We're less than a month away from the Doctor Who 60th anniversary specials, and I can't help but think back on Sarah Jane Smith, inarguably the most important Companion in the history of Doctor Who and one of two Companions who was brought back for every single anniversary special until her untimely death. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, the other Companion who was in every special until his death just 2 months prior to Elisabeth Sladen's, has had his legacy brilliantly upheld through his daughter Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. While the Brigadier himself has been absent from the past 2 anniversary specials, his daughter carries on his legacy and has appeared in every one that he missed.
But Sarah Jane, so beloved, so deeply missed, was not so honored in the 50th anniversary special. And that's partly because Lis' death was so sudden and unexpected nobody knew whether Sarah Jane should canonically be gone or not. But now, semi-canonically, the world of Doctor Who has also said farewell to Sarah Jane, and my most desperate hope is that, since she's canonically gone, the 60th anniversary specials will take a moment to recognize her or honor her in some way. We deserve to see the Doctor mourn her, the way we saw him mourn the Brigadier. We, as fans of Sarah Jane, deserve to see her honored in the show proper, and not just in the lockdown short that was made in her honor.
I desperately need Sarah Jane to get just one moment to be honored in the 60th anniversary specials, since she cannot grace them with her presence, whether that be through the appearance of her children, Luke and Sky, or through the appearance of her own companions, Maria, Rani, and Clyde. Because for so many young people, Sarah Jane Smith was their Doctor, even more so than the Doctor himself, and she deserves to be honored and remembered in Doctor Who's specials.
Until the main show actually honors her the way she deserves, I'm glad we got this:
There is no one single piece of media that makes me cry more than this right here, and I really hope that the 60th anniversary specials can manage to surpass this by honoring her in some way.
We deserved at least another 20 years with her, but at least in the world of Doctor Who we got Sarah Jane for almost ten years longer than we got Elisabeth.
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I wanna talk about my mind for a little bit
I was gonna save this until after I posted the last Wingless Angel chapter but I can’t post it yet. Pretty sure my mind wants me to get this out of my system first.
So hi everyone, how are you? How have you been? Honestly if you’re still following at all I’m delighted.
I don’t want this to come across as some excuse for all the unfinished fanfic I left behind 3+ years ago, which is why I wanted to publish WA first, so I hope you don’t take it that way. But I ended up stumbling upon an aspect of my mental health that I’m still trying to address and since I never really saw anyone post or talk about my particular issue before very recently, I wanted to share it in case it resonates with anyone.
(Clearly stuff has changed, this is where I'd normally put a "read more" but.... I guess that's not a thing anymore?? Hopefully this isn't a huge annoying wall of text on everyone's dash, oof.)
I’ve posted before about my ADHD. I’ve been getting treatment for it for 10 years now, and for all that time, medication & other coping mechanisms have been helpful to a point, but only to a point. There was still something left that was keeping me from functioning, and I couldn’t tell what it was. All I knew was that I had no will of my own, and I’d spent the last 10 years trying to create situations where the people in charge were asking (or implying that i should do) things I considered good to do. “People in charge” meant anyone besides myself. If someone was not me, they automatically had authority, simply by virtue of being someone external to me.
I did a lot of research trying to find something that matched up with my experiences & feelings, even partially, and I looked into things like PDA autism and even just the people-pleasing habits common with other ADHD folks.
At some point, with therapy, I did learn how to say “no” to other people’s demands of me. I learned to set boundaries. But I was still profoundly uncomfortable with dictating what I was going to do, especially if anyone else was ever going to be aware of it.
When I was a little kid, i was told “no” constantly, and that’s not hyperbole. I’ve cited the story many times of falling in love with the violin when I was 9 but immediately being told “No, you’re going to play the flute.” So I played the flute, but without any passion for it I couldn’t figure it out and I quit, and my mom never stopped making me feel guilty about it. But that wasn’t the only example of that kind of thing. I wanted to play soccer; mom said play basketball, so I played basketball. I wanted to play piano; mom bought me a guitar and my sister got the electronic keyboard. (We eventually switched, but I never felt like I could fully commit to playing the thing). I wanted to learn Spanish or Japanese in high school; mom told me to learn French, so I took four fucking years of French.
My feelings and wishes were effectively not a factor in what I was allowed to do, what goals I was allowed to pursue, unless I was staying in my room and out of everyone’s way (and even then I had to make sure I jumped up to do what was asked of me if I got called from another room). Eventually I learned, as a survival mechanism, to just obey. It wasn’t worth fighting anymore because I was systematically robbed of my individuality at every turn. Something happened when I was 13 that I will never talk about publicly and she played "good parent who has her kid's back" for about 5 minutes before siding with the bad guy. I brought it up years later and she was mad I'd never gotten over it. And all that is on top of being raised to be a "good little capitalist drone" who needs to be perfect and efficient at all times. I was never supported. I was never given grace. So I never gave grace to myself, because if your own parents don't give you grace & time to learn and be flawed, then clearly you don't deserve any, right?
I finally cut my mother out of my life not long after the pandemic began, a few months after having gone no-contact from my father (mostly due to his casual racism & transphobia, which cost me at least one very close friendship when I was a kid, and was unkind to my child in a way I could not abide). My immediate family - spouse and kid - are the only family I have left now. And it sounds tragic on paper, because it is, but until I finally got away from my mother's voice in real life I couldn't filter through the recordings of her voice in my mind so I could finally throw them away. And that knot is still being untied. Honestly this is 10 years into a very long mental health journey, when you think about it, but I wish I'd cut my mom out of my life a very very long time ago. I wasn't angry about lost time when I got my ADHD diagnosis. I was angry about it when I realized that yes, this had been abuse, and I hadn't been courageous enough to get away from it sooner.
Because that dehumanization resulted in me having no will power of my own, and that extended as far as simply not wanting anything anymore. I like things, sure, but anything I WANTED for myself was out of the question, especially if it involved other people in any way, but honestly even solo pursuits became impossible for me to will myself to do. For right now, when I have something I want to do, I'm telling my friends & husband to order me to do it. Because I won't do it otherwise. And it's a potentially dangerous workaround, but it's all I have for now. I and my therapist are hoping that once my brain registers that what other people are telling me to do is aligned with what I want to do, maybe it won't depend on other people's commands anymore and I'll just take control of my own life for once. But that may not work. I'll have to wait and see.
So what does this have to do with my abandoned fics? Well, it had started to become more difficult to write because the adhd "shinyness" was wearing off anyway, but I'd been doing a good job of pushing past it because people liked what I was writing. I could see my skill getting better, and engagement was going up, and that was really motivating.
But then... I stopped writing fic all of a sudden because someone made a post about finding it shitty when writers wrote about COVID in their fics, and.... that was sort of a last straw that broke me, because I do exactly that in the last WA chapter. So I just turned tail and ran away. I tried to push through and write & publish the chapter anyway, because it was the LAST chapter and I knew people were waiting on it, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Even having OSBB obligations didn't get me writing again, and given that obligation, the shame I felt about not having finished those stories weighed on me so badly that I couldn't even interact with you guys on Instagram, despite you having been so kind to me in the past.
Let's face it, that goes WAY beyond adhd rejection sensitivity, that's a trauma response. I saw one bit of honestly well-reasoned critique of work that wasn't even mine, and I just ran. Immediately I felt like I was no longer allowed to take up space here. I felt unwelcome here in this corner of the internet world, just as I have always felt like I wasn't allowed to take up space in the physical world for almost my ENTIRE life. And the shame I already feel about myself normally was compounded by what I felt was a cowardly thing to do, which prevented me from returning.
Now that I've accepted that, yes, I am an abuse victim whose life has been MASSIVELY and MAJORLY affected by that childhood trauma, I'm finally able to address it properly. Over the last few weeks I've been changing the direction of my therapy and my self-talk (reparenting yourself is HARD) and I'm feeling some improvement, but progress isn't linear so my burst of motivation the other night fizzled out, and I'm genuinely sorry for that.
So... yeah, I'm trying to come back and get those fics finished. I'm grateful for any of you willing to be patient with me. Consciously I KNOW I deserve any support willingly given to me by any of you, but I FEEL like I don't. So yeah. Thanks. <3
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Self love
People tell me to love myself but what does that even mean? I'm not even sure what the self is but I've been digging and searching and rearranging the letters in my name, trying to find something that's really me for 20 years.
I've tried to identify with my pain, the things I love, the things about me that aren't normal and the things about me that are, I've tried to identify with my painful and angry body but I'm never really there, in any of those things.
It's like telling me to admire my skin when there's nothing but scar tissue left- I don't hate it for being scarred but it isn't skin and its painful to the touch. How can I love a thing that hurts? I can't even remember this abstract concept of "me" that I'm supposed to love. I'm looking for him and fearing he will never come back.
I've tried identifying with my choices but what does that say about me? Am I my motivations, the actions, or the results? I'm never sure those are good things. I've hurt people with my choices before and yes, I've learned from those things and yes, I consider them mistakes so maybe my motivations are good.
But I don't have many choices to make and I never have. It makes me feel powerless, small in an existential way. I don't particularly want to be powerful, I just want to exist. I hate that my choices have been taken from me. I will find my power if it kills me. I will find myself someday.
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