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blackswaneuroparedux · 3 years

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Anonymous asked: I enjoyed reading your posts about Napoleon’s death and it’s quite timely given its the 200th anniversary of his death this year in May. I was wondering, because you know a lot about military history (your served right? That’s cool to fly combat helicopters) and you live in France but aren’t French, what your take was on Napoleon and how do the French view him? Do they hail him as a hero or do they like others see him like a Hitler or a Stalin? Do you see him as a hero or a villain of history?

5 May 1821 was a memorable date because Napoleon, one of the most iconic figures in world history, died while in bitter exile on a remote island in the South Atlantic Ocean. Napoleon Bonaparte, as you know rose from obscure soldier to a kind of new Caesar, and yet he remains a uniquely controversial figure to this day especially in France. You raise interesting questions about Napoleon and his legacy. If I may reframe your questions in another way. Should we think of him as a flawed but essentially heroic visionary who changed Europe for the better? Or was he simply a military dictator, whose cult of personality and lust for power set a template for the likes of Hitler?

However one chooses to answer this question can we just - to get this out of the way - simply and definitively say that Napoleon was not Hitler. Not even close. No offence intended to you but this is just dumb ahistorical thinking and it’s a lazy lie. This comparison was made by some in the horrid aftermath of the Second World War but only held little currency for only a short time thereafter. Obviously that view didn’t exist before Hitler in the 19th Century and these days I don’t know any serious historian who takes that comparison seriously.

I confess I don’t have a definitive answer if he was a hero or a villain one way or the other because Napoleon has really left a very complicated legacy. It really depends on where you’re coming from.

As a staunch Brit I do take pride in Britain’s victorious war against Napoleonic France - and in a good natured way rubbing it in the noses of French friends at every opportunity I get because it’s in our cultural DNA and it’s bloody good fun (why else would we make Waterloo train station the London terminus of the Eurostar international rail service from its opening in 1994? Or why hang a huge gilded portrait of the Duke of Wellington as the first thing that greets any visitor to the residence of the British ambassador at the British Embassy?). On a personal level I take special pride in knowing my family ancestors did their bit on the battlefield to fight against Napoleon during those tumultuous times. However, as an ex-combat veteran who studied Napoleonic warfare with fan girl enthusiasm, I have huge respect for Napoleon as a brilliant military commander. And to makes things more weird, as a Francophile resident of who loves living and working in France (and my partner is French) I have a grudging but growing regard for Napoleon’s political and cultural legacy, especially when I consider the current dross of political mediocrity on both the political left and the right. So for me it’s a complicated issue how I feel about Napoleon, the man, the soldier, and the political leader.

If it’s not so straightforward for me to answer the for/against Napoleon question then it It’s especially true for the French, who even after 200 years, still have fiercely divided opinions about Napoleon and his legacy - but intriguingly, not always in clear cut ways.

I only have to think about my French neighbours in my apartment building to see how divisive Napoleon the man and his legacy is. Over the past year or so of the Covid lockdown we’ve all gotten to know each other better and we help each other. Over the Covid year we’ve gathered in the inner courtyard for a buffet and just lifted each other spirits up.

One of my neighbours, a crusty old ex-general in the army who has an enviable collection of military history books that I steal, liberate, borrow, often discuss military figures in history like Napoleon over our regular games of chess and a glass of wine. He is from very old aristocracy of the ancien regime and whose family suffered at the hands of ‘madame guillotine’ during the French Revolution. They lost everything. He has mixed emotions about Napoleon himself as an old fashioned monarchist. As a military man he naturally admires the man and the military genius but he despises the secularisation that the French Revolution ushered in as well as the rise of the haute bourgeois as middle managers and bureaucrats by the displacement of the aristocracy.

Another retired widowed neighbour I am close to, and with whom I cook with often and discuss art, is an active arts patron and ex-art gallery owner from a very wealthy family that came from the new Napoleonic aristocracy - ie the aristocracy of the Napoleonic era that Napoleon put in place - but she is dismissive of such titles and baubles. She’s a staunch Republican but is happy to concede she is grateful for Napoleon in bringing order out of chaos. She recognises her own ambivalence when she says she dislikes him for reintroducing slavery in the French colonies but also praises him for firmly supporting Paris’s famed Comédie-Française of which she was a past patron.

Another French neighbour, a senior civil servant in the Elysée, is quite dismissive of Napoleon as a war monger but is grudgingly grateful for civil institutions and schools that Napoleon established and which remain in place today.

My other neighbours - whether they be French families or foreign expats like myself - have similarly divisive and complicated attitudes towards Napoleon.

In 2010 an opinion poll in France asked who was the most important man in French history. Napoleon came second, behind General Charles de Gaulle, who led France from exile during the German occupation in World War II and served as a postwar president.

The split in French opinion is closely mirrored in political circles. The divide is generally down political party lines. On the left, there's the 'black legend' of Bonaparte as an ogre. On the right, there is the 'golden legend' of a strong leader who created durable institutions.

Jacques-Olivier Boudon, a history professor at Paris-Sorbonne University and president of the Napoléon Institute, once explained at a talk I attended that French public opinion has always remained deeply divided over Napoleon, with, on the one hand, those who admire the great man, the conqueror, the military leader and, on the other, those who see him as a bloodthirsty tyrant, the gravedigger of the revolution. Politicians in France, Boudon observed, rarely refer to Napoleon for fear of being accused of authoritarian temptations, or not being good Republicans.

On the left-wing of French politics, former prime minister Lionel Jospin penned a controversial best selling book entitled “the Napoleonic Evil” in which he accused the emperor of “perverting the ideas of the Revolution” and imposing “a form of extreme domination”, “despotism” and “a police state” on the French people. He wrote Napoleon was "an obvious failure" - bad for France and the rest of Europe. When he was booted out into final exile, France was isolated, beaten, occupied, dominated, hated and smaller than before. What's more, Napoleon smothered the forces of emancipation awakened by the French and American revolutions and enabled the survival and restoration of monarchies. Some of the legacies with which Napoleon is credited, including the Civil Code, the comprehensive legal system replacing a hodgepodge of feudal laws, were proposed during the revolution, Jospin argued, though he acknowledges that Napoleon actually delivered them, but up to a point, "He guaranteed some principles of the revolution and, at the same time, changed its course, finished it and betrayed it," For instance, Napoleon reintroduced slavery in French colonies, revived a system that allowed the rich to dodge conscription in the military and did nothing to advance gender equality.

At the other end of the spectrum have been former right-wing prime minister Dominique de Villepin, an aristocrat who was once fancied as a future President, a passionate collector of Napoleonic memorabilia, and author of several works on the subject. As a Napoleonic enthusiast he tells a different story. Napoleon was a saviour of France. If there had been no Napoleon, the Republic would not have survived. Advocates like de Villepin point to Napoleon’s undoubted achievements: the Civil Code, the Council of State, the Bank of France, the National Audit office, a centralised and coherent administrative system, lycées, universities, centres of advanced learning known as école normale, chambers of commerce, the metric system, and an honours system based on merit (which France has to this day). He restored the Catholic faith as the state faith but allowed for the freedom of religion for other faiths including Protestantism and Judaism. These were ambitions unachieved during the chaos of the revolution. As it is, these Napoleonic institutions continue to function and underpin French society. Indeed, many were copied in countries conquered by Napoleon, such as Italy, Germany and Poland, and laid the foundations for the modern state.

Back in 2014, French politicians and institutions in particular were nervous in marking the 200th anniversary of Napoleon's exile. My neighbours and other French friends remember that the commemorations centred around the Chateau de Fontainebleau, the traditional home of the kings of France and was the scene where Napoleon said farewell to the Old Guard in the "White Horse Courtyard" (la cour du Cheval Blanc) at the Palace of Fontainebleau. (The courtyard has since been renamed the "Courtyard of Goodbyes".) By all accounts the occasion was very moving. The 1814 Treaty of Fontainebleau stripped Napoleon of his powers (but not his title as Emperor of the French) and sent him into exile on Elba. The cost of the Fontainebleau "farewell" and scores of related events over those three weekends was shouldered not by the central government in Paris but by the local château, a historic monument and UNESCO World Heritage site, and the town of Fontainebleau.

While the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution that toppled the monarchy and delivered thousands to death by guillotine was officially celebrated in 1989, Napoleonic anniversaries are neither officially marked nor celebrated. For example, over a decade ago, the president and prime minister - at the time, Jacques Chirac and Dominque de Villepin - boycotted a ceremony marking the 200th anniversary of the battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon's greatest military victory. Both men were known admirers of Napoleon and yet political calculation and optics (as media spin doctors say) stopped them from fully honouring Napoleon’s crowning military glory.

Optics is everything. The division of opinion in France is perhaps best reflected in the fact that, in a city not shy of naming squares and streets after historical figures, there is not a single “Boulevard Napoleon” or “Place Napoleon” in Paris. On the streets of Paris, there are just two statues of Napoleon. One stands beneath the clock tower at Les Invalides (a military hospital), the other atop a column in the Place Vendôme. Napoleon's red marble tomb, in a crypt under the Invalides dome, is magnificent, perhaps because his remains were interred there during France's Second Empire, when his nephew, Napoleon III, was on the throne.

There are no squares, nor places, nor boulevards named for Napoleon but as far as I know there is one narrow street, the rue Bonaparte, running from the Luxembourg Gardens to the River Seine in the old Latin Quarter. And, that, too, is thanks to Napoleon III. For many, and I include myself, it’s a poor return by the city to the man who commissioned some of its most famous monuments, including the Arc de Triomphe and the Pont des Arts over the River Seine.

It's almost as if Napoleon Bonaparte is not part of the national story.

How Napoleon fits into that national story is something historians, French and non-French, have been grappling with ever since Napoleon died. The plain fact is Napoleon divides historians, what precisely he represents is deeply ambiguous and his political character is the subject of heated controversy. It’s hard for historians to sift through archival documents to make informed judgements and still struggle to separate the man from the myth.

One proof of this myth is in his immortality. After Hitler’s death, there was mostly an embarrassed silence; after Stalin’s, little but denunciation. But when Napoleon died on St Helena in 1821, much of Europe and the Americas could not help thinking of itself as a post-Napoleonic generation. His presence haunts the pages of Stendhal and Alfred de Vigny. In a striking and prescient phrase, Chateaubriand prophesied the “despotism of his memory”, a despotism of the fantastical that in many ways made Romanticism possible and that continues to this day.

The raw material for the future Napoleon myth was provided by one of his St Helena confidants, the Comte de las Cases, whose account of conversations with the great man came out shortly after his death and ran in repeated editions throughout the century. De las Cases somehow metamorphosed the erstwhile dictator into a herald of liberty, the emperor into a slayer of dynasties rather than the founder of his own. To the “great man” school of history Napoleon was grist to their mill, and his meteoric rise redefined the meaning of heroism in the modern world.

The Marxists, for all their dislike of great men, grappled endlessly with the meaning of the 18th Brumaire; indeed one of France’s most eminent Marxist historians, George Lefebvre, wrote what arguably remains the finest of all biographies of him.

It was on this already vast Napoleon literature, a rich terrain for the scholar of ideas, that the great Dutch historian Pieter Geyl was lecturing in 1940 when he was arrested and sent to Buchenwald. There he composed what became one of the classics of historiography, a seminal book entitled Napoleon: For and Against, which charted how generations of intellectuals had happily served up one Napoleon after another. Like those poor souls who crowded the lunatic asylums of mid-19th century France convinced that they were Napoleon, generations of historians and novelists simply could not get him out of their head.

The debate runs on today no less intensely than in the past. Post-Second World War Marxists would argue that he was not, in fact, revolutionary at all. Eric Hobsbawm, a notable British Marxist historian, argued that ‘Most-perhaps all- of his ideas were anticipated by the Revolution’ and that Napoleon’s sole legacy was to twist the ideals of the French Revolution, and make them ‘more conservative, hierarchical and authoritarian’.

This contrasts deeply with the view William Doyle holds of Napoleon. Doyle described Bonaparte as ‘the Revolution incarnate’ and saw Bonaparte’s humbling of Europe’s other powers, the ‘Ancien Regimes’, as a necessary precondition for the birth of the modern world. Whatever one thinks of Napoleon’s character, his sharp intellect is difficult to deny. Even Paul Schroeder, one of Napoleon’s most scathing critics, who condemned his conduct of foreign policy as a ‘criminal enterprise’ never denied Napoleon’s intellect. Schroder concluded that Bonaparte ‘had an extraordinary capacity for planning, decision making, memory, work, mastery of detail and leadership’. The question of whether Napoleon used his genius for the betterment or the detriment of the world, is the heart of the debate which surrounds him.

France's foremost Napoleonic scholar, Jean Tulard, put forward the thesis that Bonaparte was the architect of modern France. "And I would say also pâtissier [a cake and pastry maker] because of the administrative millefeuille that we inherited." Oddly enough, in North America the multilayered mille-feuille cake is called ‘a napoleon.’ Tulard’s works are essential reading of how French historians have come to tackle the question of Napoleon’s legacy. He takes the view that if Napoleon had not crushed a Royalist rebellion and seized power in 1799, the French monarchy and feudalism would have returned, Tulard has written. "Like Cincinnatus in ancient Rome, Napoleon wanted a dictatorship of public salvation. He gets all the power, and, when the project is finished, he returns to his plough." In the event, the old order was never restored in France. When Louis XVIII became emperor in 1814, he served as a constitutional monarch.

In England, until recently the views on Napoleon have traditionally less charitable and more cynical. Professor Christopher Clark, the notable Cambridge University European historian, has written. "Napoleon was not a French patriot - he was first a Corsican and later an imperial figure, a journey in which he bypassed any deep affiliation with the French nation," Clark believed Napoleon’s relationship with the French Revolution is deeply ambivalent.

Did he stabilise the revolutionary state or shut it down mercilessly? Clark believes Napoleon seems to have done both. Napoleon rejected democracy, he suffocated the representative dimension of politics, and he created a culture of courtly display. A month before crowning himself emperor, Napoleon sought approval for establishing an empire from the French in a plebiscite; 3,572,329 voted in favour, 2,567 against. If that landslide resembles an election in North Korea, well, this was no secret ballot. Each ‘yes’ or ‘no’ was recorded, along with the name and address of the voter. Evidently, an overwhelming majority knew which side their baguette was buttered on.

His extravagant coronation in Notre Dame in December 1804 cost 8.5 million francs (€6.5 million or $8.5 million in today's money). He made his brothers, sisters and stepchildren kings, queens, princes and princesses and created a Napoleonic aristocracy numbering 3,500. By any measure, it was a bizarre progression for someone often described as ‘a child of the Revolution.’ By crowning himself emperor, the genuine European kings who surrounded him were not convinced. Always a warrior first, he tried to represent himself as a Caesar, and he wears a Roman toga on the bas-reliefs in his tomb. His coronation crown, a laurel wreath made of gold, sent the same message. His icon, the eagle, was also borrowed from Rome. But Caesar's legitimacy depended on military victories. Ultimately, Napoleon suffered too many defeats.

These days Napoleon the man and his times remain very much in fashion and we are living through something of a new golden age of Napoleonic literature. Those historians who over the past decade or so have had fun denouncing him as the first totalitarian dictator seem to have it all wrong: no angel, to be sure, he ended up doing far more at far less cost than any modern despot. In his widely praised 2014 biography, Napoleon the Great, Andrew Roberts writes: “The ideas that underpin our modern world - meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances, and so on - were championed, consolidated, codified and geographically extended by Napoleon. To them he added a rational and efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman empire.”

Roberts partly bases his historical judgement on newly released historical documents about Napoleon that were only available in the past decade and has proved to be a boon for all Napoleonic scholars. Newly released 33,000 letters Napoleon wrote that still survive are now used extensively to illustrate the astonishing capacity that Napoleon had for compartmentalising his mind - he laid down the rules for a girls’ boarding school on the eve of the battle of Borodino, for example, and the regulations for Paris’s Comédie-Française while camped in the Kremlin. They also show Napoleon’s extraordinary capacity for micromanaging his empire: he would write to the prefect of Genoa telling him not to allow his mistress into his box at the theatre, and to a corporal of the 13th Line regiment warning him not to drink so much.

For me to have my own perspective on Napoleon is tough. The problem is that nothing with Napoleon is simple, and almost every aspect of his personality is a maddening paradox. He was a military genius who led disastrous campaigns. He was a liberal progressive who reinstated slavery in the French colonies. And take the French Revolution, which came just before Napoleon’s rise to power, his relationship with the French Revolution is deeply ambivalent. Did he stabilise it or shut it down? I agree with those British and French historians who now believe Napoleon seems to have done both.

On the one hand, Napoleon did bring order to a nation that had been drenched in blood in the years after the Revolution. The French people had endured the crackdown known as the 'Reign of Terror', which saw so many marched to the guillotine, as well as political instability, corruption, riots and general violence. Napoleon’s iron will managed to calm the chaos. But he also rubbished some of the core principles of the Revolution. A nation which had boldly brought down the monarchy had to watch as Napoleon crowned himself Emperor, with more power and pageantry than Louis XVI ever had. He also installed his relatives as royals across Europe, creating a new aristocracy. In the words of French politician and author Lionel Jospin, 'He guaranteed some principles of the Revolution and at the same time, changed its course, finished it and betrayed it.'

He also had a feared henchman in the form of Joseph Fouché, who ran a secret police network which instilled dread in the population. Napoleon’s spies were everywhere, stifling political opposition. Dozens of newspapers were suppressed or shut down. Books had to be submitted for approval to the Commission of Revision, which sounds like something straight out of George Orwell. Some would argue Hitler and Stalin followed this playbook perfectly. But here come the contradictions. Napoleon also championed education for all, founding a network of schools. He championed the rights of the Jews. In the territories conquered by Napoleon, laws which kept Jews cooped up in ghettos were abolished. 'I will never accept any proposals that will obligate the Jewish people to leave France,' he once said, 'because to me the Jews are the same as any other citizen in our country.'

He also, crucially, developed the Napoleonic Code, a set of laws which replaced the messy, outdated feudal laws that had been used before. The Napoleonic Code clearly laid out civil laws and due processes, establishing a society based on merit and hard work, rather than privilege. It was rolled out far beyond France, and indisputably helped to modernise Europe. While it certainly had its flaws – women were ignored by its reforms, and were essentially regarded as the property of men – the Napoleonic Code is often brandished as the key evidence for Napoleon’s progressive credentials. In the words of historian Andrew Roberts, author of Napoleon the Great, 'the ideas that underpin our modern world… were championed by Napoleon'.

What about Napoleon’s battlefield exploits? If anything earns comparisons with Hitler, it’s Bonaparte’s apparent appetite for conquest. His forces tore down republics across Europe, and plundered works of art, much like the Nazis would later do. A rampant imperialist, Napoleon gleefully grabbed some of the greatest masterpieces of the Renaissance, and allegedly boasted, 'the whole of Rome is in Paris.'

Napoleon has long enjoyed a stellar reputation as a field commander – his capacities as a military strategist, his ability to read a battle, the painstaking detail with which he made sure that he cold muster a larger force than his adversary or took maximum advantage of the lie of the land – these are stuff of the military legend that has built up around him. It is not without its critics, of course, especially among those who have worked intensively on the later imperial campaigns, in the Peninsula, in Russia, or in the final days of the Empire at Waterloo.

Doubts about his judgment, and allegations of rashness, have been raised in the context of some of his victories, too, most notably, perhaps, at Marengo. But overall his reputation remains largely intact, and his military campaigns have been taught in the curricula of military academies from Saint-Cyr to Sandhurst, alongside such great tacticians as Alexander the Great and Hannibal.

Historians may query his own immodest opinion that his presence on the battlefield was worth an extra forty thousand men to his cause, but it is clear that when he was not present (as he was not for most of the campaign in Spain) the French were wont to struggle. Napoleon understood the value of speed and surprise, but also of structures and loyalties. He reformed the army by introducing the corps system, and he understood military aspirations, rewarding his men with medals and honours; all of which helped ensure that he commanded exceptional levels of personal loyalty from his troops.

Yet, I do find it hard to side with the more staunch defenders of Napoleon who say his reputation as a war monger is to some extent due to British propaganda at the time. They will point out that the Napoleonic Wars, far from being Napoleon’s fault, were just a continuation of previous conflicts that arose thanks to the French Revolution. Napoleon, according to this analysis, inherited a messy situation, and his only real crime was to be very good at defeating enemies on the battlefield. I think that is really pushing things too far. I mean deciding to invade Spain and then Russia were his decisions to invade and conquer.

He was, by any measure, a genius of war. Even his nemesis the Duke of Wellington, when asked who the greatest general of his time was, replied: 'In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon.'

I will qualify all this and agree that Napoleon’s Russian campaign has been rightly held up as a fatal folly which killed so many of his men, but this blunder – epic as it was – should not be compared to Hitler’s wars of evil aggression. Most historians will agree that comparing the two men is horribly flattering to Hitler - a man fuelled by visceral, genocidal hate - and demeaning to Napoleon, who was a product of Enlightenment thinking and left a legacy that in many ways improved Europe.

Napoleon was, of course, no libertarian, and no pluralist. He would tolerate no opposition to his rule, and though it was politicians and civilians who imposed his reforms, the army was never far behind. But comparisons with twentieth-century dictators are well wide of the mark. While he insisted on obedience from those he administered, his ideology was based not on division or hatred, but on administrative efficiency and submission to the law. And the state he believed in remained stubbornly secular.

In Catholic southern Europe, of course, that was not an approach with which it was easy to acquiesce; and disorder, insurgency and partisan attacks can all be counted among the results. But these were principles on which the Emperor would not and could not give ground. If he had beliefs they were not religious or spiritual beliefs, but the secular creed of a man who never forgot that he owed both his military career and his meteoric political rise to the French Revolution, and who never quite abandoned, amidst the monarchical symbolism and the court pomp of the Empire, the republican dreams of his youth. When he claimed, somewhat ambiguously, after the coup of 18 Brumaire that `the Revolution was over’, he almost certainly meant that the principles of 1789 had at last been consummated, and that the continuous cycle of violence of the 1790s could therefore come to an end.

When the Empire was declared in 1804, the wording, again, might seem curious, the French being informed that the `Republic would henceforth be ruled by an Emperor’. Napoleon might be a dictator, but a part at least of him remained a son of the Enlightenment.

The arguments over Napoleon’s status will continue - and that in itself is a testament to the power of one of the most complex figures ever to straddle the world’s stage.

Will the fascination with Napoleon continue for another 200 years?

In France, at least, enthusiasm looks set to diminish. Napoleon and his exploits are scarcely mentioned in French schools anymore. Stéphane Guégan, curator of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, which, among other First Empire artworks, houses a plaster model of Napoleon dressed as a Roman emperor astride a horse, has described France's fascination with him as ‘a national illness.’ He believes that the people who met him were fascinated by his charm. And today, even the most hostile to Napoleon also face this charm. So there is a difficulty to apprehend the duality of this character. As he wrote, “He was born from the revolution, he extended and finished it, and after 1804 he turns into a despot, a dictator.”

In France, Guégan aptly observes, there is a kind of nostalgia, not for dictatorship but for strong leaders. "Our age is suffering a lack of imagination and political utopia,"

Here I think Guégan is onto something. Napoleon’s stock has always risen or fallen according to the vicissitudes of world events and fortunes of France itself.

In the past, history was the study of great men and women. Today the focus of teaching is on trends, issues and movements. France in 1800 is no longer about Louis XVI and Napoleon Bonaparte. It's about the industrial revolution. Man does not make history. History makes men. Or does it? The study of history makes a mug out of those with such simple ideological driven conceits.

For two hundred years on, the French still cannot agree on whether Napoleon was a hero or a villain as he has swung like a pendulum according to the gravitational pull of historical events and forces.

The question I keep asking of myself and also to French friends with whom I discuss such things is what kind of Napoleon does our generation need?

Thanks for your question.

#question #ask #napoleon #french #french history #history #military history #bonaparte #france #historiography #republic #historians #personal

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phoneybeatlemania-bit-the-dust · 3 years

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do you have any theories about the india trip ?? personally, im not sure what to think about it, but i’d love to hear your thoughts !!

(Sorry its taken me so long to answer this - it just got lost in my drafts cause im an idiot lmao 🤦‍♀️)

Im not entirely certain on what I believe happened in India, if in fact anything did happen at all - but more on that later! I guess though that these are the main theories (though if you have any differing opinions/theories, feel free to discuss them!):

1. Paul rejected John’s advancements

2. John wanted to further their relationship, and Paul wanted to maintain the ‘friends with benefits’ situation they already had

3. Nothing significant happened between the two (yet something still changed in John)

I’ll try to discuss which theories I find the most convincing, compelling and substantiated - as well as offering my own opinions and hypothesis’s ^^ (discussion bellow the cut)

1. Paul rejected John’s advancements

The theory I would say im most drawn to - not the theory that im necessarily most convinced by though - is that John made a move on Paul, after a few years of pining for him, and was subsequently rejected. Its a theory that I tend to be compelled by, but I have to admit that its one I struggle to justify entirely. The problem with this theory, for me, is that this is a conclusion ive drawn based mostly off of what their relationship appeared to look like after India. It seems as though something must have happened between them to have ruptured their relationship as profoundly as it did - and because they were on relatively good terms before India*, combined with certain inferences we could draw from comments John made regarding his feelings towards Paul and their relationship, it feels as though it’s possible that he made an advance on Paul, which was rejected and thus caused the ultimate disintegration of the Lennon/McCartney relationship.

(*I mean, their relationship was always complicated and difficult - but it seems that it was okay-ish prior to India, and then just inexplicably plummeted after the trip)

But nobody (as far as im aware) has confirmed, or even really alluded to, this advancement or rejection ever having happened. And the lack of evidence substantiating the claim is a major draw back for me!

However, I do also feel as though nobody’s really come out about anything that happened in India - all ive heard is that they meditated, wrote songs, John and Cyn fought, and Ringo ate baked beans. But like, more must have happened on the trip, surely? Im not saying the absence of information regarding the trip is proof that there was a big “lovers quarrel” between John and Paul, and that everyone involved in that trip is now just sworn to secrecy or something - but like, id just like to see a biographer really investigate the holiday, and try to conclude what events might have occurred during the trip, because as of right now, with the information we have, it seems to have been, bizarrely, both a lacklustre and uneventful, yet still hugely impactful event. If the narrative of the “India trip” were to be shifted in the future in light of new information, the same way the narrative of “Let It Be/Get Back” is being changed, I wouldn’t be surprised!

2. John wanted more, but Paul didn’t

Another popular theory is that John and Paul were engaged in something of a physical affair, but in India John proposed (or perhaps demanded even) that they take their relationship further, and Paul just wasn’t compelled to do so.

Beliefs vary regarding this, based on how far you personally think their relationship went: some might say they only ever did a little drunken experimenting with one another, and that it was just a fun fling until John suggested they take it further. Others might argue that they were in fact in a committed relationship, and John wanted to go public with it - or at the very least, demanded exclusivity between him and Paul.

In entertaining this theory, im most compelled to believe that John and Paul were engaged in occasional “flings”, and perhaps by ‘68 were even acknowledging that there was some deeper and more sincere between them - but ultimately, I don’t think Paul would have ever been inclined to fully commit to John, because I think he always wanted children and a family. In addition to this, though its clear John and Paul were passionate about one another, it isn’t clear how compatible they were in the long term - and with Paul being the more grounded of the too, I suspect he would have recognised this incompatibility, which John (the idealist) might not have.

Though I admit that John could certainly be unrealistic and irrational, im not convinced that he suggested to Paul they go public with their relationship, because I think John still had a fairly strong sense of his place in popular culture, and would have still been able to recognise that if they were to “come out”, it would probably deeply and irreparably damage both their careers - as well as George and Ringo’s too - at least amongst the general public. They’d still have some ardent fans, but their following overall would have become far more niche, and the “beatlemania” would’ve worn off swiftly. Im not sure if either of them would’ve been willing to take that heat in ‘68, especially not Paul, who as I mentioned earlier, I think might have recognised the futility and incompatibility inherent in their relationship.

Then again though, John was always a little “cocky”* when it came to his sexuality - I think if an interviewer were to genuinely have enquired into his sexuality, straight up asking him “Are you bi? Gay?” I get the sense that he would have told us! Sure he’d probably have dressed the response up with a dozen quick quips and jokes, but ultimately, I think he would have given a sincere response. And so, perhaps he did feel he had the confidence, at least in India, to actually “come out”, but if Paul wasn’t willing to make this official with him, perhaps this confidence dissipated.

(*No pun intended you pervs🤦‍♂️)

Another thing to note about India is that they’d have been relatively secluded, as well as off the drugs/drinks for the most part - and this would have forced them to really reflect upon their relationship. Perhaps John saw that he wasn’t contented with Cynthia, and recognised his desire for more from Paul - and so in such a raw state of mind, I can see how he’d become so shattered if Paul were to have rejected him (that statement could relate both to the first and second theory, I feel). Perhaps John made an advance upon Paul whilst they were both sober for the first time, and that changed their relationship somehow? Just thinking out loud here!

But again, this theory overall has the same problem as the first in that, though it appears to make sense, it still lacks proof; it ultimately isn’t a substantiated claim.

3. Nothing happened between J&P, but something changed

This is probably the theory that everybody is least interested in hearing, but I still think its a pretty valid one, albeit the least dramatic (In my opinion though its still a really interesting perspective to explore though!).

Its possible that nothing of particular significance happened in India, but something still shifted in John, causing him to vilify and reject Paul. The issue with this though, is that it begs the question: why did John undergo such a significant change in India then?

Id argue that perhaps John was making very subtle and slight moves towards Paul, that Paul either ignored or didn't pick up on. Id assume that perhaps John had been hinting at this desire for awhile now, and maybe he got it into his head that in India, where him and Paul would have a lot of time to be alone and intimate, his feelings would finally be reciprocated. But then, Paul never picked up on these hints, and never made any advancements - and this broke something within John. It would fit neatly within the Yoko narrative, because it offers reasoning to the abrupt but intense attachment John formed towards her almost immediately after India - as well as explaining the sudden vilification of Paul. But I suppose that the first two theories also fit pretty neatly within the Yoko narrative, because they all relate to the same basic concept that John wanted more from Paul, and Paul didn’t - and so he tried to replace him with Yoko.

I suppose though, that the this theory overall could also be countered by making the argument that Paul also began to spiral after India, and so some occurrence presumably must have happened to Paul too. I wonder though if its possible that maybe Pauls spiralling was kind of a result of Johns? I get the sense though that Paul would need a change in his life to cause his mental health to seriously deteriorate, but I don’t feel like the same is necessarily true for John - I think John is sort of the type to spiral, irregardless of whether his life undergoes a significant change or not, because I think John was the force driving a lot of the drama and troubles throughout his lifetime. So if Johns mental well-being started seriously deteriorating, I can see this being a cause of panic and anxiety for Paul.

But something that further inclines me to believe that an actual event occurred between John and Paul is this extract from Geoff Emmericks memoir (x)(id recommend reading the entire extract, its interesting!):

‘I glanced in Paul’s direction. He was staring straight ahead, expressionless and weary. He didn’t have much to say about India that day, or any other. I sensed at that moment that something fundamental in them had changed.”’

It just really feels as though there was some confrontation between John and Paul that had to have happened to perpetuate the miscommunication later seen between them. Like if there hadn’t been some kind of confrontation, then I can’t really understand why Paul would be reluctant to speak about India, or harbour any regrets or dismay regarding the journey. Perhaps you could drill it down to the betrayal they appeared to have felt by Maharishi allegedly hitting on girls - but I feel like this was a “betrayal” mostly felt by John, I never really got the sense that Paul was deeply effected by it.

But yeah - those are the main theories I think.

Overall, I think that the third theory is probably the most substantiated claim, but I think it leaves a lot to desired. It just doesn’t feel like it totally fits together, as though theres more to the story - but I guess relationships and peoples psyches aren’t puzzles, and so not everything is always going to piece together perfectly; but I dunno.

Like I said though, the theory im most compelled by is the first. I acknowledge that it lacks evidence, but it just seems to make a lot of sense to me! But really, who knows what the hell happened in India?

If anyone else has an opinion on all this, or wants to expand upon or even suggest a new theory, feel free to! I always like hearing from you guys!

#mclennon #asks #@cinnamontoastandtears #thanks for the ask!#india #what the fuck happened in india #maharishi #pauls sexuality #discussion

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littlesmartart · 3 years

Text

Leverage AU thoughts

okay so I wanted to keep the worldbuilding for the AU in that specific photoset relatively short for the sake of how the post worked, but I've seen a lot of questions in the tags so here is some more information for you all, under the cut because it got LONG:

MORALITY: okay so I called this the "(sort of) Leverage AU" because it basically flips the Leverage concept of "criminals work together with one non-criminal for the greater good" into "one criminal persuades a bunch of non-criminals that law =/= morality and that sometimes to make sure the bad guys get justice you have to work around legality". Obviously some people are easier to persuade than others (Huaisang has always been pretty ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ about the law, but before he joins the team he insists all of his crimes have been Theoretical, and besides, pirating movies isn't real crime, da-ge, god), and some of them are a little troubled by it but have their own reasons for joining (Mingjue has a LOT of issues with it, but joins to protect Huaisang for That One Job, and then stays with the insistence that a. they don't kill anyone, b. they don't involve anyone who doesn't super deserve it, and c. that their goal is always to get evidence so the mark can be convicted and the mark is always handed over to the appropriate authorities at the end of the job. he has a little more moral flexibility than canon Mingjue because of his Complicated Past He Wants To Atone For, but he still has an incredibly strong internal moral code that he absolutely will not violate. Jiang Cheng cares more about the law in principle, rather than personally, and as soon as he sees that they can get Justice that the law can't, he's sold). Xichen has the hardest time of it; he jumps into the first job without protest because Meng Yao asks (and Meng Yao never ever asks for anything, so it... it must be important, right? And Jin Guangshan definitely deserves it). After that he has a lot of internal struggling going on, and he's usually the one in the team trying to steer them towards legal means, and going through the "correct" channels. He probably has a breakdown about it at the end of a season and spends the next season Travelling To Find Himself. He winds up coming back to the team when, on one of his travels, he watches a family he's staying with lose everything after being targeted by a conman, but because of a dirty police chief the evidence is destroyed. They refuse to take his money when he tries to help, and he realises that they only way to get them justice... is to call in the team. That's not to say he is 100% cool with everything from then on, and he definitely draws the line at certain criminal acts (stealing for the fun of it he is not okay with, for example, and he gives a Hard No on the suggestion of trying White Rabbit) but for the most part he accepts the concept of what they do as being for the greater good.

GRIFTER XICHEN: yeah it's ridiculous and implausible but hear me out... that just makes it better. Because this man is terrible at improv and can only lie when he's in character (you see that means it's not lying then, it's just ACTING) and doesn't drink and absolutely will not seduce a mark past the level of general flirting... and yet he's somehow a wildly successful grifter??? How??? I'll tell you how: he's so fucking handsome and kind and charming and cultured that pretty much everyone who meets him just... melts a little bit and, with some coaxing, gives him whatever he needs. IT'S LIKE A FREAKIN SUPERPOWER and it's absolutely ridiculous. With the added bonus that he's juuust famous enough that the average person might kind of think he looks familiar, which means he's very good at coming across like he totally belongs wherever he's seen. Of course he works here, he's been here for months... don't you recognise him?

NO WOMEN ON THE TEAM: look, in Meng Yao's defence, when he put together this team he thought it would only be for one job, he wasn't trying to future-proof it! But yes, it can sometimes be an issue if they don't have time to plan ahead, and he and Huaisang - as the most stereotypically feminine members of the team, and by far the best liars - will usually take on any female roles they need if they're in a pinch and can't call in outside help, although all of them are ready to take on roles of different genders if need be (female roles are actually the only way to persuade Huaisang to grift, and he has an extensive shoe collection for such roles that he likes to expand by billing to the company account... Meng Yao is deeply unimpressed by this).

OTHER CHARACTERS: when Meng Yao started this, he worked very very hard to keep his siblings and the rest of his family out of it, to keep them all away from any fallout in case it went wrong (and also to stop any pesky Moral Issues from getting in the way). When that was over and they started taking regular cases, he relaxed the rule a little - Mianmian will sometimes step in to help if she can be sold on how bad the person is they're taking down, Zonghui can be relied upon if they need extra muscle, and Wen Qing is their go-to Ask No Questions doctor. Wei Wuxian frequently gets roped in to consult, as, if you give him six packs of hot chips, ten cans of monster, twelve hours, and a laptop, he can become a specialist in almost anything. Jiang Cheng was very very resistant towards the idea of his brother being allowed in the team, even just as a consultant, but the MOMENT Wei Wuxian was given any access to Shenanigans there was no fucking stopping him. In the later jobs Qin Su accidentally gets pulled into one of the cons and turns out to be a WAY better grifter than anyone could have imagined, so she winds up on the "ally call list". Meng Yao is both perturbed and proud, but absolutely draws the line at teenage Mo Xuanyu being allowed to help.

PAIRINGS: flipping the "two parents + three kids" dynamic in Leverage, this AU has 3zun and Sangcheng - so "three gege + two didi". Xiyao have a One That Got Away sort of past, and Xichen joins the team SPECIFICALLY because Meng Yao expresses emotional vulnerability by asking for help fOr OnCe In HiS fUcKiNg LiFe. Nielan dated when they were teens, and are happy to be reunited, but Mingjue refuses to rekindle a romantic relationship until Xiyao sort their shit out because it's obvious to anyone with eyes how hung up on Meng Yao Xichen is. Nieyao have a certain amount of "I'll work with you towards a common cause but that doesn't mean I have to like you" vibe, but veeery slooowlyyy wind up bonding over doing stuff they're not proud of for something they were so sure was a worthy cause at the time, but now they just feel jaded and used (there's a lot of arguments along the lines of "oh, so my corporate espionage is worse than what you did in spec ops... because the military says that what you did was legal. RIGHT. OKAY. SURE."). After several years of will-they-won't-they struggle, 3zun do get together, and everyone is very relieved. As for Sangcheng... it starts off as Huaisang just flirting kind of obnoxiously with Jiang Cheng, who rolls his eyes and snarks back, and then naturally Huaisang winds up catching feelings and is like [meme voice] Haha, I'm In Danger! He is unwilling to act on his feelings because he doesn't believe that Jiang Cheng likes him that way, and continues to believe that right up until the day Jiang Cheng snaps, and grabs him and kisses him, and is like "if I didn't actually like you flirting with me I would have punched you in the face years ago" and Huaisang is like "huh. Yeah that's probably true."

#3zun #sangcheng #leverage AU #AUs #meng yao #lan xichen #nie mingjue #nie huaisang #jiang cheng #the untamed

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lizziedoesvetpath · 4 years

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If a client brought in a healthy animal and asked you to euthanise it because they no longer wanted the animal, should/would you and why?

So this is a pretty complicated question! To add to that, I work in anatomic pathology, not clinical practice, so generally by the time an animal reaches me it's a little past that point. That is to say, my approach to this question would be purely theoretical and moral. I can start the discussion, but I'll ask some of the clinical vets on here to pitch in from actual practical experience.

I don't believe that any vet WANTS to euthanise a perfectly healthy animal. It goes against everything we got into the field to do - help animals. But we also want to help people, and we recognise that sometimes you just can't look after an animal anymore. From my experience, most vets (and in fact all veterinary staff) will try to find a way to reconcile those two desires. If you were to take a perfectly healthy, happy animal to a vet to be euthanised, from my experience most will start with suggesting some other options:

1) Why do you feel you can't keep the animal anymore? Are there extenuating circumstances we can help you with? If the animal is "unwanted" because of things like behavioural or financial problems, there may be a way the clinic can help you manage your situation and keep the pet.

2) Can we re-home your pet instead of euthanising it? So you're dead-set (excuse the pun) on not keeping this animal. Have you considered surrendering it? If this is a normal, mostly or completely healthy, happy animal, it could be a great pet for somebody else! There are shelters you can surrender to, or sometimes clinics can help you find somebody to give this animal to.

So to answer your question: should we euthanise an unwanted animal, would we do it, and why?

I'm not going to tell anybody whether they should do that or not. Every animal is different, every situation is different, and every vet is different. As I said, I wouldn't want to, but I haven't personally been in this situation so I can't say. There may be no other option. I've heard of owners being refused a euthanasia in this situation then leaving and doing terrible things to kill the animal themselves (which is not euthanasia. Euthanasia means 'good death'. If you're not trained, it's hard to actually achieve this). If those are the only options, I would rather provide humane euthanasia, but that's still not an option I like. So, would I? Maybe. But it would take a toll.

And that's what I really want to drive home. Situations like this take a huge mental and emotional toll on your veterinary professional. We are inherently empathetic people, so we feel these things deeply every time. This is a large part of the "why" to my answer. I have a moral objection to taking a life for no reason, and I know that I would be distraught if forced into doing that. It's not good practice, that's true, but more than that I would struggle to handle that situation mentally. Mental health is a huge problem in veterinary medicine, and we all need to try not to perpetuate that problem.

Other vetblrs, that's my rambling start to unpacking this major issue. I know I'll have missed stuff, or phrased it imperfectly, so please do add your thoughts.

#vetblr #vetstudent #vetschool #vet #tw animal death #anonymous #question #euthanasia

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himbo-buckley · 4 years

Text

Sex, Intimacy and Buddie (better known as I have a lot of feelings about this show, some of which are related to the before mentioned topics) - Part 4

Ciao, ragazzi,

i bims, die Kriz and I will be your tourguide today. (Yes, we’re on first name basis now, congratulations, kid, ya’ll earned it!)

Okay, so I rewrote this intro like 5 times by now. 3B has been so hard on me in a way that the rest hasn’t been. While I was writing 3A I had so many thoughts and ideas and conclusions from the get go, my main worry was to fit it all in and to make it coherent. And it took me a while to get there with 3B - but don’t worry, my friends, I did not disappoint and it is just as long as part 3, despite Tim Minear personally coming to my home and vibe checking me for saying he had daddy issues. Which is fair, tbh. Sorry bro, I’ll stop calling you out like that. (No, I won’t.)

Also if you need a „quick“ refresher of what happened so far or you just forgot, here are:

part one - part two - part three

And also, the usual spiel:

This meta was supposed to be a lot shorter and only talk about how both Buck and Eddie use sex to distract their respective partners from whatever topic they actually wanted to talk about but since I decided to rewatch the show to make sure I don’t miss any such scenes, it has exploded a bit and taken on more topics

I should also mention that I am a Buddie shipper and while I tried, you will find several references and arguments for the ship in this Meta, not all of which necessarily call for a romantic pairing but just: These two are deeply connected and you cannot look at one without discussing the other and they are each other’s strongest emotional connection.

I should also preface this by saying that the whole of the 118 has some obvious intimacy / commitment issues except Bobby (which is sort of surprising) but *John Mulaney voice* we don’t have time to unpack all of that!

On another note I cuss a little in this Meta because my parents let me listen to TicTacToe as a small child and after that it never stuck that cussing is wrong so, uhm, parental supervision is advised or something

This Meta will so far have FIVE parts now. The original plan was to do three, one for each Season, and have it organised by episode so you could technically follow along (which is still true), but due to personal reasons, also known as *feelings*, Season 3 had exploded disproportionately and for readability reasons I have split it in three parts - there is part 3 which ends with the Christmas Episode, part 4 which spans what aired of 3B so far and the final part 5 which will include the final and my conclusion, if by then I am able to form thoughts again / still

Alright you guys, drumrolls please: part 4 (also called „*butterfly meme* Is this growth?“)

Episode 3.11:

I wanna be honest with ya’ll, Season 3B is sort of a mixed bag for me, because while yes, all the episodes have been great viewed separately, they just feel so … separate from each other, and with 3A having so many episode-spanning arks, it’s a bit of a letdown to return to the standalone episode format. Especially because it makes the whole two steps forward one step back thing so much more apparent as it feels like what happens in one episode has no consequence for the next. It felt a little like they burned through too much in 3A already and didn’t know where to go from there. Which is also true for me, so maybe I should stop judging.

Anyways, I’ll stop bringing the house down now.

Let’s continue with: Don’t you just love stan-ing two adorable, complicated badass firefighters? Yeah, me too.

Also, I wanna see the Doc again. Tim, can we? He could be friends with Frank? We could see them have tea and talk about those dumbasses at the firehouse? (And also legs, since, you know, Frank only has one?)

And also the bank guy, Harrison was fun. (This whole episode was.)

And I know it has nothing to do with Eddie or Buck or Intimacy or Sex (okay a little with those) but I do wanna point you to that damn meatball scene, because it’s so chaotic? First, why are all the ingredients laid out on the table but Maddie is making balls already only to then cover them in water? Look, I’m basically vegan (haha, how long do you think I’ve waited to shoehorn this in here) and haven’t cooked meat since I was … fourteen, probably? And even to me that just seemed wrong! Not to mention AFTER touching raw meat, Maddie only cleans her hands with a towel before opening the door? You used to be a nurse, Madeleine / Maddison! (Do we know her full name? I feel like we don’t.)

One thing I really love about 3B (so far) is how happy and settled my main man Edmundo Diaz is. It’s in the eyes, you guys! I don’t know if it’s a Ryan thing or a deliberate acting choice but whatever it is it translates well (haha, well, yeah, we’ll talk about that one later) into his character and it really makes you feel like Eddie is so much better. Like for all the analysis of Eddie I’ve been doing, I didn’t notice how much colder he grew since the beginning of Season 2 until this episode came and suckerpunched me with the warmth in his eyes. Good god, proceed with caution! Oliver could call me right now and say „Look, Buddie isn’t real, I just keep getting lost in Ryan’s eyes.“ and I wouldn’t even be mad, I’d just be like „How’d you get this number?“. (It was Tim, wasn’t it? Damn it, we talked about this, mate! I wanna meet his cat, not him!)

The episode doesn’t hold a lot of relevance in terms of this meta (aside from some parallels I’ll talk about in a moment) but I still want to discuss it a little bit because it means a lot to me. I just love Howard „Chimney“ Han with all my heart.

I wanna say something controversial now because we’re 500 words in and I feel like I haven’t made you regret reading my rambling yet, so here is controversial thought of the day #1: All these fucking characters are grey as fuck except Howie. Howie is good to the bone. He is the goodest boy. He is so gentle and sweet and non malicious and yes, I am including Evan in my list of grey characters because he pulled some SHIT! Okay, a little bit of shit. Things have been *implied*! (I don’t even know anymore. Maybe he’s just off-white or something.)

And what’s the worst my best friend Howard „Chimney“ Han has done on this show? Lied to his girlfriend a buncha times so she likes him better? I lie all the time. I just lied to my mother 5 minutes ago (Yes, Mom, I’m working on my thesis.)! And Howie just lied to make someone like him better. That’s not bad, that’s horrible self esteem!

Which brings me to another thing I wanna say because thank you, Jennifer Love Hewitt. If anyone from the cast gets to call me, it’s you, because you clearly had your thinking pants on when you took one look at Chimney and said: I want that one! You a real one and I will name check you on my way to heaven - not, that they’ll let me in, but the thought counts?

Now, lets talk about those parallels I mentioned before:

The Hans vs. the Buckleys.

Now, we still don’t know a lot about Mr. and Mrs. Buckley and what exactly made them bad parents (though I’m firmly team a little neglectful but not abusive) but we know a lot about Mr. Han.

One thing of the bat I wanna mention is that this episode confirms that Maddie at least had a hand in raising Buck - which doesn’t actually have to mean too much, because based on JLHs age, her relationship with Dough and the way their sibling relationship is played it’s safe to assume that Maddie is supposed to be between 5-10 years older than Buck (assuming she started nursing school after High School at around 18 / 19, which I think takes 4 years in the US? And she was an ER nurse for 8 years, making her AT LEAST 30 in Season 2, but considering how she emphasised that Buck noticed something was wrong with Dough even as a teenager and she met Dough at 19, I’m gonna assume Buck was younger then 16 because Dough won’t have shown his abusive tendencies right of the bat, so probably about 12 / 13, making Maddie like 6 years older than him? And since we DO have a definite age for Evan, Maddie is probably around 33 in Season 2 (which also works because they wanted to put her and Eddie in a relationship and Ryan Guzman is in his early 30 as well). And look, as the youngest child of two people I would call more than adequate parents I can tell you: older siblings always have a hand in raising you, especially when the age difference exceeds 4 years. One of my sisters is 5 years older than me and I was more scared of telling her about having a bad grade than I was of my parents, so…

Anyways, back to what is actually happening in the episode and how it both parallels and contrasts the Buckleys and Hans.

Like Maddie and Howie are the older siblings and Buck and Albert are the younger siblings, yet Buck and Howie are paralleled as are Maddie and Albert. Also, Howie resents his brother for the relationship he assumes Albert has with their father, but Maddie recognises that Buck probably had similar experiences growing up as she did. Of course one could argue that Howie and Albert never had a relationship before while Buck and Maddie grew up together, but look, Maddie was in an abusive relationship for quite a while and hadn’t been in contact with her brother for 3 years prior to Season 2 but it’s safe to assume they didn’t have too close of a relationship before that either, or the Buck we know would have gone to Maddie to investigate and find out why she dipped. So…

(Despite all of this, Maddie knew she could come to her brother for help in Season 2 meaning one, our boy is such a good boy always and the Buckleys can’t be all bad if Maddie knows she can count on her brother, meaning she didn’t think her parents screwed him up too much in the time since she moved out and gradually left his life. Just another thought.)

I also love how her firm believe in the strength and meaning of familial relationships triggers a shift in Howie. Please keep this in mind for when we discuss 3.16 in a few minutes, friends.

Also that kitchen scene has all my heart. They really said kitchens are a Buddie thing now, didn’t they? (Also from a non shipper perspective, Maddie and Buck are just the sweetest and for a TV show actually fairly realistic siblings. At least if I compare them to my siblings and I.)

Also in terms of the actually topic of my meta’s: this is our first indicator that Eddie considers the 118 his family. And we have another moment of Chimney seeking reassurance / being open with Eddie. I love that they have a friendship like that. (He was so excited about meeting Chimneys brother as well. A little bit puppy and like another reason why Evan and him are friends. (As if we need more)) Also love that Eddie is secure enough to voice these feelings!

(Eddie really does seem so healed in this episode? So open? And happy? Damn, Frank, you know your shit! My man had some growth.)

Now, for some sidenotes to round off this episode, because I have some and I wanna share them:

On the Buckley parents, I think the episode wants to imply that they had plans for Buck? Maybe career wise? Because in the pool scene he says something along the lines of: „Sometimes you have to put / get a little distance“ and since it’s been implied that Buck is also from Pennsylvania or somewhere close by, we can assume that he was talking about himself here. Like he moved all the way across the continent.

I’m also just gonna throw out a prediction for Season 4: since Nia is only a foster child and like 2 years old, it’s safe to assume that she has been only recently taken in. While I do not know the US-Foster system, I do have some knowledge about the German system, so I’ll just predict that either one or both of the birth parents try to get their child back.

Or they just sort of forget about all of this by Season 4.

And I really really really dislike the cancer storyline and how the show is handling it, at least in this episode, specifically in regards to May, who in my opinion, has been both written and treated by the show as someone younger than 18 here, only for the show to then turn around and go all: wow, such an adult, look how wise she is. So awesome. Like nah, son! 3A has shown that she is much maturer than she was treated in this episode.

And Eddie finally got to say „seen this before“ again. I feel like he says that a lot. Should I start a counter for that too or do ya’ll just wanna think about him naked for a bit? (I know, you guys, I know! Should I befriend someone who can make me a bunch of gifs of shirtless Eddie I can pepper in every time we get to heavy around here?)

Episode 3.12:

Ah, yes, „Fools“! The one episode I have to say I can not look at without wearing my shipper goggles. So be warned.

Which is why I’m gonna start with the elephant in the room: Ana Flores.

Now, I’ve seen (and maybe liked / reblogged / queued / drafted (Idk anymore, I’m up to 600 posts in my drafts, 300 in my queue and like 300 liked / reblogged already)) an interview with Ryan Guzman where he talks about Ana and how he isn’t sure yet wether they are heading for romance and how it needs someone incredibly badass to get through Eddie’s defences, because Eddie is barely over his wife’s death and yeah, that! Look, if you’re here, I’m gonna assume you have read the other three parts of this „meta“ and therefore know that I am a proud member of the Shannon Diaz - defense squad and will fight anyone who says a bad word about her. And you will also know that I attribute most of the stupid things Eddie did in 3A to the fact that Shannon died. So there. All caught up.

Now, as for Ana Flores herself (and I’m writing this after 3.16, so who knows what happens next): She might be in Season 4 (I think the interview said something about it or she tweeted something) but I don’t think it has been confirmed yet? So considering what Ryan said they probably won’t end up in a relationship by the end of Season 3 (again, please remember when I am writing this).

I’m not gonna comment on the actress aside from saying, damn, I wish that were me! Other than that? I don’t really care about actors unless I think they are hot and then it’s more of a: uiiii, me like-y. (Madeleine Patch, call me!)

As for the actual scenes, well, I have mixed feelings.

On the one hand side, as I’ve said before, I work with children and the idea of dating the father of one of my babies is just plain wrong to me. So there is that. Morally speaking that storyline would be trash. (And very OOC for Mr. „My son needs to be protected above all“)

Then of course there is what’s actually happening between them which, one, from the get go she seems to not reciprocate Eddie’s advances (he keeps telling her to call him Eddie, she keeps calling him Mr. Diaz). Also that whole speech about horses? Yeah, I know you’re an english teacher but ähm, what? (Put it on the list, Tim, I need answers!)

To sum it up (and explain why I brought up Shannon aside from how much I like her), I don’t think it’s headed for a romance quite yet? They may be playing the slowburn game, but I think it was more like Ali in Season 2. Because as @greyhello pointed out to me in Part 2, Ali might have been there to show us that Buck was ready for a commited relationship and it had never been Abby that made him like that, just as Ana is here to tell us: hey, Eddie is finally accepting his wife’s death and maybe, possibly, some time in the near future, ready to date again. Probably. We’ll see.

Aside from that, I actually think a little crush could be something healthy and healing for Mr. control issues. But, again, we’ll see.

So, elephant addressed. Now let’s move on.

Sidenote: I feel like the parent-teacher conference made Eddie really regret so many of his life decisions. Someone needs to tell Buck so he can make a million puns from here on out and drive Eddie crazy.

(Sidenote: Carla said „big blue eyes“! You know who has big blue eyes? Ah, now I’m just clowning.)

Now this episode returns to the Season 2 formula of giving Eddie and Buck similar storylines:

Because while Eddie meets someone he could potentially be interested it, Buck is also made aware of his single status and the fact that he hasn’t dated in a while.

I do think Buck’s stance in this episode was both curious and familiar. Familiar because it reminded me a lot of Eddie in 2.04 and I think, just like Eddie did before Shannon came back, right then Buck is closing himself off from making connections, be they physical or emotional, because he got hurt too much.

Which is why I call it curious. Because I can not decide wether I consider his behaviour growth or a step back. In Eddie it would definitely be a step back, but in Buck who had been so willing to take any chance for physical intimacy just for the sake of a connection in Season 1 to now at least seem somewhat settled in himself and comfortable with what he has does feel a little like growth? (Then again 3.16 shows us he is just scared of getting hurt again, so probably just covering up is depression.)

Also, again with the kitchen! That puts us at five (?) scenes of Buddie talking about each other or with each other in a kitchen setting (six, if you count 3.03). Now I’m probably clowning myself real hard right now, but whatever!

But I do wanna point out how comfortable Eddie and Buck are discussing Eddie’s parenting struggles, which just shows how much he trusts him.

Now I know, I myself have made a textpost about Eddie discussing his parenting struggles with literally anyone, but ya’ll know I was kidding, right? It isn’t actually true. In canon he talks with exactly 5 people about Christopher:

They are Christopher’s therapist in „Triggers“, Carla, Hen, Lena … and Buck.

Now, here comes something interesting: For Carla and therapist, it is literally their job to help Eddie with his parenting struggles, but all the other scenes? Connected to Buck. Yeah. That.

Look, the Hen scene in the Christmas episode literally involves Buck and as I’ve said both Eddie’s and Buck’s reaction here heavily implied that Eddie has had a conversation with Buck about his fight with Chris before telling Hen all about it.

As for Lena, again, she is *literally* there as a substitute for Buck. She uses his locker. Her name is taped over his - and that is actually such a nice visual, that I wanna talk about it real quick, because I’ve seen it called disrespectful a few times and I don’t agree.

One, the fact that they left the „B“: funny af, someone from set dressing is probably laughing themselves silly about this and is allowed to call me now; also a constant reminder who’s locker and place she is actually occupying. Also how she can never really fully replace him, she can’t cover the hole he left fully, he is always there, lurking.

Two, the fact that it is tape: tape is slightly see through. It is temporary and easily removed. Tape is just a quick, momentary fix. Tape can be taken off / away without effort.

So to sum it up: There’s no one he trusts more with his son.

Which is also why Buck is there at the end: because Buck is who Eddie trusts. Buck is who Eddie goes to when he’s struggling as a father. Buck is who Eddie wants by his side cheering Chris on. I mean, they are literally pushing him together while Carla films (stands on the sidelines, ready to help as needed, but not fully a part of their family unit).

So, to go back to the elephant in the room? Right now I’m not at all worried about Ana Flores.

On another note it’s also one of the last real Buddie scenes we got in 3B so far and while I do understand that there just wasn’t any storyline for them to do such a scene organically, I am very worried about what it could mean. Because I still remember when Teen Wolf stopped putting Tyler H and Dylan in scenes together because people kept screaming queerbaiting.

I don’t want that to happen here. I love Buddie and what it could represent but I’ve also written too much about their respective characters AND their connection by now to disregard how meaningful they ALREADY are and how important even as a platonic pairing they are. Because they make each other so much better and proof that straight man can have deep connection with each other and how two flawed people can help each other heal in a way that I don’t think any other relationship in this show shows.

Back to the episode, though. The ark between Christopher and Eddie here is truly beautiful and I love the way we see Eddie growing as a parent. And I think the show wrote those scenes so well and they felt truly natural and were incredibly important, both for Eddie and Christopher.

I do think, as much as I love Christopher always being Eddie’s number one priority, no matter who Eddie ends up dating (yes, even if he dates Buck) we need to see a bit of a shift here. (Also, just in general, because Christopher will grow up, even if he’ll never be as independent as a fully abled bodied child might someday be.)

Eddie needs to learn to let go of control and of Christopher a bit. Look, a partner will never come before Christopher for Eddie (unless Chris is like in his 40s and has moved out and is living his own life. And even then it’ll be close.) but in order for anyone to ever fit into his life he needs to make a little space at the top and that includes taking away a bit from Christopher.

(Also just selfcare reasons, you guys, parents need to learn that it’s okay to sometimes think about themselves! And we already saw Eddie break once cause it became too much, how easy do you think that can happen again?)

Sidenote: We all know Buck built that, right? He’s been shown again and again to have some mechanical / maschinary (?) understanding plus fairly interesting problem solving skills.

Episode 3.13:

I love the locker room scene. Firstly, it’s a definite reminder that these three have bonded a lot and it’s such a sweet familial scene.

Also Eddie’s advice: yet another hint that he’s healing from Shannon’s death.

Compare it 3.08 and the conversation Bobby had with Eddie. There are no definite callbacks or anything like it, but it is very very very obvious that Eddie is talking about his dead wife here. Who he told he loves her in her last moments. So there.

Now, as for the healing part, could you imagine 3A!Eddie saying something like that to anyone?

Even in 3.03 or 3.06 with Buck, the person he lets himself be the most vulnerable with, there are still always terms and conditions with his words.

He trust no one more with his son, which, okay, is what the scene was about and what has the highest priority in his life but still, his trust isn’t bound to himself, it’s bound to his son, not to himself, not something he has in general for Buck, but something he has for Buck in regards to his son - that Eddie trusts Buck with himself is only ever implied.

He forgives him - „also what it means to be a part of a team“. Eddie sort of impersonalises his forgiveness here, he doesn’t forgive him because he’s Buck and he’s Eddie, he forgives him because they are part of the same team.

With Eddie there is always a wall.

But here in the locker room there isn’t. It’s just: if you love her, tell her, cause you might not get another chance - Eddie certainly doesn’t have another chance to tell Shannon.

And okay, you might say, isn’t that kind of a condition as well? Saying ‚I love you‘ because tomorrow isn’t promised? And sure, it kind of is. But Eddie’s also basically saying: once upon a time I told my wife, who art now in heaven, that I loved her as she was dying and then I got real mad at her and the world after because she left me and she was planning to leave me anyways and now I’m here and I’m over that and I’m just glad I got to tell her ‚I love her‘ one last time. I’m no longer angry.

Growth, you guys.

Episode 3.14:

I feel like the writers read some of ya’ll’s Buddie fanfiction, realised how it mischaracterised the relationship between Buck and Chimney gets and said: not on my watch!

In other words: If Eddie and Buck are different sides of the same coin, Buck and Chimney are the same sides of different coins. They share so many traits and experiences!

Now, this episode. Man, you guys, it really has me stumped. Part of me thinks it doesn’t have relevance and part of me keeps going back because it thinks it does?

Oh man, you guys, I’m lost. I don’t know.

All right, executive decision: no relevance, just another drop on the breakdown-stone that is 3.16.

Someone please tell my man’s boy they need him!

Episode 3.15:

Fun fact to start ya’ll off: this was only the second episode I watched somewhat live being a little new to town and the first I saw without spoiling myself on tumblr. So it has a special place in my heart any way you look at it.

(But then again this episode also involves several of my nightmares: drowning! being below earth! Being in small enclosed spaces! Being buried alive! Huge amounts of mud that will not leave your clothes and fingernails for the next six hundred years!)

Also, uhm, did I say „Fools“ was the *one* episode I could not look at without shipper goggles? So I’m contradicting myself. It happens. Move on. (Yeah, or repress it and join a fight club! Also name check me with your therapist, please! We may have breakdowns but we do them healthy around here!)

Because these fuckers went off! Whew! I’m serious, after watching the episode I sent a clip of that scene to my roommate and asked to rate how platonic this was. Which she did not. Because she doesn’t know math, apparently. - My point is, she sees it and she doesn’t know the show.

In other news this episode convinced me Oliver is pulling an Andrew Robinson (and yes, I know he said it was in the script but then Andy also followed the script, so…).

Sidenote: Eddie is the oldest, right? Damn, for some reason I thought he was the middle child. He has big middle child energy.

(Also why they namedrop Galveston like that? I googled it an it’s just a town? Why, Tim, why?) (At this point he is just torturing me, I know it. This feels personal.)

Anyways, this episode, you guys! I have thoughts! (And they are very hard to put in order so please excuse any jumping around at this point.)

The birthscene is great and can we just for a moment think about 25 year old Eddie hugging his mother in law so very lovingly? He’s so happy here. So soft. (Also I’m about to turn 25? I would not be able to deal with being married right now either?)

And yes, this episode confirms that Eddie has killed people, and while I know it was selfdefense, I just, it’s very weird to me because these characters have become so real to me, so to see one of them kill without a care is kinda off-putting. (This is why I will always consider Eddie grey and why I can never consider Buck white - because he had been planning on joining the Seals meaning he had to consider the possibility of killing and has probably learned to kill (Do you think that’s why he’s so non aggressive? because he knows he could take everyone down?))

I’m just gonna come out and say it: anyone who says Eddie isn’t impulsive has not watched this show. In fact I’d even say he is more impulsive than Buck.

Yes, Buck will do weird and dumb shit on a whim because the thought just crossed his mind and it sounds good and he doesn’t think about the consequences, but just does it. (I could make a case that our boy has ADHD but this is not what this meta is about)

But Eddie? Eddie is impulsive in his reactions. Everytime he is in distress (emotional not physical) he stops thinking about consequences and just starts reacting. Especially if it’s about a child!

Shannon is pregnant - lets sign up for the army.

Our child has a developmental disorder - lets stay in the army.

My parents want to take away my child - lets move halfway across the country.

(Not allowed to talk to your best friend? - lets go streetfighting.)

Eddie probably thinks these things through to a point and he mostly has a plan, but he is so reactionary. He is like a raw nerve and that’s what makes him impulsive.

It’s why, instead of letting them pull him out enough until he can radio, Eddie cuts the fucking line. Because this is a child, this could be Christopher and Eddie needs to be enough to save him.

(Are you crying yet?)

I’m not gonna talk about Afghanistan except to say: ah, Eddie. My man, you are enough! Always!

(But maybe that was his guilt over killing talking? Maybe he does feel bad?)

Also why did the woman emphasis ‚Staff Sergeant‘ like that? Was that an indicator that Eddie got promoted?

Also Eddie the fucking boy scout / alter boy / goody goody two shoes trying to get up because of a superior office despite lying in a hospital bed (and not even having been cleaned from his blood yet, urgh that’s gotta itch!)

Sidenote: in light of 3.16: do you think Eddie still talks to Mills, Binder, Norwahl and what all their names are or do you think that would be too hard for him? I’m leaning toward not talking but I really liked Mills (she reminded me of Buck and Lena, tbh.)

And now, for our regular scheduled program: Shannon and Eddie.

First of all I loved all of it. I loved that we could really understand why Shannon left. I love how much they clashed but still had those little moments of recognition.

And look: The juice box scene was very rough. Eddie is likely currently suffering from PTSD, definitely having a culture shock and here is his wife who is barely holding on as well and she just wants to leave, she can’t deal anymore and both of them are so desperate and wow, just wow. Kudos Ryan and kudos Devin Kelley, I’m sad we won’t see you again, but I do hope I’ll see you somewhere else one of these days!

I’ve talked about their relationship a lot already, so I’m not sure if I have any fresh takes but I will remind you of a few you already know:

Eddie is not in love with Shannon after Afghanistan (haven’t decided yet if he was in love with her in the birth scene)

Shannon *needed* Eddie to open up to her just as much as she needed to be open with her

Eddie was not able to be emotionally intimate with his wife

they cared about each other very very much and I do think they tried

they are family (remember what I said in part 2 about Eddie talking to the 118 about Shannon? This here proof that he definitely defended her actions at some point to them as well)

Shannon was in an impossible situation with her mother and a special needs child and likely burned out and just … she needed someone to have her back, which Eddie couldn’t because he himself was suffering from PTSD at that point

I’m still mad as fuck, they killed her off! If they give Eddie any other endgame romance that isn’t Buddie without like two seasons buildup after killing off HIS WIFE I will riot!

Which brings me to Eddie and his parents which was rough, you guys!

Look, as someone who worked with children I can see where his parents are coming from in that scene but also wow, just wow.

How cold and insensitive and fuck, no wonder someone is repressed as shit, that was horrifying and I really can’t talk about this more than to say this hurts and also explains too much about Eddie. (Can we have the locker room three bonding about having horrible parents in Season 4, please, Tim? And can Buck come too? We could do it at the loft?)

As for his conversation with Christopher, obviously it was cute as fuck and also I love how he began the conversation talking to his child like every adult male I have ever met talking to a kid about something he knows will go over it’s head („It’s like we’re talking about completely different people.“). (Okay, maybe not just adult males. Maybe we all talk like that around children sometimes. I know I do.)

I really liked how they reinforced once again that Eddie wasn’t a natural at being a dad (compare how he holds his son to season 1 Buck who most definitely knows how to handle a child (And now I’m wondering if him being good at it was always planned or a „Oliver did a great job the first time we had him interact with a child so we decided to make it a trait“-thing. Damn you, Tim, for making me think so much!)) but became good at it because he was willing to learn and he cared! Dads of the world (also Moms, we aren’t all super duper either) take note!

That being said the conversation also left a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth because, one, it felt a little petulant of Eddie to turn around and leave for LA, the way it was presented here and two, Christopher at that point didn’t understand yet what Eddie was actually asking him about and it felt a bit like manipulation. Please everyone, do not consider a conversation like that consent from a child. Any adult can get a child that age to say anything they want because children just want to be liked (It’s why when children are involved in criminal proceedings it’s so hard to interview them because children follow every suggestion because they think this is what the adults want them to say.).

Now, let’s talk about puppy!boy for a second!

In 1.05 Buck tells Abby: „no one is good when it’s personal“ - well guess what buddy boys, this one is very personal for one Evan ‚Buck’ Buckley, thank you very much, that boy is losing it.

Okay, let’s compare it to the episode before and then two episodes later:

Now, obviously the situation with Maddie was a little different. Mainly because this was a hostage situation and he realised (because Seal training, remember?) that there wasn’t a lot he could do to help her right then but then again … neither was there in Season 2 when Maddie was in danger and he still acted far more frantic in the car with Athena than he did here? Like the only stupid thing he did was drive a little dangerously this time?

And of course, two episodes later we see Bobby react when Athena is in danger and while we don’t see him be frantic we do see him get ready to kill someone, so, yeah!  It could of course be inconsistent writing or deliberate to keep the attention and worry more on the people in the call centre but since they haven’t pulled anything like that before I’m leaning more into my clowning.

I mean, we also have to consider that Buck was Eddie’s lifeline here, he was supposed to be the one to get him out, so he feels extra responsible but then again we have Hen make this comment about having two cut lines, which of course says that Hen thinks that one: whatever reason Eddie had to cut his line will definitely be considered a just as valid reason by Buck to cut his line but also: BUCK WOULD DECIDE TO DIE DOWN THERE WITH EDDIE. Sorry for the yelling, but no, I do not think Buck acted out of character in 3.14.

(Which is very irresponsible, you guys. You are fathers! What happens to Christopher when ya’ll die in a well somewhere in fictional California? I can not live in fictional California! I will not be taking care of your child, Buddie! Figure it out yourself! No. We are done here! This conversation is over!)

(Okay, not quite, because I actually don’t think that would be realistic! More realistic: Buck giving Eddie his harness so he can get pulled out first and then dying down there alone.)

Like I’ve said in the at the beginning: Oliver might be pulling an Andrew Robinson. It might have just been the way they thought Buck would act if he lost Eddie while being responsible. It might have been fever making him delirious (which, btw, kudos! Because you can hear how sore his throat was and omg, that shirt hurt!)

Never mind I found the heavy focus on Buck in an episode about Eddie fairly curious - which is why now it’s video-talk time!

First: I will not bear Shannon slander around here! Yes, she was in way less scenes than Buck, but the actress also was never a main character, so ya’ll need to remember there are like 2 scenes of them as a family. And they probably didn’t have the time, money and energy to film some just for a montage - especially considering that the three of them have hardly been a family together, because first Eddie was gone and then Shannon, so…

But yes, we do have to admit that Buck was in most scenes, and yes, we do have to consider the implications of this which are: Buck is definitely a vital member of the Diaz family and when Eddie says: I’m always gonna come home to my family, this now includes Buck and I hope we see him tell him that at one point in the final cause I need him to!

And then of course there is also the radio scene in the beginning (which lead to one of my proudest tumblr-moments to date in form of this post!) which did ease us into the concept of Bucky-boy being a member of the Diaz family! So it is canon now?!

One thing I wanna point out about the school scene in the end in regards to this is that little boy’s question. Sure they used it as transition to calling Christopher his good luck charm but, uhm, why did they have Buck ask about it in the beginning then? Why have this sort of unnecessary callback to the beginning of the episode unless they want us to remember Buck?

Something to ponder for the next week, I think.

Also the episode sort of reinforced my believe that we don’t really have to worry about Ana Flores. Sure, this scene was also a chance for Eddie to redeem himself in front of a teacher he screamed at just a few weeks prior but the only interaction they had was her asking that question at the end and Eddie hardly looked at her.

(Also, if they really wanted to reinforce Eddie being interested in her, they could have had Carla make a dig about it in the beginning, even with Christopher there, but they didn’t, which to me confirms that they don’t really know what to do with her yet.)

At least Ryan was finally taking his shirt off again, I know that’s like catnip for ya’ll.

Episode 3.16:

One thing that really confuses me is how many people seem to think this episode points out only how important romantic relationship are and I don’t see that?

I mean, I see that it’s one of the points that is being made but I don’t think it’s the only possible reading of this episode.

To me it was about connection and family more than anything.

It begins actually with Eddie (the person most connected to Buck) being the first person to decline Buck’s invite, not in favour of spending time with a romantic partner, but because he has a prior commitment with his son! (And several other people, including, but not limited to, at least 2 other nine year olds. For Eddies sake I hope less than 5 or that Carla is around because he is a single father and children unionise by nature.)

And it continues with Buck by forming a connection to Red and then bonding with Maddie.

And can I just say, before we delve more into all of this, how proud I am of Evan „Buck“ Buckley after this episode? Just look at him!

This is Buck at his lowest, lower even than during the lawsuit, because back then he had something to fight against, which he doesn’t have here. Because he can’t stop other people from leaving him (that is the whole point of the episode after all) and what does he do? Instead of going full on Buck 1.0 and just finding the nearest interested person to form a meaningless physical connection with to substitute for the lacking emotional intimacy he craves so much, he goes to a bar alone and befriends an old man. And spends the rest of the episode bonding with him. And bonding with his sister. And addressing his issues, both with his sister and his family. That is huge!

(Which is why I’ve decided him not wanting to date? Symptom of his deeper issues, yes, but also a sign of growth.)

And I’ve seen some people on my dash talk about how, compared to most other 911 episodes, this episode has a fairly bleak ending, which one I agree with, two think is actually a theme with Buck centric episodes, but three don’t actually mind / think is a bad thing? It’s fairly realistic after all.

To get personal one second: I remember being a very idealistic 20-year old intern working in the foster system five years ago and my mentor, who was less than 10 years older than me but fairly badass teaching me something that technically is a well known proverb but that I, a idealistic 20-year old, had not actually understood until I worked there and saw it myself: manchmal muss man den Karren an die Wand fahren - translation: sometimes you have to let the trolley drive into the wall, which means sometimes you have to let things play out till it’s natural end before you can help. Or to use an english proverb: Sometimes you have to hit rock bottom.

And this is what I’m thinking - no, hoping - is happening here. Because, look, you don’t just solve like 20 or more years of abandonment issues in one episode and considering what a big part of Buck’s character from the moment we met him they have been, that would have been unsatisfying to watch anyways! What we need right now, in terms of Buck’s storyline is catharsis. A cleansing. Buck needs to get to his worst (which I think he did or he will, once he talks to Abby) before he can begin to get better, can begin to heal, can begin to learn that he is not alone. And that is not a bad thing!

And yes, I know our boy is suffering and we along with him because we all love Evan Buckley to death but sometimes you gotta let things break so you can fix them instead of just putting tapes over the holes you see (haha, see what I did there?).

As for the episode, here we go:

I wanna start with something else real quick which is Hen’s subplot which I found important. Because they addressed that hey, she went through a trauma not to long ago as well and maybe she is not as okay with it as we thought?

Also it shows Bobby’s double standard again, but then I think he would have reacted differently if the guy had died and it was evident Hen realised she should never pull a stunt like that again. And maybe I’m giving Bobby a bit to much credit right now. Urgh.

I do wanna say, while Chimney seemed fine at the end with what went down we did see his reaction in the next episode and honestly he is mad, it’s just that Hen is his best friend and Chimney lives on the principle of forgive and forget so there.

Now I do really like the rope rescue scene because it was badass and also because Eddie seems so done in the beginning and Bobby just looks at him like: well, he’s not doing it alone and he’s probably not gonna cut his rope!

(Also notice how Eddie cut his rope willingly but Buck’s was cut for him? What does that mean? - For reals, I may see the connection but I can’t yet make out the meaning.)

But I did appreciate Hen’s comments about them being their best guys a lot! I kind of want an episode like they used to do on Star Trek were they focus on background characters and give us the way everyone probably sees Buddie as some kind of superhuman supermen who pull the craziest stunts and somehow make it! And now, let’s get into Evan!

First of, I now Cindy was meant as a parallel to Abby but I also think to Ali because Abby didn’t leave because she couldn’t handle the fear but Ali did. So there, a sort of Ali Martin mention! Thanks for listening, Tim.

But of course with everything else Cindy is quite the parallel to Abby from the way she just left and Red never really got closure, just like Buck.

What is interesting though is that Red, different to Buck, doesn’t want closure. He wants to remember the good times and imagine what could have been. (This could of course be due to the fact that his life is about to end.)

Buck on the other hand side really craves closure, and look, I know when we first learned she is definitely coming back I was really unhappy about that, but since then we learned they run into each other which makes it fine to me. Because I thought we’d have another instance of Buck running after Abby for validation and I did not want that. But he’s not actually running after her, it’s just a coincidence so I’m happy for him getting a chance to have closure, finally.

And this is were I think the episode proofs that it’s not about romantic love as the only way to be fulfilled, first because after talking about Abby Buck asks „Do you think I’m lonely?“ which is not about romance at all (had they wanted to make it about love it would have been: „Do you think I’ll find love again?“ or something). Also the conclusion of this episode is Maddie telling Buck he is different to Red because he has her (and in general those scenes between them, yes, they were also about Abby because she was another person Buck has been left by but just like they mention a best friend in terms of people Maddie left behind it is not about the romantic aspect, it is about people he loves in general), because he has a sister and she won’t leave him again - so there, familial love! The pinky swear! The importance of family. (see 3.11)

Also had it really been about love you know what would have happened since then? We’d have seen Buck calling Abby! Maddie would have said something about Buck still being young and having time to meet someone! Instead Abby and Buck run into each other by accident and Maddie makes a pinky swear to never leave again, so yeah, I just think sometimes we need to wait for how stuff plays out before we judge.

Now of course I wanna mention the pool scene as well.

Firstly, I know we already traced a lot of what Buck says at the end back to Eddie and the grocery store but did ya’ll here Chimney say: „Seems like your making this about yourself“ and Bobby implying the same thing, so yeah, I wonder if it was them quoting Eddie or if this is what everyone is supposed to be thinking or if it was just a setup for the breakdown at the end.

Also let’s talk about Eddie real quick here, because I found it really weird that they didn’t reference his platoon from Afghanistan here? Like they could have easily have him say „I’m not in the army anymore but I still talk to my old platoon.“, especially since we MET them one episode before. So either they didn’t think of that, they wanted to reinforce the fear Buck has or Eddie may just be as lonely as Buck?

(Guess which way I’m leaning?)

(Look, children are great but they are no substitute for friends and adult conversation, just saying!)

But I love how hard Mr. Stoic and emotionally unavailable tries to reassure Buck, tries to be there for him. And also did ya’ll notice how, once Eddie speaks for the first time Buck’s focus never strays from him. Hen and Chimney and Bobby talk as well but it seems as if Buck never looked away from Eddie. (Which, definitely get that, he looked good here.) Also how Buck stresses the “That better not happen to us“ - man, what conversation could he be referencing? Man, I wish I had memorised this show by now so I could tell you about two scenes that happened in 3A between Buddie where the topic of us was emphasised a lot but alas I don’t and I can’t.

What the pool scene also proofs once more is that the 118 just like an actual family has a lot of communication issues because Hen and Chimney not being in contact with Tommy or so is a completely different situation but because of their bad communication they don’t realise that this is something they need to explain to Buck because they think this is about Red.

Bobby doesn’t get it either tbh.

But we all know who does, look, I said it about 3.03 and I’ll say it now: Eddie knows Buck. Eddie understands Buck. And Eddie is on the path of realising that Buck needs him to say the actual words and not just let his actions speak! And my my if all of this pays off I will be one happy camper! (Hums Rihanna “We found love in a hopeless place”)

On a sidenote I hate that Red pegged Buck as a hothead because he really really isn’t! He’s just excitable and sometimes struggles with expressing himself and that frustrates him!

Also I never noticed the apartment had an outside area? did we know this? There is a grill?

Also really would love to see Gigi / Dana Strattford again, I liked her, she’s pretty! (But not like to date one of my guys, Tim, kay?)

(Also whats Officer Williams up to these days? Asking for … a friend?)

And to round this episode up: Oliver still looked so sick at times and they put a lot more makeup on him than they normally do? Usually you can see the slight scaring on his face but this episode you couldn’t but you could see the tears / snot mixing with all the makeup when he was crying and honestly, not his best look! (He still makes it work, though! Just saying, I miss 1.02 / 3.02 / 3.03 Buck, I know these episodes hurt but visually they are peak!)

Episode 3.17:

Was that episode amazing? Yes.

Am I still cackling about Oliver Stark having too much leg? Yes.

Did I love the Frank mention with all my heart? Yes.

Was Michael’s meet cute in an elevator less gay than any Buddie scene we got so far specifically any in 2.01 also known as their meet-ugly? That was a rhetorical question, you guys.

As for that comment I wouldn’t put too much stock into it. I mean, if you’re a single guy and you get invited out to fifth wheel at a double date with your sister and her boyfriend and his best friend and her wife, no matter how close you are, you will feel awkward so of course you invite the other single guy who happens to be your best friend who happens to be part of the friendgroup AND the team you’re working with making this a definite team/family/work - outing.

That being said: it took me 23h to come up with a reasonable explanation for this comment and I did scream at my laptop and pause the episode after it was made and I have been thinking “Buddie” confirmed about 100 times since then!

Also, they just spent a shit ton of time together, right? Like, if Buck’s there than so is Eddie and if Eddie is there than so is Buck and I’m clowning and not calm anymore!

Maybe “Buck invites Eddie” can be our always?

In other news this episode has absolutely no relevance for anything, but I love it deeply.

And we made it you guys! It was slower going but it worked!

Thank you to everyone who read so far and thank you to everyone who has been liking and reblogging and commenting! I don’t think I’ll ever be able to express how much this means to me!

(Also please keep doing that! I too am an excitable puppy looking for validation!)

Now, to tag:

@angelcamael, @greyhello, @ipleiade, @the-family-we-choose-118 @chimbuckleys @sevensoulmates

#buddie meta #buck meta #eddie meta #911 meta #evan buckley #eddie diaz #buddie #911 #911 fox #season 3 #textpost #mine #meta #buck #my meta

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werevulvi · 3 years

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Perhaps it's not so special to just be a woman. Half the population is. So what? But to me it is a huge thing. To even be able to say those words "I am a woman." They feel magnetic somehow, clinging to my tongue. It's like the word "woman" has a texture in my mouth like no other word does, vibrating at a different frequency. As if it's poisonous to taste. Yet I taste it, yet I say it. And I will keep saying it until I've cleansed it, no matter how long it takes. No matter how annoyingly repetitive and unnecessary it may sound to you.

It is a big deal to me, because up until age 29, I never spoke of myself using that word. Not even once. To then pick it up, for the first time, at age 29... was huge. And it's been 2 years since then now, but I'm still struggling with it, and it's still huge. I still don't understand why it's so hard for me to hold and hold onto that word, yet I am fiercely protective of it. I toss it away, then pick it up again, remorseful and protective of it. And I do that again and again. For each time I pick it up again, it's as if I understand its value a little bit more. All the significance, trauma, love, pain and curiosity it carries. It is mine, and no matter how hard it is to hold... I refuse to ever truly let go of it.

I may not look like a woman, I may not even want to! But why does it matter? Why should it matter what a woman looks like? Am I taking it too far, with the masculinity, the beard and bald head? Am I pushing my idea of freedom for women's expression too far? "Yes, women can be masc and gnc, BUT..." is what I keep hearing. But what? "...but you're taking it too far by looking like a whole ass man" is what I feel like the rest of the sentence, which they do not speak, is. Perhaps I'm wrong, I can't read minds. But sometimes I feel like people's minds are so loud that I can't not hear their thoughts.

I get a lot of backlash for every time I state myself as a woman, with my obnoxious reluctance to pass as my true identity. It's difficult to properly word that, what I actually mean. Perhaps I mean to say that I refuse to look like the traditional ideal of what people expect a woman to roughly wanna look like, whether that be masculine or feminine, as long as it's clearly recognisably female in some way or another. And my "true identity" has nothing to do with my personality, or my preferred expression, but only my deep down true love for being bio female. Thus, my "reluctance to pass" is indeed my desire to keep and maintain my transition traits, and my "true identity" is my womanhood, but I don't mean it in the same way TRA's do.

That true love for being female, isn't an ideal, but rather something much closer to my survival instinct.

It's that feeling of wanting to protect yourself when in danger. It's that instant self defense you act on without thinking when you feel like you're being threatened. It's that instant reaction of removing yourself from danger the split second it touches you, your body. It doesn't matter which part of you that danger touches, whether it be your hand, knee, your love handles, scarred chest, hairy face or your genitals. No matter what part of you is touched by that danger, you will instinctively protect it. It's in that instinct that I found love for my female nature, in my instinct to protect it from harm. I found it beyond my survival instinct, because no matter what part of me is ever touched by danger, my subconscious mind recognises it as not just lovable and worthy of protection and care, but also as part of the whole. This means, that deep down I'm not just loving myself... I also know that I am whole. No matter how many parts of me are cut off or distorted... I will always be whole.

I don't always feel aware of that like in my frontal lobe, but damn, my reptile brain knows it and won't ever question it.

With that, I found that my dysphoria is a shallow creation of my frontal lobe, and that it's in contradiction of my survival instinct. Being suicidal and/or self-harming is similar to this. Even wanting to die, always came second to my survival instinct. That is probably why I never succeeded to kill myself, and also why I never succeeded to truly hate my body. This does NOT mean that such horrible suffering as dysphoria or whatever feelings lead to self harm, is somehow not real. That is not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying it's a kind of cognitive dissonance, which messes with the very core of your core instincts, and that... I think, makes such psychological issues especially harmful.

And I also mean that my self love may not always have been accessible to me on surface level, but that despite that, it has always been innate.

And with that said... having found my innate self-love, and invited it to my frontal lobe... that is sorta why I can't really regret my medical transition. Even though I still have days when I struggle. Because I can't think of my body as broken anymore. Not since I found that deep, deep, VERY deep down I view myself as whole, lovable, valuable, and worthy of respect, love and safety... no matter what ever happens to me. Because my body is me, and there is no true disconnect between my sense of self and my flesh. Only on surface level there can sometimes be disconnect.

Kinda like the branches on a tree may be disconnected at the crown, but deeper down they all share the same trunk. I see myself in a similar manner. That at the top of the tree is most of my conscious thoughts, feelings, memories, etc, as well as all the various parts of my body. Or that is what my frontal lobe is aware of. That is how I perceive myself on surface level, as a scattered mess of branches, twigs, leaves and what not, each representing aspect of me, seemingly chaotic and all disconnected. But I'm also partially aware of what's going on deeper within my mind. I'm aware of the trunk that connects all branches, twigs, leaves, etc, and I'm also aware of the roots. Not directly aware, but I sense it like an inkling. I can sense that not only is there a trunk and roots deep down that connects to all twigs, and all twigs to each other, but also there in lies my knowledge that no matter how many of my twigs are left intact... the tree will always be a whole tree.

And it doesn't matter what I look like, or what troubles my body has gone through. Survival will always be the first priority. And my self-love IS equal to my instinct to survive. Because the reason I will always come to my own rescue whenever faced with danger or threat, or perceived danger/threat, is because I love myself. Self-love is the first move before I'm even saving myself from the danger, before that split second reaction takes place. That is how fast, instant and innate my self-love is. It was too obvious to even be aware of, for most of my life.

I think that's why is was so hard for me to find my self love. Because well... it was more deeply buried than my survival instinct itself, which I thought must be the innermost core aspect of my existence. But I was wrong about that. Self-love goes even deeper than survival. THAT is the innermost core aspect. Or so I believe. Can't think of anything that would possibly go even deeper than that.

But also, although I am the most aware on my self-love in moments my survival instinct takes over, I am also aware of it in other moments.

This is also why I can't get rid of my transition traits such as my facial hair. Because finding that true self-love from deep within my core, basically made me fuse all my aspects and physical traits together into a complete wholeness. All needs to be protected and loved. Every twig, every leaf. Sacrificing bits and pieces of me that are not damaging to my health, is self harm and goes against my survival instinct/self-love. It does not matter if the parts of me are in their natural state or medically/cosmetically altered. Even if those parts of me are inconvenient for my social life.

You know how a people who get organ transplants, their bodies try to reject the new organ because their immune system regards it as foreign? Well, this is kinda like that, but the exact opposite. My body/immune system/whatever-the-fuck regards my transition traits as heakthy parts of my original body, and thus to be protected at all costs. Loss of them will result in pain and grief. Just like losing any other part of my body would. And why? Because we mourn the loss of what we love, and what we regard as "ours" and as important, whole, healthy, lovable.

Deep down I do not care as much about such things as having a functional social life. Deep down, I care much more about things like keeping myself whole, safe, healthy and loved. Getting rid of my beard goes against that. Even just shaving it goes against that. My subconscious mind regards such an act as self harm.

Does this make sense to you? That it has nothing to do with "gender," be it manhood, womanhood, dysphoria, femininity or masculinity. It has to do with self-love, self-respect and survival. And that is a hell of a lot more important than being read or respected as a woman by others. No matter how much it hurts, because respecting and reclaiming myself as a woman is also highly important to me. Thus, I have to find a way to be open and honest with myself as a woman, without further harming myself.

I know this is deep and complicated spiritual shit, but I'm just trying to explain something which I think is probably very important. This discovery I had changed my life dramatically. So am I trying to teach self-love? No, I dunno. I don't think I can do that. I don't think anyone can. Perhaps I'm just trying to show a possibility.

I also need to clarify that despite knowing I love myself deep down now, I still struggle to stay connected to that aspect of my brain. And when I'm disconnected from it, I override my survival instinct and it misinterprets itself. Basically I fall out of order and act in a self destructive way, thinking it's self protection when it's actually the opposite. With that I understand that my self-love and my survival instinct are dependent on each other and need to be in harmony with each other to really keep me alive, safe and healthy. And although I'm now sometimes aware of this bond deep with myself, I'm still in imbalance. Because I still confuse self destruction for survival sometimes. When I skip meals, when I stay up too late, when I ruminate, when I smoke cigarettes, when I skip exercising, when I let my dirty dishes mould, etc. So simply being aware isn't quite enough, but it got me very far ahead of myself.

Also, trivial matters and superficial woes still get to me. I'm still human. I'm still fallible. Which is okay, but also frustrating. And that is basically why I love being a woman, while at the same time I also still struggle to accept myself as a woman, because it does include accepting being too norm-breaking for the society that I live in to accept me. And that hurts. It's a challenge that I'm not gonna overcome over night, just because I found the most important key to my healing. It's still just a key, a framework or an attitude - not a cure or some kinda magical spell. It's highly valuable and extremely important, but I still need to properly work through my emotions and learn how to navigate my social issues.

But what I feel my self-love is doing to help me, is carrying me through all this, and soothing me when I most need it. It makes my struggle worth it, and it makes me see a hell of a lot more of my potential than I was ever aware of before. The only backside of it is... well, it seems it does get to my head sometimes, and causing me some mild narcissistic tendencies. It sometimes makes me impatient hearing people with low self-esteem go on and on about how worthless they feel. That isn't great, I know. I'm working on fixing that error too.

By Werevulvi, dated November 29th, 2020.

#my text #detransition #womanhood #gender nonconformity #self love #deep ramble #a little controversal maybe

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benyhw · 3 years

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Day 3 - Reflections on emotional maturity

"Wielding sensible arguments can at points be as effective as telling a person with vertigo that the balcony wont collapse or a person with depression that there are perfectly good grounds to be cheerful" A lot of our mind is not amenable to hard-headed logic, not when emotions are involved

Yet, truly facing and understanding our emotions and then still be able to act with some rationality and logic is a testament to emotional maturity. There is more to love, forgiveness, trust than what we think we know.

I am sorry for my hurtful words, said in times of emotional turmoil. I regret my texts and posts, impulsive and raging. I've spent a lot of time reflecting on my actions, your thoughts and feelings and ultimately your decision. The turmoil I initially faced was truly a mixture of shock from how sudden things changed as well as the immense void your disappearance has caused. Given time, I have calmed down and could examine myself deeper on many levels.

I learned that I can be loved and that I can have wants and needs. I learned that my careless acts can hurt even when I don't recognise it at that point of time.

I know my mistakes and can see its damages. I triggered this whole chain of events, rocking what was a seemingly stable relationship. I see that we are flawed, but not un-deserving of love. Our innate reactions and nature is built upon by our past, regardless whether we consciously know it or not. Some traumas and hurt that forms our current insecurities are born from history we may not even remember. Though this doesn't discount our current wrongs, it does help to allow us to understand people better.

I do know, that I can and should listen to what I want and love, not only to that of other's demands or requests. I can be selfish in love and loving. I can earnestly seek forgiveness and then put in action to repent and atone for the wrongs I've made. Yet forgiveness and moving on from the hurt I've caused, is not mine to give or take. It is for me to earn and for you to heal from. I can only do what I believe is best, in terms of my love for you and love for myself. I do feel, we both have a lot to learn in terms of emotional maturity and have ways to go to truly understand what it means to love, to hurt, to trust and to forgive.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGV5o6UHjxM - Stay in or Leave a Relationship We expect to be deeply happy in love, and, therefore, spend a good deal of time wondering whether our relationships are essentially normal in their sexual and psychological frustrations or are beset by unusually pathological patterns which will impel us to get out as soon as we can. What films or novels we've been exposed to, the state of our friend's relationships, the degree of noise surrounding new sexually driven dating aps, not to mention how much sleep we've had, can all play humbling large roles in influencing us one way or another. How much of our unhappiness can be tightly attributed to this particular partner, and how much might it, as we would risk discovering five years later and multiple upheavals later, turn out to be simply and inherent feature of any attempt to live in close proximity to another human? Try to have another conversation with your partner in which you don't accuse them of mendacity, and instead simply explain, quite calmly, how you actually felt and how sad you are at quite a few things Consider the annoying traits in all previous partners we've had and people we've known, that our current partners happen to not have, what do we manage not to fight about?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLq1ktogxn4 - What infidelity means There are, of course, many cases where infidelity means exactly what Romanticism takes it to mean: contempt for one’s relationship. But in a great many other cases, it may mean something really rather different: a passing, surface desire for erotic excitement that coexists with an ongoing, sincere commitment to one’s life-partner. The best way to recover after an infidelity may therefore be to ignore what Romanticism tells us that infidelity has to mean, and to consult instead a more reliable source of information: what we ourselves took infidelity to mean the last time the idea crossed through our minds or our lives. It is on this basis that we may – with considerable pain of course – come one day to be able to forgive and even in a way understand and accept the apologies of a repentant partner. It is on the basis of subjective experience of unfaithful thoughts that we may redemptively enrich, complicate and soften what happens when we end up as their victims.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRaaqN2Atxw - Why We Go Cold On Our Partners Going cold is, in this story, simply the unavoidable consequence of familiarity. he loss of interest isn’t either natural or inevitable. The boredom is something at once more complicated and more active. It exists because we feel hurt by, angry with, or scared of our partner and because we haven’t found a cathartic way to tell ourselves or them about it. Tuning out isn’t inevitable, it’s a symptom of disavowed emotional distress. It’s a way of coping. We’re internally numbed – not just a touch bored. To learn to cope, we need a prominent mutual awareness and forgiveness of this dynamic of sensitivity and distress – and a commitment to decode it when disengagement and indifference descend. When we've gone cold, we may not truly have lost interest in our partners, we might just need an opportunity to imagine that we are quietly really rather hurt and furious with them and we should access to a safe forum in which our tender but critical feelings can be aired, purged and understood without risk of humiliation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgQvqi6aYD8 - The Secret of Successful Relationships: Rupture and Repair Repair refers to the work needed for two people to regain each other's trust and restore themselves in the others mind as someone who is essentially decent and sympathetic and can be a good enough interpreter of their needs Repair isn't just one capacity among others, it is arguably the central determinant of one's mastery of emotional maturity Good repair relies on at least 4 separate skills: The ability to apologise The ability to forgive - To do so requires us to extend imaginative sympathy for why good people can end up doing some pretty bad things, not because they are evil but because they are in their varied ways tired or sad, worried or weak. It lends us energy to look around for the most generous reasons why fundamentally decent people can at points behave less than optimally. We cling to rupture because it confirms a story which, though deeply sad at one level, also feels very safe: that big emotional commitments are invariably too risky, that others can't be trusted, that hope is an illusion The ability to teach - They give their listener time and know about defensiveness and as a fallback, accept that they may have to respect two different realities. They can be in the end bear to accept that they will always be a bit misunderstood even by someone who loves them very much The ability to learn - They have a lively and non-humiliating sense of how much they still have to take on board. It isn't a surprise or a cause for alarm that someone might level a criticism at them. Its merely a sign that a kindly soul is invested enough in their development to notice areas of immaturity, and in the safety of a relationship, to offer them something almost no one otherwise even bothers with: feedback.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci-zID4EAPU - How to deal with trust issues 1. Ask yourself how your reactions line up with reality - The thoughts we may have may not always be an honest perception of what is happening 2. Learn to be non defensive when you communicate - Chances are, people take the time to talk to you because they care about you and not because they want to hurt you 3. Let people know what you need and be direct about it - In order to build trust, you have to be open and honest. People often have trust issues because they are afraid of getting hurt. Trust issues are developed when too much focus is concentrated on the pain, but not enough on overcoming the pain. 4. Give people a chance to show you who they are - Give people time to show you their true colours, and you may be surprised that you can go through challenges well together 5. Practice open-ended conversations that allow disagreements 6. Confront your fears and don't allow them to hold control over you - Remember, you have the power to work through your struggles openly and honestly. You have it in you to connect and build trust with others

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-K5btaxEFY - How to forgive It can be so hard to forgive because – so often – we simply are in the right and the scale of the folly, thoughtlessness and meanness of others seems utterly beyond our own measure. But there are 2 inviolable ideas which should nevertheless, in the face of the grossest behaviour, be kept in mind to increase our changes of being able to forgive: 1. We must remember how the other person got there, to this place of idiocy and cruelty - Every irritating fault in another person has a long history behind it. They became like this because of flaws in their development, which they did not choose for themselves. To forgive is to understand the origins of evil and cruelty 2. There are difficult things about you too - Not in any area remotely connected to the sort of lapses that destroy your faith in humanity. But in some areas, quiet areas that you forget about as soon as you've travelled through them, you too are a deeply imperfect and questionable individual. Gently, you have - in your own way - betrayed. Nicely, you have been a coward. Modestly, you have forgotten your privileges'. Unthinkingly, you have added salt to the wounds of others. We must forgive because - not right now, not over this, but one day, over something - we need to be forgiven too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVeq-0dIqpk - How to build (and rebuild) trust There is 3 facets of trust: Authenticity in actions, Rigor in logic and communicating that logic, True empathy towards the other

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhyfBi-Ad4c - Loving and Being Loved We start knowing only about being loved. It comes to seem, very wrongly, like the norm. Parent and child may both love, but each party is on a very different end of the axis, unbeknownst to the child This is why adulthood, when we first say we long for love, what we predominantly mean is that we want to be loved as we are once loved by a parent In a secret part of our minds, we picture someone who will understand our needs, bring us what we want, to be immensely patient and sympathetic to us, act selflessly, and make it all better we need to move firmly out of the child and into the parental position of love To be adults in love, we have to learn, perhaps for the very first time, to do something truly remarkable, for a time at least, to put someone else ahead of us.

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I know, making this decision has not been easy on you. You struggled internally alone for 5 weeks before taking the brave step to pursue what you believed was right now. I can only imagine the turmoil you've been put through. I cannot and will not blame you for loving yourself more.

When I look at myself and what I've gone through in the past weeks, I do wonder how you are coping along as well. I do believe in what we had, which meant that these days were probably not as easy on you too as you make it seem. I never imagined that my actions were seen as infidelity to you and that while we know it was not ill-intentioned, the feelings you've felt and the hurt I've caused you are valid.

I hope the above few points and videos can eventually help you to heal and move on, to feel ok enough to love another again some day. I am always here to openly talk about us, about our feelings and about what we each want now or in the future for ourselves. In the past 2.5 years, have you done and said anything to anyone or just innately felt that you would feel afraid to tell me of? Has there ever been any breach of trust on your end or guilt, before my current mistake that made you feel betrayed? I am open, with no judgement or shame, to talk about these, if you are ever willing. I have done you wrong, and I truly have repented. I will never ever breach trust like that ever again, not even at the cost of feeling uncomfortable in sharing how I feel.

I too will love myself, doing my utmost best to pursue things I want and love because they make me happy. It is ok to be selfish in love, something I have learned from you that I am grateful for. Take care, I am only 1 text away

Love, Ben

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coffeebased · 4 years

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Hey! Wikathon na! I’ve started reading Relocations by Karen Tongson, about a third through now, but I had to take a little detour through Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir like I said I would. I’ve finished reading HtN but I’m not quite done experiencing it, so I’ll probably pick Relocations back up tomorrow.

But here’s what I read in July! What’s a segue?

1. Haikyu!! Volume 44 and 45 by Haruichi Furudate

A chance event triggered Shouyou Hinata’s love for volleyball. His club had no members, but somehow persevered and finally made it into its very first and final regular match of middle school, where it was steamrolled by Tobio Kageyama, a superstar player known as “King of the Court.”

Vowing revenge, Hinata applied to the Karasuno High School volleyball club… only to come face-to-face with his hated rival, Kageyama!

And with those two volumes, Haikyū has ended. I’m really glad that my cousin got me to catch up to the series because being a part of the sheer joy and love that’s poured out the fandom these past few months has been refreshing to my spirit. I enjoyed the way Furudate brought the series to its conclusion, by giving all the characters a future and room to grow. I hope to hear more from him in the upcoming years.

2. Looking for Group by Alexis Hall

I read Looking for Group because I was reading up on Alexis Hall in anticipation of Boyfriend Material, which I will talk about later, and saw the synopsis:

So, yeah, I play Heroes of Legend, y’know, the MMO. I’m not like obsessed or addicted or anything. It’s just a game. Anyway, there was this girl in my guild who I really liked because she was funny and nerdy and a great healer. Of course, my mates thought it was hilarious I was into someone I’d met online. And they thought it was even more hilarious when she turned out to be a boy IRL. But the joke’s on them because I still really like him.

And now that we’re together, it’s going pretty well. Except sometimes I think Kit—that’s his name, sorry I didn’t mention that—spends way too much time in HoL. I know he has friends in the guild, but he has me now, and my friends, and everyone knows people you meet online aren’t real. I mean. Not Kit. Kit’s real. Obviously.

Oh, I’m Drew, by the way. This is sort of my story. About how I messed up some stuff and figured out some stuff. And fell in love and stuff.

And I knew that I had to read it. Immediately.

I enjoyed it way too much. The characters were adorable, the conflict was done well, the geeky gamer wrapper was AMAZING and the author never dropped the ball on integrating the online game into the narrative. It was very readable and I enjoyed the atmosphere of the book immensely. I also may have spent a heady week or so thinking of playing WoW, but I avoided that temptation. Made me miss uni too, and the way my friends and I would spend countless hours with each other.

3. Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall

Wanted: One (fake) boyfriend Practically perfect in every way

Luc O’Donnell is tangentially–and reluctantly–famous. His rock star parents split when he was young, and the father he’s never met spent the next twenty years cruising in and out of rehab. Now that his dad’s making a comeback, Luc’s back in the public eye, and one compromising photo is enough to ruin everything.

To clean up his image, Luc has to find a nice, normal relationship…and Oliver Blackwood is as nice and normal as they come. He’s a barrister, an ethical vegetarian, and he’s never inspired a moment of scandal in his life. In other words: perfect boyfriend material. Unfortunately apart from being gay, single, and really, really in need of a date for a big event, Luc and Oliver have nothing in common. So they strike a deal to be publicity-friendly (fake) boyfriends until the dust has settled. Then they can go their separate ways and pretend it never happened.

But the thing about fake-dating is that it can feel a lot like real-dating. And that’s when you get used to someone. Start falling for them. Don’t ever want to let them go.

I came into this book with high expectations after Looking for Group, and my expectations were mostly met. The few issues I had were ultimately negligible, probably cultural differences or conventions of a genre that I’m not familiar with. The characters were strong, and I found the book funny. I know it sounds as though I’m damning it with faint praise, so I’ll say it plainly: it was an enjoyable read and I was totally invested in the romance. I think it’ll make a really good film as well.

4. The Subtweet by Vivek Shraya

Everyone talks about falling in love, but falling in friendship can be just as captivating. When Neela Devaki’s song is covered by internet-famous artist Rukmini, the two musicians meet and a transformative friendship begins. But as Rukmini’s star rises and Neela’s stagnates, jealousy and self-doubt creep in. With a single tweet, their friendship implodes, one career is destroyed, and the two women find themselves at the center of an internet firestorm.

Celebrated multidisciplinary artist Vivek Shraya’s second novel is a stirring examination of making art in the modern era, a love letter to brown women, an authentic glimpse into the music industry, and a nuanced exploration of the promise and peril of being seen.

If you’re a millennial and if you’ve ever had complicated friendships, this book will ring really true for most of it, I think. I kept wincing at the characters’ actions and “mistakes”, recognising them as things I or my friends have done, but there are portions of the story that I found inaccessible because Neela, the main character, just seems really opaque even when they’re the ones speaking. The music Shraya made as a companion to the book slaps and can be found here.

5. Empowered 11 by Adam Warren

Costumed crimefighter Empowered finds herself the desperate prey of a maniacal supervillain whose godlike powers have turned an entire city of suprahumans against her.

Not good! Outnumbered and under siege, aided only by a hero’s ghost, can Emp survive the relentless onslaught long enough to free her enslaved teammates and loved ones, or is this–*gulp*–The End?

From comics overlord Adam Warren comes Empowered, the acclaimed sexy superhero comedy–except when it isn’t, as in this volume’s no-nonsense, wall-to-wall brawl guaranteed to bring tears to the eye and fists to the face!

Warren’s tying up a lot of loose ends and answering a lot of questions and I’m wondering if that means Empowered‘s ending soon. I haven’t seen any info regarding this, even though the words “The End” are right there in the summary, because comic books always lean on the whole the hero could die! thing, and more often than not they never do. But Emp has come so far in the past 11 volumes, and I think that she’s ready to confront a lot of the stuff that Warren’s only hinted at in the past. Most of Empowered is about how Emp deals with failure and how she rises above it, and recently it’s become about how other people have failed her, rather than how she has failed, and how she deserves better. I’m worried about her, but at least we are another volume’s worth of evidence for the Emp/Thugboy/Ninjette OT3.

6. Sex and Vanity by Kevin Kwan

The iconic author of the bestselling phenomenon Crazy Rich Asians returns with a glittering tale of love and longing as a young woman finds herself torn between two worlds–the WASP establishment of her father’s family and George Zao, a man she is desperately trying to avoid falling in love with.

On her very first morning on the jewel-like island of Capri, Lucie Churchill sets eyes on George Zao and she instantly can’t stand him. She can’t stand it when he gallantly offers to trade hotel rooms with her so that she can have the view of the Tyrrhenian Sea, she can’t stand that he knows more about Curzio Malaparte than she does, and she really can’t stand it when he kisses her in the darkness of the ancient ruins of a Roman villa and they are caught by her snobbish, disapproving cousin, Charlotte. “Your mother is Chinese so it’s no surprise you’d be attracted to someone like him,” Charlotte teases. Daughter of an American-born-Chinese mother and blue-blooded New York father, Lucie has always sublimated the Asian side of herself in favor of the white side, and she adamantly denies having feelings for George. But several years later, when George unexpectedly appears in East Hampton where Lucie is weekending with her new fiancé, Lucie finds herself drawn to George again. Soon, Lucy is spinning a web of deceit that involves her family, her fiancé, the co-op board of her Fifth Avenue apartment, and ultimately herself as she tries mightily to deny George entry into her world–and her heart. Moving between summer playgrounds of privilege, peppered with decadent food and extravagant fashion, Sex and Vanity is a truly modern love story, a daring homage to A Room with a View, and a brilliantly funny comedy of manners set between two cultures.

This was the third romance novel I read in July, and that’s honestly the highest concentration of romance novel I’ve ever had in my life. I know that I’m supposed to find romance novels like super kilig and stuff, but so far I am just very anxious for romance novel protagonists all the time. I think that the whole thing about the romance novels I have read is that they’re mostly about how deeply anxious people learn how to allow themselves to be loved and that is tough! I wanted to protect Lucie all the time! I was Invested in her Welfare, and I don’t think I cared about Rachel Chu from Crazy Rich Asians half as much, even if you condensed all my attachment from the entire trilogy. Also, small spoiler, there is a hint that Sex and Vanity is in the same universe as Crazy Rich Asians, which I think is awesome.

6. Trust Exercise by Susan Choi

Pulitzer Finalist Susan Choi’s narrative-upending novel about what happens when a first love between high school students is interrupted by the attentions of a charismatic teacher

In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. When within this striving “Brotherhood of the Arts,” two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed—or untoyed with—by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley.

The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school’s walls—until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down. What the reader believes to have happened to David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true—though it’s not false, either. It takes until the book’s stunning coda for the final piece of the puzzle to fall into place—revealing truths that will resonate long after the final sentence.

As captivating and tender as it is surprising, Trust Exercise will incite heated conversations about fiction and truth, friendships and loyalties, and will leave readers with wiser understandings of the true capacities of adolescents and of the powers and responsibilities of adults.

This is a book I could not stop reading and I felt gross after I finished it. I think that I enjoyed it and that the narrative flips were well-done and it was engaging, but Choi writes teenage trauma in 3D, and you can smell her scumbag characters. Very good will never read again unless looking to feel bad.

Re-read:

Temeraire: His Majesty’s Dragon, Throne of Jade, Black Powder War, andEmpire of Ivory by Naomi Novik

Aerial combat brings a thrilling new dimension to the Napoleonic Wars as valiant warriors ride mighty fighting dragons, bred for size or speed. When HMS Reliant captures a French frigate and seizes the precious cargo, an unhatched dragon egg, fate sweeps Captain Will Laurence from his seafaring life into an uncertain future – and an unexpected kinship with a most extraordinary creature. Thrust into the rarified world of the Aerial Corps as master of the dragon Temeraire, he will face a crash course in the daring tactics of airborne battle. For as France’s own dragon-borne forces rally to breach British soil in Bonaparte’s boldest gambit, Laurence and Temeraire must soar into their own baptism of fire.

I started re-reading it because I wanted to introduce it to my girlfriend, and I outpaced her very quickly, and selfishly. She’s still at the beginning fourth of Throne of Jade, and I feel like I blinked and gulped down four of the books in quick succession. I had to stop myself after Empire, in a very belated effort to sync up to my gf’s progress. The series is amazing, and I don’t know if I’ll ever read one like Temeraire again. Being able to revisit it should be enough, really, because every time I do it’s as though I’m caught up in a strong and wonderful wind that fills me up with delight and awe. Novik’s starting a new series this September, and I hope it’s just as good.

That’s it for July! I’m probably going to do two books at a time for my Wikathon posts, just to keep things fresh and current, so keep a weather eye out for those posts!

July, next verse, same as the first Hey! Wikathon na! I've started reading Relocations by Karen Tongson, about a third through now, but I had to take a little detour through…

#books #books 2 #reading #reading 2

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thesickpanda · 5 years

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What Do You Do When A Loved One Changes For the Worse?

For the past couple of weeks I have been having constant nightmares about a particular friend. He is on a self-destructive path and his harmful behaviours are affecting me and those around him.

My partner has insisted that I write this all down as a way to expunge it. It's going to be a while before I see my psychologist, so I guess a diary entry will have to do in the meantime.

Long story short, in the past 10 months, I have made some huge changes to how I relate to others. The extremely abridged version is that I was a doormat most of my life and came from a family of emotional bullies. They set the baseline for what was my normal and so I tended to find myself in very toxic friendships throughout my adult life. I put up with shit from other people that literally no one else would (I was often the only friend of these toxic people) and those relationships always ended horribly with me feeling like I was somehow the bad guy when I was the victim. It took many years of therapy and a lot of introspection to realise that. I acknowledged my own shortcomings and flaws and where I had contributed to the downfall of certain relationships. But equally, I let go of the guilt of ending relationships that were exploitative, manipulative and cruel. I finally understood that having personal boundaries was not only beneficial to me but also to those who would either intentionally or accidentally exploit me and my giving nature. The ultimate test came toward the end of last year when had to lay down some very firm boundaries with a close relative. We are still in communication, but now I decide when we talk and what we talk about. I've had to do this in order to protect us both. Interestingly, limiting exposure to her has been the best thing for the relationship, as we are now getting along better on the whole. I now know firsthand how important boundary setting is for the longevity of any relationship, especially the complicated ones.

I mention all this, because it started a process for me. I really took on board the advice of a Buddhist monk who told me to surround myself with wise people. I realised that some people in life were wholly negative influences. I'm talking about help rejecting complainers, emotional leeches and hapless drifters daydreaming through their own lives with nothing to give.

I have put up with so much shit from people over the years, it is not funny. I am now purging one-sided relationships that no longer serve me in any way. I'm perfectly willing and able to forgive people their flaws and faults if they are also counterbalanced with good traits. But so often I seem to have attracted people who are mean-spirited or haughty or completely unaware of their own crap and I just don't have the spoons to deal with those individuals anymore.

And herein lies the rub. It has, until recently, been an overwhelmingly positive experience for me to learn how to set my own boundaries and choose my friends more carefully. My last birthday celebration was a testament to that. I felt truly loved by the people who came to my little party and I felt seen and appreciated for who I really was. I want to be forging closer relationships with my true friends, those who have stuck by me and given back as much as I have given them. I'm fortunate to have good people in my life, but I haven't had as much time to dedicate to them because I was so busy pouring love into those aforementioned toxic relationships (which are often all-consuming). I'm changing that now, and it feels good.

But recently, it forced me to acknowledge something I have been steadfastly refusing to face up to. I have a friend in my life who I have known for well over a decade who has been troubling me a great deal over the past couple of years. I want to clarify that this friend is not a bad person. They are not toxic toward me in the way that other people have been. They are not deliberately trying to torment me, manipulate or exploit me. In fact, he has at times been exceptionally generous. He has trouble with expressing emotion so most of that generosity comes out in financial gestures, which complicates things. I'm disabled and unemployed and so I don't have any disposable income of my own. This friend knows that and has spoilt me with some really nice gifts over the years, as well bailing me out of financial hardship at critical times. In that regard, I owe him a lot. And that, in large part, has been why I have remained friends with him. I feel indebted. I've also stayed on in the relationship because I remember who they used to be. When we first met he was bright, switched on, optimistic and ambitious. He had goals and was brave and interested in the world around him. He came from a community of kind, loving people, many of whom I still call friends to this day. He surrounded himself with these people and even flew across oceans to International gatherings to be there with them. I saw so much potential and love in this person and I fell head over heels for him. I fall in love with people all the time. I see the best in them and want the best for them. Sometimes it means I come on a bit strong and intense and I have tried my best to reel that back. (It can be a bit overbearing and intimidating for people). But ultimately, I just love people with my whole heart and want to see them thrive. This friend and I connected very deeply on that level and I honestly thought we’d be best buds for life.

The problem is that we have both changed a great deal since those early years. I have done a tremendous amount of work on myself. I have seen numerous therapists, completed mindfulness courses, read self-help books, joined support groups, participated in countless programs for people with chronic pain, and just generally tried to work on my shit. I know that sounds crass, but it's something we all need to do in order to grow. We need to recognise our own issues and bullshit and do our best to address it. No one is ever going to be perfect and we shouldn't strive to be; however, if we have character flaws that are outwardly hurting others, we need to acknowledge and work on those. We also need to stop being self-destructive. I have never been one to run away from a personal challenge. I dealt with my grief after losing my dad; I faced my fears head on when my anxiety reached fever pitch, and overcame them. I took big risks when I moved country twice. I have been brave every day of my life when I wake up with three chronic illnesses and a mental illness and somehow get through the day. I have been productive and have given back to the community as much as I possibly can. I am driven toward self-improvement and self-love as much as I am committed to making the world a better place. Even though I intend to hang up my feminist activist hat at the end of this year, I still want to be involved in community activism, primarily environmental, in the years to follow. I can never not to do something for the betterment of others. It's in my nature and it gives my life meaning and purpose. I also want to pursue creative exploits, do more travel and see what else the world has to offer.

My friend, on the other hand, has resolutely given up on all of that. He too had dreams, goals and ambitions, and he hasn’t realised any of them, nor put any serious effort towards them, either.

I can remember when it happened.

A few months after I moved to Australia to be with my partner, I visited my friend. I was so excited to see him as it had been a while. But he was angry and bitter the entire time I was there. He lashed out at his mother, his best friend and at me. In quiet moments I tried to understand why he was so upset and he finally blurted that he wanted what his siblings had: a family. He wanted a loving, committed relationship, a career and children. But he was still working at the same grocery shop he’d been at since he was 15. He had dropped out of his degree. He put absolutely no effort into dating, or working on his appalling personal hygiene or appearance. I told him that if he wanted those things, he would have to work for them, just like everyone else. He threw up his hands in a fit and said he didn't want to. He just wanted them to fall from the sky. We got into big arguments over it because this friend of mine was so spoilt and so privileged. He was still living at home with his parents who gave him everything he needed. He was able bodied and, despite punishing his body with a terrible diet, reasonably well. He could hoard his money and then spend it on conventions and video games, because he didn't have to pay any rent or any bills. His parents put up with some pretty nasty behaviour from him, including his refusal to do housework. I hate to say it, but he was acting like the entitled millennial male we feminists get so frustrated over: expecting the beautiful wife, house and job to fall into his lap without having to do any work towards it. We nearly broke up during that trip. Indeed, I needed a few months away from him before I could recover from what was quite a shock. I felt resented. And it wasn't just me; he was resenting everyone else too. His mother was devastated when I left early, because at the time I was 50% of his friendship base. I adore his mother and sympathized with her position, but I told her she needed to stop enabling her son and give him a kick up the butt he needed. She refused.

After that, he simmered down a bit. He didn't bring it up anymore. He wasn't angry and he didn't lash out. He just went numb. I managed to talk him into doing a degree in creative writing, which he was once passionate about. (He completed that degree, but has done absolutely nothing with it since.) Oh, he sometimes came along to things his best friend, my partner and I went to, although he never expressed much interest in those activities. He made silly jokes and he was still fairly personable, but he never wanted to address the elephant in the room. Anytime I tried to bring it up he shut down, became silent and grumpy and otherwise sulked. He never had anything to say about it. He just went quiet and looked miserable. "But you told me that you had life goals! That you certainly didn't want to still be working at the same shop by the time you turned 30. You said that you wanted love in your life! What are you doing about it?" His reply was to grumble or make grunting noises. He just looked like he was suffering through a lecture waiting for it to be over then acting like nothing had ever happened. But I still remembered who he used to be and what he wanted from life. He had just given up on that and on himself. He put it all in the too hard basket. It took a number of years for me to realise that he wasn't interested in having any semblance of a life outside of that shop he worked at four hours a day, five days a week. He frequented the same fast food place every day and spent all the rest of his free time sleeping or on the computer, mostly on Reddit/gaming forums, porn sites and otherwise very toxic environments totally unlike the one we had found each other in. He would spend days composing SJW posts defending issues to Internet trolls, issues he did not champion nor put any work towards supporting in real life. He would then relish in telling me how he had trolled other people. He stopped writing science fiction short stories and started writing porn. He stopped reading books. He stopped watching shows. The only interests he still had were anime and a few PC games. He wasn’t even interested in the fandom we had originally met through. It became increasingly difficult to find things to talk about.

While I was off becoming a passionate feminist activist, he was digitally surrounding himself with the same sorts of people who sent us rape threats. He started using misogynistic slurs and watching harem anime, some of which he showed me honestly thinking I’d like it! (Occasionally he got it right and found an anime that we both really liked and bonded over, but that has become less frequent over the years. He doesn’t like to watch anyone else’s suggestions and wants to always be the one showing you something he has previously seen. It is vexing.) Before long, I couldn't hold regular conversations with him. He didn't follow the news, wasn't engaged in the outside world, and did not have any real passions. Outside of a limited range of anime (i.e. not horribly offensive, racist and sexist anime), the only other thing we had in common were a few videogames that we played together. And even then, he would occasionally get angry at losing and use sexist or foul language that I found very upsetting. Most of the time, when I called him out on it, he would apologise and stop… But soon enough it would creep back in.

Basically if I had met this person today, I would not be interested in pursuing a friendship with him. He is the type of individual who is going nowhere, unable or unwilling to recognize his own bullshit.

He can be very generous to his friends, especially in terms of money, which he has a comfortable amount of. But in other ways, he is intensely selfish. He never helped his parents at the family home. Appalingly, he didn't even lift a finger to help his father when he was sick with cancer. He was utterly disinterested and I needed to call his mom to found out how his dad was doing, even though he visited them for dinner weekly!). A few years ago he finally moved into a house he rents with his best friend. The house belongs to his sister, is being let out at a very cheap rate despite being a stunning home, and she is trusting him to take care of it. But most of that work falls to his best friend. He frequently skips his share of chores, leaves a mess and otherwise exhausts his poor friend who works 60 hour work weeks and is in part time study. My friend works 20 hours a week but claims he has “no time” to do basic household maintenance. He’s a self-professed “lazy bastard”. (He doesn’t see this as a problem…). I’ve lost count of the amount of arguments they have had over it. I do not mean this to sound funny, but his best friend is more like a beleaguered, 1950’s housewife, and he takes him horribly for granted and can be outright terrible to him. He puts him down and is frankly abusive towards him. I have long wanted his best friend to move out, because he is a good person and I Iove him too, but he is enmeshed in the relationship with my friend and cannot see what a bad influence he is. It’s awful to watch. I know he’s capable of keeping the place clean, because many years ago we lived together, and after one argument about his messy habits, he cleaned and tidied up just fine. He just could not be bothered to do it for anyone anymore.

In short, he's not the man I fell in love with... and I don't know what to do.

This all reached a boiling point in the last couple of weeks. I have been trying to get off a drug called Lyrica which has some very awful withdrawal effects. My friend is well aware of this because I have told him all about it and he has been supportive of my getting off them. However, my partner needs to take time off work each time I make a dose drop to ensure that I don't self-harm or get too terrified by the psychological symptoms (such as time loss and suicidal ideation). Unfortunately, he did not have enough leave saved up to do that this time, so we invited my friend to come stay with me and be there for me during what was going to be a very difficult experience. We trusted that he would be able to see me through the next 10 days.

I'm well aware that it's quite a big ask of anyone to help someone through a drug withdrawal process. It is not pleasant and if you don't have any experience in it it can be quite daunting. That said, the way things played out forced me to fully acknowledge the breathtaking emotional immaturity of my friend. Because he has locked himself away from life and avoided any and all hardships, he doesn't know what to do when faced with any sort of adversity. I was very anxious and a bit intense during the withdrawals, but I didn't try to kill myself or do anything self-destructive. I did experience time loss, which frightened me, and depression. That alone seemed to stun him. He just didn't know what to do. And I can forgive that. The problem was that his own behaviour triggered me at an especially raw time. For example, while I was silently battling dark voices in my mind telling me that I was a waste of space and life wasn't worth living, he would say things like "just die", "Die in a fire", "I hope you go to hell" and other callous remarks made “in jest”. We have always playfully bantered, but his responses to that banter have become increasingly malicious over the years. It's because of the community he surrounds himself with. Those are the sorts of things 15-year-old boys say to each other. And in terms of emotional growth, he has actually regressed to that age. He was never this mean-spirited when I met him in his early 20s. My partner took him aside one evening and politely explained to him that saying things like that to a person who is battling suicidal thoughts is not a good idea. He understood that but was unable to censor himself. He just kept doing it. He showed me anime that was so male gazey it put me off. Knowing that anime was one of the only things we could bond over, I actually looked up a recommended list of feminist anime with good storylines that we could both enjoy. But because he doesn't like to watch things he hasn't himself chosen, it was difficult. He indulged me a little but then wanted to go back to watching an anime he had already seen. He didn't seem to understand that many of his choices in recent years have been offensive and upsetting to me, and I was already a raw nerve. I kept trying to explain this to him without hurting his feelings but he seemed mystified all the same. Going for walks was one of the best ways to combat the mental struggle I was going through, and he did indulge me in a few of those, but nowhere near as many as I needed. He hates exercise.

His horrible hygiene and bad habits were also triggering my very real OCD. OCD plagues me when my anxiety is high and so it took tremendous restraint not to blow a fuse over the copious amounts of Coca-Cola cans collecting around the house, disgusting farts he dropped (and then laughed about for literally 10 minutes each time), his wearing the same pair of trousers for two weeks and the underwear he reused. He stank. I was in an enclosed space with someone who was putting no effort into making my experience more comfortable when that experience was very literally life-threatening. In the end, I had to do emotional labour to hide just how much I was suffering from him, because it made him uncomfortable or brought out some of his worst behaviours. He physically poked, prodded and elbowed me when I begged him not to. He said it was how he expressed affection. I told him it set off my anxiety. He didn't stop. It was only when my partner came home, in the late hours of the evening, when I could in whispers express my frustration. He was concerned because he too had expected my friend to rise to the challenge much better than he had. We were both disappointed. My partner and my friend get along really well and have never had any conflict in their relationship, but my partner was annoyed at the way he was acting.

I had struggled with anxiety and depression in the early years of our friendship and even though he sometimes floundered then, he still did a damn sight better than he seems capable of doing now. I cannot overstate this. The man has emotionally regressed to a teenager. He is less mature and less kind and less switched on than he was in his early 20s. He is in his mid-30s now but he does not act his age in any sense. By the time he left, I was both relieved and distraught. I felt like I'd been hit by a truck. The realisation was dawning on me that I could no longer have a meaningful relationship with him. He had made that impossible. He was not someone I could rely on emotionally in any capacity, or talk to in any depth. I was going to have to treat him as a fair weather friend. He had rendered himself incapable of being anything more.

So that is why I have been having nightmares. During his time here and in the weeks following, I have dreamt about being trapped with him and trying to get him to either leave me alone or behave better, to my great vexation. I wake from the dreams emotionally exhausted and tired. We have communicated a couple of times since then on our regular gaming nights. The last one left me cold. He was losing to one of the female characters and called her a fucking bitch. It made me flinch and then it made me anxious. I left after that game and went to bed and had more nightmares.

I have tried to address a lot of this crap in him. He doesn't want to talk about it. He makes some attempt to censor his behaviour around me, but really, he shouldn't have to. His behaviour just shouldn't be this bad. And I have found myself swallowing down so much stuff that in every other sphere of my life I would not tolerate. As a feminist, it has given me a level of cognitive dissonance I can’t even begin to explain.

Look, I don't think it is wise for people to put themselves in a complete bubble with only like-minded individuals. Echo chambers can be dangerous. But I do think you need some things in common and a base level of respect. And I have learned that it is often hard to get respect from people who do not respect themselves.

I'm not sure what to do from here. I do still love him, despite all of this, and I don't want to lose him. But I'm not sure how to make this friendship sustainable. My partner has suggested that Friend and I should no longer spend one-on-one time with each other, and I strongly agree with that. Instead, when we go to visit him in his city or he comes to visit us, we should only ever be together as a group. My partner is really good at moderating this friend of mine. They have an easy-going relationship and when there’s a group dynamic he tends to behave a little better. But I can't help but feel a great sense of loss. I feel like the person I connected with all those years ago is gone. I feel like I'm keeping something going out of respect for that person, not because it is something that especially benefits me, at least on an emotional level. While I can never repay him for all the monetary gestures and support over the years, I have given him all the love I could possibly give. And honestly, you can’t put a dollar value on that. I'm just going to have to reel that back, because I can't get entangled with someone hell bent on self-destruction. I've been close to people like that, including family members, all my life and it has only brought me heart ache. I need to protect myself. I'm just figuring out the best way to do that, and it's really hard…

#confessional post #toxic relationships #toxic friendships #heartbreak #chronic illness #self destructive friends #emotional labour #sad

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askanautistic · 6 years

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Is there any recovery from burnout? It's been three years and I'm still not back where I used to be. I feel like I might never be the same, but family has high expectations.

Yes, but the amount of recovery might vary, because there will of course be variables from person to person and situation to situation. It will depend on the causes of the burnout, the symptoms, what recovery has entailed (in terms of time, rest, support), and it will also probably depend somewhat on your own expectations and the expectations of those around you. CausesIf someone is still having to suffer the causes even whilst experiencing burnout, they will never get a chance to recover. Even if someone is away from the causes and recovers fully from burnout, if the pre-burnout circumstances are the same and the autistic person has to return to that environment, it is likely that burnout will re-occur. Symptoms/effectsWhen someone has ‘burnt out’, they often experience depression. It seems quite common for people who experience depression to be prone to re-occurrences. Quite often if someone has experienced something deeply unpleasant like depression/stress/burnout, they’ll be more sensitive to the symptoms (so if someone starts to become stressed again or to experience pre-burnout warning signs, they’ll recognise them), which might be a positive thing if it means they are able to manage things before they result in a burnout, but can also be negative if it causes the person anxiety or distress (through fear of experiencing burnout/depression again). Some people might experience worsened sensory issues, and for some people these symptoms might return to normal as they recover, but for others these symptoms might remain. I experienced burnout and my already sensitive hearing became dramatically more sensitive - my hearing sensitivity has not improved since then.The recovery periodIdeally, someone would have the appropriate amount of time (which will probably vary from person to person) and support to recover, if not fully then as much as possible. The recovery period can have complications, however.If someone has burned out due to school or work stresses, the likelihood is that they will have to return to their school or job at some point. Odds are this will happen when there has been some improvement, but not necessarily when there’s been enough improvement. As mentioned above, if they are expected to return to the same circumstances as pre-burnout, they’ll continue to struggle. Even if improvements/adjustments have been made, if they are still suffering some of the effects of the burnout, they’ll likely continue to struggle to some extent. They might also have work to catch up on, which will mean more stress. Even if this doesn’t result in another burnout, it would probably prevent further recovery (where recovery is ongoing).If someone suffers from burnout and it results in them losing their job, or having to take sick leave, depression and/or anxiety over this can of course hinder recovery. The same goes for any other potential expectations or inability perform various duties. Once someone is over the more obvious symptoms of burnout, people might start to assume they are ‘back to normal’, or the autistic person might feel pressured (by other people or even themselves) to perform duties and responsibilities before they’ve had adequate time to recover. So they’ll either push themselves too hard, or will feel depressed/anxious/stressed over neglecting various duties.There might be a lack of support, or a lack of adequate support to help someone to cope with the effects of burnout. Managing expectationsThere are some situations in which someone will have a break, recharge, and will be able to return to whatever responsibilities they have. I think that a lot of people have this expectation in mind in many situations for which this isn’t true (if someone is signed off from work, for example, the expectation is often that when they return they are fully fit for their previous duties, and even where phased returns are recommended there tend to be standard timeframes and/or pressure to keep these brief). Quite often, recovery is ongoing, and someone has to adjust their limits in line with their recovery. Someone might be at home for a while and they might start to feel pretty good and even like they are back to normal, but if they were to return to their normal duties and responsibilities would quickly become overwhelmed, instead needing to gradually increase their activities. It can be hard to actually ease yourself back into life like this, though, as the people around us often seem to think that much larger jumps between stages are manageable, and don’t often allow for taking steps back, so it’s very easy for people who are unwell to find themselves being pushed too far, too fast. It’s also very easy to go along with other people through eagerness for things to return to normal, embarrassment over being seen to not cope with what other people perceive as being everyday events, or a desire to avoid being an inconvenience, but ultimately it would probably be better if we did try to assert our limits and needs. Are your expectations fair? If your definition of recovery means being able to get back to the exact kind of life you had pre-burnout, then that might not be possible, and even if it is possible it would probably not be a good idea. After all, burnout happens for a reason - the circumstances leading up to burnout were obviously not suitable, and even if you thought you were coping, or thought you were able to hide how difficult things were, eventually there are consequences for putting yourself under that kind of strain. Also be fair to yourself over whether you have actually had the adequate time and support to recover, or whether your recovery might have been hindered by taking on things that require lots of effort to cope with. Try to give yourself credit for any recovery you have so far made rather than worrying about your end goal (and potentially letting that fear impede your recovery, or pushing yourself beyond your limits in an attempt to reach your goal, or trying to please other people).Coping with other people’s expectations can of course be difficult, too, and many people don’t understand the difficulties we face. It can be easy for an outsider to assume that because someone was previously able to do something, they will still be able to do it, or that because someone seems to be a lot better they must be ‘back to normal’, and to underestimate just how long recovery can take (or that recovery isn’t just a case of things returning to normal, but can be a case of continuing to manage ongoing symptoms and continuing to try to minimise risks of relapse). You might need to explain more fully what burnout is, what caused it, and how you feel about your recovery.

#burnout #autistic burnout

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polyanglican-blog · 6 years

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Can I be polyamorous and serve in ministry?

This question has been on my mind, in part, due to a parallel fear drawn from my experiences as a queer person. (And a very idle daydream of going into ministry myself, but I am choosing not to examine that too closely right now.) Something LGBTQ folks hear a lot from churches is that while they’re welcome to attend, they are not welcome to serve. This, among other issues, sets up a toxic and false distinction between ‘normal people’ and SOGI minorities—clean and unclean, worthy and unworthy. For surely all that is required to serve the Lord is a penitent and willing heart, and by gatekeeping in this way you’re not-so-subtly sending a message about who is ‘really’ saved and worthy of entering God’s kingdom.

Here in the Anglican Church (of Canada), I seriously doubt anyone would try to stop me from, say, joining the choir or serving on an altar gilding team, but there does seem to be a distinction in the standards lay servants are held to compared to those of the clergy, which is presumably meant for the greater unity and strength of the church.

The most obvious passage to examine in consideration of this question is 1 Timothy 3:2-13, which details requirements for those aspiring to the priesthood, and in the popular consciousness (drawn from the King James Version) declares that bishops and deacons should be ‘the husband of one wife’. In the NRSV, the translation generally used by the Anglican and Episcopalian Churches, it reads as follows:

2 Now a bishop must be above reproach, married only once, temperate, sensible, respectable, hospitable, an apt teacher, 3 not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, and not a lover of money. 4 He must manage his own household well, keeping his children submissive and respectful in every way— 5 for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how can he take care of God’s church? 6 He must not be a recent convert, or he may be puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil. 7 Moreover, he must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace and the snare of the devil.

8 Deacons likewise must be serious, not double-tongued, not indulging in much wine, not greedy for money; 9 they must hold fast to the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience. 10 And let them first be tested; then, if they prove themselves blameless, let them serve as deacons. 11 Women likewise must be serious, not slanderers, but temperate, faithful in all things. 12 Let deacons be married only once, and let them manage their children and their households well; 13 for those who serve well as deacons gain a good standing for themselves and great boldness in the faith that is in Christ Jesus.

‘Married only once’? Interesting. In the New International Version, however, the bishop is specifically charged to be ‘faithful to his wife’, as is the deacon. WELL. Each of these seems, at least on the surface, to emphasise a similar yet distinct point: the NIV charges clergy against cheating; the NRSV, against remarriage; and the KJV, against plural marriage.

This is fascinating, and telling. We Christians do not want to imagine ourselves to be guided by the social mores of our time, yet as culture shifts, so does our theology, to various extents. Tricky or confusing injunctions ought always to be checked against different translations and an understanding of the law rooted in the love of Christ. It happens from time to time that a pastor is exposed for cheating on his wife, and we hear calls from other evangelicals for grace and forgiveness, often without regard for the healing process—and that’s apart from the question of whether forgiveness and reconciliation ought to be on the table at all.

Socially, polyamory is far less understood and accepted than even cheating. Serial monogamy—the string of monogamous relationships that is most people’s dating and marriage history—is all we have achieved under the ideal of ‘till death do we part’. Everyone recognises that faithfulness in monogamy is hard, perhaps nearly impossible, and cheating is generally considered a normal failing, a mistake that doesn’t necessarily define a person. In secular circles, cheating usually results in the de facto dissolution of the primary relationship, but in many religious communities the marriage vows are prioritised above the health and even safety of the couple, so that cheating and sometimes abuse are not definite grounds for divorce.

[As an aside: Even if we make it clear that polyamory, by virtue of being consensual and open, is not cheating—which is, by definition, the breaking of a relationship agreement—it is often thought that polyamorous people take relationships and commitment less seriously. That is untrue. A polyamory proverb (which I draw directly from the seminal work of Eve Rickert and Franklin Veaux, More Than Two) is that people are more important than relationships. If a relationship is not serving the participants, it is their right and duty to make a change; to transition the relationship to something different or, if necessary, end it. This is why, although I am deeply romantic and desire some form of marriage myself one day, I will not make a promise of till death do we part.]

The context, as always, is important to a complex and nuanced understanding of this injunction. What else does this passage say about requirements for our clergy and how might a practice of polyamory complicate or empower a faithful and conscious fulfilment of these commands?

A leader who is ‘temperate, sensible, respectable, hospitable, an apt teacher, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, and not a lover of money … serious, not double-tongued, not indulging in much wine', would be so whether married to one person or three. Yet any relationship requires work, and a lot of it. That’s magnified when you add more partners to the mix, so as with the decision to have any number of children, new relationships must be undertaken with consideration to time, energy, potential growth of the relationship and any other ways it may impact your life and that of your family. One must ‘manage their household well’, as the passage states. Part of being a good leader in any sphere of life is knowing how much to take on and how to assert healthy boundaries. This is a call for moderation and self-control.

It is argued with surprising frequency that polyamory encourages immoderation and a lack of self-control. Indeed, our society at large (thanks to capitalism and its children, instant gratification and excessive consumption) is surely responsible for any lack of discipline particular to the modern population, and it is generally understood in polyamorous spheres that ‘relationship broke, add more people’ is a surefire way of running your relationships into the ground. Anyone experienced with ethical polyamory understands that you can’t simply date everyone you’re attracted to; for the health of yourself, your partners and your family, you’ve got to nurture and strengthen existing relationships, and understand the limits on your time and energy, before forming new connections.

Leaders in the Anglo/Protestant church are generally expected, where they are married, to provide an upstanding model of Christian marriage, but it has always been prescribed by authoritarian powers, rather than the hearts of the individuals involved, who may feel called to take a path less travelled. This marriage is a relatively modern vision which most often takes the form of a consensually romantic and sexual, lifelong, monogamous contract—a far cry from the Biblical standard of marriage as a political and social function, and which was often polygamous. (Still, contemporary North American purity culture often refers to the woman in a conventional marriage as the ‘helpmeet’ of the man, which is an idea still essentially meant for the social and political benefit of the man and, importantly, the survival of the woman.)

I will write further about the potential for a Christian model of polyamorous relationships, but for now I merely wish to make the point that the gold standard of the day for marriage and relationships has almost never been based in principles of true Christian love. Rather, it is by tradition sexist, economically coercive and prone to enabling all kinds of self-serving vices—further, almost no one is able to get it right. Heartache, repression, frustration and abuse are all too common in the standard, with the possibility of alternatives custom-tailored to the people of God—who are, by virtue of their creation, highly unique individuals with vastly different needs—denied in favour of prescriptive conformity to a one-size-fits-all structure.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds more like Empire than Kingdom, and I want no part of it.

#polyamory #polyamorous #christian #christianity #religion #faith #church #polyam #poly #nonmonogamy #nonmonogamous

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blackswaneuroparedux · 4 years

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Anonymous asked: Your blog isn’t what I expected for someone who champions conservative values because it is very rich in celebrating culture and strikes a very humane pose. I learn a great deal from your clever and playful posts. Now and again your feminism reveals itself and so I wonder what kind of feminist are you, if at all? It’s a little confusing for a self professing conservative blog.

I must thank you for your kind words about my blog and your praise is undeserved but I do appreciate that you enjoy aspects of high culture that you may not have come across.

My conservatism is not political or ideological per se and - I get this a lot - not taken from the rather inflammatory American discourse of left and right that is currently playing itself out in America. For example my distaste for the likes of Trump is well known and I have not been shy in poking fun at him here on my blog. Partly because he’s not a real conservative in my eyes but a .... < insert as many expletives as you want here > ....but mainly he has no character. My point is my conservatism isn’t defined by what goes on across from the pond.

Rather my conservatism is rooted in deeply British intellectual traditions and draw in inspiration from Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott, Roger Scruton, and other British thinkers as well as cultural writers like Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Waugh. So it’s a state of mind or a state of being rather than a rigid ideological set of beliefs.

Of course there is a lot of overlap of shared values and perspectives between the conservatism found elsewhere and what it is has historically been in English history. But my conservative beliefs are not tied to a political party for example. I wash my hands of politicians of all stripes if you must know. I won’t get into that right now but I hope to come back and and address it in a later post.

As for my feminism that is indeed an interesting question. It’s a very loaded and combustible word especially in these volatile times where vitriol and victimhood demonisation rather than civility and honest discussion so often flavour our social discourse on present day culture and politics.

I would be fine to describe myself as an old school feminist if I am allowing myself to be labelled that is. And in that case there is no incompatibility between being that sort of small ‘f’ feminist and someone who holds a conservative temperament. They are mutually compatible.

To understand what I mean let me give you a potted history of feminism. It’s very broad brush and I know I am over simplifying the rich history of each wave of feminism so I’m making this caveat here.

Broadly speaking the feminist movement is usually broken up into three “waves.” The first wave in the late 19th and early 20th centuries pushed for political equality. The second wave, in the 1960s and 1970s, pushed for legal and professional equality. And the third wave, in the past couple decades but especially now, has pushed for social equality as well as social and racial justice. It is the first wave and bits of the second wave that I broadly identify my feminism with.

Why is that?

Again broadly speaking, in the first wave and overlapping with the second wave legal and political equality are clearly defined and measurable, but in the third wave (the current wave) social equality and social justice is murky and complicated.

Indeed the current feminist movement - which now also includes race and trans issues in a big way - is not a protest against unjust laws or sexist institutions as much as it is the protest against people’s unconscious beliefs as well as centuries-worth of cultural norms and heritage that have been biased in some ways against women but also crucially have served women reasonably well in unwritten ways.

Of course women still get screwed over in myriad ways. It’s just that whereas before it was an open and accepted part of society, today nearly all - as they see it - is non-obvious and even unconscious. So we have moved from policing legalised equality opporttunities to policing thought.

I understand the resentment - some of it sincere - against the perceived unjustness of women’s lot in life. But this third wave of feminism is fuelled in raw emotion, dollops of self-victimhood, and selfish avoidance of personal responsibility. Indeed it bloats itself by latching onto every social and racial outrage of the moment.

It becomes incredibly difficult to actually define ‘equality’ not in terms of the goals of the first wave of feminists or even the second because we can objectively measure legal, civil and political goals e.g. It’s easy to measure whether boys and girls are receiving the same funding in schools. It’s easy to see whether a man and woman are being paid appropriately for the same work. But how does one measure equality in terms of social justice? If people have a visceral dislike of Ms X over Mr Y is it because she’s a woman or only because she’s a shitty human being in person?

The problem is that feminism is more than a philosophy or a group of beliefs. It is, now, also a political movement, a social identity, as well as a set of institutions. In other words, it’s become tribal identity politics thanks to the abstract ideological currents of cultural Marxism.

Once a philosophy goes tribal, its beliefs no longer exist to serve some moral principle, but rather they exist to serve the promotion of the group - with all their unconscious biases and preferences for people who pass our ‘purity test’ of what true believers should be i.e. like us, built in.

So we end up in this crazy situation where tribal feminism laid out a specific set of paranoid beliefs - that everywhere you look there is constant oppression from the patriarchy, that masculinity is inherently violent, and that the only differences between men and women are figments of our cultural imagination, not based on biology or science.

Anyone who contradicted or questioned these beliefs soon found themselves kicked out of the tribe. They became one of the oppressors. And the people who pushed these beliefs to their furthest conclusions — that penises were a cultural construction of oppression, that school mascots encourage rape and sexual violence, and that marriage is state sanctioned rape or as is now the current fad that biological sex is not a scientific fact or not recognising preferred pronouns is a form of hate speech etc— were rewarded with greater status within the tribe.

Often those shouting the loudest have been white middle class educated liberals who try to outcompete each other within the tribe with such virtue signalling. Since the expansion of higher education in the 1980s in Britain (and the US too I think), a lot of these misguided young people have been doing useless university degrees - gender studies, performing arts, communication studies, ethnic studies etc - that have no application in the real world of work. I listen to CEOs and other hiring executives and they are shocked at how uneducated graduate students are and how such graduates lack even the basic skills in logic and critical problem solving. And they seem so fragile to criticism.

In a rapidly changing global economy, a society if it wants to progress and prosper is in need of valuing skills, languages, technical knowledge, and general competence (i.e critical thinking) but all too often what our current society has instead are middle class young men and women with a useless piece of toilet paper that passes for a university degree, a mountain of monetary debt, and no job prospects. No wonder they feel it’s someone else’s fault they can’t get on to that first rung of the ladder of life and decide instead that pulling down statues is more cathartic and vague calls to end ‘institutional systemic racism’. Oh I digress....sorry.

My real issue with the current wave of feminists is that they have an attitude problem.

Previous generations of feminists sacrificed a great deal in getting women the right to vote, to go to university, to have an equal education, for protection from domestic violence, and workplace discrimination, and equal pay, and fair divorce laws. All these are good things and none actually undermine the natural order of things such as marriage or family. It is these women I truly admire and I am inspired by in my own life because of their grit and relentless drive and not curl up into a ball of self pity and victimhood.

More importantly they did so NOT at the expense of men. Indeed they sought not to replace men but to seek parity in legal ways to ensure equality of opportunity (not outcomes). This is often forgotten but is important to stress.

Certainly for the first wave of feminists they did not hate men but rather celebrated them. Pioneers such as Amelia Earhart - to give a personal example close to my heart as a former military aviator myself - admired men a great deal. Othern women like another heroine of mine, Gettrude Bell, the first woman to get a First Class honours History degree at Oxford and renowned archaeologist and Middle East trraveller and power breaker never lost her admiration for her male peers.

I love men too as a general observation. I admire many that I am blessed to know in my life. I admire them not because they are necessarily men but primarily because of their character. It’s their character makes me want to emulate them by making me determined and disciplined to achieve my own life goals through grit and effort.

Character for me is how I judge anyone. It matters not to me your colour, creed or sexual orientation. But what matters is your actions.

I find it surreal that we have gone from a world where Christian driven Martin Luther King envisaged a world where a person would be judged from the content of their character and not the colour of their skin (or gender) to one where it’s been reversed 360 degrees. Now we are expected to judge people by the colour of their skin, their gender and sexual orientation. So what one appears on the outside is more important than what’s on the inside. It’s errant nonsense and a betrayal of the sacrifices of those who fought for equality for all by past generations.

Moreover as a Christian, such notions are unbiblical. The bible doesn’t recognise race - despite what slave owners down the ages have believed - nor gender - despite what the narrow minded men in pulpits have spewed out down the centuries - but it does recognise the fact of original sin in the human condition. We are all fallen, we are all broken, and we are all in need of grace.

Even if one isn’t religious inclined there is something else to consider.

For past generations the stakes were so big. By contrast this present generation’s stakes seem petty and small. Indeed the current generation’s struggle comes down to fighting for safe spaces, trigger warnings and micro aggressions. In other words, it’s just about the protection of feelings. No wonder our generation is seen as the snowflake generation.

A lot of this nonsense can be put down to the intellectually fraudulent teachings of critical theory and post colonial studies in the liberal arts departments on university campuses and how such ideas have and continue to seep into the mainstream conversation with such concepts as ‘white privilege’, ‘white fragility’, ‘whites lives don’t matter’, ‘abolish whiteness’ ‘rape culture’ etc which feels satisfying as intellectual masturbation but has no resonance in the real world where people get on with the daily struggle of making something of their lives.

But yet its critical mass is unsustainable because the ideas inherent within it are intellectually unstable and will eventually implode in on itself - witness the current war between feminists (dismissed uncharitably as terfs) who define women by their biological sex and want to protect their sexual identity from those who for example are championing trans rights as sexuality defined primarily as a social construct. So you have third wave feminists taking completely different stances on the same issues. For instance there’s the sex positive feminists and there’s also anti-porn, sex negative feminists. How can the same thing either be empowering or demeaning? There are so many third wave feminists taking completely different stances on the same exact topics that it’s difficult to even place what they want anymore.The rallying cries of third wave feminism have largely been issues that show only one side of the story and leave out a lot of pertinent details.

But the totality of the damage done to the cultural fabric of society is already there to see. Already now we are in this Orwellian scenario where one has to police feelings so that these feminists don’t feel marginalised or oppressed in some undefinable way. This is what current Western culture has been reduced to. I find it ironic in this current politically charged times, that conservatives have become the defenders of liberalism, or at least the defence of the principle of free speech.

To me the Third Wave feminism battle cry seems to be: Once more but with feelings.

With all due respect, fuck feelings. Grow up.

I always ask the same question to friends who are caught up in this current madness be they BLM activists or third wave feminists (yes, I do have friends in these circles because I don’t define my friends by their beliefs but by their character): compared to what?

We live in a systemic racist society! Compared to what?

We live in a patriarchal society where women are subjugated daily! Compared to what?

We live in an authoritarian state! Compared to what?

We live in a corrupt society of privileged elites! Compared to what?

Third-wave? Not so much. By vast majorities, women today are spurning the label of “feminist” - it’s become an antagonising, miserable, culturally Marxian code word for a far-left movement that seeks to confine women into boxes of ‘wokeness’.

For sure, Western societies and culture have its faults - and we should always be aware of that and make meaningful reforms towards that end. Western societies are not perfect but compared to other societies - China? Russia? Saudi Arabia? - in the world today are we really that bad?

Where is this utopian society that you speak of? Has there ever been one in recorded history? As H.L. Mencken memorably put it, “An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.“

I prefer to live in a broken world that is rather than one imagined. When we are rooted in reality and empirical experience can we actually stop wasting time on ‘hurt feelings’ and grievances construed through abstract ideological constructs and get on with making our society better bit by bit so that we can then hand over for our children and grandchildren to inherit a better world, not a perfect one.

Thanks for your question.

#ask #question #feminism #personal #third wave feminism #society #culture

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stilinsk1 · 6 years

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Cole’s interview for Boys by Girls Magazine, part 3

(part 1, part 2) Sorry for every mistake and typo! It becomes quite powerful though - when you posted a picture we had taken of you, within an hour we had a significant amount of new followers. So it means your have the power to impact people and projects you feel passionate about. Sure, and to curate a kind of artistic lineage, so I think that's special. And that's the duty of mainstream artistry or someone who has received success, in my personal opinion, to curate an artistic collection and lineage that will influence society in a way that can truly bring about beneficial change. And your publication is dealing with the concept of masculinity in a way that's very important to me, and should be very important to all men in our society. I love that when you tweet, sometimes the whole world talks about it. It's funnt, I think people sometimes take my tweets too seriously. My twitter has always been a vehicle for shit-posting. I've never really taken it seriously, so when people do take it seriously, it always takes me by surprise.

We need to talk about 'Riverdale' as well. I just love talking about feelings. It's a passion of mine. Yeah, me too. I love you as Jughead. I just learned that you originally read for Archie.

Yes, I was given the script for Archie, and I had read one scene with Jughead and loved him. So I said: 'wow, I've got to try for this role'. I feel like he's a bit like you. Is that a fair or unfair comparison? Like I mentioned earlier - if people are not saying that, you're not doing a good job. That's the currency of a quality role. Your ability to get into character comes from a resonation you have empathetically with the role itself. That empathy is based on your lived experiences, so I resonate with Jughead very much. I mean, I was the cringiest kid in school. Jughead, to me, is the very image of a millennial teenager that many people fear, and that's what I live about his character. I had interpreted Jughead as tremendously pretentious, and it's very funny that whe people watch 'Riverdale' now, he has become a sort of heartthrob figure. Anyone who thinks they can write about their own town as a teenager, to me, that is a really pretentious move. Striving to be unique and non-conformist, I really resonated with him. Then as I got to rea more of his content I found out that he was also te narrator of the show, shich meant that he was the perspective device, which I really enjoyed. So I went in for the audition, and didn't know if I wanted to do acting or not - I was in this strange space in my life. I had just come off watching a ton of "Twilight Zone", and my audition was the whole opening monologue, so I read it just like Rod Serling in the "Twilight Zone", which they loved. When I found out it was going to be a mix of "Twin Peaks" and these other stereotypical campy teen dramas, I thought: 'fuck, this is going to be a lot of fun', and I was fully onboard. You said in another interview that Jughead struggles with vulnerability. Totally. I think Jughead's struggle with vulnerability is something I struggle with, but that's because we are both young men. Jughead turns away from emotional connection when he gets too close to people, as an attempt to safeguard himself from becoming hurt. Just a product of men being told they can't be weak. That's how I had grounded it: in the inability to be vulnerable in that kind of physiology. Where is Cole with vulnerability, are you comfortable being vulnerable? I am now. Or at least, I'm more comfortable. I think vulnerability is the petri dish for growth. Full vulnerability is something people work at, which I will try to work at my whole life. Every time you enter into a vulnerable state, you enter into a right of passage, in my opinion. So much growth comes from the ability to make yourself vulnerable, because you immediately clarify what makes you nervous, and what makes you feel strong in those moments. I'm a firm believer that history of human survival is essentialy a history of triumph over their vulnerabilities. I truly think that bravely stepping into vulnerability is the greatest and most effective way to grow as a human being. Now, vulnerability for men is one of those things that froma very young age is seen as forbidden or weak. Since men are quite young, we are taught that weakness and vulnerability is something we should avoid, and the truth is that a person only becomes strong trough recognising their weakness and addressing vulnerability - especially emotional vulnerability - and coming to terms with that. I think those are very important words for young men. The truth is, I was a very socially anxious kid. I was homeschooled, so raised inside a soundstage - not knowing how to interact with the world around me. I used comedy a lot to cover up my vulnerability, as an attempt to diffuse an otherwise hostile or threatening situation to me. And then as I embraced vulnerability when I got older, my own personal insecurity, femininity and all the other concepts that I have within me - I had the condifence to walk around and truly feel like I had mastered a space that was otherwise foreign to me. Especially during puberty, when we're getting all these complicated ideas about sexuality, maturation, social standing and professional pursuit. If we sat back and took the time to analyse why those things made us uncomfortable, we would have the confidence to take the world around us by storm. What are your thoughts around masculinity and how it is changing in the young generation of today? I can only speak from my experience, but in my youth I had experienced the world around me as an intersection between the expectation of confidence in young men and the simultaneous suppression of a large aspect of that confidence, which is an embracing of a more feminine nature than men often carry. I think the definition of masculinity in a wider context nw is undoing a lot of that, which I think is great. It's much more widely accepted to be in touch with other qualities of your masculinity. I'm of a mind that the core tenancy of modern masculinity still resonates with an ancient understanding of out roles within society, whilst simultaneously accepting that society is changing, and adapting to a viw that is fresh. For me, some fundamental tendencies still exist within masculinity, which are a kind of caretaking role, respect for your fellows and an ability to provide. But I think unlike two of three generations ago when the concept of provision was a financial definition, now the concept of the provider includes a) providing and caring for yourself and b) providing and caring for people you love emotionally. I believe part of the redefinition is the ability to recognise what aspects of yourself are affecting your emotions and how can you understand that side of yourself. Understand how to resonate and become more empathetic with the people in your lif. I think sexuality for men, in the States or in the west really, still preaches a lot of elimination of weakness. I can only speak from my own experience, but I am my strongest form when I can fully comprehend why I'm thinking a certain way and what is bringing me to an action. I'm of a mind that true strenght is the ability to take care of yourself without harming other people in the process. And I think, if your masculinity involves the destruction of anther person's masculinity, because it's an opposition to yours, we have to break down and understand that this is because you ultimately feel threatened by a version that is different to yourself. Masculinity and strenght are the products of your ability to feel secure with all sides of yourself. However you find that security, as long as it's not the destruction of another person's security, is in my opinion, the modern form of masculinity. 'Riverdale' season two! Season ne left us with unanswered questions. What can you tell us, and what's in store for Jughead. Jughead was originally Archie's conscious, and in the final episode of season one he was revealed as the soul of Riverdale - as the moral underpinning of a society that is going to through tremendous moral fluentation. The audience can view Jughead and whatever happens to Jughead as either an enlightening or destruction of the soul of Riverdale. If the sould of Riverdale is being confrtonted with these problems, what does that mean for the town as a whole? In this season he finds himself with one foot in the north side and one foot in the south side, with an impending civil war on the horizon - shaking his previous standing, of conscientious objector and this observer, forcing his hand into play. In this season, Jughead is very much learning that you can't make everyone happy, and that his fear of involving himself in the issues that are surrounding him was actually a fear of him suffering or making anyone displeased with him as a person. He has to address and embrace the fact that he's going to make people unhappy, and that it is part of his life. All this drama, but one thing is central throughout the show; those kids would do anything for each other in the midst of all that chaos. Yes, what 75 years of it being a comic has allowed us to do is not having to explain how deeply connected the characters are episode after episode. These characters are so well established in the comic lineage that people don't need a backstory on them, which has given us a lot of flexibility. Having taken time off from acting to live in 'the real world', now having returned and also doing your own photography - how do you feel you're developing as an artist? For the longest time I was working on projects and taking jobs that I didn't really resonate with the way I do now with my projects. My photography gave me a tremendous amount of self-confidence, which comes back to masculinity and all those things we talked about. The ability to express myself in a vulnerable way and show my eye in a curated personal gallery space, game me great confidence. That confidence has now lent itself to a personal artistic lineage taht has given me a foot in the door to the creation of passion projects that I would never have had the ability to do if I hadn't made myself vulnerable enough - which I'm very thankful for. I think, my acting and my photography are two completely different arts. acting for me is an empathetic creation of a character you're trying to breathe and weave life into, but you're essentially a cipher for other people's narratives. You are playing with the tools in someone else's toolbox. Photography allows me to express precisely what I want to express, using all the tools in my own toolbox, with the assistance of people who want to play the part of cipher for me. I think the meeting of both of those worlds will eventually culminate in a directorial professional pursuit. I'm trying to find ways of blending those two worlds, so I could come out with narratives and stories that truly resonate with people people from both an acting perspective and a photographic perspective. You mentioned that there is a certain loneliness that comes with celebrity. With the success of your return, without your brother this time, putting you right back in the limelight - how are you handling this now? I experience it in a different way now, because I made the conscious decision to return, and I understand that fanaticism is part of celebrity culture. The loneliness that comes with it now is something I'm much more prepared for after I took rim away to understand myself. When I was a child it was a much different story, because I hadn't made the choice to immerse myself in a world of fanaticism. It also had repercussions, which it took me a long time to deal with. Some people find religion, some people do drugs, some people branch out sexually - everyone has their own way of dealing with it. I chose education. That's a pretty healthy way of dealing with it. I thought it would be. Me choosing education also gave me an ability to be much more prepared for what I'm immersed in now. It feels better. What dreams are next on the agenda for you? I'd like to start doing films. I would like to act in a challenging roles, and make films as well. I think the culmination of my acting and photography is the inevitable conclussion of a sort of directorial debut. I think you're too much of a creative to eventually not get involved in making movies. I truly believe that. You have too much to express. I hope, eventually, but I also feel like I need a lot more time and experience in other aspects. I think acting wise, my brother and I have consistently been in competition with an image of ourselves in the past, and the industry's image of us as studio money makers and our ability to pull an audience. Now that I've been trained well enough, I'm more prepared as an actor to take on the kind of challenging roles that I aspire to. What type of roles would you like to play? Just different. Every time. But human roles where each one is different from the next - something I can sit back and be proud of. I'd love to see you do some really emotive roles. Your performance as Jughead already hits me straight in the heart. Excellent, I appreciate taht. The only thing that's stopping my brother and I now is other people's perception. I think you're doing a really good job in changing that perception. That's the hope, and over time and by doing the right thing consistently, I think people will start to get it. That was the long-term grudge to bear when we were going to college and thinking about how we were going to play it right and be comfortable with this. For us, the answer was always to do something interesting, and simply: be good people. What mark do you want to leave on the world? For years and years I looked at the arts as something less than the sciences. I thought the truest way to make my mark on the world would be to push human knowledge forward in some way or shape. I started taking archaeology as a an attempt to leave a mark on the world, and I had taken a class about palaeolithic civilisation and I brought up art as a luxury - essentially I was saying that art was something that came after the bellies were full, the sleep was had and the thirst was quenched. My professor corrected me pretty firmly in front of the entire class, and said that art, storytelling, myth and oral narration was hands down the only way humans were able to survive. The ability to portray a message was redefined to me as necessary to life itself. Artistry, if we look at it historically, is always the product of its time period. The greatest artists were always the ones that had a full comprehension of the society around them, and the ability to tactfully push the edges of their society - broaden it just a bit. Now we live in an age where the boundaries of society are no longer strict and inflexible, but rather something all-encompassing. Figures like John Lennon, Gandhi and Martin Luther King JR. - all these men had one thing in common: they all preached peace and love as the fundamentals to the operation of a healthy society - and all those guys were murdered. So I've got to figure out a way to preach that without getting murdered, haha.

#cole sprouse #cole sprouse for boys by girls #boys by girls magazine #i'm so proud of this man #he is an amazing person/genius #m1ne

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fangirlinglikeabus · 6 years

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Your Hand Feels So Grand In Mine - Chapter 1

Summary: On the day of her eighteenth birthday, Fanny is shocked to find the name of a woman on her wrist. At first, she ignores it, but things get a bit more complicated when Mary Crawford herself shows up at Mansfield Park. A soulmate AU feat. racebending. Warnings for internalised homophobia, canon typical mistreatment of Fanny.

can also be found on fanfiction.net and ao3

Don't take my arm too much

Don't keep your hand in mine

Your hand feels so grand in mine

People will say we're in love

- ‘People Will Say We’re In Love’, from Oklahoma!

It was commonly known, at the time, that upon the event of someone reaching their eighteenth birthday, two - or more, in some, rarely talked about, cases - signatures appeared on their wrists. One had the name of their soulmate, the person best suited for them in life, romantically or otherwise (again, these latter people were never talked about, except for when the name was of someone of the same gender. It truly is amazing, the number of truths thought inconvenient until they suddenly become useful). The other had the name of the person they would, or had already, convinced themselves was their soulmate, whether consciously or no. Of course, as is the way of these things, no one ever knew which was which, except by their own inference, or, if they were lucky, events which exposed one or the other. Many young people, eager to meet their soulmate, married quickly, only to discover that there had been a mistake; that their new spouse was not, in fact, the right of the persons on their wrists. This rarely impeded marriages for long; a soulmate may be a person's perfect match, but many imperfect ones are often made with some success. It is a simple fact that a marriage will work if it is formed with love and respect. Even marriages where those values were absent could often function if the two members showed enough skill at avoiding one other.

Henry Crawford was somewhat of an outlier. On his eighteenth birthday, only one name formed, on his left wrist; Henry had never set much store by soulmates, or really, truly falling in love outside of an idle flirtation, and so, accordingly, he had never and would never become so deeply in love that he could possibly believe that person and him to be destined. Unless, of course, the object of his love was, truly, the one most suited to him in all the world. Even then, the name was faded, barely legible unless you chose to look closely, which Henry didn't. His sister Mary, on the other hand…well, Mary looked very carefully indeed at things which could further her own self-interest, and considered her brother's soulmate to fall squarely into that category. She spent two years carefully studying the words on her brother's wrist, memorising the script, the name.

So her own eighteenth birthday came as quite a shock. On her right wrist was Mary Crawford, scrawled carelessly in large, elegant letters (she laughed silently, and knew this to be the false name - she may very well convince herself, or have convinced herself in the past, that she was the only person good for her, but it was unlikely to be true. It faded, but remained visible, etched onto her dark brown skin). On her left was a familiar, small script - almost as if its owner feared irritating someone by taking up too much paper. It was much bolder than it was on her brother, but still…she had looked at it for long enough in that state to recognise it on sight.

Fanny Price.

Mary stared at her wrist absently for a moment, thought briefly what a shame it was that she and Henry were predestined to be rivals, then resolved to start wearing longer sleeves. After all, no matter how little she cared about the issue of having a female soulmate herself, it wouldn't do to scandalise society quite that much. A fortune of twenty thousand pounds can do many things, but it is not so strong an incentive that people would forget such a thing, and welcome such a person into their homes.

Far away and several years later, Fanny Price started crying.

Written on one of her wrists, in the perfectly formed writing which was so familiar to her, was the name Edmund Bertram.

That was enough of a problem - the necessity of hiding it from the Bertrams did not exactly please her - but it was not the reason for her tears.

The other wrist said Mary Crawford.

Steps on the stairs! Fanny quickly pulled the sleeves of her nightdress down to hide the words, in case whoever it was chose to enter the room suddenly.

A knock on the door. A quiet, "Fanny?" Of course; who else but Edmund would have wasted their time on her? She called for him to wait, and quickly got dressed, making sure to wear a thick dress, even though the July sun was already shining through the windows. One which was most likely to hide her secret.

Edmund was standing there, neatly dressed (of course he was; Edmund made it a careful habit to be awake and ready for the day - and above all, tidy - before anyone else) and wearing a concerned expression on his handsome, pale face. Fanny's heart swelled, but as it did so, her left wrist (the one which she was so aware had his name on it) began to itch, and so she forced the feeling down and smiled at him, trying to ignore, as she did so, the few tears still making their way down her face.

"Well, ah," Edmund looked embarrassed, "I was curious as to whether you would be prepared to show your soulmates to any of your family? Of course, you are not obligated to...to show your aunts, or your other cousins, but perhaps..?"

The implication of his question hung in the air between them. Perhaps you would show me?

Here, Fanny had a problem. She truly loved her cousin (the name had forced her to acknowledge that as fact), but she felt, just as truly, that she could not show him either wrist.

"I-I would really rather not, cousin Edmund," she made herself say, and tried not to notice the disappointment in his expression, or the voice in her head that sounded like Mrs Norris - always Mrs Norris! - telling her that she was selfish, that Edmund deserved to know, and that she was being ungrateful. Alas, she was not successful - the simple refusal of her cousin's request had wracked poor Fanny so much that she began to cry again. Panic crossed Edmund's face, just for a moment, before a more soothing expression took its place.

"Fanny, I should apologise. It was wrong for me to ask something so personal of you, especially when I haven't even showed you either of my names. Come, compose yourself, and once you feel prepared, I shall escort you down to breakfast."

Soon enough, the door opened on Edmund again, and Fanny, the fresh tears still drying on her face and her eyes turned slightly pink from crying, took his arm. He served as a calming presence, even without speaking, and Fanny soon felt as close to her normal self as she could, with the knowledge that the name of a woman sat on her right wrist.

The calm was soon gone away again, for the rest of the Bertram family - apart from, mercifully, her uncle, who, along with her cousin Tom, was in Antigua for the moment - despite their usual dismissiveness of Fanny, were suddenly crowding her, demanding she give up her secret. No matter how much she quietly refused, they continued to pester until the poor girl was quite in tears again. Edmund made an attempt to stop them, perhaps slightly tempered by his own curiosity, but it came to no avail. Maria and Julia chose a simple method, asking the same question over, and when there was a failure to answer that, making angry demands. Tom, if he had been there, would have no doubt joined them; there was something to be grateful about in his absence. Lady Bertram, when finally appealed to by her children, seemed barely to understand what was going on, so distracted she had been, but as soon as her children gave a (strongly biased, of course) account, she made an offer of whatever presents Fanny would like if she would only show them, and really, whatever the names were, they could not be so very bad. Throughout all this, Fanny stayed silent, only made increasingly miserable by the questioning. It was amazing how much noise so few people could make, and she was almost tempted to give in. But fear - a greater fear than the consequences of her refusal - held her back.

"If you do not tell us," Maria said, more petulantly than could be thought possible for a young woman of twenty-one, "then when our father comes home, we shall have to tell him that you have been keeping secrets from us, and then he will force you to tell us."

Fanny was terrified of her uncle; Maria knew this, and spoke hoping - correctly, it seemed - that on weighing her uncle seeing her wrists against the rest of the family doing the same, the latter was the lesser fear. Fanny, with shaking hands, began to roll up her sleeves.

The Bertrams craned to see the names. Edmund started, slightly, on seeing his own written in bold black.

For one brief, horrible moment, everyone seemed to freeze - even Lady Bertram, who usually showed so little interest in anything not related to herself or her beloved Pug.

"Oh, how boring," Maria complained. "They are only platonic soulmates."

Julia frowned at her sister. "Are you certain, Maria? How can you be sure?"

She scoffed. "Is it not obvious? Why, with one of the names female, and the other that of our very own brother, how could there possibly be any hint of romance?"

And then the Bertrams' fleeting interest with their poorer cousin was gone, and as breakfast was served it seemed the entire issue was forgotten, the only indication to the contrary being the way Julia's eyes rested on Fanny for longer than usual, a flicker of curiosity igniting them. But for Fanny, whose mind was always ready to be filled with worry, and who, after all, was now fully, uncomfortably aware that her interest in Edmund was romantic, it sat there in her mind, as the days moved by ever so slowly. Minor, day to day worries, usually at the forefront of her mind, quickly vanished, but Mary Crawford, sitting as it did on her wrist, remained. Fanny grew pale; she spoke to no-one, not even her beloved Edmund. If the Bertrams had deigned to pay attention to her, they would have no doubt of the cause. As it was, the world moved much as it usually did, with only the insignificance of the change in Fanny's mood to affect it. And, inevitably, given some time, and the lack of suspicion shown by the family, she calmed. Edmund's name was a worry, of course, but one which she could force herself to ignore; though it caused her pain, it was a bearable pain, within the realm of acceptable human experience. And as for the other name, well, she wasn't leaving her home, and what was the likelihood that this Mary Crawford would come to her?

"A parsonage?" Mary asked incredulously. "In the countryside?"

"I am afraid so," Henry said, his words laced with faux-solemnity. "I am sure I do not know how we will cope! The savagery of it all! Although, of course, you would not have a problem at all if you had simply…gotten along with our uncle. Is it really so hard for you to like him, Mary?"

"Well I suppose it shall be nice to see our sister after such a long time away from each other," Mary continued, rather pointedly ignoring her brother. They had had similar conversations all throughout the time they had lived with Admiral Crawford. Nothing would come of it if she chose to argue; she could not convince him of the man's wickedness any more than he could convince her of his virtue. "At the very least, there will no doubt be some rich eldest son nearby, to flirt with."

"Unfortunately not," Henry said, pouring himself a glass of port from the decanter sat on the table. "An associate of mine has informed me - after I enquired, knowing your partiality to such men - that the gentleman in question has gone off to Antigua with his father. A shame, but I am sure you will cope; I hear his brother is a respectable young man."

Mary sighed. "I hold no stock by "respectable young men", Henry. Second sons yield no interest for me."

"Not even the second son of a baronet, as I am told is the case here? Ah, well. I suppose you shall simply have to waste away, without an eldest son to enjoy."

"You seem to think me to be so exceedingly shallow that my sole focus is men. I shall tell you now, Henry, that it is entirely untrue. Why, I am tempted to enjoy myself despite his absence, just to spite you!"

"Mary," Henry said, taking a large swig of his drink, "please believe me when I tell you that nothing would make me happier. Now, shall you write to our sister, or shall I?"

"Mrs Grant informs us that her brother and sister, children of her mother's second marriage, will be joining her and Mr Grant in the parsonage," Edmund said, with an uncharacteristic nervousness underlying his words.

"I am sure they will be people of a most agreeable sort," Fanny said quietly. "But, cousin, since I am certain to be far too busy to join you in entertaining our guests-"

"They are two young people by the names of Henry and Mary Crawford," Edmund said quickly. "Perhaps Mrs Norris and my mother would permit you to join the rest of us, rather than running chores? They have been invited to dine with us, anyway, so you will not miss them entirely."

Fanny said nothing; all of a sudden, she was very pale, and her hands shook slightly where they rested on the table.

"Miss Crawford is one of the names on your wrists. Perhaps it would be best if you became acquainted with the woman who could potentially become your closest friend."

"If you…" Fanny's throat was suddenly dry. She gulped. "If you think it to be best, Edmund."

"Fanny, of course I think it to be best," Edmund said gently. "But this is for your benefit, not mine. Sometimes I feel as if, well, as if you have no friends outside of myself - indeed, you have perhaps had no opportunity make friends, as sheltered as you are here, and…perhaps you would enjoy the benefit of Miss Crawford's company."

Enjoying the pleasure of Miss Crawford's company was exactly what terrified Fanny, of course. But Edmund was not to know that, nor would she wish him to know. Besides, she could not wholly avoid her if they were coming to dine - even in her nervousness she was able to admit that to starve herself would be a silly thing to do, solely to avoid a person. And it was Edmund requesting this of her; his younger cousin had never been known to refuse anything he suggested. And so it was that she found herself sitting with the rest of the family, not so patiently waiting for the arrival of Mr and Miss Crawford, along with their half sister and her husband.

"Oh, do stop fidgeting, Fanny!" Mrs Norris snapped. Fanny flinched.

"Yes, Fanny, do stop fidgeting," Lady Bertram echoed absentmindedly. "We must give these young people a good first impression of life here."

"I hardly think that the Crawfords will be so absorbed with ideas of propriety as to care about one of our number moving as slightly as Fanny has done," Edmund said calmly.

The clock ticked by.

"Oh, when shall they arrive?" Maria exclaimed loudly. She stood up and began to pace about the room. "It is not polite to be late for a dinner engagement."

After an age, one of the servants stepped into the room to announce "Dr and Mrs Grant, Mr and Miss Crawford."

Mrs Grant came in first, greeting them all, thanking them for their hospitality, and apologising profusely for their lateness.

"We would have arrived here this half an hour gone, except Mary, I am afraid, took so long getting ready-"

Mary cut her off. "I find it infinitely preferable to be late, and well dressed, than on time, nay, even early, and an embarrassment to rich young women everywhere." She smiled, and in her expression was something which tempted even the most hard hearted to forgive any transgression.

Edmund cleared his throat and stood up. "Miss Crawford. Mr Crawford," he said, bowing to both of them in turn. "A pleasure to meet you both. I am Edmund Bertram. May I present my mother Lady Bertram, my aunt Mrs Norris, my sisters Miss Maria Bertram and Miss Julia Bertram, and, of course, our cousin Miss Fanny Price."

Mary glanced at Henry, to see if she could glean any expression from his countenance. Nothing. She smiled again, more subdued this time. "It is a pleasure to meet you all." Her eyes rested on Fanny.

Something about the way Mary was looking at her unnerved Fanny. She shifted uncomfortably.

"Fanny!" Mrs Norris snapped again. She smiled apologetically at their guests. "You must excuse Miss Price; she is but a poor dependant, tragically uneducated until we brought her here, eight years ago. Please," she gestured to the chairs, "will not you sit? There is some time yet until the food will be prepared."

Mary graciously seated herself, as did her brother. All the while, her eyes remained fixed on Fanny, who was doing her best to avoid staring back.

Throughout the conversation, throughout dinner and the time after it, neither spoke to the other, but every so often, Fanny would give into temptation and stare back. There was something compelling in Mary's eyes. They seemed to sparkle at some amusement unknown to any but herself, and, perhaps, someone else too, if only they would draw closer.

Fanny looked away, blushing.

"Are you quite pleased, Henry?" Mary asked on their way back to the parsonage. They walked far ahead of Doctor and Mrs Grant; the two of them walked far slower due to the good doctor's unfortunate affliction of gout, and in fact wouldn't have walked at all if it hadn't been suggested in some quarter due to the pleasantness of the evening.

"Oh, yes, quite pleased," Henry affirmed. "With Maria and Julia both. In fact, I found the company so pleasing that I have been considering extending my visit."

"Oh?" Mary raised an eyebrow. "And what about dear Miss Fanny Price?"

He laughed. "You noticed that, did you?"

"You seem to think," she shot back, "that I am somehow oblivious of all about you. I cannot think why that is, since I usually find myself knowing you better than you know yourself."

"I suppose that I have never put much effort into hiding it," Henry said flippantly. He was silent for a moment. "I have decided," he said eventually, "that I should rather like to have some fun with Miss Price. She seems awfully boring. And who better to make her more…interesting than Mr Henry Crawford? I am sure a girl of her standing will fall at least slightly in love with someone who shows that she is his "soulmate"." He laughed.

Mary said nothing. Henry was foolish to think he would be safe from love forever, especially if he chose to flirt so blatantly with his soulmate.

Now, what about her own connection to Fanny Price? Mary rubbed absentmindedly at her left wrist. It could, she supposed, be rather diverting to fall in love.

"I am disappointed in you, Fanny," Edmund said solemnly, as they sat, secluded, in the old East Room Fanny had made her own. "I would have thought you to be more keen to befriend Mary Crawford."

"I am afraid that I am much too shy for that," Fanny said quietly.

"Well, in that case, I shall organise it so that the two of you spend some time together," Edmund declared. "It was no doubt the amount of people in the room that made it difficult for you." Fanny found that she couldn't disagree. A part of her still hoped that she wouldn't fall in love with Mary, that she didn't even have the capacity to love a woman in that way. But she couldn't bring herself to believe it, not quite, when the way Mary had looked at her still rested on her mind.

#mansfield park #fanny price #mary crawford #fanfiction #femslash #writing fanfiction like a bus #your hand feels so grand in mine #(to collect the entire thing)#*screams*#GOD i will literally kill someone if tumblr decides to fuck the posting of this up #also...why doesn't it keep formatting when you paste like i literally had to go back thru this chapter and italicise everything again

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ievani-e · 5 years

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I’m Genderqueer, I Guess!?

(AKA, My Experiences Accepting — and Then Rejecting — Womanhood)

Over three weeks ago now, on February 4th, I started out wanting to write a random little opinion piece about Disney’s Mulan. I had experienced a personal epiphany, and I wanted to revisit some of the ideas I had had about Mulan in the past, and contrast that with how I felt about it now. But, I realised, there was something else I had to write before I could. I had to write this random thing first, because this post informs that one.

So what this post is going to be about is this: I am genderqueer.

This is not a recent thing. I have not suddenly changed as a person. On the contrary, I’m exactly the same person I have always been. The only thing that has changed is the label itself: a label which, for reasons explained below, I have decided to don.

In order to properly tell you about where I am now, I have to tell you a bit about my past and give you an overview about my experiences growing up. I have to tell you how I first got to this place for my decision to come out as genderqueer/gender non-binary to make sense.

Some backstory, then: While I never directly suffered as a result of my gender identity the same way some others have, I did still struggle with gender dysphoria. I recognise that many trans and queer people have (or have had) it way worse than me, and that I am extremely fortunate to have avoided being bullied or ostracised due to my gender identity, having firmed up and sussed out what it even was only now. But, nevertheless, it was there the whole time.

Growing up, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was medically wrong with me: that the doctors must have made some kind of a mistake, and everyone around me treating me as a girl ever since was simply the result of carrying the error forward. I must have had a higher dosage of androgens in my system, or maybe an extra chromosome or something. I must have secretly been intersex and just hadn’t been diagnosed. Surely, something had to have been wrong. I couldn’t have been a girl, because any definition of or expectation for a “girl” I ever heard was something so different from what I was.

As a child, I grew up with a very narrow definition of what it meant to be a girl and what girls could and couldn’t be, because that was what had been spoon-fed to me by the media and the social norms I saw around me. These norms were perpetuated at school, by members of my family, and on TV — with TV standing in as a representative for the world at large. What I saw around me was: girls liked shopping and jewellery. Girls liked fashion and beauty. Girls liked horse-riding and ballet. Girls were vain. Girls were stupid. Girls only cared about wearing pretty pink dresses and chatting about boys. Girls were… <insert other extremely limited, restrictive, two-dimensional female stereotype here>. Those were the conclusions I had come to, based on what the world was showing me and teaching me.

And I wasn’t like that. I wasn’t like those girls. I was nuanced, I was complicated; I was intelligent and smart and not at all interested in love and romance, and I much preferred to hang out with boys like I was one of them than try to date any of them. I liked video games and horror films and reading thrillers and action adventures. I was no girly-girl: I was a tomboy, and proud of it.

Nothing I had heard about girls applied to me or appealed to me in any way. (I mean no offense if you are more feminine than I was and you do like that sort of stuff: it’s totally okay to be that way, too! It’s just that I, in particular, wasn’t).

I, the little weirdo that I felt like at the time, had never fit into the picture of the archetypal girl. So, I reasoned, the only logical conclusion was that I must not have been a girl. I must have been a boy. At least, I fit much more comfortably into the definition of a “boy” than I did the definition of a “girl”.

The problem there is, it’s easy to decide that certain characteristics associated with a certain group aren’t compatible with you when the characteristics given to you are so limited in the first place. There was a very specific mental image I had in my head of what a girl should be like, and there didn’t seem to be very much room for discussion. For boys, on the other hand, it seemed like they could be anything except that. That has a whole host of issues all its own — ones I won’t be getting into in depth now — where boys are discouraged from displaying feminine characteristics or emotionality, and this is just as harmful to boys as it is to discourage girls from displaying masculine characteristics. Double-standards do exist, and they are not okay.

But, putting aside that can of worms for now, boys generally had a lot more options than girls did. Of course I would be able to see more similarities between myself and boys when there was a wider range of options to choose from from the start.

Please permit me to be an optimist for a moment and say that I believe that, in an ideal world, all positive characteristics would be embraced and encouraged in children, regardless of whether they were typically “feminine” or “masculine”. We would love unconditionally, and judge each person for their own individual merits and demerits, rather than holding them up to some perceived notion of being “girl” enough or “boy” enough. Doing so is incredibly detrimental to us all because, when we start holding personhood up to some arbitrary standard, it becomes very easy to fall short. And that does not feel good for the many of us who don’t measure up.

But the real world and the ideal world are worlds apart, and social norms did, and do, exist. In any case, I certainly didn’t fit the cookie-cutter mould of what it “meant” to be a “girl”. And that felt like a failure on my part. I felt like I wasn’t enough; like I wasn’t good enough, just the way I was.

I grew up empathising and relating to men in a variety of ways, because in our culture and in our media it is predominantly male characters and male role models that we see. Female role models… Not so much. Female characters in books, video games and TV were few and far between to begin with, and those that did exist tended to be depicted as homemakers, love interests, sex objects and… nope, that’s about it. As a result, I didn’t know that there were more ways to be than just those.

That’s not to say that shows featuring more positive role models didn’t exist — it’s not even to say I didn’t happen across a few of them myself. Rather, it is that those positive influences weren’t numerous enough or prevalent enough for me, as a child, to notice; or to start to change my mind about women as a whole because of them. There weren’t enough positive portrayals of women for those portrayals of women to form part of a larger pattern; certainly not enough to challenge the already-existing patterns of behaviour that were being perpetuated far more prominently and pervasively. There were exceptions, but that’s just it: complex, interesting, autonomous female characters — women such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess — were exceptions; not the rule. (And I’ve never actually even seen Xena: Warrior Princess myself, so…)

One such example that comes to my own mind is that of Elizabeth Bennet, from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; which isn’t actually about pride and prejudice anywhere near as much as you might think. That, I read when I was 13? 14? 15? as part of my high school’s English Literature course, and Elizabeth Bennet was probably the closest thing I had to a positive female role model in literature at that time. Even then, Elizabeth, too, was posited as the exception, not the rule: even within the book’s own canon. You see, Elizabeth was exceptionally skilled, witty and intelligent; she was particularly sensible, reasonable (even if not open-minded…) and capable of critical thought. Unfortunately, the logical continuation of such a premise leads to the (incorrect) implication that other girls… usually… weren’t. So in the book, we see that Elizabeth wasn’t like other girls. Elizabeth was different.

So while I saw myself, to a certain extent, in Elizabeth, I also saw the same demonization of — and the desire to distance oneself from — other women which I experienced first-hand, along with the desperation to distinguish oneself from the gender norms as if they were true; not as if they weren’t. The mistake Elizabeth and I both made was that, by thinking of ourselves as “special little snowflakes” and elevating our own status to that of the exception, not the rule, it came at the cost of failing to appreciate the basic humanity and the complexity of other women: women who may, in actuality, have had a lot more in common with us than we first gave them credit for.

Meanwhile, it seemed that (cis) men were allowed to be human, and experience (almost) the full range of thoughts and feelings and ways of life attached to that, in a way that women just weren’t. But, the issue of gender and representation in media is in fact another beast entirely. What is relevant to me throughout all of this is that this all culminated in the fact that I was someone who accepted men exactly the way they were, and could relate to men in a multitude of ways; but, before discovering feminism, despised anything even remotely “female” or “feminine” and discriminated against it, dismissing it or distancing myself from it for one reason or another, despite being female myself. What. The. Fuck.

Now I’m an adult and I know better, I know that the majority of my discomfort with “the feminine” stemmed primarily from good old-fashioned sexism, both internalised and otherwise. I know now that those beliefs — both the ones I had impressed upon me, and the ones I in turn applied to others — are inherently inaccurate and deeply flawed.

Problem solved, then: it’s not that my gender identity or expression was wrong. It’s not that I wasn’t woman enough, despite not feeling like I fit in all my life. It’s that sexism exists, and sexism is the cause for all of my dysphoria, hurray(!)

Or so I thought.

Sexism does still play a part, however, and that’s what has made coming to grips with my gender identity all the more difficult for me. Before I could discern what was really true about myself, first I had to disentangle what was really true about “what it means to be a female/ a woman/ feminine” from all the fallacies, generalisations and mistruths. When I came across feminism several years ago as a young tween and learnt about what it was, it opened a lot of doors for me in terms of coming to a greater understanding of myself and the world around me. Feminism has been a very positive influence in and on my life, and is responsible for a lot of personal growth. But also, in this particular instance, confused me even further. And that’s because, I started to think that… maybe the reason why I didn’t associate myself with the concept of “girlhood” or “womanhood” when I was younger was only because the concept I had in my head had been so completely wrong all along.

Before feminism, all that internalised sexism really did go a long way towards meaning I related more to men than I did to women; or at least, thought I did, because really, I never gave women much of a chance. I had to unlearn a lot of the preconceived notions I had grown up with, and learn everything all over again from the ground up.

The more I learned, the more I came to understand; but even so, the feeling of me being different or not quite fitting in anywhere didn’t go away. It’s just that I started to think that maybe it wasn’t me who was wrong: maybe it was the gender norms themselves that were wrong. It was the idea that “women are like X and men are like Y” — and that this is universally true for all women and all men — that was wrong.

What I had to learn was that women could be anything. And I mean; I already knew that about men — but women, too?! So women can think and act for themselves, and be incredibly intelligent and have their own thoughts and opinions and expertise on a subject, and have a vast array of interests?! It sounds stupid now, especially if you already know it to be true; but it was a much-needed life lesson for the twenty-year-old me. I was already fully accepting of a wide range of personalities and occupations for men, because I saw such a wide range of men and male characters/personalities in the media. It was already a given to me that men could be anything. And yes, there is that whole “…except be feminine” thing I mentioned before, and it is an issue; but I never personally bought into that. I had my fair share of male role models with a sensitive side or more typically feminine character traits as well. What was shocking to me is that I had to learn that the same thing I had always believed to be true of men was true of women, too.

What I had to learn, absurdly for the first time as an adult, was that not every woman had to like the same thing or have the same hobbies or interests. Not all women had to look or dress or behave the same way, or any way in particular at all. Not every woman had the same likes and interests as me: but — and here was the key difference — they could have done. There was, in reality, no logical reason why they couldn’t. I realised that girls can be tomboys and gamers and total nerds and still be girls.

If that was the case, then maybe my own experience and my own expression of self — despite being so far removed from that limited childhood notion of “girl” = “pretty, vain and vapid” — was nevertheless still valid within the wider, broader and more inclusive interpretation of “womanhood”. Maybe, even with my own complete and total lack of femininity and associating myself with more typically-masculine traits and behaviours, maybe I still was a woman: just that the category for womanhood was far broader than I had been led to believe. Perhaps I wasn’t a woman who had fit into those narrow definitions I had held as true in the past; but a woman nonetheless, who could still meet the definition of a woman if only I broadened those definitions up.

No two women are the same; and as such, it makes no sense to think that there is such thing as a universal expression of that womanhood. Every single woman is a unique individual, with her own skills and experiences and her own story to tell. Just because my own experience didn’t have much in common with the experiences of those around me, that didn’t necessarily mean that I wasn’t a woman, or couldn’t have been a woman, or that I was some abhorrent anomaly. I might have been three standard deviations away from the mean; but that doesn’t mean that I was not, nevertheless, a valid data point.

So I got confused.

The feminist within me wanted me to think of myself as, and identify as, a woman. After all, I had just truly come to understand and to appreciate that being a woman was okay. I had just come to understand that “femininity” existed on a wide spectrum, and even oddballs like me could be included within that. Besides, if I was a feminist and believed in women’s rights (as a targeted approach to believing in equal rights in general), then wasn’t I supposed to be proud to be a woman? Wasn’t I meant to further the cause and #represent? If being a woman was no inferior to being a man, and if women came in all shapes and shades and were allowed to claim and celebrate their own individuality as they saw fit, regardless of the norms, then why would I need to be anything else? Was “woman” not sufficient? How could I be a feminist and yet still feel a reluctance and general disdain towards identifying as a woman?

That was one side of the confusion.

The other side of it was: well, if I wasn’t a woman, what else would I be? As a child, I had felt I fit in more with boys; but I had no all-consuming desire to be a boy or to be thought of as one myself. What I wanted was simply to be myself. I didn’t think of myself as a boy, hanging out with other boys. I thought of myself as myself, hanging out with other boys. As an adult, I feel no more and no less an affinity for one gender than the other. There is no affinity for either; and likewise, no antipathy for either. I feel empathy for everyone; a general relation towards all individuals, regardless of their gender. I don’t come down on one side or the other.

It was around the same time that I started batting around the idea of being genderfluid; but ultimately decided against exploring it any further or even acknowledging it in any real way, because it “didn’t matter, really”. I don’t know why nothing came of that back then. I guess I didn’t have the courage to pursue it, nor was there the same motivation to do so as now. I thought private thoughts: I often joked/ seriously heartfully felt that I was a gay man trapped in a woman’s body; but I also felt like a gay woman trapped in a woman’s body. And, because I felt like both a gay man and a gay woman, I reasoned that, maybe, if I looked at it a certain way, that was almost like having elements of both a straight man and a straight woman instead. Either way, I was bisexual! (Which I am, by the way.)

I tried to use my own sexuality against me; I tried to twist it around, and pressured myself to act more like a “straight woman”, or how I thought a straight woman should be. And, no, there does not seem to be much logic to that train of thought: it was just me oppressing myself, trying to knock myself back down into a more “acceptable” way of being, even if that meant flattening myself in the process. It’s weird to see how, in this way, I was still equating “straight” with “normal”, even though I was bisexual myself. This is why queer representation is so important!!

That particular mental interpretation was lacking, for many reasons. And something I didn’t think about at the time was that either way, I wasn’t cis. Either way, there was that overlap of masculinity and femininity in me: I had elements of both, but neither were quite the way convention might have you expect. I felt like I approached femininity from a male perspective: I was “feminine”, but in the same way that (some, not all) gay men are “feminine” without being women. Likewise, I approached masculinity from a female perspective: I was “masculine”, but in the same way (some, not all) lesbians are “masculine” without being men. I had traits of both within me, but even then, they were crossed over; associating my inner “male self” with the “feminine” and my inner “female self” with the “masculine”.

So maybe now, as I write this, it’s more obvious why I didn’t fit in. Everyone else around me associated “male” with “macho” and “female” with “femme”. Such extreme interpretations were at direct odds with mine, and left no room for the many variants of gender identity and gender expression in between. It was, society said, one or the other. And I wasn’t either.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t something I came to understand until much more recently, or else I might have been able to place myself sooner.

But even those past times I did question my gender, those thoughts stayed only thoughts. And in any case, because I didn’t feel like I most definitely, most assuredly wanted to be/become a man, I thought that meant that I had to be a woman by default.

So, I thought, if I can’t commit to not being a woman, I guess I will just remain a “woman”. I guess I will just stand and be counted as one of the many women who do not fit the cookie-cutter mould dictated to us by gender norms, as many women don’t. I will be just one of the many examples of why the mould is rubbish: of why putting men and women in boxes does not work, because we do not all fit in neatly. I will hold my head up as a woman and say, “I do not follow the rules, but I am not the exception. It’s the rules themselves that are jank.”

And the feminist in me was appeased. After all, this way, simply by being myself I could prove patriarchy was wrong, or something to that effect. I was proof the norms were not catch-all, be-all and end-all. I could live with being a woman; just one that defies typical social norms. And those norms ought to be questioned and defied, anyway — so I comforted myself into thinking I was doing someone some good, maybe, somehow, by acknowledging the expectations for my gender but then subverting them; and that, in so doing, it might contribute towards shattering the preconceptions themselves.

I still didn’t feel comfortable in and of myself, but I shrugged it off. I was like, “okay, maybe this is fine.” In the wise, wise words of Lindsay Ellis: “This is fine. This is fine. This is fine, guys. This is fine.”

Of course, there were still times when I felt the incongruence more keenly than at others; my wedding and the times when I get compared to my sisters were particularly triggering experiences for me. But when it was just my husband and me, together and alone, there was no incongruence. There was no discomfort. We accepted each other, and loved each other, exactly the way we were. When it was just the two of us, we could just be the two of us. When we knew each other as well as we did, on that close and personal basis, then there was no need for labels.

And so, I had privately settled the dispute of my own gender. I had mentally filed it away under “agree not to agree; it doesn’t really matter, anyway. Putting a name to it doesn’t actively change who I am.” I had told myself that that was good enough; and I had kept on living my life, continuing with things just the way they were.

I had accepted womanhood, and resigned myself to it.

And that was that.

Cue hbomberguy’s “Donkey Kong Nightmare Stream”.

For those who missed it and the surrounding controversy involving TV writer Graham Linehan (#thanksgraham), hbomberguy (real name Harry Brewis) is a YouTuber who makes sensible — okay, maybe not “sensible” —, well-thought out videos addressing a variety of topics in modern media: usually video games, film or television series, but he also commentates on social trends and ideologies, as well.

Link to hbomberguy’s channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClt01z1wHHT7c5lKcU8pxRQ

My husband first knew him from his LetsPlays, and I became a fan too because of his game, film and television analyses. (Someone who overthinks and overanalyses works of fiction for all possible meanings and real-life takeaways?? Here’s a man after my own heart!)

So when he announced he was going to do a livestream of the classic Nintendo 64 game Donkey Kong 64 in order to raise money for the organisation Mermaids — a charity offering support groups, education, and crisis hotlines for transgender individuals and their families, as well as training for corporations to raise trans awareness — we were very interested in watching it.

Link to Mermaids’ website here: https://www.mermaidsuk.org.uk/

Unfortunately, my husband and I weren’t able to watch the stream as it went up live; but we did watch through the archived footage after the fact. And boy, did it hit hard. So many feels were had. So many feels.

My husband isn’t as informed on social justice issues as I am, so a lot of the overarching context that was old-hat to me was brand-new to him. But bless him, he is learning. I, on the other hand, thought going in that I was just going to be watching a stream of a dude we liked from YouTube playing a game, and raising some money for a good cause while he was at it. What I wasn’t expecting was that some of what I heard would hit me so hard in the heart.

To pick out just a few key moments from what was truly an epic event the whole way through, Susie Green, the CEO of Mermaids herself, appeared in the stream — and, let me just say, she is so effing awesome. I have an aunt called Susie Green, too, who is also one of the most kick-ass ladies I know, so awesomeness must come with the territory or something.

Anyway, among other things, Susie Green (the CEO, not my aunt) was saying (and I paraphrase) that one of the best ways to support trans people is just to let them know that they can be safe around you.

And that broke my fucking heart, because fuck. Because LGBTQ+ people could be safe around me: but if I myself wasn’t out and proud — if I myself wasn’t visible, or open about my own situation — how the fuck would they know that?

That idea (built upon by CaseyExplosion when she said just to be a friend to trans people you know) deeply resonated with me because of past personal conversations I have had with some members of the gaming group I’m a part of. In private messages, there were people I spoke to at length about gender and about sexuality. The thing is, I was never the one initiating these conversations. Due to my own experiences and empathy, whenever they brought up that they were struggling, I would listen and I would relate and I would tell them a bit about my own experiences, too. And something that came up in one of those conversations was how difficult it was to know who you can talk to about gender and sexuality stuff, because you don’t know how people will respond or who you can trust.

One of my dear friends talked to me about his struggle with sexuality and being gay, and I could understand and empathise and listen to him without judgment because, although it isn’t exactly the same, I am bi and have my own experiences with making the personal journey of coming to understand and accept your own sexual identity, and the struggles along the way. Another friend confided in me she was having confusing feelings for another woman, and she didn’t know what to do. Again, I shared with her that I could understand because I was bi, and we talked for a long time about how she was feeling. She said later I was one of the few people she could trust to talk to about this, because she knew I wouldn’t judge her.

I know people who struggle with their own experiences, and I also know people who are so far removed from those struggles in their own personal lives that they can come across a little insensitive and non-inclusive in their speech or actions; not due to malice, but sincere lack of experience, lack of information, and lack of awareness. One such friend of mine gets very confused over what is “sex” and what is “gender” and frequently conflates the two, and tends to be very dismissive of the social issues going on around him or the community’s attempts to address those issues. And again, this is not because he is an uncaring or unkind person, because he is usually exceptionally caring and kind. But in these particular instances, because he is young and uninformed and he is not part of those circles himself (nor knows others who are immediately affected), there is no reason why he would know more about it. There is no reason why he would understand.

Still, he recognises that he doesn’t understand, and he does try to learn more and keep himself open to learning more. Thus, I unofficially took it upon myself to educate him, to try and foster that understanding; and I talked to him a lot about my own gender identity, too, to kind of serve as my own example for him of what the gender spectrum was. I told him a lot about my own experiences, eventually summarising my situation as, “I don’t agree with the gender norms and I don’t fit into them myself, but I don’t really know what I what I would fit into. I’m not comfortable being a woman, but I don’t know what I would consider myself as instead, so… … …”

On each of these occasions, and many more besides, I was fortunate enough to have these incredibly deep and meaningful conversations with real people all over the world; some of whom were struggling to find understanding and acceptance at a time when they really didn’t know who they could turn to. I’m so incredibly lucky to have them in my life, and that I could learn from all of them and know their unwavering love and support. Our friendship has enriched my life, and I have been exposed to so much love and positivity and really grown as a person because of it. I’m so grateful and glad that they found me, and that I could likewise be a positive figure for them in their time of need.

But that’s just it: they found me. They took a leap of faith, not knowing the outcome, because they needed someone to talk to and they didn’t know for sure if I would be accepting or understanding: it was just that, based on our group conversations, I seemed like the kind of person who might be. They demonstrated an incredible amount of trust and faith in me, and I am extremely grateful for that. But it’s something that they should not have had to do. They should have known that they were safe from the get-go; I should have made them feel safe. I should have been more open, more inclusive; more forthcoming with my own experiences and beliefs, so that they knew they would find a kindred spirit in me, without needing to take that risk. And that is a failing on my part.

Remember how I said about how it even came up in one of those conversations that it’s difficult to know who you can talk to about gender and sexuality, because you don’t know how people will respond or who you can trust? Well, back then, my response to that was something along the lines of: “I would hate it if someone was struggling with this stuff and they felt like they couldn’t talk to me about it, just because they didn’t know that I was queer too.”

And yet…

To my shame and my dismay, although I did share my own experiences with others one-on-one once they had already started talking about it with me, I was never the first to say, “hey, I’m LGBTQ+, and if you’re LGBTQ+ too, that’s A-okay!” I was never the first to bring it up; and in so doing, I’m worried that I might have inadvertently created an atmosphere within our gaming group where LGBTQ+ members feel like they might not have been welcomed or represented.

Because our gaming group is online, everyone is totally anonymous, and no-one has to reveal more about themselves than they want to: including their appearance, their sexuality, or their gender. Still, I wonder if maybe there are some members, new or old, who are LGBTQ+ or who are internally struggling with their own self-identity, who look around and do not seem to see anyone like them. The atmosphere in our group, as is the case with society as a whole, is one where it’s assumed cis/hetero-normative by default. Topics of gender and sexuality rarely come up in the group chat; the more in-depth ones take place in private messaging instead, where they are invisible to the others.

So, by all appearances, straight and cis is the norm… even when it isn’t.

(Update: I am very happy to announce that, since I began writing this, this has now changed! Although it was my intention to come out to my gaming group after posting this, I ended up outing myself to the group early, which initiated exactly the kind of conversations about gender, sexuality, and inclusivity we should have been having all along. Our gaming group has now officially adopted “other” as a third gender option when we are asking members to introduce themselves, along with asking for preferred pronouns! I hope this change, minor though it may seem, goes a long way to helping every member feel more comfortable when disclosing their gender and their pronouns, should they choose to disclose at all.)

Getting back to the point, Susie Green saying that something you can do is to simply help trans people feel safe… That really struck a chord with me. If even people like me who do struggle with their gender and sexuality don’t say that they do, how would anybody else know? What chance do we have of finding each other? What choice is there but to feel different and alone, even if you actually aren’t?

And in my case especially, it is very, very easy to assume I am cis and straight, even though I’m not. I’m very obviously female (thanks, big boobs), and I’m married to my husband — so that makes us a straight couple, man and wife. Luckily, my sexuality was much easier (relatively) to come to terms with for me, and I have been proud to say that I am bi the few times it does come up, as I have known that about myself in that particular regard since I was 13. Even so, because it is so easy for everyone else to assume that, because I married a man, I therefore must be straight, it doesn’t come up that often.

(Even my husband sometimes forgets. We often joke around with each other about the things we say, deliberately taking innocuous things out of context and saying, “That’s racist!” or “That’s homophobic!” One time, we were joking about something — I can’t even remember what — and I teased him about something he had said by exclaiming in mock-indignation, “Hey! That’s homophobic!” His response? “Well, can you really be homophobic against someone who’s heterosexual?” And I’m just like “…”)

It’s easy to assume a woman who is married to a man is straight. It’s easy to assume everyone is cis by default, because most people are. But that shouldn’t be the default. It shouldn’t be the norm to think, “Well, I’m just going to assume everyone is cis unless they specifically say otherwise.” All that does is create the idea that everyone really is cis, because after all, not many people (dare to) say otherwise; which in turn stunts efforts to spread awareness as many people who might have identified as trans if they had had the resources to know more about it don’t have those resources in the first place. And sticking to that as the norm creates the expectation to conform. It creates the idea that people, even those who aren’t cis, need to be cis, or at least pretend to be; because that is the norm and such thinking inherently comes with pressure to adhere to it.

Assuming cis by default makes it that much harder for trans people to say anything to the contrary, because they don’t see very many people who have the same experiences they do and may not necessarily know if it is safe to talk about it. If everyone assumes that everyone else is cis unless they make a big fuss about it, trans people may very understandably not want to make a big fuss. Maybe they’ll feel, like I did, that the only thing they can do is quietly fade into the background; to try and hide, and try not to draw too much attention to themselves, or out themselves as anything other than “the norm”.

What we all need to do is be more welcoming and inclusive, right off the bat; not because we know for certain that there are LGBTQ+ individuals in our midst, but because we recognise the possibility that there could be. Because we, as a society, recognise that there are many different expressions of gender and sexuality, and all are legitimate and valid.

I don’t want to fade quietly into the background. I don’t want to not be seen, not even by other LGBTQ+ people — those who should be my fellows. That sounds incredibly egotistical, but what I really mean is that I don’t want other LGBTQ+ people to look out at the world and not see themselves reflected in it and think that they are alone; the way I did before the charity stream began.

You are not alone. We are here. We are queer. And we should be proud of it.

For me, Susie Green’s line about simply letting trans people know that they are safe around you resonated with me deeply. For me, it was a call to action. I couldn’t hide any longer, privately satisfied with my own answer that I guess I just won’t bother defining who I am. That approach didn’t sit right with me after that. I want to be known; not for my own sake, because I’m an asocial fuck who couldn’t care less what other people think of me. But hopefully to be recognised; for someone else to see themselves in me and think, “Hey, maybe that person could relate to me. Maybe they know a thing or two about gender dysphoria and would be willing to listen to me. Maybe that’s a person I could talk to.”

That was what motivated me to come out. But I’m writing about my decision to come out as if it was a very simple process. It wasn’t. I make it sound as if I was just getting on with my life; then I happened to see the charity stream; and that inspired me to come out, and so, I did. In reality, gender issues have been interwoven with my psyche my whole life. Videos and discussions on social justice, representation and important issues within marginalised communities are something I actively seek out. And even when I felt like I really wanted to come out — to show others that they would be safe with me, and that I would welcome them and refrain from judgment — there were still things getting in the way there, too. And it was difficult.

The first time I heard Susie Green’s story on the stream, about her and her daughter and how things could be made better for today’s youth, I cried a lot. I thought about it a lot. I watched nothing but Donkey Kong for days on end, and dreamt about it too: not necessarily about the game itself (but also about the game itself), but the people, and their voices and their thoughts and their stories. I was trying to make sense of it all. For over a whole month now — ever since my husband and I started watching the stream — my head has been filled with thoughts on gender. It has overtaken my entire life ever since, and that’s because I want to do more, be more — and even this first step of simply coming out of the closet myself has taken a lot of preparation. Far more than I thought it would, actually.

For over a month, I have lived, breathed and dreamed gender non-stop. And thinking non-stop about such emotionally heavy, difficult issues does take its toll; especially when you include the multiple conversations I had about coming out with multiple people, multiple times.

But those difficulties I experienced with coming out weren’t what was getting in the way of coming out. The real difficulty there was giving myself permission to be anything but “woman” in the first place.

Remember feminism? Remember that feeling I had that, if I were truly a feminist, I would be proud to be a woman — not actively wishing womanhood away. I had unlearnt and relearnt a great many things about what it truly meant to be a woman; and ultimately, what it meant was to be human, just the same way as men were human. But even so, I did not know where matters of discrimination based on sex ended, and matters of individuality began. When it came to how I felt about myself, how much of it was to do with my sex? How much of that, in turn, was due to sexism? How exactly did I feel about myself, on the individual level, if, hypothetically, sex and sexism had (and had had) no part to play in it?

I didn’t exactly know.

Fortunately, my subconscious had the answer, even when my conscious mind did not. Some of the dreams I had about the Donkey Kong stream were mindless, repetitive, and nonsensical; just as the Donkey Kong 64 game itself is mindless, repetitive, and nonsensical. I dreamt only of hbomberguy getting endlessly stuck on puzzles and wandering around in circles — not so different from the real stream, then(!) When he cleared one level, he was faced with another, and another, and another; the game stretching endlessly on, in the way that dreams do. But the final dream I had about the stream was far more emotionally significant.

In that dream, I dreamt not about the game, but the stream itself. I dreamt about the chat, and the Discord channel for other YouTubers and allies that had been set up there. In my dream, for whatever reason, I had been accepted to join the mic call. I was able to talk directly to Harry himself and the guest stars; I was able to be a part of the stream as it went out live over the internet. I was able to talk to them all first-hand. I wept at the opportunity, and I thanked them all so much for doing this; I wanted them to know how much it meant, for them to be so open and so brave and for standing up for what was right. I told them how wonderful it was to hear them talk about their own experiences and their identities, because I was still struggling with mine. I told them about my dysphoria and my disillusionment with being “a woman”; but how I lacked the certainty and the conviction to do anything about it. I also told them about the guilt I felt as a feminist; that pursuing an identity as anything other than “woman” felt like it would be very un-feminist of me.

At that, I could very clearly imagine Harry’s face and hear his voice as he gave a bewildered, “What?!” And, to be honest, it’s probably the same reaction I would have had as well, if someone else had told me the same thing. And that’s because, as Dream Harry went on to say, that’s not what feminism is about. Feminism is not about forcing yourself to be a certain way, or about trying to be what you think someone else wants you to be regardless of the personal cost to yourself — so much so that you end up disempowering yourself in the process. Feminism, rather, is about empowerment. It’s about giving a voice to the marginalised and, in the case of trans rights and gay rights, telling them that who they are is real, and that they are worthy, too.

The stream itself is proof of that. It’s an example of the community coming together to support trans rights and recognising that transgender identities are valid identities too. No-one should be forced into a box that does not fit them, but allowed to define themselves for themselves. That included me, too.

And it was weird when I imagined the YouTubers telling me this in the dream, because it made me think about how I would respond if it was somebody else telling me they were trans. And if someone else came to me saying they were trans, I would accept them straight away, exactly as they were. I’d encourage them to be true to themselves and do what feels right for them, whatever form that may take. My own personal beliefs are that trans women are real women; trans men are real men; non-binary people are real people (even though I didn’t know that non-binary identities even existed until recently); and that feminism is about raising everyone up and empowering them, and accepting and embracing everyone as they really are. I would never tell anyone else they were being un-feminist just for being themselves; indeed, I would fight for their right to be themselves. I would regard them with unconditional love, and respect what they were telling me about themselves; accepting it as true without question. I would never tell them that their identity was wrong.

But it took hbomberguy telling me the same thing in a dream for me to actually apply those principles to myself, too.

Until experiencing the stream and hearing the personal accounts of other trans people first-hand, I had still been tied down into thinking that being for women’s rights meant that I was locked into being a woman myself; or that I was doing some kind of disservice to the cause if I were to acknowledge myself as anything else. But, for everyone to be free to be themselves and to be accepted without hate and without prejudice is the cause.

That was a conclusion that maybe I should have been able to come to on my own; but either I couldn’t, or just didn’t. It took hearing all of the wonderful people participating in the Donkey Kong stream talking about their experiences for me to realise that, maybe I was okay the way I was, too.

Discovering feminism and learning that I could be exactly the way I was and still be a woman had been an important step for me. But it was not the end of my journey. I had to go a step beyond that. Knowing that I could identify as a woman, with no degradation to myself, was one thing; but learning that I could also not identify as a woman if I so chose was also an important milestone. There are more options in life than the arbitrary one we get assigned to us at birth; and for me, being so uncomfortable with mine, I saw no reason to try and force it upon myself any longer.

I hadn’t been at all sure at first where the line was between respecting women and recognising that I myself was not a woman. But now, with the help of feminism, the Nightmare Stream and the dream that it inspired, all the amazing people who participated, and even just the knowledge that an amazing charity like Mermaids even exists and is doing great work in the world… I think I’ve disentangled myself and disavowed myself from enough sexist notions that I know that it’s not that I don’t believe in being a woman. It’s that I do believe in being an individual. And as an individual, speaking on the personal level, not only do I not follow the stereotypes and/or the mandated patterns of behaviour prescribed for my sex; I don’t want to, either. There is still something to be said for how maybe those stereotypes ought not to exist in the first place, and maybe then I wouldn’t mind so much what my sex was or what my gender was. But they do, and so I do, and I know the path that has been laid out for me is not the one I want to walk down.

And I also know that, if I hadn’t’ve been motivated to come out now, even after hearing all those brave and courageous voices; even after hearing all those incredible stories of personal tragedy, triumph, and strength; even after experiencing something which, even though I was only an onlooker, nevertheless felt made me feel like there was a space for me after all, and made me feel like I was home… then I was probably never going to come out. Ever. If even that experience, which moved me so much, could not bring me to accept myself, then it would probably have never happened.

What Mermaids and the Donkey Kong Nightmare Stream gave me was something invaluable: they gave me permission to give myself permission to be who I was all along. It taught me that I was allowed to be who I was; and that who I was was okay. That’s why the work Mermaids does is so valuable: so that no child has to go through this all alone, navigating complex topics without the words to properly explain it. Mermaids gives love and support and important information and resources, so that each child can come to terms with themselves and accept themselves the way they are. And that’s much more preferable than being a grown-ass adult trying to get your shit together when you have no clue what you’re doing; scrambling to put the broken pieces back together when really, you were never broken at all.

So, that leads me to writing this declaration:

I know what it’s like to feel uncomfortable with the gender norms thrust upon you because of your sex.

I know what it’s like when your internal experiences of yourself are incongruent with said norms and other external expectations.

I know what it’s like to feel like you are wrong just for being yourself, and like an outsider in your own skin.

I know what it’s like when you are forced to acknowledge your assigned gender and a piece of you dies because that’s not who you are, and it starts to feel like you never can be who you really are as long as the world keeps reminding you otherwise.

I know what it’s like when even simple things, such as which box to tick on a form, can be a deeply divisive topic rife with internal conflict and strife. And I know and I loathe how, in my case, I have to opt for “woman” anyway, on account of my being female and there being no better option.

And I also know how I have struggled to come up with a satisfying answer about what a better option would have been, though I have found my answer now. (Although, going back to speaking more generally, simply including the simple and unassuming option “other” would be a start!)

I don’t know what the fuck I am. But I know I’m not a cis woman.

Thankfully, there’s a catch-all term for that, and that’s genderqueer. That’s why I wanted to write this post: to come to terms with myself as my new identity, and re-introduce myself as genderqueer.

And actually, the above line about not knowing what I am is no longer true, and that’s because I can get more specific than that now. Unlike when I first started writing this, I can now say that I do know what I am. Three weeks down the line, I can now say that recognising myself as genderqueer was the start of something beautiful. Through the process of writing this post — and having many, many private conversations and coming out many, many different times to many different people — I have been learning more and more about genderqueerness all the time; and, in doing so, myself.

Through those conversations and through watching and listening to the YouTube channels of other trans and non-binary individuals, I’m becoming more and more sure of myself. I’ve realised that I am very happy to identify as non-binary; and that non-binary suits me and my own situation very well. So now, it’s not that I don’t know what I am other than “not cis” and am relying on a catch-all umbrella term to cover me anyway; it’s that I know myself to be non-binary. It’s a far more accurate of a term for how I feel myself to be than “woman” ever was.

So, while I may at first have picked up the genderqueer umbrella due solely to its all-encompassing nature, only knowing at that time that I was “not cis”, it has nevertheless led to a journey of self-discovery where I’ve realised that, hey, I actually really fucking love this umbrella. And it’s a much more comfortable umbrella for me to fit under than the “woman” umbrella had been for me. It’s so much roomier under here!!

So anyway, that’s what I wanted to say. I am bi; I am genderqueer/gender non-binary; and I am still questioning. I am B and T and Q; and LGBTQ+ folks, you are safe with me.

fin

P.S. Thank you, everyone who read it this far. Thank you for tolerating my self-indulgent trite as I waffle on about my own life when, all things considered, I have enjoyed an immense amount of “comfort” — or rather, the avoidance of misfortune — because of being able to pass. I have enjoyed a lot of love and support from the people closest to me and the ones I love the most, and that is why sitting down and definitively defining my gender — when really, it is something so personal to the individual — didn’t seem to make much difference to me as an individual before now. But it might just make all the difference to someone. I’m planning on expanding my thoughts on this (namely, gender identities vs individual identities) in a future piece of writing.

That said, if you are a LGBTQ+ person reading this (or someone who is unsure, or questioning) and you are not currently out, then despite my encouragement to make ourselves seen and our voices heard, please, please, please don’t come out if you feel it is not safe for you to do so. I am only coming out now myself because it is safe for me to do so; it was just inconvenient for me before, and that’s why I didn’t do it until now. Your safety and your well-being is the number one priority, so please, do not do anything you feel uncomfortable with or which you feel might put you at risk.

P.P.S. To serve as something of a glossary: “Genderqueer” is just an umbrella term meaning “not exclusively masculine or feminine”; which falls within the umbrella term “transgender” meaning “anyone whose gender is different from that of their assigned sex”; which itself falls within the umbrella term “queer” meaning “anyone who is not exclusively heterosexual and cisgender”. There are several layers deep to this, and getting further down is just a matter of specificity.

For example, someone who is gender non-binary is genderqueer, who is trans, who is queer. Someone who is a “trans woman” or a “trans man” (as opposed to “trans” on its own) is someone who identifies as the binary identity woman or man, but were born male or female respectively. Thus, trans women and trans men obviously come under the umbrella of “trans”, but are not “genderqueer”, though they are “queer”. The Q in LGBTQ+ can thus be seen as a kind of tautology, because all LGBT individuals are by definition not heterosexual and/or cisgender, and therefore are all queer. But while all LGBT individuals are queer, not all Q+ individuals are LGBT, as they might identify as something else entirely not covered by its own letter. The Q can also stand for “questioning”. In this way, the Q catches all individuals who are unsure of where they fit in but who do not identify specifically as LGBT, and the + denotes the inclusion of all communities and identities not covered by their own letter (of which intersex, pansexual and aromantic/asexual, to name only a few, are examples).

The website OK2BME has a great page on this. Link here: https://ok2bme.ca/resources/kids-teens/what-does-lgbtq-mean/

P.P.P.S. Interested in supporting trans rights yourself? To once again paraphrase Susie Green, Mermaids CEO, a good way to support trans rights is to support trans people themselves. Look up your local trans charities, donate or volunteer if you can, call out casual transphobia when you see it, and just generally be a friend. A number of trans individuals have crowdfunding campaigns active to try and help them cover the cost of transitioning, so that is an option as well.

YouTuber and Twitter user Mama Math (link here: https://twitter.com/hellomamamath) made a spreadsheet with links to some of the guests on the Donkey Kong Nightmare Stream who consented to be listed with the details of their websites or where to follow them. The spreadsheet also includes whether or not that person is trans. If you are interested in learning more about trans rights and what it means to be trans, simply listening to the stories of those who are trans and supporting the content they make is a great place to start. Link to the spreadsheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sdavyrGPnsrNdTxWBILoulCKxvIvzMkMaJoXPjNQcOI/edit#gid=0

If you are interested in watching the Donkey Kong Nightmare Steam yourself, here are the links to the parts:

Part 1: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/365966431

Part 2: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/366901309

Part 3: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/367450055

Part 4: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/369226467

P.P.P.P.S. (Okay, this is getting ridiculous now. This is the last post script, I swear!) In case you’re wondering, as I haven’t actually addressed it at all above, my preferred pronouns are “they/them”, as I consider “they/them” the most neutral and free of assumption. While I am not agender, I nevertheless prefer gender-neutral nouns and pronouns. I consider my own gender to be more fluid, and sometimes, “she/her” or “he/him” will feel right to me; but sometimes, they won’t. For example, if someone refers to me as “he/him” online, I won’t feel compelled to correct them and actually enjoy being referred to as such. I do not have the same euphoric reaction to “she/her”, though I understand that many people will fall into old habits and believe that it is the more “correct” term to use, even though actually it’s my least favoured out of the three. My point is that, sometimes, using “she/her” or “he/him” to refer to me may be acceptable; but using “they/them” is preferable and will always be applicable, so that is what I ask for you to use.

However, I do still have a feminine side to me, and as such, I will still relate with some feminine terminologies; but I am not “a woman”, nor do I relate exclusively to women. In this specific instance, I do ask for you to avoid calling me “a woman” and refer to me as “a person” instead.

I’m considered as something of the “mum” within the online gaming group, with others teasingly and lovingly calling me “mother”, and I love that. A very important person to me calls me “sis” or “sissy”, short for “sister”, and I wouldn’t want to change that, either. To my husband, I am still his “wife”. (I recently discovered I have a major aversion to “princess”, though, so that one’s definitely out…)

I am not truly gender-neutral, which is why I do not identify as agender; but rather, I encompass both masculine and feminine traits, and therefore I will adopt both feminine and masculine terms where they seem applicable. Some days I’ll feel more in touch with my feminine side, and some days I’ll feel more in touch with my masculine side. That doesn’t necessarily mean I want to reject all gendered terms completely, and certainly not all of the time. But I do want to introduce some gender-neutral ones into the mix, so that gender-neutrality is recognised as an option. Again, I am stating a preference, with my preference being for the gender-neutral.

As for my preferred name… well, I go by my online handle “Evani” within most game-related things, and I’m perfectly happy with that. In my mind, I know that the name “Evani” is short for “Evan-Evani”: an original character of mine who has both male and female selves (better known as the Animus and the Anima, à la Jungian psychology). Those selves are named Evan and Evani respectively, and thus they are collectively referred to as both names, even when they present as one whole and not as the two halves. I’m comfortable with my online name and don’t feel the need to change things there.

My “real” name, however… After a lot of thinking about it and batting around about a million different names and variations, I finally settled on one I was happy with: “Ievan”. (Pronounced just the same as “Evan”.)

I had been looking at all kinds of different names; starting with those which were variations on my birth name, to names which looked similar or shared the same letters, to ones which had the same semantic meaning. I couldn’t find any I liked, until a friend asked me what it was that spoke to my soul. At that point, I realised I had been trying to find a name “in keeping” with my birth name, “Stacey”; not for myself but to make the perceived adjustment easier on others around me.

But to be honest, I had never, ever liked the name “Stacey”; and changing how I spelled it to “Stacie” may have made it more tolerable, but even then, I still did not like it. I had been trying to find a new name I liked, based on an old one I didn’t. No wonder I had been having such difficulty!

Recognising that, it made no sense to base my new name for my new identity on my old one. The point of coming out as non-binary was to feel more comfortable with myself and my own identity; and adhering to my past name ran counter to that.

So, with my friend to bounce ideas off of, I took the search away from “Stacey” — the name I had never liked — and back to “Evani” — the name I had already adopted for myself some years prior and had used for myself ever since, albeit only in online settings.

I choose “Ievan” instead of “Evan”, which is perhaps the more obvious choice, because it’s an anagram of “Evani”. It also meant that, by slightly changing my online name from “Evani” to “Ievani”, I could create an amalgamation of both names. “Ievani” included both the names “Ievan” and “Evani” within it, symbolising the dual nature of the masculine and the feminine and the great deal of overlap between the two; just as I experience an overlap and a merging of the masculine and the feminine within myself. I appreciated the symbolism, as well as the fact that “Ievani” captured the same meaning to it as “Evan-Evani” did; only much more elegantly, representing “Ievan-Evani” but with much fewer letters. Having taken to “Ievani” as I did, my choice of name for “Ievan”, as opposed to “Evan”, became an easy one to make.

Plus, by spelling the name as “Ievan” with the extra “i” and not as “Evan” (even though they are both pronounced the same) meant I could have the best of both worlds: I could have a name which sounded masculine, but looked feminine. It was a blend of both, and gave me a lot of versatility and adaptability to play around with as well, owing to the fact that you can draw a lot of different nicknames and short-forms out of it. Some examples: Ieva, Eva, Ev, Evi, Evie, Eve, Iev, Ieve…Now I can basically be called whatever I feel like being called, and friends and those around me can pick out their own personally-preferred nickname for me! It grants a lot of freedom and customisation, which I love. Now, when people call me by my name, I smile instead of cringe.

(As a side-note: yes, this does make me “Ievan Evans”, and you are right, it is repetitive! But I love the peculiarity. It’s been a running gag of mine to have characters in my stories whose surname is a repeat of their first name; the first one being “Evan Evans” — the aforementioned Animus — and another one called “Luca Lucas”, though the latter is technically an assumed identity deliberately made to parallel “Evan Evans”. Now I can be a part of the joke myself, too!)

Realistically speaking, I don’t expect everyone to switch over to “Ievan” straight away. Not everyone is going to read this post, and I’m not going to choose to tell everyone who doesn’t. It’s fairly common within the queer community to not come out to everyone, and not all at once. So I accept that, to certain people, I will still be “Stacie”. And that is fine. As long as I am happy with my own identity and the way I live my own life, I can make my peace with it if I will still be “Stacie” to them.

So, if you still want to call me “Stacie”, that’s fine. I won’t fight you over it. I just might not be fine with it; but even then, it’s fine.

In regards to my writing and my self-published works: my past works were published under the name “Stacie Evans” and, in that particular regard, I think I will keep it that way going forward as well. “Stacie Evans” can be my pseudonym as an author! (Which is ironic, because usually it’s the pen name that’s supposed to be the fictitious one…) While I could legally change my name, it would be a hassle; and right now, I’m happy just adopting it for myself and testing it out.

In short, I’ll be using: Ievan for real life (including Facebook, which is more personal); Evani for games; Ievani for other social media (which I consider a mix of both); and Stacie Evans for works of poetry or fiction, as well as with those who are uncomfortable calling me Ievan.

Feeling confused? Don’t worry. You can always ask to make sure! (Which is a good idea in general, about anything; and you can apply it with pronouns, too! I personally love it when people ask my pronouns, as it confers a sense of understanding, compassion and respect.) All questions are welcome, because I believe there is no such thing as a stupid question. All questions are a chance to learn more. (But please, keep it considerate.)

Useful resources:

(not an exhaustive list; these are the things I have come across and have found helpful myself, so I am sharing them here too)

Mermaids, a UK-based charity providing support for transgender children/ young adults and their families, as well as crisis hotlines, online forums and interventions: https://www.mermaidsuk.org.uk/

The January Donkey Kong Nightmare Stream to raise money for Memaids:

Part 1: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/365966431

Part 2: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/366901309

Part 3: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/367450055

Part 4: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/369226467

Spreadsheet of the participants in the Donkey Kong Nightmare Steam, with links to their Twitter and YouTube accounts: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sdavyrGPnsrNdTxWBILoulCKxvIvzMkMaJoXPjNQcOI/edit#gid=0

Let’s Queer Things Up!, a blog about all things queer: https://letsqueerthingsup.com/

More from LQTU! content creator: https://samdylanfinch.contently.com/

Specific article linked to on the above about what it means to be genderqueer: https://www.healthline.com/health/transgender/genderqueer

Specific article linked to on the above about what it means to be gender non-binary: https://www.healthline.com/health/transgender/nonbinary

Genderqueer Me, a website with featured voices from transgender individuals and their families, as well as online talks about trans issues and information regarding transition: https://genderqueer.me/

OK2BME, supportive services for the LGBTQ+ community: https://ok2bme.ca/

Private YouTube playlist I made of videos I have watched, discussing transgender and non-binary experiences and identities, which are of personal relevance to me in some way or which discuss things which are particularly useful or important when it comes to developing an understanding of the transgender spectrum (also not an exhaustive list; I plan to keep adding videos as I find them): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTv7NUhc6gDOr1AW13CmlZujWAEo2Msyh

#genderqueer #nonbinary #coming out #queer #queers on tumblr

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