so while i was writing the book, i became violently suicidal.
this was mostly due to the fact that i had a very bad reaction to some meds and my brain stopped producing any serotonin. also i was in the last semester of grad school where it’s actually illegal to feel anything but dread. so it wasn’t going well.
somewhere in the fog of it i became aware i needed help. nobody was taking clients or my insurance. i didn’t want to do inpatient care - it wasn’t right for my needs. there’s not really an “in between” stage between “inpatient” and “no care,” but i was trying to do the right thing. i was trying to activate the chain of command that was my emergency plan. i knew i needed help now.
i used betterhelp.
i know, i know. i’m a straight-A student and so smart and so clever, how could i ever use something so blatantly bad. to be honest with you, i didn’t feel particularly keen on it from the getgo - things that seem too good to be true usually are. also, if something online is free, the price is usually your privacy.
the thing is that there was kind of a global pandemic happening at the time and i worked 5 jobs alongside of being a fulltime student and also like writing a book on the side. it is a miracle that i even thought about getting help. i would love to tell you i had the mental wherewithal to like, process whether this was the right choice for me. mostly i was desperate. i was so suicidal that i was trying to find a reason to stay inside of fortune cookies. i was the kind of suicidal that looks like splatterpaint. i hadn’t been that bad in an entire decade.
they took my data. i gave them it freely. somewhere out there, they have a dossier on me. on everything i survived. my story in little datapoints, scattergraphed beautifully.
the first woman told me that really i should be grateful, because (and this is a direct quote): “at least you’re not anne frank.” i said that i felt that statement was antisemitic, as anne frank’s life and experience shouldn’t be compared to like, a nonbinary lesbian in western massachusetts. the therapist said that i should try to use lucid dreaming to try to picture myself in an actually scary situation, like running from nazis.
i applied for another therapist. i was willing to accept the possibility that there was a bad apple in the bunch. the next therapist and i even laughed about how inappropriate that statement was. and then, in our next session: the new therapist said if i was struggling with body image issues, i should just work harder on my appearance. she spent 3 sessions in a row talking about how she was grieving, and made me memorize facts about her grandmother so “she can live on through my clients.”
i am a three’s-a-charm kind of person. okay, so what if the last person made me uncomfortable. i figured it was just a misunderstanding of priorities - she had felt she was sharing with me, i had felt like i had to take care of her. i applied for another therapist.
the last woman asked me to help her pray. she bowed her head. i stared at her, frozen, while she said: lord, i beg you: cure her.take the pain of being gay away from her.
i spent somewhere between 2.5 and 3 months on betterhelp. in that whole time, i was not getting the professional help i so desperately needed, even though i was fucking trying.
in the end, i survived this because i finally could get off the meds that were literally killing me. a request for a real therapist finally went through. i survived because my friends saved my life. because nick let me sob myself dry in his arms. because maddie took the razors out of my room when i asked them to. because grace slept over in my bed for like 3 weeks in a row since nobody trusted me not to hurt myself when i was alone. i survived because i got fucking lucky. because even when i was desperately suicidal, i was too old and too self-aware to take “you need to be prettier” as good advice.
the thing is that there’s a 19 year old me who isn’t like that. who would have heard “just think about how grateful you should be” and said - oh, i see. i would have assumed that is what it means to be in therapy: the same thing my abusers used to tell me. that i am just pretending and lazy. that i am ugly and unworthy.
betterhelp positioned itself to take advantage of an incredibly vulnerable community. it preys on desperation. it knows it is serving people who are not doing well mentally. it saw that there is a huge need for real, immediate, compassionate mental health care: and then it fucking takes your money and privacy.
i still get their ads on instagram. last night i watched as a woman in a pool pretends to talk to a different woman. they discuss her anxiety.
there’s a 19 year old version of me, and she didn’t survive this. she was too tired, and drowning. i almost fucking died. this thing almost fucking killed me.
in the ad, the woman playing the therapist takes a note on a clipboard and then nods once, sagely.
i have to admit it’s a pretty scene. the steam and light coming off the pool water lands on the actresses. like this, it almost looks baptismal, holy.
Never ask a girl if she wants to become a werewolf because she’s always going to say yes because girls love tearing things apart with their teeth and ripping people to shreds with their claws, it’s a foregone conclusion, an immutable fact of our universe really when ya think about it.
and like literally why xena warrior princess was so good is because they COULDNT acknowledge the relationship openly so they would have bonkers yonkers moments like xena & gabrielle getting crucified side by side and you FELT it. you KNEW they were in love. but nobody goes to these absurd lengths anymore they just have their gays kiss on the lips and expect us to applaud and its so cheap and weaksauce
and it’s… fine. The prince is great! They’re in love, he’s very sweet and passionate, writing her poems and songs, giving her anything she wants. The time she spends with her husband is great.
but cinderella is not royalty, her family was noble but she never spent time in those circles. She’s used to being busy, she’s used to cooking and cleaning and mending. There are hours, days, where she has nothing to do.
time passes. cinderella learns the fancy lady type of needlework. Learns to ride horses. Reads a lot.
as is normal for royalty at the time, they travel and are hosted by nobles or stay at castles owned by the king. But even that variety begins to become routine. The prince is distracted, there’s a lot of young women living and working on their route. Daughters of nobles. Younger and prettier with soft hands that have never done a day’s work.
cinderella needs something to spend her time on, and there’s a part of her thinking a couple-only trip might get her husband’s attention again, so she suggests making an old castle that’s fallen into disrepair their “project.” It was built in the time when castles were made to be defensible, so it’s quite sturdy, but it’s overgrown and secluded. The prince doesn’t know why his family stopped living there either. A hundred years ago it was their summer home.
so they go. And they work. And for a while it’s great! But when they leave for winter cinderella’s husband forgets her once again. cinderella resolves to make the best of her life and stop worrying about a man who has gotten what he wanted from her.
summer comes again and this time cinderella goes alone to the old castle (minus staff, of course, but cinderella manages to narrow it down to only repair workers and one maid). She can cook and clean and mend again, but this time it’s her own choice. She is happy.
this summer they make more progress on repairs. The workers say that most of it can be salvaged, except one tower that’s been completely overgrown with vines and briars. It will have to come down, eventually, but for now it can be safely ignored.
cinderella has more free time now. The old castle has a surprisingly untouched library, though time and moisture have damaged many of the books. Behind a collection of greek poetry cinderella finds an old diary. Very old, in fact, at least a hundred years. It’s rude to read a diary, of course, but whoever wrote this is long dead, and cinderella is bored, so…
from the description of activities the author looks to have been nobility. Maybe even a princess. She’s sensitive and sweet and smarter than she seems to realize. If circumstances had been different cinderella wishes they could have been friends…
after the summer ends cinderella returns to her husband. He’s spending a lot of time with a young musician and cinderella can’t even work up the energy to care. She does some research about the castle and the family she’s married into, finds out the name of the princess who wrote the diary.
aurora. Cursed and forgotten. She died young, they say, in a plague that also took out the castle staff and her own parents. Luckily they avoided a succession crisis, but not so lucky for the dead.
time passes. cinderella goes to the old castle again and again, even out of season. Soon enough all that remains to be done is the old tower, and the builders say they should tear it down and fill the gaps before it gets cold.
one night cinderella is restless. The princess from the diary had been fond of that tower, and cinderella is far more attached to a dead woman than she ought to be. She gets out of bed, reads by candlelight, and finally goes to walk the empty halls.
she finds herself going to the tower. Pushing past the vines that don’t seem so troublesome really. They almost part before her. The stairs are perfectly intact, the door at the top is already cracked open. As if she should have done this years ago, cinderella steps into aurora’s bedroom.
she’s as beautiful as the stories say. And sitting under her hands, crossed across her stomach as it rises and falls, is a book of greek poetry.
years later, people will tell the story of cinderella as a cautionary one. Don’t seek above your station. Don’t marry for prestige. After all, a girl who grew up as a servant once married the crown prince, and disappeared after only three years. She ran away, they say, she couldn’t handle the lifestyle.
two old women who run a bookshop together agree with the lesson. Marrying for the wrong reasons never ends well. It’s best to wait for someone you have things in common with, shared interests.
or, failing that, the more linguistic of the two says, wait a decade or ten for someone to fall in love with you from your diary.
her partner laughs and hits her with the socks she is mending.
For context: On the night of November 24, there was a fire in an apartment complex in Ürümqi (uu-RUUM-chee), Xinjiang - the capital of the part of China where the persecuted Muslim minority, the Uyghurs, live.
The barriers around the apartment complex that had been put up to funnel people through COVID precautions prevented the fire trucks from getting close enough to the building to put out the fire quickly, and 10 people died, including a small child.
There were vigils held for the victims, and many vigils turned into protests; protests also seemed to erupt spontaneously, in major cities (Shanghai, Beijing, Nanjing) along with several major universities.
Many other incidents angering the Chinese population preceded this in the past 70 days, such as:
workers being on lockdown inside an iPhone factory in order to ensure uninterrupted iPhone production
an elderly woman committing suicide by jumping out of a locked-down building and her daughter watching her die while unable to leave to go to her
everyone seeing that most of the World Cup audience in Qatar is totally unmasked (the crowd shots are now being censored)
Xi Jinping showing up to the G20 Summit in Brazil Bali with no mask
Some protesters are calling for Xi Jinping to step down and even for the whole communist party to be dissolved, as China’s political unwillingness to open itself more to international sources means that they don’t have nearly enough mRNA vaccines for their elderly, let alone their entire population.
There is just a lot of general unrest over the way the CCP has used COVID as an excuse to expand their authority and surveillance, without actually taking the right steps to solve the problem.
You might hear this summarized as “protests against the Zero-Covid policy” but don’t get these protesters mixed up with American anti-maskers: they have real grievances.
my comic this year is about pinballing helplessly between interests and the frustrating feeling of being a “jack of all trades, master of none” (but who said i have to be a “master” of anything anyway? fuck off!)
thank you so much to dreamadoodles for organizing this year! pls check out the tag to see more comics from other contributors 🌠
i think one of my fave shark facts is this thing that some species of sharks do where they sorta peek their heads out of the water to see whats above the surface…..its called spyhopping and great white sharks do it all the time
This gave me so much serotonin for some reason.
They look like they forgot they can breathe underwater and think they’re drowning
Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.
Might I add:
The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed
The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child
The human who died of radiation poisoning after repairing the spaceship
The adventures of a space roomba
Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)
I don’t know a snappy description but the my nemesis cynthia story certainly lives in my head
hilariously, these are almost all in my fic tag. so, a compiled list from the notes (and some extras):
