#THE WAY HIS LONELINESS MANIFESTS AS PAIN AND DISEASE | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

the-phantom-ender · 3 years

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SLAMS MY HANDS ON THE TABLE

DREAM SMP TMA AU WHEN?

RIGHT NOW. IM DOING IT RN. A BUNCH OF CHARACTERS PAIRED UP WITH ENTITIES.

The Buried

The fear of being suffocated, being trapped in small spaces, being buried alive. manifests as caves, dirt, being underground.

Skeppy - Most of my justification for this is heheh funny diamond block, but a common manifestation for the buried is being tight on money. Which I think fits Skeppy. I dunno.

The Corruption

The fear of corruption, filth, disease. Being uncleanly. Often manifests as rot, bugs, or infection.

Bad - This is very much for the crimson arc. Also because a manifestation of the corruption is unhealthy relationships and, while im not calling Bad and Skeppy unhealthy by any means, it’s certainly fitting with the Red Skeppy stuff.

Puffy - For much the same reason as Bad, as well as her initial goal in the server being to patch up all of the creeper holes and generally ‘clean the place up’.

The Dark

The fear of the dark, of what’s unseen. Often manifests as shadows, darkness, and cold water.

George - My justification for George and the dark is very much that it’s what isn’t seen. Out of sight and out of mind. As someone who’s known to not be involved with many conflicts, I feel its fitting.

The Desolation

The fear of pain, loss, destruction, burning. Often manifests as fire, wax, heat, and destruction of potential.

Sapnap - I feel like this one is kinda self explanatory? Local arsonist is afraid of losing a grip on things and literally and metaphorically burns all of his bridges.

Wilbur - Wilbur falls much more into the destruction of potential side of the desolation, while still playing into that fire motif. He lost everything and decides to ruin himself before anyone else has the chance to ruin him more.

The End

The fear of death itself, the unstoppable. Often manifests as bones, the dead, dreams.

Callahan - The silent wildcard fits the end fairly well. Often times no one really knows where he is or what he’s up to? But when he’s there, he’s there.

The Eye

The fear of being watched, followed, having secrets exposed. Also: the need to know and understand. Often manifests as eyes, security cameras, books, and libraries.

Ranboo - He’s constantly stuck in the middle, watching all sides unfold. Having no say in what’s happening but wishing he did. Writing everything down in a book. Need I go on?

The Flesh

The fear of animals bred for meat, the realization that humans are just meat and bone. Often manifests as meat, blood, bones, butchers.

Tubbo - The flesh is really hard to pin on a human. Honestly a lot of my reasoning here is for the butcher army thing. Also Tubbo is very much an animal lover.

The Hunt

The fear of being hunted or chased, being prey. Often manifests as predators, animalistic traits, animal instincts.

Tommy - The hunt is also really hard to pin on a human! Aggression is a very common trait with the hunt. Someone who feels trapped and lashes out at those around them.

Quackity - I point directly at the Techno chase scene. That is the most primal reaction to being chased possible. Also the fact that he changes appearance/skin frequently playing into animalistic features.

The Lonely

The fear of isolation, being disconnected from society as a whole, being cut off. Often manifests as fog, large rooms, faceless crowds, silence.

Techno - It’s the aggression as an intentional way to isolate himself. It’s the pushing himself as far away from people as possible.

Tommy - In the most literal way possible: he was exiled from his people. He talked extensively about feeling alone and how that loneliness overwhelmed him.

Eret - Has been called names along the lines of ‘The Lonely King’. When a characters arc is being outcasted from all around them, not being able to make amends no matter how they try, it’s very easy to put them into the lonely.

The Slaughter

The fear of unmotivated violence, sudden pain. Often manifests as war or murder, those driven ‘Mad with Slaughter’, soldiers.

Wilbur - Sudden pain and unmotivated violence works well for someone driven mad by war and their nation.

Techno - Blood for the blood god! Need I go on? On a serious note, a lot of Techno’s character leans on a craving for blood and violence.

The Spiral

The fear of madness, the world as you know it being wrong, your mind playing tricks on you. The fear of lying or being deceived. Often manifests as spiral patterns, repetition, hallucinations, and illusions.

Ghostbur - The man who remembers nothing but the good, a ghost of the past. A constant thing of not knowing, not remembering, being unsure of everything. People always smiling is a trope for the spiral, as well, and Ghostbur is always happy.

Schlatt - Disillusioned in his way of thinking. Schlatt was always a character that was very good at lying his way to victory and saying exactly what he needed to say to cause chaos.

The Stranger

The fear of the unknown, the unfamiliar. The sense that something isn’t right. Often manifests as mannequins, wax figures, masks, and taxidermy.

Karl - Losing track of how you act or feeling as if you have no purpose is very much a stranger thing. Karl’s background character thing plays into the idea of this super well. Things being replaced is super common with the stranger.

Quackity - Specifically possession arc Quackity. Things not being quite right, just a little off. Someone looking or acting just a little different than how you remember them.

The Vast

The fear of falling, heights, large open spaces. The fear of human insignificance, meaningless. Often manifests as void spaces, falling, infinity.

Phil - Phil is often called a god. His major motifs are flying and surviving for long periods of time. As the End is closed in the smp, a winged being being bound to the ground or falling from grace is fitting for the vast.

The Web

The fear of being controlled or trapped, doing things against your will, being controlled without realizing. Often manifests as spiders, spider webs, puppets.

Dream - This is Dream’s entire thing. He’s the god of a world and bends everyone to his will, but also feels entirely out of control when someone get the leg up on him and struggles to regain that control.

Tommy - haha being controlled or manipulated, I’ll stop bullying Tommy.

and just for fun:

The Extinction

The fear of catastrophic change, destruction of nature, destruction of humanity. Often manifests as technology like computers, code, and radio. Not much is known about this entity.

Sam - Pandoras Vault. Also the fact that he’s good with building and redstone both, but especially redstone in the case of technology. Technically there are no Avatars of The Extinction because it technically doesn’t exist, but it’s fun to imagine.

THANK YOU THIS HAS BEEN PHANTOM MIXING HIS HYPERFIXATIONS.

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sleepy-daydream-in-a-rose · 4 years

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Thorin x reader | Hanahaki |

Summary: Reader falls in love with Thorin even if he isn't always nice to her. Reader gets Hanahaki disease and it worsens everytime she realizes Thorin won't ever love her.

Hanahaki: A rare disease caused by unrequited love. It manifests when the afflicted believes their feelings are unrequited. Thus even if the feelings are requited, they will have to be convinced they are loved.

If the afflicted has been rejected then the disease will worsen and the afflicted will die within a few hours.

(I once read this version of Hanahaki somewhere but I don't remember where so it might seem familiar.)

Warnings: Angst, panic attack (but good ending, promise, I can't stand bad endings lol my heart can't take those)

You would've never guessed that love could produce such a disease. Flowers rooting themselves in your lungs, growing and limiting your breathing capabilities. Gandalf, the sly wizard, found you throwing bloody petals away and pulled you aside.

Your gut told you the Grey Wizard already knew who it was but you still refused to say. It was painful enough to realize he would never love you back, so why say it out loud? So you would die quicker? No. You refused to die until you've done your part in the Quest for Erebor.

Gandalf kindly (urgently) told you the 'cure' of the Hanahaki disease. Should you confess and your feelings are requited, then the disease would disappear. But the afflicted would need to truly believe they are loved, otherwise they will end up the same way should their feelings be unrequited. If you confess and the other person doesn't feel the same, then the afflicted would die within a few hours instead of dying a slow suffocating death.

After being transported from your home to Middle-Earth and stumbling upon the little hobbit hole, you were swept away on this quest. Gandalf had to do a lot of convincing the King under the Mountain to let you join the Company because he thought you would be an asset to the quest. How? You did not know...

You were certain you weren't fit for this quest but you knew the feeling of missing home. Something you hadn't talked about it with anyone yet. No one asked so you didn't say a word about it.

The first to approach you were the nephews, Bofur and Bilbo (and Gandalf of course). They made you feel welcomed when the others didn't.

Thorin didn't budge from his first impression of you. Frail, weak and just a human female. Useless and an extra mouth to feed.

Your first impression of him on the other hand was quite the opposite. He was more handsome than in the movies, more majestic and even more intimidating.

You developed a little crush on the brooding King but that was only because he was attractive. His personality made you gag in the beginning, but after some time on the quest, you saw through little actions that he cared greatly for his kin.

You began to admire him more, even if his attitude towards you was less than optimal and even though you weren't the recipient of his small acts of kindness. Even Bilbo was more accepted by the Company and Thorin than you were. This made you feel like an outcast.

Even though Thorin treated you like you were less, your crush on him began to develop into love because you saw what a great king he would be. The important decisions he makes and leading the Company, you wouldn't be able to do any of those things, and you doubt anyone just could. He was extremely loyal and honorable (just not to you I guess).

After a while your throat began itching and you felt an urge to cough. It began as an annoying itch and transformed into a painful cough. You didn't want to be seen as an inconvenience (even more than before) so you hid it.

Then came the petals. Bloody petals. Hiding these were easy enough since it didn't happen a lot, but Gandalf was able to pick up on it. It looked like he pitied you, and was always kind and understanding when you didn't want to say who it was (but he probably already knew).

After the ordeal with those trolls (were you weren't much of a help) Bilbo became more accepted into the Company than you (though Fili, Kili and Bofur were still very accepting and open minded).

The Company slowly opened up to you, reluctantly albeit, because of your gender. Dwarves thought that females should stay safe at home and not be out adventuring.

That hurt you to be honest. After transporting to this world you didn't have a home to turn to, but apparently these dwarves never realized that. It bothered you greatly since you never talked to anyone about your family, but you did talk about your world when certain dwarves asked questions about your world.

Little by little you began feeling more worthless and depressed, even when the Company keeps you company. (hah get it?)

You stayed quiet more than ever, only saying something when something was asked, and with less enthusiasm. The Company must've noticed how your mood dampened. You missed home and Thorin's harsh words didn't make it any better. He always remarked how you should've stayed home, but it's not like you a choice now had you? You always went out in the woods to cough out all the petals you were keeping in and hoped no one would notice.

One night, when you were keeping watch (yaaay you got a task...but it was a sign that the leader thought you weren't completely useless) you felt someone sitting next to you. You hoped your tears weren't visible as you were thinking of home and how you're probably stuck on Middle-Earth.

The fur of the King was unmissable as he was sitting next to you. Little did you know that he saw your tears glistening in the moonlight. He probably thought you were too emotional and not fit for this quest.

What he said next was unexpected. "I am sorry for how I acted towards you in this journey. You clearly have an effect on the moods of everyone here. So much, that when your mood dampened, it affects every one of us."

Confused you looked at Thorin and furrowed your brows. "There is something clearly bothering you, something you haven't told us. May I ask what it is?" He said with concern laced in his voice.

That made you break down and cry out all your pent up emotions. Thorin must've thought you were an annoyance as he shifted a bit, probably out of shock.

"I don't have a home, I don't have anyone, no family or friends to turn to, so when this journey is over where do I go?", you said with frustration and tears streaming down your face. You felt hopelessness increasing as you said those words aloud.

As your body was shaking, trembling, you put your head in your hands and soon your crying turned into a panic attack. Your mind foggy and blurry, face wet from the salty tears that were flowing down your cheeks, body shaking from the mental stress you endured during the trip.

Your breathing shortened and you brought your knees to your head while using your arms to shield yourself from the outside world.

You couldn't take it anymore missing home, the loneliness, being out of your comfort zone. Even if the Company was there to comfort you, it just wasn't the same. It became to much. You loved the soon-to-be-king and that didn't make it any easier.

His eyes widened as he took in your trembling figure. The gruff dwarf sat next to you, as seeing you in such a state made him want to comfort you. He didn't know everything about you but he had a snippet of knowing that you missed your home, even though you never said it. He heard it in your voice and when your eyes looked distant and glazed over.

He was very prideful, but seeing how he never saw signs that you would break down like this he got worried. He wondered how long you were bottling up all your emotions.

It comforted you greatly to have warmth next to you, especially when it was him.

After trying to get your breathing under control in which you failed as it almost induced another hyperventilation, Thorin helped you.

"Breathe in, breathe out, listen to my breathing and to my voice only," his deep baritone voice said as he turned to you and placed a hand on your back, "your doing great (y/n)."

The first time he said your name. That was enough to make you calm down but you didn't dare to look at him so you kept your eyes on the ground.

"I am truly sorry that I did not discuss this earlier with you," he said with a voice full of regret, "I didn't think how my words would've hurt you and how I treated you would've affected you. You are but a mere daughter of the Race of Men and this is a dangerous quest. Your life and health is my responsibility and I will not have you get killed because of a quest you have nothing to gain with. But I see that you did have a reason after all. It's my fault that I didn't see the dedication you put into your contribution to this quest."

It's true. You wanted to help them (after Gandalf informed you of this quest), because you didn't have a home either (at the moment).

In reality Thorin didn't hate you or anything, he thought it best to scare you away so he wouldn't have to worry about a woman getting hurt in his presence. Though it was very obvious that it wasn't a good method of showing his concerns. He felt an unknown pull towards you and it irritated him that he didn't know why.

"Perhaps," he continued, "when this journey is over and Erebor is ours again, I- we would love it if you stayed with us... in the mountain."

The dark-haired dwarf fidgeted a bit.

"R-really," you said tears still staining your face and a bittersweet smile after calming down a bit, "that would be my honour."

For the first time during this quest, Thorin smiled at you. A heartfelt and genuine smile. His eyes twinkled. "My apologies for being blind, my lady," he said with a soft look on his face, "you deserved better, and I will make sure no one treats you the way I treated you."

Both of you smiled at each other and began talking about your life before plunging in this world until it was time for the second watch.

After that night, you felt better. Everyone treated like you were one of the Company and things seemed to go perfectly. Except your disease, which worsened.

Weeks after that night you finally had first watch with Thorin again. He was much nicer to you. He gave his coat to you on multiple occasions, made sure you ate enough and you loved it. But you dreaded moments alone because it was becoming increasingly difficult to hide your disease. After every one of those sweet moments you felt an urge to cough, because you realized your feelings would never be returned. He was just being friendly after that night.

You were having a pleasant talk with Thorin when you felt the petals coming up.

Throat itching more than ever, you began coughing violently, trying to catch your breath. Thorin saw you struggling and it alarmed him because he didn't know if you were sick or anything like that. As he raised his hand to rub your back to help you or soothe you while coughing since it looked painful, you turned away from him. You didn't want him to see the petals, almost full flowers now.

He still put his hand on your back. Then his eyes widened. Bloody petals. Bloody half-flowers.

He knew of this disease. He knew it was bound to end with a heartbreakingly and sad death.

You knew he had seen them.

"Who?" he asked with the softest voice you ever heard from him. His voice laced with concern and something you couldn't really place.

Shaking your head you said, "It doesn't matter."

"It matters, (y/n)," Thorin said sternly as he looked worriedly at you, "the person who holds your heart must see what a kind and strong person you are."

"If it's someone in the Company, I can talk to him if you want," the Dwarven King continued.

You hurriedly shook your head and looked up at him, slightly surprised by his concerned face, "No that's not needed, I am content watching from afar."

The gruff dwarf dropped it, for now. But you could see the glances and worried gazes from him across the campfire if he heard you cough or clear your throat.

Balin knew of your predicament as he also knows of the extremely rare disease and saw some of the telltale signs. And seeing his King staring at your sleeping figure also cleared up some things for the old dwarf.

Balin, together with Oin helped you hide it from the rest of the company, they were already protective enough and you didn't want to complicate matters further. Oin made something that would soothe your aching throat.

One evening Thorin followed you out when you were 'gathering wood'. And was surprised to see you coughing up full flowers, blood included.

Tears were streaming down you face as your throat burned from all the flowers you had to cough up.

"(Y/n)?"

You turned around and saw Thorin's eyes glazing over. "Please, tell me who it is. I will do everything in my power to make them see what a beautiful woman you are. If not, please let Gandalf help you."

He was referring to the surgery to remove the disease, which would also remove your ability to ever love again. You couldn't blame people for taking or not taking the surgery. Everyone to their own. You understood the pros and cons of undergoing the surgery, but you liked the pros of suffering from the disease more than the consequences.

You only shook your head as you began crying. "You know I can't, I don't want to be rejected. I'd rather die loving him than live never being able to love."

"Who is hurting your heart, amralime?", the usually gruff dwarf said with a cracked voice, "please, let me help you. I can't bear to see you suffering like this."

Thorin's eyes were glazing over and he held a very sorrowed look. His heart was breaking as yours was, but you didn't know that. The foreign word was also unknown to you which made you confused but you didn't pay any attention to it. You still refused.

"(Y/n), please," he put his forehead on yours, "I'm begging you. I love you too much to let this go. I don't want to lose you. I want you to be my Queen under the mountain so please... let me in. Even if you don't love me, I will still love you even after I go to Mahal's Halls. You are my One, (y/n)."

Gasping as your eyes widened at his confessions. The tears streaming down your face turned from sadness turned to tears of happiness.

You smiled brightly at him. "You love... me? ", your voice wavered.

"Yes, I do. I truly do," he said with a light smile on his face as a tear of worriedness trickled down his cheek. All the brooding dwarf wanted, was for you to be happy.

"But...," your smile faltered and you stared at him, "w-why?"

It broke Thorin's heart to hear you say that for he thought you were the definition of perfection, "At first I didn't know what I was feeling but then I saw you for who you really are. You didn't complain and kept walking while the others complained and whined. I fell in love with you, your beauty and personality. I was hoping to be the target of your affections, but if it's someone else... I would totally understand for I am not an exemplary dwarrow." The blue-eyed dwarf looked at you with a pleading look in his eyes.

"Thorin, if you would've told me this sooner then... this disease wouldn't have gotten so far," you said with a gaze filled with adoration, "I-I love you too, Thorin."

Suddenly, your breathing hitched and you couldn't breathe... Thorin looked alarmed "Ghivashel, what's wrong?"

Clawing at your throat you tried to catch your breath. As if the Valar heard Thorin's whimpers when you collapsed, you started to breath again. Normally, without any pain whatsoever.

You could feel the disease going away as it had a strong reaction to the feelings Thorin and you held for each other.

"I'm fine, my love. Everything's going to be fine," you reassured the love of your life as he held you.

Thorin smiled brightly as he finally had you in his arms and he had no fear of you loving someone else. Just him and only him. You were made for each other and the Valar knew it.

#Thorin #thorin oakenshield #thorin fic #king thorin #thorin x reader #one shot #hanahaki!reader #hanahaki #happy ending #wattpad #the hobbit x reader #the hobbit x y/n #the hobbit #the hobbit imagine #gandalf

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sasorikigai · 2 years

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“ i don't want to be alone tonight. “ goddess liv @ scorpion!

love confession starters || @somniaxperdita || accepting

▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥 || For centuries of torment and agony stretching to become eons, Scorpion’s demonic world had craved for any semblance of halcyon, heavenly touch. Lest the magnificent sunshine takes down and pulverizes his Nether’s armor until he is his most vulnerable self. Openly pregnable, yet having long conquered death in order to manifest himself as hellfire incarnate, Hanzo Hasashi’s rawest form remains existing, lest not thriving. The sudden feeling of drowning endless thwarts itself upon him. His mind racing with a million thoughts that never met his lips. This familiar feeling makes his heart race with anticipated fear; that he may continue to entrap himself; being choked and silenced, staying quiet and docile, fluttering out of the way as the rushing onslaught of righteous hellfire would be rendered mere pitter-patter, patter-pitter of the perilous candlelight.

Despite the unconditional and unending love from the Goddess, Scorpion’s loneliness had manifested itself more as a creeping disease of his major organs, causing a multiple organ failure. How it would manifest behind the lungs and spreads unseen and unrecognized. In the swirling curves of dark rooms and the chaos of bright bodies, the sense of singularity would become a bitter agony; both the hum of silence and the monstrous crowd that surround this pitiful thing have no effective armorments.

For it would constantly remain, small and seeping into cartilage, unpierced. The rain falls deafening and tranquil, nearly transporting Scorpion’s senses elsewhere; bringing a rare sense of peace and belongingness he never knew existed. And even during those moments, where the sky creates chaos, when the clouds heavily cry, is where he finds his sanity through his exertive training. In the small moments of rain is when his mind remains silent and his visceral emotions become ragingly loud, as he bleeds and enervates still, but he could never perish even in the excruciating throes of fatal suffering.

The pity of time must have pursued Scorpion’s restless, septic heart, and through the wreckful siege that continues to batter his listless depression and lassitude of his heart and soul. The Goddess’ revelation does not come with no great surprise - as when he learns to levitate and hardly trying, Scorpion realizes - that they never have to be alone in their respective shadows. He could feel her pain ripping her apart, lest the God’s pain tolerance may exceedingly surpass that of the tormented wraith’s. Blue embers burn through the walls of obfuscating clouds, and how his scintillating flames burst and curve like diamonds, into the lost wandering lover’s hands. Her pain is his gain, which helps Scorpion to become intimately aware of the Goddess’ suffering and trials that face her.

“I am both duty-bound, ensorcelled in love and in your fullest disposal, should you require my eternal company. You should not inquire such things,” once deathly dark and silent gaze of Scorpion’s had considerably mellowed, as the glistening expanse of his clothed chest heaves in great successions, ebbing and flowing as he had expanded all the energy he could utilize in the burning all out, as once serpentine chains had challenged the vehemence and might of streaking lightning themselves.

“Your eyes may hide fathomless oceans; placid ad untamed in waves and crashes, but you should never allow your psyche to become blackened against the resplendent luminescence of your immaculate being.” His heaviest, most visceral words come from the most dulcet ad intimate touches, as his cradling embrace becomes a crackle of steady bonfire, its comforting warmth settling atop her shoulders, drawing her in as the pitter-patter within his chest eases the cold steel, the determined and unwavering hardness of his being to soften. ▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥 ||

#✗ the ineffable testimony of spawned hellfire (scorpion)#✗ hellfire fibrillating beneath his skin (iv)#✗ successions of binding music (olivia winter || somniaxperdita)#somniaxperdita

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lettrespromises · 4 years

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┄───➤ LettresPromises informs you : you have one notification. ❜

──➤ 𝐋𝐄𝐓𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐎𝐁𝐉𝐄𝐂𝐓 : 𝐄𝐌𝐎𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐒 𝐀𝐑𝐄 𝐀𝐍 𝐈𝐋𝐋𝐍𝐄𝐒𝐒.

──➤ Smoker sent you a letter, would you like to read it? ❜

@theastroooooworld sent a letter : ❝hello my lover 🧚🏼‍♀️, i hope you are well no matter when you see this request !since i love above all your writing, could you make a scenario with another love of my life : Smoker ? in which this angel becomes aware that he loves his best friend from childhood, but this confuses him a lot and he ends up not knowing how to act with her anymore and until he decides to tell her ? please make it very sweet and full of good vibes ! I trust you once again for this declaration of love !𓊕 — juste entre nous deux; tu es une personne formidable et j'avais juste besoin de te le dire, je t'aime fort 💜🤸🏼‍♀️❞

the author’s letter : ❝dear cam, i couldn’t be more honored of writing this request for you, especially because it concerns smoker and he has no business being this hot but oh well!! thank you for trusting me with your wonderful idea, i hope you’ll enjoy this promised letter. je t’aime si fort, t’es plus qu’incroyable et j’aimerai que tu le saches.❞

──➤ 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐫𝐞 : pure fluff. ─➤ 𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 : none. ➤ 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭 : 2.6K. Excerpt of the letter : ❝Only then did he realize that he had never felt an agonizing sensation of vacuity coursing through his veins when he was feeling frustrated. It was odd, it was foreign, he felt weak. His subconscious screamed at him to associate this haunting feeling of loneliness to the lack of your presence, and for once he agreed— Smoker knew he felt different, in the worst way possible, when you were not around, so he let out another puff of smoke.❞

Is there anything Smoker won’t put words around? Yes, there is.

There is the consuming rage fueled by his unquenched thirst to capture more pirates and bring his status of « white hunter » closer to glory. But he reminds himself that perhaps some pirates deserve to be set free as his orbs lay on the poster of Monkey D. Luffy and the letters of the word « wanted » screaming at him. There is the sense of injustice within the epitome of justice, such acerbic poetry, and the cacophony of remorses making his jaw clench every now and then. There is the frustration of acknowledging that there will forever be a gap between his own definition of justice and his superiors’ definition of justice, particularly Akainu’s version which appears too merciless to his own liking.

And there is the haunting torment of being incapable of qualifying properly his feelings.

He knows what anger feels like— he knows how anger bends his body, he knows that anger will push his sanity down a pit and he will have to sit here and observe an unhinged version of himself crawl out of said pit.

He knows what indifference feels like— but he barely realizes that his eyes roll back whenever his superior wishes, yet again, to narrow the notion of freedom within justice, he knows that his brain purposefully decides not to absorb any given information pooling out of Akainu’s mouth.

Smoker knows how his emotions manifest themselves and recognizes them kinesthetically.

But Smoker also fails to identify the newcomers.

« State your name and business before coming in. » It also seems that he has trouble recognizing the five distinct taps of your knuckles on the door leading to his office, but oh well.

Your knuckles brush the wooden surface of the door until reaching the doorknob and twisting it in the process, you close the door behind you, leaving his pseudo orders waiting in front of the door at the same time. « I’m kind of hurt, I thought you’d recognize my secret knocking style, we’ve spent ages creating this secret language as kids. »

But how could Smoker not recognize the sound of your voice and the honey dripping down your vocal cords?

He shifted in his seat, secretly thanking for your presence so his orbs could properly project a different visual than the bland reports scattered across his desk, and he thanked you a second time for allowing him to visually embrace the shape of your body, but he kept that to himself. « Should I give you a reminder of how old we are, Y/N? I’m almost certain we’re way past that age. » Smoker stated, a puff of smoke punctuated the end of his sentence.

« No doubt, you’re definitely past that age. » You trailed off whilst making your way over to his desk, a grin which radiated ill intentions shone brought amongst your facial features. You made a seat out of his desk without asking for permission, Smoker lightly tapped your left thigh in return, a weak attempt to make you get off of his desk. The experience granted by having shared the majority of your life with Smoker offered you the prestige of being free of your own deeds around him, without ever having to worry about pseudo consequences. « But I do have amazing news for you, I’m sure you’ll love it. » You finished, an amused gleam shining in the irises of your eyes at his quirked eyebrow, a silent way to tell you to explain further.

« I’m coming with you and Tashigi on Punk Hazard! Now, now… I know your emotionless self won’t let it show but I know, I just know you’re thrilled to hear that. » You slammed the report proving the sincerity of your words regarding your presence on the mission held on Punk Hazard on his desk in a loud thud, and the proudest grin appeared across your face, just to emphasize that silent victory over Smoker who had always refused to go on a mission with you, but never once did he admit it was because he was afraid of seeing you getting hurt.

Another puff of smoke left his lips, out of frustration, he recognized that he was feeling frustrated because of the way his teeth would hold his cigars a bit tighter, often approaching the limit of breaking them in two.

« You seem so eager to come on Punk Hazard, but I don’t think you realize how dangerous this mission is. » He grumbled, his eyes finding yours lost amongst the metaphorical electricity created in the room because of the tension. Smoker couldn’t quite tell what frustrated him the most— was it the fact that Akainu, out of all people, granted you the wish to come on Punk Hazard? Was it the fact he envied your ability to willingly ignore the magnitude of danger? Or was it the fact you called him emotionless?

Emotionless.

Smoker wasn’t emotionless, see— he was feeling frustrated. But, nonetheless, the words echoed in his head until it lost its meaning. Was he emotionless? No, no, no he was not. Smoker was not emotionless. He was frustrated, frustration is a valid feeling therefore is he able to show emotions. But only now did he wonder if it was genuine frustration.

« I didn’t reach this rank by slacking off, you and I both know it. I’ll see you soon enough, Smoker. »

He found his own answer when you hopped off his desk and left the room, the sound of the door being shut close was his sole wake-up call. Only then did he realize that he had never felt an agonizing sensation of vacuity coursing through his veins when he was feeling frustrated. It was odd, it was foreign, he felt weak. His subconscious screamed at him to associate this haunting feeling of loneliness to the lack of your presence, and for once he agreed— Smoker knew he felt different, in the worst way possible, when you were not around, so he let out another puff of smoke.

This enigma kept him up at the worst moments, and like every enigma, obtaining an answer to soothe the inner pain caused by the latest obsession of his mind was almost impossible. He immediately knew he couldn’t talk about it to Hina, or worse, Tashigi. Either way, he was sure to be met with either a harsh judgement and could already imagine Hina saying « You’ve mellowed ever since we joined the navy, Hina is amused. » or the inevitable stutters cascading from Tashigi’s mouth. Smoker was on his own, drown in the torment of his own emotions.

The sole temporary solution he found was to ignore you, if his body and mind had to hurt then so be it, he couldn’t handle the agonizing pain of seeing you go away, Smoker had mentally told himself to be a martyr and accept it.

You, on the other one hand, did not bother too much about his absence, you figured it was his way to mentally prepare himself ahead of a mission. You accepted it too, both his absence and the inexorable feeling of your heartstrings being bent in unimaginable ways.

Smoker lighted up the fifth cigar in a row now, and once more he blindly trusted the aftereffects of your absence for the cause of this obsession, smoking some more was merely a placebo to soothe the torture brought by the lack of answer. Truthfully, Smoker hadn’t spoken in a while, perhaps he had nothing to say as long as he knew what was going on. He spoke rarely and judged the value of his words before actually speaking— sure, he had directed his subalterns here and there to organize the ship on their way to Punk Hazard, but aside from the obligations of his ranks, he found nothing to say. Or rather, his mind didn’t grant him the ability to talk until he figured what was this haunting feeling which had no familiarity with frustration anymore. But was he emotionless?

Instead, Smoker let the rhythm of the waves crashing against the ship in the darkest hours of the night to rock his thoughts. His hazel orbs never left once the ‘wanted’ posters of Monkey D. Luffy and Trafalgar Law— of course he knew their faces and who they were, but the couldn’t trust his body anymore and wondered whether or not this secret emotional disease was going to affect his memory. Smoker hoped it wouldn’t have any impact on his memories with you, he was willing to let amnesia consume him whole and burn everything he knew except any memory which had your name written all over it.

From that moment, Smoker knew it was definitely not frustration.

« Smoker? Smoker? Earth to big cigar boy? You can go to sleep, it’s my turn to watch over the ship and you kind of look like a zombie if I’m being honest. » He hadn’t even noticed you entered the main cabin and thus he cursed himself for doing so, but Smoker noticed you looked hesitant by the way you were fiddling with your fingers, it was something you always did as a child.

Most of all, Smoker noticed something else— whenever you were in the same vicinity as him, the pain soothed, it faded away to let the most blissful sensation appear instead. Yet another question he will never obtain the answer to.

Using the grip on the armrests as a support, Smoker stood up and headed towards the door to leave you alone whilst you were on watching duty, that was the initial plan : head towards the door and leave. Head towards the door and leave. Head towards the door and-…

« Y/N, can I ask you something? » … And shamefully ask you to ease his pain instead.

You looked at him with a quizzical look painted across your facial features, both at the sudden interpellation, but mostly at the fainted grip he was holding on your wrist. « Sure, I’m all ears. » You replied, curiosity tainted the way your words came out but you kept your eyes locked on his frame anyway.

Smoker took a sudden drag of his cigars to ease his nerve and subconsciously give him a few seconds to organize the isolated parts of sentences shooting in his mind. Truthfully, he didn’t even know if this was necessary given that he ignored how he was feeling or what caused his body to hurt so much, translating this agony into words was beyond impossible. « You have to promise not to tell anyone about this. » He inquired, his orbs adopted a darker tone on the demanding tone coating his words and the hold on your wrist became temporarily tighter, you hummed in response, allowing him to continue. « If I’m being honest, I think I’m sick or have caught some kind of disease. It’s odd and quite impossible to properly be explained. I don’t know what I’m feeling, but it’s manifesting through this constant sensation of feeling empty. It weighs on my mind, and I have no idea what’s causing it. »

You quirked your brow in response, genuinely concerned as to whether or not Smoker was actually sick— after all, as you were approaching the extreme binary climate of Punk Hazard, such possibility couldn’t be evicted. You allowed your orbs to roam over his face, a guilty pleasure, and besides visible confusion, you couldn’t depict any physical symptom.

« Um, right? Do you have any idea when did this start? » You asked, hoping to obtain more hints about his situation.

« I hate to admit it but it started when you left my office last week, and now that you’re here I feel better, as in I don’t feel this emptiness anymore. » He continued, and for the first time in your life, you could admire his emotions dancing under the moonlight. « I was wondering if you felt sick, too. »

« So, if I sum it up you feel ‘empty’ and ‘in pain’ when I’m not around. » You couldn’t help but bend your lips into a smile which you knew he already hated by the ill intentioned looks of it.

« Sort of, but you haven’t answered my question : are you ill or not? » A question so innocent which found its answer in the shameless laugh escaping your lips, Smoker covered your mouth with his palm— not because he cared about the quality of the slumber of his soldiers, but rather because the sound of your laugh was awakening something else in him which was too harsh to handle.

You delicately wrapped your fingers around his wrist, slowly making him retreat his limb to his torso, and to his greatest pleasure, your laughter left an imprint on your facial features in the shape of a grin. « Would you believe me if I were to tell you that I found the cure? » You asked, already imagining the outcome of a possible answer.

« Huh? What is it? » He responded to your question with yet another question, but there and only there he found the answer to his haunting enigma when your fingers invaded his vision field and threw the sole obstacles to the apex of the situation, his cigars, on the floor before stepping on them to extinguish them. And there and only there, Smoker felt peace when your lips crashed onto his in a delicately harsh liplock whilst your palms were cupping his cheeks. It came as a reflex, and he couldn’t blame himself for it because he had fantasized about this scenario several times while hoping it would be the cure to his problems, Smoker caged you against his chest as his forelimbs protectively claimed your waist.

The more your lips were lingering on his, the more he felt every ounce of pain exude his body by his every pores— you were the cure, you were the answer to his enigma and always have been. If his lungs hadn’t failed him, Smoker would have gladly delivered himself into the temptations of your lips once more, judging by the way he blindly chased after your lips when you broke the kiss.

Another giggle escaped your lips as your thumbs brushed invisible motions against his cheeks, « Do you still feel empty at all? » you asked, such a rhetorical question, right? Smoker looked at you quizzically but then it hit him— he felt full, and vacuity had lost sense. « No, I don’t feel empty anymore. » He concluded to your amused smile.

« You’re not sick and never have been, or maybe it’s a sickness to you, but you’re in love, Smoker. That’s what you were feeling. And if I’m being honest, I’ve been feeling quite ‘empty’ myself too. » You confessed and opened your heart to him so he could admire each tone of vivid color painting your feelings for him which caused him to tighten his hold to bring you as close as humanly possible. He had found his cure and needed as much contact as possible. « I suppose you’re right, I do feel better when you’re by my side. »

And here, you planted yet another peck on his lips and gave in to the sweet temptation of savoring the taste of his lips once more. The gleam shining in the corner of your eyes reflected nothing but genuine love, and you knew it was the same gleam reflecting in his own orbs. « I’ve never been more glad to be sick in my entire life. » Smoker concluded, and kissed these words into the skin of the crown of your hair.

That’s when Smoker knew that perhaps he wasn’t emotionless, or at least, he was able to feel emotions as long as you were by his side.

#one piece #smoker x reader #one piece x reader #smoker #one piece reader insert #one piece imagine #one piece oneshot #smoker hcs #smoker imagine #smoker oneshot #one piece hcs

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tiondevi-art · 3 years

Text

Sallete Naveen

(Sallete is still in development, I will change her look many times)

"It's okay now, I'm here, I'll help you up again."

Principal information:

Name: Sallete Naveen

Birthday: 23/10

Zodiac sign: Scorpion

Relatives: Nathan (Older brother) Elaine (Mother) Melody (Adoptive aunt) Serafin (Younger brother) Erik (Husband)

Familiar: Apollo

Familiar: Apollo ( Stingray )

MBTI: INFJ

Voice: ✨

Childrens: Alon and Cassiel

Occupation:

She spends a lot of time studying astronomy, marine biology and magic, so she has little time to work, but she works in the store and also in the palace library, she knows the library with the palm of her hands.

Patron Arcana:

Major Arcana: The Sun

Minor Arcana: King of Cups

Spiritual animal:

Sallete's spiritual animal is the swan, it represents beauty, dignity, grace, purity, abundance and prestige. The swan has the ability to see the future and accept the healing and transformation that is so constant in his life and tends to be completely monogamous in his relationships, often finding true love at a young age and staying with those people through the years. The swan also recognizes the value of personal loneliness as a way to recharge batteries.

Personality:

Sallete has a gentle and reserved personality, she will rarely see her scream or get angry, she avoids showing negative feelings because she is afraid to disturb people, so she will always be happy and active. Although Sal seems very kind all the time she can also be very spiteful, she does not forgive easily and it is very difficult to regain her confidence.

Background story:

Sallete grew up with her aunt Melody and her older brother Nathan in Vesuvio, her aunt Melody and she got along very well, her aunt taught her magic and to read taro cards, so everything Sallete knows was taught by her aunt Melody, however they spend little time together because their older brother never allowed them to get very close, he was always protective Sal could only leave the house with him. but one day his brother went out alone to find a job and left Sal in Melody's care, at first everything was normal, but after a few hours Vesuvio was invaded by cruel thieves who killed and stole, they didn't spare anyone even Sallete, but the a thief who broke into her house felt sorry for being just a child and did not have the courage to kill her, so in order not to be considered a traitor he plucked her eye with a sword, leaving a terrible scar that she has hidden since the accident. After a few years, her aunt ended up dying of natural causes and Sallete gave her a funeral, but her brother did not show up, as he still held a grudge against her, even if she was not to blame, after that event Sallete's heart became even harder and she became stoic about everything, it seemed that her feelings had died with her aunt, so when she was about to give up a new boy appeared in Vesuvio, where he passed he spread his joy and his joy spread to Sallete who was extremely close to boy, his name is Erik (@sylph-dreams) and they are friends today, even Nathan approached the boy, wanting to be infected by his joy, they become a family, even when Erik returned to his country, Sallete waited for him every day in docks and that's how she met Asra and Muriel. After years the terrible plague came that took many inhabitants of Vesuvio including Sallete who tried to find a cure and was infected by the disease and ended up dying.

Magic:

Sallete converts her magical essence into Light. She can use spells as offensive or supplement (destroy or heal) light magic is a very rare attribute, but it can be mastered with effort.

Route Ending:

Upright ending:

After defeating the devil you go back to Vesuvio and everything goes back to normal, but on his last visit to the store Nathan said that Sal had moved, but would go to work in the store while he was at the restaurant, then Sallete enters the store and says who built a house for her in the forest and would love to have a visit from you. When you arrive at your house, Sallete finally manages to declare herself saying that she finally feels complete and that the pain in her heart has finally disappeared and replaced by a new feeling, which always gets stronger when you are around.

Reversed ending:

The devil releases all the negative emotions trapped inside Sal she is absorbed by despair and sadness, her blood stops being human blood and becomes gold just like her tears and her heart is crushed leaving literally a hole in her chest, her feelings become they manifest like thorny roses that pierce your skin. After that Sal hides in the devil's kingdom hoping that his feelings will disappear some day.

Curiosities:

Sallete music, so she is always trying to learn to play new instruments, she already knows how to play: piano, kalimba, guitar and violin

She can ballet and belly dance

Sal has his own world, a flooded kingdom made for wars, but it became a place of beauty after being abandoned. (Sometimes she trains with her brother in that place)

She visits Apollo frequently, as he can get out of the sea.

Sallete likes astrology, philosophy but she doesn't say much about it

She likes to write her feelings and draw, but she never shows it to anyone

#the arcana #the arcana apprentice #fanart #digital art #the arcana fanart #the arcana mc #the arcana game #my art #oc biography

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validatio-n · 4 years

Text

Dying To Live

I first met death when I was very young. I didn’t know what it was, and it never really took a form until I was around 16. I quietened his voice like we all try do to at the start, by ignoring it, partying, or seeking validation from people who don’t deserve you to glance in their direction.

It appeared as though the demons in my head I feebly tried to still had noticed what I tried to do, and they were angry. The thoughts I had of worthlessness, insignificance, unlovability and self-loathing festered from a light, continual hum that I learnt to deal with, to something likened to when you plug your headphones in and the volume is turned up the whole way. You get such a fright and rip the headphones out of your ear. Except with me, I can’t rip them out of my ear. For a long time, I couldn’t even turn the volume down. For 24 hours a day, even in sleep, no matter who I was with or what I was doing, I constantly had this music in my ears telling me I was nothing, I was no one, I was ugly and I deserved everything that had happened to me. Sure, a lot of the time it wasn’t blaring loud and sometimes I barely noticed it, but after years of trying to fight off that voice, you begin to accept it. You begin to believe it, and it becomes a natural part of your everyday life.

Once that’s happened, you’ve successfully opened yourself up for Death to manifest him self in your body. He will creep in and start slow, so you don’t notice him planting seeds in your mind that he watches grow, spreading a thick black toxic throughout your body, turning your blood to poison and your skin to ice. You’re trapped, your body doesn’t feel like your own. You pinch at your skin in disgust and dream of hacking away your non-existent fat with a meat cleaver. Slicing your arms like you’re playing the violin and staring at the blood rushing out even if the mere thought of blood makes you queasy. You’ll wonder, although you’ve gone through some shit, why you are so fucking sad. You’ll wonder why people did what they did to you, how they did what they did to you. You’ll go to the doctors and you’ll get diagnosed and you’ll go through the therapy and you’ll use your support systems and you’ll swear you’re going to beat this sadistic fuck that is depression and anxiety and panic disorder and night terror (Death, in other words), and some days, you believe you will. But when its 3am and its you and Death lying in your tear-soaked bed, Death is the only one there for you.

He’s telling you how you’re going to hurt yourself to feel better. He’s saying it’s going to take the pain away; it’s going to make you have the best sleep ever with no nightmares and no panic attacks. Hurting yourself will make you in control again, he’s saying one scratch won’t do any damage, just try it, see how it feels to inflict physical pain to quash the mental pain. You know the mental pain is your brain playing tricks on you. You know it’s a chemical imbalance. You know the anxiety and the PTSD is from your past relationships. You know Death isn’t actually sitting next to you, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t feel it, because at this time you don’t even know that it’s Death you’re dealing with. Your rational side is gone. You’re sitting in a room where oxygen has turned into a venomous gas that you’re breathing in as you hyperventilate and choke as it constricts your airways.

He watches you as you pull out a shitty pink razor, the crappy ones that you get angry at your mum for buying because you can’t get a good shave with them. Upon looking at it, you’re glad she bought the shit ones because the quality ones would be way too hard to pry open. He’s looking at you, salivating, telling you to pick apart the razor, its easy, just get a knife, wedge it in and flick up the top bit of plastic. Your hands don’t feel like your own. It feels like somebody is controlling your brain making your body move, yet you don’t stop it. Like a puppet on a string. Death doesn’t get angry when you look at yourself in the mirror, sobbing as you can’t even manage to take apart a fucking razor. He watches you throw it across your bedroom full of photos of you and your girlfriends, you and your mum, you and your boyfriends. Your little white cat gets a fright as the razor smashes against the wall and falls behind your dresser. He says in a voice so sweet yet condescending that it’s okay to be so pathetic. He watches you slide the knife under your bed. He holds you in his ice cold arms as you curl up in bed, shaking, crying, nauseous over the fact that you almost cut yourself. Death is with you as the immense loneliness washes over you, suffocating you between sobs. Death rocks you to sleep with a smile on his face, because those seeds he planted are growing, and it’s only a matter of time until they blossom.

You wake up.

You scared yourself.

You reach out to friends, therapists, family. You promise yourself you’re never going to get that close to doing something so stupid again. And you don’t. Death is gone, you’ve beaten him.

For a while.

You haven’t beaten death. You haven’t softened his voice. Sure, he wasn’t prominent in the whole ‘slice your arm into pieces’ front, but rest assured, death was still floating around your room. He’s looking through all your stuff, watching you sleep as he dips in and out of your brain, learning as much about you as he can, feeding toxic sludge to your mind as you’re unaware. Sleep paralysis. Death is smart. He knows he hasn’t worn you down enough to hurt yourself. He knows how to manifest himself in his prey and seep poison into their minds until they have been manipulated and tortured enough to snatch up and take with his mouth wide open, pupils wide, ready to swallow whole as he drags your lifeless body bloody and limp through the realms until he dumps you next to the millions of others who’ve succumbed to the disease. You haven’t gotten away that easily. It’s a waiting game now.

In the orchestral catastrophe that is depression, this was the intermission. The entertainment during this time can be called anorexia.

Death renders you weaker than you know. Anxiety grows so alarmingly fast that your appetite is reduced to practically nothing. You become intolerant to your own body. This is ok, because you’re not cutting yourself. It’s okay, because it isn’t deliberate. You repeat this to yourself over and over as you revel in the bruises that appear on the inside of your knees from trying to sleep on your side; the bones crushing in to each other. You repeat this to yourself as you watch in awe at your ribcage expand and deflate as you inhale and exhale. You can see where your rib was cracked by the hands of those who vowed to never hurt you, by those who vowed to fix you. Your skin stretched tight over protruding bones fascinate you for hours as you trace your fingers over your body in a trance like state of wonder.

You’re hungry, and it’s not for food.

Then, it becomes deliberate.

You’ve always been skinny regardless of what you ate. You’ve loved your body. Never hesitant to run around half naked no matter who was around or where you were. Not provocatively, not attention seeking, just comfortable. Your body was your safeguard. Compliments came naturally, envy was apparent. Then your mind wanders and you think to yourself I wonder what people would say if I lost just a little more weight. And then the floodgates open, and like a tidal wave crashing through an entire city Death whooshes in, appearing in the mirror behind you, his claws on your shoulders, smiling down at you like an old friend you hadn’t seen in years.

If you were just a little bit skinner, you wouldn’t be sad. You’d be beautiful.

Death knew it was time now. He didn’t tell you to say this. You thought this on your own.

30 degree summer nights lying on your side under a European cotton sheet, you feel your thighs touching. Your eyes well up with tears. You are sickened, disgusted. You want to scream, you want to vomit, you want to punch yourself. You sneak out the window of your family home and you run laps of the park you used to walk your golden retriever or smoke weed with your friends, doing cartwheels and rolling around the grass without a care in the world. You run laps until you nearly pass out and limp home at 3am in the fucking morning. The panic attacks return because all your eating is an apple a day with some almonds and a black coffee. You’re jacked up on caffeine that your already shaky hands shake even more. You can’t look people in the eye. You look sick. You want to stop but you can’t. You need your hip bones to poke holes in your lace underwear. You want to be able to hold water in the crevice that appears between your collarbones and shoulders when you shrug.

The results come fast and you love it, you’re an addict who is itching for a little bit more. You’ve never felt the way you feel when you step on the scales and its lower than it was before. The comments people made feed your addiction. The alarm you sense from them as they hug you elates you like getting another fix. You and Death are a team now, he cheers you on and tells you how strong you are for not eating the cake, or saying no to the chips, or making excuses to your friends at dinner as to why you’re not eating. Dinner at home. Already ate. Fasting for a blood test. You knew ‘too poor’ would never work as they’d just pay for you. You have an app on your phone that you log all your calories and exercise in to. 500 a day maximum and you must burn off at least 100 more calories than you consumed that day.

You’re in control of your body. For a short window of time, you were in control of most of your emotions and feelings, too. You felt powerful. You felt happy. You’re never hungry and when you are you know how to burn it off. But then you take it too far. You become so thin that people start to notice. You look like a bobble head with your head too big for your body, your jaw bone looking like it could cut ice. Doctors’ appointments start because your body isn’t working properly. They weigh you and they know the tricks you think you’re a genius for. They know you’d have loaded up on salty food. They’ll know you drank so much water you almost threw up before hand. They’ll check your pockets. Hair down because you can’t hide anything that can contribute to the scale reading. By the end of it you have to strip off completely. Scared parent, scared family, scared friends forcing you to eat, and you would, because they have to believe that this isn’t deliberate. You can’t get admitted. You’d eat to shut them up and you’d become such a good fucking liar. You would laugh and joke and talk about anything while you were eating. You would be having fun. Then you’d be alone again with your hatred for yourself. Hatred that you were too pathetic to be bulimic because of your fear of vomit. Hatred of food. Hatred of yourself.

You weren’t alone though, were you? You know who was sitting right next to you, holding your feet down as you did as many sit ups as you could until your spine was bruised. Then the star jumps until you thought you were going to have a heart attack. Then the push ups. Then the laxatives. Then you felt better.

You were skinny. You were beautiful.

But were you?

Your hair was falling out. Your lips were white. Your skin was yellowing. You’re constantly cold. Your body wasn’t functioning properly. You lost your period. You don’t care. You’re skinny.

Then you’re happy again. You’re hi fiving death. You’ve done it. You felt skinny enough.

But there lies the issue itself, it’s never enough. It’s never ‘done.’

‘You can’t stop now, you have to maintain this or else you’ll put on weight again and you won’t be beautiful,’ death would say, and you know he’s right. Then comes the fear.

Food scares you. Going out to eat scares you. You are so afraid of eating and losing your progress that you don’t realise that Death has crawled back to his original spot in your brain and he’s beginning to untie all his puppet strings, preparing your brain for his next act of torment as the intermission concludes and the music starts again, sinister and slow. His malevolent eyes so eager to consume your soul, fangs salivating with the blood you’re about to draw from your wrists. You’re exercising too much with no food which causes you both physical and mental exhaustion. Couple this with the partying on the weekends and you’ve lost the game. You’re as good as dead, and at this rate you will be soon.

The sadness comes creeping back in as you lie in your bed at night, hunched on your side clutching at your ribs letting out slow sobs as you beg the pain to ease. You cry and you cry and you don’t even know what the fuck you’re crying for. You cry for the father that never loved you and spat such venomous words at you that you didn’t want to exist anymore. You cry for the men that threw beer bottles at your head and bruised your oesophagus choke slamming you against a wall rendering you as good as speechless for a week. You cry for the people you loved most cheating on you with your best friend, cheating on you with everyone. You cry for the lies, the betrayal, the drink spiking, the hitting, the screaming, the drugs taken behind your back, for the fact you can’t trust anyone. Abortion. Abuse. Agony. You cry because you’re confused. You cry because no one knows that you’re feeling this way. You cry because you’ve never felt so alone. You cry because you realise that you just don’t want to be here anymore. You cry because you know you need to hurt yourself. You cry because you know that Death was right, it will make you feel better. It does.

You remembered where the shitty pink razor you threw across the room a year or so back landed and you float to your dresser, reaching behind it and grasp the razor, its handle dethatched from the smash against the wall. You feel for the knife under your bed – you remember the one it was, with a red handle, your mum’s been looking for it for a while. You usher your precious cat out of your room, she doesn’t need to see this, as you sit cross legged on your bed. The crying has stopped. You’re focused. Your fingers feel like they’re being controlled as you pry apart the three blades from the plastic. You slip and get a cut on your thumb but that’s okay, you wipe a tear that’s escaped, and you keep trying. It takes a little while.

Then, the softest, most delicate and angelic metal chime rings in your ears as the plastic flies off and the three blades clink together, falling lightly onto your thigh.

You’ve done it.

Ever so carefully you pick one up and examine it for about half a second before you’re holding it against your left wrist. This is the arm you started on. The world has stopped spinning, there is no sound except for your breathing that went from erratic and irregular to slow and steady. You press down lightly and slide it across your wrist.

It stings. Death is holding you, stroking your hair. He is so proud.

Small bubbles of bright red blood surface. It’s pretty. You feel light. Dizzy, but not sick dizzy. You feel tired, really, really tired. You don’t feel overwhelmed anymore, you feel numb. Disconnected from anything that isn’t the small sting and the red bubbles coming from your wrist. You want that feeling again, so you slice four more little cuts across the plethora of vital veins that run so dangerously close to the surface of your skin. You wrap your arm in a tea towel and put a hair scrunchie over the top of it. Light, superficial cuts that heal quickly. It’s not even bad. You sleep, wrapped up in Deaths’ arms as he rocks you back and forth into dreams that he is controlling. Vivid dreams of your childhood, when you were 6 years old wearing matching floral pyjamas in New Zealand with your entire family. Your mum and dad are together. Your grandma’s there. Your brother is there. Relatives you don’t even know now are there. You dream of the purple and yellow bubble machine you got. The entire dream is you running barefoot on the grass in those pyjamas, making bubbles for everyone. You smile in your sleep.

Flash forward a couple of months and you’re a veteran. No more little scratches. These are scary fucking cuts that will scar your body forever and you don’t give a fuck. Why should you, you deserve this pain. You are so twisted and sick that the only thing that will make you go the fuck to sleep and stop sobbing so goddamn much is playing fruit ninja on your wrists.

Long sleeves no matter the heat.

Broken promises to family, to friends.

Psychologists and Psychiatrists.

Medication upon medication.

You get better, honestly, you do. You go longer and longer between cuts, but every time you cut, its worse. You have your walk of shame to chemist warehouse where the staff look at you and know what you’ve done. You switch chemist warehouse locations from Chapel Street to Glenferrie Road in case they try and ask you if you’re okay. The aisle on the left when you walk in. Gauze. Bandages. Betadine. Friends who don’t yell at you, they help you, they drive you there, but they look down at your arm and cannot shield their disgust of such large and deep gashes that have completely split your skin in half. You can see the veins. When its bad, they get the gauze for you. They wash your arms as you scream from the burning pain. They carry you to the shower and wash your hair as you hold the victim arm in the air so it doesn’t get wet. They change your sheets and sit at a café for hours with you as they try to get you to finish a bowl of porridge. They see the lights gone out in your eyes. They cry. You cry. You don’t want to hurt them. You want to hurt you.

Cutting doesn’t make you sleepy anymore because you have to stay up to apply pressure to your arm to stop the bleeding. The tea towel sticks to your arm. There are bloodstains on your carpet, perfect little circles. There are razors everywhere. Inside your phone case. In your makeup bag. In your schoolbag. You’ve moved up from the shitty plastic ones. Sometimes you can’t even be bothered taking the razor apart - its messier, but its quicker.

You want to stop. You want to stop so badly especially after the time that you went too far and called a friend who couldn’t get to you. You were at home, returned from a night of drinking with your friends. Something triggered you, someone may have just raised their voice and it all comes back to you. Him screaming in your face, smashed tv’s. Violence. Police stations. Restraining orders. Changed phone numbers. Running down the street in underwear and a t-shirt with a dead phone. You might’ve been at a friends’ place and seen their fathers care not only about their daughters and sons, but about you too, and that sets you off. You get home and you’re sad, you are so fucking sad. You know what you’re going to do even before you leave wherever the fuck you were. You know, even though all the razors have been hidden, you know where there MIGHT be one, gathering dust, wedged accidentally between one of the storage cabinets at the base of your inbuilt bookshelf that carried the hundreds of books you read to escape from the reality that is your life. If it’s not there, you’ll just use a knife. You get out of the car and the tears have already started. You hold them in until you open your front door and throw all your shit on the bed. You brush past Death who was ready to welcome you with open arms. You’re in a frenzy to get to where you think that last razor might be. Death is jumping up and down excitedly. He knows it’s there, waiting for you. You find it, grab it, and there is no relief though you expected there to be.

Come on Alian, you’ve got to push down deeper this time. That’s the only way you’ll feel better. Just this one last time, it will be fine. Death said. He was right about everything else, why shouldn’t you believe him about this? It’s your right arm now, the left has way too many scars on it. The right arm has half as many, but they’re big, raised and menacing scars. There’s still room for about 5 more.

You press hard. Too hard. No matter how much pressure you apply, the blood isn’t stopping.

Death is encouraging you to go further. You can’t, you can’t keep your head up and you can’t stop the blood. Death is angry at you now. He’s mean and nasty, he’s not the understanding and supportive demon who ruins your life kindly, he’s completely turned. He’s grabbing at your fat, he’s taunting you with it. He’s making you remember memories you’d rather die than re live. He is making his voice inside your head so fucking loud that you can’t shut it out and it hurts, it hurts, you need it to stop, you reach for your pill box and open your mouth and wash down whatever pills you just took with whatever is left in the Smirnoff Vodka bottle you drank that night.

Darkness.

You’re black out drunk and you don’t know why there’s another one of your friends at your window. You’re asleep on your bedroom floor with the Little Mermaid playing in the background. Valium on the floor. Seroquel on the floor. You are covered in blood you can barely stand up to let him in. You fall asleep again in his arms. He was on the phone.

Darkness

He’s gone.

You don’t know where Death is either.

Red and blue flashing lights.

Sirens.

Banging on the door.

Darkness.

Two ambulance paramedics shaking you.

Your mum in tears.

You’re protesting. You don’t want to go with them. You’re fine. It’s just a cut, it’s not bad. It’s just like the other ones.

They need stitches. You can’t stay awake.

Darkness.

You’re getting carried out of your room like a baby by the male paramedic.

Stop, please, you’re hurting my arm.

Mum

Mum?

She doesn’t come.

Darkness.

You have your soft toy with you. You got her when you first moved to Melbourne when you were 7.

You watch your Mum and Death standing in the doorway as you’re lifted into the ambulance. You hate Death now. You’re not on the same team. You never were. He only wants to kill you.

Darkness.

You’re angry because the paramedics won’t let you sleep. You remember being really angry and really scared. Your arm is so sore. They keep saying how skinny you are. Asking what you took, how much you drank. You don’t know. The male paramedic is holding your hand with one of his and your arm with his other. You say that you want to go home. He can’t take you home, because your friend called them and told them that you’re going to kill yourself. You’re not, you promise, just please take you home. Please let go of your arm. He can’t let go because you need a lot of stitches. You’re lucky that you didn’t move half a millimetre to the left or the right or press down any harder, because they couldn’t save you if you did. Your holding on to your toy cat and he asks what her name is. Her name is Pearls. He asks who got you her and you tell him your mummy got her for you. You cry. Your mum who gave you the world, who loved you more than 50 parents combined. Your mum who would do anything for you. Your mum who told you she’ll stop fighting you if you want to leave this earth so badly. You’re not angry anymore.

You are sad. You are so fucking sad. You bury your head into the paramedics’ lap and you cry. You ask him to please just let you die.

Darkness.

You’re with a nice female doctor and she is interrogating you. You’re used to this. She tells you that if you end up here one more time (it’s not your first), you will be admitted even if you don’t want to be. You know this. You’re done with Death. You want him gone. You want to try and eat. You want to hug your mum. You want your yellow and purple bubble blowing machine. She tells you that you need stitches on the cuts you did tonight. You beg her not to have them, the blood has stopped and they can just heal over like the others. She refuses. It’s either stitches or glue. You’re scared. You’re alone and scared and Pearls the cat isn’t being much comfort. You call your friend and they stay on the phone while you have your arm sewed back together like a broken toy. You want to vomit. You’re thankful for the Valium and the Seroquel and the alcohol because you could not handle this any other way.

You have to stay a little bit longer so they can monitor you. They wanted to pump your stomach.

You’re at home now. There’s a pool of dried blood on the carpet. Lucky its dark grey carpet. That one will be a hard one to clean. Your mum hasn’t spoken to you. Your brother is overseas. You miss him.

You crawl into bed and watch Gossip Girl until you fall asleep.

You see your psychologist after you get your stitches out, and you tell him everything. You tell your doctor everything. You’re ready to get better. You tell them about the eating thing. It’s going to be hard and its not going to be pretty, but you’re going to get better. You enrol in university and you get another job. You do yoga and you go for runs. You eat when you feel like it and you eat a lot of fruit. If you feel like a burger, you get a burger. It takes years for you to have this relationship with food, but you get there. You stop getting black out drunk and you stop doing party drugs. You promise to stop for at least a year. You achieve it. You face your pain head on. You process what happened to you with the ex boyfriends. You know it’s not your fault. You know that what your feeling is a normal reaction, and you move past it. You have bad moments just like everybody else, but yours are a little worse. Yours are dangerous.

You sit on the bathroom floor clutching your head as you hyperventilate. Razors are allowed in the house again and you’ve ripped one apart and you’re rotating it between your thumb and index finger. Your heart is beating out of your chest because fucking hell you want nothing more than to slide that piece of metal over your skin and feel that rush again. You hold it to your wrist and you are uncontrollably crying. You’ve been so good when you’ve had the urgers, you’ve gone to your mum, you’ve called your friends, you’ve gone for a walk, you’ve gone to sleep, but you’re here now and there’s nothing stopping you except for your own willpower. You scream silently as the tears fall down. You’re not filled with stardust, you’re not filled with snowflakes or sparkles, you are filled with blood that has spilled too many times onto the floor. Your insides are spilling onto the fucking floor, your veins splitting at the seams. Your first kiss, your bubble blowing machine, the times you laughed so hard you cry, the year you had Christmas twice is dripping down your arm and rolling out of you. You’re coughing up and sobbing out every memory of getting in trouble with your friends or holding hands with the boy you thought you loved more than anything in the world. All your memories of the beautiful life you’ve lived are melting into the carpet of your bedroom floor staining it, reminding you of how much you hate yourself when you should love yourself. These red bubbles aren’t pretty rubies rushing out of your skin, this isn’t glamorous nor poetic, its not mysterious or romantic, its mutualization, its sickening. It’s death and you are dying. It’s you, everything you have been, everything you are, and everything you are yet to be, if you just give yourself the fucking chance.

And just like that,

You put the razors on your mum’s dresser, wrists intact, and you walk down the stairs. You go to the kitchen and you peel open a banana and you eat it. You put your headphones in, you go outside and you go for a walk around the botanical gardens. You enter through Gate D and you lie in the sun for a while as you throw bread for the ducks. The white ones with the orange beaks are your favourite. You give them nicknames. You know that in all honesty, you’re going to have more shitty boyfriends who might break your heart. You’ll also have good ones that even though it didn’t work, you grew. You know that you and your dad aren’t ever going to have a relationship. You know that you’re going to have trust issues and post-traumatic stress for quite a long time. You’ll fight with girlfriends, you’ll get too drunk and do something stupid like kiss someone you shouldn’t or break your nose at a music festival. You’ll laugh at it. You’ll have days where you hate your body and days where you love it. Days where you want the world to end and days where you never believed you could ever be so happy.

And for the first time in your 21 years of living, you’re okay with this. For the first time in 21 years, you’re at peace. You haven’t touched a razor since.

#mine

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elisaenglish · 4 years

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How We Grieve: Meghan O’Rourke on the Messiness of Mourning and Learning to Live with Loss

“The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.”

John Updike wrote in his memoir, “Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?” And yet even if we were to somehow make peace with our own mortality, a primal and soul-shattering fear rips through whenever we think about losing those we love most dearly — a fear that metastasises into all-consuming grief when loss does come. In The Long Goodbye (public library), her magnificent memoir of grieving her mother’s death, Meghan O’Rourke crafts a masterwork of remembrance and reflection woven of extraordinary emotional intelligence. A poet, essayist, literary critic, and one of the youngest editors the New Yorker has ever had, she tells a story that is deeply personal in its details yet richly resonant in its larger humanity, making tangible the messy and often ineffable complexities that anyone who has ever lost a loved one knows all too intimately, all too anguishingly. What makes her writing — her mind, really — particularly enchanting is that she brings to this paralysingly difficult subject a poet’s emotional precision, an essayist’s intellectual expansiveness, and a voracious reader’s gift for apt, exquisitely placed allusions to such luminaries of language and life as Whitman, Longfellow, Tennyson, Swift, and Dickinson (“the supreme poet of grief”).

O’Rourke writes:

“When we are learning the world, we know things we cannot say how we know. When we are relearning the world in the aftermath of a loss, we feel things we had almost forgotten, old things, beneath the seat of reason.

[…]

Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me. A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.

[…]

When we talk about love, we go back to the start, to pinpoint the moment of free fall. But this story is the story of an ending, of death, and it has no beginning. A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That’s what makes her a mother: you cannot start the story.”

In the days following her mother’s death, as O’Rourke faces the loneliness she anticipated and the sense of being lost that engulfed her unawares, she contemplates the paradoxes of loss: Ours is a culture that treats grief — a process of profound emotional upheaval — with a grotesquely mismatched rational prescription. On the one hand, society seems to operate by a set of unspoken shoulds for how we ought to feel and behave in the face of sorrow; on the other, she observes, “we have so few rituals for observing and externalising loss.” Without a coping strategy, she finds herself shutting down emotionally and going “dead inside” — a feeling psychologists call “numbing out” — and describes the disconnect between her intellectual awareness of sadness and its inaccessible emotional manifestation:

“It was like when you stay in cold water too long. You know something is off but don’t start shivering for ten minutes.”

But at least as harrowing as the aftermath of loss is the anticipatory bereavement in the months and weeks and days leading up to the inevitable — a particularly cruel reality of terminal cancer. O’Rourke writes:

“So much of dealing with a disease is waiting. Waiting for appointments, for tests, for “procedures.” And waiting, more broadly, for it—for the thing itself, for the other shoe to drop.”

The hallmark of this anticipatory loss seems to be a tapestry of inner contradictions. O’Rourke notes with exquisite self-awareness her resentment for the mundanity of it all — there is her mother, sipping soda in front of the TV on one of those final days — coupled with weighty, crushing compassion for the sacred humanity of death:

“Time doesn’t obey our commands. You cannot make it holy just because it is disappearing.”

Then there was the question of the body — the object of so much social and personal anxiety in real life, suddenly stripped of control in the surreal experience of impending death. Reflecting on the initially disorienting experience of helping her mother on and off the toilet and how quickly it became normalised, O’Rourke writes:

“It was what she had done for us, back before we became private and civilised about our bodies. In some ways I liked it. A level of anxiety about the body had been stripped away, and we were left with the simple reality: Here it was.

I heard a lot about the idea of dying “with dignity” while my mother was sick. It was only near her very end that I gave much thought to what this idea meant. I didn’t actually feel it was undignified for my mother’s body to fail — that was the human condition. Having to help my mother on and off the toilet was difficult, but it was natural. The real indignity, it seemed, was dying where no one cared for you the way your family did, dying where it was hard for your whole family to be with you and where excessive measures might be taken to keep you alive past a moment that called for letting go. I didn’t want that for my mother. I wanted her to be able to go home. I didn’t want to pretend she wasn’t going to die.”

Among the most painful realities of witnessing death — one particularly exasperating for type-A personalities — is how swiftly it severs the direct correlation between effort and outcome around which we build our lives. Though the notion might seem rational on the surface — especially in a culture that fetishises work ethic and “grit” as the key to success — an underbelly of magical thinking lurks beneath, which comes to light as we behold the helplessness and injustice of premature death. Noting that “the mourner’s mind is superstitious, looking for signs and wonders,” O’Rourke captures this paradox:

“One of the ideas I’ve clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out. If I work hard, I will be spared, and I will get what I desire, finding the cave opening over and over again, thieving life from the abyss. This sturdy belief system has a sidecar in which superstition rides. Until recently, I half believed that if a certain song came on the radio just as I thought of it, it meant that all would be well. What did I mean? I preferred not to answer that question. To look too closely was to prick the balloon of possibility.”

But our very capacity for the irrational — for the magic of magical thinking — also turns out to be essential for our spiritual survival. Without the capacity to discern from life’s senseless sound a meaningful melody, we would be consumed by the noise. In fact, one of O’Rourke’s most poetic passages recounts her struggle to find a transcendent meaning on an average day, amid the average hospital noises:

“I could hear the coughing man whose family talked about sports and sitcoms every time they visited, sitting politely around his bed as if you couldn’t see the death knobs that were his knees poking through the blanket, but as they left they would hug him and say, We love you, and We’ll be back soon, and in their voices and in mine and in the nurse who was so gentle with my mother, tucking cool white sheets over her with a twist of her wrist, I could hear love, love that sounded like a rope, and I began to see a flickering electric current everywhere I looked as I went up and down the halls, flagging nurses, little flecks of light dotting the air in sinewy lines, and I leaned on these lines like guy ropes when I was so tired I couldn’t walk anymore and a voice in my head said: Do you see this love? And do you still not believe?

I couldn’t deny the voice.

Now I think: That was exhaustion.

But at the time the love, the love, it was like ropes around me, cables that could carry us up into the higher floors away from our predicament and out onto the roof and across the empty spaces above the hospital to the sky where we could gaze down upon all the people driving, eating, having sex, watching TV, angry people, tired people, happy people, all doing, all being—”

In the weeks following her mother’s death, melancholy — “the black sorrow, bilious, angry, a slick in my chest” — comes coupled with another intense emotion, a parallel longing for a different branch of that-which-no-longer-is:

“I experienced an acute nostalgia. This longing for a lost time was so intense I thought it might split me in two, like a tree hit by lightning. I was — as the expression goes — flooded by memories. It was a submersion in the past that threatened to overwhelm any “rational” experience of the present, water coming up around my branches, rising higher. I did not care much about work I had to do. I was consumed by memories of seemingly trivial things.”

But the embodied presence of the loss is far from trivial. O’Rourke, citing a psychiatrist whose words had stayed with her, captures it with harrowing precision:

“The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.”

In another breathtaking passage, O’Rourke conveys the largeness of grief as it emanates out of our pores and into the world that surrounds us:

“In February, there was a two-day snowstorm in New York. For hours I lay on my couch, reading, watching the snow drift down through the large elm outside… the sky going gray, then eerie violet, the night breaking around us, snow like flakes of ash. A white mantle covered trees, cars, lintels, and windows. It was like one of grief’s moods: melancholic; estranged from the normal; in touch with the longing that reminds us that we are being-toward-death, as Heidegger puts it. Loss is our atmosphere; we, like the snow, are always falling toward the ground, and most of the time we forget it.”

Because grief seeps into the external world as the inner experience bleeds into the outer, it’s understandable — it’s hopelessly human — that we’d also project the very object of our grief onto the external world. One of the most common experiences, O’Rourke notes, is for the grieving to try to bring back the dead — not literally, but by seeing, seeking, signs of them in the landscape of life, symbolism in the everyday. The mind, after all, is a pattern-recognition machine and when the mind’s eye is as heavily clouded with a particular object as it is when we grieve a loved one, we begin to manufacture patterns. Recounting a day when she found inside a library book handwriting that seemed to be her mother’s, O’Rourke writes:

“The idea that the dead might not be utterly gone has an irresistible magnetism. I’d read something that described what I had been experiencing. Many people go through what psychologists call a period of “animism,” in which you see the dead person in objects and animals around you, and you construct your false reality, the reality where she is just hiding, or absent. This was the mourner’s secret position, it seemed to me: I have to say this person is dead, but I don’t have to believe it.

[…]

Acceptance isn’t necessarily something you can choose off a menu, like eggs instead of French toast. Instead, researchers now think that some people are inherently primed to accept their own death with “integrity” (their word, not mine), while others are primed for “despair.” Most of us, though, are somewhere in the middle, and one question researchers are now focusing on is: How might more of those in the middle learn to accept their deaths? The answer has real consequences for both the dying and the bereaved.”

O’Rourke considers the psychology and physiology of grief:

“When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity is wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the mental work.

The first systematic survey of grief, I read, was conducted by Erich Lindemann. Having studied 101 people, many of them related to the victims of the Cocoanut Grove fire of 1942, he defined grief as “sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and an intensive subjective distress described as tension or mental pain.”

Tracing the history of studying grief, including Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous and often criticised 1969 “stage theory” outlining a simple sequence of Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance, O’Rourke notes that most people experience grief not as sequential stages but as ebbing and flowing states that recur at various points throughout the process. She writes:

“Researchers now believe there are two kinds of grief: “normal grief” and “complicated grief” (also called “prolonged grief”). “Normal grief” is a term for what most bereaved people experience. It peaks within the first six months and then begins to dissipate. “Complicated grief” does not, and often requires medication or therapy. But even “normal grief”… is hardly gentle. Its symptoms include insomnia or other sleep disorders, difficulty breathing, auditory or visual hallucinations, appetite problems, and dryness of mouth.”

One of the most persistent psychiatric ideas about grief, O’Rourke notes, is the notion that one ought to “let go” in order to “move on” — a proposition plentiful even in the casual advice of her friends in the weeks following her mother’s death. And yet it isn’t necessarily the right coping strategy for everyone, let alone the only one, as our culture seems to suggest. Unwilling to “let go,” O’Rourke finds solace in anthropological alternatives:

“Studies have shown that some mourners hold on to a relationship with the deceased with no notable ill effects. In China, for instance, mourners regularly speak to dead ancestors, and one study demonstrated that the bereaved there “recovered more quickly from loss” than bereaved Americans do.

I wasn’t living in China, though, and in those weeks after my mother’s death, I felt that the world expected me to absorb the loss and move forward, like some kind of emotional warrior. One night I heard a character on 24—the president of the United States—announce that grief was a “luxury” she couldn’t “afford right now.” This model represents an old American ethic of muscling through pain by throwing yourself into work; embedded in it is a desire to avoid looking at death. We’ve adopted a sort of “Ask, don’t tell” policy. The question “How are you?” is an expression of concern, but as my dad had said, the mourner quickly figures out that it shouldn’t always be taken for an actual inquiry… A mourner’s experience of time isn’t like everyone else’s. Grief that lasts longer than a few weeks may look like self-indulgence to those around you. But if you’re in mourning, three months seems like nothing — [according to some] research, three months might well find you approaching the height of sorrow.”

Another Western hegemony in the culture of grief, O’Rourke notes, is its privatisation — the unspoken rule that mourning is something we do in the privacy of our inner lives, alone, away from the public eye. Though for centuries private grief was externalised as public mourning, modernity has left us bereft of rituals to help us deal with our grief:

“The disappearance of mourning rituals affects everyone, not just the mourner. One of the reasons many people are unsure about how to act around a loss is that they lack rules or meaningful conventions, and they fear making a mistake. Rituals used to help the community by giving everyone a sense of what to do or say. Now, we’re at sea.

[…]

Such rituals… aren’t just about the individual; they are about the community.”

Craving “a formalisation of grief, one that might externalise it,” O’Rourke plunges into the existing literature:

“The British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, the author of Death, Grief, and Mourning, argues that, at least in Britain, the First World War played a huge role in changing the way people mourned. Communities were so overwhelmed by the sheer number of dead that the practice of ritualised mourning for the individual eroded. Other changes were less obvious but no less important. More people, including women, began working outside the home; in the absence of caretakers, death increasingly took place in the quarantining swaddle of the hospital. The rise of psychoanalysis shifted attention from the communal to the individual experience. In 1917, only two years after Émile Durkheim wrote about mourning as an essential social process, Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” defined it as something essentially private and individual, internalising the work of mourning. Within a few generations, I read, the experience of grief had fundamentally changed. Death and mourning had been largely removed from the public realm. By the 1960s, Gorer could write that many people believed that “sensible, rational men and women can keep their mourning under complete control by strength of will and character, so that it need be given no public expression, and indulged, if at all, in private, as furtively as... masturbation.” Today, our only public mourning takes the form of watching the funerals of celebrities and statesmen. It’s common to mock such grief as false or voyeuristic (“crocodile tears,” one commentator called mourners’ distress at Princess Diana’s funeral), and yet it serves an important social function. It’s a more mediated version, Leader suggests, of a practice that goes all the way back to soldiers in The Iliad mourning with Achilles for the fallen Patroclus.

I found myself nodding in recognition at Gorer’s conclusions. “If mourning is denied outlet, the result will be suffering,” Gorer wrote. “At the moment our society is signally failing to give this support and assistance... The cost of this failure in misery, loneliness, despair and maladaptive behaviour is very high.” Maybe it’s not a coincidence that in Western countries with fewer mourning rituals, the bereaved report more physical ailments in the year following a death.”

Finding solace in Marilynne Robinson’s beautiful meditation on our humanity, O’Rourke returns to her own journey:

“The otherworldliness of loss was so intense that at times I had to believe it was a singular passage, a privilege of some kind, even if all it left me with was a clearer grasp of our human predicament. It was why I kept finding myself drawn to the remote desert: I wanted to be reminded of how the numinous impinges on ordinary life.”

Reflecting on her struggle to accept her mother’s loss — her absence, “an absence that becomes a presence” — O’Rourke writes:

“If children learn through exposure to new experiences, mourners unlearn through exposure to absence in new contexts. Grief requires acquainting yourself with the world again and again; each “first” causes a break that must be reset… And so you always feel suspense, a queer dread—you never know what occasion will break the loss freshly open.”

She later adds:

“After a loss, you have to learn to believe the dead one is dead. It doesn’t come naturally.”

Among the most chilling effects of grief is how it reorients us toward ourselves as it surfaces our mortality paradox and the dawning awareness of our own impermanence. O’Rourke’s words ring with the profound discomfort of our shared existential bind:

“The dread of death is so primal, it overtakes me on a molecular level. In the lowest moments, it produces nihilism. If I am going to die, why not get it over with? Why live in this agony of anticipation?

[…]

I was unable to push these questions aside: What are we to do with the knowledge that we die? What bargain do you make in your mind so as not to go crazy with fear of the predicament, a predicament none of us knowingly chose to enter? You can believe in God and heaven, if you have the capacity for faith. Or, if you don’t, you can do what a stoic like Seneca did, and push away the awfulness by noting that if death is indeed extinction, it won’t hurt, for we won’t experience it. “It would be dreadful could it remain with you; but of necessity either it does not arrive or else it departs,” he wrote.

If this logic fails to comfort, you can decide, as Plato and Jonathan Swift did, that since death is natural, and the gods must exist, it cannot be a bad thing. As Swift said, “It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind.” And Socrates: “I am quite ready to admit… that I ought to be grieved at death, if I were not persuaded in the first place that I am going to other gods who are wise and good.” But this is poor comfort to those of us who have no gods to turn to. If you love this world, how can you look forward to departing it? Rousseau wrote, “He who pretends to look on death without fear lies. All men are afraid of dying, this is the great law of sentient beings, without which the entire human species would soon be destroyed.”

And yet, O’Rourke arrives at the same conclusion that Alan Lightman did in his sublime meditation on our longing for permanence as she writes:

“Without death our lives would lose their shape: “Death is the mother of beauty,” Wallace Stevens wrote. Or as a character in Don DeLillo’s White Noise says, “I think it’s a mistake to lose one’s sense of death, even one’s fear of death. Isn’t death the boundary we need?” It’s not clear that DeLillo means us to agree, but I think I do. I love the world more because it is transient.

[…]

One would think that living so proximately to the provisional would ruin life, and at times it did make it hard. But at other times I experienced the world with less fear and more clarity. It didn’t matter if I was in line for an extra two minutes. I could take in the sensations of colour, sound, life. How strange that we should live on this planet and make cereal boxes, and shopping carts, and gum! That we should renovate stately old banks and replace them with Trader Joe’s! We were ants in a sugar bowl, and one day the bowl would empty.”

This awareness of our transience, our minuteness, and the paradoxical enlargement of our aliveness that it produces seems to be the sole solace from grief’s grip, though we all arrive at it differently. O’Rourke’s father approached it from another angle. Recounting a conversation with him one autumn night — one can’t help but notice the beautiful, if inadvertent, echo of Carl Sagan’s memorable words — O’Rourke writes:

“The Perseid meteor showers are here,” he told me. “And I’ve been eating dinner outside and then lying in the lounge chairs watching the stars like your mother and I used to” — at some point he stopped calling her Mom — “and that helps. It might sound strange, but I was sitting there, looking up at the sky, and I thought, ‘You are but a mote of dust. And your troubles and travails are just a mote of a mote of dust.’ And it helped me. I have allowed myself to think about things I had been scared to think about and feel. And it allowed me to be there — to be present. Whatever my life is, whatever my loss is, it’s small in the face of all that existence… The meteor shower changed something. I was looking the other way through a telescope before: I was just looking at what was not there. Now I look at what is there.”

O’Rourke goes on to reflect on this ground-shifting quality of loss:

“It’s not a question of getting over it or healing. No; it’s a question of learning to live with this transformation. For the loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools. It is too central for that. It’s not an emergence from the cocoon, but a tree growing around an obstruction.”

In one of the most beautiful passages in the book, O’Rourke captures the spiritual sensemaking of death in an anecdote that calls to mind Alan Lightman’s account of a “transcendent experience” and Alan Watt’s consolation in the oneness of the universe. She writes:

“Before we scattered the ashes, I had an eerie experience. I went for a short run. I hate running in the cold, but after so much time indoors in the dead of winter I was filled with exuberance. I ran lightly through the stripped, bare woods, past my favourite house, poised on a high hill, and turned back, flying up the road, turning left. In the last stretch I picked up the pace, the air crisp, and I felt myself float up off the ground. The world became greenish. The brightness of the snow and the trees intensified. I was almost giddy. Behind the bright flat horizon of the treescape, I understood, were worlds beyond our everyday perceptions. My mother was out there, inaccessible to me, but indelible. The blood moved along my veins and the snow and trees shimmered in greenish light. Suffused with joy, I stopped stock-still in the road, feeling like a player in a drama I didn’t understand and didn’t need to. Then I sprinted up the driveway and opened the door and as the heat rushed out the clarity dropped away.

I’d had an intuition like this once before, as a child in Vermont. I was walking from the house to open the gate to the driveway. It was fall. As I put my hand on the gate, the world went ablaze, as bright as the autumn leaves, and I lifted out of myself and understood that I was part of a magnificent book. What I knew as “life” was a thin version of something larger, the pages of which had all been written. What I would do, how I would live — it was already known. I stood there with a kind of peace humming in my blood.”

A non-believer who had prayed for the first time in her life when her mother died, O’Rourke quotes Virginia Woolf’s luminous meditation on the spirit and writes:

“This is the closest description I have ever come across to what I feel to be my experience. I suspect a pattern behind the wool, even the wool of grief; the pattern may not lead to heaven or the survival of my consciousness — frankly I don’t think it does — but that it is there somehow in our neurons and synapses is evident to me. We are not transparent to ourselves. Our longings are like thick curtains stirring in the wind. We give them names. What I do not know is this: Does that otherness — that sense of an impossibly real universe larger than our ability to understand it — mean that there is meaning around us?

[…]

I have learned a lot about how humans think about death. But it hasn’t necessarily taught me more about my dead, where she is, what she is. When I held her body in my hands and it was just black ash, I felt no connection to it, but I tell myself perhaps it is enough to still be matter, to go into the ground and be “remixed” into some new part of the living culture, a new organic matter. Perhaps there is some solace in this continued existence.

[…]

I think about my mother every day, but not as concertedly as I used to. She crosses my mind like a spring cardinal that flies past the edge of your eye: startling, luminous, lovely, gone.”

The Long Goodbye is a remarkable read in its entirety — the kind that speaks with gentle crispness to the parts of us we protect most fiercely yet long to awaken most desperately. Complement it with Alan Lightman in finding solace in our impermanence and Tolstoy on finding meaning in a meaningless world.

Source: Maria Popova, brainpickings.org (9th June 2014)

#quote #women writers #love #life #loss #grief #existential musings #all eternal things #love in a time of...#the places you have come to fear the most #the same deep water as you #laid bare #intelligence quotients #depth perception #melancholy skies #this is how it feels #stands on its own #elisa english #elisaenglish

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southwarkcofe · 4 years

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COVID-19: From the viewpoint of a scientist who is also a priest

Bishop Christopher personally requested The Revd Professor Mary Seller to write this Hearts on Fire blog. Bishop Christopher wanted to share Mary Sellar’s thoughts more widely because they form part of a bigger picture of the pandemic, offering medical and theological insights into the times through which we are all having to live. Bishop Christopher does, however, realise that this may make difficult reading for some particularly those who have lost loved ones, have contracted the virus or been shielding at home.

Until her retirement Mary Seller was Professor of Developmental Genetics, King’s College London and is Assistant Priest, at St John the Evangelist, Hurst Green, Surrey.

Epidemics were not unknown to the peoples of biblical times. They were called plagues, and were interpreted as the acts of a vengeful God as punishment for a rebellious people. There was no such explanation given in March this year, when enormous swarms of locusts devastated vast swathes of crops in East Africa. Our notions of God, and of the causes of such invasive happenings, have changed, and are more informed.

The current pandemic of a coronavirus, specifically: Covid-19, has heightened both our fear and our loathing of viruses. Over the years, viral diseases such as smallpox, poliomyelitis, measles and chickenpox have wrought much suffering on people. Currently, there is no doubt that a great deal of pain, grief and hardship has resulted from Covid-19’s arrival, both directly, through the severe illness and sometimes fatal outcome it has caused, and indirectly, in the isolation people have endured with consequent loneliness, and loss of income and livelihoods.

Thus, it may appear somewhat insensitive for this paper to opine the view that viruses are a rather beautiful and clever part of God’s wonderful creation. For yes, God, the creator of heaven and earth, and all that therein is, in his wisdom, made viruses, amongst the vast panoply of his created works! Although not visible to the naked eye, or even under an ordinary light microscope, viruses are actually the most abundant biological entity on earth, and outnumber all others types, both plant and animal, put together. Furthermore, they are essential for the survival of all other created things. Hence my acclamation of them

The wonder that is a virus – the facts

A virus is a most intriguing creation for it is both primitive and sophisticated. Firstly, there is dispute as to whether it really is a living organism. A virus comprises some genetic material (either DNA or RNA) wrapped in a protein coat. On its own, is an inert entity. It can do nothing until it finds another organism which it invades and uses for its own particular end, namely to reproduce. A virus is thus a parasite. The fact that, alone, a virus cannot replicate itself, is the reason some consider it not to be a form of life. However, there are a number of definitions of ‘life’, not only scientific, but also philosophical and theological. This aspect will not be considered further here.

When a virus encounters another organism, it attaches itself to the outer membrane of some cells of this host - in the case of Covid-19, to the cells lining a person’s nasal cavity and throat. It penetrates that membrane and enters the inside of the cell - the host has become infected. Then the virus integrates its genetic material (RNA in the case of Covid-19) into that of its host, and proceeds to use the host’s cellular machinery both to replicate its own genetic material, and to synthesise its specific viral proteins. Thus, the virus cleverly manipulates another organism both to make abundant copies of its viral genome (= the complete set of genes present in an organism), and to make the viral envelope, and in a very short time millions of copies of the viruses are produced. Usually, the host cell becomes so full of them that it dies and bursts, so releasing them to infect more cells. Alternatively, the new viruses may simply ‘bud’ off the host cell, to spread to other cells. The virus does use some of its own limited number of enzymes to facilitate part of the replication process, and it is the action of one of these that the drug ‘Remdesivir‘, currently being trialled to treat Covid-19 patients, inactivates.

I find that life story an astonishing and innovative way of existence!

Viruses probably originated just over three billion years ago, when life was in its very primitive stages, existing simply as single cells, although it is not known for sure as there is no obvious fossils record of viruses. That viruses are still around today is testament to their success as creations. It is estimated that there are at least 100 million different viruses, living in all types of life: plants, animals, birds, fish, insects and, importantly, bacteria (see below). Usually, they co-exist harmlessly.

You may find the following shocking! We humans have trillions of viruses inside us, and on our skin. We are completely unaware that these viruses live harmoniously with us, just as we are also probably unaware how vital they are to our existence. Without them, we would not be here.

Moreover, and prepare for another shock! Some of our own DNA is viral in origin. It comprises, about 8% of our total genome, in roughly 100,000 different pieces. Our viral DNA is not just a relic of evolution, but it is often beneficial to us. Some of its known functions include protecting us against disease, helping us to digest certain food, and controlling some gene activity.

Thus, viral DNA, inserted into our ancestors eons ago, inherited over the ages and carried down to us today, helps to make us tick and keep us well – now, isn’t that awe-inspiring?

Viruses are integral to nature, that is, to the entire created order. Crucial to this are the viruses that infect bacteria. These are called: bacteriophages, and overall, are the predominant types of viruses. Bacteria are another of God’s marvels of creation, for they are as vital to life as viruses are. Bacteria decompose organic matter found in both the soil and in the oceans, and recycle substances, including as nitrogen and carbon. This is particularly important because these elements are necessary for life, and plants and animals cannot make them for themselves. Bacteria produce them as they decompose matter but keep them within their structure. However, viruses that use bacteria as their hosts, kill them in the process causing them to burst, and this releases these essential elements into the environment, thereby rendering them available for plants and animals to utilise.

In this way, viruses play an indispensable role in the survival, dynamics and balance of all the ecosystems (= biological communities of interacting organisms and their physical environment, for example, the Amazon rainforest; a desert; a coral reef) that comprise life on earth.

Viruses are astounding, magnificent, creations of God. ‘O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all’ (Psalm 104, verse 24).

God and his creation

‘God saw all that he had made, and it was very good’ (Gen. 1:31).

There are a number of meanings of the word ‘good’. In the creation story, the implication is that God values all that he has made. Each member of the created order is good of itself, it is a functioning, surviving entity, it has wholeness. And it is also good for the rest of creation, as part of the greater whole.

That describes viruses exactly. They function exquisitely, God’s handiwork was excellent, enabling viruses to survive for over three billion years – they are inherently good. They are also of immense worth for the rest of the natural world, playing a vital supporting role within it, so they have a moral goodness.

God indeed made viruses very good.

Humans: co-creators with God

Our belief is that God created us human beings in his own image. One of the many aspects of that is that humans reflect some of God’s creative ability. Humans have a great capacity to be inventive, ingenious and original. This is manifest in, for example, contemporary advances in science and medicine. However, the recent developments in molecular cell biology and genetics have been possible only because of viruses, particularly bacteriophages.

The God given resourcefulness of human beings has harnessed firstly, the ability of viruses to cut the host’s DNA at a specific point, secondly, viral enzymes in order to make endless copies of RNA and DNA in the laboratory, and thirdly, the ability of viruses to infect cells, which has enabled gene therapy, using modified viruses to carry a desired gene into a cell. This has, and continues to, revolutionise medicine, and its healing power and potential.

God made viruses, and he made humans with intellect and ingenuity. I believe this is how God’s creation continues in his world today – those he made in his image are now co-creators with Him.

Science and religion

It used to be said that science and religion were in conflict. Today, I, and many others think this is not so. Rather, I believe that science enhances our knowledge and experience of God. We now understand God’s role as that of one who works in and through the processes of nature, including, through the people he has created. He remains omnipotent, but He chose to make a universe that is an ongoing process, continually changing. He didn’t just create once, a one job lot, but as a creation that evolves over time.

The genetic material randomly changes all the time – it mutates. Some changes are harmful, some are beneficial, most are neutral. Mutations are the foundation of evolution, and are God’s way of maintaining, developing and enhancing his creation. Animals and plants and viruses alter, some become extinct, new species appear. The physical world is never constant either - coast lines alters as land is eroded and falls into the sea, while elsewhere, new islands appear in oceans as a result of volcanic activity. The entire universe is expanding. The evidence that God’s creation is always changing is ever before us if we will only look.

God’s superb creation is dynamic, never static, and his work of creation carries on ceaselessly. That is God’s way.

Human suffering

God gave his human creations freedom – freedom to choose between right and wrong, and between good and evil. That was a risk; there are consequences. Usually, human suffering arises because of selfish or malicious acts by one person on another. However, the current pandemic is caused by a virus, but is not malicious or selfish, it is just itself, going through God’s way of dynamic mutation, change and development.

It may sound cold hearted and lacking sympathy, but part of balance within God’s created order is an economy of nature, which, when viewed from the human perspective, has downsides, and may not be what we ourselves would choose. On the African plains, we marvel at magnificent lions living in prides with their cubs, and also at the herds of graceful antelopes quietly grazing nearby. But lions hunt and kill these innocent creatures in order to eat and to feed their cubs, and so to survive. Similarly, crocodiles catch and eat adventurous wildebeests on their yearly migration during which they have to swim across African rivers. These are instances of the natural processes of life within the economy of the created order – there is life and there is death.

A minute number of types of viruses out of the millions that are known, cause suffering and death to humans. Even they are God’s creations. Like lions and crocodiles, they too, are instances of the natural processes of life. It is not intentional on God’s part - he did not make viruses in order to cause human suffering, it is a consequence of the wider, integrated workings of the created order, in all its forceful majesty. God does not want people to suffer, but he permits it.

Furthermore, God neither sends suffering to an individual, nor offers an individual exemption from suffering. But when suffering comes, God comes too, and is there alongside us, to comfort and lead us through it. Our way of discipleship is knowing that God in Jesus came and experienced suffering, sharing human pain at it very worst. And he showed us that the end is not the Cross, but the resurrection. After suffering, the scars will remain, but God gives us the opportunity to emerge from the darkness into the light, changed and transformed.

29.5.20

All photos by Jim Grover from his photo-story ‘Here Am I’; an exhibition commissioned by Bishop Christopher to celebrate in 2019 the 25th anniversary of the ordination of women clergy in the CoE. For more images and details: www.here-am-i.com

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consulting-celiac-in-the-tardis · 4 years

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5 Reasons Celiac Disease Is About More Than My Stomach

New blog post!

When you look up "what is celiac disease" online or receive a celiac diagnosis, it may seem like a simple disease at first. In fact, when I'm explaining my condition to new friends, I often just say, "Celiac disease is an autoimmune condition in which ingesting gluten damages the intestines."

However, in the seven years since my celiac diagnosis, I've realized something: the answer to "What is celiac disease?" can be pretty complicated...because celiac disease is about waaaaay more than just my intestines. Not sure what I mean? In honor of Celiac Awareness Month (and raising celiac awareness all year round!), here are five reasons celiac disease is about much more than my stomach.

1. The symptoms of celiac disease can manifest themselves in over 300 different ways.

It makes sense to think that a disease centered on intestinal damage would trigger symptoms related to digestion. And, in some dases, that assumption isn't wrong: for instance, my main symptoms of undiagnosed celiac disease were acid reflux, nausea and rapid weight loss.

However, stomach problems aren't the whole picture. In fact, symptoms of celiac disease can include:

Anemia

Anxiety

Infertility

Headaches or migraines

Fatigue

Discolored teeth

Thin bones or being prone to broken bones

Skin Rashes

and much, much more!

Source

As a result, some people are diagnosed with celiac disease because they are underweight, bloated and have many stomach problems...but not everyone with celiac disease is thin or experiencing stomach issues.

2. The state of my stomach can drastically impact the state of my mind.

You've probably heard the old saying, "You can win a man's heart through his stomach." However, research has only recently discovered how much emotions are tied to the gut. This is called the brain-gut connection, and scientists have found that poor gut health can actually negatively impact people's moods. For example, people with IBS and gut problems to experience more anxiety and depression than expected on average, and an unhealthy gut has also been linked to conditions like chronic fatigue, ADHD, OCD, and Tourette syndrome. I've experienced first-hand how much my stomach problems and medically restricted diet can impact my mindset. When I'm going to a new restaurant with gluten free options or trying a new gluten free product that I'm still not sure will sit well on my stomach, I feel my heart rate increase and my hands start to get sweaty as anxious thoughts swirl through my mind. I think the isolation that can result from not being able to eat "normally" at college pizza parties or out with friends has also contributed to feelings of loneliness, and on days when I wake up randomly super bloated, I definitely have a harder time wearing a smile.

I don't say all this for pity or to suggest that having celiac disease means that I'm constantly anxious, sad or lonely. As I've shared in many posts, you can absolutely thrive with celiac disease and I have not let my gluten free diet hold me back from dating, going on outdoor adventures and eating at plenty of delicious restaurants. However, I do think it is important to make people aware of how much an "upset tummy" can really impact a person's day!

3. Social isolation is one side effect of celiac disease doctors don't warn you about.

Speaking of social isolation...a recent study found that restrictions can contribute to people feeling more lonely or isolated, and I get that. As the study points out, people commonly bond over food and sharing a meal...and when you can't do that, feeling like you belong can be a little bit more challenging. At least in my experience, this is one side effect of the gluten free diet (and life with celiac disease) that no doctor or nutritionist ever warned me about. After my celiac diagnosis, I was given advice on what foods to avoid and the best gluten free brands to buy, but I had no guidance for how to maintain social ties while turning down most of the food ever offered to me.

Source

Six years into having celiac disease, I have a well-stocked toolkit to help me survive any gluten-filled social event. I am open with friends about my dietary needs and am confident in turning down food with a short, "Thank you so much, but I have celiac disease so I can't eat that." And if someone does ask, "What is celiac disease?" in return, I feel confident enough to explain. In the case of a social invitation where I know gluten-filled food will be involved, I typically:

Eat before the event.

Bring my own food.

Call the restaurant (if applicable) to ask about gluten free options, and eat there if I can safely or follow step 1 or 2.

As it's clear to see, celiac disease is about much more than my stomach - it also requires plenty of thinking ahead and the use of a well-experienced brain. ;)

4. When I'm "glutened," more than just my stomach can suffer.

Just like celiac disease has plenty of different symptoms, people with celiac disease also experience different side effects of being "glutened" (or exposed to gluten) after going gluten free.

Personally, when I'm glutened, I typically don't feel the effects for a few days. Then, all of a sudden, I'll get extremely tired but also become unable to fall asleep, have massive brain fog and lose my appetite or have an upset stomach. It often takes me about a week to feel normal, and even longer to feel "good" (in terms of my stomach no longer being upset and having extra energy).

Beyond more expected side effects like vomiting or diarrhea, though, people with celiac disease can also experience gluten-triggered depression and fatigue, rashes, joint pain, migraines, blurry vision...I suppose you could say that no part of the body is safe.

5. Celiac disease has become a part of who I am - not just what my stomach is like.

But the biggest reason why celiac disease is about more than my stomach is simple: celiac disease is a part of ALL of me. As I've shared before, I don't make my chronic illnesses my entire identity. However, I think it is impossible to ignore how much celiac disease has shaped who I am today. Because of celiac disease, I am... ...a foodie and a big fan of experimenting with and trying new (gluten free) foods. ...an even bigger lover of planning ahead and sticking to a routine. ...not afraid to stand up for myself or others with invisible and/or chronic illnesses.

And those traits are why, in some moments, I am happy that celiac disease affects more than just my stomach. What is one way you've realized celiac disease affects more than just your stomach? Or what is one way your medical condition affects more than what people might think? Tell me in the comments!

via Blogger https://ift.tt/2TAzuzV

#Blogger #college #celiac #gluten free #coeliac #celiacs #paleo #primal #foodporn #foodart

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honeyleesblog · 2 years

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grabovoi code for weight loss

What would you say if we told you that your health condition could be treated with the usage of numbers? You might find it uncanny and amusing at first, but its actually possible.

There are days when you feel helpless and hopeless. A lot of people go through pain and suffering. They are going through several diseases, and even loneliness and depression.

Doctors may prescribe medications, treatments, and surgeries but they may fail in some cases. We have been seeing a latest trend on social media but the concept is not new.

You might have heard about Grabovoi numbers. If you are a TikTok user, you are probably aware of it already. Often termed as the, ‘cheat codes of the universe’, Grabovoi numbers are useful in attracting positive energy.

People use radionic signatures to heal health conditions. Since it is becoming a popular concept all over social media, we thought of sharing some more details with you.

Here’s an article that sheds light on Grabovoi numbers and how they work. Let’s dive right into the article.

Who is Grigori Petrovich? Grigori Petrovich Gravoboy was born in the year 1963 in Kazakhstan. He is a Russian psychic who proudly claims that he has the ability to cure cancer, revive dead people, abolish death, and help one get rid of AIDS. His abilities are explained in the three-volume book called, ‘The Practice of Control. The way to Salvation.’

In the year 2005, Grabovoy promised the mothers of Beslan school hostage crises that he could bring back their dead children. However, the mothers accused Grigori Grabovoy for trying to brainwash them.

People may question his method, but there is no harm in trying it. Calling out a number does not pose a threat to the humanity or any individual.

What are Grabovoi Numbers? Grabovoi numbers utilize radionic signature to help heal innumerable health ailments. These numbers were developed by Grigori Grabovoi, a Russian psychic. Grigori used Radionic machine to do so. If you are not aware of Radionic theory and practice, it is the concept where different life forms and man share a common ground. They are connected to each other and carry their own electro-magnetic field. Once this is distorted, it results in sickness and disease.

Every disease, organ, and remedy have their own set of vibration and frequency. The Grabovoi numbers help the practitioner to identity the disease and treat it from a distance.

The cheat codes of the universe can also attract fame, luck, love, money, health, and healing. There are more than hundred codes out there, and you can utilize it to attract positive energy and restore health.

Grigori Grabovoi used his Radionic machine to locate the numbers that are associated with different health conditions. He would then instruct the clients to meditate and use these numbers. Surprisingly, it helped in treating health conditions and recoveries happened.

Where did Grabovoi Numbers come from? Grigori Grabovoi wrote a book called, Restoring the Human Body by focusing on numbers. It focuses on the practice of restoring healthy by reciting numbers. There is a number/code for every disease. Once you start focusing on the numbers, the frequency is adjusted. Hence, it is possible to fight the disease.

Although Grigori Grabovoy is a controversial figure, but his methods are being used by thousands of people.

]

How to use Grabovoi Numbers? There is a specific technique through which you can use Grabovoi numbers. Here’s a quick sneak peek of how you can use it.

Memorize the list of numbers.

Repeat all the Grabovoi numbers every day.

Say it out loud or even repeat it inside your head.

Call out the numbers in a friendly manner.

Try to feel gratitude, love, and peace inside your heart while you are calling out the numbers.

Smile at the universe while calling out the numbers.

You have to use the numbers with a good intent.

Ideally, you should keep a journal and write manifestations in it. Write down affirmations and the numbers. Repeat them every morning right after waking up. You must also say it out loud before calling it a day.

You have to repeat the affirmation along with a code. Let’s take an example – ‘I am attracting a fit body, activating code ______’

Use the code given in the list of health concerns. You can also write the code on a piece of paper and place it under your pillow.

To memorize a sequence, you must write it down or repeat it several times a day. You can also recite the numbers or sing it. This will help you memorize the sequence.

Besides, placing it under the pillow, many believers also write down the number on a piece of paper and stick it in every corner of the home.

Lastly, you must thank the universe after announcing the affirmation. Many people are also using crystals to speed up the process and make the universe happy.

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inevitably-johnlocked · 5 years

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Do you know any fics with 3g moments where Sherlock gets hurt instead of John?

Hi Lovely!!

Ahh, I don’t have anything necessarily 3G, but I have a lot of Sherlock Whump so we’ll just classify it all in the same blurb, LOL.

SHERLOCK IS SICK / HURT (WHUMP)