#they're just shrouded in 10 layers of personal venting

[gay-simple-and-chaotic]

I honestly think I'm still processing In Stars and Time (despite jumping right into Start Again LOL) because...

I've never felt this way before? Maybe it's the fictotype playing into it. Maybe it's just this life itself.

Seeing someone just like me--maladaptive coping, stupid jokes, horribly avoidant, humiliated by the gross parts of being a person, plagued by horrible intrusive thoughts, weighed down by anxiety that almost becomes paranoia, everything, right down to details like the subtly mentioned growing sex repulsion as he grows more depressed and the (okay, it's funny, yes, I'm white, but hear me out because the culture I'm referring to is Irish and Scottish/Celtic tradition, which I never had the chance to connect with because, obviously, it was...) feeling of being cut off from a culture and heritage you feel you should've had, because it's gone or you've been so removed from it that you can't regain it,, it's weird to be seen so much. Stars, we're not even that far apart in age.

But just...seeing everything that happened over the course of the game, it felt like being vivisected. It felt like I was watching someone take me apart and watching my own viscera run down their hands. I felt sick in act five, because everything Siffrin did was in a way, something I've dreaded doing, that horrible fear in my mind that one day, I'll snap on my friends and spew venom at them with intent to punch into those weak points they trustingly bared to me and my awful, disgusting, horrible fangs that I tried so hard to bury. I cried during the ending, because as cynical as I am, and the way my brain went "there's just no way this would happen in reality", it still hit hard.

And I began thinking--maybe it's not that it would never happen in real life. Maybe it's that I don't want to let myself believe it could. Because it would mean I've been running from problems I could solve with a bit of gross vulnerability. I've been running away from issues that would be solved if I just...talked. Making assumptions plagues the cast as much as it plagues Siffrin. It's just...maybe I really have been making my life harder? Maybe there's things I can do to improve my lot that I've just been overlooking because I hate to get my hands dirty? Because I hate to be seen for who I am?

And don't get me started on fanfiction. Seeing people write about what's functionally me, getting in arguments and struggles and conflicts I could feasibly get into, and the way they resolve it...it's disturbingly therapeutic? I feel like if I looked for a fic about any given issue I have, there'd be one that presents a way I could fix it and it would work.

Anyway gross vulnerability moment has been had. This is going in the personal tag, not the fandom one. I just had to talk about it. There wasn't a conclusion to this ramble, I just needed to sort my thoughts.