dat-grester-tho

I am not deleting this blog, however. All of these fics will continue to be yours to read and reread whenever you want.

All of you are welcome to join me on my personal blog, @gracieminabox, if you’re not already there. Be prepared for a helluva lot of Star Trek, feminist rants, and Goose. (Because Goose, amirite?)

I have loved every moment with you incredible people. You gave me friendship, and you gave the joy of writing back to me. I will never be able to repay such immense kindness.

First of all, thank you, so very, very much, for your kind words. They mean a lot to me.

I say this with all the love in the world, but no, I don’t think their being a couple again is very likely.

It’s not impossible. Obviously. Couples can, and have, done it - even successfully. They might be able to make that work. And if they do, I would be overjoyed for them.

But none of us - none of us, for all our speculation - have any idea what precipitated their split. It was obviously amicable enough that they’ve maintained a good friendship, about which I am so so stupidly happy; but we don’t know what the root cause(s) were of them going their separate ways in the first place. We don’t know if those root causes were resolved. We don’t know if they can be.

A committed adult relationship, especially one that involves cohabitating, involves a lot of things that can send the relationship heading south - economics, household labor, sex, career, whether or not to get married, whether or not to have children, religious/political differences, family difficulties, priority changes, communication breakdowns, the list goes on and on and on. Some of those things are workable. Some are compromise-able. Some aren’t fixable at all, or are too large to be fixed while maintaining the relationship.

If we had more data, we might be able to come to a better conclusion - but we don’t have that data, nor will we be getting it. Trying to determine if they’re going to get back together or not based on the content of a few snats and livestreams is like trying to solve an integral calculus problem with nothing more than addition - we simply don’t have what we need to draw the right conclusions.

I think Chester and Grace took their relationship very, very seriously. (I think they still do.) I don’t think they went into the decision to split up lightly. I think it required conversations, consideration, and extensive logistics. It involved a significant detangling of their intertwined lives, everything from him moving out to making custody arrangements for Goose. Their split wasn’t a singular event; it was a process, one that took a lot of time and energy to complete, and one that, if they’d had second thoughts about it, they could have stopped. I think it would make very, very little sense to have gone through all that - practically and emotionally - and then change their minds.

I know shippers want to hold on to them. Their relationship has meant a tremendous amount to me over the years; believe me, part of me wants to hold on to that hope, too. But I’m not going to get my hopes up over something like that when I think the possibility’s so remote.

Chester said it’s been nearly a year. I’ve moved to a new city, started a new job, pulled myself out of a suicidal depression, started writing in a new fandom, and continued to love Grace, Chester, and Goose with every fiber in my body.

I’ve also done my grieving for Grester. And I grieved hard, but I did it.

The five stages of grief, as delineated by Kubler-Ross, are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I can pinpoint every single one of those stages in my own grief over Grester. Yet I think some of the fandom is still hovering in the earlier stages.

Guys, this is a loss that needs to be grieved, and grieved properly.

Yeah, I know, it wasn’t your relationship. But it was your ideal of a relationship, and while you might not be grieving the loss of your own partner or relationship, you are grieving your idea of “what could be.” And that’s painful.

But the only way out is through. If you don’t grieve that loss, you will not be able to move on.

Grace and Chester are fine. They are thriving, happy, and obviously close friends. Goose seems delighted with her visitation schedule. One couldn’t ask for a more velvet divorce - hell, these two put my parents to shame.

As someone who proudly poured my heart and soul into the stories on this blog about the family they were, I want to really implore anybody who’s reading this to recognize that they seem happy as things are. And if they weren’t before, isn’t this a better solution?

Love them as people. Love them as friends. I do and I always will.

Well, isn’t this sweet :)

I have way too many of my own mental health issues to be a competent therapist - not to mention way too much of a temper - but I do appreciate the compliment nevertheless :)

Everybody processes things differently. I counsel people experiencing loss every day. It’s a major part of my job. Yes, there are ways of responding to loss that are objectively healthy and objectively unhealthy, but in between, there’s a massive gradient of subjectivity as to the best way to deal with a loss.

True, we might never know the answer. And true, we all need to become okay with that. And I have faith that we will. I have faith that I will, even though I’m not there yet. But we’re all going to have to go through our own process to get there. For some people, that’s ripping off the bandaid clean and quick. For others, it’s humor. For others, it’s anger and snarkiness. For others, it’s tears. For others, it’s clinging to some shred of hope, even if that hope is growing dimmer and dimmer. (I personally am favoring the latter two strategies.)

For an unlucky few, it’s slipping into a scary depression space. If you fall into this category, please, please talk to someone - me, someone else in the fandom, someone outside the fandom, a doctor, a loved one. This is one of those “objectively unhealthy” responses, and it goes way beyond the fandom.

No, it’s not terrible to feel disenchanted with the fandom right now. We’re in the middle of a major change. Actually, when it comes to fandoms of IRL couples, we’re in the middle of one of the biggest changes such a fandom can go through. I totally get it. I wouldn’t go into the Grester tag right now if you paid me. There’s a lot of judgment going on as to how people are processing these events. There’s a lot of sadness, a lot of anger, a holy fuckton of anxiety, and unfortunately, a not insignificant amount of disrespect, with people dragging it into their personal tags. I’ve had to disable anonymous asks on my personal blog because I got Fed The Fuck Up with people - or, I suspect, one person who just didn’t know when to quit - haranguing me about how unhealthy it was to grieve the loss of this thing we all love. We, as a fandom, are not being our best selves right now. At all.

And that blows, because we’re all really good people with big hearts and a huge capacity to love, because we love these two people, together and individually. I know we can be better than this. I’ve seen us be better than this. But I also know that grief makes it pretty damn hard for people to censor their primal responses to circumstances and events. 

Appropriate anecdote is appropriate: When my dad died, my uncle - who I met for the first time at my dad’s funeral - threw a minor hissy fit about having his holiday plans interrupted by having to book a flight for the services. When I heard about this, I flipped my shit about what a pretentious self-centered egotistical asswaffle he was, prioritizing Christmas dinner over the funeral of his own brother. Now, yeah, my uncle was pulling a pretty dick move there; but in retrospect, I also could have handled it better had I not been knee-deep in my own stew of grief and rage and confusion. But I was emphatically not in my right mind, because so much was getting filtered through that experience. Our current situation is unquestionably a more minor event than the sudden death of a parent, but a loss is a loss is a loss - voluntary or involuntary, gradual or sudden, explained or not - and they all come with their own grieving process.

So, in light of the metric ton of mess happening in our fandom right now, I feel it’s only fair that I make a post here about what happens with DGT in the event that everything I write about is a thing of the past.

(Fuck, that sentence hurt to write.)

First, I want to apologize. I myself have contributed to the uncertainty. First I said I wouldn’t post anything until things were looking positive, then things were briefly looking positive and I said I’d be posting something again, then things started to look unbelievably negative for the fandom and I immediately regretted having said a word. So for whatever role I played in the rollercoaster of emotions we’ve all been on for these past few months, I am so sorry.

Second, I want to say that this blog and all the fics contained on it are not going anywhere until Tumblr literally blows up on us all - and even then, I’ve got the originals and I will find them a nice warm home where you can continue to access them. This place means too much to me to let it go. And it’s meant a lot to many of you. It stays. Period, full stop, the end.

I think we can all agree that things are not exactly looking rosy for our fandom right now. I refuse to take a baseball bat to anybody’s fledgling hope - because that’s been done to me repeatedly in the past few weeks, and it’s a real dick move - but even the most optimistic among us can now say pretty conclusively that things appear to be on very shaky ground at the absolute best.

I don’t want to say I will never write these two again. Because to do that would hurt my soul in a way I can’t even begin to articulate. But I will say that, unless and until there’s some kind of incredibly convincing evidence that suggests that our favorite duo is thriving together, I think it’s disrespectful for me to write about them as a couple. It would be painful for me to write, realizing I’m nursing a delusional hope. It would be painful for you to read, knowing that what I’m writing is nothing but a trick of the light. And it would undoubtedly be painful for Grace and Chester if they ever stumbled upon it. While I’ve always tried to keep my fic out of their tag and away from their eyes, if we know anything after all this time, it’s that they see everything. And I’ve always tried to write fic that might make them smile if they ever came across it.

I am not saying goodbye. I’m not saying it because I might be back. I’m not saying it because I’m not going anywhere. And I’m not saying it because I don’t want to leave this place. I don’t want to let this go. Even if it’s inevitable, I’m not ready to let this go.

I love Grace and Chester to bits. And writing them - for you all - has been an unparalleled privilege. I maintain hope that it will be again, even if that hope is in vain.

No matter what, know this: I have grown to truly love all of you. Thank you for being there for me. Thank you for your praise and your prompts and your incredible kindness. Thank you for elevating my own standards for my writing to new heights. Thank you for giving me this wellspring of creativity that I didn’t think I’d ever find again. DGT is more than a blog to me, and my dinky little fanfics are dearly beloved creations. You made that possible.

I’m not saying goodbye. Even if things are different, I’ll be here.

I love you all. So, so much.

I will post an update here re: the future of this blog in light of recent developments when I can cope with doing so. Please be patient with me. That might take a while.