![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
From this list.
The two moments I’ll never forget in my life are… Describe them in great detail, and what makes them so unforgettable.
1. One thing I really strongly remember that is sort of a series of moments is the day when I started having more personal contact with the person who became my short-lived but very emotionally and coercively sexually abusive boyfriend in high school. I have this one day that I regret, and I often wonder how my life may have been differently if I had done something differently.
For some reason, perhaps because I had been sick or needed to miss class for a doctor's appointment or something, I had to stay after school to make up a Spanish quiz or test. I did so, and I was new to the school that year, and so I was really interested in plugging in with a club. I had tried drama club, but I was too afraid to do that because it required getting up really early on weekends sometimes, and I was already very tired and unaccustomed to getting up early. But anime club seemed reasonable, even though I hadn't been super into anything but nostalgic anime from my childhood for some time.
I finished my Spanish quiz, but it was before I had a cellphone, so I had prearranged to have my mother come pick me up a full hour after the end of school so I could drop into the anime club meeting after my quiz. It was right across the way from the classroom where I needed to be for making up my quiz. I found it, and I cracked open the door, and I stood there. And it was a crowded room at the time, and everyone was talking, but I couldn't really make heads or tails of what they were doing that day. When I finally did start going to anime club, it was a bit better-organized, but that day I was too shy to just finally push my way into the room and just act like I belonged there or find someone to ask.
Instead, I retreated, feeling defeated and alone, and went tearfully out to wait for my mom on the steps for the next forty minutes. I remember the wind and the sort of mild but gray day outside. And he was standing there waiting for his family to pick him up, too. I forget why he was there. Probably detention. But the thing was that at the time I sort of saw him as an underdog and a misfit much the way I felt like I was at the time rather than seeing that the reason people were put off by him was because he was dangerous.
It's a vivid series of flashes of pivotal decisions that I could have made differently, and I'm not sure if they will ever go away.
2. Another moment I remember really strongly has to do with online experience. I remember it was February, and one of my close friends and I had been participating in Fate fandom since the middle of the previous year. Sometime around December and January, she and I both became active on a forum about it. For months, we had this shared-headcanon universe that we wiled away the hours at our respective office jobs texting about during lulls. And we had sort of had this hypothetical division of primary subjects and labor, but we intended to write interconnected-universe fanfiction basically. And she started hers first while I started a different project, because I wanted to give her that because she was less experienced writing prose than I was. And she got a few chapters into it, and it was really good, but then one day she got this longer-than-the-chapter-itself diatribe from a user on the website about how ridiculously historically inaccurate this... mage wedding was...
And I just remember being in my dad's truck. He had given me a ride to a doctor's appointment or something, and I was waiting in the parking lot while he went into a store without me. And I was scrolling on my phone, and from the moment I saw that comment, I just knew that something had fundamentally changed. I knew that the moment she saw it, it would dishearten her, but a part of me knew that it meant the rest of those fics were never getting written and that what we had shared together was going to unravel because of this guy's outside influence. And I could say a lot more, but the short version is that I was right.
The two moments I’ll never forget in my life are… Describe them in great detail, and what makes them so unforgettable.
1. One thing I really strongly remember that is sort of a series of moments is the day when I started having more personal contact with the person who became my short-lived but very emotionally and coercively sexually abusive boyfriend in high school. I have this one day that I regret, and I often wonder how my life may have been differently if I had done something differently.
For some reason, perhaps because I had been sick or needed to miss class for a doctor's appointment or something, I had to stay after school to make up a Spanish quiz or test. I did so, and I was new to the school that year, and so I was really interested in plugging in with a club. I had tried drama club, but I was too afraid to do that because it required getting up really early on weekends sometimes, and I was already very tired and unaccustomed to getting up early. But anime club seemed reasonable, even though I hadn't been super into anything but nostalgic anime from my childhood for some time.
I finished my Spanish quiz, but it was before I had a cellphone, so I had prearranged to have my mother come pick me up a full hour after the end of school so I could drop into the anime club meeting after my quiz. It was right across the way from the classroom where I needed to be for making up my quiz. I found it, and I cracked open the door, and I stood there. And it was a crowded room at the time, and everyone was talking, but I couldn't really make heads or tails of what they were doing that day. When I finally did start going to anime club, it was a bit better-organized, but that day I was too shy to just finally push my way into the room and just act like I belonged there or find someone to ask.
Instead, I retreated, feeling defeated and alone, and went tearfully out to wait for my mom on the steps for the next forty minutes. I remember the wind and the sort of mild but gray day outside. And he was standing there waiting for his family to pick him up, too. I forget why he was there. Probably detention. But the thing was that at the time I sort of saw him as an underdog and a misfit much the way I felt like I was at the time rather than seeing that the reason people were put off by him was because he was dangerous.
It's a vivid series of flashes of pivotal decisions that I could have made differently, and I'm not sure if they will ever go away.
2. Another moment I remember really strongly has to do with online experience. I remember it was February, and one of my close friends and I had been participating in Fate fandom since the middle of the previous year. Sometime around December and January, she and I both became active on a forum about it. For months, we had this shared-headcanon universe that we wiled away the hours at our respective office jobs texting about during lulls. And we had sort of had this hypothetical division of primary subjects and labor, but we intended to write interconnected-universe fanfiction basically. And she started hers first while I started a different project, because I wanted to give her that because she was less experienced writing prose than I was. And she got a few chapters into it, and it was really good, but then one day she got this longer-than-the-chapter-itself diatribe from a user on the website about how ridiculously historically inaccurate this... mage wedding was...
And I just remember being in my dad's truck. He had given me a ride to a doctor's appointment or something, and I was waiting in the parking lot while he went into a store without me. And I was scrolling on my phone, and from the moment I saw that comment, I just knew that something had fundamentally changed. I knew that the moment she saw it, it would dishearten her, but a part of me knew that it meant the rest of those fics were never getting written and that what we had shared together was going to unravel because of this guy's outside influence. And I could say a lot more, but the short version is that I was right.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-04 05:33 am (UTC)From:The gatekeeping in Fate was terrible. I saw so many similar comments on shippy fics after the VN dropped (even ones that were supposed to be goofy/not taken seriously). Fanfiction isn't such a threat to the canon that it warrants some huge text dump about "inaccuracy." I wouldn't be surprised if other people stopped writing because of this.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-04 05:58 am (UTC)From:What are DBT worksheets?
no subject
Date: 2020-01-04 07:06 am (UTC)From:Dialectical behavioral therapy is a way to deal with pain associated with past trauma and invalidation, usually through exercises to build mindfulness and radical acceptance. I'm out of therapy right now, so I just use worksheets out of the DBT Handbook if painful memories get to be too much.