#and YES I FORGOT DISSOCIATION AS A DEFENSE MECHANISM

[3000-200-grains-of-salt]

Ladies, gentlemen, and those of us who know better: after a week of work, 4 late or missing homework assignments, one very full basket of laundry and far too many friends who are sick of hearing about this, I present to you:

The Hels To Pay Tango Tek Trauma Flowchart.

Featuring 59 color-coded cards, five asterisks, eight billion arrows, and cited sources. Ive worked on this for far, far too long. Idk guys i just like dissecting characters :D i think i was planning to be more eloquent with this post but here we are. im tired.

Full board here (you can add comments and draw):

@aquaquadrant @lunarcrown thought yall might like to look through this ^_^ i hope i was able to kinda get the gist of what you guys were thinking with tangos character, i really find the way he's written fascinating!

i had the idea a little while ago, about how the core of tango's whole character was a vicious cycle, started by trauma that got forged into central beliefs, and running on fear and guilt. and, VERY out of character for me i KNOW, (sarcasm) i made a chart! it started with just the central cycle with catalysts, but. it. it branched out.

feel free to add on (or call out my mistakes lol) hope ya like it. be prepared for A Lot of reading :]

[insomniblaque]

I’ve been thinking about romantic love for a little while now. Well, mostly romantic, but in general I’ve been contemplating my relationship with men and where love fits in those relationships. I’ll be honest, romantic love hasn’t manifested itself in the way I’ve seen other people experience it. I’ve never been in a mutual relationship with someone I’d call a partner, I haven’t been intimate with a person long enough for that part of a relationship to materialize, and I’ve been thinking a lot about why that is, and the role I’ve had in perpetuating that experience. When I was first trying to learn what love was supposed to look like, around middle school I’d say, I wanted to blame myself and relatively superficial factors based on some of my most intimate insecurities — how I felt about my body, my skin, my hair as the reasons why boys didn’t come flocking to me. I blamed things that are uniquely tied to what I looked like. The way I saw love being expressed to other girls — girls who were taller, lighter, skinnier, with less acne molded my expectation of what men wanted and fueled the insecurities I had because they seemed to be everything I wasn’t. While these thoughts existed and played a role in how closed off I was to the idea of professing my intense like for men, they didn’t stay for long, mainly because of the relationships I had with men at that time. My father always made it a point to affirm my worth. My father loved my smile, my gap, my violet gums, my cheeks and voice and never forgot to remind me of how special and beautiful  I am. He would jest about when I would bring a boy home often because “there was no way they weren’t asking to approach me” because I look the way I do. My friendships with mostly boys around that time also offset some of that insecurity because I had friends who not only valued me as a person but appreciated me for things I didn’t necessarily notice in myself like my wit, sense of humor, ability to listen and call them out on their shit.

Over the years, I’ve gone through different phases of trying to redefine my insecurities for myself but ultimately so that I wouldn’t let these self limiting beliefs stand in the way of the potential relationships I could develop. It started with my face. The ugly duckling years of middle school prompted my first interests in learning about makeup so that I could distract people from what I didn’t want them to see.  It evolved into a genuine appreciation of the art and eventually a form of therapy for me. I loved beautifying myself for me -- a stray compliment (though I didn’t know how to accept them) also contributed to the boost in dopamine but ultimately, it was the agency of being able to do something only I knew how to do at the time that added to my confidence. Next was my hair, I think I was the most insecure about that for the longest time. My sister always had thicker, longer hair than me and my worth — especially in a deeply Caribbean household felt tied to how manageable and beautiful I could be and hair was the first indicator of that. When relaxed, my hair was thin, uneven, and barely scraped my shoulders. In high school, after having skipped a couple of relaxer sessions before the first day of my sophomore year, I chopped it all off with kitchen scissors. I remember wanting to see if I could feel beautiful without hair and that would be the “social experiment”. Learning to love the hair that grew out of my head at any stage and detaching the value of my beauty from it was not what I thought I was doing that day at 15, but looking back my confidence grew over time from this dissociation. I was just a year and a half early from the boom of natural hair journeys and big chops of that era (yes, if you haven’t noticed I am ahead of my time in a lot of ways lmao) where other women and girls were also expanding their definitions of self-love via their hair and that also made me feel more confident that I can be all of myself around anyone. Hair no longer was a contributing insecurity for me. Recently, I did another dramatic chop, rooted more in an existential crisis, but it also kind of reminded me of the first — how I could still see myself as beautiful without relying on the factors that are called conventionally beautiful. Last, was my body. I had been prone to unhealthy habits rooted in my poor body image for as long as I could remember like restricting meals, unsustainable diets, even at one point abusing drugs (long story) to try to shave off of a few pounds or to try to find the semblance of abs under all my stomach fat. This insecurity was the hardest to shake. Looking at old pictures of myself these days baffles me because when I was trying my hardest to lose weight, I was probably at my skinniest. I didn’t begin redefining my body image until I got to college and needed to find a way to curb the freshman 15. A friend introduced to weightlifting our freshman year and all I can remember is how powerful it made me feel. The simple movements of a squat or a deadlift wasn’t what brought the thrill, it was the amount of weight I could hold in my hands for an extended period of time, the mass I could move that made me feel like if I could do that then I could do anything. Fitness in the form of weightlifting where I was tracking progress with what I could do and not how I looked like really helped me redefine the boundaries of my body. I still struggle with body image every now and again since I’m still very far from a set of well defined abs and too many things jiggle without my permission most times and I think it will always be a work in progress for someone like me who’s intrinsically a perfectionist but the frame shift I have experienced since has empowered me in ways that I never thought would belong to me.

Now back to men. I think it was around this time last year that I started taking a critical look at why I was the way I was where men are concerned. It was at the height of my dad’s battle with cancer and I was ini school failing and riddled with guilt about it. The first real idea of what a relationship would look like for me also came up in my thoughts. A guy , the topic of many stories and a couple of playlists, who I had a lot of respect for but for all intents and purposes didn’t reciprocate that respect in the ways I felt I needed kept coming into my mind at that time. We had a relatively complicated history spanning almost ten years now and it was the kind of connection that I didn’t want to bring with me as powerful as it was. The back and forth took me back to a place where my insecurities were the root of my worth and validation and that was no longer my truth. Some part of me really wanted to believe that we were the kind of people who would always find our way to each other and I held a lot of love for him. But given the place I was an in at the time, I felt like I was on the road to losing some of the most important men in my life and I wanted to do as much that was in my power to curb that by questioning the love l held for all the men in my life. So I sent some letters and one of them was to him. Disclaimer, I was really embarrassed by the letter and even more embarrassed that I sent it to his school email so he had no choice but to read it. But in this letter, I thanked him. I thanked him for seeing me— all of me when I felt like nobody did but also told him that I needed to cut the ties that attached my sense of self to how he saw me and felt about me considering he was one of the first people to admit to seeing me in a romantic context. We were becoming adults, diverging paths and still something in me was holding out for him and I knew I needed to work on letting that go. It took me a week to write that letter and another week and some liquid courage to send it to him. I wrote a couple of other letters, mailed some, kept others. Overall in this exercise, I realized the lack of emotional vulnerability I have always struggled with, the coldness as a defense mechanism that I was comfortable using and the sense of security I felt from the validation of my father and my best male friends all fueled the way I shot myself in the foot when it came to letting new men into my life. Fast forward, my father has passed, this man is back in my life in the context of a healthy friendship and I am working on the final frontier of emotional vulnerability so that whatever the next romantic experience that comes my way, I won’t run from it. I made this with all the men I’ve loved in mind, my daddy, my best friend, the first person I said I love you to and meant it, a person who I’ve recently resigned myself to just get to know as opposed to making advances on and every situation I have yet to encounter where the male half of our species is involved. This is to all the men I’ve loved before, will always love, and hopefully will learn to love. Enjoy it.

[thisstableground]

babblin about this weird-ass week i just had under the cut

so obvs tuesday was therapy day and it’s the first time i’ve explained the thing in more than like, three abrupt sentences. i wasn’t quite ready for the first person present tense approach so we went through events just past tense, and she asked for more details as needed and it was terrible and exhausting and then it turns out even though i felt like i said everything i needed to she was like “and we’ll work on slowly expanding on the parts you skimmed over” like THIS IS WHAT YOU CALL SKIMMING??

i mean a lot of it totally was skimming but still. yikes.

(my therapist is great, by the way, and did not judge me at all when she was like “did you bring anything to ground you” and i was like “yes i have an assortment of seals”)

my homework for the two weeks between sessions (because okay, the one not great thing about my therapist is that she has got yet anther training day this tuesday and so im missing ANOTHER week at WHAT I WOULD CALL A CRUCIAL POINT) was to write up the events as a script with as much detail as possible and i was going to take a break/work on it slowly but i had some momentum going, so i did that on wednesday morningand then aggressively remembered a significant amount of details that i had forgotten and have been frankly a mess since

there are also some realisations which i am super not happy about and definitely not gonna write up on a public blog of the “i know this is normal and a lot of people experience this and that i don’t judge them for it but because it’s me i must feel Guilty and Ashamed and Wrong”. not sure what to do about that so i’m just kinda leaving it in the corner for now

the rest of the week has been alternating between the following:

holy shit have i been dissociating something fierce in a way that i haven’t for a very long time.  i’m talking “standing on the stairs for 20 minutes because i forgot that i existed halfway down”. and i had one of the worst dissociation/flashback combos that i’ve had in years while i was warming up a ciabatta roll in the oven the other day which was very surreal because 97% of me was like shaking and dying but the other 3% was like “sophia snap out of it you gotta think of the BREAD”

(i saved the bread just in time and had a pretty decent sandwich, you’ll be glad to hear)

i have vertigo! that’s new and hideous! literally feels like someone keeps grabbing my eyeballs and shaking them around. it feels exactly like being drunk and i do not enjoy it at all.

other fun physical symptoms include: permanent tension headache. Just So Sweaty At Totally Random Moments. numb hands! tinnitus! i’m trying to take the fact that these are new as kind of a good sign, like when you feel sick for ages then you throw up and the part where you’re actually throwing up is the worst but you feel so much better after. although i have in fact thrown up like four times and do not yet feel better, but metaphorically.

i keep finding myself in the mood where i’m like “i kind of want to talk this situation out with a friend” but then the second i go to write a message or think about calling someone i get so aggressively and instantly sleepy that it’s like nope, just gonna immediately nap. someone on reddit said this is probably a defense mechanism because the idea of talking about it is overwhelming and i’m pretty sure they’re right but what a goddamn stupid defense mechanism it is. i’m also torn because part of me is like, what do i expect to get out of telling anyone? how do i start that conversation? what if i start that conversation and someone is like “i don’t see the point of you telling me this”, which is how i feel like everyone will react. so i haven’t quite got over the Actually Talking About It hurdle yet but i guess the fact i want to is big progress from like a few months ago where i could barely even acknowledge to myself that the thing happened.

other progress/good things:

weirdly, i have not had one single nightmare since tuesday. this is the longest i’ve been without nightmares for a while. i can only assume that i’m doing all my feeling bad while conscious now which is probably better?

done a lot of Crying Intensely While Singing which to me i consider as a good sign – it means i’m not just avoiding anything that might give me an emotion and it’s very cathartic. been real into my tarot again too -  i’m trying to learn the meanings of the cards by heart. i have the Wild Unknown deck and it’s so pretty and calming to look at.

i have done so much exercise. more exercise than i have in the past year combined probably. like two to three hours of yoga a day. i went on what was going to be ten minute walk just to prove that going on a walk wouldn’t help and people would stop suggesting it, but annoyingly i almost immediately starting enjoying it and ended up being out three hours. i got extremely lost and somehow was in a field with no idea how i got there. that wasn’t dissociation, that’s just me having no sense of direction. my landlord was like “where did you go on your walk” and im like “i don’t know but there were definitely cows there”

made a real good turkey and black bean chilli the other day. not quite as 100% on the eating as i should be but i don’t think living off turkey chilli and potatoes and frosties and juiceboxes is too bad, considering.

[kitsuningtonshippoknockoff]

Mostly Air

Heya kids.  Another Kit/Ren thing.  Might go through some more revision, but I wanted it to get out, since I’ve been sitting on it for months. Standard BtD warnings apply.

---

Christopher Kirillovich Shiponikov (his full name; an anchor) doesn’t know what other people think about dissociation.  He’s never let anyone know it happens to him—or didn’t, until Ren—and he’s never met anyone else who dissociates.  Well.  He’s met people who try to do it for some weird kind of fun, with drugs and music and ASMR.  What they’re after doesn’t really seem to be what happens to him.  He assumes, though, that most people think it’s something like catatonia—just sitting staring at the wall, unresponsive.  Dead to the world with your eyes open.

And sometimes that does indeed happen to Kit.  He could not count the hours he’s spent curled up in his tent, unmoving.  Once he ended up pretty badly dehydrated because he just couldn’t bring himself to get up and drink.  He did used to think that was part of his dissociation, but he’s beginning to suspect that’s more of depression thing, a thought he’s tried to resist because he hates the idea of being A Person With Depression.  It just seems so maudlin.

Not like he’s ever gonna talk to a professional, of course, so who’s to say, really?

The point is, when Kit dissociates, most people don’t notice.  Sometimes even he doesn’t notice until an episode has gone on for a full day.  He can make wonderfully weird conversation; he can flirt like some kind of six-foot-plus Hopak-dancing Bond Girl; and he can get dressed and jump out the window in under three minutes in all circumstances that require it.  He can do everything he does when he’s not dissociating.

He’s just not… there.

Kit actually prefers his more blatant episodes, the ones where people do see something is wrong.  When he stares too long at nothing.  When he asks people to repeat sentences they haven’t finished.  When someone asks how he’s doing and the only thing he can think of saying is the truth: I don’t know.  It’s easy enough to play those off as part of his bizarre schtick.  Hey, Tommy Wiseau can get a table at the Palm just by weirding out the staff; the method works.

What Christopher Kirillovich Shiponikov (his full name; an anchor) hates is when he has an episode, and nobody can tell.

He’s pretty sure Ren can’t tell.

Dissociation is often a defense mechanism that starts in childhood.  For a totally random example: If one night five armed strangers broke into your house, shot your dad, burned your mother alive in front of you, forced you to eat her heart, and then spent a day burning you with a hot iron, you might start dissociating!  It’s funny, really.  Like your body tells your soul, Hey pal, no hard feelings if you don’t wanna stick around for this.  And it is soul rather than mind; Your mind is stuck down there with the rest of you trying to make sense of things and keep you alive.

But you aren’t there.

Whatever you really are.

His body and mind reacted just as they needed to when Ren took Kit down to the basement and tortured him.  When beautiful Ren took Kit down to the basement and tortured him.  When Ren with whom Kit had fallen in love took Kit down to the basement and tortured him.  When sad, lonely, sweet, smart, gentle Ren, Ren who cheered Kit up when he was sad about stupid things on the internet, who smelled like soap and clean water and who was the only, only, only other fox Kit had ever met after they all died, they all died, they all died, they all died—

--took Kit down to the basement and tortured him.  Kit screamed in all the right places.  He cowered.  He apologized profusely, crying.  He said he loved Ren, that he was sorry, he’d just been scared all his life and he never felt safe and his feelings were all fucked up and he loved Ren, he loved him the moment he met him, but he was scared.  So scared.

All of that was true.

Understanding dawned on Ren: Kit really was fucked up.  And that satisfied him.  Kit wasn’t trying to withhold his love at all; he was just twisted up inside.  And now, of course, Ren knew a way to fix things.  He knew how to get Kit’s real, true feelings out of him.  And he’d do it again, and again, and again—

You don’t know that.

Yes I do.

You don’t know what Ren was thinking.

He kept hurting me.  Even after I started screaming.  It wasn’t just the screams he wanted.  He said it has to be like this.

Maybe it won’t happen again.

If someone tortures you once, they’ll do it forever.

I knew what would happen if I was caught.

I let him catch me.

I deserve this.

“Kit?”  Ren calls softly.  His voice is so lovely.  A head raises itself from the couch cushion, and eyes peer in the direction of the voice.

“Christopher Kirillovich Shiponikov,” a mouth says.  From far away, Kit screams in frustration.  Ren looks a little taken aback, even though he didn’t hear the scream.

“Um… what?”

“Nothing,” Kit hears himself say.  Head lies down, eyes close.  “S-sorry. I’m—I’m still—”

“Shh…” Ren pads over to the couch.  “Everything’s OK.”  He smiles more deliberately.  He’s trying to be reassuring.  “Can I sit next to you?  I thought you might be getting a little lonely.”

It then occurs to Kit that he has no idea when, exactly, he got where he is—on Ren’s couch, shrouded in blankets that smell like fancy, environmentally friendly laundry detergent. He gets lost a moment, considering the smell.  It smells a little like Ren (but without the blood underneath).  Eyes dart upward, watching Ren furtively.  Kit doesn’t remember how long ago the basement was.  He doesn’t know how long he’s been lying here in Ren’s living room, alone.  But he does understand that apparently Ren has been… giving him space.

You know, the kind of thing you do for someone who’s had a bad day.  

Bad night.  

What even is time.

A mouth says, “Please don’t leave me alone,” and Ren’s smile turns tender.  His eyes shine.

“Just—scoot over a little, OK?  No, other way—shh, shh... it’s OK, I’m just gonna sit here… and you can put your head down here… that’s right…”  All Ren’s movements are slow, careful—telegraphed.  He’s treating Kit just the way you’d treat a wounded animal, working to be as unthreatening as possible.

I wish he’d kill me like that.  All gentle and sweet while I bleed out.  He’d hold me, and pet me, and tell me everything was OK.  I’d believe him.  It would be like going to sleep again after a bad dream.  It would be a nice way to die.

A head has ended up in Ren’s lap.  Ren is petting him now, Kit realizes, but not killing him.  Ren could.  His hands are delicate and warm and soft, but there are claws.  Claws just like Kit has.  But the funny thing is that even claws can be gentle.  Ren scratches gingerly, carding through Kit’s hair.  Ren makes a quiet, pleased noise; he must like the way it feels.  Kit sighs and shifts his head (like dogs do dogs do that fucking dogs) so that Ren can tell where he really wants to be scratched.  Ren laughs a little, and focuses on the spot at the back of Kit’s head just to the side and above the nape of his neck.  Kit makes a soft sound in his throat.  When Ren withdraws his hand he manages to restrain a noise of disappointment, and then Ren starts petting his ears.

It’s been so, so long (fourteen years) since anyone’s done this for him.  He never even let Mei Cai do it, and she was willing.  Sometimes he’d try to do it for himself, but of course it’s not the same, and usually made him feel worse.  Sometimes even nauseous, if he kept at it.  His mom and dad and even his sister used to do it from time to time, when he was sitting in someone’s lap or about to go to sleep.  And there was…

A brow furrows.

There was a sound, wasn’t there?  A sound that went with it, with the petting.  Why would there be a sound?  His mind is frustratingly sluggish.  Maybe he’s about to go to sleep.

Wait.  No.

Fear.  Fear is making it hard to think.  But it’s detached.  In his mind, not his body.

Terror.

Why?  The body is safe.  The body is comfortable.

What is…

Oh.

The sound.

Kit is… purring.

He’s pressed close to Ren.  Ren had stopped a moment, shocked by the noise, but he picked up petting again readily.  He’s murmuring something again, but Kit can’t focus, not with his mind, body, nor soul.  It hasn’t been so long since Kit last purred; he purred the first night he met Ren, when he got down on his knees and let Ren touch his ears, feel that they were real after Ren had let Kit feel that Ren’s ears were real.  When all he knew was happiness and a strange, sweet apprehension.

I knelt to you, Ren.

Was that too much?

Was that not enough?

A sigh slips out of him, and Kit purrs and purrs for Ren.  For Ren, whom he loves.  For Ren who hurt him.  For Ren who will hurt him again, surely.  For broken Ren who, shyly, hesitantly, begins to purr back.  They are together.  They are warm.  And they are happy.  This is happiness.  You can be happy even when you’re in despair.  Kit knows this. 

Kit doesn’t know how long it lasts.

Kit  doesn’t want it to stop.

The fear goes away, and there’s a pleasant numbness.

Kit is lost.

But eventually, Ren moves away a little.  Kit makes a scared noise, and Ren makes low, reassuring sounds in response.

“Hey, hey... it’s OK.  I’m not going far.  I just have to get up to make dinner,” Ren tells him, “Remember?  You can eat it here with me, don’t worry.  But all you’ve had today is popcorn, right?”

Is that right?  Eyes cast around.  There’s an empty bowl at one end of the couch, still smelling of butter.  Oh.  Ren must have brought that to him earlier.  He must have eaten.

He forgot.

“Did I…” he hears himself say, “Did... I say thank-you for feeding me?”

“You did,” Ren says, smiling, “Don’t worry.  But we’ve gotta get some real food into you, to make you feel better.  Popcorn’s tasty, but it’s mostly air.”

Kit gets confused about time again when Ren leaves.  He’s not sure how long it took Ren to say that last sentence: ‘Popcorn’s tasty, but it’s mostly air.’

Mostly air.

Mostly air.

Like me.

That little voice sounds so flat.  It’s hardly even sad.  But it rings in his ears, trapped in his head.  Mostly air.  Like me. I’m mostly air.  No anchor.  Cut and burned away.  Mostly air.  I’m mostly air.  Not a person.  Just a dream.  Nothing left.  Mostly air.

Can you tell, Ren? Can you tell how much of myself I’ve lost?  No. Why would you?  It doesn’t show.  And maybe… maybe there’s nothing to show.  Maybe I never had any self to begin with.  Maybe it was all mostly air.  Maybe I’d only fooled myself into thinking I was real.  Maybe I’m my own bad dream.  But will you notice when even that is gone, Ren?  When all that’s left is a soft, hollow thing that clings to you and tells you you are loved?

Bet he’d like that, spits a much crueler, nastier voice, Bet he wants that.  Bet he’ll be fucking happy.  No person, just a good fucking dream.

Mostly air.

But that’s not true.  Kit knows it’s not.  Ren would be hurt if he understood what had happened.  Ren would be sad.  Ren would be upset, maybe he’d even regret what he’d done.  But only if he could tell, and Kit…

Kit doesn’t think Ren can.  He hopes Ren can’t.  He wants Ren to be happy.  He loves Ren.  Maybe all there really is to him is love for Ren.  That’s a nice thought.

Kit has forgotten all this by the time Ren comes back, or maybe he forgets it because Ren comes back.  He feels a little realer when Ren comes back.

Of course he would.

He’s Ren’s good dream.

Ren helps Kit sit up. He’s set a tray on the coffee table in front of the couch, and he looks so hopeful.  He’s arranged an elegant meal: There are strawberries, there’s a little rice, there’s some yakitori, and dipping sauces, and besides all that off to the side is a blood-red dish of raw flesh.

Raw hearts.  A mouth smiles.

“Never… never met anybody who liked chicken hearts but me,” Kit says softly.  Ren’s smile is bright and beautiful, the sharpness of his teeth soothingly familiar.

“I love chicken hearts! They’re hard to get fresh, but they’re up there with mac & cheese and dango.  Ah, I’m so glad you like them too!  I thought you might~”  He presses a quick kiss to the corner of kit’s mouth.  That feels good.  Kit blushes a little.

His cuts still sting when he moves the wrong way.  His shoulder aches where the nail went in.

“The yakitori is chicken heart, too.  I can make something else quick if you want more variety, but I thought it might be fun to decide which we like better~”

“Yes,” Kit hears himself say.  He picks a raw chicken heart first, holding it delicately in his claws.  He wants to taste blood.  He wants it to fill him up.  Ren keeps talking, and Kit is sorry, so sorry, but it’s hard to hear him.  It’s OK, though.  Ren doesn’t mind repeating himself.  He’s just so glad to have Kit.

He raises the heart to his teeth, and bites down.