#or is the intense degree of my interest in and emotional responses to my girlfriend itself some kind of weird problem unique to me

[unopenablebox]

i'm fighting demons but the demon is making biweekly posts about how perfect 🌸 is

[sunflowersandsapphires]

The Sun Will Rise

Wake Up, Chapter 8

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pairing: Matt Murdock x fem!reader 

summary: In an attempt to stop the advances of an unwanted suitor, Matt Murdock accidentally condemns you to being his fake girlfriend.

warnings: sexual assault themes and descriptions, if non-con themes trigger you please do not read. other warnings: swearing, misogynistic language, violence

This chapter is very intense. I tried to keep the S/A stuff as not graphic as possible to avoid triggering people but it is very much there and the violence is more present than any other chapter.

a/n: Today has been a fucking DAY yall. My new cat got sick (he’s ok he just ate too fast and then got sick on me and my bed which was gross), I am having issues with pay equity at work, and trying to deal with utility issues in my house. I am very sorry for the late update. PLEASE let me know how you feel about this chapter, your comments and reblogs literally make my day every week. 

w/c: ~4.5k

Four years ago, you’d been desperate for a change.  Despite spending thousands on a fancy degree, you had gotten nowhere in the legal field and your job waiting tables at a diner in Queens barely paid the bills, though you were grateful for the work. 

Pouring coffee and taking orders wasn’t the worst job you’d ever had and the majority of customers during your shifts were sweet. You played the role of “cute, friendly waitress” well, making even the grouchiest patrons appreciate your soft smile and quick response time. Maybe this persona you’d adopted in your efforts to avoid your crippling anxiety was the reason he started looking your way. Perhaps it was your obvious desperation to be liked. Whatever it was that drew his attention, it was your eventual disinterest that kept it. 

The first day you met James Lannister was a shitty one. You’d worked a double shift, meaning you had been less than perky towards the end of it, leading to stupid mistakes and screaming customers. Emotions were running high when he took a seat in your section, so his calm demeanor and attentive smile drew you in. 

He’d only made pleasant conversation with you the first few visits. Asking about your day, your week, your hobbies, your interests, your family, your aspirations. Anyone would’ve been eager to spill their guts to him, he was quite charming. The way that his green eyes pooled with fascination as you spoke was almost reverent. No man in your life had ever made you feel that way, like nothing else in the room mattered. 

Which is why the red flags zipped right by you without triggering your internal security system. Day after day, he’d visit your place of work after his own shift at the Pro Bono Association. He’d ask his questions and encourage you to ask your own, which led to a standing invitation to sit with him when there was a lull in traffic at the restaurant. Your shared interest in the legal system and his willingness to share a slice of that life with you compelled you to take him up on the offer. 

Next came the gifts. Little things, at first. Large tips, suggestions for weekend entertainment complete with a gift card or fully funded ticket, books to further your legal studies after work. It was strange, but the attention was divine. He wasn’t an ugly man, and you’d never felt noticed like this before. 

Eventually, he’d goaded you into joining him and his wife for dinner at their house. Mrs. Lannister was beautiful and cunning. On the surface, she was always polite, reassuring, more than willing to host you or have you join them in public, but there was an ominous undercurrent that you never could place. The way she looked at you when her husband turned his back was almost murderous, but you were so caught up in the idea of being wanted that you glossed over the tension between the two of you. 

You were lonely, sure, but you never wanted romance or…other things…from Lannister. To you, he was a mentor, an idol. Someone to live vicariously through while in a transition period in life. But after accepting all of his kindnesses, you’d unknowingly crossed a line. 

Before it all fell apart, it almost seemed like universal intervention. During a seemingly mundane conversation, Lannister clasped his hands over yours with a giddy expression. It seemed that there was an entry level position opening up at the PBA office in Queens and he thought you’d be perfect for it. Not only would it be a substantial pay raise from your current position, but there were opportunities for growth and he would be your boss. 

At the time, it felt like a miracle. Your ticket to the next stage of your life. And it was, but letting your guard down for that shark ended up being the biggest regret of your life. 

Transitioning into your new role wasn’t seamless, but you took it in stride. Your eagerness to take on complex projects and expand the mission of the organization impressed the more seasoned employees. Lannister began taking you to lunches, galas, drinks, anywhere that he could introduce you to his network of attorneys. It was thrilling to be thrown into the world you’d always dreamed of and received with such open arms. 

For a few months, it was pure bliss. Until the night you placed your first case. 

Placing the case itself was unproblematic, you were happy that you fit into the role so well—and you expressed such sentiments to Lannister who invited you over to his house to celebrate. Arriving with a bottle of your favorite wine, it was immediately clear that something had changed. The once cozy house was in absolute disarray, riddled with empty liquor bottles and boxes of feminine clothes. And, although Lannister had implied there would be others there, you found him alone. 

Lannister noticed your wandering eyes and explained that his wife had left him. He told you not to worry about that and to focus on your personal success. The two of you enjoyed some good food and cheap wine, the older man drifting closer by the glass. Eventually, you felt your eyes growing heavy and he insisted that you stay over given the late hour. 

That night, you dreamt of a large shadow, looking over you while you slept, warm touch dancing over your clothes. You tried to protect yourself, but your arms wouldn’t respond to the commands your brain sent. When you woke up, you found your skirt unzipped. 

It got blurry after that. Lannister’s very public divorce led to inopportune inebriation, massive hangovers in the office, lewd comments, and wandering hands. While you still accompanied him to events, he began claiming you in public in increasingly repulsive ways. Holding you by the waist, kissing your cheeks, stroking his fingers over your neck, using that disgusting pet name. My little Princess. 

You only tried expressing your discomfort once before it escalated. You’d approached him in his office after lunch, when he was likely to be more sober, and hesitantly asked if he would consider pulling back. You’d been met with the most terrifying display of anger you’d ever seen. You hazily recall books being thrown, hits landing along your arms and torso, insults being hurled at you. 

He had made you. You would be nothing without him. You were ungrateful and whoreish and conniving just like his wife. While the memories faded, the scars from your skin splitting over the hinges of his office door still shone in certain lights. 

After that his actions were deliberate. His lingering touches scalded you. Being alone with him meant sentencing yourself to torture. When he was angry, he’d call you into his office to “talk it through.” To your absolute horror, these talks often involved a locked door and drunk hands groping your trembling form. 

For weeks you endured his abrupt switches between calculated insults, physical abuse, emotional manipulation, and inappropriate contact. You were barely alive, going through the motions and slowly convincing yourself that you deserved it. You’d fallen out of contact with your friends, were so emotionally fragile that a stern look from a stranger could send you into a panic attack, and you found yourself so nauseous that the first few hours of each day were spent hugging a toilet. 

It was clear you needed help, but Lannister was your boss and his threats terrified you. He’d made it clear that if anyone found out about his behavior, it would cost you your livelihood. As an incredibly well-known attorney with an impeccable record, there was no way you’d win in court, he had too many friends on the force or the bench. Not to mention how new you were to the organization. Despite his growing alcoholism, your coworkers were as enamored with Lannister as you used to be, the chances of them believing you were minimal. 

So, you stayed, trapped in a nightmare of your own unintentional creation. Until a position opened up in Manhattan. 

Applying on a whim, you’d kept your application a secret, not expecting to even get an interview. But, apparently the managing attorney across the East River had heard your name through the grapevine because she reached out within the week to schedule a lunch with you. 

The heavy weight that hung over your shoulders like a shadow has lessened considerably in the days leading up to the lunch. The possibility of escaping the hell you were living in quickly appeared like the light at the end of the tunnel. 

Manhattan was beautiful and the employees of the PBA office in Midtown were ecstatic to meet you. It was the best day you’d had in months, until you got back to your own office. 

Realizing you’d forgotten an important file you needed for a clinic the next day, you walked briskly through the quiet building, hoping to get in and out without running into your supervisor. Unfortunately, the world was not that gracious. 

As you rummaged through your desk, the overhead lights turned on making you flinch. Your hands stilled over the file cabinet, your breath catching on your throat. 

“You little bitch.” Lannister was furious if the rage dripping from his tone was any indication. “Tell me, Princess, why did I receive a call from Midtown about how happy they were to have finally met my assistant?”

You couldn’t speak, your throat constricting as if wrapped with fabric. Frozen in place, you heard him approaching and you cowered. 

“Thought you could go behind my back? Leave me high and dry without a warning? You owe me, little princess. After all I’ve done for you…”

Whether from fear or something else entirely, your brain blocked out the rest of his actions that night. You came to shaking on the floor, bloody and partially undressed, but you weren’t alone. Lannister had disappeared, thankfully, but your coworker stepped into your office with a shaky inhale. 

Erica was a young attorney who’d started a few weeks before you. Your emotional state had made it difficult to grow close to anyone in the office, but she’d always seemed sweet. And, fortunately for you in the end, she’d heard the commotion your boss had caused before storming home. 

As your wonderful coworker helped you clean yourself up, you tearily confessed the secrets you’d worked so hard to hide. Disgusted, Erica had encouraged you to speak to HR and you’d submitted a complaint later that day with her assistance. 

You owed Erica a great debt. Over the period of the investigation, she’d become a fixture in your office, making sure to keep you at a distance from your abuser. Without your prompting, she’d offered the committee looking into the allegations her full testimony. You were quite certain that her statement is the reason Lannister was fired. 

In the weeks following his termination, you felt like a new woman. You’d moved to a cute little place in Hell’s Kitchen and begun your new work as a volunteer coordinator. While you still struggled with crowds of lawyers and the taste of alcohol, a good therapist and a decent amount of time had helped you heal a considerable amount. 

Enough to open yourself up for the possibility of a relationship, which you weren’t sure you’d ever want after everything you’d been through. Meeting Matt had changed that though, turning ‘never’ into a ‘not right now’. 

Sweet, considerate, adorable Matt who had brought you more comfort than you ever thought you deserved. Who was probably still furious with you for falling for him, but you couldn’t help but plead with the universe to send him anyway. Please, Matty, please come for me. 

As the muggy van rumbled over potholes and uneven roads, you pictured his beautiful face. The way his eyes crinkled when he smiled. How his brow furrowed with concern over the most minor harm that had befallen you. The beautiful way his lips melded with yours as a single kiss made you feel weightless. You regretted not kissing him one last time before ruining what you had. 

I’m sorry, darling. Please don’t let them take me from you. I’m not ready to let you go just yet. 

As Matt neared the 4th floor, a knawing pit of dread grew in his stomach. He could smell your tears, newer than those that had fallen after he’d left, but your heartbeat was nowhere to be found. Frantically pacing the hallway, he quickly noticed your suitcase abandoned a few feet from the door to your shared room. Crouching down, he tilted his head, evaluating the scene. The scent of your fear coated the floor, walls, and fabric of your bag. You must have been terrified for it to penetrate your surroundings to that degree. Underneath your pheromones, Matt shuddered with rage as the sickly saccharine fragrance of Beatrice Snyder’s reached his sensitive nose. Mingling with her perfume was a different smell, smoky and dark. 

You’d been cornered by Snyder and an unidentified man, he was sure of it. Fumbling to find the right end of his key card, he threw open the door and stripped out of his suit. Given that he’d intended to share the night with you, he’d intentionally left his body armor at home. A black long sleeve tee and scarf around his face would have to do tonight. 

Stepping back into the empty hallway, he fled to the stairs. While the scent of your fear only fueled his dark anger, it was strong enough to leave a trail down the stairs and out the back door into the cool night air. As inconspicuously as possible, Matt navigated through the building, dodging employees and guests successfully until he reached the loading dock behind the kitchen. Your scent stopped here, replaced by the smell of gasoline. 

No, no, no. Where are you, angel? What happened to you? 

Matt growled in frustration, spinning around desperately searching for any sign of you, he ripped his phone out of his pocket and pressed your speed dial, hoping that you could still reach your phone. 

Receiving nothing but your voicemail message in return, he felt his fists clench. “It’s going to be ok, my beautiful girl. I’m coming.” 

Replacing the phone in his pocket, he took off in the direction of the strong scent of auto fuel, praying to God that the most recent vehicle would lead him to you. 

The van jolted to an abrupt stop and you slid along the dirty carpet into a seat in front of you. Your back ached from the jostling you’d gotten on the ride to whatever destination you’d apparently arrived at, and you could feel the imprint of thousands of plastic carpet strands that had melded with the flesh on your cheek during the drive. The sound of car doors slamming and the heavy footfalls following made you strain against your binds one final time. 

A large, rough hand snatched your ankle, yanking you towards the night air at the tail end of the vehicle. Kicking your legs wildly, you flopped like a dying fish along the carpet as you were slowly pulled outside. The fingers at your ankle moved to wrap around your throat, forcing the airway to constrict. Struggling fiercely against your captor, you heard a familiar, rasping voice from behind you snarl, “Shut her up, you idiot!” 

Lannister’s goon pressed a sharp implement against the soft flesh of your stomach. “Keep movin’ and you’ll lose a lot more than your man, bitch.” 

As your squirming died down, reality set in and tears began flooding down your face. It was over. He’d won. All of the efforts that went into putting distance between the two of you were meaningless. He’d found you, and Snyder was going to take Matt from you because of it. 

You were roughly stood on your feet and forced to move in the trail of Lannister and his other goon. Eventually, you were forced into a cold metal chair, binds attached to the stiff bars of the furniture. Your blindfold was ripped off, though your gag remained. James Lannister’s ferocious grin appeared in your line of vision, making you flinch. “So glad we’ve been reunited, Princess. We’re gonna have some fun.” 

The group had taken you to what appeared to be an abandoned warehouse. There were broken wooden palettes and scraps of steel scattered around the floor. Holes in the sheet metal walls allowed cold, winter air to blow crisp waves of wind through the space, raising the hairs on your neck. A gaping hole in the roof above you showers you in moonlight, illuminating a small s circle around you and Lannister. 

A knife glinted in your peripheral vision and you whimpered, squirming involuntarily. Lannister grabbed a fistful of your shirt, yanking you forward with a growl. “The more you squirm, the more damage I do, little princess. I’d hold still if I were you.” 

With that warning, he slashed a jagged cut in your top, nicking the skin along your collarbone. A hand ran over your hair, grasping the strands and tugging so that your face was turned towards your captor’s once again. “There’s my obedient little pet. Was wondering where she’d gone.” 

Bile rose in your throat as Lannister stroked his massive hands along your face, planting heated, bourbon-soaked kisses along your neck and down your chest. Prying away your torn clothes, he turned to face the goons. “Is it ready?” 

“Yes, sir.” One deep voice responded from the shadows of the warehouse beyond your visible surroundings. “Before I have my fun,” Lannister stepped aside, revealing a tall dark shape topped with a blinking red light. “I’d like to record a confession, dear. For my sanity, and for the board to know the truth.” 

Raising his barely slurred voice, he turned to the camera. 

“State your name, for the record.”

“Please don’t do this. I don’t—“ Your pleading morphed into a screech of pain as the point of the blade ripped a gash in the exposed skin of your shoulder. 

“Wrong answer, pet.” Lannister took a swig from a practically empty bottle of liquor that had seemingly materialized out of thin air. A trail of blood wormed its way to the cement floor, pooling at your feet. You stared at the river of red liquid for a moment before stammering out your name. 

“That’s a good pet. What’s your relation to me, my dear?” Chucking the now empty bottle aside, it shattered at your feet, spraying you with cheap alcohol and pieces of glass. 

“I worked with you. In Queens.” A smaller knife plunged into the meat of your thigh and you screamed in agony. The larger of the two goons shuffled into your wavering vision, smiling as he wiped your blood from his hands. 

“More specific, Princess.” Lannister spat at you. 

“You were my boss.” 

“That’s right. Now tell us, how did you get me fired?” 

You sobbed, “I didn’t, I wasn’t—“ Grasping the knife still planted in your leg, Lannister twisted it, grabbing your throat. 

“Yes you did, you miserable bitch. You ruined my fucking life. I lost my divorce settlement, my job, my house, my reputation. All because I took an ungrateful slut under my wing.” Ripping the blade from your body, he hurled you to the ground. 

“TELL THE TRUTH!” Lannister roared, sending a brutal kick into your chest and knocking the air from your lungs. “Tell them that you seduced me for months and then used me to land a promotion. TELL THEM THAT YOU TOOK MY ENTIRE LIFE FROM ME AFTER I’D GIVEN YOU EVERYTHING!”

Stomping over your body again, he stumbled backwards allowing you to cough out a response. “I—I took everything f-from you. I was un-ungrateful.” 

Lannister cackled, pulling you from the ground by your uninjured arm. “Turn the camera off. They won’t want to see this next part.” 

The goons stepped forward to follow your former boss’s orders, but a piercing sound from outside halted them in their tracks. A horrific shriek, the sound of metal grinding on metal, echoed through the warehouse. All three men froze, looking to each other as if expecting to find the cause of the noise at the hands of their fellow assholes. Dropping you hard onto your shoulder, Lannister turned towards the source of the creaking and your head lolled after him.

As the door to the warehouse slammed open, you cried in relief as your weak gaze made out the black clad figure against the night sky. Daredevil. Your devil. He came for you. Tears poured down your cheeks and your limbs tensed, Matt’s presence drawing you in like a magnet. 

Lannister huffs out a laugh. “The fuck do you want, shadow man? Don’t you have robberies to stop?” At his sides, the other men shuffled nervously, knives gripped firmly as they awaited their next command. 

Matt stalked forward into the warehouse, his body stiff as it held his rage back, visible tension like that of water building against a dam. Fists clenched, he prowled an arc around your three kidnappers. “Step the fuck away from her.” His deep timbre was pitched exceedingly low with pure fury and it sent ripples of goosebumps across your bare skin. 

Drawing the handgun from the back pocket of his slacks, Lannister stepped towards you once more. “Do your worst, Devil. She’s not leaving here alive.” The world slowed, as if the air around you was suddenly thick as molasses. Your eyes were processing as much as they could as dread settled in your stomach. The barrel of the gun moved across Lannister’s body and pointed at you as his meaty thumb cocked the weapon. 

Simultaneously, Matt’s athletic form rocketed forward, skillfully dodging the swings from both of your unnamed assailants and leaping at Lannister. A gunshot rang and you traced the bullet as it soared towards you. Suddenly, your vision went white as pain seared through your body following the pointed metal cylinder as it tore through your abdomen. Screaming in anguish, your ears rang with a high pitched tone, the flash of white across your sight fading to black. The only thing you could focus on was the burning agony as the puddle of your blood seeped into your torn clothes. Forcefully shutting your eyes, your inhales turned shallow, and you prayed to your beloved Matthew that he would get you out of here before you took your last breath. 

Matt’s skin was alight with rage as he maniacally tore through the three brutes to reach your collapsed form. The head captor’s words barely registered in his ears over the deafening sound of a gun being pulled. No. Do not let it be her, take me. The safety was undone as Matt ripped one man’s shoulder from its socket, using the falter in his steps to knock him unconscious. He needed to be faster. He had to reach you. Planting a hefty kick into the next guy’s stomach, he brought his billy club up to meet the force of the man’s own body weight bringing him down. A hollow thud of a body on cement meant there was one attacker left. And then came the gunshot. 

As the bullet escaped the barrel it was encased in, Matt roared, the devil inside him fully consuming his consciousness as tackled the shooter. Knuckles connected with a jawbone, then the softer cartilage of a nose, then the lumpy space of a rib cage. Matt poured every emotion he had into this criminal, each punch holding seeds of guilt and regret and desperation. 

The smell of your blood cascading over the dirty floor broke him from his trance. Dropping the battered body of your captor to the floor, he dove beside you, hands hovering over your body as he assessed the damage. 

Sobbing in relief, he cupped your face as gently as he could. “It’s ok, angel. You’re gonna be ok. They’re not gonna hurt you anymore. Just breathe with me, please sweetness, breathe.” 

Your shallow pants stuttered as your hand weakly grasped his shirt. “Ma-Matty?” 

“Yah sweetness, it’s me. I’m right here. Gonna get you out of here, ok? Just hold on.” Ripped a strip of fabric from his shirt, he pressed it over your largest wound, biting back a pained sound of his own when you hissed. “I know, I know, angel. I have to stop the bleeding.” 

The soft smell of salt melded with the metallic odor of your blood. You were crying, holding on to the fistful of his shirt like it was a lifeline. “Y-you came for me? I’m—I’m so-sorry” 

Stroking your face lightly before he dialed 911, he cooed. “Of course I came, lovely. I’ll always come for you. Always. Now you just focus on breathing. In and out, sweetness. Good girl, just like that.” 

At the operator’s greeting, he spit out a rough command for police and an ambulance, giving a brief description of the events that had happened. Next, he pleaded for their help. There was no way he alone could get you to a hospital in time. 

“They were holding her hostage. She’s been shot, stabbed too. Lost a lot of blood. She’s still alive but she needs medical attention, please hurry.” He spit out the approximate location, scrubbing tears from his face as he pocketed his phone. 

Pressing his forehead to yours delicately, he whispered. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, my sweet girl. It’s going to be ok. I’m so sorry.” Your hand raised shakily to cradle his nape. 

“Matty,” Your voice was weak, but determined. “I—I need you to know—“ 

“Hey, this isn’t one of those moments, sweet girl. You can tell me later, when you’re healing. You focus on—“ 

“No, please.” You begged, he fought back a choked cry so that you could say your piece. 

“I love you. S-so much.” You heaved a breath.  “I’m sorry that I ruined—“

“Shh, you didn’t ruin anything.” Matt chided gently, tears slipping faster after you'd confirmed his previous mistake. “I love you too, my wonderful, sweet girl. I won’t let them take you from me. I won’t.” 

“I’m sorry.” You choked out, and then you fell out of consciousness. 

Matt collapsed against your chest, clinging to the sound of your weak pulse as his body trembled with sobs. He planted soft kisses to your hair and cheeks, stroking lightly over your skin as he willed God to save you. 

The distant sound of sirens forced Matt to pry his face from your pummeled body. As the sound of vehicles approached, he made sure to alert the paramedics to your presence before taking back to the shadows. Hearing the clamor of attendants around you, he made a promise. “I’ll be there when you wake, angel. I’m sorry.”

Taglist: @maladaptivedaydreamingbum @scoliobean @harperdoodle @mattkinsella @leikelle @sweetbee0108 @dark-night-sky-99 @fallen-angels2213 @will-delete-this-later-probably @cheshirecat484 @thornbushrose @vernon-dursley

[nugnthopkns]

i know you get deja vu

word count: 1.4k

warnings: explicit fem!reader, cursing, it's mild angst up in this b

recommended listening: deja vu | olivia rodrigo

a/n: wrote this short little ditty while avoiding my adult responsibilities lmao. it is not great but i really like the premise, maybe one day i'll do something more with it

Your eyes have to be failing you.

There’s no way he showed up, let alone with another girl – who looks shockingly similar to you. She’s a more polished, more refined version of yourself, and anger bubbles in your stomach the moment you see him walk through the door with her in tow.

When your parents informed you they’d invited Pierre-Luc to your graduation party you shrugged it off. Their reasoning was he’d been a large part of your college experience, and it was sound enough logic. You stumbled across him in a coffee shop during your freshman year and quickly fell into a romance that lasted until a few months ago. The breakup was rather brutal, though your family doesn’t know that, so you didn’t expect him to stop by your parents’ house to congratulate you on completing your degree.

Much to your distaste he does make an appearance, with who you presume to be his new girlfriend. You don’t want to stare at the pair, but you can’t help it – they look good together, possibly better than you and Pierre did. However, you notice that the young woman has on a dress that’s identical to one hanging at the back of your closest. Pierre had bought it for you when you accompanied him to France one offseason, and the thought of him replicating the trip with her crosses your mind.

Finding it too much to be in the same room as him, you excuse yourself from a conversation with some of your father’s business partners and grab your sister by the elbow on the way into the sunroom.

“What’s the matter with you?” She grumbles, upset you pulled her away from a conversation with a boy she has a tiny crush on.

“He’s here,” you whisper shout, doing your best to inconspicuously point to the culprit of your dampened spirits.

“Who?”

“Luc.”

Her expression softens, and it’s clear she feels sorry for you. “Shit. I didn’t think he was actually going to show up.”

You let out a rather strangled laugh. “Me either, but he’s here and I don’t know what to do.”

The two of you stay tucked inside for a few more moments, deriving a plan that gets your ex-boyfriend off the premises as fast as possible without him seeing you. She heads outside first, making sure to grab one of your cousins who’s obsessed with hockey on her way. Together they make a beeline for Pierre, who is beyond excited to catch up with your family. You slip through the door and into a conversation with some fellow graduates in the back corner of the yard. It isn’t interesting, just about future plans, but it keeps you occupied. You’re careful to keep you back turned and your voice low – anything to keep your existence inconspicuous.

Your sister keeps Pierre-Luc busy, chatting to him about how the playoffs went and what his goals for the offseason are. A small crowd gathers around him, mostly just extended family members who haven’t seen him in a while, and he indulges their questions with a kind smile. You can tell your luck is running out, that he’s finally going to spot you in the crowd and rush over to say whatever he came here for. The fates are cruel, and at that moment your mother calls everyone into a circle for a toast.

“I want to thank you all for coming,” she says, pulling you to stand beside her. You can tell Pierre is looking at you, but you avert your eyes and look anywhere but him. Your mother continues talking. “We’re incredibly proud of our daughter for completing her degree, and we can’t wait to see what she does next. If you’re here, we appreciate the role you played in her success. To Y/N!”

Your name is chanted like a chorus, and your eyes meet Pierre’s as he raises his glass. The intensity of his stare makes you blush, and you bury your head into your father’s shoulder, playing it off as being overcome with emotion. More toasts ensue, including one where you thank everyone for their continued support, and then the cake is cut. You try to slip inside, praying that Pierre-Luc and his date will leave, but the devil himself grabs your elbows as you open the back door.

“Congratulations,” he says softly, accent thicker then the last time you heard his voice. You can’t lie to yourself – he looks good. The sunshine has done wonders for his skin, and the tattoos peeking out from his shirt sleeve look new.

“Thank you.”

You offer nothing more to the conversation, which clearly upsets him, but he doesn’t do anything other than knit his brows together. It makes sense that you wouldn’t want to speak to him since the last time you did was the screaming match that ended your relationship. You go to make your exit, but the small girl hanging off Pierre’s side speaks.

“It’s so nice to meet you,” she smiles. “I’m Maisie. Luc talks about you a lot.”

“Pardon?” You’re caught off guard. Why would he talk about you to his new girlfriend?

The man in question shifts uncomfortably, like he’s going to get caught in a lie. “Yeah, it’s so nice that you guys are still friends.”

There it is. Saying that you split amicably is probably the only way he could convince her to attend this stupid party in the first place. “Ah,” you sigh, “Well not everyone is afforded the same luxury.”

Against your better judgement, you compliment her dress. Maisie thanks you graciously, explaining that Pierre bought it for her and once he’s cleared to leave Columbus they’ll be taking a trip to France, with a pit-stop in Portugal because she’s never been. Your insides churn, but you manage to keep a glaringly fake smile plastered on your face. The conversation shifts, and you find out that she also studies English Literature and expects to graduate next year. You laugh off all the coincidences, but it’s obvious to you and Pierre-Luc that Maisie is a substitute for the person who came before her.

“Why don’t you go get us some drinks babe?” Pierre asks, and the girl skips away after reaching on her tip-toes to press a kiss to his cheek.

You fiddle nervously with the hem of your dress, anxious to be alone with him. “It isn’t what it looks like,” he starts, but you cut him off.

“It’s exactly what it looks like Luc, and don’t you fucking dare say otherwise.”

He lets out a defeated sigh. “So what if it is? I think it’s glaringly obvious that I still love you.”

No shit you think, but you bite your tongue and say something more respectable. “I’d say so. She’s exactly like me, but hopefully she won’t mind being asked to put her whole life on hold.” There’s a bite to your tone that you can’t help, but it sets Pierre-Luc on edge.

“You can’t still be fucking on about that.”

You’re seeing red now, irate that he is still choosing to minimize your emotions. “I am! Because you asked me not to continue school, which is something I explicitly told you I wanted to do, just so I could be a more conventional NHL girlfriend. And then you broke up with me when I said I wouldn’t do it.” You inhale a deep breath before continuing. “I hope you have fun with Maisie in France. You should take her to that little café we went to, in Bordeaux, where we ate so much food we couldn’t walk back to the hotel. And I hope that every time she looks at you like you hang the moon, you remember that you’re recycling our entire relationship because you let it fall apart at the seams.”

Perhaps your emotions got the best of you, because the look on Pierre-Luc’s face is nothing short of shock. You’re taken aback too – your parents raised you better than to say hurtful things, but seeing him again brought up a myriad of things you hadn't yet dealt with. Without another word, you spin on your heel and head inside, slamming the door behind you. It shouldn’t upset you this much, after so many months, but for a reason you’re unwilling to admit to yourself it does.

You sit in the bay window of your childhood bedroom, wrapped in a blanket even though it’s the beginning of summer, and watch as Pierre-Luc presses a kiss to her forehead before thanking your parents for inviting him one last time. Just like him, every relationship you have for the rest of your life will be an attempt to replicate the love you had for Pierre – a never-ending circle of deja vu.

☼☼☼☼

taglist: @samsteel @kiedhara @tortito @boqvistsbabe @iwantahockeyhimbo @himbos-on-ice @2manytabsopen if you want to be added shoot me an ask :)

[jinterlude]

Grow a Pear

—Requested by @shadowsremedy: Seokjin + Kuroko’s Basketball + School Gym as part of @bangtan-headquarters​ Bangtan Anime Club Drabble Event!

—Pairing: Seokjin x Reader (Female OC) [feat. Seungcheol from SVT]

—Genre(s): Humor, Slight-Angst, & Slight-Fluff

—AUs/Tropes: Anime-verse, Kuroko’s Basketball!AU, High School!AU, Basketball Player!Seokjin, Basketball Club Manager!Reader, Opposites Attract Trope

—Warning(s) & Rating: Swearing, Reader threatening bodily harm onto Seokjin, Shameless flirting, & Jealousy from an old middle school rival / PG-15

—Word Count: 1.6K

—Summary: In which news of playing against a certain team sparks a rather interesting memory...

—A/N: This drabble is based on episodes 52 & 53 of KnB, but you do not have to watch the series to understand this story’s overall premise! It is also inspired by Kesha’s song “Grow a Pear” (hence the title LOL) because I immediately think of Kise’s character. Since Seokjin reminds me of that 2D pretty boy, I decided to write a fun story! 

“Hey, ___!” 

A faint hum exits your lips as your eyes remain fixated on your player statistics book. You flip between a few pages with the gears in your brain working in overdrive, almost forgetting for a split moment that Kaijo’s basketball captain asked for your attention. 

“Yes, Sungwon?” You reply, closing the book and tucking it underneath your arm. 

Pursing his lips, Sungwon strides over to you, leaning against the stage inside the gym. Don’t you love playing inside an auditorium? 

“So…” He begins but grows silent. How on Earth is he supposed to ask you to be the sacrificial lamb? How will he tell you that you’ve been chosen to say the team’s resident narcissist yet talented prodigy that Kaijo will play against Fukuda Sugo? Specifically, they’re playing against a certain someone with a rather colorful history with yourself and said prodigy. 

Tiny creases form on your forehead as your brows knit together. You know that carefree look anywhere. More often than not, you become chosen to do a specific task that no other teammate wants to do—talking to Kim Seokjin. 

“Now, before you say no—”

“Nope.”  

“You didn’t even hear what I have to say.” 

“Doesn’t matter. My answer is still the same. No.” 

With that, you turn on your heel, and not even a few steps in, you bump into the one person you don’t want to see. 

“Princess!”

And to think…

You were having such a fantastic day…

“What do you want, Seokjin?” You question, grabbing the statistics book from your underarm and flipping it open to some random page. You already have the data mesmerized like the back of your hand. You just want to appear busy in front of the arrogant pretty boy. 

“Well, besides you finally acknowledging that you’re my girlfriend? A little bird told me that we’re playing against his team in the Quarterfinals,” Seokjin replies, his tone dropping near the end. This serious expression slowly takes over his handsome features, almost sending shivers down your spine. 

If looks can kill, then Seokjin is guilty of murder in the first degree...

Thank God he chose to attend a different school. Who knows what will happen if two people who absolutely despise each other play on the same team. 

“Remind me to thank Namjoon for that…” You mutter, slightly shaking your head as you slowly draw in your breath. Then, a force, light chuckle escapes your lips, personally finding it rather humorous of the current situation. 

“Anyway, so how are you feeling about playing against the dude who has a thing for your sloppy seconds?” You tease, attempting to lighten up the situation. 

Seokjin’s brow perks up, “Sloppy seconds?” he repeats, a tiny grin form on his handsome face. 

You nod, “Well yeah...I mean, he did steal your ex-girlfriend from you.” 

In response, the arrogant basketball player hums. However, this exciting gleam enters the corners of his eyes. 

What is he thinking now? 

Suddenly, he turns to you, his gaze piercing into yours with this unexplainable emotion glazing over his eyes. 

“Oh? I mean, he did come close to stealing you away from me that one day.” He states as this bright smile dances across his gorgeous face. 

For a split second, your cheeks become hot. Your heart practically drums against your chest. Shit. Even your palms clam up, sticking to the cover of the player statistics book. 

What is this feeling? 

Then, it dawns on you. This nervousness is the same emotion you felt when you comforted Seokjin that fateful day—well, supported him in your own unique way…

Tapping your pencil against your chin, a soft growl emits from your lips as you try to figure out the best course of action. The Captain, Kim Namjoon, previously asked you to develop a plan to preserve the Generation of Miracle’s stamina, specifically when using their rather unique talents. At first, you thought Namjoon was flat out insane for asking such a request. Like, you’d have to take into account their height and weight difference. Oh! You couldn’t forget that you also keep in mind their current talent levels. All while these calculations occur during an official game with another team.

Yeah...

Namjoon might as well tell you to put on a fucking jersey while he’s at it. 

Rubbing the sides of your forehead, you can’t help but let out a long, harsh breath as this throbbing sensation enters the left side of your head. 

“Hey, manager ___.” You hear a familiar voice, interrupting your rather irritating calculations. You look up from the tiny pile of scattered papers containing player statistics. However, you don’t bother spouting words towards the overly cocky player. Instead, you merely hum in response, unknowingly irking the basketball player. 

Plastering on a smug grin, the person leans against the stage, quickly glancing at what you’re doing. 

“So, is that the special project Namjoon asked you to do for him?” The arrogant male student asks. 

“Yep, and shouldn’t you be practicing Seungcheol?” You question back, raising a brow. 

Seungcheol scoffs lightly, “Why? I mean, I already earned a permanent spot on the regular team, so…” He trails on, chuckling to himself. He finds the mere thought of his spot being taken away quite humorous. 

You mentally roll your eyes. God, you don’t know who’s the bigger arrogant fool. Him or—

“Yo, Seokjin!” shouts Jungkook, running up to the new recruit. 

Ah, Kim Seokjin. He recently joined the basketball club just a few months ago. He’s already showing promise despite being a second-year student. Shit. Seokjin’s talents have rapidly progressed to the point that Namjoon took notice of him and was promoted to first-string just last week. 

Yet, you can’t quite put your finger on it, but something is holding Seokjin back. 

But what? 

Before you become entirely lost in your thoughts, you hear Seungcheol’s arrogant voice taunt Seokjin. 

Oh, great…

You swiftly stand up from your seat and rush over to the argumentative duo. But as you draw near to the quarrelsome pair, you instantly halt. What is this intense atmosphere lingering in the air? 

And why do you suddenly feel something other than agitation towards Seokjin? 

“W-what did you say?” 

“You heard me, Kim Seokjin. Whoever wins our 1v1 match earns the right to call ___ his girlfriend.” 

“Hold on. You can’t just call dibs on ___!” shouts Jungkook in complete and utter shock. 

Instantly slapping yourself back, in reality, you snatch a basketball from an innocent player and roughly throw it at Seungcheol, anger visible all over your face. 

Sadly for you, the annoying prick catches it with ease, smirking at you. 

“What’s the matter, babe? You don’t believe that I can put Seokjin in his place?” He coos, further taunting Seokjin. What sets the handsome prodigy over the edge is when Seungcheol abruptly pulls you against his chest, dropping the basketball in the process. His cheek brushes against yours, making you want to gag. 

Just as you’re about to violently elbow him in the stomach, Seokjin shoves Seungcheol away before forcefully throwing the discarded ball at him. 

“You start.” 

“This should be fun.” 

But it was just the opposite... 

It was a complete slaughter with Seokjin on his hands and knees, panting and sweating profusely. His eyes widened from the shock of his defeat. 

Not only has he lost horribly against Seungcheol, but he also lost you—or so he believes. 

“So, how about that date, baby girl? After all, you’re now my girlfriend.” Seungcheol asks, making sure that Seokjin can hear him. 

“Yeah, I don’t date dudes who have a thing for other fellas’ sloppy seconds.” You bluntly state, turning towards Yoongi and Jungkook, “I mean, first it was Yerin, right? The one that was going around the entire fucking school saying that she was Seokjin’s girlfriend. Oh, I feel sorry for her since it was just last week, you were chasing after her, and now you’re after me.” You say, clicking your tongue in fake disappointment. 

Seungcheol’s arrogant smile vanishes and is now replaced with a scowl. 

“Let me ask you this, why are you obsessed with Seokjin’s sloppy seconds? Like there are a million girls in this damn school who, oddly enough, would love to be your arm candy. Yet you go after the ones that either show interest in Seokjin or who Seokjin’s interested in. Like, dude. Stop. It’s honestly creepy to the point that I firmly believe you have a weird obsession with him.” You finish as you walk over to Seokjin, offering him a helping hand. 

Seokjin faintly smiles, grabbing your hand, as he pulls himself up. Soon, his smile becomes bright. His sweet smile almost blinds you—and makes your heart skip a beat. 

“I knew you had a soft spot for me, ___.” 

“Don’t push it, Jinnie boy.” 

Softly shaking your head, you playfully shove Seokjin, snapping him out of his thoughts. You then jump down from the stage, having popped yourself up there moments earlier. 

“Well, all I have to say is that Seungcheol better watch out. He hasn’t seen your ‘Perfect Copy’ in action yet.” You warmly smile as you make your way towards the exit but soon halt. You glance over your shoulder, maintaining that sweet smile, and say,

“Besides, he’s no match for you with your girlfriend cheering you on from the bench.”

“Right…” He mumbles, totally ignoring your words. Then, it hits him as if someone doused him with cold water. 

“Wait! Did you just call yourself my girlfriend?!!” Seokjin hollers, chasing after you. 

“I don’t know. Win tomorrow’s match, and I’ll let you know.”

“Oh, that’s cruel, princess…”

Grow a Pear is copyright 2021 by jinterlude, all rights reserved.

[aleatoryalarmalligator]

Forgive me, I’m here to vent again.

Things have seemed a little better, at least I’m starting to brush myself off a bit and split my losses. In the coming days after the break up, I felt very unspecial. I felt moldy inside and grey, like something was pulled out of me. I felt gross and used up. I guess that in a very specific way I was made into something special or pretty, someone who had perfect strength and vulnerability, that I was some unique form of beautiful that he alone had discovered and learned to interact with. I was very open to him in a way I hadn’t been with other people. And losing that closeness is difficult for me still.

I’m trying to remember who I was before him, and here and again as spring emerges and I walk around town after work or watch the streets as the bus takes me where I am going, I find myself flowing more with what’s around me, or seeing more into it. I don’t feel as separated from myself. I don’t know if that makes any sense.

Not that I ever wasn’t me, but my focus at one time didn’t even acknowledge his existence. I was my own in a way that I had given partial custody to him after we got together. I realize that though not having anyone to look forward to or talk to is a bit of a drag, I was so used to the ebbs and flows of being disappointed that to a degree I was building up resentfulness and bitter personality traits around the prospects that there was no way out of this situation and I would never find anything in it. I had to hold my tongue more than I should have. I lived in fear of him walking away from me, and low and behold, he did it anyway.

I’m still hurt and I still love him. What gets me are the small memories of elements that are so distinctly him, little worlds that could only ever exist between him and I in songs and places and times that seem out of place, things I will always be haunted by but unable to recreate. There is a vibe to hanging out in a permanent midnight at 7-11 or Plaid Pantry at 2am. Or the way his tone of skin matched with his glasses, his beard, with his long hair around his face, his black eyes and sarcasm, the distinct way his hands felt, the way he walked and engaged with strangers, his skinny legs, just the overall way he approached everyone good or bad. I know it very very well.

I could text him but it wouldn’t make any of the old feelings come back. What we had is broken and I did the best I could to try to talk about that. If he really cared he would apologize and it’s for the best that he doesn’t care that much, or more likely he has this element of pride that will prevent him from admitting any indignity. He’s willing to lose friends over some petty stuff.

I know this is dumb but I can’t help but know that he’s going to miss me for a lot longer, years after all this. I have a way of pushing forward and he has been winding down for some time. He doesn’t have as much to look forward to. I imagine he will have some last ditch relationships that won’t last long in the course of the next few years and then he will have to live with what he’s done to his body (he drank a lot and now he’s losing feeling in his fingers and feet from permanent nerve damage). And I won’t be there. Which when you think about it that way, I get sadder for him. I wish he had been just a bit more forward thinking and connected to himself more. I don’t think he deserves that, but it’s what he’s going to get and he won’t do anything differently.

He’s going to be out one night in some bar and remember that he loved me and that he was dumb and told me he didn’t want to be my friend anymore because I told him in a passive aggressive way that I wanted him to want to see me more and I felt like this had become enormously one sided. Someday nobody is going to want to see him. I don’t think it will change much but I know it’s going to happen.

It’s fine. With what I lost I guess there is quite a bit to gain. It’s just giving up that identity or that certainty. And 2020 was a year when I really really felt lost and he was there. We went to the protests together, we suffered the intense wildfire smoke, we talked every night for so long, that I struggled to sleep without talking to him at least for a few minutes. 2019 was a year of secrets and intimacy and being exhilarated and 2020 was a year where him and I stuck it out and actually got to know each other. When he got a new job though, he like, deleted the friendship with me. I don’t know why, but maybe he met someone new. He started referring to me as a distant friend, and a fuck buddy and then he just stopped referring to me at all. I tried to message him, I told him I needed to talk. He wouldn’t do it. He would ignore those messages, or call me emo. He was warm and friendly at times and sometimes seemed invested like nothing was wrong but it seemed like he just pulled away overall. But he wouldn’t acknowledge it or tell me why. So I sat and stewed and felt abandoned all winter.

Then he started talking to his ex again who I am well acquainted with, who doesn’t know that he was with me afterwards. She still had a thing for him and wasn’t mentally stable. If she could have handled it I would have let her know. She’d sorta moved on, but you know how things like that go. They hadn’t ever not been friends but it felt like he was trying to rekindle something. And I didn’t like that. So I pushed him away, I backtracked all that openness I had had. I was a little humiliated and enraged, I got mad and started preparing an emotional escape. Between being pushed away and having to compete with his ex, I felt better off leaving the situation behind entirely. And I think for me, even though I tried to keep things going, it just died there. That was like a month or two ago now.

When I approached him about not making time to hang out with me in the way I had done for him, or wanting me to invest in him, calling me his girlfriend sometimes but not really wanting to be a boyfriend or acknowledge it at other times, I said I felt used and it wasn’t fair. And that made him tell me he never wanted to talk to me again. It hurt but whatever. It was such a cowardly response. Such a fuck you to every good thing that was worth it in our friendship. He threw me away because I brought up something that made him uncomfortable and he would rather just pretend I didn’t exist than give me any real answer. That was its own cold answer in and of itself I guess. But at least at the end of it he actually said something. I got so used to being half ghosted. At least he just ended it, cowardly or no.

A part of me is afraid though that this will happen to me again. I really really didn’t like losing this relationship. It was the dearest thing to me and letting go didn’t and won’t kill me, but I don’t know how much more of that kind of desolate disillusionment and misery I want to flower my life with. I guess there are only so many things a person can control or know about someone else before becoming invested emotionally.

I’m actually doing better than I thought I would, and I can only see this getting easier. It’s actually easier for me to wake up early, eat well, exercise, and plan my day. Those were hard when we were together, it was either a blissful fog or a heavy dreadful fog, but there was always a brain fog in everything I did with little moments of clarity when we were close. I do well on my own. I’m stronger than him and am capable of making certain kinds of progress that he’s not as disciplined in doing.

I’m almost freaked out about how chill it’s been since, considering how devastated it made me. I was in shock. I guess it’s just that I don’t have to worry about it anymore. I can put this chapter in my life behind me for better or worse. I don’t anticipate his existence in my life too much. I still notice when he is online. I can feel him thinking about me a little, which I know that’s weird. It makes me feel a little vulnerable and sad and a little part of me wishes he would just reach out because he does want me back, but I absolutely cannot put myself in that situation again. Even if I want it, it’s like my body wouldn’t listen. It’s not the side I’m focusing on or listening to but I have dumb naive little feelings at times. He regrets his decision but he isn’t going to step outside of himself to correct it. And if he does I am not interested in hearing him out. He had so many opportunities to talk, so many.

Okay, I’m done using tumblr as an emotional sounding board. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk

[sczphanc]

people often fail to recognize that psychosis exists all the time. people with psychotic disorders still have psychotic disorders outside of the dramatic psychotic episodes and if you are close to someone who experiences psychosis it is important to recognize that people with psychotic disorders have very real symptoms that exist everyday.

delusions do not just come in the form of grandiose, absurd beliefs completely removed from reality. most people with psychotic disorders experience delusions everyday and those delusions need to be addressed just as much as those that typically occur during acute psychotic episodes. they can be very subtle, they can be very difficult for the sufferer to express, they can be relatively congruent with reality and they can be much harder to pick up on but they are delusions. for example, yesterday I became convinced that a text from my neighbor was actually sent by my landlord in order to entrap me in admitting to something that was cause to evict my girlfriend and I. I don't know what they would have tried to have been coaxing me to admit but that only made it more distressing to me. this is obviously less clinical than something such as a belief that I am the host of a fourth dimensional time goddess but it is nonetheless a delusion, a very distressing one in fact.

there are many different types of hallucinations. many hallucinations are subtle things. many people with psychotic disorders hallucinate many times a day everyday. hearing voices scream at you or being followed by whispers can be very distressing but hearing actual people around you say something about the way you are dressed or the way you are walking throughout the day can be similarly distressing. hallucinations do not always take the form of entirely fabricated perceptions, they can also be distortions of the things around you. they can be hearing air raid sirens but they can also be seeing cars around you flash their highbeams as they pass you. they can be distortions of everything around you but they can also be a sudden change in the intensity of lights and sounds around you.

there are many different types of disorganization. most people with psychotic disorders experience some level of disorganization everyday. disorganization is not something that turns on and off, it is something that can exist to various degrees and as ratios of different types of disorganization. disorganization, at it's worst, can mean not being able to speak, not being able to maintain any semblance of coherence, not being able to process information, not being able to understand what is going on around you but it can also mean not being able to speak concisely, not being able to convey what you are trying to say clearly, repeating the same idea or phrase several times over the course of a conversation, having a hard time writing and phrasing ideas. all of these things are disorganization; disorganization is not defined by inability but rather by difficulty

negative symptoms exist all the time for most people with psychotic disorders. if you've ever been close to someone with a psychotic disorder you've almost certainly seen them in a state in which they either had no desire to or could not take care of themselves or maintain their responsibilities. things like not showering for days, not drinking water or eating, not changing clothes, doing little besides laying around doing close to nothing. however, negative symptoms are always there, not just during these types of episodes. negative symptoms can mean not being interested in being around others, not enjoying things you used to, not responding to things appropriately, indifference towards the happenings of others, general apathy, blunted emotional responses, etc. negative symptoms exist all the time and they need care and understanding to heal in day to day life.

it can be hard to be close to someone who experiences psychosis. it can seem like they aren't who they used to be even when they are doing okay. it can seem like they are no longer the same person at all. this is not the case. just as the flairs of acute, off the rails symptoms can be treated and managed the day to day symptoms of psychosis can be treated and can improve overtime but they require just as much care and understanding. people who have psychotic disorders need to be able to be comfortable expressing their day to day struggles and it's important to do your best to understand that they are just as much symptoms as everything else and that they need reassurance and empathy in those day to day struggles

[peraltasames]

all i know is a newfound grace

requested by @capnperaltiago & anonymous - 32. A kiss so passionate, so perfect - that after they part, neither person can open their eyes for a few moments afterwards.

c h e e s y af + an excuse for me to write more taylor swift-inspired early relationship fluff about amy falling for jake instead of studying shocking

read on ao3

Jake has always been full of surprises.

Some are unwelcome, like his “Peralta guarantee” that resulted in her having to take him to the ER, or the ants she found in her car weeks after he left a half-eaten candy bar in the glove compartment during a stakeout to “keep it safe” while they chased their perp. Others, however, such as the unexpected acts of kindness and bravery and sometimes even maturity that he’s displayed over the years she’s known him, have caught her so off guard that it took a long time - longer than it should have, really - for her to acknowledge her feelings for him.

Over the course of one evening alone, one of their first dates - their fifth, to be exact - she actually loses track of how many times she’s astounded by him.

He shows up early, for starters. Jake is rarely on time, she’s grown to expect tardiness, so when he knocks on her door more than ten minutes prior to the agreed upon time - she was ready twenty minutes earlier, of course, but she would be foolish to start holding him to Santiago standards - Amy thinks her ears are deceiving her.

He brings flowers. They’re light pink orchids, her favourite, and slightly wilted because he bought them that morning when they caught his eye at a stand on the way to work and he thought of her and he is still Jake, so it makes sense that he didn’t think to put them in water. The sentiment is so sweet that she could not care less about how they look as she puts them in her nicest vase.

It’s his turn to pick the restaurant, so she’s fully prepared to spend the evening at the nearest buffet with bottomless chicken fingers. She does very little to hide her affection, stopping to kiss his cheek in the middle of the sidewalk, when he states that he picked a nice, casual Cuban restaurant within walking distance to her place because, according to Jake, she “mentioned that she missed her mom’s cooking” and she “is always talking about how he should get more exercise.”

Throughout dinner, as she watches him nearly cry after they place a bet on who can handle the most hot sauce (winner picks the movie later) and observes the way his eyes light up with genuine interest and adoration as she talks about her day, Amy comes to the most startling revelation thus far: she’s totally falling for him. Hard.

It’s a little intimidating; Amy doesn’t have commitment issues per se, but it’s a little overwhelming to not be able to breathe normally at two o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon because Jake is smiling at her across their desks or have her mind clogged with images of him in her bedroom last night when she’s trying to focus on her paperwork (she’s made two typos this week).

Perhaps even more surprising is how incredibly safe and at ease she feels with Jake despite the intense emotional rush. It’s a lot less scary jumping off the deep end when she’s almost certain he’s going to be there to catch her.

“That was amazing,” Amy says as they walk out of the restaurant and onto the street, the sky coloured with orange and pink hues as the sun sets over the city. It’s a gorgeous late summer evening, the kind that could only be improved upon by the large amount of tamales in her stomach and the light, fluttering sensation in her chest.

Her hand reaches down to tangle her fingers with Jake’s without much of a thought, but it’s still a new enough concept - them, Jake and Amy, holding hands - that her grip remains loose until he smiles at her and tightens his hold.

“I agree. Although, in the future, I probably shouldn’t make bets that I have no chance winning.”

She pats his hand reverently. “Yeah, that was a long shot.”

“I thought maybe you would cut me some slack out of pity after my eyes started to water, but it appears even my girlfriend will show me no mercy.”

The casual usage of the word “girlfriend” delays her response time considerably while she takes a moment to replay it in her brain, but she quickly recovers when she feels him turn to look at her.

“Your eyes weren’t watering, Jake, you were straight up crying,” she teases him, gently bumping his arm with hers. “In your defense, it wasn’t really a fair fight.” He looks at her hopefully for a moment, and she shakes her head. “We’re still watching Harry Potter. I won fair and square!”

He sighs dramatically as they reach her building, his hand slipping out of hers and immediately moving to her back as they walk up the steps. “You did.”

Amy smiles to herself at her boyfriend’s - not partner’s, not colleague’s, not friend’s, boyfriend’s - antics as she stops at the top of her stoop to rifle through her purse for her keys. Once she’s secured the keychain, she glances up to find Jake gazing at her - a gaze she’s become very well-acquainted with over the past weeks - with his eyes flickering from hers to her lips, his bright smile fading into a serious, fixated expression. Maybe it’s the two margaritas she had with dinner or the fact that she’s felt increasingly secure in their relationship with every passing day thus far, but she doesn’t wait for him to make the next move.

Completely indifferent to the dozens of New Yorkers enjoying an evening stroll, Amy rolls up onto her tiptoes, an easier feat with the heels she’s wearing, and presses her lips to his. It’s already an automatic response for her to wrap her arms around his shoulders and his hands to rest on her waist, pulling her closer.

He quickly deepens the kiss, angling his head for better access, and she’s once again overwhelmed by the feeling of intoxication that comes with kissing him. It’s very quickly become the only thing she wants to do at any given moment, something she can’t believe she’s missed out on for all these years. It’s dangerous to throw words like “love” and “fate” around this early in a relationship, even in the confines of a journal entry or a phone call with Kylie, but there’s no denying that even her best kisses with Teddy or previous boyfriends never made her feel like this.

(Like she’s floating.

Like this is it for her.)

She melts into him, and an unprecedented urge to pop her foot up in the air like she’s in a movie washes over her. It feels like nothing short of a fairytale when he reaches up with one hand to cup her cheek and they gently pull away, remaining close enough that their noses brush and keeping their eyes closed, neither of them ready to burst the bubble of passion and intense emotion that’s enveloped them.

“Wow,” she whispers, worried that speaking too loudly will disrupt the tranquility of the moment. She slowly draws away from him as her eyes flutter open, and he comes to the surface a moment later, his grip on her waist loosening slightly. “That was, um…”

Jake lets out a breathy laugh, his eyes shining with raw affection as he takes in the similar smile gracing her face. “…Yeah.”

She’s positive she could stay here until morning as long as she gets to keep kissing him, but a cool breeze sends goosebumps up her body. He immediately detects her shivering and responds by rubbing his hands up and down her bare arms. It’s such a natural response that she can’t help but wonder how many times he’s watched her complain about being cold before, how many times he’s stopped himself from trying to warm her up.

“Should we go inside?”

She nods, unlocking the door and reaching out behind her to take his hand and lead him in.

About halfway through Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, while curled up on the couch with her head on Jake’s shoulder and laughing softly as he imitates the characters with varying degrees of horrible English accents, she realizes she shouldn’t be surprised at all. Some small part of her, though she repressed and fought and ignored it for as long as possible, has been falling for this idiot since the day she met him.

[scripttorture]

I perused your solitary tag but didn't get the answers I needed so sorry in advance if this is something you've answered or way too long and specific! Thanks so much for doing this! So I have an MC who was kept in solitary for about 10-11 months when she was seventeen after her father was executed for treason and she tried to complete his goal. She failed but has a plan for how to kill the person who executed him. She is kept on a regular schedule, given any art materials and books she wants 1/?

2/2 and allowed to see her mother for an hour for one hour everyday. She knows her isolation will end in a year, knows shell probably be executed, and she has a cause like you mentioned being important. Immediately following her lock up she was thrust into a variety of stressful but social situations but about two and a half years later it's slowing down. She lives with her gf, but is far away from her mother and not close with many of her friends. What long type of term effects would she have?

Iknow this is no one’s favourite answer but- it really is hugelyindividual and impossible to accurately predict.

Fromthe details you’ve given me I get the impression you’ve thoughtabout this scenario and this character a lot. That’s will help youdecide on the symptoms you want her to have. But those symptoms areyour decision.

Ican tell you what the common symptoms are. What I can’t do ispredict symptoms, no one can. I also can’t tell you definitelywhich symptoms will be the ‘best’ pick for your story. You knowthe story and the character far better then I do. That means you’rebest places to judge what adds to the story and what doesn’t.

Ithink it would be best to start by picking the character’s symptomsand go from there.

Mostpapers put either depression or anxiety (or both) as the most commonmental illnesses solitary confinement causes. From what I can tellpolitical prisoners also report these conditions very frequently.However I get the impression (anecdotal rather than based onstatistical analysis) that political prisoners are less likely toself harm or attempt suicide then the average solitary prisoner.

Difficultyinteracting with people is probablymore common in younger solitary survivors. The brain is still growingand we arestill learning social interaction throughout our teenage years. Sonot being able to interact with others during that time is reallydamaging to someone’s social development.

I’msaying ‘probably’ because I don’t have good statisticalanalysis focused solely on teenagers in solitary.

But-well based on what I do know about normal social development andbrain growth, I think it’s highly likely she’d struggle withsocial interaction. That doesn’t necessarily mean that she’d beanxious around people, although that would be a common way for thisto show up. It’s often a…. feeling of isolation, disconnectionfrom others and being unable to engage in ways that are seen associally acceptable.

Itcould mean social interaction is draining or often unrewarding. Itcould mean ‘always’ doing or saying the ‘wrong’ thing ineveryday situations. It could mean a feeling of constant pressurearound others and misinterpreting their social responses.

Ithink irrational impulses and mood swings can be really narrativelyuseful symptoms. They fit well in a lot of different kinds of plotsand they can easily be used to make life more difficult forcharacters in interesting ways.

Psychosisand hallucinations are rarer symptoms generally. They also mightbe less likely if cell conditions are better (theevidence is unclear on this point).Which sounds like it’s the case for your character.

Thisalso seems to apply to some of the physical symptoms, particularlyeye problems. Insomnia and lethargy seem to show up however ‘good’cell conditions are. And I’d suggest considering the other physicalsymptoms for the period the character is confined.

Thetime frames you have don’t seem unreasonable to me. Neither do thegeneral conditions.

Themain thing that’s standing out is the set up after she’sreleased. Being suddenly thrown into intense social situations wouldbe incredibly stressful. For some people just out of solitary itmight be impossible to deal with and trigger an obvious breakdown.

Nowthat doesn’t seem like a fit for your story and there are otherpossibilities.

Theone that’s coming to mind is- Sometimes people with mentalillnesses can… for want of a better term ‘push through it’ fora short time. This is incredibly unhealthy. It’s a little likeignoring a fracture in the foot to keep walking. It can be done butit makes the problem worse.

I’m-not entirely sure how to describe this which is somewhat hampering myability to explain it. I’m thinking of things like- the number ofpeople I knew with severe depression and suicidal ideation whocompleted competitive, high-pressure degrees, without medication orprofessional help.

Itis possible, sometimes, for people to just… keep going, ignoretheir mental health problems and try to ‘act normal’. If they’revery good at what they’redoing then there may not even be a noticeable drop in performance,whether it’s academic or social. People do this, it happens. It’snot unrealistic.

But-this is incredibly badfor someone. Having a character with severe mental health problemstry to bottle them away or hide them or power through them- it isn’ta bad thing to write. Just be aware that if that’s the route youwant to take it will be damaging for the character. She’ll bepushing herself too far too fast and sooner or later she willcollapse.

Fora lot of the people I knew that happened at the end of their degree.If your character knows roughly how long she’ll have to keep upthis mad social schedule then- it is possiblethat she could keep going right until the end.

Ifyour character is doing something like that over several years then Ithink she’d need some kind of outlet and the ability to retreatfrom social situations at least some times.

Thisdoesn’t have to be dramatic or seem strange in the setting. It canbe things like- establishing a daily routine that involves getting upearly and walking alone in the woods for an hour before having to doanything or taking time to herself at night after her obligations areover. Little things like this and small outlets for unpleasantemotions can keep someone with a mental health problem alive in astressful situation.

Oncethese social obligations are over- Honestly I think it sounds likelythat someone in this situation would have an obvious breakdown. Thatsort of bottling, avoiding behaviour often ends up… bringing thingsto a point when all the problems seem to explode at once.

Essentiallysurvivors need to make adjustments in order to live their lives.They’re generally not able to just pick everything up again asnormal. Their limits, physical, mental and emotional are oftendifferent. (It’s also pretty normal for survivors and people withmental health problems generally to blame themselves to a degree fortheir limits changing. To feel bad about no longer being able to do aparticular things, as if it’s somehow their fault.)

Yourcharacter could put off those adjustments and live in denial for awhile. A lot of people with mental health problems do. But shecouldn’t put off those adjustments forever.

Thissort of scenario would probably end up putting a lot of pressure onher girlfriend to act as a carer. Whether her girlfriend is willingto or not that’s a lot of work. It’s difficult to do alone. @scripttraumasurvivors has posts on characters helping traumasurvivors in a non-professional context, take a look through theirtag because I think you’d find them helpful.

Ifyou don’t want thecharacter to be bottling everything up and powering through likethis- Then you’d have a healthier, better adjusted character at theend of the two and a half years. You’d also need a world that’smore supportive of mental health problems.

Soa- non exhaustive list of things that I think this society would needto normalise would be things like- letting her drop out of socialengagements suddenly with no warning and no negative repercussions.Greater understanding of different peoples differing needs forpersonal space. Physical adjustments to spaces to make them moreaccessible. Social acceptance of expressing negative emotions andemotional pain. Open, honest discussion of mental health.

Alot of this would be possible in a culture that’s in roughly thesame place the West is now about mental health- if the character’smother was managing this sort of thing for her. Making sure she’sdoing OK, encouraging her to stop if she isn’t. Insisting on anyadjustments or consideration she needs. Standing up for her.

Thatkind of role for her mother would require a very close relationshipbetween the characters. The daughter would need to feel that shecould tell her mother anything and share details about her mentalhealth.

Thecommon symptoms are here. But what those look like in the longterm for your character are really dependant on the story, thecharacter, her relationships with the people close to her and theworld.

Givenher age and the time she’s confined this character would probablyhave mental health problems for the rest of her life. That doesn’tmean she’d never learn to manage her symptoms. Part of that isusually a process of trial and error, trying to find out what helps.Sometimes the only answer is waiting until the mood passes.

Takea look at the Masterpost and have a look at the sources I link tothere. I think reading what people who’ve come out of solitary sayabout the experience will help you feel more confident about handlingthis. Shalev’s Sourcebook on Solitary Confinement and SolitaryWatch will be particularly useful to you, I think.

Thereisn’t a formula. There isn’t a standard set of symptoms or waypeople heal. Which means that we should be working it out anew foreach character, making the process feel unique to each individual.

Ihope that helps. :)

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About to give up?

Feeling all twinned-out? A Twin Flame stage nobody ever talks about because it’s just not all peace, love & light Let’s take a stole down the dark side of the Twin Flame journey So last week I got a donation from a Soul brother who reads my articles and told me he likes my brutally honest, no bullsh*t approach to the Twin Flame concept rather than sugarcoating all the hard work it really involves with self. If you have read my stuff, you know there are no magic pills and that I believe this journey is much more about becoming who you are meant to be than getting hooked up with your twin. I also believe that when you have become who you are meant to be, that the relationship with the twin and everybody else will be so MUCH better – because you have completely transformed yourself. We are all caterpillars coming into this journey, meant to become the most breathtaking beautiful butterflies…   My blog fan totally challenged me (in a good way) by saying that a lot of twin flame teachings are just romantic spiritual porn, but not mine. Which basically gives me a new level to live up to, because I want to be that person that debunks all those Twin Flame myths, broaches all the Twin Flame taboos and gets as many people as possible unstuck in their journeys. I want to get you from crawling over the ground to soaring through the sky!   Not because I am a rebel at heart, but because this is my soul mission to cut through the crap of all the BS that does not get you where you need to be on your amazing magic filled adventure with your beloved – aka your Twin Flame journey. In the end only ONE thing interests me and that is bringing up the truth, because it is the truth that sets us free. Romantic spiritual porn is awesome to drift off on in illusion, but drifting off in illusions only creates delays, more suffering and extended timelines – i.e. they are a f*cking waste of valuable time that you could otherwise be investing in creating Heaven on Earth because that is our joint mission as Twin Flames. So guys and gals get ready for another truth bomb. Because this week I am venturing on the dark side of the Twin Flame journey which is tricky to do because we are going to discuss all those low vibe energies that aren’t fun at all – but we are going to address them in an ultra high vibed way. So you can release them, instead of stay stuck in them or repressing them because you are afraid that allowing them to be felt is gonna jinx your life and your union. It’s really not just all peace, love & light We live in a world of contrasts, our 3rd dimensional physical experience is one of duality. It’s not the ultimate truth we know that, but it is part of the living here on planet Earth experience. Many people new to spirituality and the Law of Attraction fear lower vibrational energies because they think experiencing them will only attract more sh*t in there lives. It doesn’t work like that. When you suppress negative emotions (pretend they aren’t there by sweeping them under the rug) they don’t actually go anywhere. In fact they become much more dangerous than allowing yourself to experience them, would ever be. This is because they are now subconsciously doing the very thing you feared, attracting more of the same matching vibrational frequency crap into your physical life experience. Anything you resist, persists – that is just how this Universe works.   So if you resist feeling so called negative emotions, than you are in fact locking them into your physical experience in a much deeper way, than if you would have allowed yourself to feel the emotion and let it move out of your vibrational system. If you fear that feeling your negative emotions is going to bring you out of alignment to union with your Twin Flame, repressing your so called negative emotions (pretending they aren’t there) WILL actually derail your energies because repressed emotions get stuck in your energy field which structurally lowers your vibrational frequency. This does not happen when you allow yourself to feel them and allow them to move out of your system. Your frequency might drop temporarily, but it will climb quickly after that. Plus if the negative experience NOW is linked to any past experience (even previous lifetimes is possible) that you still carried repressed emotions around, you would actually be able to raise your frequency higher than before because you just allowed yourself to let go of some old emotional gunk and sludge that was weighing down your vibrational field. In my online program the Align to Your Divine Plan Twin Flame Mastery Program I teach that you should look at emotions like taking a dump. When you have taken a sh*t on the toilet, you don’t turn around and make up all kinds of stories about your bodily waste. You are glad it’s out and you flush it away. Yet when it comes to emotions, we DO want to create all these stories around them, hold on to them, nurture them and so on. When basically all you have to do is just have yourself and emotional crap and flush it out. Most people either vomit their negative emotions on the other, which is a big no-no because the other is not responsible for how you feel – you are responsible for your own feelings. If they don’t vomit their emotions outwards, they either fester in them or keep them fuming inside (yeah I mean all you twin bashers – well actually you fester and puke) or the third option they stuff them way deep down so one day it will all erupt. These are all unhealthy ways to deal with all these tough, hard to handle and uncomfortable emotions. The real spiritual approach to emotions is just to allow them to be felt and breathe through it.   Then instead of wiping your tooshie, you smudge yourself and your surroundings and put your feet in a warm Epsom salt foot bath to help you fully release all the vibrational residue of the experienced emotion…. and you are good to go. It is that easy. You don’t have to hold on to the emotion. You don’t need to rehash it. You especially don’t need to deny it. You don’t need to analyze it or understand it. Just allow yourself to let that sh*t go. So now that you have given yourself permission to have negative emotions, let’s look at how they can be triggered on your Twin Flame journey. Let’s be honest your Divine counterpart is being a total pain in the *ss sometimes Let’s just get real with each other here for a minute, some parts of this journey totally s*ck! This is the kind of crap you have to deal with: Ghosting – not responding Benching – keeping you warm for later Rejection – taking back their love etc Abandonment – pulling you close and then running away No commitment – I love you, I want to be with you but, da-da-da-da…. Wishy-washiness – first they are hot then they’re cold No integrity – actions and words don’t match New or existing girlfriends or wives (guys you can turn this around – gays make it work for you ) Not being able to move on, because you never got closure and the list goes on and on….. All this stuff hurts like hell. Let’s not kid ourselves here. It not only brings up grieve, it also brings up anger because anger is a natural part of any grieving process and feeling as if you have lost your Twin Flame is often more painful than losing a loved one to death. It rips your heart out, pulverizes it and spits out the pieces. It’s brutal, unlike any loss or pain you have ever felt before. Yes, separation is an illusion but the experience sure feels painfully real.   Let’s not pretend it’s not. Sure, in the end we need to suck it up – but it is in the feeling of the intense depth of our pain that we actually push through and get to the other side of the transformation. Adversity is the biggest catalyst of change How much we would like to think that we can learn as much from getting our way and the love & light bit, it actually doesn’t work like that. The biggest catalyst for change is adversity. It’s when things don’t go as we planned and we don’t get what we want that we get forced out of our comfort-zones and THAT is where not only the magic happens, but the inner transformation. Last week I was watching another loop movie with my youngest son. If you don’t know what a loop day is, it’s based on the movie Groundhog day with Bill Murray in which he is forced to relive the same day over and over again until he ‘get’s it right‘. The overall theme in loop movies is that, you can’t get out of the loop until you have transformed whatever the loop was set up to transform, without knowing the plan in advance – you have to figure it out by trial and error. The movie we watched was a modern version of this. A college student wakes up in a dorm room on the day of her birthday over and over again, to figure out who kills her that day. The girl starts out as a spoiled brat that is not very nice to anyone basically. As the story progresses and we have watched her loop in waking up, trying to find her killer and then getting slaughtered every night – we see that she is wearing this b*tchy mask in order not to feel the pain of her mother’s early death a couple of years before. As the movie unfolds and she comes closer and closer to unmasking her killer she in facts heals deeper and deeper inside which makes her want to become a much better person. She makes a 180 degree turnaround in character, when she allows herself to deal with the traumatic effects of losing her mother at a young age and stops trying to avoid the pain it caused her. Watching this movie made me realize we are all ego brats when we start out on this Twin Flame journey, no matter how much spiritual or healing work you have done before you met your twin – you have a WHOLE transformation process ahead of you still. Yet it is the above mentioned crappy behavior of your twin, that will be the catalyst of this inner transformation together with the looping effect of not being able to move on from this person. In the end the suffering is so great that YOU MAKE IT STOP and when walking away is not an option, you are left no choice but to find what DOES work. As Twin Flames we are in exactly such a looping experience, until we figure out how to break the loop. Just like any character in a loop movie, we try the easy way out first. Then we try our old ways. When that doesn’t work we get frustrated and that frustration opens us up to trying new ways or actually our old ways not working leaves us no choice, but to try something new and that is the point of transformation that the loop was setup to create. To move you out of your old ways (3D) into a new way of being (seeing/feeling/doing) – the new 5th dimensional vibrational frequency of creating Heaven on Earth.   You can’t get there without experiencing the frustration of the old ways not working anymore – it’s impossible because these frequencies are mutually exclusive. You are meant to manifest 5D in your 3D physical experience, but you can’t access 5D if you stay stuck in old paradigm 3D thinking which is fear based and views the world from the ego perception of separation from the whole and source. The Twin Flame loop is set up to make this specific transformation from 3D to 5D – as a PHYSICAL EXPERIENCE not just some spiritual notion somewhere up there. 5D is not up there, it is a dimensional frequency that needs to be anchored in your daily life. Spirit has only one way to get you there and that is to not leave you any other option – but to move out of the old and into the new. If you got the guy or girl of your dreams immediately, there would be no incentive to do anything any other way because doing things the way you have always done them, got you what you wanted. It is in NOT immediately getting what you want, that you get stretched from who you were to begin with and who you wanted to become in this lifetime. How to break the loop?! You might think that loving your twin unconditionally is ALWAYS feeling love and saying yes, but unconditional love is also loving someone enough to not put up with their sh*t. It’s being able to see them for who they really are – the good, the bad and the ugly and inspiring them to live up to the highest expression of themselves. Way too many Divine Feminines use unconditional love as an excuse to become their Twin Flames doormat when loving unconditionally should also be directed at the self. You cannot love yourself unconditionally and at the same time be your twin’s doormat, you can’t love yourself and abandon your own truth and desires to meet the needs and wants of someone else. Unconditional love has to go both to yourself and the twin, because otherwise it’s not unconditional it’s codependent love – meaning you bending over backwards to deserve/earn/keep the love of another. Read this blog here about the new love templates Twin Flames are bringing into the world. In the whole analogy of shifting from old to new ways, codependent love is certainly old ways and masking codependent love by thinking you are loving unconditionally only keeps you looping because you aren’t shifting. Not only that, your twin’s obnoxious behavior will continue because he (Divine masculine) can’t shift if you don’t. If you keep accepting bad behavior from your twin because you love them ‘unconditionally‘ you are doing yourself and them a disfavor. Say your twin is married and keeps coming around to you for sex, just because that person is your Twin Flame does not change the fact that you are having an affair with a married person. But above all this is not a way to get this person to commit to you, if this person really wants to be with you sex is not going to be the decisive factor. Yet making them feel what their life will be like without you in it, is sheer manipulation. Standing up for yourself has to be authentic, not a way to get what you want because in a loop scenario you can’t manipulate your way out of the loop effect.   The shift has to be real and genuine to break the loop. In the case of Twin Flames, what binds most twins in the looping effect is the fear that if they let their twin go – they will lose them forever. Fear of loss is at THE ROOT of codependency (read this powerful article on how codependency shows up in the Twin Flame connection) and it is this fear that makes way too many Divine Feminines shy away from speaking their truth, standing in their power and becoming who they are meant to be – because they subconsciously fear that choosing for themselves will cost them their connection with their twin. They don’t realize that this is the transformation the loop was set up to make. You becoming who YOU are meant to be, fully and unapologetically. If this person truly is your Twin Flame, he/she will revel in the sight of you expressing your highest version of yourself. If they split because of it, good riddens – you don’t need anyone in your life holding you down or small. Remember you aren’t meant to be a caterpillar you are meant to soar the skies. Key symptoms of feeling all twinned-out It’s when you realize that you can’t force yourself out of the loop. You can’t manipulate your way out of it and that you have exhausted yourself trying all the old ways that did not work, that you get to a point of desperation and despair and this happens at various times of the journey – when just before a massive shift you in fact feel all twinned-out. You just don’t care as much anymore. You don’t feel your twin as much anymore. Your telepathy disappeared maybe. You don’t think about your twin as much or any other shift in your connection that may make you wonder – Do I still love this person as much? Is this really my Twin Flame? Or everything feels lost and over, is this really the end? Of course if you get entangled and stuck in negative emotions then you have a problem. If this is the case for you now, write yourself an email as if it is directed to the Universe and ask your Divine guidance team to show you the truth of the situation you are angry about and what you need to know. This will open up the way to see what is happening in your physical experience from the highest perspective, which will help you to understand and forgive if necessary. There are many moments on this journey that doubt or negative feelings creep in, yet there also seems to be a taboo on expressing them because well then this person must not be your Twin Flame and sure this can apply to some cases. There are certainly people out there mistaking very toxic and abusive relationships for Twin Flame connections, but to think that this journey is all peace, love & light is an illusion. Anything that forces you out of your comfort zone is going to bring up a variety in emotions and not ALL of these emotions are going to be 100% positive – that is the reality of life.   It is actually a very positive sign if you are starting to feel all twinned-out because it means your are coming more into balance. It also means you are close to an important pivot point of either coming into physical union with your twin or finally being able to move on with your life. A prerequisite for it truly being twinned-out and not just sick and tired of (read impatient with) the journey, is that you have made the inner transformation, which I talk about here in this article on inner union. Many people freak out when they start to feel more neutral or maybe even somewhat negative toward the twin – afraid it means all is lost perhaps. I wrote this article to help you understand that there is nothing to fear if you are experiencing this, because as you can read in the descriptions below ALL of this is helping you come into a deeper alignment with your deepest heart’s desire. Here are some signs that you are starting to feel twinned-out: No. #1 You are done obsessing over your twin You don’t miss your twin, think about them 24/7 anymore or hope they will come back. This is because you have healed the voids in yourself that you were trying to fill externally. You are meeting your own needs now and therefor don’t NEED the other in the way you felt you needed them before. No. #2 You lost interest in the Twin Flame subject You don’t want to read anymore information about Twin Flames, watch YouTube reads or be part of Twin Flame groups. You just lost interest in the subject and are focused on other things in your life. You are no longer waiting for your twin to come back, instead you are creating the life you love and want to live. No. #3 You are ready to drop the Twin Flame label You stop identifying with the Twin Flame label, meaning seeing yourself as a Twin Flame or the other as a twin. Maybe the whole Twin Flame concept is bullsh*t anyway? Letting go of the Twin Flame label helps you open up to the truth of the connection. It’s a sign that you are ready to face the truth, you have overcome your fear of loss on all levels. Because if this person truly is your Twin Flame, the connection can’t ever be lost anyway. No. #4 You see your twin for who they really are – a mere mortal You see your twin for who they really are and for the first time dare to get honest about if this other person even fits into your life at the moment. Do you really want to be together with this person, as they are now? You may even think your twin is a total bleep-bleep and that’s okay. Most Twin Flames start off their journey thinking their Divine counterpart is a demigod, but no one can stay on such a high pedestal and you certainly can’t be together with someone you have placed high above yourself. Because by putting them on a pedestal, you have placed them out of your league. So seeing your twin for the imperfect human being they are is actually a massive step forward to getting into an actual physical relationship with them. It means that you can see the real person instead of the romantic fantasies you were projecting on them. No. #5 You are no longer over-focused on union You are not obsessing or focused on union. You are fine one way or the other. Actually the more neutral you become about being in a relationship with your twin, the more you become a vibrational match to it. Wanting something TOO much actually demagnetizes you. My favorite Florence Scovel Shinn quote is: Your ship come in over a “don’t care” sea. When you can be happy with or without your heart’s desire, it will suddenly appear.   Florence teaches that there is an occult law of indifference. “None of these things move me.” “None of these things disturb me” we might say in modern language. When you can no longer be disturbed, all disturbance will disappear from the external. No. #6 You may even feel disconnected from your twin When you don’t feel the immense pull or feel your twin period, this is not a bad thing. It may feel like you are fully disconnected energetically – the connection feels as dead as a door nail. Though it may feel alarming, the disconnect allows you both to fully focus on what is going on for YOU in this moment, which would not be possible if you still felt super close and connected to your twin. Remember on this journey the souls use both closeness and distance to facilitate the inner transformation it has come to create. No. #7 You have let go of fixed timelines You may have lost faith in all the signs and synchs you have gotten or you still acknowledge them but don’t take them to mean that physical union is going to happen tomorrow or super soon. You realize that the signs and synchs are confirmation from your Divine guidance team that you are on the right path and heading in the right direction and that physical union is not the goal of this journey, it’s a byproduct. Of course before you get to this point you first had to loose faith, which when you do makes you think all these signs and synch are only just f*cking with your head. This leads to feeling misled by the Divine, which of course feels very scary and sh*tty. Faith however doesn’t mean getting what you want, the way you wanted it. It means trusting despite outer experiences that the Universe always has your back and is helping you come into vibrational alignment with your deepest heart’s desire. It asks you to understand that the seemingly irritating delays, are in fact the very thing that are aligning you deeper and deeper to the very thing you have asked for. Provided you don’t give up, because you didn’t get YOUR WAY. No. #8 You stepped into your power and found your self worth You have developed healthy boundaries and self worth which makes you not put up with any of your twin’s crap anymore. When you have truly overcome your codependency and the underlying fear of loss, you have no issues standing up to your twin or anyone else. This again has to be authentic and not just a way to get the other back, your problems in your Twin Flame connection are vibrational in nature therefore you cannot fake it. If your so called healthy boundaries are coming from ego, they aren’t in fact healthy boundaries they are merely masked attempts to force the other person to give you what you want. When you truly step into your power you could care less about what the other person does or doesn’t do because you know they aren’t the source of love in your life, YOU are. As you are no longer seeking fulfillment outside of you or fearing to lose something outside of you that you falsely believe you need – you no longer need to wear masks or please others. Instead you give yourself permission to become the REAL you – not the you you think you need to be to others to get what you want or feel you need. No. #9 You realized you can’t screw up your union anyway  Many Divine Feminines fear screwing up their union one way or another and it’s all just fears in your heads ladies, figments of your imagination. Remember EVERYTHING your twin triggers inside of you is meant to help you purge old emotions and heal on the deepest level. Also the very negative feelings are part of this clean up. Since November 2017 my twin and I have worked through betrayal issues and deep core wounding that I didn’t even know was tucked away in the far depths of my subconscious. In this period I have been pissed as h*ll with him and I have made him well aware of it. He knows how angry I have been and has just endured and supported my rage being unleashed. Of course throughout this process I have remained respectful to him, but I have really spoken my truth. He knows what I am upset about and why. This is what has been going on on a 3D level. So I was just in Ibiza for my very first Gangsta Goddesses retreat and we went up to Es Vedra where I did a meditation to ground my light body on one of the most magnetic spots worldwide next to the North Pole and the Bermuda Triangle. My twin has showed up in my dreams off and on but for the rest our communication has consisted of me speaking my truth and him patiently reading it. On that rock in front of Es Vedra – I am doing this meditation and out of nowhere I feel my twin’s energy coming in full force into my heart and grounding the light body with me on that spot. I have no idea what it means, but what I do know is that our higher selves laugh at our 3D tiffs and troubles. They have their own agenda and are implementing that whether we cooperate or not. I mean I have been angry with him for months and I have either not spoken to him or when I opened my mouth gave him truth bombs that he is still trying to digest and he shows up energetically anyway. I have not been easy on him at all, yet his higher self is not bothered one bit by my 3D behavior. The same can be said for me, I have been pissed with him for some time and have certainly not been his most adoring fan like I have been in the past. There was no reason for me to think of him or to want to feel him grounding my/our light body together. I am perfectly capable of grounding my own, thanks. I certainly didn’t invite him to come and honestly I am not impressed with his current 3D behavior as well, so there was no longing inside of me to have him show up in this way energetically. It happened nonetheless and it made me realize once again, you can’t screw things up with your twin – provided they are really your Twin Flame. Since I have let go of the twin label for myself in my own process, the Universe has been staking up the confirmation in all different ways. I see it and acknowledge it, but stay in a state of indifference as much as possible. I’ll tell you why. Recently I went to Mother Meera where I also met up with the lovely Ana Souto from the Bloom From Within Project. I had been thinking about the guy (twin) while driving to the event. I had thought about everything that had happened in our lives since we met. Sometimes you have these thoughts that just come with ultra awareness and this happened to me as I walked in the door. I remembered how much I had wanted to marry this man and have his baby. A desire we had both strongly felt and I thought of how different things had unfolded for us and that he was even married to someone else now. At that moment I felt such gratitude and acceptance for where I am now and that what I had gotten from this journey has been so much more valuable, then being married to him and having his child would have been if I had gotten it at that time. I love babies and children, but the bliss of having a child with the man you love is nothing compared to the bliss of truly coming home to yourself. Not to mention the fact that cleaning up all the core wounding like I have is going to make any future relationship with him or someone else so much better because I am no longer coming to a relationship with a beggars cup, begging to be loved. I am coming with a cup flowing over with love for myself and the other. If this is where this journey has already brought me now, in a space of being – far beyond what I had envisioned for myself, then I am in awe of where I will be once my higher self has brought me where it wants me to be in this lifetime. This realization alone helped me to surrender even deeper to the Divine Plan my soul scripted for me, because it has proven to me without a shadow of a doubt that it’s plan for me is much more magical and majestic than anything I can come up with in the limited 3D version of myself. I pray this article serves you and helps you further along on your journey. Donations are very thankfully received. If you wish to make a donation of any amount, you can do so here. Wishing you magic and miracles on this amazing adventure with your beloved. If this article resonates with you please share it abundantly. Thank you.         Twin Flame reunion energy is flooding in, are you ready to reunite with your twin? 11 Twin Flame side effects that hardly anyone ever talks about, in this way … Astrology and Twin Souls, here is how the planets are influencing your Twin Flame journey in… 7 reasons to stop dating and become exclusive with your Twin Flame (even when you are not together) 50 shades of silence on the Twin Flame journey, the real reason why the Divine Masculine… Help! My Twin Flame is in a romantic relationship with someone else – does this mean…

[silverscribe87]

On Lapidot Hate

I've been seeing a lot of Lapidot hate come across my dash lately, which is to be expected of the SU community. There is a very vocal crowd that despises the ship as if it personally crushed all their hopes and dreams. And that's fine. You can like what you like and dislike what you dislike.

What isn't fine is all the irrational and dishonest mental hoops people bend over backwards to jump through to justify their hatred. I'm gonna go over a couple of my favorites. I'll probably regret this.

Peridot is always there for Lapis, Lapis does nothing for Peridot. One sided relationship.

I swear if this isn't the most annoying load of bull. Peridot's emotional support and caring for Lapis is more obvious, more bold and easily observed. And there's a good reason for that. They're both at different points in adjusting to their new lives, at different points in their personal development. Peridot already went through a ton of development and adjustment before Lapis ever moved into the barn with her. Steven and the rest of the Gems helped her to grow. Helped her to become a new and better gem. A different gem from the one Lapis knew during her imprisonment on the ship. “It's different now, I'm different!” Ring any bells? Peridot is to Lapis what Steven was to Peridot. A guide. A steady pillar in a world that's been turned upside down for her. So yeah, Peridot will be doing a lot of heavy lifting in that department. And honestly, and I know I'll get hell for saying this, Lapis just has more trauma to deal with than Peridot ever did. And I am by no means trying to diminish what Peridot went through, what she sacrificed and her effort in getting over all that Homeworld programming. But Lapis got caught up in a war she was never meant to be apart of. Lapis was imprisoned in a mirror for thousands and thousands of years. And when she finally made it through all that, finally got to go home, she was betrayed and made a prisoner all over again. Yes nearly every character in SU is suffering emotional trauma to one degree or another, but Lapis' is some of the most intense and most prolonged. And she does care for Peridot. She encourages Peridot in things she's excited about. She gets involved in Peridots interest. She supports her. She protects her. Peridot has been Lapis' savior in more ways than one and while it's certainly not as obvious as the feelings Peridot lavishes on Lapis (and come on we all know Peri is a little overbearing anyway :P ) those feelings are obviously reciprocated. If in a more subtle way. It's not a one sided relationship.

Lapis was horrible to Peridot! She broke her recorder!

Of course she was! In the beginning. People seem to block out how...forceful Peridot was in Barn Mates. The last time Peridot and Lapis interacted before that point, Lapis was Perdot's prisoner. Just an informant necessary for her mission to earth. Dragging Lapis back to a place she had desperately tried to escape. Peridot was her interrogator. And now here she was casually trying to brush all that off as “in the past” and shower Lapis with gifts so they could just forget about all that and be friends! Relationships don't work that way. Now this isn't all on Peridot. Her interpersonal skills were still in development to put it lightly and Steven wasn't helping matters with his well intentioned but hugely naive attempts at guiding Peridot in forming a relationship with Lapis. But that doesn't change the fact that Peridot was still really arrogant at this point and didn't seem to fully grasp how she'd hurt Lapis in the past or why Lapis couldn't just let all that go and trust her now. Lapis didn't trust her and she couldn't understand why Steven trusted Peridot either. Because she didn't know the new Peridot yet. But when the Roaming Eye came and Lapis realized Peridot was telling the truth about everything. Yeah. She started being more receptive. More willing to get to know Peridot. Willing to trust her after being shown proof of her truthfulness. Imagine that. Lapis didn't break Peridot's recorder because she was being petty. Lapis didn't try to drive Peridot away because she's a bitch. It was all a very real response to her past experiences with Peridot exacerbated by Lapis' other existing traumas.

Those are my two biggest pet peeves. Lapis and Peridot's relationship isn't perfect. It has flaws. They both have flaws. That's life. That's people. That's relationships. If you can't stand the ship, if the thought of them being gay farmer artist girlfriends together drives you insane, that's fine! That's great even! You're allowed to dislike things! Allowed to critique them. But by the stars stop making up bullshit that just isn't true to justify your disdain. And really fucking stop attacking people who disagree with you.

I don’t think Lapis is some flawless, sympathetic angel. But she’s not the Satan some make her out to be. Nor is Lapidot, or most any other ship really.

[nalufever]

Memes

‘Since Forever’ Nalufluffweek 2017: read on FF.net - ch 1   ch2   ch3   ch4   ch5   ch6   ch7   ch8   ch9  (don’t be afraid to leave reviews - the lifeblood of every writer ever)

Prompt: Memes. Success! Kind of. Confession articulated - and now to see if Lucy understands. Is she going to accept? Now, if Natsu can just stop rambling - that would be great. Lucy's about to write herself a note giving herself permission to do whatever she wants - and right now, it's to kiss Natsu silent. Win - win.

Lucy feared her heart would break free of her ribs. Had she ever felt so nervous before? Why was she standing still like this? Shouldn't she say or do something?

"Lucy, this is something I never expected to find or even want - a person who means more to me than anything else." Natsu nodded slowly, his chest rose and settled with a deep breath. "I want us to be more than friends. But if you don't feel the same, I'd learn to accept it." He shoved his hands into his pockets, swaying a bit side to side, eyes trained with intense focus on Lucy.

Aware Natsu was waiting for a response, Lucy gulped. She stared back at Natsu, the cold railing against her back at best a mild distraction. "Why'd you call me fat?" Aghast at the involuntary question, Lucy clapped her hands over her mouth.

"You still on that?" Natsu laughed. "How long ago was that? And I didn't say you were fat - I said it was a good thing you weren't too skinny! That costume on our last mission would never have fit you right if you were a bone-rack." He pulled his hands free, dislodging Mira's letter. It fell unnoticed at their feet. Natsu made an exaggerated hour-glass shape motion and then gave Lucy a wink and thumbs up sign.

"Too skinny?" Lucy felt colour rise higher on her cheeks. "So you don't think I'm fat?"

"Even if you were - which you aren't -" Natsu stepped close, breath tickling Lucy's bare collar. "- I fell in love with the girl who wants to be a writer. A person who battles beside her spirits, who trusts deeply and has learned to forgive. My partner, who happens to have a brilliant mind. Lucy, I love you."

Lucy felt like she and Natsu were in a suspended cocoon. This intimate moment was insulated from reality. Just inches away the real world threatened to intrude. The lights floating on the water continued to bob and spiral into new patterns. Lights across the harbour flickered on and off. Pockets of noise; conversations from other balconies in the hotel and music could be faintly heard. The stars watched in silence and the wind brought fresh scents of the sea.

Now that the moment was here - the moment Lucy had daydreamed about for untold years - she didn't know what to do. She didn't know what to think, where to look. Didn't know if she could trust her voice to work - was she going to laugh or cry? And in that desperate instant, Lucy cast her eyes down and spied the dislodged paper from Natsu's pocket.

"Will you be my girlfriend?"

Crouching down and picking up the letter was the work of an instant. Rather than answer Natsu, Lucy flipped the pages open.

Before she could read, Natsu caught her wrist. "I'd rather you didn't."

"I don't know what to think." Lucy gave a longing look to the letter before turning her gaze back to an anxious Natsu. "You're asking me to be your girlfriend, but before we left on this vacation,” Lucy gulped and forced herself to keep speaking. "You said you didn't consider yourself boyfriend material."

Natsu have a half-hearted chuckle. "No, what I said was that I'm not hung up on labels - meaning 'boyfriend' isn't enough to describe what I feel for you." He took the rustling papers from Lucy. Jamming them into a pocket, he placed her now empty hand over his thumping heart. "Feel my shirt - it's totally made out of boyfriend material!"

She ignored his feeble joke. "Why ask me to be your girlfriend now?"

"Because I've finally figured out that's what you want - and I want the same thing." Natsu took encouragement from Lucy's hand - still on his chest and gently rubbing. "Yeah, I asked for help. I needed it - there's no shame there. I'd ask a thousand people for help if it meant you saying yes."

Lucy felt the heat radiating from Natsu surge and drop. "Are you nervous?"

"Duh."

For Lucy, at that moment, Natsu seemed like his usual dorky self. Casual. At ease with himself and any situation, even if he'd just admitted to being nervous. Lucy ran her tongue over her drying lips. Interesting. Natsu seemed truly tense now. This was very important to him. No room for pretending or evading how she felt. "I'm nervous too."

"Y-you are?"

"I like you too. I've been scared to admit exactly how much." Lucy edged closer. Her hand still pressed over Natsu's heart, the rhythmic thumping soothing. "I don't care what we call this new stage in our relationship - but I want you to know I'm always gonna be yours."

"Is this a yes?"

Lucy smiled wide - lips stretching with a burn. "Yes."

"So, this means you do want me to be your boyfriend!" Natsu almost crowed, jubilant and relieved in equal measure. "Ice Princess can suck it!"

"..." Lucy gave Natsu a gimlet stare.

Slightly shamed, Natsu shrugged. "I went to Mira for help after Gray said I was out of my depth. Stupid bastard is gonna eat his words when we get back to the guild."

Lucy wet her lips again, raised her eyebrows slightly and tried her best to hand Natsu a telepathic clue - time to kiss.

Natsu leaned closer to Lucy, his breath tickling. "A wizard is never late, nor is he early, he confesses and kisses his Lucy exactly when he means to."

"Yes?" Lucy couldn't help her involuntary reaction - fluttering her eyelashes, trying to say wordlessly 'kiss me!'

"I need to go over there to see and hear for myself exactly what they're doing!" Mira tossed down her binoculars. "Let go!"

Laxus held Mira tight and shook his head. "Let the two idiots figure it out for themselves."

The she-devil almost twisted free, hissing at Laxus, "Ain't nobody got time for that!"

"Damn girl." He grinned at Mira. "Let's go work off some of your passion."

"Let me check on them later?"

Laxus winked. "Do you really think I'm gonna not give you my all? If you're able to walk later - that's gonna be surprising."

Mira giggled and clapped her hands. "I happened to bring a few new toys with me."

"I have all the time we need for that."

Natsu slid one arm around Lucy's waist and the other around her shoulders, his hand plunging into her hair. His voice was low but steady, "Lucy, you're -"

Lucy closed the distance between them - giving or was it taking - Natsu her first kiss. Lips slid over lips, mouths opened in exploration and tongues played without reserve. Passion rose, wild - like fire. Hot insistent desire made the two mages press their bodies closer.

Out of breath, they ceased their lip-lock. Natsu grinned foolishly - as did Lucy.

"Wow."

Natsu echoed Lucy's sentiments and then said, "Why'd we wait so long?"

"Not sure." Lucy looked dazed, but somewhat coherent. "We should make up for lost time."

"Hells yeah." Natsu kissed Lucy again - never more glad he'd admitted he needed help.

Mira's Letter:

Natsu, you need to read ALL of this letter - no skimming or you'll miss important information! Don't you shake your head and say, 'yeah, yeah!' You came to me for expert advice - so LISTEN!

You want to confess to Lucy your feelings - and that's a good thing - but just saying 'I like you' isn't enough. Girls like romance and emotions. Do you even know about all the different kinds of love a person can feel?

Physical Love (that would be insert tab A into slot B or whatever orifice works for the both of you) ~ Love of the mind (brotherly or platonic) ~ Playful love ~ Longstanding love ~ Love of the soul ~ Love of the self (fyi - not masturbation)~ Love of the child (you and Lucy should have 30 babies!)

You can have more than one type of love feeling for another person - and you don't have to nail down exactly to what degree it exists - admit it like a responsible adult and consult Lucy on how she feels.

Ooh! Here's an important definition! Soul mate: kindred soul, a person with whom one has a strong affinity, shared values and tastes, and often a romantic bond. That's what all the smart people are betting on. Do not make me lose my bet.

Affection can be giving thoughtful gifts at the right time - especially when your significant other isn't expecting anything. (Let's face it, for a long time I thought you were asexual - then I thought maybe you liked guys (nothing wrong with that!) and then Lucy showed up and you couldn't leave her alone - but let's not assume heteronormativity - the world is a large place and there's no call to discriminate.)

I think Lucy'd look great in frilly undies - she might like edible body paint, (I know a place that sells spicy chocolate flavour!) or some new bras (If in the heat of the moment, you burn off the one she's wearing - then she'd already have a replacement!) - ooh, and candy 3 There's a saying, 'candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker' - alcohol lowers resistance - but it might leave one or the other of you with regret. Keep a clear head and save drunken shenanigans for after you break each other in.

Natsu, tell Lucy how you feel. Give her the information she needs to sort her own emotions - wait for an answer and accept it graciously. Though I tell you what, if she runs away, I'll have Laxus send me over there through his lightning travel magic and 'talk' some sense into her.

You need her consent for any decent fun things you two can do once you confess. I know you have a cosplay kink - or else you wouldn't have held onto that maid outfit from Everlue Mansion. Matter of fact, I know the perfect little boutique that has silk scarves, feather dusters, padded handcuffs and all the gadgets take the same kind of batteries! Saves on keeping five kinds on hand!

You and Lucy have been best friends for a loooooong time. I expect some pretty vanilla sex between you two. (At the right time of course - but it's inevitable!) You're lucky you came to me, Erza would either have murdered you for daring to want to besmirch Lucy - or - forced you to read some of her favourite erotic novels. But just say the word, I can get you a near mint copy of the Kama Sutra.

Let Lucy know all the little things she does that you enjoy ~ and later you'll get to enjoy how bendy she is. Don't be afraid to try new positions and actually TALK about what feels good and be honest about what doesn't. Neither of you are mind readers - ooh, and don't ever ask Warren about what's on Lucy's mind (or anyone else for that matter) - he'll take great delight in telling you in horrific detail all the things you NEVER wanted to know - and there won't be enough bleach to wipe your mind clean.

So if you wanna show Lucy affection, be sure to compliment her lots and lots. Tell her she's pretty - say you like her outfit - admire her smarts - bring up something she did on a job you two did and say exactly what she did that you thought was awesome! Don't skimp on the details - those are what prove you pay attention.

Confess! After Lucy admits she loves you too - give her a big smooch! Try not to slobber - but a judicious amount of tongue is to be expected. No groping unless she touches you first! And I know I said you two should have 30 babies - you might want to give yourselves some time to enjoy running around your house naked. ^^ So for now, you should keep a stash of birth control with you at all times. You never know when you might get the urge.

Sex is a great headache cure btw ~ orgasms release endorphins. So if you're driving Lucy batty, all you have to do is seduce her pain away. Also! Lube! This will benefit the both of you. Make sure your lube and condoms are compatible. Don't be embarrassed to experiment. Don't be embarrassed to talk about safe words before getting your freak on.

I'm proud of you for reading all this, Natsu. :D It takes a mature person to admit when they need help. And face it, I'm the best help there is. Last, but not least - my best tip: ask Lucy with confidence - don't waffle. Wear your big boy pants and put all your best effort into showing her your sincerity. Tell her you like her. I know it's scary. Admit it's grown stronger the more you've gotten to know her - all sides of her. The good and the bad. You like her because she's Lucy.

The whole guild knows how you feel about her. You've managed to clue us in before you realized it for yourself - and now you've got to convince your partner. Ganbatte!

P.S. I call godmother once you and Lucy start popping out babies.

xoxo Mirajane 3

Thanks to everyone who's put in the time to read all these chapters - Don't be too shy to comment on what you'd like to see for the nalulovefest coming up - I'm not sure if people would like to see more high school shenanigans or if I should revisit my Officer Dragneel and Journalist Heartfilia AU? Comments, suggestions, critiques and reviews are extremely welcomed. My special thanks to @impracticaldemon for urging me to write for the fluff week. Without her, this story would not exist (or the title ~ lol). Go and check out her writing - it's excellent. Also, a warm thanks to @eliz1369  and @shell-senji  - also both excellent writers and active in the Hakouki and FT fandoms. I have deeply appreciated your reviews.

Tag Squad!! Just say the word - I can add or drop you from the list, no worries!

@rocktqueen @unashamed-shipper @ftfanfics @fic-writer-appreciation @celestialgeekmage @soprana-snap @celestialspiritqueen @nalu-fluff-week

[rockrevoltmagazine]

PSYCHOSTICK'S Alex Dontre Talks New Music, Future Academic Plans, Salty Fish, & Alien Anthropology!

So PSYCHOSTICK has long held a top position in the music parody world, and the explosion of their Christmas 2019 adventure, “Zombie Claus,” proved that they’re planning to hold that spot for a long time to come. But is there more to the rowdy Chicago crew than just boobs, beer, and dogs with socks? We sat down with drummer Alex Dontre, who this holiday season also released his debut autobiographical tome, Dichotomies: Lessons from a College Life to get the scoop!

First things first, thank you for taking the time to talk with us. How was your 2019 Holiday Season with the new single and book releasing?

Certainly! My holiday was great up in the Toronto area. I visited my girlfriend’s parents and whatnot. They hail from Newfoundland, so I got to try some awesome new foods like Newfie Figgy Duff! It’s a real thing, I swear. I also tried salted cod, which was intense! I’m not sure my desert bones are made for salty fishes.

As for everything else, it has been an especially busy year for me. My friend Tommy from URIZEN told me I should write a book a few years ago. It sounded fun, but I wasn’t sure what to write about, so I didn’t put much additional thought into it. Then in October of 2019 I just decided to blast through and finished writing the initial draft in 10 days. Around the same time, Psychostick was recording our holiday parody for the year and filming the video. Then November hit and we looked especially productive!

Where did the idea for “Zombie Claus” come from? What inspired the satirizing of such an iconic Rob Zombie song with those particular lyrics?

I really can’t remember! We were in the van and someone started singing it. That narrows it down, I suppose. It wasn’t me! Maybe I should make up a fun story instead. It’s tough to answer questions about inspiration because it’s usually very subtle and doesn’t make for a wacky tale.

The video seemed to be EVERYWHERE online between Thanksgiving and Christmas, how was the fan reaction to this release versus your previous Christmas parodies?

This one was really great! It’s funny, our fans are very supportive of most anything we do. We aren’t really going to hear from people, “Well, this year’s video sucks…try again.” Instead, it’s more the frequency of just how many people are talking about it. That seems to be a better judge. However, it’s also good to ask family because they’ll be real with you. For instance, Matty’s mom likes mostly all of the holiday songs we’ve done, although there was one she did NOT care for. When we put out “Oh Tannenbaum,” she wasn’t particularly thrilled to see her son creepily humping a wreath with a tree.

What is your bucket list song to parody?

Parodies are fun to do in the moment, but they don’t have any big emotional payoff to them. So I don’t have a bucket list. I have a couple of cover songs I would love to do, however. A super heavy version of “The Cat With 2 Heads!” by The Aquabats would be awesome. I would need to practice a lot if I want to get that drum part down, yikes!

You also released an autobiography, Dichotomies, around Thanksgiving, tell us a little bit about the book and what fans can expect reading it? Not asking for spoilers, but what is the essential take away?

I certainly did! Actually, it’s more of a story that traversed several years than an autobiography. I don’t talk about how I was a gross kid or anything. Instead, it starts in 2011 when I enrolled in college for the first time while I was on tour. It goes from there and documents the many insane things that happened up to my graduation with my master’s degree in Business Psychology in 2017. I know that’s a huge spoiler, but if I didn’t graduate, the story wouldn’t really make any sense! In any case, I blasted through over 50 classes in that span of time, and Psychostick played over 500 shows in North America and the UK. The goal (in part) in writing it was to share a lot of fun things I learned. I talk about finance, economics, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, you name it. I also want to convey the idea that everyone is busy. If you have a goal in mind but are apprehensive about giving it a shot, my story is proof that with enough drive and commitment, you can accomplish whatever you’d like.

Over the course of your career, you’ve intermingled Rockstar lifestyle with college student responsibilities and writer goals, how did you balance those very different roles?

Ha! The preface of Dichotomies actually addresses this “rockstar” idea. In my view, I’m not a rockstar. There are too many pretentious connotations. I’m just a musician. In any case, that is exactly what the book is about. I’m not content simply being one thing, and one thing only. I have lots of interests and hobbies that I choose to pursue, but far too often, people assume we all need to just be one thing. I am not just a drummer any more than I’m just an academic. I choose to carve out time in my daily life to accommodate both, much in the way I carve out time to eat and sleep.

Can fans expect future books? If yes, will you be sticking in non-fiction or will you go into any other genres?

Almost certainly, yes! It was a lot of fun to compose, so I am currently developing some other ideas. I don’t have any plans for fiction at this point, although I love sci-fi. One book idea is to write a non-fiction explanation of various human things told from a space alien’s perspective. I had this idea of a cultural anthropologist explaining to his alien peers about all the bizarre human things like economics or sociology…from an alien perspective. Something like, “The water bags assign value to colorful pieces of paper and trade them in irrational ways. Sometimes, they imagine the value of worthless items on display increases due to something they call a ‘sale.’ During this ‘sale,’ they eagerly dispense a disproportionate amount of their colored paper on items that are seemingly worthless. They then discard the items in their ceiling closets within a few lunar cycles. Avoid visiting the planet during their annual tumultuous season known as The Holidays.”  

Finally, what can fans expect from both you and Psychostick in 2020? Any live shows or new music in the works?

Yes to both! We are currently finalizing a few weekend shows in various areas around the country. We don’t have plans for any extensive touring right now, so we’re doing more regional shows instead. As for recording, there is always something in the works! I’m actually planning to record something this weekend. Plus, we just announced that I will be filling in on drums for the band Dog Fashion Disco, on tour in June! They are a great group of humans, so it should be a blast.

There you have it, now go check out “Zombie Claus,” if you haven’t already, and grab a copy of Dichotomies, online now!

Purchase Dichotomies Online: Hardcover & Paperback United States: Psychostick, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, & Powell’s Canada: Amazon.ca &Indigo Mexico: Amazon.com.mx Brazil: Amazon.com.br United Kingdom: Amazon.co.uk & Blackwell’s Netherlands: Amazon.nl & Bol Germany: Amazon.de Denmark: Saxo France: Amazon.fr Italy: Amazon.it Spain: Amazon.es & Agapea Australia: Amazon AU & Fishpond New Zealand: Fishpond Japan: Amazon.co.jp Singapore: Amazon.sp United Arab Emirates: Amazon.ae

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PSYCHOSTICK’S Alex Dontre Talks New Music, Future Academic Plans, Salty Fish, & Alien Anthropology! was originally published on RockRevolt Mag

[anna-2807]

Want to know the correlation?

I hate cancer because it kills by ravaging the body and leaves families without dads, mothers and siblings.

It is difficult to treat, and it sometimes goes undetected until it is too late.

Shame is emotional cancer, and I hate it just as much, if not more than cancer.

I hate it because it ravages the soul and steals lives as quickly or as slowly as cancer.

I hate shame more because no one wants to talk about it, so it goes undetected for months, or years, or forever.

It robs lives when it whispers lies into our minds that we are defective and broken. And because of that, we are somehow less-than.

But unlike cancer, shame is…well…shameful.

Unlike cancer patients, no one gathers around the infected and brings food and comfort. If everyone knew that shame can be just as deadly, perhaps we would all be more watchful and compassionate.

But shame can ravage more than a person’s soul.

Shame will sabotage relationships–especially romantic relationships

Shame causes us to fight our way out of responsibility.

We have to deflect and deny accountability because it hurts too bad.

We can’t just admit when we have done wrong, because our shame takes us to dark places we are afraid we will never escape.

So we minimize our bad behavior.

Shame also filters everything that comes at us through a lens of contempt.

Our spouse may want to simply point out an area where we need to improve, but instead, we feel attacked.

We can’t hold ourselves in warm regard, so we force others to mirror back to us that we are good enough. If they fail to do that, we get angry or lose interest in them.

The best I way I know to illustrate shame is with client’s stories.

(Names and specific details are changed to protect privacy.)

Brian isolates himself because he feels undeserving of love

Jennifer is married to Brian. They have two kids, and everyone loves each other in this family. But Brian is moody and this causes problems. He is often irritable with the kids and snaps at them for no good reason. He spends a lot of time in the bedroom alone watching TV when the family is together. He says he is just an introvert, and that there is nothing wrong, but his family misses him and wants to spend time with everyone together.

When they can coax Brian out of his shell, he can be playful or he can be mean. No one ever knows which Brian they will see. Brian is so closed off. He won’t discuss what he’s thinking or worrying about. His family just feels more and more distant and no one knows what to do.

Shame is a toxic part of this family. What his wife and children don’t see is that Brian has a lot of shame. He doesn’t think he deserves his family and he believes they will all be much better off without him. He isn’t suicidal, he just doesn’t want to be around others when he is feeling the toxic effects of shame so acutely.

Even though Brian is the one feeling the shame, it affects his entire family. His kids don’t know his withdrawal is about Bryan’s issues. Like all kids, they assume it is because he doesn’t love them. Bryan’s wife believes he doesn’t love her enough either. Now Bryan’s shame transfers to all of them as a carried feeling. It is one way shame passes down from one generation to the next.

Bill tries to drink his shame away

Serena is married to Bill. Bill has three to four drinks every evening but refuses to consider he has a drinking problem–he just needs the alcohol to unwind. Sometimes Bill does get excessively drunk, and when he does he embarrasses everyone in the family

At his worst, he will call someone stupid or shout humiliating things, but this doesn’t happen often enough to concern him. He gets angry when his wife insists he stop drinking. That’s because Bill is using the alcohol to self-medicate.

Bill is very defensive. When his family points out his drinking is embarrassing to them, he gets angry. He insists they are all too sensitive. When I meet with Bill alone, I see the shame that he bears. His wisest self knows he is failing his family but he avoids taking responsibility because he already thinks he is a terrible person. He hides from the truth and keeps drinking to shut out the voices in his head that tell him he isn’t good enough or smart enough. He just wants everyone to leave him alone, so he uses anger to keep them away.

When I confronted Bill on his behavior, he was angry with me. He threatened to walk out and never come back. I told him he could absolutely do that, but I felt sure he was about to lose his wife and kids. I also told him that I knew he could look at himself and see what his family needed him to see: that he was hurting them and he could do better.

Bill sobbed on my couch and all the shame and humiliation he felt came pouring out of him. Bill was told he was worthless his entire life. He didn’t want to live this way any longer. Before he could make any real improvement he needed to go through our Breaking Free workshop. This workshop was the beginning of a new life for Bill.

Sandra had an affair because of shame

Mark is married to Sandra. Sandra is a stay-at-home with three small kids, while Mark is a successful professional who works long hours. Sandra loves her kids but she gets bored staying home all day. She has a college degree in philosophy but doesn’t think that will help her get a job. She doesn’t know what fuels her passion or purpose in life and she feels lost and alone.

Mark is always working and when he is home, she feels he is critical of her and how she spends her time. She admits she doesn’t do a very good job of cleaning and cooking but she just can’t motivate herself to care. She thinks Mark is brilliant but believes she has never lived up to her potential. Mark’s mother doesn’t like her either. Sandra reports that her mother-in-law is very critical and thinks Sandra takes advantage of her son, Mark.

When I met Sandra alone, I discovered that she has an inner critic that echoes the messages she got growing up. She is simply not enough. Not smart enough. Not pretty enough. Not fit enough. Not perfect enough.

Sandra went on a weekend trip with her girlfriends and met a man in a bar. This man paid her attention and made her feel special. For the first time in her life, she experienced the thrill of infatuation. She fell into a sexual and an emotional affair that lasted several months. But the guilt started to destroy her. She began fantasizing about driving off a bridge and ending it all. Her husband found out about the affair and her life fell apart.

Mark wants to work on the marriage, but Sandra is having a difficult time forgiving herself. She has shame attacks regularly. Until Sandra deals with the root of her insecurities and feelings of worthlessness, she will flounder around feeling lost and disconnected.

These are three different couples to help you see how shame can show up differently in relationships. Shame can manifest itself in isolation, anger, or self destructive behaviors. It keeps you a prisoner to lies that restrict your happiness and joy.

When shame is at its worst, I see clients who are unable to function in their daily lives.

Examples of how shame can manifest itself at the lowest point:

It causes depression even to the point of being suicidal.

Drinking to numb the pain – longing for relief from the misery of feeling unloved and unlovable

Binge eating or shopping excessively.

Viewing porn to numb the pain.

Engaging in extreme risk taking behavior to keep the adrenaline flowing

Using prescription or illegal drugs

Self-mutilating behavior like cutting or hitting hard objects with bare hands. Feeling physical pain often lessens the intense emotional pain shame causes.

How Do Shame Attacks Work?

Everyone makes up stories. When someone says something or shows us behavior, we assign meaning to what we see and hear. If we have a shame core, the meaning we assign is often negative and critical.

For example, if I hear my husband slam a door I have options in how I filter that event. One is to think he simply wasn’t paying attention and used too much force in shutting the door. I might check in with him to see if he is ok. I could also assume he was mad at me. Then I could think of some reason he may be mad and start to get angry at him. If I am someone who has a lot of shame, I would have a distorted filter so I would tend to take offense easily. Now we are off the races. All because I made up a story about a slammed door.

This is how shame frequently trips us up in our relationships causing us to imagine harm that is never intended.

Shame also enables us to get in relationships with people who aren’t good for us because it is someone who is more broken than we are and it is all we feel we deserve.

Or, shame keeps us stuck in a bad situation because we don’t have enough esteem to demand something better.

So we live with the bully, the addict, the serial cheater, the abuser.

Shame comes from childhood trauma

If you struggle with shame, somewhere in your childhood you were told or treated like you were not precious and valuable, like you didn’t matter.

Some of my clients who have shame battles are quick to tell me they did not have abusive childhoods.

Shame expert Pia Mellody defines trauma as “anything less than nurturing.”

Childhood trauma, big or small, creates shame

The big T’s of trauma are the overt abuse situations you expect:

beatings, sexual abuse, being told you are stupid.

But there are the little t’s of trauma:

Those are the situations where we didn’t get enough hugs and cuddles.

We had a parent who had to work all the time and couldn’t be there enough.

We were bullied in school or had parents who raged and fought all the time.

We may have had a parent who died or divorced.

Think of anything that made you feel minimized or shoved aside.

So basically, (by this definition) childhood trauma is the human condition because no one had the perfect childhood.

As a result, many of us have developed a shame core that resides just below our unconscious. That shame core infiltrates our unconscious and our conscious and causes us to have thoughts and feelings that inhibit our well being.

A counselor’s struggle with shame

I struggled with shame for most of my young adult life. This shame made me frequently depressed and anxious.

I would have a shame attack and would spend weeks in bed hiding from the world. I even became suicidal several times. No one who has met me in the past few years can believe what a mess I was at one time in my life. But I did learn how to conquer shame and so can you!

Pia Mellody developed a process for inner child work many years ago, but I had never heard about it. I fought for my mental health by using some of the same principles as Pia’s model, but I wish I had known about it because it would have helped me immensely.

To fight shame, you have to confront the lies you tell yourself and replace them with the truth even when you don’t believe it is the truth. You have to look at every story you make up about events and challenge them for truth.

Trauma work isn’t about blaming our parents for being less than perfect. Most parents do the best they can, and so we focus on impact not intent.

Inner Child Work can help you deal with shame

The Marriage Place is now offering a 3-day Breaking Free workshop that involves looking at your childhood trauma and processing it in a way that rewires the way the brain functions. This is a powerful, life-changing three days that can help you deal with addictions, shame, anger, depression and anxiety. Click here for more information.

Read more at https://themarriageplace.com/2016/02/how-shame-ruins-your-life-and-how-to-change-it/

[neonsheepcollector-blog]

Human relationships/partnerships/friendships are not white-and-black.

Something that I’ve come to understand in my thirty years is that there is a vast variety of human relationships, and how we experience the joy and struggles of companionship with the people in our lives.  And I want to dispel (and reinforce) certain ideas.  The way people move in life together, the way they love, is diverse, dynamic, and multifaceted. 

Just as there is a great rainbow of sexual, and gender expression, so there is of human interaction and partnership (and in many instances, these play together well).  Relationships are, for many people, not so cut and dry as the terms ‘boy/girlfriend,’ ‘friend,’ ‘partner,’ ‘significant other,’ ‘made-family,’ etc.  The range of human emotion and the outright complexity of interpersonal relationship fails to incorporate many kinds of situations that fall outside normally-accepted social constructs.   Many people have family who are not blood, just as many people have partners who do not fit the definition of a romantic partner.  I’m going to talk here more specifically about these non-traditional partnerships as there’s nearly endless (both useful, and useless, advice out there on that).

That means:

Not all life partnerships need be romantic or sexual in nature.  Some start, or wind up that way, but not all are, and this is not a bad thing. Emotional intimacy expresses in many ways, and you can express intimacy in both romantic, and aromantic ways.   You do not have to be attracted to someone who is your life partner; you can be, or you may be, depending on degree, over time, from start to finish, etc.  All are variables on the individual.  But bottom line, no one said somewhere that the person you choose as your partner must be your romantic partner.  I’ve known plenty of people who have deeper, more meaningful connections with a non-romantic life partner than they do fleeting/temporary/otherwise passing romantic interests, and trust me that isn’t as uncommon as you might think.

Life partnerships/close companionship need not be monogamous, whether the relationship is romantic/sexual or not!  Again, boundaries, communication, and respect are essential.  

Not all romantic partnerships need be sexual, or physically intimate.  Whether this is conscious choice, or because one or both parties are on the asexual spectrum, again this is not a negative.  Respect for boundaries and preferences are part of the key tenets of trust of any close relationship with someone else.   Some people rarely want sex or physical intimacy, even if they don’t identify as asexual.   Some people who identify as asexual are open to doing things with a romantic partner.   Some people rarely--if ever--are sexually attracted to actual people.  These are facts about other people that must be respected. Understanding isn’t as important as respect.  

And please, please remember this one: soulmate does not necessarily mean ‘sexual/romantic partner’.  

You do not need a formally acknowledged title, a term, a word, a social convention, ruling, or public recognition to make your emotional partnership valid and important in your life.   And even if you do have the luxury of those terms (and yes, it is sometimes a luxury, even a privilege, especially in regions/cultures where same-sex, non-binary/genderqueer relationships are stigmatized).   YOUR ABILITY TO PUBLICLY ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH SOMEONE DOES NOT MAKE IT LESS PERSONALLY LEGITIMATE. Oftentimes, as singular individuals, in difficult circumstances, you can do little to change the views of society, parents, religious structures, etc.  Your inability to disclose these relationships or partnerships does not invalidate their authenticity, or your authenticity.   Having non-traditional relationships can sometimes be socially frowned upon.  Respect each other’s situations.

You are not required to explain any relationship to someone else.  You don’t need to tell someone the details, or nature of your relationship (I’m leaving out examples of legal questioning for sake of argument here).   It’s not their business.  Other peoples’ opinions, speculations, suggestions, etc, are immaterial.  Ideally, they should only remark on those at your request.  Nobody likes busybodies. 

The rules of other peoples’ relationships and partnerships are not something you are owed an explanation of.

“Life” partnership does not necessarily mean “lifetime”.  People change, situations change, feelings change.  I feel like people are stuck in this mindset that when you develop something with someone, the goal is for it to stay that way...forever.  That’s ridiculous.  Even in the most traditional, life-long, monogamous partnerships, the nature, intensity, and character of a relationship can change.  This is called being human.  People grow and change as years go by.  You find ways to incorporate new things, new emotions, etc into their lives.  This does not necessarily mean any partnership is destined to fade or break apart--some do the opposite!--but it does mean you need to be open to change and be self-aware.  There is always room for personal growth.

Consent. This doesn’t just mean consent in a sexual context. You are not required to give someone consent to do something, take a responsibility, involve themselves, or ask emotional intimacy of you unless you are prepared to give it, and neither is the other party.   Especially when it comes to sharing details of your life with someone.  You are never allowed to make another person’s choices for them without their consent.  You don’t select their other friends, you don’t control their access, you do not take from them that which they are not ready and willing to give.  Again, just because you have an established, long term partnership with someone does not give you control, nor they over you.  Communication, negotiation, mutual respect and understanding, and being open and honest, are paramount.  Talking about feelings--even things like loneliness, jealousy, feeling neglected, or hurt by certain actions you or they do--need to be discussed before they ferment, and a relationship (of ANY kind!) becomes toxic. 

You aren’t required to mirror each other’s ideologies.   Whether this is religious, political, cultural, etc, it doesn’t matter.  You’re under no requirement to completely share your worldview with a life partner, companion, romantic partner, metamour, or anyone, really.  While it helps to see eye to eye with someone on most issues, rarely, if ever, do people agree on everything.  That is not a negative, or a failing. That is life.  Respect them, and they should respect you in turn.  So long as you both have this fundamental respect for each other’s thoughts, you should be free to agree, disagree, or agree to disagree.   Rarely (if ever) should this preclude your partnership moving forward (though it can be difficult or impossible if you or the other person has views that invalidate you or them; I’m just going to assume that if you’re at that point, that isn’t a problem).

Remember, at the end of the day, that the people you journey with and keep close are important to you, and you to them.  Respect, love, and treasure them.  If other people don’t understand how you or any partner you have, or friend, or whatever work, that isn’t your problem, nor do you have a duty to explain. It doesn’t take away from the validity of what you have with someone.

[giantpurplerabbits]

The World is Round - 18/09/16

///(((I’m just going to note that what follows is a rather intense piece of writing that I spurted out on a particularly godless journey on the aforementioned date. I’m fine now, really. - 03/05/17)))\\

I smell awful. Really awful. I should be a museum exhibit. It may be terrible, but I feel freed by my smell. I feel like the smell of my exterior may have finally attuned to my interior in a way that has finally freed me from general expectations.

I wonder whether other people can smell it? I believe they must be able to. But from what distance? 15 feet? 20 feet? I’m counting in metric because it feels a lot better at accounting for short distances. Or is that imperial? I must check later when I have an Internet connection.

I don’t normally write. I’m a very lecherous being really. It’s probably why the smell is helping. The warning people never normally get. I don’t really know how to feel about my ability to destroy people. They come to me. It must ultimately be what they want. I’m what they want. For no real good reason. A change of perspective I suppose. I guess that is what destruction is good for… A change of perspective.

One might wish that people had a better ability to judge their interests. But then, really, that’s not very high on the problem list of the human race. Really, anyone who’s not a genocidalist is really a saint. But then who am I to judge? I’m sure genocidalists have lives too. Long, long lives of seconds and minutes and hours and days and years and decades of moments that struggle to conjure up a human being. Who is anyone to judge? We’re fucked, really.

So it continues, boring and monotonous. I’m currently on the train. A world is falling past me. Many worlds in fact, but I won’t get into listing infinities again, I’m sure you get the idea. I just saw The Fat a White Family. Good band. Expressing so you don’t have to. I feel thankful to them really. In many ways they’ve sacrificed decent lives to provide what some might consider to be artistic meaning. They’re not very well people, that’s for sure. I think Descartes tried to do something similar. But in all honesty, everything he discovered was wrong.

The words are falling out of my head. Sooner or later this will all stop.

Tomorrow is a blank cheque. A blank cheque of my time, effort and money. I don’t want to talk about work. So I won’t. Other than to say that I work as a projectionist. Yes with film once. The world is becoming increasingly less isolated and increasingly more obsolete. Trains stopped. Anyway. It’s not fun. Not as much as it ought be.

Data.

I’m lazy, insecure, relatively hopeless, reliable (but not in love), , ,

To be honest I’ve kind of given up. I used to be happy, you know like that real kind of happy, where you know you’re miserable, but you know you’ll always be miserable, the truth is that this is practically as good as it’s ever going to get. I wish I wasn’t so accurate in my predictions. So after years of struggling with all that, I’ve finally given up. My life is sacrificial bread, now I’m just trying to figure out how best to give it away.

Everyone and everything /everyone is dying in 2016, it’s practically celebrity deathmatch./ sorry people on the train are interrupting my train of thought. Is telling me the same thing at the moment. Something along the lines of the past was good (that one comes to varying degrees, after all, the recent past was good, beyond that is…) the present is a transitional phase, the future will be complicated. Fairly straightforward.

I was quite thankful not to get shot by something extremists tonight. It would have upset my girlfriend too much.

Next station is the airport.

It’s only a matter of time till there is a terrorist attack in England/London, so say the experts. Culture is eating itself, with little seeming to flow in. The planet is invariably dying. We’re past the levels where our man made pollution was manageable. It’s really as apocalyptic a time as it has ever felt. I feel like in my more luxuriously bitter moments, one can count the number of generations left with a couple of half-severed fingers. When culture goes, so do the rest of us. And bring it on. The UK and the US are drowning in their own mistakes, the world is given to mass disaster, human nature is evil and the world celebrates mother Theresa. Just cut the chord, nothing is worth the suffering of so many, and no it’s not for any damn good reason.

Rant over. Life gets boring when one invokes too much emotion. I always quite liked the long-necked things in Star Wars episode II. I always felt like they were essentially what the human race would be if built slightly better, but hey, they were arms dealers and responsible for the death of everything, so who am I to judge?

Yawn yawn yawn.

Why am I so obsessed with being built to fail? Defective? It was only today I realised that was actually regarded a trait of being an INFP. How rewarding. Nice to know I’m on schedule.

One has to be very careful when one gains an interest and belief in the mystical not to let it damage your life to levels you’re not willing to support on a purely rational level. But then I’m a pretty rational person. I like logic too much. It’s why I’m not really to be trusted with people. I mean, I’ve got an emotional side too, it’s just, it’s quite well governed by the rational one, which means under bad influences I can become pretty well… Pragmatic, that’s the word I wanted. It also means that in the past I’ve thought that you could deal with people logically and that when they said they understood and agreed with you they meant you were on the right side of history. That’s not really how it works.

So the mystical is not a thing I can explain very easily (the justification comes and goes in my mind) all I can say is it starts with energy and fairly common things that one can easily witness, and comfortably spreads out beyond that. Magic does seem to be a thing. Some people seem attuned to it, some not. But that’s not a morality or value judgement, it’s merely an observation, but then I do a lot of that too. No wonder I ruin people.

My cigarette appears to be vomiting out tobacco of its own free will. I can’t blame it, I only smoke, like most people, as a form of long-term undetectable suicide. I wouldn’t mind getting stabbed tomorrow. But then maybe I would once it happened. There’s so much freedom in the inevitable, or maybe good will is a better word. People really enjoy the feeling (by which I mean on what would appear to be an instinctive level) of having lost control. I mean sure, enjoyment is a strong word, but then, emotions can be quite odd things. Enjoyment might be the least desirable one.

A little, long or middling time ago I dated a crazy girl. She was not very well. Times were tough. If she ever read this she might have a problem, so I’m going to stop.

Secret doors, morality calls. What is one to do. Try and care. Well. Caring is inevitable, for some anyway.

Did you ever see that film ‘The Act of Killing’? I’m not explicitly recommending it, because some people won’t enjoy it. There’s that word again… Enjoy… Misuse, or truly an odd emotion? Anyway, it’s not an enjoyable film. But it will show you something.

I hope you realise I’m an unreliable and deeply flawed narrator because otherwise you’re probably not going to enjoy this very much. Also, I’m not fishing for compliments, I’m perfectly happy to accept this is a really pointless, vain, unreadable (well now you’re being just a bit silly) boring and poorly written piece of writing WITH self-aggrandising statements, I mean… Semi-colons, I mean, colonoscopies, I MEAN ANGRY VOICE DEEP TONE LOW THROAT VOMIT IT OUT … eurgh…. Writers should leeArn to not … (Self-aggrandisement again, not fun) (invert commas? No) getting closer… It’s a stupid joke I’m sure you can finish it…

Now at Haywards Heath.

There was a man opposite me, that is at the table adjacent to mine, who was frowning I suspected (drowning by numbers) at my having my feet up on the seats. I took them down. As he left he took the bag of wrapping which I had left on that table when I had been previously sat at it and put it in the bin as he left. Would I have done the same? Maybe so, actually, as I left. I envisioned a situation somewhat like that one when I left the bag there in the first place. It was somewhat guilty of me I recognised, to not be taking full account of my rubbish, but then I know how trains are cleaned, at least partly, firstly people wander down the aisles and pick stuff up. I feel for these people I really(?) do, but it surely must be said without doing whatever the opposite of reducto ad absurdum is (y'know, butterflies and Hurricanes type stuff) that there will be nothing lost to that person by picking up that bag and putting it in the bin. The Karmic cost of the action, should there possibly be such a thing, surely can’t be that high if to be honest entirely existent, but then if karma exists then who the hell knows who’s fucked in the hereafter or not. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t balance out down here, but then these are old arguments.

No I’m not very educated, yes I’m aware, the occasional references to philosophical ideas, terms or really anything that to the wrong mind may be considered to be an attempt at learnedness should know I’m fairly in on the joke, an A-level in philosophy doesn’t count for shit, it’s merely a joke unto itself, and to be honest in the long run I didn’t even get a good grade. I like to think because I didn’t like the way the second year was graded as goes for my academic college life (or, the years I learnt I didn’t want to be an academic) but then that’s just inflation.

The next station is Brighton. Nearly home. Hipster twats here I come.

Split-infinitives… That’s the fucker.