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thelastpilot · 4 years

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‘On GOD We Are Going to Get You a Girlfriend’- A Lovesquare Story as suffered by Nino

My last charity fic for @mlbforblm! The prompt was Aged Up College AU lovesquare, in which Adrien is struggling with his love for both Marinette and Ladybug and Nino is put in the position to be the ultimate wingman. I went a little off script with this prompt but I hope it scratches that itch nonetheless.

The concept itself lent itself much better to 15k than 4 but I did what I could! Hope it gets a laugh out of you.

It was twilight in Paris, the tail end of sunset slipping away as people all across campus engaged in extremely varied states of productivity. That is to say, at most 20% of the campus’ live-in population was actually getting any work done, while the rest of them were either limping along or had already given up.

It was midterms week, clearly.

In the dim space of a reasonable apartment accommodation were well -intentioned study implements of every kind. The completely average couch and carpet were covered with just enough of a layer of highlighters, pens, and printed pages to give a really studious impression at a glance, but whatever vibe it might have managed was thoroughly ruined by a young man laying face down on the floor, a game console nearly tumbling from his hands. Another, separate, but equally as unfocused young man had his back to plain white wall against which they had been meaning to put like… a chair or something at least for most of the semester now, staring idly out of the sliding glass door to his left that offered only a sliver of a view from his current position. At most he could see two lovely, but neglected, potted plants and a shoddy balcony looking off towards the main body of their college campus.

He watched the small patch of sky he could see succumb to a light coverage of clouds, and as he considered the possibility of rain, he sighed.

“Nino?” he finally spoke, looking away from his strip of sky. He waited for a response for a second or two, before reaching out with his foot and gently prodding his friend’s side to check he was alive, smirking slightly when he received a grunt for his efforts.

“Mm,” Nino answered from his curled up position, the glasses on his face a perfect reflection of his Pokemon team’s stats, which was ironic considering that Stats was exactly the thing Nino was avoiding at the minute. After a beat too long, he realized his friend was still waiting on his response. He lifted his head slightly, his hat falling free to the ground as he said, “Mm? Yeah?” He blinked slowly. “What?”

Adrien smiled down at him, chuckling a little before tossing aside a textbook he had been pretending to take notes from for the last hour. When his lap was free he leaned forward and rolled to the ground, mimicking Nino’s exact positioning on the ground a small distance away from him, sighing again (louder this time).

“What?” Nino repeated himself, laughing when Adrien leveled him with a sour look. He rolled his eyes but dutifully paused his game, shutting his Switch off and putting it on the ground out of their eyeline. “Go for it dude, what’s up.”

“You’re not going to like it.”

“Is it a girl thing?” Nino asked flatly, raising an eyebrow when all Adrien managed was a sheepish smile. “Dude.”

“Come on! You’re my friend, you’re contractually obligated. Look don’t make fun of me just help okay; I’m really stuck now.” Adrien pleaded with him, bringing his hands in front of him to cartoonishly beg for his grace. He got another eye roll for his trouble but Nino hadn’t gotten up and left yet so that was a good sign.

It wasn’t that his friend didn’t want to help him, its just that… well.

Adrien always had some kind of girl problem, pretty much off and on for the past five years. He knew it got hard to listen to and Nino had put in way more than his fair share of time into this. Especially since he had made essentially no progress whatsoever in all that time, but boy was he almost on to something here.

Nino said nothing else, making a vague hand gesture for him to continue and Adrien did as he always did.

He hesitated, carefully considering how to phrase something.

“So um, there is this girl. That uh, girl, I always talk about. The one you don’t know. And then there is another girl, one who you do know.”

“Do we HAVE to be so vague man? We’re in our own place, there is no one around. Can’t you just say it? I get so confused when we do it like this.”

Adrien tensed slightly, discomfort crawling up his back. “I uh, I can’t. Just- just listen okay? I can’t explain it.”

“We’re in our house,” Nino complained again. But Adrien ignored him, because he always ignored him when he said that.

“Just listen okay?”

Nino looked at him squarely, or at least as squarely as he could manage while laying on the ground. When Adrien patiently waited for a response Nino finally sighed, rolling on his stomach and laying his face sideways on the floor to match him, nodding stiffly for him to continue.

“It’s just, there is these two girls,” he began, “I’m losing my mind over it, I’m worried man and it’s coming to a head. I know I’ve said that before, but I mean it this time. I have never ONCE in my entire LIFE gotten the timing right Nino, I’m dead serious.” Adrien rolled around a little gripping his hair with both hands. “I get the timing wrong EVERY TIME. I have never been where I’m supposed to be! I’ve never made a move at the right time I have never done it right. I get close with one girl but she doesn’t reciprocate or she tells me to wait or she says that its complicated, then I get close to the other girl but I feel GUILTY because I still care about the first girl. But she says it isn’t right so I work on it I let go but then the other girl is gone or moves on or life gets in the way. I have been in the wrong place EVERY TIME-,”

Adrien’s ranting continues, rolling around on their carpet as he incredibly vaguely and very stupidly details a problem that he has had for many, many years. Nino can feel himself retreating into his own thoughts, more focused on Adrien’s animated rolling than his actual words. He reaches out once to save a stack of notes from getting creased and ruined, but other than that remains completely still and lets his friend do his thing.

This happened maybe once a week or so, maybe a little less often or more often depending on the status of the girls.

The fact that Adrien literally REFUSED to say their names made this completely incoherent, but where in his love life he was inconsistent, when it came to never talking about work Adrien was true to form.

Nino blinked blearily as Adrien continued, pouring over the reasons he cared so deeply for them both and why that made him feel like a bad person. It left Nino to stew, wondering much like always why they did it like this.

The two of them were superheroes. Spoilers if you didn’t know. He didn’t feel like much of a superhero when he was sprawled out on his shared apartment floor suffering the long run up to failing his Stats midterm like any other student. But the fact remained that he was one, and so was Adrien. The problem was that Adrien was serious about keeping life and work separate. It was pretty much only hard and fast rule about this gig that Nino had picked up on when he first joined. Never talk about work as a civilian, under any circumstances. You only get to talk about work when you’re suited up, and you’re only allowed to talk about life in plain clothes.

Honestly, it was so hard to do it that way, but the rules were clear, not that anyone had actually stopped to explain them to him. Adrien froze up whenever he even so much as mentioned an akuma attack or asked about an injury. Don’t talk about work, but…

They lived together now, this was the first semester where they had done so and Nino was so hyped about it. Like FINALLY, our kwamis can relax and we can be ourselves. He had been so excited about it, but to his profound disappointment Adrien refused to relent on his rule. Their kwamis were never even out in the open except for in their rooms, like he knew Adrien was strict but surely he wasn’t that committed.

Nino understood that it was probably Ladybug’s rule but still, it’s not like she was here. He wouldn’t advocate for disobeying her but… come on man. His brain hurt.

He KNEW Adrien was talking about Ladybug/Marinette. He knew that for a fact, but Adrien would never say her name out loud, because that overlaps with work (even though they hang out with her in person like every single day.) Maybe Nino didn’t know who the heck this second girl he was talking about was, but at the very least he could be clear about one of them.

Whoever the second girl actually was sounded a lot like Marinette, so the for-sure thing was that he had a type. Honestly though he had stopped trying to figure it out years ago. If he wasn’t so exhausted from not studying he would humor him like he always did, but today… man he was kind of tired.

He waited until Adrien was done talking, undoubtably ending by asking for advice as per the usual. Then, like always, Nino said what he always did.

“You need to communicate. If you are not crystal clear with these girls about what they want and what you want nothing with ever happen. You need to bite the bullet and TELL them, at least ONE of them, what you’re thinking.”

And like always, Adrien groaned and covered his face and said, “It’s not that easy!”

They both grumbled dejectedly into the carpet, repeating their years old platitudes until they gave up on each other. Nino usually did this a lot better but he reserved the right to tap out and Adrien usually seemed to accept that.

The only different thing Adrien actually said was when he was standing. He mumbled, “I know, I know. You’re right, as usual but… I’m maybe gonna ask someone else. See what they think.”

“I don’t know what answer you’re hoping for, but that’s all I’ve got.”

“I know,” Adrien sighed, offering a hand to help him off the ground. He smiled gently, but his eyes were sad. Enough of a gesture to explain that he wasn’t actually mad at Nino’s dismissiveness. He had a right to refrain.

They spent an idle few minutes cleaning up their mess, consolidating their notes and books into two loose piles and neither saying much. It was only about thirty or so minutes later when Adrien announced vaguely, “I’m gonna go for a run.”

“Yeah man,” Nino answered, knowing by heart Adrien’s codeword for ‘patrol’. Didn’t know why he didn’t just say it, but that was a dead horse long beaten.

Adrien left within a minute or two but Nino stood blearily for awhile in the living room, staring at nothing as he debated just going to bed for the day.

He was just about to head to his room to ask if Wayzz was ready for dinner when the kwami in question came flying into the room, confidently out in the open space now that Adrien was gone.

“You’re getting a call!” Wayzz piped up importantly, waving his little flippers a bit to sell the point. “It’s Cat Noir!”

“I- what?” Nino sputtered, glancing towards the apartment door in confusion. “He literally just- ugh.” Nino groaned as loudly as possible, Wayzz shaking his head a little. “Why is he LIKE THIS, he could have just TOLD ME TO COME.”

“I know he’s odd about it, but he must have his reasons. You should go, he must need you for patrol.”

Nino demanded a few more moments of frustration, which Wayzz indulged, before grabbing his keys and unlocking a window in case he didn’t feel like using them. It was Adrien’s turn tonight but okay whatever.

It only took him a minute or two to transform and get out onto their building’s roof, stretching a bit before raising his wrist. He forced himself to take a deep breath and remind himself of the rules while he returned Adrien’s call.

Through the hazy, green, holographic screen he saw the face of Cat Noir answer on the first ring, the feline superhero sighing in relief and smiling widely.

“There you are! I was hoping you were out. Hey, I know this is kind of sudden but… um I was wondering if you were willing to meet up with me. I want to ask you about something.”

He allowed himself to hang his head in frustration just out of the video feeds eyeline, pulling a sharp breath through his teeth before answering, “Yeah bud. Lets meet up.”

“Great!” Cat Noir answered enthusiastically, genuinely happy that he had agreed for whatever reason. “Meet me here when you get a second,” and he sent over his current location. Sure enough he was literally like, one block over.

He hung up without a goodbye, dragging his feet as he started to head that way. He was slow about it sine it was at most five seconds away for him. Adrien was so INTENSE about this charade some days it just drove him completely crazy. But rules are rules.

He waited for about a minute to distance their patterns, then with a short jump and a few corner’s turned he found Cat Noir crouched on top of the Linguistics building.

“Hey, you got here fast,” Cat greeted him happily, a little nervous looking actually. ‘Carapace’ as he was really had to resist the eye roll there, deciding instead to nod.

He went over and sat somewhat heavily, not pretending with an greeting at all and just watching him flatly. For whatever reason this made Cat Noir hesitate a little, but he quickly got over it, pushing through the weirdness and folding his hands in his lap.

“Well, listen I won’t waste your time much. I know we don’t really do this, we only ever talk about work and that’s the safe thing, I get how it is.” Cat Noir looked away, his gaze fixated on the possibility of rain, before he finally sighed.

“I just… I was wondering if I could get some… girl advice?”

Cat Noir looked to his ally, scanning his face and getting even more nervous as he more or less saw a brick wall of an expression on Carapace’s face.

Carapace blinked, saying nothing as Cat Noir began to talk unprompted, persevering despite the lack of reciprocation.

“So um, there is a girl, and you know that. I always talk about her, and there is another girl, one that you don’t know.”

Carapace blinked.

He softly let out a “Bro…” but Cat Noir was hyping himself up now and he started rolling.

“It’s just, there is these two girls,” he began, “I’m losing my mind over it, I’m worried man and it’s coming to this point where like, I-,”

He kept going, looking down at his gloved hands and missing Carapace’s slowly warping expression. He started rambling, about how he always got the timing wrong, about how he cared about both these girls so much and he just didn’t know what to do. He started and he didn’t stop, completely unaware of Carapace starting to lose touch with reality.

Finally Carapace interrupted, stammering slightly in a tone that was wildly like…

Disbelief?

“Dude I- stop, hang on. Dude I just- I know?” He waited for a beat, watching Cat Noir blink in confusion. He scanned his face, looking for just- literally anything. After another moment that was way too long, he finally braved it. “We- we already, we already talked about this.”

Cat straightened, throwing his head back in exasperation and groaning loudly, “Okay I know I talk about girls sometimes but I honestly never bother you with this much can you humor me please?”

“No I-,” Carapace paused, his voice getting quieter. “We just… literally we-,”.

“Please man I- UGH I’m really having trouble!” He nearly shouted it, looking so genuinely unheard that Carapace was reeling. “You’re one of my only close guy friends I NEED a second opinion, I’m begging now. I already asked my other friend but he always says the exact same thing and he’s RIGHT but I need someone to say something else!” Cat suddenly mimicked his voice saying, “”You need to communicate.” That’s what he says, he’s RIGHT obviously but I just-,”

He kept talking, briefly glossing over how this ‘friend of his’ wasn’t particularly helpful with this line of questioning, so Cat Noir had chosen to seek HIM out instead.

And as he went on with his rant, Carapace slowly brought his hands to his face in intense contemplation.

Suddenly, in the middle of Cat Noir’s over the top love ranting Carapace decided to interrupt him.

“Hold up- hold on now. I need to clarify something, just cause I need to double check alright, just checkin’ something.”

Cat Noir paused, looking to him and slowly saying, “…okay?”

“You KNOW I know you’re Adrien Agreste right?”

Silence. Cat abruptly went rigid, but Carapace just splayed his hands wide, rapidly searching his face for confirmation of the impossible.

“Like dawg you KNOW that right? You’re aware? You know that right?”

Cat Noir was frozen, holding as still as possible like Carapace was a T-Rex and if he didn’t move this problem was just gonna go away. But Carapace pressed further, getting louder as he said “DUDE you know who I AM RIGHT?!”

The feline superheroes breathing was starting to pick up, his eyes blown wide as he REALLY looked at his friend, before he nearly inaudibly squeaked, “…no?”

“ADRIEN-,”

“Shhh!” Cat Noir leapt forward, trying to grapple him as he went into full panic mode, “Wait shut up shut up!”

“IT’S BEEN FIVE YEARS!”

“SHUT UP!”

They started to wrestle, Cat Noir violently shushing his companion as he had a full melt down, saying things like “All this time-!” and “You’re an idiot!” and “I thought you were just- oh my god!”

“Please!!! This is terrible Carapace shut up!! I don’t know how you found out my identity but I-,”

“WHOSE THE SECOND GIRL-!?”

“Lower your voice!”

“WHOSE THE SECOND GIRL”

“What do you mean?!”

Carapace gripped him hard by the shoulders and threw them both until Cat Noir was flat on his back with a harsh thump against the roof tiles. The turtle hero held him tight and shook his shoulders, his eyes crazed with years of realization colliding together at once. “Who is the second girl in your ridiculous life, what’s her name?!”

Cat Noir looked wild and frightened, finally becoming so flustered that he just hissed in a whisper, “It’s Marinette okay!?”

“And?”

“And WHAT!?”

“AND?” Carapace reiterated, shaking him harder.

“And LADYBUG you MORON!” he hissed as quietly as he possibly could.

Instantly Carapace stopped, holding him in a vice like grip just above the tiles. After an incredibly still moment, he dropped him, closing his eyes and putting his hands over his face.

Cat Noir was flat on his back, panting heavily and staring up at him freaked out, but it was like Carapace had been struck by lightning and he was just sitting there, completely still.

“Oh,” was all he finally said, curling in on himself slightly. Before suddenly, he pitched to the side and just lay there on the roof tiles, rolling onto his stomach.

“…oh?!” Cat eventually managed, twisting onto his side to look at him just laying there. “That’s all you have to say?! Of COURSE it’s Ladybug! I talk about her EVERY. DAY.”

“This… explains… so much,” Carapace muttered, not even listening to him. With a huff Cat crawled onto all four and went over to him, his heart racing in what was nearly a panic attack at this point. But all of Carapace’s energy had been spent, and he just mumbled dejectedly with his face smooshed against the tiles.

Cat Noir’s ears twisted forward, trying to make out the words, before he just lost his patience and hissed “What are you saying?!”

“I said YOU’RE STUPID!” the turtle barked out, turning his face back into the filthy roof.

“Why am I- UGH forget it! Just forget it we have a way bigger problem here- If Ladybug finds out my identity has been compromised she’s going to-,”

“Is SHE stupid too!?” Carapace interjected, twisting just enough to look up at him incredulously. “Is everyone stupid but ME?”

“What the hell are you talking about?! Dude there is RULES! No one is allowed to know anyone elses identity!”

Carapace just gaped at him, before his eyes unfocused and he just went limp. He whispered it when he said, “So she IS stupid…”

He waited a beat, and wretchedly mumbled to himself, “Oh god you’re both so stupid.”

Cat Noir was at a loss, looking all around him like he was desperately trying to make sense of it all, stopping only to try and sort of Carapace’s miserable breakdown.

He was about to give up and just drag Carapace to a lockable room somewhere before his friend propped himself up all at once with the most exasperated expression he had ever seen on a human person.

“So help me- someone has to do some shit about this, listen to me-,” Carapace got to his knees and lunged forward to grab him by the bell. He pulled him forward, and with all the determination of a war general he proclaimed, “On GOD I am going to get you a girlfriend, do you hear me? I am going to make this happen because I can not STAND another DAY of this. Got it?!”

“I- Carapace I-!?”

“GOT IT?!”

Cat Noir dangled helplessly in his grip, and with his last wits he sputtered out, “Okay, okay!!! I’ll do whatever you say!”

#adrien agreste #nino lahiffe #love square #adrienette #ladynoir #carapace #mlbforblm #sorry if this isnt my best #but #it cannot be overstated how much i love the fact that almost all of ninos dialogue #is delivered while face down on the floor #cause thats a mood

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adhdtoomanycommas · 4 years

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ADHD, Gifted Programs, and Accidental Accommodations

So one big thing has been on my mind pretty consistently since I got diagnosed last year at the age of 30—why did it take so long to figure this out? At no point in my K-12 education or my 4 year bachelor’s degree schooling did any teacher or counselor question or suggest I may have ADHD, despite the fact that I check nearly every single box on every diagnostic criteria (both inattentive and hyperactive!)

One obvious reason is sexism. Pretty early in my reading on the subject, I learned that ADHD is dramatically under-diagnosed in girls and women. Partly this is because of different presentations, but a lot of it is just that the stereotype people have in their heads of what an ADHD kid looks like is always a boy.

But the other big reason, and the one I want to talk about today, is the fact that one of the few ADHD diagnostic boxes that I didn’t check was “bad grades.” So really, the question is, why weren’t my grades bad?

That’s not to say I was especially good at school work. My backpacks, desks, and binders were always a complete mess, and I NEVER did the homework. I would do the big projects (at the last possible second, of course) but daily homework just straight up didn’t happen. If there was time left at the end of class I would sometimes quickly do the homework for the next day, and occasionally jot down some approximation of it in the minute or two before class started, but when I was actually at home, I never touched it.

But here’s the thing with ADHD brains: We can focus on things with no problem, as long as we find them interesting. And I’ve always read quickly enough that doing the reading for class was usually interesting. And for the most part, the class content itself usually seemed interesting enough. But probably most importantly, I consider tests interesting. There’s always been enough of a challenge racing-the-clock game-like aspect to them to me that I would stay engaged on the tests, and even if didn’t completely know the material, I was good at using logic to get a pretty good guess (like using all those tricks they teach for standardized tests—narrowing down the options on a multiple choice question, looking for answers in the other questions, etc.)

So even in the classes where turning in the daily homework counted for part of the grade (math and language classes mostly) I was usually able to scrape a B with only the occasional C thrown in, and everything else was A’s.

But part of my saving grace was the “gifted” classes. I was very lucky that, despite not knowing about her own (probable) ADHD, my mom knew enough about how she worked as a student to know that me (and my brother) really needed to be engaged and challenged in order to thrive. Because of this, she advocated for us hard—she insisted we be allowed in my elementary school’s “gifted” program in kindergarten (based on our test scores of course) even though the “gifted” program officially wasn’t even available until first grade. And when we moved to a different state, she advocated for us again and got us included even though the “gifted” class was “full.” She knew that nothing would make us fail faster than being bored in class, so she made sure that there was at least one day a week when we would be challenged and actually get to engage with material we found interesting.

Aside, ��despite how essential they were for me to thrive in school, the entire concept of “gifted” programs and “gifted” kids is problematic as hell. Half of the screening is basically just looking for class signifiers and seeing whose parents had enough free time to give them a head start (or whose parents have the time to advocate for their kids the way my mom did for me). Not to mention there’s likely a massive racial bias. So in all this discussion of why I did ok despite my ADHD, it’s important to note that there’s a lot of privilege at play here determining who gets access to these types of programs.

This is also why I keep putting “gifted” in quotes-- I don’t think there is anything inherent about academic ability. Also, academic ability, reading ability, testing aptitude, etc. are definitely not indicative of intelligence. Plus the entire concept of the measurability of intelligence is based on eugenics ideas, so clearly one should take the whole thing with a huge grain of salt.

Nowadays the term all the parenting blogs like to use for kids like me, with ADHD (or dyslexia, or autism, or whatever else) who also test well enough to be flagged as “gifted,” is “Twice Exceptional” which is a term that makes me immediately want to punch whoever uses it. Seriously, it makes me gag. Like, it doubles down on the “special” euphemism and seems entirely designed to make parents feel better about their kid without any consideration to how the kid feels. No kid wants to be singled out, especially one who’s already probably pretty socially isolated (which I could digress about but that’ll be another essay for another day), and being Twice singled out certainly doesn’t help anything.

But ultimately the teaching in the “gifted” class itself wound up being really good accommodations for ADHD. I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if they were better than the accommodations in the separate classes actually intended for kids with ADHD and other learning issues, though since I wasn’t diagnosed as I kid I can’t actually speak to that as I don’t have any experience there. But in the gifted classes, firstly, we were given more specific subjects as opposed to the overviews we got in regular classes. And it’s way easier to be engaged on specific subjects like ice age mammals, or the wreck of the Titanic, than it is to be engaged with a broad list of dates or categories. We did logic problems that were presented as games, but that were indirectly teaching us the basics for higher level math. In 6th grade, we did research projects and got to pick our own subjects completely, so we could write about whatever we were hyperfixating on at the moment (mine was on medieval warfare as depicted in the Bayeux tapestry). And if we happened to get excited and blurt out an interesting fact vaguely related to whatever was being discussed, that was likely encouraged instead of reprimanded like it would be in the normal classroom. This continued into high school, as honors and AP level classes tended to be a lot more discussion based rather than the top-down approach at other levels, as well as affording more opportunity to choose one’s own subjects.

The story you’ll hear from (or about) a lot of ADHD kids (especially undiagnosed) flagged as “gifted” is of hitting a wall at some point, academically speaking. That did happen to me briefly, in middle school. We started being assigned a lot more long-term projects, and there was a bit of a learning curve while I figured out how to put things off Until the last minute and not Past the last minute. But thanks to some patient teachers who believed in me (which I might not have had outside of honors classes), I managed to pull out of it and improve my grades (with the exception of the only report-card F of my entire academic career, from a sadistic gym teacher who seemed to think that enough berating would cure asthma).

Even more stories I’ve read and heard from people who were diagnosed with ADHD as an adult say they hit that wall academically when they started college—the first time they were really self-guided in their studies. But again, there, I was saved by an honors program. In this case, it was the Honors Tutorial College, a truly strange program at Ohio University. I was tracked into HTC by one particular professor who very much wanted HTC to expand into the art program and decided that because I had both strong test scores and a strong art portfolio (and probably, lets be real, because I was the daughter of one of the other professors) that I was the perfect person to be the first student in the new program.

OU’s website describes HTC as “flexible curriculum and one-on-one tutorials with renowned faculty that allow your curiosity to take the lead in your education.” It’s rigorous, but comes with a lot of perks, like waiving certain gen-ed classes, being able to take classes without first taking the required prerequisites, and designing one’s own independent study classes individually with instructors. And those perks are (as far as I know entirely accidentally) the perfect accommodations for an ADHD student (and probably pretty good for Autistic ones as well, based on some of my peers in the program).

A lot of the gen-ed classes I waived were ones I probably would have been bored in and thusly not done well. Being able to skip pre-reqs meant that, for instance, for my English requirements I was able to take far more interesting classes like Shakespeare’s Comedies, YA Lit, and Playwriting instead of English 101, 102 etc. If I wanted to learn about something in particular, I had help finding a professor willing to help me in an independent study/tutorial class. Being the pilot of the program meant I was able to shape it so that I could get an art degree without ever having to choose one medium (which as far as I know is still an option for anyone pursuing an HTC Studio Art degree). And at the end of the program, when we were required to complete a massive thesis project and paper (at basically graduate level), not only could I choose my subject to meet my hyperfixations, but I had individual help from a professor keeping me on task on the less-fun parts at every step of the way.

HTC students are required to keep their GPAs above a high threshold. At one point one of my grades (in Latin class) was low enough to hurt my average, and I was called into HTC headquarters for a check-in meeting. I was asked why my grade had fallen, and I explained that the class wasn’t that interesting (at that level it was mostly grammar) but that it was getting better as we were moving up into translating more actual historical material. That explanation was entirely accepted. Imagine if “it’s not interesting enough” was considered a valid excuse for grades slipping for everyone, how much less stressful school would be for ADHD kids!

So ultimately it’s pretty much been having the luck and privilege to get myself flagged for “gifted” classes that kept my grades up throughout my school years. Accidental accommodations have continued into my adult life as well. At my most recent office job, for instance (which I lost due to covid layoffs), I had a pretty hands-off boss who just didn’t care if I doodled, got up to stretch my legs every once in a while, and listened to audiobooks at my desk all day as long as the work got done.

I didn’t need a diagnosis to get these accommodations, because they were given freely, which meant I was able to succeed even without knowing about my own ADHD. If I had been diagnosed, and had had to ask for accommodations, I wonder if I would have done as well as bias against people with ADHD means people wouldn’t have expected as much from me.

So if you’ve made it this far, I’ll ask for the same for others that I got for myself. If you are a teacher (or a manager in an office setting), I strongly encourage you to consider how to make your classroom, office, etc. more accessible in general, without someone having to disclose a diagnosis or be singled out for accommodations. The biggest easiest one you can do is to allow (or even encourage) doodling in lecture settings. Even for neurotypicals, there have been plenty of studies proving people retain information better when doodling, so everyone should know by now that someone doodling doesn’t mean they’re not listening. If at all possible, encourage discussion and contribution. Give everyone breaks to stretch and move around. And give as much freedom as possible on what to learn about. You might be surprised what people are capable of when these reasonable steps are taken to give everyone room to thrive.

That’s all for now, hopefully you got something out of this unwieldy ramble. I’d be curious to hear if you’ve run into any accidental accommodations in your life and how they’ve helped. Until next time!

#actuallyadhd #Actually ADHD #adhd #gifted kids #former gifted kid

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wordshelp919 · 3 years

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Words Help.

It’s hard to admit to being the victim of abuse. Oftentimes it is the condition of the abusee to believe that they are not worthy of qualifying their experiences as ‘abuse’. Most likely due to repeated conditioning on the part of the abuser. That is the case for me.

I have spent my whole life trying to figure out how to be. Not who. How. My identity did not have the freedom to develop for my own sake, but always for others. As all people are different, it meant that I had to learn varying ways to accommodate all types of people. As a child, I was rarely angry. Even when other people were angry with me, I never lost my cool, at least without attempting to understand the situation. If I could just figure out why they were angry and then fix it, then there wouldn’t be a need for anyone to be upset. It is not always to the benefit of any individual to be so accommodating.

I was isolated in a house with only four people to love. I wanted a happy family, peace, and love and I worked for it as best as I could. In my undying attempt to love the first the members of the family, I neglected to love the fourth. Through my own constant self-adjustment, I somehow became the answer to all of their life’s grievances; their punching bag. My mom’s helplessness from being forced by her mom to beg for rice, being beat up by her dad, brother, uncles, aunts, tormented by her cousins, and every single black person in the all-black neighborhood that she grew up in was subconsciously redirected an iron fisted need for control for me and my sister. My sister is not as accommodating, and eventually her subconscious redirected most of her control therapy to just me.

I was a good kid. Easy-going, kind, and obedient. Unfortunately for me and Ella, the virtue of obedience grays when given to the wrong people.

I cried much too often, and still do. I am very sensitive by nature, but even for someone like that, young Donna cried way too much. I would earn an intense punished no less than once a week. By intense, I mean that it would last for over an hour with screaming and yelling and crying and snot. By third grade I mastered the art of hiding my puffy eyes by deepening my eyelid crease with a bobby pin. I didn’t think it was abnormal to be so puffy eyed from crying so often. I just didn’t want to look weird for school. It’s true, even good children need to be disciplined, but I don’t consider what happened discipline. I know that now because it never was to the benefit of my own virtue. All I learned from those countless hours of being yelled at was that my mom was a severely broken person. After the punishment ended and I was allowed to wash my face and go to bed, I would be left thinking about the knife-tongued words that would echo in my mind well into my early twenties. In an exhausted daze, I would wonder to myself.. why was I so bad at listening to her the first time? Why was I so disobedient? I never thought that I took her for granted or even felt a lack of gratitude towards either of my parents, but I mustn’t do this again because according to her, that is what this all equates to. I don’t want to be those things. But apparently I am. Was. Am. Won’t be starting now.

My dad has a lot of blanks in his life. It is his pride, I believe that is what keeps him from sharing any part of his life that is a story and not just numbers that equate to his grand self-earned worth. Also, probably the fear of someone hearing his story and thinking that it is not that bad. I have that same fear, but I learned about pride from a young age, and I try to do the opposite of whatever my pride tells me to. Pride, my dad, my sister; to disobey one is to disobey all. So fighting pride is not so difficult sometimes. I may be missing the stories of his life that fuel his type of abuse, I can look to my sister’s for the answers.

She learned about his pride from an even younger age than I and it’s through her responses to it that I can understand my dad. We learned about pride from the same live-in teacher, but the only difference between me and her is that she loved power more than people and instead of fighting pride, she became its prodigious student. If only her ease of learning was limited to art, music, and math. She was tainted by evil and became a jaded, angry adult at only 8 years old. The beautiful and innocent nature of children died when she discovered her love for pride and power over others. I asked her one night, bringing to surface the odd, powerful, mysterious quality in her, “what is your secret? How can I be like you?”. She told me she would tell me, but I had to swear that I wouldn’t tell our parents. I promised. “The secret to being like me is that I don’t love Mommy and Daddy all the time”. I was spooked. I broke my promise within the minute.

I am so proud of young Donna for that night. It’s odd, the memories that we choose to keep, but that night I clearly remember feeling terrible for the instinctual decision I made. I was scared and naturally gravitated towards my parents but I betrayed my sister. To think that that night young Donna went with her gut would be a proud moment for young adult Donna. Yet I can’t help feeling as though I failed her(y.d.) She could call out those wrong things with much more clarity than I can even now, all the while loving those wrong people much more than I do.

Anyways my sister’s secret to her twistedness was to withhold love. The opposite of love. Hate.

When you find out that Hester’s power came from Satan worship, you run.

I always thought she loved me differently than how she did our parents. It was clear how much more she loved me, although both her hatred and love was combined with elements of obsession and ownership. Unfortunately, she valued power more. She was fueled by hatred and was enormously jealous of me for the love I received which was so different from that which she did. She never thought once that the difference between us may have been because of the love that I gave. Her pride wouldn’t allow for that kind of thinking. It had to be my fault.

Instead of facing the obvious truth of why my parents loved me more sweetly than they did her, she decided to level the playing field on her own terms. I could not smile in certain ways because she thought I was trying to be cute and by extension, curry favor of people, and by extension, take it away from her. I wasn’t allowed to be sad, in case it would cause someone to comfort me. I was an attention grabber, a brat, selfish, and spoiled. According to her, that is. And most damaging of all, I was a crybaby. Her constant criticism worked for the most part. I don’t smile like that anymore. I not only aggressively hate myself for portraying her other definitions for me but I hate others for those very things as well.

One thing I could not ‘fix’ was the frequency of my tears. I tried holding them off for the first time in my life. I remember that first day clearly. I had given up. I decided not to fight her anymore, but just completely let her have her way and do nothing. I sighed a lot, and with every breath, I felt my energy leaving me. The attempt at complacency didn’t last.

Since that moment, I have cried an average of once a day. It has been 8 years. I guess crying is something that I never grew out of.

So that was a long segway to introduce my father’s story. It is the same, only the subjects are different, the reason for adopting pride is different, and the self-delusion is different. My dad was jealous. Is jealous. Of both me and my sister. It is only a theory, but if not jealousy there is comparison and transactional thinking taking place in his head. No words, just numbers. If there were any words in his brain, a conscious to speak the truth, he would have to hate himself as well. Luckily for him, no such thing has taken place and he can continue to believe that he is a perfect man. He is far from perfect. All too calculative, all too focused on the hurt in his life and not on the well-being of his children. And if my theory serves to be true, then it would be my sister who would have suffered the most from his jealousy. She was the one who was actually good at everything. My dad claims to have been the same. The only difference is that he endorsed for his children what his own father refused to. Not that they didn’t have the financial means to, but his own father chose his eldest son and no one else.

The abuse that comes from my dad is the most twisted and intricate and frightening of all three. I still don’t understand why he is so frightening other than the fact that he worships pride and loves hatred without realizing it. Those things are only momentary band-aids for deep wounds. He has 30 years of bandaids stacked in layers on his heart 10 miles high. What he needs is for those band-aids to be removed, the wound assessed, and then surgery performed to cut deep into the flesh to reveal the cancer that has sprouted and matured into every vague nook and crevice of his body.

My sister and I are treated the same when it comes to his manner of abuse, but my mom bears the brunt of it.

His ego is fueled by putting everyone down. Apparently he requires a lot of fuel because his ego has a half life of one hour.

No one is allowed to ask him a question he doesn’t know the answer to. How dare you make him feel inadequate. Poor kids and your inevitable need to question everything in the world. Poor kids and your tendency to ask for help. You should have known better before asking him a question from your third grade Wordly Wise workbook. Of course he wouldn’t know and of course you would get punished for making him feel stupid. I still remember telling my friends from school that he hit me on the head with a golf club. They were shocked and then I had to tell them it was plastic. As long as it’s plastic it’s okay. I didn’t mention that he screamed in my face and dragged me back by my feet into the study when I tried to run away, scraping my knees on the polished hardwood floor. I didn’t tell them that the golf club bruised my head. And I didn’t tell them that when I told my mom later that night, she didn’t care.

For us, it was a typical Friday night.

Poor kid, you should have just agreed that european is spelled europian. But by then you were already a student of pride.

Poor wife, there are no “should haves” for you. Your poor treatment is inevitable no matter how you change yourself for him. Your existence is for the purpose of being his cannon fodder. When the cannonball is released on enemy territory, it is far away from him, unable to do him any harm. Allegedly. Oddly, you are also enemy territory. It’s confusing, both the metaphor and the real life scenario that it illustrates.

He needs you to anger him so that his own anger and resentment towards his own family can escape him. It allows him to express pent up emotions in the form of hatred against you. The fact that you take his hatred to be constructive criticism is the result of your own abuse. That is not accomodation. Take it from me.

Not everyone has the privilege of learning what it feels like to be treated well.

#family #abuse #acknowlegement #healing

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byuneebuns · 5 years

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Fenced In (Part 15)

Chanyeol/Baekhyun x Reader College AU

Rated: M for Smut

Tags: Angst, College AU, Slow Burn

Author’s Note: HELLO!!!!! It’s good to be back. I hope you enjoy the update. Thank you again for waiting for me. ♡ No link to the mini masterlist in this post since Tumblr is (I believe still) being odd about links, however it can be found using the masterlist post in my bio! Please give me your thoughts, feelings, etc about this update! It’s been so long since I published anything, so the feedback would be very encouraging.

Your blood turned to ice as your brain caught up with reality. You barely managed to wait until the professor finished calling out names before you leapt out of your seat and made your way to his podium, trying your best to keep from breaking into a desperate sprint.

Someone else didn’t have that much self control.

Baekhyun was taking the steps of the lecture hall two at a time, weaving through the crowd ahead of him haphazardly, ignoring the death stares he was receiving from those that weren’t quick enough to get out of his way.

He reached your joint destination first and you arrived just in time for your stomach to sink at the words you overheard.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Byun, but I don’t have enough time nor interest in your personal life to rearrange the entire class to accommodate your request. Best of luck to you both, and I look forward to seeing your work.”

Baekhyun didn’t spare you a backwards glance as he stalked out of the classroom. Without considering the consequences of your actions you followed, catching his shoulder in a tight grip, and forced him to finally face you.

When his gaze met yours it felt like your heart was stuck in your throat, beating ferociously against the walls of your esophagus, strangling you.

His eyes were sad, tired, and a little wary.

“What do you want?”

You wanted to hit him. To scream at him. To curse his name for being so unaffected by your presence while you suffered being in his.

You bit your lip, just hard enough to for the metallic taste of your blood to taint your tongue.

“We need to talk.”

You kept a firm grip on his sleeve as you half led, half dragged, Baekhyun down the hallway towards a vacant classroom. If he had objections they were hidden from his expressionless face. Now that you were alone with him you were starting to regret your rash actions. Heat rose to your face as your nerves got the best of you. Your tongue felt coated in cement and you both stood there in silence while you agonized over how to tackle this obstacle until Baekhyun finally spoke.

“Look, I don’t want to get a bad grade on this. We can just email each other our work. We don’t have to work together directly.”

You felt a stab of pain in your chest, like you were walking in on him all over again, being rejected all over again, being heartbroken all over again.

All of the pain you’d spent weeks burying was rushing back to the surface in light of his indifference.

“Why are you being like this? More importantly, why do I care so much? This is so stupid. I wish that I’d never met you.” You shouted, louder than you’d intended, hot tears searing the corners of your eyes where they were threatening to fall.

Baekhyun was somehow towering over you, despite his average stature, with carefully rehearsed cold words balanced on the tip of his tongue. Words that melted as your calm exterior shattered. Your lip was trapped between your teeth, a familiar sight, but not in the way that he was used to.

Your eyebrows were shaking ever so slightly, in time with your hands, as you fought a losing battle to maintain your composure. As you struggled, so did he. You stood together, the silence stretching into years until it was unmade by two words so soft they were almost drowned out by the sound of your heartbeat pounding in your ears.

“I’m sorry.”

“You are, Baekhyun. Just not in the way that you mean. Not that you actually mean anything that you say.”

Your voice was sharp. Sharp enough, you hoped, to cut the man that stood opposite you. You wanted him to hurt. To feel at least a fraction of what you felt when you saw him. You wanted to hate him, perhaps more than you’d wanted to believe that he ever felt anything real for you.

“I’ve never lied to you. Not once. Brand me what you will, I deserve your hatred, but I’m not a liar. Not to you.”

The final thread holding you together finally snapped. All attempts at poise and self-control abandoned, you sank to the floor, crouching to hug your knees to your chest as the levees collapsed and released the flood of tears that you’d been desperately trying to contain.

“I hate you Baekhyun. Just go. Please, just go.”

You heard footsteps, but they sounded far away. You couldn’t tell where they were headed and you didn’t care. Everything else ceased to matter as your sadness, the sadness that you’d been ignoring for weeks, swallowed you whole.

A firm hand found your back and your body suddenly lurched forwards. Your eyes flew open just in time for your sight to be stolen by the chest your face was firmly pressed into. You opened your mouth to protest, but he spoke first:

“Please. Please don’t speak. I know that I’ve done awful things. You could say that they’re my specialty.” His monologue was punctured by a bitter laugh.

“I deserve your hatred. I do. But you don’t deserve to be hurt like this. Don’t cry over me. I can’t watch you cry. I’m sorry for dragging you into my bullshit. I’m...not a good person. I don’t like myself, and I try to make up for it by being charming and funny and kind and cool and all of these things...that I’m...not. I’m not any of it. I make girls that I don’t deserve fall for me to fill a void, and then I run away from their feelings because I’m a fucking coward. Only this time it was a little different.”

Baekhyun held you tighter, gripping you almost to the point of discomfort, like he thought that you would vanish if he let go. His voice dropped to a whisper.

“This time I ran from myself. I was so scared. So, so scared. Of you. I haven’t felt this way in so long, haven’t cared about what someone else thinks of me, about their feelings. Not really. Haven’t looked forward to seeing someone just to see them and...I got scared. It was too much. You always saw right through me. I couldn’t stand the thought of you seeing too much and being disappointed. I thought if I pushed you away, if I just...did what I always do...that it would go away, and then you were there, and your face, and I, I just-. I’m sorry.”

Baekhyun’s voice finally broke after his breathless admission, giving way to soft sobs. Almost against your will you felt your arms circle his waist, holding him with the same intensity that he held you with as your tears softly rained on each other. Time stopped. The only thing left that proved you were still alive was a steady heartbeat. You weren’t sure if it belonged to you or to him.

The sound of the door opening tore you out of your trance.

“O-oh, we thought this was empty.” The shadow of a female figure was barely visible before the door slammed shut again, the faint sound of women giggling left in it’s wake. The deed was already done; the spell had been broken. Baekhyun withdrew from you, hastily wiping stray tears from his swollen eyes.

“Ah, I don’t know what I was thinking. I really am sorry. For everything. I hope that you can...find the happiness that you deserve.” He choked on his last words like they hurt him to speak them as he stood, turning to flee the room, to flee from you again, but the sound of his name rooted him to the spot.

“Aren’t you tired of running away yet?” Your dry lips cracked, overwhelming your tastebuds with the salty mixture of tears and blood. Baekhyun stared at you, disbelief painting over his anguished face. You gently patted the floor next to you, inviting him to return to your side.

He was a man torn. Like a frightened rabbit, ready to escape at the first sign of danger, his eyes darted across your face uncertainly while his feet slowly shuffled forward. He sat beside you at last, watching you with a mystified expression.

“Why?” Was all he managed to croak from his raw throat.

“If you know that what you’re doing is stupid, isn’t it better to change? I still kind of...really want to punch you right now, but I also don’t want to see you look so sad. It hurts. I don’t want to hate you. I want to know the Baekhyun that hides behind a mask. Besides, he and I have a project to work on.” You smiled at him gently, warmly, encouragingly, and watched the fear slowly melt from his face and give way to a shy, yet brilliant smile.

“Yeah, I guess they do.”

***

When you got home Chanyeol was pulling on his coat. The way he smiled at you tugged at your heart strings in ways you weren’t familiar with. Guilt? You had nothing to feel guilty about. The emotion pierced your heart all the same.

“Baby girl, you’re just in time for me to leave.” He pouted, enveloping you in a bear hug. You breathed in his scent, willing it to calm you. Your brain felt like a bundle of raw nerve endings after the events of the afternoon.

“Sorry I’m home so late. I have a big English project due soon.” You breathed into his chest, nuzzling it softly with your cheek.

Chanyeol pulled away, his large hands resting on your shoulders while he studied your face.

“You okay?” He asked, staring pointedly at the puffy bags circling your eyes, running the pad of his thumb over your cheekbone with worry.

“I’m fine, Yeollie. You’d better get going. I’ll be here when you get back, okay? Go get those tips!” You said with what you hoped was a reassuring smile, smoothing the front of his work shirt from where you’d wrinkled it. You were relieved when he returned the same loving grin, kissing you gently on the forehead before taking his leave.

You let out a breath you hadn’t known you were holding when the door shut at your back and trudged towards your bedroom, collapsing on your bed still fully clothed. You were asleep in seconds.

***

“Stop stalling and let me see it!” You scowled impatiently, clawing at the the backpack that Baekhyun was trying desperately to keep out of reach.

“I already told you that it isn’t ready yet. Sto- Hey!” He scrambled to recover his belongings as you danced away from him with them in tow. A warning glare from the librarian kept him silent as he crept after you with a gloomy expression.

“Fine, you can read it I guess, but I’m not satisfied with it yet....” He muttered while you rifled shamelessly through his possessions.

“You’re so funny, Baekhyun. We’re supposed to work together, remember? Wow, for someone that tries to act so carefree you really are meticulous with your schoolwork, aren’t you?” You mused, smirking at your partner’s obvious embarrassment as you thumbed through very diligently taken lecture notes in search of his essay.

True to his word, Baekhyun was a different man than the one you’d grown to know before. In a short week you’d met a man that was a little nervous, shy, easily embarrassed, and surprisingly hardworking. It was apparent that he’d been putting on an act for a long time and keeping his guard down around someone was still very uncomfortable. Despite the differences though he was still very much the same in his own way. Still witty, still demanding and pouty, still flirtatious at times, still prone to giggle fits and silly jokes. Still a living ray of sunshine, just with a few clouds sometimes.

It was real. It was refreshing.

There were times that he seemed to be his old self again and you couldn’t help wondering if it was just so ingrained into him that he wasn’t quite sure who he was anymore. The pity that you felt for him outweighed your resentment, perhaps against better judgment. You wanted so badly to ask why he’d closed himself off emotionally, to ask what had happened to him, but it was a conversation for another time.

You finally found the bundle of papers you’d been searching for and your eyes pored over them eagerly, holding your breath until you reached the final punctuation mark.

“This is great! Perfect!” You exhaled.

You beamed at your companion, your grin widening as you saw his cheeks light up with embarrassment.

“You think so? It’s just okay. It needs a lot more work.” He muttered, pressing his palms into his face to hide its hue.

“No, it’s perfect! Don’t change a thing.”

The words had scarcely left your still-parted lips before they were forced together by the softness of Baekhyun’s mouth pressed against them, one hand gently caressing your jaw while the other wound itself at the nape of your neck and held you to him. You stiffened, dumbstruck, with cheeks blazing until he finally withdrew.

“You’re perfect. Don’t change a thing.” He whispered, his voice husky as he tucked a stray strand of hair behind your ear affectionately.

Alarms were ringing in your ears as your shock subsided into panic. You snatched your bag and stood, ignoring the way Baekhyun’s eyebrows drew close with worry.

“I-I forgot, I actually have to, uh, go, I have...something!” You blurted out, too alarmed to even come up with a proper excuse before all but sprinting from the library, leaving Baekhyun alone with his distress.

***

The lights were off in your apartment when you opened the door. Your brow furrowed. You’d thought you had remembered Chanyeol saying today was a day off for him. Perhaps you were mistaken. You tapped a quick text to him all the same.

You: I thought you said that you would be home when I got here! :(

Yeollie: I picked up a shift at work.

You: Ah, I see. What time are you off?

Yeollie: Late.

You: Noooo. Have a good night ♡

Your eyes burned holes into the screen.

“Read 19:07.”

He was just busy.

Maybe he was in a bad mood.

You were taking it personally where you shouldn’t but anxiety was ripping through your good sense. Chanyeol was never, ever short with you like this. He always texted first, was always quick to response, and his messages were always full of every bit of warmth that his physical presence contained.

You placed your phone on the coffee table where you couldn’t keep from glancing at it in hopes of a reply every few minutes. Minutes that stretched into hours as you tried to distract yourself with the mindlessness of the television, convincing yourself that you weren’t waiting up for him, you were just very engrossed in this movie, whatever it was called.

Your phone vibrated, your heart pounding wildly until it stopped altogether when you saw the sender’s name on your screen.

Baekhyunnie~~<3: I’m really sorry about earlier please don’t be mad at me!!!!!! <3333 >.<;;

You: It’s okay, I’m not mad.

Baekhyunnie~~<3: You seemed pretty mad to me but maybe it was just the way you ran away from me. You know, in terror.

You sighed, massaging your temples in a vain attempt to keep the mounting stress headache at bay. You should have seen this coming. Foresight wouldn’t have freed you from the desire to avoid it though.

You: It isn’t that...it’s just everything that happened is still so fresh. And I don’t really know how to say this but I’ve kind of been seeing someone lately

You held your breath as you watched Baekhyun start and stop typing at least five times before the screen flickered to life with his reply.

Baekhyunnie~~<3: I see

Baekhyunnie~~<3: who?

You: Actually it’s my roommate. Chanyeol.

Baekhyunnie~~<3: I can’t say that I’m surprised

Baekhyunnie~~<3: but I’m not going to lose.

Baekhyunnie~~<3: besides i’m way cuter than him~ 'ㅅ' hehe~

You couldn’t help snorting. For as much as he might have been trying to lighten the mood you could feel his resolve and you had no doubt that he meant every word and it made your stomach jump for reasons you couldn’t quite pinpoint.

You elected not to respond, more out of speechlessness than annoyance, and regretted it immediately.

Baekhyunnie~~<3: you’re not allowed to ignore me after i make declarations of war it makes me feel weird -_-;

Baekhyunnie~~<3: but hey, really, if you want me to give up on you I understand, so please just tell me what you want. I don’t want to make you sad, or uncomfortable.

There it was. The question you weren’t ready to answer. Your body felt like it was being crushed from the immense pressure of those words alone. You couldn’t breathe, wished with all of your might that you could vanish at that moment, slip into a coma and reawaken whenever this mess was over.

You could see Baekhyun starting to type again so you answered at last, if only to keep him from pressing on.

You: Please don’t ask me things like that for now, I can’t answer what I don’t honestly know

Baekhyunnie~~<3: It’s ok, I get it. Take your time ok?? and get some sleep young lady it is past your bed time, only delinquents stay up this late

You: that explains why you’re messaging me then

Baekhyunnie~~<3: exactly now go to bed!!!!!! >:0

You dragged yourself to bed as instructed, not at all cured of your unease, and stared at the ceiling in silence until exhaustion finally claimed you.

When you woke up in the morning and finished blinking away your grogginess you were met with a terrifying realization:

For the first time in weeks, you had woken up completely alone.

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rhubarbplants · 4 years

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Students and everyone else should understand the different ways their brains work so they can understand what kinds of study habits or productivity techniques will work for them personally. In this essay I will...

Talk about my own issues with having a low PSI, and what that might look like for other people.

I sometimes feel like it’s impossible to get the ideas in my head out into the real world, and that it takes an extra moment to understand new topics my teacher is introducing. This is because I have a low processing speed. The processing speed index or PSI is a part of an intelligence scale that ties in to IQ tests. When I took it I got ‘gifted’ scores for all of my categories except PSI. So I had a high Verbal Comprehension Index (VCI), Visual Spatial Index (VSI), Fluid Reasoning Index (FRI), and Working Memory Index (WMI). So basically my brain is functioning at a very high level. There is a catch.

My brain can’t keep up with my brain.

No seriously, my PSI is so low that I feel like my ideas are never the same out loud as they are in my head. Even this. I love to write and read but the English language doesn’t seem to have enough words for me, or at least not the right ones. Because my highest and lowest scores are so far apart (literally 50 points) the level at which I can actually function in the real world is actually much more average.

PSI has a lot to do with concentration, short term memory, and the ability to register and react to visual stimuli.

Low PSI also affects you ability to react as quickly. So in class when your teacher is having a class discussion people with low PSI scores might not interact as much because they need to take the time to process all the information. It's not that we don’t understand or don't want to participate but that our time is better spent mulling over the information then spitting out our thoughts.

Also a big gap between intelligence and processing speed can make you feel like you are not as smart as the people around you. You might tend to be a perfectionist and feel like the things to make/do/write/say will never be quite right. That unfortunately will probably never change because our languages just don’t accommodate what's going on inside our brains. Luckily this means you will do better on tests or assignments where you have time to think things over and edit over and over.

Low PSI has also affected my ADHD, making concentrating and contributing even harder. But I have found that when I do have something to say, and a way to say it, I realize I really do understand what’s going on.

If you want to read more check this out: https://nspt4kids.com/parenting/understanding-the-wechsler-intelligence-scale-for-children-fifth-edition-wisc-v/

#adhd problems #adhd #ADHD #non neurotypical #processing speed #personal rant

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samanthassandcastle · 6 years

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13 Tips For Making Your Semester Just a bit Easier

Why hello there. I'm a graduate, which is super scary to say. I also am a perpetual student and as someone with mental illnesses, school can be hard. I mean, it's hard for a lot of reasons, lets be real. It can also be a wonderful experience. Below, I've listed 13 of my personal methods of helping my year be just a bit easier. Will they work for you? Maybe. I can't possibly know that, only you can. Bear that in mind. If you know something wouldn't work for you, ignore it. There's no harm in that. :)

Read the effing syllabus

No lie. Every single class I had at my last university had a quiz on the syllabus during the first week. They’re incredibly important because they typically have a calendar of assignments, tell you when you’re going to be doing things, give you policy information, have a grading breakdown, and have all of the required materials, not to mention your class and professor information.

Plan your semester

After you get all your syllabi, make a master calendar. I got one of the monthly calendars from the target dollar spot, or really anywhere like amazon, staples, office depot, etsy, target, etc. I personally used bullet journaling and created my own planner. I went over the top and color coded the classes, but you can simply put the class and the assignment on the date it’s due. This helps make sure you always know what’s coming and aren’t blind sighted when it comes due. You don’t even have to do it in a paper planner. One of my classmates scheduled reminders on her iPhone on the due dates. She said it took forever, but she liked it.

seek out accommodations

This may not be as obvious, but is tremendously important. my second semester I was taking six classes in the same department and just all happened to have projects due around the same time. I was having an incredibly hard time keeping up because I have severe anxiety and would become overwhelmed incredibly easily. I couldn’t take any less classes because my major courses were on cycles and that was the only time they were offered and I had a specific time frame to finish, so don’t start with that. My point is that when I realized that it was becoming an issue, I spoke to my school’s disability services and received accommodations from my professors. It’s contractual, and they cannot ask what the disability is, and they’re required to uphold whatever you and they agree on. I was allowed more free absences than the “unpenalized” ones, and a leniency with due dates, provided I let the prof know what was going on, generally. I always said that I was having a “flare up” because that’s not violating my privacy, but still allowed the prof to understand that I was having an issue. Most schools don’t require formal documentation from a doctor, but I had it, so I provided it. Some even are very lenient, and will have the on campus health services help you out too.

don’t be afraid of being less than perfect

I went into school telling myself that I was going to be on the deans list, have a 4.0, and have all of the regalia when I graduated. That didn’t happen. What did happen was that I had 95 units in five semesters. Yes, that averages 19 a semester, but the way I did it was hell. First semester I had 5 classes- 18 units, second semester I had 5 classes, band, and lessons - 21 units, the six week summer I had 4 classes, one of which was a one on one which I will talk about later - 15 units, my last fall semester was 6 classes and band - 23 units, and my final semester was 5 classes and band - 18 units. Needless to say there was no way I was getting that 4.0. What did happen was I joined an honor society, was on the editing staff for the literary journal, got two articles published in the school paper, was on the executive board for a national club, and commuted 45 minutes each way, every day and sometimes weekends, for two and a half years, and ended up with a 3.2. Not only that but I had regalia for my honor society and my club, and I set a precedent for future students and got an award at the end of year honor’s banquet. I don’t think that I did too shabby, and I don’t regret not getting that 4.0.

apparel matters but not how you think

We all know that the brain is weird. For instance, if I throw on leggings and a tee immediately when I wake up, my brain is in chill mode. This is why I rarely wore loungy clothes to school. I even dressed up on Fridays, calling it fancy Friday because I love alliterations. This tactic might help you stay in the correct brain space, or not. I don’t know how your brain works. I do know that someone looked into the relationship between clothes and mood, so it can't all be rubbish.

go to office hours

So many times I heard people complain because they don’t understand something, or that the prof is being too hard on them or other things, but there’s one thing that can help with that. Go to office hours. Your profs set them up for a reason. That’s where you can get help with assignments, clarification on things, or help in other academic things. They won’t bite you I promise. You may even grow an amazing academic relationship with them. My advisor was one of my profs. She is a very intimidating woman in the classroom but a completely different prof in her office. In speaking to her about my graduation plans and needs and such she did the amazing thing of teaching me a one on one, honors, independent study, of one of the classes that she teaches that was out of cycle, so that I would be able to graduate on time. Granted, cramming an entire semester of books to read into six weeks of once a week sessions was INSANE, but it was one of my favorite classes, and an amazing thing that she did for me.

take advantage of free things

Free things are literally the best, amirite? Go to the events because they typically have free food. My school, around midterms and finals had free test taking kits with pencils and test booklets. I believe that there were a ton of free events and things for residents, but I lived off campus and commuted a long time, so I rarely did things. I did however, get a free shirt at nearly every event I went to, and got a sweet tumbler just before I graduated.

seek out associations and clubs

I am a(n inactive) member of the Phi Alpha Theta honor society because of my grades in my history courses and an alumnae of the Kappa Phi Club which is a national Christian sisterhood similar to traditional Greek life, but founded on different ideals and values. -I could go on and on about Kappa Phi, so don't get me started. :)- Both of these organizations can be started at your school if they aren't already available. By seeking out associations and clubs and the like, there are innumerable opportunities for you. As a member of PAT I have scholarship opportunities for grad school and Kappa Phi has given me amazing friendships to women across the country and will grant me leadership opportunities in the future.

don't be afraid to talk to professors like they’re real people

News flash: they are. They have feelings. I adopted a kitten from one of my profs, and I’ve babysat his children. I formed a close enough friendship with a different prof to be able to write his end of semester evaluation in emojis, which ended up in his tenure package. With forming relationships with your profs, they are able to know more about who you are and will be able to write you amazing letters of recommendation in the future.

mental health days are important

As part of my accommodations, I was given a leniency with attendance and I was able to take mental health days. I didn’t take a lot, maybe on average three a semester, but they helped me so much that if I hadn’t taken them, I would have fallen behind in my work. Your mental health is so important in school. Please don’t mentally drain yourself so that you can achieve “perfection.”

do more early on in the semester

This may seem like a silly thing, but it helps in the long run. After you go through your syllabus, take a look at things that look like they’re easy to do, or wouldn’t take long and do them the first couple weeks. Sometimes, if it’s an online submission, you can even submit it early and not have to deal with it. I did that for one of my senior projects and was incredibly happy that I did. While all of my classmates were struggling or hadn’t even started the couple weeks before it was due, I had mine finished and was just waiting to turn it in. That took the load from 5 senior projects to do to 4, and with them all due the same week it was a tremendous help.

be aware of your spending

$4 here and there at the coffee shop or quick mart on your campus may seem like nothing, but it adds up. I realized one semester that I had spent nearly $100 in one month just on coffee, which I could easily make at home, so that’s what I did. I made coffee at home and sometimes lunch and was able to keep better track on my spending.

noms are important

Sometimes it’s hard to make the cafeteria hours for meals, especially if you’re an athlete with practice during the meal times. This is why snacks are super important, or quick meals that you can make at home or in your dorm. During the summer my class started before the coffee shop opened so I couldn’t grab food there, so I started making overnight oats. I took a mason jar and filled it about half way with dry quick oatmeal, put other things (my fave was peanut butter and jelly) inside it and filled it the rest of the way with almond milk or soy milk because ya girl can’t have dairy, then put the lid on and popped it in the fridge before bed, and in the morning I had breakfast to eat in class.

There you have it. Easy peasy, right? Duh. I hope something here helped you, and if it did, let me know. If you have any to add, also let me know. I wish you the best of luck with your semester and the rest of your year!

xoxo s

#school #tips #wiifm #university #semester #back to school

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innermysteries · 3 years

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The Greek word for soul was psyche, what we call the soul is the unconscious mind. What is the unconscious mind? It is part of the brain that is not connected to the network of neurons that make up our waking, resting state of consciousness called the default mode network, or the ego. It is interesting, as you will soon see, that Psyche was a female character. Another very intriguing Greek concept was the Daimon, the origin of the word demon. It is the inner genius, the spirit guide within. I offer you an explanation of what they could have meant by this. What follows is an investigation into the neuroscience of the soul and my experiences of self-discovery.

Carl Jung stated that civilized man has become soulless, let us investigate how we could have lost our soul.

The majority of civilized humans are born in a hospital, snatched from their mothers and tortured with needles, circumcision, etc. This is profoundly traumatizing. The way that infants have been treated in the civilized world is so different from the way that our hunter-gatherer, tribal ancestors treated infants for millions of years throughout hominid evolution. Humans in the civilized world come away from childhood seriously traumatized and brain damaged.

Tribal societies breastfeed for three years, this is natural birth spacing. Early weaning is neglect and abuse, it causes weaning conflict, oral fixation, sadomasochism, self-destructive tendencies and the secret death wish. Tribal societies certainly would not leave an infant alone and abandoned in a crib to cry itself to sleep. We are told that infants are to be left alone to cry themselves to sleep until they learn to soothe themselves, but what is actually occurring in the infant mind is a splitting. This is called primitive dissociation and is the root cause of all severe personality disorders such as borderline, antisocial and narcissistic personality disorders. The infant has only one option as a defense mechanism against the nightmare existence within which it finds itself unable to escape from while being neglected by its caregivers, as it is completely helpless and dependent upon them for its nourishment and psychological well-being. That defense involves the severing of the incoming connections from the source of negative emotion, the right hemisphere. This gives birth to the unconscious mind as the default mode network is constructed to protect the infant mind from the pain of its existence. This also occurs when one takes Prozac. The default mode network is a Prozac network.

This is not a great way to start out life, and in a culture of rampant narcissism most of us are victims of narcissistic, parental abuse. People think that you can do whatever you want to babies because they won't remember, this is an utterly cringe-worthy and ignorant approach to parenting and the handling of babies in a hospital setting. A baby's brain is going through an intense period of development during this time that will shape their psychology for the rest of their lives. The corpus callosum undergoes the greatest period of its development during the first twenty-four months after birth.

The reason for the epidemic of opioid addiction has to do with the fact that opioids are naturally released in the brain of all animals, including humans, when a child is nurtured by its mother.

This infant neglect, this narcissistic wound, or what Freud called the primal wound, makes us long eternally, even as an adults, for this nurturing from the mother, and so we crawl into the comforting embrace of an addiction, or try to replace the mother with romantic partners. It is no wonder that the United States has become a welfare state as we look to the Democratic party, the archetype of the mother, to provide social welfare programs to care for its childlike demographic. All baby animals need a sufficient amount of nurturing or they will die. Is it any wonder that what we call civilization is, in reality, a toxic, suicidal, theme park.

This is absolutely no different from the rats of NIHM experiment that was performed in the 1950s. The national institute of mental health created rat utopias in which the rats were given unlimited food and nesting materials. When the rats reached a certain population density they became insane and the colonies collapsed. This was due to the males becoming hyper-territorial and then began guarding the females who were then unable to nurture their young, so the young died.

Infant trauma is not the end of the story, when a child In our society reaches a certain age they are thrown into a heavily left-brain biased educational system In which imagination, one of the most significant mental faculties that distinguish the human from all other primates, is discouraged in favor of language and mathematics. Language and mathematics are also incredible mental faculties that separate us from other primates, but if you think about it, how many languages and branches of mathematics are we spending our youth learning? All fields of study require us to learn a specialized extension of language, whether it be chemistry, physics, political science, anatomy, biology, psychology, etc. These fields of study require us to learn a whole new set of terms and symbols in order to understand and work with the formulas and concepts involved in that field. We are not just learning basic math, we are learning pre-algebra, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, statistics, and the list goes on. Students who are imaginative, creative and staring out the window in boredom are stigmatized as having learning disabilities or ADHD and are prescribed drugs to make them fit into the system so that the system does not have to adjust to accommodate, properly nurture and encourage the creative geniuses in our society. The left hemisphere is a conformist, the right hemisphere is an individual. This is most likely why Carl Jung called the process of psychic integration the process of individuation. Creative geniuses and independent thinkers are a threat to a system of conformity and control that is designed to dumb down the population in order to shape them into tax paying, corporate, consumer slaves who perform repetitive, menial tasks In order to scratch out a living, existing on a hamster wheel, never getting ahead and working until they're dead. I do not think it is a coincidence that the retirement age is the average age of mortality among males. We are not supposed to figure this out, we are supposed to be grateful for our jobs and the crumbs that we are thrown from the towering heights occupied by an elite class that parasitically feeds on the laboring masses.

After school we enter into a left-brain biased working world. The brain continues to develop until age twenty-five and we spend most of this time using left-brain functions, almost completely neglecting right-brain functions. Our culture exacerbates and perpetuates this bias.

If you look at the stages of ego development you will notice that at the earliest stage, the impulsive stage, the characteristics are indistinguishable from those of borderline personality disorder. This is the most dissociated and most severe disorder. This is the psychology of a toddler, not having developed the executive function of the prefrontal cortex, It is completely unstable. It throws temper tantrums, having no emotional control or ability to communicate its needs in a more sophisticated way, seeing others In the most primitive way, as either nice to me or mean to me. Antisocial being the next severe, the self-protective and opportunistic child, doing whatever it can get away with, he gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar and blames his sister. The next stage shows the characteristics of narcissistic personality disorder, the conformist, the diplomat. This is adolescent psychology In which the right hemisphere is still largely repressed into the unconscious as a defense against the instability of the underlying borderline personality disorder. The left hemisphere is a narcissist and the default mode network is left hemisphere biased.

These personality disorders show the least amount of neural integration between the right and left hemispheres. Jungian psychology is about integration of the psyche. Carl Jung didn't know anything about the brain or hemispheric lateralization, and yet, somehow, he was profoundly insightful. When he referred to the Anima, the female psyche, he was referring to the right hemisphere which has become unconscious in civilized man. In split brain patients, the right hemisphere will refer to itself as female. The left hemisphere shows many masculine characteristics such as murderous aggression and rationality whereas the right hemisphere is irrational, the source of dreams, compassion, empathy and pro-social emotions.

Every stage of ego development, whether you look at Loevinger's model, Suzanne Cook-Greuter's model, Spiral Dynamics, among others, you will see a gradual integration of the characteristics of the right hemisphere into consciousness. There are ten stages of ego development and I would consider it a spectrum of narcissism, with the tenth stage being that of a taoist master, or enlightenment. Each stage displays a greater amount of self-awareness and humility that come along with meta-cognition, introspection, self-reflection and self-criticism. These are functions of the right hemisphere, as are empathy and imagination.

The reason for our condition, the unenlightened, psychological condition of civilized man, is a disorder of the corpus callosum. This information highway between the two hemispheres of the brain has a lack of communication in one direction. In traumatized infants this condition is called fractional anisotropy. What we don't realize is that what is considered to be a normal, healthy brain among civilized people is actually neurologically damaged.

Brain scans of experienced meditators show a significant increase in the thickness of the corpus callosum, a deactivation of the default mode network and an activation of the insular cortex, the command centers of the brain. The insula, which exists in both hemispheres, sends and receives signals to and from the entire brain. This is how one can achieve enlightenment, or, what I call whole-brain neural integration. This is our natural state of consciousness, the Zen mind. It is the hunter-gatherer state of consciousness. Meditation is a simulation of what a hunter-gatherer does all day long, hunting and fishing with a calm, clear mind yet alert and completely aware of his surroundings. This is mindfulness or what is commonly referred to as being present in the moment. A mind that is not thinking, planning or ruminating on the past and future, or about how others perceive us, a mind without self-consciousness, an undisturbed mind. This is what the Tao Te Ching means by returning to the primal identity. Unfortunately, in order to do this one must leave civilization behind because civilization will never allow you this state of mind with it's endless requirements of left-brain functions, fast-paced modality and stress. Now you see why the enlightened masters are usually forest hermits.

Our civilization, our society, displays every characteristic of the narcissistic, left hemisphere. Narcissism is a defense against a deep feeling of vulnerability and insecurity from childhood neglect and abuse. Unfortunately, the left hemisphere is not the wiser of the two brains. It evolved to make quick and dirty decisions and is certainly not where consciousness should take its residence. It is obsessed with material acquisition because it evolved as the part of the brain that seeks out food. It has an incredibly narrow way of seeing the world, It sees the world as a cognitive map composed of primitive symbols.

The fact is that we have two people inside our heads, when the right hemisphere finally breaks through into consciousness, It can be quite frightening, as Carl Jung described when he stated that the encounter with the Anima may cause petrification and even death.

I personally, experienced panic attacks as my right hemisphere began to break through into consciousness, as I experienced intuition, which is defined as thoughts that originate beyond conscious reasoning.

My encounter with the Anima sent me on a journey of homelessness, vulnerability, nature therapy, meditation and solitude. These things are necessary in order to deactivate the default mode network and activate the command centers of the brain in order to use the entire brain, or as Carl Jung put it, to become whole, to become the Self. This is the individuation process, to disconnect from the herd and become an individual, to develop one's inner world. The right hemisphere does not live in a box, figuratively and literally. It does not want to be confined in an artificial, domesticated prison. Like all animals, humans do not thrive in a cage, and the right hemisphere, when it makes its appearance on the stage of consciousness, makes no bones about this issue. The right hemisphere is open-minded, it evolved to confront the unknown such as predators, mates, unfamiliar territory. It then creates a cognitive map of the unfamiliar to be stored in the left hemisphere, which evolve to concern itself with the familiar. This is why a left-brain biased society is highly neurotic. The definition of neuroticism is fear of the unknown and seeking validation from others. The left hemisphere is also very concerned with where it fits in to the social hierarchy of status and dominance. Openness is one of the big-five personality traits, and it is synonymous with curiosity. In my view, openness, curiosity and facing the unknown are all the same thing. Once you free your mind from its prison then you will be outside the box and you will not want to live in a box. You will want to be in the natural environment where we evolved for millions of years before the sickness of civilization overtook the mind of man.

In order to reconnect with the right hemisphere of the brain, one must process traumatic, repressed memories and emotions, and confront and accept the negative, rejected aspects of one's unconscious personality. This is what Carl Jung described as the confrontation with the Shadow. This is the psychoanalytic process. These blockages must be cleared away, this is what the Tao Te Ching referred to as untying your knots.

A strange phenomenon, realizations, epiphanies, bolts from the blue, will suddenly occur to one who has begun to experience the integration process. Carl Jung stated that this begins after the disillusion of the persona, which I interpret as being an identity crisis, or the collapse of the self-narrative, the self-construct, which is usually composed of distorted beliefs about oneself. When one realizes that these beliefs are invalid, conditioned, brainwashing then this self-construct can come crashing when this happens a person can easily feel that they have absolutely no idea who they are anymore. This is what happened to me when I realized that I had been a scapegoat child of a grandiose narcissist father who had gaslighted me into believing that I wasn't good enough, I had an inferiority complex.

These flashes of insight indicate that intuition has begun to come online. This is a function of the right hemisphere, this is how it communicates. There is so much information that the right hemisphere wants to communicate but was unable to. I will never forget how it made my hands shake, It felt as though information was being downloaded to my mind from the universe. Carl Jung referred to this as the flooding of unconscious contents into the conscious mind, and warned about it overwhelming the conscious mind. He called it ego inflation. A person feels as if they are a god or the universe itself. This inflation will pass.

The right hemisphere is also musical and will communicate with songs. If a song suddenly appears in your mind, think about the lyrics and what they could mean in the context of whatever situation you are in, a decision you are trying to make or a conflict you are attempting to resolve. Most of the time these songs are light-hearted, sarcastic and humorous. Implicit meaning, IE; metaphor, sarcasm, irony, and humor are functions of the right hemisphere, wow the left hemisphere can only interpret things explicitly. An example of explicit interpretation is the way fundamentalist Christians interpret the Bible literally and not as a metaphorical mythology. When this function of the right hemisphere begins to come online you will suddenly realize the hidden meaning of all kinds of movies and stories. This is one of my favorite functions of the right hemisphere and was an incredible time for me when this began to occur.

It is very strange to have a conversation going on in your mind instead of an internal monologue, but the hardest part is awakening to the horrors of reality. This is taking the red pill, Awakening from the dream world of left brain optimism. This is a period of great darkness that one must endure as one begins to realize the truth of the human condition and the massive problems with society. As one's eyes become open to how suicidal we all are, how reckless and unenlightened civilized man has become. Civilized people live in a state of somnambulism, they are sleepwalkers, they live in a dream world of left hemisphere biased optimism and grandiosity while they unconsciously work to destroy themselves, destroy their environment and enslave, imprison and domesticate themselves. In fact the situation is quite grim and there is little cause for optimism. We have destroyed our ecosystem and are now facing our extinction.

There is no good news for the human race that comes with enlightenment. Awakening means facing reality. This is the great burden that one must carry. This is where stoic philosophy comes into play, Nietzsche's pessimism of strength. This is the Freudian transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle that would normally occur in the adolescent mind during the rite of passage into adulthood in a tribal setting. This element is missing from the modern, civilized world, and so we remain psychologically childlike, regressed, in a state of arrested development. We have attempted to eliminate suffering from our existence but suffering is necessary for psychological development and, ultimately, we create much more suffering by trying to eliminating it.

This psychological process of accepting the call to adventure, leaving ones comfort zone, venturing into the unknown, into the dark underworld of one's unconscious mind, facing the demons there, overcoming resistances and recovering the treasure hard to attain is what the myths are about, the myth of the hero's journey.

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shieldagentscully-blog · 6 years

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Scalpel & SHIELD: Chapter 5 - Big, Goddamn Hero

Howard University - 2002

Scully hadn’t ever seen herself teaching at a university. It was the farthest thing from her mind years ago when she studied under Daniel Waterston at Stanford, the brilliant cardiologist, thinking she was going to fix hearts and change lives. She had been young, brilliant, eager to please, and absolutely full of herself back then. But life had a funny way of turning things upside down. More than a decade ago, she stood at a crossroads. Broken hearted and betrayed, she had the choice to stay in the field she no longer loved with a man who had lied to her or to forge a new path in a more interesting field and perhaps make a greater difference than she’d thought possible. She took a gamble and left to join the FBI. It hadn’t worked out exactly as she had hoped, but it was the path that led her to the X-files and to Mulder. For all that she lost, she could never regret having him come into her life.

Now she stood at another crossroads, another choice between a road that was secure but not fulfilling and one that held the promise of the things she sought but could destroy her and her son. To most, the choice should have been simple, but Scully had wrestled with it all night, laying in bed, the young face of Samantha, heartbroken and tired, floated to her mind. She had been alive in 1974. She had lived until 1979. Just what had the likes of Spender and Rinehardt done to her? What had she endured? Were those men still out there, kidnapping other Samanthas? Did they have Mulder?

It was that last thought that sent her out of bed, finally, giving up on sleep as she flipped quietly through channels until William finally stirred, bright and early, as always. He hardly noticed her dark mood as he fussed and whined, his sore teeth and gums making him fractious as he piddled with breakfast as she tried to force coffee into herself. He had been even less thrilled to be dressed and loaded up in the car to go to his daycare, howling most of the way there until she got him inside, upon which time his entire personality changed to that of an angelic saint. Frustration didn’t even begin to describe her mood as she returned to her car and made her way to campus, fighting Midterm students and parking. By the time she even got to her office, she was in the mood to lock herself up, hide away, and pray that no student came looking for her.

Unfortunately, even as she rounded the corner, she saw someone sitting just outside of her office door. She had already sighed and begun to mentally prepare herself before it occurred to her that the man waiting patiently couldn’t possibly be a student. He was at least 80, far too old to be the average college student, and certainly no one she remembered having in her class. He sat straight in the heavy chair that sat out there, one hand laying on the cane at his side, his silver head resting against the wall by her door. She cleared her throat as she approached, causing him to look up with a broad smile.

“You must be the talented and amazing Doctor Scully I’ve been hearing about!”

That caught her short, but she smiled, recognizing the compliment. “Someone clearly has been telling you some sort of line if they said those things about me.”

“I doubt my daughter would lie to me like that. She hasn’t lied to me since she was seventeen, and I caught her in the backyard, in the dark, with a boy. She learned better! But, she says good things about you.”

It took her only seconds after that to realize who she was indeed speaking to. “Doctor Jones, I presume?”

“I could be Livingston, but that would flip the tables a bit, no?”

Scully laughed, unlocking her office to let the older gentleman in. He rose slowly from his seat, leaning on his cane, but still tall and proud despite the age that now withered him.

“Come in, sir! Have a seat.” She waved to one of the two leather seats by her chair, the one not currently occupied by a stack of ungraded papers. “Can I get you coffee? Water?”

“I’m fine!” He waived her offer off as he settled into the creaking leather. “If I knew that you were so pretty and accommodating, I’d have been here to see you sooner.”

“Well, you are here, and that’s what matters.” She perched on the other side of the desk, trying to bite back the grin of delight and amazement. Gabriel Jones was a figure of legend in her household growing up, as were all the Howling Commandos. The old films had been a staple of television viewing, and while Scully was well aware that the real life heroes were very different than the sanitized, Hollywood depictions, she couldn’t help but feel like a figure of history and legend had just alighted into her office.

“It’s an honor to meet you, sir! I can’t even tell you how special it is that you stopped by!”

“Well, Wanda kept telling me to get over here and I kept putting it off, but I happened to be by today. Had coffee with some of the donors and advancement, you know the types, all wanting to pump hands and look impressive. Had enough of that and decided to come find someone with a brain to talk to.”

She couldn’t help but laugh. “I’m honored! Ever since your daughter told me that her father was the famous Gabriel Jones, I’ve been bugging her to meet you. You were a hero of mine growing up!”

“You watched those stupid movies?”

“Well, I was also seven and convinced you all could walk on water, Captain America especially!”

“Well, Cap probably could walk on water, but the rest of us were just average, Army Joes, doing a job.”

“I don’t know, taking down HYDRA and defeating Johann Schmidt seemed more than just the average Army work.”

“Still fighting and dying, just like everyone else.” He nodded, solemnly, a sad sort of wistfulness about him as he regarded her. “Wanda tells me you were in the FBI before she dragged you over here.”

“I was for about ten years. I worked in a small division for most of it, investigating unsolved and strange cases.”

“The X-files, I heard about them.”

That surprised her. Few people outside of the FBI knew about them and those that did often mocked them. He didn’t seem to be doing that. “I’m sorry, how did you know about them, sir?”

“I’m not ‘sir’, I’m Gabe, and as for how I heard about them, I knew Arthur Dales from my days in SHIELD. He had been Army buddies with someone, maybe Sawyer, but anyway, he would come and chat with us on some of the more interesting cases he had going on.”

“You were in SHIELD?”

“For a bit, yes. We were all under the auspices of the SSR, which eventually was closed down after the war and rolled into SHIELD when it was formed. I was there for a while, till the kids started come along and getting older and I realized I wanted to be around to see them grow up. Left SHIELD, finished up my degrees and went into teaching history and public policy.”

“I know, I’ve read some of your articles.” The fact that Dr. Jones was an intellectual on top of being a hero had caused her no small delight, especially given his long career in academia. “So do you really speak five languages?”

“Seven? Been bored in my retirement.” He laughed brightly, as he leaned back comfortably. “Don’t get me wrong, I loved teaching and researching. By the time I got into it, I could actually have the sort of voice I couldn’t have when I was a kid in the 40’s, getting a degree that may or may not allow me to work in the nicer establishments of Washington DC. But, as much as I loved doing it, there was a part of me that missed the old life.”

“The Commandos?”

“Yeah.” He grinned with broad reminiscence. “I didn’t even start out the war with those guys. I was in the 92nd Infantry, the Buffalo Soldiers, because that’s where they stuck the black kids that signed up. We got sent to Italy to serve as support there. That’s how I met Barnes and Dugan. They were in the 107th and all of us were sent to face Schmidt. We all just happened to be captured together. War has that habit, I guess, putting folks together that would never have talked to one another until they were forced to live in the same, ten foot cage.”

That was the least of the horrors that Scully knew most soldiers faced in World War II. “Despite all that, you still wanted to fight?”

“Hell, yes! I saw what they could do, HYDRA.” Something dark and grave passed over his expression, a ghost of old terror, never forgotten, rising to the fore. “We were just sitting ducks there when they came up over the hill with their lasers, blowing tanks to kingdom come. Whole platoons cut down in an instant. We had no choice but to surrender. And then to be drug to Schmidt’s hell, forced to work till we dropped, or like Barnes, till we nearly died. I saw most of my unit go that way, drug off to wherever Zola had them. None of them ever made it out.”

Scully didn’t know what to say to that. She knew death intimately, saw it on it’s most basic, fundamental, scientific level everyday. And she knew something of the horrors faced by soldiers in World War II, but admittedly had only paid half attention to them. Like many historical events, they seemed so distant and outside of her, not something real and tangible. Seeing the grief of someone who lived it, even after sixty years, made it all too palpable.

“Anyway, when Cap came and got us out, the Army offered to send most of us home, discharge us on medical leave. I thought about it, frankly, more than just a little bit. After all, most everyone I knew was dead, and here I was, a colored boy with a college education doing grunt work and nearly getting killed for it. I had half a mind to come back home to Howard and walk away from it all. But, then Cap comes along, all truth and justice and wanting to punch Hitler in the jaw, and I’m signing up to join his suicide squad along with Dernier. Never regretted it for a second.”

This conversation was hitting uncomfortably close to home for her. “Even when it would have been safer for you to go back home and lead a quiet life?”

“One could have argued there wasn’t much of a quiet life back home, either, not for someone who looked like me. Maybe I knew that and didn’t want to have to face that. Maybe I wanted a bit of revenge for those that didn’t make it out, like I did. But, I figure, a lot of it was Steve.”

Captain America. Even the name caused a thrill, knowing that this man knew someone she so revered. “What was he like?”

“Steve Rogers?” That caused Gabe to laugh outright, a wheezing sound as he shook his silver head. “I’d love to tell you half the crap those movies put out there was bullshit, but a lot of it was true. First time he came waltzing into our prison, all by himself, not an ounce of self-preservation to him, saying he was ‘Captain America’ and that he’d punched Hitler 200 times. We all thought he was nuts. We didn’t realize it wasn’t that he was crazy, it was just that he was stubborn and convinced his will was bigger than yours. But, he grew up this scrawny Irish kid from the wrong side of Brooklyn, so I suppose he always had that chip on his shoulder.”

“As a scrawny, Irish kid myself, I understand that feeling intimately.”

Gabe only chuckled. “Yeah, but you are a hell of a lot prettier than Rogers was.”

“Oh, I’ve seen pictures. I don’t know about that.”

“Lord, you too! Barnes was always floored by it, these women throwing themselves at Cap and he wouldn’t know what to do. Of course, he only ever had eyes for Peggy, so I don’t think he even noticed.”

Shaking his head, he sighed fondly. “Steve could be obtuse like that, but in a good way, you know. He never saw differences the same way others did. Didn’t matter to him if you were white, brown or yellow, didn’t matter if you were even American, only that you wanted to do the right thing and were willing to take a stand when no one else would. Guess when you grow up like he and Barnes did, those things don’t matter as much, maybe.”

There was no hiding the deep sadness welling up in his fond words. “You must really miss them.”

“The Commandos? Yeah, everyday. There’s really only Peggy, Morita and me now. Jim’s harassing his grandkids and traveling the world. Peggy’s only now retiring from SHIELD. Thought they would have to carry her out on one, frankly, didn’t think she’d ever leave. And here I am, mostly retired, teaching a class now and again, stumping for my alma mater, going to museum openings.”

“Don’t suppose it’s as exciting as taking out HYDRA.” Despite herself, Scully couldn’t help but think of Coulson’s visit and his simple request, or the fact that deep down, underneath the pain of loss and fears for her son, she had really wanted to say yes.

“No, but it’s a good life for a man just turned 80. Besides, there’s others to fight those fights now. My grandson, Antoine, he’s joining up with SHIELD when he’s done with his degree. Says someone has to carry on the family legacy.”

Someone has to carry on.

The last conversation Scully had with Mulder before he disappeared had been outside of Skinner’s office, the fateful evening when Alex Krycek had shown back up in their lives. He’d begged her to stay, to leave the X-files, to go be a doctor and live her life and leave the mystery behind...to leave him behind. She tried, she really had. But Coulson’s visit loomed, along with the implied threat of what still lay out there. Spender, as far as anyone knew, was still alive and was still dangerous. It didn’t matter that she left the X-files and the FBI behind, that she had stopped asking questions, that she was attempting to lead a normal life, if he was still out there, he was still scheming. And knowing he had likely been with HYDRA the entire time made the danger even more overt. If he had used his own children in his heinous experiments, what was to say he wouldn’t come for his grandson?

“Do you know Phil Coulson? He’s an agent with SHIELD.”

Something sharp flickered in Gabe’s eyes, but he played off at being nonchalant. “I’ve heard the name, yeah. One of Fury’s agents, said to be really good. How do you know him?”

“He came to visit me last night.” She eyed Gabe pointedly, sensing he knew far more about that than he was willing to let on. “I found it interesting he rushed to see me on a Sunday evening, on my way back from Baltimore, right after your daughter made me a nice job offer to stay and teach here.”

“I’d only say it was interesting if I knew what a SHIELD agent was doing at your house.”

“Making me a counter-offer.”

“Well, then, that is interesting. SHIELD wants to recruit you.”

“Apparently, he heard from sources about me.”

“SHIELD could use a woman of your talents.”

“So could your alma mater.”

“Oh, I’m sure. Wanda would be upset if you left her. She’s been thrilled to have you. But like Antoine keeps telling me, someone has to carry on.”

As simple as that, she realized her decision was made.

“I have a feeling your daughter is going to be mad at me.”

Gabe only smiled knowingly. “Just like when I caught her in the backyard with a boy, I’m sure she’ll get over it. She’s used to me coming in and messing up her good time.”

#crossover: x-files #crossover: mcu #x-files #mcu #scalpel and shield #Agent Scully #gabe jones

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webbgo · 3 years

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Here are some of the most important principles for improving your own site’s UX design and, ultimately, winning over audiences to your cause.

Design for an overarching objective.

What’s the number-one thing you want visitors to your website to do? Design for that. If you can’t answer that question, you’re likely not ready to make a website. Truly useful websites make it abundantly clear what they’re about. Consider the most-visited website in the world, not to mention the history of the internet, Google’s homepage.

It doesn’t matter that Google offers dozens of goods and services at this point in 2020. Google’s original and still-core product reigns supreme on their site: a lone search-entry blank and the buttons to activate it surrounded by plenty of white space; all other options are minimized and pushed to the margins.

Good UX design funnels visitors toward a clear action, whether that be buying a product, signing up for a service or reading a breaking news story. Websites without an overarching objective often suffer an identity crisis and end up putting their visitors through the “paradox of choice”—the feelings of frustration and fatigue that come from having too many options at your disposal.

Write for how the Internet reads.

The Internet has fundamentally altered how we read. “Reading a book from cover to cover” may have once been a popular proverb about thoroughness, but, given the vast wealth of info on the world wide web, no one’s got time for that. The speed of information-retrieval has replaced the virtue of thoroughness.

Nowadays, instead of reading, we scan. Eye-tracking studies have revealed that Internet-users “read” in an F-shaped pattern, mostly scanning headlines, subheaders and the opening sentences of paragraphs as a means to compensate for the overwhelming amount of information available online.

Smart UX design will accommodate such behaviors by frontloading the most important, topical, “load-bearing” information words toward the beginning of headlines and lead sentences, along the left-margin, where users are hoping to find them. Additionally, user-friendly websites will avoid long blocks of text in favor of shorter, easier-to-digest paragraphs with frequent breaks.

Chunking your content, making use of bullet-point or numbered lists and using white space to visually separate content allow visitors more “jumping-in” points as they furiously scan for what the information they’re after.

Invest in compelling visuals.

Remember earlier when you learned that visitors will judge your website in less than a second? A lot of that has to do with the visuals. For many visitors, if the visuals disappoint, then the site as a whole disappoints.

As humans, we’re wired to be visual creatures, favoring our eyes over all other senses, with more than 50 percent of the cortex—the surface of the brain—dedicated to processing visual information. Given our cognitive biases, then, it’s no wonder that we prefer beautiful, image-driven websites to less aesthetic ones.

Even within visual information, we have a clear preference for pictures over text. Our brains process images 60,000 times faster than words, which is why we can’t resist looking at the pictures before reading. It’s just easier on our brains. Knowing this, it’s important to invest in high-quality photography or videography that helps tell as much of your website’s story as possible, saving words for where pictures fail.

But visuals go way beyond pretty pictures. Consistent typography, color schemes, icons, negative space and clear hierarchy between elements are other aspects of visual design that shouldn’t be disregarded.

Clock your page speeds.

It’s not just that people don’t have patience for reading anymore. We don’t have patience in general. For better or worse, the Internet has cultivated a culture that has come to expect instant gratification. When it comes to your website, that means that approximately 40 percent of your incoming traffic will give up if your site takes longer than three seconds to load.

Page speed is the average time it takes for a page of content from your website to load. It’s also important because, for many search engines, it’s one of the factors that determines how well your site ranks in search results. Many helpful sites exist that will give you a measurement of your website’s page speed for free.

There are a host of things you can do to rev up your page speeds, though many of them require a decent amount of web background to execute. For example, you could enable file compression, optimize your website’s code, reduce the number of page redirects or leverage browser caching to cut down on page-load times. Another tactic is to make sure the file sizes of your website’s images are no larger than they need to be, though not at the detriment of featuring high-quality images, given their importance as mentioned above.

Don’t forget about mobile.

Certainly, you’ve experienced it before: a website that hasn’t been optimized for mobile. It takes forever to load, the text is illegibly tiny, the images are improperly formatted and buttons, menu options or hyperlinks are nearly impossible to click with regular-sized human fingers.

The sad part is that mobile traffic has made up more than 50 percent of all web traffic since 2015. That means that roughly one out of every two people visiting your website are likely viewing it on a smartphone. Is the experience visiting your website going to be as user-friendly for them as for someone visiting from a laptop?

The biggest difference between smartphones and computers is that smartphones favor scrolling through vertically stacked content whereas larger computer screens allow for greater variety in how a user navigates through a website.

There are two main design approaches for mobile-friendly websites: responsive or adaptive. Responsive design resizes the elements of your website to fit the resolution of the user’s device. Adaptive design is like having two different websites—one for computers and another for mobile. The former approach involves less work web development work overall and works across a range of screen sizes, while the latter has the potential to provide the best experience on mobile, particularly if that’s where the majority of your web traffic is coming from.

Fortunately, many CMSs, such as WordPress, Wix and Squarespace, offer mobile-responsive themes. If you’re using one of these to build your website, make your theme is mobile-friendly.

Feeling out of your depth?

If the thought of redesigning your site for optimized UX induces a headache, don’t panic. There are numerous creatives, specifically UX writers and web designers, who can give your organization’s website the makeover it needs.

Choose Webbgo Premium for your web designs all you have to do is call us on 9823872858 and our executives will help you choose the perfect web design for your business.

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cherrywinecbd · 3 years

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5 Surprising Health Benefits Of CBD Oil

There's nothing sexier at this time in the world of health and health than CBD (cannabidiol) petroleum . If you like it or not, the most important oil extracted from the cannabis plant is rapidly making its way to conventional audiences and making its presence and benefits sensed. Naturally, whenever you learn that this new product is derived from marijuana, you may have an instantaneous reaction to discount it as helpful to your general wellbeing. However, before you go comparing CBD oil as well as other CBD established services and products to traditional marijuana usage, take a step back and look at all the positive effects that are connected with CBD.

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How is CBD Different than Marijuana? Before we dive in to the numerous positive effects of CBD, it's useful to know what precisely CBD oil is and how it differs from marijuana. CBD petroleum is a chemical compound present in the cannabis plant, however it is not a psycho active, unlike THC, so it wont allow one to hallucinate or receive "high" and it may be used by everybody else from minors, seniors, elite-level athletes and even pets. CBD was used to take care of minor injuries and reduce inflammation at people suffering from arthritis, conflict anxiety and depression and promote more restful sleep, suppress epileptic seizures, and also enhance cognitive function; all without some of the harmful side effects typically associated with THC.

1. CBD May Help With Stress And Panic It must not come as news which the United States and many other countries all over the world are confronting a mental health crisis among kids, adolescents and adults. We are living in a era where we all have been invited to have the next great 'item' or choose the upcoming big vacation; of course if we aren't doing this then somebody else is and so they have to have a much better life than us at least that's what Instagram tells us. However, that isn't a healthy way to live and constantly comparing ourselves or our lives creates stress.

Anxiety may come in many diverse forms. It can form as a result of requirements at work, recent health conditions that have arisen suddenly, matters going on at the lives of your kids, or just about anything else on your life that causes you to encounter jealousy. Anxiety can have a tremendous toll on your brain and ultimately lead to depression if left untreated, however, CBD oil can help. Recently, CBD oil was demonstrated to alleviate symptoms commonly associated with social stress and other forms of anxiety such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

While the research remains in its infancy, the calming effects of CBD petroleum are incontrovertible. If you're coping with finding peace in your daily routine, try going for a few drops of CBD oil into centre your self and calm your anxiety.

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2. CBD Might Help You Sleep Insomnia, tied tightly with anxiety, may be the by product of a brain that just does not know when to close away. After a very long day it may seem almost regular to really have trouble falling asleep as your brain is rehashing events which happened daily or you are anxious about matters you have planned another moment. Turning off the human own brain and drifting off to sleep may well not be as simple as turning off your bedroom lighting before leaping in bed.

CBD can help facilitate your head and the body just before falling asleep. But CBD may also help you stay asleep more by restraining your REM sleep. A study which examined patients suffering from RBD or REM sleep behavior disorder, discovered that the addition of CBD prior to sleep had a considerable effect of their movement while sleeping which contributes to deeper rest and not as much of this groggy feeling when waking in the daytime.

3. CBD Can Decrease Infection In Joints And Muscles

During the years you've collected some level of inflammation in your joints and muscles; if it is from being a competitive athlete on your younger years or just from normal deterioration usually seen in older adults; the human own body has developed a level of swelling that can be eased by CBD oil.

Studies have shown that carrying some form of CBD has paid off inflammation average adults and those individuals experiencing arthritis. The other form of either CBD, cream or balm, can be implemented to strained or sore muscles to help reduce pain and swelling. To take full benefit of CBD's healing properties take several drops of CBD oil at morning or employ CBD cream to all areas of one's body you have nagging injuries or chronic pain such as hands, wrists, knees, elbows, or other over used joints.

4. CBD Might Be Associated with Resist Cancer-Like Infection The expression 'medical marijuana' is becoming more main stream at medical and wellness market. While you may not be afflicted by any of these illnesses currently, some natural remedy which may decrease cancer is well worth noting.

No, unfortunately CBD is not the cure for cancer. But several studies have linked CBD usage to lower levels of cancer in humans and pet subjects. 1 study revealed that the effects of CBD could have a noticeable impact on symptoms associated with lung cancer. The research was not conclusive however is really a hint into the huge techniques CBD can be ingested, since it doesn't introduce users for the very same carcinogens utilized with medical marijuana patients.

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5. CBD Can Promote Long term Brain Health

Everybody else would like to maintain Father Time away as with age comes memory-loss and declined brain function. As you grow older, you are less challenged to find new things which doesn't induce the brain to create new brain tissues to maintain a top functioning mind. You are not becoming dumber, you're just being analyzed less intellectually so the brain doesn't feel bound to do at its highest capacity. This also contributes to memory loss that may form into a type of dementia called Alzheimer's disease.

However, recent studies have shown that supplementing with CBD can counteract the symptoms in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. Neuroplasticity, and also the brains ability to accommodate and learn allowing for memory build up, was demonstrated to rise over areas who've consumed CBD. These studies are extremely promising as they might require further research and tests to become conclusive, they reveal how CBD can ward off the effects of several cognitive degeneration-related diseases.

Overview CBD alone is changing lives for the better and flipping medical and wellness industry on its mind. CBD oil and also the various different designs of CBD might not be the end-all-be-all of physical and mental pain relief remedies, but with the extreme increase in popularity of CBD expect more rigorous studies to appear about the incredible benefits associated with daily CBD use.

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