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ausetkmt · 7 months

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Lynching victim Rubin Stacy’s story being told by his family in film screening at NSU

Anne Naves knew something bad had happened to her uncle when her male relatives came home from fishing, each wearing a pall of silence. Dad wasn’t cracking jokes like usual. Grandfather looked grave. And her uncle, Rubin Stacy, hadn’t come back. The next day, someone from the funeral home said a body had been dropped off.

Naves, 8 years old at the time, only discovered the full gruesome truth about her uncle years later. On July 19, 1935, acting on an unproven accusation from a white woman, a masked lynch mob strung up Stacy under a Fort Lauderdale tree, hanged him and shot him 17 times as spectators gawked and children laughed.

The brutality and silence of Stacy’s lynching is revisited in the new documentary, “Rubin,” which will screen on Tuesday, Oct. 3, at Nova Southeastern University. In the hourlong film, the farmhand’s death is recounted through the eyes of his surviving descendants, but mainly through Naves, who was the last living eyewitness to the trauma — and to the secrecy — that followed.

The film, the first to be made by relatives of Stacy’s family, also chronicles the history of lynchings in America, used as a tool of punishment and to foster silence.

“I think (my family) knew that, without telling us (kids) what really happened, they would save us a lot of trauma,” Naves says in the documentary. “The neighbors and our church members respected our silence, too, because they knew that if it could happen to our family, it could happen to theirs.”

For “Rubin” director Tenille Brown, who is a cousin of Rubin Stacy, the film has in recent weeks also morphed into something else: a posthumous tribute to Naves. After filming her interviews for the documentary, she died on Sept. 18 at age 96, leaving behind a strong legacy: She was a Broward County educator for 25 years, teaching at Pines Middle and other schools.

“The biggest piece of the film was Anne,” Brown says in an interview with the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “Without her, there’s no story. She’s the driving force. She was ready to talk. She told me to record her. She really pushed me when I didn’t feel confident and said, ‘Record me anyway. Just go.’ ”

The rest of America witnessed the cruelty of Stacy’s lynching long before Naves did. A series of photos immortalize the moment when a white crowd gathered around Stacy’s body hanging from a tree. These images ran in newspapers nationwide, were published by the NAACP, Life magazine and National Geographic, and are now archived in the Library of Congress.

It was a tale of Jim Crow-era racism that Fort Lauderdale would’ve rather forgotten — the brother of a corrupt Broward County sheriff participated in the lynching — but city officials have made strides in recent years to acknowledge the tragedy by placing memorial markers around Fort Lauderdale. One is on Davie Boulevard and Southwest 31st Avenue, also known as Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, near where Stacy took his last breath. There’s another on the 800 block of Northwest Second Street, where he lived, and a third at Woodlawn Cemetery, his final resting place. In February 2022, a section of Davie Boulevard was renamed Rubin Stacy Memorial Boulevard.

“I’m glad they acknowledged it,” says Brown, of Pompano Beach. “These stories make some people in the state uncomfortable, but if they are based on fact, we need to tell the truth. You can’t turn your head. These are things you can’t ignore.”

For Brown, it was these memorials — and Naves’ willingness to break her silence — that motivated her to reconstruct Stacy’s story. To do so, she also interviewed Ken Cutler, Parkland commissioner and historian, and Tameka Bradley Hobbs, library regional manager of Fort Lauderdale’s African American Research Library and Cultural Center.

“My family didn’t want to talk about it out of fear for years,” Brown says. “There was shame. There’s an element of hurt, and you can hear that emotion in Anne’s voice. Now it feels freeing. This is a story that was suppressed for years and by sharing it, this is how we overcome.”

Michael Anderson, a producer for “Rubin,” says the film also tackles what too many school textbooks don’t stress enough: the history of Black lynchings.

“For Black youth to know their stories, they have to know the history of lynchings,” Anderson says. “They still don’t know how lynchings were used as a weapon to keep a community quiet. That’s exactly what it did to Rubin Stacy’s family.”

IF YOU GO

WHAT: “Rubin”

WHEN: 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 3

WHERE: NSU’s Rose & Alfred Miniaci Performing Arts Center, 3100 Ray Ferrero Jr. Blvd., Davie

COST: Free, but tickets must be presented for entry

INFORMATION: 954-462-0222; MiniaciPAC.com

#https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/lynching-victim-rubin-stacy-s-story-being-told-by-his-family-in-film-screening-at-nsu/ar-AA1huFAr #Lynching in america #Black People #Black American Lynchings #Lynching victim Rubin Stacy’s story being told by his family in film screening at NSU

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danidandandadididan · 3 months

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Give us Srpska hcs NOW

Before we start this cesspool of autism, keep two things in mind:

1. He has a total of 4 appearances so i’m only really using the design as a base cause he has no personality trait other than being like what? 7?

2. I’ve seen a few people mention before they shared head cannons about him that they’re in fact not from R. Srpska so their head cannons might not be accurate. However I’m from Srpska, so as far as you’re concerned I am Milorad Dodik

Also these might not be organized so please don’t mind it if I drop his trauma only to then say what his favourite Smiths song is

Anyway

1. He’s a Serbian Ultranationalist (shockingly)

2. Remember how in Serbia’s description it’s said that he’s tan though not as quite as his other neighbours? Srpska is the tanner neighbour

3. His eyes are ever so slightly slanted

4. Thick eyebrows for an easy threatening glare

5. Very raspy voice?? Can’t compare it to anything, just imagine a teenage Goran Bregović or something

6. He used to work in the Fabrics where he inhaled enough smoke to kill 7 grown adults (and that could be a factor in damage of his vocal chords)

-> other factors might be smoking or just yelling God bless

7. Obnoxiously masculine probably a misogynist

8. His hair is actually kind of curly, it became wavy later on in his life though. If he puts in enough effort he could bring the curls back (he won’t)

9. He carries a tarp around his waist most of the time, it’s something that stuck with him since the Ottoman period, and it’s easy weapon storage so

10. Massive fan of Serbian literature

-> specifically Andrić he brings him up any chance he can

If not Andrić then Dučić or Šantić

11. Calls Enis by his pre-conversion name, probably Stefan or something

12. Enis calls him Alija

13. I don’t see him getting along with Vojvodina ever, they probably don’t even understand each other when they speak

Voj: te vagy a legundorítóbb ember, akivel valaha találkoztam

Srp: الله أكبر

14. However he rubs off on her sometimes, like she probably accidentally uses Ijekavica when speaking in Serbian cause of him

(This is based off the fact that there’s way too many Bosnian serbs in Vojvodina)

15. He calls her Mađarica and she calls him turčin

16. Probably aromantic

17. Heterosexual or Bisexual, Idk depends on the day

18. He was born during the Ottoman period when Bosnia first converted to Islam and led to the massive split between Serbs and future Bosniaks. Immediately that was kind of odd for everyone, some were worried cause they didn’t know what it could mean, others kind of saw it as a torch in a dim room

19. Srpska was always “Ilija” before the 90’s, he rarely got any specific country name but he always represented the serbs of Bosnia one way or the other. Though during the ottoman period there’s a massive chance he represented the Raja in Bosnia, especially cause that will later lead into the creation of the Hajduks

20. Speaking of which: Srpska was a Hajduk

21. The ottoman period were his most crucial years of developing relationships with other yugoslovenes also under the rule, his opinions never changed even after it was over

22. He feels a Familial bond with Serbia and Hercegovina. Serbia for obvious reasons though Hercegovina is based off the fact that it was the initial “birth place” of what will become of the Bosnian Serbs, so you can technically say Srpska’s roots are in Hercegovina.

23. Though thats only for the familial bonds that were there since birth, there’s a single one he developed during his childhood and that’s his father-son bond with Montenegro. Based off the fact that Serbs of Bosnia always had a guaranteed second home there during the time period.

24. He was almost kidnapped multiple times in the “gift in blood” process (or Devshirm if you’re turkish enough) thankfully he managed to escape most of the time which is why he wasn’t turned into a janissary

25. I said this before but he received an injury to his frontal lobe which fucked him up pretty bad

26. Him and Montenegro had very different ways to deal with the Ottomans, Montenegro tried to make affairs with them while Ilija was already spilling his blood everywhere

27. he got his ass beat multiple times

28. His favourite Smiths song is Bigmouth strikes again

29. Hercegovina rubbed off on him to the point he developed a very obnoxious eastern Herzegovinian accent which means he unironically says stuff like Kastig and Bogalj but sometimes still uses Sarajevo slang and he sounds actually stupid

30. Idk exactly how he ages, he’s probably 15-17 nowadays physically

31. Hated the idea of Yugoslavia

32. Has been yelling about Unified Serbia since the 18th century

33. Him and Kosovo are more so rivals than enemies, Srpska points out his lack of hydroelectricity and Kosovo points out the lack of women who feel safe around him

34. Collects icons like Pokemon cards

35. Also has an icon wall

36. Shaved his hair off at one point in his life at least

37. Has a framed picture of Gavrilo Princip above his bed

That’s already too much already i’ll stop now

#yugotalia #aph srpska #balkantalia #turklet #yugotalia srpska #aph bosnia #aph herzegovina #aph montenegro #aph serbia #i hate him

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pics-and-fanfics · 1 year

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Family Reunion (Part 2)

Pairing: Loki x F!Reader

Warnings: fluff, mild swears, teasing (nice and not nice), people being fucking rude, mild suicidal thoughts, trauma, toxic parent.

Summary: You finally take Loki to see your family several states away, and he learns why you only visit them once every 2 or 3 years. (Mom totally not based off mine, no way…)

Part of my 25 Days of Fluff! writing. Warning! This is very long, and might require more parts!

You go up to your Dad, hugging him for a brief second before letting go, then kiss his cheek. He smiles, patting your head absently before going back to the stove. “Dad, I’d like to introduce you to my boyfriend.” you say, and he turns around, narrowing his eyes at you. “Dad, this is Loki. We’ve been dating for a while, please don’t get mad.”

Loki heard the twinge of fear in your voice, and he leaned down, kissing the top of your head, making you smile a little. “Sir, it is a pleasure to meet you, Y/n is always talking about her parents.”

“They aren’t that bad.” Thor says, sitting next to you and Loki on the floor. “That’s because you don’t know them like I do. Mom’s an idiot, always doing stupid shit, and Dad always listened to her, never believing me. I was the one in the wrong, I was the one lying and causing problems, when in all actuality, it was my mom. She’s a pathological liar, and a narcissist. Just- Just take anything she says with a grain of salt.” you say, sitting in Loki’s lap.

“Besides, we- Oh hey booger butt.” you say, quickly changing the subject. Loki looks up from where he was braiding your hair to see you crawling out of his lap, towards another girl. “How’s my favorite butt-head?”

“Y/n! I’ve missed you so much, everybody around here is so boring, they don’t want to do anything fun! Come play with me, I’m so bored!” Loki hears you laugh, seeing you actually smile for the first time since you walked in the door. He watches as you dig your fingers gently into the girl’s ribs, making her giggle and dance away from you.

“Booger-brat, this is my boyfriend.” you say, trying to pull Loki up, but he smirks, going limp, pulling you down with him, making you laugh again. “Come- on- you stink head.” you growl, standing up and pulling his arm. “But the floor’s comfortable, Y/n. I don’t want to move!” he whines, and you roll your eyes, giving up.

“Well anyways, this annoying man is my boyfriend. Loki, this is Morgan, my niece. And Morgan, this is Thor, my co-worker. Thor, my niece.” you say, pointing at Thor.

You sit down on the couch, laying your head on Loki’s shoulder. You looked at the cards in your hand, smiling, as you laid down a +4, making Morgan groan as she picked up her cards.

The next day, you wake up from your sleep, Morgan jumping on your bed. “Let me sleep, dude. I had to drive for almost 2 days.” you say, pulling the covers up higher. “Nana says she wants you to get up or she’s going to come in here with a spray bottle.” Morgan says, pulling the covers back. “Oh, fun. Tell her I’ll take my chances for five more minutes of sleep.” You snuggle into Loki, making him hum.

Not even two minutes later, you get sprayed in the face with a spray bottle. “Get your lazy ass up, Y/n. We’ve been waiting on you for three hours.” You sit up, rubbing the water off your face. “Well then just open presents without me, Mother. I’ve been driving for nearly two days, I want to sleep.” More water, and you feel Loki sit up beside you. You glare at your Mom, who stalks out of the room.

“Fucking bitch, I hate her so much.” you mutter, crawling out of the twin bed. You pull on a pair of fuzzy socks from your suitcase. “What was that about?” Loki asks, and you hear the rage in his voice. “Oh, that was my loving mother’s way of waking me up. I told you she’s a bitch.” you say, pulling on clean clothes. “I’m starting to better understand why you hate her so much. At least you could leave.” Loki says, running his fingers through your hair.

“I’m sorry I’m complaining, it’s just- she made my life a living hell. You’ve seen how she treated me.” you say, remembering the nights Loki had soothed you from your nightmares, dulling the pain from the memories. “I’m just glad you’re not crying everynight, wishing for death.” Loki says, and you let a tear run down your face.

“I don’t know how I deserve you, Lokes.” you say, pulling your hair up into a pony tail. You hear pounding at your door, and you internally scream. “I’m coming, I’m coming! Jeez loise, give me a goddamn minute.” You pull your camera out of your suitcase, putting the batteries in and quickly going through the set up again.

Loki smiled, watching you laugh at your neice’s reactions to the presents you had gotten her. He watched as you snapped pictures of everything, including the ugly expressions on Patrica’s face when she opened the presents you had picked out for her. “Why would you get me something so ugly? You know what I wanted.” your mom says, and Loki bites his tongue when you pat his knee.

“That is very rude to say, Lady Patrica. At least your daughter got you something that made her think of you. You should be grateful that she is even here, taking time off of work to be here, and you are treating her like shit.” Thor says, and Loki looks at him, slightly shocked. Even you looked shocked, your camera slipping out of your hands. Loki closes your hands around it, and you grip both the camera and his hand tightly.

“Exscuse me? Who do you think you are, coming in my house and talking to me like that?” Patrica says, getting up from where she was sitting, putting the mug down. Then Loki saw what was on the cup.

“World’s worst Mother award goes to you!” Loki couldn’t help but snicker, making Patrica whip around her head to look at him. “Honestly, you call yourself her mother, yet you don’t act like one. She would have been better off staying in New York and opening presents with me and her boyfriend.” Thor says, standing up, showing the obviuos height difference.

“Tho- Thor, I think it’d be best for you to go outside. Mom, I’m so sorry, he has no filter on his words, he should not have said that, and he’ll leave right now if he knows what’s best.” You hissed the last part, and Loki could hear the way your voice wavered. Loki heard you take a deep breath as your mother turned to you, and he stood up, ready to defend you.

“You know what, actually, no. Because Thor’s right. You’ve treated me like shit all my life, and I’m not going to put up with it anymore.” you say, pushing all the presents from your mother away. “I’m done. I’m fed up, I’m pissed off, I’m beyond traumatized. You-” Loki turns to look at you, seeing you throwing the now opened present that had just been in your lap to the floor.

The contents were showing. A knife, and a note. “You are a disgusting human being. You don’t deserve happiness, you narcissistic bitch. It’s all ‘me me me!’ You never think about anyone else. You’ve nearly gotten me killed on multiple occasions! I’m DONE! I AM TAKING MY SHIT, AND LEAVING! SAYANARA, ADIOS, FUCK YOU!” Loki chased after you when you stormed off to the room you had slept in, grabbing your things.

Five minutes later, you were driving down the road, Thor and Loki silent, in awe of your outburst. You slowed down, pulling off the road into an empty lot. You stared out the window, tears running down your face.

‘I figured since all you talked about was wanting to die, I thought why not help you?’

“Darling?” Loki says, snapping you out of your daze. “What she did was wrong, and I’m very sorry. If you’d like, we don’t have to go back.” You feel Loki kiss your hand, and you sniff, leaning over after turning the car off. “Lady Y/n, I agree with my brother. What your mother did was evil, and I’m surprised that she raised an amazing woman, kind, caring, and so different from her.” Thor says from the backseat, and you smile.

“I’m just glad it’s over.” you say quietly, closing your eyes. “I’m very proud of you for standing up to her, Y/n.” You smile at Loki’s words, feeling a little better.

🎄

Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed this, as I wrote this instead of doing my project. I did finish it tho. Fingers crossed for a decent grade! 🤞 Let me know if you want to be tagged in any future posts, seeing as I'd rather type 50+ sentences for shitty fics instead of <4 per page for a test grade.

@vbecker10 @huntress-artemiss

#Loki #fluff #fanfic #loki fan fic #loki x you #loki supportive boyfreind

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rebelbyrdie · 1 year

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TW: Trauma, Medical Stuff...Storytime Rant

So for anyone not caught up with the drama that is my life, I was in the hospital for 33 days, but the story starts way before that. This is about to get personal so, yeah. This one is long and has a lot of details.

I have type 2 diabetes. I was diagnosed with PCOS at 20 and diabetes at 25 (on my birthday...total bummer). About 2 years ago I had a sore on my right foot. I thought it was just a cracked callous, but it would not heal. My wife (then girlfriend) took me to the walk-in clinic and then the ER. The ER diagnosed the wound as a diabetic ulcer and referred me to a podiatrist. We will call him Dr. B.

So I spend 2 years with Dr. B. I was there 1 to 2 times a month. He would use a scalpel to scrape off dead skin, give me creams and wrap my foot. I then developed a second ulcer on my left foot.

Now all this time we are slowly getting it smaller and better looking...until I lost my insurance when I switched jobs. I had to choose between going to my regular doc for diabetes and Dr. B. I chose Dr. B because I had open wounds that had to be seen to.

August 2022 the right foot gets infected. We immediately go to Dr. B. He takes XRays, gives me antibiotics, and assures me that I did nothing wrong, that these things happen with open wounds. He examined the xrays and assured me the bone was not infected (spoiler alert: it was). The infection clears up and all is well (it wasn’t).

Life goes on, I get married, go on honeymoon, have a nice Thanksgiving. Then I started to feel bad on my first day of my Christmas vacation. Fever, chills, general shittiness. I thought I had the flu. My right ankle and foot swelled, but I chocked that up to an old injury in that foot and the cold snap (we were in the teens in TN). I got through Christmas (I don’t remember much) but I wasn’t getting better.

I went to the walk in clinic. Negative for flu and covid. They said it was a stomach bug. At that point I was vomiting up everything I ate/drank. They gave me anti nausea meds and sent me home. The next day I was still vomiting despite the meds so we went to the ER.

At the ER I saw a doctor...I’ll call her Dr A. Dr A told me I had a gut infection of some kind and/or my gallbladder was infected. I told her about the ulcers and swelling, but she never examined my foot. THey did bloodwork and though my white blood cell count was higher than usual, they felt it was not something to worry about. A stronger anti nausea med and antibiotics and they sent me home.

On Dec 31st I was still sick with a high fever and other fun stuff. My mom came over, she looked at me, checked my leg and immediately took me back to the ER. Dr. A was on shift and she came to look at me again. She still advised it was my gallbladder. My mom made her look at my foot. Still swollen and now red. "Does this look like her gallbladder?!” I was finally admitted. It turns out I was sceptic. So I got IV meds and a lot of scans. They did an abdominal scan and sent the surgeon to examine my gall bladder. He was pissed and said that it was obviously my leg and a blood infection.

More scans revealed that I had a bone infection in both my left and right feet. I honestly don’t remember much about this part of things. I was kinda activly dying. THe small town hospital I was at could not handle my case so they sent me an hour away to a bigger hospital. I arrived in the evening, those surgeons (Dr G and Dr C) saw me in the morning and I was having my right leg removed that afternoon. Later they removed part of my left foot too (goodbye pinkie toe). After a week I was off to rehab. I did pretty well at rehab. Now I’m home.

Now there are some behind the scenes shenanigans. Remember Dr. B? Yeah it turns out that back in August I already had bone damage (from infection) in my right foot. Dr. C thought I’d had surgery on it. About 1/3 of the bone was already gone...destroyed by infection. I actually noticed that my pinkie toe looked odd on the xray and asked if it could be because I was developing a bunion and he said “maybe”. He cleared me on Dec 14th when I was definitely infected for sure and said he’d run my insurance for skin grafts to close the holes. When Dr C did my examination prior to surgery he was able to poke his finger through the wound and touch bone. That is called tunneling and it means that the wound was not just on the surface like I was lead to believe.

Either Dr B was wildly incompetent or totally negligent. If they had caught this in August or before (there is some evidence that I may have had bone damage the whole 2 years but that research is ongoing) then I may not have lost my leg and almost my life. After my amputation, Dr G told my mom and wife that the leg would have killed me even with the antibiotics. I had literally been on the brink of dying. I needed 2 post op blood transfusions.

So my wife thinks we should sue Dr B. I have never really sued anyone. I was sued once for a car accident when I was 18, but I’ve never really looked into medical negligence/malpractice. I, obviously, have a lot of medical bills. Also my house is small and currently navigating it is difficult. Not to mention lost wages and, well, pain and suffering. I don’t know if we have a case and I am still unsure it is a good idea to pursue it at all.

I was raised conservative with the whole pull yourself up by the bootstraps and walk it off mentality. So while I have educated myself as an adult, the knee jerk reactions of “lawsuits are get rich schemes by fraudsters or people too lazy to work” is still there.

I am still going to doctors, trying to schedule a counselor, and I will eventually need a prosthetic leg. Should I really sue the doctor? I thought about it a long and hard time and did some research. A small victory could help secure my and my family financially for at least a few years...but I don’t know. I had a lot going on and couldn’t afford many of my medications so my diabetes was not great. I am very aware that my decisions helped put me in this situation. I wasn’t on my meds properly, I wasn’t eating as well as I should have, and I didn’t do any 2nd opinions or anything. It wasn’t just Dr B’s fault, but I certainly feel that as a doctor he did not fufill his duties.

I am currently getting all the records, xrays and 2nd opinions I can get my hands on, just in case.

It is a lot and is kind of stressful. My life is forever changed. I am conflicted and I am a little bit scared. My 5 year plan has gone kabloom. Even if things turn out in my favor and I get money, things are still wildly off kilter for me.

Anyway. Doctors suck. Every nurse I spoke to bad-mouthed the American health system and my hospital food is still the worst.

#personal #trauma #medical #diabetes #amputation

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ladyniniane · 7 months

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Happy birthday to me!

I’m 27 now! Some musings below the cut.

So this last year was good…but also pretty hectic in some places? I’m happy that a solution has been found to my cat’s health problems.

The biggest change for me right now is that I’ve decided to leave my job. Long story short: they didn’t keep their promise of giving me a raise (and it’s almost impossible to get one). I’m fed up of not getting enough recognition and being just an expandable employee. Plus, my manager had been petty for no reason. So it was starting to take a toll on my wellbeing. To be honest, I’m going through all sort of emotions at this moment, sometimes I wonder if I made the right choice, but deep down I believe I did. It’s a big jump into the unknown and it’s a bit scary. But I will try to find a way. Beside, I can still be proud of my work achievements.

A year ago, I started taking driving lessons again after…4 years without driving. I was determined to get my driver’s license, but sadly I didn’t. I’m even more afraid of driving than I was before, because the exam was an extremely…unpleasant experience to say the least. Going back to driving and taking these lessons took a lot of energy and I feel kinda burned out when it comes to driving. Getting help isn’t easy, and even if I know that I sound like an emo kid, many people don’t really understand what I’m really going through. This experience leaves me a taste of failure, but we will see later.

A thing I’m proud of is writing. I’m able to write consistently and I did my best word count ever during NaNoWriMo in November 2022 and I did all the Camp NaNos. I’ve been able to move forward on many projects. I’ve also published stuff on the internet again, something I hadn’t done in 3 years. But, that’s where the disheartening part starts. My stories get (some) views, but barely any interactions (shout out to those who did interact, you’re axe some) I feel like I’m screaming in the void. I write for myself, but I also write to connect with other people, especially since I put a lot of time and effort in it. I know that it happens to many people and that at the end of the day I’m not entitled to anything. I hope that it doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of my stories, I think that it’s just that my audience isn’t there.

There were also many pleasing moments, travels, food, books and all the little nothings that make life beautiful. I’ve progressed at dealing with some doubts, traumas and anxieties even though some new stuff has taken their place (put a coin in the jukebox and whe start again?). That’s funny because when I turned 25, I thought that things would only go upward from this point on. Turns out that they’re still a little chaotic and that I still have many things to figure out (and that makes it even more sad for people who think everything is over at 25, come on, that’s just the beginning). Anyway, that’s just life, trying out stuff, making mistakes and at the end, maybe, find your place.

There are good things to come, I think, and right now I’m excited for the FE OC Week.

Anyway, happy 27th birthday to me! I’m happy to turn 27, I like this number and beside, every year imparts me with more wisdom and life experience. Which is good. And as Julian of Norwich wrote: “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well”.

#about me

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marshmallowprotection · 2 years

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Tw: alcohol

Hey Kait, could I please get some advice? I really don't know what to do... So, my friend is having a birthday party next week and although I really don't like hanging out with a group of people I don't know, I want to make her happy, so I always make sure to show up and at least try to act more or less engaged. She's turning 18 this year, so it's a huge occasion and she's really looking forward to this date. The thing is, I just found out that all 10 people that are going to be there are planning to drink. Like, really drink. Like, the whole 'party all night' drink. And that's... I'm really uncomfortable with that and idk what to do. Alcohol is a huge trigger for me + I can't drink anyway because of my antidepressants.

So I'm going to be the only one sober there. I feel like I'll upset and disappoint her if I just tell her the way it is... She's so happy while talking about this upcoming day and I feel like I'm a bad person for not wanting to go. These are people I don't know, and most of the time I get judged for being the only one not drinking, and it gets even worse if they find out that I'm flat out uncomfortable with the smell of alcohol and it makes my anxiety flare up. I mean, I don't want random people to know I have depression, because it's something very personal, but either way, I'm scared of being silently judged and left out.

I feel like I'll be a bad friend for not showing up because of all this. Everyone is okay with going and I'm the only one having this problem. Not to mention that I'm 3 years older than her, so it's considered completely unacceptable to not drink when you're my age. I live in a country where drinking alcohol is considered a norm and I've been made fun of so much because of my trauma associated with it. I really don't know what to do with myself here

It's okay. Alcohol isn't comfortable for me, either. I avoid it as much as I can, too.

I hate that there is a societal expectation to be okay with drinking. It's okay if you want to drink and if you do it in moderation, but nobody should be shamed for choosing to avoid it. You shouldn't have to explain or justify why you're not interested in drinking. I’m 25, and I have never had anything to drink because of personal trauma and because I simply don’t want to. However, just like you, I’ve heard this many times: “Just a sip, take a little sip!” and that’s not okay.

It's not cute to demand personal history or trauma from people to finally accept the "no". You shouldn't have to tell people why you're uncomfortable to be respected.

You don't owe anybody an explanation if you say no. You're allowed to just say no and it should be respectful. Nobody should be coerced into doing something that they don't want to do. They should not be forced into doing something because of peer pressure. If you say no, it should be the end of it. You said no, so no more asking if you want to try or do something.

I don't think it's great that you feel like she's going to be upset about this. A real friend would never ask you to do something that you don't want to do. A friend that understands and respects you will never ask you to do something that would hurt you in the long run. If somebody tells you that you're not their friend because you won't do something that could traumatize you further or trigger you, they're not your friend. They are definitely not your friend.

In fact, they shouldn't be your friend because friends don't do that to each other.

So, my advice in this situation is to be honest. Say that you're not interested in drinking and you’d rather celebrate her day with her later. It's her party so she can do anything that she wants to do, but that doesn't mean that you have to go along with it. Being friends with somebody doesn't mean that you have to put yourself in a precarious situation. If she is your friend then she will understand that this isn't something that's comfortable for you. If anybody says otherwise or makes you feel bad for saying these things, they're not your friend. You do not need friends like that.

You are not a bad person for having boundaries. If it's not going to be something that works for you, it's not going to work for you.

Do not go out of your way to make other people happy if it means that it's going to destroy you. Do not take the shirt off your back if you're not going to have a shirt to wear in the cold. You're not ruining anything. All you have to do is be honest. You don't have to explain everything if you don't want to, just say that you're not interested in drinking and that you'd rather celebrate with her in a different way on a later date. It's as simple as that. It doesn't have to be complicated.

You don't have to explain anything to your friend if you don't want to. Honestly, you could just say that you have a bad family history of alcoholism and you can leave it at that if you don't want to explain. There's no reason to add you're dealing with other problems with your mental health. But if you feel like you have to give something, that should be all of it. Just a bad family history. What's important is that your friend should respect your boundary. I'm terribly sorry that you feel like you have to do something even though it could make you uncomfortable.

#tw alcohol #mod kait #not mm

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alsjeblieft-zeg · 1 year

Text

088 of 2023

Just The Basics 1. How old are you?

32, soon to be 33.

2. Are you male, female, or ....?

Male.

3. What's your sexual orientation?

Gay, but asexual.

4. Where do you live?

Belgium.

5. Who do you live with?

My husband and two cats.

Family and Friends 6. Are you currently in a relationship?

I’m married.

7. Do you have any children or want any in the future?

No and no. I’m kinda stepdad to my husband’s son, and it’s enough to me.

8. How's your social life?

Pretty good. I have quite many friends.

9. How's your relationship with your immediate family?

Better than before. But I’ve always been close with my sister. And to my dad,

10. How has your eating disorder affected your social life/other relationships?

Not much, honestly. Things got better over time, but it’s not even related.

Interests and Hobbies 11. What are your hobbies?

Shortwave radio and other weird radio signals, photography, travelling.

12. What's your favorite TV show? Favorite movie?

I don’t really have favourites, and I find movies boring.

13. Do you like reading? If so, what's your favorite book?

I love reading, but I have too many favourite books to mention them all.

14. What's your favorite number?

16.

15. What's your favorite color?

Black and green.

16. What's your favorite animal?

Cat, hands down.

17. Do you have any pets?

Yeah, two cats.

18. How has your eating disorder affected the aforementioned areas of your life?

I don’t think it has affected them in any way.

Right Now 19. What's your mood right now?

Content and cheerful.

20. What's the last thing you did?

Went to Sint-Niklaas by train, took some photos, went to Ghent for shopping, came back by train.

21. What's the last thing you touched?

My laptop’s keyboard.

22. Who's the last person you talked to?

My husband. He picked me up by car.

23. What's the last thing you said?

“Food is ready”.

24. What's the last thing you ate?

Waterzooi.

25. What was the last thought that crossed your mind?

Probably M.

26. Turn to page 32 of the book nearest to you (if there is one within convenient distance) and type the first full sentence.

No, thanks.

27. If you're watching TV/something on your computer, what?

Hell’s Kitchen.

28. Is there anyone else in the room with you? Who?

Yeah, my husband and one of our cats.

29. Do you want them to go the fuck away?

Why would I?

30. What's in your purse right now?

I’m a dude. I use backpacks.

31. What are you going to do later today?

Chill out.

Life 32. What does an average day look like for you?

Taking the train and going anywhere. Tuesdays and Thursdays, working half days.

33. How has your eating disorder affected your average day as compared to before you developed it?

I don’t think it did in any way. It’s rather the source of my disorder that caused trauma and anxiety.

34. Are you in school or working? If so, what's your major/in what field do you work?

I do both. I have a degree in electrical engineering, and I’m doing yet another in Dutch language, but my uni is on hiatus now, due to my health issues. I work as an electrician in a big, French rail transport company. I produce electrical components and then install them in train carriages.

35. What's your dream job/what do you want to be when you grow up?

I love my job and I can’t imagine doing anything else.

36. Has your eating disorder affected school/work?

No, it hasn’t.

37. Eating disorder aside, what would your ideal life look like? Where would you like to live? Career? Family?

Except for health problems, I wouldn’t change anything about my life.

Diagnosis 38. Which eating disorder do you struggle with?

EDNOS.

39. Are you officially diagnosed with an ed or any other mental illnesses? If so, when were you diagnosed?

Generalised anxiety disorder and OCD. And with an ED, too.

40. Do you agree with your diagnoses?

Yeah, it’s pretty obvious I have anxiety.

41. Are you currently receiving treatment for your ed and/or related mental illness(es)? In the past?

Never for my ED, but I was taking antidepressants years before and this year I came back to them.

42. Are you on any medications?

Yeah, two different meds for epilepsy, fluoxetine for anxiety and blood pills.

43. Do your friends/family know that you have an eating disorder?

They might know, but not fully acknowledge it.

Getting Deep 44. Why do you think you have an eating disorder?

I know why. It’s trauma from sexual abuse.

45. If you're receiving treatment, what does your therapist/psychiatrist etc. say the reason behind your eating disorder is?

I’m not receiving treatment for this.

46. Do you like your eating disorder?

Honestly, I hate it.

47. If you like some aspect(s) of your eating disorder, which one(s)?

Getting invisible and bones sticking out.

48. What's the most inconvenient thing about having an eating disorder?

Everything else.

49. If you could switch the eating disorder you're currently struggling with, would you?

I would get rid of it.

Recovery 50. Are you in recovery? If not, do you want to recover?

No, but I want to recover.

51. If you're not currently in recovery or contemplating recovery, do you think you will in the future? If so, when?

In the future. Might talk about it with my psychiatrist.

52. If you're not in recovery, what's stopping you?

I keep my disorder on autopilot.

53. If you could wake up tomorrow and be cured, would you want it to happen?

Yeah, pretty much so.

Food 54. Do you actually like food?

Neither like nor dislike.

55. Do you like food more than sex?

I like everything more than sex. I have sex-related trauma.

56. What's your favorite non-eating disorder food?

Spaghetti.

57. What's your favorite eating disordered food?

Oatmeal. But I don’t categorise food like that.

58. If you could only eat five foods for the rest of your life, which ones would you choose?

Oatmeal, waterzooi, rice with veggies, yogurts and soups.

59. Do you like cooking/baking?

Cooking yes, baking not really.

60. Do you like going out to eat at restaurants? If so, do you have a favorite?

I do, but I do it rarely.

61. Have you ever worked in a food-type setting (grocery store, restaurant etc.)?

No, I haven’t.

Girls (or Boys) Gone Wild 62. Do you smoke cigarettes?

No, never even tried.

63. Do you drink caffeine? If so, what's your beverage of choice?

I do, but limited. I usually have caramel/vanilla latte.

64. Do you drink alcoholic beverages? If so, what's your poison?

Not anymore. I’m not allowed with my medication.

65. Do you use drugs of any kind? If so, which one(s)?

No, not interested.

66. Have you ever been arrested? If so, why?

No.

67. Have you ever been to jail?

No.

68. Do you have any tattoos?

Yes, two on my forearms.

69. Do you have any piercings?

Eight in total: 3x left ear, 2x right ear, 2x lower lip and left eyebrow.

70. Has your eating disorder affected any of these aforementioned areas of your life, decisions to partake in substances, or decisions to alter your physical body?

No. I always liked tattoos and piercings.

#survey #categorised survey #q&a survey #tw: eating disorders

0 notes

oviids · 3 years

Note

pls share some of your spn fic recs 🥺🥺

ok, a few things first:

followers and mutuals who do not have supernatural brainworms, kindly avert your eyes

i don’t normally rec or even read much fanfic any more but this is a CRISIS ok (cont.)

there is so. much. content for deancas out there and i have incredibly high standards, several ancient ao3 bookmarks, can speedread, and want to spare you guys the experience of wading through it all.

i also have a section for spn femslash since I was pretty into that back in the day (sadly a lot less fan content for this :/)

I don’t really like au’s or pure smut (I honestly usually just skim or skip those scenes) so if you’re mainly looking for that kind of thing this probably won’t be very helpful to you. jsyk.

i’m not great at describing stuff but i’ll do my best, i’ll also try and add tw’s when neccesary.

i wil try and keep updating this with any other decent fics i find, feel free to rec stuff too since i’m like 7 years behind.(edit 1/25/21) this is getting looooong so i’m going to start making another list on my spn blog rather than update this one

(edit 1/3/21) since this has gotten pretty long i’ve added rating/approximate word counts and marked my particular favorites with an asterisk.

Dean/Cas fic:

So Says The Sword*** - explicit/85k. FUCK its good...au/time travel where dean is not pulled out of hell by cas and says yes to becoming the michael sword. honestly could serve as an alternative to actually watching the show, if you want to get into dean/cas without actually doing that to yourself.

Fata morgana.* - teen/6k, pst s9 finale. very bela centric and i love it, she finds cas looking for dean in hell.

Redemption Road -misc/600+k. an incredibly long fic from a collaborative writing group back in the day. canon divergent from the end of s6 on, has a cool take on godstiel and the leviathans, as well as the lovecratian mythos connection. ngl when i reread it i only made it about 28% in but imo the casual reader can actually stop around there, the rest concerns a lovecraftian apocalypse that is still good (i think i don’t remember it very well) but not required to enjoy the first half. if you prefer i have an ebook version i can send you on gdrive.

Someone Who's Feeling For Me* - mature/45k, s12. they run into lisa braeden and dean thinks cas is into her while cas thinks dean still likes her. treats lisa way better than the show ever did and the miscommunication is pretty funny rather than annoying.

a turn of the earth - mature/95k. time travel fic where cas from s10 keeps showing up in deans life from a few years before s1 to right before the hellhounds take his soul. slow burn, good character study, and at one point cas punches the dad in the face and it rules.

On the Wings of War - teen/85k, canon divergent s5. dean accidentally becomes the Horseman of War. plays fun, fast and loose with biblical lore, michael has some rights.

Named - mature/95k, alternate s5. EXTREMELY blasphemous in a fun sexy way. manages to predict metatron almost to a T. there’s one major character death and its literally jesus christ, everyone is very sad about it and it sets the rest of the story rolling. an alternate interpretation of cas’ mission to raise dean from hell which had me on the floor. ngl its kind of misogynistic at points, but its from 2010 and tracks with late oughts-2010 spn (sorry anna the author did you dirty here:/).

The Girlfriend Experience - explicit/15k. uhhh i don’t normally rec or even read smutty stuff unless someone i know is specifically asking for it but this has stuff like sam trying to be a good ally and dean thinking holding hands with cas is ‘kinda gay :/’ minutes after having gay sex with him.

i crippled your heart a hundred times - explicit/19k, s8. cas confesses his feelings and dean spends a long time getting his head out of his ass about it. truly hits different after the actual confession, despite being written six years early it feels like its actually what could have gone down more or less if the writers weren’t talentless demons who hate us.

My Roots Take Flight** - mature/125k. reverse au where cas is a hunter and dean’s an angel...OR IS IT???? an alternate retelling of s4. tw for briefly being set in a psychiatric hospital/the hospital being mentioned somewhat frequently throughout the fic, plus more references to torture in hell and heaven than usual.

The One Thing You Can't Lose* - teen/4k.you know those posts about how cas is a super-strong super-tough ancient warrior but he just lets dean tug him around because he likes it? thats it thats the fic.

Hands, From Which All Things Are Built - teen/14k, post s8′s ‘goodbye stranger.’ cas is on the run with the angel tablet but keeps in touch with sam and dean by text, he and dean still manage to be terrible at Actual communication.

Autrement, Danger - or, The Account of an Exceedingly Long Day - mature/30k, post s11. a monster that takes the appearance of your soulmate leads to some wild miscommunications and dealing with years of repression, also dean gets to see cas’ true form which is always cool. tw for non-graphic mentions of underage sexual assault/sex work.

Down to Agincourt - mature/explicit/900++++k, endverse continuation. endverse!cas survives his encounter with lucifer and discovers another time-displaced dean from s7. i’ve only read the two of four parts but its really good, veeeeery slow burn, has a lot of fun oc’s and takes a rather surprising but (imo) entertaining and intriguing turn into Hellenic history and mythology. usual tw’s for endverse/endverse!cas but nothing graphic, it’s actually pretty light-hearted (relatively speaking of course).

Nothing Equals the Splendor** - explicit/8k, THEE finale fix it fic you’ve been waiting for! posits that the entire final episode was just a (very bad and lame) djinn’s vision.

like moses and batman and james dean - explicit/31k, post s8. explores dean’s trauma and internalized homophoba from his technically canon experience with sex work and its impact on his relationship with cas. the sex work itself isn’t really shown in any detail but it’s still a relatively heavy fic.

Crazy Diamonds - explicit/25k, s4/alternate s14. fresh-out-of-hell dean and dean from 10 years in the future are displaced from time and sent to each other’s present.

where the weeds take root - explicit/30k. au where the men of letters kick them out of the bunker and they accidentally move out into the country, get over their codependence and semi retire. featuring chicken coop building, sam volunteering at a dog shelter, gardening, and blissfully mundane domesticity.

No Resting Place - teen/6k. djinn dream fic, switches back and forth between cas’ dream of being married to dean and retired from hunting to the aftermath when he wakes up. tw for brief mention of suicide since, y’know, djinn dream.

any port in a storm - mature/52k. post s8 finale. cas and dean have to pose as a couple going through a rough patch for a case and actually deal with their emotional baggage, cas struggles with being human and metatron is up to stuff.

all this and heaven too* - explicit/7k. in the author’s own words ‘...a love letter to every trans person who ever projected onto Dean Winchester.’ absolutely unzipped me emotionally and theologically, its just. so good. tw for very brief mentions of internalized transphobia/dysphoria.

Because it is* - mature/6k, finale fix it. killing chuck does not bring back anyone back and the winchesters spend a very long time dealing with what they’ve lost, cas and dean SOMEHOW still manage to have signifigant communication issues even after the confession. tw for suicidal thoughts/brief attempt.

Vena Amoris and Other Old-Fashioned Bullshit* - teen/4k, s6. when cas fell for dean it automatically soulbonded/angel married them, shenanigans ensue when dean finds out during the angel’s civil war. funny and actually written back when s6 was airing so cas is still (or at least pretending to be) kind of an OP asshole which is fun.

Rinse, Repeat - teen/3k, s8. angsty character study of cas as he’s reprogrammed and trained to kill dean. not really dean/cas since its just cas’ pov of canon events but its beautifully written and ends with him snapping out of it through the power of love (also now a canon event!).

Emergence - explicit/59k, canon divergent after s11. dean meets a hunter he only recognizes as their friend claire novak’s missing father, but soon realizes he might be the answer behind the mysterious void in his memories and feelings (aka everyone’s memories of cas are completely wiped away for three years).

Cuckoo And Nest - explicit/10k, early established relationship/character study, cas tries to figure out how he fits into dean’s life and space in the bunker.

Build a Home* - teen/20k, canon divergent s12. sam and eileen are cute and turn the bunker into men of letters/hunters hq and everyone but cas moves in, mutual miscommunication issues and pining ensues.

Down in the River - teen/5k, early s8, cas prays to dean in purgatory while sam and dean try to figure out a way to get him out.

Teaching Poetry to Fish* - mature/52k, ?? BC through the entire series/canon divergent s14 and 15. retelling of crucial scenes throughout the shows timeline from cas’ pov, feat. actual fish and poetry.

the minor fall, the major lift - gen/4k, post confession/finale fixit. dean goes into the empty to save cas and runs into several old friends (and enemies).

With the Kisses of His Mouth* - teen/3k, gen later seasons. dean and cas keep kissing by accident.

Remaining Grace - explicit/109k, alternate s6. au where cas asks dean for help with raphael and dean, of course, does. tw for temporary major character death/semi-graphic depictions of alcohol withdrawal.

The face of heaven.* - teen/10k, au, dean is a regular guy and cas is a fallen star (think ‘stardust’, kinda).

Stories Are Made of Mistakes* - teen/5k. newly human cas has trouble getting used to a human body and humanity in general, but still figures out that he and dean are A Thing before dean does.

Hurry Up And Wait - mature/21k, canon divergent s12. a fairyland and quite possibly LOTR related case comes up and dean goes full fanboy, mary is introduced to the wonders of the peter jackson adaptions, many references and comparisons (including between cas and dean’s ‘friendship’ and arwen/aragon). also charle is still alive and has just been doing fairy stuff this whole time.

There Are Many Things - explicit/28k, s9. cas is extremely lonely/touch-starved and trying to figure out this whole human thing, as well as where he and dean stand after being kicked out of the bunker.

It's A Long Life to Always Be Longing - teen/40k, post s11 finale. amara helps dean by putting him in a magical coma so he can finally get some much needed rest and show him possible futures for him, sam and cas. meanwhile sam and cas go on a roadtrip (or several) to find componets for a spell to wake dean up. really good sam and cas friendship, they actually talk about their shared lucifer trauma and stuff.

Non-Photo Blue - gen/2k, s4/5/alternate s5. fifty moments from cas’ memories of dean.

Tall Grass - explicit/57k, canon divergent post series. cas becomes the ultimate plant dad. feat the wayward sisters gang, cathartic character growth, fun oc’s, domesticity, and lots of actual botanical info-dumping.

on vessels - no rating/gen/2k. established dean/cas, cas tells dean about how he used to imagine what it would be like to have him as his vessel.

search for tomorrow on every shore* - teen/11k, post-finale (extremely derogatory). some angels in jack’s new heaven act out and dean gets temporarily resurrected in 2003 and runs into his younger self.

Architecture of the Minotaur’s Heart - explicit/45k, very canon divergent post s1. dean’s new house seems to have a life and mind of its own, while in his dreams he sees glimpses of a world and apocalypse that never came to be and an angel that looks strangely like his mysterious neighbor, cas. loosely inspired by the book house of leaves (which i highly recommend for fans of weird horror).

The Distance Of The Setting Sun - explicit/17k, post s5. established dean/cas relationship, team free will finally takes advantage of cas’ abilities to go on vacation around the world.

diamond star halo - teen/5k, s11. dean lets cas use him as a temporary vessel while he recovers from rowena’s spell, sam is a long-suffering third-wheel.

Make Known** - teen/16k, s6/7. dean struggles to understand how cas could have become his enemy and whether he ever truly knew him in the first place.

blunt little instrument* - mature/1.4k, post finale. dean finally confronts his father in heaven, very cathartic.

my heart a compass*** - teen/10k, post confession. the empty forces cas to re-experience his most regretted moments while dean tries to snap him out of it and bring him home.

A Crash Course in Someone Else's History - teen/11k, s6. cas from the very start of s4 is brought forward in time by s6!cas to distract the brothers from his and crowley’s plans.

The Cuckoo Father - mature/8k, s7 au. the woman who found cas in the river post-leviathans does not marry him bc he was sent to her by god or whatever, but actually identifies him as jimmy novak and sends him back to claire and amelia.

The Dead Dean Clause* - teen/5k, post alt s5 ending. team free will celebrates surviving taking down lucifer by getting blitzed, cas lies to a cop and gets an impromptu driving lesson. title/description sound dark i know but it’s actually very funny and light.

Suck It, Judy Garland - mature/20k, s12 (after the ‘i love you...i love all of you’ episode). cas and sam have to pretend to be a couple for a case and dean is NOT happy about it.

By Daylight and In Dream - teen/16k, s5. pre-dean/cas, dean invites cas to use his dreams to hide from the other angels. tw for very brief mention of a memory/dream of alastair sexually assaulting dean.

The Five People You Meet in Heaven - mature/22k, post-canon. an actually happy (if sometimes bittersweet) heaven endgame written several years ago, though some details are rather eerily similar to the show’s ending.

heaven is a place on earth* - teen/2k. dean’s pov of some of the times cas left him behind throughout the show, and one alternate ending where he finally gets to stay.

I Cleanse The Mirror - teen/20k, alternate s6. dean’s body is stolen by an ancient elemental and his soul has to hitch a ride in cas’ vessel.

an exploration of gender; angelic*** - mature/4k. *oscar isaac voice* lets get into angel gender politics!! aka cas is trans.

Zenith - explicit/33k, s9. after 9x06 an angry witch curses cas with the ability to see supernatural beings and human souls.

La cucina. - gen/3k, alt s9. dean goes wild helping a newly-human cas find out what kinds of food he likes, or the early s9 domesticity we deserved!

Dean Winchester, Cocksucker at Rest***** - teen/7k, post-finale. john and mary finally come over for dinner and john reacts to dean/cas in a rather predictable fashion. SOOOOOOOOO good omg, its so funny and a little sad and very very cathartic. part of a series that has a few other really good short fics.

The Way You Didn't Go - teen/5k, s15. coda to 15.09, dean has nightmares about the moc!cas timeline.

On Drowning - teen/28k. dean saves cas after he nearly drowns, they both try and deal with the physical/mental fallout (aka the fic where thee iconic “you only touch me when you think I’m dead or dying” originates). tw for realistic depictions of drowning/triage/misc medical information.

The Thirty-Six Questions That Lead to Love* - mature/13k. claire has dean and cas pretend to be her gay dads for a case and they play the titular 36 question game, get mistaken for swingers, and birdwatch, among other things.

Assorted F/F stuff:

Deep Breaths* - mary/ellen, au where mary said no to azazel’s deal and let john stay dead, still becomes a milf.

Like Rebel Diamonds - krissy/claire, they become hunter gf’s on the hunt for cas to kick his ass for taking jimmy. not-so-stealth dean/cas as well.

To Ash and Bone - anna/ruby, same author as the previous fic (p much all of her stuff is good from what i recall). au where ruby is a witch and helps anna when she’s cursed.

Holy Clockwork Angels - jo/ruby, STEAMPUNK au with very cool worldbuiilding.

At Day's End - jo/anna (my fucking KINGDOM for more jo/anna content, the dean/cas parallels are allllll there), au where they are both at the camp in the endverse and gfs.

these posts - ok so not actually a fic but i’m now obsessed with this hannah/meg dynamic.

Tagelied - mary/ellen, the true story of how ellen got into hunting before angels interfered.

Hell's Bells** - meg/abaddon, alternate s8/9 where meg survives crowley’s attack with sam’s help and teams up with abaddon (who she has a sk year old crush on) to take back hell.

The Ecstasy of the Rose - anna/ruby, anna travels back in time to escape heaven and becomes a signifigant part of ruby’s old human life.

Angel Underground - anna/jo, kind of an urban fantasy au with a very intriguing premise (sadly its very short, i’d love to see more if this ‘verse).

Clover, Flame - billie/mary, billie was always the reaper that showed up to take mary after her death(s) over the years.

Drag Me To Heaven - anna/ruby, a variant on the ‘last night on earth’ thing with dean.

Come Home* - jo/anna, canon-divergent au where anna is the new waitress at the roadhouse and helps jo set up a (probably not really) haunted house for halloween.

#if you told me i'd be doing this in 2020 three weeks ago i'd have laughed in your face :/#deancas #supernatural #fic recs #spn femslash #destiel #fic #the alie tag #spn posting

2K notes · View notes

sephhaa · 3 years

Text

IMPOSTERS

*Art by: @sssabotagee outline/reference: unknown.

Pairing: Keith Kogane | Lance McClain | Klance

Summary:

With Covid-19 driving everyone to go into a global pandemic it begins a new era of media. Lance McClain is a 25-year-old live streamer with famous high school friends, Pidge and Hunk. It encourages his friend Hunk to invite him to an Among Us discord where he plays alongside Pidge’s Esports team. It brings about a new era for the gaming community as his videos begin to grow in numbers in little over two weeks.

Keith is a faceless YouTuber with too much to lose. He’s famously known amongst the gaming community for his silent gameplays of the popular game: VOLTRON. Garrison owned and awarded game of the year. Between keeping his identity hidden and trying to continue his career, he faces challenges he never thought would happen to him. Trying to deal with the media putting him under fire for something he didn’t do and dealing with a stalker, he turns to the one person he didn’t think he would find comfort in, Lance.

Now with a full-blown investigation underway, Lance’s own issues revolving around his family, both Keith and Lance come to an agreement. Being roommates in exchange for pretending they're in a fake relationship. At least until things die down. You know, like imposters. But in real life.

a/n; Finally posting my very first VLD fic!!! I’ve already posted the first five chapters on ao3 a day or two ago. It’s taken me time to post it here on tumblr cuz I’ve been busy ughhhhh it’s been a little stressful lately lol. Anyways! I’ll be bulk uploading this fic. If any of you know me or have read any of my previous content you guys would know I would write the entire fic before actually posting it. I mainly like that method of writing cuz I don’t want to stress myself out to force an update when I want to do the story justice and to it’s readers by giving them quality content. So! First 5 chapters are uploaded and then in a later date another 5 chapters will be uploaded and this cycle will continue until the end of the fic. Anyways! Enjoy! Beware of the tags cuz at some points of this fic it gets intense.

READ ON AO3

Chapters: // 1 // | // 2 // | // 3 // | // 4 // | // 5 // | // 6 // | // 7 // | // 8 // | // 9 // | // 10 // | 11 // | 12 // | 13 // | // 14 // | // 15 // | // 16 // | // 17 // | // 18 // | // 19 // | // 20 // | // 21 // | // 22 // | // 23 // | // 24 // | // 25 // | // 26 // | // 27 // | // 28 // |

Cover art is not mine!!!

#m.list #klancefic #klance #amongUsAU #SocialMediaAU #COVID-19AU #GamerAU #Voltron #voltron fanfic #ao3 #ao3fic #Lance Mcclain #Keith Kogane #Voltron characters #oc characters

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itsclydebitches · 3 years

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Hey Clyde, did you check out Wonder Egg Priority at all? The first ep is super promising, but the series as a whole is one of those real fascinating disasters from a story and a production standpoint that might be up your alley as a thing to pick apart haha.

I’d warn that it’s also reeeeal offensive and this generally gets worse as it goes though.

Hi, Phoenix! How are you and Cube doing?

Okay, I hadn't watched Wonder Egg Priority when I received your ask this morning. Now I have. In a fit of intense curiosity I settled down for a rare binge session and tore through all twelve episodes + OVA in a single sitting. It is now nearly 3:00am as I write this because I, oh so clearly, make fantastic life choices.

A question for you: what did I just watch?

The rest is going under a read more partly for spoilers, but more-so because WEP—and the summary I'm about to give, because I feel like I need to try and explain this to tumblr's faceless void for my own, dwindling sanity—comes with about every trigger warning under the sun. Seriously, if you are triggered by anything that we might think of as a "standard" trigger (meaning, not unique to you and your own experiences), best to proceed with caution.

Right! What the ever loving fuck happened in this show? Well, let's work through this chronologically. Two genius, frat boy brothers (I get their names mixed up so I'm not even gonna bother) are locked in their apartment and closely monitored because of Super Secret Science Research. Even though, I think, they're the ones who created this company. Not important! What is important is that they're bored enough to create an AI for funsies, thinking of her as their daughter and letting her name herself Frill. Frill is the perfect, cutesy, also genius child who has a habit of popping her lips — which the camera focuses on in an incredibly creepy fashion. One day Brother #1 (the hot one) falls in love with a random woman we know nothing about and Frill gets jealous.

"Jealous in a general sense?" you ask, thinking this show is in any way normal. "Like, just of her Dad giving attention to someone else?"

"No," I respond, patting your hand. "Jealous because she's in love with him." Which, beyond the subject matter itself, comes completely out of nowhere. Frill has a line about what you'd do if some woman stole your husband away. I, fool that I was, briefly considered that these two guys were lovers, not brothers. Oh no. They're brothers. Frill just considers Dad #1 to be her "husband."

So, in true evil AI fashion, she murders the wife, leaving only her newly born child behind. Who is a daughter.

Uh oh.

Dad #1 locks Frill in a coffin-esque hole in the basement and goes on with his life. Things are great! Until years later when the daughter reveals that she has fallen in love with her uncle (Dad #2 to Frill). She knows (somehow??) that both her dad and her uncle loved her mom, so if the loser uncle will just wait a few years he can marry her instead! He brushes her off, but the next day she’s found dead of an apparent suicide.

Realizing that this was somehow Frill’s doing, he marches down to the basement and confronts the murderous child they’ve had locked up for years. She’s now surrounded by screens in, again, true creep AI fashion. How did she get all this while she was locked up? Oh, just the three bug girls she created as friends prior to killing the wife. They’re devoted slaves, I guess. So the uncle says enough of this insanity and seemingly sets Frill on fire.

OH and Frill’s subtitled dialogue also puts “uncle” in quotation marks, implying that the daughter was always Dad #2’s??

Anyway, both brothers are now super obsessed with death and claim that they think Frill has had a hand in lots of girls’ suicides, even now after her own death. This is brought into question later when it’s revealed that they might have just concocted this scheme to try and bring back their daughter. I’m really not sure. Regardless, they use hand-wavey science to create eggs that I guess contain the souls of young girls who have committed suicide, then they sucker in other young girls who have lost people to suicide to try and rescue their loved ones in a dream world, saving others along the way. A tomboyish girl, Momoe, lost a classmate who admitted to loving her, but who Momoe rejected. Rika, a former junior idol, used and rejected an overweight fan only to learn later that she’d starved herself to death. Neiru, the 14yo president of some science company (yup) was attacked by her sister before she jumped off a bridge. Finally Ai, our protagonist, is a victim of bullying who managed to make friends with a single girl, Koito, who then jumped from their school building for unknown reasons. They’re all given the chance to bring these individuals back to life, provided they protect other victims of suicide by defeating the monstrous traumas that drove them to that act in the first place.

And you know what? That concept was great. However, the execution ranges from “Okay, that was pretty good for an anime. Kudos there” to “That’s the most offensive thing I’ve seen in my life.” Needless to say, unpacking all the battles they fight would take a lot more than this already absurd summary. Basically, if you can think of something horrible to happen to young girls (and one trans guy whose existence in that egg undermines the whole message of the episode), there’s an attempt to tackle it here.

During all this the four girls become friends and Ai works through her suspicions about Mr. Sawaki, a teacher at her school. What’s going on with Mr. Sawaki? Uh… everything! He’s somehow connected to Koito’s death, he’s dating Ai’s mom, and Ai apparently loves him too because her friends say so, even though this is never actually addressed and she barely interacts with him. It’s all quite the complication.

In time though the girls complete their “mission” of bringing their loved ones back to life. Rika and Momoe manage it first, only to find that Frill’s bug-girl lackeys have arrived to kill them. Why? Because that’s what Frill does, I guess. Momoe’s crocodile familiar (cute animals the girls were gifted to help them fight) takes a killing blow for her and the bug-lady then proceeds to carve up his corpse and force feed it to Momoe. Fantastic!! Building off of that, the next bug-lady who Rika encounters kills her turtle too, following in the footsteps of her bug-sister by, presumably, forcing her to eat parts of its head. Ai refuses to sacrifice her familiar to stay alive, but luckily the suicide she was protecting turns out to be herself from a parallel universe (that's a thing now!) and she takes the killing blow herself, which is done by pulling out the eye she’s sensitive about (she has heterochromia.) So parallel Ai passes on (again?) and the three girls don’t work through this trauma at all, instead becoming more traumatized through the realization that the loved ones they brought back no longer remember them. They’re alive, but the relationship they all had with them is dead.

It’s about this point that the main storyline wraps up and I’m relieved that there’s an OVA to finish things off. Surely they can somehow bring this all together in 45 minutes.

…25 minutes of that OVA is recap.

So with only about 20 minutes left, we learn that Neiru, the only one to not complete her mission yet, has mysteriously gone missing. It turns out she was an AI/clone/something all along, made to replace her sister and, presumably, that’s what caused the whole stabbing-suicide incident. She successfully brings her sister back, but stays behind in the dream world because Frill promises her she can become human. How is Frill here when she’s dead? How will Neiru become human? Isn’t Frill the “temptation of death” or whatever? There are no answers. A flashback finally reveals that Koito was having a relationship with a teacher at another school, he committed suicide, she transferred, she tried the same thing with Mr. Sawaki, he kept refusing her advances, and finally while threatening suicide to get his attention, she accidentally fell.

(So why was she in the suicide egg if it was an accident??)

Except, all this information comes through Mr. Sawaki himself, there’s a whole subplot about whether he’s really a villain, or if Ai is just making him into one, and this show might as well be titled How Much Pedophilia Can We Put into One Anime? So make of that what you will.

A dead character randomly shows up, but it's fine because she's actually just a version from a parallel world. How did she get here? Why is she here? Lol, it's cute that you think these are answered.

Rika, the character who cuts and almost committed suicide halfway through the show, breaks down saying how much she misses her dead loved ones, right after her friends refused to let her go on another mission that would surely end in her death and… that’s it. That’s all we get about her.

Momoe too, though she’s hopefully just vibing somewhere with that longed-for boyfriend.

Ai transfers schools and then one day randomly remembers that she loves Neiru and rushes back to start cracking eggs again because that will? Somehow?? Let her see Neiru???

When I say there are too many unanswered questions to possibly list here I really, really mean it.

Finally, in a personal attack on me, the protagonist with a name that is literally AI is not in any way an artificial intelligence.

And that’s it! Congratulations, you now “understand” WEP. And see, the funny thing is that the off-the-rails, bat-shit crazy aspects kind of catch you off guard? Yeah, the first episode is fantastic. In fact, I think I got through about six episodes thinking that this was a solid, if at times really messed up anime, but I was willing to shrug off a lot of stuff due solely to the amount of sensitive material they were attempting to cover (which is always quite difficult to do). Probably the only reason I was able to binge so fast was because the first half of the series was so engaging. The characters are charming. The animation is GORGEOUS. There's actually a ton of good here that is also worth yelling about. But then the plot comes in like a freight train and I was left staring dumbfounded at my screen as more and more insanity kept happening. Having watched the "explanations" I am now more confused about the show I just saw.

Phoenix, if you’ve bothered to read this rambling, 3:00am rant: thank you. I think? Idk if I should actually be thanking you or cursing you for tuning me into this, but it was definitely an experience, that’s for sure lol.

I'm off to bed now RIP the chance of having normal dreams ✌️

#mymetas

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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 3 years

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Religious Trauma Syndrome: How Some Organized Religion Leads to Mental Health Problems

By Valerie Tarico

Marlene Winell interviewed March 25, 2013

At age sixteen I began what would be a four year struggle with bulimia. When the symptoms started, I turned in desperation to adults who knew more than I did about how to stop shameful behavior—my Bible study leader and a visiting youth minister. “If you ask anything in faith, believing,” they said. “It will be done.” I knew they were quoting [3] the Word of God. We prayed together, and I went home confident that God had heard my prayers. But my horrible compulsions didn’t go away. By the fall of my sophomore year in college, I was desperate and depressed enough that I made a suicide attempt. The problem wasn’t just the bulimia. I was convinced by then that I was a complete spiritual failure. My college counseling department had offered to get me real help (which they later did). But to my mind, at that point, such help couldn’t fix the core problem: I was a failure in the eyes of God. It would be years before I understood that my inability to heal bulimia through the mechanisms offered by biblical Christianity was not a function of my own spiritual deficiency but deficiencies in Evangelical religion itself.

Dr. Marlene Winell is a human development consultant in the San Francisco Area. She is also the daughter of Pentecostal missionaries. This combination has given her work an unusual focus. For the past twenty years she has counseled men and women in recovery from various forms of fundamentalist religion including the Assemblies of God denomination in which she was raised. Winell is the author of Leaving the Fold – A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving their Religion [4], written during her years of private practice in psychology. Over the years, Winell has provided assistance to clients whose religious experiences were even more damaging than mine. Some of them are people whose psychological symptoms weren’t just exacerbated by their religion, but actually caused by it.

Two years ago, Winell made waves by formally labeling what she calls “Religious Trauma Syndrome” (RTS) and beginning to write and speak on the subject for professional audiences. When the British Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Psychologists published a series of articles on the topic, members of a Christian counseling association protested what they called excessive attention to a “relatively niche topic.” One commenter said, “A religion, faith or book cannot be abuse but the people interpreting can make anything abusive.”

Is toxic religion simply misinterpretation? What is religious trauma? Why does Winell believe religious trauma merits its own diagnostic label?

Let’s start this interview with the basics. What exactly is religious trauma syndrome?

Winell: Religious trauma syndrome (RTS) is a set of symptoms and characteristics that tend to go together and which are related to harmful experiences with religion. They are the result of two things: immersion in a controlling religion and the secondary impact of leaving a religious group. The RTS label provides a name and description that affected people often recognize immediately. Many other people are surprised by the idea of RTS, because in our culture it is generally assumed that religion is benign or good for you. Just like telling kids about Santa Claus and letting them work out their beliefs later, people see no harm in teaching religion to children.

But in reality, religious teachings and practices sometimes cause serious mental health damage. The public is somewhat familiar with sexual and physical abuse in a religious context. As Journalist Janet Heimlich has documented in, Breaking Their Will, Bible-based religious groups that emphasize patriarchal authority in family structure and use harsh parenting methods can be destructive.

But the problem isn’t just physical and sexual abuse. Emotional and mental treatment in authoritarian religious groups also can be damaging because of 1) toxic teachings like eternal damnation or original sin 2) religious practices or mindset, such as punishment, black and white thinking, or sexual guilt, and 3) neglect that prevents a person from having the information or opportunities to develop normally.

Can you give me an example of RTS from your consulting practice?

Winell: I can give you many. One of the symptom clusters is around fear and anxiety. People indoctrinated into fundamentalist Christianity as small children sometimes have memories of being terrified by images of hell and apocalypse before their brains could begin to make sense of such ideas. Some survivors, who I prefer to call “reclaimers,” [8] have flashbacks, panic attacks, or nightmares in adulthood even when they intellectually no longer believe the theology. One client of mine, who during the day functioned well as a professional, struggled with intense fear many nights. She said,

“I was afraid I was going to hell. I was afraid I was doing something really wrong. I was completely out of control. I sometimes would wake up in the night and start screaming, thrashing my arms, trying to rid myself of what I was feeling. I’d walk around the house trying to think and calm myself down, in the middle of the night, trying to do some self-talk, but I felt like it was just something that – the fear and anxiety was taking over my life.” Or consider this comment, which refers to a film [9] used by evangelicals to warn about the horrors of the “end times” for nonbelievers.

“I was taken to see the film “A Thief In The Night”. WOW. I am in shock to learn that many other people suffered the same traumas I lived with because of this film. A few days or weeks after the film viewing, I came into the house and mom wasn’t there. I stood there screaming in terror. When I stopped screaming, I began making my plan: Who my Christian neighbors were, who’s house to break into to get money and food. I was 12 years old and was preparing for Armageddon alone.”

In addition to anxiety, RTS can include depression, cognitive difficulties, and problems with social functioning. In fundamentalist Christianity, the individual is considered depraved and in need of salvation. A core message is “You are bad and wrong and deserve to die.” (The wages of sin is death [10].) This gets taught to millions of children through organizations like Child Evangelism Fellowship [11] and there is a group organized [12] to oppose their incursion into public schools. I’ve had clients who remember being distraught when given a vivid bloody image of Jesus paying the ultimate price for their sins. Decades later they sit telling me that they can’t manage to find any self-worth.

“After twenty-seven years of trying to live a perfect life, I failed. . . I was ashamed of myself all day long. My mind battling with itself with no relief. . . I always believed everything that I was taught but I thought that I was not approved by God. I thought that basically I, too, would die at Armageddon.

“I’ve spent literally years injuring myself, cutting and burning my arms, taking overdoses and starving myself, to punish myself so that God doesn’t have to punish me. It’s taken me years to feel deserving of anything good.”

Born-again Christianity and devout Catholicism [13] tell people they are weak and dependent, calling on phrases like “lean not unto your own understanding [14]” or “trust and obey [11].” People who internalize these messages can suffer from learned helplessness. I’ll give you an example from a client who had little decision-making ability after living his entire life devoted to following the “will of God.” The words here don’t convey the depth of his despair.

“I have an awful time making decisions in general. Like I can’t, you know, wake up in the morning, “What am I going to do today?” Like I don’t even know where to start. You know all the things I thought I might be doing are gone and I’m not sure I should even try to have a career; essentially I babysit my four-year-old all day.”

Authoritarian religious groups are subcultures where conformity is required in order to belong. Thus if you dare to leave the religion, you risk losing your entire support system as well.

“I lost all my friends. I lost my close ties to family. Now I’m losing my country. I’ve lost so much because of this malignant religion and I am angry and sad to my very core. . . I have tried hard to make new friends, but I have failed miserably. . . I am very lonely.”

Leaving a religion, after total immersion, can cause a complete upheaval of a person’s construction of reality, including the self, other people, life, and the future. People unfamiliar with this situation, including therapists, have trouble appreciating the sheer terror it can create.

“My form of religion was very strongly entrenched and anchored deeply in my heart. It is hard to describe how fully my religion informed, infused, and influenced my entire worldview. My first steps out of fundamentalism were profoundly frightening and I had frequent thoughts of suicide. Now I’m way past that but I still haven’t quite found “my place in the universe.”

Even for a person who was not so entrenched, leaving one’s religion can be a stressful and significant transition.

Many people seem to walk away from their religion easily, without really looking back. What is different about the clientele you work with?

Winell: Religious groups that are highly controlling, teach fear about the world, and keep members sheltered and ill-equipped to function in society are harder to leave easily. The difficulty seems to be greater if the person was born and raised in the religion rather than joining as an adult convert. This is because they have no frame of reference – no other “self” or way of “being in the world.” A common personality type is a person who is deeply emotional and thoughtful and who tends to throw themselves wholeheartedly into their endeavors. “True believers” who then lose their faith feel more anger and depression and grief than those who simply went to church on Sunday.

Aren’t these just people who would be depressed, anxious, or obsessive anyways?

Winell: Not at all. If my observation is correct, these are people who are intense and involved and caring. They hang on to the religion longer than those who simply “walk away” because they try to make it work even when they have doubts. Sometimes this is out of fear, but often it is out of devotion. These are people for whom ethics, integrity and compassion matter a great deal. I find that when they get better and rebuild their lives, they are wonderfully creative and energetic about new things.

In your mind, how is RTS different from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?

Winell: RTS is a specific set of symptoms and characteristics that are connected with harmful religious experience, not just any trauma. This is crucial to understanding the condition and any kind of self-help or treatment. (More details about this can be found on my Journey Free [15] website and discussed in my talk [16] at the Texas Freethought Convention.)

Another difference is the social context, which is extremely different from other traumas or forms of abuse. When someone is recovering from domestic abuse, for example, other people understand and support the need to leave and recover. They don’t question it as a matter of interpretation, and they don’t send the person back for more. But this is exactly what happens to many former believers who seek counseling. If a provider doesn’t understand the source of the symptoms, he or she may send a client for pastoral counseling, or to AA, or even to another church. One reclaimer expressed her frustration this way:

“Include physically-abusive parents who quote “Spare the rod and spoil the child” as literally as you can imagine and you have one fucked-up soul: an unloved, rejected, traumatized toddler in the body of an adult. I’m simply a broken spirit in an empty shell. But wait...That’s not enough!? There’s also the expectation by everyone in society that we victims should celebrate this with our perpetrators every Christmas and Easter!!”

Just like disorders such as autism or bulimia, giving RTS a real name has important advantages. People who are suffering find that having a label for their experience helps them feel less alone and guilty. Some have written to me to express their relief:

“There’s actually a name for it! I was brainwashed from birth and wasted 25 years of my life serving Him! I’ve since been out of my religion for several years now, but I cannot shake the haunting fear of hell and feel absolutely doomed. I’m now socially inept, unemployable, and the only way I can have sex is to pay for it.”

Labeling RTS encourages professionals to study it more carefully, develop treatments, and offer training. Hopefully, we can even work on prevention.

What do you see as the difference between religion that causes trauma and religion that doesn’t?

Winell: Religion causes trauma when it is highly controlling and prevents people from thinking for themselves and trusting their own feelings. Groups that demand obedience and conformity produce fear, not love and growth. With constant judgment of self and others, people become alienated from themselves, each other, and the world. Religion in its worst forms causes separation.

Conversely, groups that connect people and promote self-knowledge and personal growth can be said to be healthy. The book, Healthy Religion [17], describes these traits. Such groups put high value on respecting differences, and members feel empowered as individuals. They provide social support, a place for events and rites of passage, exchange of ideas, inspiration, opportunities for service, and connection to social causes. They encourage spiritual practices that promote health like meditation or principles for living like the golden rule. More and more, non-theists are asking [18] how they can create similar spiritual communities without the supernaturalism. An atheist congregation [19] in London launched this year and has received over 200 inquiries from people wanting to replicate their model.

Some people say that terms like “recovery from religion” and “religious trauma syndrome” are just atheist attempts to pathologize religious belief.

Winell: Mental health professionals have enough to do without going out looking for new pathology. I never set out looking for a “niche topic,” and certainly not religious trauma syndrome. I originally wrote a paper for a conference of the American Psychological Association and thought that would be the end of it. Since then, I have tried to move on to other things several times, but this work has simply grown.

In my opinion, we are simply, as a culture, becoming aware of religious trauma. More and more people are leaving religion, as seen by polls [20] showing that the “religiously unaffiliated” have increased in the last five years from just over 15% to just under 20% of all U.S. adults. It’s no wonder the internet is exploding with websites for former believers from all religions, providing forums [21] for people to support each other. The huge population of people “leaving the fold” includes a subset at risk for RTS, and more people are talking about it and seeking help. For example, there are thousands of former Mormons [22], and I was asked to speak about RTS at an Exmormon Foundation conference. I facilitate an international support group online called Release and Reclaim [23] which has monthly conference calls. An organization called Recovery from Religion, [24] helps people start self-help meet-up groups

Saying that someone is trying to pathologize authoritarian religion is like saying someone pathologized eating disorders by naming them. Before that, they were healthy? No, before that we weren’t noticing. People were suffering, thought they were alone, and blamed themselves. Professionals had no awareness or training. This is the situation of RTS today. Authoritarian religion is already pathological, and leaving a high-control group can be traumatic. People are already suffering. They need to be recognized and helped. _______________________________

Statistics update:

Numbers of American ‘nones’ continues to rise

October 18, 2019

By David Crary – Associated Press

The portion of Americans with no religious affiliation is rising significantly, in tandem with a sharp drop in the percentage that identifies as Christians, according to new data from the Pew Research Center. …

Pew says all categories of the religiously unaffiliated population – often referred to as the “nones” grew in magnitude. Self-described atheists now account for 4% of U.S. adults, up from 2% in 2009; agnostics account for 5%, up from 3% a decade ago; and 17% of Americans now describe their religion as “nothing in particular,” up from 12% in 2009.

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2019/1018/Numbers-of-American-nones-continues-to-rise

_______________________________

Marlene Winell interviewed by Valerie Tarico on recovering from religious trauma Uploaded on January 31, 2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIfABmbqSMA

24:12

On Moral Politics, a TV program with host Dr. Valerie Tarico, Marlene Winell describes the trauma that can result from harmful experiences with religious indoctrination. Dr. Winell explains that mental health issues are widespread and need to be understood just as we understand PTSD. There are steps to recovery, treatment modalities, and resources available as well. She now refers to this as RTS or Religious Trauma Syndrome. _______________________________

Links:   [3] https://www.biblestudyonjesuschrist.com/pog/ask1.htm  [4] https://marlenewinell.net/leaving-fold-former  [8] https://journeyfree.org/article/reclaimers/  [9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thief_in_the_Night_%28film%29  [10] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+6%3A23&version=KJV  [11] https://valerietarico.com/2011/02/04/our-public-schools-their-mission-field/  [12] http://www.intrinsicdignity.com/  [13] https://www.maryjohnson.co/an-unquenchable-thirst/  [14] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs+3%3A5-6&version=KJV [15] https://journeyfree.org/category/uncategorized/ [16] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qrE4pMBlis  [17] https://www.amazon.com/Healthy-Religion-Psychological-Guide-Mature/dp/1425924166 [18] https://www.humanistchaplaincy.org/ [19] https://www.christianpost.com/news/london-atheist-church-model-looking-to-expand-worldwide-91516 [20] https://www.pewforum.org/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise/  [21] https://new.exchristian.net/  [22] https://www.exmormon.org/  [23] https://journeyfree.org/group-forum/ [24] https://www.recoveringfromreligion.org/

_____________________________________

Get God’s Self-Appointed Messengers Out of Your Head

Valerie Tarico Which buzz phrases from your past are stuck in your brain? “God’s messengers” were all real complicated people with biases, blind spots, favorite foods and morning breath. They were not gods and they are not you. So how can you get them out of your head or at least reduce them to muffled background noise?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElfyYA420F0

#religious trauma syndrome #Marlene Winell #Valerie Tarico

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popculty · 3 years

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52 Films by Women: 2020 Edition

Another annual challenge complete!

Last year, I focused on diversifying my list. This year I kept that intention but focused on watching more non-American films and films from the 20th century. Specifically, I sought out Agnès Varda’s entire filmography, after her death in 2019. (I was not disappointed - What a filmmaking legend we lost.)

I also kept a film log for the first time and have included some of my thoughts on several films from that log. I made a point of including reviews both positive and negative, because I think it’s important to acknowledge the variability and breadth of the canon, so as not to put every film directed by a woman on a pedestal. (Although movies directed by women must clear a much higher bar to be greenlit, meaning generally higher quality...But that’s an essay for another day :)

* = directed by a woman of color

bold = fave

1. The Rhythm Section (2020) dir. Reed Morano - Not as good as it could have been, given Morano’s proven skill behind the camera, but also not nearly as bad as the critics made it out to be. And unbelievably refreshing to see a female revenge story not driven by sexual assault or the loss of a husband/child.

2. Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962) dir. Agnès Varda - If you ever wanted to take a real-time tour of Paris circa 1960, this is the film for you.

3. Little Women (2019) dir. Greta Gerwig - Still my favorite Little Women adaptation. I will re-watch it every year and cry.

4. Varda by Agnès (2019) dir. Agnès Varda & Didier Rouget

5. Booksmart (2019) dir. Olivia Wilde - An instant classic high school comedy romp that subverts all the gross tropes of its 1980s predecessors.

6. Girls of the Sun (2018) dir. Eva Husson

7. Blue My Mind (2017) dir. Lisa Brühlmann

8. Portrait of a Lady On Fire (2019) dir. Céline Sciamma - Believe the hype. This film is a master thesis on the female gaze, and also just really effing gorgeous.

9. Belle Epine (2010) dir. Rebecca Zlotowski

10. Vamps (2012) dir. Amy Heckerling - With Krysten Ritter and Alicia Silverstone as modern-day vampires, I was so ready for this movie. But it feels like a bad stage play or a sit-com that’s missing a laugh-track. Bummer.

11. *Birds of Prey (2020) dir. Cathy Yan - Where has this movie been all our lives?? Skip the next onslaught of Snyder-verse grim-darkery and give me two more of these STAT!

12. She’s Missing (2019) dir. Alexandra McGuinness

13. The Mustang (2019) dir. Laure de Clermont-Tonnere - Trigger warning for the “protagonist” repeatedly punching a horse in the chest. I noped right out of there.

14. Monster (2003) dir. Patty Jenkins – I first watched this movie when I was probably too young and haven’t revisited it since. The rape scene traumatized me as a kid, but as an adult I appreciate how that trauma is not the center of the movie, or even of Aileen’s life. Everyone still talks about how Charlize “went ugly” for this role, but the biggest transformation here isn’t aesthetic, it’s physical – the way Theron replicates Wuernos’ mannerisms, way of speaking, and physicality. That’s why she won the Oscar. I also love that Jenkins calls the film “Monster” (which everyone labels Aileen), but then actually uses it to tell the story of how she fell in love with a woman when she was at her lowest, and that saved her. That’s kind of beautiful, and I’m glad I re-watched it so that I could see the story in that light, instead of the general memory I had of it being a good, feel-bad movie. It’s so much more than that.

15. Water Lilies (2007) dir. Céline Sciamma – Sciamma’s screenwriting and directorial debut, the first in her trilogy on youth, is as painfully beautiful as its sequels (Tomboy and Girlhood). It’s also one of the rare films that explores the overlap of queerness and girl friendships.

16. The Trouble with Angels (1966) dir. Ida Lupino – Movies about shenanigan-based female friendships are such rare delights. Rosalind Russel is divine as Mother Superior, and Hayley Mills as “scathingly brilliant” as the pranks she plays on her. Ida Lupino’s skill as an editor only enhances her directing, providing some truly iconic visual gags to complement dialogue snappy enough for Gilmore Girls.

17. Vagabond (1985) dir. Agnès Varda – Shot with a haunting realism, this film has no qualms about its heroine’s inevitable, unceremonious death, which it opens with, matter-of-factly, before retracing her final (literal) steps to the road-side ditch she ends up in. (I’m partly convinced said heroine was the inspiration for Sarah Manning in Orphan Black.)

18. One Sings, The Other Doesn’t (1977) dir. Agnès Varda – Probably my favorite classic Varda, this film feels incredibly personal. It’s essentially a love story about two best friends with very different lives. For an indie made in the ‘70s, the diversity, scope, and themes of the film are impressive. Even if the second half a drags a bit, the first half is absolute perfection, engaging the viewer immediately, and clipping along, sprinkling in some great original songs that were way progressive for their time (about abortion, female bodily autonomy, etc) and could still be considered “bangers” today.

19. Emma (2020) dir. Autumn de Wilde

20. Black Panthers (1969) dir. Agnès Varda

21. Into the Forest (2016) dir. Patricia Rozema - When the world was ending (i.e. the pandemic hit) this was the first movie I turned to - a quiet, meditative story of two sisters (Elliot Page and Evan Rachel Wood) surviving off the land after a sudden global blackout. Four years later, it’s still one of my favorite book-to-screen adaptations. I fondly remember speaking with director Patricia Rozema at the 2016 Chicago Critics Film Festival after a screening, her love for the source material and desire to “get it right” so apparent. I assured her then, and reaffirm now, that she really did.

22. City of Trees (2019) dir. Alexandra Swarens

23. Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) dir. Eliza Hittmann - To call this a harrowing and deeply personal journey of a sixteen-year-old who must cross state lines to get an abortion would be accurate, but incomplete. It is a story so much bigger than that, about the myriad ways women’s bodies and boundaries are constantly violated.

24. Paradise Hills (2019) dir. Alice Waddington

25. *Eve’s Bayou (1996) dir. Kasi Lemmons – I’ve been meaning to watch Kasi Lemmons’ directorial debut for many years now, and I’m so glad I finally have, because it fully deserves its icon status, beyond being one of the first major films directed by a black woman. Baby Jurnee Smollett's talent was immediately recognizable, and she has reminded us of it in Birds of Prey and Lovecraft Country this year. If merit was genuinely a factor for Oscar contenders, she would have taken home gold at eleven years old. Beasts of the Southern Wild has been one of my all-time favorites, but now I realize that most of my appreciation for that movie actually goes to Lemmons for blazing the trail with her story of a young black girl from the bayou first. It’s also a surprisingly dark story about memory and abuse and familial relationships that cross lines - really gutsy and surprising themes, especially for the ‘90s.

26. Blow the Man Down (2019) dir. Bridget Savage Cole & Danielle Krudy - Come and get your sea shanty fix!

27. Touchy Feely (2013) dir. Lynn Shelton - R.I.P. :(

28. Hannah Gadsby: Douglas (2020) dir. Madeleine Parry - If you thought Gadsby couldn’t follow up 2018′s sensational Nanette with a comedy special just as sharp and hilarious, you would have been sorely mistaken.

29. Girlhood (2013) dir. Céline Sciamma

30. Breathe (2014) dir. Mélanie Laurent

31. *A Dry White Season (1989) dir. Euzhan Palcy

32. Laggies (2014) dir. Lynn Shelton

33. *The Old Guard (2020) dir. Gina Prince-Bythewood – Everything I’ve ever wanted in an action movie: Immortal gays, Charlize Theron wielding a labrys (battle axe), kinetic fight choreography I haven’t seen since the last Bond movie…Watched it twice, then devoured the comics it was adapted from, and I gotta say: in the hands of black women, it eclipses the source material. Cannot wait for the just-announced sequel.

34. Morvern Callar (2002) dir. Lynn Ramsay

35. Shirley (2020) dir. Josephine Decker

36. *Radioactive (2019) dir. Marjane Satrapi – The story is obviously well worth telling and the narrative structure – weaving in the future consequences of Curie’s discoveries – is clever, but a bit awkwardly executed and overly manipulative. There are glimpses of real brilliance throughout, but it feels as if the director’s vision was not fully realized, to my great disappointment. Nonetheless, I appreciated seeing Marie Curie's story being told by a female director and embodied by the always wonderful Rosamund Pike.

37. *The Half of It (2020) dir. Alice Wu - I feel like a real scrooge for saying this, but this movie did nothing for me. Nothing about it felt fresh, authentic or relatable. A real disappointment from the filmmaker behind the wlw classic Saving Face.

38. Mouthpiece (2018) dir. Patricia Rozema - I am absolutely floored. One of those films that makes you fall in love with the art form all over again. Patricia Rozema continues to prove herself one of the most creatively ambitious and insightful directors of our time, with this melancholic meditation on maternal grief and a woman’s duality.

39. Summerland (2020) dir. Jessica Swale - The rare period wlw love story that is not a) all-white or b) tragedy porn. Just lovely.

40. *The Last Thing He Wanted (2020) dir. Dee Rees – As rumored, a mess. Even by the end, I still couldn’t tell you who any of the characters are. Dee, we know you’re so much better than this! (see: Mudbound, Pariah)

41. *Cuties (2020) dir. Maïmouna Doucouré – I watched this film to 1) support a black woman director who has been getting death threats for her work and 2) see what all the fuss is about. While I do think there were possibly some directorial choices that could have saved quite a bit of the pearl-clutching, overall, I didn’t find it overly-exploitative or gross, as many (who obviously haven’t actually watched the film) have labeled it. It certainly does give me pause, though, and makes me wonder whether children can ever be put in front of a camera without it exploiting or causing harm to them in some way. It also makes one consider the blurry line between being a critique versus being an example. File this one under complicated, for sure.

42. A Call to Spy (2019) Lydia Dean Pilcher – An incredible true story of female spies during WWII that perfectly satisfied my itch for British period drama/spy thriller and taught me so much herstory I didn’t know.

43. Kajillionaire (2020) dir. Miranda July - I was lucky enough to attend the (virtual) premiere of this film, followed by an insightful cast/director Q&A, which only made me appreciate it more. July's offbeat dark comedy about a family of con artists is queerer and more heartfelt than it has any right to be, and a needed reprieve in a year of almost entirely white wlw stories. The family's shenanigans are the hook, but it's the budding relationship between Old Dolio (an almost unrecognizable Evan Rachel Wood) and aspiring grifter Melanie (the luminous Gina Rodriguez) that is the heart of the story.

44. Misbehaviour (2020) dir. Philippa Lowthorpe – Again, teaching me herstory I didn’t know, about how the Women’s Liberation Movement stormed the 1970 Miss World Pageant. Keira Knightley and Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s characters have a conversation in a bathroom at the end of the film that perfectly eviscerates well-meaning yet ignorant white feminism, without ever pitting women against each other - a feat I didn’t think was possible. I also didn’t think it was possible to critique the male gaze without showing it (*ahem Cuties, Bombshell, etc*), but this again, invents a way to do it. Bless women directors.

45. *All In: The Fight for Democracy (2020) dir. Liz Garbus and Lisa Cortes – 2020’s 13th. Thank god for Stacey Abrams, that is all.

46. *The 40-Year-Old Version (2020) dir. Radha Blank – This scene right here? I felt that in my soul. This whole film is so good and funny and heartfelt and relatable to any artist trying to walk that tightrope of “making it” while not selling their soul to make it. My only initial semi-note was that it’s a little long, but after hearing Radha Blank talk about how she fought for the two-hour run-time as a way of reclaiming space for older black women, I take it back. She’s right: Let black women take up space. Let her movie be as long as she wants it to be. GOOD FOR HER.

47. Happiest Season (2020) dir. Clea Duvall - Hoooo boy. What was marketed as the first lesbian Christmas rom-com is actually a horror movie for anyone who’s ever had to come out. Throw in casual racism and a toxic relationship treated as otp, and it’s YIKES on so many levels. Aubrey Plaza, Dan Levy, and an autistic-coded Jane are the only (underused) highlights.

48. *Monkey Beach (2020) dir. Loretta Todd

49. *Little Chief (2020) dir. Erica Tremblay – A short film part of the 2020 Red Nation Film Festival, it’s a perfect eleven minutes that I wish had gone on longer, if only to bask in Lily Gladstone in a leading role.

50. First Cow (2019) dir. Kelly Reichardt – I know Kelly Reichardt’s style, so I’ll admit-- even as I was preparing for an excellent film, I was also reaching for my phone, planning on only half paying attention during all the inevitable 30-second shots of grass blowing in the wind. (And yes, there are plenty of those.) But twenty minutes in, my phone was set aside and forgotten, as I am getting sucked into this beautiful story about two frontiersman trying to live their best domestic life.There is only one word to describe this film and that is: PURE. I’ve never seen such a tender platonic relationship between men on screen before, and it’s not lost on me that it took a woman to show us that tenderness. Reichardt gives us two men brought together by fate, and kept together by a shared dream and the simple pleasure of not being alone in such a hard world; two men who spend their days cooking, trapping, baking, and dreaming of a better life; two men who don’t say much, but feel everything for each other. The world would be a much better place if men showed us this kind of vulnerability and friendship toward each other. Oh, and it’s also a brutal take-down of capitalism and the myth of the American Dream!

51. Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) dir. Patty Jenkins - My most-anticipated film for the past two years was...well, a mixed bag, to say the least. Too many thoughts on it for a blog post, so stay tuned for the upcoming podcast ep where we go all in ;)

52. *Selah and the Spades (2019) dir. Tayarisha Poe

I hope this gives you some ideas to kick off your new year with a resolution to support more female directors!

What were your favorite women-directed movies of last year? Let me know in the tags, comments, or asks!

#finally finished this #52 films by women #2020 #writing #movies #movie reviews #orig

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winterscaptain · 4 years

Note

i loved hotch’s top 3 parent moments, but what are his top 3 most defeated moments & how do the kids/mom help him cope/feel better

ooooh these got REALLY long so they’re going under a cut (they’re basically three drabbles so i included the ajf tag list (whoops))

a joyful future masterlist

aaron comes back home from very long day full of infuriating people and politics, and isaac has left everything all over the living room floor. he trips on something (probably shoes) and breaks. he doesn’t get mean or anything, but his bark is definitely harsher than he intended. isaac is so so upset, and he holes himself up in his room. aaron feels awful, instantly. mom runs interference, and spends some time in the dark with isaac so he can calm down with minimal stimulus. when isaac is ready, mom goes back into the living room and finds aaron distraught, his head in his hands.

“i promised myself i wasn’t going to become my father.”

mom just wraps around him like a koala and is like “you’re not. you just had a bad day. for god’s sake, jack snapped at me over something ridiculous yesterday, and isaac and soph got into a knock-down drag-out fight last week about a puzzle while caro was simultaneously throwing a tantrum about fruit snacks. we’re all allowed to have bad days, and you can make it right. he’s a smart kid - just tell him what’s going on and remind him that you’re not upset with him and that you love him.”

aaron goes to isaac’s door, knocks, and waits for isaac to tell him he can come in. aaron sits at the foot of his bed, waiting. they sit in the dark for a long time, and isaac eventually crawls into aaron’s lap. his dad tells him everything that happened in his day at work, and rounded it all off with “it was wrong of me to get upset with you, little man. it wasn’t your fault, and i love you more than anything, all the time, no matter what. i’m so sorry, and i hope you can forgive me.”

“i can.”

mom walks in later to find them asleep, aaron propped against the headboard with his ankles crossed, isaac sprawled across his chest.

when the girls are older, maybe 14 or 15, he puts his foot down about an out-of-town concert with a friend and their older brother. the concert is a few days away, and sophia mentions it over dinner.

without really meaning to, he goes into full drill sergeant mode and gets a little too specific about all the things that could go wrong. it was very clear in the moment that the topic was not up for discussion, that he was not under any circumstances going to allow the girls to go to a concert a couple hours away with only a nineteen year-old college sophomore as a supervisor.

it turns into one of those “i hate you you never let me do anything” teenager moments. sophia gets up and shuts herself in the garage with the treadmill and runs until she’s tired, showering and going straight into her room without a word or glance in his direction. caroline really quietly sets her napkin on the table, and leaves out the back door, headed for the porch swing that faces the back of the property. she, too, goes to bed without saying goodnight.

mom doesn’t say anything in the moment, and they finish dinner with the boys (isaac, now 16 or 17, and elliot, now 10 or 11) and get them ready to wind down for the night. when they settle into bed, he starts to doubt himself.

“i was too hard on them, wasnt i?”

before mom can answer, aaron gets a call from jack (now 26 or 27) on his cell. he tells him that sophia tattled to him about the concert, and he didnt mention this to them, but he’d be okay taking the day off work to take them and their friends, and even find a spot to stay overnight so they aren’t out driving late.

mom eavesdrops. aaron tells jack to hold on a second, and mutes him. mom says that would be a good compromise and reminds him that they aren’t little anymore, and they can mostly fend for themselves (thanks to a few weeks’ worth of self-defense with derek over the summer). “i know it’s hard, honey. i can’t say i’m wild about it either, but if jack goes, i’d feel a lot better about that than the alternatives.”

he sighs, kisses her, and tells jack that would be alright. “i’ll go down the hall and tell them.”

“have some sucking up to do, old man?”

aaron just rolls his eyes and hangs up before walking down the hall. he knocks on the door, and two flat “what”s come from the other side of the door. he opens it, and finds caroline and sophia facing each other from their beds on either side of the room. he could tell they were talking shit, the set of their mouths giving them away.

they’re looking at him like he’s goddamn war criminal. he pulls caro’s desk chair and sits backward on it in between the ends of their beds. “your brother has very graciously offered to take friday off of work to take you and your friends to the concert and spend the night in norfolk with you.”

“so, you’re letting us go?”

he tries not to let the biting resentment in sophia’s tone get to him. “i am. i’m sorry for coming down hard on you at dinner. it was wrong of me, and i understand that it could feel like i don’t trust your judgement. i do.” he looks at them each in turn. “it just freaks me out a little that you’re getting older a lot faster than i thought you would.”

caro’s lip wobbles, and she throws her covers back and crosses to him, giving him a hug. “thank you. we’ll be good, i promise.”

“i know, my little love.”

it takes him a little while to get back into sophia’s good graces, but when he picks them up from jack’s apartment at the end of the weekend, she can’t stop talking about how much fun she had. he’s pretty sure he’s forgiven.

its when he first starts dating mom that jack starts to act out. he’s usually a really well-tempered kid, but sometimes he’d snap at her or withdraw and it made her feel awful. there were definitely a couple of nights were he’d snap at her over something small and she would retreat to the back bedroom to take a minute. it wore on aaron to tell her that she wasn’t an imposition, that she wasn’t replacing haley, that she isn’t his second choice or ‘the backup’

they both have this moment of total defeat - they’ve known each other for so long, and jack has known her most of his life, but the change in relationship status really brought up a lot of stuff for the kiddo.

mom comes around faster, learning to understand that jack is just adjusting and having trouble with the idea that there’s a semi-permanent female figure in his life, and that his dad’s attention is divided. thus, when aaron inevitably breaks down about it, she’s there.

“i feel selfish. maybe i shouldn’t have -”

“aaron. we are doing everything we can to make this an easy adjustment for him, but it’s difficult.”

“but nothing’s changed! you’ve been here for five years.”

“love, everything’s changed, and we’ve only been dating for a couple of months. that’s a lot for someone who’s barely seven. you’re not selfish, you’re not a bad parent. you haven’t made a bad judgement call. he’s just really young and is having trouble handling these very big changes in his home landscape.”

so aaron finds a therapist for jack to see twice a week, figuring it was a good idea anyway with all the trauma he may or may not remember. it’s still sucky for a while, but as jack starts implementing the coping mechanisms he learns and mom takes on a role closer to a peer or friend than a parent, things get a lot easier.

tagging: @arganfics @quillvine @stxrryspencer @agenthotchner @wandaswitxh @hurricanejjareau @fics-ilike @ange-must-die @ughitsbaby @rousethemouse @criminalsmarts @dr-reid-ismyspiritanimal @shrimpyblog @genevievedarcygranger @ssaic-jareau @good-heavens-chris-evans @angelsbabey @gublergirls @writefasttalkevenfaster @venusbarnes @vintagecaptainspidey @micaiahmoonheart @ogmilkis @thatreallyis-americas-ass @marvels-agents100 @newtslatte @risenfox @mrs-dr-reid @captain-christopher-pike @joemazzello-imagines @pinkdiamond1016 @sebbybaby0 @pan-pride-12 @hotchlinebling @lee-rin-ah @sunshine-em @word-scribbless @jdougl-love @sageellsworth05 @emmice9 @nohalohoseok @giveusbackourbucky @bauslut @yourlovelynewsbian @sparklingkeylimepie @aili28 @kingandrear @reader4027 @spnobsessedmemes @rogers-mouth @dreila03 @forgottenword @aaronhotchnerr @ssa-morgan @hotchnersgoddess @buckybau @phoenixfyre374 @sana-li @tegggeeee @abschaffer2 @ssacandi-ass-prentiss @songbird400 @dontkissthewriter @ellyhotchner @a-dorky-book-keeper @lotties-journey-abroad @mrs-joel-pimentel-23-25 @laneygthememequeen @ahopelessromantic @violentvulgarvolatile @andreasworlsboring101 @mooneylupinblack @ssareidbby @violet-amxthyst @lcvischmitt

#anon reply #tali answers stuff #tali talks cm #a joyful future #ajf aaron

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leafs-lover · 4 years

Text

Because Two People Got Drunk: 6

Series Masterlist

A/N: I know some airplanes actually have the option for first class “pods.” I have no idea what these look like but I read an article/interview Kaitlyn Bristowe did years ago after her and Shawn first got engaged and she said they had sex in one of these pods during a night flight.

Summary: You head to Denmark with Fred for a vacation and meet his family when something happens.

Warnings: Smut, NSFW, Public sex, Mile High Club, some cuteness, mentions of death and drunk driving (don’t be stupid folks), probably some swearing

Word Count: 2,621

July 25, 2021

You agreed to the trip to Denmark with Fred. Family is important and they will be half of your sons family. It will be good for you to know the people your son will be related to, you just hope it isn’t too awkward or that they don’t ask too many questions about your relationship with Freddie. You decided on 8 days, the first and last essentially were travel days and adjusting to the time change. You were going to spend a few days in Copenhagen doing sightseeing, with 3 nights in Herning visiting his family. Fred flew into Denmark with you but since he was staying longer you would be flying back solo.

You tried to book your own ticket in coach, but he argues that since you were only going because he asked he should pay for the flights and hotel. You tried protesting it, but eventually agreed but told him you’d be fine to just share 1 room if he was, it was likely that you would be spending your nights together anyways might as well save him some money, even though he likely didn’t care.

He opted for first class seats, you figured for the leg room but the seats actually had the option to convert to beds. You and Fred convert to beds and you lie down with a blanket over you both, Fred wraps an arm around you and place his hand on your stomach. You lie there watching step brothers as his hands stroke your stomach. You expect one or both of you to fall asleep at some point during the movie. Half way through you feel his hand slip lower to the elastic of your yoga pants. His hand slips under and rests on your lace underwear. He moves forward so you feel him pressed against you “can you be quiet skat?” you nod, a soft yes slipping from your mouth.

His fingers slide into you and begin to do wonders. A soft moan leaves your lips and he nips your ear “you need to be quiet" as he slams his fingers in harder and deeper. You feel his member harden against your ass as you grind back into him. He uses his other hand to bring your pants down slightly to expose your ass. He then pulls his sweats and boxers down. You reach back with one arm and give him a few strokes before he grabs your hand and pins it down in front of you. He shifts you to bring your knees toward your chest and he shifts down, sliding his hard cock in you. You look around the only passenger who could see you is asleep, but you adjust the blanket to ensure you are fully covered in case someone walks by.

He is thrusting in slowly but forcefully. Bottoming out each time, you bite your lip to suppress your moans. He is rubbing your clit, you know neither of you will last long. The thrill of sex in public, possibly getting caught. He continues his pace, and the hard thrusts have you seeing stars. You clench as your orgasm crashes over you, feeling his warmth fill you shortly after. He pulls out and returns your pants to their position as you begin to doze off for the rest of the flight.

The first few days you spend touring Copenhagen and some other cities. Fred shows you some of his favourite spots, takes you to restaurants always refusing to let you pay claiming you are his guest. You even found a market and did some shopping for yourself and the baby; once again you aren’t allowed to pay.

Now it’s time to go to Herning. As you zip your suitcase nerves come over you. This was the whole reason for the trip to meet his family but what if they don’t like you? Fred sees the wheels turning in your head, he comes up behind and he wraps his arms around you placing his large hands on your stomach, this always calms you down “stop worrying everything will be fine" you nod against him as he let’s go grabbing your suitcase. When you arrive to the hotel, you were expecting a normal hotel room with a bed, dresser and maybe a small table. You realize Freddie booked you guys a suite, with a full living room, and a separate bedroom with an over sized king bed.

Tonight is a dinner with his parents and siblings, you start getting ready a few hours in advance. Trying to take the nerves off by looking perfect; telling yourself by looking perfect they will like you more. You take a long shower listening to your favourite playlist, exfoliating every inch of yourself. When you get out you wrap your hair in a towel as you begin to do your make-up keeping it light and simple. You blow dry your hair and style it with some loose curls. Now it’s time to get dressed, you look through every item in your suitcase trying to figure out what outfit best represents “I’m the girl having a baby with your son. I’m not his wife or girlfriend, and I got pregnant after one night with him. Please like me.” You quickly realize you did not pack any outfits that say this, what was going through your mind before you left Toronto.

Fred walks into the bedroom and see’s you standing there wrapped in your towel staring at your clothes. “Doesn’t matter what you wear, you know that. We have to leave in 10 minutes or we’ll be late. That will influence their opinion of you for sure.” You laugh finally deciding on some jeans with a pink tank top and a flowy floral knee length cardigan, you pair it with some brown open toe boots. As you finish zipping them up Fred walks over “see? beautiful” he says before reaching around you to open the door.

You walk in to his parent’s house behind Fred as he greets his family. As you wait for dinner they ask basic questions, where are you from what do you do? His dad remains pretty quiet.

Dinner is served and the conversation shifts into some harder questions:

Do you guys have a name picked out? Is the child going to be raised with a religious background? Where is it going to live with you or Fred? You either answer “no or I don’t know” to these then IT comes: What if Fred doesn’t sign in Toronto how will you make it work?

You have been dreading this, you knew this would come but still you’re uneasy neither of you have answers to any of these. Fred finally chimes in “I guess we have some things to figure out, but we will sort it out"

You agreed somewhat, yes you could figure out a name and religion wasn’t that important to you. But what if he left Toronto, rumours are he will be.

Charlotte “You haven’t had discussions on the future? Fred’s career can be unpredictable, some things you can figure out as you go but of this baby is due in November. With you in Toronto and Fred potentially in a different country how does that work? How does he see his son and have a relationship during the season?”

“I guess I never gave much thought to Fred leaving” you lie. “But if that’s what he has to do because he thinks it’s best for his career I’ll support that decision. We’d figure something out, we’d have to" Fred squeezes your leg lightly with a soft smile. You take a deep breath before continuing “my parents died when I was young so I know the impact growing up without parents can have on a child. I don’t want my child to feel that way.” Everyone stares at you, but your eyes go to Fred as he looks softly at you but you can see through his facade to the shock.

That night you return to the hotel and get ready for bed. He pulls you in to his chest rubbing your shoulders “we’ll be fine dear, we’ll be fine" you nod and move away crawling in to bed. You roll onto your right side, facing away from Fred when you hear him softly say “I’m sorry about your parents.”

You roll onto your back saying “it was almost 20 years ago.”

He throws an arm over you “doesn’t make it better, or mean I’m not sorry because it was a while ago. You lost your parents.” You turn to face him as he pulls you closer, brushing some loose curls from your face.

“I know, sorry. I guess I have gotten use to deflecting when talking about it.”

“You don’t have to apologize, you don’t even have to talk about this. If you want to I am here though” he says looking into your eyes. Silence fills the air.

A few moments pass before you finally say “I was 12, they went to dinner in downtown Toronto. My grandparents were in town for a visit, they used to come for a few weeks in the summer and they were spending the night with me. They were on the drive back, 7 blocks from home and went to make a left hand turn. A car barrelled through the red light into the driver’s side. My dad was killed instantly, my mom was taken from the car to the hospital. She underwent emergency surgery and she shockingly survived the surgery, but the trauma was too much and she died in the ICU 12 hours later. Turns out the driver was drunk, more than twice the legal limit.” You have told this story so many times it’s almost robotic, but this time it’s different. You don’t know if it’s Fred’s soft brown eyes staring into yours or if it’s the pregnancy hormones but you feel so many emotions as tears fill your eyes and slowly fall onto your cheeks.

“I am so sorry (Y/N). You shouldn’t have had to go through that” he says wiping the tears from your face. It must be the pregnancy hormones because you begin to sob uncontrollably, you haven’t cried like this over your parents in years. He pulls you in tight stroking your head until your cries steady and you fall asleep.

You wake up and today is the annual Andersen Uno tournament with the cousins and a big barbecue. Two of his aunts smother you almost instantly.

“Yeah mushrooms it’s her thing.” Fred says “I made sure there was enough mushroom dishes for a small village today” you both laugh.

“So has the baby been moving lots?”

“No not yet which I find a little strange. My doctor said it can take up to 25 weeks. I’m at about 22, but I’m going to bring it up at the next appointment.” They both nod “my first was close to 25 weeks too” one says.

The Uno tournament with about 15 players and 5 decks begins. It’s a little challenging with some of his cousins speaking little to no English, and you knowing even less Danish but fun none the less. You sit with one card left in your hand and Fred beside you when he puts down a pick up 4. “No! I was so close!” you shout as he laughs. A few turns later his cousin ends up winning.

Later in the night people are scattered around the yard when you feel something in your stomach causing you to jump slightly. You look around for Fred spotting him by the food table talking with his mom. You practically run to him.

“Fred! Fred!” he looks up at you startled, fear reaching his face.

“Give me your hand" you grab it and place it on your stomach “give it a minute."

Then he feels it, a smile instantly spreading across his face “is that? Did he just?”

‘Yeah he’s kicking! He’s finally kicking!” you exclaim. Fred takes his other hand placing it on your stomach. “He’s kicking” Fred says softly looking into your eyes.

Without thinking you lean up, connecting your lips with his. It starts soft until he leans into it; you wrap your fingers in his hair. Its very passionate, as his hands move to the small of your back pulling you in closer to him. After a minute you separate from each other with your foreheads touching. Fred smiles at you as you feel his families’ eyes burning a hole in the back of your head. The rest of the night you spend around the fire, cuddled up on Fred’s lap with a blanket draped over you. Fred has his hand on your stomach waiting for your son to kick again.

People begin to dwindle as Fred’s hand begins to dip slightly lower. You adjust in your seat leaning into him more. He kisses your hair and whispers “want to get out of here?” you nod in agreement.

As you return to the hotel, you feel his hands interlace with yours as you wait in the elevator, resting your head on his shoulders. He unlocks the hotel room door, as you walk in he spins you around. His hands lightly graze your sides as he leans down capturing you in a soft kiss. You reach up tangling your hands in his hair, he slowly pushes you into the bedroom and over to the bed. Your knees hit the bed and he slowly leans you back onto it, pulling your shirt off in the process.

“So beautiful” he mumbles leaning down and attaching his mouth to your neck while undoing your bra. You slide your hands under his shirt and pull it over his head. His hand shift to your thighs sliding up, gently pushing your shorts up as your back arches, and you feel wetness beginning to pool at your core. His mouth is making work of your neck and chest as he undoes your shorts and pulls your underwear down with it. You manage to bring your hands around to his front and undo his shorts as he steps out of them.

He slowly leans down and places soft gentle kisses on your stomach before moving to your thigh inching towards where you need him most. You moan out causing him to slide his mouth onto your folds, he gently licks you for a few minutes before pulling away. You feel him stroke his cock across your entrance a few times, coating himself in your juices.

He begins a slow pace, gently thrusting in to you, bottoming out each time never breaking eye contact. You wrap your legs around his back as he continues his slow pace. You feel a sensation in your stomach as your orgasm approaches. Your hips buck up and Fred notices as a smirk creeps across his face. You shudder as you clench around him. He keeps up his pace before pulling you to sit in his lap, he gently thrusts up into you as you begin rocking your hips. You lay your head on his shoulder as he continues to thrust slowly up into you. You feel his dick twitch as he spills deep inside you. He collapses on you turning so you are laying on your side, him still inside of you. He presses soft kisses to your forehead “smuk kærlighed” he whispers stroking your hair.

Freddie has fucked you many times before but this felt different. He looked at you differently, he kissed you differently, touched you differently. And what did he say? Soon his hand is stroking your hair and his soft kisses cause your mind to turn off as you drift to sleep.

Next Chapter

#Freddie Andersen #Freddie Andersen Smut #Freddie Andersen Fic #Frederik Andersen #Frederik Andersen Smut #Frederik Andersen Fic #NHL Smut #NHL Fic #freddie andersen x reader #frederik andersen x reader #fred andersen #fred andersen x reader #fred andersen smut #fredzilla #because two people got drunk #my writing

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lovelazarus · 3 years

Text

rating: Mature

archive warning: graphic depictions of violence

words: 2645

tags: Self-Harm, Suicide Attempt, Suicidal Thoughts, Self-Harm (fairly graphic), Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, graphic description of suicide attempt, Flashbacks, Trauma, Fluff, Fix-It of Sorts, Dean is alive, Castiel is alive, Hurt/Comfort, POV Dean Winchester, brief mention of John Winchester - Freeform, Canon-Typical Violence, Sad with a Happy Ending, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, Past Abuse, Homophobic Language, 15x20 Fix-It

summary: (This fic starts out with a graphic dream/flashback of Dean's mid-20s.) Cas showed up to save Dean in 15x20 after he let himself get impaled on rebar, his attempt to stop living while thinking Cas was truly gone in the Empty. It's been a few months since that event in the Barn. Things have been calm since Chuck lost his power & Jack brought Castiel back to help rebuild heaven (although Jack isn't in this directly!). Even with things being okay, Dean's decades of trauma are still bubbling up and Dean has to face the reality of his actions (past & present).

PLEASE read all tags before reading!

The last thing Dean remembers is sitting down on the couch in the Deancave, waiting for Cas to come pick tonight's movie. He must’ve dozed off at some point because suddenly it's 2004 and he’s 25 years old again.

The two years Sammy was off at Stanford was one of Dean’s lowest points in life; including his trip to hell, being a demon & helping kick start the apocalypse. He was completely alone.

Sam was gone, John was irate and blamed Dean for Sam leaving, for not stopping him from leaving. Dean was hunting alone, without his family, for the first time in his life. His last hunt however was the first to deeply scar him irrevocably.

A father and 2 sons, roughly the same age apart as him and Sam. Both attacked by an extremely vengeful spirit, the father was gutted and the sons were supernaturally manipulated into hanging themselves. Dean walked into their house hoping to save the family after following trails of the case, but he walked into a gruesome scene that left him shaking and holding back from vomiting.

In Dean’s mind, it was a representation of his own torn apart family. He left the home, found the grave of the spirit, and put it to rest with unsteady hands and bleary eyes.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get to you in time… I could’ve saved you and I wasn’t there. I wasn’t good enough to help you. I’m so sorry.” Dean whispers, half to the victims and half to his younger brother, thousands of miles away and unable to hear his plea.

He gets to the motel room he rented with his duffle slung over his shoulder and stands outside the door with the key in his hand, almost afraid to enter, lest he finds another sick and twisted scene inside. He exhales roughly and shoves the key into the door and strides in.

All that's inside his cheap bottle of gas station whiskey and a pack of menthols.

He drops his duffle on the extra twin bed before scooping up his liquor and smokes. He wants to erase this entire hunt from his mind if he can.

Oh, how he wants to.

Three hours later his whole pack is gone, cigarette butts shoved into an old ashtray, and 3/4th the bottle of whiskey is sitting harshly in his stomach. Dean can’t stop picturing that family as his own. Thoughts of his father’s anger circle inside his mind like a tornado.

“I told you to watch out for Sammy, boy! Do you even use that brain other than to continuously disappoint me and fail your brother? To fail Mary?”

HIT

“I left you alone for two weeks! TWO WEEKS THAT'S ALL! Now Sam has run off and you’re going to pay for it.”

HIT

“So you blew through all the money I left you and now you’re turning tricks like some little faggot? You’re going to influence Sammy to that shit and I won’t allow my sons to be like that.”

HIT

With each memory of John rushing back into Dean’s mind, he can still feel the physical hits coming. His dad was right. This would never have happened if he hadn’t been more careful. If he had protected Sam like he was told to. If he had been a better son.

He finishes the last of the whiskey as the screams of his father’s voice start to fade back into the black void inside his mind. But the moment the last drop of liquor touches his tongue, he breaks. Every punch landed by his father that he took in order to protect Sam comes rushing back. Every harsh word and drunken fight he got into. Every argument with Sam over being too controlling, too much of a soldier.

Dean feels sick.

The toilet in that crappy motel room has certainly seen better days, but no matter how much Dean vomits, he stays just as drunk.

In a moment of blind anger, he destroys the kitchenette, the TV, and the nightstand. He chucks the empty whiskey bottle at the wall and watches the glass fly everywhere as it shatters.

He absent-mindedly picks up a large piece of glass.

This could kill me. One quick and easy slash to my neck or wrist and that’d be it. No more pain for Sam, and no more disappointment for dad.

He lets his hand drop to his side and allows the shard to fall to the floor. This isn’t the first time he’s had thoughts like this in moments of weakness, but it's certainly the first time there was a calm push behind it. He collapses to his knees with a broken sob. He doesn’t want to do this anymore. He's tired.

God, he is so tired.

Dean isn’t sure when he decided this was his only option to stop the deep visceral pain he’s feeling, but it's where he’s at now.

Swallow all the pills in the med bag? No, that's what bitches and girls do, plus… it's painful.

Slit his wrists in a nice warm bath? Even worse than pills! You really are some kind of faggot, aren’t you?

Shotgun to the face? Now that's the man’s way out.

He pauses, looking over to his favorite sawed-off. It’ll be an absolute mess if that’s the way he goes. He thinks again to the family he couldn’t save; how gory and horrific it was. He shudders and breathes in sharply. He can’t do that to someone else, especially not some innocent civilian.

“Of course,” he mutters under his breath “I have a rope in the trunk.” So that’s the plan.

He stuffs all his shit into his duffle, writes out an apology to Sam, Bobby, and John (it’s a suicide note, but it doesn’t explain anything), and then he ties a military-grade noose. He finds a chair that isn’t completely destroyed by his earlier rage and begins to tie the rope onto the ceiling fan.

He stands there for a moment, contemplating. “Am I really about to do this? I’ve fought monsters and demons and ghosts for twenty years and this is where it ends?”

He shakes his head and shrugs.

“Always knew I'd die before thirty.”

He raises the noose to his head and just as he is about to slide it around his throat… The chair breaks apart, and he's left lying on his back with the wind knocked out of him.

“FUCK!” he manages to yell out before his lungs and chest start burning again. Tears begin to pinprick at his eyes as he lays motionless (and probably concussed, he didn’t break his fall at all). “I can’t even kill myself right.” he thinks to himself.

Slowly, he gets himself off the floor, groaning at the pain in his skull and back as he does. Crawling over to his bed, he sees the glass shard he dropped earlier.

“I just want to stop this fucking FEELING” his mind screams. “Just do SOMETHING you worthless son of a bitch!”

He picks the glass back up.

Everything is hazy when his brain starts to come into focus again. His hands feel slick and wet, so he brings them to his face to see what he touched.

Blood.

His own blood.

Three long gashes across his forearm, roughly a quarter-inch deep and four inches long each. He needs to stitch himself up for sure.

30 minutes later and it just looks like a hunt gone bad, his arm is sewn up and all the motel towels are stained red.

For a fleeting moment, he feels at peace. The rush of discovering what he did in a fog of failing to kill himself and the overwhelming feeling of failing his family, he feels like this was something he deserved. Like he deserved to be punished.

After an hour of dissociating and staring at the wall, he passes out and sinks into a moment of silent nothingness. No nightmares, not yet.

Dean practically jumps out of his skin when he hears Cas’s voice from the doorway.

“Dean? You look pale. What's going on?” Castiel asks with his familiar cadence.

Dean wishes he knew what brought that memory back up. Instead, he plasters on a fake smile and shakes his head reassuringly the best he can.

“Nothing Cas, just thinking I guess. What took you so long? You burn the popcorn or somethin?” Dean knows he sounds insincere, he knows that Cas knows, too. He doesn't want Cas to worry any more than he already does, though.

“Dean, your heart rate sped up and you were on the verge of hyperventilating, what happened?”

Damn it. He should’ve known Cas could still do that weird x-ray angel shit. Instead of trying to hide it further, he sighs and motions for Castiel to sit beside him on the couch.

However, he blanches when Cas passes behind him and brushes his hand against Dean’s shoulder. Cas sits down carefully, not to overwhelm Dean. Castiel has seen him during a flashback before, especially after hell. Cas looks inviting, ready to listen to whatever Dean has to say. Cas was always trying to be open with him lately, Dean knows it’s because of the struggles the last six months.

Cas dying, if briefly. Dean ALMOST dying, because of it.

Wait…

That's when Dean realizes.

Every time he’s lost someone, it's been bad. Drunk passed out on the floor, let Baby be filthy, run into hunts without any concern for his safety, bad…

The two worst times were when he lost Sammy, and when he thought he lost Cas to the Empty.

Dean must’ve been sitting there with a strange look on his face for a while cause Cas reaches out gingerly to silently ask if he’s alright. Dean gives him a half-smile and lets out the breath he was apparently holding.

“Cas, did I ever tell you about what I did in 2004 when Sam was off at Stanford and I was hunting by myself?”

Cas tilts his head in that endearing way he always does, “Not that I recall. Is something from back then troubling you now still?”

Dean clenches his jaw and runs a hand over his mouth, a nervous tic he picked up from John decades ago. “I did something similar back then to what I did in that barn. I gave up.”

Castiel’s eyes widen a bit, starting to understand what Dean is trying to say, but staying silent, to let him get this out.

Dean cracks a wry chuckle, “y’know, when you pulled me outta hell and into my body again, I was surprised you wiped the slate and got rid of all my scars.” He glances at Castiel, just for a moment, to see his reaction. It's soft but a little confused.

“At the time, I thought you would like to come back whole. A fresh start after what you went through in hell. I know now that life is about the imperfections and that the littlest things have meaning and memories. I’m sorry if I took those from you, Dean.” Cas meets Dean’s eyes with apologetic fondness and sincerity.

“Cas, it's okay. Really. Sometimes… I don't know, there's some scars I just miss sometimes.” He runs his hand along his forearm, where the self-harm scars would’ve been. “The ones that were here… they gave me a constant reminder of what almost happened. What I almost did.” Dean can feel his face getting warm as he talks about it, eyes watering up but no tears slip down his face.

Cas seems to nod along, waiting for him to continue with concerned patience. “I tried to kill myself back in ‘04. Sam was gone and doing fine without me, he had Jess. Dad was pissed at me for not getting him to stay and hunt. I had no one. I hit a low point after finding a really fucked up case about a vengeful spirit that gutted a family, father, and two sons…” Dean chokes up, as he pictures the glazed eyes of the corpses he found. A shiver runs down his spine as he can still picture it like it was yesterday.

“You saw your father and Sam in them and it brought up a lot of emotions, that’s understandable.” Cas tries to reassure him but doesn’t quite understand what Dean’s trying to get at.

“I got drunk after I salt and burned the spirit's corpse. I felt empty inside and like nobody needed me. I couldn’t save those kids and I didn't see any point in saving myself…” tears are now flowing gently down Dean’s face as he tries to push out what he needs to say, what he needs Cas to understand about this. “When you, when you said all that stuff before you left… I felt that same exact way. Even though I had Sam and Jack and then the whole bullshit after with Chuck and Lucifer and Michael… I felt so damn alone. Like I’d failed you, cause I couldn’t even save someone I love the most.” Dean’s voice goes harsh as he full-on sobs at those last few words.

The past few months since Castiel has been back, they haven’t talked about Cas's confession before being taken by the Empty, and Dean hasn’t said it aloud (even though his mind is screaming those three words every time he looks at Cas). Dean feels Cas touch his hand gently, reverently. A sob violently racks his body as he looks up into blue eyes also filled with tears.

“I’m so sorry Dean. I’m sorry.” the last word catches in his throat as Dean grabs his hand fully, intertwining their fingers.

“I know Cas. You did it to save me. You seem to keep doing that, huh? From hell, saying yes to Michael, Billie, from myself…” Dean softly strokes his thumb against Cas’s hand while tear tracks continue to stain his face. “Cas, thank you. I know I’ll never be able to pay you back for all that you’ve done for me and for Sam but… thank you.”

They lock eyes for a moment, Dean knows Cas loves him and he knows he loves Cas. He can’t think of a goddamn thing standing in the way right now. Dean releases Cas’s hand, cups his face, and brings their lips together, finally.

It takes a moment for Castiel to understand what's happening, but he quickly catches up and kisses Dean back fervently.

Cas tastes like summer rain after a long drought, like lightning and thunder all at once, like earth and something ethereal Dean can’t quite place. Cas tastes like coming home, and he is.

“Me too, Cas. Son of a bitch, I love you too.” he whispers into Cas’s mouth as Cas lets out a sob-laugh.

They pull apart for a moment, hands still against each other's cheeks. Communicating with their eyes is something they’ve mastered after 12 years, but there's something unknown now. Something new, something hopeful. And dammit if Dean isn't going to latch on to that hope.

They decide on an old western, Dean’s seen it a hundred times before. They’re leaning into each other silently watching as Dean’s eyes begin to close. He can feel Cas running his fingers against his arm, where those scars would’ve been. It's then, in the comfort of his Angel, that Dean falls fast asleep.

For the first time in 40 years, he doesn’t have nightmares. Not of yellow eyes, not of losing Sammy; not of John’s anger, not of hell; the apocalypse, Michael, Chuck, losing Cas… it all feels distant and far behind him now. When Dean wakes again, Cas still has his arms around him, eyes closed, and is running his fingers through Dean’s hair.

Dean knows all his trauma won't just vanish, but in this moment with Cas...it feels possible.

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