#this feeling of malaise is completely beyond my control | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ghostdrew22 · 3 years

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Glass Shatters || Draco Malfoy

Requested: No Pairing: Draco Malfoy x fem!reader, also kinda Blaise x fem!reader Warnings: mentions of drinking, toxicity, ANGST, just pure fucking angst and asshole!draco, oh and swearing lol Summary: You realise that it’s time to end things with Draco when he hurts you one last time. AU with no Voldemort - 7th Year.

WORDS : 2294

Lyrics taken from ‘What Do I Tell My Friends’ by Bree Runway (the loml)

~~~

Hold me, don't let me go I'm fragile, I'm gonna fall right into you Catch time that I have lost Fly high, free fall, ooh

There’s always been something so beautiful about the way that glass shatters, loud and chaotic, scattering shards of itself everywhere and lodging itself in places that it doesn’t belong. It’s poetically exquisite, to just come apart and spread into tinier pieces of what you were once before, but it’s grossly painful to wear oneself out like that.

Sometimes, though not often enough, there is someone there to catch the glass before it hits the ground and scatters into a million pieces. A safety net, perhaps is the right word, there to protect those lattices from coming into contact with the hard surface that awaits them. Something to keep them from separating like the tangled limbs of playful children on a trampoline when they come back down to land against the woven polypropylene. But there’s not often a safety net waiting for you to fall.

And maybe that’s why people typically shatter like glass.

Turn it up for a wild one Turn it up for a wild one Turn it up for a wild one I'll get stupid, I'll get dumb (Uh-huh) Turn it up for a wild one Turn it up for a wild one Turn it up, turn it up, uh

You catch a glimpse of Draco across the room. He’s doing it again. He’s got one arm around Cho Chang’s shoulder and another around Millicent Bullstrode’s, and not a single sliver of attention is being directed toward you.

You’re not fragile. No. You never have been.

For as long as you can remember, you’ve prided yourself on being strong, on being able to protect yourself. What most people see when they look at you is power and ferocity- you're made of what Gods are made of and almost everyone knows it. You are not fragile.

But when it comes to Draco, you are like a frail baby bird that's always being nursed back to health. That was what a routine like the two of you had demanded. Submission, protection, but most would call it toxicity. You are putty in his hands and he knows it- every wall that you’ve ever built to protect yourself is nothing more than a child’s play pen when Draco is involved.

You catch his eye and scowl at the mischievous grin that he’s got on his face. He knows how much you despise his flirtatious nature, and it’s exactly that reason that encourages him to keep it up. You’re a beast that’s not to be messed with, like a tiger lodged in a cage, and he’s the only one that knows how to tame you. It always goes down the same way; he insists that the two of you need to keep it on the down-low, he then proceeds to flirt with everyone, you get upset, the two of you get in an argument and well... he always wins.

You're not fragile yet he always gets a reaction out of you.

But not tonight, no. Tonight it’ll be different.

Tonight you’re going to have a good time, with or without that snow-flake haired prick. You turn beside you where Neville, your best friend, is seated and smile at him.

“Neville, want to get smashed with me?”

“Always, Y/N.” Neville responds with a grin and you excitedly get up to get you both some drinks.

You're g-g-getting way too close (Oh oh, oh oh) Stop blowin' up my phone (Oh oh, oh oh) Just let me be alone (Oh oh, oh oh) It's gotta come to an end 'Cause what do I tell my friends? What do I tell my friends?

Draco catches a glimpse of you leaving the couch where Neville, Blaise and Hannah are sitting, and decides to follow you toward the drinks table.

“Whoring around are we?” He asks with his eyebrows raised and you roll your eyes.

“Oh please, you’re one to talk.”

“What the fuck did you just say?”He tugs on your chin and brings you up to face him.

“First of all,” You start as you softly remove his hand from your chin and lower it to his side, “You heard me. Second of all,” You put a hand to his chest and gently shove him backwards, “Back up please, I can smell your breakfast from here.”

He runs his tongue along the inside of his cheek in annoyance. “Y/N, this bratty behaviour-“

“Call me a brat, ever again, and I’ll make sure that’s the last thing you ever call me.” You smile, “I have a name, stick to it.”

This is very new for Draco, he’s never seen you speak so calmly in the heat of an argument. He’s seen you rage at him, yell until your lungs are sore and throat is raw, clench your fists so tight that crescent moons form in your palm. But he’s never seen you like this, never so collected. If he’s being completely honest, your level-headed appearance is throwing him off.

“Whatever pothead Neville’s given you is clearly fucking with your head, let’s go back to my dorm-“ He starts as he inches closer and grabs your wrist.

You yank yourself out of his grip and take a few steps away from him, “As tempting as that offer sounds, I’m good thanks.” When you notice the look of confusion painting across his features you smile awkwardly, “I know how this always ends so I’d much rather be alone.”

“So I’m just supposed to wait until you don’t want to be alone anymore?” He asks with a scoff.

“It’s not like I haven’t been doing that for you.” You accuse and watch as he clenches his jaw in frustration, a sign that his patience for you is wearing thin. “And that’s not what I meant. I want to be alone, indefinitely.”

“What?”

“This,” You gesture between the both of you, “Is over. I can’t do it anymore.”

“Oh my fuck, do what Y/N?”

“All of it. I can’t keep sneaking around anymore like some kind of dirty secret. I can’t keep watching you flirt with everyone that’s within a 5km radius, and I can’t keep lying to my friends. What am I meant to tell them when I go disappearing for hours at a time and come back, covered in hickeys?”

“Nothing. It's no one's business.” He grits out angrily and you scoff with a small laugh.

“You’re pathetic. We’re done.” You utter before walking away from him, and his little corner, and go back to join Blaise, Hannah and Neville on the dance floor.

In the mirror like you're tough, right? I shoulda known once when you bit twice Drip drop both my , yeah I been nice Vodka overdose but no ice I'm done catching feelings, I catch flights Was in the dark but I got bright Not crawling back to you tonight Not crawling back to you tonight, tonight

“Shots, now.” You mumble once you get back to your friends and they waste no time obliging.

Draco’s had the pleasure of picking you apart like a worn out doll for too long, you won’t tolerate it anymore. He calls, you run. He warns, you heed. He scolds, you leave. Whatever he wants, you do without a moment of hesitation. When had you become so easily prey to his antics? You steal a glance of him checking himself out in a nearby mirror and feel your throat close up in disgust. How can someone so gorgeous be so horrible?

Deep down, beneath all that beauty and cockiness, is a vulnerable, scared and loveless little boy who didn’t learn to outgrow his insecurities. He can pretend all he wants that he’s a diamond but you’ll always know, he’s dark and desolate like a stone of coal. Something inside of him is fractured beyond repair and now he’s just remnants of disintegrated life. And try as hard as you might, you can’t fix whatever’s broken inside him. It’s not your job to anyway.

You always run back to him, in hopes of finally curing the malaise that torments his soul, but not tonight. No. Tonight will be different.

Turn it up for a wild one Turn it up for a wild one Turn it up for a wild one I'll get stupid, I'll get dumb (Uh-uh) Turn it up for a wild one Turn it up for a wild one Turn it up, turn it up, uh

“Is this a party or a funeral? For fucks sake, turn it up Ginny!” You shout as you turn behind you to face the beautiful ginger that’s controlling the music.

“Anything for you Y/N.” She responds flirtatiously as she sends you a wink and proceeds to turn up the volume to the music. You look away from her with a dopey smile, trying to pretend that her wink hadn’t made butterflies erupt in your stomach. Oh Ginny. If you hadn’t wasted so much time pining after that blond prat then maybe you’d have gotten to her before Harry had.

“Come dance with me!” Blaise yells over the music and you happily agree as you let him take your hand and move you toward the makeshift dancefloor.

Any other time, you would have refused. It’s no secret that, despite being best friends, Blaise and Draco can be very competitive. Blaise had always been your friend and Draco, had not. But it was quite obvious to anyone who had eyes that the two of them both took quite a liking to you, and while your relationship with Draco isn’t public, it’s still never a good idea to get too close to Blaise. But fuck good ideas, tonight none of it matters.

If Draco likes to see you angry then today he’ll see you seething. Every unspoken rule that’s ever sat between the two of you will now be broken so harshly that it’ll shake him to his core.

You wait until you’ve spotted him in the room, then you hook your arms around Blaise’s neck and allow his hands to fall on your waist as a measure to guide you along with him. It’s not long until Draco sees you, and when his eyes lock with yours, you know that he’s positively enraged. If this is a game, today you are winning.

He’s almost always got the upper hand. But not tonight. No. Tonight is different.

Before you know it Draco is crossing the room and yanking you away from Blaise by the arm, dragging you to an abandoned section of the room.

“What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Why are you hovering so close to me?” You ask in frustration as you step back from him. “Sheesh.”

“Sheesh? Sheesh?” He repeats in disbelief and you have to resist the urge to laugh. “Y/N, how much have you had to drink?”

“Not enough apparently, considering I’m standing here with you and not grinding against your better looking counterpart.” You mumble and Draco scoffs.

“Blaise is not better looking than me-“

“Okay Romeo, whatever you say.” You cut him off with a giggle, “Are we done here or was there more?”

“Was there more?” He repeats in a mocking tone, like a child making fun of their childhood friend. “Of course there was bloody more!”

His outburst has you laughing, genuinely laughing, and for a second you see the Draco Malfoy that got you into this mess in the first place. Your funny, good-looking, charming classmate that you accidentally allowed to creep into your heart. But he’s not the real Draco, no, that Draco doesn’t actually exist.

You bring your hand up to cup his cheek and, without even thinking, say “I wish that this was the real you.” He furrows his eyebrows at you, clearly confused, but you continue nonetheless. “I can’t keep doing this Draco, I love you but I love myself more and I can’t allow you to get in the way of my wellbeing any longer.”

He pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs, “How am I getting in the way of your wellbeing?”

“Tell me that you love me too, right now, say it.” You shrug.

“Y/N, you can’t jus-“

“Okay, tell me that we can go public.” You revert and he swallows.

“Why are you-“

“Fuck, I’ll make it easy for you.” You interrupt him once again and give him a thin smile, “Tell me that what we have is real and that we’re in a relationship.”

He opens his mouth but no words come out and you nod your head awkwardly in understanding.

“Y/N, it’s not that-“

You scoff and shake your head in disbelief, “Your chest is hollow and yet you still have no space for me.”

“No-“

You blink back tears as you continue, “You push away everyone that cares about you and then you turn around and complain about the fact that there’s no one left to root for you. How can I possibly be in your corner when you’re continuously trying to shove me out of it?”

There are tears welling in your eyes but you don’t let them fall, no, he doesn’t deserve to make you cry.

He looks at you in shock and you know that you’re not getting any kind of closure from him. Despite how hard you’d tried to convince yourself otherwise, you had always been nothing more than a warm bed that he could settle into when he was lonely. The fire in you that he’s always admired seems to dwindle whenever you’re beneath his gaze, and now you realise that it’s not fair for you to die out for him.

“I hope you learn to start letting people in.” You whisper before giving him a kiss on the cheek and walking back toward your friends.

He watches you walk away from him and struggles to sort through his thoughts. No, no, no. You can’t leave him, everyone else has already left him. You’re safe, you’re warm, you’re you, and Draco knows that he has feelings for you but how can he possibly convey that when words always get trapped in his throat like a cricket in a shoebox?

He knows what he wants to say to you, the words are scraping against the belt of his mouth like knives ripping through tape on a cardboard box, but how does he get them out, how does he make you understand?

Maybe that’s just it, he doesn’t.

He doesn’t make you understand. He doesn’t get you. He breaks, little by little, with every step you take away from him.

What do I tell my friends? What do I tell my friends? What do I tell my friends?

“What was that about?” Blaise asks in your ear and you roll your eyes as you pull back to look at him.

“Draco being immature, nothing important.”

“Oh, that’s good.” Blaise smiles sheepishly. “I was worried that maybe something was going on between you two.”

You smile brightly at the boy as you bring his hands down to your waist and sway to the music. “Why would that worry you Zabini?”

“I’m kind of into you.” Blaise whispers before bringing his lips down to connect with yours.

You don’t notice, too engulfed in the feeling of Blaise’s lips against yours, but across the room Draco’s eyes are focused quite intently on you and Blaise. When the two of you kiss Draco drops the glass that he had been holding, and he thinks that maybe he’s that glass; being smashed to smithereens.

~~~

Okay, I’ll stop with angst now... (maybe) I have the sudden desire to write fluff so the sequel to ‘Falling Out Of Love With Astoria Greengrass’ will definitely be wholesome and fluffy.

I’m probably not going to post again for a few days, I’m a bit worn out rn, but I’ll be back to writing soon!

anyway, love you all

jean <3

#draco #draco malfoy #draco x y/n #draco imagine #draco fanfiction #draco malfoy angst #draco malfoy x reader #draco malfoy fluff #draco malfoy imagine #draco angst #draco fluff #harry potter #harry potter fanfiction #harry potter imagine

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citrinekay · 3 years

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and I'd hate to fade alone

@bambikieren and I were talking about the pros and cons of S2 a few days ago, and we both agreed the richness of tension and relationship development between Bill and Holden would have been greatly improved by incorporating Holden's panic attacks. I said something along the lines of "their opposing personal traumas could have made them both feel as if they were alone in the investigation, their partnership from S1 abandoned." She suggested I write a fic about Holden calling Bill after a panic attack in Atlanta, so here it is:

A brief yet unsettling nightmare wakes Bill with a jolt. He was once again treading through the lightning dust to the basement of the house on Cimarron Court. It was pure daylight, full of warm sun. Then he reached the place where he’d witnessed the chalky shape of a cross laden with a toddler’s fragile form, but instead of a cleaned-out crime scene, he laid eyes on Brian hunched over a squirming figure.

Brian is a small kid - doesn’t look capable of anything violent; but behind Bill’s eyelids, he saw the worst possible version of what happened that day the boy died. His son - his own chosen child - smothering the life from the baby. In the dream, Brian looks up from the arduous task, his dark eyes gleaming with infernal impulse.

“Dad,” he says, calmly. “Is the fish dead yet?”

Bill is awake in the next instant, his heart thundering against his ribs and sweat itching in the creases of his armpits and down his back. His mouth is dry, tasting of the three beers he washed down before passing out on the couch.

It takes him a moment to convince himself it was a product of his mind encumbered by stress and fatigue and dread, and nothing more. When he gets his bearings again, he realizes that the clock on the wall isn’t indicating the afternoon but well past one o’clock in the morning. The only light Nancy had left on when she went to bed was the lamp beside the couch. The kitchen and dining area are draped in shadow, familiar fixtures undefined and murky and disconnected from his little pool of yellow light.

Swinging his legs over the edge of the couch, Bill sits up slowly with a groan, and scrubs his hands over his face. The next logical step is getting up from the couch to walk himself to bed where his weary heap of bones belong, but the lingering dread in the pit of his stomach keeps him chained in place.

He isn’t certain when coming home on the weekends from Atlanta began feeling like a second job, but the joylessness is inescapable. Facing Nancy with the noble reassurance that he’s trying to save the lives of children no longer seems feasible just like facing Holden with the lie that he’s dedicated enough to his family to be flying home every weekend for no other reason than to spend time with them had reached the end of it’s credibility.

Perhaps that’s why going back to Atlanta now seems like less work than coming home. In a few short months, his life had become a careful manipulation, a tight-rope walk of convincing everyone in Atlanta, Quantico, and here at home of a specific narrative. While in Atlanta, don’t mention Brian. While at home, don’t mention Atlanta. At Quantico, don’t mention either one. The drive to keep his stories straight burned exhaustion through him like a hot fuse. At least now he isn’t bold-faced lying to Holden.

Rousing himself from the couch, Bill grabs his cigarettes from the side table, and ambles into the darkness of the kitchen. He doesn’t bother to turn on a light as he finds the cupboard by memory, and fills a glass with water from the tap. He washes away the stale taste of beer, and when his throat is no longer aching, replaces it with the heat and nicotine of a cigarette.

Standing over the kitchen sink, he taps ashes down the drain, and studies the night sky beyond the window. Constellations emerge against a tapestry of black, unhindered by clouds. In the silence, despite Nancy and Brian sleeping only a few walls away, he feels utterly alone.

The shrill ring of the telephone jars him from his sinking malaise. He has little time to ponder just who the hell would be calling this late at night as he rushes to grab the receiver and stop it’s ringing from waking Nancy or Brian.

“Hello?”

Raspy, labored breathing rustles across the line, startling his defenses.

“Hello? Who is this?”

“Bill …” Holden whispers, his voice low and trembling, nearly unrecognizable. “Don’t hang up.”

Instant worry seizes Bill’s chest, those hassled defenses migrating into protective alarm. “I’m not. Are you okay?”

He hears Holden swallow thickly.

“It’s so late. Did something happen?” Bill presses.

“I … No.” Holden’s hesitation shines dishonesty clearly through the affirmation.

“Then why are you calling me?”

Silence registers across the miles of phone line between them, but Bill can hear the slight hiccup in Holden’s breathing, the undercurrent of distress that he recognizes because he’s been feeling it bubbling up within his own chest for weeks.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have-”

“No, it’s okay.”

Bill presses his eyes shut as the rushed reassurance rouses another bout of silence, this one rife with confusion.

“It is?” Holden asks, at last.

“Yeah, of course. Look, Holden, I know things have been … rocky between us lately, but I know you care about this case. I know it’s been hard on you.”

“And you,” Holden whispers, carefully.

Bill takes a drag of his cigarette, and steadily exhales smoke past pursed lips. The nicotine doesn’t have the calming affect he’s searching for. Despite his honesty last week, he and Holden haven’t spoken about what happened with Brian. Part of him knows they should, but as the prospect approaches now it twists the knot in his gut tighter.

“Yeah,” he mutters at length.

“If it makes you feel any better, you hid it incredibly well. I had no idea.”

“It doesn’t, but thanks.”

“Got any tips?” Holden asks, offering a hapless chuckle.

“What? For lying to everyone and pretending I’m fine?”

“Yes.”

“None that I’d wish on anyone … least of all a friend.”

Holden’s muted sigh is tremulous. “Are we still … friends?”

Bill adjusts his grip on the phone, and bends to brace his elbows against the edge of the counter. Staring down at the ashes dwindling into the sink, he tries to come up with a response that doesn’t make him the bad guy in this situation. His thoughts are nothing more than an empty roar, taken by exhaustion and panic.

“I want us to be. Is that good enough?” he asks.

“Yes,” Holden agrees, his tone perking up. “I can live with that.”

“Then I guess I should apologize for lying to you and pretending everything was fine.”

“Mhm.”

“So … I’m sorry.”

“Me too. If I’d known-”

“But you didn’t.”

“I could have been a better profiler. Instead, I’ve been completely wrapped up in my own shit. You know, I’ve never felt more alone than I do right now, surrounded by the dozens of people who are on this task force. God, I really miss those early days when it was just you and me on the road.”

Bill’s instinctive reply is, “why would you miss me?” But he bites it down because he misses Holden too, and maybe he’s still too burdened by pride to admit it.

“Those were the days,” he says, instead.

“We weren’t so alone then,” Holden sighs, then stifles a yawn.

“You sound tired. I should let you go.”

“No, it’s just … it’s the Valium sinking in.”

Bill chest flinches at the mention of medication, the insinuation it invites - that Holden’s first impulse after surviving a panic attack was to call him.

“Are you okay?” he asks once more.

“I guess I would be lying and pretending I’m fine if I said ‘yes.’”

“Probably.”

“It’s okay. You can ask me about it.”

Bill draws in a slow breath against buzzing nerves. This isn't them. They don’t ask each other personal questions or talk about it. Holden is floating out of reality on benzodiazepine and Bill is too morbidly curious about someone else’s pain rather than his own; but it’s late and they’re both loath to fade alone.

“Does it happen often?” Bill asks, softly.

“Hmm … yes. Not enough to impede me from doing my job, but more often than I’d like.”

“What triggers it?”

“Sometimes the obvious things - a bad dream, a bad thought, a crime scene, a smiling picture of a kid who I know is dead and died terribly. Sometimes nothing. It’s unpredictable - that’s in the nature of panic disorder.”

“But the Valium helps?”

“It does damage control.”

Bill nods, biting the inside of his cheek as he processes this information. What he’d said by the riverside lashes across the back of his mind, and it looks utterly cruel from this perspective.

“What does it feel like?” he asks, closing his eyes against the surroundings of the kitchen.

He waits with bated breath while Holden thinks. His lungs burn with anticipation as if to say “sell me your pain; let’s make a fair trade of it; you try on mine, I’ll try on yours.”

“It feels like … suffocating. Very slowly. My lungs hurt, my head hurts. I can’t think or breathe, and I feel very small and trapped and …”

“And what?”

“Helpless.”

“Sounds awful.”

“It is. Even if it only lasts a few minutes, I come out of it feeling like I ran a marathon. I’m exhausted for the rest of the day, but when I lay down, I can’t sleep. My mind races.”

“That’s why you called me?”

“Well, I couldn’t get up off the floor, but I could drag the telephone and the Valium off the nightstand,” Holden murmurs. “I wanted something to hold onto.”

Bill clenches his jaw as he imagines Holden lying on the hotel floor in his pajamas, his pallor white and clammy with sickness, his body trembling. He wants to say that if he were there now, he would leave his own room and come over, he’d pick Holden up off the floor. They could hold onto each other.

When he opens his eyes, however, he sees that he’s still standing in his dark kitchen, and the only warm body to hold onto within touching distance wants nothing to do with him right now.

“There isn’t much left,” he says with a grim chuckle. “For you to, you know … hold onto.”

“Because of what happened?” Holden asks, gingerly. “With Brian?”

Bill smothers his rising hackles. Holden opened the door by offering to talk about his panic attacks, but Bill had kicked it wide open by even asking the questions. Talking about Brian is quid pro quo. Now all that’s left is putting a price tag on his own pain.

“Ever since it happened, I’ve just been trying to hold everything together. Here at home, Quantico, down there in Atlanta. It’s like there isn’t enough of me to go around, and I keep cutting myself into smaller and smaller pieces, dividing them across the problems I need to control. You were right when you told me I was distracted, that I wasn’t there when I was there. Truth is, I can hardly focus on one thing. Every time I close my eyes or my thoughts wander just a little, it goes back there - to a baby dying, and my kid saying absolutely nothing about it to me or Nancy.”

Holden is quiet for a moment before breaching the invisible wall. “How did it happen?”

Bill inhales a steadying breath, and blinks against the sting at the corners of his eyes. “A group of them were playing in the park. They ended up over at the house Nancy is the realtor for. Things got out of hand. The older boys somehow suffocated the toddler. They put him in the basement of the house, but … they didn’t just leave him. They - well Brian - he-”

“What did he do?” Holden asks, his tone lacking condemnation but rather perking with twisted curiosity.

“There was some old flooring in the basement. They made it into a cross, laid the baby across it like … like he was Jesus, and he was going to somehow fucking rise from the dead. It was all Brian’s idea. It was …”

Holden’s breathing quickens against the line. “God, Bill-”

“How do I reconcile that? How do I fucking forgive him? It was weeks before they found him, Holden. Brian left a baby lying there for weeks, and said nothing. I mean what the hell is wrong with someone who does something like that?”

“Maybe he was scared-”

“No, he knows he can come to us. We’ve never mistreated him, hit him, yelled at him. Never once made him think he couldn’t talk to us.”

Holden falls quiet.

The silence over the line thickens, and pretense falls away. Bill can hear the normal reassurances splinter. Holden studies the mind, and he understands darkness. He can read Bill’s fears even from across the country - and he recognizes their validity.

“You think he didn’t feel anything?” Holden asks. “That he’s just like the subjects in our study.”

Bill’s throat chafes with mounting emotion. He hasn’t dared admit it to himself, but it is what he thinks. It haunts his every nightmare.

“Yes,” he whispers.

“Bill, we don’t know everything. Especially when it comes to children. Remember when we talked about intervention, and we wondered if somewhere along the line, something could have been done to stop these men from killing?”

“Yes.”

“This is the time to do something. Get him help. Nothing is written in stone.”

Bill rubs his eyes hard. “You really believe that?”

“Aren’t we beholden to at least try?”

Try. Yes, all he has done for the last few months is try, but that is the god-forsaken truth of the human condition. Trying, and trying, failing and trying. Learning one or two things along the way. It’s inescapable.

“Thanks,” he mutters.

“You’re welcome.”

They sit in silence for a long moment.

It feels better with some of the weight off Bill’s chest. He imagines it will be back in the morning. All the more reason not to hang up.

Holden yawns softly against the receiver, his rustling breath prickling down Bill’s spine. He presses the phone closer to his ear, and waits for the indolent moan at the end. When it comes, low and throaty, it doesn’t last nearly long enough.

“Tired?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Wanna go to bed?”

“No. Do you?”

“No. We can keep talking.”

“Okay. About what?”

“Something else,” Bill suggests, angling for a lighter tone. “Something not so fucking depressing.”

“Okay. Here’s something.” Holden’s voice takes on an impish tone. “A few weeks ago, I threw your betting sheets out the window of the car.”

“What?” Bill asks, a choked laugh fighting its way past the calcified emotion in his chest. “I wondered where those went.”

“You weren’t talking to me then. Christ, that makes me sound bitchy doesn’t it?”

“Yep. It does.”

“Fine. But since when do you bet on ponies?”

Bill bites his lower lip. This conversation isn’t heavy enough for honesty, at least not yet. It isn’t important for the truth that he hadn’t been interested in racing until Ted Gunn plopped the analogy in his brain right next to the trigger points that are Holden.

“Not long,” he says. “Just something to distract myself. Mindless entertainment.”

“With a price tag.”

“Everything has a price tag. It’s just a matter of scale.”

“What’s the price tag on this conversation?”

“Nothing. It’s an even trade.”

Holden hums something indistinct.

“What?” Bill asks. “You want me to take something from you?”

“Or I could take something from you.”

“You already took my betting sheets.”

Holden laughs, softly. “I did. Okay, what do you want?”

Bill’s levity disappears into a panicked, heady ether. Before Atlanta, he’d often wished for Holden to say those exact words for him; then his world came crashing down, and those wayward thoughts were available to blame for his own lack of dedication to his family. Holden was an easy target for a rage he doesn’t have the will to hold onto anymore.

“I want you to take care of yourself,” Bill says, finally. “Get some rest.”

Holden sighs, unhappily. “It is almost two o’clock.”

“Exactly. I’ll be back tomorrow. We can talk then if you want.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, as long as we can both keep our eyes open. This surveillance is killing me.”

“Don’t worry. We’re going to get him. If not tomorrow, then the next night.”

“If you say so.”

“I do.”

“Well …. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Bill.”

They linger a moment longer before muttering further goodbyes. When the phone hits the cradle, a deep and abiding silence replaces the hiss of static across the line and the warm cadence of Holden’s voice. Outside the window, the stars are the same even as time marches forward, dragging him towards an inevitable precipice. It’s some small comfort that he won’t be making that fall into the abyss alone.

#bill x holden #mindhunter #my writing

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raspberryjones · 4 years

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At This Time...

Sitting here paralyzed for days, trying to figure out what more I can do. Quarantined, distracted from grading these final papers by the fires in my feed, knowing that donating to activist organizations and RT’ing, on top of crying, shaking and cursing, is not nearly enough. Plus, just about anything I say/do on the socials feels like a f*cking performance. All of it — except the anger and the stream of information that continues to reassert the utter disdain that this country’s White supremacy (not just Tr*mp, but the whole friggin’ establishment) has for Black and Brown people, here and throughout the world. The insidiousness.

Even wallowing in my own exhaustion — jobless, hope on a tattered string, watching the powers that be f*ck the populace over in every way imaginable… All of it feels self-pitying, when I can recognize my privilege and be struck by the existential sorrow that, even before this week’s events, or the racial disparity of the pandemic’s victims, surrounds most Black American lives. When I hear my Black and Brown friends and colleagues express their own exhaustion, as so many have over the past five days, it has the weight not just of the moment, or a political term, but of history. Personal, familial, written in volumes, reaffirmed constantly — and running contrary to America’s dip-shit self-mythologizing.

And yet... Despite this horror-show past, with white supremacy’s attempts to subjugate them for generations, Black America’s ability to move society forward has been beyond fucking remarkable. The creation of culture, the strength of moral character, the depth of communal compassion. It is no overstatement that the moral and creative compass of not just Black excellence but of the African-American community I’ve known, has been among primary lodestars of my life in this country. And while I do not expect all other folks to feel the same way I do, I most certainly judge those who feel contrary — or those who dismiss the notion that, if anyone’s ever made this hard land great in the past, it’s been Black Americans.

And that in the struggle to understand the fullness of this account, you will find pretty much all contemporary crises. It’s incredible that, in 2020, a majority of people still don’t comprehend the connections between systemic white privilege and Black death in the headlines, between colonization culture and the overwhelming inequality rampant in American society, between the contemporary malaise of the Western imagination and the whitewashing of the media. For a person who does not simply work in/with culture founded on the Black experience, but gets their very lifeblood form it, this is a hard fucking pill to swallow. The big “YOU don’t get it!”

So, when thinking about WTF else I can do, as a writer who deeply supports Black American communities in the struggle against white supremacy, I thought it worthwhile to reiterate some of this historical record’s personal and social importance. Having just spent a semester teaching NYU sophomores about how we got here — while re-reading classic texts by LeRoi Jones and Ralph Ellison and Isabel Wilkerson, Nikole Hannah Jones’s massive new one, and discussing the contemporary settings of these ideas with DeForrest Brown Jr. and Angel Bat Dawid — what I believe should be our collective mission is fresh and clear in my mind.

This is where music comes in. It’s especially important that anyone who listens to contemporary music in the 21st century, also participates in reappraising these whitewashed texts, restoring Blackness back to the center of this culture. Not only to acknowledge the proper origins of the forms and ideas that are so important to it — and thus, acknowledge the people who developed these forms and ideas — but act accordingly in times of crisis, requiring us to use our white privilege to support pro-Black and anti-colonialist positions in a way that could actually lead to structural change. To “see something, say something” when companies belligerently monetize the (Black) people’s culture and do not recompense the community, or when cops act like overseers that treat Black lives as wanton boys do flies.

Because… Here’s the thing: blues and jazz are the basis of all great new music of the last 100 years — paving the way for the post-modern Black electronic music (hip-hop, house and techno and electro) which is the core of pretty much all popular sounds of the 21st century. And the Black experience is the DNA of these musics — meaning, in the clearest terms, that we don’t get to have this music without the burden that preceded it. This is at the core of the accusation that “loving Black culture more than Black people.” You do NOT get to do one without the other, and still call it “love.”

Unlike European art, that original Black music is not the product of some art-school- and conservatory-learned experiments. Or of commissions from a royal court. Or of direct updates on thousand-year folk forms. Oral traditional and molecular memory aside, Black American music’s past was almost completely — genocidally, is also a word — wiped away in the Middle Passage. So when it came to fruition in the years during and after Reconstruction, it did so as a personal Black expression of what to do and how to live in this new, foreign here-and-now, far from “home.” This music is, simultaneously, a lament and celebration, complaint and utopia, art and evidence, personal diary and modernist work. Nothing like that had been conceived before, and it was so revolutionary that almost no one’s been able to build a next-level to it since.

It was also the first musical art-form original to the United States. Now imagine: the engine of this art-form’s motivation was a desire to express oneself within a society that did not want to hear any of what you had to say. A society that, in many cases, did not regard you as fully human. And yet think of how Black music expresses the full spectrum of humane truths and emotions. Actually, fuck it, don’t read me telling you about it. Go listen to the Wesley Morris episode of the 1619 Project podcast, who does a far better job than I of narrating Black American music’s wonders. This is why remaining on the sidelines, or providing only cursory support to the uprising, does not sit well.

It is crucial that people around the world know this history when they hear a variation of these musics being described as “global phenomena” or “universal,” or divided into “genres.” Such terms might seem neutral, or even complementary to its creators; but at their core, they move to dilute the role that the Black experience played in its birth. And distancing the music from the people who made it (and why), mitigates the music’s values. What was once specific becomes conditional — out goes the particularity of its expressions (feelings, words, citations), and in come market-democratizing generalities, like capitalization and trends, elements that tend to be elevated by whoever controls mass communication. This is how a local culture becomes a global genre, and how some people who make “techno” or “jazz” music in [insert European city here] can’t comprehend why “neutrality” towards George Floyd’s death is a betrayal of their creative work.

But... They will do as they will do. And, as I said before, we will judge them - because it is on these very decisions and proclamations that the intention of the art-work (a crucial aspect in the value of the art-work — its contemporary “aura” some might say), that artists and their audiences are judged. And when I mis-step, my Black friends and colleagues will also judge me, and the humility and self-reflection with which I handle this will say volumes about what my cultural intentions are. Because for the rest of us, there never has been nor will continue to be a disconnection between the culture we have sworn allegiance to, and the need to change society’s norms, to speak about the need for social justice, and to continually reassert that #BlackLivesMatter and #BrownLivesMatter.

And that if you continue to engage with the words and ideas that I hope to continue putting out into the world, this is their starting point. That music — for all its glory and hope and joy and wrenching feeling and fuck-you energy and let’s-love energy and all that — is neither the beginning nor the end. It is one narrative of history’s arc. That chapters of this history are being written all the time, some quietly and some in push-notifications, and that what’s going on outside our windows at this moment, is a major scene of the permanent record. To be quiet is to be complicit. I choose not to be complicit. I hope that you make that choice as well.

youtube

#blacklivesmatter #brown lives matter #how to be an ally #jazz #techno #House Music #black music #hip-hop #sister rosetta tharpe

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thechembow · 5 years

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Why Do We Blame It on the Rain?

Apr. 29, 2019

Rain suppression vs. OR in Frazier Park today

People often think of rain as being depressing weather and attribute their malaise to dark days or seasonal effective disorder. It’s true that darker and gloomier places breed depression, drug abuse, crime, murder and suicide, but these problems also happen in sunny places. So what is it about rain and gloomy weather that makes people feel so bad? Without rain we can’t live and nothing grows. When we don’t get enough rain, people complain about drought. When we get abundant rain, people complain that the weather is “unpleasant,” as if we should base our happiness on an external circumstance that we can’t control anyway. Heavy rain is reported in an apocalyptic manner by the news, but so is a lack of rain. In the world of YouTube junk, conspiracy channels describe every type of weather as warfare being “done to us” by someone, they say the government. Is it not possible that weather is a force that is built into the workings of this Earth, or that not everything weather does is bad?

Today in our part of Southern California, we awoke to a light rain. This is very late in our rainy season, but with the intensive gifting work in 2018 in the US west and a recent complete gridding of Fresno and Clovis, there is a very high orgone energy concentration in Southern and Central California. This is greatly offsetting heavy DOR attacks on this region. We endure heavy DOR assaults daily these days, because there has been so much rain in the forecast. It is the parasitic objective to stop or at least reduce all rainfall everywhere. Wet climates with strong storm systems farther north usually experience abundant rain despite DOR because all they can achieve there is a reduction in rain. In California, it is much easier for the parasites to achieve drought. By gifting throughout the entire state of California in depth, targeting the cell towers which are for weather control, we began to restore the climate here. Then by targeting the Pacific Northwest, a high DOR but still very rainy climate, we opened the floodgates for a more even dispersal of precipitation throughout the west. This brought more rain to California, and more sun between rains, rather than grey gloom, to the northwest.

People tend to focus on physical world explanations for everything they feel and experience. When I lived in Portland, Oregon, which is considered depressing because of rain, I was miserable. But I liked rain so it was confusing. I didn’t know about orgone energy, I didn’t know about DOR, and I didn’t even know what a “chemtrail” was. Here is an example of a lyric I wrote in 2006 about the way it felt on a DOR day, but not knowing why it was that way:

Nothing’s fun today It’s dark and grey without the rain It's overbearing Don't take much to make me cry I sit and stare and wonder why

Everyone's the same Oppressed, oppressive, or insane I'm going nowhere Don't take much to make me sad I wish I knew the love I had

I don’t really know where it came from, but I seemed to know that under all the malaise, I had some kind of love that I couldn’t recognize. This was the love of God, of the cosmic orgone energy, the life force energy. But during my time in Portland, not knowing what was going on energetically, I had no idea why these grey days without rain made everyone act crazy and sucked the life out of me. I was abused, robbed, and almost destroyed by Portland before returning to Los Angeles in 2009. When I returned to Portland for the first time in November 2016, we gifted the towers and I saw just how serious the DOR emergency was there. It was oppressive for a reason. The best, brightest, and most sensitive people in Portland were always abused because the population had such dark and negative energy. DOR adds to that socialist, lowest common denominator mentality of these harsh northern cities. It adds to the crime and the despair that leads to drug abuse and an inability to make a life for oneself. It contributes to poverty, hatred for people who are different or think differently, and mental disease.

The battle ending for the day with OR skies.

What people don’t like about rainy climates has little to do with the rain itself, but the DOR that is used against every rainstorm that comes through. I have been to some terrible places, and by terrible, I mean energetically. For example, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle are all nice looking cities with places to overpay for coffee, food, and alcohol, and are all considered desirable because one can be gouged while on foot or bike. But in every one of these places, I have never felt good. They have too high of a DOR, but this is not something most people can detect. Those who can’t feel DOR don’t understand why I feel ill in these towns. Some other highlights in my travels to horrific grey and gloomy DOR zones include London, Stockholm, Copenhagen, New York, and Pittsburgh. All of these places sucked the life force out of me, but for any that I visited before 2014, I did not know why at the time. Of course there are many sunny places like LA that were once very DORish on a daily basis, and where DOR lead to drought. Now it’s mostly human DOR spewing affecting LA since almost all of the cell towers are neutralized and the drought is over. This is actually easier to contend with than a city with operational cell tower arrays.

Rain is blamed for the effects of rain suppression. We feel exhausted, sickened, and weakened on rainy days, and things seem to go wrong. People are rude, they may even act crazy and violent. This is not because of the life giving rain but because of the deadly radiation that is used against every rain storm. Every rain is a battle. This is true even in the rainy climates. If it’s raining a lot and you don’t feel good, pay attention to what kind of rain it is and what the clouds look like. Is it a grey flat sky? Is the rain splattery? Are you getting rain when you would normally get snow? These are all indicators that something is suppressing your rain. If rain were allowed to happen without interference, it would be a pleasant experience. I have enjoyed those orgone rains as well, once a battle is won.

We have seen in every region we have worked with orgone energy, that it increases healthy clouds and rainfall. We have also seen that when there is not to be rain naturally, the sky clears to a deep blue and all DORized water vapor (what people think of as “chemclouds”) is coalesced and evaporates in lovely spirals and puffy clouds. Rain and snow have increased dramatically in California and beyond with this last record breaking winter, and over the past five years of working with orgonite, rainfall records have been broken again and again in California, even in months that don’t get much rain historically. This is because we have never seen natural weather in our lives until now. This past winter the entire continental USA received the most precipitation on record. This is because of how orgonite has spread around the continent from our gifting and thanks to people learning to make it from us or contributing to our continuing work by buying it from us.

Most of all, your attitude toward the weather will influence how the weather affects you. If you’re a smart phone user, that is the main thing affecting your mood, not the weather. Wifi is similarly destructive. Orgonite is necessary to offset EMF you can’t remove from your life completely, other people’s pollution. As long as you have a device which programs negative thoughts and gives you easy access to YouTube garbage, you’ll continue to feel bad no matter what the weather. We can’t base our happiness on weather. We can influence it for good with orgonite, but we have to accept the fact that this is wartime and we are attacked daily. They attack etherically so only the sensitive know something is up. But still, the most energetically sensitive people I know are smart phone users, and using a smart phone will ultimately be their energetic undoing. How can you try to feel good when you have something in your hand that’s making you sick? Why complain about 5G when you’re participating in it? You’re only harming yourself.

The last thing to remember is that weather is not designed to make you feel good or bad. Weather is woven into the intelligent design of our world. It is a force beyond us, in which our only influence is positivity and restoration or negativity, which contributes to the destructive weather manipulation, all energetic. We are not special on our own, deserving of the weather of our choice like we’re picking it off of a menu. We are part of a greater creation and it’s not our will that we exercise. When we work in geo-restoration, we are providing labor for God here on Earth. We are undoing aeons of damage by parasites to this garden planet and enjoying the process of transmutation. You can’t customize the weather for your wants and you must accept the changing climate. We have been terrorized by the idea of climate change because they knew already that this restoration would take place. By terrifying people about climate change, they use those programmed minds to generate the world they want to see, a hot and energetically polluted desert. When we break out of the fear of climate change and see what orgone energy is doing, we accept with joy the new cool and rainy climate, and cherish the sun of summer, knowing that the winter will come again. Rain is a blessing to all life and never something to take for granted. Take it from someone who has seen drought and found a solution. There is no way to paint a negative picture of rain in my mind, only of DOR, which we must all tackle individually in order to free our minds and then our sky.

A heavy DOR attack neutralized

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ultraclairedg · 6 years

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Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Lovecraft is sometimes called the father of horror, though not the horror of the “Freddie Kruger” slasher kind, but rather the horror that comes from fear of the unknown, what might be just beyond our senses, lurking in the dark. He remains extremely influential even though the vast majority of his work was published posthumously and he died in poverty, but he was the ultimate wordsmith, believing that American English was low level and slang and not worthy of being used, meaning that his works contain many interesting, archaic words. His first work was poetry, which is what his mother thought he should be writing, and his prose is clearly influenced by poetry, having a kind of rhythm and metre. He was greatly influenced himself by Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic writings, which also use a number of archaisms.

Lovecraft, as well as both his father and his mother, seemed to have suffered from chronic forms of what we would call mental disorders. Both his father (who died when Lovecraft was quite young) and his mother died in that same mental health institution. One recurring aspect of his writing is the idea that the sins of one’s fathers are paid for by the sons down through the generations. Although it is not known or mentioned by any of his biographers, he may have felt either consciously or subconsciously that his mother’s and father’s psychological problems contributed to his own mental malaise.

His life and works are fraught with his ideas of racial superiority and inferiority, which probably cause a lot of upset to 21st century sensibilities. He very much disliked the immigration of non-white, non-Europeans to the USA and often used racial insults to describe those who were not WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants). This fact may influence some to ignore his work but I believe we should not judge those of a less enlightened age by our modern standards.

Lovecraft himself adopted the stance of atheism early in life. In 1932, he wrote in a letter to Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian:

All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world, or an eternal survival of personality exist. They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hairsplitter to pretend that I don't regard them as arrant and negligible moonshine. In theory, I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of radical evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist.

(direct quotation taken from Wikipedia)

He had a particularly nihilistic view on life, feeling that human beings had little or no control over their lives and were at the mercy of the powers of the universe. The gods in his works are alien, which is perhaps reflective of the belief that there is no god as we, humans, believe, but rather the “Elder Gods” who are from a completely different and much older civilisation/universe that sees our own as puny, inferior and sees humans as only good for being slaves or sacrifices.

Whatever your views on Lovecraft’s beliefs, as a wordsmith he is second to none. Here are a few of my favourite words from some of his stories.

Machicolations – a projecting parapet with an opening for projecting missiles/oil/etc on an enemy below (See photo)

Preceptor – a teacher, an instructor

Batrachian – frog like (from the Greek word βατραχος /vat-tra-hos/ meaning frog)

Chthonic – adjective describing gods and other creatures dwelling under the earth (from the Greek word χθόνιος, /kʰtʰ-ón-ios/ meaning in, under, or beneath the earth

Camalote – a type of water lily (see photo)

Lucubration – laborious, studious work often producing a pretentious or sedulous literary result

If you’d like to sample some of his works, many of them are online and a quick Google search will give you access to them.

#hp lovecraft #horror stories #Interesting words #Archaisms #Robert E Howard #edgar allan poe #Cthulu #Elder Gods

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clausvonbohlen · 5 years

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‘Be careful what you wish for...

…because it may come true.’ This saying has always perplexed me. Surely we want our wishes to come true? (So long as we wish wisely, that is). Who would willingly choose to be in an indefinite state of wanting? But I think I understand it a bit better now.

In my last post, I mentioned how I had felt restless upon returning to Athens last autumn. I visited Mount Athos for the first time in October, and that was an oasis of calm, but it also gave me plenty to think about. Maybe the peacefulness of the monasteries made me see things more clearly: back in Athens once again, my restlessness was all the more evident. And not just a restlessness, but an underlying malaise, an impatience, a sense that things were not quite right.

I was also able to recognise that this restlessness is something I have felt all my adult life. In the past, I have deployed a toolkit of strategies to avoid confronting it. Strategies such as intense exercise, or alcohol and socialising, or pursuing girls, or drugs, or (more long term), changing jobs, or moving from one country to another.

In the past, I have always blamed my restlessness on something outside myself. But now I live in a city I love, surrounded by people whose values resonate with my own, in a beautiful country, and my main occupation is one I have chosen freely, and that I often find deeply rewarding. And so I have to face the fact that the malaise stems from within.

So now I understand the saying, ‘Be careful what you wish for because it may come true.’ If it does come true, and you are still not happy, or at peace, then a very unflattering mirror is held up to you; you are forced to confront your own dysfunction.

One aspect of getting older is that patterns in your life become more obvious. When you are in your 20s and a situation occurs for the second or third time, it is still easy to blame the outside world. But when you are in your 40s, and you recognise that certain situations keep repeating themselves, you are forced to confront the fact that you may be creating them, or at the very least contributing to them. The disadvantage of this is that you lose the pleasing illusion of your own blamelessness; the advantage is that you now have the opportunity to change things.

Reading back over what I have written, it all sounds so clear and logical. But that’s not how it was at the time. Initially, I attempted to deploy the toolkit described above. But my lower back was still hurting, so I couldn’t escape from the malaise through sport and exercise. I went out at night, but the hangovers have become too painful. One night I stopped by the addicts in the park and bought some more of the local version of crystal meth. I felt great for 24 hours, and then predictably and deservedly terrible for a week. A girl I liked disappeared without a trace, and a subsequent perfunctory encounter left me feeling very empty. And only then did I fully understand: I need to address this, or I will never feel peace, and it will end up killing me, one way or another.

Last summer I had met a friend’s brother-in-law at a wedding. He claimed to work with plant spirits, and to channel their energies – from his home in Portugal - in order to perform healings; all he needs is a photo in which he can see your eyes. A few days before New Year he got in touch, casually, to say hello and ask how I was. I told him that I was at a low ebb, so he offered to perform a plant spirit healing. I felt I had nothing to lose, and that is why, on the morning of the 31st December, I was lying on the floor of my darkened apartment in Athens, listening to his Spotify playlist on my headphones, while sage leaves smoldered in the ashtray and my new friend in Portugal harnessed the spirits of his helper plants and sent them my way.

Did the plant spirit healing help? It is hard to say. Now, half a year later, I feel like a different person, with a new lease of life. But of course this is not a control experiment, and that might have happened anyway.

On the morning of the healing, back in December, I spent a couple of hours in a written whatsapp conversation with the plant spirit healer, for him to get to know me a bit better. It was a sort of diagnostic interview, with some very direct questions on his part. But he made some insightful comments and I found it genuinely therapeutic.

I admitted to the healer that I felt a lot of guilt about my own unhappiness. I am sympathetic to the suffering of all those who have been dealt a rough hand by life, but in my own case, is it not just the privileged self-indulgence of those who have nothing better to do? I have been blessed with loving parents, a good education, material means, and some mental capacity. With all of these advantages, how can I justify feeling miserable? Should I not be using them in some productive way, to create a better world?

The truth, of course, is that I have been trying in a modest way to do that for 20 years, and yet the malaise has always been there.

The healer’s response was a reframe that had the satori-inducing effect of the most striking koan: the crime is not to feel miserable despite worldly advantages. The crime would be if you failed to use those advantages to address and resolve your misery. It is possible that my soul was incarnated in this body, at this time and in this place, specifically because it provides me with the opportunity, the means, the capacity, and the precise challenges that I need for my own spiritual evolution. This is my fate, and I can embrace it and thereby progress on the only path that matters, or I can continue to try to fight it.

Another reason not to compound my malaise with guilt, the healer pointed out, is because our blockages are not entirely of our own making. This is the meaning of ‘inherited trauma’. Trauma does not need to be acute or dramatic or PTSD-inducing; it can refer to any form of malaise, unhappiness, discontent, frustration, mental suffering. It can run in families as well as in genders and races. My father’s depression and alcoholism will have affected me, as will the fact that my mother never had a relationship with her own father, and never introduced us to him while he was still alive. She never talks about it, but there must be a lot of sadness bound up with that relationship, and that sadness gets passed on. It gets passed on because your parents are the templates you inevitably copy, and also because it creates the emotional energy field in which you grow up. But it is important to remember that most parents do their best, and that their blockages and traumas have come from their own parents, and so on back up the generations. But if we don’t want to keep passing them on to following generations, then we have to commit to confronting them and dissolving them in our own lives.

The healer went on to mention a related but more mysterious concept: the shamanic 7 generational principle of ancestral healing. What we do in this life can, apparently, affect 7 generations of ancestors. When there is a lot of dysfunction in a family, it may fall to us to address that. The healer referred to it as ‘taking a hit for the team’. It sounded farfetched, even by my standards, but thinking back over the history of my family, it struck me that the lucrative forging of weapons over generations is unlikely to be karma-neutral (irrespective of attempts to offset it with workers’ welfare programs). I wrote a novel motivated by my desire to explore (and ultimately reject) the notion of inherited guilt, so this does not sit particularly well with me. And I certainly don’t think of myself as some sort of chosen one. However, I have long since ceased to dismiss things out of hand just because I don’t fully understand them.

To return to my darkened apartment on the 31st December: I listened to the playlist, trying to be receptive to the energy of beneficent plant spirits, and felt… not a lot. Although, I must say that over the next few days I felt more positive than I had done for a long time. But that may have been due to being less hungover than most in the early days of January.

They were cold, wet days in Athens, and I spent them ensconced in a few cafés, reading an author whose words resonated with the clarity of the finest Zen singing bowl. He is an author I had first heard of about a decade ago, but at the time I had dismissed him without reading him. I was wary of his popularity and hype; he seemed liked the worst kind of self-help guru. Back then I was a doctoral student in psychology, and I had no time for someone I assumed was a purveyor of ersatz spirituality. His name is Eckhart Tolle, and how wrong I was. And how arrogant. In January I read ‘A New Earth’, carefully, twice. It was a epiphany: he expresses so much that feels intuitively true, but which I have not yet experienced deeply enough for me to be able to live my life through the lens of that understanding.

His description of the collective dysfunction of the ego struck a particular chord. I remembered the pony-tailed South African shaman in Peru who, having fed me a glass of the noxious San Pedro cactus hallucinogen, told me to let go of my ego. It is not that I am particularly full of myself, or selfish, or ego-centric. Rather, like the rest of our Western culture, I have fallen into the trap of identifying completely with my thoughts and feelings, my likes and dislikes. I seek my sense of self through the things I possess and the way I appear to others, and I have lost my sense of who I am beyond that, which is what we all are: undifferentiated awareness, the universe becoming conscious of itself, and an expression of the divine. But read Tolle, or the Upanishads, or even (without blinkers) the Bible; they contain the same message, in different terminology.

If you look to the ego for your sense of identity, you are on a very unsteady footing. Talents, possessions, achievements, reputation; these are all fleeting. But if your sense of identity, of core self, is dependent upon them, it means that every time you lose something, or something doesn’t go your way, or you feel slighted, or that you have failed in some sense, then your identity is threatened. And that, from the ego’s perspective, is the very worst thing that can happen. It is enough to make daily life a constant nightmare, and that is what so many adults’ faces express.

Perhaps, if you read this blog, you might look at my life and think that I have lived it on my own terms. You might wonder why I write so much about ego, when the choices I have made seem motivated by an authentic search (at least I hope they do), rather than by the desire to acquire possessions or power or fame. And, on the surface, that is indeed the case. When I am by myself, in the places I love, I feel the authenticity of those choices, and a calmness can grow out of it. However, when exposed to places and situations where those values are not evident – hectic materialistic cities, ambitious and worldly people – then my confidence gets rattled and, on a deep and mostly unconscious level, self-doubt will spread its probing tentacles.

The area in which this happens most frequently, and most painfully, is in my relationship with my parents. On the surface, they have been faultless in always encouraging me to follow my heart, and never trying to force me to follow a path that would not have felt true. But that is on the surface. On a deeper level, I think I have sensed their unexpressed desire for me to be ‘someone’ in the eyes of the world, so that they can be someone through me. And they have these desires because they have not yet done the work – and probably never will – that would lead them to the knowledge that the eyes of the world are meaningless. I have picked up these subliminal messages from the way that they talk about successful people, or about the worldly success of the children of their friends. It is painful for me because it makes me feel like a failure, although my parents are themselves not sufficiently conscious to be aware of how I might feel.

I now believe that this phenomenon is what drives many people, and makes them miserable. Unless our parents are highly aware, they are still stuck in seeking happiness through achievements. When their own achievements fail to satisfy them (and achievements, being ego-based, can never satisfy us for long), then they look to their children for vicarious satisfaction. This places a burden on the children, and one which can never be fully resolved, since there is no limit to achievement: I have a friend who felt like he had failed because he won a silver rather than a gold medal at the Beijing Olympics! Children want nothing more than to feel loved by their parents, but if they think that parental love is contingent upon their own worldly achievements, then they are condemned to Sisyphean misery.

These realisations crystallized in the days following the plant spirit healing. Then, towards the end of January, I received a Facebook message from my cousin (on my mother’s side) in Australia. We do not know each other well; we are in touch once a year at most. He had been sorting through boxes of our grandmother’s stuff and had found a few photos that my mother had sent her over the years. He photographed a few of the images and sent them to me. They were photos I had seen before, but as soon as they came into focus on my screen, I was overcome with emotion. One photo in particular had me choking up: I am in school uniform, and my mother is visiting me during my first or second year at boarding school. There is such happiness, and such love, in her expression. And yet I was only 14 years old - I had not yet achieved anything in my life. I was struck by the realization that, on the deepest level, my mother’s love for me is not contingent on achievements, or success of any kind. It is a given, even if our respective blockages and egoic concerns can sometimes cloud the water. But the cloudiness is a distraction, and sediment will settle. To quote the ska artist Lord Tanamo, ‘A mother’s love is from creation, it is truly the greatest association!’

I spent a long time looking at those images. The fact that my cousin had sent them to me out of the blue seemed to be a confirmation of Tolle’s belief that, when you are aligned with the intelligence of the Unmanifested (as he calls it, but you could insert the One/ consciousness/ Being/ God), then the universe will give you what you need.

Over the next few days, I felt a lot lighter than I had for a long time. But I also experienced the recurrence of extreme sensitivity around my navel, so sensitive that it verged on being painful. I looked online, but it didn’t sound like an ulcer or a hernia, more like an energy blockage. I decided to return to Iannis, the Greek energy healer who practised an ancient Asclepian method, similar to Reiki, and whom I had visited once before, a year ago, for back pain (an encounter I wrote about in a previous post).

Dr. Iannis was just as I remembered him – small, curious, twinkly. He stood behind me and diagnosed low energy and a ‘reduced aura’. He did not pick up on the discomfort around my navel. When I mentioned it, he said that it had to do with psychology and the emotions – something very deeply buried, a trauma of some sort, possibly a birth trauma? He could not be more specific, but it was enough to make me pretty sure that the discomfort was connected to the photo that had moved me so much a few days before.

Iannis was confident that he could help. As on the previous occasion, I lay on the couch with my eyes closed while he moved his hands above my body. I felt a cool breeze on the backs of my hands and the tops of my feet – this, according to Iannis, was energy and not air, and indeed his hands moved so slowly that it seemed impossible they could create the breeze I was feeling. And as he had predicted, the umbilical sensitivity disappeared within a couple of days.

At the end of the session, I told Iannis about my plan to return to Mt. Athos, the Greek monastic peninsula, for a longer visit. I was quite proud of having arranged this, since I had written my first formal letter in Greek to request permission, and then sent it to the Abbot of the monastery. I am not Orthodox, and I wanted to stay for a whole week, so I had to present a convincing case, and I was happy to receive a positive response. I thought that, being a spiritual place, and far from the drugs and alcohol which had contributed to my low energy (or ‘reduced aura’), Iannis would be encouraging. But in fact, he was dismissive.

‘Mt. Athos is not such a good place,’ he said.

Many urban Greeks are dismissive of their religion. In the cities, the Orthodox church can seem materialistic, manipulative, and only concerned with lavish ceremonial regalia and pomp and show. But Mt. Athos could hardly be further removed from all that, surely Iannis knew that?

‘The problem with the monasteries,’ he continued, ‘is that there are no women.’

Ah, I thought, the usual accusations of homosexuality, pederasty, abuse… It seems a secular shibboleth to me, certainly I have never seen any hint of it in the monasteries I have visited. But my assumption was mistaken. Iannis continued: ‘Men and women are both composed of varying degrees of male and female energy. A man has some female energy, and a woman has some male energy. To be physically and psychologically healthy, you must learn how to balance these two energies within you. Retreating to an entirely male environment does not help you do that. In fact, it can do the opposite.’

Well, it is an interesting theory. I have by now met a small number of inspiring monks on Mt. Athos who seemed pretty centred and balanced – certainly happy - but as far as my own energetic make-up goes, Iannis may have a point.

In any case, I returned to Athos in February, to spend a week at Iviron. At that time of year there are not many visitors. I had a small cell with a writing desk, and I spent most of the week reading and writing. One reason for returning to that particular monastery was that I had a circuitous introduction to a Greek-American monk there (via the wife of the brother-in-law of the monk’s brother, who – somewhat incongruously, or perhaps not - is a US marine). But I managed to track Brother Eugenios down and he is a delightful, inspiring man. He is in his mid-30s, highly intelligent and thoughtful, with a doctorate in theology and an astonishing memory. I met him for daily chats in the monastery library, where he also gave me some books about the Orthodox faith.

Returning to Mt. Athos

I got into the habit of attending Matins at 3.30am. I would usually stay for an hour or two and then return to bed, but the monks would push on through until dawn, some four hours later. Though I can’t understand the liturgies in Koine (Alexandrian) Greek, there is nevertheless something powerfully affecting about the bearded monks chanting by candlelight, incense heavy in the air while wind and rain batter the outside of the chapel. With very few exceptions, that same scene has been repeated in that place every night for the last 1000 years.

There is much that is very attractive to me about the Greek Orthodox faith. But there are stumbling blocks too. When I asked Brother Eugenios what the Orthodox Church would say about a healer who died some years ago on Cyprus, but whose healings are well documented (he is the subject of a book called ‘The Magus of Strovolos’, by the sociologist Kyriacos Markides), Brother Eugenios replied that the church would be very circumspect indeed. A religious elder would have to determine whether the healings occurred through the intercession of God, of whether it was the work of the devil.

‘But when the healings are effective? When sick people get well? Even then?’ I asked.

‘Yes, even then,’ confirmed Brother Eugenios. ‘The devil uses precisely such stratagems to trick people. That is why he is so dangerous.’

The Devil and his works... they have not played much role in the anodyne versions of Christianity I have encountered thus far in my life. But they are significant in the Orthodox faith, as are certain other darker aspects. There is a fresco on the far wall of the smaller Portaïtissa chapel at Iviron that depicts a river of flame siphoning the damned off into the jaws of a giant sea monster. Around the edges are stock medieval images of hell and purgatory. They do not make for pleasant viewing.

On my last night in the monastery it snowed, and the following morning I had to leave early to hike back up to Karyes, breaking tracks through the ankle deep snow. Mt. Athos shimmered in the distance, the forest around me slowly came to life, and thoughts of the Devil and his infernal sea monsters were soon far from my mind.

There was chaos at Karyes since the road was frozen over and the normal bus to the port of Dafni could not run. Replacement minivans were shuttling monks and pilgrims down the steep mountain road. Everyone had made arrangements, and was on busy schedules, and it was all rather confusing. But equally, none of it really seemed to matter very much, and I experienced a calmness and an inner amusement that I had not felt for a long time. And this time it has stayed with me, for the most part. I would like to think that it has been built on solid foundations.

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i-am-too-sick · 7 years

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More Arrhythmia AU! Last thing I'm posting before Sick Days starts! Previous~

It took Nico's sleep-addled brain several seconds to realize what had woken him. The room was shrouded in darkness, Will snoring softly beside him, arms draped protectively around him.

He blinked back the haze from his eyes; healing or not, he was still on a lot of medications, though at lower doses. He wriggled some in Will's grasp, trying to get a good look around. It was when he turned in the direction of the monitors that he saw the nurse, clipboard in hand as she recorded his late night vitals.

"How are you feeling?" The nurse asked softly, scrawling a note on her file with a small smile. "Sorry for waking you, I try to be as careful as possible not to wake the patients."

Will shifted, snored softly, and buried his cheek against Nico's hair. His grip tightened slightly, his boyfriend held protectively against him.

Nico chuckled lightly, Will's hair tickling his forehead. "It's okay," he said fondly, brushing back Will's curls. "I've been doing a lot of sleeping already."

He watched the nurse bustle around the room, reviewing his vitals, adjusting something on his drip. "I'm doing okay, feeling better than I have the past few days actually. Any chance of me getting out of here anytime soon?" he asked hopefully.

"Did your boyfriend not tell you?" She asked, giving him a gentle smile. "Tomorrow morning, I think. Possibly the afternoon, depending on your fever." She said, gently checking his IV drip before standing back up. "Your vitals are good, though, your heartbeat is strong- you're doing really well. Your incision sight is good too."

Nico was so taken aback by her statement that he couldn't even be upset at Will for not telling him. Tomorrow—he'd be free tomorrow. He heaved a sigh of relief, his hand going to his chest unconsciously. "Is there anything I can do to make sure it's the morning? The sooner the better."

He turned and checked his own vitals. He did still have the fever, that much was obvious by the fatigue and slight feeling of malaise that weighed heavily on his shoulders, but it was still low enough that the hospital considered discharging him. And his incision—Nico himself hadn't thought to check the scar after his last surgery, the thought of the raised, angry-looking mark marring his skin was less than appealing. He had just assumed that Will or the doctors would take care of that, which evidently they had when he must have been out of it.

"And another thing, do you know a place to rent surf boards? Not for me," he added quickly when the nurse gave him a look with the clear impression that he was crazy for even thinking about surfing in his condition. "He really wanted to surf on this trip." He patted Will's hair fondly, a sad smile playing on his lips.

The nurse chuckled softly, shaking her head with relief when she realized that he wasn't, in fact, talking about himself. "He looks like he could be a surfer." The nurse mused, stepping back from the machines.

"Well, there's a beach almost right across the street, and a rental place nearby. I can get you some information about it, if you want, but you'll have to take it very easy."

Was there a beach across the street? Nico hadn't seen the outdoors since he'd looked out the window at their hotel. Frankly, he didn't even know where they were in relation to the hotel.

"That would be great, thanks." His eyes drifted back to Will when he blond shifted beside him. "I have no intention of doing anything but laying in the sand. Let him do all the fun stuff," Nico mumbled, biting back a yawn.

The nurse smiled and nodded. "I'll see what I can do. You should go back to sleep, it's late. The best thing for you now is rest." She said, moving toward the exit of the room.

An hour or so later, she returned to a quiet room, both boys asleep. She set a sheet of paper on the bedside table, having called the rental place to let them know ahead of time.

When Will woke up the next morning, Nico was still asleep and he was feeling significantly better than he had the entire vacation. The room was quiet, some of the monitors having been removed overnight.

Nico struggled with wakefulness, eyes fluttering only when he felt Will stretching beside him. He blinked lazily, eyes bleary as he fought off the lingering sleepiness.

"I dreamed I was a cat," he said groggily, "and I just stayed up curled up beside you all day."

As he became more alert, he noticed some of his IV bags had been removed, whatever was still being pumped into him, falling at a slow, easy drip.

"Oh," he said, surprised. "All the machines are gone."

"Mm..." Will smiled sleepily at him, reaching over to stroke idly at his hair. "Yeah. You're getting discharged." He murmured, as if it was some big surprise. "In just a couple of hours."

Will's smile was sleepy, his posture lazy as he leaned over to give Nico a short good morning kiss.

"Really?" Nico asked, eyes wide. He stretched high over his head, toes curling beneath the sheets, and noticed the sheet of paper on the table beside his head. The table that, thankfully, had not been adorned with flowers, balloons, and teddy bears—little tokens of love that would have completely mortified him.

He reached for the paper, reading the note scrawled on the page. He beamed and gave Will another kiss. "We're going surfing. Or rather," he corrected, "you are."

Will blinked, rubbing sleep away from his eyes and turning to gaze at Nico. "What? No we're not." He finally said, shaking his head. "We're going home, Neeks. We're getting on a plane."

Will kissed him back regardless, flopping onto the pillows with a sigh. "Maybe you're more delusional than I thought."

"I am not," Nico said with a huff. He tried not to look too disappointed, the piece of paper clutched firmly in his hand. He'd ruined their vacation already—with something beyond his control—and he wasn't about to let Will's one chance to have a good time slip through his fingers.

"You don't have a choice," he said, smiling ruefully. He held the paper up for Will to see. "You have an appointment at 2. Your board will be ready then."

Will took a long moment to process what Nico was saying. Taking the paper, he frowned at the words on it- it wasn't as if he was upset, on the contrary. He just couldn't figure out how Nico had managed to plan this out.

Turning to Nico, he frowned. "Babe-" He said, feeling himself getting a little choked up. "How did you-"

Nico exhaled, relief washing over him. He half expected Will to be upset with him, and he managed a weak smile when he received the opposite reaction.

"The night nurse helped me set it up," he said, leaning back into the pillows. "You saying that you wanted to go surfing was the one thing I remembered before winding up here, so I wanted to make sure you got your chance."

It was too early for Will to function yet, the gesture making him overly emotional. Frowning a little, he wrapped Nico in a hug and squeezed gently. "I love you. I don't know how you went about that, but I love you."

"Are you sure you're well enough for that?" Will asked, frowning as he pulled away. "I mean, you really shouldn't be sitting in the sun."

Nico shrugged. "You're the doctor, and the nurse didn't have a problem with it when I told her last night."

He picked up his arm and draped it loosely over Will's shoulder. It was a little awkward with both of them lying down, but Nico didn't mind it so much. "We can get one of those huge umbrellas," he said, making a grandiose sweeping motion with his free hand. "It's just sunlight, Will, and I haven't seen any in days."

"Mmm... I don't know." He said, frowning. "I can't keep an eye on you if I'm surfing. I feel like that'd be a little irresponsible." He mumbled.

"We could get an umbrella... and a beach towel so you can lie down or a chair... and blankets, in case you get cold." He looked deep in thought, slipping into Nico's hold with ease.

Nico matched Will's frown with one of his own. "I'm not a child, Will. And I'm not so frail that a little outside time will send me back to the hospital."

"You're not a child, but you don't have a pacemaker and you are just getting over a deadly infection." Will said, rolling his eyes. "I mean, I'm not saying you're frail but, it's... you're just getting discharged, Neeks."

Nico shuddered despite himself, the thought of ending up back at the hospital, especially when he was about to be discharged, made his skin crawl. "Look," he said, capturing Will's lips with his own—his own form of apology for getting so defensive when he knew Will was just being cautious. "I want you to have the vacation that you paid for. The surfing is my way of saying thank you for always being there for me."

The kiss, however, caught Will off guard, and he paused for a second to reciprocate. "I know, I really appreciate it." Will said, wrapping his arms around him. "It's a great surprise. It'll be okay as long as we're careful."

"I promise to be careful," Nico said, kissing Will for good measure. "Umbrellas, towels, blankets, whatever you want—I think there's a book in my suitcase."

He stretched again, muffling a yawn behind his hand. "I think this place makes me sleepy," he said, fighting off another yawn. "I can't wait to watch you surf."

"Okay. Okay." Will said again, kissing him slowly and softly. "I love you so much. I'm so sorry this vacation turned out so terribly."

Standing up, Will stretched his arms out and wiggled his fingers. "You'll be sleepy for another couple of days, and you're going to be on antibiotics for a while longer." He warned, kissing his hand.

Nico kissed him with fervor, melting into Will's side. He pulled away with a gentle sigh. "Yes, because it's all your fault that my incision spread an infection throughout my entire body," Nico said rolling his eyes.

"Totally my fault." Will joked, though he definitely felt like he shouldered some of the blame. He kissed him once more, smiling. "Lets get you ready to go."

Nico tried not to look too disappointed when Will stood from the bed. "No more IVs I hope. Please tell me painkillers and antibiotics come in pill form."

"No more IV's." He promised, "All pills, nothing too bad. They might make you nauseous, but we'll get you some antiemetics if you need them."

Nico sat up and scooted to the edge of the bed, grabbing the handrail as a wave of dizziness washed over him as he moved from lying down to sitting up. He stretched high over his head, his legs sliding down onto the tiled floor.

"C-Cold," he stammered as his bare feet touched the linoleum. He grabbed Will's sleeve, his legs wobbly after so many days without use. He wrapped himself around Will's arm, begging for warmth and needy without reason. "Do I even have clothes to wear out of here? I thought they cut my shirt."

Will wrapped a steadying arm around his shoulders, gently helping him to his feet and keeping him from wobbling over. "Careful, you're still sick, Nico... out of the hospital doesn't mean healed- you're probably at flu level, now..."

Gently lowering him back to a sitting position in the chair next to the bed, Will smiled. "I had an emergency bag packed when we left. Don't worry." The bag contained sweats, loose fitting and careful. "Let's get you changed."

"Wait, this is flu level?" Nico asked, actually surprised by the information. Compared to how he had been over the last several days, Nico almost felt like he could run laps around the hospital without so much as a sweat. "What was I at before?"

Will sighed, moving to kiss him softly. "Infections like that can often be deadly, Nico. Let's just be happy it wasn't." Wrinkling his nose, he stood up and shoved his hands in his pockets, exhaling slowly and shortly. He stood up, grabbing the rest of their things and putting it in the bag.

The stress of the whole situation resurfaced with a vengeance, the thought of Nico actually dying making him nauseous. Taking him to the beach would be just as idiotic as taking him on vacation weeks after surgery. He seemed fine, sure, but who knew what would happen? While he was healing, Nico needed to be resting and able to get somewhere safe if need be.

Nico pulled a pair of gray sweats from Will's duffle bag, slipping them on beneath his hospital gown. They were baggy and definitely not his own. He removed his gown with a flourish, untying the strings and tossing it onto the bed in favor of a loose fitting T-shirt.

Looking down and taking in his appearance, Nico couldn't help the sour look that appeared on his face. "I look like I'm going to a slumber party."

"I'm sorry about the clothes, but your stitches..." He muttered. "Neeks, I think maybe we should just- get the medicine you need and get to the airport. I don't want to risk something going wrong, not again-"

Of course he needed loose clothing, Nico thought, realizing he hadn't once thought about his stitches. He couldn't risk the fabric rubbing against the still healing scar and irritating the stitches, especially with the possibility of infection still sky high. Of course Will had thought of everything.

Which is why Nico didn't argue when Will asked to get out of surfing. He supposed it was logical—just standing and putting on his clothes was exhausting. "Will...," he murmured. He didn't have an argument against Will's decision to leave, but that didn't mean he had to like it.

Will took out his phone, beginning to pull up information on flights home. Truthfully, all he wanted was to be back home and safe- the last thing he needed was another disaster like that one. He wasn't so sure he could handle that.

"It's just... Nico, I thought you were fine, and I thought this was a good idea, and then we got here, and you- you almost died, and-" his voice hitched slightly, and he hardened his focus on his phone. "It's risky, and I'm- I'm scared."

"No, I get it," Nico said dejectedly. "You're probably right. I mean—of course you are. I'm sure it was scary. And I'm sorry... I just wanted you to have a good time."

He took Will's hand and brought it to his lips. "I love you. I'm sorry, I'm not thinking about myself. When do we leave?"

Will chewed hard at his lip, determined not to start crying yet again. The last thing anyone needed right now was for him to start crying. He blamed himself for this entire epidemic, and it seemed like the only way to fix it, (or try to) was to get him home.

"I just want you to be safe..." Will whispered, blinking hard as the words on the screen blurred and distorted. "I just want to go home so this nightmare can be over-"

"Shh, okay, okay," Nico crooned. He stood up and wrapped his arms around Will, his own emotions threatening to get the better of him. "We'll go home, okay? I'm fine. Everything turned out all right."

He rubbed up and down Will's arms, standing on tip-toes to kiss at the blond's eyes when they grew misty. He took the phone from Will's precarious grip, scrolling through the list of flights when Will had all but checked out on him.

"Oh," Nico said, surprised. He turned the phone around and showed Will the screen. "The next flight home isn't for another four hours."

"I'm sorry." Will croaked uneasily, his own hand coming up cup carefully around Nico's arms, holding on. "I'm sorry, I just.. i'm just so anxious.." his voice cracked, and he wrapped his arms around his boyfriend, pressing his face into his hair as he began tearing up.

He held on a little tighter than necessary, fingers curled into Nico's shirt as he struggled to get his emotions in check. When Nico pulled away, though, he sniffled and quickly swiped at his eyes, squinting at the phone. "Four hours..? That's a long time.."

"Uh huh, a very long time," Nico said, nodding. "Long enough to sneak in a half hour of surfing, maybe?"

He knew it was a dumb plea. Will had been very adamant in his decision to get Nico home as safely and as quickly as possible. But Nico couldn't say that he didn't try—he still very much wished that Will had had a chance to enjoy himself on this vacation.

"Too long..." Will mumbled, wrapping his arms around him yet again and closed his eyes, sniffling quietly and resting his cheek on Nico's head. "I'm too nervous to surf. I'd fall a lot and you'd laugh at me.."

"I'm kidding," Nico said, kissing Will's cheek. "We can go back to the hotel and take a short nap before we have to go to the airport. Now come on, cheer up. The nurses are going to think I was mean to you."

Their hotel had been called when Nico was admitted, warned them they wouldn't be returning. The place had been incredibly kind—they'd given Will a voucher for a free stay and left their room open for the remainder of the stay so they could get their things in their leisure.

"I just want to make sure we have something that will keep you comfortable for the flight..."

"Seeing your smile is the only thing I need, Will."

Nico slipped out of Will's grasp and sat back in the chair, drained. He held Will's hand, occasionally pressing light kisses to each side of his palm. "And I wouldn't laugh at you. You're great at everything."

Will frowned a little, sad that Nico had pulled away but knowing he needed to take it easy. "I dunno about that." Will said, sitting back on the edge of the bed. "I think you probably need lots of antibiotics and rest."

Sighing softly, he gave Nico's hand a squeeze. "I'm just nervous about taking you anywhere so soon after you started to recover..."

"And I'll have the antibiotics," Nico said, "and I've been resting for days. Frankly, I'm a little tired of it."

And just tired in general, but he didn't say that. Will didn't need another excuse to say no, though it was unlikely he'd say anything else.

"I know you are, and I appreciate you being cautious, but it's half an hour, Willl. I'll sit under the umbrella with towels, blankets—everything we talked about. It can't be more stressful that being on a plane for several hours."

Will looked hesitant. Of course he wanted to go surfing- he loved surfing, and it had been a really long time, but that didn't mean it was a good idea.

But if they were going to be waiting around anyways, it wasn't like sitting on the beach was much different than sitting in a hotel room.

Chewing at his lip, Will nodded just a little bit. "Don't remind me about the plane thing..."

Nico bit back a smile, sensing Will's resolve beginning to slip. Somehow, he knew mentioning the plane ride would be just the push he needed to get Will to even consider his offer—if the blond thought the beach was dangerous, an airplane had to be ten times worse.

Nico stood again, draping his arms around Will's neck, and kissed him. "It's just thirty minutes. How about, the minute I start feeling any different than now, I'll let you know? If I have to, I'll settle with cuddling you in the hotel room until it's time to catch our flight."

Will sighed tiredly, his hesitation showing through. "I mean... I guess half an hour isnt that long... and I can stay close to the beach so you can see me." Will said, kissing him back.

"Of course I want to see you," Nico said with another swift kiss to the tip of Will's nose. "There's no point setting all this up if I don't get to watch you show off." He dipped his head into Will's collarbone. "I love you. You really do deserve this."

Will hummed his response, sighing tiredly and giving Nico a gentle squeeze. "I'm out of practice, don't get your hopes up too high." He warned, running his hand up the back of his shirt.

"The plane ride is what will suck... they said they'd give me enough of the heavier painkillers to keep you comfortable the whole time, though..."

Nico pulled a face at the mention of stronger painkillers—he already felt like a zombie with the ones he was on now. "Great," he said, wrinkling his nose. "So I won't remember any of the flight home."

"Oh, they're not stronger than what you're on now. You're already super drugged up. They'll slowly lower it once we get home."

Nico chuckled, rolling his eyes. "Drugged up." It wasn't a lie though. He knew the shear amount of medicine he was on attributed to how sluggish he felt. Maybe Will would like out and Nico would just take a nap in the sand.

"I want to see you surf," he reiterated, shuddering as he felt Will's cool hand slip beneath his shirt. "I don't care if you're out of practice."

"Mmm, well. If you want to see it so bad, you need breakfast." Will said, kissing the tip of his nose. With a tired sigh, he stood slowly and made his way to zip up their now packed bag. "I'll run and grab something for you to eat, okay? We'll have breakfast and then get all of the discharge stuff settled, okay?"

With a tired sigh, Will kissed Nico one last time before stepping out, taking a moment in the hallway to take several deep breaths before heading to the cafe downstairs. He returned with juice and a little breakfast plate for Nico, a granola bar for himself. "Eat what you can, okay? There are pancakes, if you feel up to it-" He said, handing over the tray.

Nico swallowed thickly at the sight of the pancakes. He was hungry, his appetite back with a vengeance after so many days on mushy popsicles in a cup, but the sight of the pancake, practically drowning in syrup, was enough to make him queasy. He pushed the plate away with vigor.

There was a bowl of fruit and scrambled eggs that he was more than happy to nibble on in the meantime. "What about you?" he asked around a mouthful of egg. "You can't get through the day eating only a granola bar."

Will rolled his eyes. "I know my limits, di Angelo." Truthfully, he was still too nervous to eat more than this, and surfing was hard work- the last thing he needed was to get sick, too.

He ate his granola bar, glad to see Nico eating a normal sized meal for the first time since they arrived. He'd been losing weight, and at this point Will knew it was getting ridiculous. He'd have to make sure he started eating right, again.

Nico polished off his scrambled eggs quickly, picking at his fruit out of necessity more than actual hunger. Even though it had only been less than a week, eating already seemed like a foreign concept to him and was something he'd have to fight to do without not nauseous.

"Yeah, yeah," he said popping a grape into his mouth. He picked absently at the bandages around his hand from when he'd inadvertently pulled out his IV. "I know I pushed for the whole surfing thing, but I'll be happy when we're finally home."

"We don't have to go, Nico. Honestly, I'd rather you be comfortable, don't do this just for me." He said quickly, frowning widely.

He stole half of a strawberry, if only because the pink color was nice to look at. Vibrant in such a dull place. He wished they allowed flowers in the ICU. Once they got home, he guessed.

"No, we definitely have to go. We have to." Seeing the frown on Will's face, Nico added quickly, "Seriously, I'm fine. It's just, you know—I miss my own bubble." He waved his hands dramatically in front of his face, a goofy grin on his face. "Nico World."

He pushed the rest of the fruit in Will's direction, if only because it was a nice distraction to watch him eat. Nico might have been the one in the hospital, but Will needed to take care of himself too. "Come on, I'm bored. Can we leave yet?"

Will was taken a little bit aback by how badly Nico seemed to want him to go enjoy the water. When he really thought about it, he was sure Nico knew how stressed he was. He was reminded of how much he really loved Nico, deeply and stupidly hard, someone who was trying his best to cheer him up from his hospital bed.

Very quickly, he leaned in to give Nico a long, passionate kiss. "I love you." He said, kissing his cheek. "I'll get you back to Nico world soon." He promised. Stealing another piece of strawberry, he smiled a little. "These would be better with sugar on them."

While Nico was caught off guard by the suddenness of Will's kiss, it didn't mean that he didn't melt completely at the feel of Will's lips on his own. "Whoa...," he breathed with a smile when Will finally pulled away, stumbling and lightheaded.

"I love you too," Nico said, still trying to get the pleasantly dazed look off his face.

"If that'll shut you down so quickly, I oughta be doing it more often." Said Will, rolling his eyes. "I think we can probably go now, but let me go double check with your nurse. We need to take out that Iv, too."

Will went to talk to the nurse, getting the rest of the papers signed before going back to the room. "Good luck, you're free to go. I have all of your meds here."

"Finally," Nico sighed. They still had to wait for the nurse to take out his last IV, but she was right on Will's heels when he strolled back into the room.

His IV was removed under Will's watchful gaze because Nico refused to watch the needle as it slid out from beneath his skin. He was given instructions on how to take his medicine: antibiotics three times a day until he could schedule an appointment with his cardiologist back home (which was basically Will), and his painkillers were to be taken liberally as needed, though she suggested a pill and a half for the flight since the pressure in the cabin was likely to cause him some discomfort.

Much to Nico's chagrin, he was forced into a wheelchair—at least until the front door, the nurse assured him. "I don't know which I hate more," Nico said, trying valiantly to sound casual and not let his true bitterness come across in his tone, "hospitals or wheelchairs."

Will took Nico's hand, walking beside him as they made their way to the exit of the hospital. Will shot a longing glance at the fish tank, swearing he'd take Nico to a real aquarium sometime soon.

"I know you hate the wheelchair. I'll piggy back you to the beach, though. I don't know if we should go there now, then rest at the hotel after? Do you feel well enough? Or would you rather go to the hotel first to rest?"

"If we don't go now, we never will," Nico said a little sadly. He could feel his muscles, achy from so much movement, and he knew he'd be gone the moment he laid eyes on the hotel room bed. He told himself he'd get time to sleep on the plane ride home.

It was the first time Nico didn't immediately voice his opposition for a piggyback ride. He knew there was no point, really—if Nico was getting his way with surfing, Will would get what he wanted too.

#nico di angelo #will solace #solangelo #percy jackson and the olympians #heroes of olympus #arrhythmia au #sickfic #my fiction #emetoprincess

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operawindow9-blog · 5 years

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What’s missing from our list of 2018’s best TV?

As we wind down 2018, our best-of coverage continues with the following question:

What’s missing from our list of the year’s best TV?

Kyle Fowle

There’s hardly reason to argue with almost any year-end list these days because of the sheer number of good TV shows out there, but I’m genuinely surprised that HBO’s High Maintenance didn’t make our list. The second season of the HBO run keeps with the anthology-esque spirit of the show, but it goes deeper in ways surprising and touching. So, there’s still the random characters that populate New York and The Guy’s life, but what’s different this time around is a narrative through-line involving The Guy’s ex. That character arc, one of pain and jealousy and moving on, adds so much to a season that’s already achingly honest. Add in the fact that one of the year’s best episodes—“Globo,” reckons with the election of Donald Trump, and the completely indescribable feeling of moving through the world on the morning of November 9, 2016 in a smart, poignant, and stirring way—and you have a season of TV that’s more than worthy of any year-end list.

Myles McNutt

It’s difficult for an established reality show to make it into a best of TV list: Beyond the fact that critical conversation privileges scripted programming, reality shows are built on iteration, and that feels less novel or memorable when we reach the list-making time of year. And I’m part of this problem, because I failed to put CBS’ Survivor on my own list despite the fact that its fall cycle has been absurdly enjoyable for a show in its 37th—not a typo—season. Yes, the David Vs. Goliath theme is profoundly dumb. No, I couldn’t tell you a single thing that happened during the season that aired in the spring, so 2018 wasn’t all great for the series. But something about the alchemy of casting and game-play has created a season with a succession of satisfying twists and turns, reminding us that although we may not instinctively think of it as list worthy, a reality show 18 years into its run can still create some of television’s best drama and comedy. (I’ll never hear the name “Natalie” without laughing now.)

Eric Thurm

Making reality TV really pop is an artform: There are hundreds of hours of interactions to film, comb through, and precisely edit into a narrative that will make sense, delight viewers, and feel just slightly off, like humans hanging out too many years in the future to quite make sense to us. So every year, I become more and more impressed with the reigning queen of the genre: Vanderpump Rules. The sixth season is one of the show’s best; over half a decade in, Vanderpump Rules remains an examination of fame, misfired charisma, and the terrors of tenuous social status that would put any 19th century novel to shame. Whether it’s Jax Taylor maybe falling in love with his reiki master Kelsey while his relationship with Brittany Cartwright festers like an untreated sore, Stassi Schroeder’s then-boyfriend creating a new god tier of social faux pas by grossly hitting on Lisa freaking Vanderpump, or the slow-moving car crash of James Kennedy ignoring the “best friend” he was clearly sleeping with (not that anyone else cared), Vanderpump Rules remains mesmerizing. The cast of past, present, and future SUR employees are stuck with each other forever, and it’s incredible. It’s not about the pasta; it’s about dread.

Clayton Purdom

Aw, come on—am I the only person who thought Maniac was one of the year’s best? Well, apparently. Cary Joji Fukunaga’s 10-parter was far from perfect, but it aimed admirably high, wrangling spy action, elven fantasy, late-capitalist malaise, intense family dynamics, corporate psychotherapy and more into a freewheeling caper across several levels of reality. It also got career-best comedic performances out of Emma Stone and Justin Theroux and a fine, sad-sack turn from Jonah Hill. And Ben Sinclair! Not all of its ideas stuck, but it was messy, smart, and light in a way I’d love to see more sci-fi attempt.

Dennis Perkins

I’ll admit, I was worried going into the new, Mary Berry-less (not to mention Mel- and Sue-less), Great British Baking Show era, but I am pleased as rum baba to say that this enduringly endearing and delightfully stressful baking competition series has marched on just as sweetly. Sure, there’s a lingering bitter aftertaste to the great British baking show schism that led to those departures, but not on the Great British Baking Show itself, which rides remaining judge Paul Hollywood’s gruff charms alongside new judging partner Prue Leith and celebrity goofballs Noel Fielding and Sandi Toksvig without missing a trick. The key ingredient to this series’ success has always been the utterly generous heart that goes into every episode, and Fielding and Toksvig, if anything, seem more emotionally invested in the fates of the contestants they have to expel, one-by-one, from the show’s famous tent. And if Hollywood and Leith continue the necessarily merciless judging of soggy bottoms, overworked and under-proved doughs, and the occasional collapsing confectionary disaster, they, too, provide warmly constructive criticism rather than the traditional reality show scorn. A series—as the departed Berry was wont to say—“cram-jammed” with delights, The Great British Baking Show remains one of the most cozily exciting TV experiences going. [Dennis Perkins]

Alex McLevy

Maybe it’s the curse of distance that comes from being released way back in January, or maybe it’s simply a victim of the era of Too Much TV, but I’m bummed out to find the Steven Soderbergh-helmed Mosaic failed to crack our top 25. The miniseries is everything you could want in superlative television: a sharply nuanced and well-written mystery, performed by a coterie of uniformly strong actors at the top of their game (longtime character actor Devin Ratray deserves to be getting award nominations for his star turn), and an ace director brilliantly shooting and editing the whole thing into an intriguing puzzle? It’s the one thing I have felt comfortable recommending to anyone all year long who’s asked me what great show they should check out, regardless of individual tastes, and sadly, not a single person to date has responded with, “I’ve already seen it.” (Feel free to ignore the accompanying multimedia app as an experimental lark on Soderbergh’s part.) You’d think an HBO series from an Oscar-winning director wouldn’t need underdog-status championing, and yet here we are. Give it a watch if you haven’t yet—and odds are, you haven’t.

Caroline Siede

Come on you guys, Netflix’s Queer Eye gave us two full seasons and a special in 2018, and we couldn’t even give it a spot on our list?! I get that it can be hard to stump for reality TV when there’s so much great scripted stuff out there, but Queer Eye at least deserves a special award for being one of the most unexpected joys of 2018. The new Fab Five offered an updated spin on the early ’00s Bravo original, emphasizing self-empowerment, confidence, and empathy along with styling tips and home makeovers. Karamo used his vague “culture and lifestyle” assignment to deliver some really thoughtful therapy sessions, Tan invented a whole new way to wear shirts, Jonathan established himself as an instant icon, Antoni put avocado on stuff, and Bobby did five times as much work as everyone else while getting barely any credit for it. Whether we were bonding over tear-jerking transformations or mocking Antoni’s complete inability to cook, Queer Eye was the rare cultural unifier based on something lovely and uplifting, rather than dark and depressing. I’m guessing we’re still going to need that in 2019, so it’s a good thing the show has a third season on the way. Until then, I’ll just be rewatching A.J.’s episode on a loop.

Lisa Weidenfeld

I watched and loved a lot of TV this year, but it’s possible Wynonna Earp is the show I looked forward to the most, and also the one I wish I was seeing on more best-of lists this December. It’s a Western, a procedural, a Buffy descendant, a horror comedy, and probably a few other things as well. But mostly it’s fun. Its wildly entertaining third season was the strongest yet, and featured a potato-licking mystery, a Christmas tree topper made out of tampons, and one of TV’s sweetest ongoing romances—the usual stuff of great drama. The show’s mythology keeps expanding into an ever larger battle between forces far more powerful than its scrappy team of heroes, but it’s the writing and character work that make the show shine. Wynonna may be tough and merciless in her pursuit of victory, but it’s her sense of humor that keeps her human and compelling, and the bond between her and sister Waverly has provided a grounding emotional force on a show with an increasingly complex central plot. There just aren’t enough shows on TV that would work a Plan B joke into their heist sequence.

Vikram Murthi

Even correcting for James Franco’s involvement, which might put people off for legitimate reasons, it blows me away that The Deuce didn’t crack AVC’s main list. David Simon and George Pelecanos’ bird’s-eye view of the inception and proliferation of the sex industry in the United States represents some of the most mature, compelling television of the year. Simon’s detail-oriented, process-focused approach comes alive when examining a side of American culture that functions as a metaphor for everything: gentrification, the rise of cultural conservatism, urban renewal, late capitalism, and, most potently, the filmmaking process. This season, Simon and Pelecanos pushed their subjects toward broader freedoms that quickly revealed themselves to be traps in disguise. Not only does all social progress come with a price, but also it’s limited to those pre-approved by those controlling the purse strings. Yet, Simon and Pelecanos never forget that the tapestry of human experience is neither exclusively tragic nor comprehensively optimistic. Some people discover happiness, and others lose their way. Rising and falling in America has always been a permanent state because social environments and political context circumscribe life-or-death choices. It’s been a decade since The Wire ended, but its worldview lives on through Simon’s successive work: everything’s connected, follow the money, and bad institutions fail good people every damn day.

Danette Chavez

Although the show’s title addresses a certain demographic, Dear White People has so much to say beyond calling out the oblivious and privileged. Yes, Justin Simien’s adaptation of his 2014 film of the same name wears its politics on its sleeve, but they’re right next to its heart. The show is much more a winning coming-of-age dramedy than it is a polemic, and even then, it’s still miles ahead of most college-set series in both style and substance. Simien’s created his own visual language to capture both the intimacy of the relationships among the core cast, as well as the microscope they’re under as black students at an Ivy League school. And I really cannot say enough about the dialogue, which crackles and informs. Season one had such a moving coming-out storyline, made all the more so by DeRon Horton’s vulnerable performance; the new season follows Lionel’s adventures in dating and dorm sex, with hilarious and poignant results. Really, the whole cast should be commended, from Logan Browning, who provides a wonderfully complex center as Sam, to Antoinette Robertson, who may have given the series’ best performance in season two’s “Chapter IV.” Dear White People still makes a point of punching up—at racist and sexist institutions, tangible and otherwise—but many of its most extraordinary moments have come from characters like Sam, Gabe (John Patrick Amedori), and Reggie (Marque Richardson) recognizing their personal foibles. Thankfully, Netflix has already renewed Dear White People for a third season, giving you all a chance to get it together.

Gwen Ihnat

The odd Amazon sitcom Forever had a lot to say about the monotony of monogamy and marriage: Can you really stay with someone happily for the rest of your life? (Or afterlife, as the case may be.) With anyone but Fred Armisen and Maya Rudolph cast as that main couple, Forever might have slowly slid into bland drudgery. But the two gifted comic actors injected a lot of life into the monogamy question, aided by a spirited supporting cast including Catherine Keener, Julia Ormond, and Noah Robbins. Sure, there are some days when you want to talk to anyone but that person sitting across from you at the breakfast table. But who else would discuss with you, ad nauseam, banal topics like the perfect way to spend a half-hour, or the best way to sit in a chair? The standalone episode “Andre And Sarah” makes achingly clear how much finding (or not finding) that person who makes you shine steers the path your life will eventually take, all in a mere 35 minutes.

Allison Shoemaker

While I’d love to praise one of the many things that aired this year that I’m sure to revisit in future—someone else is going to mention Wanderlust, Salt Fat Acid Heat, and the dazzling Jesus Christ Superstar Live In Concert, right?—I feel compelled to bring up a program I’m almost certain I’ll never watch again. It’s unlikely that when HBO snapped up The Tale at Sundance this year, the network was thinking of the benefits of the pause button. Yet it’s a benefit all the same. The debut narrative feature from documentarian Jennifer Fox follows a fictionalized version of the director (played by Laura Dern) as she re-examines a traumatic childhood experience she’d filed away in her mind as loving and consensual, managing to be both gentle and almost unbearably upsetting all at once. Dern’s simple, seemingly relaxed performance belies the nightmare which fuels it, and that pause button may prove invaluable to some—it certainly was for me. The Tale is a film which seems to demand that you witness, rather than merely watch it. Should you need to walk away for a minute, it’ll keep.

Noel Murray

I know, I know: At least once or twice a year someone tells you about some cool animated series you should be watching, and talks about how trippy and ambitious and strangely deep it is. But guys, trust me: You need to catch up on Cartoon Network’s Summer Camp Island. Only half of season one has aired so far (20 10-minute episodes, mostly non-serialized), with the rest of the first batch reportedly set to debut before the end of the year. It’s a show parents can watch with grade-school-aged kids or on their own—a treat for animation buffs, and for anyone who enjoys a the kind of surrealism that’s more adorable than upsetting. With its snooty teen witches, dorky monsters, and never-ending parade of anthropomorphic clothes, toys, plants, and foodstuffs, Summer Camp Island is like a weird old Disney cartoon crossed with an ’80s teensploitation picture. And it is glorious.

A.A. Dowd

Mike Flanagan is a Stephen King guy. You could guess that from his adaptation of Gerald’s Game and from the news that he’s doing King’s Shining sequel Doctor Sleep next. Or you could just watch his work and marvel at how plainly influenced it is by the author’s, at how well it captures that signature King touch—the division of perspective among multiple characters, the interest in history and trauma, the graceful juggling of timelines. There’s much more King than Shirley Jackson in Flanagan Netflix take on The Haunting Of Hill House. The miniseries didn’t scare me as much as it seemed to scare a lot of my friends and colleagues—while well-executed, its jolts were mostly of the familiar James Wan spirits-slithering-up-walls variety. But I loved the intricacy of the storytelling, the way Flanagan moved fluidly from the childhood scenes to the adulthood ones and back again, mapping the entwined lives of these damaged siblings to suggest the way that our past and present remain in constant conversation. (It’s memories, of course, that are really haunting the Crain family.) In the end, I found Haunting Of Hill House a better, more spiritually faithful adaptation of It than the real one from last year. Guess that makes me a Mike Flanagan guy.

Erik Adams

The contents of The Big List demonstrate that it’s a great time for television comedy of all stripes: Animated, musical, workplace, detail-oriented genre parody, surrealist examination of the agony and ecstasy of existence. And while I would’ve liked to have seen some notice for the humble charms of NBC’s Superstore or a nod to that episode of Joe Pera Talks With You where Joe hears “Baba O’Riley” for the first time, I’m surprised that we didn’t heap more praise on another Michigan-set cable show co-starring Conner O’Malley. Like Myles with Survivor, I’m willing to accept that I’m part of the problem: Detroiters didn’t make my ballot’s final cut, despite all the hearty laughs, shoddily produced TV commercials, and General Getdown dance routines (“He’s a general—he’s the best”) the Comedy Central series gave me this year. Sam Richardson and Tim Robinson’s love letter to their shared hometown will always be powered by the stars’ explosively silly onscreen connection, but season two did some stellar work at fleshing out their characters as individuals, whether it was Sam reuniting with an ex to record a sultry grocery-store jingle or Tim (loudly) grappling with the family legacy of Cramblin Duvet Advertising. If nothing else, these episodes proved that when it comes to comedic news anchors, sometimes the inspiration for Ron Burgundy outstrips the legend himself.

Source: https://tv.avclub.com/what-s-missing-from-our-list-of-2018-s-best-tv-1830979080

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ultimatestudyabroad · 5 years

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New Year’s Resolutions

It’s New Year’s resolution time! Like in 2016, I’m facing another year of massive change. So, the typical resolutions – work out more, lose weight, etc. – are completely unrealistic given the nomadic, unsettled life I’m about to lead for most of the year. But no matter – I’m not very interested in those things anyway! The goal for the year is abundantly clear to me; I don’t even have to stop to think about it. The goal is obvious: hang on the Aussie Mel.

I’ve written a lot in this blog about the personal goals (beyond the PhD) that drove my move to Australia. I was trying to effect a very real personal change that I wasn’t even sure was possible. Turns out it was! Though it can be easy to forget how far you’ve come, I’ve had things lately remind me of the life – more accurately, the mindset or way of being – I left behind. First, I experienced a mini-burnout. While busting my butt to get my revisions done and reach that penultimate draft, I was working seven days a week on mentally taxing work. I felt tired all the time, even when I first woke up. And I started having headaches because I was clenching my teeth at night. This brief spell of burnout was understandable and completely bearable. I was coming up on a major deadline for a massive, three-year project. I should expect to work hard and tire myself out doing so. (And, indeed, a nice 4.5-day weekend after I got the draft to the supervisors fixed everything!) So, I recognized the burnout, but wasn’t too worried about it. I did realize, though, that I used to feel that way all the time in my old life. Then, there was no final deadline that would provide relief. Just a perpetual state of exhaustion and tension.

I also recently read that great article on Buzzfeed, “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation” by Anne Helen Petersen.* I consider myself too old to be a millennial; nevertheless, Petersen so perfectly captures the diffuse malaise I felt but couldn’t quite describe or explain, a malaise I could also sense in my friends and clearly identify in my students. The aim of the article is simply to acknowledge; Petersen doesn’t think it can be fixed – the structures of society are too against that. But as I read, I realized that I had fixed it; I had cured my burnout. I had to rip myself completely out of my life to do it, but I did it.

Now, I’m facing going back, facing putting myself back in that environment, back to where most people around me will be stuck in the mindset that they should be working all the time. My biggest fear about the coming year is not where I’ll end up, what kind of job I’ll get, or if I’ll run out of money. My biggest fear is slipping back into that place of perpetual burnout, of becoming American Mel again.

Hence the New Year’s resolution: hang on to Aussie Mel. The problem is, I’m not exactly sure how to. The forces Petersen describes and I used to feel are strong and so pervasive so as to be almost impossible to identify. So, how do you attack that when you’re in the middle of it? I half expect to find that I can’t and run off to another country in a few years. In the meantime, though, I have to give it a go.

But how? I’m struggling to come up with specific strategies and I’m open to suggestions if anyone has any! As I see it, there are two parts to this: what I do and what I think. Hopefully, if I manage both of those appropriately, it will carry over into how I feel. The first part is easier to control, obviously. I’ll need to budget carefully to make sure I have enough money for the things I want to do: vacations, shows, mini-trips. Since I’ll no longer have student loans and a house to pay for, this should be do-able. The hardest part will be corralling people into doing things with me. When everyone around you is stuck in the burnout fog, how do you get them to add something else – even something enjoyable – onto their calendars without stressing them out more?

Managing what I think will be much trickier, especially since my brain doesn’t like to shut off. I’ve got some tricks up my sleeve – meditation, mindfulness, gratitude journals, etc. – but will they be enough? I’ve changed my mindset, but my more positive mindset doesn’t get tested here very much. What will I do to interrupt the negative thought loop? What will I do when the noise is keeping me from enjoying something I actually want to do? What will I do when I’m sitting at my desk and I’m feeling my chest tighten because I know there’s no way I can ever finish everything that’s on my plate for the day? All of these things regularly occurred before I moved to Australia. I have to figure out a way to deal with them, but I’m scared I won’t be able to.

The stakes are high for my New Year’s resolution. If I fail, I’ll lose the happiness and contentment I’ve worked so hard to achieve. In addition to those stakes, I face the pressure of not really knowing how to succeed. But, I have no choice. I have to give it my all. Wish me luck!

* This article has gotten a lot of … well … buzz, even in Australia. They were just discussing it on The Drum. The panelists decided it didn’t resonate with them. And I screamed at the TV, “That’s because you’re Australian and she’s American! The two places are different!”

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365footballorg-blog · 6 years

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Warshaw: Will players be scoreboard watching on Decision Day? Of course.

Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

October 25, 20182:30PM EDT

The shot goes wide. Goal kick coming. Quick look over at the coach. What’s that face? Is that anguish or excitement?

Ball’s back in. “Andy, slide left. Left shoulder! He’s on your left shoulder! Well done.”

Throw-in now. Quick look to the side. I’m pretty sure that’s anguish.

Ball’s back in. “Yeah, give it here.” I put my hands in front of me to tell my teammate I want the ball to my feet. It comes. I switch the field. We attack to the byline and get a corner.

I can’t keep waiting. I gotta know.

“Coach, what’s the score?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Bobby Warshaw (R) duels Dwayne De Rosario during his playing days | USA Today Sports Images

He’s right, of course: That other game doesn’t matter at all. Well, it matters, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I can only play in this game. And we have to win. If we win, the other score doesn’t matter.

In my fifth year as a pro, my Norwegian team was fighting for a playoff spot. We needed to win and to get some help. I thought about the other game every second of our 90 minutes.

Because if the other team were to win their game, our win wouldn’t do us any good, anyway. How was I supposed to ignore that?

Such is life on the last day of the season.

And such is the coming experience for the Montreal Impact, Columbus Crew SC, New York Red Bulls, Atlanta United and Real Salt Lake (to a much more amplified anxiety level) on MLS Decision Day presented by AT&T.

Crew SC currently lead the Impact by two points. If Columbus win, they slot into the Audi 2018 MLS Cup Playoffs. If they draw or lose, it gets messy.

Montreal have 14 wins this year; Columbus have 13. If Columbus tie and Montreal win, they will be tied on points; Montreal will go through because the Impact will have more wins on the season.

Atlanta lead the Red Bulls by one point in the Supporters’ Shield race. If the Five Stripes win, the trophy is theirs. If they don’t, they leave the Red Bulls an opening.

And RSL, well… they don’t have a game, so they have to sit and hope the LA Galaxy blow it against Houston.

Every player in those games will be playing two games in their mind at once.

My teammates and I didn’t know anything about the other game until halftime. Our team coordinator had been checking the scores and couldn’t help himself. “Draw! They’re tied! Win and we’re good!”

Our coach didn’t hide his annoyance. He didn’t want us thinking about the other game. “We can only control what’s here,” was the line he had repeated beyond count that week.

Last year, the final Audi #MLSCupPlayoffs spot came down to the 93rd minute.

More drama to come on #DecisionDay by @ATT? #tbt pic.twitter.com/Id68u587in

— Major League Soccer (@MLS) October 25, 2018

It’s essentially impossible to ignore the situation. When your fate depends on someone else, you can’t help but think about them.

Every facial expression the coach makes – What’s he hiding? Every rumble from the crowd – Anxious groan or excited rumble? Every shout from the stands (“They’re winning, you’re screwed”) – Is it true?

You have to deal with your own game – each pass, each duel, each adjustment – yet you can’t help getting deflated or elated based on the signs around you. You feel the emotions of your game, plus the pull of the other one.

It was the most exhilarating, tortuous experience of my life. In the end, we got the results we needed.

One thing that helped: We gave up a goal early. It made the situation on our own field feel more urgent and real. It smacked us into the present, as much as anything could. We had to find a goal. Chasing the game ensured we didn’t get caught in an anxious malaise. We had to fight; we didn’t get stuck in “Wait-and-See” hope.

That’s the biggest part of any decision day: Pushing away the fear and the hope, and just fighting for what you can control. If you don’t handle your own business, nothing else matters.

Series:

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The Winning 11 Pick ‘Em’

Who ya got on Decision Day? Pick which teams will win on MLS Decision Day 2018 presented by AT&T (Oct. 28) for a chance to win a trip to the MLS Cup 2018. It’s FREE and easy. Make your picks now!

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Warshaw: Will players be scoreboard watching on Decision Day? Of course. was originally published on 365 Football

#course #decision #players #scoreboard #Warshaw #watching

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mylymedlife · 7 years

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A Negative Lyme Test Is Good News, But It Doesn’t Mean You Feel Better.

I received this email about two months ago. You might wonder why I didn’t immediately post it and make a big fuss. There are a number of reasons for that.

For starters, it has taken me a while to process it. To believe it’s true. When I got the email I had no reaction whatsoever. I simply stared at the screen in stunned silence. Lyme Disease hijacked my life for eight years, and I spent nearly every waking moment either fighting it or just trying to bear it. Then suddenly with the arrival of an email bong, my tormenter is dead. Just like that.

This may sound odd, but I just couldn’t absorb the fact I had actually beat Lyme. That I didn’t have to fight anymore. An image came to me of a prison guard arriving to let me out of jail, but after he unlocked the door I just sat in my cell. I sat there because I didn’t know how to be free. I only knew how to be a prisoner.

That’s what happened to me with Lyme disease. As the years ticked by and nothing was working, I started to believe I would always have Lyme disease. That a life with Lyme was my only reality. And now here was black and white evidence of a different possibility.

Much later in the day I sat down and thought about all I had done. The tests, the procedures, the doctor visits, all the wretched things I had put down my throat, the prayers, the fears. And then finally, the tears came. Tears for my lost eight years. Tears for how hard I fought. Tears for how tired I was. Tears for how my life will never be the same.

I’m crying as I recall the memory.

There’s another reason I didn’t jump for joy when I received the news of my negative test. As it turns out, the negative test is really just the beginning of the true healing. One more cruel thing about Lyme. My doctor explained it like this: picture hitting your thumb with a hammer. When you lift the hammer up, the assault is over, but your thumb is wrecked and will take some time to heal. Killing the last Lyme spirochete is like lifting the hammer off your thumb. The assault is over, but there is still a lot of healing to be done.

That’s where I am now. In theory, lyme spirochetes no longer inhabit my body. (I say in theory because Lyme is good at hiding from your immune system and from tests. I will need to be re-tested in a few months). But while the Lyme is gone, the damage it has done remains. The issues I still wrestle with, in order of severity, are:

Slow GI motility that necessitates a mostly liquid diet.

Extreme anxiety I never had prior to Lyme.

Low physical and mental stamina. I’d say I’m operating at a quarter of the capacity I had before Lyme.

Hypothyroidism. Never had it before Lyme. Will probably be on thyroid medication the rest of my life.

Osteoporosis. The result of malnutrition and weight loss due to my Lyme induced GI issues. (I’m only 48 and there is no family history).

A general sense of just not feeling like myself.

In spite of that list, I feel better than I have in a long, long time. So let’s end with a more positive list. Here are the things that are improved:

No more bone crushing, debilitating fatigue. There were many days when I could hardly extract myself from my chair.

No more brain fog. There was a period of about two years when I could barely focus enough to read.

No more 24/7 general feeling of malaise.

No more nausea and more or less constant stomach pain (credit the liquid diet for that).

If you ignore my GI area, my body feels fantastic. Light and airy. It used to feel extremely heavy and creaky. At times, I felt like I had quicksand in my veins.

I no longer feel like I am 100 years old. I don’t really know what it feels like to be 100 of course, but I can imagine, based on how I used to feel.

As I take the 30,000 foot view of my journey, I still have a ways to go. But I think I have covered more ground than what remains. At least I hope I have.

I have no idea when or if I will finally feel completely well. That’s beyond my control. So, as I enter this next phase of my journey, I will do what I have done all along. Take each day as it comes. Find gratitude wherever possible. Life life when I can. Rest when I need to. Focus on how far I’ve come instead of how far I have to go. And the most important thing of all -- focus on the effort, but let go of the outcome.

I learned long ago that the outcome is up to a force much greater than myself, and the more I work to give up control, the more content I am.

Let’s have an Amen for that.

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misdirectedforward · 7 years

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up to now: the mania, the eating disorders, and the becoming of a labrat

there’s a part II to this story. the reason i came back. while the development of my TMD progressed due to the copious bundles of side conditions that rack on and come with the package of ehlers danlos syndrome, i had a severe psychosis episode induced by a severe manic episode and that’s what essentially brought me home. the realisation that i need to be on medication to prevent another one from happening. i never wanted to experience another one of that magnitude again. i had experienced psychosis episodes before and only 1 or 2 others to the degree of the one i had at the university. i just thought it was apart of my ptsd or possibly my adderall considering it can bring out psychosis in some. however, i didn’t want to be taken off of it and feared i’d be told i was schizophrenic, so i never brought it up to the professionals. i didn’t know i was bipolar, i didn’t let myself believe i was despite my mothers persistent accusations of me being bipolar. the devastation of the destroyed hope i had for being the odd one out, that i at least dodged that genetically cursed bullet, was intense when i learned i was. my initial thought was i was just fucked up as the rest of them. but then i realised i wasn’t completely. for the most part i don’t believe i act bipolar, seemingly most who know me don’t believe i do either and that’s due to how ridiculously self aware i am with a deep understanding of myself and for the most part a good amount of self control. i guess it’d only make sense to seem more stable as far as switching from highs and lows go. a gift that no one else in the family has. i’m just worried i won’t have a chance to put it to much use, that it’ll fade away and turn into narcissistic tendencies and ignorance. two of the most prominent qualities my parents posses and like my parents, i’ll follow in their footsteps without realising it. so i’m hoping i find the right medication and get into therapy soon. i’ve just gotten prescribed topamax after the hunch i had about lamictal turned out to be right. it left me feeling like i was being hit in the sides and back with a hair brush of 6 inch needles in place of bristles with an overwhelming feeling of malaise, leaving me unable to even get up to do the dishes simply because i didn’t have the energy within me to do so. i’m hoping for a better outcome with topamax. i have high hopes because on top of migraine prevention, the biggest side effect is weight loss. and if i’m being honest, that’s the main reason i asked for it out of the many mood stabilisers i researched. at the university, my boyfriend wasn’t the sweet and polite proper southern boy he initially lead on to be. he was selfish, entitled, and angry. it lead to a quick nose dive off the deep end with a buoy he grabbed onto with the word "alcoholism” printed on it. i couldn’t be happier to be out of that relationship. i think he’s the only person i have ever regretted dating. he wasn’t who i thought he was, while i remained a little too much everything he already knew i was. an instant attraction turned cataclysmic and cold. on top of feeling entitled to my body, like he had a legal right to it, a damn patent on me saying he could do whatever he wanted with me because he owned all rights to me, he also saw it as the biggest burden that he was responsible for making sure i was able to eat. he signed up for it. he knew what he was getting into, he was the one that offered to take me on. and for that i am eternally grateful, but that doesn’t pardon his behaviour. he claimed he didn’t have much money yet spent hundreds on weed, and then alcohol, and then tattoos. but i was an object of less value, so i guess my wellbeing was able to be exonerated by his moral court. lucky for him. i couldn’t possibly blame him in total for my acting on impulses and triggers, as i’m responsible for my own actions. i know my ulterior motives behind the scenes of this show, including but not limited to: a need for control, feeling trapped, a lack of concern with my own life and honestly simply pure boredom and having nothing better to do. and despite being fully aware of all of this, for whatever reason i just can’t, or really don’t want to, stop any of it! while i may have pulled the trigger, he loaded the gun, showed me how and at which angle toward my temple to shoot it. the barrel and trigger may be wiped clean but the bullets still have his fingerprints all over them. however, i don’t blame him for this. i just see him at fault for this. with him, i got used to not eating. my thighs became distant friends, never bumping into each other anymore. my collar bones, tightly wrapped in the silk of my thinly spread skin, calming to the touch for some reason. i could feel each individual rib, each with its own identity. i watched my hip bones rise above the surface, romanticising and idolising them once i noticed. seeing them like dolphins poking out of the sea on a clear beach sunset instead of the result of malnutrition and organ damage. refusal to eat turning into excitement. eating resulting in extreme guilt or purging. continuing the ritual once i returned home. they say old habits die hard, and while i’m responsible for my reaction to being triggered by his digging up of my bones, he’s still at fault for inducing as well as being, if you will, an accessory to the relapse of the old habit that could die with me at any waking moment. the increased distortion i see in the mirror. the fingers down my throat if i eat too much. the laxative bottles i swallow by the week, dare i eat more than 600 calories. the 10 pounds i felt i gained that was really only 3 on an extremely forced but half full stomach making it actually only around a pound if it’s not all water weight to be diminished the next morning. no visible difference between my body at university, my last doctor weigh in, and today. the only difference torments me from inside my head, these cruel thoughts fed through the world class oxygen i was fed some nights as the only meal of the day. the intake and body obsession, the external self loathing, the competition with myself, the race against my own body until my skin and muscles and organs shed off until i’m nothing but a skeleton, will that even be enough then?! i was finally happily recovered, happy with my body for the first time in a very long time that took a very long time. until him. in time, may there be forgiveness as i’ve given with all of the people who’ve done wrong by me. but right now i don’t have the conscious choice to remove the fault i, at least for now, will continue to hold over him with great contempt. for the wrath i receive from the darkest part of my mind i worked so hard to lock up with a life sentence, it is his fault. on top of creating physical triggers within, or rather with-on, me beyond overlooking and ignoring, is also on mistreating me so, it is his fault. and soon, you wanted nothing to do with me. but only to then hold on to a sentimental piece of me with refusal to return it. but wait, there’s more! a voracious and vicious bite to the jugular in close corners, because taking one of the only forms of proof on this planet that my mom can at times value me over herself wasn’t enough. for my downward spiral, whether it be initiation or turbocharging on your behalf, is your fault. i’ve already taken responsibility for my blood, spewed up from my oesophagus. the question that bares is, could you deal with carrying it in your bare hands if you knew?

#may 8 2017 #entry #ana #mia #bipolar #dear diary #self help #ask me anything

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