on romanticizing the rot
growing up not popular but not unpopular does funny things to your psyche. it makes you do things like falsely romanticize the toxic reality of being fourteen years old out on the town drinking liquor you bought from strangers and hanging out with people four five six years older than you.
at fourteen i wanted nothing more than to be one of those girls, who went out every weekend and got shit-faced with fair-weather friends who'd leave you out in the cold if they had to. but that can’t be true. they couldn’t’ve been that toxic to each other, right? not like they were to me. it must bond you, in some way.
when i first got drunk at seventeen i think me and my friends’ brains connected. our neural pathways will always be linked and we are bonded for life. and there’s nothing like the friendliness of drunk girls: the compliments in bar bathrooms, the unbridled and unwavering support they show, the intent interest with which they listen to you, the genuine and bright way they compliment you, say you're so pretty oh my god I love your skirt you’re gorgeous you're literally a goddess he aint shit dont call him you deserve better i want to worship the ground you walk on
i guess the problem comes when drunk girls get sober. the unity of a drunken haze disappears into a cloud of smoke much like the one they were exhaling the previous night.
theres something deep and powerful in partying. in throwing your life away. in substances and succumbing to them. there must be. that’s why we keep romanticizing them, right? that’s why I wanted nothing more than to have that at fourteen, have that fun, dangerous, thrilling feeling of being alive. of being young and doing things you're not supposed to. I didn’t even think of the immense danger these girls put themselves in.
seeing my old friend solidified this. revealed the toxicity that they must’ve had to adopt to survive. she told me how she wishes things didn't go the way they did in junior high, told me about the one who was behind most of the drama and everything that contributed to those three years being some of the worst of my life. conversation in smoking areas are special like that. they tear down your walls and get you to reveal yourself. talking over a shared cigarette is a bonding experience and talking with her after years of uncertainty on where we stand all melted away and we talked as if we never stopped. i love her, truly. she lived through the decay, found herself after it. i went through the self discovery process, too. realized, and really, knew all along, that the ideas and experiences i was craving and romanticizing were not worth throwing my childhood away.
at eighteen i still crave the decay despite of this.
i experience bits of it, now. i feel it when im walking home at 5 am. its nearly palpable when im sharing a smoke on a park bench, tipsy, and the scene is right out of a coming of age movie. at least i hope it is, but i fear it might not be, might be a horror movie or a documentary on my downfall. i still want to live through that chaos. i crave it on rainy evenings biking home from work. i crave it when the musics loud and i pass by a group of teens having fun and somehow feel left out despite being in the same club. when i see people entering bars when im on my way home from having a drink in the park with my friends. i see it in university students getting black out drunk weekly. microdosing alcoholism at the excuse of making the most of your youth. its part of the college experience! its normal! come out with us and drink so much you wont remember half of the night the next day and do it all again a week from now!
the small town syndrome. when theres not much else to do except go to parks and drink with your friends. when your whole country is on the brink of alcoholism and its normal for preteens to start drinking and smoking. its hard not to romanticize it, right?
i still crave the decay. i still romanticize the rot. i yearn to live through it, vividly, violently.
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also: I mostly switched over from saying "antipsychiatry" to psych abolition after I started to see more groups like CPA use it, and thought I'd share some of my thoughts on it.
antipsychiatry is a fundamental part of psych abolition for me, but i think my definition of psych abolition contains a lot more. first, there's a lot more things than just psychiatry that i want to abolish and transform--the whole mental health system and many different belief systems, types of providers, forms of treatment, and types of incarceration that are encompassed in that. i think it's important to name and identify the particular harms of psychiatry as a value system in the way it is the strictest example of pathologizing, medicalizing, and the strongest adherer to the purely biomedical model of illness and how this creates so much harm. but i think that there are also so many other harmful structures + belief systems within the whole mental health system. i also sometimes see therapists, for example, portraying themselves as alternatives to psychiatry, and while that's true in the sense that they are a different treatment option than a psychiatrist, they are often still harmful actors in their own rights and entangled with the state in an equally bad way.
second thing for me is that i think it's really important to intentionally build cross movement solidarity, especially with the prison abolition movement and to expand the way psych survivors currently support support people fighting for abolition of all forms of incarceration. (i drew inspiration from sins invalid and the 10 principles of Disability Justice). I see so many people in psych survivor spaces saying " I can't believe we were treated like prisoners on the ward" with the implication that it's fine if prisoners are treated that way, but it's bad when it happens to them. i think that's fucked up and i think that any psych survivor movement that doesn't actively support people incarcerated in prisons is a movement that does nothing to dismantle white supremacy. we need to be able to recognize the ways carceral logics operate in many different structures, and approach our activism as a shared struggle, where we constantly are led by those most impacted. so i think that naming what we're doing as "abolition" is important (with the important caveat that our organizing must then actually be abolitionist, and especially for white organizers, that we need to learn about the history of abolition, actively support the Black leaders and thinkers who have created the prison abolition movement and not center ourselves, that we actually have to be actively involved in supporting abolitionist work happening in your area, instead of just stealing the work of Black abolitionist scholars to use it for our own benefit without any credit or reciprocity, that we need to actively interrogate ways white supremacy culture and antiblackness are showing up in our movement places so that we aren't inviting our comrades who are people of color into spaces that are not safe for them, or exploiting our comrades of color by expecting them to do the work of dismantling the racism within our shared organizing spaces--don't call yourself a psych abolitionist if you still call the cops on your homeless neighbors, if your solutions to psych incarceration contribute to gentrification, if you refuse to support currently incarcerated comrades, for example.)
third thing is that antipsychiatry as a specific term is often associated with the sociologist theory from the 1960s, some of which i think is useful, some of which comes from antisemetic and racist psychiatrists who should not be given any legitimacy. antipsychiatry also often gets associated with cults like scientology. although i think that scientologists bastardize a lot of antipsychiatry stuff and weaponize it for their own ends, a lot of the public thinks of them if you say antipsychiatry, and it can cause misconceptions. also think that people sometimes assume antipsychiatry is inherently against medication and while i don't think that's our responsibility to clear up every time people misread our words on purpose, i think it's been a lot more helpful for me to talk about medication in the context of autonomy, harm reduction, war on drugs, and the ways that psychiatry creates issues to consent, autonomy, informed use, risk reduction, etc etc etc. and i think psych abolition helps me do that a little better.
i get in a lot of conversations with people who say "well from what i've seen you are just against institutionalization. why not just say that instead of attacking psychiatry?" and my answer is always if we want to end institutionalization, we have to end the structures, belief systems, and power dynamics of psychiatry--psychiatry is one of the logics that enables institutionalization to continue, and abolishing institutionalization without abolishing the structures that allow it to continue mean that it just pops up again in a new form with a new name (asylums to hospitals to group homes etc etc etc). so i think psych abolition to me is a clearer way to encompass the ways that all these systems are interconnected, and that when we're fighting for mad liberation, the right for mad/neurodivergent/mentally ill people to access care, support, healing on our own terms, to be free from institutionalization and violent treatment, and have the right to exist as mad people, whether or not we're "cured."
TL;DR: I switched to saying "psych abolition" rather than antipsychiatry even though there are many core ideas of antipsychiatry that I agree with. I think that for me, psych abolition helps clear up some misconceptions that people have about antipsychiatry, more clearly connects to prison abolition, and makes it clear that we need to transform more of the mental health system than just psychiatry.
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You know I don't think Timmy actually ended up sharing Wanda and Cosmo for all that long with Chloe in the grand scheme of things.
I mean there's various points in the show that seem to imply that having Fairy GodParents is a temporary thing. Like extremely temporary for most kids.
As in even being 10, and having gotten Cosmo and Wanda at age 8, Timmy's considered as having been a GodChild for a long time. Even if that's only a couple years.
Like there's a reason why there's multiple episodes about all of Fairy World being interested in whatever Timmy's up to.
Timmy's an outlier case.
He's going to end up aging out of the system (bar any breaking of any major rule that the fairies can't find a way to forgive) and everyone knows it.
They made a whole live action trilogy of bending the rules just for him where he gets to keep his fairies as an adult, and then turns into a fairy at the end of that trilogy.
He's a, probably wouldn't have made it to adulthood without fairies, kind of a case.
That's not the case for most kids who get fairies, or at least it's heavily implied that's not the case for most kids who get fairies.
Take Cosmo and Wanda being Crocker's fairies in 1972, and having already been his fairies for about 2 years by that point, but having had been Billy Gate's fairies in 1970.
We're never even given a hint that Billy lost his fairies traumatically, because he grew up to invent the internet just fine, and we never hear about him beyond that. And it seems like if a kid traumatically loses their fairies before their ready, it ends with them being a screwed up adult.
Which tells me that whatever situation Billy was in to need fairies resolved itself shortly after the time travel thing.
Heck even then, it was heavily implied that Crocker's life, even qualifying for fairies, was better than Timmy's was. Considering the only things mentioned is that he's got a single mom that works multiple jobs, and when she doesn't she tends to focus on her hobbies, and an evil babysitter to deal with.
He's not bullied at that point, he's not struggling academically, the only things wrong with his life (before getting over dosed on magic mindwipe and being disfigured and losing his mind as a result, which turned him into a social outcast) is that he's got a single mom who works a lot and leaves him with a mean babysitter so she can have me time.
That's it, that's what makes him qualify.
And he would have aged out of at least one of those problems before turning 18. He would have been 14 when he would have naturally outgrown needing to have a babysitter (as that's how old Vicky starts babysitting Timmy).
Then by that point he would have also been old enough to get a part time job of his own. Lightening the financial lode on his mother, and possibly freeing up some of her working time to actually spend with her.
Meaning it's possible that both of his fairy qualifying problems would have resolved themselves by age 14 or 15.
But also the kind of miserable it takes to get godparents (at least when that baseline is first established) is temporary for most kids.
I wouldn't be surprised if the typical Fairy GodParent & GodChild relationship typically only lasted like a year or two for most kids.
[And it seems like the majority of kids we meet who have GodParents, get them at age 10.
I'm pretty sure Timmy being 8 and getting his Fairies, is the youngest kid we ever see having Fairies.
Other than de-aged Vicky that one episode, but because it happened in the constraints of one of Timmy's wishes, I'm not going to count it. Especially because when Cosmo and Wanda are reassigned to Vicky, no one comes to erase Timmy's memory of having fairies, so she doesn't have to worry at all about hiding them which all other godkids do.
Also Vicky is just given Cosmo and Wanda and not her own fairy, which I feel heavily implies that all of this is falling under wish logic, and not normal logic.
Crocker is the second youngest, because he had Cosmo and Wanda at 9.]
Especially in cases where the root of the kid's misery is something they have the power to personally confront and change.
Like if a kid gets a fairy because they're being bulled at school to the point it's ruining everything else in their life. [Bully is making it to where they can't complete school or home work, causing grades to drop, meaning no extracurricular stuff, and getting in trouble with parents.]
But that kid manages to reveal what's happening, and gets things to change, and their life goes back to how it was before. Then that kid obviously doesn't need a GodParent anymore to make up for their miserable life.
I could easily see plenty of situations where a kid might only have a GodParent for less than a year.
Like Hazel's situation from A New Wish weirds me out, because all her problems are super temporary problems that resolve in like a few months to a year for most kids who have those problems.
It's missing her older brother who left for collage. Which most kids eventually get over after just getting used to them no longer living in the same house as them.
When the younger sibling gets used to the older siblings absence, a pretty good chunk of them revel in the bizarre experience of being either the new oldest, or an only child for the rest of their own childhood.
It's moving to a new city and having to make all new friends. Which Hazel does over the course of season 1. She's got 3 friends if Dev counts.
Everything causing her to need fairies is all extremely temporary. Which is a large part of the reason why I don't think she'll be one of the kids to age out of the system the way Timmy was.
She's got parents who love her, she's not struggling at school, she doesn't have an abusive babysitter, she's already started making friends at her new school, her brother came home from collage, but even then that's something she'd just grow out of eventually.
So I feel like unless something in her life changes for the worst, she's going to only have Cosmo and Wanda for a few years at most. And lose them around age 14-15.
Sure her problems are a lot more relatable than Timmy's ever were.
Which is understandable considering Timmy was a kid who had literally everything going wrong in his life, except he wasn't living in poverty.
From neglectful parents, being bullied as school, an abusive babysitter, being specifically targeted by a teacher for harassment, being the target of a girl's stalker crush on him, being canonically considered an idiot even without Crocker targeting him (even though I'm pretty sure he just has ADHD). And that's just the major stuff he starts off with.
That's not even getting into like the magical enemies he makes over the course of the show. Who are out to get him from then on.
And the fact that his parents weren't actively malicious towards him, just forgetful and oblivious.
But Hazel's problems are also all a lot more temporary than Timmy's ever were.
And that's like, the big thing that makes them different and give me the feeling that, while Timmy definitely aged out and had fairies until the last possible moment, kids like Chloe and Hazel probably only had fairies for a few years at most.
That's most likely why Wanda and Cosmo still refer to Timmy as their last godchild before retiring. Even though they were assigned Chloe years after they were assigned to Timmy.
Chloe's issues probably resolved at some point and Timmy returned to being a singular GodChild from that point on.
[I'm guessing she grew a backbone at some point, lets her parents know all the pressure they put on her was making her miserable, and stopped being a complete doormat for literally everyone. Because those were her big problems that caused her to qualify for Fairies.]
Which was probably extremely awkward for Timmy in the aftermath of Chloe having her memories purged of fairies, considering they only spent time together because they were made to share fairies.
Sure Timmy had seen kids lose their fairies before, like with Remy, but he'd never cared then because he hardly spent any time with Remy, and no one would call him and Remy friends.
But it had to be weird when it inevitably happened with Chloe, because by the end there, she basically lived in the Turner house.
Heck of the two kids who get fairies in A New Wish, I'd say that Dev is the kid more likely to be an age out case than Hazel. If he ever regains godparents.
Considering having a single parent, who literally loves business and money more than he'll ever love his own kid, is a bit more of a permanent misery than "I moved to a new town and have no friends, and my brother went off to collage" is.
Just to be honest.
Like maybe it's different rules because Hazel is a post-retirement passion project for Cosmo and Wanda, and they can stay with her until she'd age out because they're not on official rotation or whatever.
But no one will be able to convince me that she'd actually need fairies the entire rest of her childhood unless something horrible happens to her in season 2.
Like baby girl those are some temporary issues that tend to resolve themselves within a year, how are you going to keep qualifying for fairy godparentship the rest of this series?
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