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thehollowprince · 4 years

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CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING

I got a reblog from one of the people that really dislike Scott McCall on one of my asks today. Like, an actual reblog and not just another anon chasing their tail in circles trying to convince me, themselves and the rest of the world that Scott was truly just Bad™. I was super surprised because that usually doesn't happen until after their leaders Athena and Cole give them the signal, but in the same breath I wasnt surprised because they had me blocked so that I couldn't reply. Par for the course, I guess, but I managed to snag screencaps of the reply and I'm here to just... go through them.

My favorite part of this is that they seemed to have been under the impression that my answer to that anon was a challenge of some kind.

For anyone interested, this was all in response to this ask that I answered yesterday. I went through and debunked all of their points and that's what I'm going to do again with this.

1: are we referring to the first season when they broke up after Night School because Scott "abandoned" them to save their lives from Peter? Because, yes, Scott did send her texts and a picture of them when they were together, and she got upset, and after explaining things, guess what, he did, in fact, leave her alone!

2: I've already talked about Scott's interaction with Isaac in Anchors ad nauseam, which can be read here and here. If anyone doesn't want to read the second one (I admit, I can get a little long-winded), what I said was that I didn't like that scene because of how out-of-character it was for Scott. As for Jackson, with the way he treated people, Scott in particular, I'm honestly surprised that no one beat him before that. Scott has the patience of a saint to deal with that for as long as he did without snapping.

3: what's really weird about this is how these people who really dislike Scott (and just by how that was phrased I think I finally found the anon) always fixate on that time Scott shoved Isaac. Just that one moment, and you know why, because their were no moments after that. Scott had no objections to Allison and Isaac hooking up (they never got around to actually dating).

4: this is one of those moments where I want to shake people and say "please watch the damn show!", because what this dingus left out, like everything else in their reply, was context (more on that in a minute). In that scene where Scott yells at Allison (Raving), its after their plan starts to fall apart. That's one of Scott's legitimate flaws in the show (conveniently overlooked in favor of fictional flaws). When things don't go according to plan, he gets frazzled and upset. It's why he and Stiles work so well together, because Stiles excelled at the spur-of-the-moment stuff. Their plan to capture Jackson (to save his life) and discover who his master was wasnt going according to plan. As a matter of fact, it went completely belly up, and a lot of people were in danger. Forgive me if I give a scared sixteen-year-old some leeway in that situation.

6: this is another instance where you just know that they either haven't watched the show, or they've seen the episode once (probably when it aired) and have never gone back to watch it again, relying solely on their Tumblr community to reaffirm their stance on the situation. What this person failed to include, was that the hunters were already hunting Isaac and Erica and Boyd. They were after Derek's pack since the moment Gerard came to town and declared war on all werewolves, whether they were involved in Kate's death or not (Omega). No thought as t all is given to why Isaac, Erica and Boyd were even in that situation to begin with. Why did Derek involve children in his issues?

What this person is also leaving out is that Scott and Allison didn't get to talk about what happened to her mother at the rave until season three. After she killed herself, she was manipulated by Gerard into actively hunting Derek's pack, and basically told Scott to leave her alone while she contemplated murder.

But once again, we have that double standard rearing its ugly head. Why is Scott supposed to tell everyone everything, but the same doesn't apply to characters like Derek or Stiles? Why didn't Derek tell Scott about his history with the Argents and why he hated them so much? Why didn't Stiles tell Scott about Donovan's or Josh's deaths or Theo's involvement? Why is that the fandom allows themselves to empathize with how these characters are feeling, with allowing them to be emotional in their decisions, but not the lead?

This is where context becomes incredibly important, because without context, we get people making blanket statements about a character in order to paint them in a bad light. Without context, I could make statements like "Stiles is a murderer for killing Donovan" or "Stiles nearly killed a police station full of people" or "Lydia was in league with Peter to bring him back from the dead". Those statements by themselves don't put those characters in a good light, do they? But once you add the context to those situations, it changes the entire perspective of things.

With context, I know that Stiles didn't murder Donovan, but that it was an accident that happened in a life-or-death situation. With context, I know that it wasnt Stiles that planted those explosives, but the Nogitsune possessing him. With context, I know that it was Peter's hijacking of Lydia's mind and untapped power that allowed him to rise from the dead. We're allowed to remember the context of these situations, but why not ever when it concerns Scott and his hardships? Another good example is painting Scott as an idiot because he had bad grades, while completely ignoring the circumstances around his life that led to his grades slipping, namely the werewolf shenanigans he was getting dragged into. The double-standard comes in when a legion of fans come to Stiles' defense for writing an essay on the history of circumcision for an Economics class, because "he has ADD/ADHD" all over one throwaway line about him taking Adderall.

Context is everything, and it's amazing how often it's completely ignored when it comes to Scott.

Two more points.

Sadly, this isn't just something specific to the Teen Wolf fandom. Fandom in general seem to think that romance is the final evolution of any kind of relationship. It says something about them that that's where they're putting the emphasis on Scott's and Allison's relationship, and not the fact that they found their way back to being friends after everything that happened between them in season two.

And then there's this gem.

Wait... what?

I am so confused by this, because I'm not talking about a character I hate, but rather defending one I actually live against a campaign of misinformation. They use the word irony, but I don't think it means what they think it does (this isn't the Alanis Morrisette song).

Final thoughts: I often find myself wondering why I even humor these people anymore because it doesn't matter what I say, or what evidence I produce, they're just going to go out of their way to twist everything into making it sound like I think Coolsville sucks. But I'm like a cockroach, I persist. It's going to take more than they can throw at me to make me stop calling out the racism and double-standards that permeate this fandom.

#scott mccall defense squad #teen wolf fandom problems #teen wolf meta #fandom racism #context is everything

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thesickpanda · 5 years

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Where is My Mind?

Stress can make you feel like you're going crazy.

I cannot emphasize this enough. Long-term, persistent and intense stress well above your baseline levels can make you feel like you're losing your mind.

Life is stressful and when I think back to when the intense periods of stress started in mine it gets a bit ridiculous because I grew up in a domestically violent household with severely mentally ill parents in a country on the brink of civil war with one of the highest crime rates in the world. So I have been kinda stressed for a very long time. However, in more recent months, the level of acute stress I've been experiencing has made me feel disconnected from reality. I've experienced derealisation a number of times due to Lyrica withdrawal and accidental cannabis highs. But this one is different. The depersonalisation I’ve been experiencing is from pure, unrelenting stress. I really did question my sanity more than once.

In July, I saw my psychologist to describe this feeling to her. She very helpfully drew a diagram which explained the neuroscience of why we feel this way when we've experienced high levels of stress for a long time. It was really helpful to see that because it reassured me that what I was feeling was, as much as this can be said, "normal", given the amount of strain I was under. But the stress hasn’t let up since then and I have been well above my baseline for much too long.

Long story short, I haven't really recovered since my family visited me last year. 2018 was a year from hell. 2019 hasn’t been much better but for different reasons. Basically, the hardships I’ve endured being the leader of a non-profit all these years reached critical mass and finally, at long last, broke me. After 8 years of pouring all my heart, soul and every last spoon I had into it, I quit last month…and to very little fanfare at that. 3 people turned up for our final meeting, and only because we needed to hand them the organization’s physical assets. We had a little unplanned dinner out and that was that.

I'm grateful to the handful of people who have reassured me they will continue its legacy beyond my departure, genuinely I am, but overall I think I stayed in that position at least a year longer than I should have. I feel incredibly jaded and cynical about the whole thing.

And I’m sorry if this offends anyone, but screw Sydney’s activists. The vast majority of them can barely call themselves that. I have never been in such an apathetic, vain, self-centered and lazy city when it comes to political activism. This migrant has had enough of trying to get Australians to care about their own issues. (And yeah, the people I handed the non-profit over to? Also migrants).

It is telling that the final meeting was also the night before we moved house (because we always had to wrap our own lives around the goings on of that organisation, not the other way around, which is another major reason we quit). So after an hour and a half’s drive into the city, we had to get home late to get up early the next day to start that fun process.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Before we ever got to moving day, we first had to find a house. If you haven’t done it before, let me tell you, the process of house hunting on a tight budget in a hostile market is disgustingly stressful.

We were looking from June. The property market in Sydney is unbelievably expensive and even though it experienced a so-called "correction" for a year, (meaning that house prices stabilized instead of continuing to rise), that ended just as we entered into the property hunt. I am extremely grateful that we got the house we did at the price we did, but my God, getting to that point nearly killed me. I keep explaining to people that it felt as if my partner and I ran full blast over broken glass to the edge of a dock, leapt several metres and grabbed onto the barnacles of a departing ship by our fingernails. I really do think we may have been among the last millennials that got on that “property” ship, and it was only because, at long last, we had help from my partner's extremely wealthy parents. After shaming us for a decade for not being able to afford impossible house prices (“ok boomer…”), he finally relented and helped us out. Again, I'm grateful, but also disgusted that this is the world we live in. Housing should be a human right and we shouldn't have this intergenerational greed and infighting over something so basic. Forgive my inner socialist.

Finding the house was only the first part of the equation; moving into it was the next step.

The moving process was incredibly arduous. At the time we should have been packing up the house, my partner's work decided to send him interstate for business on multiple occasions. By the time moving day came round, we were not ready and we couldn't afford to pay removalists. We enlisted the help of two amazing friends and Joe's brother-in-law. Again, super grateful that I had their help, but my God, was it intense. It took the better part of four days to move everything. We had to pay off the mortgage and the rent for the previous place for a two-week period, putting considerable strain on our savings. At the same time, we needed to get some work done in the new house so that was being done while we were trying to sort out the old house. The rental laws in this country are a joke and are widely considered to be abusive to renters, including by many of my American friends who now live here. I doubt we will ever see our bond returned, even though we were treated like crap living there for three years in a house that was not sealed, had no insulation or air conditioning, leaked and was draughty, didn't have proper doors et cetera et cetera. I mean, we had maggots falling from the ceiling… twice. The place was rotting and rotten but because my partner couldn't completely colour match the paint when he tried to cover up what was absolutely reasonable wear and tear on one of the walls, I'm sure we will lose all that. As usual, the landlord will claim it costs our entire $1800 bond to get a $50 an hour painter in to patch up one wall. They always do this. In your contract it says reasonable wear and tear are a few knocks and dings on the wall and that the tenant is not expected to pay for that. In reality, in every rental we have ever lived in, the landlord has refused to refund the bond when there’s been even the slightest bit of damage, even if we had a record of being model tenants. It was almost comical how hard my partner was trying in the middle of the move to cover up a few scrapes on the walls from moving furniture in and out. It all came to nothing because for love nor money he couldn't find the correct match of paint. And then of course he had to mow the entire grounds of the last rental when he really wanted to be using his weekends to sort out and unpack the new house. Good God, it was awful.

My partner and I barely spent any quality time together during this period and he was extremely stressed out and distant from me. I totally understand why but the whole thing flared every single one of my conditions and I needed him as my carer. But he couldn’t really do that, as he was trying to do literally everything else. Moving house is hard on a healthy body, never mind one with two chronic pain disorders, irritable bowel and generalised anxiety disorder. And then (because of course), a family member of mine (one of the abusers) picked that moment in time to start harassing me, thereby triggering my PTSD which led to a nervous breakdown which led to intense depersonalisation, insomnia and nausea. Everyone and everything seemed unfamiliar to me, even my partner. I started to doubt whether or not I loved myself or anyone else anymore. I just felt so completely and utterly disconnected from the world. I began to lie awake at night terrified that I was fading away, that I could no longer feel anything other than fear. All the time, people kept saying, “congratulations on the new house! You must be so excited!” But all I could feel was sickness and dread.

Two weeks after moving in, I had to drop my Lyrica one more time. This drop has been very difficult. All of the stress has led to some dark thoughts in the back of my mind which of course Lyrica then co-opts and exaggerates. I have had a more than a few moments of suicidal ideation. Everything in my life on paper has improved. We are now homeowners, we live in a beautiful part of the world, we've made some new friends lately, things are settling down et cetera et cetera. But I feel like I'm in shell shock after this year and last year. I haven't even had time to process that I am no longer the president of the not-for-profit I founded and formulated an identity around. I just haven't had the time to process literally anything. I've been more exhausted that I have ever felt. Oh, I'm sure everyone will say, “this too shall pass”. But I do not believe that bullshit. Yes, this individual stressor will pass but more horror will come and I know that makes me sound super negative but I just cannot remember a period of time when things were calm for… I can't remember. I just feel like I've been in a hurricane forever.

So yeah, I'm writing this post while experiencing Lyrica withdrawal which makes me depressed and anxious. It's probably colouring my vision on everything. Fine. But I have been going through Lyrica withdrawal for two years, so it’s kinda become my normal. My final drop is on 26 December after which I will experience two more months of withdrawal and hopefully, after that, some semblance of sanity again. In the midst of all this I have to study for my citizenship test which is at the end of this month. I don't get any government support for my disability until I have been a citizen of this country for eight years, and as I’d like to survive my 40s, I need to get citizenship now. But yeah… studying an eighty-page textbook with an addled brain is just so much fun.

Of course, during this time we haven’t have Internet because we had to disconnect the old place and it takes an age for it to get reconnected at the new place. We only recently acquired it at the new house. So there are piles of emails waiting for me. Many of them are from friends and I'm glad for that. But there is also a lot of life admin I now need to do. I have to change my address on every account I hold, which is really tedious. We have also had to organise time with family. Because my partner's family helped us get this house, we feel especially obliged to go to every single one of the family events, of which there are many. He comes from a big Catholic family so every relative who comes to visit, every party that's being held, every birthday, wedding, funeral and religious holiday, we’re now expect to attend. We have several in the next few weekends, taking up most of the time we *needed* to be unpacking the house. We’re obligated now.

In all this negativity, though, I want to say that I am genuinely grateful to be one of the lucky ones to have a house. I know it sounds like I am whining about a good thing. It's not that I'm not glad for this (I know how ridiculously privileged we are). I just haven't been able to really feel it yet. I think that regardless of what happened this year, I’d be feeling this way. Something broke in me last year and just hasn't really come back. I feel shattered.

And all my chronic pain conditions have been wearing me down too. I found out this year that the operation that cost me and my friends so much money (to remove that nerve in my foot) had failed. Or rather, the surgeon had completely botched it up. I have PTSD from that surgery. Just the thought of going back to have it done again fills me with heart racing terror and cold sweats. I’ve had numerous surgeries before that one and been fine, but the reaction I had from the anesthetic last time was so severe, and the recovery so long, that I genuinely fear it more than almost anything else. And yet I need to go in for that nightmare all over again in 2020. I'm going to be asked to trust a different surgeon to do the same so-called “simple operation” to restore some functionality to my left foot. My right knee is probably also going to need surgery since it has been resistant to any physiotherapy rehabilitation. And on top of all this, my poor partner's health has also taken a hit this year from the stress which is worrying me. Because I can always do with some more worry…

But hey! This too shall pass! You should be happy! Life is great now! Yay yay yay!

Fuck, sometimes it just want to be allowed to feel shit and to have other people say “okay you can feel shit now. Yes, some good things have happened but right now you need to process the bad and that's okay too”. My lord, if people could just do that for me. If they could just let me feel what the fuck I need to feel.

What I feel is exhausted, scared, freaked out, traumatized, weird, sick, angry, overwhelmed and fed up. And I need to feel those things before I can feel anything else.

#rant #Fibromylagia #chronic illness #chronic pain #chronic stress #stress #overwhelmed #personal catharsis

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livingagainsttheodds · 5 years

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Cake for Breakfast

Every morning I'm woken up by my enthusiastic three year old. He's ready to start the day and is eagerly waiting for me to roll out of bed and make him breakfast. All this excitement and the sun hasn't even made it into view yet. I don't know about anyone else but I don't think we're meant to wake up before the sun does. I think it's our cue from God to saying "alrighty, let's begin the day, I've turned the light on!". But teaching that to a three year old isn't exactly easy. So I grumble to myself (sometimes not to myself) and I slowly rise out of my bed like a character from an old zombie movie. Now here's the part where I'm sure you're saying "just go make some coffee and get on with it, like a normal person." The problem with that is I can't. I have never been able to drink coffee without severe repercussions. Sure, I had some as a teen and a young adult but I would regret it right away and pay for it for a few days after. I won't give you too many details because hey, we just met. But I'll at least say since giving birth to my son, the time I could use a jolt of caffeine on a daily basis the most, caffeine affects me even more now. Not only is it a stomach thing but very shortly after consumption it feels like I'm having a full on panic attack. My heart races and my skin crawls and I feel like I can't breath. Like I just ran a very long race and but can't calm down. I picture Bruce Banner when he's transforming into the Hulk. That doesn't look like a pleasant feeling for him, and that's how it feels for me. Crazy, I know. But like I said in my first post I'm not like everyone else. And sure, I've tried teas and caffeine free coffee and sodas. None of it likes me. So I've given up on it all. It makes me so much more tired and so much more drained then before drinking it! It's funny to think, I've actually been chronically fatigued most of my life. I've always needed 10 hours of sleep to function (now I get about 8 and that suffices as I don't have a choice). But even then I'm still pretty tired most of the time. The brain fog is no joke. Now there are lots of reasons for these issues, which maybe I'll tell you about another time. But imagine going through high school like that. I only made it through school by consuming large amounts of sugar, sleeping during the lunch period, and doodling my way through my classes to stay awake. It wasn't easy and I know sugar is so so bad for you, but I still can't give it up. Knowing this about me, can you imagine that I was a cheerleader too? Yep, that's right. I did cheerleading all through junior high and high school. Which is funny because I don't really have an outgoing bone in my body. My whole life I was told I was shy or introverted. Which yes, I was. But in the last year or so I've finally realized what I really am. I am a highly sensitive person. There is so much more to this then "being sensitive". I will leave it to you to check out this website which explains it way better then I could. But part of why I need so much sleep and am constantly drained (especially since I'm with my three-nager all day every day). It also explains my use of sugar to keep going my whole life too. Since I'm constantly drained by other people and their emotions and I can't just hide in a hole by myself whenever I need to recharge, I have to have something to pick me back up. Weirdly enough sugar has the same effect as cocaine in your brain. Luckily sugar is the hardest drug I've ever let myself try. Seeing as how I can't even give that up, I know anything else would have gone down hill fast. Or I'd be the 0.0001% with some kind of crazy life altering side effect. 

So honestly, as a stay at home mom I do struggle. As I know most do. But I struggle because I don't have the tools most others have to help them along. I cannot down an energy drink and keep on trucking. I can't relax with a glass of wine (or any other alcohol) at night to ease my tensions from the day (more on alcohol in future posts). So I wake up, zombie walk to my kitchen, eat 3 cookies to wake my brain, and fry some darn eggs. A And after breakfast I get to snuggle my kiddo tight and get a big hug from him telling me "thank you for the delicious breakfast mommy!!", because he's about the sweetest kid ever. And that little bit of extra love gives me just enough energy to continue activities for the day until lunch time. When I'll have a handful of mini M&M's to keep me trucking again.

#stayathomemom #sweets #sleep #health #home & lifestyle

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