#limiting thought patterns and depression

[sugary-strawberry-shortcake]

Reverse Bloom (Yandere Batfamily x Neglected! Poison Ivy‘s Daughter! Reader)

Chapter 3

A/N: oki this one got looonngggg. But it’s the first time where we get more flashbacks and one of the brothers relationship dynamic with her. What do y’all think?:) - poppy

Wayne Manor had always been quiet, but lately it was a different kind of silence.

Not the calm kind—the heavy kind.

The kind that pressed into the ribs.

That made even the floorboards feel like they were holding their breath.

No one said anything outright, but the Batfamily could all feel it. In the halls. At the breakfast table. Between patrol rotations.

Something had shifted.

Dick was the first to notice it.

She didn’t sit next to him anymore.

Didn’t linger in the kitchen.

Didn’t poke her head in while he was doing push-ups just to say hi.

She still smiled when she saw him—but it never reached her eyes.

Tim noticed the pattern change.

She didn’t leave flowers on his desk anymore. Didn’t ask about his tech.

Didn’t thank him when he opened the door for her. And he couldn’t explain why that made his hands clench every time he thought about it.

Damian didn’t say anything out loud.

But he watched. Watched her in the mornings as she walked past him in the hall without greeting him like she used to. Watched her sit alone in the library and never asked to watch him fight.

He told himself it didn’t bother him.

It did.

Cass, when she visited, tilted her head every time she saw YN.

Her body said what the others wouldn’t: She’s walking differently. Holding herself like she’s shrinking. Or hiding. But no one really knew why.

Unbeknownst to them, it wasn’t anything they had done recently.

It was everything they hadn’t done.

Because Y/N had stopped trying.

Stopped trying to fit into a space they’d never made for her. Stopped smiling for the sake of keeping peace.

Stopped running after them like the sweet little sister they hadn’t earned.

They had all been used to her giving.

And now that she had stopped?

The silence felt louder than ever.

⸻

Rain tapped at the window.

The digital clock on her nightstand blinked at 12:31 AM. The light from her laptop cast soft shadows across her blanket. The screen was full of browser tabs—open rentals, part-time jobs, temp agencies, and fake ID generators she could barely understand.

She was fourteen.

There weren’t many options.

She’d searched every “rooms for rent” listing within city limits. Most were in Crime Alley or the Narrows. One was near Gotham Heights, overpriced and probably fake.

She chewed her nail, eyes tired, mind aching.

I don’t need much. Just a place to exist. Somewhere no one’s watching me like I’m about to shatter. Somewhere I can breathe. Somewhere I can survive.

She hated thinking this way.

But she hated feeling like a unwanted guest in her own house more.

A knock.

Not on the door. On the window.

Her breath hitched.

She turned slowly, heart already knowing.

Jason.

Only he ever used her window.

She closed the laptop quickly and slid under the covers, flattening her breathing like she used to when she pretended to sleep after nightmares.

But the knock came again.

Not urgent. Not loud.

Just… persistent.

She knew that knock. He always knocked like that—like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to be let in or forced in.

Her heart squeezed tight.

Jason had been the brother she got along with best.

Not because he was kind. Not because he was warm. But because he was real.

He never lied to her.

Never sugarcoated anything.

He spoke in anger and silences, and somehow that was easier to understand than the fake smiles from the others.

He was never really around.

Not after he came back.

Not after everything broke.

She remembered the mess.

The shouting.

The day Bruce stopped looking anyone in the eye. The way the whole house smelled like grief and sweat and smoke.

She had been just a kid— barely being able to talk when he died.

She thought Bruce was depressed.

She thought everyone was.

Until Tim showed up.

And then she realized…

Bruce just didn’t want her.

⸻

When Jason came back, it was like watching a bomb walk on legs.

Angry at Bruce. At Gotham. At the world.

And her.

He didn’t say it, not at first.

But she felt it every time he looked at her—like her very existence reminded him of all the things he hated.

Especially her blood.

Especially her mother.

He had shouted once—just once—and it had cracked something in her forever.

She never smiled at him after that.

After that, their relationship had slowly stitched itself into something fragile and strange.She never asked questions when he used her window. He never asked why her eyes were always tired.

It worked.

And now?

Now he was back like always. Like nothing happened. But something did happen, happen to her.

⸻

A third knock.

She sighed softly and sat up.

Her feet padded across the room quietly. She unlocked the window.

Jason was crouched on the ledge, still in his Red Hood gear, helmet clipped to his belt, hair wet with rain.

His eyes met hers.

“You’re not asleep.”

She rolled her eyes and moved aside without answering.

He climbed in, boots dripping, and stood in the center of her room like he’d never left.

She crawled back into bed, not looking at him.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” she said.

“You used to let me in after only a minute.”

“You used to be gone for weeks.”

He paused.

The tension stretched between them like a thread.

The rain slid gently down the window now, streaking light across the walls as Jason shrugged off his jacket and dropped it onto her desk chair without asking.

Same as always.

YN sat cross-legged on the bed, arms wrapped loosely around her knees. Her laptop was tucked, closed and quiet, under her pillow. The web of open tabs still buzzed in her head—cheap apartments, fake ID services, under-the-table jobs—but now she had to pretend none of it existed.

Jason stood for a minute, hands on his hips, looking around the room.

“You changed your sheets,” he said at last.

She blinked. “Yeah?”

He nodded toward the bed. “I remember the old ones. Ivy-patterned. These are white.”

“People change,” she said lightly, too lightly.

Jason arched a brow but didn’t press it. Instead, he walked over and dropped onto the floor beside her bed with a grunt. His back hit the side of the mattress, arms sprawled out. He looked up at the ceiling like it had something to say.

“It’s weird being here again,” he said.

For her it has been years since he visited her. For him it has been a month or two.

Y/N hummed.

“I mean, the last time I came back from patrol and crashed at the manor, I think Tim was still using dial-up and Bruce didn’t hate me this week.”.

A tiny smile tugged at her mouth before she could stop it.

Jason heard it in the silence.

“Hey—look at that. You do still have facial muscles.”

“Don’t be stupid,” she muttered, but not unkindly.

“Don’t tempt me. It’s a skill.”

They sat like that for a moment—him sprawled out, her curled in, both listening to the rain.

It was an unusual silence.

“You used to ask me more questions,” Jason said without looking at her.

Y/N blinked. “What?”

He rolled his head back against the mattress to look at her upside-down. “About patrol. Or the city. Or my bike. You used to sit here like a baby detective and quiz me about what it’s like being the black sheep.”

Her throat tightened.

“You used to talk more,” she deflected. Her tone was calm and almost collected and void of any emotion.

Jason smirked. “I still talk. You’re just not asking anymore.”

She didn’t reply.

He sat up slightly, one arm hooked over his raised knee. “So what gives, Little Bloom?”

She flinched at the name.

Jason didn’t miss it.

He frowned. What was up with her?

“I’m just busy,” she said, too fast. “School. Life. You know.”

“You’re fourteen.”

“Exactly.”

He studied her. There was something in her voice—an edge, dull and tired. Something older than fourteen. Something she shouldn’t have.

“You’re acting different.”

“You’re imagining things.”

“You’re quieter. Colder.”

“I’m growing up.”

Jason’s gaze lingered on her, hard to read.

“Guess we all missed it,” he muttered. “You growing up.”

She looked at him then.

Something fragile flickered behind her eyes.

He didn’t know.

He didn’t remember.

Didn't remember how she died because of them.

None of them did.

“Maybe you weren’t looking,” she said softly.

Jason blinked, caught off guard by the foreign sharpness in her voice—too subtle to be cruel, too quiet to be innocent.

The silence between them stretched, thick and full of all the things that hadn’t been said in years. YN shifted under her blanket and leaned her cheek against her knee, staring past him.

Jason didn’t know what else to say. And it hit him, sharply, that maybe that was the problem.

He had never really known what to say to her.

She used to make it easy. Bright-eyed, curious, always asking questions. “What was it like out there?” “Is it scary?” “Do you have a favorite safehouse?” “What’s your favorite kind of bullet?”

Now? She didn’t ask.

She just avoided looking at him, like she didn't want to be near him.

He sighed and stood up, stretching his back. “Alright. I’ll get out of your hair.”

She didn’t respond.

Didn’t say goodnight.

Didn’t ask if he’d come back with pleading eyes.

Jason lingered for a moment longer, then walked toward the window, grabbing his jacket from the chair.

“You know,” he said without turning, “for the record, I always liked those blueberry muffins. You should tell Alfred to make them again sometime.”

She didn’t say anything.

He left before he saw the pained look on her face.

⸻

Downstairs, the kitchen was dark except for the faint under-cabinet lights Alfred always left on. Jason padded across the tile, opened the fridge, and leaned in without thinking.

He expected to see a plate of something sweet on the second shelf.

A tray. A box. A little note with nothing written but a tiny, flower-shaped doodle in the corner.

But there was nothing.

Just leftovers. Steel containers. An empty ceramic plate where something had clearly been taken out.

Jason frowned.

“Huh.”

He opened a few cabinets. Checked the breadbox. Even glanced into the oven.

Nothing.

Weird.

He’d never really thought about it before—he just assumed Alfred made the muffins. The cookies. The lemon bars.

Now it was all gone. And he felt a strange… emptiness.

Like something had been quietly taken away. But he dismissed it. Maybe the old butler had been busy with one of Damian’s tantrums again?

He grabbed a beer, leaned back against the counter, and cracked the tab open.

Took a long drink.

Frowned deeper.

Something’s off.

He didn’t know what yet.

But for the first time since he’d come back to the manor, he felt it wasn’t just the house that had changed.

It was her.

And maybe… it had been for a long time.

He just hadn’t been looking.

Jason didn’t dream much. Not really.

But some nights, the garden bloomed inside his head like it had been waiting for him.

It was always the same—ivy along the railings, fresh grass underfoot, the faint scent of rain and cookies and Alfred’s cologne. And her.

Tiny. Toddlersized. Sitting on a patch of sunlit moss with a flower crown slipping over one ear.

He couldn’t even remember her name the first time he met her.

Bruce had just brought her home. She was two—maybe younger—and barely able to form words, let alone keep up with everything that was happening around her.

He hadn’t been angry about her, though. Not then. Not yet.

He remembered standing in the hallway, boots still muddy from patrol, when he first saw her toddling out from behind Alfred’s legs, all wide green eyes and a stuffed elephant in one arm.

She saw him—and blinked. Then smiled.

Like he was the sun.

“Hi!” she chirped, stumbling forward on chubby legs. “Juh-son?”

He blinked at her. “…Yeah?”

“Hi, Juh-son!”

Alfred had chuckled behind her. The butler clearly adoring her. “She’s been practicing your name, Master Todd. Quite determined.”

“Juh-son!” she squealed again, arms up like she wanted to be picked up.

He stared at her. Then laughed—genuinely laughed—and crouched down. “Well, hey there, trouble. You always this loud?”

She hugged his neck like she’d known him forever.

And in that second, he remembered feeling something he hadn’t felt in months.

Warmth.

Purpose.

Something good.

Something worth protecting.

⸻

But the warmth didn’t last.

Not for him.

(Post-Jason’s Death)

She remembered it all wrong.

It was supposed to be the kind of day where Alfred made lemon scones and Bruce let the sun touch his office windows.

But instead, the manor went silent.

The kind of silence that felt wrong—like something had been cut out of the world.

She was small. Too small to understand what “he’s gone” meant. Too small to grasp death.

But she knew something was missing.

Jason’s jacket was still in the hallway.

His boots, still at the door.

The gun holster he never used—left behind.

She remembered knocking on Bruce’s study door.

Tiny fists. A flower in her hand.

“Daddy?”

No answer.

“Daddy…?”

She waited. Knocked again.

The door didn’t open.

She sat there for two hours before Alfred found her curled up on the floor.

Bruce stopped speaking much after that. Not that he did it much before that.

Stopped looking at her.

Stopped noticing.

She’d go days without hearing his voice.

And when she finally did, it was always for someone else—Tim. Dick. Patrol.

Not her.

When Tim showed up, she remembered being confused.

He was nice. Smart. Kind in the polite way strangers are kind to children.

But that’s when she realized…

Bruce wasn’t just sad.

He was replacing Jason.

And keeping her far away from it.

⸻

When Jason came back from the dead, he wasn’t the same. Everyone knew it.

His memories were jagged. His rage, unfiltered.

He didn’t feel warm anymore. He felt like gasoline.

And every time he looked at her—bright-eyed, hopeful, still sweet—he wanted to scream.

Because she had what he lost.

She had the love he never got back.

The affection Bruce never gave him after the resurrection.

The softness he had buried under gunfire and ash.

She was everything untouched by the world.

And he hated her for it.

It happened one night after a fight with Bruce. The kind that left Jason shaking, fists bloodied from a punch he’d aimed at a wall instead of his father’s face.

He stormed down the stairs.

Every breath was acid.

And there she was.

Eleven. Barefoot. Hair in a braid with a ribbon tied at the end. Holding something she’d baked—banana bread, maybe—and walking up toward him. With a goddamn smile.

“Jason!” she chirped, eyes bright. “I—I saved you a piece! I heard yelling so I thought—”

“Don’t.”

She froze.

He hadn’t meant to snarl it. But it came out like a snarl anyway.

She blinked, uncertain.

“I just thought—”

“You thought wrong,” he spat.

Her eyes widened. Her hands gripped the plate a little tighter.

“You think I want anything from you?”

“I—Jason, I just wanted to—”

“To what? Be the good little daughter? The perfect little Wayne?”

Her lip trembled.

“You think you’re not like her?” he hissed, voice full of venom. “You’re just like your mother. Ivy’s little weed. That’s what you are. All sweetness on the surface and rot underneath.”

Her eyes welled. “I’m not—”

“You think a few cookies and smiles make you clean?” His voice cracked. “You’re just like her. Evil. Dirty. Manipulative. Bruce should’ve left you where he found you.”

She didn’t move.

Didn’t cry.

She just set the plate down on the stairs.

And walked away.

Jason would never remember the exact words. He buried them somewhere deep.

But she never baked banana bread again.

He never apologized.

Not properly. Not with the words she deserved.

After that night—after he spit venom down the stairs and shattered something he couldn’t name—he just stopped talking.

And then, weeks later, he showed up at her window again.

Midnight. Rain. Bruised ribs under his jacket. She opened the latch like nothing had ever happened.

She didn’t bring up the hallway. Or the banana bread. Or the name weed.

She just let him in.

And sat beside him while he muttered about patrol and crime bosses and stupid decisions Bruce made.

And she listened.

Always listened.

Asked about his nights. Asked if he’d eaten. Asked why he never stayed longer.

But she never talked about herself.

And he never asked.

He told himself it was fine.

She was fine.

She baked again eventually. Left muffins in the fridge. Cookies in Tupperware. Pies on the cooling rack when she knew he’d be back.

And he took.

He always took.

⸻

Tonight, standing alone in the kitchen, it finally hit him.

There was nothing on the counter.

No muffins. No pies. No scones. No glass containers waiting in the fridge with a sticky note bearing a tiny hand-drawn flower.

And worse—

The houseplants were gone.

Not dead.

Just… gone.

The little pots she used to water every morning. The vines that used to curl around the cabinet handles. The single white lily that always sat in the corner by the coffee machine, just because she liked it there.

All gone.

The windowsill was empty. Bare.

The air didn’t smell like jasmine or lavender anymore—it just smelled like… air.

Jason stared.

He couldn’t explain it, but something tightened in his chest. Something low and wrong.

He opened the fridge again.

Still nothing.

His hands curled around the edge of the counter.

It wasn’t just about the food. It was never about the food.

It was her.

He stood there for a long time.

In the middle of the kitchen, hands still braced on cold stone, staring at nothing.

Trying to figure out why his chest felt tight.

Why his breathing had gone shallow.

Why the air felt heavier now than it had during any firefight.

He didn’t know what it was.

He didn’t know that it would get worse in the next few days.

Much worse.

____

It was rare for the manor to be this quiet in the middle of the day.

Dick had dropped in without warning, like always—straight from Blüdhaven after wrapping up a double-night stakeout, sore from sleeping on rooftop gravel and a little guilty for how long it had been since he’d set foot in the house.

He hadn’t seen Bruce, not properly.

Hadn’t seen the others in weeks.

Cass had texted something vague and cryptic about “things changing.”

And Alfred had responded to his check-in with a brief “We miss you, Master Richard. Some more than others.”

He assumed that meant Jason or Damian had started another round of drama.

Typical.

The house had smelled the same—lemon polish, faint smoke from the fireplace, something deeper buried beneath. Maybe he was just imagining it. Maybe not.

He passed through the library, the sitting room, Bruce’s study—

Empty.

But Bruce had clearly been there recently. The chair was warm, the coffee mug half-full. A thick, overstuffed folder sat on the edge of the desk, one word scribbled on a post-it stuck to the cover.

Y/N.

Dick didn’t touch it. Just glanced at it, vaguely thinking Bruce was probably updating school records or something—maybe another evaluation of her “involvement” in family business, which Bruce had always firmly kept her out of.

He didn’t question it.

He didn’t question much when it came to her.

He hadn’t thought about her in… he couldn’t even remember.

God. How long had it been since he last saw her?

What did she look like now?

How old even was she?

Twelve? Thirteen? No… wait. She was younger than Damian, right?

That realization hit like a quiet slap.

He didn’t even know.

⸻

He wandered upstairs, lazy steps drawing him through parts of the manor he barely remembered.

It wasn’t until he reached the east wing—the forgotten hallway, tucked behind the third landing—that he paused.

The dust here was thicker. The air colder. The lights overhead flickered faintly. There were no paintings on this side. No signs of family. Just cobwebs.

And one slightly open door.

Something pulled at him. A flicker of memory. A tiny voice calling him from years ago.

“Dicky! Dicky, look! I made you a flower crown—see? See? You have to wear it or it’s bad luck!”

He pushed the door open.

⸻

The room was small—too small for a Wayne.

Not much bigger than a closet with a window.

But he knew immediately.

It was hers.

There were flowers everywhere. Hanging vines along the walls, potted plants clustered at the window, tiny wildflowers peeking out of chipped ceramic cups like they’d grown there on their own.

They hadn’t.

She had done this. Like she always had.

Like his Little Flower always did.

The nickname struck him so hard it nearly buckled his knees.

He remembered her as a toddler. Barely talking. Always clinging. Always with a drawing or a dandelion in her hands, trying to shove it into his palm like it was treasure.

He’d called her that once.

Little Flower.

And she’d giggled so hard she fell over.

He hadn’t said it in years.

He hadn’t seen her in years.

And now?

The room didn’t look like it belonged to a child.

It didn’t look like it belonged to anyone.

The bed was neatly made, sheets no longer the soft pink-and-green florals he half-remembered. Now they were gray. Plain. Clinical.

The drawings were gone. No family stick figures. No bright crayon hearts. No mess.

It was clean.

Too clean.

Lifeless.

⸻

Dick stepped inside slowly, fingertips brushing along the bookshelf where little paper crafts used to sit.

Empty.

He moved toward the desk—stopped.

There were old impressions on the wood.

Shapes from frames that had been moved.

Photos that had once stood there.

And were now gone.

Something twisted in his gut.

He didn’t know what it was.

But it felt wrong.

This felt wrong.

The girl he remembered would’ve had plants climbing the ceiling by now. There would’ve been glitter on the floor. A pile of flower crowns made from weeds. Scribbled notes taped to the wall. Half-burnt candles that smelled like vanilla.

But this room?

It felt like someone had been erasing themselves.

Dick exhaled shakily.

And for the first time in a very long time, he realized—

He couldn’t picture her face anymore.

Not as she was now.

He could only see the toddler version. The one with dirt on her cheeks and stars in her eyes. One he had not seen in a while.

And he hated that.

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[becomingthatgirl111]

journal prompts you can use to improve your life

journaling is a really powerful habit that i love because it has helped me a lot in my transformation and healing process. it also offers us many benefits for our life. when we write down what we feel or what we want to achieve we are focusing and giving it much more clarity. through this magical practice, we can solve any type of situation or problem. It helps us to get rid of fears and anger. my favorite way is to ask myself questions that I can answer, this gives me more clarity and concentration. i recommend doing it on paper in fact i have my own notebook in which every day i carry out this wonderful practice.

✨ some of its benefits are:

helps reduce anxiety and depressive thoughts.

improves cognitive capacity, writing by hand activates many neural networks and, consequently, improves our cognitive capacity. In addition, it also emphasizes that this activity promotes prospective and working memory.

helps cultivate discipline

improves memory

it helps us to create habits moreover, writing on paper those "tasks" or habits that you want to integrate into your life, makes your brain catalog them as "important actions" and it is more likely that you fulfill them in the day. What happens is that your reticular active system (SAR) files them as actions that you must accomplish.

✨ journal prompts ideas

for the morning - have a great day and focus on the positive and what we want to accomplish today.

how do i want to feel today?

what should i focus on?

how do i need to act today to get closer to my best self?

what should i avoid?

what can i do to have a great day?

what would i like my day to be like?

today…(the things you will do, how you will feel)

today no…. (the things you want to avoid and not focus on)

for times of stress or anxiety.

how am i feeling?

what has caused me to feel this way?

have i felt this way on other occasions? is it a pattern i am repeating?

how would i like to feel?

what should i focus on?

what would make me feel good right now?

is there anything i can do right now to fix it?

how would i like to act the next time this situation happens?

how would my best version of me act in this situation?

is there anything I can do to make this better?

to become our best version

what would my best version look like?

what things should i change to get closer to my best version? (like thought patterns, habits…)

what can i do to get closer to becoming my best version?

what do i commit myself to every day to be closer to this version?

what would my desired life look like 6 months from now?

what would my desired life look like 1 year from now?

what are those thought patterns or limiting beliefs that prevent me from living my life the way i want?

what is it that makes me feel fearful or insecure? (make a list and next to it you can replace the negative affirmation with a positive one).

write down 5 positive affirmations of how you want your life to be from now on and commit to repeating them daily.

to focus on new goals or habits

what habits would i like to implement in my life from now on?

what habits do i need to remove from my life?

what would my desired routine look like?

what can i do to achieve this?

what would be my dream lifestyle?

what can i do to achieve it?

what are my goals?

how can i get closer to them?

do i feel capable?

if not, what is stopping me?

what can i do to change that thinking?

against negative thoughts

where does this thought come from?

how does it make me feel?

how would i like to feel about it?

what thoughts would i like to have?

from now on i commit myself to…(list of positive beliefs you will have from now on)

for the evening, to end your day on a high note and prepare for the next day.

3 things i am grateful for today

how did i feel today?

what can i improve tomorrow?

what should i focus on more tomorrow? (e.g. goals)

how would i like to feel today?

these are just a few examples, you can use them if they help you or invent your own, the important thing is that they help you feel better or whatever you want to achieve at that moment.

it is important to write every day, even if you feel good, write how your day was, what you want to improve, what you can do to make it better, anything! but this habit is very powerful and will improve your quality of life a lot.

[rederiswrites]

I wrote this out for FB and then thought I might as well share it here as well. So if you have ADHD, are a late-diagnosed adult with ADHD, and most particular if you are a person with a uterus and/or have children, this one might be for you.

...

Last couple of days have been a little...weird. Let's start at the beginning. Buckle up and learn something.

As many of you already know, I have ADHD. It's a condition with a PR problem--a lot of people, often even medical professionals, have a very distorted idea of what it does, and a very limited one. For starters, it's not about parenting, or lead paint, or lack of discipline. It's genetic, *highly* heritable, starts in childhood and persists throughout life, and is a sufficiently severe disability that it comes with a decrease in life expectancy of up to 13 years. It is a visible difference that can be perceived in brain scans. These are all, at this point, well established and thoroughly attested in the scientific literature. ADHD affects up to 5% of the population and appears across cultures. It is very common.

It's not just about lack of attention--in fact, plenty of medical professionals think the name should be changed, as in fact the problem isn't the volume of attention but the way we struggle to direct it. We are motivated by interest, and struggle to properly weight future goals and consequences, specifically because they are in the future. If the robin outside the window is more immediately rewarding to our brain, we will watch that, and not the teacher. Our ability to properly weigh the consequences of that choice is negatively impacted by our own biochemistry.

We struggle with many of what are termed the "executive functions", the self management systems of the brain. Degree and presentation varies from person to person, but initiating tasks, completing tasks, staying ON task, restraining impulses, emotional regulation, and working memory are among the things impacted. My working memory is notoriously horrible. When they send you those activation codes on your phone? I often have to go back and read them out several times to enter a six digit number. I have to stop and remind myself what I'm doing between every step of my morning bathroom routine, or making tacos. Sometimes I take off my glasses to put on my contacts, reset, and reach for my pill bottles while I still can't see. My long-term memory is also affected, with my husband de facto serving as the memory-holder of the family.

Another common symptom I personally experience is "time blindness", which can mean both that you have no "internal clock" that has a clear idea of the passage of time, and that our ability to properly weight the importance of things in the future is impacted. So, for example, I can know intellectually what's coming, but it takes some really complex and exhausting antics to actually focus and work on those things if they're more than a week or sometimes even a couple days away.

Without externally imposed controls, many ADHD people flounder and fail to meet social markers of success. Estimates of how many ADHD people manage to complete college range from 5% to 15%. Again: 5% to 15%! I have failed twice myself. WITH externally imposed controls, ADHD people often have to work far harder to make their brains do what is required, and either fail and develop an image of themselves as failures (usually with plenty of external help), or keep fighting and suffer crippling burnout.

To that point, ADHD is HIGHLY comorbid with a whole range of knock-on conditions, some of which stem from the same brain patterns that give rise to the ADHD itself, and others from the trauma of living with a disability, but they include very high rates of depression, anxiety, fibromyalgia, social isolation, and addiction. I have dealt with depression, anxiety, and fibromyalgia my entire adult life. I have never ended up in the trap of self-medication but let's be real, that's partly about having supports and a healthy social environment. It's not some accomplishment I praise myself for, nor is addiction a sin I shame anyone for.

And anxiety has a very different texture to it when what you're really anxious about is the next time you fail in some catastrophic way. Lock your keys in the car. Completely space on a doctor's appointment. Go to pay for groceries and find that your wallet is next to your computer at home. Because the anxiety is not irrational fear of some generalized bad thing. These things do and will happen, regularly. Sometimes it feels like the only fix is getting good at recovering. Because no matter how many times you manage not to blow it, there's always another chance.

So, the struggle to be a reliable person, to be a consistent parent, to be a dependable life partner, is continuous. And it is so so so hard and it sometimes feels like you're not actually making any progress at all. I have tried therapy. I have tried three (or four??) different non-stimulant medications that sometimes help people. One of them DID help. ALL of them had catastrophic side effects. There were times as I was trialing these medications when I needed to be minded because I wasn't capable of taking care of anything, not even myself. Without Jacob, I don't know where I'd be. Not here. Probably in poverty, which is where he found me.

I have tried probably most organizational tools you know of. I have tried imposing schedules, all of which turned to dust and ash when the next fibromyalgia flareup or the next major life disruption happened. I don't think a new schedule has ever lasted a month before.

I HAVE felt like I'm made progress lately. I learned things that really helped my fibromyalgia, which gave me the space to work on other things--just like getting the borders of a puzzle finished. Enough things were spiraling upwards, and I think I might be cementing some gains. I have felt optimistic.

But in the meantime, I asked my doctor if, now that no less than three cardiologists have insisted my heart is Perfectly Healthy, I could finally try stimulant medications. After decades of use, Adderall, Ritalin, and a couple related stimulant drugs are still the gold standard for ADHD treatment and improve outcomes substantially for many people. And stimulants are in serious international shortage. Have been for many months. The only one she thought she could get me was Adderall. And she didn't dare try anything but the standard 30mg because nonstandard dosages would be even less attainable.

So now I'm taking Adderall. One week on 30mg, which I stopped when it was clear my function was being seriously impaired rather than improved. Reassessed with the doctor, now trying 60mg, because that's two of the pills I've already managed to obtain. It is....too much. And in some ways it fixes problems I wasn't working on, while so far making my executive function, my initiation or even *contemplation* of tasks, virtually nonexistant. Which was, of course, the thing I was trying to fix.

So yeah. When you have the context, I figure you can understand the substance of my frustration yourself. If you have children, I don't think you need my help to imagine what it would be like to know that you are unpredictable, or to see that your children are used to to you undergoing events that make you act strangely and erratically. I think just knowing that often, new medications introduce themselves by giving me a migraine, and I know this is possible when I take that first pill, is fairly self-explanatory. And so I expect you can imagine what it would be like, with all of this as a backdrop, to experience worsening of your symptoms, probably because of age-related hormonal changes. To in desperation try something you'd previously been denied. And to learn that it probably won't help.

In a week, I will either give up on Adderall for now or find a way to make it work. I'll put together the pieces yet again--at this point, possibly my strongest personal skill--and continue that upward climb as far as I can get. I'm incredibly fortunate in that regardless, I will be fed and dry and warm and loved. But right now, I feel justified in some serious dismay.

[antisocialsharky]

ASPD Affects More Than Just Behavior

I spent some time in the disorder related subreddits (big mistake, I know) and stumbled upon the following comment:

"ASPD shouldn't be a personality disorder diagnosis, its just bad behavior and has nothing to do with personality"

Lets get into why that is absolute bullshit, shall we?

1. ASPD is more than just behavior. While no diagnostic mannual is able to describe the whole range of experiences that fall under a diagnostic label, even the DSM-5, with its very behavior heavy criteria, manages it to get that point across. You'll find mentions of a "lack of remorse", "irritability & aggressiveness" and "disregard for the safety of self or others" in the main criteria.

The "associated features supporting diagnosis" section, mentions the following additional traits, that could be seen as not strictly behavioral in nature: lack of empathy, inflated & arrogant self appraisal, glib/superficial charm, inability to tolerate boredom and depressed mood.

The proposed alternative ASPD criteria (that is not used for diagnosis, but is used to understand the condition) describes these traits: egocentrism, absence of prosocial inner standards, lack of remorse, lack of concern for others, incapacity for mutually intimate relationships, callousness, persistent/frequent angry feelings, boredom proneness, lack of concern for ones limitations, denial of the reality of personal danger and lack of respect for promises & aggreements.

All of those traits are not strictly behavioral, but have something to do with ones emotional state and thought patterns. Its the basis, that provokes and influences behavior sure, but claiming that ASPD is nothing beyond that behavior is ridiculous.

2. The definition of a personality seems to be along the lines of being "a characteristic way of thinking, feeling and behaving" or "any person's collection of interrelated behavioral, cognitive, and emotional patterns that comprise a person’s unique adjustment to life". Everyone will have their personal definition, but this does overlap with how the DSM-5 defines a personality and thus defines the areas in which a personality is seen as disordered (whether you are a fan of that concept or not).

As mentioned above, theres a lot of evidence in the criteria that ASPD is not just comprised of "disordered behavior", but also "disordered emotions" and "disordered thought patterns". Or, if you prefer to think of it this way, you could say that ASPD affects all three areas in a way that disables the individual.

Now, a very interesting part of the personality definition is the "unique adjustment to life" part and that brings me to my next point.

3. A personality disorder is caused by a mix of different factors, but most often includes a genetic and an environmental factor. This environmental factor usually has something to do with trauma and/or adjusting to a difficult life situation.

And oh damn would you look at that...its almost as if ASPD, as a personality disorder, is a unique way of adjusting to that difficult life situation, which totally overlaps with the definition of a personality. Shocker...

All sillyness aside, ASPD is a deeply ingrained pattern that forms as a way of surviving & being able to deal with what life throws at you. Its not superficial, its not just behavior. It influences everything. You can think of it as a liquid, that seeps into the smallest crevices of your brain and sticks to the walls and refuses to leave again.

The fact that ASPD is so often singled out, as being "just bad behavior" is no mistake of course. Its due to stigma and the way in which people view antisocial traits as bad & undesirable (tho the same could be said for all other PDs in one way or another). It proves yet again, how little some people know about the subject and how much more awareness is needed.

Some part of the blame, probably lies with the behavioral focus in the DSM-5 main criteria, which is often the only one people learn about! Many do not bother looking beyond and learning about the condition from the people who have it, or explore what it simply is in the end: an adjustment of personality that just made sense/was essential and cannot be entirely reversed again (and the argument could be made, that it shouldn't have to be reversed).

Let me quickly dive into some personal examples at the end, to make the whole thing a bit more graspable:

• ASPD is more than just behavior, because if I see someone cry because they hurt themselves, I cannot feel with them and I do not feel any desire to help them. I will think about them as weak and annoying, I will secretly hope that they just stop so I don't have to deal with it and I will have to work hard to keep the annoyance that I feel off my face. The behavioral part will be what I do about it. Do I get up, turn around and walk away? Or do I sit down and comfort them and try to help, even if it entirely goes against any emotion I feel & any thoughts I have?

• ASPD is more than just behavior, because if someone just so happens to bump into me in public, I will feel anger. I will be furious, curse words will run trough my head and my brain will play trough multiple scenarios of revenge and reactions that would be satisfying to me. I will think every negative thing under the sun, I will feel every bit of rage, disdain and annoyance. But the behavioral part is what I do about it. Do I let my aggression out and make that persons day as miserable as they just made mine? Or do I wave it off, smile and go on, even if everything inside me wants to claw its way trough their face?

first posted on my instagram (same @)

[elliespassagerprincess]

Hello can you do a fic based on the song “the cut that always bleeds” by Conan gray ? Thank you <3

The cut that always bleeds - ellie williams x reader

Hi anon!! I loved writing this, i was chanelling what happened between my ex and lmao. I hope you like it:)

This story is based off the song The cut that always bleeds by Conan Gray. If you can please listen to the song as you're reading:)

Pairing: ellie x fem!reader

requests are open! send me your silly thoughts

Warning: emotional manipulation, abandonment, grief, mentions of depression

Summary: in which she left you bleeding

authors note: sup babygirl

masterlist

“Every time I think maybe this time it’ll be different.”

You always swore you wouldn’t be the kind of person to beg for love.

But Ellie Williams makes you forget that.

She walks into your life already in pieces, smelling like old blood and regret. And somehow, you make yourself believe that if you hold her long enough, she’ll stay.

She never does.

You know her patterns now: The way she disappears for days without explanation.

The way she shows up at your door at 3 a.m., soaked in sweat and shaking.

The way she never says your name like it means something—but touches you like she’ll die if she doesn’t.

You should walk away.

But the truth is—you need her.

And that’s the worst part.

Because even after everything, after every goodbye that wasn’t really a goodbye, you still hope.

Hope that one day, she’ll look at you and finally say it.

Not I’m sorry.

Not I didn’t mean to.

But I love you.

She never does.

And the more you wait, the more it eats you alive.

“I don’t love you. But I don’t want you to love anyone else.”

Ellie is selfish. She knows that.

She tells herself it’s because she's lost too much. Because she doesn't know how to be good for anyone—not anymore. Not since Joel. Not since Seattle. Not since the blood, the screaming, the way Dina looked at her like she didn’t recognize the person standing in front of her anymore.

Ellie was never meant to find someone else.

But there you were. Soft. Kind. Safe.

She told herself she wouldn’t get close. That she was just tired, just lonely, just... fucked up.

But you looked at her like she was worth something. Like there was a version of her that wasn’t just made of scars and anger and ash.

So she let you in.

Just enough. Just enough to feel real.

She came back to Jackson after one of her episodes—days gone, no explanation.

She automatically made her way to your place. She quickly knocked at the door, almost excited to see your face. When you opened the door Ellie didn't expect to see you in the state you were in.

She didn't expect the silence. She didn't expect the tension. She didn't expect you to look the way you did.

You'd normally be angry. But this time was different.

You were not angry.

Not even hurt.

Just... empty.

“You always come back,” you say, looking at her “But you never stay.”

Ellie tried to tell you the truth—that staying feels like suffocating. And she's not ready to stop running, because if she does, all she hears is the sound of what she's lost.

“I don’t know how to love you the right way, I'm trying my best.” Ellie admits, and it’s not enough. She knows it isn’t. It never has been.

You laugh, bitterly. “Trying isn’t enough anymore, Ellie.”

And Ellie don’t have anything left to give.

Because you're right.

Later that night, Ellie sat on the roof of the old church where the stars peek through cracks in the clouds. She smokes a little. And Ellie thinks of the way you looked at her. The disappointment  in your eyes, the way your voice cracked, your honesty.

“Every time I think maybe this time it’ll be different.”

Ellie remembers how you looked sleeping next to her. Peaceful. Trusting. Like you believed—really believed—she wouldn’t break you like she broke everything else.

She did anyway.

She thinks she pushed you to your limit. She knows she broke you.

You’ll move on one day.

Someone else will pick up the pieces.

Someone who doesn’t flinch in the night or run at the first sign of quiet love.

And Ellie will be alone again.

But safe.

Because if no one gets close, no one can leave.

No one can die.

No one can love you just to stop.

Ellie didn’t mean to keep cutting them open.

But that’s what she does

She's the cut that always bleeds.

And you're just another scar that never gets the chance to heal.

“You break me, just to fix yourself.”

The first time you kiss someone else, it feels wrong.

You think about calling her. Just to hear her voice. Just to remind yourself why you held on so long. But you don’t.

Because this time—maybe—you’ll let yourself heal.

Maybe the cut can finally close.

And maybe, when she knocks on your door again, you won’t open it.

You’ll listen through the wood. You’ll hear her whisper your name.

And you’ll stay silent.

Because love shouldn’t be something you survive.

It should be something that lets you live.

And Ellie Williams never gave you that.

<3

[antiporn-activist]

I thought y'all should read this

I have a free trial to News+ so I copy-pasted it for you here. I don't think Jonathan Haidt would object to more people having this info.

Tumblr wouldn't let me post it until i removed all the links to Haidt's sources. You'll have to take my word that everything is sourced.

End the Phone-Based Childhood Now

The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development.

By Jonathan Haidt

Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you’ve likely seen the statistics: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States—fairly stable in the 2000s—rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.

The problem was not limited to the U.S.: Similar patterns emerged around the same time in Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, the Nordic countries, and beyond. By a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data.

The decline in mental health is just one of many signs that something went awry. Loneliness and friendlessness among American teens began to surge around 2012. Academic achievement went down, too. According to “The Nation’s Report Card,” scores in reading and math began to decline for U.S. students after 2012, reversing decades of slow but generally steady increase. PISA, the major international measure of educational trends, shows that declines in math, reading, and science happened globally, also beginning in the early 2010s.

As the oldest members of Gen Z reach their late 20s, their troubles are carrying over into adulthood. Young adults are dating less, having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likelyto live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens, and managers say they are harder to work with. Many of these trends began with earlier generations, but most of them accelerated with Gen Z.

Surveys show that members of Gen Z are shyer and more risk averse than previous generations, too, and risk aversion may make them less ambitious. In an interview last May, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison noted that, for the first time since the 1970s, none of Silicon Valley’s preeminent entrepreneurs are under 30. “Something has really gone wrong,” Altman said. In a famously young industry, he was baffled by the sudden absence of great founders in their 20s.

Generations are not monolithic, of course. Many young people are flourishing. Taken as a whole, however, Gen Z is in poor mental health and is lagging behind previous generations on many important metrics. And if a generation is doing poorly––if it is more anxious and depressed and is starting families, careers, and important companies at a substantially lower rate than previous generations––then the sociological and economic consequences will be profound for the entire society.

What happened in the early 2010s that altered adolescent development and worsened mental health? Theories abound, but the fact that similar trends are found in many countries worldwide means that events and trends that are specific to the United States cannot be the main story.

I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online—particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected. Life changed rapidly for younger children, too, as they began to get access to their parents’ smartphones and, later, got their own iPads, laptops, and even smartphones during elementary school.

As a social psychologist who has long studied social and moral development, I have been involved in debates about the effects of digital technology for years. Typically, the scientific questions have been framed somewhat narrowly, to make them easier to address with data. For example, do adolescents who consume more social media have higher levels of depression? Does using a smartphone just before bedtime interfere with sleep? The answer to these questions is usually found to be yes, although the size of the relationship is often statistically small, which has led some researchers to conclude that these new technologies are not responsible for the gigantic increases in mental illness that began in the early 2010s.

But before we can evaluate the evidence on any one potential avenue of harm, we need to step back and ask a broader question: What is childhood––including adolescence––and how did it change when smartphones moved to the center of it? If we take a more holistic view of what childhood is and what young children, tweens, and teens need to do to mature into competent adults, the picture becomes much clearer. Smartphone-based life, it turns out, alters or interferes with a great number of developmental processes.

The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world.

My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now.

1. The Decline of Play and Independence 

Human brains are extraordinarily large compared with those of other primates, and human childhoods are extraordinarily long, too, to give those large brains time to wire up within a particular culture. A child’s brain is already 90 percent of its adult size by about age 6. The next 10 or 15 years are about learning norms and mastering skills—physical, analytical, creative, and social. As children and adolescents seek out experiences and practice a wide variety of behaviors, the synapses and neurons that are used frequently are retained while those that are used less often disappear. Neurons that fire together wire together, as brain researchers say.

Brain development is sometimes said to be “experience-expectant,” because specific parts of the brain show increased plasticity during periods of life when an animal’s brain can “expect” to have certain kinds of experiences. You can see this with baby geese, who will imprint on whatever mother-sized object moves in their vicinity just after they hatch. You can see it with human children, who are able to learn languages quickly and take on the local accent, but only through early puberty; after that, it’s hard to learn a language and sound like a native speaker. There is also some evidence of a sensitive period for cultural learning more generally. Japanese children who spent a few years in California in the 1970s came to feel “American” in their identity and ways of interacting only if they attended American schools for a few years between ages 9 and 15. If they left before age 9, there was no lasting impact. If they didn’t arrive until they were 15, it was too late; they didn’t come to feel American.

Human childhood is an extended cultural apprenticeship with different tasks at different ages all the way through puberty. Once we see it this way, we can identify factors that promote or impede the right kinds of learning at each age. For children of all ages, one of the most powerful drivers of learning is the strong motivation to play. Play is the work of childhood, and all young mammals have the same job: to wire up their brains by playing vigorously and often, practicing the moves and skills they’ll need as adults. Kittens will play-pounce on anything that looks like a mouse tail. Human children will play games such as tag and sharks and minnows, which let them practice both their predator skills and their escaping-from-predator skills. Adolescents will play sports with greater intensity, and will incorporate playfulness into their social interactions—flirting, teasing, and developing inside jokes that bond friends together. Hundreds of studies on young rats, monkeys, and humans show that young mammals want to play, need to play, and end up socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play.

One crucial aspect of play is physical risk taking. Children and adolescents must take risks and fail—often—in environments in which failure is not very costly. This is how they extend their abilities, overcome their fears, learn to estimate risk, and learn to cooperate in order to take on larger challenges later. The ever-present possibility of getting hurt while running around, exploring, play-fighting, or getting into a real conflict with another group adds an element of thrill, and thrilling play appears to be the most effective kind for overcoming childhood anxieties and building social, emotional, and physical competence. The desire for risk and thrill increases in the teen years, when failure might carry more serious consequences. Children of all ages need to choose the risk they are ready for at a given moment. Young people who are deprived of opportunities for risk taking and independent exploration will, on average, develop into more anxious and risk-averse adults.

Human childhood and adolescence evolved outdoors, in a physical world full of dangers and opportunities. Its central activities––play, exploration, and intense socializing––were largely unsupervised by adults, allowing children to make their own choices, resolve their own conflicts, and take care of one another. Shared adventures and shared adversity bound young people together into strong friendship clusters within which they mastered the social dynamics of small groups, which prepared them to master bigger challenges and larger groups later on.

And then we changed childhood.

The changes started slowly in the late 1970s and ’80s, before the arrival of the internet, as many parents in the U.S. grew fearful that their children would be harmed or abducted if left unsupervised. Such crimes have always been extremely rare, but they loomed larger in parents’ minds thanks in part to rising levels of street crime combined with the arrival of cable TV, which enabled round-the-clock coverage of missing-children cases. A general decline in social capital––the degree to which people knew and trusted their neighbors and institutions––exacerbated parental fears. Meanwhile, rising competition for college admissions encouraged more intensive forms of parenting. In the 1990s, American parents began pulling their children indoors or insisting that afternoons be spent in adult-run enrichment activities. Free play, independent exploration, and teen-hangout time declined.

In recent decades, seeing unchaperoned children outdoors has become so novel that when one is spotted in the wild, some adults feel it is their duty to call the police. In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that parents, on average, believed that children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in front of their house, and that kids should be 14 before being allowed to go unsupervised to a public park. Most of these same parents had enjoyed joyous and unsupervised outdoor play by the age of 7 or 8.

2. The Virtual World Arrives in Two Waves

The internet, which now dominates the lives of young people, arrived in two waves of linked technologies. The first one did little harm to Millennials. The second one swallowed Gen Z whole.

The first wave came ashore in the 1990s with the arrival of dial-up internet access, which made personal computers good for something beyond word processing and basic games. By 2003, 55 percent of American households had a computer with (slow) internet access. Rates of adolescent depression, loneliness, and other measures of poor mental health did not rise in this first wave. If anything, they went down a bit. Millennial teens (born 1981 through 1995), who were the first to go through puberty with access to the internet, were psychologically healthier and happier, on average, than their older siblings or parents in Generation X (born 1965 through 1980).

The second wave began to rise in the 2000s, though its full force didn’t hit until the early 2010s. It began rather innocently with the introduction of social-media platforms that helped people connect with their friends. Posting and sharing content became much easier with sites such as Friendster (launched in 2003), Myspace (2003), and Facebook (2004).

Teens embraced social media soon after it came out, but the time they could spend on these sites was limited in those early years because the sites could only be accessed from a computer, often the family computer in the living room. Young people couldn’t access social media (and the rest of the internet) from the school bus, during class time, or while hanging out with friends outdoors. Many teens in the early-to-mid-2000s had cellphones, but these were basic phones (many of them flip phones) that had no internet access. Typing on them was difficult––they had only number keys. Basic phones were tools that helped Millennials meet up with one another in person or talk with each other one-on-one. I have seen no evidence to suggest that basic cellphones harmed the mental health of Millennials.

It was not until the introduction of the iPhone (2007), the App Store (2008), and high-speed internet (which reached 50 percent of American homes in 2007)—and the corresponding pivot to mobile made by many providers of social media, video games, and porn—that it became possible for adolescents to spend nearly every waking moment online. The extraordinary synergy among these innovations was what powered the second technological wave. In 2011, only 23 percent of teens had a smartphone. By 2015, that number had risen to 73 percent, and a quarter of teens said they were online “almost constantly.” Their younger siblings in elementary school didn’t usually have their own smartphones, but after its release in 2010, the iPad quickly became a staple of young children’s daily lives. It was in this brief period, from 2010 to 2015, that childhood in America (and many other countries) was rewired into a form that was more sedentary, solitary, virtual, and incompatible with healthy human development.

3. Techno-optimism and the Birth of the Phone-Based Childhood

The phone-based childhood created by that second wave—including not just smartphones themselves, but all manner of internet-connected devices, such as tablets, laptops, video-game consoles, and smartwatches—arrived near the end of a period of enormous optimism about digital technology. The internet came into our lives in the mid-1990s, soon after the fall of the Soviet Union. By the end of that decade, it was widely thought that the web would be an ally of democracy and a slayer of tyrants. When people are connected to each other, and to all the information in the world, how could any dictator keep them down?

In the 2000s, Silicon Valley and its world-changing inventions were a source of pride and excitement in America. Smart and ambitious young people around the world wanted to move to the West Coast to be part of the digital revolution. Tech-company founders such as Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin were lauded as gods, or at least as modern Prometheans, bringing humans godlike powers. The Arab Spring bloomed in 2011 with the help of decentralized social platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. When pundits and entrepreneurs talked about the power of social media to transform society, it didn’t sound like a dark prophecy.

You have to put yourself back in this heady time to understand why adults acquiesced so readily to the rapid transformation of childhood. Many parents had concerns, even then, about what their children were doing online, especially because of the internet’s ability to put children in contact with strangers. But there was also a lot of excitement about the upsides of this new digital world. If computers and the internet were the vanguards of progress, and if young people––widely referred to as “digital natives”––were going to live their lives entwined with these technologies, then why not give them a head start? I remember how exciting it was to see my 2-year-old son master the touch-and-swipe interface of my first iPhone in 2008. I thought I could see his neurons being woven together faster as a result of the stimulation it brought to his brain, compared to the passivity of watching television or the slowness of building a block tower. I thought I could see his future job prospects improving.

Touchscreen devices were also a godsend for harried parents. Many of us discovered that we could have peace at a restaurant, on a long car trip, or at home while making dinner or replying to emails if we just gave our children what they most wanted: our smartphones and tablets. We saw that everyone else was doing it and figured it must be okay.

It was the same for older children, desperate to join their friends on social-media platforms, where the minimum age to open an account was set by law to 13, even though no research had been done to establish the safety of these products for minors. Because the platforms did nothing (and still do nothing) to verify the stated age of new-account applicants, any 10-year-old could open multiple accounts without parental permission or knowledge, and many did. Facebook and later Instagram became places where many sixth and seventh graders were hanging out and socializing. If parents did find out about these accounts, it was too late. Nobody wanted their child to be isolated and alone, so parents rarely forced their children to shut down their accounts.

We had no idea what we were doing.

4. The High Cost of a Phone-Based Childhood

In Walden, his 1854 reflection on simple living, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The cost of a thing is the amount of … life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” It’s an elegant formulation of what economists would later call the opportunity cost of any choice—all of the things you can no longer do with your money and time once you’ve committed them to something else. So it’s important that we grasp just how much of a young person’s day is now taken up by their devices.

The numbers are hard to believe. The most recent Gallup data show that American teens spend about five hours a day just on social-media platforms (including watching videos on TikTok and YouTube). Add in all the other phone- and screen-based activities, and the number rises to somewhere between seven and nine hours a day, on average. The numbers are even higher in single-parent and low-income families, and among Black, Hispanic, and Native American families.

In Thoreau’s terms, how much of life is exchanged for all this screen time? Arguably, most of it. Everything else in an adolescent’s day must get squeezed down or eliminated entirely to make room for the vast amount of content that is consumed, and for the hundreds of “friends,” “followers,” and other network connections that must be serviced with texts, posts, comments, likes, snaps, and direct messages. I recently surveyed my students at NYU, and most of them reported that the very first thing they do when they open their eyes in the morning is check their texts, direct messages, and social-media feeds. It’s also the last thing they do before they close their eyes at night. And it’s a lot of what they do in between.

The amount of time that adolescents spend sleeping declined in the early 2010s, and many studies tie sleep loss directly to the use of devices around bedtime, particularly when they’re used to scroll through social media. Exercise declined, too, which is unfortunate because exercise, like sleep, improves both mental and physical health. Book reading has been declining for decades, pushed aside by digital alternatives, but the decline, like so much else, sped up in the early 2010s. With passive entertainment always available, adolescent minds likely wander less than they used to; contemplation and imagination might be placed on the list of things winnowed down or crowded out.

But perhaps the most devastating cost of the new phone-based childhood was the collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face. A study of how Americans spend their time found that, before 2010, young people (ages 15 to 24) reported spending far more time with their friends (about two hours a day, on average, not counting time together at school) than did older people (who spent just 30 to 60 minutes with friends). Time with friends began decreasing for young people in the 2000s, but the drop accelerated in the 2010s, while it barely changed for older people. By 2019, young people’s time with friends had dropped to just 67 minutes a day. It turns out that Gen Z had been socially distancing for many years and had mostly completed the project by the time COVID-19 struck.

You might question the importance of this decline. After all, isn’t much of this online time spent interacting with friends through texting, social media, and multiplayer video games? Isn’t that just as good?

Some of it surely is, and virtual interactions offer unique benefits too, especially for young people who are geographically or socially isolated. But in general, the virtual world lacks many of the features that make human interactions in the real world nutritious, as we might say, for physical, social, and emotional development. In particular, real-world relationships and social interactions are characterized by four features—typical for hundreds of thousands of years—that online interactions either distort or erase.

First, real-world interactions are embodied, meaning that we use our hands and facial expressions to communicate, and we learn to respond to the body language of others. Virtual interactions, in contrast, mostly rely on language alone. No matter how many emojis are offered as compensation, the elimination of communication channels for which we have eons of evolutionary programming is likely to produce adults who are less comfortable and less skilled at interacting in person.

Second, real-world interactions are synchronous; they happen at the same time. As a result, we learn subtle cues about timing and conversational turn taking. Synchronous interactions make us feel closer to the other person because that’s what getting “in sync” does. Texts, posts, and many other virtual interactions lack synchrony. There is less real laughter, more room for misinterpretation, and more stress after a comment that gets no immediate response.

Third, real-world interactions primarily involve one‐to‐one communication, or sometimes one-to-several. But many virtual communications are broadcast to a potentially huge audience. Online, each person can engage in dozens of asynchronous interactions in parallel, which interferes with the depth achieved in all of them. The sender’s motivations are different, too: With a large audience, one’s reputation is always on the line; an error or poor performance can damage social standing with large numbers of peers. These communications thus tend to be more performative and anxiety-inducing than one-to-one conversations.

Finally, real-world interactions usually take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen. But in many virtual networks, people can easily block others or quit when they are displeased. Relationships within such networks are usually more disposable.

These unsatisfying and anxiety-producing features of life online should be recognizable to most adults. Online interactions can bring out antisocial behavior that people would never display in their offline communities. But if life online takes a toll on adults, just imagine what it does to adolescents in the early years of puberty, when their “experience expectant” brains are rewiring based on feedback from their social interactions.

Kids going through puberty online are likely to experience far more social comparison, self-consciousness, public shaming, and chronic anxiety than adolescents in previous generations, which could potentially set developing brains into a habitual state of defensiveness. The brain contains systems that are specialized for approach (when opportunities beckon) and withdrawal (when threats appear or seem likely). People can be in what we might call “discover mode” or “defend mode” at any moment, but generally not both. The two systems together form a mechanism for quickly adapting to changing conditions, like a thermostat that can activate either a heating system or a cooling system as the temperature fluctuates. Some people’s internal thermostats are generally set to discover mode, and they flip into defend mode only when clear threats arise. These people tend to see the world as full of opportunities. They are happier and less anxious. Other people’s internal thermostats are generally set to defend mode, and they flip into discover mode only when they feel unusually safe. They tend to see the world as full of threats and are more prone to anxiety and depressive disorders.

A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting “safe spaces” and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to “microaggressions” and sometimes claimed that words were “violence.” These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development.

5. So Many Harms

The debate around adolescents’ use of smartphones and social media typically revolves around mental health, and understandably so. But the harms that have resulted from transforming childhood so suddenly and heedlessly go far beyondmental health. I’ve touched on some of them—social awkwardness, reduced self-confidence, and a more sedentary childhood. Here are three additional harms.

Fragmented Attention, Disrupted Learning

Staying on task while sitting at a computer is hard enough for an adult with a fully developed prefrontal cortex. It is far more difficult for adolescents in front of their laptop trying to do homework. They are probably less intrinsically motivated to stay on task. They’re certainly less able, given their undeveloped prefrontal cortex, and hence it’s easy for any company with an app to lure them away with an offer of social validation or entertainment. Their phones are pinging constantly—one study found that the typical adolescent now gets 237 notifications a day, roughly 15 every waking hour. Sustained attention is essential for doing almost anything big, creative, or valuable, yet young people find their attention chopped up into little bits by notifications offering the possibility of high-pleasure, low-effort digital experiences.

It even happens in the classroom. Studies confirm that when students have access to their phones during class time, they use them, especially for texting and checking social media, and their grades and learning suffer. This might explain why benchmark test scores began to decline in the U.S. and around the world in the early 2010s—well before the pandemic hit.

Addiction and Social Withdrawal

The neural basis of behavioral addiction to social media or video games is not exactly the same as chemical addiction to cocaine or opioids. Nonetheless, they all involve abnormally heavy and sustained activation of dopamine neurons and reward pathways. Over time, the brain adapts to these high levels of dopamine; when the child is not engaged in digital activity, their brain doesn’t have enough dopamine, and the child experiences withdrawal symptoms. These generally include anxiety, insomnia, and intense irritability. Kids with these kinds of behavioral addictions often become surly and aggressive, and withdraw from their families into their bedrooms and devices.

Social-media and gaming platforms were designed to hook users. How successful are they? How many kids suffer from digital addictions?

The main addiction risks for boys seem to be video games and porn. “Internet gaming disorder,” which was added to the main diagnosis manual of psychiatry in 2013 as a condition for further study, describes “significant impairment or distress” in several aspects of life, along with many hallmarks of addiction, including an inability to reduce usage despite attempts to do so. Estimates for the prevalence of IGD range from 7 to 15 percent among adolescent boys and young men. As for porn, a nationally representative survey of American adults published in 2019 found that 7 percent of American men agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I am addicted to pornography”—and the rates were higher for the youngest men.

Girls have much lower rates of addiction to video games and porn, but they use social media more intensely than boys do. A study of teens in 29 nations found that between 5 and 15 percent of adolescents engage in what is called “problematic social media use,” which includes symptoms such as preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, neglect of other areas of life, and lying to parents and friends about time spent on social media. That study did not break down results by gender, but many others have found that rates of “problematic use” are higher for girls.

I don’t want to overstate the risks: Most teens do not become addicted to their phones and video games. But across multiple studies and across genders, rates of problematic use come out in the ballpark of 5 to 15 percent. Is there any other consumer product that parents would let their children use relatively freely if they knew that something like one in 10 kids would end up with a pattern of habitual and compulsive use that disrupted various domains of life and looked a lot like an addiction?

The Decay of Wisdom and the Loss of Meaning 

During that crucial sensitive period for cultural learning, from roughly ages 9 through 15, we should be especially thoughtful about who is socializing our children for adulthood. Instead, that’s when most kids get their first smartphone and sign themselves up (with or without parental permission) to consume rivers of content from random strangers. Much of that content is produced by other adolescents, in blocks of a few minutes or a few seconds.

This rerouting of enculturating content has created a generation that is largely cut off from older generations and, to some extent, from the accumulated wisdom of humankind, including knowledge about how to live a flourishing life. Adolescents spend less time steeped in their local or national culture. They are coming of age in a confusing, placeless, ahistorical maelstrom of 30-second stories curated by algorithms designed to mesmerize them. Without solid knowledge of the past and the filtering of good ideas from bad––a process that plays out over many generations––young people will be more prone to believe whatever terrible ideas become popular around them, which might explain why videos showing young people reacting positively to Osama bin Laden’s thoughts about America were trending on TikTok last fall.

All this is made worse by the fact that so much of digital public life is an unending supply of micro dramas about somebody somewhere in our country of 340 million people who did something that can fuel an outrage cycle, only to be pushed aside by the next. It doesn’t add up to anything and leaves behind only a distorted sense of human nature and affairs.

When our public life becomes fragmented, ephemeral, and incomprehensible, it is a recipe for anomie, or normlessness. The great French sociologist Émile Durkheim showed long ago that a society that fails to bind its people together with some shared sense of sacredness and common respect for rules and norms is not a society of great individual freedom; it is, rather, a place where disoriented individuals have difficulty setting goals and exerting themselves to achieve them. Durkheim argued that anomie was a major driver of suicide rates in European countries. Modern scholars continue to draw on his work to understand suicide rates today. 

Durkheim’s observations are crucial for understanding what happened in the early 2010s. A long-running survey of American teens found that, from 1990 to 2010, high-school seniors became slightly less likely to agree with statements such as “Life often feels meaningless.” But as soon as they adopted a phone-based life and many began to live in the whirlpool of social media, where no stability can be found, every measure of despair increased. From 2010 to 2019, the number who agreed that their lives felt “meaningless” increased by about 70 percent, to more than one in five.

6. Young People Don’t Like Their Phone-Based Lives

How can I be confident that the epidemic of adolescent mental illness was kicked off by the arrival of the phone-based childhood? Skeptics point to other events as possible culprits, including the 2008 global financial crisis, global warming, the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting and the subsequent active-shooter drills, rising academic pressures, and the opioid epidemic. But while these events might have been contributing factors in some countries, none can explain both the timing and international scope of the disaster.

An additional source of evidence comes from Gen Z itself. With all the talk of regulating social media, raising age limits, and getting phones out of schools, you might expect to find many members of Gen Z writing and speaking out in opposition. I’ve looked for such arguments and found hardly any. In contrast, many young adults tell stories of devastation.

Freya India, a 24-year-old British essayist who writes about girls, explains how social-media sites carry girls off to unhealthy places: “It seems like your child is simply watching some makeup tutorials, following some mental health influencers, or experimenting with their identity. But let me tell you: they are on a conveyor belt to someplace bad. Whatever insecurity or vulnerability they are struggling with, they will be pushed further and further into it.” She continues:

Gen Z were the guinea pigs in this uncontrolled global social experiment. We were the first to have our vulnerabilities and insecurities fed into a machine that magnified and refracted them back at us, all the time, before we had any sense of who we were. We didn’t just grow up with algorithms. They raised us. They rearranged our faces. Shaped our identities. Convinced us we were sick.

Rikki Schlott, a 23-year-old American journalist and co-author of The Canceling of the American Mind, writes,

"The day-to-day life of a typical teen or tween today would be unrecognizable to someone who came of age before the smartphone arrived. Zoomers are spending an average of 9 hours daily in this screen-time doom loop—desperate to forget the gaping holes they’re bleeding out of, even if just for … 9 hours a day. Uncomfortable silence could be time to ponder why they’re so miserable in the first place. Drowning it out with algorithmic white noise is far easier."

A 27-year-old man who spent his adolescent years addicted (his word) to video games and pornography sent me this reflection on what that did to him:

I missed out on a lot of stuff in life—a lot of socialization. I feel the effects now: meeting new people, talking to people. I feel that my interactions are not as smooth and fluid as I want. My knowledge of the world (geography, politics, etc.) is lacking. I didn’t spend time having conversations or learning about sports. I often feel like a hollow operating system.

Or consider what Facebook found in a research project involving focus groups of young people, revealed in 2021 by the whistleblower Frances Haugen: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rates of anxiety and depression among teens,” an internal document said. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

7. Collective-Action Problems

Social-media companies such as Meta, TikTok, and Snap are often compared to tobacco companies, but that’s not really fair to the tobacco industry. It’s true that companies in both industries marketed harmful products to children and tweaked their products for maximum customer retention (that is, addiction), but there’s a big difference: Teens could and did choose, in large numbers, not to smoke. Even at the peak of teen cigarette use, in 1997, nearly two-thirds of high-school students did not smoke.

Social media, in contrast, applies a lot more pressure on nonusers, at a much younger age and in a more insidious way. Once a few students in any middle school lie about their age and open accounts at age 11 or 12, they start posting photos and comments about themselves and other students. Drama ensues. The pressure on everyone else to join becomes intense. Even a girl who knows, consciously, that Instagram can foster beauty obsession, anxiety, and eating disorders might sooner take those risks than accept the seeming certainty of being out of the loop, clueless, and excluded. And indeed, if she resists while most of her classmates do not, she might, in fact, be marginalized, which puts her at risk for anxiety and depression, though via a different pathway than the one taken by those who use social media heavily. In this way, social media accomplishes a remarkable feat: It even harms adolescents who do not use it.

A recent study led by the University of Chicago economist Leonardo Bursztyn captured the dynamics of the social-media trap precisely. The researchers recruited more than 1,000 college students and asked them how much they’d need to be paid to deactivate their accounts on either Instagram or TikTok for four weeks. That’s a standard economist’s question to try to compute the net value of a product to society. On average, students said they’d need to be paid roughly $50 ($59 for TikTok, $47 for Instagram) to deactivate whichever platform they were asked about. Then the experimenters told the students that they were going to try to get most of the others in their school to deactivate that same platform, offering to pay them to do so as well, and asked, Now how much would you have to be paid to deactivate, if most others did so? The answer, on average, was less than zero. In each case, most students were willing to pay to have that happen.

Social media is all about network effects. Most students are only on it because everyone else is too. Most of them would prefer that nobody be on these platforms. Later in the study, students were asked directly, “Would you prefer to live in a world without Instagram [or TikTok]?” A majority of students said yes––58 percent for each app.

This is the textbook definition of what social scientists call a collective-action problem. It’s what happens when a group would be better off if everyone in the group took a particular action, but each actor is deterred from acting, because unless the others do the same, the personal cost outweighs the benefit. Fishermen considering limiting their catch to avoid wiping out the local fish population are caught in this same kind of trap. If no one else does it too, they just lose profit.

Cigarettes trapped individual smokers with a biological addiction. Social media has trapped an entire generation in a collective-action problem. Early app developers deliberately and knowingly exploited the psychological weaknesses and insecurities of young people to pressure them to consume a product that, upon reflection, many wish they could use less, or not at all.

8. Four Norms to Break Four Traps

Young people and their parents are stuck in at least four collective-action traps. Each is hard to escape for an individual family, but escape becomes much easier if families, schools, and communities coordinate and act together. Here are four norms that would roll back the phone-based childhood. I believe that any community that adopts all four will see substantial improvements in youth mental health within two years.

No smartphones before high school  

The trap here is that each child thinks they need a smartphone because “everyone else” has one, and many parents give in because they don’t want their child to feel excluded. But if no one else had a smartphone—or even if, say, only half of the child’s sixth-grade class had one—parents would feel more comfortable providing a basic flip phone (or no phone at all). Delaying round-the-clock internet access until ninth grade (around age 14) as a national or community norm would help to protect adolescents during the very vulnerable first few years of puberty. According to a 2022 British study, these are the years when social-media use is most correlated with poor mental health. Family policies about tablets, laptops, and video-game consoles should be aligned with smartphone restrictions to prevent overuse of other screen activities.

No social media before 16

The trap here, as with smartphones, is that each adolescent feels a strong need to open accounts on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms primarily because that’s where most of their peers are posting and gossiping. But if the majority of adolescents were not on these accounts until they were 16, families and adolescents could more easily resist the pressure to sign up. The delay would not mean that kids younger than 16 could never watch videos on TikTok or YouTube—only that they could not open accounts, give away their data, post their own content, and let algorithms get to know them and their preferences.

Phone‐free schools 

Most schools claim that they ban phones, but this usually just means that students aren’t supposed to take their phone out of their pocket during class. Research shows that most students do use their phones during class time. They also use them during lunchtime, free periods, and breaks between classes––times when students could and should be interacting with their classmates face-to-face. The only way to get students’ minds off their phones during the school day is to require all students to put their phones (and other devices that can send or receive texts) into a phone locker or locked pouch at the start of the day. Schools that have gone phone-free always seem to report that it has improved the culture, making students more attentive in class and more interactive with one another. Published studies back them up.

More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

Many parents are afraid to give their children the level of independence and responsibility they themselves enjoyed when they were young, even though rates of homicide, drunk driving, and other physical threats to children are way down in recent decades. Part of the fear comes from the fact that parents look at each other to determine what is normal and therefore safe, and they see few examples of families acting as if a 9-year-old can be trusted to walk to a store without a chaperone. But if many parents started sending their children out to play or run errands, then the norms of what is safe and accepted would change quickly. So would ideas about what constitutes “good parenting.” And if more parents trusted their children with more responsibility––for example, by asking their kids to do more to help out, or to care for others––then the pervasive sense of uselessness now found in surveys of high-school students might begin to dissipate.

It would be a mistake to overlook this fourth norm. If parents don’t replace screen time with real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity, then banning devices will feel like deprivation, not the opening up of a world of opportunities.

The main reason why the phone-based childhood is so harmful is because it pushes aside everything else. Smartphones are experience blockers. Our ultimate goal should not be to remove screens entirely, nor should it be to return childhood to exactly the way it was in 1960. Rather, it should be to create a version of childhood and adolescence that keeps young people anchored in the real world while flourishing in the digital age.

9. What Are We Waiting For?

An essential function of government is to solve collective-action problems. Congress could solve or help solve the ones I’ve highlighted—for instance, by raising the age of “internet adulthood” to 16 and requiring tech companies to keep underage children off their sites.

In recent decades, however, Congress has not been good at addressing public concerns when the solutions would displease a powerful and deep-pocketed industry. Governors and state legislators have been much more effective, and their successes might let us evaluate how well various reforms work. But the bottom line is that to change norms, we’re going to need to do most of the work ourselves, in neighborhood groups, schools, and other communities.

There are now hundreds of organizations––most of them started by mothers who saw what smartphones had done to their children––that are working to roll back the phone-based childhood or promote a more independent, real-world childhood. (I have assembled a list of many of them.) One that I co-founded, at LetGrow.org, suggests a variety of simple programs for parents or schools, such as play club (schools keep the playground open at least one day a week before or after school, and kids sign up for phone-free, mixed-age, unstructured play as a regular weekly activity) and the Let Grow Experience (a series of homework assignments in which students––with their parents’ consent––choose something to do on their own that they’ve never done before, such as walk the dog, climb a tree, walk to a store, or cook dinner).

Parents are fed up with what childhood has become. Many are tired of having daily arguments about technologies that were designed to grab hold of their children’s attention and not let go. But the phone-based childhood is not inevitable.

The four norms I have proposed cost almost nothing to implement, they cause no clear harm to anyone, and while they could be supported by new legislation, they can be instilled even without it. We can begin implementing all of them right away, this year, especially in communities with good cooperation between schools and parents. A single memo from a principal asking parents to delay smartphones and social media, in support of the school’s effort to improve mental health by going phone free, would catalyze collective action and reset the community’s norms.

We didn’t know what we were doing in the early 2010s. Now we do. It’s time to end the phone-based childhood.

This article is adapted from Jonathan Haidt’s forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

[drawingrainbowsonthewalls]

Episodic Water Dependency [Disorder] [EpWD or EWDD]

Definition: A disorder characterized by having episodes of extreme water dependency that cause discomfort, distress, stress, and/or depressive thoughts, feelings, or actions. These emotions often result in impulsive or compulsive actions in order to be in, near, or consume water/another liquid. [this could also be used as a symptom or aspect of another disorder]

[tw: mentions sh and suicide below]

[Ones Dependent Liquid or DL may vary however this Disorder was made with water in mind… you could call it ELDD, Episodic Liquid Dependency Disorder if you wish or if that fits better]

Symptoms/Criteria:

      1) Distress, discomfort, dysfunction, stress, or dysphoria when one has not been in, near, or in—some cases—consumed water/their DL[dependent liquid] recently.

      2) Having a strong connection to water or your DL[dependent liquid] that may intertwine with various aspects of ones identity.

      3) during an episode being unable to function/experiencing a difficulty in functioning when one has not come in contact with water or their DL[dependent liquid] for short or extended periods of time [this can be as long as a month or as short as a few minutes].

      4) [If one experiences sensory differences] having ones sensory issues get worse during episodes where they have not had contact with water or their DL for an extended or short time. 

      6) experiencing depressive episodes, suicidal and/or self-harm induced thoughts/actions, or similar during/as a result of water dependency episodes. One could also turn to water/their DL for the answer/solution to problems. 

      7) Having these symptoms and experiences be more extreme than typical water/liquid dependency. 

      8) noticing episodic patterns for at least 3 months; an episode, worsening of symptoms, or development of this disorder may occur for a variety of reasons such as external factors like stress or fear as well as internal factors such as self-esteem, brain chemical levels, and/or other mental health problems. 

      9) Fear or distress caused by being dirty or feeling like your dirty even if you’ve recently showered, bathed, or washed off.

Possible causes, triggers, and risks:

      1) The cause/causes for this disorder are unknown however possible causes may include:

           - Neglect

           - Being without proper ways to clean/clean oneself fro extended periods of time

           - Low-self-esteem or poor mental health

           - Paranoia or a fear of germs

      2) You may be more at risk if you have another mental health disorder/syndrome such as Major Depressive Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, OCD, DPD, PTSD, etc. etc.

      3) Common triggers for an episode include but are not limited to; overwhelming / intense emotions, stressful and / or traumatic events, being away from running water / water / their DL, being unable to wash yourself, etc.

      4) Some of the possible risks that come with EpWD[D] is:

            -  Becoming overly dependent on water/your DL and running the risk of it becoming an addiction.

            -  Being unable to function or get work done because of distress, stress, or discomfort surrounding feeling messy/unkempt  -OR- being unable to work or function because you’re too caught up cleaning yourself and surroundings. 

            -  A disconnection in relationships as they don’t/wouldn’t understand and/or feeling too stress/distressed/uncomfortable to make strong bonds and connections

This term can be used by anyone // we have no DNI so neither do our coins // please follow your own DNI

As long as you use this term in good faith [genuinely, not as a joke or troll] we will have no problems as it is not our place to tell you what to do.

if this term or something similar has been coined prior to this consider it a recoin / redesign as we often do not know or realize

[rainforestakiie]

Vacation Away Part 01

hello. this is for @inubaki! who made me some amazing fanart for my fics! i'm so greatful! thank you so much!

'Adam and Lucifer get the same idea to take a break on earth. Adam in heaven and Lucifer in hell, both take on human form and embark to earth only to stumble in to one another. Whether or not Lucifer catches onto who Adam’s first is up to you while Adam remains clueless or in denial. They spend the weekend together and basically just begin falling in love without labels or restraint. But they are on a time limit.'

there is a second part of this. i changed it a little but i hope you like it inubaki. i love your other ideas too! so i might write them as well!

ah, hope you enjoy it at least!

Vacation Away (Adam/Lucifer goes on vacation on Earth) = Part 01. Part 02.

A month after the harrowing clash between the Exterminations and the Princess of Hell, Adam was still engulfed in torment. His head throbbed with a relentless heaviness, a dizzying fog clouding his thoughts. His body remained seared with pain, each ache a cruel reminder of his suffering. His spirit, once resilient, now lay in shambles, a shadow of the man he once was. The agony was a haunting echo of his earliest wounds, inflicted by Lilith’s poisonous actions, Eve’s heartbreak, and the ultimate devastation wrought by his archangel’s betrayal.

It was as if Adam had never healed at all. A suffocating, obsidian cloud of despair and depression seemed to cling to him, smothering any breath of relief. He gasped for air, his chest constricted by the relentless grip of sorrow. Only in those fleeting moments of waking from slumber did he feel a whisper of peace, a fleeting escape from the nightmares that plagued his restless nights.

After the brutal beating, whether he deserved it or not was irrelevant to him now. Adam found himself teetering on the brink of death once more. It was a cruel pattern, a relentless cycle of near-death encounters whenever one of the three crossed his path. Fate had a twisted sense of humour, always dealing Adam the losing hand, leaving him battered and scarred after every encounter. Despite the supposed necessity of meetings between Heaven and Hell, Adam had fought fervently to be excluded, but Sera and Michael had insisted on his involvement as the first man. His gut feeling had been right; their meetings were rife with snide remarks and veiled insults from the King and Queen of Hell. Even in silence, Adam felt like nothing more than their designated punching bag.

His ego was shattered, bruised by the beating inflicted by the very one who had once hurt him the most. Adam was merely following orders, never wishing to become an instrument of death against the Sinners. Yet, Heaven's demands were unyielding, and Sera’s insistence on his involvement only deepened his misery. Adam, who never sought this path, found himself trapped in a relentless cycle of pain and sorrow.

Adam could never see things from the Princess of Hell's perspective. To him, she was naive, far too sheltered to truly grasp the gravity of the souls she sought to redeem. Adam had never wanted to be involved in the first place. He preferred to feign ignorance, to pretend he was unaware of humanity's darkest deeds. There was a clear reason why a human soul descended to Hell instead of ascending to Heaven. Contrary to popular belief, it wasn't for minor transgressions or even serious crimes where remorse was shown. Heaven's gates were not as stringent as many believed. Not a single Sinner in Hell was innocent; every soul there had committed grievous acts against humanity, acts of harm and murder, devoid of remorse or repentance.

The Princess of Hell, in Adam’s eyes, was utterly foolish. She was delusional to think that smiles, trust, and rainbows could redeem those who had no regret for the heinous crimes that damned them to Hell in the first place. Without genuine remorse, the gates of Heaven would remain forever closed to them.

Perhaps Adam had embraced his role as Leader of Extermination too fervently, but the Princess was blind to the dangers she courted. She stirred emotions, rattled cages, and pushed boundaries without understanding the consequences. The Angels were duty-bound to protect the righteous, and if the Princess had her way, victims would be forced to confront their worst perpetrators in Heaven—a perverse and cruel outcome.

What she was doing was fundamentally wrong. And the so-called snake, the King of Hell, wouldn’t even enlighten her about the true nature of Hell and its Sinners. To Adam, it was insanity. Perhaps he had been too rash, too rough, and perhaps he deserved the reprimand he received. But for heaven's sake, the Princess needed to be put in her place, too. Her actions threatened to harm more human souls.

Adam groaned, running a hand over his face. His skin prickled with anger, his golden feathers bristled. He had nearly died in Hell. After the cowardly King granted him 'mercy,' a one-eyed Sinner had stabbed him. This incident only reinforced his point. Lute had dragged him back to Heaven, to Sera and Emily, just in time. He was alive, still an Angel, but now...sicker, he guessed.

Sliding off the side of the bed, Adam’s head pulsed with a relentless, excruciating pain, and his golden wings fluttered and shuddered at his sides. The only visible remnant of his near-death experience was the star-shaped scar on his chest. The rest of his ailments were more insidious, affecting his health in ways he couldn’t fully comprehend.

The persistent knocking on his door made his dizziness worse. He wobbled towards it, dragging his wings across the floor. "Go away," he murmured.

Silence followed, and Adam foolishly thought the person had left. He had been locked in his room since his narrow escape from death. But then, a small, timid voice broke through the door.

"Adam?" Emily whimpered. "You’ve been inside for so long… please…"

Adam could never be cruel to Emily. She was one of the sweetest angels, yet she shared the Princess of Hell’s naivety about the truth of Sinners and Hell. He couldn’t bring himself to shatter her innocence; the light in her eyes would dim if she knew the full extent of the darkness. Sera had wanted to cruelly enlighten her, but Adam had begged the older Seraphim not to.

Sighing deeply, Adam opened the door, and the small Seraphim jumped in surprise. Her eyes brightened upon seeing him, but concern quickly spread across her face, her shoulders tensing with worry.

"Oh, Adam! How are you feeling?" she asked, taking hold of his hands. "You look dreadful! Have you been eating? Sleeping? Do you need anything? I can get some medicine for you."

Adam managed a small smile. Emily was probably the only one who showed him genuine care. "I’m fine, really, Emily. I just want to be left alone."

"But I haven’t seen you in so long…" Emily's wings drooped. "I wanted to check on you."

"I know you did, and I appreciate it." Adam ruffled her soft purple and white hair. "I think I need a break. A vacation or something. I need to get away from everything. My head… it’s not in a great place. It hasn’t been for a long time."

Emily sniffled. "A break? You want to get away from everyone? Even me?"

"No, no," Adam hurried to reassure her. "Not you, Emily. I just need time away from Heaven, Hell, Sera, and everything else. I’m sure there will be another meeting soon, and I know I’ll be forced to attend again…"

He desperately needed to withdraw from Extermination Day and everything related to Hell. He would figure it out eventually. "I have too much noise in my head. Too much going on, and I need time."

"Oh," Emily mumbled softly, her head slowly nodding.

She seemed deep in thought, and Adam almost worried. Emily always had strange ideas. He could see the gears turning in her little head and fought the urge not to shut the door.

"You should go to Earth!" she suddenly exclaimed brightly. "You should go down to Earth! That’s the best place to go! Nobody would think to look for you there!"

Adam paused, considering. Earth? That might be a good idea. On Earth, nobody knew who he was. In Heaven, he was always drowning in attention. It was suffocating. He couldn’t even go outside without being mobbed by Winners. It was too much. He wasn’t used to being followed around like that, having people cling to him. He would never get used to it.

Nobody knew him on Earth. The humans there wouldn’t even blink twice if they saw him.

"I mean, we can give you a disguise if you’d like?" Emily offered, her pretty wings fluttering. She smiled so brightly, so sweetly, that Adam found himself agreeing without fully thinking it through.

"But Sera would never allow it," he deflated, excitement sparking momentarily. "She would rather cut off her wings than let me go to Earth for a break. As a Seraphim, I need her permission to leave Heaven's gates..."

"I’m a Seraphim too!" Emily huffed, puffing her chest out as her angelic eye glowed. "I can give you permission, and I will deal with Sera later!"

"I don’t want to cause problems for you. Sera’s pretty… strict. We both know she’ll never be happy with this, and I don’t want you to bear the brunt of her anger." Adam frowned, recalling how terrifying Sera was when angry. He had always avoided being on the receiving end of it and couldn’t forgive himself if Emily had to endure it.

But Emily continued to glow, unfazed by the thought of Sera’s wrath. "Don’t worry about Sera. Leave her to me. I can handle her."

"But—"

Emily gave him such a pointed look that Adam was reminded that despite her small and fragile appearance, she was ten times more powerful than he was. Emily was an ancient being, maybe even triple his age.

"If you’re sure…" Adam weakly conceded.

Emily huffed, straightening her form and planting her hands on her hips. "I’ll get all the paperwork done without Sera noticing! We’ll aim for you to leave next week!"

Adam found himself smiling. This was why he adored Emily so much.

"Thank you, Emily."

She beamed in return.

A couple of days later, Emily sat at the end of Adam’s bed, surrounded by a bundle of papers. Her pretty eyes shimmered with enthusiasm as she sifted through the parchments, a sweet smile on her face.

“Or, we have these!” she sang, holding up a parchment with a long list of names. “I put together all the newest upcoming music festivals! Maybe you could attend one of these? It might be fun!”

Adam smiled crookedly, his eyes scanning the words. Emily was so considerate, so thoughtful. She had compiled numerous ideas and suggestions for his vacation, detailing places he could go and things he could try. Of course, as long as he brought her something back. She was innocent and sweet, reminding him of his own daughters.

“I really appreciate the thought, but I’m going on a break to get away from noise, not to be around more,” he said. In truth, he’d love to attend a music festival or even a concert. But his daily headaches and constant fatigue demanded a calm, still place with as few people as possible. “I need silence, I think…”

Something like Eden, a small voice whispered, but Adam ignored it.

“So, Hawaii’s out of the question then.” Emily pouted. “I heard the flowers are very pretty.”

“And the drinks are amazing,” Adam joked, his grin widening as Emily giggled.

Yet, his headache at the thought. He would love to go to Hawaii; it would be amazing. The alcohol could help ease his anxiety, and the flowers were beautiful. Adam would love to wear one of those flower leis. But Hawaii was a tourist magnet, teeming with people. While they wouldn’t recognize him, Adam wanted solitude, not the heart of a crowd. So, Hawaii was out of the question.

Flowers...like the blossoms from Eden. The sweet scent and warm summer breeze.

“Adam?” Emily tilted her head curiously.

Adam lowered his head and meekly shrugged his shoulders. “I wish I could just go to Eden for a vacation. I really miss it…”

“I’m so sorry, Adam.” Emily’s smile turned sad and gentle as she reached forward to squeeze his hands. “I’m so sorry you lost so much. If only I had been born earlier, I could have helped you. I could have fought for you back then.”

Adam sighed. “You’re so sweet, but I know I can never go back to it. But I just miss it so much. Eden is my home, and I fear I will never feel that way about another place. Heaven is nice and all, but it’s not Eden.”

Emily’s eyes shimmered with understanding, and she squeezed his hands tighter. “Maybe one day, Adam. Maybe one day you’ll find a place that feels like home again.”

"While I can't bring back Eden, I can do something else," Emily said softly. She raised her hands delicately, summoning a scroll of soft pink and purple parchment. With gentle fingers, Emily unravelled it. "I wasn't sure if you would want to. I was worried it might even offend you, but... I put together a list of towns and cities that are similar to Eden. With flowers and so on..."

Adam's eyes widened in surprise, his golden wings shimmering and twitching. "Y-You did?"

"Yes." Emily smiled sweetly, her eyes lowering to the list. "I have put together ten of the most beautiful and peaceful places you could go. Keukenhof Gardens was the first place I thought of. Called the 'Garden of Europe,' Lisse is home to Keukenhof, one of the world's largest flower gardens. It features millions of tulips and other flowers."

"Then I found out about Medellín, Colombia, known as the 'City of Eternal Spring.' Medellín hosts the annual Flower Festival (Feria de las Flores) in August, showcasing elaborate floral displays and parades featuring intricate flower arrangements." Emily explained, reading what she had noted down on the parchment with a soft hum. "Hitachi, Japan. Hitachi Seaside Park: Famous for its seasonal flower displays, this park in Hitachinaka features millions of flowers, including nemophila, tulips, and kochia, creating breathtaking landscapes that change with the seasons.

"Giverny, France. Monet's Garden: The village of Giverny is known for Claude Monet's gardens, which inspired many of his famous paintings. The gardens are meticulously maintained and feature a stunning array of flowers, including water lilies.

"Spello, Italy. Infiorate di Spello: This small town in Umbria is famous for its annual flower festival, where intricate carpets of flowers are created in the streets for the Feast of Corpus Christi.

"Brussels, Belgium. Flower Carpet: Every two years, the Grand Place in Brussels is transformed into a vibrant flower carpet made up of hundreds of thousands of begonias. The event attracts visitors from all over the world.

"Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Dubai Miracle Garden: This expansive garden is home to millions of flowers arranged in stunning designs and structures. It holds the title for the world's largest natural flower garden.

"Furano, Japan. Lavender Fields: Known for its picturesque lavender fields, Furano attracts visitors during the summer months when the fields are in full bloom, creating a sea of purple flowers.

"Madeira, Portugal. Funchal: The capital city of Madeira, Funchal, hosts the annual Flower Festival in spring, featuring parades, flower carpets, and vibrant floral displays throughout the city.

"Victoria, Canada. Butchart Gardens: Located on Vancouver Island, Butchart Gardens is famous for its beautifully landscaped gardens, featuring a diverse range of flowers and plants in various themed gardens."

Adam's heart warmed as he listened. The detailed descriptions brought each place to life in his mind. "Emily, this is incredible," he said, his voice thick with emotion. "I never imagined... thank you."

Emily beamed. "I just want you to be happy, Adam. I hope one of these places can bring you some peace."

And so it was that Adam found himself standing before the enchanting Keukenhof Gardens. The allure of the "Garden of Europe" captivated him, invoking vivid memories of the Garden of Eden. The thought filled him with a renewed sense of purpose, his wings lifting gracefully instead of dragging wearily behind him.

The air on Earth surprised him with its sweetness. Despite the passage of time and the pollution that had thickened the atmosphere since Eden, Keukenhof Gardens offered a refreshing breath of purity. It wasn't quite like Eden, but it was perhaps the closest he could find.

Adam's golden eyes gleamed as they swept across the quaint city of Lisse. It was serene, just as he preferred. The surroundings beckoned with promise: the inviting Keukenhof Forest to the west, the historic Ter Specko to the north, and even a charming Black Tulip Museum nearby. Here, amidst such beauty, he felt he could finally clear his mind and heart.

Emily, bless her soul, had deftly managed to slip the paperwork approving Adam's stay on Earth past Sera. He wasn't sure what was transpiring in Heaven, but Emily had insisted he leave before Sera discovered their plan. She had even strategically omitted his Earthly location from the documents, ensuring Sera couldn't retrieve him. As the Seraphim responsible for his permission to stay, Emily alone knew his whereabouts and could visit without his consent. Sometimes, Heaven's rules worked in his favour when cleverly navigated.

Yet, Adam worried for her. He hoped Sera wouldn't be too harsh. Emily was simply doing what she believed was right, and Adam was profoundly grateful for her courage. It was the first time Heaven had done something for him, and he couldn't thank her enough.

Though Emily had wished to grant him a month or two, she had only managed a week. But that was plenty. Ample time away from the celestial struggles, the turmoil of Heaven and Hell, the conflicts of winners and sinners, and the shadows of his past heartbreak. Here, in one of the most beautiful places on Earth, Adam hoped to escape and forget.

He could pretend. He could deceive himself if he closed his eyes tightly enough, imagining he wasn't the first man but just a regular human, living a simple, serene life on Earth. For one single week, Adam will pretend he was just a normal human visiting the town of Lisse. 

His hair, now more red than brown, framed his face in soft waves. His once brilliant golden eyes had mellowed to a gentle shade of amber. The angelic tan that once graced his skin had faded to a paler hue, making his freckles stand out more prominently. Adam had grown slimmer since his days as an angel, though he still bore a slight curve in his stomach. He had lost nearly sixty percent of his former self after the Sinner had almost claimed his life. 

Even before Emily altered his appearance, his illness had rendered him nearly unrecognisable. Adam was perpetually tired, moving slower than before, with a small limp—a souvenir not from the one-eyed Sinner, but from the King of Hell’s brutal assault. The damage to his nervous system was irreparable. 

Sera and Emily had laboured tirelessly over his chest wound, trying to keep him from bleeding out. By the time they realised the extent of the nerve damage, it was too late. He had to live with the limp in his left foot and the near numbness of his right hand. But he supposed it was fine.

Adam gazed down at the white-lined paper in the book before him. His amber eyes were vacant as his mind struggled to find words.

“Are you alright, hun?” the little old lady behind the counter asked gently.

He blinked, snapping out of his reverie, and straightened up. His right hand refused to curl around the pen properly. Biting his bottom lip, he switched to his left hand. “Yes, sorry,” he replied.

The little old lady could see that Adam wasn't truly okay, but she kindly chose not to press the issue. She settled back in her oversized cardigan, her fat ginger cat napping on the counter beside her. Adam awkwardly scribbled a random name in the sign-in book, double-checking it to memorise his 'new name' before stepping back. In truth, there was no real need for a fake name or a disguise; walking around without his wings or halo would suffice. But Adam wanted to be someone else, just for the week.

“Alright then, sweetheart,” the little old lady sang as she rose with her walking stick. “Your room is just this way.”

Adam managed a small smile as he moved to follow her, pausing to pet the ginger cat. Maybe, just maybe, this week wouldn't be so bad after all.

“So, Graham, are you here to see our tulips?” the little old lady asked with a sweet hum.

Her voice brought a warmth to Adam's heart, reminding him of his granddaughter, the second human to enter Heaven. She had chosen to remain in her elderly form, a sweet little thing who would nap randomly, often requiring Adam to carry her. He hadn’t seen her since...

“Yes,” he swallowed. “I love... nature. I’ve always enjoyed flowers, trees, grass...”

“Nothing wrong with that. You seem like such a sweet young lad,” she said, leading him down the corridor of her flower-themed inn. “Such a sensitive soul you are. The youth of today aren’t interested in nature, too obsessed with electronics, like their phones. You remind me of the other young man upstairs, he signed in this morning.”

Adam sheepishly rubbed the back of his neck. “Um, well... I’ve always loved nature. So I... enjoy going to see it. My plan is to go see the tulips, the flowers this week. Maybe even go to the museum.”

“Are you here just for the week?” the old lady questioned, pulling out an old ring of keys. She shuffled to an oak door adorned with a carved flower. “I own a florist shop. We specialise in all the beautiful flowers Keukenhof has to offer. My daughter used to help me run it, but my little grandson’s sick, so she hasn’t been able to work. If you’re interested, I could use a hand. Only for the mornings, so you will be free by 11:00AM.”

How sweet.

“I’d love to help,” Adam immediately said. He hadn’t worked with flowers in years and missed everything about them, everything about Eden. “I don’t need to be paid or anything. I’ll volunteer.”

“Such a nice young lad,” the little old lady hummed, unlocking the door to his room. “I don’t want to be a bother. You’ve already paid for your room, and I’ll make you hot meals on the house.”

Adam beamed. It sounded wonderful to work with flowers again, even if just for a week.

“Thank you.”

“No, thank you,” the woman chimed. “You have no idea how much you have helped me. I wish all youngsters were like you these days.”

If only she knew Adam was thousands of years older than her. 

The florist was beautiful, and Adam's breath was taken away the moment he stepped inside. The flowers were gorgeous, each one a unique blend of shades, shapes, and sizes. Adam hadn't seen so many lovely flowers in such a long time. It was amazing to see.

He was given a sage-green apron, sandy brown gloves, and his first task: creating a bouquet. The little old lady was very friendly, patient, and sweet, teaching him how to arrange the flowers just so.

Adam was tasked with making the bouquets for orders, nothing else. It was so fun to do, and Adam never realized how enjoyable it could be. The flowers smelled lovely, and he would often stop to take in their fragrance. The florist wasn’t very big—the front had rows of flowers and plants, with a counter beyond them, and a small workshop in a room on the other side of the counter.

“Wonderful work, Graham,” the little lady cooed, taking his newest freshly made bouquet and moving it to a vase. She lightly ran her wrinkled fingers across the petals. “You really seem to have a talent with flowers. Perhaps you’ve worked in a florist before?”

Adam flushed sheepishly. “Not really. I’ve never worked in a florist before.”

“Really?” the old lady gasped, appearing surprised. “But you knew so much without me even needing to tell you. How strange.”

Shrugging helplessly, Adam smiled warmly down at the flowers around him. If the florist was this beautiful, he couldn’t wait to see how lovely the rest of Keukenhof would look.

“Mrs. Dorothy?” a familiar yet unfamiliar voice suddenly called.

The little old lady hummed, turning towards the voice. She wiped her hands on her apron and began to wobble towards a figure stepping into the doorway of the florist.

“Ah, Samuel,” Dorothy said kindly. “You’re here. Wonderful.”

Adam squinted his eyes, awkwardly wiping his gloved hands together and turning to look at this new person. Samuel, he reminded himself. A strange sensation twisted in the pit of his stomach as the figure stepped fully into the workshop, meeting Dorothy as she wobbled towards him. The old lady was speaking to him, but Adam wasn’t listening; his ears only picked up buzzing. He blinked awkwardly, glancing at the young man with a weirdness seeping over him.

Samuel appeared somewhat familiar, but Adam didn’t know why. He had never seen him before.

“Ah, Graham, this is Samuel. My other customer. He’s staying the week also at my inn,” Dorothy explained, gesturing to the man. “He’s agreed to volunteer at my florist too.”

She tilted her head to Samuel. “Samuel, this is Graham. You’ll be working together in the mornings.”

Samuel nodded with an oddly familiar smile. His blue eyes shimmered as he gazed at Adam and stepped up to him, his delicate pale hand reaching out. “It’s lovely to meet you, Graham. I hope we can get along.”

Adam stared at the hand. His stomach began to hurt, and he had no idea why. Samuel was short, reaching his shoulder. His face was cherry-shaped, with rosy cheeks and large sea-blue eyes. His hair was a strawberry blonde that curled around his face in a fashion Adam was sure he had seen before but couldn’t quite place.

When Samuel cocked his head innocently, his golden eyebrow raising, Adam mentally kicked himself. He quickly wrapped his hand around Samuel’s, a spark of electricity running through their skin at the contact. Adam almost yanked his hand back but swallowed it down. It looked as if Samuel hadn’t noticed the spark and continued to grin innocently at him.

Wait. Was it innocent? Adam felt a strong chill run up his spine. He recognized that sort of smile. It wasn’t so innocent…

“Nice to meet you too,” Adam mumbled quietly. “Um….Samuel.”

Why did the name sound so wrong to him? 

“I’m sure we’ll be spending a lot of time together.”

~#~

Lucifer was engulfed in a profound and suffocating despair, far deeper than he had ever experienced. His emotions were a chaotic, tangled mess, with an ever-increasing weight of sorrow pressing down on him each day. Even with Charlie by his side, their rekindling relationship offered no respite from the relentless grip of his depression. The once comforting presence of his rubber ducks, which used to bring a sliver of solace, now failed to pierce through his gloom.

Something was fundamentally broken within him, something he couldn't comprehend. Ever since his catastrophic fall from Eden, Lucifer had not been the same. Lilith's departure had been anticipated, yet even that couldn't account for the depth of his current despair. He was hollow, a shell of his former self. 

Though he had a room in the new 'Hazbin Hotel,' he scarcely used it. Charlie thought he had moved in with her and her friends, but Lucifer couldn't truly reside there. Each time he retired to the apple-shaped room at the hotel's corner, he would open a portal and retreat to his mansion. He couldn't explain why he kept returning to this dark, desolate building, but he did. It was as if he were expecting someone or something, and each time he found it cold and empty, his heart ached with unbearable pain.

Initially, he thought he was yearning for Lilith, clinging to the hope that she had returned, only to be devastated by her continued absence. But he soon realised that his turmoil was not about Lilith. It was something else, something he couldn't identify. Sitting in the centre of his cold, empty, and lonely chamber, Lucifer perched awkwardly on his four-poster bed, surrounded by mountains of rubber ducks. He clutched one in particular, rolling it between his claws with a lopsided frown, his red and gold eyes narrowing in scrutiny.

This little rubber duck had red curls attached to the back. He remembered crafting it years ago when he was still hopeful, still a dreamer. It was the Eve rubber duck. He placed it gently on the royal purple quilt, next to the Lilith duck, his frown deepening. His own duck was on Eve's other side, a grim reminder of something that happened centuries ago. 

His eyes drifted toward another duck placed farther away from the trio, and his chest tightened in agony. It had been so long since he had brought out his Eden rubber duck set. Lilith had never seen them. He had locked them away, for his eyes only, the guilt gnawing at him relentlessly.

With delicate claws, Lucifer picked up the duck that mirrored his own loneliness and sadness. He cradled it in his darkened hand as if fearing it might dissolve. The soft brown tufts of hair gave the duck an endearing look. He remembered remaking it countless times, never satisfied, which fueled his incessant quest for perfection in his rubber ducks. If he couldn't make Adam perfect, none of the others would be either.

This rubber duck always appeared crestfallen, perpetually sad and heartbroken, a reflection of Lucifer's own regret and foolish actions. Each time he remade the Adam duck, it always ended up with defects, odd bumps near the eyes that made it look on the verge of tears. Stroking the top of its head, Lucifer longed to comfort it, to stop its eternal weeping, but the duck remained frozen in its state of sorrow. He blinked away his own tears, trying to hold back the overwhelming tide of his own sadness.

Adam hadn't attended any meetings since that fateful battle months ago. In truth, Lucifer had expected the arrogant, self-absorbed first man to bounce back quickly. He wasn’t overly concerned when Lute had hauled Adam's beaten and bloodied body back up through the portal to Heaven. For a fleeting moment, Lucifer had wondered if he’d gone too far in his fervour to protect his daughter. His love for Charlie was boundless, and he would have obliterated anyone who dared make her cry. But Adam had already been defeated. Lucifer had done more than just defend Charlie; he had humiliated Adam, ensuring all of Hell knew just how much of a cuck the first man was.

Lucifer hadn't given it a second thought. He convinced himself that Adam needed a dose of humility and that at the next meeting between Heaven and Hell, the first man would be there, his usual brash and infuriating self. Lucifer was certain of it. He was beyond certain that when he and Charlie entered the grand hall for the meeting, Adam would be sitting in that golden chair next to Sera.

He had wagered his entire being, his magic, his rubber ducks, even Hell itself on it.

So it was soul-crushing to enter the hall and find not Adam and Sera, but Sera and a small Seraphim clearly meant as Lucifer’s replacement—and fucking Michael. The discomfort and aggression in the room were tense. 

Even the little Seraphim, whom Charlie had befriended and called 'Emily,' wasn't smiling. Charlie had said Emily was always cheerful, always beaming, but now Emily looked blank, upset, disappointed. Charlie tried to talk to her, but Emily ignored her, which clearly hurt his precious daughter.

Lucifer hadn't asked about Adam then. He let the strangeness wash over him, expecting Adam to be at the next meeting...and the next...and the next, until ten meetings had passed with no sign of the first man. Lucifer had stopped listening to the discussions, stopped caring about Charlie's arguments.

"Where's Adam?" he finally asked, and the three Angels before him darkened instantly.

"You will be dealing with me from now on," Michael spat, his aggression blinding Lucifer momentarily.

Michael and Lucifer had clashed since before the fall, never agreeing on anything. But this time was different. Michael's rage was unprecedented, even more intense than when Lucifer had defied God's plan and corrupted humanity. Lucifer was bewildered.

Charlie was shocked and confused, but neither of them received any answers.

That soul-crushing ache from centuries ago, when Adam had first caught him with Lilith, returned with tenfold intensity. It nearly made Lucifer's legs buckle beneath him. How badly had he hurt Adam? He hadn't intended to harm him so grievously. He just wanted to scare him, to send a message so Heaven would think twice before threatening his daughter again.

Emily glared, and Charlie bristled in shock when she asked if Adam was alive.

Lucifer's head spun as he sat on his bed, hugging the rubber duck to his chest with a sigh. Maybe Adam deserved some of the things he did that day on the crumbling grounds of the hotel, but he certainly didn't deserve all of it. Lucifer had gone too far. He had beaten Adam beyond recognition, beyond what he had intended and purposely humiliated him in front of all the Sinners…so nobody would ever take him seriously again…

Lucifer wanted to see Adam. No, he needed to see Adam. The most recent meeting had come just this morning, and Lucifer had decided to miss it—a decision he now realized was foolish. His absence had been the root of many problems, but he couldn’t bear the thought of going to the meeting room again and finding Adam still absent. The pain was becoming unbearable.

Groaning, Lucifer flopped back onto his bed. He held the Adam rubber duck above him, his other hand clutching his own rubber duck. Together, he held them aloft, his gaze softening with sadness. It hadn’t always been this way. Their relationship, their friendship, hadn’t always been bitter and hostile. Once, it had been sweet, gentle, and loving. Once, he and Adam had been closer than anyone could imagine. Adam had been Lucifer's entire world, and Lucifer knew he had been Adam’s world too.

But feelings, emotions, had gotten in the way. Lucifer had believed he’d fallen in love, but Adam’s betrayed expression had haunted him since. Once, when Lucifer was still hopeful, still a dreamer who believed in God's plan and ideals, he had thought that despite everything, Adam would come around and they would be close friends again.

But that never happened. Lucifer would never forget the excruciating agony of realizing that Adam hated him. Adam hated him...

“Dad?” came a sudden voice, making Lucifer jump with a startled yelp.

His rubber ducks danced in the air as he sprang up, desperately trying to catch them. The Adam rubber duck bounced onto the purple, black, and red carpet. Lucifer’s eyes fixed on it, that familiar ache tightening in his chest. Why did it always feel like Adam was running away from him?

“Dad?” Charlie stepped in, her eyes glancing around at his collection of rubber duck toys.

Lucifer awkwardly grinned, trying to hide the fact that he’d been on the verge of tears. “Charlie! What brings you here? Is everything alright with the hotel?”

Charlie’s gaze returned to her father, a strained smile crossing her lips. “Well, the meeting was this morning, and you missed it—”

She paused as she stepped forward, and Lucifer’s eyes zoomed in on her foot as she raised it above his precious Adam rubber duck. His breath caught in his throat as Charlie was about to step on it.

“Oh.” Charlie looked down, lifting her foot to see the duck. She immediately picked it up, her gaze softening. While she didn’t fully understand what her father was going through, she knew there was something he hadn’t told her. “This looks like Adam.”

“Does it?!” Lucifer squealed, too forced. He released a series of sheepish, forced laughs that made Charlie flinch. “It—it must be defective! Give it here and I’ll throw it away!”

Charlie glanced at his clawed hand and then back at the Adam duck. It definitely did not appear defective. Instead, she could tell a lot of time and effort had gone into its creation. It had ten times more detail than any other duck she had seen. With a soft hum, her delicate fingers folded around it, holding it gently. Clearly, it was an important item to her father.

“Dad,” she spoke softly, moving to sit on the edge of the bed. “You miss Adam.”

Lucifer’s eyes widened, his mouth opening and closing. “W-what? No, I don’t! He—he got what he deserved. I don’t care if—if—if he’s hurt…”

Charlie tilted her head in disagreement. “I’ve noticed it too. It’s strange that Adam isn’t in the meetings anymore. Emily…”

With a soft sigh, Lucifer dropped the fake happy persona he’d been putting on. His face immediately fell, and he swung himself over, sitting next to Charlie. “I think I really hurt him.”

“You were only protecting me,” Charlie said quietly, her eyes gazing down at the rubber duck in her hand. “He...was trying to kill me.”

“He wasn’t,” Lucifer said quickly, making Charlie blink in surprise. “I mean, I don’t know if he genuinely hated you, but he wasn’t trying to kill you. He was trying to scare you. Adam—Heaven in general weren’t allowed to attempt to kill you. It was the contract between me and Heaven, so I wouldn’t get involved in the Exterminations.”

Charlie’s face scrunched up in sadness and pain.

“I was only trying to scare him. I wanted to punish him for even trying to hurt you, for even threatening you. But the truth is, Charlie, I know better,” Lucifer groaned, running a claw down his face.

“What...what do you mean?” Charlie asked in a quiet, shaky voice.

Lucifer didn’t speak at first. He hunched his shoulders, arching his back. He rested his elbow on his thigh and tapped his clawed fingers to his chin. Lucifer carefully plucked the Adam rubber duck from Charlie’s hand and gazed down at it. “I was one of the top beings of Heaven. I was a Seraphim. The eldest of them all. I know how Heaven works. I know how it ticks.”

“Dad…” Charlie whispered, a bone-chilling coldness creeping into her heart. “Dad...are you…?”

“I doubt Adam acted alone. I mean, I haven’t seen him outside of the meetings in years, but I can't imagine the Adam I knew from Eden descending into Hell to slaughter thousands of Sinners,” Lucifer murmured, his eyes narrowing as he stared at the mountain of ducks before him. “Whether he agreed with your plan or not, the Adam I remember, who adored animals and wept when a lion attacked a deer, would never willingly lead an army to kill thousands.”

Charlie's hands clenched together, her knuckles turning white. “Dad, are you suggesting…?”

“I’m not suggesting, Charlie,” Lucifer said harshly. “I’m saying he was ordered to. You don’t defy Heaven. I am living proof of what happens when you do. It might not excuse his actions, but it is something to consider.”

Charlie covered her mouth, her face contorting in anguish. She made a choked sound, barely holding back tears. “I never thought about it that way…”

“There’s a lot you don’t know,” Lucifer admitted, a rare vulnerability in his voice. He closed his claws around a duck, holding it close to his chest. “I’m so...stressed.”

Charlie looked at Lucifer, her sympathy pouring out like a flood. “That’s why I came to see you. I figured you weren’t using your room back at the hotel.”

“Oh, right, I’m sorry,” Lucifer flinched. “I just…”

“You don’t need to explain. I already know,” she smiled weakly, placing a comforting hand on Lucifer’s shoulder. “I was thinking, maybe you should go on vacation?”

“Vacation?” Lucifer repeated, raising an eyebrow. “Me? The nonexistent King of Hell? I’ve only just begun to take my role seriously. Can you imagine what they will say if I just up and leave now? After that battle? I will never hear the end of it.”

With a broken, exhausted groan, Lucifer buried his face in his hands, pressing his palms into his eyes until he saw stars. Who knew taking the role of King of Hell seriously would be so draining?

"I just need five minutes. That's all. I'll be better in five minutes," he said.

Charlie wasn't sure if Lucifer was speaking to her or himself. It was clearly a lie. She rubbed his shoulder, worry etching her face. It was the first time she truly saw her father for who he really was—a sad, broken man. She had been too young to understand, to see the depths of his depression.

"Dad, this isn't healthy," she spoke softly. "None of this is healthy for you. You're...you're practically killing yourself."

Lucifer's head snapped up, his eyes wild. "What are you talking about? I'm fine! I'm okay, you don't need to worry!"

"Dad..." Charlie deadpanned, gesturing to the piles of ducks around them. "You're not fine. You need time, and no, I don't mean time here. Locking yourself away in a dark, damp, and cold mansion isn't going to help you. If you don’t feel comfortable being at the hotel with me, then let me send you on vacation away from the Pride Ring. Away from Hell."

In that moment, she looked every bit the Princess of Hell, and someday, the Queen. Lucifer's chest swelled with pride, but only for a fleeting second before everything crumbled again.

"Charlie, I can't really go anywhere," he said weakly. "It's kind of you to offer, but I can't leave Hell. I'm bound to Hell."

Charlie grinned widely, a reflection of him. "I thought about that. I think you should go to Earth."

"Earth?" Lucifer repeated, eyebrows raised. "Once again, I can't leave Hell. I am bound to Hell."

"You can if you're summoned," Charlie sang, pride evident in her voice. "If someone summoned you and you entered into a contract. Say, a week-long contract of relaxing?"

That was true. By the law of Heaven, Earth, and Hell, the only way the devil himself could leave Hell was by contractual summoning. He used to be summoned frequently in the earlier years. But as humans grew more corrupt, they stopped believing in Lucifer and ceased summoning him. In many ways, it had been a blessing in disguise. After being trapped in Hell for so long, being summoned to Earth and seeing the blue skies had been wonderful. But it hurt doubly when he returned to Hell.

Lucifer could foresee that aching pain returning if he agreed to Charlie's plan. He saw the flaws in it. It was almost laughable, really. But at the same time, Lucifer's heart fluttered in a way it hadn't in centuries. He wanted out. He needed time away from Hell, from his depressed room filled with ducks. He needed to clear his mind, clear his head, and come back with a fresh perspective.

"And who would be foolish enough to summon the King of Hell?" Lucifer asked, eyeing his beloved daughter. "Because last time I checked, humans aren’t exactly summoning demons anymore."

They no longer needed to. Humans had become so corrupt that they didn’t need Hell or demons to commit terrible and awful crimes against humanity. They did it themselves now, which honestly proved everything Heaven feared. There was so much Charlie didn’t know—the true reason Heaven would never let Sinners through the golden gates.

"Alastor knows somebody," Charlie began before pouting when Lucifer’s face soured. "Dad, please. He isn’t that bad!"

"Of course he is," he grumbled sullenly. "He knows somebody who would summon the King of Hell himself! Unbelievable!"

"He’s trying to help!" Charlie insisted. "It’s an old family friend. She’s old, on the verge of death herself, but she owes Alastor a favor still."

Lucifer scoffed. "You mean she summoned Alastor, and now he owns her soul. What did he offer her? Freedom from their deal if she does this little favor for him? Out of the goodness of his heart?"

Fucking bullshit. His hair stood on end, and his skin prickled when Charlie simply continued to stare. Clearly, he had hit the nail on the head.

"Charlie!" Lucifer exclaimed, his body twitching, the burn on his back forming with his wings beginning to burst out. If Alastor had tricked his little girl! "How did you get this favor? What did you offer?"

Charlie held her hands up. "Calm down. It’ll only be for a week. There are no strings attached. I didn’t make a deal with Alastor or anything. He just overheard Vaggie and me and said he could offer his assistance."

"For free?" Lucifer growled, his eyes narrowing suspiciously.

The Princess of Hell groaned deeply. "Dad, please. This is a great opportunity for you! You said so yourself, you’re drowning in here! You need time away from Hell, from this mansion, and everything else! From Heaven and its rules! It’s only a week!"

"Anything can happen in a week," Lucifer shot back. "It’s too dangerous. I don’t trust him."

Charlie released a deep, exhausted sigh. She stood up and crossed her arms, looking away sheepishly before glancing back. "Well...you don’t really have a choice, Dad."

"What?" Lucifer blinked slowly, his eyebrows creasing. "What do you mean I don’t have a choice?"

Charlie breathed in deeply, a twitchy smile spreading across her lips. "I mean...it’s already been arranged. You’re going to be summoned at dawn."

"Charlie!"

[steddieas-shegoes]

Request:hard of hearing Steve who realizes that the party are doing their best to accommodate him by learning ASL, using subtitles, etc and he is overwhelmed with joy about that bc nobody else seems to be doing it. Robin, Jonathan, Nancy, Eddie, Argyle & Wayne go to ASL classes with Steve. And just being supported the whole time

MY LOVE! This one's a bit on the shorter side because the struggle is real with words today. I still feel like it gets the emotions across that Steve feels about the party loving him and supporting him, which is what's most important. That post-vacation depression is hitting me so so hard. Enjoy! - Mickala ❤️

----------------------------------------------

The hearing in his left ear went first. It wasn’t a slow and steady loss of hearing so much as one day he could hear fine, the next sounded like water was blocking it, and the next he couldn’t hear at all.

No doctor could explain what happened, and they’d assumed it was just a delayed reaction to the head trauma he’s experienced.

They recommended he prepare for hearing loss in his other ear.

They said it so casually, like it was fine and something easy to handle. Like he wasn’t panicking at the fact that he wouldn’t be able to hear anything.

He started learning sign language, late nights sitting with Robin as she worked through VHS tapes from the library with him and Eddie.

He didn’t tell anyone else at first, didn’t want to scare them or make them feel like they had to treat him differently.

But they noticed.

They saw the way he turned a certain way when they were talking, leaning his head subtly so his right ear was facing towards conversations.

They saw his hands moving in fluid patterns when he thought they weren’t looking. El was the one who pointed it out, her own limited experience with sign language just enough to figure out he was practicing basic sentences.

They saw how he kept touching his left ear, like if he touched it, maybe his hearing would come back.

So they went to Robin, all of them, begging her to teach them sign language, begging her to keep it a secret from him.

But even Robin didn’t really know much, and all she knew was self taught, so they struggled after a few lessons.

Eventually, Steve had to tell them.

He could tell some of his hearing in his right ear was going, though at least it was happening much slower.

He sat them all down, Eddie next to him holding his hand, Robin on the other side with an unreadable expression on her face.

And when they all already knew, he felt Eddie squeeze his hand, felt tears run down his cheeks without his permission as everyone surrounded him in a group hug.

Within a week, they all signed up for ASL classes in Indy, Eddie and Nancy driving everyone, everyone chipping in for gas even though Eddie offered to pay for it.

As if that wasn’t overwhelming enough, knowing his chosen family all loved him enough to learn an entire language just to be able to communicate with him, they all started figuring out subtitles for movie nights.

Dustin, Eddie, and Jeff figured out a system that let Steve feel the actual note changes of Eddie’s guitar instead of just the same vibrations through the whole song.

They kept a whiteboard in every room, called it Steve Sharades (“for the alliteration!”), and used it as a message board when they weren’t sure of the signs for certain words or phrases.

He was thankful for that when he woke up one morning to near silence.

Just a slight buzzing in his right ear.

When Eddie said good morning, he only knew because he read his lips.

He cried, he felt lost, scared, alone.

But only for a little while.

His family had been preparing for this, had taught themselves how to still give Steve as much of “normal” as they could.

That night was dinner with Wayne, who had been warned about this possibly happening, and probably got a warning from Eddie while Steve was in the shower earlier.

When they arrived at his trailer, he pulled Steve into a hug, arms tightening until he could barely breathe.

He could feel Wayne’s heartbeat against his chest, felt ihs hands on his back, wide and strong, holding him together.

When he pulled away, he started signing as he spoke so Steve could read his hands or his lips.

All okay, son?

Steve sobbed, but nodded.

Wayne had learned sign language, too.

Steve turned to Eddie to hug him, knew he was the one responsible for teaching Wayne secretly.

Steve told them both he loved them, showed them in every way he could, too.

Just like they showed him.

[gravity-between-us]

Gravity Between Us

Chapter 3: Cosmic Ruin

Summary: Caleb and I have known each other for as long as I can remember. We were once childhood friends, our bond as natural as the stars in the sky. But now, everything has changed. What used to feel like a safe, familiar orbit between us now pulses with unspoken desire.

Our friendship is no longer enough to keep the tension at bay, and the distance between us feels unbearable. Secrets, lies, and unhealed wounds stand in our way. I don’t know if we can survive this new gravity pulling us together... but I can’t keep pretending I don’t want to try.

Pairing: Female! MC x Caleb

Spoilers: Spoilers for Caleb's Myth's as well as memories. Read at your own risk for these. Lore spoilers.

WARNINGS:

Unlikely to be completely canon. The other love interests will not be likely to appear in this fic.

MC is named. MC is socially awkward. MC can be depressed at times.

Very? Slow Burn.

Very explicit smut (Chapter 12 onward): PiV/oral (male and female receiving)/anal sex. Fingering. First time. Pet names (angel, babe, baby, pip-squeak). Kinks: Praise, breeding, creampie, light dom/sub. Rough. Some consensual degradation talk (MC is into it). Probably many, many more that I am forgetting to name. If you see one that should be listed that isn't, feel free to let me know. (MC is a repressed deviant, and so is Caleb.)

Awkward blend of darker moments, angst, fluff, and humour.

Drinking. Questionable life decisions. MC spirals.

Protective Caleb. Both MC and Caleb are a little obsessive and overly protective of each other, which could be considered an unhealthy relationship.

We will revisit memory scenes, but they will be different from the memories in-game.

As proofread as I can get it, but not beta read, so probably some mistakes.

Limited plot - most focus is just on their relationship and interactions.

More warnings could be applied, but as a general rule of thumb, please read at your own risk and do not continue if you find the content triggering.

The house is too quiet. I blink blearily at the landing pad, my sluggish brain taking too long to register what my eyes already know—Caleb’s aircraft is gone. It’s not unusual. He leaves early for duty all the time. But today, it feels… off. The space he’s left behind is heavier than it should be, like his absence has seeped into the walls, the air—into my bones.

I shuffle to the couch and collapse onto it, sinking into the cushions with a slow exhale. My limbs feel leaden, my mind foggy, like I’m moving through molasses, but I tell myself it’s just the morning. Just the remnants of sleep clinging to me like a second skin.

I tell myself a lot of things these days.

The silence stretches as I stare at nothing, trying to get my head on straight. My thoughts are a tangled mess, threads knotted so tight I don’t know where to start unravelling them.

Emotions have never been my strong suit. Not since Gran. Not since Caleb. Since they were declared dead, something inside me shorted out, like a failsafe I didn’t know existed kicked in to keep me from shattering. I flicked a switch and shut it all off because the alternative was unbearable. Grief felt too big, too endless—like drowning with no shore in sight.

So I threw myself into my work.

Being a Hunter meant never having to stop, never having to think, never having to feel. Every mission was a reason to keep moving, every fight a distraction, every kill a release. Adrenaline was easier to chase than ghosts. Blood was easier to wash away than memories.

It worked. Until it didn’t.

Pain, I’ve learned, is a funny thing.

Physical pain is predictable. It follows rules. A cut will sting, a bruise will ache, a bone will break and knit itself back together in time. You learn its language, its patterns, how to endure and wield it. You can grit your teeth through it, drown it in med gel, push past it until it fades into something distant and dull.

But emotional pain?

It doesn’t obey. It doesn’t follow a script. It seeps into the cracks of your mind like ink spilled on paper, bleeding into places it doesn’t belong. It warps time, making days stretch too long and nights pass too fast. It steals the colour from the world, leaves everything muted, drained, and hollow.

And the worst part?

You can’t outrun it. Not forever.

I press my palms against my eyes and let out a slow breath. I don’t know how long I sit there, lost in my head, but eventually, I sigh and let my hands drop, staring up at the ceiling. I need to move, to work—to exhaust myself before my thoughts drown me.

The gym is quiet, save for the steady thud of my feet against the treadmill. The rhythmic pace, the hum of the machine beneath me, the burn building in my limbs—it helps ground me, gives me something to focus on besides the ghosts clawing their way up from the depths of my mind.

But no matter how fast I run, they follow.

Caleb’s voice, low and teasing, calling me "pip-squeak" like it’s second nature. The way his fingers skim my ankle, kneading lazy circles into my foot while we sit on the couch.

The treadmill beeps, signalling the end of my run. I don’t hesitate. I move straight to the weights, pressing through the burn, chasing exhaustion—but it doesn’t stop the flood.

Him spinning me around last night, laughter tangled with mine, the heat that sparked when the moment stretched just a little too long.

I drop the weights onto the rack, my breathing uneven, sweat dripping down my spine. My muscles ache, but it’s not enough. I cross the gym in a few quick strides and slam my fists into the punching bag. The leather gives beneath my knuckles with a satisfying resistance.

I hit it again. And again.

Caleb used to be an open book to me. I knew every thought before he spoke it, every shift in his expression, every flicker of emotion behind his eyes. Now, there are pages missing—whole chapters he won’t let me read. Shadows cling to him in ways they never did before. Pain he won’t name. Secrets he won’t share.

I don’t know how to bridge that gap.

After my shower, my muscles ache, and my knuckles throb with the telltale promise of bruises. I feel like an overcooked piece of pasta as I sink onto the couch, remote in hand, flipping through the endless black hole of television channels.

There’s nothing on. Or maybe there is, but my brain refuses to process any of it. Every channel blends together into an indistinguishable mess of colour and noise. I should be able to relax, to let the exhaustion in my limbs lull me into something resembling peace, but my thoughts are restless.

Of course, they drift right back to him.

Slipping into bed beside him. The way his hand found my back in his sleep, fingers curled into the fabric of my shirt like he couldn’t bear for me to leave. The steady, rhythmic sound of his breathing, the rise and fall of his chest beneath my palm. The feel of his skin beneath my fingertips—warm, solid, real.

Nope. Absolutely not.

I cannot sit here and think. Clearly, that is bad for me. I need a distraction.

Like divine intervention, it hits me.

Drinking.

Yes. That is the answer. A responsible, definitely healthy coping mechanism—just a little to take the edge off.

I make a beeline for Caleb’s liquor cabinet, fully prepared to make some questionable life choices. Unfortunately, my plan encounters an immediate roadblock. Apparently, Caleb does not stock normal alcohol. No wine. No beer. No fruity little drinks that go down easy, and let me pretend I am not actively making a mistake.

No, what he has is a collection of bottles with labels that look like they were designed for space mercenaries with a death wish. Dark Matter Blackout. Nebula Burn. Void’s Mercy. That last one feels ominous, but I grab it anyway.

I pour myself a shot. It smells like regret. I take it anyway. It burns like fire and bad decisions.

Perfect.

One more shot. Then another. By the time I down the third, my head feels pleasantly light, my body loose, the tension in my muscles finally unspooling.

Yet I still cannot sit still.

So I do the next logical thing: I turn on some music. Loud enough to make the floor vibrate beneath my feet, loud enough for the bass to thrum in my bones, loud enough to drown out every single thought trying to claw its way back into my head.

Then, because I am apparently on a roll with making excellent choices, I decide now is the perfect time to clean.

Everything.

Every room, every surface. I scrub, I dust, I straighten, I organize. I throw myself into it with an enthusiasm that should honestly concern me. The floors gleam. The kitchen sparkles. I rearrange the throw pillows three separate times before deciding their original placement was, in fact, superior.

The house is immaculate—a sharp, perfect contrast to the absolute mess inside my head.

At some point, between scrubbing down the counters and aggressively reorganizing the bookshelf, I pick up the bottle and start using it as a microphone.

Unfortunately for literally everyone who has ever possessed the ability to hear, I am now in full concert mode.

I crank the music even louder and dance like an absolute menace through the house—spinning, swaying, shaking my hips like I am the only person in the universe. Which, technically, I am. At least in this house. I belt out the lyrics, horribly off-key, the bottle clutched in my hand like a mic, and I am killing it.

Caleb is missing out. I am a vision. A drunk, chaotic vision.

Mid-spin, a new brilliant idea strikes me.

The furniture.

It is all wrong.

Which means, obviously, I must fix it.

I grab the couch and drag it to a new spot. Step back. No. Not right. I shove it to the other side of the room. Step back. Still wrong. The coffee table gets moved next. Then the side table. Then the couch again.

I am locked in a battle of wills with this furniture.

And I am losing.

I reach for the bottle to soothe the sting of my failure—tilt it back—nothing.

I blink and shake it. As if the laws of physics might bend to my will and magically refill it.

They do not.

Betrayal. How could Caleb let this happen? How could he have the audacity, the unmitigated gall, to not predict that I would one day get tipsy and need more alcohol than he has stocked?

I grab my phone, thumbs flying across the screen.

Inara: Wow. Unbelievable. Truly. I have never known such disappointment. Caleb: … What? Inara: You. Have failed me. Caleb: Okay. I feel like I should be apologizin’, but I don’t know what for. Inara: I am in crisis, Caleb. Crisis. And where are you? Off gallivanting around, leaving me to fend for myself. Caleb: … I went to work. Inara: Question. How do you feel about change? Caleb: What did you do? Inara: Why do you always assume I did something? I just had a thought. A vision. A great and powerful idea. Caleb: Oh no. Inara: What if… hear me out… we completely reinvented the living room? Caleb: … Caleb: What does that mean? Did you move the furniture? Inara: I am taking creative initiative for our shared space. Caleb: Where is the couch? Inara: Currently… in an experimental location. Caleb: Where. Inara: TBD. Caleb: … Caleb: Is it upside down? Inara: Not right now.

At this point, I toss the phone aside because this conversation is going absolutely nowhere. With a sigh, I yank open the cabinet and reach for another bottle, tucked away behind a terrifyingly strong one labelled Celestial Burn: Nova Strength Whiskey—which, frankly, sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen. Instead, I grab Black Hole Rum—Guaranteed to Suck You In.

Hm. Promising.

I take a swig straight from the bottle, wincing at the burn, then turn back to the disaster I’ve created.

The living room is in ruins. Half the furniture is positioned at angles that defy logic, like some kind of avant-garde art piece that only makes sense to the deeply unhinged. The couch is half-shoved against the wall, one leg somehow balanced on a precarious stack of books. The coffee table isn’t anywhere near the couch—just abandoned mid-movement, off to the side. Pillows are scattered across the floor like casualties of war.

It’s fine. It just needs… adjustments.

My brain stutters over itself for a moment before latching onto an entirely useless thought.

Caleb’s elbows.

His elbows.

Why? Who knows.

But suddenly, I can’t stop thinking about them—how they’re weirdly sharp yet somehow elegant. Is this a thing? Do people have attractive elbows? What is he doing to them? Moisturizer? Elbow exercises??

I scowl at absolutely nothing.

What the hell is wrong with me?

It must be the living room. The energy in here is all wrong. I need to fix it. Now.

Naturally, I launch myself back into the chaos, frantically dragging things around again, as if physically rearranging furniture might somehow realign the absolute mess in my head.

The living room remains a battlefield of terrible decisions and increasingly questionable interior design choices. I’ve tried every possible configuration—from asymmetry to something that’s probably a fire hazard. Nothing feels right. The universe is mocking me.

I stumble through the wreckage, gripping the bottle of Black Hole Rum like a lifeline, belting out the lyrics to some ancient pop song with the confidence of a rock star and the vocal accuracy of a malfunctioning AI.

Somewhere between a dramatic twirl on the rug and an ill-advised attempt to launch myself off the couch (which, to be fair, is mostly where it’s supposed to be), I realize the problem.

The real problem.

The root cause of my complete mental breakdown disguised as an impromptu home renovation.

Caleb.

I march to my bedroom, nearly tripping over an upturned chair, and grab the apple plushie from my bed. It’s soft. Innocent. Blissfully unaware of the fate that awaits it.

Flopping onto the floor amid the wreckage, I cross my legs and cradle the plushie as if it were Caleb himself. I glare at its stupid, stitched-on smile.

“You.” I jab a finger into its round little body. “This is your fault.”

It does not respond. Probably because it’s a stuffed apple.

I poke it again, more aggressively this time. “How dare you have such… offensively attractive forearms? And those elbows!” I shake the plushie like it can be reasoned with. “They’re not supposed to look that good, Caleb! They’re just bones! But noooo, even your damn bones are irritatingly good-looking! Why?”

The apple remains unimpressed.

I flop backward onto the floor with a groan. “I know you’re not actually Caleb. I’m not that far gone.” A pause. “…But if you were Caleb, I’d be yelling at you for scrambling my brain like this.”

I hold the plushie up, squinting into its beady little eyes. “This is your fault,” I mutter again, smushing its round face. “Your. Fault.”

Since the universe has a cruel sense of humour, it’s then that I hear the distant hum of engines, and my head snaps up.

I’m on my feet in an instant, pressing myself against the living room window like some kind of elite super spy. I think I’m being subtle.

I am not.

Caleb’s aircraft touches down smoothly, its sleek frame reflecting the evening light. The second the hatch opens, he steps out in his crisp uniform.

Colonel Caleb.

I sneer. He looks stupidly good in that uniform. I hate that uniform. All stiff formality, Fleet-approved rigidity, silent reminders of things I really don’t want to think about right now.

But also—ugh.

He looks obnoxiously good in it.

Caleb pauses at the bottom of the ramp, frowning. He definitely hears the music. His eyes sweep toward the house.

I duck lower, convinced I am hidden.

I am very visibly pressed against the glass.

I snort to myself. Angry. Happy. Frustrated. Relieved.

Because despite my spiralling, despite my brain being an absolute mess of elbows and bad decisions, I’m just glad he’s home.

Caleb steps inside, and his entire body tenses. He gawks, slack-jawed, at the disaster that was once a living room. The music is still blaring at full volume, and I don’t even need to look at him to know he’s staring at me like I’ve completely lost my mind.

I ignore the look. Irrelevant.

Instead, I scurry up to him—though, in my haste, I definitely trip over myself, catching a foot on the rug that I swear wasn’t there a second ago.

Whatever. Doesn’t matter.

I right myself and throw my arms around him, squeezing tightly before shoving my face against his shoulder—

And sniffing him.

Oh. Oh, he smells good. Too good. Unfairly good. That stupidly crisp, clean scent with just a hint of dark amber, spice, and him beneath it.

It is, quite frankly, mouth-watering.

I hum against his jacket in approval. He goes completely still. "Okay," he says slowly, his voice half-drowned by the music. "What—"

I cut him off before he can move, change, comment, or fix things. I grab his hand and yank, dragging him straight into the war zone that is our living room.

"Alright, resonate with me." I stop in the middle of the mess, gripping his hands and staring at him intently.

Caleb blinks. "What?"

I shake our joined hands as if that will somehow help. "Resonate with me. Right now. I need you to feel this with me."

He tilts his head, bending slightly to peer into my probably glassy, unfocused eyes. “Pip-squeak, are you drunk?"

"That’s not the important part here," I conclude, exasperated. "Listen, I think I need to use your Evol to move the couch—or possibly suck it into a black hole due to its sheer defiance."

Caleb exhales sharply through his nose, the sound suspiciously close to a suppressed laugh. "You want to use gravity manipulation—on the couch."

"Yes. It’s a menace, Caleb. A menace that needs to be neutralized."

He stares at me as if I’ve just proposed launching the couch into orbit. “Right. Okay," he says slowly, then looks back at the room, his eyes tracing the path of absolute destruction.

He’s clearly holding back a laugh, which only makes me more frustrated—because this isn’t funny! Okay, it is a little funny. But not in the ‘laugh at me’ way!

"Inara." He says my name, his voice dipping just enough to make my pulse stutter. There’s a teasing lilt to it, though—light, playful, knowing.

And just like that, my entire focus snaps to his lips. The way he says my name—like he’s savouring it, rolling it around like a particularly fine piece of chocolate. My breath hitches slightly, and then, because I’m this me instead of regular me, my brain promptly swan-dives into the gutter.

I wonder how it would sound when he’s moaning my name.

Nope. Nope. Don’t go there. Nope!

I jerk back too quickly, and before I know it, I’m stumbling—a disaster in motion. I swear the floor didn’t exist a second ago.

Caleb catches me like we’re in some kind of action movie, and I’m the heroine who somehow always trips over her own feet. His arms close around me, steady and unshaken, like he expected this.

And instead of letting me go—like a decent human being—he dips me. Full-on, dramatic ballroom-dance style. He doesn’t even look winded. He just looks... amused.

I blink up at him, still tangled in his arms as he holds me there, one brow quirked in silent amusement. He’s enjoying this.

"Fell on purpose, huh?" he drawls, voice laced with dry humour. "Just so I could catch you? You’ve got quite the dramatic flair, Inara."

I open my mouth to deny it, but the words tumble out in a mess of stuttered nonsense. "What? No! I—I didn’t mean to—uh, I wasn’t trying—" I cut myself off with an embarrassed laugh because this is exactly what I didn’t want to happen.

Caleb chuckles, clearly enjoying himself far too much. “Sure you weren’t.”

I glare at him, but it’s half-hearted because he’s already lifting me back upright, effortlessly resetting me on my feet like I’m nothing more than an unruly puppet. He’s so natural, like there is nothing remotely absurd about this situation.

"You should probably sit down.” He nudges me toward the couch, and I let myself be guided, flopping onto the cushions with an exaggerated huff.

Caleb grins and shrugs off his uniform coat, tossing it over the back of the chair like it’s an afterthought. It’s so casual and effortless. It still makes my heart flutter.

With a swift motion, he turns the music down, the thumping bass fading to a softer pulse. I watch him, still acutely aware of the lingering weight of his hands on me, though I try to shake it off. I shift in my seat, forcing myself to look at anything other than him.

Like the dangerous creature he is, he saunters into the kitchen. His eyes glint with something playful, mischievous—like he’s plotting.

He glances back at me, smirking. "If I’m going to understand what’s happening here, I need to get on your level, don’t I?"

Before I can even ask what the hell that means, he plucks a bottle from the shelf and pours himself a shot. Then, with effortless grace, he knocks it back in one fluid motion.

“You are a mess,” he mutters under his breath, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Okay, let me change first. I’m sure you’ve got more ‘furniture rearrangin’ plans for me.”

I cannot stop myself from grinning as he turns to leave, but the moment is fleeting. He is already heading down the hall to change. I wait impatiently, my foot tapping against the floor in anticipation.

When he returns, rubbing his hands together like a mad scientist on the verge of unveiling a grand experiment, I sit up straighter. "So? What’s the plan? Are we resonating or what?" My excitement threatens to spill over.

His lips curl into a smirk, and there it is again—that glimmer in his eyes, the one that says he is enjoying every second of this.

"Resonate, huh? Sure. Let’s not." His voice dips, laced with amusement, as he crosses the room. "You think I am going to give you gravity manipulation in this state of mind?”

I pout. "You are no fun." With a dramatic wave of my hand, I declare, "The couch must pay."

He arches a brow, a chuckle rumbling from his chest. "Right. And I am definitely not letting you use me as some gravity-defying superpower to exact revenge on the furniture. I will handle the moving while you—" he gestures vaguely, "—supervise."

I open my mouth to argue, but the way he is smiling—genuine, unguarded—makes me hesitate. I soften.

By the time Caleb has worked his magic, shifting the furniture into something resembling order, we have eaten dinner, cleaned up my earlier disaster, and now, I am sprawled face-down on the couch. 

The world tilts around me, spinning a little too fast, and the only thing keeping me tethered is my apple plushie, clutched as if my survival depends on it.

As the alcohol wears off, the buzzing in my skull morphs into a slow, gnawing embarrassment, making my head throb all the more.

Caleb, however, seems entirely unbothered by the ordeal. He is mostly teasing me, which—if I am being honest—I deserve. He is a steady rock while I am a hurricane of awkwardness.

He walks over and rubs my back, his voice soft. "Still awake, pip-squeak?"

I grumble something unintelligible, half-turned away from him, unwilling to admit it. I just want to curl up and disappear for a while. He asks again, his tone warm with concern. "Do you want me to take you to bed?"

Bed. The last place I want to be. Just another lonely void where my thoughts lurk, waiting to ambush me. I shake my head—but immediately regret it as dizziness crashes over me like a wave.

He chuckles, clearly entertained by my self-inflicted suffering. "Sit up and take these," he says, pressing a glass of water into my hands, along with two pills, which I eye with suspicion. 

The last time he gave me pills…

Caleb notices the wariness, and his expression flickers, guilt passing over his features.

“It's just for the hangover," he reassures. "You will regret it tomorrow if you don’t take em."

As much as I want to argue, I know he is right. With a reluctant sigh, I push myself up with a groan and swallow the pills, the cool water soothing my uneasy stomach.

He sits beside me, fingers flicking the top of my head. “Dummy.”

I stick my tongue out at him petulantly, and slump against him. My head finds his shoulder, and my sight blurs as I stare at the TV screen. Drowsiness creeps in like a tide, pulling me under. I start sinking lower, sliding from his shoulder into his lap.

"What happened today?"

The words slip out of me, slurred and accompanied by a half-hearted snort. "Forearms…"

Caleb goes still. "Forearms…?"

I nod, too sleepy to elaborate. "Ridiculously attractive forearms."

Silence. I think he is trying to decipher what the hell I just said. His hand rubs slow circles on my back, but I can feel the confusion radiating off him.

After a long pause, he exhales a soft sigh. “Come on." He slips his arms under my legs, cradling my back with ease. "Time for bed."

A small, contented sigh escapes me as he lifts me. He carries me effortlessly to the bedroom, his movements sure and practiced, as if he has done this a hundred times before. Settling me onto the bed, he tugs the covers up around me, tucking me in.

As sleep pulls me under, I mumble, barely conscious, “You’re a good man."

Chapter Masterlist Thank you for taking the time to read! I started this for fun, and decided it might be something silly others may possibly enjoy with me.

If you do, leave a comment, or don't, or you know, do whatever you're comfortable with!

Take care everyone!

[overgrown3d]

Messages from your person 🫂 (PAC)

💭What do they have in their mind? What words have they left unsaid? What is something they want to tell you the most, be it about love, gratitude, and friendship? !REMINDER! This is a general reading, take what resonates.

✨How to select your pile?✨

1. Slow your breathing, taking deep inhales. Focus on feeling present in your environment.

2. Looking from left to right, use your intuition to pick the pile meant for you (what you connect most with.)

3. Doesn't resonate? No worries! Pick another, it's message may be just right for you.

!!For Entertainment Purposes Only!!

Pile 1 -> Pile 2

Pile 3 -> Pile 4

🔹Pile 1 ;

Cards: The Hermit (rev), The Sun, King of swords (rev), 9 of swords, 10 of wands, 8 of swords

"Dear Pile 1,

There are so many things in my head that I want to say, but I struggle to say them. I feel so burdened with responsibilities and tasks, I am not the lover I want to be, I am not the person that I so badly need to be. I'm in a dark place right now, and it feels like I'm doing the wrong things to get through it. What I need the most is to step up for myself, to find peace and confidence. There are nights where I am kept awake, and days where I am kept moving. I'm sorry, I feel like I disappointed you, and I disappointed myself. Truth is, what I need is help. Carrying my burdens alone, I don't think I can make it out of here."

🌊~~~~

Alright, that was really depressing 🥲. Pile 1, this person feels trapped right now. Daily responsibilities can be taking a toll on them right now, I also heard that they aren't meeting expectations? They have pretty bad self esteem, undermining themselves despite all the work they do. I'm getting that this person is pretty impressive in how much they can handle. But right now, they are at their limits, they can't take anymore. A lot of their feelings of being "trapped" are their own insecurities, they have a lot of things in their mind that they can't control. Honestly, it's like they know they need to focus on themselves more, but their daily schedule and habitual thoughts don't allow for that change to come smoothly. I'm getting that they just need help to go through these things, they don't want to be alone. They do have a lot of things to say, but it's like they're not in a space where they can voice their thoughts out. Maybe it's also their role that they are considering.

If you chose this pile with your FS in mind, this is most likely where they are right now in life, or could be the same energy when the two of you meet.

🔹Pile 2;

Cards: Page of Wands, The Devil, Strength, The Hanged Man, 10 of swords, 6 of Cups, 10 of Cups

"Dear Pile 2,

You really changed me, you let me see the light in my future way beyond what I could've ever imagined. I never thought I could have my own happily-ever-after, but I learned that it wasn't too impossible in the first place. I'm so grateful for the new experiences you brought me, and experiences we went through together. I was able to learn a lot from you, like being introduced to spiritual concepts, and having more faith in the divine. I'm making the steps to change my life for the better, with newfound strength. I appreciate you for these new insights."

🌊~~~~

Pile 2, your person mentions you a lot in this reading. There is a lot of emphasis on their gratitude towards you, and whatever you've done, it really helped them open up to a new experience or thought patterns. Like, they have a lot of confidence in creating a future for themselves, and are enthusiastic to be walking down that path. Perhaps you gave them advice, or commented on how they can process their trauma and emotions, maybe even introduced them to Tarot, Astrology, Meditations, etc. They now adopt this in their lifestyle, and it's greatly serving them to the point where they give you a bunch of credit for it haha. Habits are standing out to me here, they could've been the type of person to really struggle with temptations & being lazy, but now they're psyched to start acting. I'm heavily feeling like you helped them break old patterns and gave them hope. You kinda changed the trajectory of their life. They think it's thanks to you, and want you to know it!

🔹Pile 3 ;

Cards: The hanged man, 6 of swords, the tower, the hermit, king of words, queen of wands, the star, 4 of swords, 4 of pentacles

"Dear Pile 3,

Life has been pretty good lately. I feel in control of things like my thoughts and emotions. They don't go haywire anymore, haha. I'm not leading the life I used to. I'm doing better each day with all this healing and stuff. I'm focusing a lot on resting, trying to build up my assets, and mature a whole lot more. Life has been steady, and I'm slowly rebuilding it. I'm lucky to have another chance at life, and I'll be sure not to waste it."

🌊~~~~

Your pile is different from 1 & 2! This message is addressed to you in the form of a check-in letter. I'm getting the vibe that this is a relationship where you aren't closely in contact right now, or interactions could happen occasionally. This honestly feels like they are telling you not to worry about them, since their life is going pretty well right now. This person could've been in a bad place before, which justifies you having worries about their life, but low-key they're kinda thriving lmao! They seem to be in a steady and good place, probably a drastic comparison to their past or how you first met them. Their life is in the process of balancing right now (though it can be that they are financially struggling), but this is more of their headspace being balanced. They're pretty zen, which might come up as a legitimate shock lol. You most likely were included in their old life somehow, enough for them to want to update you on their life.

🔹Pile 4 ;

Cards: 6 of wands, 2 of Cups, queen of cups, 4 of cups, 5 of cups, 5 of wands, page of cups

"Dear Pile 4,

I've been at a loss, and I know it's in my best interest to put things behind me. I still grieve, grieving over many things. Among the many, is the past. Nonetheless, I move on -- I'm still learning and growing. I know I'm not lacking in support, I have you among other things. There are days where I'm not sure how to pinpoint my emotions, inside of me are inner conflicts at times. It's a battle I'm going through, but do believe that after trial and error, it's one that I'll win."

🌊~~~~

Pile 4, this person cares so much about you. Honestly, it's tempting to say that this is romantic, but it honestly applies to platonic relationships given the context. They have a lot of care for you, so much so that they want to be emotionally open about these things. To them, you're their rock, their shoulder to cry on. You're the Queen of Cups while they're the Page. Honestly, you help this person process their emotions, because I'm seeing that they greatly benefit through having you around in tough times. From the 2 of Cups, this is definitely a union, energy is heavily pointing to this being a close connection. This person may be overcoming a loss, hence the help you provide. Arghhh it's like they want to improve themselves not just for their sake, but also yours. They want to move together as a team, but they feel that they need to develop themselves emotionally still. They do want to let you know of their appreciation, but it's like this is something they want to do alone, this will be their own victory.

🌊~~~ You reached the end of the reading, 'till next time!

[nerdforreid]

Prologue - Burnt out

Authors note - Hi! This is a teaser for what will hopefully be either a long one shot or a multi-part depending on whether it’s enjoyed or not but I’ve never written before and wanted to put out a teaser before releasing anything else. Please let me know if there’s anything I should change/ include.

Summary - Spencer Reid x reader. Although this is only a prologue the fic is going to be about the readers struggles with burn out and pushing her concerned coworkers away as a consequence. Despite this there is one of her coworkers who has been watching her throughout her time at the BAU and has recognised the patterns in her behaviour. However, will Spencer’s interference cause more harm than good?

Genre - hurt/comfort, heavy angst, fluff at the end

Warnings - fem!Reader, she/her pronouns used for the reader, allusions to depression, mentions of a difficult childhood, allusions to childhood trauma, possible lack of commas and proper grammar

Word count - very short but don’t get used to it x

While your childhood had been a blurry array of mismatched memories, there were a couple lessons your parents unconsciously taught you that you carried with you every day, like a form of sacred scripture. For example, you learnt at a young age how to ‘predict’ or anticipate the ways in which someone may act; some may call this walking on eggshells, but you preferred to view it as an early sign of the life ahead of you as a member of the BAU. Because of this, you liked to view yourself as very emotionally intelligent and empathetic, and you were even praised for this by your fellow team members. However, despite the highly valued benefits, it could definitely be a hurdle in itself sometimes, considering what you did for work.

It wasn’t a rare occurrence that there would be times when you would lie awake at night plagued by questions about the victim's friends and family and what came next for them. Despite your better judgement, you’d constantly torture yourself with the question, “What if things were different?”. But they weren’t different, and they never would be.

 

Burnout was something you ran from in the fear that showing the slightest weakness would prove to yourself and your coworkers that you weren’t cut out for this. You could even go months before the exhaustion and pain finally caught up, but when they did, it was all consuming.

 

Out of your two years and three months working at the BAU, there had been four separate occasions where you had sent emails in the early hours of the morning pleading with Hotch to let you take time off, each time only stating it was due to personal problems. You knew it was stupid to not just lie and say you were ill, but you also knew it would be naive of you to try to lie to one of the best profilers you knew.

 

You tried to keep occasions like this rare and would take any precautions necessary to limit the worries of your BAU family. You would force yourself to reply to each and every one of the cat memes that Penelope would forward you, and you would even reply to the long and thoughtful messages from JJ confirming that, despite her probably valid worries, you were in fact completely okay. However, there was one member of the team who could see through your perfectly crafted mirage with ease, and it was none other than your best friend, Spencer Reid.

—————————————————————————————————————

Hi again! I hope you enjoyed this despite it being so short! Please let me know if you’d like me to continue :)

[04k96]

[Prompted with ChatGPT]

How Cognitive Overload Can Lead to Mental Strain

Cognitive overload occurs when the brain is overwhelmed by too much information or too many tasks, surpassing its capacity to process and handle them effectively. This can happen in various ways:

1. Mental Fatigue and Reduced Decision-Making Capacity

• When the brain is overloaded, it becomes fatigued, and this affects decision-making abilities. As a result, individuals may make poor decisions or be more susceptible to outside influences.

• This mental fatigue could contribute to a sense of being “trapped” in a pattern of behavior or unable to think clearly, potentially leading to a feeling of loss of autonomy.

2. Decreased Ability to Resist Manipulation

• Cognitive overload can impair a person’s ability to engage in critical thinking, making them more vulnerable to persuasion or manipulation. In extreme cases, this could make a person more easily influenced by external forces, whether that’s media, social pressure, or authoritarian figures.

• This dynamic, especially in contexts of social media, advertising, or propaganda, could feel like a form of “mind enslavement” in the sense that a person loses the ability to make independent decisions and is guided by external influences.

3. Chronic Stress and Mental Health Issues

• Ongoing cognitive overload can lead to chronic stress, which in turn leads to mental health issues like anxiety and depression. These conditions can make a person feel helpless, trapped in a cycle of overthinking or constant worry, which could feel like a loss of control over one’s thoughts and behaviors.

4. Decreased Autonomy in Decision-Making

• Overload can reduce the mental bandwidth available to focus on important tasks or personal goals. As a result, an individual might prioritize external demands over their own desires, leading to feelings of passivity or being controlled.

Cognitive Overload in the Context of Modern Life

In the modern digital age, where people are constantly bombarded with information from social media, emails, news, and other sources, cognitive overload has become a common issue. This constant influx of information can contribute to:

• Attention fragmentation: Constant distractions can prevent deep thinking and reflection, making it harder for individuals to focus on personal autonomy or critical thought.

• Behavioral manipulation: Algorithms, social media influencers, and advertising can exploit cognitive overload by bombarding individuals with persuasive messages, making it harder to resist outside influences.

While this doesn’t equate to literal “enslavement,” the feeling of being overwhelmed and losing control can be a significant psychological burden. The reduction in mental autonomy could indeed feel like a kind of mental enslavement, especially if external forces dominate one’s thoughts and actions.

Preventing Cognitive Overload and Maintaining Autonomy

To counteract cognitive overload and the potential for compromised autonomy, the following strategies can help:

1. Mindfulness Practices: Mindfulness techniques such as meditation and deep breathing can help reduce mental fatigue and increase awareness of one’s thoughts, reducing susceptibility to external influence.

2. Digital Detox: Limiting time spent on social media and digital devices can help reduce information overload and give the mind the chance to rest and reset.

3. Time Management: Prioritizing tasks and breaking them into smaller, manageable chunks can prevent feeling overwhelmed by an excess of demands.

4. Critical Thinking: Engaging in critical thinking and reflection can help retain control over decisions and actions, resisting manipulation and avoiding the loss of autonomy.

In summary, while cognitive overload itself doesn’t directly cause “mind enslavement”, it can lead to feelings of powerlessness, manipulation, and reduced autonomy, which may feel like a kind of mental enslavement. Maintaining mental balance and self-awareness is key to avoiding these negative effects.

[requiemsystem]

CUES VS TRIGGERS

Trigger warning for discussion of TBMC as well as a brief mention of suicide as an example. A cue is an intentionally implemented trigger during the process of TBMC. All cues are triggers, but not all triggers are cues. Keep in mind everything shared in this post is based off of our personal experience, you may experience things differently. Neither of our experiences are wrong, they are just different. A cue activates a specific mind-controlled behavior or belief. The urge to act on the behavior or believe the belief can feel almost robotic and implanted, not like a genuine desire. Typically, the feelings are very strong and difficult to fight. For example, if you have a cue to make you suicidal, these feelings may feel like they come from outside of you, as if they are not yours and have been implanted into you or come from outside of you. This is just our experience, and others may experience it differently. A trigger is something that activates a mental illness-based behavior or thought pattern. Triggers typically do not feel as hard to resist when they are behavioral as cues, but this can vary depending on the individual, the trigger or cue, the amount of recovery that has been done, and other factors. For us, triggers typically do not feel like they have been implanted or originate externally, they tend to feel like they come from within us and are triggered by something external. For example, if you are triggered by something relating to your trauma, you may experience feelings of depression and feelings that you experienced during the time of your trauma, these feelings likely will not feel implanted into you. Keep in mind that this is our experience. Telling the difference between triggers and cues varies a lot by the individual and the trauma. If you feel it is safe to do so, it may be beneficial to keep a log of what triggered you and what response it triggered. This can help you identify patterns and help in determining if something is a cue or trigger. Keep in mind that cues and triggers can essentially be anything, there is no limit to what can be associated with trauma, and there is no limit to what abusers can manipulate to associate with your trauma. A trigger or cue can range from a word, a phrase, a song, an object, an image, or anything else. - Veritas

[crippled-punk-guy]

I wanted to say I have a similar leg situation but instead of people being shocked I can stand they all gaslit me into thinking legs were fine. Even though I can't wear skinny jeans or stand straight 😭. What I find interesting is that for some reason around the world everyone has different tactics of verbal abuse towards physical disabilities. Like something inside them just makes them want to say the stupidest shit. "Oh your legs look fine" ma'am my one leg is so wonky I could make a literal mad max bow out of it.

Anyway 3am depressing thought.

There’s a weird dichotomy I’ve noticed where some people seem to over react to disability (such as verbal abuse, infantilization, being so overly accepting it circles back to singling you out, even physical violence)

I feel like a lot of that comes from fear and not understanding, but a lot of it is definitely just hatred and wanting to hurt people.

But like you said there’s also a crowd that down plays disability. Ignoring symptoms and limitations, damn near arguing with people about if they actually have an issue or not. You would think a leg deformity would be pretty obvious and hard to ignore but I guess not. I feel like that’s definitely a dangerous thought pattern to go down, not just for the effects it’s having in the moment for you but that type of thinking primes you for the alternative medicine pseudoscience pipeline and the idea that “good vibes” and a little essential oils can cure you of anything.

And what exactly is the point? I always question why able bodied people want to say you’re “fine” when you’re very clearly describing how you are not. Any type of issue with the leg can cause a ripple effect, it’s a pretty large area that connects to many intricate little systems. The pain associated with a leg bow should not be underestimated, the joints are having a lot of extra stress on parts of them that can’t really handle it properly. It’s really shitty for people to try to undermine that.

Maybe them trying to ignore it comes from a place of not wanting to make us feel like we’re unwelcome and I do appreciate that, but I mean come on you and me both know that it’s there whether you acknowledge it or not.

Remember kids, ignoring marginalized groups only leads to one thing: forgetting them. Actively denying their existence has led to a lot of suffering throughout humanity.

Also, can’t wear skinny jeans gang unite! Tripp pants were made for us (hell it’s even called Tripp)

[ask-jaxy-boy]

what advice would you all give me to cope with depression 🔥

.... uh... yeah I've no clue. Get good?

Try focusing on the good things in life!

Uh... I was on meds? So I'm not sure?

Seek Professional Help: Consult a healthcare professional, such as a psychiatrist or psychologist, for an accurate diagnosis and treatment plan. Consider therapy, such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which can help identify and change negative thought patterns and behaviors. Lifestyle Changes: Engage in regular physical activity, even if it's just a short walk. Get enough sleep (7-9 hours per night). Eat a healthy diet rich in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. Avoid alcohol and recreational drugs, as they can worsen symptoms. Self-Care Practices: Practice relaxation techniques, such as meditation, yoga, or deep breathing exercises. Spend time in nature or engage in hobbies you enjoy. Connect with loved ones and build a strong support system. Set realistic goals and celebrate small achievements. Medications: Antidepressant medications, such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) or serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs), can help regulate brain chemicals and improve mood. Follow your doctor's instructions carefully and take medications as prescribed. Other Considerations: Consider light therapy if you live in an area with limited sunlight. Explore alternative therapies, such as acupuncture or massage therapy, if desired. If you have thoughts of self-harm or suicide, seek immediate medical attention or call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988. Remember: Coping with depression takes time and effort. Don't give up if you don't feel better immediately. Be patient and persistent with your treatment plan. Recovery is possible, and you are not alone.

((Every one has different ways to cope with depression. Whatever healthy way you choose to cope, you got this! ))