#this is my long winded way of saying ronan and hennessy get therapy challenge <3< /div> Explore tagged Tumblr posts

[iwowzumi]

so i’ve had a few hours to process mi and i know that mstief has said it’s very much about chronic illness and while i very much agree, it’s MY coping series and i get to project onto it so i’d like to throw my hat in the ring for it’s about mental illness as well, especially the more “””destructive””” ones, and specifically how people cope with it. tw for mental illness, s/uicide, and all the stuff that comes with it.

because ronan and hennessy are undeniably destructive, either because they can’t help it (murder crabs, the lace) or because they want to be (ecoterrorism, hennessy’s orb). this applies both to their immediate surroundings AND to themselves, their relationships. and while in these cases the cause seems to be the dreaming, it would be easy to draw a parallel to mania or psychosis, maybe dissociation (though dissociation among trc/tdt characters i.e. jordan, matthew, adam is a discussion for a different day). i’m showing my hand a little but i also think ronan’s paranoia in this book is pretty significant— see his whole “everyone was in on it” spiel when it was, at its core, his loved ones trying to protect him from self-destruction. i also think mental illness here is deeply tied to creation/dreaming (as it is for many mentally ill people). ronan creates and sometimes creates destruction but when he doesn’t it destroys him (nightwash) and hennessy has a mental block, arguably due to trauma that keeps her from creating at all (the lace) but i digress.

the way i see it, ronan and hennessy are two very mentally ill people coping in very different ways. or rather, they are at different stages in their coping process. hennessy (although she very much has an individual struggle i want to emphasize that) is where ronan used to be. she’s s/uicidal— i think that’s inarguable. the lace aside, she even asks for liliana and carliana to kill her. but i think the lace speaks for itself. it hates her and it destroys, but it’s really hennessy hating herself, wanting to destroy herself. thats why she keeps dreaming doubles (though i would also argue that the doubles are an attempt to imagine a hennessy without mental illness, without trauma). that’s as much as text, and it’s nearly a direct parallel to how ronan used to view himself. he used to dream doubles as well— versions of himself to give to his self hatred and s/uicidal tendencies. hennessy is learning, she’s stopped dreaming doubles, but on some level she still hates herself enough to want to die. it invades her dreamspace and renders her unable to create. it makes sense to me that she was only able to dream the orb after encountering carmen and liliana, two supportive (and lesbian, diversity win!) women who explicitly tell hennessy that her life has value. but her solution to turn off the ley line is also interesting to me. the lace, her tendency for self-harm that tends to manifest when she creates, is so overwhelming that the only way out of it that she sees is to remove her ability to create altogether, and i wonder how this will affect her. i’m eager to see how her character develops in the third book and i hope that will come in the form of her treasuring her own life and reclaiming her ability to create from her trauma and mental illness as well as rebuilding relationships with people (jordan!) who she’s pushed away out of fear or self martyrdom.

and then there’s ronan. we’ve never seen ronan at his most s/uicidal— that was pre-trc, when he went to the hospital. idc if they were his dreams, that was a s/uicide attempt and i will not be dissuaded on this. still, a lot of trc was ronan coming to terms with himself as a dreamer, a gay man, a high school dropout, a mentally ill person, and learning that his life DOES have value! and that’s a lesson i think he’s learned by tdt, and certainly by mi. he wants to live, and he wants to create! but he feels stifled by a world that doesn’t want to accommodate that. in this world there’s no space for his murder crabs or his hay barn full of wheels— for his mania and destruction. and he feels and fears that his loved ones only want him as a diluted version of himself, which is devastating when you’ve only just learned to accept all of yourself. and it’s hard because you don’t want to hurt your loved ones! or yourself! but you also don’t want to be treated like glass, or like you’re defective, or like you have to hide the wild and sometimes ugly parts of yourself to be palatable enough for society to accept you. so he creates bryde. someone like him, but who has it all together and is in control, who can help him create a world that accommodates him, doesn’t stifle him, but also indulges ronan in his most self-isolating, paranoid compulsions. bryde is both an indulgence and a self-protective measure. i think this is why the lace is afraid of bryde because on some level, bryde IS the lace, just in a different form, evolved, a different way of coping that involves living. but it’s also why adam and all of the people who love ronan are afraid of the lace— they can see that bryde is just as destructive, just in a different way.

this is not to say that either hennessy or ronan are wrong, that one is coping “better” than the other, that they’re coping badly, or that bryde and lace are their “evil mental illness.” it’s way way more complex than that, and that’s why i find myself increasingly sympathetic to hennessy even as she becomes more destructive in the same way that i can’t find myself completely disagreeing with bryde. these parts of hennessy and ronan can be inwardly and outwardly harmful but they can also be beautiful and necessary— hence the magic that is dreaming. (this is also not to say that the people they dream aren’t autonomous, but that’s a whole other can of worms) the mental illness can’t be shunned away or eliminated entirely. it has to be radically accepted as a part of the whole that is ronan and hennessy. and that’s a lifelong process that i think every mentally ill person grapples with, and i’m very much looking forward to seeing how hennessy and ronan evolve with respect to these concepts in the third book