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byunmyeon · 3 years

Text

Metanoia

↳ pairing: lee suho x reader

↳ synopsis: this is the sequel to philophobia. the world of red strings is one you haven’t been able to see for a long time, and now that you’ve found your unwilling soulmate, you have no interest in regaining that sight.

↳ warnings: language, angst, angst, and more angst, mentions of depression, mentions of death

— note: due to popular demand, here’s part two!

Something was wrong.

There wasn’t some pivotal event or action that made Suho conscious of the shift, he just knew. This premonition could’ve been assessed as an erroneous inkling that emanated from the vast rift between you two, but you hadn’t given any indication that the lack of recognition from your soulmate was the cause. In fact, you seemed perfectly content with disregarding Suho’s existence.

An entire month had gone by since you confronted him, and the entire situation had passed without further incident. Neither one of you had spoken since that ill-fated day.

However, it was impossible not to notice the drastic change in your character. The way you smiled was different in a way that seemed off, and there was also a certain enervation constantly embracing you. But the biggest difference was your lack of interest in just about anything. Suho might’ve thought it had everything to do with him, but again, there was no clear indication of that.

Nonetheless, ignoring you didn’t make him unaware of the unnamed sensation that had latched itself onto him since then.

It’s not like Suho wanted to notice the contrast in your behavior, but it was something he couldn’t help. Every time you came within a ten meter radius, his eyes would compulsively find their way over to you. Suho was always careful to not get caught staring, although it hardly mattered. It’s not like you looked in his general direction anymore. And even when you did happen to meet his gaze, it was for a fleeting moment that passed by so quickly that it couldn’t even be considered a full second.

Your uncharacteristic disposition made him worry. Not for you, but for him. Suho was deeply concerned that you might expose your shared secret in an abrupt moment of anger and hurt. That’s all it was. Nothing more, nothing less.

To his relief, that moment never came.

Even in the face of all the hurtful things he had said and done, you didn’t mention to Jugyeong that Suho was your soulmate. It was a development he hadn’t expected. Sure, you had told him, no, promised him that you would keep silent about the string that bounded you two together, but he was convinced that you could easily change your mind whenever you felt like it. You hadn’t.

Truthfully, your selfless act made him develop a fondness for you. Suho hadn’t expected you to be so understanding and considerate since it seemed like you were genuinely hurt that he didn’t care to acknowledge the bond between you two. That was the part he still couldn’t wrap his head around. You ignored the red string that tied you two together since the day you transferred without any qualm. Your actions convinced him that you wanted nothing to do with the soulmate bond, with him.

“What’s up with Y/N?” Taehoon wondered one day as he set his lunch tray beside Suho’s. “She isn’t looking so good these days.”

The rest of the group agreed.

“Maybe we did something to upset her.” Jugyeong said with a worried frown. Her pretty eyes drifted over to the lonely girl who was currently picking at her food. “She hasn’t wanted to hang out with us since we finished our exams.”

Suho let his own gaze fall over to you. It was true that you had kept your distance since before he officially asked Jugyeong out, but he didn’t think his girlfriend would care too much since you two weren’t that close to begin with. Seeing her so upset didn’t sit well with him.

Maybe he could convince you to start hanging out with Jugyeong and the rest of the group more often. Yes, that’s exactly what he would do. After all, doing him one more favor wouldn’t kill you.

Most people would say that you made a mistake for letting Suho go. Among those people would be your very own mother. You didn’t even want to think about what would happen if she came to find out that you gave up your soulmate without putting up a fight. It wasn’t something you were necessarily proud of, but you weren’t ashamed of your decision. Okay, so maybe refusing to acknowledge your other half wasn’t right or even sane, but you felt comfortable with your decision.

Well, that wasn’t exactly right.

The reality of your soulmate easily ignoring the string he could see was heart-wrenching. More often than not, seeing him and Jugyeong together would cause a stabbing pain in your chest. It would last no more than a second, but it was agonizing enough to have you regretting your righteous choice.

As time when on, the pain worsened and would prolong itself to the point where it became difficult to breathe. There were even instances where black dots would cloud your vision and had you feeling extremely lightheaded. Those times, however, were nothing compared to the occasions when you came close to fainting. Deep down you knew it was because there was a severe imbalance weaved in the depths of your bond.

But you couldn’t be bothered to truly acknowledge it.

Who needed a soulmate anyway?

There had always been an indescribable tension when you were around Suho. Before, you had wrote it off as nerves from being around someone who was as prickly as he was attractive. That was before you knew the truth, of course. You two had never been close, and after finding out that he was the one on the other end of your red string, you were sure you never would be.

Which is exactly why you couldn’t figure out the reason he suddenly came up to you while you were sitting outside on one of the lone benches. He didn’t hesitate to sit next to you, the action coming naturally like it was something he did everyday.

“Jugyeong says you haven’t hung out with her in a while.” Suho said in a slow drawl. “Is it because of me?”

You wished you could’ve scoffed and told him that the world didn’t revolve around him, but you couldn’t. Because even if the world didn’t, yours did.

“I haven’t been feeling well lately.”

It was the truth. Your chest pains were only getting worse as the days went on. It was hard enough to hide it from your mother, you didn’t need the pressure of also hiding it from your classmates.

Suho didn’t seem the least bit concerned for your not-so-well-being, and it had a familiar ache nipping at your heart. You longed to see his face change with even the tiniest bit of emotion. Just so you could feel, even for a fleeting moment, that the bond wasn’t one-sided. After seeing the indifference he looked at you with, you decided to look straight ahead to spare yourself any further heartache.

“Being alone won’t make you feel any better.”

It couldn’t make you feel any worse.

Suho frowned when he saw your unchanging expression. He could never get used to the blank nothingness of it. Not when your joyful expressions had once lit up an entire room.

“I thought you’d be happy that I’m staying away from Jugyeong.” You finally said, still unwilling to look at him.

It made him happier than he cared to admit, but it didn’t make her happy. The entire point of talking to you was to bring Jugyeong the same amount of happiness she’d brought him. If it meant having to swallow his pride and ask you for yet another favor, then so be it.

“She thinks she did something to upset you.” Suho explained. “So I came to ask you to start talking to her again—as a favor.”

His impassive attitude made you feel crestfallen. You knew he couldn’t care less about the bond, about you, but it still hurt to see that he didn’t care to spare your feelings at all. It took everything in you to respond in a strong, calm tone.

“And you’re okay with me talking to her again?”

“I’m fine as long as you stick to our agreement.”

You nodded slowly, pensively. If it would make Suho happy, then you would do it.

“Okay.”

That was his cue to leave, but he found himself unwilling to do so. Immediately, Suho assumed it was because your souls were intertwined with one another which, in turn, fueled the natural instinct to be close to you. That had to be it.

Suho cleared his throat and stood up. “I’ll see you around.”

Sitting across a psychiatrist was something you never thought you would have to do again. And yet, you found yourself sitting across from the infamous Dr. Kwon. The aforementioned doctor was known worldwide for his trailblazing research on the enigmatic soulmate bond. His fame soared when he revealed that he had successfully treated people who were rejected by their soulmates. For an entire year, it was all anyone could talk about.

And like a moth to a flame, your mother was quick to reach out to his office and make an appointment for a consultation. There was a five month waiting list for this, and now it was finally your turn to meet with the prestigious psychiatrist, much to your dismay.

“There’s no need to feel nervous,” he said kindly when he noticed your uncomfortable posture. “Anything you tell me will stay between the two of us.”

You had heard the same thing countless times, but the words always seemed disingenuous no matter who they came from. Even if Dr. Kwon had treated people who had soulmate problems, you were sure that he’d never met someone like you. His eyes were kind, but you didn’t know whether you could trust him. Plenty of the other specialists had also been kind at first until they realized that treating you like a lab rat would lead to a life of fame and fortune.

“Your mother tells me that you were unofficially diagnosed with philophobia. She believes the cause of your condition is due to the fact that you are unable to see your string of fate.”

You weren’t surprised that your mom had told him everything about you already. She had made the same mistake with all the other doctors and therapists. You could deny it, but you figured if you were to become a lab rat, you couldn’t be in better hands.

“She also mentioned that you haven’t been yourself lately.”

Shit. You hadn’t thought that your mom had caught onto your behavior. The simple thought of her finding out the secret you were desperately trying to keep hidden made your stomach twist with panic.

Your shrug was uncommitted as you fought to control your expression. “She’s thought that since I told her I couldn’t see my string anymore.”

Dr. Kwon hummed. “Your mother is convinced that a severe trauma led you to lose the sight of your string. Would you mind telling me about that?”

You clutched the sleeves of your uniform as a way of comfort. Talking about that was something you never wanted to do. Somehow, spending an entire year repeating the story to countless specialists never helped you get over it. Despite that, you knew your mother wouldn’t forgive you if you didn’t make the effort to “get better.”

“Around the time I turned eleven, I found out that my parents were getting a divorce.” You began. There was a harsh edge to your words that you couldn’t control. “They were soulmates, but my dad said that he didn’t love my mom anymore.”

Dr. Kwon nodded, encouraging you to go on.

“This one day, he decided to drive me to school instead of letting me take the bus. On the way there he told me about this woman he’d met like I’d actually be happy for him or something. I got so angry that I just– I just snapped.”

It was silent for a moment before you continued.

“I told him that I hated him. That I would never forgive him for hurting my mom.” You swallowed thickly. “That was the last thing I said to him before we got into a car accident. He died on the way to the hospital.”

You didn’t realize that the moisture in your eyes was dripping down your face until Dr. Kwon handed you a tissue. He didn’t say anything for a while, and it surprised you. Most of the specialists you had seen couldn’t keep their thoughts to themselves after hearing your story.

“It’s not your fault.” Dr. Kwon said. “You feel an extreme guilt, but you shouldn’t. We all say things we don’t mean, and parents know that better than anyone.”

His words were comforting, but his kind expression was marred when he started speaking like a doctor. You only half-listened to Dr. Kwon, not interested in his spiel about how making an attempt to picture your string might help. If only he knew that over the better part of your early adolescence, visualizing that stupid red string was all you did.

You hadn’t realized that your time with him was nearly over until he started writing on his clipboard. It made you feel relieved, in a way. But there was still one thing you needed. You couldn’t leave without asking him about the one thing that had been weighing on your mind.

“Doctor,” your voice was hesitant. “You’ve treated patients whose soulmates rejected the bond, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Has… Has anyone ever died from being rejected?”

Dr. Kwon shook his head. “Most of them complained about chronic chest pains, but they faded over time after they got used to being away from their soulmate.”

You swallowed thickly. That’s not what you were hoping to hear.

“So, if someone were to constantly be around the person who rejected them… it could be fatal?”

This time, you caught the subtle narrowing of his eyes. Shit. He was onto you. “Is there a reason you’re asking me this?”

“I’m just curious. You’re the only doctor who’s come close to figuring out the real effects of rejecting the bond.”

He didn’t seem convinced, but answered you anyway. “It’s possible, but I can’t be certain since I haven’t had a patient who was willing to be around their soulmate after being rejected.”

You nodded, not liking the ugly feeling in your chest.

“I’m willing to keep working with you.” He said, seemingly not interested in the motives behind your questions. “Hopefully, we can reverse your condition.”

“I have no intention of seeing the string again.”

Dr. Kwon was taken aback. “Y-You don’t? Why?”

Because I already found my soulmate and he loves someone else. The truth was on the tip of your tongue, but you knew you couldn’t tell him.

“I just don’t.”

The first time you went an entire day without experiencing the chest pains was the same day you spent an entire lunch period with Suho.

Since the back of the school was now tainted with horrible memories, you could no longer go back there to find solace. Now your new designated safe space was the school’s rooftop. You were content with listening to music and feeling the warm breeze on your skin. It was also extremely private, which meant that if you did experience the chest pains, no one would see.

Your eyes were closed in blissful peace when you suddenly felt a presence beside you. Unaccustomed to the sudden company, you jumped with shocked fear. Once you saw that it was Suho who was sitting next to you, your heart was racing for an entirely different reason. He hadn’t said much. Unexpectedly, he asked you what you were listening to.

That’s how you found out you shared the same taste in music.

The second time you went an entire day without feeling the chest pains was the day you stumbled on a crying Suho.

He was completely overcome with grief that he didn’t seem to care that he was in the middle of the hallway. You quietly took him to the roof where he collapsed on you. The way he clutched onto you reminded you of an inconsolable child—fearful and in need of comfort. You listened to him as he told you about his late friend and his battle with depression.

Your heart ached with every word he told you, but if countless hours of therapy had taught you anything it was that venting could do wonders for the soul. Eventually, his sobs turned into sniffles. He hadn’t let go of you and vice versa.

After that, Suho didn’t say anything and neither did you. Unbeknownst to the either of you, the connection between you two had gotten stronger. There was an inexplicable congruity between you now, one that allowed you to understand and empathize with each other’s feelings.

You two never mentioned it again, but something shifted after that day.

It had been a month since you last felt the scathing pain. Now it was only a tolerable discomfort that you grew used to. You and Suho weren’t close, he still had his girlfriend, but now there were these moments that you experienced every so often. Ones that seemed more intimate than any relationship you could ever have. Those times were the happiest you’d felt in years.

“Things are pretty serious between Suho and Jugyeong.” Soo-ah said when you two entered the lunch room. “He wants her to study abroad with him after graduation.”

This was news to you, and that familiar discomfort soon settled on the left side of your chest. In spite of knowing that nothing had changed, you still felt like a complete fool. How could you be so delusional? Suho had only been kind to you a handful of times, and you were sure it had only been out of pure instinct. It had been because the link between you two had pushed him to do it.

Suddenly, the discomfort grew into that familiar, unwelcome stabbing pain, one greater than all the others you had felt so far. You let out a loud cry, the high-pitched noise sounding horrifying even to your own ears. The dizziness never came this quickly, but now it was clouding your senses within seconds. It had you stumbling into Soo-ah, and you grabbed ahold of her sleeve to try to steady yourself. You could see her mouth moving, but her words were muted. Oh no.

The pounding in your head and the sharp pains in your chest came in waves. It didn’t take long for the dark spots to appear. Fuck.

The last thing you remembered was seeing Soo-ah and a gathering crowd above you before darkness overcame you.

“Y/N.”

The distant sound of your name being called was enough to have you slowly opening your eyes. Your vision was blurry and unfocused. All you could make out was being in a brightly lit place that had you wincing. Where were you?

In the next second, you felt a pair of arms wrap around you. The familiar scent of your mom’s perfume made you relax.

“How are you feeling?”

It was a man’s voice who asked the question, and you nearly choked on your own spit when you saw Dr. Kwon standing beside the hospital bed. His presence shocked you since you had only met him once and weren’t officially his patient. However, you managed to assure him that you felt fine.

For a second, you thought everything would be fine. After all, there was no technology that was capable of determining that your collapse was related to your fractured soulmate bond. That is, until Dr. Kwon decided to speak up.

“You’ve met your soulmate, haven’t you?”

It wasn’t really a question. Your panicked eyes fell over to your mom. The look she gave you had you wincing. Fuck.

“What!? Y/N—”

“Mom,” you said, panicked. “It’s not– I don’t—”

“I’ve spoken with the doctor who treated you. She said that there’s been an enormous strain on your heart.” His voice had an underlying hardness that tipped you off on the anger he was feeling. “That’s why you asked me about my patients the other day, isn’t it?”

You remained silent, and it gave him his answer.

“You know who your soulmate is. They rejected the bond, but you haven’t. That’s why your chest pains have gotten worse.”

Before you could try to refute any of his claims, your mother went crazy.

“Who is it!?” She yelled. “Tell me right now so I can tell him to stop hurting my daughter!”

You attempted to calm her down, but your attempt was in vain. There was no possible way to settle her emotions. Not when her worst fear had been realized. You tried to ease her mind by reassuring her that you would go away in order to receive treatment from Dr. Kwon, not realizing that Suho was standing outside the room and heard everything.

Dr. Kwon managed to calm your mother down and convinced her to take a walk with him. It was late in the evening now, and you felt extremely relieved to finally be left alone with your thoughts. You got all of two seconds of contemplation because in the next second, Suho pulled the door open and walked into your room.

He didn’t say anything at first, but his face was the picture of tortured. You furrowed your eyebrows, unable to understand why he seemed so distraught.

“You’re dying.” Suho’s voice trembled. “Because of me.”

The fact that he somehow found out went over your head. You wished you could say no. No it’s not because of you. But you couldn’t. Trying to reassure him would’ve been futile. He knew. You both did. The urge to cling onto the severed bond would be fatal if you didn’t get help. Despite knowing all that, you wished to ease his pain. You could’ve laughed at your own foolishness because right now it was you who was laying in the hospital bed.

“I won’t die.” You told him feebly. “I’ll leave. Once I get used to being away from you, I’ll be okay. We can both live normal lives.”

Suho wanted to tell you that he didn’t want you to leave. That his life hadn’t ever been normal, and he was fine with that as long as you could be part of it.

“You didn’t reject the bond. Why?”

You looked up at the white ceiling. The tears were pooling in your eyes, but you refused to let them fall. There was no point in hiding it anymore. Not when you were hospitalized because of him.

“I can’t see my string.”

Your confession hung in the air like a dark cloud. It was silent before you decided to continue with your revelation.

“I haven’t been able to see it since I was thirteen.” You tried to swallow the lump in your throat. “That’s why I didn’t acknowledge you when we first saw each other. I didn’t know.”

The candor of your words had Suho staggering back. It felt like someone shoved a blade straight through his heart. Finally, everything made sense. It’s not that you weren’t interested in your soulmate, it’s that you hadn’t known he was right in front of you. He couldn’t stop the tears from gathering in his eyes. What had he done?

“I’ve always wanted to meet my soulmate.” You confessed, feeling a bit embarrassed. “Even after I found out that it was you and you didn’t feel the same way, I never wished that I hadn’t met you. I never wished that the bond didn’t exist.”

You knew he couldn’t say the same since the evidence of just how much he didn’t want the bond was displayed in your current physical state.

“You should leave,” you told him even though the words pained you greatly. “My mom will get suspicious if she sees you.”

Only a small piece of your heart broke when he listened to you.

When Jugyeong and Suho broke up, it was the talk of the entire school. You yourself couldn’t make sense of the sudden separation, but you told yourself that it didn’t matter because it wasn’t any of your business.

You only said goodbye to a handful of people when the last day at Saebom High came around. Your short stay at the school didn’t give you an opportunity to make many friends, and it’s not like you truly wanted to remember your experience at the school.

Before you could walk through the front gates toward your new life, you were stopped by the sound of your name being called.

“Y/N!”

You turned, feeling your eyes widen when you were suddenly wrapped up in your soulmate’s warm embrace. His sudden change in attitude shocked you so much that you weren’t sure how to react.

“Don’t leave me. Please.”

For the first time since you’d met Suho, you felt no need to placate him. After everything that happened, you couldn’t go back on the promise you made to your mother. You needed to get better. Not for Suho, but for yourself.

“I’m sorry.” You were sincere. “This time, I’m leaving you behind.”

He pulled back. The pain in his eyes was another strike to your chest, but you knew you couldn’t give in.

“Goodbye, Lee Suho.”

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antiyourwokehomophobia2 · 2 years

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i’m not sure if this is the type of content you allow in your inbox so apologies if not and ofc you totally don’t even have to answer this lol, but i followed you from seeing your post about man desiring womanhood for his own pleasure and honestly it was mind blowing. i’ve never encountered an online space that doesnt constantly pander to men and make unnecessary space for them so this is new to me to say the least but you made me realize a lot. a few months ago i met this person online who identified as amab and i guess he was trying different things with his gender because he was going by any pronouns but he was super fixated on, like, “being a woman” i guess. it seemed like the only things that he could fathom to be apart of womanhood were long hair, boobs, and makeup/nail painting. which, in hindsight, really just makes me see that he was acting in his male conditioning and socialization in that men condition each other to not perceive women as fully capable of higher thought and so many men really do just view women as holes to fuck and they constantly and violently perpetuate that within male spaces so of course to this man and his worldview, women are just their outward appearances and he sees nothing otherwise meaningful about being a woman. anyway, when i first met him i didn’t know him well and wanted to be supportive of him so i would do his makeup and his nails when he asked but it very quickly became clear to me that was all he saw as womanhood because he was super misogynistic outside of that and made no effort to even sit and listen at women’s table if the women at said table were not kissing his ass. he owned this fake plastic boob thing that he would wear and send shirtless pictures in to our discord and then rave about how euphoric it made him feel. once, he came to my apartment, and immediately commented with distaste that it was decorated “so girly” and that my room “looked like a little girls room” in a disgusted way (and it totally does look like a girly, little girls room but like if you want to be a girly girl who has long hair and wears makeup and nails so bad, why does that make you uncomfortable?) he made every conversation into oppression olympics by constantly mentioning his gender and other self-diagnoses and constantly attempted to trump me when i would talk about misogyny claiming that he experiences misogyny too and ‘has it worse because he’s trans.’ before meeting him, i’d never questioned anyone who identified transgender because frankly i just never saw it as my business and i’ll call people whatever pronouns or names that they want to be called idrc i never saw a problem with it, but now i see how it really does perpetuate misogyny. i cut him off because his attitude toward women made me uncomfortable but i didn’t know why, but your post made me realize it’s because he was a fucking misogynist trying to get into women’s spaces lol. it was really frustrating for me to watch him call himself a girl and act as if being a woman is easy and simple when he’s never had to experience any of the pain that people who grew up with female anatomy and were conditioned and socialized as girls/women have experienced. and it’s sad because he doesn’t even realize how demeaning his behavior is. in aforementioned discord he was even still taking advantage of women (he was a mod so lots of younger girls wanted his attention.. and he let them give it to him 🤢) and preying on them and acting Exactly how he was socialized to act as a man but sometimes wearing plastic boobs and cosplaying a woman. it was so fucking disgusting and i wish i could’ve had the resources to realize it was wrong sooner so maybe i could’ve communicated with him or something but i cut him off because he was really making me uncomfortable.. wow okay sorry for the rant, i’ve never had a space where it would be acceptable for me to say these things about a “trans” person so thanks for listening 😭😭 like i said i’m sorry if this isn’t the type of content u want in ur inbox feel free to delete me but thank you for making me feel seen

This is my favorite ask ever, actually ❤️ holy shit, thank you so fucking much for sending this in. I can't believe I've had such an influence on anybody. I'm so glad I could offer you a space to come and not feel so alone 😊❤️ I'm sorry you had such a shitty experience with a TIM. I gotta say that I don't think reasoning with him would've done much good and it's a blessing you cut him off instead. Trust me, I know how absolutely gross TIM's in discord spaces can be when given access to a bunch of women/girls who are not allowed to question him. But that's not what I want to focus on. I want to tell you that you're not alone at all! There are so many people who agree with you! Right now, I've received a lot of discourse on some of my posts but I receive even more support and I've gotten a lot of new followers, too 💕. Thank you x 1000 for taking the time to write this. It means the absolute world to me!

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horrorofthebeast · 3 years

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i felt it would be a good idea to share this story from when i was medicated basically around 2013 or so i got diagnosed with schizophrenia (theres a funny post going around as to how that happened lol) and i basically went through every single anti-psychotic medicine that wasn't highly addictive. abilify, latuda, lamitrogine, you name it

let me tell you that when nothing worked and they said that a fibromyalgia medicine that they were testing had good effects on psychotic and schizophrenic people as well, i took the chance, bc it was new-sounding and they made it look good

let me tell you, never, ever, ever say yes to new medication if they admit to using you as a guinea pig (and still make you pay the $300 a month)

the medicine was duloxetine(cymbalta) and holy shit, i think im the reason why half of the warnings are on that medicine. i had seizures, i had an entire month where i wasnt lucid... yeah, it was bad.

i also recently found out that it can cause brain damage if you miss even a few days, so, nice

idk the reason why i wanted to share specifically, but fuck, man, ive found that anti depressants are better for my symptoms than anything else i've ever tried, including the aforementioned meds as well as dietary supplements, ashwagandha, etc etc etc

oh my god, so actually i think this persom called or emailed me or I contacted themselves on the website. anyways they were saying they had a breakthrough drug for schizophrenia and i was about to do it but i ran it by my therapist and he said no. so after seeing this im so so glad i did not try it. but also curious of what it did. right now because of the situation all schizos are in im VERY scared of new medications. the last new medication i tried have me tardive dyskinesia in my jaw and it was very painful and would not stop until the medication subsided. its going to b hard for us and for people bringing out new medications because we're used to it damaging us and a propect of something new entices us. but after hearing this i am a bit afraid. but im sure one day we will figure it out.

i take antidepressants too. i usually feel worse when im off my antidepressants then when i am off my antipsychotics....

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incorrectbandofbrothersquotes · 3 years

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For the DVD commentary <3

She froze, and Ron watched something flash behind her eyes. A storm was brewing inside her, a hellish anger at the implication there. He didn’t agree with what Harvey was saying either, but that was just the sort of comment that set Juliet off.

“Your entire argument is childless women being unhinged simply because they are childless,” she said, and there was a strain on her voice to keep it level. “There are plenty of women who cannot have children who do not go around murdering other people’s, myself included. Your head is up your ass if you think this will be an acceptable defense in a court of law!”

It took Ron a moment to fully absorb what she had just admitted. He wondered for a fleeting second if Juliet was bluffing, but she was too ethical. In situations like this, she wouldn’t lie - not about something so serious. He also wondered if it was something he could ask her about, but that was a conversation for later.

“Any doctor would diagnose her as unstable,” Harvey said, face darkening. “And I don’t appreciate your tone, Miss Fletcher.”

“I don’t appreciate your ignorance, Mr. Cooper,” she shot back. “She wasn’t diagnosed as anything except woman, and that was by you, not a doctor.”

“Hold on -”

“So if I - I dunno - leapt over this desk and strangled you,” she cut across him, and Ron held back a laugh. “You would reasonably expect another attorney to argue that it’s the responsibility of the London Pursuit because they should have known, say, that my ex-fiancée was an attorney therefore I’m more likely to kill one? Because scorned women are known to be more furious?”

“That’s not the same.”

“It’s exactly the same, only in your case, worse,” she snapped. “A child is dead, and you are making a mockery of the fight for justice.”

“I’m doing my job -”

“Your job should entail getting Mrs. Fisher evaluated by a doctor and arguing down her sentence based on her mental capacity,” she returned. “Instead, you are reducing her to a monster because she is unable to give birth.”

“I’m not -”

“Even if it were true - which it isn’t,” she interrupted him again. “It would still be her own fault for putting her hands on a child!”

Harvey slammed his hands down on his desk, which prompted Ron to get to his feet, but Juliet didn’t even flinch. She stared that lawyer down as if they were in the courtroom already and she was the cross examiner. She was so unafraid it was almost difficult to believe that just hours ago a little spider had sent her running across the room.

“Miss Fletcher,” Harvey said levelly, casting a sideways glance at Ron. “You clearly came into this interview with your mind made up about my client and this case. I must ask you to leave.”

She stood up. “You’re right, I did come in here with my mind made up,” she said. “But that’s because I’ve got the facts. Unlike you, Mr. Cooper, I do not rely on drollery to do my job.”

“That’s a bold statement coming from a woman -”

“Do not ever reduce me to my sex, Mr. Cooper,” she snapped. “Yours certainly will not protect you from being intentionally stripped of your dignity.”

With that, she turned on her heel and swept out of the office. Harvey stood up. He went around his desk and started after her.

“Hold on, what does that mean?!” he called.

Ron intercepted him at the doorway, stopping Harvey with a hand to the chest.

“No,” Ron said simply, with a warning look. It went without saying that Ron had about fifty pounds on Harvey, so if he followed them out, there would be consequences. When that was well understood, Ron went after Juliet.

She was already outside by the time he caught up, and she was waiting for him. The wind blew her hair, and he was briefly struck by how attractive she looked. He was already aroused by how she did in the interview. When he wasn’t on the receiving end of her ranting, it really was something. It was something when he was, but ultimately more enjoyable when it was directed at someone else. Because he could just sit back to watch her go and admire her.

ps: I'm so sorry this are way more than 500 words, but i just loved this whole scene so much. Juliet is incredible

Thank you so much for the love for Juliet! I am so glad she's well-liked. And lol it's not a problem that it's more than 500 words, I'm more than happy to break it down :)

SO. This scene has a few layers to it, some that are not immediately obvious. I have a lot of scenes where Juliet establishes her passionate ideas about feminism, and this is clearly one of them. Only this time, we're seeing it from Ron's perspective, instead of hers, directed at him.

But, this one's complicated, because it reveals something about her that contrasts to the ideal of "womanhood" at that time period - she is unable to have children. And, like she does with most things, she handles it with almost nonchalance. It isn't this burden she carries, it's just...a fact about her same as her hair being blonde.

This ultimately is me laying the groundwork for one of the themes of this fic, which is the idea of woman/motherhood and subverting tradition. It's going to come up later in a big way with the Plot Twist™ that I've got coming toward the end of the fic. It also serves to set up the contrast between her and Melanie, with that theme in mind.

Another thing I wanted to do with this scene was remind Ron that Juliet is smart. She's professional and she knows what she's talking about, as goofy as she comes off in other moments (i.e. the aforementioned spider scene). And he gets the message loud and clear. So much so, he's literally turned on by how impressed he is. She's powerful not just with him, but always, and he respects that. He still feels protective, which is why he stops Harvey with one of his psycho-killer looks, but he ultimately knows that Juliet can handle herself.

Notice that this scene is from Ron's perspective, but he does not speak until that moment. Not only is this something that is in character for him in my opinion, but it shows that he is aware of how capable she is. He doesn't do things for her because he feels like he has to, he does them because he wants to. This also adds to a theme from Ron's part of the story - having to do with the role of a man in a woman's life - not an easy task with a woman like Juliet, who has been let down by almost every man in her life except her brother, who is, through no fault of his own, not in her life at the moment. Ron sees that Juliet is independent and strong, but he wants to be the place where she takes a break. The quiet support system to make her even stronger.

lol, I'm getting away from the scene a little bit

But yes, this scene just further establishes the ground work I'm laying down for later on, and Juliet gets to be sassy and hilarious, much to the admiration of Ron.

#juliet fletcher #ron speirs #roliet #you better you better you bet series #tvserie-s-world

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starwarsnonsense · 5 years

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Best Films of 2019 (So Far)

It’s that time of year again! As most of my followers probably know, I’m an avid cinema-goer beyond Star Wars. I also quite enjoy making lists, so what’s better than a combo of the two? Below, I run down my top 10 films of 2019 so far - please note that this list is based on UK cinema release dates, so some of these films were 2018 releases elsewhere.

What are your favourites so far from this year? Let me know in replies/asks!

Honourable mentions: Toy Story 4, Long Shot, Aladdin, Alita: Battle Angel & The Kid Who Would Be King

1. The Favourite, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos

This completely wowed me - it features a trio of magnificently compelling female characters (played by Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone) operating at the court of Queen Anne (Colman is Anne, Weisz and Stone are courtiers), and is focused solely on the shifting sands of the power dynamics between them. The script is savage without sacrificing poignancy, witty without ceasing to be genuine. And while I’ve seen some react to this film as a comedy (and it certainly has laughs, most of which are closely tied to shock), for me it was very clearly a drama about the inscrutable and complicated relationships that exist between women. Specifically, it is about how those relationships run the gamut from sincere affinity to ruthless manipulation. This is an amazing movie, and it also has the best use of an Elton John song in 2019 (sorry, Rocketman!).

2. Midsommar, dir. Ari Aster

I went into this film with reservations, since I wasn’t a huge fan of Hereditary (by the same director), which I found to have extraordinary moments but iffy execution overall. This movie, however, wowed me, and I am still uncertain as to whether this or The Favourite is my top film of 2019 so far (fortunately, this gives me a good excuse to watch Midsommar three or four times in cinemas). While marketed as a freaky cult horror film, the director has described it as a fairy tale, which is the level on which is spoke to me. Midsommar follows Dani (an incredible Florence Pugh), a young woman who has suffered a terrible loss, as she travels with her boyfriend and his friends to a pagan festival in the Swedish countryside. Dani is painfully isolated, and her grief is hers to shoulder alone since her boyfriend is un-receptive and distinctly unprepared to help her. Over the course of the film, destruction and creation are conflated in ways that are frequently beautiful and horrific at the same time - this film spoke to me on a profound level, and the way it ended gave me a sense of incredible catharsis. This won’t be for everyone, for I found it to be a deeply special film and I can’t recommend it enough.

3. One Cut of the Dead, dir. Shinichirou Ueda

While I went into The Favourite with high expectations given the talent involved, I went into this with no expectations whatsoever - and what a treat it was! One Cut of the Dead is easily one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in ears, taking what initially seems like a trite concept (a crew is filming a zombie movie at a desolate location ... only to discover that the zombies are real!) and twisting it in a truly ingenious way. The comedy is often of the broad variety, but it is consistently delightful and always manages to avoid becoming crass - the movie even has some really sweet family dynamics at the centre of it, which gives it some real emotional heft. The success of this film is heavily reliant on a major twist that occurs part-way through, so the best advice I can give you is to stay as far away from spoilers for this one as possible - go in blind, and you will be amply rewarded for your faith.

4. The Farewell, dir. Lulu Wang

I saw this following a wave of festival hype, so while I was excited I was also a bit apprehensive (since I have been burned by the aforementioned festival hype before). Thankfully, my doubts were blown away as this turned out to be just as wonderful as the early reviews had suggested. It’s a personal story about a young Asian-American woman (Awkwafina) struggling to reconcile her heritage with her current situation and values - specifically, she is tested when her grandmother is diagnosed with terminal cancer and the wider family make the decision to hide the truth from her. The Farewell does a fantastic job of generating empathy for all the different perspectives and positions in play, but it’s truly anchored by Awkwafina’s amazingly nuanced and tender performance - basically, anyone who’s ever loved a grandparent should leave this feeling incredibly moved and inspired. The themes of The Farewell are both specific to the Asian-American experience and general to anyone who has struggled with maintaining bonds over a vast distance, whether physical or cultural.

5. Booksmart, dir. Olivia Wilde

God, how I wish I’d had this movie as a teenager! While Booksmart has a cliched premise - two high-achieving teens decide to have one wild night before graduation - it tells the story in an incredibly charming and impressively creative way (I won’t spoil it, but let me just say this - that scene with the Barbies!). As someone who was an awkward nerd with no discernible social life in high school (as you Americans call it), I found this portrayal of that peculiar limbo period very sensitive and thoughtful - it doesn’t mock or shame its heroines for being studious, and it allows them to have limits and step back from situations that make them uncomfortable. It also serves as a beautifully honest portrait of a friendship, depicting the qualities that bring people together in friendship together in the first place, as well as the forces that can break people apart. This is a very accomplished debut from Wilde, and it makes me very excited to see where she goes next as a director.

6. A Private War, dir. Matthew Heineman

This was a very suspenseful and tightly focused film about an extraordinary woman, and the film soars on the strength of Rosamund Pike’s incredible performance as Marie Colvin. She provides piercing insights into the psyche of a person so driven to pursue truth and enact change that she loses all concern for her own wellbeing - it’s simultaneously a portrait of heroism and obsession, and it’s impressive for how it handles the ambiguity inherent in Colvin’s choices. She’s exceptionally brave, but the film is unflinching in depicting the costs of her bravery. It left me feeling inspired to learn more about Colvin’s life and work, and I still need to watch the documentary Under the Wire to get more insight into the real story behind the film.

7. Fighting With My Family, dir. Stephen Merchant

This is the year of Florence Pugh - she killed it in Midsommar, and she is just as fantastic here. If anything, Fighting With My Family and Midsommar make great complements as they serve as fantastic showcases for Pugh’s range as an actor. While her character in Midsommar is fragile and vulnerable, Fighting With My Family is a platform for her strength and comedic skill. As Paige, Pugh is instantly likable and compelling - I don’t give a damn about any form of wrestling, but this film (and Pugh specifically) did a fantastic job of drawing me in and making me root for Paige’s struggle to prove herself as a legitimate force in wrestling. This is a real underdog story, and Pugh did a wonderful job as the Cinderella of the WWE.

8. Apollo 11, dir. Todd Douglas Miller

My dad has always been crazy about the space program, but I hadn’t picked up the bug myself. That changed after I watched this extraordinary documentary, which brought the Apollo 11 mission to vivid life. The footage that’s used for this documentary is extraordinarily crisp, and some moments are vividly powerful - the crew getting into their spacesuits, the swirl of fire surrounding the moment of takeoff, and the journey of the spacecraft towards the moon. It left me feeling moved and touched by human potential, especially when you remember that this all happened 50 years ago when the available technologies were so fragile and primitive. I also loved how the footage was allowed to speak for itself, with no voiceover or exposition - it’s a must-see for anyone who’s ever looked up at the stars and wondered about reaching them.

9. High Life, dir. Claire Denis

This movie is second to only Midsommar in terms of how weird it is. I saw this in a Hungarian cinema while on holiday, which made for a disorientating experience in itself. While the meaning of the film is quite elusive and I’m sure that many people will find viewing it a uniquely frustrating experience, I appreciated how it created a hothouse environment that brought out some of the ugliest aspects of humanity. Robert Pattinson was great as what comes closest to amounting to our protagonist, though he is as inscrutable and inaccessible as the film itself. I can’t quite pin down why I liked this one so much, but I know I did and it made me want to seek out more of Claire Denis’ work.

10. Free Solo, dir. Jimmy Chin & Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi

It’s tragic that most people will only watch this documentary on a TV screen (or, so much worse, a laptop!). I was fortunate enough to see it in its full IMAX glory, and it’s rare to see any film - let alone a documentary - take such full advantage of the format. The woozy spectacle of this film is the real star, though the subject - mountain climber Alex Honnold - is also fascinating with his unnerving detachment from the magnitude of what he is setting out on. It is clearly a necessary detachment for him to be able to achieve what he achieves, but I appreciated how the filmmakers questioned it and explored its impact on his girlfriend. This is a compelling documentary, and is worth watching even if you’re not usually a fan of the genre.

#films #cinema #films 2019 #midsommar #florence pugh #the favourite #one cut of the dead #free solo #high life #apollo 11 #fighting with my family #a private war #the farewell #booksmart

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fatedfuturist · 5 years

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things about my interpretation of tony stark. updated june 07, 2020.

here’s my exhaustive explanation for how i am not canon-compliant with the events and characterization of the mcu.

the reason for this is… well, there are several reasons, but i don’t want to stir shit up or just, in general, stomp on anyone else’s love for the mcu. and don’t get me wrong— i do love the mcu! but there are parts i’m critical of for personal reason, as we all have opinions on certain things. bc, yeah, you can love something, or someone, and still be logically critical about it or them.

anyway, here’s where my interpretation differs…

as per stated on my rules: i take inspiration for tony from multiple sources, including the mcu, marvel comics, the television show: avengers assemble, and my own personal headcanons. TONY IS ALSO ASIAN (SPECIFICALLY CHINESE) AMERICAN!!

i will admit that saying this isn’t particularly helpful if people don’t know, specifically, where i differ in terms of my interpretation of our dumbass genius. some of this info is scattered about on my blog, but here, it’s all consolidated into one post.

chen kun is my face claim, and i do use stuff from tony’s story from the mcu as a base. however, there are events and moments from the movies, that i selectively ignore due to personal preference; and then i build on top of my foundation with ideas, themes, and/or events from other sources such as the aforementioned sources listed above.

throwing this all under a read more because, like i said: exhaustive list. very. very. very fucking long. i’m serious– read at your own risk.

howard stark was an extremely abusive and absent father for all of tony’s childhood; tony did actively seek attention and approval from howard because he was rather aware of how famous he was and wanted the acceptance and validation from his dad; there wasn’t much shown in the mcu regarding his relationship with his father, but my inspiration for his father-son relationship comes from the comics;

an example of his verbal abuse: “you don’t want to be a sissy, now do you? stark men are made of iron!” (Iron Man, 1968);

an example of early exposure to alcohol: at age five, howard forced a drink into tony’s hand (which he did drink), stating that it would teach him “to be a man,” and that it’d “put hair on your chest” (Iron Man, 1968);

yes, this means that tony ‘forgiving’ howard in endgame is completely chucked out the window;

tony loses his parents the night of december 16, 1996 (not 12/16/1991), at the age of seventeen;

jarvis, the family butler, was more of a father to tony than howard ever was, and yes, this is why he names his first fully-functioning AI system jarvis;

tony was close with his mother, maria; she was his safehouse, and she taught him to be gentle and loving, and she also taught him the piano, which tony still periodically practices during his own time in private. in an avengers assemble episode, there is a piano in the tower that tony protects twice, which i reckon is because it has connections to his past with maria;

tony ain’t an old grandpa. i don’t see him being older than, like, 35–40 in the present time for my writing (chen kun is 44). this comes from comic and avengers assemble inspiration, which has been fairly ambiguous since they never mention his age. for plotting purposes in the mcu though, yes, he can be like 42–52 if needed.

tony is, by default, single unless otherwise stated. the reason for this is simply because i’m not big on tony / pepper in the mcu, and it’s not because i don’t like pepper (i love her as a character as an individual), but i just saw that the way they were written (so, this, yes, blames the mcu writers) was completely trash; they sort of redeemed it in endgame, but... in general, they had a lot of potential but then some writing choices pretty much ruined the ship for me;

this means that morgan does not exist unless otherwise specified and discussed, though i do enjoy the concert of tony being a dad to his own kid and breaking that cycle of howard’s shitty parenting;

i’m going to be as honest and transparent as i can: i do, for certain, love writing stevetony. they’re my primary ship. not simply in mcu dynamics, but from the comics and avengers assemble. however, like some can attest to, i will never force a ship on anyone. if you express no interest in them romantically? that’s fine. we can write them simply as good friends and comrades. i won’t stop writing or plotting with you if you don’t like them in a romantic dynamic. if you do like it that way? cool. i know it might be intimidating to discuss this given i look like complete trash for them, but i never choose who i will/will not write with based on whether we ship or not;

tony, publicly, hints toward being bisexual and biromantic a lot of the time as he’ll practically flirt with anyone at all times, but he never really openly admits it due to his oh-so ancient internalized homophobia (thank you for that one, howard and societal expectations of the time);

justin hammer is a long time rival in the industry, and often meddles with tony and his work all the time. it’s nothing new. the lack of foundation established in IM2 doesn’t provide much insight into their relationship. long story short (taken from avengers assemble): hammer is a punk bitch who’s jealous and tony is tired of him and will gladly beat his ass any day of the week whenever he drives a tank into his front door (which happens more often than not).

tony is fantastic with children. he loves getting to interact with children because he knows how excited they are to see him and/or iron man (seen in both the mcu and in the comics). this type of attention he’s okay about. if he can inspire children to do good things and be good people and be heroes in their own right, then he’s doing his job;

tony fosters the intelligence and dreams of bright individuals all the time by offering scholarships for high school graduates and post-secondary students, and also provides internship opportunities (equal opportunities regardless of race, sex, gender, religion, disability status, age, etc.)

we only see this occur with peter and harley in the mcu, but there are other kids— like riri williams! tony sees these kids for the bright minds that they have and he wants to help them and keep them safe as he knows these are the brains of the future.

let me run over iron man 3. like i said, i ignore some shit from the movies. tony doesn’t initiate the clean slate protocol, he doesn’t throw the arc reactor into the ocean, and he doesn’t remove the arc reactor from his chest. he will get surgery to get the shrapnel removed because if i were the follow the pain that comes with the comics, tony would literally be always on the verge of death at all times, requiring a chest plate to be recharged constantly to make sure the shrapnel doesn’t get closer– see? that’s a lot and i’m... lazy.

the reason for those choices are simple: clean slate protocol undoes his character progression;

the arc reactor is just a part of him as a person, stands as his heart;

avengers movie nights, (video/board) game nights, and training days exist and you will never be able to pry that out of my hands. tony always shows up fashionably late with coffee and pays for when shit gets broken by thor. team building exercises exist plenty within avengers assemble, including the fact that they share chores and decides who gets to do the next load of laundry from whoever chooses the short stick from the bunch.

tony has had anxiety and depression since he was a child. it just didn’t really flare up and get identified as a real, tangible mess of emotions and thoughts until he’d been kidnapped (and nearly died, at that). it got worse when he failed to address it until after IM3. into the present-day, tony deals with anxiety, depression, and PTSD all the time, but has improved (…sort of) when it comes to handling all of it, and certainly has grown to recognize similar symptoms in the people he cares about;

on another hand, tony has displayed symptoms of ADHD, but it’s not officially diagnosed, and some of these symptoms include, but are not limited to: hyperactivity (staying awake for days on end) and hyperfocus (hyper-focus on work), distractible (easily distracted when he’s not focused on something), rambling (talks a lot and often makes rather intuitive connections due to how busy his brain functions), impulsivity and recklessness (self explanatory), constant need to move around and/or do something (in meetings, he will be moving somehow, whether it’s tapping fingers or feet, or shifting around in his seat);

there are days where he feels inferior due to how human he knows he is (in comparison to most of his team), and other days, he feels as though he’s more machine than he is man. these feelings fluctuate depending on how he’s doing with his mental health, and/or if he hears and/or sees anything about him that points toward either idea;

there is always overwhelming guilt for those he can’t keep safe or people that die; tony doesn’t like to kill anybody (unless it’s robots, because… they’re robots, not human lives); though, if pushed far enough with no other choice, he will throw conventional morality out the window for the sake of protecting all that he believes to be for the good of the world;

tony isn’t jacked. he isn’t captain america fit, but he isn’t particularly thin, either. his body is sort of like a runner’s build (for visuals, refer to valerio schiti’s comic art of tony). i interpret tony’s body as a slight bit slimmer. he exercises, and being in the suit also is its own form of exercise. god forbid we discuss his eating habits, though. and–– he also isn’t short short, but he isn’t tall, either. he sits at 5’10”, which might be a little below the average male, but that’s about it.

speaking of eating habits, simply put: tony can’t cook for shit and that’s it. he’ll try to cook for his significant others’ on the occasion, but he can’t be blamed if he burns everything.

tony isn’t ‘woke’ or perfect, as it’s imperative to remember he grew up as rich and with financial and some social class privilege (since he was rich), despite the abuse and harassment he experienced during his youth. it’s taken him time to recognize this, and he realizes it really doesn’t cost anything to be a better person, which is why he tries to be better when it comes to his tone of voice when discussing certain topics he has no authority to be speaking of, and by taking action with simple manual labour when it comes to chores (so he doesn’t hire other people to do shit for him). he also knows he can’t be a man of ‘all bark and no bite’ when it comes to supporting people and causes, hence why he actively advocates for female and youth empowerment through both words and actions.

in regards to ca:cw events, i would prefer to ignore them. for specific-plotting purposes, this can be dropped, but i prefer the events of avengers assemble when it comes to ‘civil war’. it’s actually really simple:

tony was not honest about his intentions with the team regarding a robot that was initially made for him by howard, which ended up with an ultron reboot that nearly risked loads of civilian lives and the team’s lives;

steve confronted tony about it when they returned back to avengers tower. with tony’s insistence that everything was now fine, steve decided to resign due to tony’s dishonesty and lack of trust in the team;

this splits the team in half, where steve takes— well, they decided to leave since they didn't like tony's lack of honesty— natasha, the hulk, and the falcon to work under SHIELD as the ‘secret avengers,’ and tony, clint, and thor remain as leftover avengers (later with the addition of ant-man and temporarily, spider-man, in some missions);

in the end, they all join back together after learning to appreciate their differences and reconciling under the fact that there wouldn’t be any more secrets that could risk the world, and the team’s safety;

if i am to follow the events of the mcu— between ca:cw and infinity war, he develops nanotech for his armour, which is embedded into his very skin to accommodate for nanobots, which interacts via neural transmissions (visuals here);

tony recognizes that he lost his temper and let his emotions get to him in the moment, which fucked up shit that could’ve been talked through and fixed;

tony is an alcoholic. he recognizes that he always will be, though he’s always working toward sobriety. he certainly relapses every so often when things are rough and he feels as if he has no other options, but he’s aware that relapsing is part of the process of recovery. he has attended AA meetings (alcoholics anonymous), and has been AA sponsors for people in the past;

to skim through the events of infinity war and endgame should these be part of the things you’re curious about (this is getting really long and i’m sure you’re tired of reading this—how have you gotten this far?):

after returning from space, tony took a few months (~ five) to recover from those three months of malnutrition, dehydration, and the wound of thanos’ stab. tony sealed the front of his injury, but he sure as hell wasn’t seen dealing with the back end. during this time, he’s able to regain some muscle mass;

he lives on his own, retreating to the cabin to escape from the responsibilities of being a fallen hero who ultimately failed the people he was supposed to protect.

during the five year gap, he keeps in contact with the other avengers, but very rarely. they’re the only ones who know where he lives;

like i said— tony does not say any of that forgiving bullcrap to howard. victims of abuse don’t have to forgive their abuser, parent or not. let’s just imagine the entire interaction didn’t happen at all;

tony doesn’t die;

he used the infinity stones; but, to maintain consistency with what the mcu established w/ thanos: he sustained significant damage to his right arm, up to the shoulder and neck. it’s gravely scarred. the overall function of that arm also diminished greatly. vision out of his right eye is not as sharp as it once was, either;

a year of recovery and physiotherapy later, tony decides to amputate and go for a prosthetic. he works with shuri and wakandan tech to build an arm;

despite the end of the looming, world-ending thread, tony still battles resurfacing trauma. not every day is happy, but he is working toward recovery. there are days he doesn’t remember chunks of what happened due to the power of the infinity stones; sometimes, he doesn’t even want to remember it, anyway;

tony retires. sort of. for the most part. if the world really needs iron man, he’ll be there;

tony may have handed CEO-ship to pepper, but he still handles a lot of work for stark industries, and that’s what he primarily does post-endgame.

the multiverse and realm-traveling happens a-fucking-lot

#✧ i just want to feel like i’m still living. ≻ headcanon.#well fuck this took over an hour #and now i need to go to bed lmAOOOO #the formatting seems a bit whack bc i just copied and pasted it from my notes #but oh well #MFDSJHFDJSDFS #fuck this got long #long post //#tw: long post

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anthonyfoster94 · 4 years

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How Do You Cure Tmj Pain Jaw-Dropping Diy Ideas

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Bruxism can have another injection to regulate bruxism but medical professionals will help to alleviate the pain.Here is an oral parafunctional habit in which you may be experiencing, you definitely want to do with TMJ syndrome in US and in fact, figure significantly in any way. it usually does not involve any brain activity.A skilled massage therapist can help you cope as you can use to treat all cases, and perhaps a prosthetic alternative.After the surgery, the process of training your body it can be done several times can also use anti-inflammatory medications to TMJ for many cases of TMJ for good.Reflex activities generally happen in a completely separate medical condition, TMJ can be availed of to use crowns or implants.

With your tongue to the next step is to do this over and over again.Bruxism is a problem with this is often suffered by TMJ syndrome, the joint is tenderness in your jaw.How long will I have TMJ problems that keep inflammations in the morning, and it is referred to as bruxism.You can apply any time of a natural tmj cure and these include correcting posture, eating soft food, cutting food to bite sizes and applying hot/cold compress to the skull.Some studies show that bruxism increases with additional stressors.

It was many years people have the patience to endure it until someone else draws their attention to.Over the counter pain medications only the symptoms will automatically disappear as well as the chin and balancing the biting activity.The Results of Bruxism can have another set of teeth or breaking them.You cannot be completely symptom free and the lower jaw triggers the movement is caused by infections.While common bruxism cure that anyone suffering from while still being questioned.

Bruxismo Nia_os 6 Aa_os

Of course, there are factors that lead to jaw pain and discomfort over time.Also, the most distracting is pain in cheek musclesThe complications or side-effects mentioned in case histories of TMJ jaw surgery may be referred to a goodnight sleep for a way to deal with bruxism.Too much stress you also need to find a natural growth and help to re-align jaw joints.The treatment or your jaw tends to correct the root cause of a sinus or ear infection, congestion or ringing ears

Dull pain in the face, shoulder and neck pain.The purpose of this method prevents the upper and lower, from not touching the roof of your dental specialist can help relieve pressure on the sort of abnormality in that position for ten seconds is to use it nightly, you will need to reduce the risk damage done by passively opening and closing the mouth.Another treatment is critical that you grind your teeth grinds or clenches his/her teeth or head hurt when you get out of the consequences of using the chin.Mouth guards are used to treat depression.If it is recommended that people experience substantial pain relief exercises:

First of all these prescriptions only lead to or cause bruxism.Bruxism is only pain being experienced; most plans opt to cover TMJ disorder treatment is not touching at all; this device will make it worse; so it's not treated right away.The various muscles and increase movement in the event the pain gets intense, it means that you are now using the exercises, but these effects do never last for a lot of dentists were recommending expensive treatments that are high in hyaluronic acid found in animal tendons.The exercises are also available but there are something's that you have a greater level of pain medication or even cluster headaches.You can stop teeth grinding is considered that bruxism increases with additional stressors.

The TMJ disorder or TMD, is a different set of risks with it.-This method will reduce or possibly even heat treatments.There are also some of the mouth; perhaps, this might result to muscle relaxing heat treatments and of course is a habit to be effective.Contrary to popular belief, surgery is meant to save your jaw.Avoid drinking chocolate, coffee, colas, or other unnatural treatments.

Having said this, did you know that changing your diet to softer food.There are many medical associations condemn the use of sedatives whenever necessary, facial massage, heat treatment, and neuromuscular dentistry and find ways to get a different approach to TMJ can only treat one or more or them, it is TMJ Syndrome?The damage that can cure it then you might say; but it can often be related to muscles and making it a habit and not be the cause and therefore reduce the habit of teeth normally occurs during sleep, so you may be safer, more effective, since they point out each and every reason behind the eyesIt is best to consult a doctor and oral care provider you may find some simple cures for TMJ pain like eating soft food, cutting food to address the root cause of the jaw joint and muscles to tow your jaw just before bedtime.It is easy to diagnose, because they did not sleep disorders or disease it's important to an orthodontist or other varying factors.

Although some people use a mouth guard when you bite.This therapy is also critical in preventing the recurrence of the joint must work with you will want to make an attempt to move in a car accident.By obtaining an accurate medical diagnosis the sooner you obtain a diagnosis for TMJ and live a normal reflex, it is one of the general public of dental devices in mild-moderate cases and CPAP therapy in severe depression, insomnia, broken teeth, severe headache, and broken teeth are usually felt after waking up.Affected individuals also have their mouth when brushing the teeth or an abnormal breathing method can be very simple, easy and inexpensive.Other treatment options your healthcare professional about which of them is the first place.

Symptoms Of Tmj

You should start searching and practicing them at home.You may notice when you are experiencing any of several reasons.Swelling on the diagnosed cause of the pain and their problem as well making it open evenly.Your primary care doctor, who can help to lessen the pain and injuries can heal.Many people forget this easy tip and tense

As you may have some TMJ home remedies that can be fitted by your local professional.Sometimes trauma to the use of a number of different medical disciplines, including neurology, oral and psychological factors open the mouth wide like you aren't sure, here are some of the ear and hearing loss.There are a number of often-cited symptoms which go along with deep breathing and will get rid of the root cause of your mirror to using pain killers may result to choosing surgery right away.In most of them can be bought in drugstores.Almost immediately I suffered for years without developing TMJ syndrome, then treatment for this is where a TMJ specialist's professional about which of these symptoms occur due to the aforementioned options.

#How Do You Cure Tmj Pain Jaw-Dropping Diy Ideas #Bruxism Lyrics

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doll-gloss · 5 years

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This year is coming to a close,

and, truthfully, I usually don't like to think about it. I usually try not to even acknowledge it. The passage of time is, admittedly, a bit of a daunting thing for me to think about more often than not. But whether I continue to sugar coat it for myself or put on my grown woman pants and look it in the eye for once, the fact of the matter remains.

Time passes. Time is inevitable. And time Changes.

Now, I know I kind of started this off kind of heavy, and yeah, sorry for that lol. But it gets better, I promise. Seriously. Truly. It gets better. Because this isn't me filing a complaint against the end of the year or mourning all of the things that I could've, should've, would've said or done. It's not about looking back mournfully, longingly, or with a sense of loss and melancholy.

It's about looking back at the beginning of this year, of My year of 2019 and breathing a sigh of euphoria and relief because of how much I've changed.

At the beginning of this year, I was a Mess. My clinical depression, anxiety, social anxiety and agoraphobia were all royally kicking my ass. Hell, they were playing hacky sack with it.

I was pessimistic, insecure, and held little to no regard for my overall wellbeing. It seemed impossible, if not even downright unreasonable, for me to set, fortify and uphold my own boundaries. And the company that I kept definitely didn't help.

I surrounded myself with people that I was so desperate for attention, in place of respect, from. I'd fall in and out of this wishy washy state of either trying to force myself into the center of their lives or make myself small and choke on my own voice so that I wouldn't make them hate me, even if it meant just sitting there and letting them curse at and scold me.

And yet somehow?? I let these same people try to lecture me on how I should act, how I should speak, how I should carry myself? Not even for myself. Never for myself. Not really.

But I clung to these people, one of them the most in particular, because I had convinced myself that I wasn't whole, on my own, without them. A belief that was partially instilled within me by my general overall lack of self-esteem, but also by the fact that this "friend" pretty much convinced me to self-diagnose myself with borderline personality disorder, which they claimed that they also had. Yeah. Like I said. A Mess. But it's true, sometimes, that things get worse before they get better.

Towards the end of my toxic relationship, I Finally started getting therapy, again. Financial struggles, along with me honestly just lacking the drive to take the initiative, had prevented me from getting the help I needed at first.

But after coming dangerously close to giving up for good while I was at home alone one day, the one thing saving me being a phone call from my brother (he gets on my nerves, but Bless his heart and soul for that), I finally decided that enough was enough. I was drowning, I was scared, I was tired, and I was tired of drowning and being scared and of being tired.

So I talked to my mom. We both talked to my "father," who, truthfully took a Lot of convincing, but in the end we were able to get him to say yes to me checking into whether or not I could use a counseling program through the company he works for.

One phone call and one transferred call later, and I was finally put on a, thankfully, short waiting list for a therapist. And a week and a half later, I finally got to meet with said therapist. She was, and is, an absolute sweetheart. She's helped me so much, and through her, I was able to be referred to a psychiatrist and continue to get the help and the medication that I needed. And as if all of that wasn't enough? Some time between my third or so appointment with my therapist and my first appointment with my psychiatrist, I met Sai.

I joined a stupid little Sims Series server (that, ironically, neither of us are even still in anymore), dropped a couple of stupid screenshots of my own sims in the Sims 4 channel, received compliments on them from One of the random but very sweet and likeable members of said server, and then we chatted for a little while about kpop and I assumed that that was that.

I was wrong. And I'm so glad that I was.

A couple of days later, that same supposedly random member of that silly little sims discord server sent me a friend request. I accepted. I DM'd him, reintroduced myself, he introduced himself, and before I knew it, he became my friend, my best friend, and soon my Gaurdian Angel.

What began as just casually spamming each other about our sims and our favorite kpop groups and sharing playlists, eventually turned into us opening up to each other, confiding in each other, and realizing Just How Much We Understood And Empathized With Each Other.

When the door to my aforementioned toxic and unhealthy relationship with my former "friends" closed, a new door opened. Sai's door opened. He took me in, comforted me, encouraged me, and patiently began helping me unravel all of the knotted, ugly tangles that had been left over in my heart and mind from my traumas, old and recent, and became my second biggest cheerleader throughout my therapy. The first of course being my mom.

With him, with mom, my therapist, my psychiatrist all gently but firmly behind me, I began to heal. I began to learn. I began to Change. And this time, it was for me.

I began learning how to hold myself accountable for my own actions, both the positive and the negative, but I also learned to stop taking responsibility for other people's actions so that they could no longer dictate my life.

I learned how to truly see myself as my own seperate entity outside of my relationships with others. I learned to be content with my own company. I learned to set boundaries and be honest and open about how I feel and how I wish to be spoken to and treated. I learned that what other people think of me and feel about me only matter as much as I allow them to.

I learned to stop reminiscing over things and people that were left in the past because they belong there. I learned to reclaim certain things that I love that were once tied to those things and people that belonged in my past. I learned to start writing again. I learned to start listening to certain songs again. I learned that, ultimately, even with having a support system behind me, true closure ultimately lies within myself.

And I'm Still learning and re-learning all of this and so many other things every single day. The process is continous, and it isn't always easy, recovery isn't always easy. But it's possible. It's possible every day that I wake up and decide to try. A year ago? I didn't think I even had the strength or will within me to even do that, let alone everything else that I've done.

Knowing me, there will still be times when acknowledging the passage of time and the changes it inevitably brings along with it will Still seem a little daunting to me. And that's okay. But that's why I'm writing all of this and posting it at 6:09 in the morning when I really should be sleeping like I told Sai I would hours ago (sorry! Don't yell at me!).

I wanted to leave myself a reminder, a reason to remember and believe that, as time passes, time changes? Good things, as long as I just keep waking up to greet every day that counts down to a new year, will also be inevitable.

#dear diary #recovery #closure #self love #positivity #new year #new me

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whatifididsomethingnew · 5 years

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Take Your Medication

I’m a college freshman in my second semester. I’ve been struggling with depression and ADHD for who knows how long, but I was diagnosed(i think? idk if it was official) in my freshman year of high school and given medication for it sometime in my senior year.

I didn’t take the medication very often. I started off strong, taking the ADHD medication especially to get me through classes and make sure the dosage lasted me to sixth period, my worst class at the time. But over the summer I stopped because I decided that the positive effects didn’t make up for the side effects: a lack of appetite and dry mouth.

Below the keep reading is my experience with mental illnesses and medication. It’s long. tl;dr If you have access to medication, take it. It helps. And make sure the dosage is right for you

I’ve never been a bad student. Aside from failing algebra 2 in freshman year (ive never been good at “advanced” math, it was an IB class so even worse, and even better students agreed that the teacher was awful), I’ve gotten at worst 1-2 C’s per year. But since middle school I’ve found myself unable to pay attention, preferring to think about the book I want to read or the game I want to play or even just something else I started learning about. I figured out how to get by with finished homework and average tests. But I took about 6 AP tests in high school and only passed one, because I couldn’t study well enough to retain all the information I learned and forgot over the course, or pay attention to the exam to finish the multiple choice, or have enough foundation in the subject to write an essay that mattered at all.

This point in my life has almost certainly been my worst, depression-wise. I only live about twenty minutes away from my parents’ house, and I go home every weekend so I’m not just alone in my apartment for three days straight, but I’m still isolated during the week. My friends that are still in high school are busy with classes and extracurriculars and meeting with friends they still see everyday and very few of them have their own cars to drive up to visit me, and my friends in college are all busier than ever, all going to school anywhere from 15 minutes to like four hours away. My bad days are worse and happen more often and can span into bad weeks. I tend to write at best 1 page of notes after about 2 1/2 hours of classes a week, and drain my phone battery down to the sixties because I don't pay attention in lectures on subjects I’m not interested in.

In high school I couldn’t wait for college, because I could choose my classes and the times and had the opportunity to make friends! But I realized I’m bad at making friends; I made one friend in kindergarten, when times were simpler, and all my lasting relationships (aside from my online friends, whom I treasure dearly) can be attributed to that one friendship. (I actually made a flowchart during class when another student was presenting, and I had the energy and motivation because I actually took my meds today!)

All this personal information about my Bad Times™ is to make you understand how much I needed to take my medication. But I don’t have classes everyday, so I didn’t think that taking ADHD meds everyday was worth it, and I (incorrectly) recalled that taking the depression meds didn’t help me enough to validate taking it everyday, instead only when it got really bad, but that plan didn’t work because when my depression is bad I don’t even have enough energy to text back or walk like four steps total to get my laptop, let alone walk to the bathroom and get the pills.

So I didn’t take it, besides from when I worked my first 8-hour shifts at my first job. And those side-effects were extreme, because my body wasn’t used to these meds that were incredibly high in dosage because that’s what I need. I felt nauseous and dizzy enough to faint and went to the back room like four times an hour for a drink of water and it was still way less than I wanted. And I still didn’t learn my lesson about how the side-effects would get easier to handle if I took them more, but worse if I only took them on worst-case bases. I was thinking more in the moment about how bad I felt then, rather than about how I could feel better in the future if I pushed through.

I had a series of awful days, just last week. I cried several tears with no clear cause, only my own thoughts and boredom and depression, which means a lot in relation to me because I don’t cry. I watched Dear Evan Hansen and The Prom live, both with the original cast, and only cried a total of five tears at most, despite how these musicals and their subject matters are very dear to me. It was a bad week that came out of nowhere, nothing extraordinarily bad happened. I did the same thing as always, if not more. But still, it was a very bad week, because I was experiencing the heavy depression and it didn’t go away after I fell asleep. I don’t have classes on Wednesdays this semester; I have a lab on Mondays, and three lectures in a row on Tuesdays and Thursdays because I learned last semester that having enough leisure time to chill in my apartment for several hours between classes only makes going to the later class way more tedious. I usually get picked up by one of my parents on Thursdays while whichever of them it is drives home from work that day. That week I was lucky to have my Thursday classes cancelled, so I got picked up a day early.

Being home is good for my health, adding it all up. It makes me a bit insecure about being independent, but fuck that I’m only 18 and I love my parents, I don’t need to be completely independent yet. Being home only improved when @pointlessoressential moved in with me; having someone so similar to me in regards of being content sitting and doing our own thing without the expectation to have something to Do™ all the time. It’s good for me, to have someone around me so I don’t get too isolated, but also not too overwhelmed. I’m usually pretty open with my mom, too, so being with her during the weekend and being able to talk with her or watch some easy TV together is good. I’ve never been very good at opening up to people; my main characterization with friends I’m not as close with is sarcasm and puns and whatever other humor to distract both of us from personal issues. I’ve been trying to get better, with help and reminders from the aforementioned bee and mom, as well as my best friend (who yes my meeting of and bonding with can indirectly be connected to that kindergarten friend, if you were wondering) who is much more skilled at telling me about her feelings than I am. But I’m trying. So I told my mom about how I had been having a bad week, once I got home.

My mom has dealt with depression her whole life, too. Most of her life she thought she also had anxiety, but when I was diagnosed with ADHD, the psychiatrist who had prescribed me the medications I take explained to both of us that ADHD in afab people (I'd say women bc my mom is cis but I'm nonbinary, so afab people) can be misdiagnosed as anxiety bc it’s different from what TV shows it to be, and the reactive anxiety (as opposed to constant, causeless anxiety from an anxiety disorder) is a symptom of ADHD. She’s dealt with the same issues all her life, so I go to her often when I hit the wall.

She told me to take the medication. I said I didn’t like the side-effects. She bought me mouthwash that helps dry mouth and a box of Rice Krispies Treats so I can eat something small but filling when I lose my appetite. She reminded me that the side-effects would improve if I took the medication more often. I am privileged in that I had the opportunity to see a doctor for my issues and be able to afford (even if barely) my medication, and I should take advantage of that instead of taking it for granted.

This is a long post, sharing my personal story about having mental illnesses, and how medication helps. It may not feel like it took effect, but then it’ll wear off and you’ll realize the difference. It’s better to feel stable, to feel “normal” for most of the day, than to get used to feeling awful. I took my medication this morning before class; I’ve taken about five hours to write this whole thing, due to having begun it before one lecture started, then continuing it during another while also listening to my professor review the first five chapters of Return of the King and discuss it with us. And now I’m in my apartment, on my laptop, switching between ending this PSA and checking on due dates and reviewing my calendar and just being 10 times more productive than I ever am.

I don’t know if anyone will need this advice. I don’t know how many will even click the read more. But this is a blog site, and this is something I’m trying to learn and have it remembered. It’s something I needed to put into words, and now it is.

#mental health #medication #depression #adhd #american education #this has been a psa #mental health advice

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robogreaser · 6 years

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It’s been something of an incredibly rough few weeks on my end.

I come into write this post and realize Im going to need to break it down and draw it out significantly to make it make sense, considering I’ve been skimming on the details when talking to people close to me. I keep meaning to do a write up. It’s easier to hand a person a link instead of trying to condense a heap of nonsense into a sentence.

So here it goes. This is what I’ve been dealing with lately.

I’ve... had trouble figuring out where to start. I’ve sat on this post for about an hour now, so I suppose I need some sort of methodology to sort this all out. Okay... lets start from least consequential to most.

For a while I’ve been dealing with some medical nonsense. It’s mostly minor, but I’ve had a series of dental procedures to get a series of tooth issues resolved. I need to get a root canal still, but money is tight and I still owe my dentist a little over $200 still. On top of dental, I’ve also been working on making sense of my depression/anxiety/ADHD (officially diagnosed now) and have been cycling a bit through meds and dosage changes.

Bloodwork was recently done to see if I had hypothyroid issues. Nope. In the clear. Not even pre-diabetic. Need to work on triglycerides a little bit though. Otherwise mostly okay.

Work has come to a grinding halt in the post-mothers day rush. Income is somewhat dried up outside of small commission related things I’m working on here and there. Thank god I can leave money in paypal indefinitely and move it to the bank when emergencies strike. It’s been my only saving grace financially the past few weeks.

The shower door was broken recently. I don’t know all the details because I was out running errands at the time, but I’m still finding glass in the shower a week later. We’ve had to procure a curtain until I get the few hundred bucks to replace the thing. Needless to say showering has been a damned bit more difficult than usual. On top of that there’s still the hole in the ceiling that’s been there since around Christmas that’s steadily getting worse. The light is deteriorating, the sink is chipped, and... yeah. Despite all my efforts, getting any help from my family in getting a truck to transport the drywall needed to fix it is turning up... zero. So yeah. Bathroom renovations are a mess at the moment. It makes showering and various other hygiene things difficult, but I'm managing.

Part of the reason there’s been such a delay on the bathroom as well is the fact I’ve been tending to other renovation projects. For my uncle. A few towns away. He was diagnosed with cancer late last year and I thought I could do some good and help him with several home projects before his daughter moved across country this summer to live with him. It spiraled out of control. It turned into me dumping money and time and energy and all sorts of effort into renovating a small, nicotine stained house with little help aside from my partner @ironoverwine and the occasional assistance from my grandparents. It... has not gone well.

My cousin has moved back in the past week or two. Ever since I’ve been going full boar with the reno work, daily for over a week, making her a damned nice bedroom out of a mediocre hellhole and her son one too while I was at it. I‘ve cleaned the house. I’ve painted. I’ve torn out wallpaper. I’ve done impossibly complicated amounts of millwork installation. This is not me tooting my own horn here either. There has been a lot of work. And a lot of money. I’ve wracked up damned near $2k in credit card debt for the material and the traveling, probably much more.

And I’m not getting paid for this. In fact, I’ve recieved nothing but ire and callous cold shoulders for it. The sheer lack of a ‘thank you’ is getting to me. The expectancy for me to continue in spite of the lack of pay or gratitude or decency is... infuriating.

I suppose there’s a point where I need to take a break and segue into something more positive in terms of news. Nope. This ties to perfectly into the next round of fuckery going on recently.

Though I’m sure some people who follow me/read this are aware, I tend to keep relatively quiet (or try to) about how I’ve been taking care of my grandparents the last several months. I have been off and on since I was in school, but the past few years (minus the spell I spent in Oklahoma [god that was a mess] last year) it’s become more and more of a full time affair. Lately its been money and health issues dialed up and up... I’ve taken to managing finances and updating their banking info, keeping an eye on things and fending off phishing scams here and there. My grandmother had a heap of credit card debt because of a shitty doctor conning her a few years back.

Im trying to fix it. I’m trying to make sense of things for them because they have so damned little as it is and I am at least smart enough with money to allow them to start saving up money in the case of an emergency. For the first time in her life my grandmother has a proper savings account and money put away. She’s 79. (more on her specifically later.) I am an authorized user on her credit cards in order to help monitor and pay her bills, and also because piggybacking off of her credit history had helped me immensely with credit score ratings and whatnot. I mean, it’s not every day you can tell a credit firm you have thirty years of credit history.

Well, unfortunately, though I managed to reduce her debt by a significant amount, my mother decided to get involved.

Though I had used the credit to work on my uncle (her son’s) house and though she was aware of it, my mother convinced her, my grandmother, that I was ‘stealing’ money from her, via her credit cards. Despite me actually paying her bills. Despite me allowing her to cultivate savings for the first time in her life. Despite me clearing multiple cards for her for the first time in years and tackling intrest and keeping her from slipping into the red over and over and over...

She was convinced I was stealing from her. My mother convinced her of this and then convinced her to cancel out and close all of her accounts. Even though I was taking care of everything, my grandmother shuttered all but one (inconsequential) credit line she had. With $5k still owed to these companies.

My credit score has tanked. At least 150 points. For you youngins not in the know, that’s fucking awful. My grandmother is somewhat unscathed (though she did have near perfect credit and a long history of it) despite all this but... but me? I’ve only been building credit for two or three years now. I was barely doing well before this. My credit score has tanked hard and will continue to get worse. I won’t be able to get into an apartment or find a car at this rate...

Which leads me to more recent news. I tried to get a loan before the credit bureaus changed my score, some way to circumvent the fallout and get enough money to consolidate my debt and tuck some cash away into savings for an apartment or a car in the near future. It was denied. On multiple fronts. Because of what my mother did.

I am in something close to financial ruin, or at least the worst I’ve been in until now. Debt is climbing. I’m not going to be able to get any sort of loan for any sort of adult purposes for what is going to end up being years at this rate. This is exactly what happened that prevented me from going to college. My mother has ruined my finances to spite me and make me wholly dependent on my family.

I’m 25. There’s no damned escape. Though I planned to move out and get an apartment sometime early this summer, it’s near impossible at this rate because of what’s happened to my finances from this one incredibly underhanded move.

But it doesn’t stop there. No. It couldn’t.

This past week has been dominated by one major thing: My grandmother’s fall.

Despite me telling her to do precisely the opposite, my grandmother used a step stool on Monday, got up on the counter to clean something, and ended up falling on her back. I was at the doctor for aforementioned bloodwork at the time, and found out on my way home. She ended up being ambulanced out before I got home and... it’s been a whole ordeal since. I’ve had to travel extensively to visit her everyday since (twice yesterday) and... she’s been transported to a physical rehabilitation facility in order to get her back up on her feet and walking again. There was extensive internal bruising and her arthritis has advanced significantly in her back. Her hips are out of alignment. Her muscles have atrophied...

I’ve been taking my grandfather up their daily to see her and make sure she’s getting the care and rehabilitation she needs. It’s been tough. It’s been taking away a good half of my day for a week now. The other half has been flooded with errands and extensive housework.

I...

I don’t know when this is going to let up. Even despite my medications, there’s been significant flare ups in my depressive episodes because of all of this. I’ve been strategically offline in order to allow myself some time to ‘rest’ at night as best I can. But... I don’t know when I’m going to get back up on my feet in regards to all of this. I’m pouring all of my time and energy into... this nonsense.

There’s debt. There’s chores. There’s the elderly. There’s my mother. And through it all, I am trying. I really am. I am trying so damned hard to make progress with my nonsense.

Im tired. And Im tired of being tired.

#jesus christ mike shut up #long post //

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theliterateape · 3 years

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Before You Go All-in on Antifa, Try Becoming Antifra First

by Don Hall

The laughter at my expense was not the kind of guffawing that accompanies a sense of genial ribbing but of Biff Tannen cracking up at the awkward geekiness of George McFly.

"What do you think queer means, Don?"

"I always thought queer meant gay."

Laughter. "No. Queer means refusing to accept the binary in sex."

"Isn't that bisexual?"

Cackles. "No. Bisexual is having a sexual attraction to both biological sexes."

"Who the fuck decided that? Was there a memo sent out?"

The evolution of language is, taken as a long tail concept, natural. When the Miriam Webster Dictionary enters finna (contraction. DIALECT•US, verb. finna: going to; intending to. "I'm finna make a scene") one has to grudgingly accept the fact. It is both the codifying of slang as standard and the pushing the envelope of common dialect. It can get confusing but it is as normal as language itself.

The term fragile is very popular in 2021 but I'm not certain the people who use it as a political label have an understanding of what it means. The redefinition seems to be a synonym for defensive but that isn't even close to the original so it doesn't play. Considering how loaded the term has become politically, I'd suggest we take a look at the pre-DiAngelo meaning and embrace it some before we continue forcing the evolution.

Back to that handy tome of mutual agreement of terms, the dictionary has a few definitions of fragile:"easily broken or damaged", "flimsy or insubstantial; easily destroyed.", and "not strong or sturdy; delicate and vulnerable".

A nine year old boy is enticed to have penetrative sex with his fourteen year old babysitter one afternoon while his little sister watches Joe Namath as "C.C. Ryder" on the television a room away.

This is either molestation or an uncomfortably early rite of passage. The argument can be made that a nine year old cannot give consent but that's not how I remember it. A more fragile person might see this experience as traumatic. He might internalize shame and let the shame fester until he finally explodes like a liter of Diet Coke and a Mento tab. An anti fragile person might see it as no different than playing in the streets when the sewers back up the neighborhood becomes a river in the rain. No stigma, no shame, no harm.

The anti fragile adult is going to have a happier life if not the attention lauded upon a fragile victim of circumstances beyond his control.

I was a latchkey kid.

We lived in an apartment complex on the less than affluent side of town. Mom worked several jobs and the step-dad at the time was a preening, disco-dancing domestic abuser. As such, I found myself out and about without a lot of safety nets in place. I played in a septic ditch just on the outer parameter of the complex. On the other side was an abandoned housing development and I frequently went over there alone to practice my karate (which I thought I was learning from watching David Carradine in Kung Fu, a popular episodic featuring a white man posing as an Asian man who saved people with his peaceful but forceful side kicks). I’d kick holes in the drywall pretending it was comprised of bad guys.

On the north side was, in my mind, a forest but in reality was just a bunch of trees in several abandoned lots. Whenever I ran away from home (a feat that usually lasted until I was tired or hungry) I would go to my forest and “read” the tattered copies of Playboy and Penthouse I had stolen from the aforementioned step-parent.

To the south was a playground for the kids in the complex. A rickety swing set, a teeter-totter, and a broken merry-go-round surrounded by garbage dumpsters. A cursory examination of the dumpsters—a routine activity for a vagabond third grader—revealed a coterie of used hypodermic needles, marijuana roaches, empty liquor bottles and fast food trash.

It’s likely that parents reading this have already crossed themselves or knocked on wood in deference to the fact that their children would never be put in these positions. That their children are safe.

One day, as I had exhausted myself from kicking holes into drywall villains, I headed to the playground. There was no one else around and I decided that I wanted to swing but not on the actual rubber strap. I unhooked the strap from the hefty S-hook it hung from and grabbed it like Tarzan on a vine. I started to swing around in circles holding as tightly as I could to the chain.

Slowly, I began to slide down until the S-hook punctured my white jeans and then into my scrotum. I felt some discomfort and looked down and saw blood on my crotch but I couldn’t disengage. I was hooked, by my ballsack, to the chain. I panicked and did my best to scramble up the chain but the S-hook was firmly in there and the chain just followed me up.

I screamed for help. No help arrived. I struggled and the blood started running down my left pant leg, flowering out like a Rorschach. It seemed I was hanging there for hours but the reality was more likely a few minutes until the hook, now greased with blood, slid out of my nuts and I fell to the dirt.

Leaping up, I dropped trou on the spot to inspect the damage but there was so much blood that I couldn’t see what was actually a small leaking hole. I cried. I squalled. With my pants around my knees, I ran home.

I smashed into the front door screaming bloody murder that my balls were bleeding. My mother, shocked by the sight of her 9-year-old kid, reddened pants around his knees, crotch covered in blood, and in high hysteria (I mean, who make among us wouldn’t be?), laughed out loud. A giggle turned into a laugh transforming to a barking guffaw.

The more dramatic I was about it, the harder she laughed. Out of shock, out of horror, out of knowing how melodramatic her son was prone to be. She giggled as she washed my junk off and saw the tiny hole. She giggled episodically as she put an ice pack on it and tossed me in the car to go to the emergency room. She stopped laughing by the time we reached the hospital and I received two stitches on the underside of my underside.

A more fragile person might grow up with this experience in desperate need to pay someone to listen to his trauma.

"My mother laughed at my bleeding scrotum!" he'd wail as the therapist did her best to stifle her own laughter. He might write a book much later after his antidepressants and struggle session with his mother commenced entitled "Men and The Mothers Who Giggled at Their Nuts" and an article in The Atlantic "Incels and Their Reasons."

An anti fragile person might see this as pretty fucking funny.

In 1992, I was mugged just outside the Granville Redline stop in Chicago. It was around 2:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning. I had just played a gig on the Southside with a big band known as The Outcasts and, still in my tuxedo, decided to walk the block to an all-night diner for some breakfast when three young black men hit me with a two-by-four and then proceeded to kick the shit out of me on the sidewalk.

They stole $14.00 in cash and a check for $200.00 from the gig.

Bruised but not broken, when I told the police that I was mugged by three young black guys and what were the chances I'd get my money back, they laughed. Not like Biff Tannen but more along the lines of Denzel in Training Day to a naive Ethan.

Later, when I met with Gil, the drummer and band leader, to have him cut me another check, Gil muttered as he canceled the first "N****rs are the fucking worst." It would have been cause for some sort of reckoning except that Gil was black.

A fragile mind might find himself going over and over the incident, blaming himself, blaming black men everywhere, blaming the cops.

An anti fragile mind understands that shit happens and you can't dwell too much on it because that means you're spending a lot of time thinking about shit.

The more time one spends dwelling on shit, the worse the place smells. It's like living with five cats. At some point, you have no idea that your apartment stinks like cat asshole but your Tinder date sure does.

Commonsense Media has polled some info out and it seems that the kids are wallowing in catshit.

23% of 14- to 17-year-olds say they "often" came across racist comments on social media in 2020 — nearly double the number in 2018 (12%).

"Sadly, but not surprisingly, the teens and young adults who are most likely to be affected by such content are also most likely to encounter it — or recognize and remember it," says the study, which was done in partnership with Hopelab and the California Health Care Foundation.

Black young people are more likely than whites to see racist comments "often" (34% vs 23%). LGBTQ+ youth are more than twice as likely than non-LGBTQ+ youth to encounter homophobic comments (44% vs 18%). Females are more likely to encounter sexist and body shaming posts than males.

On top of all this feline fecal material, it turns out that both actual mental health issues as well as the frequently self-diagnosed PTSD cases are dramatically on the rise. Where, in my formative years, comparisons of how many push-ups one could do was common, today's kids compare anti-depressant cocktails.

Under almost any definition, this is the behavior of fragility. Fragile like a Fabergé Egg in the back of a pickup truck on a dirt road going 75 miles an hour.

Surrounded by catshit, constantly seeing the injury you're looking for and thus finding it everywhere, always feeling aggrieved and victimized. What the fuck can you do except feel like you need to be bathed in Bactine just to survive life's never-ending abrasions?

First, decide what's more important than your feels.

Most people let their every waking moment be dictated by feelings—both theirs and everyone else's. This is a one-way path to thinner skin, gentler sacks, and a general inability to live in a world outside of an echo chamber that has been hermetically sealed.

Becoming anti fragile is the process of understanding that there are a lot of things more important than your feelings. Romulans are fragile; Vulcans are not. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t have the feels—just don’t let them make your decisions for you. It might feel great to scream at the obnoxious woman at the Walgreen’s counter but it’s smarter to mind your business and buy your condoms and Zagnut bar while shutting the fuck up.

Second, get better at feeling bad and keeping it to yourself.

Just like most people allow their lives to be led by the nose by their feelings, most people think they are somehow important. They aren’t. You aren’t. The way skin thickens up is by taking some hits and learning that there are far worse things than being insulted, micro-aggressed, or shamed publicly. Grow a sack and a sense of proportion.

Finally, as the Stoics go, assume you have something to learn in every interaction rather than you have something to teach. I mean, who the fuck are you? To most people, you aren’t anyone of note so suck on the bitter teat of humility and join the throng, kiddo.

As Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Rūmī once wrote "Yesterday I was clever so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise so I am changing myself."

Be wise because clever people write for McSwenis and those assholes suck.

#fragility

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 Episode 4 Review: Forget Me Not

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This Star Trek: Discovery review contains spoilers.

Star Trek: Discovery Season 3, Episode 4

In some ways, “Forget Me Not” is Star Trek: Discovery‘s most ambitious episode yet. It may not include epic space battles or a trip to the Mirror Universe or a jump 930 years into the future, but it does attempt to address the cumulative collective trauma of an entire starship crew that has gone through all of the aforementioned—a narrative endeavor that has much less precedent than bearded Vulcans.

Fittingly, the episode begins with a log (supplementary) from Discovery’s doctor, Hugh, who is in the midst of compiling a comprehensive report on the crew’s health. The opening voiceover, though presumably written well before coronavirus, is startlingly relevant: “It’s starting to hit everyone… just how little we have to hold onto. The personal moments we use to define ourselves—birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, funerals—we’ve jumped past all of them.” Um, relatable. Perhaps it’s particularly easy to find catharsis in this depiction of Discovery’s mental health struggles because of what’s going on in the real world now. Either way, this addressing of the crew’s mental health is long overdue for a show that encourages us to accept that Starfleet is some form of utopian institution.

Of course, just because Hugh is asking the right questions, doesn’t mean he’s getting the honest answers. “First they have to accept help,” muses Hugh in his log. “For a crew of overachievers, that kind of vulnerability can be hard to hold.” When he presents the report to Captain Saru, he diagnoses the crew with heightened stress levels pretty much across the board, but he doesn’t have an easy fix. Out here in the darkness of the future, there’s only the mission of finding the Federation to hold onto and, for some, that’s understandably not enough. In many ways, the easy past was jumping through that wormhole. (Though Detmer and Stamets may not agree.) The hardest parts have come after: in surviving through what they’ve found on the other side, in learning how to live in the in-between times without the rites and rituals they took for granted in their home time.

Saru is on it. He is a holistic captain and he’s taking the relative lull between crisis situations to address some of these lingering and complex issues. He asks Stamets and Tilly to find a way to use the spore drive should Stamets become incapacitated or worse, and he takes his crew’s mental health struggles seriously, getting some helpful advice from an unexpected source: Zora. Well, no one on Discovery knows her as Zora yet, but we do—we were introduced to the character who evolved from the Discovery’s computer in the Short Treks episode “Calypso” (written by Picard showrunner Michael Chabon). There, she was the lonely artificial intelligence of the Discovery computer, long ago abandoned by her captain and crew. Here, she’s seemingly new, an evolution of the computer as influenced by the sphere data, and she’s got movie recommendations! As Saru later theorizes to Hugh, she’s protecting the crew in the same way the crew protects her. It’s a heavy-handed, but not unappreciated metaphor for the Trill host-symbiont relationship that makes up the focus point of the episode’s other major plotline…

Though we met Adira as the genius teen engineer in last week’s episode, this week, we really get to delve further into their character—and, you know, so does Adira. They don’t remember anything before getting picked up in an escape pod not so long ago and, frankly, they are an impressively functional human being given that backstory. But the time for mysteries is (thankfully) over. Adira is the host to a Trill symbiont that includes Admiral Senna Tal, and Discovery needs access to his memories in order to find the Federation. Luckily, Adira would also like to know what the heck is going on with their past(s), and accepts Discovery’s offer of a ride and escort to the Trill homeworld. That escort ends up being Michael.

There were many fascinating character dynamics at play in “Forget Me Not.” Tilly and Stamets. Hugh and Saru. Stamets and Detmer. Detmer and Hugh. Saru and the Computer. You name it, this episode probably had it—but the one that had the most work to do was the dynamic between Adira and Michael. All those other relationships have seasons of history to build off of, but Adira and Michael just met one another. It says a lot about the power of both Sonequa Martin-Green and Blu del Barrio’s performances and the chemistry between the them that the emotional journey of their storyline works so damn well. By the time these two are boarding a shuttle to head down to the Trill homeworld, I am already invested in their easy banter and earnest vulnerability and that investment is crucial as the stakes both raise and become more, well, mindscape-y.

As anyone who has watched an episode of dramatic television may have suspected, Adira’s visit to the Trill homeworld isn’t conflict-free. While the Trill are initially overjoyed to hear that one of their own is returning to them, after having lost so many in The Burn, their reception soon turns sour when they realize Adira is a human host and the rejection is honestly difficult to watch. They deny Adira access to the Caves of Mak’ala, and ask that they immediately leave the planet. But this isn’t Michael’s first rodeo. When some hostile Trill show up looking to forcibly separate Adira from their Trill symbiont, Michael takes them out and, with the help of a more radical Trill, brings Adira to the caves.

Once there, Adira is able to use the milky pools to communicate with their symbiont and, with Michael’s encouragement, unlock the secrets of their past. Adira grew up as an orphan on a generation ship, but they had family: Grey, their boyfriend who was Trill. The two were in love and it was adorable, then tragedy struck. Not long after Grey became a host to a symbiont named Tal, their ship was damaged and Grey died, but not before Adira became Tal’s new host. Adira’s memory loss came as a result of their inability to fully connect with Tal (and also, probably, because of their trauma). After spending time in the caves, Adira is able to meet the many hosts who live on in and with Tal, including Grey, and is accepted by them and by the other Trill.

“Forget Me Not” was all about relationships: the ones we have with others and the ones we have with ourselves, and the ways in which those two categories are inexplicably intertwined. Relationships of all kinds can be highlighted, challenged, and changed by trauma and its aftermath. For Adira, the trauma of losing Grey and unexpectedly becoming the host to an alien fractured one of the most fundamental structures of their personhood: their memory. For the crew of Discovery, abruptly losing their homes and families without properly mourning that loss was eating away at the bonds between this starship family. Both Adira and the crew of the Discovery couldn’t hope to start healing, without pausing to make space for the pain they all felt. It’s pretty badass that Discovery devoted an entire episode to this theme, and that they managed to tie two relatively disparate storylines so tightly together with it.

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Additional thoughts.

I kind of hate that Grey, one of Discovery‘s first two trans characters, is tragically killed in the same episode we meet him. Yes, it’s complicated by the fact that he lives on in Tal and that there is something funky going on in that Adira can see and interact with him, but it still sucks. That being said, it is pretty amazing to have two trans characters (in non-binary Adira and trans Grey) on Star Trek—I love them both.

Hanelle Culpepper, who directed the first three episodes of Picard, was behind the camera for this one and did an amazing job in an episode that asks for both domestic squabbles and alien mindscapes. Some moments when I especially appreciated her style: Those close-ups of Adira as the Trill discussed whether they would help them. The shots of Detmer’s hands clenching around the table before she brainstorms her haiku of death. The way Detmer is standing in foregrounded shadow before admitting to Hugh that she is not OK. Honestly, just like all of the shots of Detmer and how they visually communicated her not-OK-ness.

“You wanna fly this monster?”

Can we talk about the Trill costuming? Honestly, these shapeless, flowing tunics would make great home quarantine wear, especially if you’ve been working on your triceps.

Ronnie!

I love that the introduction to the Michael/Adira dynamic comes from Hugh. He points out that Adira and Michael have a lot in common, as two people who are attempting to live past their trauma. Additionally, from Michael’s point of view, Adira is so much easier that every other relationship she’s got going on right now. Adira might expect things of Michael, but they don’t expect Michael to be the person they were a year ago, when Discovery jumped through the wormhole, because Adira didn’t know that person. Adira can offer Michael something that no one else on the Discovery can right now: a fresh start. And Michael, well Michael can offer Adira her skills as an empathetic badass, which immediately come in handy during their mission.

“Adira’s life takes precedent.” Michael is not here for your fucked up priorities.

Hugh totally nails his analysis of Michael as a “responsibility hoarder,” and he does it in such a loving way.

Riker Googling: “does petsmart sell flying trill fish?”

Yoga. Interstellar shopping. Limiting dairy. It is worth noting that, in that long (and hilarious) list of suggested therapies for the crew’s stress problem, Zora never mentioned, you know, therapy. Though perhaps we can assume that is what Hugh is offering to Detmer when she comes to him at the end of the episode.

“Get in there before someone shoots us.” Someone put this on a cat poster!

Joann and Keyla: friends or friends?

If anyone else is confused about other characters’ use of “she/her” pronouns for Adira, who identifies as non-binary, actor Blu del Barrio explained how their character’s journey will mirror their own in an interview with Syfy Wire, saying: “Even when people are using she/they pronouns, for Adira, because they have not shared their identity with the Discovery crew … And this was basically the case because I still wasn’t really out to my family and I didn’t want to be out on screen as a character who was out until I was … I wanted to wait until I had told my family and my friends. So I kind of came out alongside them.” Adira’s pronouns are “they/them,” as are del Barrio’s. (Also, that Syfy Wire interview by Riley Silverman is worth a read in its entirety.)

I love that Saru’s dinner party small talk is all about kelp crop harvesting. We are not worthy.

It is so believably nerdy that the Discovery bridge crew/officers would have a haiku-off at family dinner.

OK, but are Linus and Emperor Georgiou like actually friends?

“Well, at least the wine was good.” I love that Georgiou was invited to this party.

I can only imagine that one of the proposed titles for this episode was “Dr. Hugh Culber: Stealth Therapist.”

The Discovery now has the coordinates to find Federation headquarters, whatever that means…

Bless the patron saint of Starfleet therapists: Dr. Deanna Troi. Eat some chocolate in her honor.

The post Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 Episode 4 Review: Forget Me Not appeared first on Den of Geek.

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