“When I first heard it, from a dog trainer who knew her behavioral science, it was a stunning moment. I remember where I was standing, what block of Brooklyn’s streets. It was like holding a piece of polished obsidian in the hand, feeling its weight and irreducibility. And its fathomless blackness. Punishment is reinforcing to the punisher. Of course. It fit the science, and it also fit the hidden memories stored in a deeply buried, rusty lockbox inside me. The people who walked down the street arbitrarily compressing their dogs’ tracheas, to which the poor beasts could only submit in uncomprehending misery; the parents who slapped their crying toddlers for the crime of being tired or hungry: These were not aberrantly malevolent villains. They were not doing what they did because they thought it was right, or even because it worked very well. They were simply caught in the same feedback loop in which all behavior is made. Their spasms of delivering small torments relieved their frustration and gave the impression of momentum toward a solution. Most potently, it immediately stopped the behavior. No matter that the effect probably won’t last: the reinforcer—the silence or the cessation of the annoyance—was exquisitely timed. Now. Boy does that feel good.”
— Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Secret History of Kindness (2015)
the way that one line from the new epilogue in an astarion romance is going to HAUNT me
just. what a profoundly intense thing to confess to someone.
like, just these six months of newfound happiness with you exerts a force on his heart equal and in direct opposition to two centuries of endless torment, the gnawing hunger and exploitation. this flashbulb-bright fraction of his long life holds the same gravity to him as years upon years of darkness and suffering.
in all likelihood, he hasn’t even known his lover for as long as his worst memory lasted, that year sealed away to go mad from starvation and sensory deprivation, yet he still tells them this brief time has been so fundamentally and powerfully important that the weight of even that unimaginable hell is vanishingly small compared to this present he has now and the future ahead of them both.
ml secret santa gift for @raindrops-on-the-roof ! ✨
sorry for being a week late i have this problem where i over-detail things that were meant to be simple. I wanted to do a silly lil love square comic and somehow get alya & nino in there, and at the time, elation was all i could think about! lol (this takes place in a reality where that was the last episode i watched)
Thank you @mlsecretsanta for hosting such a cool event 💙
hey idk which anxious pre-t babe needs to hear this but i didn't get to when i was younger so. testosterone will not make you ugly. it won't make you a horrible person. it won't 'mutilate' or ruin your body. if you want to go on testosterone then literally all that happens is it makes you really fucking hot and REALLY fucking happy.