#apparently may is mental health awareness month

[sleeplesslionheart]

The Haunting of Bly Manor as Allegory: Self-Sacrifice, Grief, and Queer Representation

As always, I am extremely late with my fandom infatuations—this time, I’m about three years late getting smitten with Dani and Jamie from The Haunting of Bly Manor.

Because of my lateness, I’ll confess from the start that I’m largely unfamiliar with the fandom’s output: whether fanfiction, interpretations, analyses, discourse, what have you. I’ve dabbled around a bit, but haven’t seen anything near the extent of the discussions that may or may not have happened in the wake of the show’s release, so I apologize if I’m re-treading already well-trod ground or otherwise making observations that’ve already been made. Even so, I’m completely stuck on Dani/Jamie right now and have some thoughts that I want to compose and work through.

This analysis concerns the show’s concluding episode in particular, so please be aware that it contains heavy, detailed spoilers for the ending, as well as the show in its entirety. Additionally, as a major trigger warning: this essay contains explicit references to suicide and suicidal ideation, so please tread cautiously. (These are triggers for me, and I did, in fact, manage to trigger myself while writing this—but this was also very therapeutic to write, so those triggering moments wound up also being some healing opportunities for me. But definitely take care of yourself while reading this, okay?).

After finishing Bly and necessarily being destroyed by the ending, staying up until 2:00 a.m. crying, re-watching scenes on Youtube, so on and so forth, I came away from the show (as others have before me) feeling like its ending functioned fairly well as an allegory for loving and being in a romantic partnership with someone who suffers from severe mental illness, grief, and trauma.

Without going too deeply into my own personal backstory, I want to provide some opening context, which I think will help to show why this interpretation matters to me and how I’m making sense of it.

Like many of Bly’s characters, I’ve experienced catastrophic grief and loss in my own life. A few years ago, my brother died in some horrific circumstances (which you can probably guess at if you read between the lines here), leaving me traumatized and with severe problems with my mental health. When it happened, I was engaged to a man (it was back when I thought I was straight (lol), so I’ve also found Dani’s comphet backstory to be incredibly relatable…but more on this later) who quickly tired of my grieving. Just a few months after my brother’s death, my then-fiancé started saying things like “I wish you’d just go back to normal, the way you were” and “I’ve gotten back on-track and am just waiting for you to get back on-track with me,” apparently without any understanding that my old “normal” was completely gone and was never coming back. He saw my panic attacks as threatening and unreasonable, often resorting to yelling at me to stop instead of trying to comfort me. He complained that he felt like I hadn’t reciprocated the care that he’d provided me in the immediate aftermath of my brother’s loss, and that he needed me to set aside my grief (and “heal from it”) so that he could be the center of my attention. Although this was not the sole cause, all of it laid the groundwork for our eventual breakup. It was as though my trauma and mourning had ruined the innocent happiness of his own life, and he didn’t want to deal with it anymore.

Given this, I was powerfully struck by the ways that Jamie handles Dani’s trauma: accepting and supporting her, never shaming her or diminishing her pain.

Early in the show—in their first true interaction with one another, in fact—Jamie finds Dani in the throes of a panic attack. She responds to this with no judgment; instead, she validates Dani’s experiences. To put Dani at ease, she first jokes about her own “endless well of deep, inconsolable tears,” before then offering more serious words of encouragement about how well Dani is dealing with the circumstances at Bly. Later, when Dani confesses to seeing apparitions of Peter and Edmund, Jamie doesn’t pathologize this, doubt it, or demean it, but accepts it with a sincere question about whether Dani’s ex-fiancé is with them at that moment—followed by another effort to comfort Dani with some joking (this time, a light-hearted threat at Edmund to back off) and more affirmations of Dani’s strength in the face of it all.

All of this isn’t to say, however, that Dani’s grief-driven behaviors don’t also hurt Jamie (or, more generally, that grieving folks don’t also do things that hurt their loved ones). When Dani recoils from their first kiss because of another guilt-inspired vision of Eddie, Jamie is clearly hurt and disappointed; still, Jamie doesn’t hold this against Dani, as she instead tries to take responsibility for it herself. A week later, though, Jamie strongly indicates that she needed that time to be alone in the aftermath and that she is wary that Dani’s pattern of withdrawing from her every time they start to get closer will continue to happen. Nonetheless, it’s important to note that this contributes to Dani’s recognition that she’s been allowing her guilt about Eddie’s death to become all-consuming, preventing her from acting on her own desires to be with Jamie. That recognition, in turn, leads Dani to decide to move through her grief and beyond her guilt. Once she’s alone later in the evening after that first kiss, Dani casts Eddie’s glasses into the bonfire’s lingering embers; she faces off with his specter for a final time, and after burning away his shadow, her visions of him finally cease. When she and Jamie reunite during their 6:00 a.m. terrible coffee visit, Dani acknowledges that the way that she and Jamie left things was “wrong,” and she actively tries to take steps to “do something right” by inviting Jamie out for a drink at the village pub…which, of course, just so happens to be right below Jamie’s flat. (Victoria Pedretti’s expressions in that scene are so good).

Before we continue, though, let’s pause here a moment to consider some crucial factors in all of this. First, there is a significant difference between “moving through one’s grief” and simply discarding it…or being pressured by someone else to discard it. Second, there is also a significant difference between “moving through one’s grief” and allowing one’s grief to become all-consuming. Keep these distinctions in mind as we go on.

Ultimately, the resolution of the show’s core supernatural conflict involves Dani inviting Viola’s ghost to inhabit her, which Viola accepts. This frees the other spirits who have been caught in Bly Manor’s “gravity well,” even as it dooms Dani to eventually be overtaken by Viola and her rage. Jamie, however, offers to stay with Dani while she waits for this “beast in the jungle” to claim her. The show’s final episode shows the two of them going on to forge a life together, opening a flower shop in a cute town in Vermont, enjoying years of domestic bliss, and later getting married (in what capacities they can—more on this soon), all while remaining acutely aware of the inevitability of Dani’s demise.

The allegorical potentials of this concluding narrative scenario are fairly flexible. It is possible, for instance, to interpret Dani’s “beast in the jungle” as chronic (and/or terminal) illness—in particular, there’re some harrowing readings that we could do in relation to degenerative neurological diseases associated with aging (e.g. dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, progressive supranuclear palsy, etc.), especially if we put the final episode into conversation with the show’s earlier subplot about the death of Owen’s mother, its recurring themes of memory loss as a form of death (or, even, as something worse than death), and Jamie’s resonant remarks that she would rather be “put out of her misery” than let herself be “worn away a little bit every day.” For the purposes of this analysis, though, I’m primarily concerned with interpreting Viola’s lurking presence in Dani’s psyche as a stand-in for severe grief, trauma, and mental illness. …Because, even as we may “move through” grief and trauma, and even as we may work to heal from them, they never just go away completely—they’re always lurking around, waiting to resurface. (In fact, the final minutes of the last episode feature a conversation between older Jamie and Flora about contending with this inevitable recurrence of grief). Therapy can give us tools to negotiate and live with them, of course; but that doesn’t mean that they’re not still present in our lives. The tools that therapy provides are meant to help us manage those inevitable resurfacings in healthy ways. But they are not meant to return us to some pre-grief or pre-trauma state of “normality” or to make them magically dissipate into the ether, never to return. And, even with plenty of therapy and with healthy coping mechanisms, we can still experience significant mental health issues in the wake of catastrophic grief, loss, and trauma; therapy doesn’t totally preclude that possibility.

In light of my own experiences with personal tragedy, crumbling mental health, and the dissolution of a romantic partnership with someone who couldn’t accept the presence of grief in my life, I was immediately enamored with the ways that Jamie approaches the enduring aftereffects of Dani’s trauma during the show’s final episode. Jamie never once pressures Dani to just be “normal.” She never once issues any judgment about what Dani is experiencing. At those times when Dani’s grief and trauma do resurface—when the beast in the jungle catches up with her—Jamie is there to console her, often with the strategies that have always worked in their relationship: gentle, playful ribbing and words of affirmation. There are instances in which Dani doesn’t emote joyfulness during events that we might otherwise expect her to—consider, for instance, how somber Dani appears in the proposal scene, in contrast to Jamie’s smiles and laughter. (In the year after my brother’s death, my ex-fiancé and his family would observe that I seemed gloomy in situations that they thought should be fun and exciting. “Then why aren’t you smiling?” they’d ask, even when I tried to assure them that I was having a good time, but just couldn’t completely feel that or express it in the ways that I might’ve in the past). Dani even comments on an inability to feel that is all too reminiscent of the blunting of emotions that can happen in the wake of acute trauma: “It’s like I see you in front of me and I feel you touching me, and every day we’re living our lives, and I’m aware of that. But it’s like I don’t feel it all the way.” But throughout all of this (and in contrast to my own experiences with my ex), Jamie attempts to ground Dani without ever invalidating what she’s experiencing. When Dani tells her that she can’t feel, Jamie assures her, “If you can’t feel anything, then I’ll feel everything for the both of us.”

A few days after I finished the show for the first time, I gushed to a friend about how taken I was with the whole thing. Jamie was just so…not what I had experienced in my own life. I loved witnessing a representation of such a supportive and understanding partner, especially within the context of a sapphic romance. After breaking up with my own ex-fiancé, I’ve since come to terms with my sexuality and am still processing through the roles that compulsory heterosexuality and internalized homophobia have played in my life; so Dani and Jamie’s relationship has been incredibly meaningful for me to see for so, so many reasons.

“I’m glad you found the show so relatable,” my friend told me. “But,” she cautioned, “don’t lose sight of what Dani does in that relationship.” Then, she pointed out something that I hadn’t considered at all. Although Jamie may model the possibilities of a supportive partnership, Dani’s tragic death espouses a very different and very troubling perspective: the poisonous belief that I’m inevitably going to hurt my partner with my grief and trauma, so I need to leave them before I can inflict that harm on them.

Indeed, this is a deeply engrained belief that I hold about myself. While I harbor a great deal of anger at my ex-fiancé for how he treated me, there’s also still a part of me that sincerely believes that I nearly ruined his and his family’s lives by bringing such immense devastation and darkness into it. On my bad days (which are many), I have strong convictions about this in relation to my future romantic prospects as well. How could anyone ever want to be with me? I wonder. And even if someone eventually does try to be with me, all I’ll do is ruin her life with all my trauma and sadness. I shouldn’t even want to be with anyone, because I don’t want to hurt someone else. I don’t want someone else to deal with what I’ve had to deal with. I even think about this, too, with my friends. Since my brother’s death and my breakup, I’ve gone through even more trauma, pain, grief, and loss, such that now I continue to struggle enormously with issues like anhedonia, emotional fragility, and social anxiety. I worry, consequently, that I’m just a burden on my friends. That I’m too hard to be around. That being around me, with all of my pain and perpetual misfortune, just causes my friends pain, too. That they’re better off not having to deal with me at all. I could spare them all, I think, by just letting them go, by not bothering them anymore.

I suspect that this is why I didn’t notice any issues with Dani’s behavior at the end of Bly Manor at first. Well…that and the fact that the reality of the show’s conclusion is immensely triggering for me. Probably, my attention just kind of slid past the truth of it in favor of indulging in the catharsis of a sad gay romance.

But after my friend observed this issue, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I realized, then, that I hadn’t extended the allegory out to its necessary conclusion…which is that Dani has, in effect, committed suicide in order to—or so she believes, at least—protect Jamie from her. This is the case regardless of whether we keep Viola’s ghost in the mix as an actual, tangible, existing threat within the show’s diegesis or as a figurative symbol of the ways that other forces can “haunt” us to the point of our own self-destruction. If the former, then Dani’s suicide (or the more gentle and elusive description that I’ve seen: her act of “giving herself to the lake”) is to prevent Viola’s ghost from ever harming Jamie. But if the latter, if we continue doing the work of allegorical readings, then it’s possible to interpret Bly’s conclusion as the tragedy of Dani ultimately succumbing to her mental illness and suicidal ideation.

The problems with this allegory’s import really start cropping up, however, when we consider the ways that the show valorizes Dani’s actions as an expression of ultimate, self-sacrificing love—a valorization that Bly accomplishes, in particular, through its sustained contrasting of love and possession.

The Implications of Idealizing Self-Sacrifice as True Love

During a pivotal conversation in one of the show’s early episodes, Dani and Jamie discuss the “wrong kind of love” that existed between Rebecca Jessel and Peter Quint. Jamie remarks on how she “understands why so many people mix up love and possession,” thereby characterizing Rebecca and Peter’s romance as a matter of possession—as well as hinting, perhaps, that Jamie herself has had experiences with this in her own past. After considering for a moment, Dani agrees: “People do, don’t they? Mix up love and possession. […] I don’t think that should be possible. I mean, they’re opposites, really, love and ownership.” We can already tell from this scene that Dani and Jamie are, themselves, heading towards a burgeoning romance—and that this contrast between love and possession (and their self-awareness of it) is going to become a defining feature of that romance.

Indeed, the show takes great pains to emphasize the genuine love that exists between Dani and Jamie against the damaging drive for possession enacted by characters like Peter (who consistently manipulates Rebecca and kills her to keep her ghost with him) and Viola (who has killed numerous people and trapped their souls at Bly over the centuries in a long since forgotten effort to reclaim her life with her husband and daughter from Perdita, her murderously jealous sister). These contrasts take multiple forms and emerge from multiple angles, all to establish that Dani and Jamie’s love is uniquely safe, caring, healing, mutually supportive, and built on a foundation of prevailing concern for the other’s wellbeing. Some of these contrasts are subtle and understated. Consider, for instance, how Hannah observes that Rebecca looks like she hasn’t slept in days because of the turmoil of her entanglements with Peter, whereas Jamie’s narration describes how Dani gets the best sleep of her life during the first night that she and Jamie spend together. Note, too, the editing work in Episode 6 that fades in and out between the memories of the destructive ramifications of Henry and Charlotte’s affair and the scenes of tender progression in Dani and Jamie’s romance. Other contrasts, though, are far more overt. Of course, one of the most blatant examples (and most pertinent to this analysis) is the very fact that the ghosts of Viola, Peter, and Rebecca are striving to reclaim the people they love and the lives that they’ve lost by literally possessing the bodies and existences of the living.

The role of consent is an important factor in these ghostly possessions and serves as a further contrast with Dani and Jamie’s relationship. Peter and Rebecca frequently possess Miles and Flora without their consent—at times, even, when the children explicitly tell them to stop or, at the very least, to provide them with warnings beforehand. While inhabiting the children, Peter and Rebecca go on to harm them and put them at risk (e.g. Peter smokes cigarettes while in Miles’s body; Rebecca leaves Flora alone and unconscious on the grounds outside the manor) and to commit acts of violence against others (e.g. Peter pushes Hannah into the well, killing her; Peter and Rebecca together attack Dani and restrain her). The “It’s you, it’s me, it’s us,” conceit—with which living people can invite Bly’s ghosts to possess them, the mechanism by which Dani breaks the curse of Bly’s gravity well—is a case of dubious consent at best and abusive, violent control at worst. (“I didn’t agree,” Rebecca says after Peter leaves her body, releasing his “invited” possession of her at the very moment that the lake’s waters start to fill her lungs).

Against these selfish possessions and wrong kinds of love, Jamie and Dani’s love is defined by their selfless refusal to possess one another. A key characteristic of their courtship involves them expressing vulnerability in ways that invite the other to make their own decisions about whether to accept and how to proceed (or not proceed). As we discussed earlier, Dani and Jamie’s first kiss happens after Dani opens up about her guilt surrounding her ex-fiancé’s death. Pausing that kiss, Jamie checks, “You sure?” and only continues after Dani answers with a spoken yes. (Let’s also take this moment to appreciate Amelia Eve’s excellent, whispered “Thank fuck,” that isn’t included in Netflix’s subtitles). Even so, Dani frantically breaks away from her just moments later. But Jamie accepts this and doesn’t push Dani to continue, believing, in fact, that Dani has withdrawn precisely because Jamie has pushed too much already. A week later, Dani takes the initiative to advance their budding romance by inviting Jamie out for a drink—which Jamie accepts by, instead, taking Dani to see her blooming moonflowers that very evening. There, in her own moment of vulnerability, Jamie shares her heart-wrenching and tumultuous backstory with Dani in order to “skip to the end” and spare Dani the effort of getting to know her. By openly sharing these difficult details about herself, Jamie evidently intends to provide Dani with information that would help her decide for herself whether she wants to continue their relationship or not.

Their shared refusal to possess reaches its ultimate culmination in that moment, all those years later, when Dani discovers just how close she’s come to strangling Jamie—and then leaves their home to travel all the way back to Bly and drown herself in the lake because she could “not risk her most important thing, her most important person.” Upon waking to find that Dani has left, Jamie immediately sets off to follow her back to Bly. And in an absolutely heartbreaking, beautiful scene, we see Jamie attempting the “you, me, us,” invitation, desperate for Dani to possess her, for Dani to take Jamie with her. (Y’all, I know I’m critiquing this scene right now, but I also fuckin’ love it, okay? Ugh. The sight of Jamie screaming into the water and helplessly grasping for Dani is gonna stay with me forever. brb while I go cry about it again). Dani, of course, refuses this plea. Because “Dani wouldn’t. Dani would never.” Further emphasizing the nobility of Dani’s actions, Jamie’s narration also reveals that Dani’s self-sacrificial death has not only spared Jamie alone, but has also enabled Dani to take the place of the Lady of the Lake and thereby ensure that no one else can be taken and possessed by Viola’s gravity well ever again.

And so we have the show’s ennoblement of Dani’s magnanimous self-sacrifice. By inviting Viola to possess her, drowning herself to keep from harming Jamie, and then refusing to possess Jamie or anyone else, Dani has effectively saved everyone: the children, the restive souls that have been trapped at Bly, anyone else who may ever come to Bly in the future, and the woman she loves most. Dani has also, then, broken the perpetuation of Bly’s cycles of possession and trauma with her selfless expression of love for Jamie.

The unfortunate effect of all of this is that, quite without meaning to (I think? I hope—), The Haunting of Bly Manor ends up stumbling headlong into a validation of suicide as a selfless act of true love, as a force of protection and salvation.

So, before we proceed, I just want to take this moment to say—definitively, emphatically, as someone who has survived and experienced firsthand the ineffably catastrophic consequences of suicide—that suicide is nothing remotely resembling a selfless “refusal to possess” or an act of love. I’m not going to harp extensively on this, though, because I’d rather not trigger myself for a second time (so far, lol) while writing this essay. Just take my fuckin’ word for it. And before anybody tries to hit me with some excuse like “But Squall, it isn’t that the show is valorizing suicide, it’s that Dani is literally protecting Jamie from Viola,” please consider that I’ve already discussed how the show’s depiction of this lent itself to my own noxious beliefs that “all I do is harm other people with my grief, so maybe I should stop talking to my friends so that they don’t have to deal with me anymore.” Please consider what these narrative details and their allegorical import might tell people who are struggling with their mental health—even if not with suicidal ideation, then with the notion that they should self-sacrificially remove themselves from relationships for the sake of sparing loved ones from (assumed) harm.

Okay, that said, now let’s proceed…‘cause I’ve got even more to say, ‘cause the more I mulled over these details, the more I also came to realize that Dani’s self-sacrificial death in Bly’s conclusion also has the unfortunate effect of undermining some of its other (attempted) themes and its queer representation.

What Bly Manor Tries (and Fails) to Say about Grief and Acceptance

Let’s start by jumping back to a theme we’ve already addressed briefly: moving through one’s grief.

The Haunting of Bly Manor does, in fact, have a lot to say about this. Or…it wants to, more like. On the whole, it seems like it’s trying really hard to give us a cautionary tale about the destructive effects of unprocessed grief and the misplaced guilt that we can wind up carrying around when someone we love dies. The show spends a whole lot of time preaching about how important it is that we learn to accept our losses without allowing them to totally consume us—or without lingering around in denial about them (gettin’ some Kübler-Ross in here, y’all). Sadly, though, it does kind of a half-assed job of it…despite the fact that this is a major recurring theme and a component of the characterizations and storylines of, like, most of its characters. In fact, this fundamentally Kübler-Rossian understanding of what it means to move through grief and to accept loss and mortality appears to be the show’s guiding framework. During his rehearsal dinner speech in the first episode, Owen proclaims that, “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them,” with such eerie resonance—as the camera stays set on Jamie’s unwavering gaze—that we know that what we’re about to experience is a story about accepting the inevitable losses of the people we love.

Bly Manor is chock full of characters who’re stuck in earlier stages of grief but aren’t really moving along to reach that acceptance stage. I mean, the whole cause of the main supernatural haunting is that Viola so ferociously refuses to accept her death and move on from her rage (brought about by Perdita’s resentment) that she spends centuries strangling whoever she comes across, which then effectively traps them there with her. And the other antagonistic ghostly forces, Rebecca and Peter, also obviously suck at accepting their own deaths, given that they actually believe that possessing two children is a perfectly fine (and splendid) way for them to grasp at some semblance of life again. (Actually…the more that I’ve thought about this, the more that I think each of the pre-acceptance stages of grief in Kübler-Ross’s model may even have a corresponding character to represent it: Hannah is denial; Viola is anger; Peter and Rebecca are bargaining; Henry is depression. Just a little something to chew on).

But let’s talk more at-length about this theme in relation to two characters we haven’t focused on yet: Hannah and Henry. For Hannah, this theme shows up in her struggles to accept that her husband, Sam, has left her (Charlotte wryly burns candles in the chapel as though marking his passing, while Hannah seems to be holding out hope that he might return) and in her persistent denial that Peter-as-Miles has killed her. As a ghost, she determinedly continues going about her daily life and chores even as she’s progressively losing her grip on reality. Henry, meanwhile, won’t issue official notifications of Dominic’s death and continues to collect his mail because doing otherwise would mean admitting to the true finality of Dominic’s loss. At the same time, he is so, completely consumed by his guilt about the role that he believes he played in Charlotte and Dominic’s deaths that he’s haunting himself with an evil alter-ego. His overriding guilt and despair also result in his refusal to be more present in Miles and Flora’s lives—even with the knowledge that Flora is actually his daughter.

In the end, both Hannah and Henry reach some critical moments of acceptance. But, honestly, the show doesn’t do a great job of bringing home this theme of move through your grief with either of them…or with anybody else, really. Peter basically winds up bullying Hannah into recognizing that her broken body is still at the bottom of the well—and then she accepts her own death right in time to make a completely abortive attempt at rescuing Dani and Flora. Henry finally has a preternatural Bad Feeling about things (something about a phone being disconnected? whose phone? Bly’s phone? his phone? I don’t understand), snaps to attention, and rushes to Bly right in time to make an equally abortive rescue attempt that leaves him incapacitated so that his not-quite-ghost can hang out with Hannah long enough to find out that she’s dead. But at least he decides to be an attentive uncle/dad to Miles and Flora after that, I guess. Otherwise, Hannah and Henry get handwaved away pretty quickly before we can really witness what their acceptance means for them in any meaningful detail. (I blame this on some sloppy writing and the way-too-long, all-about-Viola eighth episode. And, on that note, what about the “acceptances” of Rebecca, Peter, and Viola there at the end? Rebecca does get an interesting moment of acceptance—of a sort—with her offer to possess Flora in order to experience Flora’s imminent drowning for her, thereby sparing the child by tucking her in a happy memory. Peter just…disappears at the end with some way-too-late words of apology. Viola’s “acceptance,” however, is tricky…What she accepts is Dani’s invitation to inhabit her. More on this later).

Hannah and Henry’s stories appear to be part of the show’s efforts to warn us about the ways that unprocessed, all-consuming grief can cause us to miss opportunities to have meaningful relationships with others. Hannah doesn’t just miss her chance to be with Owen because…well, she’s dead, but also because of her unwillingness to move on from Sam beforehand. Her denial about her own death, in turn, prevents her from taking the opportunity as a ghost to tell Owen that she loves him. Henry, at least, does figure out that he’s about to lose his chance to be a caring parental figure to his daughter and nephew—but just barely. It takes the near-deaths of him and the children to finally prompt that realization.

Of the cast, Dani gets the most thorough and intentional development of this move through your grief theme. And, importantly, she learns this lesson in time to cultivate a meaningful relationship that she could’ve easily missed out on otherwise. As we’ve already discussed, a critical part of Dani’s character arc involves her realization that she has to directly confront Edmund’s death and start absolving herself of her guilt in order to open up the possibility of a romantic relationship with Jamie. In Episode 4, Jamie’s narration suggests that Dani has had a habit of putting off such difficult processes (whether in regards to moving through her grief, breaking off her engagement to Edmund, or coming to terms with her sexuality), as she’s been constantly deferring to “another night, another time for years and years.” Indeed, the show’s early episodes are largely devoted to showing the consequences of Dani’s deferrals and avoidances. From the very beginning, we see just how intrusively Dani’s unresolved guilt is impacting her daily life and functioning. She covers up mirrors to try to prevent herself from encountering Edmund’s haunting visage, yet still spots him in the reflections of windows and polished surfaces. Panic attacks seem to be regular occurrences for her, sparked by reminders of him. And all of this only gets worse and more disruptive as Dani starts acting on her attraction to Jamie.

It's only after Dani decides to begin moving through her grief and guilt that she’s able to start becoming emotionally and physically intimate with Jamie. And the major turning point for this comes during a scene that features a direct, explicit discussion of the importance of accepting (and even embracing) mortality.

That’s right—it’s time to talk about the moonflower scene.

In a very “I am extremely fed up with people not being able to deal with my traumatic past, so I’m going to tell you about all of the shit that I’ve been through so that you can go ahead and decide whether you want to bolt right now instead of just dropping me later on” move (which…legit, Jamie—I feel that), Jamie sits Dani down at her moonflower patch to give her the full rundown of her own personal backstory and worldview. Her monologue evinces both a profound cynicism and a profound valuation of human life…all of which is also suggestive, to me at least, of a traumatized person who at once desperately wishes for intimate connection, but who’s also been burned way too many times (something with which I am wholly unfamiliar, lol). She characterizes people as “exhaustive effort with very little to show for it,” only to go on to wax poetic about how human mortality is as beautiful as the ephemeral buds of a moonflower. This is, in essence, Jamie’s sorta convoluted way of articulating that whole “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them” idea.

After detailing her own past, Jamie shifts gears to suggest that she believes that cultivating a relationship with Dani—like the devoted work of growing a tropical, transient Ipomoea alba in England—might be worth the effort. And as part of this cultivation work, Jamie then acknowledges Dani’s struggles with her guilt, while also firmly encouraging her to move through it by accepting the beauty of mortality:  

“I know you’re carrying this guilt around, but I also know that you don’t decide who lives and who doesn’t. I’m sorry Dani, but you don’t. Humans are organic. It’s a fact. We’re meant to die. It’s natural…beautiful. […] We leave more life behind to take our place. Like this moonflower. It’s where all its beauty lies, you know. In the mortality of the thing.”

After that, Jamie and Dani are finally able to make out unimpeded.

Frustratingly, though, Jamie’s own dealings with grief, loss, and trauma remain terribly understated throughout the show. Her monologue in the moonflower scene is really the most insight that we ever get. Jamie consistently comes off as better equipped to contend with life’s hardships than many of Bly’s other characters; and she is, in fact, the sole member of the cast who is confirmed to have ever had any sort of professional therapy. She regularly demonstrates a remarkable sense of empathy and emotional awareness, able to pick up on others’ needs and then support them accordingly, though often in gruff, tough-love forms. Further, there are numerous scenes in which we see Jamie bestowing incisive guidance for handling difficult situations: the moonflower scene, her advice to Rebecca about contacting Henry after Peter’s disappearance, and her suggestion to Dani that Flora needs to see a psychologist, to name just a few. As such, Jamie appears to have—or, at least, projects—a sort of unflappable groundedness that sets her apart from everyone else in the show.

Bly only suggests that Jamie’s struggles run far deeper than she lets on. There are a few times that we witness quick-tempered outbursts (usually provoked by Miles) and hints of bottled-up rage. Lest we forget, although it was Flora who first found Rebecca’s dead body floating in the water, it was Jamie who then found them both immediately thereafter. We see this happen, but we never learn anything about the impact that this must have had on her. Indeed, Jamie’s exposure to the layered, compounding grief at Bly has no doubt inflicted a great deal of pain on her, suggested by details like her memorialization of Charlotte and Dominic during the bonfire scene. If we look past her flippancy, there must be more than a few grains of truth to that endless well of deep, inconsolable tears—but Jamie never actually shares what they might be. Moreover, although the moonflower scene reveals the complex traumas of her past, we never get any follow-up or elaboration about those details or Dani’s observation of the scar on her shoulder. For the most part, Jamie’s grief goes unspoken.

There’s a case to be made that these omissions are a byproduct of narrator Jamie decentering herself in a story whose primary focus is Dani. Narrator Jamie even claims that the story she’s telling “isn’t really my story. It belongs to someone I knew” (yes, it’s a diversionary tactic to keep us from learning her identity too soon—but she also means it). And in plenty of respects, the telling of the story is, itself, Jamie’s extended expression of her grief. By engaging in this act of oral storytelling to share Dani’s sacrifice with others—especially with those who would have otherwise forgotten—Jamie is performing an important ritual of mourning her wife. Still, it’s for exactly these reasons that I think it would’ve been valuable for the show to include more about the impacts that grief, loss, and trauma had on Jamie prior to Dani’s death. Jamie’s underdevelopment on this front feels more like a disappointing oversight of the show’s writing than her narrator self’s intentional, careful withholding of information. Additionally, I think that Bly leaves Jamie’s grieving on an…odd note (though, yes, I know I’m just a curmudgeonly outlier here). Those saccharine final moments of Jamie filling up the bathtub and sleeping on a chair so that she can face the cracked doorway are a little too heavy-handedly tear-jerking for my liking. And while this, too, may be a ritual of mourning after the undoubtedly taxing effort of telling Dani’s story, it may also suggest that Jamie is demurring her own acceptance of Dani’s death. Is the hand on her shoulder really Dani’s ghost? Or is it Jamie’s own hopeful fabrication that her wife’s spirit is watching over her? (Or—to counter my own point here and suggest a different alternative—could this latter idea (i.e. the imagining of Dani’s ghost) also be another valid manner of “accepting” a loss by preserving a loved one’s presence? “Dead doesn’t mean gone,” after all. …Anyway, maybe I would be more charitable to this scene if not for the hokey, totally out-of-place song. Coulda done without that, seriously).

But let’s jump back to the moonflower scene. For Dani, this marks an important moment in the progression of her own movement through grief. In combination, her newfound readiness to contend with her guilt and her eagerness to grow closer to Jamie enable Dani to find a sense of peace that she hasn’t experienced since Eddie’s death…or maybe ever, really (hang on to this thought for this essay’s final section, too). When she and Jamie sleep together for the first time, not only does Dani actually sleep well, but she also wakes the next morning to do something that she hasn’t done to that point and won’t do again: she comfortably looks into a mirror. (One small qualification to this: Dani does look into her own reflection at the diner when she and Jamie are on their road trip; Viola doesn’t interfere then, but whether this is actually a comfortable moment is questionable). Then, shifting her gaze away from her own reflection, she sees Jamie still sleeping soundly in her bed—and smiles. It’s a fleeting moment of peace. Immediately after that, she spots Flora out the window, which throws everything back into accumulating turmoil. But that moment of peace, however fleeting, is still a powerful one.

However, Bly teases this narrative about the possibilities of finding healing in the wake of traumatic loss—especially through the cultivation of meaningful and supportive relationships with others—only to then totally pull that rug out from under Dani in the final episode.

During that final episode, we see that Dani’s shared life with Jamie has supported her in coming to terms with Viola’s lurking presence, such that “at long last, deep within the au pair’s heart, there was peace. And that peace held for years, which is more than some of us ever get.” But it’s at the exact moment that that line of narration occurs that we then begin to witness Dani’s steady, inexorable decline. Sure, we could say that Dani “accepts” Viola’s intrusions and the unavoidable eventuality that the ghost will seize control of her. But this isn’t a healthy acceptance or even a depiction of the fraught relationships that we can have with grief and trauma as we continue to process them throughout our lives. At all. Instead, it’s a distinctive, destructive sense of fatalism.

“I’m not even scared of her anymore,” Dani tells Jamie as the flooded bathtub spills around them. “I just stare at her and it's getting harder and harder to see me. Maybe I should just accept that. Maybe I should just accept that and go.” Remember way back at the beginning of this essay when I pointed out that there’s a significant difference between “moving through one’s grief” and allowing one’s grief to become all-consuming? Well, by the time we reach the bathtub scene, Dani’s grief and trauma have completely overtaken her. Her “acceptance” is, thus, a fatalistic, catastrophizing determination that her trauma defines her existence, such that she believes that all she has left to do is give up her life in order to protect Jamie from her. For a less ghostly (and less suicidal ideation-y) and more real-life example to illustrate what I’m getting at here: this would be like me saying “I should just accept that I’m never going to be anything other than a traumatized mess and should stop reaching out to my friends so that I don’t keep hurting them by making them deal with what a mess I am.” If I said something like this, I suspect (hope) that you would tell me that this is not a productive acceptance, but a pernicious narrative that only hurts me and the people who care about me. Sadly, though, this kind of pernicious narrative is exactly what we get out of Bly’s ending allegory.

“But Squall,” you may be thinking, “this scene is representing how people who struggle with their mental health can actually feel. This is exactly what it can be like to have severe mental illness, even for folks who have strong support systems and healthy, meaningful relationships. And there’s value in showing that.”

And if you’re thinking that, then first of all—as I have indicated already—I am aware that this is what it can be like. Very aware. And second of all, you make a fair point, but…there are ways that the show could’ve represented this without concluding that representation with a suicide that it effectively valorizes. I’ll contend with this more in the final section, where I offer a few suggestions of other ways that Bly could’ve ended instead.

I just want to be absolutely clear that I’m not saying that I think all media portrayals of mental illness need to be hopeful or wholesome or end in “positive” ways. But what I am saying is that Bly’s conclusion offers a really fuckin’ bleak outlook on grief, trauma, and mental illness, especially when we fit that ending into the framework of the show’s other (attempted) core themes, as well as Dani’s earlier character development. It’s especially bleak to see this as someone with severe mental health issues and who has also lost a loved one to suicide—and as someone who desperately hopes that my life and worldview won’t always stay so darkly colored by my trauma.

Additionally, it’s also worth pausing here to acknowledge that fatalism is, in fact, a major theme of The Beast in the Jungle, the 1903 Henry James novella on which the ninth episode is loosely based. I confess that I’ve only read about this novella, but haven’t read the story itself. However, based on my (admittedly limited) understanding of it, there appears to be a significant thematic rupture between The Beast in the Jungle and The Haunting of Bly Manor in their treatments of fatalism. In the end of the novella, its protagonist, John Marcher, comes to the realization that his fatalism has been a horrible mistake that has caused him to completely miss out on an opportunity for love that was right in front of him all along. The tragic fate to which Marcher believed that he was doomed was, in the end, his own fatalism. Dani, in contrast, never has this moment of recognition, not only because her fatalism leads to her own death, but also because the show treats her fatalism not as something that keeps her from love, but instead as leading her towards a definitive act of love.

All of this is exactly why Dani’s portrayal has become so damn concerning to me, and why I don’t believe that Bly’s allegory of “this is what it’s like to live with mental illness and/or to love (and lose) someone who is mentally ill” is somehow value-neutral—or, worse, something worth celebrating.

How Dani’s Self-Sacrifice Bears on Bly’s Queer Representation

In my dabblings around the fandom so far, I’ve seen a fair amount of deliberation about whether or not Bly Manor’s ending constitutes an example of the Bury Your Gays trope.

Honestly, though, I am super unenthused about rehashing those deliberations or splitting hairs trying to give some definitive “yes it is” or “no it isn’t” answer, so…I’m just not going to. Instead, I’m going to offer up some further observations about how Dani’s self-sacrificial death impinges on Bly’s queer representation, regardless of whether Bury Your Gays is at work here or not.

I would also like to humbly submit that the show could’ve just…not fucked around in proximity of that trope in the first place so that we wouldn’t even need to be having these conversations.

But anyway. I’m going to start this section off with a disclaimer.

Even though I’m leveling some pretty fierce critiques in this section (and across this essay), I do also want to say that I adore that The Haunting of Bly Manor and its creators gave us a narrative that centers two queer women and their romantic relationship as its driving forces and that intentionally sets out to portray the healing potentials of sapphic love as a contrast to the destructive, coercive harms found in many conventional dynamics of hegemonic heteronormativity. I don’t want to downplay that, because I’m extremely happy that this show exists, and I sincerely believe that many elements of its representation are potent and meaningful and amazing. But…I also have some reservations with this portrayal that I want to share. I critique not because I don’t love, but because I do love. I love this show a lot. I love Dani and Jamie a lot. I critique because I love and because I want more and better in future media.

So, that being said…let’s move on to talk about Dani, self-sacrifice, and compulsory heterosexuality.

Well before Dani’s ennobled death, Bly establishes self-sacrifice as a core component of her characterization. It’s hardwired into her, no doubt due to the relentless, entangled educational work of compulsory heterosexuality (comphet) and the aggressive forms of socialization that tell girls and women that their roles in life are to sacrifice themselves in order to please others and to belong to men. Indeed, Episode 4’s series of flashbacks emphasizes the interconnectedness between comphet and Dani’s beliefs that she is supposed to sacrifice herself for others’ sakes, revealing how these forces have shaped who she is and the decisions that she’s made across her life. (While we’re at it, let’s also not lose sight of the fact that Dani’s profession during this time period is one that—in American culture, at least—has come to rely on a distinctively feminized self-sacrificiality in order to function. Prior to becoming an au pair, Dani was a schoolteacher. In fact, in one of Episode 4’s flashbacks, Eddie’s mother points out that she appreciates Dani’s knack for identifying the kids that need her the most, but also reminds Dani that she needs to take care of herself…which suggests that Dani hadn’t been: “Save them all if you can, but put your own oxygen mask on first”).

In the flashback of her engagement party, Dani’s visible discomfort during Edmund’s speech clues us in that she wasn’t preparing to marry him because she genuinely wanted to, but because she felt like she was supposed to. The “childhood sweethearts” narrative bears down on the couple, celebrated by their friends and family, vaunted by cultural constructs that prize this life trajectory as a cherished, “happily ever after” ideal. Further illustrating the pressures to which Dani had been subject, the same scene shows Eddie’s mother, Judy O’Mara, presenting Dani with her own wedding dress and asking Dani to wear it when she marries Eddie. Despite Mrs. O’Mara’s assurances that Dani can say no, the hopes that she heaps onto Dani make abundantly clear that anything other than a yes would disappoint her. Later, another flashback shows Dani having that dress sized and fitted while her mother and Mrs. O’Mara look on and chatter about their own weddings and marriages. Their conversation is imbued with further hopes that Dani’s marriage to Edmund will improve on the mistakes that they made in their lives. Meanwhile, Dani’s attentiveness to the tailor who takes her measurements, compliments her body, and places a hand on her back strongly suggests that Dani is suppressing her attraction to women. Though brief, this scene is a weighty demonstration of the ways that the enclosures of heteronormativity constrain women into believing that their only option is to deny homosexual attraction, to forfeit their own desires in order to remain in relationships with men, and to prioritize the hopes and dreams and aspirations of the people around them above their own.

Dani followed this pathway—determined for her by everyone else except herself—until she couldn’t anymore.

During the flashback of their breakup, Dani explains to Eddie that she didn’t end their relationship sooner because she thought that even just having desires that didn’t match his and his family’s was selfish of her: “I should’ve said something sooner. […] I didn’t want to hurt you, or your mom, or your family. And then it was just what we were doing. […] I just thought I was being selfish, that I could just stick it out, and eventually I would feel how I was supposed to.” As happens to so many women, Dani was on the cusp of sacrificing her life for the sake of “sticking out” a marriage to a man, all because she so deeply believed that it was her duty to satisfy everyone’s expectations of her and that it was her responsibility to change her own feelings about that plight.

And Eddie’s response to this is telling. “Fuck you, Danielle,” he says. “Why are you doing this to me?”

Pay close attention to those last two words. Underline ‘em. Bold ‘em. Italicize ‘em.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

With those two words, Eddie indicates that he views Dani’s refusal to marry him as something that she is doing to him, a harm that she is committing against him. It is as though Dani is inflicting her will on him, or even that she is unjustly attackinghim by finally admitting that her desires run contrary to his own, that she doesn’t want to be his wife. And with this statement, he confirms precisely what she anticipated would happen upon giving voice to her true feelings.

What space did Edmund, his family, or Dani’s mother ever grant for Dani to have aspirations of her own that weren’t towards the preordained role of Eddie’s future wife? Let’s jump back to that engagement party. Eddie’s entire speech reveals a very longstanding assumption of his claim over her as his wife-to-be. He’d first asked Dani to marry him when they were ten years old, after he mistakenly believed that their first kiss could get Dani pregnant; Dani turned him down then, saying that they were too young. So, over the years, as they got older, Eddie continued to repeatedly ask her—until, presumably, she relented. “Now, we’re still pretty young,” he remarks as he concludes his speech, “but I think we’re old enough to know what we want.” Significantly, Eddie speaks here not just for himself, but also for Dani. Dani’s voice throughout the entire party is notably absent, as Eddie and his mother both impose their own wishes on her, assume that she wants what they want, and don’t really open any possibility for her to say otherwise. Moreover, although there’s a palpable awkwardness that accompanies Eddie’s story, the crowd at the party chuckles along as though it’s a sweet, innocent tale of lifelong love and devotion, and not an instance of a man whittling away at a woman’s resistance until she finally caved to his pursuit of her.

All of this suggests that Eddie shared in the socialized convictions of heteropatriarchy, according to which Dani’s purpose and destiny were to marry him and to make him happy. His patterns of behavior evince the unquestioned presumptions of so many men: that women exist in service to them and their wants, such that it is utterly inconceivable that women could possibly desire otherwise. As a political institution, heteropatriarchy tells men that they are entitled to women’s existences, bodies, futures. And, indeed, Eddie can’t seem to even imagine that Dani could ever want anything other than the future that he has mapped out for them. (Oh, hey look, we’ve got some love vs. possession going on here again).

For what it’s worth, I think that the show’s portrayal of compulsory heterosexuality is excellent. I love that the writers decided to tackle this. Like I mentioned at the beginning, I found all of this to be extremelyrelatable. I might even be accused of over-relating and projecting my own experiences onto my readings here, but…there were just too many resonances between Dani’s experiences and my own. Mrs. O’Mara’s advice to Dani to “put your own oxygen mask on first” is all too reminiscent of the ways that my ex’s parents would encourage me to “heal” from my brother’s loss…but not for the sake of my own wellbeing, but so that I would return to prioritizing the care of their son and existing to do whatever would make him happy. I’ll also share here that what drove me to break up with my ex-fiancé wasn’t just his unwillingness to contend with my grief, but the fact that he had decided that the best way for me to heal from my loss would be to have a baby. He insisted that I could counteract my brother’s death by “bringing new life into the world.” And he would not take no for an answer. He told me that if I wouldn’t agree to try to have children in the near future, then he wasn’t interested in continuing to stay with me. It took me months to pluck up the courage, but I finally answered this ultimatum by ending our relationship myself. Thus, like Dani, I came very close to sacrificing myself, my wants, my body, my future, and my life for the sake of doing what my fiancé and his family wanted me to do, all while painfully denying my own attraction to women. What kept me from “sticking it out” any longer was that I finally decided that I wasn’t going to sacrifice myself for a man I didn’t love (and who clearly didn’t love me) and decided, instead, to reclaim my own wants and needs away from him.

For Dani, however, the moment that she finally begins to reclaim her wants and needs away from Eddie is also the moment that he furiously jumps out of the driver’s seat and into the path of a passing truck, which leaves her to entangle those events as though his death is her fault for finally asserting herself.

Of course, the guilt that Dani feels for having “caused” Eddie’s death isn’t justa matter of breaking up with him and thereby provoking a reaction that would prove fatal—it’s also the guilt of her suppressed homosexual desire, of not desiring Eddie in the first place. In other words, internalized homophobia is an inextricable layer of the culpability that Dani feels. Internalized homophobia is also what’s haunting her. As others (such as Rowan Ellis, whose deep dive includes a solid discussion of internalized homophobia in Bly, as well as a more at-length examination of Bury Your Gays than I’m providing here) have pointed out, the show highlights this metaphorically by having Dani literally get locked into a closet with Edmund’s ghost in the very first episode. Further reinforcing this idea is the fact that these spectral visions get even worse as Dani starts to come to terms with and act on her attraction to Jamie, as though the ghost is punishing her for her desires. Across Episode 3, as Dani and Jamie begin spending more time together, Edmund’s ghost concurrently begins materializing in more shocking, visceral forms (e.g. his bleeding hand in Dani’s bed; his shadowy figure lurking behind Dani after she’s held Jamie’s hand) that exceed the reflective surfaces to which he’d previously been confined. This continues into Episode 4, where each of Eddie’s appearances follows moments of Dani’s growing closeness to Jamie. A particularly alarming instance occurs when Dani just can’t seem to pry her gaze away from a dressed-up Jamie who’s in the process of some mild undressing. Finally turning away from Jamie, Dani becomes aware of Eddie’s hands on her hips. It’s a violating reminder of his claims over her, horrifying in its invocation of men’s efforts to coerce and control women’s sexuality.

It is incredibly powerful, then, to watch Dani answer all of this by becoming more resolute and assertive in the expression of her wants and needs. The establishment of her romantic relationship with Jamie isn’t just the movement through grief and guilt that we discussed earlier; it’s also Dani’s defiance of compulsory heterosexuality and her fierce claiming of her queer existence. Even in the face of all that’s been haunting her, Dani initiates her first kiss with Jamie; and Eddie’s intrusion in that moment is only enough to temporarily dissuade her, as Dani follows this up by then asking Jamie out for a drink at the pub to “see where that takes them” (i.e. up to Jamie’s flat to bang, obviously). The peace that Dani finds after having sex with Jamie for the first time is, therefore, also the profound fulfillment of at last having her first sexual experience with a woman, of finally giving expression to this critical part of herself that she’d spent her entire life denying. Compulsory heterosexuality had dictated to Dani that she must self-sacrifice to meet the strictures of heteropatriarchy, to please everyone except herself; but in her relationship with Jamie, Dani learns that she doesn’t have to do this at all. This is only bolstered by the fact that, as we’ve talked about at length already, Jamie is very attentive to Dani’s needs and respectful of her boundaries. Jamie doesn’t want Dani to do anything other than what Dani wants to do. And so, in the cultivation of their romantic partnership, Dani thus comes to value her own wants and needs in a way that she hasn’t before.

The fact that the show nails all of this so fucking well is what makes all that comes later so goddamn frustrating.

The final episode chronicles Dani and Jamie forging a queer life together that the rest of us can only dream of, including another scene of Dani flouting homophobia and negotiating her own internal struggles so that she can be with Jamie. “I know we can’t technically get married,” she tells Jamie when she proposes to her, ���but I also don’t really care.” And with her awareness that the beast in the jungle is starting to catch up with her, Dani tells Jamie that she wants to spend whatever time she has left with her.

But then…

A few scenes later—along with a jump of a few years later, presumably—Jamie arrives home with the licenses that legally certify their civil union in the state of Vermont. It’s a monumental moment. In 2000, Vermont became the first state to introduce civil unions, which paved the way for it to later (in 2009) become the first state to pass legislation that recognized gay marriages without needing to have a court order mandating that the state extend marriage rights beyond opposite-sex couples. I appreciate that Bly’s creatorsincorporated this significant milestone in the history of American queer rights into the show. But its positioning in the show also fuckin’ sucks. Just as Jamie is announcing the legality of her and Dani’s civil union and declaring that they’ll have another marriage ceremony soon, we see water running into the hallway. This moves us into that scene with the flooded bathtub, as Jamie finds Dani staring into the water, unaware of anything else except the reflection of Viola staring back at her. Thus, it is at the exact moment when her wife proudly shares the news of this incredible achievement in the struggle for queer rights—for which queer folks have long fought and are continuing to fight to protect in the present—that Dani has completely, hopelessly resigned herself to Viola’s possession.

I want to be careful to clarify here that, in making this observation, I don’t mean to posit some sort of “Dani should have fought back against Viola” argument, which—within the context of our allegorical readings—might have the effect of damagingly suggesting that Dani should have fought harder to recover from mental illness or terminal disease. But I do mean to point out the incredibly grim implications that the juxtaposition of these events engenders, especially when we contemplate them (as we did in the previous section) within the overall frameworks of the show’s themes and Dani’s character development. After all that has come before, after we’ve watched Dani come to so boldly assert her queer desire and existence, it is devastating to see the show reduce her to such a despairing state that doesn’t even give her a chance to register that she and Jamie are now legal partners.

Why did you have to do this, Bly? Why?

Further compounding this despair, the next scene features the resumption of Dani’s self-sacrificial beliefs and behaviors, which results in her demise, and which leaves Jamie to suffer through the devastation of her wife’s death. This resumption of self-sacrifice hence demolishes all of that beautiful work of asserting Dani’s queer existence and learning that she doesn’t need to sacrifice herself that I just devoted two thousand words to describing above.

Additionally, in the end, Dani’s noble self-sacrifice also effects a safe recuperation of heteronormativity…which might add more evidence to a Bury Your Gays claim, oops.

And that is because, in the end, after we see Jamie screaming into the water and Dani forever interred at the bottom of the lake in which she drowned herself, we come to the end of Jamie’s story and return to Bly Manor’s frame narrative: Flora’s wedding.

At the start of the show, the evening of Flora and Unnamed Man’s (Wikipedia says his name is James? idk, w/e) rehearsal dinner provides the occasion and impetus for Jamie’s storytelling. Following dinner, Flora, her fiancé, and their guests gather around a fireplace and discuss a ghost story about the venue, a former convent. With a captive audience that includes her primary targets—Flora and Miles, who have forgotten what happened at Bly and, by extension, all that Dani sacrificed and that Jamie lost so that they could live their lives free of the trauma of what transpired—and with a topically relevant conversation already ongoing, Jamie interjects that she has a ghost story of her own to share…and thus, the show’s longer, secondary narrative begins.

When Jamie’s tale winds to a close at the end of the ninth episode, the show returns us to its frame, that scene in front of the cozy, crackling fire. And it is there that we learn that it is, in fact, Jamie who has been telling us this story all along.

As the other guests trickle away, Flora stays behind to talk to Jamie on her own. A critical conversation then ensues between them, which functions not only as Jamie’s shared wisdom to Flora, but also as the show’s attempt to lead viewers through what they’ve just experienced and thereby impart its core message about the secondary narrative. The frame narrative is, thus, also a direct address to the audience that tells us what we should take away from the experience. By this point, the show has thoroughly established that Jamie is a gentle-but-tough-love, knowledgeable, and trustworthy guide through the trials of accepting grief and mortality, and so it is Jamie who leaves Flora and us, the audience, with the show’s final word about how to treasure the people we love while they are still in our lives and how to grieve them if we survive beyond them. (But, by this point in this essay, we’ve also learned that Bly’s messages about grief and mortality are beautiful but also messy and unconvincing, even with this didactic ending moment).

With all of this in mind, we can (and should) ask some additional questions of the frame narrative.

One of those questions is: Why is the secondary narrative being told from/within this particular frame?

Answering this question within the show’s diegesis (by asking it of the narrator) is easy enough. Jamie is performing a memorialization of Dani’s life and sacrifice at an event where her intended audience happens to be gathered, ensuring that Miles and Flora begin to recognize what Dani did for them in a manner that maybe won’t just outright traumatize them.

Okay, sure, yeah. True. Not wrong.

But let’s interrogate this question more deeply—let’s ask it of the show itself. So, Bly Manor: Why is the secondary narrative being told from/within this particular frame?

We could also tweak this question a bit to further consider: What is the purpose of the frame? A frame narrative can function to shape audiences’ interpretations of and attitudes towards the secondary narrative. So, in this case, let’s make our line of questioning even more specific. What does the frame of Flora’s wedding do for Bly’s audiences?

Crucially, the framing scene at the fireplace provides us with a sense that we’ve returned to safety after the horror of the ghost story we’ve just experienced. To further assure us of this safety, then, Bly’s frame aims to restore a sense of normality, a sense that the threat that has provoked fear in us has been neutralized, a sense of hope that endures beyond tragedy. Indeed, as we fade from the secondary narrative and return to the frame, Jamie’s narration emphasizes how Dani’s selfless death has brought peace to Bly Manor by breaking its cycles of violence and trauma: “But she won’t be hollow or empty, and she won’t pull others to her fate. She will merely walk the grounds of Bly, harmless as a dove for all of her days, leaving the only trace of who she once was in the memory of the woman who loved her most.”

What Dani has accomplished with her self-sacrifice, then, is a longstanding, prevailing, expected staple of Western—and especially American—storytelling: redemption.

American media is rife with examples of this narrative formula (in which an individual must take selfless action—which may or may not involve self-sacrificial death—in order to redeem an imperiled community by restoring a threatened order) to an extent that is kind of impossible to overstate. Variations of this formula are everywhere, from film to television to comics to videogames to news reports. It is absolutely fundamental to our cultural understandings of what “heroism” means. And it’s been this way for, umm…a long time, largely thanks to that most foundational figure of Western myth, some guy who was crucified for everybody’s sins or something. (Well, that and the related popularization of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, but…I’m not gonna go off onto a whole rant about that right now, this essay is already too long as it is).

In Bly Manor, the threatened order is the natural process of death itself, which Viola has disrupted with a gravity well that traps souls and keeps them suspended within physical proximity of the manor. Dani’s invitation to Viola is the initial step towards salvation (although, I think it’s important to note that this is not entirely intentional on Dani’s part. Jamie’s narration indicates that Dani didn’t entirely understand what she was doing with the “It’s you, it’s me, it’s us” invitation, so self-sacrifice was not necessarily her initial goal). It nullifies the gravity well and resumes the passage of death, which liberates all of the souls that have been trapped at Bly and also produces additional opportunities for others’ atonements (e.g. Peter’s apology to Miles; Henry’s guardianship of the children). But it’s Dani’s suicide that is the ultimate completion of the redemptive task. It is only by “giving herself to the lake” that Dani is able to definitively dispel Viola’s threat and confer redemptive peace to Bly Manor.

It’s tempting to celebrate this incredibly rare instance of a queer woman in the heroic-redemptive role, given that American media overwhelmingly reserve it for straight men. But I want to strongly advise that we resist this temptation. Frankly, there’s a lot about the conventional heroic-redemptive narrative formula that sucks, and I’d rather that we work to advocate for other kinds of narratives, instead of just championing more “diversity” within this stuffy old model of heroism. Explaining what sucks about this formula is beyond the purview of this essay, though. But my next point might help to illustrate part of why it sucks (spoiler: it’s because it tends to prop up traditional, dominant structures of power and relationality).

So…What I want us to do is entertain the possibility that Dani’s redemptive self-sacrifice might serve specific purposes for straight audiences, especially in the return to the frame at the end.

Across The Haunting of Bly Manor, we’ve seen ample examples of heterosexuality gone awry. The show has repeatedly called our attention to the flaws and failings of heterosexual relationships against the carefully cultivated safety, open communication, and mutual fulfillment of a queer romance between two women. But, while queer audiences may celebrate this about this show, for straight audiences, this whole situation might just wind up producing anxiety instead—as though heterosexuality is also a threatened order within the world of Bly Manor. More generally, asking straight audiences to connect with a queer couple as the show’s main protagonists is an unaccustomed challenge with which they’re not normally tasked; thus, the show risks leaving this dominant viewer base uncomfortable, threatened, and resentful, sitting with the looming question of whether heterosexuality is, itself, redeemable.

In answer to this, Dani’s self-sacrifice provides multiple assurances to straight audiences. To begin with, her assumption of the traditional heroic-redemptive role secures audiences within the familiar confines of that narrative formula, which also then promises that Dani is acting as a protector of threatened status quos and not as another source of peril. What Bly Manor is doing here is, in effect, acknowledging that it may have challenged (and even threatened) straight audiences with its centerpiece of a queer romance—and that, likewise, queers themselves may be challenging the status quos of romantic partnerships by, for instance, demanding marriage rights and improvements in media representations—while also emphatically reassuring those audiences in the wake of that challenge that Dani and Jamie haven’t created and aren’t going to create too much disturbance with their queerness. They’re really not that threatening, Bly swears. They’re harmless as a dove. They’re wholesome. They’re respectable. They—and queer folks more generally—aren’t going to totally upend everything, really. Look, they’ll even sacrifice themselves to save everyone and redeem imperiled communities and threatened orders—even heterosexuality itself!

A critical step towards achieving this assurance is the leveling of the playing field. In order for the show to neutralize the threat of queerness for straight audiences, comfort them with a return to safety, and promise them that heterosexuality is redeemable, the queer women need to have an on-screen tragic end to their relationship just like all of the straight couples have. And so, Dani must die and Jamie must grieve.

That accomplished, the show then immediately returns to the frame, the scene at the fireplace following Flora’s rehearsal dinner.

There—after we’ve witnessed so much queer joy and queer tragedy crammed into this final episode—we see Flora and her fiancé, bride and groom, sitting together, arms linked, taking in all that Jamie has to tell them. And with this warm, idyllic image of impending matrimony between man and wife, the safety to which straight audiences return in the frame is, therefore, also the safety of a heterosexuality that can find its redemption through Dani’s self-sacrifice. Not only does Dani’s death mean that Flora can live (and go on to marry her perfectly bland, unremarkable husband, all without the trauma of what happened at Bly), but it also means that she—and, with her, straight audiences—can ultimately benefit from the lessons about true love, loss, and grieving that Dani’s self-sacrifice and Jamie’s story bestow.

And so, Bly Manor concludes with a valorization of redemptive self-sacrifice and an anodyne recuperation of heteronormativity, bequeathing Flora with the opportunities to have and to hold the experiential knowledge that Dani and Jamie have provided for her. Here, queer tragedy serves up an educational opportunity for heterosexual audiences in a challengingly “inclusive,” but otherwise essentially non-threatening manner. The ending is a gentle, non-traumatizing, yet frank lesson to heterosexual audiences in the same way that Jamie’s story is a gentle, non-traumatizing, yet frank lesson to Flora.

Did the show’s creators intentionally do all of this to set about providing such assurances to straight audiences? Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t really know—or care! But, especially in light of incidents like the recent “Suletta and Miorine’s relationship is up to interpretation” controversy following the Gundam: Witch from Mercury finale, I absolutely do not put it past media corporations and content creators to very intentionally take steps to prioritize the comfort of straight audiences against the threats of queer love. And anyway, intentional or not, all of this still has effects and implications loaded with meaning, as I have tried to account for here.

Honestly, though, I can’t quite shake the feeling that there’s some tension between Jamie, Owen, and maybe also Henry about Jamie’s decision to publicly share Dani’s story in front of Flora and Miles. Owen’s abrupt declaration that it’s getting late and that they should wrap up seems like an intervention—like he’s been as patient and understanding as he possibly could up to that point, but now, he’s finally having to put a stop to Jamie’s deviance. I can’t help but read the meaningful stares that pass between them at both ends of the frame as a complex mixture of compassion and fraught disagreement (and I wish that the show had done more with this). The scene where Dani and Jamie visit Owen at his restaurant seems to set up the potential for this unspoken dispute. By their expressions and mannerisms (Dani’s stony stare; the protective way that Jamie holds her as her own gaze is locked on Dani), it’s clear that Dani and Jamie are aghast that Flora and Miles have forgotten what happened and that Owen believes that they should just be able to live their lives without that knowledge. And it’s also clear, by her very telling of Dani’s story, that Jamie disagrees with him. Maybe I’m over-imposing my own attitudes here, but I’m left with the impression that Jamie resents the coddling of Miles and Flora just like I’m resenting the coddling of straight audiences…that Jamie resents that she and Dani have had to give up everything so that Miles and Flora can continue living their privileged lives just like I’m resenting the exploitation of queer tragedy for the sake preserving straight innocence. (As Jamie says to Hannah when Dani puts the children to work in the garden: “You can’t give them a pass forever.” Disclaimer: I’m not saying that I want Miles and Flora to be traumatized, but I am saying that I agree with Jamie, because hiding traumatic shit is not how to resolve inter-generational trauma. Anyway—).

Also, I don’t know about y’all, but I find Flora and Jamie’s concluding conversation to be super cringe. Maybe it’s because I’m gay and just have way too much firsthand experience with this sort of thing from my own comphet past, but Flora’s whole “I just keep thinking about that silly, gorgeous, insane man I’m marrying tomorrow. I love him. More than I ever thought I could love anybody. And the crazy thing is, he loves me the same exact amount,” spiel just absolutely screams “woman who is having to do all of the emotional work in her relationship with an absolutely dull, mediocre, emotionally illiterate man and is desperately trying to convince herself that he does, in fact, love her as much as she (believes) that she loves him.”

I feel like this is a parody of straightness?? Is this actually sincere??

This is what Dani gave up her life to redeem??

To me, this is just more bleak shit that Bly leaves us with. It is so painful to watch.

Bless.

Okay, so I know that I said that I wasn’t going to offer a definitive yes or no about whether Bly commits Bury Your Gays with Dani’s death, but…after writing all of this out, I’m honestly kinda leaning towards a yes.

But I’m already anticipating that folks are gonna push back against me on this. So I just want to humbly submit, again, that Bly could have just not done this. It could have just not portrayed Dani’s death at all.

To really drive this point home, then, I’m going to conclude this essay by suggesting just a few ways that The Haunting of Bly Manor could have ended without Dani’s self-sacrificial death—or without depicting her death on-screen at all.

Bly Manor Could Have Ended Differently

Mike Flanagan—creator, director, writer, editor, executive producer, showrunner, etc. of The Haunting of Bly Manor—has stated that he believes that the show’s ending is a happy one.

I, on the other hand, believe that Bly’s ending is…not. In my view, the way that the ending treats Dani is unnecessarily cruel and exploitative. “Happy ending”—really? If I let myself be cynical about it (which I do), I honestly think that Dani’s death is a pretty damn transparent effort to squeeze out some tears with a sloppy, mawkish, feel-good veneer slapped over it. And if we peel back that veneer and look under it, what we find is quite bleak.

To be fair, for a psychological horror show that’s so centrally about grief and trauma, Bly Manor does seem to profess an incredibly strong sense of hopefulness. Underlying the entirety of the show is a profound faith in all the good and beauty that can come from human connection, however fleeting our lives may be—and even if we make a ton of dumb, awful mistakes along the way. If I’m being less cynical about it, I do also think that the show’s ending strives to demonstrate a peak expression of this conviction. But—at least in my opinion—it doesn’t succeed in this goal. In my writing of this essay, I’ve come to believe that the show instead ends in a state of despair that is at odds with what it appears to want to achieve.

So, in this final section, I’m going to offer up a few possibilities for ways that the show could have ended that maybe wouldn’t have so thoroughly undermined its own attempted messages.

Now, if I were actually going to fix the ending of The Haunting of Bly Manor, I would honestly overhaul a ton of the show to arrive at something completely different. But I’m not going to go through all the trouble of rewriting the entire show here, lol. Instead, I’m going to work with most of what’s already there, leading out from Viola’s possession of Dani (even though I don’t actually like that part of the show either – maybe someday I’ll write about other implications of Viola’s possession of Dani beyond these allegorical readings, but not right now). I’m also going to try to adhere to some of the show’s core themes and build on some of the allegorical possibilities that are already in place. Granted, the ideas that I pose here wouldn’t fix everything, by any stretch of the imagination; but they would, at least (I hope), mitigate some of the issues that I’ve outlined over the course of this essay. And one way or another, I hope that they’ll help to demonstrate that Dani’s self-sacrificial death was completely unnecessary. (Seriously, just not including Dani’s death would’ve enabled the show to completely dodge the question of Bury Your Gays and would’ve otherwise gone a long way towards avoiding the problems with the show’s queer representation).

So, here's how this is going to work. First, I’m going to pose a few general, guiding questions before then proposing an overarching thematic modification that expands on an idea that’s already prominent across the show. This will then serve as the groundwork for two alternative scenarios. I’m not going to go super into detail with either of these alternatives; mostly, I just want to demonstrate that the show that could’ve easily replaced the situation leading to Dani drowning herself. (For the record, I also think that the show could’ve benefitted from having at least one additional episode—and from some timing and pacing restructuring otherwise. So, before anybody tries an excuse like “but this wouldn’t fit into the last episode,” I want to urge that we imagine these possibilities beyond that limitation).

Let’s start off by returning to a point that I raised in the earlier conversation about grief and acceptance: the trickiness of Viola’s “acceptance.”

What Viola “accepts” in the end aren’t her losses or her own mortality, but Dani’s desperate, last-ditch-effort invitation to inhabit her. Within the show’s extant ending, Viola never actually comes to any kind of acceptance otherwise. Dani’s suicide effectively forces her dissolution, eradicating her persistent presence through the redemptive power of self-sacrifice. But in all of my viewings of the show and in all of my efforts to think through and write about it, there’s a question that’s been bugging me to no end: Why does Viola accept Dani’s invitation in the first place?

We know that Peter figured out the “it’s you, it’s me, it’s us” trick in his desperation to return to some form of life and to leave the grounds of Bly Manor. But…what is the appeal of it for Viola? How do her own motivations factor into it? For so long, Viola’s soul has been tenaciously persisting at Bly all so that she can repeatedly return to the physical locus of her connection with her husband and daughter, their shared bedroom in the manor. She’s done this for so long that she no longer even remembers why she’s doing it—she just goes back there to grab whatever child she can find and strangles whoever happens to get in her way. So what would compel her to accept Dani’s invitation? What does she get out of it—and what does she want out of it? What does her acceptance mean? And why, then, does her acceptance result in the dissipation of the gravity well?

We can conjecture, certainly. But the show doesn’t actually provide answers to these questions. Indeed, one of the other major criticisms that I have of Bly is that it confines all of Viola’s development to the eighth episode alone. I really think that it needed to have done way more to characterize her threat and at least gestureat her history sooner, rather than leaving it all to that penultimate episode, interrupting and drawing out the exact moment when she’s about to kill Dani. (Like, after centuries of Viola indiscriminately killing people, and with so many ghosts that’ve been loitering around for so long because of that, wouldn’t Bly Manor have rampant ghost stories floating around about it by the time Dani arrives? But there’s only one minor suggestion of that possibility: Henry indicating that he might’ve met a soldier ghost once. That’s it. And on that note, all of the ghosts at the manor needed to have had more screentime and development, really). Further, it’s disappointing that the show devotes that entire eighth episode to accounting for Viola’s motivations, only to then reduce her to Big, Bad, Unspeakable Evil in the final episode, with no rhyme or reason for what she’s doing, all so that she can necessitate Dani’s death.

As we continue pondering these unanswered questions, there’s also another issue that I want to raise, which the show abandons only as an oblique, obscure consideration. And that is: How the hell did Jamie acquire all that extensive knowledge about Viola, the ghosts of the manor, and all that happened, such that she is able to tell Bly’sstory in such rich detail? My own sort of headcanon answer to this is that Viola’s possession of Dani somehow enabled Viola to regain some of her own memories—as well as, perhaps, a more extended, yet also limited awareness of the enduring consciousnesses of the other ghosts—while also, in turn, giving Dani access to them, too. Dani then could have divulged what she learned to Jamie, which would account for how Jamie knows so much. I bring this up because it provides one possible response to the question of “What does Viola get out of her possession of Dani?” (especially given the significant weight that the show places on the retention of one’s memories—more on this in a moment) and because this is an important basis for both of my proposed alternative scenarios.

Before we dig into those alternative scenarios, however, there’s also a thematic modification that I want to suggest, which would help to provide another answer to “What does Viola get out of her possession of Dani?” while also alleviating the issues that lead into the valorization of Dani’s suicide. That thematic modification involves how the show defines love. Although Bly’s sustained contrasts between love and possession have some valuable elements, I think that the ending would’ve benefitted from downplaying the love vs. possession theme (which is where we run into so much trouble with Dani’s self-sacrifice, and which has also resulted in some celebratory conflations between “selflessness” and self-sacrifice that I’ve seen crop up in commentary about the show—but, y’all, self-sacrifice is not something to celebrate in romantic partnerships, so please, please be careful idolizing that) to instead play up a different theme: the idea that love is the experience of feeling such safety and security with another person that we can find opportunities for peace by being with them.

Seeking peace—and people with whom to feel safe enough to share traumas and experience peace—is a theme that already runs rampant across the show, so this modification is really just a matter of accentuating it differently. It’s also closely linked to the moving through grief theme that we’ve already discussed at length, as numerous characters in Bly express desires for solitude with loved ones as a way of finding relief and healing from their pain, grief, and trauma. (And I suspect that I latched onto this because I have desperately wanted peace, calm, and stillness in the midst of my own acute, compounding traumas…and because my own former romantic partner was obviously not someone with whom I felt safe enough to experience the kind of peace that would’ve allowed me to begin the process of healing).

We run into this idea early in the development of Jamie and Dani’s romance, as narrator Jamie explains in the scene leading up to their first kiss, “The au pair was tired. She’d been tired for so long. Yet without even realizing she was doing it, she found herself taking her own advice that she’d given to Miles. She’d chosen someone to keep close to her that she could feel tired around.” Following this moment, at the beginning of Episode 5, narrator Jamie then foregrounds Hannah’s search for peace (“The housekeeper knew, more than most, that deep experience was never peaceful. And because she knew this ever since she’d first called Bly home, she would always find her way back to peace within her daily routine, and it had always worked”), which calls our attention to the ways that Hannah has been retreating into her memory of her first meeting with Owen as a crucial site of peace against the shock of her own death. Grown-up Flora even gushes about “that easy silence you only get with your forever person who loves you as much as you love them” when she’s getting all teary at Jamie about her husband-to-be.

Of course, this theme is already actively at work in the show’s conclusion as well. During her “beast in the jungle” monologue, Dani tells Jamie that she feels Viola “in here. It’s so quiet…it’s so quiet. She’s in here. And this part of her that’s in here, it isn’t…peaceful.” As such, Viola’s whole entire issue is that, after all those centuries, she has not only refused to accept her own death, but she’s likewise never been at peace—she’s still not at peace. Against Viola’s unpeaceful presence, however, Dani does find peace in her life with Jamie…at least temporarily, until Viola’s continued refusal of peace leads to Dani’s self-destructive sense of fatalism. Still, in her replacement of Viola as the new Lady of the Lake, Dani exists as a prevailing force of peace (she’s “harmless as a dove”); however, incidentally, she only accomplishes this through the decidedly non-peaceful, violent act of taking her own life.

But…what if that hadn’t been the case?

What if, instead, the peace that Dani finds in her beautiful, queer, non-self-sacrificing existence with Jamie had also enabled Viola to find some sense of peace of her own? What if, through her inhabitation of Dani, Viola managed to, like…calm the fuck down some? What if Dani’s safety and solitude worked to at least somewhat assuage Viola’s rage—and even guide her towards some other form of acceptance?

Depending on how this developed, the show could’ve borne out the potential for a much more subversive conclusion than what we actually got. Rather than All-Consuming-Evil Viola’s forced dissolution through the violence of Dani’s redemptive self-sacrifice (and its attendant recuperation of heteronormativity), we could’ve instead had the makings of a narrative about sapphic love as a source of healing that’s capable of breaking cycles of violence and trauma. And I think that it would’ve been possible for the show to accomplish this without a purely “happy” ending in which everything was just magically fine, and all the trauma dissipated, and there were no problems in the world ever again. The show could have, in fact, managed this while preserving the allegorical possibilities of Viola’s presence as mental and/or terminal illness.

But, before I can start describing how this could’ve happened, there’s one last little outstanding problem that I need to address. In the video essay that I cited earlier, Rowan Ellis suggests that there are limitations to the “Viola as a stand-in for mental/terminal illness” reading of the show because of the fact that Dani invites Viola into herself and, therefore, willingly brings on her own suffering. But I don’t think that this is quite the case or that it interferes with these allegorical readings. As I’ve already mentioned at various points, Dani doesn’t entirely understand the implications of what she’s doing when she issues her invitation to Viola; and even so, the invitation is still a matter of a dubious consent that evidently cannot be withdrawn once initially granted—at the absolute most generous characterization. Dani’s invitation is a snap decision, a frantic attempt to save Flora after everyone and everything else has failed. Consequently, we don’t necessarily have to construe Viola’s presence in Dani’s life as a matter of Dani “willingly inviting her own suffering,” but can instead understand it as the wounds and traumas that persist after Dani has risked her life to rescue Flora. In this way, the show could have also challenged the traditional heroic-redemptive narrative formula by offering a more explicit commentary on the all-too-often unseen ramifications of selflessly “heroic” actions (instead of just heedlessly perpetuating their glorification and, with them, self-sacrifice). Dani may have saved Flora—but at what cost to herself? What long-term toll might this lasting trauma exact on her?

And with that, we move into my two alternative ending scenarios.

Alternative Ending 1: Progressive Memory Loss

Memory and its loss are such significant themes in Bly Manor that theycould use an essay all their own.

I am, however, going to refrain from writing such an essay at this moment in time (I’m already super tired from writing this one, lol).

Still, the first of my alternative scenarios would bring these major themes full-circle—and would make Jamie eat her words.

In this alternative scenario, Viola would find some sense of peace—even if fraught and, at times, tumultuous—in her possession of Dani. As her rage subsides, she is even able to regain fragmented pieces of her own memory, which Dani is also able to experience. The restoration of Viola’s memory, albeit vague and scattered, leads Dani to try to learn even more about Viola’s history at Bly in an effort to at least partially fill in the gaps. As time goes on, though, Viola’s co-habitation within Dani’s consciousness leads to the steady degradation of Dani’s own memory. The reclamation of Viola’s memories would occur, then, concomitant with a steady erosion of both herself and Dani. Thus, Dani would still undergo an inexorable decline across the show’s ending, but one more explicitly akin to degenerative neurological diseases associated with aging, accentuating the “Viola as terminal illness” allegory while also still carrying resonances of the residual reverberations of trauma (given that memory loss is often a common consequence of acute trauma). Jamie would take on the role of Dani’s caregiver, mirroring and more directly illuminating the role that Owen plays for his mother earlier in the show. By the show’s conclusion, Dani would still be alive, including during the course of the frame narrative.

I mentioned earlier in this essay that I’ve endured even more trauma and grief since my brother’s death and since my breakup with my ex-fiancé. So, I’ll share another piece of it with you now: shortly after my breakup, my dad was diagnosed with one of those degenerative neurological diseases that I listed way back at the very beginning. I moved home not only to get away from my ex, but also to become a caregiver. In the time that I’ve been home, I’ve had no choice but to behold my dad’s continuous, irreversible decline and his indescribable suffering. He has further health issues, including a form of cancer. As a result, he now harbors a sense of fatalism that he’ll never be able to reconcile—he does not have the cognitive capacities to address his despair or turn it into some other form of acceptance. He is merely, in essence, awaiting his death. Hence, fatalism is something that I have had to “accept” as a regular component of my own life. (In light of this situation, you may be wondering if I have thoughts and opinions on medical aid in dying, given all that I have had to say so far about fatalism and suicide. And the answer is yes, I do have thoughts and opinions…but they are complex, and I don’t really want to try to account for them here).

Indeed, I live in a suspended, indefinite state of grieving. Day in and day out, I watch my father perish before my eyes, anticipating the blow of fresh grief that will strike when he dies. I watch my mother’s grief. I watch my father’s grief. He forgets about the symptoms of his disease; he looks up his disease to try to learn about it; he re-discovers his inevitable demise anew; the grieving process restarts again. (“She would wake, she would walk, she would forget […] and she would fade and fade and fade”).

What, then, does acceptance look like when grief is so ongoing and so protracted?

What does acceptance look like in the absence of any possibility of acceptance?

Kübler-Ross’s “five stages of grief” model has been a meaningful guide for countless folks in their efforts to navigate grief and loss. Yet, the model has also been subject to a great deal of critique. Critics have accused the model of, among other things, suggesting that grieving is a linear process, whereby a person moves from one stage to the next and then ends conclusively at acceptance (when grieving is, in fact, an incredibly uneven, nonlinear, and inconclusive process). Relatedly, they have also called attention to the fact that the model commonly gets used prescriptively in ways that usher grieving folks towards the end goal of acceptance and cast judgment on those who do not reach that stage. These are criticisms that I would level at Bly’s application of Kübler-Ross as well. Earlier, we thoroughly covered the show’sissues with grief and acceptance as major themes; but in addition to those issues, Bly alsotends to steer its characters towards abrupt endpoints of acceptance, while doling out punishments to those who “refuse” to accept. At root, there are normative ascriptions at work in the show’s very characterization of deferred acceptance as refusal and acceptance itself as an active choice that one has to make.

This alternative ending, then, would have the potential to challenge and complicate the show’s handling of grief by approaching Jamie’s grieving and Dani’s fatalism from very different angles. As Dani’s caregiver, Jamie would encounter and negotiate grief in ongoing and processual ways, which would continue to evolve as her wife’s condition worsens and her caregiving responsibilities mount, thereby lending new layers of meaning to the message that “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them.” Dani’s fatalism here could also serve as a different interpretation of James’s Beast in the Jungle; perhaps her sense of fatalism ebbs and flows, morphs and contorts along with the progression of her memory loss as she anticipates the gradual whittling-away of her selfhood—or even forgets that inevitability entirely. Still a tragic, heart-rending ending to the show, this scenario may not have the dramatic force of Jamie screaming into the waters of the lake, but it would be a relatable depiction of the ways that many real-life romances conclude. (And, having witnessed the extent of my mom’s ongoing caregiving for my dad, lemme tell ya: if y’all really want a portrayal of selflessness in romantic partnerships, I can think of nothing more selfless than caring for one’s terminally ill partner across their gradual death).

Additionally, this scenario could allow the show to maintain the frame narrative, while also packing fresh complexities into it.

Perhaps, in this case, Dani is still alive, but Jamie has come to Flora’s wedding alone, leaving Dani with in-home caregivers or within assisted living or some such. She comes there determined to ensure that Miles and Flora regain at least some awareness of what Dani did for them—that they remember her. The act of telling Dani’s story, then, becomes not only the performance of a mourning ritual, but also a vital way of preserving and perpetuating Dani’s memory where both the children and Dani, herself, can no longer remember. To be sure, such purposes already compel Jamie’s storytelling in the show: Narrator Jamie indicates that the new Lady of the Lake will eventually lose her recollection of the life she had with the gardener, “leaving the only trace of who she once was in the memory of the woman who loved her most.” But in the context of a conclusion so focused on memory loss, this statement would take on new dimensions of import. In this way, the frame narrative might also more forcefully prompt us, the audience, to reflect on the waysthat we can carry on the memories of our loved ones by telling their stories—and also, maybe, the responsibilities that we may have to do so. “Almost no one even remembers how she was when her mind hadn’t gone,” Jamie remarks after returning from Owen’s mother’s funeral, a subtle indictment of just how easily we can lose our own memories of those who suffer from conditions like dementia—how easily we can fail to carry on the stories of the people they were before and to keep their memories alive. (“We are all just stories in the end,” Olivia Crain emphasizes during the eulogy for Shirl’s kitten in The Haunting of Hill House. In fact, there’re some interesting comparative analyses we could do about storytelling and the responsibilities incumbent on storytellers between these two Flanagan shows).

Along those lines, I think that this would’ve been an excellent opportunity for the show to exacerbate and foreground those latent tensions between Jamie and Owen (and maybe also Henry) about whether to share Dani’s story with the now-adult children.

In the show’s explorations of memory loss, there’re already some interesting but largely neglected undercurrents churning around about the idea that maybe losing one’s memory isn’t just a curse or a heartbreaking misfortune (as it is for Viola, the ghosts of Bly Manor, and Owen’s mother), but can, in certain circumstances, be a blessing. Bly implies—via Owen and the frame narrative—that Miles and Flora have been able to flourish in their lives because they have forgotten what happened at Bly and still remain blissfully unaware of it…which, to be clear, is only possible because of the sacrifices that Dani and Jamie have made. But this situation raises, and leaves floating there, a bunch of questions about the responsibilities we have to impart traumatic histories to younger generations—whether interpersonally (e.g. within families) or societally (e.g. in history classrooms). Cycles of trauma don’t end by shielding younger generations from the past; they especially don’t end by forcing impacted, oppressed, traumatized populations (e.g. queer folks) to shoulder the burdens of trauma on their own for the sake of protecting another population’s innocent ignorance. But how do we impart traumatic histories? How do we do so responsibly, compassionately, in ways that respect those harrowing pasts—and those who lived them, those most directly impacted by them—without actively causing harm to receiving audiences? On the other hand, if we over-privilege the innocence of those who have forgotten or those who weren’t directly impacted, what do we lose and what do we risk by not having frank, open conversations about traumatic histories?

As it stands, I think that Bly is remiss in the way it tosses out these issues, but never actually does anything with them. It could have done much, much more. In this alternate ending, then, there could be some productive disagreement among Jamie, Owen, and Henry about whether to tell Flora and Miles, what to tell them, how to tell them. Perhaps, in her seizing of the conversation and her launching of the story in such a public way, Jamie has taken matters into her own hands and has done so in a way that Owen and Henry can’t easily derail. Perhaps Owen sympathizes but does, indeed, abruptly cut her off just before her audience can completely connect the dots. Perhaps Henry is conflicted and doesn’t take a stand—or perhaps he does. Perhaps we find out that Henry had been torn about whether to even invite Jamie because of the possibility of something like this happening. Or, perhaps Henry wants the children to know and believes that they should hear Dani’s story from Jamie. Perhaps we see scenes of past quarrels between Jamie and Owen, Owen and Henry. Perhaps, once the story has ended, we see a brief aftermath conversation between Owen and Jamie about what Jamie has done, their speculations about how it may impact Miles and Flora. Perhaps the show presents these conversations in ways that challenge us to reflect on them, even if it does not provide conclusive answers to the questions it raises, and even if it leaves these conflicts open-ended, largely unresolved.

Alternative Ending 2: Living with the Trauma

If Bly’s creators had wanted Viola’s inhabitation of Dani to represent the ongoing struggles of living—and loving someone—with severe mental illness and trauma, they could have also just…done that? Like, they could have just portrayed Jamie and Dani living their lives together and dealing with Viola along the way. They could have just let that be it. It wouldn’t have been necessary to include Dani’s death within the show’s depicted timeline at all.

The show could’ve more closely aligned its treatment of Dani’s fatalism with James’s Beast in the Jungle—but with, perhaps, a bit more of a hopeful spin. Perhaps, early on, Dani is convinced that her demise is imminent and incontrovertible, much as we already see in the final episode’s diner scene. For a while, this outlook continues to dominate her existence in ways that interfere with her daily functioning and her relationship with Jamie. Perhaps there’s an equivalent of the flooded bathtub scene, but it happens much earlier in the progression of their partnership: Dani despairs, and Jamie is there to reinforce her commitment to staying with Dani through it all, much like her extant “If you can’t feel anything, then I’ll feel everything for the both of us” remarks. But maybe, as a result of this, Dani comes to a realization much like The Beast in the Jungle’s John Marcher—but one that enables her to act on her newfound understanding, an opportunity that Marcher never finds before it’s too late. Maybe she realizes that her fatalism has been causing her to miss out on really, truly embracing the life that she and Jamie have been forging together, thus echoing the show’s earlier points about how unresolved trauma can impede our cultivation of meaningful relationships. Maybe she realizes that her life with Jamie has been passing her by while she’s remained so convinced that Viola will claim that life at any moment. Maybe she comes to understand that her perpetual sense of dread has been hurting Jamie—that Jamie needs her in the same ways that she needs Jamie, but that Dani’s ever-present sense of doom has been preventing her from providing for those needs. And maybe this leads to a re-framing of the “you, me, us,” conceit, with a scene in which Dani acknowledges the extent to which her fatalism has been dictating their lives; in light of this acknowledgement, she and Jamie resolve—together—to continue supporting each other as they navigate Viola’s lasting influences on their lives.

By making this suggestion, I once again do not want to seem like I’m advocating that “Dani should fight back against Viola” (or, in other words, that “Dani should fight harder to win the battle against her mental illness”). But I do want to direct us back to a point that I raised at the very beginning: grieving, traumatized, and mentally ill folks can, indeed, cause harm to our loved ones. Our grief, trauma, and mental illness don’t excuse that fact. But what that means is that we have to take responsibility for our harmful actions. What it absolutely does not mean is that our harms are inevitable or that our loved ones would be better off without us.It means recognizing that we still matter and have value to others, despite the narratives we craft to try to convince ourselves otherwise. It means acknowledging the wounds that fatalistic, “everybody is better without me” assumptions can inflict. It means identifying the ways that we can support and care for our loved ones, even through our own struggles with our mental health.

“Fighting harder to win the battle against mental illness” is a callous and downright incorrect framing of the matter; but there are, nevertheless, intentional steps that we must take to heal from trauma, to receive treatment for our mental illnesses, to care for ourselves, to care for our loved ones. For instance…the very process of writing this essay incited me to do a lot of reflecting on the self-defeating narratives that I have been telling myself about my mental health and my relationships with others. And that, in turn, incited me to do some course-correcting. I thought about how much I want to work towards healing, however convoluted and intricate that process may be. I thought about how I want to support my family. How I want to foster a robust social support network, such that I feel a genuine sense of community. How I want to be an attentive friend. How, someday, if I’m fortunate enough to have a girlfriend, I want to be a caring, present, and equal partner to her; I want to emotionally nourish her through life’s trials and turmoil, not just expect her to provide that emotional nourishment for me. I started writing this essay in August; and since then, because of it, I’ve held myself accountable by reaching out to friends, spending time with them, trying to support them. I’ve also managed to get myself, finally, to start therapy. And my therapist is already helping me address those self-defeating narratives that have led me to believe that I’m just a burden on my friends. So, y’know, I’m workin’ on it.

But it ain’t pretty. And it also ain’t a linear upward trajectory of consistent improvement. It’s messy. Sometimes, frankly, it’s real ugly.

It could be for Dani, too.

Even with her decision to accept the certainties and uncertainties of Viola’s intrusive presence in her life, to live her life as best she can in the face of it all, perhaps Dani still struggles from day to day. Perhaps some days are better than others. Perhaps Viola, as I suggested earlier, begins finding some modicum of peace through her possession of Dani; nonetheless, her rage and disquiet never entirely subside, and they still periodically overtake Dani. Perhaps Dani improves, only to then backslide, only to then find ways to stabilize once again. In this way, the show could’ve more precisely portrayed the muddled, tumultuous lastingness of grief and trauma throughout a lifetime—without concluding that struggle with a valorized suicide.

Such portrayals are not unprecedented in horror. As I contemplated this ending possibility, I couldn’t help but think of The Babadook (2014), another piece of horror media whose monster carries allegorical import as a representation of the endurance and obtrusion of unresolved trauma. The titular monster doesn’t disappear at the film’s end; Sam emphasizes, in fact, that “you can’t get rid of the Babadook.” And so, even after Amelia has confronted the Babadook and locked him in the basement of the family’s home, he continues to lurk there, still aggressive and threatening to overcome her, but able to be pacified with a bowlful of worms. Like loss and trauma, the Babadook can never be totally ignored or dispelled, only assuaged with necessary, recurrent attention and feedings.

Bly could have easily done something similar with Viola. Perhaps, in the same way that Amelia has to regularly provide the Babadook with an offering of worms, Dani must also “feed” Viola to soothe her rage. What might those feedings look like? What might they consist of? Perhaps Viola draws Dani back to Bly Manor, insisting on revisiting those same sites that have held implacable sway over her for centuries. Perhaps these visits are what permit Dani to gradually learn about Viola: who she was, what she has become, why she has tarried between life and death for so long. Perhaps Dani also learns that these “feedings” agitate Viola for a while, stirring her into fresh furor—but that, in their wake, Viola also settles more deeply and for longer periods. Perhaps they necessitate that Dani and Jamie both directly confront their own traumas, bring them to the surface, attend to them. Perhaps, together, they learn how to navigate their traumas in productive, mutually supportive ways. Perhaps this is also what quiets Viola over time, even if Dani is never quite sure whether Viola will return to claim her life.

You may be wondering, then, about what happens with the frame narrative in this scenario. If Dani doesn’t meet some tragic demise, what happens to the role and significance of grieving in the act of Jamie’s storytelling? Would Jamie’s storytelling even occur? Wouldn’t Dani just be at Flora’s wedding, too? Would we miss the emotional gut-punch of the reveal of the narrator’s identity at the end?  

Perhaps, in this case, the ending removes some of the weight off of the grief theme to instead foreground those troubled deliberations about how to impart traumatic histories (as we covered in the previous scenario). As such, the frame could feature those conflicts between Jamie (and Dani here too this time), Owen, and Henry concerning whether or not to tell Dani’s story to Miles and Flora. Perhaps Dani decides not to attend the wedding, wary of contributing to this conflict at the scene of what should be a joyous occasion for Flora; perhaps she feels like she can’t even face the children. And then, without Dani there, perhaps an overwrought Jamie jumps into the story when the opportunity presents itself—whether impulsively or premeditatedly.

Or…Perhaps the show could’ve just scrapped the frame at Flora’s wedding and could’ve done something else instead. What might that be? I have no idea! Sky’s the limit.

At any rate, even with these changes, it would’ve still been possible to have the show conclude in a sentimental, tear-jerking way (which seems to be Flanagan’s preference). Perhaps Jamie’s storytelling does spark the return of the children’s memories. Perhaps, as they begin to remember, they reach out to Dani and Jamie, wanting to connect with them, wanting especially to see Dani again. And then, perhaps, the show could’ve ended with a scene of Miles and Flora finally reuniting with Dani—emotional, sweet, and memorable, no valorized suicide or exploitation of queer tragedy needed.

Conclusion

In my writing of this essay—and over the course of the Bly Manor and Hill House rewatches that it inspired—I’ve been finding myself also doing a great deal of reflection about the possibilities and purposes of horror media. I’ve been thinking, in particular, about the potential for the horror genre to provide contained settings in which we can face and explore our deepest fears and traumas in (relatively) safe, controlled ways. Honestly, I think that this is part of why I enjoy Flanagan’s work so much (even if it also enrages me at the same time). If you’ve read this far, you’ll have seen just how profoundly I relate to so much of the subject matter of The Haunting of Bly Manor. It has been extremely meaningful and valuable for me to encounter the show’s depictions of topics like familial trauma, grief, loss, compulsory heterosexuality, caregiving for aging parents, so on, all of which bear so heavily on my own existence. Bly Manor produced opportunities for me to excavate and dig deeply into the worst experiences of and feelings about my life: to look at them, understand them, and give voice to them, when I’m otherwise inclined to bury them into inconspicuous docility.

Even so, the show does not handle these relatable topics as well as it could have. Flanagan and the many contributors to this horror anthology can’t just preach at us about the responsibilities of storytellers; they, too, have responsibilities as storytellers in the communication of these delicate, sensitive, weighty human experiences. And so, to reinforce a point that I made earlier, this is why I’ve written this extensive critique. It’s not because I revile the show and want to condemn it—it’s because I cherish Bly Manor immensely. It’s because I wanted more out of it. It’s because I want to hold it and its creators accountable. It’s because I want folks to think more critically about it (especially after how close I came to unreflectively accepting its messages in my own initial reception of it).

Television usually doesn’t get me this way. It’s been a long time since I was this emotionally attached to a show. So this essay has been my attempt to honor Bly with a careful, meticulous treatment. I appreciate all of the reflection and self-work that it has inspired me to undertake. I’ve wanted to pay my respects in the best way I know how: with close, thorough analysis.

If you’ve read all this mess, thanks for taking the time to do so. I hope that you’ve been able to get something out of it, too.

Representation matters, y’all.

The end.

#the haunting of bly manor #bly manor #thobm #dani clayton #jamie taylor #dani x jamie #damie #sapphic romance #lesbian romance #mental health #compulsory heterosexuality #queer representation #not a fix-it fic but a fix-it essay

[donnerpartyofone]

For a long time now I've been getting stoned basically nightly, and I finally started to feel that I didn't like that I was just doing it mindlessly, instead of choosing to do it for enjoyment. It was supporting my appetite and at least slightly helping with my insomnia, but a lot of it was just about my desire to completely tune out for at least part of every evil day that I'm forced to live. Also I was worried about my lungs, and gummies can be expensive, so I just stopped except for once or twice a week, and even then I try to make it a really conscious choice instead of a compulsion. At the same time I got more consistent about daily exercise and meditation, and I thought all this would add up to me feeling better, but it definitely DOESN'T. Having more clarity and energy is terrible! I just feel really angry all the time with nothing to do about it, and I'm intensely aware of everything that's wrong and everything I'm DOING wrong, and everything in the world just feels totally unforgivable. And now I get to also be mad about the fact that I apparently have to choose between my lung/brain health and my mental health, since most of this drug intake is related to the fact that I can't find a psych med that doesn't fuck with my tinnitus or cause some other problem that makes it a non-starter for me. So anyway this morning I'm having beer for breakfast because the brewery is the only place from which I can stalk the mail carrier who just stopped delivering my shit, and who keeps scanning it as "out for delivery" so I can't even go to the fucking post office and just pick it up myself, and the last time this happened for months and months and months I solved it by speaking to the carrier directly. I never even found out what was going on with my packages, just something about talking to him made him nicer. I may not have the same luck with whoever the new guy is, but I have to at least feel like I tried to do something or I'll go insane. So, chug a lug, everybody! Here's hoping the alcohol makes me feel like less of a raging cunt for the next [X] hours.

[csmeaner]

the truth about Ravaen [ferin/nauticlops owner]

post related

okay i knew i saw those screenshots before and it's because i had this in my drafts and forgot about it until now so here it all is

okay it's a lot so brace yourself- i want to be clear that this was gathered by me and a couple friends, so not every issue was directed at me but also at my close friends.

https://sta.sh/21s4pab1sg9o https://sta.sh/016uq6oihv0 on July 30th 2019, one of my friends [my then partner] made a status on deviantART about diversity in ocs,

to which Ravaen left the following comment.

My friend then blocked Ravaen shortly after, to which Ravaen sent me the following dms about it.

September 7th 2019 after i received some anon hate that i've since deleted and Ravaen took it upon herself to look up me and my friend's facebook pages- the same friend who blocked her a month before.

https://sta.sh/21itlsj1fujv on July 22nd 2022, i messaged Ravaen on behalf of one of my friends who cut her off for mental health reasons, about a species Ravaen had bought that my friend had owned a single design in. after messaging Ravaen about this, she apparently told Szarlotka who took it upon herself to find out who it was and not only seek out the design, but fav and unfav it, basically making her presence known.

included in this file is the message my friend sent Szarlotka before blocking her.

Ravaen then proceeded to message me freaking out when i was unaware of the message that was sent until after this happened.

https://sta.sh/012uebt9rvem this is her ripping off the pallet to one of my designs, specifically the mascot for my species, with the colour picks next to them.

https://sta.sh/01hbobnpuj18 one of my friends owed Ravaen a refund and they were trying to work out a deal, when Ravaen got a little upset about them wanting their pride bases to only be used for pride flags.

https://sta.sh/01kenw2zlsr3

and now with my newest update, she's basically encouraging people in her community to go against my tos.

https://sta.sh/2341zh11pw1 there have been anon messages sent to closed species drama tumblr accounts about someone who scammed me back in May. Ravaen was aware of this and tried to say i wasn't scammed- that's a whole different thing- but now any time an anon about said person comes up, Ravaen accuses it of being me.

https://sta.sh/2w41t15viqc she also deleted every single message she sent me before August 19th, and every single message she sent my friend. it makes me feel like shes trying to cover her tracks honestly.

this isn't even everything, but it is almost everything we have proof of other than word of mouth. send me anon hate, i do not care. <3 

This is an addition to my post about Ravaen, she's now encouraging her CS community to break my tos and telling them how to do it!! Along with making me look like I did something wrong when she's the one who's been playing childish games all weekend.

unsure of the other stuff, people can form their own opinions from the screenshots, but fucking changing your tos and screwing over a bunch of people is NOT the way to go about this and is honestly a hugeeee dick move on your part. those aren't your characters and you don't have a fucking right to enforce an addition to your tos on people who aren't even aware of things happening just because one person wronged you.

#proof #screenshots #submission #ferin #candyfloss

[ewan-mo]

On the way home

Sat 30th Sept 2023.

I started yesterday with a visit to the Benedict Medical Centre, a small hospital in a poor suburb of Kampala.   They are continuing to find funding a bit of a struggle.  It was worse in Covid but there are 3 government health centres in the locality who give free medication when they have it, and three or four private-for-profit ones.  Also Butabika Hospital, the main psychiatric hospital, is only about 3 miles away, so many people with a mental illness go straight there. The public perception of mental illness is that it means 'Butabika'. It takes quite a shift to imagine that mental illness can be treated at the level of a small hospital like Benedict Medical Centre.

They are hoping that having a psychiatric clinical officer will enable them to develop a good reputation for mental health care.    JF has sponsored Robin to train as a psychiatric clinical officer.  He has finished the course but has still to get a project approved.  We are helping them to raise the awareness of mental illness and its care in their community and to present the hospital as an alternative to Butabika.

Meanwhile, Joshua and I had agreed to look at the experiences of people with mental illness or epilepsy who have been confined at home, usually by their families. They may be chained, tied with ropes, or left in shackles and sometimes leg shackles as well, then locked in the room and dependent on someone else to prepare their food and attend to their personal hygiene. I would be really interested to know how they think of it all. Are they troubled by traumatic memories? Angry with their families? Resentful about the lost years? Or do they just accept that this is how it is during times when they are ill and troubled or overactive and moveous?

Some of you will remember James, who was kept locked in a dark room, chained by his ankle, from his late 20’s to age 42, about 15 years. When we saw him 6 months after our first meeting, he was being cared for by the team and on treatment, and was totally transformed. James taught me a little of what it can be like for our patients, and his story comes with me whenever I teach on international mental health. 

Joshua and I thought it would be interesting to interview some of the  patients we know who have been in similar situations. He’s made a good start, but the majority of the cases so far come just from Bwindi Hospital. Apparently the research journals get suspicious when that appears to be the case; you may have been making up the details!

I’ve asked our young colleagues to scout around to find us some more, as several thought there were some in their districts. Village health workers from the Village Health Teams (VHT), church leaders and local councillors often know their communities very well and will be aware if there are some individuals hidden in the darkness.

The VHTs remind me of the old wise women of the villages in earlier times in our English landscapes. I can remember some from the villages near where my grandmother lived in Somerset. ‘Aunt Em’ and ‘Aunt Cis’, for example. They knew all the local remedies, the herbs and potions that could help with everyday ailments. I’d quite like to talk with them again now, but they have long gone.

When Joshua and I talk, we find our conversation ranges far and wide beyond clinical matters. He’s not short of opinion on some of the political shenanigans that go on in Uganda and from his stories I learnt some fascinating details. He’s interested in English politics too though even he, who has long experience of goings on in Africa, was a bit surprised at the thinking and impact of Liz Truss. And indeed her very short tenure as our prime minister. Uganda’s current president has been in charge for 37 years. Just imagine….

Joshua is a great friend to Jamie’s Fund. He has years of experience in mental health research, and trained as an mhGAP Master Trainer in Geneva (and Italy!) directly under the auspices of the World Health Organisation. We have been very fortunate to have him and his support in our training programmes which have been making such a difference across Uganda. 

Market day at the roadside.

Hassan later drove us down to Entebbe where we had a late lunch in a café we have known for some years.  It has a lush green garden.

A metal baboon in the garden.

We were then dropped at Guinea Fowl guest house, where we spent time catching up on our computers. They were doing major road works on the residential road outside and I enjoyed watching the machines at work – as I used to do 60 years ago.  Not sure why they have selected this road for such major works – the fact that a number of military officers apparently live on it may not be a coincidence.

A grader at work, even after dark.

We went to the airport late evening and  all went smoothly.  In Brussels I was fascinated to make the acquaintance of a Ugandan dentist who has lived in London for a long time but still comes back to Uganda to see family. Her father is a doctor and her sister is a psychiatrist in UK! 

We changed planes in Brussels and got home late morning today, Saturday.

It has been a very encouraging visit.  Hugh, Linda and Avril have found the same encouragements visiting the hospitals in the west as well.  Although JF is stopping we will continue to visit and have tentative plans to return early next year when six of the PCOs JF sponsored will be graduating.

Thank you for reading our blogs and we hope you have found them of interest.  We have aimed to give you a flavour of what we have been doing.

If you would like to drop us an email, please do using the email [email protected]

[oops-allsquids]

My English literature class in school focused on frankenstein for one of our books. We finished exams almost a month ago and yet I'm shocked that apparently my friends from class didn't know what I considered to be one of the most integral pieces of information from the novel (or at least the scene wherein the monster is brought to life) which is that:

Frankenstein loved his creation until he looked at it's eyes

This is fascinating to me from an analysis standpoint and I ended up writing a short essay of sorts to them in an attempt to explain why I deem this so important. And tumblr looks old media so here, have a treat.

As the creature comes to life Victor is marvelling at the creatures beauty "limbs in proportion", "features as beautiful", "hair of a lustrous black", "teeth of a pearly whiteness", it's only when the creature firsts opens its eyes that Victor is then filled with disgust. He describes the beauty of the body as a "horrid contrast" to the eyes, and there is likely a multitude of reasons as to why this may be.

One being that a person's eyes are something that shows their humanity, you can read emotions through people's eyes and they act as one of the most expressive parts of the human body, the "watery eyes" of the creature do not do this, likely coming off as emotionless and unnatural on the creature. This may also link with the fact that eyes are considered the windows to the soul, and in looking at the creatures eyes he is aware of the lack of humanity in the creature.

Looking the creature in the eyes may have been what Victor needed to finally become aware of the egregious actions he committed in creating the creature. From originally admiring his creation objectively in its beauty, to looking it in the eyes and suddenly being filled with disgust shows a realisation that his actions were wrong, both legally and religiously (as religion plays a major role in the novel's contest and story).

This second point is also somewhat stated to be the reason why Victor falls ill when he returns to his room as both his physical and mental health catch up with him from overworking and the moral ambiguity of his actions.

#frankenstein #analysis #apparently this was unimportant to everyone but me #miss that class though #i loved/love the over analysing of media in a way that matters to no one else #and this class really hit that for me

[blogthebooklover]

I may have shared a post some time ago about body focused repetitive behaviors (BFRB). Well, I’d figure it was time for me to share my own struggles with it. I have trichotillomania, and I’ve had it since I was 10 years old. It basically means self inflicted hair pulling, which 100% sucks ASS. When I turned 18 it went into (lack of a better term) remission and my hair grew out. I had it so long, that it touched the middle of my back (unfortunately, I don't have any pictures at this time of me with long hair). I absolutely loved how long my hair was.

And then, the whole 2016 Presidential election happened.

Aside from that, there were some other issues going on at the time, too.

That first picture is 23-year-old me feeling absolutely the worse I had EVER felt about myself. I felt so bad, all of the hard work I had put in to grow my hair out. There is so much shame around trich, constant self esteem issues, feeling alone, and too much bullying unfortunately. It was then, when I finally decided I would shave my hair completely. I felt so much more like myself than ever.

It absolutely does suck having this, especially when you’re a kid.

Here’s a small collection of me wearing four of my wigs (I have ten, yes TEN!), that I wear in public sometimes. Mostly during a holiday (that deep red one is my first lace front, btw).

Wearing wigs helps me out, I wore more natural looking ones in high school, and I like to express myself through them. I usually wear them in public, because I got done with people asking me about my hair loss (& I had a child ask me if I was a boy or a girl). I do like to choose whichever hairstyle I feel like coordinating with an outfit (yes, I intentionally wanted to look like a leprechaun for St. Paddy's Day, lol).

As you can also see from the photos, I'm plus-sized, which is DOUBLE the self esteem issues as a pre-teen and a teenager.

It took me a very long time to accept and love myself fully. I have my moments from time to time now as an almost 30-year-old woman. The point I am trying to make is that it wasn't until I was an adult, that I decided to really be honest about my mental health struggles. When you're growing up, you just want to fit in, no matter which group you wanted to be included at that time. I'm just mad at myself for not being more open and honest about my mental health.

We all want to be accepted and loved for who you are.

I want anyone who struggles with BFRB or any other mental health disorders to know: YOU ARE NOT ALONE! YOU ARE ALWAYS BEAUTIFUL!

I am here for you, if you just need to talk.

Edit: Apparently, I recently found out that September is also Trichotillomania and Alopecia Awareness Month. YAY!!!!

#my face #trichotillomania #trichotillomania awareness #bfrb awareness #mental health #mental health awareness #mental health matters #hair loss #tw hair pulling #self love #self care #self worth #you are valid #you are loved #body focused repetitive behavior #obsessive compulsive related disorders #representation matters #trich awareness month #september #actually ocd #alopecia awareness month #i'm tagging this under alopecia b/c of similarities w/ hair loss #you are beautiful #you are enough

[builder051]

🪨 And 🎭

🪨Black soot

Confession— why would Santa put you on the naughty list? (And have you set it right?)

You all know I have autism and ADHD, as well as BiPolar type II. I have a-- the best way I can put it is as a social learning deficit--Like I've always been book-smart at/above my educational level, but meeting friends and having conversations... I'm a solid 5 to 10 years behind what would be expected for street smarts and cordiality expected for my age. I'd never use my mental health or learning delays to excuse behavior that's universally unkind or problematic. However, my combination of issues creates a fair number of misunderstandings--usually when someone is doing something that I find odd, my brain fills in with the most likely reasoning, and then my internal judgement assigns a probable reason for the action as either good or bad. In a perfect world, I'd love for people to give me a brief warning or explanation--like, "I'm opening the very loud door to let the dog in." Instead of just suddenly opening and slamming the very loud door, and when I look up at the person, they have a displeased expression, and I automatically want to know what is going on, if I have contributed to anything the person is upset about, and, if true, what I can do to not make them unhappy again. I know that's putting a lot of work on the rest of the household to accommodate me, and I absolutely shouldn't expect it. I carry a lot of stress inside, and I frequently touch base with DD (who is in better communication with the rest of the household adults than I am) just to gauge how everyone may be feeling and to respect their mindset rather than jumping to the conclusion that a slammed door doesn't automatically mean it is a rude behavior that is done because the person is in a bad or angry mood.

The worst "behavior incident" of 2022 was when I got really angry at the roommate with whom I share a bathroom. She's a CNA and works in a hospital/rehab center, so she has to shower and disinfect daily, which leads to her being in that bathroom more often than I am. (Due to my port and tubes, I can only do a thorough shower 2x a week, and rely on bath wipes, etc. for the days in between. Several annoying events happened subsequently (towels on the floor, not changing the empty toilet paper roll, leaving the shower curtain completely out of the shower, and, the final straw, leaving the toilet unflushed when... it really needed to be flushed.)

I let DD and the other roommate know, but they kind of blew it off, and I wanted to get the CNA roommate to get the message that I was quite aware of her slobbery and that, as a fellow bathroom user, I was quite happy to continue, or even step up, my share of the bathroom cleaning, but it was kind of necessary that she put in some effort as well. So I put a note in the bathroom advising some rules, like flushing the toilet, changing the empty toilet paper roll, etc.

I didn't think I was being incredibly out of line (-like-We put sticky notes on people's food in the fridge), but apparently I was way wrong really bad and had upset the roommate and disappointed DD in my behavior. I felt horrible, and I do not want to be seen as a mean roommate. I wrote an apology note (which none of them agree is written as an apology, but I specifically addressed and atoned for my actions--rudeness of leaving the note and overreacting to what amounts to normal bathroom use and mistakes that just happen, not because they're done to purposely be bad--this specifically referring to the unflushed toilet. I don't really know any other way to apologize in an honest and kind way. I can dismiss the stimulus that set off my actions, own that my actions were wrong and went too far, then express how we can keep working together for shared-space upkeep). And I bought her a bag of cat treats (Even with drama, she has the most adorable cat.

Now it's been, like, two months? No more toilet unflushed problems. But also no more action to work together to keep the shared space cleaner. I know now that I'm not permitted to give a name to the blame. I can just do my part, let the household know if anything dangerous happens or if anything breaks, and try to keep a less-judgemental open mind.

🎭Burgundy stage curtain

Who is “in the wings,” helping you and supporting you through the stress of the season? (Basically a thank you shout-out.)

@mohini-musing, My lovely DD, has always provided with me so much love and support. We were able to have some conversations to try to get to the bottom of what's screwing with my productivity lately, and we're going to start a fresh program soon. My ADHD meds are not working so well, we think, and I need, in addition to moving on to something else RX, to be held to a student-style daily structure so I can't run off chasing butterflies when I'm supposed to be painting or something.

I'm so grateful for my baby boy (he's almost 5, but he still fits in my lap. His age, looks wise, is kind of like a chunky 3-year old.) To paraphrase an absolutely horrid doctor's appointment, to which I chapparoned bby as note-taker and bby cuddler, somebody who somehow managed to achieve an MD told us something to the effect of 'everything with a brain can have a seizure, and given what we're working with...' Maybe I should find that doc again and make an appointment for me and baby boy, just to prove how wrong he is. Bby can sit up and briefly stand up in my lap (so he can kick the doc quite easily). He babbles around 10 individual words and phrases, including "I love you" and "Good morning." He knows several signs in ASL and connects them to either their correct meaning or a code word that stands for something bigger. (His stroller has a blue canopy, so he signs blue for the stroller.). Bby came to us blind, with "no functional vision." After working with him to get to know that he can see light and dark, bby has been able to recognize at least 5 colors, and he has a favorite color (green) and least favorite color (pink). We got one more major report of good news for baby boy this week--his doctor is evaluating him for a gait trainer (basically the forefather of a walker). Because bby is interested in putting his feet on the ground and stomping, he's passed the magical test to start working on putting weight on his feet and legs. I love all my kiddos, and everyone in the household, but this year, even after he's had a few health scares, I'm so happy to see my baby thriving. He brings much happiness, even when I'm feeling down.

[x-littlemoth]

Apparently May is not just Mental Health Awareness Month, but also BPD Awareness Month. So, in celebration of that, anyone with BPD (be it stranger or mutual):

I see you. Your struggles and feelings are valid. Stay strong. ♥️

#tw bpd #bpd awareness #tw mental health #mental health awareness #little moth's blog #little moth's page

[coochiequeens]

Trigger warning : sexual abuse of children. A trans identified man was found with “extremely deviant and depraved material involving the sexual abuse of children, ranging from teenagers to very young children and babies.“

An Australian man who identifies as transgender has pleaded guilty to three offenses related to possessing “extreme” child sexual exploitation materials, including videos he created of himself performing sex acts next to a sleeping 5-year-old.

Josh Dean French, 25, who goes by the name ‘Jayda Dean,’ confessed to twice filming himself masturbating next to his friend’s sleeping child, opportunistically exploiting the 5-year-old while her mother ran an errand. French had been work colleagues and friends with the girl’s mother, and she had trusted him to keep an eye on the house while she went to the grocery store.

French first came under police scrutiny during a separate investigation into an unnamed individual suspected of child sexual abuses. Law enforcement became aware of communications between the suspect and French, who was using his “female” name to communicate with the other pedophile. On November 9, 2021, police raided French’s home and seized his electronic devices.

In total, authorities found 73 “extreme” videos and images on French’s devices, 49 of which contained aggravated child sexual abuse, and 24 of which contained non-aggravated child exploitation media. Among them were the two videos of French masturbating by the sleeping girl.

In a statement made during sentencing on September 15, Judge Julie McIntyre highlighted the depraved nature of the material, noting that the abuse images found by police were among the most serious kind.

“The material found in your possession, whilst not extensive, excludes some extremely deviant and depraved material involving the sexual abuse of children, ranging from teenagers to very young children and babies. To describe this material as ‘disturbing’ is an understatement,” Judge McIntyre said.

She emphasized that the possession of child sexual abuse materials “are not victimless crimes.” 

“When you access and possess child exploitation material, you access the physical pain and emotional trauma of children being subjected to sexual abuse,” Judge McIntyre elaborated, noting that such abuse causes long-term physical and mental health issues.

“Moreover, the victims live with the knowledge that the images and videos of their abuse exist in perpetuity on the internet. The existence of that material and the continual fear of being identified adds to victims’ feelings of shame and humiliation,” she added.

During a psychological evaluation, French apparently insisted he did not have a sexual attraction to children. He also blamed the child sexual abuse material possession on his male persona, whom he apparently suggested was a separate entity.

French pleaded guilty to one count of aggravated producing child exploitation material, two counts of possessing child exploitation material, one of which relates to material depicting children under 14 years of age, while the other concerns material depicting children over the age of 14.

French was sentenced to a total of 4 years, 10 months, and 8 days after Judge McIntyre imposed a discount on his time served. She noted that he will be eligible for parole in May of 2024. It is unknown if French will be serving his sentence in the female estate, or if he will be ordered to a men’s institution. 

According to Women’s Forum Australia, the state of South Australia, where French was convicted, has no straightforward policies on where to place transgender inmates, but individuals are usually accommodated on a case-by-case basis. 

French is the second transgender pedophile identified in South Australia, and the third in the country, over the past 30 days. A 2016 report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that there were only 1,260 “gender diverse” people in the entirety of Australia.

#Australia #jayda dean is a man named josh dean french #Trans identified sex offender #child abuse

[closedspeciesteahouse]

the truth about Ravaen [ferin admin]

okay it’s a lot so brace yourself- i want to be clear that this was gathered by me and a couple friends, so not every issue was directed at me but also at my close friends.

https://sta.sh/21s4pab1sg9o / https://sta.sh/016uq6oihv0q on July 30th 2019, one of my friends [my then partner] made a status on deviantART about diversity in ocs, to which Ravaen left the following comment. My friend then blocked Ravaen shortly after, to which Ravaen sent me the following dms about it. September 7th 2019 after i received some anon hate that i’ve since deleted and Ravaen took it upon herself to look up me and my friend’s facebook pages- the same friend who blocked her a month before.

https://sta.sh/21itlsj1fujv on July 22nd 2022, i messaged Ravaen on behalf of one of my friends who cut her off for mental health reasons, about a species Ravaen had bought that my friend had owned a single design in. after messaging Ravaen about this, she apparently told Szarlotka who took it upon herself to find out who it was and not only seek out the design, but fav and unfav it, basically making her presence known. included in this file is the message my friend sent Szarlotka before blocking her. Ravaen then proceeded to message me freaking out when i was unaware of the message that was sent until after this happened.

https://sta.sh/012uebt9rvem this is her ripping off the pallet to one of my designs, specifically the mascot for my species, with the colour picks next to them.

https://sta.sh/01hbobnpuj18 one of my friends owed Ravaen a refund and they were trying to work out a deal, when Ravaen got a little upset about them wanting their pride bases to only be used for pride flags.

https://sta.sh/01kenw2zlsr3 and now with my newest update, she’s basically encouraging people in her community to go against my tos.

https://sta.sh/2341zh11pw1 there have been anon messages sent to closed species drama tumblr accounts about someone who scammed me back in May. Ravaen was aware of this and tried to say i wasn’t scammed- that’s a whole different thing- but now any time an anon about said person comes up, Ravaen accuses it of being me.

https://sta.sh/2w41t15viqc she also deleted every single message she sent me before August 19th, and every single message she sent my friend. it makes me feel like shes trying to cover her tracks honestly.

this isn’t even everything, but it is almost everything we have proof of other than word of mouth. send me anon hate, i do not care. <3 

_________________________________________________

This is an addition to my post about Ravaen, she’s now encouraging her CS community to break my tos and telling them how to do it!! Along with making me look like I did something wrong when she’s the one who’s been playing childish games all weekend.

#submission #Ravaen #ferin admin

[opedguy]

Texas Mass Shooter All-too-Familiar

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), May 25, 2022.--Slaughtering 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas May 24, some 80 miles west of San Antonio, 18-year-old Salvador Rolando Ramos showed all the same traits of school shooters, reclusive, temperamental and non-communicative, all the hallmarks found in teenage killers.  While there are plenty of misanthropes that don’t commit mass shootings, Ramos fits the profile to a T, showing the kind a Autistic Spectrum disorder often overlooked and untreated by school officials.  Whether Ramos was ever treated for autism or other behavior problems isn’t know but it’s clear he had all the features of a ballistic killer.  Ramos was shot dead by an off-duty immigration and border inspection officer but only after he had gunned down 19 children and two adults.  Ramos’ mass-shooting comes only 10 days after a racist teenager murdered 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket.    Before Ramos went on his rampage at Robb Elementary School, he shot his grandmother, who apparently remains in critical condition at an Uvalde hospital.  Imitating the Dec. 14, 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., Ramos, like 20-year-old  Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza,  shot his grandmother before moving on to his rampage at Robb Elemenary.  Lanza shot his mother between-the-eyes before going on to Sandy Hook where he killed 20 children and six adults.  Law enforcement officials no doubt look for a motive or precipitating cause for Ramos’ shooting rampage but glaring similarities exist between most childhood shooters.  Like 18-year-old Payton S. Gendron who shot 10 Black people May 24 at a Buffalo supermarket, Ramos followed the same script of a teenage killer equipped with AR-15 assault rifles and body armor.    Debate has started again over the Second Amendment and the need for better gun control legislation.  When the National Rifle Association [NRA] meets in Houston May 27, speakers, including former President Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tx.), will no doubt blame the Uvalde incident on mental illness or some other type of depravity.  “He [Ramost] was kind of a weird one.  I never got along with him.  I never socialized with him.  He doesn’t talk to nobody,” said Juan Alvarez, 62, boyfriend of Ramos’ biological mother. “When you try to talk to him he’d just sit there and walk a way,” speaking volumes about the reclusive, socially inept personality that often goes with child mass shooters.  What’s disturbing is the fact that Uvalde police, two months earlier, came to the Ramos home for a domestic dispute when he left to live with his grandmother.  Uvalde police did not assess Ramos for dangerousness.    Police and other mental health professionals often miss signs of dangerousness, failing to get appropriate treatment for suspicious individuals.  With today’s medical insurance not covering all mental health, it’s difficult for law enforcement or school counselors to refer to appropriate treatment.  Police cannot intervene early because it violates civil rights, unless a violent incident has already occurred.  Ramos had no  history with the Uvalde police or his high school with violent behavior.  Reports of Ramos telling a friend that he might do “something” didn’t result in police notification.  Ramos grandfather, Rolando Reyes, said they were not aware that Ramos possessed assault rifles and ammunition. But whatever the holes in the current mental health system, elected officials must pass some type of gun legislation to prevent teenagers from getting assault weapons.    Ramos apparently bough the assault rifles legally close to his 18th birthday.  Where he got the cash for the purchases in anyone’s guess.  Elected officials, including Second Amendment advocates, must accept existing research on brain development, knowing that the adult brain doesn’t mature until at least 25-year-of-age, maybe later.  So when it comes to purchasing firearms at retail stores, elected officials can surely agree that teenagers aren’t ready to assume responsibilities of gun ownership.  Much talk in the gun debate focuses of longer waiting periods to complete gun purchases or extending more comprehensive background checks.  While all of that can’t hurt, elected officials must keep guns out of the hands of teenagers, no matter what.  Until the teenage brain evolves by age 25 into a responsible adult, the government must prevent teens from buying lethal weapons.    Salvador Rolando Ramos was another teen killer, someone with a disturbed upbringing, but, more importantly, just not mature enough to buy lethal weapons.  When 49-year-old Texas Democrat governor candidate Beto O’Rourke interrupted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott at a press conference today in Uvalde’s central square, it said more about politics than any practical ways to prevent future mass shootings.  “This one is on you,” O-Rourke screamed at Abbott, blaming the pro-Second Amendment governor for the horrific mass shooting.  But instead of hurling insults, elected officials must work together across the aisle to come up with a fix that works.  Since it’s impossible, at this point, to assure comprehensive mental health services, elected officials could still change the age at which lethal gun purchases take place.  Raising the legal age to 25 would have saved at least 19 children and two adults. About the Author John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.

[etakeh]

OK 

apparently May is Mental Health Awareness Month, so everyone stop what you’re doing and be aware of your mental health!

Yes, that sounds facetious, and that’s how I initially intended it, 

but

it’s actually a good idea.

Take a minute and just...be aware of it.  Don’t ignore it. It’s important.

#mental health #mental health awareness #be alert #be aware #mental health is everywhere

[novelsmini]

Cervical cancer is a type of cancer that occurs in the cells of the cervix, the lower part of the uterus that connects to the vagina

Cervical cancer-

Cervical cancer is a type of cancer that occurs in the cells of the cervix, the lower part of the uterus that connects to the vagina. Most cases of cervical cancer are caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV), a sexually transmitted infection. Here are various details about cervical cancer:

 Risk Factors:

1. HPV Infection: Persistent infection with high-risk types of HPV is the primary cause of cervical cancer. Not all HPV infections lead to cancer, but certain strains increase the risk.

2. Smoking: Women who smoke are at a higher risk of developing cervical cancer.

3. Weak Immune System: A weakened immune system, often due to conditions such as HIV/AIDS or immunosuppressive medications, may increase the risk.

4. Birth Control Pills: Long-term use of oral contraceptives has been associated with a slightly increased risk.

5. Many Pregnancies: Having many full-term pregnancies, especially if they occurred at a young age, may increase the risk.

6. Family History: A history of cervical cancer in the family may contribute to an increased risk.

Cervical Cancer Awareness Month-

Cervical Cancer Awareness Month is recognized in January each year. The month serves as an opportunity to raise awareness about cervical cancer, its risk factors, prevention strategies, and the importance of early detection. The goal is to educate the public, healthcare professionals, and policymakers about the impact of cervical cancer and encourage actions that can reduce the incidence of this cancer and improve outcomes for those affected.

During Cervical Cancer Awareness Month, various organizations, healthcare providers, and advocacy groups may conduct educational campaigns, host events, and share information through various channels such as social media, articles, and community outreach programs. The awareness efforts often focus on the following key messages:

1. **Prevention through Vaccination:** Highlighting the importance of HPV vaccination, especially for adolescents, to prevent infection with high-risk types of human papillomavirus (HPV) that can lead to cervical cancer.

2. **Regular Screenings:** Emphasizing the significance of regular Pap smears and HPV tests for early detection of precancerous changes or cervical cancer.

3. **Risk Reduction Strategies:** Providing information on lifestyle factors that can reduce the risk of cervical cancer, such as safe sex practices, quitting smoking, and limiting the number of sexual partners.

4. **Access to Healthcare:** Encouraging individuals to prioritize routine gynecological check-ups and screenings, and advocating for increased access to healthcare services for all.

5. **Support for Those Affected:** Acknowledging the challenges faced by individuals diagnosed with cervical cancer and promoting support networks, resources, and information for patients and their families.

By promoting awareness and education, Cervical Cancer Awareness Month aims to empower individuals to take proactive steps in preventing cervical cancer and ensure that those diagnosed receive timely and effective treatment. It also serves as a platform to advocate for policies and initiatives that improve cervical cancer prevention, screening, and treatment on a broader scale.

Symptoms:

Cervical cancer may not always cause noticeable symptoms in its early stages, which is why regular screenings, such as Pap smears and HPV tests, are crucial for early detection. As the cancer progresses, symptoms may become more apparent. It's important for women to be aware of potential signs and seek medical attention if they experience any of the following:

1. **Abnormal Vaginal Bleeding:**

   - **Between Periods:** Bleeding or spotting between regular menstrual cycles.

   - **After Menopause:** Any bleeding or spotting after menopause, which is defined as 12 consecutive months without a menstrual period.

2. **Unusual Discharge:**

   - An increase in vaginal discharge that may be watery, bloody, or have a foul odor.

3. **Pelvic Pain or Discomfort:**

   - Persistent pain or discomfort in the pelvic region, especially during sexual intercourse.

4. **Pain During Urination:**

   - Pain or discomfort during urination can be a symptom, though it is less common.

5. **Pain in the Lower Back or Leg:**

   - Advanced stages of cervical cancer may cause pain in the lower back or leg due to the spread of cancer to nearby tissues.

6. **Weight Loss:**

   - Unexplained weight loss not attributed to diet or lifestyle changes.

7. **Fatigue:**

   - Ongoing fatigue that is not alleviated by rest or improved sleep.

8. **Swelling of the Legs:**

   - Swelling in the legs may occur if the cancer has spread to nearby lymph nodes, causing blockages in the lymphatic system.

It's important to note that these symptoms can be caused by various conditions, and having one or more of these symptoms does not necessarily mean a person has cervical cancer. However, if any of these symptoms persist or are unusual for an individual, it is crucial to consult with a healthcare professional for further evaluation and appropriate testing.

Regular screenings, including Pap smears and HPV tests, are effective in detecting precancerous changes or early-stage cervical cancer before symptoms appear. This emphasizes the importance of routine gynecological check-ups and discussions with healthcare providers about individual risk factors and screening schedules. Early detection greatly increases the chances of successful treatment and recovery.

Diagnosis:

The diagnosis of cervical cancer involves a series of steps, including screening tests, diagnostic procedures, and imaging studies. Early detection is crucial for successful treatment. Here's a detailed overview of the diagnostic process for cervical cancer:

 1. Screening Tests:

Pap Smear (Pap Test):

 Description: Cells are collected from the cervix and examined under a microscope for any abnormalities.

 Purpose: Detects precancerous changes or early-stage cervical cancer.

 Frequency: Regular screenings are recommended for sexually active women starting at age 21, with the frequency determined by individual risk factors.

HPV Test:

  Description: Checks for the presence of high-risk types of human papillomavirus (HPV).

  Purpose: Identifies women at higher risk for cervical cancer.

  Frequency: Often done in conjunction with Pap smears, typically starting at age 30.

 2. Diagnostic Procedures:

Colposcopy:

 Description: A colposcope (a lighted magnifying instrument) is used to examine the cervix for abnormal areas.

  Indications: Follow-up for abnormal Pap smears or HPV tests.

Biopsy:

 Description: Removal of a small tissue sample from the cervix for laboratory examination.

 Types:

  Cervical Biopsy: Removes a small piece of cervical tissue.

   Endocervical Curettage: Scrapes cells from the cervical canal.

  Conization (Cone Biopsy): Removal of a cone-shaped piece of tissue.

  Purpose: Confirms the presence of cancer and determines the extent of abnormal cells.

 3. Imaging Studies:

- CT Scan (Computed Tomography):

  - Description: X-ray images are taken from different angles to create detailed cross-sectional images.

 Purpose: Determines if cancer has spread to nearby lymph nodes or other organs.

MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging):

Description: Uses magnetic fields and radio waves to create detailed images.

Purpose: Helps assess the extent of cancer and identify spread to nearby structures.

PET-CT Scan (Positron Emission Tomography-Computed Tomography):

 Description: Combines PET and CT scans to detect areas of increased metabolic activity.

 Purpose: Assesses whether cancer has spread to other parts of the body.

 4. Staging:

Description: Determines the extent and severity of cancer, guiding treatment decisions.

Staging System: International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO) staging system is commonly used for cervical cancer.

 5. Other Tests:

Blood Tests: Certain blood markers may be measured to assess overall health and response to treatment.

 6. Genetic Testing-

Description: Identifies specific genetic mutations that may affect treatment decisions.

Indications: Considered in some cases, particularly for advanced or recurrent cervical cancer.

 7. Multidisciplinary Consultation:

Description: A team of specialists, including gynecologic oncologists, radiation oncologists, and medical oncologists, reviews the diagnostic findings to develop a comprehensive treatment plan.

The diagnostic process for cervical cancer involves collaboration between the patient and healthcare providers. If cervical cancer is confirmed, the information obtained from diagnostic tests helps determine the stage of cancer and guides the development of an individualized treatment plan. Early detection and accurate diagnosis play a crucial role in improving outcomes for individuals with cervical cancer.

Stages of Cervical Cancer:

Cervical cancer is staged from 0 to IV, with higher stages indicating more extensive disease.

Cervical cancer is typically staged based on the extent of its spread, and the staging helps guide the treatment plan. The staging system commonly used for cervical cancer is the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO) staging system. The stages range from 0 to IV, with higher stages indicating more advanced disease. Here's an overview of the stages:

 Stage 0 (Carcinoma in Situ):

Description: Also known as carcinoma in situ (CIS) or pre-cancerous lesions. At this stage, abnormal cells are found only on the surface of the cervix and have not invaded deeper tissues.

Treatment: Often treated with procedures like cryotherapy, laser therapy, or cone biopsy to remove the abnormal cells.

 Stage I:

Description: Cancer is confined to the cervix.

Sub-stages:

 IA: Invasive cancer that can only be seen under a microscope and is limited to a measured depth of invasion.

 IB: Clinically visible invasive cancer confined to the cervix.

Treatment: Options may include surgery (hysterectomy), radiation therapy, or a combination of both.

 Stage II:

Description: Cancer has spread beyond the cervix but not to the pelvic sidewall or lower third of the vagina.

Sub-stages:

  IIA: Involvement of the upper two-thirds of the vagina but not extending to the tissues around the uterus.

  IIB: Cancer has invaded the parametrial tissues (tissues around the uterus) but not the pelvic sidewall.

Treatment: Typically involves a combination of surgery and radiation therapy.

Stage III:

Description: 

 Cancer has spread to the lower third of the vagina or the pelvic sidewall and may block the ureters (tubes that carry urine from the kidneys to the bladder).

Sub-stages:

 IIIA: Cancer has spread to the lower third of the vagina but not to the pelvic sidewall.

 IIIB: Cancer has spread to the pelvic sidewall and/or may block the ureters.

Treatment: Combination of surgery, radiation therapy, and possibly chemotherapy.

Stage IV:

Description: Cancer has spread to nearby organs, such as the bladder or rectum, or has spread to distant organs.

Sub-stages:

  IVA: Cancer has invaded adjacent organs, such as the bladder or rectum.

  IVB: Cancer has spread to distant organs, such as the lungs, liver, or bones.

Treatment: Treatment may involve a combination of surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy, depending on the extent of the spread.

 Recurrent Cervical Cancer:

Description: Cancer has come back after initial treatment.

Treatment: Treatment options depend on the location and extent of recurrence and may include surgery, radiation therapy, and/or chemotherapy.

It's important to note that the specific treatment plan for cervical cancer is highly individualized and depends on factors such as the patient's overall health, the stage of cancer, and the presence of specific risk factors. Patients should discuss their treatment options and prognosis with their healthcare team. Early detection and appropriate treatment play a crucial role in improving outcomes for women with cervical cancer.

 Treatment Options:

The treatment of cervical cancer depends on several factors, including the stage of the cancer, the patient's overall health, and individual preferences. Treatment options often involve a combination of surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy. Here's a detailed overview of the main treatment modalities:

 1. Surgery:

a. Hysterectomy:

  Description: Surgical removal of the uterus, and sometimes, nearby tissues.

   Types: 

    Simple Hysterectomy: Removal of the uterus and cervix.

   Radical Hysterectomy: Removal of the uterus, cervix, part of the vagina, and surrounding tissues.

   Indications: Common for early-stage cervical cancer.

b. Lymph Node Dissection:

   Description: Removal of lymph nodes to check for the spread of cancer.

   Indications: Often done during a radical hysterectomy.

2. Radiation Therapy:

a. External Beam Radiation:

   Description: High-energy rays target cancer cells from outside the body.

   Indications: Used to treat the cervix and surrounding tissues.

b. Brachytherapy (Internal Radiation):

   Description: Radioactive sources placed directly into or near the tumor.

   Indications: Commonly used after external beam radiation to target residual cancer cells.

 3. Chemotherapy:

Description: Medications that kill rapidly dividing cells, including cancer cells.

Indications:

  As Primary Treatment: Before or after surgery to shrink tumors.

 As Adjuvant Therapy: After primary treatment to kill remaining cancer cells.

 For Advanced Stages: To control the spread of cancer.

4. Targeted Therapy:

Description: Drugs that specifically target cancer cells or the processes that support their growth.

Indications: Used in some cases of advanced or recurrent cervical cancer.

 5. Immunotherapy:

Description: Boosts the body's immune system to target and destroy cancer cells.

Indications: Investigational, with ongoing research for its use in cervical cancer.

 6. Clinical Trials:

Description: Participation in research studies to test new treatments or combinations.

Indications: Offered to some patients as an option, especially in advanced or recurrent cases.

 7. Palliative Care:

Description: Focuses on relieving symptoms and improving quality of life.

Indications: May be integrated at any stage, even alongside curative treatments.

 Follow-Up Care:

After completing treatment, regular follow-up appointments are crucial to monitor for recurrence or any long-term effects of treatment. This may include physical exams, imaging studies, and other tests.

It's essential for individuals with cervical cancer to have open and ongoing discussions with their healthcare team to understand the recommended treatment plan, potential side effects, and the overall prognosis. The choice of treatment is personalized, taking into account the specific characteristics of the cancer and the individual's health status.

Preventions:

Preventing cervical cancer involves a combination of vaccination, regular screenings, and adopting healthy lifestyle practices. Here's a detailed overview of cervical cancer prevention strategies:

 1. HPV Vaccination:

Description: HPV (human papillomavirus) vaccines are highly effective in preventing infection with the most common high-risk types of HPV.

Vaccines:

  Gardasil 9: Protects against HPV types 16, 18, 31, 33, 45, 52, and 58, as well as types 6 and 11, which cause genital warts.

  Cervarix: Protects against HPV types 16 and 18.

Target Population: Recommended for both males and females, ideally before sexual activity begins.

Age Recommendations: Vaccination is typically recommended for adolescents around the age of 11 or 12, but it can be administered up to age 26 for females and age 21 for males who were not vaccinated earlier.

2. Regular Screenings:

Pap Smear:

  Description: Cells from the cervix are collected and examined for abnormalities.

  Frequency: Guidelines may vary, but generally, starting at age 21, with the frequency determined by individual risk factors.

HPV Test:

  Description: Checks for the presence of high-risk HPV types.

  Frequency: Often done in conjunction with Pap smears, typically starting at age 30.

Combination of Pap Smear and HPV Test:

  Description: In some cases, both tests are used together (co-testing) for enhanced screening.

  Frequency: Recommendations vary; typically done every 3-5 years for women aged 30 and older.

Screening Guidelines: Follow the recommendations of healthcare providers or relevant health organizations, taking into account individual risk factors.

3. Safe Sex Practices:

Condom Use:

  Description: Consistent and correct use of condoms during sexual activity can reduce the risk of HPV transmission.

  Precaution: While condoms offer some protection, they do not eliminate the risk entirely.

 4. Quit Smoking:

Description: Smoking is a risk factor for cervical cancer. Quitting smoking reduces this risk.

Benefits: Smoking cessation has overall health benefits and can improve the effectiveness of cervical cancer treatment.

5. Limiting the Number of Sexual Partners:

Description: Having a smaller number of sexual partners reduces the risk of HPV exposure.

 6. Early Vaccination for Boys:

Description: Since HPV can also cause cancers in males and can be transmitted through sexual activity, early vaccination in boys is recommended.

 7. Health Education and Awareness:

Description: Educate individuals about the risks of cervical cancer, the importance of vaccination, and the need for regular screenings.

Encourage Early Detection: Emphasize the importance of seeking medical attention for any abnormal symptoms.

 8. Follow-Up Care:

Description: Women with abnormal Pap smears or positive HPV tests should follow up promptly with their healthcare providers for further evaluation and management.

9. Pregnancy Planning:

Description: Women planning to become pregnant should discuss their cervical health with their healthcare provider.

Preventive measures work best when combined, and it's essential for individuals to work closely with healthcare providers to develop a personalized prevention plan based on individual risk factors and health history. Early detection and prevention are key to reducing the incidence and impact of cervical cancer. Early detection and prevention are crucial for managing cervical cancer effectively. Regular screenings, vaccination, and adopting healthy lifestyle choices can significantly reduce the risk of developing this type of cancer. It's important for women to discuss their individual risk factors and screening schedules with their healthcare providers.

#lifestyle #women health #women #awareness

[leewritesthings]

This sucks.

For reference, I'm currently unemployed. I'm not at the stage where I'm b*gging internet strangers for money... yet. Maybe several months or now, if there are no crises.

Anyway, it's been stressful, to say the least. My SO is an absolute darling by insisting I'll get every job I get an interview for -- even if my outlook is much more bleak. I don't have an offer until I'm staring one down in the face. I've been rejected at the final stage so many times now it's actively painful to count.

Of course, my life has decided that I shouldn't be exempt from my share of drama. It doesn't matter if the actual event happened long ago, or if it didn't involve me to begin with -- it involves me now, apparently, because I exist in these circles. Did I mention I'm unemployed and broke for all intents and purposes?

One of my fellow underemployed (not unemployed) friends highly insinuated to me that I should buy them a game to make up a thing that happened years ago and... you couldn't ask this months ago, when I wasn't monitoring my credit card like a hawk? When I'm having to justify every single goddamn purchase to myself, as if there's anything I can do to avoid food. Or worse, meds.

Another one of my "friends" (I think I may be using that word too liberally. I hope I'm wrong.) insinuated that by telling another friend they should talk to a mental health professional, I was somehow being... ignorant? Like, no, buddy. That's not how any of this works. I'm well-aware that I'm not any sort of mental health professional, and neither are you, for that matter. And dealing with this is currently out of my realm of expertise. I've hurt myself, and others, by trying to be a therapist when I'm not remotely qualified. That's why they should talk to someone qualified. Not you, and not me.

But that's not really the thing, though, is it? People enjoy playing the hero when it comes to mental issues -- for some goddamn reason -- without any regard if they're helping or actually hurting or worse enabling the person in question.

Anyway, that's two -- count them, one, two -- friend groups that I don't feel comfortable associating with currently. I don't really have much beyond that, which is why I'm writing here. It... really feels like no one cares, besides my SO. And that has to be enough, at least for right now.

I just wish I could have somewhere -- some time -- to relax and enjoy my friends. I hate the holidays. I hate how sad winter makes everyone, even if I enjoy hiding my gender with hoodies and sweats. I hate the pressure every year of getting people presents. I hate the pressure to bake, the pressure to get people together, the pressure to be happy and joyful... when there's so little to be joyful about.

I'm also trying to separate myself from the Chr*stian supremacy we see in the US. December throws a wrench in that plan, of course. Just the whole damn month.

I don't really know where I'm going with this. I suppose that's the point of a journal entry.

#journal

[banyan-sebring]

Understanding Anxiety and Its Triggers

Anxiety is a mental health condition that can manifest itself in various forms, such as generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, and various phobia-related disorders. Anxiety refers to feelings of worry, fear, or tension, and for some people, it can also lead to panic attacks, which are episodes of distress marked by physical symptoms such as rapid breathing, chest pain, and tightness. Therefore, it's important to identify anxiety triggers to prevent and properly manage symptoms.

Identifying Anxiety Triggers

While some people may feel anxious for no apparent reason, there is almost always an underlying cause that may be beyond their awareness. Identifying anxiety triggers can be particularly difficult if they are things that individuals typically encounter or deal with daily. This may be a sign of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), a mental health condition characterized by excessive worry about everyday issues and situations that typically lasts longer than six months. Symptoms of GAD include worry, restlessness, fatigue, trouble concentrating, irritability, increased muscle tension, and trouble sleeping. Other reasons you may feel anxious for "no reason" include hereditary factors, brain chemistry, and medical conditions such as arthritis, asthma, COPD, and diabetes.

Tips for Finding Anxiety Triggers

Identifying and understanding anxiety triggers is crucial for avoiding or coping with them. This process can take time, but there are several tips that can help:

Take Notes: Jot down details about your surroundings, who you're with, what you smell and hear, and even what you ate (if you're eating) whenever you feel anxious. Over time, you'll likely notice patterns of things that are usually present or those you experienced that contributed to your anxiety.

Research Your Diet: Diet and anxiety are closely linked. Foods that can make anxiety worse include processed meats, high-sugar foods, caffeine, and alcohol. Pay attention to when you're eating these foods and how you feel. If you notice that your anxiety levels peak after having coffee, soda, or eating sugary foods, then simple adjustments in your diet can make a huge difference.

Pay Attention to Sleep: Lack of sleep can significantly impact mood and make individuals more prone to anxiety. Getting eight hours of sleep (or more) every night is crucial for maintaining a healthy balance both physically and mentally. If you struggle to fall asleep or tend to be up too late, try cutting off screen time at least 30 minutes before bedtime, reading in bed, and avoiding caffeine and sugar a few hours before bedtime.

Consider Relationships: Some people may be anxiety-inducing, and it's okay to limit time with them if necessary. Consider if the relationship is toxic or if you need to find a new way to communicate with the individual. If it's something that they tend to say or do whenever you spend time together, consider expressing how you feel.

Anxiety Triggers Checklist

Additionally, our mental health and drug rehab in Sebring, FL, has created an anxiety triggers checklist as a base to help individuals get started in identifying their anxiety triggers. The checklist includes factors such as alcohol, caffeine, conflict, financial problems, lack of sleep, life transitions, low self-esteem, medication, messy home, negative self-talk, self-neglect, social gatherings, stress, sugary foods, unbalanced diet, upcoming exams or meetings, and work environment.

#anxiety #triggers #mental health #anxiety attack

[earthquakxr]

Info Doc for Mobile

Lancea Ioannis Petrakis-Alverez

information

GENERAL INFORMATION

Aliases: Lance Alvers, Avalanche, Richter Species: Human Mutant Age: 23 Apparent Age: 20’s Place of Birth: Brisbee, AZ USA Date of Birth: May 10th ♉︎ Hair: Brown Eyes: Bright Brown-Hazel Race: Greek/Mexican Nationality: US Citizen Height: 6’4” / 193cm Weight: 185 lbs / 83.9 kg Gender: Cis Masc

DESCRIPTION Lance stands at an imposing height with an often more intimidating scowl on his face(though it’s just his resting face). His hair hangs long and straight, down to the middle of his shoulders when not tied into a ponytail. His manner of dress is mostly grungy clothing, thrifted and patched up, with a majority of torn jeans and band t-shirts. He wears either hiking or combat boots, but never sneakers. His built frame requires some shirts to have their sleeves cut off.

He has multiple tattoos, all of which are symbols representing the element of earth.

PERSONAL INFORMATION

Sexual Orientation: Closetted Bisexual Relationship Status: Single Occupation: Guitarist/Bassist, Busker Religion/Practice: Roman Catholic

OTHER INFORMATION

Mental Health Status: Unstable, Recovering from Meth Addiction Disorders/Mental Illnesses: Intermittent Explosive Disorder, BPD, ADHD Alignment: Chaotic Good Personality: Forthright, Determined, Passionate, Protective, Distrustful, Angry Special Traits: Leadership, Quick-Thinking, 

Likes: Alt Rock, Blues, Metal, Johnny Cash, Geology, Jeeps, Off Roading Dislikes: Authority, Laws Against Victimless Crime, Entitlement, Addict Judgement

FUN FACTS

⫸ Speaks fluent Greek, but only conversational Spanish

POWERS & VULNERABILITIES

Seismokinesis

Vibration Manipulation: Lance has the ability to manipulate seismic vibrations through inorganic matter, like dirt, rocks, and metals. These vibrations are primarily released through his hands and his feet, and work more effectively through direct touch. Though he can remotely send and manipulate seismic vibrations, it takes a lot more focus and energy. Sand and loose soil is more difficult to manipulate than solid rock or metal. With equivalent focus and direct contact, he can form shapes from dirt, stone, and metal, usually simple shapes like walls, spikes, or domes.

Vibration Absorption: With focus, Lance can absorb the vibrations of an earthquake or other source of violent vibration, nullifying it. Lance also absorbs residual seismic vibrations through the ground unconsciously. These vibrations may build up in his system until he has to release them. If repressed or withheld long enough, the vibrations will escape through violent headaches and seizures, which also cause earthquakes around him. This also affects his mood. The more seismic energy held inside, the more prone to explosive outbursts he is.

Geo Symbiosis: Lance is aware of the consciousness of the planet, itself, though is unable to directly communicate with it. Instead, he feels the emotions located locally on the planet’s surface (e.g. agitation before an earthquake, tranquility in still land). This allows him to tell when an earthquake is incoming, or when the planet is suffering distress from invasive destruction like fracking, drilling, or blasting. Due to his connection with the planet, flying or being a great distance from ground level induces nausea and disorientation, as his body struggles to maintain the connection. Too long apart from the ground and he may pass out.

Addiction

Lance suffers an addiction to methamphetamine, which started during his months of homelessness on the road. He had to sober up while under treatment for his powers at Xavier’s, and has been clean for just under two months. However, his struggle against addiction is far from over, and temptations lurk around every corner of his difficult life and circumstances.

#info