I’m out of blog posts, exhausted, and super depressed about everything going on in the world (which is why I’m out of blog posts, but I’ll write about that later). So, rather than try to kick my ass into gear in order to pretend that I’m still writing these a week ahead of time, I’m going to fully admit that I’m writing this on the eleventh, that I’m probably going to have to edit this after it posts tomorrow, and that all I can seem to do right now is take refuge in what scant comforts remain to me after I burned through them in the first year of the pandemic… [this is why I try to write them early enough that I can edit them before they go up since the rest of the post doesn’t really support this idea here]. The primary comfort amongst them being The Legend of Zelda and Majora’s Mask in particular. I feel a little weird, writing about it right now, but it also feels kind of appropriate given that it is a game about preventing the end of the world while the world is constantly ending. About finding joy or love or peace as the world falls down around your ears. About grief and endings and healing throughout them. I’m pretty sure that all the recent thoughts buzzing around my head are a result of something I read and a discussion I had rather than something I wrote, but it still feels like I’ve touched on this recently even though I have clear evidence I haven’t.
Continue readingChildhood Trauma
Reopening Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door Twenty Years Later
Content Warning for discussion of childhood trauma in the context of a retrospective about Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. There’s also spoilers for Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door in there, too, but not super specific ones.
Continue readingUnpacking The Past
Recently, my younger sibling (the middlest of us middle siblings) brought me the last of my things from my parents’ house. A lot of it was model train stuff that used to belong to my dad and that now belongs to me for reasons I don’t remember (I probably said I’d take it when he mentioned planning to throw it out sometime a decade or so ago), but this delivery also included a bunch of the seasonal decorations that had been given to me in my childhood and all of my “baby books” as my family called them (pretty much anything for kindergardeners and younger). I had a pretty impressive collection (all of us did), but I think I might have held onto mine the best. I was always the kid most interested in building my book collection. I reread things the most. I enjoyed having them since, with one exception, books were never forbidden to me in a household where every other piece of media I ever acquired had to be vetted by my parents to make sure it was appropriate for me. Which is funny, since books wound up being some of the most subversive stuff I ecountered as a kid in a lot of ways, some of which weren’t always terribly constructive or thought-provoking. I mean, I remember tearing pages out of my Dragon Ball manga because some of the art showed a woman’s breasts and I knew I’d lose all access to manga (which had somehow fallen under the blanket approval of books in my parents’ minds) just as well as I remember how Fullmetal Alchemist taught me to be more critical of authority. Or how Tuck Everlasting taught me that maybe endless anything wasn’t actually something I should desire (which laid the groundwork for me questioning the faith I was raised to accept without thought) and how Hatchett taught me how to start fires without matches.
Continue readingEmotional Processing And Pain I Could Once Ignore
Content Warnings for discussion of childhood trauma (specifically neglect and abuse at the hands of my parents and brother).
I wish yesterday’s good mood had lasted a bit longer [it did eventually pick back up again, but today did not help much]. I made it through an entire day with it intact, but it did not survive a night of poor sleep and an unfocused day of finding myself browsing the internet because I needed something more engaging than my work to keep me awake. At least nothing bad has happened. I came by this poor mood honestly. It is a melancholy of my own making. A sadness of my own. Pure, homegrown sorrow. It was, of course, influenced by outside sources, as all such things are. It’s not like I want to think about my miserable childhood. I’ve gotten pretty good at not thinking about it, most of the time, but there’s little I can do in the face of something that will push past the blanket I’ve thrown over that portion of my mind and draw bits of my past out into the light. I’m only half to blame for it this time, though. Sure, I chose to watch last week’s John Oliver deep dive about homeschooling knowing that I was going to get myself caught up in the misery of the past, but I wasn’t exactly expecting it to be so focused on how homeschooling is used by some parents to avoid scrutiny while they abuse or neglect their children. Nor was I expecting an incredibly brief conversation with my friend about her trip to her local county fair to bring up oddly strong memories of the fairs I went to ask a child that eventually revealed to me that all the happiest memories I have of my childhood are from when I was alone or at least away from my entire biological family. But they did and now I’m trying to figure out if I have something I need to work through here or if I need to allow myself to be sad for a while since that’s a pretty reasonable reaction to my reflections and minor realization.
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