#but i always tag things!!! and i never vent about overly personal or even triggering stuff

[catnykit]

dont'ya hate it when interesting asthetics are aslo connected with 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐞 which means that you came for pretty images and you got triggering vents

[fromzerotoeuphoria]

This MH Shipper Tho...

So last week I made a post about how Haru gets sentimental when around Rin which I had originally posted to Reddit (before I got my Tumblr account). It wasn't too popular on Reddit as there are many more MH shippers there than RinHaru shippers, which is totally fine; I didn’t care about the post being popular (I figured it wouldn’t be), I really just wanted to share my thoughts and love about RinHaru with the world. 😁💜🌸

The rules of the subreddit clearly specify "No Hate Comments" and "No Ship Bashing." If you read my post, even on the Tumblr version I don't even mention any other ship and certainly don't hate on any other ship. It was merely an appreciation post of RinHaru that discussed how Haru gets especially sentimental when around Rin.

I literally wrote this disclaimer in my original post:

But of COURSE, that’s just too much for some people and they still get triggered.

Disclaimer: This isn't an anti-Mako//Haru post but it is an anti-Mako//Haru shippers who are immature, hateful and hilariously insecure about their ship. This isn’t towards all Mako//Haru shippers, esp those lovely and chill ones. To those I send my love (because I appreciate y’all and also love my big squish Makoto 💚).

So this afternoon I get a notification that I have a comment on my Reddit post:

I didn't want to just assume this person was a Mako//Haru shipper, because they could've been an anti-shipper in general, so I checked out their profile first because I like confirming things rather than jumping to conclusions and making assumptions.

But sure enough:

OMG ahahaha y’all this person was so triggered by my post—a post that had absolutely no hate towards Makoto nor Mako//Haru—that they made not only one, but TWO posts that broke community rules by ship hating because of it. AND those two posts were the only posts they ever made on Reddit, ever. 😂 

Literally, all my original post did was give some rare RinHaru appreciation in the subreddit. And the post was even tagged as “Shipping” and had RinHaru in the title. And still this person willingly clicked on it knowing it was a ship post about their notp smh. 

Even in my response to them, I didn't hate on any ship. Yet even then, they're still mad and then try to turn the blame onto me:

Imagine being so insecure and overly sensitive about your ship that the very appreciation of a different ship, one that never invalidates your otp nor Makoto, triggers you that hard. Lol YIKES.

Needless to say, both of their posts were removed for breaking the rules of the subreddit.

Here’s the thing: I’m new to the Free! fandom so I wasn’t here when the ship wars were at their worst. So when I come across all of the Rin and RinHaru hate when I dive into fandom posts, it hits me like if it was new, because no matter how long ago it was, it’s still hate. Hate that still crops up today, which I see frequently on other areas of the internet. 

I tend to write a lot of “posts” addressing this hate or defending RinHaru, but it was originally just for myself and my private blog/diary. Now that I have tumblr, I’ve debated many times whether or not to publish these defenses of RinHaru since the ship wars aren’t nearly as bad as they were before, and a I’m sure a lot of the haters have moved on to (hopefully) better things. Yet every time I feel like maybe its unnecessary to write these long meta posts about RinHaru or posts that address hate coming from mh shippers, I run into something like this, either on YouTube or apparently now Reddit (even though it's against the rules). 

So you know what, I’m not gonna feel bad about addressing RinHaru hate anymore, even if it's from the past because it still goes on today. Also, I know how hard it is to see the hate as a new fan, and seeing people defend Rin and RinHaru is always comforting. Hopefully it’s comforting to others, too.

Anyways, pseudo-venting sesh over.

BONUS: this person really hates Rin lol

[localsadghoul]

vent post

This is full of abuse and drug triggers. I’ve tagged them all, but I really want to put that warning up first just in case. This is a really long, bleak, and overly complicated post. If you stick with me, thanks. If not, I understand. I just need to put this out on paper. I’ve been gaslit about my abuse my entire life, and if I don’t start putting it in words, eventually my abusers’ will win and these terrible memories will be erased and I will never feel valid in my suffering because of it. That’s somehow worse than the suffering itself.

I had a panic attack at school today. Nevermind this is my first semester back after five years, nevermind this brand new city i’m still adjusting to, nevermind my 50+ hour weeks at my new job; the point is I set expectations for myself that I wasn’t meeting, and it was killing me, and I had to leave before a mandatory attendance class. Often, when people post about their mental illnesses, specifically anxiety and depression, someone will comment on their thread “call your mother!” Call your mother. One of those go-to, “drink water” “exercise” “feel the sunshine” type pieces of advice to self-medicate. I know these are legitimate to some and that’s awesome. But to people like me, it’s bullshit.

And not because I’m some expert or elitist when it comes with medicating mental illnesses. I’m self-diagnosed, uninsured, and self-medicating. But, I do know my brain is not well, serotonin is missing, and my chemical balances would probably resemble the layout to a winning rollercoaster attraction if you mapped it out. Anyway, the reason is why it’s bullshit is because I can’t call my mother. Not because she’s dead, not because she doesn’t love me, but because I have to choose to not have a relationship with my mother.

There’s an entire history of emotional, mental, and on rare occasions physical abuse I could go into to describe what my mom, and her branch of family, has put me through. For a long time, I excused it. I really did. She was also not mentally well, dozens of doctors and series of medications had proved that to me. She’d spend days in her bedroom with all the lights off some weeks, others her abuse would intensify and it somehow always fell on me (or at least that’s how it felt). I was the youngest, which means as her mental illness progressed, I was the one receiving the worst of it.

A short background to my family; I have no full blooded brothers or sisters. I was raised in a nice, new house with five brothers and sisters from a few different combinations of parents. Despite us all coming from broken households, we had the recipe for a happy childhood. We were “housepoor”, and I later in life learned a lot of christmases happened thanks to various loan companies, but we were still happy. We all benefited from appearing middle class, white privilege, and regardless of blood, we had two parents. Kind of. My step dad is one of the greatest people on the planet. I call him Jerry and he’s just as much my dad as my biological dad is. So, further on, I won’t refer to him as my step dad, only as Jerry, because that’s who he is.

So, anyway, times passes, my siblings get older and start moving in and out of the house, my mom’s mental illnesses are winning as a result of her changing her medications, or doctors when hers wouldn’t prescribe the drugs she really wanted, or when she’d start a job and decide she didn’t like it and had a mental breakdown that would put her out of work or on disability or whatever; this caused inevitable unemployment and Jerry’s salary as a GM of a restaurant to support all six kids, my mother’s lifestyle, my siblings’ various unplanned babies, stints in rehab, evictions, divorces, incarcerations, etc. We were losing the house. Our house. I was the only kid left, and the only home my memory could remember was disappearing before my eyes. My aunt’s boyfriend was a realtor and by the time I was 13, my house was on the market and we were looking for two or three bedroom houses for rent for my mom, Jerry, and me.

At 13, I had been removed from all gifted programs as a result of my ADHD (which, to a 13 year old with no understanding of mental illnesses translated into me being too stupid to continue these programs I had loved and held pride in since I was 7, my only real accomplishment in my life at this point), I recently had come back to a trip from my home state, where my late father got arrested for a DUI, forcing my step mom to make the seven hour drive to get her kids’ (but because I was not biologically hers she felt no need to include me; i had to be transported to the Columbus airport to fly on a plane for the first time alone back home to Tennessee), and I was also losing my home; something I didn’t even really understand at the time was a monumental thing. 

At this point our house had been on the market for months, which caused a lot of conflict between Jerry and my mom and my aunt and her boyfriend, all of which put my grandparents, the only members of our family with any “money” (mostly just credit card debt) in a weird position. (Again, later in life I learned that a lot of my mother’s mental illnesses and abuse was passed down from her parents, my grandmother who is also addicted to all sorts of fun pills and my grandfather, who I never really learned much about but I think it has been alluded that he was a serial cheater and abusive towards my grandmother. Just a big cycle of poverty and abuse that stemmed from rural Ohio). My grandparents were at the house, everyone was really stressed out and tensions were high, and I was mad. I can’t remember why. At the time, and consistently my entire life into adulthood, I couldn’t keep a clean room. Ever. It’s a pretty common symptom of attention deficit disorders, but it infuriated my mother who was a very appearance based person. While we had store brand everything, she had a beautiful wardrobe, hundreds of dollars worth of makeup, and if you didn’t know any better, you’d assume she was the wife of a wealthy man and her only job in life was to look approachably beautiful. So, if I had to guess why I was mad at them and they were mad at me, it’s probably because while we were trying to stage the house in order to sell it, my room was probably a mess and they wouldn’t let me leave the house until it looked as nice as we pretended our family was. 

Jerry wasn’t home at the time. I think my sister, Devin, was, because she recalled some of this. Anyway, we got into a fight, I was a mad 13 year old who was dealing with hormones, feeling stupid, with the thought process that my beloved father was a deadbeat alcoholic, etc rinse repeat, right? I stormed upstairs to my room, but God, did I know better than to slam my door. I closed it behind me (also knowing better than to lock it behind me), but I was mad, and I felt it in my fingertips, and I wanted to slam that door but it was already closed and impulsive thoughts took over and I did the only thing my brain wanted me to do; which was simply to grunt and push my door with enough force to make a small thud sound. Imagine throwing a shoe at a closed door; enough to rattle it against the frame, but not enough to cause any actual damage to the structure itself. I was mad and my body wouldn’t hold it. I wanted to respect my mom and grandparents enough to not let the anger slip from my body but it did and it came out as a 120 pound teenager pushing her hands against a door.

But, a part of me knew better. Before the sounds of their feet racing up the stairs to my room even began, I curled into a defensive position on the floor. I knew what was going to happen. I challenged their egos, in whatever small way I did, I challenged them and they were going to win. A family of narcissists, and I dared demonstrate any amount of teenage angst. Within a matter of seconds, my bedroom door flung open, and before their swinging hands and legs (all three of them, my grandfather, grandmother, and mother) made contact with my body, I was already yelping and screaming for them to stop.

I don’t remember if the occurrence lasted five seconds or five minutes. I don’t remember if any of it left bruises. I don’t remember what was yelled at me, I think a combination of “don’t you ever disrespect us again” or something along those lines. I don’t remember what happened afterwards. Probably apologies, but whatever happened, it was enough for me to still love, adore, and look up to these people, my family, for almost another decade. 

Of course it didn’t stop there, and the older I got and the wider sense I had revealed a lot of my mother and her parents’ manipulation, drug addictions (including pill trading with my oldest sister and second oldest brother, who were both addicts as well). My mother threatened me with suicide, her self inflictions were rubbed into my face because it was “my fault”. Her relationship with Jerry declined and by the time I was seventeen, they were separated, and I was signing a lease on an apartment with no experience or knowledge of how to support myself.

Still, I tried. My mom got worse. She started dating men she met on the internet, including an ex-boyfriend of my oldest sister. She moved back to Ohio for a bit, back in with my grandparents. Social media was alive and well in my family, so anytime I would show signs of resentment towards my mom, I would get an instant message from my grandmother calling me a selfish, ungrateful brat, or sometimes she’d approach it with more kindness than that, more of a “it would really help your mom if you would just call her and tell her you love her.” My grandmother is not a cruel woman. Yeah, it occasionally reared its head out, but she saw herself as a provider, and wanted to mother us when our own mom couldn’t do it. Or that’s what I told myself at the time. She also threatened to shoot Jerry with a shotgun she claimed she was going to buy just for the occasion, but still I had to believe my grandmother at least was good. (She did profusely apologize for her threats, which doesn’t excuse it).

 God, if you looked at my family, you would never guess any of this. We look like a normal, middle class, diverse family. (Just a random observation, not really important to any of this.)

Between the ages of 17-21, it was a cycle of trying to love my mother, trying to grow our relationship, her disappointing me, me trying to care for myself and remove her from my life, and my grandparents forcing me back in. They’d occasionally send me $20 here and there for groceries, so out of survival I’d almost always did what they’d tell me.

It wasn’t until my dad died and my mother selfishly made it about her that I finally, FINALLY, drew the line. (Laughing at myself that it was protecting my dead dad, not caring for myself, that finally cut the cord.) In a rage, I finally typed out the longest, most brutal message I could really laying out all the damage she had done to me, including pleads to never contact me again, and hit send. Of course, what did we learn when I got my ass beat at thirteen for pushing a closed door? You never challenge narcissists. This is when the gaslighting really comes into play. She claimed all of the abuse never happened, my grandmother and grandfather start messaging me with “how dare you”s etc. Except, I wasn’t a dependent teenager anymore, I was a twenty two year old woman with a job, a purpose, and my own doors to slam and my own house to scream and yell in. The only thing I had to do to silence them was block all of them. And I did.

And it’s been nearly two years. Sure, they try and contact me occasionally, still gaslighting me that I was never actually abused, but also with apologies for having to experience /some/ level of unpleasantry because of the way they handled their mental illnesses. My life since then has been all about self-preservation in the biggest way. Of course, I am not free of their tendancies or behaviors, but I am conscious of them and I have a level of self control and education to stop myself before it causes the amount of pain they caused me and my siblings (I’m not the only one who faced the abuse, I’m just the only one willing to admit it because I don’t get my drugs from my mom or I choose to remain willfully ignorant with evil my family is capable of). But I’m struggling. I’m struggling through gen eds at a community college. I’m struggling to be a good partner, a good fried, a good ally. I’m struggling to exist with myself. I know mental illness is hereditary, but I also can’t stop myself from wondering nearly daily if I could be the kind of person I want to be without ever experiencing their fucked up version of “love”. Isn’t that what every kid of abuse ponders? Would I even hold myself up to the often unreachable standards that I do had I not endured them? 

I don’t know. All I know is, I’m an anxious, manic depressive “spaz” (as my family referred to me for years), and I won’t call my mother. It won’t make me feel better. The only love I need to learn to receive is self-love, because I’ve spent a lifetime neglecting it.

And if you can’t call your mom, if you can’t call your dad, if you can’t call a single family member because of their abuse; it’s not because you failed as a child. They failed you. I’ve got to remember that. We all do.