#sorry idk if that’s all super personal

[rozugold]

Goshh I finally sat down and took the time to get my skin tone accurate for this art of my mc sona and it’s got me feeling all emotional skdhdjk

[hawkfrostandmudclaw]

[thedreadvampy]

sometimes I forget that my experience has been. um. not 'your experiences are not universal' vibes but more like 'your experiences are EXTREMELY atypical'

[heshemejoshi]

more toto and chimichang.. to put it bluntly they have bewitched my entire mind and soul

[aquarterasian]

still upsets me so bad that homare's skating career was overshadowed by her crush on harry like why.... why did henri have more of an arc in that regard than she did hes a side character. and i love henri ofc his relationship with masato and his conflict with growing older and becoming less androgynous looking is genuinely such a great storyline and i wouldnt give it up for anything but homare deserved to have an equally well thought-out storyline considering shes one of the main characters but i always feel like she was just reduced to her crush on harry and it just makes me :/

[briar--rising]

Rosh Hashanah is next week. It's always been my favorite holiday, and every year I prepare for it and look forward to it. But this year I've been dreading it, and until this past week I couldn't figure out why.

I haven't been to synagogue much in the past year. I've gone a handful of times, but much less than any other year since graduating college. And I thought of going, my therapist tried to encourage me to go because she knows it often makes me feel better, but there was just this inner resistance that I couldn't figure out and wasn't ready to look at closely enough to decipher anyway. And then as the High Holy Days got closer and closer I started to notice that I was really dreading them, which is not how I usually feel. And so I brought it up in therapy on Tuesday, and came to some really important realizations.

I've been doing a lot of very serious grief work and trauma work this fall. My most serious trauma anniversaries are almost all in the fall, and it's a season of great grief and usually highly elevated symptoms for me. My first serious psychotic break was in the fall, four of my five hospitalizations have been in the fall, etc. Until this year I spent every autumn of the past decade pretty severely psychotic. I could not face the trauma and grief that this time of year brings up for me, I could not process those feelings and memories without losing my mind in defense so that I wouldn't have to truly experience them. I've always known this, and for a few years have tried very hard to truly experience my grief and not retreat into psychosis, but I never managed it until this year.

This autumn has been different. I've still struggled with psychosis much more than in the summer, I still have to fight it most days. But I'm winning most of those fights. And I'm grieving. I'm mourning, I'm crying, I'm sitting with my feelings for as long as I can bear and then distracting myself from them when they get too much instead of retreating into symptoms most of the time. I'm genuinely experiencing the thoughts and feelings I need to be experiencing. I'm reading about death, about grief, about loss, I'm talking about these things in therapy. It's often incredibly painful, though sometimes it is simply a peaceful kind of sorrow. I'm getting in touch with a lot of the feelings I've found so difficult to face from some of the hardest times of my life, and I'm experiencing some of them again.

And some of those feelings that I was really quite blindsided by and that I've been largely repressing for 15 years are incredibly complicated feelings about G-d. When I was 11 years old I was just like any other religious and traumatized kid: I prayed to G-d to fix it. I did that thing kids do, I tried to make bargains with Him. "Dear G-d, if I clean my room will You save my mommy? If I'm perfect, will You fix my family?" You know. Things like that.

I was desperate for anything, anyone to save me. I talk sometimes about the particular traumas of that year, about my brother's birth, about my mother's hospitalizations, about her suicide attempt. But I have no words to express the year as a whole, except to say that terrible thing after terrible thing after terrible thing happened, and throughout all of it I was neglected and left at sea. My mom was sick, my dad was trying to keep his head above water, no one was there for me. So I tried to turn to G-d. And when He wasn't there for me either, I felt incredibly abandoned and betrayed, both by Him but also because I was taking my feelings about my family neglecting me during severe trauma and putting them onto Him. It's hard for me to express the levels of hurt and rage I felt at G-d during that time period.

And then my memory cuts out. I remember approximately nothing from shortly after my twelfth birthday (in June) until November over a year later. I have a handful of memories of specific events that took place at school or at camp, but absolutely zero memories of my internal feelings or anything that ever took place at home during seventh grade. It's just. Gone. Always has been, probably always will be.

The next significant things I remember in terms of my relationship to G-d and my religion are all about Hebrew High School, which I loved (I got to start it early bc I was being bullied in normal Hebrew School), and preparing for my Bat Mitzvah, which I also loved. My memory goes from intense feelings of betrayal and abandonment and agony to instantaneously a relatively low conflict, positive relationship with G-d and Judaism (with Jewish-appropriate amounts of questioning of course and moments of anger, but no true rage and despair like I once felt). And I stayed in that space of Judaism-as-comfort-with-minimal-internal-conflict for the next 10+ years. I have no idea how that transition happened, but it certainly didn't occur because I slowly and naturally dealt with all of my complicated feelings and embraced religion after processing.

And then this year, well. I guess the processing came due. I'd like to be very very clear that being Jewish always has been and always will be incredibly important to me, and nothing about any of this changes that. I am struggling, though. I'm re-experiencing a lot of those childhood feelings of betrayal and abandonment and confusion and rage. And not being ready to face those feelings is why I've been subconsciously avoiding synagogue for the past year, and is why I've been dreading the holidays. At least now I'm aware of what's happening, so that's a step in the right direction. And in the long term this is a good and important step not only in my trauma recovery but in my relationship with Judaism and with G-d; I can't have as deep of a relationship as I want without this kind of struggle. To quote my therapist, "your relationship with Judaism is too important to you to be easy." Thankfully in Judaism struggling like this is not only allowed but expected. But it is a struggle, right now. A painful one.

I leave you all with a song I've been listening to on repeat that is helping me confront and think about a lot of these feelings:

[excali8ur]

Scuttles in

I gave in and made a Mastodon account

Follow me or don't

Scuttles away

[frownyalfred]

if you’re the stripper I showed my ao3 to last night at the club, thx for being very cool about it and sorry I only had like 7 singles

[cozystars]

The one who carries the Mushroom Kingdom on her shoulders.

[sarcophagid]

liu gui mb

[bilestat]

insane how quickly something small can tank my mood

[anxiously-sidequesting]

To me personally malistaire is the funniest and most pathetic villain wizard101 has ever had AND I MEAN THAT SINCERELY!!! Between doomed children who have been manipulated, groomed, and isolated into becoming products of their environments, someone scorned who has been punished unfairly by having your biological heart torn out your chest and turning your children and all of reality against you to satiate their own ego, a nonhuman entity so powerful and so clueless they unintentionally threaten the lives of everyone around them, Malistaire FELL DOWN BRO. Like yeah you're bitchless now. You and me both. Get in line. Everyone in this room is bitchless. We are ALL living that ✨💅🏾💃🕺 Single Life™. You are a middle-aged man. Cope

[faunandfloraas]

No but actually coming from someone with fine wavy/curly hair who had some hair loss and lots of issue I really and truly wish I could sit down and talk with Chan because he really needs someone who understands curly hair to get him some products and show him what to do and he also needs to stop using heat. Like no straightening. No hair drying. Or at least very sparsely.

[bananasfosterparent]

[moe-broey]

It's not a direct one-to-one since Moe is firmly on the side of The Power of Friendship, but I do think it has the exact energy as The Devil from The Bible (Shadow fandub) when pressed a little too much and a mask slips

[thedreadvampy]

I tried listening to Olivia Rodrigo and I'm sure this is really good for its target audience of Teen Girls Going Through A Breakup but has she actually ever put out a song that isn't about a guy cheating, breaking up with her and moving on to someone else?

like babe he's not coming back it's been 2 years you gotta find something else in your life