#‘it’s not that serious’ my mentally ill brain says otherwise

[dykesevika]

​if I see my big beautiful robot arm lesbian girlkissing dyke shipped with a scrawny ass sewer rat of a man one more time, I’m gonna lose it 😭

Men DNI

[aro-bird]

I do have to say, as someone on the camp of "you could probably ship someone else who isn't non-partnering but honestly I don't care as long as you don't harass people over this", I think it's lost on some people that the reason why so many non-partnering aroaces may become defensive over these characters even if "it's just fandom" is the fact that a lot of aroaces who do fit these stereotypes and who may fall into this camp genuinely had horrible experiences about their social circles and yes, especially this fandom site, harassing them and saying they don't exist or that they're mentally ill and should "get fixed" among other things.

As common it is to see aspecs here on Tumblr, the queer social media site, you need to understand that there's still a lot of contempt for aroaces outside and inside this place. Hell, I received an ask calling aros and aces delusional just last Christmas Day 2023 that came with a wave of increased arophobia around that time. As much as that time period was definitely discourse against aroallo men, aphobes did not cherry pick on who they're sending hate to.

Besides this, a lot of non-partnering aroaces often receive this kind of dismissal in real life too and as much as some people may think it's not a big deal, it definitely fucks up your brain when people say you and your experiences not only don't matter but you are doomed to live a lonely and miserable life if you don't find someone. Even my otherwise very supportive relatives expressed this concern and it's absolutely out of care but it's fucking damaging to constantly hear that I will die alone if I don't find a partner (romantic, platonic, or otherwise).

This is besides dismissals like this or even non-acceptance had literally barred me from mental health care when I was a teenager because my specialist said I had a "distressed sexuality" and had specialists focused on that aspect rather than all my other issues.

The shipping of a non-partnering (typically romance repulsed or uninterested) character feels like another form of dismissal for someone like me, like my sexuality is not good enough or serious enough to be respected. The shipping of these characters sometimes reinforce the narrative that non-partnering aroace people can't find happiness on their own and do need someone (romantic, platonic, or otherwise) to be happy or they will become happier if they do find this someone. People are having fun with their ships but there are still many people who don't want to spend the time actually extending grace and understanding towards me and my experiences. I'm just another discourse topic and someone who's inconvenient to some of them.

This doesn't even account for how these fan communities aren't just filled with aspec people and do extend to allos who may take some of the discourse and actively apply it in real life to other real life aspec people. People who go and interact with real human beings and may hurt them or harass them. It isn't even accounting for the fact that even online things affect real people too.

Of course, I do understand that a lot more complex aspec identities often don't get the spotlight so they may express themselves through shipping fandom characters but non-partnering people should deserve more than these people isn't really the point of this post.

The point here is that there's a reason why a lot of non-partnering (typically repulsed or uninterested) aroace people get defensive about these things even in fan communities and it's very likely that it's because aphobia and especially against the stereotypical aroace™ still very much exist outside of our little community and they can be informed by media and the fans that consume it and this shit could genuinely have negative consequences. This of course extends to those who do have complex aspec identities as society does not treat those who don't live up to what is expected as "normal" in terms of romantic relationships and sexual attraction kindly.

Distancing yourself from these aroaces who do have frustrations with how media and fandom treat their sexuality because they're being "prudes" or are just affected by "purity culture" is unhelpful to say the least and honestly veers eerily close to shit I hear aphobes say about us.

Absolutely do stop people and block them if they're instigating and participating in harassment over shipping of all things, even these aroaces, but trying to say that every person who do have issues with shipping aroace characters are the same way with this is extremely lacking nuance and absolutely dismissive of other members of the community and why they may have the opinion they hold.

[strywoven]

as promised , here is my four week ( + a day ) check-in with the dash ; a little newsletter for everyone , if you will. for those who are unaware , i typically write one of these quarterly round-up posts during my term just to yap about things that happened whilst i was away ( as much as to remind everyone i'm not dead or to throw out any updates as necessary ) . anyways ...

seeing as it's just the start of the term , nothing is really happening. not unless you want me to discuss the several term papers , presentations , and psuedo-diagnostics i have to complete -- but !! there are some things.

i'm very vocal about being a psych major , and this was the year i bought a DSM-5-TR. many people will go nutso-bonkers over ACOTAR or other books , but i ... i lost my mind opening a thousand-page manual of diagnostic material for mental illness ( not a joke , i actually bragged about it to several people ) . owning this book , for someone who intends to go into clinical , is the HOLY GRAIL ; i cannot express to you the immense joy i get every time i open it for class and we read another section.

being in psychopathology as a class ( very thrilling stuff , trust me ) , i actually said in the midst of class , "no , no , we don't discriminate , we just diagnose." straight face , no inflection -- my professor , also an incredibly serious woman , actually gawped at me and LAUGHED . biggest point of approval from such a character i'll ever get , lemme tell you , brother.

for those who remember that i took a morality course last term , i actually ran into my professor ... ALMOST LITERALLY . nearly bumped right into the poor man scurrying to class. we spiderman pointed at each other with the whole , "you!" , "you!" happening. it was wonderful ; i love that guy.

i made a friend ; and i don't say that often because i'm very reclusive and quiet. i have two classes with her and she's very nice , a good compliment to my introversion. we spoke for a long time and she goes , "mav , gimme your insta !" and i , "do i seem like the kinda' guy with an insta ?" and she , "... you're a guy ?" to which my brain made a dial-up tone and i , "i mean- what are any of us , really ?" and she laughed. another win for me. problem : I DO NOT KNOW HER NAME . it's been 4 weeks and several classes and one long conversation and i only recognize her as , 'the loud girl with starbucks'. i know , i know , this is bad -- but don't worry , i've got a plan ( i don't ) .

as for the state of the blog ? well ... i know i tend to become negative about it when i'm in-term so. frankly , i'm not going to force it / worry about it , otherwise i know i will get even more icky and filled with self-doubt ( if that makes sense ) . so ... no replies , as you know , but ... please feel free to reach out for plotting !! i love talking to people while i work !!

[yourheartinyourmouth]

husband told me that one of his friends told him to leave me……..because i have a hard time holding down abusive jobs that fucking blow and wildly exasperate my mental health and ADHD issues. and like. it just makes me laugh. you’re serious, bro? just dump her, bro. just break up an otherwise happy family, destroy an otherwise healthy marriage, because one of the people involved is severely mentally ill and neurodivergent and has trouble staying employed because of it???? (FYI: 75-80% of people with ADHD are unemployed or underemployed. 75% of people with ADHD have suicidal ideation or have attempted suicide)

THIS is what we mean when we say that people hate us for having ADHD. THIS is what we mean when we say that neurotypicals hate us just for existing. THIS is what we mean when we say that people hate us for who we are and the things we legitimately cannot help. So a spouse unable or struggling to work suddenly becomes “just get divorced then”.

if i had a PHYSICAL disability, would he have said that? if i could point to a part of my body that wasn’t my brain and said “i have trouble working because my body doesn’t work”, most people would be like “OH, well that’s different, you’re disabled.” if i was physically disabled and this friend said “oh, they can’t walk? divorce them for it”, my husband would have punched him in his ableist-ass face and spat on him.

but because all my dysfunction and disability is in my brain, since it’s all behavioral, and since it’s not severe enough to involve forced hospitalizations and cops, people just say “oh, they’re just a lazy piece of shit. dump her.”

[sayrvne]

j

im writing this now because otherwise i will forget. i have a terrible tendancy for needing serious help with my mental health, then getting doctor’s appointments or meetings with my manager at work set up to start it off, then the second it comes to actually Doing the meeting my mind just goes blank of everything that ails me. i need to record how i’m feeling while it’s actually happening so i can relay it to my doctors or boss or whatever bc otherwise i’m like actually i’m normal :)

i really, really need help. i have been spiralling for hours now. on and off, up and down, it gets better then it gets worse again. i need a lot of help in a lot of different places and it will take a long time but i can’t keep going on like this.

first of all i need to talk to the gp, get a doctors appointment and maybe review the meds i’m on. 50mg of sertraline has kept me stable for a while but also life didn’t really throw much shit at me through the middle of 2022, not until winter came about. now that all that has been dumped on me, sertraline is like inflatable armbands while everything else is bricks tied to my legs.

but i need more help than just meds. ideally i need some form of regular counselling or therapy. when i had regular counselling sessions with the psychiatric nurse when i was 18/19, that helped me a lot. i’m open to group therapy too, i know there are a lot of local groups that organise recreational stuff like sport or gardening and shit for mentally ill people. maybe i could find a music group?

similar to that, i need to meet some new people. i feel like i would benefit from more local friends, like a dnd group or something. i feel super isolated because the people who care about me the most live at least a city away, sometimes even a country away. it’s incredibly lonely. the difficulty is that i literally don’t know how to make friends! so this will probably be my biggest challenge of them all.

ideally i need some time off work because that on top of trying to keep my sanity together while also making adjustments and improvements to my life is just Too Fucking Much tbh. i need a real break and not a christmas break where you’re obligated to see 23834 family members and do loads of things, i mean like a break where i can just focus on getting my brain factory reset.

in terms of my physical health, i think i’m on the road to recovery, or at least doing a lot better than i was - in the last couple weeks i was diagnosed with pernicious anaemia which is a hereditary condition that results in a b12 deficiency. that ticks all the boxes for the dizziness, lightheadedness, lethargy and fatigue, the latter two i’ve been experiencing for literally years with no progress.

there was more i wanted to say i think but it’s left my head already. maybe next time i’ll be quick enough to note it all down. though maybe it was for the best

[angeldiaries777]

I think all these attempts I’ve had at healing forever have just not worked because I was so addicted to pain. Again my life hasn’t been very “difficult” from an outsiders perspective. However my brain ruins everything and ugh. Being online is also making my anxiety worse. My real life is pretty chill rn and fortunate however dealing with my toxic family, mental illness and other life issues is just not a fun thing. Yeah I’m very very sick and bored of being online. even if my socials are all pretty chill im just burnt out from being on the internet since I was like 4. I just in the nicest way to myself need to go touch some grass and chill for a while. However everyone knows this the fact that I leave my room like once every 5 months to go outside and while that sounds insane to normal people like yeah that’s my anxiety brain. When I say I don’t leave my room or house I’m dead serious. Like I literally didn’t get sunlight in 8 months once at a time and I was so so sick. Mmm. Yeah I just need a break from devices and distractions anyway. I use tumblr, tv and music like a crutch and it’s just harming me because whenever I’m not on my phone I get more depressed and sad. Like when I’m not on my phone or laptop I feel like the world is going to end. It’s just such an icky horrifying sad feeling like it feels like the end of the world. how many times have i said that i need a break an not taken one? many. i know i have to get the root cause and get treated for my mental illnesses to not revert back to old habits but omg its such a battle. not fun. i have infinite empathy for addicts. if im offline that's a good thing usually. or my phone was taken away at the age of 16. embarrassing. :( i just have been sooo desperate in real life lately. yeah im gonna try to get myself in check otherwise i will be like this i till die. goodnight merry christams??? i dont fuckin know :')

[smolweeblets]

Drunk confessions

A/n: can you guys tell idk how to name my stories? Anyways Yelena is so ooc here but shes drunk so I'll use that excuse.

"Y-yn? Can you uh, pick me up please?" Sniffles could be heard as you listened to your friend. You panicked, thoughts racing through your head about what happened to her.

"please hurry up... Im at the bar we go to sometimes." A bar? Oh god this isnt good. Hurried shuffling to get into your clothes ensued. You tried to not panic and think about this rationally. Although failing for the most part.

Why is she crying? Is she in danger-? Oh god I have to get there faster.

You mentally slapped yourself, gathering your thoughts. You did need to move faster but she wouldn't be in danger, if she was she wouldn't be calling you. She was always a logical person and no matter how close you two were she would still be calling 911 if it was really serious. You wracked your brain for possible answers, then it dawned on you.

She was probably really drunk, otherwise she wouldn't be crying on a call like this with you and asking you to pick her up. Although the fact that she is drunk is also weird, since she never usually drank that much alcohol, if any at all. And she wasn't particularly a lightweight. Something must have come up in her life for her to get drunk like this. Well that doesn't matter right now, what matters is you getting her as quickly as you can.

~~~

Small sniffles and hiccups could be heard as you approached the hunched figure sitting on the steps of the bar. She looked absolutely miserable.

"Hey, Yelena? Are you okay?" You gently put your hand on her shoulder, alerting her more of your presence.

She wipes her face with her arm before looking at you and slowly nodding.

"Okay that's good, how about we get to my car now alright?" You go in front of her and gesture for her to take your hand, which she does to help herself up.

She stumbles as she stands, having to lean on to you just to not fall flat on the floor. The sight was almost funny, her large looming figure being supported by your much smaller frame.

You two got to your car and you made sure she leaned back properly and buckled up, in the process, you get a glimpse of just how bad of a state she's in.

Her eyes were bloodshot, and her face was flushed red. You could almost feel the horrible hangover she would have to endure tomorrow. Bringing her to your house instead of hers would probably be better for the both of you. So she's sure to be taken care of, and so you dont stay up all night worried she isn't. There really was no way you'd let her be by herself in this state.

You start driving and theres a long silence between the two of you. It wasn't confortable, nor was it awkward. It was just that, nothing but silence and your thoughts.

Eventually Yelena notices that you werent taking her home, even in her drunk state she could tell the scenery was different from her usual route.

"Hey... where are you taking me- *hic* " Yelena slurred her words, sounding very disoriented.

"I'm taking you to my place, its safer and i wouldnt have to worry too much about you." Your calm voice normally would have been soothing but it looked like Yelena thought the opposite right now.

"N-no- I can take care of myself just take me home please.." Yelena sounded like she was about to cry. You felt bad but you knew what was best.

"Sorry, no can do. You say that but you dont look like you can even stand by yourself." As soon as you finished your sentence, It looks like a dam broke in Yelena and she broke into small sobs.

"I dont want to be in your house right now okay... or even with you for that matter" She cried. It broke your heart seeing Yelena look so sad and hearing that it could be because of you.

"Why? Is there something I did? If so, I'm sorry but I just can't leave you alone like this." You reasoned. You placed your hand on her shoulder as a very small way of giving comfort.

"Yes you can," She whined while sloppily removing your hand. "ill be fine by myself... like i always am." The last part was barely a whisper, if you weren't so tuned in with her you would have missed it.

You grip the steering wheel hard as you think about your next move.

"Yelena, it might be personal but please tell me what's wrong, if it's been something I did or what. I can't bear to see you in this state."

"It's nothing- just let me be." Some of the sobbing had subsided, but she was still sniffling a lot. You handed her a tissue to wipe some snot off her face, which she thankfully accepted.

"Yelena, I can't just leave a friend alone like this. Just tell me what's wrong so I can help." You glanced at her worriedly.

"God! Just stop asking, it's not like you'd be able to help." Hostility was now laced in her voice, it sounded strained and painful.

"I just want to help a friend- but if you dont want to talk about it then fine."

"Dont fucking call me YOUR FRIEND!" Tears were running down Yelena's face as she screamed.

"I FUCKING HATE BEING YOUR FRIEND SO STOP CALLING ME THAT!" You could only look in hurt as you watched her say all this. You thought you two were close but hearing her scream about this felt like a stab through the heart. She may be drunk but they do say drunk words are sober thoughts and it pained you to know this was what shes been thinking of you.

"I'm sorry then... but I am still taking you home. I care about you Yelena, and you're drunk." You worriedly asserted.

"God this is why i fucking hate you- youre too... nice." Yelena spat out. She hesitated saying the last word, and faltered throughout saying it.

"Wait- come again?"

"It's nothing. Ignore me, I'm drunk." Yelena said in almost a whisper. The tears had subsided, leaving only the traces of crying.

"No. Yelena, what did you say earlier."

"Youre too fucking nice and perfect. That's why I fell in love with you and why I hate you because you'd never reciprocate my feelings. There, happy now?"

"Oh..."

"Yeah, well that you know, you can go ahead and drop me off wherever. I can manage." It seems almost as if all the alcohol got knocked out of her. From how she was acting you wouldn't be able to tell she was bawling just a few minutes ago.

You slowed down, stopping by the side of the road. Yelena wasn't shocked at all that you actually were dropping her off. She deserved it.

She was getting ready to get off, unclasping her seatbelt and reaching to unlock the door.

"Yelena wait." You grabbed her bicep, wanting her attention back to you.

Yelena looked back to you, confused. Your seatbelt was also unclasped, though she didn't notice and just wanted to know what else you wanted to say before she left.

You suddenly leaned towards Yelena and you reached out to gently hold her cheek to hopefully not make her move too suddenly and to angle her face properly. To say she was shocked is an understatement. She fully thought she'd never have a chance with you, not in a million years.

You pull back and lean back into your seat, sighing in relief.

"God, you have no clue how long I've wanted to do that." You chuckle a little.

Yelena could do nothing but gape at you with large gray eyes looking at you as if what happened was just an illusion from the alcohol. Her hand ghosted over where you kissed her, still damp from her crying earlier.

"So? Do you still want to go back to your home?" You joke, hoping to clear away the uncertainty Yelena still seemed to have.

She shook her head, too flustered to even respond properly. She was already red earlier but now, she looks like a literal tomato. A cute one, but a tomato nonetheless.

You reached over to buckle Yelena's seatbelt again and you felt her flinch under your touch. She stared at you again and you just smiled back.

"Gotta take precautions." You giggled while reaching to buckle your own seatbelt.

The ride back home was quiet, but the comfortable kind. You caught Yelena staring at you a lot, but you didn't mind, she deserves it after pining for you that hard.

You led her staggering form into your home and into your bedroom, you instructed her to sit while you picked out some clothes that could maybe fit her. It was quite a task, considering just how much bigger she was than you.

Eventually, you did find something that she could wear and handed them over. You told her you'd be sleeping on the couch tonight, since you didn't want her to be uncomfy. You were about to leave to let her get changed when she called out for you.

"I'm drunk... help me dress please?" You almost would've thought she was serious with how sincere she looked. If only she wasn't wearing her stupidly coy smirk. She really is herself, even when drunk.

"Wow, where'd my flustered little 'lena from earlier go?" You laughed lightheartedly.

"Right here, please do help me." She pleaded. Her mouth was downturned, pretending to be sad.

"Hmm... okay but no funny business, you're drunk." You chided.

"Thank you babe." Yelena jokes, having an adorable close eyed smile.

"Stop that. Dont act like you weren't just crying over me a few minutes ago." You playfully scolded.

"Whatever you say babe." She teased.

You decided to stop the banter and actually help her out of her clothes. It was a surprisingly time consuming task because she constantly kept trying to make you laugh through various actions. You appreciate the effort, but not the action. You had to basically wrangle the clothes off of her because she wouldnt stop moving and causing a fuss.

After a few minutes of wrestling to finally get her dressed you finally succeeded. You also tired yourself out, so you made your way to the light and flicked it off. Then right back on again when you heard Yelena request something.

"Hey... you can sleep here you know-" Yelena suggested.

"No thanks, i can manage being on the couch." You point you thumb behind you, gesturing to the living room.

"But since im like drunk it gives you a good chance to take care of me." She reasoned out. Admittedly a pretty smart one considering she is, in fact, drunk.

"I think you're using that excuse too much, just go to sleep." You scoffed lightheartedly

"Pleaseeee-" She whined, using her most convincing puppy eyes. God how she had so much power over you was crazy.

"If you puke on me or my bed tomorrow i will kick you out." You sighed. You relented to her wishes way too quickly for you liking.

Yelena excitedly gasped, and smiled widely. "No! Of course i wont,, now come here please." She patted the area beside her, beckoning you to get in. You flicked the light back off and made your way ro the mattress.

Yelena snuggled up beside you and practically melted in your arms. Oh how she has craved for this for so, so long. She slept soundly that night, smiling in her sleep.

[girlcalledwhatsername]

God give me the strength to not pick fights with people complaining about how every person who says anything about what helps them or others with their mental illnesses not following it up with a disclaimer of "you still need meds and therapy tho!!". There is no Single way to heal. Those therapies are often traumatising especially if you're suicidal and mention it to your therapist and they put you in a ward for it or because of the sheer amount of trauma a lot of people have with their therapists abusing the power they hold over their clients. And you'd think the blind faith in psych meds that were already founded on bogus science that was never properly proven to be true (the brain chemistry model) would at least dwindle now with the studies showing there's no correlation between serotonin and depression after all. Further readings and an organisation working on community based alternatives.

Another one and you can look at associated pages to find more, anti-psychiatry is the roots of mental health advocacy by mentally ill people who are marginalised and abused and oppressed by the system of psychiatry, it's nothing new and anti-science. Psychiatry is not an institution that is based on honest science.

I cannot believe the callousness of going to people or to creators or blogs or whatever that are talking about self care, about community care, about what helps them survive their afflictions, and having the audacity to say "you still need your meds tho, tell everyone mentally ill people need meds otherwise this is irresponsible and anti-science" no the fuck it's not. Therapy can help many people but it can and does likewise harm a lot of people too. People have the right to choose their treatment and choose how they want to heal from their traumas, you don't get to dictate that Western medicine has to be advocated by EVERYONE for them to be serious about their mental health. Psychiatric survivors are already traumatised by Psychiatry and speaking out about it and advocating for themselves and being thrown under the bus by people who don't care enough to organise and create a community that we can rely on.

Blind faith support for Psychiatry is Not Woke, it is Not Pro-science. And expecting people to advocate for it every time they so much as say "this comfort item helps with my disorder and distress!" is genuinely disgusting behaviour.

[scripttorture]

Hello! I have a few questions related to your most recent post and the definition of torture. You said:

"A trained person who was never tortured will always out perform someone whose training involved torture."

According to everything else I have seen on your blog, this makes sense - the mental and physical trauma from being tortured have lasting effects which make certain tasks more difficult.

However, this seems to juxtapose certain tropes I've seen in US military training advertisements. For example, "Hell Week" in the Navy SEAL training seems like it would be torture if it was forced upon someone (like if the soldiers didn't sign up for it and didn't have the option to quit.). *Hell Week is when soldiers are training continuously for 5 days in freezing, wet conditions, with little more than 4 hours of sleep for the entire week, under insane amounts of physical and mental stress.

- If someone chose to be tested both mentally and physically, I feel like it wouldn't be torture. However, if the same exact conditions were forced upon someone else (testing their mental and physical limits without their consent or understanding), does your quote above mean that the person who did not have a choice would not reap the benefits of the training/testing? Or would the Navy SEALs be better soldiers if they didn't have to go through 'torturous conditions' during Hell Week, regardless of their choice to do so?

(I used Hell Week as an example, but I meant this question generally. I'm trying to figure out how to best train an elite soldier and avoid any harmful torture apologia tropes, while also making sure that they are able to handle insanely challenging situations)

- My other question has more to do with the definition of torture that you quoted from the UN in one of your master posts. If someone is being seriously injured (pulled fingernails, whipping, starvation etc), but not for the purposes of interrogation, punishment, or intimidation, is that still torture, or is that just abuse? And, regardless of what we call it, would the effects be the same as if it were torture for any of the three motives above?

Sorry if this is long and hard to understand, I can clarify if needed!

It’s not the longest I’ve gotten and it’s perfectly clear, duck*. :) Honestly this is a difficult topic with a lot of nuance, it’s better to take a longer and more thoughtful approach.

 From the stand point of the legal definition and what we study/understand as torture any consensual activity, however extreme, is not torture.

 But here’s where it gets interesting: consent and our attitude to an activity actually changes our response to pain. It may even change how much pain we feel.

 I’m going to take a slightly different example to yours. There are a lot of cultures globally that have practiced scarification, ritual cutting to deliberately form scars. And this can be done for a lot of reasons: membership of a family or clan, coming of age, traditional medicine, religion, you get the idea.

 A lot of people in these cultures describe their scars as incredibly important and the process of getting them as a moving, deep and positive process.

 This does not mean they wouldn’t be traumatised if they were attacked by someone with a knife.

 Being able to approach something painful and see it as positive really changes our perspective. It makes trauma and mental illness a lot less likely. And being able to back out, even if it’s just for a little while to take a breather, seems to make us able to withstand more pain then we would have otherwise.

 The simplest and most famous experiment that dealt with this relationship between our mindset and pain asked people to keep their hands in ice cold water. They timed how long people could do it when they were told to stay silent and how long they could do it when they were allowed to swear. If they swore they could hold their hands under for longer. An average of forty seconds longer.

 Looking back over O’Mara (Why Torture Doesn’t Work, a very good intro to how pain works and what it does to the brain) the way he describes it as by thinking of the experience of pain as a collection of three things. There’s the physical sensation itself, the nerves firing. But there’s also an affective component, how we feel emotionally about the experience and a cognitive component, how we think about it.

 Did you ever play that game as a kid where you stuff as many chilis as possible in your mouth to see who would spit them out first? I… might have done. And from what I remember it hurts an awful lot. But those memories to me are mostly about messing about with my friends, I remember trying to be stubborn about it and I remember us laughing at each other.

 This is a completely different experience to someone being held down and having chili stuff up their nose. But the difference isn’t necessarily in the physical damage done or the physical sensation of pain. It’s in the other components, the emotional response and the rationalisation.

 I also had a filling drilled in my tooth without painkillers as a kid. I don’t know how common this is in the West? It happened in Saudi. Honestly my biggest memory of it is the language barrier between myself and the dentist.

 These are anecdotes obviously but I’m trying to show that you probably also have experiences in your own life that back up the experiments too. The way we think about a painful experience really does make a huge amount of difference. And that means consent matters enormously.

 These soldiers are going into this experience knowing what to expect, how long it will last and that they can stop at any time. That makes a huge amount of difference. Those same factors have drastically increased the time volunteers will spend in solitary confinement for research. I’m pretty sure if I dug even a little I’d find pain studies with similar findings.

 Here’s the flip side: the physical factors are still in play.

 Sleep is an important physiological process that’s essential to normal functioning. Studies on consensual sleep deprivation have shown massive negative impacts on memory along with a host of other things that you can read about here.

 Let’s take a non torture example. A student who stays up all night cramming for an exam is not going to develop the symptoms of trauma that a torture survivors who was sleep deprived would. But the effect sleep deprivation has on memory is due to sleep playing an essential role in preserving memory (and learning more generally.) So they’re both likely to have difficulty remembering things in days just before and just after sleep deprivation. They’re also both more likely to have false memories and catch a bad cold.

 As a result of this memory impairment I question the educational value of anything involving sleep deprivation: you can’t learn while messing up the processes that let your brain remember things.

 There have been cases in the UK of people dying during training for the armed forces. Because while consent makes a huge difference, mindset makes a huge difference- our bodies still have limits. We can choose to push ourselves past those limits and, whatever our motivation or feelings, it can do real harm.

 Personally? I’m unsure of the benefit of these kinds of exercises. As in I’m unsure there is a benefit. Learning is going to be shot, chances of injury are going to be a lot higher- I don’t see anything that could be improved by these sorts of exercises.

 Anecdotally people do report feeling like a closer unit after going through these sorts of routines. That might be the benefit: moral and unit cohesion, possibly self-esteem too.

 If you’re making up something for your story I think it’d be helpful for me to mention a little statistical effect that gets used to justify punishment pretty regularly. Get some dice out if you’ve got them and roll one. Let’s say the number represents performance in some kind of test (because effort and learning matter but our performance also varies because of things we can’t control.) A roll of 1 gets punished, a roll of 6 gets praised.

 Now after you roll that first 1 statistically speaking the chances are your next roll will be better. And if you roll a 6 then statistically speaking the chances are your next roll will be worse. People observe this effect in real life and they often conclude that there’s no point in praising someone but that punishment leads to improvement. Really it’s just a statistical effect, after a particularly, noticeably bad day the chances are things will be better next and vice versa.

 This effect can make it difficult for people to recognise overall, long term progress. Which is the kind of progress you should be paying attention to when designing a training program.

 If you want good performance from people, whatever the metric, the most efficient thing to do is ensure that those people are; well fed, have access to clean water, get plenty of sleep, have breaks and have access to medical treatment when they need it.

 I’d say the main things to keep in mind when designing this fictional training regime are:

Being honest about the effects you describe, ie if they’re spending long periods without shelter are they at risk from exposure? If they’re standing in cold water are they going to get hypothermia?

Remember that even if something is damaging or causes lasting trauma it would not necessarily prevent someone from doing their job. Torture survivors have serious, lasting symptoms but many of them still work.

 I think I’m going to leave that there because I’m not an expert in militaries or training people. And keep in mind that I am a pacifist, read this with my biases in mind.

 Getting to the second question, there is a little more to the UN definition then that. The primary factor is still who the abuser is. For it to be torture (legally speaking) the abuser has to be (or be ordered by) an on-duty government employee, part of a group that controls territory (ie an occupying force). Some countries also count international organised criminal gangs in this definition.

 It’s also important to note that torture can be targetted at someone other then the victim. So if the police arrest the brother of a political opponent and beat him in order to intimidate the politician, that is still torture.

 Basically there are a lot of factors in the legal definition of torture and it’s that way by design. The hope is that you end up with a framework that captures as much government abuse as possible.

 But it also means that there’s a pretty high barrier when it comes to proving torture. Which means that things which are legally torture can be prosecuted as assault, bodily harm or equivalents to these, because it’s easier to get a conviction for those charges.

 Technically you are correct: if abuse done by a government official doesn’t have one of the four motivations in the legal definition (attempts to obtain information, forcing a confession, intimidation or punishment) then it doesn’t meet the definition.

 However in practice I’ve not heard of a case failing because of the motive.

 I’m not a lawyer and I’m not an expert in international law. I won’t say it’s never happened. But it’s much more common for cases to fail for other reasons. Off the top of my head I’d say the most common reason is difficulty proving the abuse took place.

 The most common types of torture today are ‘clean’, a term we use to indicate that they don’t leave obvious marks. If someone turns up with fingernails torn out or the skin of their back lacerated by a whip that is clear physical evidence of abuse. Nothing else causes similar injuries. But if someone turns up at a doctor’s with swollen feet or reddened skin, if they’ve lost a lot of weight or they’re so tired they’re struggling to stand… Well all of those things can be caused by common tortures. But they can also be caused by common illnesses.

 A lot of the deaths from torture today are similarly hard to prove. Beatings and stress positions ultimately cause death by kidney failure. Which can mean that prosecutors are asked to prove a victim didn’t have an underlying health condition. Or take drugs.

 Honestly my instinct is that the motive is the easiest thing to prove. It’s often harder to bring charges against people in positions of authority, regardless of the country we’re talking about. Bringing those charges, proving abuse took place and proving it was done by the person in question, those are usually the tricky parts.

 The difference between torture and abuse is scale. Torture is industrial scale abuse.

 The law doesn’t define that scale but that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about abuse from organised authority. Abusers might have dozens of victims. Torturers have thousands, tens of thousands.

 If you want to explore a different motivation in your story, something outside the legal framework, consider the scale at which this abuse is taking place. Consider how organised it is. If it’s organised and large scale, with multiple abusers, with no prior relationship between the abuser and victims then torture will probably be a better model then abuse. If it’s smaller scale with a more personal relationship and if it isn’t supported by a legal framework/organisation then abuse might be a better model.

 For victims and survivors the difference isn’t so much about the symptoms they personally experience as the… side effect of that scale. Abuse victims are often very isolated and may not know anyone who has had a similar experience. Torture implies a community of survivors and possibly generational trauma. There are also effects to do with access to support, access to medical care and how likely it is that someone will be believed.

 Torture survivors are often systematically disenfranchised in a way that abuse victims are not. Torture survivors are often forced to leave their home country. Anecdotally, based on what I’ve seen globally over the last few years, I think that struggling to get citizenship is increasingly an issue for torture survivors. And without citizenship there’s difficulty finding legal work, getting accommodation, accessing medical care, accessing the legal system etc.

 I do not know whether torture survivors are more or less likely to be believed by their community compared to survivors of abuse. I do not think any one has attempted a comparative study. I do know that the prevalence of clean torture means that many torture survivors are not believed and this puts up a further barrier, making it harder to access medical treatment and bring charges.

 Rejali’s book was published in 2009, so things may have changed a tad. At the time he was writing the average wait for a torture survivor to see a specialist doctor was about 10 years.

 Abuse is to torture what murder is to genocide. And there are difference on a wider social scale as a result.

 I mention all that because I feel it’s relevant but the impression I get is you’re mostly interested in the long term symptoms? In which case, yes the legal definition makes very little difference. The physical injuries caused by particular kinds of abuse don’t change depending on whether it’s a private individual or a police officer holding the Taser.

 The lasting psychological symptoms are not particular to torture; they’re what the human brain does when traumatised. The same symptoms can manifest in people who witness traumatic events but weren’t actually hurt themselves. They can manifest in people who were injured in accidents and they manifest in people who were neglected or abused. Hell, I have a couple of them, though no where near the severity a torture survivors would experience. A sufficient amount of stress is enough for these symptoms to start developing in anybody.

 You can find the general list of symptoms here. There’s also a post specifically about memory problems over here.

 The pattern I describe; that these symptoms are a list of possibilities not ‘every torture victim will get all of these’ holds true for trauma survivors generally. Anecdotally there is some variability with chronic pain being reported more often with some kinds of abuse. That might be because it can have physical causes, psychological causes or a mix of the two.

 Whether it’s torture or abuse there isn’t any way to predict a survivor’s symptoms in advance. Much of the advice I have about writing torture survivors and their symptoms holds true for trauma survivors generally. Which is why I’ll still take a crack at some questions that aren’t about torture.

 Pick the symptoms that you feel fit the character and serve the story. We can’t predict symptoms and that means that there’s no reason why you shouldn’t pick the things that appeal to you.

 And I think I’m going to leave it there. I hope that helps :)

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Disclaimer

*This is a weird English endearment. I had someone ask if this was me trying not to swear. 

[hologramcowboy]

@Mental Illness Anon, I was merely stating a fact, I suffer from depression so why would you ever say I look down on people with Mental Illness? Newflash: From personality disorders to depression to more serious issues, all people suffer from something in the course of their lives, either in phases or in more constant ways.

There is no shame in Mental Illness and we should normalize talking about it. It's people like you that create needless drama and issues instead of embracing reality.

I don't vie for anyone's respect, don't respect me, respect deep values that make life better for everyone.

Such as embracing, accepting that imbalances in the brain happen to everyone whether it's phases or something more serious and there is no shame in that and we get to heal while supporting each other and that should be the norm not an exception or something that scandalizes people. I have zero problems mentioning mental illness and I don't see it as something to be judged for, people are doing the best they can from whatever it is they are living so you might want to look at your beliefs about Mental Illness since you clearly find it offensive and a trigger and that's not very healthy, not only to you but to the people around you. I know you were probably just trolling and I probably shouldn't have replied to you but you touched on a very heavy topic and that merited a response. So thank you for bringing your perspective to my attention, it allowed me to talk about something important to me even if you meant to hurt me because you assumed otherwise.

[fairycosmos]

lmao im actually so desperate to die im considering swallowing two peach pits just to see if i will choke to death because nothing else ive tried has worked so far . you know what my life doesnt fucking matter ill do it. with my luck it wont work i feel im being punished and thats why i cant die. ill do it. if i dont get back to you something happened but i doubt it. im tired like you said i deserve peace. we do. bye maybe i hope this works this is pathetic but im desperate to die

hey, i'm really sorry to hear you're feeling this way. it seems like you're totally overwhelmed right now and i completely understand how debilitating that can be. i know there's nothing i can do or say that will really change how awful it feels, and you're probably not in the headspace to read all this. but if you ever want to come back to it, it'll be here. maybe you could try some of these grounding exercises, here / here and here beforehand to get you in a place where you can focus a little. it's alright, there's no rush or pressure. i just wanted to say first of all that this is not pathetic in the slightest. sometimes the world gets on top of you and you go througn so much trauma and hurt that it really does feel like giving up is the only option. people can only take so much, and i get it. that's the trick of the suicidal brain though, i think. it uses life's suffering and your own past experiences to convince you that it is always going to be this way. to romanticize death and make it into something it isn't in your head. it is actually very hard to die, as i'm sure you know. and it's not the peaceful option or escape you're looking for, either. and the most paramount thing i want to say is that your life 100% does matter. this was never up for debate. you were born with an inherent worth and it hasn't went away just because you can no longer see it. you honestly can't fathom how you've impacted peoples lives, directly and indirectly, and even just the world itself. you don't have to be anybody but who you are, i promise, the whole point is just having the human experience you're having. you're fulfilling your purpose by existing, no matter how hard it is at times. i think it's a good sign that you reached out to me, i honestly think it shows that you have a lot of self awareness regarding what's going on and that you're truly capable of asking for the help that you need. you're not in a place right now where you can trust your thoughts and feelings, so it's good to seek an objective perspective from somebody else. this state of mind is so transient, it's so intense that it's not built to last. i'm not trying to downplay how unbelievably hard to live with, of course, but it can be freeing to acknowledge that this is not all there is, no matter how difficult it is to endure currently. you deserve to be here and to exist in a way that heals you, no matter what your mind is telling you. there can be a variety of underlying causes for suicidal feelings, and obviously they're very serious issues that need real medical attention in order to begin to overcome. but with that and with time, it is totally possible to learn to live a full live along side all you've been through. even though right now i'm sure that's the lastthhing on earth you want to do.

are you currently working with a mental health professional of any sort? your doctor, a therapist, a support group, even a hotline? if not, i would really urge you to get in touch with them as soon as possible. and if you already are, let them know where your thoughts are at lately so they can focus on upping your level of care. if you're worried about money, there are cost-effective choics available, like finding a therapist who offers a sliding scale price, or looking into mental health resources within your community. i know your brain is probably screaming at you to do the opposite, but i promise any baby step in the right direction is going to pay off. the prospect of reaching out and being honest is a daunting one, and i'm only bringing it up as something to consider at the moment (or when you feel able to) so please don't write it off all together. you don't have to do anything right now, just know you have options. you honestly do. and talking to someone really is not as bad as your brain is probably building it up to be. just like with physical illness, mental illness can be confronted and treated. it's all about learning how to manage your unique mind, and even if it takes a lifetime, it is so possible to lessen the frequency of episodes like this. or to become more prepared for them so they feel less erratic when they do occur. discussing about what you've been through, pinpointing root causes of your suicidal thoughts, learnng how to implement healthy coping mechanisms into your daily routine, building a support system, finding the medication for you if needed - all of this is going to make a tangible difference. it is not going to fix everything, obviously, but it is going to lighten the weight and broaden your perspective on yourself and on living. you deserve to be supported without judgement and with genuine care, you deserve to be listened to. there are a lot of people, professionals or otherwise, even just strangers like me, who are willing to filling that role for you.

idk how it is for you and i won't pretend to, but sometimes suicidal people don't want to lose their lives, they just want to stop living the way they are. with so much chaos and unresolved pain and exhaustion. you don't have to hurt yourself in order to get there. i know when you're in this mindset, any even slightly positive piece of advice just feels impossible to believe. but even if you can't seriously take it on board at the moment, i hope when you're in a more grounded place, you can at least consider as an alternative to absolute hopelessness. you may as well, because you are alive and that is not always going to feel like a curse. it is so hard to believe it, i get that, but it is a fundamental truth. you are in an extremely difficult moment but that is not your whole existence. the future is ever changing, and you've already made it through the past, so the only thing that really matters is this moment. focus on what you need, not what you want, but what you need to do right now to truly self - prioritize. even if that feels like the last thing on earth you want do. if self destruction and self harm was gonna make you feel better, it would've by now. welcome the idea of trying something new, maybe just the notion of attempting to guide yourself through this with a bit of self-compassion. please, if you feel like you are an immediate danger to yourself, please exercise any sense of self preservation/ survival instinct and call the authorities, a hotline or a friend/family member right away. no matter what bullshit your brain is telling you, no matter how heavy your heart is right now . everything is always always always changing and things are going to change beyond recognition, it's the one thing you can count on. you deserve to stick around to see it all, and once you've made the decision to do so, you won't feel so stuck and conflicted anymore. i'm going to leave some links that i think might help a little in this moment, but like i said, please call someone if you feel you can't be alone right now. i'm rooting for u a lot and i really hope you are able do the right thing for yourself. if it's all too hard, focus on getting through the next hour. if that's too much, the next minute. and if that's too much, the next second. break it down into what you can handle and let yourself live. and then just go from there. sending you all my love.

list of hotlines

coping with depression

coping with suicidal thoughts

so you feel like shit?

template for creating a safety plan

[dramaticviolincrescendo]

Okay, what are your thoughts on Ian's relationships? With his family, his boyfriends, and Mandy (since I think that's the only friend he's had)

Oh, no. Ohhhhhhhh, no. Now you’ve done it. You’ve asked about my dear, darling favorite character on the show. My love for one Ian Gallagher runs deep, which means this answer is going to run super long. The good, the bad, and everything in between—Ian Gallagher lives rent free in my brain and always will. I derive so much satisfaction from seeing Ian interact with other people, in whatever capacity that might be. I admire and aspire to the compassion he has shown for others over the years, even and perhaps most especially those who arguably haven’t earned it. He tries so hard to be good to people, and seeing their love for him manifest when he’s reached such lows where he can’t even fathom why the love of his life would want to be with him forever? That’s powerful.

So, yeah. I said I could write essays on these characters, and that’s exactly what you’re about to get: five hours and 6k words’ worth of my thoughts. (I am so sorry. There will be text walls.)

Let’s dive into Ian’s many and multifaceted relationships—his family, his friends, and his romantic pursuits.

Ian and Family

Ian told us where he stood on this in the very first season, and it set the standard for his character for eleven years to come. Faced with a prospect that others in his position could only dream of—not being Frank’s son and having a wealthy father with a functional, prosperous lifestyle mere miles away—Ian refused to buy into it. He refused to do what might have been objectively better for his future by seeking a relationship with Clayton. In that household, he would have had access to a better public school, more financial resources, a tutor to help him where he was struggling, and less urgency for him to work so that he could enjoy being a kid. When he got sick, he would have had access to better healthcare, too. Perhaps he would have had a better shot at West Point from that background than he did at home. But that’s just it: home was with his family, and he was very clear that they didn’t live in that nice house. All he wanted—all he wanted—was to be with his brothers and sisters. He has never referred to them as only half-siblings or half-cousins; he has never even used the words, “you’re not my dad,” on Frank. That’s his family, the people he loves most in the world, and he’s always been at his best when he’s with them and at his worst when he’s not. Let’s look at each of them:

1.      Frank: It is so striking to me that Ian doesn’t appear to hold the outright contempt for Frank that Fiona, Lip, and Debbie have exhibited at different points over the years. Aside from the handful of instances where they’ve gotten into physical altercations (which Frank always initiated) and kicking him out of the house on occasion, Ian is simply indifferent to him. But there are these moments, these brief glimmers of mutual attachment and loyalty, if those are the right words. In the scene where Ian famously doesn’t count to three before using the pepper spray on him, Frank starts saying how his New Gallaghers weren’t his real kids—that Ian is his real son, and Frank is his real father. It’s a passing thought uttered while trying to manipulate his way into the house that neither of them think much of, nor does the audience…until you remember that biologically, Frank isn’t his father, and he certainly hasn’t behaved like one either. Ian has more right than anyone to comment on that, but he doesn’t because Frank is his father. He’s the father that Ian idly hoped wouldn’t come to his wedding yet sat joking about with Debbie rather than getting pissed off that he was making out with some lady in front of everyone. He’s the father who sat at the table with them eating breakfast in 11x03 and claimed Mickey was the man in their relationship without Ian saying a word to him about it, and who Ian saw no issue with taking Franny to school when no one else could. In s4, as far removed from his family as he’d been for a while, Ian still went straight to the hospital when he heard that Frank was at death’s door. We focus so much on his attitude towards Monica because of how obvious it was that we frequently miss these tiny moments and their implications. It would take an awful lot of patience, compassion, and love not to write Frank off completely after all he’s done. Not necessarily our standard definition of love between a son and his father, perhaps, but a loving soul.

2.      Monica: I have actually written a pretty lengthy post about his relationship with her because while their shared mental illness definitely plays a role in his feelings toward her, that grew complicated far earlier than his diagnosis. The first time we meet her, we see that he has a visceral reaction to news of her presence. He runs. When Ian can’t process strong emotions, that’s what he’s done in the past. I happened upon an interview Cameron did just after the end of s1 where he mentioned something I had already been thinking: Ian’s age when Monica left is extremely important. He was a kid in s1, but one who could roll with the punches, sometimes literally. She left them two years before that. Ian would have been in middle school, roughly as old as Debbie was when she still called Frank “daddy” and forgave him for everything he did. It’s an awkward age that once again set Ian in something of a danger zone—too old to accept an excuse or no explanation at all, but not old enough to process the situation in a healthy way. And then she’s back all of a sudden with no warning. Ian doesn’t cry like Debbie, and he doesn’t typically get explosively angry like Fiona. He can’t deal, so he runs. He hangs back. He only speaks when he has to and compartmentalizes: Monica wants to take Liam, and they need to stop her. It doesn’t have to be about her leaving. They have a goal—he can focus on that. And then she’s back a year later, saying she’s here to stay while Fiona seems to take her at her word and Lip isn’t there to ground everyone. Ian tries so hard to behave like Lip would with his biting sarcasm and attempts to stay emotionally distant in a way that seemed pretty exaggerated for Ian, but he’s also dealing with a fresh wave of guilt over Mickey going to juvie—and Monica gets it. She’s the only person to acknowledge that he’s in pain and actively try to make it better. She’s the only one who really knows at the time, but that hardly matters. This poor kid, whose mother left him when he still needed her, has her standing in front of him and saying she’s sorry and listening when he speaks and taking him dancing—just the two of them. Embarrassing as it was and harmful as it could have been, she tried to facilitate his dreams when no one else wanted him to go into the military. She was there for him when he went AWOL. She came for him when he was arrested and even wanted to make a place for him in her new life, unrealistic as it was. This goes so much deeper than them both being bipolar. Ian’s comment about her parachuting into their lives in s7 wasn’t about Mickey or her role in them breaking up. He trusted her. He wanted her. He needed her. And she’d convinced him that she would be there—until she left. Over and over again. She was there for him and unintentionally took advantage of how desperately he still needed his mother. She made him keep loving her, and that’s both a blessing that has him crying into a voluminous man’s arms when she passes and a curse that wrecked him more than once.

3.      Fiona: The trust these two have for each other cannot be understated. Fiona has discussed things with Ian that she never brought up around any of the other kids throughout the entire series. In the pilot episode, she tells him about feeling needed and takes his opinion on the matter to heart. At the end of the season, he’s the one she talks to about the car because she can trust him to give her an answer even without speaking. In s2, she tells Lip that the two of them are her rocks, and we see that time and time again. That’s part of what makes their falling out over the church hit that much harder: it’s Ian and Fiona. The only time they’d been on the outs in any serious manner up to that point was when Ian was adjusting to his new reality and they were trying to find a balance between sister and caretaker. Otherwise, that bond of trust had never been severed—not until Ian literally sold himself only for it to amount to nothing in the end because she had no idea the lengths to which he’d gone to get that building. That damage gets mended, thankfully, but what a powerful period of time when those two were the only ones who’d never really been at each other’s throats. There is a downside to that trust, though. As I mentioned before, Ian was so responsible and put together when he was younger that Fiona didn’t think twice about his situation with Ned or that he ran away. Not even seventeen yet, and she was telling Debbie that she didn’t like his decision to leave but trusted him. That is one of the things I love about this show—even something like trust that we always prop up as an important factor in our relationships can betray us in the most unexpected ways.

4.      Lip: I won’t go into it here, but the relationship they share is something that means a lot to me on a personal level. It’s part of how I knew that Ian would become my favorite character pretty early on. The way he simultaneously admires and envies Lip, loves and is annoyed by him, relies on him and is desperate to pave his own path in the world—what a beautiful and accurate depiction of what it means to be a younger sibling. Lip is the first person to discover that he’s gay and openly accept him for it. (I think what he tried with Karen came from a well-meaning place even if it was horribly, horribly misguided.) Lip is the one who tries to get him into West Point, hate it as he does. He helps Ian when Terry is after him, takes care of him in the aftermath of the wedding when he realizes just how deeply Ian feels for Mickey, searches the whole damn city for him when he finds out that Ian is in trouble, gets him a job, leans on him in his own time of need… He’s not perfect. He slips up, just like Ian does. Some things break my heart, like Lip insisting that he’s earned his own space when his little brother is asking him for safe harbor or Ian thanking him for being his brother outside the prison. But they love each other so much, and I just… I can’t possibly put into words how much I love their dynamic.

5.      Debbie, Carl, and Liam: I’m grouping these three together because they’re further separated from Ian in age, so we see a lot of the same trends with them as a whole. Ian loves taking care of people. We know this. We also know that Fiona and Lip don’t typically want him taking care of them—they’re the ones who take care of him when he needs it, specifically Lip. With the younger three, however, Ian can be the Big Brother. He can shake his head in utter bafflement at Debbie’s obsession with holding her breath for two minutes, walk Carl through what he needs to go camping, and promise his baby brother postcards when he leaves. The difference here is that his relationship with them is so much less fraught with conflict. We don’t see him fight with Debbie, Carl, or Liam the way he has with Fiona or Lip. While Ian tends to be the voice of reason during conflicts overall, I think it’s also because he relies on his older siblings in a way that he doesn’t with his younger siblings, and the latter don’t tend to rely on him as much as Fiona or Lip as well. There’s a lack of tension in most of their interactions growing up because that pressure isn’t there. Perhaps this is where Ian’s age and standing in the family is a bit more beneficial: young enough to have people he can rely on while too young for anyone to really rely on him for more than his share of the squirrel fund.

Ian and Friends

I’ve seen it mentioned that Ian (and Mickey) not having more friends is bad or lazy writing. I tend to believe that that fails to take something into account that, admittedly, most of us don’t really have to think about: having friends is a luxury. It requires time and effort to cultivate friendships, especially lasting ones. As a kid, Ian spent a lot of his free time working or helping to manage one family crisis after another. Going AWOL, losing his health, struggling to acclimate to his illness, trying to find a new career path, spiraling into the Gay Jesus movement, going to prison, adjusting once again to normal life, getting married, a pandemic… I’m sure he’s had plenty of acquaintances over the years, but having a family to support and constant upheavals would have made it extremely difficult to really forge strong relationships with them. I think that’s part of what makes his relationship with Mandy so special and valuable to him: she’s sort of the same way.

When we met Mandy in s1, she had other friends. We saw her meet up with them and go shopping; she told Ian a story about how one was mad at her for not sharing her make-up. As the trauma in the Milkovich household reached its zenith for her in s2 and she started thinking seriously about getting out of there, we saw those friends fall by the wayside—all except Ian. He saw her and let her see him early on. That’s a level of trust and respect that nobody else in their neighborhood would have displayed, certainly not to her. But then there’s this guy who defended her against their creepy, perverted teacher and treated her like a human being, not an object. It’s no wonder she developed an obvious, unrequited crush and sought physical comfort from him occasionally. It’s no wonder she tried to repay the favor by giving Mickey a hard time in s3 and s4, misguided and rather uninformed as we know it was at the time. (It’s also no wonder that she went for the closest Gallagher to Ian, either, but that’s for another meta.)

And Ian… Ian is loyal to a fault. We have watched Ian cut out his own heart and let the blood drip down his arm to pool on the floor at his feet if it would make a damn bit of difference for the people he loves. Like Fiona and Lip, Mandy immediately accepted him for who he is and suggested an arrangement that would protect him as well as benefit her. That is enormous where they came from. To him, that had to feel like the ultimate sign of friendship: he could trust her with a part of him that he hadn’t even entrusted to most of his family yet. From that point on, she was on the List of People Ian Gallagher Would Do Anything For. Finding out about Terry and what had happened? He held a bake sale, of all things, to fundraise for her. Seeing that his brother—his best friend—was treating her like garbage? He put him in his place. Her boyfriend was beating her? He brought her home and made it his goal to find a safe place for her to stay, even if it ultimately didn’t work. She was going to move away from all of her meager support with that boyfriend? He didn’t just rally his own arguments—he brought in outside help with Lip, who he thought might tip the scales. It’s usually just a saying that true friends will help each other hide a body, but Ian literally tried to do that. Lucky for him, he has a good head on his shoulders and used it.

No, Ian doesn’t seem to have a lot of friends. We’ve seen that he has spheres of influence, if you will, and acquaintances that he can call upon when he needs them. (For example, the guys that helped with the preacher.) However, Ian has always struck me as a “quality over quantity” type of person. Being a soldier or an EMT isn’t lucrative, but they’re meaningful for someone who sees them as vehicles for helping people. Seeing more parts of the world than just Chicago has appealed to him in the past, but he seems perfectly content to carve out a spot for himself right here at home. Having only three best friends—Lip, Mandy, and Mickey—doesn’t seem like much of a hardship for him.

Ian and Romantic Pursuits

I hate to say that there were five, but from Ian’s perspective, there were. So, let’s talk about all five. Even though…there weren’t five. There was only one. We’ll save the best for last.

1.      Kash: The first of Ian’s perceived romantic pursuits that really wasn’t. I hope it goes without saying that I hate this man with the passion of a thousand burning suns. I hate him so much. However, their interactions taught me a whole lot about how kind and compassionate Ian really is—and how naïve. Of course, he would believe that Kash loved him. The man was buying him all sorts of expensive gifts, and that’s what we see on all the commercials and in so many movies, isn’t it? Grand gestures of affection through expensive gifts. Poor as they were, Ian still scraped together the money to buy him baseball tickets and CDs, convinced as he was that that was all part of what you did in a relationship. That desire to do things like a “normal” married couple in s11? Yeah, that starts here. Ian has always been a planner, and he’s always bought into certain stereotypes. We can see that here. What we can also see is Ian’s compassionate, kind, loving soul. He cares so deeply for other people, even ones that he doesn’t know very well, especially if they are living in circumstances that mean something to him. (For example, the mentally ill woman they tried to help at work and the shelter kids whose situations were so similar to Mickey’s.) Kash being a closeted gay man living in misery with a wife he didn’t love and two children he never meant to have clearly tugged at Ian’s heartstrings. Even after everything that happens, even though Ian behaves as though they’re awkward exes who just happen to work together, he still covers for Kash. He gives him that head start and takes it upon himself to break the news to Linda that he’s gone. He defends Kash to Lip when the latter finally says exactly what we all know: he was a pedophile who deserved to rot in prison for what he did. As with Fiona’s trust, Ian’s loving soul, compassionate heart, and desire for love outside his siblings are virtues that have done him harm in the past. This is one such instance.

2.      Ned: The second of Ian’s perceived romantic pursuits that really wasn’t. To be honest, I don’t believe that Ian would even characterize it that way. He seemed very aware that Ned was a distraction from his problems—from Mickey being in juvie, Monica falling into a depressive episode, the money in the squirrel fund being gone, Lip moving out, losing his shot at West Point, and getting denied for service due to his age. Again, though, Ian has always wanted to feel valued, and this rich dude was letting him stay in a fancy hotel room with anything he wanted readily available. This (disgusting predator) guy was giving him attention and a distraction with no strings attached. Then the complications roll in, and he’s once again faced with being the mistress to a closeted, married man. The difference here is that he’s not comfortable with it. He tries to tell Fiona twice, which is enormous for Ian when he has never been very good at communicating if it means burdening others with or even merely facing his own problems. But he tries to tell her. He rejects the GPS unit and tells Ned that he has a boyfriend, boxing him into a strictly sexual arrangement. (This, unfortunately, makes sense. It aligns with how Fiona viewed things: where Jimmy was concerned about it, she told him that it was “just sex.”) He is also visibly embarrassed to admit to Lip and Fiona what has been going on with Ned. By that point, Ian is a year and a half older and, while still scarred and warped in his views because of Kash, perhaps a bit wiser. Emotionally, he kept Ned at arm’s length most of the time. He used Ned not just as a distraction, but as a way to galvanize Mickey into taking their relationship a step forward. But Ian is still Ian, and Ian is compassionate to a fault. Ned played that card by asking if he could have a little understanding for a man whose life was falling apart. Sure, he can. He’s Ian, the Gallagher too empathetic for his own good at times. We know how that spirals out of control. It just goes to show that even when Ian was trying to maintain some emotional distance, his heart is simply too big and his perceptions too heavily impacted by the grooming he’d experienced with two different people by then, and so he [SPOILER ALERT] still feels enough of a connection to Ned after all these years to be mildly bothered that he passed away.

3.      Caleb: The third of Ian’s perceived romantic pursuits that really wasn’t. Ian’s relationship with Caleb strikes me as being similar to what he had with Ned. While more age-appropriate, Ian was very much using Caleb, just as Caleb was using him. That’s why it was so easy for both of them to walk away. Ian was in a difficult spot when they met. He was grateful to the firefighters who saved his life, but he had also just saved someone else at a moment when he was perhaps at his absolute lowest. That’s what he’s always wanted, isn’t it—to be a bit of a hero and help people? So, he’s understandably drawn there, first out of gratitude and then to be surrounded by very attractive gay firemen who helped people, saved his life, and invited him to be part of a function they were holding. But he made himself pretty clear from the start: he was interested in sex with Caleb. That was the draw. He still hasn’t come to terms with being bipolar and losing Mickey, but Ian has never not been with anyone for any extended length of time. That’s just who he is: he’s always sought some level of outward validation—from the army, Kash, Monica, Mickey, and so many others. We’re seeing him struggle with that now as he deals with the opportunities available to him as a mentally ill ex-con felon. So, he pursues Caleb as a distraction just like he did with Ned, only Caleb is a predator in his own right and can smell that his interest is coming from a place of weakness. He immediately (and initially unintentionally) preys on Ian’s desperate need for structure and order by insisting on a traditional date where Ian is very much out of his element and even goes so far as to instruct Ian on how to be intimate. It’s no wonder he mentions Mickey in these moments, as Mickey never wanted him to change, and Ian leans heavily (even slightly hyperbolically) into the fact that Mickey wasn’t a paragon of order and stability like Caleb outwardly appears. 

And I think why Ian puts up with it so long—being taught like a child, being used to upset Caleb’s parents, being paraded in front of his friends to make them jealous—is because he was getting something out of it too, just like with Ned. A stable place to live when their home ownership was in flux, a place away from his family when they weren’t providing the support he needed as he adjusted to his disorder, someone who validated his desires to help people regardless of their ulterior motives, and a physical distraction from his own problems. All of these parallel his relationship with Ned very closely. It was never going to last, of course. Ian is a strong person who temporarily forgot how strong he was because he forgot who he was, and Caleb didn’t want to be cared for—he wanted a project, like all of his sculptures. Being a project, being something that others see as needing to be fixed? That’s a hard no for Ian. It always has been. There’s a moment I love later in their relationship where Caleb tells him to turn off the lights when he goes out and lightly reprimands him for leaving one on the day prior. Ian is in a better place at that point, having regained a lot of his sense of self, and stares after him with indignation at being treated like a kid. He’s then lied to and cheated on, but I think that to mention those things to Caleb when they break up is to admit weakness on his own part—that he stuck with Caleb knowing that he was being mistreated, and Ian is not one to be called a victim. So, while we know from his discussions with Lip and Sue that the cheating and distrust bothered him most, he merely focused on Caleb lying about his sexuality, which removed a lot of the emotion from the situation—just like he did with Ned. It ultimately turned out to be a bad move since Caleb, being a skilled predator, made him question even his own sexuality in return, but we’re starting to see that Ian isn’t here to be someone’s toy anymore. Not an older, married man like Ned, but definitely not anyone his age either. I’m glad this pseudo-relationship happened because it showed Ian how strong he really was and that he could be in control of his own life. Sure, it destabilized him a little in the aftermath, but he worked through it. He leaned on his family, specifically Lip, who has always been his rock without the blurred lines that Fiona represented between sister/mother-figure/caretaker. Caleb is a garbage person, but Ian was the one who pulled the treasure from the trash, not him.

4.      Trevor: The fourth of Ian’s perceived romantic pursuits that really wasn’t. Trevor is perhaps the first relationship where we don’t see Ian dive in. Whether that’s because of his confusion over Trevor’s gender identity or the fact that he was really beginning to fully mature as an adult by that point (ostensibly finishing his education, getting a career, being fully self-sufficient, etc.), he tried to take his time and not jump right in. They hung out, talked around the neighborhood, and yes, engaged in some casual intimacy at the club. Again, Ian might not be in a full relationship, but he’s never without someone for long. At that point in the series, all he was missing was a relationship when it comes to traditional, “normal” goals for people to have. But Trevor posed a situation he’s never been in before since, while gay himself, Ian has never been very interested in activism or engaging in the LGBT community. It’s just not in his culture or environment, so to be faced with someone he’s interested in that challenges a lot of his views of gender and sexuality is something he takes his time with. Unfortunately, Trevor is younger than him and not quite as mature, not quite as experienced. He tells Ian he has plenty of friends and doesn’t need another, which is an ultimatum that has never really sat very well with me personally because I’m generally of the mind that if a person needs time and you really care for them, you’ll let them have that time. I’m not unsympathetic to Trevor: he’s been burned before and has his own trauma stemming from responses to his identity, so it makes complete sense for him not to be patient in this regard. He shouldn’t have to be—but then, Ian shouldn’t have to rush into anything he’s not 100% certain he wants either. That’s exactly what he does, though, because Ian does for others without thinking of the implications for himself a lot of the time. They make great friends, but they don’t make great partners. Trevor treats Ian similarly to Caleb in that he’s a bit of a project. Trevor educates him on the LGBT community and incorporates him into his ventures for the shelter without ever really showing much interest in Ian’s life or family, which suits Ian just fine because for as interested as he is in helping with the shelter and as attracted to Trevor as he is, he seems to know they’re not compatible. Ian, who has been having sex since he was far too young, takes a step back from it when they run into compatibility issues. (And pushes back on the pressure to bottom with some of his own—neither of them were in the right on that.) He doesn’t ask much about Trevor’s family or try to be part of his personal life. They sort of embody the “friends with benefits” stereotype: they hang out, they have sex, and that’s really all there is to their relationship. 

The reason Ian doubles down on trying to make it work isn’t because there was a future for them before Mickey broke out. It’s because he thinks he’s lost Mickey forever, he knows he’s lost Monica forever, and he’s not going to get the support he needs from his family when they couldn’t stand Monica and Fiona told him what he already knew to be true, namely that Mickey being an escaped convict would destroy everything Ian worked so hard for if he got involved. So, he does what Ian does. He needs that distraction—he needs to run from these strong emotions he can’t process, so he bottles them up and unfairly hopes that Trevor will provide some of that comfort after cheating on him with Mickey. (Had Mickey been released, I think they would have broken up. Instead, that was the first match Ian lit, but certainly not the last.) Now, the thing is, Trevor said at the start that he didn’t want to be Ian’s friend. He’s also younger and less mature in a relationship, which means he threw the concept of love out there prematurely, just like Ian thought what he had with Kash was love. The death throes of their relationship were a back and forth where Ian was spiraling and seeking comfort, and Trevor was providing some while keeping their relationship pretty amorphous. (Were they exes? Were they friends? Were they people who shared interests and danced around each other? Were they going to get back together? They never officially broke up—it fizzled and resurged, then fizzled for good.) Ultimately, whatever it was that they had couldn’t survive Mickey, Monica, or Gay Jesus. Trevor wasn’t prepared to deal with a full-blown manic episode, and based on his hands-off approach with involving himself in Ian’s life even before the Mickey-shaped bomb got dropped on them, it doesn’t seem like he really wanted to anyway. He did what he’s always done: prioritized his shelter, which I’m not deriding in the slightest. By that point, Ian was too far gone to care that he disappeared anyway. Had the situation been different and he was getting the support from his family that he needed, it doesn’t seem like he would have cared much there either.

5.      Mickey: Finally. Only took over five thousand words to get here. I’ll preface this with something that anyone who knows me from other fandoms is already well aware of, namely that I don’t do romance. Ever. Never been interested. The relationships I’ve always been most passionately interested in are platonic ones, especially “found families” and siblings, which is probably obvious from the other five thousand words here. Ian and Mickey are the first relationship I’ve actively shipped or written for in a fandom. They’re the first I’ve been invested in to this extent. As such, one of the biggest pet peeves I had when I first joined this fandom was the saying, “Ian fell first, Mickey fell harder.” These two wonderful dumbasses face planted on the concrete in front of the Kash and Grab in s1 and never recovered. I could go on forever about these two, but that particular wall of text would probably be too daunting for even the most avid Gallavich stan to traverse, so I’ll keep it fairly brief. As we can see above, Ian has a very strict sense of what he “should” want in a partner. Someone who is moderately successful in their chosen field, makes enough money to at least live comfortably, and typically does something that helps other people (a doctor, a fireman, a youth counselor). These aren’t passionate people. They’re not men who operate on instinct the way most of the people in his life have always had to by virtue of their social standing. They have life goals and opportunities that he envies, and Ian has a great deal of compassion for them when they hit a roadblock or things don’t work out. The amazing dichotomy of Ian Gallagher is that he straddles a line most people can’t between the rough neighborhood that has instilled in him all of his values/behaviors and the middle-class mentality of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and aspiring to more. Ian has always aimed for what Lip said wasn’t possible for poor people: being successful without having to scam or steal. But as I said way back at the beginning of this manifesto, the South Side is his home. His family is his family. And none of the people he’s been with personify the South Side quite like Mickey—they don’t personify home like Mickey. 

And I think that’s where the initial draw for Ian is. (I’m going to focus on Ian’s side since he’s who your question focused on.) The other guys look great on paper, and Ian’s brain says that that’s what he should aim for. We know better, though. We know that Ian has an enormous heart that belongs first and foremost to his family and their home. His heart says that this person—this dirty, rude, mean, violent person—is home. His heart says this person is everything about himself that he denies having, just like Ian was everything about Mickey that the latter declined to openly acknowledge for so long. I don’t like relationships built on “making each other better.” I really don’t. The wonderful thing about this is that it’s never been that way. Ian didn’t change Mickey. He’s exactly who he’s always been, but he’s grown past the fear of his own emotions and Terry’s response to them. He’s still a thief, a con artist, violent, and rude. Mickey didn’t change Ian either. He’s still rigidly conforming to certain stereotypes of what he thinks he should want, seeking structure (to his own detriment at times), and not a great communicator. The point for them is that they complement each other, not that they make the other a better person—not even that they bring something out of each other that wasn’t already there. That’s what Ian’s other relationships did. They made him shave off his edges so that he could fit a square peg into a round hole, and that’s not happiness. It’s simply what he thought he was supposed to do—what “normal” people did. 

With Mickey, he doesn’t have to worry so much about what is normal or acceptable. He doesn’t have to worry about whether or not his life is objectively “on track,” not until fairly recently. Mickey is the only person he’s ever been with who has accepted him for who he is, faults and strengths alike, without the underlying insinuation that he should be aiming for something else or pretending to be whatever the other person needs him to be in order to care for them. Kash needed an escape—Ian provided it. Ned needed a very specific brand of toy—Ian played that role. Caleb needed a project to feel fulfilled—Ian went along with it for a bit. Trevor needed someone who accepted him as he was but did things his way—Ian did that. To care for Mickey has only ever meant being himself because all Mickey ever really needed was him. Mickey didn’t need an escape from his home—his relationship with his family is more complicated than that. Mickey didn’t need to be saved from his upbringing—it’s what made him the person Ian fell in love with and who he is happy to be. Mickey didn’t need someone to change who he is on a fundamental level because unless it is going to get him into trouble and separate them, Ian never wanted him to. (Even then, it’s about what he does, not who he is.) And yes, I’m sure that there’s a level of excitement that Ian finds exhilarating where Mickey is concerned, but I tend to believe it goes a lot deeper than that. What he finds exciting about Mickey is what Mickey embodies about the South Side—about home. About his own upbringing, but also Ian’s. About Frank and Monica, his siblings, school, work, ROTC—existing and surviving in an environment where it’s not guaranteed that you’ll have money to keep the heat on this winter or feed your family. They spent the early seasons living in a constant state of fight or flight. They couldn’t afford not to. And there’s excitement in that. Look at how many people say that the first seasons are their favorite! There hasn’t been a huge shift in the quality or direction of the writing, just the trajectory of the characters. They’ve gotten older, and their problems have been different. It’s not about survival so much of the time anymore, but those are the storylines that excite us. For Ian, that exhilaration in the constant battle of survival in their neighborhood is sewn into the fiber of his being just like it is Mickey’s. He saw his home in Mickey before they truly fell in love, and when that followed, Mickey became home.

In Conclusion

Ian has spent his entire life looking for the “right” path only to realize that it was laid before him: his family, his small circle of friends, and Mickey. I love that that is coming full circle this season, where [SPOILER ALERT] marriage has almost made him regress a bit to that place where there must be a right way of doing things going forward, and slowly but surely, we’re seeing him loosen up.

Good morning. It’s Ian Gallagher loving hours.

[the-hopeless-haze]

Somebody Hurt Me Too Deep (Being Alive Ch 14)

Previous Chapter

A/N: I AM BACK omg ok like I’ve been through it in the last month..... yeah. This was of course based on “Being Alive” but also “champagne problems”... thank Taylor Swift for any emotional distress I cause :)

CW: talks of mental illness, brief mentions of past trauma and car accidents

Taglist (thank u all for reading ily): @caked-crusader @thatesqcrush @law-nerd105 @blackeyedangel9805 @moon-river-drifter @the-baby-bookworm @dianilaws @xecq @lv7867 @arabellathorne  @teddybluesclues​ @averyhotchner​ @houseofthirst​

“Carino? I’m home,” Rafael says as he steps through the apartment door, placing his briefcase down on the recliner. It was only 3pm, early for him to be finished with work for the day, but he had been getting out earlier recently to accompany you to physical therapy appointments. You were doing well, at least physically. It had been a long six weeks, but today might be the appointment that cleared you to go back to work full-time and maybe get out from behind the desk a little.

Mentally, though, it was a mixed bag. Some days were easier than others, and that was to be expected, but it was hard to tell the squad you were doing better when you couldn’t even bring yourself to text them back. Still, he pleaded otherwise, said every day was a new day and carried on even if they didn’t believe him.

Today, though, today was the turning point, he could feel it. You were doing so well, and eventually, your brain would have to catch up with your body. So tonight, he booked a reservation at a restaurant… not any restaurant, but the Cuban restaurant he took you to the night you asked him out and he barely used your first name and he swore he hated you with nearly every fiber of his being.

Right. As if he hated you even then.

You’re in a good mood, albeit not as elated as he hoped, but the physical therapist approves you for work but to “take it easy” and you’re laughing at his wry remarks and squeezing his hand in the back of the taxi on the way to the restaurant. His nerves almost dissipate, but they don’t. And maybe that should’ve been his first sign that tonight was not going to go as planned.

Rafael was never a superstitious man, but you order the same dish you ordered the first time he took you out, and he can’t help but think this is a sign to push forward.

“Oh, fuck it,” Rafael murmurs, a surge of anxiety overcoming him. “I was going to wait until after dinner… but…. I have something I want to ask you.”

And just like that, your face falls, but Rafael can barely take that in, he just keeps talking, his mouth moving faster than the neurons in his brain that tell him to stop, now isn’t a good time.

“I love you so much, (y/n), and I know these past few months have been so hard, and this isn’t the way either of us have wanted this year to start, but… we got through it together. I never thought I’d be in a position in my life, with someone who I love… that I’d be willing to do this, but… (Y/n)... will you marry me?”

You don’t say anything for a few seconds, but it feels like hours, days, months. “Can you get up off the floor, Rafael? You’re embarrassing us,” you finally say hollowly, and it’s true, the whole restaurant is stopped in their tracks staring at the two of you. Rafael couldn’t possibly care less, though, he couldn’t comprehend anything that was going on - he was just thinking “well, she hasn’t said no…” and then you’re getting up, throwing your napkin on the table, shaking your head, saying “I can’t do this.”

Rafael gains some of his senses back, enough to follow you outside into the tempering late February air. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No, Rafael, I don't,” you say stiffly without turning around to face him. “I’ll get my stuff in the morning. I need to be alone right now.”

“I just… I didn’t know you weren’t happy,” Rafael says, his voice breaking, and that gives you enough impetus to turn around.

“You didn’t know I wasn’t happy? Goddamn, Rafael, do you even live with me? I’ve been unhappy for months.”

“Then why didn’t you say anything?”

“Why didn’t you know?”

“Jesus, (y/n), maybe because I’m not a fucking mind reader?”

“Right. You honestly thought we were in a good enough place to propose tonight?”

“Obviously! Or I wouldn’t have done it!” he snaps. “You honestly think we’re in a bad enough place that you couldn’t say yes?”

“Obviously! Or I would have done it!” you throw his words back at him, and god do they sting.

“You never told me anything. You just withdrew.”

“Yeah. Maybe that should’ve been a sign. Look. I’m moving back home. I was going to tell you tonight.”

“What? Is that all it was? (Y/n), if you want to move back, I could work something out--”

“No. No, you can’t, Rafael. You’ve never been able to work anything out in your life because you’re too scared to! You just operate on fear - and this is no exception. You thought I was going to die six weeks ago and that’s the only reason you’ve been acting this way, and I’ve been slipping away recently and you’ve just been trying to consistently deny it so you just get on one knee and think that’s going to solve everything, think that’s going to make me stay. That’s not how it works! I’m not happy. I need to go home.”

“Oh no. You know what it is? You’re afraid. Don’t try to put this on me. You’re the one who’s walking away. You’re the one who’s running back home.”

“Fuck you, Rafael. Your family is all here. Mine isn’t. My brother’s getting a job for the first time, my mom just got on disability, I miss my dad… I’ve spent too long here. I’ve spent too long with you.”

“What happened? What the fuck happened?”

“What the fuck happened every other time, Rafael? You’ve gone through this plenty of times before.”

Rafael scoffs, shakes his head, leans against the outside of the restaurant. “You’re unbelievable.”

“I’m fucking sick, Rafael!” you’re screaming now, your cheeks turning red, your eyes leaking angry tears. “All this time, since the accident, I’ve been fucking drowning and you didn’t even notice!”

“Sick?”

“Depressed, Rafael. Anxious. Liv wanted me screened before I came back and the therapist said so. AGain. For the fucking umpteenth time in my life. But this time, I thought I had someone who cared--”

“How the fuck was I supposed to know if you didn’t tell me?”

“Couldn’t you see?”

Rafael shakes his head slowly, but now it comes back to him, all these subtle signs, the days you wouldn’t make it out of bed until 3 pm, all the days and nights you spent staring listlessly at the walls, the inability of anything he said or did to make you feel better. But it came and went, and Rafael just took it as you being upset sometimes at the limitations placed on you by your injured leg. Never did he think there was something more serious going on. Or maybe he just didn’t want to think that, and he ignored every signal.

“I’m sorry, (y/n),” he whispers, but he knows that’s too little, too late. Both of you were at fault - that was clear to him now - but was it clear to you? “I really didn’t know.”

“Evidently,” you mutter, crossing your arms over your chest.

“But you can get help. We can work this out.”

“I just… Rafael. I’m not ready. You of all people should have some sympathy for that.”

Ouch. You were going for the jugular now, hurting him where only you could, rejecting his proposal, leaving him crestfallen on one knee in the middle of a restaurant, but somehow your words hurt worse. Anyone could reject a proposal. Only you could psychoanalyze him and hurl the worst remarks his way, things no one else would be able to come up with.

“Then okay,” he sighs. “We won’t get married yet, or ever, if that’s what you want. But you really want to throw this away entirely?”

“I don’t know, Rafael. I don’t. Look, I’m sorry too. I just… I can’t deal with this right now.”

“Do you think… do you think maybe--”

“I don’t know,” you say firmly. “I don’t even know if I really want to go back home. I just know I don’t want to live like this anymore, just waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

“But it isn’t going to drop. I just fucking proposed. I’m in this for the long haul. And fuck it, if you want to go back home, I’ll work it out.”

“This fake optimism isn’t you.”

“This lack of optimism entirely isn’t you! What happened to the woman who got through some of the worst shit imaginable and landed on her own two feet? You got into a car accident, (y/n). You lived! You should be thankful, not sitting here sulking like your world’s gone to shit.” Again, his mouth moves too fast to register the look on your face as it falls, and tears start to stream down your face. He can’t stop but push it further, hurt you in retaliation.

“Seriously, Rafael, how insensitive can you be? I tell you I’m struggling and you invalidate my feelings? Fuck off.”

“I didn’t mean--”

“Why’d you say it then? You know what, I’m done. Goodbye, Rafael.”

“But--”

“No. Give me space. You owe me that.”

He does. And god, it hurts to watch you walk away, his abuelita’s ring burning a hole in his pocket when it should be on your finger. But maybe.... maybe this isn't the end. Maybe all you need is space.

Maybe Rafael's wishing on a pipe dream. He doesn't know anymore. All he knows is the sting of this pain.

-----

You walk alone in the dark, your leg still aching slightly, and you just feel like utter shit. You can’t remember ever feeling quite this low, but you can’t remember feeling rage like this, either. No one’s hurt you like Rafael.

But that’s because you loved him enough to let him.

You still love him even now, but spending day in and day out with him coddling you, you couldn’t handle it. And maybe you should’ve acted like an adult and told him and stopped pretending everything was fine when you knew it wasn’t. If only you weren’t so fucked in the head, right? Just how it always went, your life, cycles of feeling fine and cycles of feeling like you’re scraping at the bottom of a barrel for a will to go on. And yeah, sometimes even you would question why you were taking this so hard - so what, it’s a car accident, you were lucky to have lived - but Rafael didn’t understand and you didn’t know how to make him. How were you going to get in a passengers seat again without having a panic attack? Would your leg ever fully heal? You’d wasted six weeks staring at the walls of Rafael’s apartment, doing menial paperwork for Olivia that anyone could have done. How could you not feel entirely worthless? And then for Rafael to make it seem like you were overexaggerating like you should just get over this… you hated him.

But you didn’t, really. You know deep down he’s just angry the night didn’t go the way he wanted it to, with you promising to be his for the rest of your life. Still, rage is a truth serum of sorts, like cheap wine, and it makes you wonder how deep that resentment runs. How could he not notice you were upset, though? That’s a hell of a blind eye to turn.

At least back home you had Ben if nothing else.

But here, you had everything else. The squad, your career, Rafael… You couldn’t even begin to think about marriage right now - Lord knows Rafael isn’t ready either - but did you really want to throw in the towel? How do couples move past a rejected proposal, though? Hadn’t you hurt him deeper than anyone else could have? And would he ever figure out how to propose again?

Maybe to someone else, you think, someone who didn’t have all these fucking issues.

Before you know it, you have a cigarette in your mouth and a lighter in hand and you’re leaning against the side of a convenience store, watching girls walk by in stilettos hanging on to their men or giggling with their group of friends, the taxis blurring past. Then you realize you broke the first promise you made to Rafael: you bought cigarettes in New York.

Had he really wanted to collect on that promise? It wasn’t like you were addicted, it was just a stupid habit you started in high school to take the edge off, but you supposed some people had the inclination to start and never stop, but you always could when you wanted to.

Your vice wasn’t cigarettes, no, it was love. You gave all you could to whoever would take it because you were so used to people wanting nothing to do with you since you isolated yourself due to your past trauma. Once you got to college, you refused to hide in the background, and you took chances you weren’t used to taking and loved in color, you loved until it made you blue when the boys would cheat or your so-called friends would find different cliques.

You were still like that, albeit in so much a desperate way, and you had been loved in return, now, not just by Rafael but by the squad too - even if you had your squabbles. You loved them to death and back.

But friends were easier to keep than lovers.

Maybe it is scary to think Rafael was going to be the end. That he’d be the last man you ever kissed in love or passion. That you’d be the last woman standing in his long list of ex-lovers - the only one who didn’t get crossed off.

How do you love someone that much? You always said you wanted that, but the thought always terrified you anyway, and maybe it’s why you did push people away when they felt too close because you felt like you didn’t deserve it, like you were still atoning for some sin you didn’t remember committing but you still feel guilty for all the same. You wonder if Rafael feels just as guilty.

You inhale the smoke, feeling the familiar, carcinogenic burn in your throat, causing yourself pain to cause Rafael pain only to cause you pain in return; an endless cycle of hurt.

With ambivalence, you put your cigarette out and hail a cab, and tell him to drive you to your apartment which you haven’t seen in weeks. There’s dust on every surface, it’s freezing as hell, and you don’t know how you’re going to sleep tonight, alone, so you light up another cigarette, sitting solitary with your nerves running haywire underneath your skin. What the hell were you going to do now?

[frommindtopen]

They’re doing a series of sermons on the Apostle’s Creed at church. I thought I’d go through it again just to see if I still believe all of it because I’ve found lately that maybe there are some Christian precepts that I’m beginning to question.

As I was raised Episcopalian, I had to memorize this whole thing when I got confirmed, but I couldn’t remember all of it now so I had to google it and print it out. I went through it step by step and questioned myself. Do I really believe all of this? This is what Christians are “supposed” to believe. It was interesting to note that the Creed didn’t address any of the things that I, personally, am currently questioning. That was a bit of a relief to be honest. Anyway, here’s what I came up with. Honestly, I’m not expecting ANYONE at all to read this whole thing. It’s a lot of words. I’m just pasting it in to keep a note for myself for the future.

I believe in God,

(Yes, I really do believe that. I believe in a compassionate, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful being who watches over us, who CAN take steps to change things and who DOES take steps to change things - from time to time - as He sees fit, that we cannot question because we just don’t know what He knows. I believe that He is omniscient, that we know nothing compared to Him and when we bring our petty complaints to Him - even though they don’t seem so petty to us because they may have to do with life and death - we have no idea of what the grand scheme of things is - He actually knows what He’s doing and we don’t. I also believe He keeps out of our business. After all, this is OUR world, He gave us free will and let’s us use it and if we don’t use the brains He gave us or if we use those brains the wrong way and use our free will the wrong way, the only time He might step in to fix the issues that we caused is if we petition Him with enough prayer and even then He might not step in. But, yes, I DO believe in God.)

the Father almighty,

(And, yes, I believe He is the Father almighty… pretty much see the above.)

maker of heaven and earth,

(Yes, I believe He created everything. I don’t think that necessarily means there was no evolution involved. I don’t see why creationism and evolution have to preclude each other. After all, “to God a thousand years is like a day and a day is like a thousand years,” so time is all screwed up so who knows what seven days was really in the beginning. But, either way, I believe He created everything. And I get really amazed when I think about all living things having the same DNA origin, sort of like God did a cut and paste then made variations to it. Yeah, of COURSE He created everything… come on.)

and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,

(I DO believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God and was fully God and fully man. I don’t exactly get completely how that works but I DO get that it DID work. For heaven’s sake, if we can “get” some of the fantasy books out there, then how can we not “get” the concept of fully man and fully God. Is it because we say that this is real? Maybe. You know that some people run around acting like Harry Potter is real. I saw people in Universal who were wearing robes and dressed like “He, whose name shall not be spoken,” and it was like 100 degrees outside. Yet, they paced around with that heavy stuff on and serious expressions across their faces as if they were truly headed for Dumbledore or whoever it is and ready to buy a real wand. I’ve never heard a story of a wand REALLY changing the course of someone’s life with a miracle but I have heard hundreds of stories of a prayer changing the course of a life with a miracle. So… yes, I believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God and I believe He’s real, but the reason I mostly believe is because of His presence in MY life.)

who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,

(Well, yeah, otherwise He wouldn’t have been fully God…)

born of the Virgin Mary,

Well, yeah, otherwise He wouldn’t have been fully man…)

suffered under Pontius Pilate,

(Even Josephus wrote about that — Josephus, for those of you who don’t know, was an ancient historian *nonChristian, by the way* who did confirm the reality of Jesus as a living, breathing human being.)

was crucified, died and was buried;

(Yep, it happened.)

he descended into hell;

(I don’t know how we know that and I’m less sure about that one but I’m going to buy into it because it makes sense.”

on the third day he rose again from the dead;

(Now, I struggled with this one for a while. I mean that’s a hard one to believe and it was hard for me. But here’s the thing, there were hundreds and hundreds of witnesses. There were hundreds of people who saw Him after he rose from the dead, not just like the Apostles - which is how it looks in the movies - there were hundreds! The way I ended up convinced was one afternoon, my daughter was telling me about a documentary where they said that Hitler was probably not actually dead at the end of WWII because there were some witnesses who saw him in South America. Not a lot of witnesses, but a few. I got really mad because I believed that, completely. There was no doubt in my mind. Then I thought to myself, if I could buy into the Hitler thing because of a few witnesses, why am I questioning the Jesus thing when there are hundreds of witnesses? That’s when I realized how biased I am. When it comes to Jesus and the Bible, I am pre-biased to more cynicism and anything from the Bible or to do with Jesus/God will require more convincing and more proof than anything to do with another subject. I am pre-programmed to believe anything Biblical LESS easily than anything else!)

he ascended into heaven,

(Yeah, that’s pretty easy to believe if you believe the last thing, right?)

and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty;

(Also, pretty darn easy to believe if you believe the other stuff.)

from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

(If you believe that Jesus is the Son of God, of course you believe He has the right to judge people.)

I believe in the Holy Spirit,

(I DO believe in this. I know what I am like inside. Don’t we all know who we are to a certain extent? And I know the capacity I have for evil. Yet, I also know how I’ve changed since I came to Jesus. I believe that the Holy Spirit DID enter me and is still doing that work in me. Yeah Yeah, I know you can say it’s just me maturing or whatever but you don’t know what is inside of me. You don’t know the struggle I’ve had with mental illness. You don’t know what I’ve been through, how I tried to commit suicide three times, the first time at age 13, how many times I cut up my arms, all that I’ve done to others and myself. And you don’t know how that changed once Jesus came into my life so you really can’t make the judgement call on what brought about the change. Only I can make that call and I say it was the Holy Spirit.. the hand of Jesus.)

the holy catholic Church,

(I was taught that this actually means “throughout the whole” and not the Catholic Church denomination. I DO believe in the church body but I don’t feel as if the church body is functioning appropriately in the USA or probably very well anyplace else at this time. I think we are a very very sick body currently and only getting sicker. We are diseased and Covid has made us even sicker.)

the communion of saints,

(Yes, I think communion is pretty cool in that it centers our thoughts and reminds us of what the Lord did for us but I don’t believe it has magic powers or anything.)

the forgiveness of sins,

(Boy, oh boy, do I believe in this. And I sure believe that we are called to forgive others. I think that is one of our number one callings. We must must must empathize and forgive and when we can’t find forgiveness in our hearts, we must pray for the Holy Spirit to put that forgiveness there. I think that is one of our primary goals as human beings and, especially, as Christians.)

the resurrection of the body,

(I don’t know about this one, but I’m hoping that it’s true.)

and life everlasting. Amen.

(Yes, I do believe in life after life, that it will be everlasting.)

[interstellix]

november; epilepsy awareness month

since november is epilepsy awareness month, I’ve been considering dropping something like this for a while now, though hesitated since I wasn’t sure how many it would reach out to. however, not too long ago, I got the request of writing about it and explain what it is like to live with the condition (thank you anon :’)) and i figured that, really, there’s no harm in doing it. so, i decided to put this out there and hope that this reaches out to as many people as possible. admittedly, this ended up longer than planned but if you still decide to read it, thank you, big kudos to you :)

before actually going on, i may add that epilepsy, like most conditions, is something that varies from person to person so part of this is written based on my own experience with it - if a fellow epileptic wants me to add something, or feels like there’s something to correct, please do let me know.

i'm writing this purely to let people know about at least some of the pain with epilepsy, because it's not just having seizures. it's also worrying your family and friends, having to adjust your lifestyle to it (which i’ll come to a lil bit later), medicination, the side-effects of medicination, the fear of forgetting medication, the side-effects of forgetting taking medication even just a single day, possible anxiety or depression, embarrassment, hospital visits, tests, not being able to do certain things you want to do, people joking about it and making fun of you, scary and random body jerks, fear of waking up in an ambulance, fear of waking up with serious injuries or fear of not waking up at all - all of these are things that come with epilepsy and it's more of a pain than, to be honest, non-epileptics can imagine.

all that said, to those who have heard about epilepsy (or not at all) but don’t know what it actually means, is a neurological disorder; the activity in your brain becomes abnormal and uneven which mostly leads to seizures but also various sensations or loss of awareness. so it’s not constantly on-going and only actually happens when something triggers the brain to have that abnormal activity. it can happen to anyone, and when i say anyone, i mean anyone can have seizures, it’s just that it doesn’t automatically always mean that you have epilepsy (basically, epilepsy -> seizure; seizure -> not always epilepsy).

again, the condition is different from epileptic to epileptic, meaning that the triggers for seizures can vary a lot and depending on what kind of epilepsy it concerns. my own main triggers are flashing lights (also called photosensitive epilepsy) and lack of sleep but it can also be stress, skipping meals, overeating caffeine/alcohol/drugs/medicine, head trauma (aka head injury), brain damage (for example a tumor or stroke), etc.

symptoms for seizures can also vary. i’ve noticed that a lot of people think it’s always going unconscious and violently shaking/jerking, but it can also be staring blankly at nothing for a short amount of time, losing awareness, have rapid twitches in arms and/or legs, body stiffening, muscles going limp, and on and on.

honestly, one particular thing i feel like people need to know is that epileptics are just as human as others. aside from the condition itself, it socially and emotionally feels like shit when we’re treated differently. what i’ve, personally, often seen epilepsy being treated as contagious, a disease, mental disorder/illness or psychological disorder is in reality a neurological disorder. for the love of god, please take that into mind when you meet someone with epilepsy (especially if it’s your first time) because, while there’s nothing wrong with any of those, it’s really not fun when people treat you like it. we’re still human, and more human than those who think otherwise. on top of that, most epileptics are able to live just like anyone else, sometimes perhaps on the cost of adjusting your lifestyle to it, but by the end of the day many of us can live the same way as anyone else.

adding to that, if someone actually opens up to you about their epilepsy, tbh i hope you’re feeling grateful. for some, it’s not always an easy topic to talk about it so when they actually do let you on about it, you should know that it’s because they’re putting their trust in you.

something else i want to bring up is the do’s and don’t’s if you see someone have a seizure. it can be scary, understandable and this might sound ridiculous, but stay calm, for the sake of yourself, the person who’s having the seizure and people in your surroundings. this one got quite lengthy, so i’ll put it under the divider. thank you for making it this far, seriously, but it’d be great if you continued since this, no joke, can save a life.

time the seizure: most seizures end within a few minutes but if it’s still going on after five minutes, call an ambulance, whether you know if they have a history of seizures or not (what goes that, you can also check if the person is wearing some kind of epilepsy i.d)

surroundings (brief mention of blood): basically, bring the person away from harmful objects. to bring up my own personal examples, i have, during two different seizures, hit my head against a table (literally broke the entire thing) and against a shelf. while the first one miraciously didn’t give me more than a bump, the latter caused a jack and i ended up bleeding from my head. keep in mind though, that the objects don’t always have to be harmful for the head, but any part of the person’s body. obviously (i hope), bring them out from water if that’s where the seizure started.

turn the person to lay on their side: while they’re still unconscious, don’t let them lay on their back as this can block the airway. instead, put something soft under their head and loosen anything tight that might be around their neck.

don’t put anything in their mouth: for the love of god, just don’t. be it food or a cloth or something of that kind. a lot of people do especially the latter to prevent the person to bite their tongues off or swallow it (no, you don’t) but this just increases the risk of blocking their airway or making them choke on it. yet again my own personal example, this happened during my first seizure and i ended up having a cardiac arrest (how the hell i’m still alive, i still don’t know).

don’t restrain or hold their body: aside from turning them to lay on the side, don’t restrain their body, for example holding onto the parts that are jerking. this can also cause injuries or make it more aggressive.

stay with them: not only during but also after the seizure, stay with them. seizures are really, really exhausting both the brain activity and since the muscles in their body stiffen during the seizure. it can also cause one hell of a confusion/dizziness and stress so stay with them and calmly explain what happened as well as where you are. if you called for medical help, please, try to wait until they’ve arrived.

don’t give them cpr during the seizure: just don’t, it’ll only make it worse. you can, however, do it after the seizure in case the person doesn’t wake up and has stopped breathing.

also, if you’re an angel like @astronomlns and warn an epileptic for something that might include flashing/rapid lights, i love you and hope you’re having a good day :D

[crstapor]

Terror White

“You’re either with us or against us.” - George W. Bush


1.

On January 6th, 2021, domestic terrorists invaded the Capital Building in an act of political insurrection. Their intent was to overthrow the will of the people by preventing certification of a free and fair democratic election. They did so at the behest of their political leader (who was impeached a second time for inciting this gross transgression of his oath of office), other voices in their party - the so-called GOP - and talking head agitators inhabiting the far-right media echo chamber. Nearly to a man, a woman, a they, each of these terrorists were white.

Images of ‘good old boys’ traipsing down the halls of the people’s house waving confederate battle flags, kicking feet up on the Speaker’s desk, walking off with public property or smearing their shit on the floors pervaded the internet. These images provided by the villains themselves, posted shamelessly to social media profiles.

As a result of this treasonous, insulting, juvenile, despicable, and ultimately futile effort five people died. Even still, hours after the fact, a majority of members of the so-called GOP voted in accordance with the will of these terrorists. They voted to overturn the results of a free and fair election in the world’s oldest modern democracy. They did so because they believed there were serious ‘concerns’ (‘concerns’, let’s be clear, that started with them and like the Ouroboros, ended up with the confusing, if unhygienic, phenomenon of not knowing where their mouths or assholes ended or began) with the 2020 presidential election. After over 60 court cases arguing that point only one was ruled in their favor. None of the 50 States comprising our union found any evidence of wide-spread fraud. Indeed, a federal agency tasked with monitoring election security stated unequivocally that the presidential election of 2020 was one of the most secure in a generation.

And yet? There they were. Spouting conspiracy theories, assaulting police officers (those stalwart stewards of the ‘law & order’ they otherwise claim to love), brandishing spears and bearskins, stealing mail, leaving death threats to the Vice President, fundamentally acting the fool. A bunch of bullies let out of detention with rage and rebellion on their minds.

Let me be clear: each and every one of these terrorists should be hunted down by law enforcement and charged to the fullest extent of the law. They should then be prosecuted and the judges in each and every case should show or allow no mercy. These barbarians must never be allowed to storm the gates again.

Fine.

But that’s not the really interesting question here. The far-right has been producing assholes forever (one of the few things the ‘right’ is truly consistent at). What’s actually interesting is how these insurrectionists arrived at the conclusions they did. Which is to say; how did their ‘thinking’ bring them to this point.

2.

While it might be tempting for some on the left to see that last sentence as a joke, let’s remember we’re sitting at the adult table. These terrorists, being human, sharing our genetic code, are people - real, live, eating, shitting, fucking, anxious, sleeping, scared, afraid, terrified people - just like you and me. As much as it would be easier if we could see them as Uruk-hai instead of our brothers and sisters, sadly? That’s what they are. Family. Part of the Human Condition.

Though humans that are clearly very, very, very sick. My diagnosis? Mind Cancer. Let me explain, under the assumption my readers understand the difference between mind and brain. As such, I am not asserting that the terrorists are physically sick. From their pics and videos it’s clear many are - obesity, hypertension, anal retention - though that isn’t the point. It’s their mental programming, their minds, that have been infected. Infected with what?

Put simply? A disjointed ontological phenomenology obscured, obfuscated, and accelerated by persistently chaotic epistemological aberrations. Said plainly? Their ability to process reality has been impaired.

Why? Racial resentment, poor economic opportunities, an aversion to books and learning? Yes. All that. Plus? The internet, which has created a new Dark Ages.

Paradoxically, one built on light.

3.

Look. Self-interested demagogues intent on self-aggrandizement are nothing new. Nor are their ability to rally or rile a downtrodden populace. Sadly, demonizing the ‘other’ is also pretty par for the course in these scenarios. An old story, all told. What’s new this time is how it happens.

In a single second - count it out! One Mississippi - a beam, or photon of light moves 186,000 miles. Roughly seven times the circumference of the Earth. The new speed of hate. The internet, that modern marvel ushering in Humanity’s first truly post-scarcity resource, is built on light. Philosophers have for millennia wed knowledge with light. And now we all (well, those of us in the post-industrial world) carry a terminal connected to this internet in our pockets. A stunning marvel of human ingenuity. One would imagine that access to such a wellspring of knowledge and information would have a truly edifying affect on the Human Condition. Perhaps, in aggregate, or retrospect, it will. At the moment?

Yeah ...

At the moment it seems that the more access to information humans have the more they double down on tribal identities, wish fulfillment, instant gratification (read: porn), perceived slights, fantasy lands, Rick Astley videos, or the jibbering incoherent rantings of simple capitalists fomenting the fragile emotional states of low information individuals who feel they have no place in this world. This is a fundamentally devastating epistemological conundrum. Why? For centuries the barrier to the future was the amount of information, knowledge, you could access or process. Yet here and now? Here and now there might be too much access. Too much information. More so, the striking fact that our ability, as a species, writ large, to process or parse this information has not kept pace with the information at hand. A sad equation that inevitably leads to moments like 01/06/21.

4.

The Trump Terrorists of January 6th, 2021, weaponized the internet to facilitate their attempted coup. As did their ‘dear leader’ throughout his humiliating single term in office. In fact, it was the geometrical acceleration of connectivity and interconnectedness enabled via the web and its insanely capitalist platforms that allowed for their ‘movement’ to incubate and evolve. While it is true that neo-liberal policies advocating globalist economics and monetary policy are at the current root cause of most ills genuinely affecting rural, or poor, or uneducated MAGA-heads, it’s also true that apart from an Independent from Vermont no one in the political economy of the last couple decades gave much of a shit about these poor and dispossessed inheritors of old racial mythemes and toxic narratives of self-reliance. No one that is, other than their ‘dear leader’. Never mind he didn’t intend to ease their suffering in any material, or structural way. He talked about it. He tweeted about it. And then he gave them a little song and dance at the rallies. Breathtaking stuff.

However, it wasn’t just the performative act of playing ‘authoritarian’ that got them hot and bothered. No, it was at the same time the eternal need to belong to a group, the legitimate feeling of economic obsolescence, coupled with these new tools of information transmission. Tools that at once gave them powers unheralded and seemingly ensconced them in a protective shell, a perpetually larval manifestation of all their baser inclinations. A reactionary ‘safe space’ from which they could launch a thousand ships of intolerance and hate. What good is truth if you can’t weaponize it? What good are facts if you share them with everyone else?

And so we find ourselves revising Plato. There isn’t just one cave in which we are chained, kept from reality. There are multiple tunnels, alcoves, deeper caverns in which we might dwell. Furthermore, if lucky, there are different days, vistas, egresses in which we can escape from the confines of ignorance. Much like the lucky Mormons, it would seem the far-right believes there are plenty of planets in which ‘Truth’ can dwell. Never mind that multiplying ‘Truth’ in such a way doesn’t actually produce more truth.

In fact, it reduces ‘Truth’. Impoverishes it. Hollows it out.

Which is sad, really. For the major harm caused by these rebels isn’t to our democratic institutions, nor our mythological vision of our nature, nor that ever-loving economy - but to the very fabric that binds the social contract on which all the preceding rely.

That fabric being, specifically, a shared objective reality.

5.

How can we survive if we can’t agree on basic facts? Can a multi-racial, multi-cultural, representative democracy exist when a large percentage of the comprising citizens don’t believe in, or even acknowledge, that that’s actually what’s happening? Is White Supremacy so fundamentally a part of our nation’s DNA that the country can’t exist without it? If so, for those of us who vehemently oppose White Supremacy, the question might then be: is the country worth saving?

Most versions of Western Ethics indicate that violence is not the cure. Nor do I advocate such a position. At the same time I’m deeply troubled, because due their illness these actors are neither rational or coherent. Ergo, we can’t reason with them either. So what next?

To corral the revolutionary, if inchoate, spirit of these sick, fringe minds diseased as they are by hate, grievance, and digital oubliettes would any policy proposals be acceptable? Perhaps as fantastic an idea as the images from 01/06/21, what if the Federal Government decided to halt its obsequious sycophantry to corporate America and ‘elites’ and instead actually, seriously, emphatically reinvested in the heartland, in Main Street, in the working class? Wouldn’t it be ironic if a little more socialism was truly the cure these hatemongers require?

6.

Maybe we should step back and listen to the wisdom of George W. Bush.

Confronting what was at the time the most disheartening terror attack on the homeland, Bush made clear not all who could otherwise be lumped in with the terrorists were terrorists. In the same way that, yes, not all Trump voters are Trump Terrorists.

Even so. Bush made it clear you needed to pick a side.

With us - toward a diverse future in which the promise of the Founders is emboldened and expanded for all who live between our shores. Or against us - back to your stunted hovels and holes with all the other low information troglodytes you like to cosplay revolution with.  

Choose.

It’s your call. But choose quickly, because history is watching, and only one path moves toward the future.

C. R. Stapor Longmont, CO 01/16/21