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acorrespondence · 1 year

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I was just thinking about how much I love Boyd in your Boyd/Raylan kid fic, and sorry this is such a vague question lol but I'd love if you had any like bonus Boyd backstory or details that you'd want to talk about in that universe, or like just any info on how this version of Boyd and the like perfect imo characterization of how he would be as a dad and a partner came to you!

Oh no this is a great question! Well, great for me because I love to talk about this stuff, maybe not so great for you since this answer is about to be real long and rambly haha. Ultimately though I think it comes down to the fact that, at his core, Boyd is a lot less like his father or even Arlo, and a lot more like Mags Bennett. I think on the surface level, they’re actually quite different—Mags has her matronly, pillar-of-the-community persona, and her ruthless pragmatism is tucked away underneath that, but it bubbles up to the surface sometimes. Boyd, on the other hand, inhabits his personas much more fully, and cycles through a lot more of them. I think probably the biggest difference between them is that Boyd really doesn’t seem to believe in violence as a form of control, at least not for those in his employ. Killing Devil and Dewey isn’t a way to control them, it’s just a solution to the problem their presence presents. Even when he gets violent with Ava in the last season, he’s not using it to influence her behavior, it’s just more of a controlled version of a child’s tantrum—you hurt me, so now I’m gonna hurt you.

At their cores, however, Boyd and Mags are both motivated by the same thing: the idea of legacy. I think many people often mistake this in Boyd as a survival instinct, and I sort of agree, in the way that legacy and lasting impact past death are our way to blunt the innate human fear of mortality—death may be inevitable, but our works and stories can continue on. Except I think saying he’s “just trying to survive” throughout the show kind of neuters his character a bit. Because one of the things that makes him so interesting is that everyone else around him is just trying to survive, and he’s not. He wants more than that, and makes other people believe that he can get it, not just for himself but for them too. It’s why he can rally people around him so easily.

In fact, he routinely does things that he does not *need* to do, that put his life directly in jeopardy, in favor of making a name for himself and trying to improve his position in life. And in so doing, he and Mags fall into the same trap: this idea that legacy is achieved only when you beat the game. All the suffering will be worth it when you reach that light at the end of the tunnel. Mags hurts her children over and over again, both directly and indirectly, all in the name of securing her legacy, *for them*, and in the end it takes Doyle dying and losing Loretta and getting the thing she thought she wanted for her to look back and realize: *that* was her legacy. Nothing good was ever going to come out of any of it. Every action she took in the name of securing her legacy was actually destroying it, was moving her further away from the thing she thought she was working toward. All that suffering in the name of legacy? That *is* her legacy. That’s what she’s leaving behind. Ava saw it clearly, even if none of the rest of them did: it’s all just people making choices, all down the line.

I honestly think characterizing Boyd as being motivated solely by survival throughout the series is a bit of a disservice to his character development as well, because I think his whole arc in the show is leading up to his realization, in the finale, that his life is actually more important to him than his symbolic life after death—whether that symbolic survival is secured by religious means, by his epic Bonnie and Clyde-style love story with Ava, or by his adherence to Raylan’s own personal mythos that places them in opposition on a time-tested scale. These are all just the natural replacements for his astronaut goals and later his goals in going off to war—the theater for his exploits grows smaller and smaller as he fails to make a name for himself outside Harlan. Ava even came right out and said it: in Lexington she’s anonymous, no one knows her name or marital status or anything about her. If anyone’s going to remember Boyd, it’s gonna be Harlan (though several times throughout the series he gets designs on something bigger, it never pans out). In the end, though—and in contrast to Mags, who couldn’t see past the crumbling of everything she’d thought she was building—Boyd makes the decision to put life over legacy.

On the surface, his situation in season 2 might *seem* like it should have done the job of disillusioning him about legacies already, but that was more of a symbolic suicide, Boyd resigning himself to the fact that he was doomed to have no legacy and thus making *no* choices. He didn’t deny his previous legacy; it was taken from him by his father. He doesn’t even get the legacy of having killed his father, or of having killed the woman who killed his father. And following that, other people make his choices for him: Kyle with the mine robbery, Ava with their relationship. But he’s *not actually dead,* and his commitment to not making choices is a choice in itself. He’s absolutely capable of fighting back against the desires and machinations of those around him, but he just—doesn’t. And in the end, both of these non-decision decisions in their own way present him with a new legacy, which he immediately latches onto as soon as that light comes back on at the far end of his tunnel. If he’d made the realization that his life is more important than his legacy, he wouldn’t have needed this symbolic revival, because *he was never dead.*

For the purposes of my fic, the inciting incident that caused the canon divergence had to be a latter such event, to my mind—Boyd losing his way—because otherwise he’s just going to stagnate in Harlan and stay in his neo-Nazi persona long enough to get calcified in it like Mags, or until something shakes up the game board, like Raylan’s arrival. But it wasn’t enough just to give him a kid, because all he’d care about was the legacy he’s securing for that kid. So I had to figure out how to make Bo do the equivalent of killing all his followers in the woods. So: the kid’s mama runs off, Ava leaves Bowman to try and make a life on her own in Corbin, Boyd’s really low on child care options and figures Bo’s a better bet than Bowman. Only it turns out that’s kind of a rock and a hard place situation (we know from season 6 where Bowman learned his wifebeating ways, and Bo definitely strikes me as the “small children and animals don’t understand any kind of discipline but physical” kind of guy, whereas Boyd as I’ve said doesn’t really believe in control through violence, likely because it never really worked on him).

Enter: Boyd going to Raylan hoping he’ll give him purpose, just like he did in canon after the equivalent event. Only this time, Raylan offers him more than just the potential for retribution against his father. He offers pretty much the same thing Ava did, for the low low price of papering over the past. So Boyd basically teaches himself architecture—few other legacies last longer than buildings, and if you make enough then at least a few of them are bound to stick around a while—and invests in a series of failed startups until he’s hit, quite suddenly, with a Mags Bennett-style reality check as detailed in chapter 5, forcing him to confront the legacy he’s already created and the fact that it’s absolute shit. Luckily for him, unlike Mags, it happened before anyone died, and he had a chance to course-correct. Fast-forward to now, where Boyd is *trying* to make choices that actually bear out his goals, but maybe still puts a little too much stock in legacy, since he hasn’t yet reached that final step of enlightenment that he hits in the finale when he refuses to pull on Raylan.

#justie2justie communication #asks #love-leah #heavy heart #i actually do have a bit of backstory that i shared with willow in a comment exchange a few chapters ago #but this answer is WAY too long already so i’m gonna make a separate post #long post #wow this barely even answers your question does it #it barely even talks about boyd in his capacity as husband/father *facepalm*#also control through violence is not to be confused with control through fear which he does use #he’s an expert in mortality salience so he knows how to use others’ fear of death against them #boyd crowder #mags bennett #justified #my fic

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nfpa · 8 months

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#mind rider #atlas #lucky #mortality salience /

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disengaged · 4 months

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Hey pegs! I hope you’re doing well and feeling better💖

I know a lot of Metallica fics over the last 2-3 years have had a very recurring “cannibalistic/horror/gore” theme to them. It seems to be a fan favorite as well seeing how many kudos these types of stories would get! I know I am not opposed to them at all. But I guess my question is: what are your views on “cannibalism as a metaphor for love”?

Hopefully this serves as a distraction to some degree, and once again I hope you feel better soon!

cannibalism as love ... well! it clicks for me, it makes some kind of intuitive sense. the experience of love (i.e. the act of loving another) is so often conceived as being utterly all-consuming, it makes logical sense for media depictions to extend to literal consumption. i see it as symbolism of the ... somewhat-necessary loss of the self/parts of the self involved in such an emotionally-involved affair (?), but also ... it's an exploration of what it means to give oneself to another. the vulnerability, the intimacy, the power exchange—it's devotion, it's sacrifice, it's mutual complicity in tumbling down the rabbithole (the taboo, the Other; to eat your lover is a freakish thing to do). it can be tender, loving, cruel, brutal, abusive, or any combination of the above, but any way you shake it, it's ... perhaps the most extreme version of dedication. easy to romanticize, easier to eroticize.

i'm speaking mainly about consensual cannibalism here, but i think it goes without saying the non-consensual murder kind has endless potential, too.

#blah blah blah ... something about sex and eating as 'base' (i.e. animalistic) instincts + death thought accessibility hypothesis #by which i mean uh. cannibalistic love stories are forever entwined with the salience of one's own mortality and the human struggle to find #meaning. and isn't love the meaning of everything ? isn't infatuation with your lover what makes living and dying worth the trouble?#what's that song lyric. 'it was in love i was created / and in love is how i hope to die'?#and whats that jenny holzer truism. 'expiring for love is beautiful but stupid'?#yknow? like. isn't the desire to consume another/desire to be consumed by another just ... the endgame? the merging of souls?#in media anyways. god knows real-life love/fictional love are two different beasts entirely #asks #anon #i don't even know if this makes sense sorry. head foggy too many thoughts !! running on like 3h of sleep and i've been puking all day smfh #tysm for the distraction !! :) much appreciated <3 #fic #fanfiction -

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confinesofmy · 2 years

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my cousins on one side of the family lie so much and it's so disrespectful to everyone involved. it's like they're all living in their own little truman shows sometimes i s2g. no one lets anyone else experience a fully informed, real reaction to anything unless they like the way they think the person will react. oh and also if you reference any of this, even obliquely, they will get very fucking testy lmao. 🙄

#they keep trying to encourage me to lie to the others or participate in complex schemes to avoid unpredictable reactions and it's like #y'all #i am 26 years old #half your age basically #i can't live like that life is too fucking short to be pulling cons on my loved ones #'let's just be honest with them' is becoming my go-to phrase #and it's not even about big shit!!#i don't think you should lie about big shit with people whose faces you see every day #but anything less than that.. why would you do that #fr why would you put yourself in that situation for nothing #maybe it's just my mortality salience recently skyrocketing but Who Has The Time for that shit!!#if the person has a bad reaction it's not going to devastate me my ego can take the hit #and i trust that the other person will allow me to have my autonomy even if they don't like what i'm doing with it #it will be okay #we're all adults goddammit 😭#even the generation beneath them doesn't lie like this and they're literally teenage heretics living at home like...#if they're not lying about the more unsavoury aspects of themselves then why are you lying about casserole ingredients #sigh #adams year from hell

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oblivionwithbells · 2 years

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'If a way to the better there be, it lies in taking a full look at the worst.'

― Thomas Hardy

#deathawareness #Death awareness #Death #mortality saliency #mortalitysalience #mortaility-saliency #mortalitysaliency #mementomori #memento mori #memento-mori

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lexiepiper · 8 months

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Hey, Lexie! Fic authors self rec! When you get this, reply with your favorite five fics that you've written, then pass on to at least five other writers. Let’s spread the self-love 💚

Oh wow, thanks!

This is really hard, I love so many of my pieces!

I think my current top five would have to be these ones though…

The Void Yawns Softly, written for last year’s Invisobang. Space horror. Basically Danny is an astronaut who has to go and save a crew from certain doom. It’s currently one of my most popular pieces.

The Way of all Flesh was my first Bang project. It’s a traditional ghost story with the Danny Phantom twist and a small-town gothic vibe. I really loved writing it and still revisit it from time to time, just for fun.

Shift was a Phic Phight prompt that got out of hand in the best way possible. Written in only three weeks or so, it’s a multi chapter found family with the GiW as the good guys. Shift is my most popular fic by far, and just an all around feel-good experience, despite the angst interspersed between the fluff.

Reveal fics have always been my bread and butter in this fandom, and Mortality Salience is one of my better oneshots. Phantom and Valerie are trapped and helpless, and time is running out. I like to reread this one often.

Okay, so maybe this is cheating because it’s my most recent completed piece and I’m always more partial to newer works of my own, but Timekept is such delicious body horror! Written for Marsalias’ Phic Phight prompt about Danny’s insides turning to Clockwork, this was a joy to create and I think it’ll remain my favourite long after the new shiny feeling has faded.

Thanks so much for the prompt, and sorry for the formatting. I’m on mobile so I honestly don’t know how the links are going to work!

#lexiepiper

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raayllum · 8 months

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what makes you HC that Rayla was a premature baby? /Gen

It's always been a headcanon I've enjoyed for her given the emphasis Moonshadow culture puts on strength vs weakness and how it can interplay with that (something I also sometimes headcanon for Callum to be juxtaposed by him being like, a very powerful mage when he grows up lol) but both of those are 90% because I was a Very Premature baby (like almost died / was in the hospital for a hot second level lmao) and there are almost never premature babies in anything despite the fact it can... Really effect you and your family even beyond the like, heightened mortal salience, so it's a small thing I always like to see more canon rep for. Tommy from Rugrats, that one puppy in 101 Dalmatians (it's close enough ok), and Hiccup from HTTYD my beloved

#forbidden op lore #headcanons #thanks for asking #anonymous #me growing up with autism when asked 'if you could've been born anytime what would you pick':#well if i hadn't been born when i was i probably wouldn't have made it SOO thank u modern medicine/technology <3

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lilacsupernova · 6 months

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'Thou shall not suffer a witch to live': ageism, misogyny and TERF panic

The language is necessarily extreme because the 'sins' of TERFs can only be understood with reference to the misogynistic fantasies of which they are subject. Without these, one might otherwise think TERFs are ordinary women with a basic theory of patriarchy and/or understanding of the political salience of human reproduction (which is just what TERFs want you to think). 'You get these young women who start using [TERF] because they see the response first and they think, these people must be horrible,' says [Anna-Louise] Adams. 'And there's always such hyperbolic language surrounding women who are TERFs, like "literally killing trans people", "literally enacting violence" [...] And it's just this cycle of dismissing someone's views, legitimising violence against them, thinking that they're bad, then somebody else comes in and sees you doing that, then they add to it.'

...I've suggested older women become a receptacle for other people's prejudices, symbolic figures who it's okay to hate because of all the villainy projected onto them, and who purify everyone else by representing bad, regressive things - mortal bodies, dirt, boundaries - which will soon no longer matter. In the summer of 202, following her blog post on sex and gender, protestors threw red paint, intended to look like blood, onto an impression of J. K. Rowling's handprints on an Edinburgh street. The message - that she had blood on her hands - was utterly ridiculous, but it didn't matter. The point wasn't to respond to the fact that Rowling was already a monster, but to turn her into one by treating her as such. The sheer magnitude of misogynist aggression directed at Rowling the form of vandalism, book burnings, rape and death threats were what damned her, not anything she has written. As one anonymous academic tweeted, 'When you're on the outside of the fray on gender issues looking in, it's tempting to say: If someone is hounded for her speech, she must have said or done something horrible':

The crime and the punishment must match, working backwards from the severity of the punishment. For example, if the response to what @jk_rowling said is that intense, she must have said something truly terrible - otherwise, no one would be making death threats. Because that would be insane.

Ritual witch burnings themselves, writes [Llewellyn] Barstow, 'taught people that "the woman's crime" deserved the most severe punishment possible, that women, who up to that time had seldom been marked publicly as criminals, were capable of doing the ultimate evil.' The punishment doesn't fit so much as define the crime.

– Victoria Smith (2023), Hags: The demonisation of middle-aged women, pp. 284-5.

And we must denounce and punish loudly, for:

Them as protect proved witches is just as bad as the witches themselves.

– Sybil Marshall (eds. 2016), The Book of English Folk Tales, p.211.

#victoria smith #hags #jk rowling #anna louise adams #llewellyn barstow #terf #trans #witch #trans cult #halloween #lilac posts

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lonelyzuul · 11 months

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Purple used to be my favorite color (I)

Until I saw it, in the face of the dead woman, laying on sidewalk. Before those days, I never realized how colorful death was. My mind would conjure a ghostly palette; shades from grey to black at the mention. But death is as colorful as the plume on birds that have evolved to shine for love. No hiding. No camouflage.

People were leaving their meat all around, before the woman. The Care shortage growing, the people divided and dividing. The order needed to bury them away, drafted for a Higher Purpose. But she’s the first I got a good look at. And I knew her before. When she was alive. She hawked baby formula from a stoop, and in her sleeve the plug to the sapphic apothecary. Part of the whisperweb women went to for various problems, such as husbands who’re “too rough”. She would say, “there’s not a man who can maintain the right amount of rough. You’re better off with sandpaper or a file.” A smile.

Now a man steps on what’s left of her, body frozen under layers of newspaper, to tie his shoe. The words on her that were legible:

“Time: An Ebb and Flow, We’re In The Ebb”

“Is Machiavellianism The Answer?”

“Chad Supplements for Beta Fish Fights: Odds 3:1 Cucking”

“Has Freedom Gone Too Far?”

“Freedom” not too far off from the purple that’s coagulated at her cheek.

Purple used to be my favorite color.

#poetry #writing #creative writing #spilled ink #spilled poetry #spilled bullshit #poem #spilled words #mental illness #disillusion #mortality salience #story #dystopian #free verse #poerty #apocalyptic fiction

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ina-nis · 11 months

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Going a little more in depth on the whole social disconnection and existential isolation matters, I found these on Reddit and I believe their timing is pretty good. As someone plagued with suicidality and constant thoughts of death, this really resonates with a lot of my feelings and how alienating it is to be this way.

People who frequently feel alienated, isolated and misunderstood are more likely than others to have thoughts of death and dying swirling around in their minds, new research finds. It's not yet clear whether these feelings of isolation are the cause of these morbid thoughts, though there is some tantalizing evidence that they may be.

"This is an experience that some people really have, and some people have this experience all the time," (...)

Helm and his colleagues were interested in exploring how a particular experience, that of existential isolation, might tie in with thoughts of death and mortality. Existential isolation is related to loneliness, but it's not the same thing, Helm told Live Science. Loneliness is a feeling of a lack of contact with others, whereas existential isolation is the feeling that other people just fundamentally don't understand you. Socializing while feeling existentially isolated can actually make the problem worse, Helm said. (x)

The article above was based on the following text (under a paywall, so there’s a lot of gaps and it feels incomplete):

(...) Existentially isolated individuals do not feel that their views of the world are shared by others. Thus, they do not get much social validation of their worldviews. Terror management research has shown that strong faith in one’s worldview protects people from their concerns about mortality (...) When people’s worldviews are weak or threatened, death-related thought becomes more accessible. Therefore, people who are high in existential isolation or who are led to feel existentially isolated should be higher in death thought accessibility than those who feel less existentially isolated.

(...) Existential Isolation (EI) describes the “unbridgeable gap between oneself and any other being” (...) It refers to the notion that no matter how close we get to another individual, it is impossible to truly know their subjective experience (...) Although EI may be an existential reality (i.e., we can never see and experience the world via another person’s...

(...) As noted previously, terror management theory posits that individuals are able to maintain relative psychological equanimity in the face of awareness of their mortality by investing in internalized, largely culturally-based worldviews which offer individuals ways to find meaning and personal significance. In particular, investment in cultural worldviews, and maintaining self-esteem within the context of that worldview serve to buffer the individual against death anxiety (...)

(...) Given that EI is the sense that others do not share one’s subjective perceptions of the world, it may be particularly problematic for the need for shared reality (...) Many scholars have argued that our social worlds are constructed and maintained through relating to and interacting with others (...) In other words, the meaning and value we assign to social constructs, rituals, cultural artifacts (x)

From what I could understand, reading this text and researching further, people who suffer from existential isolation have less “protection” against death-related thoughts and feelings, because they don’t have buffers. This was particularly insightful:

Anxiety buffer disruption theory (ABDT) is an application of terror management theory to explain an individual's reaction to a traumatic event, which leads to post traumatic stress disorder (...) Humans respond to the anxiety and dread mortality salience produces by clinging to their cultural worldview, through self-esteem and also close personal relationships. Cultural worldviews, with their cultural norms, religious beliefs and moral values infuse life with meaning. They give life a feeling of normalcy and also a feeling of control. There is no way to definitely prove one's cultural worldview, there they are fragile human constructs and must be maintained. Clinging to a cultural worldview and self-esteem buffer the anxiety connected to thoughts of mortality. When thoughts of death are salient, humans are drawn to their cultural world view which "stipulates appropriate social requirements, and standards for valued conduct, while instilling one's life with meaning, order and permanence."

When a traumatic experience cannot be assimilated into a currently held cultural worldview, the anxiety-buffering mechanisms are disrupted. ABDT argues that individuals face overwhelming anxiety which leads to the symptoms of PTSD including re-experiencing, hyper-arousal, avoidance and disassociation. The dissociation causes atypical responses to mortality salience compared with individuals who do not suffer from an anxiety buffer disruption. When the anxiety buffer disruption is mild, exaggerated coping responses, such as rejecting or taking offense at other cultures, is expected. When the anxiety buffer disruption is severe, there can be a total breakdown of coping mechanisms (...)

Excessive anxiety experienced by post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers occurs because the events causing the post-traumatic stress disorder have demonstrated to these individuals that anxiety-buffering mechanisms are not capable of protecting them from death. Individuals who have high levels of peritraumatic dissociation and low levels of self-efficacy coping, two indicators of post-traumatic stress disorder, have abnormal responses to reminders of death. These individuals in turn do not utilize the coping mechanisms that are typically used to remove the fear of death: culture, self-esteem, and interpersonal relationships. In fact, in individuals with post traumatic stress disorder, mortality salience coping mechanisms are viewed as worthless and perhaps are even seen to be detestable (cont.)

The articles I’ve seen talk about it related to, disasters, fear of death and death-anxiety, among other things, but I believe it is possible to apply to cases such as mine, where my brain defaults to “death” as a “solution” to all problems ever, since I do not have anything else to hold onto. I’m obsessed with thoughts of death maybe not for the same reasons as people who are fearful of death do, but the mechanisms feel really similar. Therefore, my post-traumatic experiences are not about protecting me from “death” itself, but protecting me from “death of connections” (or rejection, etc), something along those lines.

The next part really hits home, for both my PTSD and other issues:

(cont.) Components of anxiety buffers

Cultural Worldview: Individuals who have post traumatic stress disorder will often reject their culture when provided with mortality salience triggers, the direct opposite of what terror management theory demonstrates to be true in those without post traumatic stress disorder. Cultural worldviews infuse life with structure, purpose and meaning. People maintain these fragile constructions by preferring the company of the like-minded. But when faced with a traumatic event, there are times when the horror cannot be assimilated into the framework of the person's existing cultural worldview.

Self-Esteem: Various studies demonstrate that individuals who have post traumatic stress disorder also have decreased self-esteem. Self-esteem cannot function well as an anxiety buffering system in those who have post traumatic stress disorder as the buffer is weakened in these individuals. High self-esteem can displace defensive responses and buffer against the terror of mortality salience because it is a signal that the individual is living at the standard they should, based on their world view. Self-worth as the terror management theory suggests is an essential component of the existential anxiety- buffering system (...)

Close Relationships: It is often mentioned that worldview and self-esteem affect ways in which our fears of death are buffered with ABDT. Close relationships also serve as a regulator of these fears (...) Close relationships seem to be a product of natural selection because of their reproductive and survival benefits, having reproductive benefits contribute to the survival of people’s genes through their offspring. Therefore, close relationships increase the likelihood of mating and brings about other survival skills like gathering food, finding shelter, environmental awareness, and protects offspring from dangers. Love and belongingness are ranked over those of esteem and self- actualization. The formation and maintenance of close relationships have been recognized in both infants and adults as a source of regulating distress. It is also noted that self- esteem can also stem from close relationships. Based on these things it was assumed that formation and maintenance of close relationships may serve as a death- anxiety- buffering mechanism. Close relationships appear to have inoculating power against basic existential threats, which allows people to respond to these threats by fulfilling relational potentials. Second, it seems the sense of relationship commitment is shaped by not only perceived relational investment, gains, and potential alternatives, as well as the existential need of denial of death awareness. Third, it seems processes of terror management not only include worldview defenses to protect the self, but also promote commitment to significant others and the expansion of the self, provided by these relationships.

Close relationships may serve as a fundamental anxiety buffer. It appears close relationships not only protect individuals from concrete and actual threats or danger, but also offer a symbolic shield against the awareness of one's finitude. Since the threat of death is inescapable, the support from those close to us make may make the thought of death more tolerable by giving meaning to our lives by being important to others.

As other anxiety buffers, interpersonal relationships are damaged as well in individuals with post traumatic stress disorder. People with post traumatic stress disorder have higher rates of divorce, more difficulty with their children, are more prone to domestic violence, and are emotionally distant from loved ones. All of these are damaging and as a result, terror management cannot be accomplished through close interpersonal relationships (x)

There it is.

I don’t really have much of 2 of these, and I like to think my “self-esteem” is always improving but... yes, everything is interconnected and my self-esteem does not exist in a vacuum. I personally feel like my own humanity is tied to other people’s, in a way or another. I don’t exist alone in the world. No one does. We’re a social species (even if not all of us are social).

The things that could help me to “hold onto life”, such as a shared cultural worldview, occur in very peculiar ways for me, both online and offline; and I don’t feel any particular attachments, unfortunately. I sense these connections are just as frail: I can brag about being part of the queer community, and the gaming community, and many fandoms too, so many other things I enjoy... but, ultimately, I don’t tie my existence or enjoyment of these things to the communities themselves, nor the culture of things. I take what I want and I do-it-myself. I love being around peers, but even if they were not here, I would still do my own thing because I learned from a young age that I could not rely on other people. I may be connected to a culture while I remain disconnected from the people taking part on it.

And of course, “close relationships” are the bane of my existence... do I even have to say anything else, considering they’re the reason for this journal in the first place?

Without these “close relationships” I feel like my... everything is very brittle, things are fragile even though they exist. And it’s not as if I were fostering dependency over others (not that this would be a problem), it’s just that... there’s no such thing for me, never for long-enough, never in any way that feels safe and reassuring so... I adapt! I function by myself, I learn how to live my life on my own and make the best out of it, I pursue happiness independent of others and...

I can’t rid myself of my own suicidality! Despite all the good things, despite all the reframing and happinesses.

It’s almost as if these things were related, huh? If my suicidality is also related to isolation, there’s no amount of things I do on my own that will help, regardless if they are good or make me happy, or if I reframe the bad ones into more positive ones. I’m still alone existentially, emotionally and physically. It’s a heavy burden to carry.

I don’t have anything to “buffer” those thoughts, I don’t have any other things to hold onto. The things I do have, do not address what needs to be address, rendering them useless. Everything is temporary, everything is conditional, everything is transitional, how do I move past this, when death itself feels more comforting, familiar and reliable than dealing with other people?

It doesn’t make sense, right?

It shouldn’t make sense! But it does for me because I have nothing else.

(Edit: I forgot to add but there’s a very good piece about this and the intersection of gender for transgender people)

#loneliness #avpd #avoidance #avoidant #avoidant personality disorder #resources #inanis post

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