#ie. visit my brain and make me inspired to write

[queenharumiura]

Just a Neo self-reporting her random thoughts for the day. This is mostly here for me to maybe revisit and think about again. [just ignore it, actually lol It's just me rambling a lot]

I like to think of all sorts of random ideas for fun, even if I know that I'll never write it out. It's a fun activity I do in order to job creative inspiration and to challenge my perception of my own muse.

We know that canonically there are different parallel universes than things can be vastly different because of one small difference (like trying to help someone with a jammed bike chain) and it had me like Haru going to school at an earlier time so that she never saw Tsuna and Reborn in the mornings. She's just your average (but still chaotic, don't get it twisted) school girl.

If we didn't know, my Haru muse is really strong, to the point that she likes to intrude my thoughts often in the form of random suggestive thoughts popping into my brain-- I really did try to consider what her life could've been like if she wasn't involved with the Vongola. Like how would it have affected her studies? Would it have affected her daily activities?

She always studies hard, but now she probably has more time to focus on her studies. For sure, she'd continue to make costumes for fun and do gymnastics. She probably has more time to have more tutoring classes. Maybe this time she's less proficient in cooking, but she is still learning to put less burden on her working mother.

What new things can she do instead that would occupy her time? Maybe all the time she spent with the Vongola crew would have gone into the creative side of hers so she'd have made more costumes so that her friend in the drama club actively tries to recruit her. Maybe she joins to help with the backstage crew (ie creating props, costuming, etc).

Hekk, it's very possible that she had decided on cram school or something to help with her studies and make new friends there. Maybe meet someone else that she could like. Have a shot at a regular and happy life fit for an average girl.

So many thoughts. THEN the sudden thoughts of 'okay but is there a different way she would've gotten involved?' That had my brain BUZZING.

That's when she hit me with different ideas like, she cross paths with a jogging Ryohei every morning and so they start off with just saying good morning but maybe one day she decides to join him at least once to see what it's like to job early in the morning. Maybe it's better than doing so at night? Maybe early morning exercise will help improve her studies-- or help wake her up (she's not a morning person). That's how she meets Kyoko and they become fast friends.

That's how you then meet the others- and boom, involved.

Then she probably hit me with the 'don't forget that Haru likes to read/study on a park bench while listening to music. It's not an uncommon sight to see Yamamoto jogging, or doing practice swings. Haru likes to see someone who is driven, motivated, and in general dedicated to something they're passionate about. She would've noticed him. Never forget that time when he injures his arm and that definitely would spark curiosity as well as her general 'I tend to worry about everyone' gene. Yamamoto being a friendly guy in general would probably warm up to her quickly and boom, friends. Then you meet the others and wow. Mafia involvement.

There is another way in the realm of, if she was more focused on her studies, perhaps she's out studying at a library or at a friends house and something that I can see being a thing is to drop by a conbini store because they are as they are called: convenient. Like, photocopiers are really convenient for students. You can buy stationary items, maybe get a late snack, send mail, etc. I've been to a few myself a few years back and they really are so convenient. ANYWAYS, I do see it that she could visit one later in the day and we do know of someone who works part-time.

The thought that at first she was scared to go in bc... hoodlum, but then realizes he's still there like a week later. 'He can't be that bad if he's still working? The store owner wouldn't keep a bad person around.' She's an academic soul, so it's the old saying "Curiosity killed the cat but satisfaction brought it back." Just her trying to learn more about him on the sly out of curiosity, and realizing that even though he seems like a hooligan, he's actually quite a decent guy. Not Haru randomly trying to strike conversation because she thinks he's fascinating. I can see her just dropping by sometimes to make sure he's still working and doing alright.

Something that I remembered from anime and then looked into today is that you cannot pay anyone a wage if they're under 16 in Japan. It's a part of their child labor laws. I can only assume that due to him not having family (ignore Bianchi) in Japan, he gets a pass or something? If not that, he lied about his age. Whichever the case may be, she'd think that there had to be some kind of extenuating circumstances for him. Her being worried and leaving something like a drink or a small bento for him. Lil notes like 'Ganba!' It's very Haru brand for her to care for people and want to support them. (My GokuHaru bias is showing, can you tell?)

Something something, I bet she gets involved with the mafia.

The easiest one? Lambo probably got lost or hurt himself and 'i'm your new onee-san' Haru comes in to help him. Where does he live? With Tsuna and them. What would Haru do? Be worried about Lambo and resolve to visit more often. Like, she found Lambo on his own, crying. SHE CAN'T TRUST THEM TO LOOK AFTER LAMBO- and don't forget how there are OTHER children too. Big sis Haru could never just leave them be.

Mafia affiliations a gogo.

I bet my Haru brain could've thought of more, but then at that point I had to go into a meeting so I shut off daydream brain.

It's funny to me how quickly Haru hijacked my thoughts and made me consider alternative ways for her to have gotten involved with the Vongola. She really told me 'how dare you try to take me away from my friends? Don't you know me? I'll find a way to befriend them all anyways. Watch me.'

She keeps hitting me with a new idea any time I try to think of regular civilian Haru. She's very unhappy with me and so I had no muse today.

TLDR

Haru told me: I'm every bit part of the Vongola so stop trying to take me out of it, i'll find a way to squeeze back in there. Bet.

Yes, lil ma'am.

#Muneo talks #((tbh idk what to tag this ass bc it's not a HC. It's not even a verse. It's just my silly thoughts)) #((Maybe the shitpost tag? Guess it's the best I got)) #((Neo asks if this is what a shitpost is)) #((Now I log off for the night))

[aurrieattorney]

it has been a While since I've remembered/interacted with any fallen hero stuff but I AM dying to know more abt suranga so pls. holds out hands.

(uhhhhh my brain is a little bit scrambled by exhaustion so please heed that there's some tough themes from the source material in this, but at least a cw for mention of suicide and eating disorders)

[inhale] ok SO 

Basically, i missed original suranga a lot given i made him when things were kind of going to shit in my life, and my very nebulous webcomic iteration wasn’t scratching the itch to have him back quite enough, and round about early feb i found out retri was coming out.

So i kinda did a redux of him, keeping some of the things i had and tossing out others while adding other stuff. Much of this i’ve already yelled at with joel and mort, but i’ve never actually sat down and put all those yellings together lol. He’s lebanese-sri lankan (not that he would know, just generally he’s some unplaceable kind of south/west asian and using that to his advantage for fake names) and his voiceclaim, both speaking and singing (suranga sings! both in arabic and english) is hamed sinno (though sameer gadhia also works). For faceclaims, basically the closest person i can get to faceclaim inspo is varada sethu, esp pre-transition with the nose and the skin-tone. He’s also a little bit taller at just under 5’5’’ rather than 5’1 cos I took mercy on him, but he still has to crane his neck to look at ricardo being the giant he is (though suranga Did used to be 5’6’’ before HB fucked his spine up, and becoming even shorter than ortega makes him very grumpy).

freddie purrcury the lint monster is still there, but suranga adopts him pre-hb (ie. sidestep days). It’s thanks to fred that suranga stays with the rangers after a near-miss with the media (which i’m writing a fic up about!), and helps him grow into himself by having to look after another being. After HB, ricardo takes him briefly while he figures out what to do with himself. He’d ultimately love to keep fred but knows he can’t do a very good job of it esp after he decides he can’t retire yet, so fred goes to elena’s (spoilers for retri ending, theres a path where you can visit her ranch!!). I’m still deciding when would be the best point for them to reunite but basically suranga very sad w/o his cat, someone help him :(

however! He’s a mob step (at least, that’s what i’ve tended to default to, i love the crime found family :3 anarchist is also a good fit tho, and i’ve read through the code for thief which could also be fitting, so i’m planning to do), i debated whether he’d want to let the gang in on his identity and the base and ultimately decided yes, it was worth it if he wanted their full trust. He also accidentally becomes a parental figure to nehal, the gang’s driver, which is unexpected for everyone, suranga especially dsakjlfdksj. nehal has spud the pomeranian now, who essentially acts as the gang’s mascot. I have a few ideas about writing fic about their misadventures b/c i am very soft about them and suranga having people who’ve got his back

i changed his suit and his villain name (Argos) to be peacock themed! (here’s some concept sketches i’ve been sitting on a while lol, it’s meant to be imposing but whether it’s actually that remains to be said lol, mysterious might fit better

I was inspired by my trip to a SL temple belonging to a god which has peacocks associated with him, as well as music and dance. Peacocks fit well with his high arrogance anyway (tho his arrogance/obscurity stat might fluctuate a bit depending on the scenario). Thus, his gang is called the panoptes. This also extends to the cyranga au with @/geek-o13’s cyrus, whose villain name is Helios, and whose namesake is also sometimes described with the panoptes epithet :D if i go into that au this post might double in length so i’ll save that for another one, but thinking about the dynamic between the two and bouncing ideas back and forth brings me so much serotonin :’) 

i know for sure suranga would have the speed mod, as it’s what i always pick, but it might make more sense strategy wise to flip from strength (which, ouch, poor rangers) to telepathy to play to what he does best, (yes to cape, cos he’s a theatre nerd in spite of the inner edna mode telling him not to lol, spent so much time designing the stupid armor and sitting in the library as yasmin poring over books for inspo.) 

i’ve also decided suranga’s got chronic pain/fatigue from the fall in HB, especially in his legs and lower back (like… that was a four storey fall. i’m doubting the farm would bother to fix sidestep’s body enough to given them full mobility/painlessness again if they’re using the MC for experiments, doesn’t seem like giving them back those things was high on the list :V), and therefore also uses a back brace and a custom-made telescopic cane he made himself that can be extended/collapsed as necessary. He also wears a leg holster over his clothes that he can slot the cane into when he doesn’t feel like carrying it. Or doesn’t want to draw attention to himself by having it fall over like thirty times after propping it against something lol. it’s also on the same leg he had the holster for his gun during his sidestep days (and the cane also can function as a self-defense weapon in a pinch). The cane very much becomes part of his physical body language, he’ll gesture/point with it, fidget by twirling it around (he’s dropped it a lot practicing, but he’s a real pro these days) knock on doors with it, or hook things with the handle, etc etc. fhr having a bunch of medical advancements in commonplace prosthesis makes a realy interesting thought experiment about what ableism would look like, esp when chen’s (and to some extent ortega’s) conversations bring up that mods aren’t all great and come with their own issues/challenges.

He’s still a tech/fighterstep, but he’s had to think more like a tactician since then cos he can’t rely so much on his body in fights, which is making me consider doing a tactician run to see if it fits. Anyway, the powersuit mortum makes is basically a mobility aid of sorts, but he has to be careful not to overdo it. He keeps pain meds on him/uses adaptive tools around his apartment (during rebirth, it’s a comfortable flat, and one of the lower ones of the complex in the off-chance the lift breaks down, before he moves into the flat above the tech shop being used as a front for the panoptes) ie. shower chair, a grabber so he doesnt have to bend too far down if he’s dropped something/otherwise would need to get onto a step-stool and potentially eat shit if he loses balance, generally having places to sit throughout the flat in reach, heat pads, etc. 

sometimes he has a habit of drinking (so a secondary vice to sweets) as a way of coping with the pain when it gets a lot, but he tries not to do it too much, and only in the privacy of his apartment. i noticed in the code diving that this vice develops because of telepathy being so energy-intensive, and that a sweets vice mc will also want food in general, not just sweets. Given one of ortega’s love languages is sharing food, they work really well with a sweets vice sidestep, romanced or friendship route :D suranga might have some kind of eating disorder alongside textural issues with food where some days he’s just not able to eat anything. He doesn’t generally do meat, because he likely never had it at the farm and is too expensive in the FEZ anyways, fish is usually ok, but pre-HB if he was having it at his flat, he had to make sure fred couldn’t eat it while he wasn’t looking lol

Basically i’m projecting some of my own crip problems onto suranga and no one can stop me lol. 

Anyway, that also means he really understands chen as a fellow physically disabled person when they start talking in retri (ortega has their own can of worms with the military-grade mods giving back their ability to walk after being paralyzed by the accident way back when they first meet chen), ie. understanding why he named his dog spoon. I’d like to hc that given how happy suranga was with fred, after hb, part of chen’s decision to adopt a dog was that he saw how helpful it was for him, even if he didn’t fully trust suranga, but! given Suranga’s a techstep, it’s canon that techstep mcs used to help chen manage his mods/do tune-up (which would require some degree of trust) and there’s even an option in retri when you meet him at HQ where you notice he’s having problems with his prosthetic limbs and suggest how to adjust it so it works better, which is a nice touch - tactician steps also played chess with him in their downtime!

He’s got yasmin to hop into if his own body gets laid up too bad, but he’s still got reservations about what he does with her body (flirting for information is alright, but no romantic relationships/sex). Her being (presumably) cis, at first it’s a little disconcerting having to perform being a woman again, but the more he gets used to being her, the more he realises feminine stuff isn’t so bad when it’s an opt in thing and begins to experiment with his own presentation sometime between rebirth and retri now he’s got a bit more freedom and confidence to try now he’s debuted as a villain.

He’s always had a fascination with how one can change how they’re perceived just in the way they carry themself, how they dress/behave etc (which then led to an interest in costumes/theatre/fashion, and i’m imagining if there were powerpoint nights at the rangers, suranga would come in with a 20 slide presentation on tearing into x villain of the week’s fit, much to themmy’s delight)

He also has an interest in sewing instead of knitting (although he still does that too, it’s just that sewing is his main thing now, which first started out as fixing holes in his clothes rather than just throw them out, then began teaching himself from books, and then on a trip to tia elena’s, asks about the broken sewing machine she never really used, and then fixes it. Elena teaches him a few of the basics, then he gets into making his own clothes, and makes a gift for elena as thanks (an embroidered shawl with sunflowers on it :3)

this then meshes really well with the puppetmaster scar (in retri, the suicidal scar from rebirth becomes a seperate tag and there’s options throughout the game to convert it to one of the other scars), which has funky implications esp when paired with fate motivation as a fourth-wall break/slightly self-aware kind of step, BUT ALSO THE AUTISM SCRIPT THING (the mc/sidestep is so autistic coded, which makes sense given the author is also autistic). If you’re a baby regene escapee that’s used to following scripts and orders, once you break out there’s only so much you can do before you have to do improv, something something how do you know what your real personality is when you’ve always had to perform? Puppetmaster being similar in flavour to the outsider scar (his original scar, iirc) with a few more bells and whistles, I think it’s p fitting, esp since it works with the strings/thread stuff featuring a lot more heavily in retri, ie. more opportunities to possess people/meet other telepaths/reflect on your relationship to your puppet (yasmin, tall latina gal in suranga’s case). I have no idea how much spoilers you’d want for retri but i’ve been code-diving big time, specifically cos retri is such a sprawling beast of code/divergent story paths.

Suranga is still a pining dumbass for ortega except from afar as the secret crush route, which hasn’t changed (although he’s a bit more clued in that ortega is up to something and has to keep his guard up somewhat). this is made DOUBLY hilarious when also paired with the chenmance (SPOON!!!!!!!!) wherein you find out chen also. has a crush on ricardo. You have to see chen instead of going to hoots with ortega to find that out tho (what a mess lol, everyone here assumes the others are straight.)

I’m angling for the poly route, since so far in retri you can only set up for it, as opposed to chargentstep where if you’re already dating ortega and you get the auction kiss with argent and mention that, you can say you want both of them and there’s no issue cos actually, ortega (julia AND ricardo) flirted with argent when she first joined, and she also likes them lol.

SPEAKING OF ARGENT suranga did enjoy fighting her (if with some degree of stress because ‘oh shit, you would be so mad if you knew i was in your head’ and being an unknown), such that he doesn’t use telepathy against her out of respect even though that’s the only thing mostly keeping them matched. On the bridge, he flirts with her to throw her off, accidentally leaning too much into his yasmin confidence, then gets confused by her actually being interested and then has to re-evaluate what exactly his gameplan is with her. He gets kissed (and bitten) at the auction when he takes his helmet off, and then when he turns up at the HQ has a very awkward conversation with her in the breakroom trying to figure out what the hell their relationship is (some kind of weird friends but the argentmance route is very cute too)

Herald/daniel is kept at arms length, suranga’s his coach and thinks he’s nice enough but a bit sensory overload with all his thoughts (he can’t really teach by sparring since he’s not up to par anymore, and it’s kind of half-true, outside of the suit he can only do so much, but he can offer pointers/maybe bring in nehal?) - maybe or maybe doesn’t pick up on the crush, idk

there's plenty more to add i likely forgot but that has been an Infodump abt suranga the current favourite oc, THANK YOU FOR INDULGING ME <3

#oc: suranga fernando

[melforbes]

seaglass blue annotations

hello! i just posted the last chapter and thought i’d put together some ~fun context~ for that fic. it got way way more attention than i ever expected and for something i feel i didn’t put that much effort into i think i did in the end put a lot of effort into it so i might as well talk about it and answer some potential questions.

my favorite book of all time is the sunlit night by rebecca dinerstein (yes, that one) and something i find really compelling about that book is how sparing the prose is, forcing the reader to fill in certain gaps, and i think having to fill in those gaps makes the book a really acquired taste with which either you love it or hate it and there’s not really an in-between

i also really adore how in that book the natural world backdrop comes to life, something i find really challenging to write. recently i even read into thin air, the book about the 1996 mount everest disaster, and even though the writing was superb, i still had to google what the hillary step was because i couldn’t picture it on my own. i don’t know how people write nature because to me it feels damn near impossible, but this sparing approach really worked, so i thought i might try it out. i tend to be longwinded (gestures vaguely at this post) and wanted to have certain parts of this be a lot smaller and more contained without negating impact. whether or not i made it work is anyone’s guess. definitely not my normal style, so to speak

based on the comments i’ve received i think this might be everyone’s favorite part. in my mind age of consent by new order was playing in the background. in pretty much every fic i have a scene like this one and all of them are based on the poem first base gold by rh*annon mcg*vin from her book branches (censored because she has a tumblr and i don’t want her seeing this haha)

i absolutely can’t do the poem justice by describing what it’s about, but the simplest, most basic interpretation of the poem is that there is no better place to kiss than right here, right now, because of the past. i really like that imagery and tend to use it a lot. she as a writer has been a big inspiration for me and if you’ve read my fic true minds i should add that the nonfiction inspiration for that was directly as a result of one of her youtube videos. i particularly love how the last paragraph (stanza? im not a poet) is one big run-on sentence that’s jovial and tongue-in-cheek and colloquial and straightforward. it feels triumphant in a quiet way to me and i love how it’s done. obviously my attempts at something similar are nowhere near as insightful, but still, the most basic image of this is that there is no better place to kiss, and that’s how i felt about the two of them finding pudding in the supermarket

this part is autobiographical; while writing this last year, i went through six months of intravenous drug treatment, a month and a half of which involved long days of doctor visits on every weekday. when you’re on stuff like that for a long time you end up with a central line for better access (potential plot hole in all of this: scully never had one) but for a month and a half i got poked almost every day and strangely enough it got harder over time. the first couple you never feel, but a week or two later you start flinching, and if the needle goes in the same vein each time, it hurts the more it gets prodded. i reached a point toward the end of the in-office visits in which i would bleed a lot every time i got poked, and i can’t watch anything like that happen to me so i was looking away each time, and when i felt that the nurse was done, i would look back over, and sometimes i would be looking down at a pool of blood that i hadn’t expected to see. it’s weird, you don’t actually feel yourself bleeding, i would’ve expected a hot bloody feeling but instead it felt like nothing. and when i say a pool i mean that it would drip down beneath my elbow, stain the sheet they’d put underneath, and i wouldn’t get all of it off until i showered. i didn’t necessarily find it scary, but it was surreal and kind of pulled me out of normalizing the experience i was having. for a very long time needing iv drugs was my greatest fear and i was surrounded by that then and fine, and then, there was blood all over my arm, and like, haha, this is actually not fine. you’d think something else would’ve been scarier, but it wasn’t. and now looking back at this paragraph i wish i’d edited it differently but hey that’s life

i’d never really understood the purpose of religion as a self-driven part of life until i took anatomy in college. i was raised catholic and though culturally i understand having a religion and being raised with one, i’ve never really reached for religion when i wanted answers, and i haven’t personally understood why that’s someone’s first option. and i know there’s been plenty of commentary on the hypocrisy of dana scully as a catholic who believes in science, yada yada yada, i think everyone has read all of that by now. but what struck me while learning anatomy is that there is a kind of neuron we don’t know the function of. there are four kinds of neurons, and one of them is still a mystery to us. and then, there’s all of these different parts of human bodies that exist in a certain perfect way, but why do they exist like that? to support life, yes, but why is it that we can make comparisons? why were irises not the same color? and we name valves of the heart after religious figures. we are so hell-bent on meaning that something literal will never be enough. and all of that made me think that dana scully has god to fill in what science won’t answer, at least not yet. and there’s definitely a bigger conversation about science as denial of indigenous cultures that i am nowhere near qualified to start. after taking those classes, i think i would be more shocked if she wasn’t religious. you can ignore pretty much all of the paragraph above but it was important to me that at some point in this fic she willingly conceded that she didn’t know what would happen and that she didn’t have answers. with illness, there is no logic, there’s no thinking your way out of it, and i think that would plague her for a long time. to me, she only would accept her death when she could say she had no idea what would happen, she has no answers, there’s nothing filling in her gaps anymore, and she’s comfortable with that. and i put all of that in a paragraph about my thoughts on god because it made sense to me. there are times that just feel like you’re in a movie and there’s no one else you can say caused them. it’s not enough to build belief on but it’s enough to bring a certain kind of wonder. also one time my parents insisted on watching stripes because it was so funny and when watching it none of us found it funny at all and my parents grimaced and were like what were we on that made that good back in the day so that’s in here now haha

and now, the biggest question: does she die at the end? when i came up with the idea for this fic, i knew the beginning and ending but not the middle, and i posted this as a smaller project (ie: chapters below 3,000 words) while illness made my bigger projects harder to work on and essentially flew by the seat of my pants the whole time. i wrote the last line a long long time ago and have always seen the ending as written as the concrete ending. when i started writing this, i never intended for there to be a definitive answer to whether or not she dies. i like premature endings (the ending of girls burn brighter comes to mind) and i think that this works better without saying whether or not she lives. and i also have a hard time with giving a definitive answer because this fic very much is about death and having her die would, of course, be traumatic, but showing her living instead i think ruins any takeaways people could have. i’ve never had cancer but as a chronically ill person i think i can speak to how you never actually win with illness; the best you can do is tie, and sometimes, no matter how much effort you put in, you “lose” anyway, you lose spectacularly, and all of your effort was for nothing. i wholeheartedly believe that humans can’t emotionally or logically process natural disasters or illness, hence why much of the talk about illness in this is from mulder’s perspective as he experiences her terminal illness secondhand; that way, he doesn’t need to (but still likely will) find logic or reason or meaning for death from a terminal illness, so his discoveries and his coping mechanisms aren’t as urgently needed. had i written a chapter that describes how she lives, i think that the discussion of death in this would be voided altogether. and i also don’t believe the ending would be much different whether she lives or dies; there’s still the need for death acceptance and talking about dying, whether or not she lives, and none of the story in this fic would have happened had the characters known she would live. the whole point is not knowing.

for a little while i toyed with writing an unofficial sequel of sorts in which i spelled out what i think happens after the ending, but after realizing that that would end up being longer than the original fic and would also have some massive plot holes, i decided against it. i do have my own version and i don’t want to share that version because i never really intended for my version to be some kind of genuine sequel in which every question gets answered and everything is wrapped up and happy ever after and whatnot. it was just where my brain wandered in the same way it wanders when i watch an open-ended movie. all of that to say, if you think she lives, then she lives. if you think she dies, then she dies. it’s your decision. i’d much rather you choose than me. i never marked this as “major character” death on ao3 because, well, she doesn’t die in this fic. whether or not she dies after the fic ends, that’s for you to decide. 

thank you for taking the time to read my writing. i never expected this to blow up (it blew up for me at least, for a while it was my most popular fic ever, with i think thousands more hits than anything else i’d written) and the response has been mind-boggling and wonderful. i don’t respond to comments often because it makes me feel like a pompous jerk (”thank you for enjoying this! i, too, enjoy this thing i have written! oh ho ho!” is how it sounds to me in my head, whereas when other writers respond to comments to me it just looks like thanks man have a good day, feel free to call me a weenie) but i’ve appreciated all of them very much. THANK YOU! i hope your new year is a Whole Lot Less Shit than 2020. i don’t plan on writing more msr because i don’t really have any ideas for them. thank you for making my last time special <3

[exalok]

whaddup my dudes!!!

i am tired and wired and this means brain no writey but brain VERY focused on absolutely all the fic i have going on at once that aren’t prompts (prompts will be incoming, no worries dissociation anon)

and THAT means y’all get to hear about my many. many. MANY projects, or at least the ones that make my heart go pitter patter when i think of them

a few examples: demon!corvo and priest!daud with extra worldbuilding ; the naptime cuddles AU ; corvo doesn’t come to dunwall so jess and daud end up arranged-married for profit (more info..... under the readmore..... i’m gonna get rambly)

also feel free to ask questions, i love questions and they get me thinking even more in depth about the world and specific instances of characters and that is the entire POINT

LIKE OKAY SO MY BRAIN PRETTY MUCH CONTINUOUSLY THROWS IDEAS AT THE WALL AND ABOUT 95% OF THEM STICK BECAUSE I’M A HOARDING RAT BASTARD i love my ideas they are my precioussss

i might have about. 25 fic more or less active at the moment? which sounds like a reasonable number but those are the ones i have an actual plot for as well as the will to get them out into the world

let’s put aside the ones i have actually posted on tumblr or ao3 (teen!daud, domestic zombie apocalypse, bondageverse, knife!corvo) in favor of those you have either no or little idea exist. begin:

I MEAN OBVIOUSLY I MADE FANFIC OF MY OWN FANFIC or as i call it parallel/companion fic, because at some point in the past a prompter inspired me and i was deep in the prince!daud fic at the time and i thought what if high chaos. what if void monster corvo? what if horrifying yet human creature of the depths!!! what if EVERYTHING was TERRIBLE and daud killed corvo as a last ditch and vain attempt to get his people out of burrows’ clutches, and it all went to shit from there??? also they’re bound by marriage contract and the vagaries of magical intention and daud becomes corvo’s life battery, in essence, which you can imagine leads to a very unhealthy relationship i think it’s not spoilering much to tell you it does NOT end well, and i’ll be writing it as a sort of foil to low chaos prince!daud

i have quite a few high chaos fics actually. high chaos is depressing to play but the story outcomes are DELICIOUS and the degrading world and character motivations are a lot of fun to play around in

weirdly enough another one of these high chaos fics is the naptime cuddles AU!!! i won’t lie it’s the one i am currently on and i want to talk about it to everyone so bad constantly. in short, corvo doesn’t kill daud and the whalers because he’s trying to get out and currently too fucked up to fight, and when he doesn’t manage to save emily despite his best efforts he comes back to daud for some kind of symbolic execution. meanwhile thomas convinced daud to take a goddamn nap with him there because daud, despite his paranoia, does sleep better with people around, and this is entirely an excuse for semi-platonic daudthomascorvo cuddles in bed followed by whaler puppypiles when the gang catches on that this is a thing they can do now I LOVE PUPPYPILE WHALERS I LOVE NAPS I LOVE REDEMPTION THROUGH THE POWER OF RESTORATIVE SLEEP please i’m so tired and i can’t actually fall asleep next to people let me live my dream vicariously additionally: this will be my contribution to the absolutely wonderful whaler vineyard of old fanon

there is also what i feel should be a classic and ISN’T though a couple of fics were written around the concept and one in particular is /chef kiss, and the concept is: high chaos corvo meets low chaos corvo!!!!! i made it a threesome with daud because no one can stop me and i fucking LOVE the idea of daud ending up capable of telling them apart through tiny details even when high chaos corvo, bastard that he is, tries to impersonate low chaos corvo, who is a bastard in much more subtle ways and would probably be better at impersonating hc!c than the other way around but finds it distasteful; also i added intense body horror because that’s how i roll and there are eventual magical CONSEQUENCES to hc!c being in the low chaos world and regularly in contact with what is essentially his narrative double when he doesn’t belong there, probably ends in a tragically bittersweet way, i’m not completely clear on it yet though i do have ideas

and oh man......... the time travel corvo fic.... the one where high chaos corvo ends up in his own seven-year-old body........... fuck i hashed out so much of the general worldbuilding for that one and ended up going way too far and imagining a sequel like i always do where corvo learns how to walk universes and gathers people he cares about from places where he can actually save them from their eventual tragic futures and the dissolution of their timelines once the outsider is ousted from the void and a new void avatar is made and SHENANIGANS YO!!! SHENANIGANS AND CAMPING!!!! SELF-CROSSOVERS!!!!!!! I COULD HAVE HIM MEET HIMSELF IF HE HADN’T TRAVELED BACK I’M CRYING I HAVE SO MANY EMOTIONS

the one where corvo is a fae child is probably a lil bit high chaos though it isn’t determined yet, and he has all of these instincts with regards to possessing and exchange and deals, and assumptions as to how other people must work approximately the same, and he is so wrong. then there’s the really creepy bad touch possible sequel that i won’t get into unless someone specifically asks because it’s a lil bit much really

oh MAN oh SHIT speaking of bad touch there’s another dead dove do not eat one where i grabbed an entire handful of granny rags’ apparent fucking around with magical arrays and rune creation and general spellery and threw it at corvo post-interregnum and he sees “ghosts” and doesn’t understand what the FUCK is going on and things go really badly for him, and one ghost, soon the only ghost, is daud, and corvo doesn’t know if he’s real, if he’s seeing things, if he’s NOT seeing things but daud is some kind of void demon, if he is and also having psychotic breaks he doesn’t remember because he ends up with some hellish bruises, but the real daud is actually still out there just hiding out and corvo will eventually meet up with him and real daud will meet fake daud and even more shit will happen

god, the demon!corvo AU gets pretty fucked up as well if i remember right; corvo is both some dude with a wife and kid and the demon that inhabits him, jess is his wife and the demon that inhabits her (to be clear, separate characters but both based on either jess or corvo oh my GOD what if i switched the demons that would be amazing but no, calm down, maybe for a short what-if scenario that will inevitably turn into its own thing), daud is the overseer with the really good exorcism record trying to get the demons to fuck off except he thinks there’s only one of them and the other takes him by surprise; cue daud being hunted by that demon, furious that daud shattered his favorite pupil, and some revelations about what exactly lives inside the abbey and also under it

on a somewhat lighter note, the one where corvo never comes to dunwall (i think his mom gets sick and he doesn’t win the blade verbena at sixteen?) is also where jess keeps losing her royal protectors to assassination attempts because the first one was decent and died protecting her and the second one was decent and had an accident and people start believing there’s a curse on the position or a curse on her, and she’s like okay so how do i make sure i don’t die now that no one is willing to become my protector since it’s pretty much a death sentence, and she arranges a meeting with the best assassin in the city and suggests an alliance -- protection and some commission overview, all secret, versus funding and housing -- in the form of a marriage and daud ends up agreeing; then later duke abele visits and corvo is among his personal guard and he gets to meet the empress, and the assassin, and there are ot3 shenanigans

oh my GOD also the kids in karnaca AU. obviously. fuck you may have seen the (dis)armingly charmed notefic but this would be them meeting as actual kids, in karnaca, just tiny babies, daud recently kidnapped and corvo doing his best to make this cool older kid into his friend and also maybe hiding him from the people who want to train him to do Illegal Things, and there are dumb childish arguments and daud goes on the run to avoid capture and there is an exchange of letters that at one point stops and corvo is Devastated and there is a REUNION and they are ADORABLE but also INCREDIBLY STUPID, AS IS RIGHT AND CORRECT, and i don’t know what happens later but it gives me warm fuzzies okay

then i have a NUMBER of oneshots that are more or less plotted out, like the one where jess has a kind of groundhog day because Heart reasons but over months and starts out not quite remembering what happened in past attempts and OF COURSE it ends with royal ot3; and there’s the one where Daud becomes the Outsider and is very temporally confused and OF COURSE it ends with corvodaud who do you take me for (including Very Perplexing arguments where daud doesn’t know at what point in this relationship’s development he is and corvo is angry or very patient depending on where he accidentally time travels to, and i make some assumptions about the non-linearity of the void avatar’s existence); and there’s the one where corvo catches the plague and gets through kingsparrow to get emily out then to people he trusts, ie the curnows and sam beechworth, then crawls away to die, but daud finds him and sighs and rolls up his sleeves and sends whalers to the Tower and emily thinks the Tower is haunted then, when it becomes very clear the Tower is not, demands one of these assassins teach her how to stab a bitch; AND THERE’S THE ONE WHERE CORVO AND JESS ARE GHOSTS AND DAUD IS A REAL ESTATE AGENT AND THE WHALERS ARE THE KIDS HE TRIED TO HELP OUT AS A SOCIAL WORKER and yes it’s ot3 and yes he buys the ghost house and ends up being filmed by the whalers to do cooking videos and fancy knife tricks and asmr because his voice is insanely soothing when he’s not being ornery; oh fuck and there’s the one where i wrote an unrequited corvodaud prompt and my brain grabbed it, smelled it, and decided that corvo very reluctantly falling for daud was necessary to the health of my feelings, and there is at least one (1) sleeping beauty coma while corvo yells at the outsider about the Heart; also there’s the one where in D2 billie was evasive about the old guy living with her on her boat and em finds daud rather than sokolov in jindosh’s basement and they have long, emotional discussions; and for the character building hell of it one that would span the outsider’s beginnings and growth and how the void tries to welcome him in

okay........................ i think i’m done rambling now

i love fanfic y’all

#dishonored #writins #so many writins #gonna have me a nap now

[carolinesbookworld]

tagged by @kabeswaters and @swellwriting <3

on a scale of 1-10, how excited are you about life right now? 0

describe yourself in a hashtag? very similar to @fortisfiliae #stressedanddepressed

if you could do a love scene with anyone, who would it be? Harrison Osterfield

if your life was a musical, what would the marquee say? prepare for disaster

what’s one thing people don’t know about you? um...idk my boyfriend knows basically everything about me sooooooo

what’s your wake up ritual? wake up, turn off alarm (bc with this at-home learning stuff i’ve been waking up like literally 1 min before my alarm goes off???), text good morning to my bf, snapchat, discord bc moonlit fam talks allll night, tumblr, get out of bed, wash face, get dressed, coffee and breakfast it’s very specific

what’s your go to bed ritual? wash glasses and face bc my skin is soo oily by the end of the day so you best believe my glasses be needing washing everyday, shower, say goodnight to fam, text bf for like 15 mins or until he says goodnight, turn alarm on, plug in phone, go to sleep

what’s your favorite time of day? morning but specifically from 7:30 until 9  

your go to for having a good laugh? FRIENDS as in the show

dream country to visit? Australia bc my dad once got to hold a baby koala there and i wanna do that so bad

what’s the biggest surprise you’ve ever had? so my family moved before my sophomore year so me and my bff started trying to surprise each other whenever one of us came to visit and the weekend of my birthday, she skypes me as she’s walking around what i thought was her house and then i start hearing an echo and next thing i know she’s standing in the doorway of my room and that was pretty much the best surprise ever

heels or flats/sneakers? sneakers converse

vintage or new? new but i love vintage aesthetic i just couldn’t live with it

who do you want to write your obituary? karli @swellwriting bc she is my brain twin and i would be mocking her horrible grammar and spelling from my grave and we would both get a good laugh about it in the afterlife

style icon? the mom i babysit for haha she’s like one of my best friends tho which sounds really weird but it’s true

what are three things you cannot live without? books, dogs, days that are exactly 65 degrees

what’s one ingredient you put in everything? um idk chocolate??

what 3 people living or dead would you want to make dinner for? Sarah J. Maas, Eddie Redmayne, my boyfriend bc i haven’t had dinner with him for 47 days

what’s your biggest fear in life? losing the people i love...and spiders

window or aisle seat? window bc aisle makes me anxious that i’m in people’s way

what’s your current tv obsession? the cw’s nancy drew it’s so good please go watch it

favorite app? instagram, discord, or tumblr, depends on my mood

secret talent? um idk i can draw very realistic portraits of people when i take the time to

most adventurous thing you’ve ever done in your life? okay so technically this wasn’t me who did it but i was part of the adventure. when me and my boyfriend were just “friends” ie. liked each other and knew we liked each other but were too scared to admit it. anyway, we had this elaborate plan to shave our youth group leader’s head if we were able to bring in a certain amount of food for the food drive during vbs week. so yeah we spent like three days planning the whole thing out and then decided to go price shopping at walmart with all of our younger siblings bc we needed supervision or something lol to see how many individual things of food we could buy with $20 each we ended up just getting like 20 huge boxes of ramen and then his sister ended up throwing up so we took her home and then went back to church where my car was parked but instead of turning to get to church my boyfriend decides to go straight through the stop light (it was green okay) and spontaneously drive up into the foothills. well we get to the top of the foothills and we’re at the lake and we all get out to look at the city and my boyfriend claims that we need to document this moment so he takes a selfie with all of us and we somehow ended up right next to each other in it and i only found this out like three months ago (this happened back in june) that he only took the picture because he wanted one of us together in case we didn’t start dating lol so sweet and yeah, that was a very long story but i needed context instead of just saying “yeah we drove up a mountain”

how would you define yourself in three words? loyal, anxious, passionate

favorite piece of clothing you own? this dark coral dress that makes my eyes and hair look really pretty

a must have clothing item that everyone should have? a hoodie

a superpower you would want? i want to be able to project my thoughts into someone else’s mind bc i’m so bad at explaining stuff sometimes especially when it comes to how i feel

what’s inspiring you in life right now? ACOTAR series by Sarah J. Maas, highly recommend

best piece of advice you’ve received? opening up to more than one person is important because if you lose that person then you’ve lost all your support

best advice you’d give your teenage self? the friends who have stuck around this long are the ones you want to hang onto and the ones that you need are the ones you don’t always see

a book everyone should read? The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

what would you like to be remembered for? being a crazy dog mama

how do you define beauty? confidence in yourself and not caring what others think about you

what do you love most about your body? my metabolism

best way to take a rest/decompress? open a window to feel the breeze and listen to Islands by Hey Ocean! which is so calming to me

favorite place to view art? nature or tumblr

if your life was a song, what would the title be? we’re going with a fob/p!atd theme here and calling it “depression screwed me over so i screwed it back and ended up worse off”

if you could master one instrument, what would it be? piano

if you had a tattoo, where would it be? probably on my forearm or by my left hip

dolphins or koalas? koalas did i mention that i want to hold a baby koala

what’s an animal that represents you? great dane puppy ie. very excitable but will also take a four hour nap when tired

best gift you’ve ever received? my best friend made this photo collage for me when i moved that is hanging in my room and it has a bunch of pictures of me and her over the years and i just love it

best gift you’ve given? for christmas i gave my boyfriend a hammock and the bookshelf addition of clue, two things he had no idea i would remember him mentioning and his face was priceless. also i made my mom a cake for her birthday this year and she was so happy and said it made her feel very special <3

what’s your favorite board game? clue or ticket to ride (specifically nordic countries)

what’s your favorite color? currently a pale turquoise

least favorite color? any shade of light brown

diamond or pearls? diamonds

drugstore makeup or designer? drugstore bc i don’t wear makeup enough to validate buying designer, also i don’t really care

pilates or yoga? yoga

coffee or tea? coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee cof-

what’s the weirdest word in the english language? palindrome is wild because it means a word spelled the same way forwards and backwards but it itself is not one such word

dark chocolate or milk chocolate? milk

stairs or elevators? stairs

summer or winter? summer but like, only june

you are stuck on an island, you can pick one food to eat forever without getting tired of it, what would you eat? panera mac n cheese

a dessert you don’t like? red velvet cake which btw is not red-colored chocolate cake as many would have you believe

a skill you’re working on mastering? writing

best thing to happen to you today? i got to put all of my new plants in my windowsill and i named one of them (its name is albert in case you were wondering)

worst thing to happen to you today? idk today’s been pretty good as far as quarantine goes

best compliment you’ve ever received? my boyfriend calls me beautiful all the time and he always reminds me that that is describing looks and personality

favorite smell? coffee or my boyfriend’s sweatshirt for the week after i steal it

hugs or kisses? can i choose both?? depends on my mood mostly but i guess hugs if i just had to pick one

if you made a documentary, would it be about? literally anything relating to the mcu

last piece of content you consumed that made you cry? a court of wings and ruin by sjm

lipstick or lipgloss? lipstick

sweet or savory? sweet

girl crush? literally any female in the teen wolf cast

how do you know you’re in love? hahahaha haha what's love

a song you can listen to on repeat? we fall apart by we as human or uma thurman by fob

if you could switch lives with someone for a day, who would it be? idk my boyfriend probably, this is something we have discussed in depth

what are you most excited for/about this time in your life? for life to go back to normal

tagging @finnofamerica @woakiees @beskarjedi @outerlacy @swanimagines hahahahaha have funnnnn this took me an hour to answer

#about me #tag game

[zenosanalytic]

Great Beasts of Legend: Centaurs, Sirens and Chimaera: The Greeks and th...

I know I’ve posted this lecture by Dr. Jeremy McInerney before, but I was watching it again(third time; really love this one uwu) and at 41:55 he starts a discussion of a boundaries-based reading of Centaurs(good target for that given the melding/muddying of boundary btw animal and man Centaurs represent[1]), beginning with the Herakles, Deianira, Nessos Myth that I feel he doesn’t quite hit though he makes/brings up other great points and it made me want to write a short little thing about why this myth, specifically, is really open to such a reading:

Ok so the basic outline: Herakles and Deianira are traveling, they come to the river Evinos where Nessos[2], the Centaur, is selling his services as a living ferry(ppl sit on him and he carries them across). Herakles, of course, decides to swim across and pays Nessos to carry Deianira across. While doing so, Nessos attempts to rape her, Deianira calls for help, and Herakles whips out his bow and arrows dipped in Hydra’s blood, and shoots Nessos dead. As he dies but before Herakles reaches them, Nessos tells Deianira to take a vial of his blood(sometimes blood mixed with his semen). The story splits interestingly here, so remember this point for later. Years down the road, Herakles is off in some part of Greece partying in celebration of yet another city he’s plundered, and he sends a train of new slaves taken from said city-plundering back home, along with a messenger with an off-hand request to Deianira that she send his favorite cloak along cuz he plans to keep partying for quite a long while. This is another point of ambiguity in the story and its retellings so remember it, too. She steeps his cloak in water mixed with the vial of Nessos’s blood, sends it along and, while the poison doesnt kill Herakles cuz he’s part god and Hydra’s poisonous blood isn’t powerful enough to do that, it DOES cause him such enormous, unending pain that he builds his own funeral pyre and burns himself alive, apotheosizing into a god in the process.

So, regarding Boundaries:

Nessos, obvsl, is a physical manifestation of the close and ever-present boundary between humans and beasts; btw self-control and indulgence; btw “civilized” behavior and “uncivilized”, as discussed above, and particularly of the threat of rape Greek men present to Greek women.

This story involves a River, a physical boundary

Rivers are ALSO what separate the world of the living from the world of the dead to the Greeks, and this is a story ABOUT TWO DEATHS, both tied directly TO a River(one taking place in it, during the act of crossing it; the other a long-term effect of that event[but also Herakles’s hubris, though most versions, being written for men, don’t emphasize that totally obvs aspect of it]).

Not only that, it’s LITERALLY the story of Herakles’s apotheosis: of how he comes to finally transcend the boundary between God and Mortal which he has straddled his whole life.

Herakles is celebrating the sack of a city, ie, his violation&destruction of the Boundaries defining said city, when he dies. Greek cities are often protected by female divinities(Athena usually), so it’s yet another symbol of rape.

So Split 1: In most versions, the reason Nessos gives for why she should take his blood is that it is a powerful love potion that will ensure Herakles remains faithful to her if his eye ever strays. BUT, also in most versions, this is a lie and he’s secretly trying to poison Herakles, though how would he know Herakles’ arrows are poisoned with Hydra-blood? I remember reading a version where he presents it to her AS POISON, explaining about the Hydra, but I cant find any mention of it online, so maybe my brain’s just making it up(or maybe this was the Hercules TV Show version X|).

Split 2: BUT BUT, while in most version Deianira sends the cloak out of desperation to keep him faithful(and of course there’s a particular slave girl in the train she’s warned about just so all of this can be EXTRA the fault of women, rather than Herakles for being a giant asshole like he always is), in other versions she sends it OUT OF VENGEANCE, TO FUCK HIM UP because Herakles is being a giant asshole, wrecking up Greece, partying as much as he likes, flaunting his rapes and his victims in her face(this is VERY RELEVANT given the nature of other versions of this story), and leaving her to run his household alone while ordering her around like she’s a slave rather than his Wife.

These are mutually exclusive: she cannot be both seeking to punish him, and trying, in anguished desperation, to keep him faithful to her[3].

Herakles in this story, as is ALWAYS THE CASE IN ALL HIS STORIES, is flaunting the boundaries of Proper Behavior, in this case those defining a happy and successful marriage(IE Hera’s Domain; which you’d THINK would be kind of relevant, given the deep narrative connection between Hera and Herakles and her quickness to anger regarding marriage violations, yet it somehow perennially goes unmentioned), and getting punished for it.

Now here’s an ADDED kicker. There’s a version of this story were Herakles initiates the conflict. one day he visits the house of Deianira’s father, Dexamenus, and while a guest, rapes her. Dexamenus can’t fight Herakles, of course, but he demands by the gods and tradition that Herakles marry Deianira to “repair” the injury(WE LIVE IN HELL!), and Herakles agrees. After he leaves to prepare for the wedding, a local Centaur, Eurytion(name meaning “Widely Honored”) visits Dexamenus and proposes to marry Deianira himeself(you know: without the whole BEING HER RAPIST thing), and Dexamenus complies. Herakles arrives a few days later, kills Eurytion, and sees that their marriage is carried out. Presumably in this version, the blood poisoning the cloak would be Eurytion’s.

What I’ve tried to get across here is that, among other things, there are readings of this myth were Herakles is the bad guy and Deianira the agent of divine punishment, if not the actual Protagonist. And those readings suggest certain ideas we would be prone to consider “modern” about the agency of women, consent, personal and social boundaries, morality, Greek ~Heroic Masculinity~, and yes even Centaurs, might not have been so alien and “anachronistic” to the ancient Greek mind as we tend to think.

But anyway, even if you think that particular part of my little argument here is total Bunk, I hope I’ve managed to get across that Deianira and the Cloak is a myth Absolutely LOUSY with the theme of Boundaries, what they mean, what it means to Cross them, and the Consequences for which you Cross, when, how, and plain just choosing to cross them in the first place. It’s a really great example for him to suggest for this particular topic, and it really inspired me quite a lot today, and I just wish there was a lecture online where he developed it further uwu

[1]And not only that, but of course owning horses was a common sign of aristocratic status, and trading horses a common aristocratic activity(this is one way you know Hesiod’s claims of poverty are a put-on; his family breeds and sells horses). I feel like it’s pretty well understood that Centaurs are in someway a commentary and meditation upon the nature of Greek masculinity, on the capacity for violent cruelty and wanton appetite Greeks inculcated men into beside all the talk of civilized society, but I also feel it’s less well understood how open they also are to a similar reading regarding the appetites and barbaric capacities specifically of the upper classes of Greek society.

[2]In some versions Nessos and Herakles actually have a history, and the whole incident is Nessos’s attempt at vengeance. There is another story, where Herakles visits a centaur who is his friend named Pholos, and a gang of nearby Centaurs(I like to think they were Rowdy Teens myself u_u) smell the wine they’re drinking and crash the party to share some. Herakles, being Herakles, of course immediately begins killing them for the perceived insult, which inevitably leads NOT ONLY to Pholos dying(cuz Herakles isn’t careful and shoots him too, or in other vers bcuz he refuses to so much as retrieve his arrows from the bodies due to concerns with “pollution” from the corpses, and Pholos cuts himself on one of the arrows), but ALSO the poisoning, and eventual death, of Chiron, who was one of Pholos’s neighbors and who Herakles accidentally knicked while wildly chasing down and shooting the interlopers. Nessos is one of these Centaur teens, and the only centaur in the whole situation to survive (:T

[3]Which, btw, the whole “faithful” thing doesnt make much sense(even though it pops up regularly in Greek Myth), because her “competitor” in these versions is a slave. These next sentences are going to be gross and awful, but in the society which told these stories male slave-owners already had unrestricted sexual access to their slaves and, beyond that, I’ve never read a single example in Greek or Roman sources of a slave being legitimized and married as a wife(which doesnt mean such examples dont exist; I’m an amateur). So the idea that a slave could threaten Deianira’s position as Herakles’s wife seems very dubious to me(as does the general trope of slave women as threats to wives in Greek stories). Again: this is all super-awful, but it’s something complicating the traditional presentation of the myth, which is rarely addressed because most academics writing for a general audience are super-loath to deal with classical slavery as the awful, body and soul crushing institution which it was.

#Penn Museum #Dr. Jeremy McInerney #cw: rape #cw: slavery #Classical Greece #Centaurs #Boundaries #Myth Analysis #Mythic Themes #Agency #Female Protagonists #analytic posts #Critical Analysis #zA Opinions #Video #Youtube

[jessefandomunited]

IM BACCKKKKK

and i had a bit of an epiphany while I was gone.

I love to read, or listen to stories, or in general get immersed by books!

And as i told you guys before this trip, I really havn’t been getting any new ideas for any stories in general. It’s been bad, and believe it or not, I actually want to make like actual stories (ie not fanfics) because while I really enjoy making fan fics, I love the thought of creating another world that characters, from my own brain, live in. it’s a beautiful thing. And while on vacation, I realized that reading inspires me. Not necessarily that I am stealing from books, but they make me want to make my own thing, and spark ideas of my own. Like i’ve been listening to these “young James Bond” books, and I love them, because I really really want to make a spy story, and these just inspire me to want to make it all the more. And while I was listening to “Ink spell” one of the books i’ve tried to finish but i got busy, and i instantly fell in love with the story. it is LITERALLY about people with the ability to read themselves into stories. I loved it so so much, that it gave me an idea for a story. I also was thinking of making a full out book about my Jesse house, but i don’t think i’d be able to publish it because all the characters are copy writed, but then I thought, what if i make a story about a writer who just has all these characters in their head and visits them. (it’s kind of a bit like “ The Man Who Invented Christmas” though >.<) BUT YOU KNOW WHAT!!! It’s similar but different. I don’t know i’m rambling. Anyways , what I decided from this is that i’m going to go back to reading before bed. Recently i’ve been going on tumblr or watching youtube untill i fall asleep, but NO LONGER!! there are books i want to read and even if i don’t read all that often, i need to read something because my brain needs to start working like a writer again. Lets see if this helps!

[michellelynnvip]

Message for the Gifted Pt 4/Finale: Most Kings, Envy, & The Purpose of Pain

In honor of #HOV50, I’m re-posting a blog I wrote in 2013. This post was 2 months after I 1st visited LA & knew I had to move here; 1 month after I wrote the post best known for its publication in the Amazon Bestseller “2 Billion Under 20: How Millennials Are Breaking Down Barriers & Changing The World.” The “Message for the Gifted” series was inspired! It’s one I re-read from time to time when I’m feeling down & need a boost. If you’re reading this, I hope it adds value to your journey in some way. Happy 50th Jay-Z! 

Most Kings/Why I Love You (Another Jay-Z Reference)***

These are the titles of 2 Jay-Z songs expressing cautionary tales of the demise of leaders. Jay-Z isn't just a rapper, he's a leader. He's a mogul on his way to becoming a billionaire. He was raised in the projects of Brooklyn, NY & bootstrapped his way up the corporate ladder by the grace of God. Jay said most who lived the life he did die or go to jail. He changed, followed his instincts at just the right time. “Good instincts” means listening to God’s voice.

He's an unreasonable man who came into this world without instruction, but he had good instincts. He lived enough pain to bury his fear & did what he had to do. He had the “instinct to increase” & did so by any means necessary. He wasn't given a lot in this life, but he's multiplied the gifts he was given 100 fold. Therefore, he's a fitting modern-day example of someone who's enacted this “Parable of the Talents.” And the fact that after a lot of hard work on his journey, he was blessed with the comfort of Beyoncè can stand as inspiration for the gifted but lonely. Much can be learned from Jay-Z. A lot of his works, especially his more recent volumes, speak to the struggles leaders face.

If you don't like Jay-Z, yet you want to be successful... quote me on this one, “never hate on someone who has that which you aspire to acquire.” You can learn something from anyone who has something you want. So don't waste your energy on anger, hatred, envy, etc (ie. criticizing the gifted). Instead, spend your energy learning from that person. There's a reason Jay-Z has an album series called “The Blueprint.” The box set is literally (with an architectural drawing & everything) the blueprint to his success. Because he's been writing songs throughout his journey, he's also leaving one of the most complete & accessible blueprints around. I recommend his book “Decoded” to anyone interested in creativity, success, or leadership... or who has an opinion on hip hop as an art form. The book was enough to convince Oprah of the validity of hip hop, & she was a very outspoken longtime critic. But enough about Jay-Z.

Jean-Michel Basquiat Charles the First

“Most Kings get their heads cut off,” the famous quote from the bottom left corner of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Charles the First, is the refrain of “Most Kings.” In this song as well as “Why I Love You,” he compares the pairs of Caesar & Brutus as well as Jesus & Judas. The troops are fickle. The “same sword they Knight you (with), they (wanna) goodnight you with.” & if you “try to teach these ****** how to be kings, but all they ever wanted to be was soldiers,” they may then consider you an outsider & have no qualms about coming for your head even though you love them. It may sound harsh, but it's true. Why? My favorite definition of leadership is, “creating a future for others that would not otherwise exist.” So in creating that future, you can become like those in Zion trying to unplug people from the machines of The Matrix which are feeding off of them.

But why would I work so hard to help people who may rise up against me? What if there are too many of them? Maybe I should do my work behind the scenes?

“Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.”

(Psalm 23:5)

Bishop Jakes said that when you're surrounded by “haters,” that's most likely when God is going to bless you.

So now that you're blessed before them, how do you prevent them from becoming your demise? For that, you need great leadership qualities, but the saving grace above all others is not an acquired skill, but a gift. You need intuition.

Envy

I've expressed that these gifts are also a burden. I've told you that the struggle to create an external environment that matches one's internal visions can be maddening. I've shared that when you're a leader, the problems of those you lead become a burden you're constantly fighting even while you're trying to avoid an uprising from the troops you fight for but may be your ultimate demise. There's an internal conflict between your emotions & your purpose, & your rational mind & the work your spirit compels you toward. There's also external conflict between you & that which opposes you for attempting to lead; leading to a future that cannot otherwise exist. Yet people envy you & the envious ones will very likely prove to be the weak links in your organization & attempt to become your ultimate demise.

It's amazing that they envy you, the leader who has all of their problems & their peers' problems, plus your own, & that causes them to become yet another one of your problems.

So Bishop Jakes spoke on the sin of envy. He said, Never covet that which belongs to your neighbor because You Can't Handle It! You are gifted according to your ability. And when you gain greater abilities & have conquered the opposition on your level, you get to move up. If you try to move up before you're ready, you will destroy yourself!

Your life is about you & what you do with your gifts. When you put your gifts to their best use on your level, you'll rise above & can even be crowned with a new gift. And of course with that new gift will come greater responsibility & more opposition, but at that point, you can handle it.

The Purpose of Pain

One of my mother's favorite stories to tell is of watching men walk on hot coals in Hawaii. She was amazed they did it without flinching. So when they finished, she asked one how it was done. He explained that pain is simply an alert telling your brain that something is wrong. So when you acknowledge it & assure the brain that you are okay, you can dismiss the pain alert.

So why do the gifted experience such great pain?

Loneliness

If you're connected to others, that's a comfort. Being comforted is a reduction in pain. So when your purpose is so much greater than you, you will live in pain until you connect with whatever spiritual forces you need to fulfill your purpose. That pain is a constant reminder that you need to use your gift & connect to the source to make some changes. Deep companionship dulls the pain & can lull you into a false sense of security as you forget to go to the source.

The Brink of Insanity

Being haunted by visions that have yet to manifest can cause most creatives to get to the brink of insanity - I spoke of in my previous post - where they say, “I have to create this or I'm going to explode!”

Of course, one will not usually allow themselves to explode. LOL That would go against the most basic instinct of self-preservation, so that a person's will must become truly unbending. The most valuable lesson I learned from the season finale of the “Avatar: The Last Airbender” cartoon was, “to bend the will of another, your will has to be truly unbending.” So at the brink of insanity, you may find the unbending will to manifest your greatest potential.

“A reasonable man adapts himself to his environment. An unreasonable man persists in attempting to adapt his environment to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

~George Bernard Shaw

Under Siege

When under siege, one must dig deep. This predicament is one of the greatest tests of character. It's a test of a true believer. In this situation, you must either stand up for what you believe in, or give up & allow your creation to be destroyed. This is a test of the strength of one's character, will, & conviction. Making it through & maintaining one's sanity is evidence of readiness to break through to a new level.

Dissent Amongst the Troops

The lessons learned from making it through a Siege prepares the initiate in part for this next level of attack. But where this attack differs greatly from the other is that previous sieges could easily be circumstantial. But at this level the attack is personal. Again, this is a test of the strength of one's character, will, & conviction, but it's also a test of the capacity of one's heart.

So why must the gifted endure such pain?

Fear is the anticipation of pain.

When the pain is present & there is nothing to anticipate, fear ceases to exist.

The Next Level

When all fear has gone out of the window, your most basic instinct of self-preservation is transformed into what I like to call “True Self Actualization.”

At that point, it's like Maslow's Hierarchy of needs inverts & the soul's highest need becomes your most basic need.

I'm at the point where my fears have been buried. The anticipation of pain has been buried in actual pain. It doesn't sound very pleasant, but it's the most powerful state of being.

From rock bottom, you're already lost to the world around you. All you have is the vision that haunts you & you know that manifesting it into reality is the only lasting solution to your ultimate peace.

When you feel you have nothing to lose, you Bury Your Fear & Expose your Talent!

Why? Because you have nothing to lose and everything you ever imagined to gain!

So here's my "Message for the Gifted:" Pain is Powerful!

If you missed the 1st 3 parts of this series, here they are...

Message for the Gifted: Ever wonder why you’re so gifted or feel the burden of a cross many envy? Then this is for you. (From the Bishop T.D. Jakes Sermon on “The Parable of the Talents”) 

Message for the Gifted Pt 2: Living in Pain (a holistic triage of the gifted patient) 

Message for the Gifted Pt 3: Genius, Insanity, & The Spiritual Burden of The Gifted 

#HOV50 #Gifted #Message #Basquiat #Jay-Z #TDJakes #PottersHouse #parable of the talents #Talent

[fictionaltortoise]

How many times have you read a book, only to find out it was being turned into a movie?

 These days it’s not uncommon. In fact, usually the book is hyped up with an alternate cover in hopes of grabbing more fans.

 I HATE THESE COVERS! But, that’s irrelevant right now.

 I’m the type of person that reads the book and is easily persuaded to watch the movie. There is something about the idea of bringing the characters to life in a way that makes them seem more real (at least in theory).

 What I have a hard time doing is watching the movie, and then reading the book. In this situation, I will likely never read the book. I don’t know why. That’s just the way it’s always been for me.

 Recently, I read two (now very popular) books in a trilogy series, called Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. I loved the inspiration behind them. Essentially, author, Ransom Riggs was inspired by his frequent visits to thrift stores and pawn shops, where he found himself buying interesting photos. Pictures are a memento of life, and are held in high regard as special (or even normal) moments were captured and can be remembered for a life time. I’m guessing what made him curious was the fact that these pictures had been given up in the first place.

 Would you donate your memories, or even sell them (for albeit a very small amount of money), to a stranger?

 Anyways, he would rummage through stacks and stacks of discarded photos and buy them in stacks, with change. Why? He’d given himself the task of writing their stories.

 This was genius to me. This was something I was already doing. Using pictures as story starters.

 Ransom Riggs took it to another level, and turned into a book trilogy.

 If I’m being honest, the books were alright. The characters were the best factor, each unique and well thought out. It was the rest of the story that was slightly generic. I ignored this and read the second one, because every story starts from a cliché, and it had piqued my interest. Riggs had created a specifically unique world, in which the misfit children were frozen in a single day of time. A time trap was what kept them from dying, and their “timekeeper,” made sure that each day was reset before the deadly destruction destroyed their world.

 This concept (the infinite loop) was the part that fell short for me. I didn’t connect with any of the characters because I never felt a sense of vulnerability. Each and every child seemed perfectly content to live the same day over and over, if it meant they could live forever.

 I’m not sure it would be quite so simple for me? Is it really worth it? To exist, but have no real impact on the world?

 Around the time I’d finished the second book, I began to hear the whispers of a movie in the making. Of course I knew I would watch it.

 In fact, I watched it before I finished the trilogy, even though a tiny voice echoed to me that I shouldn’t do it. You’ll never finish the series now, screamed my brain.

 I didn’t. I haven’t.

 I didn’t even finish the movie.

 The movie was THAT bad. To me, it screamed parody. And I was not interested in something that made fun of the world I’d invested my time in.

 The funny thing is: if I’d finished the book series first it probably wouldn’t have fractured my opinion of it. I could have held the two separately.

 Maybe my expectations were too high. It was Tim Burton, and that sealed the deal for me. Burton is, if anything, a brilliant creator of worlds.

 Trust me, I was fully aware that this was based on a series that houses some pretty extreme characters (ie: a girl that wear weighted boots because she will float into oblivion if she doesn’t, a girl whose mouth in on the back of her head, obscured by piles of hair, and a boy that is essentially a human beehive). But again, Tim Burton. This was right up his alley.

 I loved the books for these twisted features.

 The movie though, was far too exaggerated. The acting was stiff, and the dialogue monotone. Not to mention the typical movie adaptation in which it flew through the best parts of the book. I felt like I was watching the cliff notes version. And honestly, had I not read the books, this movie would not have piqued my interest in the world itself.

 I’ll give the movie this: the graphics were intense and generally high quality. Though I often sensed the presence of a green screen.

 I made it thirty minutes in, and the movie shattered my vision of the world. It was nothing like I’d expected, and was sub-par for the hype that had been built around it.

 Since then, I’ve never bothered with buying the last book.

 And this is a problem, because it is a disservice to the author.

 So, creatives (or even book & movie lovers), can a movie ruin a book for you, or vice versa?

 And what is it?

Expectations vs. Reality?

Lack of story in the movie version (exclusion of details)?

Actors/Actresses chosen to portray roles?

(All of these have been factors for me personally in many cases.)

 And, although we are told, many times over that the two should not be mutually exclusive: do the creators of the movie have a certain responsibility to uphold the book? Or should they feel free to express it in any way they see fit, since it is in a different media?

  At the end of the day, it is my personal opinion that the two should be separated, but I still have trouble setting my mind to it.

 We should adapt, and accept, and enjoy one, or the other, or even both.

#fictionaltortoise #creativity #blog #amworking #amwriting #update #books #movies #creativewriting #turtlewrites #writersontumblr

[supere1113]

The Conflict Within Myself - Track 11: Stretched and Compressed

Wow. What do you follow such a climactic song as Polaroid with? Well, it could go either of two ways: The conflict within the person consumes them and they are corrupted and destroyed (.ie dying by suicide), Or.... they are somehow saved from their darkness and led on a different path. Shall I continue the story?

****TRIGGER WARNING****... again. probably the last one, though.

So last time I left off, It was early October 2017, I had just survived the closest-call suicide attempt of my life. After I didn’t die, I knew that if I were to try again, I would get even closer, and closer, and closer till I actually died (didn’t have that far to go that last time, but still). I didn’t want that to have to happen, so I decided that if I was going to go on, I would need help. Of some kind. I doubled down on getting my parents to understand what was going on with me by writing a letter and printing it out for them to read that night. It blew up in my face, and I lost a chunk of hope a little bigger than most of the other ones I was losing almost daily (At this point, they thought I was trying to drop out of school, potentially to pursue music full-time. That couldn’t been further from the truth. I can’t give one passion up for another, I’m a renaissance man. I mean, have you heard my song Multipotentialite from the last album? It surprised me that that didn’t click for them. I imagine they were scared too, though; whether they’d ever say it out loud to me or not. Sad situation it was). All that happened during a weekend where I went home to visit my parents. After I got back on campus, my mood swings continued to intensify. I every time I was in an extreme state, I would quarantine myself in my dorm (I feel sorry for my sophomore roommate. Thankfully, he was out doing things around campus during my most rapid descents into madness. I won’t say his name here, but I love you, bro. Thank you) and I eventually only left to eat... occasionally. My psych evaluation finally came on October 17th. I was mentally close to death. My mom brought me over there, I did the evaluation, and then, knowing what she did about my current mental state, the psychologist asked me if I wanted to be hospitalized, saying she could make it happen, even if my mother still didn’t get it after that. I went in the car, waited for my mom and the psychologist to finish their conversation and then, after she got in the car, mom called dad and said she “wasn’t playing around with this anymore.” She was finally willing to go through with getting me the help I needed, the way I needed it at that point. The unfortunate part is that after you’re so far gone, meeting with a counselor each week just isn’t enough. Though I wasn’t in immediate danger, I was still quite suicidal, and my parents couldn’t guarantee to the psychologist that they could protect me from me, not long-term. So, mom drove me home, and that night brought to my family the full impact of what was happening with me. Since may parents couldn’t keep me safe enough, I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital near my childhood home the next day. My dad never wanted either of his children to be institutionalized in any way, so this was especially crushing to him. We didn’t know how long I’d have to be there, so for that reason, among others, I was medically withdrawn from school. While I was there, my results from my psych evaluation came in. I was diagnosed with Bipolar I Disorder with psychotic features and Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Crazy. In every sense of the word. You could smell the stigma on me.

I never wanted it to be that way. I mean, I got access to the help I needed, but at what cost?! Even over 2 years later, there’s a lot about that that I’m still, even if only a lil bit, angry about, which surprises me. It was just a crazy time. And in the time after the realization, I would hear for the first time my parents say to me that they missed something. That shook all of us.

~~~~~

Anyway, the end of Polaroid marks the beginning of a new phase, a new suite in the album (Act III: The Explosion). This song, along with the remainder of the album, takes place in a psychiatric facility, and, similar to Polaroid, kind of explores my thoughts while I was in there, and what changes were finally able to take root in me (fitting for an album titled ‘The Conflict Within Myself’ to explore inner thoughts, huh?).

Stretched and Compressed is really a song about the general realization that I had mental illness. My own, mostly. Even though that realization occurred long before I was hospitalized, I simplified the sequence of events on here to make the album more universal, as I stated before. As a result, S&C also explores my parents realization of my new mental reality. This was unintentional, but this song could potentially be divided into two distinct halves, The first being Stretched, the last being Compressed. The music even corresponds to those titles. The sounds of the Stretched half heave upwards as if they are being stretched by a magnet. It’s meant to channel the surprise and pain of realizing, and accepting, a new reality. In contrast, the Compressed half covers moreso the small part of you that dies in the face of that reality, and the grief, the sadness and the depression that can flood your life when you realize that this is not the way you thought your life was going to go, nor what you intended, or after something traumatic happens.

I put a little nugget in the Stretched half that I think will be looked on in awe in the future. Just before the second verse, you can faintly hear me say “I’ve been suicidal, you can’t kill me ‘cause I tried it.” This is a direct reference to a line by one of my favorite rappers, Itsdink! I call him Cody. He and I have been friends for over a decade in 2019, and earlier in the month of October of this year, he dropped on Soundcloud what I believe to be his best work yet: Want Me Dead. This album was therapeutic for him to make and for both of us to listen to because it showed all the struggles he had endured since we last saw each other face-to-face (as I stated in my song Normal off my last album, The Artist In Me, I had to leave our childhood school in 2010. Cody and I haven’t been in the same place together since then). I had been through different things than him, but much of the mental damage that ensued, we had in common. Anxiety, depression, paranoia, Suicidality, all that. It broke my heart that he had to go through that, and also blessed my heart to know that he went through it and it didn’t consume him. We were both survivors, and we were both going to drop the albums that chronicled and helped us through our struggles on opposite ends of the same month: October 2019. I wanted to connect these albums so that history may remember Want Me Dead and The Conflict Within Myself as transcendent projects, connected to each other.

The Compressed half of Stretched and Compressed is even more somber than the preceding half. This is when the stigma of having multiple mental illnesses (or even just one) really hits me; and it hits hard. When I was in the hospital, I thought I had lost everything, and in a sense, I did. My sanity, my grades, an important part of my relationship with my parents, my ability to be a good student (or any student for that matter), my scholarships, my certainty, and a whole lot of other things associated with those things. I was relieved I was getting help, while being frustrated that it got so bad that I had to be there, saddened by that fact and just in a general state of shock from all that I had endured. Those mood swings I was talking about, that was what people in the mental health community call Mania. I was manic ever since July of 2017 when Chester died. The Mania is the high end of those mood swings. Depression is the low. And being manic doesn’t always mean being happy. I describe mania as being an amplifier to whatever you’re feeling. So if you’re happy and Manic, you are ELATED! If you are angry or irritable and manic, you get beyond furious and so irritated that you may turn suicidal. Actually, though. I suspected I had bipolar, but who ever wants to be right about that?

I had a lot of fun making Stretched and Compressed, especially the last 2 minutes. That transition from Stretched to Compressed is crazy. You ever heard something like that? then when the drums and plucky mental, metal guitar kick in on Compressed.... it’s over, bruv.

Stretched and Compressed is interesting because, much like Synchronized Sound and When Your Brain Is Fried, its instrumental was thought out years before Conflict even came out (the idea, though not yet carrying the S&C name, is probably as old as songs off of Identity, so circa 2015)! The pain of the Stretched half gave me Stephen Richards and Aaron Lewis vibes from their performances on P5hng Me A*wy and Krwling respectively off of Linkin Park’s remix album Reanimation. So I channeled them in the choruses (sprinkled a little bit of Jonathan Davis from Korn in there, too. ;) He also featured on that album on 1Stp Klosr). The Compressed half is much more genre-fluid than the Stretched half. But among many others, I was really inspired by the work of MUNA and The Red Hot Chili Peppers for that part of the song.

So you’re admitted to a hospital. You’re getting help, but you’re still reeling from all that led you there. Where else could the mind take us, I wonder...

[all-the-most-beautiful-words]

Coping Addictions

I want to reach out to you if you fall under this pattern. To start, it’s okay to admit it. Life is shitty a lot and sometimes we fall into patterns we know aren’t good for us and we become addicted. Addiction is often parrelled to disease. People like to say that addiction is just as disease is, but in reality it is not.

Addiction is all mental while disease is physical. I’m not going to explain disease, if you’re reading this I’m sure you understand it well. Addiction however is voodoo in society and often misunderstood.

Addiction being taboo means we become ashamed and our willingness and strength to fight it off wants to hide. Why would we want to struggle against something seen as wicked? In all the stories addiction has won??? But it doesn’t have to.

Rehab is often required by law, but a common statistic is that once out alcoholics and drug addicts usually go back to their ways. Some people don’t understand why so I will explain in one quick sentence: Quitting must be an active and personal decision, not forced.

You have to chose to stop. It’s why addiction is so difficult. It’s also why rehabilitation programs help and are offered. Because choosing to quit is difficult on its own, but staying loyal to that decision is one of the hardest things to do. Especially if your on your own. Quitting is hard, especially when the feeling of whatever it is is euphoric. Starvation, cutting, drugs, alcohol, scratching, purging, all these things induce a reaction in the brain that is addicting because we trick ourselves overtime that it feels good... and so it does.

People form escapes for themselves and addiction becomes one of those escapes, one of the coping mechanisms. Why would we ever stop the things that help us cope??? Why should we??? They HELP US!!! But they don’t... not really.

I’m friends with a girl who scratched as a coping mechanism. When she fell into her depressive and anxiety states she scratched so hard she would bleed. It would be so strange because she would show up to school a couple days later and there would be giant scaps up her arm and people would be like “what happened” and she had an excuse. “I fell down the concrete steps in front of my house.” Or “I fell off my longboard” And people believed her. It was the only way she started to cope with things. When she broke up with her significant other (they were non-bionary) she would scratch because it had become the only way for her to cope with things.

Addiction isn’t the way our brains were naturally wired. You have to rewire your brain to become addicted... which means there’s only one way to stop being addicted. Unfortunately nobody can rewire your brain for you. One of the only things I ever learned when I was in high school was that we can wire our brains to work however we want (basically) if we work hard enough. If you wanna be good at studying, you can wire your brain to help you. You will struggle and you will be tempted into relapse, but it’s all about setting your path and staying on it no matter how steep it gets even when you’re wearing shoes too small for your feet.

So how are we supposed to break our addictions if we 1) know that it’s going to be incredibly difficult 2) have to work through constant tempstation 3) have to do it on our own and 4) when our addictions are also our coping mechanisms and put our brains on temporary highs???

The truth is, it’s going to be hard. But if you are willing and ready to accept change, then you can and will do it, but it HAS to be your choice. This is also where my advice is slightly limited.

Before I go into ways to get out of the addiction and how to rewire your brain, I want to share how I know so much. To start, I grew up with very alcoholic parents and had to watch them go through rehab all of my years growing up. I watched them get better for a couple months, and then just fall back into their own patterns because they didn’t CHOSE to change. They were told to. When I was in high school I self harmed and starved myself often, usually getting that euphoric feeling that made me feel good and it took work to get away from those habits and recognize them for what they really were- lifestyle killers.

So, our of my own experience there are several ways to go about it and a million internet resources to aid and provide information and find support.

1) Therapy: Therapy is NOT A BAD THING. It’s the only reason my friend stopped scratching, but if you’re anything like me you can’t afford it. I never got the chance to have a therapist growing up because my family saw it as rediculius taboo and now I simply can’t afford it. But, if you have a source for it do use it. Therapists are trained in the human mind and can guide you through what’s going on and how to step back and really see it. I know a lot of people have this stereotype of therapists, but they don’t just judge you’re feelings, they go into what you’re willing to share with them and form a genuine alliance with you on working towards a goal that you both see as better for yourself. It’s not always easy but it’s important.

2) Accountability Partner: If you have someone you can trust with your very personal addiction and life then this is a really good option. I have a friend who was cutting and starving for over a year and a half and her friend suddenly just said “I’m going to help you cope with something else” and she struggled for years but having that constant reassurance and encouragement and advice was really really good for her. He wasn’t like her therapist, she wasn’t relying on him for everything but she would help remind him to workout and he would help her to eat a bit. They would video chat and eat over the phone together, workout together, and they would send each other testimonies and inspiration on different ways to cope.

3) Finding a Healthy Distraction: This is what I personally had to do. It’s hard at first but distractions (as any procrastinator would know) can be very helpful. A lot of people can delve into art and exercise but that stuff just aggravated me and made me want to use my bad coping mechanisms more. It took some trial and error but I eventually found writing cramping poetry, writing short stories, running, and music were really good distractions from me. I had to still actively achknowledge and work on my addictions. I had to positively reassure myself that I was making the right decision and I had to encourage myself with positivity which I was really bad at. I couldn’t believe myself because I didn’t find those good things I was telling myself to be true... but it was just saying it. I didn’t have to believe it while heartedly, I just had to say it. And it did take a year, but eventually with the distractions and building my mental positivity I started to believe it. I did have relapse episodes which did extend the length it took me to recover from my addictions, but I had to remind myself of my goal and push myself back up again and yeah... it did feel like starting all over again and I didn’t want to have to start from square one, but it got easier... it just took getting through the hard part first. Some of the distractions I can suggest are walking, visiting new places, art, reading, writing, music (ie: writing music, singing, instruments, finding new music, composing, etc), exercise, making videos, surrounding yourself with people. There’s a lot more and it will take some trial and error but eventually you’ll find something.

There’s so many other ways that I’m not educated on. Almost every school has a councilor and all are equipped with helping you. It’s not always easy to go to them, I understand. Please don’t fear them though. School councilors are trained specifically for working with the students and do that job (unlike some other kinds of school staff) because they genuinely care and cherish every single student. That’s hard to believe but it’s true. Most teachers are also good sources. Go to someone you trust if you want to reach out. If you aren’t in school go to a friend or find someone to work with you, help each other.

I recommend working with someone, a family member, a friend, maybe a stranger online. It’s hard to quit on your own. Addiction is a real thing, a thing a LOT of people struggle with. You genuinely are not struggling alone no matter how much it feels like it. It’s not easy to want to change the things that make you feel better, but addiction isn’t a good thing. It’s not easy to understand but obsessions and addiction are scientifically BAD for your body and your mental body. I don’t know the specifics but addiction itself, unspecified, hurts the brain and the body in it’s own way. Please look into it, please just think about it. I never wanted to change my ways, but now after all the years of struggling work and hard times I’ve never been so proud and happy if a decision ever. I eventually found friends to help me out and it got better. Life will always be up and down but I’ve learned you have to pretend those hills are straight roads, and you have to make what’s best out of each ride and fall and that’s hard. And it’s okay to be unhappy sometimes and pissed sometimes and hurt sometimes, and it’s also okay to be vulnerable. It’s hard, but it’s okay. Please try to do what’s actually best for you!

[culturati-club]

27

I can not believe it. It is my twenty-seventh birthday (August 16).

These past seven years have especially flown by. I am so proud of myself and what I have accomplished in my life. I have set and lived out many goals little me would be amazed at. There are so many amazing things I have done in my life from modeling for Limited Too as a kid or having a Japanese exchange student live with my family (whom I met again recently, fifteen years later)…

In honor of 27 years on Earth, here are

27 AMAZING THINGS I HAVE DONE:

1. Modeled with Miss J. Alexander (who said I was great and was the first person ever to write a thank you note!)

2. Appeared in a magazine

3. Moved to Verona, Italy a week after I met the family on the internet.

4. Played in a family vineyard in Italy where I ate grapes and drank wine.

5. Took Tango lessons in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

6. Lived in HK and completed an art book about the “Walled City” in Hong Kong (historical site).

7. Attended an outdoor music festival in Singapore for the weekend and danced in the rain with a mysterious Australian guy named Hugh.

8. Danced in a historical Savannah fountain (very illegally) where I cut my hand open with glass.

9. Got on a yacht with a group of strangers and had the best time in Sai Kung.

10. Visit Thailand islands, make friends with a local who owned a wooden canoe, that brought us to small islands and took us deep sea fishing at night in the middle of the ocean, where he brought a small grill and cooked the fish as we caught them. Also did some epic cliff diving and snorkeling with sharks.

11. Moved to rural China a week after finishing college where I mentored over 5,000 students, teachers, and peers.

12. Got drunk off baijiu with the Chinese government before being sent back to teach a workshop.

13. Attend a Chinese family reunion in the Gobi desert where they roasted sacrificial lamb and drove us around in dune buggies across the majestic sand dunes (that we also crashed into and got hurt).

14. Hiked the Great Wall of China after taking and sleeping on the night train from Baotou.

15. Got arrested in China for photographing factories (oops) or being a pretty foreign girl that the chief wanted to talk to…it’s a mystery.

16. Go to Seoul, SK just to attend a spa for a day.

17. Eat all things unimaginable (ie: camel toe, duck brain, shark, duck bones, duck feet, rabbit, jellyfish, horse, donkey, etc).

18. Hitchhiked in China and explored the largest and most extravagant ghost city in the world.

19. Create and post street art mysteriously across USA.

20. Design and produce my own designs in China.

21. Live in Madrid and El Escorial on the property of the monastery of King Phillip II.

22. Take a bus from Germany to Switzerland just to catch a plane.

23. Given autographs and photographs to strangers.

24. Speak/understand a bit of seven languages and learn to cook a variety of food around the world.

25. Attend and review musicians and art as an art editor.

26. Move to Tokyo and start a new life alone.

AND MOST IMPORTANTLY…

27. (Not traveling but) meeting the world alone, being independent and having faith in the unknown. Meeting thousands of incredible people around the world: friends that will have a special place in my soul for eternity. Each experience has had a million other sub-experiences that are made up of each encounter with every person I have ever had around the world. Thank you for making this life of mine so special!

If I could have any wish for this birthday it would be to have every single soul I have ever known in this world meet in the same room and have a dance party!

This amazing life has only just begun! I am ready to meet and inspire lives for years to come.  

#goals #birthday