#this shit makes me literally unable to function on even the most basic levels... like i didn't really eat or move much bc i felt so bad

[daz4i]

how is it. that for a whole week. the house smelled fine, and other than some dust and cat hair it was really clean too, and everything was organized and easy to find with no towers of dishes in the sink about to topple over. even tho i didn't clean that much or do anything out of the ordinary to keep the house this way. but now my parents have been home for like 3 days and already every room except for mine is inhospitable from how bad they all smell, and there's mess all over, and the table is constantly sticky, and the sink is somehow full yet barely has any dishes in it bc the way they're organized is so ineffective, and i hate it here i wanna leave so bad

[markantonys]

I came across a Twitter thread that said the set up for the docks when it comes to the Warder bond between Lan and Moiraine was handled much better in the books cause in the show they feel like the mechanics of the Warder bond was too vague/not explained well in the show that they weren't able to connect with Moiraine and Lan's emotional conflict in s2 because of it. And I am a bit confused cause honestly I don't think the books explain how the Warder bond works at all from what I remember. Just making a lot of wild claims about how everything about the books are better and how the show is fumbling when they haven't even read half the series yet (show first to book reader). Just this trend to shit talk every choice the show makes when you don't even know the full complete story is wild to me

haters: the show hasn't done enough to explain how the bond works

all the screentime across 2 seasons the show has dedicated to showing how the bond works which the haters kept complaining was a waste of time better spent on rand having swordfights:

like literally what do they want lmao some people will never be satisfied!

but the mention of the "mechanics" of the bond is interesting to me because i think we may be hitting upon 2 different types of viewers here: the minority of lore enthusiasts who need to understand every single detail about how things work or else they will be upset and lose immersion, and the majority of audiences who are content with a general understanding of how things work and don't get hung up on details, or will at most go "hmmm i'm not sure if this makes sense, but it's a cool story beat so i'm happy to shrug and move on".

the former category were going "but what weaves is moiraine doing now? did they actually unbond and now she's remaking it from scratch? i thought the bond was only masked? this is such a plothole, it doesn't make sense, i can't concentrate on anything else about the scene" during the 2x08 moiraine & lan beach scene, and the latter category were thinking "what a beautiful and emotionally satisfying moment of seeing them come back together!" and that's it. and probably similar for the rest of the season. if somebody felt unable to connect with the emotional aspects of that storyline, i would bet it's because they felt too unclear about the mechanics of the state of the bond and couldn't let go of that confusion enough to sink into the emotional aspects. (which is really more of a personal thing; my show-only mom was definitely keyed into the emotional aspects of this storyline and didn't get bothered about some mechanics being left vague. in fact, i think she would've just gotten confused if they'd tried to explain the mechanics in more detail djkfjg bless her.)

undeniably, the show does not explain magic mechanics in as much depth as the books do. but that is because it's banking on the very fair assumption that the majority of audiences don't need to have this level of detail in order to enjoy and understand the story (and may get more confused than they need to be if they ARE given this level of detail). i'll admit that s2 was a bit muddled on What Exactly Is Going On with moiraine and lan's bond, and i found myself a bit confused by the mechanics at times, but that never impeded my appreciation or understanding of the emotional aspects of the storyline because i'm someone who is happy to shrug and move on if the mechanics of how something is functioning in a fantasy story aren't making total sense to me.

also, moiraine & lan at the docks won't happen until the end of s3 and it's very very possible we might learn even more about bond mechanics earlier in s3 via elayne and birgitte (who will be good candidates for explaining some New Bond Basics that it wouldn't make sense for moiraine and lan to talk about since they've had theirs for 20 years), so like..........maybe they should just Watch And Find Out.

it's also very interesting that this is coming from someone in the show-to-book pipeline because i honestly would not be surprised if a lot of their base knowledge for how warder bonds works was absorbed..........from the show. and they just don't realize it. granted, if they started with new spring it might be different because i'm assuming new spring goes into a lot of depth about how warder bonds work (though i don't know for sure, i haven't read it). but if they only read EOTW-TFOH, they sure as shit are not gonna have gotten much info about bonds *from the books* because we barely spend any time with characters who are part of a bond during those books. we get, what, maybe a couple chapters total of moiraine or lan pov and then start diving into it a tiny bit more in TFOH with elayne and birgitte, but it's really not that much from what i can remember - and i can't remember very well, because i went into the books already having a very solid understanding of the concept of the bond thanks to all the work s1 put into showing it. i do not remember learning anything significant about the bond in the first 5 books that i didn't already know from s1.

it's also so strange to me in general to see people start with the show, then go to the books, and then start hating on the show because as a show-to-book pipeline person myself, all going to the books did was make me go "wow thank fuck for the show, it will fix X, it will fix Y, it's already fixed Z" basically constantly. it made me 10000x more grateful for and appreciative of the show and the way it's choosing to tell the story!

[bbcphile]

Ohhhhhh (AKA. Happy Anniversary to Me: Escape from the Mold House Edition)

The last week has been A Struggle and while there has definitely been plenty of Bad Shit going on (bad medical news about a friend, having a retraumatizing medical experience, some rough anniversaries of other things that brought up trauma memories, and learning that my gallbladder is very likely a ticking time bomb and btw, everyone please cross your fingers it doesn't rupture and go septic?), it didn't feel like it was quite at the level of Bad Enough (by my incredibly warped standards from too many decades of trauma) to warrant how much of a tailspin I was in.

Well. Now I have figured out the missing piece and am feeling SO MUCH BETTER.

But holy shit, the expression "The body keeps score" is so damn accurate, because of course my body was freaking the fuck out about a very traumatic anniversary that I had conveniently temporarily blocked out even though it was only two years ago (oh dissociative disorders).

To learn about the "My Apartment Almost Killed Me" Saga, keep reading below.

Soooo, here's the backstory: in May of 2022, my health, which had been rapidly tanking over the previous 9 months, took a dramatic nose dive. I was either sleeping or nearly passed out most of the time and couldn't walk across the living room without basically keeling over face first onto the ground because my muscles would go on strike, and then I would have to lie there, unable to move, until @sufficientlylargen could literally pick me up off the ground and put me on the sofa, because the muscle weakness was so bad I couldn't even lift my head or push myself up to my elbows. I had also been in and out of the ER with stroke-like symptoms, but none of the members of my medical team could figure out what was wrong. It was terrifying.

Until one day, at the very end of May, I realized I had been walking without falling over at PT and then stopped being able to walk as soon as I walked into our apartment. I repeated the experiment a few times, and realized that yep, there was definitely something in the apartment that was mostly responsible for whatever the hell was happening. We packed a bag for me and found a friend who let me crash at their place for a week while we hired an air quality expert to come and test our place. It turns out that we had 2 feet of stachybotrys mold growing up the walls of our basement, and the combination of neurotoxins from the stachybotrys plus my MCAS was literally poisoning and killing me. Over the next few weeks, we got rid of 85% of our belongings (including several hundred books, all our clothes, some of my favorite xmas ornaments growing up, which were just about the only happy things about my childhood, and most of our furniture) because we couldn't clean them enough to keep me from keeling over when I was exposed to them, packed everything else (on the porch--because I couldn't go inside--after soaking it all in ammonia so we wouldn't bring any spores into our new place), and simultaneously house and apartment hunted to try to find a place we could move into ASAP because I was supposed to be having neurosurgery in over a month and needed a place to recuperate, and every minute we delayed was a risk I'd permanently lose function due to nerve/brain/spinal column damage. (Things were made more difficult by the fact that there was a non-zero chance I could be paralyzed by the surgery so we needed to find an apartment that didn't have stairs in case I couldn't walk.) There was other drama during this time, too (eg. my new neurologist, who I had been waiting 9 months to see, closed her practice the day before my appointment with her without making any referrals, my new PCP accused me of drug-seeking when I was trying to make pain management plans for after my surgery, etc. etc.), which didn't help. But at least, within 2 weeks of moving out of the Mold House, as we'd dubbed it, I started being able to walk more than a few blocks and to even just think about writing again (and, ya know, also regularly speak complete sentences, since sometimes the neurotoxins had taken that, too), so we knew that we'd made the right decision.

Anyway, the good news is, we found a place and moved in on July 6th, so we only had to spend a month and a bit living in friends' guest rooms, hotels, and airbnbs with our two cats (one of whom developed a UTI and ear infection from the stress and mold, so we were also medicating her), and we were able to postpone my neurosurgery until February, and the neurosurgery was a success, which is why I'm alive and able to do things like write meta and fic again!

All this to say, I hadn't realized until I saw a thing about it on FB Memories (lol) that it had been 2 years since my apartment was literally killing me and I was abjectly terrified. And it never fails to amaze me that my body (and some parts of my mind) clearly remember anniversaries like that even if I don't, because my anxiety will be through the roof and I will be having more flashbacks about Unrelated Trauma Things and just generally feeling like my resilience is at about half its normal level. My working theory is that those aspects that remember the anniversary assume it's happening again and I never got out (oh emotional flashbacks. How I hate you.), and it's only once I make the connection consciously and can reflect on 1. how terrible it was (yay validation?) and 2. the fact that it's over and I survived through sheer stubbornness and good research skills (again) that I can get back to my baseline and things (like writing) become so much more fun and easier.

Last reflection on this shitshow: last year, I was too busy recovering from my neurosurgery to notice what I was feeling about the 1 year anniversary of the Escape From The Mold House (or at least, if I had any reflections on it, I don't remember them), but I'd guess it was probably still too upsetting and traumatizing for me to be ready to look at the memories directly. But right now, at least, I'm really proud of myself. I mean, all of that was horrifying and traumatizing, and I wouldn't wish it on ANYONE, but I'm really proud of myself for saying 'fuck this, something is wrong, and I think I know what, and I am going to solve it because I can, and I refuse to die like this.' I sometimes forget that under all the anxiety and trauma and insecurity, I am fundamentally incredibly stubborn, determined, confident in my opinions, and willing to fight for myself.

I'm hoping I can hold onto that reminder as I go forward, especially depending on what I learn about whether my gallbladder is in fact a ticking time bomb. I can and will argue with my doctors to take this seriously if I have to; I just don't want to need to.

[rvdbnotreally]

girlllll don’t even get me started!!!!!!! the amount of failed friendships is insane!!! and the friend groups?? in 5 years time i’ve been in 7 different ones and that’s only counting school.

slight tw for sh and such topics!

and it’s not even always neurotypicals. my best friend in the last friendgroup i was in (sep 2022-dec 2023) started ignoring me for days and sometimes weeks and was always saying the most fucked up “jokes” to me. there was one time where she actually told me i must have been suicidal for wearing a hoodie during exam season??? (she knew that i used to be suicidal) then after three months or smt i said “hey girl can we please talk this trough because i hate this” because she was like the most important person in my life at that point.

so we met up and after a while we started talking about how we were treating each other (i was trying to not put all of the blame on her yk) and everything. i basically asked “hey could you please explain to me why you ignore me and treat me like shit most of the time” because that’s what i wanted to know.

she told me that there’s basically 5 things really wrong with me and i needed to change those thing in order for us to stay or go back to being friends. those were:

1. not always going along with the rest of the group and coming up for myself (the ONLY one i think is fair)

2. not interrupting conversations when i walk up to people (yk the moment where everybody stops what they’re talking about and says hi and you ask how are you all doing? that was interrupting people in her opinion)

3. starting a conversation in a group (she thought that i was bad at that and that i should only go along with the conversation that was already there (even if there wasn’t one))

4. not only talking about my interests (this is one that sounds alright, but she was the one to always encourage me to talk about my interests and always said that it was ‘cute’ or ‘nice’ that i actually talked about what i liked. turns out she didn’t like it anymore and wanted me to never talk about it again)

5. reading people better (this one is the most stupid because you can’t magically read people better but she wanted me to always understand what the rest of the friend group wanted and such idk man)

so after this i said smt like “hey you do understand that almost everything you named are typically associated with autism and i can’t really change that about myself” and she said that i might not fully reach the level she wanted me to, but that i could still try yk.

i thought that it was fair that she struggled with these things about me, because of course i can, it’s literally my entire life.

now here comes the most interesting part of it all. after she told me all of those things (mind you i’m a very insecure person, so these things were a huge blow to the idea that i could function as a ‘normal’ person) she asked me if there was smt i wanted her to do. there were many things but in that moment i was a bit shocked and couldn’t really put my thoughts into order. so i asked her to do 2 very simple things in comparison to what she asked of me:

1. if there was something wrong, she should tell me, because “something” (autism) made me unable to pick up on that sort of thing. (it made me very confused and angry and most of all sad that i couldn’t understand what was happening with my best friend who meant so, so much to me and i wanted nothing more than to understand her)

2. not to make jokes without making sure i actually knew it was a joke. (so many of her “jokes” made me so, so insecure and made me feel awful about myself and everything i did or didn’t do)

and yk what this girl responded with. she said and i quote “you do know i have ADHD, right? like that makes it very hard to do that?” GIRL YES i can understand because i have AUTISM????? like the thing that actually makes me act like a terrible person in her eyes isn’t good enough, but her fucking adhd hinders her from being a good friend and not saying terrible things to a person you KNOW is insecure.

so we promised each other that we would both work on it and that she would tell me if i was improving or doing smt she didn’t like. after that we parted ways and i worked on being a ‘better’ person for a whole month. i was pushing everyone away by not talking to them and i became so tired trying to read everything everyone was trying to express and everything. i wouldn’t exactly call it depressive, but it was slowly reaching a point where i didn’t want to do anything anymore, i lost all social skills i had build up over the years, i lost contact with a lot of people, i didn’t enjoy anything, i became insecure on a whole new level and most important of all, i was still losing my best friend.

she never said anything about if i was doing better or not and never even acknowledged that i was trying.

at the end of the december examperiod there was going to be this christmas gala at school and i really wanted to go, she didn’t approve of any type of school happenings and said that we wouldn’t go. the day of the gala i found out she was actually going, with her boyfriend and another friend of mine. that was the last straw and the next morning during my geography exam i was seated next to her. she came in and started talking to me, and i ignored her exactly like she did to me in the start. i think she actually failed that exam because of how i treated her. since then i haven’t really talked to her and the rest of the girls in the friendgroup decided to follow her.

sometimes i’m recovering from this friendship and sometimes i’m still in that mindset. i really, really hope i can finally make friends that can actually love me as i am. i don’t want to only be friends with boys that are attracted to me, i just want people that accept me and let me grow into the person i want to be, not the one they want me to be.

i really, really hate that i can’t keep friends for a long period of time and i know a large portion of that is because these’s people aren’t are ‘mature’ as me. in the sense that they can take criticism, come to me when they have a problem and try understand each other. i hope that everyone with or without autism can find someone or someones that care for them and i hope that people can understand why people with autism simply can’t act in a way that you understand.

i have to think about everything i do and i can’t stop thinking about every small thing i do. i just want people to understand that and not complicate matters by asking me to completely change the way i work. i hope that nobody has that.

i know probably nobody is going to read this and that’s fine, i just really, really, really needed to write this down. thank you if you did read this i hope you have a fantastic day!

Dear other autistic people, what defines a friendship to you? I don't believe I have ever had a healthy friendship and I can not find anything that truly helps me understand how one would work out. Especially with how friendships are with neurotypicals, I just feel out of the loop and it is haunting me.

Thank you in advance for your answers!

[serendipitous-magic]

Me: the 40-hour workweek was not designed for one person to be able to work that much AND have a life. It was designed for men to work literally their whole life away while their wives handled ALL of the household management stuff - chores, cleaning, cooking, shopping, laundry, gardening, etc., not to mention child-raising. It is absolutely unreasonable for us to be expected to work 40 hours, because full-time work was specifically designed for you to only work and not have to do chores or raise kids or have any kind of life outside of work. 

Furthermore, the aforementioned full-time workweek was designed for the man to support his ENTIRE family on those 40 hours, while today one full-time job is often barely enough to support one person. 

Not only that, but the cost of education, healthcare, and insurance has risen to absolutely ridiculous levels, compared to decades past, to the point where an average college degree could leave you anywhere from $30,000 to $100,000 in student debt right from the get-go, and a single hospital visit might be anywhere from $4,000 to over $100,000, even if you have insurance.

And, basically any job that’s not retail or foodservice now requires you to have a degree and years of experience in the field already, which locks many people into low-paying jobs even if you do have a degree.

Inflation and wealth hoarding by millionaires and billionaires has made the current cost of living nearly unattainable to the average person. Cost of housing alone takes over half of all income, on average across the US. 

Our government is doing absolutely nothing to solve the above crises or make any steps at all towards wealth distribution, more affordable healthcare, or more affordable education. In fact, the government is a few small steps from being a powerless figurehead of corporations and Wall Street, if it isn’t functionally that already.

And all of that is in a good year, never mind the current literal global pandemic which is making literally every single one of the above points worse.

We have been almost completely stripped of our ability to experience our lives as human beings - to make art and form meaningful connections and study things and travel and make memories and have experiences - because so much of our time is inexorably eaten away by work that we have to do if we want to pay for rent and groceries. We truly are trapped as cogs in a machine that doesn’t give a shit about us. It’s no wonder so many of us have chronic depression and anxiety and are unable to find meaning in life - it’s been stolen from us.

Older people: You’re being so dramatic. Do you realize how much better you have it than most of the people through history? 

You don’t have to like your job, it’s just what makes you money. 

You millennials are so entitled. 

Just resign yourself to spending 5/7ths of your days on earth waiting for the day to end and then commute home to joylessly consume capitalist-driven media, do chores and go to bed. Just stuff your entire life into your two days of the week off and pour the vast majority of your finite human experience down the drain, like the rest of us in the rat race. That’s life, honey :)

Me: No, see, that makes me want to die.

[samtheflamingomain]

25.21%

I've been sober for 3 months today. 92 days. 25.21% of 2021.

I could've posted more updates, more milestones (it took a LOT not to post on Day 69) but I wanted to kind of save it up for a Big Day. It was also a decent way to continue to incentivize my continued sobriety: a full pass to do a shameless, hardcore bragging sesh.

Anyway, this post comes in 2 parts: the TL;DR for those who only want the gist, then more in depth on my ability to stay sober, the lasting effects of rehab, etc.

I tried my damnedest to pare this absolute novel down, but it's long, so feel free to dip out if you just get bored. Onward!

TL;DR: I went to rehab the beginning of July for 3 weeks and haven't had a drop of alcohol since. I've lost weight, I'm more healthy, my daily anxiety level went from 8 to 2, I haven't had an anxiety attack in 3 months, and everything generally just seems... easier. My memory and concentration have improved. I've been productive and I've been meditating every day. I'm saving money, and while I sometimes fantasize about getting drunk, that's usually all it is.

Honestly, it's been much easier than I expected, but I think a lot of that is because for the first 3 weeks, the time in which I would usually break down and start drinking again when trying to get sober myself, was spent behind a locked door. So far I haven't had any days where I was close to giving in. I haven't had many days where I've been depressed about it, missing it or really tempted. Maybe 3-4. I've basically just gotten on with my life as if alcohol doesn't exist.

To wrap up the short version for those ready to peace out, I'll leave it with a bit of advice.

I don't feel qualified to give any specific advice, because my story feels very unique to me, and I honestly don't think what worked for me will work for MOST people. Sometimes people spend a year in rehab and still drive straight to the liquor store on their way home.

That said, there's one thing that I've found pretty universally true: you have to really want it. For a while, I floated about without much of a "reason" to stay sober. I don't have a spouse, kids or a job I've been fired from, so I didn't see the point.

It's taken me a while, but after not being "convinced" by a few superficial "reasons" like weight loss and saving money, I thought I needed something more... permanent? Consequential? I now realize that my "reason" for getting sober at a young age after only a few years of alcoholism is that I don't want it to get to a point where I'm hurting other people, drinking myself into multiple lasting health problems... I don't want it to become permanent or consequential.

Anyway, that's my two cents. If you do have something like kids or trouble keeping a job, definitely use that as your reason. But for anyone who's a pretty "functional" alcoholic like I was, "not letting it go on long enough to become disfunctional" is a good enough reason.

This is going to get stupid long, so feel free to walk away now, just glad you read this much and it really does mean the world when people listen to what I have to say.

Now some more things in depth. I'll go in chronological order: what made me get sober, what I took from rehab (and what I left), and how it's been the past few months.

I started drinking when I got kicked out, manic out of my mind and homeless unable to sleep. It took a while until I was able to sleep without alcohol, but by then the addict brain had taken over. I'd tried a few times to get sober myself, but I never made it more than a week without, and always got back to daily drinking after a few months maximum.

Some people need a "wake up call", a "last straw" or a "rock bottom". Something external to make them realize they can't go on as they are. For me, the catalyst was my health, which is more of an internal reason I suppose. I didn't have a heart attack or liver failure, but my anxiety was getting uncontrollable and I knew it was directly tied to my drinking.

My life had been starting to feel tolerable, and I was more financially secure than ever before. Things were looking up... except for the alcoholism. This is a weird analogy but the only one that makes sense to express why, if I was doing so well on paper, I decided to go to rehab: you have to sweep before you mop. If I hadn't been in the place I was, I don't think I would've been successful at rehab. I had to sweep up the cat turds from the floor of my life before I was able to mop up the shit stains with sobriety. I know, I'm a true wordsmith.

When I finally called the hotline that hooked me up with a bunch of different rehabs, I knew I was in for a wait. It was about 5 months from that call to checking in, which isn't too bad considering I've been on the waitlist for a neuropsychiatrist in ALL OF CANADA for 4 years.

That brings us to July 12th, Rehab Day One. I've gone in depth in multiple other posts but to touch on it briefly, if I had to describe my experience in a sentence I'd say "the place I went to got very lucky with me".

What this means is that, of the 5 people in my group, I think this exact program was only ever going to help me. At the same time, I didn't even know what I would need, but this exact program was 90% of it. I didn't think 3 weeks would be long enough, but for me it was. The hours-long, repetitive, basic-ass CBT groups held 5 times a day 7 days a week was absolute torture for everyone but myself. While it was a drag to spend an hour on defining what a cognitive distortion is, the routine and repetition, something I've never gotten out of any outpatient program, helped me to really absorb the information and let it rewire my brain.

I've always said that I'm someone who should be spending an hour a day with a therapist for the rest of my life, and while that's not even remotely feasible, this was as close as it's ever gotten, and it proved me right, because it worked. I've done biweekly therapy for a short time but even that didn't come close to the way my brain changed in those 3 short weeks.

This program required absolute commitment and open-mindedness. This isn't because it was hard work or difficult concepts, but quite the opposite. While I hate the entire concept of art therapy being used as a cure-all for mental illness, I willingly got out of my bed, went downstairs and tried doing a dot mandala for an hour because I'm willing to try anything to get better. A lot of people might think they are, but really aren't. To use the mandala as an example, one guy was really into it, I wasn't, but we both finished. The other 3 tried, messed up a few times, and then scrolled through their phones. When I say this program necessitates complete engagement, that's not a compliment. It shouldn't be a chore to engage with the program. It shouldn't take me actively saying "I know I've known this basic concept since 4th grade, but maybe hearing it again will help" to get something out of a rehab program. So again, in every way, I got lucky, and so did they.

Before I finish with the rehab section, having had a few months to reflect on the whole thing, I now have an endless list of things wrong with it. I arrived, greeted by the most jaded and disillusioned of staff, and quickly became disturbed and at points concerned with just how negligent the staff are.

Maybe it's because I've been on the psych ward where they won't even let you have shoelaces and shine a flashlight on your face every half hour through the night, but it could've been so incredibly easy to sneak in alcohol. I brought 2 full water bottles, fully expecting to have to dump them out upon arrival, but they said "nah it's fine". Is it though?

Then there were actual counsellors there who were... okay. I recall one, the one I thought was the smartest, reading a handout aloud and coming across the word "delve" as in "let's delve into..." and stumbled, then said she doesn't know that word. The room was silent. As she pulled up Google on the screen I said, "it means to dive into it". She Googled it anyway. Synonyms include "dive in". If that was the only example I wouldn't mention it, but this was the first of at least 10 words she had do Google, none past a 10th grade level, from HER OWN MATERIAL. From that point on it became clear that they had no fucking idea what they were doing.

We had one last one-on-one counselling session before we left and the counsellor just filled in boxes to questions on her computer, rephrasing everything I said to fit into the buzzwords and "lessons" we'd "learned". Example. Me: I do think I'm better able to catch myself thinking 'oh I can just have one drink' and say 'no I can't'." Her: "Okay, so would you say that you can recognize negative cognitive distortions like permission-giving thoughts and counter them with a more rational and less emotional mind?" Like girl, blink twice if your boss is holding your family hostage. She gave me some papers, detailing all the online courses they were signing me up for and options for more treatment they'd be sending me, a phone number to call and a phone appointment for the next Monday. I never got that call, the phone number is a hotline, I never got a single email from them, and given how shitty they really are at their jobs, I didn't feel the inclination to try and get those resources. If they even exist in the first place.

In summation, it was a place where it was physically impossible to get alcohol. That's really all I can say in its favor. Oh, and they let you have your cell phone.

Now on our timeline I'm back home. I want to kind of analyze why it's been easy for me.

I often said that my main goal of going to rehab was to lock me away from alcohol long enough for it to reset my brain. Most people thought that was naïve, but that's exactly what happened. But I'm well aware that my experience of "instantly became sober and literally hasn't had a single hard day in 3 months" is absurdly unusual.

I put this down to a few things. Firstly, I'm on seven different meds for my mental health. Almost all of them have their effects dulled or even eliminated when you drink. So when I noticed my mood, fatigue, memory, concentration etc all getting better at once - right about as I left rehab, I don't think it would be a stretch to say that all those meds started working properly.

Secondly, I've been keeping myself busy, but that's something I've always been good at. Now I specifically choose to undertake projects that will eat up a lot my time and put me in a state of flow. I recently made an entire card game from scratch, and let me tell you, I didn't think of alcohol for a week.

Thirdly, my other goals now get in the way of alcohol. I'm getting old and my body is deteriorating. But I've always wanted to do just one last season of gymnastics. Well, I need to lose weight for that to happen. I've already lost 35 pounds, and after another 20 I'll be ready to go. Also, I used to spend more on alcohol per month than rent. Even though I've done a few shopping sprees lately, I haven't come remotely close to how much I was spending before.

I want it more than anything. I want to be sober more than I want one night of "fun" that will more likely than not lead me back to where I was a year ago. I never want to need anything as much as I needed alcohol.

Lastly, just a few more random thoughts.

A lot of people, myself included, worried about the fact that I work at a bar as a cook, but honestly the entire time I'm there I'm thinking about food, not alcohol. If I'm hanging out with some regulars before/after, I can watch them drink and be perfectly fine with my coffee, because the coffee is $2, and I used to spend $20 after every work shift.

I also decided in rehab to start taking better care of myself as best I could. This started with getting my second vax which I'd been putting off, then an eye appointment, then new glasses, then a dentist appointment where I was informed I need to do $3000 worth of work on my implant that's erroding my bone matter, so that sucks, but I caught it early. I've also been meditating every day. In just 3 months, I've made pretty big improvements to my self-care and my daily routine.

One of my fears about sobriety was "missing out" on "having fun". A few days ago, all my housemates got together to play Mario Party, and it was kind of my first night doing something social while sober. It was a breath of fresh air - I wasn't constantly running to piss, I didn't worry about running out of alcohol, I didn't get sloppy and obnoxious as I can sometimes do. I even came very very close to winning my first game of MP. When I reflected on the night, I realized that, if I'd been getting drunk the whole time, I would've sucked at the minigames, been a hindrance to anyone unfortunate enough to be teamed with me, and likely would've stopped caring about the game itself after the first few turns.

Yesterday I was making my 4th pot of coffee of the day when I realized there was a full glass of wine just sitting on the counter. I had absolutely no idea where the hell it came from - nobody in my house drinks wine. I shrugged and poured that sweet sweet bean juice. It was only when I sat down and took a sip of coffee did I find myself thinking automatically, "this tastes so much better than wine". I only realized then that it had been rose wine, the only kind I've ever been able to tolerate. It was the ultimate moment of possible temptation, and the thought of just chugging that glass - as I may've done in the past - didn't even cross my mind.

I'm so glad to be where I am. I'm about to undergo some serious financial changes - i.e. going absolutely broke - but drinking isn't gonna help that, so I'm cautiously optimistic.

Stay Greater, Flamingos.

[livebloggingmydescentintomadness]

I wonder if I have depression . I have zero semf-esteem and some days I struggle heavily with suicidal ideation . I constantly struggle with doing homework and doing chores can be hard . My executive functions are shit . I have very little motivation for anything , even the things I adored as a child / teen and that I still love and even watching Netflix takes too much motivation . I spend most of my free time mindlessly scrolling Tumblr and Instagram . I have no impulse control about food .

sweetheart, i am Officially Diagnosed, and i have absolutely zero doubt in my mind that you have depression. you could be reading out a textbook definition right now. literally everything you just described is 100% major depressive disorder. you have depression.

i say that, repeatedly, in explicit sentences, because i know that depression is a hell of a drug and it just loves to try and convince you that it doesn’t exist. depression’s greatest trick is making you believe you don’t have depression, you’re just a fucking loser who isn’t trying hard enough and you don’t have any real reason to be miserable, everyone else has it worse, why are you being so stupid you should just make it easier for everyone else and kill yourself, and you DEFINITELY shouldn’t tell anyone else about this humiliating secret because they’ll laugh at you and tell you to get over it, which is what you should be doing anyway, you idiot.

all that? that’s depression. it’s not just feeling sad, it’s feeling blank and restless because you can’t find the energy to do anything interesting so you’re bored out of your mind even while you’re numb to pleasure or enjoyment. it’s being angry because you hate living like this and you hate feeling like this but you don’t know how to fix it. it’s reaching for anything that might make you feel good for even a few minutes, like food or drugs or buying things. it’s feeling like your entire life is falling apart and you have no future, but still managing to put on a smile whenever someone asks how you’re doing. it’s laughing even while thinking that you’d be better off dead.

you don’t need to have a “reason” to be depressed; even the person with the “most perfect” life in the world could be depressed, because it’s an illness in your brain, not an emotion or a choice. people with good lives can get cancer, right? you don’t have to justify depression with a “good enough reason” to be unhappy.

you may also be tempted to think it’s not “that bad” or even that you’re faking it, because there are periods where it gets better or even goes away completely. that’s because MDD is often cyclical, and it can come in episodes rather than a continuous level of depression. so if you spend a week unable to get out of bed or shower, then next week you can go back to school almost like normal? that’s not faking it, that’s an episode.

again, i’m trying to explain all of this because i want you to really, genuinely understand that your brain will try to talk you out of believing that your illness is real and that you need or even deserve help. you need professional help for this, because it’s real, and it’s extremely serious. 

wanting to die isn’t normal. thinking about how you’d do it isn’t normal. it’s not normal to find no joy in life and for it to take all of your strength to accomplish even the most basic tasks. and while some lifestyle changes can help, actually being able to make those changes is next to impossible without professional intervention. if you can find the right antidepressant for your brain’s needs, it will lift some of this fog and make things like exercise and eating better actually feasible.

there are a lot of misconceptions about antidepressants, so let me make a couple things clear here: antidepressants are not “happy pills.” if you don’t have depression, antidepressants literally won’t affect you. they work on a very specific biochemical process in the brain that is imbalanced by depression, and once you’re able to properly absorb the neurotransmitters you’re lacking, the depression starts to get better. it’s not instantaneous, it can take a few weeks before you see a change, and you may also have to try a few different medications before you find the one that works for you.

also, antidepressants don’t change or suppress “the real you”. you know what’s changing and suppressing the real you? depression. depression makes you other than who you truly are. antidepressants are a tool that helps you dig out of the hole depression has buried you in and lets you begin to rediscover your real self. 

also, there is literally nothing wrong with needing medication the rest of your life. people without depression are reliant on the exact same chemicals, they just are able to produce their own. if you can’t make your own neurotransmitters, storebought is fine. 

if you go on antidepressants or any other meds for mental illness, do not, under any circumstances, take yourself off of them. if you feel like you’re “better now” and “don’t need them anymore” that’s because they’re fucking working. i will come to your house and i will pee in your shoes if you ever take yourself off your meds without consulting your doctor. do not. ever. do that.

okay, i think that’s the most important information i have to share. i know it’s probably a lot to take in. but the crucial thing here is that you get help from a professional who is able to prescribe you medication, either a psychiatrist or a medical doctor. it may be beneficial to see a therapist or a psychologist, but they can’t prescribe medication. 

if you’re nervous about contacting a professional, please try reading my going to therapy tag and/or my going to the doctor tag for some step-by-step advice. if you don’t think you can afford going to a doctor, please check my therapy resources tag and healthcare tag. if you don’t know how to bring the subject up, my how to talk about it tag may help with that.

i also want you to go through my depression tag, suicide tag, and mental illness resources tag and bookmark them for whenever you need to be reminded that your problems are valid but not hopeless and you need some immediate help.

please, please do not let the illness convince you that you have to keep this a secret. that is depression’s biggest lie. depression loses so much of its power over you the day you decide to talk about it, because that’s the day you realize you aren’t alone and there are so many other people out there who not are not only going through the same thing, they want to help you. 

if you take away just one thing from this fucking long-ass post, please let it be this: talk about it.

[xellshun]

DXM

So here’s a little something I like to talk about from time to time. For starters, I am a sociopath, if you don’t know what that is then look it up if you want because it’s a lot to explain. But let’s just say this means I’m incapable of feeling things like empathy, remorse, guilt, and shame.

So with the fact that I am emotionally and mentally colder than normal people, that doesn’t mean I don’t feel other negative feelings. With that being said I have gone through my fair share of drug and alcohol abuse and over the years there was one drug that just seemed to solve everything that my disorder couldn’t. For some, it’s meth, for others, it’s pain pills, and for some, it’s alcohol. I’ve tried basically everything, I’ve even tried drugs that don’t have names yet. But there was one drug that just stood out from the rest.

The drug has many names and terms associated with it - Tripple C’s, Robo Tripping, The Poor Man’s PCP, and so on... But for me, I stuck with the simple name - DXM.

Before I share my story I do NOT condone the use of this substance and will encourage anyone reading this to steer clear of it. The purpose of this is just to share my story.

I won’t ramble on about when my abuse started or why I began abusing it. This is more focused on the experience itself. SO! DXM stands for dextromethorphan. What is it? Easy, it’s cough medicine. Yeah, childish right? Well for me it didn’t matter and what makes this drug so dangerous is the fact that you can buy it anywhere without a script, it’s extremely cheap, it’s not illegal, and doesn’t show up in drug tests...

I won’t go about giving details about the unique routine I perfected over the years to get high off of this drug because I don’t want anyone reading this to copy it and end up fucking killing themselves or anyone else. Not that I give a shit but I won’t have that coming back on me. I will also not be mentioning dosage amounts, what brands I used, where exactly to get them, or how much this stuff costs. But what I will go into detail about is the high itself, what I felt, and what it was like. And if, for some reason, YOU decide to try this shit. Do it at your own risk. I used my own body as a test rat before I figured out exactly how to achieve my desired high without causing myself or others harm and I’m fucking LUCKY for that...

So let’s begin:

Stage one - The preparation dosage. I would always start out by eating a well balanced meal, making sure I had a means of getting fresh water, accessibility to a bathroom in case I got sick, a way of calling for help if needed, and I always made sure to seclude myself. I would then begin dosing up. Taking so many at a time on a strict schedule over the course of 30 minutes. After that I would wait for the first plateau of the high to take hold. The first stage is pretty mild. The first effects you’ll feel are a mild form of numbness throughout your body, your lips will begin to tingle, your vision will begin to become slightly blurred, and you’ll feel an overall sense of euphoric calmness. Once this stage was finished I would proceed with the next. But This stage was a must. Taking more than what my routine called for too quickly would cause me to get sick which would ruin the high. The goal of this stage was to push my body far enough under the influence that my stomach would then be unable to feel the fact that I was overdosing on a substance it would recognize as poison.

Stage two - The waves of calmness. Over the next hour or so I would slowly begin taking waves of this medicine in quantities that amount to half, equal to, or times 1 and 1/2 as much as the first dosage. How I felt as each wave kicked in would determine how much I would take on the next. This would be enough to take me to a level of intoxication between the second and third plateau of the high in a couple hours with the climax of the high hitting around hour 3. At this level I would feel a physical numbness in my skin equal to what you would feel on a high dose of pain pills. At this stage I would also experience my favorite part, the emotional and mental numbness. It wouldn’t matter how I was feeling before I would get high, it would feel as if every negative feeling inside my heart and mind would just slowly fade. Just imagine in. Imagine that no matter what discomfort you are feeling. This high will make it all go away, leaving you in a state of harmony... Along with that, this is the point where visual and auditory hallucinations begin to kick in. They were never anything scarry, nightmarish, or anything that would cause me to go out and randomly attack someone because I though they were lizard people. No, hallucinations are actually very timid and for me, amusing. I remember a time I was outside at 2am having a smoke, I looked off into the distant fields near the park and track just beyond my yard. And I remember seeing fireworks flying into the air just passed the tree line about 200 yards away. They didn’t look like normal fireworks and there was no sound. If you’ve ever watched the first Lord of The Rings movie where Gandalf is shooting off fireworks in the shire, it was similar to that, they looked like they were alive. A lot of my hallucinations were filled with lights that appeared without a source, they would dance and zip around the room like bugs and would even form the shapes of tiny people who would wave at me. Another common hallucination is what I like to call “sand people.” It’s where I would stare into space and right before my eyes, particles and clumps of colored sand would appear in front of me. They would move around slowly forming all kinds of shapes. If I wanted them to vanish I would just shake my head and let them reappear. So at this point, the high was overall very calming, there was no pain, no fear, no stress, no anxiety, no depression, no sadness... It was just pure... Peace... For each person I imagine the things you see and hear will be different, but these are just examples of the “pros” of the high for me.

Stage three - Beyond the safe zone. As you can probably guess, there is a fourth plateau. This level of the high is where it can become frightening and possibly even life threatening. BUT I’ve gone to and far beyond this level. There were only a handful of times where I considered calling an ambulence but never did. Not because I wanted to die, but because I was in such a messed up state of mind I just said “fuck it.” Anyways, so during these days where I decided to send my soul to a parallel universe I was, thankfully, alone because at this point the side effects become so intense that it’s impossible to hide the fact that you are CLEARLY fucked up on something. During the second and third plateau you’ll start to experience dificulties walking and talking, much like you would with alcohol but it is slightly different. Anyways, at and beyond the fourth plateau these side effects become very strong. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to slowly crawl to the bathroom because I couldn’t walk. Not only do you become very physically impaired but at this point you will begin to loose your grip on reality. The hallucinations will become so powerful that you will experience temporary fits of delirium and psychosis. Yes, I’m serious.. For me it was like having a messed up dream that made no sense but I was wide awake and watching it play before my eyes but I was also inside the dream outside my own body... This made everything very confusing and often times I would also go through moments where my brain would race so fast that I couldn’t focus on anything... Literally. I called this side effect “The Haze.” Things would only get worse too. Slowly I would start to feel my bodily functions just... Turn off... Like I was breathing and alive but only with the most basic functions. I called this stage “Zombie Mode” because it was pretty much a mode where the lights are on upstairs but no ones home. Ready for the frightening side effects? Yeah, haven’t got there yet... Imagine you get your body and mind so far under the influence of this drug that one of your eyes LITERALLY AND ACTUALLY shuts off temporarily. Yes, this is a very real side effect that I have witnessed, temporary fucking blindness... Oh, how about uncontrollable muscle spasms that are so random and strong that it literally feels like invisible people are grabbing you and shaking your limbs? Or how about if every time you try to move, your muscles are so disfunctional that it actually feels like you have dead meat inside of you, just sitting there, weighing you down. Not only this but the hallucinations can, at this point, become nightmarish. For me, I was so used to it that I always just closed my eyes, covered my ears and would tell myself “It’s just the drugs, it’s just the drugs, it’s not real, don’t freak out, just let it wear off!” And I can’t even begin to tell you how confused and delusional you become at this point. At this stage it becomes a battle of mind over matter. So unless your pretty fearless like me, this stage might cause real harm... So yeah, it kind of feels like your body is slowly shutting down and dieing underneath you without the pain or suffering. It’s a side effect called “Ego Death.” The only GOOD part about this stage is that the physical, emotional, and mental numbess are still present and very strong. So a lot of times I was still very unmoved by what was happening to my body. This is a level I do not like to go to because of the negative side effects. The small amount of times that I did reach this point was for one simple reason, I was just too high to know any better before hand and took too much too fast. Oh and guess what else? You can’t have sex on this drug. Men can’t achieve erections, women can’t get wet, and neither can reach orgasm. At least not without the help of other drugs. So don’t plan on fuckin’ while you trip out on this shit... And let’s not forget the come down!... It’s not that bad, haha. There’s no hangover waiting for you after the come down too. The come down is just very slow, you’ll feel your bodily functions start to turn back on, things will become more clear, the feeling in your skin will come back in the form of a tingling feeling, your inner organs will start to become warm (yes you can feel it). You’ll have waves of what feels like...(How do I describe this)... Ever seen the Poltergiest movies? I think it’s one of those... A scene where someone is pulled from the fucking ghost dimension from a portal covered in fucking slime? Yeah, kind of feels like that. I call it the “Rebirth” stage. And yes, you will sweat out layers of the drug. It will be a cold and abnormally thick sweat though... Hence the slime reference. BUT at the end of the road, no hang over, no headaches, no upset stomach, you just... Go back to normal. Often times I go into a deep sleep for 12 hours and wake up feeling at 120%. So I guess you could say the come down could be both negative and positive? Depending on your opinion? For me the come down was very soothing so I never hated it..

So that’s just a glimpse into what I was going through for what was about 4 years. Those four years happening during the development of my disorder, ASPD, as well.

So why did I do it? Besides the fact that it was readily available, cheap, legal, and untraceable.... It was the mental and emotional numbness that I fell in love with... It’s not that the drug was bringing me any one type of feeling... It was the drug taking all my feelings away and allowing an overwhelming sense of peace and calmness over take me. It was my escape from reality. My way out. It was like mentally getting into a rocket ship and just blasting off into space on an adventure in my head. In fact, often times I would simply follow my own rules, get high, sit myself down in front of my TV and play video games. I would get immersed in the games and forget about the struggles of real life...

Oh and just another fair warning for you all. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT EVER mix this shit with ANY other substance, especially alcohol!! I promise you it will end badly, trust me, I would know...

So what the fuck does this have to do with my disorder and the fact that I’m a sociopath? It was just another way of completing myself. I already have a lack of many emotions due to my disorder, so for me, it was finishing myself off. Making myself completely void of any and all emotion.

Do I think this drug had any kind of effect on making my disorder worse?.. It’s possible. But their were many factors that caused my disorder to get worse over the course of the last 7 years since it started to develope. So it’s hard to tell.

Do I think this drug has caused any permanent damage to me in any way? That I’m not so sure about either. I’ve done my own research on this drug and there just isn’t alot of solid information on it because this isn’t a drug that is commonly brought up when you think of individuals suffering from substance abuse. It’s just not up there on the high ranks along side substances like opiates, stimulants, and alcohol.

So what kind of drug is DXM anyways? It’s what’s known as a dissociative anesthetic hallucinogen and is commonly compared to hard drugs such as PCP and Acid. Does this mean when you take cold medicine you could get high on accident? No. At proper dosages cold medicine acts as a cough supressent. You have to overdose greatly in order for it to act as a hallucinogen.

Am I still currently using this drug? Yes, but very rarely. I only use it when I know 100% I can do it safely, without being noticed, without hurting myself or anyone else. And since I am currently on probation with just one month left and also attending counseling... Well let’s just say I keep this shit strictly to myself and do it very secretly. The last thing I want is to end up back in jail. So don’t be concerned, you don’t have to worry about the possibility of a sociopathic guy running around town high off his ass in the middle of the night... Do I want to stop? Yeah of course. Relying on a fucking drug to feel “okay” kind of fucking sucks. Will I stop? I don’t know... Only time will tell...

So.. Is it addictive? Yes and no. Not in the same way that heroin and meth are. You won’t get withdrawal symptoms after coming off of it...

It’s more of an addiction to the “lack there of” when it comes to your emotions and mentality...

It doesn’t give you what you want, it takes away what you don’t want...

And for me, during my darkest hours of life, that is exactly what I crave...

[bravadoseries]

tell us about your braudrey wasteland baby analysis

this ended up being long and angsty i am sorry . if u want i can analyze songs from his other album in a happier way to even it out lol

“nfwmb”: 

“when i first saw you / the end was soon” - audrey and bruce met on the helicarrier and i think when they fought in new york they both knew they might not come out of it.  audrey was inexperienced and way out of her depth, bruce was really against turning back into the hulk again.  

“Give your heart and soul to charity / ‘Cause the rest of you, the best of you / Honey, belongs to me” - they both give parts of themselves away for the greater good and feel most human with each other

“Nothing fucks with my baby / Nothing can get a look in on my baby / Nothing fucks with my baby / Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing” - when hozier wrote this song everyone thought it was about how nothing fucks with his baby because he protects her but he said actually nobody fucks with her because she’s extraordinarily powerful and scary.  i think both of these apply to braudrey—nobody fucks with bruce because audrey protects him, and nobody fucks with the hulk because he’s giant and terrifying 

“moment’s silence (common tongue)” 

“When stunted hand earns place with man by mere monstrosity / Alarms are struck and shore is shook by sheer atrocity / A cure I know that soothes the soul, does so impossibly” - this is related to an upcoming ~chapter~ lol but basically audrey and bruce go on a retreat upstate that’s supposed to give him the opportunity to hulk out and like scare some squirrels in the woods but while they’re there, audrey and the hulk become good friends ? and so that’s why she’s able to reason with bruce when he turns

“almost (sweet music)” 

i would place this one as post aou when audrey thinks bruce is dead.  

“i’m almost me again, she’s almost you” - after a bit, she starts dating again but she’s still very much grieving and hung up on him 

“i wouldn’t know where to start / sweet music playin’ in the dark / be still my foolish heart / don’t ruin this on me” - audrey becomes good friends with wanda and pietro after age of ultron and they haven’t been around long but they ask her to talk about it because she sits in her room playing the same song every day and crying and they’re like … ?

“I got some colour back, she thinks so, too / I laugh like me again, she laughs like you” - i think this is just audrey letting herself be close to people again. it’s not the same but it’s not so lonely

“movement”

“I still watch you when you're groovin’” so this song i think is about like someone dancing and being really seductive and sexy but this reminds me of bruce watching audrey dancing really terribly w tony at every avengers function.  audrey literally cannot dance for shit and it’s endearing to bruce 

“When you move / I can recall somethin' that's gone from me / When you move / Honey, I'm put in awe of somethin' so flawed and free” - i think bruce gets kind of fixated on watching audrey spar and fight; like partially because it’s hot but also because he sees her as very powerful and finds it magnetizing 

“no plan” 

i’m gonna go ahead and place this as ragnarok/infinity war 

“for starts / what a waste to say the heart could feel apart / or feel complete, baby” - audrey and bruce reunite on sakaar and it’s a very emotional scene; it’s a waste to say the heart could feel apart because she knows she’s not less without him but there’s this understanding, this thing that’s been off that’s finally righted when they’re back together

“My heart is thrilled by the still of your hand / That's how I know now that you understand” - this applies to a very specific moment in ragnarok before they go to fight hela where audrey puts her hand over bruce’s and he looks at her and she’s unable to tell him that if they die right now she loves him but he knows anyway

“There's no plan / There's no race to be run / The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun / There's no plan / There's no kingdom to come / I’ll be your man if you got love to get done / Sit in and watch the sunlight fade / Honey, enjoy, it's gettin' late / There's no plan / There's no hand on the rein / As Mack explained, there will be darkness again” - so this is all very apocalyptic and not to flex but i was at a concert and hozier talked about this line and how the whole song was written about the doomsday clock and a time when it was closer to zero than ever; it’s a song about throwing caution into the wind at the end of the world and i think that’s fitting.  there’s a period where audrey realizes that they’re not gonna beat thanos, and that the snap is gonna happen, and she takes a breath and notices everything around her and just thinks about how she’s lucky to have had it at all.  

“nobody”

“You know when it's twelve o'clock in Soho, baby / It's gin o'clock where I'll wake up, I don't know / And I think about you though everywhere I go / And I've done everything and I've been everywhere, you know” - this just reminds me of when audrey is away on missions and bruce is still at the base; she’s been everywhere in the world because she’s been alive for so long and she’s been around for a lot; the one thing she’s most grateful for her lifetime to have coincided with though is bruce 

 “i’ve had no love like your love / from nobody” - this is just them lol they understand each other on another level

“I'd be appalled if I saw you ever try to be a saint / I wouldn't fall for someone I thought couldn't misbehave” - this is audrey 2 bruce … she would be appalled if he ever tried to get rid of the hulk for good; i think that it’s such a significant part of how they see and understand each other 

“If I had the choice between hearing either noise: The excitement of a thousand or the soothing of your voice / At first chance, I'd take the bed warmed by the body” - they just choose each other.  they choose to be with each other.  this reminds me of the “give your heart and soul to charity” line in nfwmb because it’s like if they had to be heroes without each other they wouldn’t be happy 

“as it was” 

there’s a conversation bruce and audrey have at the safehouse in age of ultron where bruce is saying he doesn’t feel the same since wanda fucked with his head bc of the vision he had, and he’s worried abt whether or not audrey can continue to care for him when the chaos the hulk created wasn’t for any good or if she’s changed her mind and she has to assure him that she hasn’t; there are a lot of lines from this song that remind me of that

-“whatever’s here that’s left of me / is yours just as it was”

-“Just as it was, baby / Before the otherness came / And I knew its name / The drug, the dark, / The light, the flame” 

-“its holds had the fight of my baby / and the lights were s bright as my baby / but your love was unmoved”

-“the sights were as stark as my baby / and the cold cut as sharp as my baby / and the nights were as dark as my baby / half as beautiful, too” (unrelated sidenote but this line gives me chills always)

then the second verse of this reminds me of audrey and bruce in ragnarok: 

“Tell me if somehow Some of it remains How long you would wait for me How long I've been away The shape that I'm in now Your shape in the doorway Make your good love known to me Or just tell me about your day”

“shrike” 

so audrey has a really really hard time saying i love you after bruce leaves at the end of aou, to anyone—she says it to steve maybe once, but she can’t say it besides that one time, and it’s part of why she’s so torn up about peggy dying because she didn’t tell her she loved her enough in the months leading up to her death.  

but also, when bruce comes back, audrey still can’t muster up the ability to say them out loud, and so at the end of infinity war, she’s left without telling any of the people she loves that she loves them.  when she comes back in endgame, she’s able to overcome that to tell them.  this song reminds me of that 

“I couldn't utter my love when it counted / Ah, but I'm singing like a bird 'bout it now” - this is when she comes back

“The words hung above / But never would form / Like a cry at the final breath that is drawn / Remember me love when I'm reborn / As the shrike to your sharp / And glorious thorn” - this is both; she couldn’t say it, but she’s “reborn” during endgame and she realizes that the worst has already happened countless times; there’s nothing else to be afraid of that she hasn’t survived

“Then when I met you, my virtues uncounted / All of my goodness is going with you now” - this is just audrey when bruce leaves

“talk” 

ok this entire song is just both audrey and bruce when they like each other but don’t wanna say anything about it.  

I'd be the voice that urged Orpheus When her body was found Hey yeah I'd be the choiceless hope in grief That drove him underground Hey yeah I'd be the dreadful need in the devotee That made him turn around Hey yeah And I'd be the immediate forgiveness In Eurydice Imagine being loved by me

I won't deny I've got in my mind now (Hey, yeah) All the things I would do So I try to talk refined For fear that you find out (Hey, yeah) How I'm imagining you

I'd be the last shred of truth In the lost myth of true love Hey yeah I'd be the sweet feeling of release Mankind now dreams of Hey yeah That's found in the last witness before the wave hits Marvelling at God Hey yeah Before he feels alone one final time And marries the sea Imagine being loved by me

“dinner & diatribes” 

i think…..this doesn’t match up exactly but the new year’s eve chapter…..Yeah

“Let there be damage ensued and tabloid news / And that kind of love / That's the kinda love / I’ve been dreaming of”

“would that i” 

okay buckle up this one is a lot

“True that love in withdrawal was the weeping of me / That the sound of the saw must be known by the tree / Must be felled for to fight the cold / I fretted fire but that was long ago” ok this i think is bruce’s perspective; love in withdrawal was the weeping of me = the isolation he put himself in following becoming the hulk was a very bad spot for him even though it was safest.  the sound of the saw must be known by the tree = gotta risk it for the biscuit! must be felled for to fight the cold / i fretted fire but that was long ago = i used to be afraid but now i’m not; it’s worth the risk 

“Oh, but you're good to me / Oh, you're good to me / Oh, but you're good to me, baby” bruce is just continually confused and surprised by the fact that audrey isn’t scared of him 

“With each love I cut loose I was never the same / Watching still living roots be consumed by the flame / I was fixed on your hand of gold / Laying waste to my loving long ago” 

-with each love i cut loose i was never the same = bruce has cut off everyone he’s been close to since the hulk happened and he’s not the same when he’s alone; he thinks he can make it by himself and he probably can but he doesn’t have to

-i was fixed on your hand of gold / laying waste to my loving long ago = this is actually nice bc the gold imagery specifically matches up with what audrey’s powers are, and so there’s that connection to be made 

“And it's not tonight / Where I'm set alight / And I blink in sight / Your blinding light” this also just matches up really nicely w audrey’s powers lol

“sunlight” 

“I had been lost to you, sunlight / And flew like a moth to you, sunlight / Oh your love is sunlight” i think this would be bruce after age of ultron ? he’s been lost to audrey, but when he sees her he gravitates back toward her immediately; he sees her love as sunlight

“the tale is the same / told before and told again /  soul that's born in cold and rain / knows sunlight, sunlight, sunlight” - bruce is the soul that’s born in cold and rain and audrey is sunlight

“Each day you rise with me / Know that I would gladly be / The Icarus to your certainty” - i think he’s just devoted to her 

“wasteland, baby” 

okay going line by line for this one lol buckle up!

“All the fear and fire of the end of the world / Happens each time a boy falls in love with a girl” - when they’re fighting thanos audrey is actually reminded of bruce; how losing him felt like the world ending, now it’s for real

“Happens great, happens sweet / Happily, I'm unfazed here, too” - when audrey goes at the end of infinity war, she goes smiling 

“Wasteland, baby / I’m in love, I'm in love with you” - they just love each other

“All the things yet to come are the things that have passed / Like the holding of hands, like the breaking of glass / Like the bonfire that burns / That all words in the fight fell to” - everything that has happened has led them to this moment; loki, ultron, hydra, etc. without that they wouldn’t have each other, but they also probably wouldn’t be dealing with this mess.  it’s not good or bad, it’s just the way things went.  

“Wasteland, baby / I’m in love, I'm in love with you”

“And I love too, that love soon might end / Be known in its aching / Shown in the shaking / Lately of my wasteland, baby” - they know it’s over before it’s over; they can tell what’s going to happen before it happens, and they’re just paralyzed in that moment 

“Be still, my indelible friend, you are unbreaking / Though quaking, though crazy / That's just wasteland, baby” - when audrey goes bruce pleads with her to stay

“And that day that we'll watch the death of the sun / To the cloud and the cold and those jeans you have on / And you'll gaze unafraid as they sob from the city roofs” - in the years after the snap, bruce has the most vivid dream almost every night where audrey’s . like . ghost comes to him and takes him to the top of a hill and they watch the world end around them.  it’s terrible and every time he wakes up he misses it.  

“When the stench of the sea and the absence of green” - ok lol this just reminds me of how the hulk wouldn’t come fight at the end of infinity war 

“Are the death of all things that are seen and unseen / Are an end but the start of all things that are left to do” - the world ends; half of everything is dead; but they’re still left.  bruce and steve and everyone have to go on living still.  

“Wasteland, baby / I'm in love, I'm in love with you / (That's it)” - this abruptness just reminds me a lot of the snap; that’s it.  there’s no going back.  

[thesublemon]

songs of impotence and experience

In the last couple years, I’ve revisited a lot of the things that were meaningful to me when I was younger. I’m not exactly sure why I did that. Some nostalgia. Some curiosity about whether they held up. Some sense that maybe I could get some insight into myself. Why did I love the things I loved at a time when my id was more unfiltered? What did the younger version of myself need art about that maybe the adult version doesn’t?

A lot of the works are superficially goofy genre shit, but space ships, aliens and made-up words never really felt like it was what I loved about them. My taste was just as indiscriminate as a kid as it is now, which meant I read and watched and liked a wide variety of things. Proper literary things, even. I don’t think it’s an accident that I often connect(ed) with superficially goofy genre shit. Just like I don’t think it’s an accident that a different person might connect with musicals or period movies. But that’s an aspect of my personality to analyze another time.

No, what I realized was that all of these space-and-aliens-stories…on some level, were impotence stories. They’re stories about being manipulated by outside forces, or having shit stuck in you against your will. Stories about parasites. Stories about going insane. And while those might sound like “intense” themes for a child or teenager to be preoccupied with (as if children and teenagers don’t feel things intensely), I realized that it actually made complete and utter sense. When you’re young it feels like things are constantly just happening to you. Adults make decisions for you. Society makes demands of you. It’s hard to know what power you even have, let alone how to use it. Of course I’d relate to impotence.

I remember being obsessed with Ender’s Game. I don’t even know how many times I read it between the ages of 8 and 12. There was something in me that identified with being a pawn in an adult’s world, where your intelligence or your allegiance could be used to fight their wars and you’d have no control over it, no understanding of it. This sense that you were hurting others by proxy, fighting the wrong fights, because you didn’t understand how your power was being used. But that you had power. The feeling that if you were smart and special enough to be wanted, or to know that something was up, then you should have been smart enough to change the game.

Of course there’s arrogance in believing that you, a child, are so important that all of these adults want things from you. Arrogance in looking at a 6 year old military genius and going that speaks to me. But the truth is, adults do want things from children, even “unremarkable” children. They might want a child’s validation, obedience, affection, loyalty or even something as simple and benign as happiness. Being an unhappy child when you know your parents just want you to be all right? What a feeling of failure.

There was a sense that all of these adults—including but not limited to my parents—were invested in religion, or politics, or personal narratives, or some view of the world, and I had the power to reinforce it. I could grow up to be a good exemplar of their ideological beliefs, I could give them the feeling that I admired or needed them, I could pay them attention, I could tell them I believed them. But I couldn’t know whether doing those things was what I actually wanted. I couldn’t know if twenty years down the line I’d be yearning for an enemy’s forgiveness, and speaking for the dead.

*

Fast-forward to Farscape. Farscape is about a character who looks like he should be the hero. A character who knows the same hero stories we know, and thinks he should live up to them. But then the narrative makes him alien, and incompetent, and strips him of his every bit of cultural context and familiarity. In a narrative sense, it “feminizes” him. People want things from John Crichton, and it never has anything to do with him as a person (“Don’t be jealous Frau Blücher. He only loves me for my mind.”). Everyone is always hijacking his body and putting things into it. Microbes, needles, knowledge, chips. He spends most of the show with the villain literally living inside his head. An inescapable, macabre companion that aggressively dresses himself in the drag of Crichton’s psyche.

Language is a constant motif in Farscape, because language is how you communicate yourself. If you lack language, you’re impotent. You’re alien. It’s no coincidence that Crichton’s first moment of alien-ation is that he’s injected with translator microbes. It’s no coincidence that A Human Reaction flips repeatedly between how the alien characters sound to humans, and how they sound to Crichton. It’s no coincidence that the final horror of Die Me Dichotomy is that Crichton loses his power of speech. It’s no coincidence that Aeryn starts learning English, and Crichton starts quipping in Spanish. It’s no coincidence that Crichton starts the show speaking in incomprehensible human cultural references to aliens and ends up speaking in incomprehensible alien references to humans (“Fred Scarran. From the Gainesville Scarrans.”).

And not to be unbearably personal, but as a teenage girl who was going deaf, I responded to all of that. On a basic, physical level I felt like I was losing my ability to understand people, and by virtue of not understanding, becoming unable to make myself understood. A feeling of standing outside myself and watching myself become an alien. A feeling of invasion because I could no longer exist without technological augmentation. But there was also a gendered level. Being a girl and feeling like the world’s reaction to my physical form suddenly had consequences that it was up to me to either mitigate or capitalize upon. That sexuality was suddenly something I was supposed to be able to wield, and I had no idea how. This feeling that my body was betraying me both functionally and as my means of mediating between my Self and the world. In other words, a feeling that biology and social narratives were conspiring, like the universe in Farscape, to “feminize” me.

There was a cultural level too. I was aware of being in this American social moment that seemed grotesquely material and political. So are all moments in their own way, but I didn’t know that then. All I knew was that all these people cared about PT Cruisers and Super Size Me and Idiocracy and The Simple Life and Fahrenheit 911 and freedom fries and cartoons of Bush as a monkey. All these adults were begging for me to take a side about these things that felt stupid and ugly and profane. And none their interest in my side-taking had anything to do with me, anyway.

So at that time I wanted a hero’s journey that wasn’t a hero’s journey. I wanted a story about saying “fuck you” to the forces of the universe that were clutching at my hems and driving me insane, and going off to live as an alien and eking what joy I could from it. A story about saying “no” to the two equally evil sides of any evil, pointless war. I wanted a story about how maybe that made you a monster, or maybe that was a heroic thing to do. Maybe there was something horrible about it, but maybe there was something wonderful in it too.

*

Rewind to Animorphs. The whole concept of a Yeerk in your head using your body and speaking out your mouth. If my attraction to Ender’s Game was in part about the fear that adults and institutions were hijacking my abilities, then Animorphs was about the fear that the adults themselves were hijacked. There’s real horror in the idea that your mom isn’t your mom and your friends aren’t your friends, but prisoners trapped in their own minds, being piloted by an outside force. The fear that you’d have to re-interpret your every interaction with the people you admired or cared about, looking for ulterior motives. The feeling that say, your parent isn’t speaking their own beliefs, but rather acting as a mouthpiece for their country or their neuroses or an ad on TV.

One might rightfully observe, well isn’t that just They Live or Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Rhinoceros for kids? Yes, in part. But there’s the additional, crucial fact that these Yeerks only steal people’s bodies because they’re planet-bound slugs otherwise. The Yeerks aren’t an impersonal disease, and Controllers aren’t mindless zombies. The Yeerks are Pilots, just wanting to see the stars. Pilots that didn’t wait meekly for a Leviathan to take them or a PK to tempt them, but went and conquered an empire’s worth of sentient creatures themselves. Pilots we’re primed to see as disgusting instead of pitiable or majestic because they’re just slimy little slugs, right? The Yeerks are the antagonists because they’re the idea that powerlessness begets powerlessness. They’re the idea that you may feel impotent, but growing up to control others just makes you the villain.

It makes sense that the Animorphs are shapeshifters, and young, not just because whatever, these are technically books for children and turning into animals sounds cool. I like to imagine there’s some symbolism about flexibility there. It reminds me of His Dark Materials and the way that a child’s daemon has no settled form. An impossible circumstance? You morph. You don’t take and conquer; you change.

(I’m not reading too much into things when I say that. The books draw parallels between the Yeerks and the Animorphs from the very beginning. Marco pointing out in #1 The Invasion that Tobias wants to escape his life as badly as a voluntary Controller does. Cassie worrying in #4 The Message that they dominate the animals they morph the way the Yeerks dominate their hosts. Later in #16 The Warning they’ll debate the morality of morphing people. “Controlling” versus “morphing” is one of the most central dichotomies of Animorphs, one the Animorphs themselves do not always land on the right side of.)

Disability themes are rampant. Everyone is trapped: Tobias as a hawk, Ax on Earth, hosts in their heads, Yeerks in their pools, the Animorphs in their war. To say nothing of the times the books get explicit about it, like the Andalite taboos around vecols or that final arc when they give the ward of disabled kids the morphing power. And the question every time is, which of two non-ideal options for dealing with some limitation are you going to take? Do you live as a hawk, or do you give up? When the Animorphs give the Auxiliaries the morphing power, it isn’t a triumphant moment. They do it so the kids can fight, like the Animorphs themselves had to. They do it knowing that the kids will die.

That sort of thing was the appeal of Animorphs. They were exciting, funny, imaginative page-turners, sure. But half of the reason they were page-turners was because they centered these terrible ethical quandaries, and devastating emotional choices. That’s the kind of thing that makes you pay attention in fiction: situations where you don’t know the way out, so you don’t know what will happen. The same way you don’t know what will happen once you realize that the adults can’t be trusted, or your life isn’t entirely your own.

*

Here are some things I think are interesting.

I think it’s interesting that both the morphing power in Animorphs and Leviathans in Farscape are the things those works treat as something that can be profaned. Morphing may be described in gruesome, body horrific detail, but nonetheless an animal’s power is treated as something to be respected and used to fight. So David abusing morphing is profane. Visser Three morphing is profane. Similarly, forcing Moya to give birth to a gunship is profane. Cutting Pilot’s arms off is profane. The clones eating the walls of the ship in Eat Me is profane. And both of those, morphing and Moya, are symbols of transformation. Morphing in the obvious sense, and Moya in the sense of a guardian or shepherd or mother. The sacred instrument of your journey.

I think it’s interesting that the protagonists of all three stories change, but not necessarily for the better.

I think it’s interesting that all three stories involve loving and understanding the Other. Both Farscape and Animorphs are full of important interspecies relationships: Tobias and Rachel, Elfangor and Loren, Dak and Aldrea (it’s potentially relevant that Jake and Cassie are an interracial relationship too), or John and Aeryn, D’argo and Chiana (and Lolaan), Zhaan and Stark, Scorpius and Sikozu. Both Animorphs and Ender’s Game involve the protagonists—and the audience, by extension—learning “humanizing” things about the aliens that they’re fighting against. Aliens that have forms that they are not inclined to empathize with.

I think it’s interesting that Animorphs has a lot of the same parasitism versus symbiosis themes that Farscape does, but takes them in a direction that has less to do with sex and breeding (because as unbelievably dark as Animorphs gets they’re still books for kids) and more to do with authority. Where Farscape is full of half-breeds and genetic atrocities, Animorphs is full of gods and Galateas. In Farscape, parasitism versus symbiosis is about becoming alien in a positive way, or a self-directed way, versus being forced into alienation. Loving the Other versus being made Other. Birth imagery versus rape imagery. Whereas in Animorphs parasitism versus symbiosis is about control versus autonomy. How are people supposed to satisfy their competing desires without taking away other people’s agency? How much power should authorities have over the people they’re responsible for (and responsible to)?

#26 The Attack was always one of my favorite Animorphs books because of the way it drew parallels between all of these pseudo-children and their creators. The Pemalites made the Chee, Crayak made the Howlers, and Elfangor “made” the Animorphs. Then those children duke it out for the souls of the Iskoorts and the Yeerks. A literal war of symbiosis versus parasitism. The existence of the Pemalites and the Chee might lead one to think that creating children in your desired image is reasonable and ethical, because we all love dogs don’t we? And then you meet the Howlers, who are simultaneously pure innocents and terrifying killers. Creatures that think of killing as play, as a game of fetch, because that’s what they were made to be. The Howlers are dogs too. You realize that the Animorphs are their own kind of created beings. They were given powers to fight a war for someone else.

In other words, if you look at it a certain way, all of these children have been co-opted and controlled as much as Yeerks co-opt and control their hosts. Animorphs is deeply anti-war. And one of the main ways it’s anti-war is by painting war as something essentially parasitic. Something that chews people up. Something that traumatizes its protagonists from the word go. Something that forces you to make awful moral choices. Something that only happens when competing forces can’t resolve their needs in any other way. War is parasitic and parasitism leads to war.

I think it’s interesting that all of these stories involve war, and none of them are fond of it. They each question and deconstruct the genre of war story that they seem to belong to. Instead of telling a militaristic scifi story about crushing alien Others, and being led by nigh-mythological generals, Ender’s Game tells a militaristic scifi story about child soldiers, bureaucracy, misunderstanding the Other, and how although true genius and leadership exists, it can rarely outsmart the military apparatus that controls it. Instead of telling a campy Power Rangers tale about the wonders of friendship, Animorphs was intended, by the author’s own admission, to be a “grunts-eyed view” of combat that showed the “honest cost” of war. A group of guerrilla soldiers may form bonds and accomplish remarkable things, but their story will not end with medals or Ewok revelry. Instead of telling a utopic Star Trek story where humans are powerful and advanced and have near-imperial influence, Farscape tells a story about how humans are weak and clannish, and advanced imperial powers wage wars based on nothing better than conquest or mercenary interest. Crichton becomes a kind of warrior to defend himself, but he never becomes a soldier. He leads no armies or rebellions. He is nothing more than a bargaining chip in other people’s conflicts. The protagonists of all three stories wrestle with the guilt of having had to kill their enemies on a massive scale, and innocents along with them.

I think it’s interesting how embodied these stories are. There was something novel and arresting to my young brain, reading Peter’s jokes about pubic hair, or the descriptions of Ender smashing a boy’s nose. The feeling of a monitor in your neck, gravity and anti-gravity, the grappling shower fight. It feels uncomfortable and deliberate that these children are described in the “gross”, physical way that adults in boot-camp war stories normally are. There was something mesmerizing about all those descriptions of morphing. Every book there’d be paragraphs on paragraphs about teeth rearranging, legs sprouting, eyes popping, bones liquefying. Descriptions of the hunger and fear (and sometimes delight) of animals. Descriptions of horrifying battle wounds. Limbs removed, intestines spilling out, being eaten alive by ants. There was something affirming in how sexual, and how disgusting Farscape was. That even the puppets got horny, and John and Aeryn kissed like they meant it. That people ate and farted and were full of goo.

Change, symbiosis, bodies, war. I’m not going to overreach and claim that those themes necessarily go hand-in-hand with impotence, or that these three stories I happened to love indicate anything other than that they’re kind of story I happened to love. I recognize that I’ve glossed over potential interpretations or criticisms of these stories in order to draw the parallels that interest me. But I do think that war, i.e. super-personal conflict, and bodies are two of the most fundamental ways that power and selfhood get taken away. You lose yourself when you sign your will over to forces bigger than you, and you lose yourself when you die. Bodies are inextricable from mortality, and are a kind of shorthand for every natural circumstance you can’t control. Whereas change and symbiosis are the hopeful alternatives. Symbiosis means merging with something other, even bigger, than you, but in an inherently mutually beneficial way. You don’t get lost, because it wouldn’t be symbiosis if your needs weren’t being met, but you do become “more.” Change, in turn, implies agency. Nature and circumstance may transform you—transform you to the point of death—but you can also transform yourself. Change is a neutral force that anyone can potentially wield.

*

I don’t know that I need those stories anymore. I still love them, still find them meaningful (in fact I re-read some Animorphs to write this and I was taken aback by just how much I still honestly loved it). But I don’t recognize myself in them in quite the same way. Precisely, I think, because I do have power now. Not a lot. But I have a sense of what I’m good at, and what I can control. I dress how I like, think about what I like, talk to who I like. Having a body is a still a crock of shit, but that isn’t new information anymore. None of the ways I lack control over my life are new information anymore. And so there is less of a need to process the horror of it via fiction.

It was interesting rewatching Buffy, because Buffy was never something that I identified with when I was younger, despite the fact that it was a show about a teenage girl. Possibly because fundamentally, Buffy is a story about empowerment. Buffy has power. That’s the key thing about her. It’s true that like the characters in the other stories, she has been conscripted into a supernatural war against her will. She struggles with her agency, and is increasingly traumatized by the choices she has to make. But she wins. That is the point of her. She’s a classical hero. Her heroism is moving and satisfying because it’s never emotionally easy. It’s earned. But it’s still heroism.

So I was surprised that as an adult, I found myself relating to it. You might look at a season like season six, and think that that’s an impotence story, because a lot of it is about depression and when one is depressed one certainly feels impotent. But I see it more as a story about having agency and not knowing what the hell to do with it. The terror of “you have to make your own decisions now.” And most of the seasons are like that. They involve Buffy accepting some aspect of her power and growing up about it.

I notice a number of the stories I’ve been drawn to in my 20’s have had themes like that. I’ve found myself lingering on stories about women, and stories about confronting one’s agency. As a teenager, I loved Slings and Arrows, because Geoffrey Tennant was yet another character buffeted by outside forces (Art and Social Constraints On Art), with his own, art-related Harvey. But as an adult I was excited by Cayce Pollard instead. Someone who on the one hand is practically crippled by her responses to aesthetic stimuli, but on the other hand (a) uses this to practical effect, and (b) actually spends time examining to what extent her responses are disordered. I was similarly excited by Clarice Starling learning to pursue her taste in Hannibal.

It’s a weird shift, to realize you’re not powerless. It’s not necessarily a pleasant shift. It’s why I’ve never been compelled by empowerment stories that treat it as a triumphant, unambiguously positive thing. Stories that conflate having power with having the judgement or moral authority to use that power well. With great power comes great responsibility, but how do you know what the responsible thing to do even is? If you’re empowered by a story, all it really means is that it made you feel confident enough to make your own mistakes (or not-mistakes, of course) instead of someone else’s. Which can be quite a good and exciting thing. But it also means that if things go badly, it’s no-one’s fault but your own.

So I find that the stories about power that are most satisfying to me are actually stories about things like truth, judgment, and perseverance. Stories about solving problems. Stories about making decisions. Stories about fucking up and carrying on afterwards. Stories that treat self-possession as the hard work that it is.

*

I’m curious about what comes afterwards. Already I find myself itching for a new kind of story, but I’m not sure what. Maybe I’ll go back to needing the horror of powerlessness. Maybe I’ll find religion (the wonder of powerlessness). Maybe I’ll go full nihilism, or full hedonism. When I look at the next fifteen years of my life, I see work, but what stories does one need for that? Stories that explore the ideas that you want to explore yourself? It feels open-ended, in a way. For all that I’ve done all this talk about relating to stories, I’ve never actually explicitly gone looking for stories to relate to and identify with. That’s why I wrote this, really. It’s easy to see why I (or anyone) would be drawn to stories about people who looked me, or had the same experiences as me; less easy to see the deeper, more abstract concerns that speak to what one is preoccupied with. But even given that I’ve never had a very identitarian approach to art, I find myself caring less about relatability than ever. And maybe that’s a phase of development too. The phase at which you don’t so much need to process yourself as focus yourself. The phase at which your ego is secure enough that you can let your ego go, and be curious about other things. 

[thenightnurse]

Understanding Diabetes

Let’s discus diabetes. More than 30 million Americans have diabetes, and yet most people don’t understand just how serious of a disease it is, or how it exactly works.

Before we begin, let’s clarify that there are many different types if diabetes, from Type 1, Type 2, Gestational Diabetes, prediabetes, and much more. I’ll talk about them later.

Anatomy

Let’s take a look at a few key players; The pancreas, the liver, the kidneys, your blood cells, and well, the rest of your cells lol. Insulin, glucose, ADH hormone. The stomach (breaks down and absorbs food), your muscles (stores and uses glucose) 

Physiology

Okay so all foods, once they are broken down, are only one of three things, a carbohydrate molecule, a fat molecule, or a protein molecule. Glucose is a type of carb, a very simple one, and it’s what your body turns all carbs into.

Even though I said glucose is a simple carb (one of the smallest), its still really big, in fact its too large to be absorbed into most cells, like your skeletal muscles (aka most all of the muscles you think of), your fat cells, and your cardiac muscles (your heart). Glucose can however be absorbed by your brain, pancreas, and liver. 

So after you eat some carbs, its broken down into glucose. This glucose is now chilling in your blood stream until its taken up into your liver and pancreas. The pancreas realizes that theres a good amount of sugar in the bloodstream and it releases insulin, which allows your muscles and fat cells to use that glucose. Now here’s the part that I personally hate because no one ever explains how insulin lets your body use glucose other than “it works like a key”, but to be fair it doesn’t actually help you to know how, so skip this part if you don’t care to know. 

[Ight nerds, so remember how I said earlier that glucose is literally too big to just squeeze into the cells? Well then you must be wondering how does it? Good question. So inside your cells you have these things called hexose transporters, which are some cool yet boring membrane proteins. For the most part they kind of just chill in cytoplasmic vesicles, doing nothing and floating within a cell, but when insulin comes and binds to receptors on the outside of the cell, it basically summons all of the hexose transporters, to which they then join together like a fucking mech from power rangers and attach to the surface of the cell, creating enough space to allow them to be channeled through via facilitated diffusion, which is like passive diffusion (high to low), but through a channel/passageway. When the insulin goes away, voltron disassembles and glucose can no longer just float into the cell. Dope shit.]

Diabetes Pathophysiology 

Let’s first discuss type 2 diabetes, since it is the most common type. 90-95% of people with diabetes have this type. At the end of the day, the cause of type two diabetes is Ineffective Insulin use.

Now, what does that mean? Well, it might mean that the body isn’t producing enough insulin, or that the body’s cells aren’t responding to insulin. I’ll give a few examples to help explain.

Let’s say that you wake up and eat a large breakfast of sugary ass cereal and drink a lot of juice. On the way to school or work you have a bar of what is basically sugar, and a cup of coffee. Which is in reality (if you are like me at least), is just liquid sugar and caffeine. For lunch you go and decide to eat a sandwich, which, while it might not be bad, still does have carbs which turn into sugar. You then proceed to have another cup of coffee or soda or something high in sugar. You later have a candy bar as a way of congratulating yourself for getting through the work/school day (honestly, fucking mood, same. lmao) and then for dinner you eat some pasta (again, not innately bad, but because you already had so many carbs it’ll just fuck you up). You also drink some high sugar liquids because you like the taste of it. Then you have another snack before bed. Probably high in sugar. 

Well you remember how I previously said that insulin is released by your pancreas when blood sugar levels are high? Yeah well that shit is going to always be fucking high with a diet like that. Eventually the insulin receptors that are just chilling on your cells become fatigued and no longer respond to insulin because they’re just so done with it. Well the pancreas freaks out and decides to release even more insulin to try to compensate, but it will never be able to keep up, but it keeps trying and trying.

That’s basically how type 2 diabetes goes for the majority of people. Now for type 1.

So type 1 diabetes is a lot more rare. Less than 10% of people with diabetes have it. Type 1 diabetes is when your body’s immune system (the thing responsible for fighting infections) decides to attack the cells of the pancreas instead. It’s funny how the things meant to keep us safe can often times hurt us the worst. Ouch. Anyways, the scientific and medical community still aren’t sure what causes the immune system to do so. Some believe it’s due to genes, others believe its caused by viruses, or other environmental factors. More research is coming out every day. Really dope stuff. I guarantee you that the first person to discover the cause will not only quickly become incredibly rich (fuck the bourgeoise though) but will also win the Nobel Peace Prize that year. 

Well since the pancreas is no longer functioning, your body is unable to actually use any of the carbs you eat, and since your body kind of needs glucose to live and do anything, you quickly waste away. Before the invention of insulin in 1921, the average life expectancy for someone with type 1 diabetes was only 3 years. Imagine being a parent and bearing a child that quickly just died at 3 years old for reasons you didn’t understand. Terrifying and tragic. 

Most people with type 1 diabetes get diagnosed at the age of 14. There are some very telltale signs. So because the cells are unable to actually use the glucose, it kind of just sits in the bloodstream. This puts you at an incredibly high risk for infections, since bacteria will gladly use that sugar and grow rapidly in the bloodstream. Well because of concentration gradients (dude nature really loves conserving energy, I’ll write about it later), the water from within cells decide to leave the cell and enter the bloodstream, to balance out the concentration gradient of the high amount of molecules in the blood. Well on top of that the body really wants to get rid of the high sugar in the blood so it decides to urinate a lot to get rid of it, causing polyuria (poly meaning a lot, and uria meaning piss. So you piss a lot.) 

So in your body your kidneys are whats responsible for creating urine, and then it sends it off to the bladder to be stored till you piss it out. Well it works by filtering your blood and then getting rid of stuff it doesn’t need, like sugar, urea (which is the main part of urine, so your body uses proteins a lot, and when proteins are broken down you are left with nitrogen. Well this nitrogen when combined with carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, create urea. Which isn’t healthy for you. That’s why you piss it out ), and toxins like ammonia. Among other stuff.

Normally your kidneys reabsorb the sugars and put it back into your bloodstream, but because you have so much sugar in your blood it’s unable to and instead the glucose goes to your urine. This is why they test your urine for sugar, and why diabetic patients can have urine that smells sweet. In fact old timey ass doctors would even taste your piss because if it was sweet you probably had diabetes. Well due to concentration gradients and your body naturally wanted to go to equilibrium, more water from your cells and body goes to join that urine. Because you are urinating so much, aka polyuria, you become really thirsty since you have no more liquid in your body. Like incredibly thirsty. We call this polydipsia. It’s almost an insatiable thirst. 

Well remember how I said your cells are unable to absorb sugar? Well your cells don’t like this and so it tells your brain to become hungry, to make you eat more, so that it can get sugar. But because you are unable to use the sugar no matter what, you stay hungry and continue to starve. This intense hunger is called polyphagia. (poly means a lot, phagia means eating.)

These three form the trinity of signs of diabetes. Polydipsia, Polyuria, and Polyphagua.

There is a fourth sign however. Diabetic Ketoacidosis. 

So a question you might have is how do people manage to live for so long if they aren’t able to process sugar? Good question. 

They process fats instead.

Okay so this isn’t innately bad. Yay, your body is burning fat, not too bad right? Well. Because someone with DM1 (diabetes mellitus type 1) can only process fats and no carbs, they quickly build up the amount of ketones (whats left when your body processes fats for energy) in the blood, and since ketones are a bit acidic, when they are present en masse they are able to change the pH of your blood. 

Other bad things that can happen due to DM1 and Ketoacidosis include having your electrolytes thrown out of wack due to them being urinated out, and with enough potassium gone you can have irregular heart rhythms which is never good. Lets see, due to severe dehydration your kidneys can decide to give up causing kidney failure. Because your body no longer gets rid of waste you can get really sick, and I don’t want to go into depth on that, but just think of all the troubles that can occur in your own house if you never threw out the trash. Tough shit. This is why so many patients with diabetes end up having to go to dialysis. Since they can’t filter their blood, a machine will have to. On top of this, because your fluid levels get thrown out of wack, fluids can actually build up in your lungs which makes it really difficult to breathe, as you can imagine. Basically it all just sucks.

Treatment

So treatment for type 1 diabetes is pretty straight forward, everytime you eat, wake up, go to bed, or feel terrible, you pretty much have to prick your finger, check your blood sugar levels, then give yourself a shot of insulin to compensate and everything works out. It’s very annoying, but something you ultimately have to just live with. And if you live in America then it is incredibly expensive and good luck fam.

For type two diabetics treatments a bit different. For a good amount of people, most people actually, if they were to just have a proper diet, eat less sugars and carbs, and just exercise daily, they would be fine and would be able to go about their days without worrying about diabetes. But this is the modern age we’re talking about and people are lazy sacks of shits and are unwilling to do the bare fucking minimum to ensure they have a good life and so instead we’ve developed a lot of drugs to compensate.

 Different drugs do different things. Heres what the main ones do:

Biguanides like metformin or glucophage combat insulin resistance and they decrease hepatic glucose production.

Sulfonylureas work by increasing insulin production from the pancreas.

Meglitinides increase insulin production from the pancreas as well, but these are absorbed much quicker than sulfonylureas which means that they are a lot less likely to cause hypoglycemia.

alpha glucpsidase inhibitors work by decreasing the absorption of carbs in the small intestine.

Theres more drugs but honestly I’ve spent more than 2 hours writing this already and I have to be at the hospital at 6 in the morning and I just want to shower and sleep. I’ll just say this is part 1 and I’ll continue writing about diabetes later on. Like gestational diabetes. 

[ix3ltm]

I created this account several months ago to serve as a journal when I don’t feel like handwriting. When my anxiety is high I often feel as though my thoughts are too quick and fleeting to be able to get them down on a page fast enough... sometimes I don’t even know exactly how I am feeling because I am feeling all sorts of things at once and when I attempt to make it out on a page or even to another human being I often feel as though it just comes out as if I’m just some blabbering idiot. The reality behind why I am finally writing something on this is because it currently feels as if the whole world is turning upside down and it has felt this way for months. 2020 has been a grim year to say the least and I guess I am at the point where I don’t even care if I sound like a blabbering idiot, I just need to get my thoughts out before I explode into bits and pieces. In current news, the Covid-19 pandemic is underway and really causing quite the ruckus; people are going absolutely mad (including myself, don’t let me fool you). People are scared and people react when they’re scared, unfortunately sometimes they react in a scary fucking way. I guess I can’t blame them though, nobody was prepared for this to happen. I’ts a surreal feeling to see the impending horrors that I’ve worried about for all of my life to unfold right before my eyes- although this is not what I specifically pictured, I’ve always been quite fatalistic in my thought process and this is comparable to what I have imagined in the past. I don’t necessarily agree with the way people are handling this situation, but I am not at all shocked. The people who hold power that fail to step up, to allocate resources correctly, and that remain firm in their greed do not surprise me nor do the people who are having literal fist fights over toilet paper; human beings are shit, and this is in no way a shock to me. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but I wouldn’t even be surprised to find out that there was some grandiose political scheme behind this because the reality is, it can happen and if there is a will, there is a way, especially if you have billions of dollars and mass amounts of power... I didn’t start writing this so I could start my conspiracy theory, truthfully I don’t even pay much attention to politics anyways so my theory would be quite uneducated and probably stupid as hell, that is to say if i were to have one. See what I mean? Blabbering idiot, even when I’m typing my thoughts and have the capability to fucking delete the dumb ones. Today I’m going to keep the stupid thoughts though, keep it raw for the one or two people that may scroll past this post. I hate that I don’t know if whoever’s reading this may not realize that was sarcasm, so full disclosure, that was sarcasm. Anyways, this covid-19 bullshit is driving my anxiety to extreme levels and I think I am almost to the point of insanity. Before this all happened, I was graced with the news that my mother’s brain disease has progressed and she is in need of her 3rd brain surgery. It has already been hard watching her struggle through this disease; finances, the loss of basic motor functions, and the transition from being a working, functioning “normal” person to the life of a “disabled” unable to work person. We were not at all expecting to hear the disease had progressed and at that point, I was horrified at the “what ifs” of the situation, I still am. I don’t want to go into the shit details of it all but, if you aren’t aware of the fucked up nature of our healthcare system and how traumatizing it is to discover you are sick when you have no money to afford treatment, then I would highly suggest looking into it. I feel quite bad for my mother and the situation that she is in. I selfishly feel bad for myself that I have to pan out in my mind the possibility of losing my mother at such a young age and that I may not have time to fix any of the problems between her and I... yet in hindsight, I guess I’ve panned that out several times before since my mother has been keen to threatening suicide for most of my life... I’m sidetracking. So first Covid-19 stopped me from seeing my mother and spending time with her before her surgery as she demanded we stay away and prevent any possibility of giving her the virus (not that we have it, you may have noticed mania runs in the fam!), and then yesterday my mother’s surgery was cancelled because Covid-19 patients need the beds and the surgery is not needed immediately. Sick right? Pun intended. So now she and her entire family, including myself, are forced to wait nearly three weeks to even discuss rescheduling. Crazy how unprepared our healthcare system is for a disaster considering this isn’t the first pandemic in the world..? It makes you wonder how every other person is individually impacted by this situation. Who else’s health is pushed aside because there is a possibility the hospitals will be overcrowded? Fucking weird times man. I feel for everyone during this and hope the crisis is averted quickly. I also feel for myself as I fear my high anxiety is going to cause me to lose my job... I’ve felt as though I’ve been having a heart attack for two weeks straight, I feel as though a stack of bricks has been laid on top of my chest; I’m suffocating. Then having to go to work, amidst all of the panic, causes my anxiety to worsen even more... I’m suffocating and drowning all at the same time and nobody can help me. I know I am not the only one that feels this way, I’m not unique in this... yet I cannot help but sometimes pity myself. If I had ever gotten my way, I would have never existed to even be apart of this mess we call life. Sorry to be so honest, but I really didn’t sign up for this and if there was an exit door where nobodies feelings would be hurt if I left, I would walk the fuck out in a heart beat. This is getting depressing now, so I guess I’ll stop. Cheers to whoever finds this and reads this... sorry for wasting your life and brain cells :’)

[theworldsoul]

I've been very upset lately. The pressure is insane.

And it's not like I don't know math or understand the material, I actually know all the concepts and everything. The only issue is I make little mistakes, the tiniest little mistakes, I forgot about the exponent, I wrote it as negative instead of positive, I forgot the units, I have the wrong amount of sigdigs, I added instead of multiplying... simple things, small things.

This is because my brain doesn't function well with so many rules. It simply doesn't compute long lists of strict rules sorry babe. No joke, all my mistakes arent cos I dont know what I'm doing, they're because I forgot soemthing small.

Fuck this shit man I'm not meant to be doing this... like, the amount of stress this is causing me... and I just know that tommorow after I get a shit mark my parents will be angry... I was given one days notice about the exam??? I study for hours every day??? Idk what else you want me to do like I'm already ruining my mental health for this.

I've told them before that it felt like I was overworking myself and they said that's just somehting I have to get used to and that's honestly so fucking upsetting. Like I rly said "yeah this class is fucking me up" and they went "lol idc get used to it, it will be like this for the rest of your life. Also work harder ur marks suck."

Like bro??? I have cried more in the past day than I've ever cried in ONE DAY... probably like 7 times. That's not normal, I dont think. Either I have some sort of illness or this is too much. I think maybe I have soemthing wrong with ME. Everyone else seems to handle it fine, no one else cries like I do. No one else is constantly doubting their intelligence.

Maybe it's a memory issue??? Like, one day of class I legit raised my hand and solved a question without ever having seen that sort of question before just with Logic, but yesterday I panicked because I couldn't remember how to solve it, in fact I didn't remember it at all until I asked the teacher and she told me that I should know since I was the first to have a correct answer... its almost like my brain doesn't remember math. Maybe that's because it's not built to do math??? Not like that matters... if I want a house in the future I need to finish math with a good grade.

This is SHIT. I work so hard and still I'm unable to live up to the expectations... I'm given at least 30 questions to complete for homework (I get like 4ish hours to do them since I get home at 3, go to bed at 9 and eat supper around 5) and I only end up completing like 6 before i have to go to sleep.... its painful and it's sad and I DON'T BELONG HERE!!!!! I DON'T BELONG IN A FUCKING MATH CLASS, MUCH LESS A GRADE 11 LEVEL IB MATH PROGRAM THAT WAS ORIGINALLY A YEAR LONG COURSE CONDESNED TO FIT INTO THE SPAN OF ONE/TWO MONTHS!!!!

But I can't just... do something easier. I can't. It's not an option if I want a house when I'm older. It's not an option if I want my parents to not hate me. It's not an option if I want to make the teacher who called me "hardworking" and pulled the strings to get me here proud.

I feel guilty for thinking that my hard work and dedication and whatever could ever match the natural wit of the kids who sit next to me. I feel inferior to them as I struggle with a problem that they complete instantly. I feel like I'm worthless. And maybe I am. The MOST IMPORTANT AND MOST RESPECTED SUBJECT is the one I am the worst at. And the ones my parents and society in general dismiss as being useless or stupid are the ones I'm good at and I enjoy. If the things I CAN do aren't good enough, what good am I as a person? What do I serve to society as a person? ...NOTHING.

The pain I feel over this is literally tortuous, fuck, I can't handle it, it physically hurts and it feels like my body is too weak to handle all the pain. I'm not even fucking joking, this makes me miserable. It ALWAYS has. I was so stupid to think I could EVER be good enough. I was so stupid to think if I studied for hours on end I would magically become better at math. It doesn't work that way....

And I feel guilty for wanting to be loved an valued, because how can I expect that when I can't do anything to be deserving of that? I feel guilty for the fear of my parents reactions upon seeing whatever grade I get tommorow, because really, I deserve whatever punishment comes to me. Because really, I'm not worth even having a bed to sleep in if I can't do basic fucking math. I'm so stupid. I'm SO FUCKING STUPID.

I don't know if I'll make it. If I'll pass my classes and make it. If ill get grades good enough to get a job that will pay me Enough.

This is so scary... I hate how my future hinges on this... I'm 15 and whether I live in a house or on the streets is dependent on how good I am at math.

Fuck this it's so stressful I'm panicking and I honestly wish I wasnt even human at all... I wish I could be a bird or a dog or cat or whatever, an animal that is loved, an animal that is happy and free of this crushing. Pressure. An animal that just... no thoughts head empty only animal sounds. Or maybe a baby. It would be nice to be a baby or a small child who only has to know how to write their name and maybe count to ten. Oblivious and happy and cared about. Or maybe it would be best to just be nothing at all. Freed from the prison I've been condemned to live in. Nothing at all. I wish I could sleep and never wake up.

I want to be happy... fuck. I guess I am overdoing it. Something's wrong with me lately. Normal people don't have so many breakdowns in such short spans of time over such stupid bullshit. I think that maybe I've been treated too softly in the past and now that I actually have to work its come as a shock to me.

But that makes no sense. I'm able to work and I do work, a lot, it just isn't helping and my brain won't take it in properly.

When I wake up tommorow my eyes will be swollen from crying so much.

[plantanarchy]

do you think you could talk a little about being autistic? im wondering if i might be autistic and im still not sure bc i like pass as neurotypical rlly well so far and i thought it would help to hear about actual people's experiences. you don't have to though and im sorry if this is weird!!

This has been in my inbox for a bit, I’m sorry! But yeah, I can talk about it. Keep in mind that everyone’s experience is different and its less of a “spectrum” from mild to severe/low to high functioning and more of a complex where different people have different experiences. A lot of people use functioning labels to dismiss the experience and opinions of “high functioning” folk when it comes to being autistic because tjey “don’t seem autistic” or “aren’t like those other low functioning autistic people”, but really “function” is relative and can even change day to day… on someone’s bad days they could be totally nonverbal rocking back and forth and on good days pass better at neurotypical than I do…

Ok so, I was diagnosed with Aspergers when I was ~10. I was essentially non-verbal in school and other high stress social situations and had been since I was very very young. This was interpreted as “very shy!” despite me having severe difficulty from a young age in saying anything at all to teachers, doctors, church people, even many of my peers, etc and often feeling like i was physically unable to speak but you know… because I spoke at home and with my neighborhood friends, I wasn’t considered non-verbal at all. Or I guess selective mutism is the correct term which is something I definitely still struggle with. Like when I was in middle school, I spent a few years literally being known by my mom’s friends and by some people at school as “Meep” because thata fuckin all I could physically say when somebody tried to talk to me haha

BUT ok that got away from me, point being: i was diagnosed with Aspergers at a young age which is a diagnosis that no longer exists/has been absorbed into the greater Autism diagnosis. Aspergers was separate for a long time because it was basically used to say “these kids are high functioning and different than those low functioning non communicative kids!”. Basically because I had most of the “cool and good” autism traits, my “not as cool and kinda crippling” autism traits and needs got shoved aside and essentially ignored for a long, long time. Which I think happens to a lot of kids! Even to the point of not getting a diagnosis at all or getting a wrong diagnosis and only realizing later in life what may be going on and what was missed.

Whoops before this becomes a bitter tangent, back to my experience of autism I guess. Ok, so on top of still being selectively verbal/mute (some days are worse than others and sometimes it isn’t even directly anxiety related it’s just a mostly mute day), my other symptoms include 1) it’s almost physically painful to make eye contact with anyone 2) formal social situations are beyond me, I never know what is correct or what’s coming next and usually I survive informal social situations by cracking jokes and making weird references to shit or being obnoxious and just accepting the label of “weird ass obnoxious kid but that’s just bre” 3) usually feel like I’m just two steps away from understanding what’s going on in some social situations lol like sometimes i have good intuition, can read people, can guess at what they’re thinking and then something happens that makes me question my entire interpretation of the situation and I realize maybe I wasn’t reading them correctly the whole time!!!! It’s the social equivalent of being the only one to get a wrong answer on a math problem and frantically rechecking your work lol 4) sensory overload yayyyyy when too many things happen at once (which can be like… 2 thing), I zone out and feel like my environment is unreal or blurry (fun and cool dissociation) and I can never predict what will cause that overload or when but also a lot of people have the very dramatic “autistic child screaming from sensory overload” image in their brain and thats not always accurate… my overload results in shut down 5) also along with that, I have sensory issues such as texture, sounds, etc. Certain fabrics as a kid would legit make me cry if I touched them or if my mom made me wear them (WINDBREAKERS ARE SENSORY HELL) and that still happens lol also with stuff like… chewing sounds, shoes that touch my toes in any way, loud music/bass, etc 6) along with that and with sensory overload… stimming. Stimming is basically a self-regulatory response to overwhelming stimuli and plenty of non-autistic people also do similar things when faced with high anxiety situations. Like foot jiggling, pencil tapping, nail biting, pencil chewing, etc it’s basically a soothing compulsion and not always something many autistic people can control without great effort and that control comes at the cost of not regulating anxieties or sensory overload well. I’ve got and always have had a lot of verbal/language stims and am very reptitive in my speech and writing patterns (y'all and lad anyone???) which is kinda self soothing. I have literally always had catchphrases. When im on my own i also do rock baxk and forth and other repititive body motions, also fidgeting with objects, especially cool round objects 7) catalog all the useless info in my brain!!! I can memorize information very well (not numbers though) and when I was a kiddo that got me labelled as #gifted and I was “savant” level in reading and writing but that is less cool and fun to people than beinf a math or science savant or something. 8) anyway related to that, as evidenced by this blog, I get VERY INVESTED in certain topics/ “special interests” to the point that it eclipses all other thoughts in my brain yay!!! Which isn’t a bad thing, I mean it gets me through and also if you have “good” special interests, people think you’re smart and interesting and ask your advice about stuff lol

Symptoms I don’t have that a lot of people think of when they think of an autistic person 1) I am horrendous at math I fuckin hate it numbers are the devil!!!!!! 2) 99% of my humor is sarcasm and I can understand it and figures of speech lol though sometimes i do get it wrong if i can’t read you otherwise 3) I don’t have “zero empathy”, I can feel for the plights of others VERY strongly, and can usually see any (most) POVs if it’s explained to me

There are others probably and there are certainly autistic people who have thise traits and who have different traits than I have. There are LOADS of different ways to be autistic. But also, there’s a lot of overlap between autism and between other things like ADHD, anxiety disorders, etc! So keep that in mind. Some people are strongly anti-selfdiagnosis of autism but knowing how easy it can be for kids who don’t present 100% stereotypically to slip through the cracks, I am all for it. I pass a lot of the time as neurotypical and can do most society things ok, though I have a steep learning curve compared to others… and with passing as neurotypical comes the frequent dismissal of my opinion on autism related topics and the lack of acknowledgement that actually I often DON’T pass as neurotypical and at those times my lack of passing is interpreted as rudeness, deliberate lack of effort on my part, stubbornness, lack of intelligence, lack of professionalism, an assumption that I’m angry with someone or don’t like them, etc etc. It’s an endless, awful cycle!

And I don’t really have too much personal advice for figuring out if you’re autistic or not… I did go through a point in time where despite being diagnosed I strongly denied that I was autistic and kind of had to come back to that as a near adult and realize nope… definitely autistic. And then knowing what to do with that info once youve figured it out is just… I mean there’s not much. There are little to no resources for autistic adults, very few support groups made up of autistic people and led by autistic people, very little resources directed at autistic people themselves in general, usually the focus is on the parents or guardians and talk aboit autistic people as abstract concepts… whoops, can you tell I’m bitter haha gonna end this before I go full “mental health professionals failed me and I’m a mess” etc

[fairytail-whathesays]

What happened with RWBY?

It’s time. Time to have address that which I have long avoided. Here’s a rough cut image from my blog (because it’s too long for copy-paste and I don’t want to give links to my personal): 

But if you want to get a fresh, full rant, click the read-more below. Fair warning, it’s a rollercoaster, but I’ve gotta air my problems. It revolves mostly around certain characters until that one nasty bit at the end. You’ve got to see the steady downhill feeling.

I fell in love with Sun Wukong’s character right after his debut. I liked his personality, I liked his character design, and holy shit did I love watching him fend off Torchwick with those gunchucks. 

And liking him wasn’t easy, early on. Because from the moment of his appearance, the fandom hated him. Despised him. Most of this being because Sun was quite clearly an imminent threat to the fandom’s very popular BumbleBY (Blake/Yang) ship. They would go on to claim that Sun was the epitome of homophobic and heteronormative writing, that he didn’t respect Blake. Most glaringly, they’d accuse the Black Sun (Sun/Blake) ship of having no development at all, which they really didn’t have any room to talk since Blake and Yang had barely glanced at each other the entire Volume 1 and only got one bit of good interaction in Volume 2 or 3, and had known each other a lot longer. I shipped Black Sun and believe me, I loved it despite everything they said. 

But have you ever gotten the distinct feeling that writers don’t like a character? That they go out of their way to either lock out or punish a character? Because that’s the feeling you’d get from watching Volumes 2 or 3. From there on out, Sun and his newly-introduced team were phased out with startling speed. Which seemed really odd, because from his part in the Volume 1 finale, you’d think he was a character the writers were excited for. After Volume 2 was done, I got the feeling there was some meddling from the interfering businessmen happening. Because here’s how Volume 2 went:

The trailer and opening to Volume 2 not only included Sun, but actually gave him and his team a slot of their own, which was notable because Sun was previously a standalone character. Scarlet and Sage didn’t actually appear at all in the entire volume–you only see them for one scene very far in the background and you could easily not notice them–which in fact is what happened. Many people didn’t even realize they were there until they were pointed out. Sun and Neptune fared slightly better. Slightly. Neptune got formally introduced and they got….some involvement in the first half of the volume. A little. It starts off with Sun accidentally letting slip to Neptune (while gushing about how cool Blake is) that she’s a Faunus, which is kind of important to him. That’s supposed to be a secret–although just the next episode, we’re shown that Blake gave Weiss permission to tell the rest of RWBY and JNPR, mitigating Blake’s irritation somewhat when Jaune nearly spills that secret to a library in a loud voice.

From the fandom’s reaction, you’d think Sun was a terrible person who had a history of spilling secrets and not being able to keep his mouth shut, and owed Blake an apology on his knees. Yes, it was supposed to be a secret, but I repeat: not that serious. Especially since Torchwick knew by then, and Torchwick was a real threat.

Then came the little mini-arc about trying to investigate Torchwick, which led to Sun and Neptune tagging along for the ride. Sun got a little bit of interaction with Blake where he got to feel just how brutal the White Fang group had had it and how grimdarkevil they were now. Neptune basically didn’t do anything. In the climactic chase scene and big fight against Torchwood’s mech later, Sun and Neptune get the chance to show off Neptune’s weapon (which are really cool in this series) and Sun’s Semblance (personal power)…..both of which accomplish absolutely nothing before Torchwick literally tosses them out of the scene, so RWBY can do their thing without Sun and Neptune being involved. That’s not a joke–they’re ejected from the scene, and it’s very transparent.

This trend continues. In the Volume 2 finale, where all the different teams and factions are fighting off the Grimm invasion to protect the city, Sun and Neptune are shown arriving on the scene….and are immediately skipped. No seriously, we finish up JNPR fighting, we cut to them arriving….then it cuts to the Atlas army doing their thing and Sun and Neptune aren’t seen doing anything at all except bumping their fists together at the end. This was the finale! The climax of the arc! If there was ever a time to show them doing something, it was now! If they weren’t going to be involved or seen doing something, why bother showing them being there in the first place?! Sun and Neptune were in ten of the twelve episodes in the Volume, and accomplished nothing! Sun got more done in five minutes of the Volume 1 finale than he got done in the entire second volume!

The trend continued, and worsened, in Volume 3. In the Volume 3 trailer and opening, not only did Sun and his team get a presence, they got a big presence. In the whole teams lineup at the start, SSSN (Sun’s team) appear before JNPR–that is, before the dueteragonists/secondary protagonists. I admit I got excited. It looked like SSSN were finally going to get the screentime and importance they were owed. Of course, I was wrong. Shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up.

Not only did Volume 3 continue the trend of shunning Sun and his team out of every scene they were in, it started the trend of making them incompetent laughing stocks. In their first battle of the Vytal Tournament (the four-versus-four team matches, in which RWBY and JNPR both dominated), Sun and his team do pathetically. Sage (green-haired dude) lets loose one sword strike which doesn’t even land before sitting there like a moron while an opposing team member takes him out of the field. Scarlet does better–he actually holds his own against the opposing team’s leader in one-on-one combat, but then Sun fucks up and accidentally gets him taken out. And that’s still Sun being the only really impressive member–he DID land the only real hits, and utterly smashed the one chick he fought with in the span of literally five seconds (I would say ten seconds, but five of those ten were him twirling his weapon). Neptune? Oh yeah, this is the part where they introduce the fact that Neptune is afraid of water. Cripplingly afraid of water. For this reason, he’s ineffectual for the entire fight until the end, where he tip-toes over to the water to electrocute the enemies in it. Yeah, this was an affliction given to him for comedy purposes, and to give slightly more credence to the villain’s plan of removing male combatants (no, seriously, that’s what she was doing) by manipulating the match settings.

Yeah, time out.

Put to one side Sage and Sun being varying levels of incompetent for now. Afraid of water? I’m sorry, but that’s just too much. Neptune is supposed to be a Huntsman, one of the immensely powerful and dangerous super-police of this setting who can slay vicious evil monsters by the dozen and hold his own against other Huntsman–that’s their job. Forgive me if I have difficulty in believing that a Huntsman could function well while being that terrified of water. And no, they did not actually explore this–it’s just there to make Neptune a laughing stock and unable to fight. Ha ha! Hey everyone, this kid called Neptune is afraid of water! Isn’t that funny!

It gets worse. Not only are SSSN still shoved out of the spotlight (we don’t even see Scarlet or Sage get any lines at all for the entire volume minus Scarlet’s one line as an audience member, and neither of them meets the main characters). But wait!

At the middle of the arc, guess who made it to the final round of the Vytal Tournament? The final round, consisting of eight combatants cut from several hundreds of losing combatants? Many of them with three to four years more experience than his one year? That’s right baby, Sun Wukong! Not that he gets a chance to actually fight his match or win, because all hell breaks loose before that can happen, but still! That’s got to count for something, right? Offscreen badassery, in spite of the chessmaster villainess actively trying to make sure he doesn’t make it to the finals?

Yeah, that wasn’t supposed to happen. You heard me right, that wasn’t in the setup. At least not the way the animators had it. According to the original scene, Sun and Neptune fought Pyrrha and Nora (two of the four dueteragonists) and got their asses soundly kicked, in part because Neptune’s fear of water was abused again–oh joy, more of that. Oh, nevermind that Sun at least is probably a capable match for Nora or Pyrrha, but you won’t believe what they had in mind for this scene. Floaties. Fucking floaties. Neptune was going to wear goddamn motherfucking kid’s floaties to survive water-setting combat. Ha ha ha! Look at Neptune, everyone!

Fuck that noise. Wanna know why this scene was cut? Irrelevance to the overall plot. So Sun only made it to the finals and got his offscreen badass title by default. And they were proud of this scene, too! They had most of it animated, and were going to show it if it got enough attention. This is the point where it genuinely became a humiliating thing to be a SSSN fan.

We’re not done. It’s time to talk about the last three episodes of Volume 3, where the finale disaster happens, a worse crisis than ever, and literally their last chance to show SSSN doing something or being effective. So guess what? They’re skipped again! Yep, they’re shown in the whole heroic badass teams lineup (Sun even seems excited to fight Grimm hordes bare-handed), and then they literally run offscreen and aren’t seen again, except for one small throwaway scene in which Sage and Scarlet helplessly cling to the back of an Ursa, such a minor threat it isn’t taken seriously by anyone around it. Well, what about when the teams work together to take out a Giant Nevermore? Sage cut off its head! Oh, well, he did it together with Yatsuhuashi....on an opponent that was pinned down and couldn’t move....yeah, such skill. Oh, well, Sun does make another appearance, after Yang gets her arm cut off and Blake gets stabbed! To, uh, say something? One line? Okay, I get it.

Guess what happened in May, by the way? Remember me saying I was a Black Sun shipper? Well, in May, the Volume 3 soundtrack came out–and in it was “Not Fall In Love With You”, a song from Sun’s point of view–about Blake. The first Sun-related piece of music in this show’s three years, and it’s about how much he loves another character. Not only that, but this came after Volume 3–the volume in which Sun and Blake didn’t interact at all except for one wink and a blush in one scene. Remember how I said the BumbleBY shippers loved to claim that Sun and Blake had no development whatsoever? Well, now I had to sit and stew after that slap in the face of a song and realize that they were right. They’d been vindicated. Sun really was just a boy-toy hetero love interest for Blake with no development. Man, that hurt.

And this is just the problems with SSSN. This was my biggest problem, but by now I had also already experienced Emerald and Mercury being overpowered, an insane BumbleBY fandom, the entire fandom having their heads up Roman Torchwick’s ass, everybody shitting on Weiss for being a racist even though she’d gotten over that two volumes (two real-life years) ago, constant streams of hate for anyone who got in the way of the ships, minor characters like Junior or Tukson being the butts of jokes and otherwise ignored, everybody insisting Adam wasn’t really a nutcase and that his sadistic monster-ness at the end of Volume 3 was “wildly out of character” (even though the only thing they’d ever seen of him was him wanting to murder bystanders on a train), accusations of animators whitewashing Blake despite Blake being white to begin with, and personal abuse of myself and my friends by assholes. But this was the final straw. I was through. What had happened for the last two years I’d invested in RWBY had seemed so different from Volume 1, where Sun had been one of the biggest badasses in the crew and been an involved character. What I loved about the show had been shit on and I was way too angry with how things had been handled to continue watching. I was done, and that was that.

After the Volume 3 finale, I quit RWBY a few weeks later, I was so angry. I had already quit. I’d gone from loving this series to hating it. Oh, but guess what happened the very next day?

Shane’s letter came out. Shane’s sad, angry, 36-page open letter to anyone who’d listen about how he, Monty’s friends, and Monty’s memory had been treated by the staff since he’d died in February and even before then. It was very in-detail and it was heartbreaking. The mistreatment and shunning of both himself and Sheena Duquette (Monty’s wife), the shameless and heavy altering of RWBY despite them saying in no uncertain terms to the fans after his death that RWBY would continue along the plans Monty had laid out. Everything in that letter just confirmed my fears about the handling of Volumes 2 and 3 and compounded my hatred for Rooster Teeth instead of just RWBY. 

To my knowledge and count at the time, around six thousand people were pretty pissed at this and swore off RWBY. Oh, Rooster Teeth was pissed off, too. They did their best to handle it without getting in an online shouting match with Shane, saying exactly what you’d think would be said–that he wasn’t the only one who loved Monty, that it was only his side of the story, and that he was biased.

I don’t believe he was biased. To my fury, RWBY survived that disaster that was the Open Letter. People blew Shane off as merely an aggravated ex-employee and immature. And I might actually be open to that idea, were it not for the sheer length and detail in that letter. I don’t believe the people who said that read it in full–or even looked at it. The fact of the matter is that no “bitter ex-employee” writes a 36-page exposee decrying his former companies’ deplorable practices and treatment of the memory of the one who started, wrote, and directed RWBY almost a full year after he’d already been fired. Thirty-six pages. I read every single one of them, and I believe what Shane wrote was from the heart and 100% true.

I despise Rooster Teeth for what they did and there’s no excuse for it. They’ve permanently lost me in their viewership, and I just wish that Shane’s letter had had more of an impact. Millions of people watched RWBY, and millions of people will continue to do so whether Rooster Teeth deserves them or not. I hope they crash and burn and that RWBY tanks–that might be especially bitter of me, but I wouldn’t give them another cent after seeing that disaster if they were broke and dying in the streets. 

[beccawastaken]

My life summarized Pt. 1...

I started this blog cause there is always so much in my head, it moves at the speed of light, some of it makes complete and utter sense, some of it sounds great til the very second it rolls off my tongue and then sounds nothing like it did in my head, some of it is just random nonsensical stuff that seems to have fallen off a stand up comedians cue cards and straight into the part of my psyche that prefers her own lyrics. It makes it very hard to focus on one task to completion, I even tend to put down my guitar and journal for months on end...so sad!

I must admit that I have worked my ass off to try to make some kind of sense of it all and now when I am unable to rather than let frustration take over I tend to find my random head ramblings amusing. I mean it is often a frustrated, shaking my head at myself kind of amusing but still...baby steps right? 

Sometimes the thoughts can be so intense and so rapid that its overwhelming and it takes every ounce of my strength not to scream til it stops. At its worst its almost like there are so many thoughts moving so quickly that it can sound like a constant high pitch buzz in my head. Super exhausting, and difficult to explain to those around you. People tell me to just go to sleep...ever tried sleeping with a shop vac on or inside a construction site? That would be comparable to this, plus, sleeping also isn't my forte so I’m double fucked so to speak.

The human mind and psyche intrigues me to no end. The way it works, and how the basic brain functions are the same across society yet our perception and the cogs and wheels inside each skull are as unique as our deoxyribonucleic acid. For each and every one of us, the way we tick can be vastly different from one another, from the person beside you on the bus, to that guy you’ve worked with for years to a lover or spouse and often really have no way of knowing. I mean how often do we turn to each other and say “can we talk about how your brain works?” We just take for granted that it does and don’t give it a second thought.(haha you will come to notice my love for puns)

Its the intricate differences between us that keep me interested in this self sabotaging species, I mean really, Earth doesn’t need humans to survive, in fact it may be better off without us! Who knows, what I do know is that while im here on this seemingly massive planet im going to make the most of it. 

I have a wicked sense of humour (ask anyone haha) and I enjoy messing with people (in a jovial way of course). Im talking like practical joke type of messing with people, light, innocent funny shit. I have been referred to as a brain ninja...I took it as a compliment, however, when you are on the receiving end its possible that it isnt nearly as enjoyable. I do my best not to be mean (I said I do my best, I am not perfect) cause you know, I’m no psycho, although some will attest to that statement not being true, I have honed my inner psycho and now only use her when absolutely necessary. Like if some douchelord crosses one of my angels or my grandson. Then my wrath should be feared, simple enough right? (WOW that escalated quickly! O_O)

I just do not want to waste my life, I spent so much of it not knowing how to handle daily life, assuming (naturally cause why wouldn’t I as a single child raised by someone that constantly blamed others and the world for her problems) that everyone’s mind worked the same, everybody deals with the racing and loops of thoughts you cant kick, or falls asleep with a song stuck in they’re head and wakes up and it starts again as if paused. Every morning. (Don’t drop that duh duh duh....grrr) For days! I mean doesn't everybody worry about every move they make, and lay in bed with they’re eyes closed trying to sleep and checking the clock twenty minutes later only to find SURPRISE, its been three hours! Or this relentless saviour complex I have, I can solve almost anyone's problem or at least help them find a path they are more comfy with but for years when it came to mine, I just couldn’t. This is just a few of the things i deal with or have been forced to deal with this life, Im sure i will touch on more. 

I have my children to thank for helping me learn how to deal with my version of life and not giving up on me when I know it would have been easier at times. (Dont drop that duhduhduh....ugh) I want to be honest in this blog, I pride myself on my honesty yet shy away from the darker, not so beautiful sides of who I am as if they don’t exist to the outside world. The thing is, I do not look sick, in fact I look great, besides a few extra pounds. My illness is not a physical one yet it has complete control from the inside out a lot of the time. I work very hard on a daily basis so I do not look like I am falling apart.

I feel emotions at a much higher level than the majority of humanity, I know this now. I don’t feel a lil bit of anything, if im sad, im so sad that even just being in my presence can break your heart. If something good happens and I feel a twinge of joy, I literally have to physically hold myself still sometimes cause it will surge like a lightening bolt through me and often some strange squeak comes out, fingers fully extended as if the energy just exploded form my core and out my extremities. Then, just as fast as it surges it disappears and there I am a woman bordering forty with this maniacal smile on my face like the joker and hair standing up like the professor from Back to The Future. Its quite a sight I am sure, and as much as it has been really hard to work with this side of myself I would rather be inside looking out and have to fix my hair then the onlookers forced to decide between the choice to ask if I am alright or back away slowly. Same with anger, although we have a bit of a deeper connection than other emotions, yea, thats right, we tight. Let me explain...or try;

I like to think my anger trigger point was when grandpa died, but looking back that is ridiculous, I was pissed at both my parents for what they put me through during the divorce but refused to take it out on them, they were in enough pain, they couldn't see it but i sure could.  When I am angry I scare people, I seem to fear nothing (not sure if that’s brave or not) and once I am angry there is no going back, I am completely incorrigible, illogical and refuse to listen. I have scared off men twice my size, not with violence of the physical kind, my verbal violence can be so articulated that I honestly think some people are scared to the core. I have shocked myself at times and thats not easy. Once I realized that I was growing into my version of the hulk I had to do something, I was starting to hate everyone and everything. 

I started replacing the empty yet extremely fucked up (for lack of a better word) threats with just simply making light of what it was that triggered me, albeit in an aggressive manner however it has proven effective in attempting to analyze what set me off and try to stop the rage fuelled rant.

I really wanted to give you an example but as I was trying to find one it proved difficult so im gonna call that progress. Anyway this venting became humorous to those around me, they all knew me so well that they would turn they’re heads and try not to laugh (ever been laughed at when your livid? its not cool, same as if are upset and someone says ‘calm down’ calm down, CALM DOWN?! like fuck off n all if you honestly believe im not trying, you think i wanna feel this way? like this is some kind of sick joke for me? pfft people!) in an attempt to not be caught in the crossfire of my verbal war. 

At first this angered me too (go figure, Hulkbitch) then one day, someone laughed and I took a step back and thought about what I had said and started laughing. Clearly my loved ones weren't laughing at my agony, but the words and descriptions i used to figure it out did tend to be funny. It takes a lot for me to get angry like that now, if I do tho, I still vent with sarcastic wit and make myself laugh to bring myself out of it. 

I think I have myself in line pretty well now, I guess I should give some history here, I was a very happy child on the outside but a ball of nerves within, my mother was extremely mentally ill (which i did not know til after her passing) and my father was a violent alcoholic. Luckily I was sheltered from the worst of what they put each other through as they separated when I was 2, but fought and fought and fought over me for nine years. My mum would insist dad never wanted me he just didn't want her to have me, said that I was never good enough in his eyes cause he wanted a boy. Dad, would point out the homeless lady pushing all her belongings in a shopping cart and say “hey kid, thats where your mum is headed, just you watch”. I know now they were just dealing in their own ways with what was happening between them but it really messed with me. 

My father, my daddy, quit drinking not long after the separation, i to this day believe that he did this not only for himself but for me, to show me that no matter what you can make changes, just gotta face the problem head on and deal with it so you can move past it. He was always a tough, vulgar, strong, stubborn, hilarious and short lil french man with an ego the size of Goliath. He taught me not to take shit from anyone if I believed in the topic at hand and to learn to turn a cold shoulder when needed. Emotions were not discussed, Im not even sure to this day if I can remember him ever saying I love you, but he didn’t have to, I know he did. 

Mum had her own ways of dealing over the years, she was all emotion, raw and uncut. She would always react first, think later, which meant she felt the need to apologize a lot.  For her mistake, for not being good enough, for not doing well enough this was so hard to watch. She would repeat the same self defeating patterns she had been doing her whole life and expecting things to change. Definition if insanity much? shitty part is back then they had no fucking idea what insanity was, nor did they care to look. Had someone just took her side and spoke for her she would still be here, if only she was honest with me about how sick she was, I may never have gotten as sick as I did. She thought she was protecting me...

This woman was the sun to my moon and I loved her more than words can ever express. She never believed me when I said it, she always said right up til the end that nobody ever loved her. I know this was not true cause I figured my dad wouldn't get so mad about stuff if he didn't care, the opposite of love is not hate, its indifference. Mum was always in and out of the hospital and it was super hush hush, I assumed she had cancer. I was petrified to lose her, so I didn’t ask questions, just waited.

The custody battle went on and on, I remember my dad pushing our 1970somthing car up the street for some reason, didn't phase me much. I just said “oh look theres my daddy, he looks mad!”. We went to Expo ‘86 in British Columbia and mum was subpoena’d to come back to the prairies for court immediately, so she had to leave her vacation just to go back and find out it was remanded.  They were both so angry all the time, I thought it was my fault...had I not been there there would be nothing left to fight about right?

Okay so divorce was finalized when I was 11...Grandma and grandpa (mums side) loved the shit out of me too, ive seen pics of gramma in the military which made sense as I grew up as to why she was so tough but she must have been retired by time I was born. They bought an old ‘70s van and converted it into beds in the back, a table and even a port a potty! They lovingly got personalized plates with my name and the number “2″ after it. They took really good care of me, always loved me and wanted what was best.

I remember around 10yrs old I realized my initials were B.S. and I was not impressed at all as not one word that came out my mouth (at that age) was BS. I was insulted and wanted it changed, plus I knew it would make mum happy if I changed my name to hers. The divorce was finalized my initials were changed to B.J....JUST in time for puberty, (woooooooo) yeah, didn't live that one down for a very long time.

My reason for bringing up my grandparents is so that you all know that aside from this somewhat bleak story thus far, I had many people that loved me, including mum and dad, they just preferred to fight about it. 

Shit, fuck, damn, I just had a memory, not a good one but I spoz thats why our brains block things out eh? I do not know how this came about, my mother was very abused growing up and it took a toll on her.  I remember mum and the  grandparents fighting, i remember gramma telling mum to get her head out of her ass and i remember trying to picture that...I was not going to be seeing them for a while til things cooled down.

Mum was sure that my grandpa had molested me, I am not going to say it didn’t happen but as far as I can recall my grandpa was the sweetest most loving man ever. anyway, mum was questioning me, yelling, badgering me and generally acting crazy i spoz, this was before I know what that looked like.  She kept asking inches from my face if he had done anything to me and i maintained that he hadn’t. Finally hours later I was tired and hungry and she was clearly still psychotic she yelled at me are you sure (for the millionth time) I finally yelled out “fine, he did it!” I had no idea what he had done, or when, cause i wasn't there i just wanted her to stop. She was making herself crazy and it broke my heart. I didn't see my grandparents again for three years. Grandpa had gone senile and was not himself, didnt remember close family members etc. When I got there, I ran in the house and we met at the doorway, me at the bottom of the entrance stairs and him at the top. I smiled, and he looked at me puzzled, then started crying, then laughing then crying. I was so glad he got to remember me. I missed him so much.

This was all before I was even a teenager. Grandpa died not long after he was put in a care home cause gramma wasn't able to care for him. His death was my first experience with such a thing, I had no way of knowing how to deal with a loss like this...so I guess I just didn’t.