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bangtanfancamp · 4 years

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✨This or That!✨

Hello loves, I was tagged literal ages ago by @curly-bangtan (who is such a sweet human btw! Thank you for the tag :’) it’s impossibly sweet of you) and am in the backseat while road trippin so I’ve finally got some free time to fill this out! I’m so excited !! I love these things !so without further ado🙃 Lessss gooooo

• slow burn or love at first sight

I guess to clarify, I love an instant spark of attraction and a long treacherous road to resolution- while also being painfully obvious that there is attraction and also while being overtly flirty but no one has the emotional motor skills to just be upfront about it already

•fake dating or secret dating

Oh, 1,000,000% fake dating. It is one of the single greatest regrets of my life that no one has ever asked me to be their fake date or gf. Because I would have been F A N T A S T I C at it. But I guess I’ll never get to live out that pretend to real slowburn in real life after all.... also, secret dating can feel really sucky and isolating so I don’t recommend.

•enemies to lovers or best friends to lovers

Oh god, must I really pick between my children? My whole life it was best friends to lovers. Now that I am currently dating the guy who was my best friend, I really melt over the fiery tension of enemies to lovers ... GOD! it’s so satisfying!!! But I think best friends to lovers still has to squeak by just by an ounce. (I’m a softy at heart, what can I say?)

•oh no! There’s only one bed or long distance with correspondence

Oh far and away, the one bed trope! No contest. I also deeply regret that I haven’t figured out how to make myself attractive enough for someone to try to pull this one over on me. *sigh* well, what can you do? .... also, did a long distance relationship for...6.5 years? And yeah, if you’re a romantic like me- it is dreadfully unfulfilling, let me tell you.

•Hurt/comfort or Amnesia

Mother freaking amnesia A L W A Y S !!! Heck yes! Are there amnesia fics??? 🤭I’ve never found one! But I absolutely love this trope in stories and movies. One of my all time favorites- which AGAIN- has not had the decency to actually come to fulfillment in my real life: Like why has park Jimin never showed up spontaneously at one of my doctors appointments trying to convince me that we’ve been best friends who were secretly in love with other since we were 14 and we finally just got engaged or married a month ago and his life is incomplete without me but he’ll patiently wait for me to love him in return again in my own time but in the meantime, he’ll love me in any and every little way he can until I fall for him again? Huh? Where is it! .... was that too specific😅?

•Fantasy au or modern au

no contest. Give me medieval maidens and dragons any day. I live in modern day. Lemme tell you- she ain’t that special.

•mutual pining or domestic bliss

cue Schmidt from new girl-“I can do this AWL day, son- AWLLL DAY!!” Yessssss!!! Mutual pining is my crack! Give it to me! Always! Gimme it! (Why can’t I have the things that I want!) okay this is just a Schmidt quote/rant post now. ..... I really want to love domestic bliss. And some of the writers who are excellent at it absolutely take my breath away at how beautifully they romanticize the every day. But outside of their writing, I have no scope of how to conjure that wonder up on my own. It is a skill I deeply lack. In real life, I just wind up feeling like the bliss is boring- gimme some pining! Some angst! Some tension!!! Even if I do love me some fluff. Someone once I told me that I was in love with the idea of someone being in love with me. Gotta say, he’s not wrong.

•canon compliant or fix it fic

Honestly, I can’t say I’ve read very many of either. But I do like to see how people flex their creativity.

•alternate universe or future fic

My favorite tv show of all time is Fringe (god bless you, JJ Abrams). Your girl LOVES alternate timelines, multiple universes, flashpoint, paradox, butterfly/ripple effect- all of it!! Dear god, yes! Give it to me! (Also, every time I have a crush or dream that doesn’t work out, I comfort myself with the thought that somewhere out there, there’s an alternate timeline version of me that is happily existing with said boy or flourishing in said dream endeavor. It’s a tremendous source of comfort).

Although, I must say, in the comic realm, alternate universes can sometimes frustrate me- like genuinely, could we not just make the alpha timeline the most incredible one? Instead of the best relationships and plot threads never being actual canon?! Can we get it together??? Or are alternate timelines just the comic industry’s way of writing their own fix it fics, generations after the original protagonist has been painted into a corner. Also, how hard must that be? To write endlessly for the same character for 60+ years? We write one fic or a couple books for the same character... could you IMAGINE having to supply 60 years worth of consistent weekly or monthly context!!! Wild

•one shot or multi chapter

I prefer multi chapter because I prefer getting engrossed in an entire work/world. Usually I am left wanting with a well written one shot, because they’ve made it so real that I can’t stand not having more- so my greedy butt loves the feast of multi chapter so I can have as many delicious moments and details with these characters as possible.

I do however deeply admire the skill and brevity it takes to made a succinct one shot. @underthejoon and @kpopfanfictrash are both brilliant as heck at that. And it is admirable as all get out.

•kid fic or road trip fic

honestly, considering how much I swoon over men who are good with children in real life, and how much I look forward to being both pregnant and a mom one day, I really never get into kid or pregnancy fics. I just don’t? Don’t know why. But a road trip!???? Oh heck yes!!! 👏🏽Where 👏🏽do 👏🏽I 👏🏽sign 👏🏽up!!???👏🏽

•reincarnation or character death

Oh absolutely reincarnation. I love that. I blame sailor moon for that.....But also, I think it’s just very in line with my love of alternate universes and timelines. I love how everything is connected/weaves together and feels predestined in the best way. I’m a complete sucker for it

•arranged marriage or accidental marriage

Like @curly-bangtan I legit had no clue accidental marriage was a thing? Unless you count being drunk at Vegas and waking up with a ring or we’re on some Jacob and Leah/Rachel level ish (which is really and truly the WILDEST™️ story ever ya’ll) ..... but I love a good arranged marriage scenario. The tension/push pull and inevitable relenting is so fun. But will say though, why the heck do women always fight it? Like there’s literally a whole Kim taehyung or Kim Namjoon offering to voluntarily love you and you wanna whine about it???!?! How dare you

•high school romance or Middle Aged romance

This, again, one is a pretty firm, resolute one for me. I’ll take high school. I’ve always felt a little oddly uncomfortable with more mature™️ romance stories? Not sure why. But I think the really beautiful ones always hark back to the beauty of their feelings being refreshing like the innocence of their first love. I know I personally can over glorify youth, but I love coming of age romance (high school, college, twenties) and no one can stop me!!!! I will say though, I have a secret soft spot for the niche of story where people have loved the same person since they were young and the timing just never works out but they finally find each other when they’re older. (One day is like that, and film or movie, it will absolutely rip your heart out-my god, it’s beautiful)

•Time travel or isolated together

These are both freaking AMAZING! But if anything has been established in this post, I think it’s my deep love of alternate timeline/reincarnation/time travel stories. I think they’re all from the same cloth. I adore them (I just haven’t written one because I’m not sure I could do the subtlety of it any justice.) maybe one day. My favorite writers are rumored to have the same Myers’s Briggs type as me so maybe I too could someday have a fraction of their world building skill.

I 100% love both of these so neither is a loser. But give me isolated together AND one bed in the same fic???? Speakers blown

•neighbors or roommates

I have never had the pleasure of having an attractive neighbor, though I often pined for it. (I have a bomb idea for a neighbor Hobi fic though) I did have a cute neighborhood boy who occasionally cut the grass for us in high school. But that doesn’t really count.... anyway! I LOVE the idea of being roommates with an attractive boy!!! Like holy guac, can I please????? Cocktailing this trope makes me swoon harder than none other- best friends to lovers + roommates? Yes. Enemies to lovers + roommates? Holy heck. Soulmate au + roomates???? Hold my sweet tea. MUTUAL PINING AND ROOMATES!!!! Pregnant. Fantasy/magic au+ mutual pining + best friends to lovers + soulmate au + reincarnation + roommate au!?!?!?!! frickin dead in the streets, homie.

I cannot say enough how much I enjoy roomate au. In a serious conversation, I once legitimately told my current boyfriend that the idea of marriage freaks me out- but the idea of being best friend roomates with sexual tension sounds like a dream come true. God help me.

•sci fi or magic au

I love sci fi. Deeply. But I will never love logic more than magic. Ever. (All my infp’s! come join me in the comments. 🙈)

•body swap or gender bend

Body swap has always deeply intrigued me. Especially in film. But I’ve never seen it in a fic. I’ve always wanted somebody to be able to switch into my body to feel physically, mentally and emotionally like i do. The deepest level of empathy & jean grey telepathy if you ask me, even if the trope is generally used for comedy. But the idea of switching into a dudes body and having to deal with their anatomy low key freaks me the eff out. If I got stuck in jungkooks body, I don’t think I’d pee or shower for a week 🙈 sorry everybody. I was really sheltered ok? Please don’t come for me. Lol...... also, have never seen a gender bend fic. Not sure how that would work. Not my favorite idea.

•angst or crack

Angst is my crack.

Honestly though, if it’s well written, it doesn’t feel ‘angsty’- cuz that means whiny or clunky to me. Well written ‘angst’ just feels emotionally compelling, I think. My writing weirdly leans toward what I hope is real angst (I e solid, genuine conflict and not petulance), but when I seek out a read, I look for crack honestly.

• apocalyptic or mundane

I offer you one better- a love story of the beauty of the mundane amidst the apocalyptic.

*mic drop*

Seriously though, the setting provides enough tension usually. Especially if it’s zombie apocalyptic. Just let jungkook’s fingers delicately trace my palm and smile, sweet and lopsided at me in the candle light, while we hide away in our little bomb shelter that I’ve turned into a jungle garden to bring life into this wasteland a la secret life of arrietty. sigh. Maybe I need to write this....

My gosh!!! We made it to the end! That was so much fun! Thank you for tagging me, sweetness!💕✨ 🙂

I’ll add a tag list shortly- @laurelevermore @lamourche @bts-fantasy @urlocalkpoptrash @thedreaming-poet @kimcheeeeeeeeee @hayjeon @outrotearot7 @lorengarcia-yut @bts-luvvv @chicpalestinian @flyingchixenwing @glodenclosetau @space-mermaid-in-love @thiccasswonhoruinedmylife @minminslittlemonster

Copy and paste if you can. Or if you’re dealing with a piece of technological antiquity like me and it won’t let you, then screen record/screenshot it and pop back and forth between the tabs 😅(also Thanks for dealing with the completely unnecessary treatise I added beneath every bullet point. It was just so much for fun to explain WHY I chose each one than to just say yes/no. I’ve said it before, written brevity is just not my strong suit.)

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sol1056 · 6 years

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when the lamp stays unlit

a multi-part anon that’s been waiting awhile:

...I never really fully thought of shiro as physically disabled... he had a fully functional prosthetic arm with all the motor skills of a real arm plus superhuman strength and so forth AND because it didn’t really impair him. It would be one thing if he was physically disabled and the show thus normalized disability; but to me, Shiro‘s arm (and Ezor‘s fake leg and Zethrid‘s missing eye) were more like sci-fi ‘cool battle scars’ rather than things that really impacted their social or emotional life. [...] The missing arm made [Shiro] more incapacitated during s7 (I guess?) but it was an excuse for benching him, which is something I found ableist. And while he has a mental illness as well, I thought it only ever became an issue when it was convenient to the plot. Hope that made sense, it wasn’t my intention to be insensitive since many people see him as great disability rep.

This is nearly as difficult a subject as race, but it’s also an important discussion to have. We do need the conversation about LGBT+ representation in VLD, but it’s drowning out an equally important conversation about how disability is represented (and treated) in popular media.

As a caveat, I’m a work in progress when it comes to un-learning the ableism that permeates Western culture, even when directly harmed by its perpetuation. So I’m inviting anyone with the spoons and lived experience to join in. The more voices and perspectives, the better.

Behind the cut: clarifying a few terms, how the SFF genre conceptualizes disability, how humans conceptualize difference, narrative treatment of Shiro as disabled, and PTSD/mental health in popular media.

First, let’s define some terms so we’re on the same page. Assistive technology “increases or maintains the capabilities of people with disabilities.” Adaptive technology (a subset of assistive) is tech “specifically designed for persons with disabilities and would seldom be used by non-disabled persons.” Gadgets like sock cradles are assistive, since an abled person might use them; a prosthesis or screen reader would be adaptive. The majority of media representations of disability will use adaptive technologies to signal a disability, rather than assistive. (definition from wikipedia)

Now for a few lesser-known terms. There’s a philosophical concept concerning the breakage of things we’ve always taken for granted. Like flipping a light switch: the light goes on. We don’t pause to marvel over what made the lightbulb glow. Then one day, you flip the switch and the light doesn’t come on. Now suddenly you have to stop and notice something that previously you’d never given much attention.

This sudden awareness of wrongness --- the light not going on --- takes three forms. It can be conspicuous, where it’s visibly damaged, ie the lamp is smashed. It can be obtrusive: a part is missing, ie there’s no bulb in the socket. Or it can be obstinate, ie the bulb and lamp are fine, we just don’t have power.

The abled perspective --- when suddenly reminded of disability --- is to see the disability as conspicuous and obtrusive. That is, broken and incomplete. Which means, that’s the only story the abled perspective knows, so that’s the story it tells, over and over.

It’s a common assumption, especially in the SFF genre: adaptive technology removes a character from the category of disabled. Cybernetic modifications or prostheses become design elements; the character is considered --- and written --- as abled. In a sense, the character is like the lamp when there’s power: the author can ignore the label of ‘disability’ and carry on without giving more thought to the issue.

But if there’s removal (or breakage), for the author, it’s like flipping a switch and the light doesn’t go on. You can almost hear the author thinking: ‘oh, forgot this character can’t do anything.’ Until the story provides repairs or replacement, the previously adaptively-abled character is now un-abled.

Disability --- in the absence of adaptive technology --- is, at best, obstinate. The character is neither broken nor incomplete; they’re a lamp without a power source. Nothing else has changed. But if someone never gave thought to how lamps need power to operate, their first reaction won’t be to ask if the power’s out. It’ll be to check the lamp, the bulb, the wiring, and declare it mysteriously broken because no light is happening.

Abled writers effectively shift the blame onto the lamp: it’s now useless, by some ill-defined sense. But it’s not; it hasn’t changed. It was reliant on power when power was available, and it’s reliant when power’s not available, too.

The analogy itself is already too simple for the reality; it implies a person could be abled/disabled as on/off. So let’s adjust, and say: the lamp has a solar-power backup and still lights up --- just not as quickly or brightly. Or it’s a drill whose battery needs recharging: it’s still usable as a manual screwdriver, awkward but workable. Plus, the base is still handy as a makeshift hammer.

The presence of any given disability does not automatically mean the person is fully dis-abled by all other measures as well. Analogies only go so far, after all.

But this is the main point: the character never stopped being disabled, any more than the lamp stopped needing power. By that same token, the person who takes medication for ADD isn’t ‘cured’ with medication, anymore than a paraplegic stops being unable to walk just because they have a wheelchair.

Now that I think about it, this could extend to just about any representation one doesn’t experience personally. I mean, we do it to each other: “behind the grill, she’s one of the guys.” And then we see the person after work in a dress and heels and we’re reminded she was a woman all along; we were just setting aside her gender because we could ignore it. Like the light switch we flip unthinkingly, we paid that detail no mind.

And the fact is: it doesn’t matter if an onlooker judges a trait as irrelevant. The person still has that gender, religion, ability, sexuality, ethnicity, age, etc. When we aim to be colorblind, or genderblind, or sexualityblind... it’s like having a lamp that won’t go on and not realizing electricity is required. We’re blind to half the picture, so we blame the lamp, not the absence of power.

We’re forgetting that because we can ignore her gender doesn’t mean she can. Or even would. But so long as we can, we’ll miss all the ways her reality informs her experiences.

You’re right that benching Shiro in S7 was an ableist move. The entire season makes evident how little thought the staff has afforded Shiro. To them, he was abled, now he is not, and this radically changes everything: no longer a paladin, not even a pilot, nor even on the front lines (and when he is, he loses). As @caramelcheese pointed out, Shiro’s fought with both hands tied behind his back. Lacking one arm shouldn’t slow him down in the least.

Others have written at length about Shiro’s new prosthesis. They’ve raised practical issues with a floating arm, such as imbalance and center-of-gravity, and ethical issues such as the offensiveness of a design that echoes his tormentor’s signature detail, so I won’t belabor those here. To me, there are two aspects even more insidious.

One is caused by narrative silence on Shiro’s changed status. Shiro’s only visible difference is the loss of his prothesis; the narrative fails to address this, let alone provide any other explanation. Narrative silence becomes tacit confirmation: an amputee cannot be a hero.

The second is the dehumanization. Before S7, in casual dress, Shiro’s arm was evident; in armor, he was no more marked than anyone else. His expulsion from being a paladin is visually reinforced by his loss of the Black Paladin’s armor; the Garrison uniform and space suit are modified to be constant reminders that Shiro is disabled. There is empty air where his upper arm would be.

His redesign marks him as literally incomplete.

As for mental health, we can’t discuss Shiro’s PTSD in a vacuum, when it’s a part of so many kids’ lives. Some suffer PTSD themselves from first-hand trauma, and likely many more suffer it along with their parents as a result of the US’ anti-immigrant attitudes. The hardest hit may be military kids between 8 and 18, of whom roughly one in five has a parent who suffers from PTSD.

Shiro had to have been a powerful figure for those kids. He had onscreen panic attacks and flashbacks, yet remained a hero in the story and to his team. His PTSD-inflected moments may have served the plot, but those also worked to keep present the continuing damage from his trauma. More importantly for younger viewers, he laid a hero’s narrative over the sometimes terrifying reality of a family member who suffers from PTSD or related trauma.

S3 left that behind, turning Shiro’s trauma into headaches, and even that much mentioned rarely. By S7, no signs of PTSD remained. The EPs’ tone-deaf explanation --- that Shiro learned to grit his teeth and just deal with his trauma --- was a horrific betrayal of the audience who related to Shiro. Willpower has never been a viable cure for mental illnesses or trauma.

One ingredient for healing from PTSD is support and love from a strong network of family and friends, and it’s ironic the series’ only example of a healing moment was the DnD episode. It allowed Shiro/Kuron to create and role-play a new story for himself, in a safe environment, surrounded by the support of people who mattered most to him. When Shiro/Kuron tells Coran that he feels better after playing, it’s one of the rare grace notes in the story: because that would be a healing experience for someone with PTSD.

Shiro’s story undergoes an odd reversal. He begins the story treated as though he’s abled, yet mentally traumatized. By S7, the story considers him disabled yet also fully ‘over’ his PTSD. He went from conspicuous and obtrusive for his PTSD, to conspicuous and obtrusive for being an amputee.

After thinking about it, I wonder if perhaps it’s because once the lamp has been broken for long enough --- regardless of the reason --- it eventually becomes yet another thing we don’t think about. Just like once, perhaps as children, we found light switches fascinating and the lamp going on/off to be worthy of deep thought, eventually we learned to pay it no mind.

Perhaps Shiro’s reversal is yet another indication of an abled creator who doesn’t understand the obstinate nature of disability. We have some backwards notions about illness, in the US, and one of them is that illness is a moral failure. Like, if you just tried hard enough, you’d be better. Any disability for which there’s no cure --- you can’t regrow an arm, after all --- thus renders the person both permanently broken and morally inadequate.

And, apparently, not worthy of being a paladin.

#vld #voltron #disability #representation #characterization #sol thinks about stuff #random existentialism terms #come for the sugar stay for the salt

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firstpuffin · 5 years

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A life of boredom; I hope people can gain strength from this pt 1:

One thing that I hear again and again about people with mental illness or learning disabilities or even just with a far from ideal situation is that they feel alone. I’ll say first of all that I’ve never felt like this; I’ve never felt alone and I’ve never felt like a disappointment or like I’ve let down my parents. But I imagine that it would feel terrible.

So I figured I’d put my rather boring story out there. It’s not one of success or any great tragedy; all things considered it’s been a pretty dull existence. But if it can help someone feel like they aren’t alone then maybe it’s worth it.

Also, I have no time to research a proper article.

This entry is going to be more of a background to who I am and what I had to live with, with an actual sequence of events coming later. Nothing particularly bad ever happened to me, but there were a lot of smaller things that built up; you know what they say about straw and the camel’s back.

I don’t really want to focus on the bad, I had a lot of good too. But you remember the bad, don’t you? While the good fades away.

So first of all, I was originally inspired to write this when I realised that when I graduate from university this coming May, it will be exactly ten years since I graduated from high school. This is astonishing for a number of reasons: one, it doesn’t feel like ten years at all and two, I still feel like I’m sixteen years old. A sixteen-year old who can drink and who maybe should have accomplished more by now.

There are other reasons why it feels wrong; I knew my best friend back in first school but we parted ways for middle school and by some holy shit level chance ended up in the same high school. And yes, we didn’t do the elementary to primary school thing; I only discovered that was even a thing during high school and I didn’t understand what it was. I went to three different schools and didn’t transfer once. But anyway, me and my pal have been pals constantly in the thirteen years since then; he introduced me to manga and to so many video game series and stuff. It’s also been roughly eleven or twelve years since I fell out with who had been up until then a constant in my life, but that’s for later.

It doesn’t feel like I’ve done much of anything, at least not anything of worth in those ten years. Not until I came to university.

Background: I am the youngest child in a family of four, my brother knowing what he has wanted since he was a child and worked constantly towards it. I would try to copy him and fail miserably. I looked up to him as someone who could do everything that I couldn’t.

My dad was a straight-forward thinker who comes across to new people as stern and scary, but in reality he’s basically a big teddy bear (not in that way; in the more traditional sense). You just need to get past that cold facade first.

My mother was overbearing but it was out of love rather than some other kind of twisted motive. I hesitate to talk too much about this lest it comes off badly, but it is a prime example of how the best intentions can go awry. She wanted me to be a child and so didn’t insist on making me do chores and instead did everything for me, so I never learned to be independent. Whether it was something to do with my combination of learning disabilities or just me as a person, I just let her do so. One of my greatest joys at university has been the independence, or more accurately the requirement to do everything myself. I love the cleaning the washing, the cooking.

Oh my god, the cooking. I loathe food. Or at least I used to, I’m still not a fan. I now think I know why, but the original guess was that because I had rhinitis (think year long allergies; specifically a blocked nose) and couldn’t smell anything, that I couldn’t taste things correctly. I now know that being dyspraxic can mean an oversensitivity of the senses; like taste and touch. My dyspraxia meant that I disliked most strong-tasting foods. Or really food in general. Sure there were a few things I liked, like burgers or pizza, but no curry, no shepherd’s pie… really nothing with a sauce or herbs. Or onion. Or mushy textures. Or mixed textures.

Guess what foods my family loved. Everything I hated. Mealtimes were the worst, I dreaded them. I genuinely feared going out to eat. And you know what made it worse? The complete and total lack of sympathy. I was fussy, I should just deal with it. There are children starving in Africa. So I did. I learned to eat things I hated for every meal, even when my peers would refuse to eat what they kinda maybe slightly didn’t like.

But now I live alone and I have slowly increased the meals that I do actually enjoy, or at least don’t dislike. And it’s amazing. I don’t have to fear mealtimes anymore.

Also, my parents didn’t do Christmas. Or Easter. Or Halloween. Or birthdays (although my mom tried to work around that). And Mom avoided fairy tales because she knew of their dark origins. You know, screw the current cheerful version of Cinderella; the older versions had body mutilations *gasp*. Bodily mutilations that…are not… in the current versions…

Mom meant well, but most of my Disney knowledge comes from the Kingdom Hearts series. So that’s weird.

And I’m actually kind of relieved that we never did Christmas, that holiday is a freaking mess.

So what else? Well just for a bit of background, I don’t and never did experience sexual attraction. This may seem like an odd thing to mention but do me a favour and look around; sex is everywhere! And it’s very confusing to a kid who doesn’t even know what it means to be or to find someone attractive. Over time I’ve learned to see what is aesthetically pleasing, but that’s just the viewpoint of an artist. It was very hard for me thanks to that; and even harder when during high school, events made me think that I was bisexual (it was high school, who didn’t think they were bi?). I’m not going into them because I still don’t understand what was going through my head, but eventually I realised that I wasn’t technically bi, because I didn’t experience attraction. I now say that rather than being attracted to males or females, it’s more that I’m not not attracted to them.

It’s weird, it’s confusing and hopefully you can understand why things were difficult for me. I’d be talking to my male friends when all heads turned to follow a shapely ass (I don’t get the appeal) and I would be wondering if they were listening to me (they usually weren’t). Still, it got some amusing responses from people who couldn’t understand.

Next, I didn’t have a passion like my brother, I had no motivations to encourage me to work and even worse, I was smart enough that I could coast through school with acceptable grades and the constant nagging that “I had potential”; although I suspect everybody hears that. Still, with no skills to speak of and no motivation, I just lived. Without purpose. I kinda still do. The only reason I have any goals at the moment is to keep occupied.

As a child, Mother was scared to let me go out, so I played the few video games that we had, watched the few television channels that I could, and read. Hoo boy did I read. My parents were keen on reading and so provided book after book and despite my dyslexia, I was soon waay above my peers. I was reading adult novels (no, not that kind; although one or two of the sci-fi books may as well have been) when I was in middle school (roughly around 9 and 13 years old; I can never remember). I firmly believe it was the reading that helped me overcome my dyslexia and look at me now, learning to write fiction and non-fiction and studying language. Of course, I have no social skills to speak of, so being able to go out might have been helpful.

I was also dyspraxic, but somehow I didn’t find this out until just a few months ago. Like seriously, I can’t blame anybody for this because it’s so extreme in its weirdness. My parents knew, adults I grew up with knew, even my brother knew; so how did I not? My assumption is that being dyslexic, I got the two very similar sounding words mixed up and for some reason people only focused on my dyslexia. It’s also pretty clear that my parents knew nothing about dyspraxia so that probably didn’t help.

But the dyspraxia was a huge issue for me. I couldn’t play instruments like my brother or friends, because I didn’t have the motor skills; I couldn’t do sports because I would kick a football in 180 degrees from where I intended, and when you can’t kick a football your classmates hate you to an unreasonable degree, no doubt due to living in a football-oriented culture (which is probably worth another article all by itself) and you begin to hate sports; I couldn’t draw like my brother (like seriously, he can do everything I ever wanted to). I had no motivations, no goals and I never tried because I couldn’t do anything anyway.

This is going to be controversial but do you know what made things even worse? My parents were religious. Christian to be specific, but they go by “The Church of God” like literally every fucking religion so I can’t tell you exactly which denomination. They didn’t believe in hell so I was spared that trauma, and my parents always tried to be open about things like homosexuality (“we hate the act, not the people”) so all in all things could have been worse. But it was a small church with very few children and it wasn’t long before it was just me and this one boy. And it was so, so boring. There was literally nothing to keep a child entertained and we weren’t allowed to walk off. I ended up literally walking in circles around the edge of a room again and again and a-fucking-gain for hours. Thankfully I enjoyed walking but I think people started to realise there was a problem.

I also wouldn’t get out of bed on Saturdays (because yes, the sabbath is actually on Saturday) and that definitely formed a weird habit. It’s pretty clear that I was depressed and so my parents eventually relented and let me stay at home. They were (and still are) convinced that I will return to the fold one day (I’m actually a hardcore atheist at this point). But that bad sleeping habit continued.

So that’s the start. I was a kid with a technically undiagnosed learning disability that conditioned both my mind and my body, and that always sucks. I had people around me who were motivated and goal driven and worst of all, who were talented! And I struggled to do anything. Without goals, without motivation, and with a mother who was willing to do literally everything for me, I effectively did nothing. On top of that, I developed clear signs of depression that have since gotten worse, and worse over time.

As I said though, things weren’t all bad. My parents loved me. None of us were particularly ill. I don’t know how many people I grew up with who had parents who had split and were uncaring. My hometown is full of people who have no desire to further themselves, who are happy to do nothing. I’m very lucky with my family.

Even if my brother is a snarky asshole.

#first puffin #biography #life lessons #coping with mental illness #yeah like anyone cares #thosetagswilldofornow

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