#posting another snippet to self motivate dont mind me

[jamtartandsunshine]

“Roy?” Jamie asks softly “Why are you doing this man? You hate me.” Roy sighs, setting the plates on the counter and turning to face Jamie, who’s got his arms crossed protectively across his chest and what Roy can only describe as a hopeful scowl on his face. He’s just a fucking kid Roy thinks to himself.

[lemonzestywrites]

❤️✨🖤✨

i did a poll for the next posting and y’all have spoken! this next snippet takes immediately after this posting with a bit more soft dom buck!

also i got extremely indulgent with this one so ummm...enjoy the VERY long post LMAO

✨(nsfw under the cut!)✨ft. rimming (dont say you weren't warned!)

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He’s not really used to this. A part of him isn’t really sure what to do with it- with this endless pleasure that’s fully and entirely his. 

There are no strings attached, no ulterior motives, really. Just Buck, who’s knelt between his legs and seems more than happy to linger there, driving Eddie fucking insane with nothing else but his tongue. (Holy shit, that tongue-)

Buck laps at his hole with such a hungry eagerness. Eddie strains against his bonds, writhing from the pleasure, his own cock dying for relief. But even as badly as he wants to seek out his own release, he knows better. Knows that’s not up to him, even as badly as he wants it.

Another sweet drag of Buck’s tongue sends a sharp shockwave of electricity up Eddie’s spine. He moans, the sound muffled and garbled behind the gag. Fuck. He’s not going to survive this. There’s no way.

He just manages to keep his hips from buckling again. Buck’s hands give his ass a slight, small squeeze as wordless encouragement. Eddie feels the heat of his mouth momentarily pull away, for a second. “Good boy, Eddie.”

The praise floods down Eddie’s cheeks, a burning wildfire claiming everything in its path. Scorching every inch of his skin, extinguishing every breath. He buries his face further into the mattress to steady himself, not minding the wet patch of drool pooling beneath him.

Buck dives back in not a moment later, the motion not faltering in intensity or desire. Maybe even increasing, as Buck devours him in full, the vibrations of his very self-satisfied hum doing fucking wonders to Eddie. A particular pass has Eddie instinctually bitting down on the silicone ball, the most depraved of moans being pulled from him as he does so.

Holy shit. He knew Buck was good with his mouth but this- 

This is borderline fucking illegal. It has to be- good fucking god. 

Eddie’s head spins, the world around him dizzying as he tries so desperately to at least force some air into his lungs, to make some attempt to ground himself here. He tries- he tries so hard-, but the air is too thin, too frail. His body tries to balance through every sensation, juggling through pleasure and desperation, through need and want. 

Fuck.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Distantly as if miles away, he feels the warmth behind him retract slightly. Eddie whines, the sound needy and raw, though still muffled, as all of the sweet gorgeous bliss he was being offered suddenly pauses. 

The whole world drops off its kilter and every inch of his body aches in desperate depraved need.

But just like before, he feels a familiar warmth crawl up his back once more, but this time there’s no harshness to it, no domineering edge that carries an authority like it did earlier. The motion is still confident and sure, just…softer. Broad hands slide up Eddie’s sides with easy familiarity, an act that tugs at Eddie, grounding him to this moment. Buck retakes his place, spread along Eddie’s back again, tucking his head on top of his shoulder.

“Breathe,” Buck whispers. An order. Though it doesn’t really feel like one; not in the way Eddie’s used to. Because it doesn’t draw fear or demand respect. Buck’s voice is warm, gentle, even. “Take a big deep breath for me. Eddie. In through your nose; as much as you can take.”

Maybe in a clearer head, the rate and ease in which Eddie succumbs to Buck’s instruction might’ve been a surprise to him, but here at least, it doesn’t. He follows Buck’s words without a second's hesitation, inhaling through his nose, slowly taking in as much air as his lungs can allow.

It’s not like Eddie has ever had a problem with authority per se, not in the way he’s seen with other people, a fellow soldier disobeying an order, or another classmate making a snide comment from his fire instructor's lecture. Eddie’s always followed politely, because it’s what he’s had to do. It’s what was expected of him. From the moment he was a boy till now as an adult. The outburst, the disobedience, that’s just never been allowed. So he obeys. 

But with Buck…

It’s odd, the way it feels so different. Not bad. Or scary. 

Entirely the opposite, actually.

There’s a warmth, an air that surrounds Buck and his dominance. His command is still assertive, yet caring in the same breath. Not because he’s getting some sick power trip off telling Eddie what to do. 

That’s not how this works. 

He draws in a slow careful breath, feeling the edges of his raging mind beginning to calm a bit more, the hazy feeling starting to steady itself. 

Eddie doesn’t follow because he has to. 

He follows because he wants to. 

There’s so much trust placed between every order and every action. Never drawing from the feeling of reckless control or wild sexual abandon.

Buck hums to himself. “Perfect. Now let it all go.” The words flow so easily. Eddie releases the breath he was holding, not missing the way the hands at his sides begging to rub small circles into his hips. “Slower,” Buck coos gently, and Eddie leans into the instruction as soon as it's given, slowing the exhale down a bit more. “Yeah, just like that.”

The praise lands like morning sunbeams peeking in between the blinds, a warmth Eddie basks in, the muscles of his shoulders, relaxing as they fall. “Good. That was amazing,” he assures.

Assurance.

A feeling Eddie didn’t know he was even seeking out until now. Until the words landed delicately to his ears and gently tugged at his strings closer and closer to the ground. Never letting him stray too far.

Buck doesn’t just do this to exude power or control, just to fuck Eddie and leave him be afterwards. No-

Buck…Buck cares.

afotalwcs taglist (lmk if youd like to be added to be tagged in future postings!) - @eddiebabygirldiaz @your-catfish-friend @giddyupbuck @jeeyuns @artemis-the-sinister

[charismaandcashmere]

In a Twitter account called So Sad Today, the American writer Melissa Broder has been sending out snippets of her daily inner life since 2012. Broder writes about mundane sadness – ‘waking up today was a disappointment’ or ‘what you call a nervous breakdown i call oops, accidentally saw things as they are’– and she is brutally honest about her own shortcomings (‘whoops, hurt myself conforming to socially accepted standards of beauty that i know are false but still feel compelled to fit into’ or ‘just felt a flicker of self-esteem and was like what the fuck is this’). The account has become a sensation, winning her more than 675,000 followers, and Broder’s book of personal essays about her mental-health battles, also named So Sad Today, appeared in 2016.

It’s startling that Broder’s unabashed expression of sadness – and all the shitty emotions – has struck such a nerve in a world where people’s social media profiles are immaculately curated to show their happiest selves. But clearly the growing rates of depression worldwide mean that we are struggling to be happy. Are we doing something wrong? Broder’s popularity should compel us to cast a new look at sadness and its cousins. Perhaps we should consider realigning ourselves with the Romantics, who as a group found solace in freely expressing emotions in poetry. In his ‘Ode on Melancholy’ (1820), for example, John Keats wrote: ‘Ay, in the very temple of Delight, / Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine’. Pain and joy are two sides of the same coin – both are necessary for a fully lived life.

Keats might have had Robert Burton in mind here, the 17th-century priest and scholar whose hefty volume The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) described how sadness might go into overdrive (something we’ve come to understand as clinical depression) and how to cope with it. Or various self-help books from the 16th century, which, according to Tiffany Watt Smith, a research fellow at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London, ‘try to encourage sadness in readers by giving them lists of reasons to be disappointed’. Could it be that the path leading to true happiness goes via sadness?

Recent research suggests that experiencing not-so-happy feelings actually promotes psychological wellbeing. A study published in the journal Emotion in 2016 took 365 German participants aged 14 to 88. For three weeks, they were handed a smartphone that put them through six daily quizzes on their emotional health. The researchers checked in on their feelings – be they negative or positive moods – as well as how they perceived their physical health in a given moment.

Prior to these three weeks, the participants had been interviewed about their emotional health (the extent to which they felt irritable or anxious; how they perceived negative moods), their physical health and their habits of social integration (did they have strong relationships with people in their lives?) After the smartphone task was over, they were quizzed about their life satisfaction.

The team found that the link between negative mental states and poor emotional and physical health was weaker in individuals who considered negative moods as useful. Indeed, negative moods correlated with low life satisfaction only in people who did not perceive adverse feelings as helpful or pleasant.

These results resonate with the experience of clinicians. ‘It is often not one’s initial response to a situation (the primary emotion) that is problematic, but their reaction to that response (the secondary emotion) that tends to be the most difficult,’ says Sophie Lazarus, a psychologist at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. ‘This is because we are often sent messages that we shouldn’t feel negative emotions, so people are highly conditioned to want to change or get rid of their emotions, which leads to suppression, rumination, and/or avoidance.’

According to Brock Bastian, author of The Other Side of Happiness: Embracing a More Fearless Approach to Living (2018) and a psychologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia, the problem is partly cultural: a person living in a Western country is four to 10 times more likely to experience clinical depression or anxiety in a lifetime than an individual living in an Eastern culture. In China and Japan, both negative and positive emotions are considered an essential part of life. Sadness is not a hindrance to experiencing positive emotions and – unlike in Western society – there isn’t a constant pressure to be joyful.

This thinking could be rooted in religious upbringing. For example, Indo-Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, which has been extensively studied by Western psychologists such as Paul Ekman, calls for recognising emotions and embracing pain as part of the human condition. It places emphasis on understanding the nature of pain and the reasons that lead to it. Many modern psychological practices such as dialectical behaviour therapy now employ this approach of recognising and naming emotions in treating depression and anxiety.

In a study published in 2017, Bastian and his colleagues conducted two experiments examining how this societal expectation to seek happiness affects people, especially when they face failure. In the first study, 116 college students were divided into three groups to perform an anagram task. Many of the anagrams were impossible to solve. The test was designed for everyone to fail, but only one of the three groups was told to expect failure. Another group was in a ‘happy room’ whose walls were affixed with motivational posters and cheerful Post-it notes and they were provided with wellness literature, while the final group was given a neutral room.

After completing the task, all the participants took a worry test that measured their responses to failing the anagram task, and filled out a questionnaire designed to evaluate whether societal expectations to be happy affected how they processed negative emotions. They also took a test about their emotional state at that time. Bastian and his team found that people in the ‘happy room’ worried a lot more about their failure than the people in the other two rooms. ‘The idea is that when people find themselves in a context (in this case a room, but generally in cultural context) where happiness is highly valued, it sets up a sense of pressure that they should feel that way,’ Bastian told me. Then, when they experience failure, they ‘ruminate about why they are not feeling the way they think they should be feeling’. The rumination, the researchers found, worsened their state of mind.

In the second experiment, 202 people filled out two questionnaires online. The first one asked how often and how intensely they experienced sadness, anxiety, depression and stress. The second – in which people were asked to rate sentences such as: ‘I think society accepts people who feel depressed or anxious’ – measured to what extent societal expectations to seek positive feelings and inhibit negative ones affected their emotional state. As it turns out, people who thought that society expects them to always be cheerful and never sad experienced negative emotional states of stress, anxiety, depression and sadness more often.

Painful times confer other benefits that make us happier over the long term. It is during adversity that we connect most closely with people, Bastian points out. Experiencing adversity also builds resilience. ‘Psychologically, you can’t become tough if you don’t have to deal with tough things in life,’ he told me. At the same time, he warns that the recent findings shouldn’t be misunderstood. ‘The point is not that we should try and be sadder in life,’ he says. ‘The point is that when we try and avoid sadness, see it as a problem, and strive for endless happiness, we are in fact not very happy and, therefore, cannot enjoy the benefits of true happiness.’