#if i didn’t indulge my executive dysfunction :|

[vampstel]

I fell asleep. Anyway, here’s an infodump about my two boys (Lawrence + Rei) and their experiences with being neurodivergent. I’ll talk about my other neurodivergent characters a different day :P

Lawrence

He’s autistic. He was diagnosed in his late 20s. He was evaluated once in the late 90s as a preteen but all his behaviours either flew under the radar or were dismissed as quirks.

Sadly got bullied a lot in his school years due to being different but his parents were very supportive (his mother being autistic herself but not being diagnosed either). Thus, he has a lot of trust issues and some trauma he still needs to process.

He’s very blunt and can’t lie to save his life. This has gotten him in trouble many times and most people keep their distance away from him since they deem him rude and intimidating (“but he’s a sweetheart he really is please trust me” - Rei, probably)

He’s absolutely oblivious to nonverbal cues and social cues. Doesn’t understand societal norms and thinks they’re ridiculous. Also, he takes things too literally.

Used to mask as a child to try to fit in but stopped once he got older. He doesn’t give a shit anymore what people think and that’s very cool of him

His special interests are history, music, and cats. He only infodumps when people ask him to but BOY is he passionate when he does. That’s probably the only time you’ll get to see him being expressive otherwise his tone is flat and he looks either bored or angry.

He has sensory issues, has misophonia and can’t handle staying in crowded places. He absolutely despises when people talk too loudly or when voices overlap one another. He gets headaches because of this. He also can’t stand certain tactile textures and food textures. Shoutout to overly crispy food, he hates them with a burning passion.

He regularly stims and isn’t ashamed of it. He mostly stims due to boredom and stress, but occasionally does it when he feels extremely positive emotions. Twirling his hair, drumming his fingers, and spinning anything in his hands are his most common stims. You often see him doing them while he works. I think I mentioned this before but he’s skilled at spinning his conductor’s baton because of this

He’s touch averse but also touch starved which is a great combination that I personally suffer from myself. He gets uncomfortable when strangers touch him but he’s fine with family members and close friends touching him. He is particularly very touchy with Rei and basically makes the raven his weighted blanket or teddy bear at night

When he gets overstimulated, he often leaves the room and isolates himself to try to calm down. If he’s burntout, he takes a few days off work just to indulge in his interests and relax.

Rei

He has ADHD, was diagnosed in his early to mid 20s but is unmedicated because the medications he tried didn’t help him and negatively affected his health. His father, Yuuma, also has ADHD and was diagnosed late in his life. Yuuma is very supportive and helps Rei as much as he can.

He struggled a lot in school, mostly due to deadlines and his workload. He would’ve been top of his class hadn’t it been for the fact he often doesn’t do his homework or projects (and he was a literal delinquent when he was 14 so…)

He had a lot of peculiar hyperfixations and did a lot of hobbies before sticking to art and music. Due to this, he’s got a lot of skills most people don’t know about. Did I ever mention this man was good at fencing?

He suffers a lot with executive dysfunction and burnout. There are days, sometimes even months where he can’t work or do anything and the only thing he can do to cope is to gradually get back into things or just do nothing at all.

He has sensory issues. He has misophonia and gets really bad migraines when it gets triggered. He often has his noise cancelling headphones because of this.

He’s always in a state of overstimulation or understimulation. No inbetween. He’s gotten so used to it that he just rolls with it. Oh yeah, and he forgets to take care of himself. He’s just like me fr fr

He has insomnia because he overthinks a lot. He used to have meds but grew tolerance to it and the other meds he tried only made him oversleep. His current medication is Lawrence. I’m not joking. His brain turns off once he cuddles with his husband at night.

His main hyperfixations are art, music, and the occult. This man can talk about his fixations unprompted and won’t shut up about them at all. He gets really embarrassed about it afterwards and apologizes

He stims a lot to stay focused or grounded. Often pacing around the room (only when he’s alone), bouncing his leg, or spinning/clicking his pens (which pisses Lawrence off to no end which makes Rei do it even more LMAO)

He can’t and never has a schedule. He has a general idea of things he wants to do on a day to day basis, but never sticks to it completely and prefers to have a flexible schedule.

And there you have it. Both my faves are neurodivergent, who would’ve guessed. I don’t talk about them being nd a lot cause it isn’t a big focus in the story but it IS integral to them since you can see their traits and how it affects them. Especially with Lawrence. That poor man can’t take a break.

[babymetaldoll]

"Blocked" (Spencer Reid x Reader) (Blurb)

A/N: This is the more self-indulging fic I've ever written. I'm sorry I haven't written much. I'm blocked and depressed and working on it. I am much better at many things right now, just not at writing yet. Thank you for sticking around.

Word count: 679

Summary: Spencer tries to comfort his girlfriend when she feels frustrated 'cos she can't write a story.

Hardcore fluff

Masterlist

- “I quit!!”- (Y/N) shouted, closing her laptop, resting her head and arms on it.

- “Boo, are you ok?”- Spencer walked into their home office and found his girlfriend basically laying on her desk, face hidden in her arms.

- “No. I can’t do this! I can’t write a word, my stories are going nowhere”

- “Come on, (Y/N). You know what your doctor said. You don’t have to push yourself.”- Spencer moved a chair and sat next to (Y/N). He caressed her hair sweetly, knowing that was something she loved, and it never failed to comfort her.

- “I just don’t feel like myself anymore, Spencer”- she whispered- “Writing is what I love doing the most. It’s what brings me joy and calm. It’s my escape from real life.”

- “I know. Just remember what we talked about, cerebral damage in major depressive disorder patients can lead to weaker cognitive functions. Long-term cortisol hormone exposure causes neuron development to slow or stop, leading to shrinkage. Hippocampus damage leads to memory problems, trouble with concentration, and executive dysfunction.”

Spencer just wanted to make his girlfriend feel better. He just didn’t know how to do it. Explaining the reason why she couldn’t concentrate on writing was the only idea that crossed his mind. But sadly, it didn’t work. If anything, it made her feel worst.

- “I know why it happens, honey. I just want it to stop!”- she bit her lower lips, making her best not to cry, but she knew it was impossible not to let those tears fall. Spencer hugged her, trying to comfort her. He tried to think of something else to add, but he was scared to make her feel worst.

- “I just feel like I am letting people down”- (Y/N) whispered against Spencer’s chest.

- “What? what makes you think so?”

- “I don’t know. I just… there are so many people following me, reading my stories, sharing, and commenting. And now I am not giving them anything. I love writing and sharing my stories. I…”

- “Boo, listen to me.”- Spencer held her chees and pecked her lips once before he continued talking- “You are not letting anyone down. You have the right to take some time off writing to focus on yourself. That doesn’t make you a bad person, and I am sure all your followers will understand.”

(Y/N) nodded and sighed, tears still falling from her eyes as she wrapped her arms around Spencer’s body tight and sobbed.

- “I just wanna be myself again.”

- “And you will. Just let the pills and therapy do their work, and you focus on resting and getting better. Ok?”- he felt his girlfriend nod and kissed the top of her head.

- “I’m so sorry. I hate crying so much”- she whispered against his shirt. (Y/N) tried to move from his embrace, but Spencer didn’t let her.

- “Don’t say that. I’m glad you feel comfortable with me and I wanna be here for you every time you need me. I love you, (Y/N), all of you.”

- “Even the things I hate? like my depression?”- Spencer ran his long fingers between his hair and kissed her forehead.

- “When you like someone, you like them in spite of their faults. When you love someone, you love them with their faults.”

(Y/N) moved from Spencer’s arms and looked into his eyes, with a small warm smile on her lips, still keeping him very close to her.

- “Are you quoting Hermann Hesse to look smart, Dr. Reid?”

- “I’m.”- he answered with a smirk, making her smile wider.

- “Thank you for always believing in me, and loving me so much.”

- “Actually, I might show schizophrenia signs at any day now,”- Spencer said, clearly joking- “So… if things get ugly, you are gonna have to take care of me too”- (Y/N) chuckled and kissed her boyfriend’s lips.

- “The bipolar and the schizophrenic. What a pair.”

- “Yes, we could fight crime.”- Spencer chuckled at his own words and felt his heart flutter when (Y/N) giggled.

- “That’s a story I could definitely write.”

[insomniacaesthetic]

Could you do number 4, 9, 19, 24, 29, 31, 41, and 43 on ‘Snape’s Ask’? <3 I love your writing btw ☺️

Hi! Thank you so much that means a lot when people love my writing 💕✨

Tw – self harm

I answered #4 and #19 already here

9 - What are your personal headcanons on Snape's diet and favourite foods?

I LOVE discussing Severus’ eating habits because I am a culinary major, so food is literally my fav thing to talk about. I think Severus likes to cook but I don’t think he does it very often. Very rarely. I think since he grew up poor, he would love overly salty things that are easy to make. Their main flavor profile is just salt with a side of salt. Though I know this man has a secret sweet tooth and he loves to indulge in cakes, chocolates, and cookies whenever he can but he kinda gorges himself on it then doesn’t touch them for weeks. I know he would love dark chocolate.

24 - Do you think Snape ever self-harmed?

Self-harming comes in a variety of forms. A lot of people only see it as one thing, but it can also be just neglecting to take care of yourself. I think Severus didn’t take care of himself in the ways he should have cause I don’t think he felt like he deserved to feel good. But I also think he could’ve participated in risky behaviors when he was younger as a form of self-harm as well.

29- How do you headcanon Snape's bedroom would look like?

Exactly like spinners end. Books everywhere. He also nests. So tons of blankets and pillows so he can hide away in his bed for ages and be comfortable.

31- Do you think Snape had any mental illnesses? Which ones and why?

This man has suffered through EVERYTHING. I think as a child he developed PTSD from his abuse, but it eventually just turned into CTSD. From his bullying and mistreatment, I think he developed social anxiety and depression. These things followed him through the majority of his life and worsened or improved in stages. After the death of lily, I don’t see him ever having “good days” tbh. He also has insomnia obviously

I wanted to briefly touch on the fact that Severus is definitely neurodivergent in some way. I am diagnosed with severe ADHD and severus has so many common traits of a person with ADHD. Such as executive dysfunction. (Which could explain his hair & teeth) Why he developed a knack for potions or much much more.

I think he could potentially have autistic traits as well but considering I haven’t received a professional diagnosis for this one yet, I won’t comment on it as I don’t think it’s my place.

41- Is there a side to Snape that he hasn't let anyone see? What do you headcanon this "secret personality" to be like?

I think him and Minerva gossiped DAILY about EVERYTHING. He was invested in some of these student’s lives tbh but not in a motherly sort of way but rather a “ooo what’s gonna happen next” way. So, I think he was a bit of a snarky gossip.

Besides that, I think Severus might have been a hopeless romantic but stopped beliving in true love after everyone he cared for turned on him or used him.

43- What's your favourite headcanon about Snape? Is there a movie/song/book that reminds you of Snape?

I love almost every headcanon about Severus I read. But my all-time favorite have to be the ones surrounding him, Lucius and Narcissa’s friendship. How it was them who taught him certain things like piano, or table manners. I wish we got to see a bit more about their relationship.

Everything reminds me of Severus, but I do have a snape playlist but Alone by the frights just really screams severus to me.

If you'd like to ask me a question, the list of questions is here

[veliseraptor]

do you have any fics (in any fandom) that you wish had got more attention? and would you like to highlight them now? :D

oh this is a fun question. I feel like every writer has those fics that they wish had gotten more attention and I am certainly no exception. to pick a few...of course, some of these are in small fandoms so the fact that they got less attention is inevitable. but still, they’re ones I’m proud of. (I did not put the Lymond fics on here, though, because my expectations on that scale are sort of ‘if three people read it I’m happy.’)

Girls Like Me, Death Note. 2.1k. This is one of those fics that’s like...kind of a weird one, and I get why it didn’t get a lot of attention, but I’m very fond of it. It was for the concept of Misa/Takada as a pairing, brought on by a rewatch of Death Note with some other folks that included, among other things, a lot of consideration of the way Death Note treats its women. 

Mostly it ended up being more about Misa and misogyny, and very much inspired by the lyrics of the song it’s titled after (by ThouShaltNot):  Girls like me have given up on lending out our eyes / For if and when you bring them back, they've shrunk another size /Your tiny tweezer hands are so precise, but cold as steel /Girls like me are sick of being flesh they touch, but never feel

all my wastelands flower, Doctrine of Labyrinths. 3.8k. I don’t know that I’d actually written explicit Mildmay/Felix before this fic? I can’t remember doing it, anyway. And it’s very much in line with my “service top Mildmay” agenda, which is the only way I can really see him playing that role for Felix, ever. 

And I’m just pleased with how it ended up taking shape, and the fact that for all it’s a very...tender fic, the dysfunction is still very present. I love balancing those things and I felt like I did a good job here.

Iron-black Wolves, Doctrine of Labyrinths. 10.3k. Look, I’m not sure how good this one is but I’m damn proud of it in concept and pretty pleased with the execution, too. Longest fic I’ve written for this fandom thus far (I have longer ones in progress oops), and I just...had fun playing with a whumpy relatively minor canon divergence that doesn’t necessarily actually change much about canon moving forward, but is certainly delightfully self-indulgent in multiple ways.

Still, On With the Show, Doctrine of Labyrinths. 2k. This is an older fic (I think maybe the oldest on this list? other than possibly Girls Like Me, I’m not checking dates), but I’m still pretty pleased with it. The concept was basically “Felix, pre-series, dealing with his anxieties about his old life catching up” - it’s a period of his life that I find interesting and haven’t personally explored much except for here (and in one other fic). I was proud of feeling like I got into some of the headspace of a Felix who is in a very different place than the one I write most of the time.

post war blues, Wheel of Time. 4.8k. This is another one where I’m like. Yes, I know why this didn’t get more attention, I’m not surprised, but I personally really like it, so there. What do you mean, everyone didn’t want post-series fic featuring Min and resurrected Ishamael/Moridin/Elan Morin Tedronai? I mean, I guess I didn’t know that I did until @taimproblem pointed it out to me, but.

Sin to Heaven, Dragon Age. 2.9k. My one and only Dragon Age fic! and of course it is pretty much just “make Cullen suffer, psychologically.” You hand me a situation like we’re given in Kinloch Hold, from a character I’m stupid fond of who is a traumatized mess and a half, and I’m not going to do something with it? Who do you think I am?

tear out all your tenderness, The Untamed. 7k. This is relative, obviously, because by nature of this being a bigger fandom this and the next fic are more popular than many others, but it is a personal XueXiao favorite and I feel like has gotten less attention than some of my other fics for them. Which makes a certain amount of sense! I feel like it doesn’t quite neatly slot into the dynamics I’ve mostly found in my reading, but that’s kind of what I was trying for.

And I really like some of the writing in it. 

Unnatural Selection, The Untamed. 3.1k. Again, relative, and XueYao is always going to be a more minor pairing, but this is the...less popular of the two of those I’ve written (there’s a third in the wings and you know I’m going to do more, right) and I think I actually like it more. The dynamics in both are a lot of fun, and there are certain things about I Come With Knives that I like more, but this one I’m pleased with because it is very much the push-pull of who is in control/who isn’t that I love with these two. 

And the way that they like. Like each other and also really don’t. And just the concept, too, because I didn’t know how much I wanted “fucked up sex in the vicinity of Nie Mingjue’s corpse” until I started writing it. 

we’re not the only ones, MCU. 4.8k. This one is like. Buried deep in Remember This Cold and doesn’t feature the main characters of the verse it is part of, but it’s one of my stealth favorites of the series (with Retrospective another of those). This was my first time writing Sam Wilson POV, and this fic was fun because it let me really...dig into and play with dynamics that don’t usually get to take center stage. 

Also I just had a lot of fun writing Sam trying to wrangle his disaster friends, and basically picking up the team leader role in Steve’s absence, and actually doing really well with it, because he would.

what little girls are made of, MCU. 3.5k. This one was an exchange fic that I wrote intending it to be Sharon/Natasha and it ended up only sort of being a pairing fic, and sort of more being about Natasha’s mild social dysfunction and the ordeal of trying to make friends with a spy who doesn’t really make friends in a normal manner.

I’m really proud of it, actually, and I wish it had gotten more attention.

[turnabout4what]

You used to be diagnosed with ADHD, but then got diagnosed with autism, right? Aside from needing a lot of time to recharge after social stuff, can I ask what kinds of things tipped you off as to the difference? My psychiatrist is looking at an ASD diagnosis for me after years of being labeled ADHD... and I don’t really know what to think. If this is too personal feel free to ignore it!

I’m still diagnosed with ADD, but I’m strongly suspected of having autism. I haven’t been able to pursue a diagnosis because of COVID, but I’ve been in therapy for both. Before I answer your question, I’m going to go over the overlap between ASD and ADD, because you can work on these things regardless of the diagnosis. It’s very stressful to not have a clear idea of what you’re “supposed” to be experiencing!

1.      RSD, or Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. Do you feel physical pain whenever a stranger on the internet implies you’re a bad person? You may have this common symptom of ASD and ADD.

2.      Difficulties with executive functioning. Lots of people have trouble motivating themselves to do things, but ADD and ASD make it even harder!

3.      Emotional regulation. You may become angry or anxious very easily, and you may be oversensitive. This often comes with impulsivity, especially in ADD.

4.      Hyperfocusing. Do you ever start cleaning your room and then find yourself unable to stop? This frequently is accompanied by forgetting to eat. Generally, this happens with things that you enjoy doing, but when I’m stressed, it often involves cleaning.

5.      Being prone to addiction. This can be drugs, or it can be video games or any number of things that give you a boost of dopamine. Additionally, you may get short-term obsessions. Watching a TV show may be incredibly stressful unless you can binge the entire thing in one weekend.

6.      Not being able to make and keep friends in elementary school. I was great at making friends, but I could never keep them. Combined with RSD, this was devastating.

7.      A lack of focus on work and school. Notably, if you also have anxiety, you may still be able to pull off good grades by using your anxiety to rein in your focus. I was once told by a psychiatrist who sat down with me for only ten minutes that kids with executive dysfunction couldn’t have a 4.0 GPA and that he didn’t believe I had trouble focusing. Two appointments later, he apologized and officially diagosed me with ADD. There’s a reason I don’t totally trust his diagnosis. I do find it interesting and relieving that your psychiatrist is looking at an ASD diagnosis; a lot of psychiatrists don’t consider that a possibility if you weren’t diagnosed in early childhood.

8.      Forgetting deadlines, leaving things you needed at home, and generally being an organizational disaster by neurotypical standards. My third grade teacher gave me the “tornado award” in front of the entire class to publicly shame me for how messy my desk was.

 Now, to answer your question, here are the things that stood out as being indicators of me having ASD:

1.      ASD runs in my family. My dad didn’t speak until the age of 6, and my younger brother was diagnosed as autistic when he was about two years old.

2.      I have a sensory disorder that frequently interferes with my everyday life. I’m the type who can’t be inside of a candle store for more than 10 minutes because the smells are too overwhelming. At homecoming and prom, I could be found as far away from the speakers as possible, wishing the evening would end and we could all go home. Interestingly, my issue isn’t with volume, but with how unfamiliar a sound is—I went to a TOP concert with intense earplugs in. For the opening band, I got so sick that I went to the bathroom and curled up in a ball with my hands over my ears. But when TOP started playing, I was able to take my earplugs out and I felt perfectly fine. Notably, I know every lyric to every TOP song on Spotify, and I’d never heard the opening band before.

3.      People who are AFAB and high intelligence frequently don’t show the standard signs of ASD due to how we’re socialized as infants. If you’ve ever stood in a mirror and practiced making facial expressions and hand gestures, it’s a sign you intellectually learned how to act neurotypical. Most people pick up on that intuitively.

4.      I only recently discovered that when someone asks, “How are you?” you’re supposed to ask them that question back. I always hated when people asked me that, since I was expected to say that I was doing well, so I never returned it. I didn’t realize that was rude. I still occasionally find things that are considered basic communication that I never realized.

5.      My dad was physically abused as a child whenever he showed symptoms of ASD, and unfortunately that meant my younger brother and I were verbally abused any time we stimmed, talked about our special interests, or reacted strongly to sensory stimuli. Because of this, I didn’t indulge my childhood special interest until I was well into college: insects. As soon as I started taking classes about insects, I occasionally scared classmates and even professors! I’m normally a soft and smiley person, but when I’m hyperfocused on something that really interests me, I fall into a certain state that my friends have described as “intense.”

6.      Stimulant ADD medications like Adderall and Vyvanse did not work for me. They made me more anxious and didn’t improve my focus well. You know what did work? Wellbutrin. My doctor actually just upped my Wellbutrin dose and I feel incredible

This was extremely long, but hopefully helpful! Note that all of the problems I’ve had with my ASD or ADD came from surrounding myself with people who never tried to understand me. Now I have friends who plan events with my sensory sensitivities in mind, who point out my mistakes without making me feel rejected, and who are excited to see me even when I’m 15 minutes late… again. Neither diagnosis means there’s something wrong with you. It just means people have to put in a little extra work to understand you, and I promise you’ll find people who know you’re worth that extra work.

Best wishes, anon!

[sweetbunnykook]

Bunny! Im just so sry for venting bc ur blog is a space safe for me (prev self sabotage anon) umm so bcs of my low income family, it was drilled in my head since the age of 3 the concept of money, to the point that it was a common catchphrase from my mom that ‘do u have any idea what could i possibly buy if u werent born’ it got worse after relatives (from my dad’s side) drained him and kick us out the house and the ‘u shouldnt trust anyone in this world’ was introduced when i hit 10 after (1)

finding out that i essentially was taken as a hostage by my aunt (from dad family,,again) after my mom left me in her care and go abroad to find a job and then find out my aunt embezzle like 6 grand from her instead of paying debts piling and threatened to leave me in the middle of nowhere so my mom was forced to go home and after knowing all that i felt so so angry and guilty that my mom was right and im about to turn 17 in a few months and this time i had to go to college because i didnt (2)

continue my junior year bc i took a program so i just graduate after sophomore, i felt like i didnt spend any single second having a ‘normal’ teen life and am terrified of wasting youth due to the prospect of growing up because money money money money is programmed in my head and i cant even figure out whether is it beneficial for me to take a degree suited for my passion or take a degree thats more easy so the chance i can get employed higher (im so sry that i just basically told my sob story)

I’m really sorry you have to live in such a draining environment. We can’t control dysfunctional families and most of the time, because of how young we are, it’s difficult to find an instant way out. Planning takes time but execution will be worth all the brain-rotting stress you have right now. 

Let’s address a few things first, okay? First, money is important but its importance shouldn’t make you feel like you can’t live your life. Growing up in a low income family, I was also often told of how terrifying money is because any big emergency can be devastating. My parents are strict about saving and we don’t go out to restaurants (maybe once a year, if we’re lucky), buy anything we don’t really need, or have friends that invite us to expensive places. Growing up frugal caused me to go a little crazy when I got to college and had extra scholarship money which I spent (stupidly) and didn’t save. But it made me happy that I can be self-sufficient, which is what money should really be about. If you can sustain yourself and indulge in little joyful things here and there, it’ll keep you sane until you are in the position to budget better and move out to your own space. 

Second, education is important not because of what you’re going to learn in the field you’re studying, but because you learn how to navigate life. It’s true; it’s not what you know, but who you know. When you grow up not having taught financial literacy ALONGSIDE discrimination against the working or lower class, you don’t have a full grasp of your reality to understand the way out. Parents, especially, have little to no knowledge about how times have changed. A traditional degree is not the safest route to take. There are many people walking around with a master’s degree in biology unemployed because they probably were not taught the value of creating opportunities instead of waiting for it to come around to you. I only learned about that this year, by the way. It takes time to turn away from what you parents taught you about money and education and face the reality of today’s job market. There is demand for STEM majors because technology is a large part of our lives now and of course, you might have a smoother experience landing a job after graduation. However, every graduate student have their own experiences and you can’t predict what will happen. You can only increase your chance of being hired by developing skills and talking to people who can give you opportunities. I know an aerospace engineer who was unemployed for two years after graduation, a mechanical engineer who was unemployed for six months after graduation, and people who got a job a day after graduation. 

Third, know that you’re not alone. You lost your teenage years to draining people around you. I did too. And a lot of my readers here did too. Although it’s upsetting that you can’t redo your childhood, it’s relieving that you are closer and closer to independence. You can still indulge in things you wanted to do as a teenager during adulthood. Last semester, I drove twenty minutes from school to a mall just to walk around aimlessly which was a dream of mine when I was little and wasn’t allowed to go anywhere with anyone. I still play old games I loved when I was younger and wander alone while skipping a class here and there. You have to do what you have to do to stay sane and trust yourself that YOU (yes, you), with your own efforts, will get out of there. Trust yourself, trust that anything valuable takes time to achieve, and that there are people out there who support you. 

- 🐰

[onpaperintofilm]

Oliver Stone’s ‘Natural Born Killers’ Is, More than Ever, the Spectacle of Our Time                

Yet it has never gained true respectability.

Variety

                                                                           |                            

                               Owen Gleiberman

                                      “ Works of art that were once radical tend to find their cozy place in the cultural ecosystem. It’s almost funny to think that an audience ever booed “The Rite of Spring,” or that the Sex Pistols shocked people to their souls, or that museum patrons once stood in front of Jackson Pollock’s splatter paintings or Warhol’s soup cans and said, “But is it art?” In 1971, “A Clockwork Orange” was a scandal, but it quickly came to be thought of as a Kubrick classic.    

           Yet “Natural Born Killers,” a brazenly radical movie when it was first released, on August 26, 1994, has never lost its sting of audacity. It’s still dangerous, crazy-sick, luridly hypnotic, ripped from the id, and visionary. I loved the movie from the moment I saw it. It haunted me for weeks afterward, and over the next few years I saw it over and over again (probably 40 times), obsessed with the experience of it, the terrible lurching beauty of it, the spellbinding truth of it. It’s a film that has never left my system.    

           I’ve met a number of people who feel the way I do about “Natural Born Killers,” but I’ve also run across a great many people who don’t. The reaction has always been split between those I would call “Natural Born Killers” believers (they included, at the time, such influential critics as Roger Ebert and Stanley Kauffmann) and those who thumb their noses at what they consider to be an over-the-top spectacle of Oliver Stone “indulgence.” At the time of its release, it was said that the film was bombastic, gonzo for its own sake, pretentious as hell, and — of course ­— too violent. Too flippantly violent. In a way, “Natural Born Killers” was the “Moulin Rouge!” of shotgun-lovers-on-the-lam thrillers. Either you got onto its stylized high wire, its deliberate pornography of operatic overkill, or you thought it was trash.    

           The divide has never been resolved, and the movie has never gained true respectability. Which I think is a good thing. Some works of art need to remain outside the official system of canonical reverence. But if you go back and watch “Natural Born Killers” today, long after all the ’90s-version-of-film-Twitter chatter about it has faded, what you’ll see (or, at least, what I hope you’ll see) is that the movie summons a unique power that descends from the grandeur of its theme. Far more than, say, “The Matrix,” “Natural Born Killers” was the movie that glimpsed the looking glass we were passing through, the new psycho-metaphysical space we were living inside — the roller-coaster of images and advertisements, of entertainment and illusion, of demons that come up through fantasy and morph into daydreams, of vicarious violence that bleeds into real violence.    

           I’ve always found “Natural Born Killers” a nearly impossible movie to nail down in writing (it’s like trying to capture what music sounds like). Sure, it’s easy to summarize the tale of Mickey Knox (Woody Harrelson), a sloe-eyed drawling psycho in a blond ponytail, and his ragingly damaged bad-apple lover, Mallory (Juliette Lewis), the two of whom go on a killing spree that turns them into celebrities, like Bonnie and Clyde for the age of TMZ.    

           Yet it’s the moment-to-moment, shot-to-shot texture of the movie that transforms a two-dimensional story into a four-dimensional sensory X-ray. I took my best shot at writing about it in my 2016 memoir, “Movie Freak,” in which I said:    

“The tingly audacity of ‘Natural Born Killers,’ and the addictive pleasure of watching it, begins with the perception that Mickey and Mallory experience not just their infamy but every moment of their lives as pop culture. Their lives are poured through the images they carry around in their heads. The two of them enact a heightened version of a world in which identity is increasingly becoming a murky, bundled fusion of true life and media fantasy. It works something like this: You are what you watch, which is what you want to be, which is what you think you are, which is what you really can be (yes, you can!), as long as you…believe.”

           What form does this kind of belief take? It’s a word that applies, in equal measure, to the fan-geek hordes at Comic-Con; to the gun geeks who imagine themselves part of a larger “militia”; to the gamers and the dark-web conspiracy junkies; to the people who think that Donald Trump was qualified to be president because he pretended to be an imperious executive on TV. It applies to anyone who experiences the news as the world’s greatest reality show, or to the way that social media is called social media because it’s about people treating every facet of their lives as “media” — as a verité performance. Made just before the rise of the Internet, “Natural Born Killers” captured, and predicted, a society that turns reality itself into a nonstop channel surf, a simulacrum of the life we’re living. One of the film’s most brilliant sequences is a dystopian sitcom, with a vile fulminating Rodney Dangerfield, that depicts Mallory’s hellish home. It’s a dysfunctional nightmare reduced to TV, which is what allows Mallory to murder her way out of it.    

           “Natural Born Killers” took off from a script by Quentin Tarantino that got drastically rewritten (Tarantino received a story credit), though it provided the basic spine of the film’s evil-hipsters-on-the-run structure and kicky satirical ultraviolence. But there’s a reason that Tarantino didn’t like the finished film; it’s not, in the end, his sensibility. His vision is suffused with irony, whereas Oliver Stone directs “Natural Born Killers” as if he were making a documentary about a homicidal acid trip.    

           The patchwork of film stocks that Stone employs (black-and-white, glaring color, 8mm, grainy video) turns the movie into a volcanic multimedia dream-poem. And it’s no coincidence that those clashing visual textures are an elaboration of the style that Stone invented for “JFK,” a drama about political reality (the assassination of a president) that gets sucked into the vortex of media reality (the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t mesmerization of the Zapruder film). “Natural Born Killers” pushes that dynamic several steps further, as Mickey and Mallory’s murder spree becomes a hall of mirrors that’s being televised inside their own heads. In 1967, the tagline for “Bonnie and Clyde” was “They’re young. They’re in love. And they kill people.” The tagline for “Natural Born Killers” should have been: “They kill people. So they’ll have something to watch.”    

           “Natural Born Killers” captures how our parasitical relationship to pop culture can magnify the cycle of violence. Yet that theme may be more dangerous now than it was in 1994. As a liberal who’s a staunch advocate of every gun-control measure conceivable, and would never think to “blame” a mass shooting on a piece of entertainment, I am nevertheless haunted by the possibility that half a century’s worth of insanely violent pop culture has had a collective numbing effect. In “Natural Born Killers,” a psychiatrist, played with diligent dryness by the comedian Steven Wright, gets interviewed on television about Mickey and Mallory, and his analysis is as follows: “Mickey and Mallory know the difference between right and wrong. They just don’t give a damn.”    

           That, to me, is one of the most resonant lines in all of movies, because what it’s describing now sounds chillingly close to too many of us. Sure, we all say that we care. But if you look at the actions, the judgments, the policies supported by millions of Americans, it seems increasingly clear that we’re turning into a society of people who know the difference between right and wrong, but just don’t give a damn.    

           Or maybe that’s too dark a thing to say. But the beauty, and brilliance, of “Natural Born Killers,” which draws on and radicalizes a tradition of movies (“Bonnie and Clyde,” “Badlands,” “Taxi Driver”) that deposit the audience directly into the souls of sociopaths, is that the film dares to ask us to ask ourselves what we’re made of. To ask whether we’ve removed life from reality by turning it into a spectacle of nonstop self-projection. To ask whether we’re now watching ourselves to death. “   

-- I loved it when I saw it. I saw it once. It scared me. It was too real and too predictive, too foretelling. But brilliant. Scary brilliant. To see the parody of the sitcom is to live your present life, your past life, and realize a subtle and not so subtle horror coursing through our filtered vision every day.

[gender-trash]

getting frustrated again about how hard a time I have convincing medical professionals that it is in fact a problem for me to have executive dysfunction, or no energy, or whatever.  it’s this very specific like... incredulous rage that the person who is supposed to fix my problem is instead trying to convince me that it’s fine for the problem to go unfixed, and the direct result of the problem going unfixed is that i will quickly lose my ability to do tasks.  any tasks!  schoolwork, internship work, basic chores and hygiene tasks, things i do for fun that keep me sane, and (horribly) tasks like going to bed on time and sorting out my meds and managing my dietary needs -- tasks where losing my ability to reliably do them will start a negative disability feedback loop.  this kind of thing very quickly takes away any illusions you may once have had that medical professionals have your best interests at heart, i’ll say that much.  

so now i have this problem where i really am a perfectionist and expect too much out of myself and get into a guilt feedback loop when i fail to do all of the tasks on my unrealistic to-do list, and my therapist is trying to convince me to be less guilty about this, but everything she says to me gets pattern-matched to IT IS FINE IF YOUR LIFE IS FALLING APART BECAUSE YOU CAN’T DO THINGS and i freak out because that’s a dangerous thing for anyone involved in medicine to believe.  would be cool if i could stop measuring my self worth by how much stuff i can do but let’s stick to realistic solutions here, Karen

to go into a little more detail about this, because this is my personal blog and you all are my captive audience -- fundamentally i’ve constructed my identity as being primarily A Person Who Makes Things.  this seems to match the facts on the ground well: i like making things, and if i go too long without making things, i tend to become unhinged.  however, i also have a goddamn planetary gifted kid complex.  sometimes i get big mad because look how much i managed to do while struggling against the anchor of disability, and what if i didn’t have the anchor?  as the saying goes, god gave me depression because if left unchecked i would have bested him in hand to hand combat at age 16, etc.  but this feels like an extremely self-indulgent thing to believe, so i switch to being mad at myself because part of me is still convinced that my problem is Laziness as opposed to disability, and “if i was just less Lazy i could be so much better at doing things” is a pathetic whine.  all of these stupid unproductive frustrating brain behaviors hinge on my core belief that (makin things and doin stuff) -> (identity, self-worth, etc), so it seems like getting rid of that core belief would solve a lot of problems -- but as i said, realistic solutions only, karen

[ouzoathena11]

Okay, so when I was a kid, there was a point system. I’d get 5 points for daily chores, 10 for weekly and I can't remember if I had monthly or not. I think weekly the max amount of points per week I could earn was somewhere between 100 and 500? Well, the stupid thing about it was all the transgressions I could do? The minimum it'd lose me was 1000 points. Some were 5000 or even 10,000. And they were arbitrary- sometimes mom would assume I was lying when I wasn’t, I never could figure out what talking back meant, and ‘attitude’ always seemed to change meaning. Add in that I had undiagnosed ADHD and therefore struggled with things and well it didn’t always work out. The points were then converted to money- 100 points was $1, 200 was $2 and so on. That was my allowance.

However, I still like the system better than others parents used, and to some extent it worked. So I’m modifying it in hopes of it working for my daughter in a few years. Yes, she’s only two months old so this is early. It came up because I was trying to think of ways to help me and my husband with executive function. I’ll get how that works into this later.

So, I would keep daily, weekly, and monthly chores in at probably 5, 10, and 20 points. But if they don’t get done, points won’t be lost like in my childhood. If chores aren’t getting done, there will be talks about how to improve that and why it’s happening. I want to give my children the tools I didn’t have growing up. And if they have autism like their dad or ADHD like me, its probably an executive dysfunction issue and punishment won’t help unless they’re taking advantage in which case they might start losing 1, 5, and 10 points for not doing those chores.

Additional points may be given for good behavior and grades (say 10 for a C, 20 for a B and 30 for an A each class each semester).  As for losing points, it would depend on the severity of the behavior as well as frequency. There will also be discussions about why the behavior occurred and how to fix that. For example, if they got angry, there will be lessons on how to manage it. Like meditation. In the future, the amount of points lost may be reduced based on if it took them longer to lose their temper. I want to do that because as a kid, nothing sucked more than being punished with no acknowledgement of any improvement. It was pretty discouraging. I figure small transgressions could be as low as 5 while the max might be 1000, possibly higher, though it’ll depend on the chore load because it needs to discourage bad behavior and encourage doing the chores instead of trapping them in a pit of despair.

Now, the points could be redeemed for cash, of course. Or they could be redeemed for other things at varying levels- a new game, book, pizza, fast food dessert, etc. Some would be for everyone (like pizza) but others would be possible for individuals, like the game or book, or a treat at Dairy Queen. Probably would have to factor price ranges in, like a certain amount of points for a treat under $3, more for $3-$5 and so on.  And the things available for redemption would be related to what each child likes- if they prefer comics to video games, that would be on the list of possibilities. 

The interesting thing was I realized this system could apply to adults. And you know, I don’t see any disadvantage. If my husband and I had our own chore list (which also establishes who does what so there’s no conflicts there and everyone knows what to expect week to week), and we gave ourselves points for doing it, we could redeem the points for ourselves (just not the money kind of hard to do the money thing when it’s your own money). And the kids would then see the same system they’re under affecting us, and if we yelled at them or lied or whatever, we would also lose those points, apologize and talk about what steps we’ll take to avoid that in the future. I think some problems with parents, from what I’ve seen, comes from parents not holding themselves accountable and the kids feeling like they’re hypocrites. Besides, if it helps me and my husband get things done, why not? 

Ways that this could be adapted for adults: college students could also award themselves points based on grades on essays. They could redeem points for a pass on one day of studying. Points for indulging in something they normally wouldn’t even if it was in their price range. Or they could stockpile the points for something really big that they wouldn’t feel comfortable doing without doing well in their every day life and saving up money. And of course, if they choose to punish themselves for losing their temper and such, they could easily look up ways to fix that so it doesn’t happen again. The only problem is its up to the person implementing the system to hold themselves accountable, and sometimes that’s hard. You want to pretend you did your chores and homework when you really did not. So it may not work for everyone. But hey, it’s worth a try, right?

In the end, this system may not work out as well as I’d hope. But it is what I wish I had as a child, so I want to give it a try. Some things are subject to change of course once we get the chance to put it into action.

[maybeformepersonally]

Fic: Fragile Tension

Title: Fragile Tension Author: maybeformepersonally Rating: PG-13 / Teen and Up for implied, barely-there violence Summary: Phil’s family deals in espionage, which was working out just fine until he decided to shack up with a civilian.  Word Count: 4142 Author’s Note: Written for the Phandom Fic Fest Bingo, for the square “Spies”. The title is a reference to the song by Depeche Mode. Read on AO3

Phil was terrified. He and Dan had been enjoying an early night in when the lights went out. Phil’s internal alarms immediately went haywire. It could just be a power out… except that when he leaned back to look through the doorway and into the hall, and past that to the sitting room, he could glimpse through the far left sitting room window that the neighbours seemed to have no such issues. It could be a problem with the wiring, or even in the supply company… except that Phil had people whose jobs were to prevent such inconveniences in his day-to-day life, and he’d had professionals scope out this house before he and Dan moved in. The house had state of the art security, some of which wasn’t available to the public yet, so it was highly unlikely that someone had tampered with it by mistake, and the people who would have the skills to tamper with it on purpose… Phil was understandably concerned.

He’d immediately tried sending a distress signal to both Martyn and Corn as soon as he scoped their surroundings to find them as empty as they’d been before the lights went out. He didn’t want to think about how he might need backup, but he was no fool. He wasn’t jeopardising Dan’s life for anything, least of all his professional pride. He had no signal. He knew what he’d find but he tried Dan’s phone anyway. No signal. There was no way this was an accident. Fuck.

Dan had wanted to go to the garage by himself to check on the fuse box and that’s when Phil started to panic. In a cold and calculated way that only really came out when he was working, but still. Panic. Of course, he didn’t normally have his civilian husband-to-be with him on the job. Phil was wishing he hadn’t insisted on having this date night tonight, if only he’d been alone at home when whatever this was happened, with Dan safely out of the way of harm…

 Phil insisted they should stay together, so they should both go. Dan looked dubious, but Phil could see he was afraid too. Phil let some of his panic show and Dan caved immediately. He probably didn’t want to be alone either, though for different reasons than Phil. They moved slowly and silently through the house, Phil discreetly taking a couple of things on the way that he could use as weapons. He had switched to on-the-job mode automatically, so he didn’t realise, wouldn't realise until later, that most civilians wouldn’t be able to match him on stealth at a moment’s notice while sneaking through an almost completely dark house (even if it was your own house).

 Who would send people to get him in his home?, thought Phil furiously as he moved through the main hall and into the next room. ‘A lot of people’ was sadly the answer, if only they knew where to send them. Fuck, if something happened to Dan because of him… this is exactly why he’d resigned himself to staying single way back when he’d got heavily involved in the lifestyle. That resolution had lasted an embarrassingly short time as soon as Dan came into the picture, though at least Phil could say he’d lasted a full twelve years with nothing but one-night-stands and short dalliances before that happened. As soon as he met Dan, however, it had gone flying out the window. For all his resolve, Phil had been smitten from day one.

 Martyn had run so many background checks, even once it became painfully clear that Dan was squeaky clean, that Phil had stopped trying to dissuade him after a while. Better to let him get it out of his system, it’s not like the results would change if Martyn kept it going. Eventually he’d calmed down and started to get to know Dan beyond Phil’s reassurances that no, Martyn, he’s not a honey trap, he’s not a plant, he’s not a mole, he’s just a bloke I fell in love with, okay? Can you give him a chance, at least? Your checks keep coming up empty, and we both know how good you are at what you do. I also know you got the best of the best confirming your results. It’s not his fault our family is so dysfunctional, okay, and I really like him.

 It hadn’t taken Martyn too long to warm up to him once he admitted Dan was a civilian and agreed to give him a chance, thankfully. Phil didn’t like to think about his relationship with his brother during those early days before he did. Those were dark days.

 It had taken weeks of Martyn coming up with nothing, the first and only screaming match he’d had with Martyn, and Cornelia’s interference to wear him down.

 ***

“I’m just worried about you,” the desperation in Martyn’s voice was almost enough to make Phil hesitate. Almost.

 “I know you mean well, but you’re being irrational.”

 “You’re my baby brother!”

 “I’m 31 years old, Mar. I can take care of myself. I have a triple digit kill count, for fuck’s sake.”

 “And an almost non-existent relationship history,” Martyn cut in, relentless.

 Phil winced, but he was done indulging Martyn’s overprotective act.

 “Don’t you dare. I have more successful missions that most operatives twice my age. Just because I don’t date often doesn’t mean I’m helpless.”

 “I’m- I’ve just never seen you take a risk like this. No one is this clean, Phil, it reeks of a cover-up. And I’ve never seen you this… taken with someone before. I just want to make sure, okay? Can’t you stay away from him until then?”

 Phil sighed. He was tired of fighting with his brother. They’ve always been close, it was awful being at odds with him like this. He could understand Martyn’s initial mistrust, but at this point he was being unreasonable. If Martyn of all people hadn’t found anything incriminating yet then it was almost impossible that there was anything to be found.

 “Mar, you’ve been investigating him for weeks now. There’s nothing there. And I do know how to take care of myself, you know, I can defend myself if it comes to that. Not that I believe it will-“

 “In a physical fight against an opponent, yeah. But what if he makes you fall for him and you can’t bring yourself to hurt him-“

 “You’ve been with Corn for over seven years now,” Phil’s voice was uncharacteristically cutting, but he was tired of this.

 “We knew she was safe!” Martyn immediately counters. Cornelia doesn’t say anything.

 “Mum and Dad are good, but they’re not infallible. She could have been a plant.”

 “She’s not-!”

 Phil rolled his eyes, trust Mar to completely miss the point as soon as Phil brought up Corn. “Obviously she wasn’t! What I’m saying is: you took a chance! Why should I not get the same leeway? Why can’t I take a chance? It’s a good chance. Odds are pretty good what with your extensive research on him. You know I’m right!”

 Martyn hadn’t budged then, but Phil knew from his pained expression that he had got through to him.

 It’d take another week and a half of Martyn calling in every favour he could think of and several other professionals looking into it before he caved and agreed to give Dan a chance.

***  

Now, Phil focused on the very real, very present threat to his fiancé’s life and wished he could have his big brother’s overprotective vigilance looking over both of them.

 By the time they crossed the three rooms between them and the room that led to the garage door, Phil was so on edge he’d swear the fear was a physical presence on the back of his head. Fuck, he’d have to kill in front of Dan. Soft, sweet, wonderful Dan who insisted that Phil catch bugs to release them outside instead of killing them, even the ones he was terrified of. Dan, who had slid into his life, and his heart, and his home, with his bright dimpled smile and his gentle heart, bypassing Phil’s qualms and concerns and better judgement like it was nothing.

 What would Dan even think…?

 Creak. Click. Thud.

 He didn’t get to find out what Dan would think because Dan had shoved him safely out of the way around the corner and thrown himself at the thicker shadows at the end of the hall and what the hell, Phil rolled and moved towards the scuffle, heart stuck in his throat, just in time to find several dark shapes on the floor, unmoving, and four more shapes fighting viciously in his parlour. Three of them had guns. Dan didn’t. In the half a second it took him to assess the situation, Dan had hit one of his assailants in the throat, jumped to execute a flawless thigh choke on another and stabbed the third one on his way down, landing on his feet as the three masked men fell to the floor.

 Phil just stood there, in shock.

 Dan wasn’t even out of breath.

 “Phil?” Dan whispered, looking at him, behind him, scoping the vicinity for more threats. He had a butterfly knife on his hand, how had Phil missed that? When did he get it?

 Dan turned to get a 360° look around, giving Phil a blurry look of his broad, lovely back, that back that Phil kissed whenever they cuddled with Dan as the little spoon, sprawled soft and warm and boneless in Phil’s arms; where Phil loved to bury his face first thing in the morning, before he has his first coffee, or any time he walked into the kitchen to find Dan cooking for him, for them, and he couldn’t resist wrapping his arms around his chest and burying his face at the back of his neck, breathing in Dan’s scent and squeezing him against himself. And suddenly, all Phil could think of was Martyn’s warnings, Martyn’s questions, Martyn’s worries, what do you even know about him? Did you tell him anything about our work? Don’t you think it’s suspicious he shows up when we’re pulling probably the biggest mission we’ve even been involved in and just conveniently asks you out?

 Dan turns on the light, the little click of the light switch superimposed with the click of Phil taking off the safety on his gun.

 ***

 He can see Dan freeze for a moment, then turn around to look at him.

 Phil’s face is completely blank. He’s worked very hard to perfect that blank look.

 A near imperceptible sound to his right calls his attention, but he doesn’t take his eyes off Dan’s wide, startled ones as he moves his hand and shoots the remaining assailants before they can creep in on them. He’s pointing the gun back at Dan in two seconds flat, long enough for him to make a move, Phil knows now, but Dan doesn’t. Dan is still completely frozen, staring Phil down.

 Phil doesn’t know what to do. Doesn’t know if he could even shoot him, even if it turns out Martyn was right about him all along, but Dan takes the decision off his hands when he deflates and moves back against the wall, one step away from Phil, and slowly extends his arm to drop the knife he’s been holding on top of the decorative vanity desk there. They’d had an ‘argument’ about it. Dan had seen it and immediately wanted it and Phil had said it was too expensive and completely useless, it wasn’t even big enough to store things in. He’d caved, of course. He’d wanted to buy Dan all the useless, expensive things he craved, had wanted to spoil him.

 “Okay,” his voice is a whisper still, but Phil can hear it tremble despite the volume. “Do it.”

 Phil doesn’t talk, doesn’t know what to say, what to do. He just stares blankly at the man he’d sworn to love and protect and cherish as he points his gun straight to his head.

 “Get it over with. I don’t want to know. If it wasn’t real… I don’t want to know.”

 Dan’s expression felt like a physical kick in the gut. Phil knew those eyes, knew what Dan looked like when he was trying, desperately, to hold back tears. He’d seen him look sick, look scared, look exhausted, but he’d never seen him look shattered before.

 Phil never really stood a chance.

 *** 

After Phil puts the gun down, his senses going full-on hyperactive work-mode and assuring him there’s no other threats lurking around, just Dan. Just Dan. Something in Phil breaks, something like his composure, maybe, or possibly his heart, and he has to exercise all of his hard-earned discipline not to burst out crying where he stands.

 He’s clutching Dan in his arms in the next second, holding him tighter than is probably comfortable, but he knows Dan doesn’t mind by the way he melts into him, and damn it, if he really is a plant then Martyn was right because Phil already knows he’s going to let Dan kill him if he tries.

 “I can’t. But I need… I need to know. It wasn’t- it was real, for me. It was real.”

 “Me too. It’s real for me too, Phil, I love you-“

 “Tell me. Everything.”

 “Okay,” Dan is clearly trying to pull himself together, and Phil is distantly impressed because all he wants to do right now is sink into Dan’s chest and not move for the next few hours. “But we need to go. Now.” Phil made a noise of protest, he didn’t want to let go of Dan, but then Dan let out a shaky breath and said, “There might be more coming, or outside, they could call reinforcements-”

 “You're right.” Phil acquiesced. He still took a few long seconds to disentangle himself. At least Dan seemed just as reluctant to let him go.

 “Phil-” Dan interrupted himself and made a face as a thought occurred to him. “Oh god, is that even your name?”

 “No, my real name is Kyle,” Phil intones with a terrible American accent. He might be having some kind of mental breakdown.

 Dan stared back at him with a blank expression that told him he was aggressively suppressing some kind of reaction, and the visual was so familiar it eased something in him and that coupled with the relief of the adrenaline of the last few minutes, made him burst out laughing. He sounded hysterical. He probably looked insane.

 “Yes, my name is Phil what the hell, Dan?”

 “Oh.”

 “Is your name not-?”

 “No, of course it is.”

 They stared at each other some more, until Dan grabbed his hand and moved them to the garage.

 Phil tried not to startle too badly when Dan picked up some hitherto hidden weapons on the way, and instead busied himself with doing the same.

 ***

 After a few minutes of riding in silence, Dan was the first to break.

 Phil knew he would, he could see his agitation growing. Phil was still too busy processing his new reality.

 “You almost fell flat on your face when we first met!” Dan demanded out of nowhere, bewildered. He was driving them away from the house, but his focus was understandably mostly on Phil and the revelations of the last few minutes.

 “I was nervous! You’re very attractive!” Phil defended himself, and the domesticity of it felt like a balm to his metaphorical open wounds. They sounded exactly like this when they disagreed about what painting would look best in the master bedroom, back when they had just moved in together.

 Dan shot him an utterly disbelieving look, mouth open and eyes squinting, and Phil felt he had been entirely justified, because if his boyfriend could look this attractive when he was pulling that face and immediately after rocking the foundations of Phil’s world, then no warm-blooded male-attracted person could be expected to function normally when faced with peak Summer Dan in his white skin tight tank top and his taut black tracksuit trousers which exposed his delicate ankles and hugged his thighs just so, and his silver hoop earring and his luxurious mane of wild chocolate brown curls and he was only human, okay? And gay. Very human and very gay. Phil maintained that he’d done well, considering.

 ***

 Almost exactly one year later, on a joint mission (and they only pull joint missions by then, they will not agree to be away from each other unless absolutely necessary), Dan is seething with jealousy watching his husband seduce some poor schmuck.

 He is also very turned on. It only makes him angrier.

 “You never did that with me,” Dan comments later, once they're out, mission completed and objectives met, when Phil is sprawled out comfortably next to him in the enormous plush red sofa at the hotel room where they’ll be spending the night, before going home. He's been looking at something in his phone for a couple minutes now.

 “What?” his husband asks, distracted.

 “You never pulled those honey trap skills of yours on me.”

 Not even in the early days. Granted, the initial impression Phil had left on him when he slipped into Dan’s life - literally - rather clashed with the suave worldly seductress he'd just watched Phil put on and then off like a second skin. But Dan had seen enough to know… Phil was good, exceptional even, and he could have made it work with a few adjustments.

 But now, Phil is sputtering at him, visibly offended for some reason that escapes Dan. He’s so expressive; Dan’s always loved that about him.

 “Of course not!”

 A little frown finds its way to Dan's brow without his permission. “Why not?”

 Phil just makes a high, distressed noise and a lot of hand motions for several seconds. Dan stares at him appreciatively. His quiff is still damp from his shower and drooping a bit, and he’s clad in nothing but the two large fluffy white hotel towels. He’s ridiculous. Dan loves him.

 “Because!” Phil manages to sputter out eventually.

 “Because what?” Dan asks, at a loss. He can tell Phil is genuinely mildly upset about whatever it is, but he can't figure out what it is.

 “Because!” Phil repeats, “You weren't a mark!”

 “...I mean, yeah.” They'd talked about this. Extensively right after the revelation of their secret identities came out. “But,” here Dan hesitates, but he knows they need to talk about it.

 “But you liked me. Really liked me, you said. You told me you thought I was gorgeous. That you were so mesmerized that you walked into that potted plant…?”

 He greedily took in Phil’s blushing face and spared a little amused smile at the knowledge that even after all this time, after everything they’ve been through together, he could still make Phil this flustered.

 Phil sighs. “I did.” It's said quietly but firmly. The words hold a conviction that soothes into Dan's bones like warm cocoa on a winter night.

 “Fuck, Dan, I walked into a fucking potted plant because I was so entranced with you I wasn’t watching where I was walking. I'm a trained psy ops agent.”

 Dan couldn't help the little smirk at that, nor the warm glow spreading over his chest.

 “But you were- I liked you! I mean, I liked you. I wanted… I wanted you. For the first time in a while, I wanted something for myself.” Dan can see him sink back into the seat with a long exhale, and he takes the hand extended to him and lets Phil pull him next to him. “I didn't want to… to approach you like a mark. I didn't want to entice you with some made up persona. I wanted to get to know you. As myself.” He takes another deep breath. “I wanted you to get to know me. And to like me.”

 “Oh.” Dan’s response is small. He stays quiet for a while after that, digesting the revelation, his fingers trailing up and down Phil’s arm absent-mindedly.

 “…Phil?” Dan breaks the silence after a few minutes.

 “Yeah.”

 “We're going to roleplay that though, right?”

 Phil laughs good-naturedly.

 “You will be the irresistible honey trap and I can be the hapless mark, who's hopeless before your worldly charms…”

 “Okay, okay,” he's still laughing.

 “And I can be properly enchanted and-”

 “You won’t be, though, you’ve been with me for over two years now.”

 “…whatever makes you think that knowing what you can do in bed will make me less likely to fall to my knees in worship?

 “Shut up.”

 Dan wasn’t deterred by the words, as Phil was giggling as he said them, and he could read the grin on his face. That was his self-satisfied, proud grin, the one that was almost a smirk. The one he got when someone tried to flirt with him in front of Dan and Dan got possessive. The one he got when Dan got more needy and whiny than usual and he not-so-secretly loved it.

 Yeah, Dan was going to be crossing off another fantasy from his bucket list soon.

 Phil pulled him closer by his shirt to kiss the obnoxious grin off his face, and Dan knew he’d won.

 ***

 Phil would have nightmares about the night when everything came out for the rest of his life. Sometimes it just plays out like it did in reality. Sometimes it’d be different in some way. The worst one is the one where he presses the trigger. Sometimes Dan screams at him, tells him he doesn’t love him, tells him he never did, that he was a job, that he’s glad it’s over. He doesn’t mind that one so much. In others, Dan tells him he used to love him, so much, but he can never trust Phil again (“You broke my heart. Might as well kill me. You’ve already killed us”). In some of them, Martyn shows up and it’s him that shoots Dan (this is the one that’s guaranteed to make him wake up shaking, because it’s always so real, and it could have so easily been true).

 He’ll have these nightmares for the rest of his life and every time it happens, when he wakes up in a cold sweat, or when he’s woken up by the tears that start falling from the corners of his eyes, when he wakes up shaking, feeling like his stomach’s dropped or like there’s an alarming tightness in his chest, every time it happens, every single time, he’ll wake up and reach for his husband lying next to him, in their bed, and he’ll bury his face in Dan’s chest, or Dan’s neck, or Dan’s gorgeous brown curls, and he’ll let himself cry for a bit until he’s calmed down enough to go back to sleep or to get up and face the day. Dan almost always wakes up, and he often holds him close and rubs his back or his sides comfortingly while Phil tries to calm down. He always whispers soft encouragement and gentle assurances, ‘I love you so much’s and ‘shh, it’s okay’s and ‘I’ve got you, I’m here’s. And every single time it happens, Phil will be desperately, unspeakably grateful.

 Grateful that he gets to have this, that he got to keep this. That he didn’t completely fuck it up. That Dan’s here still, by his side, in his arms, in their bed, safe and warm and alive and still every bit in love with Phil as they were back when they decided to move in together, as they were in their first anniversary, as they still were, despite everything, that day when Phil confronted Dan with a gun in his hands and other weapons hidden on his body as backup, in the hall of the home they built together. He’ll cry and he’ll hold Dan tight and he’ll be grateful.

 He’ll be grateful for Dan, who he met, improbably, by sheer luck, and was immediately enamoured with despite knowing next to nothing about him, all those years ago. Dan, who even more improbably seemed just as enamoured with Phil’s awkward charm and general weirdness, and even asked him to go on a date with him. Dan, who’d always been there for him, through thick and thin, in sickness and in health, as the minister said at their wedding.

 Most of all, he’d feel grateful for Dan’s incredible courage. He’ll be grateful that Dan was so brave when Phil couldn’t gather enough courage or faith or optimism to trust Dan first. And he’ll remember what Dan told him that first time Phil opened up about the nightmares and told him all this.

 Dan said, “I’ll always be there so you don’t have to be brave.”

[wormothy]

Here’s some ADHD and BPD moods (TW halfway down)

Not really sure how many of these are associated with the disorders but these are just some struggles of mine

(Boarderline not Bipolar)

There’s so much more but I feel like this post is too long already.

-needing to leave your room to do something but not wanting to leave your room until you finish everything you need to do in your room cos you know you’ll get distracted and never come back (I.E. I sleep with my dog and I need to let him out to pee in the morning but we have upstairs and downstairs. I need to shower and brush my teeth and get dressed and I know him peeing should take priority but I’m like. I’m never gonna shower and get in proper clothes if I leave my room rn, but this also Applies to when I study and I get hungry etc)

-talking too much

-cutting people off without meaning to in conversation

-not understanding social cues

-always worrying about other people’s feelings over my own protection

-words don’t make sense to me sometimes, I’m literally I’m a kinesthetic learner so I need to interact with things in order to actually learn it. Aka, I need to do the math problems in order to understand the formula I need to speak the words myself in order to absorb them

-lying impulsively in order to feel connected to people

-hungry but can’t find anything that sounds good except something you can’t have or is bad for you

-getting that one food your hyper focused on and ending up unsatisfied and not being able to eat

-going 10+ hours without eating “I feel weird. Huh.”

-going 10+ hours without using the bathroom “I’m. Uncomfortable?”

-covfee: makes you anxious AF but you also can’t function without it

-being really good at multitasking but also really bad at it. Aka needing the stimulation, enjoying the challenge of doing a ton of things but either never finishing them or screwing something up in the process

-I’m tired but I’m bored

-wanting to wake up early, successfully waking up early, spending 3 extra hours awake in your bed, getting out of bed the same time you always do. Dammit.

-having homework to do. Isn’t due for a week. Cool I have time. *now It’s due tomorrow* Alright. Really I’ll do it. After this round of games. *is too tired to do it* ill get up early and I’ll do it tomorrow. *morning of* finished project half assed in class 5 minutes before the due date. It’s always either A: I finish and the teacher doesn’t notice or B: I’m anxious because I didn’t finish and well I may as well drop out of class screw the refund screw the W my reputation is ruined.

-writing things down gives me anxiety, when I write to do lists and stuff it’s like they all become jumbled and nothing makes sense. The only way to organize my thoughts that doesn’t feel stressful is by having a bucket and foam cubes and fitting stuff inside the bucket. Don’t know why this is the only image for organizing and it won’t stop coming up. Idek if it’d actually work but my brain says I can’t be organized unless I do it that way.

-getting sudden bursts of inspiration and trying desperately to cram everything you can into those sudden bursts because they don’t last long

-overwhelming yourself because you have too many things to do

-becoming depressed because you suddenly realize you will never accomplish everything you want to

-suddenly realizing nothing is worth it because you won ever finish it and be satisfied

-having strong ideal and opinions and resolve and by the next day your ideals change and you can’t remember what it’s like to be the person from yesterday. Not disassociating but like, having the memories and the information of yesterday but not feeling connected to the ideals and not feeling the same way anymore

-insOmNia

-having unhealthy obsessions and feeling empty if I don’t indulge in them

-dysphoria: specifically gender dysphoria for me

-not having a solid personality, sometimes I’m an extrovert and don’t care what others think, sometimes I’m such an introvert I can’t stand social interactions and just need to be alone to heal

-thinking I have a solid sense of self and when my likes and dislikes suddenly change I go through an identity crisis. This happens at least twice a week.

-thinking I can cheer myself up by doing something that worked last time but since my personality is different I am no longer satisfied and I’m now frustrated because I can’t figure out how to make myself feel different

-uncontrollable emotions, why am I feeling this way why can’t I change it

-impulsivity: not even thinking about things before I do them, almost as if I didn’t know better but more like my body just isn’t trained think about the consequences before I do something, I just do it with uncontrollable ignorance

-having too many interests and not being able to give my all to one of them and feeling guilty that I can’t put my all into it and making myself so anxious I don’t want to do it anymore

-taking criticism too seriously because I think I’m super self aware and once someone hits it on the nail I’m mad that they called me out and I suddenly feel like everyone hates me because my weakness is showing

-Being self aware but telling myself that it’s enough to know what my problems are and deciding that I don’t need to work on them

-having a hard time planning things for the future

-getting frustrated because my brain works best last minute but last minute activities makes me anxious because I didn’t have time to mentally prepare myself for it. Aka I didn’t have time to think about how my social interactions would go so it’s like someone threw me in the deep end without telling me what water is.

-executive dysfunction: I want to do this but my body says no let’s do this useless activity for 45 hours straight

-replaying mistakes over and over until I hate myself for it

-messy rooms messy cars messy bathrooms: usually clean just, messy

-getting impulse piercings/hair cuts/hair dye

-buying clothes impulsively because I change my style so much and so often

-all or nothing mindset

-everything that’s out of sight is literally out of mind. I feel like I have to have everything within reach always.

-wasting time worrying about how it’s being spent

-being really sensitive to HOW people talk to me and HOW people interact physically, reading between lines that aren’t here, if someone asks me to do something in a weird tone I think about why they talked it me that way and sometimes decide I don’t want to do it just because the way they said it simply wasn’t how I would’ve appreciated.

-having an issue doing things someone else’s way, my way is the right way even though I know it usually isn’t

Trigger warning: self harm and anxiety

-social anxiety: Everyone is thinking bad thoughts about me and it’s my fault, I did something wrong

-social anxiety: if no one talks to me it means there’s something wrong with me que the crushing feeling against my lungs because I have no way to fix the situation

-feeling empty and wanting to lay down in the middle of traffic

-needing to feel something physical whether it be painful or not

-feeling like I need to hurt in order to start over IE cutting myself is like a fresh start

-getting so sensory overloaded that my brain shuts down and I can’t remember how to focus my eyes or move my legs (this has only happened twice, usually it’s less intense and more like I just can’t think of words, my processing shuts down)

-being so depressed you wish your bed could swallow you and you wish the world could just stop existing

[inanawesomewave]

MALADAPTIVE SCHEMA? I HARDLY KNOW HER!

I never know the correct term to use when describing someone who is trying to crawl out of their personality disorder. Is it recovery? Self-awareness? Is it decompensation? All I know is, that’s where I’m trying to be — someone who juts around antisocial personality disorder, knowing they can never find an exit, but is making the place quite a pleasant home. I’ve put lamps up near my childhood trauma to create mood lighting. I’ve papered my unhealthy coping mechanisms in pleasing, calming hues. I am placing beautiful copper and rose-gold accents around the edges of my ego, so I can see my reflection only sometimes, and when I do, it’s pinkish and bright. In terms of my disorder and the flawed personality I have been diagnosed with, I am trying very hard to make it all work for me. This involves a whole heap of knowing what I’m about, but luckily, that’s something people with ASPD are normally quite good at. What was it they said on Mindhunter? Sociopaths know very well they have complex, interior worlds, they just don’t believe anyone else does. I’ve heard that and I’m trying, but the most important part is, I know my interior world has its dark and dingy corners, and I spend 99% of my time spring-cleaning them. 

As we’ve all agreed before, personality disorders seem to form around maladaptive schemas, or core-beliefs, or whatever you want to call them. Essentially, these are systems you believe to be true about the world, other people, and yourself, that you have believed from a very young age just as your personality was forming, and now your personality has formed around them in some kind of twisted way. More often than not, you developed these beliefs so you could survive in a world that didn’t make much sense. There’ll have been adults/caregivers around you who share similar beliefs, or maybe you developed those beliefs to appeal to them or bargain with them, rather than emulate them. Whatever happened, you’ve got those beliefs now, and they’re stuck right in there like so many endless pine needles hidden in the carpet that will find their way under your skin long after Christmas is over and right up until Christmas begins again. You’ll never be free of them. The cycle will always continue.

Antisocial Personality Disorder is made up of such core beliefs. We may have intuited from a young age that the world is something of a dog-eat-dog place to be, a place where survival is reliant on what you can take from others; that there’s a finite supply of everything, right down to abstract concepts like love, trust, faith, support, and so you have to grab what you can and not be hampered by worrying about anything or anyone else. Empathy, then, can disappear, or fail to maturely form. It might be hard for someone with ASPD to understand and therefore give weight to the thoughts, feelings and views of other people, be dismissive, suspicious and fearful of close interpersonal relationships, and have a binary view of interaction as a black and white transaction of dominance and submission, parent and child, giver and taker, etc. Because these beliefs wormed their way into our psyches from childhood, for a lot of people with ASPD, the truth of these beliefs and why they got there will sometimes never become apparent, they’ll only ever be the background whir of dysfunction that generate the energy required to perform antisocial acts. But for those of us who have a diagnosis (or even a keen awareness of ASPD and ability to relate it to the self), the battle is half-won. We know there’s something up. We’d like to know more. Sometimes, we may realise that being quite so antisocial in this relentless a manner isn’t helping us to function any more, and in those situations, we need to be aware. I’ve always agreed that ASPD isn’t necessarily something you suffer from, it causes us very little pain. What hurts is sentience. It’s knowing something’s wrong and having a desire to fix it — there are no mental health resources available to us, we are fixing it alone. 
 Today I realised one of my core beliefs is fucking me up, and I need to unfuck myself about it. 

 Throughout my life, I’ve barrelled along in a big ball of angry knots about the fact that I genuinely believe that in this dog-eat-dog, eye-for-an-eye world, my worth is lower than that of everyone else around me, so I must fight to the top of the shit-heap and prove I’m here and I exist. I don’t want to be crowned, I don’t want ceremony, I’m pretty sure I don’t even want dominance, but I want to know that I’m seen and heard. It’s very probable that I am, but in my head there’s this big, buzzing neon sign that flickers on and off in the grimy darkness that reads: IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT HAPPENS TO YOU. This concern of mine has followed me around my whole life, and I still don’t what came first in this chicken-and-egg — is it because people have always overlooked my pain and expected me to care for them, or do I just think that's what’s going on because I have this belief? Honestly, it’s probably the former, but the former may be just one small square at the beginning of a hopscotch of sociopathy that I then spent my life stomping through. 
I’m drawn to caretakers, but caretakers of other people. What I’m doing when I find myself surrounding myself with people who never need to know how I’m doing is a double-edged sword: it’s great, because that way I get to blend in, go unseen, learn and not be learned, heck, I don’t even have to learn myself // it’s awful because I was right all along, I’m unimportant, so everyone else must be unimportant because I’m no better or worse than anyone else, and that’s why I don’t have to care about anyone but myself, and even then I don’t need to care that much about myself, and that’s why it really is every man for himself, and that’s why I don’t need to work on my empathy at all; because nobody really has it, it’s a lie, some kind of construct or abstraction. Silly, all this navel-gazing, isn’t it? You’d be forgiven for wanting to know how on earth I get through the day having to think like this. Well, I’ll tell you.  I even it out. I am also very drawn to cold and aloof types who are emotionally unavailable, and without delusion or a desire to change myself or them; it’s not because I want to nurture them, there’s no desire to help or fix, but because I feel comfortable talking to people who are upfront about not caring about others and I like letting them be awful because then I am allowed to be the awful me I need to bleed out on occasion; these people are the outliers in my friend group, and they feel essential in terms of evening out any Mary Poppins act I may find myself indulging in. Like, okay, sure, look at me drinking tea with nice people and talking earnestly about us all fixing our problems with a great sense of camaraderie and community, but also peep me here talking to my cold-blooded brethren as we laugh heartily about the awful things we've done and would like to do, talk about ourselves for a long time and never blame anyone else in this slithery circle for doing just that, because we're all on the same page. It’s a balancing act, and it usually serves me quite well. Also, I like to have sociopaths and narcissists in my life on my terms. That way, we're not fucking each-other over. We're just fascinating each-other, maybe even learning about ourselves in the process, we may even be finely tuning our own senses of being by virtue of being surrounded by such entertaining mirrors. Power plays come in, struggles for dominance, but everyone’s aware of it. It’s fun — picture a powerful business executive who pays a Dominatrix to beat the shit out of him. It’s that same level of measured control. 
But still, on the other side, are my friends who are relentlessly good and escape this tarry blackness, and who, as such, relentlessly see the good in others. Why is it I’m hurt more by these people than the wolves I also hang out with? 
 If a wolf doesn’t want to help me through my own personal hell, that’s fine, and they know I'm not going to be there for them when shit goes down either. It's low-maintenance and in terms of transaction it’s honest and non-committal. With the good people I know, I’m probably still not sure of the social etiquette, and therefore, my ASPD’s circuits of connection fizzle and pop and light up and sizzle more often. To these people, I want to be a different version of myself, I want to be the me who has recovered completely and maybe never had ASPD to begin with. I want to be a version of me who was misdiagnosed, or who overcame their negative life experiences with nothing but strength and understanding. I want to be the me who could comfortably call themselves an empath, a me who doesn’t have an inner monologue that howls with a laughter I can barely conceal on my face when one of the good people tells me I’m very warm and compassionate, and they’ve never seen me as a bad person. Something about me feels uncomfortable with that claim. Maybe I feel I'm duping good people who don't deserve it. 
Unfortunately, good people are taken for rides, and I watch this happen a lot, having spent a lot of my life seeking out people who are morally much more beautiful than I ever could be. And here’s where my core belief makes me a self-regarding sociopath:  Hi, my name is Scout, and I sometimes get jealous of unrepentant abusers.  Because I don’t struggle with ASPD. I struggle with trying to not have it. If I have a strict moral code of how to behave with the people I love, why don’t other people? There’s a petulant child in me who gets fidgety and restless when good people I know get swept in by an act I too have led them to believe: Hi, my name is Scout, and I am entirely self-sufficient, and emotional support makes me feel uncomfortable.    

When I see good people overlook me the way that the wolves do, in favour for another wolf, I get angry and upset. I’m the kind of antisocial brat who will date someone who has previously been in an emotionally controlling relationship, and then get upset that this person never tries to understand or know me, and yet devoted their life previously to that bastard wolf they used to date. I’m the kind of antisocial faux ami who will be resentful that a close friend seems to have no problem repeatedly letting me down and forgetting to ask me how I'm doing because they're too busy pandering to a wolf who still has their blood matted in the fur around their mouth and claws and hasn't even bothered to wash it off and pretend to be a domestic pet. I’m a person who spends a lot of time trying to believe that goodness will prevail, but cannot escape the rigid core-belief that screams: "NICE GUYS FINISH LAST”. I am resentful of the fact that having a moral code and belief system won't get you anywhere, and I wouldn't be resentful of that fact if having a moral code and belief system wasn't something I had to put a lot of hard work into, if it were instead something that came naturally to me, as if I too were a good person and not a wolf in disguise. So when I say ASPD doesn't hurt me but attempts at recovery do, this is what I'm getting at. I am never not hurt at this injustice of humanity on the whole (what, you thought I was emotionally mature enough to not blow this out of proportion and see it as a problem that's wrong with THE WHOLE WORLD? Come on, I thought you knew me). And just like these things tend to do, this causes me a lot of cognitive dissonance. Where does this leave me? You know, they say that people with ASPD are entitled to believe that they themselves deserve to break the rules when nobody else should, and I just don't think that's true. I think we see people in general as automatically bad, grimy, morally bankrupt — and we're navigating our stance in this shit-show. I don't think we think we're better than everyone else, I think we are trying to survive in a world that doesn't favour sincerity. This is a big game, and the biggest part of the game is interaction — you can't play if you want to play alone. You don’t win by not playing, you win by playing even though you really don't want to. You win by looking and acting exactly like someone who loves playing. And what you win is the chance to play again in the next level of the tournament with the other winners. Those winners are just as hard to understand as you are. Some of them are good people, others are wolves. Each level gets harder so the glory can be greater, and the grand prize? Well, I'm not sure yet, but Jesus Heck I really want to win it because if I don’t, who will? Someone who doesn't deserve it, probably. It could be a wolf, or it could be a good person, but I don't know and I can't take that risk. 
And this is how people feel often about kindness, altruism, transaction, interaction, all of it, but as ever, this is how a personality disorder makes you go the long way around to reach the same conclusion as everyone else, perhaps years later, and with an extra sting in the tail to it.  Maladaptive core beliefs. What are yours, and how do you catch them?

[a-quiet-borderline-diary]

BACK 2021

It has been YEARS since I have posted, but I believe that writing in a diary blog would be beneficial to me again, so I'm back again. I was hoping a new blogging platform would have taken off by now to make a new diary blog, but it seems nothing like what Tumblr used to be is in the mainstream right now (as far as I know.)

I can't even remember what year I stopped writing here, but I am still alive, still coping, and still living with borderline personality disorder. I have been out of therapy for about a year because I didn't want to do remote sessions, but I decided recently to bite the bullet and go back anyway because seeing a therapist is required if I switch back to my old medication management clinic. I am not happy with my current med management doctor tbh.

The doctor I have been seeing for the past couple of years cut down the limit on my adderall prescription, but I endured the lower dose because this doctor was more willing to prescribe me newer drugs for my mood and depression than the doctor at my old clinic would. At this point I'm on the following meds: 30mg adderall XR morning, 30mg adderall IR 5pm, Cymbalta 30 mg, Trintellix 20mg, Latuda 60mg, and Klonopin 0.5mg (as needed). Now that I'm already on these meds, I doubt my doctor will try to take me off of everything when I switch back. I would like to go back on my old adderall prescription though. I suffer pretty sever executive dysfunction. My old dose was 30mg IR 3x a day instead of one XR and one IR. I feel the XR does not last as long as it is supposed to when I take it. This may have something to do with how it interacts with other meds I take but I'm not sure for certain. I deff felt like 90mg a day was solid though, and I doubt they're going to allow me to take anything higher than that dose. It sucks how controlled adhd meds are, because after years of taking it (sometimes off meds when I lacked insurance for a short period though) I feel it just doesn't have the same effect on me that it once had.

I think a lot of it also has to do with the fact that when I first started taking adderall, I was only on that medication by itself at many points and it wasn't until my early-mid 20s that I began taking several other types of psychiatric meds alongside the adderall. For instance, adderall alone used to help me a lot with maintaining a low appetite, but now that I'm on all these other meds I think some of it may increase appetite and just kind of cancel that side effect out.

Over the last year and a half I gained 60 pounds. I have lost 10 of it so far using a caloric deficit diet limiting my calories to 1200 a day with *one* cheat day on Saturday where I can eat whatever I want without counting. The longer my diet has gone on, the less I am tempted to overindulge or binge on Saturday.

My diet has been going in for about 1 month. I'm a little discouraged at the moment, because I dropped that first 10 pounds in the first 2 weeks, but now 2 more weeks have passed and I'm still weighing in about the same. I am continuing to stick to my calorie limit 6 days a week though.

My normal weight is about 125-130, and now I weigh a little under 175. Before the weight loss recently I was 185, so I'm glad to have at least seen some progress in a month. My goal is to get back to what my normal size usually is.

I feel that I got to this weight through a period over a year and a half of much indulgence and binge eating. Since I'm still "mid sized" despite all the weight gain, most people don't take me seriously and I don't think they see the bigger picture of why I got this way. I was being like... Reckless about eating. For example, for a couple months I was getting the same lunch at Starbucks every day. The lunch consisted of a large green tea Frappuccino with white mocha, peppermint, and vanilla bean powder. I also ordered a grilled cheese sandwich every day, as well as a cake pop. The calories of that daily lunch was over 1000 for just one meal. I was also eating large dinners, and after dinner I would smoke, get the munchies, and eat tons of candy. I don't know for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if I ate like 3000 calories a day on a regular basis. There were days where I ate until it hurt, or until I felt sick. It was not normal.

I started developing bladder pain problems and had to go to physical therapy, and basically the main lesson I took from the physical therapy is "the sugary and carbonated drinks you frequently choose instead of water are causing you irritation and pain." This lesson mostly put my drink choice habits into question, but when this happened I decided to make a change and really just eat less, and stop wasting my daily meal calories on sugary drinks. I am still working on creating better habits about drinking water, but I only drink diet drinks or water now unless it's *cheat day. * I also cut energy drinks out completely, which I used to drink excessively (sometimes 3 a day). My body is already thanking me as I experience less pain when I am more conscious of my habits, but it's a process.

I know this is primarily a mental health blog, but my physical health (which is usually in acceptable condition) really just stated taking a downward turn on the diet of binging and indulgence I was on so I really need to change it.

Another change that occurred since my last entries, is that I ended up graduating college and now I am working full time. My job is relatively gentle on my mental health and body. However, since the job is in an office and it's sedentary, it is a little harder to maintain healthy habits. Even so, I'd rather balance that out by walking with my dog when I get home and doing squats in the bathroom at work 🙊 It feels AMAZING to work a job where I don't have to interact with customers or the public. I oversee two independent workers so even as a supervisor I barely have to do any supervising work. I can just focus on my tasks, manage out the time for the day, and go at a comfortable pace to get it all done. I have been doing well there and I have been promoted twice already... The only thing better really would be a job that pays more or a job where I can work remotely. A remote job would be a dream, because then I could spend time sitting with my cats and dog while I'm working. Honestly, I'm also hoping that if I ever get a remote job then I'll be able to squeeze in some household chores when I'm in between tasks.

Change is on the horizon, but I'll make another post discussing my upcoming life changes. For now, this has been what was missed in relation to my mental and physical health since I stopped writing here. I look forward to filling you all in more, (to anyone who still follows me) and possibly reaching some new readers who may find my entries relatable, inspiring, interesting, or helpful in some way.

✌️

[ilikemythinksoverhard]

The thing about politics that really gets me is the illusion of closure. If you didn’t know, we’re wrapping up a bit of a contentious election here in the ol’ US of A. Results not yet official, but everyone feels confident that we know what the deal is.

The vote margins are razor thin in most states. Whoever won, it was clear they were going to do so *barely*. No matter what side you’re on, there is a huge host of people who disagree with you.

As usual we’ve spent the election cycle in a state of ridiculous alarmism. If you were a newcomer to this process you would assume we were electing a new emperor, not a leader of the executive branch of a democratic republic. Also, you’d think your options were “white supremacy” or “I hate Jesus”. While racial and religious liberty issues were in play, backing people into these two corners was stupid. There were a host of issues plaguing both candidates, and very little conversation was spent on the actual job of President and how that would be executed beyond the vaguest platitudes.

But today the conversation is all, “whew! Well that’s settled! Now we can all move forward.” I’ve even seen articles about how much easier parenting is now that we have a new President. I guess it’s just my toddlers that continue to poop daily.

Like, what? Did the 70 million people who voted differently poof out of existence? Are they bewildered? Are they taking a few days off to deeply rethink their positions and all the factors that led them to vote they way they did? Are we all lined up on the Mason Dixon line, shaking hands, muttering “good game, good game, good game”?

Nothing is resolved. Nothing is settled. We haven’t even officially announced a winner! What tripe.

What gives me the absolute least hope is all the people who are under the illusion that we had two clear, stark alternatives. We had two old, rich, white, racist, misogynistic, mental-addled, ethically and financially compromised men leading wildly dysfunctional families aligning their messaging for votes. At the Presidential level, nothing said during a campaign can be accepted as authentic. It’s all strategy. They are the same guy!

Not to be that person but did no one actually look at the Epstein flight logs? Even supposing the trafficking was a hoax (it’s not), did you not see the hobknobbing of EVERYONE??? That was just one egregious, obvious example of the incestuous power grid. We keep looking into the same group of elites thinking surely there’s a moral savior in there somewhere. Somehow, this group that owns all major media, technology, universities, government, pharmaceuticals etc is going to be both the cause of and solution to our problems.

“When it’s in your own community. That’s how much you really care.” - Rachael Denhollander

Our elections are a show and will remain so as long as we keep faithfully playing the part of the “mob”. As long as we keep tolerating for ourselves what we would vilify in our opponents, as long as we keep accepting “lesser of two evils”, as long as we keep prioritizing entertainment over health and demonizing other humans while failing individually to adhere to any clear moral standard. A group of self-indulgent, immature and naive individuals is not going to magically conjure a group of moral beacons for leadership.

Today reminds me of the series finale of “Lost”, where we all pretended that the ending made sense and there weren’t loads of unanswered questions, but secretly we were so unsatisfied and thought the writers and producers terribly lazy so we went on with our lives and never talked about it again.

[talysalankil]

talys’s great nanowrimo 2019 debacle: the post

i felt like being grandiose, just not grandiose enough that I’d properly capitalize things. bear with me.

So I’ve had a bit of a time figuring out what to do for NaNoWriMo this year. So it’s venting time.

I’m also using this to do like, a status report on all my writing endeavors.

Okay so I haven’t had any new novel idea in a while now. I mean, that’s fine. I have a massive pile of WIPs anyway. But (and I think I already made a post about it earlier) the problem for nanowrimo was this:

I didn’t want to do a rewrite of any of the existing drafts:

FEITS v3 was paused at about halfway done in 2017, and while I’ve had a bunch of ideas for it, I haven’t really taken the time to work on them.

Psychopomp’s first draft is complete, but it could use a rewrite

Tangled Stars and Dragged to the Underworld are about 50k each with a missing third act

Eloped in the Night is a 15k word mess that needs major rewriting because it was still Brooding Lust when I wrote those)

Of these five books, four have planned sequels, but: I didn’t want to write a sequel, since none of them anywhere near a final stage. That being

FTEITS (for which I wrote like 30k of a first draft of book 2, most of which is good for the trash what with all the changes I’ve made), 

Psychopomp, whose sequel would have been the best candidate in this category honestly because I don’t think the rewrites would be super structural

Eloped/Dragged are part of the same universe though mostly standalones, but each of the subsequent books in that series would draw from one or both of these, and like I said, neither are even a complete first draft.

While I have a bunch of fic ideas, I didn’t want to do a fic for nanowrimo because it felt like cheating.

Which left me with um…like, nothing. Well, not quite.

So you may or may not know this (I kind of forget where I put information online) but my first draw to storytelling was actually video games. In broad strokes, here’s a quick history of that:

As a very young child (we’re talking 4-8 years old here), I’d play pretend with my plushies

When I got Crash Bandicoot 2 (one of my first video games I was really into), I started to imagine various games where my plushies would be the protagonists. Inspired by Crash, Zelda, other games…I remember once outlining a 15-part series of games around my favorite plushy, each of which was basically subdivided into chunks of different genres. I even invented a “dark age of the franchise”.

When I got Final Fantasy X and then got another gaming magazine with a walkthrough of Final Fantasy X, I started inventing a self-insert game based heavily on it, and wrote most of my ideas in the format of a walkthrough. I even parroted the editing style because I was like nine.

That story was iterated upon several times, and eventually yielded the character of Talys Alankil (well, sort of—the name actually originated in Guild Wars and was then repurposed. Somewhere in the lore, the two of them are like, extremely distant relatives, or were until I decided all copyrighted works were purged from canon). Thanks for creating my brand, 13 and 15-year-old mes.

I actually got into computer engineering because of games, except I then realized the storytelling was what interested me. Oops. I mean I like programming but I’d never want to work as a programmer in a game.

That tangent was completely pointless but whatever, this is the state of the talys post.

Anyway. Point is. I got a new idea for a game earlier this year. Life Is Strange 2 meets Octopath Traveler by way of Vanitas from Kingdom Hearts as the protagonist. This is the first time I have an idea that I can phrase in this kind of pitch so I’ll indulge. Fight me.

Working title is just “The Road” though obviously it needs some work, and over the past few months I’ve actually done some pretty good prep work, so I thought, hey, why not challenge myself this nanowrimo and write a script for a game instead of a novel!

And like, there’s no reason why not. I’m actually feeling pretty attached to the protagonist already, I’ve been wanting to try scrivener’s script writing tool, it could be fun. Of course, the problem is that a script for a game (especially this one) is inerently nonlinear and requires thorough planning, which I have not done. And nanowrimo starts…technically tomorrow night if I can still stay up past midnight.

[Second tangent time: I’ve been going for a teaching degree, which has forced me to reset my sleep schedule extremely hard and I hate it]

So that brings me option 2. Well, technically there are two options here, but only one that’s remotely viable.

I may have mentioned it before but in FTEITS, Adam and Cell bond over (among other things) a shared favorite book/author. Well, mostly a book. There is also a scene of Adam finding that author’s new book and experiencing nostalgia over his lost life, which may or may not survive the rewrites. The author, incidentally, is my self-insert in that world, and will also not be an active character in the plot of the books, but I just felt like mentioning it. And yes, that means my protagonists are fans of my work. Sue me.

The one they’re both a fan of is titled Snow to Ashes (I remember way way back, when I randomly picked a title “The Brain is Out”, before I had any idea what it was about). It is, incidentally, a chance to analyze Adam and Cell’s character arc by proxy and in a microcosm, which is good because I feel that sometimes their arcs are still kind of ill-defined. Basically the story has two protagonist and it is canon that Adam and Cell each relate more to one of them.

The problem with that is that now I’m getting a lot of ideas for Snow to Ashes, and I don’t know if I have the time to work all of these ideas and iron them out before nanowrimo starts.

So that’s where I’m at. Either way I will be pantsing it. I was hoping to get to do some outlining this week before Friday, but it turns out that being tired, having a pretty big spike of executive dysfunction, final fantasy 14, and my parents deciding to watch the TV again after years of not doing it (thus making noise at the time of day that would be perfect for me to write), is not fertile grounds for productivity. I am, incidentally, out of a FF14 subscription in four days, which is very fine by me since that game would also ruin nanowrimo itself, not just the pre-nano prep.

This isn’t really a request for feedback tbh, just, like I said, venting. Hoping to straighten my thoughts and figure out which choice is best.

As a PS i should mention that yes, the Talys Alankil game is also technically a writing option, and I could write a script for that. I mean it’s almost a rewrite because that one has a pretty rigid outline already, but. Yeah. It’s an option too.

Edited: I didn’t mention Malefacta. I didn’t forget about malefacta. I just don’t know what to do with Malefacta. It’s annoying.

Edited2: Remember when I almost wrote a superhero book for nanowrimo 2017? yeah that’s still a project I have somewhere. I’m no feeling it though. Sorry, superhero project. You were never meant to be, I guess.

[hosseinis]

your skin is so nice, what's your routine? ;0;

ahhh thank you, that’s so sweet!! ;o; i have always thankfully had relatively clear skin, though i started getting breakouts into my late 20s that i never had as a teenager, but recently i did add some skincare to my routine and that really helped! 

the biggest thing is that i’m a big fan of cleanser wipes as opposed to cleanser in the bottle, since Executive Dysfunction and all that, and i find it easier to run that over my face instead of having to wash my face and rinse it off and dry it, etc. etc., so i really recommend those if you, like me, are lazy and don’t want to take the extra time otherwise. i also use a moisturizer for dry skin once a day at night before i go to bed, because i didn’t like how it felt on my face if i did it in the morning. i also occasionally indulge in clay masks when i have some down time, and i use facial scrubs with beads in them in the shower.

i also generally try to avoid salty foods, which has also helped, and i really don’t wear makeup besides eyeliner, either. but that’s just me personally. overall my routine isn’t very intensive, but it’s fitted to my lazy needs specifically, which was the most important part. so i hope this helps a little in you or anyone finding their own! :>