#ptsd tw

When we moved to Arizona, we moved next door to a lovely retired couple - John and Lucy. John was a veteran of WWII, he had an M.D. and a Ph.D. in radiology, and he LOVED us to pieces. His wife, Lucy, was a sharp and gifted woman - well spoken, very observant, and VERY clever. I just know that she used that cleverness as a mom to great effect, because with my and my siblings she always managed to find a way to send us home with candy and treats for a week despite my dad’s protests. We loved them, growing up, and even though they have long-since passed away I love them still, and I love what I learned from them.

John was, as stated, a WWII veteran. He was enlisted as a rifleman, and later as a front line medic, starting at Point Du Hoc and moving inwards to France and towards the Rhine. He let me do a report on him in 6th grade where he shared war stories with me he had kept to himself his whole life - he said it was out of respect for his friends who didn’t get to come home and tell their stories.

He said he told me because he knew I could respect the memories of his friends.

He showed me his collection of medals, and which he’d kept hidden away in a sock in his attic because he’d feel an immense grief any time he saw them. He had wanted to be a doctor his whole life, prior to being drafted he was studying medicine and had taken the Hippocratic oath to Do No Harm. He saw his medals as a reminder that he had Done Harm.

After telling me his stories he was able to convince himself that while he had Done Harm, it was only because his only other alternative was, to him, cowardice. He chose to be brave even if it meant acting against his Oath because he felt that if he didn’t do it someone else would have to go in his place and he would be responsible for the harm that befell them. I don’t think that’s true, but for him it was and that was something no being on earth could have ever dissuaded him from believing.

He shared wild stories - melee combat on the beach, clearing artillery bunkers, receiving a Purple Heart for being injured in hand-to-hand combat with a Wehrmacht rifleman he said he felt pity for because they were the same age and he had to imagine the man he was fighting had been drafted just like him.

He shared how he was awarded a Silver Star for charging a machine gun nest, but shared that he was most proud of not killing anyone in the process. He threw a grenade with the pin still in it and when the machine gunners jumped to avoid being blown up they were killed by someone else so he didn’t have to do it. He took the machine gun and shot the other machine gun in that French field to pieces so he didn’t have to kill the people operating it. He said they were giving out Silver Stars like candy but I knew he was being modest.

He told me about being redesignated as a medic, about how he crawled for about 500 yards on his belly to rescue an injured tank driver, then threw him over his back and crawled the same 500 yards back (1000 yards total) to treat his injuries. He said he met the man in an Army hospital in England after his spine was broken by a high explosive panzer shell was fired through a hollowed out French farmhouse and landed about 20 feet away from him.

He told me about all the people he helped and saved as a medic, he told me about his work in radiology and research after the war. He showed me a hallway that was quite literally wallpapered with academic honors he’d earned as a researcher. He told me about how his first Fourth of July back was a horror show for him because fireworks and German artillery make very similar sounds. He told me about how he woke up in a cold sweat well over half a century later hearing the screams of German artillery men being burned alive with flamethrowers, or hearing his own voice apologizing to the young German soldier he stabbed in the heart at Point Du Hoc.

He told me that when he was asked to present at a medical conference in Germany 25 years after the war ended that he was so scared he couldn’t step off the plane, and that his wife had to hold his hand and lead/pull him with her. He said he was not scared because he was worried about being triggered, but because he knew that someone somewhere outside of that plane had the course of their life irreparably altered by his military service. That to someone out there he was the cause of immense suffering and harm. That some unwitting waiter could be the son of the Nazi Officer he stabbed in the heart with a 12-inch hunting knife. That some woman asking questions in the audience would be the daughter or widow of a man he sent to judgement with a .30-06. He was scared that they would hate him.

He knew what the Nazi’s had done, he knew better than anyone I’d ever met. He’d watched the documentaries, he’s seen the PoWs returning from camps, he’d seen the civilians massacred and tortured by their regime, but he also knew that among the monsters were people like him - idealistic 20-somethings who only wanted to make the world better and were ripped away from that life by the Nazi war machine. And he spent his whole life mourning the loss of innocence and peace that was forced on so many people by such a corrupt power.

To be honest I don’t know if I could do that, but he could. He told me he could still feel the dead and lost with him, both when he slept and when he woke. He told me he thought he’d go to his grave never having told a word of this to anyone. That the stories of him and his friends and allies would disappear silently with him and those like him. That he had wanted that until he realized that he didn’t have to sell out to share the stories - that he could give the stories away for free to someone who would love the people in them, and not just the content of them. He didn’t want his stories to be used as Patriotic Pornography by some TV network or magazine. He wanted the people he knew to be respected, he wanted their memories to be honored and loved, and he entrusted me, a 12-year-old “boy” to do that.

He told me for years afterwards that after telling me these stories that he slept better than he ever had. That by sharing the stories with someone who could hear Him over the din of victory and glory and honor and revisionistic history. Someone who could see the man in the story and not just see the plot of a battle being won. He wanted to be human, and he wanted the people he saw die to be human too - everyone, not just the people on his side. He wanted someone to see and to know the anguish of having to look someone in the eye as heartblood muddies the ground beneath them and hope that they understand that this was not an act of love or hatred but an act of desperation. To hope that you had just taken out One Of The Bad Ones instead of a medical student or a poet who had been drafted. He wanted me to see how hard he had worked since then to build a world without scarcity, to build a world of peace. He wanted me to know SO badly that the cost of violence, any violence, even necessary violence, is always ALWAYS paid by both parties involved.

I think about the rise of the new right wing - the new Nazi movement’s traction in politics, and I feel sad and scared - the world that Johnathan J Yobaggy, my neighbor, my friend, and my hero, worked SO hard to build is being done away with by people who do not understand the cost of the path they are entering. I can see brief moments of recognition in the eyes of some of the people I mentioned - The former young men’s president who immediately regrets misgendering me and hen he makes eye contact with me and sees Me staring back at him and not a faceless “ideology.” I can hear it in the voice of my uncle who quietly comes up to me to apologize for some homophobic comment he made absentmindedly. I can see it in the eyes of racists and sexists being interviewed on TV when they realize that they didn’t vote for a concept, they voted for a real thing. And honestly, I have mixed emotions about it. Because while I understand frustration with the status quo, the importance of basic human needs like affordable good and rent, and I know the fear that comes with feeling powerless, I also can’t help but grieve the endless wheel of history bringing us back to this God Damned Fucking Place again. I hope we can avoid this fate, not just for our sake but for the sake of everyone who has ever tried to make the world safer. For everyone who has ever tried to make up for human nature, for everyone who has ever placed themselves on the offering plate to protect others from the cruelty they know lies just under the surface of mankind’s tenuous grip on progress. I want SO badly for there to be a solution to this, for the people who idolize the Nazi party and the impact of fascism to see that the price of this path is paid in more than just blood but in soul. That they’re allowing themselves to be devoured too. I want for the centrists and the fence sitters and the idealists who want to “change it from the inside” to see how dangerous our politics have become. I want them to see that they’re losing the things that make them great in exchange for a security blanket that’s now become far far far too small to ever work for them again.

Safety found in the past is already gone, and safety found in the future is only as real as a daydream. That any ideology that promises that by “joining us now we’ll make things rough so we can make things safe in a decade” is a promise made by those who will not have to fight the battles they send you to.

I don’t know if America was ever really great, but as long as John was alive it felt great to me. There is no ideology that can replace a neighbor. No tax plan that can replace a friend. No grocery bill that can replace community and connection. No amount of budget cuts that can replace kindness. No amount of suffering from people I hate that will ever make more love. I don’t know how to make America great, but I know how to make my America great and it is not by selling out integrity and compassion and community and fucking humanity to make eggs and gas cheaper. It is by seeing and hearing the people around me. I’m not Mormon anymore, but I still know the value of mourning with those that mourn and comforting those that stand in need of comfort. I’m not Christian anymore but I still have Eyes That Can See and Ears That Can Hear. I want to make this all stop but I can’t stop the collective power of tens of millions of people so instead I listen to my MAGA coworker tell me about how sick her kid was last week. I make jokes with my Young Men’s leader. I hug my uncle. I let them see me fully, as a human and not an ideology. As a woman and not the concept of gender. As a whole person and not someone who can be easily summarized or boiled down into something short and quippy. And I let them know I can see them fully too, and I can see all their humanity as easily as they can see mine. I just have to hope that this works - that enough people can See and Hear the people in their lives who matter to them to bring them out of their personal world of forms and into the real world.

I am probably, honestly, just spiraling a little bit. I took my ADHD meds today and in addition to helping me focus they make me a little anxious so I doubt things are as bad right now as they seem. But just in case there’s any truth to the way things seem to be going, remember, and I mean this seriously: Be kinder to each other, be gayer, and read more Terry Pratchett.

Leon x Gn!Reader

Leon had always been cold. Fearless. Detached. As a seasoned agent, you’d known him since your early days as recruits. You often wondered if the last bit of Leon’s soft side had faded since rising in the ranks. Or maybe, the rookie in him was just waiting for a moment to come back out.

Set between RE2R and RE4R. Can be read as pre-slash/romance or platonic. Whatever the heart desires.

Word Count: ~3.6k

Tags/Warnings: ptsd, flashbacks, hurt/comfort, reverse-comfort, agent!Reader, touch-starved!Leon, vulnerable!Leon, cuddling, crying, sharing a bed, Leon needs a hug (and gets a hug), references to RE2R, references to Tyrant/Mr. X, angst, gender-neutral reader.

A/N: I’m back! And I come with Rookie(ish) Leon as my offering. Been busy but I haven’t forgotten about all the tasty asks waiting for me (which are always open, by the way!) Thought I’d write a little warm-up to get me out of my block which eventually turned into a full-blown fic. Hope whoever reads enjoys it! 🖤🩶🤍

❝ it's okay... it was just a nightmare. ❞

❝ it just seemed so real. ❞

❝ you were screaming. i had to wake you up. i had to. ❞

❝ i'm so tired of this. at this point i would rather just not sleep. ❞

❝ tell me about what happened. ❞

❝ it's okay. i'll stay with you as long as you need. ❞

❝ you need to see someone about this. this is not normal. ❞

❝ i'm so sorry. i didn't mean to wake you up. ❞

❝ wake up... hey! wake up! ❞

❝ it's okay. you're safe. ❞

❝ it was so scary. i couldn't move. i couldn't breathe. ❞

❝ hey. look at me. focus. just breathe. ❞

❝ how often does this happen to you? ❞

❝ i'm just so tired. i just want to sleep... ❞

❝ i can't stand to see this happening to you. ❞

❝ i hate seeing you like this. how can i help? ❞

❝ please let me help you. ❞

❝ i just woke up and it felt like there was this weight on my chest. ❞

❝ it wasn't even that scary, it just felt so real. ❞

❝ can you stay with me a minute? ❞

❝ i'm not going anywhere. you won't be alone tonight. ❞

❝ i'm sorry to wake you, i just... it happened again. ❞

❝ was it the same one again? ❞

❝ can we keep the light on? ❞

❝ it just felt like it was happening all over again. i can't shake it. ❞

❝ i really don't want to talk about it. can we just talk about something else? ❞

❝ don't touch me- please. please, i can't right now. ❞

❝ i swear... someone else was here. watching me. ❞

❝ i can't move. ❞

❝ you were hurt, and i... i couldn't get to you. it was awful. ❞

❝ do you want to talk about it? ❞

❝ i'm right here. you're safe. i won't let anything or anyone hurt you. ❞

PERIOD!

This is in reference to a great post that talked about Vaggie's PTSD flashbacks as well as the other Exorcist she was embracing in one frame. And this comment is right: how are evil people that have been explicitly evil since the first time we've seen them, being "done wrong" by showing that they...are evil? And I also agree with this person questioning why it took them hurting someone that wasn't Vaggie for these people to finally realize that their favorite characters are not not bad people? You all hate Vaggie that much? Yeesh.

The tantrums that I've seen thrown on Twitter over these flashback scenes have been very concerning. They're extremely livid that more examples are being shown of their poor, wittle, psychotic favs acting like the terrible people that they are. I've also seen so many of them justifying the abuse Vaggie went through, whether it be while Vaggie was in the Exorcist army or that fateful Extermination Day where she was disfigured, and I'm really wondering how and why they think something like that is excusable. Again, your deep hatred for Vaggie is really clouding your judgement and critical thinking skills. Someone even made the disgustingly disturbing hashtag of #lutewasrighttomutilateher, and again...how are you all excusing something like this?

There were also people highly enraged by how the two were being shown, and responded by trying to do an entire whataboutism with Vaggie killing the Exorcists in defense of herself and the hotel crew. There's a tweet that said "lute may have slapped a few people around, but Vaggie has a few bodies herself." Yes, lute abusing the soldiers goes directly hand-in-hand with Vaggie killing angels in self-defense. Yep, totally makes sense. (This is entirely sarcasm). Did these viewers just expect Vaggie to go around and ask each Exorcist to not kill her and her friends? Vaggie and crew were completely in the right to prepare a way to defend themselves and act on it, especially since Adam let them know prior that he was heading down to destroy the hotel first.

Vaggie does not—in any way, shape, or form—owe lute a damned thing. She doesn't owe Adam a damned thing. She doesn't owe the Exorcists who were—in addition to coming down to attack Sinners and the hotel, anyway—instructed to try and bring her head back to Adam, a damned thing. She was well within her rights to defend herself, so she did.

To echo the last line of that comment, don't ever invalidate Vaggie's trauma. No matter who you do or don't like, do not invalidate trauma. Yes, this is a fictional character, but she's dealing with a very real thing/very real things that people can connect and relate to from their own experiences and realities. Invalidating this character's trauma shows that not only are you a jerk (and I'm being very nice with the word choice here), but it also shows a major lack of critical thinking skills and emotional intelligence regarding differences of perspectives.

Growing up as the kid of a doctor I got to observe a lot more medical treatment than most doctor’s children do. My dad provided free medical treatment to people he knew couldn’t pay - the two conditions were that it had to be treatable at our home, and that they had to come to our home for treatment. (Because once he’s done with his shift he’s not going anywhere except to bed.) I think a lot about some of those moment and how significant they were for me as a kid, even if I didn’t realize it.

One day a kid got brought to our house. His grandpa was a loving man who was trying to take care of his grandson. His grandson had what looked like a big-ass welt on his leg. My dad took one look at it and recognized it as MRSA, a highly contagious and medicine resistant skin infection that can be fatal.

We did our usual “home medical prep” technique of wiping out kitchen take down with bleach. The younger kiddos left the room, but @inbabylontheywept and I stayed to talk to this guy who was about our age and scared as hell. He chatted with us while my dad numbed the infected area and then extracted what seemed to be enough puss to fill a milk jug. This boys leg was so pussy it would legally be denied medical care in the state of Texas. He had medically impossible quantities of goop emerging from his leg at a rate that was nearly audible, like when an upstairs neighbor turns on a shower. He packed the wound with sterile gauze and prescribed the kid whatever meds are appropriate to prescribe for MRSA, Idk I’m not a doctor. But I remember the kid saying that he was relieved that he got it treated early so he could still be ready to play football with his high school team if he was lucky.

I remember an older guy who came into a clinic my dad owned with an ingrown toenail. He’d ignored it for so long, thinking he was just being a wuss, that the toenail - once extracted - was about the size of a small pea. He sighed with relief when it was done and said he was glad to know he hadn’t just been being whiny and wasting people’s time. My dad told him he could have come in weeks earlier and still not been wasting his time. The man laughed, like my dad was kidding, and left the clinic.

I was 16, at a church dance. A girl comes up to my dad. She says she feels sick. Headache, sore throat, nausea, the works. She consents to a physical exam where my dad feels that her lymph nodes are inflamed - a sign of a potential infection. He escorts her out of the dimly-lit dance hall to a brightly lit hallway and sees her earlobes are bright red and almost painfully hot to the touch. He tells her she’ll need to take the earrings out, and when she does a geyser of pus sprays out of each hole in her ears. She has to get her ears re-pierced and is sad about it but happy to feel better.

When I worked with sex offenders we often talked about “The Offense Cycle” or the pattern of behavior typically related to the commission of a sex crime. Over time I came to realize this did not only apply to sex crimes, and in fact applies to most people as it is only barely related to sex drive and much more highly connected to ego/self-esteem. I now call it “The Shame Cycle.” The shame cycle has four parts, all centered around an experience with shame.

These parts are all circling the feeling of shame, trying to keep it subdued, because at the end of the day shame’s purpose is to drive us to hide things. While guilt is prosocial and pushes us towards others, shame pushes us away from others and towards secrecy. We all experience shame, and we all experience it over different things.

The first stage of the shame cycle is isolation. People who feel shame want to run, to withdraw, to hide their torturous evils in the darkest cob-webbiest corners of our brains. It drives us to hide from others, to keep away from them so that they never know what we did and get mad at us or hurt us in some way, be it physical, emotional, or otherwise. The base urge to stay safe is understandable, but it also drives people towards avoiding something. This effort to “not feel bad” is what I often call a “cadaver goal,” a goal to kill a feeling or thought or to experience emotional nothingness. This, of course, does not work, because as Aristotle noted- “Nature abhors a vacuum.” In the absence of feeling and connection, this step inevitably fails and gives way to the next stage of the shame cycle:

The second stage of the shame cycle is “masking,” or hiding our true needs/wants/intentions from others due to the fear that those things would force us to face intense rejection. If the thing we are ashamed about is a part of us, that means not just rejection of a concept but rejection of a part of our Selves, which is painful and challenging to deal with. So we tell ourselves that we cannot, should not, MUST not reveal our true self, but that if we put on a little show for someone to make them happy it’s not that bad, right? The trick here is that we’re trying to contain emotional experiences to a box, but emotions are living things. The town I’m in had to remodel its whole downtown area because we planted trees but didn’t give them enough space to grow. Instead of staying small, fitting within the confines of the space allotted to them, they did what living things do and started breaking shit – concrete sidewalks were ruined and unnavigable, especially for people with impaired movement. The foundations of buildings were being cracked and damaged by tree roots. Sewer lines and water lines were being broken by these invasive roots which, when given no means of egress, were forced to find space for themselves by breaking the nice useful things we’d built around them. And shame, just like so many other feelings, just like so many tree roots, does not go away if ignored. Instead, it cultivates itself. If we do not make space for it, it will make the space itself without any care to what it is shattering, cracking, breaking, splintering, or otherwise destroying as it does so.

This shattering leads into the third stage of the cycle – the “enacting” stage, the stage where the shame is not suppressed any longer because it no longer CAN be. It leads us to do bad things, things we are embarrassed of or ashamed by. For some people, shame about who they are, what they want, what they think, or how they feel can lead to sex crimes or other forms of unacceptable violence. For others, it can lead to relapses, bursts of mean-spirited verbal aggression, fits of rage, or otherwise experiencing what the kids call “crashing out.”

Once the enacting stage is finished, the final stage of the cycle presents itself – the Resetting stage. Without addressing the shame, people reset to the point of isolation, then masking, then inevitably enacting. The shame is sheltered by this cycle, which creates thoughts, feelings, and behavior orbiting around the shame like a pack of animals forming a defensive circle around their young when predators are spotted. Only in this case we are both the predator and the young, and we’re trying to save our self-concept. The Resetting stage is often defined by what is called “victim posturing,” or positioning oneself as a victim of circumstance or life, removing the sense of control allows us to distance ourself from the responsibility we would otherwise feel. The other behavior common to this stage of the cycle is “transitory guilt,” or guilt that pushes us to be kind to others until we feel better about ourselves and not until we have connected with others and restored balance for our untoward actions.

I’ll give y’all an example: There was a period of time where I hated myself. I know what y’all are thinking – a tgirl who hates herself? Color me shocked! But legitimately, it was just ingrained into me. I knew there was some part of me that felt so “wrong” compared to what I could see others feeling that I needed to hide it. I went as far as going on a mission for two years hoping God would see my sacrifice and repay me by giving me a “whatever-the-fuck-this-is-ectomy” but it didn’t work. In fact, immediately after my mission, I was possessed by such intense self-loathing that, had I felt it openly, I would have been crushed. In actuality, I was not crushed when I felt it, but I thought I was weak and incapable and I wanted to be productive so I pushed it down. I isolated myself from myself, and I hid from others. I interacted with people when necessary, such as for work or for class, but otherwise I stayed by myself. I had this horrible feeling inside me that something was going to come out of me – some act, some thought, some feeling, that would show who I really was, and then everybody would know, and they would hate that thing, and I would know that the thing they hated was a part of my soul. I would know that I was uniquely and unavoidably detestable.

So I hid it. I hid it at all costs. And eventually it gave way to masking – by hiding my feelings I fooled myself into thinking I was able to kill that part of me I loathed. But, as is inevitably the case, it came up. The roots of my sickness burrowed through the freshly-laid concrete of my hopes for the future, my comfort, and my connection to myself. Any time I’d get too comfortable with my mask, I would quickly realize that I had done something “wicked” or “evil,” such as asking a girl on a date as someone who was fundamentally Wrong. No matter how well the date went, no matter how charming the mask was, I was never me, and I always ended things before they got serious enough to show whatever was inside me. I flickered between isolating and masking, never quite allowing my roots to break through the concrete enough to get the sustenance they needed, until eventually – to my horror – I made a suicide plan.

The day-of I had everything ready – a loaded pistol, a note, a place to do the deed, and something flipped. I had a good interaction with a roommate. He was kind and told me I looked tired and should rest. I decided to delay the inevitable by an hour and walked upstairs to take a nap. Instead, I found myself sobbing. I cried myself to sleep and woke up hours later – dehydrated, distraught, and defeated. I took the position of the victim, in part because I was a victim – I was a victim of myself and of others. I told myself that nothing I was feeling could be stopped, that I was powerless to save myself, that spending even another second in contact with this pain was going to kill me unless I did it myself.

I also experienced transitory guilt – I couldn’t die unless I proved to my family it was the right thing to do. I wasn’t trying to live because my absence would harm others, I was trying to live so I could feel better about things when I finally did what I was going to do. I called the BYU CAPS center and they helped, but because my providers there could not find the cause of the shame it only reset the cycle. I spent 18 months after that point circling the drain, repeating the cycle, until eventually it happened – a beautiful, smiling transgender woman posted a timeline picture of herself and I realized what I’d been avoiding, what needed to come out of me was HER, the me I hadn’t been allowed to be for so long. Not a feminine man, not a gay man, but a whole person – a woman who could experience joy and reality in ways the now-dying husk of the man I thought I was ever could. The concrete shattered, the water lines were ruined, the foundation of the buildings I had constructed collapsed, and in the wreckage of my old self there was a strong woman with deep, powerful roots that could not be ignored or denied. At long last, with a lot of patience from friends and family, a lot of work on my end, and a significant amount of luck, I was finally able to grow past the confines of the concrete bullshit I had locked myself in. With the cycle disrupted, I was able to examine myself and found that while the false world I had built to house my warped feelings and deluded thoughts had died, the living tree of my soul was now free to thrive on.

When we experience shame we often want to extract that feeling, to remove it and dispose of it, to annihilate it and kill it, and we simply cannot, at least not healthily. We also oftentimes feel the urge to lock it up, to build around it things that are so important and advanced and powerful that we think there is no way the feeling could ever escape and be seen, but just like tree roots pulverizing cement, just dandelions growing in cracks in the sidewalk, just like a caged animal, our living feelings are not content to be restricted by what we feel is best or most logical. Instead, our living feelings need to be cultivated. We need to feel them on purpose. We need to give the feelings somewhere to go. Because with nowhere to go, they do not stay put, they start to damage things in their effort to escape.

When I was being trained on how to provide therapy to people who are grieving I was taught the mantra “grief is just love with nowhere to go, so give them somewhere to put it.” The same goes, oftentimes, for shame. While oftentimes shame is a source of information about wrongdoing, for many marginalized people shame can also be related to self-care. Many people experience shame about needing more time to rest while menstruating, not because it’s bad to need more rest or more time or more patience, but because they have been mocked, bullied, hurt, or belittled for even asking. Many autistic people feel shame when asking for accommodations – not because letting a professor know you need to wear sunglasses inside is bad, but because it’s something that can get us made fun of or belittled. Many queer people feel shame for being queer, not because being queer is bad but because our society, by and large, hates queer people. In this sense, the shame we feel can be reframed as “self love with nowhere to go.” The shame is a way we hide the parts of ourselves too precious to ever willingly subject to harm.

To clarify, if you feel shame because you DID something bad, that is different than the shame experienced by being told that you ARE bad. When sex offenders would come in and say “I hid this from my wife because if she knew she’d be livid” it wasn’t something like “if she knew how lonely I was she’d be livid,” it was always “if she knew that I was grooming her niece she’d be furious,” because of course she would, because that behavior is harming others. Sometimes shame tells us to hide things selfishly, because it keeps us safe from the consequences of our actions, but sometimes shame tells us to hide things lovingly, because it keeps us safe from the consequences of others’ actions. But that can also build up – that man whose ingrown toenail was removed was so ashamed of his own perceived weakness that he waited until removing the ingrown toenail left a wound more reminiscent of a bullet hole than a typical ingrown toenail removal wound. That girl who didn’t want to experience the pain of ear piercing again hid the discomfort she was in until she literally shot pus out of her ear like a squirt gun. Inversely, the boy who had all the pus ever made pushed out of his leg felt better BECAUSE he asked for help as soon as he knew he needed it. When we hide what hurts us, it doesn’t go away, it just forcibly gives the pain more room to grow.

For those readers of mine who are dealing with shame, or who are dealing with some aspect of the shame cycle, know that shame dies in the light. Shame cannot survive contact with reality. Know, also, that shame comes from a place of self-preservation. That you are not broken for trying to stay alive. Know that even if you feel shame that is warranted, such as shame at having harmed someone, that letting the shame out will give you more space, time, and energy to grow. Whether it’s part of an offense cycle or a shame cycle, disrupting the cycle will lead to a better, happier life. Likewise, for those who feel too overwhelmed to function right now, those who just want everything to stop so they can have a goddamn break, remember that what you want is not the absence of a negative but the presence of a positive. You don’t want to stop feeling scared, you want to feel safe. You don’t want to stop feeling sad, you want to feel relieved. If we let the pain bury our wants because it’s safer to want nothing than it is to want something and be hurt by its absence, then we end up not acting in accordance with who we know we are, and that is so much more painful and frustrating.