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min-youngis · 4 years

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gif not mine (but goddamn)

~ Pairing : Jackson Wang x Reader

~ Genre : Fluff, Comfort, Lowkey Humour

~ Summary/Excerpt : It isn’t often you’re put in a position to play optimist in this relationship. That’s his job. You run on cynicism and a purely prepare for the worst, hope for the best attitude. But apparently, not tonight.

Established Relationship

~ Word Count : 1,639

~ Warnings : as the youths say, the f word and it isn't friendship

~ A/N : written for this prompt ("It'll get better, right?") from @challengingwords with uhhh some modification. idk what it is about their prompts that make me want to write jackson + fluff/comfort but god if it isn't fun. lets me put the burden of all my emotional constipation on this y/n bitch.

i'd love to hear feedback, spread the love!

masterlist in my description.

~~~

You’re about to turn into the garage when you’re stopped by a sleek, black sedan blocking your way. Also pulling into the garage. In the inky darkness of the night only slightly illuminated by streetlamps, it seems to blend into the background.

Their windows are tinted, but you have no doubt as to who’s inside, waiting for you to make the next move. You know he can see you, though. With a small nod, you back up a bit, so he'll have space to enter first.

To your amusement, he lets out a quick, little honk, as if in thanks, before he turns the car in. You slowly follow behind, moving into the second space next to the one where he’s shutting his engine.

You busy yourself with switching off the radio and gathering your bag from the passenger seat, vaguely wondering what on earth the two of you are going to do for dinner, now that you’ve both reached at the same, late hour.

As you push your door open and clamber out, you notice him standing at the entry to the house, his bag in one hand and phone in the other, typing as he waits for you to reach him. At the sound of your car door closing, he looks up, tired expression being slowly lit up by a small smile that you can’t help but mirror.

“Hello,” he softly says, pocketing his phone in favour of gently tugging at your willing hand the moment you’re close enough so you’re pressed right up to his side, welcoming the warmth and support and affection after such a long day.

You hum in greeting, immediately sinking into his frame, head tipping up until you’re looking at his face, dark circles, short stubble and all.

Shucking your bag up so it rests in the crook of your elbow, you bring your arm up to delicately trace along a wrinkle on his forehead, smoothening it as he lets out a small whoosh of breath.

You feel him squeezing your hand that's still tucked in his before he bends his neck to rest his head on your shoulder, eyelids fluttering shut, body melting. You would’ve crumbled under the weight, with all his muscle mass and all, if he hadn’t dropped his bag and wound an arm around your waist, holding the both of you up.

The lights in the garage are bright and you’re still keyed up from work, all analysis and logic, so it’s without much of a thought that when you start carding your fingers through his brown dyed hair, it morphs into scrutinising the strands. You’ve taken to looking for breakage these days, and you get inordinately excited when you find some. It’s like the satisfaction that comes with ripping apart a split end.

You feel a tiny pinch on your hip as Jackson mutters against your skin. “Stop searching for damage.”

Unfazed at being caught, you merely give the top of his head a little pat as you reply, “Couldn’t find any today, anyway.”

You’re saved the bother of listening to him whine by a rumble that emerges from your stomach, causing you to give a sheepish smile and a shrug as he resurfaces from the nook between your neck and shoulder, fixing you with a concerned but amused grin.

He dramatically clucks in faux-impatience, like an elderly female helper who’s fondly annoyed at her young charge for not eating enough. Reclaiming your hand, he shoots one last beady look at you before walking into the house, you snorting as you willingly do the same, linked hands gently swinging.

“What do we do for dinner?” he asks as he lets himself fall backwards onto the couch, pulling you too, so you land next to him, both your necks craned up, eyes shut as you face the ceiling, bags on the floor.

“Takeout?” you mutter. The dim indoor lights and the cushions under you, Jackson’s thumb rubbing circles on the back of your hand, all lull you closer to sleep.

You feel him shift and you tilt your head to the side, summoning enough energy to crack open a single eyelid only to see him looking sorrowfully at his stomach.

“Goodbye, diet,” he mumbles as he slowly gives his abdomen a small pat with his free hand.

He recovers admirably well, though, swiftly taking his phone out of his pocket and beginning to order your usual.

Smiling at his antics, you let your head roll back to its initial position, eyelid fluttering shut again. “Don’t worry, you still have your nasty smoothie to look forward to in the morning.”

You hear the light taps of his phone as he places the order, letting out a satisfied hum when he’s done and immediately dropping the device on the sofa next to him before leaning back once again.

He shuffles a bit, and the next thing you know, your hand is being repeatedly, insistently tugged in his direction. Confused, you open your eyes and straighten up.

“Jackson, what – oof!”

He sighs in contentment above you, one arm wrapped around your waist and the other tucked behind his head supported by the arm rest. You, on the other hand, need to adjust a bit before you can reach his level of comfort, squashed as you are into his chest. You grunt as you push your way up so your head is in its preferred, warm shoulder nook, Jackson being of very little help and only slightly loosening his hold so you can reach your destination.

You suppose this is punishment for dissing his beloved smoothie.

Like he can read your mind, he says, “It isn’t so bad. You should try it sometime.”

You respond with a disgusted expression he can’t see and an ‘Ew,’ that gets you a chuckle in response. You feel the rumble of his chest underneath you, and smile in satisfaction.

“Weekend off?” you ask lightly once he’s silent again, partly to make sure he doesn’t fall asleep before the food comes and partly to ascertain whether you’re going to be facing another Jackson-less weekend without putting too much pressure on him.

The air changes, becomes a little more serious as he subtly grounds himself and sighs before replying, “Only Sunday morning. Rest of it’s booked.”

You try not to let your disappointment show, try not to seem too disheartened or sorry that he just cannot seem to catch a fucking break, but you aren’t known for being particularly good at acting.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, misinterpreting your silence for annoyance at him and immediately, you’re in a rush to clamber up to assure him how many ever times as required that he has nothing to apologise for, that he’s doing what he loves and all you want is for him to be healthy and happy and how is he supposed to be getting any rest if he can’t even get a weekend off?

The words stop at the tip of your tongue, your damning shyness that flares up at the very thought of expressing any strong emotion making you halt. You face him, your body held up by your arms resting on his chest as you try catching his evasive eyes.

You know, that if he weren’t so tired, he wouldn’t be so quick to just skim the surface of your quietness, would probably realise the true meaning behind it, but right now, you understand the need for softness, delicateness, stubborn reassurance.

Summoning all your reserves, you gently move his chin so he’s looking at you. “When can you take a break?”

He clears up a bit, momentary insecurity fading at the reappearance of his regular confidence. “Another month,” he replies, resigned.

It isn’t often you’re put in a position to play optimist in this relationship. That’s his job. You run on cynicism and a purely prepare for the worst, hope for the best attitude. But apparently, not tonight.

“That’s not too long,” you say, attempting for a cheerful tone. It doesn’t properly hit its mark, only eliciting a humourless titter at your poor attempt at optimism.

“One day at a time,” you insist, making sure he doesn’t look away, making sure he understands the conviction in your voice, making sure he knows that there may not be anything you can do about his schedule but you’re there for him, just like how he’s been there for you all those countless times that you’ve had a packed calendar.

With a soft kiss, you assert, strengthened by the returning light in his eyes, “It'll get better, yeah?”

You relish the exhale he gives, waving away the grateful ‘Thank you,’ and delighting in the subtle tightening of his insofar limp arm around your waist. You look at him for a few more seconds, making sure he isn’t going to slip back down before shuffling lower so you can go back to your previous, very comfortable position.

“We need to get up for food,” he chuckles, but he makes no move to change positions.

“We'll get up when it comes,” you reply, reaching up with a searching hand and patting blindly at his face, seeking to pacify.

The next thing you know, your hand’s been caught in the gentlest of grips and you feel him brush his lips across your knuckle.

You whine in mild consternation and bashfulness as you burrow yourself deeper into his neck, unsuccessfully attempting to hide your blush from him as he laughs knowingly, satisfied like he had intended this reaction, your hand still held in his.

“Ew,” you repeat again, giving rise to a louder peal of laughter, your unseen pout slowly, unstoppably growing into a small grin, like it always seems to around him, your fingers that were frozen in anxiety loosening and smoothly tangling with his.

It’ll get better.

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dannissa13 · 4 years

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NaNo, part three

Living is hard. That’s a dumb realization to have at any age but I find it especially stupid right now. I lived for some time being completely aimless and, in the eyes of the society at large and people who surrounded me, I was also useless and underachieving. That was weird. I was both extremely, extensively depressed, suicidal and anxious, ready to blow at any second, ready to collapse at every opportunity and start crying for minimal to none apparent reason and also angry. So, so angry at everything at the same time. And sad, I was also incredibly sad and seemingly lonely even though I had family and friends. I’ve distanced myself from everyone, lost a lot of contacts with people I used to know and became a complete shut-in with no discernible future or goals or even semblance of purpose. To this day I think about that time and I still feel the same about it. I was truly free. It cost me an arm and a leg, literally, three years of my life or maybe more if you count how much time I needed to reintegrate into the society and start being considered a useful member of it. But I’ll always think of those days, glimpse into my memory for the taste of real freedom. I was able to do what I wanted without any repercussions, I had no stakes, no hurdles to overcome, no one was able to tell me what to do or stop me from doing anything really. I was really fully left to my own devices and was free to do anything I wanted. Turns out I wanted to waste my time on the internet for hours and hours and maybe read books or something, I don’t remember much of this period of my life, it’s all a blur. But in the moments of weakness, when I’m really down, I think about that time and I think about being by myself, all alone and it both hurts and soothes me.

So yeah, living is hard. And living as an actual adult is even harder, with responsibilities, a job, relationships that you need to sustain, health that you need to monitor, money, social status, etc. I lived part of my life as a fake adult, being of age but not going through the motions of adulthood, not being able to support myself in any way or continue my free lifestyle on my own. I know now that the perceived freedom I had was a privilege not a lot of people can afford but to a mentally ill person everything is skewed and distorted. Now, in the real adulthood stage of my life I do a lot of work I previously neglected and manage a lot of things that seemed impossible at previous times. But there’s a catch - I don’t feel happy. I’m not fulfilled by my life, even though I should be, even though I’m working on it so hard. I spent a ridiculous amount of money on therapy which I’ve been going to steadily for almost two years now and I’m not happy yet. I cannot say that I’m not better, I’m just not where I wanted to be. No one tells you that, but therapy, even though it helps immensely, does not, in fact, cure you. It’s a method of making you be capable to fend for yourself against your mental illness or a way of accepting it and learning how to live with it, but in no way, shape or form is this the answer. And so, when you’re fighting back and things go up and you quality of life increases you actually think that it’ll be like that forever. The thing is - mental illness comes back. And now you’re better equipped to fight against it but it’s still a fight that you could potentially lose. And no matter where you are at life or who you’ve become it can resurface at any time and bite ya in the ass. That’s lovely. No one tells you that your depression, anxiety and OCD are here to stay, forever, by your side, they’ll never leave you even though you haven’t had them before. It’s like chronic illness - you “get better” but you never get healthy again. It’s not as bad as it used to be but is still a bit shitty. Sometimes every day is a little bit shitty and it tends to pile up until you just burst and can’t do this anymore. I’m not at that level yet, but things are not looking bright for me either.

I’m a hack writer, I always knew I was bad and thought that I was at peace with that. Turns out you can still be hurt by something even though you know that it’s true. No one gives two shits about me trying hard, even if I give it my all it might be not enough. Sometimes I honestly feel like I’m not getting any better at writing and sometimes I make up a sentence that makes me feel like a genius. It’s all bullshit in the end. I’m an honest to god boring mediocrity and I’m also incredibly lazy, so even knowing that my shit isn’t that good I won’t do anything about that, because I’ve already done the work and can’t be bothered to redo it. So yeah, I suck as a writer.

I’ve also forgot how hard it is, pun intended, to write sex believably as well as keeping it hot and intriguing without being cliched. So, I’m unable to finish a single goddamn sex scene in otherwise completed fic and it’s driving me nuts. It was much easier to do this a few years ago and I honestly have no idea what happened to me. But I’ve also written around a thousand words for a sequel for this fucking unfinished fic and it’s getting ridiculous. The time is running out and I’m thinking about turning the NaNoWriMo from a month into a “until I’m done with every work I’ve started”. It’s not gonna last, I know that, but if I’m not trying I won’t get any results.

It’s too late to post this but I’m still gonna do that. Farewell, for now. I have shit to figure out.

#dannissa writes #nanowrimo #i write stuff #writing #textpost #text #iwritestuff #mental health

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loghainmactir · 5 years

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hewwo! i was wondering if u could pls give me some advice on starting my transition? ive been so scared to start bc of family and costs but ive decided to just. do it. yknow? like if i don't ill probably die lol. u look amazing and rly confident in yourself in all ur selfies and one day i wanna be Like That ✌️❤️

hi! ok, so first of all: yeah, i absolutely can give u advice, and second of all: i remember feeling exactly like you did. it literally wasn’t that long ago, either, it was like. 2013/14/15 (i can’t remember, time is fake, whatever lmao!). third of all: bless u yr so sweet. i still have a lotta issues with confidence (i doubt myself, my talent and what i can do literally hourly), but honestly? i love my body right now. it’s a good, genderless body, goddamnit.

long, long post ahead bc i’m trying to think of things i did and good god please take it with a grain of salt because a lot of this is just me ranting about things i wish I’D done in my own position. i’m also coming from a place where HRT and surgeries AREN’T free, so that’s also A Thing. everyone’s experience is different.

transitioning (particularly medically) really super fuckin varies country by country (and honestly probably even state by state, age by age and fuckin gender by gender because cis people won’t let us fucking BE goddamn): i don’t know where you are, so my only tips there r: find a trans friendly doctor/endo (i was kinda forced to go through a hospital bc That Was How It Was here in good ol’ Australia), and one people wholeheartedly recommend, if you wanna go that route.

my first point is make sure you find safe spaces in every goddamn aspect of your transition. medically, socially, physically. if you think your doctor is refusing you treatment or is discriminating against you, you NEED to ditch that doctor. if your friends and family are really verbally or physically violent against LGBT folks, you NEED to leave that space if you can (or not come out and wait until you can leave. seriously. i’m kinda lucky– my grandma was verbally violent against LGBT folks, and initially my mum was skepitcal, but i convinced them both to go to a group for LGBT+ parents and friends and they slowly turned around). get yourself friends, get yourself allies.

i cannot stress that enough. my first doctor refused to send my referral letter to the royal children’s hospital gender clinic because even tho he presented as a “nice” guy, he believed that because this was “”””out of the blue”””” for me, he figured he’d just Not Send It (and tried to tell me that a lotta kids there didn’t actually helpo, lol). so there i was, a young 15-16 year old alister, waiting like 2-3 months for something that didn’t even get fucking sent.

join trans groups on facebook and in real life. seriously, they’re a godsend; there’s buy-and-sells, advice posts, encouragement posts. ESPECIALLY local ones. most of them on facebook are private, meaning no one can see if you’re posting/in the group, and it’s easy to check if they’re not. these fb pages + local groups are good ways to find trans friendly spaces and doctors. i found my current doctor, who’s actually one of the very few doctors who knows what the fuck he’s on about re: trans people, through a real life trans group. they were like “oh, you should see x”, and even though he’s about 30-40 minutes away from me, he’s brilliant and honestly saved my life.

along those lines: figure out what you want from your transition, and then realize & accept that this may change (and it also may not change!). very early on, i was super insistent that i wanted phalloplasty and to wear packers, and now i couldn’t care less. at first, i identified as agender, and then as a trans guy/ftm, and now i identify as a Black Hole (i’m kidding, don’t @ me). like, a lotta people DON’T change their minds. but i did, some people do, and it shouldn’t be anyone’s business but your own what you want to do with your body

(sidenote: this also goes for detransitioning or stopping medical transition but continuing to socially transition/present differently. literally, it’s fine. it’s your body. fuck anyone who says otherwise.)

again: FUCK ANYONE WHO SAYS OTHERWISE.

your body is literally your body. do NOT let anyone tell you what to do with it or who you are. i had people very early on scream at me (legitimately scream and throw me out of home, thanks grandma), tell me i wasn’t actually trans, and harrass me for this shit: but frankly, if i’d put myself back in the closet, i wouldn’t be alive right now. i would’ve killed myself years ago, and i wish i wasn’t kidding. if it’s safe, you need to stand up for your own body and your rights and put yourself somewhere that will allow you to follow through. you need to keep going and keep living.

my only other two pieces of advice are “patience, baby”– like, for real, every single part of transition takes time. this varies from where you are and who’s supporting you, but it’s generally true. it takes time for people to accept new names and pronouns

(lotta people get furious about this, and i used to be one of those people, but hindsight’s a bitch and you gotta realize that… like, it’s hard for some cis people. you gotta give them a little bit of wiggle room, especially if they’ve never ever met a trans person before. it’s about reminders, reminders, reminders: which is SO hard if you’re not safe/don’t have the confidence. there IS a flip side to this though: if chad and stacey have known your new pronouns for months, now, and they keep “””slipping””” up, they’re not slipping up, honey. they’re doing it on purpose. kick their teeth in i’m kidding please don’t do this you know what i mean.)

it takes time for HRT to kick in. it takes time to gather a Look™ of your own you like, it takes time to build confidence to even tell people, it takes time to save up money for surgeries and it just… takes time. sometimes because it’s a naturally slow process, sometimes because cis people are Cis People and like to gatekeep. i remember being very young in my transition, sitting in the car after one of my appointments with the afformentioned shithead doctor bawling my eyes out because he’d told me i wouldn’t be able to access t for x amount of time and it was bullshit. this year i’ll be 2 years on t. wild, huh? there’s a lot of us and not equal amounts of resources (ESPECIALLY in public systems) depending on where you are, so you gotta be prepared to WAIT.

i’ll tell you what super helped me through those years: hyping myself up for other things! i still have the ticket from my first twenty one pilots show. that show meant SO much to me. i cried all through it, because waiting for that show kept my mind off of the wait for my royal children’s appointments (and even waiting to go up to melbourne bc my mum and i would go and get kebabs was a good thing to focus on!). keep things that aren’t trans related on hand (seriously i struggled with this because dysphoria and shit is fucking hard!! it’s easy to say but really fucking hard to put into practice).

(one day i’m gonna tell tyler and josh just how much they saved my goddamn life. i know they hear it weekly, but i will.)

my other thing is that uh. it won’t solve all your problems especially if you’ve got mental illnesses. this is a really fuckin depressing thing i had to drill into my brain, but it really helped. transitioning solved SO many of my issues. i no longer have back issues (thanks, like, literal kilo titties, lmao), i no longer have sore ribs and i can breathe and wear shirts. i lost so much weight (and am kinda gaining it back, but whatever). i no longer have anxiety about whether people can tell i’m binding– which is WILD because i used to stress the fuck out about it to the point where i never went out anywhere. i used to sit on the bus wondering if the person next to me could tell i had titties. now it literally doesn’t even register.

my issues now stem from PTSD, depression, BPD and ADHD. how do you fix this? you don’t. but what HAS helped is finding a therapist who won’t pressure you into talking about trans shit. lemme tell you: this shit gets exhausting after the fifth time of “oh i googled ‘can you become a boy’ when i was, like, nine” (this is my go to story because this memory is so vivid). of course, there’s gonna be moments where you HAVE to: my therapist recently actively asked me to briefly run through it for my PTSD report. but otherwise we literally haven’t talked about it and that is a GODSEND (because i don’t need it. if you need it, that’s good, too!). having a therapist that you can just wordvomit at wrt anything is literally the best thing and can be super helpful– seriously, there were a few trans-related sessions where i just snarled about the bullshit gatekeeping and the bastard i had to see for my therapist letter (oooh, every time i think abt the fact that it was something like $400-500 for two fucking sessions i get so mad lol), but outta 14 it’s really only like 2-3 of them.

but yeah. that’s it. i dunno, these are things that i’ve learnt and sorta… like to think as helpful for myself. of course, this could be different for you: you’re not me, you’re entirely different, in no doubt an entirely different country, social, financial, mental state. i was FUCKED UP when i first came out. i didn’t know that then, but i do now. i spent a lotta time by myself and that’s not healthy, so i really encourage you to reach out to our community, local and worldly, because oh my god, we’re here for you. we are SO here for you.

#long post #sorry if you need this formatted for ease of reading please shout at me. i really word vomited all over this #my transition #trans #anon #asks #iodk what else to tag this as

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thegirlwhocouldntsitdown-blog · 6 years

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12 months - I have lived in Los Angeles for A WHOLE YEAR?! (16.08.2018)

One year. Wow.

A year ago today, I left my family and 3 of my best friends at the airport and said goodbye, not knowing how long it would be until I saw them again.

I am incredibly lucky to have seen some of them in the time that I’ve been here - I can’t believe I have such incredible people in my life who love me enough to come all the way here and give me some cuddles. Those people truly don’t know how much that has impacted my time here. In certain moments, it’s been so goddamn difficult to be away from Melbourne. The food is better, the air is cleaner, the healthcare is FREE and GOOD, we have TRAMS AND TRAINS EVERYWHERE(!!!), my house has a BACK YARD, I lived 30 minutes from EVERYTHING. I never understood how lucky I was to grow up in the worlds most liveable city (apparently we were overthrown this week - not happy, Jan).

Honestly, I get when people from the U.S ask me “Why would you move here?! Australia is so much better!” They’re right. But, I cannot thank the people I’ve met here enough either. It turns out, being in a place doesn’t matter - it’s the people you meet there. I think I knew that to an extent, but knowing the amazing human beings I know is the best thing about my life. Both in LA and in Melbourne, I have communities of such immensely supportive, determined, understanding, encouraging, KIND KIND KIND friends and family. Lots of people tell me they could never move away from home like I have, and I absolutely get that. I really don’t think I could have if not for my loved ones - because I am who they’ve made me.

If not for their strength and guidance, I would have no one to tell me to keep trying. If not for their positivity and resilience, I would probably be hiding in bed. If not for their perseverance and diligence, I would probably break down every 10 minutes. Granted, I have done all of those things at certain times in my life - both in Melbourne and LA - but my family and friends are the reason I haven’t let those moments solidify me in a state of bitterness and stillness. They keep me moving, trying/failing/getting up again, believing in myself.

In the last month, I have had not a great time. I still haven’t found a job to keep me here and grant me an E3 visa. I have found out some pretty troubling information about my health (explained in the “Pain” section). I have found myself forgetting who I am and why I’m here. But these people - my friends at home who I haven’t seen in a whole year, my family who I talk to every day, my community of new and old pals here in LA - have reminded me that I am capable, I am smart and I am kind. These are three things that cannot be said about everyone, and holding on to them has made me feel a lot better about whatever may come in the future.

So, over the past month I’ve had a lot of lovely moments amidst the scary ones.

The Spy Who Dumped Me came out in cinemas. My name was on the screen in the credits and it was a big moment. I was so lucky to have my beautiful pals Kelsey, Shannon, Savannah and Nathalie with me to share that moment. Below is the cake from the release party, and me dressed as an “Australian tourist” in the movie (go see it to undertand.

Disneyland boi.

Kelsey has been such an incredible friend to me for the last five years and this month has been especially challenging for me, and she has been so goddamn wonderful and kind. I love her a lot and this is her with a bloody OSCAR and then us having some bevs.

BEACH DAY WITH PALS! Molly and Josh are here, I LOVE MY IMPROV PALS!!!

I never go clubbing anymore, but my pals Jordy and Kristen asked us to come out with them to a 90′s night in Silverlake at a place called The Satellite and it was THE MOST I’VE EVER DANCED OR SWEATED EVER AND IT WAS THE MOST FUN I’VE EVER HAD IN A LARGE GROUP OF PEOPLE!

HANSON WAS PLAYING WHEN WE WALKED IN AND I SCREAMED AT THE TOP OF MY LUNGS. ALSO THEY HAD “SO FETCH” BALLOONS AND I STOLE ONE AND DANCED WITH IT ALL NIGHT, HEHE.

My sweet Joeboy McGee turned 24 and I feel so grateful to have spent the second birthday in 3 years with him (on his 22nd birthday we saw stand up in NYC and got fancy pasta, it was beautiful). I love you so much, Joey. Thank the universe (and your amazing parents) for bringing you to life.

Sweet angel Tiana joined Molly and I in LA for a few days and it was like a mini Heralayan Salt Lamps reunion. They’re both hilarious and intelligent goddesses and I’m so glad I know them.

And right now, you ask? Well, today is just a normal day. I went to the gym and am about to go do a shift at Massage Envy. I can’t believe it’s been a year, and I’m so grateful to be able to say I’m living in Los Angeles.

TRAVEL: 5/10

While I’ve been winding down from having so many people visiting, I’m also really anxious about the whole “when am I coming home?” thing. Basically, I can’t know when I come home until I do or don’t get a job.

My visa ends at the end of September, so if by this time next month, I still don’t have a job, I’ll be coming home for 3-4 weeks to visit, then returning to LA until I run out of money/my lease is up (mid December). If that happens, then I’ll be back home until I can figure out a way to come back and continue working in film and television. If I DO find a job in the next month, however, I will have to come home for 2 weeks to get my visa reinstated, in which case I’ll be back to LA as soon as I can be, and then return home for Christmas/New Years/Elyse’s wedding in late December/early January.

Apart from that, I’ve been going to the beach a lot and trying to just enjoy being here. I have a nice tan!

PAIN: 2/10

At the eye appointment with my parents, after 6 hours of weird tests and scary waiting periods, I was asked to come back to do another scary test - nay, the SCARIEST test. I had to have an ERG (info here), which is basically a test to see if there’s something wrong with my retina. After that, it determined my eyes were aye okay (yay!) but something weird has still been happening. I am currently awaiting an MRI of the brain, because the specialist believes I have “pseudotumor cerebri” (info here) . Basically, they think there’s excess fluid on my brain which causes pressure on your optic nerve, causing your vision to change and excess headaches. I genuinely thought everyone got headaches every day and that my sinuses were just weird (which is true, they’re weird), but there may be something more serious going on. It’s not a life threatening condition, but if it’s severe enough, there can some times be draining of the brain needed and even sometimes surgery. My vision isn’t changing too much, the only reason I noticed the changes was because I was on the look out for them since starting my arthritis drug, Plaquenil - I stopped taking it in April because I noticed these vision changes from February.

I’m really scared because if the MRI doesn’t give us enough info, the doctor will have to order a spinal tap (no, not the mockumentary - although this news DID turn my anxiety “up to 11″). Now, I’ve had multiple epidurals and minor back surgery, so I’m not too afraid of a spinal tap, but I AM afraid of the fact that my insurance here runs out on the 30th of September. This may be a reason I have to come home and stay home, and that terrifies me beyond anything else. I don’t want to have my body turn on me again like it has with my arthritis and my back pain. I do so much to keep myself healthy and to give my body the rest it needs, but if I have to put my future on hold for my health, I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to handle that fact without becoming a miserable wreck. All I can do for now is hope it’s nothing too serious and I can get it sorted out soon. Keep your fingers and toes crossed for me.

COMEDY: 7/10

This weekend Joey, Jordy and I will debut our threeprov improv team on a goddamn PARTY BUS for the LA Indie Improv Festival. I haven’t been writing at all for a very long time and that has been a big part of my recent slump, but in the last few days I’ve had a wave of ideas and energy come back to me and I really feel so excited to dig into something. I love making stuff.

On the downside, I have been extremely anxious about if I will be able to continue working here. I know that if it’s meant to be, it’ll happen, but for a while I’ve felt so so pessimistic and afraid of going home and not being able to continue towards my goals. All I’ve ever wanted to do since I knew what a joke was was be in comedy and work in TV - there’s nothing I love more (except my family, I know, I know). Yesterday, I had a meeting with a woman a friend set me up with. Both the woman and my friend who introduced us are both incredibly successful, kind, funny and passionate women. One of them said to me a few years ago:

“All you need to do to be a writer is two things: 1. Keep writing, don’t give up. 2. Don’t be a dick.”

Yesterday, in my conversation with her friend, she told me two things: “1. Stop worrying. 2. Be nice to people 3. Work fucking hard. 4. STOP. WORRYING”

It was the most relieving thing to be told by two different women, who are slightly older and wiser than me, who have been exactly where I am now, that I will be okay. They both believe in my ability and my personality and my work ethic, and that proves more than they realise it does. I have this incredible network of strong, generous, talented women around me - both here and in LA - who believe in me. So if these highly skilled and experienced people do, why shouldn’t I?

I’ll get there, even if a fucking visa or a few thousand health issues get in my way. It’s what I was born to do.

A year has passed and I’m a bit different, but I’m pretty much the same. The only difference may be that I know what I’m worth now. Oh, and I know how to grow string beans!

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gudlyf · 6 years

Text

Scars [Short Story]

UPDATE: Listen to this being read over at @thenosleeppodcast!

Parts of this story are true, happening to me in my younger years. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which parts those are.

I don’t go into the woods. There are things in there, things that drive my anxiety through the roof at the mere thought of coming close to them. A casual hiker may not notice them, lying low and deep within the surrounding foliage. On a windless day they remain perfectly still. They don’t have to make a move. You’ll come close soon enough, and then they’re all over you. You won’t know of their effect until you’re tucked away in your tent. Or in your bed at home. The next day — oh boy, the next day. Then! Then you will know. And then it’s too late.

But I see them. I can’t not see them, because they are fucking everywhere. When walking down the street. At the playground. Even in my goddamn back yard. Jesus, may palms are itchy just thinking about them.

They have become the most frightening living things to me in my little corner of world. I cannot believe that God had chosen to create these things, for poison ivy, poison oak, and poison sumac are clearly the work of the devil himself.

My brother grew up allergic to peanuts. For my sister, it was cashews and pistachios. This was the deadly kind of allergic, where not the slightest whiff of these nuts could pass by their nostrils without cause to whip out the epinephrine shot. Unlike my siblings, I was lucky enough not to have food allergies of any kind. However, growing up in a household without peanut butter in days before alternatives like almond butter were commonplace meant I had no concept of a good ol’ PB&J. Jam and butter? Not even close.

Though I was clear of food allergies, there was something I did have to stay very far away from: poison ivy. Poison oak. Poison sumac. The poison plant trifecta, I call them.

This was not your run-of-the-mill allergy, mind you. While 85 percent of the population is allergic to these plants, most would need to come in physical contact with the leaves to have some sort of reaction. This was not the case for me. A slight breeze off a plant several feet away would carry enough urushiol oil through the air to latch itself onto me. Then came the warm redness later that night. Sometime the next day came the itching. My god, the itching. All from walking too close to the side of the road on a windy day.

One of the worst episodes I’d experienced came when I was a boy, while helping my father stack a cord of apple wood he’d cut down that summer. Apple wood, as I was told back then, is prime stuff to stoke the stove with in winter. I suppose it must have a sweet, burning applesauce smell to it, but what do I know? And what did I care? I was getting paid ten dollars! This was going toward the gaming console I’d been dreaming of for months: the Atari 2600.

Under a blistering sun my brother and I hauled split wood onto the bed of my old man’s truck, working well past sunset. Sweaty and sunburned, we left not knowing of the full conditions we’d been working in. The logs had covered the immense patches of glistening poison oak that’d I’d otherwise have steered well clear of, had we seen them in the light of day.

The next morning, I could not open my eyes. My face was swollen to the point of being unrecognizable. My hands were bloated sausages, covered in liquid-filled skin bubbles. My inflamed feet wouldn’t fit in my shoes. My hearing was partially affected because they’d been so engorged with blisters. It even got inside my nose and on my scalp.

I must have gone through fifty bottles of Calamine lotion that summer, that awful smelling pink shit you coat on your rash in hopes of relief from the incessant itching. It would do the trick for about an hour if I was lucky, and then I’d be painting more of it on, again and again. I looked like the Elephant Man covered in concealer.

I’d resorted to drastic measures at times to alleviate the swelling. I would take a sewing needle, for instance, dip it in rubbing alcohol, then lance the pustules between my fingers in order to drain them enough that I could bend my fingers to hold onto a fork or even wipe my own ass. And yes, the poison oak got there too. But that’s not the worst spot to get the itch.

The soles of your feet; the palms of your hands. Nothing worst than that. Not even your balls. Calamine lotion doesn’t work on soles and palms, and the itch is unending and unbearable. Placing my palms on something hot, however — say, a leather seat that’d been sitting in the sun all day — somehow provided some brief reprieve. The searing pain was much more tolerable than the itching; in comparison, it was ecstasy.

Overall, not a good summer. But I did get my Atari.

Now, Ted. Ted was a different story.

There were a few times I’d gotten bad cases of the poison ivy plague during the school year. Maybe not so bad as that summer of blisters, but once bad enough that I was kept out of sixth grade for several days. My absence did not go unnoticed by Ted.

“You were out for three days because of … poison ivy?” he said, the two of us standing at the edge of the schoolyard during recess. “Just because you got a rash?”

“Just a rash? Haven’t you ever had bad poison ivy before?”

Ted shook his head. “Don’t think I ever got it at all.”

My jaw dropped. “Never? Not even a little?”

“Nope.”

“Well count yourself lucky. It sucks.” As I said this, Ted wore that faraway look of his that I’d seen too often. The kind that says there’s an idea brewing within that thick skull that’s boiling into action before it’s had a healthy seasoning of reason. A true recipe for disaster that I’d seen all too often.

“What’s it look like?” he asked, his eyes scanning the ground amongst the dense thicket of brush nearby.

It didn’t take me long to point them out. I’d been eyeing them since we got there, and I’d known they were there since the school year had started. And I presently stood as close as I was ever willing to get. I pointed to the glistening patch of leaves beneath a crop of trees.

“There’s a bunch of it right there,” I said. “Those green leaves with red. A ton of it.”

Ted didn’t hesitate. He was halfway there before I could raise a stink.

“These right here?” he called out. His pointing finger was so damned close to the poisonous bouquet. My mind’s eye saw the slick oils drifting through the air and onto his willing, exposed skin, and I shivered at the thought of being remotely as close to it as Ted was.

I nodded. “I’d get away from it if I were you.”

Except he wasn’t me. The ridiculous idea of his had already bloomed in his mind and he was dead set on seeing it through. He stepped directly into the patch. He picked one of the leaves. Then another. Then a whole branch. I couldn’t breathe. My own skin began to feel hot at the mere thought of being in Ted’s shoes, shoes that might not fit his feet anymore.

My god, his hands, I thought. His fingers. His palms! Dear lord, his palms!

It was like watching someone bite into the hottest pepper in the world with idiotic, wild abandon. But this was worse. Much worse. The mouth-burn of a Carolina Reaper may feel like the fires of a thousand suns, but that’s an agony that’s short-lived. Ted was in for days of hell on Earth.

“Wh- what are you doing?” I breathed. It was then that I noticed I’d been subconsciously distancing myself from the whole scene, as though Ted’s disturbance of the plants would affect me where I stood. In fact, even at ten feet away — for me — that wasn’t far from possibility.

“We got that math test tomorrow,” he said. “With Ms. Sullivan?”

“Yeah, but-”

“Well I’m not going to be here to take it.”

He took the words right out of my mouth.

Ted bunched the leaves in his hand, as though what he held were harmless bits of greenery and not the evil carriers of Hell oil they were. I knew it was too late for him then. Unless he immediately scrubbed his hands with rubbing alcohol, he was in for it. And I, for one, was going nowhere near him at that point. Best friend be damned; as far as I was concerned, he was a walking plague.

But he didn’t stop there.

I didn’t protest. I couldn’t protest. And if I could have, it wouldn’t have mattered. At best, my words would have been unintelligible gasps and stammers. Anything worth hearing would’ve been ignored. All of his chips were pushed to center now; he was all-in.

As one might clean themselves with a bar of soap, Ted began to rub the poison ivy all over his body. Arms. Legs. Face. For good measure, he replenished his supply of leaves when he’d rubbed some down to bits of pulp, then did the entire exercise again. Just when I thought he was through, he did the unthinkable.

He turned from the rest of the schoolyard as though he were about to sneak a piss, pulled the front of his jeans out with his empty hand, and jammed the other hand in. And then his hand came out empty.

It was suicide. I was witnessing my best friend’s self-immolation and couldn’t move a finger to stop him, for in doing so I’d surely be dooming myself.

“Think that’ll be enough to get me out of school tomorrow?” he asked.

“What did you do? That’s enough to keep you out for, like, a month!”

He pumped his fist. “Yes! Even better!”

My eyes didn’t leave Ted for the rest of the day. Where he sat. What he touched. What urinal he used. Short of wearing gloves and a mask, I behaved like some crazed germaphobe. And as far as I could tell, Ted wore that bunch of leaves down his pants all damned day. Pants that I hoped he’d set fire to come the next day, along with the rest of his clothes, once he realized the enormous mistake he’d made.

Side note about fire and poison ivy. Fire, as it turns out, is not an affective eliminator of urushiol oil. I learned this the hard way, of course, during my junior year of high school, along with a sizable portion of my fellow classmates. One of the rare times I dared enter the woods was for high school parties. It was isolated, difficult for the cops to get to, and had an unlimited selection of places to hide in and make out. When no parent-free houses were available, it served its purpose well enough.

Besides an abundance of cheap alcoholic beverages, a natural ingredient of a party in the woods is a bonfire. And a natural ingredient of a bonfire is wood. Or, at least, a combustible material of any kind. Sometimes a tire; sometimes the back seat ripped out of someone’s shit box. And sometimes random brush. In this case, on this particular evening, brush entangled with poison oak. And a byproduct of a bonfire? Smoke, and lots of it. It gets in your lungs, your hair, your clothes. And you bring that all home with you. If you’re not completely shitfaced before attempting to crawl into bed, maybe you take a shower, therefore not waking up the next afternoon smelling like a campfire. And, if you were somehow thorough enough, perhaps you don’t succumb to the full onset of the poison oak you’d been hanging around in all night.

Like me, everyone save for a few, spent at least the following few days in hell. From that point, not only would I stay far from the woods, I’d go nowhere near open fire pits save for ones fueled by gas. Until then, I’d never known what it was like to get poison oak in your mouth. Or on your dick; everyone’s got to take a leak at a raging beer party at some point.

And here Ted was about to get the full experience, his first time.

When I finally saw Ted exit the school bus that afternoon, I was sure it was the last I’d be seeing him for a good long time. I wouldn’t be paying him a visit any time soon, that was certain. Except I didn’t have to.

The next day, Ted walked onto the morning bus like nothing had happened. In fact, nothing had happened. Ted, as it turned out, was among that meager 15 percent of lucky sons of bitches on the planet who’s not affected by urushiol oil at all. No blisters. No rash. Not the slightest itch. And while I was pretty sure he’d taken a shower that morning, I still kept my distance from Ted for that day and the next. I did not want to take the chance. And though Ted felt he was in Hell for having to take Ms. Sullivan’s math test that day — a math test he clearly had no intention of preparing for the night before — in my eyes, he surely did not understand the massive bullet he’d dodged.

Some have said that it’s possible to outgrow an allergy to poisonous plants. There are others, still, who claim that actually eating one can trigger an immunity. After thirty-some-odd years of systematically weaving and dodging my way around any suspect crops of leaves — whether consciously or not — I never had the intention of finding out, most especially not by making a goddamn salad out of it. I’d grown accustomed to avoiding the shit. My quality of life hadn’t suffered at all because I didn’t go for deep-woods hikes or take up camping or trail jogging. The memory of my childhood suffering had scarred me for life; I was not keen on ever revisiting it, and certainly not on purpose.

Ted and I kept very close for a long time. Our wives hung out together. Our kids went to the same school. We attended the same church. We even started a business together, a pizza and sub shop — Giuseppe's — that somehow resisted being muscled out by booming franchises. Ted was the real talent behind the place, having developed most of the recipes himself. His pizza sauce was unmatched, which largely accounted for the loyal customer base. I was the business side of things because, if you haven’t caught on, Ted was no good with numbers; he couldn’t count out proper change for a dollar. And I was lucky if I could make a cheese sandwich.

We were called upon to cater the annual Saint Ambrose church picnic. This was last summer, with days hotter than the deepest ring of Hades, and the comet making its lasting streak across a bit of the the night sky. Pot luck alone was insufficient for the large gathering, and so Giuseppe's filled in. On the house, of course. It was our parish, after all.

Naturally, both of our families were there as well. My wife and son, Ella and Peter. Ted’s wife, Kim, and his daughter, Sophie. Truth be told, it was as boring an affair as always. The adults got by with chit-chat and gossip. The kids had to get creative to remain entertained: ball, Frisbee, hide-and-seek — that sort of thing.

Saint Ambrose owned a large empty parcel of land adjacent to the church. Most of it had been cleared years ago to make way for an expansion of the cemetery, the old one having been filled to capacity; the old mausoleum nearly there as well. No vacancy, I guess you could say. The dead check in but they don’t check out. Nothing unnatural about it, really. Just old people getting older and drunk people getting dumber, for the most part. It’s so old that some early Scottish immigrants had their names chiseled on stone there; it was bound to fill up at some point.

Sometime just before noon, Sophie came running over to us from the clearing. She wasn’t in tears, but she was not happy.

“Daddy! Peter lost the Frisbee on us and now it’s not fair because he said he won’t help me find it!”

I hung my head, exasperated. I cupped my hands to my mouth and called out. “Peter!”

Ted clapped a hand on my back. “Hey. Don’t get too mad at the kid. It’s just a Frisbee.”

I shook my head. “It’s the last opening day Frisbee I have. Remember those? With the corny phrase you put on it? Besides, that’s not the point. And I can only take his ten-year-old attitude so much, y’know?”

“Oh no, I wouldn’t know anything about that!” Ted laughed. “Let’s go find your kid and this damned Frisbee. And, hey, that phrase isn’t corny, it’s poetry!”

I had a laugh at that as we dropped what we were doing and headed in the direction Sophie had come. As we crested the small hill, I caught sight of Peter in the distance, standing just outside the edge of the woods. His back was to us as he stared into the trees beyond.

“PETER!”

“Hey hey hey,” Ted said with a gentle tone of reassurance. “He’s right there. Take the anger down a notch.”

I wasn’t angry. In fact, so far my son was doing just what I hoped he’d do. Just what I’d taught him to do. Or, rather, not do.

If you don’t know exactly what’s ahead of you in the woods, you do not enter.

And when did anyone ever know exactly what was in the woods, even ten feet in front of them? That’s right: not ever. Could be ticks or snakes or a covered-up hole atop a vast underground chasm. Or, need I say it, poison ivy.

Peter turned his head to us at the sound of my voice. His expression was of concern, though from fear of getting in trouble or of what he’d been looking at, I couldn’t say.

“What’s up, kiddo?” Ted said. “Go on in and get the Frisbee. It’s not gonna bite ya.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s not what he’s afraid of,” I said. Ted looked to me with a bit of a puzzled expression. I returned it with a raised eyebrow; he knew what I was getting at.

Ted shook his head and sighed. “Oh for crying out loud. Where is it, Pete?”

Without turning back around, my son pointed directly into the woods.

“In there. Way in there. I can’t even see it, but I can see tons of-”

“Tons of poison ivy,” Ted interrupted. “Right. Right. Your dad’s got you all worked up about it because he blows up all like a balloon near it. Am I right?”

“Come on, Ted,” I groaned.

“Kinda,” said Peter. “Only the stuff in there is, like, a lot bigger. And there’s something else in there too.”

“Yeah, the Frisbee!” Sophie called out.

Peter ignored her remark. “There’s a … tomb or something in there. Next to the huge leaves. Dad … it …”

Ted chuckled, though his tone was touched with concern.

“A tomb, Pete?” he said. “What are we, in Egypt?”

Ted sometimes had a fine way of making it difficult to discern the adult from the child in his conversations.

“I dunno what you call it.” Peter said. “It’s, like, one of those things in graveyards with a big door on it. Dad, there’s sounds coming from inside it. Like, voices.”

“What, like a crypt?” said Ted. “What the heck is one of them doing in the woods? They ain’t started putting graves out here yet. Look at it. It’s been one big, open field for years. Must be something else. Don’t let some pile of logs or whatever scare ya. Think the ol’ Crypt Keeper’s calling you to come visit? Probably left over from when they started clearing it.”

Sudden realization seemed to strike Peter then, in why he was standing with us, explaining himself. And so he began to ramble on in one breathless plea.

“Don’t let them make me go in there, Dad. That thing scares me and then there’s those huge shiny leaves and you told me to stay away from those and never touch them so I shouldn’t go in there! And there’s voices in there! Really! Please!”

“Okay, okay. Take it easy,” I said. “No one’s going in there.”

“Hell with that,” said Ted. “I’m goin’ in. Poison ivy never got me before. Won’t get me now. And the Crypt Keeper’s a little shit.”

“And you,” Ted continued, pointing an accusatory finger at my son. “You should take more responsibility next time. If getting a little itch is what it’ll take for you to do the right thing, then so be it.”

Before I could argue with Ted’s attempt at re-parenting Peter, he approached the edge of the forest and parted a mass of low-hanging pine branches, then stopped.

“Ho-ly …”

“See!” Peter said. “You see the tomb in there, right?”

Ted took a moment to answer as he appeared to survey what he was looking at.

“Yeah,” he said uncertainly. “It’s no pile of logs. Looks like an old crypt, alright. Pretty old one by the looks of it.” He turned to look at us. “This was an old cemetery before?”

I shrugged. “Not that I’ve ever heard.”

“I mean there’s no headstones, no other graves. Just … that. In there.”

“Well that’s not creepy at all,” I said. “Just leave it, Ted. Seriously.”

“Damn. Kiddo’s right about the leaves too. Like the size of elephant ears.”

“Oh, come on,” I said in disbelief. “Then those can’t be-”

“What did you say?” Ted interrupted.

“I was saying that those can’t be poison ivy. They aren’t that large.”

“No no,” Ted said, holding up a hand behind him. “It wasn’t you. Shh! You hear that?”

“Hear what?” Besides the distant commotion from the party we’d left behind, there was nothing. I looked at the kids who were both slowly backing away, shaking their heads in the negative.

“Ah! There!” Ted shouted, now uninterested in whatever noises he’d been hearing. “There you are, you blue bastard. Frisbee’s right there.”

He parted the branches further apart and stepped deeper into the woods, disappearing from sight. The sound of breaking branches followed as he marched inward, spattered with moments of colorful cursing. After about ten seconds, there was nothing.

“Daddy?” called Sophie. “Did you get it?”

A few seconds more. Nothing.

“Hey Ted!” I called out. I silently prayed that I wasn’t going to have to enter those woods to look for my friend, but the crack in my voice said it all.

Branches cracking again. Ted was running now, running for the clearing. He burst through the overhanging branches where he’d entered, panting, red-faced, and sweating profusely, no Frisbee in sight.

“Daddy! Where’s the Frisbee?”

Ted was doubled over, hands on his knees, catching his breath. Sweat soaked his shirt. His face. His hair. Even his shorts. Ted’s not exactly in shape, but he’s not morbidly obese either. A ten second run in dark woods shouldn’t have exerted him like a marathon.

“No Frisbee, sweetie,” Ted said between wheezing gasps for air. “Like your uncle said, we’ll buy a new one.”

“She began to protest. “But it-”

“Sophie, no. Just … go play with something else. We’re gonna go home soon anyway.”

She crossed her arms and stormed off.

“Uncle Teddy,” Peter said. “What happened in there? Did you hear the noises from the tomb?”

Ted stood upright and gave me a look that said he wasn’t up to talking to a kid about this.

“Pete, go catch up with Sophie. We’ll probably be leaving soon too.”

Peter did as I asked and disappeared over the hill.

“Alright, so what did happen in there? You look like you just came out of a rainforest.”

“Man, that is the spookiest damn thing I’ve ever seen.”

“What, the crypt?”

“Well yeah the crypt, but not just that. The kid wasn’t kidding about the sounds from the crypt in there. Like … I don’t know. Voices. And, damn, those leaves. All over the thing. They … you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Alright, you’ve succeeded in freaking me out. They what? Talked to you?”

“Moved. Not from wind or anything like that. I marched in the middle of them to get the damn Frisbee, and then something just felt … off. Like I thought maybe you’d come in behind me, only I knew you’d never do that, but it felt like someone was there. But it was just all of those plants, all around me.

“And then they moved. Not from the wind or anything like that. It was like they were turning to … I dunno … to look at me.

“Well I turned and got right the fuck outta there and left that damn Frisbee for those fucking plants to play with.”

I snorted, and then the chuckle just followed it on out. I couldn’t help it if I tried.

“Oh, okay,” Ted said, my laughter becoming too contagious for him to avoid. “I see. So why don’t you go on in there and get the thing? Damn zombie plants from the crypt. You’ll see!”

“You know, I’d clap you on the back but you’re sweatier than a Ridley Scott movie.”

“Ha ha. Well this ain’t sweat. It’s dew from all those leaves in there.”

I stayed far away from Ted for the rest of the walk back. I told myself as much as Ted did, that the leaves were just covered in dew. How could all that be urushiol oil? It just couldn’t be. But the scars upon the memory of my youth endured, and so I took no chances, even at the expense of Ted’s playful jeers.

Soon after, each of our families ended the day and went our separate ways.

Ted didn’t show up at the shop the next day.

Ted would usually open the place up in the morning in order to get it ready for the lunchtime crowd. I’ll stroll in sometime later, before we actually open for business. Only this time the doors were locked. Ted hadn’t shown up yet.

I unlocked the place and went inside to call Ted. After a few rings, Kim answered the phone. She sounded like I’d just woken her up.

“Hey John.”

“‘Morning. Sorry, did I wake you?”

“No I’m just … didn’t get much sleep last night. Exhausted.”

“Is Ted there? He didn’t show up to the shop today. Place was still buttoned up when I showed up.”

She sighed with exhaustion and frustration. “Oh god. I’m sorry, Ted. I should have called you. Ted’s worse off than me. It was his tossing and turning all night that kept me up. I eventually had to sleep on the couch. Looks like he … caught something at the picnic yesterday.”

“What, like a stomach bug?”

“No no. Looks like he got too much sun. Worst sunburn I’ve ever seen, the poor guy. But I guess it serves him right for not putting on sunscreen. You know how pale he is.”

“Paler than a beluga whale, yeah,” I said, punctuated with a sigh of defeat. “Alright, so I guess he’s out of commission today. Tell him to call me when he’s up and about.”

She acknowledged and hung up. I went about making a closed sign for the door and directing our phone to a voicemail message stating the same. There was no way I was attempting to run the place without Ted.

I left and spent the day doing long-neglected chores around the house. Spending time with Ella that day made me realize that we’d both somehow come out of the previous day with nary a scant tan, much less evidence of a sunburn. What’s more, it was an overcast day — we hadn’t worn any lotion.

Later that night, my cellphone rang. It was Ted. He sounded as ragged as Kim had that morning.

“Hey, man. Sorry I didn’t call you sooner.”

“Yeah sure,” I said. “Don’t sweat it. You alright?”

“No. No I’m not.”

“Jesus. From a sunburn? How bad can it be?”

“Sunburn? No, this ain’t no sunburn. Gotta be poison ivy. Itches like fucking hell.”

It took all I had to keep the phone in my hand as my mouth fell open. I suddenly felt my own skin begin to take on that characteristic burn. My palms begin to itch, my mind telling my body that it, too, was once again stricken with the rash. The mere mention of it was enough, like an instinctive cringe. What’s more, Ted of all people had succumbed to it. How?

“But I thought you weren’t allergic,” I managed to say with some measure of disbelief.

“Yeah, well. Shit happens I guess,” he said. “Listen, I gotta go. It’s … God, the itching is … I have to go.”

Before I could ask about what we should do about the shop, he hung up.

It’s not unheard of for someone who’d once had an immunity to something like poison ivy suddenly lose it over time. Ted suddenly showing signs of a reaction normally wouldn’t have surprised me. In fact, his lack of a reaction in all this time was the more surprising thing to me. And more surprising than all of that was how quickly it had taken hold on him. He’d gone from zero to one-hundred seemingly overnight.

There was nothing I could really do for Ted. He’d seen first-hand what I’d gone through in the past, what meager remedies I’d resorted to for alleviating the itching and swelling. It’s all I could do then and all he had now.

I faced the fact that it was clear Giuseppe's was staying closed for at least another day. Depending on how bad off Ted was Tuesday night, I’d have to consider my options, like hiring some temporary help. I wasn’t the best cook, but I could at least keep the business afloat.

Late the next morning, I gave Ted a call, to see how he was faring. He’d likely faced another sleepless night, so I wasn’t surprised when Kim picked up.

“Hey, Kim. How’s Teddy doing? Hope you at least got some sleep last night.”

“I slept okay. Ted didn’t sleep in the bed all night, stayed closed up in the den all yesterday and last night. Didn’t want anyone to go near him. Trust me, we didn’t want to. He was in a mood, as you can imagine. I woke up a couple of times in the night and heard him downstairs, grunting, swearing. It must’ve been driving him nuts.

“But … I guess he must be doing better. I woke up to the smell of him cooking breakfast, not that he left us any. Just a dirty skillet. Nice, right? And now he’s gone off somewhere.”

“Seriously? He went out?” Though I was amazed Ted hadn’t gotten worse overnight, I was relieved.

“Maybe check the shop?” Kim suggested. She’d read my mind.

When I pulled up to Giuseppe’s, I noticed one of the exhaust vents on the roof billowing smoke. More than usual, in fact. Ted’s car was nowhere in sight, which wasn’t entirely unusual, since he lived only a couple of miles away and sometimes made the walk. I thought this a good sign, that Ted really was on the mend and getting things prepared for the afternoon customers. Except when I got to the front door, my “temporarily closed” sign still hung in the window. I figured Ted hadn’t noticed it, so I pulled it down as I entered.

I could hear Ted busy at work in the back kitchen. The air was already hot with the warming pizza ovens, griddles and friers. One of the oven doors had been left opened, and I could see the remnants of what looked like a pizza mishap smeared upon the oven’s firebrick floor. Pretty early for pizza, I thought, but we served all kinds.

“Ted! You back there? What happened here? Oven’s a mess!”

The sound of the kitchen fryer answered, its contents being lowered into the 325-degree oil. And then something else: a man’s exhale of intense relief. No, pleasure.

I rounded the corner into the kitchen. Ted’s back was to me, facing the fryers. He wore nothing but a pair of boxers, and his skin was like nothing I’d seen before. My sneakers squeaked to a halt as breath caught in my throat. I stumbled backward, catching myself on a counter. Oozing sores covered half Ted’s back and legs. The other half was covered in blisters the size of golf balls.

“Ted,” I managed to breathe as I fought back hyperventilation.

Of course he couldn’t react. Because when I say he was facing the fryers, I mean that in a much more literal sense. His entire face was submerged in the steaming fryer oil, up to the hairline. I would’ve thought him dead, but a second later he stood upright. Grease poured down over his shoulders and trickled down his back. More of the blisters withered and broke apart under the oil’s heat. And once again Ted sighed in ecstasy.

“Ted!” What was meant to be a scream came more like a strained whisper. I threw a hand over my mouth, either due to pure disbelief over what I was seeing, or to stop myself from being sick, or both.

He straightened and turned around, my feet instinctively making a slow retreat sideways, toward the door. What I was looking at was not Ted. Not anymore. This person was unrecognizable as a human being in all but frame. Strips of red, smoking flesh peeled away from his forehead and cheeks, the bare muscle and bone behind glistening with oil. Lips … there were no lips. A set of teeth in a perpetual, skeletal grin, the tongue behind, bloated and red, peeking out behind them. Eyelids hung like useless flaps. His arms, his chest, all bare of skin, looking like an anatomy poster. His arms, blackened and charred. All that seemed to remain intact was most of the surface of his legs, and I could see blisters there continue to form before my eyes.

“John,” Ted said, his voice guttural and nearly unrecognizable, but calm and eerily satisfied. “John, you were so right. Fuck the Calamine Lotion. Fuck all that shit. All you need to do to get rid of the GOD DAMNED itching is HEAT. Once you’ve got that … oooh … it’s euphoria, Johnny. Pure. Fucking. Euphoria.”

He held up his hands, then. Hands that I hesitate to describe beyond that they were surely not usable appendeges anymore. Something fell from what used to be his face onto the floor, joining a mess of fried flesh within puddles of spent grease.

I couldn’t touch him. Jesus. I couldn’t stop him.

“Ted. Oh, Ted. No no no no.”

He breathed a wet sigh again, somehow peeling away a flap of loose, cooked skin from his forehead with one of his red, bony fingers. He threw it aside like a rotten slice of tomato.

“It’s okay, John,” he gurgled. “It’s almost all gone now. Just a little more heat, and I’ll be all better. This is so much better than the oven.”

He turned back around and held his breath, as I held mine. I turned and ran.

When I made it outside, I called 9-1-1. The police and ambulance arrived moments later. I watched as EMT after EMT entered and promptly exited, retching into the flower beds outside, before finally composing themselves to enter and save Ted’s life. I was told if they’d been only a few minutes later, he’d have been gone.

In all my life, I’d never seen a reaction to plants like that, let alone experienced it myself. What further floored me was that this had been Ted’s reaction to whatever was in those woods, a man who’d been immune to poison ivy for as long as I could remember. What would those things do to someone like me?

I talked to my wife and told her she’d have to pick Peter up from choir practice at the church that afternoon. I also called Kim, and she and I spent most of the day at the hospital. Not a stitch of him was not covered in thick bandages, and he lost most of his fingers. The CDC was apparently being called in, and we were told Ted was going to be put into an induced coma. I couldn’t bring myself to see him like that anymore, and I wasn’t sure what to tell Kim about what I saw at the shop. How was I to explain to anyone that he’d done this on purpose? An accident. A pure, unfortunate, unholy accident. That was enough.

I wasn’t sure if Ted was going to pull through. There was no doubt that his recovery, if he had one, would be agonizing. At the cost of removing whatever pure hell he’d been experiencing before, would he say it was worth it? I couldn’t fathom. Covered in pure scar tissue and skin grafts for the rest of his life, it’s unlikely he’d have to worry about something like poison ivy ever again.

My mind, just as Ted’s unfortunate body, would be scarred for life.

I called for a car to take me home. I was in no condition at all to drive.

As I exited the car at the bottom of the hill, I heard Peter call out from the driveway.

“Hey Dad! Catch!”

I was still dazed from what had happened earlier and had little time to react. Stars blossomed in darkness as whatever Peter had thrown smacked me in the forehead and fell to the ground, and I along with it. I put my hand to my throbbing head, pulling back to see blood.

“Damn. Well, that’s gonna leave a scar,” I muttered to myself.

Peter ran up and squatted beside me, his face reddened with embarrassment.

“Oh man! Dad! You okay? I’m so sorry! I thought you’d catch it.”

“Yeah, well, my reaction’s not all it used to be.”

I reached down beside me to pick up what Peter had thrown. And the words upon a circle of blue greeted my disbelieving eyes.

Fly In To Giuseppe's Empty. Fly Out Full.

#nosleep #The Nosleep Podcast #horror #short story #short fiction

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suprisinglysweetsociopath · 4 years

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Let’s start with honesty

Seriously I do not want to be honest, I absolutely love lying about my feelings to everything and everyone. But fine. Fucking fine. I am increasingly a mess of anxiety because despite my myriad schemes and theories I am increasingly terrified that none of them are going to work. Several of my friends are “essential employees” and I am fucking terrified for them - shit my mom finished chemo a year ago, she’s coming up on when cancer’s going to come back if it will, and she’s gotta work as an RN. I’m also dealing with a massive inferiority complex - and if you’re thinking “oh shit where did that come from I thought he had a giant ego.” congratulations, you are one of the literally hundreds if not thousands of people who I’ve successfully lied to. Not even meant as a taunt - I’m a really, really good liar. Guess what? I absolutely fucking hate myself. My family are well off, as you might expect from the mentions I’ve made here and there on my main that my mom’s a nurse and my dad’s a surgeon. We didn’t get that money by fucking anyone over, but holy shit I am such a silver-spoon piece of shit and I cannot begin to explain how much I fucking HATE that I am still relying on my parents. Never had to worry about being hungry, never had to worry about being able to maintain a work schedule to keep insurance or keep a roof over my head. I’m 25 years old and have actually never had to really worry about the things that plague almost everyone I love. Yeah, I should be grateful. I know. And I am, in a way. But the tradeoff is that I know, on some level, that I do not have the understanding I should. Because emotional empathy isn’t *really* a thing I’m capable of, and while i’m capable of worrying about my friends I often worry that I’m not capable of understanding them because I don’t share their experiences. I also know, clearly and painfully, that I have never actually proven my worth in any capacity that matters in regards to taking care of myself or really earning my place in the world. I don’t need to get a job to go to grad school, much less a shitty, minimum wage one in an “essential” field, but guess what? I’m going to anyway. Not because it’ll be good for me - it almost certainly will not - but because it’ll let me feel a little less like the silverspoon little cuntfuck I have always been. My parents are worried about my grades if I do it but you know what? Fuck it. I can manage. I have the discipline. Sure, I’ll wind up screaming incoherently about the frustration and the tension here, but if it soothes the absolute fucking hatred I feel about being this goddamn sheltered and safe and fucking bourgie, worth it. Oh, and let’s also add this on: I frequently realize I scare people with my reactions to things. Example. I said, to the face of someone not wearing a mask, that because they were putting people at risk by their selfish jackassery, I thought they should be summarily euthanized to avoid them infecting anyone who actually mattered. And I was really, really hoping they’d take a swing so I could. You know. Have a bit of stress release. I have said, previously, that idgaf about the old people in the retirement home a friend works in because “fuck it, they’re old, they’ve had a good run, all of them together are not worth risking you.” Apparently, that’s a cold blooded and offensive opinion to have, and I guess that makes sense that it would be once it was pointed out, but you know what? I’m only attached to so many people and I would happily drown the world in it’s own gore to keep all of them happy and healthy. Then there’s the constant seething rage and bloodlust I feel about politics. Yeah, let me be honest about that. For no other reason than that I want to see my friends and loved ones taken care of and the Republican party is in the way of the progress needed to do that, I want to maim, kill, pillage and burn my way across the entire goddamn country and slaughter every single motherfucking right winger in existence. Fuck, even now I’m working on infiltrating QAnon and seeing if I can’t get them to meet up and kill each other or better, use them as pawns to kill some of the super rich assholes who keep fucking everything up for the rest of us. And I’ve bounced around incel forums in earnest efforts to make sure the black pill winds up being “suicide” not “rape and homicide” because fuck it, I know exactly zero incels but as far as I can see every single on of them is a potential threat to people I do care about. So if they reform? Great. If they die instead? As long as it kills zero people I love? Not my problem. Ditto neo nazis and white supremacists. Them being dead does nothing but make the people I count safer. Oh, and any of the optimism you’ve seen me express in my main on the stories? All lies. All of it. I think humanity, at its core, is a race of stupid, selfish ignorant assholes with few to no redeeming qualities that it can claim on anything more than an individual by individual basis and I think our extinction at our own hands will do little more than prove Darwin right. Why do I write those? Because I feel like SOMEONE probably deserves to have hope about our species and fuck it, why not? I enjoy fantasizing about better worlds and writing about a cast who do generally have redeeming qualities and if it gives people the hope they need to continue, so much the better. Me? I’m animated by desire to be there for the people I love and an absolute refusal to die before everything I hate. That’s the only reason I get out of bed in the mornings most of the time. Oh and did I mention that ASPD and manic depression have this weird synergy where I either feel nothing or everything at fucking once? Or on the “balance” days I feel my emotions exactly the way I want to, with them there and identifiable but comfortably distant from my decision-making process, where they belong. Okay maybe my therapist was right. It does feel good to get all that out there.

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klanced · 7 years

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Hi! I really like your account and I had a couple questions. I'm starting high school soon and I'm kinda worried over it and some other things, do you have any tips or advice? If you don't that's fine. Oh and, who's your favorite paladin?

Hi hi back!! Thank u for the kind words!!! :3c And to answer your question, if I had to choose a favorite Paladin, it would probably be Allura! I love Keith but by GOD he frustrates me sometimes. Anyway, onto the advice!!

Middle school and high school are VERY different, but the differences tend to be either incredibly obvious or more subtle. Like, the kind of subtleness where you’re in sophomore year and you look around you and you think ‘hm. Sixth grade feels very far away.’

Because you’re starting high school I’ll only focus on freshman year, if that’s okay!

For the most part, freshman year is like a underhand throw. They’re trying to ease you into things. High school, after all, means waking up at the most ridiculous hour of your life, depression, and puberty Really starting to take off. For the most part, adults know that you’re going through more stuff than school at the moment. But it’s up to the individual teacher to decide how understanding they’re going to be.

Now where to start… How about academics? If you care about your grades, freshman year is essential for starting off on the right foot. Most of your science/math/English placement was probably decided in middle school, but your freshman year is where you prove where you belong. Basically: you will probably stay at that level of math/science/English for all four years of high school unless you bust your ass and study and move up. (And by that, I don’t mean moving up a math level during the school year, I mean qualifying for honors math for sophomore year, etc.)

If you don’t really care about that sort of thing, okay. But if you want to be in all honors classes or AP classes for your junior and senior year, you need to start working immediately. My biggest regret of high school is that I spent my freshman/sophomore/part of junior year working in an aimless direction, and just went with the flow. Which was fine at the time, but it came back to bite me in the ass once I reached the end of my junior year and started the college process. You don’t have to commit yourself to one specific college from the moment you turn 14. But if you want to go to a good college, or if you want to win scholarships, you have to start planning and working towards that. I don’t mean to give you a lot of anxiety, but my high school was Very competitive and honestly pretty toxic, and it’s influenced my viewpoint.

On a lighter note, take the time to look at all the available classes, even the ones you can’t take yet. If you like biology, consider taking honors/AP bio as an upperclassmen, and plan accordingly for that. What prerequisites do I need to complete? Do I have to be at a specific level for math/science? When am I eligible for the class? That sort of thing.

Also: finish your requirements as fast as possible!!! I hate art classes, and I put them off until my junior year, which was a Mistake because junior/senior year is The Year Of Electives. Well, at least in my school. So instead of taking tons of cool electives, I had to take this goddamn photoshop class to fulfill my requirement. Freshman year me was thrilled about having a free period every day; junior year me cursed my fourteen-year-old self. God. Hindsight really is 20/20.

Another thing… teachers! Try to be kind to your teachers. Unless they’re raging assholes who spit toxic one-liners or seem to single you out in class just to embarrass you. Those teachers can burn in hell. But for the most part, high school teachers are either pretty nice or completely neutral. Any supposed ‘evilness’ will most likely be your angsty hormonal self projecting on them. For example, I hated my freshman year geometry teacher. I thought she was a b word, I thought she was incapable of teaching, I thought she was annoying. In hindsight, I was just shitty at geometry and took out my frustration on her. I joined my classmates in mocking her and the class behind her back, and my convinced 'holier than thou’ self decided I was too important to ever stoop to the level of asking her for help. Because of my big ego, I only got a B+ in math, and it started a pattern for the rest of high school.

Like… there’s honestly no point in making fun of teachers. Yeah, it’s fun to do, and it helps you bond with classmates but… it also gets in the way of you asking for help. Which, by the way, I cannot emphasize enough: always ask for help. Especially during your first few weeks of school, because again: freshman year will set a lot of patterns for the rest of your high school career. It is essential that you ask for help. Sure, your teacher scribbled some comments in the margins of you B- paper, but she was also grading 30+ other papers at the same time. Do you really think her comments are deep enough for you to fully understand where you went wrong? Ask to meet with her, comb over your paper with her, and walk away with a better understanding of how to write papers. Advice and knowledge like this can only help you in the long run. Suck up your pride and push it down; you’ll be better for it.

I focused a lot on academics so let me touch on some other things… like puberty! For the most part, that ball started rolling for everybody back in middle school. But it’s in high school that you really start to see those hormones get expressed. Everyone goes through puberty, and life, at their own pace. Sometimes you’ll feel like you’re falling behind, but you’re not. It’s not a competition. This would be the world’s shittiest race otherwise. Don’t worry about others, and focus on yourself. If you don’t feel comfortable asking questions about your changing body (because lord knows the American education system will never have an actually effective sex Ed course), google it!! There are always answers for those who search them out. Again: worry about yourself.

Another thing: friends! High school is a place where you’re going to meet a lot of new people all at once. You will make new friends. It’s statistically impossible for you to not make a new friend. If you want to speed up the process, join clubs! You’re a freshman, so no one actually expects you to maintain a totally active presence. Do what you can, drop what you can’t, and carry on. Also: the people you were friends with in middle school may not stay friends with you in high school. I ended up drifting away from most of my middle school friends; I still hang out with them, but we’ve lost a lot of closeness. It’s sad, but it happens, and the only thing you can do is move forward. Every lost friendship makes room for two new ones. I can honestly say that the bonds I made in high school were 10x stronger than the ones I made in middle school. And any close friendships I kept from middle school also became 10x stronger by senior year. My theory is that everyone is their worst self during middle school :p if your group can survive that, you can survive anything.

Finally… some health tips! Take care of yourself. It’s important to try to eat as healthy as you can as early as you can. Again, and I know I’m repeating myself, it helps you in the long run. Make sure to drink plenty of water and do not. I repeat, do NOT. Pull all-nighters when you don’t have to. The all-nighters I pulled during middle and early high school have ruined me. Also, don’t drink coffee. You will get addicted. All my friends are coffee addicts and it’s honestly disturbing how much they rely on a simple beverage. Drink hot chocolate instead, if you must! I love Dunkin’ Donuts. :3c

Anyway, this is a bunch of general advice/tips. If there’s something specific that’s bothering you, feel free to hit up my dms at any point!! I may not be fast, but I’m sure to respond. I like helping :3c

#ask #thebeth02 #long post #not voltron #advice

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incorrectly-quoted-queers · 4 years

Text

Dial 20 For Hermit Crabs: Chapter 1

Genre: Drama, Romance

Themes: Anxiety, Relationships, Finding Yourself

Summary: Maggie Caspen has an anxiety disorder. Before her big break (mental, that is), she was a top-tier college student on her way to becoming a marine biologist. Then that all went up in flames, and all she has left are her parents, her cat, and the hermit crabs on the beach. But no matter the amount of forums or the YouTubers that tell her how much they feel it, too, she still feels like a directionless freak. That is, until a chance phone call with a bizarre author might just give Maggie the purpose she needs.

Chapter 1: All The Small, Anxious Things

Small things, even the smallest things on earth, can sometimes be just that. Miniscule, minute, meager. They shuffle along, overcast by the daunting workings of the world, ignored.

But sometimes small things can cast a long shadow. Sometimes they are not what they seem. Sometimes they are bigger on the inside. Small things can really end up being tremendous, gargantuan things, but some people don't realize that. Most people think the small things don't really matter. Not in the long run, at least. It was just one word. It was just one page. It was just one tiny, little hermit crab. What could matter so much about them?

But to some people, the small things can be the things that matter the most.

&&&

Everyone spends a lot of their lives fooling themselves, don't they? "Fucking this guy will definitely make me feel less empty inside" or "I can't be failing that class, I only miss it like once a week" or "the alcohol totally makes me forget all the things that hurt". Of course Maggie was not as self-righteous to think she was exempt. Her? During her stupid and short college saga, there was a decent amount of time early in which she fully believed that the "You can will yourself better" mantra was the pinnacle of truth. That it's impossible for everyone to not willfully tell themselves it will be okay and it will be. That people, at their core, cannot be weaker than they think.

Now Maggie realized she was the one bullshitting herself.

There was a lot of time and thought put into this realization, unfortunately. Maggie wished it had been a "Wham Bam" situation, but it was more of a slow burn, until the end. She had a lot of time to think when she went back home, and now she was here, in an empty Oregon bungalow. The transition between mountains of homework to nothing but a white ceiling to stare at wasn't that great.

All Maggie had to her name after the hospital was morbid contemplation, and after a long time she came to a short conclusion: yeah, college almost killed her. Life is complicated. And never forget that regardless of how deadly everything seems to be, nothingness is pretty deadly too.

She used to be the strong, upcoming Caspen scientist, with wonderful grades and a love of research, with bookish glasses and dreams of marine biology. So, what happened?

Maggie could nearly feel it pierce her heart. She knew what goddamned happened. It all began to fall apart when Maggie had a complete nervous breakdown her sophomore year. Well, before that. It began in high school, when she started to get more and more worried about school and her future. Panicked, really. Kind of consumed most every waking thought she had. But the final breakdown was the hellish cherry on top.

After a series of unfortunate events, she ended up getting a little too burned up by stress late into the fall semester and decided to burn down her dorm room right alongside her. After it ended with Maggie incoherent and blatantly guilty in the rare December snow, her mothers, the dean of the college, and some doctors decided she should take the spring semester off.

That's how she ended up spending three months in-between four hospital walls that only seemed to get egregiously larger each day. Maggie also got a diagnosis that felt like a large sticker reading "anxiety disorder" to attach to her forehead, as if it was her new identity.

After that came the long March month of her doting parents spoon-feeding Maggie her life. Her Mum, Lynn, especially loved showing her photo albums and smiling cautiously, as if hoping Maggie would have an epiphany and be suddenly cured, and as if she had amnesia and not a severely detrimental anxiety disorder. Maggie didn't feel much like the girl in the pictures any longer, but she eventually let them grow on her. It helped her Moms learn to smile again.

She stared around the dim-lit living room and could see the past few months fly by her. And somehow she ended up here, with a flower couch and kitchen made for much smaller humans. After all that hospitalization and panic, her mothers had lovingly convinced her to move out. On her own.

How could she live alone? She could barely remember life without flames dancing in front of her eyes.

Maggie knew the old her would deal with this by burying herself in another marine thesis, or getting drunk at parties with no one she knew, or having one-night stands that she planned to never see again. Anything to take the edge off. That is, until the edge stopped going away.

In her head her therapist's words echoed, about how she needed to try healthy practices to soothe her anxiety. But nothing really seemed to work yet. The closest was the beach, but it also made her ache for the studies and research that now gave her post-traumatic hives.

Yet, now here she was. Grandma was moving to her new place in Florida and Maggie was expected to be better off in her small condo. It was time to figure herself out, everyone nodded and admired. Like they understood this whole science experiment and instead of being a co-researcher, she was the subject.

It was only a short drive from her parents, was all paid off, and she'd get some autonomy back. Perfect, right?

Laying down in what used to be her grandma's big bedroom, Maggie grabbed onto her arms tight and felt another shake wrack through her body. The whole expanse felt too big, like it was ready to swallow her any minute. Yeah, she felt so fucking better. What it actually felt like was that nothing was going right in her life and this "great step forward" might actually be not so great. Sure she didn't feel like setting the whole place ablaze, but she didn't feel adult enough to own a house. She was just an anxious weirdo who does nothing but watches movies, drink milkshakes, and go to the beach.

And even going to the beach made her feel sick, because it was just a reminder of all her failures. Maybe it made her a child, but without her Moms around, encouraging her, she felt like all the weight of before was crashing back down on her.

But she still couldn't bear to tell them, or Dr. Baker, or anyone that's what she was really feeling. Instead, she just gave weird laughs and snarky jokes about how she hates living under their roof.

Well, she did, but she was regretting that now. Even if it made her a helpless stay-at-home shut-in, at least their roof felt safer.

Maggie moved in last week, but everything had been rocky. Her Moms stayed the first night to help unpack and organize and keep her company. But once her cat and her movie collection was settled, they let her be.

The only thing that made it better was the fact they didn't question her when she came over for dinner every night that week. Though, now it was Saturday night and she still felt lost in it all. Worse, it was Moms' date night so there was nowhere to run to.

Safe to say she sufficed on microwave pasta and distracting herself with a The Mummy marathon.

By 3 am, though, Maggie could barely sleep. She only saw fire and frustration burn behind her eyes. And what was worse was that when she opened them, everything she saw swept itself into her lungs and she felt like she could barely breathe.

She had been sedentary for a while now, wasting away in jobless anxiety, nowhere to go next. It wouldn't be long before the world began to erode her away.

&&&

#Dial 20 For Hermit Crabs #Anxiety Disorder #Maggie Caspen #Writing #YA Novel #Drama Novel #mental health representation #drama #romance #life after disorder

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freigaeist · 7 years

Note

43Jin x Taehyung :)))))

i can’t help falling in love with you

“falling in love with their best friend’s partner au” (from this )pairing: taejin (ft. actual taeguk) genre: unrequited love (so fluff/angst-ish.. flangst… angfloof..)word count: 2.5k

“soundslike someone i should meet”, namjoon murmurs and then looking up atseokjin in amusement: “how ‘bout you? like him, hyung? think he’stoo much?” seokjinfaces the tv, bright lights reflecting on his dark hair, glisteningon the bridge of his nose and sparkling in his eyes, huge in thought.

“toomuch”, he says. yetabsolutely endearing,he thinks.

a/n: had this ask since last october, finally did it! this is my first time posting my english writing online so my anxiety lvl is 3000. also sorry if you mind me ignoring caps for my dear life. i was listening to this and this. enjoy!

whenjeongguk introduces taehyung to seokjin he doesn’t think that thismeeting will lead to great changes in his life.

so his best friend,five years younger than him, got himself a significant other who wasyounger than seokjin by three years and older than jeongguk by twoyears which seokjin questions because kim taehyung is even more of anovergrown child than jeongguk. seokjin didn’t think that waspossible as jeongguk and he himself are known as the mental kids intheir friend group: always talking about the newest video games,jumping from one argument to the next, their bickering oftenextending into some weird kind of karaoke in made-up languages, thelist extending each time they meet.

so his best friend jeongguk gothimself a boyfriend, taehyung, whom he is about to meet.

taehyungshares his family name and his hand is equally as big as seokjin’s,warm and the grip firm. he even copies the gesture of pressing hissecond hand onto taehyung’s so that taehyung cages seokjin’s witha sheepish smile that spreads over his handsome features and makeshim younger by round about 10 years. and the kid is only 22.

theyfirst meet at jeongguk’s place where taehyung will eventually movein as they both visit the same college, met on campus and immediatelyclicking it is a match made in heaven. they are disgustingly sweet,unsure and every look, innocent touch and gesture is almost too muchto endure but seokjin feels a teasing smile tugging at the corners ofhis mouth, smiling along and averting his eyes to pay more attentionto the screen and another round of mario party that he is eager towin. that evening is interesting, taehyung is interesting.

heis everything seokjin cannot imagine, not with jeongguk, not withanybody, not as a person that really exists and as the night growsolder he feels himself being more and more in some kind of awe,fascination.

he feels annoyance at how straight-forward taehyung is,almost on the verge of rude but seokjin is endured by apologeticsmiles and sheepishly sparkling half-moons lighting up not onlytaehyung’s whole face but the room, the building, maybe half ofseoul.

seokjinfeels a faint tingle of worry making his fingers twitch whenevertaehyung scoops too close to the edge of the couch, his long limbsall over the place in excitement matching with his restless mindset -he is talking about everything and nothing with either jeongguk orseokjin and the latter appreciates that the boy somehow manages tosound equally as familiar with seokjin as he must be with jeongguk.

hisways of expressing himself hold something childlike; using thephrases in the wrong context, his tone slipping here and there sothat one could almost think he is foreign and his choice of wordsblunt and direct. he isn’t sugarcoated yet very sweet in his ownways. his voice is surprisingly deep (sometimes it vibrates inbubbling excitement which is weird but a very cute weird) andsoothing to listen to, his face wavering in expressions that haveseokjin thinking he hasn’t seen one of taehyung’s faces twice.

thekid is a mixture of opposites, colliding contrasts that surely keep being around him full of surprises. it isn’t in a bad way but inthe evening seokjin feels exhausted like he just did a calculus examor run five miles in half an hour. at the door he turns around to hisbest friend, a lopsided smile on his lips he’s looking down a bit (insignificantlybut the few centimeters mean everything to competitive jeongguk andseokjin is never too tired to point it out).

afew seconds seokjin holds the breath he doesn’t know he is holding,eyes darting over the few pimples along jeongguk’s jaw, the scar onhis cheek bone (from that one time where they thought throwing flat stones across puddles on the street that were barely three centimeters deep to make them jump several times was a good idea), stubble on his chin he is scratching anxiously andfinally looking into the huge, glistening eyes that always haveseokjin thinking about bunnies or that trico creature in the lastguardian.

thenthe words stumble through his lips before he can reconsider, softenthem, swallow them, anything. he just goes: “he’s weird. veryweird but also very cute”, mirrors jeongguk’s furrowed brows andignores how jeongguk’s lips twitch in amusement and adds jokingly:“goodcatch, JK” and claps a hand on his shoulder (maybe he attempts tocrush jeongguk bones by hitting the younger real hard but that is toform his character - at least that’s what his brothers used to tellhim doing the same every goddamn time).

jeonggukonly barks out a laughter that has his nose scrunching up and all of hishuge teeth showing and seokjin feels his tensed insides relaxing abit whilst laughing along until he sees something moving overjeongguk’s shoulder out of the corner of his eye:

taehyungis leaning in the door frame to the living room, his head hanginglow, barefoot and his posture telling that he never had nor will havea single care in the world. there is the ghost of a smile wrinklingthe corners of his dark eyes that focus as soon as seokjin is lookingat him. apparently he heard what seokjin said because the glisteningin his eyes becomes a nuance darker, then his whole face lights up asa smile blossoms over his features and then he does the most taehyungthing he can do: he makes a very deep and amused sound in the back ofhis throat and waves at seokjin which has him looking a bit dense butmaybe that’s just how seokjin feels in that moment.

seokjinpresses his lips together, blinks rapidly and sniffs before bringingup his hand to wave as well. “uhm. bye taehyung. take care”, hesays and means it. taehyung has to be someone who gets in troubleeasily so he could need a bit luck, right?

“solong, jin-hyung!”, taehyung answers, the bright smile never leavinghis face. seokjin bites back the smile by pressing his lips togetherand he nods at jeongguk once before leaving, his feet bringing himdownstairs and onto the dark streets, painted in frosty white as itwas that time of the year, on their own.

seokjin doesn’t realizethat he is deep in thoughts until he stands in front of the apartmentthat he shares with namjoon, his cold fingers already in search forthe keys. he finds the keys and is about to open the door when heturns around, gaze ghosting over a slippery side street with thatflickering street light on the other side. he found his way home andhis keys are in his pocket just like everyday - yet seokjin has thefeeling that he is missing something. something..

enteringthe living-room in his pajamas he flops down onto the couch next to asleeping namjoon whose head is rolling off the arm of the couchoccasionally, his snoring louder than the bass-boosted surroundsystem he got for christmas and his mouth hanging wide open. seokjinslaps a hand down onto the old book laying on the ugly reindeer thatcovers the front of namjoons fuzzy christmas sweater and the snoringrips off as namjoon coughs and gets up a little, rubbing sleep fromhis eyes with his knuckles.

“how’sgoin’? guk got ‘imself a sweetie?”, he asks immediately as ifto carry on with the conversation where they stopped (which was asseokjin was leaving the house five hours ago and back then namjoonwas already doomed to fall asleep) and blinks up in seokjins generaldirection, his brows knit together, one eye open. seokjin doesn’tlook at him but at the screen as he turns on the tv, nodding slowly.

“mh. he did”, he admits and the dull longing in his chest throbs.which is weird. seokjin didn’t forget something at jeongguk’s,did he?

“mh.cool.” namjoon sniffs. then opens his mouth again, voice stillhoarse and words heavy with sleep: “yoongi-hyung said he’s abit.. how to say.. weird. weird?”

seokjin’snodding gets more enthusiastic. “very weird! could be the cause ofyoongi’s daily migraine by merely existing somewhere.” namjooncoughs out a laughter, now rubbing his face with both hands as ifgetting rid of dead skin cells means getting rid of his everlastingtiredness. seokjin recommended a healthy sleep schedule but to quotethe patient himself “beenthere, done that, not working, thanks for nothing doc!”

“soundslike someone i should meet”, namjoon murmurs and then looking up atseokjin in amusement: “how ‘bout you? like him, hyung? think he’stoo much?”

seokjinlooks at namjoon for a few seconds, the anticipating dimples like aghost’s fingers pressing into his cheeks, his ridiculously tousledhair and then he thinks about taehyung. how the corners of his eyes crinkle when hesmiles, how deep his voice is but how childish his ways of expressinghimself. his endless facial expressions and antics, one more ridiculous than the next,his warm fingers on seokjin’s.

seokjinfaces the tv, bright lights reflecting on his dark hair, glisteningon the bridge of his nose and sparkling in his eyes, huge in thought.

“toomuch”, he says.

yetabsolutely endearing,he thinks.

standingup, clapping like everybody else, seokjin’s lips break into a smilethat may reach his eyes but leave his stomach cold and his heartnumb. he’s practiced that over the years because for one he got agood amount of occasions where it was necessary and he learned thatis was easier this way, so much easier.

ormaybe that is what he tells himself because as the sun itself comeshis way, all breath-taking smiles and warm hands reaching out, hisheart flutters and the smile wavers a bit. the younger looks gorgeousin his suit, a different color than jeongguk’s but with matchingbows they’re terribly adorable. as jeongguk stops by namjoon, jiminand hoseok to let himself be mashed into a big (and obnoxiously loud)hug, taehyung reaches his long arms out towards seokjin. yoongi nextto him makes a noise in the back of his throat and practicallyvanishes, very much aware of taehyung’s ability to hug as manypeople as possible at once.

“thanks”,seokjin mutters under his breath, resignation painting his nasalvoice deep and husky, before smiling again at the beaming boy thatfinally reaches him. he’s pressed against taehyung and immediatelyfeels too much at the same time:

there’s his belly growing all warmand bubbly from the inside out, his headache seems to be gone and hisfingers twitch as he rests them against the fabric of taehyung’ssuit. the boy, who’s a man by now almost being 30, smells like healways does and feels like he always does. he’s warmth andsomething incredibly soothing yet seokjin feels more alive than heusually does and as cheesy as it sounds, taehyung’s scent is homefor seokjin.

whentaehyung let go he puts his hands on seokjin’s cheeks and squishesthem together, his eyes glistening, all teeth and giggles escapinghis throat in a strained manner and seokjin is glad that the cake isyet to come because otherwise taehyung would probably eat backwardsright about now as excited as he seems.

“congratulationskid”, seokjin mumbles and ignores how hot taehyung’s fingers areagainst his flushing cheeks. taehyung hops up and down a few times,giggles and then hugs seokjin again, twirling them around slowly andalmost knocking some old relatives from jeongguk’s side of thefamily off their feet. seokjin mutters an apology and awkwardly patsthe youngers back, feeling strangled not by taehyung’s arms but hismere presence, being so close to him.

“thankyouuu jin-hyung! who looked better today, guk-ah or me? be honest”,he warns and once again rests his hands on seokjin’s shoulders, tobe exact the gape of his neck on both sides, thumbs rubbing partiallyover the texture of his jacket, partially grazing his bare skin andsetting seokjin’s bones on fire so that he could almost hear theflames gnawing on his insides, fire licking along his achingskeleton.

why does taehyung have to be so touchy, he was always likethat. his hand on seokjin’s neck, his thigh against his, bumpingknees and his nose pressed into the crown of seokjin’s head.sometimes he wonders if he was older than taehyung or the other wayaround.

“i’malways honest”, seokjin answers bluntly, eyebrows scooping up slowly andgrin growing one-sided to tease before he laughs at taehyung’sfurrowed brows, an expression of childlike impatience, and nodstowards jeongguk who is wrestling (maybe it is a hug but honestly whoknows when it comes to these two) a laughing yugyeom.

“JKof course! sorry tae but the purple of your suit is so obviously notstraight whilst jeongguk’s midnight blue is as timeless as it isclassy!” at that taehyung pouts and hangs his weight onto seokjinwhen he is slouching over, hands still resting on seokjin’sshoulders and seokjin laughs and can’t help it but bringing a hand up hetousles taehyung’s hair in a playful manner but then the problemoccurs that his fingers don’t want to leave the silky strainsalone.

theylinger carefully, ghosting over hot skin and dark strains and takingcare of the chaos they created. taehyung doesn’t even bat aneyelash at that, if anything he tilts his head a bit to side and intoseokjin’s touch, straightening his back. taehyung’s eyes dartaround slowly whilst seokjin is organizing his hair and there’sthat faint glow right underneath taehyung’s skin, in the dark brownof his eyes making them shine like orbits, the curve of his mouth ashe’s smiling ever so faintly. he’s radiating happiness and thatalone feeds the distant pounding of seokjin’s heavy heart.

whenseokjins throat grows tight, his chest aching with the throbbing echoof a pain that is part of him since he first saw that stupid face infront of him and got to know the soul living in that shell, he dropshis hand and shoves it into the pocket of his trousers, numb fingerscurling inwards, nails digging into his palm. taehyung does thatrapid move with his head to bring all the loose strains back onto hisforehead, falling into his face he looks up at seokjin and beams:

“howdo i look?”, he asks, voice deep, tripping over a syllable ever soslightly. seokjin looks at taehyung, really looks at him and for asecond he thinks he might burst into a thousand pieces and coveringeverything around him in red; the white dresses and roses, the tabledecor yoongi took care of, the cakes he made, the light wooden groundunderneath his wobbly knees and clumsy feet. then again he has beenliving with that dull ache inside of his middle for the longest timeso why couldn’t he just live with it a little bit longer? aneternity alongside the one that jeongguk and taehyung promised eachother today?

“likeall the other love foals that just got married. silly”, seokjinsaid, the smile on his face somehow keeping his flesh together,taehyung’s laughter being curse and blessing at once.

andabsolutely endearing,seokjin thought, his love for taehyung remaining a bitter taste inthe back of his throat amongst the words he will never say.

#taejin #btswriters #vkook #bts jin #bts v #kim seokjin #kim taehyung #jungkook #namjoon #uhm yes hi hello this is my first uploaded prompt thank you #if i made any grammar mistakes or smth sounds odd or out of context pls tell me!#also sry for procrastinating this for so long lmao :'^))))#idk if you reblog asks @the network? but i'd like opinions of fellow writers.......#answered #drabble #kim senior & jr #beas #beas pen #denisewoonique #i'm so tired but also very anxious i've been bragging sm abt me being eager to write and post it somewhere #in english to several people and special thanks to @grumpytth @freewinner2k17 @kimnamsjoon and @jimintensifyfor listening to my rambles ilu;#press fucking post bea would you!#i also highly recommend reading this on mobile since my desktop theme sucks #when it comes to reading smth on my blog tbh :^/#also can u bliev i wrote furniture instead of fabric? me neither

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babaleshy · 5 years

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I know I haven’t touched this thing for a while but whatever. I’m gonna rant. Yes, it’s about my folks. Yes, they are Trump supporters. No, I still can’t move out because my husband and I cannot afford it nor is there any jobs in the area that pay enough for us to move out.

On with the rant (plus, like, a mental health update which I will do first).

Going to get re-evaluated for ADHD because as much as I loved seeing Mark for counseling, he wanted to simply focus on my struggles, hence why I was diagnosed with EFD. He was great, helpful, all that. Just... There’s other stuff going on with all of these signs pointing to ADHD, and I actually forget that sometimes symptoms outside of executive functioning issues can get in the way because my depression makes me forget shit.

On top of this, Paulnetta (my new counselor) has referred me to a couple of places to go and get tested for dyslexia and other learning disabilities. What has kept me from getting tested the past couple of months is that my ID expired back in April and I fucking forgot about it. I’m going to the DMV tomorrow to get my ID renewed but will have to wait for it to appear in the mail, now, because of bureaucratic bullshit. Once I get my ID, I can finally get tested for a learning disability and FINALLY apply for goddamn Medicaid.

I’m getting mighty sick of what my parents are pulling. I’ll start with my mom since there’s not TOO much bullshit to bitch about with her like there is with my dad.

My mom still won’t engage much with me in conversation about anything I want to talk about. But the moment she decides to talk, she immediately changes the topic to her favorite country singer or something about horses. I don’t hate horses as in the animal, but looking at anything involving horses has me feeling rage because of her. She keeps getting old horses (never surpassing 3 horses) that aren’t really able to be ridden, wanting a few for companionship so no one feels alone when my mom rides the only one that is capable of being ridden. Horses are social animals. I get this. All fine and well. But my mother does the ABSOLUTE FUCKING BARE MINIMUM care for these animals. They’re healthy and doing okay mentally, but she has yet to ride since I moved back that I can remember. SHE SPENT WHO KNOWS HOW MUCH MONEY ON A ROUND PEN AND SHE STILL HASN’T RIDDEN THE HORSE SHE WANTS TO RIDE. She just sits on the couch on her phone AND tablet watching livestreams of her favorite country singer who has developed this cult surrounding the pledge of allegiance while being on FB interacting with other horse owners. My mom seems to like the aesthetic of the western/country/farm lifestyle without actually LIVING it, and I’m betting it’s because she’s too old and tired from working 6 days a week at a minimum wage job she’s been at since the mid 90s and refused to consider looking for another because she knows people who work there and shop there (small business hardware store). On top of all of this, she refuses to listen to any other radio station unless it’s country, so that plays on constant in the living room for the dog when my parents aren’t home, or she has it on in the truck and wonders why I have my earbuds in. She BLASTS anything she and my dad watch, which includes but is not limited to things like Last Man Standing, NCIS, faux news, and pseudo-hillbilly shit shows from the 60s and 70s on YouTube.

This woman did not interact with me on my terms in the past unless it was something she was interested in. If I distracted her from her soap operas or baseball/football games, she got pissed. As an adult? If she does interact with me, it’s because it involves the topic of money. My mom IMMEDIATELY gets pissed at me when I inquire about our financial situation. I don’t complain, I’m not nosy as fuck, I just wanna know “hey, can I get some help getting thirty-something bucks worth of lumber so I can build shelves for my room since I have no income?” Nope, the topic bothers my mom too much. I don’t even think she listens to me talk to her when she doesn’t participate in conversation because she is just... ADDICTED to FB. Like, hopelessly fucking addicted. And she used to get on my ass about being on MY computer too much in high school! (circa 2005-2007)

And now, onto the dumpster fire that is my father.

The bastard is having us live in a meatlocker. The air is so cold and so dry here that my skin is very dry, my nose is CONSTANTLY running and bleeding, and I’m too cold to do ANYTHING most of the time, including sitting at my desk to do anything from art to surfing the web! He uses his breathing issues as an excuse, but it was never this cold in the summer last year or any years prior. He says it’s to keep the humidity down. By the same damn excuse, because we do NOT have a working ventilation fan, and opening the bathroom window (which faces the street) would expose us and give us no privacy, my dad HAS THE HAIR DRYER RUNNING BY THE BATHROOM SINK WHILE HE SHOWERS. His logic? “The heat will cause the moisture to evaporate!” Not kidding. But he’s huffing and wheezing by the time he’s done in the bathroom. And he won’t listen to me when I tell him just how wrong he is.

The bitter old bastard has whatever they’re watching on blast in the living room. He re-clutters whatever I de-clutter. He tries picking fights with my husband by purposefully trying to engage him in topics my husband doesn’t want to talk about to get my husband to react a certain way (never works because my husband caught on real fast). This is all my dad trying to “establish dominance” or some bullshit like that. He’s flaunting the fact that he can be a piece of shit all he wants to us, and if we put up enough of a fight, he can kick us out. He’s also hoping (and he’s used a similar logic on other shit before in the past) that he pisses us off enough to move out, because he thinks we can move out whenever we want. This guy has not been in the real world since ‘95 or ‘96, and before that, hadn’t had to look for a job since the ‘70s, hadn’t had to look for another place to live since the ‘90s. He has no idea how expensive rent is, how shit the job opportunities are around here, how it’s impossible to find a decent paying job and be expected to make rent while being able to feed one’s self, etc. He is so detached from reality that he’s trying to delude himself that shit still works like it did in the 70s.

I had to make up a lie that I get car sick unless I have my music. The reality of it is that my dad stresses me out so much I fear him bringing up a topic we both know I won’t be able to keep my mouth shut on to where he will then stress me out, threaten my life, and then tell me he threatened my life “just so I would shut up.” So, dad believing that I get car sick without my music, he claims it’s a “problem with the middle ear,” which is a thing with some people, so I’m playing along with that. Gives me an excuse to not listen to my mom’s piece of shit radio station in the truck on those VERY DAMN FEW times she takes me somewhere (seriously, unless it’s to work, seeing a local country concert, or seeing her sister, my mom doesn’t wanna leave the house) and not have to explain to her why I bury my head in my own music when she won’t fucking talk to me about shit I wanna talk about, shit I’ve wanted to talk about since childhood but she doesn’t fucking care. She tried so hard to get me to be like her, wanting to live on a farm, but it failed. She knows it failed. So she doesn’t wanna talk unless it’s about the lifestyle she always wanted.

And this is the weird part, they have views and shit that would make you go “that’s not very typical of a Trump supporter” so because they’re “not so bad” to other moderates or right-wingers, I don’t have a right to complain. My parents know evolution is a thing (yet are climate change deniers), have no problem with me being a Pagan or practicing witchcraft (but will talk shit about Muslims), think that Halloween is too kiddified and the fun is sucked out of it (but there’s a “war on xmas”), and thought I spent way too much time in my room on my computer in high school (but they rarely leave their own internet devices in the living room; dad just has a computer but refuses to touch social media and hates modern technology despite being hopelessly addicted to YouTube). Like...?

Here’s what’s sad...

When my parents first got together and had me, they were a loving married couple with a kid. My brother came along, things were still smooth sailing. Dad gets hurt and we’re plunged into inescapable poverty and all of a sudden dad ignores me, mom ignores me, only interaction is breakfast, dinner, and screaming and belittling. That’s it. There was still favorites, and because the favorite died, it’s like I don’t matter that much to them, especially since I didn’t turn out anything special like they’d hoped for. They won’t own up to their mistakes, they conveniently ignore that half the time growing up I was yelled at for lack of social interaction outside of forced interaction with my brother and having ADHD and anxiety. In fact, I still can’t tell if they’re the cause of my anxiety or if I was born with it because of how young I was when the complete one-eighty with them happened.

And yet they still act like they’ll be wealthy someday, so they support the rich getting tax cuts and worship the cheetoh in office. I think they banked on me and my brother becoming successful and wealthy after high school that they continued to avoid admitting they’re stuck in poverty. Now they think they’ll eventually get wealthy with the fucking royalties on the oil (spoilers: no, lol, they’re kinda getting screwed actually but won’t admit it) or hitting the lottery.

Dad presses all of these money-making ideas onto me, ideas I don’t care about or don’t like, and won’t do it himself. He won’t even write stories to have them published because that would mean he’d have a hobby. Too much work. He even said the whole reason why he got a job at the steel mill was so he didn’t have to think. He literally claimed he’d rather have someone think for him and admitted that he’s proud to be ignorant of technology. No, I’m not kidding.

So my husband and I are forced to live with these two assholes, whose marriage is barely held together (they barely interact with one another, and when they do, half the time one is pissed at the other) and only keep the marriage going because divorce is expensive and at least they’re not as bad as their exes (mom had her jaw broken by an ex, dad was nearly killed by an ex).

Once they move north, we’ll be going with them, attend Kent State, and get the fuck out of Ohio. And I’m never looking back.

#personal #rant #needed to get this off my chest

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foodpolitician · 6 years

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introduction

hello dear readers

i created this blog as a forum on which i can openly and honestly discuss my recovery from a lifelong battle with eating disorders.

for the first time in my life, i am engaging with food in a way that is reparative instead of self-destructive. i reflect often on how i got here, how grateful i am to be here, and how i can help others. from that, this blog was born.

in my eating disorder, food was a reward or it was a punishment. restricting instilled me with an unshakeable sense of pride while binges and purges felt perennially shameful. my weight loss was unsustainable; my eating disorder had completely diminished my ability to experience joy and to experience love, be it inwardly or outwardly directed.

a pivotal part of my recovery involved reschematizing food as something that is reparative - a means of healing myself and finding balance - instead of conceptualizing it as a locus of my anxieties and fears.

an eating disorder falls under the umbrella of anxiety disorders and can be categorized very aptly as the misidentification of food as a threat. simultaneously, eating disorders are a societal disease tightly interwoven with western beauty standards, western dietary patterns, and a heaping spoonful of misogyny. eating disorders are poorly understood, but from my experience i can attest that they are complex and ever-changing, and to speak about them honestly requires careful attention to nuance. with that said, there is so much more going on in this scenario than faulty wiring.

growing up, i absolutely did conceptualize food as a threatening entity. i found it absolutely terrifying to try new things and to deviate from long-established patterns would often leave me visibly shaken and, more often than not, panicked and in tears. i remember looking at the inside of a piece of chicken as a child and panicking because i found the color and texture distressing, but had never realized until that moment. i had unwittingly been poisoning myself. i had been introducing something into my body that i all the sudden conceptualized - presently, retroactively, and forever - as impure and disgusting. i couldn't handle the cognitive dissonance. i had a meltdown then and there.

yes, i can identify the neuroses, the disordered patterns of thought. i cannot, however, write off my behaviors as wholly irrational.

i grew up eating the standard american diet. nearly everything i put in to my body was high in fat, hyperprocessed, and full of sugar - it was usually fried and on the rare occasions that it wasn't, it was always a variation of cheese on grain. i actively avoided fruits and vegetables, and conceptualized snacks like nature valley granola bars and special K weight loss cereals as the pinnacle of healthy, nutritious food. i rationalized that i could eat whatever i wanted so long as i exercised frequently enough.

obviously, my understanding of health and wellness was deeply flawed. in my mind, i connected exercising with healthy living while completely neglecting the incredibly significant relationship between eating healthy and sustaining physical and mental wellness. this is a pattern i have observed throughout my lifetime that remains ubiquitous amongst the people i know and love and meet to this day. in america, we live to eat, but we seldom eat to sustain ourselves, to preserve our collective mental health, to invest in our future well-being - to live.

i believe in the mind-body connection, and looking back, it isn't hard to understand why i felt so terribly unwell, and it's hardly shocking that my body never looked the way i wanted it to. i often wonder if my eating disorder was rooted in a subconscious understanding that my diet deviated so immensely from the way humans were biologically designed to eat - an intrinsic understanding that the patterns i carried with me were entirely antithetical to my desire to be physically and mentally healthy. in many ways, the standard american diet is inherently disordered. embracing it on an individual scale it is to engage with an evolutionary abberation. embracing it on a societal level is to normalize a cultural abhorration.

i discovered veganism in the summer of 2015 through an ex-partner. i became vegetarian and transitioned to veganism within a year. for a while, i was sincerely doing extraordinarily well. i felt physically healthier. my depression lifted. and for these reasons, for a very long time i conceptualized a vegan lifestyle as the way, the truth, and the light.

once again, i was horribly wrong. nothing in this world is so black and white. to the surprise of no one, it was actually terribly unhealthy for me to hinge my value as a person upon my ability to engage with a diet that conflates food choices with morality. i had freed myself from the binge-purge cycle through my healthy food choices only to run headlong into anorexia and orthorexia when i took it too far.

veganism eventually stopped feeling like something i wanted to engage with and became something i felt obligated to engage with in the absence of choice. my desire to improve animal welfare devolved into a life dominated by my all-consuming fear of certain food groups. i became very ill. i routinely lost my vision upon standing and for months i was hounded by the worst nausea i had ever experienced in my life. my hair started falling out again. i had never experienced a depressive episode so intense. i had never weighed so little.

i was dying.

i took a necessary break from veganism that lasted the better part of a year. disengaging with ethical veganism was one of the most pivotal and important steps i have taken on my to recovery. at no point, however, did i ever stop thinking about the benefits of plant-based diets. i knew i was on to something important, and i was determined to engage with a whole food diet again once i had given myself time to heal.

i decided to endeavor a vegan diet once again when i moved to philadelphia earlier this year, rationalizing that doing so would be easier in a big city than it was in my dumpy college town. i knew, however, that i had to go about it differently if i wanted to sustain it.

instead of focusing on the moral value of the food i was eating, i started focusing on how the foods i put into my body made me feel - which ones made me feel full, which ones made me feel energized, which ones i felt safe engaging with, and which ones triggered a desire to binge or purge.

practicing mindfulness in this way paved the way for my realization that i feel physically and mentally best when i eat a diet primarily composed of minimally processed, plant-based foods, with an emphasis on fruits and vegetables.

it finally clicked. my neuroses surrounding food began to dissipate as i continued to nourish myself with foods that made me feel physically and mentally well. because these foods feel safe to engage with, the thought of purging them seldom crosses my mind. because i am eating enough of the right things, i have reached a stable weight at which i feel content and, more importantly, capable of engaging in life fully without allowing insecurities about my body to hold me back. because i understand the mind-body connection, i am capable of making decisions with food that make me physically and mentally healthier, and because doing so makes me feel better in every conceivable way, i want to continue extending the gift of wellness to myself through a well-maintained diet. i feel optimistic about my future and proud of the decisions i have made to protect my health. i can gratefully and sincerely say that i am no longer digging my own grave with my goddamn fork and knife.

food is more than food. depending on how you engage, it will be the salve for your wounds or the bullet that takes your life. there is an unshakeable connection between what we put into our bodies and how we move throughout our life. by listening to my body and accommodating its needs, i was able to heal myself from an eating disorder in a culture built on a foundation of disordered eating.

and for that i am so, so grateful.

thanks for reading.

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