insanityOverhaul

A cat is a small creature in the middle of the food chain that is fully aware that you are a very large thing that could stomp its head in at any moment and yet it chooses to rest its tiny little head on your leg for a nap and spreads out on the floor near you exposing its belly and its most sensitive organs. It brings dead mice and bugs to you to share food.

Don’t you get it? This tiny thing trusts you. It wants to help you too. It licks your leg thinking that it’s helping. It kneads on you to find comfort. It shares its body warmth with you in the cold and gives you your space in the heat. It hisses at other mammals it sees outside including other cats in an effort to protect its family.

Hey, I know I mostly just reblog stuff and don't post much of my own stuff, but I wanted to put this out there.

I'm Raven (pls ignore my real legal name in the GFM), a queer autistic healthcare worker, and as of June 3rd my family and I are unhoused.

We lost our house bc my aunt, who lived with us and owned the house, died without leaving a legal will. So the bank took the house and refused to give us the opportunity to buy the house back, even at full price, unless one of us took on the debts she left behind. We couldn't afford that, so they auctioned off the house and it was bought by a private equity firm.

We are 3 disabled people, 2 of whom are former EMS and then me, a current healthcare worker. We also have 3 pets: a cat, a bird, and a dog. Unfortunately, the hotel we're staying in has a hard 2 pet limit, and our dog is a pit mix, so we had to leave her with a neighbor until we can find a place.

Which is hopefully where some of you come in!

UPDATE: Berrie is going to update bers gofundme with the current total amount needed for January, February, and March, that’s depicted in the email screenshot below: Alt Text Included.

If you’d like to support Berrie monthly, please go to Berrie’s patreon. Okay—! That’s all for the update!

You also see to help others at my subpage as well.

If you live in Rosemead, California, and can provide a safe escape or know someone that can help, please contact me.

If not, please reblog this so it reaches someone that can.

Like, in the standard version of Hanahaki, the point is that the disease is caused by unrequited love, and the afflicted end up coughing up increasingly large amounts of flowers, until either they suffocate or the other person returns their feelings.

A lot of versions do require a confession on top of that, but fundamentally the most important thing is the object of your affections developing specifically romantic feelings for you. Or you die.

As an aro person, I’m sure I don’t need to explain why this trope is uncomfortable for me, considering that it basically paints me as a potential death trap.

Plus some stories also feature ‘The Surgery’, which removes the roots of the flowers from the victim’s lungs, thus saving their life, but in the process makes them incapable of romantic love, which is treated as the highest tragedy.

Chronic Hanahaki on its own would still kind of have this problem, it’s just toning it down a bit— rather than being responsible for your death, your crush is instead just responsible for your continued pain/discomfort and frequent hospital visits. Better, but still kind of icky.

Chronic Hanahaki (that could still be potentially terminal in the long term, if you need extra drama) caused by not saying your feelings aloud, regardless of how the other person feels, on the other hand?

Beautiful. Great metaphor for the real effects that repressing your emotions can have on your body. Lots of dramatic potential.

Like, obviously there’s your bog-standard “I love you but don’t believe that you love me, so I will choose to suffer tragically alone rather than risk making you feel bad for not loving me back” thing that the Hanahaki genre was made for, but there’s room for more here as well.

Especially if you expand it to be about supressed emotions in general, rather than just romantic love.

For example:

The character who is in a relationship, but still has trouble verbalising their feelings sometimes, due to past trauma/mental illness, and thus still experiences recurring bouts of Hanahaki. Their partner who reassures them that it’s okay, that they know they love them, and that if they want to say it then that’s fine, but if they don’t feel they can right now then your flowers are beautiful babe, and that’s fine too.

The character who notices flower petals lying around their kid’s room, and doesn’t understand why their child won’t just tell them who they are in love with, so they can support them in confessing their feelings. Only to find out that their kid has actually been dating their same gender best friend for months now, and the Hanahaki was about coming out to their parent.

The autistic character with alexithymia, who by this point just treats coughing up the occasional flower petal as another, rather annoying autistic trait. “Fuck,” they say, coughing up a blood-stained rose and holding it up for their friends to see. “Anyone got any ideas what this one could be about?”

The polar opposite of the traditional Hanahaki thing. The ever happy, toxic positivity character who will die from the flowers choking their lungs unless they finally admit that they kind of hate you sometimes.

The character at the funeral of a family member they had an extremely dysfunctional relationship with, defiantly coughing their flower petals right onto the grave, and refusing to admit that they felt anything other than dislike or indifference for them deep down, because even now, when they’re dead and gone and it doesn’t matter, “you first, bitch.”

The character who witnessed or was told something that they aren’t supposed to know, and not only has to deal with the secret eating away at them, but also has to come up with more and more reasons for why their Hanahaki isn’t going away, even after they confess all their other secrets.

I wanna make one of these that is like a literal curtain of worms

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They’re a mix between polar bears and grizzly bears

It’s a hybrid that’s occurred both in captivity and in nature, for some reason

The best part about grolar bears however, is that they’re also known as…