#three years ago I was suicidal. Convinced that I wouldn't find anyone who would love me for who I am

[bitemeilovewaffles]

I now have a perfect set in my partners. Two boyfriends, two girlfriends.

I am unmatched in my autistic swag for pulling all these absolutely STUNNING people.

[deanwasalwaysbi]

This post from @crookedcryptid suggesting Dean and Castiel were canonically together from Dean's prayer confession on put a big stupid grin on my face, and then I went off and analyzed every episode that came afterward. So here you go?

Castiel’s in about every other episode from that point. And they are actually separated in the majority of the majority of the episodes, but the way they interact is just loving.

Episode by episode analysis under the cut. 

At The Trap, Dean confesses to Castiel in his prayer how he really feels (but not like that at least not in Chuck's censured version that we see) while Eileen and Sam split up bc of Chuck. It's late revealed that Chuck sent Sam Eileen and Sent Cas & Dean to Purgatory so they'd lose hope. (Cas must have defied Chuck's plan yet again by stopping Dean from voicing his feelings bc that's the only explanation I have to make this make any sense. (x) )

After Dean's confession, the next episode immediately separates Cas & Dean but Dean pines after the domestic life like Garth has with his family, an alternative lifestyle Dean once saw as unacceptably evil. (x)

But then next episode Castiel goes and finds Jack and brings him home. Brings him home to Dean who does this. (See gif above that lives rent free in my mind /\)

He holds Jack’s face just like he did Ben’s.  He looks into Jack’s eyes, one then the other, as if to verify that it’s really him. Then he looks from Jack to Castiel.

This dad moment. This neck hold and look to Castiel that simultaneously says, “you brought my son home to me” but also screams in Jensen’s headcanon that Dean used to look at Jack and see Lucifer but now he looks at him and sees Cas. 

(Tho that shouldn’t be hard since they clearly cast their combined biological child.)

I’m obsessed with it. It haunt my dreams and inhabits my waking brain.

The fact that this is not before ‘The Trap’ but after is so important. They didn’t set it right between them artificially, by Cas bringing Jack home. Instead, they set it right between them and then they got their son back.  Otherwise, it is the last piece of the puzzle to patch their relationship.  Dean was envious of Garth’s family, and suddenly Dean has his back.

In Galaxy Brain Chuck’s screen shows a view of Dean and Cas sitting super closely huddled together at the kitchen table. (x) Is actually from an earlier episode. There’s also the dadliest dadstiel moment ever, with Castiel letting his god killing, resurrected, super powered, three-year-old win at connect four, which was not in the script, but added by Misha and Sp8. (x)  When Sam and Cas disagree on Jack, Cas backs up Jack and Dean supports Cas over Sam.  The husbands share a whiskey while reveling in how they brought Jack up right,  “I knew it, Dean. When I was with Jack’s mother, she… You know, Kelly just had faith that Jack would be good for the world, and I felt it, too. I knew it. And then, when everything went wrong, and God took him from us… I was lost in a way I’ve never been before. Because I knew the story wasn’t over. I knew Jack wasn’t done. And I was right.” (Even if Dean’s a little too excited about using Jack as a weapon.) (Maybe this line explains what's been up with the Hellers these past 6 months yall.)

This is huge, because Dean was destroyed at the end of last season, imo, bc his idea of Jack was destroyed and he felt the need to cut himself off from all thoughts that he could have that family.  (x)

Cas also wordlessly goes into Dean’s backpack in a moment of routine casual intimacy.

Destiny’s Child & Dean calling Cas an idiot for risking his life yet again- not knowing that Cas felt secure in the knowledge that he wouldn't die bc of his deal. Dean was legit scared to lose him again. (oh no my heart). With that extra knowledge Cas had it's exactly the kind of thing Dean would do. Dean's done this exact thing before both when he was, and was not, suicidal. (S13, S6) They get Jack’s soul back, but first the classic “oh no my child has ingested something”.

Last Holiday- No Cas. 😒

Gimme Shelter - Our boys are separated yet again - Castiel talks to Paster Sexy (recast doctor sexy) who says it’s okay to be gay. We get a lot of charming Cas with Jack moments. Something happens in this episode, it happens off-screen and it's something we've basically have never seen in this series. Jack tells Castiel that he expects to die to defeat Chuck and rather than fall into the pattern we've seen every single season, Castiel immediately tells Dean what is going on, immediately tells Dean everything he needs to know to protect Jack.

Drag me Away From You (ugh oh no and they will) - No Cas

Unity - end of the warm wuvy dov. 

Dean lets Jack think he isn’t family.  Sam discovers that if they let Jack kill Chuck that Billie will kill Eileen, anyone from another dimension or resurrected and Dean. Looks. At. Cas. (x) The fear in his eyes. 

By this point Dean is unhinged. He’s back to the beginning of the season when he was afraid that all of this was Chuck’s control rather than a real relationship between them. This should have been an ‘absolution’ moment for Jack, the one Castiel says here that Jack doesn’t need from anyone but himself. The closest we get to confirmation that Cas has learned that lesson himself. (x) Dean was so destroyed after his idea of Jack died that it split up his marriage …  I mean….  Dean already chose Jack’s life once, even after Mary.  Dean is choosing him over using him as a weapon to kill Chuck is huge considering how spun out Dean was by this point.  I’m convinced that without Cas being there Dean would not have stopped, and might have let Jack sacrifice himself, might have shot Sam giving Chuck his ending.

I’m also convinced that Chuck designed The Trap to have Cas die 8 episodes ago. (x) That Dean was never supposed to have this post trap period with him.  So that he would be hopeless just like he was in episode 19.  That was in the version Chuck wrote back in episode 4. Without Cas, Chuck would have gotten his ending. (x) Woof there is a sentence that hurts in 15x20

18 - skipping this winchester main pain for the mo-

So this all got me thinking about Dean’s face after Cas says he loves him, the little choked up headshake, like maybe that’s just verbal confirmation of something he, on some level, already knew. (x)

I haven’t hit 15 in my rewatch yet and I’m sure I will find new a different things to piss me tf off when I do. 

Morning erybody?

[shysweetthing]

A bit late and possibly more than you want to deal with, but I suppose I just want to get it out of my head: Barring my therapist, no. I don't have anyone telling me I deserve love, and even if I did, I wouldn't believe them. I'm still struggling with the concept that I deserve *life.* Love's a bit much.

Hey anon, first, I don’t know where your head is right now, but if you’re anywhere near that point, please call a suicide prevention line (here: https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/talk-to-someone-now/) or if you need it, an LGBT centered one (here: https://www.ostem.org/crisis-hotlines).

It is okay to take baby steps with your mental health. It’s okay to start by convincing yourself that you deserve to live, and then moving on to bigger things. I don’t know where you are, but I can promise you that staying alive helps, a lot.

I don’t know who you are or anything about you, but as a statistical matter, I am almost certain to be older than you are–I see people calling themselves “tumblr olds” who are dozens of years younger than I am–and while that certainly doesn’t make me any smarter, it does mean that I have a little more perspective.

I have always had cyclical, deep depression–starting from the time I was about ten–which left me so dark that it scared me sometimes. When I was younger, I didn’t know why I was such a bad person, and why I had those thoughts. (It didn’t help that my parents raised me in a very conservative religion and I was absolutely queer.) I was utterly miserable, and for the most part, I never told anyone how bad it was–I didn’t start talking about this thing I didn’t understand until I was 19 or 20.

I remember telling a friend that I felt like I was in an elliptical orbit around hell, that every time I thought I was getting farther away, I got pulled back in. I didn’t think it was possible to get away. And my friend–who was, like me, an incredible dork–responded that I needed to remember that if you want to achieve escape velocity from an elliptical orbit, I needed to accelerate when I was going down.

For years, that was the thing I pushed for: escape velocity. I was going to reach escape velocity. One day, I was going to push hard enough, and do the right thing, and I would escape this thing that kept coming back to me and clouding my mind. When times were bad, I worried about the opposite: that this time, I would come crashing down. It would be irretrievable. I wouldn’t make it.

(At the time, I didn’t have a name for this thing; nobody I was around talked about mental health, and it never occurred to me that I had a real issue.)

So I pushed. I tried hard. I tried everything I could. And there were times when all I could try was to just keep living another day, so I did that. I had about fifteen years of my life where all I could think was that maybe next time I wouldn’t get out.

But here’s the thing. Every time I went down, I learned something new. I didn’t know I was learning it, but I was. I learned coping skills. I learned how to least fuck over other people when I dropped the basket containing all the eggs. I learned how to take care of myself. I learned how to exist as myself, and not anyone else.

It got better. It got familiar. I discovered that the thing I had had a name, and that I wasn’t just an incredibly bad, stupid, lazy person. I tried every last thing I could find on a list that had been clinically proven to alleviate the symptoms of depression, and my list of coping skills got even longer. I learned to be nice to myself (a little), to give myself a wide margin, and to trust that even though I would never achieve escape velocity from my depression, the cyclical nature of my orbit meant that it would ebb and flow. The patterns became familiar, and I learned to trust myself to navigate through them.

My depression has never gotten better, but I have. I am not stronger than my depression, but I know how to work with it, how to carve out a space that is me and recognize my right to exist and be happy in a framework that is hostile to my existence.

Sometime in the last five years or so, I’ve came to another realization. I have friends who are neurotypical, ones that I went to college or grad school or whatever with. They’ve all been working stable jobs doing adult things for their entire life, and I… uh, I have not been able to hold down a so-called adult job for more than three years at a time. 

(It’s okay, it’s still possible to make money and not be an adult.)

I spent the last weekend at a reunion for one of the groups I was with–highly intelligent, highly successful people who have pretty much universally reached the pinnacle of acclaim. And then there is me.

I sat with friends I knew twelve years ago when I was starting over after another devastating bout of failure, and they were fresh-faced and new. They’re all hitting their midlife crisis. The one where they realize they’ve been working at this thing forever and they’re making money and they have a big home and a garden and blah blah blah and what the hell is all of this for, anyway?

I try to talk them, gently, through my coping skills. Have you considered switching jobs? Have you considered working just part time? What about learning something new just for the hell of it? What if you took two weeks off and just slept? What if you binge-watched a brand new show? I highly recommend Yuri on Ice, you should watch it, do!

To a person, my friends look at me in bafflement and say, “I can’t do that, how could I do that? I think I just have to shrug and keep going.”

I’ve spent most of my life learning how to exist, how to be happy, in crises mode. They have never, ever had to figure that out. I have had to be flexible my entire life; they’ve become brittle to the point of being unable to bend. I used to ask myself, “What could I be if I wasn’t depressed?”

I pretty much know now. If I wasn’t depressed, I wouldn’t be happy. Not the way I am. My happiness is my most important coping skill. Before I do anything, I have to ask, “Is this going to make me miserable?” I’ve learned through experience that I cannot handle any degree of misery, not for any length of time. 

I have been forced through the crucible of my depression to seek delight. When I was younger, I thought I would never, ever be happy. I kept going, and I kept believing it was possible, and even though right now, I am on the gentle upswing of one of the worst depressions I have experienced in a decade, I am, deep down, happy.

And I was surrounded by people this last weekend who were subtly jealous of me.

I wouldn’t wish my depression on anyone. I wouldn’t. Depression is terrible and impossible.

But I promise you, that if you keep going, you will learn coping skills. You will gradually discover things that help. You will build up an arsenal of self-protection. 

And thirty years from now, you’ll be talking to the friends you envy now for their ability to function in a normal way, and they’ll all tell you that they wish they could do what you do, but it’s just not possible, it’s just not possible.

And you? You’ll have been living with the impossible all your life. To you, the impossible will be easy.

I don’t know if this will be helpful at all. I’m not a counselor. I don’t know how to help someone in crises.

All I can say is that I have lived in crises all my life and it gets better. I wouldn’t wish my depression on anyone, but I’ve reached the point in my life where I am delighted to be myself. Every decade of my life is better than the last.

You deserve love. You deserve happiness. You deserve life. Even though I don’t know you, I know these things are true. I’m here from the other end to tell you to please stick it out, because even if you don’t believe these things now, one day, you will.