The Nocturne Narrator

friends stick together

If you are getting gender affirming surgery, especially if it’s your first major surgery, PLEASE be aware that you can become SEVERELY depressed afterwards ESPECIALLY if you have a history of depression or suicidal ideation.

Post op depression is a natural reaction to the crazy mix of hormones your body goes through after major surgery as well as the stress and anxiety of recovery. Think of it like an adrenaline crash, but dragged out longer.

For me it kicked in about 6 weeks after top surgery and the worst of it lasted until about 10 weeks post op. EVERYTHING felt IMPOSSIBLE. None of the skills I’d been practicing worked. I thought everything was going to be bad forever. I didn’t attempt, but I was in the hospital. If it wasn’t for my support system I probably would have attempted.

This is not regret, but it can feel like it. I remain happy about my results to this day (going on six years later).

This is not you failing to maintain your mental health, but it can make you feel like a failure.

Things are not hopeless, but through the haze of this depression they can feel hopeless.

It can be terrifyingly sudden or it can sneak up on you. I didn’t even realize what was going on until after the depression finally passed and my mental health went back to normal.

I am writing this post because nobody told me about this before my top surgery. I was caught completely off guard. For my subsequent surgeries being aware has made all the difference. Being able to treat those symptoms as an expected and normal part of the healing journey has made them far easier to deal with. Because even when my emotions go to dark places I *know* they will pass. I have been able to tell the bad thoughts to take a bad seat and focus on healing.

i meant to draw something w/ chosen and dark being completely stuck to each other 24/7 like @questionthequestionablemyfriends did today, but this was all i managed to get onto the canvas. so i just slapped a trusty ol' burning logo on it and called it good.

i really really enjoy the way that they'd likely be completely inseperably codependent for two different reasons. dark because he's never known life WITHOUT chosen in it, and chosen because he's painfully aware of what life is like without dark and never ever EVER wants to go back to being so soulcrushingly lonely.

minor additional headcanons i have about chosen:

- he's like. EXTREMELY claustrophobic after 3 years of being stored in a tiny ass chest whenever he wasn't being used

- he's unfathomably touch starved

- huge limit for him is heavy bondage and/or any kind of metal bondage like handcuffs or chains or something. on himself, at least. hates feeling physically restricted.

hear me out

imagine these two meeting

the concept of victim managing to get stuck on Graces laptop or any tech for that matter and eventually learns how to travel through the hail mary's system

Grace after befriending an alien from another planet then to end up befriending a stickfigure that ended up on his laptop or something in space somehow