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juistheseminarian · 5 years

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Eccentric, part 2 : now I’m here

I was planning to be done with this by now - both with this article and with the illness. I can’t believe that it’s been almost 15 years and I still get people congratulating me for acknowledging that I have an issue and going it’s-the-first-step-to-recovery, which they’ve learned was an appropriate thing to say since you don’t want to stand there and be embarrassed like I do with my boyfriend’s mom when she starts crying (which she does a lot). I’ve stirred things and realized things and I intended this to sound like a sort of retrospective from a place of unadulterated success. But guess what!

I ended the last bit on my return from anorexia and lasting relationship with a psychologist I described as abusive, although that may be excessive and may come from the resentment of a long therapy seemingly not having “worked”. I started seeing them around age 12, before the eating disorder really declared, and i was referred to them at the end of an endless session of musical chairs through which I met many, many ‘emergency’ professionals whose schedules couldn’t accommodate another patient. I had to tell the whole story every time as if I were filing a police complaint or justifying an ailment that had long thinned beyond recognition, losing more of its meaning every time; I worried often, and I still do, about making myself sound ill enough to be considered, knowing I was taking their time when they could be curing people with actual issues.

Having been sent to therapy after the school phobia I developed as a 5 or 6-year-old, and then again as a 12-year-old, and on and off ever since, means I’ve barely lived without framing my every breath as something to be treated and fixed, analyzed and made normal, insufficient, dependant, bending the wrong way. I entered this longest bout of therapy as a child and left it a decade later as a child. I believe for the first few years the psychologist was reliable if a little too set in her ways: there was no talk of medication outside of an apparent agreement to exclude it, which comforted my irrational fear of treatment with just as little medical basis as I previously had. However, her patient-based approach helped me feel like this time around it wouldn’t be an issue if I wasn’t “really” anything, or that’s how I viewed it at first. I don’t mean to dismiss the entirety of what happened there, only, you know, the bits where a refusal to diagnose me lead to a refusal to treat me, which in turn lead to desperation to fit me into the superstitious ramblings of an unstable person who refused to treat herself. Fuck that person. Call it what it is.

I resented the amount of information she gave me about herself, the description of her previous marriage leading up to ten years of unhappiness she couldn’t get out of, the description of her current partner’s superior attitude, the way her life was a mess and the way I viewed her as honest instead of genuinely intrusive. She’d offer to pay me to iron her clothes, she’d talk to my teenage self about her finances, about her gynecological health, and I listened, and my mother became concerned. By then she had framed my parents as unable to understand me the way she would, she whose child had run away from home and I had to know all about it, apparently. I defended her.

After the anorexia bit I grew alright for a while. I went to high school, I had a boyfriend, I neglected my own friends in order to make him my first priority at all costs, in short I was playing my role very well. My writing got noticed, as it should be, and I was exempted from english class, as I should be. I was bad at maths, I was good at history, I enjoyed latin class, I had friends I looked cool to because of the whole having had sex thing. Over one year my boyfriend and I had split up and I saw a few boys from my grade, most notably a wreck of a teen who regularly said he could be doing this with any of my friends and prided himself for using me “as an experiment”. When I broke up with him to go have the world’s least satisfactory sex with a friend of his, he called me crying hundreds of times. He had read somewhere that cool people had open relationships so he wanted one: when I took him up on that he said I disgusted him, turned around cause he “couldn’t look at me”, and masturbated in my bed. It was terrific. I was a sheep in shame’s clothing.

There were the “can we do this without a condom”s and the “I want to see you shove that shower up your vagina to clean out the danger and I’m watching you”s and the “I can’t believe you cheated on me”s (he was kind!) and the “I’m storming out of your birthday party because you and your friends are little bitches”s. I don’t like how this is taking the same turn my life took - revolving around boys and men the second it got the chance, which is something I still haven’t worked out today as I live under the constant scrutiny of my several imaginary sugar daddy-leaning role models, but I’m keeping that topic for next time. This is, of course, she says in a white girl voice, about me.

During the last year of high school, the boyfriend and I broke up for good because I had fallen in love with a guy we had met at a music festival and had pursued email after email. I felt glorious cracking the shells of emotionally unstable dudes and making them rely on me for subcontracting introspection: now I take “you’re the closest friend I’ve ever had” as a red flag, poisonous edible paper that dissolves in my water tank and kills me. It seems I do know better now, and it seems no woman ever told me that, and I keep being scared of them, and I keep being gay too, that’s my life’s familiar ghost. I’ve never gone far enough to confront the very real fact of loving women: I saw it as a kid when female nudity made me react, when I didn’t feel any sense of belonging with either boys or girls, when I felt like a monster. That desire is different because I don’t let it exist. Funny i’m only mentioning it now. What’s it like to be out to yourself?

Do you relate to princesses? To female leads? Sometimes I can’t allow myself to replace fictional characters cause how realistic would it be to have the man of the story want to fuck me when my buttcrack isn’t even shaved? Obviously that would never work. Obviously cinderella’s ass is smooth. I never feel polished enough, or good enough an actor, or intelligible enough: expanding like a red giant, I feel like a stomach with needs, and the picture is grotesque - nothing like those Degas ballerinas. Dripping, eating itself, round but not motherly, the hunchback from Ken Russell’s the Devils is too feminine next to me. Suppose i’m fattening from storing all that shame.

***

These days I resent the other diseased. Everyone hates my uncle cause he’s got it too and he drinks and he takes medication that people view with contempt; he lets himself die but it never seems to work even though he acts like it. Somehow something is still barely holding his limbs attached, miraculously, precariously. And my friend’s mother too, brain locked in a hamster wheel, hanging on to people like smeagol consumed, no longer in touch: filtering words like a beekeeper, only letting the crazy in. She makes me afraid to give birth. Would my children grow with a devolved being, Lovecraft’s blind cave-dweller, who once was human and is now condemned to live? Avoiding it in hallways, fearing it under their bed?

By the fourth year of the relationship with festival boy my anxiety had become the decisive factor in every single move I made. I could no longer travel, be spontaneous, laugh, orgasm or breathe. The lump in my throat had grown bigger than I was and my face felt numb, I evaporated, I had emergency doctors drive a camera through my nose only for them to confirm I was choking myself this whole time. It really felt strange: like you’d have tried to swallow turkish delight but it piled up in your throat, invisible. The doctor wrote: patient known for anxiety. I thought: great, now when I die for real they’re gonna think i’m crying wolf and also they’re gonna be right. Fortunately enough, I then was relieved from the constant imminence of choking, you’d never guess how.

I called a therapist my mom had taken me to when i was about 12 and we both liked her a lot - serious and a little intimidating in just the right way, a little soft yet clearly not one to let me bullshit my way out (my mom liked those). I was in the uni hall with some friends when her assistant called me back and scheduled an appointment for me later this same week: it was a huge deal. She remembered me. I suddenly felt safe, suddenly felt myself slip from my own consciousness like the narrator in Janice Galloway’s depression book when she enters a clinic: she’s no longer her own problem, or so she thinks at first, before realizing care never comes in the shape we expected.

I started treatment almost immediately and was in shock at the realization that I did not need to suffer any more. I wasn’t aware, I didn’t KNOW of the existence of medication that would prevent me from spending hours and hours in inescapable pain, contorting my body between screams and frantic sobs, persuaded I was about to die a solitary death that’d leave me to witness my loved ones moving on in relief. Everything around me felt temporary and fleeting and treacherous. And most of all, each of these occasions were a trial for my failure to live, and I sat accused as my chrysalis life developed before me, never free, never daring, hidden, waiting. Every time, I realized how much I was missing out on. Every time I was too tired to seize the day after recovering and just dozed, scrutinized always, for a respite I knew would be short. My idea of living was a xanax in front of any distracting tv show: suddenly sleep was warm, and I wasn’t dying, and things lifted by the tornado gently fell back into place, and disappeared.

(river) Oh, I got plenty of help. Therapists and medications and EMDR and - hypnosis and transcendental meditation. Nothing made me feel better (...) I feel everything. There just wasn’t enough positive emotion to balance me out. (payton: so it wasn’t because of me?) (river) no. you were my only relief. (“the politician” (2019) ep.6)

My trust in festival boy was broken: I felt that if I was ever overcome with the looming fear and froze, he wouldn’t help. I have no idea if it was true: I’m very prone to blaming others for my feeling abandoned, often with no relation to their behaviour. I never could learn his language (i’m sure I can now) and the required travelling to see him became too much, even though we had met through travelling and didn’t feel at home anywhere. This continent of my life was infected and we steeped in sepsis for months and months, resentful, picturing other people when we touched, searching for admiration elsewhere. It’s the worst thing you can do to a bond, demand things from it when it’s dead, as if it was gonna answer. You know it’s been dead for months but when you try and bury it, you can swear you saw it squirm, and then it’s gone, and you took out the doubt.

In this case I didn’t, Martin did. Martin was an old friend I knew through my first partner, and he came back into my life with an exact timing, like he was taking up an offer I was about to throw at someone else. It was all i wanted, car rides at night, feeling desired, watching him on stage, not being shamed. Comfort and help and reassurance, feeling small next to him, and knowing for certain that he understood: everything he says I take seriously, because there’s no way he doesn’t know, I could never lie, and I don’t want to. Well - I omit a little bit since that’s what it takes for me to grow guilt-free: I’m a fangirl and have never felt the need to stop, I let the obsession continent drift and crash, and perhaps it will become submerged and perhaps it won’t. Point is, I can defend it now, all the pieces I feel,I’m no one’s moodboard.

I took a step back and realized I had no way of relying on the trope of a positive ending to this, since there isn’t one. I see no perspective for myself, and I recently understood why antidepressants were considered a risk factor for suicides. It did make me indifferent to things that used to be matters of life and death: school grades, my weight… I care, and I don’t. I gained over 10 kg that sports don’t affect at all: I run all the time, cycle all the time, and it piles up forever, and I don’t recognize myself. I don’t fit in myself anymore. I don’t want to celebrate this thing i haven’t chosen and that I can’t deal with, and when I start thinking about it I end up in a frenzy. I just pretend it’s not there, but I feel so heavy carrying all that me.

It’s a good time to be lost, if you’re okay with it. I’m not. I’m not free enough to be lost: I’m merely pulling on my leash and choking myself, looking at the shop displays, window shopping for life, shiny presents in a snowy christmas street, the others singing while I watch. I watch, I drift off, they see me lose focus, we’re too tired to get me back. There’s so much to experience and when I look back, so much I’m glad I’ve done before realizing I was doing it, because clearly it would be too late by now. I’m not a recluse by choice: I’m one of the weak ones, the eternal witness, or a loser, depending on how you see it. I like both. I think taking myself as seriously as i do now is both a symptom and a cause of why I’m such a bore: what’s so bad about looking stupid? I do it all the time while trying to not look anything at all. It’s not that deep, if I do say so myself, and as you’d expect, I never do. Ah the clever girl’s burden, say the adults, and together we mock the monster we’ve created and the monster takes it personally.

So see, that’s where I’m at: no longer can I lazily bask in the excuse of a shitty partner, this time it’s on me, it’s on being sick, it’s on being sick without an excuse. My parents support me. My partner supports me. My friends would support me if i let them anywhere near me. But I take the crazy and I give it an incubator, I show it films with role models of crazy so it can grow and grow and finally make me special, isn’t this what I do? Look at joaquin phoenix and lose weight, I tell it; you’re not very good at the crazy, looking so plump and healthy. At least show your scars: they’re fading, it’s been over a decade, so now what, we’re just gonna look like someone who should get a makeover without the moving story of why they’re neglecting their appearance? What’s funny is, I’m actually a very ambitious person, mediocre is my rock bottom - listen to me when I tell you. There’s no such thing as effortless when effortless is a mountain.

(payton: i’m scared.) (river) don’t be. There’s more honor in defeat than there is in unused potential. (“the politician” (2019), ep.8)

My therapist recently told me that if I was catholic I’d be in trouble. Duh, right? Jokes aside, she went: then people would see you as a waste because you do nothing with your force. You wouldn’t be allowed to just have that and not live it. I pondered: don’t you think I know that? Is more guilt really the solution?

I know i want things. I know I love things, and people, and sounds, and places, and smells, and being alive. But do you see the difference between ‘knowing’ you shouldn’t be doing something, and understanding it in your very flesh, by experience, growing from it with the intimate conviction that it’s something you must stay away from? I know those things, and I don’t feel them really. I’m a fast learner, I’m a semi competent person, I can almost seem okay in a group. But I have shackles for lungs and I have concrete for breath. It’s got brutalist charm and warmth almost doesn’t spread.

So that’s where I am with the dreams I have and the love I feel and the way it won’t come out. I suppose I’m awake but I’m not quite there. Martin feels it first: the pain on his face when I disconnect is breaking my heart. He’s just trying to bring me back. I’m loved. I’m locked away. And once my arms break I’ll dig my way out with my teeth if I need to.

#my writing #mental health #juistheseminarian

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roxywashere · 6 years

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Witch Activity

FursTech employee Noelle combats corporate espionage

It had started just like any other day. Most days started like any other day. Noelle rode the train to work, from Kenosha to the heart of the Danesville Metropolis. She walked from the station to the coffee shop she regularly bought breakfast at, reading the overnight news on her phone all the while. She bought a breakfast bagel sandwich and coffee, and ate it while she proceeded to her job at the FursTech building.

She worked on the 255th floor, a kilometer up. The first elevator only went to floor 150, so she transferred to the second elevator, which took her to floor 250, and instead of transferring to another elevator she took the stairs the remaining 5 floors. She scanned her Employee ID at the door out of the stairwell, and entered the FursTech national development lab.

Noelle was a hardware developer for the largest technology company in America. She was currently the lead on a new phone project, the most ambitious device the company has ever made. Her team was one of the most secretive groups in the company, surpassed only by the CEO’s personal projects.

No materials were allowed to leave the floor, and designs were only allowed on permanently installed computer consoles and their associated machining booths. This project was the most top of corporate secrets.

When Noelle arrived, CEO Aradia Furst was standing at the project station, examining the team's progress. Aradia, despite being a world famous technologist and inventor, was also widely known to be both a pagan witch and a christian sorceress. Instead of shunning this conception about her, she embraced it, and always dressed the part. She was rarely seen not dressed in long, flowing dresses or robes, exclusively colored black and gold. The phone Noelle was working on, the Pendant, was an endeavor by Aradia to bring simple, functional magic to the commonperson on the street, so it may be integrated into modern culture and the stigma around its use dispelled.

“How is the Pendant coming along, in your opinion?” Aradia asked as soon as she sensed Noelle arrive.

“It’s coming along very good, I think,” Noelle answered. “I think I’ve finally figured out the best materials to infuse to give the most user friendly experience. I’ve got a list drawn up...” Noelle, as a high-ranking FursTech engineer, had been given personal magic lessons by Aradia herself. She used her moderate amount of training to summon a hologram from the project console, showing the list of materials with an awkward contortion of her hand.

Aradia examined it for half a second before commenting. “With some substitutions, it’ll be unparalleled.” She expertly altered the list, replacing a number of archaic components with purer modern equivalents. “There. One last prototype and test, and I think we’re ready for the production model.”

“Yes, definitely. I can't wait for this to finally get into the hands of the software team. This will give us a big leg up on the Tokyo Workshop.”

“Speaking of...” Aradia dispelled the holograms. “The Workshop has a number of mahou in the city ‘on business’, so be extra cautious of espionage this week. I know for a fact that somebody on this floor leaked preliminary info on the Pendant, and that damned kitsune running the Workshop would literally kill for the designs for so compact a spell base. At the very least, brush up on your defensive and summoning spells before the next time you leave the building. If they ambush you, don’t be afraid to summon me to protect you.”

“Yes, of course.”

Aradia left, and Noelle got to work assembling the prototype with Aradia’s substitutions. She had a fully functional phone in her hand by the time she had eaten lunch.

It of course wouldn't be equipped with any offensive spells by default, but it had a number of defensive and utility spells built-in, with room for software devs to program more. Noelle and another member of the team took turns casting increasingly powerful spells of varying types against it, to test its capabilities.

An average citizen would be able to protect themselves not only against the average witch, but more mundane threats, like a mugger with a knife or gun, and be able to call for help for any more substantial threat. It would change the world, for the better.

After the day had ended, Noelle handed the phone over to the software team to begin developing the final version of the OS and program the full suite of spells. Noelle walked to the train station, careful to stay on well-lit streets, her focus completely on her surroundings. She boarded the train, picking a seat at the very front where she could see every passenger and through every car.

But she never truly expected the japanese coven to be so bold as to attack her in public.

Noelle only barely managed to get a ward up before an arcane bolt struck her, pushing her into the wall behind her and denting the panelling. She was in a daze as the three elegantly dressed mahou approached her, and cast an immobilization spell upon her. The tallest of the three hoisted Noelle over her shoulder, and then they cast a teleportation spell.

They sat Noelle in a chair, in a small dark room. Without any decorum, they immediately started casting painful spells upon her, in an attempt to forcefully pry her mind open to be read.

After a few fruitless minutes of this, they started conversing in japanese, in frustrated tones. While they were briefly distracted by their argument, Noelle hastily and quietly muttered a summoning incantation, only barely finishing it before one of the mahou caught her lips moving silently.

“Stop!” The shortest said, in a thick accent.

Noelle, through the thick mental haze of the pain she had been experiencing, smiled.

The shortest of the mahou approached Noelle, hand out to slap her, but froze suddenly. Aradia stepped out of the darkness, contorting her hands rapidly, effortlessly counterspelling every one of the other two mahou’s panicked spells and counterspells. Aradia, with a flick of her wrist, sent all three mahou collapsing to the floor. Aradia picked Noelle up in her arms, and cast a portal back to FursTech.

She gently set Noelle down on the altar in her private labratory, and cast a slow but powerful healing spell upon her.

Once she was certain Noelle had been stabilized and numbed, she returned to the dark room, and bound the mahou in a magic silk string. She strung them up from the ceiling, like a spider hanging it’s future meals from it’s web for safekeeping.

When she had fully fortified the containment spell, she woke the mahou up, and told them “I’m going to have a word with that damned kitsune.”

Aradia cast a communication spell, summoning a full hologram of the fox-devil before her.

The kitsune was tall, with black hair and ear-fur, and eight night-black tails. Her black yukata was trimmed with gold and silver, and tied with a red silk belt.

“Still working on your ninth tail, I see,” Aradia started.

“<I refuse to converse in your barbarous language,>” the fox-devil replied in Jōdai Nihon-go, an ancient form of Japanese.

“<So be it.>” Aradia returned in the same language. “<Your underlings have gravely wounded my favourite apprentice.>”

“<And what are you going to do about it?>”

“<I demand reparation.>”

“<As if you ply such influence over me.>”

Aradia reached out to grab the hologram by the throat, and the fox-devil jumped back instinctively to avoid it.

“<You say that, yet you still fear the unknown boundaries of my power,>” Aradia observed. “<Send me one of your apprentices and I'll release these three, and not further pursue you for this slight.>”

“<Keep the little one. She has potential but is too irksome to teach. I don't want her anymore.>”

“Sensei!” the short mahou cried, hearing her master’s dismissal of her.

“<As you wish,>” Aradia said. With a snip of her fingers, she cut the silk the other two were hung by, dropping them through trapdoor portals to the Tokyo Workshop. She seized the short mahou’s string, and they dropped together through a portal to her laboratory. Noelle, already awake, greeted them.

“Thank you, Miss Furst,” Noelle said, “I would have been a goner without you.”

“It was nothing. Help me unbind this mahou. That damn kitsune has ‘reparated’ for the attack on you by pawning off one of her disciples.”

“What are we going to do with her?” Noelle asked, cutting through the magic silk around the very young-looking japanese witch.

“We must treat this girl as one of our own, and show her a kindness that the fox-devil likely never did. That will be our true revenge.”

“Does she speak english?”

They both paused and stared at the girl. After a long moment of not being answered, they continued with their conversation.

“She likely doesn’t,” Aradia posited, “but we should remain tight-lipped around her just in case.”

They finished stripping her of the magic silk, and Aradia held out her hand to help the girl up. She cautiously took it.

“<What is your name?>” Aradia asked.

“Sakura Hina,” she answered.

“<Welcome to my laboratory, Hina-san. This is Noelle, and you may call me Furst-sensei, or just Aradia if you feel comfortable abandoning honorifics. How long did you train under the Kitsune?>”

“<Two years.>”

“<Then you must be quite skilled. Niponese Hermetic, primarily, I assume?>”

Hina nodded.

“<Do you know what my school of expertise is?>”

“<Kitsune-Hime told me you were you were dangerously skilled in all of the western arts...>”

Aradia took note of the fact that Hina had just called her former master a princess. “<My expertise is in the fact that I am multidisciplinarian. My grandfather may have been a more powerful sorcerer, and my mother a more powerful witch, but I am powerful enough at both and many other magics to have eclipsed them. I wish to bestow upon you as much of my skill as I can, as I have with Noelle.>”

“<Thank you... Furst-sensei.>”

“<Now, let’s get to work.>”

#short story #writing #superhero #magical girl #Astraverse

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