#// we love a queen with an unhealthy cyclical issue of neglecting herself for others

[vendettamuses]

For Piper!

// A bit of angsty introspection into Piper‘s internal struggles with herself. Mind the tags on this one, it gets a bit dark.

// Piper’s self-medicated for anxiety and depression. Because getting shipments of her meds is so on-again off-again on Rook (and in general bc she doesn’t have a proper Rx for them), Piper tries to space out the doses as much as possible and split pills where she can in order to make them last longer. But that often means she ends up under-dosing and the medications end up not being effective at stabilizing her mood.

// This leads to her having periods where her mood fluctuates. She goes from manically happy, to crying from sudden onset sadness, to lashing out at minor things, to losing her sense of direction, attention, and memory span for periods at a time. Mostly, her mood just dips though. Whenever she hits a low point she typically stays locked up in her little corner of the compound. She shuts all the blinds and just lays in bed in the dark for days at a time, too tired and too sad to eat or move or really do much but let the weight of the world crush her. That’s not always possible due to Hoyt riding her ass for not working, so she’s gotten in the bad habit where if she knows it’s going to be a bad time, she goes off to this one particular stretch of beach where there’s a little cliff with a cave overlooking the ocean and she just sits there. And she will stay there for hours or days at a time, sitting on the edge of the cliff watching the sea and sleeping in a tiny burrow she’s dug out into the cave for herself.

// This concerning form of escapism comes mostly from the fact that Piper never developed healthy coping mechanisms for how to deal with overwhelming emotions. Her whole life she’s had to repress everything she’s ever felt in order to help others- specifically her family. Taking on the responsibility of them all from a young age means that her sense of self-worry has been reduced to simply how she can serve others. She doesn’t know how to take care of herself or acknowledge her own feelings and needs, bc in her mind, doing so takes away from valuable emotional and physical availability that others might need more.

// In short, she works herself until she burns out because that’s all she’s ever known, then shuts down as a result and isolates herself because she doesn’t want to burden others by taking up emotional or physical resources that others might need more than her- and because that would cause a crisis for her internally established role as “the provider.”