#to help him through his crisis and im grateful for that truly because my brother needs the help and im glad hes accepting it

[lupismaris]

My parents cancelled the official family gathering and I put my foot down and said I wasn't coming over on Christmas unless my brother called me himself and asked me to (because I cannot stomach being in the same space as him and my father rn) and frankly I'm glad this is a bare minimum makeshift holiday sure It be nice to have decorations up but we need to clean and get rid of shit more than we need decorations and I need a fuckin break from ppl who make me want to commit acts of violence. Gonna spend the holiday break in the woods.

[mysticorigamipaper-mcl]

honestly the worst part about kentin´s arc is how much hate he is getting, i get most ppl already dont like him but now is fucking ridiculous i literally cannot go to his tag on a normal episode without reading "how awful" he is but now is worst,i just want to see cute fanart! I hate the tumblr mcl fandom, the hispanic fandom will make fun of things and even say they dont like a character but it never overflows with negativity (ik im super annoying but i need to vent and have no friends)

*hugs* You have a friend in me anon. You’re not being annoying, and venting can help one feel a little better. I’m sorry to hear there’s more negativity towards Kentin and his fans. And I also realized a while back there was little positivity towards him in the tumblr fandom. I try to give all the boys some attention through posts and fan art on my blog to share with all fans, but I noticed Kentin receives the least. It’s actually hard to find good/cute content with him in it. Though Kentin may not be my favorite personally, I can see why others like him, and it’s a shame there isn’t more material available. Not to mention that anyone who seems to voice that they like him receive so much hate in return and are shamed for their personal interest in his character/route. It must be absolutely frustrating.

Yes, after the latest episode Kentin is getting more hate than usual. But I think part of it is more towards his attitude change in the recent events since we met Evan. And his behavior towards strangers and women in general. I mean, he and Evan were acting the same, if not worse than Dake when he was always harassing Candy. Treating a girl/woman or anyone the way they did to Candy and Rosa in this episode is something very relatable in the real world. It’s unacceptable, uncomfortable and upsetting behavior. That’s why people are more angry than usual. His attitude is something a lot of us face. There are guys that actually act like this, and it may be triggering many who have experienced such attitudes in real life.

Apart from that, this is how I see his situation. Evan was Kentin’s role model and surrogate big brother in military school. Not only did Evan defend Kentin from bullies, he apparently gave him confidence and molded Kentin, transforming him while he was there.

And Kentin seems to be very grateful for what Evan has done for him. When Kentin returns to Sweet Amoris, no one recognizes him. Thanks to this, his first plan of action is get back at Amber by stealing her first kiss (her not knowing he was the nerd she used to bully) and then telling her she’s a bad kisser, in an attempt to lower her ego/self esteem. He even smashed her new cell phone. He wasn’t about to let anyone bully him anymore. And he wanted that made clear through Amber. If your Candy was mean to him before military school, he is cold towards you. If you were nice, he’s nice towards you when he returns.

Once he’s back, he befriends Armin and Alexy and no one seems to bother or bully him. He becomes more relaxed and doesn’t try so hard to put on the tough guy act. He becomes a sweet guy again (as long as your Candy is nice to him), just slightly more mature as he’s not stalking Candy anymore like a lovesick puppy. I think with the absence of Evan and the other boys, Kentin wasn’t fired up and influenced to act the way he did in military school where you had to act tough, macho and not allow anyone walk all over you. But later, I think he started feeling out of place at Sweet Amoris, if not alone. Though he clicked right away with Armin and Alexy, Armin started becoming more of a friend towards Nathaniel. Alexy has a crush on Kentin but they don’t hang out a lot, if at all these days. And he doesn’t seem to be getting along with any of the other guys, or any of the girls in his class, apart from the few conversations we’ve seen him have with Lysander or while our Candy is present in his route. Then, for those on his route, even when he finally gets to date his long time crush and kiss her, his confidence in himself and his self esteem appears to continue to dwindle. First Candy wants to hide their relationship from everyone as soon they officially become a couple (Kentin more than likely thought she was embarrassed or ashamed to be seen with him as his girlfriend) and it hurt him deeply. Then at the party during spin the bottle, Kentin became upset when another guy tries to kiss Candy on a dare and claims Candy doesn’t realize how beautiful/wonderful she is and how could other guys NOT be interested in her. I think him witnessing that and becoming more aware of that reality seriously made him question if he was good enough for Candy, if he was manly enough, if he was the kind of guy she wanted to be with. Again, his level of confidence drops.

Once Evan returns, Kentin is suddenly brought back to his military school days, and that macho attitude kicks in like Pavlov’s dogs to a dinner bell. Kentin suddenly feels like he’s brimming with confidence with his old buddy back at his side, and admires/mimics Evan to a horrifying degree. Kentin becomes so overconfident that he shifts into an arrogant, rude person. Notice how he talks back to everyone and becomes disrespectful towards Candy and the other classmates, as well as the teachers. He thinks that this new confidence makes it so no one messes with him, that no one will try to walk all over him again.

Be that as it may, I think he’s distancing himself from everyone. Putting up a wall. Making sure no one approaches him. Not even his own girlfriend. Because he’s hiding so many insecurities and fears. He has no identity. No self worth. No friends. He doesn’t have much of a father figure since his dad is gone a lot, and therefore no male figure to look up to or learn from. Until Evan came along. Evan was everything Kentin thought a man should be. Strong, confident and assertive. And because Kentin became so grateful of Evan’s support, he failed to notice Evan’s flaws. Arrogant, harassing, even delinquent like. Kentin becomes blind to Evan’s and his own behavior and makes excuses or gets defensive when people call him out on it. He gets upset when people tell him Evan is a bad influence. But to Kentin, Evan was the only person who ever seemed to be there for him when no one else was. It’s why he tries so hard to defend Evan and his actions. And as a result, Kentin becomes the very type of person he hates without knowing it. And he doesn’t want to see it.

He’s scared…he’s alone…he’s frustrated…he’s completely lost. That’s a dangerous and self destructive combination. And until Kentin accepts who he really is, learns to truly be himself or figures out what he can become/wants to become on his own, without the influence of anyone but himself, he’ll continue to have this identity crisis. I just hope for his sake, that will come about on some serious self reflection in the next episode.

[rheyareads]

Late Night Reminiscing

About a month ago, I went to my Little’s house for Friendsgiving with my sorority sisters and she had gotten out her yearbooks to look at her and another of my sisters old photos and senior quotes and things. I was hoping her husbands’ yearbooks were there because he and I went to school together and I was curious about mine. They weren’t and I had forgotten about it by the time I’d gotten home. Yesterday, my friend was moving and his wife had found our high school year books and so I decided to take out mine and laugh along with them, states away, at our horrible pictures and stupid messages.

Looking at my year book is always an emotional rollercoaster for me because I look back so fondly and wish I could relive those days but when I really think about it, I don’t know that I’d love reliving them. I hated myself so much back then and I just remember not eating, crying over boys and mean girls and just drama, drama, drama.

I was curious to see what I wrote in my senior yearbook for my goals, memories and advice and honestly I was a little surprised by what I had to say.

My hopes for the future: go to college, become a writer, get married, be happy.

This was shocking to me because if you asked me now what I thought I’d written I would have assumed it was something about becoming the best in my career or whatever – I knew I wanted to be a writer out of college – but I became so career obsessed over the last 10 years that I was a bit surprised to see I had such simple hopes for the future.

I’ve accomplished only one of my hopes and that’s a little disheartening, especially considering it’s been 12 years. It made me self reflect to see that even 12 years ago, my hope for myself was to just share my life with someone and be happy. I think somewhere along the line in college I really lost that ambition and became this hardened person who tried to find ways to escape my relationships whenever they felt like they were headed towards marriage or the possibility of sharing “too much” with someone. Granted, I haven’t been in a relationship in almost 7 years so who’s to say how I’d react these days. I can’t even fathom anyone wanting to be in a relationship with me, let alone pushing that away but, I digress.

If I look back at my last 4 relationships, I ended all of them. I left Andrew because I didn’t want him to lose his goals and dreams to be closer to me, I left James because I lost sight of every aspect with myself when we were together, I left frank because he cared about me so much more than I could care about him and he deserved to be loved better than I could love him, and I left Jason because at the heart of our relationship I felt empty because of how it all began and never felt like we ever really connected over anything outside of Greek life and the college experience.

Now, throw in a dump truck load of trauma and toss it around through out the years of those relationships and that will fill in the holes of my timelines and ultimately become the bumper cars that pushed me towards bad relationships or away from good ones, but at the heart of everything, it was always me leaving and always me craving something else, something better.

I think that idea of craving something better is a theme in my life because I look at this beautiful, beautiful girl who I feel so distant from, who absolutely hated herself and her body, and I wish I could shake her and make her realize how much happiness and love and beauty she had. Even then, even in high school when I was a size 8 and cared about my appearance, I couldn’t find happiness. I couldn’t find a way to love myself or my situation. That feeling stayed with me, every day, and just grew and grew, as I grew, and now I’m this shell of a person incapable of loving myself, incapable of believing someone could love me, and so overweight and disconnected I can barely look in a mirror.

Sometimes it makes me wonder what I ever thought happiness should look like.

My memories: things that made me smile and inside jokes with my friends, one for each year of high school, but my very last one was “time spent with the boys”

This one made my heart smile. I think it’s easy for me to romanticize the relationship I have with them now that we’re adults because we have truly known each other since we were kids and we still try to make time for each other, as best we can, even now — not to mention everyone’s married and working on babies – but sometimes I wonder if I romanticized too much and sort of “made up” the friendship I had with them in my head like we were closer than we really were. I do that pretty easily, and friendships that last 20+ years are incredibly rare so it’s easy to question that sort of stuff, but seeing it written there, in 2007, affirmed for me that I’m not necessarily the crazy girl who made these boys up that I sometimes feel I am.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I definitely loved them more than they loved me back then. My pages are filled with messages of “sorry we always make fun of you, but not really” and various jokes that are probably borderline cruel (maybe not even borderline) but boys love differently so it makes me smile looking back on it. To look back and see that even then, they were my final thought, makes me happy. They are the memory that stuck out the most to me – the people who shaped my heart and taught me how to really, truly, come to love friends as though they’re family. It also retroactively justifies the buckets of tears I cried at Mullets wedding just thinking about how far we’ve come.

Anyway – I’ve gotten off track a bit.

My advice: love the friends you have and befriend the ones you don’t.

Again – honestly surprised at seeing this. I think I’ve gone through so much of an identity crisis lately that this helped me understand that the core of who I am has always been about loving my friends. Sometimes I don’t know how I survive everything I’ve been through – losing a sibling to Suicide, car accidents, emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual assault, family members with addiction, an eating disorder, losing my aunt to cancer, caring for my brother with cancer – it’s all honestly too much to take in sometimes and I think the thread that has helped hold me to this world, to my last shred of sanity, has always been the love I have for my friends and how grateful I am for the relationships I have.

People hear about “the boys” and they genuinely question why I speak to them but the truth is – they are a part of the makeup of my soul. They are in my DNA, for better or worse, and I think having that friendship to look at and cherish over the years has honestly kept me tethered to reality when I’ve wanted to slip away. So many times I have wanted to give up but when I look at our memories and the lives they’re living now I’m just filled with happiness enough to push through. They have taught me so much pain, but also so much forgiveness and love.

My sorority sisters helped me survive losing my brother and kept me alive when I struggled with depression in college (though it may have also introduced me to some easily accessible bad coping mechanisms, but that’s another story) I can remember my heart swelling when my sisters came to his funeral, only having known me a few months, and holding me when I cried the night he died. My sisters who’ve walked in on me self harming and held me and loved me. Meeting my little gave me a love so pure I would go through all the drama of college again, just to meet her. My little connected two halves of my heart and married my Mullet and brought me some of the purest joy I’ve ever experienced

My friendship with Danielle and her family loving and accepting me helped me survive some of the most difficult times I’ve experienced with my own family and walking away from a friendship that had turned toxic and detrimental to my health. Having her family become my extended family was the only thing that got me through so many days where I felt like I had nothing else to live for.

My work friends at brockport helped me survive some of the most stressful work I’ve ever done, made me laugh every single day, and supported me when I had tragedies or health scares of my own. They’ve continued to believe in me, even after I lost everything I thought I knew when I had to leave student affairs and continue to make me laugh, despite our distance. (Sarah, Im grouping you in this group here just an FYI)

My friendship with my cousin and her friend group helped me get through losing my job, my career and my way of life after coming back home. Having friends that feel more like family with every passing year made it easier to come home and not regret that decision. And they make it easier to tolerate work now that half of them work there too

Now, it’s 3am and I may be romanticizing again, but I don’t think I am. I think that for as deeply as I feel this depression I am in, I also feel other emotions deeply, like gratitude and love for my friends.

While I’m grateful I am able to feel this deeply about friendships, I just wish I could feel this way about myself. I wish I could see my world for what it was in the moment, rather than looking back 12 years later and seeing the happiness I was blind to then. It makes me wonder all the things I’ve missed these last few years, and all the things I’m missing now, because I can’t recognize happiness for what it is.

In college, I took a class called self in society and there was a moment where someone told me I was beautiful and I full out sobbed because I hated myself so much and just couldn’t see what she saw and it felt so genuine that I was forced to believe her and it shook me to my core. That’s how engrained my self-hatred really is. That moment was a defining moment for me and sometimes I think i spend a lot of time chasing that feeling. I look back at the girl I was in high school and I feel so sad that I couldn’t see what I see in her now – someone so beautiful, who loved so deeply, and was full of life. If I could write my hopes for the future now, I’d say that I hoped to become that girl again, because I can see how beautiful she was, but I should probably wish to be able to love myself for who I am now.

I feel like so much of who I’ve become is the physical manifestation of the hatred and disgust I’ve had for myself over the years and I just wish I could learn how to embrace who I am and believe I’m worth someone loving me the way I love others – because I do love others, a lot, and I think that’s always been the person I was at my core, even when I didn’t know it.

from WordPress https://rheyareads.wordpress.com/2019/12/30/late-night-reminiscing/