#that's why I ended up adding more spiritual bond conversations than I originally meant to ahahaha

[seyaryminamoto]

hey hopefully these aren’t too many questions but im asking mostly because I forgot if you had said so, how is our favourite couple currently where you’re writing & how far ahead are you compared to where the readers are at? and finally how many parts will Gladiator be? I’m sure you have said it already but Im sure I have forgotten!!

Well, they're a fair amount of questions, haha, but that's fine :D

I'm still around 50 chapters ahead, but I've had to invest most of my time into art exclusively over the past weeks, it's why I haven't been able to write as much as I usually do. I was at a 60~ish chapter advantage, I'm not doing double updates atm so that the gap won't get too big to be manageable anymore. I'm pretty sure we all want to keep the update rate steady and constant all across Part 3... so the more chapters I write in advance, the better.

And Part 3 is the final part of the story, worth mentioning. The way I structure Gladiator, each part has its own particular identity as the status quo shifts in some way (Part 1: will-they-won't-they, Part 2: when will they get caught?, Part 3: all hell breaks loose), and each of them have certain storytelling climaxes that basically mark the conclusion of each part, so to speak. For Part 1, the climax was also very literal as it's when Azula and Sokka finally go all the way :'D for Part 2, the climax is the Combustion Man fight, and for Part 3... can't tell you that but I'm expecting you can guess at it pretty easily, haha. After each of these climaxes, we've had some more story to cover before switching to the next bit... Part 3 will feature the longest post-climax chunk of story since we have a lot of loose ends to tie and I would hate myself if I finished everything too quickly. Hopefully all that I just said makes sense? :'D

Also, not sure if you wanted to know this exactly but as things stand, I've posted 7 out of 33 arcs for Part 3... and I'm due to start writing arc 20 :'D Part 3 has a LOT of arcs but they're generally shorter than they were before, I feel? Definitely shorter than in Part 1, where they were the longest in the story altogether, I believe.

As for your other, spoilery question...

Currently, Sokka and Azula are in complicated territory. Which I'm sure comes as no surprise considering what's been happening in the story as of late...

Azula's position is extremely precarious even in what stability she has found, and she has far too many complicated motivations pulling at her from all sides, too many people to protect, all of which comes into conflict with the position she's stuck in for the time being. Sokka continues his full dedication to waging war, but while he's doing well at it, the enemy's upping the challenge in what's coming, and as much as he's trying not to be rash and to make his decisions carefully, he has nooo idea how uphill things are going to get for his push in the near future.

It's worth noting that Sokka and Azula have been able to communicate through their spiritual bond a few more times, as well as having multiple chances of noticing something's wrong (or occasionally, right) with the other, even at a distance. Their communication hasn't always been effective in informing them about what the other is doing... but they're learning about each other's movements through other sources now, too. As expected from our chaotic and beloved pair... neither one is to happy about the other's position atm. Which makes it really interesting to me that in all their frustrations about what's going on, the faith they have in each other really doesn't waver.

I don't think I should say much more than that, but I will say I'm looming closer and closer to their fateful reunion, it will still take some time but not a lot, all in all. I only have two big battles left to write before we get to what we're all waiting for... so I really, REALLY want to finish all the art so I can get to that ASAP XD

#anon #gladiator #hope that's good enough answers for your questions! #we need more Sokkla power that's for sure #that's why I ended up adding more spiritual bond conversations than I originally meant to ahahaha #couldn't help myself sorry not sorry

[deeeeeeepdown]

It feels silly to spend time or energy to write anything to you, honestly. I really feel like I understand intellectually what happened between us and I know what I should do about it. But, as is so often the case, I still have feelings there that remain unresolved despite reason. 

I wish I’d responded to your message differently. When I read it for the first time, it was with a specific alchemy of bewilderment, ego defensiveness, horror, and humor. For one thing, how dare you throw every scrap of brokenness you could find after careful examination of my life in my face out of nowhere? For another,  where the fuck did it come from? I hadn’t heard from you in over a month and I hadn’t posted anything I could imagine as “triggering” to you. And then there was the matter of you having packaged the whole thing as if you were the authority on everything from spiritual healing to my own biographical history, the professional counselor in my life, the expert in confronting friends in an act of love. We hadn’t done more than off-and-on text exchange in years, had but a single in-person encounter in nearly a decade...and yet. I realized pretty quickly that I had to respond carefully and thoughtfully but truthfully I had NO IDEA what to say or how to say it. I couldn’t imagine any reasonable forward movement in that conversation - or were you even trying to have a conversation? Maybe you just wanted to make one giant pronouncement on my life and then close the book? I still don’t know. I wish my only response had been to ask what exactly it was you were hoping for. And, admittedly, I was amused. You’d managed to conclude that my romantic relationship was a “trauma bond” because I’d told you my partner was a perfectionist. You were telling me what was wrong with my life and my psyche even though it is my life and I am a psychiatrist. 

Maybe neither of us really got this fully but the truth is that I’ve always wanted to be your friend. I wanted to be your friend as a small child when we took ballet together, I wanted to be your friend when your 14-year old life was falling apart, I wanted to be your friend when you stopped talking to me (or to anyone) as a high school student. It was very painful for me to be truly hated and rejected by you but I would have, from the bottom of my heart, forgiven all of it if it had meant we could be friends again. I tried, by the way. I tried to reach out to you, to explain what had happened, to go on stupid group dates I had no interest in, to reach out to you as best I could.  I was ecstatic when you asked me to meet you for brunch and I tried my best to be brutally honest with you about the hard things that were happening in my life at the time. I tried, really really hard every single time there was the opportunity to try. And even my trying was turned into something pathological by you - that I was desperate for your approval or that I had some kind of mothering wound. Dude, I have more friends than I can maintain well. I didn’t NEED another one, I just wanted us both to experience relational healing in light of one of the harder relational breaks we’d both sustained. You represented such a big part of my childhood and losing our friendship represented a good bit of my teenage years and I wanted to close that gap if you did too. 

You said that you had carried a lot of pain from a moment in our high school Spanish class. I don’t at all doubt that it happened, maybe even exactly the way you say it did, but truly I don’t remember it. I remember that time being one in which you were very distant from me. I remember trying hard to balance wanting to be as close as I craved and wanting to give you space if that’s what you wanted and being sort of uneasy about the way things were happening between you and your parents and being quite frustrated that you were so distant from me despite my best efforts. I remember starting to resent you a bit because I knew you’d been shit-talking me privately with Elani and I felt betrayed by that, like I could no longer trust you to be my closest companion. I remember that Elani and I made pinatas together and that you weren’t with us and I don’t remember why. I just know that my mom asked Elani and I if we had any concern that your dad might be hurting you somehow and I said I didn’t think so but that I didn’t feel good about how isolated with him you were and Elani echoed those sentiments and then the conversation moved on. I am deeply sorry if I hurt you in some Spanish class moment that I didn’t even think was important enough to file away in my memory. I was 15 and confused by what was happening with you and upset about the ways our friendship was changing and I don’t doubt for a second that I behaved poorly and in a way that caused you pain. But damn, I wish we’d talked about that sooner. I would have apologized. We could have talked it out. I had no idea you wanted an apology from me or an explanation or that you were carrying resentment around like a heavy burden. When you apologized to me in Sleepy Bee for breaking up with me, I said I forgave you and that I understood you were young and going through a terrible thing and I really meant that? I really saw it that way. You simply wanting to mend the relationship and meet up made me feel happy and hopeful and whole. I folded up everything that I’d ever known in relation to you and put it away. 

I think the only thing I really held on to was my uncertainty that I was doing friendship with you “right”. When we were in college, Austin added me on Instagram and I saw your new life, you seemingly reborn with him and I think you reached out via text expressing interest in being friends again and I was thrilled. I texted you back saying that I’d love to meet the adult you’d become. I meant that. We both had surely changed so much and become grown ups with so many stories we hadn’t shared with each other. I thought it would be a fresh start. And I never heard from you again, eventually learning from Chandler that you felt my reply was condescending. It broke my heart to hear that. Condescending was the last thing I felt or worked to embody with that reply. When things first fell apart and I tried to Facebook message you, your mom told me the same thing. That you felt I was lecturing you. 

We had many exchanges in the past year or so that helped me to trust you. I felt like a real friendship had begun and I guess that’s why it hurt to hear what you saw of my life. There was something tangible to lose again, for the first time since I was a freshman in high school. The entire time we were talking I felt like you were more interested in hearing what was wrong with my life than what was right with it and I value brutal honesty so I tried my best to convey what I was feeling and that my life was far from perfect. It’s nice to have a relationship where you can dump the shit out and not feel too negative or awkward about it since you keep it hidden for the most part. It feels honest and redemptive, 2 words I’d have used to describe our newfound connection. But I think I thought that the objective view of my life spoke to the fact that it wasn’t all bad? I’m a physician, totally in love with and ecstatic about what I’m going to spend my life doing, I live with my boyfriend who has from the beginning and despite all of his flaws helped me to be truer to myself. He’s a doctor too and despite the fact that we both came from “against all odds” situations we found one another on the other side. I have a good working relationship with my family of origin despite having to renegotiate many things about that relationship as an adult in order to keep it from ruining me, a task that required many years of therapy and great inner strength. I have a best friend of 8 years who knows me and teaches me about myself in a way I didn’t know friends could.

In the end, it feels like you can’t look at me in the longterm without seeing it all through the lens of me being a secretly conniving and miserable person. Yes, she might have become a doctor, but it made her miserable and was for all of the most ego-driven reasons.  Sure, she’s close with her parents, but those relationships are built on decades of trauma and she sacrifices whole swaths of herself in order to cling to that. Yeah, she lives with a successful man but it’s a “trauma bond” and they’re both broken, he’s a problematic person and she’s blind - just look at how she couldn’t even acknowledge how ending her engagement felt! I’m forever all wrong, the girl who shafted you in a Spanish project and an act of abandonment she can’t even remember. 

I realize you look at yourself this way, too. “Bad childhood” says the woman whose parents took me on the coolest vacation, best hikes, and most enchanting boat rides of my life. “Borderline personality disorder” diagnoses the girl with a Master’s degree in English who has never had to visit her loved one in a locked psychiatric unit. I know you suffered. I know your parents handled their divorce terribly and that you bore the brunt of that pain the most. I know it all fell apart on you and ate you alive. I even know that you told a lot of people you’d been raped by a faculty member of our high school and I don’t know if it’s true but if it is that is horrendous. But Karley, it wasn’t all bad. Your family was educated. You were cared for. Your ability to succeed in the world was always guaranteed and financial security held you up from the start. Your little sister is one of the coolest people I’ve had the pleasure of knowing and she’s healthy and succeeding in the world. You’re an adult who doesn’t have to worry for a single second that her parents aren’t okay - they take care of themselves and both have careers they love. There is so much that is broken, but there is so much that is whole. That’s true for both of us. 

Ultimately, the last time we spoke to each other, the truest, deepest part of me realized something it should have known a long time ago - it’s time to let go. I’ve tried every time there was a choice to love you wholeheartedly. No human intention is ever pure and I know there was something in that for me, but goddamn, I wanted above all to be your friend, to really know each other and trust each other and help each other grow. You will forever be a sacred part of my becoming. Many of my best childhood memories contain you and I love that. I’m so thankful. Our friendship showed me a glimpse of what life could look like for me and it made me feel held at a time I really needed it. I’ll keep that with me forever. 

But the rest? It’s time to release it. I can’t trust you not to weaponize what I share. I don’t need another person who can tell me everything that’s wrong with my heart and my mind and my life; I have myself and my therapist, and my parents and my partner and Noor for that kind of thing and for the most part all of those figures give me that information only when I ask for it, which I do. I don’t believe in forcing that insight on the people I love until they ask me to because they’re ready. It’s okay if you want that kind of unexpected honestly negative perspective from your relationship but I don’t believe in it and I don’t want it in mine. There’s a reason psychotherapists don’t go out into the streets telling everyone what’s wrong with them; there’s a reason they wait patiently in their offices for people to seek them out and then offer what they know instead of imposing it - healing doesn’t happen when you look at someone and say “Hi you trusted me with this very painful part of you and don’t forget it exists because I certainly haven’t and you need to realize that you have very painful parts that are very obvious to me, an outside observer”. Healing happens when someone is neck deep in their own muck sweating and sobbing, offering those painful parts to someone who simply closes their fingers around them and says “thank you”. Thank you for trusting me and sharing with me and allowing me in - I’ll do the same for you. Over and over until the very end, just keep doing what you can and I’ll be here to receive whatever you find down there. We all do our own work. We can’t and shouldn’t impose our efforts on the work of another. Trust me, I am doing my own work. It’s hard and painful and wonderful enough without you thinking you know how to do it better than I do. You know how to do yours but you won’t ever know how to do mine because it’s mine. 

When it comes to our ability to have a friendship it isn’t a matter of my trying and so I’ve stopped trying. I don’t think I will try again. It doesn’t heal either of us and I suspect it hurts us both more than we even realize. I see so much good in your life now. I think you have a beautiful mind and I love your interests and I think you seem like a wonderful mother and partner. I hope it all continues to heal you. I hope you find happiness and contentment and vulnerability over and over again and I hope you let it teach you. I hope that for me too. It just doesn’t serve us to do it in tandem. For more than a decade, that has only left me more confused and more in pain and I suspect you’ve been left feeling that too. And actually? That’s okay. We just aren’t each other’s people. It seems like we both have our own people to walk our own paths. 

I hope you find peace on yours. I hope I find peace on mine too.