It’s been a while. The days and nights have been flashing past as if I’m stuck on a merry-go-round spinning madly on its axis with one half in a tent and the other open to the sunshine. 

I had so much steam to vent over Sherlock, and I held out some hope for a Lost Special or some kind of announcement after that awful fourth series. I guess over the last couple months I needed some distance just to regain some perspective in my life. And, of course, my life has generated plenty of its own bothers and concerns. I’m still processing what happened to me and who I am now, and what I want and need to do. It really doesn’t feel like I ever got married at all... and legally I suppose it’s all over anyway. 

Tonight I rented the 2015 version of Cinderella with the radiant Lily James. I remember watching it on a whim with the person I used to call my husband, and feeling like it was disappointing and cliched and devoid of both emotion and romance. Well, it just goes to show that the people you’re with do influence your perception of the world around you, including art, film, and music. 

These days, I’m not really sure what my orientation is. Lesbian, bisexual, or romantic asexual. It doesn’t matter insofar as I don’t want to get close to anyone again for a very, very long time. I won’t touch a serious intimate relationship with a ten-foot pole. That’s just where I am now. But I do want caring in my life. I want a community, friendships, ships generally... I want life to matter. When my time ends, I want to have made the most of it. A few relatives of mine have passed on or are likely to pass on soon. It’s not something I think about every day-- death, I mean. But seeing someone you’ve known well, lying in a casket with their features so inexplicably distorted by the departure of their vital energy, you feel hollow and remember that one day we all will take our turn in that casket or at any rate in the earth. You might, as I do, feel a horrible sense of frustration and desperation that there will never be enough time to make life worth it before the sand runs out. And if so, what is the use? 

Five years ago, I used to sing snatches of that Death Cab for Cutie song to myself, you know the one:

Love of mine, someday you will die But I'll be close behind and I'll follow you into the dark No blinding light or tunnels to gates of white Just our hands clasped so tight, waiting for the hint of a spark

If heaven and hell decide that they both are satisfied And illuminate the no's on their vacancy signs If there's no one beside you when your soul embarks Then I'll follow you into the dark

In Catholic school as vicious as Roman rule I got my knuckles bruised by a lady in black And I held my tongue as she told me, Son, fear is the heart of love, so I never went back

You and me we've seen everything to see From Bangkok to Calgary and the soles of your shoes Are all worn down The time for sleep is now But it's nothing to cry about 'Cause we'll hold each other soon in the blackest of rooms

I used to sing that to myself and take comfort in it. Somehow, it was comforting to imagine myself here on earth with everyone else for a certain length of time and no more, like children getting worn out playing in a sandbox until evening and their tired but happy return home for food, bath, and bed. But now it feels different. Now, after all the tears and cruelty, the mental gymnastics and abuse, the long period of homelessness, and after saying goodbye to yet another old familiar face, I feel quite differently. I wish the merry-go-round would just stop for a while. Can’t we all get off and stop our heads from spinning for a minute? That’s where I am right now.

on a personal note

This is going to be a personal rant to allow me to vent off some frustration caused by some women in my life who don’t seem to understand, for personal or religious or cultural reasons, what it means to go through a divorce. 

Divorce f*ing sucks. These women seem to think, ‘oh, so you’re one of those people who just wasn’t willing to do *what it takes* to make a lifelong commitment work? Threw in the towel, did you? Gave up on the so-called love of your life, did you? You’re what’s wrong with society today.’ (’Back in my day, we counted it a blessing if a husband wasn’t vicious enough to beat you, and beyond your wildest expectations to have a husband who was actually faithful to you by his own choice.’) 

Because I was the one who walked away from what I had finally realized to be an abusive relationship, I feel like these women look at me with such derision. I don’t tell everyone that I was undergoing textbook mental, emotional, verbal abuse. I did tell some relatives, and some of those same relatives just brushed it off and expected me to be happy, told me it’s “[my] time to be selfish,” and acted like I ought to be fine and understanding about the abuser’s post-separation antics. The women I don’t share those details with, I can practically hear mentally gathering up their husbands and children if they have them, smug in the knowledge that they haven’t f*ed up like I have. The attitude rolls off them like a strong perfume. It’s like, not for one f*ing second do they think that maybe there was a serious, life-threatening reason I left my “husband.”

Once he had me in his sights, the man who became my “husband” created a magical atmosphere of specialness and trust, coaxed my darkest secrets out of me, and then, for a long while unbeknownst to naive, trusting me, used them to poke, poke, poke, and chip, chip, chip away at the essence of who I am. The first time we met, after forming the groundwork of this toxic relationship online, he reached over in the car and grabbed my crotch and chest. He took me to a fancy dinner and then back at my house, tore my clothes off me and used me for sex. If I had been given a choice about the timing that would not have been it. I convinced myself that I had encouraged it, that I must have consented, because at the time I actually believed that he was god-sent and the person I was destined to be with. I believed his many sob stories about the unjust and cruel treatment he’d suffered at the hands of women and some men in the past. I thought it was my role to love him unconditionally and do better than all of those ‘bad’ women. Under his control I broke again and again, sobbed my heart out time after time, and kept gathering the pieces of myself together again to love him. F* that. 

If I had not been extremely, unbelievably fortunate in the concatenation of circumstances that allowed me to leave him, I would have lost myself completely. The day I left him was the worst day of my life, and it felt for all the world like the most heinous and cruel thing I could ever do. That bastard took so much from me that I can never reclaim. Divorce f*ing sucks, but it is the one lighter spot in the cave of gloom I’ve been living in since he got his claws in me. I hate that I have to go through a divorce, but I fiercely guard my right and even moral duty to do so. Smug married people can go kick rocks. 

One of the things he used to jab me about was the attraction I confessed I felt toward the female form. Anytime I would say something like, “Hey honey, can we talk about this [current issue]?” he would respond, “You’re a lesbian?” Finally free of the toe rag, I am for the first time in my life starting to explore non-judgmentally and to accept my sexuality. I cannot now imagine ever wanting to be in a relationship with a human being again, but I think that maybe at this stage in my life I’m a biromantic asexual. 

What the fuck?! Honestly, END THIS. Who cares what happens to the D and R parties. No one who does this should be allowed to claim any position of respect or authority.

I wasn’t expecting to see this on mainstream TV!

I heard this song today and... of course... it made me think of Sherlock. The lines about the chains and being the hero are so much John and Sherlock...

John: “I never thought I could act this way and I’ve got to say that I just don’t get it”

Us to Mofftiss/S4: We “...won’t read that book again because the ending’s just too hard to take” “I don’t know where we went wrong but the feeling’s gone and I just can’t get it back”

.................................................

If you could read my mind, love What a tale my thoughts could tell Just like an old time movie About a ghost from a wishing well In a castle dark or a fortress strong With chains upon my feet You know that ghost is me And I will never be set free As long as I'm a ghost you can see

If I could read your mind love What a tale your thoughts could tell Just like a paperback novel The kind the drugstore sells When you reach the part where the heartaches Come the hero would be me Heroes often fail And you won't read that book again Because the ending's just too hard to take

I walk away like a movie star Who gets burned in a three way script Enter number two, a movie queen To play the scene of bringing all the good things out in me But for now love let’s be real

I never thought I could act this way And I've got to say that I just don't get it I don't know where we went wrong But the feeling’s gone and I just can't get it back

If you could read my mind love What a tale my thoughts could tell Just like an old time movie about a ghost from a wishing well In a castle dark or a fortress strong With chains upon my feet The story always ends And if you read between the lines You'll know that I'm just trying to understand The feeling that you left

I never thought I could feel this way And I've got to say that I just don't get it I don't know where we went wrong But the feeling's gone And I just can't get it back.

Love this. Please write more. :)

Martin Freeman: But look, we’ve had this planned for years. YEARS.

BBC Bigwigs: Sorry guys, but things have changed. We’re just not ready for detecting dick sucking yet.

MF: You can’t fucking do this to us. What about the fucking fans? They’re expecting this! We’ve been building to this for years!

BBCB: We feel you. We do. But no. Season four must not give viewers any idea whatsoever that this was a love story between two damaged men who heal each other and make each other whole and then only need one bedroom. How do you feel about Bond?

Benedict Cumberbatch: But it’s a love story. You said we could. You said. Martin and I have practiced!

BBCB: So we’ve come up with a way out for you. Eurus.

MF: What the everloving FUCK is a Eurus?

BBCB: She kills an innocent child and burns down the house and sexts with John and pretends to be Culverton’s daughter, and then Uncle Rudy – remember him? – locks her up in Alcatraz, and wait, don’t go, just listen, then she brainwashes EVERYONE! and Sherlock fixes her with a hug!

MF: The everloving FUCK? 

BBCB: People are gonna love it.

BC: But what about the eyesex and the stag night knee-touch thing and Sherlock coming back to life for John and how he never corrects anyone who assumes they’re a couple and the wedding speech and just how gay everything is?

BBCB: And did we mention Mary’s DVDs?

Thank you, thank you, for keeping this conversation going, for one thing, about the character assassination train that hit John Watson in S4. The abuse in TLD was horrifying. It saddens me that the writers say they’re so pleased with that season. Honestly, if there is a Lost Special, it’s been too long of a silence, and it’s too much to ask of all the viewers at large to understand without giving any explicit clues via official channels; a Lost Special or a fifth season would have a serious amount of work to do to explain S4 in even a semi-satisfactory way, and I no longer believe these writers will condescend to explain anything (Reichenbach, Magnussen’s death, John and Mary reconciliation, Eurus, etc.). The more time goes by, the more the last installment of the show feels like a spiteful flourish of runny ketchup and mustard dribbling over the canvas of what was once deeply inspiring art.

I also appreciated reading your thoughts on Irene Adler’s characterization.

I’m so grateful for you Tumblr writers out there, and for the actors and creative team behind Sherlock. Thanks to this group effort we’ve all had a glimpse of something wonderful, and the mean and spiteful forces won’t win as long as we plant the seed of that glimpse in our own creative work and allow it to bear fruit.

I just can’t believe in a universe where Sherlock Holmes and John Watson don’t end up together in love tbh.

The modern masculine novel, dealing almost exclusively with the rougher, more stirring side of life, with the objective rather than the subjective, marks the reaction against the abuse of love in fiction.         This one phase of life in its orthodox aspect, and ending in the conventional marriage, has been so hackneyed and worn to a shadow, that it is not to be wondered at that there is a tendency sometimes to swing to the other extreme …         In the career of the average man his marriage is an incident, and a momentous incident; but it is only one of several. He is swayed by many strong emotions–his business, his ambitions, his friendships, his struggles with the recurrent dangers and difficulties which tax a man’s wisdom and his courage.         Love will often play a subordinate part in his life. How many go through the world without ever loving at all?         It jars upon us then to have [romance] continually held up as the predominating, all-important fact in life […] To be made attractive once more, [love] must be handled by some great master who has courage to break down conventionalities and to go straight to actual life for his inspiration.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

, 

Through the Magic Door 

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skulls-and-tea

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WHAT THE FUCKING HELL DID I JUST READ

(via bug-catcher-in-viridian-forest)

Wow. ACD was deep!

(via tendergingergirl)

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Yesssss!

This is everything I ask to see. Seriously. Nothing more. No kiss, no sex, no romantic stuff…just them calmly saying they love each other. Something that is natural and true. This is all I ever wanted.

AND SHERLOCK’S LITTLE SMILE AFTER JOHN’S “YES” IS WHAT I LIVE FOR.

This is my life

help I’m having emotions about a cartoon antidepressant trying to be useful

One day please let me see this

The Milky Way over Nugget Point Lighthouse, New Zealand.

js

What you tell yourself inside your head when all you’ve ever had is heartache.

If Mary, Molly, Greg, John, Sherlock, and Mycroft had Snapchat.

A good article that cites many studies and brings up important points about the human condition of loneliness for gay men in particular. Several of the comments are insightful as well. The way boys in North American culture are raised with regard to processing and showing emotion, for example, sets them up for hard times ahead especially when they love men.

I agree with you, too. Writing, filming, and showing John (both John “high moral standard” Watson and John the presumable best friend of Sherlock) beat and kick Sherlock was a terrible idea... ESPECIALLY because it is never dealt with between the two characters. 

Once I happened to be traveling in Germany and went to a nighttime festival with some friends. Suddenly before our eyes, violence like this broke out, when a group of young men attacked a solitary young man, who fell to the ground, and then they started kicking him. They ran off once people recovered from the shock of what they were seeing and moved to intervene. But I shall never forget the horror of that moment. The complete evil of what a person does to another person when they treat them this way. 

So to me this isn’t some manly roughhousing that can just be fixed and forgotten with a stupid joke and a beer. It’s not movie magic that we should pass over because it didn’t really happen. It was awful and cruel, and of everything that happened in S4 this was the worst.

The 'beating' in TLD

My sister made a comment to me just after TLD aired. She said that there is now proof there is no such thing as an after life. I asked why? She replied that if there were an afterlife my Dads (not hers, she’s a half sister) would have been out of their graves and back to protest the scene where John beats up Sherlock.

It was disgusting, and unnecessary. It shook my faith in the show. How could they have thought that Watson would ever beat up Holmes? But then a gay friend called it for what it was ‘gay bashing’; the gay guy gets beaten up for being in love and the ‘straight’ guy gets to vent his own anger that he desired the gay guy and has bisexual leanings which he’s repressing. It’s part of most queer dramas. My gay friend wasn’t even upset about it just resigned.

Yet I needed to fit this into the framework of a show I believe gave us the first out Sherlock Holmes. Even without johnlock, that is a huge big deal. So WTF is going on?

If everything in S4 is MP/coma etc then having John beat Sherlock is maybe a metaphor for John’s anger after Sherlock ‘died’ for 2 years, Sherlock did kill John’s wife by feigning suicide. I get that. Don’t like it, but I can see where they are going with it. I also can see the analogy that John is angry with himself for wanting Sherlock, for the girlfriends and wife not being enough, he wants more and that more is Sherlock. However I do have to consider what my gay friend saw in that scene, the ‘traditional’ violence sent the way of a queer character. Not just in film/TV but in real life. Did the writers for some reason need to show this in order to make a point?

As some of you know, one of my Dads was beaten up by a group of men outside a pub, very similarly to what we saw on screen in TLD. Only a barmaid came out and called the police they would have killed him. The incident changed our lives as a family. However I recall him saying, years after the incident, that it isn’t the level of physical pain or possible death that they inflicted on him that night, after all it was the same anger at his existence that he saw every day in people’s eyes or heard in slurs or jokes or discrimination, no it was the fact that people feel justified to act that way. It was always his fault.

Are Moffat and Gatiss making a point here that viewers were not up in arms about a gratuitous beating? That many empathised with John? Is Sherlock still the problem? Beyond his sexual orientation is he guilty of having a personality that is not tolerated? (Reading the St John comments on the contact twitter accounts I could scream) Being other needs to be knocked out of someone? It’s a huge question and we do need to ask it repeatedly.

I hope more and more professionals from various disciplines start talking about this. It’s annoying to feel like you have to be “happy” all the time when in public. It’s worse when you not only have someone like a boss or mandatory-attendance conference speaker, but also people in your extended family getting in your face about how to find the positive in every situation. 

David Mitchell made a Soapbox video about this years ago. It’s still satisfying to watch.