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mypoisonedvine · 4 years ago

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Sessions with August | August Walker x Reader -- Chapter 1

This is something I’ve been working on for a while with my bestie @nuns-and-roses! We will be posting some future chapters from her blog so give her a follow for more of this (and also lots of amazing fics).

Summary: As a CIA psychiatrist, most of your clients are aggressive, intimidating, maybe even a little threatening. But none of them are quite like August Walker. You were trained to trust your gut and remove yourself from any situation that made you uncomfortable. If you had followed that training, maybe you could’ve saved yourself from the twisted world he planned to bring you into…

Word Count: 3k

Warnings: mentions/descriptions of childhood abuse; no smut in this chapter but there will be eventual non-con/heavy dub con and lots of dark themes like manipulation, gaslighting, stalking, etc. Discretion is advised.

Session 1 - October 9th

You only had five minutes between sessions each day, and it was a very important time. As a psychiatrist seeing patients, there is limited time to oneself. Your patients become a part of you, and you assume an identity at work that often follows you home.

Reserved, kind, patient. Every single word, every movement, was an act. And it's not that you were really lying or manipulating your patients, it's just that you had to close off most of yourself to them. It was how both of you were protected.

In five minutes, you had time to step out of that persona while you sorted your files and grabbed a quick snack. You contemplated between a granola bar or clementine, eventually choosing the latter, though you had to wash your hands to get off the sticky residue of the acidic peel.

As you washed your hands, you contemplated yourself in the mirror. You had put a lot of thought into your look for this persona. To save time and energy, you wore the same thing every day: your closet was all black pencil skirts, white button-downs and black blazers, with only a little space for your off-work clothing (which never got much use). In winter you added thick stockings to keep from freezing during the walk to and from your car, but otherwise it remained the same. Even the jewelry-- freshwater pearl studs and a dainty gold tennis bracelet-- remained the same, along with your beloved pair of Italian leather heels which weren't so high that you felt overdressed, but just high enough that you felt taller, and perhaps a bit sexy though you knew that shouldn't matter.

The goal was to look neutral, to not have your appearance distract in any way. To blend in. It had actually been sort of difficult to perfect one makeup look that you could put on quickly before work, but you'd managed. Your hair was probably what you spent the most time on each morning, since it had to be pulled back pretty tight and you wanted every single hair to be in place.

Checking the clock, you saw that it was about time to call in your next appointment. It was a new patient, a somewhat recent recruit that had already garnered a bit of a reputation. From what you'd heard he was incredibly ambitious to the point of being a bit cutthroat. What the rumors had failed to mention, you realized as you opened the door to guide him in from the waiting room, was that he was hot. And not just "hey, good for you!" hot, but "how am I expected to get any work done in these conditions?!" hot. You introduced yourself with a firm handshake and tried not to think about the size of his hands or the strength of his grip.

"Mr. Walker, please, have a seat," you encouraged, motioning to the room.

"Which one?" he asked, noticing the menagerie of chairs and sofas in your office.

"Ah, yes, this may be strange if you're used to a more... clinical space," you nodded. "Sit wherever you'd like. Whatever looks most comfortable to you."

He examined his options and seemed to be putting more thought to it than most did.

"This is a test, isn't it? You want to see what kind of person I am by what I pick?"

You laughed. "No, I just want you to have options."

He settled for a high back chair which normally made people look kind of short but his body barely fit into it. He made it look like a toy chair for a child.

"Is that your final answer?" you asked with a smile.

"I knew it was a test," he frowned.

"It's really not," you laughed, "I just want you to be comfortable."

"Tell me what it says about me. What do you know because I picked this chair?" he demanded, apparently not believing you that it wasn't a test.

"What do you think it says about you?" you asked instead.

He thought about that for a second. "I guess I'm probably more… structured than the guy who picks the bean bag. More formal."

You nodded. "That makes sense."

"Who picks the bean bag anyway?" he smirked.

"Almost no one picks the bean bag."

He smiled, and it looked a little rehearsed. But it was only the first day, so maybe he would open up over time.

“What are we supposed to do in here?” he asked, looking around as if he was expecting something he could see to explain therapy: did he think you were going to give him shocks or something?

“Well, that’s sort of up to you, Mr. Walker. The goal of these sessions is really just for you to have time each week that you can spend however you’d like.”

“Really? I could just come in here and read a book or whatever?”

“Yes, although I can’t promise you that would be the best use of your time.”

“Could I clean my gun?” he pressed.

You tried not to have a strong reaction. Then again, that could describe a lot of your sessions. “I personally would prefer that you didn’t, to be honest.” He smirked. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of guns.”

“No, I’m not,” you answered honestly, “but I think it’s better for you if this time feels distinct from your work. I know that can be difficult since this is happening through your work and is being funded by your work and we work in different wings of the same building…”

“I don’t need time away from my job. I love my job.” “I’m glad to hear that. I love my job, too, but I would have to say that it is important to my health that I get some time separate from that.”

“Your job is way worse than mine,” he grinned.

“Really?” you smiled back. “A lot of people would say my job is easy.”

“Listening to these crazies bitch all day? I’d lose my mind,” he chuckled.

“Who said I hadn’t lost mine?” you smirked.

Session 2 - October 16th

“You’re wearing the same thing as last time,” he noticed instantly. It usually took a few sessions for someone to notice. Had he really spent so much time looking at you that he remembered what you’d worn?

“Yes, I am,” you agreed.

“Lucky coincidence?” he asked.

“No, I actually wear the same clothes every day,” you corrected. He gave you a confused look. “It saves me time in the morning.”

“That’s it? You wear the same outfit every single day, just to save time in the morning?”

You looked to the ground, questioning how honest you should get. But how could you expect him to be honest with you if you couldn’t open up in this one little way?

“Clothing is a form of self-expression, and these sessions aren’t about expressing my self,” you explained. “I’d hate for my clothing choices to become a distraction.”

He looked you up and down and you felt more observed than you preferred to be.

“What you’re wearing now is plenty distracting on its own,” he said darkly.

You shifted in your seat. You felt very observed, more than you preferred to be.

“I’m… sorry to hear that,” you awkwardly replied.

“Don’t be sorry,” he shrugged.

“What… what were we talking about before?” you asked awkwardly.

Session 3 - October 23rd

“Good afternoon,” you smiled, extending your hand for a handshake. Why did you feel a little awkward when he shook your hand in return? “How are you doing?”

“I’m alright, thanks for asking,” he smiled. “How about you?”

“Well, thank you,” you answered warmly, taking your seat. “So, what do you want to talk about today?”

“I dunno,” he shrugged.

“Well, it’s up to you to guide the discussion wherever you want it to go.”

“What do the superiors think we should be talking about?” he asked, sounding a little incredulous.

“Do you think I get notes from your managers on what to discuss with you?”

“I… sort of assumed,” he admitted.

“I don’t. This is your time. Use it however you’d like.”

The way he looked at you made you wonder if he was going to take that a little too seriously.

“I guess you want me to talk about my traumatic childhood or something?”

“Well, if you’d like to…”

August looked at where his shoe was propped over his other knee, bouncing it as if he was nervous.

“It’s only our second session,” you dismissed.

“Right, right,” he responded, sounding like he was deep in thought. “I don’t want to burden you…”

“Burden? August, never worry about that. It’s my job. I’m here to help you.”

He looked up at you again, something broken and hollow in his expression. “It’s… upsetting.”

“Try me.”

He took a shaky breath, rubbing his hands together. You furrowed your brow at the complete 180 in his body language.

“Well,” he began slowly, “I always knew something was wrong when I was a kid. I knew that that wasn’t how things were supposed to be, even if it was the only thing I’d ever known.”

He narrowed his eyes like he was thinking, then glanced over to the window.

“I knew there wasn’t supposed to be blood on the walls,” he recalled with a shockingly-neutral expression, “I knew there was something wrong…”

You nodded but said nothing, wanting to let him finish this train of thought before you contributed.

“My mother…” he continued, his voice getting darker, “she was troubled, I suppose. She hated me. I don’t know what I did that made her hate me so much. She was good at putting on a face for other people, hiding my cuts and bruises so people wouldn’t ask questions. But in those days, no one was really asking questions anyway. Children were property, and women were always doing right by their children no matter what they did.”

You waited for the silence to steep for a while before you commented. “That sounds… terrible,” you replied quietly, “I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you,” he responded with a curt nod.

“Where was your father in all this?”

“Who knows?”

“He wasn’t in the picture,” you presumed.

“No, he lived with us. He just… wasn’t there. I guess he didn’t see anything wrong with it. She always had dinner ready on the table when he got home, and past that, he barely even acknowledged my existence. I guess he trusted her to raise me. I tried to tell him a few times, but he just told me to respect my mother. He just wanted me to leave him alone.”

“Do you have any memories of time alone with your father?”

“No,” he said like he was realizing it for the first time. “No, I don’t think I was ever alone with my father.”

You decided to let that one sit, hoping to let him continue without you prompting him.

“Every day was hell with her,” he finally added after a moment. “It was always something. No matter what I did, I had always done something wrong. She didn’t always beat me… sometimes she would burn spices and blow the smoke in my face. Sometimes she would make me kneel on uncooked rice. Mostly it was just beatings, though. I lost a lot of my teeth early because of it. And I’m still deaf in this ear,” he explained, motioning to his left ear.

“Wow,” you whispered. “Did no one ever stick up for you? Nobody ever questioned your injuries, like a doctor, maybe?”

“I didn’t see a doctor until I was an adult,” he laughed coldly. “She didn’t believe in that. She thought it was all part of the mind, I think-- that every health problem was just an outward reflection of all my inner faults. Thankfully, I never came down with anything too serious. She was always able to nurse me back to health, even when I got what I realize now was almost certainly pneumonia.”

“Was she more caring when you were ill?”

“Not exactly a warm-and-fuzzy type, but yes, she was gentler. She didn’t beat me until I was well again.”

“How generous,” you groaned with an eyeroll.

“I know, but you learn to appreciate the little things,” he explained. “You must have clung to any affection from adults that you could,” you offered.

“Yes, I did.”

“That seems like a reasonable response.”

“Yes…” he repeated, something darker crossing his tone, “but it can be dangerous, chasing down affection…”

You shuddered a little, but suppressed it. You wanted to explore that statement more, but a glance at the clock revealed you didn’t have even close to enough time to dig into it.

“Sounds like something we can pick up with next week,” you said lightly.

“Oh, is it already time?”

“Getting close to it,” you nodded. “I don’t want to cut you off or anything. This has been really productive. I feel like I’m getting to know you better.”

“Yeah,” he smiled, “ditto.”

“And before we wrap up, I just want to say a few things, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course, go ahead.”

“First, thank you for sharing this with me.”

He nodded in acknowledgement.

“Second, I want to tell you that you didn’t do anything to make your mother hurt you like that. There’s nothing you could’ve done to justify that… you were a child. You were her child. She was supposed to take care of you, and she didn’t. And it wasn’t because you did something wrong, but simply because there are awful, evil, sick people in this world who do terrible things to innocent people.”

He looked taken aback by that. “Nobody’s innocent.”

That wasn’t the response you expected. Most people hear “it’s not your fault” and brush it away, say that they know that even if they don’t, say that they’ve heard it all before. Had August not heard this before? Was this the first time someone was responding this way? Worse, was this the first time he’d told someone at all?

“August, you were a child. You were innocent.”

He nodded, but didn’t seem super convinced.

“And, lastly,” you finished with a sigh, “does this time next week work for you?”

Sometimes, you just have that itch in your brain, and you need to scratch it. On your way to your car from your office, you found yourself taking a detour to the records office, and leaning on the desk of the receptionist there.

“Good evening, Melissa,” you greeted.

“Oh, hey!” she smiled back from behind her computer. “What’s up?”

“Could you get me anything you have on August Walker?”

“You should be able to access that already--”

“No, that’s just from his time in Operations. He used to work in Support.”

“Really?”

“Um, yeah. Can you… get me that file?”

“Yeah, sure. ...Looks like he had another psychiatrist then, too. I think they had a mandated intake interview back then.”

“Makes sense.”

“I’ve got some tapes here.”

You laughed a little when she actually handed you literal cassettes. “Oh, you mean tapes. I assumed it was digital.”

“Not this far back.”

You slipped the tape into your car’s tape player on your drive home. Perks of having a shitty old car.

So, tell me, August, the calm male voice of the retired Dr. Newbury began, what inspires your interest in the CIA?

I have a talent. I want it to get some use.

What do you mean when you say ‘talent’?

I can do things other people can’t. And I don’t mean physically, although I suppose that’s true, too. What I mean is, I can tolerate things other people can’t. I can survive things other people can’t. There’s something about people that makes them… sensitive. Reactive. I don’t think I have that. I don’t feel things the way other people do.

And you don’t see that as a weakness?

I think I did, once. But I realize now that it’s my greatest strength. I have a sense of… peace, that most people can only dream of.

Peace? Is that something that’s important to you?

Isn’t it important to everyone?

That’s fair. Where do you think that sense of peace comes from?

Is it time to dig into my childhood, Doc?

You shivered at how similar it sounded to his own discussion with you, even when he was clearly so much younger.

I suppose.

Are you one of those people who thinks peace can only come from suffering?

Let’s not talk about me.

Well, I think that suffering is overrated. My childhood, since you’re dying to know, was fine. Simple. Something in me is… missing, maybe, but it wasn’t stolen. My mom was sweet-- the kind of person who would bake a pie and leave it in the windowsill to cool. Always at social functions, always showing me off.

And your father?

Quiet. Stern, never cruel. I mean, he would discipline me when I did something wrong-- but that’s not cruelty, that’s love, isn’t it?

You could say that.

Then sure, my father loved me.

Is that the only way your father loved you? Through discipline?

Is there any other way?

You stopped the tape but what you had heard echoed in your mind. There was something about this story that you hadn’t gotten out of what he had told you. That undefinable, inscrutable element that could only be described as the truth. Of course you had questioned his story at the time, but you had been told to believe people when they were confessing something so serious, even as some covert sense told you that something was wrong.

You pulled over and grabbed a paper file from the seat next to you.

“Of course,” you mumbled aloud to yourself, “of course something was wrong…”

You flipped to his physical examination results from his first intake. He was just 19 then, a few weeks before the interview you had just listened to.

Perfect hearing in both ears. 20/20 vision. Flawless dental impressions-- due mainly to 7 years of corrective braces staggered throughout his childhood.

You felt sick-- actually, physically sick. As much as you had anticipated that there was something off with his original story, you hadn’t prepared for such a significant fabrication. You still didn’t understand why he had lied to you… or what more you would learn had been simply a story.

#august walker x reader #august walker x y/n #august walker smut #august walker headcanon #august walker imagine #henry cavill smut #henry cavill x reader #henry cavill x y/n #henry cavill headcanons #mission impossible fanfiction #dark!henry cavill

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let-it-raines · 5 years ago

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Catch Me If You Can (17/?)

298 days. That’s how long Killian Jones was away from a baseball field. It’s less than a year, only part of a season for him, but it might as well have lasted a decade as he alternated between physical therapy and spending an excessive amount of time sitting on his couch.

But then he came back and won the World Series.

It’s something no one saw coming, and it’s certainly not something anyone who knows about his arm would predict. Now it’s a new season with new possibilities, and anything could happen. On-field reporter Emma Swan will be there to cover it all even if she is not his biggest fan right now.

Asking her out live on-air will do that.

Rating: Mature

A/n: Everyone enjoying all of these post-season games? Even if your team has already lost like mine 🙈 Anyways, we’re back in London for one more chapter here and @resident-of-storybrooke is still the mvp for reading all of these words.

Found on AO3: Beginning | Current

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Tag list: @xellewoods @galaxyzxstark @eala-captian @mariakov81 @ultraluckycatnd @royalswan @shey-starsfury @sals86 @iam2307 @ashley-knightingale @karenfrommisthaven @scientificapricot @captswanis4vr @ultimiflos @jamif @idristardis @nikkiemms @resident-of-storybrooke @tiganasummertree @bmbbcs4evr @onceuponaprincessworld @jennjenn615 @mayquita @captainsjedi @teamhook @notoriouscs @kmomof4 @ekr032-blog-blog @cs-forlife @andiirivera @jonirobinson64 @qualitycoffeethings

-/-

Emma can feel Killian’s nose nudging between her shoulder blades, his scruff scratching at her skin, and as good as it feels, she can’t help but curl further into her pillow and bring her knees up to her stomach, hoping that he’ll leave her alone so that she can sleep longer. So much longer. Jet-lag is a bitch, and she just wants to sleep forever. They don’t even get a day off when they get home, and just thinking about it has her dying.

Why in the world did she get sent over here when she’s only writing an article and doing social media stuff? Jeff should have come with her, Ruby too, but right now, she can’t really complain.

This bed is really soft.

London is wonderful.

Killian smells really good right now. He shouldn’t smell this good this early in the morning, and he probably got up to brush his teeth and put cologne on or something stupidly wonderful like that.

But she’s tired, and all she really wants is to sleep some more and for the pleasant ache between her thighs to lessen a bit so she won’t be thinking about it all day long. It’s a wonderful memory to have to think about as her day goes on, but still, a girl has got to be able to walk without her mind going to weird places.

The new phase of a relationship is so damn fun.

Sighing, she hugs her pillow more closely and keeps her eyes shut only for Killian to place the softest kiss in existence on the back of her neck that has the shiver multiplying its intensity by ten with each new vertebra that it reaches.

“Did you know that you are a kicker in your sleep?” he murmurs, his voice hoarse and gravely like it always is in the mornings. She really likes that. Like, really. “And that you are also a heat seeker, and I am in no way safe from your assault.”

“That sounds like a hard life,” Emma mumbles, still not bothering to open her eyes.

“The hardest. Do you know that we’ve only ever spent the night together in hotels? You’ve never even seen my bedroom. We somehow have never made it past the living room.”

“You’ve never seen mine.”

“True,” he sighs as his hand inches over her waist so that his nails can run over her stomach, making the muscles flutter. Or maybe those are the damn metaphorical butterflies. It doesn’t matter. “We should remedy that when we get home.” Home.

He means New York. He doesn’t mean his apartment or her apartment. He simply means the city they both happen to live in, but knowing that doesn’t change the way her heart is hammering in her chest, that residual feeling of being terrified that this is all going to blow up in her face still lingering. It’s not there as much as it used to be, some of the fear tampering down the more comfortable she becomes with Killian, but as old ones fade away, new ones emerge like one of those creepy aliens in movies.

Killian isn’t like Walsh or Neal or any of the people who have hurt her. Anyone with half-functioning eyes could see that, and it’s reaffirmed in how he supports her every day. He sends her articles she’s written in the past with little notes attached to them on what he thinks. Sometimes he shares links to YouTube videos of her interviews, asking her how she noticed the strategy they employed to win that day or simply complimenting her on thinking on her feet when she gets put in a tough situation. The only people who could possibly support her more are Ruth and David, but Killian is very much inching up to the top of the Emma Swan fan club.

He’d probably make t-shirts. Several. And wear them under all of his clothes, the dork.

Dark and broody but also dorky. That’s how she’d describe him if she had to in three words or less.

So she’s not worried that he’s going to demean her or belittle her or make her feel unworthy like she has felt in the past, but there are so many other ways for him to hurt her. Their relationship getting out, for one, could destroy her professional credibility, at least for a little while. That’s something she thinks about every time she sneaks out of her hotel room and into his. It’s ridiculous hard to find a time when someone isn’t in the hallway. But what if he’s secretly shitty in some kind of other way? What if he doesn’t continue to be so open and honest with her? What if he realizes that her hang-ups are too complicated? What if he realizes that he doesn’t want to be patient with her when she does have her freak outs? He’s so damn patient with her, always waiting for her to make the move before he does, and there’s no guarantee he won’t get tired of that.

Why is this the morning that she thinks about this?

Probably because the reality of them telling their friends and family is hitting her. It was her idea, the guilt of lying to everyone overwhelming her, but now the actuality is overwhelming her even more.

Last night, she told Killian that she would go to Addy’s birthday party under this insane plan that he has of them fake running into each other in the hallway, and the reality of meeting his family is kind of freaking her out. She’s never met a boyfriend’s family before, which was always such a blessing, and now she’s invading Killian’s niece’s birthday party.

Where his brother, who he absolutely admires in every way, will be, along with his wife and their kids and all of these other people who are important to Killian.

Emma wants to run. She knows that she does. Feelings overwhelm her, the feelings she has for Killian most of all, but she thinks she’d rather be overwhelmed by the happiness that he helps her feel rather than the anxiety.

The new phase of a relationship is fun but also terrifying.

“Are you inviting me over for a sleepover?” she finally asks, hoping that Killian can’t tell that she’s freaking out a little bit.

Killian hums into her neck, and she finally opens her eyes, the brightness of the sun shining through the curtains blurring everything for a moment. “I am. I can get you all kinds of snacks. We’ll wear our best pajamas, watch movies, play truth or dare, maybe have a pillow fight or two.”

“Do you get all of your sleepover knowledge from 2000s rom coms?”

“Possibly.”

Emma chuckles before turning on the mattress, shifting into Killian’s space like he shifted into hers, and when she’s turned in his arms, she blinks at him, taking in the unshaven scruff and unruly hair that most definitely hasn’t been tamed. She likes that too. His hair is always doing different things, and she can’t decide what she likes best.

“You very obviously did,” Emma sighs, running her hands over the muscled curves of his biceps, “but that’s okay. That’s where all of my knowledge came from too. The closest I’ve ever gotten to one that’s not, like, a sexual thing is when Ruby and I room together on road games.”

“I don’t think that counts because then Robin, Will, and I have had a ton of sleepovers, and none of them involve any of the fun things I was talking about before.” He reaches up to cover her hand with his before leaning in and lazily moving his lips against hers. There are a lot of things she’s learning at twenty-seven, and one of them is most definitely how much she likes lazy morning make out sessions. They’re definitely one of the seven wonders of the world. “And who said there was going to be nothing sexual about our sleepover? I was definitely planning at least a little something.”

Her nose scrunches up, and Killian moves to gently bite it, making her laugh. “We can have something sexual happen, but only if it’s during truth or dare. No funny business otherwise, mister.”

His lips part like he’s going to say something, and she runs her hand up and down his arm as she waits. But then he blinks one long, slow blink and shuts his mouth, whatever words he was going to say curling back on his tongue.

“What?” she questions, moving her leg against his.

“Nothing,” Killian smiles, pressing forward to run his lips over hers again, making her toes curl from the way that he knows just what to do in a kiss to make her happy. “I was simply thinking of this sleepover we’re going to have, and how I need to buy some better pajamas for it. I can’t have you seeing me in anything less than decent.”

“You’re not wearing any clothes right now.”

“And I’ve yet to hear a complaint from you about that, so I think this may be decent attire.”

“Well then,” she sighs, slowly running her foot up his calf again and watching his eyes darken, “I think it’ll be perfectly fine attire then too.”

-/-

This is stupid.

This is so, so stupid. She can’t believe she’s doing this. It’s ridiculous. The most ridiculous thing in the entire world. Okay, maybe not in the entire world, but she’s feeling extra dramatic right now.

The most dramatic, and that’s not an exaggeration.

Killian told her to meet him in the hallway where all of the suites in the stadium are located, and she’s been standing her for fifteen minutes pretending to look at her phone instead of actually looking at her phone and answering emails or something. Or checking stats for the game. She should be doing that, but they’re still in the top of the first inning, and she’s pretty sure this is going to be the game that never ends.

Ever.

And she’ll be stuck in this hallway in London for the rest of her life and die in the yellow maxi dress that she spent thirty minutes picking out because she had no idea what to wear to her secret boyfriend’s niece’s tea party birthday. She’d also debated on going out and getting a gift despite their conversation last night, but then she’d reminded herself that she’s not technically planning on coming to this thing. It’s some kind of fake spur of the moment thing, and bringing a gift would ruin that.

She needs to calm down.

This is fine.

A set of doors to her left open, and she sees Killian walk through. She’s so used to seeing him dressed in his uniform or sweatpants and some kind of team-branded t-shirt when they’re in a baseball stadium that it throws her off when she sees him in tight-fighting blue jeans with a light blue button down tucked in, the sleeves rolled up and several buttons at the top undone so that she can see little tufts of black hair and the silver chain that he wears to keep his mom’s ring next to his heart.

Athletes have all kinds of traditions and superstitions for every part of their life, but her favorite is that Killian keeps that ring on him at all times.

“Hello, kind acquaintance,” he teases when he sees her, eyes darting around the hallway while he steps closer, “funny running into you here looking absolutely gorgeous in that dress. I’d say it’s perfect for a tea party.”

“You are ridiculous.” “You have got to stop saying that about me like it’s new information.” Killian steps up to her then, looking around once more before quickly dipping his head to kiss her while grabbing her ass like they didn’t just see each other two hours ago when she finally left his room. “You do look just beautiful, though. Sometimes I don’t know how I got so lucky.”

Heat immediately rises to her cheeks, but she tries to shake it and the butterflies in her stomach off. “I ask myself the same thing about you all the time.”

Killian rolls his eyes at her before holding his arm out. “You ready to go?”

Her eyes glance down at his elbow before looking back up at him. “Why are you holding your arm like that?”

“Because it’s proper to escort a lady to an event by giving her your arm when you walk, and I like to do proper by such a lady.”

“Killian,” she protests even as her heart absolutely hammers in his chest, “we can’t do that. There are people.”

“There’s no one. Indulge me for sixty seconds, okay?”

Maybe it’s that she’s feeling overwhelmed and like taking a risk or maybe it’s the way that he smiles, but something about him has her taking his arm and placing her hand in the crook of his elbow as they walk down the hallway until they’re at the double doors of the suite.

“It’s going to be fine, Swan,” Killian promises, squeezing her hand before letting go and pushing the door open so that the sounds of children excitedly talking fill their ears and her eyes take in all of the people in the room.

It’s not many, less than are usually in a big suite, but she can see at least fifteen kids, most of them children of players, and maybe ten other adults. That doesn’t seem like the right ratio, but these kids are old enough to be semi self-sufficient about most things. Everything is fine. She’s just nervous, which only gets worse when Killian’s niece spots them.

“Uncle Killian,” Addison screeches, stopping where she is and running toward the two of them in her blue dress. Killian immediately crouches down to her level, opening his arms to her and taking her into the tightest embrace before lifting her off of the ground while Addison nuzzles into his shoulder.

It may very well be the cutest and most heart-warming thing she has ever seen in her entire life.

“Happy birthday, my little love,” he sighs, swaying her as they stand. “How are you six years old? I’m pretty sure you’re still supposed to be a baby.”

“I’m too big to be a baby. Don’t be silly.”

“Don’t be silly?” he guffaws, pulling back and adjusting his grip on Addison. “Darling, I am always silly, but so are you. You’re basically the silliest goose.”

Addison scrunches up her nose, and Emma can see Killian in her there. It might be the dimples or the blue of her eyes, but Emma can see something even though both of Killian’s nieces look exactly like their mom. She is not weird at all for noticing these things. “We have talked about this. I am not a silly goose. I am a girl.”

“Geese can be girls.”

“Did you bring me a present?”

“A present?” Killian gasps, tickling Addison’s sides so that she giggles. “Am I supposed to bring you a present? No one told me.”

“But it’s my birthday,” she pouts.

“Did you bring me a present on my birthday? I don’t remember.”

“Yes,” Addison groans, holding her head back. “I drew you a picture of us.”

“Oh, that’s right, that’s right,” Killian sighs, glancing to the side and winking at Emma, which definitely doesn’t do something weird to her heart. “You did. I have it framed on my bookshelf because I love it so much. I do have a present for you, but your mom and dad told me that I had to leave it at home so you can’t open it until you get back to America.”

“What is it?” she gasps, not at all deterred by the fact that she can’t open her present yet.

“Addy,” a male voice sighs, and Emma turns her head to the side to see Killian’s brother standing near them, and that definitely does something to her heart, “remember what we talked about? You have to be patient.”

“But I’m excited!” Killian puts her on the ground so that she’s no longer at eye-level with all of them, but her confidence might as well make her six feet tall. “Where’s Lucy? I don’t see her.”

“She’s sitting with Mommy. Why don’t you go find them while I talk to Killian and Ms. Emma here?”

That’s when Addison’s attention turns to her, and suddenly she feels like more eyes are on her than when she’s on television.

Is she terrified of a six-year-old? No, that would be ridiculous.

(Also, Killian’s brother knows her name, and while that’s not weird, she feels like it is. Then again, she knows his entire family.)

“Who are you?” she questions, her hands on her hips and eyes focused.

Emma plasters a smile on her face, one that was already there even if she didn’t realize it, before squatting down so that she’s eye-to-eye with Addison.

“Hi, Addison. My name is Emma. I work with your uncle.”

“Are you a baseball player?”

“No,” Emma laughs, and she looks up at Killian when she hears him chuckle. He simply shrugs his shoulders and waggles his brows across his forehead. “I wish I was, but I work on TV. You know those people who ask Killian all kinds of questions?”

“That’s you?”

“That’s me.”

Addison smiles, the teeth she has missing obvious, before she steps a little closer to Emma and touches her dress, running her fingers over the material. “I like your dress. It kind of looks like a princess dress. Are you going to stay for my party?”

“Only if you want me to.”

“I do. Do you want to come and look at my cake with me? It’s shaped like a unicorn.”

“Sure, sweetie,” she answers, smiling at Addison and taking her hand as she’s dragged off to the other side of the room, leaving Killian and Liam behind.

For the next hour, her best friend in the world is Addy Jones, who very much takes Emma under her wings as she shows her around the suite and introduces her to all of her friends. The only real experience Emma has with kids is Leo, and the four-year difference between six and ten is kind of insane, but it’s not hard to adjust and talk about all of the right things. It gets a little more difficult when she meets Lucy, if only because Lucy is one reserved little girl, but Emma notices that she very easily follows in Addy’s footsteps and has her own little personality, even if it’s quieter.

Lucy Jones also very much loves her uncle, and it makes Emma’s heart do that funny stuttering thing every time she looks up and sees Lucy sitting with Killian as he animatedly talks to her and makes her laugh with this little high-pitched squeal. She’s always known how much Killian loves his nieces from how he talks about them and how he has pictures of them in his apartment and on his social media, but seeing it in person is this whole new thing. He’s in his element, even more than he is when he’s on a baseball field like the one just outside, and this smile that’s been with her most of today continues to increase, the corners of her lips constantly ticking up whenever she thinks about him.

Which is a lot.

Probably more than a normal amount, and she just loves him so damn much that…

Holy shit.

She loves him.

Why is she realizing that right now as she sits at a table with people she doesn’t really even know while she watches him very obviously stick his pinky out while drinking tea teaching Lucy to do the same?

How in the world did this happen?

And is she terrified or so incredibly excited that it feels a lot like the fear that’s been weaving in and out of her days lately?

Does he love her too? Can he? She thinks that he can, that he does, but how is she ever supposed to know for sure? It’s been a good while since she actually felt this way, and she’s not sure that she trusts her heart to realize the difference.

“It’s Emma, right?”

Emma looks up from her seat to see Elsa Jones standing above her, blonde hair pulled back into a complicated braid and soft smile painted across her lips.

“Yeah, yes, that’s me,” Emma stutters, holding out her hand to shake Elsa’s. “Elsa?”

“The one and only. Well, kind of,” she laughs before pulling out the empty chair next to Emma and sitting down. “It’s so nice to meet you. I feel like I know you from your job.”

“Funny, I feel like I know you.”

Okay, so that’s probably pretty creepy. Was that creepy?

Before Emma can think about it too much, Elsa laughs, something that sounds genuine, and Emma has to remind herself that this is just another person who she knows is kind. There’s nothing to be afraid of. She talks to people for a living.

“I would bet. Killian talks far too much, so you get a lot of information out of him when you’re likely just looking to talk about the game. I really liked the special you did at the beginning of the season. It felt very much like him as a person, which I’m always so happy to see.”

“He’s a great subject. It’s not easy getting a lot of these guys to be charming and funny about things other than baseball, so I love when I find one that knows how to open up. And he’s so good with your daughters. I hope I’m not intruding on your day, but Killian – ”

“Found you wandering the halls and dragged you along?” Emma arches her brow, but Elsa simply waves her away, shaking her head from side to side as she glances out the windows to the game that Emma is only half paying attention to even though it’s her job. “Liam told me. You’re not intruding at all. Addy has gone on and on about her pretty new friend Emma, and any friend of my girl is a friend of mine. Plus, we Joneses owe you about a million apologizes for my dumbass brother-in-law asking you out.”

She has to cover her mouth with her hand as she laughs, a snort escaping her before she can stop it. “Did you guys give him hell for that? I feel like he does deserve it.”

“Oh, most definitely. Killian is not a super spontaneous guy, especially when it comes to women, not anymore at least, so I’m not entirely convinced someone didn’t spike his water bottle. I actually choked on my own water bottle when I saw it happening, so I gave him hell for that too.”

“Good, but I’ve forgiven him as long as he never does something like that again. Our working relationship is much better now because he can basically never say no when I want an interview.”

“True,” she says, her smile somehow brighter. “You’ve got to use those kinds of things in your favor. I do it with Liam all the time. It works like a charm.”

“What does?” Liam asks as he steps up to them.

“Hi, sweetie,” Elsa greets him, tilting her head back so that Liam can kiss her. “Have you met Emma?”

“I did when she came in, but I didn’t get much of a chance to talk to her before Addy dragged her away. So, it’s nice to meet you, Emma.”

“It’s nice to meet you as well. I was telling Elsa that it’s good to put real faces to names I’ve heard so much about.”

“You’ve heard a lot about us?”

“Oh, y-yeah,” she mumbles, internally cursing herself again. “Work and all. I know far too much about the lives of all of the players, which is both a good and bad thing.”

“I would bet. Do you know about – ”

“Yesterday?” she asks. Liam nods his head, his smile tightened. “Yeah, I know. It was shitty, but it happens. And I’m glad Will and Killian and some of the other guys stood up for me like that, even if Killian was an idiot for messing up his hand. But I feel like I’m part of the team sometimes, and it’s nice to know they have my back.”

“Emma,” Addy squeals as she runs toward the three of them, completely ignoring her parents, “Killian said to come and get you to ask if you wanted to join our tea party. He says that you don’t know how to drink tea, and I have to help you.”

Her eyes immediately glance over to Killian, and when he moves his brow across his forehead, laughter bubbles inside of her stomach and her mouth falls into a soft smile. The ridiculous fool.

“You know what, Addy,” she sighs, “I don’t think I know how to drink tea. You and Lucy will have to teach me, okay?”

“I know. Come on.” Addison tugs at her arm until she rises from her chair, excusing herself to Liam and Elsa before she’s dragged across the room and over to the table where all of Addison’s friends and Killian are eat snacks and drinking tea, which looks a lot more like orange juice, and Emma is told to sit down in the chair next to Killian who is holding Lucy’s goldfish snacks while she inspects all of them. “Uncle Killian, I brought Emma over. Emma, do you want orange tea or apple tea?”

“Um, orange tea.”

Addy nods her head before she’s running off to the other side of the table and leaving Emma with Killian and Lucy.

“So, you need to teach me how to drink tea then?”

He shrugs his shoulders as he attempts to flip the hair that’s fallen over his forehead back. “My brother and sister-in-law had cornered you, and I thought you might need a little saving. I knew that you were a little nervous about meeting them.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

“You talk in your sleep.”

“I do not, you as – jerk,’” she corrects, stopping herself when Lucy looks up at her. “Hi, sweetheart. I like your dress.”

“Thank you,” she says quietly, sweetly. “It’s yellow. Yours is yellow.”

“I know. We’re basically twins. Are you going to eat your goldfish?”

Lucy softly smiles, little blonde curls falling in her face, before picking up a handful of her snacks from Killian and offering them over to Emma in a sweet gesture that definitely rivals everything romantic that her uncle has ever done.

“Thank you, Lucy.” Emma pops one into her mouth only to look up at Killian and see that his eyes are crinkled, those little lines showing up, and her stomach pleasantly twists at the sight of it. She realized that she loved him less than twenty minutes ago, and there are still a lot of crazy feelings processing in her brain right now. A lot. “Do you want some, twenty-nine?”

Killian blinks, almost like he doesn’t recognize her nickname for him, before reaching over and taking some of the fish that she’s offering him. It’s cheesy and very romance novel-ish, but she swears that she feels sparks when his fingers brush over the palm of her hands.

“Thank you, love.”

“I have your orange team, Emma,” Addy shouts as she comes back to them, balancing a far too full plastic cup of orange juice that spills a little on the carpet until Emma takes it from Addy’s hand.

“Well, thank you, Addy. But it’s your birthday. Shouldn’t I be helping you do something instead of you handing me my tea?”

Addy hums at this, her forefinger tapping against her chin while her foot taps on the ground. “You can help me open my presents later, okay?”

“That sounds like a deal.”

-/-

“Working hard or hardly working?”

Emma pulls the headphones from her ears so that she can hear Killian better, even though she could most definitely hear the cheesy phrase that just came out of his mouth. His family is flying back on the team plane, as are all of the other players’ families, and since she is Addison Jones’s new favorite person as of seven hours ago, she was asked to sit with all of the Jones clan, which has really just been her sitting in a seat by the window with Addy and Lucy switching seats until the both of them were corralled by their parents to go to sleep. And now she’s got Killian sitting next to her, which is what she was hoping for but isn’t the most subtle thing in the world.

They are not subtle people even when they probably think they are.

She’d never make it in federal law enforcement or something like that.

“My deadline is in an hour, and I had to pay twenty-seven dollars for WiFi so that I could send it in.”

“So, working hard?”

“Yep.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

“No, no,” she protests, reaching down to take another sip of her coffee. Her jet-lag is going to be even worse of a bitch tomorrow. “You can stay. I just have to check my stat facts, and then I’ll be finished. It’s kind of hard to work when everyone else is asleep and it’s so dark in here, so, you know, I’m drinking all of the caffeine to stay awake. I think I have a food baby made of unicorn cake.”

“Aye, me too,” he laughs as he pats his stomach. “That was too much sugar.”

“No such thing.”

“Oh, but there is, darling.” His hand brushes over her forearm, and she can see the slight scabs and marks from him punching Arthur yesterday. Nothing new has been said, no suspensions mentioned, and she hopes that it stays that way. She also hopes that nothing like that ever happens again.

“How does your hand feel?”

“A little sore, but I’m right as rain. It’s a good thing I have several days off, yeah?”

Emma groans, shutting her eyes just at the thought of getting up to work tomorrow like most people on this plane except for Killian and Robin. “Don’t remind me. I’m going to look like a zombie tomorrow, and feel even worse than that. If I ever go overseas again, it’s going to be for long enough to adjust to the time.”

“You and me both,” he yawns, and she’s totally endeared by the way his face contorts there only for him to smile at her with a tired, boyish grin that she’s endeared by even more. “Finish up your article, my love, and then I say that you at least try to go to sleep.”

“Always looking out for me.”

“You know it.”

Her hand reaches over his scarred one so that she can squeeze it, which is all she can really do right now. But honestly, being right here next to him simply sitting together after all of the craziness of these few days – baseball, meeting her boyfriend’s family, asshole players getting punched, quick tours of London that went by in a blur, and realizing that she loves Killian – is more than enough when it’s already absolutely everything.

#catch me if you can #cs fic #cs ff #captain swan fic #captain swan

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watchtheblog · 6 years ago

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no new friends

when i lived in new york, i was dating someone for 3 months and i literally didn’t know if i could refer to him as someone i knew. we’d be returning a vehicle we rented for a weekend trip and i’d still be like “him? oh. we’ve hung out two dozen times but i don’t really know him know him.”

in la, you wait on line at a grocery store with someone for two to seven minutes and they’re name checking you in therapy three hours later.

i have never had to question the descriptor “my friend” more times than i have since i moved here.

i know now that “friend” is a spectrum that includes “person you’d invite to your wedding” and “person you exchanged “wow that party sucked” banter with in an elevator once because you happened to leave a party at the same time.”

a really corny thing people with no personalities like to promulgate - and always as if they’re the first person to have ever thought of it - is the idea that you can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat servers at a restaurant.

while i do think that is true - because like, ok sure - on the flip, i treat servers like deities, but i also once described a 12 year old as a “no job having ass bitch”, so…

(^ a photo of me immediately post yelling at a stranger)

yes. that is important. but, in my opinion, seeing how a person speaks about and interacts with someone they’ve met (who is of any tenable social standing) 1-5 times in the city of los angeles is a far better indicator of whether this person is objectively “good”, or if they are someone who pronounces ibiza in the way you know i’m talking about (you know. like they’re a character in don quixote. you fucking know the way), who will likely try to entangle you in a ponzi scheme in the near future.

these are your friends in NY:

the person you’ve known since you were born, who bailed you out of jail that time you got popped for jumping over a turnstile (this is called “fare evasion”, fyi) in high school

that exact person. no one else.

in new york, a guy who was v close friends with my ex boyfriend pinned me against the door of my ex boyfriend’s dressing room and tried to fuck me... two weeks after we’d broken up… while my ex boyfriend was in the en suite bathroom.

that’s what friendship is in new york! it means nothing!

these are your “friends” in LA:

every dog

the ex of the person you’re currently dating

the kids and other patients of any of your doctors

someone you let go in front of you on line at any establishment that serves matcha or anything CBD infused

someone you have the same in n out order as

anyone you’ve ever seen before 9am in a context other than working out

someone you DMed 10 times, who responded once with the heart that’s already there for you to click

a person you’ve fucked once or dozens or times over the course of 6 months, whom you refuse to call your significant other because you’re scum

and lastly,

a person who wanted to be your friend, whose trust you broke by trying to fuck them in a v creepy and unwelcome way

let me elaborate on the last:

last year, i was actively soliciting friendship on r*ya (a dating app) by setting up a profile and indicating i was “only here for friends”*.

*(this is a setting for 1. men who want to discreetly cheat on their girlfriends and 2. girls who want to trick men into being friends with them by pretending there’s a possibility they might fuck because they matched on a dating site.)

i matched with a “famous” “musician” (i put both words in quotations because i don’t quite consider a sleepy, middle aged white man whose music’s main accreditation is being the melody playing over a man slipping from coma to death on grey’s anatomy “famous”, but ok…) and we talked for a few weeks (mainly about how i had no friends and was desirous of a handful of them).

eventually we met up. he took me to a restaurant, i ate some food, i had one drink, we had a v boring conversation, and 50 minutes later i went home and remembered that i don’t need friends.

we didn’t talk again until three weeks later on a monday afternoon. he invited me over to his place to watch the new “curb” and eat chinese food. i said yes because i wanted free chinese food (and because i still have not learned that accepting an invitation to a man’s house apparently indicates that you’d like to suck his dick).

i arrived in sweatpants at 4pm. we ate chinese food, played backgammon, and he mansplained the “me too” movement to me for approximately 20 minutes. that is not a joke.

he also told me that louis ck would be the next man to be outed (weird flex but ok), and shared a story about him “lining girls up and masturbating on their shins”! also not a joke.

impossibly boring story short… at some point i thought, “i do not even want to be friends with this white devil. it’s time for me to leave”. so i got up, ordered an uber, and walked to the front door.

as i was putting my jacket on, he walked over to me in a way that i cannot even compare to anything to emphasize how crazy it was because it was so specifically over the top in it’s own way. this man sauntered over to me with both his arms outstretched, grabbed either side of my face and tilted his head to kiss me.

after touting his beliefs on the importance of women not being seen as sexual beings for three hours while i sat in his sterile home in sweatpants, eating lo mein, this soft, balding man tried to #metoo lite me.

that’s what friendship means to a man in los angeles.

there’s no doubt in my mind this corny bozo refers to me as a “friend”... but my only friends are on the internet + the guy who pumps my gas on coldwater.

that being said. if you made it all the way here (wow. you must want to fuck me. hello!!) we are now friends and you are therefore obligated to buy me a christmas gift from the below list of carefully curated, v expensive christmas gifts i’ve assembled:

1. what i really want is a vintage sean john velour sweatsuit that i can have altered and wear every single day of my life until i die from texting and driving, but i don’t know if that’s reasonable… so maybe this tracksuit which is for children but i am sure will fit me. or this set. or this one, which matches my sneakers:

2. i want to go to a lakers game, please. front row. i don’t want this unless it’s front row. please respect this.

3. a trip here (+ 1 for my sister)

4. this hand soap, because i love to keep my hands clean, and i also love people to know i’m rich when they use my bathroom, which they’ll know when they exit my bathroom, and i charge them for the squirts of hand soap they’ve just used

5. a personalized tray. i do all my business, sleeping, and eating in bed, so this would be helpful, so i can organize all my things. or a clutch. same people

6. these sneakers. or these. or these. or these. size 7

7. one of these two books. or another book. i love to read, and i can afford to buy them, i just thought it nice to include here... so you remember i’m a thoughtful and educated thot.

8. this dress. or this one. or this dress which i don’t think will look good on me

9. this candle

10. this fanny pack, but only because i want to recreate that man’s exact look, so probably not the best idea to purchase this.

11. these shoes. or these. 7.5

12. this chair. or these

13. a series of 1 on 1 training sessions at lagree. if you’ve ever watched me simulate sex work out, you will come through with this gift before christmas

14. this bag which is overflow from my birthday gift list. or this one

thank you so much. here is another picture of me and one of my closest friends in la - a dog i spent 90 harrowing minutes with. i hate dogs.

#no new friends #a fond farewell to a friend #lists of things i want #lists of things #things i want #my birthday #waste!#invidious consumption

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dancedance-resolution · 3 years ago

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please do not reblog, this is just a personal little note

i’m really happy with how therapy went today

it was my fourth session with my new therapist. i think i like her a lot.

conversations with my new therapist feel a lot more natural than with the old one.

with her, i don’t feel the same sort of pressure that i did with my last therapist. my last therapist gave me extremely rigidly professional vibes. and this new therapist is still appropriately professional of course, but she’s also more casual. she always opens every session with a funny anecdote about her kids, and then sort of uses that as a segue to get me to share something similar, and then based on what i share, she asks a lot of questions that lead us to dive deeper.

conversely, my old therapist always followed a strict script. she first asked me to rate my mood on a scale of 1 to 10 (which i hated doing, because i never knew what my mood actually was other than “vaguely in the middle i suspect question mark”) (thank you alexythemia, lol). then she always asked “is there anything you want to talk about today.” and i would always shake my head no, because the question is too broad to know how to respond. and that’s something my mom and i actually worked on together - starting around age 17, before each session, we’d written down stuff i should mention. but i was rarely able to say the stuff i had prepared, because i couldn’t get myself to say the words (autism symptom maybe? idk). it’s a lot easier for me to talk when i have a narrow, specific question to answer, and if the other person has been talking for a bit before they expect me to talk. and my new therapist does both of these things

and i like that this new therapist is a bit similar to me. she’s fat. she doesn’t wear make up. she was raised catholic. oh, and she has visible tattoos - which i don’t have, but my point here is that she’s not the stereotypical picture of Health Professional. and she knows a lot more about adhd than my old therapist did, and she knows slightly more about autism than my old therapist did (which was Absolutely Nothing, lol).

also, i think that this change in therapists was necessary. i was with my old therapist for 5 years. i started seeing her when i was 14. she had a very specific perception of me based on how i was when she first met me at 14 - a perception which tainted the way she responded to my current problems. and that wasn’t a good thing for me, because my outlook on life and self-understanding have changed a lot since i was 14, in ways that i never was able to articulate to her properly. plus, i was always anxious to reveal anything new to her. like i was afraid she’d get upset if one day i was like, “hey bestie, i know i’ve been seeing you for 5 years already, but i’m just now going to bring up the fact that i’ve had issues with compulsively lying to my father since age 7 uwu.” (i know it’s irrational to fear “failing therapy”, but also, it’s not as irrational as it sounds. because when i was 18, my mom revealed to the therapist that i’ve always been the type of person to cry at the tip of a hat, and my therapist seemed kind of taken aback and frustrated that i never told that to her. and yeah, it is understandable that that would frustrate her, but it unintentionally made me feel really guilty and bad.)

also, this therapist definitely treats me like an adult more than the other one did. i think maybe my old therapist was still stuck on seeing me as that initial terrified 14-year-old. whereas this therapist gives me a lot more agency and has more trust in me to know myself and my needs. our sessions do follow somewhat of a routine, but it’s a routine we worked out together over the course of the first 3 sessions when she was trying to figure out how to make things comfortable for me. (example - at the first session, she asked me what i want out of therapy, and i said, “i don’t know.” she took me at my word, and she didn’t shame me for it. and i think that that experience sorta taught her that she needs to be more specific when asking me questions.)

i also like she’s very open with me about her perception of me. like, today, i told her about how i started crying when a staff member from my community college called me to confirm that i’d cancelled my classes for this summer semester. and my therapist expressed some surprise that i cried because [paraphrasing] “you always seem very put together and articulate during our sessions. sometimes i’m able to hear anxiety in your tone of voice about certain topics, but for the most part, you always seem very emotionally grounded during our sessions.” and her honesty gave us an opportunity to talk about masking. (also, i appreciate knowing that she can hear anxiety in my voice, because i had no idea that was a thing?? like i know you can hear when someone’s voice gets high-pitched and breaks like they’re gonna cry, but i‘ve never done that during one of our sessions? lol, so i guess this is a little fun fact i’ve learned about neurotypicals, that they can detect anxiety in ppl’s voices even if they’re not obviously on the brink of tears lol.)

a few specific things that happened at today’s session that were good:

when i talked about my sleep issues, she actually brought the conversation in a direction i hadn’t expected - she started asking if i’m putting too much pressure on myself regarding productivity. my initial answer was no - i unenrolled from my summer classes. i don’t have a part time job. i don’t have any traditional responsibilities. but upon discussing it, we kinda figured out that i am putting a lot of pressure on myself to enjoy the summer, because i have this sort of doomsday mindset of This Is My Last Summer Break Before I Have To Work Full-Time So I Must Take Advantage Of Every Moment To Enjoy Myself. and that’s unreasonable - it’s a pandemic, i’m recovering from bad burn out, and i’m trying to adjust to new meds. she actually said a lot of things about bodily consent and stuff that i’d already read in the book laziness does not exist, so it was sort of like affirmation and emphasis that those concepts are good, valid, and applicable to me.

she gave me some reassurance regarding my summer schedule. my alarm goes off at 6:20 every weekday morning so i can attend mass. (i’m an atheist, but the structure is very good for me.) but i’ve had some concerns that maybe waking up so early is unhealthy and also contributing to my sleep issues (i unintentionally wake up around 4 almost every morning, and i started to wonder if maybe that’s because my internal clock is anticipating waking up at 6:20). we discussed the pros and cons of waking up for mass in the morning, and she gave me her opinion that this schedule is probably good for me (she agreed with my pro/con assessment). and she also pointed out that i woke up at 6 every morning throughout high school without as much sleep issues, so it’s more likely that the sleep issues are from anxiety. (and i’m going on anxiety meds starting in early july, so we’re hopeful that that will help that a bit.) so yeah, i feel better about my mass schedule, and i feel reassurance that this is a reasonable and good plan. she also said that she was very proud that i had not only the idea to use morning mass as a source of structure but also the discipline to go every morning despite the early hour and despite the fact that i have no external force forcing me to go 🥺 which was nice to hear, because over years of having undiagnosed adhd, i received a lot of messaging that i lack self-discipline, so i was glad to hear the validation that she thinks i’m a disciplined person (at least regarding mass, lol)

we talked about my summer goals, and we talked about possible sources of non-stressful accountability. the current flexible plan is that i’ll keep track of everything i accomplish from that goal list and then share it with her at the end of each session so we can workshop what went well, why it went well, what i’m struggling with, and how i could maybe work through those things better.

i still feel very anxious about this whole therapy thing (i’m still very scared that i’m doing it wrong and not saying the right things), but i felt especially good after today’s session. like, i’ve been in therapy for 5 years. i felt like i plateaued in progress a while ago, so i’m really happy that i managed to get something out of today’s session!!!!! that hasn’t happened in so so long (low key if ever…..).

also. IM PROUD OF MYSELF for sharing stuff with her, correcting her when she misinterpreted one thing i said, and having a positive attitude about how today went 😎. and i’m proud of myself for fending off feelings of guilt that i spent so long typing this out (it’s not wasted time, because it’s helping me process what happened today), and i’m proud that i’m in a place where i’m open to going on anxiety meds.

my life is still a mess. i had a fun little breakdown not even an hour before the therapy session, in fact! but i’ve made some significant progress over these few months - i started meds, i switched therapists, and i started (and am sticking to) a new daily routine. and i had the courage to prioritize my health and cancel my summer semester classes, which was a really hard decision for me! oh, and i also finally published that smutty crucible fic that’s been in my wip folder for over a year!

my mental health is still extremely poor, lol. in fact, one could argue that i’ve regressed in many ways. but guess what bitch!! i don’t have skooter ankle ideation, and also, generally? IM MAKING PROGRESS. that’s what counts. i’m very happy about that, and i’m very proud of myself for that.

#personal #long post #very long post

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dinacharya · 5 years ago

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Chapter 2. aka, Adele 25 therapy

what are tumblrs for if not for ridiculous oversharing and creeping into people’s lives you have no business being in, right?

disclaimer: it’s a saturday night, 11:45pm to be exact, and i’m 4 hours deep into listening to Adele’s 25 album on repeat. i’ve also micro-dosed. or maybe regular dosed, depends who you ask. For all intents and purposes here, I’m calling it a micro because i very much have a grip even if my trusty wall tapestry is doing pretty things, and I had a very clear intention diving in.

the tl;dr is that this 25-year old’s solo post-break up trip is a fucking cleanse and this is the vibe I’m fully on right now:

lol so, how did we get there:

well waking up from last night’s binge smoking, gaming & sugar session (which was honestly much needed - shout out to the peeps who were there for that) didn’t feel the hottest, obviously. but crushed that shit with more sleep and getting back into jillian michaels* in my living room and eating a healthy lunch and whatnot.

*side note: i’m sure she’s made millions already, but in this era with all the IG fitness models and influencers out there i still think jillian michaels is queen and underrated. 20 mins of jumping around and flailing weights, guided by her via TV is literally all i need to be like woh bitch i’m back. haha.

now: you know how there are just those random people in your life that perhaps weren’t around all that long or maybe they had an impact on you that you only realized later? or maybe you just never shared with them how much they meant to you, because you didn’t even know. so there are a couple of those i’m going to bring up here (no names).

starting with one - a friend from my NYC juice bar days, we spent many a wintery days and hours cooped up in that tiny shop kicking ass honestly with grade A difficult customers. she was one of my favorites to work with - so fun to laugh, with gossip with, just share a space with. i have so many fond memories of night shifts there, snow falling outside the windows. people coming in for smoothies at 10:45pm making us wonder what the fuck?

she was stunning, tall, beautiful effortless skin and bone structure and all that, she just glowed. she was always lifting up other girls around her while shaming herself. i get it, that’s just what we do, that’s what I do. but fact is she was a straight 12/10 no question. anyways, we lost touch. we all know how that whole restaurant went down in sad flames with our owner locked up at rikers (if you don’t know of the psycho saga via vogue’s coverage, and want to hear a first-hand account, that’s for another day, it’s honestly a fun one to tell). so all the people in my life from the restaurant, who were what felt like home to me in NY, kind of faded out with time.

anyways, she’s one of those people for me that still pops into mind from time to time and i just wonder what she’s up to and miss her. so today in my idle morning of moping around, she popped into mind and a quick social media search led me to find her humble page and podcast she’s just recently started - and i ended up listening to a couple episodes because, lord knows i’m a podcast nerd. but i had a chance to hear her story and how much i didn’t know of her background when we were friends back then, and what a light she still was to those around her was pretty amazing. she did say that her time in nyc was a bit of a blur that’s hard to remember because she was struggling at the time. it hurts my heart to know that, but at the same time i definitely can relate. generally i’d say living in nyc, as a student or not, can feel very isolating and while i have a lot of very vivid memories and recollections, a lot of that time is also a blur for me now the more distance i get from it.

anyways, so kind of reflecting on all that this afternoon while mozy-ing around in bed was one part of today’s journey. one bit that was also huge was hearing her talk about her overeating/binge & restrictive eating disorder during that time, which is something i’ve tried to vocalize to my friends and family and even doctor but generally isn’t taken all that seriously. when in fact these habits i haven’t addressed are probably the most crucial detriment to my health. it turns out there’s such a thing as overeaters-anonymous. like AA but for people with compulsive eating problems. that’s 100% me, so this was a HUGE discovery today for me that something like this exists. i’m not going to say i’ll walk straight into a meeting this second, but i’m definitely interested. as carly whose lived with me for the last 3 years could easily tell you better than anyone else, i have a hell of a fucking problem and i don’t even know if i understand it fully myself.

part 2:

coincidentally, around mid day I happened to get a text from an old NY roommate, someone I hadn’t heard from in over a year probably, so it was pretty out of the blue. I always perceived her to be like an older sister figure, a funny lady from Malaysia with a heavy accent and a strong attitude, doing her best to fit into American culture, dating apps, heavy into the astrology shit, and all. Anyways, she hit me up because she was concerned she couldn’t find me on social media anymore (quickly resolved) and she mentioned that she enjoyed seeing my DIY stuff on IG stories and that it was serving as inspiration for some future business she’s been envisioning once she gets out of corporate life in Pittsburgh, PA. It was all endearing and sweet. i have heard from friends before that my IG could be turned into something more if i wanted to, but i’ve never had the heart to put more structure to things that just feel like natural parts of me that i want to remain free, if that makes sense. but it’s still nice to know that out there somewhere in pennsylvania the random things i do in my kitchen and share into the IG ether can serve as a little inspo for a roommate from 5 years ago. also it was just a nice reminder to self that in the same way i have these people i admire and root for and wonder about from a distance, maybe there’s room for me to be someone like that for somebody else i’ve crossed paths with. that makes me happy.

So, part 3: hello, Adele.

i haven’t been shy about admitting the last couple months have been a struggle for me. basically since turning 25. even leading up to the big number, all year really i’d been kind of dreading what this age meant. it just feels like it’s gotta be messy whether i want it to be or not. considering every prior year has been a positive & fairly steady uphill climb, i figured at some point i’d have to pause/break/falter. don’t ask me why, age has always been something i’m glued to. (it’s funny because i don’t own a clock, the one watch i have is tucked into my wedding planner e-kit and only comes out on those days. given my job title and being a virgo and all, time has oddly never been a day to-day concern for me. (those who know me know i am never on time for anything, sorry) but i’ve always been hyper concerned about my age and the expectations (self imposed, inescapable) that come looming with it*. so birthday season usually is just a very introspective time every year where i evaluate where i’m at, the progress i’ve made, what’s holding me back, what i’m proud of, what i’m not proud of.

*quick side story, the person i’ve dated all year always would say our age difference was nothing. but that statement always irked me because it’s far from the truth. every year 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 i’ve felt i’ve learned exponentially about myself and grown. so yeah, there’s a HUGE difference, emotionally/self-awareness, all that, between 22 and 25 if you ask me. like bless my early 20′s for being stoned fun & shit, but girl’s been putting in work too ya know?

anyways, back on track: come time for my birthday this year i didn’t really want to think too hard about it and just wanted to have fun, and i did! it was definitely one of the more fun/eventful birthdays i can recall.

but now, 2 months post-birthday, fresh off of a break up, I’m beginning to see more clearly why I pushed all that usual introspective evaluation under the rug. essentially it’s what i’ve done all year, pretending 22 - 25 is nothing, and that all the work i’d done to get here was whatever. i’d taken steps back self-esteem wise, kind of let my work fall by the wayside just as something to do and not something i was excited about (which is more my norm), and i realize i wasnt being present in the right ways to friendships that mean the most to me. All in favor of some shiny beacon of excitement, being sucked into this vortex of conditional relationships* and “fun” where i frankly just had no place being.

*linked there ^ is a stellar article, when you’re ready for it

THANK GOD FOR MY FRIENDS. seriously i don’t say this enough. I have been FREAKING BLESSED by the people who choose to be in my life. like fuck yo i know it’s FACT i have not been the most pleasant to be around or hear from this year but the true ones persisted and showed me love when I needed it most, were there for me constantly through all the thick of it and still are. like those calls every day just to chat about what the fuck ever, those random “i’m thinking of you’s” and “let’s hangs” mean so much to me in my isolated world of working from home and just being a general homebody type. let me just promise to all of you once i’m out of this present messiness, that I’ll be back on track. i’ve hated being that girl, i’ve heard myself, and i’ve hated it. so while I’ve been kind of MIA morphing into something i haven’t been proud of, thank you to every single friend who’s reminded me there was still something here worthy of your time and your energy and your attention.

*now, much less saving me, I get to start showing up for you guys better too.

i’ve explained this to close friends before who have experienced it with me - psychedelics are one of my favorite ways to get a grip on my life. of course, i understand their role in fun experiences too, but i’ve always valued it first and foremost as a powerful mind-opening tool. (so naturally, i adore michael pollan’s latest book “how to change your mind”.) when i’m feeling overwhelmed or at a crossroads or muddled, i’ve found it to be the most affective way for me to tune into myself, see things with a fresh perspective, and commit to the choices i need to.

so having been on a fucking ride with these breakup emotions, knee deep in self-pity, not knowing what to make of the past year, past month, past week, & where i’m at... i was like,

why the fuck not?

just what i needed on a night to myself to give my soul a fucking cleanse. it’s a convenient weekend to have the house all to myself. read: a good place to be singing at the top of my lungs haha and doing whatever the fuck my single ass wishes all night. somehow along the way, i managed to cook up a pretty A+ tikka masala sauce and prepped a brussel sprouts salad for a dinner with friends tomorrow night, don’t ask me how. i’ve had a spiritual fucking connection to every single song on this Adele 25 album, obviously. idk why it hadn’t occurred to me until doing this that i’m now 25 listening to this album :) so all of this is to say:

Thank you, Adele.

for being a girl i can identify with who marks progress with age, unabashedly tunes into her emotions, and provides breakup comfort like no other. even though i refused to listen to this album until like a year ago

(also can we just take a moment to appreciate that Adele posted this on her own IG profile)

Thanks to those who aren’t necessarily at the frontlines of my life, but have a place in my heart, whether you know it or not, and bring forth some amazing shit or tune in at the right times.

Thank you, most sincerely, to each and every one of my friends that I won’t name here.

Close and far, you’re the ones pulling me out of a drudge of a year where I lost myself and you’re reminding me what I love to do and who I am and it feels good to get a footing again.

~ ciao, finally @ 1:43am.

p.s. below is THE picture of what i’ve been like for the last couple weeks ~ can always count on a new girl reference to have my back heheh

*we can also mark this as the night where i FINALLY get over my weird thing about not liking “Hello.” That shit’s a fucking masterpiece who was i to say anything otherwise hahaha

#journal #woh this some reaaal journaling huh haha

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charlieandbean · 7 years ago

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Early Life Story

So after answering the anon about being apologetically apologetic I’ve had a few more asking for background/a bit more of an understanding what I meant.

So I’m sorry if this doesn’t interest you, but I thought it was time for a bit of a run down.

***TRIGGERS***

So my parents were never married, but when I was nearly 2 they separated. Weirdly enough they remained close, like they lived around the corner from each other and it wasn’t uncommon for dad to come home to mum and I at his apartment. They decided never to go through the court system and instead i would spend every 2nd weekend with my dad and also every Wednesday from 5-8pm. It worked. It was great, they got on fine.

Then when I was about 4. My mum met my step dad. This was the end of all friendly interactions between my parents. My stepfather has 3 children to a previous marriage and they live with their mother, they youngest being only a few months older than I. In the beginning things were great, I loved my stepfather and I was unaware of any tension that may have been there between my parents (including my SF).

So this might be wrong, the story could be different - I wasn’t yet at school (around 5yo) but I was soon to start and one day my mum, SF and I were in their bedroom, he picked me up by my feet to play “dead fish” (where I would dangle upside down and gross out my mum) and I remember asking him to put me down incase he broke the bracelet I was wearing - it was a shitty thing from a $2 shop that was gifted to me by my baby sitter - sure enough it was broken and being 5 I was hella upset. I wasn’t upset that it was broken, I was upset that it was a gift and it had been broken even though I asked him to put me down.

And that for me was the last time I remember him being nice to me.

After that I was terrified of him, he flicked a switch. I remember starting school and him coming to pick me up on occasion, and I would almost cry and run away. I would cry when I was being dropped off after a weekend with my dad. I would stay in my bedroom. I would only go to the toilet when he wasn’t home. I would only get a snack when he wasn’t around. I would wait for him to leave in the morning (I would actually get on all fours and look under my door and listen to see if had left) before I left my room of a morning. He constantly told me I was worthless, would walk past my door and call me an attention seeker, a stupid bitch and that I’d be better off dead with my father. He would call me pathetic and call me a pig.

I was no older than 6 when this started.

When we were around family he would corner me and tell me to not be and “attention whore or else” which would mean I wouldn’t talk to anyone.. my own family… because I was terrified of what he would do. Then because I was quiet, which was unlike me, my family would talk to me and ask me questions, all while in the background my SF would be shaking his head, scowling and motioning slitting his throat. So I couldn’t win. I couldn’t talk to people but couldn’t stay quiet, so I would go sit in a corner somewhere and just try to fade away. Again. I was 6. He turned family against me, my own grandparents.

This went on for years. When my brother was born when I was 9 I was thrilled. But nope. I couldn’t touch him, couldn’t look at him, couldn’t smile at him. I remember he was like 2 and he was putting his bowl on his head, it was fucking hilarious, and I started to giggle and my SF kicked me so hard under the table I started crying. There was so much more shit like this. Day in and day out.

I remember around the same age, I was 11, we went on a holiday, I let my guard down because my SF was being somewhat normal.

I regretted it. On the way home (8 hour drive) my 2yo brother was pretty upset and mum and SF where having an argument, my mum screamed at him to pull over and that she was getting out and I remember the sheer panic that ran through my body thinking that she was going to leave me with him, and I remember looking in the review mirror and seeing the grin he had on his face knowing how I felt (that’s another thing he would angle the mirrors so he could mouth how pathetic I was without mum seeing) we got home, I had a bath and when to my room. They were screaming at each other so I packed a bag and jumped out the bathroom window and ran to my best friends house around the corner. Long story short here is that mum got me into see a psychiatrist, I went twice on my own and once with mum, the plan was to do more sessions with the two of us and then introduce my SF. But we never got there. The first night after my mum and I saw the psychiatrist together he came home drunk, and again they had a massive fight. Because he was saying “big bad ‘name’…always my fault, I’m fucking better off dead, might as well leave now…” he told my mum that my dad was the reason they weren’t working and that it’d be better if I was never born so my dad was out of their lives…. my mum shouted back that sometimes she wish she’d never had me, I stopped listening and shut myself in my cupboard and went to sleep. He victimised himself, and sure enough mum and I never went back again…. and things went back to “normal”

Fast forward through years of this.

Belittling, humiliation, assault on my father which ended up with charges, mind fuckery, taking the blame for mess my siblings made because I was scared of what he would do to them, stalking, road rage and a few self harming moments from myself, a few instances of physical assault that never went anywhere because it was “an accident” (all before 14)

The night I moved out was rough.

My mum played indoor netball once a week. She had to leave by 6. Meaning SF had to be home.m - he knew this. Instead he wasn’t, so I’d eaten with the kids got them ready for bed (brother 4 and sister about 1?) and was washing and drying the dishes (this was my job every night from the age of 7. Wash dry and put away all dishes) and SF came home, obviously slightly intoxicated. The kids were in the lounge and he sat at the breakfast bar while I dried dishes and he started. Started calling pathetic, asking him if I thought he was a piece of shit. I stayed quiet. Numb, my normal state. He kept going, asking him I thought he was shit while smiling and getting louder. I cracked and said yes. I told him straight up I thought he was a fucking asshole. He threw a hot cup of coffee at me that shattered all over the kitchen wall and ended up burning my chest. My sister was crying. So I tried to leave. I had had a bag packed for months. And I went to walk out the door. He picked me up and threw me against a wall and left. I was left shaking and crying trying to calm my siblings, who were tired, scared and emotional. I called my best friend and her mum and they came around but couldn’t do anything… they couldn’t take the kids and didn’t want to get involved with my SF if he came back. So I called my Aunty and Uncle, my aunt came flying in and I just went numb, I told her what happened and she said she would stay until mum got home, while waiting for her I finished the dishes and cleaned up all the coffee and glass. It was Thursday. I went home with my aunt and stayed there, Friday I still went to school and I called my dad who was working out of state, he flew red eye home that night and picked me up first thing on Saturday morning. Sunday afternoon my mum dropped all my clothes off and books, wrote a statement on the back of a receipt that stated she was handing full custody over to my father and he was in control. Monday she left for 3 weeks with my siblings to Townsville to stay with my uncles.

I spent years in therapy, I still need it but it’s too much right now. I was and still am on antidepressants. I clinically suffer from depression and multiple anxiety disorders. My relationships with family and friends are still hard. It’s hard to have them without feeling worthless and I don’t deserve them. I feel guilty when I’m happy because I don’t think I deserve it. It impacts every aspect of my life. Yet my mums still with him, my son(s) call him poppy and we get on well now. He has his moments, and I’m coming to a point where if another one happens soon I will be cutting him off completely.

I’m terrified that what he has done to me will impact my parenting. And I’m trying to not let it.

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angel78 · 8 years ago

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another failed attempt at seeing a new therapist

its literally pointless to try anymore. its honestly not even about “getting better” anymore its about the fact that i just want to be figured the fuck out already. i want to get it all out i want to understand i want to know what happened to me and what the hell is wrong with me... but i guess i’ve always done that myself anywhere.

i have learned everything i have come to understand about myself in writing and art, mainly my own because that is where i am sorting myself out, but of course with others’ work as well.

i was never allowed to see a therapist growing up, my parents didnt believe in mental illness and thought i was just crazy or dramatic or whatever else ive said it here before plenty of times. once i left renfrew i tried one or two but one i couldnt afford and the other made me uncomfortable. i had one therapist in wvu that didn’t help or understand at all and just made me feel like i was psycho and straight up would ask me if i paid before i sat down ???? when i finally came back to jersey, i tried to see another therapist in february and she turned me down entirely and said she could not help me or see me because i needed higher care and she couldnt be responsible for that. then finally i began seeing a therapist at my school who saw me for a few months who i thought i might finally be able to get something out of, maybe, but she told me she had to stop seeing me because i was too sick too and needed a higher care and i told her i refused to go to anything inpatient so she straight up said she cant help me anymore but we could have an appointment to find a good program for me and i never went because fuck you for that. right when things started peaking again she just didn’t want to help me anymore. i understand the “ethics” behind seeing someone who you deem “too unwell” to only be attending an hour long therapy session once a week but for gods sake she knew all of the reasons i couldnt do that and some of them were kind of bullshit in her opinion like me refusing to put school on hold again but some of them were fucking valid like money and not having a car at the time to even do an outpatient if i tried and my parents and just everything.

then finally a few weeks ago i started seeing a new therapist, literally like the day after finding out my boyfriend has fucking cancer, and i saw her three times, spent the first two times having an insurance/money battle in the beginning, and the second time waited for her for 7 minutes after my appt was supposed to start and she still cut me off right after the allotted time was up technically not giving me the appropriate 45 full minutes ???? but not only that she called me by the wrong name ???? only says elementary shit like “so how are depression and anxiety” and just nods and doesnt offer any feedback when i talk. she didnt try at all to get to know my circumstances like i always had to fish for things to talk about because she couldnt even start asking me questions of her own since the first session which like how is that supposed to help me i came here because I NEED HELP and then even though the insurance sent me a document with this therapists specializations and eating disorders WERE LISTED AS ONE OF THEM she says that she doesnt know much about eating disorders and isnt trained in them so she doesnt know how to really help and she then went on to tell me she thinks i just need a higher care and that we could have our last session (the following week from last thursday which would have been tomorrow) so we can find a program together that i should start ???? yeah nice way to say see you never and take another $50 from me when you cant even rememebr my FUCKING NAME WHEN ITS SITTING ON YOUR COMPUTER SCREEN IN FRONT OF YOU AND YOU LITERALLY LISTED EATING DISORDERS IN YOUR SPECIALIZATIONS WHEN YOU APPARENTLY KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THEM ACCORDING TO YOU sorry im livid but anyway now im back to no therapist and that makes a consecutive three suggesting i needed a higher care but i guess at least this one was just a complete idiot and didnt say she refused to help me anymore

so i just wanted to post a rant update about that and i guess from here i will just continue

i started class and my last week of training for my new serving job yesterday, i had class at 8:00 after not sleeping all night and have three more classes and then training again, i look cute today but no one lked my selfies on twitter so that was very nice also, im speeding frivolously, and ,,,,

my mom and i got into two big dumb fights over the last week over something so stupid but as always she had to go on and curse me off and tell me she doesnt want me in “her house” which is really funny because how can you call it your house when you 1) dont even have a job therefore do not pay bills 2) my dad, as much as he hurts me, just had to get a second job again to support my family when my mom doesnt even have one and doesnt even love my dad anymore but she’ll reap the benefits of having a man willing to do that for her 3) she literally left us like two months ago to live with her friend then decides to come back because “it was hard driving back and forth and i couldnt see the kids everyday” which honestly, to me, translates to it was too hard coming here every day just to bake cakes 4) she told me whenever she does get money (somehow???) she has full intentions of moving out and getting her own place so even if she did have money i guess making this number 5) she would be PUTTING IT TO GETTING HER OWN PLACE AND NOT THE HOUSE ANYWAY SO I REST MY CASE DOESNT LOOK LKE YOUR HOUSE TO ME BITCH and i left sunday night and went to be with vincent and i get to sleep with him all week and then yesterday my mom tried to send me a meme so i would respond and laugh and we could pretend nothing happened but im tired of doing that im tired of acting like just because im their child i dont deserve an apology like fuck if i dont even deserve help on my medical bills ???? i think i at the very least deserve an apology every now and again ???? especially since they are a signficant part of the reason I AM THIS WAY and then yesterday my dad texted me asking where ive been and i told him what happened and actually tried to have a mature conversation and tell him how i felt like an adult and why i dont think my mom acted fairly and he literally left me on read so thats how my family life is going

otherwise eating is impossible unless its in capsule form and and im overly paranoid and i cant drive without imagining a parallel universe every car that comes into my vicinity somehow crashes into me and not even in the suicidal way literally in the twitching at the sight of an approaching vehicle and shaking my head and closing my eyes while driving because all i can see are these traumatizing visions of things that have never happened to me and im really depressed and i have no friends

and i really sound like a whiney bitch right now but i havent posted much about whats going on in my life lately and clearly !!!! i dont have a therapist to tell !!!!

i keep wanting to write and have fragments of words but it doesnt feel right yet and i know that

i have no money and my phone and car bills are due next week and i wont be making any money until next week MAYBE

literally the only good thing right now is that vincent is doing pretty well, its really hard to see him this way a lot of the time but its getting easier because im getting used to seeing him bald or how little he eats or helping him when he’s sick, as far as we know the chemo seems to be doing what its supposed to do, he is doing well, i hope it stays that way because he’s literally everything to me and the only thing that makes me want to be on this earth

#personal

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ticketybooworld-blog · 6 years ago

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VOICES INC ONLINE! Recovery from Mental Illness is ‘ always ‘ possible!

Blog created by Barrie Macvicar - Positive about Pain & Mental Health Support Group. (facebook)

The Hopesturn Project

So who is Peter Hawes? Well to me Peter Hawes is a man who came into my life at just the right time. That time was when i was still a service user in February 2012. I met Peter on joining an online support group called

Intervoice - The International hearing Voices Movement.

The reason i had joined this group speaks for itself. Yup ! It’s in the name? Yeah ! That’s right. I was ‘ hearing voices.’��I was hearing lots of voices. Peter was one of the first to answer my call for help when i was in distress then with my experiences. He and a selection of others were instrumental in helping to teach me how to go about managing to facilitate my very own recovery. These guys just threw me some tools and helped to keep pointing me in the right direction. I then i had to get on with the hard work myself. What work? Rebuilding my entire life and mind. I had a lot to do. I guess i kinda became the apprentice of my own existence. I had to start all over again and these guys showed me how,

Peter Hawes, Kevin Healey,(Recovery Network Toronto) Egan Bidois, Mike llm Kruger, Rachel Waddingham, Richard Walkinshaw, Shirley Coffey, Lani Maria E, Paul Baker , Margaret Wylie, Marry Maddock, Earla Dunbar Suzanne Beachy and loads more all came together to offer advice friendship and support. Support that helped me Barrie Macvicar find the strength to both change and rebuild my life.

On meeting Peter i was heavily medicated. On multiple medications & diagnosed Paranoid Schizophrenic. I was in mental health services & was treated in both the hospital setting, as well as in the community. For the last two years of my time in services i was also fortunate enough to have 3 days per week home support.from a charity known as Penumbra.

Thanks to Peter and all the others i am sat here today no longer in mental health services nor hearing voices and no longer in need of support. I was discharged in August of 2013. I now live medication free. I no longer have any active Schizophrenia and i have the doctors letter to prove it. I am just getting on with enjoying living my life as best as i can. Independently. Still using the tools and the knowledge given to me by my crew above to keep myself well. At the same time as having the comfort of knowing they are all still here online at the touch of a button.

Yeah ! There is a lot to be said for online support and the friendships and knowledge that can be gained right here on

SOCIAL MEDIA !

So get yourself started and take a look at Peter’s websites below. Where you can see his work at

VOICES INC ONLINE

you can also watch a film of Peter here doing some of his Glass work and at the bottom of this page you can a look at Peters latest genius creation.

RECOVERY BOX !

Peter is my brother from another mother he’s both a friend and an inspiration and i’m sure once you will see why on reading the remainder of this blog.

Thanks everyone

Barrie Macvicar.

What is Hopesturn?

An article by Peter Hawes

Based on a project designed by everyone

So I feel to explain hopes-turn I should give a back history of the realisations that led to hopes-turn. I spent 15 years in the psych system believing one universal truth that was pushed down our throats for years. It was quite simply “you have a mental illness and medication helps so take your meds” This turned out to be untrue for me and multiple others, although I will admit that there is some the bio medical model works well for. I dont meet them often but I have seen the rare few. I then exited that system and became a victim of trauma and then later joined the hearing voices network. The hvn was somewhat productive but when I tried to push other ideas and views I was asked to conform. I couldn’t do it as it involved lying to the people on things I believed to be true. So as it turns out I did basically 15 years in a one size fits all system and then another 3 in a one size fits all system. As if that wasn’t bad enough I started my own organisation voices inc. Which was based on art therapy involving fused glass and my own psychoanalytical/ holistic theories on recovery. Voices inc while being a good project and helping a lot of people didn’t work for everyone. We had a 70% variable success rate of recovery for our attendees. Perhaps that’s cause it was a one size fits all system...... WTF are we all doing us holistic heroes in mental health like seriously there is no one size fits all system. I myself was very opinionated and just didn’t get the whole everyone’s different individuality thing so my thinking at the time was very black and white and I had the belief that this works for everyone cause it works for me and others. I will admit it was a bullshit attitude to have. But I never said I was ever perfect nor that my journey was complete I always said when up on stage that we are all still learning and growing together. Myself included. So I took some time off to learn what I needed to learn and evolve into who I wanted to be. I've spent the better part of the last year learning to listen to people and understand individuality and learning to be a team player and delegate as I felt these were all skills I needed to learn and doing so would make me a better leader and friend and just person in general. Somewhere between listening to people and understanding people me and my awesome bunch of past and present voices inc members came up with an idea. I remember the day well we were all sitting round at my right hand man Michaels place bitching about the system and lack of supports, when Robbie one of my proteges made the comment its a shame we cant get voices inc centres set up everywhere then we could reach everyone. I thought about this and theres no way we could reach everyone thats impossible. So my response was yeah voices inc is awesome robbie but I wish there were more holistic methods coming through so we could cater to the choice and individuality of the consumer. I believe it was tori who made the comment hey if we took out all the holistic therapy and art therapy out of voices inc could the same methods be used to set something else up? I went holy crap that girl has a point. Thus we all became very excited about the possibility of the new project we had devised over a bitching session at the current mental health system. Thus Hopesturn project was born. It is among my favourite projects for the simple truth that it was created not just by me but by multiple members and so has many shades and different perspectives. So now you have the story of how it was born it still doesnt answer wtf is hopes-turn? Hopes turn is a peer run initiative, hopes turn is you, hopes turn is me and hopes turn is anyone who wants to make a difference. Basically its a collective of knowledge and ideas and resources to establish different peer support groups. Hopesturn is brilliantly an anagram for “Helping Other Peers Establish Support Through Unification Recovery Network” There will be many exciting advances and opportunities in hopesturn such as--------- hopesturn radio- where peers can run there own time slot on a radio show about whatever subject they want. The benefits of this are that not only does it keep the peers running the shows motivated to talk or educate on topics they already know about, but it also provides an entirely peer run radio station for people to listen to on a variety of topics. Hopesturn peer support app – The hopes turn app is being designed at the moment and will be a bunch of chat rooms with possible gearing towards a social network theme. So that it is connecting peers with similar lived experience to each other to chat and make connections whatever there framework be it mental illness or trauma based or behaviour based or the aliens implanted a chip in my brain and that’s where my distress comes from :-P either way there’s sure to be a chat room or option to network with peers with similar views. There are also currently being set up a bunch of resources usable by hopes turn members to create and developed there own peer support groups from online conference rooms to learning resources around topics based on networking or finding a venue or even raising funds to keep your group running. The goal of hopesturn is to establish the training and resources to develop more peer run options so if anyone has an idea for a peer support group they can get this up and running. For example lets say there’s a guy called bob. We will for the sake of the argument say bob has bipolar the mental illness and identifies as such because that’s his framework for his experiences and symptoms. (I personally think bipolar actually is biological and has to do with a sensitivity to hormones and instability in environment in child hood where the child has many ups and downs) It does not matter what I think though, cause this is about bob and how bob sees things. Bob has found that dancing helps him with his highs and lows and helps him keep balance in his life. Bob then wonders if this would help other people given how beneficial dancing is for him. Lets also say for the sake of the argument bob is on lithium remembering that bob is in the mental illness framework but bobs not anti psychiatry nor pro psychiatry he just finds lithium helps him (I'm still anti psychiatry and anti meds but pro free choice and I can be anti psychiatry and anti meds cause it works well for me but each to there own) So bob decides to try set up a group called Bipolar Bobs Dancing group. Lets say he decides to run it on a Monday night for 3 hours between 5pm and 8pm. But bob while having a good idea has absolutely no idea on how to get his idea from a hypothetical to a reality as hes never done anything like this before. So bob jumps on hopesturn and finds an article on sourcing products to sell at markets. Bob is also recommended by another member dan who runs a group for depression about crowd funding and finds an article on how to set that up plus get some kick ass exposure for his crowd funding campaign. Bob also finds on hopesturn 3 other members in his local area with bipolar who are interested in helping set up his group. Bob also finds on hopesturn network a mental health worker who works in his local area and will organise a venue. Bob also finds a link to a guy who will design a flier for his group. Bob sets up the crowd funding campaign and maxes out exposure and while the crowd funding campaign is doing its thing raising cash bob gets the flier he had designed canvassed around town and local organisations. Bob uses some of the crowd funding money to run the group for the first month and invests the rest into sellable market products which arrive a week after the group starts and gets an awesome turn out. Member’s who attend bobs group are more then happy to help raise funds by doing markets sell the stock bob has ordered in. Before you know it bobs group has become a social enterprise and begins to grow. Bob then gets some of his best dancers and starts a flash mob in the city to raise awareness for bipolar and gets an article in the paper and segment on the news with contacts he found on hopeturn for media publicity. So you see how this sort of thing can just keep growing when a collective of knowledge and resources and people work together. I've done a lot in mental health and my reputation and accomplishments are re-known and I get a lot of people asking me how I accomplished all that I have in the last six years from the whole public speaking, websites, book and articles and being on tv to setting up 2 mental health organisations. The truth is there’s nothing special about me.. sure I have a high iq and adhd and a bunch of cool people behind me but at the end of the day I'm just like you the only difference is I worked out six or seven years ago that there is nothing we cant do as humans, we are basically geared to evolve and grow on a daily basis so the words can't or impossible are to me just bullshit words for things we haven’t figured out how to do yet. So I never stop I just keep looking for solutions I'm hoping that this project designed by the collective of peers will reach so many and help them figure out how to do things and over time see the possibilities are limitless. I am also hoping that it will provide more peer support options to cater to peoples individuality so that many systems can be developed cause not everything works for everyone and its important to have multiple options and support resources for consumers to access to fullly aid them in there recovery, whatever that looks like to each and everyone. Remember we own our own recovery and its different for all of us. So stay tuned guys cause this is all going off like a match at a gas station in the not too distant future . Me and the team are just finalising some of the projects and then BOOM. I will add some fliers of some of the projects that hopes turn has initiated so far and I have included voices inc because the methods removing the art therapy and holistic therapy are what we used to get the other groups up and running

Above (right) you can see some examples of Peter Hawes glass work. Peter is also well known as Peter Hawes Glass Artist and here below he shows how some of that work is done.

youtube

RECOVERY BOX ! The Recovery Box idea was formulated on 27 February 2018 when Peter Hawes and Douglas Holmes met in Point Cook, Victoria to put their ideas down on paper and to start clarifying what was needed to turn the Recovery Box from an idea into a project that would change how information would be made available to Consumer, Carers, Mental Health Professionals and the general public. The original idea was to develop an App that could be incorporated into the product Peter had developed and was already selling successfully online.

The original idea was to develop an App that could be incorporated into the product Peter had developed and was already selling successfully online.

However as the brainstorming continued using GLOSS – OFF, both Peter and Douglas made the decision to rebrand a box with its own firmware and content.

This link will explains GLOSS – OFF https://youtu.be/BDJyhqbsZv0

Peter organised a meeting with Kevin and we agreed to work together to see how we could turn this idea into a product that would revelocision how new people coming into the current Mental Health system would access information that could improves people lifes journey

A small working group of interested people would be asked to participate in a working group to assist with identifying what information would be included under each of the heading in the App:

The Headings for each of the Channels include:

Stories Coping Strategies Recovery Resources Medical solutions Events To view RECOVERY BOX - CLICK HERE

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survivor-game-changers · 6 years ago

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Rites of Passage - Day 49

Before we get to your final immunity challenge, we are taking the time to reflect upon those who fell before you. Wether directly or indirectly, because of them, you are in this spot in the game.

(we are pretending that Renee submitted on time and this was posted not after FTC yay)

Katie

Hey! Long time no talk. You look great, tell your mom I said hello as well!

Nick

Sidlegend ! i never actually spoke to you, #socialgame, but there was a lot of dropped jaws on South West when you left and you definitely shook people when you left because everyone felt slightly on edge when it could literally be anyone too leave!! thanks for playing!!! <3

Katie

Girl you were so robbed. I would have loved to play with you longer.

Nick

you were such a sweet girl when i spoke to you on the marooning, and you were there with my girl Ashley and she and everyone else only spoke highly of you!! DEFINITELY robbed, everyone was sh00K when you left and i think your a legend!

Katie

Sorry Chris!!! I hope to get to know you better once this whole thing is over with. I’ve heard really REALLY great things about you.

Nick

you had me sweating til the very last minute boy!! what an awesome dude honestly, i am scared to think of how you would play if you went any further because that last day, you really knew how to turn the tables and you were someone really great to talk to as well!! glad i got to play with The Chris Icon™ , also renee still talks about how much of a wicked person you are, then that holds a lot respect in my heart !

Renee

thank you for making me apply for this game, I went into it planning on doing nothing besides being your bitch and clearly that didnt work well, but you leaving allowed me to get this far, but I am absolutely devastated that you left so soon and i hope i got revenge enough for you. Heard it was between you and me going that night and really I wish it was me because you deserved to play this game!! love u irrelevant jtia.

Katie

Oh Johnny, you were such a constant figure in my game. You may have only made it to day 10 but your influence on this game is the reason I made it this far. I can’t wait to tell you all about it.

Nick

duuuuuude!! honestly, player of the season! you were robbed of #SingleDigits but daaaaamn you were a force ! south west had therapy sessions after you left bc we were all so sh sh shook ! not only an awesome, dynamic player, i really thought you were an awesome guy to talk too and someone that has a lot of love for this game!!!!

Renee

I really wanted to be able to play with you and it sucked that we had no power on that tribe, sorry that you left, but Im rooting so hard for you in flops hope you kill it!!

Katie

QUEEN!!! You are such a strong player and have proven yourself over and over again to just dominate the competition in this community. I knew if I didn’t get you out you would be standing right here where I am now.

Nick

my mother forever!!! when you think of TS legends, kait is the top of my list and most peoples!! voting you was really hard, but all the idol talk and relationships and alliances, it was something i felt had to be done early, because you really are a superstar player and person!! thank you for being such an icon, i idolize you, i adore you, thankYOU!

Katie

I can’t believe I got to be in a lip sync with the lip sync queen herself. Honestly a goal of mine for a very long time and I can’t believe it came true! Next time we will crush it even harder but until then I can’t wait to have you cracking me up in the reunion chat. You really bring so much life into the community and I adore you for it.

Nick

the Fashionist Legend™ HaSelf!!!!!!!!! ever since rebels n rogues, you have been a great value player and person and I love your funny, bubbly, outgoing personality, you radiate so much positivity and friendliness and i think this community is blessed with someone like you Pippa!! <3

Katie

NOW THAT was a very ugly vote and a bit hard to watch. I heard you were able to get revenge though… hopefully it was sweet.

Nick

dont. imma choke up. THIS. QUEEN. WAS. ROBBED! if i could give my spot right now to any person, it’d be you!!! i wish we were never split by tribe swap because i would NOT™ have let this happen had i been there with you! not only are you a Celebrity and future president of the world, ur someone I’m pretty happy to call a friend!!! i loved that this game brought us together bc i love talking to you and i love how like minded we are, we just seem to always be on the same page and thats so reassuring! thanks for being such a legend and i wish this game got to see more madison, so so so so so robbed! LOVE YOU MADI <3

Renee

gosh you were so robbed and the way you left really hurt but the time that we did get to play together was great queen of the toxic music video.

Katie

I had to think very long and hard about whether or not to work with you. In the end I knew us being together would have put a constant target on both of our backs and after Ancient Greece I was weary to have to take that bullet again. You’ve always been such a great friend to me and I hope to play another game where you can slice my head clean off!!

Nick

honestly SUCH A TUMBLR SURVIVOR LEGEND!!!! another vote that really hurt to do, but again, had you gone any further i rue the day u would have slayed all of us!! i think your such an awesome person and having conversations with you was super endearing bc i genuinely think your a super nice guy!! thanks for being such an icon!

Renee

I was heartbroken we didnt actually get to play any of this game together because I really wanted to be able to see how you play and I love playing games you host so I am very upset that I didnt have a chance to try and work with you in this game!! You left too soon!!

Katie

WHEW this was a very very hard vote. I think about it a lot… was it worth getting that much blood on my hands so that I could be sitting up here? We had a really wild and fun run for the first half of the game and had the swap gone differently I believe you would’ve been a really strong long-term ally. My move was messy and I hope one day I can explain it well enough so that you will forgive me for it.

Nick

another ABSOLUTE ROBBERY!! again, like madison, had i been there, i would have done everything in my heart and soul to ensure this does not happen to you!! you are such an amazing friend before anything else in this game! i could talk to you about the most boring thing and be highly entertained and I’m super thankful for the time we spent in the game! thank you for always being someone i could vent to, spit ball ideas with, scream at and with and project all my anxiety onto, you really are a legend and the TS community is blessed to have someone like you! <3

Renee

I was honestly…. so excited when we got swapped and put back on a tribe together but then I just figured you would never actually trust me, and I had to make a move against you. you would’ve destroyed this merge so I hope you take it as a compliment that I did what I did and theres no hard feelings because I really do think youre great!!

Katie

We didn’t get to talk much since we always seemed to find ourselves on different sides of the alliances, but the little conversation we had was really great. I hope your adorable animal friends are doing well and that you will flood the reunion chat with as many photos of them as you possibly can!

Nick

I’m still shaking @ ur departure. i loooooove you olivia honestly, your so freaking fabulous! we bonded day 1, and that was a bond that could not be broken and I’m so thankful i met someone like you! shattered the tribe swap split us, because all game aside, i genuinely missed talking to u! thanks for being YOU OLIVIA <3 https://media.giphy.com/media/d5TDmQA8zfQqI/giphy.gif

Renee

oh my… your blindside was so devastating and you really didnt deserve that,, we had some great moves and at first I was alittle scared but really im so glad that I got put with you in the swap because I really feel like we killed it, and I really owe you for connecting me with Andrew and crow which put me in such a good position in the game, you were so robbed queen.

Katie

JARED!!!!!! I feel as though our similar laid back personalities clicked very well together and I always enjoyed talking with you. Making the elephant with you during the battle ship challenge was and forever will be the highlight of the season for me. Thank you so much for always making me laugh it meant so much to me and I hope you are doing great.

Nick

my BOY!!! the first thing you ever said to me was “Do you want some fries?” and i knew from that moment on, you were MA MAN! i wasn’t stabbing u in the back at all, and i hope?!?!??!? that was the same for you, but i am so so blessed that i got to play this game with someone like you! i love your honesty and you humbleness, its so endearing, AND your almost as iconic as nicole… almost!! https://media1.tenor.com/images/83dd842ba61a76e1b28824a7e1a94d23/tenor.gif?itemid=5920950

Katie

I TRIED!!!!! I TRIED SO HARD TO HAVE US WORK WITH YOU!!!!!!! I always had mixed feelings about you, but that night you comforted Billy in our alliance chat I realized what I thought I knew about you was all wrong. You put on an excellent show but I know now that you have the biggest heart and I am so so happy my friend Dustin gets to be with someone so kind. Side note: Don’t be too upset that I proved you wrong in that building emotional and real connections with people in this game can get you to the end ;)

Nick

I’m still shaking from every tribal council you ever been at ! you were such a fun player too watch, so scary to be against, but you were such a force! its refreshing to play with someone who is honest and straight forward and i appreciate being able to play with you!!!! thank you for adding entertainment and intensity into this season, you shook the game hoNESTLY and i think you made a lot of people sweat and a lot of people laugh, thankYOU! ! #GAMECHANGA https://media.giphy.com/media/10QgC3CIDqjvXi/giphy.gif

Renee

the biggest personality in this game for sure. You made early merge actually really fun because you were so good at being the villain. too bad we weren’t actually on the same side but I really actually did consider working with you and omg I wish we could’ve gotten something together because highkey im obsessed with you and youre FUN !

Katie

MATT WHY WEREN’T YOU AWAKE DURING THE CAST REVEAL!!!!! I’d like it to go on record that Matt was the third person I messaged as soon as this game began. You are and will always be one of my best friends in this community... we’ve known each other for such a long time I’ve literally watched you become a man and grow chest hair!!!! You are someone I always want to talk to and I’m so thankful we flopped in Chiefs so that we could form this forever bond. ALSO THAT DOUBLE IDOL PLAY WAS RIDICULOUS SERIOUSLY GET OUT OF HERE WITH THAT SHIT. I should have known… its Matt FUCKING Summers for a reason.

Nick

another TS LEGEND! your such a force, its so infectious being on a season with you, because i have such a higher drive to play harder and do better !!! i think your such an awesome player, i admire you… king of idols!!!!! you don’t know how much stress i had when u pulled out them idols, you really knew how to shake the game and keep everyone on there toes!! thank you so much for ALLOWING me to be on a season with u, bc i feel so inferior being put on the same cast as Matt Summers™ https://78.media.tumblr.com/531420631da128193b83673530450bdd/tumblr_o6xmy3ExVx1tc2w1bo1_250.gif

Renee

legend…. In the 5 seconds before your vote out where u and I actually talked alot of game was so much fun and if i hadnt already voted for you that round and if you were going for anyone other than Katie I actually would’ve considered voting with you that round and really… the double idol play was amazing and I shook and wow.

Katie

Andrew I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this, but you are one of the most well spoken individuals I’ve ever met. You really exude intelligence even when you are lying down in your bed answering silly tribal questions. Each time we play a game I am always stunned by how strategically and socially talented you are. Keeping it up because someday you are going to be ruling over all of us. I hope to play with you again in the near future.

Nick

omg father!!! you are one of the best players I’ve honestly ever played with! we didn’t speak much, or at all?? pre-merge and i was sweating the moment i had to meet you bc your SO DAMN GOOD!!!!! there are some people who are naturally just so charismatic like u and i just honestly loved talking to u, let alone playing with u!! i think u were so exciting to play along side and even more exciting to solidify a pretty good relationship with! thankYOU for being someone I’m super proud to say i played with !!!!!!!!! <3 <3 <3 https://static.wixstatic.com/media/2827ce_d0011f547cc94d7cb6992870aa872586~mv2.gif

Renee

honestly upon seeing the cast I just figured you and I would be on opposite sides of this game like we have in other games, but as soon as your “Cortana” called me bae I knew this game would be different. When we formed that little alliance in the first swap it really changed my opinion of you and im really glad we got to work together as long as we did!!

Katie

I think after this game we are going to have to reintroduce ourselves because if there is anyone in this game that gave me a run for my money on making up lies it was you. I am not even sure if I was ever able to really trick you in this game… at times I felt like you were able to read right through me, which was TERRIFYING. You were a target of mine for such a long time and because of it that I regret never showing you all of my true self. Hope you feel the same way because I think we are going to be surprised with how similar we truly are.

Nick

my girl since day 1!! i know your departure hurt you and it cut a little when you left, and i have no excuses for it! it just shows how much of a force you were and how much people loved you! i think had i gone to the end with u in a f2, even i would have given u my vote! your such a likable, friendly, honest and respectful person and I’m hoping we can stay in touch after the season because i really loved talking to you during this game! i have so much to thank you for, for me to say i had i had a good time in this game, because you were a lot to contribute to it! i think your an ICON™ and i love your lizards xoxoxo SO MUCH xoxoxoxox https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2017-12/27/17/asset/buzzfeed-prod-fastlane-01/anigif_sub-buzz-9911-1514414805-3.gif

Renee

I feel like us not being on a tribe together ever pre merge made it difficult for us to ever be on the same page but honestly the small moments where we did get on the same page were really fun and I did enjoy talking to you about your lizards and potato chips about how annoying some people in this game were!

Katie

Had things not gotten so complicated I would have really loved to have you sitting here with me. I ended up falling into a very emotional game… more than I ever have before and the decision that I made that round is what I know I will end up haunting me in each and ever game I (possibly) get cast for after this. I hope you know how real our friendship is and that it goes so much further than this game/org/whatever. I always heard such amazing thing about you from my friends, but never took the chance to get to know you myself. Oddly enough minutes before the cast was announced I finally took the chance after being thrown into an insane situation and as luck would have it we were both cast and then thrown into this new EVEN MORE insane situation. I believe in fate and in that moment I knew it was sign that I just had to work with you and begin this amazing friendship. I can’t wait to see where this bond takes us I foresee many shore adventures.

Nick

i don’t even know where to begin here lmao. your such a legend… i seriously… there aren’t many people like u that i bond with in these games ! i can’t say much more other than thank you for this game! i bonded with u like a sister in this game, with kohls/coles, your crazy stalker, my co-worker, your mom dragging u and most importantly kmart <3 there are soon many memories i treasure ! idk what to say, I’m stumped for words when writing this, you know exactly how i feel about u, theres so much love and gratitude, tysm <3 https://media.giphy.com/media/3o7aD4GrHwn8vsGBTa/giphy.gif

Renee

you were literally the only person I thought I could work with in the game early in game and its been such a pleasure to be able to work with you as long as we did. Unfortunately I figured you would absolutely beat me in the end because you literally were friends with EVERYONE and that is something that you did really well that I know I couldn’t beat. I hope we can be friends outside of this game because I really did love talking to you and need updates on your crazy neighbor!!

Katie

THESE PAST 3 DAYS WERE WILD RIGHT???? I’m not sure how the two of us were able to go from bitter enemies one night to forming a real emotional connection the second but hey here we are. I really wish we had made that connection sooner in the game but its never too late and you know I’m not going anywhere. Taking down our façades and realizing how much we had in common was shocking to say the least, but I’m glad it happened. You were such a worthy adversary this entire game and sometimes I wonder how much luck vs strategy was responsible for me being here over you. 4th place looks much better on me than it does on you so get back out there and win one already!!!

Nick

what a PLAYER!! HONESTLY, you made moves, your frightened me, you made me laugh like no other, you made me sweat sm, u made me learn about the geography of america, thaNKYOU.. FOR all of it!! you brought this game to a new level and i have a lot of respect for you, i think you are an amazing, amazing person and u should feel very proud of ur self and how u played! also SHOUTOUT to crow for having the most fucked up sleeping schedule, and making my timezone feel like i wasn’t always completely alone and isolated <3 no one else does 4am chats better than crow! http://68.media.tumblr.com/74e0a4518f4a80d00d167c44b8caa462/tumblr_o0z8biWuWv1qfohf1o1_500.gif

Renee

I really have such a big respect for the way you played this game, absolutely ruthless. I really thought you were playing too hard/too well which is why you had to go and im so sorry that I had to vote you out because really… I wanted to see you win this game if I didn’t win this game but I had to do what I thought was right to get myself closer to the end.

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thehairypickle-plusone-blog · 8 years ago

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Fractures of my broken mind

To this day I truly believe the month I spent in the Mother Baby Psychiatric Unit in Melbourne was the first time I have been truly open and honest with myself. As rewarding as this was. Things don't change overnight. I was discharged on December 9th 2016. That's 4 months of living with my new sense of self. 4 months of stripping everything back and baring the naked truth. 4 months of battling with what I know and don't know and have yet to understand. It's been a roller coaster of anxiety, crazy highs and massive lows. A battle with the bottle, my past boozy habits and Valium sanctuary taking a firm hold of me. Being frustrated that I'm not "better yet". I keep wanting this overnight fix. But every morning I wake up it hasn't happened. We talk about trauma and something traumatic. When I hear these words I think of a car accident causing trauma to the head or a traumatic event witnessing a terrorist attack or murder. I don't bring it home to me personally on a lifestyle of living. To be told you have had a traumatic childhood and upbringing just sounds odd to me when I don't use that word in context to a family environment. It also panics me because if I don't get well if I don't take a firm hold of the reigns in my life, will that mean I'm subjecting my son to a traumatic upbringing? Am I already doing that when I can't cope and put him in his cot to go close the door and cry for five minutes in the bathroom on my own whilst he screams out in his cot. Am I already being a bad mother? Am I already setting the stones to a shit upbringing? Why is my head so cloudy? Why do I just not want to hold my son somedays? Like he's a stranger to me? Yet when he's out of my care for more than an hour I'm lost and I need my little boy back in my arms. I suppose a lot of this is just part of being a first timer at this Mum business. I think too what is everyone else's crazy and dramatic is my normal in my head. You see my mind isn't wired quite the same as most peoples. My mind overreacts in what's usually an easily resolved scenario. My mind talks to me and tells me everyone hates me. That I'm a burden, a failure, a misfit. That I don't "belong" that I don't know where home is meant to be? I see things very much for black and white. I often fail to see and correspond to criticism or people's alternative opinions to mine. I'm extremely passionate though. I take a lot to heart and hold intense values and morals over a lot of things in life. If I don't like you, I actually am terrible at not showing it and playing nice. I cut people off when their values and morals don't match mine. I used to change boyfriends like I changed my underwear I don't think I've ever had a consecutive relationship without a break up lasting any longer than 18 months. I jump into the next relationship as I can't bare to be alone. I have holes in my heart of emptiness that started when I was 4 according to psychologists. How I've tried to fill those holes has been an unhealthy cycle of, booze, boys, sex, drugs and raging metal covered in tears of frustration. It's seen me surviving life and never properly living it. It's seen me drop to all time lows just to keep the lifestyle I so badly wanted. Moving forward my anxiety is rife at this current stage. Borderline personality disorder has been made my diagnosis. There is no drug to "cure" this. Just therapy and hopefully by my mid 30s it will ease off with its intensity. When someone has been exposed to a traumatic upbringing, for example violence, sexual abuse, neglect, drugs alcohol etc. they do not learn the fundamentals of what a healthy relationship is and what love truly is. What is ok and what is not. We are seen to be erratic and attention seekers but are anything but that. I believe BPD to be a mental illness that people fear along with schizophrenia as we can be so unpredictable. I have the ability to be loving and kind and warm and the whole time despise myself. I also have the ability to be a cold hearted bitch who will do whatever it takes to seek justice. I'm a sunflower I blossom and shine so brightly in full bloom but I can also be this lonesome wee seed not knowing where to start out. I always thought I just had depression & anxiety but my moods did not actually match those of that description hence after 26 years I was told the words I didn't want to hear but words that I had suspected where what my diagnosis actually was and that was that "Hannah you have borderline personality disorder". I guess in a way I am like my Mums favourite song by the Verve "bitter sweet symphony". "I'm a million different people from one day to the next I can change I can I can change". I see how she related that to her own mental illness of schizophrenia and likewise I can relate it to the unpredictability and irrational behaviours that come with BPD. However I won't sit and allow myself to wallow in this or have this diagnosis define me. I've recognised things are getting worse lately and I've reached out and spoken up to furthermore gain help. I have a support worker who comes over for 3 hours each fortnight to help me out with Ollie and household things that somedays just seem to overwhelming for me to do. I also asked my psychologist to change my sessions from fortnightly back to weekly whilst we go through a difficult chapter. Furthermore I've recognised there's only so much mindfullness and deep breathing I can do before I need medical intervention. Hence going back onto valium. Pharmaceutical drugs are not a bad thing and I wish we would stop labelling them as being so. I honestly don't know at times if I would cope being off them and have been strongly advised not to come off my anti depressants. So there you have it there's my crazy. I know I'm the crazy friend. The colourfully wild, unpredictable one. The one you all love one minute then go what the fuck Hannah the next. But that's just me. For now anyway, for now whilst I travel down this what is a very new and untraveled road of healing, educating, and pushing through the factors in which I need to learn to strengthen myself. To heal old wounds and learn how to properly smooth over the new wounds and issues that I face. I've loved I've lost. I cannot tell you how many people I've lost. Usually just out of not knowing how to deal with a situation. However now if I cut people off it's because my over exposure and awakening of myself has also made me look deeply into the friendships and relationships I have and what purpose they serve and if they are healthy or not? I know a lot of this is quite repetitive, I've spoken before in my blogs about all these different feelings. But now I have not a label but a better understanding and insight into what I believe to be my fractured unique mind. A mind that is so powerful it can have the ability to overrule my heart and hurt, lash out and push away the ones I love the most. It's usually the ones closest to me that suffer. It's not their fault and nor is it entirely excusable on my behalf, but it is a part of this journey as I learn what in fact are the fundamentals of love, Life and caring. What it means to be loved. Until Ollie was born I feel I can honestly say I never truly loved anyone. I was selfish and protective of myself. I sought out to empower myself and if it meant it hurt people along the way then so be it, I took no responsibility. Now I've taken back responsibility. I've looked at times and situations in my life that were not ok, where I put not only myself but others at risk. Where I lied to protect my own image whilst crumbling others. To be very clear in saying that I've lied this does NOT mean I lied about Ollies paternity nor does it mean I lied about my sexual abuse when questioned over both issues of in fact I had lied. I can be a cunt but not a sociopathic cunt on that level. To say I'm a mess isn't true. I'm colourful, and loud I'm also painfully awkward and reserved on many levels. I'm grateful for as I've learnt whom my true friends and family are as I've gone through this journey. Having seen through my own bullshit I'm also beginning to see through other people's bullshit. I once read a saying and it's so accurate "don't play victim to the circumstances you created". I grew up with people who did this. I too for a long time did this. I now see through it. It's a scary thing to be honest. To admit to your own faults. It's a beautiful thing to have purpose in life and I feel now I have found my purpose. Nothing greatly spectacular I'm not going to be the next Florence Nightingale or Frida Kahlo, but I am going to be uniquely and amazingly me and a vessel of love to my son and as a partner, friend and family member and general citizen of society.

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teaandotherdrugs · 8 years ago

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A rare glimpse of emotion

It’s not often I write about my emotions so transparently. But as a word of warning, I’m going to dig deep into my mind and reveal some things that might not be all that comfortable for you to read if you don’t know me that well. Not that I think many people will read this. It’s just some of the things I’m going to write I haven’t told many of my closest friends or family.

With that disclaimer out of the way, I’m going to start by telling you my favourite band is Jimmy Eat World. Deep stuff I know. This often makes people laugh because it sounds like I’m stuck at a mental age of 14, refusing to grow up, and longing to be back in the past. That’s sort of true, but it’s mostly just because I’m hugely nostalgic. I live in my head. I always have. It’s probably something to do with being an only child and being comfortable with being alone.

My release and passion has always been writing, and I’m so lucky that I’m able to do it for a living. But I barely ever write about myself. I’ve never kept a diary, I just keep everything locked up inside. This is not healthy.

So this is me, getting out of my own head for once.

Anyway, I’m totally fine with admitting that Jimmy Eat World probably aren’t the greatest band in the world. I also know they probably haven’t released the greatest songs in the world, or are going to be that popular with many other people my age. Whatever — that’s not the point. I started listening to them in my early teens and their songs spoke to me in a way I couldn’t speak or connect to people. Jim Adkins’ lyrics seemed to line up with exactly how I felt about so many different situations, mostly involving heartbreak of some kind.

Whenever I needed to be told everything would be okay, Jimmy Eat World appeared to be there for me. Their albums got me through my intense teenage relationships, my loneliness at university, and finally dealing with the breakdown of an abusive relationship last year. The latter is the most important.

In November 2016, I was a complete mess. Not many people were aware of how much I was struggling, because I’m a compartmentaliser and I’m really great at pretending I’m okay — until I’m not. The previous June I’d been dumped by someone who had become my entire toxic world for over a year, and I’d lost a lot of myself over that time. I couldn’t eat for weeks. I cried, a lot.

In November, I found out he’d started doing the same thing to someone else, and it destroyed me. I’ve never dealt with that much emotion before, and it ate away at the self-esteem and self-worth I’d been working so hard on over the last 5 months in therapy. I started seeing a therapist after the break up because I had completely lost a sense of who I was, and I didn’t know how to motivate myself to do anything. I also knew somewhere deep inside myself I was still there, but I couldn’t connect to her, and I needed help to rebuild myself.

I stopped eating again.

So yeah, I took the setback pretty hard.

Then I heard this song:

youtube

I realised my favourite band ever had released an album and as ever, there was something to comfort me in the lyrics:

Honey, you are free

As much as you can stand to be

You are free

And it's anything you think that means

You are free

To be who you want

What you need, yeah, who you want

What you need, baby, you are free

I went back to my home in Hertfordshire to put myself back together, and I attended my next therapy session with a new perspective: I was free.

It was like I finally saw him for what he was. A narcissist, an abuser, selfish, inconsiderate, cruel, mean, controlling, and manipulative… It was as if I finally realised I had nothing to miss anymore. Maybe I never had anything to miss in the first place.

It’s a confusing place to be in because I’d more or less been obsessing over whether or not I could get him back since he broke up with me. I thought me and him were the same identity, because he’d made me feel like I couldn’t live without him.

I’m not going to say the song changed my life. But somehow, finding out about his new relationship and hearing the song coincided perfectly, and it was like a lightbulb turned on. Actually, it was more like being hit by a bus. Or a toxic fog lifting so I could see clearly for the first time in months. I realised he was doing the same thing to somebody else and I should be thankful I’d gotten out while I could.

His words suddenly took on a new meaning. I kept a mental diary of some of them.

“Go fuck yourself”

“You did this”

“You’re a manipulative cunt”

“Seriously you’re such a bitch”

“It’s your fault I’m acting like this”

“You’re so selfish”

“You only think about yourself”

“I’m going to leave you here if you don’t shut up”

“Lower your fucking tone”

“Entitled bitch”

“You need to stop being so selfish”

“Shut the fuck up”

“You’re a bad person”

And finally:

“I treat you so well.”

Because being an abuser doesn’t just mean you’re totally fucking mean the entire time. You also have to create the illusion that the person you’re abusing has something to lose. I consider myself pretty mentally strong, but he really hooked me.

I believed nothing I ever did was good enough for him, because that’s what he thought. He didn’t work for much of our relationship so I spent a lot of money on him, but nothing I did was ever enough because he “treated me so well” and he obviously deserved more than I could give him.

Have you ever heard of love-bombing? Here’s a quick summary:

Someone bombards you with compliments, text messages, wants to see you all the time, promises or buys you gifts, showers you with affection, and makes you feel like the luckiest person in the world. Things between you progress really quickly because you think anyone who’s treating you so well must be the love of your life, so why wait?

It’s a psychological trick manipulative people use, and it’s also seen in religious cults. Well, that’s what happened to me.

I was in a serious relationship far quicker than I’d intended to be, and after a few weeks of dating this guy was confessing his undying love for me. I was so different, I was the one, it must have been fate we met. Actually no, it was Tinder, which makes it sound all the more predatory doesn’t it?

It was nice to hear because I’d never been given this kind of attention before, so something primal in me fired up and told me I shouldn’t lose what we had, even though we barely knew each other in reality.

Then of course, all the promises fell through. All the things I thought he was quickly dissolved, and I was left with someone who looked at me with contempt, used intimacy as a weapon against me, and called me things nobody has ever called me before.

The first time the mask slipped was after he told me he loved me for the first time. We’d met 3 times by this point.

“If you don’t love me I’ll go and find someone who does,” was pretty much the climax of the argument. I felt this panic inside me which was so foreign to everything I thought I knew about myself. What if he was the one? What if I was fucking up something amazing? I told him I did love him. I didn’t mean it. But it didn’t matter, because I then started to believe it and I was sucked in even further.

The mask slipped more and more after that. Everything I did from that point was an attempt to try and get the person he was when we first met back. That never happened, because that person never existed.

Once, he left me crying in a hotel room alone on my birthday because I’d asked him if he was going to be late to my party. Once he yelled so aggressively in my face on the Tube that a stranger had to come up to him to tell him to calm down. Many times he left me in the street alone crying because I couldn’t work out what I’d done wrong. Many times he would be aggressive and mean to me and later deny it, just so he could blame my sadness and bad mood on me. He would make plans with me only to cancel them last minute so he knew I couldn’t see anyone else.

To give you more of an idea of how frightening he could be, narcissists are incapable of something called “object constancy.” This is when you have the ability to love somebody and be angry at them at the same time. Usually in relationships, you can argue, but you don’t want to really hurt the person you love and you work it out. With us, he really, truly hated me in the moments he was abusing me. He honestly didn’t care at all how much he hurt me or how much damage he was doing.

He never physically assaulted me, but his touch got more sadistic over time. If I opened my mouth to yawn, he’d poke his fingers down the back of my throat. He’d prod my sides, hard. He’s hold onto my hand so tightly that I couldn’t let go and he’d pull back my fingers so they clicked. It was painful and I told him to stop because I hated it. He told me not to whine. I was overreacting.

He gaslighted me. He made me think I was crazy for being upset. He made me feel like I was losing the plot, and I must have been doing the things he said because he loved me so much. He made me believe I was losing my mind.

Countless times he made me feel small and insignificant, and made me apologise for things I didn’t really understand why I was apologising for. Over and over again he threatened to leave me if I didn’t act a certain way. Time and time again he would punish me with silence or no affection because I’d said something wrong. Thousands of times he told me to shut up because I disagreed with him.

Because a narcissist is never wrong. You can argue and defend yourself as much as you want, but if you believe something even slightly different, they see it as some kind of attack. Your feelings don’t matter. They have zero empathy for you if you’re upset. It’s only when you agree out of exhaustion that they start to be nice to you again. They’re conditioning you like a pet.

It’s a confusing way to live because you know you have values, but you find yourself compromising on them time and time again. You treat yourself with the same amount of respect the abuser does — which is none. So many times in an argument I’d be struggling to understand how we got there, what I’d said, or what I’d done wrong. 99% of the time I couldn’t work it out, and I’d be stuck in this alternative reality where nothing made sense.

Have you ever been in a situation that’s so hurtful and confusing that you don’t know what to do with your body? I have, and I still struggle with that. It happens with gaslighting sometimes. It’s like you know what’s real but you don’t. I used to just pace and sit down and put my head in my hands. I tried to make myself as small as possible because I wanted to disappear. This still happens unfortunately. I tense up and I don’t know how to relax.

There’s a weird hypocrisy abusers live by. They often claim to have certain values too, such as being a feminist or very caring of other people. But you soon come to realise none of this care applies to you.

I was sucked into this cycle of desperately trying to please him, and walking on eggshells incase what I said would set him off. It was like Jekyll and Hyde. One minute he’d be talking about how much he loved me, the next minute he was replaced by a monster who seemed to hate everything about me.

But I didn’t tell anyone. I let him treat me this way and I stayed, because I honestly thought I deserved it and he must be right. Maybe I am selfish, maybe I’m not a nice person, he deserves so much better. It’s me making him upset.

I lied to my friends, a lot. Many of them never met this guy. This is probably because he knew they’d suss him out a lot quicker than I managed to. I told them I was sick or something urgent had come up when he forced me not to see them.

I questioned myself constantly: Am I pretty enough? Am I thin enough? Am I outgoing enough? Am I selfless enough? Some of those questions still haunt me, and the fear of eating in front of people I’m intimate with is not gonna go away any time soon.

But when I found myself again, it was an immense feeling of relief to finally release all the self-blame and realise it wasn’t my fault. This became my mantra and I’d repeat it to myself over and over at work, or at home, or at the gym whenever he entered my head and I felt myself getting upset. It wasn’t my fault.

It wasn’t my fault he treated me like I was nothing. It wasn’t my fault he shouted at me. It wasn’t my fault he gave me no respect. It wasn’t my fault I’d felt like crap for over a year.

I do not want pity — at all. This past year has been one of the most influential of my life and I’m thankful I went through it in a weird way. One good thing is that all this has made pain a lot easier to deal with. I really know how much things can suck. Even if something is hard, or somebody hurts me, I know I’ll get through it, because I truly believe I’ve seen what evil looks like.

When it happened in June 2016, I was ripped apart, but I managed to channel it into getting the job of my dreams. Somehow.

Even better, in November I realised I liked someone. I had a few awful dates but I met someone who reminded me what it’s like to have a crush. It didn’t amount to anything but it felt great. It was like the final step to realising I wasn’t a bad person, I was just controlled and manipulated into thinking I was. People can and will like who I am.

I just have to make sure I’m in the right place for a new relationship, because although I feel so much more myself, I’m carrying around the baggage of the past and it can be pretty obvious I’m not totally back to normal. That was a bitter pill to swallow. I’m still pretty oblivious as to how a normal relationship is supposed to progress. I know the early signs of a sociopath so it’s difficult not to apply them to everything that someone new says or does. I’ll get there in time with someone who’s patient enough.

Long story short, I then went to go see Jimmy Eat World twice in November, on my own. Both times were amazing. 2017 has had its ups and downs so far, because I’ve been hurt, but you know what? It’s great to know someone else could hurt me, because it means I have the capacity to care again.

My abuser doesn’t control me anymore. I am “free.”

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