#cws for neglect and abuse. I’ve not gone into a lot of detail but it’s there

[rainesol]

Apollyon’s childhood

Made using this prompt sheet

(CWs for child neglect/abuse. The rough parts will be in red)

Simple as, Apollyon wasn’t born. He has zero relatives. He was made using EXTREMELY taboo and illegal magic. It’s very difficult to accomplish, and takes multiple people to do.

Polly doesn’t remember much from his childhood. He can hardly recall his host parents faces, despite last seeing them at 16. His earliest memory would probably be from age six, in his early school years.

Surprisingly little. Disturbingly little. Apollyon sat and stared a lot. Also, changeling infants bite. Imagine the worst place for an infant to randomly grow barbed teeth and bite at. He was bottle-fed.

Apollyon didn’t start speaking until he was four or five. I imagine he went straight to full sentences.

He started walking EARLY. 7ish months?

I imagine later than most kids. Maybe 3/4 years? He didn’t stop wetting the bed until he was ~12.

Yeah. It’d be a little bitten, but it’s his canines you’d worry about. I don’t know when he’d stop using it :0 Either older or younger than average. Apollyon retained similar(?) behaviour into adulthood though. He will suck/chew on his sleeves or hoodie strings when anxious.

Pretty often. And it’d be about anything. Changeling children are designed to react like this more often than a typical human child.

Could probably use a post of its own. He was a lot quieter as a little kid, and then as an older child-young teen he was more volatile.

Very hard. Changelings exist to cause distress in this universe.

Walking. Gets him out of the flat.

No. Going with some myths, he’d have had a decent appetite. He lost it though, and now eats little, as he’s accustomed to.

He taught himself to cook young. He’d normally eat raw ingredients before he could. Like dry pasta.

As a baby/toddler, he’d have trouble going to bed. Currently he’s a bit of an insomniac. He can fall asleep if someone is soothing him to sleep though.

Yeah. He was scared of his host parents and would dream about them. This also meant he couldn’t go to them for comfort. Sometimes he’d stand in their doorway but being a creepy changeling kid, he’d just get yelled at to leave. Sometimes he’d dream about strange cloaked figures in the woods, too. Wonder what that’s about.

Only really the stuff the original child got from the baby shower/pre birth.

Interesting to look at. Like those sparkly water timers.

He found a lost ‘ds’ as a kid. He totally would’ve given it back, but the kids parents just got them a new one the next day, so he took it home and pirated some games for it. He still has it.

Apollyon was physically abused. As a child, he would have had very severe punishments, many of which he wouldn’t have realised weren’t normal (hitting, kneeling on rice/etc, having glassware etc thrown near or at him).

Typical day would depend on if he went to school or not. He’d spend most of the day on in school suspension.

He liked feeding pigeons and ducks. He tries to ignore bad memories. Sometimes to an unhealthy degree. One memory was of him being left in the underground. He waited for hours but his dad never came back. Eventually the police took him home. He was 7.

N/A. I doubt much celebrating happened in his household.

Apollyon had an extremely poor relationship with his host parents. He says that his father was scarier than his mother. He’d be on the receiving end of serious physical and verbal abuse from then until he was ‘big enough to fight back. Then they’d mostly ignore him. However, his adoptive mother (her name’s Maya), has an excellent relationship with him. She’s incredibly kind and understanding with him, and helps heal his poor inner child.

No friends. An acquaintance gave him his industrial piercing, though. He can’t remember her name.

His parents had a bearded dragon. It wasn’t kept very well and they gave it away when he was young.

Casual, comfy stuff. Most of his clothes came from lost and found or charity shops. One time on a non-uniform day someone pointed out he was wearing something they’d donated and he ‘just went home’. Totally not one of my experiences I’ve forced on him lol

Other than teachers, no. They weren’t any help to him. Until the age of 16, ‘every adult in Polly’s life had failed him.’

Public primary/secondary schools. He liked art class. He didn’t like much else.

N/A

I don’t know. Probably not.

Nothing friendly. That. It. Him.

Yeah. He was abused and isolated the whole time. I won’t delve too deep into specific scenarios. He tends to assume everyone just doesn’t like him.

This will probably be updated. I was sleep deprived writing it :(

#he needs a detailed post on how he was as a kid #cws for neglect and abuse. I’ve not gone into a lot of detail but it’s there #asks open #twst oc #twisted wonderland oc #apollyon belladonna

[heyellejaye]

A History, of sorts.

There are so many factors that go into the person we become, and how we behave.

(This is such a long post, filled with hella real real life story, so hang with me here.  I promise there’s a sweet little golden nugget of encouragement at the end.  If you just want the nugget, scroll down - I won’t be mad if you do that)

**CW: drug use, neglect, suicidal thoughts**

For as long as I can remember, I was picked on for something.  

Everything.

Anything.

Being fat (I’ve always been fat, unless I was sick)

Wearing clothes that were too promiscuous

Wearing clothes that were too christian

Being too sexual

Being a prude

Being poor

Having money

Wearing old clothes

Wearing new clothes

Being too loud

Not speaking up enough

Having normal hair

Having crazy hair

Listening to weird music

Listening to top 40 music

Eating kale and mushrooms and nutritional yeast and other vegan lovelies

Eating mcDonalds

Having only a dad at home.

Having only a mom at home.

Literally the broad spectrum of nonsense garnered ridicule from early on.

Those used to bother me, but I learned to kinda brush them off.  Of course, it still sewed something of an awareness in my fabric of how “not enough” I was.   

When I was little, I remember one night in particular, my mom making a comment about my “thunder thighs” and how I shouldn’t dance too hard because my belly and legs wobbled too much.

I was 9, she was 35.

To be fair, she was high as fuck with her friends and I was up at 11 pm watching TV on a school night in the 3rd grade, so there was far more wrong with that picture than just being mocked by my mom for being a chunky kid.

I looked at her that night and committed her image into my head. I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t end up as ugly as her.   She was 35, and weathered already.  She had worn herself down... tired eyelids hung heavy over vacant, wild eyes, lined all the way around in messy black eyeliner, making her blue-green irises something of an oasis in the whole mess, soot smudges from her pipe or whatever she was smoking that night on the side of her lip.  The image is burned in my mind with incredible detail.

That night shut me down.  Vulnerability became a struggle ever since.   I still don’t really dance, because of the wobble.  I’m working on that.

I wasn’t in her care much longer after that.  I saw so many really horrible things that addiction brings to users and the people in their wake. I can go into that another day, but there are a lot of things children shouldn’t have to deal with, and substance is the catalyst for a lot of that.

My dad got custody of my flock of siblings, and my mom spiraled into her own personal hell.  I didn’t see her very often after that, and when I had a chance, I kinda avoided the opportunities.  The mom that I remember when I was little was gone.  Burned away by substance, and replaced with a shaky, tongue-chewing shell of her former self, at best.

Going through my adolescence and teen-years without a mom didn’t seem weird to me, because the years leading up to it were largely mom-less too.  She was there, but kinda only on paper.  Never really in practice.  Except for the one time she told me that if I ever wanted to try drugs, that I should do them around her and not alone.

(looking back I just have to laugh at that statement, because again, I was 9 when it happened.  bless’er tweakerass heart.)

When we went to live with my dad, we almost immediately started going to church. I’m pretty sure my dad didn’t really know what to do with all these dang kids, and my Grandma who was and still is in constant devotion to a loving Jesus, told him to get us in church, so he did.

When you come from a place of neglect and trauma, surrounded by drug abuse, attending little conservative baptist church is like jumping into an icy lake after a hot shower.  It’s a shock to the system, and takes some pretty intense adjustment in behavior.  You get used to it, but there’s a process.

So, while I know the shift from my previous life to church was beneficial, every time someone said “we don’t say those things here” or “you can’t wear that here” or “That’s not how we behave”, “you should”, “you shouldn’t” was a little icy stab into my person.  Another patch sewn into my cloak of expectations, placed on my shoulders by outside individuals.  

Going through middle school and high school and beyond I was given a whole collection of “You should” and “You shouldn’t” patches that would make any Girl Scout chartreuse with envy.   Peers, adults, teachers, well-meaning relatives, church clergy, employers, boys who liked me, girls who liked me, boys and girls I liked... all sewed expectations into my personality that felt less like adornments and more like restraints.   It was rare (and not until high school, really) that someone poured into -me- specifically, and made me feel like I can be/do/think bigger than my circumstances. There were four people that come to mind, two of whom have now passed.  

(** NOTE - If you’re an educator and maybe you feel like you’re not getting through to the kids, I promise, I PROMISE, you are. You might be the reason they believe or even know that it’s possible to rearrange their stars**)

Somewhere along the way, I developed a chameleon soul.

The shoulds and shouldn’ts were so much to carry on one person, and so limiting, so the cloak became whatever the next person wanted it to be.  It’s hard to shake the tendency to accommodate everyone else’s opinions and preferences for who I should be, but I’m working on that, too.  

Take all of that life... All of those experiences, and mix media into that screwy little cake.  Media that tells us that we need to be skinnier, blonder, taller, have better hair, better makeup, cooler activities, perfect boobs, plumpier lips, brighter eyes, better skills, whiter teeth, perfect mental health, three college degrees, a great job, sunny shiny happy days all the goddamn time.   This part has been beaten to death, but in case you haven’t heard it yet... that’s not attainable.

I was FOREVER apologizing for who I was.  I would always make excuses for why I wasn’t good enough for praise for anything. “You look so pretty” “yeah, but my hair is a mess” “I love this picture you took” “yeah, but the lighting was weird, sooo...”  Gosh, Always excuses.    

I didn’t really learn that lesson well enough early on though.  

I tried.  I did.  But my chameleon soul tried so hard to be everything to everyone and eventually won.

Seasons came and went life happened and I met a boy.  We went from zero to 60, right away.

I got pregnant fast.  I got married fast.  I lost the baby a week and a half after we got married.  I convinced myself that it was God’s will that we lost the baby because we got a fresh start. I played house a while, had a couple more babies, I was attacked by depression, but still pretended to be happy. I did so much battle with my body. Not really for any reason, either.

I was married to a man who didn’t care how I looked, like... ever.  

He didn’t care that I was getting pudgier after babies.  He only ever made commentary when he was drunk.  Which wasn’t super often, but it wasn’t super rare, either.  And that’s not to say he was an alcoholic or anything, he was just more prone to poking fun when he had a few, and I was usually the target.  

He wasn’t big on compliments, and never had favorites, so the only “feedback” I got from my husband was negative.  It kicked me deeper into the need to look better to get positive affirmation, but also... I was SO depressed.  I had two babies under two and I was drowning in my own life.  I couldn’t let anyone know though, because a not-ok version of me was not who anyone wanted me to be.   I apologized for the space I took up.  I apologized for my chubby cheeks and post-baby tummy flab, and my armpit fat, and my wonky boobs and my tired eyes. I didn’t feel like I was worth compliments, honest hugs or good sex... but I pretended to be happy.

God, I worked my ass off to show everyone how happy I was.

(spoiler alert, I wasn’t.  I wasn’t ever fucking happy.  I wasn’t even interested in being alive anymore)    I didn’t want anyone to tell me what I should or shouldn’t do to be a better version of myself, and GOD forbid I admit that my happy world was less than sterling.  Why wouldn’t I be happy?  I had a cute husband and cute kids and a cute business and a cute little chunk of land in a cute little town, I attended a trendy church... literally everything looked so perfect.    Except for the person I saw in the mirror.  

I looked in the mirror and saw those heavy eyelids over dead eyes. I saw the face of a woman I never wanted to become.

I never fell into chemical substance, instead I was addicted to being everything.  The cloak I wore was my drug... and it wasted me away.  It stole the life from my eyes.  I didn’t actively seek deterioration with drugs or alcohol, but every morning, I’d lie in bed and wonder what I could do to end the parade.

I wasn’t ok, and I couldn’t talk about it with just anyone, but I had a couple of far-away friends with whom I could share the heavy thoughts.  They were ears and shoulders when I needed them to be.  They didn’t know JUST how heavy the thoughts were, but they were there for the parts I was willing to share.  They encouraged.  They challenged my self doubt and allowed space for me to be proud of myself for small reasons, and then big reasons.   They spoke life into my too-tired heart.  

I decided in that season of life that I would choose my good self. I would make choices that lead to a healthier mind. I would choose deep-down-in-my-bones joy.  I decided that I would live. Not just be alive, but -live-.  I decided that I would create things that I loved.  I’d hug with my whole self.  No ass-out hugs.  When someone fell into my arms, they would know that I wanted them there.

I decided to be better for myself and wear a face that my children could remember with fondness and not be ashamed of when they saw the same face in the mirror.  

I decided to choose to be a light for the people that cross my path, as often as I can.   I can’t build their path, but I CAN shine a light so maybe they can find their own.  

I’ve lived a whole life since that season, which is a completely different novel in itself, but the time between has been a healing space.  It’s been a big mistake making space, and a growing space and a hurting space, but the forward motion is remarkable.

I’m a week away from 35.  I hadn’t given a lot of thought to the significance of this age until lately.  I look at my whole self in the mirror and I’m proud of who I am.  I like the face I see in the mirror.  I like the way my eyes shine in pictures.  

I like the life they carry. I like my big soft body.  I like that I’m a safe place to land for my children.  I like that I can wrap hugs around my friends.  I like that my big strong legs can carry me up a mountain, even if I get a little out of breath.  I like that I’ve created humans and I’ve eaten yummy food with people I love.  I am pretty active sometimes, and sometimes I lose a little weight, and sometimes I gain a little weight, and I can’t complain too much because this body serves me so well.  I’m fat, but I also think I’m quite lovely. I don’t see those as opposing adjectives.  Fatness and loveliness can hold hands and play happily.

I have shortcomings.  I deal with some thick anxiety sometimes, and sometimes I eat too many pieces of pizza, then I feel like I need a nap, and sometimes I still take on too much, trying to be all of the things all of the time to everyone,and then I completely drop the ball and let people down...  but I’m working on making better decisions and facing that kooky anxious stuff head on.  It’s a process.

I’m a recovering chameleon.  I’m trying my best every day to not attempt to be everything to everyone, but I struggle.

The shoulds and shouldn’ts still weigh heavy on my shoulders, and some days I wear the cloak longer than others.  Trying to be free of it causes its own issues, but my feet are pointed in the right direction, I think.  

(here’s the nugget if you’re just joining from the top)

I am not the words that other people have placed on me.

I am not the opinions of other people.  

I am not the expectations of other people.

I am not the tragedy I have seen

I am not the circumstances from which I have walked.

I am not the mistakes I have made.

I am not the successes I have gathered.

I am not my illness

I am not my family

I am not everything to everyone.

And neither are you.

I’m not ok sometimes. And sometimes... I’m so ok.

I’m more than ok, I’m incredible, and I believe that the future is only more brilliant than the already radiant now.  

I hope for you, if any of this resonates with you, that you also can see your own radiance.  Not the cloak of shoulds and shouldn’ts that other people have put on your shoulders.  

I hope you really live, and you do the things you love, and you overflow with abundant joy that spills onto the people around you. I hope that when people hug you, they know that you want them there, and I hope that you only hug people you want to hug.  

I hope you know that the body you’re in is a miracle.  The odds of you being here are FOUR TRILLION to one.  You could have showed up in this life as a toaster.  But you’re not.  You’re an incredible being, capable of fat tears and belly laughs and loving someone so much it hurts and inspiring hope and surviving really heavy shit.   Toasters can’t do any of that.

And I hope upon hope that the person you see in the mirror is someone you like.  

#4-4-19