canon is a suggestion and i'm not listening

Human Adrian and Rocky designs <3

It didn’t register for me until recently that my experiences of being forced to strip naked multiple times at the mental hospital to be ‘checked’ when I was 14 was sexual assault, because the people who did it were nurses/doctors who clearly didn’t find me sexually attractive but instead used it as a form of humiliation and control towards children they deemed as ‘unruly’ and ‘uncooperative’ (ie. children who asked to be treated like people). I thought only people who fit into this idea of a child attracted pedo could be child sexual abusers, so I thought my experience didn’t count.

my stepfather would openly sexually harass me and my siblings at dinner while also loving the fantasy of killing pedophiles. whether he personally found our abuse sexually gratifying was frankly irrelevant to whether it traumatized us. whether he would be considered a pedophile or not doesn't change that he committed sexual abuse of children

And it ended up not really being suitable for my purposes, as it goes. But part of the book is actually devoted to Kenelm, the author’s oldest son…and man, his dad loved him.

Kenelm seems to have had a fairly typical upbringing for a young English gentleman, although he is a bit slow to read. At twelve he’s sent to board at Stoneyhurst College—often the big step towards independence in a boy’s life, as he’ll most likely only see his parents sporadically from now on, and then leave for university.

When he’s sixteen, however, his father moves the whole family to France, so Kenelm gets pulled out of school to be with them again. Shortly after the move, his dad notices that he seems depressed. Kenelm confides in him that he’s been suffering from “scruples” for the last eighteen months—most likely what we’d now call an anxiety disorder.

And his dad is pissed—at the school, because apparently Kenelm had been seeking help there and received none, despite obviously struggling with mental health issues. So his dad takes it seriously. He sets him up to be counseled by a priest—there were no therapists back then—and doesn’t send him away to be boarded again, instead teaching him at home himself.

And his mental health does improve. His dad describes him as well-liked, gentle, pious, kind and eager to please others; at twenty he’s thinking about a career in diplomacy or going into the military—which his dad thinks he is not particularly suited for, considering his favorite pastimes are drawing and reading. He’s excited about his family’s upcoming move to Italy, and he’s been busy learning Italian and teaching it to his siblings.

Henry Kenelm Beste dies of typhus at twenty years, four months, and twenty-five days. That’s how his dad records it. That’s why his dad is telling this story. It’s not an extraordinary story—Kenelm’s story struck me because he sounds so…ordinary, like so many kids today. And he was so, so loved. His dad tried hard to help him compassionately with his mental health at a time where our current knowledge and support systems didn’t exist. You can feel how badly he wanted his son to be remembered and loved, to impress how dearly beloved he was to the people who knew him in life.

I hope he’d be glad to know someone is still thinking of Kenelm over 200 years later.