#nothing like writing sad shit at three in the morning amirite :')

[katsu28]

🍭 lollipop - 25. “Don’t do that. Don’t push me away. I can’t help it” From list 4 with steve??? pls and ty honey <3333

thank you for this request sweet anon! i hope you like it <3 even if it is just a pile of angst oops

steve harrington x reader, 1.2k, general tw for depression (it's not explicitly stated but it's kinda implied)

Steve knew something in you had changed when you slowly stopped hanging out with everyone. Even when you did join them, he noticed that you weren’t entirely there. You always seemed a million miles away, smiles a little too forced, eyes a little too hollow. Where there used to be warmth that made everything seem a little brighter, there was nothing but hardness in your gaze, like the light in you had been snuffed out. 

It was like you were becoming a shell of the person you once were, right before his very eyes. 

And he understood why, because he’d gone down the same path the first time he witnessed the horrors of the Upside Down. How could someone face everything that you all had and not come out the other end a different person? 

Steve wanted to be there for you—show you that you weren’t alone, that you had someone who could help. That you had him. He just had to figure out how. 

That was how he found himself hovering on your doorstep tonight, shifting from foot to foot as he waited for you to answer his constant knocking. It seemed like an eternity before the door swung open to reveal you standing on the other side of it, wrapped in a blanket and peering out at him in confusion. 

“Steve?” Your brow furrowed, hands gripping the edges of the blanket to draw it tighter around yourself. 

“Hi. Can I come in?” 

“I don’t think—” 

“Please?” You opened the door a little wider for him, moving to the side wordlessly as he hurried across the threshold and headed straight for the living room. You followed him, taking a seat on the couch and watching him pace back and forth in front of you for a good while until he finally stopped. 

Steve turned to you, letting out a deep breath. “I had an entire speech planned out in my head on what I was gonna say to you, but now that I’m here I’ve forgotten everything, so forgive me if I’m, like, rambling a lot, and I’m sorry if I sound pushy or anything, I just—I need you to know this.” 

You hesitated a beat before answering, wary of what he was about to say to you. “Okay.” 

“I know what you’re going through right now, Y/N. Well, not exactly what you’re going through, but I get it. Hell, I’ve even gone through it myself. This saving the world shit is fucking awful, I get it. It’s like, the world is fine, but you’re…not. Not you, specifically, I mean, but us. We’re not fine.” He blurted, hands moving a million miles a minute in gestures that might’ve been a tad too crazed, but he couldn’t stop himself. “You feel like you’re suffocating in your own thoughts all the time, and you keep replaying everything in your head, wondering if things would’ve ended the same way if you’d just tried something else, or gotten to Eddie a little faster. You feel like you’re never gonna be okay ever again, but I’m here to tell you that you will be. You’re gonna be okay, because I’m here for you. And I know that sounds like a load of crap, I thought so too after everything, but I promise, I’m here for you, anything you need.” 

He halted in his pacing once more to look at you, pleading honey eyes boring into yours. You glanced away immediately, focusing on the lamp in the corner of the room, because the longer you looked at him, the more the defenses you put up would start to crack. “You can yell at me, throw things at me, tell me you hate the world and everything in it, tell me you hate me—I don’t care. I just want you to let me help you.” 

You pressed your lips together, fists clenching under your blanket. “I don’t need your help, Steve. And I appreciate the effort, but I’m fine.” 

“You’re my best friend and I love you, you know that. So you know that I mean it in the nicest way when I say, no you’re not. You’re not fine, Y/N, and I know that because I know you. I know you’re not sleeping, I know you’re barely eating, and I know that you’re scared and angry and confused and about a hundred other different emotions that you can’t pinpoint., because…y’know, who wouldn’t feel the same after everything that's happened?” Steve couldn’t help the bitter chuckle that fell from his lips at his own words, because it was true. 

Even he still felt the same way most of the time, terrified that something else would happen and it would be right back to square one, all of you fighting a war against something the bounds of which you couldn’t even begin to understand, but fighting anyway because if you didn’t, no one would.

“And I wish I could take away everything bad in the world from you, but I can’t. All I can do is help you through it, if you let me.” He said defeatedly, kneeling in front of you.

His hands rested on your knees, the warmth of his palms spreading through your whole body. “I can’t lose you, okay? Not after everything else we’ve lost. I need you, Y/N. You’re my best friend, and I need you. So I’m sorry if I sound like an asshole right now, but whatever tough ‘I can handle it on my own’ thing you’ve got going on here, don’t do that. Don’t push me away.” 

“I can’t help it.” You whispered, lip trembling. When you finally met Steve’s gaze, your eyes were bright with unshed tears, and he was next to you instantly, wrapping his arms around you tighter than you ever thought possible. His hug was the final nail in the coffin, the last crack in your wall that sent it crumbling to the ground. You buried your face into his chest as sobs shook your body, clutching at him like he was your lifeline as you let every feeling all out into the fabric of his sweatshirt, barely hearing the reassurances he whispered into your hair. 

You’d never cried like this in front of anyone before, not even him, and after you’d finally stopped hiccupping, you felt strangely lighter. Still the same as before, but a little bit like the weight on your shoulders had been lessened just by knowing Steve was here. He wiped your tear tracks away with his sleeve gently, pressing a kiss to your temple. 

“I’m sorry, Steve. I didn’t mean to shut you out.” You sniffled, inhaling a shuddering breath. Steve made a noncommittal noise, taking one edge of your blanket and squeezing himself under it, squishing even closer to you.

“Hey, no. You don’t be sorry. Just promise me you’ll let me help you through this.” 

You held out your pinky towards him. “I promise.” 

“Good.” He linked his own pinky around yours, giving it a firm shake. “Now let’s try and get some sleep, okay? What can I do for ya? I can sing a little something, if you want. Some Tears for Fears, perhaps?” 

You let out a watery chuckle. “Not Tears for Fears, please.” 

“Whoa, what’s wrong with Tears for Fears?” 

“Nothing. Just…stay here with me?” 

“Okay.” He said softly, rubbing his thumb over your shoulder. “I can do that.” He wouldn’t even dream of leaving. Not now, not ever. 

#i am so sorry for this #nothing like writing sad shit at three in the morning amirite :') #steve harrington #steve harrington x reader #steve harrington one shot #steve harrington angst #steve harrington x you #steve harrington x y/n #steve harrington imagine #stranger things #kait celebrates 1k!

[lhs3020b]

Post Mortem

I promised some thoughts on the nightmarish debacle that has happened. Here they are.

TL;DR I am scathing about everything. Everyone who should have helped us, failed.

It's the morning after. They've won. Continuity Remain is dead; there isn't going to be any second referendum and Article 50 won't be revoked. You cannot imagine how I feel right now, typing those words. However, I have never sought to deny reality (however lovely denial might be) and reality is what it is. We've lost a referendum and two general elections; we're finished. There is no come-back from this. The country has made a sick, twisted, greedy, myopic and stupid decision - but that's the decision it's made. I have nothing good to say for what happened, except that it did happen.

Well, let's look at the one tiny silver lining: since the ship has now sailed, I can indulge my deep, seething pool of vitriol for our collection of useless opposition parties. I'd held back previously because I didn't want to add to the circular firing squad. But they've all shot each other now and the corpses have largely stopped twitching. So off we go. (Before we start, I won't be writing about CUK/TiG/Change-UK, because they were just annoying, and I can't be arsed. I think we've all spent enough time on that shower of idiots.)

Here's the core reason for why I'm so angry: all this was completely avoidable. The media will, of course, spin BoJo's victory as a paragonic triumph of political conservatism. Like that infamous Pravda article from the 30s, on the Soviet constitution, they'll fawn over BoJo and declare him a visionary and a victor, a veritable genius of the ages, dripping with lyricism and wit. He isn't. He's an over-promoted buffoon who lucked into the top office due to the self-destruction of his inept predecessor, aided and abetted by a lying and sycophantic media - and, by a collection of opposition parties whose sole interest was in fighting each other.

Here we have the real core problem. The people on our side only switch on for fighting each other. There's little sign that they actually really care about Brexit, or the wider state of the UK. But pursuing partisan vendettas against each other? Wheeeeeeeeeee!

Let's think back to the summer, when BoJo was faced with stalling polls and a hung parliament. He could have been ousted then - but, of course, the Lib Dems were adamant that they couldn't countenance the idea of Mr Corbyn as Prime Minister. They'd had this tendency for a while - it's not new - but it accelerated and was nurtured under Jo Swinson.

When she was elected as leader I was initially a bit sympathetic - it seemed reasonable to give her a chance. Unfortunately, it turned out that she might be the most rightwing leader they've ever had - I actually suspect now that she might be to the right of Clegg. And she went and turbocharged all of their most self-destructive tendencies. I think what she thought she was doing was clawing Tory Remainers off of the Tories. This ran into two problems; 1) there weren't that many Tory Remainers to begin with and b) most of them are more Tory than they are Remain. So they mostly stayed put, and they few who did leave (thank you, to those of you that did) just weren't enough. Meanwhile, the hard-right tilt scared off the Lib Dem's left-leaning supporters.

A while back I predicted they'd lose seats at this election; I'm sad to have been proved right. I am, however, grimly-amused that Swinson herself lost her seat. The other problem with Swinson's rampany anti-Corbynism was that it partially demobilised continuity!Remain. A lot of people sensed that she was more anti-Corbyn than anti-Brexit; that also implied no plausible chance of an anti-Brexit coalition. Hoenstly, given how overt and personal the vitriol between her and Corbyn got, it's hard to see how it could ever have worked. And there's no point voting for something that you know is impossible. I do wonder if maybe this switched some left-leaning people off, or perhaps even sent a few ditherers back to the Tories (under the assumption that any sort of government is better than no government, I suppose).

As for the Lib Dem campaign, it was a mess. At one point their leader went on air to deny killing squirrels (yes, seriously, this actually happened). She got all excited about thermonuclear genocide at one point, because that's not at all weird and creepy, amirite?! Then there was the bizzarity that was "skills wallets" (don't ask - basically, the sort of policy abortion that happens when a collection of wonks are locked in a room with a boxed set of the West Wing and too much cocaine).

[OK, I'll expand this one. Briefly, skills wallets were a weird continuing-adult-education idea, where you'd have a pot of money that you could access at certain ages, apparently to take some kind of training or re-education or something. Why the ages in question, why that amount of money, and why not just make adult-ed free at the point of use, were never really explained. Then there was the can of worms that was additional voluntary contributions - what I took away from this was it was the adult-ed version of pensions auto-enrollment. I spent the last four years fighting a corrupt auto-enrollment fund, so I have strong feelings here!]

As for general themes, really, the LD campaign didn't have one. There was a lot of "Corbyn, THE MONSTER, the monster, Corbyn!". And, kind of oddly, there wasn't actually that much about Brexit. It actually didn't figure very strongly in their campaign. You came away from watching it all with a) a bad taste in your mouth and b) a nagging feeling that these people didn't know what they were doing.

To be fair to them, their vote share did go up, a bit - from 7.4% in 2017 to 11.4% yesterday. Which is, uh, not exactly dizzying. And it seems to have happened in all the wrong places, so they still managed to lose seats overall.

OK, we've gawped at the piss-stained ashes of the old Liberal Party, lying in state where some eggregious family-member has dumped them, on a roadside verge in the middle of nowhere. (Perhaps some enterprising squirrel has buried a nut amongst them.) Let's move onto the other vast, soul-sucking black hole of despair, also know as the Labour and Co-operative Party.

Oh dear god. The Labour Party.

The Labour Party is Britain's perennial second party, and nothing that happened last night challenged its second-place status. Their vote share dropped by 7.8 percentage points on 2017; this is what produced the Tory landslide, essentially. The Tory vote went up a little, by about 1 point, but otherwise stayed largely flat on 2017. This time, though, Labour collapsed. They lost a swathe of seats across the country, including places like Bolsover and Blyth Valley, which were previously rock-solid.

What went wrong? Everything. Basically, the stars aligned against us, in every single way.

First of all, Labour's campaign was dogged by the antisemitism scandal. And you know what? It was bloody well right that it did. The leadership dealt with antisemitism by ... doing nothing. Anyone who tried to raise the issue instead would get "Corbyn outriders" dumping on them on Twitter. Apparently we're suddenly not allowed to be concerned about racism on the Left anymore? Frankly, fuck that.

What they should have done was a quick-and-brutal party purge, perhaps early in 2018, when there was still time. Take some initiative, get control of the narrative again, and get rid of people who are only going to shit all over your campaign. But, uh, no. That didn't happen. I'll note that the Chris Williamson show in particular went on far, far longer than it should have.

Then we come to Brexit itself. Corbyn spent three years equivocating on the issue. OK, I'll allow that in hindsight, perhaps strategic ambiguity made some sense back in 2017 (though note that they still lost that election too). It didn't by 2019. But Corbyn was still trying to stand in the middle of the road as late as the summer - and by doing so inadvertently opened up political space for the (brief) Lib Dem revival, which in turn shunted Labour onto the defensive. And as I believe Paddy Ashdown once said, if you stand in the middle of the road, you get hit by traffic.

Eventually, the Labour leadership reluctantly adopted a second referendum position, but by then the damage was done. Basically, Corbyn had convinced Leavers that he was a Remainer, and Remainers that he was a Leaver. Labour appears to have lost votes about evenly across both Remain/Leave areas(!). In a way, he actually did unite the country - just against him. Ooops.

The rest of Labour's prospectus was a mess this year. Home Office reform was de-emphasized (arbitrary deportation by the Home Office is a huge concern amongst ethnic minorities). Drugs-law reform seems to have fallen off the agenda. There was no obvious theme to the campaign - surprising given that 2017's "For the Many" theme did cut across. Instead the "offer", such as it was, appeared to be a largely-incoherent grab-bag of spending promises, some of them with very large headline numbers. (The £58 billion for the WASPI pensions thing stands out there.) A lot of people simply didn't believe the country could afford it. You don't vote for things that you fear will bankrupt you.

Also, in a way, there's a parallel to the skills wallets thing here. Labour would have been better off, I think, just doing something straightforward like saying, "If elected we'll raise disability, sickness and unemployment benefits by £x per week, and we'll get rid of the ATOS fit-for-work assesments". It would have the advantages of simplicity, clarity and a clear political theme. Instead we got this weird fiscal machine that would produce some of those effects, except via a complicated multi-part kludge (which probably wouldn't even work properly anyway). I don't know how this came about; presumably it was an after-effect of one of the party's unending internal power-struggles.

Corbyn himself is a controversial figure, from his past associations with the IRA (more vague than the press would have you believe, but still a drag on the doorstep) to the perception of socialist extremism. Again, let me note that the "but he's a Communist, because that starts with 'C' too!" stuff is disingenuous, but this perception exists, and the Party have not found any apparent way to challenge it. Honestly? If your candidate is a ship that's holed below the waterline, yes it is horribly-unfair and all the rest of it, but you do need to run someone else. (I see no point softening that punch ; while Corbyn's been leader, the whole UK has voted 4 times, at 2 general elections, 1 referendum and 1 EU Parliament election. Every time, Labour has bombed. It's hard not to see a pattern here.)

Finally, the Labour Party itself has failed to ever re-unite. It's effectively two political parties in one - or possibly three, depending on how you want to look at Momentum. On a fair day with a strong wind, the Parliamentary portion sometimes manages to move just-about-consistently, but nothing else seems to have that behaviour. Honestly I suspect a lot of people's real fear about a Labour government is not that it would be a socialist tyranny, but rather that it would implode within about six months. Labour has lost its way amongst a storm of factional infighting. To be fair to Corbyn, this isn't new. Ed Milliband's desperate tenure was derailed by internal struggles. Even the 1997-2010 period had the ongoing squabbles between Brownites and Blairites (remember them?).

So yeah, Labour's campaign was an absolute shambles this year, and the whole country is suffering now for that.

Lastly, let's have a quick look at the Green Party. Where were they this year? With Extinction Rebellion making headlines, the Amazon burning, Australia on fire and weather records being smashed everywhere - remember that day when we had summer back in February? - it should have been the Greens' year. Environmental concerns are going up in salience - people are starting to get genuinely worried. And, uh, where were they? I can't recall hearing a single peep from the Green Party during the election. Whatever it was they were doing, it seems to have completely failed to capitalise on the moment. Perhaps they should have been a bit more visible.

The only people who come out of this with any credit are the SNP. I haven't heard anything teeth-grinding about them - though, that might just be because I live in southern England.

Oh, and let's take a final kick in the teeth, shall we? If you add up the shares of the votes received by pro-second-referendum parties ... guess what it comes to? Yup: 52%, versus 48% for the pro-Brexit parties. 52/48 - aaaaargh! Yet, the 48% had a narrative that kept their vote all in one place, so they won an absolute majority at Westminster. Ours got scattered to the four winds by several separate inept campaigns and several useless party leaders. Had there been a second referendum, we could have won it. But we never got the chance, because everyone supposedly on our side were completely, perfectly, useless.

Sigh :(

#UK internal politics #diary of a disaster #We're surrounded by idiots

[chloemill]

On my dog

Happy Friday everyone! My dog died today and I am sad.

Kind of distressing that the death of a beloved pet is the only thing that can motivate me to make words come out of my fingers but you know, what’re you gonna do. I really and truly wake up every morning with the intent to write, but then my brain does that thing where I have so many ideas I’ve been thinking about for so long that it kind of laps itself and all of a sudden has literally not a single idea whatsoever… so I just don’t write anything at all. Ain’t life grand! But anyway. My dog died today. His name was Max. Just started tearing up typing the word “was” instead of “is” so now we’re REALLY cooking with gas baby!

He didn’t actually die of his own volition, we put him down, but I believe I am correct in saying that still counts as dying. I don’t think he ever would’ve done it on his own, actually. It was his time but had to help him out, like Harry Potter giving Dobby the fucking sock or whatever it was. Alright, yes of course I know it was a sock but I added “or whatever it was” to maintain the air of humorous nonchalance to which we have all become accustomed. Back to the point, he was very, very old. Almost twenty, or twenty on the nose, or fuckin 37, we didn’t know exactly. We adopted him when I was in the fifth grade and my sister was in first, and we were whatever ages you are in the fifth and first grade (why is it literally impossible for me to remember what age I was in any given grade/year without googling it? Time, like math, is fake.) He was a few years old already at that point. We had to drive an hour or so away to meet him and pick him up from the rescue, and on the way back we went through a tunnel. My sister and I always did that dumb “hold your breath and make a wish” thing in tunnels. I think you also had to blurt out a color and an animal upon exiting the tunnel in order for the wish to come true? Why are kids so weird? Anyway, we were holding our breath and making a wish driving through the tunnel and my sister said “I don’t have anything to wish for anymore” because she was so happy we got a dog. I remember this so clearly because it was fucking adorable but also because I was a little asshole and thinking to myself “SPEAK FOR YOURSELF” because I had plenty of wishes - important goals to achieve like being Elphaba in Wicked and growing boobs. (I’m one for two on this so far and I expect it will remain that way.)

I’m not really sure what the point of this post is and it’s possible I am completely incoherent BUT! I will press on anyway. I had myself a nice cry on the A train home last night when my mom told me about Max. One of the absolute best parts of living in New York City is the ability to cry truly anywhere, and not a soul around gives a shit. That sounds like a bad thing, but it’s rather freeing. Once the day after a breakup I went into a CVS wearing sunglasses indoors with tears streaming down my face and the cashier was like “hey, how’s it going!” and I was like “[sobbing profusely] great! and yourself?” and we just carried on the transaction completely normally. The complete absence of fucks given is a comfort. I have cried a LOT about this dog dying and it’s funny, because I love dogs now, but as a kid I didn’t give… that much of a shit about Max, and vice versa. Which sounds awful, but I don’t mean it that way. We were bros, and I loved him, we just weren’t super duper attached at the hip or anything. The older I got, especially after I moved out, the more attached I became. I guess it probably has something to do with desperately clutching onto my lost childhood or whatever. When you’re a kid you just kind of assume things and people are going to last forever, and then you very quickly realize they’re not, and start scrambling to make up for lost time but it’s kind of too late huh?

Honestly, it felt pretty good to cry about something this cut-and-dry Sad™. Everyone understands why you’re sad if your fucking dog dies; even if they’ve never had a pet before, it’s pretty universally understood, and people cut you some slack. It’s nice to be able to focus on This One Reason Why I’m Sad instead of being sad and not really having a reason, because then no one really gives a fuck and you have to function anyway. I mean, people like your mom and your best friend give a fuck but in this context “No One” represents, like… capitalism… and shit. Given the option, I’ll take embarrassing-ugly-crying sad over can’t-really-feel-anything-at-all sad any day of the week. When you’re ugly-crying-sad you know it’s going to go away eventually, it’s gotta stop. When you’re numb sad you could probably go on forever that way, and some people don’t even get that far. I would like to talk about my dead dog with my therapist, but I can’t afford one, and for some reason the only ones my insurance covers are in substance abuse centers and I’m not there yet.

FUCK this is a pick-me-up of a post!!!!!!!! Spring has sprung!

I know most people don’t get to hang out with their childhood pet until they’re 26, almost 27 years of age so I really am lucky. That just reminded me of another solid NYC crying in public moment - I started crying on my birthday last year on the 1 train because I officially became closer to 30 than I am to 20 and for some reason that made me want to fling myself into the Hudson and start a new life amongst the merfolk. It’s probably less about the age and more about the fact that I’ve accomplished [checks notes] nothing but this post isn’t about me, it’s about my dog. Who, per my last email, is not alive anymore.

In the last few years of his life Max was definitely showing his age, but really didn’t have any health problems, apart from being deaf as hell. And honestly, who hears these days amirite? He couldn’t really jump on the couch anymore, or run up the stairs like he used to, but he still waddled around and cuddled and would even play tug of war with you until the last year or so. Even though he was doing okay, every time I visited home the last couple of years, I would take a picture of the two of us the day I left again for New York. Every visit I was paranoid it would be the last time I ever saw him, and I wanted to remember it. The last time I was home was last Christmas (© Wham!) and I forgot to take the picture. I remembered when we were in the car, but we were already like three-quarters of the way to the airport and also I had PTSD from a different time we were driving to the airport and I forgot my makeup bag and OBVIOUSLY I couldn’t go back to NYC without all my makeup and we had to turn the car around and I Never Heard The Gosh Darn End Of It so I didn’t say anything. Anyway, I forgot to take the picture and that ended up being the last time I ever saw him. I feel guilty and I guess that’s silly. I already have an exorbitant amount of selfies with him, and more to the point, he was a dog so he wasn’t losing any sleep over it. And now he’s gone, so even if he was, he isn’t anymore.