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#NOT TO MENTION THE COST OF RENT

cornerful · 24 days

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Sméagol and the Gift

'Now!' said Sam. 'At last I can deal with you!' He leaped forward with drawn blade ready for battle. But Gollum did not spring. He fell flat upon the ground and whimpered.

'Don't kill us,' he wept. 'Don't hurt us with nassty cruel steel! Let us live, yes, live just a little longer. Lost lost! We're lost. And when Precious goes we'll die, yes, die into the dust.'

Devastated by this. Just a little longer, he begs. Even though his existence is a torment. Even though the will that holds him to life is barely his own anymore. He has long outlived his time but it's such a cruelty that now the only freedom for him is in death. I'm glad Sam didn't kill him but the whole scenario is awful.

When a mortal keeps a ring of power he does not gain more life, he continues, denied natural mortality as the fear of death is amplified and twisted into fear of separation, nothing matters anymore but the keeping, the continuing. In that miserable existence there is no peace, and at its end there is no graceful goodbye to life, there is only dust. Sudden, empty, and final.

It would take murder to spare him that. Or falling with the ring into the fire.

Bilbo let it go in time (did he feel anything when it was destroyed?) Frodo is freed of it now, though the toll it extracted for the separation was at very least a finger. It was too late for Gollum for the price to be anything other than it was, and that's brutal.

If you live long enough, death is no longer the enemy. What Sauron did to Gollum ensured that it would always be the enemy, to be feared and avoided for ever, once time and the ring had fashioned it into the only escape left. Evil.

#lotr newsletter #suicide mention in tags #haunted by the au in which gollum goes into the fire with the ring On Purpose #bc he still couldnt separate himself from it but frodo's compassion had somewhat released him from its evil #in a way an honor to frodo's quest and in a way an act of mercy to be able to give up the self-torment #which gives me shrimp feelings bc of the everything but also back to the original point that it is so tragic that death is all that awaits #bc death is natural and that was taken from him. what is the will to live in the absence of natural death?#smth deeply horrible about that #matt bugg screaming we'll be dust. so famous and rent free #lotrn325 #damn it im having more thoughts #wraiths vs gollum: discuss #the nature of the ring kept affects the nature of its possession no? those rings were made FOR thralldom #sauron has power over gollum but not That Much and his own ring is all abt the domination #what would a 2000 year old gollum even be like ._.#the wraiths are probably even more tragic bc at this point they're like...undead. even death isn't freedom #on that topic what happened to the witch-king's spirit fr #I'm pretty sure he isn't ever actually called that in the book but it's epic and gender and way snappier than lord of the nazgul #anyway shoutout to i think yambits for breaking the lore and giving them peace that was sick #where's my gollum rehab fic #i know he's a horrible little man who is constantly trying to murder my boys but i love him so #the au...gollum gaining the willpower to destroy himself because he was given trust and kindness and companionship for once. FUCKED UP.#fucked up horrible i need a minute. being shown compassion and then becoming more self-compassionate. epic #that compassion entailing seeking the freedom of death your soul was denied bc this is fantasy and somehow the exact #arc that usually leads to fighting to live is now flipped. HUH.#yeah jirt alluded to his motivation being For Frodo but i maintain that the willingness to die is HUGE there and extremely relevant #me and my red string keeping me company #ugh tag championships i win i think but at what cost #who wants to spin around miserably in a pool like franknfurter with me as we listen to gollum's song #tam you're already invited i have a floaty for u

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icannotgetoverbirds · 1 month

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Severe fucking content warning

Content warning for literal fucking torture and abuse. everything else should be tagged. If I miss any content warnings please for the love of all that is holy tell me so I can fix it.

Psychological torture. Those are the words bouncing around my head this morning.

Did you know that sleep deprivation and social isolation are often considered to be tied for the worst tortures known to humankind?

Let me give you some more context. When I left mormonism, I lost everything in regards to my social safety net. Mormonism and my mormon friends and family were all I had.

It's by design, too; how is someone supposed to leave if their only safety net disappears when they do? Why would they even consider leaving if that safety net holds them perfectly because they can conform?

But when you can't conform, you fall through the cracks. As I did.

I didn't just lose everything, though. I didn't stop there. I also gained a neighborhood full of watchdogs who I was sure would herd me back to the cult at the first opportunity.

Going outside on foot was no longer an option - if any of my many mormon neighbors saw me, they would have Questions. If I gave any worrying answers, there was bound to be Visits. I wasn't strong enough to handle that.

Besides, I lived in suburban hell. Fifteen minutes just to get out of the neighborhood on foot, another fifteen to get to the nearest gas station. My depressed, broke self wasn't about to spend an hour walking for a round trip to the fucking gas station when I could barely handle doing my own laundry.

So I was trapped inside the house unless my parents or someone else with a car deigned to bring me with them on a trip. But it was fine at first, because I had an internet connection and multiple online friends; plus, I'd managed to forge one irl friendship with someone between deconverting and graduating high school.

My parents weren't happy about this for some reason (I have a working theory as to why and I'll get to it later). Their justification was that it was just generally bad for me to be spending as much time online as I was.

Of course, I wasn't doing great mentally, but they refused to believe that they could be at fault for that with their "mild" transphobia. Surely refusing to accept my newfangled, sinful identity on the basis of a false moral high ground couldn't possibly be the most significant source of my suffering; surely deadnaming and misgendering me couldn't be doing that much damage.

Surely refusing to assist the transitioning process in any way shape or form couldn't be a good enough reason for suicidal ideation. Surely I was just an undermedicated psycho for considering lighting myself on fire just to get them to understand my pain enough to... help me with the process of buying a binder with my own money.

Surely I just needed to get my act together and get over myself.

So, ever since that psych ward visit that treated me better than they did, they decided that I could only have internet access if I did enough of my chores around the house.

Doesn't sound too unreasonable until you remember that 99% of my friends were online. I tried telling them this, and their response was to encourage me to get back in touch with my old ward member friends. You know, from the cult I had just escaped. That, granted, my parents were still very much a part of.

(Remember that theory I was telling you about? That little tidbit is an important piece of evidence.)

So I was cut off from the world with significant regularity, having nothing but a flip phone to contact the one supportive friend whose phone number I had. That friend kept me alive and sane enough to stay that way for nearly a year as this hell dragged on.

At some point, my brother and his girlfriend moved back in with us. I guess they weren't a fan of all the sinning I was doing, because my parents had multiple talks with me about how I needed to give them more space (aka stop existing in the same room as them).

So, eventually, I was all but confined to my bedroom, since I could never sit them down to have a conversation about what times I was allowed to be downstairs and what times they would be occupying that space.

This all built up to the breaking point. I had just developed a new medical condition that left me basically bedbound in pain. I was forced out of bed anyways, because nobody was going to take care of me (probably due to the nature of the condition being considered 'sinful'). I did what I could as I could, as I always have.

There had been a misunderstanding about chores. My brother and his girlfriend were in charge of one bathroom, i was in charge of the other. Except I thought I was in charge of the wrong one. So while the downstairs bathroom stayed clean (despite me not doing much to maintain it), the upstairs bathroom became absolutely filthy.

It all came to a head when my brother yelled at me to take care of my responsibility. I finally figured out what had happened and explained to him why I hadn't been doing it, as well as why I wasn't about to start until I could actually, you know, stay standing for any significant amount of time. He yelled at me more and threatened to tell our mom.

I told him to go ahead, as any rational person would take one look at the situation and agree that I needed to rest. My only mistake was assuming that my mom retained any rationality for me.

So she called me and attempted to chew me out. mind you, i was ill and in debilitating pain already, so I put my foot down and asked her to save it for later. But I knew what was coming when she said we were going to "have a conversation" when she got home. She was going to take away my flip phone to force me to do as I was told.

My flip phone, 99% of the use for which was to call my one and only friend that i could access. My one and only friend who was the sole support in my life. The only person, the only thing keeping me sane.

That was going to be it for me. If she did that (and she'd done it before, so there was precedent), I was going to fucking kill myself.

So I locked her out of my room that night and tried to get a good night's rest in preparation for what would have to happen in order for me to survive.

At about 4 in the morning the next day, I packed up everything that i could carry and i walked out the door.

Every single thing I have been through since that day has been worth it to get out of that hell. I am still homeless over a year later and the only thing I wish I did different was to leave sooner and prepare better. Maybe get a nice duffel bag and do my laundry first instead of hauling all my dirty clothes in trash bags. I could've saved myself a lot of trouble by getting my documents together beforehand.

anyways. Befoer I came out as trans and not a mormon, my mother seemed fully supportive - or at least, like she was supporting me as much as she was capable of doing.

Afterwards? She never looked at me the same way again.

And so I have to wonder how two changes to my identity and lifestyle could wrench her away from kindness like that. How they could possibly cause such a significant change in how she treated me.

Here's the working theory.

Mormons prey on vulnerable people. Their missionaries are literally told to seek out the meek and weary and poor to "give them rest." This is also how they bring people back - they find out which inactive members are struggling without their safety net (which they often remove for the sin of inactivity/deconversion/etc) and those are the ones that they grasp at to try and bring back. Those are the ones that they reach out to, that they check in on.

So, how better to take advantage of someone's vulnerability than to make them vulnerable yourself? How better to make them vulnerable than to take away all of their safety nets? How better to tear them from their sin than to tear their sinful friends from them?

How better to break an apostate than to back them into a corner and bring in the walls? How better to turn someone towards your god than to give them no other choice except to be crushed?

And if they'd rather die than return to Jesus, well, then, at least you're sending them straight to the afterlife. Then they'll HAVE to see the truth. Then they'll HAVE to repent.

After all, all my mother needs to do to keep our family together forever is to keep me righteous. She already gave me a body. What loss is the rest of my life compared to the rest of eternity?

Better to die young than to live in sin. Better to be forced to come to Jesus than to choose to live free of him.

She wasn't a bumbling fool incapable of listening to me when I told her she was hurting me. She knew exactly what she was doing.

She abused me, TORTURED me, entirely on purpose. Entirely for the purpose of bringing me back to her god.

I have been tortured. I have experienced psychological torture. I probably have fucking brain damage from said psychological torture.

https://solitarywatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/SW-Fact-Sheet-5-Neurological-Effects-v230613.pdf

So, all that said, is it any wonder that I thought the streets would be better? Is it any wonder that I never want to see her again unless it's to use her grave as a gender neutral bathroom?

She nearly killed me. I think that was an acceptable outcome to her, too.

Certainly, the last thing she expected was for me to put my back to one wall and my feet to another and clamber out of that trap she made. Should've put a roof on it, I guess.

Anyways. If it seems like I've been less online/chipper than usual, it's because I've spent the past week coming to terms with this shit.

I love you all so, so much. Thanks for being there for me. Here's to staying alive; to escaping the trap; to finding our own families and leaving our abusers behind in the dust.

Here's to all of you. Y'all were worth the trouble of being homeless, easily.

#byrd chirps #byrd's business #cw abuse #cw torture #cw captivity #cw isolation #cw cults #cw cult abuse #cw religion #cw religious trauma #exmo #exmormon #byrd is an exmo #cw ableist language #cw self harm mention #cw suicidal ideation #cw psych ward #okay to rb #cw homelessness #oh and this isn't even mentioning that they pulled the money card after that psych ward visit #literally they were like #'okay sweetie we're gonna pay for it this time but Next Time this happens you need to Show Some Responsibility and pay for it yourself'#which was the tipping point for me realizing that me not making it out of there alive was a perfectly acceptable option to them #because i know them and they may be stupid #but they're not stupid enough to believe that forcing me to pay for my psych ward visits would keep me from needing the psych ward #mind you these people are affording rent on a very nice 4 bedroom suburban house #and they keep fucking guilting me about how much money i'm costing them?#anyways. it was fucked up.#the worst part is i honestly think the lack of acceptance was more painful than the social isolation #if they hadn't isolated me i still don't know if i would've been able to tolerate their transphobia

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thelittlespanielthatcould · 2 years

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I've been volunteering with the vet team at the county shelter, and today one of the techs was telling me about how she was numbing a kitten's throat to prevent his muscles from spasming as she intubated him. I remarked on how interesting it was that numbing the area affected the response of the muscles in the throat even while the animal was unconscious, and thanked her for explaining that to me.

She kinda looked at me for a moment and said "you're so funny. you always take in everything I say" and without hesitating I responded "of course I do. I love this stuff." She smiled and "you should do it". I told her about how I missed working in vet med. I miss it so much.

I should do it. I shouldn't do it. I can't do it. I have to do it. I don't know. I just miss it.

#everything is expensive and exhausting and I am so so autistic and it makes everything so hard #working from home and in a structured environment is so good for me in so many ways. but if you think vet med sounds depressing youre wrong #working customer service for a health insurance company in the US? THATS depressing #not to mention I just feel so myself working with animals. its the most me I ever feel. but maybe its just the only me I know.#I like having energy to be a person after work and having time to relax with my animals. I need money so I can move soon and pay rent.#but I miss the rush of it. I miss the crazy and the funny and the heartbreaking. i just felt so alive. But At What Cost?#lol. lol.#vet med #human stuff

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six-of-ravens · 9 months

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Oh, and another thing I learned the other day: apparently the point of raising the interest rates so much was to "discourage consumer buying" which is insane bc like, "we don't want people to buy things so we're going to raise the cost of living, and then complain when people aren't buying houses and can't afford rent or utilities" is horrible logic. But also I think Millennials and Gen Z have lived through too many harsh economic times for this to work. "I'll never be able to buy a house so I'll just keep buying my little treats" is a common mindset and, frankly, a justified one. Like yeah, the cost of takeout may have gone up a few bucks, but the cost of a house has gone up thousands of dollars. I'm no closer to buying a house than I was in 2020, and if my rent goes up another $250 next spring all the skipped lattes in the world won't help, so I'm still gonna get my little treat.

#there's gotta be a better way they could've worked this #they've been saying inflation has dropped a bit so HOPEFULLY rents will go back down by next February??#but still like WTF. the economy hasn't been good enough for this shit since like.....pre 2008??#you're not stemming consumer demand or encouraging people to save you're causing people with even decently paying jobs #to be unable to afford the cost of living entirely #and listen. if at the start of 2022 the government had said 'look we want you all so try and save money and not spend as much'#i would've been like 'ok challenge accepted'#i was actually saving a LOT before my rent got jacked up. like im still saving but definitely not as much!!#just do a fkn ad campaign or something encouraging people to like. help the economy by spending less? or buying local or w/e #don't raise the interest rate like 10x in a year and then cry because 'no one is buying houses!!'#ANYWAY im Late Nite Posting again i apologize. i have a bone to pick with the bank of canada #oh did i mention the B of C also got massive bonuses last year too???? fuck them! seriously!!

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milkolya · 8 months

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so. a house in vancouver cost ~ 400k in 1995. which is equal to 725k today. but an avg house in vancouver today is 2.35 million, 3.2x more.

minimum wage in BC in 1995 was $6.50. so just to keep it simple, thats equivalent to ~61,500 hrs worked to earn the avg value of a house.

minimum wage today is $16.75. so ~140,300 hrs worked to earn the value of an average home. 2.3x the amount of hours you wouldve needed in 1995. i already knew this. but doing the math makes me even more upset

#im also being pretty generous cos that 400k avg held until like 2005 when min wage was 8 bucks #and that comes out to 50k hrs #not to mention the insane increases in grocery and rent costs #obviously that cant be factored into my simple calc here #but i imagine an average renter in 1995 could put a lot more away in savings than someone in 2023

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