the thing I keep thinking about really intensely is that yes, for like 99% of their acquaintance, Crowley was the one who had more understanding of the way heaven and hell really work. but for that brief moment in their first meeting, he genuinely was more naive and idealistic than Aziraphale. like, Aziraphale was scared, even back then, at the thought of questioning god; even right back before the beginning, some part of him knew that he was fearful and unsafe, and he realised that before Crowley ever did. 

it’s honestly almost like some kind of, Aziraphale fell first, Crowley Fell harder - he never completed the realisation the same way Crowley managed to, but he arrived there earlier. And I wonder so much what exact kind of effects witnessing the demons’ fall had on him, given that he’d already obtained some of that awareness that he perhaps was not in a very good place to be. but the only alternative of places to go, as far as he knew, was at the very least just as bad, and in some ways legitimately worse.

KDL3 Stage 1-1: Tulip's stage!

I'm approaching these with a similar format to my KDL2 posts, except divided by stage rather than level since each stage is very unique in KDL3. This also means this is going to take me forever LOL. In terms of standalone ability drawings, each one will contain Kirby AND Gooey, since they have the same movesets. They're only placed next to each other for comparison though since like I said they can't BOTH wear the necklace at the same time. So far I think Gooey likes Spark the best!

This level has Rick and Nago, but I never used Rick since it was too risky-- too much of a chance of him accidentally stepping on the flowers!! Nago is preferential since he has 3 jumps. I would NEVER take Gooey here unless I was playing w 2 players though. His CPU is SO bad lmao (worse than any Helper in the original Super Star if you can imagine). That's how it is for the entire game quite frankly, but I REALLY like the idea of Kirby and Gooey going on the whole adventure together, so I'm pretending I did this whole thing with 2 people LOL.

I can tell you a little more about Nago since this post is very Nago centric! He's 19 years old and is honestly a completely normal guy... other than being able to turn into a giant cat anyways LOL. He can't use copy abilities for himself, but he's very crafty. He likes to help Kirby come up with new methods and angles to use his abilities. He has some difficulties befriending the other animal friends since he feels like he can't relate to them, so for now he's only friends with Kirby and Rick. He doesn't like when Kirby chooses to hang out with other friends over him. I guess that makes him n Rick more alike than I realized LOL. He is prone to expressing his emotions in catlike ways since he's a werecat.

I don't have much to say about this level's resident character, Tulip. She's a flower nymph, and she has 4... kids? counterparts? I don't know what they are to her. None of them transform, and the little flowers don't talk or anything, they just have eyes. Though, they can move underground by tunneling I think. Only between areas without grass though! They're very particular.

Ramblings abt Nago and calico cats in general under the cut since I have a special interest in cats and genetics:

So if you were unaware, calico cats (and tortoiseshell cats) are almost always female IRL! Thsi is because 'red' (orange) and black fur colors are both linked to the x chromosome, so a cat can only have 1 of those 2 per x chromosome. If the cat has only 1 x chromosome, it can only be red or black, never both. So this means that even though he's a male character, Nago must have 2 x chromosomes for his coat color to make sense. I think one could interpret him as transmasc, intersex, or they could say he has Klinefelter syndrome or some other chromosomal condition? So I chose to depict him as transmasc in my gijinka AU since I'm transmasc and he was my favorite animal friend when I was a kid!!

Did the designers working on KDL3 intend for him to be trans? Probably not, I think it was just an oversight. They wanted a funny cat character and calico is a very cute and popular color for cats! Though idk it is possible he was intentionally transgender since Kirby's probably like, the queerest popular nintendo mascot I can think of?? If he's gender neutral is it that farfetched for Nago to be trans or intersex? I don't know, I'm not his original designer.

Anyways another funny fact abt cats that Nago's designers might've known-- cats squint/close their eyes as a sign of trust in others! So Nago's eyes are usually shut because he's showing Kirby that he can trust him! (yes that means he's VERY upset when Kirby uses the needle ability or switches to a different animal friend cuz his eyes widen. TBF, if my friend was shooting chunks out of his face and turning them into needles, I'd be pretty distressed too LOL). I really like this detail cuz it means at least one person on the design team rlly rlly loved cats lol.

btw random, i was wondering, why don't you like hapi?

Ooh!

Well, it's a mix of multiple factors, and while some friends tried to give another POV, I still have this, idk, aversion to the character.

As to why...

It mostly comes from the context.

Hapi was released with the DLC, in 2020.

Hapi has a special condition that makes her "dangerous" to the world outside, so she's quarantined in the Abyss.

She complains about the people who placed her there being assholes because they promised to heal her but lied because she still has her special condition - the Knights of Seiros found Hapi 1 year ago (in 1179).

The Knights of Seiros rescued me—promised to protect me. But then they hid me away in Abyss.

She even compares how the CoS "hid" her in the Abyss to Cornelia's experiments :

When I was little, a lady locked me up and held me captive for a long time.

So all the knights did was move me from one cage to another. Wouldn't you call that mistreatment?

And ultimately complains about her quarantine :

Those hypocrites preached about love and decency while shoving folks like me into the shadows.

So,

I know it's unrelated to the game, but in 2020, someone complaing about not being able to go outside because of an "illness", kind of understanding why they have to stay "at home" but still thinking the gov/officials who told her to stay at home suck because they told her to stay "at home" instead of finding a remedy and how they are hypocrites because they are people who preach about certain values, like freedom, while infringing said values when it's necessary - hit a bit too close to how some people acted and behaved during, well, 2020.

Sure, it sucks to be quarantined, but there is no remedy available for now and you represent a danger to some people - what are you going to do ?

(tfw no facemasks in Fodlan)

Complain about "government/authorities BaD" On how they "lied" because they said they were going to come up with a vaccine and it wasn't available in May 2020 ?

Granted, there is the angle of "those people said they were going to help me and didn't help" that could be interpreted as her feeling betrayed by people, after having been betrayed by Mole!Cornelia.

She's jaded and doesn't trust anyone - save for a few people - and complains a lot, about many things while being apathic, giving nicknames and believing to be witty. Hapi's basically your everyday run of the mill teenager - worse, add the constant "complaining" about everything and you have the worst, a french teenager.

And that's not the kind of character I enjoy in my fantasy games (or irl in general)

Add on top the "I understand why they had to keep me quarantined because public safety but they can't be preaching about love and roses when they do this to me even if it's for reasons that are perfectly legit" spiel that could have came out of a "freedom fighter" from 2020 and you have my feelings on that unit.

Of course no one gives a fuck about her condition and iirc she's never "healed" from Cornelia's experiment? Just like everything regarding multi tiled units, the Monsters Hapi summons are just used for a "lol funny" quirk, and it is never shown nor even mentioned that some of them might have had crushed a house or two, or slaughtered a random on the way to meet her because she sighed, nope. We don't even know what happened to the Church that sheltered her, how did they discover her power, did it happen by accident, what were the casualties? Can those beasts be controled ? Some of her ending suggest so, because she fights leading an army of them, but otherwise it's just...

I mean, in her support with Yuri she mentions she doesn't want to return hom because with her curse she could destroy the village, so maybe she learnt - later - how to control the beasts, idk.

I think the Dimitri support touches it, DImitri wants to help her and lift Cornelia's curse, Hapi says the Church tried but didn't manage to find a remedy? Their ending said after pursuing the mole people they finally managed to find one though.

Tl;Dr : Hapi being a teenager would already have led her just above the Doro tier imo in how much I appreciate the character, but add the Covid-19 context, she's even below Doro.

I know, it's shocking.

((Ok weird mun ramble under the cut, tw for mentions of abuse in vague senses, nothing graphic but it’s related to irl events. I figure, it’s munday, I’m manic and prone to oversharing, and I have so much love in my heart right now for this muse and for my Green muse as well and in what ways they intersect. I started writing this as a maybe one or two paragraph posts about Red’s service pokemon and it... got very out of hand and very personal, so take this. I’ve been writing for like a half hour, and it just feels right to share.

Every single day I realize that Red is just accumulating service pokemon. And honestly it’s been really freeing to write Red as a noticeably disabled character, as a disabled person. Not everything that Red experiences do I experience (I’m not an amputee, for example), but everything that I write him with I do it from the perspective of someone who is disabled, if that makes sense? Where my own experiences lack, I obviously do research, but its so... GOOD, to be writing this character that’s considered such a big name, almost a folk hero, and have him be very plainly disabled.

My Red is nonverbal, he’s autistic, he has PTSD. He probably has other things going on that I’m not aware of yet and I’m thinking about blasting his hearing half to death to give another thing that I also experience.

In a similar vein I do the same with my Green- he’s bipolar, he’s a child of neglect, he’s ALSO autistic and has PTSD but differently. I want to do more with him, I’m considering writing him with BPD as well but I need more research to do that justice since that’s not my experience, but all of it comes from that same place of “I go through this, these characters are unequivocally top tier people in their world, strong and respected, and they do it not in spite of their conditions but at least in part because of them”.

I write the pokemon world as generally extremely friendly to autistic people. This is because I don’t really like systematic ableism in my escapism, but also because iirc, pokemon was CREATED by an autistic person who wanted to make a game that appealed to him. The world would be influenced that way, and I chose to continue that thread. Some things a world could never exactly accommodate- PTSD, abuse, the lot of it exists because the world isn’t perfect and those struggles are inherent to my life experience. And because of that, because I can’t separate that from my own experiences, it goes into the world I create in my writing.

Basically what I’m saying is that I put a lot of my heart and soul into these characters. The choices I make aren’t because they’re popular headcanons or trendy concepts- its because I know what its like, or have a loved one who knows what its like, to live that way. That is my little special spark I have to offer to these two characters, I think, that makes them unique.

Red gets service pokemon and a good therapist because he’s a recovery fantasy. He’s a character that started as an expression of my grief and externalizing the abuse that I experienced into horror, as the genre often is. But over the decade that I’ve written him, he’s blossomed into something that is different. I’m growing, I’m healing, he is the part I want to treat kindly because he’s been through that hell. And yeah, sometimes I deal him hard blows like in the Rocketverse where he is set back HARD, and changes into a worse person. That’s a story about continuing under hard circumstances and persistence despite that. I came up in a high control group, and exploring that feeling of being trapped like that in this way, where Red can come out the other side maybe not a good man, but an okay one? Is good. And in the mainverse, I plan on giving Red good things. Happiness eventually, stability. He’s going to become someone his child self wouldn’t recognize but would be able to look at and say “that’s a good man”.

Hisui is similar to Rocketverse, but deals instead with grief more abstractly, and cuts out the high-control. It’s a story about a man who didn’t know who he was even before he lost his memory, learning to become someone new again. I have severe memory issues- I mention this in my about. But being able to write a character that I know will eventually bloom into a loved member of his adopted clan that struggles in this way, in a more hostile environment, is liberating. It’s also why I write Ingo, a muse I’m actually going to be bringing back in the VERY near future because like I said I’m manic as hell right now and this is a good outlet for it.

Green, conversely, is a character in active struggle. He’s stagnating, he’s trapped. He’s crushed under the weight of his responsibilities and the baggage that comes with being a gym leader, and the former champion’s rival, and a former champion himself. He’s disabled but won’t recognize it, he won’t admit a lot of things to himself and will not look at his actual problems head-on. This is a character that is in a transitional period of his life, caught on the cusp right now of deciding if he wants to address his problems and GROW, or if he wants to just sit with them, and passively allow his issues to ruin and steal away his life. Green is born of longing and frustration, fundamentally. He’s in many ways the opposite of Red; where Red grows, Green stagnates. Where Red seeks resolution to his issues and asks for forgiveness, Green denies there’s even a problem and continues to fester that self-hatred.

The core of his problems aren’t his fault- they arise from other’s choices, genetics, bad luck and misfortune. But where his extended troubles come in is from his lack of action- the familiarity of his suffering is what’s kept him locked in this cycle. Green is, at the core, an indecisive man afraid to take risks, someone who’s built up this facade of someone who knows what he’s doing that he’s terrified that one step out of his routine will make the illusion come crashing down around him. So he sits in his gym, wanting to travel the world, and wanting to define his relationship with Red. He’s not even afraid of being rejected by him- he knows that Red will say yes. But that would mean being even more open, and emotionally intimate and vulnerable, and he simultaneously craves and fears it more than anything. Green, for me, is less a fantasy and more commiseration.  A lot of what Green struggles with, I also struggle or struggled with in the past. He’s an opportunity to tell a story of someone who made different choices. And, because I am a hopeless romantic, the story of someone who is loved and admired despite the fact that he’s a deeply flawed man.

Red and Green are both deeply flawed characters too, and it’s unrelating to their disabilities. Red’s biggest flaw right now is his backtracking, going back on his decisions. He can make them, but he struggles to follow through. He also is incredibly petty, as can be seen in the drama alert arc with @/zeconductor. His fear of following through with things has also kept him from making friends. I know that he and N would make GREAT friends, they’d get along so well, but because he can’t follow through they just end up glancing off of each other’s trajectories. Green can’t even start that process. He doesn’t know who he is, and he actively has started resenting Red a little for that. Green has a lot of cognitive dissonance and is very quick to anger, and a lot of that has to do with his unresolved and unaddressed issues.

Fundamentally, the stories I write with these two are stories about two men who, at the end of the day, love each other deeply, but have drastically different needs. They’re in different phases of the process of self-actualization and of healing from their pasts, with different levels of baggage and different types. Their needs conflict, and so so often. But at the end of the day, they’re Rivals. They’re Rivals and they love each other, weather they end up together or not, and it’s through that bond that they encourage each other to be their best and better selves.

Eventually, Red will follow through. Eventually, Green will address his problems. Eventually, they both know who they are, and they come at each other with the knowledge that the other helped foster and shape that person. They didn’t make each other, they made themselves, but their Rivalry fundamentally changed each other’s orbits with their gravity.

I write stories for me, about people like me, and I put a little part of myself in them. It’s how I connect with a world that I can’t often find myself in. Red is a man that everyone would look at and see a disabled person, seen with admiration and respect. Green is a man that might not be read as disabled, who masks at all times for fear of rejection- but in the world I’ve written, he would be accepted. He is accepted, by everyone but himself, and when he learns to accept himself, he’ll figure out who he is. They’re both a story of twenty-somethings who don’t know what they want, or are just figuring it out, and starting over. Stories about people who thought they wanted one thing all their lives and are confronted with the reality that they don’t know what they want but it sure isn’t this. Stories about people feeling out the world and making the best with the hand they’ve been dealt, and coming out the other side as people who are looked upon with respect.

They are both, at the end of the day, stories about people like me, being loved and respected for who they are, and who they are learning to be. About being supported through the realization that they need to do something completely new. About getting the help they need.

Their lives aren’t perfect. I love to hurt my boys so much. But their growth and their struggle, their disabilities and their flaws, the special little features that bloom from the cracks that come when I put them under pressure? That’s what this is all for.

The boys are like a scrying mirror. I’m letting you all take a look. What do you guys think?

Entry #11. [this will mention more graphic depictions of s/h than my other vents]

Tw- talk about s/h, r4pe, z00, p3do, cp, Ed, cults, animal 4buse, p4ras, and other stuff like it.

I AM MOT ROMANTICIZING NOR SUPPORTING THESE, THIS IS A VENT ABOUT MY EXPERIENCES FROM A TERRIBLE SITUATION. IF YOU SUPPORT THESE PLEASE GET THE FUCK OFF MY BLOG.

People really say “support victims” until those victims don’t act perfect.

I recently left a notorious online “cult.” In quotations because it’s heavily debated whether it should be considered a cult or not. I personally feel like it was, I was a helper [the highest rank a normal person could ever possibly be]. There are people who were never in the group who say it wasn’t a cult. They have no room to talk, they weren’t there, and they never experienced anything like we did.

I was in the group from August 2021 to April 2022.

I went though basically everything in the group. It got worse over time. I’m going to be blunt. I saw and heard some of the worst things a person could see. Mainly videos, images, gifs, etc.. of graphic gore. Beheadings, Accidents, Mutilation, and ESPECIALLY self harm. In fact, self harm was one of the biggest things in the group. We were encouraged to cut and carve for the group. I saw so many carvings of the logo it got boring to me. The amount of times people carved it and then were encouraged to carve deeper. I didn’t feel like I was good enough because my cuts and scars weren’t deep enough. I wanted to impress him, the leader. Eventually from being conditioned that carving was an AMAZING thing I decided that I needed to convince others that weren’t doing it already to, so I could impress him with my dedication. I was obsessed with him. I did disgusting things due to my obsession, I did anything I could in order to please him. Of course I knew that due to his various disorders, he had many issues processing the attention given to him. Everyone paid all their attention to him but in his mind it felt like nothing. He loved attention, negative or positive. He wanted the group to be known for terrible deeds because it would get him more attention. He would also suicide bait a lot. On multiple occasions he actually tried to attempt (? I think). There’s videos out others of him taking a ton of pills. A memory just came back to me: one day he was feeling especially interactive with the “tw-general” chat. He was originally streaming his self harm but he had to end the stream, and that’s when I realized that’s what he was doing. He was begging for people to encourage him to cut. It was on his thigh, I remember it vividly. Blood covered skin. The familiar pink and white of deep cuts. I admit, I joined in. It made him happy. He wanted everyone to do it. He was even making announcements about it. It would be out of place if I didn’t. I don’t feel as bad now because of how much I’ve realized that everything he did was bad. Guy really fucked his dog, and talked about it. Talked about zoo shit, talked about all that and how much he wanted to hurt and rape animals. HELL. HE EVEN TALKED ABOUT WANTING ADULT WOMEN TO RAPE HIM. I supported him through all of this, I just wanted his attention for some sick fucking reason. Why am I rambling about all this? Because of his behavior being normalized and glorified, and I was deeply obsessed with him, I began to mimic him, on purpose or not. He had many “irls”, basically believing you are a character. Because of this, and due to the fact that most higherups and members had them too, I began to think that characters that I was close to and related to were my “irls.” I pretended that they were, I pretended to be delusional to fit in. Now, “irls” are basically just rebranded “D/As or Delusional Attachments,” and people would get in trouble for calling them D/As because if you know it’s a delusion, it’s not a delusion, cuz that’s the nature of a delusion that you don’t know it’s a delusion. Which is true. I forced myself to believe this about myself for so long that it actually developed for me to feel as though I was actually those characters. I still struggle with this to this day. I sometimes still can’t shake the fact that I’m not certain characters from medias due to how conditioned it was.

And this leads into what my first line was about. When I still experience bad habits from this time, or am still struggling with a paraphilia I developed from the group, people look down upon me. It’s as if I’m not actively in recovery, it’s as If I somehow enjoy these feelings. Zoo things were so normalized and pushed upon people in the group that I couldn’t help but watch every-time it was sent. Same with p/do related things. Curiosity turned into a sick pleasure. I got pleasure from abusing people and being a total dickbag. Im scared to even say this stuff but it’s true. Victims of abusers can become abusers themselves. A lot of people don’t realize that. My behaviors take after him a lot and I hate it. I don’t want to be like this. Anyone who thinks I do is completely and utterly retarded [yes, I can reclaim it.]. My fellow ex members have felt the same way. In the recovery server we shared our stories and were gawked at, and shunned for what we experienced. I understand, learning that someone is a recovering zoo or p/do can be daunting, it might make you want to punch them or rip out their throat, but that’s not how you fix these problems. It just causes us to curl up in a ball and become a recluse from society due to never being accepted that we are trying to heal and recover and get better. My friend, when sharing his story from the group and mentioned that he was a p3do. In the group, being one was normalized, even appreciates and supported because of how para focused the group was. But as he was telling his story, someone from the recovery server just HAD to butt in and say something rude. I can’t even remember what they said. And after I asked them to apologize to my friend, they apologized to me? The fuck?? I was disgusted at the audacity. This was a space for people who are recovering from terrible things and conditioning and people who haven’t experienced that just walk in and shame the survivors. When I was telling my story, the same thing happened to me. HELL. THEIR COMMENT ABOUT MY STORY WAS REMOVED A LITTLE AFTER IT WAS SAID. It probably wasn’t cuz it made me uncomfortable, im pretty sure it was so they didn’t look bad. The absolute disregard for victims who don’t seem like “perfect” “typical” victims is sad. I’m glad atleast some people had agreed with me, but god fucking damn. There shouldn’t be any hidden rules about being a victim. Shit like this makes it hard for me to recover. It’s why I left the server. I want to be treated like a human fucking being.

I think that you being mentally disabled and having chronic pain definitely counts. And it’s the reason why I love that you’re speaking up about this discourse in PJO/Solangelo tumblr community.

What I hate the most in tumblr (or the internet in general, really) is that only one option can be valid. One person comes and says “I say this thing is ableist/homophobic/misogynistic/etc and if you think differently then you’re an ableist/homophobe/sexist/etc.” And that’s exactly what I started seeing in this discourse.

And personally that’s what I see as truly ableist. The moment when certain people stopped criticizing fictional characters and started coming after real people.

I’m mentally disabled and I share a few mental conditions with Nico and I have other opinion than those who say Solangelo is ableist. And you know, one of my biggest problems as a mentally disabled person used to be validity. The constant struggle about whether what I feel is right and valid or not. The constant questioning myself if me feeling differently than others make me worse, bad even. The constant feeling that I’m an impostor because my experiences and emotions don’t always match other people’s with similar mental conditions. It took me years to learn and accept that different people go though their mental disabilities differently and that what I feel and think is valid even if it differs from what some other people feel and think. And that it doesn’t make me a fake, an impostor, a less important person. And it took me years to just start trying to not be affected by people invalidating my feelings, emotions, and experiences. Because that’s what they do. You have a panic attack and they tell you “stop exaggerating.” You share your problems and they tell you “stop whining, I sure have it worse, that’s me we should talk about.” You share an opinion and they tell you “it doesn’t matter, I know better.”

And that’s exactly what some people are doing right now. I know some of them are trying to speak up for mentally disabled people but some and silencing those people suggesting that no matter if you’re mentally disabled or not if you speak against their opinions you’re ableist. And it actually made me feel so so bad about myself these days because I started to spend hours wondering about the validity of my feelings and conditions, which I haven’t been doing for a long time now.

So I wanted to thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you for being mentally disabled and speaking up. Thank you for sharing your opinions even if they’re sometimes against what others are saying. And thank you so much for speaking up for those like me, who are too scared to speak up for themselves. You made at least one mentally disabled person think better about themselves.

Oh my goodness i never thought me talking about ableism and toxic opinions would help someone, and I'm so, so happy it did.

First off, thank you for sharing this with me, typing out your struggles on the internet must've taken a hell lot of courage, and like thanks for trusting me with that information. I'm so happy that you're in a better place now, and I hope this internet thing doesn't have long lasting effects on your mental health.

And yeah, you're right, many people's opinions can be valid, like there's some discussions where one party is blatantly biased (nico's bisexuality) and some discussions (like solangelo being abusive) where people can perceive things differently and we should listen to different opinions without putting an irl person down.

Like, I get being angry at people's bigotry, but maybe instead of immediately assuming the worst we can inform them and allow them to rectify their mistakes. If i think caleo is abusive, i will talk about it with anyone who's willing, but like?? I won't jump into a shipper's blog and tell them off for the stuff they like??? If i read a fic where caleo is being blatantly abusive i might comment on that respectfully, or obviously i just leave?? And not give a psa on leo's character and calypso's awfulness in someone else's space??? That is a really petty mentality.

Like, I don't think solangelo is ableist, but if someone has faced ableism and/or thinks a certain ship has ableist tones, who am I to correct their opinions and experiences? As long as they don't diss on me liking a ship, we're both good ans we're both being respectful. Being respectful is good.

Bottom line, it always comes to this: if you don't like something, the back button is always just right there for you to click. If you think something is seriously harmful to a community, say so respectfully and talk it out like mature people. Seriously, anyone who has been in a fandom for more than a few months understands this.

Unpopular Opinion /lh /rp

Talking about dSMP character’s heights and sort of their body types? Not in a weird way just in a ‘how I imagine them’ way. Loosely based off of their irl heights, but some of them I don’t know, so it’s mostly guesswork and vibes. Also if you disagree you’re wrong. (Just kidding leave your ideas in the tags/replies)

Obviously this is all roleplay/character stuff. None of it is intended to be weird or to reflect on the irl people! I’m just having fun with headcanons :)

Tommy is 6′3 and very very lanky. This child is not short. Stop drawing him short. He’s taller than Techno. He’s not as tall as Wilbur, but he’s tall. He towers over most people. Emphasis on most because everyone is so tall on this server what the hell? 

Anyway I think the mental image of this super tall kid actively trying to make himself look shorter/smaller is heartbreaking. Like imagine him curled up into a corner trying to make himself as unnoticable as possible in Logsted. Imagine him slouching when living with Techno to try to make himself seem like less of a ‘problem’. Imagine Dream telling him that he’s a ‘big strong man’ and that he shouldn’t need help, he can defend himself, so when he goes back to Tubbo, he tries to make himself look *tiny* as a cry for help. He wants comfort.

But he’s also incedibly skinny. Back in L’manburg and Pogtopia, he developed some muscle from all the fighting. His shoulders broadened out and he looked slightly intimidating. But like most teenage boys, he was still lanky as hell. This only got worse when he was exiled to Logstedshire, with little food (and no drive to eat the food, or get up, or exersise) he became more malnourished and he just looked *small* despite being 6′3. This probably isn’t helped by the constant use of golden apples when he moves in with Techno, which give him energy and strength but no real nutritional value. Techno was just trying to get the kid to eat normally. When he finally stands at his full height, Techno is shocked that he didn’t notice all the slouching.

Anyway Techno is 6′2. He’s taller than a lot of people but not as tall as his brothers. He makes up for this with muscle and strength and a healthy body. Wow, the only healthy person on the server. Amazing. You love to see it. Good for him. He could win in a battle of raw strength against anyone else on the server. He’s quite broad, which makes him look bigger generally.

Wilbur is 6′5 and also he is a stick. Just. Straight up and down stick. Nothing there! He is just a pale sickly stick. This gets worse the further into the timeline you go. When claiming L’manburg and fighting in the war he starts to get insomnia, causing him to look like a corpse half the time. When in Pogtopia, he’s too busy to take care of himself properly, so he only looks worse and worse. His hair is a mess, his skin is far too pale, and he only eats enough to be able to hold his own in a short fight. There’s a reason he doesn’t wear armour or really try to fight at all. He’s subconciously self-destructive, then actively so when he blows the place to the ground. He’s always been too busy for self-care.

Ghostbur is a much more healthy, younger version of Wilbur. I would say he’s ‘water rising’ era Wilbur. The life returned to his body, in a morbid kind of way. He’s still tall but he prefers to make himself seem shorter just to be less threatening.

Phil is 5′11. He has an average build, with slight muscle from the years of playing in hardcore. He’s older, now, but he can still kick your ass. Also, he taught Techno how to fight smart, not hard. He doesn’t need to be super strong because he’s intelligent enough to outwit most people on the server. He has a wordly knowledge that others don’t possess. He also has wings, large and grey, clipped so he could get onto the server (there is a no flying rule after all).

Fundy is... 5′10, just a little shorter than Phil. His fox genes make him smaller, despite his father being 6′5. He’s got a healthy, svelte build. He’s sneaky and light on his feet. In the wars he built up some muscle, but it was quickly lost since he prefers to take a backseat to any fighting outside of those times (especially now) and he’s built for spying.

Schlatt is an interesting one because a lot of people are gonna fight me on this, but he’s not actually old. Everyone calls him old but honestly I think he’s younger than Wilbur (in canon, I feel like Wilbur is in his late 30s, early 40s, simply because). I think Schlatt’s around 35-ish, but he looks older due to his shitty health. People call him an old man either to demean him or because they see his actions and appearance and go ‘yeah, this guy is old’. Which is fair enough, because irl Schlatt and c!Schlatt both act like they’re from the 1950s.

This guy looks like shit by the end, but he looks alright at the start. Slicked-back hair, sharp ram horns, golden animalistic eyes. He’s intimidating. And loud. Then everything shifts, right towards the end. He’s frail and deteriorating throughout his short presidency, and by the end of it he’s practically a corpse, just like Wilbur.

He’s 6′3, with broad shoulders and a silhouette that seems strong not only because he carries himself as if he can fight, but also because of the percieved power that comes along with it. In reality, Schlatt is a poor fighter, and the abuse he ends up putting his body through (working out excessively to try to fight his condition, and turning to alcoholism as an escape) completely destroys him, making him probably one of the least healthy and weakest people on the server. It doesn’t really show until his death scene, since he’s covered up the deterioration since day one. Basically, mans is dead. 

Glatt, or Ghost Schlatt, or whatever you want to call him, would be a healthier Schlatt. Again, from the ‘water rising’ era. I headcanon him to have longer hair in that era. Not sure why.

Ranboo is the same height as tommy, but is more naturally lithe than made that way by lack of food. His enderman DNA can be blamed for that. He’s healthy most of the time, but may have spirals where he doesn’t take good care of himself (perhaps he forgets) and he looks pretty bad. If he goes a few days without keeping up his self-care routine, he looks a lot worse than he actually is. Sleep tends to be his biggest issue, his mind keeping him awake all night and leaving him looking like shit in the morning. Really, he’s just a kid with a troubled soul, and it shows sometimes. Most days, though, he looks very well put together.

Tubbo. He’s 5′6. He’s more childlike than Tommy, which only makes it worse when he acts in the way he does in season 2. He has burn scars across one side of his body, from his execution, and he is partially blind in one eye because of it. He takes very good care of himself, since he has to look good while being president if he wants those sweet sweet approval ratings. But when he’s super stressed, he will pull all-nighters and forget to eat. He’s got a lot of issues, but his body is very normal and healthy, all things considered. 

Quackity is 5′8. Which is really funny because that’s his actual height. He’s less sharp (?) than a lot of people on the server, but he has some muscle because he’s constantly training to ‘take down Technoblade’ (in reality, it’s a habit he picked up in Schlatt’s era, and never had the heart to drop). He tries his best to stay healthy (again, to better kill Techno) and he’s careful with his life, knowing that it’s his last.

Niki is 5′5. She’s also able to kick so much ass. That is all.

Dream is a bitch and therefore I will not be discussing him. Also he’s a blob or whatever so I guess height is irrelevant. Or maybe he’s a mysterious figure with a mask. Who knows.

No one else is important enough to talk about /j (but really I’m tired so I will stop here). Put your own thoughts in the comments, tags, and rbs. This was all in good fun, so don’t get mad haha.

Story time! Like an actual true story.

Ok, so my dad has this old car. It’s just like a random family car from 1953. It’s black, it’s rusty, but it’s honestly in better condition than you’d think. Something you need to know about my dad: he came out of the womb wanting to restore a classic car. And if you happen to know me IRL I need you to understand that this makes him so happy that when we finally started it for the first time the other day he was LITERALLY sitting in the seat grinning and bouncing. My grumpy af 6’4 nearly 66 year old father - a bald man with a white Santa beard - was BOUNCING.

Recently he’s started restoring it with the help of a friend of his and I, despite knowing nothing about car and honestly not really being much of a car person I general aside from driving them, have been helping. Yes, of my own volition. It’s nice working on it with him and I like learning new things. His friend is super knowledgeable, and my dad knows some stuff too. Plus my dad and I work well together - we both have a habit of putting things down and spacing on it so we don’t get mad about it and I seem to have a calming effect on him. I like doing projects with him.

So tonight he comes into my room while I’m playing Valhalla and he hands me a stained sweatshirt (it’s cold in the garage and I’d gotten my nice ones pretty dirty while laying under the car the other day, which - btw - exasterbated an Old Person Injury (TM) I didn’t know I had and I could barely walk on Saturday and Sunday. Feeling a lot better now.) and is like “do you wanna come help me flush the fuel line?” And I’m like sure, yeah. This wasn’t a random thing - we took the gas tank off on Saturday and this was the next step. His friend had previously brought over an air compressor and my dad wanted to use it because, well, new toy.

So because my back was still hurting he got under the car back at the pipe that goes into the gas tank and I had the air compressor at the end that goes into the the engine. The idea is that you push compressed air into the tube and it pushes junk out. So we’re trying to do this and NOTHING is coming out. Not goo, not gas, not air. And we’re like “huh wonder why” and then my ass gets the bright idea to try it the other way - push the air through from the gas tank side. And he’s like “yeah let’s try it, because that’s the way the fuel is supposed to go”.

Now fam, I need you all to understand here that I’m a smart person. But in some ways I am *incredibly stupid*. In my defense, we legit though there might be nothing in the line. The tank had been empty and the system had been sitting open for a couple days.

Spoiler: the line was NOT empty.

So I’m up in the engine and my dad is under the car because again, I was still kinda hurting. So I’m bent over the engine holding a plastic bottle over the end of the tube (bout a half centimeter wide inside a normal water bottle), just in case.....hahahahahah.....in CASE something comes out.

My dad gave one puff of that air stream and gas came flying out of that shit so hard that it rebounded out of the neck of the bottle - the small space doing what small spaces do to liquids - and going *right in my face* (I’m mostly fine.). I squeeze my eyes shut and I am not opening them bitches for hell or high water, but it took all of about 49 seconds before that shift started to burn and I made my dad led me inside. I didn’t panic, I just was like “you need to take me inside, I need soap because gas doesn’t dissolve in water. I can’t just wipe this off.”

We get inside and I’ve got my head bent over the sink complaining about how much the gas is burning my skin (this entire thing probably has only taken like 1-1.5 minutes at this point because my ass remembered from the six semesters of chem basically what to do when you get hydrocarbons places they shouldn’t be. But then.

THEN.

What do I do, I who has my face over the sink washing with dish soap because it was the closest thing in hand? I try to clean the corner of my eye and I get DISH SOAP IN MY EYE. It worse than the fuckin gas and I screamed. Like gas in the face and skin starting to get chemical burns? No problem, calmly ask for a towel and to be led to the sink. Lil soap in the eye? Scream at the top of my lungs and then try to explain to your very worried parents why you’re screaming.

And this will tell you all you ever need to know about my personality: I’m hung over the sink in pain covered in gas and I’m like “hey dad I told you that would work. So much for there not being gas in the line.”

I manage to clean up enough that I can see out my left eye so I go take a shower and continue to clean the right one with the soap in it and I’m fine except for your basic like soap in the eye nonsense and I checked the internet as you do to make sure I’d done everything. So I go downstairs and I’m like “dad I’ve named your car”

“I don’t really name my—“

“IVE NAMED THE CAR. It’s going to be called Sleipnir - the black horse of Odin, the ONE EYED *points at inflamed soap eye* god!”

Since you seem to enjoy analyzing stories I was wondering if you have any advice on what to do when your mind narrows in on critical aspects? I usually really enjoy analyzing media but recently I found that my mind tends to hyper-focus on aspects that I don't like even when I'm actively trying to ignore it and focus on what I do like. So I was just curious if you have tips for dealing with it and/or getting out of this mindset. Thanks and I apologize if this isn't the right blog for this!

Ugh. This is a big question and I’m not sure I’m qualified or immune to complaining. But I consider myself honored, I’ll try my best to answer it. 

There’s three things you can do here

a) Try to find out where it’s coming from. 

Cross-examine yourself active listening wise. Your reactions can generally come from two places: What you’re actually looking at, or yourself. 

Is everything annoying you as of late because you are angry? Are you having a bad week because of something in your private life? Are you sensitive because some larger tendency in RL/society is pissing you off? Is it even anger? What are you feeling and why? Does it really have anything to do with this movie etc?

Or is it something about the work itself? Does it remind you of something that happened to you? Does your displeasure come from a value that is important to you or a pattern that you believe to be a bad influence on society. 

Really try to put into words what it is that makes you feel this way while keeping in mind that your feelings, your reaction to the work and the work itself are separate entities. 

I’d remain open to the possibility that you have a legitimate gripe here. If you personally can’t enjoy a work either because a subjective factor or an objective flaw that’s a dealbreaker for you, you shouldn’t force yourself to like it because your friends do or because it didn’t do anything “unforgiveable”. Deciding that it’s not your cup of tea needn’t be a moral judgement on everyone who made the work or everyone who likes it. 

On the other hand you might find it easier to enjoy it if you acknowledge the flaw and put it into definite words, tell your inner critic that you heard them and then continue. If you try not to think about something you automatically end up thinking about it. 

b) Keep in mind that there are many valid stories and that all of them are worth telling

A lot happens on this green earth. Consider the following cases:

A1: A small, lithe person is mistreated by a big strong one

A2: A small, lithe person mistreats a big strong one and pretends to be the victim appealing to their small ness

B1: An eccentric kid is labeled as disordered just for being eccentric and because the teachers don’t want to deal with her 

B2: A serious-minded kid has an actual anxiety disorder and experiences stigma because of it and people not understanding that it’s real and debilitating

C1: There is a socially awkward, nerdy character. She is eventually revealed as autistic and her friends accept her just as she is. 

C2: There is a socially awkward, nerdy character. She comes out as aroace and all her friends support her. It is emphasized that she is actually as affectionate as everyone else and preconceptions to the contrary were just bigoted misunderstandings. 

C3: There is a socially awkward, nerdy character.  She finds a significant other who loves her even though she is socially awkward, and her love leads her to discover more communicative passionate sides to her personality. 

Clearly, for each of these scenarios, there are going to be people who relate to some but not to others. If you’ve got an anxiety disorder you’re going to relate to the story with the anxiety disorder, and if you were mis-labeled by incompetent teachers you’re gonna relate to that. But both actually happen in real life. B1 is me B2 is one of my sisters. You might even say they’re caused by some of the same intolerant attitudes. 

So ask yourself:  Is any of these intended as a “fuck you” to the people who would rather have the other ones? If in one particular story the character was mistakenly labeled by incompetent teachers and never had a real disorder, it it saying that no one has real disorders? If the small and lithe character turns out to be the victim, does it mean that big and strong characters are never victims? No of course not. 

 - You can criticize it if the story outright makes such statements and it is vital to do so (see next paragraph), but if the point in the story is just that this particular character was wrongly labeled, or this particular small character was the victim, then it’s simply telling a different story, not at all making a point about whether real disorders or big strong victims exist. 

What’s cathartic or empowering or meaningful to people is as different as people themselves. There’s a good chance that there won’t be an exact match between you or any given authors. 

Often the problem is not the stories that are there, but the ones that are missing. It’s not per se bad to have “girl gets rescued by prince” stories, it’s only bad if they’re the ONLY stories. The solution is more stories. 

Obviously there are exceptions to that like stuff that outright includes negative stereotypes or unquestioned bad behavior treated as good, 

c) Focus on constructivity and context instead of loaded labels

The above was more about perceived flaws this one is about real indisputable flaws. Flaws that are important to point out.

The number one goal here, if you really care about stopping harm and not anyones egos,  should be to get people to stop doing it. 

Sometimes in extreme cases making someone out to be a bad person and warning of them is exactly how you stop harm, but often time its not and getting obsessed with “punishing bad people” while losing sight of “preventing harm” does zero to help the people actually being harmed. Or worse than zero, if you associate a worthy cause with frivolous squabbles. 

Some people just don’t care and will never change their ways but you won’t ever convince those. You need to convince everyone else. All the ones who are maybe just ignorant and didn’t know better, or never had to form an opinion about this. Even if the maker themselves won’t change opinion, you can sway those. 

Imagine a bigoted religious person. how are you more likely to convince them? Get them to stop being religious, which is probably a part of their identity? Or try and argue that equality is, in fact, compatible with their religion? If you step on people’s egoes they will be attacked and block/dismiss all you have to say. Not only will they not change, they’ll dig in their heels. In the worst case, they’ll now start thinking that your Reasonable Position is incompatible with their identity. 

Again some people are determined to have their egoes stepped on and will be insulted no matter what, but those are not the target. 

This isn’t about appeasing assholes, it’s about creating change, because that will stop harm. So instead of throwing negatively changed emotional labels at people (which activates the ego and the emotions) try talking about cause and effect and consequences, to talk to their reason. Explain how the consequences happen. 

For similar reasons, try to think of solutions. You don’t want to destroy the work, you want to make it a better work that more people can enjoy without being distracted by unnecessary flaws. 

Avoid: 

“X is a [negative label] who [buzzword] a [sympathy-drawing label]!!! Why are [entire social group that contains people you want to convince] like this?!”

Instead:

“I know that this was probably supposed to express [intention], but it comes off like [unfortunate implication] and given [harmful social tendency] it might have been better to do [alternate redendition] “

Example #1: “The intention in scenes like in the original Blade Runner, several James Bond Movies or in the Original Star Wards trilogy where the original male characters was probably that these protagonists being suave guys know that the girls really want them to screw/kiss them. The authors know this because they created the characters, but IRL you cannot actually read anyone’s mind and what often happens IRL is that person A proceeds without really making sure that the other person is comfortable, and then they freeze up in fear though they don’t want to have intercourse, and ends up horribly traumatized. There’s not enough general knowledge about the “freeze” part of “fight-flight or freeze”, or good consent education and it would be irresponsible to make this worse. 

All it would literally take to fix it is to have the girls explicitly show that they want to kiss/have sex.”

Example #2: “A lot of horror fiction slaps the names of real diagnosable conditions on what are basically violent monster villains. It’s only natural to wonder what’s going on in the minds of killers and monsters and try to want to contextualize this, but it is vital to keep in mind that there is currently a lot of stigma against people with mental ilnesses, and that depictions like this can make it worse and make it hard for actual real-life people to get jobs and housing. 

If you’re going to use the names of real-life diagnosable conditions you should be committed to researching them and writing the characters realistically while being mindful of the stigma and the social impact that wrong renditions would have and not make a freakshow out of it. 

Alternatively, if you just want to do an unrealistic horror movie killer, don’t use the names of real conditions that real people have.”

d) Refresh Button. 

Especially because you’re saying that this isn’t your default mode and that it feels like some recent thing that you don’t really want. 

- take a break, busy your mind with something else, give the subconscious time toprocess and old perceptions time to settle. Then come back to it. 

- Try sort of looking at it from a new perspective, to deconstruct it from the bottom. What dothing really mean? What are we really told about the characters and events? Try processing it all new from the ground up without “common widom” 

- Things that aren’t explained on screen aren’t necessarily plot holes. There’s a difference between a contradiction, something that can’t fit together, and something that can fit together you just don’t know how. Deduce. Speculate. This is where your logic and imagination come in. 

- Maybe watch a new person react to it for all new input like a reaction vid on youtube

e) Outside Data. 

Same as above - People are basically really sophisticated Boltzmann machines/ statistical learning algorithms. I#m the least to want to admit that but to a degree we’re all influenced by the Data we take in. 

If you’re surrounded by a lot of material and soucres that pick apart every little thing in media, it’s natural that it would arise as a thought. 

If you don’t really want that in your life, filter it out. 

I hope this was of some sort of use. But I stress again that I’m no kind of authority on any such things and that many others might pick this apart as blasphemy. 

God i fucking feel the whole psychiatrists are shit / fuck the medical system vibe. My shrink ignored and downplayed my complaints about antidepressants and kept increasing the dose until i went full on manic state mode. Now i dont trust anyone and im still suffering lmfao

yeah you would not BELIEVE the shit i had to do to get doctors in Texas to take me seriously about any mental disorder that wasn’t either bipolar, anxiety, or depression. people really think that it’s just as simple as “getting up and going to the doctor!!!” but in reality it’s more like: 

(this got WAY long so it’s under a cut lmao) (trigger warning for basically everything you can imagine btw)

fucking read up on the DSM, try to figure out which symptoms you have, go on goddamn tumblr and sort through the tags of various MIs until you find someone who seems like they’re not full of shit (professionally diagnosed or otherwise). try to have conversations with these people about these conditions, and what it’s like to live with them meanwhile a bunch of irrelevant assholes are hounding you trying to “prove” you’re lying for attention or something. go look through forums of people with the Edgy mental illness you think you might have, watch how they talk, try to figure out if that’s what you do, or if maybe you’re just over analyzing, or paranoid, or something.

THEN you gotta make calls and calls and calls trying to get seen by a real doctor in the first goddamn place. the only ones that take medicaid are shitty and obviously mostly aimed at “rehabilitating” addicts, but you take what you can get. meet the doctor and be polite and try to, like, surreptitiously feel out whether you can be honest, or need to heavily edit what you tell them so you don’t end up fucking institutionalized. pretend you’re too stupid to use Google and you’ve never heard of the DSM, try to describe the symptoms you have as honestly as you can without letting on that you’ve done any of your own research. have the motherfucker blow you off and say you can’t possibly have what you think you have because you’re “too nice” or “too self-aware” or because you’re in any way interested in self-improvement that you can’t POSSIBLY have a personality disorder. finally convince him that it’s possible you MIGHT have a cluster B personality disorder, but he won’t diagnose it because of ~the stigma~. get prescribed whatever standard mood stabilizers and anti-anxiety he feels like giving you.

go to see a therapist. the therapist ALSO does not believe you when you say you may be dealing with something worse than “depression and anxiety”. when you talk about why you think you have the thing, she asks a million weird, invasive questions that sound like she thinks you live in a fucking Lifetime movie. she OBVIOUSLY doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but she’s a ~professional~ and you’re not, so you just try your best to get whatever out of it you can. you get very, very little out of it, because she’s trying to treat “depression and anxiety”, and that’s not what you have, and she is not qualified to treat what you have, and you both know it, but you’re poor and can’t afford a doctor who’s qualified. all the doctors keep telling you about the godawful stigma and telling you how you want to “avoid the label”. you try to explain that you don’t give a fuck about the label or the diagnosis, you just want the treatment. they obviously don’t believe you, and obviously think you can’t tell that they don’t believe you.

so you think, fuck it. i’ll do it myself. i’ll talk to people online who have the Edgy mental illness i think i have, i’ll ask for their advice. and they actually have good, practical, helpful advice! they share worksheets and stories and tell you ways to cope. and it’s hard and it sucks at first, but you practice and it gets easier. but if you ever try to talk to people irl about that? you’re full of shit. you’re making it up, you’re too crazy or stupid or young, too female and too poor, to know what you’re talking about. “you gotta go talk to the PROFESSIONALS”, people insist. “you gotta get a DOCTOR to tell you what’s going on.” try all day to convince any of them that the doctors are sometimes full of shit. it won’t work. it will NEVER work. you are too easy to dismiss and Professional Authorities are too easy to believe.

and the people who don’t tell you to have blind faith in The Professional Doctor Authority? they tell you that “it’s all in your head”. they tell you, if you would just Buck Up and Try Harder, the shit would go away. they say everyone gets sad sometimes and if you try to explain you didn’t just “get sad”, they roll their eyes and say you’re dramatic. exaggerating. it’s just How Your Generation Is. entitled and spoiled. oh what, you’ve been dirt poor for the last decade? you actually DIDN’T always have laptops and iphones and wifi and all that shit? oh whatever, that’s a fluke, doesn’t really count, you’re STILL entitled because of your “””generation””””

one day, after you’ve been having panic attacks nigh on constantly and deliriously telling yourself that you’re just imagining it, you’re just MAKING IT UP, eventually realize there’s no way you’re making this up. that you don’t know what you’ll do if you don’t get help soon. someone tells you, if you’re thinking about killing yourself, just call the hotline! they’ll help you! you’re suspicious, but what you’ve been doing isn’t working. so you give it a shot. you call them and tell them what you’re going through. they tell you to go to the ER. you go to the ER, they ask you questions, reassure you that you really do need to be here, then have some fuckin’ cop tell you, very slowly and softly, that he’s gonna walk you across a parking lot to a building where they’re gonna help you. for some reason he jokes about how ugly the walls on the inside are. you do not give a SINGLE fuck about how the walls look, but you’re “a girl” and you’re in texas, so you act like it’s funny. he’s annoying you, but he’s also obviously trying to help. you shouldn’t blame him for not knowing how. he’s a cop, not a doctor.

when you get to the building, you talk to a woman who asks you what’s going on. you tell her the truth, she tells you it’s okay if you need to pace around, then she tells you that you should never go through the ER because that’s a $1000 bill. you’ve never even seen a thousand dollars in cash before. what the fuck? she tells you you’re gonna stay for probably about 3 days, and then they tell you to sit on a bench, in a room by yourself, nothing to occupy yourself with but a fucking TV blaring news about the weather, apparently there’s a big storm somewhere and people are scared. you are hysterically crying and panicking and they leave you there for HOURS. you think maybe you’re in purgatory. you hear doctors in the next room laughing, talking cordially. your mind is devouring itself as you sit there shaking and trying to hold it together through faith and tenacity alone, and this is just another day at work for them.

before they’ll let you in, they strip search you. they count your scars and comment, almost laughing, to one another about how many there are, how neat they are. where you hid them. you try to make conversation and they ignore you. you are not a person, you are a patient. you want to scream at them but you know that will only make things worse, so you grit your teeth and stare into space and try not to react to anything at all. finally they believe you aren’t hiding anything and they walk you into the room with the other “general” patients. the woman says something about how “some of them are quiet and some of them are loud”. she smiles at you and you want to tear her fucking face off but you know she just doesn’t know what to say. there’s nothing to say. so you just nod and go talk to some of the other patients. they’re pretty cool, pretty nice. they try to hug you but they get yelled at for it. touching isn’t allowed.

you dont even realize for a couple hours that you’re still wearing the thin blue hospital clothes they gave you after they strip searched you. you have to go ask one of the nurses to give you your clothes and let you into a room to change. you put on your clothes, feeling slightly more human, but you still have to wear those goddamn socks instead of shoes, because your shoes are too beat up and shitty to wear without the laces. you zone out for a while and at some point, realize that while you were hysterically sobbing and packing some clothes and notebooks and books to take with you (most of which they would confiscate, telling you to go read some boring magazines about babies and dating and flowers and shit), you without realizing it, grabbed your Harley Quinn t shirt. the one where she’s looking at the camera, smirking as two cops are, apparently, about to drag her away for questioning. for some reason this is the funniest thing that has EVER happened to you. you start laughing and you can’t stop, and everyone looks at you like you’re crazy -the patients look concerned, the nurses look smug and knowing.

you eventually get it together. you remember you can’t sleep without the mood stabilizers you’ve been prescribed. you tell the nurses that, tell them you brought the pills with you, should be with your things. they politely blow you off with what is clearly a canned response, saying you’ll be able to talk to a doctor tomorrow. they ask you what your dose was, you say you don’t remember but you think it was 200mg, you tell them your doctors’ name so they can check. they nod understandingly and you think they’re gonna check. (you will later find out that they just took your word for it, and you were WAY off; you were only on 50mg. they gave you 200mg anyway. you later find out how fucking lucky you were that quadrupling your dose didn’t ACTUALLY fucking kill you.) when you eventually give up on sleeping at 4am and drag yourself up to pour some of the shitty hospital coffee they’re serving, the nurses ask you how you slept and act surprised when you say that you didn’t. “oh, you poor thing.” then they ask when’s the last time you ate and when’s the last time you took a shit and blah, blah, blah. you don’t remember most of it.

when you try to talk to any of the nurses about trying to actually TALK to someone about what you’re dealing with, they tell you they “don’t do that here”. they tell you that’s the “outpatient program”. they make you go to group where they hand out these cute little pamphlets with cute little cartoon stereotypes of people in abusive homes, make you all go around and say which one you are. the nurses think you don’t notice them smirking at you, but you do. during group one day, they talk about a man who lost his wife of 50 years and who was smiling and whistling the next day, because when asked if the cup is half empty or half full, he replies "it's a beautiful cup". the girl about your age who came here after a bender for help with her drinking problem thinks that is so profound that when she gets out of here, she goes and gets a tattoo of a cup with that quote. later, you will admire her tattoo and be happy that the story helped her. on the other hand, they also say things like that "every situation can be good". they use the example of the big storms that are currently happening, somewhere in the world: the storm is bad, but look at how people are helping each other! it's a good thing, after all! the other patients smile. you don't; you say, but a lot of people still died. a lot of people still lost their homes. that's bad. it doesn't matter if some people also helped. the nurses glance at each other nervously and double down: no, you have to "find the good" in the situation. they smile at you and tell you patronizingly how very, very smart you are. you know that's not a compliment, and you also know that THEY don't know that it isn't a compliment. you decide to just keep your mouth shut; the other patients seem to be comforted by this crap. who are you to tell them they're wrong? you shut up.

every night, one of the nurses announces that she is a motivational speaker “outside of here” and talks about Jesus and Overcoming Adversity for about twenty minutes. she clearly has been through some real shit in her life, and she also clearly believes she is really, really helping somebody with her Motivational Speeches. you don’t know if anyone else is getting something out of this -other people are often comforted by things that seem completely ridiculous to you- but you suspect they don’t. whatever. good luck getting her to shut up about whatever she’s on about. (you confess to the doctor later that day that you sometimes think about hurting people. that night, the Motivational Speaker talks specifically about ‘wanting to hurt people’. you pay close attention, knowing she thinks she’s helping, but actually just thinking that they were lying their asses off when they said this shit was confidential. you think to yourself that you need to remember that.) at one point she tells a story about a girl who tried to kill herself and failed, ended up paralyzed. the moral of the story, she says, is that “if you try to end your life before God is ready to take you, he may send you back worse off”. you stare at her and wonder, vaguely, how anyone worships the God you worship and talks about Him like that, like he’s some evil tyrant who would paralyze a child because she wanted to end it all, had the audacity to believe her life was her own to do with as she pleases. you are used to other Christians talking about God that way by now.

the main benefit of being in here is that you get actual, real anxiety medications -not the cheap, weak shit that Texas prescribes poor people asking for anxiety medications. that, and you’re in a safe place. well, not completely safe; a man much older and quite a bit taller than you overhears you and another inmate trading sex stories, most of them sapphic. he sits next to the two of you and listens to you talk for about fifteen minutes, then gets up and says something about d*kes being disgusting. you joke about him, but nervously. the other girl tells you “well if he tries anything, i’ll kill him”. you laugh and say thank you, but you know that’s bullshit. if he tries anything, everyone around you will be too late to help you. you think oh, maybe i’ll just avoid him, but the next time you go to get coffee he glares at you like he wishes you were dead, shakes his hand at you limply, and it takes you a second to remember that it’s sign language for “f*ggot”. you flip him off, but then go tell the nurses about it. you’re very careful to specify he didn’t actually threaten you, ‘cause he’s a black man and you don’t want to get him in Real trouble for “threatening” a white girl when he didn’t. the nurses tell you to “remember where you are” and that people in here are sick. you nod and say yeah, it’s probably fine. he probably won’t do anything. he has to sleep in a separate room from you, anyways.

at some point, you’re playing cards with about five other patients. talking and shooting the shit, starting to enjoy yourself. one of the guys who is in here for a suicide attempt keeps making “jokes” where the punchline is that women did something sexual. people keep not laughing and he’s obviously getting frustrated that people laugh at your jokes more than his. he starts talking shit about “sluts” and you try to, politely, reasonably, tell him that it isn’t his business who anyone sleeps with, that so long as nobody is lying or getting hurt, everybody has the right to sleep with whoever they want. he slams his hand on the table and says, “No! It’s disgusting and it needs to be destroyed.” He stalks off, too furious for words. You glance at the other “slut”, the same girl you talked about being gay with, and she agrees. everyone else takes his side, follows him around reassuring him that he totally respects women, and you’re just a crazy bitchy SJW. you know you’re right and you know he’s not just some poor wounded frat boy. you know he’s an actual danger to any woman he’s around. you also know that no one will believe you, so you just try to hold your tongue and not pick fights with him, because it doesn’t matter if you’re right. everyone will take his side. everyone always takes the man’s side.

eventually, 3 days are up. you feel calmer but just as empty and lost as you did before, except now you are approximately $2k in debt. you go to a nearby elementary school’s park, even though it’s overcast and cold, and you sit on a swingset and stare into space. there are a couple of kids there, but you figure so long as you leave them alone it’s okay. you stare into space for a good twenty minutes before you realize you still have that fucking bracelet on, the one with a bar code that they would scan every time they called you up to get your pills. you tear it off viciously, immediately. 

a few minutes later, a woman walks out of her house, across the street, toward you. you watch her curiously. she approaches you and asks you “if you know where to get any bud”. you say sweetly, “i’m sorry, i don’t,” as if you don’t know for a fact that the woman is a cop because you live on this block, and have seen her cruiser, and also what fucking stoner walks up to someone they don’t know and asks for pot in front of 2 children and on a public school’s property? she wasn’t even dressed like a stoner, for fuck’s sake; just a cop’s approximation of what a stoner looks like. jeans and an oversized t-shirt and hoodie. please. was she even trying, or do cops really just think all stoners are complete morons? do you really look like that much of a stoner right now? doesn’t matter, anyways. you knew she was a cop, and you never tell strangers you do anything illegal anyways -not when you remember to watch your mouth, at least.

the outpatient program turns out to be more of the same bullshit. starts at 7am and they make you empty your pockets and stand with your arms out so they can use a metal detector on you and make sure you’re not smuggling anything in. they make you put your knife in your locker, and that annoys you because you always carry your knife with you when you’re not at home, but you know if you say that they’ll think you’re Violent. so you put it up and feel naked and exposed and try to act like everything is fine. try to be civil with people while you’re tired and irritable and everything is so fucking stupid but you never know, right? maybe they do have SOMETHING to teach you. maybe you’re just being full of yourself thinking these people are full of shit. so you make the pain in the ass arrangements for the little bus to come pick you up, dodging questions about whether the car outside your house runs and whether you have a license and whether it would be technically possible for you to drive yourself, even though you don’t have a license still and you know for a fact if you get pulled over for driving without a license it may be years until you can actually get your license.

the ‘group therapy’ in the outpatient program turns out to be mostly about making fucking collages and shit. they hand out pamphlets about Christianity and about how a butterfly can’t become a butterfly if it doesn’t fight its way through its cocoon. one of the days, the woman leading the group will not shut the fuck up about how she “knows” that talking to a different woman in a different room is going to give you all soooooo much anxiety. you want to tell her to fuck off, but you figure she’s just really green, they’re probably using you all to break in the brand-new “therapists”. you smile at her and make nice because she’s obnoxious and dumb but she’s trying. the woman who usually leads the group is obviously annoyed with you; you are too blunt, too aggressive, too confident in yourself, even now, even at rock bottom (except fuck,don’t tell yourself this is rock bottom, don’t say that, because then like clockwork, the rug will be torn from under you and you’ll find a way to sink even lower), for this woman’s comfort. you try AGAIN to tell her what you think you have. she tells you there’s no way you have it because you’re “too self aware”. you irritably explain that you think there is a strong possibility you do have it, and you explain why, and you try very hard not to scream when the most you can get out of her is some empty platitudes about “having self control” and “seeing the other person’s point of view”.

when she leaves the room, the other patients commiserate with you about what a fucking waste of time this is. one of them is mourning the death of her daughter, lost to suicide when she wasn’t even in high school yet, and she went to the office like she was supposed to, and had an argument with the girl working there and annoyed the girl, so the girl claimed that she was “suicidal” even though the patient said she’d been dealing with depression for decades and knew it wasn’t an emergency, and that’s why she was even here. she starts crying in group and you wonder if you should go up and hug her, or that would be overstepping a boundary. you stare helplessly. the woman leading group watches sympathetically for a few seconds, clears her throat, and diverts the conversation back to her lesson plan.

at some point, they call you in to talk to a doctor. there are three people about your age also in the room, writing stuff down on notepads. one of them asks you questions about every possible trauma and hardship you may have gone through. after you admit to each one she says softly, “im sorry that happened to you.” you are grateful to be treated like a human by somebody in the room, even as the doctor himself is clearly bored with this whole schtick. the meeting takes about fifteen minutes; within a few weeks they will send you a bill for several hundred dollars. that’s how much it costs to sit in a room while a doctor ignores you and lets medical students do his job, asking you about the worst things that have ever happened to you, for college credit so they can finish medical school.

they tell you to do “homework” that amounts to writing about your feelings, your worst memories, your deepest secrets. you try to convince yourself that you might actually get something out of this whole shitshow if you just go along, but you can’t stand the idea of letting that fucking woman read anything you write. whatever. you show up every day and say no, you did not do the homework. no, you do not feel guilty about not doing the homework. the woman who leads the group glares at you. you are an incorrigible crazy girl who must not want to get any better, after all. one day they have you all go outside, hold hands, and move a hula hoop around in a circle without letting go of each others’ hands. you make a skeptical face and the lady who leads the group says something about “being resilient enough” to do her stupid little exercise. you want to tell her to go fuck herself, there’s no part of this shit that has anything to do with resilience, but you know better than to argue. you participate and, incidentally, you pass the hula hoop quicker than everyone else did, and then you say “i don’t like to touch people”, because you don’t, and the other patients let go of your hands immediately. the lady who leads the group looks pleased with herself.

on the seventh day you drag yourself up in the morning to go to this stupid outpatient program, they just have you watch Inside Out and then fill out a paper about “what emotions does society tell us to repress”. you go through the motions, go eat the lunch they serve you, and go home, knowing you are not going to bother going to the next day. These people are full of shit. you have to figure this out on your own, as usual. at least you got the higher dose of mood stabilizers you needed, though.

you get a new job, because you quit your old one in a panic. you’re too anxious and pissed off all the time and awkward and unsure of whatever the fuck these people are so mad about when you can’t sit them down immediately or whatever, to be good at customer service, so you just start doing the grunt work. you’re still under the impression that being a hard worker when you first start a new job will help you keep the job; this job will be the one that lets you figure out you don’t actually want to give 100%, because then your coworkers will slack off and when you try to slack off, your boss will be mad at you for not performing the way you usually do. 

it’s almost unbelievably difficult, but you keep showing up to work. you hide the panic attacks and you push through the depression. you smile and play nice even though everybody is full of shit and thinks you’re an idiot and you can’t ever, ever change their mind. you feel like you’re going to explode all the time, but you don’t explode. you don’t die. you don’t relapse. you toe the line and you slowly, slowly learn and improve and heal.

you try to talk to people about it. they won’t believe you. crazy people can’t fix themselves. they can’t reason their way through a problem, they can’t realize their behavior is an issue and take initiative, they can’t. it’s impossible. crazy people don’t know they’re crazy. only the Doctors can be trusted.

whatever. they’re full of shit. you have to figure out your own way to survive, just like always.

I don’t see people go into the nitty gritty bits of mental health..

And I mean those details that I find not many people speak of. As if its taboo to mention we are human. I have a filter made of cling wrap with giant holes in it. And the cling wrap bunches up in places too, distorting the words to others’ perspectives; making me come off as a bitch. (I truly am a very kind person, I am just bad with social skills at times.) My point being, that I have no problem speaking my truth to all of you invisible faces that may or may not see this. I’m sure down the road, if I ever finish and publish my novel and become J.K. Rowling famous (a dream of mine) that this can easily be dug up. I will smile with a small laugh in that interview with Stephen Colbert and be frank. 

The tags come at the end of a post and not everyone filters everything that makes them (is it squick? what was that word that is a better replacement for trigger..) So as a heads up, if you absolutely can’t stand the thought of body, hmm, uh functions I suppose. (Not sure what category my topic falls in to) then I have given you an escape rope. (Now I want to play Pokemon again.)

As I am being completely honest and transparent, I literally can’t seem to figure out when A. my nervous breakdown began (still in it) and B. when I last showered, heck even brushed my teeth. Now I know several things, thankfully. One being that I have not left the house this whole week from April 14th to today, April 20th. Easter is tomorrow and I am forcing myself (to the best of my abilities) to attend Church and the whole family get together. My plan being, Church is for God and you owe it to him and yourself to go and be lifted up. Family gathering is going to be hell, no point sugar coating it. So bring a book and think of the Strawberry/Pretzel Casserole that Aunt Faith hopefully made and the sweet pickles that Pop-Pop usually brings. Remember to be kind to yourself and fake a smile, these are the people you do NOT want to be honest with. Lie through your ass like your life depends on it because in a way, it does. You are not obligated to say anything more than hello, give hugs however because you need and love them. Do speak for a bit so as not to be rude. But the book is your safety net. Deploy it ASAP. And somehow get your loving cousin to attach to your sister instead.

A nitty gritty part that is not gross, is the withdrawal... from everyone. Like I’m straight up not talking to anyone unless I have to, and society is out of my mind. I do however, happily speak with my irl friend when she messages. I know she is busy though and has her own problems so I try to censor my frankness quite a bit because she doesn’t deserve that kind of worry. Unfortunately, my parents and sister are not able to be kept out of the whole truth for their protection. They see it. I don’t even have to say a thing. I have been threatened with a, how to put this nicely, place full of even crazier people imo and where they drug you to the high heavens. Yeah. I’m not flying over the cuckoo’s nest. (Deep terror of those places, this will not be helpful to me.) But that gives you an idea of how bad this breakdown is. The other thing I know, is that it started on Sunday. I’m inclined to believe that it was the April 14th Sunday, but am unsure as it still feels like Monday. So maybe this breakdown is heading into a week, maybe not. One thing is, those websites were right. The longer a breakdown continues, the worse it gets. Each day is less and less food, water, and movement. And that’s just basic necessities. I’m trying to hold out for my therapist appointment coming up next week. She has so many people though, that each appointment is a week or two, sometimes more, away. Not exactly the best mental treatment for my situation, I admit. But I am stubborn, perhaps that stubborness can save me while I also shoot myself in the foot. Its possible.

Now for the gross nitty gritty. Apologies for the many tangents, turns out when you don’t talk to anyone for a week, you end up with a lot to say. Good news! I finally showered AND shaved my armpits which hadn’t been shaved in months. So they can breathe I guess, and my skin can breathe too LOL. But with depression can come fatigue. I have that. So a normal depressed person can be way too exhausted to even think of a shower. For others, it may be some other form of hygiene. All forms of hygiene have died with my depression. On top of that, the bitch depression bought a horrible, mangy dog with her called Executive Dysfunction. This mutt dogs your every step. (Thank God, depression didn’t steal my love for jokes, puns, and metaphors.) Some people have depression that goes an extra step and brings about the literal destruction of that executive function system in their brain. (I just mean that the signals are all fucked up.) And then, some people with both of these also have Anxiety! So they end up with all of these contradicting thoughts and emotions that in the end, makes tasks, like showering, unaccomplishable. Now there are many other conditions that bring about these issues, I am aware, but I am speaking of my own and know for a fact that I can’t be the only one with these kinds of experiences. So this gross factor goes out to all of those who have experienced the same level of cringe or worse, and aren’t up to the potential ridicule that comes with expressing your truth. (To be clear, I’m not dedicating a gross thing to you out of spite, I just mean I’m making a problem you have encountered, heard as well.) 

By the end of the shower, I could barely make it. I was slowing down realllll fast. The NeebsGaming video I was listening to on YouTube is what got me through the shower. Gosh those guys are great. I shaved my armpits before washing my body because I figured stray hair or shaving cream might be in the crevice of one’s arm that I legit can’t see, even with glasses. Between the amount of hair that came out of my head during scrubbing shampoo like a madman, any stray dog hairs that my head picked up from my pillow which my dog sleeps on when he waits for me to snuggle, and the long armpit hair; the drain was kinda blocked. Our shower has that metal thing with holes in it, so its not as terrifying of a drain. But excessive hair or large lumps of solid soap (from a soap bar) can block off a hole. Or in my case, all. So water is not draining, which naturally means the tub is filling. My body is slowing down and I’m trying to push through it while not thinking of the disgusting water approaching my feet. If you’ve ever washed your hands after not washing them for ages and touching many things out in the world, the water, and sometimes soap, turns varying shades of gray. Depends on the dirt particles and amount of dirtiness.Well I has transparent, because its water, charcoal shaded water approaching me. As if my own filth refused to leave my body and was threatening to drag me down the drain with it. 

When I finally finished and got out of the shower, I almost decided to just leave it. Thinking that maybe it will eventually drain on its own. I’m glad I didn’t. I began reaching my hand down to the drain and told myself not to think too much about how pubic hair makes me cringe and how pulling hair from a drain in general, makes me gag. Its a disturbing act if you ask me. Now I’m struggling to get armpit hair off of my hand and there’s somehow still loads more! So I dry my other hand on my towel and rip off a piece of toilet paper. The water is still not draining and I disturbed the many hairs when I went for the first grab. So now I am fishing in charcoal water for clumps of armpit hair. Then wiping it onto the paper. The water finally drains..... oh no.... I kid you not, a whole fucking trail of dirt was left on both sides of the tub on the water’s way to the drain. I take the showerhead and turn it on. Now I’m washing hair and dirt and some other substance I couldn’t see at the time (nearsighted plus the tub is white) down the drain. Except the hair covers the drain again. Typical. At least the dirt and the tub was rinsed. Since there’s no more water, I take a sheet of toilet paper again, and save myself from having to deal with pubic hair that sticks to any surface. (Seriously, what is the deal with pubic hair.) But there’s something else in it. And a lot of this something else. Like a whole body’s worth. The pubic hair is laced with large clumps of tannish, white (my skin color) skin cells. Now I have rubbed my arm before and made a trail of dead skin rolled up into fine lines appear. In the shower I wiped my face with my hand and pulled away that same rolled up skin. But I have never, experienced this amount of filth from myself before. I am still rubbing off some skin, so I probably should have washed my body a second time.

When you become so “broken” that you can’t seem to take care of yourself in a normal time and a healthy manner, you get to learn new things about the human body and experience some events that you probably could have gone your whole life without knowing. And that is something that I feel should be shared more often. That when the person who experienced this, opens up to those they trust, or to a complete stranger, that an appropriate reaction and response be given.

Julie: And then I saw large clumps of my own skin!

Tyrone: Oh damn girl, that is nasty. 

Julie: I know right! But the saddest part is, it probably won’t be the last time. I don’t think its enough to get me to shower regularly. 

Tyrone: Julie, while that isn’t “fine”, it is fine. It is understandable. You are experiencing and suffering from a very real problem. While I can’t confidently say it is or isn’t in your control because I’m no psychologist or whatever, I can confidently say that it won’t always be like this. I doubt that your whole life will be this mess that you are in. Now you may not be back to peak function a year from now, but you will definitely be more knowledgeable of yourself and probably better than you are today. It takes time and so long as God doesn’t need you in Heaven, I’d say you have time. *chuckles* I don’t know all that you are going through, I just met you. And I don’t know how to help you in a way that you may need. But I can certainly offer an ear or two, and a hug if you want one. You just keep on trucking on. You aren’t doing much, and you aren’t doing well. But you are here, and that’s an achievement in of itself.

Julie: Wow, thanks Tyrone. This really helped. One weight on my chest has been lifted, and I will take you up on that hug if you don’t mind.

That’s what it should be like. So if you are reading this and are like Tyrone, not suffering from mental health issues, but you know someone who is, or a stranger comes up to you in need of someone to listen to them; be like him. Offer encouragement and understanding, give advice if asked for it, don’t force physical contact without consent because some people are paranoid (like me) and choose your words and expressions carefully. If someone tells you something gross, react like you are grossed out (which you likely are) but don’t put them down for it. I imagine Tyrone to have that expression of “holy cow, you serious that this happened” when he said it was nasty. That easy going expression can clue Julie in on how he isn’t getting on her, or implying anything sexist by how she is a woman and shouldn’t be this filthy. He’s jovially charismatic, and open. That makes Julie comfortable and feel lighter. Now I included religion in Tyrone’s comment to tack on some humor without making jokes at Julie’s expense, and to show how to appropriately use your spirituality, if you have one. He’s not forcing it down her throat, she may not get the satire of the joke, but he tried. Not to mention, that Heaven, in Christianity, is a place where you are whole and happy. When you go to Heaven, you are with God and your loved ones. You live an eternal life of peace. So for him to imply that she is worth God’s eyes and Heaven, means that he respects her and is lifting her up. Bonus, he is reassuring her that while time is not infinite and we don’t know what the future holds for us, as of today, she still has plenty of time to get back on the track that she desires to be on. Instilling hope and faith. If you were on Julie’s side of life, wouldn’t you want a kind and funny Tyrone to listen and talk to?

LGB no T.

I am so sick of this. The black community has worshipped dick and centered black men in everything since day 1. Now silly handmaidens and black men who 'identify' as black women want to speak over actual black women to prop themselves up. How dare you disrespect our existence and use patriarchy in a dress to make yourselves the focal point of female oppression. It's called SEXISM not genderism for a reason. Being female has been the sole basis of our abuse and you have the nerve to pretend all of that can be redirected to being about your "mentality". Get the hell outta here. You don't get to redefine things to suit your agenda. Now you're out here peddling the lie that "black trans women" face the highest level of violence. Bull fucking shit. Black women have experienced more violence than ANYONE ever, especially if we are dark skinned. Black people have been enslaved by other black people, whites, arabs and Natives, all of whom raped black women . Some even forced us to breed in astronomical numbers and take care of all the children regardless of color because all we were good for was production. Black women have suffered FGM, have been forced into marriages as children, our bodies have been placed in human zoos for people to gawk at our 'unusual' figures, our bodies have been used against our will to advance science. Present day black women carry those scars with us because trauma against our humanity for daring to exist while black and female is generational. Not only are we missing and trafficked at ridiculous rates but we are also raped, assaulted and killed under the radar. We have become the punchline for black 'entertainers' and black men everywhere from our skin tone to our character to our mannerisms to our genitalia to our diction. We get cervical cancer more than anyone but we better not say it because "not all women have a cervix." 😑 We are the poster children for everything wrong in society. When society talks about welfare queens and single motherhood, they're not thinking of 'trans' black women. When we get blamed for "destroying the black community with our feminism", they're not thinking of 'trans' black women. When society talks about black women being ugly and ghetto they're not thinking of 'trans' black women. When people approriate our culture and style to give themselves an edge, they're not taking it from 'trans' black women. Black women have attitude. Black women are fat. Black women are raising thugs. They're not talking about 'trans' black women. Day in and out, black women are society's scapegoat while all you care about is being able to use the bathroom you prefer and being able to date straight men without opposition. That is what we call a First World Problem. Your identity crisis and the elective surgeries you get to appease it do not take precedent over the global and never ending disrespect of black women. We didn't have to alter ourselves and go out of our way to be oppressed like you. Just by existing as is, the world has told us that is enough reason to take endless craps on us. Stop acting like black men haven't always found it ok to fight black women like men because our blackness allegedly discounts our womanhood. Stop acting like black men haven't embedded it in their mind that black women are not human but their mules to take care of them when life is hard, only to be discarded when they become successful. Stop acting like black girls aren't constantly robbed of our innocence with assault and dubbed 'fast' so our pain is overlooked and our fault. Stop acting like people haven't always called black women, men because we are the antithesis of white beauty standards. Stop acting like every woman doesn't get an ego boost on our backs. We are woman enough to be raped, trafficked, called bitches and hoes but too 'manly' to reap the finances, protection and reverence patriarchal society's claim to give women. Stop acting like black women are not abused physically, psychologically, emotionally and financially and haven't always been by white society, black society and everyone in between. Acting like you have it so hard when we have always been treated like an other just for being born. "The most disrespected and least protected person on the planet is the black woman." - Malcolm X He said black woman. Not black 'trans' woman. Cis privilege my ass. You think because you've been feeling for the last year what black women have been feeling since FOREVER, that you have it worse? You are only experiencing a sliver of what we get anyway. It's just that typical fragile masculinity you were born into that has you thinking you are the peak of oppression. You went your whole lives ignoring and/or capitalizing on the degradation of black women because your maleness allowed you to put it on the back burner. Your internal issues with gender did not negate the external privilege you received. But now that you 'identify' as one of us, we need to make you a priority or you slander us with poor reverse psychology. How narcissistic can you get? Womens rights are only worthy of attention when you are involved? "TERF" is not a thing btw. Stop using racism, sexism and homophobia to make yourself valid. You cannot compare white privilege, male privilege and straight privilege to this nonsense. Women have never had privilege. Or do you just wanna ignore the last thousands of years? You were born on the side of privilege and into the dominant oppressing class. Now you want access to a marginalized group with no questions and throw tantrums when we say no. It's almost like your male privilege conditioned you to force yourself onto women at any cost and taught you how to play victim when women don't fall for your shit. You want equal footing in womanhood but won't hesitate to remind us you "have it worse". You want to call lesbians bigots if they exclusively like women and vagina... because hey, how dare some women not want penis in any way, shape or form. Blasphemy! You have no concern for women in shelters fleeing abusive men. You invade their spaces and tell them to suck it up if they don't like your dick and masculine energy. You say nothing when born males use their advantages to dominate female sports. But you're the victim, right? I will say it again. It's called SEXISM, not genderism for a reason. You don't get to keep playing the "being born in the wrong body is not a privilege" card to ignore your advantages and complicity at our expense. Gender identity issues are low priority in comparison to everything else. Every day black women leave our homes, we are subjected to antiblackness and misogyny just for being ourselves. Doesn't matter how we dress or speak, it is hurled our way just for being in a female body via a black package. It will be a cold day in hell before those born male and their delusions get to define womanhood but those of us born female and our realities that came with it don't. Yes, we are the arbiters and gatekeepers of womanhood and it pisses you off there's nothing you can do about it except rally your naive liberal handmaidens and scream TERF. Interestingly enough, there are countless instances of 'trans women' raping, assaulting and killing women but not ONE woman has done that to you. Yet here you all come... into our spaces IRL and on the internet to force yourselves onto us. Why don't you go after the men who fuck you in private but don't want to publicly be seen with you and take your lives with the same gusto? Is it because you have no privilege over them and instead, it's easier to gang up on the 'weaker sex'? It's almost like you devalue women so much, you wanna speak over, redefine and attack us all while blaming our words for violence against you... well what do you know, patriarchy strikes again. We will not give into your demands. We don't negotiate with terrorists. (If misgendering you is 'violence', well propagating existent violence against us is indeed terrorism.) 😊

#blackfeminism #feminism #womanism #womenfirst #saynotopatriarchyinadress

Slipping Up The Slope

Life is hard, and death and taxes are inevitable. Or so I am told. Every day, the working American gets up. Maybe he mobilizes too early for his taste. He gets into his truck and drives to work. On the road, he is greeted by a cacophony of unskilled and inattentive, angry drivers who cut him off, flip him the bird, and generally, act like tantrum ridden children. If the man has his wits about him he shall stay his course and not react in kind. However, after years of insult upon injury, perhaps being the victim of accident or road-rage, he may well join the march of the man-children. Or more likely, years of seeing his lawful behavior met with childish antics will gradually erode his lawfulness.

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They tell me that the road was not always this bad. My wife, who grew up in Nova Scotia, tells me that the roads are not that bad there as of 2012. Maybe Canada’s world really did end then and nothing ever got worse. What I do know is that where I live, drivers become exponentially worse by the year. Statistically, and observable. I can scarcely make a commute these days without pulling over for an Ambulance, Firetruck or Copcar. The principal issue is that people are stressed, and a windshield gives drivers a delusion of anonymity. It might not always be road-rage: stress upholds escapist fantasy; texting while driving is a response to stress, in addition to stupidity. However, it is the road rage, the transgressively antisocial behavior exhibited on the road which concerns this piece. When encased in your shell of sheet metal and glass, it is easy to forget that the driver holding you up is human, too. You don’t see the man, just the bumper stickers, things to annoy you.

This anonymity is human nature in action. Call it beer muscles, if you will, but people show their true colors when they think nobody is looking. Better yet: when they think they won’t be caught. In the years I have been driving, the human condition encased in automobilia has only worsened and depreciated. What are some corollaries? Workingmen are spread thin. Money is short and fast. Time is precious. Workers are underappreciated, underpaid, uncared for by their society. For a society that is disintegrating and refuses to supply citizens with upright emotional education and security, it is no wonder people are hostile. An issue we will discuss soon is that added to this cacophony of error is the unmitigated fact that the police force is ill-equipped to deal with what the American census is morphing, devolving, mutating into.    

Another example of anonymity in action is the internet. You see it all the time, online, people write things they would never dream of saying to a man’s face. Men’s faces have been bruised for far less. This less than wholesome component of the internet has led to a number of social maladies. I have discussed them at length in a book I have written, but seeing as it is unpublished it hurts nothing to discuss them here.

The internet has fostered an age of cowards. The Aryan concepts of honor once sublimated into every stratum of Europid society has been relegated to convenience methods. For instance, it was once held in common that you simply do not say something behind a man’s back you would lack the courage to say to his face. The internet seems to have destroyed this ideal. Although, one may glean from the net that, of course, every keyboard commando would say exactly whatever bloviating nonsense he has typed, out loud to your face – no doubt while polishing his rifle, smoking a cigar and massaging his three Russian brides. On the internet, every man is a myth and a legend.

Here is another point to ponder. Entire generations are being raised without ignorance of the internet. Men of my age remember exactly when SkyNet entered their house. Men younger than me take it for granted. They might not even be able to imagine life without it. Hell, some men in my bracket might be that dull that they cannot conceive of life outside the interwebz. This component of society has changed the social norm. People now intermingle online and IRL conducts. The result has been, at least for me, profoundly ironic. When I was young and so was the internet, I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. Today? Every Normie I worked with in school could have passed for dysfunctional childhood me.

Symptoms? Conversations remain unfinished. People have committal problems. Eye contact is becoming a rarity. People struggle with informal and informal speech. Having the supposed freedom to write anything online with hardly any real consequences has given people the illusion that their opinions are wanted, or that they must, in fact, be heard. It has damaged the sense of appropriate place, and the idea of sensitive topics is gradually eroding and topical conversation has become a free for all and stream of consciousness. In large part, that is. There are examples to these notations. However, the decline is real. I am dating myself, sounding like the Coastal Elites’ version of Harold Covington; however, these are issues that warrant exploration.

The desocialization of the younger generation will impact future generations. Boomers complain about lazy youth. And men my age will replace them and be hated by the younger generation, for we will worry about the communication, organization and completion skills and coping mechanisms of the younger. More than that, we will worry because nothing tends to get better with time unassisted. Kind of like that supposed second law of thermodynamics I read about when I was younger.      This brings me to the crux of my article here. The Slippery Slope. As it goes, drivers on the road are becoming more brazen and antagonistic. The rules of the road are a joke. Who hasn’t heard a variation of this story why am I going to follow the road rules when I just watched a cop pass a guy doing an illegal turn? Or why should I be a sucker when the guy in front of me is doing 20 over and he hasn’t been pulled over? Or, I just watched a guy blow through a 4 way stop and I get pulled over for a headlight being out?  Or as time goes on you will hear: I probably won’t get pulled over anyway. I do this all the time.

Pretty soon the rules are a joke, a laughing stock, and everyone knows it. Every day I am cut off at least once per intersection because some entitled dingbat felt he could bumrush the fresh red light. He cuts through, and most often, the rightful green light traffic knows to wait a new two seconds to accommodate the moron who will aggressively run the obvious red. I’ve considered ramming them multiple times, because, if I am not mistaken, my insurance would cover it and my truck is getting long in the tooth. All this happens because the drivers who had accustomed themselves to taking advantage of the legal precedence that allows you to pass a yellow light to avoid being stuck in the intersection have come to justify ignoring when yellow becomes red. It was a slippery slope. Whatever. This message spreads. Every dirtbag that runs a red, passes illegally and gets away with it causes two subdividing problems: A. he is emboldened to continue breaking the law and taking bigger risks and, B. others will see him and in their annoyance, follow suit vis a vis me vs. them mentality. The issue with problem A. is that chickens always come home to roost – unless eaten by fox and hawk. The arrogant driver will increase his market value in stupidity until he gets himself, or more likely, somebody innocent of his idiocy that doesn’t deserve it, killed. Now the issue with Problem B is that it multiplies the instance of Problem A and creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of thoroughly unenjoyable driving.

This slippery slope is worthy of investigation because it is no longer just the road rules. The internet and driving are symptomatic of a larger problem, which we know, and shall discuss. There have always been crimes, there have always been misdemeanors. However, reports of crime dominate the news. One can hardly pass a day without hearing about rape or theft or murder. How long until all laws are treated like road rules? Say what you will of Police, but they are spread thin. The civilian populace smells blood on the water. Police on the road have to select what offenders they will punish selectively. There will come a time, and that time has come, when police begin selectively choosing which domestic crimes and which rampant crimes to deal with. There will come a time when the civilian populace is no longer satisfied with bread and circus and we shall see the true nature of the post-White America’s American.

Now, I write for the Right. This is no secret and it is no lie. To that end, it should come as no surprise that the commute and web diatribe leads us to the daunting future that may well like at stake. When the civilian populace is unhampered when laws are increasingly selectively followed and considered negotiable… and when we know the law is often selectively applied, it creates a potential for a dramatically erratic and unstable future. Why now? I presume we can be agreed that the present is, at present, rather unwell?      Anyone in the Alt-Right proper or Dissident Right abroad will be acquainted with the disaster of Charlottesville. Anyone of a significantly Right of Centre leaning will be familiar with the selective way, say, crimes against sensitivity and political correctness are punished. Anyone who has been called a Fascist or a Nazi will be familiar with the exploits of the degenerate cadre known as Anti-Fa. You will know they are on George Soros’ payroll, and that this merry band of nonconformists who all dress, look and smell the same is on the corporate dole – toeing the line they’ve been fed.

These Anti-Fa have committed assault, which I believe is still according to United States law a felony. The cases are countless. When Charlottesville happened and Anti-Fa attacked at an otherwise peaceful protest, the Police were ordered to stand down. Or so I am told. A very poor legal precedent that emboldened further Leftist violence. But. According to the Portland Phoenix and the Bollard, the Anti-Fa have never killed anyone where Nazis killed all kinds of people. So, naturally, it is okay to punch a Nazi, mace him, throw bottles of your own urine at him. It is okay to insult him, deride him. Anti-Fa have stalked the family members of Right Wing Dissidents. Anti-Fa has threatened the mothers of Fascist Sons. They have ruined lives and gloated of their deeds. They have acted shamelessly and without reproach. Are they condemned? Not very strongly. They are occasionally applauded. As to the Anti-Fa themselves? I suspect they rationalize their poor behavior, if they are intelligent enough, by claiming they are anticipating violence from their enemy. They are preventing the next inevitable Holocaust, I suppose.

So heroic.

Yet it goes that despite their wanton ignorance of the law, the popular mind transfers their guilt to men like myself. Anti-Fa is on the loose and the popular mind wants to kvetch til She’ol about the horrors of something someone said somewhere on something on the internet… somehow… it’s all so… asinine. They selectively cherrypick the real crimes committed by immigrants, coloreds, legitimate terroristic organizations, gangs… the actual government… homosexuals and liberals… and ignore them. Then, whenever a self-aware White goes off the rails, or whether some ill-advised fool or bad-faith criminal uses our politick as a springboard to vent his savagery… it is by default what the news shall discuss. Yet it follows that for every act of White on Protected Minority Class violence, you can find equal or greater systemic acts of violence or oppression committed against Whites because they are White, and, with increasing brazenness those crimes committed simply because it is in the nature of the subgroup named to do so. Spend time researching statistics, which yes can be manipulated (in either direction) and you shall eventually see that the way the question is presented leans heavily to one direction, and that direction is not Right.

I follow the road rules – begrudgingly. I have never seen the inside of a jail, nor done anything to warrant seeing one. I pay my taxes like a good Goy. I’m married. As far as anyone knows, I am a well-balanced member of society who is generous, if brusque. I love my wife and go to great lengths to help those I care for. My biggest sin is I oppose multiculturalism. I point out discrepancies which make polite ladies cringe. Even this would have been forgiven if I made those polite ladies cringe in the service of uplifting Negroes. But I don’t. I am an Identitarian, who happens to be White. You can, therefore, call me a White Nationalist. According to the recent government hearing, this means I am a Domestic Terrorist. A law abiding, generous terrorist. Indeed.

Recently to the writing of this article, there was Government appointed meetings to discuss Right-Wing extremism as the ‘biggest threat’ facing this country. It was intimated that White Supremacists commit the majority of crime in the US. I suppose it was Richard Spencer who did 9/11 then? How many people were reported dead, there at 9/11? What “White Supremacist” attack made such a death toll? Or has Al Qaeda been forgotten, did the Government extract the oil it wanted and conveniently forget the wars that followed and the freely encouraged “Islamophobia” because they readily contravene the Planet Kumbayah narrative of MultiKulti? Was it the oh-so-radical Jared Taylor who shot up that tart Arianna Grande’s concert? How many dull-eyed teenage drug addicts died there? Shall I presume Mike Enoch orchestrated the bombing of the Pentagon that followed 9/11? And it must be none other than David Duke who jumps across the Mexican Border every day, drunk, and runs down random civilians in whatever State he escapes to? White Supremacy indeed. Or did they fail to list the documented cases in which Immigrants, both legal and illegal, who murder, rape, steal, fraud and overall stink up the joint? Yes. Immigrants. I am singling out a category of people I don’t want here with WORDS. Lawfully (as of publishing this piece) written words. This Country, which could have been a Nation, is theoretically a Republic based upon Anglo-Roman Law. Laws are words, you know. These were words written by White men for other Whites. We are told, of course, that Jews played a pivotal role in defining that law but I shall elect to keep my faith in men like Thomas Jefferson, wicked Anglo-supremacists that we are. Then again, you have your Barbara Lerner Spectre’s whose hubris is burned into the minds of Nationalists for all time. If you are a self-aware White you are at risk, period. Cowardice won’t save you now. You might as well cast your die. You can’t fake Clown World, White Man and Woman. The Media, Clown World, will continue to expand the perimeter of how Supremacist is defined until everything that doesn’t fit their broadly degenerate programme is encapsulated there. White Supremacists make a special case because it is an unpopular trope. Nevermind the fact that the White Supremacist as defined by an idiot (((media))) does not exist. So. If you are someone outside the Nationalist sphere reading this, if you have a dram of honesty in you, you will consider my point.

Consider also, the popular media cherry picks and presents the worst elements of Nationalism found online and in history. It ignores the fact that the overwhelming majority of us are struggling individuals. Or, when the Media is bold, they mock and kick us when we are down. Because surely, this will increase our emotional stability. To be fair, many of our younger lads take this cherry-picking as a challenge and troll you online because they think of you collectively as an idiot. If you believe their online rants… then they would be correct. The truth is that the extreme majority of us would have settled for Freedom of Association, an end to forced diversity and not being made to kneel at the altar of MLK and the ever-increasing liberties regarding how our history is defined by those who are not us. I personally do not want an Ethnostate or to go live in a ridiculous compound in the Northwest and milk Aryan super cows until I am dead. I don’t own guns and on the one instance, my very good friend convinced me to go shooting… I hit five targets out of the fifty-five rounds I shot. I am a Mainer who wants Maine to keep on Dirigoing. Revolutionary, I am sure.

You know who else was (not) a Mainer who wanted Maine to keep on Dirigoing? Tom Kaczynski. What did he do? He said STUFF. Had a project, wrote a couple books. Did he deserve to be unanimously vilified by the apparently cowardly town of Jackman? He did if you honk your nose and have rainbow colored hair. The slope is slippery. The definition of White Supremacist is ever expanding. It is amorphous and convenience driven, now. Someday, you will fall under that umbrage. Don’t you think you won’t. You will have to whore yourself increasingly to uncomfortable depths to maintain your illusion of purity in the eyes of MultiKulti. MultiKulti makes demands on your conscience now. Today you have to pretend to support the LTBBQ-XYZ agenda. You have to bow at the knee to MLK. Tomorrow you will have to marry someone you do not love, to prove you are not a bigot. You pay mere lip service to Blacks today, you think they will be satisfied tomorrow? The day after, you will see your children robbed from your home by government agents because you were not open and inclusive enough.

Do you think your complacency will save you? Did it save the Boomers? At home and abroad the Boomers, the Government’s single greatest financial achievement, are now starting to be bled by the Fed to feed diversity. They like to point the finger at their younger generations while the immigrants they hosted run amuck. They haven’t the courage to deal with the problem they created. It is our problem now. There is hope for you. You can always admit that you were wrong. You painted us with a broad brush. Some of our guys will never forgive you. Most of us understand. You can start advocating for yourself, for your people, your race. You don’t even have to listen to Renegade Broadcasting or The Right Stuff to do this. All it takes is a whisper of testicular fortitude. You could point out at your dinner parties and barbecues that there is an unfair double standard. You could refuse to let your friend’s wife off the hook when she says something patently false to upholster her pet narrative. You could turn off the Sportsball. You could refuse to clap enthusiastically the next time your workplace hosts some pompous celebration of diversity. Keep calling Columbus Day what it is – suggest the “indigenous” make their own holiday if it pleases them. You can open your eyes and see the entitled monster that White egalitarianism has created, and you can start asking yourself if your money wouldn’t be better spent elsewhere – for you pay for that monster’s very expensive pet food.      Or silence.

Cowardice has prompted many to sell us under the bus, it is a race to condemn us the hardest. Many have done this Judas deed for their thirty pieces. (Yes, I did just make a Christ reference – it is fitting. We have our people’s interest in mind and are constantly betrayed by short-sighted buffoons.) Many have done this to increase their social capital. They think it will ease their passage through life if they think at all. Others are moved like polarities in a gravitational current – dead objects floating through space. The youngsters call them NPCs. NPCs are programmed to seek gratification by regurgitating society approved virtue signals, they think this will increase their social capital because they know bigots get fired. They do not consider the slippery slope.

However, it changes nothing. Your moment in the sun that you gained from virtue signaling? It will end. You too will become unfashionable. You will be asked to sacrifice a virtue, and you will be asked one day to give up one thing too precious. Then, my friend, you shall be a Nazi too. And it will no longer matter if you believed what I believe (and you do NOT know what I believe unless you have taken the time to ask) or if you simply did not want to make a wedding cake for a lesbian couple that defiled your religious beliefs. To your future enemy, it is the same. You may be content to remain silent when a strange looking, sexually ambiguous human with gauges and tattoos you don’t understand condemns the Christian Religion to Secular Hell… even though you yourself are Christian. Tomorrow, Christian, they will ask you to show your support for homosexuality. If you are a Conservative American who secretly understands it is the White parts of America that he loves, you already know the slippery slope.

So. Shall you sell out? Or shall you eventually say to this strange new god of Political Correctness “non-serviam?”

These are important questions to ask because someday, inevitably, things are going to get worse. The beatings will continue until morale improves. And you, my friends, are on the wrong side of history. And I should wager that you know this, too. You are there because you do not understand us.

Speaking of the slippery slope… you know, many men in my bracket would not be where we are, in the Dissident Right, were the double standard not so glaringly obvious. Ten years ago I was still lying to myself, telling myself how awful I was for having a racist thought and that maybe I didn’t actually love negroes and gays as much as the LGBT committee at my college said I should. And eventually, it hit me: everybody got a pass but me, the straight White male. I was told I had privilege, though.

A bald-faced lie. And you know it is a lie if you pay taxes. But it won’t get better. If you won’t join us and help, you can help by doing something else. Keep your mouth shut. When Nazi and Right Wing things come up in conversation? Ignore them. Don’t condemn. Don’t disavow. Don’t pretend to agree with something unless you actually do. Take away the Left’s monopoly on free speech by starving them with silence.

I know many who claim to hate the Right to not actually oppose us and our ideas so much as they do not understand, or feel we are too extreme. If the situation was not so dire, I would agree. I dislike extremity, but it shall become increasingly warranted as the government strangles the life out of her civilians moving forward. The McCarthy Era never ended. It is now fashionable to support or refuse to condemn anti-White violence, especially when Nationalists are targeted. You know the famous Holocaust maxim. First, they came for my gold teeth, and then they came for my lampshades, then they came for my showers and they stayed for my pedal powered skull bashing brain machines. They come for the Nazis today, but when they run out of ‘us,’ you will fit the bill. I want you to remember this: the word Nazi has no meaning. You can keep using it if you want, but fairly soon, you will be calling yourself a Nazi when you do. Christians are Nazis, you understand – White Supremacists. That argument is already underway. The Christian confectioner that wouldn’t make the sodomy cake? Nazi, now. Christian protests against revolting displays of public sodomy? You guessed it. The group Patriot Prayer who regularly hosts Blacks? Nazi. Proud Boys (a joke and mess)? Nazi. These groups all share this in common: to them White and Black are interchangeable, they may not be color blind but they are not racist. Yet somehow, in the retarded logic of the MultiKulti ambassadorial mind, they are equally “Nazi.”

That’s right. Someday you and I and Tom Kaczynski can all have brunch at a Thai restaurant and be accused of sedition someday because we want our mutual children to have a future that doesn’t look like Kenya. Then the Bollard will write a comically dramatic puff piece about how they infiltrated our lunch by wearing a Groucho Marx costume and spying on us. Admittedly, after that, a bunch of people are going to think we’re idiots, but they’re going to wonder why three people that aren’t all Nazis are all of a sudden being labeled such. And here’s another thing, before I run out of ambition with this piece. You’ll notice I’ve provided approximately zero proposals for some kind of solution outside of social advice. The NSA and other alphabet soup agencies can quote me if they ever read this, but the words put in our mouths by others are invalid. I have no solutions. The problem I was handed is too big for me. I know what I want. I want children. I want those children to grow up in a clean, safe, White America. Even if that means they just live in a small town in Maine and visit diversity when they’re of age and no longer bound by the rules of my house. I want it acknowledged that the standard is double and that the lie we’ve been sold about mass immigration is just that – a lie. We do not need third world immigrants. Why should my future posterity sacrifice wellbeing to suit a narrative that nobody ever asked me if I wanted?

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Something to keep in mind before we part: extremists on both sides already think the Law is a joke. Their behavior is going to increase in volition and hostility as well as scope. Why? Same with road rules. Blood is on the water, government agencies cannot or will not keep up. So when they come for you, how bold will they be by then? This law abiding Nationalist here will not seem so bad then when you have experienced Liberal Tolerance in an enriched and diverse future. All we wanted was a White American niche. But short-sighted fools decided to turn a molehill of opinion into a mountain of opposition. They will control every aspect of your life, and if they cannot shame you into submission, eventually they will resort to trickery and then force. And we? We would have left you well enough alone in your Clown World. They will force you to sit; it will make Clockwork Orange look like a Baptism Party at Catholic Charities.

You can mark my words.

from Republic Standard | Conservative Thought & Culture Magazine http://bit.ly/2IUnx4f via IFTTT

Hey guys, so i’m not sure how to format this, but i need somewhere to put this where i can get some help.

So, if you know me irl, or you read any of my more serious tags, you probably know that I’m disabled. I’ve been professionally diagnosed with a long list of things, no idea what i have and what was a misdiagnosis, no way to tell because symptoms between them overlap so heavily it could be either, or, or both. Who knows. The total list, as of this year is Autism spectrum disorder, major depression presenting with psychotic symptoms, generalized anxiety disorder, attention deficit disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, gender dysphoria, and two specific phobia: one of heights, and one of needles. All are under some form of medication or theraputic treatment, and have been for years, with only minor progress on anything but the PTSD, I am at least being kept out of crisis-mode and have not attempted suicide for almost a year, so it could always be worse.

The situation is, my family is pushing me to get a job. My mother is pushing the angle that its for my independence and self-esteem, my father is pushing the angle that its my responsibility. I recently turned 21, so i need to either find work, or get on disability and stop asking them for things. Either way, they have made it clear to me that it is unacceptable that i am 21 now and have no work history or source of income. The issues with this come in three flavours: i cannot drive, and i cannot care for myself without regular supervision, and i have little in the way of marketable skills or skillsets. Not to mention the standard mental illness difficulties.

The mental problems come in the standard “autistic with sensory issues” fare. I cant be around bright lights or loud noises, anything brighter than a fluorescent office light is too much, and even with those i often need sunglasses. Loud or sudden noises, anything above say, the level of a car-door shutting is too much and sustained sounds above the level of a printer are intolerable enough that i cannot think around them, freezing up or outright attempting to curl in and cover my ears/face/front and getting nothing done. Being allowed to wear noise-cancelling headphones helps, but muffles conversation to a point i cant understand others. Being around people for more than 4 hours a day, 5 if i push it and am willing to be irritable and upset for the rest of the day is my limit. I have difficulty understanding speech over digital media if i cant watch the lips of whoever is speaking, or be provided with subtitles or a transcript. Telephone-based jobs are right out thanks to this particular issue. I have difficulty holding attention, and cant process complex commands well, or deal with things that aren’t sequenced. I don’t deal well with other peoples emotions, and barely cope with my own. I cannot think of any job that would tolerate a worker like this in your standard retail/restaurant/gas-station entry-level, or anywhere that takes workers without a resume, or anything to put on one did they have one.

Driving, which requires many tasks (keeping track of your hands, both of your feet, the speed, the road lines, other cars, road signs, stoplights, the mirrors, the gas, etc), is impossible for me without risking my life or another drivers. I live rurally, and with no public transport to speak of in my area, I have to rely on my parents to get me places. Their schedules are rotating, and at odd hours of the day, and i have to budget for two hours around their schedules to get me to and from college. With the schedule i have now, and their schedules to work around, i cannot find any work during the week, leaving the few days of the weekend being necessary to find work on. But even this is limited, as I cant go far from home, and I still have to work around my parents rotating schedules since they frequently work weekends.

The usual recommendation at this point is to move somewhere with transportation, but here’s the real kicker. I cannot care for myself on my own. I cannot, on my own power, remember to eat, drink, bathe, or sleep properly. I cannot get my medications in without reminders and double-checks. I have difficulty with any amount of flexibility in a schedule, as i get lost when i cannot check either of my watches and know where i should be and what i should be doing, and will instead simply scroll through blogs or edit code or mod games for hours on end, doing nothing productive or useful. I cannot enforce a schedule myself, and any attempts at reminders through technology or mundane means have repeatedly failed. Ive utilized calendars, day planners, sticky notes, alarm clocks, watches, cellphone reminders, other people calling me to check if ive done something, and any other number of methods. Without another living being hounding after me to get something done, it slips my mind.

At this point, i’m  usually asked, in disbelief, how someone can forget to eat. It’s simple, i do not feel hunger until i am in physical pain from it, and often only eat one meal a day as a result of packing a meal and just, grabbing something out of the bag as i see other people eating. Often, this gets to a point where i forget to eat so long that i wind up in pain. This, as most people know, disinclines one from eating. You hurt, you’re tired, and you feel nauseous, you likely do not want to eat anything thanks to this, and simply want to go to bed. I have been hospitalized before for winding up in such a condition that i couldn’t stand thanks to this odd spiral of not eating. The same goes for drinking. I am lucky if i get more than 10 ounces of fluids in in a day separate from any snacks i might have shoved in a bag or pocket or other carry-able container. It is a wonder I am not sicker than i am regularly.

regardless, the point is made, i have extreme difficulty with remembering and motivating myself to preform basic daily activities, and will often do without to the point i sicken myself if left to my own devices. I assume it is like living with a large, depressed, child. I assume it is unpleasant, irritating, and difficult living with someone with these issues, and can think of no one who would willingly take care of someone they are living with to this degree short of a spouse or the parents of the person. Seeing as i am not exactly a catch for marriage given my life difficulties, lack of income, and lack of looks, and cannot live on my own, im rather stuck in a poor, rural area, with few job opportunities and  even fewer that wouldnt essentially be working in hell for someone like me.

Im certain, by this point, if youre still reading, you understand why im having difficulty finding a job i would want to put myself in, or even be able to tolerate. All of the career options ive considered, that i think i might be happy in, require a degree (which requires money we dont have, and years of student loans, and a job in the interim while you earn the degree), or are too far away, or require a cost upfront (such as starting a home business, or taking up a trade where you have to buy your own materials [any type of craft work]), or simply have skillsets that i can only do part of and would be incompetent to outright incapable of the rest of the skillset.

the longer I think about this, the more depressed and frozen i become, and the less and less it feels like i have any options. I’m at a point in my life where i have been unhappy and stressed and frequently outright suicidal too damn often, and i refuse to even potentially put myself in a place where i risk becoming that again. I dont know how to get past that and force myself to take a standard job. I do not know if i have any other options, with my lack of skills and mostly useless talents. I do not know how to run a buisiness, or have to cost for materials and real trainign needed to learn a craft, or the ability to run off my wn schedule that working from home would require.

i feel like i have no options. I do not want to continue this. I do not want to have no options. I do not want to be here. i do not know how to make this stop. i do not know how i can be 21 and be incompetent enough that i cannot find any sort of work i would be suited for. i do not understand how someone could end up with no motivation or skills or any amount of ability to make money. I do not understand. I do not know how to fix this. Threapy is not helping, medication is not helping, support (what little i can get of it) is not helping, i do not know how to become competent. i do not know how to become a person. i do not know how to get money at a price i am willing to pay or even can pay. I do not understand.