ANNE WITH AN E (2017-2019) 3.10, ‘The Better Feeling of My Heart’

“What,” Granger says, her voice ringing out from the doorway, crisp and curt and mostly, understandably incredulous. “Are you doing?” A splintering crack rifles through the air, and chunks of mealy gray stone—from one of the medieval gargoyle statues, decorative, ostentatious, positively seeped in centuries of Slytherin scheming—fall to the ground. “Exactly?”

Draco flicks his wand, sending another spray of sulky, rust-orange sparks blasting towards the wall. “I’m busy,” he says, no, he mimics, gratingly petulant, even to his own ears. “Go away. This is none of your business.”

Granger looks around at the mess, biting her lip, teeth really digging in. Leaving a mark. The buttons on her blouse are all done up tonight, right up to her throat. She’s the only girl he’s ever seen do that, ever seen make the effort to do that, and there’s something so despicably, dumbfoundingly virginal about it—about the contrast, the contradictions—about her ink-stained fingertips rubbing at her starched white collar, about her carelessly rumpled cardigan sleeves laid out on top of her neatly pleated skirt. She tries so hard, still, still, to be careful and reasonable and kind and obliging, and she’s not. She isn’t. She’s never been. 

Not truly.

[ read on ao3 ]

if someone tells you not to show or tell them something upsetting because they don't want awful images in their head, you need to respect that. do not tell them they're being dramatic or that they can handle it and just need to grow up. it is self preservation and forcing them to hear or see something they really don't want to witness can be really traumatic. respect boundaries. I don't know why this even has to be said.

fear, trauma, and the human threat response are fascinating to me. my brain is a survival machine perfected by nature, processing and filing away each bad and harmful experience like the world’s most meticulous archivist, cobbling together connections with stimuli to make complex decisions about when to slam the sympathetic nervous system response. it’s cross-referencing my surroundings with the library of Bad Things as we speak, allocating every resource in my body according to anticipated importance in a survival situation. It’s making all the decisions about when I need to be afraid enough to run, when I need to be angry enough to fight the threat with my bare fists.

when my hands feel cold during a panic attack, that’s my body shunting blood flow to my internal organs, turning me from a precise and intelligent creature with articulate fingers to the blunt-force, brutal beast I need to be to fight an attacker. When I feel so sick I’m about to puke, that’s my body getting me ready to run.

My nervous system can rewrite itself to keep me safe. It will change my sleep patterns to light and intermittent and make me notice where the exits are in an enclosed space. My brain is capable of concealing memories from me if I’m not ready to process them. The human mind is capable of dividing itself into multiple parallel and coexisting identities with different memories and different behaviors to protect the person.

The undeniable thing is that your body and brain love you, love you so much that they will do anything, anything, anything to make you survive. They love you even when you don’t love you. If they didn’t love you, you couldn’t feel afraid. There will always be a part of you that loves you. It might be rage and shaking and throwing up in the bathroom but you can feel yourself fighting to live even if you’ve given up and something about that is just the most amazing and fucked up and beautiful thing in the world.

The other undeniable thing is that your body and brain are endearingly, infuriatingly stupid, and they’re in control of a lot of what your organs are doing, and this is a little frustrating. They were trained on a dataset that is about 10,000 years out of date, mainly featuring things like “tigers” and “lightning strikes.” And they are so, so bad at identifying meaningful correlations. Their main response protocols are “Fight” or “Flight,” because they were developed in a time when that just about covered everything.

Now most threats have very low fightability, but the procedures haven’t been updated. When your knowledge of Threatening Things was refined through millions of years of lions, a doctor’s appointment gets categorized as LION- OTHER. This facility was DESIGNED to process lions. So Lion protocol it is.

There’s no manual override to the sympathetic nervous system response in most cases either. If you go to your brain like “hey why are you preparing me to fight lions, that’s not a lion” they’ll be like “hey ma’am, we’ve been at this a long time, trust me, we don’t need you to tell us how to do our job.”

So you sit in the waiting room of your doctor’s appointment with your limbs trembling with adrenaline because your brain is just trying to do its damn job and protect you from threats, which, to the best of its knowledge, can mostly be punched or run away from. Your body and brain love you, and they are so stupid, so very stupid.

There was going to be a point to this.

it’s okay if all you did today was get through it. that is ‘productive’ enough

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but falling back into your unhealthy coping skills during uncertain times is not going to benefit you. I know that the temptation to feed into it can be intense, but you are much stronger than that and deserve to live a healthier life. Continue on your path of recovery, it is so worth it. 

Sometimes you just need to accept that you did what you had to do to survive and forgive yourself for it.

It’s okay if you thought you were over it but it hits you all over again.

It’s okay to fall apart even after you thought you had it under control.

You are not weak. Healing is messy. And there is no timeline for healing.

As it was requested by quite a few people, I made a Venn Diagram showing the overlapping symptoms of ADHD and PTSD. I really hope this helps!

Can I interest you in a Gàidhlig Sea Shanty?

is it time for frank cho and milo manara to die or what

fuck it. be creative even if you never really *make* anything. write out plot synopses of stories and then move on. design OCs you'll never use. make mood boards and concept art and don't do anything with them. life's too short to forget everything that inspired you and creation doesn't have to be "complete" to be worth the time you put into it.

If the Government Treated Men Like It Treats Women

At Target this lady told her son he couldn’t have a Wonder Woman doll because “that’s for girls” and then bought her daughter the same one. It got me thinking about how often I see people bar young boys from appreciating girls/women as protagonists and heroes, and my own experience with it as a kid.

I remember seeing them perform this live on my campus.. My jaw dropped within 10 seconds.