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VB shit, in case of deletion:
Friday, March 22nd, 2002
6:21p - Giving in at last....
VB fills out a survey. Snert's fault. Hopefully will have it out of my system now, like the "What ____ are you" tests. Do one, no need to do more.
Right.
***
Have you ever....
01. [Fallen for your best friend?] Yes. Adrian was my best friend and the love of my life the moment I met him, though it took me a week's denial to accept that I'd fallen helplessly in love with something that had a penis.
02. [Made out w/ JUST a friend?] No, though there are a few lasses I've met lately who have me thinking such things. You know who you are.
03. [Been rejected?] Yeah. It's a feeling that ranges between the thrill of being rejected by the local Jesus Nazi community (I don't like you either!) to the shivering, unspeakable heart-pain of having part of you rejected by the parents you love dearly.
04. [Been in love?] Oh yeah.
05. [Been in lust?] I have 529 pictures of Sean Astin and counting. You tell me.
06. [Used someone?] To be honest, yes. I can be a bitch sometimes. But I do feel sorry for it later. Usually.
07. [Been used?] Yeah, because dammit, I trust people sometimes. But I try not to be used more than once...you know the old saying: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, I kick you in the head."
08. [Cheated on someone?] No.
09. [Been cheated on?] No.
10. [Been kissed?] Mmmmhmmm.
11. [Done something you regret?] More times than I care to think about.
Who was the last person...
12. [You touched?] My friend Kenny.
13. [You talked to?] My classmate LaVelle in the computer lab (not the sharpest tack in the box)
14. [You hugged?] Kenny.
15. [You instant messaged?] Cara Loup this morning, pimping Sean picness, as usual. I wouldn't be surprise if I logged on one of these days and my IM just said "Hey, I know the drill. You two chat, I'll send the new pics."
16. [You kissed?] Adrian.
17. [You had sex with?] Depends on what you define as sex. Answers could either be Adrian or no one.
18. [You yelled at?] Lorelei, but in a good way.
19. [You laughed with?] Lorelei, who is also insane.
21. [Who broke your heart?] My Mom, when she Just Didn't Understand.
Do you...
22. [Colour your hair?] Not regularly, but if the occasion calls for it, I'll be anything from a flaming red-head to Marylin Monroe blonde.
23. [Have tattoos?] Owie. Uh-uh.
24. [Piercings?] Ears.
25. [Have a boyfriend/girlfriend/both?] Have the wonderful Ozzie Bloke, Adrian, my boyfriend/fiancee/best friend/soulmate/heart.
27. [Own a webcam?] Poor and squicked. No.
28. [Ever get off the damn computer?] We likeses the Pixel Face....
29. [Sprechen sie deutsche?] Nein.
30. [Habla espanol?] Non.
31. [Quack?] With the utmost dignity.
Have you / do you...
32. [Stolen anything?] Depends on whether you consider MP3s, bootleg movies, and pirated software to be stealing. Oh, and I got really desperate once and shoplifted a packet of ramen noodles.
33. [Smoke?] If you ever see me smoking, run for help, because it means I'm on fire.
Lookie! The numbers jump...
44. [Schizophrenic?] Let us get back to you on that one.
45. [Obsessive?] 529. Your call.
46. [Compulsive?] Sleep...fic...sleep...chat...sleep...draw...sleep always lose. VB probably answers this one safely yes.
47. [Obsessive compulsive?] About fandom, hey-yall yes. About cleanliness? VB The Forked bursts out laughing
48. [Panic?] Look at the last few days of entries and the Great Fantwit Kerfluffle for your answer there.
49. [Anxiety?] Part of being perceptive, I reckon. World's too fucked-up not to be anxious about a lot of stuff once you decide to give a shit.
50. [Depressed?] And how. Am hoping change of location helps this.
51. [Suicidal?] Not recently.
52. [Obsessed with hate?] Depends on what about.
53. [Dream of mutilated bodies, blood, death, and gore?] Thanks to a combination of military past-life memories, love of militaria, and a nasty temper, yes.
54. [Dream of doing those things instead of just seeing them?] See previous answer.
55. [If you could be anywhere, where would you want to be?] London, England.
56. [Who would you be with?] All my net friends, Adrian, Kenny, and my co-lyricist.
57. [What would you be doing?] Running an asylum for fen.
58. [What are you listening to?] The humming of the air conditioning unit in the computer lab.
59. [Can you do anything freakish with your body?] Am quite flexible, but freakiest body trick...must ask Adrian.
60. [Chicken or fish?] Fissshhhesses!
62. [Is ice cream the best thing in the world?] Nope...quite the 'take it or leave it' for me, actually.
[A - Age] 21
[B - Best Quality] Insanity, which leads to Creativity sometimes
[C - Choice Of Meat] Crab
[D - Dream Date] Adrian
[E - Exciting Adventure] Going on a two-week survival trek through the north of Scotland...I WILL do that some day before I die
[F - Favorite Food] Cadbury Eggs, Peeps, custard, lemon merangue pie, crab legs, or good sushi
[G - Greatest Accomplishment] BoE
[H - Happiest Day of Your Life] When I got my Sean autograph, because it symbolized so much love and came at such a dark time in my life.
[I - Interests] See LJ profile. Do not have time to retype life :-D
[K - Kool-Aid] Cherry. Like Red Things, I do.
[L - Love] Adrian, some of my fan friends, the English Language.
[M - Most Valued Thing I Own] Money value? Computer. Heart value? The ring Adrian gave me.
[N - Name] Victoria Bitter online, Amy Player in reality.
[O - Outfit You Love] For cuddling around? My pink-and-green-moose-print flannel pajamas with the feet on them. For looking hot? My black corset with black leather pants and boots. For being fan-geeky? My Frodo costume.
[P - Pizza] Mushrooms, onions, bacon, green pepper, and tomatoes. Thin-crust.
[Q - Question Asked To You The Most] How's the fic coming?
[S - Sport To Watch] AFL
[T - Television Show] Due South, Horatio Hornblower, Trading Spaces, Sharpe's Rifles, just about anything on Discovery Channel, History Channel, Learning Channel, or A&E (am geek)
[U - Ur Favorite Song] Do not ask me this. Head will explode.
[W - Winter] Should just go away already. Hate mud when must ride bike.
[Y - Year Born] 1980.
[Z - Zodiac Sign] Dunno
Friday, March 22nd, 2002
6:21p - Giving in at last....
VB fills out a survey. Snert's fault. Hopefully will have it out of my system now, like the "What ____ are you" tests. Do one, no need to do more.
Right.
***
Have you ever....
01. [Fallen for your best friend?] Yes. Adrian was my best friend and the love of my life the moment I met him, though it took me a week's denial to accept that I'd fallen helplessly in love with something that had a penis.
02. [Made out w/ JUST a friend?] No, though there are a few lasses I've met lately who have me thinking such things. You know who you are.
03. [Been rejected?] Yeah. It's a feeling that ranges between the thrill of being rejected by the local Jesus Nazi community (I don't like you either!) to the shivering, unspeakable heart-pain of having part of you rejected by the parents you love dearly.
04. [Been in love?] Oh yeah.
05. [Been in lust?] I have 529 pictures of Sean Astin and counting. You tell me.
06. [Used someone?] To be honest, yes. I can be a bitch sometimes. But I do feel sorry for it later. Usually.
07. [Been used?] Yeah, because dammit, I trust people sometimes. But I try not to be used more than once...you know the old saying: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, I kick you in the head."
08. [Cheated on someone?] No.
09. [Been cheated on?] No.
10. [Been kissed?] Mmmmhmmm.
11. [Done something you regret?] More times than I care to think about.
Who was the last person...
12. [You touched?] My friend Kenny.
13. [You talked to?] My classmate LaVelle in the computer lab (not the sharpest tack in the box)
14. [You hugged?] Kenny.
15. [You instant messaged?] Cara Loup this morning, pimping Sean picness, as usual. I wouldn't be surprise if I logged on one of these days and my IM just said "Hey, I know the drill. You two chat, I'll send the new pics."
16. [You kissed?] Adrian.
17. [You had sex with?] Depends on what you define as sex. Answers could either be Adrian or no one.
18. [You yelled at?] Lorelei, but in a good way.
19. [You laughed with?] Lorelei, who is also insane.
21. [Who broke your heart?] My Mom, when she Just Didn't Understand.
Do you...
22. [Colour your hair?] Not regularly, but if the occasion calls for it, I'll be anything from a flaming red-head to Marylin Monroe blonde.
23. [Have tattoos?] Owie. Uh-uh.
24. [Piercings?] Ears.
25. [Have a boyfriend/girlfriend/both?] Have the wonderful Ozzie Bloke, Adrian, my boyfriend/fiancee/best friend/soulmate/heart.
27. [Own a webcam?] Poor and squicked. No.
28. [Ever get off the damn computer?] We likeses the Pixel Face....
29. [Sprechen sie deutsche?] Nein.
30. [Habla espanol?] Non.
31. [Quack?] With the utmost dignity.
Have you / do you...
32. [Stolen anything?] Depends on whether you consider MP3s, bootleg movies, and pirated software to be stealing. Oh, and I got really desperate once and shoplifted a packet of ramen noodles.
33. [Smoke?] If you ever see me smoking, run for help, because it means I'm on fire.
Lookie! The numbers jump...
44. [Schizophrenic?] Let us get back to you on that one.
45. [Obsessive?] 529. Your call.
46. [Compulsive?] Sleep...fic...sleep...chat...sleep...draw...sleep always lose. VB probably answers this one safely yes.
47. [Obsessive compulsive?] About fandom, hey-yall yes. About cleanliness? VB The Forked bursts out laughing
48. [Panic?] Look at the last few days of entries and the Great Fantwit Kerfluffle for your answer there.
49. [Anxiety?] Part of being perceptive, I reckon. World's too fucked-up not to be anxious about a lot of stuff once you decide to give a shit.
50. [Depressed?] And how. Am hoping change of location helps this.
51. [Suicidal?] Not recently.
52. [Obsessed with hate?] Depends on what about.
53. [Dream of mutilated bodies, blood, death, and gore?] Thanks to a combination of military past-life memories, love of militaria, and a nasty temper, yes.
54. [Dream of doing those things instead of just seeing them?] See previous answer.
55. [If you could be anywhere, where would you want to be?] London, England.
56. [Who would you be with?] All my net friends, Adrian, Kenny, and my co-lyricist.
57. [What would you be doing?] Running an asylum for fen.
58. [What are you listening to?] The humming of the air conditioning unit in the computer lab.
59. [Can you do anything freakish with your body?] Am quite flexible, but freakiest body trick...must ask Adrian.
60. [Chicken or fish?] Fissshhhesses!
62. [Is ice cream the best thing in the world?] Nope...quite the 'take it or leave it' for me, actually.
[A - Age] 21
[B - Best Quality] Insanity, which leads to Creativity sometimes
[C - Choice Of Meat] Crab
[D - Dream Date] Adrian
[E - Exciting Adventure] Going on a two-week survival trek through the north of Scotland...I WILL do that some day before I die
[F - Favorite Food] Cadbury Eggs, Peeps, custard, lemon merangue pie, crab legs, or good sushi
[G - Greatest Accomplishment] BoE
[H - Happiest Day of Your Life] When I got my Sean autograph, because it symbolized so much love and came at such a dark time in my life.
[I - Interests] See LJ profile. Do not have time to retype life :-D
[K - Kool-Aid] Cherry. Like Red Things, I do.
[L - Love] Adrian, some of my fan friends, the English Language.
[M - Most Valued Thing I Own] Money value? Computer. Heart value? The ring Adrian gave me.
[N - Name] Victoria Bitter online, Amy Player in reality.
[O - Outfit You Love] For cuddling around? My pink-and-green-moose-print flannel pajamas with the feet on them. For looking hot? My black corset with black leather pants and boots. For being fan-geeky? My Frodo costume.
[P - Pizza] Mushrooms, onions, bacon, green pepper, and tomatoes. Thin-crust.
[Q - Question Asked To You The Most] How's the fic coming?
[S - Sport To Watch] AFL
[T - Television Show] Due South, Horatio Hornblower, Trading Spaces, Sharpe's Rifles, just about anything on Discovery Channel, History Channel, Learning Channel, or A&E (am geek)
[U - Ur Favorite Song] Do not ask me this. Head will explode.
[W - Winter] Should just go away already. Hate mud when must ride bike.
[Y - Year Born] 1980.
[Z - Zodiac Sign] Dunno
***
Friday, April 12th, 2002
Love is a very complicated thing.
We like to think that it comes in a complete package, if we only find the Right Person, or that if some part of that mental/physical/emotional/sexual/spiritual/social package is missing, then it's Not Really Love. I'm beginning to seriously doubt that pretty fantasy.
I grew up, like any good little conservative Christian lass, assuming that I was straight. After all, homosexuality was a Lifestyle Choice made by strange people who were either sick, traumatized, rebellious, or just plain sinful. My lack of crushes on boys was just because I was a tomboy and surely I just subconsciously rejected boys as too girly a thing to be into. My fascination with my cousin's blossoming body and those of my friends was just a natural curiosity due to my own late puberty. My blase, even revolted reaction to tales of het romance and sexuality was probably due to my precocious literary scruples, and I just needed to find some to my taste.
When I got into fanfiction, I was of course too good a lass to even look in the direction of those nasty slashy people I'd heard of, because I could write het, really, even if I never felt comfortable with it, and even if I always gravitated towards pairings in which nothing actually happened (Fraser/Thatcher, pre-Day of Honour Paris/Torres) and the lass was actively pushing the lad away.
I made my final break with Christianity, discovered slash, hit puberty, and acknowledged that having graphic fantasies about girls, ogling girls, and having no more than astetic/intellectual fascination with lads was indicative of lesbianism within eighteen months between fourteen-and-a-half and sixteen. Extremely tumultuous, but also very liberating.
I tried coming out to my parents, but my mother was of the opinion that just because I talked a lot about Tom Paris and Benton Fraser when I was twelve and thirteen, I must be straight, because that means I've Had Crushes On Guys. Mother is not willing to accept that A) I have never had anything that could be interpreted as a crush on a guy either local, attainable, or within twenty years of my own age or that B) my interest in Tom and Ben was from the standpoint of enigmas. These guys were considered good looking, were interesting as character constructions, but I couldn't get them to feel right when paired with the lasses, so I collected pictures, read articles, tried to dig myself into the physical beauty, and ripped them apart from blue eyes to conflicted psyches.
To be honest, though I say I have a crush on Sean Astin now, it's really just the easiest shorthand to understand the kind of fan-love I feel for him. Were he naked, willing, and Christine-less in front of me now, I would happily drool over his amazing beauty and talk him late into the night for that amazing heart, but to be honest, not even the most skin-revealing red-hot photo in my collection causes the slightest tingle down there. Sets off the eyes and the fingers and the heart and the brain, oh yes, but the nether regions....
This complexity of what constitutes a Crush, and how you can find someone beautiful and sexy as all hell but not be sexually attracted to them...this was, I think, my first inkling of the problems that were yet to come.
I accepted my identity as a lesbian. I was very comfortable in it. It felt right. I dated some girls, kissed here and cuddled there, but never went very far. Hey, I was young, it was a conservative area, and my girlfriends were always ten years or so older than me and we were both always aware of the potential problems there.
Then I met Adrian. From the first moment I met him, it was as if my soul had clicked with the proverbial Other Half. Adrian was amazing. Smart, funny, sweet, sensative, caring, loyal, spontaneous, insightful...everything I had ever dreamed of and then some.
Only one problem. Adrian was of the penis-bearing gender. Threw me for a loop like you would not believe. See, I was in love. Big time, unquestionably in love. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. Never wanted to be apart from him for even a moment. He made me feel like I had somehow at once transcended and completed myself, and I would give anything for him. I would die for him without a moment's question, and I know he'd do the same for me. I even saw beauty in him where others saw a gawky teen...he has gorgeous green-grey-hazel eyes, long lashes, full, lovely lips, long, elegant fingers, great legs...
We loved each other, and he was a guy (despite being more than slightly androgynous in personality), so obviously, I'd been mistaken. I was still strongly attracted to girls, but now that I loved a man so dearly, I had to be bi. Right? Right. So I accepted that I was bi. We agreed to be married. Everything was perfect.
Except for one thing. I wasn't sexually attracted to him. Oh, I found him beautiful, yes. And if we worked on it, he could make me enjoy our sexual interactions well enough. Only I didn't really want him to touch me too intimately. And I was so adverse to the idea of him putting his penis inside me that I flat out vetoed it 'until marriage.' I figured that would give me time to adjust. You're not supposed to enjoy sexuality right away anyhow, right? Maybe if we communicated better, if we shared our kinks, our fantasies...maybe if we tried it this way, or if I started taking medicine for my depression, or if I started mentally substituting him for someone, or if...if...if... It was really starting to eat at me. I loved him. Our relationship was perfect. He was perfect. I loved him so much that I didn't understand why I wasn't fucking him like a rabbit on Viagra.
I thought maybe I was just sexually dead. Adrian was unhappy. Yet he loved me. I was unhappy. Yet I loved him. Wanted to share my life with him. We couldn't figure out what the problem was. I was bi, right? I had to be. I loved a man.
Then I went to Connexions.
For the first time in my life, I was surrounded by over a hundred women, all of whom were accepting of same-sex relationships, the majority of whom were lesbian or bisexual, and a considerable number of whom were so my type.
I can say without question now that I am not sexually dead. Indeed, I spent the entire weekend in various stages of arousal. And there was more than that.
I fell in love.
There was a lass there whom I already knew fairly well over the internet. I knew her personality, her sense of humour, her general background. We clicked really well in person, and moreover, she turned out to be absolutely beautiful. Next thing I knew, we were in bed. And oh, all the responses that I thought were dead and gone were so there. Fireworks and all that.
So matters had become infinitely more complex, as it was obvious that my original assessment of lesbian was pretty much dead accurate for sexual orientation, no matter what gender(s) I was capable of loving. While I'd had a long talk with Adrian before doing anything with this lass, and he had told me that I needed to explore that avenue else I'd always wonder and that could do horrible things to our relationship, I now found myself in a very strange situation.
I still loved Adrian to an epic extent. I would still die for him. I still liked to snuggle with him, hold his hand, kiss him gently now and again, still wanted to spend my life with him, still wanted to be his best friend and so much more...to be his everything. Yet now I also loved this other lass. No, it wasn't the same soul-deep bond as Adrian, but it was love, and deep friendship, and sexual attraction at a level Adrian and I could not even imagine.
I loved him. I wanted him. I loved her. I wanted her.
I was torn in two.
Finally, it was Adrian who decided matters. He pointed out that there was nothing that I was enjoying in our relationship that had to do with sex, and when you remove sex, then we're not really left in a romance any more. True, it's deeper than any conventional definition of friendship, and true, we love each other and want to always always be there for each other, but getting married just plain doesn't make sense. He doesn't want to close me off from the sexual part of my life forever, to deny that which is a part of me. So we're now agreeing to be the dearest of friends forever, to even try always to live near each other, but I am going to pursue my romance with this lass.
I will never stop loving Adrian. I will always love him in a way that is deeper than words and so much more than friendship. But it's not sex, and to fulfill that part of myself, I need a lass. And I can love that lass, and just because it's not the SAME way I love Adrian doesn't make it any less, nor does loving her sexually and not him make THAT any less.
And suddenly, today, I realized that this made So Much Sense in terms of the Sam/Rosie/Frodo dynamic. Sam loves Frodo. Loves him tremendously. Loves him so much that it transcends all our cultural understanding of love. He's probably even had sexual experiences with Frodo, and probably enjoyed them. Certainly, one's own pleasure completely aside, there is also huge pleasure in bringing pleasure to one you love, and I know that a LOT of what Adrian and I did was just me enjoying pleasing him far more than his doing anything to me. But Sam can also love Rosie. And enjoy sex with her so much that they have thirteen children almost as fast as is physically possible. And be torn between the two of them without loving either one less.
I only wish that the 'move us all into Bag End' was an option here. As it is, all of the 'real-world' options still contain degrees of Suck that I don't much like.
Friday, April 12th, 2002
Love is a very complicated thing.
We like to think that it comes in a complete package, if we only find the Right Person, or that if some part of that mental/physical/emotional/sexual/spiritual/social package is missing, then it's Not Really Love. I'm beginning to seriously doubt that pretty fantasy.
I grew up, like any good little conservative Christian lass, assuming that I was straight. After all, homosexuality was a Lifestyle Choice made by strange people who were either sick, traumatized, rebellious, or just plain sinful. My lack of crushes on boys was just because I was a tomboy and surely I just subconsciously rejected boys as too girly a thing to be into. My fascination with my cousin's blossoming body and those of my friends was just a natural curiosity due to my own late puberty. My blase, even revolted reaction to tales of het romance and sexuality was probably due to my precocious literary scruples, and I just needed to find some to my taste.
When I got into fanfiction, I was of course too good a lass to even look in the direction of those nasty slashy people I'd heard of, because I could write het, really, even if I never felt comfortable with it, and even if I always gravitated towards pairings in which nothing actually happened (Fraser/Thatcher, pre-Day of Honour Paris/Torres) and the lass was actively pushing the lad away.
I made my final break with Christianity, discovered slash, hit puberty, and acknowledged that having graphic fantasies about girls, ogling girls, and having no more than astetic/intellectual fascination with lads was indicative of lesbianism within eighteen months between fourteen-and-a-half and sixteen. Extremely tumultuous, but also very liberating.
I tried coming out to my parents, but my mother was of the opinion that just because I talked a lot about Tom Paris and Benton Fraser when I was twelve and thirteen, I must be straight, because that means I've Had Crushes On Guys. Mother is not willing to accept that A) I have never had anything that could be interpreted as a crush on a guy either local, attainable, or within twenty years of my own age or that B) my interest in Tom and Ben was from the standpoint of enigmas. These guys were considered good looking, were interesting as character constructions, but I couldn't get them to feel right when paired with the lasses, so I collected pictures, read articles, tried to dig myself into the physical beauty, and ripped them apart from blue eyes to conflicted psyches.
To be honest, though I say I have a crush on Sean Astin now, it's really just the easiest shorthand to understand the kind of fan-love I feel for him. Were he naked, willing, and Christine-less in front of me now, I would happily drool over his amazing beauty and talk him late into the night for that amazing heart, but to be honest, not even the most skin-revealing red-hot photo in my collection causes the slightest tingle down there. Sets off the eyes and the fingers and the heart and the brain, oh yes, but the nether regions....
This complexity of what constitutes a Crush, and how you can find someone beautiful and sexy as all hell but not be sexually attracted to them...this was, I think, my first inkling of the problems that were yet to come.
I accepted my identity as a lesbian. I was very comfortable in it. It felt right. I dated some girls, kissed here and cuddled there, but never went very far. Hey, I was young, it was a conservative area, and my girlfriends were always ten years or so older than me and we were both always aware of the potential problems there.
Then I met Adrian. From the first moment I met him, it was as if my soul had clicked with the proverbial Other Half. Adrian was amazing. Smart, funny, sweet, sensative, caring, loyal, spontaneous, insightful...everything I had ever dreamed of and then some.
Only one problem. Adrian was of the penis-bearing gender. Threw me for a loop like you would not believe. See, I was in love. Big time, unquestionably in love. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. Never wanted to be apart from him for even a moment. He made me feel like I had somehow at once transcended and completed myself, and I would give anything for him. I would die for him without a moment's question, and I know he'd do the same for me. I even saw beauty in him where others saw a gawky teen...he has gorgeous green-grey-hazel eyes, long lashes, full, lovely lips, long, elegant fingers, great legs...
We loved each other, and he was a guy (despite being more than slightly androgynous in personality), so obviously, I'd been mistaken. I was still strongly attracted to girls, but now that I loved a man so dearly, I had to be bi. Right? Right. So I accepted that I was bi. We agreed to be married. Everything was perfect.
Except for one thing. I wasn't sexually attracted to him. Oh, I found him beautiful, yes. And if we worked on it, he could make me enjoy our sexual interactions well enough. Only I didn't really want him to touch me too intimately. And I was so adverse to the idea of him putting his penis inside me that I flat out vetoed it 'until marriage.' I figured that would give me time to adjust. You're not supposed to enjoy sexuality right away anyhow, right? Maybe if we communicated better, if we shared our kinks, our fantasies...maybe if we tried it this way, or if I started taking medicine for my depression, or if I started mentally substituting him for someone, or if...if...if... It was really starting to eat at me. I loved him. Our relationship was perfect. He was perfect. I loved him so much that I didn't understand why I wasn't fucking him like a rabbit on Viagra.
I thought maybe I was just sexually dead. Adrian was unhappy. Yet he loved me. I was unhappy. Yet I loved him. Wanted to share my life with him. We couldn't figure out what the problem was. I was bi, right? I had to be. I loved a man.
Then I went to Connexions.
For the first time in my life, I was surrounded by over a hundred women, all of whom were accepting of same-sex relationships, the majority of whom were lesbian or bisexual, and a considerable number of whom were so my type.
I can say without question now that I am not sexually dead. Indeed, I spent the entire weekend in various stages of arousal. And there was more than that.
I fell in love.
There was a lass there whom I already knew fairly well over the internet. I knew her personality, her sense of humour, her general background. We clicked really well in person, and moreover, she turned out to be absolutely beautiful. Next thing I knew, we were in bed. And oh, all the responses that I thought were dead and gone were so there. Fireworks and all that.
So matters had become infinitely more complex, as it was obvious that my original assessment of lesbian was pretty much dead accurate for sexual orientation, no matter what gender(s) I was capable of loving. While I'd had a long talk with Adrian before doing anything with this lass, and he had told me that I needed to explore that avenue else I'd always wonder and that could do horrible things to our relationship, I now found myself in a very strange situation.
I still loved Adrian to an epic extent. I would still die for him. I still liked to snuggle with him, hold his hand, kiss him gently now and again, still wanted to spend my life with him, still wanted to be his best friend and so much more...to be his everything. Yet now I also loved this other lass. No, it wasn't the same soul-deep bond as Adrian, but it was love, and deep friendship, and sexual attraction at a level Adrian and I could not even imagine.
I loved him. I wanted him. I loved her. I wanted her.
I was torn in two.
Finally, it was Adrian who decided matters. He pointed out that there was nothing that I was enjoying in our relationship that had to do with sex, and when you remove sex, then we're not really left in a romance any more. True, it's deeper than any conventional definition of friendship, and true, we love each other and want to always always be there for each other, but getting married just plain doesn't make sense. He doesn't want to close me off from the sexual part of my life forever, to deny that which is a part of me. So we're now agreeing to be the dearest of friends forever, to even try always to live near each other, but I am going to pursue my romance with this lass.
I will never stop loving Adrian. I will always love him in a way that is deeper than words and so much more than friendship. But it's not sex, and to fulfill that part of myself, I need a lass. And I can love that lass, and just because it's not the SAME way I love Adrian doesn't make it any less, nor does loving her sexually and not him make THAT any less.
And suddenly, today, I realized that this made So Much Sense in terms of the Sam/Rosie/Frodo dynamic. Sam loves Frodo. Loves him tremendously. Loves him so much that it transcends all our cultural understanding of love. He's probably even had sexual experiences with Frodo, and probably enjoyed them. Certainly, one's own pleasure completely aside, there is also huge pleasure in bringing pleasure to one you love, and I know that a LOT of what Adrian and I did was just me enjoying pleasing him far more than his doing anything to me. But Sam can also love Rosie. And enjoy sex with her so much that they have thirteen children almost as fast as is physically possible. And be torn between the two of them without loving either one less.
I only wish that the 'move us all into Bag End' was an option here. As it is, all of the 'real-world' options still contain degrees of Suck that I don't much like.
***
Friday, April 19th, 2002
10:23a - I am wounded. It will never really heal.
The events of the last forty-eight hours have been...interesting, to say the least. When I took the oaths of a Paladin and began training, I expected spirit-plane battles. I expected that I might be asked to do extraordinary things. I just didn't expect it. Same as any soldier. They know that soldier=war, but there's still a sense of oh, FUCK when the bullets start flying. I mean, I've done this sort of thing before on an extremely minor scale with the aid of my Master. This time, it was completely alone, as she was under life-threatening attack herself, and I was facing some major-league shit.
Yes, I survived, but yes, I was wounded. The little cuts and bites (which show up in the real world as aches and pains and inexplicable bruises) are insubstantial, but I was wounded twice quite severely. The first was a sword-blow to the back of my shoulders which cut me near to the bone in an attempt to sever my head, and that has left me in such pain that I am currently on 800mg of ibuprofen in an attempt to get through the day and can barely raise my arms. The second was a sword-thrust to the belly, and I had feared that one might be mortal for a while. I know it's serious. I'm bleeding, and it's two weeks off my cycle, with no cramps, though I am in pain. I'm very regular, and I always cramp. The palms of my hands are also bright red, as if burned, and bleeding in little hair-thin cracks at the joints. I'm telling people I scalded myself.
Stranger, though, is what I've been left with spiritually and mentally. I am...suddenly old. I have all of his memories. All of them. From toddler to the day he died. Over a hundred years of memories, every day, every moment crystal-clear in full sensory detail. He's five times my age in life-years. I don't know what to do with this. It's overwhelming me by sheer mass of memory. I know things now, understand things that I'm just too young to, and I don't know what to do with it. I don't even think in the same language any more. My own cradle-tongue is now something as if learned, something I have to translate INTO for speech and text. My thoughts come in the words of his youth.
And he wants to come back. Just briefly, for a good reason, and I know I will accomidate him. Indeed, he carries so much positive energy now that I know it will be healing to me. But it will also be tiring. These things, no matter how positive, always are. And I'm so very, very tired already.
Indeed, I am exhausted. No, exhausted doesn't begin to cover it. I am exanimate. I want to - I need to - just go to my room and light candles and put up a few protection charms and curl up to lick my wounds and sort out all this shit for a day or two at least. I know I'll never be the same, but perhaps with a few days rest I could be functional again.
But I'm already way past my curl-up-and-hide limit at school. Way overdue on a lot of projects. It's the last two weeks of the semester. And I have work atop that. So no rest for the weary. I don't have a lot of choices, but I just wanted to tell the few people that would understand so that they wouldn't worry too much about me, and so they'd understand if I wasn't my usual peppy, fic-delivering self. Indeed, I wonder now if I can ever write again.
I know too much...
Namenast. Namenast, mi amma
***
7:01p - The Suck is strong with this one...
I've just been outed to my parents, not only as a lesbian, but as a slasher and all around freak...they saw my LJ. In relation to this incident, I've lost my best real life friend. I may not be moving to Atlanta after all. There is talk of mental institutions. My school work is way behind and threatening to tank utterly. I ran out of anti-depressants three weeks ago and the parents are dragging their feet on refilling the prescription. I may be getting another eye infection. My best online friends are decompensating. My muses have committed mass suicide. I have been so caught up in my own shit lately that I have potentially killed things with the new girlfriend. I am trying unsuccessfully to deal with the sudden dump of over 100 years of crystal-clear memories from the sort of life that would keep a shrink happy for millenia. I no longer think in English, and no one else currently living speaks the language I do think in now.
Can I just go back to bed for a week or three?
***
Wednesday, April 24th, 2002
2:28a - Welcome to the not-so-wonderful world of VB's mucked-up relationships...
I am scared f*cking sh*tless.
Because my parents are trying to get me committed? Because I might actually be crazy? Because my grades are up in the air and about to land with a resounding splat? Because my future currently hangs by a modem-cord and a few applications to colleges I may not be able to attend anyway?
No.
Because there are people out there who really love me.
I've been sitting here with myself this evening trying to figure out what in Middle Earth is wrong with me. I've been treating people like crap lately, one person in particular...not answering her emails, running from her on IM, hesitating to give her my contact information...and simultaneously not knowing why I was doing it and unable to stop myself. I feel horrible about it, and worse because I didn't understand why. Now, at least, I think I've had a bit of a lightbulb, and sure, it's a bloody cliched illumination, but it still counts.
My life has not been the biggest unconditional love-fest. Not to get into the gory details of VB's life, but all my childhood 'friends', for some reason, liked to use me as a punching bag. I was 6 and getting held under the water in the pool by Sarah and 8 and getting my wrist broken by Whitney and 10 and wearing long pants to hide where Rachel had thought it would be fun to drip hotwax on my skin after she'd tied me up. My parents love me deeply, but they have Major Issues with some pretty essential parts of me, like my sexuality, spirituality, morality, politics, and taste in arts and entertainment. The guy I thought was the love of my life has just stabbed me in the back pretty majorly, and before that, was behaving bloody wierd when he realized I was queer. My only sister's a Class A b*tch. Basically, I've never been really flesh-and-blood seriously in friendship or love with someone who hasn't on some level fallen short or outright betrayed me.
I fell hard in love at Connexions. Hard and fast and terrifying. I got home, and the World Descended in a great heap of crap. I should have been happy about that love, right? Should have reached out for it like a drowning hobbit. But no.
My front brain is going 'what's wrong with you, she loves you, you love her, she's hotter than a Wax Jism PWP...this should be REALLY EASY!', but my hind brain, the one that apparently controls my mouse fingers, was screaming something along the lines of "Eeek! Love! Love means HURT! Hurt BAD! Can't handle more Bad now! Keep Bad away! But tell lady to f*ck off vetoed by Front Brain who loves her. Hmmm...maybe just ignore? Nice easy cowardy solution, she'll go away on her own, and then you no get flattened no more! Okay, you'll be alone, and the people-I-love-hurt-me prophesy will have self-fulfilled, but HEY...."
And then I get all paranoid and think that I was flirting pretty outrageously. This is probably just a crush for her, and she's going to realize it soon, and that will be awful, and she lives so far away, and...next thing I know I convince myself somehow that she's just trying to get ahold of me to tell me it was just a mesmerizing short red dress all along, and I start deleting messages unread and going into full-out hiding mode.
This is also about where the former love of my life gets really down and dirty vicious and my head gets invaded by the Really Dead Folk. And all the people who love and support me on the internet, even Orange and Shawna and Adrienne and Van and such, even they I can rationalize never met me and are so safe, but I start really hysterically avoiding Pam and Loreli because they know and I'm paranoid and not thinking really clearly and sabotaging any relationship that might be risky. Including school. I've managed to shoot my grades in the foot and the people who know me there are about ready to shoot me somewhere else.
Thankfully, the fever seemed to break today with three nicely timed slaps to the face. 1) The girlfriend posted a LJ entry that made me realize that I'd really been shortchanging her and she wasn't lying in wait sharpening her knives and that maybe, to spout a ridiculous romantic cliche, I should give love a chance, because she already kind of knows I'm a wierd lesbian slasher and all that. 2) Ninglor is learning to speak Westron at a speed that is truly astonishing, and soon I won't be alone in that respect and can work out a lot of the FreakyDeakyPsychoStuff. 3) I got a look at my grades as they stand. Holy sh*t.
*sigh*
This is one of those times to invest in a good pair of kneepads. I've got some big-time groveling to do.
***
Monday, April 29th, 2002
10:52a - The good news and the bad news...
Good news: Think I can now successfully keep parents out of LJ. Have changed password a second time (in retrospect, gamgee was probably fairly easy to guess for anyone who knows me at all) and am being careful that if LJ is ever accessed from home computer, log-out is completed and all records dully wiped.
Bad news: Am currently far too fucked up to sustain anything approaching a fair relationship. Girlfriend and I are on hold for now, relationship to be possibly resumed when I get my life and head together enough to reasonably support someone else.
Good news: Am transferring jobs from this theme park to one either in LA or San Diego come the end of May or the beginning of June.
Bad news: This means the next week getaway is off.
Good news: School may not be completely shot after all.
Bad news: In order to pull off not-completely-shot, the next week will not involve sleep.
Good news: Parents are for some unfathomable reason actually letting me go to the West Coast for this job with a minimum of protest, possibly relating to flattering comments made by boss-man who wanted to transfer me because I'm the best money-maker at the park and being "wasted in a small market."
Bad news: Will only be on the West Coast until the end of summer, late August at most. Unsure of how to obtain affordable housing for such a short period of time, as most leases are at least six months, and parents worry that anything renting monthly is a "flophouse" (yes, they used that term, archaic little darlings).
Good news: Adrienne is learning Westron!
Bad news: See above. This is theoretically supposed to be a dead language. Much confusion surrounding this....relates immediately to next item.
Good news: Am on new pills to sort out head.
Bad news: New pills cause sickness to stomach.
Good news: Have many cool internet-type friends who find lovely pictures of pretty boys.
This is very good.
Thanks :-)
***
4:13p - Something is coming...
Energy is building. Something big is about to happen. Adrienne, Abbey, those closest to me in this strange thing are abuzz with it...Adrienne is having visions, Abbey having tantrums and memory rushes. And I'm...blinded. Fucking blinded because like a good little girl I took my pills and now I think in English and the memories are a dull whisper instead of a clear voice and yet the edges of my soul are itching and I know something is about to happen...and I have a motherfucking drug-induced psychic blindfold on!!!!
Made myself chunder. Bye-bye little pills. Hope you're out of my system soon, because I can't leave them to this...thing alone
Friday, April 19th, 2002
10:23a - I am wounded. It will never really heal.
The events of the last forty-eight hours have been...interesting, to say the least. When I took the oaths of a Paladin and began training, I expected spirit-plane battles. I expected that I might be asked to do extraordinary things. I just didn't expect it. Same as any soldier. They know that soldier=war, but there's still a sense of oh, FUCK when the bullets start flying. I mean, I've done this sort of thing before on an extremely minor scale with the aid of my Master. This time, it was completely alone, as she was under life-threatening attack herself, and I was facing some major-league shit.
Yes, I survived, but yes, I was wounded. The little cuts and bites (which show up in the real world as aches and pains and inexplicable bruises) are insubstantial, but I was wounded twice quite severely. The first was a sword-blow to the back of my shoulders which cut me near to the bone in an attempt to sever my head, and that has left me in such pain that I am currently on 800mg of ibuprofen in an attempt to get through the day and can barely raise my arms. The second was a sword-thrust to the belly, and I had feared that one might be mortal for a while. I know it's serious. I'm bleeding, and it's two weeks off my cycle, with no cramps, though I am in pain. I'm very regular, and I always cramp. The palms of my hands are also bright red, as if burned, and bleeding in little hair-thin cracks at the joints. I'm telling people I scalded myself.
Stranger, though, is what I've been left with spiritually and mentally. I am...suddenly old. I have all of his memories. All of them. From toddler to the day he died. Over a hundred years of memories, every day, every moment crystal-clear in full sensory detail. He's five times my age in life-years. I don't know what to do with this. It's overwhelming me by sheer mass of memory. I know things now, understand things that I'm just too young to, and I don't know what to do with it. I don't even think in the same language any more. My own cradle-tongue is now something as if learned, something I have to translate INTO for speech and text. My thoughts come in the words of his youth.
And he wants to come back. Just briefly, for a good reason, and I know I will accomidate him. Indeed, he carries so much positive energy now that I know it will be healing to me. But it will also be tiring. These things, no matter how positive, always are. And I'm so very, very tired already.
Indeed, I am exhausted. No, exhausted doesn't begin to cover it. I am exanimate. I want to - I need to - just go to my room and light candles and put up a few protection charms and curl up to lick my wounds and sort out all this shit for a day or two at least. I know I'll never be the same, but perhaps with a few days rest I could be functional again.
But I'm already way past my curl-up-and-hide limit at school. Way overdue on a lot of projects. It's the last two weeks of the semester. And I have work atop that. So no rest for the weary. I don't have a lot of choices, but I just wanted to tell the few people that would understand so that they wouldn't worry too much about me, and so they'd understand if I wasn't my usual peppy, fic-delivering self. Indeed, I wonder now if I can ever write again.
I know too much...
Namenast. Namenast, mi amma
***
7:01p - The Suck is strong with this one...
I've just been outed to my parents, not only as a lesbian, but as a slasher and all around freak...they saw my LJ. In relation to this incident, I've lost my best real life friend. I may not be moving to Atlanta after all. There is talk of mental institutions. My school work is way behind and threatening to tank utterly. I ran out of anti-depressants three weeks ago and the parents are dragging their feet on refilling the prescription. I may be getting another eye infection. My best online friends are decompensating. My muses have committed mass suicide. I have been so caught up in my own shit lately that I have potentially killed things with the new girlfriend. I am trying unsuccessfully to deal with the sudden dump of over 100 years of crystal-clear memories from the sort of life that would keep a shrink happy for millenia. I no longer think in English, and no one else currently living speaks the language I do think in now.
Can I just go back to bed for a week or three?
***
Wednesday, April 24th, 2002
2:28a - Welcome to the not-so-wonderful world of VB's mucked-up relationships...
I am scared f*cking sh*tless.
Because my parents are trying to get me committed? Because I might actually be crazy? Because my grades are up in the air and about to land with a resounding splat? Because my future currently hangs by a modem-cord and a few applications to colleges I may not be able to attend anyway?
No.
Because there are people out there who really love me.
I've been sitting here with myself this evening trying to figure out what in Middle Earth is wrong with me. I've been treating people like crap lately, one person in particular...not answering her emails, running from her on IM, hesitating to give her my contact information...and simultaneously not knowing why I was doing it and unable to stop myself. I feel horrible about it, and worse because I didn't understand why. Now, at least, I think I've had a bit of a lightbulb, and sure, it's a bloody cliched illumination, but it still counts.
My life has not been the biggest unconditional love-fest. Not to get into the gory details of VB's life, but all my childhood 'friends', for some reason, liked to use me as a punching bag. I was 6 and getting held under the water in the pool by Sarah and 8 and getting my wrist broken by Whitney and 10 and wearing long pants to hide where Rachel had thought it would be fun to drip hotwax on my skin after she'd tied me up. My parents love me deeply, but they have Major Issues with some pretty essential parts of me, like my sexuality, spirituality, morality, politics, and taste in arts and entertainment. The guy I thought was the love of my life has just stabbed me in the back pretty majorly, and before that, was behaving bloody wierd when he realized I was queer. My only sister's a Class A b*tch. Basically, I've never been really flesh-and-blood seriously in friendship or love with someone who hasn't on some level fallen short or outright betrayed me.
I fell hard in love at Connexions. Hard and fast and terrifying. I got home, and the World Descended in a great heap of crap. I should have been happy about that love, right? Should have reached out for it like a drowning hobbit. But no.
My front brain is going 'what's wrong with you, she loves you, you love her, she's hotter than a Wax Jism PWP...this should be REALLY EASY!', but my hind brain, the one that apparently controls my mouse fingers, was screaming something along the lines of "Eeek! Love! Love means HURT! Hurt BAD! Can't handle more Bad now! Keep Bad away! But tell lady to f*ck off vetoed by Front Brain who loves her. Hmmm...maybe just ignore? Nice easy cowardy solution, she'll go away on her own, and then you no get flattened no more! Okay, you'll be alone, and the people-I-love-hurt-me prophesy will have self-fulfilled, but HEY...."
And then I get all paranoid and think that I was flirting pretty outrageously. This is probably just a crush for her, and she's going to realize it soon, and that will be awful, and she lives so far away, and...next thing I know I convince myself somehow that she's just trying to get ahold of me to tell me it was just a mesmerizing short red dress all along, and I start deleting messages unread and going into full-out hiding mode.
This is also about where the former love of my life gets really down and dirty vicious and my head gets invaded by the Really Dead Folk. And all the people who love and support me on the internet, even Orange and Shawna and Adrienne and Van and such, even they I can rationalize never met me and are so safe, but I start really hysterically avoiding Pam and Loreli because they know and I'm paranoid and not thinking really clearly and sabotaging any relationship that might be risky. Including school. I've managed to shoot my grades in the foot and the people who know me there are about ready to shoot me somewhere else.
Thankfully, the fever seemed to break today with three nicely timed slaps to the face. 1) The girlfriend posted a LJ entry that made me realize that I'd really been shortchanging her and she wasn't lying in wait sharpening her knives and that maybe, to spout a ridiculous romantic cliche, I should give love a chance, because she already kind of knows I'm a wierd lesbian slasher and all that. 2) Ninglor is learning to speak Westron at a speed that is truly astonishing, and soon I won't be alone in that respect and can work out a lot of the FreakyDeakyPsychoStuff. 3) I got a look at my grades as they stand. Holy sh*t.
*sigh*
This is one of those times to invest in a good pair of kneepads. I've got some big-time groveling to do.
***
Monday, April 29th, 2002
10:52a - The good news and the bad news...
Good news: Think I can now successfully keep parents out of LJ. Have changed password a second time (in retrospect, gamgee was probably fairly easy to guess for anyone who knows me at all) and am being careful that if LJ is ever accessed from home computer, log-out is completed and all records dully wiped.
Bad news: Am currently far too fucked up to sustain anything approaching a fair relationship. Girlfriend and I are on hold for now, relationship to be possibly resumed when I get my life and head together enough to reasonably support someone else.
Good news: Am transferring jobs from this theme park to one either in LA or San Diego come the end of May or the beginning of June.
Bad news: This means the next week getaway is off.
Good news: School may not be completely shot after all.
Bad news: In order to pull off not-completely-shot, the next week will not involve sleep.
Good news: Parents are for some unfathomable reason actually letting me go to the West Coast for this job with a minimum of protest, possibly relating to flattering comments made by boss-man who wanted to transfer me because I'm the best money-maker at the park and being "wasted in a small market."
Bad news: Will only be on the West Coast until the end of summer, late August at most. Unsure of how to obtain affordable housing for such a short period of time, as most leases are at least six months, and parents worry that anything renting monthly is a "flophouse" (yes, they used that term, archaic little darlings).
Good news: Adrienne is learning Westron!
Bad news: See above. This is theoretically supposed to be a dead language. Much confusion surrounding this....relates immediately to next item.
Good news: Am on new pills to sort out head.
Bad news: New pills cause sickness to stomach.
Good news: Have many cool internet-type friends who find lovely pictures of pretty boys.
This is very good.
Thanks :-)
***
4:13p - Something is coming...
Energy is building. Something big is about to happen. Adrienne, Abbey, those closest to me in this strange thing are abuzz with it...Adrienne is having visions, Abbey having tantrums and memory rushes. And I'm...blinded. Fucking blinded because like a good little girl I took my pills and now I think in English and the memories are a dull whisper instead of a clear voice and yet the edges of my soul are itching and I know something is about to happen...and I have a motherfucking drug-induced psychic blindfold on!!!!
Made myself chunder. Bye-bye little pills. Hope you're out of my system soon, because I can't leave them to this...thing alone
***
Wednesday, May 8th, 2002
9:20a - Well, that's just peachy...
I've officially called it off with Pam.
Not that I don't care about her. Really care. Not that I don't lust after her. Really lust. Not that I don't really really want to make a relationship work. Really work. Not that I'm not lonely. Really lonely.
It's just that Murphy's Law being what it is, this had to come at a time in my life when I am quite honestly incapable of maintaining a relationship anything approaching fairly. Yeah, I could just put Pam on hold indefinitely and say "when my life straightens out and I'm capable of being someone's partner, we'll do this," and for a while, that's exactly what I was doing.
But that's not fair. You can't just leave someone dangling like that. And you can't un-dangle them and try to do a relationship when you know you can't hold up your end of it.
So I let her go. And maybe someday if my life ever gets back on something resembling an even keel, I'll show up at her door with flowers and chocolate. But somehow, I don't think that's likely, because frankly, I've treated her pretty badly in my attempts to squeeze blood from my own turnip, and right now, I wouldn't take me back either, even if I asked and said Life Was Good. Which it's not.
Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow.
I think I'll go crawl in a hole somewhere.
Why do such right things always have to come at such wrong times?
***
Thursday, May 9th, 2002
3:43a - It's one of those nights.
I miss Witchwillow. Want to have pretty girls flirt brazenly with me in public and know that of course they're really flirting and of course I'm free to flirt back without getting humiliated or worse because they'd never do something like that you sick gay freak.
I think people sometimes underestimate the value of flirting.
I'm as much for Relationships as anyone, and I want a Relationship. Can't have one right now. Know that. It sucks, but I know that. But I still want to feel desirable. Which I guess is maybe selfish...it's just I'd never been hit on before by another lass, much less one oozing Hot out every pore, and there was such a thrill about being involved in that age-old mating dance, that give-and-take with pretty much a total stranger that's all the more exciting because you don't know and don't really care if it goes anywhere, but they notice you and you notice them and...
Better stop before I dig myself into an even deeper funk and find more depressing entries with which to clutter up people's friends lists.
***
Saturday, May 18th, 2002
2:38a - My last pointless spamming survey tonight, I *swear*
Number of people on my lj friends list: 97, because I've been lazy about adding. Should be around 110-112.
...whom I've met in person: Lost count at Connexions!
...whom I've met in person more than once: 1
...whose house I've been to: 0, but will soon be 1
...who have been to my house: 1
...whose precise geographic location I know offhand: 8
...whose full names I know offhand: 3
...whom I've followed/been in touch with for more than 3 years: 0
...who live outside my country: a LOT
...whose journal I consider myself "addicted" to: 7
...whom I've lived with: 0
...who's an ex: 1
...who I'd do: 3
...who I've done: 1, maybe more depending on what happened in the Twelve Hour Tequilla-Induced-Woke-Up-Starkers Memory Hole from Connexions.
...who I have a secret crush on: Now, if I said something, it wouldn't be a secret, now would it? Though she knows. :-)
***
Wednesday, May 8th, 2002
9:20a - Well, that's just peachy...
I've officially called it off with Pam.
Not that I don't care about her. Really care. Not that I don't lust after her. Really lust. Not that I don't really really want to make a relationship work. Really work. Not that I'm not lonely. Really lonely.
It's just that Murphy's Law being what it is, this had to come at a time in my life when I am quite honestly incapable of maintaining a relationship anything approaching fairly. Yeah, I could just put Pam on hold indefinitely and say "when my life straightens out and I'm capable of being someone's partner, we'll do this," and for a while, that's exactly what I was doing.
But that's not fair. You can't just leave someone dangling like that. And you can't un-dangle them and try to do a relationship when you know you can't hold up your end of it.
So I let her go. And maybe someday if my life ever gets back on something resembling an even keel, I'll show up at her door with flowers and chocolate. But somehow, I don't think that's likely, because frankly, I've treated her pretty badly in my attempts to squeeze blood from my own turnip, and right now, I wouldn't take me back either, even if I asked and said Life Was Good. Which it's not.
Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow.
I think I'll go crawl in a hole somewhere.
Why do such right things always have to come at such wrong times?
***
Thursday, May 9th, 2002
3:43a - It's one of those nights.
I miss Witchwillow. Want to have pretty girls flirt brazenly with me in public and know that of course they're really flirting and of course I'm free to flirt back without getting humiliated or worse because they'd never do something like that you sick gay freak.
I think people sometimes underestimate the value of flirting.
I'm as much for Relationships as anyone, and I want a Relationship. Can't have one right now. Know that. It sucks, but I know that. But I still want to feel desirable. Which I guess is maybe selfish...it's just I'd never been hit on before by another lass, much less one oozing Hot out every pore, and there was such a thrill about being involved in that age-old mating dance, that give-and-take with pretty much a total stranger that's all the more exciting because you don't know and don't really care if it goes anywhere, but they notice you and you notice them and...
Better stop before I dig myself into an even deeper funk and find more depressing entries with which to clutter up people's friends lists.
***
Saturday, May 18th, 2002
2:38a - My last pointless spamming survey tonight, I *swear*
Number of people on my lj friends list: 97, because I've been lazy about adding. Should be around 110-112.
...whom I've met in person: Lost count at Connexions!
...whom I've met in person more than once: 1
...whose house I've been to: 0, but will soon be 1
...who have been to my house: 1
...whose precise geographic location I know offhand: 8
...whose full names I know offhand: 3
...whom I've followed/been in touch with for more than 3 years: 0
...who live outside my country: a LOT
...whose journal I consider myself "addicted" to: 7
...whom I've lived with: 0
...who's an ex: 1
...who I'd do: 3
...who I've done: 1, maybe more depending on what happened in the Twelve Hour Tequilla-Induced-Woke-Up-Starkers Memory Hole from Connexions.
...who I have a secret crush on: Now, if I said something, it wouldn't be a secret, now would it? Though she knows. :-)
***
Screenshot, cuts off comments: http://img37.imageshack.us/img37/2316/vbsortingapp.png
He was muggled: http://platform-934.livejournal.com/724373.html
He was muggled: http://platform-934.livejournal.com/724373.html
This is, almost entirely, a space for the Daydverse itself, and I try to keep my personal shit in my personal blogging spaces. When it comes to not inundating those of you who are just here for Renny and Susan and Mike and Terry with cooking and randomness and other fandoms, that's probably a good thing. But there's something else that I've been trying to tell myself is "enough" to be said over there, but it's not. It needs to be said here.
I'm mentally ill. Pretty fucking severely. I finally got pinned down, diagnosed, and went into proper, intensive, medicated treatment in the summer of 2012, and while I'm now in recovery, for a lot of the history of the Daydverse, I was reeeeeeeeallly fucking far on the scale of delusional schizoid disorders and didn't even know it. When they say that often the craziest ones don't know they're crazy, they're fucking right.
For those of you who just enjoy the books and the stories and the art and the community, this frankly doesn't really matter or impact you, but now you know. For others, though, who were my personal friends, it's pretty fucking relevant. For those of you who were close enough to know the truth - that I believed not only that the Daydverse characters existed, but that I could "channel" their disembodied souls and basically be possessed by them as part of an entire friggin' X-man movie's worth of superpowers I believed I had as part of being on a mission from God (holy shit how I wish ANY of that was kidding) - you're the reason I'm posting this.
That I believed it doesn't change in any way that what I was doing was wrong and incredibly fucked up and that it lead to some really, really damaging and fucked up relationships. I hurt people, in some cases badly, sometimes as myself, sometimes as others. I cut people off because of things that my delusions told me, and some of you (wisely) cut ME off when it went too far. I'm not going to name names because I understand how some of you might not other people to know you were involved that deep in my crazy and just want it to go away and are glad that I've basically dropped off this part of the planet for the last eighteen months while I've been trying to unravel my head.
I have tried to individually and privately contact those I know I hurt (who haven't told me to fuck off and never contact them again) and apologize, but recently, I saw someone who described themselves as an "ex-Daydian" say that I'd hurt them, and it was someone I would never have listed among those ranks. This made me realize that not only am I in absolutely no position to judge who I did and didn't wrong in my deeply erroneous belief that I was communicating with some alternate dimension where it was all real and sharing some divinely ordained destiny, giving voice to the spirits and stories of real heroes and villains living and dead, but the very fact that those 'possessions' left me with huge blank holes in my memory means that I literally don't know what I did or didn't do in a lot of cases, and I theoretically could easily have many more victims among the Daydians than I know.
Causing pain to even one of you is the last fucking thing I have ever wanted. Even in the depths of my batshit, my intent was to hopefully cause positive change in your lives...and yeah, entertain you a little while making you think. I genuinely care about every single one of you, and it grieves me deeply to understand that intentions mean shit in that I HAVE hurt an unknown number of you past and present. There are a few of you I love so much and know how much of a betrayal this is that it's literally reduced me to sobbing in shame and guilt too hard to have been able to tell you directly yet, so I've been hoping you'd see it somewhere and now I guess this is that somewhere.
I'm here to apologize. I am sorry. Deeply, unreservedly, profoundly sorry and ashamed. You gave me trust and love and friendship and my own damned fandom, and for many of you who deserved it least and gave me most and loved my stories the deepest, I pissed crazy all over you and your lives and I'm not even going to pretend I know how much damage I did. If you don't want anything more to do with me or the 'verse, that's ok. I don't expect your forgiveness, your 'loyalty,' or anything else. If you want to talk about it more or want a personal or direct apology - and I am absolutely extending them to ANYONE who feels like they want one regardless of how close we are/were or aren't/weren't or how, if relevant, things ended between us - let me know here if you want it in public and in a private message, email, or text (my phone number is 757-634-7195) if you want it privately. If you know anyone who has left the fandom whom you feel should see this message, feel free to pass it on, especially if they were "inner circle" who ended badly.
I don't think I can undo it, but I want to do what I can to make amends and do whatever the people I hurt think is most appropriate to what would be best for them now.
I'm mentally ill. Pretty fucking severely. I finally got pinned down, diagnosed, and went into proper, intensive, medicated treatment in the summer of 2012, and while I'm now in recovery, for a lot of the history of the Daydverse, I was reeeeeeeeallly fucking far on the scale of delusional schizoid disorders and didn't even know it. When they say that often the craziest ones don't know they're crazy, they're fucking right.
For those of you who just enjoy the books and the stories and the art and the community, this frankly doesn't really matter or impact you, but now you know. For others, though, who were my personal friends, it's pretty fucking relevant. For those of you who were close enough to know the truth - that I believed not only that the Daydverse characters existed, but that I could "channel" their disembodied souls and basically be possessed by them as part of an entire friggin' X-man movie's worth of superpowers I believed I had as part of being on a mission from God (holy shit how I wish ANY of that was kidding) - you're the reason I'm posting this.
That I believed it doesn't change in any way that what I was doing was wrong and incredibly fucked up and that it lead to some really, really damaging and fucked up relationships. I hurt people, in some cases badly, sometimes as myself, sometimes as others. I cut people off because of things that my delusions told me, and some of you (wisely) cut ME off when it went too far. I'm not going to name names because I understand how some of you might not other people to know you were involved that deep in my crazy and just want it to go away and are glad that I've basically dropped off this part of the planet for the last eighteen months while I've been trying to unravel my head.
I have tried to individually and privately contact those I know I hurt (who haven't told me to fuck off and never contact them again) and apologize, but recently, I saw someone who described themselves as an "ex-Daydian" say that I'd hurt them, and it was someone I would never have listed among those ranks. This made me realize that not only am I in absolutely no position to judge who I did and didn't wrong in my deeply erroneous belief that I was communicating with some alternate dimension where it was all real and sharing some divinely ordained destiny, giving voice to the spirits and stories of real heroes and villains living and dead, but the very fact that those 'possessions' left me with huge blank holes in my memory means that I literally don't know what I did or didn't do in a lot of cases, and I theoretically could easily have many more victims among the Daydians than I know.
Causing pain to even one of you is the last fucking thing I have ever wanted. Even in the depths of my batshit, my intent was to hopefully cause positive change in your lives...and yeah, entertain you a little while making you think. I genuinely care about every single one of you, and it grieves me deeply to understand that intentions mean shit in that I HAVE hurt an unknown number of you past and present. There are a few of you I love so much and know how much of a betrayal this is that it's literally reduced me to sobbing in shame and guilt too hard to have been able to tell you directly yet, so I've been hoping you'd see it somewhere and now I guess this is that somewhere.
I'm here to apologize. I am sorry. Deeply, unreservedly, profoundly sorry and ashamed. You gave me trust and love and friendship and my own damned fandom, and for many of you who deserved it least and gave me most and loved my stories the deepest, I pissed crazy all over you and your lives and I'm not even going to pretend I know how much damage I did. If you don't want anything more to do with me or the 'verse, that's ok. I don't expect your forgiveness, your 'loyalty,' or anything else. If you want to talk about it more or want a personal or direct apology - and I am absolutely extending them to ANYONE who feels like they want one regardless of how close we are/were or aren't/weren't or how, if relevant, things ended between us - let me know here if you want it in public and in a private message, email, or text (my phone number is 757-634-7195) if you want it privately. If you know anyone who has left the fandom whom you feel should see this message, feel free to pass it on, especially if they were "inner circle" who ended badly.
I don't think I can undo it, but I want to do what I can to make amends and do whatever the people I hurt think is most appropriate to what would be best for them now.
What a wonderful thingy! thanfiction wrote in daydverse March 4th, 2011
Sometimes, you get a review that just makes you squee. Not even necessarily because it's positive, but because it's so clearly the well-thought-out product of an intelligent, insightful person who really took the time to read and think about what you wrote. When you get those reviews, you'd still sigh in happiness if they hated it, and when they like it, it's a special kind of win. And yes, I have sent this person a PM trying to invite him to the community as well as telling him that his wish that there was more covering the missing pieces of after.....
***
Fri, March 4, 2011 2:05:32 AM
[FF Review Alert] Story: Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness
From:
FanFiction.Net <bot@fanfiction.com>
Add to ContactsTo:thanfiction@yahoo.com
Thanfiction,
A new review/comment has been submitted to your story.
Story: Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness
Chapter: 25. Epilogue
From: Jemsaal ( http://www.fanfiction.net/u/2775643/ )
Reply URL: http://login.fanfiction.net/review_pm.php?reviewid=122078862
-------------------
Finished the book yesterday. It took me a day to work through it before I
could respond.
1. The writing itself. You caught my attention immediately. Seamus mouthing
off to Carrow had me falling over myself laughing. As the book developed, the
love and care for the characters became clear. There were a few things that
were forced, but most of them seemed to come as a result of being bound to the
events in the canon. In some places, I think you explained the
situation/characters even better than JKR did. Especially for your first
attempt, this was absolutely amazing and I would be quick to by anything you
actually published.
2. There were two elements that seemed to leave me empty. First, as others
mentioned, was the killing off of so many characters. Unlike others here, I
didn't become immune. Instead, it became too much and I wanted to just skip
over the pages. When you build your characters to the point that you did (and
a very good job doing it), killing too many of them off creates a visceral
reaction-and makes a second read not as enjoyable (however, I think I
understand why you did it-see last paragraph below). Second, you fell into
the same trap JKR did. Again, if you build that much into the characters
(even the side characters), PLEASE give them a resolution more than, "15 years
later...". How did Susan cope? Did she have the child? How did the teachers
put the castle back together for next year? Did they? What happened to any of
the other characters? As with JKR, a short chapter 6 months later-say the
first picnic in memory of the DA (I've peaked ahead to the next book) would
have finished this off perfectly, and created enough of a hope that people
would want to read it again. However, it is a tribute to how you made the
characters come alive that this kind of conclusion needed.
3. As for "sexism and the rape scene". I think much of what is said in some
other reviews is too much reading into the story and not enough reading the
story itself.
A. Lavender acts EXACTLY like a woman who has been raped by force. She
hides, dresses in layers, wants no one to know, even breaks off her
relationship. When questioned, she swings from withdrawn to very
defensive-both to push others away. Only when caught, and realizing there is
no more chance to lie about it, does she show them. Now, since she realizes
that she has protectors,AND her family is safe, she can think about other
elements of what happened to her, instead of trying to protect her family and
thus remaining quite. What does she do? She goes into the room of two of her
protectors, wraps up COMPLETELY in a blanket so that only the very top of her
head is seen, and sleeps. Again, there are Charms on the dorms. NO sex can
happen there, nothing untoward can happen at all. She is doing the equivalent
of what man women do after rape, sleeping in the safest place possible for her
(Sadly in reality, some will even result to sleeping in a closet with a
knife-but this is the wrong forum for that discussion). Then, she doesn't
show back up in the story until its time to take the Polyjuice potion-and she
was asked. This continues to PROPERLY portray a rape victim-many of whom turn
inwards and only respond when directly asked a question. Next time we see
her, she has moved to becoming a rescuer-another common step for some rape
victims. I think she was portrayed quite well, and the results were also
portrayed well, ESPECIALLY, when the story was not the story of Lavender. As
a throw-away character, which she is in both books, as are most of the
characters who die in the battle at the end, her plight was well written, and
her disappearance and reappearance n the story was also realistic to the issue
at hand.
B. Sexism? I found nothing sexist in this story. Neville's two key
lieutenants were women. Ginny and Luna were written as courageous, strong,
intelligent, and brutally honest. They keep Neville going, and along with
Hannah and Lavender (as well as a few others), remove him from leadership.
Neville's feelings when Parvati is being cruciated is ABSOLUTELY perfect-and
her "thank you" becomes another show of feminine strenght-that she had it in
her to continue. GREAT WRITING. His response to Luna's fear (who wouldn't be
in that situation?) is perfect-and is the exact same thing I would have done
myself. Again, it is the women who most often bring Neville back down to
reality, hold the group together when he can't for some reason, take's care of
those who are injured, and all-in-all, really seems like a feminists' dream.
Strong, intelligent, firm, and able to excel pretty much EVERYWHERE. In
short, I think you wrote the women VERY strong-and very well.
4. I cried at the end. For a forty year old man, that's an interesting
statement. I did not cry at the last chapter, nor the epilogue, but rather,
at the author's final comments. I couldn't figure out why this writing was
really taking hold and messing with my emotions like they were- the author's
comments made me understand. In many ways, you wrote not a story, but a
parable of what our 18, 19, 20 year old men (and women) are going through
right now in Iraq and Afghanistan. The brutality, the hopelessness of war,
the "no happy endings at the end of the day," the maturity and aging that
happens 10 years to a day came through the last half of the book like diesel
truck. I cringe to hear the testimonies of our soldiers (and think we did in
the story-a couple of the scenes, Parvati crawling across the grass, Jack
Sloper with only a stump for his left leg, sounded like things you actually
heard from the soldiers) that drove you to write this way. Thank you for
honoring them and their pain.
-and yes-1st world 15-18 year old boys and girls can turn into hardened
soldiers just as quickly as anywhere else. Especially when they grow up in
military families and already know what it is about and the stakes which they
are fighting for. Every character in this book can be assumed to have lost a
family member to Voldemort in the first war. They have spend a year under
Umbridge, and now, another year under a brutal dictatorship where they are
having to keep each other alive. It is very realistic, written very well, and
reflects the research done interviewing REAL warriors.
All in all- and EXCELLENT book. One that I am not sure I want to read again.
Its the exact same way I felt after watching Schindler's list and Saving
Private Ryan.
-------------------
Do not reply to this email. If the review is signed, use reply link provided
above.
FanFiction.Net Messaging Service
Sometimes, you get a review that just makes you squee. Not even necessarily because it's positive, but because it's so clearly the well-thought-out product of an intelligent, insightful person who really took the time to read and think about what you wrote. When you get those reviews, you'd still sigh in happiness if they hated it, and when they like it, it's a special kind of win. And yes, I have sent this person a PM trying to invite him to the community as well as telling him that his wish that there was more covering the missing pieces of after.....
***
Fri, March 4, 2011 2:05:32 AM
[FF Review Alert] Story: Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness
From:
FanFiction.Net <bot@fanfiction.com>
Add to ContactsTo:thanfiction@yahoo.com
Thanfiction,
A new review/comment has been submitted to your story.
Story: Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness
Chapter: 25. Epilogue
From: Jemsaal ( http://www.fanfiction.net/u/2775643/ )
Reply URL: http://login.fanfiction.net/review_pm.php?reviewid=122078862
-------------------
Finished the book yesterday. It took me a day to work through it before I
could respond.
1. The writing itself. You caught my attention immediately. Seamus mouthing
off to Carrow had me falling over myself laughing. As the book developed, the
love and care for the characters became clear. There were a few things that
were forced, but most of them seemed to come as a result of being bound to the
events in the canon. In some places, I think you explained the
situation/characters even better than JKR did. Especially for your first
attempt, this was absolutely amazing and I would be quick to by anything you
actually published.
2. There were two elements that seemed to leave me empty. First, as others
mentioned, was the killing off of so many characters. Unlike others here, I
didn't become immune. Instead, it became too much and I wanted to just skip
over the pages. When you build your characters to the point that you did (and
a very good job doing it), killing too many of them off creates a visceral
reaction-and makes a second read not as enjoyable (however, I think I
understand why you did it-see last paragraph below). Second, you fell into
the same trap JKR did. Again, if you build that much into the characters
(even the side characters), PLEASE give them a resolution more than, "15 years
later...". How did Susan cope? Did she have the child? How did the teachers
put the castle back together for next year? Did they? What happened to any of
the other characters? As with JKR, a short chapter 6 months later-say the
first picnic in memory of the DA (I've peaked ahead to the next book) would
have finished this off perfectly, and created enough of a hope that people
would want to read it again. However, it is a tribute to how you made the
characters come alive that this kind of conclusion needed.
3. As for "sexism and the rape scene". I think much of what is said in some
other reviews is too much reading into the story and not enough reading the
story itself.
A. Lavender acts EXACTLY like a woman who has been raped by force. She
hides, dresses in layers, wants no one to know, even breaks off her
relationship. When questioned, she swings from withdrawn to very
defensive-both to push others away. Only when caught, and realizing there is
no more chance to lie about it, does she show them. Now, since she realizes
that she has protectors,AND her family is safe, she can think about other
elements of what happened to her, instead of trying to protect her family and
thus remaining quite. What does she do? She goes into the room of two of her
protectors, wraps up COMPLETELY in a blanket so that only the very top of her
head is seen, and sleeps. Again, there are Charms on the dorms. NO sex can
happen there, nothing untoward can happen at all. She is doing the equivalent
of what man women do after rape, sleeping in the safest place possible for her
(Sadly in reality, some will even result to sleeping in a closet with a
knife-but this is the wrong forum for that discussion). Then, she doesn't
show back up in the story until its time to take the Polyjuice potion-and she
was asked. This continues to PROPERLY portray a rape victim-many of whom turn
inwards and only respond when directly asked a question. Next time we see
her, she has moved to becoming a rescuer-another common step for some rape
victims. I think she was portrayed quite well, and the results were also
portrayed well, ESPECIALLY, when the story was not the story of Lavender. As
a throw-away character, which she is in both books, as are most of the
characters who die in the battle at the end, her plight was well written, and
her disappearance and reappearance n the story was also realistic to the issue
at hand.
B. Sexism? I found nothing sexist in this story. Neville's two key
lieutenants were women. Ginny and Luna were written as courageous, strong,
intelligent, and brutally honest. They keep Neville going, and along with
Hannah and Lavender (as well as a few others), remove him from leadership.
Neville's feelings when Parvati is being cruciated is ABSOLUTELY perfect-and
her "thank you" becomes another show of feminine strenght-that she had it in
her to continue. GREAT WRITING. His response to Luna's fear (who wouldn't be
in that situation?) is perfect-and is the exact same thing I would have done
myself. Again, it is the women who most often bring Neville back down to
reality, hold the group together when he can't for some reason, take's care of
those who are injured, and all-in-all, really seems like a feminists' dream.
Strong, intelligent, firm, and able to excel pretty much EVERYWHERE. In
short, I think you wrote the women VERY strong-and very well.
4. I cried at the end. For a forty year old man, that's an interesting
statement. I did not cry at the last chapter, nor the epilogue, but rather,
at the author's final comments. I couldn't figure out why this writing was
really taking hold and messing with my emotions like they were- the author's
comments made me understand. In many ways, you wrote not a story, but a
parable of what our 18, 19, 20 year old men (and women) are going through
right now in Iraq and Afghanistan. The brutality, the hopelessness of war,
the "no happy endings at the end of the day," the maturity and aging that
happens 10 years to a day came through the last half of the book like diesel
truck. I cringe to hear the testimonies of our soldiers (and think we did in
the story-a couple of the scenes, Parvati crawling across the grass, Jack
Sloper with only a stump for his left leg, sounded like things you actually
heard from the soldiers) that drove you to write this way. Thank you for
honoring them and their pain.
-and yes-1st world 15-18 year old boys and girls can turn into hardened
soldiers just as quickly as anywhere else. Especially when they grow up in
military families and already know what it is about and the stakes which they
are fighting for. Every character in this book can be assumed to have lost a
family member to Voldemort in the first war. They have spend a year under
Umbridge, and now, another year under a brutal dictatorship where they are
having to keep each other alive. It is very realistic, written very well, and
reflects the research done interviewing REAL warriors.
All in all- and EXCELLENT book. One that I am not sure I want to read again.
Its the exact same way I felt after watching Schindler's list and Saving
Private Ryan.
-------------------
Do not reply to this email. If the review is signed, use reply link provided
above.
FanFiction.Net Messaging Service
Remember the time when we were talking about the thing... thanfiction wrote in daydverse February 23rd, 2010
One of the fun things about the chat rooms, both LJ and Skype, is that it can quickly become impromptu storytime, Q&A, or realtime debate. Unfortunately, most of the comm doesn't get to see that, and even the people who just aren't there at that moment often miss out. However, the good news is that chat clients keep logs, and a lot of us have saved our favorite discussions. So here's a post where you can pose that great delving into the psyche of Snape, the sorting of sorting, the noble and most ancient backstory of Black, as long as you pay attention to a few little guidelines:
1. Save the chat as a text file, HTML file, or post on your personal LJ and link to it, do not post the whole thing here.
2. If the chat occurred on Skype, or any other client that shows real names, you MUST do a find-replace and substitute real names for LJ screennames before posting. NO EXCEPTIONS. That includes in-text.
3. ALL personal material must be edited out. That includes but is not limited to people talking about their day, mood, health, love life, personal life, job life, school life...ANYTHING that is not fandom related.
4. Any chat that contains sensitive material in the context of the chat (someone talking about empathy with a character because of their own difficult experience, for example) MUST be cleared with that person or those people first. If they say no, it doesn't go up. Period.
5. Give a rough summary of what the chat is about in your comment and link. "This is where Bob, Cfc, and I discussed Bill Weasley's fear of camels, with a digression into Platypuses on the Dragon Reserve in Wales."
6. Make sure to mark for both spoilers and warnings, and give a rough rating on the chat log, as you would a fic.
7. The chat needs to be relevant to the 'verse. While minor tangents are fine, that awesome debate we had about whether or not Kathryn Janeway was a better Captain than Benjamin Sisko doesn't belong here, sadly. Very sadly indeed. Nor does the exploration into multilingual words for "water" and the way the predominant sounds of a language affect the structure of their poetry, our favorite 80s music, or how to make a catapult out of a can of carrots and a plastic spoon. Even though we mentioned Luna while we were doing it.
8. Use common sense, and in the words of the immortal Bill and Ted, be excellent to one another.
Let the chatter begin!
Tags: information
( 15 comments — Use Your Galleon )
Harry Potter-OOC or was it the Horcrux? Chat
m_oquinn
2010-02-24 06:15 am (UTC)
This is an edited SkypeRoR chat with thanfiction, angakkuq_10, ceirdwenfc, faeriegal713 and several others that started out as a rant on the title of a than-vid and turned into a discussion on Harry Potter's sanity.
There is long chat version with lots of side tangents
http://m-oquinn.livejournal.com/3709.html
And a shorter version that is just the Harry relevant pieces
http://m-oquinn.livejournal.com/4044.html
(Reply) (Thread)
Re: Harry Potter-OOC or was it the Horcrux? Chat
blazzano
2010-02-25 07:44 am (UTC)
Interesting discussion there. I have a few thoughts on Harry's death march at the end of Deathly Hallows....
Leaving aside the larger issues of possible personality changes in books 5 to 7, I actually have no particular problems with his mental state leading up to his walking into the forest clearing - that is, I do not consider it OOC or feel that a Horcrux-influence hypothesis is required to explain it (though it can't be entirely discounted, of course). Yes, his internal mood is strikingly different from his other brushes with death. As a reader, I would be unsatisfied if there were no apparent reason for that difference. But I believe that, for Harry, the situation was sufficiently unique to allow for it.
The human mind is an engine of complex thought and logic, coexisting with emotionality. Below this, we have an ancient foundation of instinct. Under situations of high stress, instinct will often rise to the forefront and influence a person's decisions. For sentients like us, instincts are both a curse and a blessing. They can inadvertently lead us into deeper trouble, yes, but they can also help us survive in situations that require a quicker or more absolute response than the intellectual mind can deliver.
One of the most ancient and important instincts is "fight or flight": the instinct - which we share with most complex animals on earth - to either flee from a source of danger or meet it head on. The lower mind prepares the body for this situation by dumping in adrenaline, increasing one's heart and respiration rate, etc. In the Harry Potter series, almost all of Harry's brushes with death call upon these instincts, IMO. The Chamber of Secrets? Harry chooses to fight to save his loved ones; once the fighting actually started, it came down to instinct-driven ducking, rolling, and stabbing. Philsopher's Stone? An intellectual pursuit that became fight/flight for Harry after he was captured by Quirrell. Goblet of Fire? Well, before we got to see him flying circles around dragons, we read about his intense fear of the coming task. Once the task actually started, he was well-served by his instinctive reaction - it helped keep him from being roasted alive while he figured out how to grab the egg. Later in the book, he was cornered by Voldemort in the graveyard and given no choice but to fight - and then to flee for his life.
In short, even where there's room for Harry to second-guess himself and doubt his path before he's fights (or flees), eventually things progress to the point where intellectual anguish is irrelevant, and there's nothing left to it but to give into the instincts that had served him so well. The same is true for the DA in book 7 as well: all their long months of planning, strategizing, and training boiled down to a few hours of adrenaline-pumping running, ducking, fighting, and killing.
Harry's march to death is different from all of those, IMO. He was not fighting in the literal, instinct-driven sense. He was not fleeing in order to save his skin. He was completely rejecting the influence of an instinct which at that moment must have been thundering through his mind as strongly as it ever did. He was steeling himself up for a death where instincts were useless; sure, he was still fighting for his friends, but in a way that's comprehensible only with abstract intellect.
He did not know that his actions would give his friends magical protection from Voldemort - so far as his instincts and higher mind were concerned, what he was doing was suicide. In all his previous situations, he rushed into danger despite the likelihood of death, yet hoped that he would live. In this situation, he was actively seeking out death. As he would have seen it, the payback for that suicide was merely that Voldemort might die - eventually, and after God only knew how many more deaths of his friends.
(to be continued)
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
Re: Harry Potter-OOC or was it the Horcrux? Chat
blazzano
2010-02-25 07:45 am (UTC)
IMO, the difference between fighting for your life and calmly walking into the jaws of death, while consciously choosing to not struggle, without even the luxury of knowing that your decision will save your friends in the long run, is vast. So I don't think one can cite his death march anguish as evidence that his personality has changed, because I believe he had never been in a situation like that before. I forgive and understand his needing to angst about it, especially since he went through with it after all.
Er, wow, I didn't know I had that much to say on the subject. 0_0 I'm looking forward to seeing what you do with Harry's character in AP, by the way, Than.
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
Re: Harry Potter-OOC or was it the Horcrux? Chat
bluealoe
2010-02-25 03:32 pm (UTC)
Man, I was going to write a reply explaining why I didn't see Harry's death march as OOC, but I see you've already done that, and explained things much better than I could. Suffice it to say I agree with you 100%.
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
Re: Harry Potter-OOC or was it the Horcrux? Chat
zeviz
2010-02-26 03:21 am (UTC)
Good point. Both your explanation and Than's sound equally reasonable to me. (His is obviously more dramatic, but that tends to be his style.)
About whether DH epilogue implies a happy or a sad ending, my guess is that JKR wrote herself into a corner by her description of the final battle, because there was too much death in that battle for the classic "and they lived happily ever after" happy ending she was aiming for. That's my guess about why the epilogue is so focused on two families, with only a couple mentions of others. This way she could write the expected "happily ever after" scene, leaving all the unhappiness offscreen.
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
Re: Harry Potter-OOC or was it the Horcrux? Chat
blazzano
2010-02-26 05:12 am (UTC)
That's quite true, re: the unhappiness being cut out. In fact, in the immediate aftermath of the battle, I suspect that even Harry's unhappiness was quite fierce (though nothing on the families with even greater losses, true enough). If there was one thing that consistently bothered Harry, it was people dying for him. I imagine that he slept a good 24 hours or so, and then woke up to a rather unpleasant reality as he finally had the leisure to examine the cost of the battle.
I suppose I can accept that she didn't want to cover that in the book itself. But though it's too much to hope for, I'd love to see Rowling release a nice little collection of ficlets - she could intersperse them into the entries of the encyclopedia she's supposed to be writing. She could cover a heck of a lot of the missing bits if she wanted to, including the long road to recovery in the Wizarding world.
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
Re: Harry Potter-OOC or was it the Horcrux? Chat
zeviz
2010-02-26 07:02 pm (UTC)
She could cover a heck of a lot of the missing bits if she wanted to, including the long road to recovery in the Wizarding world.
My guess is that she doesn't want to admit (even to herself) that there would have to be a long road to recovery. She set off writing a Disney-style fairy tale about an unhappy boy finding a magic world. A variation on a Cinderella story, which ends in marriage, and happiness, and everybody living happily ever after.
The problem happened when she made the books grow along with the protagonist. It was a great idea, but she wasn't ready, or perhaps willing, to deal with the full implications of the resulting genre shift. Even while talking about her protagonist's realization that even magic can't solve all problems, adults and authority figures aren't all-powerful, etc, she still couldn't abandon her Dysney-style fairy tale roots.
This is a potential explanation for why "the later books don't live up to their full potential": to do so, she'd have to switch genres completely and write something in the style of DAYD and AP, which would be as out of character for her as writing happy shiny rainbows would be for Thanfiction.
So while Rowling might be forced to write a few more books, they are likely to focus on world-building, and gloss over the darker themes that she'd have to deal with if she went into too much detail about the battle of Hogwarts, or the fate of the secondary characters.
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
zeviz
2010-02-24 07:03 am (UTC)
Thank you for this idea. It will be good to see the logs from fun chats that I've missed. I'll also see if I have anything to upload.
"While minor tangents are fine, that awesome debate we had about whether or not Kathryn Janeway was a better Captain than Benjamin Sisko doesn't belong here, sadly. Very sadly indeed. Nor does the exploration into multilingual words for "water" and the way the predominant sounds of a language affect the structure of their poetry, our favorite 80s music, or how to make a catapult out of a can of carrots and a plastic spoon. Even though we mentioned Luna while we were doing it."
But those were the most fun. :( :P
(Reply) (Thread)
ceirdwenfc
2010-02-24 01:20 pm (UTC)
>5. Give a rough summary of what the chat is about in your comment and link. "This is where Bob, Cfc, and I discussed Bill Weasley's fear of camels, with a digression into Platypuses on the Dragon Reserve in Wales."
I still say that his fear of camels is grounded in falling off one at the Wizarding Petting Zoo when he was five. I don't know why he went to Egypt in the first place right out of Hogwarts.
And Bob agrees with me about the platypuses. Cross-species inter-mating should not be done on the Reserve and certainly not within the view of the other platypuses.
(Reply) (Thread)
Seamus, Stephen, Rowan and lots of Lavender
m_oquinn
2010-02-26 08:50 am (UTC)
Kate_lb needed some info for Stephen's 20 she is writing-but thanfiction got side-tracked to Seamus-then moved to Stephen, which led to Rowan who somehow got us to Lavender. Enjoy :-)
http://m-oquinn.livejournal.com/4954.html
(Reply) (Thread)
Jack Sloper Skype Chat
m_oquinn
2010-02-26 08:52 am (UTC)
Lots of info from thanfiction on Jack Sloper
http://m-oquinn.livejournal.com/5960.html?#cutid1
(Reply) (Thread)
elen_nare
2010-03-01 05:13 pm (UTC)
It's great to read these transcripts! Thank you for posting them, m_oquinn.
And I know the link sidebar is getting rather long, but could this be there too? I worry it might just drop off the main page and fade away otherwise.
(Reply) (Thread)
Skype ROR chat - Demelza, Colin, Sally-Anne, Diana Stemple, Jamie Stebbins, Sword Adventure
elen_nare
2010-03-09 12:24 am (UTC)
Information on Demmy, Sally-Anne, Diana and Jamie, plus a bit about Colin, the Sword adventure, and selection to attend Hogwarts.
http://elen-nare.livejournal.com/11090.html
(Reply) (Thread)
magikcat112
2010-03-26 04:36 pm (UTC)
Rated PG-13 for mentions of violence, murder, drugs, etc. Language and spoiler warnings.
This is where thanfiction talked about Snape, his motivations during DAYD, and a secret about Terry Boot.
http://magikcat112.livejournal.com/56541.html?#cutid1
This is where [info]thanfiction talks a little bit about Remus Lupin, and tells the origin story about Fenrir Greyback.
http://magikcat112.livejournal.com/56541.html?#cutid2
(Reply) (Thread)
Information on the Malfoys
lyssa_adelia
2011-01-06 07:08 am (UTC)
Transcription of a conversation that took place in the Skype ROR on 2/17/2010. Edits have been made to condense the information into paragraphs, as opposed to sentences. Rated PG
http://lyssa-adelia.livejournal.com/114078.html
One of the fun things about the chat rooms, both LJ and Skype, is that it can quickly become impromptu storytime, Q&A, or realtime debate. Unfortunately, most of the comm doesn't get to see that, and even the people who just aren't there at that moment often miss out. However, the good news is that chat clients keep logs, and a lot of us have saved our favorite discussions. So here's a post where you can pose that great delving into the psyche of Snape, the sorting of sorting, the noble and most ancient backstory of Black, as long as you pay attention to a few little guidelines:
1. Save the chat as a text file, HTML file, or post on your personal LJ and link to it, do not post the whole thing here.
2. If the chat occurred on Skype, or any other client that shows real names, you MUST do a find-replace and substitute real names for LJ screennames before posting. NO EXCEPTIONS. That includes in-text.
3. ALL personal material must be edited out. That includes but is not limited to people talking about their day, mood, health, love life, personal life, job life, school life...ANYTHING that is not fandom related.
4. Any chat that contains sensitive material in the context of the chat (someone talking about empathy with a character because of their own difficult experience, for example) MUST be cleared with that person or those people first. If they say no, it doesn't go up. Period.
5. Give a rough summary of what the chat is about in your comment and link. "This is where Bob, Cfc, and I discussed Bill Weasley's fear of camels, with a digression into Platypuses on the Dragon Reserve in Wales."
6. Make sure to mark for both spoilers and warnings, and give a rough rating on the chat log, as you would a fic.
7. The chat needs to be relevant to the 'verse. While minor tangents are fine, that awesome debate we had about whether or not Kathryn Janeway was a better Captain than Benjamin Sisko doesn't belong here, sadly. Very sadly indeed. Nor does the exploration into multilingual words for "water" and the way the predominant sounds of a language affect the structure of their poetry, our favorite 80s music, or how to make a catapult out of a can of carrots and a plastic spoon. Even though we mentioned Luna while we were doing it.
8. Use common sense, and in the words of the immortal Bill and Ted, be excellent to one another.
Let the chatter begin!
Tags: information
( 15 comments — Use Your Galleon )
Harry Potter-OOC or was it the Horcrux? Chat
m_oquinn
2010-02-24 06:15 am (UTC)
This is an edited SkypeRoR chat with thanfiction, angakkuq_10, ceirdwenfc, faeriegal713 and several others that started out as a rant on the title of a than-vid and turned into a discussion on Harry Potter's sanity.
There is long chat version with lots of side tangents
http://m-oquinn.livejournal.com/3709.html
And a shorter version that is just the Harry relevant pieces
http://m-oquinn.livejournal.com/4044.html
(Reply) (Thread)
Re: Harry Potter-OOC or was it the Horcrux? Chat
blazzano
2010-02-25 07:44 am (UTC)
Interesting discussion there. I have a few thoughts on Harry's death march at the end of Deathly Hallows....
Leaving aside the larger issues of possible personality changes in books 5 to 7, I actually have no particular problems with his mental state leading up to his walking into the forest clearing - that is, I do not consider it OOC or feel that a Horcrux-influence hypothesis is required to explain it (though it can't be entirely discounted, of course). Yes, his internal mood is strikingly different from his other brushes with death. As a reader, I would be unsatisfied if there were no apparent reason for that difference. But I believe that, for Harry, the situation was sufficiently unique to allow for it.
The human mind is an engine of complex thought and logic, coexisting with emotionality. Below this, we have an ancient foundation of instinct. Under situations of high stress, instinct will often rise to the forefront and influence a person's decisions. For sentients like us, instincts are both a curse and a blessing. They can inadvertently lead us into deeper trouble, yes, but they can also help us survive in situations that require a quicker or more absolute response than the intellectual mind can deliver.
One of the most ancient and important instincts is "fight or flight": the instinct - which we share with most complex animals on earth - to either flee from a source of danger or meet it head on. The lower mind prepares the body for this situation by dumping in adrenaline, increasing one's heart and respiration rate, etc. In the Harry Potter series, almost all of Harry's brushes with death call upon these instincts, IMO. The Chamber of Secrets? Harry chooses to fight to save his loved ones; once the fighting actually started, it came down to instinct-driven ducking, rolling, and stabbing. Philsopher's Stone? An intellectual pursuit that became fight/flight for Harry after he was captured by Quirrell. Goblet of Fire? Well, before we got to see him flying circles around dragons, we read about his intense fear of the coming task. Once the task actually started, he was well-served by his instinctive reaction - it helped keep him from being roasted alive while he figured out how to grab the egg. Later in the book, he was cornered by Voldemort in the graveyard and given no choice but to fight - and then to flee for his life.
In short, even where there's room for Harry to second-guess himself and doubt his path before he's fights (or flees), eventually things progress to the point where intellectual anguish is irrelevant, and there's nothing left to it but to give into the instincts that had served him so well. The same is true for the DA in book 7 as well: all their long months of planning, strategizing, and training boiled down to a few hours of adrenaline-pumping running, ducking, fighting, and killing.
Harry's march to death is different from all of those, IMO. He was not fighting in the literal, instinct-driven sense. He was not fleeing in order to save his skin. He was completely rejecting the influence of an instinct which at that moment must have been thundering through his mind as strongly as it ever did. He was steeling himself up for a death where instincts were useless; sure, he was still fighting for his friends, but in a way that's comprehensible only with abstract intellect.
He did not know that his actions would give his friends magical protection from Voldemort - so far as his instincts and higher mind were concerned, what he was doing was suicide. In all his previous situations, he rushed into danger despite the likelihood of death, yet hoped that he would live. In this situation, he was actively seeking out death. As he would have seen it, the payback for that suicide was merely that Voldemort might die - eventually, and after God only knew how many more deaths of his friends.
(to be continued)
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
Re: Harry Potter-OOC or was it the Horcrux? Chat
blazzano
2010-02-25 07:45 am (UTC)
IMO, the difference between fighting for your life and calmly walking into the jaws of death, while consciously choosing to not struggle, without even the luxury of knowing that your decision will save your friends in the long run, is vast. So I don't think one can cite his death march anguish as evidence that his personality has changed, because I believe he had never been in a situation like that before. I forgive and understand his needing to angst about it, especially since he went through with it after all.
Er, wow, I didn't know I had that much to say on the subject. 0_0 I'm looking forward to seeing what you do with Harry's character in AP, by the way, Than.
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
Re: Harry Potter-OOC or was it the Horcrux? Chat
bluealoe
2010-02-25 03:32 pm (UTC)
Man, I was going to write a reply explaining why I didn't see Harry's death march as OOC, but I see you've already done that, and explained things much better than I could. Suffice it to say I agree with you 100%.
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
Re: Harry Potter-OOC or was it the Horcrux? Chat
zeviz
2010-02-26 03:21 am (UTC)
Good point. Both your explanation and Than's sound equally reasonable to me. (His is obviously more dramatic, but that tends to be his style.)
About whether DH epilogue implies a happy or a sad ending, my guess is that JKR wrote herself into a corner by her description of the final battle, because there was too much death in that battle for the classic "and they lived happily ever after" happy ending she was aiming for. That's my guess about why the epilogue is so focused on two families, with only a couple mentions of others. This way she could write the expected "happily ever after" scene, leaving all the unhappiness offscreen.
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
Re: Harry Potter-OOC or was it the Horcrux? Chat
blazzano
2010-02-26 05:12 am (UTC)
That's quite true, re: the unhappiness being cut out. In fact, in the immediate aftermath of the battle, I suspect that even Harry's unhappiness was quite fierce (though nothing on the families with even greater losses, true enough). If there was one thing that consistently bothered Harry, it was people dying for him. I imagine that he slept a good 24 hours or so, and then woke up to a rather unpleasant reality as he finally had the leisure to examine the cost of the battle.
I suppose I can accept that she didn't want to cover that in the book itself. But though it's too much to hope for, I'd love to see Rowling release a nice little collection of ficlets - she could intersperse them into the entries of the encyclopedia she's supposed to be writing. She could cover a heck of a lot of the missing bits if she wanted to, including the long road to recovery in the Wizarding world.
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
Re: Harry Potter-OOC or was it the Horcrux? Chat
zeviz
2010-02-26 07:02 pm (UTC)
She could cover a heck of a lot of the missing bits if she wanted to, including the long road to recovery in the Wizarding world.
My guess is that she doesn't want to admit (even to herself) that there would have to be a long road to recovery. She set off writing a Disney-style fairy tale about an unhappy boy finding a magic world. A variation on a Cinderella story, which ends in marriage, and happiness, and everybody living happily ever after.
The problem happened when she made the books grow along with the protagonist. It was a great idea, but she wasn't ready, or perhaps willing, to deal with the full implications of the resulting genre shift. Even while talking about her protagonist's realization that even magic can't solve all problems, adults and authority figures aren't all-powerful, etc, she still couldn't abandon her Dysney-style fairy tale roots.
This is a potential explanation for why "the later books don't live up to their full potential": to do so, she'd have to switch genres completely and write something in the style of DAYD and AP, which would be as out of character for her as writing happy shiny rainbows would be for Thanfiction.
So while Rowling might be forced to write a few more books, they are likely to focus on world-building, and gloss over the darker themes that she'd have to deal with if she went into too much detail about the battle of Hogwarts, or the fate of the secondary characters.
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
zeviz
2010-02-24 07:03 am (UTC)
Thank you for this idea. It will be good to see the logs from fun chats that I've missed. I'll also see if I have anything to upload.
"While minor tangents are fine, that awesome debate we had about whether or not Kathryn Janeway was a better Captain than Benjamin Sisko doesn't belong here, sadly. Very sadly indeed. Nor does the exploration into multilingual words for "water" and the way the predominant sounds of a language affect the structure of their poetry, our favorite 80s music, or how to make a catapult out of a can of carrots and a plastic spoon. Even though we mentioned Luna while we were doing it."
But those were the most fun. :( :P
(Reply) (Thread)
ceirdwenfc
2010-02-24 01:20 pm (UTC)
>5. Give a rough summary of what the chat is about in your comment and link. "This is where Bob, Cfc, and I discussed Bill Weasley's fear of camels, with a digression into Platypuses on the Dragon Reserve in Wales."
I still say that his fear of camels is grounded in falling off one at the Wizarding Petting Zoo when he was five. I don't know why he went to Egypt in the first place right out of Hogwarts.
And Bob agrees with me about the platypuses. Cross-species inter-mating should not be done on the Reserve and certainly not within the view of the other platypuses.
(Reply) (Thread)
Seamus, Stephen, Rowan and lots of Lavender
m_oquinn
2010-02-26 08:50 am (UTC)
Kate_lb needed some info for Stephen's 20 she is writing-but thanfiction got side-tracked to Seamus-then moved to Stephen, which led to Rowan who somehow got us to Lavender. Enjoy :-)
http://m-oquinn.livejournal.com/4954.html
(Reply) (Thread)
Jack Sloper Skype Chat
m_oquinn
2010-02-26 08:52 am (UTC)
Lots of info from thanfiction on Jack Sloper
http://m-oquinn.livejournal.com/5960.html?#cutid1
(Reply) (Thread)
elen_nare
2010-03-01 05:13 pm (UTC)
It's great to read these transcripts! Thank you for posting them, m_oquinn.
And I know the link sidebar is getting rather long, but could this be there too? I worry it might just drop off the main page and fade away otherwise.
(Reply) (Thread)
Skype ROR chat - Demelza, Colin, Sally-Anne, Diana Stemple, Jamie Stebbins, Sword Adventure
elen_nare
2010-03-09 12:24 am (UTC)
Information on Demmy, Sally-Anne, Diana and Jamie, plus a bit about Colin, the Sword adventure, and selection to attend Hogwarts.
http://elen-nare.livejournal.com/11090.html
(Reply) (Thread)
magikcat112
2010-03-26 04:36 pm (UTC)
Rated PG-13 for mentions of violence, murder, drugs, etc. Language and spoiler warnings.
This is where thanfiction talked about Snape, his motivations during DAYD, and a secret about Terry Boot.
http://magikcat112.livejournal.com/56541.html?#cutid1
This is where [info]thanfiction talks a little bit about Remus Lupin, and tells the origin story about Fenrir Greyback.
http://magikcat112.livejournal.com/56541.html?#cutid2
(Reply) (Thread)
Information on the Malfoys
lyssa_adelia
2011-01-06 07:08 am (UTC)
Transcription of a conversation that took place in the Skype ROR on 2/17/2010. Edits have been made to condense the information into paragraphs, as opposed to sentences. Rated PG
http://lyssa-adelia.livejournal.com/114078.html
Dear Gwyndyn,
Look, I know that you were the one to talk to
Luvcharlie, AND I know that you did not mean for
anything that happened to happen. Someone has been fucking
with us. Cfc is under some kind of attack, something is trying to literally eat her kids.
She sent message and we didn't get it because we were on road-now when we contact her it is like no one is home. Cheerful, everything is wonderful mode-nothing has been wonderful for ages. there is something big and something dangerous and deadly-You have the capacity and strength and power to do something. We are powerless and have been rung out by trip. Please, this is your dream-the children are in the house in the woods being eaten by monsters-Andy is down and when his shield over those kids break. it. is. over.
> Oh my.
> Anything and everything else aside, let's deal with the
> important stuff. I can and will help of course.
>
> I need a general idea of where they are. If you have a pic
> you could email that would help. Their names, if you know
> them. Anything that would help me zero in on them,
> y'know?
> I'll do what I can right now, but it won't do much
> good without something more specific to work with.
>
> Please get me whatever info you can asap.
> Love you dear, be strong, all will be well.
> xoxo
> Gwyndyn
[Way too much personal info, redacted]
We will have more info following. The most important thing is to get inside the house so to speak, and distract from the children.
Thank you thank you thank you
>working. more info on nature of threat?
>please tell andy he can step down and relax, not to burn himself out. i've got some serious >shields started and am trying to target the actual threat, but i can't pinpoint it yet.
Spirit/Astral form of technically dead but
v. powerful Seneca Sachem-level shaman, plus allies and
minions. I know this sounds crazy, but is true.
>ok. i'm enlisting some help.
>do you know why this is happening? who's ultimately behind it? that would help...whoever's >sending the ill will is a tool. i want the source.
>something isn't right here. this isn't shamanic energy, but something darker. and there's >only one energy signature, no sign of "allies" or "minions". are you sure of your source? >also, there seems to be a secondary target, but i can't identify it. what's really going on?
A source said that it was above " the
wheel" with each spoke a world and the hub a connection
place. it was a shaman/wizard cross in late 16th possibly
but that has passed from place of dead to something above
that. Several targets have been hit so far. Not sure who or
what is current secondary. The "allies" seem to
have been neutralized by someone from the hub as a favor to
Andy.
Look, I know that you were the one to talk to
Luvcharlie, AND I know that you did not mean for
anything that happened to happen. Someone has been fucking
with us. Cfc is under some kind of attack, something is trying to literally eat her kids.
She sent message and we didn't get it because we were on road-now when we contact her it is like no one is home. Cheerful, everything is wonderful mode-nothing has been wonderful for ages. there is something big and something dangerous and deadly-You have the capacity and strength and power to do something. We are powerless and have been rung out by trip. Please, this is your dream-the children are in the house in the woods being eaten by monsters-Andy is down and when his shield over those kids break. it. is. over.
> Oh my.
> Anything and everything else aside, let's deal with the
> important stuff. I can and will help of course.
>
> I need a general idea of where they are. If you have a pic
> you could email that would help. Their names, if you know
> them. Anything that would help me zero in on them,
> y'know?
> I'll do what I can right now, but it won't do much
> good without something more specific to work with.
>
> Please get me whatever info you can asap.
> Love you dear, be strong, all will be well.
> xoxo
> Gwyndyn
[Way too much personal info, redacted]
We will have more info following. The most important thing is to get inside the house so to speak, and distract from the children.
Thank you thank you thank you
>working. more info on nature of threat?
>please tell andy he can step down and relax, not to burn himself out. i've got some serious >shields started and am trying to target the actual threat, but i can't pinpoint it yet.
Spirit/Astral form of technically dead but
v. powerful Seneca Sachem-level shaman, plus allies and
minions. I know this sounds crazy, but is true.
>ok. i'm enlisting some help.
>do you know why this is happening? who's ultimately behind it? that would help...whoever's >sending the ill will is a tool. i want the source.
>something isn't right here. this isn't shamanic energy, but something darker. and there's >only one energy signature, no sign of "allies" or "minions". are you sure of your source? >also, there seems to be a secondary target, but i can't identify it. what's really going on?
A source said that it was above " the
wheel" with each spoke a world and the hub a connection
place. it was a shaman/wizard cross in late 16th possibly
but that has passed from place of dead to something above
that. Several targets have been hit so far. Not sure who or
what is current secondary. The "allies" seem to
have been neutralized by someone from the hub as a favor to
Andy.
We need your bottles! AND STORIES! thanfiction wrote in daydverse May 24th, 2011
So, Brittany was loved by several of the local ethnic grocers in the Fairfield area. When she died, I went around and told them, because she wasn't just a regular customer who would be vanishing suddenly, she was a friend. She had even been asked to be in one of their daughter's wedding. I was given gifts by some of them to express their grief, as well as their hope for my recovery. Brittany had been renowned as a white girl who could keep up with the hottest of the Indian and Mexican hot, so these gifts, unsurprisingly, involved chilis.
A LOT of chilis.
Way more chilis than I will ever eat in a reasonable amount of time. So the DenCo ladies and I have come up with an idea. We're making a buttload of hot sauce and selling it at the Denver farmer's market to raise money for the Brittany Quinn memorial trek. This is currently in progress as seen here.
However, we're going to need bottles. Now, some, we're going to have to buy, but there was also an idea. Abused women are not one-size-fits-all. There is no "type" who gets abused or doesn't. So we're not going to get dozens of identical bottles. We're collecting bottles from thrift stores, Craig's list, our kitchen cupboards, and Freecycle. We're also asking you: If you have resealable bottles that can be sterilized in between 1-6oz (30-180ml) sizes, we want them! The more creative and individual the better! If you know someone who does glass work and would be willing to make some bottles, even better still!
Email me for the address to ship them to, and please, spread the word on this. We need to collect enough bottles for about 5 gallons (19 liters) of sauce, and I will keep a running tally on this post of how many we have so far.
EDIT: Forgot to add regarding the lables/stories. They're going to be pre-printed with the official stuff (allergy info, ingredients, etc) but then there will be two elements that are individual. One is that the "face" of the lable, the part that people see, will be hand-written with one of the words that gets used as lables on abuse victims, either by their abusers or by society when they try to get help for their abuse, such as bitch, weak, lazy, greedy, etc.
The other is that each bottle will come with a little flyer that both explains what the sauce is for, thanks the buyer, and then has an individual quote of between 10 and 250 words. These will be contributed by you guys. Your experience with someone abusive. Watching a friend or loved one be abused. Helping someone get out. Getting out yourself. What happens when someone doesn't get out. What it's like to live with abuse or survive after. How people treat you if they know you were abused. Whatever. You can post it publically here and we'll re-print it, or you can send it privately by direct message or email. We'll use your full name, anonymous, your initials, your screen name, or whatever you want. And please, please, spread the message on this. Ideally, we'd like to have a different one for each bottle.
( 7 comments — Use Your Galleon )
anywhere_but_nj
2011-05-24 10:47 pm (UTC)
We don't do much regarding glass bottles in my house, but I'll keep an eye out. And ask around.
Also, would it be possible to buy the hot sauce ourselves? :D
Do we have to be a bottle contributor to give a quote?
(Reply) (Thread)
thanfiction
2011-05-24 11:07 pm (UTC)
1. Thank you, and they can also be ceramic, metal, or certain kinds of plastic. As long as they can be sterilized and have lids that you can re-apply (so like, soda bottles with pry-off bottlecaps are not ok.)
2. Absolutely
3. Anyone can give a quote.
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
anywhere_but_nj
2011-05-25 12:00 am (UTC)
Got it.
My friend's dad suggested this site:
http://www.bottlesrus.com/index.cfm
It doesn't have prices or anything =/ but it's still there.
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
thanfiction
2011-05-25 03:59 am (UTC)
Thank you, and while we'd like to do the individualized bottles, you've just provided us a great backup if we can't get enough.
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
bluealoe
2011-05-25 02:36 am (UTC)
I don't think sending bottles from Japan would be very economical, but I'll see what I can do about contributing quotes/stories. Should I send them by email/LJ message, and if so, which address/username?
(Reply) (Thread)
thanfiction
2011-05-25 04:03 am (UTC)
Bottles from our international friends would be statements rather than economy, but having shipped things to Asia, I definitely understand. As for the quotes, thanfiction@yahoo.com
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
lunaedomina
2011-05-25 06:51 am (UTC)
I shall definitely give you my own testimony about abuse. However, France is not the best place from where to ship bottles, and mine are bigger than your specs.
So, Brittany was loved by several of the local ethnic grocers in the Fairfield area. When she died, I went around and told them, because she wasn't just a regular customer who would be vanishing suddenly, she was a friend. She had even been asked to be in one of their daughter's wedding. I was given gifts by some of them to express their grief, as well as their hope for my recovery. Brittany had been renowned as a white girl who could keep up with the hottest of the Indian and Mexican hot, so these gifts, unsurprisingly, involved chilis.
A LOT of chilis.
Way more chilis than I will ever eat in a reasonable amount of time. So the DenCo ladies and I have come up with an idea. We're making a buttload of hot sauce and selling it at the Denver farmer's market to raise money for the Brittany Quinn memorial trek. This is currently in progress as seen here.
However, we're going to need bottles. Now, some, we're going to have to buy, but there was also an idea. Abused women are not one-size-fits-all. There is no "type" who gets abused or doesn't. So we're not going to get dozens of identical bottles. We're collecting bottles from thrift stores, Craig's list, our kitchen cupboards, and Freecycle. We're also asking you: If you have resealable bottles that can be sterilized in between 1-6oz (30-180ml) sizes, we want them! The more creative and individual the better! If you know someone who does glass work and would be willing to make some bottles, even better still!
Email me for the address to ship them to, and please, spread the word on this. We need to collect enough bottles for about 5 gallons (19 liters) of sauce, and I will keep a running tally on this post of how many we have so far.
EDIT: Forgot to add regarding the lables/stories. They're going to be pre-printed with the official stuff (allergy info, ingredients, etc) but then there will be two elements that are individual. One is that the "face" of the lable, the part that people see, will be hand-written with one of the words that gets used as lables on abuse victims, either by their abusers or by society when they try to get help for their abuse, such as bitch, weak, lazy, greedy, etc.
The other is that each bottle will come with a little flyer that both explains what the sauce is for, thanks the buyer, and then has an individual quote of between 10 and 250 words. These will be contributed by you guys. Your experience with someone abusive. Watching a friend or loved one be abused. Helping someone get out. Getting out yourself. What happens when someone doesn't get out. What it's like to live with abuse or survive after. How people treat you if they know you were abused. Whatever. You can post it publically here and we'll re-print it, or you can send it privately by direct message or email. We'll use your full name, anonymous, your initials, your screen name, or whatever you want. And please, please, spread the message on this. Ideally, we'd like to have a different one for each bottle.
( 7 comments — Use Your Galleon )
anywhere_but_nj
2011-05-24 10:47 pm (UTC)
We don't do much regarding glass bottles in my house, but I'll keep an eye out. And ask around.
Also, would it be possible to buy the hot sauce ourselves? :D
Do we have to be a bottle contributor to give a quote?
(Reply) (Thread)
thanfiction
2011-05-24 11:07 pm (UTC)
1. Thank you, and they can also be ceramic, metal, or certain kinds of plastic. As long as they can be sterilized and have lids that you can re-apply (so like, soda bottles with pry-off bottlecaps are not ok.)
2. Absolutely
3. Anyone can give a quote.
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
anywhere_but_nj
2011-05-25 12:00 am (UTC)
Got it.
My friend's dad suggested this site:
http://www.bottlesrus.com/index.cfm
It doesn't have prices or anything =/ but it's still there.
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
thanfiction
2011-05-25 03:59 am (UTC)
Thank you, and while we'd like to do the individualized bottles, you've just provided us a great backup if we can't get enough.
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
bluealoe
2011-05-25 02:36 am (UTC)
I don't think sending bottles from Japan would be very economical, but I'll see what I can do about contributing quotes/stories. Should I send them by email/LJ message, and if so, which address/username?
(Reply) (Thread)
thanfiction
2011-05-25 04:03 am (UTC)
Bottles from our international friends would be statements rather than economy, but having shipped things to Asia, I definitely understand. As for the quotes, thanfiction@yahoo.com
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
lunaedomina
2011-05-25 06:51 am (UTC)
I shall definitely give you my own testimony about abuse. However, France is not the best place from where to ship bottles, and mine are bigger than your specs.
***Note: Formatting may be fucked as this was retrieved from a sporking.***
You have known me as Amy Player, as Strwriter, as Voyagerbabe, VB, Victoria Bitter, Mr. Frodo, and Jordan Wood.
I am NOT re-entering fandom by making this statement, and I want it known from the very beginning that I am doing so completely alone. No one knows I'm going to make this post, and I am probably going to catch a lot of hell from people who have told me that I should just move on
with my life and not poke the crazy online people.
However, I can't do that. It is basic ethics that when you have wronged someone, you cannot move on without apologizing, and I have wronged a lot of people.
What I am doing here is not a plea for sympathy, nor an excuse, nor any attempt to weasel my way out of anything. I am 23 now, an adult, and I need to take an adult's responsibilities for the actions of my teen years,
and for the ramifications they have had.
Not only that, but I don't believe that you are all just crazy people. I was one of you once, and I know that there are many very decent individuals among you who know nothing other than that you were lied to and used,
and you deserve to at least hear the other side of the story, both so that you can make your own judgments as rational people, and so that you can stop worrying that somewhere, out there, the next post in your favorite fandom might be VB, poised to strike again.
For the record, I have in fact moved on with my life, and have spent the last several years trying to make amends of it. I have gotten a lot of therapy, and what I am writing here is the product of a huge amount of self-exploration and difficult self-confrontation, as well as professional help and guidance.
I have re-connected with my family, moved away from Hollywood, have and intend to have in the future no contact with any fandom of any kind, re-discovered God,
changed my name, come to terms with myself as a transgender man, and am now seeking both gender reassignment surgery, normal employment, and a normal, healthy life.
As previously stated, this confession/setting things straight is part of that. I first came to online fandom shortly after puberty, under the name of Strwriter. I was a passionate Star Trek fan, and the idea that I might be
transgender had not yet even vaguely occurred to me.
What I did know was that I was unusually intelligent,
and that none of the other girls particularly liked me (I did not have any real co-ed opportunities, so all I knew of boys was from books and movies) and that I desperately longed to be accepted. I knew that on the internet people could have all kinds of different identities and be whomever they wanted to be, but I didn't understand much beyond that, and both through age (13) and the kind of blindness only the naively intelligent are capable, I didn't really care. What I knew is that I could type anything to anyone and they would like me.
This started getting out of hand beyond the usual teenage online self-role-playing when I discovered an entire new world on the internet...sex.
I was aware of the mechanics of it, previously, and that it was something that was very nice for married people to do, and terribly sinful and bad for unmarried people,
but there had never been any remote appeal to anything about it before. I had been warned that pretty soon, I would be wanting it with boys, but I dismissed that as utterly ridiculous.
It stopped becoming ridiculous as soon as I started discovering increasingly explicit fanfiction. However, it was a discovery far more upsetting to me than simply "oh, THAT'S what all the fuss is about." To my horror, I realized that I was a horribly perverted person. I was thinking about it all the time, but in badbadbad ways.
What I know now is that I was thinking about it from the male perspective, with an almost preternatural instinct to the male half of things, but at the time, I just knew that like so many things about me before, it wasn't SAME. I became fascinated and obsessed with boys, true, but not the way I was 'supposed' to be. I was tremendously covetous. I wanted to know everything about men's bodies and men having sex in the way that anyone obsesses about something they desperately and unobtainably desire to possess, and simultaneously, I was hungry for information about the women's side of things, hoping to find somewhere in all these women expressing their sexuality whatever it was I was missing. And always, always the hunger for acceptance. For someone to tell me - preferably many someones - that I was wonderful, perfect, fabulous, talented, etc. to counteract the constant sick feeling that something unknown was hideously wrong with me.
Of course, all of the groups that held adult fanfiction were off-limits to a 14 and later 15 and 16 year-old, but that was okay.
I needed in desperately, I rationalized, so I'd just make another identity. In retrospect, the choices I made there were psychologically pretty transparent.
I created an identity who was horribly scarred, sick, messed up, and dirty, with a terrible, sexually deviant past...but it wasn't her fault, of course.
Thus, I thought, I could explore as much as I needed to, and no one would hate me for being so hungrily curious about THAT, nor be shocked and hate me if I let slip any clues how messed up I was about it. Of course, I tried not to let that show, faithfully parroting the other women both in conversations and in fic, so that hopefully I could just find out what was wrong with me and how to fix it without them knowing.
Yes, I took it too far...WAY too far, including visits in person and telephone conversations behind my parent's back. But at the time, it seemed justified. After all, I couldn't let anyone know how bad I really was, nor could I stop what seemed my only hope for finding a way to fix it, as it was the only thing in my life that addressed sexuality at all.
Looking back at some of the stories I was writing then, I find it almost tragically laughable – there is remarkably good writing interspaced with saccharine pap cut and pasted straight out of the cliche generator. You can almost sort it sentence by sentence into "VB writing" and "VB Fitting In".
Then, at 16, I found slash. I had been in entirely het groups previously, who were very scornful of slash, and had simply dismissed it as BAD, but then I stumbled across my first one by accident, as it was unmarked. Like the old children's game of hot and cold, I practically heard my psyche whisper "warmer!"
The concept of homosexuality was even vaguer to me than that of sex had been. I knew it was men who did sinful sex things with other men, or women who did sinful sex things with other women, and that it was a lifestyle choice that they made. But here COMMA! for the first time, were stories about people wrestling with "I'm different, it's my shameful secret, it's about sex and gender, and I'm compelled to lead a double life to hide it."
All remaining vestiges of moral restraint went flying out the window, as I had to get into the slash community. Surely IT was there.
This was closer than anything I'd yet found. But it had to be hidden even more carefully, so the lies grew thicker and faster, and I got better at them, discovering refinements such as "if you're an American, you're a smarty-pants, if you're British, you're just cool" at blending just enough truth into my fictions, and playing different stories to different people.
The good news of this phase was that it opened me up for the first time to the amazing discovery that God created more variety among humanity than Heterosexual Male and Heterosexual Female, and that there were people out there who were tolerant of that.
It also, however, messed me up in a lot of ways.
Already socially awkward, I became flat out incompetent off the internet.
Already having serious problems with out of control behavior from the hormones of puberty (estrogen and I DO NOT MIX) I was further driven to
half-psychosis both by the stress of maintaining these webs and by the lack of sleep from regularly spending entire nights on the internet with my
new-found hope and curse.
Already having serious problems with the truth (never easy for someone who is lied to every day by their own body, as I've found out) lying was becoming more second nature than telling the truth as I tried to keep the increasingly growing spider's web out of my offline life.
I also at that time started to hate and resent my parents, my upbringing, and my religion with a desperate fervor. THESE people were far closer to understanding what I was, and the slashed characters were far closer to BEING what I was (ironically, I identified far more fully with the most well-written male slash characters than I ever had with female characters) than anyone around me, and they all hated and feared their families, the real world, and the Christian Church. Lessons learned and internalized with the uniquely stupid fervor of the very young.
Sadly for me, most people who are that phenomenally messed up at such a young age and with so little experience are usually sniffed out and helped for what they are very quickly. I was a little too good for my own good,
and although occasionally people caught me as a liar, no one ever saw past all the facades that were hiding THE BIG SECRET... that I still didn't even know the answer to.
At 17, I entered college, my first experience simultaneously with formalized education, with a full, co-ed social structure, and with living away from home...while leading a quintuple life online,
still struggling with my unknown terrible thing, clinically deranged to the point of paranoid episodes once a month, and with a psychotic, obsessive need to make people like me.
Oh, and I was abruptly adopted as the pet of an egotistical manic-depressive failed artiste with delusions of grandeur who was simultaneously the most loved and hated professor in the theater department, and by the most bohemian inner core of theater people, including trying to have a boyfriend with a semi-gothic Australian.
Yeah, that's right, I was in theater on top of it, having never been in any actual production since a summer-camp-type thing at the age of 10. If I had ever wondered what it must have been like watching the Hindenburg, ring-side seats to my mental health that year must have been pretty close.
The lying reached nuclear levels, and I was starting to lose touch with reality and begin facing an actual nervous collapse, when "salvation" came to me. Oh, Jesus Christ, if I could undo ONE mistake...
No one is probably going to believe me, but I can't even remember her name, though her face is as clear in my memory as if she were sitting next to me. She was the Priestess, and she had all the answers.
Yes, the Christian Church, my parents, and their narrow thinking were the problem. Yes, there was something different about me, but no, I wasn't messed up. Yes, I felt oddly divorced from my body, and increasingly from reality.
Yes, I had serious problems at this point being ABLE to tell the truth, because everything I said might endanger another lie and make someone not like me and/or find out. Yes, I felt terribly alone. But all this wasn't because something was wrong with me, it was because I was special, wonderful, gifted, a miracle, even.
I was a Paladin, she told me, a spiritual and psychic warrior capable of channeling the spirits of others... ghosts, demons, the living, the dead, even the
non-human. The Church would never accept me, but The Goddess knew what I really was and loved me, and the Priestess would help me love and understand myself as a rare lesbian Paladin.
The reason I felt divorced from my body is that I could separate from it to allow the souls of others...it's also why I felt so connected to the male characters from my writings, because male spirits regularly flowed through me because my lesbian energies were very compatible to them.
Already near my wit's end, I swallowed it, hook, line, and pentacle. It was the closest thing I'd ever had to an answer, and most tellingly, I thought, she had approached ME with it, telling ME my darkest shames and where they had come from.
At the time, it seemed an unquestionable miracle. Now, I see that I was flying psychological flags and signs miles high to anyone who knew how to read them.
All of this, of course, had to be carefully guarded against anyone who was Closed Minded, but the pagans have had to keep their secrets for millennia, so that seemed okay. I got drawn in deeper and deeper without even realizing it, and in hindsight, I honestly can't say how I managed to start believing that faeries and gnomes and dark wizards and all these non-human creatures straight out of Dungeons and Dragons were real...and talking to her through me. But I did. Profoundly.
By the time Lord of the Rings came out in winter of 2001, I had all but completely dropped out of the real world, existing only for my online web and my life as a Paladin.
I was spending weeks alone in my apartment, skipping classes, ignoring friends and family. My Priestess had told me that it was yet another example of how The Sacred has to be slipped in to the truth of the ages in a way unbelievers can handle, but that Tolkien wasn't just making a metauniversal statement. Nae, the Red Book of Westmarch was more real than the Christian Bible, being a single faded volume found by the Professor and painstakingly translated to prove the truth of a history lost to the brutal censorial axes of the post-Constantine Romans.
I was such a strong Paladin, in fact, that I could probably call forth a vision of the finding...
and, of course, I did, which proved it. But you know what? I can now say that I can tell every one of you to call forth a vision of Mickey Mouse beating
an elephant with a bunch of carrots, and you all will. It's the human imagination. A miracle in itself, yes, but...
Well, anyway. I was still keeping those lives mostly separate, and I got into Lord of the Rings fandom surprisingly separate from my increasingly bizarre spiritual journey through same. I was already active in
Sharpe fandom, Sean Bean was in Lord of the Rings...and when I followed the line, I found an enormously active slash fandom. In I went, discovering
that here was a place where my intensive immersion recently into fantasy thinking served my pen even more praise than my experience with 18th
century living history had served me in Hornblower!
The formation of BitofEarth the mailing list and website went exactly as it appeared...honestly, the best records of that are to be found on the list itself. All the shenannigans with me were happening on chats, my livejournal, and emails having nothing to do with BoE yet, and everything to do with what they always had: PLEASE VALIDATE ME!
Spring of 2002, I had what I now consider the beginning of my legal separation from reality. It's okay, we've had counseling now, and the relationship has been repaired, but 2002-03 were really close to the brink of divorce, and it began in March.
I had been recently informed by my Priestess that a halfling spirit from the past would soon contact me, that he was trapped in a terrible darkness, and that only I could save him.
I was already close friends with Orangeblossom, (though I am going to leave her out of this statement as much as possible, as I AM doing this alone and am not going to speak for her) and what happened next is already a matter of public record, and, fairly perhaps, ridicule. Yes, I did believe that I was channeling Merry, and then others. I believed it completely, and letting my desperate ego hide my low self-esteem, I believed it all the more because I didn't think I was good enough to make up anything as compelling as it became.
You have known me as Amy Player, as Strwriter, as Voyagerbabe, VB, Victoria Bitter, Mr. Frodo, and Jordan Wood.
I am NOT re-entering fandom by making this statement, and I want it known from the very beginning that I am doing so completely alone. No one knows I'm going to make this post, and I am probably going to catch a lot of hell from people who have told me that I should just move on
with my life and not poke the crazy online people.
However, I can't do that. It is basic ethics that when you have wronged someone, you cannot move on without apologizing, and I have wronged a lot of people.
What I am doing here is not a plea for sympathy, nor an excuse, nor any attempt to weasel my way out of anything. I am 23 now, an adult, and I need to take an adult's responsibilities for the actions of my teen years,
and for the ramifications they have had.
Not only that, but I don't believe that you are all just crazy people. I was one of you once, and I know that there are many very decent individuals among you who know nothing other than that you were lied to and used,
and you deserve to at least hear the other side of the story, both so that you can make your own judgments as rational people, and so that you can stop worrying that somewhere, out there, the next post in your favorite fandom might be VB, poised to strike again.
For the record, I have in fact moved on with my life, and have spent the last several years trying to make amends of it. I have gotten a lot of therapy, and what I am writing here is the product of a huge amount of self-exploration and difficult self-confrontation, as well as professional help and guidance.
I have re-connected with my family, moved away from Hollywood, have and intend to have in the future no contact with any fandom of any kind, re-discovered God,
changed my name, come to terms with myself as a transgender man, and am now seeking both gender reassignment surgery, normal employment, and a normal, healthy life.
As previously stated, this confession/setting things straight is part of that. I first came to online fandom shortly after puberty, under the name of Strwriter. I was a passionate Star Trek fan, and the idea that I might be
transgender had not yet even vaguely occurred to me.
What I did know was that I was unusually intelligent,
and that none of the other girls particularly liked me (I did not have any real co-ed opportunities, so all I knew of boys was from books and movies) and that I desperately longed to be accepted. I knew that on the internet people could have all kinds of different identities and be whomever they wanted to be, but I didn't understand much beyond that, and both through age (13) and the kind of blindness only the naively intelligent are capable, I didn't really care. What I knew is that I could type anything to anyone and they would like me.
This started getting out of hand beyond the usual teenage online self-role-playing when I discovered an entire new world on the internet...sex.
I was aware of the mechanics of it, previously, and that it was something that was very nice for married people to do, and terribly sinful and bad for unmarried people,
but there had never been any remote appeal to anything about it before. I had been warned that pretty soon, I would be wanting it with boys, but I dismissed that as utterly ridiculous.
It stopped becoming ridiculous as soon as I started discovering increasingly explicit fanfiction. However, it was a discovery far more upsetting to me than simply "oh, THAT'S what all the fuss is about." To my horror, I realized that I was a horribly perverted person. I was thinking about it all the time, but in badbadbad ways.
What I know now is that I was thinking about it from the male perspective, with an almost preternatural instinct to the male half of things, but at the time, I just knew that like so many things about me before, it wasn't SAME. I became fascinated and obsessed with boys, true, but not the way I was 'supposed' to be. I was tremendously covetous. I wanted to know everything about men's bodies and men having sex in the way that anyone obsesses about something they desperately and unobtainably desire to possess, and simultaneously, I was hungry for information about the women's side of things, hoping to find somewhere in all these women expressing their sexuality whatever it was I was missing. And always, always the hunger for acceptance. For someone to tell me - preferably many someones - that I was wonderful, perfect, fabulous, talented, etc. to counteract the constant sick feeling that something unknown was hideously wrong with me.
Of course, all of the groups that held adult fanfiction were off-limits to a 14 and later 15 and 16 year-old, but that was okay.
I needed in desperately, I rationalized, so I'd just make another identity. In retrospect, the choices I made there were psychologically pretty transparent.
I created an identity who was horribly scarred, sick, messed up, and dirty, with a terrible, sexually deviant past...but it wasn't her fault, of course.
Thus, I thought, I could explore as much as I needed to, and no one would hate me for being so hungrily curious about THAT, nor be shocked and hate me if I let slip any clues how messed up I was about it. Of course, I tried not to let that show, faithfully parroting the other women both in conversations and in fic, so that hopefully I could just find out what was wrong with me and how to fix it without them knowing.
Yes, I took it too far...WAY too far, including visits in person and telephone conversations behind my parent's back. But at the time, it seemed justified. After all, I couldn't let anyone know how bad I really was, nor could I stop what seemed my only hope for finding a way to fix it, as it was the only thing in my life that addressed sexuality at all.
Looking back at some of the stories I was writing then, I find it almost tragically laughable – there is remarkably good writing interspaced with saccharine pap cut and pasted straight out of the cliche generator. You can almost sort it sentence by sentence into "VB writing" and "VB Fitting In".
Then, at 16, I found slash. I had been in entirely het groups previously, who were very scornful of slash, and had simply dismissed it as BAD, but then I stumbled across my first one by accident, as it was unmarked. Like the old children's game of hot and cold, I practically heard my psyche whisper "warmer!"
The concept of homosexuality was even vaguer to me than that of sex had been. I knew it was men who did sinful sex things with other men, or women who did sinful sex things with other women, and that it was a lifestyle choice that they made. But here COMMA! for the first time, were stories about people wrestling with "I'm different, it's my shameful secret, it's about sex and gender, and I'm compelled to lead a double life to hide it."
All remaining vestiges of moral restraint went flying out the window, as I had to get into the slash community. Surely IT was there.
This was closer than anything I'd yet found. But it had to be hidden even more carefully, so the lies grew thicker and faster, and I got better at them, discovering refinements such as "if you're an American, you're a smarty-pants, if you're British, you're just cool" at blending just enough truth into my fictions, and playing different stories to different people.
The good news of this phase was that it opened me up for the first time to the amazing discovery that God created more variety among humanity than Heterosexual Male and Heterosexual Female, and that there were people out there who were tolerant of that.
It also, however, messed me up in a lot of ways.
Already socially awkward, I became flat out incompetent off the internet.
Already having serious problems with out of control behavior from the hormones of puberty (estrogen and I DO NOT MIX) I was further driven to
half-psychosis both by the stress of maintaining these webs and by the lack of sleep from regularly spending entire nights on the internet with my
new-found hope and curse.
Already having serious problems with the truth (never easy for someone who is lied to every day by their own body, as I've found out) lying was becoming more second nature than telling the truth as I tried to keep the increasingly growing spider's web out of my offline life.
I also at that time started to hate and resent my parents, my upbringing, and my religion with a desperate fervor. THESE people were far closer to understanding what I was, and the slashed characters were far closer to BEING what I was (ironically, I identified far more fully with the most well-written male slash characters than I ever had with female characters) than anyone around me, and they all hated and feared their families, the real world, and the Christian Church. Lessons learned and internalized with the uniquely stupid fervor of the very young.
Sadly for me, most people who are that phenomenally messed up at such a young age and with so little experience are usually sniffed out and helped for what they are very quickly. I was a little too good for my own good,
and although occasionally people caught me as a liar, no one ever saw past all the facades that were hiding THE BIG SECRET... that I still didn't even know the answer to.
At 17, I entered college, my first experience simultaneously with formalized education, with a full, co-ed social structure, and with living away from home...while leading a quintuple life online,
still struggling with my unknown terrible thing, clinically deranged to the point of paranoid episodes once a month, and with a psychotic, obsessive need to make people like me.
Oh, and I was abruptly adopted as the pet of an egotistical manic-depressive failed artiste with delusions of grandeur who was simultaneously the most loved and hated professor in the theater department, and by the most bohemian inner core of theater people, including trying to have a boyfriend with a semi-gothic Australian.
Yeah, that's right, I was in theater on top of it, having never been in any actual production since a summer-camp-type thing at the age of 10. If I had ever wondered what it must have been like watching the Hindenburg, ring-side seats to my mental health that year must have been pretty close.
The lying reached nuclear levels, and I was starting to lose touch with reality and begin facing an actual nervous collapse, when "salvation" came to me. Oh, Jesus Christ, if I could undo ONE mistake...
No one is probably going to believe me, but I can't even remember her name, though her face is as clear in my memory as if she were sitting next to me. She was the Priestess, and she had all the answers.
Yes, the Christian Church, my parents, and their narrow thinking were the problem. Yes, there was something different about me, but no, I wasn't messed up. Yes, I felt oddly divorced from my body, and increasingly from reality.
Yes, I had serious problems at this point being ABLE to tell the truth, because everything I said might endanger another lie and make someone not like me and/or find out. Yes, I felt terribly alone. But all this wasn't because something was wrong with me, it was because I was special, wonderful, gifted, a miracle, even.
I was a Paladin, she told me, a spiritual and psychic warrior capable of channeling the spirits of others... ghosts, demons, the living, the dead, even the
non-human. The Church would never accept me, but The Goddess knew what I really was and loved me, and the Priestess would help me love and understand myself as a rare lesbian Paladin.
The reason I felt divorced from my body is that I could separate from it to allow the souls of others...it's also why I felt so connected to the male characters from my writings, because male spirits regularly flowed through me because my lesbian energies were very compatible to them.
Already near my wit's end, I swallowed it, hook, line, and pentacle. It was the closest thing I'd ever had to an answer, and most tellingly, I thought, she had approached ME with it, telling ME my darkest shames and where they had come from.
At the time, it seemed an unquestionable miracle. Now, I see that I was flying psychological flags and signs miles high to anyone who knew how to read them.
All of this, of course, had to be carefully guarded against anyone who was Closed Minded, but the pagans have had to keep their secrets for millennia, so that seemed okay. I got drawn in deeper and deeper without even realizing it, and in hindsight, I honestly can't say how I managed to start believing that faeries and gnomes and dark wizards and all these non-human creatures straight out of Dungeons and Dragons were real...and talking to her through me. But I did. Profoundly.
By the time Lord of the Rings came out in winter of 2001, I had all but completely dropped out of the real world, existing only for my online web and my life as a Paladin.
I was spending weeks alone in my apartment, skipping classes, ignoring friends and family. My Priestess had told me that it was yet another example of how The Sacred has to be slipped in to the truth of the ages in a way unbelievers can handle, but that Tolkien wasn't just making a metauniversal statement. Nae, the Red Book of Westmarch was more real than the Christian Bible, being a single faded volume found by the Professor and painstakingly translated to prove the truth of a history lost to the brutal censorial axes of the post-Constantine Romans.
I was such a strong Paladin, in fact, that I could probably call forth a vision of the finding...
and, of course, I did, which proved it. But you know what? I can now say that I can tell every one of you to call forth a vision of Mickey Mouse beating
an elephant with a bunch of carrots, and you all will. It's the human imagination. A miracle in itself, yes, but...
Well, anyway. I was still keeping those lives mostly separate, and I got into Lord of the Rings fandom surprisingly separate from my increasingly bizarre spiritual journey through same. I was already active in
Sharpe fandom, Sean Bean was in Lord of the Rings...and when I followed the line, I found an enormously active slash fandom. In I went, discovering
that here was a place where my intensive immersion recently into fantasy thinking served my pen even more praise than my experience with 18th
century living history had served me in Hornblower!
The formation of BitofEarth the mailing list and website went exactly as it appeared...honestly, the best records of that are to be found on the list itself. All the shenannigans with me were happening on chats, my livejournal, and emails having nothing to do with BoE yet, and everything to do with what they always had: PLEASE VALIDATE ME!
Spring of 2002, I had what I now consider the beginning of my legal separation from reality. It's okay, we've had counseling now, and the relationship has been repaired, but 2002-03 were really close to the brink of divorce, and it began in March.
I had been recently informed by my Priestess that a halfling spirit from the past would soon contact me, that he was trapped in a terrible darkness, and that only I could save him.
I was already close friends with Orangeblossom, (though I am going to leave her out of this statement as much as possible, as I AM doing this alone and am not going to speak for her) and what happened next is already a matter of public record, and, fairly perhaps, ridicule. Yes, I did believe that I was channeling Merry, and then others. I believed it completely, and letting my desperate ego hide my low self-esteem, I believed it all the more because I didn't think I was good enough to make up anything as compelling as it became.
June of 2002, I went to meet Orangeblossom in person in Oregon. It was a deeply profound experience, getting to "channel freely' with someone else in person,
and there it wound up taking a still-further turn into the bizarre. Focusing on trying to 'reach' Frodo, I found myself 'bringing' Elijah Wood by accident. I since understand that what I was really doing was an uncontrolled mix of free-association and role-playing, but at the time, I thought it was all very real.
Though even I was reluctant at first to believe it could be possible to have channeled a living human being, my doubts were shattered when things I had "channeled" were proven to be true in the DVD release and in interviews that hadn't occurred yet. What had actually happened, of course, is that I already knew a near-fanatical amount about that young man from being a fan to the level I was, and any good profiler can tell you that someone with a gift for getting into the heads of others (like a writer) and enough information can often predict other people's actions to a creepy extent.
Yet from my point of view, it was irrefutable evidence, and this one felt more right than anything previous (no surprise, as I was for the first time role-playing a human male, near my own age, struggling with sexual identity issues and trying to juggle what people expected of him with his true self).
I believed heart and soul that I was channeling the spirit of Elijah Wood. I have tried to explain this away as just "role playing that got out of hand" before, or as "poking the tinhats", but that's just excuse-making to try and hide how phenomenally fucked up I was.
Being Elijah gave me the ability to be a boy, and I clung to it with a fervor I didn't know I was capable of, nor was willing to admit to. I believed that something had clearly gone wrong with the Paladin powers, because "Amy" was less and less willing to return (given the option, I was loathe to be a lesbian girl again) and Elijah was slowly splitting off a second consciousness from himself and taking over my body. This is about as far from reality as it ever got, and lasted through all of 2003. Yes, I thought I was the split-off duplicate channeled soul of Elijah Wood the entire time I was planning and attempting to execute Project Elanor and all the other BitofEarth events.
Yes, that is crazy.
Yes, that is fucked up.
No, I don't think that absolves me.
As Elijah, I tried to deal with the 'terrible situation' of being split off from myself and trapped in a girl's body (the closest I had yet come to confronting being transgender, as the only other exposure I had to the concept was MsAllegro, who sets off every NO alarm in ANYONE'S book) as best I could, even taking some people 'into my confidence' to 'tell them the truth.' Which was spinning farther and farther away from what anyone else on this planet knew as reality.
I also got BitofEarth into HUGE trouble from a fire triangle of three different major problems, all of which I am owning up to freely.
1: I was relying on a lot of "knowledge" which I wasn't aware I was making up.
This was primarily about the movie industry, publicity, and my "friends" on the cast and crew. Again, using the profiling principle, I was right enough of the time that I got an amazingly long way before it began crumbling around my ears, but in the end, the house (or the real world) always wins.
2. I was at this point completely unraveled from what was and was not true about my own life, and what I believed about myself and my past could change from moment to moment. This did not engender what you would exactly call a spirit of trust, which is something very important when you are working on a project of that magnitude.
3. Aware that I had lost everyone in my previous life - whether that was as Amy OR Elijah - I hung a crazed amount of importance on BitofEarth, the people in it, and them all continuing to like me at all costs. Especially Orangeblossom, whom I had fallen in love with by then.
In order to try and maintain this, I took on ridiculously more than I could handle.
If someone wanted it, I promised it. If I could find a way to do it - lie, cheat, hook, or crook - I did it, or if I couldn't, I came up with an excuse that made it not my fault.
I delegated my hugely overloaded plate to others, but when they weren't happy with the work, or if something went wrong, I took it back onto myself rather than confront them or drive them, even if I already had more than I could handle.
I considered the success of Orangeblossom's and everyone else's whims at BitofEarth to be the stuff of life or dearth, and had completely lost all perspective. And if you're fighting for your life, not a convention or organization, you'll do anything, say anything, promise anything, and prop yourself up on a house of cards hoping you can find glue before the wind blows.
Well, as everyone knows, the wind blew big time and I didn't have any glue. Seeing the sure destruction of TentMoot and the exposure of the lies I had told to try and pull it off, I tried to kill myself.
I am actually very thankful for this, as the mandatory rest in the mental hospital was my first step towards re-connecting with reality.
No, BitofEarth was not a scam. I was never trying to get anything out of anyone, and I have never profited so much as a dime from any cast or crewmember, nor anyone associated with New Line Cinema.
As a matter of fact, Orangeblossom and myself spent ourselves into destitution and still OWE about $1,200 to Jeanine in money she spent on us because we were pumping every dime into BoE, and about $100 to the Kiwi's for money they spent on themselves because we had abjectly nothing. I was never trying to con anyone, or to get anything out of it, even attention, as anyone who was in that inner circle can recall that I ducked the spotlight as though it were poison.
All I wanted was to make a lot of people happy,
but I did it in a way that was maladjusted to say the least, and with the facts as truly beyond the bizarre as they are, I can certainly understand and hold no malice against those who could see no possibility but a deliberate scam.
After the fall of BitofEarth, I tried a home-based business selling credit-card readers with a guy who I'd met at the mental home, but he WAS a scam artist, and I was soon standing on the sidewalk in San Dimas with Diamond, Orangeblossom, an eviction notice, and not a red cent to my name. Begging at gas stations for money and gas to get us there, we made it into Hollywood, where we crashed on a friend's couch for a few days until we could scrape together the money taking pictures as costumed characters on the Boulevard to get a cheap motel room.
We lived hand to mouth that way for all of 2004 and the first half of 2005, trying to repair our lives. The maelstrom that destroyed BitofEarth, horrifying and painful as it was, was, in the end, I believe, the work of God.
It also destroyed the 'duplicate Elijah' and I had to start over looking myself hard in the face. It was about this time that we separated from Diamond, who had begun having fits of temper where she would bite and attack us and herself, as well as stealing alcohol. We have heard several stories about her going through quite the litany of roommates with several different horror stories of lies and dozens of identities on her part, but I don't trust gossip, and it's not my business anyway. I haven't seen her in over 3 years, and I hope that she is well and has gotten the help she so clearly needed.
Terribly afraid at being pinned as a con artist when I hadn't stolen from anyone, and seized with panic attacks at the thought of being made to live as Amy Player, a girl, I tried to adopt a new identity so that I could sort myself out while still living as a male.
No movie stars this time, no big deal, just a drifting 'actor, writer, jack-of-all-trades' with a mysterious past he wouldn't talk about.
I got a lot of therapy, found out about transgender, saved up money, got an apartment, and started looking at building up a long-term life again.
In October, an opportunity presented us to move to Toronto to help manage a small cafe and live in an attached apartment as roommates with the owners. We felt that this was a perfect opportunity, as not only could we fully move back into the 'normal' workforce, but we could get a fresh start and be really honest with people, as we didn't have pre-existent relationships there created under a need to hide my insanity or my gender situation.
We told people that we were moving out East, flying to New York (this was true, flying to Buffalo and meeting our employers there saved over half on tickets) so that we could leave that far behind and live like normal people.
God, however, does not allow Jonah to flee Ninevah. The Toronto opportunity was a scam, and we were stranded in Buffalo. In early February. Of this year. Nothing makes you look at your life like twenty degrees below freezing windchill.
I had already become a Christian again over the course of my therapy, once I knew that I was just another example of God's infinite diversity and not some terrible creature,
but at the border, it seemed like He was speaking to me.
****You can't run. You can change, and you have changed, you can grow up, and you have grown up, you can mature, and you have matured, and you can go on to live a normal life, but you must deal with what you have done in the past. I may be able to wipe your sins clean as though they never happened, but that does not absolve you of needing to face those you sinned against.*****
…
…
…
So we called Orangeblossom's mother, and my parents, and we have reconnected with our families. I am home now, as I write this, patching things up with my parents, and at the end of this month will be moving on to a regular job and apartment with Orangeblossom and our little pet bird.
Our relationship has grown from two severely screwed up people clinging to each other to something amazingly precious and tried by fire, and we hope to spend the rest of our lives together.
I do not expect forgiveness or absolution from any of you, but I do ask of you one thing. Please do not try to destroy me any further unless I warrant it.
If I am caught with so much as a toe out of place in a charity, organization, business, or online, feel free to light the pitchforks, but as for the past...I beg you. I was little more than a child, and a profoundly messed up one.
There was a police investigation, charges were never filed, civil fines were paid. I am currently trying to set aside as much as I can per month of my paycheck (as soon as I have one) to pay off the last of my financial obligations to Jeanine, but I am really and truly trying to be a healthy and law-abiding grown man, no matter how disastrously crazy I was as a young girl. Please, please...you have my social security number, my date of birth, my other vital stats, many of you.
I live in fear every day that I will find things done in my name for spite, that I will get a job only to find people parked outside my office yelling for my head, that years from now I will adopt a baby and have people organizing an internet campaign to call Social Services and get it taken...that my life will be ruined because in 2003, I tried to organize a fan convention when I should have spent that year in a mental hospital.
I don't want your forgiveness. I'm willing to accept your anger, your hate. I don't think this will just go away. I know that the written word endures, that the things I wrote can never be taken off of the internet thanks to Google Cache and the Wayback Machine,
and that there will always be a book out there commemorating what I have done, and what people thought of me because of that. My lowest and darkest moments will always be public sport and satire, because I lied, and that is a sin, and to sin is both to hurt others and to bring their retribution upon you.
I am not trying to escape, indeed, I am confronting it all head-on and with what I hope you can see is soul-baring honesty.
Comments are not locked. I will even answer your questions on specific matters, and answer them in full honesty, as I know that however lengthy, this has just been an overview.
I have stopped running. I have confessed my sins. I await the consequences. I deserve no forgiveness.
I only ask to be allowed to have a second chance at life,
not at your lives.
God Bless You
Sincerely
Just Me
and there it wound up taking a still-further turn into the bizarre. Focusing on trying to 'reach' Frodo, I found myself 'bringing' Elijah Wood by accident. I since understand that what I was really doing was an uncontrolled mix of free-association and role-playing, but at the time, I thought it was all very real.
Though even I was reluctant at first to believe it could be possible to have channeled a living human being, my doubts were shattered when things I had "channeled" were proven to be true in the DVD release and in interviews that hadn't occurred yet. What had actually happened, of course, is that I already knew a near-fanatical amount about that young man from being a fan to the level I was, and any good profiler can tell you that someone with a gift for getting into the heads of others (like a writer) and enough information can often predict other people's actions to a creepy extent.
Yet from my point of view, it was irrefutable evidence, and this one felt more right than anything previous (no surprise, as I was for the first time role-playing a human male, near my own age, struggling with sexual identity issues and trying to juggle what people expected of him with his true self).
I believed heart and soul that I was channeling the spirit of Elijah Wood. I have tried to explain this away as just "role playing that got out of hand" before, or as "poking the tinhats", but that's just excuse-making to try and hide how phenomenally fucked up I was.
Being Elijah gave me the ability to be a boy, and I clung to it with a fervor I didn't know I was capable of, nor was willing to admit to. I believed that something had clearly gone wrong with the Paladin powers, because "Amy" was less and less willing to return (given the option, I was loathe to be a lesbian girl again) and Elijah was slowly splitting off a second consciousness from himself and taking over my body. This is about as far from reality as it ever got, and lasted through all of 2003. Yes, I thought I was the split-off duplicate channeled soul of Elijah Wood the entire time I was planning and attempting to execute Project Elanor and all the other BitofEarth events.
Yes, that is crazy.
Yes, that is fucked up.
No, I don't think that absolves me.
As Elijah, I tried to deal with the 'terrible situation' of being split off from myself and trapped in a girl's body (the closest I had yet come to confronting being transgender, as the only other exposure I had to the concept was MsAllegro, who sets off every NO alarm in ANYONE'S book) as best I could, even taking some people 'into my confidence' to 'tell them the truth.' Which was spinning farther and farther away from what anyone else on this planet knew as reality.
I also got BitofEarth into HUGE trouble from a fire triangle of three different major problems, all of which I am owning up to freely.
1: I was relying on a lot of "knowledge" which I wasn't aware I was making up.
This was primarily about the movie industry, publicity, and my "friends" on the cast and crew. Again, using the profiling principle, I was right enough of the time that I got an amazingly long way before it began crumbling around my ears, but in the end, the house (or the real world) always wins.
2. I was at this point completely unraveled from what was and was not true about my own life, and what I believed about myself and my past could change from moment to moment. This did not engender what you would exactly call a spirit of trust, which is something very important when you are working on a project of that magnitude.
3. Aware that I had lost everyone in my previous life - whether that was as Amy OR Elijah - I hung a crazed amount of importance on BitofEarth, the people in it, and them all continuing to like me at all costs. Especially Orangeblossom, whom I had fallen in love with by then.
In order to try and maintain this, I took on ridiculously more than I could handle.
If someone wanted it, I promised it. If I could find a way to do it - lie, cheat, hook, or crook - I did it, or if I couldn't, I came up with an excuse that made it not my fault.
I delegated my hugely overloaded plate to others, but when they weren't happy with the work, or if something went wrong, I took it back onto myself rather than confront them or drive them, even if I already had more than I could handle.
I considered the success of Orangeblossom's and everyone else's whims at BitofEarth to be the stuff of life or dearth, and had completely lost all perspective. And if you're fighting for your life, not a convention or organization, you'll do anything, say anything, promise anything, and prop yourself up on a house of cards hoping you can find glue before the wind blows.
Well, as everyone knows, the wind blew big time and I didn't have any glue. Seeing the sure destruction of TentMoot and the exposure of the lies I had told to try and pull it off, I tried to kill myself.
I am actually very thankful for this, as the mandatory rest in the mental hospital was my first step towards re-connecting with reality.
No, BitofEarth was not a scam. I was never trying to get anything out of anyone, and I have never profited so much as a dime from any cast or crewmember, nor anyone associated with New Line Cinema.
As a matter of fact, Orangeblossom and myself spent ourselves into destitution and still OWE about $1,200 to Jeanine in money she spent on us because we were pumping every dime into BoE, and about $100 to the Kiwi's for money they spent on themselves because we had abjectly nothing. I was never trying to con anyone, or to get anything out of it, even attention, as anyone who was in that inner circle can recall that I ducked the spotlight as though it were poison.
All I wanted was to make a lot of people happy,
but I did it in a way that was maladjusted to say the least, and with the facts as truly beyond the bizarre as they are, I can certainly understand and hold no malice against those who could see no possibility but a deliberate scam.
After the fall of BitofEarth, I tried a home-based business selling credit-card readers with a guy who I'd met at the mental home, but he WAS a scam artist, and I was soon standing on the sidewalk in San Dimas with Diamond, Orangeblossom, an eviction notice, and not a red cent to my name. Begging at gas stations for money and gas to get us there, we made it into Hollywood, where we crashed on a friend's couch for a few days until we could scrape together the money taking pictures as costumed characters on the Boulevard to get a cheap motel room.
We lived hand to mouth that way for all of 2004 and the first half of 2005, trying to repair our lives. The maelstrom that destroyed BitofEarth, horrifying and painful as it was, was, in the end, I believe, the work of God.
It also destroyed the 'duplicate Elijah' and I had to start over looking myself hard in the face. It was about this time that we separated from Diamond, who had begun having fits of temper where she would bite and attack us and herself, as well as stealing alcohol. We have heard several stories about her going through quite the litany of roommates with several different horror stories of lies and dozens of identities on her part, but I don't trust gossip, and it's not my business anyway. I haven't seen her in over 3 years, and I hope that she is well and has gotten the help she so clearly needed.
Terribly afraid at being pinned as a con artist when I hadn't stolen from anyone, and seized with panic attacks at the thought of being made to live as Amy Player, a girl, I tried to adopt a new identity so that I could sort myself out while still living as a male.
No movie stars this time, no big deal, just a drifting 'actor, writer, jack-of-all-trades' with a mysterious past he wouldn't talk about.
I got a lot of therapy, found out about transgender, saved up money, got an apartment, and started looking at building up a long-term life again.
In October, an opportunity presented us to move to Toronto to help manage a small cafe and live in an attached apartment as roommates with the owners. We felt that this was a perfect opportunity, as not only could we fully move back into the 'normal' workforce, but we could get a fresh start and be really honest with people, as we didn't have pre-existent relationships there created under a need to hide my insanity or my gender situation.
We told people that we were moving out East, flying to New York (this was true, flying to Buffalo and meeting our employers there saved over half on tickets) so that we could leave that far behind and live like normal people.
God, however, does not allow Jonah to flee Ninevah. The Toronto opportunity was a scam, and we were stranded in Buffalo. In early February. Of this year. Nothing makes you look at your life like twenty degrees below freezing windchill.
I had already become a Christian again over the course of my therapy, once I knew that I was just another example of God's infinite diversity and not some terrible creature,
but at the border, it seemed like He was speaking to me.
****You can't run. You can change, and you have changed, you can grow up, and you have grown up, you can mature, and you have matured, and you can go on to live a normal life, but you must deal with what you have done in the past. I may be able to wipe your sins clean as though they never happened, but that does not absolve you of needing to face those you sinned against.*****
…
…
…
So we called Orangeblossom's mother, and my parents, and we have reconnected with our families. I am home now, as I write this, patching things up with my parents, and at the end of this month will be moving on to a regular job and apartment with Orangeblossom and our little pet bird.
Our relationship has grown from two severely screwed up people clinging to each other to something amazingly precious and tried by fire, and we hope to spend the rest of our lives together.
I do not expect forgiveness or absolution from any of you, but I do ask of you one thing. Please do not try to destroy me any further unless I warrant it.
If I am caught with so much as a toe out of place in a charity, organization, business, or online, feel free to light the pitchforks, but as for the past...I beg you. I was little more than a child, and a profoundly messed up one.
There was a police investigation, charges were never filed, civil fines were paid. I am currently trying to set aside as much as I can per month of my paycheck (as soon as I have one) to pay off the last of my financial obligations to Jeanine, but I am really and truly trying to be a healthy and law-abiding grown man, no matter how disastrously crazy I was as a young girl. Please, please...you have my social security number, my date of birth, my other vital stats, many of you.
I live in fear every day that I will find things done in my name for spite, that I will get a job only to find people parked outside my office yelling for my head, that years from now I will adopt a baby and have people organizing an internet campaign to call Social Services and get it taken...that my life will be ruined because in 2003, I tried to organize a fan convention when I should have spent that year in a mental hospital.
I don't want your forgiveness. I'm willing to accept your anger, your hate. I don't think this will just go away. I know that the written word endures, that the things I wrote can never be taken off of the internet thanks to Google Cache and the Wayback Machine,
and that there will always be a book out there commemorating what I have done, and what people thought of me because of that. My lowest and darkest moments will always be public sport and satire, because I lied, and that is a sin, and to sin is both to hurt others and to bring their retribution upon you.
I am not trying to escape, indeed, I am confronting it all head-on and with what I hope you can see is soul-baring honesty.
Comments are not locked. I will even answer your questions on specific matters, and answer them in full honesty, as I know that however lengthy, this has just been an overview.
I have stopped running. I have confessed my sins. I await the consequences. I deserve no forgiveness.
I only ask to be allowed to have a second chance at life,
not at your lives.
God Bless You
Sincerely
Just Me
Andrew Blake's emails to Carlanime/ATF's commentary on his Amy Player fauxpology, part 1
(Anonymous) 2015-04-10 07:04 am (UTC)(link)Sent: Tuesday, November 15, 2011 7:48 AM
Subject: The Other Side of the Story
First of all, before I begin anything, understand that this is being sent under the most extreme confidentiality. I have talked to you fairly extensively since the Brittany’s eulogy debacle, and I believe you’re trustworthy and a decent person. You’ve also not published or gossiped about my diagnosis, nor caused wank on my Facebook, which gives me further incentive to trust you. However, not to be too harsh, but if one word of this pops up on one of the wank sites, I’ll know where it’s from and I actually will honest to God sue you for invasion of privacy. Now that that unpleasant business is out of the way, it’s only fair for you to know the other side of this whole sordid mess.
As you know , the official on paper diagnosis of what’s wrong with me: Severe Gender Disphoria leading to Dissociative Identity Disorder possibly comorbid with Borderline Personality Disorder on select aspects. I assume you’ve looked that up by now. However, I have to give that with the caveat that the psychologist who gave that diagnosis didn’t have the full story either. I withheld things because I’m afraid of anything from just being mocked and not believed all the way to being locked up. If I’m lucky, it would be in a mental institution. If I’m not, it would be to be studied somewhere. The reality is that I don’t know what’s actually wrong with me, though I have theories, and I can tell you about it, even if I can’t categorize it. Whether you believe me or not is wholly up to you.
There is more than one of me.
My life has never been ‘right.' I didn’t have a name for it for the longest time. When I was a child, I just knew that things were very confusing. It wasn’t about gender identity for me, because gender role was never a big deal in my house: my father was the gentle, artistic one who loved show tunes and rescued baby animals and ran rescue while my mother was the hardass welder and unquestionably ran the household. I did, however know that nothing ever seemed right or real, and that I often had gaps in my memories where people said - and it was obvious I had - done things I didn’t remember. I was obsessed from literally toddlerhood with acting and pretending to be someone else, and those were the only times I felt at all ok. When I was just “being myself,” I always felt like I was trapped in something horrible. I was desperately lonely, but I didn’t want friends, because friends wanted to relate to me in ways that just made me feel worse. I wound up in several very abusive friendships before the age of ten, just because it actually felt more right to have a 'friend’ who treated me like the dirt I felt like than one who was being nice to something that felt so wrong. [SISTER’S NAME REDACTED], on the other hand, was perfect, and I was gradually more and more simply the “bad” one, even exorcised several times because everyone knew something was very, very off, and in my mother’s religious circle, that meant demons. I tried to be “good” and be what “a girl is supposed to be”, but I was frankly horrible at it, and lying then more than when everyone else said I was lying. And yet I wasn’t a “tomboy”, either. No football and worms and GI Joes…I was my father’s gentle, artistic, idealistic, caretaking, son who didn’t even know how to explain that. I retreated more and more deeply into fantasy, going to extreme lengths to become the youngest character interpreter in the history of Colonial Williamsburg and getting every hour I was allowed by law, because it gave me 20-30 hours a week of being someone who was ok with themselves.
When I was about 12, horrible physical things started happening. That would be, if you want to be blunt about it, when what most people would call my sanity finally utterly broke. Imagine the most grotesque Eldrich abomination, body-horror type monstrosity you can. Now imagine that it’s eating your body. Slowly, painfully, unstoppably. Now imagine that everyone around you is insisting that it’s normal and a good thing and that everything you do think about yourself or think is right or wrong is called a lie or worse. And that you’re socially isolated, rurally homeschooled, in a hardcore right wing 700 Club/Irish Catholic environment with a sister who is the embodiment of everything that you’re supposed to be but aren’t. I really can’t say I’m surprised that something drastic happened.
I started having more and more blank spaces. I’d lose huge chunks of time, and find evidence of what I’d done in the mean time. What was even more horribly surreal, these blank chunks apparently belonged to a different person. Or rather, two or three of them. I had utterly no consciousness when it was happening; same as if I’d been knocked out, no control over my actions, and no control over what happened during them, but afterwards, I would remember…but as if I’d been watching rather than doing it. Two of them used my name, but seemed to have completely different memories and versions of my life, different likes and dislikes, different habits and talents, while the third was the character I’d been playing at Colonial Williamsburg. My time at work was no longer mine, but everyone was suddenly utterly floored by my incredibly realistic performance. No other child actor was coming nearly as close to seeming like an entirely realized person! And NEVER breaking character! What was even more eerie; these alter egoes didn’t seem to have any knowledge of me, nor awareness that they were anything other than full and complete human beings who had lived entire lives.
To this day, I don’t know what they are. It’s the thing that scares and fascinates me the most, and that I can’t quite be honest with psychiatrists about. They don’t fit the rules for DiD alternate personalities. They’re not only too fully realized; their self-contained histories are too complete, and contain information I couldn’t possibly have. They have skills I don’t have; some even speak languages I don’t.
I isolated myself more and more socially. Now there was starting to be more pressure on gender roles, and the older I got, the less people treated me with a child’s androgyny. Boys started coming on to me. I started working a second job. I was working 50-60 hours a week when we got the computer and the internet. I dove into it with all the desperate hysteria of the lonely who are incapable of socializing normally. It never occurred to me to present as a boy online. I still didn’t know what I was other than wrongwrongwrongwrongcrazywrongcrazy. I was doing everything I could to hide the alters. I was afraid they might be demons, or that they’d be treated as demons, but I also knew I absolutely could not cope with my own life. Yes, some of them took parts I had once desperately loved, but they also made it possible just to function by taking the parts I couldn’t bear, even as hiding them was making my life less and less functional and I was getting in more and more trouble for the things they did and the “lies” they told. You can’t exactly say “I wasn’t me, and it was true to them!”
[excerpt from a prior posted explanation went here; I’ve cut it for length]
This is almost true. Except that it was almost never me online. Two of the by-then-three alters - the two I’ve already told you about other than the CW one - were the ones who got into the online stuff. They weren’t even aware of each other. They sent each other emails and worked together online on stories. It wasn’t a hoax or sockpuppets; it was the most surreal thing to be caught in the middle of, and I had no control over it at all. I simply had to dance faster and faster when it WAS me to try and get out of the hot water they kept putting me in.
By the time I got sent off to college - at not quite 17, never previously schooled, away from home for the first time, living in Newport News with a cousin who hated me and constantly derided me as crazy and weird - I was almost never in my own head. I was very seriously contemplating suicide. I was no longer working Colonial Williamsburg. That one went away. A new one showed up, and I hated her tremendously. I wanted to kill her, and I hated the situations she got me into. It’s the one you hear about a lot from CNU - the little asskissing theatre queen who almost married me off and (I can’t believe I’m actually admitting this) did what I honestly feel is rape me several times with several different men and a couple of girls. I call it rape because I DID NOT CONSENT to my body being used that way and had no control over it or ability to say no. But how the fuck do you ever explain to anyone that technically, you raped yourself? Or was it me? Again, I don’t know. They’ve never fit what dissociations are supposed to be. And I couldn’t scream for help; instead I just had to do everything possible to pretend that I was only me, at the same time that I was still gagging with internal horror over what me was. It was like even when I was in my own head I was trapped in my body. I don’t know if I’m making sense. If I’m conveying the kind of nightmare it was.
Then I met someone who for the first time offered me some kind of explanation, some kind of anything that made even the vaguest sense, and I pounced on it like water in the motherfucking desert.
[another excerpt went here]
Again, strip away that I’m trying to hide the alters here, and you’ve got the brutally honest truth. Under her “careful guidance” over a half dozen others appeared, and I was relegated to the nosebleed seats in my own head. Sometimes it was as much as a month before I’d be there.
During this time, they got involved with Abbey. I say they, because I honestly didn’t know about it for the better part of three months, and by then things were well underway. It was the alter from CNU and one of the Priestess’ servants who got to know her and started doing things with her while I was just using my very little time to attempt to bullshit to my parents why I was failing out of school. Next thing I knew I’d been transferred to Georgetown in Washington DC. I had no say in that. A lot of my most prized possessions got discarded by alters to whom they meant nothing when I moved. Abbey had been flown out to see me, and they’d had sex with her “for Beltaine." I’d hit a new low: a married woman. I stopped even trying to hold on and just let them take me.
June of 2002, I went to meet Orangeblossom in person in Oregon . It was a deeply profound experience, getting to "channel freely’ with someone else in person, and there it wound up taking a still-further turn into the bizarre. Focusing on trying to 'reach’ Frodo, I found myself 'bringing’ Elijah Wood by accident.
Though even I was reluctant at first to believe it could be possible to have channeled a living human being, my doubts were shattered when things I had "channeled” were proven to be true in the DVD release and in interviews that hadn’t occurred yet.
I give a pseudobabble bullshit excuse for how I could have known those things (I’m good at trying to smooth over the impossible in my life) but the fact of the matter is that they were things I couldn’t have known. Again with the I have no idea what actually is going on. Are they ghosts? Mirrors of consciousness from another plane of reality? Some kind of time loop or alternate? Jungian collective unconsciousness creations? No fucking clue.
As I try to tactfully explain, this was the first one who had openly been male. And as horrible as it was - because to him and his as I’ve mentioned before full personality and previous memories, he’d been yanked from his life and thrown into this mess - it was at the same time wonderful in a way I couldn’t possibly describe to be able to look over memories and actions and have them feel somehow more right even as they were so so wrong. I let go. I let the alter have me because at least he was a he.
I believed heart and soul that I was channeling the spirit of Elijah Wood. I have tried to explain this away as just “role playing that got out of hand” before, or as “poking the tinhats”, but that’s just excuse-making to try and hide how phenomenally fucked up I was.
Being Elijah gave me the ability to be a boy, and I clung to it with a fervor I didn’t know I was capable of, nor was willing to admit to. I believed that something had clearly gone wrong with the Paladin powers, because “Amy” was less and less willing to return (given the option, I was loathe to be a lesbian girl again) and Elijah was slowly splitting off a second consciousness from himself and taking over my body. This is about as far from reality as it ever got, and lasted through all of 2003. Yes, I thought I was the split-off duplicate channeled soul of Elijah Wood the entire time I was planning and attempting to execute Project Elanor and all the other BitofEarth events.
Yes, that is crazy.
Yes, that is fucked up.
No, I don’t think that absolves me.
As Elijah, I tried to deal with the 'terrible situation’ of being split off from myself and trapped in a girl’s body (the closest I had yet come to confronting being transgender, as the only other exposure I had to the concept was MsAllegro, who sets off every NO alarm in ANYONE’S book) as best I could, even taking some people 'into my confidence’ to 'tell them the truth.'
I also got BitofEarth into HUGE trouble from a fire triangle of three different major problems, all of which I am owning up to freely.
1: I was relying on a lot of “knowledge” which I wasn’t aware I was making up. This was primarily about the movie industry, publicity, and my “friends” on the cast and crew. Again, using the profiling principle, I was right enough of the time that I got an amazingly long way before it began crumbling around my ears, but in the end, the house (or the real world) always wins.
Actually, I was right on everything that pre-dated the "split,“ but as the gap between that and the present got wider, there was more and more information I had that was no longer accurate.
Subject: The Other Side of the Story
First of all, before I begin anything, understand that this is being sent under the most extreme confidentiality. I have talked to you fairly extensively since the Brittany’s eulogy debacle, and I believe you’re trustworthy and a decent person. You’ve also not published or gossiped about my diagnosis, nor caused wank on my Facebook, which gives me further incentive to trust you. However, not to be too harsh, but if one word of this pops up on one of the wank sites, I’ll know where it’s from and I actually will honest to God sue you for invasion of privacy. Now that that unpleasant business is out of the way, it’s only fair for you to know the other side of this whole sordid mess.
As you know , the official on paper diagnosis of what’s wrong with me: Severe Gender Disphoria leading to Dissociative Identity Disorder possibly comorbid with Borderline Personality Disorder on select aspects. I assume you’ve looked that up by now. However, I have to give that with the caveat that the psychologist who gave that diagnosis didn’t have the full story either. I withheld things because I’m afraid of anything from just being mocked and not believed all the way to being locked up. If I’m lucky, it would be in a mental institution. If I’m not, it would be to be studied somewhere. The reality is that I don’t know what’s actually wrong with me, though I have theories, and I can tell you about it, even if I can’t categorize it. Whether you believe me or not is wholly up to you.
There is more than one of me.
My life has never been ‘right.' I didn’t have a name for it for the longest time. When I was a child, I just knew that things were very confusing. It wasn’t about gender identity for me, because gender role was never a big deal in my house: my father was the gentle, artistic one who loved show tunes and rescued baby animals and ran rescue while my mother was the hardass welder and unquestionably ran the household. I did, however know that nothing ever seemed right or real, and that I often had gaps in my memories where people said - and it was obvious I had - done things I didn’t remember. I was obsessed from literally toddlerhood with acting and pretending to be someone else, and those were the only times I felt at all ok. When I was just “being myself,” I always felt like I was trapped in something horrible. I was desperately lonely, but I didn’t want friends, because friends wanted to relate to me in ways that just made me feel worse. I wound up in several very abusive friendships before the age of ten, just because it actually felt more right to have a 'friend’ who treated me like the dirt I felt like than one who was being nice to something that felt so wrong. [SISTER’S NAME REDACTED], on the other hand, was perfect, and I was gradually more and more simply the “bad” one, even exorcised several times because everyone knew something was very, very off, and in my mother’s religious circle, that meant demons. I tried to be “good” and be what “a girl is supposed to be”, but I was frankly horrible at it, and lying then more than when everyone else said I was lying. And yet I wasn’t a “tomboy”, either. No football and worms and GI Joes…I was my father’s gentle, artistic, idealistic, caretaking, son who didn’t even know how to explain that. I retreated more and more deeply into fantasy, going to extreme lengths to become the youngest character interpreter in the history of Colonial Williamsburg and getting every hour I was allowed by law, because it gave me 20-30 hours a week of being someone who was ok with themselves.
When I was about 12, horrible physical things started happening. That would be, if you want to be blunt about it, when what most people would call my sanity finally utterly broke. Imagine the most grotesque Eldrich abomination, body-horror type monstrosity you can. Now imagine that it’s eating your body. Slowly, painfully, unstoppably. Now imagine that everyone around you is insisting that it’s normal and a good thing and that everything you do think about yourself or think is right or wrong is called a lie or worse. And that you’re socially isolated, rurally homeschooled, in a hardcore right wing 700 Club/Irish Catholic environment with a sister who is the embodiment of everything that you’re supposed to be but aren’t. I really can’t say I’m surprised that something drastic happened.
I started having more and more blank spaces. I’d lose huge chunks of time, and find evidence of what I’d done in the mean time. What was even more horribly surreal, these blank chunks apparently belonged to a different person. Or rather, two or three of them. I had utterly no consciousness when it was happening; same as if I’d been knocked out, no control over my actions, and no control over what happened during them, but afterwards, I would remember…but as if I’d been watching rather than doing it. Two of them used my name, but seemed to have completely different memories and versions of my life, different likes and dislikes, different habits and talents, while the third was the character I’d been playing at Colonial Williamsburg. My time at work was no longer mine, but everyone was suddenly utterly floored by my incredibly realistic performance. No other child actor was coming nearly as close to seeming like an entirely realized person! And NEVER breaking character! What was even more eerie; these alter egoes didn’t seem to have any knowledge of me, nor awareness that they were anything other than full and complete human beings who had lived entire lives.
To this day, I don’t know what they are. It’s the thing that scares and fascinates me the most, and that I can’t quite be honest with psychiatrists about. They don’t fit the rules for DiD alternate personalities. They’re not only too fully realized; their self-contained histories are too complete, and contain information I couldn’t possibly have. They have skills I don’t have; some even speak languages I don’t.
I isolated myself more and more socially. Now there was starting to be more pressure on gender roles, and the older I got, the less people treated me with a child’s androgyny. Boys started coming on to me. I started working a second job. I was working 50-60 hours a week when we got the computer and the internet. I dove into it with all the desperate hysteria of the lonely who are incapable of socializing normally. It never occurred to me to present as a boy online. I still didn’t know what I was other than wrongwrongwrongwrongcrazywrongcrazy. I was doing everything I could to hide the alters. I was afraid they might be demons, or that they’d be treated as demons, but I also knew I absolutely could not cope with my own life. Yes, some of them took parts I had once desperately loved, but they also made it possible just to function by taking the parts I couldn’t bear, even as hiding them was making my life less and less functional and I was getting in more and more trouble for the things they did and the “lies” they told. You can’t exactly say “I wasn’t me, and it was true to them!”
[excerpt from a prior posted explanation went here; I’ve cut it for length]
This is almost true. Except that it was almost never me online. Two of the by-then-three alters - the two I’ve already told you about other than the CW one - were the ones who got into the online stuff. They weren’t even aware of each other. They sent each other emails and worked together online on stories. It wasn’t a hoax or sockpuppets; it was the most surreal thing to be caught in the middle of, and I had no control over it at all. I simply had to dance faster and faster when it WAS me to try and get out of the hot water they kept putting me in.
By the time I got sent off to college - at not quite 17, never previously schooled, away from home for the first time, living in Newport News with a cousin who hated me and constantly derided me as crazy and weird - I was almost never in my own head. I was very seriously contemplating suicide. I was no longer working Colonial Williamsburg. That one went away. A new one showed up, and I hated her tremendously. I wanted to kill her, and I hated the situations she got me into. It’s the one you hear about a lot from CNU - the little asskissing theatre queen who almost married me off and (I can’t believe I’m actually admitting this) did what I honestly feel is rape me several times with several different men and a couple of girls. I call it rape because I DID NOT CONSENT to my body being used that way and had no control over it or ability to say no. But how the fuck do you ever explain to anyone that technically, you raped yourself? Or was it me? Again, I don’t know. They’ve never fit what dissociations are supposed to be. And I couldn’t scream for help; instead I just had to do everything possible to pretend that I was only me, at the same time that I was still gagging with internal horror over what me was. It was like even when I was in my own head I was trapped in my body. I don’t know if I’m making sense. If I’m conveying the kind of nightmare it was.
Then I met someone who for the first time offered me some kind of explanation, some kind of anything that made even the vaguest sense, and I pounced on it like water in the motherfucking desert.
[another excerpt went here]
Again, strip away that I’m trying to hide the alters here, and you’ve got the brutally honest truth. Under her “careful guidance” over a half dozen others appeared, and I was relegated to the nosebleed seats in my own head. Sometimes it was as much as a month before I’d be there.
During this time, they got involved with Abbey. I say they, because I honestly didn’t know about it for the better part of three months, and by then things were well underway. It was the alter from CNU and one of the Priestess’ servants who got to know her and started doing things with her while I was just using my very little time to attempt to bullshit to my parents why I was failing out of school. Next thing I knew I’d been transferred to Georgetown in Washington DC. I had no say in that. A lot of my most prized possessions got discarded by alters to whom they meant nothing when I moved. Abbey had been flown out to see me, and they’d had sex with her “for Beltaine." I’d hit a new low: a married woman. I stopped even trying to hold on and just let them take me.
June of 2002, I went to meet Orangeblossom in person in Oregon . It was a deeply profound experience, getting to "channel freely’ with someone else in person, and there it wound up taking a still-further turn into the bizarre. Focusing on trying to 'reach’ Frodo, I found myself 'bringing’ Elijah Wood by accident.
Though even I was reluctant at first to believe it could be possible to have channeled a living human being, my doubts were shattered when things I had "channeled” were proven to be true in the DVD release and in interviews that hadn’t occurred yet.
I give a pseudobabble bullshit excuse for how I could have known those things (I’m good at trying to smooth over the impossible in my life) but the fact of the matter is that they were things I couldn’t have known. Again with the I have no idea what actually is going on. Are they ghosts? Mirrors of consciousness from another plane of reality? Some kind of time loop or alternate? Jungian collective unconsciousness creations? No fucking clue.
As I try to tactfully explain, this was the first one who had openly been male. And as horrible as it was - because to him and his as I’ve mentioned before full personality and previous memories, he’d been yanked from his life and thrown into this mess - it was at the same time wonderful in a way I couldn’t possibly describe to be able to look over memories and actions and have them feel somehow more right even as they were so so wrong. I let go. I let the alter have me because at least he was a he.
I believed heart and soul that I was channeling the spirit of Elijah Wood. I have tried to explain this away as just “role playing that got out of hand” before, or as “poking the tinhats”, but that’s just excuse-making to try and hide how phenomenally fucked up I was.
Being Elijah gave me the ability to be a boy, and I clung to it with a fervor I didn’t know I was capable of, nor was willing to admit to. I believed that something had clearly gone wrong with the Paladin powers, because “Amy” was less and less willing to return (given the option, I was loathe to be a lesbian girl again) and Elijah was slowly splitting off a second consciousness from himself and taking over my body. This is about as far from reality as it ever got, and lasted through all of 2003. Yes, I thought I was the split-off duplicate channeled soul of Elijah Wood the entire time I was planning and attempting to execute Project Elanor and all the other BitofEarth events.
Yes, that is crazy.
Yes, that is fucked up.
No, I don’t think that absolves me.
As Elijah, I tried to deal with the 'terrible situation’ of being split off from myself and trapped in a girl’s body (the closest I had yet come to confronting being transgender, as the only other exposure I had to the concept was MsAllegro, who sets off every NO alarm in ANYONE’S book) as best I could, even taking some people 'into my confidence’ to 'tell them the truth.'
I also got BitofEarth into HUGE trouble from a fire triangle of three different major problems, all of which I am owning up to freely.
1: I was relying on a lot of “knowledge” which I wasn’t aware I was making up. This was primarily about the movie industry, publicity, and my “friends” on the cast and crew. Again, using the profiling principle, I was right enough of the time that I got an amazingly long way before it began crumbling around my ears, but in the end, the house (or the real world) always wins.
Actually, I was right on everything that pre-dated the "split,“ but as the gap between that and the present got wider, there was more and more information I had that was no longer accurate.
Andrew Blake's emails to Carlanime/ATF's commentary on his Amy Player fauxpology, part 2
(Anonymous) 2015-04-10 07:05 am (UTC)(link)2. I was at this point completely unraveled from what was and was not true about my own life, and what I believed about myself and my past could change from moment to moment. This did not engender what you would exactly call a spirit of trust, which is something very important when you are working on a project of that magnitude.
This is because I was continuing to split further. The mess the Priestess had made of me and the alters she had started were still developing, but now Elijah, not me, was the default. Each of those, again, was a completely separate entitity with their own past, and my mouth, face, voice, and eyes could give you ten different backstories in ten days and every single time be able to pass a fleet of lie detectors that it was the truth.
3. Aware that I had lost everyone in my previous life - whether that was as Amy OR Elijah - I hung a crazed amount of importance on BitofEarth, the people in it, and them all continuing to like me at all costs. Especially Orangeblossom, whom I had fallen in love with by then. In order to try and maintain this, I took on ridiculously more than I could handle. If someone wanted it, I promised it. If I could find a way to do it - lie, cheat, hook, or crook - I did it, or if I couldn’t, I came up with an excuse that made it not my fault. I delegated my hugely overloaded plate to others, but when they weren’t happy with the work, or if something went wrong, I took it back onto myself rather than confront them or drive them, even if I already had more than I could handle. I considered the success of Orangeblossom’s and everyone else’s whims at BitofEarth to be the stuff of life or dearth, and had completely lost all perspective. And if you’re fighting for your life, not a convention or organization, you’ll do anything, say anything, promise anything, and prop yourself up on a house of cards hoping you can find glue before the wind blows.
Well, as everyone knows, the wind blew big time and I didn’t have any glue. Seeing the sure destruction of TentMoot and the exposure of the lies I had told to try and pull it off, I tried to kill myself. I am actually very thankful for this, as the mandatory rest in the mental hospital was my first step towards re-connecting with reality.
The alter committed suicide. Or rather, the alter attempted suicide with my body and succeeded in terms of destroying himself as a consciousness. I was left holding the bag, blinking back into existence after over a year, deluged with sudden memories that I’d had no part in and which more or less boiled down to "Wow I’m in Deep Shit."
After the fall of BitofEarth, I tried a home-based business selling credit-card readers with a guy who I’d met at the mental home, but he WAS a scam artist, and I was soon standing on the sidewalk in San Dimas with Diamond, Orangeblossom, an eviction notice, and not a red cent to my name. Begging at gas stations for money and gas to get us there, we made it into Hollywood , where we crashed on a friend’s couch for a few days until we could scrape together the money taking pictures as costumed characters on the Boulevard to get a cheap motel room.
We lived hand to mouth that way for all of 2004 and the first half of 2005, trying to repair our lives. The maelstrom that destroyed BitofEarth, horrifying and painful as it was, was, in the end, I believe, the work of God. It also destroyed the 'duplicate Elijah’ and I had to start over looking myself hard in the face. It was about this time that we separated from Diamond, who had begun having fits of temper where she would bite and attack us and herself, as well as stealing alcohol. We have heard several stories about her going through quite the litany of roommates with several different horror stories of lies and dozens of identities on her part, but I don’t trust gossip, and it’s not my business anyway. I haven’t seen her in over 3 years, and I hope that she is well and has gotten the help she so clearly needed.
Terribly afraid at being pinned as a con artist when I hadn’t stolen from anyone, and seized with panic attacks at the thought of being made to live as Amy Player, a girl, I tried to adopt a new identity so that I could sort myself out while still living as a male. No movie stars this time, no big deal, just a drifting 'actor, writer, jack-of-all-trades’ with a mysterious past he wouldn’t talk about. I got a lot of therapy, found out about transgender, saved up money, got an apartment, and started looking at building up a long-term life again.
This is all again true, but there are some major omissions which were left out to try and protect Abbey. During this time, there was an entire litany of alters. The more stress I was under, the more I split, and this time, they were almost all male and all inter-related with each other one way or another. It had nothing to do with the Daydverse. It is not any kind of precedent to the Daydverse. Abbey’s just assuming, and has frankly never even read it (especially since she calls it my grand "slash epic” when the only gay couple are the very minor characters of Stephen and Derek) After Cherie left, I couldn’t handle it any more.
I was stranded in this huge mess I hadn’t made with this woman who was incredibly needy, clingy, and demanding and whom I frankly couldn’t stand, but whom I had to pander to desperately because she was all I had in the world. She wanted, I gave. I even wrote a screenplay for her and signed over the rights so she could register it in her name with the writer’s guild and managed to get her pitched to Dreamworks, but then she got bored with it and changed her mind. I had nowhere near anything approaching enough self-esteem or even energy to fight back against that she had also learned to ask for the alters and they’d come. I don’t really know her well, but in memory, she revels in being loved and petted and most of all Special. She must at all times be Special. She’s also the most malleable person I’ve ever seen, and I don’t mean that she was “easy to control." Actually, she was incredibly difficult because she was very much a love/believe the one you’re with. This week she’s conservative, now she’s liberal, this week she’s vegetarian, now she wants to raise chickens, we redecorate the apartment fifty times, she wants to be a director no screenwriter no novelist no actress no tv producer…you can see it again now. On her blog, it’s vividly apparent as she realigns herself to the crowd, as long as they call her Special.
I estimate that from 2003-2007 I probably spent a collective month in my own head. Each time the infodumps of catchup memory were huge. I’d get debilitating let-me-die migranes for a day or two. And then I’d know just how much had happened, how many promises and changes and plans had been made without me, and I’d be utterly unable to cope with even knowing where to begin to handle it. So I’d just lie there until, before too long, Abbey would get frustrated with me and ask for one of the others and I’d be gone again.
Next thing I knew, I was back in Virginia. In an apartment, working three jobs, and Abbey had gone with her mother but was still sending me letters saying she loved me and if "we both got our acts together” she’d be coming back. So I posted an apology to try and start the process of rebuilding the mess I’d been left in, figuring that maybe trying to calm down the angry people was a good place to start. I had no idea that she was on any kind of vacation or anything of the sort. I didn’t know where she was other than “with her mother." I worked, I went to counseling, I got a name for (what I was willing to tell him) of what was wrong with me. I started the transition process. I dutifully wrote updates to Abbey weekly and sent her Christmas and birthday presents and received little tokens in return. I didn’t actually have any feelings for her myself, but she was part of the package I’d inherited, and I had very strong feelings for the idea of having a real, stable, relatively sane life. No, things weren’t good. Thanks to Jeanine and the alters, I was a laughingstock and pariah in my old circles, and the whole FtM transition was hell and a half (I found out halfway through that I had a heart condition that almost disqualified me and gave me a prognosis of less than five years, though that later proved to be a mis-reading of the MRI), but I put my head down and shoulder to the proverbial grindstone and told myself that soon I’d just be any other man with a girlfriend who loved him and we could move away from the shame.
Then out of the blue I get a call. It’s her. I give my latest update and ask when she’s coming. She says never. She says she’s with someone else. I ask if we can be friends. She says no. I ask about the bird. She says it’s dead and that if I ever contact her again she’ll have the police on me and she hangs up. I stood there for ten minutes with the phone in my hand, then went into my apartment and sat there. I didn’t go to work. I was in shock. Six weeks later I got evicted, losing my deposit because the electricity had been off for weeks and the fridge was a mire of maggots. I weighed less than 100lbs. I moved into my car. I drove down to the library. I answered an ad for a telemarketing job. I realized I’d have to interview. I started sobbing. I blacked out.
Fourteen months later I’m standing in a room I don’t know with a cat I don’t know, and there’s another, massive infodump. This time, there’s been only one alter. He’s been using my new legal name, Andrew Blake, but he has, like the others, his own fully realized backstory. And oh, God, he’s completely unlike the others. If I’d been able to actually have a life, he’s who I only wish I could have been. He’s smart, funny, strong, and unlike so many of the others who have run roughshod over my life before, he’s so, so kind. He's gotten me into an apartment with a guy named Mark that I’d been friends with when we were very young, he's holding two jobs, has put my mother in her place (he thinks he’s my brother and has just forcefully insisted that he "won’t discuss Amy, I’m your son and you deal with me or not. No Amy, no [SISTER’S NAME REDACTED]”) and reconnected with Papa and my Dad as a SON. I'm actually digging out of the 25K of debt Abbey left me in, and he’s gotten into HP fandom but not in the old way. He’s been writing, drawing, and it’s amazing work that has attracted REAL friends and a REAL social life and he’s been helping people beyond my wildest dreams. He knows nothing about me, and I’m terrified he’ll find out. He’s a wonderful, wonderful man, and he doesn’t deserve me and my mess. But at least some of my demons have followed him - HE’S gotten infodump from people he’s based the Daydverse on, though nothing else.
I don’t know what brought me back, but in that space, I evaluated things and decided that I was a lost cause. No, that’s not self-pity. I never really had a chance. 28 years in, and I’ve lived maybe 10 of them, and pretty much everything since 1995 has been just nightmarish desperate paddling against other people’s mess. Never really a chance to become anything, no real personality or asperations beyond “Oh God please no more what now." And here is this man, this GOOD man, making good things out of the rubble of my life and he has a circle of friends who love him, whom he loves, and who depend on him. So I gave him my life. Sydney Carton: It is a far far better thing and all that.
I had learned during the 2003-2007 span that I could plant triggers - nothing complicated - like post-hypnotic suggestions that would cause me to be yanked back. Very similar to the "If I say chicken fricassee, you’ll wake up,” stuff of movies. He’s aware of the wank and it doesn’t really bother him because hey, it’s all about his sister and he’s got a thick skin, good sense of humor, strong sense of perspective, and a lot of self-esteem. But if it gets really serious about my past vs what he knows as his, it triggers chicken fricassee, I deal with it, and he just has a blank space. And he’s resourceful and has good friends and works around them. As far as he knows, he just has occasional blackouts, possibly from the multiple concussions (which my body DOES carry).
He has no idea of all this, really. And I don’t want him to. He’s the man you’re friends with, but I’m the one trying to shield him from the mess I made before he came along. It’s why I never respond publicly to the wank, why I never say anything about it anywhere other than email boxes where I can delete the correspondence as it’s read and he never has to know. Please, take him as he is. Take me for whatever you want to. Hate me, throw me to the wolves, whatever, but please know that I’m not going to see him destroyed by this. If you do choose the wolves, I’ll find a way to make it look like someone else sent the email. I’ll spin whatever I have to spin, and he’ll believe it, because hey, he KNOWS his own past and life, and he has no reason to doubt them. He’s a good, good person, whether he’s a manifestation, spirit, ghost, alter, other, dissociation, or whatever else. It doesn’t matter. I’ve decided to let him live. Please do the same.
I’ll be waiting for your reply and then this whole thing is getting deleted from the email. I’ve tried to be comprehensive, but it’s a lot, and like I said, I don’t carry on about it in public.
Regards
Legally, Andrew Blake, but not Thanfiction
Did anyone screencap the comments to this? I remember they were pretty epic.
Apparently the transcript of her interview with Andy has ~mysteriously vanished from its original space (http://rebecca-johnson-vafj.squarespace.com/blog/2014/7/16/interview-with-andy-blake-part-1). I made a freezepage to preserve it a while ago though:
http://www.freezepage.com/1405980290KFAVXMYBDV
http://www.freezepage.com/1405980290KFAVXMYBDV
Thanks for saving this, nonny.
I have a few caps:
http://postimg.org/image/kz82ddbjp/
And also a cap for the second, angry "leave me alone!" four days later:
http://postimg.org/image/pwlmyhdit/
Text:
amy_player wrote,
@ 2007-03-07 19:31:00
I have said my piece and taken responsibility for all my lies and misdeeds in the fandoms I was involved in and all the people I hurt, and I have clarified the things that were unclear. I will still be watching this for people whom I owe private apologies to to come forward and give me contact information, and I will send those people apologies individually as needed. However, I am not getting drawn back into fandom, and there will be no more public posts under this or any other identities, and private correspondance will only be forthcoming with those whom I had an actual relationship with.
God bless you all.
Me
http://postimg.org/image/kz82ddbjp/
And also a cap for the second, angry "leave me alone!" four days later:
http://postimg.org/image/pwlmyhdit/
Text:
amy_player wrote,
@ 2007-03-07 19:31:00
I have said my piece and taken responsibility for all my lies and misdeeds in the fandoms I was involved in and all the people I hurt, and I have clarified the things that were unclear. I will still be watching this for people whom I owe private apologies to to come forward and give me contact information, and I will send those people apologies individually as needed. However, I am not getting drawn back into fandom, and there will be no more public posts under this or any other identities, and private correspondance will only be forthcoming with those whom I had an actual relationship with.
God bless you all.
Me
SA fucked up the url: click on the image to get the non-blurry version!
THANK YOU! I have the audio files, but hadn't saved the transcript before she took it down. This is really helpful!
TB
TB
http://andythanfiction.tumblr.com/post/29541577172/excuse-me-while-i-ramble-crazytalk-about-my
Excuse me while I ramble crazytalk about my writing
Sometimes it hurts. Like, physically head-throbbing jittery hungry but too nauseated to snack want to walk or run or do something but too exhausted and unfocused HURTS. Shoving at the inside of my head, jammed against each other like bodies that will be found piled against the only fire exit after the flames have run out of things to consume. Knotting my fingers and drowning out each other’s claims in their own and all of them worthy and yes, I promised this one and oh, but I love that one and this one’s been waiting forever but I can’t do any because I can’t do all and it’s late, so late, with work tomorrow and I should be in bed.
But they’re still there. Always. Every moment of every day. Needing. Needing. Needing. Even at the expense of the “real”, or of myself.
Eighty-odd DA. Plus their parents, siblings, ancestors, children. Human stories, so intertwined and independent, so real, truthful, deserving. They need to be told, seen, heard.
Never enough time. Not if I did nothing but write and draw for the next ten years, twenty. Things would have to be left out, even still, and I hate that I’ve already had to make so many omissions.
It’s why I constantly bubble over with information on my own fandom. I want to overshare. Let me tell you. Let me tell you. Let me tell you. Give me an inch and I’ll give you everything. I know only a tiny tiny number of people even care or listening to anything beyond DAYD, but it wouldn’t matter if I were the last person on earth.
Apocalypse? End of the internet? No problem. I’d tell the burned buildings about Colin. Draw a picture of Rachel in the ashes. Graffiti Renny’s name into the dust. Feed Tommy’s recipes to the shadows and sing Stewart’s music into the wind and dance in the barren streets for Li because I’d need to. It drives me.
So don’t you ever, ever apologize for asking or think you’re being obnoxious for wanting to know or see or wonder about, and don’t you ever assume that it’s a stupid detail I wouldn’t know. I know what color underwear their mothers were wearing the night they were conceived. Not being able to talk about them to most people is so strange for me that it feels like closeting and is the biggest barrier to me having “normal” friends, a “normal” life. I feel like I’m stealing from them. I feel guilty. AP and the rest of it burn like untreated wounds.
It guarantees that no matter how much life gets in the way, I’ll always come back to this until every story is told.
As long as there is breath in my body.
Posted 2 years ago
9 notes
Tagged: Daydverse, writing, nucking futs and know it.
Excuse me while I ramble crazytalk about my writing
Sometimes it hurts. Like, physically head-throbbing jittery hungry but too nauseated to snack want to walk or run or do something but too exhausted and unfocused HURTS. Shoving at the inside of my head, jammed against each other like bodies that will be found piled against the only fire exit after the flames have run out of things to consume. Knotting my fingers and drowning out each other’s claims in their own and all of them worthy and yes, I promised this one and oh, but I love that one and this one’s been waiting forever but I can’t do any because I can’t do all and it’s late, so late, with work tomorrow and I should be in bed.
But they’re still there. Always. Every moment of every day. Needing. Needing. Needing. Even at the expense of the “real”, or of myself.
Eighty-odd DA. Plus their parents, siblings, ancestors, children. Human stories, so intertwined and independent, so real, truthful, deserving. They need to be told, seen, heard.
Never enough time. Not if I did nothing but write and draw for the next ten years, twenty. Things would have to be left out, even still, and I hate that I’ve already had to make so many omissions.
It’s why I constantly bubble over with information on my own fandom. I want to overshare. Let me tell you. Let me tell you. Let me tell you. Give me an inch and I’ll give you everything. I know only a tiny tiny number of people even care or listening to anything beyond DAYD, but it wouldn’t matter if I were the last person on earth.
Apocalypse? End of the internet? No problem. I’d tell the burned buildings about Colin. Draw a picture of Rachel in the ashes. Graffiti Renny’s name into the dust. Feed Tommy’s recipes to the shadows and sing Stewart’s music into the wind and dance in the barren streets for Li because I’d need to. It drives me.
So don’t you ever, ever apologize for asking or think you’re being obnoxious for wanting to know or see or wonder about, and don’t you ever assume that it’s a stupid detail I wouldn’t know. I know what color underwear their mothers were wearing the night they were conceived. Not being able to talk about them to most people is so strange for me that it feels like closeting and is the biggest barrier to me having “normal” friends, a “normal” life. I feel like I’m stealing from them. I feel guilty. AP and the rest of it burn like untreated wounds.
It guarantees that no matter how much life gets in the way, I’ll always come back to this until every story is told.
As long as there is breath in my body.
Posted 2 years ago
9 notes
Tagged: Daydverse, writing, nucking futs and know it.
"I'm not famous only because I pity normal people too much, and they need me."
(Anonymous) 2015-04-11 03:08 am (UTC)(link)http://andythanfiction.tumblr.com/post/13715032540/dreams-and-priorities
Dreams and Priorities
There’s a part of me, there always has been, that desperately knows what group I belong with, and that hungers to shine among them. It gets shivers from Lady Gaga and tries not to let anyone see me cry during Rent and snuck out in the middle of the night to wander around parts of cities where It was happening like a starving man pressing his hands to the restaurant window. I could do it, I know it. I could be one of those shining, dazzling rocket-beacons of people. I have the talent in a dozen areas, I have the style, the guts, the charisma, the thick skin, the passion.
But there are a lot of those.
It’s not that I’m afraid my bang and flash would be lost in the perpetual Guy Fawkes Day/Fourth of July of celebrity, it’s that there are already enough of those for the people who are looking at the sky to see and admire and chase, and they have to by definition stay aloft.
It’s that I’ve seen all the people down on the ground who are crouched in holes and under things and in closets, and they’re scared and hurting and needing and they don’t believe there’s a sky, much less fireworks. I’d rather take my light and use it like an emergency flare, like a rescue worker’s flashlight, and go find people and guide them out and release them into the world where they can have their own sky and sunlight and do whatever they want without fear…and then go back down the hole and get another.
It’s my choice, to spend all my time underground, indoors, quietly coaxing those who deserve so much more than they are afraid is all they can be. Someone has to do it, and I have penance to pay.
But sometimes, in between trips under, I forget to keep my eyes downcast, the sparkle fills my eyes, and I catch myself with a tight throat and all I can do is slap myself back down again, take a deep breath, and hope that maybe 30 will be old enough for that to start to die, because everyone says those kind of wants are for the young.
Dreams and Priorities
There’s a part of me, there always has been, that desperately knows what group I belong with, and that hungers to shine among them. It gets shivers from Lady Gaga and tries not to let anyone see me cry during Rent and snuck out in the middle of the night to wander around parts of cities where It was happening like a starving man pressing his hands to the restaurant window. I could do it, I know it. I could be one of those shining, dazzling rocket-beacons of people. I have the talent in a dozen areas, I have the style, the guts, the charisma, the thick skin, the passion.
But there are a lot of those.
It’s not that I’m afraid my bang and flash would be lost in the perpetual Guy Fawkes Day/Fourth of July of celebrity, it’s that there are already enough of those for the people who are looking at the sky to see and admire and chase, and they have to by definition stay aloft.
It’s that I’ve seen all the people down on the ground who are crouched in holes and under things and in closets, and they’re scared and hurting and needing and they don’t believe there’s a sky, much less fireworks. I’d rather take my light and use it like an emergency flare, like a rescue worker’s flashlight, and go find people and guide them out and release them into the world where they can have their own sky and sunlight and do whatever they want without fear…and then go back down the hole and get another.
It’s my choice, to spend all my time underground, indoors, quietly coaxing those who deserve so much more than they are afraid is all they can be. Someone has to do it, and I have penance to pay.
But sometimes, in between trips under, I forget to keep my eyes downcast, the sparkle fills my eyes, and I catch myself with a tight throat and all I can do is slap myself back down again, take a deep breath, and hope that maybe 30 will be old enough for that to start to die, because everyone says those kind of wants are for the young.
Do you really have a cult, like that tumblr post says that's going around? (Asked by Colourmycity)
(Anonymous) 2015-04-11 05:56 pm (UTC)(link)http://andythanfiction.tumblr.com/post/86490759067/do-you-really-have-a-cult-like-that-tumblr-post
Yes, I did, though not on purpose and not any more.
From about age 16 to just under two years ago, I was, bluntly, batfuck crazy. It’s been diagnosed as a form of paranoid schizophrenia closely related to DID (which my psychiatrist thinks in and of itself is a schizoid disorder) and is responding very, very well to medication and treatment. As a result, I believed several things completely and sincerely that were snarky rhino-fisting Jesus on a ham sandwich WRONG. I have discussed some of them before to a lesser extent or alluded to them, but this is the most open I’ve ever been about it in public because, simply, I’m incredibly fucking ashamed of it and it all looks so much worse laid out on paper that I still can’t quite believe that this was ever my unquestioned normal as much and as I thought inevitably and inescapably as breathing (and unfortunately, this is not a full list of my delusions and hallucinations, just the ones relevant to my fucked up friend patterns):
Multiverse theory that included not only levels of existence where all possible histories were true, but where all fictional universes were true, and that certain very special and important stories could be communicated to our world from the world in which they were true
That I could hear, contact, and channel the spirits of beings and people from these parallel dimensions, fictional characters, as well as certain people - living and dead - on our own dimension
That I was sometimes telepathic and would just know what other people were thinking
That I was sometimes pre or post-cognitive
That I was sometimes given knowledge without knowing where it came from, downloaded into my head like the Matrix
That these gifts had been given to me by God with a solemn duty to tell the stories that He had decided needed to be told, to allow these other beings to live and experience our universe through me - especially those who had died young or unjustly - and to try to help as many people as possible.
That this was part of a divine higher plan or purpose for which I had been chosen by God
That the US government and/or various terrorist organizations knew about my abilities and wanted to capture me and perform awful experiments
Are any of these things true? Fuck no. Did I believe them? Oh God yes, to the point where I literally put my life and the lives of others on the line for and because of them more than once. I believe the only reason that things didn’t go much worse is that there is some kind of merciful diety who recognized no ill intent. (Oh, and just to make things more interesting, absolutely zero ability to differentiate fantasies and created memories or scenarios from reality and real memories. We’re still sorting that out…my therapy sessions sound like Peeta Mellark pretty often and I’ve come to the difficult conclusion that at least for the time being, I literally cannot trust ANYTHING I remember from certain parts of my life unless it’s corroborated by an outside source or completely insignificant. )
That’s not to say harm wasn’t done. A LOT of harm was done. As you can imagine, this was NOT A HEALTHY COMBINATION for me or anyone else around me. That I was crazy was what lead to the situation where I did the things I did to my friends and loved ones, but it does not absolve me of doing it nor make it in any way ok. I DID REALLY FUCKED UP THINGS. I’m still untangling all of them, and I’m still struggling even to contact some of the people I’ve hurt because sometimes God, where do you even start and how do you say “sorry I completely took reality up the ass and you with it but I never meant to hurt you and I really love you as a friend.” Whether or not Sam thought he was ganking demons in 5.02, he murdered two innocent non-possessed kids in a convenience store, and that he thought he had no choice doesn’t make them less dead or him any less the one who did it.
If you look at the list above, you might be able to already understand how exactly it went wrong and why so many people describe it as a cult environment, but I want to break it down to demonstrate that yes, I do actually understand what I did wrong and how I’m preventing it from happening in the present and future. This has been a long and difficult process and continues to be ongoing, sorting out pathology (hallucinations and fixed delusions), maladaptive thought patterns and habits from said pathology (some of the paranoias and the excessive people-pleasing and self-hatred to make up for how much I knew I was costing them), things that are just plain shitty tendencies of mine (micromanaging and the world’s worst time management, for example), and things that are actual good qualities of mine that got corrupted and spat on by the crazy (writing talent, leadership, desire to help people, charisma). Maybe it can even help someone who may recognize some of these behaviors in a relationship or friendship they’re in (or even in themselves), and of course, if anyone who knows me currently sees me doing any of these things, PLEASE let me know immediately so that I can get help, but more importantly stop doing it!
The Chosen Few
What I did then: I was constantly evaluating new people for whether they were suitable to let into the inner circle of those who knew about my superpowers and could share the burden of managing them. People weren’t assessed as friends, but as potential team members, and it was deeply impressed upon them what a tremendously important and above all SECRET task it was, with huge emotional weight placed on being part of that group. Leaving was a huge fucking deal. It all revolved around me and whatever plan I had going on, and it was expected to be the most important thing in their lives or at least be worth dropping anything else if they were needed.
Why it was wrong: Regardless of my intention, it was fucking predatory. In picking out people who would believe me and keep my secrets, I was actually targeting people who would be most willing to enter a completely fucked up situation and stay there because the person at the center of it was charismatic and showered them with genuine love…to make up for otherwise being a sucking life-ruining black hole of crazy. And then it was just our little family against the world and anything that anyone said could be dismissed because they clearly didn’t Understand what it was like on the Inside.
What I’m doing differently: “The Posse” unlike previous groups, is not a tight-knit, secretive, or exclusive band. It’s a casual term for about 20-30ish local fannish people who all like to sometimes get together and do stuff, with an elaborate venn diagram of overlapping interests and fandoms. It’s not all about any one person, one thing, no one has to believe anything, people wander in and out for sometimes months at a time, anyone can add to the group, you’re posse just by saying you are. While yes, I have some closer friends, I am doing everything possible to keep the relationships as open and autonomous as possible. I am not pursuing some special magical hyper-friendship soulbond; just having NORMAL FRIENDS is fucking GREAT!
Constants and Watchers
What I did then - When I was receiving messages from other dimensions or channeling spirits/characters, I often had extended blackouts or periods of memory loss. Rather than taking this as the massive fucking warning sign it was, I recruited friends to act as aids. One of them had to be with me at all times, practically 24/7/365 in case I “had a knock” and they were responsible for supervising the episode and then letting me know exactly what happened.
Why it was wrong - I basically turned completely untrained friends into the full time care team for a dangerously unstable hallucinating individual. “Others” could be violent, distraught, disoriented, and were almost completely unpredictable, sometimes putting my friends into dangerous, stressful, and just plain uncomfortable situations that they felt fully responsible for not only managing, but hiding from those who didn’t know “what I was” and reporting back to me when it ended minutes…or hours…or days later.
What I’m doing differently - Thank pharmaceuticals this doesn’t happen any more. If it did, however, I understand that it is under no circumstances something that is in any way right to put on laymen…especially if they think it’s real! Therefore I’ve made sure that my friends know if I start acting strangely or don’t seem to think I’m myself, they need to just keep me safe long enough to get ahold of my parents and/or call for professional help, NOT supervise it, guide it, or make friends with it.
Center of the Universe
What I did then - Friendships were all-consuming. I would drop my life completely to go be with someone. Living together as a group was the ideal - we came as close to communes as we could and aspired to a lifestyle that had minimum outside contact. Everything revolved around me, my powers, what “The Others” were doing/needed, what messages were coming in, and what the latest project was. Family, jobs, money, material goods, health, time, relationships etc. were all expected to be set aside or offered up to pursue the greater goals, and if you balked, clearly you didn’t care about the current emergency or cause and what was wrong with you, this was God’s plan to help the world.
Why it was wrong: I was completely consuming other people’s lives and resources. I thought it was ok because I had given up just as much of my own, but I missed the memo that I had the right to give up MY things for MY crazy, not to compel other people to give up theirs. There was just nothing, nothing remotely ok about this.
What I’m doing differently: I backslid on this one during GISHWHES big time when I accidentally went off my meds, I’ll say that right now. For the most part, though, I think I’m doing really well at not only accepting that all my friends have their own lives and boundaries and that’s ok, but encouraging it. When I thought one of my friends was getting too wrapped up with me, I gave her an ultimatum that if she didn’t start doing more things away from me and cultivate more of a separate life and get therapy specifically addressing her thing for me, we wouldn’t be able to hang out at all.
The Secret of 42
What I did then - I believed I understood All The Things. Whether it was the truth behind historical events, deep religious and philosophical questions, human behavior, complex sociology, conspiracy theories, complex economics, or celebrity tinhatting, I knew The Truth They Don’t Want You To Know.
Why it was wrong - I’m smart. I’m damned smart. Ain’t nobody that smart. If someone is telling you they know all the secrets to the big damned thing, they’re either bullshitting you or their brain is bullshitting them. It’s not true in popup ads and it’s not true in life.
What I’m doing differently - There are things I’m good at, such as cooking, cosplay, living cheap, some kinds of art, storycraft, a lot of school of hard knocks common sense. Those are things I can quantify and teach from my own experience. However, I’m making very sure to state when something is my opinion, experience, or theory rather than just presenting everything I think as fact, and to make very clear where the limits of my actual expertise are and aren’t, as well as to admit when I just don’t fucking know.
Yes, I did, though not on purpose and not any more.
From about age 16 to just under two years ago, I was, bluntly, batfuck crazy. It’s been diagnosed as a form of paranoid schizophrenia closely related to DID (which my psychiatrist thinks in and of itself is a schizoid disorder) and is responding very, very well to medication and treatment. As a result, I believed several things completely and sincerely that were snarky rhino-fisting Jesus on a ham sandwich WRONG. I have discussed some of them before to a lesser extent or alluded to them, but this is the most open I’ve ever been about it in public because, simply, I’m incredibly fucking ashamed of it and it all looks so much worse laid out on paper that I still can’t quite believe that this was ever my unquestioned normal as much and as I thought inevitably and inescapably as breathing (and unfortunately, this is not a full list of my delusions and hallucinations, just the ones relevant to my fucked up friend patterns):
Multiverse theory that included not only levels of existence where all possible histories were true, but where all fictional universes were true, and that certain very special and important stories could be communicated to our world from the world in which they were true
That I could hear, contact, and channel the spirits of beings and people from these parallel dimensions, fictional characters, as well as certain people - living and dead - on our own dimension
That I was sometimes telepathic and would just know what other people were thinking
That I was sometimes pre or post-cognitive
That I was sometimes given knowledge without knowing where it came from, downloaded into my head like the Matrix
That these gifts had been given to me by God with a solemn duty to tell the stories that He had decided needed to be told, to allow these other beings to live and experience our universe through me - especially those who had died young or unjustly - and to try to help as many people as possible.
That this was part of a divine higher plan or purpose for which I had been chosen by God
That the US government and/or various terrorist organizations knew about my abilities and wanted to capture me and perform awful experiments
Are any of these things true? Fuck no. Did I believe them? Oh God yes, to the point where I literally put my life and the lives of others on the line for and because of them more than once. I believe the only reason that things didn’t go much worse is that there is some kind of merciful diety who recognized no ill intent. (Oh, and just to make things more interesting, absolutely zero ability to differentiate fantasies and created memories or scenarios from reality and real memories. We’re still sorting that out…my therapy sessions sound like Peeta Mellark pretty often and I’ve come to the difficult conclusion that at least for the time being, I literally cannot trust ANYTHING I remember from certain parts of my life unless it’s corroborated by an outside source or completely insignificant. )
That’s not to say harm wasn’t done. A LOT of harm was done. As you can imagine, this was NOT A HEALTHY COMBINATION for me or anyone else around me. That I was crazy was what lead to the situation where I did the things I did to my friends and loved ones, but it does not absolve me of doing it nor make it in any way ok. I DID REALLY FUCKED UP THINGS. I’m still untangling all of them, and I’m still struggling even to contact some of the people I’ve hurt because sometimes God, where do you even start and how do you say “sorry I completely took reality up the ass and you with it but I never meant to hurt you and I really love you as a friend.” Whether or not Sam thought he was ganking demons in 5.02, he murdered two innocent non-possessed kids in a convenience store, and that he thought he had no choice doesn’t make them less dead or him any less the one who did it.
If you look at the list above, you might be able to already understand how exactly it went wrong and why so many people describe it as a cult environment, but I want to break it down to demonstrate that yes, I do actually understand what I did wrong and how I’m preventing it from happening in the present and future. This has been a long and difficult process and continues to be ongoing, sorting out pathology (hallucinations and fixed delusions), maladaptive thought patterns and habits from said pathology (some of the paranoias and the excessive people-pleasing and self-hatred to make up for how much I knew I was costing them), things that are just plain shitty tendencies of mine (micromanaging and the world’s worst time management, for example), and things that are actual good qualities of mine that got corrupted and spat on by the crazy (writing talent, leadership, desire to help people, charisma). Maybe it can even help someone who may recognize some of these behaviors in a relationship or friendship they’re in (or even in themselves), and of course, if anyone who knows me currently sees me doing any of these things, PLEASE let me know immediately so that I can get help, but more importantly stop doing it!
The Chosen Few
What I did then: I was constantly evaluating new people for whether they were suitable to let into the inner circle of those who knew about my superpowers and could share the burden of managing them. People weren’t assessed as friends, but as potential team members, and it was deeply impressed upon them what a tremendously important and above all SECRET task it was, with huge emotional weight placed on being part of that group. Leaving was a huge fucking deal. It all revolved around me and whatever plan I had going on, and it was expected to be the most important thing in their lives or at least be worth dropping anything else if they were needed.
Why it was wrong: Regardless of my intention, it was fucking predatory. In picking out people who would believe me and keep my secrets, I was actually targeting people who would be most willing to enter a completely fucked up situation and stay there because the person at the center of it was charismatic and showered them with genuine love…to make up for otherwise being a sucking life-ruining black hole of crazy. And then it was just our little family against the world and anything that anyone said could be dismissed because they clearly didn’t Understand what it was like on the Inside.
What I’m doing differently: “The Posse” unlike previous groups, is not a tight-knit, secretive, or exclusive band. It’s a casual term for about 20-30ish local fannish people who all like to sometimes get together and do stuff, with an elaborate venn diagram of overlapping interests and fandoms. It’s not all about any one person, one thing, no one has to believe anything, people wander in and out for sometimes months at a time, anyone can add to the group, you’re posse just by saying you are. While yes, I have some closer friends, I am doing everything possible to keep the relationships as open and autonomous as possible. I am not pursuing some special magical hyper-friendship soulbond; just having NORMAL FRIENDS is fucking GREAT!
Constants and Watchers
What I did then - When I was receiving messages from other dimensions or channeling spirits/characters, I often had extended blackouts or periods of memory loss. Rather than taking this as the massive fucking warning sign it was, I recruited friends to act as aids. One of them had to be with me at all times, practically 24/7/365 in case I “had a knock” and they were responsible for supervising the episode and then letting me know exactly what happened.
Why it was wrong - I basically turned completely untrained friends into the full time care team for a dangerously unstable hallucinating individual. “Others” could be violent, distraught, disoriented, and were almost completely unpredictable, sometimes putting my friends into dangerous, stressful, and just plain uncomfortable situations that they felt fully responsible for not only managing, but hiding from those who didn’t know “what I was” and reporting back to me when it ended minutes…or hours…or days later.
What I’m doing differently - Thank pharmaceuticals this doesn’t happen any more. If it did, however, I understand that it is under no circumstances something that is in any way right to put on laymen…especially if they think it’s real! Therefore I’ve made sure that my friends know if I start acting strangely or don’t seem to think I’m myself, they need to just keep me safe long enough to get ahold of my parents and/or call for professional help, NOT supervise it, guide it, or make friends with it.
Center of the Universe
What I did then - Friendships were all-consuming. I would drop my life completely to go be with someone. Living together as a group was the ideal - we came as close to communes as we could and aspired to a lifestyle that had minimum outside contact. Everything revolved around me, my powers, what “The Others” were doing/needed, what messages were coming in, and what the latest project was. Family, jobs, money, material goods, health, time, relationships etc. were all expected to be set aside or offered up to pursue the greater goals, and if you balked, clearly you didn’t care about the current emergency or cause and what was wrong with you, this was God’s plan to help the world.
Why it was wrong: I was completely consuming other people’s lives and resources. I thought it was ok because I had given up just as much of my own, but I missed the memo that I had the right to give up MY things for MY crazy, not to compel other people to give up theirs. There was just nothing, nothing remotely ok about this.
What I’m doing differently: I backslid on this one during GISHWHES big time when I accidentally went off my meds, I’ll say that right now. For the most part, though, I think I’m doing really well at not only accepting that all my friends have their own lives and boundaries and that’s ok, but encouraging it. When I thought one of my friends was getting too wrapped up with me, I gave her an ultimatum that if she didn’t start doing more things away from me and cultivate more of a separate life and get therapy specifically addressing her thing for me, we wouldn’t be able to hang out at all.
The Secret of 42
What I did then - I believed I understood All The Things. Whether it was the truth behind historical events, deep religious and philosophical questions, human behavior, complex sociology, conspiracy theories, complex economics, or celebrity tinhatting, I knew The Truth They Don’t Want You To Know.
Why it was wrong - I’m smart. I’m damned smart. Ain’t nobody that smart. If someone is telling you they know all the secrets to the big damned thing, they’re either bullshitting you or their brain is bullshitting them. It’s not true in popup ads and it’s not true in life.
What I’m doing differently - There are things I’m good at, such as cooking, cosplay, living cheap, some kinds of art, storycraft, a lot of school of hard knocks common sense. Those are things I can quantify and teach from my own experience. However, I’m making very sure to state when something is my opinion, experience, or theory rather than just presenting everything I think as fact, and to make very clear where the limits of my actual expertise are and aren’t, as well as to admit when I just don’t fucking know.
Did You Really have a Cult (continued) (Asked by Colourmycity)
(Anonymous) 2015-04-11 05:57 pm (UTC)(link)Rescue Ranger
What I did then - I had a saving people thing that would have made Harry Potter queasy. If someone was in trouble, I had to swoop in and fix it, which usually meant drawing them in close under my protective wing…and right into the crazy soup.
Why it was wrong - Unsurprisingly, people who are notably not ok are also more likely to be grateful to be part of a small, special group of people who are willing to do anything for each other, value having a Big Higher Purpose, be willing to believe in magic and miracles, and otherwise be extremely vulnerable to cults and cult-like things. Also unsurprisingly, getting involved in something like that when you’re already fucked up only makes it worse, no matter how good the intentions of helping. All I wanted was to make people better. Every so often, I did. More often - and once would have been too many times - I hurt them worse.
What I’m doing differently - I am not a trained therapist, social worker, police officer, or doctor. If you’re in trouble, I will listen, offer you my best advice (which is actually, now that I’m medicated and it’s coming from ME, not my superpowers, sometimes pretty decent or at least hard-won, but I always make sure it’s properly disclaimered) and help you get in touch with professional resources that are actually equipped to solve your problem. Further world and people-saving impulses are channeled through structured activities by established charities like Random Acts.
Inside Man
What I did then - - I believed that I had secret insider knowledge of all sorts of things, especially medicine, government, the military, the legal field, and entertainment industry. Often this came from Others who were in those fields. I would act accordingly, even so far as to perform minor surgery, prescribe medication and courses of treatment, create legal documents, etc. It also lead me to believe I had special relationships with celebrities and to behave inappropriately towards them.
Why it was wrong - Once, I tried to use my “insider knowledge” of the entertainment industry to try to plan a full-scale convention the size of Vegas Con with just a half dozen other people who had never done any such thing, six months, and a budget of a few hundred dollars. Needless to say, it went so badly it’s still notorious over ten years later…but the money and face lost with that was relatively minor considering. I endangered people’s health, finances, legal standings, careers, schooling, and basically everything else thinking I knew shit I didn’t fucking know.
What I’m doing differently - There is a reason that I say over and over and over again on all of my meta that I don’t work for SPN or write for any other TV show or have anything to do with that industry. I am extremely consciencious now of where my actual expertise stands, and to keep my experting within those fields. If I can’t prove why I know the thing, I don’t care if I think I know it, I know I don’t know it. I also make sure to check my behavior with and around celebrities and follow outside cues for the boundaries THEY set while reminding myself that I have no more status with them than any other fan in the same situation.
Story Time
What I did then - I believed that my stories and the lives of the Others were of tremendous, even sacred importance. It was my duty and mission to make sure they were told, and the only way in some cases to guide the course of events (for the scenarios that were interactive) and/or put their spirits to rest (for those that had ‘already happened’).
Why it was wrong - I was prioritizing what were effectively role-playing-games-that-didn’t-know-it and elaborate fic writing and world building over actual life, and what’s worse, I thought it was real, treated it as real, and persuaded others to do the same. I had people call out sick to work to help me defeat enemies that only existed in my head because at one point I literally thought that we were going back in time and stopping Hitler. That’s not ok.
What I’m doing differently - Extradiegesis is my new best friend. I have come to understand that my stories are my stories, my characters are my characters. I created them, I didn’t summon them from another realm, and I HAVE CONTROL. If they don’t get written, not a damned thing happens, and it’s never, never ok to put writing fiction for a hobby ahead of any real person.
Secret Keepers
What I did then - There was a tremendous, tremendous pressure to keep my abilities and everything related to them secret. If I was found out, it was made very clear that whomever had been responsible for the breach would be responsible for whatever happened to me, whether I had to disappear and go on the run so that They didn’t get me, whether I had to kill myself rather than fall into Their hands, or whether They actually managed to capture me after all…and all the subsequent torture, imprisonment, and other sundry horrors, including of course what would happen to all those other worlds and people and to the rest of the inner circle if I were no longer able to “help.”
Why it was wrong - This placed a horrific burden of guilt that prevented people from acting on what would have been otherwise extremely smart instincts to GTFO, as well as creating a massively high stakes Us Vs Them situation, requiring them to lie, and requiring them to isolate the truth of how they were living from family and other friends, eventually alienating them. It also fostered a tremendous mistrust of authority figures, especially police, social workers, doctors, and mental health workers…the very people they should have been running to.
What I’m doing differently - Hell yes I still have some secrets with some people whom I really trust. It’s called privacy, and that’s ok and healthy. What I don’t have are catastrophic sword of Damocles arrangements, I don’t expect anyone to live a lie for me or to help me perpetrate same, and I understand that if someone betrays my trust…life will go on, even if it will hurt.
Apocalypse Now
What I did then - Everything was always endgame, high stakes, the big one. Something on some plane of reality was always in a state of crisis, and if things seemed ok, it was an indicator that something was about to hit the fan. This made it impossible to plan anything well, and we were always in crisis mode and playing catch up. Insomnia was a fact of existence when my brain was running away with itself, and I would sometimes sleep as little as 21 hours in a week.
Why it was wrong - Without even meaning to, I was literally creating brainwashing conditions for the poor bastards who were trying to be my watchers. Constant stress, absolutely no set schedule, sleep deprevation…and of course, anything at any time could be overridden by an emergency, so if you were looking forward to something important, flip a coin whether you’ll actually get to do it.
What I’m doing differently - Other than of course, the tremendous relief of being alone in my head and on only one plane of reality, I am working very hard to keep a sense of perspective. This is something else I backslid on during GISHWHES. Fandom should be fun. It’s not the end of the world, it’s ok if things go wrong…but things are almost never actually a crisis and should not be treated as such.
Zardoz has spoken
What I did then - I would act on things that the Others had told me, what they told other people, or that I had read in peoples minds, seen in the future, or simply “knew.”
Why it was wrong - Because all of that was complete bullshit with a healthy dose of paranoia. I don’t know where they are now - I know that at least one of them is, sadly, passed away, though I’m making the gesture anyway to make it known to anyone who cares that I am taking responsibility - but if this somehow gets around to any of them: Jason R, Gabriel A, Kyrie A, Cherie D, Leah B, Kaitlin A, and Amber B, I severed our friendships, shamed you to others, and accused you of awful things based on what I now know to be hallucinations, and if you see this and choose to contact me, I want to apologize fully. I also owe apologies to the parents of Amanda K, Kaitlin A, and Kristin N among others, for having made completely unfair judgements of their families that had awful consequences for their relationships.
What I’m doing differently - If I did not see it my damned self on this plane of reality or the person did not directly tell me about it without prompting or leading questions, I’m not acting on it. If I’m going to cut you off as a friend, it’ll be for what you did to me, not what some supernatural entity says you did to them on another plane of reality.
Do You Remember When
What I did then - Because I have an exceptional memory for certain kinds of data, I assumed that my memory was flawless on all things, and I related memories as facts. If something or someone else contradicted me, I declared them mistaken or lying.
Why it was wrong: Because I have a massive problem with differentiating created and real memories, I was often recounting inaccurate information…on top of the perfectly normal iffiness of memory which I never alloted for. As a result, I not only unfairly reconstructed events to fit what I needed at the moment, but I also wound up gaslighting people who knew they remembered A by insisting fervently that B was true and that they couldn’t trust their memories.
What I’m doing differently: Unless I’ve been told the story by a third party or have some outside corroboration, if it’s a long-term event memory, I’m assuming it’s at the very least distorted and weighing whether I use it accordingly. In other words, if my memory of what my grandmother put in macaroni and cheese is inaccurate, no real harm done, so I’ll go ahead and put the peas and tuna in without much investigation. When I remembered a 5th grade friend holding my head under the pool, however, I sought validation from my parents before sharing with others. My default is now that the other person remembers correctly, not that I do.
Master Plan
What I did then: I believed that I was executing a divine plan and therefore if I trusted in God and just did my best, everything would work out in the end somehow no matter how much it seemed like things were going wrong and that He would just send the money, people, or whatever were needed to make it happen.
Why it was wrong: I failed to learn from mistakes, ignored warning signs that things were going wrong, and skipped important steps or details. This often put us in deep last minute hot water or lead to uneccesary complications, and rather than God, the burden often fell on my friends to bale us out…which I then used as proof that see, it had all been ok in the end.
What I’m doing differently: If something isn’t going well, I stop and ask for help and re-assess the situation. If necessary, like with the intended Camp Ouroboros LARP, I quit rather than plow ahead and assume that it will all come together or other people will pick up the slack. While it is ok to leave some details to the last minute, if it’s vital, it needs to not only be known, but have a backup plan.
TL:DR - From about 1999-2011, most (though not all) of my friendships and relationships were tainted or completely consumed by mental illness that caused them to be deeply fucked up and damaging affairs that revolved around my special secret superpowers and the people who “helped me live with them.” Now, all my friendships and relationships revolve around shared interests and activities in the real world that are based on healthy third party parameters with a strong awareness of extradiegesis. In other words, we hang out and watch and talk about TV shows, make stuff, and sometimes go out and do fun things like anyone else. It’s not special, it’s not saving the world (any more than Random Acts, volunteer work, etc)…and I wouldn’t trade it for all the superpowers I ever thought I had.
I also need to acknowledge and thank my parents, Mike and Cyd, for still loving me, taking me back again and again, forgiving me too many times for too many things, and getting me help (and paying for it until I could get insurance and being understanding of all the disaster that recovery can be), Karen for sticking by me but never enabling, Brittany for first showing me that I needed help, Laura, Kristin, and Ed for the intervention and making me start getting it, my care team, Dr’s T, K, J, C, and G, Meg (wings-andgrace), Chris, and Jenn for being the first friends I had to whom I confessed everything and for not walking away when I did, the posse for teaching me what a fucking phenomenally abnosome thing “just friendship” really can be, Misha Collins for giving me hope that I can still be abnosome and brash and eccentric and creative and a leader who wants to help all the people and change all the things, Osric Chau for pinning me down and making me face what I was giving up because of fear of Them finding out how crazy crazy really was and what awful things I’d done, and last but oh so not least, a certain angel for giving me the courage to believe I can openly say just how fucked up I was and still be worth loving as I am now.
What I did then - I had a saving people thing that would have made Harry Potter queasy. If someone was in trouble, I had to swoop in and fix it, which usually meant drawing them in close under my protective wing…and right into the crazy soup.
Why it was wrong - Unsurprisingly, people who are notably not ok are also more likely to be grateful to be part of a small, special group of people who are willing to do anything for each other, value having a Big Higher Purpose, be willing to believe in magic and miracles, and otherwise be extremely vulnerable to cults and cult-like things. Also unsurprisingly, getting involved in something like that when you’re already fucked up only makes it worse, no matter how good the intentions of helping. All I wanted was to make people better. Every so often, I did. More often - and once would have been too many times - I hurt them worse.
What I’m doing differently - I am not a trained therapist, social worker, police officer, or doctor. If you’re in trouble, I will listen, offer you my best advice (which is actually, now that I’m medicated and it’s coming from ME, not my superpowers, sometimes pretty decent or at least hard-won, but I always make sure it’s properly disclaimered) and help you get in touch with professional resources that are actually equipped to solve your problem. Further world and people-saving impulses are channeled through structured activities by established charities like Random Acts.
Inside Man
What I did then - - I believed that I had secret insider knowledge of all sorts of things, especially medicine, government, the military, the legal field, and entertainment industry. Often this came from Others who were in those fields. I would act accordingly, even so far as to perform minor surgery, prescribe medication and courses of treatment, create legal documents, etc. It also lead me to believe I had special relationships with celebrities and to behave inappropriately towards them.
Why it was wrong - Once, I tried to use my “insider knowledge” of the entertainment industry to try to plan a full-scale convention the size of Vegas Con with just a half dozen other people who had never done any such thing, six months, and a budget of a few hundred dollars. Needless to say, it went so badly it’s still notorious over ten years later…but the money and face lost with that was relatively minor considering. I endangered people’s health, finances, legal standings, careers, schooling, and basically everything else thinking I knew shit I didn’t fucking know.
What I’m doing differently - There is a reason that I say over and over and over again on all of my meta that I don’t work for SPN or write for any other TV show or have anything to do with that industry. I am extremely consciencious now of where my actual expertise stands, and to keep my experting within those fields. If I can’t prove why I know the thing, I don’t care if I think I know it, I know I don’t know it. I also make sure to check my behavior with and around celebrities and follow outside cues for the boundaries THEY set while reminding myself that I have no more status with them than any other fan in the same situation.
Story Time
What I did then - I believed that my stories and the lives of the Others were of tremendous, even sacred importance. It was my duty and mission to make sure they were told, and the only way in some cases to guide the course of events (for the scenarios that were interactive) and/or put their spirits to rest (for those that had ‘already happened’).
Why it was wrong - I was prioritizing what were effectively role-playing-games-that-didn’t-know-it and elaborate fic writing and world building over actual life, and what’s worse, I thought it was real, treated it as real, and persuaded others to do the same. I had people call out sick to work to help me defeat enemies that only existed in my head because at one point I literally thought that we were going back in time and stopping Hitler. That’s not ok.
What I’m doing differently - Extradiegesis is my new best friend. I have come to understand that my stories are my stories, my characters are my characters. I created them, I didn’t summon them from another realm, and I HAVE CONTROL. If they don’t get written, not a damned thing happens, and it’s never, never ok to put writing fiction for a hobby ahead of any real person.
Secret Keepers
What I did then - There was a tremendous, tremendous pressure to keep my abilities and everything related to them secret. If I was found out, it was made very clear that whomever had been responsible for the breach would be responsible for whatever happened to me, whether I had to disappear and go on the run so that They didn’t get me, whether I had to kill myself rather than fall into Their hands, or whether They actually managed to capture me after all…and all the subsequent torture, imprisonment, and other sundry horrors, including of course what would happen to all those other worlds and people and to the rest of the inner circle if I were no longer able to “help.”
Why it was wrong - This placed a horrific burden of guilt that prevented people from acting on what would have been otherwise extremely smart instincts to GTFO, as well as creating a massively high stakes Us Vs Them situation, requiring them to lie, and requiring them to isolate the truth of how they were living from family and other friends, eventually alienating them. It also fostered a tremendous mistrust of authority figures, especially police, social workers, doctors, and mental health workers…the very people they should have been running to.
What I’m doing differently - Hell yes I still have some secrets with some people whom I really trust. It’s called privacy, and that’s ok and healthy. What I don’t have are catastrophic sword of Damocles arrangements, I don’t expect anyone to live a lie for me or to help me perpetrate same, and I understand that if someone betrays my trust…life will go on, even if it will hurt.
Apocalypse Now
What I did then - Everything was always endgame, high stakes, the big one. Something on some plane of reality was always in a state of crisis, and if things seemed ok, it was an indicator that something was about to hit the fan. This made it impossible to plan anything well, and we were always in crisis mode and playing catch up. Insomnia was a fact of existence when my brain was running away with itself, and I would sometimes sleep as little as 21 hours in a week.
Why it was wrong - Without even meaning to, I was literally creating brainwashing conditions for the poor bastards who were trying to be my watchers. Constant stress, absolutely no set schedule, sleep deprevation…and of course, anything at any time could be overridden by an emergency, so if you were looking forward to something important, flip a coin whether you’ll actually get to do it.
What I’m doing differently - Other than of course, the tremendous relief of being alone in my head and on only one plane of reality, I am working very hard to keep a sense of perspective. This is something else I backslid on during GISHWHES. Fandom should be fun. It’s not the end of the world, it’s ok if things go wrong…but things are almost never actually a crisis and should not be treated as such.
Zardoz has spoken
What I did then - I would act on things that the Others had told me, what they told other people, or that I had read in peoples minds, seen in the future, or simply “knew.”
Why it was wrong - Because all of that was complete bullshit with a healthy dose of paranoia. I don’t know where they are now - I know that at least one of them is, sadly, passed away, though I’m making the gesture anyway to make it known to anyone who cares that I am taking responsibility - but if this somehow gets around to any of them: Jason R, Gabriel A, Kyrie A, Cherie D, Leah B, Kaitlin A, and Amber B, I severed our friendships, shamed you to others, and accused you of awful things based on what I now know to be hallucinations, and if you see this and choose to contact me, I want to apologize fully. I also owe apologies to the parents of Amanda K, Kaitlin A, and Kristin N among others, for having made completely unfair judgements of their families that had awful consequences for their relationships.
What I’m doing differently - If I did not see it my damned self on this plane of reality or the person did not directly tell me about it without prompting or leading questions, I’m not acting on it. If I’m going to cut you off as a friend, it’ll be for what you did to me, not what some supernatural entity says you did to them on another plane of reality.
Do You Remember When
What I did then - Because I have an exceptional memory for certain kinds of data, I assumed that my memory was flawless on all things, and I related memories as facts. If something or someone else contradicted me, I declared them mistaken or lying.
Why it was wrong: Because I have a massive problem with differentiating created and real memories, I was often recounting inaccurate information…on top of the perfectly normal iffiness of memory which I never alloted for. As a result, I not only unfairly reconstructed events to fit what I needed at the moment, but I also wound up gaslighting people who knew they remembered A by insisting fervently that B was true and that they couldn’t trust their memories.
What I’m doing differently: Unless I’ve been told the story by a third party or have some outside corroboration, if it’s a long-term event memory, I’m assuming it’s at the very least distorted and weighing whether I use it accordingly. In other words, if my memory of what my grandmother put in macaroni and cheese is inaccurate, no real harm done, so I’ll go ahead and put the peas and tuna in without much investigation. When I remembered a 5th grade friend holding my head under the pool, however, I sought validation from my parents before sharing with others. My default is now that the other person remembers correctly, not that I do.
Master Plan
What I did then: I believed that I was executing a divine plan and therefore if I trusted in God and just did my best, everything would work out in the end somehow no matter how much it seemed like things were going wrong and that He would just send the money, people, or whatever were needed to make it happen.
Why it was wrong: I failed to learn from mistakes, ignored warning signs that things were going wrong, and skipped important steps or details. This often put us in deep last minute hot water or lead to uneccesary complications, and rather than God, the burden often fell on my friends to bale us out…which I then used as proof that see, it had all been ok in the end.
What I’m doing differently: If something isn’t going well, I stop and ask for help and re-assess the situation. If necessary, like with the intended Camp Ouroboros LARP, I quit rather than plow ahead and assume that it will all come together or other people will pick up the slack. While it is ok to leave some details to the last minute, if it’s vital, it needs to not only be known, but have a backup plan.
TL:DR - From about 1999-2011, most (though not all) of my friendships and relationships were tainted or completely consumed by mental illness that caused them to be deeply fucked up and damaging affairs that revolved around my special secret superpowers and the people who “helped me live with them.” Now, all my friendships and relationships revolve around shared interests and activities in the real world that are based on healthy third party parameters with a strong awareness of extradiegesis. In other words, we hang out and watch and talk about TV shows, make stuff, and sometimes go out and do fun things like anyone else. It’s not special, it’s not saving the world (any more than Random Acts, volunteer work, etc)…and I wouldn’t trade it for all the superpowers I ever thought I had.
I also need to acknowledge and thank my parents, Mike and Cyd, for still loving me, taking me back again and again, forgiving me too many times for too many things, and getting me help (and paying for it until I could get insurance and being understanding of all the disaster that recovery can be), Karen for sticking by me but never enabling, Brittany for first showing me that I needed help, Laura, Kristin, and Ed for the intervention and making me start getting it, my care team, Dr’s T, K, J, C, and G, Meg (wings-andgrace), Chris, and Jenn for being the first friends I had to whom I confessed everything and for not walking away when I did, the posse for teaching me what a fucking phenomenally abnosome thing “just friendship” really can be, Misha Collins for giving me hope that I can still be abnosome and brash and eccentric and creative and a leader who wants to help all the people and change all the things, Osric Chau for pinning me down and making me face what I was giving up because of fear of Them finding out how crazy crazy really was and what awful things I’d done, and last but oh so not least, a certain angel for giving me the courage to believe I can openly say just how fucked up I was and still be worth loving as I am now.
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