Between Parallel Lines and Starry Skies

hey y’all wanna talk about a lesser talked about trauma effect?

loss of autonomy.

not knowing how to do anything without explicit permission or instruction.

feeling like you’ll get in trouble if you do anything on your own will.

waiting until you’re given permission to do so much as eat.

not feeling like your body is your own.

if you experience this you aren’t broken or alone. you were abused and traumatized and conditioned to be like this. remember you belong to nobody but yourself. you are and will be okay.

the fact that mary died when sam was only 6 months old is kinda crazy. not for like serious plot related reasons but imagine a carseat in the impala. 

There wasn’t a universal car seat law until 1986. I was born the same exact year as Dean and when I asked my mom about car seats she said “Well, we had the van back then” (not a mini-van, an old van that had 2 seats up front and open space in the back) “so I put a playpen back there and put you kids in it when we went somewhere”

According to my mom car seats did exist but they weren’t common and most people still had cars with no seat belts so if you had a car seat you’d have to put it in there unbelted and hope it didn’t slide around too much. Most people held their babies while in the car

The Impala was made in 1976 when seat belts were considered a luxury upgrade, it doesn’t have any. Imagine 4 year old Dean in the passenger seat holding baby Sam tight while John took a corner

I see a lot of people joking about the adhd thing of "I have a appointment/phone call at 3pm, guess I won't do anything all day!"

But no one seems to make the connection that it's a time blindness thing. One of the symptoms of ADHD is not having a good and accurate sense of time. And not doing stuff prior to an event with a hard deadline is an obvious coping mechanism for that.

Can I go to the store? It's 10am and the appointment is at 3pm. How long does going to the store take? An hour? Three hours? Five hours? I DON'T KNOW!

I get anxious trying to do things before appointments because I'm aware that I don't know how long those things take, and that if I think I do, I may be very wrong. Too often I've been like "hey I can walk to the corner store and grab a drink, that'll take like 15 minutes!" and then an hour later I get back and whoops my rice has burnt.

Plus there's also the fact that ADHD people know that motivation and focus is a two-edged sword.

Like, let's say you decide to play a video game. You've got time, you can pause/save whenever, so this should be a perfect fit to make good use of your waiting-time. So you start playing and WHOOPS you get really focused for some reason today (because people with ADHD do not get to pick when their brain decides to focus) and the next time you look at the clock it's 2:49 and you haven't showered or dressed and the appointment is 30 minutes away. Fuck. (you could have set an alarm, but now you're asking people with the forgetting-things-and-time-ignoring condition to remember it set alarms)

And with motivation, it can be almost worse. Instead of playing a game, you so something useful or creative. You clean your room or fix your plumbing or write a story or draw a picture. And suddenly it's great. Your brain is firing on all cylinders. You've got all the motivation you can ask for, and you are FLYING. the ideas are brilliant, your hands are nimble, you're getting stuff done you've been putting off for weeks or months. And then the alarm goes off. Time to go to your appointment. Fuck.

You drive there, your brain still full of ideas and plans. But by the time you get back, the motivation is gone. You may still have the ideas but you don't have the drive to write them down. You can't force yourself to do it. Your sink is still in pieces. Your room is half-cleaned, and you have to shove all the sorted clothes into one big bin just so you have somewhere to sleep. You've left things half finished again, in a cycle that has been repeating your whole fucking life. It seems sometimes that nothing ever gets finished.

So next time you don't even start. There's not time. You've been burnt too many times. Why add another half-completed project to your pile of shame?

My point is that people seem to be going "lol I can't do anything all day if I have an appointment at 3pm" like this is a quirky "oh I'm so scatterbrained!" weirdness they alone have, and not a major complication of a disabling mental illness.

(and that's not even getting into the secondary effects. If you know that having an appointment ruins your whole damn day, you're going to avoid them. Even when it's things like "going to that party" or "meeting your friends for a drink/game" or "going to a movie with that cute girl from your math class". Things you should enjoy. Things that'd help you be social. Things that make you feel human.)

im having feelings about the uffington white horse again

so essentially there’s this cool horse drawn into the hills in england made out of chalk and it’s like 3,000 years old.

people carved trenches 3,000 years ago and filled them with chalk in the shape of a horse but what’s interesting is that if you fail to maintain the horse by adding new chalk regularly, it will disappear. for 3,000 years, we’ve been filling in chalk in this horse so it doesn’t disappear.

we’ll never know what the purpose of the horse was originally. we’ll never know if it had ritual or spiritual significance or if it was just art. but we do know that people maintained it then, and, even though the meaning of the horse has long been lost to time, we continue to maintain it now.

the people who made this horse are long dead, but they live through us still, don’t you think?

couldn’t agree more we’re best friends now

an american coming face to face with universal healthcare

This right here, is exactly why propaganda in the United States fights to convince people that universal healthcare is shitty. Because if Americans legitimately realized how good universal health Care would be for them, they’d stop letting all the healthcare companies rake in billions of dollars in profit every damn year

i mean this so seriously if you have any sort of creative project you can and should be a little obsessed with it. you should reread your own writing and look at your own art and brag about your ocs its literally good for your health

This recently came across my timeline on Twitter ala @coelasquid and it’s too good not to include.

Kelly Turnbull is so fucking wise

2012-13 AO3 was a beautiful fever dream.

dean’s genuine love and worship of his dad is just as much a part of him as his hate and rage towards him

there’s a thing that happens when people talk about dean, especially in relation to john, where they’ll dismiss textually positive feelings he has - however he fucked up they are - as solely being a consequence of john’s abuse. 

but whenever they talk about negative feelings - like 3x10′s “my father was an obsessed bastard” - people frame it as dean’s real & true personality and feelings shining through. 

this is what i mean when people say they flatten the dynamic. instead of acknowledging that dean is experiencing these contradictory feelings at once, it’s portrayed as if john somehow coerced him into feeling love. 

and this is why a lot of people cannot honestly look at their relationship: because there is so clearly an Abuser -tm- and a Victim -tm- in this dynamic, it has to be bad and awful always. and if dean says it isn’t, he’s lying.

it is wild to me how much sam is not worried about food or money, particularly in s1. he does not understand why dean wants to make money and/or why he gets upset about sam just giving it away for information. like, sam, my dude. where do you think the money y'all are using is coming from???

#the swear jar duh @shallowrambles

Sam's lack of concern about money is such a fascinating character trait. A lot of effort has to go into not realizing your poor when you grow up poor. Work done by the adults in your life generally, but in this case probably Dean. Sam's lack of concern probably means Dean only very rarely told him he couldn't have something because it was too expensive.

Trust me, when you get told things are too expensive growing up you learn very quickly to start checking the price tag before asking. It's a lesson that sticks with you too.

Then we have the Stanford years. Sam had a full ride, but that doesn't cover food and boarding and supplies usually. Work study was probably part of his financial aid package, but that's not going to cover a lot. Where was the rest of the money coming from? Were John and Dean and Bobby and Pastor Jim and who knows who else just sending money every month?

Sam's attitude towards money is not that of someone who worked a 40 hour minimum wage job on top of studying. Or 20 hours a week.

(I mean Sam is enough of a hypocrite to have hustled pool and still look down on Dean for it. So that's a possibility.)

Which is to say I don't know why Sam has such financial security ingrained in him. There are a lot of potential reasons. And it's fascinating from a character perspective.

The duality of "If you even imply that being aro or ace condemns someone to a sad and lonely life I will fucking fight you"

and

"being aro and ace is the most isolating thing I will ever experience"

i think the tags are important

Hanging out with old people rules because after a while they trust you enough to confess to murder totally unprompted

Wait what.

Sometimes old ladies had to kick the ladder out from under their stepfathers when they were girls and that’s valid

oh, my little old lady murder story was her replacing the medication in her abusive husband's capsules with rat poison.

"back in the day, our grandmothers worked on their marriages and didn't get divorced!" nah, friend, they COULDN'T get a divorce so sometimes they killed their fuckin husbands. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My grandma murdered her first husband the first time he beat their daughter.

My college was next to an assisted living facility and one time we went over there to draw people’s portraits so we could get practice drawing older people. The lady I was drawing idly told me that she "dealt quite handily with her first husband” while making a stabbing gesture. Five minutes later she requested I make sure not to draw her double chin. I honored that request.

So when I was a child my grandmother told all these great stories about growing up in the Alaskan wilderness. Amazing bad ass stories about her and my great-grandmother. I recently asked my mom why my great-grandmother moved from Texas to Alaska in the first place. Turns out my Great-grandfather was abusive to my great grandmother for years and she lived with that until the first time he hit my grandmother, who was like three at the time, my great-grandmother got him very drunk and beat him to death then moved to Alaska to hide from the cops.

Men don't realize their life expectancy went up thanks to divorce.

Source

:))))))))

I feel like US conservatives went from a 3/4 to 7 on transgender people over the course of a year and a half.

Basically, if this passes, the state Florida will take away your children if you are transgender or one of your children is transgender (as the bill notes it will take away cis children if they have a trans sibling).

Absolutely monstrous.

These don't have to be completely separate steps in linear series.

This 7 is occurring simultaneously with 4 (Transness is being classified as an essential threat to welfare) which enables 10, (they deny they are committing a crime by stating that they are acting against the crime of Transness).

And Official action usually trails Inspired action. Part of the reasons for 1-4 & 6, is to make an unofficial 5. People without governmental power or association who can engage in the rest more freely and quickly than the government can at first. The easiest part of 8 is to simply not punish (or punish less) "random" attacks made by "unassociated" individuals.

The influential members of intended genocides understand that there will always be someone to act on their words. All they have to do is set the target and stand back. Other people will happily murder for them.

And as that progresses, it gets easier and easier to move into official action as the society becomes ever more fearful and reactive.

in honor of ace week id like to shoutout every asexual who first thought they were bi/pan because they looked at all the genders and felt no difference and zero is equal to zero so they said “huh. must be bisexual” and then shoved their sexuality back under the rug for 3-5 years

As a member of the bi community, ace people are always welcome underneath the bi umbrella

Galaxy brain take, and I’ll embrace it on the merit of being inclusive and fun.

if you have a very strong opinion that people should be free to choose, you respect that choosing neither is still a valid choice to exercise

Cops are trained to be bad. Anyone who insists on being good is not welcome.

The problem with being a Creative Person is I want to create all the things. I want to draw a little drawing. I want to write a fic. I want to write a book. I want to paint with watercolors. I want to paint with oil paints. I want to animate. I want to make something out of clay. I want to sew a dress. I want to play a song on the ukulele. I want to play a song on the cello. I want to play a song on the harp. I want to write a song. I want to write a musical. I want to make a webcomic. I want to make a video game.

I want to do EVERYTHING but I don’t have the TIME or MONEY or MOTIVATION

so so sooooo sexy when tv shows end when they're supposed to. so sexy to have a thematically coherent & significant narrative and follow it to its natural conclusion. I'm salivating

Hey babygirl, just so you know what you’re dealing with, I’m the kinda gal who saves manually before hitting “Save & Quit” to exit the game.

He learned his lesson

Nah you guys don’t get it. For all that Gandalf complained about Pippin, he better than anyone else knew that Pippin was absolutely crucial. Pippin accomplishes a very impressive feat: not only does he manage to see something in the palantír (most hobbits would perceive nothing, as these stones were designed for use by high elves), but he manages to close his mind against Sauron. That is a seriously impressive feat of ósanwë given Pippin’s youth and almost total inexperience. The only clue Sauron manages to glean from the meeting with Pippin is that he is in Meduseld: which Pippin probably did not even directly give to him. Pippin did not tell Sauron his name, so Sauron is led to believe that Pippin is Frodo. I remind you, in the books, the Good Guys manage to trick Sauron, by making him believe that Aragorn has claimed the One Ring. They can only do that because of Pippin’s ridiculous feat of ósanwë. Far from sabotaging the mission, he is the one who allows it to succeed (albeit, not on purpose). This is why Sauron doesn’t think anything is fishy when Aragorn wins the Battle of the Pelennor Fields by controlling ghosts: that would be consistent with the idea that he is using the One Ring. Which Sauron believes that Pippin brought to him. This is why Sauron pulls out his old “play nice and weak” card from his Númenor days. He first of all believes that Aragorn is a lot more powerful than he actually is, and secondly thinks that the Ring is beginning to affect him.

He should perhaps have remembered that Aragorn is named for Fingolfin. Fingolfin’s mother-name, Arakáno, would properly be translated to Sindarin as “Aragorn”. Most people would not show up to an enemy fortress with an army they knew was far too small, and start a battle they knew they would lose. But Fingolfin famously did exactly that.

When you read the line “fool of a Took!” It is important to understand that in the context of Gandalf calling himself a fool on several occasions. Galadriel too sees beyond the veneer of foolish naivety in Pippin. She gives him and Merry belts that almost definitely were once her brothers’. A golden flower on a gift from Galadriel can only be a golden lily, the sigil of the House of Finarfin. Galadriel, while all hell was breaking loose in Tirion, raided her brothers’ rooms and took their belts from when they were little kiddos, hauled them across the Helcaraxë, and then held onto them for three Ages before giving them to two hobbits she just met. Merry, of course, is comparable to Angrod and Aegnor: his great deed is done in a moment of beserk rage, and it is a feat of strength. This then implies that she is comparing Pippin to Finrod. That’s one hell of a complement coming from Galadriel: but as I just pointed out, entirely warranted. Pippin manages to reproduce Finrod’s feat of radio silence, in the face of torture by Sauron. Which again, is extremely impressive given that Pippin is far younger and less experienced than Finrod was.

You see me <3