ravenousnightwind

[ravenousnightwind]

Fuck yeah!

People always told me I was acting like a toddler or acting like a child. Even when I was a child they'd say it. Usually after they did something to me. As if their actions held no merit to my reacting a specific way.

Often times, we're caught up in what we feel and may not even have a choice, because those feelings build up or have to be released some how. Even when you are "acceptable" it doesn't mean that other people wont do things to make you be like them, or to cause you a problem to get a reaction out of you.

This post takes me back to my trauma, and it makes me remember that while I did or said things that might be seen as inappropriate or bad, it's not like I was never pushed to that point.

Anyway, just sharing my experience. It's hard out there, but just take care of yourselves no matter what.

some autistic people have a fight response to overstimulation, unfamiliar/unpredictable situations, breaks in routines or focus, loss of sentimental objects, interpersonal issues, etc.

this can involve physically harming themselves, other people, or objects. yelling and screaming. getting irritable or angry. reckless or impulsive behavior. being rude or saying mean things. you get the idea.

autistic people who do this should still be supported. we deserve people who will advocate for us, respect us, listen to us, care for us, include us, and fight for us.

and no, this does not mean autistic people are allowed to hurt others without consequence.

it means autistic people are people. we're not a monolith. autistic people who have fight responses are just as important as other autistics - especially when it comes to community and advocacy.

autistic people do not have to be palatable to have their human rights respected and upheld. autistic people are allowed to struggle, and that struggle looks different for everyone.

[ravenousnightwind]

I think after everything I've been through, getting back into any sort of worship or spirituality will seem more like something common.

Just sitting and enjoying the moment rather than some big ritual. It's important to realise that the gods dont require constant attention. They exist without us, and appreciating what they bring can also be part of a healthy way of reverence.

[ravenousnightwind]

Things my dad taught me vs. the truth

Abuse: It is good to not eat/barely eat. Truth: Food is necessary for my survival and it is not a moral failure for me to eat, no matter how much or how little.

Abuse: I have no right to privacy or ownership of my own space. Truth: I am a human being who has a right to autonomy and safety. I am allowed to have my own space - I do not belong to him.

Abuse: I am overdramatic and too sensitive. Truth: I am an empathetic person who was having a normal response to being abused. I am not the problem for crying, panicking, hyperventilating, or feeling hurt. He hurt me.

Abuse: It's no big deal if he acts inappropriately towards me. Truth: His inappropriate behavior towards me was severely traumatizing and taught me that my body does not belong to me. My body is mine, and he never taught me consent. I have trouble setting boundaries because of this, and that is not my fault.

Abuse: My worth comes from serving others - him specifically. Truth: I have inherent worth simply by being alive. My value is held within myself - all that I am. Serving others should come from the compassion, love, and support that I want to give - not obligation rooted in fear and self-hatred.

Abuse: I'm selfish, lazy, and didn't contribute anything to my family when I lived with them. Truth: I'm kind and severely disabled, which makes it very hard for me to show up in ways that are expected of someone my age. My passion and personhood are undervalued by my father. I am more than what I can do for someone else.

Abuse: My dad was trying to give us/my parents more privacy by remodeling the house when I was younger. Truth: My dad remodeled the house to make it easier for him to abuse us. He took away my bedroom door a few years after remodeling it. He never cared about us. He only cared about himself.

Abuse: My father would never hurt me and would risk his life for me. Truth: All my father has done is hurt me, and he has done many things that could have killed me. I survived not because of his grace, but because of luck and my own determination.

Gonna stop here because I really could go on forever. Fuck you, Dad.

[ravenousnightwind]

As much as I love Ireland’s Immortals for a lot of reasons, I’m kind of bummed the author doesn’t seem to detect the same pre-Christian substrates that I do within the medieval works.

For example, I’m noticing what appears to be genuine pre-Christian narratives nested within in the medieval story The Second Battle of Moytura, particularly in the bit about Bres’s conception. I’ve not seen a single author address it so far, and most boil down this conception-event as “Elatha and Ériu fucked on the beach.”

But it's not.

For those who aren’t familiar, here’s the passage in question:

Now the conception of Bres came about in this way. One day one of their women, Eriu the daughter of Delbaeth, was looking at the sea and the land from the house of Maeth Sceni; and she saw the sea as perfectly calm as if it were a level board. After that, while she was there, she saw something: a vessel of silver appeared to her on the sea. Its size seemed great to her, but its shape did not appear clearly to her; and the current of the sea carried it to the land. Then she saw that it was a man of fairest appearance. He had golden-yellow hair down to his shoulders, and a cloak with bands of gold thread around it. His shirt had embroidery of gold thread. On his breast was a brooch of gold with the lustre of a precious stone in it. Two shining silver spears and in them two smooth riveted shafts of bronze. Five circlets of gold around his neck. A gold-hilted sword with inlayings of silver and studs of gold. The man said to her, "Shall I have an hour of lovemaking with you?" "I certainly have not made a tryst with you," she said. "Come without the trysting!" said he. Then they stretched themselves out together. The woman wept when the man got up again. "Why are you crying?" he asked. "I have two things that I should lament," said the woman, "separating from you, however we have met. The young men of the Tuatha De Danann have been entreating me in vain-and you possess me as you do." "Your anxiety about those two things will be removed," he said. He drew his gold ring from his middle finger and put it into her hand, and told her that she should not part with it, either by sale or by gift, except to someone whose finger it would fit. "Another matter troubles me," said the woman, "that I do not know who has come to me." "You will not remain ignorant of that," he said. "Elatha mac Delbaith, king of the Fomoire, has come to you. You will bear a son as a result of our meeting, and let no name be given to him but Eochu Bres (that is, Eochu the Beautiful), because every beautiful thing that is seen in Ireland—both plain and fortress, ale and candle, woman and man and horse—will be judged in relation to that boy, so that people will then say of it, 'It is a Bres.'" Then the man went back again, and the woman returned to her home, and the famous conception was given to her.

In case you’re not familiar with the cast of characters here: Ériu represents the physical landmass that is Ireland. Elatha is a fomorian king. The fomorians are thought to be sea-dwelling supernatural beings of some kind. People have equated them to the titans of the Greeks and the jötnar of the Norse, but I think this is a false equivalence and that the fomorians may instead be reflections of an older pantheon of gods.

I think this because of the weird, somewhat-disjointed way everything is described in this passage. From my experience reading the Norse myths, when a text has this kind of nature it’s because it’s saying one thing while meaning another.

There’s a theory out there that Elatha was originally a sun-god due to his dripping-gold imagery. But personally, I think the descriptions of him and his vessel are meant to represent this bad boy:

And the reason why I think Elatha represents Halley’s Comet (or another comet of rare and exceptional appearance) is for a number of reasons:

First, unlike the sun and all the usual fixtures we see in the firmament, Elatha appears once to Ériu and doesn’t return. His appearance is not only unanticipated, but so spectacular that he woos Ireland in a way that no other celestial body has done before, despite their repeated attempts.

Second, Elatha’s vessel is described as being of a great size and indistinct shape, which slyly hints that its nature is something other than a boat. (Also, the fact this sky-vehicle is characterized as a seafaring vessel rather than a chariot suggests this is a very old story.)

Third, the sea is described as calm and still as if it were a level board. If you were sailing on such a sea on a moonless night, it would probably look and feel as though you were sailing into open space. This is evoking the imagery of the sky by using the imagery of the sea, suggesting we’re in fact talking about the former by hiding it behind an unusual description of the latter. (It’s also possible this story preserves the kind of atmospheric conditions that occurred during this hypothetical visitation of Halley’s Comet. Who knows?)

And finally, the fomorians are said to be “from the sea.” Later interpretations of this cast them as sea-raiders or something like aquatic demons. But theoretically, this could have come from a older belief that the gods came from “beneath the sea” in the sense that they came from “beyond and beneath the horizon, where the sun rises and sets.” If cosmic bodies were thought to be gods, it would have looked like they entered and exited the material realm via water, because Ireland—being an island—is surrounded by the sea on all sides.

(This in fact pairs very well with the theory that the early Irish believed bodies of water were portals to the Otherworld, evidenced by the number of offerings found deposited in them. If they watched their gods rise and set from the ocean, it’d make sense they’d view any body of water as a way to access the gods’ otherworldly realm.)

So now, with all that said, this puts the visuals behind Elatha and Ériu squarely into Proto-Indo-European territory—Their meeting echoes the archetype of the Sky God copulating with the Earth Goddess. Normally I’m not one for P.I.E. comparisons, but this feels pretty on the nose and I’m curious whether it has academic weight.

If so, it also suggests their son, Bres, may have once been a significant figure in pre-Christian Ireland; much different than the half-rate villain he’s cast as in the Second Battle of Moytura. This would also explain why his wife is Brigid, a goddess who was likely just important back then as she is now (supposedly she’s a reflex of a Dawn Goddess).

The overall plot of Moytura itself is an Irish equivalent of David and Goliath—in other words, very Christian—but this is just one of several nuggets of older myths I see scattered within it, disincorporated but otherwise preserved. The presence of these nuggets are hard to detect because they’re supposed to be; they’re written in such a way that our minds automatically smooth over the small, granular disruptions they cause in favor of plot continuity. But this is exactly how people would hide information inside information as a way to preserve it; they would exploit loopholes in the way cognition works so that these things would go by undetected. I saw it with Snorri’s Prose Edda and I see it here.

Unfortunately, it seems the Irish had to take more aggressive measures than Snorri to hide this information, so the substrate of their old mythology is wedged in really deep. It’ll take me months just to find all the threads in Moytura alone, and even then I don’t know how much can be resurrected from it.

[ravenousnightwind]

I had a vision...

[ravenousnightwind]

Over my time of discovering what limits me and my life circumstances, I have developed a particular kind of attitude. The fuck em all attitude that says listen, you're not my disability, so stfu and listen, or gtfo because I don't care what you have to say.

Which some people might determine to be pompous and self centered. In reality, I consider myself to be a rational person. There's just certain things or aspects of things that I have a hard time budging on because it's integrated into how I experienced everything.

That doesn't mean I'm not willing to listen to see a different point of view. It just means I'm passionate about what I'm talking about. So if you have a different opinion and approach me and say hey, look at this tho. I'll probably have a sit down and let you talk about it. I'm just not going to be here for shit that like is ultimately morally wrong. Like racism, homophobia, and other bullshit like that. That's the main thing.

[ravenousnightwind]

#007 - #008 - #009 - The tails of the Squirtle line are made of sea foam, storing air for long dives. They prefer staying at shores and spraying water on random passersby for amusement.

Sponsored by @la-bruja. Design process under read more.

So for this line I had three main goals: 1. Add some more aquatic turtle anatomy on the line. 2. Make their shells based on sea shells, so that i can introduce the blastoise cannons as the shells openings, almost like a siphon. 3. the very popular "put that fur back into the blastoise.

So for my studies i started with studying both a turtle with flippers and one without, and then applying those on my squirtles to see which one worked best. To avoid overlap with the titouga line, I decided to go with the snaked neck turtle as inspiration, but i brought some of the pig nosed turtle's nose to the line because its cute

The tails turning into some sea foam-y subsance and the fur ending up looking more like gills came later, to tie down random parts of the design into a more water related theme, instead of it just being a water type because its a blue turtle. also it storing oxygen is a reference to turtles breathing outta their ass btw. they do that

The rest just came from me enjoying drawing turtles and making it as accurate as i could without losing the whimsy

[ravenousnightwind]

They say paganism is about doing, but I think that's an easy answer for someone who is capable and able.

It's easy to say it's about doing when you can do things, or afford it. But what about those of us who aren't able and don't get a choice?

I say paganism isn't just about doing, it's about being. Holding what you would do, or even what you think inside you. It's a way of living, and that way doesn't have to be extraordinary. It can be simple, and it can be thoughts.

For those who disagree, that's because you're lucky enough to be able to do those things and have those things. It's a privilege you either earned or was capable of obtaining. Not all of us are so lucky in that, and I say this as someone who has also been lucky too.

Either way, none of it takes away from what we do or how we believe. Everyone is different and diversity is really important. Especially in the pagan community where all of us come from different walks of life and circumstances.

-May Frigg be with you and guide you

[ravenousnightwind]

What is the one thing you desire most in this life?

Freedom. The ability to do what I want and how I want it.

They say it's possible to stop these seizures I'm having. Let's take a Crack at it.

[ravenousnightwind]

If you find truth in yourself, to be at peace with all that has gone wrong, despite it still affecting you. Holding it in your heart, and helping yourself to lead to a peaceful life. You can find solace in knowing that you know yourself, your surroundings, and your problems to the best of your ability. That in itself is what it means to be who you are without permission and restriction. For the only rules you make are those you make yourself.

[ravenousnightwind]

So, they confirmed that I'm having seizures because of my trauma, both as a child and up.

At first I was like idk is that what this weak sort of physical feeling is? Yes, actually it is. There's never been a time in my life when I didn't feel it, and I remember specifically after about second grade it started to increase and really showed itself in fourth grade and onward.

So..yeah I guess this physical feeling I have felt my whole life is actually a seizure. The more I looked at it, the more I examined everything that ever happened to me, the more I began to realise the feeling I've felt for so long is the same.

Mental illness is crazy, and the more you've been through, the more likely it is you could also have a seizure. I dont mean like shaking, though apparently that's possible too. The neurologist told me there's literally no way to tell the difference between an epileptic seizure and a non-epileptic seizure without being admitted and examined. That it can range from shaking to simply feeling tired or weak, or lying there motionless and unable to move.

After all this time it feels like I have an answer, that my struggles weren't for nothing. That I can find a way through this.

[ravenousnightwind]

I think approaching spirituality and religion should be done calmly, respectfully, but most of all without stress. As someone who suffers from mental illness, it's important to realise you can only do your best, and sometimes that means bare minimum. This is after all, something that's supposed to help you through the everyday. So it should always be a relaxing and fulfilling experience in my opinion.

[ravenousnightwind]

The fucked up thing is that I never realized just how bad everything affected me. Like, I knew what happened, acknowledged it, but I didn't really feel it all until much later in life. Not until I was completely safe from anything that could ever hurt me again.

Trauma lives with you, and in many ways, you never get over it. My fears are still there, but it's muted in a better, more manageable way. I used to think oh yeah, I'm over this now, but I'm not. You can't get over trauma, it's just in your head forever floating around. But that doesn't mean you have to let it control you or be you if that makes sense. You can take steps towards prevention and make episodes or problems less frequent, but you'll always have to live with it. But there's a difference between living with it and accepting it, having problems because of it, vs letting it drive your way of being.

CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) really helped me flesh out my problems. Made me realise I can alter my pathway of thinking. I just had to try to focus on the things I could control instead of the things I couldn't. Once I managed a way to do that, things became easier. I stopped having as many manic anxiety episodes. I stopped having major depression episodes, but there was only so much I could do on my own. I then started to rely more on medication as a way to help myself.

I know, that was one of the hardest things. Accepting that maybe I could get help from medication, something that harmed me, forced on me. But, I was able to overcome that fear and find a way forward by using my ability to speak to the professionals about my concerns. That's what it's supposed to be like. You voice your concerns, they listen, they offer guidance, acceptance, and even alternatives, medication related or not. You just have to seize control and be forward about what you want to get anywhere with professionals.

I feel tho that I am in a good place. I'm better than I was before, and while I still have problems, they don't stop me entirely from living my life the way I want. I can manage them better, and by extention, I manage myself and people better. It's just a process, and it can be hard, but it's not impossible. You just have to want it bad enough to make changes. Don't just lay down and take it. Seize your own power, use your will, and direct events with your words and your actions. It's hard and you may fail or even think of giving up! But this is okay, this is normal. Just keep going, you'll get there. Things won't always be positive, but you can make your life better if you try. It just takes time, the only one who can make those changes are you. Keep trying. Never give up! Never Surrender!

[ravenousnightwind]

Bitches be testing my patience on not mattering things. When I don't like I say hey. You're bothering me stop it. If you don't guess what, yo gonna get the shit from me and idc who I offend in that moment cuz if you press me, I will press you back, and I'll turn it up just so you know not to mess. I'm not a thug, but I don't put up with shit because I've head enough nonsense in my life you think I put up with you when I got medical shit to deal with. I have to deal with that I don't have to deal with you. You heard?

[ravenousnightwind]

I'm different now. Like I got a software update.

They confirmed that I'm having non-epiletic seizures. Now, it's a matter of figuring out how to get my body to stop doing that. Cuz apparently you can stop these types of seizures from occurring. They say it's common in people with trauma. Oh, okay.

Yeah..trauma has made me, but it doesn't have to be me. I guess. It's just, I've been through so much already and I'm not the same person that I was. I have to hold back who I am, and my own emotions. Good and bad, so I don't fall prey or victim to my own tendencies. It's kind of annoying, really.

I'm at this point where I like being alone, even though I also welcome new people, I like my space and I don't feel the need to have to constantly search for someone to..love me I guess. Because I have people who love me now..and I guess that's pretty significant for someone who has never truly experienced people who actually care about me.

It was always hard for me to recognize when people care or not, but I also realise now what it means to not have to break your back to care. Yet, I understand what it's like to know when maybe someone isn't fit for me. Maybe. Because when you're compatible with a person, you get along with them and you can work out problems together whenever they occur. But people are strange, humans are strange, really.

I cried sometimes when my friends told me they love me. I cried and told them that no one has ever told me that or even wanted to or tried to spend time with me like they have. It feels nice to be cared about, but for it not to be this weird distance or dissonance where I question it. Because when I did, they just explained why, they didn't act weird and ghost me.

Now that I know what it's supposed to be like, it's easier for me to determine when I want someone in my life or not. Or if I can stand them. But it has also made me more weary and more alert. I'm more hesitant about getting to close to people right away. Trauma tells me things and in this way, it helps me make better friends because I can tell the difference between someone who wants my friendship and values me, vs someone who just wants to say hey but not get involved with me more than that. Which is still weird and confusing to me. At least now though, I can categorize it better in my head.

Anyway uhm, I'm okay. Things feel good, and I'm slowly making progress to just...living better. I can only look up and try and see what I can do, and in the end what ever happens at least I know I've tried to do my best at anything.

[ravenousnightwind]

I want my gay rights now! - Marsha P. Johnson (NYC Pride Parade, 1973)

[ravenousnightwind]

Because deep inside of me

I am the eternal flame

Violet blue

Hues

Surround me

I am the Phoenix

Strong and ever swift

I will keep going

Even when I die

I will come back rising

Towards my path

Ever pushing Forward

“Oh how do you stay positive when the world is so awful how can you stay positive when our lives are falling apart-“ SPITE!!!!! ITS SPITE GODDAMN IT!!! REMEMBER WHEN YOU WERE ANGRY AT THE WORLD AS A TEENAGER?? THAT KID WAS RIGHT AND YES IT FUCKING SUCKS AND NO, ITS NOT FAIR, SO YOU HAVE TO KEEP TRYING TO MAKE IT FAIR!!!!