#welcome to the most dysfunctional sibling relationship ever. there is so much context in this situation we Have Not Posted Yet

[secret-bug-pain-blog]

Febuwhump Day 13 - "You weren't supposed to get hurt"

Part two of the We Forgot To Post Some Prompts Special. This one's family drama edition!

"...Kina?"

What.

Astotheles briefly abandoned his guard to glance to the side. Kina was frozen in the middle of moving into position, staring at the Royal Blade like she'd seen a ghost.

"...Maki?" Kina asked.

...did they know each other???

The Royal Blade- Maki, apparently, if that was his name. It was an odd trick of perspective to try and think of the mantis as the person who would have an informal name, considering that he had been half-certain the bug didn't have any sort of life outside of being Elizant's personal lap dog before now, but considering that Kina seemed to know him-

"I- Kina, what are you doing here? You- the mission- we thought you were dead!" 

Kina reared up- breaking formation entirely, Astotheles noted somewhere in the back of his head, but considering whatever bundle of something she was bringing to light with the Royal Blade, he couldn't really bring himself to resent it. He could easily question it, though. What in Bugaria could have possibly given her the chance to build any sort of relationship with Elizant's top minion?

Kina took a step back as the Blade- Maki, advanced on her. The blade fell limp in his claw as he abandoned his guard almost entirely. "I-"

"You- you were missing for months! Were you here this whole time?" His scent muddled as he advanced further, a mix of emotions that Astotheles struggled to decipher- and that he really shouldn't be spending the time to decipher, in the middle of a battle. Kina continued to back up, driven by the Blade - a sight that would've been almost comedic, if it weren't for the situation at hand. He was barely half her size against a bug that towered over most of the battlefield - and she was still retreating, though she smelled more of shame than of fear.

"Didn't you think that I might still care?" the Blade asked, somewhere between accusatory and hurt, and Kina reacted, flinching back as if she'd been struck.

"I didn't want you to get hurt!" she cried, distress leaking into her scent- an Ant stumbled out of her path as she flared her wings, a cricket darting around her ankles. Astotheles was getting increasingly certain that this was not the time or the place, and yet...!

The battle still raged around them. With the Royal Blade distracted, the tide was changing, if slowly. Astotheles caught a handful of bugs slowing, shooting glances at the unfolding drama in their midst before dealing with the actual fight. Distracted. Off their game.

He didn't have time for this.

"Kina-"

Astotheles had heard enough.

The mantis saw him coming, but he didn't react quickly enough. A sharp blow to the back of the claw, and he was disarmed- another few blows to the head knocked him out before he could bring his guard back up. The Royal Blade crumpled to the sand like a puppet with its strings cut, taken down by a needle-hilt to the head, and Kina jolted to attention, raising her blades in preparation to...

To attack the bug who had downed her squadmate. A conditioned response. And one that Astotheles knew very, very well.

She stared at the bug on the ground like her whole world had abruptly been turned upside down, and all that Astotheles could think was that we don't have time for this.

"We will need to talk about this later," he told Kina. Her expression wavered, stress, worry, relief, and resignment mixing so closely that he struggled to tell where one scent ended and the next began. It was a concerningly long moment before she nodded.

There was history, there. But he didn't have time for whatever new surprise that Kina had been hiding in her back pocket, and right now, he had a battle to win.

[schmetterlinq]

December 12th is my 28th birthday!

And so much has happened in 2017, I feel compelled to look back and ramble about my year....

Looking back, taking stock of my feelings, helps me process stuff. My head is so full of thoughts all the time that writing things out helps. And it feels particularly important this year like I said. Because so much has happened and for the first time in a long time, I can actually say the good has outweighed the bad for the most part. It didn’t always feel that way at the time, but in hindsight this has been the best year I’ve had in, well, years.

(It feels strange to say that when in the wider context it often feels like the world is falling apart. But maybe that��s why it’s even more important for us to remember individual good things.)

There’s so many things I want/need to talk about that I barely know where to start, so I’m going to do my mother’s favourite thing and make a list.

Family My sweet sibling, the first best friend of my life, got married this year. Their wife is from the US, and they met while she was in London on a university exchange. Funnily enough, my sibling was actually born in the US themselves, because at the time my father was working in NYC so we lived abroad. (I have little to no memory of this being 2 at the time.) Because being born in the US automatically gives you citizenship, my sibling has an American passport, and they were able to move out to be with their wife as soon as they were done with university in the UK. They didn’t have to deal with any difficult or expensive immigration requirements which was so fortunate for the two of them.

The two of them have lived together in the US for several years now, and while I miss them terribly, seeing their happiness makes my heart so full. My sibling is two years younger than me and we’ve always been so close. They have grown from the kid I spent nights crying with while they struggled with their gender identity and sexuality, into a happy, capable, confident, proud person. Being in a relationship and making a commitment to someone through marriage was always very important to them (I remember teasing them because they’d buy wedding magazines even as a teenager). They and their wife are perfect for each other. Our whole family adores my sibling’s wife, even our younger brother who generally hates everybody. She really feels like one of the family. She’s in our family group chat and everything (yes we have a family group chat, my dad needs somewhere to post all the animated emojis he finds on his iPhone…) They married in California and we were all able to be there which was so special. Seeing the life the two of them have built together is such a blessing. I will be able to see the two of them again this Christmas and I’m so excited. In California I felt free and light, and I actually enjoyed the sun and the hot weather. There was another special part of being in California which was ALICIA 💕… more on her later.

Work Since February, for the first time, I am working a full time job. I know, 27 is pretty old to start working full time – more on this later as well.

I was finally able to translate the experience from volunteering and part time work I’ve been doing for the past few years into a proper position (with a proper wage!) and although I moan about my job a lot, it’s really been a gift. To be honest, I used to worry my mental health wouldn’t allow me to work a full time job. Now it’s been nine months and I’m (mostly) coping. It’s been such a confidence boost. Getting this job also meant I was able to leave my old part time job, which gave me a lot of useful experience but had become a very toxic environment due to management changes and had been really getting me down. My new office is much more chill and friendly which has been much better for my mental health, and I am given much more responsibility as a full-time staff member and able to do more in depth work with my clients.

My role is helping cancer patients claim disability benefits and other welfare and financial aid. It’s hard sometimes but it feels important. The welfare benefits system is under attack in the UK at the moment and people are really struggling. I don’t do this job to feel good about myself of course but – it’s good to feel like I’m doing something to help, even a little bit, you know?

It’s also almost ten years now since my grandmother died, of cancer, which triggered the worst breakdown and depressive episode I’ve ever had and led to me dropping out of my dream university when I was 19 and spending nearly a year in my bedroom at my parents’ house watching daytime TV and hating myself. I wasn’t able even to re-start university until I was 21, which is why I am that much ‘later’ to really get into the world of work. I actually don’t think about my grandmother all the time at my job, although part of me worried before I started that I might. In fact weeks can go by and I don’t think of her much at all. But it feels right that this is what I’m doing now. It feels like I’ve come full circle, in a good way.

This isn’t what I want to do forever. Long term, I really want to go back to university and teach and write. But I enjoy this for now, I’m earning a wage, I’m gaining confidence and helping people, and I need to get my mental health and my self-discipline really back on track before I think about going back to learning. Which leads me neatly on to…

Mental health; the compulsion to write I’ve been on anti-depressants for nearly 10 years now, and I probably will be for the rest of my life. No shame, I don’t ever want to stop taking them, they’ve been lifesavers. On top of that I am finally – finally – taking the first steps for getting into treatment for my ADHD. I had my first consultation a month ago and my second is at the start of the new year. I’m trying not to hope for too much, but if I could find ways to navigate my executive dysfunction in particular it would really change my life.

Mentally, I’m always up and down. I think I’ll always have the tendency to get lost in dark places and take a while to find my way out, for the rest of my life. But overall I feel pretty happy. And more than happy I feel hopeful, and, for the first time in years, to my astonishment, to my disbelief, I feel… creative, I feel inspired to write again.

Writing was always my first love. I wrote my first ‘novel’ when I was 11; I used to get up at 5 in the morning to write chapters before school. (I still have a copy of this ‘novel.’ It’s hilariously, heart-warmingly bad. There are dragons.) Throughout my years at school, which I hated (I was good at the work but I had no friends), I would write like a mad thing to escape my dark moods. As well as prose I began writing poetry and, later song lyrics. I discovered fanfic when I was 16 and that helped me connect with other people who wrote, share my own writing and make the first real adult friends I ever had. Writing was a compulsion; I couldn’t not do it. I would write and dream, and dream of having other people read my writing and feeling touched by it.

My grandmother was also a (actual published) writer. We used to talk about our writing for hours. She was a kindred spirit to me, and when she died, it was as though I lost my creativity. It’s not that I haven’t written anything since then – I have, I even did creative writing as part of my eventual degree when I went back to school – but it was never the same. I never felt that absolute compulsion to write that used to fuel me in the past. It really felt as though part of me had withered away and died. I honestly had started to give up on it all together and tell myself it was a nice thing I did as a kid and then grew out of.

(Part of me doesn’t know how to write this next bit without feeling extremely embarrassed and exposed, like the time I got drunk at my uncles’ Christmas party and told a complete stranger my entire mental health history. But I’m also trying not to be embarrassed by my feelings and how intensely I have them, and I can’t explain where this is going without talking about this, so here goes.)

My love of kpop never really overlapped at all with my writing ambitions before, which was honestly a good thing. It was a welcome distraction from the fact that I often felt about as creative as a plastic bag.

Even just fandom wise, I have to stop and say this year has been kind of bananas. After Alicia (as I said – more on her later!) got me into EXO last year, I used to joke and say, well, at least this is the ‘worst’ i’ll ever get! I never had any interest in any other boy groups or liking any other boy groups or even sparing a passing glance at any other boy groups. I felt like I already had too many of them. I felt like in a few years I’d probably age out of kpop anyway as my faves started to retire so there wasn’t any point in getting into any much younger groups. I certainly never felt any interest in these new young trending boy groups, those were for the youths, get them off my lawn.

Then I read online that a member of BTS, Min Yoongi - who I was semi-aware of through a couple of mutuals, yes that means you Hyemi - had released a solo project that talked a lot about mental health issues. I was quite impressed by that – we all know that stuff is hard to talk about for anyone, and more so in the kpop industry. I was curious so I decided to download it and give it a listen.

I spent an evening with this solo project, a lyrics translation website and a bottle of wine. Somewhere halfway through, when he talked about being in a psychiatrist’s office with his parents, I remembered my own parents and them arranging my psychiatric appointments, and a chord rang in me and I started crying. By the end of the album I was crying more than I had in a long time but it was in the most cathartic, cleansing way. I listened to all the tracks all the way through about three more times and read the lyrics and just cried until I felt drained and uplifted.

For quite a while that was all there was to it. I would listen to his songs and feel happy and comforted. But of course after a while I started to want to know more about the person behind the songs. I saw a gifset of him just throwing glitter over himself and I knew he was going to steal my heart and he did. The trouble with this is, once you start to pay attention to one member of a group you inevitably learn about the others and start to appreciate them as well… then I made the mistake of telling Hyemi about this and she made it her mission to drag me further in and now, well, I find myself having adopted several new kids.

But back to my main point. At some stage, listening and thinking and feeling understood, I started to feel that compulsion to write myself again.

I feel like a part of me that was sleeping has woken up. I really want to write again. I’ve written songs again, a type of writing I really really had assumed was just an immature teenage hobby. I have a notebook in my bag again. I’m certainly not back to how I used to be as a teenager but it’s there, it’s still in me. I have no idea if it will really go anywhere but honestly… I don’t care. I have a part of me back I thought was gone for good, a part of me that I used to share with my grandmother and still makes me feel connected to her.

I never really feel any desire to meet or talk to celebrities I admire. I’ve done it in the past and it was always inevitably hideous and embarrassing and disappointing. But if there was a way, just as one writer to another, I would say, thank you, thank you.

And now with that (finally) over it’s time for the finale to this monster of a blog post,

ALICIA, or how EXO got Hattie a girlfriend

The biggest, brightest highlights of 2017 have been the times I was able to spend with my favourite person in the world, Alicia. Alicia was a highlight of 2016 too of course, but this was the year we finally got to meet in person. It had been well over a year of talking online all day almost every day, of

Alicia and I met, of course, right here on tumblr dot com, because we are that gay millennial cliche. We were casual online friends for quite a few years actually and used to chat on tumblr messenger about random shit. At the beginning of 2016, she decided she was going to get me into EXO (still an impressive feat, I’m sure some of you remember how I used to hate them) and we started messaging each other online multiple times throughout the day. We were both going through some quite tough things then, me with my shitty part time job sucking the life out of me and her with a very close friend/almost sister moving far away. We distracted each other with EXO and in the process, she became my best friend and also I kind of wanted to hold her hand a lot. We had no idea how we could make it work, neither of us had a lot of money and didn’t know if we could afford to travel regularly to visit, let alone even consider long term options like moving, but it felt too… important, too promising to let it go and so we just kept talking. And finally, finally, in May this year, with the boost that having my new full time salary gave me, I was able to fly to visit her in the US for a week. Our first days together were soft and lovely and rainy and we held hands and shyly got to feel comfortable with each other. In the summer I was lucky enough to have her as my plus one at my sibling’s wedding, and we got to spend some beautiful, extremely hot, silly days in California together. And then in November I spent my first real American Thanksgiving with her and her lovely family who have been so terribly sweet and welcoming to me.

I don’t want to be one of ~those people~ and write some novel length post about how great my SO is but part of me is honestly still in a state of ??? It seems so random that we even got to meet each other. We’re so similar and yet so different at the same time. She understands me and puts up with me when I’m being a grumpy little raincloud and cuddles me and makes me food and tea. She’s so cute and smol and fits perfectly under my arm. She takes me to Starbucks and for vegetarian food and she holds my hand whenever we walk together. She listens to me ramble about random shit and rambles back at me about the same. She indulges all my weird interests and even finds my enjoyment of car racing cute. She makes me feel like I’m not alone any more, I always have someone to go to who will support me and fight my corner and see the best in me, and I want more than anything to be that person for her as well. I love you, my koala 🐨💕

This is so long and I don’t know how to finish… I feel like my life might be going somewhere. For the first time in maybe ever. As I’ve said before. I don’t want to hope for too much. But most of my life, especially since graduating but even before that, even as a teenager, I felt directionless, like I was just being swept along. Now I feel like I’m finally starting to see some semblance of a path ahead. I don’t want to hope for too much. But it feels really good, it feels really good.

If you got to the end of this mess then congrats tbh. I wish you all a beautiful Christmas and the happiest new year!

(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧