#when your institutions abuse us. think about that why don’t you | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

seireitonin · 2 months

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heyy, i am huge fan of creepypasta (espacially Toby), so could u make headcannons about him in relationship in his 30's? Btw i love your content and follow u on tt :3

I’m so sorry I’m just now getting to this! I get distracted and I’m not on tumblr a lot! Anyway thank you for your patience and support!!

Dating Toby in his 30s

Dating Toby was hard already

With his mood swings, cocky behavior and detachment despite him loving you so much

This was BEFORE he got captured

Now that he escaped the mental institution and is more traumatized than he already was….its worse

He clings to you now more than ever, scared to lose you

Scared you don’t love him anymore, although he’ll never say it

Why?

He got captured. It’s humiliating, embarrassing to him. A hit to his ego

So he’s kinda insecure about the way you view him. He doesn’t want to look weak or helpless in front of you. He’s supposed to be protecting you

He’s also much more possessive and protective over you, so scared something is gonna take you from him

Getting him to eat food has been a challenge

Getting him to do anything but lay in bed and stare at a wall has been a challenge

You thought he was unstable before? That’s worse too

Every single noise makes him jump

He’s so paranoid never able to relax

Some nights he’ll stand in the corner talking to the wall, unblinking. It’s what he did at the mental institution

You’ll have to lead him back to bed and hold him until he eventually snaps out of it

Even then he’ll never be the person he was before he got captured

Your Toby is gone

He’s much more moody and aggressive

“What the fuck are you coddling me for? You think I’m weak?”

“No. I dont. I’m worried about you”

He wouldn’t talk to you like that before. You know he doesn’t mean it

He used to love when you cared about him, when you held him

Toby can’t stand the feeling of being at another mercy or weak. It’s how he felt when he was being abused by his dad and being at the mercy of his captors brought back that feeling

Has more tic attacks because he has fears/ thoughts and hallucinations about being back in that place. His anxiety is constantly off the charts too, he’s gone back to chewing the skin off his fingers

His tics were less frequent before he got captured but now they’re constant, his tic attacks coming in harder and more frequent than ever

His tics are just straight up begging and screaming sometimes. Those are the noises he would make in the mental institution and they’re permanently part of his tics now

He hates it. Hates that you have to hear that

But you’re understanding and support him anyway

He loves the fact that you’re so understanding. He loves you

He can’t believe he was ever apart from you

He got captured protecting you

You were both surrounded, he pretended that he kidnapped you and that you were his next victim

To be fair he did kidnap you but you were never his victim

“I’m sorry I have to do this” he said as he cupped your face in his hands and looked into your eyes

“What-“

He grabbed you, putting you in a headlock choking you tightly, hearing the police come

Toby whispered aggressively in your ear as he squeezed your throat so the police would believe that you were his victim, not his lover

“Don’t say a word and listen to me. When they ask questions, you don’t fucking know me. I kidnapped you. I was going to kill you. You were trying to escape and I found you. You don’t remember anything. Do you fucking hear me? When they let you go, you go back to our cabin and you fucking lay low. Don’t come look for me. Don’t you fucking dare”

He had never been serious with you like that before as he gave you a story to tell and instructions in your ear

It scared you. As if you just remembered that he was a murderer and could just end you if he wanted although you knew he wouldn’t hurt you

The police surrounded you both soon after and he held the blade of his hatchet to your throat as he kept you in a headlock

“Come any closer and I’ll kill this bitch!” He screamed out making you truly look like a victim

After a standoff and you safely being handed over to the police and being put in the back of an ambulance, Toby got cuffed and shoved in the back of a police car

You exchanged a final glance, as you fought back tears to not look suspicious as you watched the man you love get taken away from you to an unknown fate

Its another reason you’ll never leave his side

He sacrificed himself and what little sanity he had to keep you safe

He told you about everything they did to him there. The experiments, the abuse and him being seen as less than human, the straight jackets, the metal mussel they had on him at all times, the padded room, having to hear people talk to him about his past from his abuse to the murder of his father to working for what they thought was a fictional being called Slenderman

Everyone looked at him with fear. With his many kills under his belt and his unpredictable nature

Hearing all of it fills you with guilt

He went through all that because he loves you

So you’ll never leave him. How could you ever? After what he did for you

Toby wakes up screaming at night sometimes, thinking he’s back in the institution or having a vivid dream about it

He’ll pull on his hair and his tics become violent and he thrashes

You just rub his back “it’s okay. I’m here. You’re here. You’re safe”

He feels bad after it’s over every time but it comes out like aggression because he doesn’t want to be vulnerable

“I know. I’m not stupid.”

He’s grateful. He is. Truthfully he’s scared and anxious but he’ll never tell you.

But you already know and you still love him

He loves you too, just give him time to readjust and he’ll try his best to get better for you again but that won’t be for a long time

You miss your Toby.

Your playful,upbeat, cocky and obnoxious Toby.

He wasn’t perfect but he was yours

Now you feel guilt when you look at him

“Toby…do you hate me?”

“No”

“You’re lying to me aren’t you”

“No! Why are you saying that?!”

“Because I feel like it’s my fault you got captured! I’m the reason that you went through that!”

He looks at you, blankly “no. You’re not the reason. It probably would’ve eventually happened regardless. I just did what I had to do to protect you. That’s it. So don’t say anything stupid like that to me ever again. I didn’t go through that for nothing. I did it for you.”

You tear up and for the first time in months, you hold each other. He holds you. And you hold him and he feels good. You missed him.

He takes you in, remembering how much he loves you. Going through all that for you and being able to keep you safe was enough for him

You love each other despite these horrible circumstances and the new problems that came from this

He lets you run your hands through his hair while your in bed together like he used to before

He’s starting to hold you again

He’s still not 100% his old self and most likely never will be, but he’s trying his best

Because he needs you now more than ever

And you will always be here

#creepypasta #creepypasta hcs #creepypasta characters #creepypasta fandom #creepypasta headcanon #ticci toby headcanons #ticci toby #ticci toby hc #ticci toby hcs #ticci toby creepypasta #creepypasta ticci toby #ticcitoby #ticci toby x reader

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mostlysignssomeportents · 10 months

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America's largest hospital chain has an algorithmic death panel

It’s not that conservatives aren’t sometimes right — it’s that even when they’re right, they’re highly selective about it. Take the hoary chestnut that “incentives matter,” trotted out to deny humane benefits to poor people on the grounds that “free money” makes people “workshy.”

There’s a whole body of conservative economic orthodoxy, Public Choice Theory, that concerns itself with the motives of callow, easily corrupted regulators, legislators and civil servants, and how they might be tempted to distort markets.

But the same people who obsess over our fallible public institutions are convinced that private institutions will never yield to temptation, because the fear of competition keeps temptation at bay. It’s this belief that leads the right to embrace monopolies as “efficient”: “A company’s dominance is evidence of its quality. Customers flock to it, and competitors fail to lure them away, therefore monopolies are the public’s best friend.”

But this only makes sense if you don’t understand how monopolies can prevent competitors. Think of Uber, lighting $31b of its investors’ cash on fire, losing 41 cents on every dollar it brought in, in a bid to drive out competitors and make public transit seem like a bad investment.

Or think of Big Tech, locking up whole swathes of your life inside their silos, so that changing mobile OSes means abandoning your iMessage contacts; or changing social media platforms means abandoning your friends, or blocking Google surveillance means losing your email address, or breaking up with Amazon means losing all your ebooks and audiobooks:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

Businesspeople understand the risks of competition, which is why they seek to extinguish it. The harder it is for your customers to leave — because of a lack of competitors or because of lock-in — the worse you can treat them without risking their departure. This is the core of enshittification: a company that is neither disciplined by competition nor regulation can abuse its customers and suppliers over long timescales without losing either:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

It’s not that public institutions can’t betray they public interest. It’s just that public institutions can be made democratically accountable, rather than financially accountable. When a company betrays you, you can only punish it by “voting with your wallet.” In that system, the people with the fattest wallets get the most votes.

When public institutions fail you, you can vote with your ballot. Admittedly, that doesn’t always work, but one of the major predictors of whether it will work is how big and concentrated the private sector is. Regulatory capture isn’t automatic: it’s what you get when companies are bigger than governments.

If you want small governments, in other words, you need small companies. Even if you think the only role for the state is in enforcing contracts, the state needs to be more powerful than the companies issuing those contracts. The bigger the companies are, the bigger the government has to be:

https://doctorow.medium.com/regulatory-capture-59b2013e2526

Companies can suborn the government to help them abuse the public, but whether public institutions can resist them is more a matter of how powerful those companies are than how fallible a public servant is. Our plutocratic, monopolized, unequal society is the worst of both worlds. Because companies are so big, they abuse us with impunity — and they are able to suborn the state to help them do it:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

This is the dimension that’s so often missing from the discussion of why Americans pay more for healthcare to get worse outcomes from health-care workers who labor under worse conditions than their cousins abroad. Yes, the government can abet this, as when it lets privatizers into the Medicare system to loot it and maim its patients:

https://prospect.org/health/2023-08-01-patient-zero-tom-scully/

But the answer to this isn’t more privatization. Remember Sarah Palin’s scare-stories about how government health care would have “death panels” where unaccountable officials decided whether your life was worth saving?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26195604/

The reason “death panels” resounded so thoroughly — and stuck around through the years — is that we all understand, at some deep level, that health care will always be rationed. When you show up at the Emergency Room, they have to triage you. Even if you’re in unbearable agony, you might have to wait, and wait, and wait, because other people (even people who arrive after you do) have it worse.

In America, health care is mostly rationed based on your ability to pay. Emergency room triage is one of the only truly meritocratic institutions in the American health system, where your treatment is based on urgency, not cash. Of course, you can buy your way out of that too, with concierge doctors. And the ER system itself has been infested with Private Equity parasites:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/17/the-doctor-will-fleece-you-now/#pe-in-full-effect

Wealth-based health-care rationing is bad enough, but when it’s combined with the public purse, a bad system becomes a nightmare. Take hospice care: private equity funds have rolled up huge numbers of hospices across the USA and turned them into rigged — and lethal — games:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

Medicare will pay a hospice $203-$1,462 to care for a dying person, amounting to $22.4b/year in public funds transfered to the private sector. Incentives matter: the less a hospice does for their patients, the more profits they reap. And the private hospice system is administered with the lightest of touches: at the $203/day level, a private hospice has no mandatory duties to their patients.

You can set up a California hospice for the price of a $3,000 filing fee (which is mostly optional, since it’s never checked). You will have a facility inspection, but don’t worry, there’s no followup to make sure you remediate any failing elements. And no one at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services tracks complaints.

So PE-owned hospices pressure largely healthy people to go into “hospice care” — from home. Then they do nothing for them, including continuing whatever medical care they were depending on. After the patient generates $32,000 in billings for the PE company, they hit the cap and are “live discharged” and must go through a bureaucratic nightmare to re-establish their Medicare eligibility, because once you go into hospice, Medicare assumes you are dying and halts your care.

PE-owned hospices bribe doctors to refer patients to them. Sometimes, these sham hospices deliberately induce overdoses in their patients in a bid to make it look like they’re actually in the business of caring for the dying. Incentives matter:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/12/05/how-hospice-became-a-for-profit-hustle

Now, hospice care — and its relative, palliative care — is a crucial part of any humane medical system. In his essential book, Being Mortal, Atul Gawande describes how end-of-life care that centers a dying person’s priorities can make death a dignified and even satisfying process for the patient and their loved ones:

https://atulgawande.com/book/being-mortal/

But that dignity comes from a patient-centered approach, not a profit-centered one. Doctors are required to put their patients’ interests first, and while they sometimes fail at this (everyone is fallible), the professionalization of medicine, through which doctors were held to ethical standards ahead of monetary considerations, proved remarkable durable.

Partly that was because doctors generally worked for themselves — or for other doctors. In most states, it is illegal for medical practices to be owned by non-MDs, and historically, only a small fraction of doctors worked for hospitals, subject to administration by businesspeople rather than medical professionals.

But that was radically altered by the entry of private equity into the medical system, with the attending waves of consolidation that saw local hospitals merged into massive national chains, and private practices scooped up and turned into profit-maximizers, not health-maximizers:

https://prospect.org/health/2023-08-02-qa-corporate-medicine-destroys-doctors/

Today, doctors are being proletarianized, joining the ranks of nurses, physicians’ assistants and other health workers. In 2012, 60% of practices were doctor-owned and only 5.6% of docs worked for hospitals. Today, that’s up by 1,000%, with 52.1% of docs working for hospitals, mostly giant corporate chains:

https://prospect.org/health/2023-08-04-when-mds-go-union/

The paperclip-maximizing, grandparent-devouring transhuman colony organism that calls itself a Private Equity fund is endlessly inventive in finding ways to increase its profits by harming the rest of us. It’s not just hospices — it’s also palliative care.

Writing for NBC News, Gretchen Morgenson describes how HCA Healthcare — the nation’s largest hospital chain — outsourced its death panels to IBM Watson, whose algorithmic determinations override MDs’ judgment to send patients to palliative care, withdrawing their care and leaving them to die:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/doctors-say-hca-hospitals-push-patients-hospice-care-rcna81599

Incentives matter. When HCA hospitals send patients to die somewhere else to die, it jukes their stats, reducing the average length of stay for patients, a key metric used by HCA that has the twin benefits of making the hospital seem like a place where people get well quickly, while freeing up beds for more profitable patients.

Goodhart’s Law holds that “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Give an MBA within HCA a metric (“get patients out of bed quicker”) and they will find a way to hit that metric (“send patients off to die somewhere else, even if their doctors think they could recover”):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Incentives matter! Any corporate measure immediately becomes a target. Tell Warners to decrease costs, and they will turn around and declare the writers’ strike to be a $100m “cost savings,” despite the fact that this “savings” comes from ceasing production on the shows that will bring in all of next year’s revenue:

https://deadline.com/2023/08/warner-bros-discovery-david-zaslav-gunnar-wiedenfels-strikes-1235453950/

Incentivize a company to eat its seed-corn and it will chow down.

Only one of HCA’s doctors was willing to go on record about its death panels: Ghasan Tabel of Riverside Community Hospital (motto: “Above all else, we are committed to the care and improvement of human life”). Tabel sued Riverside after the hospital retaliated against him when he refused to follow the algorithm’s orders to send his patients for palliative care.

Tabel is the only doc on record willing to discuss this, but 26 other doctors talked to Morgenson on background about the practice, asking for anonymity out of fear of retaliation from the nation’s largest hospital chain, a “Wall Street darling” with $5.6b in earnings in 2022.

HCA already has a reputation as a slaughterhouse that puts profits before patients, with “severe understaffing”:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/workers-us-hospital-giant-hca-say-puts-profits-patient-care-rcna64122

and rotting, undermaintained facililties:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/roaches-operating-room-hca-hospital-florida-rcna69563

But while cutting staff and leaving hospitals to crumble are inarguable malpractice, the palliative care scam is harder to pin down. By using “AI” to decide when patients are beyond help, HCA can employ empiricism-washing, declaring the matter to be the factual — and unquestionable — conclusion of a mathematical process, not mere profit-seeking:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/26/dictators-dilemma/ggarbage-in-garbage-out-garbage-back-in

But this empirical facewash evaporates when confronted with whistleblower accounts of hospital administrators who have no medical credentials berating doctors for a “missed hospice opportunity” when a physician opts to keep a patient under their care despite the algorithm’s determination.

This is the true “AI Safety” risk. It’s not that a chatbot will become sentient and take over the world — it’s that the original artificial lifeform, the limited liability company, will use “AI” to accelerate its murderous shell-game until we can’t spot the trick:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/10/in-the-dumps-2/

The risk is real. A 2020 study in the Journal of Healthcare Management concluded that the cash incentives for shipping patients to palliatve care “may induce deceiving changes in mortality reporting in several high-volume hospital diagnoses”:

https://journals.lww.com/jhmonline/Fulltext/2020/04000/The_Association_of_Increasing_Hospice_Use_With.7.aspx

Incentives matter. In a private market, it’s always more profitable to deny care than to provide it, and any metric we bolt onto that system to prevent cheating will immediately become a target. For-profit healthcare is an oxymoron, a prelude to death panels that will kill you for a nickel.

Morgenson is an incisive commentator on for-profit looting. Her recent book These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs — and Wrecks — America (co-written with Joshua Rosner) is a must-read:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a DRM-free book, which means Audible won’t carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/05/any-metric-becomes-a-target/#hca

[Image ID: An industrial meat-grinder. A sick man, propped up with pillows, is being carried up its conveyor towards its hopper. Ground meat comes out of the other end. It bears the logo of HCA healthcare. A pool of blood spreads out below it.]

Image: Seydelmann (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GW300_1.jpg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #hca healthcare #Gretchen Morgenson incentives matter #death panels #medicare for all #ibm watson #the algorithm #algorithmic harms #palliative care #hospice #hospice care #business #incentives matter #any metric becomes a target #goodhart's law

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literary-illuminati · 10 months

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Book Review 39 – Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

This is one of those books I’d heard mentioned in a dozen different places before I finally decided to read it. I think it was the review in Thing of Things that finally pushed me over the edge and convinced me to read it myself? Very happy I did, even if I had a severe case of deja vu reading a few particular passages (and even if it does suffer from a few of the usual pop nonfiction issues at times).

The title gets across the substance of the book clearly enough; this is, to paraphrase the author, a work of counter-economics. That is, an attempt to illuminate the workings of an advanced capitalist economy by showcasing the sorts of crimes that take advantage of its complexity and parsitize it. It’s nowhere near as dry or academic as all that, of course (Davies keeps up a chatty, conversational sort of tone throughout, and takes every chance to dunk on academic economics as a discipline that presents itself); most of the meat of the book is case studies and anecdotes of particularly famous or illuminating frauds, which are all great reading. Honestly reading about con artists is so fun I should really feel guiltier about how hypocritical my disdain for more traditional true crime is.

The books, if not central thesis, then definitely on of the main things it keeps coming back to, is that the optimal level of fraud in an economy is higher than zero. Fraud is fundamentally an abuse of trust, after all, and if no one’s trust is getting abused, then that probably means that an unjustifiable amount of resources are being spent checking up on every possible thing, and a great deal of productive work isn’t getting done because people are too paranoid to work with each other.

The term Davies uses is the Canadian Paradox. Which is the fact (anecdote, popular wisdom, whatever) that Canada, with its mostly trustworthy institutions and rule of law and developed financial system, has vastly more fraud than, say, Greek shipping (I don’t know why specifically Greek and specifically shipping. Specifically Canada because in the ‘90s the Vancouver Stock Exchange was apparently the most full of scams and fakes in the world). The reason for this being that Canadian investors more or less assume that anyone with a stock listing is probably on the level, because they’re usually right; Greek shipowners, by contrast, absolutely expect to get screwed over if they leave themselves vulnerable, and so do business exclusively with people who they have strong relationships and embedded social ties with. The overwhelmingly intended takeaway being that the Canadian equilibrium is the one to aspire to.

The book’s organized around Davies’ own taxonomy of fraud – he divides the broader category into four distinct (if overlapping) types based on the trust they abuse and so (in a broad sense) are crimes against. Those types being: 1) the Long Firm (neither of the words mean what you think they do here), which is just lying and defrauding someone, buying on credit, reselling and skipping town before the first bill comes due, etc 2) Counterfeiting, of currency yes, but also legal documentation, audited account books, hell even mining samples, providing forged documentation that people trust so they accept your lies 3) Control Frauds, when employees or trustees take advantage of their control over assets to juice the books and manipulate returns in ways that maximize ‘legitimate’ profits for themselves (distinct from embezzlement, which is just taking advantage of control over assets to, well, take them) and 4) Market Crimes, which intuitively might not seem like crimes at all, at least in a moral sense, but are regulated or criminalized or made taboo because people engaging in them damages the wider structure society or the market or capitalism or whatever relies upon.

The types of fraud, you’ll notice, get steadily more abstract and conceptual as you go on – the only thing that distinguishes most control fraud from managerial incompetence and over-optimism is a paper trail showing they knew what they were doing. The only thing that distinguishes a market crime form just, being good at business, is the opinion of whatever jurisdiction your in’s regulatory authorities. One gets the sense that these sorts of tricky conceptual crimes interest Davies more than more straightforward sorts of fraud, and his discussions of them certainly get more philosophical than the mostly technical descriptions of long firms and counterfeiting.

Of course, you don’t really read a book like this for the theorizing – I mean, I didn’t, anyway – but for the interesting and absurd case studies of historical frauds. Of which the book delivers in spades; everything from the ‘salad oil king’ of New Jersey with with his vats of water with a layer of oil floating on top, to Ponzi and his original scheme, to the counterfeiter who destabilized the Portuguese economy sufficiently to pave the way for a reactionary military coup, to the first actually comprehensible explanation of the whole Savings&Loans crisis in ‘80s America that I’ve ever read to, of course, the 2008 Mortgage Crisis.

One trait of historical frauds that gets more salient the more of them you read is that, because many of them involve taking advantage of some since-patched loophole in law or regulation, in retrospect it seems positively absurd that they could ever have worked. The book cautions against this point of view – given how bewilderingly complex the modern economy is, there are doubtless more absurd loopholes and abuses of what people will take on trust now than there have ever been. People just haven't written books about them yet.

Anyways, speaking of 2008 - the financial crisis was a generation-defining event for the people who got fucked over by it, but it clearly did a number on the paradigms of guys like Davies too. It gets a chapter to itself as an ‘innocent’ control fraud. That is, an institutional setup and incentive set that inevitably causes massive amounts of crime even though the people at the top actually profiting from it all are, technically speaking, innocent (and most of the low-level employees doing the crimes are mostly just trying to meet aggressive sales targets and keep their jobs. Which, hardly justifies a lot of the conduct, but they weren't profiting from the enterprise like the managers and executives.) The term Davies uses is ‘crimogenic’ – as in, an environment that incentivizes and will almost inevitably lead to the commission of crimes.

A note on the author – Davies was a regulator and then a market analyst in the UK for much of the early 21st century, and whatever the specifics is clearly someone with an insider’s view of financial markets and investment banking. Not really an apologist – or I mean, he is, to the extent that he clearly considers them useful institutions that do more good than harm for the world at large, and considers the present regulatory setup governing the markets if not just, then at least pragmatically useful. But about the culture and foibles of the financial services industry itself he’s pretty cynical. In any event, as the book goes on he starts peppering in personal anecdotes about how he was personally involved with some event on the periphery of the frauds he’s discussing or saw them happen live, which I mostly found charming but I can see how it would grate.

In any event, it’s a very chatty, casually written book, by a centre-left pro-regulation but incredibly finance-brained guy. So, you know, caveat lector if you’re going to find that totally insufferable. For myself I found it a fun, casual read, and a more educational one that I really expected.

#book review #dan davies #nonfiction #economics

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latenightsimping · 1 year

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THE EDGE

“...There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who’ve gone over.” - Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels

Summary: A part of the deal to freedom included a stay at Pennhurst. It’ll take everything to keep the hope that one day the locked doors will open, the windows will no longer have bars that block the view, and that one day, the name Eddie Munson will be synonymous with the word ‘innocent’. The hope, he never realised, would also come to be synonymous with your name.

Chapter: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4

Pairing: Eddie Munson x reader

Word count: 3.9k

Warnings: angst, heavy themes of inpatient treatment/hospitalisation, heavy themes of mental health, institutional deprivation of liberties, body injuries, mentions of suicidal ideation, themes of institutional abuse, can be a dark read (continue with that in mind, look after yourselves), canon divergence, Eddie survives the demobat attack, post-S4 timeline, slow burn romance, eventual smut, 18+, eventual fluff, there will be a happy ending

AN: Chapter three is finally here! Many thanks to my lovely boyfriend @mantorokk-writes for test reading and making the header, I'm forever in love with you <3 This series is gonna be a slow work in progress, but thank you for reading so far! Really excited to see where it's gonna go, and how we're gonna get these two out of this pickle. Enjoy!

Taglist: @edsforehead, @idkidknemore, @harrys-tittie, @gaysludge, @smileygoth

A congealed lump of what was apparently mac and cheese, boiled to death vegetables and bitter orange juice. Eddie had become used to shit food long ago, thanks to a lifetime of only buying the cheapest non-brand groceries to try and save costs. But this… This was something else. Fuck, he was surprised it even passed the mark for being fit for human consumption. It reminded him of the stories his old man used to tell about prison food, about how the trick was to eat it without thinking too much, barely savouring the taste before you swallowed. The similarity getting stuck in his throat.

But at least he wasn’t eating his meals in silence anymore. With you sitting opposite him, filling any dead air with talking about the hospital gossip, though he’d given up on trying to follow along after the first apparent affair taking place. But the content didn’t matter. For the first time in so long, maybe even longer than he realised, you had offered him a seat to get out of trouble with no motive behind the action. Had given him his own pack of cigarettes after swindling one from an orderly just before lunch started, the one that seemed to stare at your chest more than your eyes, putting yourself at risk for no gain of your own. It was exceedingly rare to find people that would do something out of the goodness of their hearts, and the question was rattling around his head with such a velocity that it tumbled from his lips before he even realised.

“Why are you doing this?”

Even he internally winced at the lack of warmth in his tone, making it sound more like an accusation than a question. But if it offended you, you didn’t act as if it bothered you. Instead, the corners of your lips twitched upwards, eyes drifting from your tray to his own as you tilted your head.

“What’dya mean?”

Giving himself a few needed seconds to reframe the words in his head with taking a sip of his drink, he swirled the contents of the paper cup, deciding to stare down into it rather than look up. “I mean, why are you helping me? You don’t know me.”

From the very quick glance upwards he chanced, there seemed to be something there that was bittersweet. Eyes slightly widened, mouth downturned, yet an ever so slight huff of a laugh as you balled up a serviette in your hands. “Trust me, I know how it feels to be the new guy on the wing. The way the others look at you like you’re a fuckin’ chew toy?”

He’d noticed the way the other patients stared, when the steel door behind him slammed shut. Some didn’t even look over, too caught up in their own internal world. But there’s a certain feeling that can overcome a person when they’re accustomed to having to be on high alert at all times. A certain flash of the eyes that makes your stomach churn, blood pooling to your feet and your mind telling you to run. You studied his face for a moment, a sympathetic smile briefly twitching at your lips.

“I had someone look out for me too, when I first got here,” you explained, the paper in your hand now being twisted and toyed with as you spoke. “She uh… Her name was Patty. She was this take no shit kinda woman. Taught me the best way to curb the hunger was smoking cigarettes, which orderlies would give pretty girls special treatment, which patients to never go near. That sorta useful shit.”

Though you smiled, it didn’t reach your downcast eyes. “She got sick last year. Didn’t say much about it, but it took a toll on her. It finally got her a couple of months back. And you know what the worst thing was about it?”

Plenty of what you were saying was ‘the worst thing’. Being caught on the wrong side of a power dynamic, having to go hungry because nobody cared, patients having to be caregivers because God forbid those that actually got paid to do it actually did their fucking jobs for once. All of those answers dying on his tongue, replaced with a slow shake of his head.

“Nobody came to see her in the end,” you muttered, brows furrowing as your voice cracked. “She told me she had a son, told me the doctors called him and told him, but he never came. I get it, I mean, not many of us have the luxury of seeing people from the outside… But she was on her fucking deathbed, y’know?”

When your eyes finally met his, glossy with unshed tears that you seemed so determined to never let overspill, there was a look to you that made all the pieces click together. Made the parts of him that he’d kept buried away for self preservation start to rise back to the surface. Taking a firm grasp of his heart and squeezing for good measure.

The look of pure fear.

The fear that one day, both of you would end up like Patty. Untethered to the world outside, cast adrift with the other lost souls. Taking the last few rattled breaths with nobody around to hear them, looking up to the sky and the view still blocked with bars. Nobody with spare change for the ferryman, forever stuck.

“I’m sorry.” It was all he could think to say, no other words seeming quite right. The tone as hollow as he felt, as shaky as the tremors in his hands that never quite seemed to go away. All he could think to say, but the truth. He was sorry you were here, if your proclaimed innocence was to be believed. He was sorry for himself too, deep down.

“It’s whatever,” you replied, clearing your throat as you tried and failed to staple the look of nonchalance back on your face with a half decent result. “Anyway, don’t worry about your first therapy session, alright? I got it covered.”

He shot you a small look of incredulity, head tilted to the side as he followed your lead in piling used napkins and cutlery onto his meal tray. “What’dya mean?”

The smile you gave him next was finally a genuine one, a glimmer in your eye that could only mean mischief.

“You’ll see.”

You could see the stress levels that you tried so desperately to lower over lunch to begin raising as you and Eddie filed into the day room for group therapy. How his jaw clenched so hard you were surprised he didn’t break enamel, a shortening fuse near a naked flame as he took his seat next to you. Leg bouncing with beats akin to a hummingbird’s heart, chewing at the skin around his ruined nails with eyesight dancing around the room to end up on the tile right in front of him. You couldn’t blame him; he was walking into the unknown, with no idea where the hell he would end up. You remembered the feeling well.

Others clad in the same off white uniform as you took their respective seats around you, the energy in the room a palpable, frantic buzz. Nerves, apathy, distaste and mocking. You could feel it all, see it in the faces around you that you’d come to know in the years that you’d been imprisoned. Small naked flames, that could be as harmless as a match or as intense as thermite. The day could go either way. And it would depend on the questions posed to them.

Dr. Madden made his way through the doors, adjusting the thick horned rimmed glasses that permanently perched on his beak-like nose as he took his seat. You’d never liked him; he was nosy, even for a psychiatrist, always putting two and two together to end up with an equation that made no fucking sense. Nothing could ever be simple, in his eyes. Someone’s violent outburst had some convoluted reasoning to do with Daddy issues and not being hugged enough as a child, rather than someone just needing a fucking cigarette and not being given one. It took everything within you not to roll your eyes into the back of your skull as he cleared his throat to begin.

“Good afternoon everyone,” he began, eyes settling over each patient for a brief second before focusing on Eddie. “We’re welcoming a new person into the wing today. Have you had any sort of therapy like this before, Mr. Munson?”

Eddie’s reply was a brief shake of his head, glance not leaving the cracks of the floor as he fiddled with the split ends of his hair. Madden’s bushy eyebrow raised a fraction as he sat himself slightly forward. “Well, we start with a brief check in. How we’re feeling, what we’d like to talk about in today’s session. Perhaps you could start us off? You seem nervous today.”

You couldn’t hold back a scoff, the psychiatrist’s beady eyes narrowing on you as you fished through your pockets for your pack of cigarettes. The look on his face evident that he wasn’t amused at your perceived insolence to his ‘therapeutic process’. He could shove that process where the sun didn’t shine, as far as you were concerned.

“He’s a newbie, of course he’s gonna be nervous,” you shrugged, waving over an orderly with a lighter, who seemed to be watching you with ever so slight trepidation as he ignited the flame that you used to puff life into your cigarette. Huffing out an exhale of smoke that was aimed in his direction. “Bit of a redundant question, isn’t it?”

Madden was a tough nut to crack, but you’d managed to get the veins in his neck bulging a couple of times. You just needed to know which buttons to press, and it seemed you hit one with a jab to his reasoning. “I don’t find it redundant at all,” he answered with a smile slightly too smug for your liking. “But if you think that an example of a check in could help, maybe you could go first instead?”

You took a sharp inhale as you gave a grimace of indifference, face scrunched up as you jerked your head towards an older lady that seemed on the edge of her seat to talk. “Why don’t you get Miriam to do it? From what I remember, she was just starting to open up about her fucker of an ex husband.”

Was using another patient’s anger, something you knew got them started into an hour long tangent until they were red in the face unethical? Maybe. But it was every man for himself out here, and you didn’t have anything akin to backup in the process. As expected, the woman launched into a tirade, screechings which contained the words “useless bastard” and “should have divorced him before he did it to me!” melding into the background as you shot a smug smirk in Madden’s direction. To his credit, he was hiding his distaste well, his only giveaway the slight flush creeping above his collar.

For most of the session, you managed to evade the heat from coming towards you and Eddie. A few more prods to Miriam, staying silent when the psychiatrist asked if anyone else had anything to add. A question to old man Hardy about the house he got kicked out from before being transferred, each person being used like a shield to hide from the questions you knew Madden had for you. You knew you were fucked from the moment he put his hand up to cut off Duane about his teenage trauma prematurely, eyes fixed on you as he sat back in his chair.

“Does Duane’s story resonate with you?” he asked with a heightened pitch of voice, head slightly tilted as his lips twitched upwards. It caused your back to straighten, knowing full well where he was going with this. Somewhere you swore never to go back to, ever since the nightmares ever so slightly decreased and the flashing images weren’t permanently burned into the back of your eyelids.

“No.”

The words reverberated around clenched teeth, knuckles turned white as you gripped the cracked pleather of the cushion you sat on. Out of your peripheral vision, you saw Eddie staring at you with a slight questioning to his glance, and it made your gut twist even more. You hated how suddenly the tentative power dynamic had switched. How your already lacking control was going to spiral even further, if Madden willed it.

“I think it might, though,” the good doctor continued, the slight smirk being poorly hidden as his head tilted to the side. “You had a lot happen when you were eighteen, didn’t you? When you made the choice to-”

“I’m not going to talk about it,” you snapped back, folding your arms as a poorly constructed buffer between you and the man opposite. Your eyes glanced at the clock on the wall, a slight ease of tension as you realised the time. “Not with only five minutes left of the session.”

“But you’re going to have to talk about it sooner or later,” he countered, daring to look slightly sympathetic as he regarded you. “You’ve been here two years, and you’ve never talked about that night. It doesn’t show much progress, now does it?”

You wanted to stand up, pick up your chair, and crash it over the top of his head. How the fuck would he know what ‘progress’ you’d been making? How much work you’d had to put into yourself, rationalising and justifying everything about the night that changed the path of your life, so much that you probably could never step foot on the original trail if you tried. How you still tortured yourself with what you could have done differently, the actions that you did take haunting you like spectres? Madden knew nothing of how often you’d dragged yourself off the precipice time and time again, nothing but bloody fingernails and a quickly ebbing will to live, as you weighed up the decisions of falling asleep to never wake up again against staying alive to do everything in your power to clear the stain on your name.

To Madden’s credit, he didn’t push further. Letting the silence hang in the air, perhaps a non-verbal push that might get you talking. It might have worked, once upon a time. When you had no secrets to hide, too worried about what others thought, wanting to please people so much that it deprived you of happiness. But that was before you were branded a psycho, tossed into this place with the key thrown away. Now, you couldn’t give a shit about what others thought.

Except, there was a way your stomach dropped when you looked over to see the way Eddie looked at you. Not with disgust or horror, which you were used to by now. There was slight concern in his eyes, mixed with empathy, the combination making you want to squirm in your seat. You didn’t even know each other, yet his humanity seemed to still be intact for now, seeing another person clearly struggling and not being able to do anything about it.

You decided to stare at the clock on the wall for the rest of the session, filtering out all other noises and focusing on watching the minute hand strike closer and closer until time was up.

As you put away chairs, you expected Eddie to ask you about it. Maybe try to pry, or get answers for questions that could be in his own mind. But he didn’t. He stayed silent as you both wandered back to the table you met at, sitting down with him wordlessly reaching for the deck of cards in the middle and starting to shuffle. And silent you stayed. Going through the motions of a routine you knew too well; free time, ‘music’ therapy - as if listening to the same vinyl of Bach twice a week for two years would do anything other than make you want to smash your head against the chipped white walls. Dinner consisting of a brick of so-called ‘meatloaf’ that you knew well enough to avoid even attempting to eat, settling for tasteless vegetables and vaguely lime flavoured Jell-o instead.

Even silent when the orderly Nguyen told you to haul ass to the laundry room for work placement, and to take your new ‘friend’ with you. You were brought out of the routine of folding sheets when you heard Eddie clear his throat, looking up to see him slightly rattled as he sorted various clothing into separate piles.

“Hey uh… You don’t have to say anything if you don’t wanna, but… Thanks. For today.” You saw the corners of his lips twitch upwards, a ghost of a smile as his eyeline landed on the messy stack of undershirts. “Didn’t have to stick your neck out of me, but you did. Appreciate it.”

You mustered the leftover social energy you had to lift your shoulders into a slight shrug, rubbing the back of your head whilst the other hand took your weight as you leaned slightly on the table. “It’s nothing. Sorry for not being so talkative I just… Still don’t wanna talk about why I’m here, y’know?”

A curt nod was his reply at first, lips a narrow line and eyes darting around as if he was thinking hard about something. Finally glancing towards the door, then around the room, as if to make double sure that what he was about to say wouldn’t be overheard. He looked panicked; either a deer in the headlights or a lion ready to defend itself, you weren’t sure.

“They said I killed people.”

It was so quiet you barely picked up on it, and you had to admit, it took you aback. There was an initial flight or flight reaction that doused your autonomic system, as if his words set off a red light in your head and you had to start looking for an improvised weapon. However, that was pure instinct, only for a second before logic took over. For someone who was apparently a killer, he certainly did look hollow about it all. Besides. Those in glass houses…

“Did you do it?” you mumbled back, eyes leaving his to take the pressure of both of you, hands busying themselves with folding the now grey sheet in front of you, toying with the frayed corner to try and conceal it in the fold somehow.

“No.”

You found yourself at a precipice. He had stuck his neck out to tell you his charge, not knowing if you’d stick around or bolt and leave him on his own again. It was a sign of trust; an olive branch, that you could either accept or leave hanging between you. You had only known Eddie a day. Less than that, maybe seven hours, tops. But so far, he seemed to have his wits about him. He didn’t strike you as the judgemental type. He didn’t pry, and he tried to distract you when you were at your lowest, instead of offering useless advice or forcing you to open up. When you looked up at him, there was no hint of deceit that you could tell. He was staring at you with those intense eyes of his, an expression reading both ‘I’m telling the truth’ and ‘dear God, I hope you fucking believe me’.

For so long, you had wanted reinforcements in this place so badly. To not fight alone, to have backup. In the outside world, no way would you trust someone this fast. But this was Pennhearst. A place with different rule sets. You needed to take the help wherever it came from, and hope it didn’t blow back in your face later.

You needed to give him something in return.

You didn’t falter with eye contact as you said the words you thought you’d never say. The words that made your stomach churn, made you want to flinch as you said them. “They said I killed people, too.”

You saw the look on his face to be one of bewilderment, eyes scanning you up and down as if he’d never seen you before. You wondered if that’s what you’d looked like not five seconds ago, mirroring each other as you confessed your sins. “Did you do it?”

“No.”

The crease between his eyebrows seemed to smooth, after what felt like hours of staring at each other, the only other sounds the rhythmic knocking of the decrepit industrial dryers. It was you who finally broke the silence, busying yourself again with grabbing the pile of undershirts near you by the bottom and pulling it towards you to begin folding. “I don’t expect you to believe me. And if you don’t want me to know about what happened, I’m not gonna push it.” You shook your head as you frowned at the fabric in your hands.

“Why do you believe me? When I say I didn’t do it?”

You glanced back up at him to find a worried expression on his face, staring at you like he couldn’t quite believe you. As if it was too good to be true, to finally be believed. You wracked your brain for an answer, only to shrug and say the first thing on your mind. “Because guilty people don’t look so frightened of their consequences. I suppose on a subconscious level, they know they deserve the hell they created for themselves.”

You heard a sound which you figured to be a sharp exhale of air through his nose, most likely an attempt at a wry laugh. “You don’t look frightened.”

Your lips turned downward as you frowned again. “You get good at hiding it after a while, I guess.”

You heard your name being called, so softly that your heart nearly shattered. Not your last name being barked out with disdain, or in a patronising tone like a shrink would. It was said like somebody actually gave a shit. You looked up to be met with a look that was one of genuine concern, his eyebrows furrowed and lips slightly parted as if he was wondering what to say.

It was getting too intense for your liking.

Shaking your head as you cleared your throat, you flashed a tight smile as your folding became hurried. “Finish that pile quick, yeah? Orderlies hit the roof when you don’t finish your chores on time.”

To his credit, Eddie didn’t push it. The rest of the time being filled with small talk and comfortable silences, until your names were called to be taken back to your room for the night. The motions of getting ready to bed had become mechanical a long time ago, on autopilot as you brushed your teeth and changed clothes. Hearing the call for lights out, and getting plunged into darkness against your will. You knew that first checks were in an hour.

You had sixty minutes to cry to yourself about finally being seen, about not being treated like a criminal that deserved the way you were being treated. Hugging the pillow to your face and willing yourself not to be making a sound, clutching the cheap cotton between your fingers as if your life depended on it. Sixty minutes until you needed to shove the emotions back down, and face tomorrow, same as you always did.

Same as you always did, but at least you had someone on your side.

#eddie munson x reader #eddie munson x you #eddie munson fanfiction #eddie munson imagine #stranger things fanfiction #stranger things imagine #stranger things x you #eddie munson self insert #stranger things self insert

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midnight-in-eden · 1 year

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Sorry to bother you. I'm a transmasc exmo and my brother is inactive but intends to leave someday. He brought something to my attention, but so far I've only seen a reddit post about it, allegedly a story about a transgirl was affected by this already is on facebook, but I can not find it. It's being said that a new policy has gone to affect, that "Any one who has socially transitioned, is now excluded from baptism." In other words, transgender children can not be baptized, and neither can any other transgender individual, unless they detransition. People are confirming that this policy is going into the Handbook within the next few weeks. I don't have a big exmo support system, has anyone heard of this policy? Are they going to announce this change or are they literally just trying to slip this in and hope it goes unnoticed?

You’re not bothering me at all. Yes, I’ve heard of this. I don’t know any more than you do, I’m afraid.

I think the surface reason is this way they just don’t have to deal with transgender people. Just like they don’t have to deal with gays. Either group will still be “welcome”—as long as we don’t “act on it.” “We love you, but only if you stay in the closet and don’t make problems for us.”

I think the underlying reason is the church has elected to try and ingratiate itself with mainstream American Christianity. (I mean, it’s been doing this since it got rid of polygamy, but it’s accelerated in recent years.) That is why they’ve emphasized the church’s full name instead of “Mormon,” that’s why they’ve quietly backed off more outlandish beliefs (Kolob, exalted people getting their own planets, etc). That’s why they got rid of the various pageants showing parts of 1800s church history—and kept the Easter pageant in Arizona, redoing the soundtrack and script to be more appealing to Christians in general. And that is why they’ve dug in their heels when it comes to accepting LGBTQ people. Genuinely, I believe that this policy is meant to play out like the first Policy of Exclusion, which banned the children of gay parents from baptism until they turned 18 and could disavow gay marriage. That policy was reversed after a few years, but not before flushing out a lot of people who—up until then—had been trying to stay in the church but advocated loudly for LGBTQ acceptance. A lot of undesirables, in the church’s view. A wave of those people left when the original PoX was instituted. Another wave will leave with this one. That will leave the church with a membership that skews even more strongly conservative, that is even more acceptable to American evangelicals. They do not want gay and trans members. They want to be respectable to American Republican Christians.

(Most evangelicals are never going to accept Mormons as Christians, imho, but that isn’t going to stop the church from trying.)

My feelings on this are torn. I think it is actually better for LGBTQ people to leave/not join the church, and perhaps this will protect some trans people from the harm the church does. On the other hand, I know queer people who consider the church their spiritual home. I think everyone should have spiritual autonomy—but in Mormonism, you really don’t. Your access to every covenant necessary for salvation and exaltation is locked behind a gate that is only opened if a priesthood leader decides you are worthy. Trans people who transition are being deemed unworthy en masse and that seems like spiritual abuse to me.

We’ll have to wait and see how this plays out. Even among Mormons I know who are relatively accepting of gay people, few are as welcoming of trans people, so I doubt they’ll get much pushback from the majority of members.

#exmo #exmormon #apostate #policy of exclusion #policy of exclusion 2: electric boogaloo #sorry for the wall of text!#queer shit #long post #ask #anon

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powerfulblob · 7 months

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YEAH IT'S THAT POST TIME

let’s go!!!

OK so I’m gonna just talk about Goldenloin for a bit because Sir Fucksalot has given me many thoughts about life and shit

some background: I started out reading the Nimona comic, and was super hyped when the movie got released. I’m Korean, living in North America, and also queer and genderfucked which is probably relevant to this

ANYWAY

A lot of people have talked about the Model Minority Myth so far, but I wanted to talk about something else: Specifically, his complicity in other’s oppression, and how he uses his lack of choice in his privilege to justify his actions.

In that one scene: “A direct descendant of Gloreth? I never asked for that!” He’s actually really accurately portraying a lot of the conflicting feelings about being both privileged and Asian: It’s the recurring thought I’ve had so many times:

“Look: The only reason why I have this privilege in society is because of my parents’ horrible amounts of pressure, and the pressure their parents put on them, in order to not get literally crushed by it: I never asked for that! Why should I care if other POC are suffering?”

It’s about knowing that your position is horrible, and comes with thousands of sacrifices (especially when you consider the subtext that he’s had to hide his relationship with Boldheart from the media), but not being able to use that for the process of liberation?.

It’s about ignoring all of the ways in which you’re still not allowed to live freely (the poverty rates for queer Asian folx, the rates of suicide, the rates of illness, abuse).

It’s a constant struggle for me to avoid that train of thought: The “I don’t care,” the “it’s not my fault, because I never asked to live here,” the “What could I possibly do?” the “I better stay with this Institution, then, and not try to run away”

So in a way it was nice to see that, in the end, he (sorta) stood up for other people, himself and his values? Or something? I don’t know?

(Lol I do think that they absolutely fucked up his character growth in the end: They should have had a more coherent theme for his actions near the end of the movie, but I still love this character... If I were in charge of the movie, I’d definitely make sure he gets a better arc to go with that incredibly monologue near the middle that was sadly played off for comedic effect... if I were in charge of his ending, i would have made him resist the institution much more quickly, because he really didn't change much until legit the last minute, and they never quite explained why??? )

Yes, it is a children’s movie, and I’m probably getting a bit too worked up about this. But still... let me cook ig?

idk honestly i'll put together a more coherent essay later i think

#nimona #tw: suicide #tw: racism #tw: homophobia #tw: parental abuse #analysis #ambrosius goldenloin #koreanposting #ig #trans posting #i guess #how do I tag this?#i guess it's an essay?#yeah

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meili-kese-anyaleko-old · 11 months

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I want everyone here, for a moment, to imagine what it’s like. Imagine what it’s like, for no one, and I mean no one, to listen to you. Automatically and state-mandatedly dumped into a building for six hours a day, or seven or eight depending on where you are. And you can’t call for change or speak out because you are apparently lying all the time and also can’t speak to anyone usually because that’s somehow bad. I am not kidding when I tell you that there’s a rule for people not to congregate in groups of more than three.

If you did manage to tell someone with an ounce of power, they will laugh in your face as you tell them that abuse is happening, even if it lands someone in a hospital.

As a society, we still believe that it’s okay and your moral imperative to hit people smaller than you. Supposedly it’s training, but that is complete nonsense. People don’t hit their cats but they do hit flesh and blood, living, breathing humans that have no power. Wonderful, look at us, we are so civilized. Then a bunch of problematic stereotypes get pushed so that everyone thinks that all people below the age of eighteen have no braincells and just want to party. Some of us have sensory issues and can’t go to parties, but that’s a human thing to be different, and we aren’t humans.

If you are not physically abused, you are emotionally abused. Emotions are a human thing, and we aren’t humans, so we don’t get those, it is “just a phase” or “moody teens am I right?”. Yes they are moody, they have every right to be. They have every right to scream at you right now if you think trans genocide is okay, but abolishing problematic institutions is not, we don’t, that’s a blessing for you. Welcome to the world of a child. Oh and some people (those “MAPs”) will try to go after you.

But I am sick and tired of giving blessings to people who want to throw us out. I am sick and tired of giving people who are wasting oxygen with every word they say the comfort of our silence. This is personal. Hey, you, don’t stay quiet. I see you “angry child”. That anger loves you, it knows you can’t be treated badly, cherish it. You are not weak, and there is nothing wrong with you but the world. I see you “trouble kid”, I know you went undiagnosed, but know that there are always people that care about you, you don’t owe people a mask, you don’t owe them an explanation as to why you cannot stand the sound of the cafeteria. I see you queer kid, I am so proud you can hide for this long, and I hold out hope you won’t have to, ‘stranger’ is weaker than ‘together’.

I love all of you, so much, I live for the fact that you are still around. You deserve just as much as anyone. The only way they’ll let us go, is if we let the flames grow. Go outside and breathe in the wind, feel it on your skin, dance in it, that is what freedom feels like. Like the wind, like the water, we don’t need to grow up, we don’t need to stay quiet. I’ve been waiting far too long to speak to shut up. We need change, not stricter punishment. We are alive right now, we aren’t becoming alive tomorrow. We will be, have been, and are, breathing right now, feeling right now, existing right now.

#adultism #childism #youth rights #youth liberation

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saintmeghanmarkle · 7 months

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Lady C Tea YouTube 10/12/23 (a few nuggets paraphrased by me) by u/daisybeach23

Lady C Tea YouTube 10/12/23 (a few nuggets paraphrased by me) Greetings from Castle Goring!Let me read a statement from Harry, The Duke of Sussex. This is in relation to their attempts to use children and certain abuses online to further his and Meghan’s agenda of censorship. In that ridiculous symposium that he and Meghan were parachuted into by the largest company on earth, Blackrock. Harry said, “There is a reason why no one is working in this space. The size and power of these companies can make you feel scared and helpless. We all realize that.” Without realizing it, Harry is giving the game totally away, because HE is being backed by a large company and HE is not scared, nor is Meghan. In fact, he is using the company and they are using Harry and Meghan to increase a stranglehold on information. I have to give this a bit of a recap. They arrived in a 7-car convoy to travel 200 feet. They could have walked it in three minutes. Of course, that would have denied them to show how much they need security and how much they need 7 cars to protect them. What kind of protection are we getting against their word salad and rubbish? I suppose you must be careful about your carbon footprint but they do not. And, did you notice what she was wearing? She wore evening wear in the daytime, yet again. I have said this before. Meghan has no clue how to dress. She has no clue what is appropriate. She wore eveningwear to Trouping the Colour and church services during the day, in Britain. She wore a variation of the same outfit she wore to Ripple of Hope awards where she insists on showing us her big, broad shoulders. To wear evening wear in the middle of the afternoon, who does that except a tart or a scrubber? The woman is so inappropriate at all times it is beyond me. I don’t know if you noticed Catherine wore a smart trouser suit for the whole day. I don’t know if you noticed Meghan stopped off at a school on Brooklyn, Meghan wore spray on trousers. I don’t know if you have noticed but Meghan think she has the best figure and the best legs in the world when they are actually shapeless. She thinks her legs are the benchmark for leggy beauty. There is something deeply disconcerting about someone who is a public figure, objectifying herself. Remember she complained about being objectified by Deal or No Deal, but on two occasions in New York she objectified herself physically. The first time, she showed us her legs and chicken foot and then she showed us her bare shoulders. I am going to read a few remarks from the newspapers. This is going to show that despite Meghan and Harry’s efforts to be taken seriously, they are treated like a joke. Except for Harpers Bazaar who said she cemented her fashion icon status in an off the shoulder pantsuit. LOL….LOL….no, my dear…I was a student at the Fashion Institute. I am here to tell you that Diana Vreeland and Carmel Snow would be spinning in their graves that the magazine they made famous would make such a ridiculous statement. And when is Meghan going to stop emulating Medusa? We already know you are just like Medusa. The New York Post, Page Six, Associated Press and Town and Country all mentioned Harry and Meghan made their first return to New York after their “near catastrophic car chase.” Oh my was that the two hour car chase where they were traveling at two miles per hour? Sniff Sniff. The whole thing was a study in indignity, rampant exhibition of greed and power grabbing.

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longislandcharm · 8 months

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PARTIES: @longislandcharm, @vanishingreyes TIMING: Early August SUMMARY: Winter is forced by her production team to see a therapist and ends up on Dr. Reyes' couch. The sessions aren't off to a great start. WARNINGS: Just to be safe, slight mentions of substance abuse

“Let’s get this over with.” Winter threw her purse down on the couch before plopping down next to it. When she had ended production so suddenly with talk of a mental breakdown the producers of Spirit Speak thought it would be a good idea to mandate some therapy sessions before she could come back. She’d been busy since then, too busy to see anyone, but her manager had been hounding her to start sessions as soon as possible because she needed a written statement of wellness. Who knew how long that would take? So, here she was. And she already hated it. The medium wasn’t one to really talk about her feelings and it’s not like she could tell the psychologist that there was an actual incident with a spirit. She would definitely be put in an institution if she did.

“How does this work? I tell you why I had a breakdown, you prescribe some sort of antidepressant, and then I’m on my merry way?” She knew full well that wasn’t how this would go but a girl had to try, right? The sooner this woman believed she was fine the better. Winter crossed her arms over her chest, bringing one leg over the other as she took in the office they were in but refused to look at the other or the ghostly man standing in the corner. She wouldn’t acknowledge him. Or the fact that she might actually need to be here. The fear that she really was having a full break was heavy on her mind and she didn’t need those thoughts to worsen with the glare he was sending her. “It was just a rough night. I don’t know why they’re making such a big deal about it.”

It wasn’t uncommon for people to feel less-than-thrilled at best about going to therapy. Xóchitl didn’t blame them. She’d had her fair share of less-than-ideal therapists. “Of course.” She readjusted her position.

“Not exactly, no. I’m not a psychiatrist, and I also don’t believe in just prescribing and letting people go. It’s important to keep an ongoing relationship, even if it turns into us just checking in to see how your medication works.” This woman was going to be one of the trickier ones Xóchitl had worked with, that much she could tell, but that much she also didn’t mind so much. It gave her a thrill (however strange that might’ve been) to figure out complex cases. Or even resistant cases, which she supposed was closer to what this was.

“Probably because those are people who care about you, and they’re concerned. It’s fine, this is judgment free; you can vent or talk or anything. Also, please, you can call me Xóchitl. No need for me to be Doctor Reyes here. I think that makes things a whole lot less personal, and, in turn, less effective.”

“Oh, perfect. This should be a lot more pleasurable than I thought.” Sarcasm dripped from her words while Winter mentally cursed her manager. The woman didn’t believe in prescribing and letting people go so she wasn’t even going to get a fun prescription out of this for a little while and she had to check in. Someone shoot her.

She leaned forward, arms still crossed over her chest. “You don’t need to talk to me like I’m five, Dr. Reyes.” God, she was being bitchier than usual. She almost felt bad…almost. “I know how therapy works. I was forced into it as a kid too so it’s not my first go around so I know when someone is being a tad condescending.” Winter’s voice had lost the slight edge to it as she spoke of her childhood run in with a therapist. She’d almost forgotten the brief stint but the memory did bring back some info she’d lost along the way while she sat back again. Sylvia. How could she forget Sylvia? “I had an imaginary friend for a few years and my dad was concerned when I was still talking to her by age ten so he sent me to someone.”

Her mind had drifted and Winter hadn’t meant to give the doctor that much information. Yes, she knew how therapy worked, but she also knew it was a slippery slope and once you started really talking everything seemed to come to light. Xóchitl didn’t need to know she had seen people before. Hell, she didn’t know she had seen anyone at all. The best distraction was to talk about why she was here in the first place. “Anyway, I freaked out while filming a weird scene and thought I saw something but it turned out to be nothing.”

Xóchitl knew full well that she wasn’t supposed to roll her eyes at clients, but sometimes it took every ounce of her concentration to keep from doing so. Which, thankfully, she’d mastered but she still took in a silent deep breath before she refocused on the woman in front of her.

“This is how I talk to most everyone, Winter.” She raised an eyebrow. “And you’re just as welcome to call me Dr. Reyes as you are to call me Xóchitl, I want this space to be as comfortable for you as is possible.” If it were more appropriate, and if she were the oversharing type, then Xóchitl might’ve told the woman in front of her that she hadn’t always had the best therapists, but there was a part of her that also figured the other woman might think she was just trying too hard again. “Guessing you weren’t too thrilled about that, huh? Makes sense, I don’t know if I’d be thrilled either.”

Even if it wasn’t a whole lot, the woman talking about anything was as good a start as she could hope for. “Could I ask what it was you saw? Or didn’t actually see but people thought you did?”

“So, you’re condescending to everyone then?” There was a slight smirk on Winter’s lips as she moved her head to the side. It seemed to her that the medium might have been getting to the doctor just a smidge and any time the girl could cause frustration no matter the type was always a good time. Maybe she needed to talk to the other woman about why that in particular was so satisfying to her but it was already quite clear that Winter wasn’t the sharing type. “What child is happy about being forced into therapy? For that matter, what person is? Doesn’t make things very comfortable for anyone.”

Give an inch just to take a mile, that was the key with most therapists. If you gave a little bit of the truth, unwillingly at that, they were most likely to believe the rest of the bull that would come, something that she remembered from her childhood. Hopefully, Dr. Reyes was the same way. “I thought I saw…” Pausing, she did her best to look hesitant with what she wanted to say. In a way, she was. Did Winter tell the truth here as well or did she make up some sort of lie? It wasn’t like Dr. Reyes could break confidentiality and tell the world that she didn’t actually see ghosts before but she’d let that slip to a few people already and was torn. She decided to do something in between. “I thought I saw some weirdo trying to break onto the set. Like some sort of hallucination or something. But he moved too quickly for it to be real.”

Her eyes cut over to the corner of the room where her ghost was blatantly laughing at her and she had to roll her eyes. Winter just hoped the doctor would think it was more because of the statement she’d just made than a reaction to something that wasn’t there.

“According to you, apparently.” It seemed to Xóchitl that this woman was very much used to people bending at her will, at getting whatever she wanted. If nothing else, maybe this would be a good opportunity to show her how that certainly wasn’t always the case. “I doubt anyone is happy to be forced, but considering you aren’t a child, if you really don’t want to be here, you are welcome to leave.” She gave a noncommittal shrug of her shoulders. She certainly didn’t in any way want to drop this woman as a client, but she seemed to perhaps need a bit of tough love.

The woman had seen something that wasn’t there. Xóchitl, for a moment, wanted to remark that the same sort of thing had happened to her, but there was no way. She was hardly willing to talk about that with her babysitter and her parents and that one girlfriend she’d had for three years of college – there was no way she was going to admit that in front of this woman. Not to mention, it would have been highly inappropriate and unprofessional.

“That’s something – did you call attention to it, or did it bring you anxiety?” She paused for a moment, unsure of exactly how to proceed, wanting to tread carefully (and figuring that she had to, if she wanted Winter to stay around. “Or maybe everyone else was more worried than you were?”

“And yet my show won’t go on unless I seek counsel. Sure looks to me like I’m being forced.” She most likely could have talked her way into starting the show up without seeing someone, the production company didn’t care whether or not she was having a mental breakdown as long as the ratings were good. Even her own mother would never have allowed a slip in Winter’s character to stop her beloved Spirit Speak. But the crew, the director, they had all been worried enough to threaten walking out if she returned without seeing a therapist. Or had they been afraid? That one made more sense. Either way, it looked like Winter was stuck with this until she was cleared to return because as irritated as she got with the majority of them she still felt like they were sort of family. She eyed the doctor, her gaze penetrating, daring the woman to argue that case. “That show is everything to me.”

For a split second, the patient could see something etched into the doctor’s features. Maybe it was understanding or recognition, maybe it was some sort of judgment, she couldn’t quite tell since the emotion was wiped away before it could register. It did leave a curiosity that commonly took over her own mind though. She wouldn’t ask, this was Winter’s appointment after all, but she made a mental note of the happenings.

“Of course I called attention to it, I thought someone was breaking in.” She shrugged a shoulder, not wanting to reveal the type of bone crushing fear that had taken over her that night and still lingered even now. She put on a brave face but Winter wasn’t as brave as she pretended to be and this ghost following her around still scared her even if he hadn’t done anything to try and harm her yet. “I was scared, yea, but who wouldn’t be? I think everyone else was scared of me. They didn’t see what I saw.”

“Well then I am sorry about that. I don’t think anybody should be forced to do anything,” even if it was supposedly for their benefit, Xóchitl figured. Putting requirements on things like this — they only lessened the likelihood of something actually helping, because if this woman – Winter – only saw this as a requirement, Xóchitl wasn’t sure if she’d be as willing to believe that it could help. It wasn’t going to hurt to try to help her (Xóchitl was intent on doing her job, even if faced with pushback), and there was a part of her that wondered why she was so resistant to all of this.

She wondered if it would be weird if she looked up the show and watched an episode. It would just be gathering background information on her client, wouldn’t it? Yet Xóchitl figured it would also be a bit weird, especially given the hesitancy Winter already had about therapy.

“As well you should have,” Xóchitl nodded. “So then they judged you because of it?” It was halfway between a statement and a question, because she knew part of the answer. “Seems pretty lame if they got scared of you just because of that. But I’m not here to judge. Unless you want me to?”

For some reason, Winter had believed the doctor when she gave her apology. There was a sincerity in the therapist’s voice that pushed back at some of the medium’s hostility, the girl searching the other’s face for any reason to let the feeling rise again. She wanted to not like her. She wanted a reason to tell production that her opinion on Winter didn’t matter, but she didn’t have anything to snap back at her this time. “I guess.” The words lacked the fierceness that had been accompanying all of the others so far and she again looked away towards the man standing in the corner if only to concentrate on something else.

He was still an ass though. His eyebrow was raised, probably wondering where this was going to go, but he stayed a silent observer just as he had since the day he’d been tied to Winter. “I wouldn’t say they judged me.” She looked back at the doctor, trying to forget about the ghost who was most definitely judging her right now. “I saw something that nobody else did. I should have mentioned there were others facing the same direction as me and not one of them saw the guy either.” Or his ghoulish appearance. “Concern is more the word we’re looking for here.” It was her turn to raise an eyebrow, that edge returning to her words. “Why would I want you to judge me, doc? Seems like something a therapist shouldn’t really do.” Had enough time passed yet? This wasn’t getting them anywhere, admittedly because Winter refused to tell the truth though. She looked at her phone to check the time and thankfully it was getting to that point. “Besides, the session is ending soon so we should leave on a high note, right?”

#Threads #Thread: Xóchitl #Therapy Session

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trans-axolotl · 1 year

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Sorry that this topic is heavy, but your posts are always very well thought out and I value your insight and antipsych perspective. What are your thoughts on some countries (now possibly including canada) allowing medically-assisted euthanasia for young mentally ill people if they request it? There was a story recently about a belgian terror attack victim being euthanized at 23 at her request. I personally believe that committing suicide is a right that every person should have because I think that punishing suicide attempters is the worst thing you can do for them, and ultimately, it’s their life and they deserve ultimate autonomy over it. Not that I think suicide should be encouraged, either, and having a specific government-endorsed suicide program seems sort of bad…? Like euthanizing young people comes with a lot of ethical complications — but I don’t know how to express why it feels weird given my personal beliefs about suicide being a right. (additionally, it feels even weirder because I do support these types of programs for the elderly (although i know what an ethical minefield those are too)). What are your thoughts?

Hey, anon. Thanks for bringing this up!

I have a lot of mixed thoughts about MAID (Medical assistance in dying) and also about what it means to consider suicide a right and in what ways I think that should play into mad organizing.

Firstly, I think the way that Canada's bill C-7 was written and the way it's being put into practice is just blatant eugenics. The rhetoric while legislators were debating and passing the bill made it clear the way they saw disabled lives as unworthy. In a context where many disabled people are forced to live in poverty, where treatment is often impossible to reach, where accessible affordable housing is often nonexistent, where the medical system is filled with ableism and stigma--it is incredibly fucked up to add suicide as an option on the table when there are so many coercive factors at play. Instead of working to make society more accessible and do things that improve the quality of life of disabled people of any age, the government and doctors are using MAID as a way to completely ignore structural ableism and spread narratives that disabled lives are not worth living. I am incredibly, incredibly infuriated about the way MAID was expanded in Canada. I would recommend that people check out the amazing work of the Disability Fillibuster to learn more about MAID in Canada.

Although I don't think every instance of MAID is inherently unethical, I am VERY wary of any bills that expand MAID like Bill C7 because I think that in the context of an ableist society that already doesn't consider disabled lives worth living and tells marginalized people every day millions of reasons why they wish we were dead, MAID bills will come with dangerous levels of coercion that cannot be safeguarded against. For example, the American medical system, with a long history of eugenic sterilization, medical experimentation on Black Americans, and widespread institutionalization, is not a system I ever trust to be able to handle the power of MAID without treating marginalized people's lives as disposable. (Link to read more about the history of medical experimentation: content warning for antiblack racism, sexual exploitation, slavery, and medical abuse of many types. )

At the same time, I am deeply invested in noncarceral approaches to suicide, and I believe that in order to effectively fight against psychiatric incarceration, we have to expand our understanding of the right to autonomy. The psych system, like many institutions of total control, weaponizes a fake concept of safety to justify depriving people of autonomy. In the context of prison abolition, Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie use the phrase "carceral safety" to talk about the ways that police use the rhetoric of "safety" to continue perpetuating a violent system of incarceration:

"The state’s carceral safety robs our communities of the conditions and nutrients that would allow true safety to grow, forcing us into the position of constantly reaching for more security from the very institutions that make us collectively less safe." (from Reclaiming Safety, August 2022).

Similarly to police and prisons, the psych system wants us as mentally ill people to believe that the only way safety and suicide prevention can occur is within institutions where autonomy is deprioritized and any kind of abuse is acceptable if it can be explained as a "life-saving" measure. So part of noncarceral suicide prevention involves rethinking the way we think about autonomy, and prioritizing autonomy and freedom as inherent rights, regardless if people are making risky or harmful choices about their own wellbeing. Suicide should never be criminalized and I think that a step towards decarcerating suicide requires us to embrace the importance of autonomy.

Rethinking autonomy to include the right to harm ourselves is something that I think is an important topic to grapple with in noncarceral suicide prevention, but I think it's one we also have to be careful with and approach with a lot of nuance when talking about it publically. Approaching suicide prevention with a bodily autonomy framework does not mean that we need to support government-sanctioned suicide, does not mean we need to advocate for eugenic policies, does not mean that we should advocate suicide for marginalized people who are already so used to being told that the world wants them dead. Suicide prevention is incredibly important to me, and it will never feel liberatory to me if I'm using my understanding of bodily autonomy to promote suicide in any way. Liberatory suicide prevention includes more than just noncarceral crisis response and helping people map through their distress. It also includes advocating for the material conditions we need to survive in our everyday life, and in my mind, that includes things like advocating for disabled people to have our basic needs met so that we don't have to live in poverty, inaccessible housing, and aren't coerced into suicide through eugenicist bills like Bill C7 in Canada.

Definitely think there is a LOT more to say on this topic and that my opinion is not the only way of looking at this, so I absolutely encourage followers to jump into the discussion.

#personal #psych ward tw #antiblack racism mention #suicide tw #euthanasia tw #medical assistance in dying tw #eugenics tw #ask to tag #antipsychiatry #antipsych #mad pride #psych abolition #prison abolition #i don't even know what to tag this as

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altf4d3lete · 3 months

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Okay I’m not saying Tyler is the best option for Wednesday, and I definitely think you have great points regarding your Enid is the best for Wednesday post, but I think Tyler’s motivations are oddly parallel to the sense of justice you set up with Wednesday. Hear me out on this one because it might be a little bit complicated.

I think the Hyde and Thornhill have made it so Tyler doesn’t have any say in the violence he’s committed, but I do think the Hyde corrupts people possibly by feeding off what anger they have and magnifying it. It’s like the bad parts everyone has but magnified and ultimately corrupted. Also, Thornhill seemingly tried to seduce and groom him before deciding to imprison him in that cave, and I think when she showed him those files she used it as a way to target Nevermore the institution (and therefore everyone associated with it).

I think Hunter mentioned that his actions in season two might be motivated by the fact that he now hates outcasts because of what Nevermore did to his mother. That banning Hydes made it so one of the most vulnerable as well as dangerous groups of outcasts did not get the education they needed to stay safe. He was also mentally abused by Thornhill before getting his Hyde unlocked, and we’ve seen regular people get convinced into all sorts of stuff by abusers. Though it rationally doesn’t make sense, I could see Thornhill convincing him that what he did to Xavier was because his Dad convinced him to hate outcasts, which wouldn’t have happened if his mother didn’t get put away/died, which wouldn’t have happened if Nevermore “did more”, but that it doesn’t matter anyway because everyone at Nevermore deserves pain because they are complicit. I don’t think post-Hyde Tyler really has any say in what he does, but that pre-Hyde Tyler was groomed into thinking this somehow made sense. Then that little seed of hate Thornhill planted allowed for the Hyde to corrupt him faster, or at least made it so he felt he could only trust her pre-Hyde. So it’s violence in response to a perceived injustice, similar to what Wednesday does. The thing is, I think it’s partly a fault of Wednesday’s character in this rendition. Her belief that she is judge, jury, and executioner and needs no one else keeps her in an echo chamber where she doesn’t question her own violent tendencies and ends up hurting people she loves. They are comparable right now, which is why they get along in S1, but it’s because the Hyde also feeds into her worst instincts.

I agree with most of what you’re saying. I think Thornhill definitely told him that it was reasonable for him to lash out the way he did, especially after knowing what his mother was and what could have happened to her. However, my point was more that the fact that he assaulted Xavier in the first place proves to me that he had already justified it in his mind. And maybe at some point he regretted it or he was starting to change, but he honestly only seemed apologetic about it when there was the possibility of Wednesday being upset with him, so I doubt that was the case.

I do agree, I definitely think that Thornhill made him and his thinking and pre-conceived notions worse, and I think that he was groomed into hating outcasts more than he already did.

I also agree that the way him and Wednesday react to things is paralleled in some way, but their reasons for the way they act are not, and that’s the key point. Wednesday reacts to general injustice about outcasts and innocents being hurt. Tyler reacts to PERSONAL injustices. Kinda like the hero v villain dilemma, where the hero would sacrifice everything for the general population and for the greater good/general justice, while the villain would sacrifice the greater good and general justice if it meant correcting a personal injustice against them.

#wednesday #wednesday addams #netflix #tyler galpin #wednesday netlfix #hot take #marilyn thornhill

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monstercollection · 2 years

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I want to talk about some of my feelings about John Seward. I tried writing a post about it before and deleted it after giving it some more thought, but I’m going to try again.

Background: I’ve worked in group homes with people with various combinations of neurodivergence, mental illness and disability for 10 years and am ND, disabled and mentally ill myself.

CW: Modern Institutions, institutionalization of Autistic people, abuse of disabled children mentioned briefly.

Seward as autistic is a really hard headcannon for me to grapple with because autistic people have been institutionalized at high rates for as long as asylums existed.

Is it possible an autistic guy with fewer needs could run an asylum that likely held at least some autistic people who are high needs/have behaviors? Sure, I guess but we never see Seward doing anything but perpetrate the problems in that system.

This is not going to be the first time we see him go out of his way to trigger and escalate Renfield. I’m not going to give any major spoilers here, but this isn’t an isolated incident.

It’s also hard for me to grapple with “compared to the practices of the time, he’s progressive,” because these were not just the standards of his time. These are standards that have stretched right through the present day. This is stuff that still goes on.

I’ve been in direct care for 10 years and I work for an agency that formed when whistleblowers started opening about about what was going on in Massachusetts’ institutions in the 80s. A lot of these whistleblowers and people who formerly worked in institutions now the company and they have shared some absolute horror stories about things that were standard practices.

I teach self-advocacy curriculum that focuses on the history of the disability rights movement and we talk about this a lot. We go into the history of institutions and the people I’m educating are always shocked to hear just how recent this stuff is. It’s all within their lifetime.

We still have the Judge Rottenberg center in MA that uses things like electric shock adversives to punish autistic kids (and the most horrific thing is that many of these kids’ own parents have gone to court to defend that practice).

This is my third time reading through Dracula. And I’m not going to expect people who haven’t read the book to take my word for why you shouldn’t like Seward or why he is bad or any of that. You’re along for the ride and you get to enjoy these characters however you want. You aren’t problematic or bad for having your own take, you’re just doing your own literary interpretation and that’s cool.

But I’m always going to empathize more with the actual disabled and mentally ill patients (esp, here Renfield) in the institution than I am the asylum guy. This includes people (again, like Renfield in this book) with challenging behaviors or the rare few who have physical aggression (this is the population I worked with in group homes for years and they are no less deserving of proper, compassionate care, dignity and autonomy than anyone else).

But I like… I can’t help but wonder what the Seward fans would think about the practices at the now shuttered Danvers State Mental Hospital (where some of my coworkers came from and where several of the individuals we serve once lived) or even the notorious Willowbrook Institutions. Those were “the standards of the 1980s”.

I don’t mean that in an accusatory way. Most people straight up do not know about this stuff. I just think it shifts the perspective to know the history of all this is a lot more recent . But I also think it’s strange that we would judge people in the 1980s a lot more harshly than they would people doing the exact same thing in the 1890s, and we might want to examine why that is.

We expect things in the Victorian Era to be bad because we have the idea that time is a steady march toward progress and that people in the past were always more ignorant than we are, so we kind of hand wave things. That breaks down when we actually look at our recent history.

The disabled and mentally ill people of the Victorian Era knew just how horrible life in asylums were. Restrictive environments where you had no personal autonomy, no consent of consent, where adversives were used on the regular (and I haven’t even touched on conversion therapy and the roles institutions played there) —these environments were hell. When you say “people didn’t understand back then,” that’s not true. Disabled and mentally ill people knew. It was just a matter of people not listening.

And that was not just true back then. It’s true today.

So yeah, I come at Seward with a lot of biases. I’m writing a book right now with him as the secondary villain so clearly I do not love the guy.

I respect everyone’s right to head-cannon what they want and make him your eeby-deeby and all. This is a fun internet book club and we’re all just here to have a good time.

But I just kind of had to respond to some of those takes because I think a lot of them come from a place of little understanding of the role of institutions played in the struggle for disability rights, especially for autistic people and I think it’s an important part of the conversation.

Edit:

I wanted to clarify something because it is coming up in people’s responses to this. “Seward is Autistic” is absolutely a valid take and I’m not saying it isn’t possible for an autistic guy to run an asylum, or that it would automatically mean he couldn’t be ableist if he did.

My personal discomfort with that head cannon is that I don’t really like storylines where a marginalized person is blamed for their oppression of their group (ex: the homophone is secretly gay). This is purely down to personal preference.

I think a lot of autistic, anxious and general ND people are claiming him as one of their own because he is presented as one of the stories heroes and they like seeing themselves in that. And that’s kind of the point of fandom.

Everybody’s going to filter him through the lens of their own experiences. This is just mine.

#dracula daily #john seward #jack seward #cw: mental institutions #Cw: discussion of abuse of disabled people

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pettyrevenge-base · 1 year

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Rude buyer threatens me with a chargeback, then loses both the item and her payment.

A woman bought a designer handbag from me online, then about a week later sends an extremely rude message, claiming it had damages and smelled funny. She wanted her money back IMMEDIATELY, and demanded I send it to her on Venmo (against policy and massive red flag for fraud) or else she would file a chargeback (threatening sellers with chargebacks is also against policy). Being as it was the weekend, and her language was really abusive and gross, I decided not to interrupt my weekend and waited till Monday morning to respond, which is within the TOS.

She was really aggressive, and sent me more rude messages demanding I relent and pay her off site "or else". I checked her feedback and at least one other seller reported that she also tried to coerce them into an off site refund with a chargeback. Buyers have enormous latitude in online sales, and tbh, I just didn't want to deal with her anymore so on Monday I responded offering her a full refund in exchange for a free return, and though I did not believe she was being honest, I gave her the benefit of the doubt and said maybe it was damaged in transit. I fully expected her to return the wrong item, but after I gave her a free return/refund option, she filed then a chargeback anyways claiming the item is not as described, then left very negative feedback. Both the feedback and existence of a chargeback claim harms my presence on the site and hits me with fees and an automatic refund for her, taking money out of my account automatically and messing with my budget. There's a reason why most sellers will do most anything to avoid chargebacks, it really is inconvenient and damaging for us.

Now being as this used to be my profession, I know that it's considered fraudulent to file a chargeback when the retailer has offered a full refund. So naturally, I appealed the case and it was decided in my favor, and her refund was reversed. I blocked her and moved along. Fast forward about two weeks, and the original item shows up on my doorstep, returned, and without any of the damages that she complained about. Now. I realized in this situation I have no legal obligation to refund her at all, but better still, is that when I went to the seller dashboard to try, I don't even have the option to refund her because the case SHE OPENED was closed and decided in my favor. I still felt a little funny about relisting, so I emailed the site for more direction.

Apparently, when you file a chargeback you are forfeiting your right to seek a refund directly from the retailer in favor of seeking a refund from your financial institution. She had apparently messaged the site and modified my feedback to demand a refund after the chargeback failed, and sent them the tracking number of the item she ultimately returned, saying that since she had a tracking number they had to refund her. But a failed chargeback is final in this case, and because her behavior was deemed fraudulent, the website itself is not able/willing to refund her anymore either. The only way I could give her her money back was if I unblocked her, exchanged info, and sent the refund on venmo or paypal, which are linked to my personal email and phone number. Given how rude she had been I have no interest in opening up any unmediated communication, and I'm certainly not going to give her my personal contacts of any kind.

So by following through on her coercive threat to file a chargeback against me, she managed to lose both the item and her money. A chargeback is not the silver bullet people often think it is. If she'd been even reasonably polite, I'd have had no issue communicating with her directly to give her money back, even if she had filed the chargeback.

Source: reddit.com/r/pettyrevenge

#pettyrevenge #lol #omg

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stranger-rants · 1 year

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I’ve been in the Billy community a long time before I became active online. But I’ve noticed more people are starting to grasp the criticism Billy Hargrove fans make of the show and fanbase. Not everyone tho there’s still a dubious amount of hate and harassment thrown at marginalized creators in the Billy fanbase. Especially racism thrown at BIPOC Billy fans like myself who don’t fit into the fandoms stereotypical racist monolithic assumptions about BIPOC fans in the Stranger things fandom. But I was wondering if you had any ideas to why that could be? Since you’re outspoken about how it took some time for you to empathize with Billy’s character. I’ve kinda just accepted I don’t understand where this shift is coming from I started to just become content with the abuse I faced online for liking Billy Hargrove as a character and knowing that Netflix’s knows this shit happens but they’d probably never speak out against it being to afraid to upset their market audience. I kinda acquired this “Boo hoo 😭” attitude around me connecting to this character’s story and getting hate for it but I’m glad to see more understanding around how a person like me can like him. I’m still angry tho. But I got anger issues.

ANYWAY I LOVE UR BLOG 🥸

Thanks as always for the love 💜

I made a joke about this on my main blog before... how I hate characters because I would want to fight them in a parking lot, but not in the way where I think I am objectively better than people who like them or something like that.

It's okay to hate characters, but nowadays people turn dislike into a performance of morality. They're not honest about their hate, and they're not much interested in confronting that because they're so convinced they're right.

I think these people just want to be seen as better than everyone else. I think there are people who use "the right language" to perform morality without having to commit to questioning real systems of oppression or their own role in it.

It's why they'll call out Billy's racism, but do nothing to confront the racism within the overall narrative or the racism informing the narrative on the outside (i.e. the way the biases of the showrunners influence the way characters of color are treated).

It takes hard work to confront your own biases and work towards a better society. I struggle all the time managing my emotions and saying/doing the right thing when someone says or does something not great to me. Every day I struggle!

It is hard to not hold a grudge and to not want a severe institutional consequence for harm done, but I have been trying for years now to empathize with the pain and suffering people go through regardless if they're A Good PersonTM.

That being said, this is fandom. Fandom and the participation in it is not inherently activism. Liking the "right" content doesn't translate to doing the right thing for society. There are politics in stories, yes, but being in fandom isn't revolutionary.

I don't know if that answers your question, but I hope it helps. I didn't like Billy at first. I did think he was a brat (still do) and I found some of his behavior repulsive (still do). However, I never thought he deserved what happened to him. Ever.

#asks

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nerdygaymormon · 2 years

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Just need to vent this frustration to someone who's also mormon, but like. WHY are we not allowed or encouraged to ask critical questions about WHY we do things in the church?

my family was reading this talk (2009 May you Have Courage from Pries. Monson) and came across this quote:

"The commandments of our Heavenly Father are not negotiable!

Powerful is this quote from news commentator Ted Koppel, host of ABC’s Nightline program for many years. Said he:

“We have actually convinced ourselves that slogans will save us. ‘Shoot up if you must; but use a clean needle.’ ‘Enjoy sex whenever with whomever you wish; but [protect yourself].’

'No. The answer is no. Not no because it isn’t cool or smart or because you might end up in jail or dying in an AIDS ward—but no, because it’s wrong.'"

And I said that Koppel came SO CLOSE to making a valid point and then just washed it all away. Because I have found there is usually an actual reason for commandments beyond God said so--especially the ten commandments. Multiple sexual partners increases your risk for an STD, etc. And then rather than rely on the actual evidence that he had to explain WHY NOT TO do something, he just said "no, we don't do this because it's wrong" and it made me want to pound my head against something.

So many times in my life I've been told that we don't do something "because it's wrong" but not WHY. After I learned I was lesbian I started to think more critically about the church's policies and this has caused a lot of friction between my family and me because (I'm not out of the closet to them) I'll ask WHY and people will just get angry instead of thinking about it.

That happened. My dad got after me for saying that STDs are a valid reason for the law of chastity and said that "it's wrong and you're ruining the emotional side of sex when you don't have the same partner" and like, okay, Sure. But when I tried to bring up that other commandments also have valid reasoning that makes sense, it just turned into this...thing. Like it normally does with my family. But I digress. Basically it boiled down to this: "God rarely has any reasons for asking us to do anything, and you just need to accept that."

And I just feel so frustrated. Because on the one hand, personal revelation is a thing, right? God can give us answers on how we're supposed to live within the church's policy? (I, for example, feel encouraged to get my ears pierced in multiple places) So you can receive personal revelation for why you as an individual are supposed to follow a specific policy.

But on the other hand, it feels horrifying to have to trust a God who just makes us do things without any logical reasoning. Maybe this is just cptsd kicking in from past abuse. But am I doing this whole thing wrong? AM I supposed to just accept that God has us do things for no reason and stop asking questions about WHY? Do you think we can ask why without being condemned for it?

Also I'm so sorry that this ask turned monstrously long, and thank you if you made it to the end of that.

For some LDS folks, there's this idea we have a prophet, the prophet speaks for God, therefore we just need to follow what the prophet says, no need to ask "why?" Or as someone phrased it, "when the prophet speaks, the thinking has been done."

In General Conference, in local meetings, and in private meetings with leaders, the message often conveyed is obedience to ecclesiastical authority and loyalty to the institutional church.

Here's a few quotes that show we have a tradition of independent thinking and questioning, and for you to ask "why" is following in this noble tradition:

“You must work through the Spirit. If that leads you into conflict with the program of the Church, you follow the voice of the Spirit.” (Elder S. Dilworth Young, First Council of the Seventy, 1945; quoted here, p. 17)

"When [President Brigham Young] says that the Spirit of the Lord says thus and so, I don’t consider that all we should do is to say let it be so.” (Elder Orson Pratt, 1847, quoted here, cover jacket)

“Cursed is he that putteth his trust in man, or maketh flesh his arm, or shall hearken unto the precepts of men, save their precepts shall be given by the power of the Holy Ghost.” (2 Nephi 28:31)

This is a long quote from Elder Uchtdorf on not blindly following the leaders, but evaluate what they teach. “The invitation to trust the Lord does not relieve us from the responsibility to know [truth] for ourselves. This is more than an opportunity; it is an obligation – and it is one of the reasons we were sent to this earth. Latter-day Saints are not asked to blindly accept everything they hear. We are encouraged to think and discover truth for ourselves. We are expected to ponder, to search, to evaluate, and thereby to come to a personal knowledge of the truth. Brigham Young said: “ I am… afraid that this people have so much confidence in their leaders that they will not inquire for themselves of God whether they are led by him. I am fearful they settle down in a state of blind self-security. … Let every man and woman know, by the whispering of the Spirit of God to themselves, whether their leaders are walking in the path the Lord dictates.” “So we continually seek truth from all good books and other wholesome sources.” (Salt Lake City, Utah January 14, 2013)

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Why would we need to have a personal witness, or evaluate the correctness of what a leader teaches, if anyone who is the prophet can never be wrong?

Matthew 17 has an interesting illustration that a good tree doesn't bring forth evil fruit. "Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them." That "tree" could be a person, but it also could be a policy or teaching. We're taught to evaluate whether something is a good teaching by the results it produces.

I believe we are living under our privilege in the church because we don't take the things we've been given and ask "why" as a way to understand the purpose of the teaching/doctrine/policy. Can we see where the Lord is leading us? What's the trajectory? We could use the understanding gained from asking "why" to figure out what our next steps should be as we move in the direction the Lord is guiding us.

For example, both the Bible and our modern church have a history of expanding the circle of inclusion to let more people in and let them enjoy the blessings from God. Let's look at that trajectory and think about who we're currently excluding and would God want us to break down the barriers to let them in?

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Orson Pratt, who is quoted above, opposed legalizing slavery in Utah even though Brigham Young was in favor of it.

Governor George Romney of Michigan marched in favor of Civil Rights and an apostle wrote him concerned because equality isn't right for a people cursed by God.

Pratt and Romney asked "why," and acted on the understanding they gained, even when the church opposed them.

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I think asking "why" is a great way to understand some laws or commandments were okay for people at one point in time but don't apply to us now.

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I think Ted Koppel's quote is troubling, should people die for doing something "wrong"? If someone is addicted and uses needles to inject drugs, wouldn't it be better if they had access to clean needles so they can avoid diseases? Shouldn't someone use condoms and other protection when having casual sex to protect against STI's & pregnancy? These "consequences" can ruin lives and can be avoided.

People can change and repent, but not if they're dead. We're essentially condemning them if we force the worst consequences on them.

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