#nobody needs to know the specifics of any therapy or mental health work i am doing | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

writefinch · 4 years

Text

Family-Owned Small Business

(CN: incest, sex work, mentions of sexual assault & suicidal ideation)

The worst part of my job is administration. Last-minute rescheduling when a client flakes on us. Chasing up payments. Booking accommodation at short notice. Answering messages! Jesus, every time in the last year when I've slumped, sighed, and thought to myself "fuck working, I need a break from all this" it's been when I've opened my messages and seen thirty different texts that need a reply. Some people are fine with it I guess, but for me it's boring, time consuming, and stressful.

Big deal though, right, I mean nobody loves doing admin, why even bring it up? Well, if I tell someone that for work last night I ate a client's cum out of my mom's pussy, I'd expect that they'd get fixated on the sex work and the incest. I'd expect them to freak out and not pay attention to the specifics of what I'm saying. So, first, I'd like that person to know that the thing I hate about my job is probably the same thing that *they* hate about *their* job. I would rather lick my mom's asshole for five minutes than answer emails for five minutes, and I answer a lot of emails.

Do we have to worry about violence, danger, cops, and legal trouble? Yeah, we do. Am I scared of these things? Yeah, sometimes, but I had to worry about all of those things before I started doing sex work. At least now we've got the money to buy our way out of the worst of it.

I'm not saying that what I do with mom is an objectively healthy relationship, let alone a perfect one. If you took me back in time and told me I could pick a completely different life for me and my mom, I'm sure there's a bunch of choices I'd pick over this one. But I never had that choice. I got hurt a lot growing up. I feel like I've finally escaped the things that hurt me, but I know that I've barely started to recover from them.

That's why I'm writing this. We've saved enough money to afford some therapy and my first session is next week. I want help with the fear, the nightmares, the mood swings and insomnia, I want to stop the rush of rage and terror that flows through me every time I see the word 'dad,' I want help untangling the stuff that came out of being told I was a pansy when I was growing up, then figuring out I'm gay, then figuring out I'm a girl, then figuring out I'm all three of those things while I was living in a place that kept trying to kill me for it. What I don't want is for the psych to pin it all on the two least harmful and least fucked-up things about my life, and worse, I don't want them to make me believe it. This journal is a prophylactic, an assessment of my job, my relationships and my life that I can refer back to if and when someone sticks their fingers in my brain and swirls them around.

I'll start with a problem statement: my dad. The memories that hurt the most are the ones where he almost appeared human, the flickers of joy, curiosity and humor that stood out from the bland cruelty that made up the rest of his personality. I'll remember him buying me ice cream or talking about a book or a movie with me, I'll doubt myself and wonder if I just went crazy and cut him out of my life for no reason, and then my brain will hook onto a random act of sadism he inflicted on me.

The physical abuse was bad all on its own, real psycho shit like driving me out into the woods and making me pick through the brush for a switch he could hit me with and a whole lot more I won't go into, but the emotional abuse was worse. When I was eleven, I forgot to feed my cat one day. He gave her away to my uncle, but told me that she'd developed malnutrition and had to be put down. I didn't find out the truth for another two years, when he just let it slip at Easter. He bragged about it, even, like he'd invented a really smart child-rearing technique. I don't want to write too much down here because I don't need to, if anything I want therapy to *stop* everything he did from running through my head. He's a punishment-obsessed sadist, a Baptist, and he works as a judge. Did he ever sexually abuse me? No. Parent of the year, right? He kicked me out for being a fag the day I turned eighteen, so it's ironic that my biggest fear is that he comes looking for me. He doesn't even know I'm a girl.

On the other hand, my mom has had an interesting life. She's kind of a fuck up. When I was one year old, mom and dad split and dad got full custody--being a judge helped with that--while mom left the state. She spent a decade trying to kick a heroin habit and a year and a half in prison for related stuff, got banned from even entering the state I lived in on account of her parole--again, dad being a judge helped with that--illegally emigrated to Canada for a while, and went to Oregon by mistake, doing a mixture of bartending, delivery driving, MDMA dealing and whoring to stay afloat.

The only reason we met again is that I was in the same city staying with friends, also whoring. I don't remember the first time I saw her, but the first time we talked was in a mutual friend's tiny studio apartment with a few other hooker friends. We ended up comparing our Pest Lists, shared a few drinks, and swapped numbers. A week later we fucked, and a month after *that* we realized that we'd Oedipus'd ourselves. It seems funnier now than it did at the time.

That was an emotional time. We cried with joy that we'd found each other, we started tip-toeing around the ideas of rebuilding our lives together, and we agreed to pretend that the sex had never happened. Of course, we got drunk together a week later and fucked again. She's hot! I have a thing for older women, I have a thing for breaking taboos, and I have a thing for being mommied in bed. Blame dad for raising me like this, I dunno.

We started doing sex work as a team after she got a dental abscess. The bill for the hospital stay and the tooth removal was insane, and the dentist straight-up told her that she'd end up with another in a different tooth within a year if she didn't get two root canals. Even when she was recovering, we could only afford fish antibiotics off of Amazon. We crunched some numbers and made some inquiries, and figured out that we could pull in two week's worth of our combined income with one night of mother-daughter stuff.

Our first joint session was with a real estate pervert I'll call Stan, a chubby balding powerlifter in his fifties who we'd both had as a client before. Mom took me over her knees and switched between spanking me and fingering me while he watched. I sucked him off while mom made out with him, made out with my mom with his cock between our lips, licked his balls as mom licked my ass, then let him fuck my ass while mom sat on my face. That was the first half hour. He came six more times before we passed out in the early hours of the morning, and I drifted off nursing his finally-limp cock in my mouth. He paid us the price of a used Volkswagen for our trouble, and I blew him one last time before we left as a thank-you.

Six months later, mom's teeth were fixed, I was on spiro, and we had just under a dozen clients for our "doubles sessions." Only a few of our appointments are ones with me and mom together, three or four a month, we mostly work alone. That's not out of a deliberate choice, it's just that we've got a strict criteria for who we'll double up on.

Trust is one thing: depending on the lawyers we can afford, what we're doing is either kinda illegal or extremely illegal. Since my dad is presumably still a judge, I don't want him to ever find out about this. He'd put us in a prison or a mental institution. We won't do a double session with a client unless we've both had individual sessions with them.

Money is the other thing. Getting your dick sucked by a hot mom while her daughter sucks your balls costs a week's wages for the average person. Hiring us for the night is more like a month's wages. Even in a city like this, there's only a few thousand people that can drop that kind of money on hookers. Then, they've got to *want* to fuck a trans girl and her mom together. Don't get me wrong, more people are into mother-daughter incest than you'd expect, but it's not a universal thing.

Clients are, on average, annoying. It's a fact of life. The thing that all clients have in common is a ton of disposable income and a fondness for fucking hookers. They're not necessarily bad people, but there’s a heavy ‘What can a banana cost, ten dollars?’ vibe to them. It’s not that they’re adrenochrome-drinkers who don’t see regular people as human, it’s more that they don’t have an intuitive awareness that other people don’t have savings accounts, health insurance, an investment property, and four figures of walking-around money at any given time. I guess I'd feel differently if I was like, a concierge or a PA, but there's a lot more pillow talk in my job.

I've had bad and dangerous clients before, there's been at least two occasions where I was pretty sure I was going to die--one where the hospital afterwards stay wiped out four months of income, not counting the month where I couldn’t work--but they were all before I met mom, when I couldn't be so careful about screening prospective clients and dropping them if they threw up red flags. I'm sure we'll get bad clients in the future, but we're in a better place to deal with them safely.

I also wanna write down what a "normal day" is like. Friday was a good example. I woke up early at 9am and cooked breakfast for mom. She was up already doing the laundry. We entertain some clients in our apartment, so we go through a lot of clothes and a lot of sheets. You can't fuck a guy on top of another guy's cum stains, that's rude. Some of the job is Housework But More. We don't really use the main bedroom or the sitting room because we treat them like bed and breakfast guest rooms. It's annoying but every time we have a session without getting an actual hotel or motel room we save like $50 minimum.

After breakfast I epilated, showered, and went for a run. Personal grooming isn't that big a deal in terms of time, I'm not saying I don't spend a lot of time on it, I do, but I'd be spending that time even if I worked in a bar or an office or something. Look: I'm hot. I might have been a weird-looking spotty nerd when I thought I was a boy, but as a girl I'm a fucking dime. I could get like, 25% uglier before it had any impact on my earnings. The only part of personal grooming that's necessary for sex work and I wouldn't do all the time anyway is power-washing my guts an hour before every session.

After lunch, mom went to see some friends and I played Magic for a few hours. At two pm, the actual work started. I picked up the work phone for the first time that day and began answering texts. An hour later I'd cancelled the 6pm appointment, blocked out all of Sunday evening, checked in with a few regulars, and provisionally moved three guys to the 'Time Wasters' list.

I spent a while sexting with a good prospect. He was a good prospect because he paid up-front for the sexting instead of treating it like a free samples platter at Costco. We scheduled a tentative appointment for next Tuesday, when his wife would be out of town on a business trip. Most of the guys I fuck have kinks, and I swear that 'cheating on your wife with a sex worker' is the most common one there is. Do I feel bad about it? At my hourly rate, absolutely not.

Mom got back at half four, so I took a break. We made tacos for lunch together and ate while watching Billions. She nudged me and told me that I need to do my injection, and, well, we have a little ritual for that. I'm scatterbrained and I'm not great with needles, but mom has been incredibly supportive with my HRT, and when I told her I was having problems taking them on time, she came up with a way to make me as comfortable as possible. As soon as the needle is ready, I laid down in her lap and she cradled my head in her arms, pressing her bare chest against my face. I took a nipple into my mouth and nursed it softly while she stroked my hair. She called me a good girl, telling me how proud she is of her daughter, how much she loves me, and asked if I was going to take my medicine like a big girl. On good days I inject myself while she pets me and coos over me, and on bad days she takes the needle and does it for me. As soon as I dropped the needle in the sharps container, mom pressed a Hitachi against my cock and took one of my nipples into her mouth, called me her big brave girl, and asked if I was gonna cum for mommy.

As usual, the answer was yes.

Late afternoon and early evening is when the messages start flowing in, especially on Fridays, when the kinds of people with hooker money have either left work early and thinking about getting laid, or are still held up at work and are desperately thinking about getting laid. This kind of messaging gets trickier, because it comes down to what I'm providing. Like, setting up a session is the kind of normal administrative stuff that's baked into the price of a session. It's also partly a sales job, so I'm naturally flirty and solicitous, and because I do sex work I talk openly about sex.

However, *sexting* is not normal administrative stuff. If I'm sending you messages for jerking-off purposes, I can charge by the hour or by the text but I will insist on charging for it. Also, it's not just sex that me and mom provide. There's a reason that 'companionship' is an old euphemism for whoring, it's because whores are good company. I'm a good listener and I don't judge, which means I'm like the fun parts of a therapist but without all the homework and self-improvement. I'm (unsurprisingly) friendly with all of my clients, and I have more than a few clients and former clients who I'd consider good friends and vice versa. I talk to a bunch of them outside of a business context, especially the ones I met outside of my job, and that's a normal part of maintaining a pool of clients for any sales job, but on the other hand... it's a demand on my time and it's a part of my services. I can and have bluntly told guys that they're wasting my time when it comes to uncompensated sexting, but the platonic stuff requires a lighter touch.

One of my regulars, Fintech Pete, sent me a message. Two messages later, he sent me $100, and we're off. Describing in gratuitous detail exactly how I'm going to suck his cock, begging him to fuck me until my clit is drooling all over the sheets, sending him feet pics, things of that nature. Pete is great for sexting because he barely jerks off while he's doing it, he saves all the messages and pictures and jerks off to them later, because he's got some biohacking routine where he only cums once a week. He said once that part of the reason he hires sex workers is that he takes each nut a lot more seriously if he's paying three digits minimum for the privilege. He does this teleconferencing report with the board of directors at his company four times a year, and every time he hires me to kneel under the desk in his home office and suck him off while he makes his presentation.

Anyway, while we were going back and forth like that, he mentioned that I'd made a joke one time about doing a joint session with my mom. I told him it wasn't a joke, and to cut a long story short, half an hour later I was asking mom if she was up for an overnight session starting at 9pm. She agreed, Pete confirmed, so we both got ready--think getting dolled up for a night out but with a more thorough enema--and drove to his place. He lived outside of town in a two-bedroom suburban home, alone with his two dogs.

As soon as we were parked in his garage I did the safety call in front of him: I rang a friend of mine, told her we were visiting a friend, told her it was at the address I sent her earlier, and told her we'd call her again tomorrow morning. Was it really necessary to do that with someone like Fintech Pete? No, but practice makes permanent. If you let these things slip when there's no danger, eventually they'll slip when there is danger.

Now, I don't want to imply that I'm in a lot of danger! There's a reason that most of the faces you'll see on the Trans Day of Remembrance are of poor black and brown women, because real danger comes when you can't turn skeevy jobs, when you can't afford to take precautions, when you have to make the choice over and over between maybe starving and maybe getting murdered. I'm white, I've got a good support network, and I've been relatively lucky in that I can do all these things to minimize my risks. I've still got to do them, though! Things like safety calls are a good habit to get into and it helps all sex workers if there's an expectation that they've all got someone looking out for them.

...I get that there is some bravado creeping into this journal. I start off saying that admin is the worst part of the job and a page later I flippantly mention that the job has put me in the hospital. On a day to day basis yeah, the admin is the bit that sucks the most, but if you offered me a deal where the admin is twice as bad but I never took that session, I’d take it in a heartbeat. This job has left me with some scars. Any time something cold touches my wrist I get a vivid flash of the first time I had my hands zip-tied behind my back in a cop car. I've had nightmares all my life, and more than a few of my nightmares are about stuff that's happened since I got into sex work.

If it seems like I’m downplaying it, it’s because the harrowing stuff is where the job has gone wrong, it’s not baked into the everyday stuff, and most importantly it has nothing to do with my mom. The work I've done with her is some of the least stressful and dangerous I've had since I started this job, and whatever wounds I have, she's not the one who caused them.

On a more positive note, a cool thing about doing sessions with my mom is that we can dress pretty conservatively and still have it come off as insanely lewd. Mom wore a black cocktail dress with an imitation pearl necklace and her hair up in a bun, I was in a white blouse under a lambswool sweater, a pleated short skirt, cheap dark tights--Pete has a thing for tearing them--and patent leather shoes. When you're going to suck a guy's world entirely off alongside your mom, the more modestly you're dressed, the more perverted it looks. Out in the suburbs it also means you get to avoid the microskirts and fishnets look which screams to the neighbors 'I've just hired a pair of hookers' or the mid-range raincoat over microskirts and fishnets look which screams 'I've just hired a pair of pricey hookers."

Pete's living room looks like the back room of a Radio Shack, computer guts everywhere, every surface turned into a makeshift workbench. It's not a suitable place for lovemaking; I don't want to have to pull shards of a soundcard out of my perineum. His bedroom is a lot neater, with a king-sized bed to sit on, a ton of pillows to lounge up against, and a TV mounted on the wall. Mom poured out some wine, a mid-range red zinfandel that we'd picked up on the way, Pete brought out some imported dark chocolate that costs like $40/kg, and I swung my legs over his lap and turned on the Food Network. I took a bite of chocolate, mom took a sip of wine, and before either of us swallowed she pulled me into a deep kiss, mixing the wine and the chocolate. It's a good combination, and Pete enjoyed the show.

The night started off with chatting. None of us were in any rush, not with an overnight session, and since Pete has been a client for each of us for a while it was a pretty relaxed atmosphere. Pete's fingers danced over my thighs, absent-mindedly plucking ladders into the fabric as we talked baseball, business, sex work, the difference between the gentrified fag bar downtown and the really gentrified fag bar downtown, programming and other nerd shit, local politics, the contestants on Cutthroat Kitchen, just normal stuff. Mom and Pete started talking about fancy cooking stuff so I started annoying them both by claiming that sardines are just fully-grown anchovies, that DOP labels are all fake, and that instant grits are better than the regular ones until mom jabbed me with a finger and told me that my mouth should be put to better use elsewhere.

You know how some people say "Cilantro tastes like soap, that's why it's good?" Same thing for how weird it feels to go down on my mom. The first time I ever jerked off, watching a 144p clip of Rocco Sifreddi fucking a girl in the ass while flushing her head down a toilet bowl, knowing that this meant I was going to go to Hell unless I begged God for forgiveness and never did it again, I came so hard I passed out. It feels good, it feels wrong that it feels so good, and it feels even better because it feels so wrong.

She was already wet when I got between her legs. I kissed her clit and started licking, her bush tickling my nose and her thighs squeezing my ears. Fabric rasped over my head as she hiked her dress up to run her hand through my hair. Everything was muffled but I could hear kissing and clinking, and I knew that mom was undoing Pete's belt and jeans to give him a Catholic-quality handjob.

I got mom worked up, bucking her hips and getting all breathy, until she asked me to get up here and give her some help. I crawled up to his groin and winked up at him. He blushed and grinned back. Pete's not a bad-looking guy. I mean, I don't care about looks in general, I guess I can look at someone and say that objectively they're ugly, and if someone is beautiful it adds something to the experience, but like... it doesn't really figure into it. Obviously most johns don't look like supermodels but they're not uniformly ugly, as I said before the thing that johns have in common is being horny guys with a lot of disposable income. Still, Pete is towards the better-looking side of that scale.

...Okay there is one thing about him that's weirdly common for my clients, I call it 'John Balding:' where a guy is losing his hair but in a slow, uneven, and kinda weird pattern, so that even when they cross into being more bald than not, they never bite the bullet and shave it all off. Pete is only like 30% of the way through that process so it doesn't look terrible yet, but he's on that track.

Anyway, back to the sex. A fun thing about double blowjobs is that you can take them a whole lot slower than solo blowjobs. Me and mom have had a lot of practice so we go at about 1/4th speed and it feels twice as good. She started off by wrapping her hand around the shaft, slowly stroking it while she softly kissed the tip, and I licked his balls, gently lapping at one, then the other, cleaning away the day's sweat and musk, carefully taking both of them into my mouth at once. Mom swallowed half his length, and I started kissing my way up his shaft as she pulled back up, my lips touching the head as hers reached the very tip. She grabbed me by my hair and pulled me into a deep French kiss with his cock in the middle, precum mixing with spit, moaning as we felt him twitch and grunt, mom's hand on his balls and my hand on his shaft. We broke the kiss and repeated it in reverse, taking his cock in my throat as mom kissed her way down to his balls. He came after five minutes of gentle little schoolgirl kisses on each side of his cock from the pair of us. The first rope caught mom on her cheek, the second hit her hair, but I wrapped my lips tight around the head and sucked him dry before he could spill another drop.

You can't give a client a mother-daughter blowjob and not snowball the cum back and forth in front of him. We've done it enough times to get the timing down: wait until he sits up straight, because if you don't he'll be too dazed from nutting in your mouth to really appreciate it. Make sure he's looking at you, move your hair out of the way so it doesn't obstruct his view, open your lips so that a trickle of jizz almost sloshes out, move in close to your mom so that your noses are touching and it's clear that you're about to kiss, sink a palm into her tits as she grabs your ass, and then you gotta really go for it: wide-mouthed, feral, energetic, like you're trying to reach each other's sinuses. If a little bit of cum spills out because you're being so sloppy, that's a sign that you're doing it right. You're going to lick it up afterwards anyway.

We broke the kiss, I licked mom's face clean, and we took a break. We drank some more wine, he offered us cigarettes--the coolest clients are the ones that let you smoke indoors--and we cuddled and relaxed for a while with Guy's Grocery Games playing on the TV. Pete went to get some water, and returned with three bottles and a strip of Cialis. He downed two pills, we both stripped off--it was sweltering by that point--and got ready for the next round.

Mom played with his nipples and I got between his legs again, this time going lower than his balls to eat his ass out. Rimming is a trusted client privilege like the mom-daughter stuff is, except it's less about trusting them in the legal sense and more about trusting that it won't be grainy down there. I like it when a client is clean enough to rim, because I'm extremely good at it. Mom says she's better, she claims she once made a guy no-touch cum with a rimjob, but I don't fucking believe her.

He got hard after a minute of digging my tongue into his ass, but his cock was still super-sensitive so we figured we'd tease him for a while longer. We swapped places, mom ate his ass while he made out with me, squeezing my tits and playing with my cock. I like it when guys touch my tits, my cock is... fine, I guess? I don't viscerally dislike people touching it but it doesn't do much for me. After a minute of that he reaches around and works a finger into my asshole, which is much more my speed.

By the time he was two knuckles deep I looked down and saw his cock twitching, leaking precum onto his stomach. He seemed pretty worked up. I kissed his neck, nipped at his ear, and whispered, "Do you wanna breed me, Mister?"

He sure did.

I use condoms unless I've got an extremely compelling reason not to, and mom has a cool trick for getting them on. She grasped Pete's cock around the base, placed her lips around the tip, deepthroated the entire thing in a single stroke, and as she slowly lifted her head back up, his cock was neatly fitted with a condom.

As soon as I lubed up he put me on my back, pushed my ankles up to my ears, pressed his cock against my hole and sunk into me inch by inch. He muffled my moans with a kiss and rutted me into the bed. I gotta give it to him, all that biohacking and cardio is doing something right because he railed me at a fast, steady pace until my dick was leaking all over my tummy and I couldn't form sentences in my head any more. Mom made out with him as he finished, and at that point I was just babbling nonsense. He was gentle and cautious as he pulled out of me, stroking my hair as I reached down to take off his condom. I poured the contents out over my tits, slumping back against the headboard as mom licked them clean.

It wasn't yet midnight by then, and we went on like that through the night. Licking his feet, mom-daughter 69, him sucking my cock while mom rode his dick like a Sorority cowgirl champion, more wine, more double-blowjobs, tacking an extra $200 onto the fee for the privilege of pissing in my mouth instead of having to get up to go to the bathroom, a whole buffet of fun whore stuff.

We woke up at around ten in the morning, stayed for breakfast, then said our goodbyes. Me and mom thanked him for his custom, and he thanked us for a good time. By midday we were at home, we both showered, checked our calendars, messaged our evening clients to confirm that they were still on, and then... well, the rest of the day kinda evaporated. I played Demons' Souls until I couldn't keep my eyes open any longer, passed out in bed, and woke up when my alarm went off in the evening.

That's one of the things I don't like about overnight sessions: you're technically only spending like, ten to twelve hours with a client, and for some of that time you're either not fucking or actively asleep, but it kinda feels like it destroys two days. By the time it's scheduled, everything in the rest of the day is either preparing for it or doing it, and when you get back it takes the rest of the day just to recover. I don't like that part of my job, and if I sit down I can probably go through a whole bunch of things I don't like about my job. I still know that my job isn't a *bad* job, because the last time I had a bad job it was at a chicken processing plant. Know how I know that the chicken job was bad? Because I excused myself for a bathroom break four hours into the shift, walked off site, and never came back.

You know what, there's another reason I know that this isn't a bad job and that mom isn't a bad mom, and I guess it's part of the reason I've written all this down in the first place. I was seven years old when I first wanted to die. By the time I got to high school, suicidal thoughts were just the radio static in my brain. I can't remember any point after like, grade school where I didn't daydream about suicide every single day.

Now? I sometimes go for weeks without thinking about killing myself. It hasn't gone away completely, it still pops up when I'm upset or stressed out or tired or really hungry, but what I do is I talk to mom about it, and she talks me out of it. I feel guilty sometimes about putting that pressure on her, and taking that pressure off is part of the reason I'm going to therapy I guess.

I hope it works out.

I really think it will.

#story #stories

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missmentelle · 4 years

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Would you say it's the same thing for ADHD? I was diagnosed as having 'traits of adhd' a few years back and always assumed it was more a reflection of the fact that i was diagnosed by a med student not being supervised who made some significant errors in the way she tested me as well as omitting what I thought were some significant observations from her writeup, but I've been wondering lately whether I am actually ADHD or not

It’s the same for all disorders - if a diagnosing professional wrote down on a psychology report that you have “traits of” a mental disorder, it means that they felt you did not meet the criteria for a full diagnosis at that time, most likely for one of five reasons:

You didn’t have enough symptoms to meet the minimum required for the diagnosis, or you were missing a key symptom that is required to make that diagnosis.

Your symptoms are not severe enough to warrant a diagnosis; they do not cause significant disruption or impairment in your daily life.

Your symptoms only occur in one specific context (eg. you have symptoms at school, but not at home, work or with friends), or your symptoms are a side effect of medication or intoxication.

Your symptoms have not been going on long enough to meet the criteria for the diagnosis, they don’t occur frequently enough to make the diagnosis, you have long symptom-free periods that negate the diagnosis, or your symptoms did not appear at an age consistent with the onset of that diagnosis.

You sort of meet the criteria for the diagnosis, but there is a different diagnosis that does a much better job of explaining your symptoms (this is sometimes listed as a “differential diagnosis”, rather than “traits of X”).

A report stating that a person has “traits of” a certain disorder or “features of” a disorder is actually extremely common. I’ve probably read more than thousand psych reports at this point in my career, and it’s quite normal for phrasing like that to appear on them. Usually, this is actually a sign that the person is being rather thorough - they are noting that they considered ADHD as a possible diagnosis but ultimately could not make the diagnosis for some reason or other. As I said, other reports may format this differently, and include a list of “differential diagnoses” in the conclusion - this is a list of diagnoses that they considered but ultimately ruled out for one reason or another.

Unfortunately, learning that you have “traits” of a disorder doesn’t really tell us much, especially without seeing the full psych report. Maybe you didn’t have ADHD then, but you have since developed it. Maybe you don’t have it and never did. Maybe you have some other sort of executive dysfunction or disorder that explains your symptoms, but it was missed the last time around. Maybe a diagnosis of ADHD was warranted back then, and still is. Maybe you only have ADHD symptoms in a specific context, which would make you ineligible for diagnosis but suggests there is something going on that needs to be addressed. I don’t know enough about your case to know for sure. All that I know is that the only way to be sure if you have ADHD - or any other mental disorder that you may be concerned about - is to seek a second opinion and get another assessment done.

(I’m going to give some clarification about what having “traits of” a disorder means for other readers who may have similar questions. You should know, though, that ADHD is actually slightly different than other disorders like BPD that you may have “traits of” - ADHD is a neurological condition that responds to medication, and if you are given ADHD medication when you don’t actually have ADHD, you are going to notice pretty quickly that you’ve been misdiagnosed. If you calm down and get more sleep while taking what is effectively speed, you can be pretty sure that ADHD is the correct diagnosis for you. People with other disorders like depression, agoraphobia, PTSD and BPD don’t have the same kind of litmus test available for their diagnosis.)

It’s important to remember that everyone has traits of at least one diagnosable disorder - most people will have traits of several. Some people are more easily distractible than others, some people have more trouble sleeping, some people are naturally low-energy or feel more intense emotions. If you browse through a copy of the DSM-V, you are going to find some stuff in there that sounds like it applies to you. Nobody has perfect mental health, especially in their teens and early 20s. But most people do not meet the criteria for the diagnosis of a mental disorder.

This is where we have to think critically about what a diagnosis actually is, why we do it, and what it actually means. Diagnosing a psychological disorder is not like diagnosing a medical disorder, where we can do some blood tests and scans and know exactly what a person has. Psychological diagnoses are always subjective, to some extent - we made categories to describe common clusters of behaviours and symptoms, and we decided where to draw the line between “someone who is just quirky” and “someone who needs formal psychological treatment”. Where exactly we draw that line has always been the subject of debate.

We could make it so that everyone who has any sort of mental health flaw at all gets diagnosed with a disorder, but that sort of defeats the point of diagnosis - if almost everyone on earth has a diagnosis, then a diagnosis effectively becomes meaningless. There’s no longer meaningful distinction between “someone with an overactive imagination” and “someone with treatment-resistant psychosis” - it all just gets slapped with the same diagnosis. It can also lead us to “medicalize” behaviours that might not need to be “medicalized”. After all, if we diagnose someone, we need to do something about that diagnosis. Diagnosing them means we’ve identified that they need some sort of treatment or intervention. But do all quirks in human behavior really need to be ironed out with treatment? Do we really want to build a world where everyone who falls outside a very rigid definition of mental health gets told that they have something wrong with them? Likewise, if we make diagnosis too restrictive, that’s not good either. Now we have the opposite problem - if we make the criteria for a diagnosis too strict and too narrow, we miss people who might seriously benefit from having treatment. If we say “you need to be severely suicidal before we can diagnose you with depression”, we’re going to overlook a lot of non-suicidal people whose depressive symptoms are ruining their lives, and who could be treated if we just recognized them as depressed. If we are only diagnosing and helping the most severe of the severe cases, we aren’t really making good use of the tools available to us and diagnosis once again becomes basically meaningless, because not having one is no longer a good indicator of whether or not you need help.

Diagnosis is a balancing act, and there are a lot of people who fall in kind of a grey area where it’s not totally clear if we should be diagnosing them or not. People are complicated, and they rarely fit neatly into categories. If we have a twenty-year-old girl who experiments with drugs, has a lot of short-term and casual dating relationships that end poorly, struggles to make and keep friends, and doesn’t really have a stable sense of who she is and what she wants, does she have BPD? Or is she just a normal 20-year-old? How would we decide? If we diagnose her, we might be pathologizing behaviour that isn’t really all that unusual for her age group, and making her feel like she’s defective for struggling with things that are pretty normal for someone her age to be struggling with; diagnosing her could make her believe that she’s incapable of healthy relationships, which could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the other hand, if we don’t diagnose her, we could be missing the fact that she does actually have a fairly serious disorder, and depriving her of the chance to get life-changing treatment that might help her develop the healthier, more fulfilling relationships that she has been missing out on. We could be leaving her to deal with her destructive behaviours on her own, without having any of the language or tools she needs to disrupt those patterns.

If you’ve been assessed by a mental health professional and you have questions about how they reached the conclusions they did, I encourage you to ask questions and have an open conversation about your symptoms, possible treatments and needs. If you don’t feel that they have a good understanding of your case, I highly encourage you to get a second opinion on your diagnosis from another professional. Whenever possible, seek a diagnosis from someone who specializes in mental health - this should be a psychologist or psychiatrist (or in some cases, a neurologist), and not a general practitioner or family doctor (some family doctors can diagnose and treat basic depression, but even then, you should seek a referral to a specialist for further treatment and assessment). Also remember that diagnosis does not have to be a barrier to seeking therapy - anyone can get therapy, even if they do not meet the criteria for a psychological diagnosis, and everyone can benefit from seeking out a therapist to improve their coping skills, social skills, and general mental health. Hope this answers your question! MM

#Anonymous #AnsweredByMM

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actualbird · 4 years

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nobody asked but here are five neopets that i think would benefit from therapy | a vaguely unraveled style 7 minute presentation i presented to my friends at an online party and am posting due to popular (like 5 people) demand

Neopets. Those wonderful little creatures you spent your childhood with. You can play with them, paint them, feed them. But after years on the Neopets website I had to wonder. Are we meeting the needs of our Neopets’ mental well being?

The answer is no. There are no therapists in Neopia, and that is a travesty, because today, I am going to discuss with you all five specific Neopets I think would benefit from therapy.

Our candidates for therapy are the following

The Grrarl, the Shoyru, the Blumaroo, the Draik, and the Grundo. Why did I pick these five bundles of neuroses in particular? Because I think they have interesting placements in something I am calling The Therapy Scale.

The Therapy Scale is a wonderful graph created completely by me with no referral at all to any psychological material whatsoever. It is based completely on the two aspects I think, as a depressed piece of shit who has gone to therapy, are important when popping down into your local psych clinic. On the Y-axis, we have the two poles of neuroses. The closer one is to Severe Mental Illness, obviously the more severe their mental illness is, the closer one is to You’re Okay, the healthier or more “normal” their mental state is. On the X-axis are the two poles of Receptivity to Therapy. Non-Receptive meaning those who are against therapy and would resist or avoid it, and Receptive meaning those who are open and willing to work in therapy to make themselves better.

The interesting thing about this graph is that it creates four zones, which says something about each person.

If you are in the green zone you are fucked up and want help.

If you are in the blue zone you aren’t that fucked up but you wanna talk to somebody, which is totally valid, like, go for it.

If you are in the yellow zone, you are very mentally ill and are against bettering yourself which basically makes YOU a stinky cat that refuses to take a bath.

And lastly, the red zone. For the normies who are against therapy as a concept. If you are here not only are you normal, but you are an asshole about it.

With that outta the way, let’s get mentally well, baby!

Let’s start with Grrarls

Grrarls, according the official Neopets flavor text, “Are ferocious creatures, or at least they try to be. With lots of care and attention, Grarrls can grow to be some of the strongest Neopians.” I’m taking this to mean that if you leave a Grarrl in an unhealthy environment, they may develop a superiority complex and a tendency to be aggressive out of insecurity.

On the therapy scale, they are here. A superiority complex would definitely skew them a little bit to the non-receptive side, thus making them a stinky cat. However, they’re personality needs work, and they aren’t too far gone to the left for things to be hopeless.

Next, the Shoyru.

“The Shoyru is a fiery little creature. Treat him right and you will have a friend for life, but if you are mean to him he will never forget it.” We’ve got anger issues, baby. And an unhealthy focus on revenge. The Shoyru seems to be that weird kid somebody bullied in middle school and now they’re plotting murder. Not good! Go to therapy!

On the therapy scale, they are here. On the fence concerning receptivity, but if you treat a Shoyru right, I assume they can be talked into taking the next step for their health.

Up next is one of my favorite Neopets the Blumaroo!

“Blumaroos love to bounce on their long tails. They are joyful creatures who are often seen hopping through the tropics of Neopia whistling happy tunes.” They sound happy right? Wrong. I’ve owned quite a number of Blumaroos and my god, do they have a propensity for depression. I think Blumaroos have taken up the role of “the happy one” and thus represses all negative emotions while feeling guilty about them.

The Blumaroo will have to be dragged kicking and screaming to therapy it seems, so attached to their happy persona that they will refuse to even think of therapy as a possibility. They sure do need it though, so get ready to sit your Blumaroo down for an intervention.

Let’s lighten up a bit with the Draik.

"These cute little dragons appeared in Neopia one day without much warning at all... it's as if they came from another world..." These cuties have identity issues and trouble fitting in.

On the scale, they’re in the blue zone. They’re awkward, but they’re pretty alright, though would still benefit talking to somebody about their problems.

Let’s get dark now for our last Neopet. The Grundo.

“After centuries of imprisonment by the evil Dr. Sloths, who transformed them into his hideous servants, the Grundos have returned to Neopia. Grundos are naturally friendly, and try sometimes too hard to be cool. They will eat almost anything.” Wow! Species wide trauma leading to group PTSD, unhealthy coping mechanisms, and social masking. These lil guys need therapy, but will they be receptive?

In my opinion, yes. These guys are so fucked up. They need help and they know it. All you have to do is bring up the possibility of therapy and they will burst into tears, nodding.

So what do we learn from this presentation?

Neopets need therapy. I’ve just discussed five among the total 55 species of Neopets. Many more Neopets species could benefit from therapy, and yet their needs in that regard aren’t being met.

Neopia needs a system of mental health care.

Neopia needs a Therapy Faerie. Like the Soup Faerie, but instead of giving soup to the disenfranchised and poor, she gives licensed psychological services to all those who need it.

Thanks for listening, everybody.

#dootdootdoot #i dont know how to tag this. i'll just leave it like this #long post

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heresince93 · 5 years

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Gillian Anderson Sunday Times Interview Transcript

There is a moment in the second series of Netflix’s Sex Education when Gillian Anderson’s character, Jean, sighs a deep resigned sigh as she is lying in bed one morning and spots the messy pile of small change her latest lover, Jakob, has left on her bedside table.

It’s my favourite moment of this uplifting show about the tangled love lives of British secondary school teens that manages to appeal to both parents and adolescents alike. Anderson plays the outrageously inappropriate sex therapist Jean Milburn, a stylish, confident single mother.

The sight of those coins will resonate with any woman of Anderson’s age and stage of life (she is 51), whatever kind of relationship they are in.These pennies, a symbol of how untidy life gets and the constant imposing presence of someone else even when they aren’t in the room, represent for Jean the gradual realisation that the excitement of a new love soon becomes tempered by the boring bits.

For those of us who have been married a while, the coins are perhaps the equivalent of the dull domesticity of picking up the shirt always dropped on the floor or the wet towels you always end up refolding after your teens have left them near but not on the bathroom radiator. Anderson and I chat about this a lot when we meet to talk about the second series of Sex Education, given that we are both working mothers in our early fifties.

The actress, who is most recognised for her role as Scully in The X-Files, is twice divorced and has three children, Piper, 25, Oscar, 13, Felix, 11, all of whom live with her in London. Her partner of three years is the playwright, screenwriter and creator of The Crown, Peter Morgan, himself a father of five.

In person Anderson is chatty and witty, aloof and friendly at the same time, a peculiarly feline trait that I often encounter in driven, confident women who have reached midlife. Tell me about Jakob and the coins, I say, what is it like starting a new relationship in your forties, compared with your twenties?

“It’s very different,” she says. “I think you are more fully formed, especially if you have taken time out of previous relationships to find yourself.

“Early on after the break-up of my last relationship and before my current one, somebody encouraged me to write a list of needs and wants in a future partner. Needs are non-negotiable. If you go on a date with someone and realise they won’t meet, say, three of those needs, then they are not the person for you. It may last as a relationship, but it won’t make you happy. Wants are easier, not more frivolous per se, but easier to deliver. Doing this made it clear to me going forward who would be good for me in a relationship.

“And there is a new creativity nowadays to what a relationship should look like, too. For instance, my partner and I don’t live together. If we did, that would be the end of us. It works so well as it is, it feels so special when we do come together. And when I am with my kids, I can be completely there for them. It’s exciting. We choose when to be together. There is nothing locking us in, nothing that brings up that fear of ‘Oh gosh, I can’t leave because what will happen to the house, how will we separate?’. I start to miss the person I want to be with, which is a lovely feeling. And it is so huge for me to be able to see a pair of trousers left lying on the floor at my partner’s house and to step over them and not feel it is my job to do something about it!”

I’ve never interviewed a celebrity who, even though she is wearing heels (little pointy white boots) is still shorter than me (I’m barely 5ft 2in), but Anderson is tiny. This is only important to note, I think, because her roles since Dana Scully have been so big and so powerful: Blanche in A Street Car Named Desire and Margo Channing in All About Eve on stage; Lady Mountbatten in the film Viceroy’s House; Stella Gibson in The Fall; and now Jean Milburn.

I wonder if she is perhaps filed under “tricky, unpredictable, charismatic, spiky, intelligent and fearless woman” in the casting director’s directory of suitable roles. After all, her next part is going to be Margaret Thatcher (in The Crown). And when she arrives for our chat in the closed Chinese restaurant of a central London hotel, she apologises for the sticky mess in her hair caused by wearing the Iron Lady’s wig the previous day. Her nails are manicured pale pink like Thatcher’s too.

“She had a condition that meant two fingers of each hand would curl around — Reagan had it too — so it affected her gestures and she would wear lots of rings and bracelets to distract. But she kept her nails long, which is how I have to keep them now,” Anderson says. She is fascinated by Thatcher, concluding, after studying her childhood, that “nobody ever existed like her. She was unique.”

Anderson might be unique herself, and despite giving many interviews (three last year), I see that she has been smart and managed to remain a bit of an enigma. When I listen back to the tape, she is very good at general talk, but not so hot on specifics.

She spent her early years in north London with her American parents before going back to Michigan for high school. She was a teenage punk plagued by panic attacks that have continued to trouble her over the years, particularly during her intense work schedule on The X-Files. She went into therapy at 14, then became world famous at 25, and had her first child at 26 (the same age her parents had her, before going on to have her two siblings 12 years later). She split up with her first husband three years after that.

In 2011 she endured the death of her brother, Aaron, aged 30, from a brain tumour, which she rarely discusses. She is an impressive activist, campaigning for a variety of issues including women’s rights in Afghanistan, Burma, South Africa, Uganda and South America. There are 10 charities she has worked with listed on her website, and in 2017 she co-wrote We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere, a well-received book of advice for women. She has also designed two small fashion collections for Winser London, which include some gorgeous silky blouses. I found I had three in my wardrobe without knowing they were hers.

She is a Bafta nominee and Golden Globe winner, and Neil Gaiman, who cast her in the TV series of his book American Gods, said: “She is in this strange place where everything exists in the shadow of Scully, yet she is bigger and better than that.”

When I listen to her 2003 Desert Island Discs, though, she tells a darker story. In between Radiohead and Jeff Buckley, she talks of troubled mental health that she has worked ferociously hard to improve. She has been in therapy for more than 30 years.

Anderson tells me she has been teetotal since her early twenties and despite some mild probing on my part is reluctant to elaborate on exactly why. I understand. She has soon-to-be teenage children who don’t need to know about any of the “dangerous things” she has done, as she described them to Sue Lawley.

I’m fascinated by Anderson and can see why she was the perfect person to cast as the quirky, funny therapist Jean in Sex Education, which really hits its stride in the second series. While still a comedy at heart, the subject matter tackled by its fantastic young cast is revelatory. Sex Education is one of the first productions to hire an intimacy director to make the young actors feel comfortable and process what they were doing, often naked in front of multiple cameras, to be happy and authentic about what they did and feel they had input.

Anal sex, drugs, masturbation, STDs and nudity feature graphically in this show, which I would advise all parents and teens to watch, though not at the same time — only Jean would do that. When I interview Anderson I have yet to see the finale, but Jean’s journey is that of many women in the middle of their lives after divorce with teenage children.

“There’s a grief, isn’t there?” Anderson says as we discuss the menopause. “I haven’t quite got to the place where I don’t have my eggs, but your body is going to mourn that, isn’t it? I remember the very last time I breastfed and it was heartbreaking. I wept and wept through it.

“And I know people who describe particularly difficult periods at home without realising they are describing their mothers going through the menopause.

“We’re all at the point where we’re kicking off just as our teenage children are kicking off. I was looking at some home videos of Piper when she was three and wondering where all my patience came from in my twenties. I have forgotten that version of me.”

She says she doesn’t feel quite ready for her two boys to become teenagers, but sometimes Jean slips into their conversations at home.

“I find myself saying something embarrassing at the dinner table and I don’t know if it is me or if Jean has given me the licence to say that. Maybe I have always been that way, though. Some of what she shares is too much information. I wouldn’t share it, even with my eldest in her twenties. But my son came home after having a sex education class and I completely clammed up. I couldn’t bring myself to continue the conversation. I just let it die. I really don’t know why.”

Over the years Anderson has tried to schedule her roles to fit in with her children, but like many of us who have devoted much of our time to careers, she still lives with nagging doubts about doing the right thing.

How did you deal with a small child while filming back-to-back episodes of The X-Files for 16 hours a day, I ask, especially when you decided to go it alone as a mum. “I missed her, really so much. Those moments when you see a small child in the street when you are apart from yours and the conversation just drops, it’s hard. She was on a plane a lot when she was six and we moved production to the West Coast. I justified that, I mean it was selfish on my part. I just could not imagine being away from her for long periods of time.

“I became obsessed with schedules, and I still am because of that time. I would plan and colour-code everything, make a series of propositions about schedules so I could see her, and the show would either reject or accept them.

“With the boys the longest I have been away from them was during the two X-Files movies, but again I would be travelling constantly to see them.”

I ask her if she regrets working so hard. “Not yet,” she says. “I have a feeling that will come. I definitely feel like on a level I do regret Piper flying back [to her dad, when she was six] as an unaccompanied minor.” We sit in silence for a bit, mulling over the thought.

“But there’s another version of my life where I could have worked less, had a smaller life and been more present as a parent. I could have chosen that, that could happen. But sometimes it feels like why would you, if you keep getting work as an actor, doing things you dreamt of doing and being offered incredible roles at this age, while paying the bills, and you still get to see them a huge percentage of the time and they witness a mother enjoying her work?”

She has talked to her daughter about it, but says Piper is not yet at the place where the lightbulb goes on and she realises Mum was still up at 6am the days she faced 16 hours of work to be with her, or those days we all have when we are still on the edge of the sports pitch, despite the demands of a job.

But Anderson is an all-or-nothing personality. She tells me she is either on a healthy eating plan, meditating and working out or hiding like a hermit at home eating chocolate. She has been plagued by frozen shoulders all her life, leading to months of pain-filled insomnia and cortisone injections.

“My default position is sedentary,” she tells me when I ask about her meditating and yoga right now. “I like being in bed in my PJs. When I’m working, like right now, I seem to exist mostly on chocolate. Then I go through a stage when I feel dreadful and I review it all and start a food plan, torture myself counting shots of milk and all that.

“In the cycle of all or nothing, I am in the nothing phase right now. It has gone on for quite some time, but I think I am better to be around. I was having lunch with my daughter and we were just, you know, eating, not asking for stuff without oils or sugar, and she said, ‘It’s so much better when you are not in that place.’ ”

I’ve enjoyed my hour with Anderson; she is likeable and thoughtful. I sort of hope we’ll meet again one day. It’s unlikely she’ll read the interview; she has said before that she rarely does. So what do I think as I walk away from her? I’m impressed by her curious nature and, obviously, her sense of style, a blueprint for us all at this stage of life, but mostly I’m inspired by her strong sense of self. It has obviously taken quite a bit of work for her to get there, but from what I can see, it has been worth it.

@GillianA

Sex Education series 2 is available on Netflix from Friday

Hair: James Rowe at Bryant Artists. Make-up: Mary Greenwell at Premier Hair and Make-up. Nails: Saffron Goddard at Saint Luke using Sisley Hand Care

#gillian anderson #sunday times #interview

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dearsubconscious · 4 years

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Warning: the following is a story of psychological/emotional/narcissistic abuse that may be hard for some readers.

Finding the right emotions to say

Some context is needed before you continue reading. This is an introduction to my new Tumblr account and an overview of how my story started. I originally wrote this in May of 2019. When I wrote this, I was trying to get out all of my thoughts during a very dark time. I wrote this over the course of weeks of sleepless nights when my mind wouldn’t stop running. It may read a bit disorganized, but I wrote it as a way to explain to the people that matter to me what I had come to realize about myself. Only two people have read it prior to me posting this, neither of which are my family members. I am still not comfortable with any of my family knowing about this and I have never really talked about many of the details of what happened out loud, even to the two people that have read this. Many of my specific memories are not included in this story...some were just too brutal for me to even write out without completely mentally breaking down at the time. I have decided to start telling my story as a way of mental therapy. Even if nobody on here reads this all of the way through, it will help me mentally just to organize my memories and thoughts. I hope that I can also open a discussion on a sensitive and (I believe) very overlooked topic, hard as it may be to talk about. If you have found yourself in a similar situation, I truly hope that have a better present and/or future. I wouldn’t wish this mental torture on anyone. As you will see in posts that follow this one, I will explain how the long term effects of the mental damage have caused persistent problems with my relationships with all people that matter to me, my working life, my financial stability and my overall health. This is a long read, but here it goes:

Please read all of this carefully and in its entirety. Its long and it will be uncomfortable to read, but it’s very important to me. I would prefer that it be read all at once, which may take a little while, so if you don’t have time to soak it all in, please save it for another time.

My mind goes around and around in very vicious circles of emotions. I feel...well...a lot...is all I can describe in simple terms. That just doesn’t cut it, though. I keep telling myself that I’m probably insane. I don’t know if I just don’t want to believe it, if I’m just hurting that bad, if I’m in shock or if there is something deeper than that that I just don’t understand. I’m not sure if I know what to feel or believe anymore because my own mind has been keeping an enormous secret for years...

I know who I used to be and who I want to be and for years I have been upsetting myself on a nearly hourly basis because I can’t figure out why I behave the way that I do in many normal situations. I know what the right thing to do is in almost every case, but I can’t seem to be able to do the right thing most of the time anymore. The most logical explanation, until very recently, was just to blame it on regular stress. It seemed too obvious, yet it has a very empty and incomplete generalization of what I would actually be feeling. I have continued with my habits and behaviors very frustrated with myself every time, which is usually many times daily. I spend a lot of time contemplating why I don’t feel okay even though so many things are going well in my life. It’s like I’ve been living very much in a haze and I don’t believe or understand who I am.

The impulsive eating, nagging need to always be doing something special or interesting, yet always coming up short or simply doing nothing at all (and knowing the whole time that there was always something else that I needed to be doing to be more “responsible”), impulsive buying, and, above all else, the incredibly infuriating mental “freeze” that has seemed to be ever present in everything that I do. Most prominent were the “freezes” in my passions, in tasks that are incredibly important and almost anytime I have to make a decision. Not following through on so many things and seeming apathetic about the task of finishing. I would, again, just tell myself that it’s from stress, but I always knew that this was simply not true. Most people use stress as a motivator to get things done, but not me. I, for some reason, find myself doing the exact opposite. This leaves me very frustrated, empty, and numb.

I stress eat a lot and this, coupled with other bad habits feel impossible to break even though I very much mentally want to. I “freeze” at the moment that I should make a better choice and feel great anxiety when faced with the decision. I usually end up doing nothing at all, or doing the wrong or bad thing, thinking that it’s just easier and thoughtless. I hate myself for it. I really do believe that I can and will get better someday; that I will be much healthier; that I will work out regularly; that I will be productive every day, but instead I fall victim to my own mind almost every time...

Years ago, small physical/mental changes started happening to me that I couldn’t explain; long before the seemingly learned or self-induced behaviors that I just explained.

I was always a night owl, but through most of my childhood and early teenage years I would do it on purpose to do things like watch movies, play video games, etc. As I grew older, however, it started happening without a desire to. I was very alarmed by this at first. I couldn’t sleep even though I tried hard to; even though I was tired and exhausted; and I would fight very hard to change my poor sleep habits. I started to believe that maybe I had caused my own insomnia from staying up late as a kid, but there was a very different...anxious...feeling underneath it.

Through most of my school years I had been an eloquent speaker and writer. I would get compliments on it from teachers, family, family friends and strangers frequently. However, during high school I began to trip on my words at times and I would have to find simpler words to use when speaking and writing. I thought for years that this was attributed to my lack of sleep. Maybe it was. But this started to feel like a chain that didn’t make sense, as it couldn’t be attributed to simple stress, but was undoubtedly connected.

I’ve always been a very...very...patient person. I remember my step mother said years ago that I have an “old soul.” She described me this way as a compliment to my patient, calm, wise and passive demeanor in everything that I do. So when I began experiencing deep anxiety that would violently wake me up in the middle of the night during my few hours of sleep, I was very alarmed. I noticed that my attention span began getting shorter. In more recent years, I began lashing out, breaking my calm and passive personality. I get uncharacteristically angry or upset with little things that never bothered me before and do it visibly for those around me with immediate and harsh behaviors. I despise this more than almost any other behavior that I have. I feel that I’ve lost control when it happens and I immediately regret it. It isn’t who I am...

As time has progressed into full adulthood, I have found even the simplest of tasks incredibly hard to be motivated about. The “freeze” began spreading to things such as picking up something that I dropped on the floor. I would feel very anxious about the task of picking it up but truly frozen from simply picking it up for long periods of time because my brain would just go around in vicious circles of stress. I became a messy person. I was no longer able to prioritize tasks in my mind in a proper manner. It’s incredibly embarrassing when I get caught in a mental freeze as it is, generally, pretty visibly obvious on my face. And, as recent as the last few months I have been struggling much more deeply with words when speaking. I will start to say something and know exactly what I want to say, but it seems as though my brain is working much faster and cluttered than my mouth. I won’t be able to get out a full word or phrase. The words will very literally slur together in my mouth and no matter how hard I try I am unable to say it properly. Even if I try to slow my words way down I can’t get it out. It’s like a mental block between my brain and mouth. It’s mentally very frustrating and painful.

I feel that I have lost the ability to fight most of my impulses, leading me to eat poorly and a lot, spend a lot, laze around in a fog a lot, etc. I know that this deeply frustrates those around me and I hate it when it does. I want to change my habits and impulses, but it mentally just isn’t that easy for me...I’ve needed help with this for years and I just don’t know how to admit it or face it. I also don’t know how anyone would actually help and asking for help feels very weak and stupid...

Under pressure from difficult situations or pressure-driven decisions, I freeze in a way that infuriates those around me and it infuriates even my self very deeply. Sometimes my freeze causes me to make a wrong or bad decision almost unconsciously. This leads me to a dark, swirling set of emotions about my self, especially when I’m called out for my wrongdoing.

I’ve also had a very low self esteem for quite some time that has been ever present in all aspects of my life and overcoming it at times is incredibly difficult. I have become a very shy, easily embarrassed, easily uncomfortable person for things that should excite me or bring joy and I just can’t seem to get passed my self-made walls. And I hide these insecurities as best as I can so that nobody knows that I’m actually in very bad mental distress at any given moment...which has been more often than not for a while...

I’ve had a deep and growing feeling of confusion and despair. I used to be very depressed in middle school and high school that I was sure I had gotten past, but I’m not sure anymore. I knew that I had been through the worst feelings of my life, but it seems to all be coming back to haunt me in a very different way that I never could have imagined. And I’ve been very lost and numb from my confusion over what has been happening to me.

I have spent years trying to justify my actions and behaviors to myself as “stress” or something similar simply because I have had no idea what has been happening to me...

Then something occurred that sparked something sleeping much deeper in my subconscious than any of that...

A little over two months ago a random video came rolling through my Facebook feed about physical abuse in a specific relationship in England. This happened recently and I believe that it said that this was the first case where a female was charged with physical assault for abuse in a relationship against a man in the UK. I haven’t seen or read much about true abuse in relationships, so I watched the whole short video to understand the specifics. It told the story of what happened to the boyfriend and how it went almost unnoticed by everyone even with glaring signs and such seeming-apathy from both the man and the woman about his constant injuries. He would make up stories to everyone including the police and hospitals about his injuries because he feared for his life. One day recently, the police were called to their residence for a yelling-noise complaint made by the neighbors. Upon arriving they found the man bloody on the stairs, and he told them that he tripped and fell and hit his head (because his girlfriend was in the room). They agreed, aided him, but immediately noticed the many other injuries that weren’t as new and they recognized the signs right away from experience. Through some coercing, they managed to pull him outside, away from his girlfriend, and got the real story from him. She had been manipulating, threatening, hitting and cutting him on a daily basis for years since nearly the beginning of their relationship to control him and trap him. The police officer that spotted the signs and made it a point to bring out the truth and knew that he would be more likely to talk about it away from the girlfriend because he was afraid for his life.

I couldn’t comprehend going through such obvious physical trauma and nearly being overlooked. I am thankful that I have never been physically abused. I immediately scrolled on and distracted myself with some video of planes, I’m sure.

But for the next several days I kept thinking about that video and story and I couldn’t get this weird feeling out of my head about it. I couldn’t place it at first but it began to remind me of the overarching confusion and despair that I have been feeling for a long time about my self. It felt very...not at all nostalgic...but familiar... It started to become far more clear from there...

I immediately began researching and reading. Perhaps too much at times...

My mom has been going through abuse for years with my step father in multiple forms and though I have subconsciously, and even quite consciously known that it was occurring, I think I was too afraid to research the specifics of the abuse. The subconscious side of my brain must have been telling me not to because I was too afraid of what I would find for a very different reason...

For over four years I was very brutally psychologically/emotionally abused every minute of every day.

Sxxx (blocked for anonymity) (a name I rarely use, because I have subconsciously wanted to block it out for the rest of my life) did far more than a little bit of manipulation to control me and everything about my life. I know this was probably somewhat apparent to most people around me but the abuse was much deeper and more prevalent than anyone could have ever known or imagined...and more than I noticed or wanted to admit to myself... She did so many things, big and small, blatant and subtle, in public and in private (mostly), that completely destroyed me mentally. I think that I blocked out each incident as best as I could and I became very visibly numb but subconsciously extremely damaged with every passing day.

As this realization began to sink in, after the Facebook story, I went into a state of emotional shock that has had me trapped in a very vicious circle of negative emotions. I began researching deeper into it and reading a lot of articles, news and health journals, Wikipedia pages, news stories, blogs, etc. that drove home the realization. But I wanted to have some sort of immediate validation of this, so I searched for quizzes by mental health organizations that help individuals determine if they are in an abusive relationship. The first quiz had a long series of “yes” or “no” questions. I read every one very carefully and took the quiz as honestly as I could, treating it as though I was still in a relationship with her and reliving the way I was treated, digging up memories that I didn’t even know that I have...and I definitely don’t want to have. When I finally reached the end, it gave a percentage score of the likelihood that I was abused... 98.8%...

The only reason that it wasn’t 100% was because the only question that I answered “no” to was a question pertaining to children and houses, which we obviously never shared.

I took another, shorter test and scored a 92% for very similar circumstances. It’s true that what I experienced wasn’t physical abuse like the story that I read, but it is, basically, absolute that I was psychologically/mentally abused for years and, while it generally doesn’t come with standard PTSD, as the world knows it, like physical abuse does, it can be seen as more serious and have much worse long term effects that tend to go mostly unnoticed, but are extremely detrimental over time...according to the research that I’ve done anyway...and which I am finding that I believe from experience... I found in the research that I have most of the long term symptoms and a lot of my behaviors and tendencies are tied to mental changes that happened during those years...

The emotions and shock came rushing in like nothing I’ve ever felt. It began with a deep upsetness, followed by a deep anger. How could I have let that happen? Why didn’t I realize this years ago? Who am I actually because of this?

The research didn’t help. I started to tell myself that it can’t be true out of pure denial, reinforced by the research. Many articles and pages seemed to have a consensus that males arent typically affected by abuse in a deep way like females and are so overwhelmingly usually the perpetrators of abuse that psychological/mental abuse against males is seen as essentially non-existent. Only four pages that I read of the dozens agreed that abuse can happen equally to any gender, in any relationship and have equal effects. But, in order to read more about symptoms, long term effects and how/why abusers abuse, I had to read articles/stories about male abusers.

I started to feel like I was crazy. Like I wasn’t supposed to feel any feelings about what happened to me. Like I was supposed to pretend that it didn’t happen at all. It feels oddly sexist of me to believe that this happened to me, and also weak of me to believe that I was so brutally abused and mentally scarred because of how so many pages and people made it a male-against-female-only situation. Maybe it is very sexist and weak of me and I need to just bottle it all up as if I never knew what happened (I essentially have been for years anyway)...maybe I am just crazy and remembering things wrong or imagining things... I know that there are many people out there that are abused and are/were in far worse situations than I am...including my own mom. I don’t know... it all just feels so...confusing and intimidating...and too much for me to understand or handle... This feeling is very reinforced by the way I was and always have been treated as a “pushover” by many people for what happened during those years... I know that I wants, but it’s far more complicated than just being a “pushover”...

Maybe not all of the issues that I listed early on in

this...whatever-you-want-to-call-it are related to what happened to me, but the more I am piecing things together, the more I am finding that it was likely the brutal subconscious driving factor in all of it. I’m far too embarrassed by it all to bring it up in person or face it and I feel very foolish and selfish to blame all of my problems on something that happened years ago, but it actually makes a lot of sense...

It’s very frustrating, as well, that every medical page that I read was about actively being in an abusive relationship and their solution to every problem was always to change the way the abuser behaved in the relationship or end the relationship entirely and that should just fix everything... yet they also all agree that there are long term effects, water the relationship has ended, that can last for years or even the rest of a persons lifetime that they just don’t discuss solutions for...

The biggest problem of all is, now knowing all of this about my likely-abuse, I still don’t know how to move forward and progress past all of these issues that I have now. I almost regret knowing more than not because it has made my emotions much stronger and more confusing. I don’t want this to define me or keep ahold of me and everything that I do, but it’s a constant battle against my own brain that I just can’t seem to win...especially as the bad memories start flooding in uncontrollably...

She used to make me believe that all problems were my fault, that I was never good enough, never would be good enough, and that I should give up on everything because I was wasting everyone’s time, energy and life including mine with my “stupid and ridiculous” ideas, hobbies, activities, etc. and I “wasn’t good at any of them anyway.” I was treated as though any decision that I made was a bad one, a wrong one, a stupid one... she would manipulate me into joining things or going to things so that she would look better than me to everyone there and try to make it look as though I didn’t care or that she was the victim...

For the entire four years I had to be in constant contact (usually by text) within every 5 minutes at most to prove that I wasn’t ignoring or “cheating” on her. If I didn’t answer within five minutes I usually received a text that read “bye” to make me feel abandoned, worthless and guilty. It would make me feel as though I had been ruining her life. I would be constantly (usually a dozen times a day or more) having to apologize and explain myself. She would usually continue to ignore my long pleading messages for several hours or even until the next day, then either pretend like nothing ever happened, or say that I owe her. She would always claim that because I didn’t text back that I missed out on something big or important to her and that I must be cheating on her or simply didn’t care about her. No matter how much I would say or very visibly show that I cared she would treat me as though I was still very wrong. I was never once put first in her life. I could handle not ever being first, but to be not only far from first, I was, instead, constantly put down as though I was the bane of her existence. I went very out of my comfort zone and disobeyed rules, teachers, family, etc. to “make it up to her.” This was incredibly beyond my character but she would put me in a very dark and anxious place nearly hourly. She used my extreme patience and sympathy against me by keeping me trapped in a destructive cycle. I would have to leave home when I wasn’t supposed to or miss so many important events with my own friends or family without permission to walk to her house and apologize in person, only to be shunned initially at the door.

She made me join the speech and debate team. I probably could have been good at it too... she made sure that I was part of her group, but that I wouldn’t actually participate in the group. Any part that I had was to be done away from the group with no understanding or explanation of what I was tasked with. I was isolated from everyone and everything happening. When I would have to rejoin the group the day before a debate I would be barated and torn down by her followed by the rest of the group because I did everything wrong. We went to several debates and at one of the very first ones I made a small and simple mistake in the debate against a team from another school that I didn’t know I had made because I was never taught. She got visibly mad immediately, even with the judges and opponents in the room. As soon as that debate was over, she stormed out of the room with no explanation and walked back to the waiting area without saying a word to me. As soon as I arrived (shortly after her), I immediately found her ranting to her friends and our classmates in front of everybody else about how stupid I was and how I ruined the debate for her and our whole school. She cast me in a very bad light and made it sound as though the mistake was so simple that I must be a “complete idiot” to make it. She went on about this for about an hour, even stretching the conversation to neighboring opponent schools seated nearby. And any time I would try to step into the conversation to defend my self she would angrily cast me off to a secluded table away from them and everyone for the rest of the day. She took away my phone and anything else that I had claiming that I didn’t deserve it because of my screw up (something that she did often with phones and other meaningful objects). I tried to hold hands with her and plead with her on the two hour car ride home in the back of her dads car but she would angrily refuse with the silent treatment all the way until I was dropped off. It didn’t matter how many times that I would agree with her that I was “stupid” and “worthless”, she would still treat me as though I was even lower than that.

At every school dance that I attended with her, she would immediately leave my side to go find friends. Every time I would catch up with her she would leave me again to find a different friend for no other reason than just to find them. She would do this to control me, make me feel abandoned and make sure that I was always paying attention to her and nobody else, isolating me from everyone, even in a large crowd of people that I know. And as the night would go on she would begin to tell people that I was ignoring her because I wouldn’t stay right with her (because I couldn’t keep up or I wouldn’t immediately notice that she silently left again) and I must not care about her, even though I would spend the entire time in a mad dash back and forth trying to find her, never having time to stop and talk to anyone that I knew that was trying to talk to me. She or someone would spill something on me by accident but she would just laugh and usually make it worse somehow (spilling more on me, finding people to embarrass me for being a klutz to, etc). If I accidentally spilled something on her or even near her it was a guarantee that she wouldn’t talk to me or pay attention to me for the rest of the night. I was always expected to pay for everything and drop off jackets and pick them up and carry her stuff everywhere, but never received any kind words or gestures, as was true for everything and everywhere we went for the whole four years. I was young and very naive about relationships at first, so while I thought it was strange, I just thought that I was being polite and gentlemanly and showing that I cared, but I was very much told and shown the opposite, which became far more obvious over time. It was simply expected and if I didn’t then she would use it as a reason to prove to others (and to me in our many daily arguments[consisting mostly of her yelling and saying incredibly rude things to me while I would spend a lot of time apologizing]) that I am a rude person who doesn’t show that I care.

One day, we had gone to a movie with her little sister at the movie tavern and, after the movie, we had lots of time to kill before the bus came to take us home so they decided that they wanted to go to kohl’s. We wandered around for a while and eventually ended up in the jewelry department. As usual she was trying to lose me in the store as a “game” much like she would do at dances or...well...anywhere public that we would go, really. The aisles were very small in the jewelry department and I turned a corner too quickly, very seriously trying to keep up with her to avoid the claim that I “left her because I didn’t care” and, in doing so, I accidentally stepped on the back of her heel and “flat-tired” her shoe, so-to-speak. It was minor and I almost didn’t even noticed that I had done it but she immediately yelled “ow” and screamed at me and threw something at me. It left a small red mark on her heel that she showed everyone. She claimed that I abused her and she claimed that to everyone, including her family and mine for years after that. She made me pay for everything that her and her sister had picked out at kohl’s and made me change my plan (to just go home) and instead walk them all the way back to their house (about 2.5 miles) carrying everything. They walked ahead of me about 15 feet the whole way to their house and spent the whole time making fun of me and barating me.

Her and her family tried very hard to make me change religions. They made me watch many documentaries and shows about their religion against my will and they even brought several holy figures and very religious friends to their house for special occasions just to try to convince me that their way was the only right way. They would ask me a lot of derogatory questions to make me feel stupid for not believing or participating. They would make me participate in things that I knew nothing about and didn’t want to do. I respect their religion, as I do everyone’s, and politely tried to abstain but she would get very mad, again claiming that I must not cares out her, then, and make me participate. I attended every special occasion that I could for her and her family. I even spent an entire Christmas Day away from my family and the traditions/plans that we had made so that she could make me watch her and her family open their gifts and partake in their traditions. This would have been okay if I had been seen as welcome, but instead, since I wasn’t part of their religion, I was intentionally isolated the entire day, especially by her. And the gifts that I had bought for her she wasn’t very fond of, so she would trash talk about them and how I could have done better and how I must not care about her at all because the gifts proved that I “didn’t know her at all” even though she would keep them and wear them (jewelry) or display them (souvenirs, stuffed animals, etc). She would pry at my insecurities to make them worse and make me feel like her life was miserable because of me.

Marching band meant the world to me, as did flying and filmmaking. She hated all of these things about me because they were things that she didn’t participate in, didn’t enjoy and were things that would take my attention away from her for a bit. She would constantly say things like “well why don’t you just quit school and break up with me to go be in the marching band, then.” That’s a very light attack compared to many that she had said to me on a daily basis and she meant them in a very serious and derogatory way to make me feel bad for participating in the things that I love. She only attended one marching band event throughout the entirety of high school but she wasn’t actually there to cheer me on. She managed to pull that facade off for my family and friends while she was there, but she slowly started isolating me from the band and all other people as the night went on so that she could keep control of me and my life. At any other time (all other performances and rehearsals throughout high school [including band concerts]) she would get mad immediately if I brought them up in conversation and when I was actively at them because she saw them as optional things that I was participating in because “I cared about them more than her”. She never attended any other event because, even though I would invite her and her family well in advance, I would remind her the week of or week before and she would claim that I never invited her and that it was way too late, she had something else to do during those times or simply wouldn’t attend out of spite. She would make me believe that I hadn’t invited her sooner and that I was crazy and stupid for thinking that I did. She argued with me on a daily basis about how I cared about band and filmmaking more than her even though I began giving up those parts of my life for her and I would break the rules and secretly pull my phone out all of the time to message her to keep “checking in” and keep her relatively calm while in class, at rehearsal, during concerts, etc...though she was always mad anyway. I attended every choir concert and IB event; church and family event that she had and cheered her on whole heartedly...hoping that she would be happy that I was there. Instead I would get ignored, not introduced to people I didn’t know, and constantly made fun of whenever possible...

Her strangle hold on my life may sound like something I could just walk away from at any time, but it was far more complicated than it seemed. Her and her family found ways to subliminally, and very forwardly, threaten me into staying in the relationship on a daily basis, again using my patience, sympathy and insecurities against me and degrading me like I was too naive and stupid too understand how to be in a proper relationship so they needed to teach me. I was, in fact, very naive because I believed them (specifically her) and believed that giving in to their lives, lies and treatment was for the better.

I hated myself and believed that I was a truly bad person in every way. I believed that I owed her and her family the world and my life. When I would tell her that I was in distress, she would just tell me that I should “go kill myself, then.” I subconsciously knew that a lot was wrong but I saw no way out but to try even harder every day, actually making my mental state/scar significantly worse every day...nearly leading me to a very different way out...

She always tried to make me plan dates that I couldn’t afford or wasn’t capable of doing at that age because I always “owed her one” for everything that I do wrong. I planned three dates in a row one time and she didn’t like a single one of them. Quite in the contrary. She told me flat out that she hated them and hated my ideas because they were childish, stupid and she didn’t like participating in the types of things that I had planned. These included a picnic, a nice dinner and movie with frozen yogurt at her favorite place, and an active date to jumpoline. She made me feel like I didn’t care; like a failure; like I didn’t know her at all; like I was stupid. She, of course, told everyone that we knew or met for weeks about how horrible I was at planning.

We had several classes together throughout high school, mainly French. She always made sure that I was aware that she knew French better than me and that my experience didn’t matter. If I tried to correct her when she said or wrote something incorrectly, she would get very angry; tell me, very seriously, to “shut up” and usually ignore me for a while. She would always try to be in a group with me in activities in that class but, just like speech and debate, she would isolate me from the group right away and insult me every time that I got something wrong. This morale destruction happened so frequently, slyly and subliminally that I believed that I was bad at everything and so I began shutting down in every class and activity that I took in high school, participating in activities less and less. I stopped doing homework for fear that I was always wrong and had no understanding, which was constantly reinforced by my poor testing and grades. At the time I truly believed that I was just stupid and couldn’t understand anything in school, not knowing that it was all in my head and I just wasn’t ever fully engaged ever again. I felt very left behind in school. Something that has always pained me very much...

This, of course, all came to a head on homecoming night of senior year. The night started at her house for photos where the attention was, no doubt, completely on her and how she looked. I wore one of my dads nice shirts, and, though it wasn’t the nicest shirt, it was what I had and what we could afford. For years, she had been buying dresses and sending me samples of the colors to force me to match her. She would refuse to help me pick anything out and I couldn’t afford to keep getting new outfits to match every special occasion. This time I had chosen my dads shirt because, even though it wasn’t a perfect match for color, it was a complimentary color. It was a nice shirt but it wasn’t the perfect shirt, which was made clear to me right away. She was immediately mad as soon as she saw me. She was quick to insult my outfit and so was her family. They felt that I looked like trash, that I have no class or style and that I didn’t care about her especially on special occasions. I was constantly reminded about that every time we encountered another person throughout the night, as she insisted to everyone that I didn’t care, which was obvious because I “didn’t try at all to match her and my shirt was awful”... This put me in a bad place from the get go.

We went to my dads house for a nice home cooked meal that I picked out and she, of course, hated. She didn’t eat much of it and very blatantly didn’t finish or clean up or have any gratitude for.

After dinner, my dad had offered to take us to the school for the dance. She didn’t like this idea because she hated my family very blatantly and picked out a few key things that my dad had said in the car on the way to the dance to immediately throw in my face as soon as we got out. My dad can definitely be abrasive, but that night he had actually been incredibly pleasant and kind to her all the way until we dropped her back off at home that night, so there was extremely little for her to be angry about, but she latched onto something and threw it in my face in front of everybody standing in line to get into the dance. She stormed off without me with her ticket to find one of her friends in line. I couldn’t find her so I had to enter the dance alone. As soon as I found her inside, she threw it in my face that I left her alone... the dark place grew so much stronger. She dragged me to do photos with one set of friends, then immediately abandoned me on the dark dance floor to go find different friends for no reason other than to make me chase her. I looked for her for almost a half an hour, but couldn’t find her, so I found some friends at a table in the cafeteria to sit with and calm down. Not even five minutes after that, she shows up and yells at me in front of the friends about not caring, abandoning her, how terrible I look and how I am an all around terrible boyfriend and person. She then found a way to quickly convince our friends to scramble away with her again to go find other friends, leaving me alone at the table...

I didn’t get up and chase her that time...

I sat and stared at my phone for the rest of the night as though I was doing something important as best as I could to cover up the fact that I was in an extremely dire mental state. I was just staring at a blank phone in all actuality. But the plan worked. Nobody talked to me or noticed me for the rest of the night. When she finally came back a long while later, alone, she only came to request that I call my dad to come get us and take us home. I did so, then made one final plea for help to her without being too obvious about my distress so that I wouldn’t leave myself open for an attack for being “stupid” or “weak” about my emotions, but she ignored me, as usual, and sat in silence. We left in silence and dropped her off in silence.

That night, I got home and immediately got into PJs...barely...said goodnight to my dad and step mother, thanking them for all that they did that night and went to bed. I lay my head down and wanted nothing more than for the mental torture of myself (believing that I was a horrible person and I ruined her life and her important night again) to stop and stop for good, so I buried my face in the pillow and pinched my nose as hard as I could, thinking that I could smother myself and it would at least look like somewhat of an accident. Only moments later I passed out...

Fortunately, I had rolled away from the pillow and had managed to breathe again. I didn’t wake up until the next morning, however. I woke up very dazed and confused. I wasn’t sure that what I had done the night before was actually real but it very slowly sank in as I lay in bed for hours, slowly thinking. I was lucky to be alive and, though that was a very stupid and ineffective way of thinking of killing myself, I realized that my thoughts were so clouded that night that I didn’t have time to contemplate a better way. I knew that if this continued that I eventually would, which actually scared me literally almost to death because it’s not who I am. I didn’t understand then why I had decided that I had decided that this was the best course of action that I could possibly take. I thought that I was just generally depressed and that I was overall terrible at life. I didn’t understand what was actually happening at all but I knew that something had to change. I immediately began planning a long, difficult, but desperate plan to leave her. Subconsciously I knew that it was the right thing to do, but I never full understood why I knew it would make things better...maybe that makes me very naive...but that’s just the truth...

When I finally did leave her, it was a very messy situation, but I felt very liberated. I was very foolish and rash in everything I did for a while because I was so mentally damaged from such a long period of abuse. I had no idea that was what was going on, though. I felt better, but not right. I thought that I would feel like I was always supposed to. Like I would be healthy and smarter again. However, I actually felt very hollow and damaged. I didn’t know why and I definitely didn’t realize that the scar was so deeply created... It never went away...and perhaps got much worse over time, in fact, as it’s had time to brew subconsciously without me knowing.

These are only very few of the incidents and daily torments that I was put through. I didn’t realize how much pain it had actually put me in or how much pain it would continue to cause me for years. I never really knew why I wanted to kill myself over something so seemingly small. I guess, in a way, I knew subconsciously all along, but never wanted to pick at the details because it hurt too much as it was...

One of the things that has picked at me the most in recent years is how my mom views me. She believes that my high school struggles and my messiness and my lack of motivation are all learned behaviors from her because of the way she behaved and that my step father had put us both down to, which she believed was her fault for keeping him around. I always knew that this wasn’t true, it wasn’t her fault. The situation with my step father definitely didn’t help, however, I couldn’t help but feel that it wasn’t her fault or even his fault. I never could tell her that I disagreed, though, because I didn’t have an answer for why I am who I am and I have behaved the way that I have or why my high school years went so poorly. But, in these last couple of months I have realized that I actually had all of the negative behaviors and thoughts that I have described before she did and that it isn’t learned from one another at all. I realized that my years of brutal abuse started before hers and she has been going through it too now with my step father, and we just both react to our abuse in a similar way. I feel really guilty for not realizing this sooner and helping her understand and feel better about who I am and how I have turned out; that it’s definitely not her fault. She has taken so much out on herself about my life and it makes me very depressed. But I don’t know how to confront her about this now, because I don’t think that she will believe me or understand; at least not for many years after her relationship with my step father is over.

I am very broken and depressed and angry with myself and upset and...so many other feelings from this shock of realization of my abuse that I can’t help but feel the same put-down feeling that I had while it was happening. It’s like living in a nightmare, but it’s already happened before and it’s just as scary this time around. I am finding that I’m very sensitive to certain words, phrases, actions, etc. that I never know are coming, but they trigger little moments of panic or depression out of nowhere that I try very hard to hide. I never expect them and I know that none of them are intentional or with the same destructive motive at all, so I just usually have to mentally talk my way down, which typically doesn’t take very long if I have something to distract me, thankfully. But hiding it can be tough and I am sorry for all of the times that it does show (which is hopefully never) because it isn’t a baggage that I want anyone to ever see in person or have to put up with. These little triggers have been around for many years now, but I never really understood why. Sometimes they trigger little unpleasant memories, make my heart race, give me a little panic attack, make me suddenly defensive, etc. I like to think that I am pretty good at hiding the moment and just keeping them internal these days, because they are generally small enough moments and easy to hide, but the long term effect of each trigger is usually a depression that may last hours. I’ve been blowing these off as nothing more than unpleasantries that nobody needed to know about. I guess, for years, I just assumed that everybody has similar feelings and moments, which many probably do. It never really occurred to me, though, that having them daily...and multiple times daily...wasn’t a normal thing. I found out in my research that these are actually symptoms of a specific post traumatic illness that is very similar to PTSD and generally called, classified and treated the same way...

This is not who I am, but I know that this is part of my life now and forever and I have to find a way to push on...especially as other parts of life get a bit rough...

I have so many good parts of my life right now that I know I will never get back to my darkest state. With all of the little stresses piling up recently, it can be easy to give in to the depression that has always been there and likely always will be and it isn’t an opportune time to have had this realization...but then again...when would be... I just keep telling myself that I am very fortunate for the here-and-now and that everything is ok and will always be ok. I know it’s true and I just have to let that feeling fight it’s way through the rough...

All of this is a realization and also a confession that I hide a lot of things. I hide that I suffer from constant small headaches from muscle tension and grinding my teeth from stress, the constant aches and pains in my muscles from stress; I hide my constant anxiety and the real depth of my insomnia; I hide my nearly constant dark feeling; I hide my trigger moments; I hide my many health problems that concern me; I hide my very low self esteem. I don’t like hiding these things at all, but I am extremely embarrassed and nervous to ever let them show or discuss them. That’s why I usually shy away from the topics when they are brought up and start reverting to short answers with a dull look on my face... When asked if I’m ok, the answer will always be “yes”, but the reality is almost always “not really” and I actually hate that very much but I’m too afraid to say so because I’m embarrassed, so I hide it. I know that everything is and will be ok anyways, but it’s still very tough...

One of my least favorite parts of this is that every time I have a very good, happy, laughing, excited or enjoyable moment, it is almost always followed by an immediate, deep crash into negative emotions and depression that I have to try extremely hard to hide for the betterment of those around me (so that I don’t ruin the good moments) and out of embarrassment. Sometimes, I will try so hard to hide it and I will become too seemingly positive or excited about stuff that I may go overboard with it and almost seem like I’m awkwardly trying to cover up something which brings out my biggest fear that I will be caught in my insecurity. I try really hard to come across very positive for those around me all of the time, or as often as possible. I always have as I like helping others. I like helping others see a different perspective; I like making others feel like their life matters, I like being seen as a positive, uplifting person when people need it most. I don’t mind being the mediator in tense situations if I know that I can bring the conversation or mood back to a calm and happy one. The horrible truth is that, usually, when I am being positive for others I am actually in one of my mentally darkest moments. I am hiding my pain with my positivity. I don’t like having to hide things this way, but my desire to be positive for others is real at the same time. It’s very complicated to understand this mix of feelings as I don’t understand it myself. I feel that my positivity leads people as far away from my dark insecurity as possible and theirs at the same time. It makes me feel safe from giving into negativity for the world to see and keeps me from being the center of attention in a very negative and embarrassing way. It sounds very selfish when I put it all out this way, but I do actually want those around me to be in a good place and I’m glad that I can help them.

Letting out all of these thoughts is maybe what I need but to also relive what happened to me when I thought that I had blocked most of it out makes it hurt all over again, almost as much as it did in the moment. However, I know that I already learned a lot from that period of my life and I’m still learning a lot, I guess, but it is still hard to get passed it anyway. I know that good things are always coming and this deep pain will hopefully pass. I do fear that I won’t be able to hide what is happening to me forever and showing it is the last thing that I want. I don’t ever want this to interfere with anything good in my life or any time that I get with the people that I love and care about in my life. I truly hate that she still has a strangle hold on every aspect of my life because of the way that she damaged my mind and I hate that it is so difficult to break out of the habits, emotions and behaviors that have such current and long-lasting negative impacts.

I don’t want to feel the deep negative emotions from my trauma all over again, but they are here to stay for a while, and I know that they won’t ever quite go away, but it will lessen with more time...I hope. And this rough patch will be short lived because of all of the real love I receive from everyone around me... and for that I am always grateful...

If you are reading this, then I have decided that sharing this was important to our relationship. I am by no means looking for attention or sympathy. In fact, quite the opposite. I have been very undecided about sharing this at all because l am very embarrassed by it and it makes me feel weak and I have had a deep and unfounded fear that I won’t be understood...it has nothing to do with wanting to keep secrets or worrying specifically about how anyone will take it because I know that, in reality, everyone will be accepting and caring. Those that I am closest to truly love me very much and I know that. I don’t want you to think that it has anything to do with you or our relationship (whatever that may be) that I didn’t share this sooner or haven’t been open with you. I care about you and our relationship and my relationship with everyone close more than anything else in my life, which is why I know I need to share this. It’s just really hard to put all of your insecurities out in the open to anyone...I hope that you understand that... As I’ve been writing this for about two months now (mostly written in two nights with constant editing and adding since) and reading over and over, I’ve been so dazed on it all. Maybe I’m just being very over dramatic about the whole thing, but the emotions from this are very real and very strong. I sit in my car at lunch eating alone, trying to figure out how to be okay with myself so that I can keep going. I’ve spent a lot of my sleepless time working on this, making sure that I say everything that I want to and mentally building up the courage to share it and trying to decide the right time to let this be read... I don’t think that I’m ready to talk about this in person yet, but thank you for taking the time to read it and soak it in with me...it means enough right now...

#abuse #emotions #story #memories #memory #hurt #pain #writing #aesthetic #my story #emotional abuse #psychological abuse #narcissistic abuse #thoughts #long reads #reading

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alluringoneirataxia · 4 years

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Long Winding Road Stay Strapped My Dude

By: Astoria Cathryn Andromeda

Alrighty, this is a long one boys. So I touched briefly on this in my Welcome to Literally Everything post. No worries I'll recap you, so you don't have to switch back and forth. I just diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, and then ADHD when I was 18 years old, and even then I had to fight for it after countless hours of research. See, there seems to be a wee bit of misogyny in the neurodiverse diagnoses. When I say a wee bit, I mean that scientists used to think that only boy could be autistic or ADHD. They only studied autism in males. Fortunately, nowadays we know that girls can be autistic and/or ADHD, but we present the traits differently than boys, and a lot of our traits are played off due to gender roles in society. For example, being overly talkative in girls is called chatty, whereas boys who can't sit still are sent off for testing immediately. This also causes problems for the boys, because little Johnny gets put on Adderall at the ripe age of 6 years old, just because he can't sit still for 8 hours straight, which by the way should not be expected of any elementary school kid, By the time, he's 25 he's 1) completely dependent on amphetamines 2) his body will stop producing dopamine due to being on the medication for so long. Nicht Gut. Generally, boys who are on the spectrum get picked out earlier due to late speaking, or lack of social skills. This is the one thing that girls happen to do better than boys. Girls are good at masking, which is basically taking social traits, phrases, personalities, demeanor, and copying them. In public, they put on a mask and at home, they have a meltdown. Girls are still not picked up as being on the spectrum, because shyness is called being 'ladylike' and 'dainty', and having a meltdown is just because :( girls are oh-so emotional, boohoo. Anyways tons of women do not get diagnosed with autism until they are well into their adulthood, I actually can be considered lucky to have technically still been a teenager when we finally got all the pieces together.

Alright, let's start with I don't know me as a baby. I did not speak until I was 2 years old, and then it was immediately full sentences from then on. I didn't do the babbling thing, which I don't know how impactful that really is to the topic. I was a very shy little girl. I was teeny tiny, we didn't know I if I was going to make it to 5 feet tall until I had a big growth spurt in 7th grade. I am 5'2 now and definitely done growing in case you were wondering, so not that short anymore. I did not like talking to adults, especially strangers, especially men. I did not look anyone in the face, and I will always hide behind my parent's legs when they would try to introduce me to people. I am an only child, and I spent a lot of time entertaining myself. I always had seasonal affective disorder, where my grades would dip in the winter. My parents knew I had a timer, they had 45 minutes from the moment they stepped into a restaurant before I would start breaking down. If I got off schedule as a toddler in any form, it was a catastrophe. Or this is what my parents and family tell me. I didn't really notice. I did not like being out in public a lot, I was a very picky eater, and I was extremely hyper. I was a very eccentric child, I only had 1-2 close friends and they were always a very well-liked outgoing girl who I just followed around. Looking back, I don't know how we missed it. I was shy because I didn't understand how social interactions worked, I was anxious about it because I didn't understand, I had sensory overloads, routines, and a very bland diet with a safe food which was ketchup. I put that shit on literally everything, eas, apples, mac and cheese, pizza, all meat, anything something forced me to eat that I did not like. But because I could sit still in class, and because I could zone out and daydream all day through school and still make A's nobody ever flagged me for anything and how I was supposed to know that not everybody just copied other people, scripted things before they talked, and could never pay attention. My mom always required me to be in a sport, and I was a gymnast and a swimmer for a long time, two very high-intensity sports, to help lower my energy levels, and because my mom has mild depression and she knows that exercise does help. Skip to middle school, my mom tells me I'm being bullied at church. It's not that I wasn't observing my surroundings I knew I was being excluded, but I didn't understand vindictive behavior, I thought it was my fault. I had zero friends in 8th grade until I sat down next to a random acqutaince I had gone to school with since I was 4 and the same gymnastics place. Then we were immediately attached at the hip after that. She is my best friend due this day and definitely got me through high school. Led me through so many social situations without either of us knowing. I had a very close friendgroup in highschool, all of them were on the drumline which I met through my best friend, and my first boyfriend was my best friend's neighbor. I ended up playing bass guitar for my high school's indoor drumline, and it was the best experience ever. I love my friends, but I had really bad depression when I was 15-now:) jk It's better. I didn't really realize I was depressed, I just didn't want to go to school, or swim practice, or do anything so of course, my mom noticed, and then once it was pointed out to me it got worse. My severe anxiety spiraled with my depression. Senior year of high school, my boyfriend and I were like toxic star crossed lovers, hurting each other over and over again without meaning to. My friends and I were self harming, all my close friends gad some demon going on. I finally decided to try therapy again after the disaster of being forced to go when I was 15 and the lady told me I wasn't depressed because I had a boyfriend and good grades. It helped a bit, I was able to get my panic attacks under control. Then I went away to college and stayed dating my senior high school boyfriend, we were just up and down as always, but with slightly better communication. My freshman year of college I joined a fraternity, a research lab, and my first hs boyfriend/ex/best friend and I went to a Christian campus place. By second semester, I had a lot of people who knew me and talked to me, but I didn't have any close friends, and even less close friends who were girls. All my close friends who were girls were at another college. My parents were worried about me, so they made me rush a sorority, which I knew was never my scene, but my parents made me join and I found a few girls I liked. Soon I was going to 6 classes, fraternity chapter, research lab meetings, christain crash group meetings, soriorty pledge meetings all on every Tuesday. I was different person at each of these events and wore a different mask. I was having what I know now were autistic burnout meltdowns every single day on the phone in my crusty dorm's stairwell. It was not cute. His mental health had always been bad too. Finally I decide I need to try a psychatrist and go back to therapy, and then he broke up with me. Then I made my first close friend, a guy who was in 3 of classes, and I took him to my fraternity's formal, and then coronavirus happened. Rona kinda saved my grades, and mental health by sending us home event though it did suck. I got on anti-anxiety meds and things went up, but I was still having what I thought were panic attacks, they were austistic meltdowns. My psychiatrist, he's kinda an asshole, he diagnosed me with Obessive Compulsive Personality Disorder. I'll insert definition here: (OCPD) is a personality disorder that's characterized by extreme perfectionism, order, and neatness. People with OCPD will also feel a severe need to impose their own standards on their outside environment.> Basically hr told me I had rules for everything like how everyone drives on the right side of the road, but nobodythinks about it andwhen I broke one of my rules I got depressed, and when wasn't perfect I got depressed, and when I made an A I was relieved not proud. The diagnosis seemed to fit really well, and my therapist and I started working finding my rules, and getting rid of the bad ones, and making the others less harsh. I had thought every once and in a while in my life when I was really upset, what if I'm on the spectrum, because I just felt so hopeless for social interactions and I didn't understand. I always felt like I was a very specific person, but after the ocpd I started thinking more and more, and I saw a tik tok of a girl with lae diagnosed autism basically describing me and ranting about the misogyny. I did more research and I decide, yea I'mm gonna bring it up to mypsychatrist well he's a dick, so he was like um you don't act like sheldon cooper from the Big Bang theory,and I was like wellI just I have always thought I might have adhd like be neureodiverse, and he was like your grade point average in hs was a 97.8%, you're not adhd. I immediately cried, because I can't handle when anyone says anything in a even a slightest stringent tone. I'm baby, I know lmao. It made me angry though because I felt like he just brushed away all of my struggles I had in my whole life. I spent hours researching and typed up a 47 page document on evidence for why I was on the spectrum, and had my parents help will some of checklists to make sure I was getting outside perspectives. I rally my parents to be my back up and next psychiatrist appointment we actually talk about it and he asked my parents questions about when I was young and such and finally he was okay you're on the spectrum. I felt so validated and like I could start being myself. I slowly got more and more confident, changed my style of clothing, and researched more about adhd pushed to be tested, and oh look at that I also have ADHD. So basically discourse: "I feel like as a child I coded a machine to do life for me so I didn’t get bothered except I didn’t know about the machine I thought i was the machine and now I’ve become self aware and I have to learn how to read the code and rewrite the code because it’s dysfunctional because I’m not functioning well as a human being. I was really shy as a child. I would turn beat red when people talked to me or looked at me so I think I started cookie cutting situations and using them over and over again because they worked until I accidentally hard wired these expansion rules and expectations for myself. I didn’t may attention is class ever I just day dreamed and if I got good grades i wouldn’t be bothered i could just stay in my head and if I did my sport well my parents didn’t bother me. I was never asked if I did my homework I just did it so I wouldn’t be asked and have to deal with that situation. I would cookie cutter situations in class that would draw the least attention to myself.

I feel like i don’t have friends I just fulfill the expectation like a side quest on video games" I wrote this down pre autism confirmation when i just thought I had ocpd. Now I don't directly identify with ocpd, but I definitely think I developed that personality disorder a bit from living with undiagnosed autism. I am linking below the very informative Tik Toks by the lovely Paige on autism in girls. The imposter syndrome one really hit home. I had had so many panic attacks about thinking I tricked people into being my friend, or thinking I was smart.

I highly suggest watching these short tik toks, you'll definitely learn something

https://vm.tiktok.com/wVvcYA/

https://vm.tiktok.com/wqRRUf/

https://vm.tiktok.com/wnqhvX/

https://vm.tiktok.com/wqeyYg/

https://vm.tiktok.com/wnoE7u/

https://vm.tiktok.com/Kas6gB/

https://vm.tiktok.com/owM9hs/

Imposter syndrome

I am also linking an article about Sheldon Cooper from Big Bang Theory and Autism that explains why my psychiatrist was wrong, and also I am a girl and the spectrum is called a spectrum because it's a fucking spectrum no two autistic people are exactly the same it's like a color wheel.

http://www.autismsupportnetwork.com/news/problem-sheldon-cooper-and-cute-autism-387783

Here is a fun comic about the spectrum and how to view it.

https://the-art-of-autism.com/understanding-the-spectrum-a-comic-strip-explanation/

I am still learning about myself, and how to be me, and how to be myself but without breaking bad social rules. It's quite humorous though because I'll learn something is related to autism and I'm like oh shit again, like still, like, we're still discovering things.

"Tu ne me manques pas"

Bis später,

Astoria.

#asd #autisminwomen #autism #actuallyautistic #aspie #aspie memes

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valiancyvulnerability · 4 years

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A Reflection and an Apology

I do not know where to begin.

In my attempt to begin, I hope you are doing well and are in a good mental space. “Things” continue to be difficult during this time; it’s frigidly cold, and there are a multiplicity of reasons to not be okay lately, if that is the case for you.

I went MIA for a long while because I foolishly fell into a self-inflicted trap once my mental health seemed to be improving during the fall semester. I had fully convinced myself that I had no other advice to offer, I had no reason to heal thru typing my jumbled thoughts onto a computer screen, and that, my friends, was a mistake I deeply regret.

Once I had become fully adjusted to college life, I was felt truly comfortable and at ease. I involved myself in extra-curriculars, made a handful of friends, and started eating again. I remember telling my therapist at my last appointment before school that I would call her a month into the semester to check in, but I never dialed her number. I ghosted her all of first semester because it felt as if therapy was something for me to temporary utilize when I am not doing well, and I was doing, so what was the point?

A toxic part of my personality is that I choose to believe that I can solve all problems alone. In all aspects of my life, that has always been the case. Give me an issue--and I am quick to get my ass in gear and think of the most reasonable solution to execute. I was not cognizant at the time that this was playing a principal role in how I viewed my own “healing”. I was not relying on anyone else other than Carson to get better, and once I got to a convincing enough spot, I ran with it and gave myself a pat on the back. Gold star. This was all me, and simply because I got results, it seemed healthy at the time.

Once the end of October rolled around, there was a sudden turbulence that didn’t seem to be the result of anything specific. I started to slip with my schoolwork, I engaged in hour-long staring contests with the ceiling, I locked myself in my room all day and took frequent unnecessary naps, and I stopped eating once more. Back at square one. Friends and family reached out, but it all sounded like white noise to me. I have possessed the ability to just push through my entire life, and this just happens to be a rough patch. Call me egotistical, but I was fully absorbed in the idea that the only person that could help me was me.

The rest of first semester was a series of many beautiful ups and many ugly downs. It was definitely a “going through the motions” type of situation. Every thought in my brain was so askew at all times that it disguised itself as a sense of consistency and comfort. I told myself I was excited to go home for break, but I knew the transition was going to absolutely wreck me just as much as it did when I moved in, whether I chose to acknowledge it or not.

I moved all of my belongings out of my dorm and drove back to my hometown. I drifted from all of my friends from school that were important to me. Once finals were over, I blocked out everything school-related from my brain. I spent my time with my home friends, but was rather inconsistent as a friend to them. I blew up on my family daily, using some of the most explosive and hateful language that I have ever used. The excessive sleep persisted. I texted my therapist to seek medication. She replied that her soonest opening was the morning of my birthday.

My birthday quickly approached on December 22. This was the first year I was home on my actual birthday, just because COVID had tampered with our typical holiday plans. My friends threw a birthday party for me the evening of the 21st, which meant the entire world to me. I knew about it prior, and felt a peculiar dread filling up inside of me as the day lurched forward. Are they doing this because they know I haven’t been doing well and this is just an act of pity? Do they feel like they have to? Do they even want to do it in the first place? I wanted to stay home and sleep as I had been doing all afternoon. Nonetheless, I got myself up, got ready, went and met my friends and had a great time.

On the day of my actual birthday, I woke up and went to therapy. Upon my arrival, I caught her up on what had been going on in a fit of run-on sentences and utter word vomit. She suggested medication and set me up with a psychiatrist to meet with. I knew this was finally a form of relying on someone that is there to help. Although I wasn’t being my own usual rock, it did not feel like defeat. It felt like I was slowly being lifted from underwater. That evening there was a set plan to be with my family and get dinner, have cake, the works. The day continued. to drag, and I hibernated in my room, cocooned in blankets. I finally came downstairs to use the restroom and not two seconds of me being downstairs I got in an argument with my family. In a swift movement, I got dressed, got my keys, and started to leave. I wanted to just drive around aimlessly and pretend I had a different final destination rather than just returning home. On my way out the door my mom expressed that she had tried to make the day special and felt as if she had failed as a parent.

This was a huge turning point in where I finally stared my own struggle straight in the face, sobbing, right in my own living room as it grinned back at me. I broke down, and the feeling I was experiencing was something like being submersed in a dream that you are conscious in, yet out of control. I felt as if I was choking, I wanted to vomit, but I stood, blubbering and trembling like a frightened chihuahua. Tears spilled down my face in furious waterfalls, and the expression on my face was still as stone.

After gathering myself, I went on my drive as planned, and it was storming. What am I doing? I thought about my therapy session from that morning and recalled telling her that there was not a day where I don’t think about not being alive. It’s rare that I feel like a danger to myself, but I explained that it was more of a sensation that I desired to be in a comatose-like state in a foreign country where I was ultimately unknown, and I wouldn’t be a burden to anyone in my life anymore.

What am I doing? I felt a pull to leave Illinois altogether without warning. Don’t tell your friends or your family, just go. Their lives will continue to move forward as they have and you are doing this in order to no longer be at a halt. Drop out of school. Get a job. Get an apartment, maybe with some plants and a neat rug. Start fresh. Be the genuinely good person you have failed to be for too long. Maybe cut your hair, too.

I have felt this weird pull to be elsewhere since my birthday. I started my antidepressant, Lexapro, right before I moved back into school for second semester. I am having a difficult time making friends. I cry every day. I sleep too much. Truthfully, waking up, getting ready, and making coffee in the morning feels like an immense feat. The psychiatrist told me I would go experience a “blackbox” period for up to six weeks where I would feel alone, exhausted, nauseous, and would potentially be a danger to myself. I have felt all of these things the past few weeks.

Now that I am beginning to scrape the surface of my body being acclimated to the medication, I feel better. Like really, I do! The desire of this “elsewhere” still lingers in the back of my brain, although it has taken on somewhat of a different form. I continue to daydream of this apartment, the plants, the rug--but it is not an attempted escape. In my head, it looks like a potential adventure for healing as opposed to avoidance when life challenges my well-being.

The biggest lesson I have had to learn (the hard way, unfortunately) from 2020 as a whole and the preceding months is that I need to start taking the initiative to do things for myself. The toll my health has taken has been overwhelming, and I had tricked myself into believing I was “doing what I needed to do” by taking an extra 3-hour nap and locking myself in my room every day.

I have had to cut out things that were no longer serving me. Some were more painful than others, but I couldn’t be apologetic for it anymore. I have had it with waking up every day in a state of complete misery, permitting others to walk on my emotions, hating my body, and the way I was living. In order for me to move in any type of positive direction, I myself had to come first.

I still have my down days, but my lowest point is behind me now, so I can properly reflect on everything that has happened up to his point. I feel as if I owe you an apology:

If you have been a part of my life in any way, shape, or form in the past year, I am sorry. I have been inconsistent, moody, dishonest, and just a poor quality individual. In order for me to give love to anyone I cross paths with, I had to be able to provide that for myself. Instead of repairing a broken machine, I kept using it until it combusted in the faces of everyone I care about. I wish there was an immediate fix to the problems I created over time, and if there was an instant solution, I would follow it with my entire being.

From this point forward, I want to assure you that I am trying to be better. I want to be there for all of you in the way you have tried to be there for me. I have not been kind to myself, and especially nobody else. If this feels applicable to you, please reach out to me so I can do my best to make amends personally.

With love,

Carson

This is not intended to be a pity trap. I am not seeking that. However, my goal is to normalize the conversation about mental health. The truth is that we all have a brain, and more often than not, we don’t always listen to what it needs. I hope that if you find yours asking something of you, you listen.

As always, stay safe and well. If anyone ever wants to extend the conversation of mental health with me personally, do not hesitate to reach out.

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x--daughters-of-darkness--x · 4 years

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HALESTORM's LZZY HALE: 'Going To Therapy Has Been One Of The Most Amazing Acts Of Self-Love That I've Done For Myself'

During a recent appearance on the "Hardcore Humanism With Dr. Mike" podcast, HALESTORM frontwoman Lzzy Hale spoke about how rock music has long been an outlet for youthful rebellion and how it has served as the musical voice of its time, but not the mainstream voice — the underdog voice.

"The beauty of music, and specifically rock music, is that it has always stood up for the downtrodden, always stood up for the freaks, the people that don't necessarily have a place at the cool kids' table," she said (hear audio below). "And what we've ultimately cultivated in our band community and all of that, and our career, but also, we didn't invent this — this is just something that exists and we are very proud of — being proud of your flaws, or your so-called flaws, being proud that you don't necessarily fit in… And that's easier said than done, but the beauty of music is that I'm able to turn these real-life experiences, or these stories that I hear from our fans, into something that they can take as theirs."

Hale also touched upon her own struggles with mental health and how she has benefited from treatment.

"I've been going to therapy for about a year and a half, for the first time in my life," she revealed. "It started before the pandemic. And it's been one of the most amazing acts of self-love that I think I've done for myself. Now I have so many more tools in my tool box to, like, just be, 'Okay. Something's going on. All right. I need the hammer. There it is. All right. We've got it.' I digress.

"But it's really great to be a part of that thing that is something bigger than yourself," she continued. "I feel like through music, that has been a vehicle. At the same time, what I'm discovering just about who I am and the kind of things I wanna get out to the world, even beyond music, I think I'm learning even more about what my own mission statements are and what I want to put out there in the world."

Hale added: "As far as I know, I've got one ride on this thing, so I'm gonna do what I can. [Laughs]"

Last month, Lzzy said that HALESTORM has demoed "about 60 ideas" for the follow-up to 2018's "Vicious" album.

In September, Lzzy confirmed to U.K.'s Rock Sound that she has been using her coronavirus downtime to compose material for the new HALESTORM LP. "I've been writing, honestly, some of the best songs I've ever written, because I've just had the time, and there isn't any deadline and nobody's breathing down my neck, saying, 'Hey, where are those demos?'," she said.

"I haven't been home without a gig for this long in probably over 15 years, so that's a strange thing. I think in one way, I have the time, but in another way, I'm seeking that high out, I'm seeking that joy that I find from playing out live every night. I'm not writing for any other reason — I'm not writing for a deadline, I'm not writing for a record, even though technically I am; we are technically working on a new HALESTORM record. But I'm writing from such a position of joy right now, literally just getting excited about some small piece of music. And I'm taking more risks now, because I have the space and the time and I've settled into something. And I'm not even quite sure what that is, and I feel like it's gonna reveal itself maybe later, but right now, I'm in it, and it's exciting."

"Halestorm Reimagined", a collection of reworked HALESTORM original songs as well as a cover of "I Will Always Love You", the love ballad made famous by Whitney Houston and Dolly Parton, was made available in August.

Lzzy and her brother Arejay (drums) formed the band in 1998 while in middle school. Guitarist Joe Hottinger joined the group in 2003, followed by bassist Josh Smith in 2004.

In December 2018, HALESTORM was nominated for a "Best Rock Performance" Grammy Award for its song "Uncomfortable".

In 2012, the band won its first Grammy in the category of "Best Hard Rock/ Metal Performance" for "Love Bites (So Do I)". According to the Grammy web site, Lzzy became the first woman to earn a Grammy in the category.

#lzzy hale #Halestorm #2020 interviews

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littleoldrachel · 4 years

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i am burned out (i smell of smoke) - part three

you are all TOO NICE TO ME i can’t cope with how kind you are!!!

here is part three!

(i'm having a pretty hard time with my own bad brain at the moment so pls don't hate me for the typos, etc. i will fix them when my brain is less yoghurty, pls forgive me)

good news: the next chapter will only be a bit more angst and then it's all comfort from there on out i PROMISE he's gonna be okay <3

i am burned out (i smell of smoke) [on ao3]

summary: in which virgil falls apart, learns how to put himself back together, and realises he doesn’t have to do it alone.

word count: 6.7k ish ( part 1/5 | part 2/5 | part 3/5)

warnings: mental health issues - look so there is some pretty intense mental health stuff in here so please. go careful. also trigger warnings for some super brief suicidal ideation. you are loved and i am here if you need a reminder of that <3

timeline: i suppose this is set in early TAG verse? jeff is missing and nobody is Coping Well.

happy belated birthday, nutty!! <3

iii.

The days that follow are an enigma.

Later, in therapy, he'll struggle to remember a single detail. There is simply a gap that promises pain should he poke it too hard, and he will shy away from reliving a single minute of it.

At the time though…

It’s a waterfall of suffering; he is cascading down, down, down, and every time he grabs a hold, his hand slips on smooth rock and agonising memories. Relentless misery beats down on him until he stops even trying to raise his head, because it is always stronger than him. Hitting the bottom, he is submerged, unable to distinguish the surface from the floor because of the murky grey all around him, and he can’t breathe down here, he’s alone down here, he’s going to die down here.

So. The days that follow feel a lot like drowning - and Virgil would know.

He can’t breathe and his limbs are too heavy and everything is muted, grey, useless, but himself most of all. He cannot feel much of anything at all beneath this crushing despair, but he knows that he is utterly sick of himself, beyond exhausted of feeling so terrible, desperate for a way out but unable to communicate this to his family.

He spends a lot of time thinking about his parents. Not a day goes by where he doesn’t remember them, but it’s usually memories of their lives, rather than grisly and traumatic thoughts of their deaths. But now, he can’t seem to stop himself from fixating on the way his mother turned the snow around her berry-red as she first stopped shaking, then speaking, then breathing. Nor how his father’s final moments must have been elation-turned-fear, how the heat of the flames must have engulfed him all at once, if there was any relief that he would once more be with Lucy -

He never allows himself to think these thoughts. They're too upsetting, too raw, too painful.

But now, he is powerless to stop them.

On the fifth day of this new low - though it is fast becoming Virgil’s norm and that terrifies him - the klaxon sounds and Virgil can barely drag himself to the lounge. He does so anyway, arriving in time to see Gordon disappearing down his chute. Scott casts a glance in his direction as he makes his own way to his ship, concern blossoming at the sight of Virgil’s blank eyes.

“Go to bed, Virg, you look rough.”

(Virgil doesn’t argue, which only tightens the knot of worry in Scott’s stomach, but he shoves it aside in favour of the rescue).

Virgil returns to bed, avoiding all reflective surfaces he can. He knows how terrible he looks and he cannot stand the sight of himself, but he also can’t seem to bring himself to get in the fucking shower.

He’s disgusted with himself - it’s no wonder Scott didn’t want him on the rescue.

Or any rescues, apparently.

“You’re sick, Virg,” Scott begins, when he arrives home late that night to find his younger brother hasn’t moved from his bed.

Virgil protests (hardly, weakly), though he can’t find the conviction for the words. It’s like he’s going through the motions of a well-rehearsed play. “I’m not sick. I’m fine to fly.”

“Abso-fucking-lutely not.”

Virgil sighs, rolling away from his brother and that horrible mounting worry.

“You see, the fact you didn’t call me out on that language tells me just how horrible you must be feeling. I mean it, Virg. Grounded until you’re recovered. And I want you to have a medical first thing!”

It doesn’t feel like there’s any recovering from this sickness.

Not having the distraction of rescues is punishment enough, but worse is the knowledge that Gordon keeps falling asleep over breakfast because Virgil can’t pull his fucking weight. He feels completely fucking useless - is being completely fucking useless - and yet, he still can’t bring himself to get out of bed. His brothers parrot concerned, loving questions he can’t answer and show him a kindness he certainly doesn’t deserve, and Virgil -

Virgil is a paradox: on the one hand, he is too empty to feel a single damned thing, no matter how much he wants to cry, no matter how hard he tries to put a label on these experiences, there is nothing there and therefore he is nothing. But on the other hand, Virgil is overflowing with raw, live misery so heavy he can’t take a full breath and so awful he stops caring about the fact.

He’s not okay.

He doesn’t know what’s wrong and he doesn’t know why, but he’s so far from okay, it’s laughable.

Only, he hasn’t laughed in weeks, and Gordon has stopped trying to make him.

That realisation burrows into his heart, a sharp nasty sting of guilt and loneliness. He misses his brothers and he knows it’s his fault that they’re withdrawing - isolating yourself from them will do that - but it hurts all the same.

It hurts because when Scott had started to count on neat whiskey to get him through the day, Virgil had dug his heels in and refused to let it be so. It hurts because when John had been relying on study drugs and no sleep to get through his PhD, it was Virgil who refused to let him hide away in shame. It hurts because Virgil has been there for more of Gordon’s panic attacks than he wants to remember, and yet he remembers them all the same. It hurts because Alan is too young to have lost so much, but Virgil refuses to let him shoulder that alone.

Virgil loves his brothers with every single drop of Tracy blood in his veins, and he isn't afraid to show it by any means necessary.

But he's so, so tired.

Not of loving them - never that - but there's something so lonely and sad about this feeling and he’s exhausted by it and terrified of it and it all just hurts.

“There’s nothing wrong with him,” says John hesitantly, and Scott looks sharply at his younger brother across their father’s desk. “Don’t try and tell me this is fine, John,”

"I know it's not fine," snaps John, “but I’m telling you that physically, he’s fine. A few bruises, but nothing some rest won’t fix.”

Scott begins to pace, frustration thrumming through his body. “He’s not eating properly,” He runs his hand through prematurely greying hairs in a motion learned from his father. “He’s just not Virgil.”

“I know.”

“I haven’t seen him paint or play piano in weeks, hell he isn’t even trying to get me to talk about my feelings. He’s alone all the time, constantly tired...”

“I know.”

“I just - are you sure? Nothing cracked at all? No signs of-”

“I had Brains run three separate scans, Scott. I’ve checked the results myself.”

“Could it be a concussion of some kind? He took a pretty big beating in Gen-”

“Scott. For God’s sake, listen. Physically, he’s fine.”

Scott stares at him, wishing not for the first time that the cogs of his brain moved at the same velocity as John’s. “Physically… so you’re saying this isn’t a physical thing?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

Scott swallows - this is okay, unexpected, but he can recalibrate and work out what it is that Virgil needs, this is fine. “So it’s a mental thing.”

John smiles in spite of the gravity of the situation. “I don’t think that’s the correct term, but yes, I believe so.”

“What specifically?”

“I’m not a doctor, Scott. Virg’s the one with medical training.”

“Yes, but he’s not telling us anything.” Scott stares at John, fear clawing at his throat, at the thought of his brother - his best friend - hurting so much and yet seemingly unable to voice it. “What do I -” his voice cracks and he clears his throat hurriedly. “What do I do?”

“This isn’t all on you, Scott,” John says, his turn to be sharp now. “He’s my brother too.”

Scott takes a deep breath; the weight of his one thousand responsibilities have never felt so heavy on his shoulders, and yet, they may as well be feathers for how unimportant they are compared to this bombshell. But. John’s eyes reflect his own concern, but there’s a determination in the set of his jaw Scott has come to rely upon - his younger brother has never met a problem he couldn’t solve.

“Fine. What do we do?”

“I… I’m working on it.”

“John. This isn’t all on you.”

“Yeah yeah, Kettle.” John rubs his eyes. “EOS and I are researching. There’s a lot out there and because he won’t tell us how he feels, I don’t - I don’t know if we should get him a therapist like Gordon had or meds like me or… I don’t know what. And our lives aren’t exactly normal, so it’s hard to say what will actually help.”

EOS pipes up, her lights dancing somewhere between turquoise and green (Virgil would know what to call that): “The recurring theme across research is ‘being there’ for the patient. A strange concept since humans are so limited by their physical forms.”

John smiles again, but it’s strained. “I’ll explain later, EOS. But it’s like how Virgil always checks in with me after a bad day.”

The words bring a lump to Scott’s throat that he can’t explain.

“I see. So, you need to ‘check in’ with him now?” EOS asks.

“Something like that.” John catches Scott’s eye again. “Normalcy is also good. Being active.”

“So I shouldn’t ground him?” Scott says, though the thought of Virgil piloting his ship in a poor mental state terrifies him. He’s not afraid of his brother’s skill - that has never been in question - but how is he supposed to protect him from something none of them can even see?

“I don’t know.” John says it like it’s physically painful - perhaps it is, John is always loathe to admit lack of knowledge on a topic. “Maybe not? Though I don’t want him flying a ship if he’s feeling like, well -”

Scott slumps back into his father’s chair - his chair now. “Exactly. I don’t know what to do, John.”

“Me neither.” Uttered quietly. Helplessly.

Scott hates this.

Silence stretches between them - uncomfortable, worried tension that neither of them know how to handle.

Eventually, John sighs, “I should go, Scott. Duty calls and all that.”

“John…” His brother pauses in reaching to cut the commline. “You - he’d tell us if he was feeling really bad, right? This is Virgil we’re talking about. He loves all that feelings stuff.”

“Yeah. Yes.”

But John’s voice is laced with an uncertainty that curdles the worry in Scott’s stomach.

Virgil's not sure exactly how long it's been but it must be weeks and he's losing his fucking mind.

Every day is the same and it’s all one neverending nightmare.

With the morning birdsong, he locks himself in his rooms and sleeps - or at least tries to, because it doesn't count as sleep when he wakes even more tired. He rejects his brothers' concern and ignores the trays of food Grandma has taken to leaving outside his door.

Where he's able to, Virgil still attempts to check in with them all after difficult rescues, still tries to fulfill his role as resident caregiver, but it's becoming increasingly hard to field their nagging questions.

He almost caves, when Alan slopes into his room and practically begs him to tell them what's wrong. His brother's wide blue eyes are a weapon all of their own, and it takes all of Virgil's resolve to shrug his worries off. He steeps in self-loathing for hours at the hurt in Alan's eyes.

Virgil doesn't understand why it's so hard to say the words out loud. For someone who has always championed self care and mental well-being, this inability to communicate his own suffering is as unexpected as it is unmanageable. He doesn't know where it's come from, nor how he's going to fix it; all he knows is that he cannot bear Scott's judgement, John's worry, Gordon's probing, Alan's disappointment -

It's too much.

It's all too much.

And he despises himself for that.

He endures John’s insistence he has a physical - and a second and third when the results are inevitably fine. He allows Scott’s anxious hovering as he answers Brains’ questions without complaint - another wrinkle to add to his brother’s worry lines, but he doesn’t have the energy to fight it.

For some reason, the medical proof that he is, in fact, fine, is damning. At least if there were some physical cause for his current state, he thinks it would be easier to bear (easier rather than fine, because he’s Virgil goddamn Tracy with a mile-wide stubborn streak) but instead he’s just falling apart with a single good reason.

(He hates himself for it).

Scott watches his brother brush past his piano like he doesn’t even notice it’s there, flinch from the sunlight like it burns him, grow skinnier and more hunched beneath those tatty plaid shirts, and his heart aches.

If their positions were reversed, Virgil would know what to do. Virgil knows Scott better than he knows himself, would have probably been able to resolve this before it even started.

But Scott isn’t Virgil - he cannot untangle emotions and comfort weary souls like his brother can.

He doesn’t know what to do with this shell of a man.

Scott spends what little time he has researching, learning, planning, but nothing he tries seems to help at all. Each time he broaches the topic of having someone to talk to with Virgil, his brother simply shuts down. He whines and begs Virgil to play him something but Virgil just sits before the piano, working on muscle memory alone. He stares at the medical reports until they blur and fade into restless sleep.

But he loves his brother just as fiercely as Virgil does him, and so it’s in sheer desperation that he tells John Virgil is back on duty. His brother blinks, schools surprise into an unreadable calm, and Scott feels the need to justify himself.

“I just - maybe giving him a sense of purpose will help. Some structure back, you know?”

“Sure, Scott,” John says, though his tone is anything but.

Scott’s announcement that he’s back on duty is a surprise to Virgil. His brother goes from you're not flying Two again until you're fit to, and you're not fit to until you goddamn talk to me to we need Two, now, Virg practically overnight. Alan and Gordon exchange similar looks of confusion, and Virgil is doubly aware of what a burden he has been to them all.

In Scott’s defense, they do need Two - and all of the ‘Birds to be honest.

Virgil pushes through the foggy exhaustion that has become his waking state, and drops into his chute like he’s never been gone. By the time he’s adjusting his uniform, the fog has cleared a little, and when he’s settled in the pilot’s chair - his chair - he feels better than he has in weeks. Gordon flops down beside him, feet somehow already propped on the dash, and Virgil shoves them off automatically.

He feels alive.

Rescues help. For all the pressure and pain they bring, rescues give him a purpose. Even though rescues drove him to - no. Virgil doesn’t want to think about that now. All he knows is that without rescues - well. Actually, Virgil doesn't want to think about that option either.

It’s been a while since he’s flown his ‘Bird, but she’s the same reliable dream she always is (a little worse for wear in her left thruster perhaps, from Gordon’s overeager antics, but nothing some tinkering won’t fix later. The fact that he is even interested in tinkering speaks volumes). The thrum of Two’s engines is practically medicinal and he revels in being able to breathe freely, think clearly - it’s been so, so long.

The journey to the rescue zone is quiet, updates from John and occasional witticisms from Gordon are background noise to the beloved sound of Two responding to his lightest touch. Alan and Scott - speed junkies till they die - are far enough ahead of them that Virgil and Gordon exchange their usual eye rolling at Alan’s antics (“and the youngest Tracy takes the lead, a swift manoeuvre from Mr Alan Tracy proving once and for all that he is the true champ- hey, that’s not fair-“) and for a minute, it’s like none of the last few weeks had happened.

Gordon bounces out of his seat as they begin their descent, practically vibrating with adrenaline as he dashes to his own ‘Bird. Virgil drops Pod 4 with a grin at Gordon’s whoop, catches a glimpse of sunshine yellow cutting through murky water, before sweeping round into landing beside Alan’s rocket.

In spite of the carnage around the Thunderbirds, Virgil feels the adrenaline stirring in his own chest, because finally, something he knows how to do, how to help, how to fix.

It's an earthquake, the second one in this area in as many months. The hastily-reconstructed housing never stood a chance against tremors that tickled six on the Richter scale. In places the ground has cracked in two, dark zigzagging lines snaking across the desolate landscape. Piles of rubble, pools of dirty water, clouds of dust, and among them, people staggering hopelessly through the remnants of their houses.

Families who have already lost everything are once again homeless. Virgil’s heart aches at the injustice of it all.

International Rescue's task is simple, in theory. Virgil and Alan are to get the survivors out from the rubble nearest the epicentre, whilst Gordon takes Four up to the dam and assesses the damage done to the wall’s defences. Scott will be assisting with rescues from the sinkhole on the edge of the town - the result of overtaxing the land and the force of nature. And John, of course, as their ever-seeing eye in the sky. Simple.

As simple as it can be when you’re surrounded by desperate people and their frantic hopes that you’ll save their loved ones. A quick word with Alan and Virgil dons his exo-suit, grimacing a little at the familiar weight of the Jaws of Life on his limbs. He’s reluctant to use the Mole given that it is likely bodies will be distributed at different depths in the wreckage - and Jesus, what a bleak thought that is.

Alan begins tackling the top layers of rubble, using a combination of grappling hooks and jet blasters to clear the smaller chunks of rock, wood and dust from the area. Watching Alan work so efficiently and professionally sends a jolt of pride through Virgil’s chest; in many ways, Alan is and always will be their baby brother, but at times like this, it’s impossible to deny the man he is becoming.

Whilst Gordon is Virgil’s usual partner on rescues, Alan is equally capable and hard-working, and between them and John’s careful scans, they begin locating some of the missing. Something loosens in Virgil’s chest at the sight of the first dust-streaked hand reaching towards them through the rocks - bruised, filthy, but unmistakably alive. As much as he tries to avoid superstition on rescues, beginning with a corpse is never a good omen.

(Of course, this isn’t to say they don’t find bodies. A mother wrapped around her child, body misshapen from the weight of the rocks. An unrecognisable man, head bashed to a pulp - Virgil sends Alan to get some water at that point, nausea making them both shaky).

As is always the way, human kindness prevails, and soon the local people are involved in the rescue efforts. Virgil knows from experience that it’s best not to fight it, but he asks in a broken attempt at their language (that John then delivers flawlessly) that they stay away from the more dangerous sites.

As if it’s not all one big danger site.

Still. He’s busy and sweating and focused, and there is no time for self-loathing or guilt in his head at the moment. His arms are aching a couple of hours in, but he keeps going - has to keep going - because there are more people who need him and he needs this. It feels like it takes an age to clear just the stretch of what was once a row of houses, but once they have, Alan and Virgil barely stop for a rest before moving to the next place they are needed.

Virgil forces Alan to eat an energy bar, watching closely despite Alan’s glares to ensure it all goes down, but can’t bring himself to have more than a few bites of his own.

Eventually, God knows how many hours later but late enough that there is but a slither of sun left on the horizon, John’s murmurs of heartbeats in the rubble grow further and further apart, and the number of bodies only continues to rise. Things deteriorate further with the aftershocks that rip through the land and Virgil clings to the person he’s in the middle of rescuing, willing them not to slip from his shaking grip.

(He manages, just, though they have gone ragdoll limp by the time the earth resettles).

(But he keeps going).

Gordon has come to join them, tired but satisfied that reinforcements are in place, and Virgil smiles like it’s normal for him, claps him on the shoulder. “Good job, Gords.”

The grin he gets in return is a little bemused but bright and Virgil feels alive.

The sky is velvety black now, tiny pinpricks of silver piercing it, and up there, one of those lights is his brother. Even with Two’s floodlighting, Virgil has to squint now to see what he’s shifting, his arms are leaden, and his head aches with dehydration. The end is in sight though; as brutal as it is to admit it from this point on, they will mainly be pulling bodies, and despite Scott’s insistence that International Rescue will continue their efforts, the local authority is equally stubborn that their crews can take it from here.

(Virgil hears a mutinous, “fat lot of good that did last time,” muttered into Scott’s comm and can’t help but agree).

He sighs, pauses for a second to stretch his muscles, and taps his own comms.

"John, status update?"

"Two more life signs in the vicinity. To your left. Signal's faint… are they beneath that building?"

'Building' is a generous word for the structure that John has identified. Its stone walls are cracked from ground to roof, angry black tears through stone that has started to crumble. In places, the rock has already given way, revealing open sky and starlight through the gaps. It’s been reinforced with wooden shafts, which are crippled under the strain. The building is practically swaying in the breeze: a Jenga stack one block from collapse.

“Building integrity?” Virgil asks, though Virgil the Engineer is already running calculations on structural integrity and coming up with big flashing red NOs. Not even with the proper equipment - there isn’t enough of a structure to even hold onto, let alone hold up.

No way in hell is Alan going in there. Nor Gordon.

But someone has to.

“No way,” John says sharply, just as Virgil knew he would, but he’s already moving, squeezing through the space where a window once was. “Virgil - Virgil, no - at least wait for backup-”

Virgil swipes the connection away - he’ll pay for it later, but for now, he needs to focus and John’s audible yet uncharacteristic panic isn’t conducive to this.

It’s even darker inside, and Virgil makes a mental note to thank Brains for installing the headtorch in the suit. Eerie shadows bounce off the walls but at least he can see where the stairs have semi-collapsed against an internal wall - where the two victims must be buried.

“Hello?” Virgil tries, picking his way through the damage as best as he can in the gloom. “Can anyone hear me?”

There’s a pause, and then - unmistakably - a sob. A stream of words in a foreign tongue, far too quick for Virgil to understand, but he knows the universal language of fear and he moves.

He grunts as he begins shifting rocks. “I’m Virgil, I’m with International Rescue. I’m going to get you out.” He repeats it in a clunky version of their language, and gets a further panicked babble.

John appears again as he spots the leg of one of the victims - torn trousers and tiny feet, a child - and he does not look impressed. “Firstly, Virgil, what the fuck? Second, Scott is on his way and he will kill you for not waiting for backup-”

“We might not have time for that, John,” Virgil pants, shoving slab of the wall away. It has uncovered the whole lower body of the child and it’s a sharp twist in Virgil’s chest to see the duck patterns so dirty and ruined.

John pinches the bridge of his nose and breaths out noisily. “This is incredibly dangerous, Virgil.”

“So let me do my job and get out of here,” Virgil snaps back, and John recoils. Virgil regrets the words the second they leave his mouth - he’s tired and dehydrated and stressed and he didn’t mean it, of course he didn’t - but John’s already gone blank with carefully-concealed hurt.

Virgil hates when he does this.

“John, I-”

“Don’t, Virgil. Do your damn job.”

As John closes the connection, Virgil swallows down his guilt and focuses on the task at hand. There will be time to make it up to his brother later.

They’re both children, it turns out, wrapped up in each other’s arms, tear stains tracking their cheeks, and scared shitless, but alive. The boy has a head wound that’s bleeding sluggishly and the girl is cradling her arm protectively, but it’s okay, Virgil got them out, they’re going to be okay.

“I’m Virgil,” he tells them, kneeling before them and tapping his chest. “What are your names?”

“Faroqh,” the girl says, pointing at the boy and then at herself. “Leila.” She adds something on the end - a plea, he thinks, though it’s too quick to catch anything.

“I’m going to get you out,” Virgil says, keeping his voice calm and soothing. He holds out his hands and the boy reaches for it, scrubbing at his eyes.

John pops up again and the girl leaps back in shock. “Virgil - get out, aftershocks incoming, get out-”

The ground is already moving beneath them, juddering, groaning, and Virgil seizes the boy, scooping him against his chest, tries to reach for the girl through the clouds of dust rising -

Quiet.

For a split second, he thinks they’ve escaped it.

And then it all goes wrong.

The ceiling caves first, then the walls, collapsing inwards like dominoes. There’s no time to think, Virgil just reacts, throwing himself blindly in the direction of the girl, cushioning both children as best he can against himself as the rocks rain down.

In his mind, he’s vaguely aware that this is more of a Scott-move than a Virgil-move. Scott is the one who’ll fling himself into danger without a second thought, if it means someone else gets theirs.

And yet, here he is.

Even with the suit, it hurts. Jagged lumps crash into his back, pelt his already aching arms, bash his head further into the rocks.

It doesn’t matter, he doesn’t care, just let them live, take him instead -

(Wait, what-?)

He doesn’t remember losing consciousness, but the next thing he can recall is a ringing in his ears and the realisation that the ground around them is still.

“Virgil, get out of there!” John’s voice cuts across his comms, and Virgil opens his eyes.

“Faroqh?” he murmurs. “Leila?”

He feels one of them say something in his chest, senses slowly coming back online. Unfortunately, the fact that every single part of his body is in agony also makes itself known, and Virgil groans, shifting against the weight on his back.

“Virgil? Jesus, Virgil, talk to me. Scott - do you have eyes on him?”

“Almost,” Scott’s voice is tight with poorly-concealed anger and concern. “Virgil, do you copy?”

“Y- yeah,” Virgil manages, then coughs harshly.

“Status?”

“I think - I think they’re both fine. One is definitely c-conscious.”

There’s a pause and then Scott says, even more tightly. “And you?”

“Nothing broken I don’t think.”

“You’re a fucking idiot,” Scott says grimly.

Virgil closes his eyes again, because he’s so tired and he doesn’t have the energy for Scott’s hypocritical bullshit right now, but he must have lost more time because the next thing he knows, the weight on his back has lifted and strong arms are dragging him upwards.

His older brother is there, eyes a battleground between worry, fury and yet more worry. Virgil loosens his grip on the children, looking up at Scott. “Scott, I had to, they’re just kids-”

Faroqh stifles a cry and Scott’s eyes snap to him. “Give them to me.”

“I just - can you - Leila wasn’t speaking - is she-?”

Scott presses his fingers to her throat and there’s an agonising pause. “She has a pulse.”

“Thank God,” Virgil murmurs, slumping back and releasing his grip on the children.

“Thank God?” Scott repeats incredulously. “Virg - I don’t - I -”

“Don’t do this now, Scott,” John’s voice is quiet but authoritative. “Wait for me, please.”

Scott closes his eyes briefly. “Deal,” he mutters, and then picks up Leila’s body, stretching his other hand out to Faroqh. “I’m going to take these two out to Gordon and Alan. And then I’m coming back for you. Don’t you dare move.”

Faroqh accepts Scott’s hand but looks anxiously at Virgil, who does his best to smile encouragingly.

And then Scott is gone and Virgil is alone in the mess he’s created.

The weight of realisation comes crashing down around him, even harder than the building fell, and it’s a punch to his already fragile ribs. He does his best to focus on breathing rather than the swell of shame and self-loathing that’s ballooning in his chest because he really fucked this up. Virgil can feel his control beginning to slip and digs his fingers into the bruises on his legs. The pain grounds him momentarily, but only leaves him emptier when he stops. And so he only stops when Scott’s silhouette fills the entrance once more.

As Scott approaches, furious concern has him practically vibrating with emotion. Virgil takes a deep breath, choking down his own self-loathing for now, accepts the hand up and staggers into his brother’s side as the pain hits him in full. He may not have broken anything but his entire body feels like it’s been used as a punchbag and it hurts.

Scott’s grip tightens around his waist and the worry intensifies. “Can you make it out?”

“Yeah,” Virgil says. (Probably is more honest).

Leaning heavily into Scott, they make their painfully slow way to the door, out to where a pair of anxiously-hovering brothers are waiting for them.

Alan barely restrains himself from lunging at Virgil, eyes overly bright. “Virg - are - are you okay?”

“Fine, Allie,” Virgil says, pointedly ignoring Scott’s irritable snort of disbelief.

Gordon’s expression is caught between relief, worry and anger, but the former wins over and he hurries to Virgil’s other side. “What were you thinking, Virg? Going in without backup?”

“Not now, Gords, I promised John we’d wait for him. Let’s just get this moron home first.”

Virgil’s mind is struggling to compute the words whilst also concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other. “Wait - John’s coming.”

“Yup.” Scott’s mouth is so thin it’s a grim slash.

Well, shit.

“You’re not flying home. No fucking way.”

“She’s my ship.”

“I. Don’t. Care. You just got injured and you’re not fit to fly.”

“Scott, it’s just bruising-”

“And a probable concussion,” chimes in Gordon, standing his ground when Virgil shoots a glare at him.

“You’re not flying and that’s an order.”

It’s not often that Scott pulls rank on him - it’s a cold day in hell when he has to - and it’s the shock of it that causes Virgil to spit “yes, Commander” with such venom. He loathes himself for the hurt he knows will be in Scott’s eyes but stalks to the passenger seat without meeting his gaze. Scott watches him for another few seconds and the stare burns right down to Virgil’s soul, scorching across his anger and burrowing right into his guilt.

But he still can’t meet his brother’s eyes.

Scott turns, leaves and Virgil sags in his seat. He doesn’t say a word whilst Gordon starts Two’s engines, not even when he revs a little harder than is necessary. He can’t bring himself to answer a single one of Gordon’s attempts at humour and eventually, Gordon lapses into silence too.

Virgil’s head is in turmoil and his chest is heavy - heavier than it’s ever been. There’s a mounting dread about the screaming match he’s about to have with his brothers (because he knows it’s coming). Guilt and shame over what he put his brothers through with his antics (because that haunted look is back in Scott’s eyes and Virgil hates that he put it there) battling a self-righteous assurance that he did the right thing in rescuing those kids. Embarrassment that he fucked up the one thing he thought he could do. Gnawing anxiety over nothing he can place specifically but it’s there and it’s overwhelming. Misery that he failed, yet again, sending him straight back to the pit he’d been stuck in before all of this happened.

Above everything though, spreading insidious arms and draping its poisonous cloak over all, is an exhaustion so intense and so absolute that Virgil does not want to exist.

(God, he’s so tired).

In the infirmary, Scott helps Virgil out of the exo suit at last, sucking in sharp breaths at the sight of his brother’s skin mottled purples and blues.

(“Jesus fucking Christ, Virg”).

Scott is as gentle as possible whilst checking for cracked bones and yet Virgil still has to grit his teeth not to wince at his touch. Eventually, Scott seems satisfied with his findings - as satisfied as it’s possible to be when his younger brother looks like a messy oil painting of angry bruising - and allows Virgil back into a sitting position to run through some mental exercises.

It’s as Virgil is answering Scott’s questions without complaint that John bursts through the doors, heading straight for Virgil like a missile.

John grabs him by the shoulders and shakes, uncharacteristic panic blazing in his eyes. "What the hell, Virgil? It's never you! You're supposed to be the one I can trust not to pull stupid shit!”

“Johnny, you - you shouldn’t be up yet,” Virgil says weakly, “gravity-”

“No, you don’t get to tell me to take care of myself right now-”

“Less of the shaking please, John,” Scott cuts in. He’s taken a step back, arms folded.

John nods, releasing Virgil apologetically, but the verbal assault continues. “What were you thinking? No, scratch that, you obviously weren’t thinking at all.” In contrast to Scott’s, John’s anger is quiet. Virgil would rather be shouted over by Scott than reprimanded by John any day; John knew exactly how to let you know that you had disappointed him.

Virgil takes a deep breath in spite of this. “I was thinking that there were two people who needed to be saved.”

“Are you being serious? That’s your excuse for going in alone, without telling anyone where you were going or waiting for backup? That aftershock could have killed you, Virg.” John’s voice trembles and he swallows viciously. “For a moment, I was so afraid it had.”

There’s a pause, in which the guilt might swallow Virgil whole, chew him up, spit out his bloody remains before his brothers. There’s nothing he can say but Scott and John look so expectant that he feels compelled to justify himself.

“I didn’t know there would be an aftershock.”

“That’s not the point, Virgil, and you know it!” Scott explodes. “You didn’t tell us what you were doing, you had nobody watching your back-”

“They were children. They were children and they needed me.”

“We need you.”

“Stop acting like you wouldn’t have done the same, Scott!” Virgil doesn’t know when they started shouting but now he can’t stop. “Don’t act like you haven’t pulled this shit on me a hundred times! Stop being such a goddamn hypocrite-”

“It’s not the same, Virgil. It’s just not.”

“Oh sure, because you’re Scott Tracy, you get to do whatever you like, fuck the consequences-”

“Because I have you watching my back,” Scott yells.

It all goes very quiet and Virgil’s mind is blank.

“What?” he whispers.

Scott looks physically pained, forcing his answer out like pulling glass from a wound. “I’m not saying it’s fair or right, Virg. But I know that whatever stupid thing I do, I have you stopping me from going too far. Pulling me out when it goes wrong. And I know it puts too much pressure on you, and I am sorry for that - I am. But what you did today - you didn’t let us help you. You didn’t let me help you.”

(This is about more than just today and Virgil can feel it in every exhausted cell of his body but fuck, he doesn’t have the energy to hash that out now. He just wants to go to bed and sleep and sleep (and never wake up?)).

John speaks up now, holding Virgil’s gaze with the same anger, only it’s not really anger, Virgil realises. It’s love, marred by fear and stress. “Going into that situation without backup was suicide, Virg.”

A pause.

“I’m not - you don’t think that I’m -” Virgil splutters, though he doesn’t know if the denial is more for his benefit or theirs. They’re wrong, he’s sure of it, they have to be wrong.

“We - we know there’s something going on with you,” John says, glancing at Scott. “And - and after today, we’re even more worried.”

“We care about you, Virg.” Scott’s eyes are wide, pleading. “Why won’t you let us help you?”

(Because I despise every single thing about myself, but most of all how much I’m burdening you all. Because you deserve better than my weakness. Because it’s not worth it).

(He says none of that, obviously. Even if he wanted to, his throat has gone dry and his brain seems to be stuck on John’s words like a scratched record).

He needs to get out.

The realisation sucks all the air from his lungs.

Anxiety rising so fast he thinks he might be sick, Virgil stands. “I - I can’t -” (breathe)-

Shove past Scott and John who are looking at him with such lost expressions Virgil can’t bear it. Inhale around the tightening band of guilt and panic-

Almost at the door and they haven’t tried to stop him - he’s not sure why this hurts more than their protests would have. Exhale and feel lungs constrict even further-

He makes it to the door, and now, exit strategy in his grasp, he can breathe. He stops, one hand on the doorframe and half-turns. Scott’s eyes take on a hopeful gleam and Virgil feels terrible for being the one to stamp that out. “They were children. Tell me you wouldn’t have done the same.”

He doesn’t wait for a response, stumbling on autopilot back to his room, sinks down into his duvet and succumbs at last to the panic attack.

When it’s done - for now, at least - he lies in his own sweat and taut muscles, drained in every sense of the word.

What the fuck is he doing?

Virgil doesn’t understand why he’s pushing away all the people who love him, nor why the thought of exposing this ugly, aching part of himself to them is utterly unbearable. Existing like this - so miserably and shamefully - is unbearable and he can’t face it anymore. He wants to cry. His chest aches with it and yet he can’t even muster the energy to do that.

Instead he lies there for hours, mind racing with reminders of his uselessness, body aching from his failings, soul longing for an endless sleep.

#thunderbirds are go #virgil tracy #littleoldrachel writes #happy belated birthday nutty!

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