#ive been given permission to do this and it makes me happi <:3

[mabsolgirl]

Blood warning

The first meeting.

She was looting a recently crashed ship for parts when she found something else...

Don't worry they're doing better

This is an AU of @linxprime's space AU. Please go check out their original AU! It's a lot of fun and this branches off of that

#lore time #I figured out names! FP is “Alexa” with the fake name “PIXELATE”. GM is Stella. #Pixel as mentioned before is albino. Because of it she has an increased chance of getting burned. #Stella has bones and can breathe. They dont need oxygen to survive though. #Puff and Purr can think for themselves for the most part. They behave like tamed animals are jaguars instead of lions here #fnaf #fnaf oc #fnaf au #art #au of an au babeeee #ive been given permission to do this and it makes me happi <:3 #supernova au au

[bebebelll]

does anyone know her dad? daniel ricciardo smau (part 1)

pairing: daniel ricciardo x toto's secret child!reader / daniel ricciardo x schumacher and wolff!reader warnings: cursing and some general fandom hate wags get note: first time doing this i dont know if this right but lets go! part 2, part 3 and part 4

mickschumacher happy birthday to @ynquads !! sorry for crashing into the cake! mama said she'll make you another

liked by maxverstappen1, landonorris and 122 498 others

gina_schumacher thanks for almost cropping me out of the picture

mickschumacher it's about yn!! ynquads i though i was you favourite cousin gigi :( why u being so mean to me :( i'll go tell my parents micschumacher ill tell mama you're being mean to yn username123 always love seeing mick and yn be annoying little siblings

maxverstappen1 congrats! is it enough to say it here or do i have to make my own post? ive given you a present

ynquads bring me cowboy boots from austin and you dont have to

username cute cute cute cute cute cute

username honestly schumacher genes dont even feel real anymore

username right!?!?! i want yn to win the figure skating grand prix but then i remember that video where she went karting with max username like a billion drivers and a skater and the good looks in ONE family? god really does have favourites

lewishamilton happy birthday! it's been great seeing you grow up

username excuse me sir? what do you mean grow up?

ynquads visited japan for a wedding and now i'm all ready for skate america!! let's gooo cricket club!!

liked by maxverstappen1, landonorris, susie_wolff and 112 666 others

username YOU GOT INVITED TO YUZURU'S WEDDING

ynquads i even got to bring daniel🤭

danielricciardo it was a lovely wedding❤️❤️(ours is gonna be better)

username excuse what the fuck lewishamilton actually you're not allowed to marry her without our permission danielricciardo whose permission would i even ask? lewishamilton every german speaking driver and like three team bosses good luck

username ARIANA (our queen & god susie wolff) WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE

maxverstappen1 daniel's being gross make him stop

danielricciardo am not! ynquads lmao throw bread at him danielricciardo all the love ive given you and this is how you repay me? ynquads ooh i'll repay you 😏 maxverstappen1 dont be weird under my comment

username oh she has time to fly to japan but not go to a single race ever

username babes danny has not been in the since zandvoort. theres been no race to go see him username they've been together for like three years and she's only been to less than ten races username like seriously cant she ever be supportive username you people do realize she's an athlete too?

ynquads we got silver!!!💪🥈🥈🥈congrats to kaori sakamoto 🥇 and isabeau levito🥉 (also thanks uncle lewis for dinner)

tagged: lewishamilton

liked by maxverstappen1 and 237 274 others

nicorosberg he gave you alcohol?

ynquads i have never actually drank alcohol at all in my entire life (also dad was there i was not even allowed to get food that had rum in the sauce) maxverstappen1 oh yeah we did not at all just get drunk ynquads shut up before nico goes to talk to my DAD

username are we all just gonna ignore that she calls lewis "uncle" like seriously how disrespectful is that

username calm the fuck down she calls him and all the older grid (especially sebastian) uncle so it is not new

danielricciardo why you holding your head like that? is it heavy from all the pretty? i can hold it for you

nicorosberg this is who you choose @ynquads danielricciardo why are you bullying me too??? ynquads hes funny onkel nico (uncle) username how is nico rosberg here dragging danny ric? you dont even follow him?

username EVERYBODY CALM DOWN THIS IS NOT A DRILL WE HAVE A CHANCE TO HAVE YN WIN THIS YEAR'S GRAND PRIX PLEASE BE ON EVERY PODIUM

susie_wolff congrats honey! we're really proud!

username i still think it's so damn weird she just hangs out with the older grid. how does she even know then to go on dinners

username okay but when the hell did this even happen? i follow yn and she trains in toronto and during summer is in germany or england. she doesnt attend the races? how the fuck is she and DANIEL RICCIARDO together babes

username i bet my life that max introduced them i can feel it in my bones that he planned this username "oh sorry i won by 30 secs and you have a shitbox to drive, wanna meet my friend she's great gf material? you have no chance without help" ynquads i mean.... username OH MY GOD

username she's such a shit girlfriend honestly. she dates daniel for publicity and then drags lewis down too

username what the fuck are you smoking??

username how the FUCK did daniel ricciardo bag the talented pretty QUAD QUEEN MISS YN SCHUMACHER!!! thats my wife actually! what about our kids and three lambs??

f1wagsupdates paparazzi has released a video of mercedes team boss toto wolff exiting a restaurant and driving off with a young woman. even though she tried to cover herself, the woman was quicky identified as yn schumacher. she is a figure skater and 20+ years younger. in an interview from home yn can be seen walking around the wolff kitchen in little clothing. is this the ending to toto's perfect looking marriage with fellow motorsport boss susie wolff?

liked by 10 385

username if i dont read it, it doesnt exist. no one's cheating ever

username toto and susie's kid is like 5 how could he throw that away??

username its always the goddamn family men fucking over their wives and kids

username this is such bullshit. toto and susie have been together since like 2011 this is so horrible

username little clothing? she's wearing like pajamas

#formula 1 #formula 1 x reader #daniel ricciardo x reader #daniel ricciardo insta au #formula 1 social media au #daniel ricciardo #toto wolff

[moonlightchild-otome]

Ikemen Vampire - Jean d’Arc Route Summary Chapter 10

here is the tenth chapter!

to clarify again, I’m not very good at japanese so if anything is wrong or weirdly translated everything is on me.

of course there is going to be some spoilers so do not read if you don’t wish to know jean’s story yet.

*also little bonus at the end about Jeanne d’Arc real story! of course you don’t have to read it to understand his route in the game but it’s very interesting :)*

The Count tells MC the history of the war between France and England, also known as the Hundred Years’ War...

【 Comte 】  Jean was a soldier who led the French army during the Hundred Years War.

Jean fights for his country, France and defeats the English army. Jean d’Arc, soon after the defeat of the enemy, becomes a true hero for his people.

However, such glory won’t last for Jean :( 'The most tragic end of the world's heroes', as they say.

In the course of the battle, Jean was captured as a prisoner of war by the enemy. The King didn’t want to help him for some reason. 😡

And of course... 🙄

【 Comte 】  Jean was convicted of heresy and it has been decided that he would be sentenced to fire.

After Jean's death, the king ordered a re-examination of his treason and found him to be innocent, and he went down as a hero of France.

The fact that Jean never knew went down as a hero after his death and this won’t change the fact that he died as an innocent. The protagonist is angry because it doesn't make any sense.

From the bottom of my stomach, I feel a mixture of anger and frustration.

Here, the MC asks the Count a question. “Why did he bring him back to life after such a death?”

There's something different about the Count returning the great men of the mansion and Jean.

The MC wonders if Jean really wanted the Count to bring him back to life. Before the Count can answer, Jean appears, interrupts him, takes the MC by the arm and leads her away.

【 Jean 】  One look at this man's face is enough. I don't like it. Let's go, woman. 

As soon as they arrived in the library, Jean seems to have calmed down a little lets go of the MC's arm.

The protagonist apologises for trying to find out about his past without his permission, but Jean says that's okay. Jean says it's okay, because his life has been written about in books anyway. However, he says that he doesn't want the Count to tell her about it.

【 Jean 】  ...It's not enough to say I hate it, it's too much.

Jean says that he is not a hero and that he is no different from the children's book he used to read, The Ugly Duckling.

it hurts me so much that this is the way he perceives himself when he deserves all the love in the world </3

Jean's gaze fell on the book 'The Ugly Duckling', which was still on the table.

That’s it for chapter 10!

here is some real background info about the real Jeanne d’Arc! She is such a brave and interesting historical figure. The epitome of a real badass, fearless and powerful woman.

so, the hundred years' war, if we summarize as much as possible is a series of armed conflicts that began in 1337. which opposes the kingdom of france and the kingdom of england.

in 1328 at the death of king charles iv, the question arises as to who will inherit the french crown.

one then has the choice between the cousin of the preceding king philippe de valois and edward iii the king of england who by his mother isabelle is also a descendant of the french throne.

you can imagine putting an english king on the french throne, wasn’t seen very well. 

edward not happy, which led to a succession crisis, which lead to the hundred years' war.

obviously this conflict, quickly overcomes a simple succession crisis.

it's a mess.

what you have to remember, is that the english are gradually invading part of the kingdom of france.

in 1415, after the battle of azincourt and the english victory, the english king henry v controls much of the north of the kingdom of france, including paris for that matter.

but it is far from being the only concern.

what you have to keep in mind is that the king of france at the time, charles vi, is reached at rather regular intervals of madness.

this obviously prevents him from administering the kingdom properly.

as a result, in parallel with the conflict with the english, a real civil war breaks out.

to find out who between his son the heir charles and his cousin the duke of burgundy will be able to take back the reins of the kingdom; the duke of burgundy is supported by the burgundians who will end up allying themselves with the english and the son of the king the heir charles is supported by the armagnacs.

but during this time, charles is betrayed by his own father who disinherits his son and after his death, gives the crown to the english.

i warned you that it was really messy.

and it is in this incredible mess that our jeanne arrives.

and where exactly does jeanne come from? from domremy.

she is also often called the virgin of orleans.

she is associated with the city of reims, but jeanne was originally born in domremy.

and where exactly is this place? domremy is this little town to the west of the city of the vosges department, on the banks of the meuse river.

isn't it pretty?

this is jeanne's birth house,

she would have been born around 1412. the building classified as a historical monument since 1840 includes in addition to a cellar, three large rooms originally used to house the whole family, her parents and four siblings.

according to jeanne's trial, it is here that she would have learned to sew or weave which were two occupations of the young girls of the time.

her father was a ploughman, so she often had to look after the animals.

and since she is very pious she spent a lot of time praying.

she went on pilgrimage at least once a week, for example in the notre dame de bermont chapel, about three kilometres (as the crow flies) from her birth house.

and jeanne d’arc, as you may have guessed, wasn't always called jeanne d’arc.

no, in history she has had different names and official nicknames.

there are of course the best known ones: the virgin of orleans, jeanne the virgin or even just the virgin and in the vicinity of domremy she was also called the jeannette de rommée, in connection with her mother's name. she has even signed several letters with the name jehanne.

and it's even more complicated if you're interested in her surname “d'arc”.

which was originally written darc, without the apostrophe. here again there have been many variations, and i'll mention a few of them: tarc, dars, darx and even d'ailly or daly according to the phonetic transcription of her name, with a lorraine accent. from there we move on to duly, then du lys.

when the king ennobled jeanne and her family, it is written on the deed, la dame du lys in reference to the royal coat of arms.

this is the magnificent bois-chenu basilica, which was built between 1880 and 1940 in honour of jeanne.

and for the record, this incredible basilica was sometimes considered to be the place where jeanne would have heard voices.

however if we refer to the trial, it is in her father's garden, near the house, that jeanne would have started hearing voices, celestial calls, coming from saint catherine of st. margaret's and the archangel saint michael.

the divine mission entrusted to her was very “simple”.

she was only commanded to be a cavalier, to cross a kingdom occupied by the english to go and find the future charles vii and convince him that she is the one sent from heaven.

to help him to take his place on the throne by her coronation in reims.

to show him how to liberate the kingdom of france, of the english presence.

it seems to be an easy enough mission for me. 😅 (nope)

so obviously you can imagine that the people didn't take her seriously right away. it took a few years before she managed to convince the world that she wasn't completely crazy.

- jeanne?

- yes?

- this is the voice.

- is someone talking to me?

- you are the chosen one, jeanne, join me.

- yes, i'm coming.

- i hope you like human barbecue. (ok i'll stop :/)

how is the legend of jeanne forged? how does one go from being a peasant girl eager to help, to jeanne of arc, heroine of the kingdom of france?

this is le centre d’interprétation (the interpretation centre), which is just behind jeanne of arc's birth house and retraces her youth and adventures.

her journey is incredible, at 17 years old, jeanne can't stand not doing anything anymore, she has been hearing voices urging her to act for four years now.

so she decides to return to the châtellenie de vaucouleurs, to meet captain robert de baudricourt, one of the king's faithful followers and after several vicissitudes, she manages to convince him. it wasn't easy, i remind you that her main point was that she hears voices. but yeah, he finally agrees to send her with an escort, join the heirn in chinon.

the journey is quite long and above all risky, we are talking about more than 500 kilometres and in this period of turmoil, the dangers were quite present especially if you look at the map, one realizes that the small expedition crosses areas not controlled by the enemy coalition.

fortunately, everything went well for jeanne, who arrives at her destination on march 1429 and gets an audience with the heir two days later. he was quite suspicious of this young woman at first, who claims to hear divine voices but according to the story she made a revelation to him that we don't know which eventually convinced him.

for the entourage of the suitor of the throne, it's not that simple and you can understand them, betting on jeanne is a little bit like a poker game. so they insist that she will be given a few interrogations, she is questioned about her life, about her morals and finally confidence is established, she is equipped with military equipment. she then undergoes mini combat trainings and here we go, her dream is about to come true, she joins a supply convoy in blois and on april 22nd, with more than 4000 men, she is headed for orléans.

the arrival of jeanne of arc changes many things.

her faith, her confidence in victory gives hope to the soldiers and to the inhabitants, who are filled with new energy. they manage to win in less than 10 days, 10 days and the english are obliged to give up their plan, which consisted of taking the city and then attacking the south of the loire.

jeanne who comes out of this battle with this image as a victorious, ultra badass woman and just earned her nickname... la pucelle d'orléans (the virgin of orleans).

thanks to her victory in orleans, jeanne thus becomes a kind of national heroine. she represents by her fame and her qualities, a not insignificant asset for the heir in his fight against the english and the burgundians.

but what makes a real difference is less her qualities as a war strategist and more her ability to charm and to galvanise the troops and the inhabitants along the way.

it's quite simple, before jeanne's arrival, the english had a reputation for never losing their invincibility.

and jeanne achieves the feat of restoring confidence in a possible victory.

it gives the impression to the troops that they are going to receive a kind of divine help and it changes everything in the soldiers' minds, all the more so because before her arrival there was a prophecy, who said that a virgin would help defeat the english so when jeanne arrives, everyone thought "it's ok, we're saved"!

jeanne persuades the future king to start a ride to reims who is in the middle of enemy territory, to be crowned.

jeanne thus succeeded in carrying out one of the following missions which were supposedly entrusted to her by the voices she hears; in other words, since she has succeeded, she is necessarily an envoy of god, and that for the mood of the troops, it makes a huge difference.

unfortunately after the time of victories comes the time of defeats.

after the coronation, the king and jeanne no longer really agree. she is convinced that her mission is to keep the english out of france.

the king, for his part, is longing for a little rest.

for example, he does not feel at all capable of taking back paris, while jeanne, a little bit stubborn, goes there anyway and suffers a failure.

on top of that she is wounded, she gets a crossbow arrow in her thigh, moreover, she breaks her sword which had for all victories...

it's a bad sign.

some people think that the virgin is abandoned by god. some time later jeanne went to compiègne, a city besieged by the burgundians and by some english contingents and once again it goes wrong, she is taken prisoner in may 1430, by the burgundians.

she tried to escape, but all her attempts failed and in november of the same year, she was sold to the english. jeanne is then taken to the castle of rouen, where members of the church judge her for heresy.

the trial was to say that charles vii was crowned thanks to a witch, she is also blamed for everything and anything, for dressing in men's clothing,

for deferring directly to god's judgement without going through the church, for hearing the voices of demons and not of saints.

jeanne really plays her life on each of her answers, in addition, she faces accusers totally committed to the english cause on her own when she was only 19 years old.

moreover, the witnesses are obviously not chosen at random, everyone who could speak up for jeanne is under pressure. everything is being done to ensure that she is condemned. finally, she ends up at the stake, on the market square, and we make sure there's nothing left of her body, to prevent it from being turned into holy relics.

and then after the end of the hundred years' war, i.e. almost 25 years later, the church reverses this first court decision. king charles vii wants to wash away the insult that was done to him through this trial and he pushes jeanne's family to ask for a review. pope calixtus iii agreed and jeanne was rehabilitated in 1456. the investigations carried out are more serious, many of jeanne's contemporaries jostle to plead in her favour and even people who had once spoken badly of her finally return to saying good things about her.

the first judgement is broken and the young woman's memory is rehabilitated.

an unusual little fact in the end - many people have not been able to admit that the story of the virgin ends up on a pyre. for them it was impossible, this story was too beautiful, this too extraordinary woman.

and it went far enough that people found stories of women, who a few years later claimed to be the real jeanne.

just imagine them saying stuff like "oh yeah, yeah it's me i didn't burn at all, my face has changed a little bit but it's me, i assure you, believe me, really".

a certain claude des armoises is said to have pretended to be her, in the metz region. after having acquired a certain renown, having been given gifts by former relatives of jeanne; she even went so far as to meet two of the virgin's brothers, who (hold on because it's completely insane) believed her.

they really believed it was their own sister who had died at the stake.

it's a crazy story!

well, we don't really know if they really believed it, or if one pretends to believe it for financial reasons for example.

in any case, this woman, who was talked about everywhere, is unmasked by the king himself, so that this fraud can be stopped.

in the end, i find this story quite unusual.

here are the friends!

i hope it wasn’t too long to read (it probably was) and that you have learned two, three little things on our dear jeanne d’arc. after all, she is one of the most famous women in history!

#ikemen #ikemen games #ikemen series #ikemen spoilers #Ikemen Vampire #ikemen jean #IkeVamp #ikevamp jean #Jean #Jean D'arc #jean route #ikemen vampire jean #jeanne d'arc #history #france #my translation #jean all chapters

[noctomania]

Just having a moment

Dad already had been fighting a lung infection for a while when the pandemic hit. After about the first year, I think, of the pandemic his health has steadily gotten worse. It's been one thing after another and now we're looking at a situation where he may be facing the end of his life. He can't breathe well on his own and he has an extreme phobia of wearing a mask so he's been apparently a bit difficult during the pandemic in terms of wearing a mask, but also now that he needs a mask to help him breathe. The only way they could get it to work was sedating him (with his permission) so he can wear it.

I'm at work rn but I'm not *here* really. I couldn't tell you anything about the last hour. Ive not cried, the only time i really felt close to crying was bc I was hearing my sister cry on the phone. I'd known this was coming and I guess either I'm prepared? Or just hasn't really hit yet? Idk. It's complicated bc my relationship with my parents lately has not been great, we don't really talk. I still haven't talked to my stepmom. I don't know how to explain why I feel a way towards them. Bc it's not like a blunt obvious issue yanno? It's just they have a culture about them that I don't deal well with i guess.

I don't know that I'll be able to speak to him before he passes, idk what the next steps are, and I can't be there so I'm just stuck knowing that things are going south and that I have nothing to do but sit and wait for the inevitable. It's not that I don't feel anything, I feel sick and tired and frustrated. But also plain overwhelmed so I can't even get the energy to deal with any of that feeling. I do care, I just deal with things differently bc I have to.

Anything to do with family immediately triggers a ton of shit I don't want to think about yet think about all too often. I can't shut shit off. And what's worse is there is also a part of my brain saying I'm selfish and petty and that nothing but other people's issues matter and all that shit. That if i had real problems I wouldn't be where i am. But then i remember I'm only where i am bc I have fought so hard to keep from giving up even though I have wanted, dreamed, fantasized about not having to fight anymore and just giving up.

Do you know how infuriated i get with myself when I am triggered by a fuckin pill bottle bc I feel like I'm the one who made myself mentally ill? But i have to give myself grace and remind myself that I'm not in a tunnel and that isn't Destiny - i just need to let the moment pass and the moment pass and the moment pass. That nobody makes themselves miserable on purpose. That not all issues have a place to lay blame. That the important thing is to try to take care of myself. Which is hard when I'm not getting the prompts I should or don't understand them or whatever.

When i last talked to dad he said he'd always been proud of me. Idk why or how. I'd never really thought about whether or not I make them proud. Idk why. I've felt just difficult, inconvenient, a financial drain. When i moved into their house they put me to work as soon as it was legal, when it was exhausting me bc I was in school and literally hurting bc my feet are shit, I was shamed for quitting. When I was turning 18 i was given an ultimatum to either go to college - which I did not want to do bc I had no idea what I wanted to do & it was a lot of money - or move out and find a way to live off of what a queer 18yo in texas fresh out of high school could find to sustain them. Somewhat homeless during college, as every holiday and summer break it was like ok who is going to let me sleep on their couch while the dorms are closed? Eternally grateful to those who put me up here. Can think of at least 3 households who did. I hate accepting help. It was humbling and I always tried to be a good guest. I never felt like I was good enough and always felt like a burden despite never being treated as such by these households. They treated me as family.

That continued as college ended going from couch to a full time live-in temp job to scrambling to find an apartment that I couldn't really afford when ppl couldn't put me up anymore. Applying to over a hundred jobs. Then landing an overpriced room in a precarious situation I was too naive at the time to navigate that also almost landed me on the street. When I reached out to my parents just for guidance on what I could do, they took it as me asking to move in with them (which i never asked for that i recall), said they couldn't help me, and that I'd have to sign up for the military if I was struggling (which was illegal at the time bc of the trans ban they clearly didn't care to know about despite knowing their son is trans) Anyway...

Idk what there was of me to be proud of. What did I do? What you told me to do? Is that what you're proud of? My submissiveness? Ruining my life for your opinion?

He also asked if I was happy. Happy? In this world? In this pandemic? I said I'm content bc at this point I didn't feel allowed to complain about anything but certainly couldn't lie. I wasn't allowed to feel vulnerable about what I'm facing every day. Someone always has it worse.

Well no shit someone always "has it worse", bc that's not a real standard. Am I not allowed to say it's hot out bc people in hell don't get snow cones?

Part of self care I've had to learn is that grace with yourself and taking yourself seriously. This is a very hard thing to do for some of us. Some of us will let ourselves get to a point where it's worse than had we dealt with it earlier on. Some of us struggle with knowing what it looks like to ask for help or where or how or even allowed to. Or even necessarily to know when we should.

I'm trying to balance the self care with trying not to be self-absorbed. I'm trying to still differentiate between the two as somewhere along the way I'd been taught they are the same when it comes to me but nobody else. I'm trying not to believe this whole post is self pity bc it's really just relaying the facts. I just can't help but imagine the shit being talked about me behind my back bc I know it happens.

Idk there's no real end to this and i should be more focused at work. I just needed to dump this off.

#dear god im an emotionally complex person but i dont feel like i have permission to be

[ask-the-clergy-bc]

I couldnt find it when I checked so I don't know if it's been done before, but the papas/cardinal with an s/o with ADHD?

Wrote this in the direction of the reader is showing different symptoms or behaviors typical of an adult with ADHD- so I hope this is what you were looking for! Also, since no two people experience ADHD exactly the same I wrote for a mix of all types and different symptom focuses. Please enjoy! 

Aaaaaand HUGE shout out to @atricksterproblem, who inspired me a long time ago with her wonderful head canons of Papa III having ADHD himself! I’ve been incorporating that into my works and she was kind enough to give me permission to expand in my own writing! Thanks Trickster! <3 

And here is also a mild trigger warning, since I’m going to be talking about some distressing symptoms! 

Papa Nihil: Admittedly, doesn’t really know a lot about ADHD simply because he grew up in a time where there wasn’t a whole lot of knowledge about the subject. Back in his day, there weren’t a whole lot of labels or even help for people. Far different from the wonders of today’s psychological understanding!  All he knows is sometimes you show VERY similar behaviors and habits to his youngest son. Except, unlike with his son, the Grand Papa has been far more supportive and helpful with you. Nihil took a lot of notice during days you seemed far more restless and easily frustrated with tasks you tried to accomplished. He kept finding unfinished projects littered over your work area and you nearly in tears as you could just not will yourself to sit and focus, even though you desperately wanted to. 

Nihil sat with you and tried to help you work through it little by little until you broke down and admitted that your ADHD was acting up worse than normal. When he gave you a blank look, you almost thought he was judging you.... until he dead panned asked what that meant. It took a little time for him to fully understand what the disorder was as you felt more comfortable to explain. Nihil is honestly a bit ashamed he didn’t know sooner or offer you better support- he tends to be blind to other’s distress or needs. Nihil knows he wasn’t the most patient with his children in the past and now tries to do better by you. He takes the time to do more reading and ask what he can do to help keep you more on focus or even motivated. He’s no doctor but he’s not heartless and loves you. If offering help and support is what you need, he will give it to you!  

Papa I: Knew from the get go you probably had some form of ADHD or were nuerodivergent- which is not at all a bad thing. He, being nuerodivergent himself, knows that there is nothing shameful or ‘broken’ about you (an unfortunate feeling many siblings have felt about themselves and confided to him about.) So it doesn’t even occur to him to give your ADHD any mind unless your symptoms were bothering you. It wasn’t as often, but he always sat with you during small anxiety attacks or days you were feeling down. But the worse was the time where you were feeling extremely upset and couldn’t calm yourself down. When Papa sat with you asked what was wrong you nearly cried when you explained the situation.

 That someone said something hurtful the other day, that it REALLY hurt your feelings to the point where you couldn’t get it out of your head, and how you nearly had a panic attack over how you thought people were thinking poorly of you and judging you for being stuck on something for DAYS that wasn’t EVEN that important! That now you felt like you were a giant baby and no one was going to want to talk to you cause you cried about everything! Papa only tutted and put a reassuring hand on your shoulder. There’s nothing wrong with being upset and you aren’t foolish for feeling so strongly about it. Your reaction doesn’t make you ‘overly sensitive’ and it’s ok to slowly get it out of your system. Papa knows that you emotions tend to be way stronger than his are, but he’s always there through the good and bad days! All he wants you to know is that he will never invalidate how you feel and he’d rather you feel strongly than try to bottle everything. 

 Papa II: Despite being a quiet and seemingly emotionless, Papa does pay attention to those around him. Especially you, his significant other. He was very keen and picked up almost immediately when he could tell you seemed to struggle to understand what he was saying. Normally, incompetence bothers him- he’s met many stupid people who couldn’t tell their ass from a hole in the ground. But he was also quick to know that you absolutely were not stupid- not in the slightest. Papa could tell the way your brows crinkled in frustration when you were trying to understand an order from your boss, only to ask them to repeat it several times. Or when you both had a conversation with someone and your eyes seemed to look far away until you were brought back to Earth. 

Papa is not heartless, and has never made an attempt to shame you or put you down for it. He’s a smart man and can tell right away the difference between simply not paying attention and struggling to keep attention. He’s Papa after all- what kind of leader would he be if he didn’t understand all the different types of people in his flock? His suspicions are only confirmed when you feel comfortable telling him that you had ADHD- when you broke down and felt self conscious. You begged him not to think you were incompetent and that you really WERE trying your best to listen. He merely put up a hand to stop you and answered with a gentle, “I know, no need to apologize.” Papa has only asked you be open on days you need support... and he’s none too happy if anyone ever gives you trouble for needing time to listen and ask questions. He never wants you to apologize. 

Papa III: Papa has always been known for many things, both good and bad. Ever since he was a child he’s been hard to make sit still for very long and always seemed to want to get his hands on any and everything. Even as a young priest his mind always seemed to be far away and never at the task at hand. To this day Papa is still the same and was very delighted to know you shared his energy! He always pegged you as someone who would rather be putting their efforts into something FUN or MEANINGFUL, and not the dull boringness of responsibility. That is, until you confided in him that you and your therapist were making plans to help with some cognitive behaviors. You were excited to tell him the ideas you both had since you recently found your lack of concentration worse than normal and were eager to set up a better routine! 

Whatever do you mean, darling? ‘Hyperactivity’? ‘Inattentive Type’? What does that even mean?? You were shocked that he didn’t know that you had ADHD. When you two sat down you were happy to just share some of your experiences with him, as he was incredibly curious. Recently, you felt that you were drifting off into space more than normal and felt like you weren’t processing what people were telling you as easily. Papa was confused and posed the question, isn’t that normal for everyone? When you explained that it wasn’t you both started to compare experiences. How you both couldn’t sit still, or focus when it wasn’t interesting... or focus too hard when you LOVED something. You didn’t think of it at the time, but your conversation is how you both realized maybe HE had the same thing! At the end of the day, it has made you both closer and given you a mutual support system.  

Cardinal Copia/Papa IV: Copia is honestly not as phased when you opened up to him about your ADHD the first time. You were used to some people not really understanding what it was like to be an adult with some of these issues, and sometimes being incredibly rude about it. But Copia acted so casually, like you only just told him your shoe size or favorite color. It takes him a minute to understand why you were so confused and he apologizes profusely. He’s quick to explain that being a Cardinal, in his experience, is very hands on with Siblings of Sin. He’s worked with so many abbeys and so many children of sin, that he’s met people from all walks of life. So he’s had a lot of Siblings he’s helped with ADHD and other similar conditions! 

Copia has never one to really see a person’s diagnosis as something to be ‘shocked’ or ‘weary’ about. That doesn’t define you as a person, nor does it make you any less to anyone deemed ‘typical’ or ‘normal.’ The only time these are a problem are when symptoms are keeping you from living your best life. Copia admits that he already knew you had ADHD long before you became a couple- simply because he’s worked with many siblings who have sought comfort and advice from him and noticed a lot of your telling habits. Copia doesn’t like asking about it or making you admit it if you aren’t ready- so he never did. Copia wanted you to be comfortable enough to talk to him about it if and when you needed to. When you feel ready he just wants to let you know he’s always there for support to help on days it feels bad. He knows how it feels to be overwhelmed easily, and wants you to always come to him if you need to! 

#the band ghost #ghost bc #Ghost headcanon #reader insert #minor trigger warning #mental disorder #anxiety #symptoms #adhd #papa nihil #papa emeritus i #Papa Emeritus II #papa emeritus iii #papa emeritus iv #cardinal copia

[let-me-love-you-loki]

Waking Up in Vegas-Ch. 41

Chapter 41: Wouldn’t Dive In

Dean, Morning, 10:43 AM

           “You’re out of the woods,” the doctor said from the end of Mera’s bed. He smiled at her and tucked his hands in the pockets of his white coat. “We’re going to finish you on the drip you’ve got, and then we’re going to get you out of here and back home.”

           The knot in my chest loosened just a little. I sagged into the chair by her bed and let out a breath. She looked so much better. Her eyes were bright and amber. She had more normal color in her face, and the rash that came with her disease had faded from her cheeks. For the first time in over a week, she looked like herself.

           “Thank you,” Mera replied, giving the doctor a faint smile. He promised to send a nurse down with discharge papers and instructions and left. When the door shut behind him, Mera sank back against the pillows and closed her eyes.

           “It’ll be nice for you to sleep in your own bed again,” I said, leaning forward and propping my elbows on my knees.

           My wife turned her head toward me, her eyes going slightly golden in the light. “I want to go home so much, Dean. I want to go back to when you didn’t have to worry about me.”

           I took her hand, threading our fingers together. “Mera Ambrose, I will worry about you every day for the rest of my life. Because you are my wife, and I love you more than anything in this world.”

           Tears glittered on her lashes, but she blinked them away. “Don’t make me cry, Dean,” she whispered. “They’ll think I’m sick again.”

           “Alright,” I said, kissing the back of her hand. “Relax and let that IV finish, then we’ll spring you out of this place.”

           Mera smiled—maybe the first genuine, wide, beautiful smile in days—and my heart bounced against my sternum. For an instant, she was the woman I’d first seen that day in FCW. She was the one I’d watched and adored and loved from afar until she finally fell perfectly into my arms. I’d vowed to spend my life making her feel safe and happy.

Mera, Afternoon, 1:08 PM

           It felt strange to be in regular clothes again. I’d been in a hospital gown for ten days, and I was suddenly desperate to be back in my own house. Dean had taken my bag and gone to pick up the car. A nurse helped me into a chair and wheeled me down to the entrance of the hospital. When he pulled up at the curb in the truck, Dean hopped down from the cab and came around to help me up.

           I shouldn’t have been, but I was amazed by how gentle he was. His hands on my back and my arm were tender but firm. He guided me with sure, slow steps and bore most of my weight as I climbed up into the cab of the truck. He stood up on the runner and buckled my seatbelt.

           “Ready to go home, sweet wife?” he queried, brushing wayward strands of hair from my forehead. His lips ghosted over my forehead.

           I nodded. “Take me home, Dean.”

           The drive from the hospital was quiet. He kept one hand on the wheel. With the other, he held my hand as if it would be the last time. His ring-worn fingers entwined with mine, thumb stroking the back of my hand. Every now and then, he would draw my it up to his mouth and ghost a kiss on my flesh.

           I had a lot of time to think on that ride home. I thought about what my life had been like until that day almost a year ago. Before that night, I’d lived my life for someone else. No matter how hard I thought, no matter how desperately I tried to remember, I had no memories of a time before Colby Lopez. I knew there had to be. But he was as ubiquitous in my life as my own family. I’d very much become the person I was because of the person I’d been with him.

           For him.

           Teenagers think they know what love is. And maybe some of them do, but I couldn’t say for sure if I had. I’d never dated anyone else. Never spent time with people who weren’t Colby and his core group of friends. I was hard pressed to remember the name of a single friend who had just been mine. Everything… everything was tied up in Colby… in the boy who would eventually become Seth Rollins.

           Part of me wondered if I could ever separate my sense of self from the life that had been chosen for me. I couldn’t lay it all at his feet—I’d made the choice to give up my spot at Iowa State. I’d made the choice to study athletic training so I could get a job to be with him. I’d gotten in that car, traveled, stayed in cheap motels, scrounged change for the dollar menu right beside him. No, I couldn’t say that everything was his fault. But I couldn’t say that he gave me a fair chance at a life of my own either.

           And now… I was so close to having just that. A life of my own choosing. Dean, who had never pushed me, never asked for more than I could give, never took more than what I was willing to share. He’d taken me as I was, broken and uncertain, and given me permission to be who I wanted to be. I wouldn’t delude myself and say things were perfect, but I felt freer in my marriage to Dean than I had in the twenty years I spent tied to Colby.

           It was like the first breath of clear air after being trapped in a dank room. To be with Dean was to finally be with myself. With the real me.

           The me that I’d never gotten to know.

Seth, Afternoon, 2:41 PM

           I sat in my car for what felt like years. The garage door had long since come down, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to go inside. I was just there… driver’s door open, one foot on the concrete, hands gripping the wheel so hard that my fingers had gone numb. My head was back against the headrest, eyes staring at nothing.

           After seeing Mera in Las Vegas—fragile, sick, and exhausted—the very thought of going into my own house made me sick. The moment I turned down the street I was bombarded with memories of when this house had been a home. When Mera Reynolds had lived and breathed and loved and laughed and existed with me within these walls. I could remember the way her amber eyes turned to brass when she laughed as I carried her over the threshold the first day. I could hear her laugh from the Christmas when I put mistletoe in every doorway, when I went up on the roof to hang the lights and the ladder fell.

           I remembered the first time we stood on the sidewalk in front of this house. I remembered how happy she’d been when I told her it was ours. She’d wanted to turn one of the spare bedrooms into an office. She wanted to use it to work from, to store her supplies. To study.

           She’d wanted to go back to school, to go enroll at St. Ambrose University in the city, to finally get certified as a psychologist.

           My heart felt like stone in my chest. I blinked, swallowing hard as I remembered what came next.

           Just like with Iowa State, I’d talked her out of it.

           Because I wanted her with me. I wanted her to travel with me, to become a road AT on top of working the televised events.

           Because I couldn’t see past the fact that what I wanted had never had anything to do with Mera being happy. It was about me being the center around which her life revolved.

Dean, Afternoon, 3:22 PM

           Mera sat on in the overstuffed armchair in the living room, a blanket draped over her legs. The first thing she’d done when we got home was take a shower. Then she’d put on her favorite lounge clothes and curled up in the living room. I couldn’t explain how the sight made me feel—the calm and peace and pure and simple elation that pulsed through my veins every time my heart thumped in my chest.

           “Do you want anything?” I asked, stretched out on the sofa with the remote in hand. I was surfing channels, trying to find something to watch.

           I looked over at her, my breath punching out of my body when I saw her smile. There was life and light in her again. She was my Mera, my wife, my best friend again. It felt like the world had been spinning off kilter for the last ten days and only now it had righted itself.

           “I would kill for some sweet and sour chicken and fried dumplings,” she said, snuggling beneath the blanket. “How much do you love me?”

           Laughing, I sat up. I could feel my face light up with a smile… the one that I kept just for her. “Enough to crawl on my hands and knees through broken glass and burning coals to bring you deep fried Chinese food.”

           I watched Mera smile. Her eyes glittered golden. There was health and life in her face again. And God knew, I had no words for how good it was to have her back again.

           “They deliver, you know,” she replied, reaching for me. I moved to her, crouching by the side of her chair as she stroked her fingers over my jaw. For a moment, she was quiet, her eyes bouncing as she looked me over. Her smile softened. “Thank you, Dean.”

           “For what, sweet wife?”

           She leaned over to press a kiss against my cheek. “I know that you know Seth came to see me. I could see it in your face when you came in after he left. Thank you for not making a big deal of it. Thank you for letting me have that.”

           I wanted to tell her how angry I’d been about it. I wanted to tell her that I hated how he could still weasel into her life. I wanted to tell her that I couldn’t stand the thought of him being close enough to her to hurt her again. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.

           Instead, I squeezed her fingers and kissed her knuckles. “You are your own woman, Mera. As much as I want to keep you from any kind of hurt or harm, I know that you are strong enough to know your own mind. I trust you. More than I’ve trusted anyone in my life.”

           A single tear rolled down her cheek. “Thank you for that, too.”

Tag List

@mox-made-me-do-it​ @houndsofjxstice​ @unatictoosweet @xbutterflius-effectusx​ @mother-forker​ @instantboquetdestinysblog @dcnmarvelgamergeek​ @pinkduality @lilred91​ @not-that-kinda-gurl08​ @maelleoute​

#waking up in vegas #wuiv #dean ambrose #dean ambrose fanfiction #wwe #wwe fanfiction #seth rollins #seth rollins fanfiction #mera reynolds #dean x mera #ofc #oc #multi-chapter #real person fanfiction

[thewritingcaptain]

A Failed Homecoming (Chapter 3)

It was time to call May and tell her what had happened - the abridged version of it, anyway. He would need her permission to handle some of the paperwork in the aftermath of this anyway, and he couldn't keep this from her any longer. He just hoped she didn't try to keep Peter from him when she found out.

The next few hours were some of the most agonizing of his life.

By the time Tony had reached the nearest hospital, the kid was limp and lifeless in his arms - with the exception of the occasional seizure, of course. He was glad for the suit, because without it, he might not have been able to hold on to him at all, let alone with as hard as he himself was shaking.

He still had the bag with the clothes strapped onto his back, but there was no time to change him, and little need for it anymore. The outfit that had once passed for his old suit was unrecognizable now, between the blood soaking it, the various rips and tears in it, and the fact it was half disintegrated from the electrocutions. Even Tony himself wouldn't have known what he was wearing if he hadn't seen the video of him in it before his arrival.

At least he didn't have to lie to the paramedics about what happened as he dropped the kid in the ER. It was simple enough to cover up his involvement as Spider-Man by simply saying that he had been abducted to use against him because of a presumed relationship they had, and the reasons behind Tony bringing him in and the circumstances surrounding the injuries were soon forgotten by the medical personnel when he told them exactly how he'd gotten them and what he'd been through.

Now, Tony sat in the waiting room, alone, pacing back and forth as he waited to hear some kind of news. He'd already called Pepper and Happy to let them know that he had the kid and to tell them to alert the police about the Vulture's escape, but he didn't have any more information for them than that. And he was so not looking forward to calling May. He still hadn't done so, largely because he didn't want to call her simply with news of what had happened but no explanation of Peter's condition. There was no point in calling until he knew something.

It was an agonizing few hours that he spent pacing that small waiting room, waiting desperately for news of the kid. When a doctor finally came out of the double doors to talk to him, he practically leapt at her.

The news she carried wasn't good, but it wasn't the worst case scenario, either. He was damaged, yes, but he was alive. Damaged he could work with; dead, on the other hand, he could not.

He allowed himself to be escorted to the room they were keeping him in and nodded to the nurses before coming in. What greeted him wasn't a pretty sight.

The kid was absolutely plastered with tubes and machines. He had one attached to both his chest and his head, an IV in one arm, an oxygen mask strapped onto his face, and a leg casted and placed into one of those hanging slings to keep it elevated above his heart. That was just what Tony could see. Under his gown, he knew there was at least one open wound in his side and a few broken ribs that had been wrapped, and his head was also swaddled in bandages on the one side. Lord only knew what else.

But he was alive, and breathing on his own, and that was enough for now. Tony took a steadying breath as he seated himself in the hospital chair and pulled out his phone. It was time to call May and tell her what had happened - the abridged version of it, anyway. He would need her permission to handle some of the paperwork in the aftermath of this anyway, and he couldn't keep this from her any longer.

He just hoped she didn't try to keep Peter from him when she found out.

Taking a deep breath again, he pulled out his phone and placed the call.

May picked up on the second ring, despite not knowing his number. Maybe she was just desperate enough to know where he'd gotten off to by that point that she was answering all the calls. "Hello?"

The panic in her voice broke his heart, as did the fact that he was going to have to solidify it. "May, this is Tony Stark. Do you remember me?" Not the best way to start off, maybe, but better than just blurting out the news.

"Mr. Stark? Listen, with all due respect, I'm in the middle of something right now, so-"

"I know." He closed his eyes. "Peter is missing. I'm with him now, though. I found him. Or rather…" he swallowed. This was the tricky part. "His captor found me."

May was so quiet on the other end of the line for a moment that he was genuinely worried that she'd either passed out or had some kind of heart attack. "May?" he asked cautiously.

"I-... I'm here." Her voice was barely more than a whisper. "What's going on, Tony?"

"Before I tell you that, let me just tell you that he's hurt, but he's with me now and he's gonna be okay. Okay? Can you trust me on that much?"

"Where is he?"

Tony hissed through his teeth. "We're in the hospital. But he's alright, remember?" he added quickly at the pained noise from the other side. "I'd tell you which one, but it's out of state and I don't actually know. I just got him to the quickest one as fast as I could."

"What happened to him?" Her voice broke slightly, and something in his chest seemed to crack at the sound. He may well have a heart attack before this day was over.

"I…" Tony stopped, trying to think of the best way to put it. He couldn't give her the whole truth, not yet, not until Peter was ready to tell her, which he clearly hadn't been, and he couldn't add that to her pain right now anyway. As furious as he himself was with Peter for putting himself in harm's way, he didn't need May to be as well. It was better for her to think the blame was all on him. "Peter was abducted. Someone knew of his connection with me because of the internship and tried to ransom him back to me." There. Not good, but close enough to the truth.

"Oh, Peter." He could hear the tears in her voice, and suddenly he found himself blinking back a few of his own. No, he wasn't going to cry. Not here, not right now. "How did you know? How did you get him back?"

"I… was at the Tower when the guy called me off of Peter's phone. I tracked it to them, gave the guy the money." So much more had happened than that, but he couldn't bring himself to tell her half of what had happened in between.

"How much?"

"It doesn't matter. Trust me when I say it was pocket change for me, May. I just… I would have given anything to get him back, alright? It honestly doesn't matter." He looked down, picking some imaginary lint off his pants, just to have something to focus on that wasn't the flashbacks of the kid's face while he was in pain, or his broken body in front of him. "This whole thing is my fault, May, and I am… so sorry for what happened that I can't even express it. If I had ever thought for a minute that this could happen…" He didn't even know what to say. He would have spared no expenses to keep him safe. "I would have done everything in my power to make sure it didn't. And if you don't want him to continue with the internship, then I completely understand, and I will respect that." Even if it kills me. "I just… would still like to be allowed to check up on him, if you don't mind."

"Oh, Tony." Her voice broke again, and he knew she was crying on the other side. "I would never keep you from seeing him, and I could never take the internship away from him, either. Working with you means so much to him." Funny, considering he had no idea what he did when he said he was interning with him, but now wasn't the time or the place to reveal that. "The fact that you can even say half of what you just did is enough to tell me everything I need to know."

Some of the tension drained from his body as he processed the relief. "Thank you, May. I honestly don't know what else to say. Apologizing won't change what happened, but I can assure you it will never happen again."

"I know it won't. And it's not your fault, Tony. You couldn't have known this would happen. I'm just so grateful that you got to him in time." She stopped for a moment, and he waited patiently, knowing she was trying just as hard to keep her composure as he was. "How is he? Do you know anything yet?"

"Yes, I talked to the doctor right before I called you." He sat back in the chair, staring at Peter's nearly obscured form. "It's a long list," he warned quietly.

"Just tell me."

Tony closed his eyes. "As of right now, he has a broken leg, broken foot, a few broken ribs, a wound in his side, and a concussion. They think he's having sensory issues due to nerve damage, and they detected a mild cardiac arrhythmia that should straighten itself out." Hopefully, if the kid could go more than a few hours without being shocked. "And… he's having seizures."

"Cardiac distress? Seizures? Nerve damage?" Her voice was so high that he winced slightly. "What the hell happened to him?"

He wet his lips, looking down. "Sources say he tried to fight off the guy who abducted him. Nasty fight, some nasty conks to the head, probably where most of the wounds come from, although we won't be sure until he wakes up. And…" this was the worst. Why did he have to tell her this? "I… think he may have been shocked once or twice." Or three or four times. And electrocution was closer to accurate of what he experienced than a small shock, but he couldn't bring himself to tell her that.

"Oh, God." She was really crying now. "What makes you think that?"

"The symptoms, and, well…" he closed his eyes again, his face contorting as he tried to block out the pain himself. "I may have seen it happen."

"How many times?"

The shaking in his voice mirrored hers as he answered. "Twice." His voice was barely a whisper. It was all he could manage. "It was probably the most horrible thing I've ever seen." Tied right up there with believing he'd watched Pepper fall to her death.

They were both quiet for a long minute. The only sound was May sniffling softly as she tried to get herself together. Finally, she said, "I'm so sorry, Tony. But thank you so much for what you did. He's… he's like my son."

Tony stood up slowly, walking over to the kid and looking down at him. He longed to reach out and touch him, but he knew it would just hurt him. "Yeah. Mine too."

Again, that horrible silence. "How is he?"

"I don't know if I can say fine, considering his injuries, but he's doing alright. He's unconscious but stable. They're keeping him sedated until they can figure out where the seizures are coming from and what to do about it." His eyes flicked to the nodes attached to the kid's head before he forced them away again.

"Will they be permanent?"

"I don't know yet." He shook his head. "They've all been short and lower level, which is a good sign. It could be a result of the shocks or the concussion or both. There's no way to tell yet."

"When can I see him?"

Tony sighed heavily. "I don't know. I want to get him out of here, at least to a better hospital, but I'm trying to let them get all the preliminary stuff done, at least. I don't want to risk moving him before he's ready. And I would like to see him wake up first." He paused. "I'll probably need your permission for a lot of that. They took him because of his state and they've only given me as much as they have because I brought him," and because he was Tony freaking Stark and no one dared challenge him, "But legally they shouldn't have. If I start trying to give orders they'll want your consent."

"Of course. If you figure out where you're at and text me the number, I'll call in and get it handled." She paused for a minute. "But one more thing before you go."

"Anything," he responded without hesitation.

"I… Do you have a plan for when he gets out? I still have to work, and I don't think I'll have the time to give him the care and attention he'll need. I can't afford not to go."

Shit. He had been so worried about the here and now he hadn't really thought about letting the kid go home and what would happen once he got there. He really didn't want him out of his sight again, which he knew was completely infeasible but not an illogical response to what had happened.

And May… she was right. Of course, it wasn't as though he couldn't fund them plenty for as long as she needed to be off work, but she didn't seem like the type of woman who took handouts well, and if he had to guess, her job was probably one of the few things holding her together at this point. He knew that feeling.

He also knew that he didn't want to leave him. In his mind, he knew there was a seemingly simple solution to both of these problems, but… was he ready for that? Most days he could hardly take care of himself, let alone the kid. And what would happen if the other Avengers showed up at the tower? And with the move… how could he balance that, honestly?

"I…" He swallowed thickly. He could figure all that out later, if May even said yes. Peter was the most important thing right now. "I could take him."

"What?"

"I mean, he could stay with me. Most of the time, I mean. You know, until he's better. You'd still have full access to him, of course, and I'm not exactly experienced with taking care of someone, I admit, but between Pepper and Happy and I, we could figure out. Take shifts, or something." He was rambling, he knew, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth he was struck with an overwhelming fear that he'd overstepped, and that May would change her mind about him even being able to see him, so he found himself fumbling to justify his offer.

"Oh. Oh." May stopped for a moment, and he thought his heart stopped too. "That's really kind of you, but I couldn't ask you to do that."

"It's not asking. I'm offering." He looked down at him, reaching up and brushing the kid's hair from his face, careful to avoid touching his skin. "I'd be thrilled to have him. Besides, it's the least I could do, considering this whole thing is my fault." Which was all the more reason she'd be justified in saying no.

May went silent, and he said nothing, knowing nothing else he could say would do much for her. "Alright, then," she said at last. "Let me know when you're on your way back to the city, then. I'll meet you at the Tower?"

"That sounds great. I'll keep you updated, May."

"Thank you." He knew those two words went so much deeper and were for more than just promising to keep her updated.

"Anytime," he said, and meant it. Then she hung up, and he lowered the phone, staring at it for a long minute before putting it away.

He'd done everything he could. Now all that was left to do was sit there and wait.

#irondad #thewritingcaptain #au #spiderman au #spiderman homecoming au #marvel cinematic universe #marvel cinematic universe au #irondad fanfiction #iron dad #irondad and spiderson #a failed homecoming

[ajoy3fanfics]

Missing Pt. III

Hey guys! Thank you everyone that has been following along with this story and reviewing! The response was way more than I expected. I have a clear storyline for this in my head, and if anyone is interested I’m more than happy to write it! As always, thanks so much for reading!

Note: I’ve been posting the past two chapters in my one shots ( FF- One Shots) but I decided to make it its own story! I’ll post chapter 3 in the one shots, moving on will post it in FF- Missing 

~.~

He could hear her footsteps rushing towards him, his name falling off her lips in a rush. Even as she began to approach, Inuyasha refused to turn her way, choosing instead to hold Kagome prisoner with his stare. He could see it in her face, the uncertainty, the guilt, like she had done something terribly wrong and had just been caught; as Kikyo got closer to his bed, Kagome waivered, turning her gaze down. He felt rage building up, threatening to boil over as he continued to stare at her, looking fucking ashamed. Ashamed! Like she had done something wrong! She fidgeted, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.

Kikyo called out to his name once more, her voice a mix of relieved and sad, trying her best to break him from his daze. “You’re finally-”

A sharp growl cut her off mid-sentence, an animalistic warning, making Kikyo jump back. Inuyasha sharply turned his head, eyes narrowed in anger with a scowl on his face, looking almost feral.  “Leave.” He snarled, fanged bared. The dog demons attempts to scare off the intruder might have worked on someone with a weaker will, but Kikyo was no stranger to the primal side of the hanyou. Instead of running for the hills, she simply frowned, not moving forward, but neither heeding his request. “Fucking go!” He practically barked out, tone severe, harsh.

“What lies have you been filling his head with?” Kikyo demanded, arms crossed over her chest to cut a more imposing figure, a true feat for a woman who measure no more than 5’4. Her accusation seemed to rattle Kagome, who had chosen to keep unusually quiet, her face contorting with anger. “I didn’t do anything like that!” She snapped. Even though Inuyasha was on her side, becauseof coursehe was going to back her up, when she felt wronged her voice could be somewhat shrill; his ears flattened as she continued her assault. “He’s got amnesia. He doesn’t remember us breaking up.”

“Were notbroken up!” He interjected, teeth clenched, trying to make her understand.. Kagome raised her brows, giving Kikyo a rather smug look. “See?” She asked, throwing her hands up in exasperation. “Maybe if you were here, you’d know what was going on with him.”

“He’s been unconscious for a month.” She justified. Inuyasha flicked his gaze towards her, keeping watch between the women standing on either side of him. “I had to work! As soon as I got the call that he woke up I got on the next flight to the city. Not that I have to explain myself to you.” Kikyo added in for good measure. “Why are you even here? I thought you were banned.” Inuyasha couldn’t help but notice that she looked self-satisfied with her last remark.

“Banned?” He echoed, totally confused because how the hell would Kagomeget banned from anywhere?FinallyKagome looked his way, like she just remembered he was in the fucking room; she blushed. Any other time he would’ve found it cute, this embarrassment and possibly funny story, but now he was feeling nothing short of rage. “Banned?”He spoke slower, angrier, making the machines to beep furiously. Great. Another damn spike in his blood pressure.

Another 24 hours in this God forsaken hell. A nurse promptly ran in, her hand readied on a walkie; clearly she had heard tales of his previous outbursts and was ready to call for backup immediately. “What’s happening here?” She asked. Inuyasha was quick to answer that nothing was wrong, but Kikyo felt it was her place to interject. “She’s not supposed to be here.” She said, like it explained the entire situation. “She was banned from this hospital room last month. She’s upsetting him.”

Inuyasha had never felt pure rage before. He’d been mad, furious- sure. Dangerously angry? Yeah, he’d been accused of that. But rage? The kind so potent and powerful that he could take his supernatural strength and snap a neck in half? No, he hadn’t felt that before, but fuckhe was feeling it now. He had never thought it would be directed at his high school ex-girlfriend, but stranger things had happened.

Like everyone fucking telling him he dumped Kagome.    

“She’snot upsetting me.” He ground out, trying to keep his cool. The nurse looked unimpressed, tilting her head to get a better look at Kagome. “Ma’am, is it true you were banned?” Kagome looked down at the floor and nodded. “I was given permission to come today. But I don’t want to cause a problem.”

“Special permission?” The nurse questioned, eyeing  Kagome suspiciously. She nodded again, eyes still downcast.  She considered Inuyasha, looking ready to rip the wires and IVs out of his arms as she questioned the woman on the side of him.  She walked to the monitors, checking his vitals before she took her leave. The room felt stiff and awkward, the task seeming to take an eternity. When she was finished, she recorded the information on his chart. “Whatever your problems are, I suggest you work them out outside of the room. He needs peace and quiet, not a catfight.” Thinking it was best for the patient to give a warning and space, she decided to momentarily back off. “If there’s anymore trouble you’re both out.” She added as she walked out the door.

“I-I should go.” Kagome stammered. Inuyasha whipped around to look up at her, pressing her lips together nervously. When did she start fidgeting so damn much? “No.” He said sternly, but she only smiled at him in response. “I’m really glad you’re okay, Inuyasha.” She leaned down and wrapped her arms around him, giving him a gentle hug. He brought his hands up to her back, feeling more like a zombie than a person as she embraced her. She was leaving? Leaving?

Inuyasha breathed in, closing his eyes as he indulged in the spice of her natural scent and the cherry blossom body was she used. She inhaled and he felt her chest tremble.

This was a goodbye hug.

Panic struck him, that was the only was to describe what he did next. Locking his arms around her back, he pulled Kagome towards his chest. She yelped as her cheek was smushed, causing her lips to pucker. “Inuyasha!” She bucked, trying to get free of his hold. “Let me go!” The hanyou shook his head. “No.” He answered, sounding more like a child throwing a tantrum than a full grown man. “Not until you promise you won’t leave.” He heard her sigh in frustration. “Inuyasha!” She protested, wiggling hopelessly against him.

“Inuyasha, let her go.” Kikyo’s tone left no room for guessing. She wasn’t at all impressed by this show of affection. Nostrils flaring, his fiancé pressed against him in a body lock, he finally felt assured enough to address Kikyo the way his demon was demanding him to. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing here, but I want you to go.” He argued. “She,” he started, moving his right arm to motion to the woman held hostage, “isn’t going anywhere. She’s my fucking fiancé. I don’t know what bullshit your trying to sell, but you need to fucking go.” Kagome struggled beneath his grasp.

To her credit, Kikyo did her best to hide her pain. She processed his words, trying to swallow her feelings. “You- You’re with me now.” She tried, confidence breaking at the sight of her boyfriend gripping onto another woman for dear life. He shook his head, somehow making it look threatening, dangerous. When he spoke, it was low, wild. “Go.” Kikyo looked up to the ceiling, trying to blink back her tears. “I’ll go, for today. I- I wont hold this against you… you’re sick.” Her voice dropped. Finally, she took a deep breath and turned away. Stopping in the doorframe, she spoke, refusing to look back lest she lose her nerve. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

It wasn’t until Inuyasha was sure that she had left that he focused his attention on Kagome; she had stopped trying to fight against him, his demon strength no match for her. “Inuyasha?” She tried. “This- this is really uncomfortable. Let me go?” It came out as a question, pleading.

“I meant what I said.” Inuyasha swept his thumb over her back, trying to soothe her, trying to soothe himself. “I’ll let you go if you promise you won’t go. We need-” Inuyasha stuttered. “We need to talk.”

Kagome sighed beneath him, clearly defeated. “Fine,” she said. “Let’s talk.”

#inuyasha #inufanfic #inukag #fanfic #ficlet #work in progress #thank you for reading #kagome

[jadedjo]

2019 End of Year Fic Review

I am happy to say that I achieved 3 of my goals from last year. Compete Return to Endor and Crossing A Line and find a beta/alpha/cheerleader: The Fic Whining Circle helped me achieve all of this! I LOVE you guys!

But despite having written more last year than this year I take this year as a more creative journey. With the support and encouragement of people I look up to, I was able to broaden my horizons and stretch my creativity. But this also had its drawbacks. Namely, in the form of the White Rabbit (plot bunnies multiply when other creatives pass theirs on to you unintentionally)

2 White Rabbits that I chased this year were Apocalypse Yavin and the WIP Admiral Luke Au. They were not my ideas. They started as discussions from others that I ran with (with permission). So new goals for 2020 are to leave plot bunnies alone. I have more than enough projects that I do want to finish.

If any come across my path, I shall appreciate them but shall not fall down the rabbit hole. There was a post that came across my dash that said something along the lines of, you need to start x projects to find the 1 that will get done. So, if I need to drabble something to get it out of my head so be it but not let it balloon into the 50k or more that the Admiral Luke Au is turning into.

If anyone sees me chasing the White Rabbit be sure to pull me out of the Matrix STAT.

Goals for 2020:

I’m not sure what I want to accomplish next year. I have WIPs that I need to decide if I’m going to continue or let go of. Many of them I like and would like to finish someday, but they also pressure me with their very presence.

Right now, the Admiral Luke AU is first and foremost in my mind. The basics came out of a what-if discussion about what-if Luke never left military service. While he was a General in Shadows of Mindor we all agreed that a man in Admiral Whites was HAWT so he was switched from General to Admiral Skywalker. Then Mara was added to the mix. Luke would dislike her fringe neutrality and she would think him just another stuck up military leader who was given a position based on his name only. The premise was so she and Luke could have angry sex in his office.

That idea quickly morphed into an elaborate back story with both nu!canon and Legends mixed together to explain the current state of affairs and a re-write of The Thrawn Trilogy to include Hera Syndula, Ezra Bridger, Ahsoka Tano, Thrawn from both TTT and nu!canon, and why Luke is still in the military. But I think I overwhelmed myself with the scope and now have to take this is small chunks so as not to hide in terror of the massive fic it wants to be.

As for the WIPs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ We’ll see.

Some interesting stats for this year:

1.    favorite fic you wrote this year

Apocalypse Yavin

2.    least favorite fic you wrote this year

Drabble: Corellian Checkers (nothing wrong with it, but of my mini fics I like it the least)

3.    favorite line/scene you wrote this year

From Twilight: Time stopped and in the instant between day and night their lips met.

4.    total number of words you wrote this year

For Posted Fics its 35,937

For WIPs its 28,574

Total: 64,511 (last year’s total was 79,028, but I admit I had a 20k sprint last year.)

5.    most popular fic this year

I Get Off (ya’ll love that PWP)

6.    least popular fic this year

Return To Endor

This was a self-indulgent fic for long-forgotten made for TV Star Wars films. I’m not surprised this is the least popular fic

7.    longest completed fic you wrote this year

Apocalypse Yavin (12792)

8.    shortest completed fic you wrote this year

Spin The Bottle (376)

9. favorite character to write about this year

I was going to say Luke Skywalker or Mara Jade but… Cindel was a surprise and interesting to write about so I shall name Cindel Towani as my favorite this year.

10. favorite writing song/artist/album of this year

According to Spotify, it was Blade Runner 2049. Its mellow and easy to have as background music that will drown out other noises without making me want to actively listen to it.

11. a fic you didn’t expect to write

I Get Off

12. fic(s) you completed this year

In reverse posting order:

Apocalypse Yavin Reeling from the revelations that Vader is his father, needing to get used to a malfunctioning new right hand, and having to save his friend from carbonite, Luke is sent on a quest to find a kyber crystal for a new lightsaber. Unfortunately for him, Yavin IV is where he can find one. The moon is now a hellscape from the death throes of the Death Star and he has the eerie feeling that something in the Force is there, in pain, crying out for release.

Return Luke returns to Tatooine. But what kind of welcome will he find there? Owen Lives AU Flash Fic Crossing A Line (Getting To Know You Series) With a new Force bond firmly in place, Luke and Mara must now navigate this unexpected turn in their relationship. How do you go from friends to lovers because the Force wills it? Post-Nirauan story.

Not Just Another Day (Flash Fic) Luke gives Mara a gift on his birthday. 

Comfort (drabble) Han finds Jaina at the end of the Vong War. Prompts:  “War’s End” kiss & “You’re strong, baby. You have to be.” Reveal (drabble) Luke returns home to find Mara in an unusual situation. Prompts: “I do” kiss & “Frost the damn cupcakes.”

Spin The Bottle (drabble) Prompt: Spin the bottle & "Come over here and make me"

Corellian Checkers (drabble) Han hears Leia say something to Wedge Antilles he'd never thought she'd ever say to anyone.Prompts: “We’re playing checkers. If you don’t like it, leave.” & A Hoarse Whisper “Kiss Me”

Twilight (drabble) When Luke and Mara are forced to trek through the wilderness once again they find more than just pretty scenery.Prompts: Staring At The Other’s Lips, Trying Not To Kiss Them, Before Giving In & “You can scream if you want.”

Return To Endor Cindel Towani is alone in the galaxy. She returns to the one place where she felt at home. The forest moon of Endor. She just prays that the one person she most wants to see is still there.

I Get Off “He could have called you ‘Master.’ Like I do sometimes.” Mara's voice was a smoky purr in his ear. Her arms slipped around Luke’s waist from behind. Luke smiled. “I don’t think it would be the same as when you do it.” “It better not be … Skywalker.” Luke jumped as one of her hands gave his stomach a slap. — Destiny’s Way, Chapter 3. by Walter Jon WilliamsJust how does Mara call Luke 'Master'? In the sexiest way possible.

4 Times Mara Noticed Luke's Feet and 1 Time Luke Noticed Mara's Mara never thought of herself as finding feet attractive. Until she spotted the toes of one Luke Skywalker. ~~~ Luke never paid much attention to Mara's feet. But they'd never been encased in shiny black leather before.

Written for the fetish/Trope roulette 

13. fics you’ll continue next year

I assume this means fics posted but not completed this year. Since its technically 0 I’ll say: The next installment of the Getting To Know You Series

14. current number of wips

7 which is too many. I’ll be paring down this year and trying to keep the white rabbit in check.

15. number of comments you haven’t read

ZERO. I LIVE for comments.

16. most memorable comment/review

Anything from the Fic Whining Circle!

17. events you participated in this year

Fetish/Trope Roulette which resulted in 4 Times Mara Noticed Luke's Feet and 1 Time Luke Noticed Mara's and its spin-off I Get Off

18. fics you wanted to write but didn’t

This years Halloween fic was supposed to be a Cyberpunk Halloween fic featuring Shirlee Faughn, Mara Jade, and my OC Starry Ice crew. I never finalized the plot so it got pushed to 2020 in favor of Apocalypse Yavin.

#year in review #jade writes #2019 fan fiction

[draw-you-coward]

[ask sent in that i’m unnaming for the sender’s privacy, considering the info involved. posted with permission!]

“I think I figured out why I love the ikael series so much, and it's just like... honest and genuine and scathing writing of being neurodivergent and in relationships and dynamics and all the good and bad things that happen because of it? I'm allistic but have other things going on but Ikael is so hugely relatable? Every chapter it's like, oh, fuck, I do that, I've been there??? (1/2?)

And it's so inexplicably healing and cathartic to read that and then have it come to a happy resolution bc the people involved are in healthy and supportive and nonnormative relationships (I can't express in words how much I love Thancred and Ikael's qpr and their cohabitation/co-parenting ish and the whole family dynamics of the scions and all) bc like, in my experiences, these things have been very negative and traumatizing and like, (2/3)

...I haven't had ppl in my life who really know how to support me in the specific ways I need when I'm like nonverbal or shutting down or having a panic attack or whatever? It's just, so good to read queer neurodivergent characters fucking being human and flawed and also like being in healthy relationships and supporting each other with things I've given up on other people being able to support me on? (3/3″

~*~ (reply below the cut)

Honestly, that’s why I started to write what I did.

I started ikael off as a sort of joke character, and when i wanted to write something with thancred, i substituted my woL for him because oddly i found he had a lot more chemistry? ikael was sort of there for when i wanted to write about something i found the game writing didn’t resolve properly, or i wanted to explore more. eventually, as his character began to take shape, i started to find him... really cathartic, and started to make the series about him instead of just being named after him (which i do for all my characters because it’s simple and to the point lol).

I was hesitant to make ikael autistic, because it was just in the wake of myself finding out I was autistic, and i didn’t want to do it wrong (and frankly there was a mote of internalized ableism and denial there too spun from a lifetime of misinformation) and i had mostly been writing him as “well i do this lol/it doesn’t have to have a label”. but since i have - there’s a turning point somewhere early ikael.series where you can sort of tell it happens - i’ve found it astonishingly easy to relate to him, much more than i ever have with allistic characters! i’ve since received similar responses from other people, and it warms my heart ;w;

i actually hesitated to even make him openly gay at first! (he always was by design lol) which sounds wild . but the fandom, minus aymeric/estinien shippers, was pretty heteronormative! especially with ikael being a “catboy”, and myself being unfamiliar with anime tropes like that and the final fantasy genre in general. i didnt know how it would be received, or whether people would think i was “just another cis girl fetishizing gay men” (nevermind that im,, nb and not even attracted to men :p) making him aro was weirdly a little harder for me to decide. i’m aroace. there’s always been an element of “well people mock aros and/or aces” and i still see posts on my dash making fun of qprs and telling people “those are just friendships lmao jfc people go outside”. so once again i didn’t know how it’d be received

ok i’ve waaay gone off topic sorry! but yeah man at the bottom of the line, if we can’t have it, and if this world won’t allow it, i want to create a space where it exists. it’s one of the biggest reasons why i never create any conflict related to identity or relationships (homophobia, transphobia, everything listed above) in my canon. we already have that to a frankly staggering extent. what we don’t have is resources for autistic people, for neurodivergent people, we don’t have the common understanding and acceptance for mental health that should frankly be universal . i’m writing mostly for myself and people like me (in whatever way that is), yes. im also writing for people who don’t have an understanding of these things so they can develop a healthy one. i’ve said this before but i’m never going to purposefully write a conflict that’s unresolved, or resolved in an unhealthy way. im not going to hurt the characters without healing them. i dont write unresolved angst or trauma. at the very most, i take my time with long term trauma, because that can’t be fixed in 3k words! again, ive said this before: people do what i dont, and that’s great! im not attacking it; i even like reading it sometimes. but that’s not the purpose of my writing.

thanks for sending in your thoughts! <3

#ask #yeah man #lol

[bullwrinkledmagnum]

*****there's more than one person.

One person sends the checks then another person puts them in my account.

I only saw the first check not any other

Because the check is made to me as I'm the only person on the account.

Then on the remote deposit or phone deposit on the back its written "for mobile deposit only" or something to that effect.

Instead of my signature

And that can be done at my actual bank where its written "for deposit only" in the signature line on the back.

So even if i had not given the remote deposit information, the log in to my banks, they could still done it locally.

The only difference is the cameras in the bank lobby and in the bank lanes in the drivd thru.

For looking into the phones and using that information, they need a judge's order -- in olden days anyway.

Although I'm pretty sure its much more lax now although we are to assume they still need a judge's order/permission to use the information in court.

But it's fairly different in my phone as well as several people i know, as we are witnesses and victims, our stuff is pretty protected although sometimes if someone continues to try to hack us, sometimes they're allowed in just to see what they want.

And a lot of times the protection people will reverse the hack. So if you want to steal my photos, they sill steal yours.

I dealt a lot more with hacking in the early 2000s. Now I'm just protected.

Except for certain FBI agents attempting to not pass tests they are given. Like remotely entering my phone to see what im doing. Often they will fuck with my shit. And so thats when evidence to fire them and kick their asses was accumulated

Thank God that stage is over. Cause it was really annoying and pissed me off every fucking time.

Anyways, so there's one person pretending to be two or there's two people.

Its not my job to know nor care.

I chill about life. I really don't care who is on the other end of a screen, especially when it's too hard to figure out, but it is annoying. I just try not to let it get to me

But ive been off toppamax for 3 plus weeks and that bipolar shit dealing with annoying ass fuckers and TRYING to ignore it is Too difficult

I also dropped muscle relaxers and tramadol.

Because i got a flat on the way to the doctor and I missed my appointment and unfortunately they don't believe in refilling unless im seen.

I'm not gonna be able to get an appointment for 6 weeks... So...

Pretty much I'm all about fuck it.

Im actually doing good. Although i have allergies and a cold.

I went online to do the online visit for urgent care type issues and got a steriod for my cold and its healing up just fine, no more green, just white snot and cough ups

Although today and last night i began blacking out when i cough.. And we aren't sure why.

And so...

Probably isn't the time to fuck with me.

I have no chill and be happy pills.

I habe Cymbalta that takes care of my pain and so i can be a bitch and,take care of everything else...

Not that it makes,me a bitch cause it doesn't, it jist doesn't lie to my brain and tell it shit is alright when it ain't.

So im just more of my natural angry self.

Which is very sad.

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Erica Heftmann breaks free from the control of the FFWPU / UC

Dark Side of the Moonies by Erica Heftmann  (Penguin Books 1982)

Erica Heftmann was born in Washington, DC, in 1952. She believed she was born again in 1974 to Korean parents — the Lord of the Second Advent, Reverend Moon, and his wife, Hak Ja Han. She was deprogrammed from the Moon cult and became interested in the issue and power of mind control. In the 1980s, because of her research and expertise in that field, she was in demand as an adviser to mental health professionals, clergy, legislators, educators, legal and medical practitioners, law enforcement agencies, mind control victims and their families throughout the world.

Contents

Part I – Heavenly Deception

Part II – Free Will But No Choice

Part III – Return to Reality

Part IV – From the Outside Looking In

1 The Technology of Mind Control 2 Deprogramming Therapy 3 Judiciary, Legislature and the ‘Cryptocracy’ 4 Critical Judgement

Notes

Dark Side of the Moonies is the disturbing account of one person who gave up her own mind, her whole life to a man she thought was the messiah.

Since her liberation from the Moonies, she has come to understand the power that was used to control her. In revealing the hidden life of one cult, Erica Heftmann exposes the startling force cults are exerting in society – and the grip they have on many people.

I was a Moonie. When I regained my mind and could look back at the horror of it, I realized that my freedom was conditional. I was haunted by the need to understand how and why I had been transformed into what I hated most. Now I would be an ex-Moonie. My innocence would never return. … I had to live with the ignorance and prejudice of a public that believes I was somehow pre-disposed to becoming a cult member while they are immune. People think cults are something to laugh at, groups of religious half-wits who would never have made it in life anyway and are better off where they are. I was there … to further incredible schemes of political and economic power.

I am setting out my story and my explanations of it. I do this for the sake of others who have suffered agonies so profound as to make my cult experience seem like a holiday. I wish that I could bring voice to the countless others... I write this for people under mind control, especially those I love who are mentioned in these pages. Do not be afraid to use your own minds; you need no greater masters.

In this era we are learning about the plight of the handicapped, the minorities, those who have been denied the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We must learn about all unfortunates because we are responsible for depriving them by our failure to listen, to understand, to allow them the right to help themselves. Those who are able and refuse to help are the true unfortunates. They do not know how precious life is.

Erica Heftmann 1981

page 1

Part I – Heavenly Deception

On the last day of 1974 I nudged my way through the bustle of downtown Los Angeles with a lot on my mind. It wasn’t only taking inventory of the past year. It was the pattern I saw emerging. Breaking away, testing new ground, retreating. Every path led to the same edge and, feeling I couldn’t make it across, I would go back to find another path. I had come to know the edge pretty well.

I was surprised to hear the stories that circulated about me because I considered my life to be too ordinary. My measuring standards were not set by my peers but by the characters that peopled my books and travels.

Adulthood was edging me away from my mother and an older sister I adored. My father and brother had removed themselves from the family during my late childhood but what was left was stable. Mom was always patient, comforting, totally involved in her two girls.

I had a short romance with formal education. After two terms at university I declared myself graduated, having learned everything I felt the institution had to teach me: how to find a book in the library and how to sit down to coffee with an interesting professor.

With full sails and no rudder, I went to Europe taking every precaution not to be a hippie, annoyed that of all the times I could have been born on this planet I had to co-exist with a counter-culture that popularized doing one’s own thing. I picked my way carefully to avoid the throngs of stereotyped individuals who faced me at every turn. …

My mother was not easy to rebel against because I felt she was usually right. How could I break away and establish my own identity if there was no risk involved? She was always there to fall back on, to soften the blows. … Maybe you’ve been on your own for a few years but the world has just been your playground.

Wait a minute. Don’t be that hard on yourself. Someone puts you on a speck of cosmic dust whirling through space without asking your permission and then just as rudely and abruptly and inevitably takes you away. While you’re here you’re given a set of problems and a set of rules for solving them. Like someone leaving a kid to amuse himself with square pegs and round holes. ’Bye kid, see you in eighty or ninety years. No, Erica, I don’t blame you one bit for stepping back to take a look at it all. People are manipulating and killing each other and for what? Do they even enjoy the spoils of their exploits? Why waste your life trying to set things up for them to destroy when you have enough sense to realize that there’s something else in this existence to do?

Lonely, confused and worried about fulfilling my potential, I had escaped the forced gaiety of the office New Year’s party. Everyone making crass jokes about resolutions and getting drunk to forget them.

On the last working day of the year, all the desk calendars in the office buildings were collected and released into the wind from the roofs. They fluttered down like ticker tape. Now as I walked the last couple of blocks to the bus stop, I stared at them cluttering the pavement. Some pages had little notes jotted on them. OCTOBER 15/meet Dave for lunch. Or 2:00/REGIONAL MEETING. Giving in to a wave of melancholy, I couldn’t help but see the metaphor days lying in the gutter, accumulated so quickly and then forgotten.

A big commuter bus moved away from the kerb and blasted a clump of pages into an open drain with its exhaust. So it’s come to this, has it, I tried joking with myself.

I looked up about the same moment that I felt someone gazing at me. A pair of blue eyes much like my own. A young woman just a few paces away was watching me. She was wholesome looking, rather tall, and had a short, dark-haired young man with her.

In my memory, it is etched that I was the one to start the conversation but I know that this is not the way it happened. There was just something so familiar and so welcoming in her eyes that I felt myself reaching out to make the first move.

All I needed for an introduction was to know that they were foreigners. How well I remembered the feeling of being a newcomer to a city and how comforting it was when strangers had stopped and talked with me.

The girl’s name was Ingrid and she was from Switzerland. The one she towered over was Antonio, a Peruvian. I asked how such an unlikely combination had met They explained that they were touring with an organization called International One World Crusade. This was their last stop in America and within a week they would push on to Japan.

Ingrid had spent all of her time in Los Angeles cooped up in the kitchen cooking for the others. On her first opportunity to get out and see the sights, she was delighted to meet someone. They chatted on. Out of the corner of my eye I was searching for a coffee shop we could dive into. I made the suggestion. It was one of those magical meetings that happens when one travels and I could tell the feelings were shared all around. My bus didn’t stop running for a few hours.

‘We’d love to,’ Ingrid said, ‘But we are just on our way back for an evening meeting. Would you like to walk with us? You could see our headquarters office and meet some of the others.’

Something flickered in me, making me want to bolt, no matter how friendly they were. Something about not being on neutral turf. I noticed it at the same time I realized that I was already walking with them in their direction. …

page 187

Part III Return to Reality

Up late this morning. At 6.00 I should already be in the lodge with Paul to correct reflection books. Paul is the best assistant I’ve ever had and this is by far the most successful workshop since the old days with Alex. Yesterday Mr Kadachi gave the VOC lecture so that we could have some time to catch up on our reports but we scrambled up onto the roof of the lodge to talk instead.

I think it is important to develop a good subject-object Foundation for the Abel position we hold collectively. …

Paul is still having Chapter Two problems about his old girlfriend. I am glad he is confiding in me. I remember all the times Kathy and I kept him away from Lisa and occupied when the centres used to come up for weekend workshop. I thought Lisa’s transfer to MFT would solve a lot. They were both trying hard to overcome and by all external appearances they had but now I’m finding out that Paul is entertaining hopes of being blessed with her. It isn’t good to think about the Blessing, especially trying to second-guess Father. Paul keeps insisting that Spirit World prepared them for the Family because they had been sweethearts since high school. . He is suffering so much and so much wants to please Heavenly Father.

We must be a good combination because we’ve been having such fantastic results with our workshops. We work as a unit. Father was right that if you serve someone well enough, you make him dependent on you. He opens up to you and gradually the power shifts its balance point. If you are a good object, it is much more important than being a mediocre subject. …

I have finally learned how to handle sleep. Imagine how much time is wasted in the Fallen World. Midnight is just the beginning of the evening for me. Paul covered for me for fifteen minutes yesterday during discussion and made me sleep. On the way down the hill with the class, he whistled for me when they passed the dorm and I was out the back way and down to the lodge before them. I had only had forty-five minutes of sleep the night before and during the past weeks it has been usually two hours, sometimes three. That fifteen minutes was like a whole night I got up completely refreshed. I think I’ve finally broken through.

I must apologize to Mr Kadachi. I was so upset with him because he slept during the day and pulled staff meetings as late as 3.30 in the morning — never before 2.00. The meetings were late only because he was reading or playing with his lizards. When he had us as a captive audience he would put off staff matters and expound on some recent theory about the Restoration. I contradicted one of his theories and still feel horrible about it but it did bring the meeting to a quick close. No one else would dare stand up to Kadachi-san. …

The day sailed by with its own effortless momentum. In the afternoon I was called into the kitchen for a phone call. Mr Kadachi was pacing. I picked up the receiver.

‘Erica? I was afraid I wouldn’t get through to you. They gave me the usual runaround.’

‘Well, Mom, sometimes I’m busy and can’t get to the phone.’

‘Too busy to take a call from me?’

I rolled my eyes up. How would she like it if I interrupted her at work?

‘I’m here in San Bernardino and I hope you won’t give me some story about being too busy to see me today. We have a date, you know.’

Did we? It seemed that I was always trying to get out of some engagement and I kept postponing these visits with promises. Guess she finally caught up with me. Kadachi was at my side poking around in his lizardarium. I placed my hand over the receiver.

‘She says she’s in San Bernardino and wants to see me today.’

‘You have a workshop to look after. Tell her to make it another time.’

I uncovered the receiver. ‘I have a workshop to look after. Could we make it another time?’

‘Erica, I’ve driven all this way.’ She sounded a bit frantic. ‘Are you going to make me turn around and go back? I’m leaving for New York tomorrow, remember, and I want to see you before I go.’

‘She’s insisting. She says she’s driven all this way and wants to know if I’m going to make her turn around and go back. She’s leaving for New York tomorrow.’

Kadachi gave me a look that revealed nothing and turned back to his lizards. How could I be so weak as to have to bother him and get him to tell me what to do?

‘Look, Ma, I’m going to have to go now. My class is starting.’

Click

I was hardly out the door when the phone rang again. It took three calls before I was reluctantly given permission to go. I wasn’t pressuring either side, they just fought it out with me as the transmitter of information. The condition was that I be back for evening discussion. I wouldn’t have missed that for the world anyway.

By the time she and my step-father Chuck arrived, I was bathed and had styled my hair with a blow-dryer I found in the sisters’ cabin. I also found a ‘good’ set of clothes I’d never seen before. They fit and I looked very nice when I sized myself up in the mirror.

I ran down the steps of the lodge to meet them. The guard at the gate had already informed me of their arrival. After quick hellos I found myself in an argument. I wanted them to come inside and meet my friends. They replied flatly that they were not interested in coming in, only in seeing me.

‘You say you’re interested in what I’m doing. How are you ever going to find out if you don’t see for yourselves? You just keep reading those negative articles.’

They could hardly conceal their discomfort and my mother couldn’t pass the opportunity for some hostile remarks so I decided that it was better to leave right away. Then, at least, I could return earlier. Paul was thrilled about taking over for a while and I was looking forward to the meal so it wasn’t a bad arrangement after all. I told them to wait a moment on the landing. I searched for Kadachi to say goodbye. His wife told me he had locked himself in his room at his cabin. I would probably return before he emerged from his meditation.

I slid in the front seat between my parents and chattered the whole way down the mountain. I told them about Roy’s close scrape with his parents. They had tried to kidnap him but he escaped. He was sorry for hurting his father in the tussle on the ground but not sorry enough to speak with them. I usually handled Roy’s calls. They simply would not understand that he had been transferred. They thought we were hiding him. No one at camp even knew where he had been transferred to.

‘Imagine parents trying to do something like that to their own child!’ I gasped.

Chuck dropped us off at a small restaurant in town while he went to see about getting something fixed on the car. I ordered a large meal and wolfed it down. Mom didn’t touch what she had ordered. She said that she was coming down with flu and had lost her appetite. If my stomach had been able to stretch, I would’ve eaten her meal as well. We didn’t talk much. These days we had little in common. I couldn’t see the point in pretending to be interested in the Fallen World and she refused to take an interest in the Restoration. She kept glancing at her watch, obviously worried about Chuck taking so long.

When he arrived, he said he wasn’t hungry either and they wanted to beat the traffic back to town. They still had to pack for their trip. He hastily paid the bill and we went out to the car. The lot was dark and the car was at the rear of the building. I instinctively sized up the lot for fundraising. Hard habit to get over. Good thing I was going back to camp instead of out blitzing.

I was grabbed from behind and thrown forward. It happened so quickly that I was in the back seat between Chuck and a strange man before I caught my breath. My mind jammed. My mother was in the driver’s seat revving the engine and another person sat in the front seat on the passenger’s side. We took off as the doors were being pulled closed.

It was several moments before I could speak. My mind snapped into the witnessing mode. I politely extended my hand to the man on my right to introduce myself.

‘How do you do? My name is Erica.’

He reached under the seat and brought out a bouquet of flowers. Presenting them, he said, ‘Very well, thanks. My name is Dana. Here, these are for you.’

Dana! I couldn’t believe it. Dana Stevens? It must have been ten years since I’d seen him — he’d been living in Paris for that long. He was a dear friend of the family, someone I had been infatuated with as a child. Mom had told me that he had come back a few weeks before to get married.

I could not recognize him in the dark but there was no mistaking his style. I looked at the person in the front seat. A woman. She must be his new wife.

‘Mrs Stevens, do you mind if I embrace your husband?’ I threw my arms around Dana’s neck. It was totally unprincipled but my mind was jilted and I was too happy to see him to care about Principle for that moment.

My mother had the wheel gripped firmly. ‘I’m sorry, Erica. You didn’t show up at Dana’s wedding so we’re going to have another reception party now just for you.’ I believed her even though I still felt a panic. I had no time to be part of a practical joke. They would worry back at camp, especially Kadachi. I pleaded for her to stop and let me phone them at least. My mother could always out-insist me, especially when I became hysterical. I thought of leaping from the car, disregarding the danger, but I was flanked by two strong men. Roy had told everyone to carry matches with them so they could set fire to the place if anyone ever took them by force. A lot of good that would have done me. I was no longer in the mood for conversation and numbly rode the rest of the way in silence. My mind was blank as if I had been unplugged.

We pulled off the freeway somewhere in Long Beach and, after circling around some residential streets, pulled up at a modest house with several cars parked in the driveway. They surrounded me on the few steps into the house and then, with some other people, formed a corridor so that I had no choice but to go past them to the rear of the house. I didn’t know how many people were in the house or who they were. It didn’t look like a party.

I entered a small bedroom at the end of the hall. The room was tiny, carpeted and bare except for a blanket and a pillow. There was a piece of plywood covering the one small window. Through my mind flashed the story of The Collector. It was clear to me that I was going to be held prisoner for someone’s pleasure but I had no idea for what purpose.

The sight of the blanket and pillow made my heart stop. I knew this was the end of the line. When I looked up I saw half a dozen strangers standing around me. The door was shut. It was explained to me that I would have to speak with these people. Disbelief clogged my mind. They wanted to talk to me about the Movement. How could they talk to me about something they knew nothing about? I understood then that I would stay in that room until I converted them all or died — there would be no way to escape unless I could befriend one of them and gain sympathy to be set free. I wondered how that tiny room would look after the first year. I would know every crack on the ceiling, every sound from the outside. I looked for Dana. Surely he would help.

‘Can I see Dana please?’

‘I’ll see if I can find him for you. In the meantime, why don’t you make yourself comfortable?’ It was a woman who spoke. She was thirty-ish, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. She looked nervous, which gave me confidence. She left the room and two or three of the others trailed out with her.

Dana appeared at the door. His shirt was unbuttoned and he had a beer in his hand. He looked at me with mild surprise as if he couldn’t fathom why I might want to speak with him.

‘Dana, what do you think you’re going to prove with this? I’m going to be missed at camp by people who care about me. What sort of a kangaroo court do you intend to hold? You’re holding me prisoner. You can’t do that.’

Spectacularly unimpressed with my plea to his sense of justice, he suppressed a belch and scratched his chest. ‘I’m not the one who made the decision, you know. Your mother wants you here. It can’t hurt to listen.’

‘Listen? Under these conditions? Why didn’t you just arrange to have these people, whoever they are, come and meet me in a coffee shop somewhere? I would discuss anything with anyone at any time. That’s my job.’

‘Well, your anywhere and anytime and anyone seems to be here and now with these folks, doesn’t it?’

The years had changed him. I remembered the late-night talks, how, he had made my head spin with his unconventional ideas. He was the one who first infected me with the idea of breaking free. Now he had sold out like the rest of them, even getting a beer belly. There would be no point in talking to my mother. I knew how she was once she made up her mind about something. I asked to see Chuck. I knew he would not be able to conceal anything. His face always gave him away. He had always listened to my ideas with endless patience and took my troubles to heart. He supported and nurtured my individualism with pride, even the things that must have been hard to swallow. Surely he would understand me now. Yet when he came in and sat in the same place that Dana had been sitting, I wondered if I was going to come up against the same stone wall. Maybe they had some kind of routine worked out. We were no longer on the same team. God had divided us.

He didn’t give me the chance to wonder long. He took me in his arms. ‘We had to do this, honey.’ His voice broke and he cried, unable to speak for a while. ‘It’s a horrible thing to have to see you here like this. We want you to be free. I know that’s a hard thing to understand, that we’ve locked you up to free your mind. We wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t love you. All we want you to do is to listen to these people. They’re good people, honey, don’t be afraid. You know your mom would never let anyone hurt you. That’s why she wants you away from that group. We miss our girl — the one who’s so free, the one who was never afraid to stand up for what she believed.’

Now it was my turn to force back the tears so I could speak.

‘Will you stay with me?’ I was terrified of the thought of them leaving the next day for New York.

‘Of course we’ll stay with you.’ It was my mother. She must have been listening at the door. I didn’t hear her come in.

‘You aren’t going to New York?’

‘No, that was just a story to get you to come with us. We were so afraid that you would cancel again and now that we brought Sara out here —’

‘Sara? Is she that lady? The one in the shorts.’

My mother held a handkerchief for me to blow my nose as she had done when I was a child. ‘Now the other side, blow hard, you can do better than that.’ I laughed through the tears until Sara walked in with some others and my panic returned.

I decided to size up my captors. Mom and Chuck left the room. The others sat around me in a semi-circle. Danny had been in the Children of God. He said he’d been deprogrammed by Sara.

Doug had been in the Family. As soon as I learned this I tried to see the brother in him. Sometimes he revealed it but he had been in the Fallen World too long. The brother in him was only a flicker. Perhaps he would be the one I would befriend if I could convince him of Principle. He could help me escape back to Father. Would that make him my spiritual son? He did not want to talk about his spiritual parents or his missions. He said they were not important. What else could there be to talk about if we were going to talk about the Family?

Jill had been in the Family too, but not long enough to know very much.

I didn’t know quite what to make of Sara. She seemed to try to blend into the background and quite succeeded — all but those eyes of hers. Every time she caught my glance she pinned me to the spot.

Something was rattling around loose in my mind trying to find where it belonged. Maybe my whole mind was rattling around loose. I felt fatalistic — the controls were jammed on automatic pilot I felt almost... well, sportive, gay... having the burden of the destiny of mankind lifted from me temporarily. The ball was for once in somebody else’s court. A funny thought lifted the corners of my mouth. Old girl, you only get kidnapped once in life, that is, unless you’re terribly unlucky. You may as well have a good time. After all, you’ve got a captive audience.

I made myself comfortable. ‘It looks like we’ll be here for a while,’ I remarked breezily. ‘If you want to do your job properly, you’ll need some background information on me. I guess I’d better tell you about myself.’

Danny stretched out and groaned, then unclasped his hands from behind his neck and drew himself up on one elbow. ‘The only thing we need to know about you is already obvious. You’re brainwashed.’

‘You watch too many movies. Who do you think you are, Clint Eastwood? Where did you get this brainwashing stuff?’

‘Well, Queen-for-a-Day, what happened to your humility, love, understanding for mankind and all of that? If you were a real disciple of Christ, you’d be praying for me and setting a good example. I guess your dignity and integrity only work when you’re plugged into your little messiah.’

Doug shot him a look to keep quiet. Interesting. They were not united so I was bound to triumph. First rule of Principle. Unity forms the Foundation. I had the knowledge of Principle on my side, they had nothing, not even unity. Evidently Doug remembered something of it in trying to keep Danny in line.

Danny rolled onto his back and addressed the ceiling. ‘All right, go ahead and give us your testimony. I probably know it word-for-word already. I’ve heard enough of them and they’re all the same. Don’t tell me, let me guess — you went to India, came back and read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, had an abortion, became a militant feminist —’

Doug cut in, ‘Don’t mind him. Sure, I want to hear your story. It’s hard to be a Moonie. You wouldn’t be where you are unless you were a good person but don’t tell me that you joined because you realized it was the truth. None of us joined because we understood what they were teaching us.’

I began my story. To my surprise, it didn’t come out like I had planned it. It wasn’t my usual testimony. I told them about my life before, about the things I had loved and believed, things I had forgotten until then. I must have talked for two hours. Sara was pacing outside. Jill left for a while and when she came back in she asked me if I wanted anything to eat.

‘No thanks,’ I answered. ‘I had dinner with my mother.’ My mind drifted back to the camp for a moment. It seemed universes away. I wondered where I was. Whose house was this?

‘Is this Sara’s house?’

‘No,’ Jill answered. ‘It belongs to a woman named Alice.’

‘Can I see her?’

A woman was brought to the door. She hesitated before coming in. She was a friendly looking, middle-aged lady, the kind I’d seen by the hundreds on the lots, motherly, middle-class. I thanked her for letting us use her house. It seemed to me that it must have been a great inconvenience to have so many people in her home for such a long time. I indicated the boarded window. I was sorry for my being the cause of her house being turned upside-down. Tears formed in her eyes.

‘Honey, your parents love you very much. Everyone here is very concerned for you. We all want the best for you. Everything will turn out all right.’ She hesitated and phrased her question shyly. Jill says that you don’t want anything to eat. Can I bring you something else? Something to drink? How about a glass of warm milk?’

Warm milk, yech. I always hated it and gagged on it but I didn’t want to refuse her hospitality. For her sake I gratefully accepted. I was glad I did when I saw the look on her face. She couldn’t have been more happy if I’d given her a million dollars.

While she was fetching the milk, the conversation turned away from me and the kids talked among themselves. I couldn’t hate them. I wished that I could have joined in the conversation but it was as if they were speaking another language, things I hadn’t any knowledge of. Danny was sprawled out comfortably. Jill was teasing him and heaved the pillow at him. He propped himself up with it and turned to me.

‘So, this Moon is the messiah, eh?’

The devil himself couldn’t have been more satanic. What a way to talk about Father! It slashed my heart to hear him referred to as ‘Moon’. I would have to educate this guy if we were going to be able to talk at all. He would have to learn to call him Reverend Moon.

‘History will show if he is the messiah or not Reverend Moon has —’

‘I know, he has the potential of becoming the messiah but now he is in the John the Baptist position. I’ve heard it all before. Why don’t you just come out and say it. It will save us a good twenty-four hours. Don’t give me all the PR lines. I know you believe he’s the messiah.’

‘Well, I have to define what messiah means.’

‘Yeah, he has to be born in Korea between certain years — where’d you get all this information anyway? I could tell you that the messiah has to be 5’5”, have blue eyes and be born in Los Angeles in 1952. How’s that grab ya?’

‘God has revealed certain things to me.’

‘What’d He do, call you on the phone?’

‘Don’t you believe in God?’

‘Don’t try to get off the subject by attacking me. Yes, I believe in God but my God doesn’t go around talking to me. Just answer a simple question: did God call you on the phone?’

‘Don’t be absurd.’

‘Does that mean no?’

‘No, God did not call me on the phone. There, are you satisfied?’

‘Did He send you a telegram?’

Doug broke in. ‘What he means is how does God communicate with you. You said that God revealed certain things to you. How did you receive them?’

How did I receive them? I just knew. ‘I just knew.’

‘Maybe you just knew wrong?’

‘Divine Principle clearly outlines the qualifications for the messiah.’

‘Great, who wrote the Divine Principle?’

‘It was revealed by God.’

Doug looked at Danny. ‘You getting dizzy yet? I told you the Moonies have everything tied up and you can go round and round for ages without getting anywhere.’

Danny sat up and looked at me. ‘It’s no different than my group. We believed our leader was the end-time prophet Why? Because his doctrine said so. I thought God revealed it to me too.’

‘Well, you were misled. Divine Principle talks about that. You were in a cult’

‘And you are in one.’

Alice came in with the milk and my mother trailed in after her.

‘Are you getting sleepy? I brought you some things to sleep in.’ She produced a nightgown and slippers. My eyes popped out of my head. A nightgown no one had worn before. It was so beautiful, so elegant, and slippers. I couldn’t wait to put them on.

‘Where can I change?’ Surely I wasn’t expected to change in front of the men. I had heard that men in deprogrammings humiliated and raped sisters.

Danny and Doug stood to leave.

‘Good-night, Brothers.’

Doug said good-night but Danny couldn’t resist getting in one last little dig. ‘In case you didn’t know, we are not biologically related. Brothers is also not a common slang term — it’s a Moonie word. The sooner you stop talking like a Moonie, the sooner you’ll stop thinking like one. Do me a favour, hey? Every time you use a Moonie word and I stop you, try substituting an English word.’

‘Okay, good-night, Clint Eastwood. How’s that?’

He tossed the pillow at me.

Sara and I were alone. She was cautious but wanted to know how I felt, what I needed, what my fears and anticipations were. There was nothing about her or any of the others that would cause me to distrust them. I could see that they were sweet and honest people, just misled and being used by satanic forces. Mostly, my mind was on sleep. The opportunity to sleep away from masses of people, in clean bedding, in a quiet house, in my own nightdress, close to my parents — it was too much of a luxury to put off.

Sara asked if I would mind if she and Jill slept in the room with me. I laughed. Would I mind having only two sisters in the room with me? I was under the covers in a flash and the light was turned out. They left the door ajar. They were going to sit in the kitchen for a while and come to sleep later. Mom came in to say good-night. I made her promise me one last time that she would not leave for New York that she would be there when I awoke in the morning. I don’t remember if she left before I fell asleep.

With the window boarded over and no sunlight, I had no idea what time it was. By habit, I was completely awake. From totally off to totally on in a millisecond. I tried to fall asleep again but it was useless. I’d have to get up sometime and face the music. This was Sunday. I had probably missed Pledge. I couldn’t muster my thoughts to say a proper Pledge but I started in on a short prayer. Security and anxiety were marbled in my heart As long as we talked about Principle, I would be safe. They were not united and they did not have God’s truth. There was no way they could harm me. It would just be a matter of time. Sara came in.

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t want to wake you. I just came in to find my brush.’

‘It’s okay, I just woke up before you came in. What time is it anyway?’

‘Ten o’clock. Bet you’ve never had such a good sleep in the cult.’

Cult! That word hurled frustration, fear and anger at me. I stood up quickly and began to fold my bedding.

‘You want to take a shower?’

‘Yes, thank you. If I may.’

Sara showed me across the hall. What a luxurious bathroom. I felt like a princess. A fresh set of towels were set out for me and everything was spotless. A new toothbrush and a new tube of toothpaste, a hairbrush, even some cosmetics. I turned the shower on full blast. Sara yelled through the door.

‘There’s plenty of hot water. Let’s forget about the cold shower conditions, okay?’

‘Okay!’ How did she know about conditions? She obviously didn’t know very much. I couldn’t set a condition without clearing it with a central figure anyway. I stepped into the shower. Ah, I would have a hard time stepping out again. I watched the steam escape through a small window. I remembered in The Collector that the woman had thrown a note out the window in hopes that someone would pass by and read it. Maybe I could do that. But what good would it do? I was in the Fallen World now. Even if I could squeeze out the window and run away, to the police maybe, they’d just bring me back here. In Satan’s world who would help a Family member? I would have to work it another way. I didn’t have enough mental power to consider the future anyway. It was all I could do to concentrate on the present I was being bombarded with new-old sensations, the things in the bathroom, the cleanliness, the newness, the freshness, the comfort and security. I was reluctant to turn off the shower. My mother came in and talked to me through the shower door. She wanted to know if I needed shampoo or anything else. If nothing else, it was overwhelming to be with her in circumstances that seemed so normal. It was like being on holiday. Maybe I could postpone the inevitable confrontation. I felt a surge of energy and wanted to crow with pleasure. Sleeping until ten o’clock!

Mom brought me some clothes to change into, a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. It felt deliciously wonderful and forbidden to wear them. I asked permission to keep the slippers on. She gave me a queer look

The bedding was put away and the room was bare again but for one blanket and a pillow. As I dried my hair with a towel, Danny asked me what I wanted for breakfast. I wasn’t in the mood for eating. We decided on coffee.

He brought it in and went out again for his Bible. Doug carried in a small case of papers. They wanted to talk about fundraising. Fair enough. Doug had been on MFT. I couldn’t understand why he asked me questions he already knew the answers to — questions about the Economic Restoration. It was as boring as giving lecture to answer him.

They couldn’t do anything to dislodge the truth. After all, they had nothing better to offer. Nothing better than beer, cigarettes, divorce — the Fallen World. I remembered how Larry had told me that even if God did not exist and if Father wasn’t the messiah, the gathering of dedicated people giving endlessly of themselves was bound to be the best thing yet.

‘Why do you lie on the streets when you beg money from people?’ Sara entered into our discussion.

‘I don’t lie. I never did. Lie about what?’

‘Lie about where the money was going.’

‘Everyone knew I was from the Unification Church. We even wore —’

‘— badges issued by President Salonen,’ Doug. ‘But most people didn’t understand that you were a Moonie. If they ask you outright if you are raising money for Reverend Moon, you deny it, don’t you?’

‘Never! I’m proud of Father. Why would I conceal the truth?’

‘You lied to Tom Evans.’ Now my mother. Okay, I made a sales pitch in the gallery of someone who worked with my mother and by the time I realized who he was I couldn’t retract what I had said.

‘Okay, so I lied once.’

‘Once!’ Everyone cried out in unison.

I was not hurt for myself. I was trying to shield Father from their attack. Nothing they could say or do to me would worry me, but they must not blaspheme.

Sara said, You don’t even know when you’re lying and when you’re not. You weren’t like that before. Somebody taught you a little trick called Heavenly Deception.’ Danny chimed in, Yeah, we did the same thing in the Children of God but we called it Spoiling Egypt.’

Sara continued ‘And in Scientology they call it Fair Game and in the Divine Light Mission they call it something else and I call it a con game. How could you tell people the truth about where the money was going when you don’t even know yourself? What about your little 40-day condition that was extended? Where did that money go?’

How did she know about that? I told her what I had found out. The money went to buy some land.

‘That land was already paid for, honey. The money you raised went straight into Moon’s pocket for some little private business deals. Wake up, Erica, you’ve been had.’

I turned to Doug. ‘You know the importance of fundraising. It is to pay indemnity. We have to restore tribal, national and other levels.’

Doug turned to his case of papers and fished out a page from Master Speaks. He read to me from it that Father said all of that indemnity was paid already. I demanded to see the page. Master Speaks. The first thing that hit me seeing it was the format of the page. The familiarity of it energized me. He snatched it back.

‘Don’t space out on me. I know you are visually programmed. The sight of the thing reinforces your programming. Just read these lines.’

I read them. How did I know the paper wasn’t a forgery. ‘Mother, how could you want me to believe people as low as these. Look at Sara. Look at the way she’s dressed, the way she speaks.’ Sara stiffened.

‘Please don’t smoke in front of me either,’ I demanded. How satanic to fill the room with smoke. She didn’t say a word, just stubbed out her cigarette and put the ashtray outside the door.

‘I won’t smoke in front of you if it bothers you but I’ll tell you this, you spoiled brat, it’s not the smoke that bothers you. It’s this holier-than-thou little goodie-two-shoes routine of yours. Why don’t you come back down to earth with the rest of us mortals. You can’t even answer simple questions. How thin your perfection is when you’re outside your self-centred cult. You think you’ve become more God-like? Is God so arrogant? You think you’re saving the world with Moon’s money? What do you know about responsibility? Do you tend the sick, the poor, do you ever pay income tax?’

‘I’m a missionary without income. I have nothing to pay tax on.’

‘Maybe, but you have to file every year with the government anyway. When was the last time you filed?’

‘Okay, so I didn’t file last year, big deal.’

The morning dragged on. They kept talking from man’s point-of-view. I kept talking from God’s point-of-view.

We broke for lunch and, while we ate at least, the crew eased up on me. As soon as I put my plate down, Danny looked over at me through narrowed eyes.

‘So, Moon’s still the messiah, huh?’

I had to fight to keep the food from coming back up. There was just no point going on like this. We could discuss until Satan’s restoration and they still wouldn’t make sense.

‘You can say what you want but you’ll never make me lose my love for Father.’

‘Erica, when we point things out, just assess them as they are, at face value. If the Bible says one thing and Doctrine X contradicts it, then that doctrine is wrong if it claims to be harmonious with the Bible. You click off when anything threatens Moon. You have no ego, no mind of your own. You’ve got two possibilities: a) Moon is the messiah, b) Moon is not the messiah. If it helps you, let’s not say Moon, we’ll say Mr X instead. Now, he’s either the messiah or he’s not. He can’t sort of be the messiah, agreed?’

It took us a long time to get on equal footing. Finally he got me to accept, for the sake of argument, the hypothetical.

‘If he is the messiah, we can all pack up and go home. If he’s not the messiah and has claimed to be, then what is he?’

I couldn’t fill in the blank.

‘If he’s not the messiah and he’s claimed to be, then he’s a fraud. Now, how can we determine if he is or not? Glad you asked that question, folks. Let’s make it really easy on him and not even use the acid test. We’ll just let him cut his own throat. He says that God is eternal, absolute and unchanging, further that he is the second Christ. It follows, seeing as God doesn’t change His mind, Moon must jive with what the first Christ said about Christ’s mission.’

This was not so difficult to accept as the initial point. Once he got rolling, I could follow him after a fashion. As soon as he pulled out the Bible to substantiate what he said, to prove that Jesus and Father did not agree, I was hopelessly lost again. Every time he made a point, I would do a quick scan through Purpose/Fall/Restoration.

I was aware of the binary functioning of my brain. Each question entered and was shuffled off down yes/no corridors until it met the proper answer or a dead end. Something like a pinball machine. I worked the flippers like mad but the balls just rolled down the chute. Danny would send the ball shooting out again and I made the same scan through Principle with the same result. Sometimes a phantom answer would appear but it would vanish either before or after the question passed through. I couldn’t hold both a question that didn’t compute and a phantom answer that didn’t compute. One of them faded as I concentrated on the other.

Danny was well versed in the Bible. If only Kadachi or Alex could have been with me. Surely they would know the answers. There had to be Divine Principle reasons why the Bible was wrong, I just didn’t know them. After a while my attention scattered. When we talked about the Family, I felt my mind become agile again but as soon as Danny started up with his Bible, my brain felt like cotton and my eyelids started to droop.

Some people came in the room quietly like they were entering a theatre after the show had started. I felt like I was on the operating table in an arena for medical students. Bright lights and someone saying, ‘Here we see the soul exposed, badly lacerated. The heart is bleeding and the mind is twisted. Some of this will be corrected through surgery but the patient will probably never be healthy again.’

One of the visitors, a middle-aged man with a kind face picked up Danny’s Bible and leafed through it. I braced myself for a raging born-again argument ‘You believe you’re doing God’s will, don’t you?’ Probably next he was going to ask me if I knew God’s will by telephone or telegram. I set my jaw. It’s too long a story to explain — if I told you that I know God when I see Father, you’d never understand.

‘You’d do whatever Moon asked you to, wouldn’t you?’ ‘He would never ask me to do anything that was not the will of God.’

‘What if he asked you to kill your mother?’

‘ — ’

‘Why don’t you answer me?’

‘ — ’

‘Forget about answering that question. Your silence tells me what I really wanted to know: you actually have to sit and think about whether or not you’d kill your mother if a man told you to. A man, Erica, not a god, and you are under his control.’

He snatched up the Bible. The sound of the turning pages was like trees falling in the forest.

‘“If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his own family, he has disowned the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” The Bible says to help the poor, to help other people. Jesus didn’t tell his followers to give Him their possessions. He told them to distribute them among the needy. Do you believe that is a good thing to do?’

I nodded.

‘Well, then, that makes you better than True Father, doesn’t it? You want to give to the poor and your messiah only wants to take everything for himself.’

I was too weary to begin to explain to him the meaning of the Economic Restoration. When Jesus was on earth, it was the mission of the messiah to serve mankind. For the Second Coming, it became the duty of mankind to serve the messiah.

He wouldn’t let go of that point. That makes you a better person than your Master of the Universe, doesn’t it?

‘You have more compassion than he does. You don’t see anything wrong with him keeping everything for himself?’

I thought back to Father’s visit that had left me so desolated. I remembered that the brothers and sisters from the centres drove through the night to get back to their centres and sleep only an hour or two before having to drive back for Father’s morning address. Meanwhile, Father was sleeping in silk sheets. He could have at least let them sleep in the garage. One driver fell asleep and his van had gotten into an accident.

I began to cry. The man holding the Bible was looking at me waiting for an answer. I couldn’t speak. He put the Bible down and cradled me. So long I had been giving, giving, giving everything I had. He rocked me gently and whispered, ‘Don’t worry, baby, we’re right here. Don’t be afraid. We’re all going to see you through this, doll.’ He didn’t try to hush me, he just let me cry. I tried picturing True Father in my mind but I could not see him comforting me like this. I couldn’t believe that even in the Spirit World he was beside me. All I knew was the here-and-now of things and their realness. Fear gripped me — so this is how Satan would win me — with confusion, with trying to soften the warrior in me.

I heard myself make the man promise he would come back the following day. When he went to the door, I got up and extended my hand, Moonie-style, to shake hands with him. He grabbed me in a bear hug and ruffled my hair, ‘You’re gonna be all right, kid.’

With the others, discussions went on without either side gaining. I retreated under the blanket. Only my head showed, propped on the pillow. Doug and Sara and Jill continued. They would go through a point and ask me to clarify my side of it. I had just not studied enough, not read enough Master Speaks. There were answers to these things but I did not know them. The things they asked me didn’t matter. I believed in Father.

Sara asked me, ‘What I want to know is why you need so much proof to get out of the group. Lord knows you didn’t need any proof to get into it If I ask you if two plus two is five, do you need to look it up? No! You just use the common sense you had as a child. So why, if I show you things that don’t add up by Moon’s system, can’t you see it?’

Danny came over and ripped the blanket off me. ‘It’s the dead of summer, you know. The rest of us are sweating. What are you, a foetus? Sit up and join the human race.’

I grabbed the corner of the blanket and we each tugged our end of it. ‘Well, I see you have enough strength to fight for your baby blanket, don’t you have enough strength to fight for your mind? We’ve been sitting here hour after hour force-feeding you. Where’s your interest? Some disciple you are. Let’s assume that Moon is the messiah and we’re satanic. Don’t you have a lot to learn from us? You should be picking our brains for all we’ve got, go back to your cult and show them the blueprint of the opposition. You’re a lousy Moonie, I’ll say, and you’re not much of a human being. Your brain doesn’t work. We ask a simple question and you either space out or tell us something Moon said. I think we might as well just cover you up with this blanket and stick you six feet under, babe.’

He smiled. ‘But it’d be a shame, ’cause I know you’re in there, somewhere. I know because I’ve been through it. I’m only tough on you because someone’s gotta do it, otherwise we’d sit here playing games. Honest, I’m really a decent guy.’ We both started laughing. ‘We drew straws to see who would play the part of the heavie. Doug and I were arguing about it, weren’t we bro? We both accused the other of getting the part last time. I’ll tell you what, you think he’s sweet? He can be a worse son-of-a-bitch than I.’ That was signal for them to start rough-housing. We all needed a break. I went to the bathroom.

I closed the bathroom door. I’d had chances to be alone for a few moments like this in the Family but it wasn’t the same. I was never alone-alone. I looked at myself in the mirror, something I so rarely did that I knew Father’s face better than I knew my own. I noticed my locket. It had been given to me by Maria and was engraved: ITPN. In True Parents’ Name. Kadachi-san explained to me that it was blasphemy to abbreviate Parents’ name even in that much-used phrase that we signed our letters with. I wore it with some embarrassment but refused to take it off because it was given to me by my spiritual child. Maria got kicked out of the Family. Dr Baum ordered me not to talk to her anymore, even when she called up desperate to be allowed back into the Family. She was so exhausted after Yankee Stadium that she had stayed in bed for three days and Dr Baum turned her out for a problem of attitude. It tore me in two to have to refuse to come to the telephone when she called up pleading.

I unlocked the chain. That same chain had once held the cross given to me by Father Peter. Reverend Kropf made me remove it because the cross was a symbol of Satan’s victory. Inside the locket were pictures of Father and Mother. I looked at them.

I had heard that deprogrammers were likely to deface pictures of Parents and nothing could be worse, but I liked them all — even, perhaps especially, Danny. Deprogrammers could torture brothers and sisters but we had to protect Parents to the death. I removed the pictures and swallowed them to save them from harm. Everything was out of focus in my mind. As we talked in the room, the obvious Principle answers were in my mind. They were my mind. But at some point, I don’t know when, a second answer started to appear, a phantom that would hover and then disappear like the tiny stars you can only see if you look slightly away from them. The two answers would passively cancel one another and only the question would remain until I could no longer remember it. I looked at the locket in my hand. I was of two minds, two hearts. It seemed a millstone around my neck. I left it on the toilet tank.

‘Let’s talk about this messiah of yours,’ Sara. ‘Do you know anything about his past?’

I did. He had seen Jesus when he was sixteen, had been in prison before he began his ministry.

‘Did you know that the university where he claims to have gotten a degree in electrical engineering has no record of him? No record by either name. His real name isn’t Sun Myung Moon, you know. He changed it from a name that means shining dragon — sounds more like the Beast than the messiah. He’s been married before, arrested for indecent acts. He’s a common thug, a businessman, a criminal. He’s a pimp and he’s got kids like you out on the street hustling for him. He even claims to be a Jew, doesn’t he?’

‘Well, a descendant of the House of David. I guess that would make him a Jew.’

‘Funny since he claims that the Orientals are descendants of Japheth and the Jews of Shem. How do you feel about him saying that the six million who died under Hitler died because it was God’s will. This coming from a Jew.’

‘You answer that yourself. You’re the guys who claim to have all the answers.’

‘Sit up,’ Sara urged. ‘Come on, don’t cop out now. You should be defending your faith. There’s nothing wrong with thinking about things. Think! If you’re trying to find the answer in the DP, you won’t find it because the answer is just not there. Two and two will never equal five.’

My mind was elsewhere. I looked at the stack of papers. The reverse of an article we had just read was on the top of the heap. It showed a reproduction of a painting of Jesus on the cross. It was exquisite. It reminded me of the fresco I used to study in the Greek Orthodox cathedral Jesus of infinite tenderness and dignity, Jesus who by His deeds gave meaning to life. Across the stack on another part of the floor was a picture of Reverend Moon. His pudgy, glistening face peered up at me. My eyes went from one to the other, from Jesus to Reverend Moon and back again.

Sara and the others seemed at a standstill. Sara picked up the Bible and leafed through it. She stopped at a page in Genesis and handed the book to me. ‘Read that. Start with Genesis 2:24.’

I read aloud: ‘Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Now the serpent was more subtle than any other —’

‘Stop right there,’ said Sara.

I looked up at her.

‘Don’t you see it? Adam and Eve were husband and wife before the Fall, not brother and sister; husband and wife, one flesh. They did not fall because they had sex before becoming perfect. And further, Lucifer fell before them because it says that Eve was tempted by a serpent, not the Archangel.’

I looked back at the page. My vision sharpened with an almost audible click. My face burned, my blood was pounding through my body. I looked back up at her. Sara was waiting.

What happened next happened clearly, frame by frame, but was all contained in a split second.

What was spectacular was not the question nor the answer but a total sensation that I had to acknowledge and identify. Doubt, I called it. Doubt. Perhaps I could entertain the possibility that what they were saying was true. I felt myself peering over a cliff. The abyss was so without light and without bottom that the shock weakened me. I feared I would fall and equally feared remaining on the edge. But no sooner did the shock seize me than I found myself on the opposite side.

The split second came as I was handing the Bible back to Sara. ‘Well, then, what was the Fall?’

‘I’ll tell you my interpretation but there are many. Everyone in this house would tell you something different and some don’t even have an opinion or couldn’t care less. That’s all okay. That’s what life’s about.’

It never occurred to me that people could have different opinions or no opinion at all. I was sure that these people would try to destroy the Divine Principle and then unveil their truth. Subconsciously, I must have believed that it would be the antithesis of goodness and that ... what a totally astounding idea that I could choose what I wanted to believe. This last idea came as Sara explained that there was no rush on truth, that I would have the rest of my life to think about things. Still, most of my mind believed that the non-Family force had the scoop on the Fall.

Sara handed me back the Bible and pointed to Genesis 3:5. It read: ‘For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’

She stated simply, ‘If you are tempted to place yourself in the throne of power you lose your innocence and you learn the true nature of good and evil.’

At dinner-time my face was still burning. The message came in from the kitchen to find out what I wanted to drink with dinner – milk, juice, water, coke.

‘Make it a gin and tonic.’

‘Getta load of her,’ Danny nudged Doug. ‘Queen-for-a-Day is having herself a drink. Hey, no drinking on the job.’

‘Well then, we’ll take a break — and while we’re at it we can call a truce until dinner’s over. What do you say? I won’t call you Clint Eastwood and you won’t ask me if Reverend Moon is the messiah.’

I felt frisky and in a mood for celebrating something but I had nothing to celebrate. I didn’t want to cope with anything. I concentrated on my dinner.

‘Compliments to the chef!’ I called out. ‘Must’ve been you, Mom, no one cooks like you.’

Different sensations were rushing me, things I’d never known could be sensations — like spontaneity. Not checking the catalogue in my brain before or after a thought or action. Sara sat next to me with her plate.

‘Yeah, your mom is a great cook. I’ll tell you, she’s a great lady. Sure it was easy for you to make the choice between your family and the cult because you never lose your family so it’s not a real choice. You can cut them off, mistreat them, but they always love you. Moon wouldn’t know you if he tripped over you. You couldn’t get through to him on the phone now if you wanted him to come and rescue you. But your real parents? They’d go through anything to rescue you and believe me, they already have. I know you couldn’t have looked your mother in the face and told her that Mrs Moon is your True Mother. You’ve got a lot to learn about parenthood. You know how Moon is always saying that his members are more loving than anyone else and they have ‘Parental Heart’ — honey, you could never fathom what real caring is. You’ve been in a make-believe world. Moon used you. Your parents never stopped caring, never gave up on you.’

My tears were hot They had nothing to do with what she was saying. The thought of my mother’s love made me feel that I could love myself, forgive myself, cleanse myself of the never-ending guilt I had felt in the Family. For once I could feel that I had given of myself, that I was a good person. No matter what Sara said, I was not a spoiled brat. I was sincerely trying to do the best thing. I felt the two of me, one pitiful and the other pitying.

Doug joined us. He had a VOC lecture book in his hand. ‘You know, what really gets me is how you went on and on so self-righteously about Moon being against communism. What do you or anyone else in the group really know about it? Did you know that Moon uses the identical methods of indoctrination? You have the world so sharply divided between Satan and God, black and white. Do you think that fascism is any better than communism? Was Hitler any better than Stalin? I can see the Moonies on trial saying, “I was only following orders”. What about democracy?’ He paused and fished in his case for some papers.

‘You need only one error in the Divine Principle to make it false. We’ve shown you hundreds. It’s a strange thing about mind control — if you demolish most of the doctrine and leave just a tiny bit standing, the mind hangs onto it.’

Evening brought another guest. Mom had been talking about a young man who had been deprogrammed from the Divine Light Mission. She was glad that he had been able to arrange the time to come and talk with me. He talked about his job, asked how I was feeling, stayed away from heavy subjects. It was hard for me to remember how conversations were supposed to go. By the time he got to the end of a question, I had forgotten the first part of it. He sensed that I was bleary.

He set up a tape recorder for me to hear a speech by his former guru. A man with a funny accent was saying something like: when you have evil thoughts, push them out of your mind. Because your mind troubles you, give it to me. It won’t trouble me.

The young man rolled his eyes ceiling-ward. We all laughed yet it was a frightening tape. How could you be told what and what not to think? Imagine someone telling people not to use their —

Father ‘I am your thinker. I am your brain.’

Lectures: Have no give and take with negative thoughts.

It suddenly wasn’t so funny. Change the accent a little and —

The young man nodded when I looked up at him with this realization spilling out of me. The room was filled with people. Such a small room, so many conversations like a cocktail party. No one noticed the crucial understanding in that exchanged glance. It didn’t matter. In the Family everything had to be noticed, examined, accounted for and nothing belonged to me. It was always public knowledge, any private thought. This understanding was for me alone, accountable to me, a me exists. In the Family everything was given equally ultimate significance. Things do have different values. So no one noticed me. So what.

I was resting my head in my mother’s lap and she stroked my hair distractedly. She was engrossed in a conversation with Doug. Jill and Sara were laughing about something in the corner. The others were getting up to go into the kitchen. The young man from the Indian cult stretched out between my mother and the wall.

Why hadn’t Father told us about these other groups — so many of them? Sara had read me the testimonies of people I thought were all ex-Family members. Turns out they were from several other groups. All else aside, Father should have explained to us the truth about cults and mind control for our own sake.

‘Would you like to go out with me sometime?’ The young man had a nice smile.

I laughed. ‘Under the circumstances, that’s a very tempting offer.’ The escape I had wanted. I was surprised when I found myself telling him to call me at my mother’s house to arrange a date. Would I be living there?

‘Wherever you are, I’ll find you. All the employees where I work are going to Disneyland for an evening, you know, when they close the park down for a private party. Would you like to do something like that?’

Be anonymous again? Be a part of life with no one looking over my shoulder? Laugh at simple things?

How had it happened? It seemed that as soon as I entertained the possibility of something other than Principle, my prison vanished. I was free. Confused but free.

What about True Parents? I loved Father and could see him accusing me of being Judas. I pictured the photos from the locket. I visualized the image of Parents deep inside me. They would stay there until I dealt with them later. I would deal with everything later.

Before I fell asleep, Jill came in. She sat down where I was snuggled under the covers. ‘Know what I did the other night? I went down to the ocean. I kicked off my shoes and walked along the shore. I found a place to sit and I just sat there feeling the wind on my face, listening to the waves, smelling the salt air, letting the feeling of the sea surround me. I thought to myself: I am free. I can think anything I want.’

I was jealous of her. How wonderful to go to the sea. To sit at the shore and belong to no one. That most sacred and private place between me and me had been violated. I wanted the salt air to cleanse me, renew me.

What do you do when a huge section of your life is spliced out and the two ends fit neatly back together as if that time had never been — when you wonder where that lost time went but you’re still in it like a phantom — when you wonder who that other person in the time spliced out was but at the same time realize that that other person is the most familiar core of what you are made of — when you are relieved to the point of euphoria and terrified at the same time (both for no apparent reason and for endless reasons) — when you can’t go back to being that old self at the past end of the splice and certainly aren’t the self you haven’t been yet at the future end — and the reality of the matters at hand is so crushing that it requires the equivalent of a session of parliament in your brain to decide if you want a cup of coffee and when none of that really matters because everything emanates a calm like the warbling of birds after the bombing has stopped and you know the bombs will never fall again.

Another good night of sleep. In the morning we breakfasted and talked. I was aware that I no longer had any opinions about anything. I was blank. The blast had taken everything out by the roots. I was amazed that Danny and Doug disagreed on various things. The outside world was now my world and it was not united. Doug was talking to me about switching over from my absolutist frame of mind. He said that the doctrine wasn’t so important but the way I thought. Not which things were painted black and which were painted white, because these varied from cult to cult. All ex-members, he said, had to get away from thinking in black-and-white terms and start looking at the shades of grey. I was miles ahead of him. I was dealing with technicolour. Let out of a dark hole into the blazing sunlight, the eyes of my mind winced closed.

I didn’t want to leave the deprogramming room for the time. I didn’t feel deprogrammed. I was to learn that deprogramming only starts the mind thinking again, asking questions. It doesn’t provide the answers.

I was brought into the living room. The team was relaxed, limbs draped over the furniture, every comment followed by a soft round of chuckles. The world had never looked so wholesome, so inviting. It seemed that milk and honey, or sunlight or some tangible substance of peace was flowing out of everything.

Dana and his wife stopped by. They were on their way back to France. Dana told me a little bit about the concerts he was doing. His wife told me about her dress when I admired it. Alice showed me pictures of her children. Tears still formed in her eyes when she looked at me and several times she put her arm around me to say what she couldn’t find words for. She promised me that I would have a wonderful life. I hoped I didn’t look to her like someone who needed a glass of warm milk. The drifts of conversation carried jokes and casual swearing I found offensive. It was all too much for a mind that was racing nowhere fast. I wandered back into the deprogramming room and curled up on the floor with the pillow. Danny followed me in and plunked himself down.

‘Wanna talk?’

‘Sure.’

I didn’t, really. I just wanted to absorb the racing.

‘Spit it out.’

It wasn’t a matter of spitting, it was a matter of running to all the vast frontiers of my brain at once with a sieve to catch evaporating thoughts. It came out something like this:

‘Dan, I want you to watch me. I think I might be too clever, like I might be fooling you — or me — or something. I want to be deprogrammed or not deprogrammed. Maybe you know what I mean.’

‘Sorry, lady, I know what you’re going through but I can’t help you. You have to do this one alone. The ball, as they say, is in your court.’

‘What did you do after you left the Children of God?’

‘Why, so you can do the same? Sorry, I ain’t gonna be your new messiah. Besides, I don’t think you’d want to do what I did. When I found out that Moses David wasn’t the end-time prophet, I got sick. I just started to vomit. I was in bed shivering and sweating and Sara stayed up with me. It was a long time before I could go back and understand what had happened. I floated a lot. Floating means when you snap back into your programme. You’re probably not far enough out to snap back into it but when you do — it’s an eerie feeling —’

‘Like being back in the cult but not being there? Like phantoms?’

‘Like phantoms.’

Danny stood up and moved for the door. ‘Piecing things back together takes a long time. You have to learn to be patient with yourself — like when you get your leg out of a cast, you can’t run on it right away.’

I could hear the others laughing in the living room. I stared at the carpet. My senses were like bees out of the hive. I could see the carpet. The blue was so intense I could almost hear it. I could take the feel of it under my hands. I could feel my heart beat. A few moments, a few precious moments of awareness. I would have a lifetime of them. Cradling myself I thought no one, no one can ever take this away from me. Yet hadn’t someone already done that? Yes, I would have to have patience even to find the place to begin again.

‘Honey?’ My mother was standing at the door. ‘Can you come here for a minute? We want to ask you something.’ In the next room Chuck was sitting on the bed. Mom shut the door. The floor was piled high with a tangle of clothes spilling out of half-open suitcases. My mother sat on the edge of the bed, choosing her words gingerly.

‘How do you feel?’

‘Like Lazarus. Whatever the question, the answer is probably going to be “why not”?’

‘Erica, we have to decide what you’re going to do now. You know that you have all the time in the world and that we’re always here for you but Sara thinks it would be a good idea for you to go home with her for a while. Some time to rest and learn some more. She has answers we simply don’t have. There is so much more you have to sort out for yourself.’

The thought appealed to me. Of course, just like the ladies in nineteenth-century novels who took a cruise or sojourned at an auntie’s when they were grieving. But on the heels of this came an image of Sara’s house. So many new things to cope with. She would have friends visiting. The thought of having to face anyone new was staggering. Of having to fill my time. If only I could hide away, but where? I didn’t want to see anyone I knew, not even my sister, until I was better. Before I could finish the thought, a tidal wave of tears tore everything loose. They were not tears of self-pity, frustration or grief. They were not tears of relief. They were tears I was born with. I wanted to cry to the bottom of them so I would never have to cry again. I don’t know how long we were there, Mom and Chuck crying too before Sara poked her head in the door.

‘Mind?’ she abbreviated.

Mom and Chuck exited. Sara curled up on the bed.

‘Enough clothes for the first six months, eh? I’ll say. It’s been what, two or three days? You sure don’t travel light ’ I found a sleeve of something to mop my face with.

‘Coming to New York with me?’ Sara never cut any fancy footwork, never introduced a subject. She searched my face. The invitation was sincere.

I grinned. ‘When do we leave?’

pages 228-236

2

When you hurt yourself somehow, fall down or get in a fight, you walk away thinking you’re feeling pain until you wake up the next morning and the soreness has set in and you puff up and turn every colour of the rainbow. I was going along for a while thinking, jeez, there’s not much to this when the shock wave returned from its journey of reverberation and smacked me. I was so bottomed-out physically that I didn’t get to the mental problems for a long time.

Most of the first month I slept I’d get up at ten and be back in bed by three in the afternoon. It was hot and humid. I shared Sara’s bedroom, a converted attic. There were windows at both ends under the eaves and the heavy summer wind passed through the room. Whenever I closed my eyes and put my head on the pillow, I felt I was falling into a thick darkness with such a strong force that there was no way to hold back. Sleep locked me into a blackness violently swarming with images. I would wake up screaming or imagining that I had screamed. No matter where she was in the house, Sara would hear me make the slightest stir and would appear at my side to put on the light, smooth down the covers and listen to me until I was quiet again.

It was during that time that I became familiar with a nightmare that recurred for years. A black ocean devoid of life. No matter how far inland I was, the waves would find me and suck me out to the depths. It was not the water that frightened me because I could breathe in it. It wasn’t a fear of sharks or sea monsters. Not even a microbe lived in the sterile inkyness. It was the power and vastness of it.

I was extremely sensitive to light and sounds. Crowds made me dizzy; the faces would blend and I’d grow faint. My memory and attention spans were useless. I couldn’t read or converse for more than a few minutes without getting completely worn down and needing a rest Reading a newspaper article could take an hour. How would I ever catch up on the world since my Rip Van Winkle sleep in the cult? I even had to learn about the things I’d not been isolated from but merely blanked out of my perception like the changes in clothing styles.

Sara had to keep reminding me to think for myself, to not look to her for opinions, to not soak up whatever I heard. But she had little trouble getting me to try new things. Boating, skating, concerts, dancing, water-skiing — but not all things came easily. Remembering how I had served Kadachi-san and all the guests at headquarters house soft drinks and had never been allowed to drink something so fine myself, I swore I’d drink the stuff until I burst In the cult I had served from bottles and didn’t know that drink cans had since changed and were manufactured with pop tabs. I saw the cans in the fridge and balked. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to figure out how to open one and didn’t venture to try for several months. I never knew when I would excel and when I would fail, when the next step would be on rotten floorboards or on no floor at all. I glossed over with what I hoped was a sophisticated appearance by remembering things from the old Erica.

Sara read me as if I had neon signs flashing what I needed. When something needed to be resolved, she never hesitated to draw me into discussion but dancing the polka at Polish weddings, sitting on the front stoop eating watermelon, taking a martini break from a shopping spree, washing the dog and chasing each other around the yard with the hose — these did more for me than years of psychotherapy ever could have.

I shuddered to think if I had been institutionalized instead of deprogrammed I would have been in a hospital for years getting worse. Sara knew what she was doing. She had first gotten involved when her brother fell prey to a nomadic cult and disappeared. He got arrested hundreds of miles away and when they went to claim him, they found a total stranger who spoke in Bible verse, wore a long robe and had been surviving by scrounging food from garbage tins. After straightening him out, handling a Moonie was a piece of cake.

She took me out to meet people — seemed like she knew everyone in the whole state. We gave talks about mind control. We’d pull into a small town, talk to the school kids, the local paper, the service club luncheon and then have the whole town turn out in the evening to hear us speak at the church. What a welcome to the Fallen World! Total strangers listening to me with tears in their eyes, pinching my cheeks, giving me their addresses in case I ever needed them for anything. The warmth and attention were wonderful but I started to feel like a circus exhibit.

Sara started doing deprogrammings at home. It was my turn to say: I’ve been in your shoes. Every time I watched a deprogramming, another huge burden was lifted. They didn’t all break out of mind control in the same way. Kara from Ananda Marga let out screams that shook the house and Billy from The Way calmly balanced his Bible on his knee, took off his spectacles to wipe them and observed, ‘Well, it certainly appears that I’ve been deceived.’ Some said nothing but flushed in stunned silence. It was always miraculous to see the real person suddenly rush into the robot shell.

We worked together on floating until each person learned to handle it alone. We recognized the symptoms in one another instantly and instinctively. Sometimes the eyes would glaze over or the person would drop out of conversation. My own mind was like a minefield. I never knew when I’d trip an explosion. Sometimes I’d catch it like a contact high from one of the others, sometimes a phrase, a snatch of a song, maybe an unresolved bit of doctrine and always parking lots. Going to stores was a trial. I’d automatically check the lot for the flow, for the clues from Spirit World. If no one else was around, I’d work myself into a panic. I’d think what if, what if. If they are right, I’ve been deceived by Satan. My mind would start pacing and sniffing its old haunt, Purpose/Fall/ Restoration, and I’d snap back, or only half snap back and be spread between here and nowhere.

The thing to do was trace the floating back and resolve the problem that had triggered it In the cult they told us to cut off doubt Sara encouraged it Challenge, weigh, delve, decide. In the cult they told us that everything about the other world was evil. Sara told us not to destroy our good memories and benefits from the cult, people we loved, things we had learned and overcome.

Floating was only the punctuation, not the constant

The constant was exhilaration. The intensity of it was sure to illuminate the rest of my life. Every time I encountered something, I considered it as if I had never known of it before. There is an essence one can sometimes feel for a quiver of a moment when he looks at the stars. I felt that all the time. The smallest thing was not without its glory. Being able to sit down without permission, without guilt Buying a postage stamp with my own money and being able to send a letter of my very own thoughts to anyone. Feeling the wind, seeing the buildings, smelling the earth, letting my imagination run free. And being able to say no.

This expanding, more than anything else, combated floating. I simply could not fit back into that narrow mental slot. When I realized that, I knew that even though I was not completely healed, it was time for me to get back into the world.

I was prepared to enter society at the bottom rung, having been used to meeting handicaps that I never knew I had until I found myself in a situation for which I was not equipped. It took me a long time to realize that part of my handicap at this stage was being too advanced. By having met my weaknesses and shortcomings I had become stronger and wiser than most people who simply refused to admit to human frailty. I kept thinking I was wrong because I didn’t fit in but it was still the same old world that didn’t make sense.

There were practical problems that hit me left and right How to explain that blank in my resume when applying for a job. Say that I was off on independent study in some remote place or tell the truth and risk losing out on the job? Getting a driver’s licence, opening a bank account, getting references to rent a flat — meeting new people, especially dating, I always wondered if I should tell the story or not If I didn’t tell it, I would remain a stranger and if I did, I’d have to tell the whole thing knowing that when I’d finished, the person was not likely to have changed his view that cults are harmless groups of people who are better off where they are. When I was speaking to groups in New York, the people had been friendly because they pitied me. Now I was learning that no one really understood.

One of my old friends invited me to a high school reunion party. I mingled: a singer, a local politician, a craftsman, a journalist One woman arrived late. The talk quieted down as she made her entrance and hellos. ‘Sorry I’m late, guys. You’ll never believe what held me up. I stopped at a gas station and some Moonie came up trying to sell me flowers!’

The whole room burst into laughter. I looked down at my drink. The girl I’d been talking to turned to resume the conversation. ‘And what have you been up to since I last saw you, Erica?’

The thing that got me most upset was when people asked why I had become a Moonie and then didn’t notice at all how uncomfortable I was in answering. They’d never think to ask in casual conversation, tell us about how you became a quadriplegic in your motorcycle accident or tell us about watching your best friend get blown to bits in Vietnam and, oh, pass the chips, won’t you?

I found out that my brother had tried to foil the deprogramming. He thought my mother was over-reacting and shouldn’t treat me like a baby by bailing me out of trouble. He thought it was a fad, a phase I’d pass through. He wanted to phone me at the camp to tip me off to get out before she came to get me. Luckily, he wasn’t motivated enough to follow through. When I saw him, I asked him about it He scoffed at the idea that I had been brainwashed. Okay, big brother, what if you are right and I had just happened to, say, be into self-mutilation and your little plan had worked? He was unmoved. According to him, my great failing was that I just hadn’t been cool, hadn’t been doing the in thing, something I was still guilty of. I decided, after a time, to put my thoughts to him in a letter. The letter came back to me. He had scrawled across it ‘I’m rubber, you’re glue ...’ from the rhyme we used to taunt each other with as children ‘… anything you say bounces off me and sticks to you’. Welcome home, sis.

Surely someone would understand. I went to speak to a rabbi who reduced me to tears by ridiculing me for having toyed with Christianity and then to a minister who said I would have never become a Moonie if I had studied Christianity better. Father Peter was too embarrassed to discuss it I was barking up the wrong tree. It wasn’t a religious problem but a psychological one.

I finally came across a lukewarm article on the subject in an obscure publication and wrote to the author. He referred me to the only person he knew who had any knowledge of cults. I went to see this professor and gladly consented to having our talk taped for use in his book. A totally misleading sliver of one of my remarks later appeared in a Moonie PR book. I then heard that this professor was on Moon’s payroll as a functionary at the annual international conference that a Dr Moon with eyeglasses hosts for eminent scientists.

After the Jonestown tragedy, an informational hearing was called in Washington, DC. The Moonie campaign to have the event cancelled did not succeed but they pressured enough that the Moonie president was called to testify and ex-members were not.

Hundreds of Moonies had the place mobbed by dawn. A friend, fearing for my safety, got me into the hearing room before the doors were opened to the public. First the press came in, bright lights, scuffle, equipment being set up, the sound of people filling up the room behind me and then a peculiar and familiar stench. That smell I could never get rid of on the fundraising team. I turned around and saw the entire hall filled with Moonies. As people stood in turn to give their presentations, the Moonies jeered, stomped their feet, hurled insults. Security guards, panelists, press all stiffened at the unpredictability of this confrontation. Wasn’t it the right of a governing body to gather information after the assassination of a congressmen and the death of over 900 others? How many were the Moonies willing to sacrifice to protect themselves? One of the ex-cultists prevented from testifying who had lost her tiny son in the suicide-massacre shook like a leaf when the Moonie president spoke in her stead. The Moonies rose as a man with a deafening cheer.

I wasn’t going to hang around. I pushed my way through the knotted crowd towards a side exit. Almost there but someone was blocking my path. I tapped his shoulder to move him aside. He spun around and faced me. Baum.

‘Erica, it’s-so-good-to-see-you, we’ve-been-so-worried-about-you.’

Yeah, so worried you’ve been losing sleep thinking what deprogrammed fundraisers will do to Moon’s bank account. I tried to step past He kept talking so fast he was spitting.

‘Listen, Sister, I-know-that-you-think-I’m-possessed-by-evil-spirits and we-think-that-you’re-possessed-by-evil-spirits, but-that-doesn’t-mean-that —’

‘Bob,’ I luxuriated in the heresy of addressing him like that and putting my hand on his shoulder, ‘I don’t believe in evil spirits.’

‘What?’ He took in a sharp breath and seemed to grow visibly larger with disbelief and indignation. ‘Well... don’t you believe in God?’ He had on a red and white pinstripe shirt that had an odd optical effect of making him seem to vibrate all the more.

‘You mean a person can’t believe in God without believing in little invisible things running around that make people open their wallets and fall asleep on the highway?’

I still love you, Bob, but not in a way you could understand. Not because doctrine says I must, not to show how super-spiritual I am.

‘I know you weren’t one of those jeering and stomping your feet You were always dignified and knew to turn the other cheek.’

His smile caught me off guard. Then I checked the eyes. They were blazing. ‘Oh, no. Oh, no.’ His head bobbled. ‘Things have changed. The time has come. The course has changed from a passive one to one of aggression. We’re on the offensive now.’

All the times Moon had spoken about military aggression. All the times we listened with our lids fluttering closed, as he droned on in his hypnotic way, punctuating with militaristic words, of battle, of enemy, of charging and crushing, defeating, subjugating, annihilating, of taking over the government, the United Nations, the whole world. Baum had me by both arms. I looked toward the door, searching wildly for a face I knew. Two friends spotted me. They flanked me and moved me through the door into an empty corridor. Baum ran after me, shouting, dancing to himself, trying to pry one of the men loose.

‘Leave her alone, Baum, can’t you see she doesn’t want to talk to you?’

‘Never mind that. You have to answer to a few things, Erica. What about this article in Newsweek? Why did you lie, Erica? Why are you saying things about us that you know aren’t true? You can’t do that, you can’t get away with it.’ He had his lips peeled back, lunging forward at every question. What did he intend to do about it? The press had already gone for the story about suicide training in the Moonies, about members being taught how to slash their wrists. Ex-members everywhere were crawling out of the woodwork. I wasn’t the only one talking.

Off the corridor behind one of the endless unmarked doors we stood. We’d ditched Baum. I was shaking. I sank into a chair.

I was shaking because I knew that but for a flick of fate, Baum and I could have traded places.

And by that same fate I had once been a model Moonie, a hard-liner like Baum. Would I not have made a model Nazi? Had not both the victim and the victimizer lived within me? Was I not now cast out forever from the innocence I once enjoyed? Moon had held out the forbidden fruit and my eyes had been opened to know good and evil.

#FFWPU #Family Federation for World Peace and Unification #Moonies #Unification Church #Sun Myung Moon #Erica Heftmann

[the-kipsabian]

Also sparkleharper and/or spaceharper

sparkleharper ~

Who offers their jacket when the other is cold?jared. this smol thing on his side cant be cold, nope he wont allow. his sparkles will keep him warm lol

Who giggles uncontrollably when the other playfully picks them up?idk how many times i can repeat myself, but mads will just. yell. and she cant pick up jared so yep

Who compliments the other in front of everyone?jareddddd. mostly cause thats just what he does tbh. and mads doesnt need to say anything to compliment him in front of everybody tbh, everyone already knows how fantastic the school senpai is lol

Who is more likely to tell the other a pun and what is the other’s reaction to the pun?i think in this case the puns fall on mads to deliver? being the courteous gentleman that he is, jared laughs. pretty much every time, not even depending whether he gets it or not tbh

When one of them has a bad day, what does the other do to help cheer them up?jared puts up a “fashion show” for mads, completed with a photoshoot session of goofy outfits and expressions and googly eyes. when jared needs to distress, mads sits him down, asks him to ramble to her about any recent d&d games and help him plot some really stupid and lighthearted side quests while having a relaxing cup of tea and some kit made cookies

If they got to pick what one another wears for a day, what would one another wear?blue. lots of blue. mads wants jared to wear his blue shirt (”its pretty and its soft and you look so nice in it”) and jared insist she wears one of his shirts (”cause its adorable, they are so big on you”) and her favorite pair of blue jeans. i dont think i need to say why anymore at this point lol

Who introduces their partner to their family first? How does it go?for this, i wanna say mads? jared obviously isnt too keen on introducing anyone to his family, and while mads is very hesitant about this, especially since this is a super well-behaved boy its. gonna get very awkward considering what kind of a bunch of normies my family is mmmm. but jared is a good boio underneath all that rich senpai stuff, so it would probably go very well in the end, actually

In a coffee shop AU, who would be the coffee shop employee and who would be the customer?jared is too pretty to work as a coffee shop employee sssooo hes the customer, and mads is the daydreaming waitress woo

When they sit side by side, do they touch one another? For example, does one person has their arm around the other, do they sit holding hands, or linked arms, ECT.jared definitely. has at least one arm flung around her at like all times. if he needs to be more discreet in like a more public place or whatnot, he holds her hand under the table

What is a small thing that one another does to make their partner happy?jared definitely tries to befriend the stray cats tbh. mads takes his encouragement about herself to heart and whenever jared is feeling down or just generally missing her, she send him little video messages to cheer him on and selfies she wouldnt sent to anyone else cause jared keeps saying he loves seeing her and that makes him happy so dang it shes gonna push past her comfort zone to be more comfortable with herself and make him happy

What would they do to celebrate their one year anniversary?jared would arrange something very elaborate tbh. take her to dinner, possibly see a movie, go to the arcade, win her everything she wants, walks in the moonlight.. literally anything that he can think of, and he would fit it into either one day or over the weekend, if mads seems like shes gonna get exhausted by it

When did they know that loved each other, and when did they first tell each other that they loved one another?i feel like they both had like. hard time actually recognizing when it was love tbh? like yeah mads first falls for him cause of aesthetic reasons, and jared is playing the senpai card of loving every girl, so you cant really tell on the outside when its actually love or when either of them develop like real feelings, but at some point it just. kinda becomes obvious that oh shit i. love this person?? and yeah its jared who definitely says it first tho. its like an offhand remark at first and mads is like ‘what did you say’ and jared repeats it and realizes that oh heck i. actually do mean this??

Who likes to give the other hugs from behind followed by a kiss?jared does this as a combo, mads sneaks in little kisses when hes piggybacking her around tbh

Who would make a playlist for the other person? What would be featured on the playlist?i feel like mads would do that? jared is more about more expensive presents, while mads cant really afford that so she has to pull something selfmade together and yeah, that happens. its mostly like ambient sounds and background music tbh, stuff she thinks will inspire him and what he could use for d&d games and maybe some more upbeat stuff for the fashion shows and for better days

Who would bring their partner on a romantic date under the stars?they could both do this tbh? mads wants to surprise him so she arranges a little cuddling under a blanket while stargazing moment, and jared just does this a lot in general

~~~~~~~~

spaceharper ~

Who offers their jacket when the other is cold?jeff. mom friend habits kick in and they kick in hard. this has also probably been established somewhere in the canon of this route anyways lol

Who giggles uncontrollably when the other playfully picks them up?im gonna keep repeating myself but mads. except that she yells. put her down yall pls

Who compliments the other in front of everyone?mmm i wanna say jeff? but its like. really soft things and its done in almost unnoticeable fashion, like its just really offhand comments like “oh shes so sweet” etc. unless its something that she has given him a permission to share about her writing. then jeff will lose his freaking mind cause eveRYONE NEEDS TO SEE THIS THING MY GF DID OMG

Who is more likely to tell the other a pun and what is the other’s reaction to the pun?i’d imagine jeff is more of a pun man out of these two. he does it very casually tho, like most of the time its not on purpose or he doesnt put much emphasis on it, so most of the time mads just misses it. if she gets it tho, she will most likely laugh

When one of them has a bad day, what does the other do to help cheer them up?jeff arranges some cuddle time, with the help of kit builds a blanket fort, gets some scented candles, and they just cuddle up with some strays and play animal intersection. if its jeff that needs destressing, mads will literally cling onto him until he sits down and just takes it easy - which is her cue to throw a blanket on him, get jeff a cup of tea and just sit down and talk about random nonsense with him to make sure he takes a break from everything

If they got to pick what one another wears for a day, what would one another wear?onesies all day every day. jeff in a hamster onesie, and mads in a fox one

Who introduces their partner to their family first? How does it go?jefffffff. i think ive crossed this topic enough times by now tbh lol

In a coffee shop AU, who would be the coffee shop employee and who would be the customer?mmmm i’d say jeff is the customer? i could see him working in a coffee shop tho, but this pair feels better to me with mads behind the counter tho

When they sit side by side, do they touch one another? For example, does one person has their arm around the other, do they sit holding hands, or linked arms, ECT.jeff does what mads feels comfortable at the moment. usually its just limited to hand holding, tho if they are in relax mode, like playing games and mads doesnt wanna be too cuddled up but still wants to be close enough to jeff, there will at least be her legs in his lap

What is a small thing that one another does to make their partner happy?jeff brings sweets and stray cats. hes also always available for cuddles and advice when needed. mads sends him stupid pictures of her with googly eyes and gets him hamster related gifts cause they made her think of him

What would they do to celebrate their one year anniversary?STARGAZING WITH CANDLE LIGHT PICNIC NEXT QUESTION

When did they know that loved each other, and when did they first tell each other that they loved one another?jeff helps her through some rough times and shes like. oh heck i like this boi like. LIKE him. oh dear goodness me what do. jeff comes somewhere afterwards as they spend more time together and thats where the whole ‘you wanna join hidden club’ thing comes along and only after that jeff has it in him to actually tell her how she feels mmmmalso it would. probably actually be mads who tells him first? jeff has hard time opening up about his feelings even if they are there, so it falls on her to confess about it first yay

Who likes to give the other hugs from behind followed by a kiss?both honestly? tho jeff needs to be sitting down for this lol, but yeah they both do it. its just a cute little way to show the other that hey im glad youre here

Who would make a playlist for the other person? What would be featured on the playlist?probably both? with both asking help from luke cause oh my god wHAT DO

Who would bring their partner on a romantic date under the stars?mads? its one of those nights when jeff really needs to destress and she knows how much he likes space and stars and stuff so she basically drags him out to just lay on the grass and stare up at the sky like yes pls jeff tell me about your plan to shoot hamsters into space again tho i mean when you put it like that its not like. super romantic pfff but you know it doesnt need to be romantic as long as it makes him happy

#asagao!mads #sparkleharper #spaceharper #its been so long since i did spaceharper stuff oh wow #anyways heres thingsssssss yay <3 #coughedfeathers #thank you for asking! <3

[seekfirstme]

The following reflection is courtesy of Don Schwager © 2020. Don's website is located at Dailyscripture.net

Meditation: Why does the Lord Jesus say we must 'hate' our families and even ourselves (Luke 14:26)? In Biblical times the expression 'to hate' often meant to 'prefer less'. Jesus used strong language to make clear that nothing should take precedence or first place over God. God our heavenly Father created us in his image and likeness to be his beloved sons and daughters. He has put us first in his love and concern for our well-being and happiness. Our love for him is a response to his exceeding love and kindness towards us. True love is costly because it holds nothing back from the beloved - it is ready to give all and sacrifice all for the beloved. God the Father gave us his only begotten Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, who freely offered up his life for us on the cross as the atoning sacrifice for our sins. His sacrificial death brought us pardon and healing, new life in the Spirit and peace with God.

The cost of following Jesus as his disciples

Jesus willingly embraced the cross, not only out of obedience to his Father's will, but out of a merciful love for each one of us in order to set us free from slavery to sin, Satan, and everything that would keep us from his love, truth, and goodness. Jesus knew that the cross was the Father's way for him to achieve victory over sin and death - and glory for our sake as well. He counted the cost and said 'yes' to his Father's will. If we want to share in his glory and victory, then we, too, must 'count the cost' and say 'yes" to his call to "take up our cross and follow him" as our Lord and Savior.

What is the 'way of the cross' for you and me? It means that when my will crosses with God's will, then his will must be done. The way of the cross involves sacrifice, the sacrifice of laying down my life each and every day for Jesus' sake. What makes such sacrifice possible and "sweet" for us is the love of God poured out for us in the blood of Christ who cleanses us and makes us a new creation in him. Paul the Apostle tells us that "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us" (Romans 5:5). We can never outmatch God in his merciful love and kindness towards us. He always gives us more than we can expect or imagine. Do you allow the Holy Spirit to fill your heart and transform your life with the overflowing love and mercy of God?

The wise plan ahead to avert failure and shame

What do the twin parables of the tower builder and a ruler on a war campaign have in common (Luke 14:28-32)? Both the tower builder and the ruler risked serious loss if they did not carefully plan ahead to to make sure they could finish what they had begun. In a shame and honor culture people want at all costs to avoid being mocked by their community for failing to complete a task which they had begun in earnest. This double set of parables echoes the instruction given in the Old Testament Book of Proverbs: "By wisdom a house is built" and "by wise guidance you can wage a war" to ensure victory (Proverbs 24:3-6).

In Jesus' time every landowner who could afford it built a wall around his orchard or vineyard as a protection from intruders who might steal or destroy his produce. A tower was usually built in a corner of the wall and a guard posted especially during harvest time when thieves would likely try to make off with the goods. Starting a building-project, like a watchtower, and leaving it unfinished because of poor planning or insufficient funds would invite the scorn of the whole village. Likewise a king who decided to wage a war against an opponent who was much stronger, would be considered foolish if he did not come up with a plan that had a decent chance of success. Counting the cost and investing wisely are necessary conditions for securing a good return on the investment.

The great exchange

If you prize something of great value and want to possess it, it's natural to ask what it will cost you before you make a commitment to invest in it. Jesus was utterly honest and spared no words to tell his disciples that it would cost them dearly to be his disciples - it would cost them their whole lives and all they possessed in exchange for the new life and treasure of God's kingdom. The Lord Jesus leaves no room for compromise or concession. We either give our lives over to him entirely or we keep them for ourselves. Paul the Apostle reminds us, "We are not our own. We were bought with a price" ( 1 Corinthians 6:19b,20). We were once slaves to sin and a kingdom of darkness and oppression, but we have now been purchased with the precious blood of Jesus Christ who has ransomed us from a life of darkness and destruction so we could enter his kingdom of light and truth. Christ has set us free to choose whom we will serve in this present life as well as in the age to come - God's kingdom of light, truth, and goodness or Satan's kingdom of darkness, lies, and deception. There are no neutral parties - we are either for God's kingdom or against it.

Who do you love first - above all else?

The love of God compels us to choose who or what will be first in our lives. To place any relationship or any possession above God is a form of idolatry - worshiping the creature in place of the Creator and Ruler over all he has made. Jesus challenges his disciples to examine who and what they love first and foremost. We can be ruled and mastered by many different things - money, drugs, success, power or fame. Only one Master, the Lord Jesus Christ, can truly set us free from the power of sin, greed, and destruction. The choice is ours - who will we serve and follow - the path and destiny the Lord Jesus offers us or the path we choose in opposition to God's will and purpose for our lives. It boils down to choosing between life and death, truth and falsehood, goodness and evil. If we choose for the Lord Jesus and put our trust in him, he will show us the path that leads to true joy and happiness with our Father in heaven.

"Lord Jesus, your are my Treasure, my Life, and my All. There is nothing in this life that can outweigh the joy of knowing, loving, and serving you all the days of my life. Take my life and all that I have and make it yours for your glory now and forever."

The following reflection is from One Bread, One Body courtesy of Presentation Ministries © 2020.

CALCULATORS

“If a king is about to march on another king to do battle with him, will he not sit down first and consider whether, with ten thousand men, he can withstand an enemy coming against him with twenty thousand?” —Luke 14:31

We are building a new life in Christ (Lk 14:28) and fighting a battle against the evil one. Before we go any further, we must “sit down and calculate the outlay,” to see if we have enough strength to do the job (Lk 14:28).

Many people plan for the future financially, but few prepare spiritually. Many lives collapse because of failure to accept the grace necessary to persevere. Many marriages fall apart because the couple did not strengthen their relationship in preparation for future challenges. Parents often regret not having spent more time with their children because later they see their relationship with the children is not deep enough to weather the storms of adolescence. Even many Christians will not have the spiritual strength needed to survive the mass apostasy (2 Thes 2:3; Mt 24:10-12). They will fall away before Jesus’ final coming because they were not prepared (see Mt 25:1-13).

Let’s live today as if it were our last day. We must go deep and grow strong in our personal relationship with Jesus. May Jesus become so real to us that nothing will ever shake our faith. We must be prepared for anything by doing everything to deepen our relationship with Him.

Prayer:  Father, may I face the realities of my weakness, life’s overwhelming demands, and Your saving grace.

Promise:  “Work with anxious concern to achieve your salvation.” —Phil 2:12

Praise:  St. Charles was the nephew of Pope Pius IV. He was instrumental in the Counter-Reformation of the Sixteenth Century. He is the patron saint of catechists, catechumens and seminarians.

Reference:  

Rescript:  "In accord with the Code of Canon Law, I hereby grant the Nihil Obstat for One Bread, One Body covering the period from October 1, 2020 through November 30, 2020. Most Reverend Joseph R. Binzer, Auxiliary Bishop, Vicar General, Archdiocese of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio February 25, 2020"

The Nihil Obstat ("Permission to Publish") is a declaration that a book or pamphlet is considered to be free of doctrinal or moral error. It is not implied that those who have granted the Nihil Obstat agree with the contents, opinions, or statements

[deafeningsuitdestiny]

The Elephant in the Room

Chapter one, My beginning

Hey there,

how are you?

Me, well I'm doing okay. To be honest a little roughed up, but okay none the less. My names Paige, I'm 22 and a bit of a nerd. 

I spend most of my time in my room, by myself, hiding in my world of electronics. That's kind of what ive always done. My whole life has been a bit of a rollarcoaster. I was born in '98 and while others wouldnt, I do wholehartedly consider myself a '90's baby. Not that I actually remember much of the 90's.

I've grew up in the sunny and ever so saught after california Inland Empire, in a tiny town called Norco, horse town USA. No, I didn't ever have a horse in my backyard growing up. But I always had one at my grandparents. Tinker was her name when I was young. We never rode her, grandma always said that she had hurt her foot when she was younger so we couldn't. I personally just think my grandma left her alone for so long that she wasn't a 'broke' horse anymore. 

Not that that was her fault. She has arthritis really bad in both knees and has had it for as long as I can remember. Growing up i spent a lot of time with my grandma. I was at her house almost everyday. Both of my parents worked. My dad in construction and my mom at a christian pre-school. That meant that every morning, Monday through Friday at 4-5 A.M, I was hauled over to grandmas house. I have endless love for my grandma for so many reasons. Her home has always been a safe haven for me to go, and really has been my whole life, even as an adult.

My childhood is probably one of the most complex parts of my life. I've never really been one to talk about  it, or myself really. If you would have asked me a few weeks ago i would have brushed it off and said it was normal. However, my childhood was far from normal. I actually don't remember a lot of it. I have really had to sit and think about it to try to piece it all together. I won't go into detail about anyone in my family but me, but it wasn't really all Glitz and Glam for any of us.

Like i said my earliest memories are at my grandmas house. I do remember a bit about my childhood home. I remember having big birthday parties and asking to go to friends houses all the time. Thats not really something I was allowed to do a lot. Except for my childhood bestfriend, Natalie. I went to her house as often as my parent would let me. I remember having her house phone and my moms cell phone number memorized only. I called her almost everyday after school waiting for her to get home from dance classes so we could talk about the Sims and whatever elementry school drama we could find.

I'm so thankful for Natalie. She's been a really big person in my life and I have been able to rely on her a lot through-out my life. She and I to this day keep in touch. I also spent a lot of time with my 'cousin' Kendyl. I say cousin because her mom Stephanie and my mom were best friends. So i know i spent a lot of time with her and she is considered Family. When I was home my mom babysat her a lot. Stephanie was a single mom when I was growing up and hustled her ass off to get whatever she could for kendyl. But that meant she worked a lot.

Therefore Kendyl was also a very good friend to me growing up. Although I can remember being a bit mean to her at times. I was older and not getting enough attention in my own home so I think I ended up taking it out on her a bit. I can vividly remember her mom going off on me for smapping a balloon on her hand. Lightning struck quite a very few times in my childhood that I remember getting really upset, but that was one of them. I don't really remember why but I think there was a small group of us all hanging out. I got embarressed.

When I talk to other people about their childhoods they remember so much more than I do, but I do think it's a blessing that I don't remember a lot of it. Another memory I have from when I was younger is being at Stephanie's boyfriends house with Kendyl riding around in her green little Jeep, we went  up and down his driveway until the battery was so low it wouldn't go up anymore and we ended up flipping over somehow. For some reason I also remember getting in trouble for that like it was my fault when i was probably no more than 5 outside playing without any supervision.

A lot of my childhood is like that, no supervision and left to my own devices. I think that kind of explains a lot of why I am the way that I am. I learned to exist by myself. So i learned how to escape from the world around me. A tool I use well into my adulthood.

Chapter 2 Growing Pains

I gained a sister at the ripe age of 2 & 1/2. Ms. Avery Rose made her appearance and I was not so happy at the time. I greeted her with a sippy cup to the head the day she came home.

Sorry Ave, Love you.

I was standarly upset about having another person to now add to, what i considered, a competition for attention. We shared a room, with a bunk bed. I claimed the top bunk so she was stuck on the bottom. I've always been messy, so naturally I ate in my bed. Therefore i had ants in my bed. That meant that Avery would not go anywhere near the top bunk, as shes a bit of a clean freak, and at the time that meant my deturrant was working as intended. I had my space and everyone stayed away. That was the goal, so I slept with ants. It didnt really bother me.

I don't remember why I wanted to keep everyone away, but I felt the need to. So I made huge messes and didnt really ever take care of myself. The idea was if I looked a mess and had messes around me, the standard person would stay away. I would be safe and could do as I pleased. which wasnt much but escape to the land of my imagination.

I can remember going to my toy box and literally throwing every toy I could grab over my shoulder to make a mess of my bedroom floor. My grandparents ended up coming over that night for dinner and my grandma helped me pick up my bedroom. When I say helped I mean I sat contemplating begrugendly as I watched my grandma pick up the beautiful chaos that I had created for myself. She knew i was upset, so she stayed in my room with me until I fell asleep, turned on sleeping beauty to try to calm me down, and it worked. Disney Works. Dreamworks Works. Very well, thanks to grandma. To this day I can turn on a classic disney movie to calm down.

I don't think she even knows, but to this day I use that. She has given me one of my greatest coping mechanisms.

Isolation bred imaginary friends. Bobber, Bingalong, and Joshco. They were with me wherever i went. I had bobber well into my later adolescent years and still vividly remember what he looked like.

They were all tiny, and could fit in the palm of my hand but would sit on my shoulders more often than not. Bobber had scraggly hair and wore overalls and had a red shirt. It's not a surprise that red was my favorite color most of  my life. My whole family still teases me about them, but in a really weird way they are family to me. They were around when no one was there.

I did not like the outdoors as a kid. Absolutely hated playing outside. My mom, thinking I needed the normalcy would lock Avery and I outside to "play". Most of the time this led to me intentionally scraping my knee, stubbing my toe, or just outright throwing a fit to get back inside. I wanted to play on the computer instead. Club Penguin, BarbieGirls, VirtualMagicKingdom, Wizard 101, Neopets, I had a Nancy Drew Orca game that I loved to play, a Jimmy Neutron game I completed several times over. I loved the escape of it all.

Those were the only places I felt happy, safe, and had enough fun that I felt like I was thriving.

Chapter 3 School House Blues

School was always something i've been naturally good at, when i put in the effort anyways. My grandpa spent the time teaching me math as a kid, thankfully. Otherwise I would have been lost. It was not my strongsuit. School was never somehing that i wanted to pursue but I did good because I was expected to do good.

Although I never really fully paid attention as a kid. I was still off in my own world. I had a Group of girlfriends I always hung out with. It was Jada, Myself, Natalie, Emily, Cheyenne, Taylor E. , Taylor M. and sometimes a Sierra or Cierra. To that friend group ~ I am sorry if I forgot anyone. This was a while ago haha

Even in the group I always tried hard to fit in, because I felt like I didn't. I felt like that third wheel friend that always had to try really hard. I think my try-harding annoyed a lot of them to be honest. By the 6th grade the whole group was done with me and the last 6 months of elementry school I spent by myself at a picnic table, until I remembered the Library and Mrs.Curd.

Thank god for Mrs.Curd. From that moment on I spent all of my free time in the library. We has something called A.R. when i was growing up when I was growing up, basically the school wanted to make sure we were reading enough books and growing our mini human brains. The goal was to get to 100% by the end of the trimester. Well in 6th grade I made it to 100% by the second day of school thanks to the twilight series, I had read in the matter of a few days, I flew through it.

I remember finishing the first book in a day and immediatly begging my mom to go get the next one.I even read Midnight Sun online as it was released without Stephanie Meyers' permission. All 152 pages then I think it was. That also meant whenever it was A.R. time I would Immediatly run to the library while everyone else silent read. I would put books away and eat all of her butterscotch candy.

A huge shoutout to Mrs.Woolard for letting me go~ that is until my other grades started to drop. Math started to get the best of me since I was so caught up in books and my imagination. I wasnt allowed to run off to the library anymore, I had to focus on my A.M. basically it was the math version of A.R. but every single recess and lunch time I spent with Mrs. Curd.

I don't really know what happened to her, but I really hope shes doing well. She is a big credit as to how I'm still here. Teachers really are the Life Blood of our society. I'm living proof.

Chapter 4

Puberty

I wish I could tell you that Jr. High got better. My grades kept falling. Thankfully my educators were still a few good and true. Mr.Walker taught me more history and structure than I ever could have asked for. That man taught me organization.

He was a stickler, he was very good at making sure the homework assignments were done and held the accountability for it as well. I remember he was the first teacher to ever give me a detention, because the whole class didn't do the outline the night before. It was a detention that came with love however. The whole class spent that hour after school writting the outline.

Thus my love of writting began. I can't tell you how many outlines i did in that class but it was a lot. A whole binder full. His homework schedule revolved on a schedule. That meant that if you missed a day you still had a pretty good idea of what was expected of you.

It was also nice because he was someone who didnt believe in homework on the weekends. He believed in putting in hard work and having your personal time as well. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday were days that homework typically wasn't assigned. Unless of course we had a project, but they always came with ample time to get them done and a solid deadline.

Mr.Walker taught me the importance of balance and knowlage. That you need to know whats going on, but you also need to take care of yourself. At the time that didn't quite click BUT years later I can look back on those days and understand the importance of what he was teaching me.

Jr. High was also the time that I Joined Choir. I was hoping it would be the fun and happy place I always dreamed of but quickly learned it was kind of a free for all with songs nobody knew unless it was around christmas time. Not exactly what a Maturing Mini Human was interested in. I remember asking Mr.Betts if we could do more relent songs, or something in the Top 40, his repsonse was no, we have to keep the classics alive, which I understand. Now looking back I wish I would have told him he was living in the past and trying to grow the future.

That doesn't work.

Chapter 5

A small circle

In Jr. High the friend group was small. So small in fact I don't think I ever consistantly spoke to more than 2 people at a time. Keeping up with friends we never my strong suit. I remember sitting in the same far right table next to the choir room every day. Being excited for Pretzel day and having access to vending machines. I would spend every quarter I had on the many snacks back then, no regrets haha.

That lunch table actually had some of my fondest memories, dancing and practicing ballet spins with Chey, doodling the many anime doodles with amie. Shes probably one of the first friends I ever openly talked to about my love of Anime. I wrote every one I watched on the front of my homework planner, it was my messy list of all the things I loved. Blue and Black ink was smeared all over it.

I wish I kept it but I didn't. It was lost in the many moves. By jr high we were living in our third house. We had moved into a new house when my baby brother came along. We outgrew our little three bedroom, moved on to a 5 bedroom and then went back down to a 4 bedroom. It had stairs and don't ask me why but that was the most exciting thing to me. I could not wait to live in a house with stairs. Call me an odd ball, everyone else in the house complained that it was too hot upstairs or they didnt like to carry the laundry up the stairs, but I didn't mind at all. I thought it was fun!

I was also in love with that house because of all the trees in the backyard, lemons grew in a large plethora. We were never short on lemons, apricots, a few tiny oak trees, the street was lined with tall pines, we had peppers that grew, grapes, it was like a mini haven. I don't think we ever could have used all the lemons. The two trees produced so much fruit my dad would complain about having to pick them out of the grass.

That house is also where I fell deeper in love with music, the Ipod Touch 1st generation came out and I think i went through a pair of headphones every 2-3 weeks. My parents werent too happy about that but my eardrums were. Evinescense, Lincoln Park, Black veil Brides, and Rihanna became my heros. I ran to them when the rest of the work felt too scary to handle. I remember watching the music videos over and over. Dancing around my room with the music as loud as I could get away with. Which was pretty loud as long as it was still light outside.

I still do that, in my car the music is always full blast. Music became my escape all over again but this time it was everything I wanted to listen to which rocked my world. Figurativly and Literally.

Chapter 6

DisneyLand

Through all of this my mom was losing touch with herself. It was one of the hardest things I have ever had to watch. The strong woman I once thought could rule the world was now bedridden. A lot. It was nothing she could have controled. She just fell to pieces and I had a front row seat.

It was my first heartbreak watching her shatter bit by bit. It felt endless, lonely, and daunting. My poor dad just had to keep going to work. That wasn't an option. he had three kinds and a sick wife he needed to provide for, and he did his damndest. We never went hungry, we had the new clothes still, we just had no savings. He couldn't keep up with it all by himself and I don't fault him for it. Our world was going through a forced change that none of us were ready for. At that point he wasnt even working at a job he liked. After everything crashed in 2008 he lost his fancy construction job.

He wasn't working with all the people he loved, he wasn't being paid properly, he was just working his ass off trying to make it. Lightning continued to strike,  a lot of screaming matches brewed, and it didnt help that my room was closest to theirs.

So hiding things? You could not.  No hiding anything, I knew all the struggles and annoyances.

Thank the Universe for headphones. I kept those things in almost 24/7.

Now, choir was not all bad. It did have some pretty fun moments when we got out of the classroom the few times we did. We ended up going to Disneyland, going back stage and recording a few disney songs as a class which I do have to say, was pretty fricken cool. To me we got the perfect songs, we did Hawiian Rollarcoaster Ride from Lilo and Stitch and The is Halloween from The Nightmare Before christmas. Two Iconic, what I consider to be, classics. Moments like that got me through.

That only took us a few hours and then we were free to roam Disney and enjoy all of the magic. For the first time since I was 5-6 years old. And then I could do whatever I wanted. All the ride choices were at my finger tips. It was the first time I felt Free.

Trips like tha gave me things to look forward to, and honestly thats all I needed.

It took absolutely forever to get our recordings back and I didnt end up buying one, we were struggling financially as the time and I was not about to add another expense to the plate. I knew I was taking enough. Probably too much. More than my parents could have handled at the time. But I knew that, and I was still messy as hell. It kept my room as my space so nobody could come in. It was mine. My Chaotic Castle. Where I was free to blast the music, dance, and sing all I wanted.

It was my home.

Chapter 7

Off a cliff

That chaotic castle didn't last and we ended up moving to another house, but this one hung off a cliff. We had to downsize again, so Ave and I were back in a room together, and quite unhappy about it. We already fought like we were mortal enemies and for a while the severity just got worse and worse. Then one day it was like a switch went off and we decided to just make the best of whatever situations came our way. Teamwork makes that dream work. You do what you gotta do.

Sharing that tiny room with her was hard. She didn't have a closet and had to use my brothers while he used a wardrobe. We barely had room to walk around. Each of us had a bed, a nightstand, and atop our 'Paige, Avery, Money, Boys' cabnet was an itty-bitty TV in the middle that we often faught over. Usually we could reach a mutual agreement when it came to NCIS or Law and Order: Svu.

To this day we can recite the opening by heart.

We shoved two tiny twin beds in that room and did our best to get through it. Her being a clean freak did not enjoy my mess that I allowed to take over everything. Eventually she got to the point were she would just shove everything to my side. I brushed it off with an eyeroll and a shrug.

Even worse I am not a fan of laundry. And as a lazy pre-teen I was not about to do it all the time. So I lived in dirty clothes and didn't care. Once a week we would go over to grandmas house to spend the night and she would always make sure I had clean clothes. She made sure we all did when we were over, she did what she could. I always wished It was more but you can only stretch a sheet so thin before it tares too, you know?

We also had a family dog that nobody really took the time to take care of. Crap and pee was a common occurance when you walked down the hall, it got to the point where it didn't even phase me anymore.

By this point nobody had come to our house in years. We really kept an isolated boat. It was hard, I was basically trained to stay quiet and thats what I did. I put my headphones in and went off to my own. Kinda like now its funny how everything comes full circle when you don't process it. Some things you can't just wish away.

They demand to be felt.

Chapter 8

That House

That house was one of the places that haunted my nightmares. It never felt safe or like home. I atribute that to it residing right next to a cemetary, talk about the Heebe-Jeebies. It felt wrong. While I spent all of my time in my room, my sister was smarter. She always had a knack for the more social butterfly side of things. She built her own support system of friends. She didn't wait for one to poof into existance in our household. She made sure she found people who actually cared about her. That's not something I learned until much later in life. You really need a group of people you can count on, its what makes you feel human, it brings you back down to earth. It humanizes you to yourself, as wild as that sounds.

When I was a kid i thought of myself as one of the wild things, like in that book 'Where the Wild things are." I even came with the scraggly hair to match.

Avery Rose taught me it's necessary to have people in your corner, because you cannot do everything yourself. No matter how hard you try. The world is a big place to take on by yourself and you will fail every time. Trust me.

Chapter 9

Basketball

Throught my life my family always tried to in some way shape or form keep me busy. Idle hannds never thrive. When I was small it was dance, but I grew tired of that quickly, then I was pushed head first into basketball. 10 years of it to be exact. Now that sport and I have always gone back and fourth. It's very much a love/hate relationship, But i can sit here today and honestly tell you I know that game like the back of my hand.

All the way down to Passing Game.

Its a game that tests you, pushes you to your limits, and forces growth. With some perseverance you make those sidelines and suicides your bitch. The running is good for your lungs. It helps you breath more clearly.

So note to self, basketball, the sport that needs to be played, and it needs to be played more. A hell of a lot more, and if you haven't lately- Go pick up a Basketball and start dribbling.

Your hand eye coordination probably needs it.

Chapter 10

Staying Active

Through-out my messiness, I did also stay active. The hustle has and always will be real. Its what drove me. The desire for better. If you aren't pushing yourself you arent growing. Without growth, you die. So in a sense, the hustle is the whole point to life, you just have to find your hustle. It's different for everyone.

The shoe just has to fit, you can't force it like Cinderella's step sister tried.

It won't work.

You have to find your niche, for me it's writing.

For you?

Well, what do you dream about?

[heartslogos]

Ive been awol for a while, so I have to ask: why did you leave the batfandom?

a combination of things, but a lot of it was like...demand?? like people got...demanding...and that conversely made me not want to write as people got more and more demanding

it’s all over my info/faq pages that I don’t do requests but I think that sometimes people just think that because you write something that they’re free to ask you write this or that or whatever

and this is going to sound shallow but I’ve found that in certain fandoms, big fandoms usually, it becomes okay for your comments to be “update this” or “when is this going to update” or “you should’ve done this” or “i liked everything except how you should’ve done it this way” or something like that, which isn’t very feel good encouraging. comments like “i like this!” or “nice!” or even “

and once that starts it becomes, for me, a cycle of anxiety and toxicity. i get upset because someone spent all this time to read my stuff and tell me exactly why i’m wrong and i get mad and i want to say something like “then don’t read it!” or “if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all!”. but then i think that if i do say that what if that person keeps coming back? it’s happened to me before where i’ve had people just come back and back over and over to tell me why something i’ve written isn’t good to them and how i should fix it for them. like sometimes literally months later they’ll come back to try and continue telling me why i am wrong about something (a portrayal of something very personal to myself, a story that borrows in part from my own experiences as a real breathing person, etc.), and when i try to be polite about telling them to either leave me alone because maybe they’d be more interested in reading something else, that’s clearly not in my wheelhouse, they start turning it into a thing where i’m in the wrong, where it’s my fault because i posted this thing and they have a right to tell me all these things i didn’t ask for or want and shouldn’t i be so grateful? aren’t i so pathetic? aren’t i so hypocritical to post this thing i worked on and not accept criticism/their personal tastes? and also how am i supposed to get better if i don’t tailor to your opinion? don’t i want to be a better writer? also my writing makes them so uncomfortable i should be happy they even read it, i should be honored and grateful for this commentary

and so i get stuck in this cycle of getting mad but then getting anxious and then getting mad again and then getting anxious

this isn’t a problem that’s specific to the batfandom. it’s a problem i’ve been experiencing in other fandoms too, and i think that maybe it’s reflective in some sort of cultural shift in fandom and creative works where people think that if it’s on the internet you have free reign to criticize as you see fit and the person you criticize should be silent about it (it’s one thing to give constructive criticism when asked for, it’s another thing entirely to give it when it is unsolicited. and just because a creative work is available to be seen or experienced does not mean permission is given to provide criticism). but in a large fandom like comics fandoms i think the volume of input is much higher and i had to deal with this anxiety on a more daily basis than i do now that i’ve transferred to smaller, more niche areas

(though i swear that i’ve had some real, real bad poos coming at me and making me feel really really awful)

anyway that’s probably a lot more than you wanted to hear but it’s something that’s bothered me for a long time and continues to bother me 

#Anonymous