don't hug me i'm scared episode 6 electricity is really something when you're autistic, huh. yellow guy is made fun of all his life by his only friends and laughed at for being "stupid" when all he needed was a change of batteries but no one would listen to him and give him the accommodations he needed and deserved and when he finally did get new batteries and become more clearheaded his friends didn't like him any better. they stopped making fun of him, sure, but they didn't like that he was "smart" all of a sudden, because they'd gotten used to him being "the stupid one". and he looked in the mirror and saw his former self, and his reflection asked him, "have we gone wrong? they seem upset with us" because the truth is even if the way you are now is more comfortable for you, even if it doesn't hurt to think anymore, people will only ever like you if you're the Right Kind of autistic/adhd/traumatized/whatever. have we gone wrong? have we gone wrong? that's what you always ask yourself. "maybe they're not in charge of us anymore." "maybe they never were." and his reflection walks away, as if accepting that the others will think what they will think, and it won't matter, because yellow guy is his own person, no matter how difficult it is for him to articulate his thoughts, and he doesn't need their approval to think. "maybe they never were."
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leo has spent his entire life curating an image for himself. the Leader with the plan, who always knows the right thing to do, who always has the exact words his brothers need to hear at just the right time. a firm hand to guide, an ear to listen, a voice to inspire hope.
even when he stumbles, it’s controlled. quiet in such a way that not even his brothers, who share a roof and food and clothes and blood, realize it. leo doesn’t fall apart, he can’t, because the foundation that crumbles brings down the entire house.
maybe it’s your outsider perspective that gives you insight. you see it in the way he doesn’t bother to wrap his still-bleeding knuckles after hours in the dojo, silently sliding over the last slice of pizza to his orange-clad baby brother, forgoing fun nighttime outings in exchange for more training, suddenly excusing himself from conversations of harrowing night patrols so that no one can see the hiccup in his breathing growing and growing until the memories threatens to engulf him.
the way he rejects himself over and over is so familiar, a mirror reflection that moves in time with your own movements, and oh, it hurts to see it. but you do it anyway because you have never met someone more worth looking at than him.
maybe he sees it in you too—or maybe he just needs something, someone, to notice him, even if he would rather die than admit it. but eventually, he allows you to silently bandage his bleeding knuckles and kiss the spaces between his fingers until their trembling ceases and the shudder of his breathing quiets. when you find him pacing at night, restlessly walking between his brothers bedrooms, he stops resisting you as you gently pull him back to bed and drown out his racing thoughts with the sound of your own rhythmic heartbeat.
you don’t fix him, you wouldn’t dream of it because you love him and loving isn’t the same as fixing—but you kiss his scars with as much tenderness as his lips, and something in him heals each time.
he confesses to you one sleepless night under a hazy new york sky that he doesn’t know the difference between being loved and being used.
i don’t either, you admit. but i would like to learn.
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how do you have the time to write all this stuff /and/ play video games etc etc at the same time? Is it just that you write insanely fast after all these years? I have a lot of hobbies, writing being one of them, and i have such a hard time juggling them lol.
Hi anon,
So, real talk -> The reality is I don't have the time to write and play video games at the same time most of the time.
I haven't written anything since the 17th. I haven't started the next Palmarosa chapter. I'm on day 8 of not having opened a new document and writing anything.
I've edited a whole two chapters (which I suspect I have to go over again) and I've responded to some comments and asks, and that's it. No writing, no growing wordcount, I've been stagnating / not doing anything due to burnout since the 17th (I know the date because I have a giant whiteboard of completed chapters next to me).
Honestly, most of the time I don't actually have the time to read, play video games, watch television, or movies. I am too busy writing/editing/sleeping. With Toby in the mix, the small amount of media I was consuming has vanished.
Sometimes I can play certain video games while writing - these are usually low stakes video games I can endlessly put on pause and then play for five minutes at a time, like Dorfromantik and Garden Galaxy. Any kind of idler video game, like Havendock is also good for this.
Anon, you can't have a lot of hobbies and actually keep up with them and write the way I do, and therapist/s wouldn't recommend you drop all of your hobbies to write the way I do anyway. Trust me.
I had two things I wanted to start learning this year, and I haven't started learning them yet. I don't have the capacity. I had a therapist gently point out to me that if I was always at 100 in terms of output, how can I have any energy leftover for self-work and processing? The answer is: I don't. (That's actually why I've spent a week playing video games, and if anything it's just reminded me that my capacity is still at 100 and this is going to take a bit of concerted decompression).
Most of the time it's not normally quite this overwhelming. Toby has just maxed me out because he's a high energy dog who is also a puppy with Separation Anxiety, and there's no quick or easy fix for that. But most of the time it's still very intense. The list of shows I really want to watch, and books I really want to read, is very long. But I often don't have time to indulge in those things because I'm too busy writing.
A lot of the time I don't actually have the time to reread my own fics anymore, outside of editing.
This year was meant to kind of tackle that more decisively but you know then we got a puppy so... not so much.
But yeah anon, there is no 'how do you do this and do this' - you don't do one of those things, or you do it very haphazardly, in small amounts.
I do write very fast (my wordcount is 120-150wpm), but I don't edit fast (I'd tender that editing fast for most people is a bit of an oxymoron), I don't answer asks fast (some of the longer ones take me an hour to compose), etc. And even then, writing fast is not the same as the time it takes to think out the chapter, to figure out what's happening, letting it percolate etc. A lot of my life is also just resting. I lose about 2-5 hours of every afternoon to sleep or rest for example, where nothing productive happens. And I think one of the reasons I read so many manwha atm is that they're so easy to read comparatively, and so quick, and that's the only way I can really consume stories these days.
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Why is major depression so hard. I do not understand why it is possible to feel like this.
Anxiety makes so much more sense. There's lots of scary things out there.
But the complete lack of energy or desire to do anything is really very eerie.
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man i don't know who else out there is struggling with feeling like they're Too Much when they try to make friends? or like the only way they know how to connect with people is by being helpful, knowledgeable, or deeply engaged about some fandom thing (and end up either drained dry trying to be something for other people, or forgotten about when people move on)? but i am kissing you on the forehead. you deserve closeness and support and love, hang in there
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i don’t know why i still remember this but back when until dawn first came out, i watched mark and jack’s playthroughs first. when it got to josh having his breakdown when mike and chris were tying him up in the shed, they were both kinda laughing and being like why are you being so weird
then i watched emma blackery’s playthrough and she said how sad the scene was. and i just remember thinking how true that was. we were watching a kid’s mental breakdown; watching his mask fall and seeing what he was actually thinking and going through after losing his sisters. his delusion of power and perception of reality was broken and seeing how quickly he declined mentally was heartbreaking. and it’s only made worse later in the game when we find his transcripts from his therapists and see him experience auditory and visual hallucinations
it’s just interesting how the scene hits completely different to people who have faced mental illness than to people that haven’t
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I have about three emotions left in this depression: fear, sadness, boredom. And I'm not even sure boredom counts.
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