you have to go to work so you can pay for your doctor, who is not taking your insurance right now, and if you say i can't afford the doctor's you are told - get a better job. it is very sad that you are unwell, yes, but maybe you should have thought about that before not having a better job.
(where is the better job? who is giving out these better jobs? you are sick, you are hurting - how the hell are you supposed to be well enough for this better job?)
but you go to the doctor because you had the nerve to be hurt or sick or whatever else. and they tell you that it is because you have anxiety. you try your best. you are a self-advocate. you've done the reading (which sometimes pisses them off worse, honestly). you say it is actually adding to my anxiety, it is effecting my quality of life. so they say that you are fat. they say that all young people have this happen to them, isn't it a medical marvel! they say that you should eat more vegetables. they say that you probably just need to lose a little more weight, and that you are faking it for attention.
(what attention could this doctor possibly give? what validation? that's their fucking job, isn't it?)
there is always a hypochondriac, right. someone always tells you about a hypochondriac. or someone who is unnecessarily aggressive during the worst days of their life. or someone looking "for a quick fix". or some idiot who wasn't educated about how to properly care for themselves who just abandons their treatment. and again, the hypochondriac, the overly-cautious hysteric. these people don't deserve to be treated like humans (right), and since you might be one of these people, you also don't get treated like a human. because those people can really fuck with the system, you now have to pay for it. and besides. you're actually probably faking it.
(more often than not, you find a 2:1 ratio of these stories. for every "hypochondriac", there are 2 people who knew something was wrong, and yet nobody could fucking find it. the story often ends with pointless suffering. the story often ends with and now it's too late, and it's going to kill me.)
you are actually just making excuses. someone else got that procedure or that diagnosis and he's fine, you should be fine too. someone else said they watched a documentary about other inspirational people with your exact same condition, maybe you should be inspirational, too. you're just too morbid. your pain and your experience is probably just not statistically concerning. it is all self-reported anyway, and you're just being a baby.
(once, while sitting down in the middle of making coffee, you had the sudden, horrible thought - i could kill myself to make the pain stop. you had to call your best friend after that. had to pet your dog. had to cry about it in the shower. you won't, but that moment - god, fuck. the pain just goes on and on.)
you know someone who went in for routine surgery and said i still feel everything. they told her to just relax. it took her kicking and screaming before they figured out she wasn't lying - the anesthetic drip hadn't been working. you know someone who went in for severe migraines who was told drink water and lose weight. you know someone who was actively bleeding out and throwing up in the ER and was told you're just having a bad period.
in the ER there are always these little posters saying things like "don't wait! get checked today!" and you think about how often you do wait. how often the days spool out. you once waited a full week before seeing the doctor for what you thought was a sprained wrist. it had actually been broken - they had to rebreak it to set it.
but you go into the doctor. the problem you're having is immediate. the person behind the counter frowns and says we're not taking your insurance. you will be paying for this out-of-pocket.
they send you home with tylenol and a little health packet about weight loss or anxiety or attention deficit. on the front it has your birthday and diagnosis. you think about crying, and the words swim. it might as well say go fuck yourself. it might as well say you're a fucking idiot. it might as well say light your money on fire and lie down in it. and the entire fucking time - the problem persists.
it's okay. it's okay, it's just another thing, you think. it's just another thing i have to learn to live with.
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In love with the idea of captain marvel being Billy's imaginary friend. Like, it'd be so easy. Early depictions had them as almost fully separate people sometimes, like one soul with two minds, rather than just two filters like we mostly see now.
But imagine a Billy down on his luck, hurt and hiding from police and criminals alike, daydreaming the hours away as children do, taking inspiration from all the superheroes rising to fame, making little stories to play out his dreams of saving the world with a generic action doll he found while dumpster diving once. Most of the paint's rubbed off.
Red's his favourite colour, his comfiest jumper is a bright ruby even after all the grime and washes. Gold, too, it's shiny and warmer than silver! A hero cape is a must, big and eye catching! And he can fly, of course, like superman, and in his daydreams, when he's sore and frustrated after a long day's grind, his superhero is smart enough and knows all the right words to get the bullies to stop without resorting to fighting.
His superhero fantasy is one he spends a lot of time on, the first one he goes for when struggling to sleep at night, and he can picture it so clearly. Captain marvel is big and bright and kind, strong enough to lift the boxes for the old lady up the road who's moving all by himself, fast enough to catch Jamie who fell out of the tree on Saturday and broke his leg and couldn't come to class for weeks. He appears at the entrance to alleys when Billy is cornered, he steps up behind to cover for him when he gets caught shoplifting, he sits at the bus stop with him when it's pouring rain and the right bus doesn't seem to be coming.
And then the wizard comes, or rather whisks him away, and like a magician from a fairytale breathes life into his imaginary friend until Billy feels thrice his size and a million times more invincible.
From then on, captain marvel is a real hero, just like Billy is a real boy, and as one they save the whole city, and then the whole world, and get cats down from trees and help Mrs Victoria move the last of her boxes and she gives them a pinch in the cheek and cookies for the road and sometimes it hurts but it's so much better than he imagined.
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Ok I swear I will go to bed after this and I have made basically this same post before but while people talk a lot about Vimes' possession by a spirit of vengeance, I love the storyline of Tiffany getting possessed by an entity of desperate desire. She spends the whole book out of her element, struggling to fit in socially, wanting something to hide behind, and the hiver feels the same way. It's formless and helpless without a body to wear, and all it wants is to accumulate whatever will keep itself safe. It doesn't realize what that does to everyone around it. It's our id. It gives us what we want, even when it's not what we need.
And Tiffany gets her body taken over and watches herself threaten and steal and kill, forced to acknowledge that these actions stem from what the hiver sees in her, and when she gets free she pities it. She understands what it means to be scared and alone and ruled by your worst impulses. She gives it a name. She takes its metaphorical hand and helps it through the door. (And then accidentally gets stuck in the land of the dead and has to get dragged back, man Tiff what is it with you and underworlds). God I love her.
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Hadestown x MSR
[HERMES, spoken]
Do you really wanna go?
[ORPHEUS]
With all my heart.
(transcript below the cut)
[ORPHEUS, spoken]
Where's Eurydice?
Where is she?
[HERMES, spoken]
Why you wanna know?
[ORPHEUS]
Wherever she is, is where I'll go
[HERMES, spoken]
And what if I said she's down below?
[ORPHEUS, spoken]
Down below?
[HERMES, spoken]
Down below
Six-feet-under-the-ground below
She called your name before she went
But I guess you weren't listening
[ORPHEUS, spoken]
No…
[HERMES, spoken]
So…
Just how far would you go for her?
[ORPHEUS]
To the end of time
To the end of the earth
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I do respect and commend people who are not paraphiliacs but try to be openly supportive because it's the type of decision that can come with a lot of harassment involved, and for a lot of people I know the mindset that 'you can't control a paraphilia but you can control the harm they cause' is like, the 101 of this sort of activism.
But we ought to move on to 102 at some point, right? This isn't even simply about paraphilias but about the larger discussion on sexual abuse: 'the harm they cause' is a reductive and inaccurate view that continues to perpetuate the idea that sexual abuse is caused by sexual desire.
That there is a wrong type of 'horniness' that makes people violate the autonomy of others, and therefore people who are oriented towards being 'turned on' by the wrong things are always implicitly more at risk than the people with 'normal' orientations: that we speak of paraphiliacs in terms of 'control' and 'avoidance', as if they were reactive dogs that need to be muzzled.
This view simply does not hold up when we compare it to other sexualities (and I think this is sort of another fundamental issue involved: people think that paraphilias are somehow morally 'distinct' from sexualities and thus speak of them in different terms and standards).
A man who sexually abuses a woman didn't abuse her because of his heterosexuality. A man who sexually abuses another man didn't abuse him because of his homosexuality. What you are attracted to is neither prerequisite for nor predictive of abuse, because abuse rests on factors like power dynamics, dehumanisation and the ability to get away with it first and foremost.
It is very surprising to me still that people who seem to recognise that abuse isn't about 'the victim was so hot that I couldn't resist' and that there are larger interpersonal and systemic factors at play still often speak of paraphiliacs in these terms (something to be controlled, something that causes 'urges', something that, even it doesn't 'make' you abusive puts you at risk of it). To me, it tends to reveal two things:
The first is, like I mentioned above, these people think there is a fundamental difference between 'sexuality' and 'paraphilia' in terms that are underlined by respectability politics. And I say this as somebody who doesn't actually consider being a paraphiliac as quite 'the same' as being queer/etc. (there are other sociopolitical differences that make me think this), but when you see the people who make these distinctions explain themselves:
'Liking the same gender is normal, liking [x] is not'
'Homosexuality isn't a mental illness though, I have nothing against the mentally ill but a paraphilia is a mental illness'
'Being queer doesn't give me urges to hurt people unlike a paraphilia'
'You don't need to "recover" from being gay, that's conversion therapy and it's also impossible! However I support paraphiles who are seeking help for their attraction!'
... the message becomes quite clear: people believe that there are identity markers that are inherently indicative of morality. That a paraphilia has to be distinguished from a sexual orientation because a sexual orientation is never a reason why a bad person is bad, but a paraphilia could be.
And the second, which I find more fundamental, is that these people don't talk to paraphiliacs. They 'want' to be activists so they will 'support paraphiliacs seeking recovery, don't bully them, don't threaten them!' but they will put paraphiliacs on their DNI as their personal boundary, 'for my own comfort.'
Look, I'm not here to tell people to interact or not interact with whoever, frankly it's none of my business. But I do think you need to consider what exactly you're trying to do when you say you want to advocate for a group you refuse to even talk to. Do you think you sound different from those people who say 'I don't care if you're gay, just don't be doing that in front of me'? If you won't talk to paraphiliacs, your idea of how paraphiliacs live come from stereotypes, call-out posts, and hyperpathologised psychiatric description, even if you think you're reading those posts in a Non-Judgemental Critical Thinking Immune-to-Propaganda Way.
Like I said, I do have some appreciation for people who take that 'first step' of at the very least recognising the harm in perpetuating the normalisation of threatening/harassing/etc. paraphiliacs, but there is often this kindness-as-concession undertone to it all when you see it spoken about in these controlled, pathologised ways. It feels very much like you don't think you're actually talking about real people, but you're talking about abstract concepts in a thought experiment where you side with the model that furthers your self-image of your ideological bent.
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