Magna

bwah another kind eitaku comic idk

and I think it's also partially because... there is this pattern I see in families that produce traumatized kids, wherein the narrative of who the child is is ultimately owned by the family. like, your parents own Knowledge Of Your Self. any attempts to assert expertise in the field of who you are or what you experience is met with derision mockery punishment etc.

this can present in a variety of ways, and some of them look fairly benign, including things like "my parents think I'm this kind of person, but they don't really understand that I am a different kind of person, and every time I try to assert the person I actually am, they argue with me and try to overlay their version of me on to reality instead of listening to me about who I am and what my experiences are"

and I think that depending on how you experience that, it can range from being Just Annoying in some cases to, in many cases, being quite traumatic in and of itself. because it means that you have been trained not to believe that your understanding of yourself and your experiences is ultimately something that is owned by you. which I think is incredibly incredibly damaging both on a personal and relational level. ownership of our own self narrative is a REALLY important thing for human beings to have.

functionally I think that this often presents as an inability to understand what your own needs even are, and a willingness to simply assume that whatever you are feeling at any given time must be the incorrect reaction, especially in the face of an assertion by someone else that the correct reaction would be different than the reaction you are having.

those are both very long-lasting relational harms that go on to cause more harm in the future, because it is impossible to have a truly mutually trusting and healthy interpersonal relationship with someone when you are not aware of what your own needs are, and are certainly not capable of communicating them.*

Genuinely this hits me like a ton of bricks. The narrative was: “My parents gave me life. I owe them my life. My only purpose in life is to make them happy. If I make them unhappy, I’m a bad person. If I cannot make them happy, I have failed my only purpose in life. Therefore I must die.”

I struggled for so many years cause any time my parents were the slightest bit unhappy with me, my brain immediately went “I have failed. I must die. I should kms.”

I couldn’t be anything. There were so many things I wanted to do with my life, but my parents didn’t like that. At the same time, I couldn’t be what they wanted me to be. I was stuck. The only logical thing I could do was to die.

Thank fuck I didn’t.

For those caught in the same dilemma, I’d say the dilemma itself is a good sign. It means our sense of self isn’t strong enough yet to drown out the noise, but it’s strong enough to not be subsumed. There still is an authentic version of us in there, fighting for survival, fighting for the day we could finally be who we were always meant to be.

For me, it took my sperm donor dying and my egg donor moving far away. I sped run through teenagehood, college, young adulthood in just 5 years. I entered the workforce 10yrs later than my cohort. I reparented my inner child. Just last week I sat down to a meal, mentally repeating to myself over and over “It’s ok. We’re safe here. We won’t run out of food. Nobody will yell. If we can’t finish the plate no one will get angry. If we’re still hungry we can have more. We can eat whenever we want. It’s gonna be ok.”

Took me 10 years but I got there.

🌌

The Moment from Devilman: Crybaby

alt version and original picture under the cut

(Roku x Gyatso)

Wanna see Gyatso draw a tattoo on Roku...

I think Roku would be playful and figure that since his friend has an arrow, he wants one too.

I have like fifty things I want to draw but sparkeater Perceptor absolutely will come around again. Detail and timelapse under the cut

Day twenty-six of making art everyday for Pride Month! Wicked's Elphaba and Glinda.

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