s a l s e d i n e

The World

is violent and mercurial

it will have its way with you.

We are saved only by love --

love for each other and the love

that we pour into the art we

feel compelled to share: being a parent,

a writer, being a painter, being a friend.

We live in a perpetually burning

building and what we must save

from it all the time is love.

Widow's Bay (2026—) | Season 1, Episode 10 "We Hope You Enjoyed Your Time!"

Widow's Bay

There's a quote I love. I got it up here in cross-stitch. So, I'm gonna read it to you... "The world is violent and mercurial. It will have its way with you..." Can't read that, can't read that part, can't—can't read—oh, here! Here it is... "We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it all the time is love."

You were the victim, and it wasn’t fair, but it’s over now. Nobody came to save you, and I’m sorry, but it’s too late for anyone to go back and do it different.

You’re suffering over something that cannot be resolved. You’re allowed to feel angry, or outraged, or betrayed, but there will eventually come a time that you don’t feel that so violently anymore, and you’re going to want to have something good left to go back to.

You can’t make anyone love you the way you need to be loved. That’s how a lot of good things end. Not with a clear sign, something blocking the road that says “do not proceed”, just a splitting of the path that’s still moving somewhat in the same direction.

You can’t fix them. Nothing you can do will fix them. And if they fix themselves, they can’t do it for you- they have to do it for themselves as well, because otherwise a day may come when they’re alone, and as long as they live, they are their only true constant. So you can support, and you can encourage, but the hardest part is up to them. And sometimes they can’t do it even with your help.

Sometimes letting go of someone feels like mourning at their funeral before they’ve died, and every time you see them after it’s like talking to a ghost that doesn’t know it’s dead. Sometimes that happens. You’ll both still wake up tomorrow anyways.

I understand that you’re afraid, and that you’re afraid for good reasons. And I understand that being brave isn’t as easy as just turning that fear off, and you would if you could in a heartbeat. But the thing is, as long as that fear is able to dictate your choices, it will have power over you. If you don’t believe you can try to fight it, if you accept that it will always be in charge, you let the frightening thing stay present in your life. It will exist as long as you stay paralyzed. And that sounds cruel, but it isn’t something anyone can fix for you.

The person you may let yourself become after experiencing the terrible thing may very well grow into a much bigger, much more terrible thing, and someday it will swallow the first terrible thing whole. And all that will be left is something far worse for someone else. And you will not be able to shrink it down by explaining where it came from, because terrible things that are dead and gone are never as terrible as terrible things that are alive right now in front of you.

If you read this whole thing and found yourself angry, if you thought to yourself ‘I know that, and it doesn’t help. I know that, and I’m still suffering. I know that, I’ve heard that, I’ve been told that before, over and over and over again, by people who aren’t listening who don’t understand, who don’t get it, and I’m still hurting, still tired, still in pain, still suffering, and this isn’t something a handful of pithy words from some asshole who isn’t here and present and walking in my shoes suffering what I’m suffering from can fix. I know all of this and it changes nothing”, I want you to know:

Yeah. That was me, too. I sat at the bottom of a miserable pit that I didn’t even dig while a bunch of detached, emotionally unavailable jackasses who weren’t helping even a little yelled all this down at me, like just saying it hard enough or making me hear it as though I wasn’t already a hundred percent aware and still hurting anyways would magically solve all my problems and it didn’t. Like I was some whiny little rat with a victim complex looking for the easy way out and not the survivor of something awful doing their goddamn best to keep going, scraping by on the skin of their fucking teeth.

Every single note on this list is something someone told me at the exact wrong time, that made me want to scream and cry and smash a goddamn brick over their head because ‘I already know that, you fucking asshole, and it doesn’t change anything, so fucking help me or piss the hell off.”

That’s why I wrote the list.

It’s everything I needed to know that I already knew, that only made me feel worse, and didn’t help me improve anything at all even a little bit until I experienced the exact right circumstances that made them click the exact right way and allowed me to say it to myself and feel only a sense of, “okay yeah, I get it now.”

It’s not something I would ever directly say to someone in a time of crisis, but it’s all stuff I learned and needed to learn while I was that person.

You get what I mean?

A: Love it. Spend my time combing AO3 for it.

B: Like it. Not one of my bigger cravings, but it can scratch a certain itch if I’m in the right mood.

C: Neutral. A good author might be able to sell it, but a bad one will kill it deader than dead.

D: Not my favorite. I avoid it if I can, but it won’t necessarily put me off reading something.

And my dad and brothers? Were deeply disturbed by the movie Jennifer’s Body. I was flabbergasted. It’s not scary! It’s not even that gory. But they were horrified by it. These men who grew up on 70s slashers were legitimately shook by 90 minutes of Megan Fox eating a few teenage boys, mostly off-screen.

Similarly, my all-male reading panel for my thesis? Were so disturbed by my synopsis of the film Teeth that they couldn’t even talk about it. One of them said he couldn’t look at his wife for a week after reading it.

Again, grown-ass men who study and teach media for a living. Who definitely watch and enjoy horror movies. One of whom was a huge Tarantino buff. We watched and read worse in his intro to mass media class! But one movie about a girl whose vag could bite was enough to haunt him.

Then of course you have things like the Gone Girl backlash–men yelling that Amy Dunne is evil and women clamoring to assure everyone that they know she is not someone to emulate–the backlash against Carol Danvers, and, more recently, the griping from MRAs against the upcoming film Hustlers, which is about strippers scamming their Wall Street clients.

My conclusion? Most men–at least most straight, cisgender men, who are both my sample population and most of the ones whining that Carol is a “villain”–are perfectly fine with, and desensitized to, media where men do violence to women (horror movies), or men do violence to men (horror and action movies). They’re even sort of fine when women do violence to women (“ooooo cat fight!”).

But they get intensely uncomfortable when women are depicted doing any kind of violence to men, especially in films that tilt the balance of power to the other side of the m/f gender binary beyond a single moment or scene.

So woman as flesh-eating monster with men as her preferred cuisine? Woman who responds to unwanted sexual contact by biting it off? Woman who frames her cheating husband for murder? Woman whose response to harassment–behavior that many of the loudest whiners know is both creepy and reflective of their own thoughts/actions–is to break something?

Too scary. Unacceptable. Disturbing. These men hate being presented with the idea, even in fiction, that their position of power is socially constructed, that it could easily be flipped the other way. It terrifies them.

In feeling that terror, they experience a tiny modicum of what living, existing, moving, being perceived as a woman in the world is like.