CW: anxiety talk about Nesta in ACOSF chapters 45-50
The moment Nesta learns that Amren voted against her—that is, voted against informing Nesta about the weapons Nesta Made—Nesta's entire inner monologue becomes filled again with damaging and spiraling negative self-talk, self-loathing, and false self-assessments of her own unworthiness of anything good.
It literally begins as soon as something cracks inside her at the knowledge that she was weighed and judged and found unworthy by her former friend. (This is in ACOSF chapter 45.)
This begins a really important shift in Nesta's inner voice that's about to last all the way to chapter 50 with Cassian by the lake. It's a shift from the healthier inner voice she's been cultivating through her friendships at the House of Wind (both with her found sisters and Cassian) and through training and Mind-Stilling, back to something more like how she has felt for the majority of her life, but especially since her father died and (in her mind) she failed to save him, at least until she began to heal in ACOSF.
This shift makes Nesta an unreliable narrator about the world around her during this next stretch of the story, in an incredibly important and devastating way. I hope to write more about this when I reach the hike with Cassian in my reread.
The shift in Nesta is incredibly obvious for anyone who has experienced triggers like this themselves, and on this reread it took my breath away at how authentically SJM writes Nesta's experience here.
This next stretch — chapters 45-50 — are the dark and beautiful heart of Nesta's healing journey in this book for me. I know these chapters receive a lot of criticism, so within the bandwidth I have available to me I want to offer my perspective on just how perfectly SJM nails this next stretch of Nesta's story (which we can take from SJM's honesty in her interviews about this book that part of why she got this so right on the page is because she was writing from personal experience with this herself).
Hopefully more on this to come.
(And while there is a lot I could write about the vital role people like Amren play—or don't—in the healing journey of people with the kind of anxiety and negative self-talk Nesta struggles with, and how unhelpful to that journey behaviors like Amren's in this book are, I'm choosing not to focus on her in any reflective writing I do on this, because I care so much more about Nesta than I do about Amren, so I'm not going to waste precious words on her.)
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