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killed-by-cas-confession · 4 years

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A ficlet thing I wrote when I was having an anxiety attack from my GAD. Dean’s been kidnapped by witches and thrown under a spell after the events of 15x18 (with the bonus that Jack rescued Cas from the empty but... ya know, Cas comes back to the bunker ofc) (That anxiety ficlet I mentioned that I was contemplating adding more plot to. Still might do that and throw it on AO3 but I’m focusing on my Season 16 fix-the-unmentionable-finale-that-doesn’t-exist-fic so maybe later) I just have it on my phone and edited it sloppily because I want it out somewhere, so I’m throwing it on here. TW: Anxiety attack and the thoughts one has during one, Canon compliant Violence mentions, John Winchester mention, Self Worth issues. Not beta-read, barely proofread.

His heart is going a mile a minute. Its pounding in his ears, bashing against the inside of his skull like a jackhammer. His breaths are shallow, quick, too quick, too much.

It's all too similar to the buruburu case in Colorado, taunted by his mind about his time in hell, about returning, after he was saved by an angel, by god he wishes he could be saved by that angel again.

Please. Please. Someone save me, please-

It's all too much, it's too much, it's too similar to those years spent in the pit, the torture he suffered, and it won’t stop, won’t stop, please stop-

Time somehow is passing at a crawl and a mile a minute. His throat feels tight, like he’s being choked, and he has been, so many times before, but then he could fight against it and now, despite how much he cries out, only half aware of every plea that leaves his lips, they simply hang in the empty, foreboding space. Every assault on his mind comes like he's thumbing through a flip book, the images intense and gone as quickly as they came only to be replaced by ones just as hellish as the last.

He simply exists, thrashing and falling in this agonizing space, in this spell-induced hell, this anxiety filled pit.

He sees John one minute, hears his angry yells. He can feel every punch and kick and breaking of bones he’s ever taken the next minute, and then, then he's seeing the faces of all the monsters he's ever almost died to, the animalistic rage behind them; something twisted and evil and gnarled and aimed right at him-

He can see the pit, feel the rip and tear of hell hound claws that dragged him down. He may as well be buried in a pine box because there can’t be oxygen in this damp basement he's locked in, because his lungs refuse to take any in.

Above it all is the ache splitting his ribs, for every death he's had to watch and carry on through- every victim he couldn't save, every family member he's ever failed- Sam, Jo, Ellen, Bobby, Charlie, Mom, Cas-

Cas, help, help me, help me please—

It's a plea, a prayer, for help, for forgiveness, an apology for it all; the fighting, the lies, for not listening to him, for not helping him, for not saving him; from Crowley, from Rowena, from Lucifer, from Asmodeus, from the Empty.

It's an apology for not saying it, for not stopping him, yet again, when he left him in that dungeon months ago, when everything was falling apart just like he is now.

He's only able to duly note that there’s a bang above him. A shot. A yell and a burst of energy. It's too far away, too far outside this bubble of torment that he's stuck inside and can't escape. He can’t bring himself to pay attention to the blood leaking down his face, the swollenness of his left eye socket and the pressure building steadily there. He knows at some point he tried to move, to curl in on himself, to somehow protect himself against the mental hits, forgetting the chains keeping him prisoner against the cold cement wall, and his ribs protested harshly. He's sure some are broken but he can't bring himself to care, because it's just more pain, more nausea inducing fear.

None of it can really matter now, ever since the spell that has his lungs gasping for breath and hot tears staining his cheeks as he struggles to calm his pulse, to not shake against his shackles. He can’t breathe, he can’t breathe, is the spell finally killing him? He knows it's the spell, he knows, he knows, but he keeps seeing flames on the ceiling, Sam's back bleeding red onto his palm, burnt wings on the ground around him, everyone he loves leaves, dies, he corrupts everyone who touches him, why do people keep touching him?

He just wants it to stop, please, please make it stop, please make it quiet, please end it, because he can't watch Sam fall into the pit, he cant watch the blue white glow and hear Cas's scream-

Cas, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, sorry, I'm sorry-

He clings to Cas, like he did being half carried down the bunker halls that day, begs the thought of the angel to ground him somewhere; the movie nights, the car rides, the late night phone calls with Dean sitting outside his hotel room in the driver's seat of the impala so he doesn't wake Sam but those happy thoughts feel so far away, like it isn't him in the memories, and they're easily replaced by the tears sliding down Cas's cheeks as he says his goodbyes, Death pounding on the door like his heartbeat in his skull, boom, boom, boom, until Dean's lungs bottom out as his back hits the wall-

"Cas!!"

"Dean!"

He twists his face, screws his eyes shut tight; no, no he can't hear his voice, can't hear it saying what he can't say back-

"Dean, I'm here."

Stop, stop; Cas is safe and home, but he can't be, maybe Jack didn't bring him back, maybe it's all been a cruel joke. Maybe he's still in hell, suffering the loss of a love he's never known.

Dean has to be still sitting on the dungeon floor, twisting and jerking to free himself from the chains that hold him there, his body protesting, his throat caught between a sob and a yell, both so broken by pain, forced to lose his best friend, forced into silence by the trauma, unable to scream or whisper it back and he opens his eyes, tries to see through the blur of tears, only to be taunted by blue eyes staring back, wide eyed and scared, scared of him, scared to be saying it, scared of dying.

"Cas, please-" he hiccups a sob, willing Cas to stop looking at him, to stop the rough hands yanking at his wrists, rougher hands still frantically gripping his shoulders-

"Dean, Dean it's us, its Sam and Castiel--it's me, stop-"

Stop, and he's sure Cas is lying broken, on the floor beneath him in the bunker in a mess of books and wood splinters, a moment from death at Dean's own rage-fueled, bloodied hands-

And then Cas is cupping his face and he forces his eyes open, forces himself to look into the blue eyes peering back at him, and he can't help but to rest into the warm palms, to get relief in any way, uncaring if Cas kills him here in this crypt over this tablet now.

"Cas-"

"They're coming, hurry-"

"I'm getting it, just--...I got it, help Dean, I’ll cover--"

And then the chains are free, and Cas is lifting him from Hell, lifting him from the pit, an arm around his back, a hand around his wrist but this time it isn't restraining and restrictive; no it's carrying him through the gunshots, through the bunker halls, up wooden steps and into sunlight, into leather seats where he can collapse back, his head lulling forward to stare at the dark floors that should be the dirt at a lake house, marred by burned wings-

"Dean, I've got you."

"Cas..." He whimpers out, aching on the movie nights, an old western playing over them in the dark where he can blame the closeness on booze, on tiredness, on just accidentally shifting closer trying to get the popcorn. He aches to let himself fall into Cas's hands, closing his eyes against the touch that he knows he shouldn't want, and yet he thinks Cas wants now, somehow, someway in front of a neon cross-

"Dean, it’s alright, I’m not going to hurt you. Look at me...look at me."

He shouldn't want to peer up into those blue eyes and imagine the cosmic energy behind them and yet he does, to just selfishly grasp at the possible love behind them, to feel the words ‘I love you’ over and over again; that he's loved, that he's a loving, cared for, selfless, kind person, all the things he's still not sure he is and yet he wants to be, wants to be more than anything and yet how can something as otherworldly as Cas be wrong?

"I've got you. Take this, for me, it’s okay."

How can he deny someone like Cas, when he's looking at him so purely?

Cool glass meets his lips and a liquid snakes down his throat and its somehow vile and yet holds a ginger root scent that’s warm and kind of smells like that trench coat or maybe that's coming from the fabric itself that he’s gripping like a lifeline now, head curling against the angel's warm palm. Cas is staring so mournfully sweetly at him, and suddenly his entire body is full of warmth and intimacy and safety; kindness and love and he can’t help but whimper in awe at it.

"Shh. It's okay, Dean. It’s okay."

It's okay.

It’s okay to finally let himself ignore the old western on the tv, Sam and Jack, to let his head lull onto Cas's shoulder, to let Cas guide him against his chest, to let Cas wrap an arm around him. It's okay to cry at the sensation of Cas's warm palm against his cheek, to focus entirely on his thumb stroking his skin.

He can hear Sam asking Cas a question, he's sure he hears his own name, but it isn’t accusing, it isn’t judging, it isn’t hateful; Sam's asking if he's okay. Because of course he is.

"He will be."

Maybe he will be.

No, he will be because Cas has got him.

Cas has got him, like he's always had him; once more he's lifting him up from hell, and he's safe in his arms, curled up against his side now, the safest place he could be, and finally his body and mind drift away from the exhaustion of it all; lulled to sleep by Cas's warmth against his side, the rumble of baby's engine, the low Led Zeppelin track on the radio, and the knowledge that he'll be okay.

#destiel fanfic #deancas #casdean #destiel #ficlet thing #cee rambles about things #i wrote this in like an hour to cope with bad levels of anxiety #and it helped #this is the second time ive written an anxiety based fic to cope with anxiety #anyone else do this #reblogs welcome #god i just love commas dont you

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stranger-who-writes-fiction · 3 years

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Me, throughout the entirety of 6x05:

And I suppose I could just leave it there but NO, we’re doing a LIST. Of all the excellent things from “Prom Night!”

SPOILERS!

AV Club reviewer giving this episode the first ‘A’ of the season: :D

AV Club reviewer still insisting that “Midvale” was filler: D:<

Forever destined to disagree with the AV Club reviews in some way or another...

Okay, so! We begin with a very helpful reminder from Alex that things are different, in this Post-Crisis World!

(I mean, on the one hand, am I slightly distressed that key aspects of the Pilot and the WHOLE of “Midvale” are now gone, along with Earth-38? Yes.

On the other, Kara remembers her lived-experiences of everything that had transpired in the Earth-38 timeline, so they still sorta happened and have informed her characterization.

So...it’s fine. It’s fine. This is fine.)

I do love that, ‘Kara punched a meteorite out of the sky’ is now a Thing That Happened, though.

(Well perhaps NOT ANYMORE but I’m getting ahead of myself.)

KENNY LIIIIIIIIIIIIIVES!!!!!

“Scooby-Duo” listen, as someone who has already imagined all these kiddos in Hanna-Barbera cartoon style, running around Midvale, solving crimes and saving the day, I loved this description.

Alex being like, ‘DO. NOT. SCREW UP. MY PAST.’ ahhhhh we love to see that scary Older Sibling energy on full display.

And then Brainy and Nia are off to the past!

The only thing that could’ve made the utterance of ‘totes’ worse would’ve been the addition of, ‘magotes’. Thank goodness they exercised restraint in the writers’ room.

FORTUNATELY the terrible ordeal of reliving dated slang is offset by some truly excellent lines and line-reads throughout the rest of the episode.

For instance! Loved Brainy’s, ‘the perfect optical illusion’ and ‘off the dash, please.’ So great.

Other honorable mentions: ‘Damn it, Mitch!’ ‘That’s a LOT of exposure’ and I forget the line itself but when Cat’s like, ‘normal town my a--’ and then the cut to commercial break AAAAAHHHHHH so good.

Okay, back to the episode, Nia and Brainy, on the Legion Cruiser, AND THEN!

AND THEN AND THEN AND THEN!

OUR KIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIDS!!!!!

I love them. It won’t happen, but gosh, I want a Midvale spin-off so bad.

Like, the Crisis retcon made some space in the girls’ past for a spin-off to actually...kinda work.

(But sustaining the premise across multiple episodes/seasons would be tricky and there would always be the threat of running up against like. The current show’s continuity.

But hey! They could just ignore it, I guess! That’s what the Superman show is doing!) *insert frowny emoji here*

So the kids have gathered with Alex for milkshakes, which is delightful.

But ALL IS NOT WELL! As Alex reads about the ‘luckiest town’ and is like:

(Except with a lot more anxiety and frowning)

I feel as though we already knew Alex went to Stanford but I can’t remember if Kara’s (terrible) resume revealed that she went to National City University?

*Checks* Yes it did.

Another thing I LOVE is just. Alex as the Responsible One, whose anxiety is perpetually cranked to a 9.5, driving the Scooby-Duo around in the suburban mom van for super-ing jobs.

Also, ‘super-ing’ is an excellent verb, 15/10

Young Cat Grant! ....More on her later.

Nicole and Jesse did such a great job with the comedy in this episode--their initial attempt at a cover story/lie is so good.

And the masterful transition into an actual good lie that Nia knew would win Kara over...VERY NICE.

Kara being so obviously thrilled that there are OTHER ALIENS! WITH POWERS! HERE, IN MIDVALE! RIGHT HERE!

Fandom has ruined the whole ‘Kara has golden retriever energy’ as is their way but I must say...very much getting ‘excited puppy energy’ here.

Nia and Kara comparing powers was so CUUUUUUUUTE!!!!

As was the picture on Kenny’s desk of him and Kara. D’aaaawwww.

(But OH NO SADNESS...BECAUSE A BREAKUP IS IMMINENT.)

Okay in addition to all of the incredibly adorable content we also get lots of FAMILY FEEEEEEELINGS, which: Yes, good, yes.

But Eliza is only here as a PICTURE on Kara’s nightstand and a NAME on Alex’s badge, I am sad. :C

(Hope Helen Slater is in this last season at some point...need that soothing mom energy after all the Phantom Zone angst)

I think I’m out of order now but Kenny wanting to help Kara help people is just. The most adorable thing.

Spoiler alert: I use the word ‘adorable’ a lot in this list. Sorry...but also not.

The Brainy music when he’s in the school computer lab watching the printer is really great. I think we’ve heard it before, but it meshed so well with the whole vibe of both the character and the episode, just stood out nicely, I guess.

Okay, so. Do we think that Jesse could always do the baseball bat tricks, and the writers wrote it in, or do we think that he learned them for the show? My money is on the former.

Either way, very impressive.

And now for the truck situation! I kinda thought it would turn out that it was Cat’s doing, as she was trying to suss out the ‘super’, but nope, it was the blue dudes.

(Which makes more sense, since they have no qualms about endangering other people.)

And ON THAT NOTE, the blue guys! They are the perfect level of ridiculous, and they are wonderfully straightforward in ways that the Phantoms are not.

Also, I love that one of them is named Mitch?

Nia and Kara save the day!

After Kara busts the brakes and is like, ‘uhhh....they’re not working’

I noticed the Metropolis license plate and while yes it’s a little strange that plates are...apparently city-based in this corner of Earth Prime, stranger still is that Cat presumably drove clear across the country to check out this story. Right? Like, that’s the only way she has that plate out in Midvale?

Wait, wait. Totally forgot to mention Kara and Nia’s EXTREMELY OBVIOUS ‘don’t be suspicious’ sunglasses gambit at the Midvale College campus you absolute DORKS.

Right, so.

Remember those FAMILY FEELZ??? WELL!

We’ve got Nia’s call to her mom, which, oof. OOOOOF.

And then we have even MORE FEELINGS aka: The garage talk.

Okay. OKAY. So even though I’m a little sad “Midvale” no longer occurred in Earth Prime’s timeline, I am fascinated by the ways this new series of events have impacted Alex, Kara, and their past. (Also thrilled that Kenny lives, natch). Alex’s resentment and the burden of ‘protect Kara, PROTECT KARA’ have been left to simmer while Kara’s determination to help people has led to some...earnest but slightly careless secret hero work. The building blocks of the conflict introduced in “Midvale” are still there so while it might at first seem a little...repetitive, for Alex to lay all this out to Kara, it’s really just the reveal of a new boiling point; a post-crisis update on the scene in Midvale where Alex is like, ‘I had two parents before you showed up.’

AAAAAAAAAHHHHH IT’S EMOTIONALLY DEVESTATING I LOVE IT.

And then like. The new, but also not-new angle, of Alex leveraging her world-weariness against Kara’s youthful optimism/somewhat reckless desire to help, and then Kara throwing BACK that she’s explored other solar systems.

The LAYERS.

Also that Alex is like, ‘we need weapons, let’s tell mom and also call the DEO,’ classic Alex.

The garage talk ends with Kara determined to come clean to Kenny...BUT OH NO, THE HERO HIDEOUT IS SO CUTE, AND KENNY IS SO DEAR.

And the reveal that the almost-kiss in “Midvale” actually happened d’awwwww these kids.

Like. I am legitimately torn, here. I totally understand and support Kara in being honest with Kenny about the whole college situation--but also GAH. KENNY IS SO NICE AND CUTE AND EARNEST.

You know what ELSE is nice and cute and earnest?

Nia singing “9 to 5″ to Brainy to cope with stress and boost morale.

Heckin’ adorable, gosh.

Aaaaaand some other stuff occurred as the episode closed out but I don’t have them in my notes and BASICALLY I want the next hour like, now. Right now. Because this was WONDERFUL. FROM START TO FINISH.

So some Overall thoughts!

I said we’d get to Cat ‘CJ’ Grant later, so here we are: I...think I liked her? Overall? It was a performance that gradually won me over, is how I would describe it.

Absolutely wild that Cat built a media empire in a mere six years.

Also her whole, ‘I am going to find this extraordinary being and name them and kick Lois Lane into the classifieds’...I mean she eventually gets two out of three, there.

As I already started to mention, sad that Eliza wasn’t here! But it makes sense, since a lot of this, Kara is trying to keep on the DL.

Obviously, I am ALWAYS down for these flashback situations with the young Danvers. But it was also nice to take a break from the Phantom stuff. The plot here is simple/streamlined in a way the Phantom stuff...isn’t. I love the emotional character stuff coming out of the Phantom Zone arc but wow, the Phantoms are just. Needlessly complicated.

The little episode recap where Lena is explaining that Phantom Prime is like a bloodhound was like, ‘oh right, they do that too...in addition to all the other stuff that they apparently do.’

So, yes. Welcome change.

The change of scenery + type of action was nice too!

Though RIP to everyone’s hair, fighting against the moisture.

This episode also handled the Brainy/Nia relationship really well, IMO. Like, due to the whole, ‘trying to fit so much in, always’ approach to Supergirl episodes sometimes results in a bit of...one-sidedness, for various characters. Think for instance of Kelly needing to cheer everyone on in episode 2, but not having space for her own feelings/emotional needs in that episode.

I’ve felt that a bit with Brainy and Nia thus far--one will sort of take up more narrative space, so the relationship feels a little lopsided.

NOT SO HERE! They are both going through some stuff, they are both struggling to cope, they both come to rely on one another for help.

YES. GOOD. YES!!!!

Something I’m loving about season 6 overall is that so far, it doesn’t feel like the plot is stepping on character development too much. Like, it still isn’t a perfect balance, and some episodes manage it better than others, but compared to season 5? Leaps and bounds.

Everything was so nicely tied together and the dialogue was witty, the humor was delightful, EVERYONE WAS ADORABLE AND EARNEST AND DID I MENTION ADORABLE?* but they never lost sight of the themes and emotional through-lines and GAAAAAHHHHHH MIDVALE EPISODES ARE THE BEEEEEESTTTTTTTTT!

*Okay Alex was mainly stressed out but that’s to be expected.

TL;DR - Best episode of the season thus far? Best episode of the season thus far.

#SG post #long post #supergirl spoilers #supergirl season 6 spoilers #gif

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willadisastercry · 4 years

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tw: voltron and anxiety

my brain has just accepted it as fact that Lance was most likely head hostage negotiator for his friends’ sanity while in space and let me tell you why

first order of business: i must establish that Lance is cannocially a goofball. this is factual and cannon. he is confident and charming and assertive and always the first to make a stupid joke just to put everyone at ease or piss them off because he loves them and that’s his thing. he wants to annoy the shit out of them and make them laugh not only because they need it but because he does too.

while i’ve seen a lot of posts suggesting Lance could have ADHD (and while i pretty much agree in that deduction and what i suggest in this post goes hand in hand with this disorder in particular, it requires a more thorough explanation that i as someone with adhd feel like they can provide a solid reasoning behind this theory) i think it can more simply be put as a headcannon that he has general anxiety or a generalized anxiety disorder that manifests in his self worth/esteem making him require more validation, affection, assurance despite his own portrayal of confidence and security (of which is a coping mechanism meshed with pre-existing personality traits). this is done through humor and affection for others, i. e. why he’s the “class clown” of which is a common example used for this type of behavior.

i recognize that voltron is a team of TEENAGERS at war in and entirely new enviornment with none of their usual comforts who have lots of hormones and logical fears that they have to navigate all while tasked with an immense responsibility. that’s stressful in and of itself. but this leads my brain to come to the obvious conclusion that any time a member of voltron exhibited anxiety, so like showed symptoms that they were about to have a panic attack, were stuck in a pattern of irrational thinking, showed harmful coping behaviors related to irrational fear, etc. Lance would sus it out and be at their side immediately to talk them down. no funny business. no jokes until he was sure they were feeling better. his cockiness would disappear and instead he’d be calm, he was always so composed, so comforting. he wouldn’t leave their side until it passed. he’d check on them throughout the day to make sure they hadn’t gotten worked up again. he’d even probably recognized their individual triggers and symptoms and became the only one who could effectively talk them down. every single one. it didn’t matter if they were in the middle of a mission. if something happened to trigger them he would drop whatever he was doing to go to their aid. he had been dealing with this his whole life, and they had just been introduced to such an intense dose of it and were expected to perform. in a hostile environment! and Lance being the softhearted goof he is definitely wouldn’t forgive himself if they got hurt or hurt themselves when he could’ve helped.

and so... Lance has assigned himself an enormous task because he’s Lance. everyone has sort of caught on to this and just accept Lance as being so strangely in tune with their well-being in this regard, all of them having varying degrees of understanding why, the general picture being it likely runs in his family and he is well aversed in both experiencing it and mollifying it. so when ever Shiro is hit by a flash back or has gone catatonic in a more intense episode of his cannon PTSD, it’s Lance and Keith at his side making sure he’s safe from hurting himself, they protect him from getting hurt if it happens in the middle of a mission, and from possibly hurting the people around him. Lance is a light sleeper and is often woken up by light cries and whimpers of his friends having nightmares, depending on which direction they come from warrants his level of concern (he goes by where their room is and the pitch of their cries, because they all get nightmares every now and again, they’re at ~war~ and it’s traumatizing, but some of his friends have worse reactions and tendencies in that state) and sometimes if they never quiet he’ll wait up to make sure they fall asleep okay and that no one hurts themselves in their delirium. and similarly, when Keith is rocked by a string of sleepless, nightmare ridden nights or occasional bouts of insomnia (neither officially established as cannon) and turns up to breakfast sleep deprived and sluggish Lance keeps an eye on him, takes it easy on him with his chiding, watches to see that he doesn’t over exert himself and end up snapping at someone and then crumbling from an exhaustion induced anxiety attack, especially when they’re out on a mission where the stakes are higher to maintain your composure. Lance is there when Hunk who is the most expressively anxious of the bunch is feeling particularly skiddish about a circumstance or on a dangerous mission or in anticipation of one of their teammates stumbling out of their cryopod in tact. he is especially good at knowing what’ll trigger his best friend and can usually manage some reassuring words before he goes full fight or flight and loses his lunch. but what’s most impressive is when he gets through to Pidge. she is a perfectionist, she needs constant intellectual stimulation to calm her nerves but the long hours she spends straining her eyes and her brain is also what makes her inclined to breakdown after a tough mission or during a difficult training session or from aparticularly tactless joke from one of the boys about her height and the like, but especially from frustration about not being able to solve a problem. but when Pidge breaks down it’s like next level bad, her usual practicality and composure utterly abandoned since when she’s lost her logical exterior it’s after a long time of surpressing her emotions, so if she has started crying she usually can’t get herself to stop, on several occasions hyperventilating and passing out. Lance seems to be the only one whose reassuring words she can prescribe to. he does breathing excercises with her to regain a normal breathing pattern and let’s her fall asleep on his chest so she can feel the rise and fall and emulate it. There’s fully now a whumpy fic that i wrote about this dynamic... here.

and the entire team is there to support Lance when he has an episode of his own anxiety. though he is really good at rationalizing his intrusive thoughts when he’s overwhelmed or panicked, it’s all of his good vibes only bs that helps him neutralize most of his anxiety before it builds. but when it does build up it usually manifests in him breaking down over the thought that he might never see his family again, it’s constricting, it’s the only thing he can’t rationalize. his team is very aware of this and try to comfort him before he spirals and usually catch it. Pidge even tries to do his own breathing techniques with him sometimes. and Hunk is especially good at calming him after a nightmare that he wakes up screaming from, usually about his family member dying or him dying before he gets to say goodbye, but Hunk is there whispering mantras in spanish to him until he calms down enough to go back to sleep.

so basically Lance is voltron’s emotional support animal and no one can convince me otherwise.

i digress.

#voltron legendary defender #voltorn #voltron fandom #headcanons #vld lance #vld headcanons #vld anxiety #anxiety #anxiety tw #lance angst #langst #lance anxiety #lance headcannon

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and-then-the-trash · 4 years

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Disorders and Relationships

I am not a very good girlfriend. My s/o might try to say that I’m sweet and cute and understanding and make an effort and all of that (these are in fact things that they have told me before, not things that I think justify my other behaviors), but the fact is that I am not an easy person to love. What I’m about to talk about doesn’t just apply to romantic relationships, by the way, I’m just using examples and talking in the context of my romantic relationship because that’s what is on my mind at the moment.

Here are 2 things about me that are probably important for context here:

I have been in my current romantic relationship for about 15 months now

My s/o and I both have various mental disorders and my own diagnoses include anxiety, depression, and ADHD. Most of the things I’m going to be talking about have to do mostly with my ADHD.

As previously stated, I’m not exactly an easy person to be in a relationship with. I tend to lose track of time and can be very forgetful, and I sometimes forget to actually say things out loud. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said the phrase “I don’t say this enough but I promise I think it/it’s true” to my s/o, because it’s something I do a lot. I forget to actually tell them how I feel about them, what I think about them, what I love about them, what I appreciate about them, etc. A lot of this is because of how ADHD affects my working memory. Basically, for me, a lot of things are sort of “out of sight, out of mind”, and that includes people. It isn’t because I don’t care about people, it’s just that my brain works in a way that I don’t remember that people

Exist

Might want to talk to me/hear from me

Might need me to actually tell them that I do in fact love them and care about them and this is why

Because of this, I will forget to text even my closest friends for days, weeks, even months sometimes if they don’t text me first. My s/o and I used to try to combat this by saying that we would always call each other on Wednesdays. We could of course talk other times if we were free and felt like it, but Wednesday was designated Call Ray Day. Unfortunately, we got out of the habit. Something that especially didn’t help was that my sense of time is Wack. Basically, my sense of time is similar to my working memory: something is either Now or Not now. I am often uncertain as to what day it is, how much time has passed, how long it takes to do things, how long I have to do a thing, etc.

The fact that I have almost no sense of time also contributes to why it is that I forget to text and call people; I simply don’t realize how much time has passed. I have no clue if my s/o came over to meet my cats last weekend or two weeks ago or a month ago. Something could have happened yesterday and I’ll think it happened 2 weeks ago, and it can go the other way around as well. I also just forget a lot of things. I once got onto some Zoom call, probably recently but I have no clue, and when asked how my day was, I answered that I wasn’t sure because I couldn’t actually remember most of it. I said “I think led virtual Shabbos services this morning?” (I guess this must have been a Saturday) and was met with a confused response of, “You aren’t sure?” and the truth was that I wasn’t. I could not be 100% sure about whether that had happened earlier that day, or a week ago, or if it actually wasn’t Saturday anymore but was actually Tuesday and that event had happened 3 days ago. So yeah, I forget things a lot and often need someone else to be the first person to reach out or I might not talk to someone for months and I’ll think it’s only been a few days, maybe a week.

I get very preoccupied and distracted. This almost seems like it should be obvious because, duh, 2 of the letters in ADHD stand for “Attention Deficit”. The attention just isn’t really there sometimes. That’s not quite how it works though. I hyperfocus on things for both short and long periods of time. Hyperfocusing basically means that when I focus on something, I’m all in. I don’t notice what’s going on around me, I don’t notice time passing, I don’t notice my body telling me to eat and drink. When I’m hyperfocusing, I don’t remember to check my messages and respond to people, and this includes important people like my s/o. I can also sometimes get preoccupied or distracted while we’re talking to each other. I’ll be talking about something and get off track and end up rambling about something unrelated for 10 minutes until my s/o reminds me that I’ve lost the original point. I also have to ask people to repeat themselves when talking, partly because I space out a lot, and partly because my brain will latch onto any small noise and say “Hey there’s a thing!” and suddenly I’ve missed half of what someone just said to me.

There are probably so many other things I could add about ways that ADHD as well as my other disorders affect my life and my relationships. Things like how depression sometimes renders me unable to convince myself to get out of bed for hours, making me late to things because I didn’t leave my self enough time to get ready (lack of a sense of time also doesn’t help with this). Things like how my anxiety makes me struggle to be open with my s/o about my experiences and trauma and the things that make me who I am and probably explain some of my other weird quirks. I could probably make a whole separate post about how I accidentally suppressed most of my emotions for years on end and now I struggle to identify and express emotions because I sort of forgot how to let myself feel emotions. Things like that have made it so I respond to a lot of things with logic and reasoning, which isn’t always what someone needs. I’m not good at remembering that not all people approach things the way I do, so I need to remember to ask someone how they want me to approach whatever is going on, and if they are looking for me to say something specific. Basically, I can be a mess.

I don’t often sit down and think about all the ways my disorders affect me and my behaviors and actions. I never really had a conversation with my s/o where I explained to them that I am ADHD and these are things that will happen because of that. I don’t realize when I do a lot of these things, and for a while, I hadn’t taken the time to think about how my disorders could affect others. Despite probably not knowing what they were getting into, my s/o has been so unbelievably understanding and encouraging and helpful every time I realize I’ve made a mistake or forgotten to call or text or tell them something. They have reassured me every time I tell them “I am neurodivergent and it probably is the main reason for this thing I do and I’m sorry”. Their level of understanding when it sometimes feels to me like I’m just blaming things on my ADHD is one of the things I love most about them. They get that I’m not trying to blame every mistake on my disorders. They understand that I don’t even understand/realize all the ways I’m affected and I won’t even realize these weird quirks and things about me until after the fact. Part of why they understand so well is because they are also neurodivergent, and while we don't have the same disorders and are often affected in very different ways by our various disorders, they can understand better than most people that having a mental disorder can and will affect every aspect of your life, even if you don’t realize it at first.

I’ve come to realize that having any kind of disorder, be it mental, physical, mild, severe, etc., can and likely will affect your relationships (all types, not just romantic). This is not your fault. It’s just how you work, and people need to respect that. I wrote this post after a conversation with my s/o in which I had rambled on about what makes them a good s/o in my mind because it was brought to my attention that I had once again forgotten to tell them these things. I then tried to once again explain that if anything, I’m the bad girlfriend because I’m the one who will forget to text and call and tell my s/o all these things I love about them and all these things that make them wonderful. I added that my ADHD is probably frustrating for them and for other people who know me. I then said, “It may seem like I use ADHD as an excuse a lot and I promise I’m not trying to”. They told me this:

“Having any disorder is a full-time job and symptoms can get to be a lot. I of all people get that. We just have to remember that symptoms aren’t our fault and that we are still learning to cope with them.”

I will probably always be learning how to cope with symptoms of my various disorders. I will probably have to work more on recognizing and remembering symptoms, and also remembering that while there are definitely things I should be taking responsibility for, my symptoms are not my fault. Your symptoms are not your fault. Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise. You are beautiful and amazing as you are, and that includes all of your quirks, accommodations you may need, Special Interests you may ramble about, days where you may not be able to function on your own, things you may need help with, etc., etc., etc. All of it. All of it is YOU, and anyone who wants to love you will learn not to love you despite these traits and things, but love the things that make you so uniquely you. The same goes for you too. Learn to love these things about you. Love yourself for who you are. Love yourself for how you function, how you think, how you move, how you look, how you love others. Love it all. And when you can’t do that, because sometimes you can’t and that’s okay too, remember that I love you no matter what.

Now go drink some water. <3<3<3

#relationships #my s/o #adhd #depression #anxiety #disorders #mental disorders #mental health #love #self love #how disorders affect relationships #my life #my relationship #my mental health #my disorders #i do also have a physical disorder #i just didn't bring it up here #its a whole other thing :P

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imasimpforstevengrant · 5 years

Text

I feel you

Author's note:

@raven-romanoff

@maristela1968

For you again, lovelies!

This is the first smut I write after almost two years. I hope you like it!

As always, sorry for any typos. English is not my first language.

____________________________________

Summary: Follow up to "I understand you".

As his strange relationship with Harleen oscillates between friendship and desire, Arthur takes the things to another level.

Warnings: angst, self hatred, mentions of masturbation, swearing, house breaking, strong sexual themes and smut.

Words: 6.258

Part 1:

Part 2:

____________________________________

Arthur couldn't sleep that night. His mind, overtaken by a growing confidence, tormented with new feelings for her created a dark, devilish smile in his face. He closed the door carefully, taking off his hoodie, shirt and shoes, wearing only sweatpants around the house, smoking a cigarette. He sat on the couch, knees bouncing. Something in his chest burns. That night Arthur felt different. He felt sure of his actions, instead of the usual anxiety and fear. Replaying the wonderful moment which he was the protagonist of, savoring every detail, while directing to the table. Her voice echoed through his head, her smile painting across his memory, the way she looked at him. His feet weren't able to keep still and Arthur knew this hyperventilation was caused by the shock of his first intimate contact with a woman. He already planned what he would do once they'd meet again. Probably to take her to dinner or simply going to the playground with a coffee and cigarettes to spend the night talking.

Handing himself his treasured journal, Arthur searched for the section dedicated to her. Grabbing a pen, he wrote her name. Misspelled, but affectionately.

Harlen Quenzel.

He tried in vain to write anything else, because his mind clouded basking in a bliss he had never felt before.

The blinding white light coming from above the kitchen hindered the happy replay of the image of Harleen coming closer to him to kiss his lips. But he simply turned it off. The tips of his fingers touched the dry flesh blessed by her mouth. Lighting a cigarette he fantasizes now. Taking her in the floor, in the bedroom or in the couch... She would love it. Arthur guaranteed himself that. The proof was clear: she had enjoyed his sudden and explosive display of passion. He suppressed a chuckle, afraid of another fit of laughter. But it did not go further. He stood in the dark for a while, before going to the couch to try to get some sleep. His mind was way too excited to even hold his legs still. The lucky loner grabbed the pack of cigarettes, smoking another one immediately after finishing the other one. Thing was, he couldn't consummate his passion in this moment... But he certainly could let his mind fly by thinking about Harleen and her virtues for now. Arthur headed to the bathroom.

A little joy given by himself wouldn't be so bad. ________________________________________

Over the next two months, the strange relationship between Arthur and Harleen grew from a friendship that had frequent outbursts of passion to long hours of talking about anything, from work to jokes.

As much as Arthur felt a silently uncontrollable lust for Harleen, he truly felt affection and caring for her. This was shown in small gestures like inviting her to dinner or waiting up late when her shift was over whenever neither of them would spend the entire night sleeping. They had each other and it was okay with that. In was in these situations where their bond grew. It was so ironic that the one thing that prevented an actual rest to his tormented mind also allowed to have the closest and most meaningful relationship he ever had in his life.

Arthur became more introverted than he already was. He didn't talk too much at work and had the growing tendency to isolate from others. To his co-workers this was probably another demonstration of his deteriorated mental state but Arthur was too busy trying to cope with these new feelings. He was asked more than once about this but he avoided to answer, limiting to reply he was okay. At the end of the day, the party clown left with a anxious pace. His co-workers were sure Arthur had finally lost his mind. And in some way, he did. Why was he in a rush? They would never know.

It was saturday when things changed. Arthur came back from a gig to Haha's with his clown make up on. Once in, he cleaned it from his face to leave without saying anything afterwards, too withdrawn into his daydreaming. He set a foot into the bus, as always, facing the window. The lights of daylight disappeared into the darkness or the night, rain pouring out. Arthur shielded from the cold sinking into his partly tattered hoodie. By this hour, Harleen should have been in her workplace. He just hoped no one would harm her at the time of her return. Arthur thought he could wait for her at the building's entrance, making sure she was safe. Harleen would like it.

He thought this weekend would be different. And Arthur had a very good reason why.

_________________________________________

It was Sunday when Arthur got up early to clean the house and to prepare breakfast for Penny to feed during the first lights of day.

It was in this way he could focus completely on his upcoming date at night. As the day vanished for nighttime to arrive, he put a cheap cologne on, his pants perfectly ironed. Same with the shirt and red vest. And the usual yellow hoodie Harleen learned to love so much. His excitement reflected in his voice as he waved goodbye to his always distracted mother, who simply waved back, not interested on how much brighter Arthur's eyes were in that moment. Heading to the door, he heard a frustrating ask:

"Happy, can you put this letter in the box?"

His shoulders lose strength. Arthur tried his best to hide his annoyance.

"It's for Thomas Wayne".

"I know, mom", the whisper was almost inaudible. Returning to the living room, he took the letter gently just to jump back to the door to free himself, "I'll be back at night".

She just nodded. And he finally breathed his freedom, feeling more confident than ever. But his sense of victory over the world vanished as he realized he still had that fucking letter in hand. A tired sigh leaves his lips. But he ran as fast as possible to reach the first floor to get rid of the piece of useless attempt to get attention from a man who maybe didn't remember her. The rusty locker received it and Arthur at last could set a foot outside the building, crossing his arms.

Harleen arrived a few seconds later. Arthur smiled, coming closer to her. Her outfit was unpretentious but neat: black pants and sneakers, a red wool sweater. Her hair was done into two colourful buns and a few strands which fell into her face. But the thing he liked the most was that blood red lipstick... And her grin made it better.

"Hello, clown man", Harleen nuzzled his nose tenderly. It was an habit he loved from her, as any other touch. He chuckled, greeting her back. Then both got out of the building, leading to the donut shop so they could have coffee and toast.

"So, how was your week?", Harleen asked as Arthur held his cup, drinking the steamy hot liquid.

"It was fine. I had a gig in a children's hospital. It turned out great because it was a charity event".

"Really?"

"Yeah. They were... Getting money for families that cannot afford to pay treatments".

Harleen nodded, warming her hands with the mug. Arthur then returned the question. Harleen told him the bar had more regulars than usual. This caught her eye, and paid very much attention to it during the weekly shift.

"What is it?".

"People are drinking their souls out" she replied, after eating her toast, "and that's not all. There was a recently fired guy that feared if Wayne is elected mayor, unemployment and riots will get worse."

Arthur lowered his head. He ate the toast to state:

"Why do so many people believe in that man, anyway?"

"He's rich, successful and an entrepreneur. Men like him have no idea how to run a city for the simple fact that entrepreneurs like him see people as numbers, not as complex sentient beings."

"How come?", Arthur fixed his collar.

"They only care for economy, Arthur. They disregard the fact that not everyone has the same chances for success they had and therefore any help for impoverished people is nothing but a "waste of money". Wayne is convinced that everyone who receives any kind of welfare doesn't want to work." Arthur remained silent for a while, processing what she just said.

"Men like him will never know what is like to be someone like you or me", Harleen concluded, finishing her coffee.

"But at least we have our jobs" Arthur commented comically.

"Yeah, as long as we get paid" and both laughed.

The shop was almost empty, which made easier to listen to the radio while talking. This gave them more topics to talk about. But then a song came out. Arthur knew it, he closed his eyes, engulfing himself in the gloomy tune of the song:

"King of all

Hear me call

Hear my name

Carnival"

Harleen did not interrupt. She understood that Arthur, as an extremely introverted person, couldn't be interrupted when exploring, talking or listening. It was pleasant to see him glad or enjoying things for once. She smiled as he mouthed the lyrics, which he knew perfectly. As the song came to an end, Harleen extended her hand, eyeing Arthur to look for his approval. As much as he enjoyed the sudden outbursts of affection, Arthur still wasn't used to publicly show it. Harleen comprehended as well and wouldn't force him to do it. She discovered it when going back from a previous date when she just held his hand. He became a blushing mess but it didn't go further, thank goodness.

Arthur noted the hand whose black and red nail polish established a hurtful contrast in comparison to her light skin. He then looked at her. He slid his own towards Harleen's. Their hands intertwined. Another little touch and he was already yearning for her. Arthur wanted to love her without words, without distance between them. Just the two of them. He wanted so much to tell her, but didn't dare to. Despite the fact he adored her, there was something he could never tell her... Yet.

There was something Arthur loathed about himself but he did his best to not to give it too much importance, choosing to focus on other things, instead. Arthur Fleck was a man and as such, he had needs. But the need wasn't the problem. Satisfying it was. He was comprehensive enough to understand that motherly affection was the closest thing he ever had to love. Devoid of any bond with anyone else, he frequently masturbated to soothe the sexual need. Usually to porn magazines whose pages he tore up to stick them in his journal. A fulfilling sexual life was a dream, far away from his reach. He could only see it but never take part in it, as it was with everything in his life. An eternal spectator, never a protagonist. Thinking of her, lusting after her... And he wasn't able to even mutter a fucking word. He cursed the emptiness roaming during all his life. Because he had nothing to offer her except desire. His inexperience was never a problem, given his surrender to embrace a life of solitude. Until now. Her arrival to his life made him remember how much of a man he was. And her kindness just fanned the fire within him.

Harleen squeezed his hand a little more, noting his unsettled nerve. Arthur sighed, out of the gloomy, bleak storm that creeped out as a dark mist in his mind. But her face shines as a small light of hope. Her eyes promised so many good things that he couldn't bring himself to believe.

"What's troubling you, Mr. Fleck?" her smile was accomplice, as if she knew what was lurking into the labyrinth of his mind, but wanting to hear it from his mouth.

"I just... I was thinking about...", Harleen encouraged him to tell her. He inhaled deeply, lighting a cigarette to cope with the newfound stress. Once again, his everlasting negative thoughts clouded the moment. The vocal cords were unresponsive. His hand broke contact with hers to hold his forehead, looking for the right words to speak. His knees bounced. Harleen leaned in, waiting.

"Artie?"

The tender pronunciation of the diminutive form of his name turned his gaze to her.

"I think I prefer to tell you... In private".

Harleen nodded. The response sounded too dark. And she knew that if Arthur talked like that, it was something serious. They left the donut shop, walking towards the subway. It was almost empty and dark. Just a few people were on it. The couple sit down, with Harleen tangling the arm around his to tilt her head on his shoulder. Arthur kept his eyes on the window, trying to figure out how the fuck he'd tell her about it.

As they reached the last stop, they left the subway station to step up the stairs and then Arthur reached a dirty, dark public restroom surrounded on the outside of a fence. Both stopped for a moment before the gnawed door. Harleen looked up to the party clown's dark features. He pronounced no words.

"Arthur?"

"There's something I need to tell you", his murmur comes shy, cast down.

"What is it?"

He stepped away from her. His hands clasp his mouth, disapproving his thoughts. He shook his head, eyes shut. Circling his own personal space, lightheaded. Harleen came closer to him.

"Is it bad?"

Arthur glared at her, guilty.

"I mean... I don't know how to tell you. I just hope you don't laugh at me".

"Why would I do that?".

Arthur half opened his eyes.

"I want...", It took a long, deep inhalation to pronounce the first part. He coughed, to clear his throat seconds later, "I need to tell you... That I really like you... And--", he silenced his words, trying to put them correctly in his mind.

"And?"

"See" he sighed, "I've..."

Harleen widened her eyes in anticipation.

"I've been thinking about you a lot... and I would be lying if I tell you I don't want something else".

"What is 'something else'?" Harleen whispered.

Arthur processed the question. And then answered:

"It's just..." He brushed the small beads of sweat on his forehead with the palm of his hand, "I love the way you touch me, Harleen" Arthur continued, "and I simply can't get enough of it".

"Because we both need it, Arthur. I love just as much as you do. That makes it so satisfying", he chuckled, humbled. Harleen expected more of him.

"That's not all", he gazed not to her. This was the one moment that could end it all or strengthen this precious bond of theirs.

"Arthur" she called him, "don't be afraid. Please tell me".

"I want to sleep with you", Arthur finally confessed, gazing at her. His eyes confirmed the statement. He blinked slowly, wanting her to see the animalistic yearn on them.

Harleen stared at him, shocked of how much he trusted her to confess something so intimate. His breathe had shortened. His green eyes glowed like emeralds, embellished even more with his pupils dilated. The blonde invited him inside the bathroom so they could keep baring their souls. Arthur inspected the place to make sure it was completely safe to stay there. Harleen locked the door once they knew it was unoccupied.

"I don't want to beg for love" Arthur said, his voice raspy, "but I don't want to lie to you. I want to know if you feel the same" Arthur spoke in a very low voice. Harleen looked at him, infatuated before this new dark vibe from him. He looked like a totally different person. Her fingers slid into his curls.

"I knew it already, Arthur."

"And why doesn't it bother you?"

"Because I can understand why you want it".

Arthur turned to her. Never in his life he felt more expecting. Harleen explained, in very simple terms, that she found his attachment understandable: Arthur had been deprived of love during all his life and this new bond made him feel important. From becoming visible and cared for to reaffirm his manhood through sexual desire. Arthur heard every word carefully, and it made sense. Everything made fucking sense. It was through sexual intercourse that men felt loved.

Love.

It was always about love, at the end of all.

Harleen returned the cigarette to him.

"Don't blame yourself. You're a human, after all. Sex is the most pleasant of human activities, so don't feel bad for enjoying it".

"It's not that I don't enjoy it. I don't feel ready to do it, despite of how much I want it".

Harleen frowned, and her silence just made Arthur confess one of his most (if not the most) shameful secrets. Only now she knew the extent of her impact in his life. She knew a lot about him, including the seven medications he was in, but this? She had been aware of the way he looked at her, but hearing him actually admitting it out loud made her shudder. Her arms locked around his shoulders to pull Arthur to a kiss in the cheek.

"It's not a race or a competition. You just feel and act according to your instincts. Also, I'd be lying too if I said I don't want anything else" Arthur sank his eyes into Harleen's, "quite frankly, we were close to have sex the night we first talked if it wasn't because I was too tired to do so, but now, if you don't feel ready to do it, I won't pressure you to do anything".

"Starting a friendship in that way? I like it" he hummed, mischievous.

"We are not friends... Because... Friends are not supposed to touch each other. That's what lovers do. But... We aren't lovers, yet" Harleen whispered.

"Then what are we?" Arthur asked.

"We are, Arthur. We simply are" this time her kiss directed to his mouth. _________________________________________

Arthur changed his damp clothes to avoid the cold. The bedroom TV was turned on as well as the hall lights. The usual. He prepared the dinner for his mother, bathing her and making sure she'd go to bed. The conversation was the same. Thomas fucking Wayne and the fucking letters. Arthur had no interest on losing energy on nonsense, so he only nodded. He took a shower and shaved the growing beard and wore his grey sweatpants. A few observations written in the pages of the journal about his day at Haha's and Arthur felt his routine was finished, therefore he could count down to the moment when Harleen was back at home from work. His eyes darted at the clock. 1:14 am. Less than two hours for her return. He felt confident enough to go to her apartment and stay all night with her. He smoke five cigarettes in the meantime, walking over the house. Turning the TV on so time wouldn't pass so long. He sat at the couch, waiting for an old rerun of Murray Franklin's Show. An actor was to be interviewed but he couldn't focus entirely on it. He laid down. His mind pictured her beside him. However, as much as he cherished all the physical and emotional affection from her, it wasn't enough anymore. It was hard to accept it but that's just the way it was. As the show ended, an old movie ran. Arthur turned the device off. The clock sets the time: 2:24 am. Less than hour. He got up, turning the lights off, hoodie in hand and determination in his mind. Locking the door, Arthur left. He walked across the halls, stepping down to the destination: 7H. The door was unlocked, much to his surprise. The loner felt truly in home. If only she was in there for him to shower her in his affection. But he then realized the neon lights were on. His heart skipped a beat. The air seemed... Different. He stood as quiet as possible to see what was going on. The rain slightly broke the total silence that ruled the place. Arthur reached the living and then, only then, he saw her.

Harleen was placidly sleeping on the couch, wearing a two part, peach coloured pajamas. Her mane was a mess of white, blue and pink strands that fell over her face. Her head rested on a pillow and her pose revealed how comfy her sleep was. Kneeling beside the couch, Arthur leaned over her face, his fingers set aside the colourful mane to obtain the beautiful vision of her peaceful facial expression. His thumb glided over her lips, which he soon joined with his. It was slow, intimate kiss, full of subtle hunger.

Seconds later, her hands cupped his face to make the caress steadier, humming playfully. Arthur broke the kiss to eye her. Half sleep, Harleen smiled at him.

"Hey" he called, secretive.

"Good night, Mr. Fleck", she muttered, voice pasty, "another insomnia night?" but he shook the head.

"I thought you weren't here. I couldn't help it", he muttered.

“Never said I mind. Bar closed earlier and here I am”.

“Really? Why?”

“The riots, Arthur. Boss preferred to send us home before any damage could be done by the protesters”.

Arthur made room for himself in the cozy, fluffy long couch. Asking if she was okay, Harleen just replied she took a taxi to make home safely. Arthur sighed, relieved. The blonde smiled at him but didn’t move any further. He noticed that, blaming for being so inconsiderate. Getting into her apartment and disturbing her rest like that? What a awful friend (lover) he was! Recoiling with guilt and diving again in the brooding mood so typical on him, he distanced from his love. She fell asleep once more. Arthur kept his gaze on her, tracing invisible touches in her curves. She was so close yet so far. He wanted to be a part of her, to be with her.

Inside of her.

The calloused fingers held his face to wash away the shame. The nerves were too much to take. The laugh gestated in a noise initially deaf to hear from afar to a thunderous fit. Harleen jolted at the sudden outburst. Arthur couldn’t feel worse. The expression on his face was so desperate for silence that the blonde immediately went after him when he shrugged, attempting in vain to drown the horrible noise that made his vocal cords bleed. Harleen dissuaded Arthur of any idea of escape just to hold him. The mentally ill loner sank his face into her neck. The embrace didn’t stop the scandalous explosion to keep shattering the quietness of the place, sensing Harleen squeezed his faint figure, seemingly trying to put every piece of his broken yet beautiful soul to help to soothe the pain.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—“

Her voice hushed his apologize. As the din disappeared into nothingness, both returned to the living room on the couch but Arthur took a step back from her.

“Why?”

Puzzled, Harleen frowns. She gave him space to recover.

“Why what?”

“Why me?”, Arthur regained strength to ask her, staring at her for a long period of time, “of all men you can have, why me?”

For the first time, Harleen seemed upset.

“If you think I do this out of pity, you are very, very wrong” the fire in her eyes was fascinating.

“Then why?”

Harleen processed the question while Arthur desperately awaited the reason to be verbalised.

“Please”.

She gulped.

“Because you’re a good man, Arthur”.

The response was too simple to be believable, though it was grateful to hear a compliment from her. Desiring more, his stare pierced her soul, to let her take the hint. Imprisoned under the green spell of his, Harleen proceeded to continue:

“I mean- you are always trying to make people laugh, yet people don’t see you and you still continue. You love what you do, you have been kind to me, you care about your mother putting your well-being aside. Don’t you think that is worth enough?”

Arthur shut his eyes, his head to the left, lighting a cigarette while the bouncing knee betrayed his feeling of unsettlement. Harleen noticed it. Wind took words away. Actions prevailed in time.

Time! That’s precisely what he needed. Both battled uneasiness in their own, unique way. While Harleen on her own end of the couch thought on a way to help him, Arthur tried to give order to his convulsed mind. He constantly touched his forehead and chest but never dared to eye her, terrified that she would vanish. The damn cigarette placed again on his lips. The muteness grew so uncomfortable the loner returned to glare at the blonde. She slowly approached to him, searching in his face his approval to get closer. Afraid to disturb his personal space in the same way someone would be cautious when getting closer to a wild animal. Arthur gasped, his blood boiling in what seemed the exact moment that would define his life. Harleen crawled to him, reaching his shoulders to concrete her goal: sit in the space between his legs.

If Arthur believed that just a hug put him on fire, this new contact aroused him to the point of insanity. The blonde crowned the physical bond placing her head in the crook of his neck. The temptation to take her and possess her now was insufferable but he found the will to not give in into the impulsive reaction. How? He’d never know. His heart rate was so violent, so overwhelming that the threat of a heart attack was becoming more real. Harleen placed her hand on his chest, like caressing his damaged heart like a mother would do with an scared child. His lungs finally caught a calmer rhythm as minutes went by. Arthur craved new touches, new discoveries, yet he wanted to remain like this forever. He savoured the closeness of their bodies… but it wasn’t enough. Harleen surely knew it by the moment Arthur stopped smoking.

And whenever Arthur Fleck stopped smoking, it meant something serious got his attention.

As the last fire on the cigarette died on the ashtray, Arthur turned his focus completely on her. He’d return her the favour, since she invaded his personal space so shamelessly. Harleen distanced a bit from him to allow the hoodie to come off. She approved the sight with a wide smirk: despite what people could say about his figure, Arthur was not as thin as his outfit revealed. His bare upper body had a plenty of muscle in the biceps. She traced a finger across the aforementioned part to touch his jawline now, going down his neck and collarbone. Next, a nuzzle against his face to continue the intimate bond, brushing her lips with his, without kissing him. However there was no further reaction from him except for a serene look on his face at the caresses. As the touch came to an end, she kissed his mouth repeatedly, her lips curved into a smile. The gesture motivated his instinct to get the better of him. He rose his dark, thick eyebrow to let her know how much of an accomplice he turned out to be, like a warning of what he had planned for her.

It was almost a ritual. Whenever a situation turned out to be too unfamiliar or too good, his hands would act as the link to confirm his psyche wasn't playing tricks with him. But this wasn't only a situation. This was a person who unchained a situation. And how he thanked every second of it. It seemed a spark of happiness enlightened his life, for once. Probably because even fate believed that no human being should be so miserable. He needed a constant reaction from her to keep convincing himself this wasn’t a dream. To increase the enjoyment of his hands touching her, Arthur executed a move directed to her chest, gliding his hands over her breasts, covered by the thin fabric of the sleeveless shirt. Harleen gasped, eyeing the curious hands as they roamed upon that delicate part of her. Arthur was fascinated, as his grin evidently brought out.

Since he had understanding about sex, Arthur craved a woman’s touch. It began as wet dreams, continuing with the subsequent discover of porn, a source he always went to in order to provide himself a little satisfaction. He remembered the particularly unhappy time of highschool, where bullying and harsh looks were a routine. The laughing fits during class, boys from all ages mocking at him during recess. But lunchtime was the worst part. If he wasn’t beaten up, his food paid the price. Starving and tired, Arthur was relieved in part by dropping school. He wouldn’t have to deal with the brutality of his classmates anymore. Girls usually avoided him, scared by his weak appearance. He never asked a girl for a date, afraid to be taken as a pervert. He just repressed any sexual need, feeling like a depraved creep for being curious about female body.

The mental drift continued for a couple of minutes when he noticed that Harleen wasn’t too quiet now, her shortened breath revealing an intense joy at his touch. As it happened always in a moment of adrenaline, through his arms an herculean strength ran so intensely that made her sit on his lap with no problem. The most exciting part of this new bold position was that he could face his lover, aiming his interest to her neck, covering it with slow, paused kisses. Harleen supports on his shoulders, delighted at his intimate exploration. Her shortened breath became a heavy panting while the latter morphed into a loud moan. Arthur immediately looked up to the blonde, her mane tickling his face. Did he caused such wonderful reaction? Him? Arthur Fleck, the perpetual loser, the unfunny clown, the embodiment of what a man should never be?

Suddenly, the grip loosened. Arthur felt he couldn’t concentrate anymore on Harleen in the same way. A sensation similar to fainting snatched away the energy on his arms. A surge of boiling blood flowed down his groin.

Arthur knew what this meant and her thighs straddling his hips, exactly where his searing intimacy reacted to such delectable recreation.

This encouraged him to let his wildest side come out. The pale hands lifted the shirt to the level of her neck, obtaining her bare chest to devour while getting into the inner part of the shirt, leaving the barrier between skin and fabric behind his back. Harleen reared up before the fulminant demonstration of lust, screaming while clawing at his shoulders. She felt his mouth, eager and famished, assiduously paying dedication to her soft sinuosities. The position enabled her to coddle him as well.

Because he fucking deserved it.

Her fingers stirred the dark curls under the cloth, begging for more. When Arthur felt the arousal was too much to keep building it up to simple caresses, he threw the shirt aside to obtain her upper nude body to admire. His eyes widened as the glimpse was even more beautiful in reality than in his fantasies. He hummed, approving the sight, too anxious to take her and yet so insecure if she’d be satisfied.

The blonde tugged into his belt, making clear her desire to pursue a deeper insight of their relationship. Her body performed a subtle movement to make him lay down on his back. As Arthur got rid of his clothes, so she did. Once she reached her own full nudity, he covered his mouth, amazed. Forget the models in his journal. Harleen had no comparison. And she probably knew it.

“Do you like what you see, mister Fleck?” she purred, seductive. He panted, regaining the oxygen to answer.

“Yes” was all he answered. Arthur could hardly speak at this point. His eyes said everything, anyway. The tease was a gift before the beloved blonde climbed atop him. Arthur helped her, grabbing her by the hips he longed so much to trace his fingers on.

Harleen leaned over his face to grant it a last kiss, enjoying this final step preceding to the loss of individuality.

She seemed so unreal, even when her full weight upon him proved wrong. And he knew exactly what to do to prove his psyche otherwise.

The last trace of doubt disappeared completely as his own sex found itself inside of her at last. The insertion was very slow, no rushes, so both lovers could memorize every sensation. The pressure around his hardened length turned out to be a pleasure beyond the thinkable, causing a shuddering, fastened breath to crumple his lungs. He arched his back, a loud, pleasurable moan escaping his mouth. As he got used to the warm welcome she gave him, his hands held her hips to proceed. Harleen lolled her head back, moaning softly, rejoicing at his presence inside of her delicate womanhood. Stillness held their bodies together as they enjoyed the sensation brought by the union.

Arthur recovered from the initial shock before the long desired loss of his hated celibacy started to take place. Harleen, naked much to the delight of his eyes, had her white, porcelain skin beautifully shaded by the pink and blue dim neon lights. Arthur smirked at her, admiring her body with his hands, not to convince himself that he was not hallucinating but to make sure to tell her how much he had desired to do this.

Just then Harleen did her magic.

“Let me show you that you’re not invisible”.

The rhythm worked in a slow pace. The blonde’s masterful moves made him moan and groan loudly as she straddled his hips. Everything he imagined with her appalled in comparison to this. Harleen, so provocative and prodigious, was so delicate in this erotic surrender. Like almost floating in the air. Arthur wondered how much it could take until reaching the peak of the carnal pleasure. But the obnoxious thud that beat his brain even in this moment found itself defeated by this lovely and pleasurable novelty, eventually. Watching Harleen on top of him was an irresistible landscape and Arthur couldn’t be more grateful for it even if he tried.

And her moans didn’t help either. Harleen was too lost in the moment to even talk to him, restricting her vocal expressions of pleasure just to plead for more.

Arthur plunged in this novelty to feel like a man for the first time in his life. He chuckled, joyful. His concentration centered exclusively on her. Harleen was a living mess of ecstasy, away from reality. He couldn’t love her more, specially when she called his name. The grip on her hips became tighter, as the warm space that surrounded his arousal narrowed. Her moans arose to louder screams. Now that was something he wanted to hear, sliding his fingers up to her waist to her chest.

The sense of control began to disappear eventually.

The instigation inspired a new move from Arthur, who got up to enclose her waist to absorb her essence. Fastening the moves, the blonde threw her arms to his neck, increasing the union as much as they were able. Their screams echoed through the apartment, announcing the proximity of the climax.

The final frenzy took ahold of the lovers. It hit Harleen first, as the convulsion whipped her insides, her figure trembling.

Arthur was convinced his soul was living his body at the time of his climax. While Harleen allowed him to flood her with his seed, he held her hips to keep inside her the longest time possible. The passionate, fulfilling embrace that served as the conclusion to the act recomposed their sense of reality. Once the physical bond was broken, the lovers laid back in the couch. Arthur still had a hard time recovering from his first sexual experience. His lungs finally eased down as Harleen reassuringly talked to him. Arthur opened his eyes, to smile to her.

“That…” he stuttered, breathless, “that… was… fucking sensational”.

Harleen supported her head in her hand.

“Couldn’t agree more”.

Arthur smiled and didn’t resist the temptation to sink into her arms, awaiting for sleep to come. He gave himself in completely, handing his vulnerability to her. Harleen sighed, palming his back. Arthur recoiled in pain and she didn’t hesitate to apologize.

“What’s this?” Harleen was going to get up to check him out but he prevented it, shaking his head. Apparently it didn’t have too much importance for him.

“I want this” his whisper sounded legitimately grateful. He took her hands to kiss them dearly, “I want this”.

She nodded and then changed her position so Arthur could place himself upon her. Her open arms received his fragile, starving shape to grant it comfort, like remind him of how much of a man he could be. The loner muttered something, but Harleen was already sleeping. Arthur didn’t move at all, silently enjoying her chest moving up and down. He planted a kiss above her right breast and closed his eyes.

The rain intensified. And Arthur fell asleep in a state of complete inner peace for the first time in his life as the pink lights dissipated into black as his eyes slowly closed.

It was the most beautiful darkness he’d ever been in.

#joker #joker movie #joker film #joaquin phoenix joker #joker 2019 #joker arthur fleck #arthur fleck imagine #arthur x harley #arthur fleck #harley quinn #joker x harley #harleen quinzel #dc comics #dc edit #jokeredit #arthur x reader

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seancekitsch · 5 years

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Making up for Lost Time: The Epilogue

Requested by: eh, a few of you wanted this when i mentioned it and i can’t let Stanley the Manley go

Just to be safe....Warnings for the series include: canon issues including self harm, attempted suicide, emotional trauma, mentioned disordered eating, the clown, anxiety, adult Bill Denbrough’s personality, book and movie canon being merged together because I like to play god, a twin peaks reference?? light smut and my terrible vocabulary, canon events.

But this is lighter and fluffier this is basically just being together forever and gross cute

-You open up your apartment to Stan right away, but relationship wise other than living together you move very slowly at first. There is no fear of death or shape shifting clown making you tear each other apart.

-He finds a job rather easily. Being an accountant, his role is necessary anywhere in the country. He could move out within a few weeks, but it would be pointless knowing he would move right back in eventually. He also doesn’t think he could sleep in Seattle without you in his arms.

-Your first date is at a roadhouse dive bar ten days after he arrives. There’s loud live music, which Stan never really cared for, but the way your face lights up when the band plays an updated version of an old Roy Orbison tune... he couldnt picture anywhere else he would rather be.

-Between the French fries and the beers and you gently singing along to him, it’s a sad kind of happy that he realizes this is what he’s wanted his whole life and that he’s missed so much. He vows from then on to start making up for lost time.

-Stanley Uris truly lays on the charm for the entire six months the two of you can last before a poorly planned last minute marriage that only the losers attended. Taking it slowly is short lived.

-You wore the first white dress you could find. It was vintage and it wasn’t formal, but Stan thought you looked like royalty. He wore a suit he would wear to work on any given day.

-Richie officiated; you had joked with him on the phone about becoming a minister beforehand not realizing he would actually get his minister credentials. Bev was maid of honor, Mike was best man. Ben wrote a beautiful short poem and read it in lieu of vows, and Bill gave the beautiful wedding gift of employment in editing his next book turned tv series scripts.

-The two of you settle into married life like it was meant for the two of you. Maybe it was. You pack each other little lunches for work and give each other back rubs after long days. Weekend mornings running errands and having sex after putting away the groceries. It’s all grossly domestic but it feels like instinct.

-Stan is riskier sex wise than he had ever been in his adult life with you. Sure there’s love making, but neither of you feel pressure when enjoying each other’s bodies. You’re not trying for kids, you’re not trying to prove your attraction to each other. There’s just messy hands and lips all over your bodies and exploring.

-You have car sex for the first time since Stan first got his drivers license in high school. You have sex in mall bathrooms. You’ve done some out on your balcony that you’re sure your neighbors did not appreciate. It’s like you can’t get enough of each other anywhere. And you LOVE IT.

-Some nights there are nightmares for the two of you to get through. You dream of him finishing what he started in the bathtub, and he dreams of that moment in the kitchen when his own corpse attacked you and you let it. You wake up crying into each other’s skin and hold one another close, soothing the pain and sealing it back into the past.

-As glad as you are to remember each other and the losers, the two of you have a pretty strict “the past stays in the past” rule besides them. There’s a lot of trauma and bad feelings that don’t even involve the clown that you both wish you still didn’t remember. But that being said, you’re more than supportive to each other when you can’t block it out.

-You see Richie and Bill most often due to work and proximity. It is a quick flight for the two of you to spend the weekend in Beverly Hills with Richie at his house or to Northern California to the set of Bill’s new tv series.

-Richie ends up coming out as bi and ends up with a man who looks surprisingly like dear late Eddie. His ex wives have a lot to say to the press about this relationship. You and Stan really like his new partner and invite them up to Seattle for holidays from now on. When they adopt a little girl, you become the godparents.

-You and Stan go on a lot of vacations together. You like to travel and experience new things and go to museums together. His favorite place you’ve ever taken him is the bird hall in the natural sciences museum in London. He spent three whole hours in there with his notebook sketching and taking notes on rare birds he had never seen besides in paintings. He couldn’t thank you enough for surprising him with that little detail of the trip.

-It works out well because he handles all of the budgeting and logistics like hotels, and you handle the day to day activities. You fill in all of the details that his logistics lay the groundwork for.

-About a year in, you get matching tattoos. Stan never wanted one or saw himself having one, but the scar on his wrist wouldn’t disappear like the one on his hand did and he hated to look at it. You help him design it. It’s a simple black-capped chickadee taking flight. The state bird of Maine and flight promising future and change. Yours goes onto the opposite wrist than his.

-Stan also starts to take Judaism seriously again after all of this. Mostly when things are hard to cope with, he turns to his faith. You always go to the synagogue with him if he wants you to, but sometimes it’s somewhere he has to go to alone. He always comes back a little clearer headed, the logical level headed Stan you know.

-About five years after your return to Derry, Patty Uris actually sends Stan an email inviting them two of you to her wedding. You go, and just like he hoped, he and his ex wife can stay friends. She understood what they both needed, and he couldn’t thank her enough for being the great person she was. And you couldn’t thank her enough for being there for Stanley when he needed her.

-He loves the fall in Seattle with you, it’s rainy and so much colder than his old home in Atlanta and there’s so much time to sit cuddled up in front of your big window and watching the birds fly and the leaves fall.

-There are moments when the two of you have forgotten how much time has past, and you still see each other as the nervous teens you were when you first fell for each other. You never lose that spark of young love, no matter how comfortable you get around one another.

-And when 27 more years roll by, the two of you don’t even notice. You’re looking forward to your 26th wedding anniversary soon, and there’s a party with all of your childhood friends and their kids and grandkids and you have to get ready.

And that’s a wrap i love Stanley Uris 🧡🧡🧡

#my work #stanley uris x reader #stan uris x reader #stanley uris #making up for lost time

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leviathren · 4 years

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ENC 1102 Final Project

For my final project in my Introduction to Inquiry Based Research course, I am writing a blog post about the research I conducted this Spring 2020 semester. It’s school related so I’m posting it here! This is going to be a long one so grab a cup of tea or a plate of fruits and vegetables and strap in.

TW: brief discussion of body image, mental health, addiction

Social Media: The Effects of Growing Up Online, and How We Can Use it for the Better

Introduction

I used to struggle with self control when it came to being on social media. Social media blew up and became a huge thing for seemingly everyone to have right about when I was growing up and going through the critical developmental stages of adolescence. Myspace was just before my time, it had left its glory days before I had any social media. But then came Facebook. And then Instagram. And Vine, Snapchat, Twitter, etc. My generation was the first to experience having social media from a young age and all the way through our teenage years, and then finally reaching adulthood. I never had anything like social media before. I barely had a phone and any contacts to message before switching to a smartphone and then having social media accounts, and I think that contributed to me not knowing what healthy limits were.

It came and went in phases. There would be a period of time where I would unintentionally spend hours on my phone every day, just scrolling through Instagram. I wasn’t using it in a meaningful way, like connecting with friends and family, I was just scrolling. Mindlessly, endlessly.

I realized at some point, probably in my early years of high school, that this was an issue. It wasn’t horrible, but I still was spending more time than I wanted on my phone, and throughout the years, I have become better at being mindful with how I consume and use social media, and I have noticed that I have become so much more present in general. I don’t know if this was directly because of the healthier relationship with social media I have now, or if it was just coincidence in timing. I was lucky that I wasn’t too negatively affected by social media, but many people have raised concerns on how it may affect our mental health, and I decided to look into it more and see if I could help even just one person with this.

Mental Health: Social Media as a Stressor

Social media platforms were created to connect us with our friends and family. That’s the “social” part of it. However, social media has become a place where people typically showcase the best parts of their lives. Some call this the “highlight reel” on social media. These snapshots of fleeting moments in our busy lives only show the internet what we want it to show. I am aware that there are exceptions though, such as spam accounts where people share their more vulnerable moments with a private following of their close friends and sometimes family, or social media personalities such as Trisha Paytas who share many vulnerable, not so picture-perfect moments publicly, but the average user doesn’t tell their friends and followers everything that’s going on behind the scenes. Therefore, the majority of posts don’t accurately portray our lives. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing - we all need boundaries and privacy - however, this can sometimes make users feel as if they aren’t enough, or that they aren’t doing enough.

Humans have a habit of social comparison. We do it naturally because it’s a way for us to “estimate one’s past and present social standings” as Tahir M. Nisar, an associate professor at the University of Southampton, wrote. Many people compare their own lives to the lives of others as a means to evaluate themselves and to measure whether they’re doing well or not (Nisar 55). This has been a generally known fact for a while, but when I conducted my own research via online survey, I asked the participants if they ever found themselves comparing themselves or their lives to those of others they see online, and 47.9% of them said “yes, often”, while 43.8% said “sometimes”, and a mere 8.3% said “no, never”. Comparing yourself to others is natural, and it isn’t always a bad thing, but for some it can become a dangerous rabbit hole.

Jeff Cain, an associate professor at the University of Kentucky, wrote that these comparisons “often result in envy, depression, reduced happiness, etc. because they perceive others’ lives more favorable than their own.” I’m sure most of us have experienced this at least once before where we wish our lives were more like someone else’s without even realizing it. It can be a hard thing to not do! The problem here is that that can lead to us setting unrealistic expectations for ourselves, and then us being too hard on ourselves when we don’t reach that level.

Some of the unrealistic expectations we may place for ourselves can be physical appearance. 8.3% of the participants in my survey said they often photoshop their appearance for social media, 10.4% said they sometimes do, 10.4% said they do but only rarely. This is one thing that needs to change.

A good sign is the rest (70.9%) said they never photoshop themselves. In recent years, body positivity has grown and become a more developed movement, leading the online community in a more positive direction. This is a great use of social media, using platforms to share positive, helpful messages to bring together a community and to spread awareness and knowledge of a particular topic.

Coping: Social Media Used as a Distraction

When I conducted my research, I asked the participants what the main reasons/purposes were that they used social media for, and the majority of them said something along the lines of “to connect with friends and family”, and many said they used it to pass the time, to stave off boredom. Sometimes, users will go on social media to distract themselves from negative emotions such as sadness, loneliness, anxiety, stress, etc. Although not a permanent solution, it’s a temporary relief, and this can be helpful. Sometimes, social media can be a distraction from important things though. I know I definitely get distracted from studying or doing homework by checking social media. I’ve already done it once while writing this, yikes. But don’t worry, it’s not all bad!

Ahmad Mushtaq, an academic Vice Chancellor at Alberoni University, and Abdelmadjid Benraghda, a professor at Universiti Malaysia Pahang, found that students mostly used social media to “improve their knowledge and information.” They found that social media was actually a useful tool in education, because it allowed students to find information easily and connect with peers and instructors.

In my research I asked if participants find that they get distracted by their phone and go on social media while doing tasks such as homework or watching movies, and a whopping 77.1% said “yes, often” while the remaining 22.9% said “sometimes”. No one said “no, never”. This may be connected to how many people find it difficult to focus. Using apps that don’t allow you to check your phone for a period of time can help reduce the amount of times we get distracted by social media. One of my favorites is an app called Flora, where you can grow a little tree for staying off of your phone for the chosen amount of time.

Addiction: Excessive Social Media Usage & Reliance

When we think of addiction, we often think of substance abuse, but it can also happen in areas such as social media usage. Within the millennial generation, substance abuse has actually decreased, but smartphone use has increased and continues to do so. Researchers believe that “those susceptible to addiction have simply shifted to a new drug: smartphones” (Cain 739). Cain also writes about how “neuroimaging studies show that Internet addiction...shows similar increases in activity in brain regions associated with substance-related addictions”. Several studies have indicated that as levels of depression and anxiety of an individual increase, they become more inclined towards social media addiction (Simsek 115). One study showed results of a “positive relationship between social anxiety and social media addiction” (Baltaci 78). Although my study was not nearly extensive enough to determine if any of my participants suffer from social media addiction, I did find that the majority of them spent 3 or more hours on social media a day. In fact, four of those participants responded that they spend 9 or more hours on social media a day.

One thing that many users have experienced is FOMO (the fear of missing out). I have experienced this myself, especially in middle school and early high school. A user who experiences FOMO may feel that if they don’t check their phone, they might miss out on conversations, like in group chats, or things like recent events, opportunities, etc., so it may cause them stress or anxiety if they don’t regularly go on social media. On the other hand, some people get stressed/upset when they do go on social media, because they see photos or posts in general from an event or get-together that they either weren’t invited to or couldn’t make it to. Because of these negative feelings related to social media, FOMO has been associated with unhealthy smartphone use (Cain 739).

That was a lot, so what do we do?

Ok, so I know that was a lot of information, probably too much for a blog post on tumblr, but since I wrote all that out anyway, what do we do with it?

Although there were many negative responses indicating that certain uses of social media had harmful effects on mental health, including studies and results that I didn’t mention, there were also results that showed that many people felt indifferent with social media, and it was sometimes even beneficial (such as the academic use of it).

Those who spent longer amounts of time on social media tended to also feel more negatively when using it, and felt better when they used it less, so I would recommend monitoring your usage time and being careful of spending too much time on it. “Too much time” is very subjective though, so perhaps logging how you feel in relation to how long you spend on social media can give you a good idea of what a good amount is for you personally. Spending more time doing things with our hands/bodies, like physical activity or hobbies, can be very healthy ways of spending our time instead of being on social media. It can help distract us from the urge to check our phones, a distraction from a distraction if you will.

When it comes to content consumption, we all must be careful of what we expose ourselves to. Reducing or even completely cutting out certain content that stresses or upsets us can help tremendously. This can even mean unfollowing certain people who’s posts may make you feel upset, even if you know them personally, were friends at some point, or are just acquaintances. Even though it may feel awkward or even mean to do that, it might help in some cases.

Maybe you could relate to some of the things I wrote about in this post, maybe you didn’t relate at all, but I just want to thank you for reading all the way till the end, and I hope this helped share interesting information that can be useful to you.

#socialmedia #english project #research #research project #social media and mental health #mental health #fomo #growing up with social media #social media #how social media affects us #body image #body positivity

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universally-the-same · 5 years

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The link between perfectionism and escapism

Another benefit to therapy is that it’s allowed me to start connecting the dots to behavior patterns in my life. After making these realizations, I’m seeing how important it is to look for and recognize these patterns. If you want to make a change in your life, or better understand why it is that you do what you do, look for the patterns. There’s so much more to their story that what you see up front.

Perfectionism I’ve always admitted to being a perfectionist, but never really considered how extensively that theme played out in my life. It’s not just perfectionism in tasks, or the “all or nothing” tendency that I have when I start a new diet, or start working out. It’s more expansive and all encompassing than that. Katie used the word hyper-focus which sums it up perfectly. My fourteen year-old-self would have used the word obsessive, but I like the word hyper-focus better. I feel like it removes any preconceived negative notions that comes along with this level of perfectionism.

Throughout my life there has always been something that I’m hyper-focused on. Mostly the object of my focus has been something that has benefited me positively on some level, though thinking back there were times where I became hyper-focused on my woes as well.

I think back to my idolization of Dolly Parton and Jean Smart, and my obsessive friendship with Jean’s publicist. I think back to the guy I was fixated on at the mall and how my BFF and I would go and spend hours every Friday night hanging out in the music section of Sears so that I could be the object of his attention. These are just a few of the examples off the top of my head that consumed me for years growing up.

When I would allow myself to feel into my reality, I would blare my music and feel every lyric and every note of every song. I would relate to the music, and allow it to engulf me in sadness. It was this crazy extreme of feeling alone, yet knowing that I wasn’t because someone else could articulate what I was feeling.

This, however led to a summer where I became fixated on poetry. I poured my heart and my tears onto paper as I expressed my feelings in a rhythmic fashion. In one summer I wrote close to 80 poems.

As I grew older, country line-dancing became my obsession and 6 nights out of the week you would find me on the dance floor; a social butterfly feeling into the music once again; but this time allowing it to engulf me in joy.

When I met my husband, I threw myself into our relationship and lost sight of everything else. Many years into our marriage, when I began to acknowledge that I had lost a part of myself I went back to school. Not only in hopes of finding a better job, but because I believed that it would help fill that hole. It did, because I became obsessed with school. I graduated top of my class.

When I wasn’t throwing myself into my schoolwork, I was throwing myself into my work-work and winning awards for top sales there. But once I finished my Associates and Bachelor’s degrees, I had nothing to fixate on, work was miserable, and once again that void in my soul made it’s presence known.

It was during this time that I decided to finally listen to the voice in my head that had been suggesting therapy. Through therapy I found meditation, which allowed me to reconnect with my soul and I reconnected with my spirituality again.

I was able to start learning how to control my anxiety though meditation and mindfulness, and also by releasing some of my perfectionist tendencies. I began realizing that it didn’t matter what other people thought, it only mattered what I thought. This earth-shattering news allowed me to start loving myself which opened the door for me being able to start trusting myself again.

Five years later, the rabbit hole has gotten deeper and deeper, but I’ve been loving every second of it. Some might say that I’ve become somewhat hyper-focused on this whole process. While I don’t necessarily agree, because I believe that self-work is some of the most important work you could ever do, would that really be such a bad thing? And let’s be honest, it’s never been about being a “bad thing”. My perfectionism was actually a blessing in disguise.

I’m now learning that my hyper focus had been a means of survival for me; a coping mechanism. You see, my hyper focus tendency, I’ve come to learn, is another form of escapism for me. By becoming consumed by the task/object at hand, it has allowed me to not have to focus on other things in my life that may not have been so pleasant, such as my childhood with my mother.

Escapism All of the people/things listed above were all forms of escapism for me. But as I go further, I realize that there were more. My best friend and I played with Barbies until we were 16 growing up. Yes, I feel funny admitting to that, but this is one of the ways that I coped with my reality. The intricate story lines that we would play out allowed me to escape. I could become someone who was beautiful, had the perfect body, was popular, had an amazing singing voice, was confident, had a wonderful boyfriend… these were all things that I didn’t have, and all things that I wanted.

And it wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t acknowledge the role that food played into all of this. After the divorce, things were hard. I was living a life of alternating extremes. On one hand, I had my mother’s house that was full of strict rules with severe consequences resulting in physical and mental abuse. On the other hand, my dad was working three jobs to take care of me and afford to send me to private school. This meant that I was often home by myself, unsupervised.

I spent my weeks with my father dreading going back to my mother’s house, and the weeks with my mother were spent wishing I could be at my dad’s house. Food became a source of comfort, escapism and an area of my life that I could control.

Growing up, my earliest “diet mentality” that I was introduced to comes from my father trying to teach me portion control in a deli when I wanted a small bag of chips. I was probably around the age the 7. The deal ended up being that I could get the chips, but the trade off was that I couldn’t eat the whole bag. Now, this isn’t a ridiculous trade-off, and I don’t think that my father did anything wrong. I know that everything was out of concern for me and my well being, as well as trying to prevent me from enduring what he had as an chubby teenager, but it’s also the first time in my life that food became “restrictive” or a “bad thing”.

One of the thought processes behind intuitive eating is that once the “restriction” is removed from the food, the desire and the need to have that food becomes less. That “forbidden item” just becomes… food. And once it becomes “just food” the need to binge on that particular food source lessens because you know you’ll have it again. (Not saying that intuitive eating is a free-for-all, and I as I continue to learn about the process, I will continue to explain more) but I do believe that those “rules” and “restrictions” toward food (along with a cocktail of other mitigating factors) set me up for my life long relationship with it.

Now, back to this idea of finding an area of my life that I could control. As I mentioned, half of my post-divorce life was spent with unreasonable, rigid rules the other half was freedom. In some ways, food became a drug and a means of escapism.

It literally allowed me to escape because I would sneak off to the 7-11 that was several blocks away, or I would sneak off to the little convenience store by one of our favorite breakfast places. There was adventure, and excitement, a thrill in getting the food. And then when I got it, eating it released endorphins that made me feel happy and safe.

In previous posts, I’ve talked about how the only happy memories I have with my mother are surrounding food, and how food also provided me nurture and nourishment. So it served so many purposes, and really.. it did a great job. I had opportunities to try different recreational substances during this period in my life, but thankfully, I never felt the need to escape from these, because I had found my escape from something else.

What this means today After explaining all of that, someone could look at my life today and think… what could she possibly have to escape from now? And it’s true… I’m very grateful for the life I have. Is it perfect? Of course not, but I recognize what I do have and focus on that. I’ve always been a positive person and my optimism also allows me to thrive because I don’t focus on the bad.

But that’s not to say that I don’t have bad days. And when I get sick, or get into a fight with someone, or I’m stressed out at work, or stressed out because a family member is sick, or there’s a ten-thousand dollar home repair that needs to be done on that I have to miraculously make the funds appear for… I mean… the list goes on and on. And let’s be real… it’s normal life stuff. The stuff that each and everyone of us deals with every day.

That’s this stuff that still triggers what has become a subconscious reaction in my body. When there is some level of stress, be it mental, physical, emotional, and I’m sure even spiritual, my body goes into survival mode. It’s what it’s spent the last 32 years doing. And now, I have to somehow retrain that subconscious response.

It’s going to be challenging, for sure. But for the first time in my life, I’ve been gifted with an incredible amount of insight into an area of my life where I’ve been searching for answers for so long. That insight allows for a whole other level of self-awareness. I’m now realizing how deep my relationship with food runs. It’s more than a source of fuel for my body. It’s been a literal means for survival on many levels.

*this blog post was originally posted on my My Curvy Journey blog on 4/14/2019 and moved to my Universally the Same blog.

#escapism #hyper focus #hyper-focus #intuitive eating #patterns #perfectionism #therapy

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sl-walker · 5 years

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Maybe you’ve done this before, but can you speak to how you came up with all the Blackbirds’ personalities and/or goals? Like what inspired them and such. I think we know the story behind a few, like Raze, but I’m curious about all of them!

Oh gosh. I probably have in pieces, but I’m totally down with answering it. XD Thank you for asking it, too! This’ll get long-ish, so under the cut it goes. But the easy answer is that all of them actually evolved very organically; aside a few notes, I didn’t really plan any of them. They just kind of happened in the best way. But for more detail, read on.

Shiv I stole from a short comic where he was actually fridged at the end on Orto Plutonia. His habit of writing to his dead brother charmed me and broke my heart, and his own end was just a big ole nope. Maul needed a sergeant, I wanted Shiv, so I grabbed him. Even in the short span we saw him in quasi canon, he displayed a dry sense of humor and a quick wit (and some skill at words), so I just built on that limited framework. He would have had to have been highly trained to be an advanced scout like that, he would have had to have been level headed, and beyond that, he really just grew into his own person organically. Him wrestling with losing his twin, him having to process that while coping with the burden of leadership, with a new squad on one side and a green CO on the other, all of that just kind of happened as the story went on.

Tally's definitely been my answer to the habit of people writing mean, snarky medics. I wanted one who was kind to the people in his care, who believed in consent and autonomy. Beyond the fact that the squad was built around Maul -- who would need someone like Tally if he was ever going to learn how to be a person -- it’s just enjoyable to defy the trope. Originally, he was going to be older, more along Husk’s relative age, but it was clear right off that he wasn’t. Of all of them, I think I most end up projecting my ‘politics’ onto him; his open cynicism, his belief in solidarity, his subversiveness and distrust of the establishment. But Tally, no joke, grabs the reins every single time I write his narrative. All of the Blackbirds feel really real when I write them, but he’s the one who often surprises me. I don’t so much think I came up with him as that he ended up with some part of me and then went on to totally do his own damn thing. And if that sounds crazy, I’d love to see someone else try writing him organically and find a different result. LOL! He’s just a really strong personality.

Smarty is a total geek, except not. Because unlike the stereotypical geek portrayal of like, the 1980s, he had no trouble getting laid. He wears graffiti on his battlefield armor. He’s skinnier and softer looking than most of the others, but he’s also kinda fearless and badass. He’s apt to go on and on, but he’s also sharp as hell. I loved the idea of a clone who self-studied everything because 1.) he was intensely bored on Kamino, and 2.) because he has a genuine, enthusiastic passion for learning. Like-- honestly, most of the Blackbirds are subversive not just in narrative, but also outside of it, because defying tropes is a lot of fun, narratively.

Castle’s personality is partly because I love engineers. Scotty from Star Trek is my hero, has been my whole life, and Castle is kind of a sideways homage to him. His skill and talent at building or repairing things, his steadfastness, but also his occasional struggles understanding what’s going on with people internally speaking. Scotty’s his own thing entirely -- don’t even get me started there, the Arc of the Wolf can be googled -- but Castle shares some traits with him. Castle is also a bit more like the clones we see portrayed in canon, which makes him an interesting perspective in this group of odds, ends and eccentricities.

Husk also serves that; of all of them, he is in the mold of Rex and Cody. I wanted someone who was older and had been around for damn ever, who got the full load of indoctrination, both Mando and Kaminoan, and who would offer a more ‘traditional soldier’ perspective on things. One thing is absolutely sure, though, is that I never, ever wrote Husker to be villainized because of that. His view of things -- though it’s evolving now thanks to experience and kinship -- has always been just as legitimate a take as the other Blackbirds and I never wanted him to be portrayed in a bad light because of it. I also wanted him to be 501st originally because that would be an interesting bridge between Skywalker and the Blackbirds, and an interesting conflict Husk would have to work through. His personality kinda grew around all that; his fierce love and loyalty to his brothers, his unique place trying to balance who he was raised to be while being surrounded by the other, more subversive Blackbirds. (He was named in homage to Bill Adama in BSG, too.)

Your boy Misty is kind of the most normal of everyone, honestly. He’s the one who’s managed to not be traumatized by war, or by their upbringing, or by anything else. He’s actually incredibly resilient in that regard. It’s not that he doesn’t feel things deeply, but he seems to have kept from letting those get hooks into his brain, and that’s no small feat in their galaxy. His genuine love of the water was the first thing I knew about him, and it’s remained kind of a constant in how his personality develops. His ability to be a fair leader when put to it, but not enjoying the role, for example; his absolute confidence when he is in charge of something like a water rescue. I’m really looking forward to doing more with him in Year Two and highlighting just how good a specialist he is in that, as well.

Brody was always going to be a slicer, but like the others, his personality just happened over time. I knew he’d be a bit cynical because he already has more exposure to the wider galaxy than the others, but I didn’t anticipate a lot of the nuances. Like his idealism finally getting stoked by Radio Anarchy. That was a lot of fun to see, and brought home that he, too, is a young guy and not immune to hope. The Llanic arc was a big one for Brody, not only in terms of development, but in terms of his entire life after this. His mischief at the Viable ad was also a Moment(tm), but if you asked me what his actual defining arc would be, it’d be Llanic, and it happened kinda on its own.

Raze, as I’ve said, ended up being homage to my son; the ADHD, also the introduction of meds and how those made his life easier, also his cuddly nature and kindness and generosity. His artistic lean, however, is in homage to my oldest kid. I knew he’d be kind of distractable, never on time to meetings, hyper competent in his field, always down for a hair-pet and someone to snuggle up to, and oddly enough, Raze is the one who doesn’t surprise me often. LOL! I guess because I live with his inspiration. His being ace just-- was. I didn’t intend it, but it happened; when I was writing the camping fluff back in the day and Tango was lamenting, Raze was just like, “Nah, not interested.’ He’s just a wonderful, positive presence, and while he’s having an awful time with survivor guilt right now, he’s still wonderful. And I honestly don’t know of anyone who doesn’t love him.

Tango ended up being one of the most complex of the Blackbirds! Like, there is part of him that is definitely me -- “HDU write about this person I love inaccurately, I’ll just have to do it better than you!!!” -- but most of him is actually not. Like-- his actually-pretty-inaccurate crush on Maul. LOL! He loves the idea of being in a relationship with Maul, but doesn’t quite grasp what that would entail realistically? The crush and literally everything else about Tango happened in the course of the story. I knew early about his fanfic leanings, but not how he would get there; I knew about his superstitious streak, but not that he would end up slowly losing it piece by piece in favor of something he can control, namely his writing. His feelings about Rabbit and what happened to Rabbit are more added layers to his complexity. And while Raze is the teras kasi protege, it’s actually Tango who’s probably a bit more Force sensitive than the norm. Nothing to Jedi levels, but there’s something there. His future’s going to be an interesting one. (And Etah and Adao will be a running thread through the whole series.)

Rabbit was always going to be Rabbit. I knew his name and Rancor’s before I even wrote the first chapter. And I knew he wasn’t going to see the end of Year One. I knew that he and his twin were both brand spanking new, and would therefore have to develop on their own, over time, and they did. I had no real personality traits in mind for either, beyond their desperate attachment (and in fairness, co-dependency) with one another. So, he happened. And I wanted him to be a person, even knowing his fate. I didn’t want him to be cannon fodder. I didn’t want the audience to suspect what would eventually happen. And when the time came, it was absolutely, critically important that when I wrote his end, I was sobbing on my keyboard. I had to love him, and to do that, I had to write him well. (And I cried so hard I could barely type, then I cried for hours after, too.)

Rancor is the least developed, but that was by design? I still don’t know him as well as the others. I know he’s Rabbit’s twin and some things about him now, as an individual, but Rancor himself has always been defined by his proximity to his twin. He’s never thought for a second to step out into his own so far as to lose sight of Rabbit, and so he hasn’t. We get hints of it -- his vote on Bravo-984, his punching a clone in the teeth at the climax of that training mission, his possessiveness and anxiety, his basic quiet competence when put to it -- but it’s only really going to be over time that he gets to figure out who he is. He’s always going to be Rabbit’s twin, but now he has no real choice about becoming his own person, and we’ll see how that goes.

Thank you again for the ask! I hope these answers work.

#shiv #tally #castle #husker #brody #smarty #misty #tango #raze #rabbit #rancor #blackbirds: year one #witness me #littlekmac

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flowers-by-the-bed · 5 years

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Just ignore this it’s just for me to try and organise myself because idk what to do right now aside from cut myself up and hit my head and I’m trying my fucking best to not do that. But as always I need the knowledge that my thoughts are “out there” rather than just writing somewhere private in order to feel like it’s helped me. Not that I have much hope for that anyway. I was doing so so well, moving on, making progress, taking control of things, finding good influences to be around and getting my work done and it all gets shattered over nothing or when my meds don’t work as well as they should. Everything in my life and everything about me is so fragile and built on such fragile foundations and however stable or genuine the changes I make seem, they are nothing. Even if my mood flips again tomorrow and things magically get better, it doesn’t make my emotions any less strong right now, and it would definitely flip back to this as soon as the next stressor happens. I hate it.

I wrote out a huge post about all my feelings earlier and it made me feel better but I went to post it and the fucking connection got fucked and it deleted itself and that alone has sent me spiralling and im so upset and angry and that just says everything, i almost threw my laptop at the wall but threw my phone instead. I’ve been trying to remember what I said because it made me feel better but I just keep crying and hitting things and myself and I cannot shake it, and that’s my reality rn

_____

I’m so exhausted being me and being this mess and I don’t want to even try anymore. Whatever I do and however much I think I make progress, I always end up back in this situation with no triggers or warning. No progress or motivation is worth it because I will never be fixed or stable and there isn’t a guide to navigate this. Why should I try and move forward when within three days this can happen and I’m back at square one. Either my meds were faulty or this is just me but who the fuck cares which it is because either way I’m just a fucking incapable piece of shit. There is no reason I should flip this quickly and feel so strongly over literally nothing but tiny normal inconveniences and the level that I hate myself because of everything and just in general is too much. I hated myself anyway but EUPD moods make it so much worse and so much more intense and I literally cannot do anything close to normal functioning when this happens. My dad came round to check how I was and I cried for a while but then I was ready to try and go out the house with him, but I saw myself in the mirror and had a complete breakdown and cried in bed for hours and didn’t speak. I’m fucking pathetic but I can feel all of the fucking fat on my body everywhere and it feels like a disease, I disgust myself. I couldn’t move or even think about going outside because I couldn’t and still cant stand the thought of anyone seeing my body. It’s vile and I hate it and even when I have a few good weeks and start eating normal amounts again, seeing my body sends me back into a spiral and I regret ever eating at all. I’m crying now because it just feels like you can see the fat expand by the minute and it makes my anxiety and anger and sadness go haywire. I don’t want to try anymore I’m exhausted trying to pretend that one day I’ll get fixed and I’ll be stable enough for myself that I can lead a normal life but it just isn’t possible. I want to drop dead because this is not living. I am exhausted of my thoughts making me think of the most triggering things when I know full well I am already bad enough that I want to die and hurt myself, and just sinking lower into that spiral until I scare myself about what I’m going to do. Every single month there is something that brings me back to this place where I remember that no matter what progress I’ve made, it’s all fake and down to some fucking pills. And as soon as those get taken away, I’m back to being some pathetic waste of space and effort who’s almost 25 and unable to even control their fucking emotions even at the bare minimum level so I can function. I felt so guilty with my dad here and me just being a wreck and unable to talk or go outside. It’s pathetic. I don’t know why I deserve a head that hates me this much and can’t do it’s only fucking job. I’m tired of faking it and tired of hating myself and tired of knowing that for as long as my life lasts, this is all it’s going to be. And it isn’t a life. It isn’t fair and I don’t know why I had to end up like this. EUPD is ugly and it is vile and eventually, whenever it happens, this will be what kills me. The only things that distracted me even a little was my dad coming over and keeping me busy before I fell back into that hole and Matt messaging me, because it grounded me a little for an hour or so because it was nice to interact when it’s been months, but it didn’t work for long. Those aside, I just want to be someone else. It’s too much, I don’t know how to get my thoughts out, I can’t get the anger out even when I hurt myself or break things, it’s like drowning in self-hate to the degree that you cannot see anything else. I just want to sleep and wake up and have this whole stupid fucking disorder and brain gone or a bad dream. It’s not hard to see why I don’t achieve anything, I will never get to my full potential because of my brain and the boat has pretty much already sailed on me achieving the things I wanted to with my work anyway. Because of how incapacitated I have always been during education because of this. It’s not hard to see why people leave, why I am too much to handle. I flip so quickly and the anger expects others to understand what’s going on when in reality I don’t have any idea either. I need validation and then I don’t want a thing from them. It’s too much. I don’t blame anyone. I blame myself. Every aspect of my life gets fucked up by my inability to control myself or my thoughts or feelings and this is just a huge fucking pity party for me to try and organise my thoughts, just so that for the rest of today, I might be able to move my head away from them now. I’m exhausted. I’m angry. I’m upset. I’m detached from 90% of the people in my life and I don’t care. I just want to hide until I drop or until just one area of my life makes sense. If I could hate myself less and not want to puke and cry and cut every time I saw my body, I’d be able to come with the sad and the angry. If I didn’t react so strongly to the smallest triggers, or felt stable, or stable in my relationships, or able to trust ANYONE, I’d be able to deal with hating myself a little better. If I didn’t read meaning into everything people say and misinterpret things, or have such a strong emotional reaction to people speaking to me or whatever then I’d have more stable relationships and I could cope better with the rest. If I didn’t have such bad anxiety affecting most of my life, the EUPD in general would be easier to control. If I didn’t feel this inability or desire to share with the people in my life who actually do care, I’d find things easier to deal with and would have an actual support system. But by my own design and suspicion and refusal to overshare and burden people directly, I’m a fucking mess. Everything hitting me at the same time, at 400% power, it incapacitates me. I wish I didn’t have a personality disorder so I knew exactly what I’m actually like, and not constantly wondering what is me and what is an illness. I wish I wasn’t anxious so I trusted people’s intentions and could be myself instead of reining myself in and being terrified of being bad at things or embarrassing myself, and never making progress with anything or anyone because of it. I wish I had a healthy relationship with food. I wish I didn’t self harm. I wish I wasn’t depressed. I just want to be someone else and be a real adult. Life is hard enough without an arsenal of chemical imbalances and broken mental Schemas. I was doing SO well and it equates to nothing. I don’t want to be a 24 year old pathetic mess of a person. It’s too much. Although I do it to myself because I’m not someone who enjoys talking directly to people about my problems and I’d never want to burden them, it’s alienating and hard to try and function without explaining what is wrong.

#personal #eupd #bpd #mental health #illness #venting

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kaeleenmichelle · 5 years

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On Mental Illness

I guess you could say I've had what they call writer's block lately. This whole writing thing is harder than it seems sometimes, there are times that I can't seem to remember how to put words together to form sentences. I don't know if it's because as I type this it's World Mental Health Day and I've been reading every story under the sun, including Chrissy Teigan's Glamour essay- two years later- but I'm writing. Finally.

My first recollection of having anxiety was in kindergarten. Every morning, without fail, there would be a lump in my throat and a knot in my stomach. I was sick with worry over being late, despite the fact that my mom always made sure I was walking through the doors before the tardy bell. (Or whatever the kindergarten equivalent of a bell is) I also had- and still have- a particular disdain for change, so you can imagine the horror that going to school seven hours a day for the first time put me through. My parents did the best they could in trying to calm me, but as I was known for having a flair for the dramatics (I was a theater kid, cut me some slack) they didn't think anything of it.

I don't blame them, because neither did I. How could I? I didn't know that not everyone worried about every little thing. So I pushed on, the anxiety that I didn't know was anxiety more of an annoyance than anything. I was as fine as a kid who never stopped thinking or worrying could be, and I excelled in the best way I knew how. I always made sure my grades were up, (Minus math. We don't talk about math here) I did theater, I made friends. But the little knot in my stomach was always there, just waiting for my brain to give it a reason to twist itself through. I made friends, yes. But I never really felt like I was ~one~ of them. I did the normal kid things, went to sleepovers where we ate junk food and watched movies- the stuff of Lizzie McGuire dreams! But on multiple occasions I ended up calling my mom to pick me up (on a landline!) before the night was through because I just couldn't bear to have fun. I just wanted to go home.

In my formative teen years, this translated to me not doing much of anything outside of school. I can’t count the amount of things I’ve missed out on over the years: cast parties, youth group trips, social experiences that could’ve helped shape me. Instead, the lack of connection made me feel hollow but I couldn’t bring myself to change things. It was during this time in which I was officially diagnosed with anxiety disorder, and I could finally put a name to the things I was feeling. I got on medication, and things got pretty good!

Until they weren't. All hell broke loose the summer before my senior year of high school and I got my first bout of situational depression. It was bad. Though I'd dealt with anxiety for years, I had never experienced a panic attack before that summer. It was the beginning of what I now affectionately call my ~dark time~. And then when the smoke cleared and everything was better and the situational depression should've faded, it didn't. It hung on for dear life, following me to college and watching my every move, along with a myriad of other issues. And the anxiety was worse than ever. At some point during my sophomore year, I couldn't take it anymore. I moved back home, leaving Friday night tailgates and my friends behind for therapy and Friday nights spent at home, alone. I am a textbook introvert, gathering energy from my sacred alone time. Unfortunately, when you struggle with mental illness a night in can turn into two and then four and suddenly it's been a week and you haven't returned any messages or spoken to your friends or seen the light the day, which is something I still have to force myself to fight. Anyway, the first couple years of this switch off felt unproductive, like nothing was changing.

Thankfully, after three more years things have definitely changed. My ~dark time~ has long since passed. But there are always the bad days, and the bad weeks. Months even. Accepting the fact that I'll have to deal with my anxiety on some level for the rest of my life has taken me years to do. Sometimes I feel I'm still not there. There's guilt and resentment and anger but in those times I remind myself of the support system and how privileged I am in that way.

I suppose by now you're wondering why I've spent this entire essay having a one woman show and I guess I have been, haven’t I? Call me the Mrs. Maisel of writing. I guess I just wanted to write this as an open letter because writing is cathartic and though humor is my normal coping mechanism, sometimes I feel like we should really be talking about it.

In the intro of one of her cookbooks, Chrissy Teigan (maybe I just wrote this to talk about how obsessed with Chrissy Teigan I am) writes about how in the thick of her postpartum depression, she ended up sleeping on the couch so often that she started keeping her robes in the kitchen so she wouldn’t have to go upstairs. And she writes that John slept on the couch with her every. single. night. I think that's what we're all looking for. Someone who will sleep on the couch with us, metaphorically speaking. Or literally. That helps too.

#writing #anxiety #mental illness #mental health #writers of tumblr #spilled words

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coldtomyflash · 6 years

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Weird question, and it's perfectly okay if "I don't know" is your answer: How did you manage to do grad school AND finish writing so many good fics? I'm writing the lit review for my dissertation right now, and I want to finish several WIPs I have (if nothing else, just to prove to myself that I can), but it just feels like I can barely do either, much less both. Any advice at all?

Ah, no worries! It’s not that odd a question. Actually, someone’s asked me before ^^; My reply to them at the time was here. No need to read it, but it’s some context?

My reply now that my head is in a healthier place is... long and winding and not actually full of that much advice but eh, I rambled as I do. If you just want the advice, scroll all the way down and it’s there.

For starters, I’m not a normal comparison point. This isn’t to pat myself on the back, but for a variety of reasons, writing is something that comes really naturally to me. I’ll detail those reasons, but before I get into that, the point I’m illustrating here is that... sometimes I think people compare themselves to how much I wrote and what else I accomplished in that time and think “hey cool - that is a function human! Why can’t I do that?” And the answer is short answer is that my brain is programmed for pretty much one thing, and that thing is writing writing, and holy crap I was the opposite of a functional human when writing that much and that quickly.

The long answer is -

I’ve been making up stories literally as long as I can remember. I spent my childhood consuming stories. I taught myself to read and was during school I was consistently reading about 8 grade levels above my reading level, and loved learning about narrative structure. I annoyed the shit out of my older brother by reading the same book series as he read, but guessing plot points that were going to happen either in that book or else 2-3 books out. he didn’t get how I would just know and I’d be like “it’s obvious - that’s where the story has to go!” Because I was imagining it in my head - what i would do with it, where it would go, where it had to go. Closing the page mid0chapter and imagining the next-scene, and then picking back up to see how right or wrong I was.

And I had a best friend for most of my childhood through to early adulthood with whom I made stories. Every weekend, creating narratives together, not writing them down but basically roleplaying them by talking them out (voices and all, it was a heck of a lot of fun, as much as it made me pretty much the nerdiest teen in existence). We tried to write a novel when we were 12, got about 7 chapters in. We had a lot of starts and stops on other stories too.

Which isn’t said to stroke my own ego, it’s said to highlight that I have a metric fuckton of explicit and implicit practice at storytelling. It was and sort of is my “whole life”. I also had teachers that helped me develop storytelling skills, and was really freaking lucky to go to a school with an AP program for English that seriously stretched my ability to write fast. We had to write an essay every single class, during class, and have it finished by the end of class (or in less time if we had lecture stuff to go over too) in my last year of high school. The essays could be creative response (i.e., short stories). I wrote a short story almost every week in the space of an hour when I was 17. By the time I got to the end of year final and actually got to use a computer and type that shit instead of hand-cramping halfway through, I somehow managed to write the two-essay final in the allotted 3 hours and, i shit you not, had a wordcount of 6000 words.

That’s still my record. It was probably a dumpster fire but I got 100% probably for sheer volume.

Anyway that was over a decade ago, but the whole reason this life story is pertinent is because -

I have practice. The only way to improve at anything, to get faster at it, for it to ease, is to practice. Practice at storytelling, practice at having to set a scene using just words sitting in my BFF’s room and trying to describe the image I had in my head for how I wanted her to see the scene as it was playing out. Practice at writing fast and getting feedback on how to write. Practice implicitly at trying to imagine what routes stories can take. Practice taking stories apart and piecing them back together, in my head, all the time.

So that’s part of it.

The other part, and this is what I said in my previous post, was depression. I was seriously fucking burnt out and depressed when I started writing coldflash fic, and grad school took a huge toll on my mental health. It’s easier to write when you’re doing it to procrastinate working on your dissertation, and easier to keep writing when you get positive feedback and it feeds those lovely dopamine gremlins in your brain who aren’t getting any positive validation from grad school because holy damn that shit is hard.

I had no balance in my life for a long time. It wasn’t good. I went to counselling. I got more balance. Fic slowed down. Still finished, but not 120k words in 3 months (that was the pace when I started fic writing...jfc I don’t know how I managed.) Life got harder. Fic was now harder to write. I got more counselling. Fic was easier to write. I moved around the world. Fic got harder to write. I started anti-depressants. Narratives now seem to be flowing again.

Regardless of the state of my mental health though, I’ve never written as much as quickly as I did during the middle of grad school. And I think that’s because I was very narratively pent up when I started writing fic. I had been so busy and pushing myself so damn hard in grad school that I didn’t make almost any time for stories, for fic, for imagining my own stories. I was suppressing that side of myself in the service of Focus. So when I burnt out, my narrative side rebounded and said “fuck that noise, I still exist, and we’re making space for me”. It took over. I came literally a hair’s breadth from quitting my PhD post candidacy. Idk what type of program you’re in, but business schools in North America? It’s a 5 year PhD typically, and I was at the end of year 3 and eyeing the door.

Anyway - I say all that because -

I am not a good example and you should not do what I did. Finishing that many long WIPs that quickly wasn’t healthy, and was only possible because I didn’t do much else at the time, and had a lifetime of practice and a narrative rebound to make it even possible.

But -

My actual advice?

1) Practice. Practice. Practice.

Not all at once, but everything counts. Daydreaming counts. Watching shows and thinking of how they could be improved counts. Talking out story ideas with friends counts. Just make it fun. Practice is something we think of as arduous and annoying. Learning new words is practice. Meeting new people and considering their traits is practice. Everything can be practice for writing. All the research you do can be practice for writing. (Random note: a childhood coping mechanism for anxiety that I had was to narrate what I was doing to myself in my head in the 3rd person. Like telling a story of myself walking to gym class in my own head. That was also practice.)

2) Have fun with it!

Don’t making writing an obligation. Then it’s another thing on the list of things you avoid. Finishing stories often feels like an obligation. I’m going through this right now with Needs Must. It can be hard to complete a WIP because you start to have internal anxieties about disappointing readers, not living up to expectations, exhaustion from that narrative, distraction / temporary loss of interest (which is normal! and not actually a bad thing!). All of that then makes you feel guilty, which makes it impossible to get into a creative space to write. You can’t work on the thing you’re avoiding.

3) It’s okay to give your WIPs breathing space.

When you hit a wall, you may need to set it aside and read it again in a month with fresh eyes. You may need to treat your story like someone else’s story. That’s, again, literally where I’m at right now with Needs Must. I just reread a bunch of it and hadn’t really forgotten the details but once they’re on the page they’re out of my head, and so taking some time before going back to reread it made it easier for me to think of like I think of every other story: “what would I do next with this? Oh that’s a twist, that needs to come back later. There’s a theme here, we’ve seen that three times. What’s the best ending I, as a reader now, can imagine for this?”

If avoidance, guilt, and/or writer’s block aren’t your issue, and it’s literally just down to time management -

4) Your graduate degree is more important than your WIPs.

Your WIPs aren’t going anywhere, they don’t have a deadline, and your readers will wait for you, and new ones will find you. Time management is an essential, awful, part of being an academic.

I get more done, both at work and creatively on fic, when I’m just a bit too busy, but that’s me. Figure out what is optimal for you, and do it. When do you get the most writing done? When you’re relieved? When you’re anxious? Late at night? First thing in the morning? When does it flow? When won’t it ruin your graduate career?

(Seriously I was writing fic at work last week and was kicking myself. I don’t have time for that shit! Set boundaries on your time!)

But full serious here, graduate school is exhausting, and almost inherently de-motivating, and even the best damn students eye the door a lot of the time, even if they do finish. It’s stressful and you feel constantly powerless. It’s a lot to need to cope with. I found writing to be a way to cope. That lit review you’re working on? Yeah, it’s zapping your time and energy. That’s normal (unfortunately). And it’s good to give yourself breaks from that to write. Don’t feel guilty for taking time here and there for yourself - to write, or to not write. To relax, unplug, unwind. To close your eyes and daydream (if you’re me) or have a bubble bath (if you’re my sister), or do whatever helps you honestly, genuinely destress. The best thing you can do for both writing and for graduate school is to take breaks and take time for yourself. There is actual science on the importance of breaks, and academics are fucking notorious for putting too much pressure on themselves to actually relax.

5) If you’re burnt out and/or depressed - seek help!

Most universities have resources for mental health! Talk to a doctor! Don’t put too much stress and pressure on yourself! Almost half of grad students are mentally ill at some point!

6) Talk out your stories with friends!

I know I already said this under “practice” but having a fandom friend to bounce ideas with and cheer you on is amazing and essentially. I was in constant contact with Bealeciphers when I started writing, and now I have a different friend who’s helped me the past couple years with writing and developing my stories. Mostly they cheer me on, and when I’m stuck, I tell them where the story is going and what I need help with. But honestly, writing doesn’t need to happen in a vacuum and doesn’t need to be you hunched over a laptop in the dark all alone and staring blankly at a screen (I’m definitely not projecting here, no siree). It’s amazing how motivating it is and how much it can help you stay on track to check in regularly with other writing friends!

7) Pick your battles.

You say you have a... couple(?) of WIPs? How many are you juggling? Is it too many? Do you need to set one (or two??) aside? When my steam was slowly and AATJS and Tumbling Together started to feel like a chore, I set TT aside and took a month break from AATJS then dived right back into AATJS (with the help of the friend mentioned above, cheering me on) because I knew it would be the harder one to finish, and the one that I feared I’d never finish if I put it aside too long. I tackled the biggest hurdle first. If that’s the type of thing for you, I recommend it. Pick the story that’s either the most or least likely to get finished, and focus your energy there.

Another battle-picking thing here? It’s okay to outsource. I’m terrible for not using a proofreader beta. It’s a weird control thing, despite the fact that I love people pointing out typos in my works so I can freaking fix them. The point here is: don’t be like me. If you suck at finding your own typos, use a beta or proofreader. My writer friend who helps me helps when I get stuck. I help them when they need feedback on specific scenes and tones, and I’ve recently discovered they hate editing (I love editing) so this entertains me to no end. Just - you don’t have to do it all yourself. If you feel like you do, see points 5 and 6 again.

Aaaannnddd that’s that. Whew. I just spent... wow, too long on this. I spent as much time on this as I did on my own grad student’s lit review I was providing feedback on today ^^; #whoops

#redhead vs. writing #long post #long post for ts #phyn rambles #writing advice #depression tw #ask to tag #Anonymous

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yet-another-autistic-blog · 5 years

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The Journey

I started my autism journey a few months ago, but realistically, it's a journey I've been on my whole life. Two of my best friends noticed that I was having a rough time dealing with life, so they encouraged me to seek out mental health help. I was scared, but I knew they were right. I made the appointment, and quickly was diagnosed with severe anxiety and mild depression. I was put on an antidepressant, started going to therapy, and was put into a 6-week "Understanding Anxiety" class.

At first, it was helping. The medication took a while to kick in, but when it did start working I noticed my appetite getting better, and I was having much less frequent "panic attacks." I put that in quotes because I later realized they were actually meltdowns. The therapy kind of helped, in the sense that it was nice to finally talk to someone about how my narcissistic mom messed me up in a lot of ways (that's a topic for another post). The class was more helpful than the therapist because it gave me concrete strategies and tools I could use.

As I started working on my anxiety, I realized there were issues I was struggling with that didn't fit into the anxiety box or the depression box. Since there's a family history of autism in my family, I started looking up more information about it. Most of the early stuff I read described how to diagnose autism in children, so I almost gave up, but I decided to google "adult female autism" and found several articles written by women on the spectrum. Many of the things I read seemed eerily familiar.

I started a list of reasons I might be on the spectrum. It was supposed to be a pros and cons list, but the few things I wrote on the "reasons I'm not autistic" side were just self doubts without much substance. The other list soon grew much larger than I had anticipated. I tried to think back to my childhood and revisit old memories in an autistic context. For example, I remember my mom being bothered that I walk on my toes "because it's a sign of autism." I still walk on my toes because I thought that was a dumb reason not to. I remember my mom getting angry at me when she would ask me a question and I would take too long to respond because I had to think about my answer. I remember getting overwhelmed by too much sound, too much light, too strong tastes, too uncomfortable clothes.

When the list reached nearly 3 pages long, I decided I needed to talk to a professional about my findings. I knew that 4 kids in my family had official diagnoses (2 of my brothers + 2 of my cousins), and that a few adults in the family were suspected to be on the spectrum. I decided that I was going to be the first adult in my family to get a diagnosis. I figured that Step 1 would be to talk to my therapist at our next session. I organized my list into categories, and made sure to include at least one memory from childhood for each category. I printed it out, put it in my bag, and went to the therapy appointment.

I took a few deep breaths to calm my anxiety, and I told her about my suspicions. I tried to tell her verbally some of the reasons, but I started feeling anxious again as she didn't seem convinced. She reasoned that because I've been able to hold down a job for 3.5 years and I feel empathy when my boyfriend feels bad, I can't possibly be on the spectrum. And besides, even if I was, apparently Kaiser doesn't do autism diagnosis in adults. And even if I was able to get a diagnosis, they don't have any programs to support autistic adults.

I felt crushed. I thought I finally had the answer to a question I had been asking my whole life: "What the hell is wrong with me?" Then I realized, the therapist was not an autism expert. She's probably only familiar with the stereotype of autism, not the subtleties. I knew that people on the spectrum are capable of feeling very deep empathy. I knew that even though I was successfully holding that job, I was still struggling with specific aspects of that job, like phone calls, writing complex emails, etc. I realized that I was able to learn more about autism in a month of online research than this woman learned in all her years of school.

I honestly don't remember the words of the rest of the appointment. I remember slipping back into my mask, because I no longer felt safe. I remember that it was suddenly much harder to make eye contact than it had been previously. I remember thinking about the printout in my bag. I never even mentioned it to her because if she didn't even understand that people on the spectrum can feel empathy, then she wasn't going to understand the subtleties of what I had written. I said whatever I needed to say to fill out the clock until our session was over. We made a follow-up appointment as usual because that's just what you do at the end of an appointment, and I was certainly not going to break routine and create a conflict. I cancelled the appointment online later that day because I had lost all my trust in her.

Since that appointment, I continued to struggle with the autism question. I spent hours reading forum posts, blog posts, articles, etc. Eventually I came to these conclusions:

1. It's highly likely that I have Asperger's / Autism Level 1, and I've just been masking well enough that nobody caught it.

2. An official diagnosis would be helpful for confirming what I already know, but there aren't really any support services for adults I would be able to take advantage of, so it's currently not worth the thousands of dollars it would take to get diagnosed outside of Kaiser.

3. If I struggle with the same things autistic people do, and if their coping strategies also help me (stimming, taking more alone time, engaging in special interests, etc), then it makes sense for me to use the label.

Speaking of labels, I know that Asperger's isn't the official name anymore. However, it's much easier to refer to myself as an Aspie than a "person on the autism spectrum." If that bothers you, feel free not to follow my blog. If you are autistic, suspect you might be autistic, want to know more about what it’s like to live on the spectrum, or just want to see me type words, feel free to follow. My journey isn’t over. It’s just getting started.

#autism #aspergers #actuallyautistic #personal #autism acceptance

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jigensass · 5 years

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Here we are (this is very long so TL;DR this blog is getting archived)

It’s been over a week since I’ve taken a hiatus and a few close people know about what has happened. And I have made a decision in response to an insight meditation retreat I took over the course of this weekend.

I’m going to be dropping roleplaying Stephen and possibly roleplaying altogether.

First, after 5 years of this blog, you’re probably wondering why. Well, I woke up.

Yes, I’m a talented writer and I can weave your fantasies into realities. Yes, I enjoy every single person I have written for. You’re not the problem. My writings are the problem that is hurting my lifestyle and it leads to toxic behavior.

Ever since I decided to go into this hiatus and a few days prior, I’ve been peeling back that I am more sensitive than others to certain situations and at sometimes have the ability to as previously stated, weave fantasies into realities and make them feel as real as possible. This can be problematic when I get in too deep. So much as I have in the past without even realizing, begin to dissociate the line and my own reality and the one I made that I have fallen in love with. The two begin to crossover and I don’t even realize I’m doing it until it’s too late. This had led to multiple people getting hurt and I didn’t even know I was doing it. Why has this been happening for so long and I’m noticing it after 26 years? Well, no one kind of stopped me or I didn’t notice because when I was younger I lived in my own little world. And that own little world became the internet and then the internet started converging with the little world and I didn’t know what to do except the one thing I knew best: make up stories and not even realizing it, they became my own little world. It’s how I coped and got away from the actual reality that I lived in (school, work, family, etc).

Now how did Stephen come in? Well, (holy shit I’ve been in the sphere of Doctor Strange for 7.5 (8 years in the Marvel sphere) years now that’s the longest I’ve stuck to anything). There was a game on Facebook where I heard of him and at the time in 2010, there were only comics and the movie from 2006(7?) (I remember actually SEEING the commercial for the movie and asking ‘how is this guy a superhero he’s a doctor’ oh how my 13-year-old self was foolish).

I fell in love with Stephen’s character for one reason: he had all the powers of a god, yet he was still human. It would take me another 5 years to realize where my path was actually headed with this magic man and the actual man named Benedict Cumberbatch.

Along the way, since this blog was created and many rp threads later, there were many times I felt so absorbed into my work that even though I had an external life with friends and people I knew. It became...a problem. It was obvious when I began to piss off my friends in college for trying to gain this...atmosphere of Stephen Strange and then try to be myself.

But I didn’t know who ‘Crystal’ was for...like ever. Only until after this weekend did I find out this answer (stay tuned).

I kept trying different things, nothing felt good. I didn’t feel like a human being unless I was by myself clacking away at a keyboard and being absorbed with the Sorcerer Supreme who I (for the longest time) considered a reflection of who I was or what I wanted to be (at some point Magnus Bane got thrown into the pot in 2014 so that’s just a lovely stew...). It ate at me for years and I wasn’t even aware during points where I became lost that the parasite was there. The parasite was my power to get lost in worlds I created and then believe the world was still there in reality. And it (probably) hurt many real human beings in the process.

And just recently I yanked that parasite off and threw it away. Realizing that seeing Stephen as a reflection is dangerous and will get me pulled into the looking glass if I don’t stop.

So as of today for the sake of my mental health, this blog is being archived.

I’m not saying it was all bad. I wouldn’t be typing this because of roleplaying with one person in particular who, even though my coworkers were slapping me in the face (metaphorically, of course) and concerned for my life during the nine months of suffering I held at my new job, was AT THE TIME, the only person who could get through to me and wake me up. The reason this journey started because of a very deep wound that was still scarring, but this person was the one to be my guide on the path to just finding what I needed to figure out what the heck was going on.

About a month later after this realization, I joined a sangha and began meditation on a weekly basis or when I could. This (and to this day) practice has unearthed a lot of stuff that I’ve buried so deep that it blew my mind how messed up my childhood was. Why I was so...sarcastic...and had to make a joke to every serious detail...and impulsive...and...determined to get out of this hole. Like a certain....doctor

(No joke when I watched Doctor Strange in theatres in 2016 when this line was said I died laughing because of the tone and manner of how it was said was something I would do. I’m a sassy piece of shit IRL)

Back in late 2016/early 2017 right after I watched this movie, I remember wanting to embrace MCU Stephen with open arms. I felt the pain he was feeling, having to give up his mundane life to become the guardian of the Earth, and I wanted to take him down that journey of suffering, of realizing that he chose for the sake of his hands, provided him with....the power of a god yet he was still human (also I was stunned because he was (I BELIEVE right behind T’Challa) the FIRST Marvel main character to actually DIE on camera. As in no pulse, not coming back dead.

But instead I got female OCs wanting to bang and marry him, and the funk kicked itself right out the door. And this is when I got into experimentation. Demons, Mermen...the list goes on.

This is where it became obvious that Stephen was leaning towards men and less towards women and the relationships were slowly becoming....uninteresting. Either for me or the other person. Around this time this was when the shit hit the fan hard and I had a mental breakdown and contemplated suicide (it wasn’t the first time). Yeah, surprise~. The package gets nastier.

At this point, as many of you know, I was diagnosed with Attention Hyperactive Association Disorder (or ADHD) and I began taking medication which helped, but with the meditation beside it, this was where a nasty load of stuff boiled inside including:

Emotional and some Physical Abuse from my Parents

My mother almost killed me once. She nearly snapped my neck.

Emotional Abuse from Teachers and Peers in School

I was given a nickname that I just passively went with and in the end, I hated it. When I tried to change it, people didn’t listen to me.

I gave my opinion about how I did not enjoy Glee on Facebook. I was shunned by nearly every music department student.

Trust Issues that supported the Anxiety because of said Emotional Abuse (and for a point in my life, pretty sure I had Avoidant Personality Disorder)

I’ve been at the same job for over 2 years now and just last Friday I had to balls to tell someone my life was a dumpster fire.

Depression because I couldn’t hold/meet expectations that I had imagined as being next to perfect standards because of past emotional abuse to be under the impression I could meet nothing less (thus over the years I lowered my expectations, yet nothing changed). Sometimes I had suicidal thoughts and the only reason I didn’t do it was because I thought felt good to suffer

In turn, because I was abused emotionally in a certain manner that I thought that it was okay to do so when I couldn’t get a grounding of having things in my control as well because of my conditioning or just try to be noticed. At the time, it was the only way I knew how to put the board in my favor. It was when I did this and my boss wrote me up that I just...became silent. People wondered why I didn’t talk and then when I did, it was (and sometimes still is) in the most passive tone of observation. Over time I did learn this was one of the most unwholesome things I could do and I have still lost my footing in times of despair that I go back to this way of talking because I’m conditioned to beat myself up when something bad happens (and even during this weekend’s retreat those unwholesome thoughts came up).

So sorry for anyone I’ve hurt in the past because of this. I’ve disconnected with many because of my ignorance.

Thus the result of this toxic upbringing and my choice to follow it blindly led to a misunderstanding of relationships to the mundane level (romantic or platonic). Every situation that failed, I tried better. But it only felt worse since till this day every single one has failed, minus one or two, have all ended in some kind of disaster merely due to, what probably was my destructive behavior.

Even now typing this dumpster fire was difficult. Because I have 3 ways of responding

1. I’m a Bot Beep Boop How are you? Good! That’s Good!

2. I have a mask and there’s no one else here behind the ask

3. You sure you want to talk to ME? You sure you find me INTERESTING? You? Find me attractive?! Kay...Just warning you....*reveals the dumpster fire* You can go backward out the entrance door

So...yeah. I’ve never ‘felt’ until recently that my life “mattered”. That I was just...kind of an empty sponge. Day in, day out. Paying off debt for a job that I don’t even do anymore because I’m better at other things, like deduction. And working with data and information.

But anywho....if you’ve made it this far in “My Journey to Find out Who the Heck I Am” Congrats, you made it to this weekend’s insight meditation retreat. Because it was both terrible and uplifting at the same time.

yesterday we meditated for about 8ish hours and I wanted to kill myself (literally) from all the pain in my back. I questioned if I had to go see a chiropractor after it was all said and done. And then something came up that I noticed that I always was aware of.

The teacher kept referencing other teachers before her and near the end of it all when she would keep talking, the references were driving me nuts. Like, she just kept telling us to follow the Buddha like he was some holy person and it clicked: I don’t like organized religion because I’m being told how to do my practice. So when we went outside to walk, it all just kind of clicked when I found a bench off to the side of the business complex (our retreat was at our local sangha and non-residential). I sat on that bench and stared at the fence and the rain and said to myself ‘I am the River’, meaning I should go with the flow and acknowledge and be aware of any ripples made in me.

And that everything that was being instructed on this retreat had been told to me from another source: all of my coworkers who probably have not sat on a cushion in their life.

Today when we the teacher did a talk this morning about ‘self’ and ‘not self’, she, in short, repeated what I said from a quote by Thich Nhat Hanh (monk from Vietnam) about how we are not a river, but an ocean.

And even though the teacher’s story was relatable, it clicked who “Crystal” was and where Stephen stood in Crystal’s life.

Crystal is made up of many individuals parts and is just...Crystal. Stephen is not a reflection, but one of those many parts.

Even though I acknowledge this wisdom, I currently believe I do not (and might not) have the ability to return to my writings because of why I previously explained. It’s not you, it’s the current in the river.

So thank you to everyone who has befriended me along the way and helped me down this path.

Namaste.

*two minutes later* lemme find a Benedict Cumberbatch Buddhism gif to close this story, show me the money Google

youtube

GOD DAMN I-

youtube

#out of the sanctum #well then

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the-energon-hole · 6 years

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Can you please do a Drabble for Tfp Optimus and Knockout where the reader (a human S/o) has an episode of sleep paralysis (or a really bad nightmare) and goes to them for comfort? (If this is too much or if you don't want to write this you don't have to I would just love to see an imagine like this ) ^-^

((A/N - I have never experience sleep paralysis, but my older brother has, and I have to say it sounds like the most unpleasant thing in the world. I wrote about the nightmare since I can relate to it a little bit more, but if you have sleep paralysis I am so sorry and I hope you can at least get a decent amount of sleep out of your nights.

Also I made this kind of long as I got carried away writing it in the background as I was playing video games on the side, gotta do that multitasking yo!))

Optimus Prime

Everything felt so uncomfortably fuzzy and distant, you had to for some reason keep reassuring yourself that your conscious mind was real and that you existed on some kind of level of understanding- but as the haze began to grow to a very loud and distracting level, and the darkness began to consume your perceived consciousness that the only emotions your ever waking mind can begin to comprehend was utter primal fear.

What was going on?

Were you even real? Was this life even real?!

A loud and slightly obnoxious air swallowing gasp left your mouth as you felt your heavy and slightly sweaty and sticky body shoot up from your once comfortable position in your warm bed. You clutched at your chest as the once warm blanket fell from your shoulders as the cold night air hit you like a ton of sobering bricks, you can feel your heart pounding a mile a minute as your hands are also shaking uncontrollably while you try to get your breathing under some kind of control. Fear was the only thing your body wanted to comprehend at the moment, sheer panic and terror was all that you were feeling as you swung your head back and forth to scan your bedroom to see if someone or something that must have roused you from your much needed and wanted slumber.The room was just as dark and empty as you remembered leaving is as you laid down to sleep.

For some reason that thought left you feeling a little hollow and anxious on the inside as the darkness began to seep into you, you reached behind you to clutch your once forgotten pillow to your chest as an off attempt to give yourself a little comfort and ease.

What was it that scared you awake?

Obviously from what you can tell it was a bad dream, but you just can’t seem to recall the contents of said dream that caused your mind to race this way, and now that you were thinking about jt you can’t seem to understand why your brain is telling you that you are in danger so long as you are still sitting here. This has happened before to you, bad dreams are a fairly common occurrence for a lot of people, but normally you are able to recall what it was that made you so nervous and you can rectify these feelings by applying logic and reason to your mind to remind yourself that those anxieties are unfounded.

A brisk and chilling walk down the street will help you clear your intrusive thoughts maybe, it will at least ease your racing mind of the idea that you are in some kind of peril and need to evacuate the safety of your room hopefully.You threw on a light jacket that you had hanging on a chair in your room and you threw on some old and worn out sneakers, and as you made your way to the front door of the house you made sure to be very careful as to not disturb the other people that are potentially still asleep inside the house. You shut the door slowly and quietly with that small click assuring you that you succeeded in not disturbing anyone, and as you turned to begin your small walk down the empty and slightly chilly sidewalk it really hit you how cold the air was outside. It was always colder here at night since this was an arid and hot climate during the day, it always felt like you couldn’t bundle up enough to stave off the chill in the air when you want to spend some time outside at night.

You liked living here well enough but as your body shuttered when another gust was kicked up you wondered how expensive it would honestly be to move out to a tropical island where cold air just doesn’t exist. You would have to deal with a lot of grainy sand though and from what you have heard it’s crazy expensive to live in a state like California or to live off the coast of Virginia near the beach. It made your mind come to ease a little as you thought about all the amazing possibilities of travelling all over the states, it was always something that you wanted to do but you are unable to because everything was so damn expensive.

Maybe one day.

“What are you doing out so late?” You asked as you noticed Optimus Prime parked a few blocks from your house just off of a freeway entrance seemingly just trying to blend in with a few other parked semis.

“Observing human drivers and interactions at night, but more importantly, what is it that you are doing out so late at night and alone?”

A car suddenly zoomed by on the freeway making quite a loud noise as you felt your heart begin to race again, living out here in the middle of nowhere in a town that is only a pit stop for most that is a very common occurrence, people speed through the main interstate on their way to the big city of Las Vegas during all hours of the day whenever the highway patrol isn’t skulking about. That was city never slept, and honestly, you were starting to get that sinking feeling that you might never sleep again either as your body began to tell you to allow that pesky panic to set in once again. Optimus seemed to pick up on your shift in demeanor quickly from what should have been just a small interruption in an ongoing conversation, and he was able to connect the two points together in him processor as he saw your hands begin to shake a little at your sides as you stare blankly at the empty freeway.

He knew that you were always a little skittish and jumpy whenever you were alone, and he knew you liked to be up and about and active whenever you were feeling anxious and closed off. He silently opened his cab door to you as you all but too eagerly jumped into the promise of safety and serenity that was in his alt mode. He asked you again in a much softer and quieter tone what was wrong and why you were out so late alone, and you told him about your eerie and intrusive feelings that all stemmed from a simple nightmare- but you can’t remember what your bad dream was about, which was a little embarrassing as you were beginning to grow frustrated at your brain’s own interpretations of what you were supposed to be doing and how you were supposed to react.

Optimus understood what you meant though, and he will be here for you until you can fall asleep once again, he doesn’t have anywhere pressing to be so he will happy to sit and stay with you until you are calmed down enough to once again be able to drift off into a blissful slumber.

Knockout

You must have been very exhausted from the days never ending problems and events that just seems to throw themselves at you just to keep you on your toes, as you don’t really remember falling asleep on a cold and rather hard examination table that was located within the medical bay of the ship, at least you hoped it was in there because if it wasn’t it would just add to the suffocating anxiety in which you can feel begin to creep up on you that pretty much just all but forced you to jump up with a cruel and atrocious start- you can feel you body ache a little as your vision began to clear from all the moist and sticky tears that unceremoniously made your face appear to glicine in the harsh light of this room.

Why the heck were you crying?!

Come to think of it, why were you even awake to begin with?

No one was in the medbay as far as you could tell from your position on the table in the corner of the room, and the only noises to be heard around you was the quiet and kind of calming noise of the humming and buzzing of various machines running in the background of the room. It appears that there wasn’t any kind of physical disturbance to be had in the normally quiet and cool room, so there was no reason you should have been jostled awake so violently like you were just a few moments ago.

You clicked your tongue slightly frustrated that you couldn’t find a physical cause of your restlessness because that meant it was all in your mind and you had to cope with that fact, and as you sat up to stretch your body to shake off the stiffness you tried to take your mind off the ever impending anxiety and try to relax and come back into the present form it’s hazy and foggy place that was known as the dreary dream land of your unconscious mind. It was strange that you were alone in the almost always busy and bustling room, Knockout is normally hanging around during all hours of the day doing various important work on some projects or just simply jotting down some data for future references or use, and on the rare occasion Starscream was out and about around here just ranting and raving about how in his mind the state of the Decepticons have started declining again ever since Megatron was resurrected from his eternal slumber.

Funny, just it seems like you and the war mongering villain have so much more in common than you thought.

It made you always laugh about how Starscream kept trying to make alliances within the ranks, only to burn the bridge so badly that he can’t even keep a proverbial bridge open long enough to cross it and take advantage of the benefits that comes from having allies in low places. He tried to manipulate you once, but you just scoffed at his inability to learn from his past mistakes as you didn’t want to be a reason he was severliy punished again by Megatron, and declined his “overly kind and merciful attempt at keeping you alive”. He was pretty peeved about you turning him down, he didn’t outright threaten you, but when he said he wouldn’t feel bad if an accident were to happen to you well- it kind of gave you that gross and muggy feeling deep within the confines of your chest that you can’t fully describe.

Hmm, there was that anxiety again, what was going on in there brain?A loud clang reverberated through the room unexpectedly as something big and hard must have hit one of the metal walls in the room, you couldn’t help but let out a pitiful loud whine as you instinctively tucked yourself into a kind of fetal position as you were still trying to shake off that fuzzy feelings that came with just waking up from an unsuccessful nap.

“Woah! Relax there, it’s just me.”

Knockout. It was just Knockout that came slinking into your cview, he had a look of surprise as he wasn’t expecting you to be that fearful of him accidentally hitting the walls.

You let out a noise of discontent and frustration as the cherry red mech approached the table where you were once resting so nicely, he tutted back at you as he didn’t appreciate the attitude you were giving him in his own medbay because he made one accidental noise. You just rolled your eyes and stood up for the first time in a few hours as your body began to pop and creak as you stretched out your tight and stiff muscles. You stumbled as you tried to walk again as it was partly because your leg was asleep and partly because your body was forcing your heart to beat so quickly in your chest, which didn’t go unnoticed by a certain brightly colored medic, and man did you wish he would just mind his own business sometimes.

You loved and appreciate this companionship you had with him, but sometimes being around someone for a long time can be a little grating, especially when that someone can read you like an open book like Knockout can.“Hmmm, what’s wrong little grouchy pants?”

Ugh, you hated when he patronizes you.

No you didn’t, you really loved it.

You told him that your anxiety was getting to the point where you couldn’t sleep, and you were being plagued by these violent and intrusive thoughts that almost make you regret falling asleep in the first place, it was kind of hard to admit these kinds of things out loud as you always regret oversharing your emotions with people, but you knew Knockout would understand given he has shared similar experiences with you before.

He hummed with that sultry voice of his as he approached the table you were still standing on. You felt his clawed digits brush against your face and stroke through your hair in that loving way you sometimes craved for so much. He all but grabbed you off the table and took you around the lab to collect more data, and to play around with some of his experiments he has going on in the background of the bay. It was a nice distracted from your racing thoughts as you felt comfort in the arms of the mech you are growing ever closer to as the days went flying by.

(06/02/18)

#Transformers Prime #Optimus Prime #Knockout #Long Post #Drabble

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