#Jesus Christ I'm 25 years old and feel like a teenager

[xhjl03]

When I was back in my childhood home last October, I was sitting on the floor when I looked at my old desk. I used to hide under there when I was stressed or upset or afraid. At some point—I must have been no older than 14, because I think that's when I was no longer able to fit—I had written with a Sharpie "I don't think I'll live long enough to graduate college."

I'm 25 now. Almost 26. I graduated from undergrad four years ago. When I see other people talk about finding these sort of messages, they mention how proud they are for making it so much further than their younger selves could have imagined.

I'm not proud. It feels awful, actually, to know that I've been living in complete and total misery for over a decade. I've been trudging along for years out of a sense of obligation and guilt towards the people that love me. In some ways, I'm worse than I ever was as a teenager. I used to be passive suicidal. I used to just hope something bad would happen to me. But now I have to spend so much energy actively resisting the urge to take a bunch of pills that I saved from my surgery, drink as much vodka as I can stand, and then go jump off a bridge. I look at the third rail warning signs and mentally gauge how easy it would be to climb that fence, wondering if they turn off the electricity after midnight when the trains stop running. I look up how to get a gun in this state (not easy) and look up if you can still get carbon monoxide poisoning from cars.

I don't think I realized that there were different types of depression as a kid. Back then, I felt the traditional sense of sadness where I could barely get out of bed and where my panic attacks were rocking back and forth and hyperventilating. You could tell I was depressed.

I go to work every day. I was going to school every day when I was enrolled. I shower, cook dinner, clean my house, walk the dog. But I ache. I'm angry all the time, I'm stressed, and I'm so tense that when the nurse tells me to relax my muscles I can't because I don't know how. My panic attacks are silent now. I keep working through them with my mind racing with all the different ways I could die and just end it right now until they stop and I suddenly feel so tired that I could almost fall asleep at my desk.

I don't remember being a teenager. But I do know that the sheer frustration and anger and hopelessness that I feel now is new. Teenage me felt like I was trapped in a steel box with no windows, so I never tried to do anything. Adult me is trapped in a normal room with the windows boarded up from the outside and the door walled up with concrete and I'm screaming and banging on it but every just thinks I have to try for a little longer and I'll get it open.

I'll be 26 in May. I have spent more than half my life being bounced from therapist to therapist and trying a dozen different antidepressants. It's not worth it. Everyone says your 20s are the worst and things get better in your 30s and jesus fucking christ I can't do four more years of this.

[ganymedesclock]

On the subject of 'Don't call Shiro Dad' thing, I'm 30 now and Jesus Christ if I was in Shiro's position at 25 I'd be an absolute trainwreck. Like when you're a teenager, people in their twenties seem like adults, but we're all faking it! We don't know what we're fucking doing! That is the dark secret of adulthood.

Spoken as someone who’s 22, why do you think I’m so driven about this.

And most 25-year-olds aren’t also dealing with flagrant PTSD and cut off from therapeutic support.

Like... any version of Shiro in a mundane AU that retains his trauma, I’m always bewildered by, “what do you mean he doesn’t have a therapy dog and a regular counselor he’s seeing”

Shiro in general, as I’ve said before, strikes me as always someone who was kind of a driven overachiever and perfectionist, he’s very focused on his image, and seeming like this charismatic bastion of certainty. It’s actually one of the more interesting points of foil between past Zarkon and Shiro- in that for both of them, the concept of “discipline” and rigid standards of behavior are a major factor, but in opposite ways.

Zarkon pretty much was very poor at managing his own feelings and desires. If he wanted something he bashed ahead with it using his force of personality and stubbornness to get there. He resented anybody trying to tell him otherwise. But he instead directed all his unrelenting standards outwards, on other people.

Shiro, with very rare exception, does not put his standards on others. And said exceptions are virtually always when it seems as if he’s projecting onto other people.

Slav? Someone obviously traumatized and anxious, and Shiro absolutely explodes at him, why aren’t you just putting your issues in a jar because the fact that you’re affecting other people with them is unacceptable, and this is unlike him as Pidge and Lance’s near-horrified reactions tell us:

And Shiro himself realizes this, and tries to soften up or at bare minimum ignore Slav because on a level he realizes Slav doesn’t deserve it- but that first impression got under his defenses.

From s3e6 through s4e1, we see that Shiro is uncharacteristically hard on Keith- and I think this is the same mechanism afoot. He’s projecting. He feels like he can’t be Black Paladin so he’s trying to load all of those expectations of what that should be onto Keith and that trips up the empathy and compassion we know he has for Keith’s situation, that comes back full force when he realizes that his expectations, his insistence on Keith replacing him, nearly drove Keith away from the team.

And what this tells us is that Keith and Slav are effectively collateral damage for Shiro’s monstrously destructive self-talk. Shiro’s bedside manner with Slav’s trauma is how he’s handling his own issues. And he’s slowly, painstakingly getting better.

This scene, I’ve said before, is actually one of the most heartwarming scenes for me. Sure, at a glance, this seems like a major low for Shiro, and it is, but that’s why I think it’s so important: because there’s no way in hell he hasn’t crashed like this or come close to it before. He’s trying to hold up a massive weight, endlessly, without talking about it.

For Shiro to have returned to the team and spent some time in isolation in his room, not trying to clean up and pretty much having himself a depression power nap, is ironically one of the healthiest things he’s done because he’s allowing himself to react like somebody who’s not okay. And what just happened to him? Everything in s3e5? He was not okay. There is no reasonable person that would expect him to be okay after that.

He actually looked at his team and went “I’m not okay, and I need time to become okay again.”

And it’s a baby step, and I can’t help but believe he cut it off way too short. Because now that we have a better sample of post-s2 Shiro, I feel like the unnerving sense of “fakeness” achieved by the strange camera angle and slightly awkward posing in this scene...

...Wasn’t trying to warn us that there’s something unnatural about Shiro now.

I think it was trying to warn us that Shiro forced himself to clean up and go back to acting like Good Charismatic Leader Figure before he was actually ready. This is why he feels stilted, going through the motions: because mentally he’s still sitting there in a dark room in his undershirt going “what... the fuck... just happened.” As I think anyone would with prior trauma if they were literally abruptly teleported from somewhere they felt safe into the hands of the people who hurt them the most.

But he doesn’t see himself as allowed to do that for long. (which is still an improvement over thinking he’s not allowed to do that ever- if you want a direct canon example of Shiro directly stuffing a panic attack into a box, see s1e9) He’s worrying the team, they all need this more than he does (he thinks.)

What I think is interesting about Shiro’s new look, is that it actually does make him look younger than his previous style, and personally, I think this is character development rather than clone- I think this is indicative that the pedestal that separated Shiro from his team is breaking.

Because even if they come to it from opposite directions and for opposite reasons, isolating themselves and their issues from their team is one of the fatal flaws that literally killed Zarkon. Shiro is gonna need to cut that out if he’s gonna survive.

(not to sound overly alarmist. I think he is gonna survive, because, again, it already seems like he’s setting down the path of being more honest with himself, and with others)

Honestly, I think that’s totally why Black didn’t immediately take him back- when we see in s4e1, it wasn’t because Black didn’t trust Shiro, as when he asked them to, they did.

Black, as someone who lives in Shiro’s head, was calling beans on his speedy turnaround. Black knew Shiro was faking it and went “uh, no thanks, Keith’s got this, you’re gonna stay home, and take care of yourself,” with a very, ironically Shiro-like “you need this more than I do, and I feel responsible for taking care of you. Whatever happened to hurt you, even if it was completely out of my power, I think it was my fault.”

(which is a small thing I find completely morbidly hilarious: Shiro reads the Black Lion as a kind of immaculate untroubled figure whose behavior around Zarkon- which reads so much like anxiety and panic attacks- are judgments against his inherent lack of worth, when he plies most of the same methods himself to cover his own trauma. They’re so alike that Shiro is misunderstanding the Black Lion.)

[fortheloveoffitz]

That moment when you realize you're crushing on a co-worker....