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#i’ve never had one of those ‘moments of clarity’ in therapy outside of this
vi-visected · 1 year
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my therapist: how are you feeling in the wake of your (autism spectrum disorder) diagnosis?
me: well it makes sense doesn’t it? i was the one who requested testing. like on some level i kind of figured.
my therapist: yes, i’m personally glad we pursued it because it helps me better understand parts of your behavior and how to accommodate you. but how do you feel about it? you said before that you were in heavy denial about the possibility when you were younger.
me: well yeah, i had a preconceived idea of what autism was that i know now wasn’t true. but at the time it was distressing and i didn’t want to think about it too hard.
my therapist: how was it different then? what was your idea of autism then?
me: it was, you know, severe developmental delay. i never thought i had developed abnormally at all, so to try and match up the severity i associated with autism and the way i viewed myself, i just couldn’t.
my therapist: but you did.
me: sorry?
my therapist: you did develop abnormally. both socially and academically.
me: socially yes, but i had no problems with academics. i always especially excelled at reading comprehension, more so than anyone else in my grade. i started lagging in high school but i think that was a lot of burnout and depression and ptsd, probably. i was incredibly smart. hell, i spoke in full sentences earlier than most of my peers.
my therapist: violette, that’s still abnormal development.
me: …huh?
my therapist: developing abnormally fast is still developing abnormally.
me:
me: oh.
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writerman · 4 years
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Psst. Write a hanahaki disease fic for Barduil where Thranduil has it. You gotta write it.
Hey, anon, remember when you requested this probably like a year ago? Yeah, me either...
Anyway, here is what you asked for. I wrote over 7000+ words in a day to finish this asap.
My thanks to @morticia-butler​ for all the help looking up Hanahaki disease headcanons and an iconic line I simply had to include.
This is a long one so some of it will be under a readmore BUT you can also read all my other Barduil prompts via this fancy schmancy LINK
On to the story!
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8:30am. Thursday. September 17th. Just petals. 
The mirror reflected a pale and haunted image back at him while bright and vibrant yellow petals dusted the front of his pyjama t-shirt. 
Daffodils. 
His favourite. Thranduil, however, had come to detest the sight of them. The sunshine yellow flowers openly mocking him, their bobbing heads in the breeze seen as a gaggle of them laughing almost jovially at his situation. 
No point thinking on it in-depth, not when he could temporarily abate the problem. 
With such a thought in mind, Thranduil brushed the petals from his shirt into the sink and watched as they swirled in the water a moment before vanishing down the drain into the darkness. 
But there would be more. 
There was always more. 
A soft knock at the bathroom door stilled his hand as he reached for his toothbrush and he turned to see Tauriel watching him with concern. 
“I didn’t know you were visiting today, what are you doing here?” Thranduil’s voice was soft as he spoke, though, the lilting sound of surprise cracked his voice for a moment. “Had I known you planned to visit I’d have been ready by now. What are-” Thranduil watched as Tauriel leaned toward him, her hand brushed the fabric of his t-shirt as she plucked a petal still clinging to the fibres. 
“Dad, you said this had stopped!” The words rushed out and they were so loud as she held the petal up between them. While it hadn’t meant to come out so accusing, he could hear the dismay that coloured her words, it still felt harsh and Thranduil braced himself for a barrage of instructions to get himself to a doctor. 
“It was quelled for some time. The doctor gave me special inhalers that slow the spread but I’ve not had the time to contact the surgery for a refill.” He gestured to an empty inhaler laying innocently on its side by the sink. They had helped immeasurably and the majority of his family had believed the disease was done and gone. 
But Hanahaki was not that easy to be rid of, he knew and deep down his family knew that too. It was easier to think he had been cured than to do consider the alternative…
“I dropped by because I wanted to know if you felt like grabbing breakfast?” Tauriel turned from the bathroom door and wandered into her dad’s bedroom, his clothes were laid out already, she paced past the bed and back out into the hallway. “I’ll be downstairs, let’s go out still.” 
There was no time to respond and so Thranduil internally agreed to breakfast with his daughter. She and Legolas were the same in that they were strongwilled, always happy to make a decision and happy to make it for someone else too. 
They definitely had gotten that trait from him, even if he had mellowed somewhat with age. It was easy to recall his younger days with clarity, he walked tall never a curve to his back because he bowed to no one. 
He had been so headstrong and confident, even after his wife had died. People had come to him speaking softly with sincere condolences but Thranduil cast the sorrowful glances aside and carried on working. 
That felt like aeons ago now, Thranduil was more in touch with his emotional and mental health now, gave and took the time of others as freely as he should have when he was younger. Thranduil found value in the world where once he would have shunned it. 
Turning to look in the mirror, that pale and haunted face stared back but the eyes seemed less empty than they had earlier. Even with his disease there was still hope within him, it was choked and stuttering by the roots of the flowers in his chest and lungs but it was there. 
“I can’t give up, not yet.” He whispered to himself. 
They ended up heading to Tauriel’s favourite place for breakfast, it was a small family-run restaurant and the food was good. The cheery wait staff did not match the highly polished wood and marble of the place but it felt strangely homely all the same. 
It was while Thranduil perused the menu that Tauriel brought up the subject, or rather, the object of his disease to him. A public place so he would not make a scene, perhaps, or rather, she hadn’t thought of the setting and only wanted to relinquish her hold on the burning question she had within for months. 
“So, will you at least tell me who it is that did this to you?” Badly worded. No one had passed the disease onto him, that wasn’t how it worked and he knew Tauriel understood that. “Come on, dad. Do they know what they’ve done to you?” Of course, she was angry but why was she being angry with someone innocent in all of it? 
While the majority of the time Thranduil was able to ignore these unnecessary outbursts from his children, there were ofttimes when his frustration got the better of him and one of those times was now.
With hands loosely balled into fists resting on the tabletop, Thranduil pinned his daughter with an icy glare that quashed whatever words she had left inside to say on the matter.  
“I have told you time and time again, I will not tell you who it is. You know damned well that they are not to blame in this. You’ve seen the diagnosis, even though I’ve asked you to stay out of it, you’ve seen the words ‘ self-inflicted’ on the documents.” He voice was low but the chill in his words caused Tauriel to sit back in her seat and avert her gaze from his. 
“I’m sorry-” She stopped when the waitress came over and set down their coffee and a rack of toast. There was time enough between the waitress approaching and leaving for Tauriel to regain her composure. “I’ve read so much about this over the past few months, it might now be onesided that’s all.” She was right but the percentage was low.
Hanahaki disease was such an odd illness to contract, the phenomenon of flowers growing in a person’s chest and lungs due to unrequited or onesided love. The agitation of yearning and pining watered the blooms until the lungs were completely full and the chest cavity would split open with leaves and stems and petals spilling out and killing a person instantly if they hadn’t already died from suffocation. 
But that was only intense cases. There were ways to slow the spread and Thranduil was taking measures to ensure he could do such a thing. 
Regular therapy was one. His therapist was a wonderful woman who guided him through the process of coming to terms with his unrequited love. They spoke of how to be honest and open with the feelings he experienced and how to provide his own closure.
Though, they had many hurdles to jump. Thranduil didn’t believe in closure per se, to him revisiting something traumatic and uncomfortable merely reopened wounds. They’d spent many sessions focussing on the death of his wife and while it had helped immensely in allowing a belated grieving it ultimately had not helped with his predicament.
But he was not to call it a predicament his therapist had said. To remove the seriousness of the disease was to remove the value of his own life. There were many times she had asked him to look from the outside in and speak on the issues in his life as though they affected another person. It had helped and when things looked bleak or if Thranduil began to brush off the seriousness of his illness he would remind himself that he would not allow someone else to do that to themselves. 
The next most drastic step was surgery, but it was a temporary step and it slowed the spread of the disease. Researchers in the medical field studying Hanahaki always implied heavily that the physical manifestations of the disease were caused by the brain and thus Hanahaki was registered as a mental illness. 
It was why doctors pressed so hard for those that suffered to seek therapy. 
“I won’t be involving the person in this what so ever, Tauriel. Please, I ask again that you drop the subject.” How he had pleaded like this before and how it emotionally exhausted him to see the fear in her eyes every time she visited. 
It was all because he knew that one day she feared she’d find him lying dead, a bouquet of blood-stained flowers adorning his chest in a beautiful and grotesque display of the love that had plagued him. 
“I understand that you’re scared but I promise you I have no given up. I have an appointment with my therapist this afternoon and with my surgeon to discuss a date for surgery.” 
His words seemed enough to placate her for now and she instead busied herself with buttering some toast.
3:00pm Thursday. September 17th. Just petals.
“We spoke about your wife again last week, I noted that you requested we move on from the subject. Why do you feel you need to leave that subject alone?” The room was shaded from the bright Autumn sunshine streaming in from the window. 
Thranduil could see the glowing gold around the edges of the blinds and forgot where he was for a moment as he watched it flicker with the shadow of trees swaying the breeze. He couldn’t remember why he’d suggested they move on but it seemed the right course of action to him. 
“I just feel we aren’t focussing on the real problem.” When he spoke he made a point to look at her. Maintaining eye contact seemed important at that moment, he didn’t want her to think he was ruled by indecision. “My wife has been dead for years and we have already confirmed that, as much as I miss her, I have come to terms with her death and grieved appropriately.” Too business-like. As soon as the words had come out of his mouth he knew. 
The therapist merely ‘hmm’d’ in response and wrote something down. There was the internal battle to struggle with now, to explain himself to her or let her assume something of him that he would, personally, deem incorrect. 
“What is it you would like to speak about instead?” 
That was the problem, he didn’t really know. The only thing he wanted to ask was ‘How did you get over someone and quickly?’ but there wasn’t really much of an answer she would be able to give.
Magazines for years had offered ‘helpful tips to get over that person that doesn’t like you back!’ and Thranduil had put no stock in their, so called, wisdom. Now they didn’t publish these things, now they would ask you to seek help if you experienced any symptoms they listed on the page. 
Distraction techniques had been offered by his family in droves at the beginning when his diagnosis had been revealed. Nothing had actually helped because his mind would often wander to the object of his affection when he was practising a new hobby. 
“I think my need to rush these sessions is just because I’m scared of losing myself completely and if I do that, well, you know what happens.” Thranduil gave a half-hearted shrug, he barely lifted his shoulders but it was a shrug all the same and his therapist acknowledged it as so with a nod. 
“Everyone is scared of dying, Thranduil. Perfectly healthy people, people who have terminal diseases. Do you want to talk about your fear of dying?” 
He didn’t. 
They, instead, spoke of newer experimental ideas that Thranduil might have been interested in trying. She wrote out the prescription for the refill on his inhaler and made another appointment for a week later. 
It wasn’t often that Thranduil left the sessions more tightly wound than he had been when going in but he at least knew that he’d need something to talk about next week or they’d get back on the subject of his wife and he honestly didn’t think that was helpful. 
His next appointment was at the doctor's office, they wanted to schedule surgery but they had needed proof he was visiting his therapist before they would agree. It was a messy and an unfair condition but at least at the doctor's office he could get them to fill the prescription so it wasn’t too much of a wasted trip if they refused his surgery. 
1:00pm Friday. September 18th Foliage. 
The office was quiet now. 
Everyone but Thranduil had packed up for the day and headed out to start their weekends. It was a perk Thranduil had implemented years ago and it had been appreciated, even if it had been created to benefit him more so than his employees at the time. 
Nothing was waiting for him at home and there was plenty of paperwork to do so he poured himself a glass of water, took his inhaler and got comfortable at his desk reading through a brief for a new promotion. 
So engrossed was he in his work that he failed to notice someone entering the office and only when a takeout coffee cup was set before him did he move his gaze from the files he had been reading to intently. 
Looking up Thranduil ceased his movement almost instantly at the sight of his best friend Bard. The afternoon sunshine illuminated his handsome face with a soft golden glow, his brown eyes looked golden as he smiled down at him. His cheery countenance was always welcome and so was his gift of coffee but Thranduil could tell his friend was there with an agenda of sorts. 
“Haven’t seen you lately, Thran. You’re not holding yourself up in this office every night until late again, are you?” The concern, it left a shaking and aching hole inside Thranduil and that hole soon became clogged with stems and leaves, give the disease an inch and, well, that old adage. 
“No, I just had something to do here but it can wait. Did you need something?” To try and remain relaxed and carefree around Bard was increasingly difficult, more so when he had endeavoured to hide his disease from him as much as he could. 
“Hm, well, I just had the feeling that you’ve been avoiding me for a while if I’m to be completely honest.” Straight to the point, no beating around the bush for Bard and he had every right to be concerned because he was correct.
Perhaps it was more obvious lately that he had been trying to avoid Bard for a few weeks. Avoidance was never going to be the answer but this man was why he had the disease, or rather, what exacerbated it. There would never be a time he would place sole or even partial blame on Bard for what he was going through. 
“I’m sorry, I suppose I have been caught up in work recently. I’m absolutely not overworking myself before you ask. However, I’ve neglected my best friend and I think I owe you a drink, at least.”
“At least,” Bard repeated in agreement and he grinned, they didn’t move to get up. 
Thranduil busied himself with taking a sip of his coffee, it was a blond roast from Michael’s he could tell without even looking at the logo on the side of the cup. All the while he inwardly cursed the tightness in his chest and new shoots began to sprout and buds began to burst into bloom. 
There was no chance he could even begin to hazard a cough. It’d look like a cat had swallowed a canary. Or a man that had swallowed his feelings. 
For a short while, they chatted idly about what they’d done recently. Bard talked of hating the empty nest syndrome he was suffering now that Tilda had moved out, leaving the family home nothing but a ‘mausoleum of family memories that were visited by a spectre that had helped create them’. It was a dramatic sentence and Thranduil laughed aloud before offering something vaguely sympathetic to soothe his friend.  
“Can’t you clock out already, you own the business let’s get out while it’s still bright,” Bard complained as he rose from his seat and wandered toward the large window Thranduil sat with his back to. “The sun is still warm and we could probably walk to the pub instead of taking the car.”
“Walking to the pub suggests that you don’t wish to have a few drinks but one too many.” As much as he hoped he sounded wise, Thranduil knew Bard would have clearly taken it as a challenge. So they were absolutely going to get drunk that night and Thranduil couldn’t have been more terrified of that prospect.
“I haven’t seen you in ages, you’re my best friend and even if we both regret how bad we feel in the morning, age that does that to you, I want to get drunk with you, Thran!” Ah, old age hadn’t fully caught up with Bard yet, he was vibrant and energetic and hot. Gods above was that man gorgeous. 
That was where it all began though, Bard had blazed into his life when they were in their early 30’s. Thranduil had just lost his wife and was trying to juggle a career and two grieving kids. 
Bard and his wife Anya had helped him. They took the kids to school and picked them up and fed them so Thranduil could… do what? He couldn’t even remember now- he hadn’t grieved that was for sure!
With a 10 year and an 8-year-old broken over the loss of their mother and having no support from their emotionally unavailable father, Tauriel and Legolas had grown up to be quite well adjusted. Though, some of that might have been the therapy they’d gotten as suggested by their school. 
It had happened only 2 years later, Bard lost Anya and he was thrown into a situation similar to Thranduil’s and the roles were reversed. Sigrid and Tauriel grew up like sisters and were still close because of how often they saw one another. They bonded strongly over what had happened to their mothers and became each other’s strength when they needed it.
The same happened with Bard and Thranduil, they became close friends. They took the children on holiday together, camping or water parks and spent their weekends finding activities for the kids that they too could take part in. 
For a while, it had been just friendship, but then as the children grew up and wanted to spend less time with dad and more time with friends they found company in each other more often than not. 
Then Tauriel and Legolas moved out for university, Sigrid and Bain left Bard for the same reason, Tilda was always adventuring with her friends and so when the empty house became too much they would go out. 
Dinner, drinks, a walk in the park, catch a movie or two. 
Innocent stuff, but Thranduil allowed himself to get comfortable and in letting his guard down he let feelings in that he had tried to avoid from the moment he met Bard. 
The problem was when Anya died Bard told Thranduil he couldn’t ever see himself falling in love with another person again. 
This was proven time and time again over the years, dates would happen once or not at all with people that could have been his perfect match, and eventually, Bard learned to ignore anyone that tried to flirt with him. A suggestive smile or even a compliment was brushed off as nothing more than friendly and the more unattainable he became the more Thranduil realised he was in love with him. 
A terrible turn of events to be sure, and now he suffered daily for it with petals littering his pillows and flowers choking out his lungs. 
“Are we going out then?” Bard’s voice cut through the memories Thranduil was replaying in his mind for the hundredth time and how thankful he was when he did. The blooming of the flowers in his chest increased with the thoughts of Bard. 
To say no to the request would put a strain on their friendship. Bard had already noticed that he was being avoided and it would do them no good for Thranduil to continue that. So, with a nod, he got up from his seat and grabbed his jacket. 
“It is a nice day, let’s walk to the pub then.” Intoxication was the last thing he needed but to keep up the charade that all was fine he’d need to at least try and play along. To play the role of a man in perfect health, body and mind, didn’t seem easy but he had to try. 
He would try because he loved him. 
10:45am Wednesday. September 30th. Bursting Blooms.
It was classed as routine surgery but Thranduil couldn’t imagine how hard it would be to slice someone open and remove flowers stamen to stem to root. Temporary as it was, he was thankful they had managed to organise it so quickly, his outing with Bard and the subsequent dinner the night after meant that his condition rapidly grew worse as time went by in the company of his best friend. 
He’d woken to more petals on his pillow than he had ever seen before and his breathing laboured. Even coughing to free up space didn’t work and instead, he was gifted with near whole flower heads landing in his hands.
The kids were horrified as they watched this because of course, it would have happened while they visited. Which led to him having to listen to endless ‘You should go to the hospital right now.’ in a chorus from them both until he showed them the inhalers. 
They sat either side of him in the waiting room now. 
Legolas bounced his leg continuously looking around the waiting room for something to distract him. He’d taken time away from University to be there to help with recovery. 
Tauriel chewed her nails and checked the time on her phone every couple of minutes as if time flowed differently in a hospital waiting room. 
There was no cause for his anxiety to manifest when he was sat between two that were already doing all the work for him. Sadly, he had no words to calm them of their fears because he was just as afraid. 
“Have people died from this surgery, dad?” Legolas piped up out of the blue, he sounded so young in that moment and Thranduil felt guilt course through his veins like ice for putting his children through something like this again. 
When he didn’t answer Tauriel did for him and she shook her head even though Legolas was focussing more on a poster across the room than on anything else. 
“No, because the surgery, while invasive to a degree, only removes some of the plants. They don’t fully remove everything because they simply can’t. Dad is going to be ok, more ok after this than he is now.” Her confidence only shaking by the tremor in her voice and Thranduil hoped Legolas couldn’t hear it. 
“Hmm, ok.” Pensive now Legolas falls silent but his leg continuous to bounce but not as animatedly as before. He was not calmed but something in her words convinced him that the surgery would be fine. 
Though, he didn’t understand why she would lie to him like that. His son was perfectly capable of looking up the survival rate on his phone, it was low just as low as the rate of people that were cured by expressing their feelings to their heart's desire. 
They were approached by a nurse in scrubs. 
“Mr Oropherion, if you would like to come this way.” 
1:56pm Wednesday. September 30th. Roots. 
Someone was gently squeezing his arm.
“Thranduil, you’ve just come out of surgery. Can you hear me?” The same nurse that took him in was now waking him. “We need you to respond to know you’re ok.” 
Nothing felt real yet he managed to croak out something akin to an ‘I’m fine’ but that was it. The need for sleep and an excruciating pain rushed over him and he groaned hands gripping the sheets as he waited for it to subside. 
“Out of 10, 10 being very painful and 1 being not painful at all how do you feel?” The nurse was holding a clipboard and a pen, they looked down at Thranduil with an expectant look and merely blinked blankly when Thranduil didn’t respond right away.
He needed more time than this to consider everything, on the one hand, he could breathe on the other the pain of being sliced open and stitched back together was awful. 
“Ah… 8 maybe?” His whole body shook as he came out of the anaesthetic and all he wanted was to leave his body while it was in this state and return when he was at home comfortable in his own bed with a cup of tea. 
His time in the recovery room was short and he was wheeled into a private room where he was greeted with the grim face of his best friend. Bard looked awful, pale and he seemed to have aged 10 years all with concern etched deep into his face. 
“You were having important surgery and just elected not to tell me?” It was quiet, so quiet that Thranduil almost didn’t hear him speak. It wasn’t until they were fully alone after someone had administered strong painkillers, that Thranduil finally acknowledged what Bard had said to him. 
“I didn’t need more people worrying about me than was necessary. I’m sorry, Bard. I should have told you but I didn’t want you to ask what the surgery was.” If he was honest, he still didn’t want Bard to know and if he asked him then and there he would outright refuse to tell him. 
Even if keeping such secrets ended their friendship it would be safer then, the heartbreak of losing him as a friend was all the cure he needed and it would continue to protect Bard from the truth. 
“If you had just told me that I could have been here for you from the beginning! Instead, I get a call from Tauriel asking me to come by and sit with Legs because she had to go grab something from home. I had no idea what she was talking about so you can probably expect a gushing apology from her later.” Bard dragged a hand through his dark hair, now laced with silver, as he started to pace. 
It wasn’t fair. 
Life wasn’t fair but this was kicking a man while he was down! 
“I’m sorry, Thran. I didn’t mean to come in and just… yell at you. How are you feeling, are you ok?” Bard moved towards the bed and poured a glass of water out and handed it to Thran who took the offering gratefully and slowly sipped the cold water in trembling hands. 
“Why can’t you tell me what the surgery was?” Bard pulled up the visitor chair so he was sad right by Thranduil’s bedside. For a moment he seemed indecisive in his actions until he, apparently, had a moment of clarity and took Thranduil’s hand in his. “Is it… cancer?” The words were uttered almost reverently as though he was afraid to speak the words any louder than a whisper. 
Could he lie and say yes? 
Oh, how disrespectful he would be to cancer survivors and those who had lost their battle. No, he could not lie and so he shook his head feeling more forlorn with each passing minute. The desperate need to wrench his hand from Bard’s was unbearable, the heat of the man’s hand seared into his skin and he couldn’t think straight wondering how it would be to hold his hand and know he loved him back. 
Something inside him grew and already a new bloom began to sprout. 
This was too dangerous. 
Gods, he was dying and yet he still thought he had a chance with this man sat at his bedside holding his hand whispering words to him like a prayer. 
Eventually, he knew he’d had to put an end to all of this. 
How he wasn’t sure. 
8:36pm Saturday. October 10th. Stems. 
The children had just left, left with promises to be there again in the morning but Thranduil waved them away and told them it was not necessary to coddle him in such a way. The look on their faces told him he really had no say in the matter what so ever. 
The surgery results were more temporary than he’d have liked, petals had started appearing again after a mere 10 days. With the inhalers they were few and far between but only 10 days of respite. His scars not yet healed from the procedure! 
All in all, it seemed to have been a waste of time but at least he was still able to breathe with relative ease, though emotionally it seemed he was breathless. Legolas and Tauriel barely gave him a second alone and were hawks when it came to spotting petals.
At first, they’d been nigh hysterical but Thranduil had calmed them down and explained that these things happened and that he was still able to breathe well enough so there was nothing to worry about. 
They hadn’t believed him. Not even for a second but they were distracted enough to come down from the height they’d been at in their worry. 
The doorbell rang not even 5 minutes after the children had left and Thranduil assumed one of them must have left something behind, so when he opened the door to find Bard on the doorstep he was surprised but ushered him all the same. 
“It’s late, what are you doing here?” Thranduil shivered and pulled the long misshapen and baldy knitted cardigan tightly around himself. It had been a gift from Tauriel, she had knitted it and then proceeded to never try knitting again yet Thranduil adored the huge thing that near drowned him. “Aren’t you coming inside?” 
He noticed after a moment that Bard lingered a little too long at the door and seemed frozen by indecision. It wasn’t like him to be unsure of something so Thranduil prodded again. 
“Are you coming in?” But Bard wasn’t looking at him, he was staring at the cardigan and feeling self-conscious Thranduil wrapped his arms around it trying to cover the large holes, but Bard kept staring until Thranduil actually become protective of the garment and snapped at him. 
“What are you looking at?” Much like Tauriel had done before, Bard leaned forward and between his finger and thumb pulled a yellow petal away from Thranduil’s clothing, it seemed much brighter in the gloom of the autumn evening. 
It seemed enough for Bard to piece together the truth and he looked dismayed, his shoulders dropped and his head dropped for a moment before he forced himself to look up at his friend. 
“Is.. this why you had surgery?”
“Let’s not do this on the steps outside, come in and I promise I will answer all of your questions.” That seemed to put him in motion and with a short nod, Bard stepped into the warmth of the house and Thranduil shut the door. 
“How long have you had this?” 
Straight to the point, Thranduil had hoped he’d be given the chance to offer tea or something else before Bard started grilling him for answers. Honestly, though, he knew the question Bard wanted an answer to the most and Thranduil didn’t think he had it in him to tell him that, not yet at least. 
“Hmm, a year now, maybe?” It had been so long since he had been without the cursed disease and he hadn’t exactly been counting, seeing it was more a count down to his death if he truly tried to rack up the days. 
“Is there a cure, will you die from this?” The panic appeared from nowhere and Bard bit his lip as he tried to work out what he wanted to do next, he seemed to want to cross the room toward Thranduil and pace so to put a stop to either Thranduil made him sit down. 
“I will make tea and answer those questions when I come back.” One of them had to remain calm, while he would have loved to have thrown away his composure and screamed to the Heavens that life wasn’t fair he didn’t think it would help his situation in the slightest. 
When he returned with the tray Bard was stood again but this time by the fireplace looking at the family photos set out across the mantle. They were mostly of himself with the kids, one of is and Bard’s family all together on a camping trip and one of his wedding day. 
“Hanahaki, huh?” He must have googled it while Thranduil was in the kitchen, that was fine but he probably knew more than Thranduil would have liked now. “So the surgery you had was to remove some of the flowers… ah, I can’t pretend like I’m not going to ask. Who is it that did this to you, Thran, who is the one that can’t or won’t love you back?” The tone seemed one of incredulity, as though Bard couldn’t quite believe there was anyone in the world who couldn’t love Thranduil.
But there was. 
“Does it matter who and isn’t it better to see that I am trying to get better instead of giving up?” Deflect the question by asking a question, the only thing he could do as he poured tea and tried to stop his hands from trembling. “I am doing everything the doctors say I should.” 
“Which is?”
“Haven’t you just checked the internet for all of this?”
“Well, yeah, but I want to hear you say it, that’s all.” The conversation was going nowhere because Bard clearly couldn’t stand not knowing who this person was that had captured Thranduil’s heart and refused to return it. 
“I have therapy every week, I have inhalers to slow the spread of the blooms and recently I had surgery to remove the majority of the blockage but the roots are deep.” Such a drastic admission and so unfair to reveal his imminent death so casually. 
Taking a sip of tea, Thranduil watched Bard’s face cycle through several emotions before settling on… nothing. Instead of responding Bard merely added some sugar to his tea before lifting it to his lips to drink. 
“So, you were just planning on dying without telling me?” The words came out flat as though the conversation was casual yet boring. He had hurt his friend that much he was sure of but there wasn’t really much of anything he could say to soothe him now. Bard had been right, and what Thranduil had thought was caring and helpful turned out to be more selfish than anything else. 
“No, I would never do that to you, Bard. I don’t want to keep these things from you but please see this from my perspective. This isn’t something I want to scream from the rooftops- ‘LOOK AT ME EVERYONE I AM DYING BECAUSE THE PERSON I LOVE DOESN’T LOVE ME BACK AND I AM NOT EMOTIONALLY STABLE ENOUGH TO ACCEPT THAT!’ why would I want to reveal my weakness to someone? If Legolas and Tauriel hadn’t found out I would not have told them either!” He didn’t like being weak like this, not after a life of being seen as an unshakable strength a rock that you could rely on. Everything was beginning to crumble why would he want to bare his soul now? 
“Fine but don’t think I can just forgive you for hiding this from me. After everything we’ve been through together you just fail to tell me that, 1) you’re in love with someone, and 2) You’re dying because of it.” Bard set down his cup a little too hard and pushed himself to his feet and headed for the door. “I… I have to go, Thran. I’m sorry.” 
He was on his feet in seconds following Bard to the door but the man was already in his car by the time he got out onto the steps to call him back. 
“You don’t understand…” Thranduil whispered as he tugged at the cardigan pulling it tight around him against the chill. “I didn’t tell you to save you from the guilt that I know you’d feel.” Of course, the words merely dissipated into the cold night air and the vapours trailing each word rose into the sky before vanishing completely. 
At least the universe heard his admission of the truth. 
4:00pm Friday, December 11th. Nothing but a memory. 
They had given him a clean bill of health. 
No roots, stems, stamens, petals, not even a leaf remained. The flowers had wilted and withered to nothing and Thranduil took an easy deep breath as he left the doctor’s office. It was a chilly December evening and he was adjusting his scarf when Legolas nearly bowled him over running into him his arms thrown around his neck in a tight embrace. 
“I heard the news! You’re better now for good?!” The excitement in his son’s voice brought genuine tears to Thranduil’s eyes and he buried his face in Legolas’ golden hair for a long month savouring the warmth his son gave. 
When they broke apart Tauriel was stood by her car, the engine still running. They must have just arrived as he was leaving. She gave him a cheery wave before climbing into the car to shut off the engine. 
Thranduil hadn’t confessed his feelings to Bard and Bard had not confessed his to him. Instead, he had worked hard to understand that sometimes your feelings just were not reciprocated and that was ok. 
Platonic love was just as good as romantic love, sadly, he hadn’t been able to speak to Bard since he’d walked out on him all those weeks ago. While he would always love Bard he understood that what he had done was hurtful and if he’d been given the chance he wished he could apologise. 
It had never been his intention to hurt his best friend but he had been so caught up in his own pain he had forgotten to consider those nearest and dearest to him. How had it been fair to hide such a horrible problem from those he held dear? 
“Have you heard from… him?” Tauriel knew everything now, she’d gotten it out of him not long ago, he was at his lowest and needed someone who might understand. It was not his proudest moment, leaning on his daughter emotionally for support, but she had been steadfast in her support of him that it seemed so easy to tell her everything. 
Thankfully, Tauriel didn’t hold the reaction Bard had against him. 
“I had been angry just like him too, remember?” 
Oh, she had, she had screamed murder in his home, right in the centre of the living room, when she had realised and didn’t speak to Thranduil for days. It was the longest she had ever gone without talking to him before, a whole 6 days until she came around and they talked about what it meant for the family. 
But now they were fine, life could resume. Thranduil could live with seeing them without the soft concerned glances Tauriel and Legolas would exchange when his chest grew tight and he wheezed as he tried to grasp a full breath. 
If only he could repair his relationship with Bard. There weren’t many he shared his life with and losing someone was extremely noticeable when that someone was fully apart of his daily life.
Even visiting his usual haunts proved useless. There didn’t seem to be a trace of him anywhere and Thranduil was much too much of a coward to walk right up to his door and demand to be let in. 
Yet, none of his calls were returned or his texts answered. When Tauriel asked Sigrid if her dad was ok she just shrugged and said he wasn’t doing anything unusual of late, but he had been grabbing a drink with workmates more often. 
That wasn’t a cause for concern as Bard had always been the friendly and sociable type. 
Whatever was going through his friend's mind he sincerely hoped he would take the time to consider contacting him so they could talk. There were only so many text messages he could send without looking incredibly desperate. 
5:30am Tuesday, December 24th. Easy breathing. 
A shrieking doorbell and the sound of continuous banging on the door jolted Thranduil awake and he swore loudly as he tumbled out of bed and shuffled wearily down the stairs. Whoever it was had better have a fantastic reason as to why they had to get him up at stupid o'clock in the morning!! 
When he pulled the door open to see a rather dishevelled Bard using the door frame to hold himself up the air in Thranduil’s lungs seemed to vanish. He stood motionless for a good 30 seconds before helping Bard inside. 
“You absolutely reek of alcohol. What are you doing here?” 
There was silence proceeding his question and, at first, Thranduil thought the man had fallen asleep on the sofa where he had collapsed but it appeared he was just thinking of the best response. 
“I had to see you.” Surprisingly he didn’t sound drunk and Thranduil considered that the cold must have sobered him up. For his own mental health, he decided against asking him what he meant about having to see him. 
“I don’t know about you but the larks aren’t even up yet and I am tired. Let me make some coffee for the both of us and we can see if I can’t get some sense out of you.” As he turned to move Bard’s hand shot out and his fingers curled around Thranduil’s wrist tugging him backwards with ease. 
“No, let me speak to you, hasn’t it been long enough already?” A sleep-deprived gravelled tone did not suit Bard and Thranduil could see dark circles around his eyes. Whatever had been on Bard’s mind of late must have had him up around the clock. 
“You were the one that decided you’d had enough of me, remember?” 
Those words caused the man before him to relinquish his grip on Thranduil’s wrist and he just gave a nod but when Thranduil didn’t move he took a deep breath and began to speak. 
“I’m sorry that I made it about me. There wasn’t even a second where I considered how scared you must have been to know that any day could have been your last.” 
“Yes, well, thankfully those days are behind me now.” 
Like a shock of electricity had gone through him Bard jumped to his feet looking this way and that before having the decency to look genuinely apologetic. 
“Did I interrupt your sleep with them?” In the light of the living room, Thranduil got a better look at him and something inside him clicked into place and he had to withhold a groan when he realised he had definitely, once again, fallen in love with his best friend. 
“There is no one, the person I was in love with, I’m not in love with them now. It took a long time to come to terms with the fact they did not care for me the way I wanted but I am better because I started to love me more.” Oh, what a liar he was. Yes, he did care for himself a lot more but he was falling right back into the rut he had been not 8 weeks ago. 
The second he started spitting petals he was going to wring Bard’s neck. There was no way he was going through all that again!
“There’s no one, ah, good. That means I have a sliver of a chance to ask you out on a date then.” 
No, no he wasn’t doing any of this without coffee. As much as he wanted to address every single word the man had just uttered he wasn’t doing this without caffeine and maybe some toast. 
Without a word he walked off into the kitchen and, like a lost puppy, Bard obediently trotted in behind him trying to get his attention. No, no, no, he was going to fill the machine with coffee beans and put bread in the toaster then he was going to get the toaster and throw it at Bard’s head! 
Whipping round to face him, Thranduil grabs a fistful of Bard’s shirt and pulls him close enough that they are nearly nose to nose. 
“You’re telling me that you have developed feelings for me in the past 3 months I have been in recovery?” 
Fear was the only emotion in Bard’s eyes and they were wide to the point the whites almost exceeded the iris. It would have been funny if Thranduil hadn’t wanted to throttle the man where he stood. 
“Well, I wanted to tell you I loved you as soon as you opened the door but you’re so scary when you’ve just woken up. You’re scary now, please don’t kill me. I love you!” 
That was it. 
“You LOVE me? Is that so Mr I Will Never Love Again? IS that so?!” There was a mixed bag of emotions stirring up inside him but mostly the murderous intent was winning out. Killing Bard wasn’t really on the cards but he wasn’t going to let the man get away with nearly killing him for over a year even if he had no idea it was his fault. 
“You are very, very, very lucky that I just so happen to love you, too.” The iron grip on Bard’s shirt relaxed and he tried his best to smooth the deep wrinkles but it was not to be. Regardless, he had Bard looking at him with a sappy grin plastered over his pale face like he’d been told he’d won the lottery and not the affections of a highly problematic male. 
“R-really?” 
“As much as it now pains me to say this, yes, I do love you so very much. So much so that my heart could burst if I tried to contain it any longer.” The thumping of his heart was so hard in his chest that he was sure Bard could have heard it if he’d tried. Somehow things were falling into place now with such little effort. 
There had been a chance Thranduil would have found himself bitter about the whole thing and shunned Bard’s advances. Revenge should have been high on his list with the grinning idiot before him but he couldn’t bring himself to do anything other than lean in and press a kiss to his Bard’s lips. 
“Really, really.” 
57 notes · View notes
slash-em-up · 4 years
Text
Marry Your Monsters Pt. 10
In which life is not at all like a box of chocolates; but it’s true you never know what you’re going to get...
Again, TW: for self-harm and suicide attempt
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What was she doing, what was she doing, oh GOD what was she doing?!
Red was all Miranda could see for a moment as a trickle of blood slid past the hideously sharp knife and down her wrist – droplets peacefully gliding down to splatter on the floor, unaware of their origin.
Eyes wide, her brain warred within her.
‘Pull the knife, make it end..’
‘Stop!! Stop and fight!!’
Peripherally, Miranda was aware that she was hardly in a fit state of mind to be making any decisions at the moment; but the deciding factor came as her stomach heaved with a small but mighty kick – as if her daughter could sense her mother’s distress.
With a strangled cry, Miranda withdrew the knife from her arm and tossed it as hard as she could across the dark room.
She collapsed back, heaving with emotion, and frantically began attempting to staunch the bleeding.
The thin linen of her dress wasn’t ideal; but the pain that came from her tight wrapping grounded her, and gave some momentary clarity.
Only to be interrupted by the office door being pushed open.
“Jesus, FUCK!”
Spann looked like a woman who was rarely surprised and quite frankly the expression didn’t suit her.
Miranda was sure she looked like a fucking mess, from her sweaty, tousled hair to her hiked up dress and blood-stained skin.
Delightful.
Before she could do more than open her mouth Spann was by her side, eyes taking in the lay of the room – specifically the empty video tape cases.
Another muttered “fuck” and Spann had whipped out her phone and sent off a text to parties unknown.
“Don’t… please, Spann..”
Spann jerked her sharp gaze up to meet Miranda’s.
“Don’t what?”
“…don’t call Jesse…”
The snort that followed her comment was unexpected.
“No, I like my spleen right where it is, thanks. I’m getting you some help, I can’t stop this bleeding alone.”
Miranda hissed in pain as Spann’s hands joined hers in putting pressure on her wrist.
Without looking up Spann spoke.
“What were you thinking, Miranda?”
A fresh wave of tears dripped down Miranda’s face.
“He… he killed those women… he tried to kill that other girl… oh God, his face… and I would have done the same thing! He’s a murderer - you’re ALL murderers!”
Spann raised a brow, finally looking Miranda straight in the eye.
“Yes, he is. I don’t expect you to understand why we do what we do; but the Organization has been around long before you or I, and it’ll be here long after.”
Shaking her head, Miranda tried to make sense of what Spann was saying.
“The Organization? So this is some kind of organized crime thing?”
A shrug.
“I suppose that’s one way of putting it… we, and especially your husband, are tasked by some very powerful people to… remove certain individuals from general society.”
“Jesse hired a fucking whore and then tried to kill her…”
“I suppose from an outside perspective it’s a bit hard to understand…”
Miranda gasped out a harsh laugh.
“It’s fucking psychotic is what it is!”
Spann sighed.
“That’s between you, Mr. Cromeans, and hopefully your marriage counselor.”
The curl of Miranda lip at that comment was completely involuntary.
“If I see Jesse right now, he won’t live long enough to make it to therapy.”
------------------------------------------------------
Preston whistled a jaunty tune as he strode down the halls of the chrome-plating factory.
God, what a dump.
And he knew it wasn’t for lack of funds. The Organization and by extension the Cromeans family had been keeping his life-style firmly in the ‘more than comfortable’ category for years. If they’d wanted they could all be floating in a giant chrome blimp for Christs sake. But no, gotta keep things under-wraps in anticipation of the next big screw-up.
Like this fucking nightmare. Preston didn’t know how; but it was beginning to seem like Jesse was aware of Preston’s… corporate climbing.
He’d gone completely off the rails and taken Jessica Cannon - who was supposed to be 100% off limits.
‘I catch my own fish… mother fucker.’
In his opinion, Jesse should have had the common decency to put a gun in his mouth the moment he came back to consciousness.
If his face had been turned into dog food by some no-name whore… Well, he was too smart to let that happen anyway.
Preston smirked in remembrance of the look of shock on that Tommy kids roommates face as he’d plunged his knife into her chest. He was getting turned on just thinking about it, and Prestons hands itched for the flunkies in the armory to finish up his own knife.
Maybe he’d break it in on Jesse or his cunt of a wife.
He’d admit that plan had gone mildly off course… where was the bitch anyway?
This train of thought was interrupted as his phone buzzed in his coat pocket.
His new toy was ready. How exciting.
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The blood flowing from Miranda’s wrist had slowed, as had the conversation.
Both women now sat at the desk, awkwardly looking anywhere but at each other - neither in the mood for a deep conversation on the ethics of The Organizations serial-killing/assassinating/black-mailing business.
Miranda was beginning to regret asking Jesse out for a drink all those years ago. She could have just stayed in her lane and married a nice boring lawyer who’d cheat on her with some barely legal co-ed and then she’s make bank on the divorce settlement.
Fuck, that was sounding pretty appealing right now.
The sound of a steady knock on the door brought both women out of their thoughts.
Spann rose, giving Miranda a reassuring look, and walked to the door - opening it to meet a tired-looking woman dressed in pajamas and a pea-coat.
“Hey.”
The woman smiled.
“Hi.”
“Thanks for coming.”
Leaning in, the woman placed an affectionate kiss on Spanns lips and walked through into the office, pulling her coat from her shoulders and dropping a leather back-pack onto the floor.
“You must be Miranda? I’m Doctor Lisa Bhasin. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Miranda gave a shallow nod.
“I hope all good things; but since you know Spann and probably my husband I’m guessing not…”
Lisa looked at her sympathetically as she unzipped her pack, pulling a trauma kit and some quick-clot gauze from its depths.
“Yeah, it takes some getting used to being ‘the spouse of’… but I promise it does get easier. And if it doesn’t, after the baby is out I can prescribe some Xanax.”
Spann let out a short giggle as Miranda gaped up at Lisa.
“…You’re joking.”
Lisa laughed and met Miranda’s startled look with a kind, understanding one of her own as she began examining the cut on Miranda’s arm.
“Maybe a little…”
While Lisa carried on with her exam, Spann moved behind her to boot up the computer on the desk - quickly cycling through a series of cameras until she stopped with a loud curse.
“Fuck, that son of a bitch!”
The other women startled at her tone, looking over her shoulder to see the screen.
Lisa gasped.
“Oh shit…”
Miranda felt her heart plummet. The shining chrome-skull mask was now an all-too familiar sight, and the man wearing it was striding towards a clearly-wounded woman, some kind of spinning blade held casually in his hand.
“Wait…” Miranda narrowed her gaze, pulling herself closer to the screen. “That’s not Jesse…”
“No.” Spann agreed, sounding angrier than Miranda had ever heard her.
“That’s Preston.”
Both Lisa and Miranda spoke at the same time.
“Preston?!”
“What?!”
Spann sat back in the chair, clearly deep in thought.
“He’s been trying to weasel his way into Mr. Cromeans positon in The Organization for a while. Looks like he’s finally making his move.”
Miranda sneered.
“Fine, he can have it.”
Lisa and Spann looked at each other briefly before Spann wet her lips and responded.
“I don’t think you understand, Miranda. This isn’t just a case of Preston getting an inflated ego… You don’t just leave this job... He’s going to try and kill Mr. Cromeans, and you too if I had to guess. Frankly, I’m surprised you’re still alive”
Miranda raised her bandaged wrist, waggling it in front of Spann.
“Well…?”
Spann rubbed her face tiredly.
“Jesus, all you Cromeans are the same…”
She raised a serious gaze to Miranda
“Look. I get you’re not happy with what you’d found out about your husband, I do. But right now, protecting his position in The Organization is the only way you and the baby are going to stay alive. It sucks; but that’s just how it is.”
Miranda sat back in the chair, looking from Spann to Lisa to the bloody horror occurring on the screen.
Unthinkingly, her hand rose to settle atop her distended stomach.
“Fuck. Fine. What do we do to help Jesse?”
Spann smirked.
“I’m glad you asked…”
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Burned Part 20
Summary:  Alfie Solomons is in need of a secretary. Tommy Shelby mentions a young woman in need of employment. From there the two step into a dangerous dance together.
Part 20: Good news is met with the bad. Aberama Gold is informed. 
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         Louise sat outside the door into the doctor’s office. She waited patiently for him to finish up with speaking to Alfie after the examination. She was undoubtedly anxious as she waited but at least he was seeking help.
           Finally, after about half an hour, Alfie came out. He stopped in front of his wife for a moment. His eyes searched her face as he summoned the courage to speak.
           “I’m sorry.” He muttered before passing by her and leaving the office.
           Confused, Louise looked to the doctor who was standing in the doorway. Her stomach twisted up and she felt sick. There was a large part of her that was in denial. Of course, she’d been worried about the possibility of cancer, but she thought it was just an overreaction. She wanted so desperately to be wrong. But judging by Alfie’s reaction and the look on the doctor’s face, she had been right all along.
           “Why don’t you come in, Mrs. Solomons.” He let her into his office.
           She came and sat across the desk from him.
           The man, Doctor Cecil Stephens, was a kind man with much compassion for his patients. He was well known in the Camden community for being one of the best doctors in the area. He’d been in practice for quite some time but had yet to formally see Alfie Solomons as a patient.
           Of course, he knew the gangster, it was hard not to when his practice was in the Jewish man’s domain. He’d treated many of Alfie’s men, people who came in beaten an inch of their life, ones with bullets lodged in them, or a missing body part such as an eye or finger. With this pattern, Cecil naturally assumed that he would come across Alfie one day. And most likely it would be under violent circumstances.    Instead, the man arrived that morning with his wife by his side. He looked grumpy, but it was merely a ploy to hide his worry. Once behind doors, Alfie explained the issue and showed him the abrasions that were starting to form on his skin. The man was uncharacteristically quiet and sat stiffly through the diagnosis.
           Cecil had seen many reactions in his time as a doctor. It was difficult to predict someone’s response to a terrible fate. If anyone were to react violently, he assumed it would be a man with such a reputation as Alfie Solomons. So it was a surprise to see Alfie merely walk off, leaving his wife.
           “Mrs. Solomons, I’ve examined your husband and spoke to him.” Cecil sat down and looked through the notes he’d taken. “I’m afraid he’s developed a form of skin cancer.”
           Louise sucked in a sharp breath and felt the sting of tears in her eyes. “I…I don’t understand. How?”
           “Well, there is still a lot of research being done on cancer. Unfortunately, it’s in the early stages. However, I’ve seen many men like your husband, veterans who were affected by the gases used in battle.” He explained with the same gentle tone he used for all his patients and their family members.
           “Y-you can do something for him, right?” Her voice was small and she clutched helplessly to her handkerchief.
           “There are therapies that are still being developed but we aren’t sure the long term effects. Radiation has been proposed in recent years, but it’s unknown if it helps.” He was sympathetic to the woman. Alfie had told him they were just wed in the summer and they’d only just found out she was expecting. A cancer diagnosis certainly wasn’t expected or desired.
           “That…that’s simply not good enough.” Louise stammered. Her heart began to race. She would not lose her husband. She refused to bury him so soon. “There must be something you can do.” Her voice rose and her breathing became shallow. The office closed in on her and she panicked. No, it had to be a nightmare. She would wake up and learn it was nothing more than a treatable condition.
           “I’ll try everything I can to try and ease his pain, but it’s unlikely it’ll be treated completely.” Cecil kept a calm demeanor.
           Louise suddenly stood, nearly kicking her chair back from the sharp movement. “You’re a fucking doctor, you’re supposed to be able to help him!” She shouted. “I’m not going to let my husband die!”
           Not half a second after her outburst, Louise felt strong hands leading her out of the doctor’s office. “That’s enough, Lou,” Alfie said firmly.
           “No! He can’t just not have answers!” She fought against her husband’s hold but he was still much stronger than her.
          “No use in yelling, yeah? C’mon.” He muttered a quiet apology to Doctor Stephens before escorting her outside to the car.
           Once he got her in the backseat, Louise burst into hysterical tears. “He’s lying. That’s not what it is. We’ll find another doctor. Someone who’ll know better.” She rambled through her tears.
           Alfie embraced her close. “Sh, sh, s’alright, love.” He wasn’t going to argue with her when she was in such an irrational state. “Try to breathe.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~
           Louise spent most of the afternoon in a huff and crying off and on. Alfie stayed home with her, leaving a list for Ollie to finish at the bakery. For most of the time, he sat quietly while Louise kicked up a fuss. She ranted about, pacing through the parlor with Cyril at her heel. The next moment she was curled up in Alfie’s lap sobbing.
           He did his best to comfort her but his mind had gone to a dark place. He thought about getting his affairs in order. Editing his will to include his son or daughter. Louise would need help if he died. He couldn’t leave her with nothing, especially with a child. He figured he could divide up his estate, leaving most of it to Louise, some to Ollie and his family, and the rest to the several Jewish charities he donated to. That would give him more peace at night.
           Yet, money couldn’t heal her wounds if he were to pass. He wanted to berate himself for letting her get so attached. If she didn’t have him, then it wouldn’t hurt as much when he died. He assumed for a long time that when he died, the majority of those who knew him would be happy. Mean ‘ol Alfie Solomons would never again bother them. He didn’t anticipate having a devoted wife and child.
           Now he was anxious for their well being when he was gone. Would his enemies take advantage of her? Could he guarantee her safety if he wasn’t there protecting her?
~~~~~~~~~~~~
           Ollie arrived at the Solomons’ home late that night. He came in with a list of the things he’d completed and any messages he’d gotten that day.
           Louise had exhausted herself and passed out in bed even before dinner. Alfie was glad she could finally get some peace after the difficult day.
           He greeted his assistant at the door.
           “How’s Louise?” Ollie asked. “Did she go to the doctor yet?”
           Alfie grunted and nodded as he flipped through the telegrams. He didn’t want to tell anyone about his cancer. The last thing he needed was for his enemies to think he was weak and easy to overthrow. “She’s asleep.”
           “Well, Shayna offered a few things for the baby.” The young man said. “If you’d like, I can bring them soon.”
           Alfie’s heart wrenched. “Yeah, mate, thanks.” He mumbled.
           It was clear to anyone, especially Ollie who had spent so many years as his right-hand man, that something was seriously wrong. “Sir, are you alright?”
           The gangster stared blankly at the words in his hand. He wasn’t really registering the typed words. All he could read was Shelby Company Ltd. But his mind was too overwhelmed to really understand the meaning of the words. “Ollie…” He glanced up from the telegram. “If anything were to happen to me, would you make sure Lou is kept safe?”
           His assistant furrowed his brow. “Sir?”
           “Just hypothetically.”
           “Well, ‘course.” Ollie shrugged. “She’s like family now.”  
           “Yeah…”
           The two men stood by the front door in silence. The only sound came from the grandfather clock in the hall and Evelyn preparing a light dinner for Alfie.
           “Sir, are you expecting something to happen?” Ollie asked cautiously.
           Alfie frowned. “’Course not.” He retorted. “But it ain’t like I’m a fucking saint, am I, Ollie?”
           It only made the man further confused. His boss never worried about his occupation killing him. He was confident enough to assume he’d always get away or was brave enough to accept death. Ollie figured perhaps his mindset had been altered by the news of the pregnancy.
           Alfie exhaled sharply and shook the fog out of his head. He was still alive. Wasn’t dead yet. He still needed to work. “What the fuck does Tommy want now?” He demanded.
           “Asking about Goliath. He said he heard he was a boxer.” Ollie explained the telegram in his boss’s hand. “Says he wants to set up a match.”
           “Really? While he’s got Changretta on his tail? Fucking crazy gypsy.” He grumbled. “Wants to make a spectacle of it all, well, fine. Give me nephew a ring tomorrow morning then Tommy. We’ll brave the beast and go to Small Heath.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~
           Goliath had arrived early the next morning. Alfie filled him in by the door and they were about ready to leave for Small Heath.
           “Alfie?” Louise had panicked when she woke up to an empty bed. She went to the top of the stairs, clutching her dressing gown shut.
           Goliath had never seen such a shift in his uncle’s gruff demeanor before. He’d seen Alfie interact with Louise during holidays. That’s where the two had met for the first time. But there was something about the two being in their own home in the early morning that caused a change. It was a brief glimpse into the intimate relationship they upheld when no one else was around.
           “Yeah, love.” Alfie traveled halfway up the stairs to meet her. “You alright?” He murmured.
           She nodded. “Where are you going?” Her voice was hoarse from crying the day before and her eyes were still red.
           “Birmingham, have to see Tommy.” He explained with full clarity. After the cancer diagnosis, he felt like he owed her at least some honesty.
           “Can I come?” She chewed on her lower lip and touched his arm.
           Alfie weighed the risks. No doubt Luca Changretta was watching Tommy’s every move. He didn’t want the Italian to know about Louise, but he’d be a fool to think the man didn’t already know. Alfie also knew it would be a suicide mission if Luca tried to make an attack in Tommy’s own backyard. If anything, she might be safer there with both his men and the Blinders surrounding them.
           “Alright, love.” He nodded. “Go get dressed, take your time.” He descended the stairs again when Louise returned to the bedroom.
           Goliath gave Ishmael a side-glance. The young man just shrugged and nodded. He’d seen the effect Louise had on his boss since day one. The adoration of a woman was a powerful thing, indeed.
           Speaking of a woman's affection, Evelyn came out of the kitchen. She smiled and fixed Ishmael’s collar. “You be careful.” She warned. “No fighting.”
           The man sported a goofy smile. “Me? Don’t know what you’re on about Lyn.” He replied.
           She raised an eyebrow and shook her head. “Cheeky.” She gave him a smirk and left the men by the door.        
           Ishmael cleared his throat and had a hard time concealing how happy he looked. Goliath looked utterly perplexed. Was there something in the water?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
           Louise was quiet during the car ride to Birmingham. It was like she was trying to ignore the day before. Maybe if she didn’t bring it up, it wouldn’t be true and it would just fade away.
           Alfie could sense all the types of denial his wife was experiencing. And it pained him to know he couldn’t ease her burden. All he could do was hold her hand.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
           Small Heath was just as gray and gloomy as Louise remembered. Alfie looked displeased as he got out of the car.
           “Come to Small Heath, you’ll go to hell for fucking breathing.” He muttered as he helped his wife out of the car.
           “It’s quiet.” She noted. In fact, it was completely deserted, not a soul walking around. It left a strange feeling in the air and she felt like they were being watched.
           “Stretch your legs, treacle,” Alfie said to his nephew. “Fuck me, looks like he’s grown. He’s like a mushroom, innit he, grows in the dark.”
           Louise smiled and lingered near Alfie. She couldn’t shake the strange feeling that the empty street gave off.
           “Where is everyone?” Alfie checked his pocket watch. “Ishmael, please, will you hit the call to prayer?”
           “Did you tell Tommy a time?” Louise asked but was interrupted by the car horn.
           “Mhm, loosely.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Well, hit it!” He ordered his driver again. The car horn echoed through the street a little longer. Alfie rolled his eyes. “Yes, thank you.” He pushed past Ishmael and laid on the horn.
           Louise sighed and stood by the hood of the car, listening to the unrelenting noise. A moment later, Tommy came out of one of the homes on the street. He nodded at Louise and she gave him a silent apology for the antics so early in the morning.
           Alfie didn’t quit until Tommy was stood right in front of him. “Morning Alfie.” The Blinder greeted.
           “Yeah, it is, so how come everybody’s in fucking bed?”
           “This must be Goliath.” Tommy acknowledged the young man taking a piss on the sidewalk. “Let me introduce you to David.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
           “I hear you’re probably more in need of the old rum at the moment, rather than gin, mate.” Alfie led Louise by the arm as they were brought down into the cellar that had been converted into a distillery. There was a fierce chill in the air and Alfie slipped off his scarf to wrap it around his wife. He stopped when he heard a flutter of wings and warbling coming from above them. “Oh dear, you’ve got fucking starlings, mate. That shit will rot your pipework.” Alfie reached into his coat to draw his gun. “These bastards only understand one language.”
           “Alfie!” Louise grabbed his wrist to stop him from loading the gun. She knew he was armed but only because Tommy probably expected him to be. Even she had brought her gun. It wasn’t a time to walk around unarmed.
           “S’alright Alfie, I’m getting a kestrel,” Tommy explained.
           “I hear that you’ve got Italians, mate, you’ve got a kestrel for them?” Alfie inquired deadpan.
           The two men continued talking as Louise lingered around the small distillery. She glanced up to the ceiling and saw the starlings that Alfie had spotted. One of them stared back at her, cocking its head. She followed it as the bird hopped across a pipe towards a small nook in the corner. A bundle of debris had been constructed into a nest and when the mother approached, four little heads popped out. They chirped, their mouths open wide to receive food. The mother perched at the nest, checking over her chicks.
           Louise’s gut wrenched. What would happen if Tommy got a kestrel? Would the bird of prey eat the mother and the babies, or would it just rid of the mother leaving the chicks to starve to death? Where was the father? Would he arrive just to find his family all gone? Could animals feel the same heartbreak that they did?
           “And you just cannot wash it out, right, ‘cause it come out your mother’s tits.”
           Louise glanced over, completely baffled by the snippet she’d heard of their conversation. She left the birds and walked over to the two men.
           “No, the Americans’ll want it sweeter.” Alfie set down a glass of gin.
           “Do you drink, Louise?” Tommy offered a glass to her.
           “No thank you, I’ve been feeling under the weather.” She explained knowing the alcohol would only make her feel worse.
           “I heard a copper got shot,” Alfie spoke, unafraid to talk about such issues in front of Louise. He knew she’d find out eventually. “Who shot him?”
           “My kestrel.” Tommy offered a seat to Louise by the table.
           “How many are here?”
           “Eleven.”
           Louise shot her husband a look of uneasiness. Eleven men were more than enough. And they had yet to visit them in Camden. As far as she was concerned, it was only a matter of time until that day.
           “Enough to drop a man who wrapped his balls in an OBE till they fell off,” Alfie said with a smug look.
           Louise just shook her head, knowing it wasn’t worth the effort to try and get him to be a bit politer.
           “Well, the real question is, Alfie, which side are you playing for, aye?” Tommy was almost glad Louise was there with them. He had a feeling her husband wouldn’t lie about loyalty right in front of her.
           “Fucking hell.” Alfie chuckled darkly, the brim of his hat casting a shadow over his eyes. “What kind of world is it to bring up children when your own mate can ask you that question?”
           Louise glanced down at her hands on her lap. Indeed, what kind of world was it?
           “But the truth is, Tommy, you’ll be fucking dead soon.”
           “Alfie.” She gave him a sharp look. “Don’t say that.”
           “S’alright, Louise,” Tommy assured her. “We’ve all got our opinions, don’t we Alfie?”
           “Tommy, there are men approaching.” Finn came down into the cellar.
           “Yeah, let them pass.” His brother waved them in. “Right,” he turned back to Alfie. “You tell Darby Sabini, from me, that if the Italians win, they’re not planning on leaving. After me, it’ll be him, then you, then the Titanic. They’re coming and they’re here to stay.”
           Alfie’s eyes were cold on his counterpart. His jaw clenched and Louise could see his thoughts running rampant. But he couldn’t get another word in before another group of men came downstairs.
           “Mr. Shelby, we’ve come to talk about the fight.”
           Alfie raised an eyebrow and pointed his cane at the man. “Your kestrel? Tommy, when a pikey walks in with hair like that, you have to ask yourself, have I made a mistake?”
           “Who the fuck are you?”
           “Who the fuck am I?”
           “Who the fuck is this?”
           Louise pinched the bridge of her nose. “Oh dear.” She whispered. Tommy, however, looked amused at the ensuing battle.
           “I, my friend, am the uncle, protector, and promoter of that fucking thing right there.” He jabbed his cane towards his nephew who was lurking in the background like a misplaced tree. “In whose shadow nothing good nor godly will ever grow. That there, right, is the Southern County’s welterweight champion.”
           “Alfie…” His wife tried to step in but he was already too far gone to stop.
           “He is of mixed religion, therefore he is godless. He was adopted by Satan himself before he was returned out of fear of his awkwardness.”
           “Alfie.”
           “He is impossible to marry off, due to his lethal dimensions. His mother. Terrified, she’s fucking abandoned him. And there he is, stood before you like the first of some brand new fucking species!”
           “Alfie, that’s quite enough.” Louise implored him again to stop. “They get it.”
           “And that, mate, is me wife. She’s the exact fucking opposite, ain’t she? Fucking angel. The world ain’t never seen such a gorgeous creature and the fuck if I know why God let me in her presence. Yet here I am, accompanied by a fucking demon and an angel and you’ve got the absolute fucking nerve to ask me who the fuck I am?”
           Louise couldn’t help but smile a little bit. Endearing yet chaotic.
           “So, will you offer your son?” Alfie inquired, ending his little rant.
           Aberama glanced over at his son with a sly nod. Bonnie smiled and stood up straight. “Name the day, Mr. Shelby.”
           Louise looked back and forth between the size differences of the two young men. She stood and felt a wave of nausea. Her face paled and she looked up at the ceiling when she heard the starlings grow a little louder.
           Big fucks small.
           Blood pounded in her ears and the scent of gin began to make her dizzy.
           “Whoa, whoa!” She heard Alfie exclaim as she stumbled forward, the world going black.
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opinionated1 · 5 years
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‘Phantom limb’
Like most people, I’d heard stories about how amputees could still feel their missing appendages. I didn’t doubt it at all. Too many people had made the claim for it to be fantasy or delusion but I never expected to experience it myself. Who would? Unfortunately my near fatal car accident was both irreversible and life changing.
The damage to my body was so extensive they had to remove my right arm at the shoulder joint. That made having a prosthetic arm very difficult (and nearly impossible to have any functional use of it). With a morbid sense of humor, one of my friends suggested I could become a rock drummer like the one-armed drummer in Def Leppard. He was just trying to make me laugh but it really hit home my new disability.
Pretty much right away I started getting those fabled phantom pains. I could still feel ‘it’ right on my shoulder stump. It was surreal to realize the arm I felt wasn’t really there. I could finally understand the reason for the surprise and disbelief so many others experienced. Worse than that though, my phantom limb began to do more than just tingle or ache. It started having ‘impulses’.
Here’s the thing. These impulses didn’t match my own feelings. Not by a long shot. My missing arm wanted to do ‘things’; independent and diametrically opposed to my own wishes. Quite frankly, it was very disturbing the things that popped in my head. My phantom hand would ‘reach’ to put itself around the necks of people who I had no ill will for. It was strange and frightening to imagine doing harm to them.
Why would ‘it’ want to hurt anyone? (Especially those who had been nothing but kind to me). The creepy sensation was so visceral and bizarre that I didn’t know how to tell anyone about it. What would I say? “Hi Aunt Gertrude, for reasons I can’t explain, I can still feel my disembodied arm and it wants desperately to strangle you. By the way, these cookies are fantastic!”
Feelings of malice grew stronger by the minute. The rising tide of anger I felt inside was so alien to my normal temperament that I had to remind myself it was all in my head. There was a conflict raging and my body was poised to be the battleground. Of course I knew that a phantom arm couldn’t harm anyone, but I worried it might try to influence the rest of me. As it was, I was already having a hard time tuning out the inappropriate impulses my missing limb was trying to accomplish.
Can you imagine standing next to your new boss and keeping a calm demeanor while your imaginary arm tries to throttle him? My face must have betrayed some hint of inner turmoil. He took me aside afterward and asked if there was something wrong. I assured him it was nothing but I’m not sure I convinced either of us. The impulses were getting more violent. If the same sinister force that inspired them was able to get my remaining arm to cooperate, I would be in a world of trouble.
I realized I needed psychological help. Hallucinations of that level were no mere fantasy or role-play but I was afraid to be completely honest with a therapist. Frankly it sounded full-on crazy and I feared involuntary commitment. Wasn’t my efforts to get help for my delusions and phantom feelings a sign that I wasn’t malicious or out to hurt anyone? I felt sure my voluntary disclosures would be seen as an asset to my sincerity. It pointed to my enthusiastic cooperation but every asylum in the world is filled with people who believe they are lucid and clear. With murderous impulses coming from my missing appendage, perhaps I wasn’t in a position to judge my level of clarity.
There on the couch, my therapist asked what my phantom arm was doing at that very moment. It was a mind blowing question. No one else would have entertained the idea to humor me. It seemed like an important step in my recovery. I explained that it was reaching for the side of the couch in an effort to rise me up. He found that fascinating. He wanted me to go into greater detail. Could I ‘see’ the missing appendage with my eyes? Could my missing hand ‘feel’ the soft, plush material of the furniture? If I were to wave it through an open flame, would it feel burned?
They were fantastic questions. I could see why his fee was so high. He was very good at getting to the heart of the matter. The therapist listened intently to my answers. It was certainly far outside of the mundane things he probably heard from his other patients on a daily basis. I admitted that while I couldn’t ‘see’ the missing arm, I could still ‘feel’ the sensations of my missing hand brushing the velour on the sofa. It was like I was caressing the material of my sheets at night. Just because you can’t see anything in the dark doesn’t mean the object isn’t there or that the other senses do not work. He smiled at my telling justification.
He reiterated his question about the fire. I felt my response about being able to feel the couch material was enough to imply that if held over an open flame, I would feel the heat from that too (even if we both knew it was purely psychosomatic). He smiled in a way that made me feel very uncomfortable. Only later did I learn what he quietly whispered to his receptionist over the phone.
“You’re still very much in denial about the loss of your arm.”; He began. “Intellectually you know it’s gone, but subconsciously you still haven’t accepted it. It’s a profound loss to lose a major limb and the human mind is a very powerful, complex thing. It can convince a person crawling across the desert that they are drowning in a mirage of water. It can do all sorts of inexplicable things. In this case, your mind hasn’t let go. It has you convinced it’s still there and that you can feel things against absent skin and nerve endings. That part of your subconscious is still very angry about the car accident and lashes out at everyone you come in contact with, in blind frustration. It’s nothing more.”
It all made perfect sense. There was no one I could blame for losing my arm so everyone was the target by the phantom limb. I asked if he could help me overcome my delusion and finally accept the loss. He nodded with warm confidence.
“I need to help you come to grips with this terrible loss. It’s totally understandable. After you finally accept it, the unexplained impulses to harm others will immediately fade away. Rest assured, you wouldn’t have actually hurt anyone anyway. It’s just a subconscious frustration manifesting itself in the safest possible way to vent (via a phantom, nonexistent arm).”
My mind reeled. He saw it so clearly. For the first time in weeks, I felt relief. Maybe I wasn’t a budding homicidal maniac after all. It wasn’t clear how he was going to get the message across to my unaccepting subconscious, but the esteemed doctor obviously had a master plan. We made some small talk for a couple minutes until there was a knock on the therapy room door. His assistant came in with a large canvas bag from a hardware store chain.
“Oh yes! That will do perfectly. Thank you, Cynthia. We are about to do some unorthodox, experimental exercises with these visual props. Mr. Pierce may become emotional and cry out during the therapy. If you hear any raised voices, please just disregard them. I hope we can have a breakthrough for him. It’s imperative we are not disturbed.”
His assistant nodded slowly while raising an eyebrow in curiosity. She couldn’t imagine what her boss had in mind, and frankly that went for me too. I was especially startled when he brought a large camping hatchet and chopping block out of the shopping bag. Before I could ask him about them, he raised his hands to calm me.
“Intellectually you know your arm is missing, right? You can see that it’s gone and you know that there is no one else to blame for it. It was an accident, but your subconscious mind is stubborn and wants to pin the blame on someone. It doesn’t want to let go of that tremendous anger and it doesn’t want to accept you are an amputee now. To reinforce that your arm is really gone, I want you to stretch the phantom limb over this chopping block and ‘hack it off yourself’ with this hatchet. Once your eyes relay that the missing appendage is removed (by you), it will let go of the misplaced blame on others and accept the truth. It’s the only way your subconscious can come to terms with the devastating loss. The removal of the phantom limb must come from you.”
It was one hell of a speech and the explanation sounded logical but I was very reluctant. It seemed like a dangerous maneuver. The doctor tried to reassure me. He suggested that any hesitancy on my part was my subconscious trying to avoid accepting the inevitable. My jitters were really a last minute ‘hail Mary’ to avoid coming to final terms with the loss.
With a shaky hand I accepted the hatchet from him and tried to force my rebellious ‘arm’ over the block. There was a fierce war going in my head. I could see the doctor (out of the corner of my eye) observing the unorthodox therapy from a few feet away. He was transfixed. I think he saw his idea as revolutionary and groundbreaking. In the symbolic gesture of ‘severing off’ my already severed arm, he was sure my mind would finally accept the loss and stop projecting anger at others.
He was wrong. Dead wrong. I blacked out. I have no firsthand knowledge of what happened next but the doctor videotaped all the sessions with his patients for official records. I’ve since watched the gruesome bloodbath a number of times during my hearing and the subsequent murder trial of Doctor Berkeley. It was hard to argue with video evidence but I swear it wasn’t really ‘me’ swinging that hatchet in the footage. I was possessed by the will of my phantom arm as it fought for its existence.
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aimeetiggzx-blog · 5 years
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I Used to Think My Abusive Relationship Was My Fault. Now I Know I’m worth more.
I have spent most of my teenage years in emotionally and physically abusive relationships. Until a almost a year ago, I thought I was the worst kind of damaged goods, a girl who could only love men who hurt her I means that’s been my past since I was 15. 5 years now! I didn't want to talk about my experiences at first because I thought that my kind of pain was self-inflicted. If I was stupid enough to stay, I deserved it,
I know there are three sides to every story. In this article, you're going to hear one and that’s mine - Aimee Carver. I don't write this with venom. The men I've been involved with were handsome, smart, charming and talented. There were good times. The bad times outweighed them.
Most people don't know I've been in (to clarify again) emotionally abusive relationships. From the outside, I'd bet my life looks pretty great. Some parts of it always were. I guess I am proof that there is no likely candidate for abuse.
For a long time, I found my romantic past, when the hits started happening I started dreaming of all my ex-boyfriends again.
Trauma is a funny thing. It hides in the shadowy corners of your mind, resurfacing when all you want is for it to be erased from your memory forever.
I'm writing this for a lot of reasons. Some of them are:
I think abusive relationships are an epidemic in our society. It could help someone understand their friend, their sister, their daughter who keeps going back. It could help someone who keeps going back. Because articles like this helped me. Because what trauma really wants is a voice. To anyone who needs help, You think you are crazy. You're anxious all the time. Your heart beats quickly. You have a lot of questions for your boyfriend at the time that you don't feel like you can ask. You wonder if you're always being lied to. You spend a lot time in the past, likely when you first fell in love him. You apologize constantly two your new lover, When you explain your fights to anyone who will listen, no one understands why you're apologizing. You are always confused. You're high as a fucking kite when he's nice to you. He says "one small thing," and with an embarrassing clarity, you are reminded of all the parts of yourself you hate. How can he see those parts so clearly? You cry a lot, you hide a lot. Sometimes you know why. Sometimes you don't.
You are not crazy even if you think your going insane your not.
When you're with your boyfriend in my case my ex you're usually with just him alone. You feel weird around your friends and family, the people you used to feel the most yourself and safest around. You can't remember how to feel like yourself anymore. Now, being in your own skin is like a long dull headache that won't lift and then that slowly feels like normal. Pretty much all your thoughts about yourself are negative.
"I used to be funny, why aren't I funny anymore?"
You think you are crazy.
“Why ain’t I perfect”
“Why ain’t I skinny”
“Jumping over a hug”
There will be good days with your boyfriend. There will be miraculous days of exquisite and suffering beauty between you two.
The sad truth - On these days, you will feel better than the best and like everything's okay. You will believe that the chaos has made you stronger; that he loves you more than anything. These days are bright spots in the darkness that has descended upon you. They are the moments of hope that you'll cling to, your proof that everything is okay, until one wrong word is said and your in hospital due to his harsh actions.But at that time moments aren't a life. Moments aren't enough. You deserve weeks, months and years of feeling like everything is okay. You deserve a lifetime of that.When your relationship ends like mine did, you will drown in the confusing, competing narratives in your head, just like you did while in the relationship. Memory is going to be a weird thing for you for a while. Grief is a delusional state.
We really loved each other (so you thought) I could've helped him if I'd tried harder (but you tried and failed) I'm not perfect. And sometimes, I don't think love should feel like this.
The latter will be quieter, the former will roar inside you. Some days, you will think you left the most beautiful relationship and the truest love in the whole world. Some days you will think you are just hysterical and crazy and that you weren't being abused at all. Until very recently, I still had days like that. After you break up with him, you might not feel an immediate sense of relief, empowerment or really anything that resembles "I know this is the right thing." You will likely feel very alone. Unfortunately, coming out of the fog with your eyes open is more painful than slipping into one without noticing.
But just always remember: feelings aren't the truth. You aren't the worst off you've ever been. Expect the sadness. It sounds crazy but welcome it. That sadness is going to live in you for a long time and it will teach you a lot. I know you don't believe me, but that sadness is your friend. That sadness is your becoming.
Not everyone you lose is a loss.
Tell your story no matter how murky the details seem at first. Keep talking. Read every article you can find on abuse until you feel an intellectual understanding of what happened tunnel into you emotionally. The head will come first, your heart will follow; it will all become clearer.
If you're lucky like I was, you'll find a therapist that can help you. And now I’m in a healthy, beautiful, loving relationship with my boyfriend Louis. It’s early stages but it’s the best kind of love feeling ever. He taught me what love is like, he taught me care but most of all he taught me to be myself again and for that im greatful every single day to you!
Don’t get me wrong you will have to reflect on your past relationship. Don't blame yourself for not leaving sooner, and don't let anyone else blame you, either. In moments of trauma and shock the brain has a funny way of protecting itself. It's called disassociating. You have done a lot of this. You will remember about three months in your ex-boyfriend did something and it was like a mask was lifted. He showed you a person you had never met before. I mention this because statistically an abusive person will do something that throws you completely off balance within the first three months. Then, they will be really sorry.
You will come to learn that real love is not a cycle of cruelty, effusive apologies, a honey-moon period, then a dreaded waiting for the other shoe to drop followed by more cruelty. Abusive relationships are defined by this pattern. When you do leave, you will realize that the space that your relationship took up was enormous. It was, whether you knew it or not, the monkey on the back of every thought you had. When it's gone, the emptiness left in its wake will feel like an ocean around you
It will take way longer than you want to "get over it," and you will think you will never reach the shore.
You will. When I was newly single and going on dates, this is how it went. First, I dated blindly and way more than I should have. I was attracted to guys who were like all my ex-boyfriends, physically and emotionally. Then, I started dating people who were completely different but whom I was not ready to love. Like a teacher, I observed how they treated me with a confusing detachment and thought, "Oh, so this is what it should be like."
"So, this is what kindness is like."
Dating made me feel like the loneliest person in the world for a long time. I wish now I hadn't done it at all, but withdrawal is painful and uncomfortable. I was willing to try anything to feel just a little better. But trust me just like me your king will find his way to you and it will be a little weird at first but that weirdness goes and it will become the most perfect thing in your life.
But in every process till you are full over it You will miss your ex boyfriend in a way you didn't know was possible and you don't think should be allowed. You will want to get back together. Abusive relationships fuck your brain chemistry up. They're addictive, and the withdrawal is not fun.
Don't worry tho baby girl.. with time, your brain will even out. In awhile, you won't want to be with him anymore. Crying helps you detox, so do a lot of it( I still cry alone due to all the horrible flashbacks and memories) you just have to find someone who’s willing to understand and help you over come them not make them worse. So does sleeping, exercise, therapy, eating healthy, seeing your friends and laughing.
For me, alcohol didn't really help I broke down every time trying to kill myself due to the fact of feeling so dirty and broken Or I guess, it did, until it didn't.
When you're in the withdrawal phase, you'll begin to understand why you thought being in an abusive relationship was okay for you. You're going to have to look at a lot of your past and your inherited patterns it’s best to do that alone.. It can get heavy but knuckle through it. You can do it. I’m proof that it can be done.
You will tell people that know your ex-boyfriend about what happened and how he treated you. Likely, no one will be surprised by his behaviour. Likely, no one will confront him. This is one of the saddest parts of our world. You will feel like the last one in on a sick joke.
Your ex-boyfriend will probably never apologize to you. If you do hear from him or see him, he will make you feel crazy. He's really good at that (like sending pics of him and his new girlfriend kissing) He will likely minimize your history, dismiss your relationship and pull the rug out from under you again. The way he frames you and your relationship will be distorted.
I believe that amends can happen, but usually, not in a timely manner. Like you need time to really unpack and understand why it all happened, so will he. Now factor into this that you have the desire to understand yourself and your behaviour. The closure you desire is a myth and it's not reachable in one conversation. Closure happens slowly and keeps happening. You'll give it to yourself.
If you leave your boyfriend for someone else, beware. Until you truly understand why you were in the situation you were, emotionally and intellectually, your subconscious will have a sad way of attracting an identical relationship that looks completely different from the outside. This is not always true.
At first, when the fog is lifting, you will look at your past self with shock and disgust. Then, later, you will look at your past self with sadness. Then, with understanding. Finally, you feel the most visceral pride for the moment you left, even if you didn't want to because you did that on the blind faith that life might be better on the other side. You did that on hope alone. You didn't know what you do now. That's so brave.
“You are so brave”- the only words I need to hear yet waiting for it.
I know how scared you are. I still get scared. My years of all the recovery has been the most challenging and rewarding of my life. It's not perfect and I don't think it ever will be. I get lonely and restless. I live with those feelings. Actually, I try to understand them. One day, your life will look like a version of mine. Things will keep getting better and better, faster and faster. Good things will keep finding you. You will be really happy. That happiness will get so big that you won't notice how the sadness is lifting until it's almost gone.
My life is full of hard work, art, friends who love and support me, friends that I am lucky to know. I have more energy than I know what to do with. I am the most productive I have ever been. I sing, I dance, I have meaningful conversation, I rest, I laugh a lot, I stay out too late. I am closer to my family than ever before. I found my way back to my old friends.
Maybe I'm becoming myself again.
Finally, (I know you're worried about this) you will meet someone else. You will fall in love again and this time, it will be about more than your wounds matching up with someone else's. It will be different and it will be better(I’m proof of that too my new boyfriend is my world for all the good reasons) But something becomes more important to you than romantic love and it's called self-worth. It will feel like it happens almost over night, but you will grow to love the person you are.
You should.
You fought hard to become her.
So love her.
Love Tiggz
AimeeCarver
Xx
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dementor1112 · 5 years
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my mother isn’t cancelled at least, i don’t think so
I can’t stop thinking about the first person to ever put radium into paint, imagining the years they might have spent in the lab, fiddling with chemicals, years in university and apprenticeship leading up to the culmination of a career, an invention that would become a household name, that would light up the dials on the planes that won the great war. I imagine their horror as the first stories came out, as cases went to trial and the newspapers wrote about young girls rotting from the inside out, the jaws falling out of their skulls, the realization that this was their life’s work: that all they’d built was poison. I’ve been thinking a lot about the young soldiers sent into war, kids that boarded their planes to the desert genuinely believing that they were liberating a people and precipitating a future of peace and democracy; I think about them realizing, having broken their minds and bodies for the cause, that the fruits of their labor would be chaos and terror and the disintegration of state after state, that they were means to the deaths of millions. Most of all, I’ve been thinking about my mother, about what haunts and consumes her, and the absolution that I wish I could provide but I cant.
I don’t want to talk about my childhood. I don’t want to talk about the things that made up the first decade and a half of my life, and I don’t think I need to. The details don’t matter. The story is universal, of the trauma that your family can cause you, or maybe it isn’t universal and it just feels that way. The story is about your immigrant parents, your families of color, and if not quite universal it’s something familiar enough to be immediately recognizable, for the shared dark jokes, the shared therapy-speak, the shared impossibility of reconciling all that our parents did for us with all that they did to us. But that’s not the story: the story is about being twenty four and learning how to love your family in a way that’s true to yourself.
I think there’s a journey a lot of us take: you love your family and you’re afraid of them, you love your family but you’re angry, you love your family but you slowly realize that what you had wasn’t just how things were and wasn’t normal. You love your family, but you start to slowly realize the extent to which it all affected you, the ways in which it warped you, you love your family but you discover again and again how much of the things inside your head that cause you pain, the things you do that you hate yourself for, the impulses and fears you can’t explain can all be traced back to them. You resent your family. To be able to heal, you allow yourself to be angry, to be told with clarity that it wasn’t your fault, that what you experienced was real; that your pain and trauma are is valid. You love your family, but you need distance to set and splint everything. And then you’re older and then you’re the age your parents were when they had you, and then your parents reveal themselves as broken battered adults with whom you feel a sense of kinship. You learn to love your family again, in a whole new way, or maybe you don’t. A lot of the time you don’t. I was lucky, I suppose. A lot of us never get to hear our parents own up to their mistakes or see them try to atone for their actions. I don’t want to pass up the chance at healing that offered us, for her sake and for mine.
My mother didn’t believe in psychiatry until I got diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and not for a while after. Mental illness is hereditary: she’s never seen a doctor and she’s never been diagnosed, but while I was trying to explain my illness to her I told her about what it was like to feel great crashing waves of despair that sucked the air out of my lungs, and as I detailed my thoughts she told me that hey, everyone gets those thoughts, don’t they? She was a high school dropout who married young, and remarried, and had us, and poured all of herself into us and perhaps didn’t know how. I don’t know if she had to fight the same mental horrors that I did, or if she had any help. I don’t want to justify the things she did wrong. I can’t justify them. I can’t reconcile the unambiguous way I’d feel about anyone else I’d heard did the same things to their children, and the way my own feelings toward her are all a set of storm-cloud grays. I don’t know whether it’s because we share the same blood, or whether I’d feel the same empathy for anyone else once I’d known and seen as much of their stories.
On the phone one night with swirling snow outside and the cold sinking into my bones I called my mother because I missed her and I told her things were hard. I don’t usually say this: when you’ve been living with your depression for all your life, saying “I’m alright” when someone asks you how you’re doing is a reflex. Either you really are fine, and in those moments you want to laugh at the question- obviously I’m fine, everything is great!- or you don’t want people to worry. But that night the darkness felt perched at the top of my bed, a senselessly cruel figure that felt as eternal as a god, waiting to take my hand and lead me to death. You know things are bad when you can feel him- whenever it manifests, I’ve always thought of it as a “him”, faceless but solid enough to feel the air move against my skin. The mainstream Islam my mother practices considers suicide forbidden, a route to eternal damnation. I can only see it as a very real possibility as to how my life will end. I hope it doesn’t end that way, but hoping is the best I can do. I didn’t tell her all this. All I could say was that things were hard. But our family had never talked much about our internal lives, and that’s made us good at guesswork.
There were a few seconds of silence and then she burst into sobs. She wished she could just hug me, she said, and that my illness had been such a worry since I’d first told them. She told me that she prayed every day that God would take away my pain and that I’d get better. She’d walked outside to talk to me. She was living with my grandmother- her mother, a once-indomitable woman who survived Churchill’s famine and was known to friends and neighbors as the iron lady, now trembling and frail- who had cancer that had spread through her body and settled in her lungs, a hospice worker that told herself she was a nurse. She couldn’t cry indoors because her mom would worry and she’d been putting up a cheerful front for weeks, and it left her drained. Please don’t die, she begged, please please please, whatever happens, dying like that is a mortal sin and I can’t lose you forever, I can’t lose you in this life and the next and never see you again. You can’t break my heart like that, whatever you do, whatever happens, I can’t lose my son forever.
She regrets how she treated us when we were kids. She tells me this every time we talk and she asks for forgiveness, from me and from God. She told me that she constantly fantasized about finding some kind of time machine, about going back in time and changing things, doing anything anything to spare us, that she wondered everyday if she would have been better to have given us up and entrusted us to someone else altogether. I tell her that I know what it’s like to have hurt people, and to have lived with the knowledge of having hurt people. I don’t wish that on her, and I tell her as much. I don’t want any more pain in our lives. I don’t want the destruction in our pasts continue to perpetuate itself. I don’t want her to suffer, I want her to be happy, I want her to have the life she’s dreamed of having.
When I first told my parents about my mental illness it was shortly after my first time being hospitalized. The pain that led me there was still fresh and for the first time in my life it didn’t feel like pain I deserved. It was pain I could rightfully be angry about. And I was. You know hell, from scripture?, I told them. I lived that, I couldn’t imagine anything worse, I spent days curled up in bed telling myself that hell couldn’t be worse than this, and you’re partially responsible. I wanted them to own up to it and I wanted them to take some kind of responsibility. She shut down completely. She knew she lost her temper at us but every example I brought up made her go white. I couldn’t have hurt you like that, she’d sat on the bed and repeated, I couldn’t have done that, I couldn’t have done that, I couldn’t have done that. At the time it made me angrier at her. Just take responsibility! I’d snapped at her. I just want that! Just take responsibility!
It feels clear now that she was in shock and denial, that she was processing the narrative of her life shifting suddenly under her feet. When I think about trauma that passes itself down generations, all that I feel a sense of loss and waste and destruction. My mother sacrificed so much, gave up so much of herself, all for something that ultimately turned out to have caused immeasurable damage. It’s a painful and existential loss, the feeling that your life’s work went to waste, that all you built were ruins. Every generation we dream about giving our children a life better than our own and too often we realize that all we’ve done is continue that cycle, that the result of decades of their lives was all suffering. It’s how I imagine the lives of the chemists that created radium paint after reading about the radium girls, the first scientists to synthesize thalidomide as reports of deformed babies made the newspapers. It’s why I can’t stop thinking about them. Every time I see parents in the news that had their children die as a result of their mistakes, it’s how I imagine them: haunted, fantasizing about finding some kind of time machine.
Regret doesn’t work retroactively. Nothing will ever make me whole the way I could have been. I don’t want to excuse my mother, just to understand her, and forgive her, and make my peace with her presence. I want to be kind to her and to myself. I want the cycle of pain to stop.
My mother already had three children by the time she was my age. I know that I, the person I am right now, wouldn’t be able to look after one child, let alone three. I know that for a fact. So how could I expect her to know what she was doing? If I woke up tomorrow with kids, I don’t believe that I would have caused them the same kind of harm or subjected them to the same violence, but I also know I wouldn’t have devoted myself to them, or spent as much time on them, or given up my life and my career and the things I wanted for them.
I know that, and I could choose that. Did she have the same choice? Growing up in a small conservative town in the 1990s where people were expected to start their families in their early twenties, with limited options available to her, how much of a choice did she really have? I knew so little about the world at twenty-one, the age she had me, let alone at nineteen, when my oldest sibling was born. I know so little about the world even right now. Could she really have had any idea what she was getting into? Did she find herself, one day, trapped in a reality that she didn’t really know how to cope with?
I can’t cancel my parents.
I can never figure this one out. I believe my parents deserve forgiveness for damage on a scale that I don’t think I would give similar grace to for anyone else, including myself.
Calling accountability to our changing norms “call-out culture” has always felt disingenuous to me, a way to negatively frame collective social repudiation of actions that cause harm to others. It made sense to me that it ultimately makes the world a better place. It felt clean and logical. But love is the quantum unit where the clean convictions of morality break down. When I’m this close none of it makes any sense anymore. Grace for my family isn’t consistent anymore — my family is no more human than anyone else, so how could I possibly argue that my parents are uniquely deserving of absolution?
I can never figure this one out. How can I possibly develop a consistent sense of who or what deserves redemption? Would I be able to tell myself that they deserved redemption if they’d been anyone else, if I’d only known of the things they did to someone else instead of living through it myself? Would I have described that as giving them a pass for their actions? I probably would have. Why does giving someone a pass feel right, then, when it coexists with the empathy you have for those you know and love?
Does love and loyalty blind people from dealing fairly with loved ones who deserve more censure? Or does knowing someone deeply and personally create the empathy that makes you see their remorse as suffering, that makes you weigh their remorse as pain, that makes you weigh their pain against the pain they caused others, and makes you believe they deserve to be redeemed, that they’ve earned some kind of redemption? My parents aren’t more human than anyone else. My parents aren’t unique in having rich inner lives, being full of contradictions, having consciences. My parents aren’t unique in feeling guilt or remorse for irreversible harm.
Is there a point at which empathy tells us that the pain of their remorse and their attempts at change can be considered sufficiently redeeming, that they deserve good things again? Or is it all apologism, some kind of Stockholm Syndrome where knowing and caring about someone makes you willing to give them grace that they don’t deserve? Do people earn grace? Is remorse a form of pain we should empathize with, or should we consider it just desserts, worthy of no particular sympathy? Should the empathy I feel for the real pain I can see my parents feeling as remorse translate to other humans, who have done wrong and are making an effort to change and are remorseful? Everyone I love is no more or no less human than anyone else. The same morality should apply.
I can never figure this out: is it individual? Do only I get to forgive or not forgive someone who caused me serious harm? Should the outside world forgive them because I have, or would that be giving them a pass that they don’t deserve as long as the ruins that they made of me continue to walk the earth? Do even I have any right to give them absolution when I’m not the only one they’ve hurt — they hurt my siblings too, and if I could ever forgive them for myself, can I possibly justify being an outsider and giving them that absolution? Is there even any kind of standard? I don’t know. But it feels like a very important question that may have no real answers, and being close to it, both loving the people who hurt someone and being the subject of their harm, makes it much harder and messier than the abstraction of acquaintances or public figures. I stay up nights trying to find an answer. I’ve never been able to figure it out.
In my first semester of grad school, I told her I was struggling more than I had in a while and that I was worried I wouldn’t be able to manage this, that it was hard being alone, in a new country, with nobody I knew around me, how I felt like I just wasn’t cut out for this, that I never would be. We didn’t usually talk much about our feelings but I was struggling, and I think she could hear it in the dull, stumbling monotone of my voice. And she told me about how, when my family had first moved into a new country, back when I was still a teenager, that she was convinced she’d never be able to drive, that she felt like she just wasn’t cut out for it, that people who were able to drive just had something she didn’t. Years later, my sister had a terrifying encounter on a night out, and that very day she just sat down with the book, learnt everything, and she ended up passing her driving test. She became such a confident driver that even your father was impressed, she said.
She told me that she believed that if you wanted something enough, God would put in a favor for you, that a lot of the time she felt that she had some kind of godmother looking out for her. We don’t have godmothers where we grew up so when she said this she meant a fairy godmother, like in the Disney movies she’d watched with us on repeat when we were children. She’d learnt every single word to Hercules because as a toddler I loved it so much we watched it every day. She told me later that she’d gotten sick of Hercules. She did it anyway.
Ever since she was a child, she told me, she’d always dreamed of having a house of her own, where she wouldn’t have to share a roof with her extended family. Something out of the magazines. She got to have that house when we moved to Singapore and she threw herself into it with abandon- that house was my baby, she said. She met a contractor that she became friends with in a cab, where he moonlighted as a driver, and he helped her to renovate on a budget. That was her godmother, she said. She told me that, in the years after I’d left the country for college, she’d had to move out suddenly, and that somehow, miraculously, she found a place in the same building complex that was available to move into immediately. She told me she’d been talking to my dad about selling the house- her baby!- to pay for me to go to college, before she could even move in. I got the e-mail confirming a full-ride scholarship the next week. She got to have things that felt impossible when so many times things felt like they might fall through. She believed that grad school would be the same for me: no matter how impossible it felt, God would help and I’d get there.
But even with all that she feels that her parenting ledger is indelibly in the red, and I think she needs to know she’s not irredeemable. She tells me that she prayed constantly for her quick temper to ease, to not fly off the handle, and she hopes I’m proud of how now, no matter what happens, she never gets angry. She tells me a friend cheated her out of half her savings, and she didn’t feel any anger. She hoped he’d do something good for himself with the money and she’s thankful for the life she has. She’s religious, so she believes in some form of karma: whatever happens to her is God’s will, and life is a test. Misfortune is atonement. Anger would be failing the tests of her commitment to atonement.
I hate seeing her hurting. I hate hearing the haunted feeling in her voice. At moments it feels like inflicting hurt upon others is some original sin. Like some Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, the story of our family is predestined, and we are doomed to repeat ourselves over and over, and something tied into the fabric of our souls ensures that good intentions eventually devolve into inflicting pain. I was angry and said things that still haunt her. I don’t know if any real good that came out of my anger is worth having crystallized an existential crisis that consumes her every day. I don’t know how to live with having caused that kind of pain, and so I understand. I don’t wish that on her. I don’t wish that on either of us.
I try to comfort her. I remind her that at the end of the day, she did raise two pretty decent kids, both with college degrees. She tells me that if a measure of how well you raised your kids was how they treated the people around them, she must have done something right. I see her looking after her own mother, giving up any dreams she had to move back in to look after her, and I wanted her to know how much I admired that kind of self-sacrifice. I don’t tell her that I admire her strength in choosing to watch her mother die just to make her final months better, that I didn’t think I would have the strength to do the same. My grandmother is in her late eighties and my mother is only forty-five. I don’t want to think about it. I hope I don’t have to.
She tells me, and herself, that she thinks she did spend time playing with her kids, doing fun things with us, taking us on vacations and trying to spend time with us, and that was something. As she spoke, she kept hedging herself, telling me every other sentence that she wasn’t trying to avoid responsibility by saying this. It breaks my heart to see my words having become part of her own self-talk. In the final reckoning, she says, she doesn’t know if any of it mattered when she’d caused so much pain. I wanted to tell her that I felt her remorse and that I didn’t want punishment, that I loved her, but our family had always been so bad with emotions that I couldn’t verbally say “i love you, mom” on the phone, much as we both needed it. But healing is trying. Sometime after we hung up I texted her an I heart u emoji.
My parents moved to a bigger, wealthier country when we were children. Their parents moved from the country to the city before they were born. I’m here now, one step further, the first of our family to make the move to the west, inheriting the hope that any children I have will get to grow up in a place where they’ll have better lives than me, three generations living out our own versions of the immigrant dream, of struggles and sacrifices that our children would first take for granted then grow to understand.
When I was younger I thought that I would never have children, that I’d never risk my unresolved demons fucking up an innocent child. Now that I’m older, I’m more hopeful that the trauma we’ve had inflicted on us and in turn inflicted on others, generation after generation, would become something soft and gentle and beautiful. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to put in the amount of effort and sacrifice and myself into my children that my mother did, but I’m hopeful that my children will never feel fear, that they’ll get to make mistakes, that they’ll be at ease with me. I’m hopeful that, as I try to build a childhood for them in a family that expresses their emotions, that talks about their lives, that tell each other they love them without hesitation, hearts more open than I ever have, that I’ll learn to be those things too.
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zendallkiner · 5 years
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When you realize you can no longer make yourself happy
What do you do? This is a question I've frantically been striving to answer over the last few months. One morning I awoke from a haze that has fallen upon my life for the last few months only to realize what I had been doing was no longer working. The exercising that I had come to rely upon as my main form of stress relief was failing. Cooking had lost its charm making me dread thinking of going to the market much less actually being there. This left me hungry although no appetite and becoming complacent with this new reality. Reading became less if a way to enter new worlds and more of a dull activity. Honestly, the only thing I found comfort in was the dust-laden concrete floor of my room with the fan blowing in my face and the frequent yet unpredictable visits from my two year old brother. This is something that slowly became my life. Quietly, without word it took over my thoughts, my body and my emotions leaving me utterly exhausted after a day of laying around. The morning I took notice of the haze, I awoke around 10am with tears flowing for no apparent reason and still longing to be asleep. This is when something within me registered as not right. A feeling of dread overcame me when I started to realize this was not my normal although I had allowed it to be. When thinking about who I am, this picture of myself shifting from side to side on the floor day after day is not it. Rather, I imagine myself to be interesting, engaged, optimistic. When I think of who I am and who I want to be it's somebody excited to talk to others and hear about what's going on in their lives. I picture myself eager to learn and willing to try new activities. I'm emotional because that's how I've always been in leading with my heart making me want to talk about challenges people face as well as the moments of happiness that arise amidst it all. When I registered that this idea of myself no longer existed, the fear took hold. I understood something was wrong and I could no longer fix it alone. Reaching out about mental health issues is much easier said than done in my case. To reach out was to accept that I was no longer able to do something for myself that I've been doing for years. I was no longer able to make myself happy, to pull myself out of the dark places I had fallen to. Reaching out was to recognize that I had a problem and in doing so was to share it with another individual, leaving me vulnerable and at risk for judgement. To me, it felt like I would become a burden to my friends because I stopped caring to hear what was going on with them. All that mattered was what was going on in my mind and my heart. That morning, I finally made the decision to figure this out. How could I figure out what's been causing this if I didn't notice it's presence until once in the thick of it? While I had no answer to this I reached out to my doctor anyways. I had described to them the state of being I had become accustomed to and was later connected to a therapist. My whole life, I've been surrounded by those experiencing depression. It's incredibly sad to see this and know that I've also fallen subject to it as well. Over the years, I've told some of those individuals under its spell to try therapy although never experiencing it myself. Having an outside objective listener to understand and provide another perspective that could offer clarity sounded like a good idea. Some people were receptive to this suggestion while others were more resistant. When met with such resistance I often became frustrated because to me it seemed like a logical step in the right direction to finding a solution. Here I am now and feeling much more resistant than I imagined would ever feel in this situation. Friday morning rolled around to which my first intake appointment was scheduled for 10am via a telephone call. Sitting in my room with the door shut, the nerves and regret overcame me. Thinking to myself that today felt different, I actually felt a little better and maybe I no longer needed this. Maybe I misjudged the situation and really could handle it on my own. After the first 5-minute confidentiality part of the session we dove right in. Her first question being "why don't you tell me in your own words what's going on." To which I responded with tears. Choking through my answer not being able to justify where any of this was coming from. Trying to explain a feeling that just didn't seem logical was challenging and frustrating. I described the lethargy and lack of interest in all things that I love where she probed a little further to gain a greater glimpse of the overall picture at hand. By the end of the phone call, I had admitted to a lot of things I didn't realize I was feeling. Admitting to feeling like a failure, feeling overcome by depression, feeling bad about myself as a whole on most days and lacking any desire to reach out to friends and family alike. Before this discussion, many of my feelings were not put into certain categories as such. Rather, it just became this stagnant state of being so when hearing her ask these questions only to find myself responding with either "more than half of the days" or "most days" was truly devastating. They say when you have a problem, the first step is admitting it. It wasn't until I heard myself admitting these things to a stranger over the phone while sobbing on my dusty concrete floor that I understood how bad it had gotten. Recognizing this gave me the sense of agency to try to fix it or at the very least put a plan in place to start the process. Mental health is similar to physical health in that it must be made a priority. It must be actively worked on in order to get to a good place. It's a process that takes a lifetime of practice. As that practice is deepened and better understood, the experience might be a little happier accompanied by a more frequent positive mindset. But the mind and person are always subject to lulls and the quiet voice of negativity. We all experience it on some level, whether it's something we're willing to admit or not. While I've only started this process of healing two weeks ago, having a plan in place has helped. Understanding this will not happen overnight to get back to feeling like myself but that it will happen eventually so long as I stay committed, is what gives me hope. Truthfully, this is something I've felt embarrassed and quite shameful for letting it get this bad but after having my second session with the therapist, I am trying to relieve the self-imposed pressure. During this second session, she gave me a few writing activities to try as a way to organize my thoughts. A way to decipher between the facts and the feelings, coming to a more logical conclusion to certain situations or people making me feel some type of way. When doing this, she kindly reminded me to refrain from posing any judgement onto myself. I chuckled and thought that this was a silly reminder until I embarked on my first exercise when I found my inner critic to reveal itself in the most harshest of ways. As writing, I felt embarrassed for being angry and upset about these various circumstances I thought I had dealt with. Truly expressing how I feel and physically writing such thoughts down brings to life what is hiding in some of the darkest parts of my mind. To address them is to diminish the power they clearly hold in my life, but doing so non-judgementally is all a part of the process. This is what has caused me to share my process today. In an attempt to use writing, something I utterly adore, as a vehicle to unabashedly demonstrate that I'm human and as such I am not perfect. Humans have darkness looming in parts of us we never would like to give recognition to for fear of self-imposed judgment coupled with that of spectators. Others may critique who I am and how I feel as being unwarranted but as I've found myself to be the harshest critic of all, I think I can deal with the rest. As I've been trying to navigate through the negative, one positive guiding force has been yoga. I'll leave you with what my favorite instructor likes to recite during her class. You are worthy. You are strong. You are loved. You belong.
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johneetries · 5 years
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To begin...
Hello. I’m bipolar and manic depressive. I discovered these things as a result of a suicide attempt. There. Now the hard part is out of the way. Let’s get into it.
Being diagnosed with a mental illness was one of the most normal and foreign events I’ve ever experienced. Was it a surprise? No. Was it easy to digest? Double no. Being diagnosed with bipolar was a very somber “aha” moment. But before that moment could happen, a misdiagnosis inevitably happened first.
I spent this past summer working in middle-of-nowhere, South Dakota. Classic one liners about small Midwestern towns couldn’t even do justice to how desolate this place was. There were no traffic lights. No easily recognizable grocery chains. And worst of all, no Taco Bell. The events of my summer consisted mostly of two things: working and drinking. I was working over seventy hours a week. The first month I was there, I had two days off. Total. My post shift activities started simply with a beer at the bar once the restaurant was closed. Then a six pack would find it’s way home. Six became twelve. Twelve became eighteen. Eighteen became thirty. Liquor started being added to the mix. If it came between buying food or booze, I chose booze every time. Sleep became less and less until almost nonexistent. Toward the end of my time there, I was averaging between thirty minutes to two hours of sleep a morning. And I stress morning. I would generally stay up drinking until the sun had long risen. Every single night. As I reach the end of this paragraph, I can see how clear the warning signs may have seemed. But they weren’t. I was riding the wave of a bipolar high.
For the unversed, bipolar disorder exists in a spectrum of highs and lows. During the highs, the symptoms are rarely seen as symptoms. In my case, I perceived that I was feeling good. Great, even. I was putting in long hours at work and doing a damn fine job, at that. So what if I wanted to stay up drinking all night? As long as I was still functioning at work, there’s no problem. You can see how easily I was able to sway myself. Hard work equated to hard drinking. Simple math from a complicated brain. The longer the highs go unchecked, it can lead to mania. Which it did for me. Occasionally drinking all night turned into every night. And quickly. I isolated. I self-harmed. I stopped eating. The crossover from my highs to my lows were blurred. But when the lows hit, they hit hard.
Keep in mind, at this point in time, bipolar disorder was not on my mind at all. I boiled it down to simple and incorrect equations like excessive booze equals better mental state. Being a warm and welcome individual in the workplace subdued the self-hate that was growing. The whole “fake it till you make it” mentality used inappropriately. You keep your demons waiting outside your gate long enough, a few things will happen. One: more demons will show up. Two: they will grow irritable from being ignored. And three: they’re going to eventually smash that gate down and flood your castle.
My demons demolished my castle and its outlying kingdom. In one perfect storm, I completely lost my footing. For a multitude of reasons I could never describe or put into words, I decided to kill myself. And that is where I would like to leave that. While I am thankful that my attempt was unsuccessful, I will never feel the desire to talk about those moments in great detail. I know why I did what I did. I know the headspace I was in. I know the abuse I put myself through to get to that place. That is all that matters for anyone else to know. The explicit details and play-by-play of that night are mine. And mine alone. For selfish reasons, I keep that frame of thinking to myself. But for even more selfless reasons, I don’t ever want anyone to know what I was fully thinking in that moment. No one should have to ever understand how it feels to be ready and willing to take your own life. No one. There is no lower feeling than falling asleep for what you believe to be the last time.
Scratch that.
There is no worse feeling than waking up after falling asleep for what you believed to be the last time. The moment my eyes opened and I awoke cold and alone on the street, I knew that everything would change. And it did. Through a series of darkly humorous events, I eventually landed in a mental facility in Sioux Falls. Where I was held for twenty-four hours and within that time diagnosed with very base depression. A diagnosis I could have made for myself years ago. The doctors answer? Medication. Prozac. Two-hundred milligrams.
Now, I’m not sure if this a common mistake or one that was specific for me. But Prozac made me worse. Noticeably worse. It wasn’t until I started going to therapy and was diagnosed with bipolar and ordered to immediately stop taking Prozac that I started to feel better. The way it has been explained to me is antidepressants can often increase bipolar symptoms. Now for me, I was on a serious run with the lows. And Prozac was making those lows plummet further than I was ready for. It was explained to me that bipolar requires a mood stabilizer to be treated effectively. Again, not sure if this common treatment or was specific for me. But after enough time on a mood stabilizer, I could see how it was helping. But I’m jumping ahead.
Upon my release from the mental hospital and my return to Phoenix, I did eventually find therapists to see. Where I was asked a series of questions. Questions that I knew would lead to bipolar diagnosis. So when my psychologist suggested I might have bipolar, I was pretty hesitant. The questions were too obvious and handpicked for such a diagnosis. It wasn’t until he had me meet with his colleague, a psychiatrist, that things came into focus. She asked me much more specific questions. And based on my answers, she started asking questions that seemed tailor made for me. The more I answered, the more she asked. Never once did she stop to tell me I definitely had bipolar. She asked so many questions that I eventually hit my “aha” moment. I sat there in silence as it all soaked in. I’m bipolar. This is for the rest of my life. I have to do something about this. When I looked up, she was just looking back at me. Seemingly dissecting my brain through whatever my eyes were telling her. And from there we started discussing medication.
After six weeks on proper medication, I started to notice a difference. The symptoms of bipolar weren’t completely gone. But they became mild. I was balancing out. I was thinking more clearly. In the midst of all this clarity, it became important to me to not hide my mental illness. I wasn’t planning on being brash by walking around with a megaphone shouting “I’M BIPOLAR” to every passerby. But I also wasn’t going to keep quiet about it like I had some dirty secret. Because the truth of the matter is this: There are so many others like me who live with the knowledge of their illness every day. People who carry the burden of orange bottles in medicine cabinets. People who pay professionals to declutter their brains. Then there are the people who have yet to be diagnosed. The walking wounded limping their way through life. Ignoring the signs and unknowingly self-destructing.
I’ve walked both paths. I know exactly how they both feel. To be honest, neither one is great. But the fact is plain: I dodged suicide. I got a second lease on life, and I don’t want to squander it. So I’m trying to better myself and my surroundings. Maybe I’m getting things right, maybe I’m not. But I’m trying. I’m not staying on the course my life was on that got me to suicidal ideation in the first place. I’m branching out and doing things differently. And I sure as hell will not be quiet about mental health. Anyone who stumbles across this that struggles with their own fight with mental health: you are not alone. While your illness is a part of who you are, it does not define who you are. You define who you are. No battle is ever won without a fight. So fight for yourself. Fight for a better tomorrow. Fight to stay alive. Accept your reality. Own it and move forward. No one makes a better you than you. In the face of all that haunts you, live your life. Even if it feels impossible. I assure you, it is not. I am thirty-two and completely starting over. In the wake of my attempt, everything in my life has changed. For better or worse, everything has changed. I’m taking what’s left of the time I was allotted on this planet and trying to enjoy it. I hope you do the same, friends.
Until next time,
J.
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Ripple with Andy Manzi
Ripple with Andy Manzi
This March, we’ll hear from Andy Manzi, founder of the Warrior Surf Foundation, on the topic of Ripple. A perfect match, if you ask us.
A little about Andy:
After returning from tours overseas with the USMC, Manzi found myself working through the effects of TBI, PTSD and depression. Through a good friend he was introduced to surfing, and from his first ice cold winter surf, he knew he had discovered something important. Surfing changed his life and helped him to overcome those difficulties. It wasn't long before he knew this was something that other veterans could benefit from, and so they launched their program. Over time it has grown to serve more veterans, but they stay true to their roots - veterans serving veterans.
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1. What do you love most about what you do?
I love the fact that every day I work towards making the world a better place. Simple.  A million ways we can do it. Choose one. 2. What inspired you and how did you become involved in your current career(s)? 
I believed that surfing gave me a chance to live a full life and walk around with a full heart after a tough childhood and a tough war experience. I witnessed many go through a transformation during surf lessons I was teaching on Folly Beach and I was sick of all the clinical bullshit I tried to do to get better. I was tired of so many of our people committing suicide, having issues with the law, and pretty much living shitty lives, etc. I didn't want anyone like me to live in a secret prison in their minds as I did at times. A pill is only the beginning of the end for some. So I was like, screw it- let's get a specialist to helps us provide therapy on the beach and we will give free surf lessons. A lot has happened since. 3. How do you start your day? 
My mornings used to be very chaotic, actually really hard for me to find clarity especially with a load of life stuff to knock out every day. Over the past year and a half I've found myself waking before sunrise no matter where I am; just enjoying the quiet, whether it's breathing, surfing, or just sitting with a cup of coffee while looking at the sun. I feel those few hours in the early morning are crucial for your quality of life throughout the day. I'm blessed to have autonomy when it comes to my schedule, so I take a few hours for myself every day in the morning. One of the best options we have in this chaotic life. 4. Tell us about your proudest moment or accomplishment. 
I have a lot to be proud of. I've done so much. Tons of accomplishments but honestly the fact I learned to surf decently is truly the greatest accomplishment, because without it the last 12 years of my life would have been very different. *The fact that I'm in the process of passing off this Foundation to someone else** is a huge accomplishment, most NGO's never get there or fail because Founders won't give it up. 5. Do you have a hidden talent? 
I uses to think I didn't have any lol, but I actually have a few and they will stay hidden. :) 6. Who or what gives you creative inspiration? 
We are all creative in our own ways. Some with paint, others with food, for me this it’s this Foundation. My creative drive comes from wanting to see a change in the world, especially when there is an option to do so. Knowing that people need to be led through experience that propels them forward in a life that they are in control of, and one that they love. 7. Coffee fuels our morning events. If you’re a coffee drinker, what’s your go-to order?
Cold drip all-day 8. What is your favorite place in Charleston? 
Honestly, I love Queen Street grocery and the corner it sits on, I call it my secret spot lol.  I love sitting there early morning or late afternoon. I love that corner. 9. How do you unwind or de-stress? 
Cooking a nice meal alone or with close people, which is probably one of my love languages. Sitting quietly outside by the water. Surf and yoga. Now the guitar, so peaceful. Rapid Fire:
morning person or night owl? morning person
Summer of winter? Quick to say summer but I have to winter because I'm always somewhere beautiful in the winter
Mountains or beach? beach
Pancakes or waffles? waffles
Fiction or non-fiction? non-fiction-- I wish that was opposite
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New Post has been published on https://lovehaswonangelnumbers.org/energy-update-jan-2020-blinding-clarity-drama-healing-course-correction-magic-abundance/
Energy Update, Jan 2020 ~ Blinding Clarity, Drama Healing, Course Correction, Magic, Abundance
FCGCT Commentary: We are moving from the mind, to the Heart… not the balancing of the two. The mind conflicts with the Heart, and is the cause for imbalance, pain, fear, suffering and more. It is the Heart and Brain which work in harmony together. The mind… the ego, blocks the Heart, as it Edges God Out. It is the Heart and Brain which work in harmony to allow Balanced Harmonics, your Divine Blueprint. Let go of the mind, and solely flow from the Heart, connected to the Unified Heart in Unity Consciousness.
Energy Update, Jan 2020 ~ Blinding Clarity, Drama Healing, Course Correction, Magic, Abundance
By Lee Harris
There are five main themes coming up for January:
BLINDING CLARITY- a theme for the whole year of 2020 and it will be making its first big appearance this month.
DRAMA HEALING – healing from dramatic events that have recently occurred or finding new ways to deal with what used to show up as drama in your life.
COURSE CORRECTION- an energy that is going to come in very strongly in January and through early February. There will be a lot of opportunities for you to course correct.
RISE OF THE MAGICAL – magical energy beginning to show up in your personal life at play and at work.
ABUNDANCE – where the MAGICAL is concerned.  People giving you experiences, things, and opportunities that you weren’t anticipating or didn’t know you could bring to yourself.
Welcome to the first Energy Update for 2020.  This time of year always carries with it a ‘review and renewal’ energy for people that’s been a tradition for decades. We take stock of the past year and we start to think ahead, but it’s also interesting that this month is also the beginning of a new calendar decade. Certainly, in terms of spiritual, energetic, astrological terms, the 2020 to 2030 decade is going to be a huge one. So it adds some weight to the ‘review’ energy that many of us will be feeling.
BLINDING CLARITY
 In January, the first theme that came to share with you is Blinding Clarity and this also relates to the 2020 forecast (a 1-hour 11-minute detailed live video forecast, found HERE). Blinding clarity is going to be something that shows up time and time again throughout this year to come, and this can relate to many different aspects of life. 
It can mean suddenly having clarity about your life as a whole or certain situations you are personally in, but equally, for many of us on the planet, it’s going to be us suddenly having truth revealed to us that we either weren’t ready to see, weren’t seeing, or weren’t expecting. It relates to outgrowing people, places and truths that used to hold and serve us, but are no longer needed where you are going next.
So, this blinding clarity can sometimes hit you like a ton of bricks and deliver a truth that is unexpected. It can be painful to process or very shocking at the time that it happens, but as time goes on, we become more able to take a long view of why those events come up for us and what it is they’re doing for our lives. For most everybody, we are being asked to move forward and to change at higher speed than ever before. This is also because the world is changing so fast; much faster than most of us in this body, this lifetime, have ever experienced before.
Blinding Clarity is driving change, and it is happening personally, collectively and in the world at large, and while there’s a lot that we can say about that, I mostly want to focus on how that’s going to feel to many of you personally. There is often an element of shock (or grief) and having to let go of the old when new clarity emerges. However, what may be newer for most of us, is the charge of energy that comes with it. When this blinding clarity hits you – either it will come through your internal awareness or it will show up through outside events.  It’s going to have a charge unlike any other in your past and bring in an electrical energy to your field.  It might make you know what you want to do immediately or feel this real sense of fire and wanting to act on something. It brings with it an energy of doing at high speed with less fear than before. In that sense it represents a breakthrough of old limitations.
Just try and be aware of that charge being something that’s going to come through you. It’s going to activate and elevate you, which is great, but as ever, be mindful about how you act on it. When we get very electrified, we tend to want to run out into the world and sometimes force our external circumstances to match the electrical feeling that we have inside us. 
Sometimes that’s exactly what we need to do and sometimes that is how we make forward strides in life.  We either previously haven’t had the courage to make or didn’t know that we could, but equally, it can be a chaotic way of doing things if we are trying to force things before they are ready.
  If you are familiar with that ‘I need to make a change’ feeling and it starts brewing in you….:
Let it sit with you for up to a few days if you can.
Let it have some time to move through your body, mind and energy as you consider the changes you want to make.
Let it stay in your system as long as you can before you make any big or dramatic actions, for that will help the outcome.
If you can’t do any of the above, and just need to go for it, then trust the propulsion energy is what you need to follow, BUT be aware that dramatic changes can make for dramatic reactions. 
So the above considerations offer a new way to be mindful when that electrical charge comes in. 
So if you can sit with it for a while, you’ll be able to feel, “Ah! This charge, this energy, it’s reshaping me inside myself.”  
Ask yourself:
What can I practically do with this feeling and desire I have now, that is perhaps a smaller step and less impactful to my outside world while I build on and ground this energy in my body, heart and mind? 
  Blinding Clarity brings with it a big energy of transformation and if in this moment it looks like things are rearranging in you and around you, that’s where all your focus will go. But actually, if you look back a year from now or two years from now, you’ll see that what this blinding clarity is actually doing is propelling you into a higher place far beyond the current details you can see today. 
It is moving you into a more aware place and more importantly, a more aligned place. You might be slowly being shifted into a reality where you’re actually more useful to that reality than the one you are in now. Your skills, talents, and abilities are more able to come out where you are going, and so might your feelings of being present in life and in love. 
  So, it can be a tricky time to navigate emotionally, because that level of blinding clarity and the transformation energy it carries with it, has a lot of big effects on our emotional relationships and connections with each other. 
  DRAMA HEALING
This leads me to my next theme, which is Drama Healing.
So this is interesting and I’ve never heard this as a theme before, but drama healing came in very strongly as a message for January, and we can look at this several different ways. 
Drama healing can literally mean there is an actual drama in your life, (a physical, very dramatic event that can be sudden, painful, or toxic), but equally, it can mean that you are learning how to navigate out of and through dramas in a more peaceful, more stable way than ever before.  
You may find yourself taking stock and look back at your life and go, “Wow, the last time this happened in my life or something like this, I did not react very well. It caused a huge outpouring of emotion or conflict in me and things were unstable for a while.” Many of you will notice that while drama healing can mean that yes, dramas are happening in your life to force and induce healing for you, it can also mean the opposite. That you yourself are seeing that you are no longer needing to play out the kind of 3D drama game in quite the same way that you were. And that can be a great gift and feel very liberating.
Many of you will notice this ‘Drama’ theme because you might be the compassionate ear or listener to someone else who is in one of those periods, and you may have compassion, because you remember being there yourself.   Equally, there is a rise on the planet around emotional drama for people, as there is so much change happening at high speed which is putting more in touch with their feelings at deep level. And for many, that experience is like a shockwave running through mind and body. 
And most of you reading this have probably been on your path for a while, so you may have been aware that this was always going to be an explosive time on the planet and a time of big changes. 
Drama healing can also mean that if you’ve been through some big dramas in the last year or perhaps the last few years, there is going to be an energy of healing coming in for you now. So, you can really start to lean into that and start to begin to give yourself permission to recognize that the trauma can now be left behind you. That a slower period is upon you so that you can integrate. Equally, this will be a great time to go and get whatever kind of trauma therapy you really need, so that you can really work with your body for any shocks that it has been through,  You don’t need to carry that with you or be running subconscious anxiety through your next few months. 
  And anxiety is a big theme and focus on the planet right now, so it is definitely something for everybody to look at and work with. Lots of people are feeling it, it’s in the air, so it might be something that you have to be mindful to not get involved in –  the dramas of others with your emotional body. 
  Many empaths are beginning to learn, “Oh, great, I can hold space for other and I can listen, but I don’t have to run all their emotions through my body while I do that.”
Like for many of you, this lesson has definitely been a real learning curve for me personally over the years, and it takes focus, awareness and some digging deep to see where and why you began doing that in the first place. But this way of being is something that you will be starting to notice is changing energetically inside you as the months go on and January heralds a new beginning of that.
  COURSE CORRECTION
Course Correction is a theme we will be seeing in January and it is where you have made a choice, a decision or started to go in a certain path and then you get to change your mind or make a different choice. You could also be on the receiving end of someone else’s choice, so it may have resulted in shock or emotion for you. 
Course Correction energy is going to come in very strongly in January and early February, so there are going to be a lot of opportunities for you to course correct in one of two ways: 
Either the form of the choice you have made (or others have made) will be changed, meaning decisions made will be reversed or minds will be changed. Or if not the form of what ‘actually’ happened, the way you feel and get to move forward after these sudden changes will happen faster than usual because of the presence of this energy.
So, there’s a lot of intersection there around the themes of ‘Drama Healing’ and ‘Course Correction’, and sooner being able to feel open to where you find yourself, rather than to recoil or close off from it. 
These are very tender times and the emotional surface of everybody is much closer to the skin. People are either showing up in beautiful vulnerability, authenticity and leaning on one another for support, being more open with each other than ever before. Or conversely, they are fighting, with judgment and defense against what’s going on or shutting down and pulling away. This is just the heart trying to protect itself from the shock, from the pain and conflict, and we can see that energy playing out on a world scale. 
How we each deal with it, will be personal.
  RISE OF THE MAGICAL
The other theme for this month is a pleasing one-  it’s Rise of the Magical. We don’t just have The Rise of Skywalker in January (hello fellow Star Wars fans!), we also have the rise of the magical and it is going to show up in many different ways, but specifically in work and in play. 
  So for those of you who are very mission-focused – the work that you’re here to do, the mission that you’re here to have, you’re going to see a lot of magic and opening occurring in the kinds of relationships that you bring into your life to help you with your work. Perhaps, the magical will show up as just a new awareness of the good place that you’re in, because a lot of mission-focused sensitives, change makers, light workers are being really supported right now, because we need it.
This decade is going to bring a lot of challenge with it, but also a lot of positive energy around transformation. So you will be seeing a lot of magical synchronicity, connections, and opportunities coming up around the work that you do, the mission that you’re here for, but equally, play.  This relates to this new level of connection, openness, vulnerability, and sharing that is available on the planet. It doesn’t mean you should sit at home and wait for it to knock at your door, we definitely have to be proactive. 
We definitely have to recognize when we’ve been shut at home for too many years, and wonder why we feel isolated. 
Isolation is one of the issues that we have now as a theme on the planet, so we have to take steps and make strides to walk out of isolation. I always say, start with making an affirmation of intent. 
“I will bring more magical loving, wonderful friends into my life this year.” 
“I invite wonderful new people to come into my life.”
Then back up that intention with some actions. 
  Put yourself in some scenarios where you might meet some people, to show you’re willing on the ground as well as in the energy realms.
With magical new energies and the rise of the magical showing up in work and at play, it can also boil down to you feeling more present than you ever have and being able to go, “Wow, even with all that crazy that’s going on in the world, I actually, in this moment feel more present, more conscious, more alive. In a few moments that might change again, but right now I actually feel more light and more alive than I ever have.”  
That’s when you know magical energy, is in and around you and you are tapped in.  When we talk about magical things happening, they are the things that induce that state and that we also attract more of when we are living more from that state. Magic, like heart energy, is a magnetic force.
  ABUNDANCE
Magical meetings and magical opportunities is where abundance comes in as our last theme in January. Abundance where the magical is concerned, with people giving you experiences, things, and opportunities that you perhaps weren’t anticipating or didn’t know that you could bring to yourself. So there’s a real thread of connection that’s beginning to happen for those who want to find each other, so be willing for that to come into your life too.
  COMING INTO A NEW DECADE
To conclude, what we are doing in January is really opening new ways and energies for this coming decade. Most of us aren’t going to tune in on the next 10 years, which is okay, because that’s not where most of us work with our focus in our minds, but we are at the beginning of a very new decade and the energy is here now. 
If you cast your mind back to 2010 and how you felt, especially, if you were one of those people who thought that 2012 was going to change everything overnight, or you weren’t quite sure about 2012 and there was some uncertainty, take a moment to look back at all that occurred for you in this past 10 years. 
We’re in a much stronger time now in terms of collective awareness around active transformation on the planet, and there is actually less uncertainty around what is going to go on with our future now than there was in 2010. People are more aware than before of the needs we face at this time and we’re also more aware of the areas of crisis than we were in 2010. And awareness leads to change.
In 2010 there seemed to still be a lot of magical thinking in much of the spiritual community. Nothing wrong with that, but that changed after 2012, when people recognized we’re all still here being part of this 3D world yes, BUT with all the other dimensions we have available to us too. And sleeves are being rolled up by those who feel here to be part of this change era. 
This recent era that we’ve been in has held plenty of death energy, in literal and metaphoric ways. I know of lots of people who have exited the planet in not just the last year, but even the last few months and I am hearing that reported from many others too. Death energy always brings with it transformation and new birth. As those left behind, have to shift and become someone new in the wake of a loved ones passing. So in that way, death creates a birth also.
So if you are still here on the planet my friend, you have something to do and/or something to be here for in the coming decade.
We’re at the beginning of a decade where a lot of new ways on the planet will open, and also new ways of being in you, in me, and in all of us as individuals.  If you have a little nervous energy when I say that, that’s okay. It’s just an indicator that, yes, you’re in that change group, too. There are going to be some things or ways of being that you have to let go of in order to move into your next stages, but everything you’ve walked through has prepared you for the way you are right now. 
  So as we enter 2020, thanks for tuning in and I hope you have a January full of grace, healing and magic.
Much love, 
Lee
~~~~~~~~~
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thedefinitionofbts · 7 years
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Our First and Last (Ch. 9)
Ch. 1 | Ch. 2 | Ch. 3 | Ch. 4 | Ch. 5 | Ch. 6 | Ch. 7 | Ch. 8 | Ch. 9 | Ch. 10 | 
Ch. 11 | Ch. 12 (Final)
Pairings: Jeon Jungkook x Reader (MAIN) | Park Jimin x Kim Taehyung | Jung Hoseok x Min Yoongi | Kim Namjoon x Kim Seokjin
Genre: Angst, Fluff, Soulmate Au, Scifi
Words: 4.4K
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Days in lab were consuming most of your summer. Graduate classes would start in early fall, but that wasn’t until September. You had finally completed a successful attempt of the experiment Jungkook had assigned you, and were feeling much better about wasting so much material (aka convincing yourself it wasn’t all in vain).
Jungkook was always busy, and seeing him after that “visit to his apartment” was surprisingly not as awkward as you had originally prepared for. Granted you barely saw him around anyways, but when you did, the neurosurgeon had just acted like nothing out of the ordinary had happened and continued treating you the way he had before, but you were somehow less intimidated by his status.
It's not until now, that you find yourself sitting in his office once again, discussing more theories and the next steps of the project.
“I’ve made some alterations to the project” Jungkook says, as he pulls up another PowerPoint on his computer.
Damn, how does this guy have enough time on his hands to put together this stuff. It’s not like we’re having a lab meeting…
“Recently I’ve gotten a new surgical procedure approved, and it changes up the game.”
You look at him, waiting for him to continue because it’s not like you knew how important any of this was or what kind of vital role this so called procedure plays in the overall project. And you didn’t understand why he always just assumed you knew what he was talking about 100% of the time.
“It may redefine consciousness”
He pauses, perhaps waiting for an awestruck response from you, but you continue to look at him, wondering if consciousness was ever defined in the first place.
“We’ve always associated consciousness with being awake, leading us to believe that our dreams are part of our subconscious.”
You listen to him explain, trying to follow along as best you can so you won’t have to ask any dumb questions later.
“It’s a simple, minimally invasive procedure where the connections between neurons in the lower cortical layers are strengthened. You know, the area where our perceptions are bound into a cohesive whole, and this procedure could potentially change the sleep-awake dynamic, making dreams more clear and understandable.” Jungkook pauses and looks at you with that pair of memorizing doe eyes, and you almost forget what he was talking about. Good thing the eye contact only lasted for a fraction of a second because you were practically getting lost in them. “It’s like putting on glasses for the first time, there’s a certain element to that breathtaking experience of depth and clarity that we haven’t had the ability to explain properly, and now this might be the answer.”
“Is it possible that dreams and memories are one in the same?” You ask, not knowing how or why that thought suddenly popped into you head and came out of your mouth without any warning.
Jungkook slowly raises his eyes to look at you again. There was an unspoken glint in them that you had never seen before, like your question had sparked something in his own head that he wasn’t expecting.
“Memories….” He’s looking at you for an unnaturally long amount of time, before he clears his throat and averts his eyes. “We won’t know until experimentation on humans. So far, the brains of non-human primates are the closest match, and those monkeys can’t really voice anything to us.”
Another thought pops into your head.
“Do you need volunteers?”
“Y/N, I’m a biochemistry major. You’re going to need to do more explaining than that.” Hoseok says as you’re telling him about consciousness and the re-defining nature of Jungkook’s new procedure.
“Well, if we’re talking about consciousness, the simplest scenario is you looking in a mirror. Let’s say you didn’t know the mirror was placed in front of you, and you just saw a being that was exactly the same as you, down to the last subatomic particle. So how is your brain just able to know, that the supposed you that you are looking at is not you, and that the you looking at it, is you?”
“Ok, you lost me at ‘the simplest scenario’” Hoseok slumps down in his chair.
“Whatever, the point is, Dr. Jeon is going to help me clear up my dreams.”
“Y/N, you can’t just let this guy just use you as a lab rat. I mean, as hot and intelligent and skilled as he is, your not obligated to donate your body to him… ” Hoseok says before realizing he phrased that in the worst way possible. “Ok, that came out wrong, but you know what I mean.”
“But I want to, Hobi. Besides it’s a simple procedure and experimentation on humans has already been approved by the medical association.”
“But…but…”
“Just think of me as a volunteer.”
“What about the risks involved?”
“Temporary amnesia, but it’s very unlikely. Especially with someone as skilled as Dr. Jeon.”
“He’s that good?”
“He’s that good.”
Hoseok doesn’t look convinced, but you had already made your decision.
After you had revealed to Jungkook that you happen to take therapy sessions at the same clinic he goes to, Jungkook thought it was probably a good idea to pay a visit to Dr. Kim Taehyung before the actual procedure (out of respect and maybe to also apologize to his partner Jimin for being rude in the past). It was embarrassing to say the least, especially seeing the dorky smile spread across the pink-haired psychologists face as he accepted the apology in a flash.
Taehyung, however, had not been as easily forgiving, and he was far from happy about the whole “experimental procedure”.
“As her psychologist, I’ll need to take more factors into account.” Taehyung says as Jimin stands behind the couch he was sitting on.
Jungkook was sitting on the other couch across from Taehyung. It was like having a therapy session; only there were two faces across from him, Taehyung and Jimin, which made Jungkook feel even more uneasy because of the antagonistic terms they had been on before. The three of them were in Taehyung’s office, and Jungkook thinks this is about as friendly as he’s ever been (or is ever going to be) with the two psychologists. He’s also starting to think that maybe this was a bad idea, but he sucks it up like always and explains the actual procedure.
“She’s agreed to go through with it, and there are virtually no risks involved”
“Dr. Jeon, you do realize that most professors don’t consider doing experiments on their students, right?” Taehyung voices, only to have Jimin whisper “Taehyung!” and nudge his shoulder, reminding him that Jungkook has no ill intentions.
“I wouldn’t if I wasn’t confident that this procedure is harmless,” Jungkook says. He looks down, as if trying to summon more words of reassurance; more ways to convince Taehyung that he knows what he’s doing and he’s worked his whole life for this.
“This might even help her condition” Jimin says to Taehyung after realizing the latter hasn’t responded.
Taehyung sighs after a long drawn out silence where him and Jungkook were basically just staring each other down. “Very well, I’m going to trust you, as a doctor, to make sure she comes out of this unharmed.”
Taehyung was recalling the last session he had with you, thinking about how much you struggled to remember the last event that happened in your dream, after they the man that had consistently been present, suddenly disappeared. But the thing that really caught Taehyung’s attention and came as a shocking revelation was the fact that Jeon Jungkook was the very professor you were doing research under. All of this lead Taehyung to feel weirdly attacked in way because Jungkook had been showing up everywhere ever since Jimin brought him into the clinic and started treating him. Not only was he the central topic him and Jimin would talk about most of the time, he recently shifted to also becoming the main focus of his therapy sessions with you. And just when Taehyung thought it couldn’t get any more “intimate” with Jungkook, here he was again, directly dealing with this admittedly “hot” neurosurgeon whose life kept getting intertwined with his and Jimin’s.
“Thank you, Dr. Kim” Jungkook says, feeling his face flush a little for the first time in years. The office room suddenly felt uncomfortably warm, making Jungkook tug at the collar of his dress shirt.
Taehyung swallows, not knowing if he preferred this side of Jungkook to his previous commanding alter ego, but one thing’s for sure, it’s certainly going to take some getting used to.
“Well, that’s that then” Jimin says, clapping his hands together. He was clearly unaware of the awkwardness looming in the atmosphere, but at least he saved both Jungkook and Taehyung from another moment of drawn out awkward silence.
“Dr. Jeon, where are we going?” You ask as Jungkook tells you to take a walk with him after lab.
It was the day before the procedure, and Jungkook had told you to take a break from doing experiments, which somehow entailed doing something outside of lab with him for a second time. He was probably just trying to get you to relax so you could be in a physically optimum condition for the procedure, so you don’t question him on the matter and just decide to go along.
It was early afternoon and the weather was mild, sunny with a cool breeze. The scenery was very green, different shades ranging from bright chartreuse to dark pine, splattered across your visual field; a perfect contrast to the light blue sky, the patches of yellow dandelions in the grass, and the dark maroon colored shrubs lining the side of the path.
“About what you said the other day….” Jungkook begins to say as the two of you are walking along a cobblestone trail behind the hospital. He was wearing a navy blue, knitted sweater, with a white-collar, and his black slacks and dress shoes were on point as always.
“About dreams and memories…” He looks at you, almost hesitating to continue.
“Oh, that was just my mind running off to places.” It surprises you that he’s still thinking about what you said. You didn’t actually think it through before it just came out of your mouth, and you certainly didn’t expect Dr. Jeon to actually take that comment so seriously.
“It’s something I’ve also thought about. In the past and up until now.”
You find yourself confused again, but you had long gotten used to feeling this way whenever you had conversations with Jungkook. His mind always seems too far ahead of yours, and you’re never able to catch what he’s trying to get at. But this time, his words really grab your attention.
“Those paintings. They’re places I feel like I’ve been. The dreams I used to have, although it sounds crazy, but they feel too real to just merely be dreams.”
At this point there’s a thought in the back of your mind, that you don’t have the courage to voice or even think about. It’s always been there, like some crazy idea that was a manifestation of your mind playing tricks on you, but you’ve always kept it buried because maybe you were insane to think that everything Jungkook was saying is eerily similar to your own feelings about your dreams, too similar. But saying that out loud might make it seem like you were trying too hard to resonate with his words and might strip them of profoundness, so you always chose to stay silent.
And the two of you continue walking for what feels like an eternity but is only probably no more than five minutes, until the second surprise of the day decides to hit you in the face.
Through the corner of you eye, you see whom is undoubtedly Hoseok chatting with someone in the distance. He hadn’t spotted you and Jungkook yet, so you decide to do something you didn’t think you had the guts to, which was push Jungkook back behind the nearest tree, because you were not about to go through a long ass explanation about why you were with him outside of lab, again. And Hoseok would be having a field day if he saw you walking together, side-by-side, chatting like you were close friends or even worse…
You heart was pounding, and you immediately regret what you just did because prior to today, you had never even come close to making physical contact with the guy. But by some unseen force that came over you two seconds ago, you were somehow given the audacity to just slammed him into a tree on a whim. At this point, you can’t even bring yourself to lift your head and look at the expression on his face because the physical distance between the two of you was too close to even breathe. He was basically cornering you against the tree.
“Wait, isn’t that the guy you came with on the first day” You hear Jungkook ask as he peaks at them from behind the tree you guys were hiding by. “And what’s he doing with Yoongi?”
“What?” You ask while simultaneously turning and taking a look for yourself, forgetting the nervous regret that was strangling you earlier. Low and behold, the guy Hoseok was chatting with was indeed Min Yoongi.
“Are you sure I’m allowed in the palace?” Jimin asks, as the young prince guides him through the empty halls and eerie chambers.
“My father is visiting a neighboring state, so he won’t be back until later” The young prince reassures the fairy boy.
It was Park Jimin’s seventh visit to the Yang Dimension in Kim Taehyung’s timeline, but the young prince has already grown attached to bubbly fairy boy and the new found company of his first ever friend.
Taehyung looked forward to seeing Jimin, every year. Planning out everything he wanted to do with the boy during his short visits, and even making trips deep into the forest every day of the year to look for Jimin, despite the latter telling him he can only travel through the portal once a year on that specific day. But Taehyung never stopped thinking that just in case Jimin is able to come back more than once a year, he wouldn’t miss a single opportunity to see his only friend, even if it meant extra severe beatings from his father for leaving the palace, more cuts from the thorny bushes in the forest, and the fatigue, due to physical exertion, that would constantly wash over his frail body.
Their time together never felt like it was enough, because even when Jimin was there, Taehyung still missed him, and he would always cry himself to sleep at night every time the pink-haired boy left to go back to the Yin Dimension. He knew there was nothing either of them could do about it, but he learned to cherish every second he was fortunate enough to have with Park Jimin. To him, the fairy-boy’s yearly visits were the only thing worth waiting and living for, like the perfect rainbow after a destructive thunderstorm or the irreplaceable stable comfort of a home that never existed.
“Will you come back?” The prince had never failed to ask the same question every year. Never getting tired of hearing the same answer, the only answer he ever wants to hear.
“Yes, you’ll see me again next year.” The reassuring musical voice of Jimin would calm him, ever so slightly, but it was fleeting and just like his visits, it never lasted long enough.
“Please don’t leave me.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
This was the first time Taehyung had brought Jimin to the palace. They spend a day playing in Taehyung’s bedroom, laughing and chatting until the yellow-orange glow of the sunset filled the room.
“Jimin?”
“Hmmm?”
“Can I kiss you?”
The fairy boy is startled by the young prince’s sudden request, lavender eyes a dazzling contrast against the warm toned world, flawless pale skin almost translucent under the sunlight, but without answering he smoothly leans in and kisses Kim Taehyung on the lips. Their soft skin melding into one as cool meets warm in a perfect fusion of atomic particles from opposing dimensions.
The emotion swelling in their chests is like nothing either of them has ever felt before, but as quickly as the moment had escalated, it ended just as abruptly. The sound of the door to Taehyung’s bedroom banging against the wall as it is kicked open by a guard is loud enough to shatter the glass windows.
“Remove that filthy animal!” The King’s voice is deep and disgusted as he walks up behind the group of guards that have just barged into the prince’s room.
“Jimin, run!” Taehyung yells desperately, as he stares wide eyed as his father whose face is full of fury. The alarm in his mind is ringing, causing him to feel a sharp pain in his head.
“GO!!”
Jimin dashes out of the room, agile feet allowing him to dodge the guards. He turns his head one last time, only to see the King land a forceful punch on the prince’s beautiful face. The scene almost causes him to stop in his tracks, but Taehyung’s scream for Jimin to keep running prevents him from turning back.
As he hops down the steps and out of the palace, the image of Taehyung’s bloody lips and bruised eyes has manifested into physical pain for Jimin. He clutches his chest as he sprints into the forest, blinking away the tears that are blurring his vision.
“It’s Jungkook and Y/N” Taehyung says when he puts his earphones in, hastily dials Jimin’s, and hears the voice on the other end. He sitting in rush hour traffic now, with rain beating down on the window shield of his car as the windshield wiper desperately tries to swipe the buckets of water away. The obnoxious honks of the cars stuck in a their lanes is irritating, but Taehyung has more important things on his mind.
“What’s with them?” Jimin’s voice on the receiving end sounds muffled due to the bad signal.
“They’re from the first parallel universe we met in” Taehyung can feel his heartbeat quicken as the words leave his mouth. He had been having this sort of hunch for a while now, but only recently was it confirmed.
“The Yin and Yang dimensions?” Jimin’s voice is louder now, but Taehyung can still hear the sounds of sizzling vegetables being stir-fried in the background. Jimin was cooking dinner.
“Yes.”
“What? Are you saying we finally found another pair? How do you know?”
“The surgery. When she woke up, she was able to recall memories her brain had previously neglected. The ones that manifested in her dreams.”
“So Dr. Jeon just successfully redefined dreams and memory in consciousness? Wait, what happens now?” Jimin is trying to steady his rushed thoughts, but all of his questions are just tumbling out of his mouth.
“Are you ever going to stop drooling over the guy?” Taehyung’s voice comes out slightly irritated due to traces of jealously he won’t ever admit to. He narrows his eyes, even though Jimin can’t see him.
“Hey, I’m just interested in his research” The latter defends.
“Whatever, the point is, I think she’ll figure it out soon, if she hasn’t already.”
“But Dr. Jeon doesn’t know, does he?”
“Why do you keep referring to him so formally?”
“Because he has just graced humanity with other worldly knowledge and made a groundbreaking discovery, I feel weird just calling him “Jungkook”, it seems so….informal”
Taehyung rolls his eyes, and inhales a long breath of air before exhaling and tightening his grip on the steering wheel as the vehicles lined up in front of his finally begin to inch forward.
“Whatever, the point is, no he doesn’t know yet, so it’s up to you to guide him.”
“Me?! Why is all the pressure suddenly on me?”
“Have you forgotten you’re his psychologist?” Taehyung closes his eyes and leans he head back against the head rest, thinking that maybe Jimin was so caught up with how “hot” Jungkook is, that he forgot why he was treating him in the first place.
“Oh, yeah….” Jimin swallows nervously, half struggling to register all this new information and half trying to connect it all back to whatever he previously knew.
“You said he had dreams right? From what I can tell, those dreams sound awfully similar to Y/N’s dreams, which means there’s still hope.”
“Yeah, hope…..”
A week after you had woken up from your procedure with Taehyung by your side, everything was starting to come together. You had explained to him that you were certain that you had met Jeon Jungkook in another universe, and somehow ended up in this one after both of you had decided to “jump”. At the time, you had look at the golden-haired psychologist, waiting for a confirming response, although you already knew that nothing he said then was going to change your mind about what you were already certain of. You even told him about the paintings in Jungkook’s apartment, and the fact that you know him and Jimin are from the same universe.
“Y/N, I think you should come on a little trip with Jimin and I” was Taehyung’s only response.
And so Taehyung and Jimin had decided to take you by the ocean, thinking that perhaps the atmosphere was suitable for the long story that they decided to orally narrate for you. Before the procedure, you would’ve waved everything they were saying off as if they were telling you some fictional fantasy only fit for teenagers, but everything you’ve been seeing in your sub-conscious dreams had already come together and you knew it was real, just like you had always wanted to believe that it was.
However, what happened to them after they jumped into the wormhole was still overwhelming and heart wrenching, and you tried to suppress the questions forming in your head as they talked because you didn’t want to interrupt the captivating tale. They spoke of different universes, where they met only to fall in love again, cycles of hard fought beginnings and inevitable endings, in search of a place where eternal love could exist.
“Maybe eternal love just doesn’t exist” You say, listening to the waves of the ocean crash against the rocky shores as Jimin finishes and falls silent.
“Contrary to popular belief, it actually does, but the catch is, sacrifices have to be made.” Jimin looks at you with an aged smile that transcends his physical youth and reflects the amount of hardships he’s gone through. Noticing that his philosophical thoughts have put you in a confused state, he proceeds to explain in more detail.
“Matter that forms the bond of love can only choose one or the other. Either the medium exists eternally or the bond of love exists eternally, but one has to be traded for the other. That’s what Taehyung and I have discovered over the years, throughout our travels to different dimensions and our struggles to finally find each other again. We’ve learned that this particular trade-off is the only constant in every dimensional universe.” Jimin explains, his eyes dreamy now as he looks towards the setting sun.
There’s a long silence and the only thing that can be heard is the ocean, waves growing stronger as the sun disappears below the horizon, signaling the pending rise of the moon from its slumber.
“You know why the people in both the Yin and Yang dimensions never get a taste of true love?” Jimin asks.
“Because they’d rather choose eternal life?”
“That and because they are literally missing their other half” He smiles, and you could see the moon’s glow reflecting off his clear skin and crescent shaped eyes.
“Do you think he’ll ever remember?” The procedure was the only way you were able to, and you know there’s no way Jungkook could ever operate on himself. But deep in your gut you’re also certain that even if he never does you’ll still wait for him up until the end of your days. Because even breathtakingly beautiful is an understatement for the memories you have of him, and as long as you had the power to, you would never that go.
“There were several universes where I had to wait for him and others where he had to wait for me. We were lucky we recognized each other at the same time in this one, because knowing and waiting really takes a toll. We know from experience.” Jimin reaches over and gently pats you on the shoulder. His touch loosening a bit of the tension you didn’t realize was there.
“We’ve been to many parallel universes, but we ultimately decided to stay in this one. It’s the only one we’ve come across that allows us to spend the entirety of our lives together, and that’s all we’ve ever wanted anyways.” Jimin says.
“So what made you guys choose this universe?”
“We realized that us escaping to different universes was still choosing physical matter over love. And after so much waiting and painful goodbyes, we eventually decided it was time to let go of the medium. To choose love as the thing we wanted to last eternally.”
He pauses and looks over at Taehyung in the distance, who has walked down to the beach to soak his feet in the foamy water. The tender look in his eyes speaks of solace and gratitude.
“Whether we remember it or not, our love will always be there long after our physical bodies cease to exist. It’ll make a home in the colorful swirl of the gravitational field of gaseous stars; the image of the full moon on a clear night sky, representing the feeling of longing between distanced lovers; the pastel colors of the sky slowly lighting up at dawn and the warm hues of sunset mixed with the cool toned reflection of water. It’ll manifest in the sound and smell of rain, the strong, continuous flow of waterfalls, and perhaps in the stories that are passed down from generation to generation.”
That’s when you realize Jimin was right. And at that moment, you finally understand why the legend of Park Jimin and Kim Taehyung is told to every kid in the Yin and Yang dimensions and why it’s such an unchanging tradition.
...
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batterymonster2021 · 5 years
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Loving your lady parts as a path to success, power & global change: Alisa Vitti at TEDxFiDiWomen
New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/loving-your-lady-parts-as-a-path-to-success-power-global-change-alisa-vitti-at-tedxfidiwomen/
Loving your lady parts as a path to success, power & global change: Alisa Vitti at TEDxFiDiWomen
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Translator: Monika Kapuscinska Reviewer: Reiko Bovee I’ve waited all day to get my arms on you. So, I wish to take you back to the place I was about 14 years ago. I was once a student at Johns Hopkins university, and i was once equipped to start my existence, I was once planning to become OB/GYN. And my body, out of the blue, went into complete hormonal fall down. And thus, so did my lifestyles, fully dysfunctional. I couldn’t stand up, couldn’t go to sleep, couldn’t have any energy. It was a non-stop nightmare to get up now not recognizing your self and now not realizing the best way to are living within the physique that you simply had.I need you to snapshot me. I fairly do need you to seem. (Laughter) I was once 200 kilos. I do know, correct? Protected face, chest, back, arms, wherever that you just could put, in painful cystic pimples. It would take me half an hour within the morning of cautious uncomfortable utility of make-up to try to move outside. I was once depressed; I was exhausted; i would menstruate once a yr, and no one had any inspiration what used to be wrong with me.It had been getting progressively worse from in regards to the age of 15. And i used to be getting progressively more curious and frustrated. And in considered one of my insomniac moments I was on the library, of direction, science nerd, horny scientist, i might like to say. Getting to know in some of the obstetrics journals. And i saw this small be trained on a sickness known as Stein-Leventhal disorder. It used to be named after the gentleman who categorised this grouping of symptoms. I said, "Oh my god, I match this description to a tee." So I felt very naughty, however I ripped off the file, and the next morning I very vigorously marched into my gynecologist place of job.Without an appointment, of path, very first thing in the morning, i am like, "hi, so I suppose I just discovered what’s been wrong with me for the final seven years, and i would like a transvaginal ultrasound right now!" She looked at me, "How have you learnt what that’s?" and i stated, "Let’s do this confirmatory test and let’s examine." I said, "i’m now not leaving here except we do it." So we did it. And he or she said, "look at that! You do have Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. In fact, you were proper!" And being a now-what-solution style of girl I mentioned, "So now what? What do we do?" "Now i do know what it is ultimately! Now what?" She mentioned, "good…" and i’m going to never omit sitting in that chair in her place of work. She mentioned, "you have a future laid out ahead of you of obesity, diabetes, infertility, heart ailment, and cancer. And we’ll medicate you along the best way, so don’t worry." and that i do not forget sitting in that chair.And it wasn’t out of anger, or a sense of victimhood; there was once no battle; it was simply on a cellular degree; my entire being said, "No, thanks," and i said to her, "thanks very so much for your opinion. I’ll take my very expensively expert Hopkins intellect and go figure this out." So that is what I did. And i apprenticed myself with all forms of healers, and i used to be doing all different types of fun experiments. I had grew to become orange from drinking a lot carrot juice at one point. My female friend at that time – she’s still my first-class pal – she grabbed me and he or she mentioned, "you may have turned orange. It’s time to discontinue this scan." And "I ought to finish this scan!" (Laughter) None of those experiments made any trade in my signs at all. After which, about ten years ago, what was coming to the forefront in nutritional science was this proposal of nutritional genomics that you just could use food to control gene expression.Oh, I used to be so became on by this. I said, well if that’s feasible, if food might make a decision– you recognize, in a collection of twins, if the weight-reduction plan in a single twin can make a decision how her well being is going to happen versus her same twin with an extra diet, distinctive issues, what can i do with meals to recalibrate my hormonal process? And that’s once I dove into my study and studied sensible medication, opted-out, freaked out my mothers and fathers, didn’t emerge as a health practitioner, and instead became a functional nutritionist and developed this five-step nutritional protocol that rebooted my entire endocrine approach as you will find how superb I appear now. (Applause) (Laughter) And opened my core in mid-town long island nine years ago and started treating other ladies with similar conditions: menstrual issues, fertility problems, low vigour, low libido. And they’d come into my middle, limping with these issues, periods out of whack, could not get pregnant if they’ve tried 17 times, are not able to function, can’t bear in mind the final time once they thought about intercourse, or pleasure, or whatever.And in a similar fashion, their lives have been also untethered, uncentered; they were not, they did not have their middle point. And we would follow the protocol, and their health disorders would get to the bottom of themselves, brilliant matters for me as a scientist, like a woman with no period for 17 years she’d have to go to the health care professional as soon as a yr to be triggered with progesterone to have a bleed. She menstruates month-to-month now. And we’re shut friends, I simply in finding that whole story so interesting. An extra lady got here in on delivery manipulate, on Prozac, in a job she hated, in a relationship she hated. We received her off all of those medications, of direction, with the help of her physician, and six months later she wrote me and he or she stated, "by the way, feeling best," – that used to be a given – and stated, "Moved to L.A.And have gotten my first screenwriter job, and the show that i’m writing for is now being in syndication." Love that. One more girl had two firms, had all kind of matters occurring in her lifestyles, exclusive Pilates clients in the big apple, very fancy, had her possess studio in Greenwich, Connecticut; husband was once in transition in his career. And she used to be having erratic cycles. She’s in her mid-30s. We utilized the protocol to her body. And with no trouble – this is the part that I variety of get serious about – without problems, her body restored itself. Recollect that sport, connect four? I love that game, I used to play that always with my brother.So, you already know, her whole existence simply began lining up. She with ease let go of these customers in big apple, allowed one in all her companions at the studio to take on extra accountability. And she realized that she had been putting off having a baby for some distance too long, and was once in a position to conceive naturally for this reason of the work which used to be so exciting to see. And, of course, being any person who’s all in favour of biology, i like the inspiration that she was once therapy herself of those signs, all of these ladies.But the bigger discovery was that if a girl is in line, in alignment, in harmony with that inside ecosystem that she has, that starts offevolved to impregnate the ecology of her whole existence. With this thought of transformation; your body is a transformation agent. And then that can begin to affect the relaxation of your existence. So unique. And that is when I fell in love; I mentioned, "Oh, my God." here we are, we are walking round with these blueprints in our our bodies that inform us how you can live and work in a technique that’s in the waft of our bodies. And if we are able to emerge as fluent in the language of our biochemistry, and our physiology, this grouping of glands and organs – that I wish to call woman ingredients – that we will have access to an infinite supply of vigor, and vitality, and clarity, and unwavering purpose.I mean I was completely hooked. So, Aldous Huxley as soon as mentioned that man is an intelligence basically in servitude to his organs. And that i concept, that’s unhappy, that we appear at being in our our bodies as this style of slavery based lure that we need to deal with. And i’ve fairly as a substitute found that females who get into partnership with their our bodies end up becoming the fullest expression of themselves, and dwelling as leaders and change marketers of their lives and communities. So let me introduce you to your lady parts. I simply cannot support myself. If i’m on stage i will speak about woman components, i will let you know about them. I need you to as a minimum go residence realizing what they’re.(Laughter) Nothing else. So, there are two things i want you to understand. First is the physiological structure to your body known as the endocrine system. Six glands. Hypothalamus in the midbrain, pituitary gland nestled close by means of, thyroid, here, pancreas, right here, adrenals, here, ovaries, right here. They work in an interconnected method making definite that your body has what it wishes to function: mind, coronary heart, muscle, tissue, hormones. Interesting. And they’re so enormously sensitive. Hypothalamus works with this factor known as poor bio-suggestions so any time that some thing happens, the temperature changes outside, hypothalamus picks that up, pituitary gland sends a message to the thyroid, all of a sudden, you might be adjusting to the temperature.You did not have got to do a thing. You were simply having fun with the climate. Love that. Genius. Most effective in a physique could that happen. Anyway, then there may be this physiological structure: your hormonal ratios; you’ve gotten 4 of them that happen in a single month cycle. And it is really fascinating, since we most effective ever reference that in an extraordinarily normal manner: "I want to get pregnant," or "i do not wish to get pregnant." that’s how we reference these hormonal ratios. The ovulation one is type of essentially the most famous. And the period, the menstrual phase is probably the most infamous. But there are four. There are a couple of others. So i want you to begin to feel about the place you might be in that cycle. And here are the 4 phases. First you’ve the follicular section, exciting phase. And neurochemically these hormonal ratios trade your mind chemistry. So you’re a further character, week over week inside a month. Yeah, you already know. (Laughter) In that follicular section, the place the eggs are style of coming as much as maturity; one is going to make it to the Fallopian tube, very enjoyable time.(Laughter) Neurochemically speakme, you’ve gotten essentially the most entry to ingenious vigour that you are going to have the entire month. Simply. This can be a excellent time to start new initiatives: mastermind, plan, dream colossal, all of that. In the ovulatory section, which everyone knows very good, so i’m not going to dive into it. In the ovulatory section, we’ve the high-quality communication abilities and probably the most power that we can have the entire month. This is absolutely a time to have fundamental conversations. Would it be genius when you could plan to ask for a elevate when you’re ovulating? (Laughter) Whoever is attempting not to give you the carry is like, "Please take the money. You are so irresistible." (Laughter) Or go on a first date, or have an most important dialog with your partner. Or inform your mom something you rather want her to claim sure to. You’re only a magnet at that time. In a luteal section, B vitamins are being called into action, for the reason that the liner is thickening, and it’s a very energized approach. However we become very element oriented right now. So that shoe closet you couldn’t get to arrange earlier than, that is the week.Detail oriented duties are very effortless to do. Try not to plan them in the different two weeks. Within the fourth phase, the menstrual segment, this is the time of the month when you simply have probably the most lively conversation between the right and the left hemispheres of the mind. So strong! So, if you are looking into course right, evaluation your existence in the past 30 days, how you probably did this month, this may be the time to do it. You are most competent to acquire those gut feeling physique messages.So, take become aware of, take a moment to take realize at the moment. Gloria Steinem mentioned, when she was talking about the film, "omit illustration" which i love, she stated, "ladies are taught to view their our bodies as unending tasks to work on, whereas, boys from a young age are taught to view their our bodies as instruments to grasp their environment." I actually fell off my chair once I heard her say that.Due to the fact that is not that the truth? We, as women, get on this hamster wheels of self-development and self sabotage. And we don’t be taught about these predominant, actual bodily buildings in our our bodies that provide us this blueprint to the way to prepare our lives. I mean, in the event you clearly adhere to the map you study exactly what you should consume, while you will have to eat it, the way you will have to transfer your body, the way you will have to prepare social commitments, work priorities. It can be all laid out for you. You don’t have got to consider, or do, or push, or battle. It can be simply there for you. And sadly, the environment is somewhat bit learning us correct now. Lady’s our bodies are in hormonal breakdown in epidemic proportions. I feel it can be 20 million ladies within the Unites States suffer from endometriosis, fibroid, PCOS… In 2009, 1.42 billion greenbacks have been spent on infertility remedies. Premiums of idiopathic "no-known" reason of infertility are on the rise in both men and ladies.Cancers of the reproductive organs are on the upward push in guys and women. Medications are being prescribed, left and proper, for medication of matters that do not rather need remedy, but relatively need a systemic method. And additionally it is fascinating, on account that we’re also in a very equally intriguing historical second, the place we now have essentially the most vigour economically and because the largest patron demographic than we’ve ever had earlier than. Which you can literally vote together with your dollars to claim to corporate the united states, "whats up, i would such as you to custom-match an environment for me." "i might love to peer extra maternal care there." So, on the middle we want to empower as many ladies as can to be trained this language, and leverage their bodies as a device.So, I want to provide the three things that we teach every person. The first is you have to fall in love. You have got to study what these ingredients do and how you can devour to support them, so they are able to operate optimally for you. The 2nd factor is that you simply have got to commit, commit to this new relationship with your body. I would like you to plot your month, thematically, week over week, in keeping with these hormonal ratios, so that you could just do extra, go teach your lifestyles; I call it "in-body time management". The 0.33 thing is, i need you to begin to leverage your body as a energy device. And i need you to reply the query that none of my sufferers can ever answer the first time I ask it of them, which is: if I have been to wave a magic wand and repair your body to superb vitality what would you do with that energy? How would you be a transformation agent in the world? If that you may start to answer that query, then we are able to relatively step into our roles as leaders as women.So, females provide birth via the body. The most important act of our generation of females goes to be to be in a partnership with the body, to not depart it out. And i relatively want to see you’re keen on your woman ingredients, transform your life, and change the sector. I am Alisa Vitti. It’s been an honor. (Applause) .
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airoasis · 5 years
Text
Loving your lady parts as a path to success, power & global change: Alisa Vitti at TEDxFiDiWomen
New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/loving-your-lady-parts-as-a-path-to-success-power-global-change-alisa-vitti-at-tedxfidiwomen/
Loving your lady parts as a path to success, power & global change: Alisa Vitti at TEDxFiDiWomen
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Translator: Monika Kapuscinska Reviewer: Reiko Bovee I’ve waited all day to get my arms on you. So, I wish to take you back to the place I was about 14 years ago. I was once a student at Johns Hopkins university, and i was once equipped to start my existence, I was once planning to become OB/GYN. And my body, out of the blue, went into complete hormonal fall down. And thus, so did my lifestyles, fully dysfunctional. I couldn’t stand up, couldn’t go to sleep, couldn’t have any energy. It was a non-stop nightmare to get up now not recognizing your self and now not realizing the best way to are living within the physique that you simply had.I need you to snapshot me. I fairly do need you to seem. (Laughter) I was once 200 kilos. I do know, correct? Protected face, chest, back, arms, wherever that you just could put, in painful cystic pimples. It would take me half an hour within the morning of cautious uncomfortable utility of make-up to try to move outside. I was once depressed; I was exhausted; i would menstruate once a yr, and no one had any inspiration what used to be wrong with me.It had been getting progressively worse from in regards to the age of 15. And i used to be getting progressively more curious and frustrated. And in considered one of my insomniac moments I was on the library, of direction, science nerd, horny scientist, i might like to say. Getting to know in some of the obstetrics journals. And i saw this small be trained on a sickness known as Stein-Leventhal disorder. It used to be named after the gentleman who categorised this grouping of symptoms. I said, "Oh my god, I match this description to a tee." So I felt very naughty, however I ripped off the file, and the next morning I very vigorously marched into my gynecologist place of job.Without an appointment, of path, very first thing in the morning, i am like, "hi, so I suppose I just discovered what’s been wrong with me for the final seven years, and i would like a transvaginal ultrasound right now!" She looked at me, "How have you learnt what that’s?" and i stated, "Let’s do this confirmatory test and let’s examine." I said, "i’m now not leaving here except we do it." So we did it. And he or she said, "look at that! You do have Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. In fact, you were proper!" And being a now-what-solution style of girl I mentioned, "So now what? What do we do?" "Now i do know what it is ultimately! Now what?" She mentioned, "good…" and i’m going to never omit sitting in that chair in her place of work. She mentioned, "you have a future laid out ahead of you of obesity, diabetes, infertility, heart ailment, and cancer. And we’ll medicate you along the best way, so don’t worry." and that i do not forget sitting in that chair.And it wasn’t out of anger, or a sense of victimhood; there was once no battle; it was simply on a cellular degree; my entire being said, "No, thanks," and i said to her, "thanks very so much for your opinion. I’ll take my very expensively expert Hopkins intellect and go figure this out." So that is what I did. And i apprenticed myself with all forms of healers, and i used to be doing all different types of fun experiments. I had grew to become orange from drinking a lot carrot juice at one point. My female friend at that time – she’s still my first-class pal – she grabbed me and he or she mentioned, "you may have turned orange. It’s time to discontinue this scan." And "I ought to finish this scan!" (Laughter) None of those experiments made any trade in my signs at all. After which, about ten years ago, what was coming to the forefront in nutritional science was this proposal of nutritional genomics that you just could use food to control gene expression.Oh, I used to be so became on by this. I said, well if that’s feasible, if food might make a decision– you recognize, in a collection of twins, if the weight-reduction plan in a single twin can make a decision how her well being is going to happen versus her same twin with an extra diet, distinctive issues, what can i do with meals to recalibrate my hormonal process? And that’s once I dove into my study and studied sensible medication, opted-out, freaked out my mothers and fathers, didn’t emerge as a health practitioner, and instead became a functional nutritionist and developed this five-step nutritional protocol that rebooted my entire endocrine approach as you will find how superb I appear now. (Applause) (Laughter) And opened my core in mid-town long island nine years ago and started treating other ladies with similar conditions: menstrual issues, fertility problems, low vigour, low libido. And they’d come into my middle, limping with these issues, periods out of whack, could not get pregnant if they’ve tried 17 times, are not able to function, can’t bear in mind the final time once they thought about intercourse, or pleasure, or whatever.And in a similar fashion, their lives have been also untethered, uncentered; they were not, they did not have their middle point. And we would follow the protocol, and their health disorders would get to the bottom of themselves, brilliant matters for me as a scientist, like a woman with no period for 17 years she’d have to go to the health care professional as soon as a yr to be triggered with progesterone to have a bleed. She menstruates month-to-month now. And we’re shut friends, I simply in finding that whole story so interesting. An extra lady got here in on delivery manipulate, on Prozac, in a job she hated, in a relationship she hated. We received her off all of those medications, of direction, with the help of her physician, and six months later she wrote me and he or she stated, "by the way, feeling best," – that used to be a given – and stated, "Moved to L.A.And have gotten my first screenwriter job, and the show that i’m writing for is now being in syndication." Love that. One more girl had two firms, had all kind of matters occurring in her lifestyles, exclusive Pilates clients in the big apple, very fancy, had her possess studio in Greenwich, Connecticut; husband was once in transition in his career. And she used to be having erratic cycles. She’s in her mid-30s. We utilized the protocol to her body. And with no trouble – this is the part that I variety of get serious about – without problems, her body restored itself. Recollect that sport, connect four? I love that game, I used to play that always with my brother.So, you already know, her whole existence simply began lining up. She with ease let go of these customers in big apple, allowed one in all her companions at the studio to take on extra accountability. And she realized that she had been putting off having a baby for some distance too long, and was once in a position to conceive naturally for this reason of the work which used to be so exciting to see. And, of course, being any person who’s all in favour of biology, i like the inspiration that she was once therapy herself of those signs, all of these ladies.But the bigger discovery was that if a girl is in line, in alignment, in harmony with that inside ecosystem that she has, that starts offevolved to impregnate the ecology of her whole existence. With this thought of transformation; your body is a transformation agent. And then that can begin to affect the relaxation of your existence. So unique. And that is when I fell in love; I mentioned, "Oh, my God." here we are, we are walking round with these blueprints in our our bodies that inform us how you can live and work in a technique that’s in the waft of our bodies. And if we are able to emerge as fluent in the language of our biochemistry, and our physiology, this grouping of glands and organs – that I wish to call woman ingredients – that we will have access to an infinite supply of vigor, and vitality, and clarity, and unwavering purpose.I mean I was completely hooked. So, Aldous Huxley as soon as mentioned that man is an intelligence basically in servitude to his organs. And that i concept, that’s unhappy, that we appear at being in our our bodies as this style of slavery based lure that we need to deal with. And i’ve fairly as a substitute found that females who get into partnership with their our bodies end up becoming the fullest expression of themselves, and dwelling as leaders and change marketers of their lives and communities. So let me introduce you to your lady parts. I simply cannot support myself. If i’m on stage i will speak about woman components, i will let you know about them. I need you to as a minimum go residence realizing what they’re.(Laughter) Nothing else. So, there are two things i want you to understand. First is the physiological structure to your body known as the endocrine system. Six glands. Hypothalamus in the midbrain, pituitary gland nestled close by means of, thyroid, here, pancreas, right here, adrenals, here, ovaries, right here. They work in an interconnected method making definite that your body has what it wishes to function: mind, coronary heart, muscle, tissue, hormones. Interesting. And they’re so enormously sensitive. Hypothalamus works with this factor known as poor bio-suggestions so any time that some thing happens, the temperature changes outside, hypothalamus picks that up, pituitary gland sends a message to the thyroid, all of a sudden, you might be adjusting to the temperature.You did not have got to do a thing. You were simply having fun with the climate. Love that. Genius. Most effective in a physique could that happen. Anyway, then there may be this physiological structure: your hormonal ratios; you’ve gotten 4 of them that happen in a single month cycle. And it is really fascinating, since we most effective ever reference that in an extraordinarily normal manner: "I want to get pregnant," or "i do not wish to get pregnant." that’s how we reference these hormonal ratios. The ovulation one is type of essentially the most famous. And the period, the menstrual phase is probably the most infamous. But there are four. There are a couple of others. So i want you to begin to feel about the place you might be in that cycle. And here are the 4 phases. First you’ve the follicular section, exciting phase. And neurochemically these hormonal ratios trade your mind chemistry. So you’re a further character, week over week inside a month. Yeah, you already know. (Laughter) In that follicular section, the place the eggs are style of coming as much as maturity; one is going to make it to the Fallopian tube, very enjoyable time.(Laughter) Neurochemically speakme, you’ve gotten essentially the most entry to ingenious vigour that you are going to have the entire month. Simply. This can be a excellent time to start new initiatives: mastermind, plan, dream colossal, all of that. In the ovulatory section, which everyone knows very good, so i’m not going to dive into it. In the ovulatory section, we’ve the high-quality communication abilities and probably the most power that we can have the entire month. This is absolutely a time to have fundamental conversations. Would it be genius when you could plan to ask for a elevate when you’re ovulating? (Laughter) Whoever is attempting not to give you the carry is like, "Please take the money. You are so irresistible." (Laughter) Or go on a first date, or have an most important dialog with your partner. Or inform your mom something you rather want her to claim sure to. You’re only a magnet at that time. In a luteal section, B vitamins are being called into action, for the reason that the liner is thickening, and it’s a very energized approach. However we become very element oriented right now. So that shoe closet you couldn’t get to arrange earlier than, that is the week.Detail oriented duties are very effortless to do. Try not to plan them in the different two weeks. Within the fourth phase, the menstrual segment, this is the time of the month when you simply have probably the most lively conversation between the right and the left hemispheres of the mind. So strong! So, if you are looking into course right, evaluation your existence in the past 30 days, how you probably did this month, this may be the time to do it. You are most competent to acquire those gut feeling physique messages.So, take become aware of, take a moment to take realize at the moment. Gloria Steinem mentioned, when she was talking about the film, "omit illustration" which i love, she stated, "ladies are taught to view their our bodies as unending tasks to work on, whereas, boys from a young age are taught to view their our bodies as instruments to grasp their environment." I actually fell off my chair once I heard her say that.Due to the fact that is not that the truth? We, as women, get on this hamster wheels of self-development and self sabotage. And we don’t be taught about these predominant, actual bodily buildings in our our bodies that provide us this blueprint to the way to prepare our lives. I mean, in the event you clearly adhere to the map you study exactly what you should consume, while you will have to eat it, the way you will have to transfer your body, the way you will have to prepare social commitments, work priorities. It can be all laid out for you. You don’t have got to consider, or do, or push, or battle. It can be simply there for you. And sadly, the environment is somewhat bit learning us correct now. Lady’s our bodies are in hormonal breakdown in epidemic proportions. I feel it can be 20 million ladies within the Unites States suffer from endometriosis, fibroid, PCOS… In 2009, 1.42 billion greenbacks have been spent on infertility remedies. Premiums of idiopathic "no-known" reason of infertility are on the rise in both men and ladies.Cancers of the reproductive organs are on the upward push in guys and women. Medications are being prescribed, left and proper, for medication of matters that do not rather need remedy, but relatively need a systemic method. And additionally it is fascinating, on account that we’re also in a very equally intriguing historical second, the place we now have essentially the most vigour economically and because the largest patron demographic than we’ve ever had earlier than. Which you can literally vote together with your dollars to claim to corporate the united states, "whats up, i would such as you to custom-match an environment for me." "i might love to peer extra maternal care there." So, on the middle we want to empower as many ladies as can to be trained this language, and leverage their bodies as a device.So, I want to provide the three things that we teach every person. The first is you have to fall in love. You have got to study what these ingredients do and how you can devour to support them, so they are able to operate optimally for you. The 2nd factor is that you simply have got to commit, commit to this new relationship with your body. I would like you to plot your month, thematically, week over week, in keeping with these hormonal ratios, so that you could just do extra, go teach your lifestyles; I call it "in-body time management". The 0.33 thing is, i need you to begin to leverage your body as a energy device. And i need you to reply the query that none of my sufferers can ever answer the first time I ask it of them, which is: if I have been to wave a magic wand and repair your body to superb vitality what would you do with that energy? How would you be a transformation agent in the world? If that you may start to answer that query, then we are able to relatively step into our roles as leaders as women.So, females provide birth via the body. The most important act of our generation of females goes to be to be in a partnership with the body, to not depart it out. And i relatively want to see you’re keen on your woman ingredients, transform your life, and change the sector. I am Alisa Vitti. It’s been an honor. (Applause) .
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nathjonesey-75 · 5 years
Text
A Day In A Life
They say retrospect is a wonderful thing. To be able to review; objectively and honestly – moments, times or even periods of time. Critically or loosely. Positively or negatively. Sometimes that essential clarity of thought cannot be granted until enough time has passed, as the mind (it has been known) to play tricks on us. In this particularly unique instance it has taken me this long – twenty-two years, in fact – to be openly able to absolutely look everything in the eye and be brutally frank. To the point where it’s almost completely written in the third-person, about another individual.
 I suppose it could be as much the self-therapy I’ve wanted to gift myself, as it is hopefully a document of mental health learning for others. Tomorrow I will turn the grand, fuddy-duddy, middle-aged, wrinkle-washed age of forty-four. Double the age of probably the most pivotal and instrumental birthday anniversary of my life. Those who have known me forever will know why – but as I try not to assume that I know everything about everyone – this is a story from a very jittery life journey. Having lost people; friends and acquaintances from my generation to mental health struggles and coping mechanisms which didn’t work – “every little helps”, as Tesco says.
 On Wednesday, May 7th, 1997, I travelled back to Nottingham; to my university life, having visited my mother after a write-off, nasty car accident had broken both her legs. She used to tell me up to that point “I’ve been driving twenty-five years and had no accidents, so don’t tell me how to drive!” When the time had clearly come to blemish the self-prognosed perfect driver’s record – it was done in destructive style. Anyway, having left my pin-legged mother in Llanelli, I returned to pre-arranged birthday drinks in Nottingham. A month or so away from completing my BA (Hons) Communication Studies course, this was to be probably the last big celebration before a month of coursework was to be completed. Life was good (apart from the aforementioned Mrs Damon Hill-Jones’s road exploits).
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 After a few hours of not paying for any drinks, I felt on the brink of being annihilated - should I drink any more. So, after running into my work colleague from my part-time job at the Beatroot nightclub, the two of us diverted from Sam Fay’s late bar – to his nearby flat, near Nottingham castle, so I could chill out for an hour. The plan was to return and see the night out until 2am. Whether the walk and fresh air had helped or not, I had a semi-second wind. We got to his flat and my ideals of birthday grandeur got the better of me. I wanted a bottle of bubbles. At that time of night, the only place I could get one would be a nightclub, so we ordered a taxi to take us to…sigh….The Black Orchid. A cheesy, yet huge club in the enterprise park which had Wednesday student night on. Did I need the bottle? No, yet the cab was booked.
 It was at this point that my mental hard drive crashed. My next memory was waking up in a hospital bed, the following afternoon, with not only my friends around the bed, but my father as well. I opened my eyes and asked; “What happened?”, as if I was in a scene of a film where the character had woken up in heaven – only to be sent back to earth with a completely abstract life narrative to the one which was being played up to the Wednesday. Turns out I had probably had another drink at my friend’s, at some point of the night consumed a small amount of amphetamines, then passed out on the first-floor landing, but falling sharply down the twenty feet of stairs on my head, all the way.
Now, with music playing loudly, my workmate and his flatmate heard nothing. It was their neighbour who heard a large ‘thud’, who rang the doorbell in concern which alerted them, along with the taxi which had arrived outside. There was blood everywhere. I had fractured my skull, torn nerves while breaking my nose and had a slight haemorrhage on the side of my head. Five days were spent in Nottingham’s QMC Hospital, mostly sleeping. On the Saturday, I remember getting out of bed in a complete fuzzy daydream, wearing only one of those crappy bed gowns; walking to the toilet with the nurse calling after me “Nathan! Where are you going?” “Home!” was the abrupt, muddled answer. I urinated, went back to bed and proceeded to enter hibernation once again.
 Doctors said I was lucky to be alive. There was a dent at the front of my cranium, around an inch long. Had that been an inch higher in position on my skull – I was told I would have died. Those nerves I severed were my smell and taste nerves, so I’ve had very diminished senses in those departments, since. Most pivotal – was my doctor, back in Llanelli; once I returned and spent another five days in Prince Phillip Hospital, he said “You will experience some depression and levels of fatigue.” Immediately, in my head I decided – no I won’t. Not the depression, anyway. I’ll find a way of keeping lively and feeling good. The fact Being ruled out of playing rugby or football for at least nine months became a huge problem. My penultimate match played before the incident was for Wales Students Rugby League team against Scotland. The previous summer I had trained pre-season with my beloved Llanelli RFC, with the likes of Stephen Jones and Ieuan Evans; taking my fitness to a new level. I was twenty-two with the world at my feet. There was no way I was stopping. Unsurprisingly, it took a very short space of sleepy, anxious time to realise I’d have to succumb to the doctor’s prognoses.
 Panic attacks began, embarrassingly in public while visiting a friend for their birthday in August 1997, having seen out three months of ‘no alcohol’ from my doctor’s orders. I had no energy. Not even enough to complete my coursework, so Nottingham Trent University gave me an extension of three months – to the end of August, to submit my work. However, I was living away from the university and my beloved friends. What the hell was happening? No energy; forced to live with my mother and brother while my father and sister both lived in Cardiff; both studying for their new careers. Here beginneth the hardest years of my life.
 By the end of 1997, I had managed to graduate successfully, but I was by then suffering heavy depression and anxiety, fuelled by the loneliness of having no friends around; not knowing why I was on earth and wanting to die. I had lost all tracking of whom I was, what I was doing and where any of it was going. Plus, glandular fever had bitten me hard, taking a month out of my glorious, progressive freezer job at Asda.
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In January 1998, I was charged with drink-driving, having driven home on Christmas week with no care for repercussions; caught on camera making a U-turn in a forbidden area. While living at home with my mother caused all sorts of tension, arguments and vitriol, the only thing which kept me partially sane was my first set of turntables. With very few points of company around in a reversal of vibrant, university life – it was me; and the decks. Over time, it became a slow, fearful return to “normal” life. I have never been a naturally confident person – easily intimidated in the past by louder, overconfident characters, but this new anger in me – for what I didn’t know – became something, someone – I had to allow to be played out. Not a villain, but an even more insecure little boy to that one on the morning of May 7th, 1997. Unapologetically cavalier, which only cost me at times – and those who suffer depression will know how past mistakes can eat the soul of those who made the mistakes.
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For many years I refused to accept depression and anxiety were a part of me. My mother has since told me she believed it began with my grandfather’s death when I was seventeen, but I know from looking deeply inside myself, from exploring instincts I’ve always had, but with which I’ve had to become accustomed – questions I’ve asked in early teenage years, that my fears and those scared instincts – must be tied into my neurological wiring. Throughout my early twenties, from that point I lived out wild teenage years – years locked away inside the vault of a strict upbringing. Partying. Having to surrender, also – any instinctive passion or talent I had for playing rugby, from being oversensitive to knockbacks and increasing lack of confidence.
 Seventeen thousand career changes later, I find myself at almost full-circle completion point. Only now, a bit of maturity (which I appreciate) makes the Peter Pan in me; hopefully a more reasoned character and person. I went into teaching (having told myself at eighteen I would never become a teacher) to try forging a predictable, 9-to-5 life for myself in a past relationship. To try proving to myself I was a virtuous individual (ironically omitting the thought that there are vile and immoral teachers out there too – luckily not many, but there are!) among the clouds of twentysomething decisions – without realising I didn’t have to almost burn myself out a second time, by becoming something I was not aligned with - to prove I could be virtuous and good. Back, now; working in hospitality and trying to revitalise my DJ career (as that’s what I always wanted to do), playing music I love and believe in – rather than what I fooled myself into thinking others wanted, in those hazy days.
 Personally, visiting a psychologist in 2013 (my own choice) to try fathoming whether I had ADHD – which could explain these seventeen-thousand career changes, as well as lack of interest in my later school days – may have given me the road signs I needed. Being told it wasn’t attention deficit, but depression – being medicated has been like having a carbon monoxide fan for the air I breathe. It can always seep back into the oxygen channels, but I have now the ability to blow it away. The ridiculousness of life is something I have to laugh at – I don’t believe in staying miserable (despite being the younger Victor Meldrew). I appreciate the chances I have now and my family life. The point being – the imbalanced brain wires may have always been there but became violently exacerbated by this accident. I cannot stress enough how important it is to consult a mental health professional. Drop the pride, the façade and ideals of grandeur – everyone has some kind of something going on. Some are better are dealing with it than others.  Some can’t hold on in the battle.
 In one of those seventeen thousand careers – twenty years ago, in fact – I worked at what was, pretty much – an abuse line, call-centre; at British Gas in Cardiff. One reason I didn’t last there was because I am not a salesman. Plus, I’m an impatient non-salesman. In this job, the department had to deal with calls from people who had been mis-sold contracts by field agents, selling gas and electricity. On one memorable occasion an English man called, calling me a “f***ing c***” for asking him to explain – a little slower – what exactly happened and how he was conned. When I told him I’d hang up if he didn’t change his abusive tone, he replied “Sorry, I haven’t had my medication today, have I love?” To which his wife, shouting in the background answered, “No, he hasn’t.”
 I still laugh at that, knowing that’s the bar of communication I’d prefer to stay beneath.
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krazybomb · 7 years
Note
Dear Past Me,
@aira-the-ancient-star I am so sorry this is late!
Okay I keep saying I’ll answer this but I’ve been really busy so its been hard >_(also holy shit mobile really fucked with the formatting so give me a bit to clean this up- like it removed half the words and all the spacing and I have no idea what the fuck happened. ANYHOW)
Dear past me, 
To me when i was 10,
I know everything seems scary and horrible bad. it feels like whenever you are the only one home that noone will come back. it feels like you are going suffocate in cramped hallway during a tornado siren so you try to breathe air from under door in fear. You feel that at any moment death or injury will come for you. 
It never does. The only real fear you have worry about is Mona- though you already knew that sure. 
To me when I was 12,
These are good friends. At least one of them is- the short kid down the street who you always play outside and inside with.
On another note, while your first crush is awkward and not reciprocated, don’t let that color future endeavours with other people. You will come back to this place many times in your mind as a place of peace. Rocky shores, salty air, and cool damp ground. You had lots of fun here- You’re still friends Jared even after all years. Nate…. not as much. sorry. But you will find people you can relate to who are less cynical and are just as intelligent as you, if not more so in a lot of cases, in the future. These friends are bright shining lights, that give emotions that you barely knew were possible. 
…. I know you keep wanting make sure nothing bad happens- always say “See you later” and hope for a response, or else you think you’ll never see them again. You will. Leaving here is hard, but you’ll be back again-  just don’t look back through rose colored glasses.
To me when I was 14,
Freshman year in high school was hard- But you made a lot of friends in a short time. Unfortunately, that first ‘relationship’ you’re in won’t work out. Though you weren’t into her that much anyway, so it’s probably for the best. Surprisingly, the things you learn in these next couple years stick with you as some of the most useful things you’ve learned in school. Who would have thought school was preparing you for the future? In the mean time, keep following your desire create things. Keep dreaming about building your own games and designing things to do in other games. its something you will  continue to enjoy well into the future. I’m Sorry you had to deal what felt betrayed promises and being mislead on your first ever potential ever date though. I wish I could tell you this would be the last time you experience pain from her- but it will happen again. And it will be much worse.
To me when I was 16/17,
l’m... so sorry. I’m so sorry that you have to go through this. I’m so sorry that you have to juggle crushing amounts of school work and these unrequited feelings that seemed to become something before devolving into a year of pain and suffering. I can’t say it was entirely her fault, because you never followed through with trying to communicate your pain and how you felt. You let it stay inside to fester and you didn’t say anything to her. It’s not your fault though-  you were scared, but you have to change in the future and learn how to SPEAK UP....please... You need to. It’s okay though. It doesn’t last forever. You…You are strong. Just keep walking forward. This will be one of the most painful years in your life, but you have to keep going forward. Keep going through all the pain, even when you beg for something to end it, with your emotional turmoil being so wretched that it feels like your body is being dissolved by acid. There are brief moments happiness from her, but the neglect that followed stained it irreparably. 
She is not without fault- frequently cutting off conversations without warning, not to respond until much much later, the next day or days later with no explanation why- letting your anxiety run rampant. Continue to call you pet names well after you’ve broken up, keeping you hopeful when you should move on. I’m not sure how much of this was intentional and how much was not but this combined with your own lack of communication will cause you  great pain. Her name will forever mark your mind as something that makes you shudder..... even though some part of you still loves her. 
Getting medication was a good choice and getting therapy was a good choice. Ultimately it will take a year of therapy after your breakup for you to realize… you don’t need her. You don’t need to hold on to the hope that you’ll get back together. You can be your own person. You don’t need ‘another half’- you want a relationship that feels equal and balanced. You let go of the idea of soul-mates, because it’s just a numbers game. The day you realize this is so profound on your psyche that you still remember it, clear as day, almost three years later. 
The day you let go of what felt like the weight of the world. The day you realized that you had wants and needs and you deserved better. The day you felt everything got a bit brighter.
To me when I was 18,
 While you still struggle with anxiety and fear of rejection and have to calm yourself down repeatedly, you are doing much better than before. College feels much better than high school ever was and you gain many new friends, some better than others, but many provide a place you feel comfortable with. You pick up new hobby playing cards another playing make-believe and rolling dice. Both stick with you years later. You start a relationship that brings many firsts and great joy. They teach you what a normal relationship feels like. With actual affection, and the feeling of actually being cared for. It brings you so much joy that you cry from happiness. You learn to communicate your feelings in greater detail and speak up when you have a problem. Keep doing this, learn to do it more and to do it better. Unfortunately the relationship doesn’t last terribly long, only a month and a half, but the end couldn’t have been avoided unless you had acted sooner to ask them out. No need to blame yourself, you couldn’t have known and the action is in the past. Be sure you tell them how greater clarity may have helped though. Ensure that they know, that next time they do something like this and another person is involved, that there is absolute clarity. They will learn from this, and try to do better. Following this breakup is the worst you have ever felt in a long time- possibly the worst you have ever felt considering how you needed to go to counseling for it. But regardless, you will recover, and continue to march onward. 
To me 6 months ago,
How quickly things change. Enjoy this relationship while it lasts- it is certainly longer than any relationship you’ve ever had. You will experience even more firsts- with the same person you experienced many of your other firsts with (who knew you’d get back together?). They will help you make peace with your sexual side, and help you begin to understand the importance saying your side of an argument. You will learn the importance of speaking your mind. Keep doing this and remember to get better at it. Unfortunately it does not last forever, but the pain you will experience is bad, it is bearable. it ends for a good reason honestly (mainly for your sake) , and the only way I can see your relationship with them being successful is if this happens.
 If you will return to a familiar face in the future or meet someone new, I do not know. If you will stay close to your current home or leave to parts unknown, I do not know.
One thing certain is that there will financial troubles aplenty, and you must focus on your needs, and fulfilling those needs with or without a partner. Emphasize actualizing verbalizing them. Always put verbalizing and saying your needs at the forefront of your priorities.
But stay kind. Stay empathetic. You will gain more friends who you have not met properly yet, or haven’t spoken to. Your goal is to try to be happy in a years time- regardless of if you have a partner or not. Fulfill your needs as best possible using as many sources as possible. Recognize that one source cannot fulfill them all. Recognize that you won’t always know what’s best for people and sometimes you have to take a “hands-off” approach and support from afar, as much as it pains you. Remember to listen to your own needs and verbalize them, loudly if need be. (But do so when it’s appropriate)
Hopefully any future letters to myself now confirm that I’m doing things right. Or at least heading in the right direction. (Though I guess I won’t know until I get to the future huh?)
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