my brother and i lost each other for a while - he used to be my protector when we were kids and then he got sent away for being too good at it. and then we became strangers. now we're in our 30s and we've become best friends and we're both desperate to be near each other and in each other's lives again. :'-). we'll get there. i think he'll be living down the hall from me again very soon.

i made my therapist cry today 😭 sometimes i, like…feel guilty about the therapy process. like it would be better for everyone if i kept my trauma to myself where it’s been locked down for decades. but this feeling is not good for my recovery! she has taught me this. it’s just so hard not to feel like i’m committing violence by describing violence that has happened to me. and also this feeling goes hand in hand with the feeling i had for many years when i was younger, a feeling like my sexual desire, and the gratification i got from engaging sexually with other women consensually, the act of craving someone else’s body — it felt like an inherently violent, abusive, exploitative, objectifying act to me. it took me so long to conceptually separate rape from sex. every time i had sex i would think i was worse than my abuser.

i joke but i empathize so deeply with noel’s struggles early in their relationship. every sign in the world is telling him it’s impure and evil and abusive and criminal and selfish to pursue liam, or even just to allow liam to love him the way liam is naturally inclined to, that liam as the younger party does not know what’s good for him, that noel as the ‘adult’ should be the one to lead by example and act responsibly. so he tells liam that it’s not gonna happen and that he’ll get over it if he just tries to, and he leaves to make it easier. and maybe that would have been the end of it if his brother had been anyone else. but it was liam, who has steadfastly refused to do anything but follow his heart since the day he was born. and noel has been in love with him his whole life, too. so in this way, both having and not having liam is a failure. he cannot win. he can either follow the path of irredeemable perversion or unrequited love/constant heartache. in either case he will suffer biblically. so yeah, he was trying, and failing, longing and giving in. this is why i think “you told me the king would never have me, you taught me Sweet Mary before you slapped me” is about noel and this struggle specifically. i think noel must have succumbed quite often, before putting his foot down quite harshly in an attempt to set liam on a better path.