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darkficsyouneveraskedfor · 2 years

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Forbidden Lessons XXI

Masterlist

Somehow the longest chapter thus far.

Warnings: noncon, age gap, abuse of power, coercion, mentions of suicide, depression. Y'all know I do it dark and spicy. You have warnings, use them.

Thots, comments, screaming, and feedback are welcome and highly encouraged. Thank you!

Your mother doesn’t stay much longer. She’s bored, as she usually is when she’s not the center of attention. There’s only so much a single person can offer her. And her pathetic suicidal daughter is hardly a fond audience.

You take out your phone again. She insisted on getting your number, feigning offense that you hadn’t already texted her with your new one. It makes little difference, she isn’t going to call.

Your chat with Professor Barnes pops back up. ‘Sunshine?’

You forgot to answer. You type into the box, ‘sorry, fell asleep. Home.’ He sends back a smiley face almost immediately and you leave the cell on the night table. You don’t get how people can live their lives on those tiny anxiety-inducing gadgets. It’s probably easier when you actually know people.

You shut off the lights and let your laptop cast a dim glow around your dorm. You lay in the soft hue as your eyelids droop, the dialogue of actors soothing your mind. You latch onto their fictional issues, those are much simpler. You drift off into sleep, almost forget the cold river, the cruel professor, and your selfish mother.

When you wake, you’re groggy. It’s the deepest you’ve slept since the morning on the bridge. You assume it’s the panic attack breaking down the final slat of resistance or just the mountain piled high over the week finally overcoming you. It doesn’t matter, it was hardly more restful than any other night.

You eat a bowl of instant oatmeal and look over the outline for that day’s course. You skim through the articles listed there and count down the time until you need to leave. That class is easier, the professor doesn’t notice you, nor do the students.

You return in the afternoon. Your mother honks and startles you before you can start up the walkway to the front door. She leaves her car parked in the space against the curb and clomps up to you in her heeled boots.

“How was class, honey?” she asks but doesn’t wait for a reply, “oh, I had a marvelous time last night. So much fun. I met the dreamiest man at the bar. Mm, so handsome. I got a picture. Oh, but listen to me, like a girl again, all agog. Ugh, he is so nice. The way he calls me darling…”

She trails you inside, you, her silent sounding board. While she’ll hardly get the praise she desires, she won’t ever get anything less than tolerance. It’s enough for her.

“Anyhow, I had to come check on you, like a good mommy,” she preens as you climb the stairs, “I think I might be in town a little longer than I thought.”

“Oh?” you utter as you enter your dorm.

“I’ve got a date tonight! Oooo,” she squeals, “I can’t believe it. I thought this trip was going to be bust but I might’ve met my one. Can you believe it? After all these years, after your father ran out, all those stupid guys I chased around– means I can’t stay for dinner of course but I’m going to leave you some money to order in.”

“Okay, mom,” you say as you let your jacket fold over the back of your desk chair.

“I should go out and buy a new dress, shouldn’t I?”

“I guess,” you mumble. She doesn’t hear you, she’s on her stage, giving her monologue.

She falls onto your bed in a swoon, still gabbing about how she thinks red is her best colour. You go to the kitchen and put the kettle on. You wonder if it’s a compulsion. It definitely calms you just to hear the soft tremble of the water.

You turn and lean your crossed arms on the counter. You stare at the wall, humming to keep her talking, to keep her distracted. At least the skeez she met at the bar will give you a night to yourself.

💙

You stare at the phone. It’s your own mistake. You should have closed the app after you played scrabble. But no, you scrolled down socials and now you couldn’t breathe.

Your mother’s in red, her new dress, you see just the strap in the frame of the selfie. It’s not her that bothers you. It’s him. It can’t be but you know unequivocally that it is. The man she met last night, the one taking her to the oh so romantic dinner, is Professor Laufeyson.

You don’t understand it. You can’t. Does he know? How would he? Your mother certainly has no clue. She can’t see that far beyond herself.

You pace around, hitting the chair with your hip each time you pass, unable to stay still. When have your mother’s relationships ever lasted? This will just be another secret to keep. She’ll do the usual, ‘when will he call’ then shift to ‘maybe I’ll call him’ to ‘fuck him, there’s lots of fish in the sea’ as quick as usual.

Still, you’re worked up. That damn chair keeps getting in the way and you still smell her perfume lingering in the air. The over expensive shit that gives you a headache. She’d rather splurge on that then pay for the gas down to see you or upgrade your dorm. She couldn’t even pay for you to take the train!

Stop. Who are you mad at? Him or her? Both? Why can’t you just not care about either of them? Why can’t you be like them and just not care?

You steady your phone. It’s after nine. Later, you have another class tomorrow. Fuck it, you won’t sleep anyway.

You tap the only other name in your contacts and the chat pops up. ‘Awake? Meet me by the river. Pls.’

The short message reflects the shambles of your racing mind. You grab your jacket and slip your phone in the pocket. You pull on your thick wooly hat but don’t bother with mitts. You step into your boots and out the door, keys loudly jangling as you turn the latch.

You tramp down the hall to the stairs, clumsily descending and stumbling out into the wintery night. January’s almost over but February doesn’t look to be any better.

Around the back of the building and through the tunnel beneath the library, you come up on the busy street at the edge of campus. You cross at a slant with no regard for the traffic and pass between the barren hedges of the park.

The fountain is frozen over completely as you walk along the curve of its basin and carry on to the thick rail of the bridge. You look across to the yellow lights of the city buildings between blackened windows. You inhale the cold air wafting off the river and look down.

You hear the water, violent and hungry, swirling and swishing, crashing against the pillars of the short bridge. Black and bulging, the cacophony gets louder and louder in your ears as you peer down, leaning on the rail as the wind curls around your legs.

“Hey, hey,” Professor’s Barnes’ voice is laced with concern as he breaks your trance. He’s out of breath as he nears, “you okay? What are you doing here?”

You keep your gaze on the water. What do you tell him? That you couldn’t resist the urge to come here, to think about that morning, because it was the one time you felt in control. That your mother is going to fuck the man who drove you to this place and there’s nothing you can do.

“Sunshine?” he says desperately, gripping the cement rail.

“There was someone I thought cared about me. I thought they liked me. And they didn’t,” you say quietly as he leans in to listen, “I didn’t think they would after I jumped. I just couldn’t handle it. I didn’t want to live with my own stupidity. I didn’t want to go on knowing that no one would ever like me. That I’d never be special to anyone. I jumped because I’m still as stupid as I was.”

He’s silent. A long exhale softly escapes his nose. He gets closer but doesn’t touch you. You stare at the waves. That’s what they would’ve saw. Nothing. You would be down there, invisible as you always are.

“Whoever it is, they didn’t deserve you. They don’t deserve your energy, not like this. They’re the stupid one. The one who can’t see… you.”

You laugh darkly, “you’re nice. And as good a liar as they are. I’m okay, you know? There comes a point of being helpless where you just accept it because fighting it won’t do anything. So you just let everything happen. You’ll survive, not because you want to, but because life will make you.”

He slips his hand off the railing and turns to lean his back against it. He squeezes your shoulder with his hand, “I know there’s nothing I can say to fix or change what you’re feeling, but I know you texted me for a reason. I came because I know you need someone. You don’t have to say it if you can’t. Just let me be here and we’ll both pretend you don’t want me to be.”

You take a deep breath and look at him. He has a beanie pulled crookedly over his dark hair, a shank jutting out to his brow, his jacket is open and his boots undone. He must’ve raced down here.

“You should do your coat up,” you say as you step back and hug yourself, “it’s cold.”

“It is,” he sighs and chuckles, reaching to zip up his coat with shivering hands, “you like hot chocolate?”

“I have class in the morning. And I already feel awful that you came all the way down here.”

“So make it worth it,” he says awkwardly, “there’s this place, so cool, board game cafe, it’s at the other end of campus,” he turns and points above the sprawl of academic building, “it’s open til midnight. And you can play any game you want. Or that they have, and they serve stuff better than any Starbucks.”

You huff, a fog of air between you. It’s the least you could do and you’re not quite sure you should be alone just yet. Your teeth chatter as you lower your chin.

You don’t trust him, you can’t, but he’s not trying to lure you to his office or some hotel or a bathroom. He’s just being kind. Maybe it’s pity but you can live with it. He’s the one who made sure that you have to.

“Alright, one game,” you acquiesce.

“Yes,” he pumps his arm but quickly shakes away the show of excitement, “uh,” he offers his elbow, “let’s go. We might still get a good table.”

You shake your head with a tight-lipped smile, hidden in the shadows. You hook your arm around his and let him take you away from the river. You feel his warmth wrapping around you, radiating against the late chill.

“Just don’t make me play Jenga,” he says as you wait to cross the street, “it’ll be a short game.”

#bucky barnes #loki #dark loki #dark!loki #bucky barnes x reader #loki x reader #series #drabble #dark drabble #dark!drabble #forbidden lessons #professor!loki #professor!bucky #mcu #marvel #ask drabble

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realityquestioned · 2 years

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✰ it’s time to wake up, CAROLINE FORBES, you’ve been in cryosleep for too long and the people of VAMPIRE DIARIES VERSE miss you. when you went into slumber you were FORTY-TWO years old, your pronouns are SHE/HER, and you WERE VOLUNTEERED for the expanse program. now that you’ve awoken, your position as a EVENT COORDINATOR is waiting for you. remember, the expanse thanks you!

THE BASICS;

NAME: caroline forbes

ALIAS(ES): care, carebear (by friends)

AGE: 42, appearing 18-young twenties (age she was turned)

PRONOUNS & GENDER: she/her, cis woman

BIRTHDAY & ZODIAC: october 10th, libra

FACECLAIM: candice king (accola)

AESTHETICS: stubborn light in a sea of darkness, perfectionism and control forged by deep seated insecurities, found strength in soft hands, a reputation of being just a bit dramatic.

A DEEPER LOOK;

BACKGROUND: caroline comes from post the events of vampire diaries, the originals, and legacies. she had just taken back control over the school she opened for her daughters and other young supernatural kids.

WEAPONS: n/a

POWERS/ABILITIES/SKILLS: as a vampire, caroline has vastly increased strength, speed, and healing. she can control most human minds with compulsion (will always ask player permission in rp). she has standard vampire fangs, though not always extended and visible. obviously, she also survives on blood.

GREATEST STRENGTH: physically, caroline has great control over her vampire side and is often able to use it to her advantage. mentally, she has an unfathomable amount of determination for her goals.

GREATEST WEAKNESS/FLAW: physically, being a vampire makes her vulnerable to sunlight and an herb called vervain that would burn her if in contact. mentally, caroline’s struggled with insecurities since she was a child, and while she’s grown and overcome a great deal of them, she still has moments where it can get the best of her.

ONE FEAR: losing her daughters and being unable to protect them

ONE HOPE: that she can use her extended lifetime to set up a better world for her kids and others.

HEADCANON(S): tba!

THE QUESTIONNAIRE;

HOW DOES YOUR CHARACTER FEEL ABOUT BEING DROPPED INTO THE CAMBRIA PROGRAM? ARE THEY EXCITED? SUSPICIOUS? CONFUSED?

caroline is definitely less than pleased. she didn’t sign up for this and doesn’t love the option being taken from her. and okay, maybe being in space is kind of cool and she’s going to make the best of it, but she worries about her kids out there and the school she left behind. she’s working on putting herself into a position of influence on the ship, knowing it to be the best way to figure out exactly what’s going on.

WHAT DOES YOUR CHARACTER HOPE TO SEE THE MOST DURING THE CAMBRIA ONE’S JOURNEY?

despite her reservations about all of this, the idea of seeing new planets and all they could offer is something she never thought she’d do. caroline is just hoping maybe she’ll find someone she knows on board too.

IF YOUR CHARACTER COULD BRING ONE THING OR PERSON FROM HOME, WHAT WOULD IT BE?

her daughters, primarily. they’re both old enough now to be without her, but caroline has a protective nature and hates to be away from them.

#caroline forbes ; intro #cambria:intro

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lgist · 2 years

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How do I know? Something that has been eating away at me ever since I have started writing is how do I know if what I am writing is actually good? It is like I’m locked in a dark room firing darts at a dart board I cannot see, I hope I am hitting the bullseye every time but in reality I have no idea if what I am saying, thinking, creating, is at all resonating with anyone who reads it. This isn’t about numbers or statistics, I am talking the words and actual sentences that I produce. I’m always in fear that what I am actually writing is not at all what I imagine it to be and instead would fall into this category of “fake deep” writing that is so annoying to come across on any social media timeline. I can only hope and pray and as I keep writing I am sure I will keep getting better but in the back of my mind there is always a voice saying, “was that even any good?”. Of course I love doing it, I love creating something from the blank page of nothingness, but the actual content of what I am creating has me in a bind. This blog is perhaps relatable for other writers and I suppose any creative media, how do we know it’s any good? Especially when we just start out. I love the Dunning-Kruger effect but I find it terrifying, like where am I on the graph? Am I at the peak of ignorance? I feel as if what I write now is good content, yet there is always this voice that doubts me and my capability to write well. Imposter syndrome is a nasty thought process and I feel as if I am cursed. It makes me worried to write my next blog, I feel as if it needs to be a constant one up contest despite the wide variety of topics I might end up doing, that might be completely unrelated. This makes it especially difficult to get my raw ideas on paper, it needs to be dressed properly and have amazing manners before I am confident to present any of them. If I could let go of this bug, this glitch within the mainframe and replace it with code to naturally believe in myself, I would. Alas, the world is not that kind and the human mind will always have some sort of skepticism about everything, including ourselves. It permeates this very paragraph, I feel as if every sentence that gets put down is over dramatic and undersells my entire idea in the first place. I wonder what causes it, I wonder what evolutionary standard necessitated this line of thinking. Perhaps it is the constant need to be perfect, to be flawless. An imaginary concept that is alluring, to be without flaw is to be extraordinary. So once we get that feeling of “that was my best piece yet” it becomes this obstacle to overcome and can really bog down the emotional ecstasy of feeling out our passions. As it becomes a slog to meticulously overanalyze every aspect of every post, the fun and the chaos of engaging with our passions becomes boring and we fall out of love with the action entirely. It makes you forget about the reason you began pursuing passion in the first place, instead of doing what you love, it becomes work and work is the opposite of the natural nature of passion as passion should not feel like work. It should not be exhausting to engage with your passion, sure you can burn out at times but work is just mundane, colourless and detrimental to the passionate psyche.

Maybe our compulsion to feel perfect is derived from the picturesque personas displayed on social media. People who have the white smile, perfect bodies, PR teams who tell them what to say and when. Young children will grow up with the mentally of striving for this unrealistic prospect of perfection, when in reality these Instagram models and celebrities themselves are human. They exist with fault, fault that is often left out of their perfect image and because of this anytime a fault is discovered it is what is put under incredible scrutiny. We want to avoid scrutiny at any cost, it is difficult to hear what is imperfect about yourself. So we hide our imperfections, photoshop away the humanity and unique attributes we were born with so we can all look like the spitting image of beauty. Standards have only raised in the information age. God forbid you make a mistake, it must be constant wins. When you only win and never lose, wouldn’t the feeling of winning become trivial? Our minds focus on loss much harder than the feeling of winning, I feel as if this is only exaggerated from the perfection we spectate on a daily basis. I mean it is always click worthy to hear your favorite celebrity fucked up. Perhaps if we stopped placing ourselves on pedestals, puppeteering our personal shows that which always have a happy ending and normalize failure, we would be more free to fluidly engage with passion. This would make it never feel like a job but a necessity to the very fiber of our beings.

However, I do feel an important distinction when it comes to the idea of perfection is the need to be perfect and the striving of perfection itself. You can strive for perfection, perhaps you should, improvement doesn’t come free and you must learn the perfect method that which is personal to improve. Yet the need and compulsion to be perfect is entirely different, this compulsion will not let you improve, you will get stuck on the slightest of problems as you figure hundreds of solutions in your mind, giving yourself the paradox of choice as you choose the safest idea to seem perfect. Passion is not about safety, it is about rigorous experimentation. Experiments that might fall flat on their face or teach you something about yourself you never knew existed. For what is passion besides an avenue into your psyche, a place for you to escape and enter this flow that escapes time, as you can spend hours on a certain piece and it would only feel like 15 minutes have passed. The need to be perfect is an illusion of safety and kills motivation as you can’t breach your own standards. Dismantle your standards, see where it goes and if it fails, try again. I am still battling with the compulsion to be perfect, I want to write pieces that really get you to think. I am always worried I have not accomplished that feat with each and every blog. I worry I repeat myself too much, like a broken record. I worry I will run out of ideas, I worry, I worry, I worry yet I wont let it ruin my flow and I know I will keep improving with each post, neither should you. Experiment and have fun, let go of perfection and instead strive for each creation to be unique in its own right. Perfect your method of learning and improve alongside it, passion should burn and I’ll be damned if I let mine wilt away in a sorry excuse such as “I am not good enough”

_______________________________________

Exploring the very nature of my writing, I must admit I worry this also falls into the category of “fake deep” and you know what, I don’t care anymore. I will write what I feel like writing and if it keeps getting better, that is all I should worry about. We all have a creative mind within us it, is important to acknowledge our capabilities and never short sell ourselves, we all can do it. Much Love - S

#philosophy #imposter syndrome #writers and poets #writerscommunity #leftism #leftist #positivity #politics

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damacbycavalli · 9 months

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How iOS 16 and Android 13 Could Change the Future of Smartphones?

Some more aspects of your non-digital life will tie knots with your smartphone. This is because of new launches by Apple and Google the iOS 16 and Android 13 and these are the advancements for which people are waiting across the globe. These two distinguished tech giants will make your phone a digital wallet where you can store your legal ID and other essential documents.

These companies are also evolving how your phone interacts with your cars, smart home gadgets, and several other day-to-day devices. Both iOS 16 and Android 13 are equipped with new specifications and attributes which are much more than digital wallet and speed of the connections. Overlap of these two may confuse people about the selection of the right for them.

No Need for the Physical Wallet

As mentioned before both Apple’s iOS 16 and Google’s Android 13 have introduced their intention to launch the Digital Wallet. Apple has introduced a new BNPL feature called Apple Pay Later. This allows users to pay later for their purchase in 4 equal installments over six weeks.

The identification cards stored in Apple Wallet can be used to verify your age for the applications where 18 years of age is a compulsion. Google has also introduced features and adapted some new specifications to compete with Apple. The Google wallet will contain details like payment and transit cards, vaccination records, boarding passes, and student IDs, which is very similar to the Apple Wallet.

Apple and Google are working aggressively with Government agencies to fulfill this project. The common intention these both firms share is to make mobile devices more reliant. Sameer Samat, Android and Google Play’s vice president of product management said that “These days there are only two things I don’t leave home without: my phone and my wallet. So the question is, can my phone replace my wallet?”

Corey Fugman who is Apple’s senior director for Wallet and Apple Pay made his comments during the WWDC keynote recently.

“With Apple Wallet, we’re working hard on our goal to replace your physical wallet,” these were his exact statements.

With people’s support and technical advances, credit cards are already being replaced by smartphone-based payment apps. Apple pay is supposed to act as a regulatory force that can increase smartphone users by the year 2025 by a major percentage of 50%.

Conclusion

Both iOS 16 and Android 13 are being launched by Apple and Google respectively. These both introduce new and very unique specifications which will digitalize the non-digital aspects of a person’s life. The most popular among these are Apple’s BPNL and Digital wallet. These both will remove the issues of the masses and will improve the execution of certain things that are not digitized yet.

Hi guys, I’m Roberto Edward, and I believe that nobody can fight cybercrime alone. Let’s unite and overcome the biggest challenge of our age. I live in Dubai City, UAE, and my dream is to see a Cybercrime free world.

Source: How iOS 16 and Android 13 Could Change the Future of Smartphones?

#Apple #iOS 16 #Android 13 Could #ingenwebmatics

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ledenews · 1 year

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David Croft: Bad Bald Jokes Just Slide Right Off

He’s bald. Like shiny and forever bald. So bald you can search the internet and there are no non-bald photos. THAT bald. So bald you want to make fun of him for being bald. But you can’t be critical, not even a hint of humorous, because as soon as you think you can crack a joke, he places his baldness on a campaign shirt and wins the election. Again, THAT bald. But that’s because David Croft is THAT good. Not only is he one of the leading transaction/mergers and acquisitions attorneys in the region, but Croft also is in his second term as a member of the Ohio County Board of Education. What makes him so effective in both positions is passion, a wish to make his hometown better than it was the day before, and because he refuses to take anything for granted. He sips on joy but never dares gulp, and Croft contemplates his next moves the vast majority of the time because each step taken, he believes, needs to be forward toward another broad smile. Croft recently had a few areas on his face checked and cleared of suspicious growths. While the majority of your classmates from Wheeling Park High’s Class of 1985 now live elsewhere, you have chosen to live here in your hometown. Why? Wheeling is my home. When I graduated high school in 1985, most of my family lived in Wheeling and I lacked the compulsion to leave. I focused on gaining an education that would permit me to stay in Wheeling. I was lucky in finding secure employment practicing law with the law firm Spilman Thomas & Battle, PLLC. In addition to family matters, Wheeling is an amazing place to live and raise a family. The cost of living is low with a high quality of living. Our public and private schools are excellent, and the residents can easily travel to larger cities to enjoy the larger city attributes. Our community is filled with good, hard-working, considerate people. I have zero regrets staying. What’s more important about a restaurant? Is it’s food menu or its bourbon menu? Without a doubt, food. Because of bourbon allocations, it is difficult for any of the local restaurant’s to consistently carry a significant bourbon menu. Besides, good bourbon cannot overcome the experience of bad food. There are several individuals in the community that have extensive bourbon collections and are willing to share them. Who is the one mentor you remember most and why? I cannot name a single individual mentor that I remember most. Rather, I have been blessed to have had good people nudge me in the right direction where I might have taken a different path. My former high school coach and now friend, Ken Steiner, taught me disciple and how to achieve results by putting in the work. While in college at West Liberty, I worked for Meredith family at the Washington Avenue True Value. Don Meredith treated both employees and customers with respect and was a great example of how to run a business. Since I began working as a professional, I have enjoyed the guidance of several talented lawyers, which I still look to for advice today. Croft and his friend Craig Karges recenty shared some time at a local event. What does a high school student need most? Motivation. The opportunities are now available for high school students. However, those opportunities will be lost if young motivated people do not take advantage of those opportunities. Motivation is closely followed by having a strong work ethic. If you throw in ability, integrity, and humility, then that person has no ceiling on what that person can achieve. Do you miss having a full head of hair? It’s been so long since I have had hair I do not know. What I do know is that I have never considered hair transplants or some kind of treatment to regrow hair. I don’t spend much time looking at myself, and I don’t really care what others think of my appearance, so there is really no motive to have hair or to think it's somehow going to improve my appearance. I am what I am. Most importantly, my wife likes me as I am. Read the full article

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titoist · 2 years

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recently, near the end of july, i gave into a sort of "habit" - a compulsion, maybe. my ublock origin did not effectively block *all* notes, only the notes button at the top right of the dashboard, and thus i could effectively just go to my blog to check the number of notes i had gotten at any given time. this has proved somewhat regressive, and i've now both found a way to delete both the notes that are visible on my blog, and i've taken the time to "unpin" ublock origin - an extra click or two necessary, as to dissuade me from turning it off. it's not incredibly prohibitive, but i ought it'll give me some extra time to rethink my choices. this is complete isolation, in comparison, where earlier i had been gradually letting in outside influence more and more. i do truly enjoy using this site as an outlet to write down my thoughts, as something in-between a journal and a bulletin board. but introducing a strictly social function to it is completely destructive to my mental processes - the tinge of mad anxiety that comes with posting something and, for the first ten or so minutes until someone likes it, becoming increasingly self-frustrated and afraid that perhaps i had said something completely horrendous and visibly so to everyone but myself. bashing myself on the head in routine self-flagellation for the public disapproval of my internal thoughts, mild excitement for finding something to say being replaced by enflamed neurosis. until someone does like it, and those feelings dissipate as quickly as they came, revealing them as the ridiculous absurdities that they are. seeing through it but never being able to overcome the pavlovian conditioning. it's maddening, and the thought of being really living under it again makes me consider that i would prefer suicide. well, saying i'd kill myself is a little dramatic, maybe. i don't think there exist any feasible circumstances under which i would seriously contemplate suicide, but any less dramatic framing would feel insufficient. i was completely beholden to that manner of thinking for years, and in that time my relation to my thoughts and inner emotions had become so one-sided - reblogging and scrawling out on here as quickly as they came, that the thought of it being the dominant force in my life again is a nauseating nightmare. living life as kind of a constantly-electrocuted lab rat rather than the fully developed human being that i could be.

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novelistash · 3 years

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Lex Evans

Continuing my compulsive catalogue of fictional lives that I didn't come up with.

After the wedding, Ayla took Lex golfing and admitted that she had created distance with Lex ever since she'd made a move on her. They became besties again. At the age of 31, Lex sold her town home, so she could focus on renovations on her and Ariana's equestrian ranch home.

Throwing party after party, Lex realized she wasn't just hilariously addicted to Bahama Mamas, but simply addicted to alcohol. She went to AA, but got nothing from it.

While long boarding and drinking Mai Tais Ayla admitted to Lex that she'd been offered opium and seriously considered using it. Lex said she was glad Ayla didn't go down that path.

At the age of 34, Lex became a Sr. Environmental Scientist, but her real job was dumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into Arian and Lex's mansion.

The days all started to bleed together, and Lex drove all the way to work before realizing it was Saturday. Lex suspected that the drinking was getting in way of her memory. Remembering her luck with spiritualism in the past, Lex found a Witch Doctor to help her with her alcoholism. She ate a raw Komodo Dragon Egg. After purging most of her stomach, the thought of liquor made her sick.

Ayla's continued drinking pulled Lex and her apart, and Clive became Lex's new bestie.

While at the record store with Ayla, she talked about opium again, saying that her new bestie was smoking it around her. Lex told Ayla she was glad she wasn't using it, but Ayla got quiet instead. Lex was pretty sure she was going to try it.

At the age of 39, Lex accidentally scored on her own goal while playing soccer. Everyone laughed for ten minutes. She sold her old BMW and bought a used Suburu. Ariana renewed their vows and adopted Carter, 3 year old whose father couldn't afford to pay for his medical bills. Lex bonded with Carter by doing yoga with goats.

Carter called out "mama" and Lex and Ariana laughed when they realized they didn't know who he was asking for. While buying new clothes, Lex tried on a stranger's coat. She was caught and left the store in humiliation.

Carter had his first day of school and Lex's niece Kylie was old enough to get a job as a receptionist. Lex reflected on how awesome human beings actually are. After playing laser tag with Carter and Archie's family, Lex and Archie became best friends. Lex's friend Eleanor talked her into crashing a wedding. She didn't remember how it ended, only that she was back at home puking in the garden bathroom so Ariana wouldn't know she was drinking. Lex went to a hypnotist to overcome Alcoholism and it worked. Picking up a bottle of champagne only made her think of maple syrup.

At the age of 42, Lex's niece Hazel graduated secondary school. At the graduation party, someone told Lex to shake her money making, so she shook Ariana. Lex gave her nieces $10,000 each. (Kylie getting money for the graduation she'd been too drunk to attend!) While playing bingo with Ayla, she admitted that she'd been cheating on her boyfriend. Lex told Ayla that she'd always be there for her.

Hazel became a Jr. Flight attendant and moved out of the house. Lex housed a celebration at the mansion and she was offered ritalin. Lex turned them down. Lex wrote up a will that named Ariana and Carter as the sole inheritors.

At the age of 44, Lex was sexually harassed at work. Her coworker Michael pulled her shirt off in front of everyone. The supervisor fired Michael. The Evans family started going house shopping.

At the age of 46, Lex's mother got very sick. She took her mom to Dr. Cooper and he treated her diarrhea, caused from contaminated lettuce. The lettuce outbreak had originated in Indonesia. This got Lex thinking about social responsibility, and she decided to run for School Board Director. She ran against Angus White and lead a clean campaign. After knocking on 1000 doors, Lex lost the election. Ariana took the family to Thailand to help Lex get past the sting.

At the age of 47, Lex had another brush with death! While hiking off trail, she slipped into quicksand! Lex remembered her swim team days and swam out of the pit. She was in there for 8 minutes. Contemplating life, she read her step brother Kobe's journal. Kobe found her and Lex apologized. Lex decided that she needed to downsize her life. She needed to get out of that mansion.

At the age of 49, Lex's mother passed away of natural causes. Lex and Kobe both inherited $2,618,526. Lex finally found a buyer for the manision, and sold the property for 4.3 million. They moved into a midcentury home with 3 beds and 2 baths. Carter was starting secondary school, and Lex gave him $10,000 to spend how he wished.

At the age of 50, Lex celebrated her 20th anniversary with Ariana. They laughed about the prenup. Ariana encouraged Lex to keep running for office and Lex realized she could do anything she set her mind to. Lex caught the flu, but recovered after a trip to the doctor.

Lex's niece Kylie married her college boyfriend. Though neither were unemployed, Kobe had the funds to pay for the wedding. Lex's friend Eleanor convinced her to start drinking again. Lex spent a lot of time with wannabe sommeliers, and dealt with a very real relapse. Lex went to AA and found the strength to throw out thousands of dollars of premier wine. Lex and Elanor got into a fight about the perfect crotch shape, but they both knew it was about drinking.

At the age of 52, Lex lost her step father. He had a stroke in the closet and Lex found him dead. The thought of dying alone in a closet haunted her, making her uneasy about staying in windowless rooms. Ariana talked to Lex about the future at a local park, and Lex decided to run for School Board Director again. She ran a clean campaign against Sophia Johnson, but someone called Ariana a biznatch! Lex called the man a troll and won the election. Lex held energetic rallies about education and the environment.

At the age of 53, a provocative intern tried to hook up with Lex while they were working late. Lex turned him down, but she had been turned on. She talked to her wife about the pros and cons of becoming swingers. That following morning, she planted a cucumber garden.

Carter graduated secondary school and Kobe retired. teen pregnancies were becoming an issue in Lex's school district, so she mandated contraceptives be available. Lex held a rally to dispel the myths about contraceptive encouraging pregnancies.

A friend of Lex's wanted Lex to put her on the payroll without having her do any work. Lex offered her a job as a lead janitor instead and she stopped talking to Lex. Carter asked his mothers if he could study finance at a university, and they encouraged him to live his life how he wanted. Lex went to a bar with Ariana, and was able to stop after one drink.

Kobe's daughter, Hazel, married Jayden Roberts, a restaurant worker. While dancing at the celebration, Ariana fell to the floor. After taking Ariana to the hospital, she was diagnosed with cancer of the buttocks! Lex renewed her vows to Ariana. Lex read Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," and found little reason for cancer to exist.

While at a masquerade ball, Lex flirted with a politician to grease the gears of government. Ariana was furious, but no amount of trying to explain the situation helped.

At the age of 58, Lex fell out of bed and hit her eye. She could see for 6 days. Lex's term as School Board Director ended. Ariana's cancer went into remission. Lex and Ariana went to Osaka, Japan to celebrate. Ariana forgave Lex for flirting and encouraged her to run for a second term. After another clean campaign against Hugo Miller, Lex won re-election!

Carter graduated uni and became a Jr. Stockbrocker. After a trip to the gym, Lex was diagnosed with a staph infection.

At the age of 60, Lex and Ariana celebrated their 30th anniversary. Ariana vowed to make more time for their marriage, by finally retiring. During the party Lex caught Kobe sneaking around in her room and the two got into an argument. Lex was the first to apologize even though she wasn't at fault.

Carter got promoted to Stockbroker. Lex was diagnosed with hemorrhoids and cherished naps above all other activities.

Kobe's daughter, Kylie came out as gay. Lex was offered a $3 million bribe and turned it down.

Lex finished her second term in office with a 100% approval rating. As School Board Director, Lex Evans was known for her energetic rallies. She tried to run a clean campaign for Mayor of Sydney. When she didn't deny the truth of her past with alcoholism, the public sided with 79 year old, Eli Epping. Lex went on a vacation to Machu Picchu with Ariana.

Lex spent $754,000 on an unsuccessful campaign, and then at the age of 65, retired.

Ariana and Lex moved to France to get away from the public eye. They bought an art deco home! They adopted a cat named Zorro from the animal shelter. Lex bought a used tesla.

At the age of 68, Lex lost her step brother Kobe after a stroke. He had refused to seak medical treatment, even though his hearing was going out.

Lex's life was dominated by renovating the art deco home. She missed her friends in Australia. Lex and Ariana argued about the nature of reality. Ariana thought it was a waste of time to talk about things like that.

Lex got into a car accident on the way home from her 40th anniversary, her butt got cut. She visited her friend Ruby in prison. Ariana started withholding sex. They both opened up about their fantasies on a trip to Venice, Italy, and things seemed to be back to normal.

Shortly after Lex's 71st birthday, her cat Zorro passed away. Lex and Ariana moved back to Australia, moving into an adorable cottage with 2 beds and 1 bath. Lex sold her tesla and art deco home in France, and bought another used Suburu. Though the move back to Australia helped Lex's mood, it had done nothing to help her relationship with Ariana. They were getting into fights about everything from video games to fishing laws.

Forty-two years into their marriage, Ariana asked for a divorce. Lex begged Ariana to stay. Even though she agreed, she refused to go to marriage counseling.

The next year, Lex and Ariana went sky diving and slowly things started to improve. It seemed like Ariana was simply bored with life, so Lex would try to be more spontaneous.

Lex and Ariana renewed their wedding vows after volunteering at a retirement home, something they both hoped they would never be in. Lex gave 0.74 carat diamond earrings to Ariana. She said the gift was an insult.

The day after Lex's 78th birthday, she witnessed a bank robbery! Within a year, her best friend and first crush, Ayla passed away. The doctor's said it was, "her time," but Lex felt strong and happy. Lex lost two more friends that year, and wondered if she was fooling herself and started to think about her bucket list.

Lex and Ariana's 50th anniversary was a solemn affair, as Ariana was suffering from bronchitis. Someone hacked into Lex's instagram account, so she deleted all her social media.

The 82 year old millionaire, Lex, wanted to run for office again. Ariana thought it was a waste of time and money. Lex ran despite Ariana's objections and lost. Ariana was back to withholding sex and it was like their life in France had been forgotten.

Lex sold their cottage for a modern home. The change in scenery helped Lex and Ariana move on from the drama of the past, but their marriage had become a sexless one. Lex brought up having a threesome or an open marriage to try and bring some excitement back into their life and Ariana was furious. She moved all of her stuff into a spare room.

58 years into their marriage, Ariana said Lex was too old to be attractive, despite being named Sydney's most attractive woman over fifty a year prior. Lex confronted Ariana about her being faithful, and Ariana admitted that she was seeing someone else. The two got a divorce. Lex Evans was now Alexandra Miller.

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theygender · 4 years

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I think dealing with mental illnesses is a lot like dealing with my cat. Sivir is very anxious by nature and has an especially bad case of separation anxiety. Unfortunately, she tends to cope with these things mainly by destroying carpets and chewing through wires. We do our best to calm her anxiety when we can (making sure she has a safe place to hide when there's construction or other loud noises going on, comforting her whenever it's storming, never locking her in another room from me) and then when we can't... we mitigate the damages. When we go on a trip, for example, we thoroughly Sivir-proof the house. For the most part this means putting away any and all wires that can be put away, and making the ones that can't be put away unreachable. My work equipment stays Sivir-proofed at all times unless I am actively using it (learned that the hard way). And to keep her from tearing up our carpets, we spray a deterrent on the places we don't want her to scratch and then make sure there are plenty of alternative scratching boards loaded with catnip

I could get caught up on how I think she should be behaving and get angry at her for not acting the way I want her to. I could convince myself that training is the only solution and taking any other measures to mitigate damage are worthless or not good enough. But I know that's not true. Frustration is normal, but allowing my frustration to spill over into the way that I treat her would not help her overcome the issues she's facing. And while training her not to act on any destructive behaviors certainly would be ideal, it's important to also have safety measures in place to use while she hasn't yet reached that point. And it's also important to realize that she may never reach that point. Waiting around for her to be perfectly trained instead of learning to how live with the behaviors she currently has would only leave me with a lot of disappointment and chewed up wires

Likewise, I think it's important to come up with ways to live with your mental illnesses instead of focusing excusively on trying to cure them. I used to struggle with compulsions that made me hand wash all of my already clean silverware before I used it, and this led to frequent breakdowns because I felt like I could never get them clean enough—so I started buying plastic silverware instead. I used to constantly run late to work because my executive dysfunction was so bad that I couldn't get out of bed until it was already past time for me to leave the house—so I started putting an alarm in the kitchen. Neither of these things are cures; they didn't get rid of the issues I was having. When I ran out of plastic silverware I would still have breakdowns over the metal silverware. When I forget to set my kitchen alarm I still struggle to even get out of bed. But even though they don't get rid of the problems I'm having, they do help me live with them. It's important to meet yourself where you're at, especially given that true recovery is an unrealistic goal for some people. And it's important to give yourself sympathy too

#rambling #dont know what this is but here you go #ive been effectively quarantined for six months now i guess its time to get contemplative #anyways. therapy is important and good and recovery is a great thing to try for #just like training your pets is important and good and stopping sivir from ever trying to destroy anything again would be amazing lmao #but neither of those outcomes are guaranteed. some people never recover from their mental illnesses. some pets cant be perfectly trained #in the meantime youve got to learn to work with what you have and to love yourself (and your pets in this example) in spite of any mistakes #the alternative will not help you heal

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blacckestrose · 4 years

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50 QUESTIONS

I was tagged to this in Facebook and I never really use Facebook and I really don't want to tag there anyone to this, but here again is a lot of people I would like to know better, so I annoy you by this long question tag. 😂

1. What colours is your hairbrush?

Black

2. What food would you never eat?

Slugs or bugs over all, dogs, liver...

3. Are you usually hot or cold?

I'm 24/7 cold, I have two sweaters on, I have my fluffy socks on and lots of blankets when I'm watching the TV

4. What did you do 45 minutes ago?

I cooked some noodles for me, I'm learning how to eat other than just sushi with sticks

5. Favourite chocolate?

Finnish milk chocolate, if you haven't tried it yet: W H Y

6. Have you ever been at a professional sports event?

Yess, I was in Brussels at Diamonds League event in 2015, then we have gone to several ice hockey games with my dad

7. What was the last thing you said out loud?

Try to convince dad to get a dog

8. Favourite ice cream flavour?

Vanilla or pear, lemon is also so gooooood

9. What was the last thing you drank?

Rasberry juice

10. What kind of wallet do you have?

Koya cardholder 💜

11. What was the last thing you ate?

Noodles 😂

12. Did you buy clothes last weekend?

Thank god no, I cannot afford spend my money now on anything stupid

13. What was the last sports event you saw?

There was biathlon competition at my city couple of weeks ago but I watched it on TV

14. Favourite snacks?

Oat chips, yes I like old peoples food don't @ me

15. Who was the last one you texted to?

Deniiiii 💜

16. Do you like camping?

Well it depends, if you can promise me there won't be any spiders or any snakes and there won't get cold and I can get comfortable, I can think about it

17. Do you eat vitamins?

Everyday, girl needs her vitamins to stay healthy 👏

18. When was the last time you travelled?

November 2019

19. Do you like sunbathing?

You know I would, but I do not tan, I burn. And it doesn't matter if I swam in the sun cream, I burn. So no.

20. Asian or Italian food?

THIS IS LIKE A SOPHIES CHOICE omgomgomg.... I can't answer I need both in me

21. Do you drink soda?

Too much

22. What colour socks are you wearing now?

Grey

23. When was the last time you were speeding?

Probably the last time I drove a car. Do not tell the police but I like to drive fast. I'm an excellent driver though so trust me, I know what I'm doing ok

24. What are you afraid of?

Spiders, like seriously, if I found now spider in my apartment I'd move to streets cause I'm alone here

25. What can you see if you turn left?

Window and from there I can actually see someone's dog fled from the leash and they are desperately trying to catch her... 😂

26. What kind of housework you like the least?

Doing the dishes

27. What is the first thing you think of when you hear someone talking in a language you don't know?

I'm interested what the language is but that's about it

28. Do you sleep on your back or side?

Depends

29. You crave fast food, where do you go?

I call my fave sushi place to bring me some sushi

30. What is your lucky number?

31. Who was the last person you talked to?

Mom and my sister, dad was there somewhere too but he really doesn't talk

32. Do you eat meat?

Yes but not red meat usually, reindeer and moose is exception, and sometimes beef

33. What was the last song you listened?

Anpanman - BTS

34. Last book?

How to Overcome Your Obsessions and Compulsions - Edna B. Foa & Reid Wilson

35. What is your favourite day of the week?

Thursday, cause then it's only one day for the weekend 😍

36. Do you know the alphabet song backwards?

No way, and I won't even try to learn

37. Favourite coffee/tea?

Latte ☕💜

38. Favourite shoes?

My sneakers

39. When do you usually go to sleep?

At 1-2

40. When do you usually wake up?

At 11-12

41. Sunrise or sunset?

Sunset 😍

42. Do you like your bed soft or hard?

100% soft, I need everything be soft 😍

43. Describe the plate you are eating from

Green plate from Finnish design Iittala

44. Your favourite type of alcohol

White wine, I have my 'the' wine that I have to have if I have a night out 😍

45. Do you like board games?

I LOVE BOARD GAMES like there's nothing better than have a board game night with friends 😍😍 YAS WHO'S WITH ME?!

46. If you had a car, what kind would it be?

Nissan Leaf, electric car

47. Do you know how to change car tires?

My dad does

48. Dream country

South Korea and Australia

49. If you could choose from any jobs in the world, what would you like to do?

BTS private assistant? Ok maybe not 😂 a job where I can just travel the world and get paid well for it, I'd like also be a youtuber maybe 🥺👉👈

50. What would you like to try to do? And what is stopping you?

Time travelling, that would be so cool. And what's stopping me? Dumbledore didn't give me the Time Turner 😠

I tag @memeofthesoul @sugasugakookies @jinniestan @clickclacktothemangmang @hoseoknysus @kookie-off-his-kookie @kimsouthjoon @agustmoonchildd

You don't have to do this if you don't feel like it of course! 😊

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johnvawter · 4 years

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Jimmie Hale Mission's Active Recovery Program

A Birmingham-based student housing developer with several years of experience, John Vawter is the principal of Capstone Collegiate Communities, LLC, where he guides numerous projects to ensure student housing needs are well-catered for. Besides working at Capstone Collegiate Communities, John Vawter is involved in community work and served on the board at Jimmie Hale Mission for the homeless for five years. Downtown Jimmie Hale Mission, Inc. is a Christian-based non-profit organization, which for more than 75 years, has helped restore and transform thousands of lives by addressing homelessness and addiction. The organization relies on the generosity of people in the local community and across Alabama to help achieve its objectives. Jimmie Hale Mission has various programs such as the Active Recovery program which is an in-depth 16-week program that uses a Christian approach to help participants understand and overcome the issues that lead them to addiction. Under the program, each client works individually with a professional counselor throughout the process. Active Recovery teaches clients how they can make value-based decisions, develop a future story and battle unhealthy compulsions. Active Recovery Program is designed to deal with both addiction and poverty by rescuing and enabling affected individuals to work towards fulfilling their life goals.

#Principal #John Vawter

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bountyofbeads · 4 years

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What It Took for a Fox News Psychiatrist to Finally Lose His License https://nyti.ms/2MbUGZu

What It Took for a Fox News Psychiatrist to Finally Lose His License

Keith Ablow was a popular fixture on the cable channel until 2017, and a high-profile therapist. He left a trail of vulnerable female patients who claim he abused them.

By Ginia Bellafante | Published Dec. 20, 2019 | New York Times | Posted December 21, 2019 |

Late in 2009, a 28-year-old woman not long out of graduate school found herself in a stressful job at a Bronx hospital and decided it would be useful to talk to someone. Searching online, she came across the name of a psychiatrist, Keith Ablow.

Dr. Ablow was familiar to her from his writing, both his journalism and the best-selling thrillers he turned out — “Denial,’’ “Projection,” “Compulsion,’’ “Murder Suicide.’’ She had read all of those, as well as “Psychopath,’’ a book about a psychiatrist who prods the interior lives of strangers only to kill them, baroquely obscuring the distinction between patient and victim.

The woman — who has asked to be identified only by her confirmation name, Monique — found Dr. Ablow just as his media star was rising. That year, Roger Ailes had hired him as a regular contributor on Fox News, where he would remain until 2017, speculating about the mental states of political figures and presiding over viewer segments like “Normal or Nuts?”

Dr. Ablow offered counseling in the conventional sense, but he also conducted life-coaching via email. Monique engaged with him this way at first, but after she answered various questions about her past, mentioning adolescent bouts of depression, she agreed to see Dr. Ablow in person. His busy schedule meant that she would have to go to his primary office, in Newburyport, Mass. He was impressive to her, and so Monique made the five-hour trip for her first visit.

Over the next year and a half, Monique saw Dr. Ablow two or three times a week, at the reduced rate of $350 an hour. During this time she found herself coming unwound.

Her anxiety about work did not recede. On the contrary, she felt increasingly addled and insecure, and problems that had been latent for a long time resurfaced. She began cutting herself, something she hadn’t done in years.

Monique came to believe that Dr. Ablow had not only failed to help her; he left her more damaged than she already was. For his part, Dr. Ablow would maintain that whatever boundaries she thought he violated — the frequent texts and emails, the intimate revelations about his own life — were in the service of her treatment, well within the standard of sound psychiatric care.

As Monique would discover, it would take years — and several other patients coming forward with their own stories of manipulation — for Dr. Ablow’s transgressions to be taken seriously.

The case represents a core challenge of psychological treatment. At a cultural moment in which all kinds of relationships are policed for abuses of power imbalance, psychotherapy takes place in seclusion: two people, alone in a room, with one holding extraordinary influence over the other, just as it has been since Freud. It remains a world with murky oversight, and if you are harmed, it is not obvious what can be done.

By the time Monique left his care, her new marriage had fallen apart and she had developed a dependency on Valium, Xanax and Adderall. She also said she had drained her savings of $30,000 to pay for the treatment.

Most alarming, she had become obsessively, insidiously reliant on Dr. Ablow’s affirmation, a circumstance she and her lawyer would later suspect he engineered.

On an unusually hot late-summer morning, in a coffee shop just north of the city, Monique recounted how she had come under Dr. Ablow’s thrall. When she finally disentangled, she filed a complaint with the disciplinary board in New York that oversees psychiatrists — a body that works secretly and can take years to respond to charges. In this case, when it finally completed its initial review of Dr. Ablow, it found no reason to sanction him.

As we spoke over several hours, Monique’s caution gave way to a fluid and emotional narrative. It was easy to imagine her on the other side of conversations that played out this way hundreds of times. She was, in fact, a therapist herself.

That she had this training compounded the embarrassment anyone in her situation would surely feel. Monique was reflexively skeptical about human motivation. As a child she had resisted authority. How had she landed here?

From the beginning, Dr. Ablow presented himself as an idealized caretaker more than a guide. “As if he said, ‘Let down your guard, let go of everything and completely fall on me, because I will give you everything you ever needed. And you need nothing but to trust me,’” she reflected.

This was intoxicating to Monique. Her childhood had been marked by her father’s volatility, her mother’s emotional absence, a difficult relationship with her brother. With Dr. Ablow, she found herself in the strange state of feeling both further weakened by her past and protected from it.

If therapy is the project of overcoming, Monique belatedly came to believe that Dr. Ablow urged her neither toward strength nor self-reliance. “He did make me feel beautiful and precious and special,’’ she said. “But very broken.’’

On May 15, Dr. Ablow’s license was suspended in Massachusetts after an investigation determined that his continued practice was a threat to the “health, safety and welfare” of the public. He is appealing the ruling.

This article is based on interviews with Monique and others, including her current therapist as well as legal and medical documents obtained by The Times. Dr. Ablow did not respond to attempts to speak with him directly, but his lawyer, Paul Cirel, issued a statement on his behalf, writing in an email that his client would not “breach the ethical/confidentiality standards of his profession” and comment further.

Earlier this year, Dr. Ablow referred to the claims Monique made in her legal complaint to the health department in New York as “groundless.” He has categorically denied all allegations of sexual misconduct against him that have come up in subsequent cases. And he has said, as he did with Monique, that to whatever extent he revealed personal information with patients, he did so in the effort to help them work through issues of psychological importance.

On Feb. 5 next year, a hearing will take place in Massachusetts that will ultimately determine the future status of Dr. Ablow’s medical license.

From the outset, Monique had inklings of doubt about Dr. Ablow, but she easily suppressed them. Her first meeting with him ended with a prescription for an antidepressant. Although she found it curious that he would administer drugs so quickly, she deferred to his approach.

The boundary between patient and doctor was permeable from the start. Dr. Ablow took Monique to a taping at Fox; he connected her with a literary agent when she wanted to write. On one occasion, she mentioned she was near his office with her dog. This was in Newburyport, where she still went for treatment on occasion, running up bills in local inns, in addition to seeing him in New York. She knew Dr. Ablow had expressed an interest in meeting her dog, and he briefly left a session with another patient to come outside and play with him, she said.

Their sessions had an improvisational, transgressive tone. According to her official complaint, Dr. Ablow twice wondered, for no apparent therapeutic purpose, whether Monique had genital piercings. At one point, when she was describing a conflict with her father, Dr. Ablow responded: “Why don’t you tell your father to come stick a gun in my face and see what happens.”

Money was an ongoing problem for Monique, and she eventually questioned why so much of her costly time in therapy was spent listening to Dr. Ablow talk about issues he confronted in his own life — that his sister was drawn to broken men, that his son did a lot of pacing.

These confidences nonetheless made Monique feel as though she held outsize status with Dr. Ablow. Which made it all the more painful for Monique when she felt dismissed by him — when he would arrive late for their sessions, she said, or text and email during them.

Any of these incidents might have given her pause, but it took what she regarded as an explicit act of cruelty to compel her to leave. Early on, Monique had told Dr. Ablow that she feared, above all, being physically trapped — imprisoned, taken somewhere and locked up.

Many months later, during a disagreement about something relatively minor, she said, Dr. Ablow suggested that he might have to hospitalize her. Hospitalizing a distraught psychiatric patient is not an unreasonable course in certain circumstances, but Monique was certain he was preying on her vulnerabilities.

“I couldn’t trust him after that,” Monique said.

When Keith Ablow was in medical school at Johns Hopkins University in the 1980s, after graduating from Brown, he hoped to become an ophthalmologist. It was a mentor at Hopkins who suggested psychiatry, recognizing someone profoundly curious about other people’s lives.

His ambition was evident early on. He wrote the first of his 16 books, “Medical School: Getting In, Staying In, Staying Human,’’ while he was still a student. A paperback edition featured a blurb from The New England Journal of Medicine.

In the mid-1990s, Dr. Ablow was interviewed for a book, “In Session: The Bond Between Women and Their Therapists.’’ The author, Deborah Lott, had met him at a gathering of clinicians and found him to be insightful on the subject of boundaries and transference. Ms. Lott thought of him “as one of the good guys,’’ she said recently, “an advocate for women.”

Before his emergence at Fox, Dr. Ablow was a familiar presence on daytime talk shows, where he delivered advice with a brash compassion. Ms. Lott had lost track of him until his television appearances. As a Fox commentator, she said, his persona was radically different from the one she remembered. (A spokeswoman for Fox confirmed that Dr. Ablow’s contract was not renewed in 2017 and had no further comment.)

On TV, Dr. Ablow’s habit of diagnosing political leaders, particularly President Obama, who he believed suffered from abandonment issues that made him a weak leader, sparked criticism from a profession that maintains a fierce distaste for this sort of conjecture.

In 2014, Jeffrey Lieberman, chair of the psychiatry department at Columbia University, publicly denounced Dr. Ablow, who in turn responded with a clever press statement: “I am apparently joined by my nemesis Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman in rejecting the position that psychiatrists ought not comment on public figures. Lieberman condemned me as a ‘narcissistic self-promoter’ — yet he has never interviewed me.”

In November of that same year, Ms. Lott received a circumspect email from a young woman who had read her book and had questions about Dr. Ablow’s involvement. It was Monique. She was wondering what Dr. Ablow was doing in a book about boundaries. “She had no ax to grind,” Ms. Lott recalled, “other than trying to make sense out of what had happened.’’

Two years earlier, in 2012, Monique had outlined all of her allegations against Dr. Ablow in a lengthy complaint she made with New York State’s Office of Professional Medical Conduct, the agency empowered to suspend and revoke psychiatric licenses.

In these documents, she claimed that Dr. Ablow had crossed multiple boundaries, overwhelming her with details about himself — that he had been attracted to his children’s babysitters, for instance, and that his marriage was unfulfilling.

He asked her to coffee frequently. He encouraged her to move in with a female friend of his in Manhattan when Monique separated from her husband, only to later tell her that the roommate he recommended was “nuts.” He mentioned to Monique that he wanted to send a former all-star running back for the New York Giants to her as a patient. He also suggested that she date him.

At one point, while she was still seeing Dr. Ablow for regular therapy, he offered her a job with his life-coaching business. She took it, counseling people remotely. For a few months, she was both his patient and his employee.

In the course of her efforts to establish her own practice, Dr. Ablow encouraged Monique to move to Newburyport, which would be cheaper than New York.

She almost went through with it.

Monique had recently married a man after a four-year engagement, yet her ambivalence about him persisted. Dr. Ablow knew all about this. In fact, when she emailed him on the eve of her wedding, he gave her confounding advice. In his reply, he implicitly encouraged her to go through with it, at the same time remarking that marriage itself was “absurd.”

On the day she planned to move and leave her husband behind, in January 2011, a tremendous storm hit the Northeast. She decided to stay in New York, where she continued to see Dr. Ablow for another six months.

Once she made the decision to leave Dr. Ablow, Monique met with a Manhattan lawyer, Audrey Bedolis, who has concentrated in psychotherapeutic malpractice since the early 1990s.

Ms. Bedolis knew that cases without accusations of sexual misconduct, clear physical abuse or some other singular, dramatic incident are typically hard to litigate; she and her client eventually abandoned plans for a lawsuit. But Ms. Bedolis believed that the sheer volume of Dr. Ablow’s boundary trespasses would surely result in disciplinary action from state authorities.

In the dynamic between Monique and Dr. Ablow, Ms. Bedolis saw something all too familiar. Though she knew only Monique’s side of the story, it seemed to her a clear case of exploitation that, while it did not involve sex, was just as devastating. “First he medicated her when she never thought she should be medicated,’’ Ms. Bedolis said. “Then he lured her in as the only person who could help her.”

For several years, Monique waited to hear something from the conduct office in New York. In October 2017, the office finally wrote to say that it had found “insufficient evidence’’ to bring any charges of misconduct against Dr. Ablow.

One week after the New York board wrote to Monique saying that it would not sanction him, it sent a separate letter to Dr. Ablow, stating that in her case, he had failed to render proper care and treatment and that he prescribed medications inappropriately. He was told to refrain from boundary violations.

But there was no punishment for this; his license to practice psychiatry in New York remained in good standing.

This spring, however, based on Monique’s claims and the testimonies of four other female patients, as well as several former employees of Dr. Ablow’s, the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine ruled that Dr. Ablow practiced “in violation of law, regulations, and/or good and accepted medical practice.” As a result of that suspension, he consented to cease practice in New York, where a renewed investigation by the conduct office is underway.

Three of the women — like Monique, all young — told an investigator for the Massachusetts board that Dr. Ablow had become sexually involved with them during the course of their treatment. One of them said that he introduced her to sadomasochism and hit her with a belt during their encounters, exclaiming, “I own you.”

In a formal written response to the board, Dr. Ablow denied this, as well as the charges that he had been physically intimate with the other patients involved in the case.

In a statement issued in August, Dr. Ablow’s lawyer, Mr. Cirel, addressed the charges in a series of malpractice lawsuits brought against Dr. Ablow, which were settled out of court this year, as well as the allegations in the complaint to the state, writing: “We are pleased that the civil matters have been amicably resolved. Dr. Ablow can now focus his attention and resources on overturning the Board of Medicine’s order of temporary suspension, so that he can restore his medical license and resume helping patients into the future, as he has countless times in the past.”

Last winter, before the suits were settled, Dr. Ablow appeared on a Boston-area news show, where he addressed them and claimed to be a target of cancel culture. “A male, a public person and a Trump supporter,” Dr. Ablow said in the interview. “So am I surprised? Yeah. But shocked? No.”

In his rebuttal to the Massachusetts board, Dr. Ablow said that one of his accusers had a history of falsely accusing men of sexual misbehavior and that she had essentially confused what happened between them with the actions of a recurring character in his novels.

The documents filed in conjunction with Dr. Ablow’s suspension reveal something else as well — that in three separate instances in which his medical license came up for renewal in Massachusetts, between 2013 and 2017, he failed to notify the state that he was under investigation in New York. During the renewal process, an applicant is asked specifically if he or she is under investigation in a different state. Dr. Ablow said that he wasn’t.

After her time with Dr. Ablow, Monique was apprehensive about trusting a new therapist. Eventually she returned to the psychoanalyst she saw during her first year of graduate school, Robert Katz. Recently, she gave permission to Dr. Katz to speak about her experience with Dr. Ablow.

Monique entered treatment with him shaken by what had happened to her under Dr. Ablow’s care, he said. Dr. Katz viewed the boundary violations she described as a means of grooming her for a sexual relationship.

Of everything she brought up, Dr. Katz added, one detail stuck out most in his mind: that Dr. Ablow had suggested to Monique that she become an escort to earn the extra money she needed. (Dr. Ablow has denied ever saying this, and denied it again when another patient made the same claim.)

In recent years Monique has settled into a successful private practice (this is why she insisted on anonymity in exchange for participating in this article).

Still, even now, after all she has come to understand, she finds herself occasionally missing the connection she had with Dr. Ablow, longing again to experience how much she imagined she meant to him.

When a psychiatrist, psychologist or social worker is barred from practicing, it does not necessarily mean that they are prevented from dispensing advice, in an office, for profit. Life-coaching is a career open to almost anyone; requiring no credentials, it is largely unregulated.

After the suspension of his license, Dr. Ablow repositioned himself. The Ablow Center for Mind and Soul in Newburyport identifies Dr. Ablow on its website as someone who “practiced psychiatry for over 25 years before developing his own life-coaching, mentoring and spiritual counseling system.” Over the summer, he took courses in pastoral counseling at Liberty University, the evangelical Christian college in Lynchburg, Va.

The Ablow Center is expanding its services, including free therapy for veterans once a month. It also announced an essay contest for high-school and college students considering a career in counseling.

Beyond that, visitors to the center’s website can find regular blog posts from Dr. Ablow, like a recent entry with the headline, “Why a Depression and Anxiety Consultant Could Be the Key to Recovering.”

For anyone “still’’ feeling anxious or low, Dr. Ablow had some wisdom: “It may have nothing to do with you,” he wrote, “and everything to do with the treatments being offered to you.”

______

Ginia Bellafante has served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big City columnist. She began her career at The Times as a fashion critic, and has also been a television critic. She previously worked at Time magazine. @GiniaNYT

#fox news #mental health #mental ill health #mental heath support #u.s. news #public health #health #health & fitness #health news #nyt > top stories #top news

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xenosgirlvents · 5 years

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The Way Out - Review

Synopsis: A ship becalmed in space needs repairs. Fortunately, a nearby watch station offers refuge… Surely nothing can go wrong for the crew of the Fortune's Favour?

Plot: This is a fairly good one, definitely the best of Warhammer Horror I’ve come across so far. In many ways the setup is a classical horror and scifi trope which serves it well. A group of spacefarers come across an eerie station and board it...then things start to go bad.

Have you ever watched Event Horizon? In many ways there are similarities between the plots. You have some sort of spacecraft, a spacestation in this case named most ironically Refuge, a group of unlucky victims board it and begin to experience an escalating series of horror phenomena linked to their own personal experiences.

The horror aspect is executed excellently in this one, throughout, playing to the subtle, personal rather than the visceral or gory. The horror strikes at the things the cast regret or feel guilt for, or whatever personal foible they have, dragging it out before them and forcing them to face it. Even till the end there isn’t much in the way of mindless action scenes and the horror remains largely subtle which I enjoy a lot.

In what, I feel, will become a repetitive section when discussing Warhammer Horror is that the ending is once more completely bleak and hopeless. I know Horror loves this as a genre but in my opinion the best horror stories don’t just use the hopeless ending. Regardless though the ending is lacklustre to me the overall plot is still good, develops well and has several good moments.

Characters: This is one of the most successful juggling of a large cast I have ever seen in a Warhammer audio drama. I’m honestly impressed. Most audio dramas can manage a single protagonist and a single antagonist if they are good, with other characters being very exogenous, but this story manages 5! The character dynamics and interactions are strong here, working together well, in many ways like Corsair: Face of the Void, which also has a very good character interaction web.

Our characters are the command crew of the vessel; Captain Karina, Security Officer Halitz, Techpriestess Sumer (my love) and Navigator Dhovar.

Sumer is my favourite character of the story and is lovingly portrayed. She is by far the greatest source of comedy and such a ray of proverbial sunshine that, although she has no depth to her, she helps prevent the story from lapsing into the common ‘overly dark’ tone by giving it some levity. She’s clearly a character mostly serving the role of tension breaker with no real arc or depth to her but she has a vibrant personality and, most importantly, is simply an immensely likeable character.

Dhovar, obvious bad guy, is the obvious bad guy. For most of the audio drama he is a weak character simply written as the obvious problem. He’s arrogant, likes no-one, constantly hears voices whispering to him and decides he wants to follow the mysterious voices (surely not a bad idea at all!) and tell no-one about them. I’d overall say he’s just a stock bad villain except...the final moments of the story do redeem him somewhat. They give a very personal, human, motive to his recklessness which, though not saving him from being the stock idiot of a horror story who reads the necronomicon, does make him easier to understand.

Halitz is honestly an interesting character. But there is a...a soured aspect to it. You see in many ways Halitz is clearly the stealth protagonist, not Karina. Although the story begins presenting Karina as the protagonist much of the mid and end focuses purely on Halitz and his dark past fighting Tyranids as a member of the Astra Militarum. Halitz has a nuanced depiction; initially a generic military tough guy but then as we see into his mind he’s actually a deeply damaged man, grappling guilt and PTSD and who suffers from the well-fleshed out character flaw that he simply cannot take responsibility for himself, he always, always, needs to find a way to shift his actions, the consequences of them, on to someone else. All this makes for an interesting character who highlights human weaknesses well but...at the expense of very much turning this from a story about Captain Karina’s experience into a story of Halitz’s weaknesses. Part of the problem, I fear, is that as a horror story it needs a character who can feel fear and be affected by the horror inside but Karina is, mostly, depicted as so impossible to scare or intimidate that she doesn’t serve well as a viewpoint character once the horror begins. Still it leaves a bad taste in my mouth as Halitz largely becomes the protagonist and Karina ends up shunted aside.

Karina herself is a fun and engaging character who’s only weakness is that, inside a horror story, she is perhaps to unflappable, able to simply bulldoze her way through the horror with apparent ease, the only member of the core cast who isn’t overcome by some manifestation of her own weaknesses. Atlhough this makes her very fun and enjoyable the result is that I feel the narrative never spends to much time on her since it wants to focus on the other characters who are affected by the horror. I’m already beginning to fear these Warhammer Horror stories will have a trend of female ‘badass’ characters who are ‘important’ and do complete actions in the plot but end up having little substance or agency as Captain Brandon is somewhat similar in Perdition’s Flame.

Beyond this there is then also Kosch, a lone survivour found aboard the station. There is little to say of Kosch. She does an adequate job of providing exposition in an organic manner, conveying the fear of the horror before it becomes persistent, but she has little character beyond that to discuss.

Sound Design: The sound work on this one is very good! Sumer’s voice, in particular, I want to praise as conveying both a distinctly human and emotive voice with synthetic and mechanical aspects interwoven which make it actually really pleasant to listen too.

Beyond that the use of accompanying background noises are used well, the voice acting is good for the most part...though I’d note Black Library’s somewhat limited pool of Voice Actors and Actresses is noticeable in a production with a large cast like this because Crewwoman Kosch sounds almost identical to Captain Brandon from Perdition’s Flame.

A small complaint though: like Perdition’s Flame the ‘supernatural’ voices used are very much of the ‘deep and rumbling’ variety that echo. This isn’t on its own bad or concerning but...if every single ‘spooky’ voice ends up being this same deep, bass, rumble it will soon move from ‘intimidating’ to just boring. I hope we get more range on the spooky voices in the future.

Themes: The story’s focus is rather obviously on the weaknesses of people, things which motivate them. Every member of the core cast has a weakness which rears itself in the story:

Halitz is wracked with guilt over his treatment of a comrade in the past, this manifests in a seemingly compulsive inability to ever accept the consequences for his own actions as part of an extended denial, Sumer is consumed with curiosity and the need to understand the unknown even when she places herself in danger to do so, Dhovar’s issue is the crux of the story so I shan’t go into it in detail, save to say that he misses his home and would do anything to get back there and Karina exemplifies hurting people you care for when they are threatening you and others through their actions. Of all of these only Karina ‘overcomes’ her foible, confronts it and owns it, not as something she must repent for, but as something she accepts about herself. Halitz falls into complete denial, so desperate to never accept blame that he will do anything to escape it, Sumer risks herself to satiate her curiosity and Dhovar makes a terrible bargain even knowing he shouldn’t before he finally sacrifices himself at the end to undo his mistake.

Conclusion: The best of Warhammer Horror by far yet and honestly just an enjoyable little piece of work. I’d recommend it for anyone who wants to get into Warhammer Horror as I don’t think it holds much for someone looking for a normal Warhammer adventure.

#warhammer #warhammer 40k #warhammer 40000 #the way out #audio drama #warhammer horror #astra militarum #imperial guard #adeptus mechanicus #navis nobilite #navigator #imperial navy

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coral-station · 5 years

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1: Fresh Start Station (Draft)

Agent 8 needed a new name. After everything she had gone through and despite all that she had gained, it wasn't without loss. Her arduous journey that started with her fateful encounter with a young squid she would come to know as Agent 3, propelled her through the darkest depths of the deep sea and - perhaps without her full understanding - culminated in the social liberation of her kind. Torrents of demanding feats and tests came at her one after the other as she was set in pursuit of Agent 3. The reasons and truths drew closer each step of the way and, Agent 8, surfaced alongside them. Agent 8, with help from a surprisingly crackpot team of Squid, Cuttlefish and Octopus had overcome a maniacal and ancient evil to, much like their composition, united societies and found a freedom deeper than the oceans they escaped from. What was lost however, was Agent 8 herself. 'Agent 8' was a nickname for convenience sake; her previous name, memories and life was left behind, torn off at the bottom of the sea. The only thing Agent 8 had left floating in her mind was the heavenly melody of the Calamari Inkantation, brought in by a rebellious tide that carried so much flotsam from a wreckage of life to be left behind.

"How about we just call you 8?" Said Pearl who, by this point, had become tired of thinking about the same thing for this long.

"No, Pearlie. It needs to have more meaning to it, you know" Marina looked over at me, warmly considering my feelings "You've gotta start fresh, right?"

"Yeah, you're right. I want to start re-establishing me again, somehow" Marina shot me a quick pose as I did my best to hide the pensive look that grew on my face.

Pearl stood up from the lavish sofa, perhaps jumped off like a small child who sunk too far into the overly fluffy cushions would be a more accurate way to describe the small squid's movements. I watched as she trudges along the matching pink, fluffy rug that filled in the floor space from here on the sofa to most of the way to what was more window than wall. Sunlight broke through the thin cloud cover and warmed the large open-plan seating room so effortlessly in a way I never thought I would experience. I have a vague recollection of seeing the sun's rays break through the waves far above my head. Thinking of when I would have been in such shallow waters as to see the sun gave me a headache. While remembering specifics of my life from before is tough, I still recall clearly how cold and dank Octarian society was and, most of all, how profoundly deep down our lives were. This separation from the world above was stressed upon us no more clearly than in rare specs of light that penetrated our darkness, teasing us of what was up there - teasing us only if you still had a mind to think with of your own.

After concluding the events that had me fighting for the liberation of all Octolings from a society that was as oppressive as the ocean's pressure, I began to live with Pearl and Marina. This duo had assisted me under the guises of M.C. Princess and D.J. Hyper_Fresh respectively. Pearl was a shorter-than-most-squid who, despite living in luxury her whole life, was honest, tireless and as loyal as a barnacle. Marina, on the other hand, was actually an Octoling like me! Likewise, her life was changed when she first heard the Calamari Inkantation. Unlike me, she had managed to escape to the surface world and join the Inkling's society all by herself. When Pearl and Marina met, they had instantly bonded over their love of music and formed a band: Off the Hook. Off the Hook just as instantly became a hit and the two of them of are at the forefront of Inkling pop-culture, but I've come to know rather differently following their stint as my undercover saboteurs.

"But what you did was really something!" Pearl spun around from large pane of glass and beamed a smile as radiant as the summer afternoon. "I thought that continuing to call you 8 would carry some ... gravy"

Marina and I surely shared the same dumbfounded look on our faces for a moment until Marina cracked the code. "Do you mean gravitas?"

"...What did I say?" Pearl then joined ranks and wore a similar confused expression. There was nothing to do but laugh about it.

"Thanks, Pearl. I just would rather start life here with a blank slate and fill it out myself from here on" I stretched out my legs and stood up, leaving what I imagined was the softest place on this earth. I had no real intention to go anywhere and just walk around idly, but as if catching me before I left forever Marina spoke up.

"Are you still thinking of leaving soon, finding your own place?" Marina may well have held out her arm to grab me "I mean, I- uh, we, want to help you all we can. It's the least we can do"

It was clear Marina felt somehow indebt to me personally, owing to her also being an Octoling. The significance of it all was never lost on me. "I would love that" not being in a position to be as self-reliant as I want to be quite yet, I could only accept gratefully.

It was the polite thing to do anyway, to oblige and let both Marina and Pearl express their gratitude - not that I feel deserving completely. Truthfully, the whole ordeal was such a whirlwind, I can hardly believe I was capable of doing something of the things I had to. They say in certain dire situations you find that your body is capable of unimaginable physical feats. I must have tapped into my primal instincts - do or die. It was a real rush! Living with Pearl and Marina in their stylish mansion far from the city - further from the sea - it was too quiet, relaxed and I was on edge. Even now I find it uncomfortable to sit still for too long. When I look out to or ponder around the well-kept garden, the smell of cut grass and trimmed hedges that soothes others only makes me almost uncontrollably agitated by the serenity of it all. My bedroom window towards the rear of the estate overlooks the garden's stone bird water feature, waking up to that sight in the morning irritates me. I cannot comprehend that thing. Marina often sits beside it watching the flesh and birds that congregate to sing, as if offering their songs for consideration to Marina as she works on her with her laptop and headphones. I think it’s supposed to be calming - at least that's what she says. "The sun's early morning warmth and sweet bird song are all I need to recharge my heart when I'm feeling down or burnt out" was her answer when I asked her once. Not that I meant to, the question just found its way from my head and out through my mouth to Marina. "Oh! And my Pearlie! Nothing else works quite like her when it comes to recharging my heart" she would add with a coy smile pressing one hand against her cheek.

I want to break the whole thing. Kick my legs out at it and flail my arms until one or the other breaks.

My head often fills with sudden impulses like that. Even when I see Pearl and Marina cosy-up with each other, all I can do is fake a smile and try not to wrest my tentacles from my mantle. Not that I have anything against them, my emotions just go from zero to one hundred with only enough time for me to pretend they don't exist. I've never acted out of turn though, I've managed to resist these compulsions for now. Though, when my mind isn't preoccupied with something else, or when I'm not kept busy, I'm constantly bombarded from the inside like this. It gets worse. This next bit is very tough for me, I don't want to admit it’s going on. I can hardly bring myself to believe it’s real. I'm haunted by a phantom. Not a phantom of the gloopy life form that inhabited the telephone, but of the train. When I close my eyes and silence is all I hear, the distant chug of the train rolls in from the darkness. The darkness itself soon bares arrival to the train's headlights. The long hallways of Pearl and Marina's grand design does nothing to abide this presence either. At night, I see the train pull past the far end of the hallways. The sleek finished double wooden doors around the house shift their state to better resemble the automatic doors of the deep-sea metro's carts when I'm on my own and no one else can see. The normal relationship of commuter and public transport has been spun on its head and the train awaits my arrival, with this house the station - or perhaps, more specifically, the destination. Trying to reconcile these thoughts cuts me deep to my core. I have no sense of previously established sense of self to draw from and explain my own thoughts logically thereby. Where there may once have been a 'me' is lost and replaced by the mess I am now. This new me that I am now has lost something far more integral to my being than the difference in the change of my surroundings. It is as though I left behind all my personal belongings on the station when I boarded the train, or left them on the train when I alighted the station. Which way around is it? I cannot possibly tell.

I let Pearl and Marina know I would be stepping out the rest of the day, to get some air and explore around. Pearl had some business in the city that evening and insisted I join her on her way down if I was going that direction. Since it would be no imposition on her driver to have me as an extra passenger, I took her up on her offer. A launch event for a line of Camp Triggerfish camping gear, clothes and various other sundries was being held at The Reef. Since Camp Triggerfish was owned by Pearl's family, it was her idea to hold a wild launch party with live performance from Off the Hook. In the end, she had to settle for much more tame press event purely for publicity sake. Canopies and expensive champagne would be the height of the festivities to encourage favourable write ups. While it may just be purely circumstantial, Pearl was certainly much more active and busier than her impression gives off, so this half-hour at most car journey would be the most time I've spent in her company just the two of us. It was a little hard to tell if Pearl felt as anxious about this as I was, but the thought of visit Inkopolis gave me an opportunity to act on one of my impulsive thoughts that a little awkwardness wouldn't be too hard to put up with. Thankfully, Pearl is just as surprisingly comfortable to be around.

"You know, my Dad has a few empty condos not too far the pad now that we could set you up in" Pearl could tell I had something on my mind and, as outlandish as her lifestyle is, her offer was completely genuine and considerate to me.

"Wow, thank you. Honestly. But I'll have to pass up on such an offer. Not that I want to reject all your generosity, I just had something smaller in mind. Something more quaint" Sitting next to Pearl on the leather seats, absentmindedly stroking the fabric upholstery in Pearl's chauffeur driven limousine it wasn't hard to imagine how it was possible that she just offer up a condo space for me so easily.

At home Pearl is a little slobbish, unkempt and sometimes disastrous when it comes to household chores, but here in the car's atmosphere she cuts a much more refined figure. It was as though she could flip a literal switch that turned her from an unruly child to a sophisticated and responsible adult. I was about to ask after her father's work when she leaned over to the window on my side and redirected my attention. "Check it! The ocean. It's for real mad, yo!"

Without time to breakdown what she was saying, I looked outside to see the cliffs break to reveal the ocean that expanded across the horizon. "Mad" I found myself repeating. The sight was gorgeous. The ocean could be seen from Pearl's place but the cliff edges were a little further on so the view was always a little oblique. I had yet to return to Inkopolis since moving in with Pearl and Marina so this was an entirely new vista for me. The sun reflected so large on the ocean with waves' ripples further imposing its size. To the east the tall skyscrapers of Inkopolis also made their presence on the ocean's surface known too by cast an equally impressive reflection. Driving down from the hillside also brought into view the harbour opposite the mainland of Inkopolis. It was this harbour from which we bested Tar-Tar and the weaponised statue. The partially recognisable head of the statue that remained mostly sunken beneath the ocean would soon come into view, and so too would the memories of the fight. The sky rails. The bombs from the helicopter. Pearl's heroic roar. The throbbing of my hearts.

"You can see it, yeah, the head?" Pearl broke the silence and my intense stare relaxed, but my eyes still remained fixed.

"I wonder if anyone else really know what happened" I took a deep breath then breathed out. Pearl sat back in her seat contemplating how to answer. No, was the obvious answer, but I think my question had an extra layer to it that we both knew to be there, hidden underneath.

"Perhaps someone else saw it. Perhaps a few. It was such a big to-do and we got so caught up in focusing on what we had to do that we could have had a large cheering crowd before us and we didn't notice"

"It wouldn't have been at all like you to miss out on a chance to put on a show for them" I surprised myself by saying something like that so casually.

"Hey! What do you think my scream was for? I can only hope they boo-yah'd back!" Pearl and I shared a good chuckle.

Spending time with Pearl on the car journey into Inkopolis was a lot more rewarding than I imagined. I actually felt somewhat embarrassed being so initially pensive, but I think Pearl understands me a whole lot more than she lets on. Soon the car drove through the harbour and across the long bridge over the ocean into Inkopolis proper. Showing further her ability to intuit me, or at least the mood, Pearl instructed the driver to stop the car and let me out after we finished our cresting the bridge. I thanked Pearl for bringing and for the pleasant journey. It was probably unnecessary to say that second part out loud, my mouth had gotten the better of me. Pearl shrugged it and, before closing the door and zooming off to prepare for her event this evening, she gave made me one more offer.

"The thing at the Reef tonight, come to it if you want. Sorry I didn't remember to invite you sooner. Just say you're on the guest list!" She closed the door and waved to me from inside the window, at some point she managed to put on a pair of dark sunglasses without me noticing. Pearl rode off without telling me a specific time for the launch party and smile played its way on my face. That was more along the lines of what I expected from Pearl. Nonetheless, I was now in Inkopolis. I felt empowered. I felt like was finally taking my own lead again. But my mind soon grew blank. Where was I going? No, that's not quite right. I knew where I wanted to go, I'm just hesitating. There was only one place I felt drawn. I had to shift the balance, put it right again. I had to go to underground, back to the deep-sea Metro.

#coral-station #coral station #ink-182 #splatoon oc #splatoon fan fic #splatoon fan-fic #splatoon #splatoon 2 #ink 182

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funkymbtifiction · 6 years

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Infinity War: Thanos [INTJ]

OFFICIAL TYPING by Starry / ENTP Mod

WARNING: *May contain spoilers!*

Functional Order: Ni-Te-Fi-Se

Perceiving Functional Axis:

Introverted Intuition (Ni) / Extroverted Sensing (Se)

His Te services his warped Ni vision of promoting balance in the universe. Gamora mentions that he has always been obsessed with the idea of acquiring all six Infinity Stones, ever since she was a child. That is indicative of him nurturing his Ni obsession, and using the rest of his functions in order to devise tactical strategies to overcome all foreseeable setbacks, and procure them. His Ni foresees destruction if the universe carries on the way it has, recklessly. His NiSe feels the overwhelming urge to act in order to bend the Universe to his convoluted vision. Wanting to shape the “imperfect” world into his deluded notion of a "perfect" world is an inferior Se compensation for a very distorted Ni. He improvises well on the battlefield, but he had never engaged in physical combat till necessary. All these years were spent perfecting his plan, only after that does he launch direct strikes. He is successful because of the degree to which he can foresee the conclusions of his actions, and be prepared to effectively use the physical environment to his advantage. It is easy to think he has higher Se but much of his power comes from the Infinity Stones themselves. He does not relish violence and uses it only as a means to an end. His Ni makes him profoundly detached when it comes to wiping out entire civilizations, in order to restore balance. When he sheds tears before taking the Soul Stone, this is an act that humanizes him and serves as a reminder that Thanos is not like other villains. He is not doing this to amass power and rule the Universe. His efforts are towards servicing a higher purpose, a higher "ideal".

Judging Functional Axis:

Extroverted Thinking (Te) / Introverted Feeling (Fi)

Living in extremely harsh conditions and experiencing first hand, the loss of his home planet forced Thanos to create a concrete Te means of preventing this, which is simple and extremely direct in its execution. His TeFi makes him self reliant, and he does not share the emotional burden he has carried with him. His pain is deeply suppressed till he shapes it into a vision that he is compulsively driven to implement. Through TeFi, Thanos is able to pay the steep price needed to obtain the Soul Stone. His TeFi also plays out when his chosen method randomizes the chaos of destruction. His Fi makes him design it in a manner that it is quick, with an emphasis on mercy.

Enneagram Core: 1w9 - social

The whole build-up to his arc is about him acquiring the Stones to carry out his vision. His vision is about saving the Universe and doing the right thing. He focuses on right and wrong, condemning the reckless consumption that will lead the Universe to its ultimate doom. His solution is simple and direct. He applies it universally, he is supremely logical and detached about it unlike a 1w2 would be. He is promoting his universal values and vision across the board, as opposed to the 1w2 that has a subjective micro-focus compared to the 1w9's macro-focus. He also executes his entire plan with a calm demeanor, much suited to someone with a 9 wing rather than a 2 wing.

Hogwarts House: Ravenclaw

Thanos is a Ravenclaw, because he is not about bravery, or cunning or toil although he shows that he is capable of all three throughout his arc. What stands out the most is his extremely logical, if even inhuman approach to problem "solving". His superiority complex about his own intellectual prowess is implicit. Using it in service of his grand vision is what enables him to not step back when he is required to pay the ultimate price in order to obtain the Soul Stone. He seeks no personal gain in bringing his vision to fruition. He sacrifices everything with no hope of any reward. The reward is in the solution itself, which is a distinctly Ravenclaw trait.

#mbti #enneagram #mcu #avengers #infinity war #intj #thanos #enneagram 1 #enneagram 1w9 #ravenclaw #ravenclaw villains #official typing #c: intj #m: intj #c: 1w9 #c: enneagram #social #intj x 1w9 #character typing

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eco-lily · 6 years

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Raindrops and Rooftops ♡

It was quiet. So noiseless, it made the dark haired woman uneasy. Unable to rest, where she sat on the couch. Normally, Lily was enjoying the solitude. Able to think freely, without the constant interruption from her roommate. Yet, that was when Morgane was away for work. Traveling, for her job, in wanderlust fashion.

Now, however, it made the area colder. Her friend was just down the hall, door opened a crack. Silent. There was no constant streams of conspiracy theories , or aliens, or cryptids. Leaving Lily pouting. There wasn't messes across the apartment; no sticky notes or lost articles of clothing. No books she stumbled over. Her obsessive compulsive behavior was calmed.

It wasn't right. Something was wrong.

It was movie night, damnit. Lily, dressed in an overly large sweatshirt and spandex shorts, was waiting on an event that wouldn't happen. There should have been popcorn kernels strewn over the area rug. Sticky stains from sour candies on the coffee table. Screams from some b-horror movie actress, or an old black and white Hepburn film with tissues at the ready.

Her bare feet padded towards the bedroom door, hesitant. Still, there was a silence. And from her position, Lily could clearly see a bottle of red wine on the bed. A figure lying upon the mattress, fingers gripping the bottle, at she stared at the ceiling.

Something was wrong, that much was clear. The scientist vaguely wondered which coworker it was. To have brought the flight attendant to the depths of her depression all over again. It wasn't Morgane, when she was like this. The constantly optimistic, opinionated, and boisterous woman was just... Not there.

Lily held a hand over her aching heart. The empathetic nature filling the woman, as if Morgane's pain was her own. Oh, darling...

Then, an idea. Like a light bulb sparking to life above her head, as a smile broadly spread across her lips. She darted back to the living room. The noises of opening, and closing doors. Cupboards. Rustling of fabric. Metallic clinks. It resonated from the apartment; a symphony of noise it seemed the other didn't care to measure.

Probably another late night cleaning expose'. Per Lily's OCD.

It took about forty five minutes to set up, and Lily was proudly standing with hands on her hips. It was quick, really. Nothing perfect. But, it would do.

The bedroom door swung open with such a force it bounced back from the wall. Startling Morgane, who's eyes widened before narrowing at her roommate.

"What the hell, Lil?"

"C'mon."

"I'm busy."

"You're not busy. Bring the wine." But, the shorter woman was already reaching over. Tugging Morgane to her feet, to follow closely behind. The bottle in tow. They were going to need it.

Down the short hall, past the kitchen and through the living room. Where the tiny balcony sat. Doors swung open, as the drizzle of rain began to fall from the clouds. Mimicking Morgane's mood. Upon the cement sat their two chairs, often only used during the day. Or late night drinking that brought more than laughter. That balcony was one of a million memories; all good.

Blankets and pillows piled onto the chairs, and the old glass coffee table was squeezed in front of them. Upon it, a simple laptop. With Netflix brought up, and ready to go. The string of violet lights Lily had placed around her bedframe, had been drug out. Dangling at the metal railing haphazardly.

"C'mon." The dark haired scientist tugged Morgane's hand, out into the crisp autumn air. For a moment, she stood still. Giving comforting squeezes to the flight attendants hand. A silence spread between them, as two different pairs of eyes stared out at the city. The violet lights only a blot against the thousands that littered New York City in its beauty.

The city of hope. The streets had once been rumored to be paved in gold. A new life. A stretch of creativity, from the single most starving artist using spray paint on street corners. All the way to the men in skyscrapers eating caviar. People of all walks of life traveled to this city. To have a glimpse of its wonder.

"I know some things wrong.." It was quietly spoken, and Lily didn't look to her roommate. Merely stared out at the wonders they had accomplished. "You don't have to tell me. The whole 'been there, done that' spiel. But, I wanted to remind you that.. You've come this far."

Morgane sighed, merely staring out at the city scape. Sparing a glance at Lily, as her hand tightened around her fingers. "Lil, I'm sorry-"

"This is life, Mor. I mean, shit happens." Lily shrugged, "But.. We came this far. Y'know? Even if we take two steps backwards, not everyone can say we didn't make it. Because we did. We have."

The scientist tipped her head, to look at her friend. A small smile tipping her lips. For any friend in her life, Lily was not one to back down. Especially, Morgane. The one person who gave her confidence. Gave her moral support, and reassurance in any situation. Made her brave. Even in the face of danger; while hacking systems during Morgane's nightly escapades as a vigilante. Lily would lie if she said she wouldn't give her life for the woman.

"I'm just taking a wild guess that it has something to do with work. Since you've not been the same since you've come back... Tonight's movie night, you never miss that."

"Its just-"

"All I need is a name."

"Its a list."

"I can work with a list!" Lily was exuberant, leaning forward with a tongue sticking out. "It's a simple malware that can be transferred via email. Phones, laptops, desktops, I mean it works across the board! I could change a few things, make ringtones sound like porn noises. Freeze a bank account. Even... Get this, leak their fetishes to the world..."

Morgane let out a laugh, that seemed almost strangled in a sob. It was swift, as her arms wrapped around the scientist. Bringing her into a tight hug, that was quickly reciprocated. Lily's arms winding around her waist, as she breathed a sigh of relief.

There she was. Her Morgane.

"You're a brat, when you get like this." Lily's muffled voice came from Morgane's shirt. "Totally ignore me. Lock yourself up. You know I need constant human contact." The joke was effortless, causing more chuckles.

"Its like I have a cat."

"Just feed me. Give me attention when I want it. Change my litter-"

"Oh my God!"

Lily pulled away, grinning through her giggles. Before sobering, and speaking more on a subject that seemed past.

"Morgane is the name of a Celtic Goddess. She was a warrior, powerful in battle, often depicted riding alongside men in her time. When no woman was. She also healed people, treating ailments and helping others. Don't you ever forget you are a warrior Goddess. You can overcome anything."

Another embrace, so quick and strong it nearly knocked Lily backwards into one of the deck chairs.

"I care too much.." Lily expressed with a sigh.

"Only because you almost didn't get movie night."

"Yeah... I mean, I was really excited about watching that new It movie.." The dry joke was brought with more laughter. An endless sea of it, as the night wore on.

A Goddess, and a Hacking Scientist. Who would have thought the two would have found a friendship?

#eco lily #lily #aimless horizon #morgane #Fo My Lady #You are a warrior #Named after a warrior goddess #never forget that #I got you #i also never break a promise #heres that Lily and Morgane drabble #♡

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