mother, meanwhile, was “the hood princess,” a woman who would do her hair just to go to the grocery store. She was a teen mom, like her own mother had been.

Many facets of Kiarra’s youth—the fact that her parents weren’t together, her father’s incarceration, the guns on the corners—are what researchers consider “adverse childhood experiences,” stressful events early in life that can cause health problems in adulthood. An abnormally large proportion of the children in Baltimore—nearly a third—have two or more aces. People with four or more aces are seven times as likely to be alcoholics as people with no aces, and twice as likely to have heart disease. One study found that six or more aces can cut life expectancy by as much as 20 years. Kiarra had at least six.

She and others I interviewed recall the inner-city Baltimore of their youth fondly. Everyone lived crammed together with siblings and cousins, but people looked out for one another; neighbors hosted back-to-school cookouts every year, and people took pride in their homes. Kiarra ran around with the other kids on the block until her grandma called her in each night at 8 o’clock. She made the honor roll in fifth grade and got to speak in front of the whole class. She read novels by Sister Souljah and wrote short stories in longhand.

Yet Kiarra also describes some jarring incidents. When she was 8, she heard a loud bop bop bop outside and ran out to find her stepbrother lying in the street, dead. One friend died of asthma in middle school; another went to jail, then hanged himself. (Other people I spoke with around Penn North and other recovery facilities had similarly traumatic experiences. It seemed like every second person I met told me they had been molested as a child, and even more said their family members had struggled with addiction.)

Kiarra told me she got pregnant by a friend when she was 12, and gave birth to a boy when she was 13. Within a year, the baby died unexpectedly, and Kiarra was so traumatized that she ended up spending more than a month in a psychiatric hospital. When she came home, her boyfriend physically and sexually abused her. He “slapped me so hard, I was seeing stars,” she said.

She took solace in eating, a common refuge for victims of abuse. One 2013 study of thousands of women found that those who had been severely physically or sexually abused as children had nearly double the risk of food addiction. Kiarra ate “everything, anything,” she said, “mostly bad foods, junk food, pizza,” along with chicken boxes—the fried-chicken-and-fries combos slung by Baltimore’s carryout joints.

At first, she thought the extra weight looked good on her. Then she started feeling fat. Eventually, she said, “it was like, Fuck it. I’m fat.” As her high-school graduation approached, she tried on the white gown she’d bought just weeks earlier and realized that it was already too tight.

Kiarra didn’t know many college-educated people, but she wanted to go to Spelman, a historically black college in Georgia, and join a sorority. Her family talked her out of applying, she said. Instead, she enrolled in one local college after another, but she kept dropping out, sometimes to help her siblings with their children and other times because she simply lost interest. After accumulating $30,000 in student loans, she had only a year’s worth of credits.

So Kiarra put college on hold and worked at Kmart and as a home health aide—solid jobs but, as she likes to say, “not my ceiling.” She longed for a purpose. Sometimes, she had an inkling that she was meant to be an important person; she would picture herself giving a speech to an auditorium full of people. But she remained depressed, stuck, and, increasingly, obese.

She began doing ecstasy, and, later, downing a pint of vodka a day. She remembers coming to her home-health-aide job drunk one time and leaving a patient on the toilet. “Did you forget me?” the woman asked, half an hour later. Kiarra broke down crying.

Soon after, she checked into Penn North for her first try at recovery. This past year’s attempt is her third.

Kiarra lives in Sandtown, the Baltimore neighborhood made famous by the Freddie Gray protests, where heart disease and cancer are the leading killers. (Jared Soares)

Sandtown is 97 percent black, and half of its families live in poverty. Its homicide rate is more than double that of the rest of the city, and last year about 8 percent of the deaths there were due to drug and alcohol overdose. Still, its top killers are heart disease and cancer, which African Americans nationwide are more likely to die from than other groups are.

The way African Americans became trapped in Baltimore’s poorest—and least healthy—neighborhoods mirrors their history in the ghettos of other major cities. It began with outright bans on their presence in certain neighborhoods in the early 1900s and continued through the 2000s, when policy makers, lenders, and fellow citizens employed subtler forms of discrimination.

In the early 1900s, blacks in Baltimore disproportionately suffered from tuberculosis, so much so that one area not far from Penn North was known as the “lung block.” In 1907, an investigator hired by local charities described what she saw in Meyer Court, a poor area in Baltimore. The contents of an outdoor toilet “were found streaming down the center of this narrow court to the street beyond,” she wrote. The smell within one house was “ ‘sickening’ … No provision of any kind is made for supplying the occupants of this court with water.” Yet one cause, the housing investigator concluded, was the residents’ “low standards and absence of ideals.”

When blacks tried to flee to better areas, some had their windows smashed and their steps smeared with tar. In 1910, a Yale-educated black lawyer named George McMechen moved into a house in a white neighborhood, and Baltimore reacted by adopting a segregation ordinance that The New York Times called “the most pronounced ‘Jim Crow’ measure on record.” Later, neighborhood associations urged homeowners to sign covenants promising never to sell to African Americans.

For much of the 20th century, the Federal Housing Administration declined to insure mortgages for blacks, who instead had to buy homes by signing contracts with speculators who demanded payments that, in many cases, amounted to most of the buyer’s income. (As a result, many black families never reaped the gains of homeownership—a key source of Americans’ wealth.) Housing discrimination persisted well beyond the Jim Crow years, as neighborhood associations rejected proposals to build low-income housing in affluent suburbs. In the 1990s, house flippers would buy up homes in Baltimore’s predominantly black neighborhoods and resell them to unsuspecting first-time home buyers at inflated prices by using falsified documents. The subsequent foreclosures are a major reason so many properties in the city sit vacant today.

Some of Baltimore’s rowhouses are so long-forsaken, they have trees growing through the windows. These dilapidated homes are in themselves harmful to people’s health. Neighborhoods with poorly maintained houses or a large number of abandoned properties, for instance, face a high risk of mouse infestation. Every year, more than 5,000 Baltimore children go to the emergency room for an asthma attack—and according to research from Johns Hopkins, mouse allergen is the biggest environmental factor in those attacks.

The allergen, found in mouse urine, travels through the air on dust, and Johns Hopkins researchers have found high levels of it on most of the beds of poor Baltimore kids they have tested. When kids inhale the allergen, it can spark inflammation and mucus buildup in their lungs, making them cough and wheeze. These attacks can cause long-term harm: Children with asthma are more likely to be obese and in overall poorer health as adults. Getting rid of the mice requires sealing up cracks and holes in the house—a process that can cost thousands of dollars, given the state of many Baltimore homes.

The mice, of course, are just one symptom of the widespread neglect that can set in once neighborhoods become as segregated as Baltimore’s are. One study estimated that, in the year 2000, racial segregation caused 176,000 deaths—about as many as were caused by strokes.

All summer, Penn North’s aging air conditioners strained against the soupy heat outside. For Kiarra, the first few months at the recovery center felt like boot camp. The staff woke the residents before 7 a.m., even if they didn’t have anywhere in particular to be. Kiarra’s days were packed with therapies: acupuncture in the mornings, meant to help reduce cravings; individual meetings with peer counselors; Narcotics Anonymous sessions, in which dozens of strangers slumped on metal folding chairs and told stories of past drug binges.

Once a week, Kiarra would leave her post at the front desk and walk across an empty playground for an appointment with her psychotherapist, Ms. Bea (who asked that I not use her full name). Kiarra would climb the steep, narrow staircase of Penn North’s clinical building, then stop at the landing to catch her breath.

Ms. Bea’s goal was to help Kiarra understand how her substance abuse, her weight, and her difficult childhood were interconnected. Like many young people in Baltimore, Kiarra had spent her life trying to attain ordinary things—love, respect—that seemed always to skid beyond her grasp. She wanted male attention, but then she got pregnant. The baby made her happy, but the baby died. Her siblings started having kids and she loved them, but she was jealous. She fell into a deep-sink depression. She’d eat a second dinner, then get so drunk that she’d scream at her friends. She’d realize that she was going to wake up to a blistering hangover and would keep drinking. It was coming anyway, so why not? “Struggle days,” she called these times.

During one appointment in August, Kiarra told Ms. Bea that she had been attending Overeaters Anonymous meetings by phone. Something another member had shared, about why people are sometimes reluctant to shed weight, had stuck with her. “He was saying when you lose the fat, you lose a part of you,” Kiarra recalled.

A few years earlier, she had founded a club for plus-size women called Beautiful Beyond Weight, with some of her best friends. The goal was to help overweight women feel better about themselves. They put on fashion shows that she described as “Beyoncé big, but on a Christina Aguilera budget.” She worried that if she lost too much weight, the other girls in the club would think she was a hypocrite. She decided she would aim to be “slim-thicc”—not too skinny.

“So imagine if you were a size 14,” Ms. Bea said. “What would be happening here—with you?”

Ms. Bea was trying to help Kiarra see how she sometimes uses her size as a form of protection, a way of making her feel invisible to men, so that she could eventually work through her fear.

In Kiarra’s experience, disappearing could be useful. She told me that once, when she was 17, before she had gotten so big, she met a guy in an online chat room. She went over to his place, where they watched TV and started having sex. But then—the skid—his three friends barged into the room and raped her. She fled, half-dressed, as soon as she could.

“Yeah,” Kiarra said, envisioning herself many sizes smaller. “I wouldn’t be able to take it.”

Kiarra has trouble concentrating sometimes, and she thinks the reason might be that she and her brother were exposed to lead from old paint. When Kiarra was 6, her grandmother heard that a girl living in another property owned by the same landlord had been hospitalized. She took Kiarra to get tested. The results showed that the concentration of lead in her blood was more than six times the level the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers elevated—an amount that can irreversibly lower IQ and reduce attention span. Kiarra, too, was hospitalized, for a month.

Scientists and industry experts knew in the 19th century that lead paint was dangerous. “Lead is a merciless poison,” an executive with a Michigan lead-paint company admitted in a book in 1892. It “gradually affects the nerves and organs of circulation to such a degree that it is next to impossible to restore them to their normal condition.” But as late as the 1940s and ’50s, trade groups representing companies that made lead products, including the Lead Industries Association, promoted the use of lead paint in homes and successfully lobbied for the repeal of restrictions on that use. Lead-paint companies published coloring books and advised their salesmen to “not forget the children—some day they may be customers.” According to The Baltimore Sun, a study in 1956 found that lead-poisoned children in the slums of Baltimore had six times as much lead in their systems as severely exposed workers who handled lead for a living.

In speeches and publications, Lead Industries Association officials cast childhood lead poisoning as vanishingly rare. When they did acknowledge the problem, they blamed “slum” children for chewing on wood surfaces—“gnaw-ledge,” as Manfred Bowditch, the group’s health-and-safety director, called it—and their “ignorant parents” for allowing them to do so. In a letter to the Baltimore health department, Bowditch called the lead-poisoned toddlers “little human rodents.”

Even after stricter regulations came along, landlords in segregated neighborhoods—as well as the city’s own public-housing agency—neglected properties, allowing old paint to chip and leaded dust to accumulate. Some landlords, seeking to avoid the expense of renovating homes and the risk of tenant lawsuits, refused to rent to families with children, since they would face the greatest risk from lead exposure. Poor families feared that if they complained about lead, they might be evicted.

Partly because of Maryland’s more rigorous screening, the state’s lead-poisoning rate for children was 15 times the national average in the ’90s; the majority of the poisoned children lived in the poor areas of Baltimore. In some neighborhoods, 70 percent of children had been exposed to lead. The city’s under-resourced agencies failed to address the problem. Clogged by landlords who hid behind shell companies, Baltimore’s lead-paint enforcement system had ground to a halt by the time Kiarra was poisoned. According to Tapping Into The Wire, a book co-authored by Peter L. Beilenson, the city’s former health commissioner, Baltimore didn’t bring a single lead-paint enforcement action against landlords in the ’90s. (A subsequent crackdown on landlords has lowered lead-poisoning rates dramatically.)

When Kiarra was 14, her family sued their landlord for damages, but their lawyer dropped the case because the landlord claimed he had no money and no insurance with which to compensate them. Kiarra remembers her grandmother not wanting to give up, demanding of the lawyer, “What do you mean there’s nothing you can do?”—only to get lost in a tangle of legal rules she didn’t fully understand.

On a hot Saturday this past August, Kiarra brought her nieces with her to work and corralled them in the front office. She was babysitting that day, and staffing was short at the center. The girls climbed restlessly on the stained office chairs and under the tables.

Kiarra is close with her family. She spends much of her free time texting her favorite sisters on her cracked cellphone, and she talks to her grandmother every few days. Any familial strife upsets her deeply: She can vividly recount a long list of times her mother disappointed her. Then again, sometimes she feels like she’s the one who has let everyone down, with all her drinking and dropping out.

Near the end of the day, Kiarra’s cellphone rang. It was her father, calling to yell at her because she hadn’t come to see him recently. “I’ve been busy,” Kiarra told him.

When Kiarra was little, and when her father wasn’t incarcerated, he had provided for his children—unlike many dads she knew. She’d sought his approval by researching Islam, his religion, and trying to reconcile it with the strict Christianity of her grandmother’s home. A few years ago, she tried to impress him by joining a tough-seeming social club that turned out to be too much like a gang. (It “wasn’t a good fit,” she told me.)

On some level, she still respected her father. But he had an explosive personality and struggled with depression and addiction. Kiarra told me he taught her what men are supposed to be: fierce protectors who sometimes turn their wrath on the women in their lives.

Kiarra usually tried to see her father’s outbursts as a cry for help. But today, she decided to confront him. Their conversation escalated as they accused each other of failing at fatherhood and daughterhood.

“How many of my plays have you been to?,” Kiarra demanded.

Her father launched into a tirade. “I will come for your fucking dumb ass!,” I overheard him yell at one point. “You going to respect me!”

“Respect works both ways,” Kiarra said. “I’m not that little girl that’s gonna let you slap the shit out of me.”

What bothered Kiarra most was that her father had never hit his other daughter that way, so why her? Why did it feel like he was always rejecting her? (Her father later confirmed that he had hit her as a child, saying, “Discipline is a must, whatever form you choose.”)

As he continued screaming—“I’m gonna put your fuckin’ head in the dirt”—Kiarra’s eyes glazed over. “Death gotta be better than here,” she said.

She hung up, then wiped away tears. Just today, he had called her at 12:30 a.m., 3:48 a.m., 7:47 a.m., 11:24 a.m., 3:33 p.m., and 4:44 p.m. One time when she didn’t answer the phone, Kiarra said, he showed up in person at Penn North.

Her father called back, rambling less coherently than before. “How much of my life did you spend incarcerated?,” Kiarra asked him. When she was little, she would go out hustling with him. “I was 14 fucking years old seeing dead fucking bodies, and you’re talking about where the fuck did this drinking shit come from?”

Kiarra hung up, this time for good. Then she wept. “As long as I’m fucked up, this man is cool, but as soon as I decide I want to get my fucking life together it’s like …” Her voice trailed off. She turned and told me she wanted to go to McDonald’s. “McDonald’s is killing me,” she said, “but it’s a special treat.”

She ordered her usual—a McDouble and a McChicken, along with a sweet tea—and waited silently amid the beeping of the cash registers.

Most of the people I met at Penn North were optimistic and surrounded by fiercely loyal friends. But their lives also seemed, like Kiarra’s, unrelentingly stressful. Between the hugs and handshakes, I heard a lot of trepidation. I have to move again … Where will I go? Will I get this job at Target? Will I ever walk again? Will I get to eat today?

Research shows that this kind of day-in, day-out worry can ravage a person’s health. Certain stressful experiences—such as living in a disordered, impoverished neighborhood—are associated with a shortening of the telomeres, structures that sit on the tips of our chromosomes, which are bundles of DNA inside our cells. Often compared to the plastic caps on the ends of shoelaces, telomeres keep chromosomes from falling apart. They can also be a measure of how much a body has been ground down by life.

Some researchers think stress shrinks telomeres, until they get so short that the cell dies, hastening the onset of disease. Different kinds of prolonged emotional strain can affect telomeres. In one study, mothers who had high stress levels had telomeres that were as short as those of a person about a decade older. Another study found that children who spent part of their childhood in Romanian orphanages had telomeres that shortened rapidly.

Arline T. Geronimus, an expert on health disparities at the University of Michigan, has found that African Americans have more stress-related wear and tear in their bodies than white people do, and the difference widens with age. By measuring telomere length in hundreds of women, Geronimus estimated that black women were, biologically, about seven and a half years older than white women of the same age.

Unrelenting stress also affects our daily behaviors: Stress causes some people to eat more, especially calorically dense foods, and to sleep less. On average, African Americans get about 40 minutes less sleep each night than white people do. Among women in one recent study, poor sleep alone explained more than half the racial disparity in cardiovascular-disease risk.

Living in a dangerous neighborhood like Sandtown requires a vigilance that can flood the body with adrenaline and cortisol. These hormones are supposed to kick in only long enough for us to get away from an immediate threat. If they trickle through us constantly, they can raise the risk of heart disease and compromise the body’s immune system.

These kinds of changes in body chemistry aren’t limited to people living in poverty. Even well-off black people face daily racial discrimination, which can have many of the same biological effects as unsafe streets. Thomas LaVeist, the dean of Tulane’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, has found, for example, that even among people earning $175,000 a year or more, blacks are more likely to suffer from certain diseases than whites are.

In an emerging field of research, scientists have linked stress, including from prejudice, to compounds called methyl groups attaching to our genes, like snowflakes sticking to a tree branch. These methyl groups can cause genes to turn on or off, setting disease patterns in motion. Recently, a study linked racial discrimination to changes in methylation on genes that affect schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and asthma.

Several studies also show that experiencing racism might be part of the reason black women are about 50 percent more likely than white women to have premature babies and about twice as likely to have low-birth-weight babies. Researchers think the stress they experience might cause the body to go into labor too soon or to mount an immune attack against the fetus. This disparity, too, does not appear to be genetic: Black women from sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean are less likely to have preterm births than African American women are, possibly because they’ve spent less time living in America’s racist environment.

Kiarra Boulware (Jared Soares)

Throughout the fall, Kiarra kept her doctor appointments, and she began working out at the small gym at Penn North, placing a picture of Chrissy Lampkin, the curvaceous girlfriend of the rapper Jim Jones, on her treadmill as motivation.

But wasn’t losing much weight. Like most Americans, she got advice from her friends on what to eat—but that advice at times proved confusing and contradictory. She tried a boiled-egg diet, which left her with hunger pangs and a lot of leftover eggs in the fridge. She went seven days without meat but wound up eating more starches, which sent her blood sugar soaring.

One bright day in late September, Kiarra returned to Bon Secours to see Ebony Hicks, a behavioral-health consultant who, like Kiarra’s doctor, works through Health Care for the Homeless, a Baltimore nonprofit that cares for the very poor. Hicks began by asking Kiarra what her goal was. Kiarra said getting down to an even 200 pounds “would be awesome.” Her weight remained, stubbornly, about 150 pounds higher than that. But she stayed optimistic, writing down Hicks’s aphorisms about needing to be patient and not expecting immediate results—“Anything overnight usually lasts about a night!”—in a notebook she’d brought with her.

Gently, Hicks asked Kiarra what she had eaten that day.

“French fries,” Kiarra said.

“All you’ve had is french fries?,” Hicks asked.

“Mm-hmm.”

It was 3:30 in the afternoon.

They walked to a room across the hall, and Kiarra stepped onto a scale.

“I gained two pounds,” she said quickly, “so now I’m depressed. I eat too much.”

“We have to work on getting you more regularly eating throughout the day,” Hicks said.

Kiarra asked whether “detox tea,” something she’d heard about from a friend, was healthy.

“You can detox with lots of fiber-filled vegetables,” Hicks said.

“What’s that?,” Kiarra asked.

Hicks pulled up a web page describing fruits and vegetables that contain fiber. She listed them off one by one.

Would Kiarra eat avocados?

No.

Coconut? Also no.

“I do eat berries,” Kiarra said. “Let’s put that down.”
Kiarra doesn’t know why she dislikes so many fruits and vegetables. Her grandmother cooked healthy meals, putting turkey in big pots of greens for flavor. She had a rule that you could never leave the table without eating your vegetables. Kiarra would fall asleep at the table.

Hicks gamely pressed on. “Peas? You like peas?”

“I think I’m going to throw up,” Kiarra said, grimacing.

“Chickpeas,” Hicks offered. “You ever ate hummus?”

“What is hummus?”

Fried food has long been Kiarra’s legal high—cheap, easily acquired, something to brighten the gloomiest day. It is also one of the few luxuries around.

Predominantly black neighborhoods tend to become what researchers call “food swamps,” or areas where fast-food joints outnumber healthier options. (Food deserts, by contrast, simply lack grocery stores.) One study in New York found that as the number of African Americans who lived in a given area increased, so did the distance to the nearest clothing store, pharmacy, electronics store, office-supply store. Meanwhile, one type of establishment drew nearer: fast-food restaurants.

That’s not a coincidence. After the riots of the 1960s, the federal government began promoting the growth of small businesses in minority neighborhoods as a way to ease racial tensions. “What we need is to get private enterprise into the ghetto, and put the people of the ghetto into private enterprises,” President Richard Nixon said around the time he created the Office of Minority Business Enterprise, in 1969. As Chin Jou, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney, describes in her book, Supersizing Urban America, fast-food companies were some of the most eager entrants into this “ghetto” market.

Fast-food restaurants spent the next few decades “rushing into urban markets,” as one Detroit News report put it, seeking out these areas’ “untapped labor force” and “concentrated audience.” In the 1990s, the federal government gave fast-food restaurants financial incentives to open locations in inner cities, including in Baltimore. The urban expansion made business sense. “The ethnic population is better for us than the general market,” Sidney Feltenstein, Burger King’s executive vice president of brand strategy, explained to the Miami Herald in 1992. “They tend to have larger families, and that means larger checks.” (Supermarket chains didn’t share this enthusiasm; in part because the widespread use of food stamps causes an uneven flow of customers throughout the month, they have largely avoided expanding in poor areas.)

Fast-food executives looked for ways to entice black customers. Burger King made ads featuring Shaft. KFC redecorated locations in cities like Baltimore to cater to stereotypically black tastes, and piped “rap, rhythm and blues, and soul music” into the restaurants, Jou writes. “Employees were given new Afrocentric uniforms consisting of kente cloth dashikis.” A study from 2005 found that TV programs aimed at African Americans feature more fast-food advertisements than other shows do, as well as more commercials for soda and candy. Black children today see twice as many soda and candy ads as white children do.

The marketing and franchising onslaught worked, and the diets of low-income people changed dramatically. Before the rise of fast food and processed foods, many low-income black families grew their own food and ate lots of grains and beans. In 1965, one study found, poor and middle-income blacks ate healthier—though often more meager—diets than rich whites did. But over the next few decades, the price of meat, junk food, and simple carbohydrates plummeted, while the price of vegetables rose. By the mid-’90s, 28 percent of African Americans were considered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to have a “poor” diet, compared with just 16 percent of whites.

At Carver Vocational-Technical High School, which Kiarra and Freddie Gray attended at the same time, only about a third of students go on to enroll in college—yet another factor that could be contributing to the area’s low life expectancy, given that college graduates outlive high-school dropouts in every racial category.

One reason college graduates live longer, researchers believe, is that education endows people with the sense that they control their own destiny. Well-educated people seek out more nutritional information because they’ve been told they can achieve anything—why not perfect health, too?

Kiarra, by contrast, wasn’t yet sure what she could accomplish. She wanted to live up to an image in her mind of a “fly, crazy, daring, dream-chasing girl,” but she cycled between getting excited about new possibilities and being flattened by setbacks. Sometimes, she would dream of turning Beautiful Beyond Weight into a business—one that would sell T-shirts and caps with empowering messages for plus-size women. But she wasn’t really sure how to do that.

When Kiarra felt especially adrift, she would visit Steve Dixon, Penn North’s director, in his tiny office at the end of the hall, and ask him for advice on finding her purpose. He would tell her to pray and meditate. “When you pray, it’s like you’re talking to God,” Kiarra told me once. “But when you meditate, it’s God talking to you.”

Kiarra sometimes asks Steve Dixon, the director of Penn North, for advice on how to find her purpose in life. (Jared Soares)

In November, some combination of prayer, meditation, and research led Kiarra to enroll in a medical-assistant training program. The class added another $7,000 to her student-loan debt, but Kiarra seemed to thrive in it, and a few weeks before Christmas, she was excitedly planning her post–Penn North life. Once she had her medical-assistant certificate in hand, she would move to Philadelphia, get a job at Temple University, and take classes to become a registered nurse. Eventually, she hoped to become a nursing professor. That future held everything she wanted: helping people, being a leader, making her own money, having her own place.

Feeling chipper, she decided to browse the wigs at a nearby store, stroking the hairpieces and whispering to the best ones that she would be back for them on payday. She had a new reason to get dolled up: a truck driver, “fine as wine” and with no kids—and, accordingly, no messy entanglement with another woman. She tried to boss him around, but he told her to mind her own business, and she kind of liked that. His birthday was approaching, and she wanted to take him someplace fancy. She would wear a black dress, and he would wear a black suit.

To help pay for everything, Kiarra decided to register as a Lyft driver. All that was required was a $250 deposit; she began calling around to different relatives to raise the money.

Twenty-seventeen, she thought, had been her best year yet.

A few weeks later, a bitter cold settled through the East Coast, and Kiarra’s sunny mood had faded. Things had ended with the truck driver over some mean Facebook posts and the fact that he’d lied to her about not having kids. She was also reconsidering her plans for the future, now thinking that instead of setting her sights on Temple, she should focus on graduating and finding a job—any job—that would pay well enough and provide insurance that would cover her extensive health-care needs. Her grandmother said driving for Lyft in Baltimore was too dangerous. She might not move to Philly after all.

But a new opportunity presented itself. Because of a change in her insurance plan, Kiarra had to switch doctors. Right away, her new doctor asked her whether she had considered bariatric surgery. Kiarra said she was scared of the complications, such as digestive problems and infections, but the doctor reassured her that complications are rare. She was interested in the gastric sleeve, a procedure that would dramatically reduce the size of her stomach, causing hormonal changes that would help her lose much of her body fat.

Kiarra still felt conflicted about losing her identity as an overweight woman. She couldn’t relate to the people on the Overeaters Anonymous calls who said they hated their bodies. She liked hers. “People say, ‘Hey, you’re fat,’ ” she said. “And I’m like, ‘That’s obvious.’ ” But she was motivated by her diabetes—which was already causing her vision to blur and her feet to tingle—along with the looming threat of other “fat diseases,” as she called them, frightening ones like heart failure. She figured that if she really wanted to have a successful plus-size clothing brand, she’d at least have to live long enough to see it happen.

She decided on the spot to go forward with the surgery, worried that she might change her mind otherwise. She signed up for the mandatory pre-op classes that prepare participants to eat just half a cup of food for every meal, at least initially, after the surgery. Her mother was nervous, but her sisters were all for it. Her grandmother told her to put it in God’s hands.

Earlier that month, Kiarra had organized a birthday party for her 2-year-old niece, Brooklynn, in Penn North’s community room, decking out the dingy yellow walls with pink balloons and ribbons. Within a few weeks, it was decided that Kiarra would gain custody of Brooklynn for a while so that Kiarra’s sister could go back to get her high-school diploma.

Kiarra was happy with this arrangement—she already sometimes referred to Brooklynn as her “daughter-girl”—and she began to see Brooklynn as a reason to stay on track. Juggling coursework and single parenthood exhausted her at times, but she wanted to be the successful role model for Brooklynn that she never had herself. In the chatty toddler who loved dress-up and Moana, Kiarra had found, if not her purpose, at least a purpose. “It feels like the Earth is full, you know?” she told me one day this spring.

Her new status as the child’s guardian meant that her stay at Penn North could be extended, through some alchemy of program definitions, for nearly another year. Staying on would mean cheap housing for Kiarra and Brooklynn, two people who desperately needed it.

With that settled, Kiarra turned her attention to the six-month process of hoop-jumping that was required to qualify for the gastric-sleeve surgery. The first pre-op class was an hour and a half long and took place at a hospital 30 minutes from Penn North. Kiarra thought the time commitment seemed excessive; with a smirk, she wondered aloud why the doctors couldn’t just tell her and the other patients, “Y’all fat. We gonna cut you up.”

But the doctors needed Kiarra to understand that the surgery was not something to take lightly. To qualify, she would have to get her sleep apnea and diabetes under control. She would have to keep a food journal, submit to behavioral evaluations, write an essay explaining why she no longer wanted to be morbidly obese. For the rest of her life, she’d need to wait 30 minutes between eating a meal and drinking a beverage. When one of Kiarra’s classmates said that after the surgery, eating too much would cause you to get violently sick for an hour, Kiarra recoiled a little.

All of the rules and obligations seemed more intense than Kiarra had expected. “Six months, you’re going on like 16 appointments,” she said. “Whoo, that’s a lot.” Given all she had to contend with, I wondered whether she would end up meeting the requirements—and, given the stakes, what might happen to her if she didn’t.

Tony Conn, a Penn North staffer with whom Kiarra is close, calls her a “wonderful, brilliant person.” Early on in my reporting, he told me her biggest flaw is that she sometimes doesn’t see things through to the end. “As soon as [something] looks like it’s gonna come to light, she’s like, ‘Okay, I did that. So let’s find something else,’ ” he said.

But lately, Kiarra had shown a new sense of calm and dedication. One day while she worked the front desk, an older man flirted with her as he signed the attendance sheet.

“When you look in the mirror,” he said, “and see how beautiful you are, what do you say to yourself?”

“We’ve come a long way,” she said quietly. “Let’s stay there.”

Article source here:The Atlantic

[snezfics-n-shit]

Show more @@ to the class please I am BEGGING YOU I need dumb lawyers to survive

I do have a WIP involving the Turns Tabling(tm) for snzfcker Phoenix and Miles finding amusement in the irony of the situation >.>

Here, have little a preview as a treat under the cut (actually there’s a lot, like the first 2-ish pages oofers)

    Phoenix’s mother had clearly purchased a new doorbell. The tune echoed from behind the door at the press of the button; this year, it was much louder and played Jingle Bells a month too early. Speaking of a month too early, other than a rather articulate variant of a ‘no soliciting’ sticker, the decorations on the door were Christmas themed as well, completely skipping Thanksgiving and likely put up the day after Halloween. That was just how Mrs. Wright was: a major Christmas enthusiast through and through.

Just as expected, she greeted her son and his family while sporting a comfy Christmas-themed sweater. Cats in Santa hats, a design that had Trucy in awe at how cute they were. Christmas and cats, two of Mrs. Wright’s joys in life. Mrs. Wright had little contact with family members other than Phoenix and Trucy, so she resolved a lot of the resulting loneliness by adopting cats. The cats she adopted were a lot like her, having few blood relatives around and finding a home in a found family.

“Phoenix! You’re early!” Mrs. Wright looked up and down at her son, assessing just how many extra pies she would need to make; he was skin and bones since he had been disbarred! “You didn’t have to shave before you came, dear. The holiday is this Thursday, so you have time to make yourself look nice.”

“You tell me that every time I visit, mom.” Phoenix chuckled. “Today, I have a good reason to look nice. There’s someone I’d like for you to meet.”

“Well, I know I’ve met your adorable daughter before.” Mrs. Wright leaned down to give Trucy a big hug. “You have no idea how happy I am to have a grandbaby to spoil!”

“You tell me that every time, too.” Phoenix stepped to the side, showing off Miles, who had done a spectacular job at hiding behind him before the big reveal. “This is my boyfriend, Miles Edgeworth. I’ve been meaning to tell you since we started dating, but only now does he have a day off where you can finally meet in person.”

“Wait, Miles?” Mrs. Wright blinked a few times. Miles was certainly as well dressed as the boy she remembered Phoenix bringing home so many times, but was he the same person? “That sweet boy who would always help me with the dishes when he stayed over? This is him?”

“I believe so, Mrs. Wright.” Miles hardly remembered his youth well enough to give a definite answer, but that sounded like something he would have done. It sounded like something he would do even now, actually.

“Sounds like you found yourself a keeper, dear.” Mrs. Wright held the door open wider to let the trio in. “It’s awfully chilly today. Come inside before you catch a cold.”

The walls were lined with framed pictures of Phoenix, with unsurprisingly many of which being of him celebrating Christmas. The trend continued even with pictures of Trucy that Phoenix had sent to his mother. While there weren’t nearly as many, there were a few notable photos of Phoenix’s parents: the pictures taken when they renewed their wedding vows and when Mrs. Wright got her associate’s degree after Phoenix started working with Mia, for example.

“Ah, now I remember.” Miles looked a little uncomfortable with the holiday-centric decor. “Your mother’s Christmas obsession.”

“Be nice.” Phoenix whispered. “It’s something she really likes; it’s not hurting anyone.”

“I love Grandma’s reindeer!” Trucy lifted herself with her tiptoes, eager to see the skillfully crafted wooden reindeer lining the shelf above the shoe rack. “Rudolph’s my favorite! Because he made everyone real sorry for making fun of him!”

“He did, didn’t he?” Phoenix slipped off his shoes and hung up his and Miles’s coats on the coat rack. “I like him, too. He had a talent that really turned Christmas eve around.” That sounded much like how he used to be in the courtroom. He missed that courtroom a lot.

“I’m gonna go find Buster!” Trucy ran off. Buster was one of Mrs. Wright’s cats; his big personality quickly made him Trucy’s favorite. Phoenix, however, was more fond of Doily (formerly Dollie), a friendly and relaxed cat who was happy as long as she had somewhere to sit. There were three more: a senior cat named Gerald, a gray tabby named Della, and a new kitten named Harvey. While it seemed like a lot of cats, the home Phoenix’s parents resided in after Phoenix left for Ivy University was specifically picked to be spacious enough for even the most rambunctious cats. 

“I believe you told me you wanted to introduce me to your parents’ cats, correct?” Miles followed Phoenix to one of the living room couches. “And you’re sure they’re not aggressive or anything?” While Miles knew dogs had a history of being working and companion animals, he couldn’t exactly say he had read any solid proof of cats earning a similarly high status. Even the nicest cats he had met always seemed more interested in leaving as many scars on his hand as possible than being friendly with him. 

“I can vouch for all but Harvey, since he’s new, but my mom has always been something like a cat whisperer.” Phoenix yanked a tissue from the end table next to the couch’s arm rest. “I’m sure they’ll like you a lot.” He smiled before blowing his nose softly. “My nose must be thawing out.” He chuckled.

“I told you to bring your scarf when I called you.” Mrs. Wright called out from the kitchen. “Now you’re catching a cold, aren’t you?”

“No, I feel fine.” Phoenix rubbed the bottom of his nose with the tissue folded in half. “Just part of warming up.”

“I’m surprised you’d forget your scarf for someone who claims going out with a wet head spells ‘pneumonia.’” Miles hummed. 

“Hey, you know it’s not scarf weather.” Phoenix chuckled and tossed the tissue into the trash bin, impressed that he made the shot. Miles found it amusing that Phoenix completely ignored the wet head comment, likely because he really did tell Miles and Trucy that all the time. “It is the perfect weather for mom’s homemade stew, though.”

“I’m eager to try it, considering you’ve been talking it up since she called to invite us over.”

“It’s really good!” Phoenix repeated the claim he had been making for weeks. “I can’t wait for you to try it.” He pressed his knuckle against his nose. “Hopefully it’ll be dinner soon.”

“That won’t be for a while, I’m afraid.” Mrs. Wright carried some glasses of water to the living room. “Your father is working late tonight.”

“What does he do?” Miles leaned forward.

“He works in construction. He’s very proud of his work.” Mrs. Wright smiled as she placed the glasses of water on the coasters sitting in front of Miles and Phoenix. “Before Phoenix was born, where he worked didn’t earn him nearly enough to support us. He’s been much happier ever since he’s found somewhere that lets us live comfortably.”

[Stay tuned, homies, full fic will be posted in time >.>]

[fragiilexa]

1 - 10

identity ask………oh shit           ACCEPTING

1. if someone wanted to really understand you, what would they read, watch, and listen to?

Hm, well I guess this is three questions omg but I’ll just go down the line. If they wanted to really understand me they’d have to read the Bible, which I know is saying a lot in one thing. But the reason I am the way I am is because of the things I’ve learned from that book and I would not be who I am without it. Of course I actually haven’t been able to read the whole thing yet but I take a lot of who I am from it & it’s just something that’s shaped me as a person? Oh but also I really don’t read books much anymore, but if I had to give another one it would be The Last Song? Maybe? ( The book is better than the movie, even tho I like the movie, the books better ) It just talks a lot about forgiveness & stuff and it was a lesson I really needed to learn at the time I read it & also am still learning. OH and also Crazy Love by Francis Chan, which is like a christian book, but it’s also had a huge impact on me, okay but onto watchin’.

Okay this is hard because there isn’t one full thing you could watch where the whole thing has impacted me. But there are a lot of movies I’ve learned from, ( and also since this doesn’t say specifically movies ) there are also a few speeches that I’ve really learned from ( and people would probably be able to understand me better if they watched them. But I can’t name those right now? But, I’d have to say, like, not as a whole, but Dr. Who, at least some specific episodes. Uh, Captain America?? The Help? There are more but I have a hard time naming movies/shows.

Okay and then music, fricken music, okay I could put so so so so many songs down, songs are like the soul of my life & help make me, me BUT I’m just going to give you ONE because if I didn’t this would go on forever and TWO it’s kind of my theme song but I Was Here, by the queen Beyonce. Is like, hands down my favorite *what makes me, me* song. I could name a lot more. I could make a 24 hour long playlist. But I won’t bc that would take forever. 

2. have you ever found a writer who thinks just like you? if so, who?

Yes, There have been a few and most of them are not on anymore but, Kae I think I can solidly say we think very similarly on just, like, how to develop muses, how to work out characters and how REAL they’re supposed to be, you know? Characters can, and should have flaws and no one has tons of perfect relationships. Real life is messy & writing should reflect that & I think we are just hella synced with that message & feeling and she’s just lovely so yeah @spookylip is bae & we think alike ( obviously bc we took those selfies that matched wITHOUT EVEN KNOWING ) we are #one

3. list your fandoms and one character from each that you identify with.

Girl Meets World: Riley Matthews.Glee: Tina Cohen - Chang.Marvel: Captain America, Steve Rogers.Hamilton: Eliza or Peggy SchyulerDisney: HeiHei ( no just kidding ) Moana, Princess Anna, Rapunzel,Harry Potter: Newt ScamanderStar Wars: FinnMy Little Pony: ( don’t u dare judge ) FlutterShyTwilight: Alice Cullen

4. do you like your name?  is there another name you think would fit you better?

Okay so I used to not like my name so much ‘cause it was really bland & there were a lot of other girls named rebecca when I was in school, then people started calling me rachel so it was like ‘my name is totally forgettable’ ( or i was i dunno ) but over the past few years I’ve started to love it, though someone ruINED the meaning of it for me *side eyes that kinky anon* but I don’t really care & I love my name now, just, never ever call me becky or I will murder u in ur sleep. :))))

5. do you think of yourself as a human being or a human doing? do you identify yourself by the things you do?

I was slightly confused reading this but I re-read it & now I get it. I think at the moment, or for the longest time I’ve been a human being, like, there are just no opportunities right now for me to be doing what others my age are, or even younger than me. Not only that but I have to work on a lot of anxieties of mine, but that being said I don’t think I’m doing nothing. What I’m doing is small, yeah, but I try to do the best I can with what I have & I have a lot of faith that things happen for a reason & right now I’m keeping things going in my family & trying to better myself, no matter how many downsides that has, sort of. & I do Identify myself by the things I do, mostly because in doing something you have the opportunity to help someone. I try to do the right things, sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t but it’s a daily thing, y’know?

6. are you religious/spiritual?

Yah. You can see that with some of my answers but I am, though I know right now a lot of people assume that if you’re religious ( especially christian, on this site at least ) that it automatically means you’re this, this & this *insert any form of ism or phobic term* but that’s really not how it works. We’re all sinners & no matter what that still doesn’t change the way God feels about us ( no matter what, we, as humans think is sin, or sinful ) I could go on a lot about this topic, honestly it’s a big part of who I am. But personally, I love God, I have a personal relationship with him that I try to work on daily & grow with him daily, my God is all loving and I just wished more people my age, or at least people on here knew that?? I dunno, there’s just so much rhetoric surrounding Christianity & most of it is wrong & I just??? Mmmm I’m getting off topic but yes! I am! It’s like a huge part of what keeps me going, I love Jesus.

7. do you care about your ethnicity?

YES. Oh my Gosh yeah, okay well I’m white, lmao, but where I come from is still like, really important to me. It used to not be. I actually used to be kind of… not ashamed but embarrassed when my Mom did really dutch things. Like, ok backing up, My grandpa moved here from the Netherlands when he was in his early teens around the time that the holocaust happened, though I couldn’t give you the exact date because I’m hella forgetful but he came with his parents and he met my Grandma and u know the deal it goes down the line. But anyways I used to like, not like the things that came with being dutch, like, I just thought it was all stupid & silly, like clogs & doilies & stupid little things like my great grandma & grandpa always used to use forks & knives with everything because it was a custom where they came from & like, it’s all small things but over the years I’ve just learned to be really proud of where my family came from? My Grandpa went through a lot to come here, he saw a lot of things he never talked about and I didn’t know him well because I was young when he died but I just really love embracing my heritage there & stuff. 

Like I’m white yes, and I’m basically a ‘mystery white’ ‘cause my dad is a mutt  & my mom isn’t fully dutch either. I’m one of those 10% Irish 25% Hungarian 50% Dutch & 15% other type of whites, but??? I’m still proud of all of it?? Like I love learning about where I came from & who I am & I think everyone should be proud of all parts of their ethnicity. As Matthew Montgomery said: “ Love all your percentages. “  

8. what musical artists have you most felt connected to over your lifetime?

shiT fam, this is getting so long & it’s gonna get longer, okay let me just do like… two, tha two tops…

Demi Lovato: Obviously, I mean… obviously She is one of the people I look up to most and I don’t know where I would be if I never had her & her music in my life. She’s taught me so much about strength and confidence and overcoming something when it looks like it will be impossible. She’s helpped me grow into someone who cares & wants to learn & help others and I just admire her so much for what she’s done, for herself, for others and for never giving up when she could have. Not to mention the ballads that have helped me through really hard times, or the speeches she’s given that remind me I’m strong & capable 

Taylor Swift: *que everyone groaning who’s reading* anYWAYS I can’t even honestly write down or explain how many times that Taylor and her music has helped me when I felt like I wanted to give up, or how many times I have cried listening to songs that should not have resonated with me but did. She’s helped me to realize not only that I am important but that no matter what, despite what people may do to me, or make me feel that I’m still important and worth working on. She’s also shown me what goofing off can do to make you feel better, how not giving a shit has helped me move on from past relationships and how being unapologetically ME is okay

In fact, I feel like Demi’s taught me those things too. But they’ve both done it in different ways, which I think shows how beautiful loving yourself can be. Because you don’t have to love yourself how another person loves themselves. You have to figure out your own, unique way to view yourself & believe in yourself & love yourself & I think that’s just really beautiful. Now, they both hate each other ( or at least severely dislike one another ) but I just feel like they’ve both done so much for me and I don’t think I could thank either of them enough for showing me strength, beauty, confidence and love in the way they have. It’s insane how much of an impact people can have but they have. I could go on but I woont I promise.

9. are you an artist?

YES I am, though my skill can be debated I love drawing when I’m in the mood & painting & jst everything that has to do with art. 

10. do you have a creed?

I don’t know if this means religious, or… otherwise… but I mean, technically I’m a baptist christian ( i think? not sure anymore ) but like, I am Christian, I feel like, sadly, the beliefs I hold are a bit left leaning & less erm, strict? When it comes to how I interpret the bible, where as a my family is different, I think? I don’t know, but I just try to follow the teachings of Jesus & his disciples. “ Love others as I have loved you - John 15:12 “ I do go by other teachings but I think that’s the top of my list. Jesus loves us unconditionally, he died for us, lived for us, and rose again so we didn’t have to burn up in hell for eternity. The least I can do is show everyone the same kind of unconditional love he’s showed me throughout my life & make sure people know that though we do sin & are inherently bad at heart, he still loves us despite our downfalls and doubt. I don’t know if that really answers this question but I had to look up creed & this is the best answer I came up with SO, thank u for sending this in and I love u