because sometimes there are invisible tests and invisible rules and you're just supposed to ... know the rule. someone you thought of as a friend asks you for book recommendations, so you give her a list of like 30 books, each with a brief blurb and why you like it. later, you find out she screenshotted the list and send it out to a group chat with the note: what an absolute freak can you believe this. you saw the responses: emojis where people are rolling over laughing. too much and obsessive and actually kind of creepy in the comments. you thought you'd been doing the right thing. she'd asked, right? an invisible rule: this is what happens when you get too excited.
you aren't supposed to laugh at your own jokes, so you don't, but then you're too serious. you're not supposed to be too loud, but then people say you're too quiet. you aren't supposed to get passionate about things, but then you're shy, boring. you aren't supposed to talk too much, but then people are mad when you're not good at replying.
you fold yourself into a prettier paper crane. since you never know what is "selfish" and what is "charity," you give yourself over, fully. you'd rather be empty and over-generous - you'd rather eat your own boundaries than have even one person believe that you're mean. since you don't know what the thing is that will make them hate you, you simply scrub yourself clean of any form of roughness. if you are perfect and smiling and funny, they can love you. if you are always there for them and never admit what's happening and never mention your past and never make them uncomfortable - you can make up for it. you can earn it.
don't fuck up. they're all testing you, always. they're tolerating you. whatever secret club happened, over a summer somewhere - during some activity you didn't get to attend - everyone else just... figured it out. like they got some kind of award or examination that allowed them to know how-to-be-normal. how to fit. and for the rest of your life, you've been playing catch-up. you've been trying to prove that - haha! you get it! that the joke they're telling, the people they are, the manual they got- yeah, you've totally read it.
if you can just divide yourself in two - the lovable one, and the one that is you - you can do this. you can walk the line. they can laugh and accept you. if you are always-balanced, never burdensome, a delight to have in class, champagne and glittering and never gawky or florescent or god-forbid cringe: you can get away with it.
you stare at your therapist, whom you can make jokes with, and who laughs at your jokes, because you are so fucking good at people-pleasing. you smile at her, and she asks you how you're doing, and you automatically say i'm good, thanks, how are you? while the answer swims somewhere in your little lizard brain:
how long have you been doing this now? mastering the art of your body and mind like you're piloting a puppet. has it worked? what do you mean that all you feel is... just exhausted. pick yourself up, the tightrope has no net. after all, you're cheating, somehow, but nobody seems to know you actually flunked the test. it's working!
aren't you happy yet?
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Honestly I think the fics where Danny’s a Kryptonian have a lot of potential, so here’s me throwing my hat into the ring
Danny was born a human. He was born to two loving (though slightly neglectful) human parents in the painfully mundane state of Illinois.
Then, he died, but he didn’t do it right. He became a Halfa; too alive to be a ghost, but too dead to be human.
Then, through strange, uncontrollable circumstances, that changed as well.
He had been heavily injured, missing a large percentage of body mass, and was at the cusp of either dying fully or just fading from existence.
(Perhaps it was an ordinary fight. Perhaps it was the GiW, or his parents. Perhaps it was a simple accident. That didn’t matter now.)
He fled, phasing through the ground, trying to bury himself as deep as possible.
(Perhaps he didn’t want to be unmasked in death. Perhaps that was already too late, and he just wanted his body be able to rest in peace.)
Unfortunately for him, he was in Metropolis, and ended up in a secret genetics lab below the earth.
Danny detransformed, completely exhausted, falling onto a table covered in different labeled specimen containers. He closed his eyes, and prepared himself for what would happen next.
And… nothing.
Slowly, cautiously, he opened his eyes.
Danny sat up, brushing off the foul-smelling liquid from the specimen jars, petri dishes, and assorted vials.
He felt…fine.
No, better than fine. He felt normal. Healthy.
He felt like he wasn’t missing most of his internal organs anymore.
Danny looked down at his stomach, and saw that the wounds that were killing him had completely disappeared.
(The blood blossoms, if there had been any, were still there, but they no longer hurt. At most, they itched a little, or maybe just tickled a bit.)
He wanted to question what in the hell had just happened, but he didn’t want to jinx it. He just quietly changed back to Phantom, going invisible and phasing out of wherever he had found himself in, ignoring the loud alarm system that had begun to blare when he broke the samples on that table.
Life mostly went back to normal after that.
If, like Danny, you ignored all the physical changes in a valiant effort to remain in denial that something was horribly wrong.
His skin was tougher, now; he didn’t get scrapes or cuts, even when he accidentally fumbled a knife while trying to cook. His ghost form was stronger, too; he was barely knocked down by his old rogues anymore.
He could fly, even in his human form. Though, admittedly, the flight was much different. It was like using a muscle he hadn’t known existed beforehand. He didn’t just ignore gravity or wind resistance, though he felt more graceful in the air now than he ever did as Phantom.
There were more powers popping up, lasers and cold breath, x-ray vision and super strength. His lungs and heart were larger, and he could handle temperatures much easier. He didn’t have to transform to handle the pressure and cold of space anymore.
His reaction time had improved, becoming much faster than ever before. His senses were much stronger, and he had even seemed to gain a sense of electric fields, like a shark.
The only thing that separated him from a Kryptonian was that he had developed electrokenesis, which he had never seen any of them use on TV.
So, surely, he was fine.
Everything was normal, he hadn’t been transformed by alien DNA in a sketchy lab, he had just had a really weird and specific metagene activation.
—
Clark Kent, Kal-El, was panicking.
It had been around a month and a half since a particularly brutal fight between Interpol and an unknown assailant, and it seemed that Interpol was determined to draw out whoever had scorned them.
Their method of doing this, of course, was trying to level the city.
He and Jon were doing their best to stop them, but with both Kon and Zor-El away on their own business, it was difficult.
And by difficult, he meant almost impossible.
Slowly but surely he was driving them back, but not without massive amounts of damage to the city, especially with only Jon on dedicated rescuing duty.
He was distracted, trying to draw a group away from a heavily occupied building, when a projectile hit him in the back of the head.
The world spun for a moment, and then it went black.
(It was, probably, then, some sort of Kryptonite-metal alloy. Interpol at its finest.)
He woke slowly, forcing his eyes open. He felt like he had been hit by an eighteen wheeler.
Clark jolted up, preparing for the worst.
To his shock, though, the city hadn’t been reduced to rubble while he was out.
Jon seemed to still be working on evacuation, either unaware that he had went down or forcing himself to focus on the task at hand.
Then, a lightning-quick figure flew into view, and Clark’s mind went blank.
He thought, for a moment, that Kara was back. But, no, that wasn’t right, she was supposed to be off-planet for another week or so.
Besides, this new figure didn’t move like her. They were lankier and more slender, and they flew quicker than any member of his family.
Their powerset was different, too; they focused mainly on using blasts of ice and electricity to drive enemies back, only occasionally using their strength or lasers—ones which came from their hands instead of their eyes.
He had woken up at the tail end of the fight, it seemed. The remaining Interpol agents were fleeing from the mysterious metahuman.
They stayed in the sky, motionless, watching them leave.
As if they could sense him staring, they turned.
They were small, still clearly young. Probably around Kon’s age, or maybe even younger.
Instead of the colorful clothing he had inherited from his family, the stranger wore black and white clothes which looked similar to a hazmat suit, their face covered by some sort of gas mask.
Interestingly enough, instead of the S-shape crest that he was so used to seeing, the stranger wore the letter D on his chest.
Kal’s heart sped up.
From up in the sky, he heard the stranger’s heart, on the left instead of the right, speed up in return.
But before he could say a word to them, they sped off, disappearing into the deep blue sky.
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so one of the things that's so horrifying about birth control is that you have to, like, navigate this incredibly personal choice about your body and yet also face the epitome of misogyny. like, someone in the comments will say it wasn't that bad for me, and you'll be utterly silenced. like, everyone treats birth control like something that's super dirty. like, you have no fucking information or control over this thing because certain powerful people find it icky.
first it was the oral contraceptives. you went on those young, mostly for reasons unrelated to birth control - even your dermatologist suggested them to control your acne. the list of side effects was longer than your arm, and you just stared at it, horrified.
it made you so mentally ill, but you just heard that this was adulthood. that, yes, there are of course side effects, what did you expect. one day you looked up yasmin makes me depressed because surely this was far too intense, and you discovered that over 12,000 lawsuits had been successfully filed against the brand. it remains commonly prescribed on the open market. you switched brands a few times before oral contraceptives stopped being in any way effective. your doctor just, like, shrugged and said you could try a different brand again.
and the thing is that you're a feminist. you know from your own experience that birth control can be lifesaving, and that even when used for birth control - it is necessary healthcare. you have seen it save so many people from such bad situations, yourself included. it is critical that any person has access to birth control, and you would never suggest that we just get rid of all of it.
you were a little skeeved out by the implant (heard too many bad stories about it) and figured - okay, iud. it was some of the worst pain you've ever fucking experienced, and you did it with a small number of tylenol in your system (3), like you were getting your bikini line waxed instead of something practically sewn into your body.
and what's wild is that because sometimes it isn't a painful insertion process, it is vanishingly rare to find a doctor that will actually numb the area. while your doctor was talking to you about which brand to choose, you were thinking about the other ways you've been injured in your life. you thought about how you had a suspicious mole frozen off - something so small and easy - and how they'd numbed a huge area. you thought about when you broke your wrist and didn't actually notice, because you'd thought it was a sprain.
your understanding of pain is that how the human body responds to injury doesn't always relate to the actual pain tolerance of the person - it's more about how lucky that person is physically. maybe they broke it in a perfect way. maybe they happened to get hurt in a place without a lot of nerve endings. some people can handle a broken femur but crumble under a sore tooth. there's no true way to predict how "much" something actually hurts.
in no other situation would it be appropriate for doctors to ignore pain. just because someone can break their wrist and not feel it doesn't mean no one should receive pain meds for a broken wrist. it just means that particular person was lucky about it. it should not define treatment.
in the comments of videos about IUDs, literally thousands of people report agony. blinding, nauseating, soul-crushing agony. they say things like i had 2 kids and this was the worst thing i ever experienced or i literally have a tattoo on my ribs and it felt like a tickle. this thing almost killed me or would rather run into traffic than ever feel that again.
so it's either true that every single person who reports severe pain is exaggerating. or it's true that it's far more likely you will experience pain, rather than "just a pinch." and yet - there's nothing fucking been done about it. it kind of feels like a shrug is layered on top of everything - since technically it's elective, isn't it kind of your fault for agreeing to select it? stop being fearmongering. stop being defensive.
you fucking needed yours. you are almost weirdly protective of it. yours was so important for your physical and mental health. it helped you off hormonal birth control and even started helping some of your symptoms. it still fucking hurt for no fucking reason.
once while recovering from surgery, they offered you like 15 days of vicodin. you only took 2 of them. you've been offered oxy for tonsillitis. you turned down opioids while recovering from your wisdom tooth extraction. everything else has the option. you fucking drove yourself home after it, shocked and quietly weeping, feeling like something very bad had just happened. the nurse that held your hand during the experience looked down at you, tears in her eyes, and said - i know. this is cruelty in action.
and it's fucked up because the conversation is never just "hey, so the way we are doing this is fucking barbaric and doctors should be required to offer serious pain meds" - it's usually something around the lines of "well, it didn't kill you, did it?"
you just found out that removing that little bitch will hurt just as bad. a little pinch like how oral contraceptives have "some" serious symptoms. like your life and pain are expendable or not really important. like maybe we are all hysterical about it?
hysteria comes from the latin word for uterus, which is great!
you stand here at a crossroads. like - this thing is so important. did they really have to make it so fucking dangerous. and why is it that if you make a complaint, you're told - i didn't even want you to have this in the first place. we're told be careful what you wish for. we're told that it's our fault for wanting something so illict; we could simply choose not to need medication. that maybe if we don't like the scraps, we should get ready to starve.
we have been saying for so long - "i'm not asking you to remove the option, i'm asking you to reconsider the risk." this entire time we hear: well, this is what you wanted, isn't it?
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