#tw mental disorder mention

[ravenwraithe]

Chasing Pasts in Shadows

part 1 | part 2 | part 3

please pay attention to the tags, there's some heavy stuff going on

Mr Reyes was a balding, rotund man in his fifties, who greeted them, showed them around the garden like a realtor and finally invited them into the parlour (A parlour!) to have some tea. Will was currently sat on the long couch with Mike crowding him in towards the right armrest and eyeing the plates suspiciously and worrying the rip in his black jeans . Max took the armchair nearer Mike, picking up one of the sandwiches. Mr Reyes took the last armchair, settling in with a sigh. “Oof. Bad knees, these days. I'm not as young as I was, back in the eighties,” he chuckled, “but you kids don't have to worry about that yet, hmm? I should hope not. Well, take whatever you’d like to eat and you can ask away,” He leant back into the plush of the chair.

Will nodded and reached in for a grape. ”Mr Reyes, before we start, if at any point of time you feel uncomfortable answering questions, do let us know. We want to know as much as possible about the case but not at the cost of your mental health. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

“Good. Max, hand over the recorder, please.”

Max passed it to Mike. Will reached out for it, electricity racing up when his hand briefly brushed against Mike’s. He fought down a shiver, clicking it on and placing it on the middle of the table, among the delicately arranged sandwiches, fresh fruit and cheese and crystal glasses of sparkling water. “Just say your name and age, we’ll take care of the rest.”

“Javier Reyes and 53.”

“Mr Reyes, you called us to investigate some disturbances in, um, your house. Could you please elaborate?” Will asked, chewing on his grape. It was delicious.

“Oh, what do you want to know about?”

“When did they first start?”

“About 10 months ago, I was in the kitchen to get a drink, I think, at 2 am in the morning, because the mini fridge in my room had broken down a few days ago. The entire house had blown a fuse, and some of my appliances short circuited before the fuse. Old faulty circuitry in an old house. So, I was getting a beer from the refrigerator, when the chandelier started swinging, just enough to be visibly moving. I thought nothing of it, going back to bed. Things progressively went worse from there,” Mr Reyes said. Will could see his fingers clenching hard.

“Worse how?” Max asked, reaching for another plate of sandwiches. “These are delicious, by the way.”

“I’m glad, Ms. Mayfield,” Mr Reyes smiled, his eyes losing a bit of their edge. “About your question, well, it didn't get bad right away. At first, it was swinging chandeliers, knives out of the wooden block, on the island or just my phone dying even if I charged it all night,” Mike, Max and Will glanced at each other. What the fuck? Mike mouthed silently.

Just keep listening, Max mouthed back.

Mr Reyes didn't notice their little conversation, continuing, “then I started finding the knives in increasingly weird places, like the library, behind a book I was thinking of reading, in the bath where I could have cut my foot on it, once I found a meat cleaver on the bedside table. I couldn't sleep again for the rest of that night,” Mr Reyes cut off, shivering. Will felt like it, too. Meat cleavers near his head? Will would run, screaming and never looking back.

“Are you okay, Mr Reyes? We can take a break if you like,” Will asked.

“No, no, it’s fine, it’s relieving to get this off my chest. I was so happy when I saw the Facebook ad,”

The what? Facebook? What the fuck was Lucas doing?

“If you are sure,” Will nodded.

“I heard footsteps, first on the floors above or below me, then it got closer, I heard it outside in the hallways, in the room adjacent to the one I'm in, and it always walks towards me. They start silent, barely audible, getting louder and louder til I'm sure there’s someone on the other side. Just there, looking, standing, staring. It’s gotten even closer since the last few days,” Mr Reyes' face was frozen in an expression of confused terror. Will felt sorry for the man. Mr Reyes seemed so optimistic, so happy. No one would ever think he was going through a horror film all the time.

Mr Reyes went on. “The footsteps are always coming from where I can’t see. I was making and eating dinner the day before, when the dreaded sounds came up, thud, thud, thud, behind me,” Mike inched closer to Will, a movement so minute, Will would have missed it if he wasn’t attuned to every single part of Mike. “I whipped around, sure I’d see the intruder, a squatter or something, but there was no one. Nothing. I decided I’d call someone, maybe a priest to have a look around the next morning. I threw away the rotting pb&j full of maggots-”

“Wait, rotting pb&j?” Mike asked, perplexed.

“Oh, yeah. It's been happening for some time but food goes bad the moment I take my eyes off them. It rots away like it's been sitting there for days. Liquified and maggots crawling through them,” Max set her plate of sandwiches down, a bit green in the face. “I'm not sure how that is happening, but I don't eat here anymore, my friends take me out for meals.”

“Mr Reyes,” What the fuck, Will asked, “Do you have any other place to stay for a while? All of this sounds like it’s very intense for you-”

“Oh no, Mr Byers, I can’t leave this place, not after- not after my dear Emily…” Mr Reyes choked up. “I can’t bear to leave this place, no. If I stay over at a friend’s, she won't come to me. She talks with me in my dreams, asks me how I am, we do things we normally do, like cooking together, reading in the library, kissing me, but if I don't come home, Emily doesn't come to me, only the sound of footsteps, getting closer,” A tear dropped down Mr Reyes’ face. Will felt unsettled. The things he was describing did sound like a true haunting, but what if it wasn't?

“Mr Reyes, I think it'd be good for you to take a stroll in the garden, get a breath of fresh air,” Will spoke up. “I insist.”

Mr Reyes slumped, breathing heavily. “Alright,” He said, after staring at his shoes, for what seemed like an eternity, “I'll take a short walk outside,”

Will turned back to the others the moment he left. “How are you guys holding up? If this case is true, it'd would be the biggest one yet, financially and paranormally,”

Max looked at Will. “You don’t believe him, do you?”

“It’s not that, I suspect other things as well,”

“Will,” Mike said, so softly near his ear, Will nearly jumped out of his skin. “I don’t think he's lying,”

“What do you mean?”

“Max, you can feel it right? It’s so heavy around him, It is coming off in waves,” Mike stared at the door Mr Reyes exited from.

“It’s still here though,” Max said. “If he was being haunted, then the intensity of the energy would cease the moment he left, but it didn’t.”

“But it’s different, they are not similar,”

“You mean there are more than one entities in this house?”

“It doesn't have to be an entity, Byers, it can be a object with history as well,”

“But this doesn't feel like an object, it feels separate,” Mike sighed loudly. “I don't understand.”

“So I was way off when I thought it was schizophrenia.”

“You thought it was schizophrenia? Have we not done this shit like a thousand times?” 

“Well, sue me, I was thinking of his mental health, Max. It has happened before, when it was just El, Mike and me.”

“Okay, okay, Max, calm down, Will can’t feel the traces so it’s not his fault. Will, thank you for looking out for us, I, uh, we appreciate it.” Mike looked at Will, eyes soft. Will felt his cheeks heat up.

The door swung open and Mr Reyes walked in, his face noticeably calm.

“I feel better now,” He took his seat. “We can continue.”

“Mr Reyes, can you show us the food thing?”

***

things are escalating, what is going to happen?

thank you for reading!!

once again this was only betad by grammarly and hemingway editor so please lemme know if there are any errors or weird dialogues bc english isnt my first language and some of it looked funky to me.

some more lore that i can't figure how to put in the story w/o infodumping

el's full name is Janelle Hopper

will and el are still step siblings

lonnie is out of the picture

el is hopper's bio daughter

el was never experimented on and she grew up a happy normal life bc hop and joyce got together when will and el were about 5

mike, will and el met in kindergarten, just like in canon

the only reason el has this backstory is because i personally want el to not have a trauma filled life

next part should be up tomorrow, same time ie 1800 IST, spam me with messages if i don't update ✨✨

tell me what part you liked!!

[emotionaleating]

pls don’t flirt with me i want to be nonchalant so bad but i unfortunately crave connection so intensely that i will give you my entire soul and forgive you over and over until i’ve lost myself completely and feel like i’m drowning

[goofyrpmaniacs]

Wi: Oh no I think you mixed her up with Onyx. Alex's other sister.

Tw: Mention of mental disorder

A: Or...more like the same person.

Dr R: Pardon?

Rayleigh: What?

A: I-It's a lot to explain, but Jasmine is...Onyx's...other half. She has a split personality see...she's just been split apart from Onyx.

Ray:....I don't really get it, but Jasmine is Onyx...but not really?

[gor3sigil]

I’m Trans and Insane and I’m doing fine.

[TW Psychosis, transphobia, psychophobia, medication, psych ward]

“Are you sure ?” she asked.

I remember looking back at her in disbelief, because that was certainly a question I never asked her when she came out.

“Why do you ask ?” I say.

“Dude, I’ve seen you go into depersonalization so hard you even thought you were a human soul in a robot vessel and now, you want me to trust you when you say that you, too, are trans ?”

That’s the memory that comes back to me as I fold and put in my bag my psychiatrist’s note attesting that I suffer from gender dysphoria, NOT LINKED to any psychotic symptoms. Here it goes in my folder with my prescription note, an increase - again - of my anti depressants and Xan, and my endocrinologist’s HRT prescription, increased too - finally.

I go to two separate pharmacies to pick up each prescription for two reasons:

There is only one in this godforsaken town that always had testosterone in stock.

I can’t explain to you with words the look you can get when you give back to back, to someone who, despite not being a doctor, works in healthcare, a note for trans HRT and then a note for psychiatric meds.

And I’m lucky, because I’m not taking antipsychotics anymore. Contrarily to what you could think, it doesn’t magically makes the voices and the shadowy people disappear, but it can make a mess of your head pretty bad and my doctor and I both agreed that I didn’t need more damage up here than what I already had. And no, it doesn’t make your delusions vanish magically too: in fact, I was still pretty certain that I was talking to my soul family out here in Argentine telepathically about my mission on Earth, the meds just made it more difficult to understand their voices, but the belief was still solid.

Anyways, I’m back home with the Hoy Grail I fought tooth and nails to get: a letter from the Sacred Council of Mental Sanity also known as Psychiatry that I was, indeed, a bit delulu, but also trans, and that both things didn’t play into each other. My transness wasn’t a delusion, my delusions didn’t have anything to do with being trans.

Or did it ?

Chicken or egg, you know the drill. Did I have my selves fractured before and one of the piece that shattered my brain happened to make me trans or was I just trans with a shitload of traumas in the back that made me insane ?

But don’t worry, at least, trans people when we’re together, we have each other’s back ! Right ?

“Transidentity ISN’T a mental illness !! We don’t DESERVE to be FORCIBLY LOCKED UP and MEDICATED and MADE TO CONFORM FOR OTHER’S SENSE OF SECURITY !!”

Neither do I, RIGHT ?

Oh

Or do I ?

Remember what she said, my girlfriend, right at the beginning ?

How I can’t be trusted about myself when sometimes I don’t even have a sense of self anymore or I have too much selves who fight against each other ?

And what do we say to that ?

Get treatment. Get in-patient. Take medication. And for the love of God, shut the fuck up about it, you’re giving us a bad name.

Because being trans and crazy can’t exist. It’s absurd. You have to fix one of these two things. Choose which jacket I’ll wear, and they call it a straitjacket for a reason it seems, so am I queer or am I insane ?

All I know today is there isn’t a universe in which I’m a trans without any mental illnesses, or mentally ill without being trans. And yet, I can’t tell you how many time I got asked “do you think you’d be trans if you never got through [x trauma] ?”. I. Don’t. Know. I’ll never know. And I deserve just as much agency as you get despite being mentally ill. If you don’t believe in that, don’t come yapping about “liberation for all of us”, but “if one of us is crazy they’ll all think I am too and that can’t happen”.

No LGBTQIAA+ person deserves to be told they need to be put away, to be cured, to be allowed out in the open only if they’re deemed “acceptable” by society’s standards. And no mentally ill people deserve to either.

No trans person should be going through years of counseling to have the access to HRT.

And I shouldn’t have had to threaten my own mother’s life to avoid being locked in an adult psych ward at 14.

If you ever think, for one second, that these two things have nothing to do with one another, you are far removed from history.

To hear queer people say “yeah but some mentally ill people are dangerous !” feels like you don’t even know where you come from.

And if I want to say, that me being trans is linked to me being mentally ill, or at least, that both are connected in a way, all hell breaks fucking loose.

So I’ll explain very carefully.

See, when I was young, my mind got shattered into a thousand of pieces I had to try to glue back on. All these pieces of myself broke further more down the line because I couldn’t catch a fucking break. And now, it happens that the final puzzle does not have the same face it had before. It happens that its shape changed over time, for reasons over the control of all of us who tried to build ourselves back. Now there’s a bigger picture, less pieces, a few other shadows, and me. Built from the shatters. With my own needs and afflictions.

And whoever you are, whatever your agenda might be, I will not let anyone take any agency away from me under the false pretext that I can’t know anything for myself. They say that about children, they say that about minorities, about physically disabled people, about the people they want OUT. And my trans siblings, you know that.

I came out for the first time 7 years ago, to my then girlfriend, who was the one asking the question that is the first sentence of this text. I came out a second time 3 years ago. Been on HRT, had top surgery, had psychotic breaks, got my meds changed, switch therapist.

Because I am trans and crazy. And yet, all these choices I made, I made myself. It didn’t have to be that hard to get the basic care I needed. It didn’t need to be. But it WAS. And I’m part of the lucky crowd of people who had access to out-patient treatment, who never have been locked up in ward, who managed to stay alive through meds withdrawals without medical assistance when I had no therapist.

Be very careful of when you start to put conditions on the rights you think you deserve. Be very, very careful about your definition of sanity and of how it warps the way you see people. When you start to say “I have access to that, but there’s people like X or Y who shouldn’t BECAUSE”, pause and ask yourself what led you to think this way. More often than not, you’ll find yourself playing the same mind games as the ones you swore to fight against, and when it gives them the upper hand, they won’t hesitate to come for you after that.

[fatphobiabusters]

As unhealthy as you perceive any food to be, it is much more unhealthy to be scared of the act of eating.

-Mod Worthy

[betterluckthenexttime]

[endedbyisiaha]

Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough?Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough? Why can’t I be good enough?

[bellegotd1zzy]

when the situation so bad not even sucking it in can save you so you have to pull this outfit

[orphancoded]

[fieryprime]

I think if I hear one more YT channel call that Colleen girl that abused and groomed kids "narcissistic", I'll implode.

Here are some basics:

NPD is a stigmatized disorder.

"Narcissistic" describes a person who has NPD.

I thought people learned this lesson when we removed "psychotic" from the list of insults you can throw around. Guess not.

The words you're looking for are "self-centric", "self-absorbed", "egomaniac", "egotistical".

Being any of the aforementioned does not make you narcissistic.

You can't armchair diagnose people. Yes, not even the shitty ones.

You can't claim that abusive behavior is connected to the person's disorder(s). Abuse is a choice.

By armchair assigning narcissism to shitty people, you are furthering the stigma against narcissistic individuals.

The risks of completing suicide in pwNPD are very high.

Narcissists are not inherently abusive.

Narcissistic abuse does not exist.

Colleen Ballinger is not a person with NPD.

Her actions are her conscious choice; her inability to apologize and make amends has nothing to do with pwNPD.

Leave the term "narcissistic" out of your mouth if you don't know how to use it.

And kindly, shut up about narcissistic traits unless you're narcissistic.

[emotionaleating]

[cvtmyhearttopieces]

the feeling of getting worse is so comforting

[dumbbitchdisaster]

Full stomach= nasty feeling, nauseating, disgusting, fat pig, uncomfortable

Empty stomach= beautiful, angelic, comforting, it girl, worthy, confident

[stargirlanthem]

every day, i feel less and less real ✶⋆.˚

[artiumghosted]

I just love making these types of memes. I'll probably make more lmao

[npd-hottakes]

Consider intent before calling someone manipulative.

Instead of accusing someone with npd (or anyone for that matter) of trying to manipulate you, you should instead tell them why what they said might come across as manipulative without being accusatory or condescending. Most people don't realize something they said might be manipulative.

When you just say "this was manipulative and you're a bad person for saying it" they won't know what to change and they'll just pretend to be sorry so you'll leave them alone. It helps no one.

But when you instead say "that unintentionally came across as manipulative because X, I know you didn't mean it and you're not a bad person, but you should say Y instead in the future so people won't misinterpret you" will save both parties from future trouble and is far less likely to offend anyone.

Advice that could've saved so many of my past relationships. A lot of the time all you need is clear communication and boundaries.