#falsemyth

y’aleda / cont.     

  She’s not sure if the whistle makes her feel better or worse. It sure doesn’t make her feel smarter, but she thinks she used to be good at laughing at herself, and maybe this is an opportunity to practice.

@bestsellingsurvivor said: eweven for mawy [sic]

have there been other meaningful people of the same or similar identities in your muse’s life that they’ve looked for support or understanding from? how did that go, and was the impact positive or negative in the end?

okay so... i think the first person mary ever looked to in a “same hat?” kinda way was her first girlfriend. it’s... a bit isolating and Not Great to get an initial sense of your identity from your romantic partner only, just because that doesn’t promote an awesome dynamic, but also because mary’s first girlfriend was ummmmmmmmmmmmm a secretary in her department who was ummmmmmmmmmmmm engaged to one of mary’s colleagues.

so this wasn’t a relationship particularly steeped in a deep lesbian culture or identity or even a nice, wholesome sense of escaping heterosexuality, both because the relationship was uh CHEATING and because the relationship ended when mary’s gf went through with her marriage to her fiance, to mary’s shock and sorrow.

mary was also really deeply affected by this woman because when they met up again after the breakup, her ex recharacterized their relationship in a very harmful, negative way. i know i wrote quite a lengthy post about this but i CANNOT find it on my blog so i’ll briefly explain:

basically in order to deal with/live with the fact of her past lesbian relationship, now that she had completely immersed herself in a heterosexual life, mary’s ex insisted to mary that the relationship only happened “because you [mary] wanted it.” she basically painted mary as a kind of obsessive aggressor and rejected the notion that she’d played an active, desiring part in the relationship.

this interlocked very nicely with the burgeoning cultural topos, born out of psychoanalysis, that lesbianism was a kind of neurosis that manifested as obsession, usually coming out of some kind of past trauma. mary really, REALLY deeply internalized this. it’s part of why she periodically refers to her lesbianism as her “condition” or similar, medicalized terms. so this whole experience, suffice it to say, was a Negative.

i’d say the other person that played a major role in supporting her identity--this time a positive one--was eve. they were friends for years, long before they ever had a romantic relationship; they had a light flirtation going on most of that time, and both knew the other was gay pretty much from day 1.

eve also has a sense of herself as, perhaps, having a “condition” i.e. lesbianism, but where mary due to her background didn’t have a chance to explore that early in life, eve did, and she had a much better time developing a sense of her sexuality as natural and not necessarily bad or pathological. mary’s initial sexual/romantic experience was a bit of a negative and helpless one--she felt very much buffeted about by her desires, and the combo of that first, incredibly charged sexual experience rendering her almost powerless emotionally with the frankly immoral nature of being an engaged woman’s bit on the side was um... not great. but eve had so much more time and more opportunities to explore and enjoy, not just throw herself like down a well of Lesbian Pathos.

so eve has played a great role in mary’s life in this regard, of being kind of the wall that mary bounces her guilt/negativity off of and she knocks a chip off that ball of negativity each time, and it gets smaller and smaller. i think it’s also very hard to hate yourself for a quality that you love in someone else and soooooo much of what initially made mary feel safe and comfortable around eve was the fact that they were two eccentric gay women who could just sit and shoot the shit and like... it became harder to pathologize her own desire in the face of a woman whose same desire she felt was natural and good.

GAS ME UP / ACCEPTING

            “ I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE HELL you are, but if you move I swear to God, I’m going to shoot. ”

      @falsemyth​ ( pandora ) said:  “ i feel things when i’m with you. ”

      NO PERSON, ANYWHERE, COULD EVER POSSIBLY describe charlie as naturally open or emotional, nor could it be said that she was suave. she could be charming, certainly. flirtatious, definitely. she had a cool head when a gun was pressed to hers, confidence in her own abilities and a very competitive spirit. 

            what she did not have the head for was a girl holding her hand.

   it was like her brain had turned to liquid and started dripping out of her ears like the world’s most horrible lava cake. any of her usual wit or charm had drained away, and her mind was completely blank. charlie rarely choked. she was generally considered competent and courageous under any kind of pressure, but apparently there was a line, and it was just the slightest pressure around her hand.

         “ oh. ” her mouth began without any input from her intelligent consciousness, in a tone that definitely betrayed the internal meltdown ongoing. 

            @falsemyth / y’aleda said: “ you can trust me. ”

   IN THE HEAT OF THE MOMENT, GUNS bearing down on them, it seemed like charlie had little choice. she was bleeding from the wound to her side, and her vision was getting blurry. in anger and frustration, she slammed her foot down beside the pedals before she dragged herself along to the other side of the pod’s bench seat, gripping her wound and gritting her teeth.

         “ shit, GET IN. you better know how to fly this thing. ”