Metaphor about mothers

I was born to the best and worst beings in existence. And every single day I wish I could help my mother avoid ever meeting my father.
My mom isn’t perfect, but she is a good person. She tries to help and support strangers and doesn’t even brag about it. In fact, she forgets helping them until they later come back and thank her profusely for her help. She worked through advertisement in the 80s-90s in NYC while living with next to nothing. She went through sexual abuse, harassment, and worse throughout this time. But every single day my mom worked to make not only a better life for herself, but for her future family. A lot of credit cards and the points system is because of her influence with banks as a small, woman-owned business.
My father seemed like a great dad. But when confronted with the proof of his gambling addiction, it is like the world came into clear view for me. I had ignored the fighting and screaming; feared the moments where he attempted to kill her in front of me. But when all the lying, cheating, and thievery came out I couldn’t ignore the things that, deep down, I KNEW.
He told her that he was going to put her in a trailer home. The man has done nothing but kick and beat her (mentally and metaphorically) throughout this divorce. My mom has done NOTHING to deserve this torture. She paid for him for over 30 years, and this is the thanks she gets?!
He admitted (IN COURT) that he forged my mom’s signature and took her inheritance, as well as mortgage fraud, tax evasion, and theft. But somehow a judge thinks that he deserves a substantial monetary gain because “he can’t go into the world poor.”
So here I am, willing to trade my freedom and sanity for my mom’s. He has used me to threaten her for years now, and I’m sick of him playing the victim. I am gladly selling my soul to a demon to try and save my mom.

[I just recently learned of this community after I had shared this in the raisedbynarcissists sub, and I couldn't figure out how to crosspost it so I'm just copy&pasting]
As the title states, (and despite the existential risk to myself - as I am disabled, impoverished, and my survival is reliant on the room I rent in her attic - given her recent threat to have have me thrown out by the police because she could not handle the feelings she had during the argument that she initiated), I have finally drawn a bright red line in the metaphorical sand regarding my nMom's treatment of me. This is the culmination of 8+ years of sustained, one-sided, unreciprocated, and unsuccessful effort on my part to sustain, salvage, repair, or improve our "relationship".
 
Reading through some of the posts on this sub over the past day or so has been very validating, as one thing she's always been extremely committed to is making sure she's the loudest voice in my life telling me how invalid all of my emotions and experiences and realities are.
 
I am very grateful for anyone who takes the time to read this post, and any input, commentary, criticism, insight, commiseration, etc, is welcome and appreciated (especially on the topic of being NC-except-as-a-tenant). Her lifelong response to my needs or inconvenient requests for respect or attempts to hold her accountable for her behaviour (throughout literally hundreds and hundreds of interactions that she has walked away from or hung-up on) has essentially been "tl;dr 🖕". So I'm acutely aware of the length of what I'm written, and I'm very used to her cold (or even mocking) avoidance and dismissal of valid issues by commenting on the length or format of my communications without ever engaging on the merits.
 
Anyways, enough preamble, here's the full letter (all of the square-bracketed disclaimers and AI-summary are part of the letter as delivered to her, to try and counter the acute and selective illiteracy she develops whenever she begins to read something she doesn't like):
 
[Start of Letter]
 
[This document begins with a 382 word AI-generated summary (titled "AI- GENERATED SUMMARY:" below the square-bracketed opening remarks), estimated at 1m23s time required to read. If you are unable or unwilling to make it through even this brief summary, then there is literally nothing else I could possibly do to assist in your comprehension of my positions. The full message following the summary is approximately 2100 words, estimated at approximately 8 minutes to read.]
 
[If you would like assistance in understanding things I've written that you're struggling to interpret or comprehend, you can go to chatgpt.com (no account necessary), or download the ChatGPT app from the Google Play Store on your phone. You can simply interact with the chat in natural language (in other words, type as though you were texting another person) and it will understand what you are saying. If you are struggling to understand how to interact with it effectively, you can simply inform it of that (in any wording you choose) and it will assist you with altering your approach to receive more effective results.]
 
AI-GENERATED SUMMARY:
 
Your son's message is a powerful declaration of his boundaries, grievances, and intentions within your relationship. Here's a breakdown to help you understand:
 
Preface: He advises you to read with an open mind and, if needed, with assistance due to the emotional complexity.
 
Declaration of Disengagement: He firmly states his decision to disengage from any form of interaction or acknowledgment outside of essential landlord-tenant matters.
 
Condemnation of Abuse: He accuses you of perpetuating a cycle of abuse that has deeply impacted his health and stability.
 
Rejection of Coercion: He dismisses the idea that being evicted is a viable solution to the abuse, highlighting the coercive nature of such a choice, and how it leaves him vulnerable to further harm.
 
Criticism of Your Behavior: He unreservedly condemns your actions, particularly your exploitation and manipulation, emphasizing the gravity and effects of your conduct.
 
Challenges to Your Claims: He directly confronts your claims regarding his efforts in the relationship, asserting that he has consistently made extensive attempts to maintain it, despite your accusations to the contrary.
 
Commitment to Compliance: He unequivocally affirms his commitment to compliance with all landlord-related demands, demonstrating his unwavering respect for your authority as the homeowner.
 
Demand for Clarity: He demands clear and unambiguous knowledge of the requisite terms when any changes to living arrangement paradigms are demanded, underscoring his willingness to comply with any directives you may issue.
 
Defense Against Gaslighting: He firmly asserts his unwavering commitment to respecting your property and authority, preemptively refuting any attempts to accuse him otherwise.
 
Insights into Your Behaviour: He offers insights into patterns in your behaviour, linking them to moments of vulnerability or distress in your life.
 
Call for Self-Reflection: He urges you to seek professional help for your narcissism and unresolved childhood traumas.
 
Caution Regarding Gravity: He states that failing to address your responsibilities would be a missed opportunity for both of you to salvage the relationship and resolve underlying issues.
 
Reiteration of Hope: Despite his current stance, he leaves the door open for reconciliation if you undergo necessary personal growth.
 
Closure on Unequal Effort: He firmly states that he can no longer sustain the one-sided effort in the relationship and won't continue to do so.
 
It's evident that he's deeply hurt and demanding acknowledgment, change, and resolution in your relationship.
 
[end of AI-generated summary; my full, non-AI-generated message follows below]
 
[I recommend that you read this in its entirety at a time and capacity level where your literacy and comprehension are at their highest level, and preferably with the interpretational assistance of a knowledgeable and competent support person or technological assistant.]
 
[Presumably, after reading a few sentences or less, your defense mechanisms will be activated and you will eject. However, as with the vast majority of the things I have said to you that have gone unacknowledged, I am completely certain that the contents are cogent and comprehensible, and I believe that with competent support and vulnerable effort you undoubtedly have the raw cognitive capacity necessary for comprehension if you are able to stabilize your emotional reactions and put real effort into the actions necessary for you to understand my words.]
 
I will not talk to you.
I will not look at you.
I will not approach you.
I will not acknowledge you.
 
If you attempt to interact with me on any interpersonal level not related to your role as a landlord, I will reserve the right to express just how fucking despicable it is to treat such a vulnerable person with such utter disregard and abuse for so fucking long.
 
The cycle of abuse you have maintained to destabilize me for your own pathological reasons has caused - and continues to cause - extensive damage to my health, stability, and existence. However, since I know your response to this would likely be some variation of "you're not a victim here [my name], so if I treat you so bad, just leave", I'll preemptively and unequivocally condemn such coercive and abusive tactics, and state again (as I did the other day), that the forced choice between your abuse and life-threatening-homelessness is obviously no choice at all, and leaves me perpetually subject to your coercion and abusive control.
 
Such exploitation by you is absolutely disgusting, and honestly I understand why you run away from yourself at every single instance where you're in danger of having your lifelong house-of-cards ego even slightly threatened. I know if I treated another human being the way you treat me for even a moment, let alone for the literal years you have done so, I would not be able to face myself in the mirror either. You should be fucking ashamed of yourself.
 
You say I "don't want to be your son anymore", as though it has been someone other than me making hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of efforts and attempts in order to try and single-handedly keep our relationship alive, and as though it has been someone other than you who has stonewalled me for years about every single legitimate and valid time I attempted to gain even the slightest foothold as a full human being in the owner-pet relationship you have fought so hard to maintain. You siphon, in fact demand, emotional supply whenever you so choose, and then fucking discard me as soon as it appears that I might do anything that would result in you losing even a fraction of a percent of the 99% to 1% imbalance you believe is an immutable part of our "relationship".
 
I will do my absolute best to be in my room as much as physically possible when you are home, so as to minimize the need to be physically adjacent to you in the course of our respective activities of daily living.
 
I, again, remain unequivocally committed to my position of deference and compliance towards any rules/demands related to my existence, presence, or activities as your tenant.
 
As you refuse to provide any sort of unambiguous guidance or clarification whatsoever regarding your shifting demands affecting my ability to access/perform basic activities of daily living, I will continue to act in good faith with respect to my adherence to all previously-established arrangements and protocols (whether codified or de facto) regarding such activities. To the full extent of my abilities, and to the extent that it is physically possible, I will immediately and unequivocally comply with any alterations, additions, or excisions you choose to impose regarding the nature of our physical coexistence as landlord and tenant, regardless of your disregard or intent for any harm to my stability that will ensue as a result.
 
If you intend to attempt to manipulate or threaten or gaslight me to illegitimately and dishonestly accuse me of failing to comply with your rights and demands as the homeownelandlord, then I can assure you that such efforts will be ineffective and inadvisable. The extensive history of my genuine, documented, and unwavering commitment to absolute respect of your home, property, and landlord-tenant authority is unassailable, and nothing has or will change about the good faith nature of my efforts to simply live peacefully and work on stabilizing my health and continuing to attempt to develop basic protocols that offer me the opportunity to seek the ways and means required to sustainably exist, survive, and seek meaning and fulfilment as a human being.
 
To try and make it a bit more bite-sized (without warranty as to the efficacy of said efforts), since I know when your ego is threatened you conveniently - and dishonestly - become completely unable to read a couple thousand words:
 

• I have never been more disgusted by the actions of anyone or anything more in my entire fucking existence.

 

• I will continue to be an absolute model tenant, despite the harmful effects of your constant abuse, and I will unequivocally comply with any demands you make with your authority as my landlord. I will explicitly and aggressively defend against any attempts to gaslight me, or attempt to dishonestly accuse me of failing to comply with any such demands.

 

• Feel free at anytime in your life to decide that maybe it might be time to face the fact that - though skillful in your delusion - you are the same scared child you were 40 years ago, and if you ever want to truly and meaningfully experience what it's like to be secure with yourself beneath the false veneer of superficial and ego-protecting interactions you surround yourself with at the exclusion of true and honest existential vulnerability, then you need to seek, engage with, and be honest and vulnerable with, professional clinical care for your intractable narcissism and the lifelong effects and deficits associated with same. In other words, to reductively and rhetorically restate what you disgustingly told me the other day as a means of deflecting from the fact that you couldn't go more than two seconds without contradicting yourself, “get your fucking meds adjusted”.

 

• When faced with any sort of challenge to your control or authority, your lifelong fear of abandonment has caused you to push people away before they have the opportunity to leave you, resulting in premature, self-created, and misdirected sabotage of significant relationships at the first sign of disturbance or genuine vulnerability. I know you're terrible at recognizing or interpreting patterns or facts, but think, for example, about when your efforts to remove me from your life and/or house have been at their most intense:

 

• (a) in 2016(ish) when conflicts about my role in helping with the [redacted address][job of cleaning out my grandpa's apartment after Alzheimer's took hold] triggered feelings of grief and fear in you at the decline of your father's health and the inevitability of his then-upcoming death,

 

• (b) in late 2019 through 2020ish, in the leadup to and aftermath of your father's death, where you threatened or demanded my removal from your house during damn-near every single minor conflict about utterly insignificant household disputes. The vulnerability and grief you felt surrounding his death triggered the core-level unresolved sense of abandonment you carry as a result of the lack of parental affection you received because of, inter alia, the level of care required by your [editor's note: dying of CF as a teenager] sister and resultant lack of parental support available to you as a result,

 

• (c) in 2021ish, surrounding your mother's acute medical events and her subsequent death, where your treatment of me followed effectively the same patterns and underlying causes as the item above (sans explicit threats of eviction, opting instead for the more oblique and covert references that have been your MO until the recent regression to explicit threats within the past few days).

 

• (d) in 2024, surrounding the final decline and subsequent death of [dog], where all of the same behaviours described above returned and steadily escalated, culminating in telling me to get the fuck out of your house because I wouldn't stop moving some boxes for 30 minutes, and then telling me that you were going to call the police to have me removed from your house as a result of your inability to force me to stop making accurate statements that damaged your ego and need for unquestioned interpersonal control in your self-appointed role as the sole ruler of the relational hierarchy you fought so hard to maintain.

 

• You need to actively and vulnerably seek and participate in professional clinical treatment for the lifelong effects of the hollow narcissism that has maladaptively protected you from your deepest childhood injuries and vulnerabilities, at the expense of truly genuine connection with, at the very least, your firstborn and only son.

 

• [note that the contents of this bullet point are neither a threat of suicide, nor an indication of any intent whatsoever to harm myself or others. I am including this disclaimer to preemptively remove your ability to selectively manipulate my words in order to further gaslight me]
  If you want me gone from your house, and life (and possibly my own life, given the extreme existential risk posed by homelessness for a vulnerable person with the significant disabilities I am faced with), then you will have to have me physically removed from your house in cold blood, and until the day you (or I, depending on the order) die you will live with that being the last time you ever saw the son that you took for granted and abused for 32 fucking years while he groveled at your feet begging for even scraps of affection or humanity from the person who constantly love-bombed and discarded him at her convenience to serve her own narcissistic desires worth no regard for the whole entire person she was subjugating to the role of, barely, a pet.
  

 

• Be aware that if you choose to remove me from your life as a pathological and assuredly-ineffective avoidance mechanism to try and preemptively shield yourself from the fear of abandonment that is triggered in you as a result of my overwhelmingly valid and necessary actions to demand that you cease your lifelong efforts to subjugate me in your self-created hierarchical position at the top of our unequal relationship, then you will be doing yourself an irreparable disservice by extinguishing whatever sliver of opportunity might remain for you to get the help you need to allow you to finally see me as a real person and begin making real decisions and changes and efforts to participate in efforts to salvage whatever scraps of hope might remain for us to have a relationship before both/either of us die.

 

• Feel free to ignore and/or conceal the tens of thousands of words of documented history in order to share contextless excerpts of this text within your self-serving echo chambers in your efforts to receive false validation of your delusional victimhood. Or, alternatively, feel free to vulnerably share this in its entirety - along with the full corpus of my messaging regarding the severity of the harms caused by your behaviours - with a competent and knowledgeable mental health professional(s) for the purposes of seeking treatment for your underlying pathologies and working towards genuine growth.

 

• In the unlikely (though incomprehensibly-or-perhaps-delusionally-still-hopeful) event that you are still reading, I will conclude by saying that the possibility for any hope of salvaging our relationship lies firmly and solely within your control.

 

• After over 8 years of significant, relentless, documented, often-vilified, and absolutely unreciprocated efforts to single-handedly to put 100% of the effort into a relationship that you reaped the benefits of while remaining unwavering in your abdication of even the slightest of responsibilities, I have run out of ways, means, ideas, and capacity to continue unsuccessfully trying to do both of our parts.

 

• I am not closing the door to the possibility of reconciliation if/once you have undertaken the extensive individual work you need to do if you are ever going to be able and willing to put the necessary effort into repairing our relationship. But neither am I continuing to continue working outside your closed door hoping that one day I might be able to do enough to influence you to treat me like a full, real, EQUAL, human being.

 
I love you, and goodbye for now. I hope to see you on the other side, but I cannot force you to undertake the journey.
 
- [my name]
 
[/End of Letter]
(any edits are fixing formatting/copy&paste errors)

Hi guys :) I have something cool to show you.
From my studies, mostly introspective, I believe I have come across a great discovery: that the ancient primordial language of man is METAPHOR (and possibly also for animals as well; this might be a bridge). In other words, pictures. But there is a catch: metaphors are not mere pictures. If I say "God is the sun" I am not saying that God is literally a sun.
How I came about this discovery: if you try really really hard to express yourself, to come up with exactly the right sentence -- or even exactly the right WORD, you hit a massive wall. The closer you come to perfection, the more tantalizingly far away becomes the prize. You think you've found exactly the right word to describe something, or to describe your feelings but nothing quite fits. You get really close. But then you look in closer and see if the word truly resonates with what you want to say, and it is amiss. It is a fun game to play, in a way.
For me, when I hit this massive wall, it is very frustrating. I cannot truly capture what I mean and feel. But then a vista opens up, the walls disintegrate into light dust. A picture appears to me. An image. A symbol, if you will. AND this picture/metaphor captures what I wanted to say, what I really mean, PERFECTLY. And that is what shocks me, that anything can be perfect. But this is.
So my hypothesis is: preverbal metaphors are translated into words. We are generally not aware of this process. That's why it may require introspection. In other words, there is meaning, which is invisible and empty (or so it seems) which then, when we want to speak or write or make it materialize, we convert into words. Like one energy being translated into another. This translation is not perfect. This invisible energy is actually the metaphor.
Metaphors, such as "God is the sun", trap an enormous amount of meaning into them. People say "A picture is worth a million words." But this is even better -- metaphors trap a trillion words within them. This metaphor can be unpackaged, but the resulting words will never fully reflect its original state.
Here's some dumb examples:
"There is electricity all over my body" (I try to find the word to describe what I am feeling. I try "anxiety", "nervous", "scared", "worried", "tense". None of them fits. It is very frustrating. Perhaps I am a perfectionist. But, then, like I said perfection can actually be achieved. The image comes to: my body with electricity zigzagging through my whole body. This fits the feeling exactly, it is a perfect fit. Just the right resonance.)
I had another example but I forget it 🙁 My memory is very bad. (If I think of it I will put it in a comment.) What I mean by "dumb" examples isn't really that they're dumb, but just that's it's hard to find an example that isn't super personal and embarrassing but not too boring either so that the example loses all vividness entirely.
A softer version of my hypothesis: This metaphor stuff is only true of me. But I doubt that. It is possible that I am more visual than most, because I am deaf. These days, since this discovery, I think of metaphors as my natural language, my mother tongue. It is beautiful. My second language is writing (I don't know why). And my third language, quite dusty, is talking.
What about you? Do you share this experience too? Are metaphors your primordial harbingers of meaning? (Do you believe in the preverbal? And if so, what is its nature?) Thank you so much! I would love to hear your experiences.
Note: in my other posts I said I wasn't going to reply to comments, but I change my mind. I will definitely reply to your comments. I don't have much to say/post anymore, so I have time to reply now.

II. The Narcissistic Personality of Our Time
...
Social Influences on Narcissism
Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure. In Freud’s time, hysteria and obsessional neurosis carried to extremes the personality traits associated with the capitalist order at an earlier stage in its development - acquisitiveness, fanatical devotion to work, and a fierce repression of sexuality. In our time, the preschizophrenic, borderline, or personality disorders have attracted increasing attention, along with schizophrenia itself. This “change in the form of neuroses has been observed and described since World War II by an ever-increasing number of psychiatrists.” According to Peter L. Giovacchini, “Clinicians are constantly faced with the seemingly increasing number of patients who do not fit current diagnostic categories” and who suffer not from “definitive symptoms” but from “vague, ill-defined complaints.” “When I refer to ‘this type of patient,’” he writes, “practically everyone knows to whom I am referring.” The growing prominence of “character disorders” seems to signify an underlying change in the organization of personality, from what has been called inner-direction to narcissism.
Allen Wheelis argued in 1958 that the change in the “patterns of neuroses” fell “within the personal experience of older psychoanalysts,” while younger ones “become aware of it from the discrepancy between the older descriptions of neuroses and the problems presented by the patients who come daily to their offices. The change is from symptom neuroses to character disorders.” Heinz Lichtenstein, who questioned the additional assertion that it reflected a change in personality structure, nevertheless wrote in 1963 that the “change in neurotic patterns” already constituted a “well-known fact.” In the seventies, such reports have become increasingly common. “It is not accident,” Herbert Hendin notes, “that at the present time the dominant events in psychoanalysis are the rediscovery of narcissism and the new emphasis on the psychological significance of death.” “What hysteria and the obsessive neuroses were to Freud and his early colleagues…at the beginning of this century,” writes Michael Beldoch, “the narcissistic disorders are to the workaday analyst in these last few decades before the next millennium. Today’s patients by and large do not suffer from hysterical paralyses of the legs or hand-washing compulsions; instead it is their very psychic selves that have gone numb or that they must scrub and rescrub in an exhausting and unending effort to come clean.” These patients suffer from “pervasive feelings of emptiness and a deep disturbance of self-esteem.” Burness E. Moore notes that narcissistic disorders have become more and more common. According to Sheldon Bach, “You used to see people coming in with hand-washing compulsions, phobias, and familiar neuroses. Now you see mostly narcissists.” Gilbert J. Rose maintains that the psychoanalytic outlook, “inappropriately transplanted from analytic practice” to everyday life, has contributed to “global permissiveness” and the “over-domestication of instinct,” which in turn contributes to the proliferation of “narcissistic identity disorders.” According to Joel Kovel, the stimulation of infantile cravings by advertising, the usurpation of parental authority by the media and the school, and the rationalization of inner life accompanied by the false promise of personal fulfillment, have created a new type of “social individual.” “The result is not the classical neuroses where an infantile impulse is suppressed by patriarchal authority, but a modern version in which impulse is stimulated, perverted and given neither an adequate object upon which to satisfy itself nor coherent forms of control…. The entire complex, played out in a setting of alienation rather than direct control, loses the classical form of symptom - and the classical therapeutic opportunity of simply restoring an impulse to consciousness.”
The reported increase in the number of narcissistic patients does not necessarily indicate that narcissistic disorders are more common than they used to be, in the population as a whole, or that they have become more common than the classical conversion neurosis. Perhaps they simply come more quickly to psychiatric attention. Ilza Veith contends that “with the increasing awareness of conversion reactions and the popularization of psychiatric literature, the ‘old-fashioned’ somatic expressions of hysteria have become suspect among the more sophisticated classes, and hence most physicians observe that obvious conversion symptoms are now rarely encountered and, if at all, only among the uneducated.” The attention given to character disorders in recent clinical literature probably makes psychiatrists more alert to their presence. But this possibility by no means diminishes the importance of psychiatric testimony about the prevalence of narcissism, especially when this testimony appears at the same time that journalists begin to speculate about the new narcissism and the unhealthy trend toward self-absorption. The narcissist comes to the attention of psychiatrists for some of the same reasons that he rises to positions of prominence not only in awareness movements and other cults but in business corporations, political organizations, and government bureaucracies. For all his inner suffering, the narcissist has many traits that make for success in bureaucratic institutions, which put a premium on the manipulation of interpersonal relations, discourage the formation of deep personal attachments, and at the same time provide the narcissist with the approval he needs in order to validate his self-esteem. Although he may resort to therapies that promise to give meaning to life and to overcome his sense of emptiness, in his professional career the narcissist often enjoys considerable success. The management of personal impressions comes naturally to him, and his mastery of its intricacies serves him well in political and business organizations where performance now counts for less than “visibility,” “momentum,” and a winning record. As the “organization man” gives way to the bureaucratic “gamesman” - the “loyalty era” of American business to the age of the “executive success game” - the narcissist comes into his own.
In a study of 250 managers from twelve major companies, Michael Maccoby describes the new corporate leader, not altogether unsympathetically, as a person who works with people rather than with materials and who seeks not to build an empire or accumulate wealth but to experience “the exhilaration of running his team and of gaining victories.” He wants to “be known as a winner, and his deepest fear is to be labeled a loser.” Instead of pitting himself against a material task or a problem demanding solution, he puts himself against others, out of a “need to be in control.” As a recent textbook for managers puts it, success today means “not simply getting ahead” but “getting ahead of others.” The new executive, boyish, playful, and “seductive,” wants in Maccoby’s words “to maintain an illusion of limitless options.” He has little capacity for “personal intimacy and social commitment.” He feels little loyalty even to the company for which he works. One executive says he experiences power “as not being pushed around by the company.” In his upward climb, this man cultivates powerful customers and attempts to use them against his own company. “You need a very big customer,” according to his calculations, “who is always in trouble and demands changes from the company. That way you automatically have power in the company, and with the customer too. I like to keep my options open.” A professor of management endorses this strategy. “Overidentification” with the company, in his view, “produces a corporation with enormous power over the careers and destinies of its true believers.” The bigger the company, the more important he thinks it is for executes “to manage their careers in terms of their own…free choices” and to “maintain the widest set of options possible.”
According to Maccoby, the gamesman “is open to new ideas, but he lacks convictions.” He will do business with any regime, even if he disapproves of its principles. More independent and resourceful than the company man, he tries to use the company for his own ends, fearing that otherwise he will be “totally emasculated by the corporation.” He avoids intimacy as a trap, preferring the “exciting, sexy atmosphere” with which the modern executive surrounds himself at work, “where adoring, mini-skirted secretaries constantly flirt with him.” In all his personal relations, the gamesman depends on the admiration or fear he inspires in others to certify his credentials as a “winner.” As he gets older, he finds it more and more difficult to command the kind of attention on which he thrives. He reaches a plateau beyond which he does not advance in his job, perhaps because the very highest positions, as Maccoby notes, still go to “those able to renounce adolescent rebelliousness and become at least to some extent believers in the organization.” The job begins to lose its savor. Having little interest in craftsmanship, the new-style executive takes no pleasure in his achievements once he begins to lose the adolescent charm on which they rest. Middle age hits him with the force of a disaster: “Once his youth, vigor, and even the thrill in winning are lost, he becomes depressed and goalless, questioning the purpose of his life. No longer energized by the team struggle and unable to dedicate himself to something he believes in beyond himself, … he finds himself starkly alone.” It is not surprising, given the prevalence of this career pattern, that popular psychology returns so often to the “midlife crisis” and to ways of combating it.
In Wilfrid Sheed’s novel Office Politics, a wife asks, “There are real issues, aren’t there, between Mr. Fine and Mr. Tyler?” Her husband answers that the issues are trivial; “the jockeying of ego is the real story.” Eugene Emerson Jennings’s study of management, which celebrates the demise of the organization man and the advent of the new “era of mobility,” insists that corporate “mobility is more than mere job performance.” What counts is “style…panache…the ability to say and do almost anything without antagonizing others.” The upwardly mobile executive, according to Jennings, knows how to handle the people around him - the “shelf-sitter” who suffers from “arrested mobility” and envies success; the “fast learner”; the “mobile superior.” The “mobility-bright executive” has learned to “read” the power relations in his office and “to see the less visible and less audible side of his superiors, chiefly their standing with their peers and superiors.” He “Can infer from a minimum of cues who are the centers of power, and he seeks to have high visibility and exposure with them. He will assiduously cultivate his standing and opportunities with them and seize every opportunity to learn from them. He will utilize his opportunities in social world to size up the men who are centers of sponsorship in the corporate world.”
Constantly comparing the “executive success game” to an athletic contest or a game of chess, Jennings treats the substance of executive life as if it were just as arbitrarily and irrelevant to success as the task of kicking a ball through a net or of moving pieces over a chessboard. He never mentions the social and economic repercussions of managerial decisions or the power that managers exercise over society as a whole. For the corporate manager on the make, power consists not of money and influence but of “momentum,” a “winning image,” a reputation as a winner . Power lies in the eye of the beholder and thus has no objective reference at all.
The manager’s view of the world, as described by Jennings, Maccoby, and by the managers themselves, is that of the narcissist, who sees the world as a mirror of himself and has no interest in external events except as they throw back a reflection of his own image. The dense interpersonal environment of modern bureaucracy, in which work assumes an abstract quality almost wholly divorced from performance, by its very nature elicits and often rewards a narcissistic response. Bureaucracy, however, is only one of a number of social influences that are bringing a narcissistic type of personality organization into greater and greater prominence. Another such influence is the mechanical reproduction of culture, the proliferation of visual and audial images in the “society of the spectacle.” We live in a swirl of images and echoes that arrest experience and play it back in slow motion. Cameras and recording machines not only transcribe experience but alter its quality, giving to much of modern life that character of an enormous echo chamber, a hall of mirrors. Life presents itself as a succession of images of electronic signals, of impressions recorded and reproduced by means of photography, motion pictures, television, and sophisticated recording devices. Modern life is thoroughly mediated by electronic images that we cannot help responding to others as if their actions - and our own - were being recorded and simultaneously transmitted to an unseen audience or stored up for close scrutiny at some later time. “Smile, you’re on candid camera!” The intrusion into everyday life of this all-seeing eye no longer takes us by surprise or catches us with our defenses down. We need no reminder to smile. A smile is permanently graven on our features, and we already known from which of several angles its photographs to best advantage.
The proliferation of recorded images undermines our sense of reality. As Susan Sontag observes in her study of photography, “Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.” We distrust our perceptions until the camera verifies them. Photographic images provide us with the proof of our existence, without which we would find it difficult even to reconstruct a personal history. Bourgeois families in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Sontag points out, posed for portraits in order to proclaim the family’s status, whereas today the family album of photographs verifies the individual’s existence: its documentary record of his development from infancy onward provides him with the only evidence of his life that he recognizes as altogether valid. Among the “many narcissistic uses” that Sontag attributes to the camera, “self-surveillance” ranks among the most important, not only because it provides the technical means of ceaseless self-scrutiny but because it renders the sense of selfhood dependent on the consumption of images of the self, at the same time calling into question the reality of the external world.
By preserving images of the self at various stages of development, the camera helps to weaken the older idea of development as moral education and to promote a more passive idea according to which development consists of passing through the stages of life at the right time and in the right order. Current fascination with the life cycle embodies an awareness that success in politics or business depends on reaching certain goals on schedule; but it also reflects the ease with which developments can be electronically recorded. This brings us to another cultural change that elicits a widespread narcissistic response and, in this case, gives it a philosophical sanction: the emergence of a therapeutic ideology that upholds a normative schedule of psychosocial development and thus gives further encouragement to anxious self-scrutiny. The idea of normative development creates the fear that any deviation from the norm has a pathological source. Doctors have made a cult of periodic checkup - an investigation carried out once again by means of cameras and other recording instruments - and have implanted in their clients the notion that health depends on eternal watchfulness and the early detection of symptoms, as verified by medical technology. The client no longer feels physically or psychologically secure until his X-rays confirm a “clean bill of health.”
Medicine and psychiatry - more generally, the therapeutic outlook and sensibility that pervade modern society - reinforce the pattern created by other cultural influences, in which the individual endlessly examines himself for signs of aging and ill health, for tell-tale symptoms of psychic stress, for blemishes and flaws that might diminish his attractiveness, or on the other hand for reassuring indications that his life is proceeding according to schedule. Modern medicine has conquered the plagues and epidemics that once made life so precarious, only to create new forms of insecurity. In the same way, bureaucracy has made life predictable and even boring while reviving, in a new form, the war of all against all. Our overorganized society, in which large-scale organizations predominate but have lost the capacity to command allegiance, in some respects more nearly approximates a condition of universal animosity than did the primitive capitalism on which Hobbes managed his state of nature. Social conditions today encourage a survival mentality, expressed in its crudest form in disaster movies or in fantasies of space travel, which allow vicarious escape from a doomed planet. People no longer dream of overcoming difficulties but merely of surviving them. In business, according to Jennings, “The struggle is to survive emotionally” -to “preserve or enhance one’s identity or ego.” The normative concept of developmental stages promotes a view of life as an obstacle course: the aim is simply to get through the course with a minimum of trouble and pain. The ability to manipulate what Gail Sheehy refers to, using a medical metaphor, as “life-support systems” now appears to represent the highest form of wisdom: the knowledge that gets us through, as she puts it, without panic. Those who master Sheehy’s “no-panic approach to aging” and to the traumas of the life cycle will be able to say, in the words of one of her subjects, “I know I can survive… I don’t panic any more.” This is hardly an exalted form of satisfaction, however. “The current ideology,” Sheehy writes, “seems a mix of personal survivalism, revivalism, and cynicism”; yet her enormously popular guide to the “predictable crises of adult life,” with its superficially optimistic hymn to growth, development, and “self-actualization,” does not challenge this ideology, merely restates it in more “humanistic” form. “Growth” has become a euphemism for survival.
The World View of the Resigned
New social forms require new forms of personality, new modes of socialization, new ways of organizing experience. The concept of narcissism provides us not with a ready-made psychological determinism but with a way of understanding the psychological impact of recent social changes - assuming that we bear in mind not only its clinical origins but the continuum between pathology and normality. It provides us, in other words, with a tolerably accurate portrait of the “liberated” personality of our time, with his charm, his pseudo-awareness of his own condition, his promiscuous pansexuality, his fascination with oral sex, his fear of the castrating mother (Mrs. Portnoy), his hypochondria, his protective shallowness, his avoidance of dependence, his inability to mourn, his dread of old age and death.
Narcissism appears realistically to represent the best way of coping with the tensions and anxieties of modern life, and the prevailing social conditions therefore tend to bring out narcissistic traits that are present, in varying degrees, in everyone. These condition have also transformed the family, which in turn shapes the underlying structure of personality. A society that dears it has no future is not likely to give much attention to the needs of the next generation, and the ever-present sense of historical discontinuity - the blight of our society - falls with particularly devastating effect on the family. The modern parent’s attempt to make children feel loved and wanted does not conceal an underlying coolness - the remoteness of those who have little to pass on the next generation and who in any case give priority to their own right to self-fulfillment. The combination of emotional detachment with attempts to convince a child of his favored position in the family is a good prescription for a narcissistic personality structure.
Through the intermediary of the family, social patterns reproduce themselves in personality. Social arrangements live on in the individual, buried in the mind below the level of consciousness, even after they have become objectively undesirable and unnecessary - as many of our present arrangements are now widely acknowledged to have become. The perception of the world as a dangerous and forbidding place, though it originates in a realistic awareness of the insecurity of contemporary social life, receives reinforcement from the narcissistic projection of aggressive impulses outward. The belief that society has no future, while it rests on a certain realism about the dangers ahead, also incorporates a narcissistic inability to identify with posterity or to feel one self part of a historical stream.
The weakening of social ties, which originates in the prevailing state of social warfare, at the same time reflects a narcissistic defense against dependence. A warlike society tends to produce men and women who are at heart antisocial. It should therefore not surprise us to find that although the narcissist conforms to social norms for fear of external retribution, he often thinks of himself as an outlaw and sees others in the same way, “as basically dishonest and unreliable, or only reliable because of external pressures.” “The value systems of narcissistic personalities are generally corruptible,” writes Kernberg, “in contrast to the rigid morality of the obsessive personality.”
The ethic of self-preservation and psychic survival is rooted, then, not merely in objective conditions of economic warfare, rising rates of crime, and social chaos but in the subjective experience of emptiness and isolation. It reflects the conviction - as much a projection of inner anxieties as a perception of the way things are - that envy and exploitation dominate even the most intimate relations. The cult of personal relations, which becomes increasingly intense as the hope of political solutions recedes, conceals a thoroughgoing disenchantment with personal relations, just as the cult of sensuality implies a repudiation of sensuality in all but its most primitive forms. The ideology of personal growth, superficially optimistic, radiates a profound despair and resignation. It is the faith of those without faith.

So I, F24, made the decision at Thanksgiving to go no-contact with my Father, and both sides of my family, maternal and paternal, have been guilt-tripping me non-stop for this decision for months. However, none of them know or understand the circumstances leading up to this decision. (This is long one, but context is important to understand why I no longer with to associate with him)
First, we have to go back to when I was a kid. During my childhood my dad was just a dude who lived in our house and ate all our snacks. He barely interacted with us, save for taking me to the occasional Harry Potter or Marvel movie. He missed my softball games, my volleyball games, my basketball games, my school events such as choir recitals, plays, etc. not because of work (which I would understand) but to instead play Warhammer and paint little figurines for the game. He was also emotionally volatile and abusive. On several occasions he slapped me across the face and numerous times called me "as dumb as a monkey" and even one time called me an "ogre."
Shit ultimately hit the metaphorical fan when I was 16, and I discovered (on my 16th birthday, yeah, literally on the day I turned 16) that my mother was cheating on my father. From there, family life spiraled. At the time, I was very angry with my mother, and while I still disagree with how she handled the situation, she was very much a "married-single-mother." She took care of all the household chores, mowed and watered the lawn, walked and fed the dogs, cooked dinner, coached my softball games, attended me and my brother's events, all on top of being a full-time high-school teacher. I can't blame her for trying to seek emotional connection with someone else when none of her emotional needs were being met by her husband.
Now, after my mother's cheating was revealed, my father went off the rails. Especially when he began to notice I quickly reconciled with my mom, and for obvious reasons, chose to live with her. As she was quite literally, the only parent I had. I still had a relationship with my father, but it become tense. It all boiled over a few months later when on Easter, my brother and I came back from my mom's newly minted apartment a few minutes away, to an empty home with pills all over the counter and floor (I'll let you fill in the blanks of what he did). After I called my mom, she called the nearest hospital and found out my father had been taken there to be treated.
This left me scarred emotionally for months, as a few weeks before when I was staying at my father's house alone, he woke 16-year-old me up in the middle of the night and told me to take all his pills away. I'd told no one about it, and kept it to myself out of pure fear and being a child put in a situation beyond her years. After the event, my father refused to speak about it, refused to acknowledge what his actions had done to me and my brother, and as a result, I emotionally disconnected from him completely.
He sensed this disconnection, and instead of trying to apologize or take responsibility, he attacked the relationship with my mother. He did many things like texting me to tell on her, but the most egregious thing he did was show my naked photos of my own mother - including a photo of her vagina - while telling me she was a dirty whore for sending photos to men. From that point, I refused to go over to his house and stay there alone with him. I never told anyone about what he did (at least not for a few years, until I finally told my mother what he'd done when I was 23). We maintained contact, but from that point on the relationship was tanked in my mind. I was only nice and only attended holidays to maintain appearances, and in hindsight, out of fear of his retaliation.
Well, finally, after moving back home from college (to which even failed to congratulate me) I decided I had enough of the niceties and the pageantries, and no longer wanted to deal with him. Ever since I told him I no longer wanted to speak with him or have contact, he's been speaking to almost every member of our family with a sob story, including my maternal grandmother. With each family member he speaks too, all of them call me or text me telling me to "Give him a chance" or to "be fair to him." Each time I tell them I've made my decision, I've been told I'm being an asshole for holding the past over his head. So here we are.
I guess I just wanted to vent and get this off my chest. If you took the time to read, thank you, I really appreciate it :)

Ok this is story's probably a lot more light-hearted than some of the stuff I've seen on this subreddit but I'm bored and this just popped back into my head so here goes.
When I was like 12ish I was developing a habit of staying up all night and sleeping during the day during school breaks, which as you may imagine, my mother wasn't happy about.
Being the pre teen little shit I was, I argued that no harm was done since I always turned around my sleep schedule when school started up again and I was still getting sleep just at different times. Looking back my mother was probably more concerned about me being a shut in who touched less grass than a camel and the eye strain from playing video games and watching YouTube in the dark every day but I digress.
Anyway one day I guess she decided to try a more hands one approach to parenting for a change a told me she'd be shutting off the internet at 10pm that night.
Naturally I was bummed at this, but as I've said, what I also was, was a little shit. So I came up with a brilliant scheme to foil my mother's nefarious plan of getting her preteen child to have a healthy life style.
Basically what I did was I went on youtube and let a video play until the end (not relevent but this was the video https://youtu.be/cMkJDPvJxdk?si=lOfs0pIH7urOnb6J , yes it was Vocaloid, shocker I know) so the video was fully loaded in.
Then, 10pm rolled around and mom did as she said and disabled the WiFi router, leaving me, a poor Gen z child starved of it's one source of entertainment. But I didn't care that much actually since I was too busy smirking and (metaphorically) rubbing my palms together like a cartoon supervillain at my genius scheme.
Long story short I spent like 9 hours listening to that one Vocaloid song on loop while sketching in my art book until finally, I heard my mother wake up from the other room.
The look of complete befuddlement on her face when she saw me watching a YouTube video like nothing happened was pretty fun I'll admit, but I was determined to keep a straight face as she asked me how I was doing that.
Putting on my best sheepishly confused expression I shrugged and said something like "I dunno, you must have pressed the wrong button or something"
Now obviously this whole plan hinged on my mother not understanding technology to save her life, and lo and behold, it worked. And I guess my mother must have just gave up after that one plan cause she just let me be after that.
Anyway, moral of the story, don't gaslight your parents kids, and maybe go touch some grass

About six months ago, in November, I started my journey through the "Chronicles of Chrestomanci," which of course are not really a series as much as a collection of books which all take place in the same set of universes. I read everything in order of publication, posting my thoughts here each time, and with the completion of this book I am now all the way through these wonderful novels. Please forgive my lack of direct quotes this time--having read nothing else for fun besides these books for six months, I found my note-taking capacity to be somewhat diminished. Maybe in the future I'll write a more detailed review.
The Pinhoe Egg is the final Chrestomanci book, whether you're reading them in order of publication or chronologically. I have no doubt Diana Wynne Jones did not intend this to be a "series" with a beginning and end; rather, I assume she simply got several book ideas that took place in this world, and this happened to be the last time before she died. It is sheer luck, then, that this last book is a sort of grand culmination of them both thematically and narratively, and possibly the best of the lot.
We start, typically, with a new protagonist, Marianne Pinhoe, and a new locale, the small rural village of Ulverscote, located a stone's throw from Chrestomanci Castle and Helm St. Mary. I liked that we got a little more background about this area throughout the book. When I go back to reread Charmed Life, I'm looking forward to putting it all into this new context.
Marianne became a favorite character almost instantly, and I was hooked on her storyline right from the beginning. Jones has a typically virtuosic opening sequence, wasting no time in establishing the key characters and launching into a dreadfully funny episode telling of Marianne's grandmother (who is also a kind of matriarch or "Gammer" over all the Pinhoes) apparently abruptly developing dementia and being forcibly removed from her home. There is black comedy galore here, all painfully adjacent to the real experience of making arrangements for a feeble or senile parent, as when Gammer is so averse to leaving her home that she roots herself in the bed, complete with actual roots. Meanwhile, Gammer's brothers and many children squabble over who gets to live in her house and where her belongings will go.
I mentioned before how Jones is always surprising me with the variety of formal structures and writing styles she employs. I thought I had figured out her game here, and was sure it was going to be similar to Conrad's Fate, where a new protagonist gradually makes their way into meeting familiar characters. But of course, Jones neatly sidesteps all reader expectation and switches tracks suddenly a few chapters in, focusing on Cat Chant as a second, equal protagonist, and revealing this book to be, among other things, the true sequel to Charmed Life--published 29 real-life years later. Jones then begins alternating between Cat and Marianne unevenly, and sometimes even from sentence to sentence, as in Witch Week. Her sleight of hand is sly and clever, and the craftsmanship is remarkable. Hats off--each of the seven books in this series reads totally differently. Jack of all trades, master of all, our Diana.
Jones stacks on the themes this time. We of course get some of her usual preoccupations, particularly with that of unreliable families. The Pinhoes may be the worst of the lot, or at least the most upsetting, because while in most of the other books the dysfunction is obvious, things are more insidious here. The reader is actually led (through Marianne's obedient, rule-following perspective) to see Harry, Cecily, Gammer, and most of the uncles and aunts as well-meaning individuals who care for one another. However, as in Charmed Life (and Cat himself draws the comparison), as the book goes on and Marianne becomes more independent, it becomes increasingly difficult for her, and for us, to justify their cruel behavior. It is genuinely devastating when Marianne figures out what's going on halfway through the book, decides to approach the adults in her life about it, and is laughed off or outright punished by all of them. There is a familiar scene at the end of the book: Marianne's and Joe's talents are vindicated by Chrestomanci and they are given the opportunity to nurture their skills in an education apart from parents who hold them back by refusing to understand or accept them. Replace the current Chrestomanci with the previous acting Chrestomanci, Gabriel de Witt, and you have the same scene as the end of Conrad's Fate. The detail that Marianne and Joe still go home and see their parents regularly is brutally realistic, Marianne able to convince her mother to soften on some issues, but ultimately failing to truly connect with her father. This seems to me the ultimate conclusion of the obsession with family dynamics in the Chronicles of Chrestomanci--that your family will always be there, like them or not, whether or not a true understanding can ever be reached. I'm not ashamed to say I cried through the last couple chapters of the book, and found the first line Jones has written that made me audibly sob. This was a feeling from childhood I didn't even know I had forgotten:

[Marianne] was depressed and worried. Dad was never going to understand and never going to forgive her. And Gaffer had still not turned up. On top of that, school started on Monday week. Though look on the bright side, she thought. It'll keep me away from my family, during the daytime at least.

As in Conrad's Fate, the potential toxicity of religion crops up here, in a bigger way than ever. The last act of the book is barely disguised by its magical trappings: what we have here is a group of devout, religious conservatives, being shown the harmful effects of their actions, and blindly rejecting all of the proof and logic in front of them in favor of enforcing rules and laws that keep them comfortable. There is no doubt that the next generation of Pinhoes will be just as subject to the old traditions, in spite of Marianne and Joe breaking free. That the Reverend Pinhoe is portrayed as a hapless and kind man, ignorant to most of the wrongdoing in the village, does little to soften the point of Jones's pencil here. As I said, I was startled by how moved and devastated I was by this final section, recognizing all of the real-world pain in this fantastical setting.
Jones has always been steadfastly protective of those who cannot speak up for themselves, as with the character of Cat who finds it difficult to recognize and verbalize his feelings. This time, borrowing from a kind of Shinto animism, Jones includes the concept of Dwimmer, a magic that is focused on the life force within all creatures and plants. There is no debate where Jones stands on this--her deepest and most profound sympathies lie with Cat, who can't bear to imagine his horse Syracuse chopped into dog meat, who frets over Klartch's wellbeing when out of his sight, and who firmly refuses to apologize for releasing all the goblinlike fairy folk from their bindings. There is no direct intimation of endangered species, global warming, or human-caused environmental destruction in this book, as you might expect in this kind of setup (I suspect Jones was too clever to resort to trite metaphors). However, in a fascinating twist, a plot detail revolves around the Pinhoes and Farleighs erecting a barrier in the forest to contain the magical creatures, making the forest feel empty and incomplete in the process--a magical, but also literal, instance of deforestation. Motives of plants, herbs, and trees, both good and evil, carry through the book as well. Jason and Gaffer Elijah Pinhoe, as well as Cecily, are handy with plants and tend large gardens. The Farleighs' and Pinhoes' spells tend to take the form of small bags of weeds and branches as well. Interestingly, and insightfully, the natural world is portrayed as difficult as well: Gammer grows roots to impede her family's mission, and the vile Gaffer Farleigh morphs into a stubborn, gnarled, immovable petrified oak when Cat works a spell forcing him to assume his true form.
This was one of the most enjoyable books in the Chrestomanci series, and it was bittersweet to close the door on the Pinhoes. I like that the continuity between these books is vague and tenuous, so I'm free to imagine all sort of side goings-on, like what might happen to Marianne and Cat later in life, or whether Conrad and Christopher remained friends, or what Roger and Julia thought when their dad told them all about the events at the academy in Witch Week. Howl's Moving Castle is still the book closest to my heart, and will forever be the Diana Wynne Jones I read over and over, recommending to anyone unfortunate enough to strike up a conversation about books with me, but I am so glad that I found the time to welcome Chrestomanci and all his strange acquaintances into my heart, too.
Here's my personal ranking of the Chronicles of Chrestomanci, but please note I love all of these books and a low ranking does not mean I don't like the book. I have to put that there because there's always someone who doesn't understand that last place doesn't mean bad or worst. I'm not including the short stories individually because it's impossible for me to weigh a short story against a novel, whereas a large collection seems to make sense to me. I also must admit that the top three, especially the top two, were really difficult to place and I more or less love them equally.

1. Conrad's Fate
2. The Pinhoe Egg
3. Charmed Life
4. Mixed Magics
5. The Magicians of Caprona
6. Witch Week
7. The Lives of Christopher Chant

My next Jones book will be -- drumroll, please -- Archer's Goon, though I'm taking a break for some adult reading during the summer. While I'm in a school semester I can pretty much only manage to read children's fantasy, so I'll see you all come August or September. :) Thanks to those of you who have been reading and following my journey from start to finish. I would love to chat more about this book and this series.
Oh, and finally... ALL SPOILERS ALLOWED!

When I was three years old I was in a really bad car accident. I didn't know it at the time, but that singular event would come to define everything about my life moving forward. What I remember about the accident is mostly a collage of backdated comments I was able to reel out of my father in the following years. He was driving me and my mom in his old '91 Chevy Tahoe through the twisting backroads of Southern Illinois, weaving his way through the gnarled branches of oak trees which interlocked into a braided ceiling overhead. A fog had rolled in, giving the impression that we were driving through a cloudy tube. Everything was simultaneously bright and opaque. I didn't mind though, as I was in the back seat working on a coloring book. My mom was in the front, talking with my dad or turning around to entertain my completed pictures.
Although I was of the age where my memory was just beginning to mature, I still recall two things very clearly from the accident. First was the sensation of breaking. I remember feeling the way a plate must feel to be dropped: weightless at first, then suddenly meeting a much larger, more solid object—the air popped like a firecracker, and the entirety of my body shattered into hundreds of fractals. And then I remember a hand. It was my dad's hand pulling me from the wreck.
I ended up hospitalized for weeks after the crash. My mom was less lucky. The impact had killed her instantly.
As I've alluded to, I was young, and at the time I didn't fully understand the implications of what had happened. I knew something was missing, but it was like a word on the tip of my tongue, or the forgotten vanilla in a cherished cake recipe—coloring my experience, but not the whole of it. Not like my dad. For him, it was the whole fucking cake. He had somehow made it out with only a few scratches. I'm sure he had a really bad case of survivor's guilt, and frankly, looking back, I wouldn't have blamed him if he slumped into despair and spent his days drinking away his sorrow. But he wasn't that type of man. He got help. It took him years before he was able to recall anything that happened that morning, and most of it is still repressed, but he shared with me what he could. Or at least that's what I had thought.
My dad was a Middle School teacher since before I was born, and he kept his job until very recently. As a result, we didn't have much by way of resources. I grew up on Disney Channel and TV dinners for the most part, but I didn't mind. When I became of school age, his job actually made caring for me pretty convenient. Since our Elementary and Middle schools were connected, he was able to drive me there and back each day.
It was around third or fourth grade that I realized I was different. I didn't understand the other children or even the adults most of the time. They would say things then immediately change their mind, or they would talk about something and in the next breath forget its existence entirely. I remember one day at lunch, I had just gotten my tray of hot food and sat down with some friends. One of the kids, Alex, was talking about a stuffed bird he had won for getting first place in Mr. Curtis's pop-up math competition. We were all admiring its blue wings and white belly and sharp black beak and beady eyes. I left mid-conversation to get a chocolate milk. When I came back, I asked to see the bird again, and Alex said "what bird?" I was perplexed. "The bird—the bluejay you were just showing us." I remember all of the other kids looking at me like I was crazy. I figured they were all playing a trick on me, so I got up and went over to Alex's seat and crouched down, looking under the table, then I sprung up and tried to open his lunchbox. "What are you doing!?" he yelled. I felt so confused and embarrassed that I ran to the bathroom to cry.
And then there was another time a group of kids were laughing about a joke one of the girls, Taylor, had made about our homeroom teacher's face looking like a seal. I knew it was mean, but at the time I just wanted to fit in so I played along, but when I made a comment about her resemblance to the semi-aquatic animal, they all looked at me confused. "What are you talking about? We never said that…"
These misattributions kept happening, and it led to me being ostracized from most of the little childish cliques that popped up. I developed a quasi-standoffish temperament which I used as a shield against a chaotic world that I didn't understand. My dad eventually had me tested for ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), but I passed the test. He asked if I wanted to move to a different town with different schoolmates, thinking that perhaps I was getting bullied, but I told him it was fine. Somewhere deep down I felt like no matter where I went, this problem would follow me.
You may think that I was simply coping with the absence of my mom, and while I'm sure that her absence has left certain holes in my life, kindly, no, that wasn't what was happening. You see, at first I didn't notice the instances of what I'll call "blinking". I simply thought that I was misremembering things: objects, words, events. They were all little things anyway. A bird, a joke, my pencil box. It wasn't until sixth grade that I realized the magnitude of the phenomenon.
I was in my dad's 6th grade Social Studies class and we had just been assigned our "Ancient Civilizations" project which involved creating a diorama of our chosen civilization and presenting its features to the class. My friend at the time, Claire, had taken my first choice of Ancient Rome (which we had a heated argument about at lunch), so I was left with Ancient Egypt. At the time, all I pictured for Egypt was a plate of sand. However, my dad and I went through some illustrated history books and pictures on the internet and he really built up the project for me.
Over the course of a couple months, he helped me shape three pyramids out of small wooden planks and a bunch of tan clay. We placed them in the center of a giant square shoebox lid which served as the container for the diorama. Then he bought some small wooden mannequin puppets and we dressed them up in cloth clothes (mostly kilts and tunics) and colored their eyes, mouths, and hair. We added a few obelisks and some small box-huts which were collected into a little village around the Nile. Finally, we added a light glaze of glue where we felt would be necessary and then covered the whole project with golden glitter.
As we worked on each part of the diorama, my dad helped me understand what we were adding and why it was important to Ancient Egypt. I loved the way he talked about history. He spun everything into a miraculous story. To this day, I don't think I've ever had a teacher who came close to his level of charisma and creativity. As a result, I became really proud of my diorama. I memorized all the little details and rehearsed my speech in front of the mirror for hours leading up to the last couple weeks of class. And then, two days before I was supposed to give my presentation, everything fell apart.
First, I need to apologize for deceiving you about an aspect of my story. I thought it might help you to understand what I was going through at the time. What I'm about to tell you is going to sound insane. I get that. But please hear me out. The truth is that I was never assigned to present on Ancient Egypt; everything else about Clair taking my first pick and dad helping me with the whole project and my excitement leading up to the presentation was all true, but it wasn't a project on Ancient Egypt, it was a project on Ancient Sidovan, which was a civilization located on the eighth continent called "Catalan" (the same name as the spoken language, but unrelated) which was due West of Australia in the Indian Ocean.
I know this sounds incredible, and if you want to believe it's all in my head, I get that, but I remember clearly all sorts of facts about it: the Malagasy, the same people who populated Madagascar, were the first peoples to discover Catalan and settle it. However, about five hundred years later, Indian ships would arrive and create the civilization known as Sidovan. A pidgin language formed between the indigenous population and new arriving Indians called "Hiesa" (pronounced: Hai-E-suh or Hai-ʔ-suh). Catalan had a warm climate with plenty of natural resources, but Sidovan had a dense enough population to require agricultural production. They grew rice, grain, sugarcane, vegetables, and even tobacco.
I remembered all of these facts and more. My diorama reflected the main features of the Sidovan civilization. And then two days before my presentation, I woke up and my diorama was entirely different. The hilly grasslands were traded out for sandy dunes. The Hindu statues and stone palaces became clay pyramids and large spear-like pillars. And everything was covered with the ickiest yellow glitter I had ever seen. Tears stung my eyes as I trampled over to my dad's room and banged on his door. "Dad! What did you do!?" I yelled.
"Honey?" He responded, rushing over to the base of the stairs. "What's wrong?"
"The diorama. It's ruined!"
"It's what?" he asked and ran up the stairs, leading me to my room. He looked over it for a few seconds, checking to see if everything was intact, then said, "I don't see it, honey. Where is it ruined?"
I was completely dumb-struck. What did he mean he didn't see it? "All of it!" I shouted. "The whole thing is wrong. Where's the grass and the stone buildings and the lady with the four arms and the elephants? Where is my project!?"
My dad looked at me in silence. "Lauren, baby, what civilization do you think you were working on?"
"Ancient Sidovan, of course! We've been working on this for months now! Dad, please tell me you remember."
He knelt down and put his hands on my shoulders. "Honey, your project was on Ancient Egypt. There is no Ancient Sidovan."
"Y-you're lying." I protested. "Books, you have books. On your bookshelf."
He took me into his study and showed me all of his books. None of them were on Ancient Sidovan. He even turned on his computer and typed in the name of the civilization, but all that came up was a near match "Sidon". I remember feeling the sudden urge to puke. My entire body felt like it was pumping battery acid instead of blood. "I—I don't," I started but suddenly my head felt very light, and I fainted.
When I woke up, I was in the hospital. I had lost consciousness for over half an hour, enough time for my dad to call 9-1-1 and have the ambulance transport me to the nearest ER. They ran all sorts of tests on me, but they all came back fine. After a couple hours of IV fluids and monitoring, they released me with my dad.
I ended up skipping the rest of school that week. My dad didn't make me present my diorama. In fact, he never brought the subject up again. Part of me was glad. I just wanted to forget the whole thing ever happened. But another part of me couldn't move past what was clearly the most absurd thing to ever happen to me. About a week after the incident, I tried to broach the subject, but when I asked my dad about it, he didn't seem to remember our conversation at all. He said I had fallen ill and that's why I needed to go to the ER and miss class. I felt like I was going crazy. If I was older, I probably would have voluntarily checked myself into a psychiatric ward. But I was young and helpless and alone, and I decided that if I just ignored the changes well enough, I could still get along. This proved difficult though, as the blinking would only exacerbate in the coming months.
Up until the time of the project, I hadn't been able to directly observe the phenomenon. It was always in retrospect that things disappeared. It was during the summer after sixth grade that this changed. I still remember the first time it happened. I had just gotten out of the shower and was drying my hair in front of the mirror. After it was dried, I threw on my clothes then went to tie my hair up in a ponytail, but as I went to set the elastic tie, I felt its weight dissipate in my hand. I gasped and held my hand out. The circular black band was gone.
Fast forward to seventh grade and the blinking had spiraled out of control. Reflecting back on it, most people would probably have assumed I was drinking psilocybin-infused water, as the delusions were somewhat consistent with psychedelic phenomena: except these distortions were real (at least they felt that way to me).
I'd wake up and grab the box of Special K but end up eating Cheerios. The McDonalds logo would look yellow and red one day, but purple and black the next. I'd be watching a show, and then a different show, and then a different one. It was as if the entire universe was a Christmas tree with millions of lights, and the lights kept shifting hues randomly, faster and faster, and I was the only one who could see their changing colors. I remember one night my dad made spaghetti for dinner and we went out onto the porch to eat it. While we were sitting, I saw our neighbor's house, a two story townhome, blink and become a single story bungalow. I gasped, and my dad asked what was wrong, but when I tried to explain he just gave me a strange look. For him, no matter what changed, the world was "always that way". While for me, it didn't have "a way".
The situation peaked when Clair, that friend I mentioned before, disappeared. I texted her (my dad had bought me a BlackBerry at the beginning of summer break) but didn't get a response. When I asked her other friends if they knew where she was, I got the usual "what are you talking about?" look. I knew right away what had happened, even though I didn't want to believe it. I went to the teacher and asked if there was a Clair in our class. She said "no". I broke down in front of everyone. I couldn't take it anymore. I ran out of school. The lady at the front desk tried to stop me, but I just barrelled past her. I kept running until I got to a big park across the street and bawled my eyes out until the police arrived and escorted me home. When they tried asking me what was wrong, I didn't say anything. There was literally nothing I could say that they would understand.
That night I prayed to God for the first time. My dad wasn't a religious man. He went to Catholic church with my mom when she was alive, but after she died he never went back. Still, I knew how to pray, even if I never did it. I copied some of the people I saw praying in movies and interlocked my fingers and knelt down on my bed, stuffing my head into a pillow. "Dear God," I said, "Please, please, please help me." I told Him about my struggles and asked Him to make them stop. I spent an hour saying the same things over and over again. And when I was finished, my little body was so tired, I fell right to sleep.
I knew something was different the second I opened my eyelids. I didn't only feel relieved, but I felt… embraced. I felt like someone was watching over me. I felt like I wasn't alone. I moved through my day with cautious apprehension. I didn't want to get my hopes up only to be let down. But to my surprise, the blinking had stopped. At least I couldn't remember any of the inconsistencies, and to me, that was a win. I began to pray regularly, and the more I did, the more I could feel the sense that someone was looking out for me. It was like I was getting a big hug from some cosmic force that loved me and wanted me to be happy.
I made it a habit to pray regularly. I asked my dad if he could take me to a church, and he agreed to take me to St. Mark's, the same church that he and my mom used to attend. Over time, I realized that the actual church services weren't as important to me as the praying. For whatever reason, there was something about praying that was like a glue for my brain, holding the entire universe together. As I got older, I considered that maybe it wasn't that the changes were no longer happening, but that I simply didn't see them anymore. In other words, maybe I was just becoming like everyone else. Either way, I didn't mind.
In my teenage years, I got into mindfulness meditation. I thought that I'd want to go into religious studies and become a theologian, so I started to learn about Eastern traditions in addition to Christianity. I joined a bunch of different school clubs to meet kids of different faiths: Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam. I tried to find a common thread which linked them all and would explain what happened to me as a child. The metaphors of Heaven and Hell, Good and Evil, the Taoist Yin and Yang—duality. Every religion seemed to speak about a way of being that would lead to a better place. In some cases that better place was a physical future existence, and in others it was merely being in contact with the perfection of nature or the present. Metaphorically, the teachings could explain what I had gone through in a kind of loose way, but there were no explicit statements about my condition.
***
I want to fast forward to why I've decided to write about this now. To give you an idea of where I'm at, I'm now 25 and working on finishing my MA in Computational Linguistics. I know that's a bit of a switch from what I was thinking when I was a teenager, but I really only interested in religion because of the value praying afforded me as a child. I didn't actually have much interest in the subject, itself. After my first year of college, I changed to an English major, which ultimately led to me taking a linguistics class and enjoying it so much that I switched tracks in my Junior year. Considering the state of the world, I thought minoring in Computer Science might help me financially in the future, so I ended up charting a path which I figured might lead to something like developing translation software.
Anyway, everything was going fine until a few weeks ago. I was out at an all-night diner with a few of my friends from the program. There was Jeremy, Martin, Bella, Jordan, and Macy. We had been working on a group project together involving modeling construction grammars by generating primitive 3D structures using C# and running the code through a game engine (it's a bit weird, but essentially we were trying to create a multidimensional model for language using a similar but more advanced concept than other LLMs), and just had a breakthrough. It was 2AM though and not a brain cell existed between the six of us, so instead we focused on a different problem: Macy's ongoing breakup with her semi-long distance trucker boyfriend. We tried to explain why Mike wasn't going to work out as we ordered a round of milkshakes and waited for the lone overnight kitchen worker to scoop out three balls of ice cream from the Deans carton for each of us, blend it, then have the server deliver the vintage diner glasses on a plastic tray.
I dug into my thick strawberry shake with a spoon. It was delicious. I kept eating but focused back on the conversation. I remember feeling something odd about one of the scoops, but I was so entrenched in Macy's story that I didn't notice the metal shard in my ice cream until I felt it against my lip. "P-tuh" I spat out the shard and ice cream all in one motion, then covered my mouth which I was sure was bleeding. The silver blade was probably as large as my thumb, and it had two jagged edges, as if it was fastened for the purpose of causing damage. "What the fuck!" I yelled.
Everyone at the table turned to see what was the matter. "Hey, Lauren, you okay?"
I spoke through a covered mouth, using my free hand to point at the table. "That was in my—"
But it was gone.
"In your… shake? Was something in your shake?" asked Jeremy.
I froze. In that moment, the stories of my childhood that I had only remembered as faint nightmares came back in a wave of crushing terror. How could I have been so stupid to think they would simply vanish forever? No, this isn't the same thing, I thought. But deep down, I knew it was. I drew my hand away from my lips and saw that it was dry—no blood. When I looked back up, all of the blood in my veins went cold. My friends were… smiling at me. Their lips were elastic like taffy, stretching to reveal their teeth. I could feel them radiating malevolence, as if the only thing holding them back from picking up their utensils and stabbing me to death was some thinly veiled force field. The moment lasted for what felt like half a minute, then Jordan said two words which made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
"Found you"
The words ricocheted in my now adrenaline powered skull. But just as he spoke them, the world blinked and my friends were back. Bella reached out and grabbed my hand. I pulled away, but when I saw her concerned expression, I relented.
"Sorry, guys, I think I'm going to have to call it." I said.
"You sure, L?" asked Jordan. "You look like you just saw a ghost."
"Yeah, thanks, but I just…" I stumbled for a lie, but when one wouldn't come, Martin stood up and said he'd walk me out to my car.
"Thanks," I said as I got into my little 2015 Jetta. "It's just been a long day."
"No problem, Lauren. You know, if there's ever anything—"
"I know," I said but didn't mean. Some things just couldn't be shared.
I drove for about five minutes before stopping at a gas station. I pulled in and parked near the back. Then I interlocked my fingers and prayed for half an hour. I apologized for not taking my praying seriously and asked to once again be granted peace. Unlike my younger years, I also drifted into other avenues of thought. I imagined my mom. I pictured the whole arc of my life, all of the little decisions that led me to where I was. I cried for a long time. I felt like that little girl again reaching out for help. I still felt so lost, so out of control; there were so many things missing, and I was so confused.
I decided then to take a trip back home and visit my dad who was now working as a private tutor. He made enough prepping affluent students for the ACT and SAT that he could spend his free time pursuing his real passions: reading and writing. When I arrived at his doorstep that weekend, he greeted me with open arms. "How are you, kiddo? It's been, what? A year or so?"
It was actually more like two years, but I didn't tell him. I just smiled and nodded.
"Well, come in."
The house was almost exactly how I remembered it. Linoleum floors, beige walls, a few scattered pictures, the scent of camomile. Everything minimalist. There was a quaintness, a prettiness to the way everything seemed to be well kept and in a perfect place. From the cherry wood chairs we'd sit in to eat, to the cream-colored loveseat. I felt at home.
I spent the drive thinking of what I would talk to my dad about, but ultimately I wasn't sure what I'd say. I loved my dad, but I think growing up it was easy to see him as naive. After all, arguably the most important episodes of my childhood were completely unknown to him. In that way, I kind of loved him from a distance. Maybe losing my mom also played into that. Maybe I just had trust issues. And after what happened at the diner… Luckily there hadn't been any blinks since.
I stayed for a couple days and he showed me around some of the different coffee shops where he'd tutor kids or write some of his stories. I met some of his friends, mostly other retired or part-time teachers who were in a similar place in life. I was happy for him. Then, on Sunday, he made me my favorite meal growing up: homemade carbonara pasta with chicken and broccoli. The sauce had a few different cheeses, butter, olive oil, and a raw egg yolk. It was the perfect blend of creamy, savory, and sweet. After we ate, he cracked open a scrapbook of some old photos and other clippings he had put together.
We reminisced about the past and laughed whenever I'd cover up one of my awkward pictures. He brought up some stories from school that I had forgotten, naming some teachers that I hadn't thought about in years. Apparently I had started at the end, because as I moved to the other end of the book, I kept getting younger and younger. I flipped to the last pages and noticed a couple pictures of my mom that made my heart sink.
"She was beautiful, wasn't she?" said my dad.
"Mmm," I agreed.
I flipped to the last page and saw a collage of newspaper clippings. One of them was related to the accident. It was headlined: "Two Survive Head-On Collision". After a cursory glance at the text, I noticed something odd. It said, "Both the husband and child, a three year old girl, sustained life-threatening wounds. The husband was found unconscious on the scene. The girl was found twenty meters away from the vehicle, crying." I swallowed, trying to remember back to what happened that day. The feeling of crashing, of the world slowing down, then breaking, returned. And then there was a hand. My dad's hand. Or was it? If he was unconscious, who pulled me out of that wreck?
I looked up at my dad. He was smiling.
I shot up and started backing up slowly toward the door. "No, not you, too. What is this? What's happening? Who are you?"
My dad, or whatever was controlling him, laughed."Oh, Lauren, Lauren, Lauren. You know who we are." he purred as he stood up. He lifted his hands and the lights began to flicker then bend in a way which shouldn't have been possible. Dark figures began to propagate from the shadows along the walls. The pictures nailed there began to blink out of existence. I turned to run toward the door but the handle was gone. Glass shards materialized all around me and swarmed like locusts. Certain I was going to die, I dropped down on my knees and once again turned to prayer, this time asking God to directly intervene and save me.
Everything went quiet.
"Honey? Are you okay?"
I didn't trust his voice. I knew if I opened my eyes, I'd see that awful smile. He was just toying with me. "It's not you," I said in between muttered prayers. "I know it's not you."
"Honey," my dad said, closer. I felt his arms wrap around me. This was it, I was going to be suffocated. I waited for the inevitable crushing weight of my chest collapsing. I waited to break all over again.
"I would never hurt you, Lauren. I love you more than anything in the whole world."
I burst out in tears. "No, it's not you, I know it's not you. You don't exist!"
My dad's weight dissipated. I opened my eyes and saw that he was no longer there. "Dad?" I called aloud. "Dad? Where did you go?"
I checked all over the house, but there was no trace of him. There were still pictures of him all over the house, so I knew he hadn't blinked out of existence like everything else, but somehow he was missing.
***
I left the house and got a room at a hotel, where I am now. I'm sure at this point that whatever is happening to me is no longer random. Something out there is actively trying to hunt me. Maybe it has been my whole life, but only now it can see me—however weird that sounds. If that's right, then God has been on my side trying to protect me from this demon or monster or devil or whatever it is. Regardless, the methods I was using when I was younger are not going to cut it anymore. I already posted my story in several other small circles and have gotten one reply. A man who goes by the name "Trent" (apparently it's an alias). He said that he has some insight into my "condition" and can offer help if I want it. I'm planning on meeting with him tomorrow. I'm not sure if it's a good idea, but at this point I need answers. I can keep you updated with my progress if that interests you, and to anyone who knows anything about what's happening to me, please… I could really use your help.
***
I was just about to post this when Trent sent another message. This is what it says:
Trent: We can do the \*** at **** O'clock. Also, if what you're telling me is true, your mother may still be alive.*

When I was three years old I was in a really bad car accident. I didn't know it at the time, but that singular event would come to define everything about my life moving forward. What I remember about the accident is mostly a collage of backdated comments I was able to reel out of my father in the following years. He was driving me and my mom in his old '91 Chevy Tahoe through the twisting backroads of Southern Illinois, weaving his way through the gnarled branches of oak trees which interlocked into a braided ceiling overhead. A fog had rolled in, giving the impression that we were driving through a cloudy tube. Everything was simultaneously bright and opaque. I didn't mind though, as I was in the back seat working on a coloring book. My mom was in the front, talking with my dad or turning around to entertain my completed pictures.
Although I was of the age where my memory was just beginning to mature, I still recall two things very clearly from the accident. First was the sensation of breaking. I remember feeling the way a plate must feel to be dropped: weightless at first, then suddenly meeting a much larger, more solid object—the air popped like a firecracker, and the entirety of my body shattered into hundreds of fractals. And then I remember a hand. It was my dad's hand pulling me from the wreck.
I ended up hospitalized for weeks after the crash. My mom was less lucky. The impact had killed her instantly.
As I've alluded to, I was young, and at the time I didn't fully understand the implications of what had happened. I knew something was missing, but it was like a word on the tip of my tongue, or the forgotten vanilla in a cherished cake recipe—coloring my experience, but not the whole of it. Not like my dad. For him, it was the whole fucking cake. He had somehow made it out with only a few scratches. I'm sure he had a really bad case of survivor's guilt, and frankly, looking back, I wouldn't have blamed him if he slumped into despair and spent his days drinking away his sorrow. But he wasn't that type of man. He got help. It took him years before he was able to recall anything that happened that morning, and most of it is still repressed, but he shared with me what he could. Or at least that's what I had thought.
My dad was a Middle School teacher since before I was born, and he kept his job until very recently. As a result, we didn't have much by way of resources. I grew up on Disney Channel and TV dinners for the most part, but I didn't mind. When I became of school age, his job actually made caring for me pretty convenient. Since our Elementary and Middle schools were connected, he was able to drive me there and back each day.
It was around third or fourth grade that I realized I was different. I didn't understand the other children or even the adults most of the time. They would say things then immediately change their mind, or they would talk about something and in the next breath forget its existence entirely. I remember one day at lunch, I had just gotten my tray of hot food and sat down with some friends. One of the kids, Alex, was talking about a stuffed bird he had won for getting first place in Mr. Curtis's pop-up math competition. We were all admiring its blue wings and white belly and sharp black beak and beady eyes. I left mid-conversation to get a chocolate milk. When I came back, I asked to see the bird again, and Alex said "what bird?" I was perplexed. "The bird—the bluejay you were just showing us." I remember all of the other kids looking at me like I was crazy. I figured they were all playing a trick on me, so I got up and went over to Alex's seat and crouched down, looking under the table, then I sprung up and tried to open his lunchbox. "What are you doing!?" he yelled. I felt so confused and embarrassed that I ran to the bathroom to cry.
And then there was another time a group of kids were laughing about a joke one of the girls, Taylor, had made about our homeroom teacher's face looking like a seal. I knew it was mean, but at the time I just wanted to fit in so I played along, but when I made a comment about her resemblance to the semi-aquatic animal, they all looked at me confused. "What are you talking about? We never said that…"
These misattributions kept happening, and it led to me being ostracized from most of the little childish cliques that popped up. I developed a quasi-standoffish temperament which I used as a shield against a chaotic world that I didn't understand. My dad eventually had me tested for ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), but I passed the test. He asked if I wanted to move to a different town with different schoolmates, thinking that perhaps I was getting bullied, but I told him it was fine. Somewhere deep down I felt like no matter where I went, this problem would follow me.
You may think that I was simply coping with the absence of my mom, and while I'm sure that her absence has left certain holes in my life, kindly, no, that wasn't what was happening. You see, at first I didn't notice the instances of what I'll call "blinking". I simply thought that I was misremembering things: objects, words, events. They were all little things anyway. A bird, a joke, my pencil box. It wasn't until sixth grade that I realized the magnitude of the phenomenon.
I was in my dad's 6th grade Social Studies class and we had just been assigned our "Ancient Civilizations" project which involved creating a diorama of our chosen civilization and presenting its features to the class. My friend at the time, Claire, had taken my first choice of Ancient Rome (which we had a heated argument about at lunch), so I was left with Ancient Egypt. At the time, all I pictured for Egypt was a plate of sand. However, my dad and I went through some illustrated history books and pictures on the internet and he really built up the project for me.
Over the course of a couple months, he helped me shape three pyramids out of small wooden planks and a bunch of tan clay. We placed them in the center of a giant square shoebox lid which served as the container for the diorama. Then he bought some small wooden mannequin puppets and we dressed them up in cloth clothes (mostly kilts and tunics) and colored their eyes, mouths, and hair. We added a few obelisks and some small box-huts which were collected into a little village around the Nile. Finally, we added a light glaze of glue where we felt would be necessary and then covered the whole project with golden glitter.
As we worked on each part of the diorama, my dad helped me understand what we were adding and why it was important to Ancient Egypt. I loved the way he talked about history. He spun everything into a miraculous story. To this day, I don't think I've ever had a teacher who came close to his level of charisma and creativity. As a result, I became really proud of my diorama. I memorized all the little details and rehearsed my speech in front of the mirror for hours leading up to the last couple weeks of class. And then, two days before I was supposed to give my presentation, everything fell apart.
First, I need to apologize for deceiving you about an aspect of my story. I thought it might help you to understand what I was going through at the time. What I'm about to tell you is going to sound insane. I get that. But please hear me out. The truth is that I was never assigned to present on Ancient Egypt; everything else about Clair taking my first pick and dad helping me with the whole project and my excitement leading up to the presentation was all true, but it wasn't a project on Ancient Egypt, it was a project on Ancient Sidovan, which was a civilization located on the eighth continent called "Catalan" (the same name as the spoken language, but unrelated) which was due West of Australia in the Indian Ocean.
I know this sounds incredible, and if you want to believe it's all in my head, I get that, but I remember clearly all sorts of facts about it: the Malagasy, the same people who populated Madagascar, were the first peoples to discover Catalan and settle it. However, about five hundred years later, Indian ships would arrive and create the civilization known as Sidovan. A pidgin language formed between the indigenous population and new arriving Indians called "Hiesa" (pronounced: Hai-E-suh or Hai-ʔ-suh). Catalan had a warm climate with plenty of natural resources, but Sidovan had a dense enough population to require agricultural production. They grew rice, grain, sugarcane, vegetables, and even tobacco.
I remembered all of these facts and more. My diorama reflected the main features of the Sidovan civilization. And then two days before my presentation, I woke up and my diorama was entirely different. The hilly grasslands were traded out for sandy dunes. The Hindu statues and stone palaces became clay pyramids and large spear-like pillars. And everything was covered with the ickiest yellow glitter I had ever seen. Tears stung my eyes as I trampled over to my dad's room and banged on his door. "Dad! What did you do!?" I yelled.
"Honey?" He responded, rushing over to the base of the stairs. "What's wrong?"
"The diorama. It's ruined!"
"It's what?" he asked and ran up the stairs, leading me to my room. He looked over it for a few seconds, checking to see if everything was intact, then said, "I don't see it, honey. Where is it ruined?"
I was completely dumb-struck. What did he mean he didn't see it? "All of it!" I shouted. "The whole thing is wrong. Where's the grass and the stone buildings and the lady with the four arms and the elephants? Where is my project!?"
My dad looked at me in silence. "Lauren, baby, what civilization do you think you were working on?"
"Ancient Sidovan, of course! We've been working on this for months now! Dad, please tell me you remember."
He knelt down and put his hands on my shoulders. "Honey, your project was on Ancient Egypt. There is no Ancient Sidovan."
"Y-you're lying." I protested. "Books, you have books. On your bookshelf."
He took me into his study and showed me all of his books. None of them were on Ancient Sidovan. He even turned on his computer and typed in the name of the civilization, but all that came up was a near match "Sidon". I remember feeling the sudden urge to puke. My entire body felt like it was pumping battery acid instead of blood. "I—I don't," I started but suddenly my head felt very light, and I fainted.
When I woke up, I was in the hospital. I had lost consciousness for over half an hour, enough time for my dad to call 9-1-1 and have the ambulance transport me to the nearest ER. They ran all sorts of tests on me, but they all came back fine. After a couple hours of IV fluids and monitoring, they released me with my dad.
I ended up skipping the rest of school that week. My dad didn't make me present my diorama. In fact, he never brought the subject up again. Part of me was glad. I just wanted to forget the whole thing ever happened. But another part of me couldn't move past what was clearly the most absurd thing to ever happen to me. About a week after the incident, I tried to broach the subject, but when I asked my dad about it, he didn't seem to remember our conversation at all. He said I had fallen ill and that's why I needed to go to the ER and miss class. I felt like I was going crazy. If I was older, I probably would have voluntarily checked myself into a psychiatric ward. But I was young and helpless and alone, and I decided that if I just ignored the changes well enough, I could still get along. This proved difficult though, as the blinking would only exacerbate in the coming months.
Up until the time of the project, I hadn't been able to directly observe the phenomenon. It was always in retrospect that things disappeared. It was during the summer after sixth grade that this changed. I still remember the first time it happened. I had just gotten out of the shower and was drying my hair in front of the mirror. After it was dried, I threw on my clothes then went to tie my hair up in a ponytail, but as I went to set the elastic tie, I felt its weight dissipate in my hand. I gasped and held my hand out. The circular black band was gone.
Fast forward to seventh grade and the blinking had spiraled out of control. Reflecting back on it, most people would probably have assumed I was drinking psilocybin-infused water, as the delusions were somewhat consistent with psychedelic phenomena: except these distortions were real (at least they felt that way to me).
I'd wake up and grab the box of Special K but end up eating Cheerios. The McDonalds logo would look yellow and red one day, but purple and black the next. I'd be watching a show, and then a different show, and then a different one. It was as if the entire universe was a Christmas tree with millions of lights, and the lights kept shifting hues randomly, faster and faster, and I was the only one who could see their changing colors. I remember one night my dad made spaghetti for dinner and we went out onto the porch to eat it. While we were sitting, I saw our neighbor's house, a two story townhome, blink and become a single story bungalow. I gasped, and my dad asked what was wrong, but when I tried to explain he just gave me a strange look. For him, no matter what changed, the world was "always that way". While for me, it didn't have "a way".
The situation peaked when Clair, that friend I mentioned before, disappeared. I texted her (my dad had bought me a BlackBerry at the beginning of summer break) but didn't get a response. When I asked her other friends if they knew where she was, I got the usual "what are you talking about?" look. I knew right away what had happened, even though I didn't want to believe it. I went to the teacher and asked if there was a Clair in our class. She said "no". I broke down in front of everyone. I couldn't take it anymore. I ran out of school. The lady at the front desk tried to stop me, but I just barrelled past her. I kept running until I got to a big park across the street and bawled my eyes out until the police arrived and escorted me home. When they tried asking me what was wrong, I didn't say anything. There was literally nothing I could say that they would understand.
That night I prayed to God for the first time. My dad wasn't a religious man. He went to Catholic church with my mom when she was alive, but after she died he never went back. Still, I knew how to pray, even if I never did it. I copied some of the people I saw praying in movies and interlocked my fingers and knelt down on my bed, stuffing my head into a pillow. "Dear God," I said, "Please, please, please help me." I told Him about my struggles and asked Him to make them stop. I spent an hour saying the same things over and over again. And when I was finished, my little body was so tired, I fell right to sleep.
I knew something was different the second I opened my eyelids. I didn't only feel relieved, but I felt… embraced. I felt like someone was watching over me. I felt like I wasn't alone. I moved through my day with cautious apprehension. I didn't want to get my hopes up only to be let down. But to my surprise, the blinking had stopped. At least I couldn't remember any of the inconsistencies, and to me, that was a win. I began to pray regularly, and the more I did, the more I could feel the sense that someone was looking out for me. It was like I was getting a big hug from some cosmic force that loved me and wanted me to be happy.
I made it a habit to pray regularly. I asked my dad if he could take me to a church, and he agreed to take me to St. Mark's, the same church that he and my mom used to attend. Over time, I realized that the actual church services weren't as important to me as the praying. For whatever reason, there was something about praying that was like a glue for my brain, holding the entire universe together. As I got older, I considered that maybe it wasn't that the changes were no longer happening, but that I simply didn't see them anymore. In other words, maybe I was just becoming like everyone else. Either way, I didn't mind.
In my teenage years, I got into mindfulness meditation. I thought that I'd want to go into religious studies and become a theologian, so I started to learn about Eastern traditions in addition to Christianity. I joined a bunch of different school clubs to meet kids of different faiths: Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam. I tried to find a common thread which linked them all and would explain what happened to me as a child. The metaphors of Heaven and Hell, Good and Evil, the Taoist Yin and Yang—duality. Every religion seemed to speak about a way of being that would lead to a better place. In some cases that better place was a physical future existence, and in others it was merely being in contact with the perfection of nature or the present. Metaphorically, the teachings could explain what I had gone through in a kind of loose way, but there were no explicit statements about my condition.
***
I want to fast forward to why I've decided to write about this now. To give you an idea of where I'm at, I'm now 25 and working on finishing my MA in Computational Linguistics. I know that's a bit of a switch from what I was thinking when I was a teenager, but I really only interested in religion because of the value praying afforded me as a child. I didn't actually have much interest in the subject, itself. After my first year of college, I changed to an English major, which ultimately led to me taking a linguistics class and enjoying it so much that I switched tracks in my Junior year. Considering the state of the world, I thought minoring in Computer Science might help me financially in the future, so I ended up charting a path which I figured might lead to something like developing translation software.
Anyway, everything was going fine until a few weeks ago. I was out at an all-night diner with a few of my friends from the program. There was Jeremy, Martin, Bella, Jordan, and Macy. We had been working on a group project together involving modeling construction grammars by generating primitive 3D structures using C# and running the code through a game engine (it's a bit weird, but essentially we were trying to create a multidimensional model for language using a similar but more advanced concept than other LLMs), and just had a breakthrough. It was 2AM though and not a brain cell existed between the six of us, so instead we focused on a different problem: Macy's ongoing breakup with her semi-long distance trucker boyfriend. We tried to explain why Mike wasn't going to work out as we ordered a round of milkshakes and waited for the lone overnight kitchen worker to scoop out three balls of ice cream from the Deans carton for each of us, blend it, then have the server deliver the vintage diner glasses on a plastic tray.
I dug into my thick strawberry shake with a spoon. It was delicious. I kept eating but focused back on the conversation. I remember feeling something odd about one of the scoops, but I was so entrenched in Macy's story that I didn't notice the metal shard in my ice cream until I felt it against my lip. "P-tuh" I spat out the shard and ice cream all in one motion, then covered my mouth which I was sure was bleeding. The silver blade was probably as large as my thumb, and it had two jagged edges, as if it was fastened for the purpose of causing damage. "What the fuck!" I yelled.
Everyone at the table turned to see what was the matter. "Hey, Lauren, you okay?"
I spoke through a covered mouth, using my free hand to point at the table. "That was in my—"
But it was gone.
"In your… shake? Was something in your shake?" asked Jeremy.
I froze. In that moment, the stories of my childhood that I had only remembered as faint nightmares came back in a wave of crushing terror. How could I have been so stupid to think they would simply vanish forever? No, this isn't the same thing, I thought. But deep down, I knew it was. I drew my hand away from my lips and saw that it was dry—no blood. When I looked back up, all of the blood in my veins went cold. My friends were… smiling at me. Their lips were elastic like taffy, stretching to reveal their teeth. I could feel them radiating malevolence, as if the only thing holding them back from picking up their utensils and stabbing me to death was some thinly veiled force field. The moment lasted for what felt like half a minute, then Jordan said two words which made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
"Found you"
The words ricocheted in my now adrenaline powered skull. But just as he spoke them, the world blinked and my friends were back. Bella reached out and grabbed my hand. I pulled away, but when I saw her concerned expression, I relented.
"Sorry, guys, I think I'm going to have to call it." I said.
"You sure, L?" asked Jordan. "You look like you just saw a ghost."
"Yeah, thanks, but I just…" I stumbled for a lie, but when one wouldn't come, Martin stood up and said he'd walk me out to my car.
"Thanks," I said as I got into my little 2015 Jetta. "It's just been a long day."
"No problem, Lauren. You know, if there's ever anything—"
"I know," I said but didn't mean. Some things just couldn't be shared.
I drove for about five minutes before stopping at a gas station. I pulled in and parked near the back. Then I interlocked my fingers and prayed for half an hour. I apologized for not taking my praying seriously and asked to once again be granted peace. Unlike my younger years, I also drifted into other avenues of thought. I imagined my mom. I pictured the whole arc of my life, all of the little decisions that led me to where I was. I cried for a long time. I felt like that little girl again reaching out for help. I still felt so lost, so out of control; there were so many things missing, and I was so confused.
I decided then to take a trip back home and visit my dad who was now working as a private tutor. He made enough prepping affluent students for the ACT and SAT that he could spend his free time pursuing his real passions: reading and writing. When I arrived at his doorstep that weekend, he greeted me with open arms. "How are you, kiddo? It's been, what? A year or so?"
It was actually more like two years, but I didn't tell him. I just smiled and nodded.
"Well, come in."
The house was almost exactly how I remembered it. Linoleum floors, beige walls, a few scattered pictures, the scent of camomile. Everything minimalist. There was a quaintness, a prettiness to the way everything seemed to be well kept and in a perfect place. From the cherry wood chairs we'd sit in to eat, to the cream-colored loveseat. I felt at home.
I spent the drive thinking of what I would talk to my dad about, but ultimately I wasn't sure what I'd say. I loved my dad, but I think growing up it was easy to see him as naive. After all, arguably the most important episodes of my childhood were completely unknown to him. In that way, I kind of loved him from a distance. Maybe losing my mom also played into that. Maybe I just had trust issues. And after what happened at the diner… Luckily there hadn't been any blinks since.
I stayed for a couple days and he showed me around some of the different coffee shops where he'd tutor kids or write some of his stories. I met some of his friends, mostly other retired or part-time teachers who were in a similar place in life. I was happy for him. Then, on Sunday, he made me my favorite meal growing up: homemade carbonara pasta with chicken and broccoli. The sauce had a few different cheeses, butter, olive oil, and a raw egg yolk. It was the perfect blend of creamy, savory, and sweet. After we ate, he cracked open a scrapbook of some old photos and other clippings he had put together.
We reminisced about the past and laughed whenever I'd cover up one of my awkward pictures. He brought up some stories from school that I had forgotten, naming some teachers that I hadn't thought about in years. Apparently I had started at the end, because as I moved to the other end of the book, I kept getting younger and younger. I flipped to the last pages and noticed a couple pictures of my mom that made my heart sink.
"She was beautiful, wasn't she?" said my dad.
"Mmm," I agreed.
I flipped to the last page and saw a collage of newspaper clippings. One of them was related to the accident. It was headlined: "Two Survive Head-On Collision". After a cursory glance at the text, I noticed something odd. It said, "Both the husband and child, a three year old girl, sustained life-threatening wounds. The husband was found unconscious on the scene. The girl was found twenty meters away from the vehicle, crying." I swallowed, trying to remember back to what happened that day. The feeling of crashing, of the world slowing down, then breaking, returned. And then there was a hand. My dad's hand. Or was it? If he was unconscious, who pulled me out of that wreck?
I looked up at my dad. He was smiling.
I shot up and started backing up slowly toward the door. "No, not you, too. What is this? What's happening? Who are you?"
My dad, or whatever was controlling him, laughed."Oh, Lauren, Lauren, Lauren. You know who we are." he purred as he stood up. He lifted his hands and the lights began to flicker then bend in a way which shouldn't have been possible. Dark figures began to propagate from the shadows along the walls. The pictures nailed there began to blink out of existence. I turned to run toward the door but the handle was gone. Glass shards materialized all around me and swarmed like locusts. Certain I was going to die, I dropped down on my knees and once again turned to prayer, this time asking God to directly intervene and save me.
Everything went quiet.
"Honey? Are you okay?"
I didn't trust his voice. I knew if I opened my eyes, I'd see that awful smile. He was just toying with me. "It's not you," I said in between muttered prayers. "I know it's not you."
"Honey," my dad said, closer. I felt his arms wrap around me. This was it, I was going to be suffocated. I waited for the inevitable crushing weight of my chest collapsing. I waited to break all over again.
"I would never hurt you, Lauren. I love you more than anything in the whole world."
I burst out in tears. "No, it's not you, I know it's not you. You don't exist!"
My dad's weight dissipated. I opened my eyes and saw that he was no longer there. "Dad?" I called aloud. "Dad? Where did you go?"
I checked all over the house, but there was no trace of him. There were still pictures of him all over the house, so I knew he hadn't blinked out of existence like everything else, but somehow he was missing.
***
I left the house and got a room at a hotel, where I am now. I'm sure at this point that whatever is happening to me is no longer random. Something out there is actively trying to hunt me. Maybe it has been my whole life, but only now it can see me—however weird that sounds. If that's right, then God has been on my side trying to protect me from this demon or monster or devil or whatever it is. Regardless, the methods I was using when I was younger are not going to cut it anymore. I already posted my story in several other small circles and have gotten one reply. A man who goes by the name "Trent" (apparently it's an alias). He said that he has some insight into my "condition" and can offer help if I want it. I'm planning on meeting with him tomorrow. I'm not sure if it's a good idea, but at this point I need answers. I can keep you updated with my progress if that interests you, and to anyone who knows anything about what's happening to me, please… I could really use your help.
***
I was just about to post this when Trent sent another message. This is what it says:
Trent: We can do the \*** at **** O'clock. Also, if what you're telling me is true, your mother may still be alive.*

Have you guys seen Project 2025?? This is about U.S. politics by the way, and my vent is that we DO NOT pay enough attention to what is happening behind the scenes in politics. We just don't. So for the love of everything, please research and inform yourself about what Project 2025 is because it can and should heavily impact your vote for president at the end of this year.
Imma be blunt so nobody has to wonder where I lean. I lean democrat, but I love seeing moderate politics in action and we have seen some of that with Biden and I know it's upset many Democrats but moderate is compromise and compromise is healthy!! I'm so done with playing extremes! Let's calm down! Let's compromise! Let's be peaceful! We're all Americans and we should want what is best for ALL OF US together as a country.
These extremes we are playing with are dangerous. Like, looking at Project 2025 there's stuff they want to prioritize like centralizing things around stable families and combating the porn industry to defund and end sexual exploitation and attack human trafficking. That is GREAT. I LOVE THOSE IDEAS!
However, even with how much I love those ideas, they're taking it WAY TO FAR. It's incredibly extreme. We can stabilize families without annihilating terms that help people understand themselves and their sexuality. We can demolish the porn industry and recognize that porn is addictive without further victimizing the people impacted by porn by suddenly outlawing and banning it and metaphorically pulling the rug out from underneath people's feet. I mean, people work for a living in the porn industry and addicts will either experience severe withdrawal or find themselves on the wrong side of the law because they can't stop themselves from looking at something that is suddenly illegal.
What I'm getting at, is I like some of the things they want to do! I just look at this group that's organized itself into what is now called Project 2025 and I terrifies me! They want to make drastic and extreme changes very rapidly, things that society is not capable of withstanding, and even the governmental and legislative changes they want make push us more towards autocracy and away from democracy and being a republic. I can't stress this enough, this next election has the potential to bring about EXTREME, permanent, chaotic, or reforming change. This could be good or it could be VERY VERY BAD.
I'm not here to tell you how to vote or what to do, I'm just here to show you that this is a thing. I want everyone to know there's organizations that are pre-meditating to gain power and control and bring gigantic change to the government and society at large. Sure, we say this every election, but this is different. I'm 27 and I haven't had decades of voting under my belt but I've never seen or heard of anything like this Project 2025 and my parents and grandparents have never spoken to me about seeing anything like this either. The fact that there's a gigantic slew of politicians organizing themselves to basically overrun government offices and implement immediate, drastic change is something we as Americans should consider carefully! If you want these changes and you believe they can pull it off, then vote that way! But I urge you to consider how much dysfunction and choas they can cause in a short amount of time if they defund the DOJ, dismantle the FBI and DHS, completely turn away from the climate crisis, eliminate the department of commerce, and look at ending things like the department of Education, the Federal Communications Division, and the Federal Trade Commission.
They're also talking about getting rid of all abortions, even medically necessary ones, country wide. They want to ban contraceptives. They want to, and I quote from Project 2025s own mandate "delete the use of terms like sexual orientation, gender identity, gender, inclusion, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, abortion, reproductive health, and reproduction rights"
All I'm asking is for us all to pay attention, to see what this is, and see if you WANT to support this or not. You WON'T find this plan on Trump's website or as an official part of his campaign but even Project 2025 itself admits they believe Trump will win the presidency and then they and Trump will be able to accomplish all of Project 2025s goals.
Again, I'm not telling you what to prioritize or how to vote, but I want you to know a vote for Trump is a vote for Project 2025 as well. If that's what you want, then vote Trump in. If not, vote for someone else. And, for those of you who find that you too, like me, genuinely agree with some of what they want to do, consider the big picture, NOT just the part you agree with. Also consider how this impacts your friends and families. No gender equality and no reproductive rights greatly impacts ALL women. Think about your daughters, sisters, wives, and mothers. They may not ever want an abortion or a hysterectomy or birth control but what if something happens to their health and they suddenly NEED one of those things to save their life or improve their quality of life? If you have any friends or family that are trans or identify as anything other than heterosexual, they are trying to DELETE their identifiers. They're trying to ERASE entire parts of people.
To end my vent, again, I'm not telling you what to do, I'm just telling you to be aware. Don't think "Oh we always say the other party is going to destroy American, it doesn't really matter as it always works out fine anyways" because Project 2025 is the evidence that CHANGE WILL HAPPEN. I can't foresee if it will destroy us or not, but I can say that trying to do THIS MUCH DRASTIC CHANGE will alter our country permanently.
If ever there was a time to take an election seriously, NOW IS THE TIME! VOTE YOUR CONCIENCE!! Don't vote by part lines, don't vote with your wallet, don't vote based upon who you hear about more... Do your do diligence and vote carefully and with purpose!
To wrap this up, here's some sources for people to read for themselves:
This is from project 2025s website and if you find the "read the mandate" button under the picture of their book it goes in depth on what they want to do and why.
https://www.project2025.org/policy/
Scrutinize me for using Wikipedia all you want but it's a good way to get a brief summary that discusses concerns and narratives as seen by the people pushing this agenda and the people worried about if this agenda is seen to fruition.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
Please feel free to add other sources in the comments. Feel free to discuss as well, but don't turn this into Trump vs Biden or Democrats vs Republicans. This is meant to put a spotlight on Project 2025 and whether or not it's goals would be good for us! For our country! That's it!
Also, I'm editing for typos as I've found a couple but nothing else has been altered and I cross posted this to GenZ because I'm GenZ and we commonly discuss politics there.

Disclaimer:This was made in the span of 3 days. I would have posted here daily if I had remembered that this subReddit exists.
Part 1(Monday):
I met my crush when I was in high-school. I was 13 and she was 14. When I set eyes on her, I knew that she was the one for me. Her reflective skin was like gold waiting to be rubbed and loved. Her luminous eyes were like marbles designed for gazers. Her hair was like a sari, but as soft as silk, waiting to infatuate onlookers who fall in its honey-sweet trap. An example of the above is me.
2 years later, this infatuation still encrusted me. I was in Class XI, and we were studying to obtain Indian Secondary Certificate. Although it is exacting on us, we still have the time to appreciate our boons. I did so via writing a love letter, and presenting it to her. Today, I found out that I had left it at home, despite fatiguing on it. I was devastated. However, I replicated it while pooping on the toilet at the double.
I gave it to my crush, and then, due to being overwrought, ran away from her, hyperventilating, laughing, and crying at the same time. Unfortunately, she just said thanks to me at reccess. I was devastated. However, when I went home, I was taken out of the frying pan into the fire. My mother had discovered the original love letter.
She told me that she found it in my bag, and that we were going to read it together. I was in the most calamitous set of circumstances I had been in my entire life. Fortunately, her phone started ringing in the adjacent room, leading her to retrieve it and communicate to the other person. I darted towards the paper and vehemently did the needful. However, I froze in trepidation when I heard the voice of my crush's father's at the other end of the landline. However, since he works in a scam-centre, he just wanted to scam my mother.
When she finished rebuking him, she came back to the drawing room, where she had reserved my love letter. When pursuing it and interrogating me about its whereabouts, she was replied to via bewildered faces and expressions with a lack of fear. However, she grew tired of pursuing its whereabouts, and therefore, left the room. However, I believe that she has seen it, as they uncrumpled it and left it neatly folded on our bookshelf, which fills me with terror.
Part 2(Tuesday):
I met my crush when I was in high-school. I was 13 and she was 14. When I set eyes on her, I knew that she was the one for me. Her reflective skin was like gold waiting to be rubbed and loved. Her luminous eyes were like marbles designed for gazers. Her hair was like a sari, but as soft as silk, waiting to infatuate onlookers who fall in its honey-sweet trap. An example of the above is me.
I decided to test my valour via generating and sending a love letter to her. Unfortunately, at the time, she just said 'Thanks', which had left me devastated. Moreso, I had to duplicate my letter while pooping out biryani I ate on Sunday, in the highschool toilet, since my mother had stolen my original letter. I thought I did the needful to destroy it. Unfortunately, it was all in vain, which caused my letter to be found by my father.
My father was about to beat me with his belt, which was the worst thing that could happen to a 16 year old Indian teenager. However, fortunately, somebody in uaeteenagers gave me advice, which I used. I dissembled my stories and weaved a lie that states that my friend dared me to give my crush a love letter, and that I was not in love with her, which persuaded my father that I was not in need of a thrasing.
I was relieved, and to make my amygdala, my insula, my insular cortex, and my periaqueductal gray even more elated, she had put a love letter in my bag that apologised for her lacklustre response towards me. She has requested a date that will be taking place tomorrow, and since my parents will be out, of the house, I saw eye to eye with her metaphorically, to ensure that we could literally see eye to eye with each other tomorrow.
I am currently, very elated by this, and am thrilled by a new experience that I will be experiencing. Until now, the only acquaintance with dates I had seen so far were in Hollywood pictures, which cater to a western audience, and therefore, until now, have led me to believe that us Indians cannot get dates due to our conservative nature. However, I was proven wrong, and will extract the moral of the impossible being possible from this memorable episode.
Part 3(Wednesday):
I met my crush when I was in high-school. I was 13 and she was 14. When I set eyes on her, I knew that she was the one for me. Therefore, I valiantly and strenuously, produced a love letter and delivered it to my crush. She was elated by this, and made me elated as well, via inviting me on a date with her. I contentedly to do so, not knowing the consequences of the tragic decision I made.
Today, at 18:00, which is half an hour after I reach my house, I get prepared to go on the date and dazzle her, leaving my house abandoned. To my ginormous shock, she had apparently booked a taxi for me. I live in Dubai. My house was in Al Furjan, while our date was in Motor City, which resulted in a mere half-an-hour journey As I diffidently walked up to the restaurant, I was greeted with a ghastly sight.
She had arrived, but not alone. Her entire family was with her, from her parents, to her elder brother, to her extended family, including her grandparents, uncles, and aunties. They began bombarding me with questions such as my grades in different subjects. However, I had a notable concern:As with most Indian parents, her parents were averse to love, and believed in arranged marriages, similar to mine. There was only one way out, and it was of an execrable nature.
With a heavy heart, I began to rip the most stentorian, malodorous and most fervent fart I had released in my entire life. It had now reverberated towards the now tumultuous room. Amidst all the pandemonium, I escaped from there, and with the permission of a stranger, took another taxi back to my house in Al Furjan, where I would be unscarred from the danger of both my parents' potential revelation, and the disapprobation of the family of my crush.
I am now typing this amidst a stream of tears and a heavy heart. However, I have now learnt sacrifice, and that bitter truth that life would be blemished in one way or another, for example, in this case, either via the revelation of my parents, the disapprobation of the family of my crush, and sacrificing my potential wife. However, this is something that can neither be concealed in y hippocampus, nor my amygdala, which results in me sharing this.
(Please speak in English. I don't know Hindi.)

Disclaimer:This was made in the span of 3 days. I would have posted here daily of it weren't for the restriction of relationship posts to be only on Wednesday.
Part 1(Monday):
I met my crush when I was in high-school. I was 13 and she was 14. When I set eyes on her, I knew that she was the one for me. Her reflective skin was like gold waiting to be rubbed and loved. Her luminous eyes were like marbles designed for gazers. Her hair was like a sari, but as soft as silk, waiting to infatuate onlookers who fall in its honey-sweet trap. An example of the above is me.
2 years later, this infatuation still encrusted me. I was in Class XI, and we were studying to obtain Indian Secondary Certificate. Although it is exacting on us, we still have the time to appreciate our boons. I did so via writing a love letter, and presenting it to her. Today, I found out that I had left it at home, despite fatiguing on it. I was devastated. However, I replicated it while pooping on the toilet at the double.
I gave it to my crush, and then, due to being overwrought, ran away from her, hyperventilating, laughing, and crying at the same time. Unfortunately, she just said thanks to me at reccess. I was devastated. However, when I went home, I was taken out of the frying pan into the fire. My mother had discovered the original love letter.
She told me that she found it in my bag, and that we were going to read it together. I was in the most calamitous set of circumstances I had been in my entire life. Fortunately, her phone started ringing in the adjacent room, leading her to retrieve it and communicate to the other person. I darted towards the paper and vehemently did the needful. However, I froze in trepidation when I heard the voice of my crush's father's at the other end of the landline. However, since he works in a scam-centre, he just wanted to scam my mother.
When she finished rebuking him, she came back to the drawing room, where she had reserved my love letter. When pursuing it and interrogating me about its whereabouts, she was replied to via bewildered faces and expressions with a lack of fear. However, she grew tired of pursuing its whereabouts, and therefore, left the room. However, I believe that she has seen it, as they uncrumpled it and left it neatly folded on our bookshelf, which fills me with terror.
Part 2(Tuesday):
I met my crush when I was in high-school. I was 13 and she was 14. When I set eyes on her, I knew that she was the one for me. Her reflective skin was like gold waiting to be rubbed and loved. Her luminous eyes were like marbles designed for gazers. Her hair was like a sari, but as soft as silk, waiting to infatuate onlookers who fall in its honey-sweet trap. An example of the above is me.
I decided to test my valour via generating and sending a love letter to her. Unfortunately, at the time, she just said 'Thanks', which had left me devastated. Moreso, I had to duplicate my letter while pooping out biryani I ate on Sunday, in the highschool toilet, since my mother had stolen my original letter. I thought I did the needful to destroy it. Unfortunately, it was all in vain, which caused my letter to be found by my father.
My father was about to beat me with his belt, which was the worst thing that could happen to a 16 year old Indian teenager. However, fortunately, somebody in uaeteenagers gave me advice, which I used. I dissembled my stories and weaved a lie that states that my friend dared me to give my crush a love letter, and that I was not in love with her, which persuaded my father that I was not in need of a thrasing.
I was relieved, and to make my amygdala, my insula, my insular cortex, and my periaqueductal gray even more elated, she had put a love letter in my bag that apologised for her lacklustre response towards me. She has requested a date that will be taking place tomorrow, and since my parents will be out, of the house, I saw eye to eye with her metaphorically, to ensure that we could literally see eye to eye with each other tomorrow.
I am currently, very elated by this, and am thrilled by a new experience that I will be experiencing. Until now, the only acquaintance with dates I had seen so far were in Hollywood pictures, which cater to a western audience, and therefore, until now, have led me to believe that us Indians cannot get dates due to our conservative nature. However, I was proven wrong, and will extract the moral of the impossible being possible from this memorable episode.
Part 3(Wednesday):
I met my crush when I was in high-school. I was 13 and she was 14. When I set eyes on her, I knew that she was the one for me. Therefore, I valiantly and strenuously, produced a love letter and delivered it to my crush. She was elated by this, and made me elated as well, via inviting me on a date with her. I contentedly to do so, not knowing the consequences of the tragic decision I made.
Today, at 18:00, which is half an hour after I reach my house, I get prepared to go on the date and dazzle her, leaving my house abandoned. To my ginormous shock, she had apparently booked a taxi for me. I live in Dubai. My house was in Al Furjan, while our date was in Motor City, which resulted in a mere half-an-hour journey As I diffidently walked up to the restaurant, I was greeted with a ghastly sight.
She had arrived, but not alone. Her entire family was with her, from her parents, to her elder brother, to her extended family, including her grandparents, uncles, and aunties. They began bombarding me with questions such as my grades in different subjects. However, I had a notable concern:As with most Indian parents, her parents were averse to love, and believed in arranged marriages, similar to mine. There was only one way out, and it was of an execrable nature.
With a heavy heart, I began to rip the most stentorian, malodorous and most fervent fart I had released in my entire life. It had now reverberated towards the now tumultuous room. Amidst all the pandemonium, I escaped from there, and with the permission of a stranger, took another taxi back to my house in Al Furjan, where I would be unscarred from the danger of both my parents' potential revelation, and the disapprobation of the family of my crush.
I am now typing this amidst a stream of tears and a heavy heart. However, I have now learnt sacrifice, and that bitter truth that life would be blemished in one way or another, for example, in this case, either via the revelation of my parents, the disapprobation of the family of my crush, and sacrificing my potential wife. However, this is something that can neither be concealed in y hippocampus, nor my amygdala, which results in me sharing this.
(Please speak in English. I don't know Hindi.)

Alright, first off I Read a post by u/Shiroudrake
About how Aether and Lumine are the Stars of the Morning and Evening and are the Split aspects of the one of the Shades(Venus). This sent my brain down the spiral abyss and into Baleful cleansing fire and now I'm creating this post. I agree that the Twins are likely the Son and Daughter of One of the 4 shades splitting itself with help from The Primordial One, because one of the shades did help him make all the creatures in the land. As seen in the quote below, this likely includes the stars in the sky (aka: the Twins) Stars of the Morning Phosphorus (Aether) Hesperus (Lumine). It would also explain the absence of a fourth Moon Sister.
Quote from Before Sun and Moon: "The Primordial One and One of its shades created the birds of the air, the beasts of the earth, and the fish of the sea. Together, they also created flowers, grass, and trees, before finally creating humans — our ancestors, numerous as the stars in the sky,"
With that, it's time for me to go crazy in the comments and drop a whole bunch of "Forbidden Knowledge" (aka incomprehensible Genshin Lore Speculations).
Let's zoom out, like waaay out. In Genshin, Gods are just powerful life-forms, think sci-fi style. These life forms have a hierarchy of power that also seems to be related to 2 things: first, how alien they are to Teyvat; and second, and arguably more important, how many times they can split themselves/create new life while still maintaining a "Core" version of their identities (example: Egeria and Oceanids). By Core version, I mean having the ability to create/use energy without suffering an identity death or loss of memories/goals/ambitions. Keep this in mind, because every "God" in the game does seem to have a limit to this power...every God except one.
When the lights go out for a "God," both metaphorically with their minds and literally with their power source, only one entity benefits from this death. This bad bitch is "The Night Mother," who is referenced in the in-game book the Pale Princess and The Six Pygmies (yes I read all of the leaked books, and they do seem like a massive lore spoiler for the gods/alien nature/potential future of the game). This bad Momma is currently the ultimate power in the cosmos...think about super massive black holes vs an ant and you'd get the power lvl difference between Zhong Li and The Night Mother. She not only controls the abyss, but seems to be the abyss! Her Aspects include everything that is infected with forbidden Knowledge. The Unknown is the dark, and it is fear, and it is all the things we wish we knew but don't...She has active control over that entire domain. Everything that interacts with hethe abyss for long enough becomes tainted, changed, and serves her will/vision. She wants only one thing...no light of any kind. No Suns, No Moons....and No Stars! A kingdom of eternal Night. She is also the mother of all things, because if you go back far enough in cosmological history you hit the unknown...which is her realm. Where did life on earth come from? Pre-mRNA molecules in a primordial soup? God? Eventually, if you go back far enough, we don't know...and that's where her power starts...at the edge of the light.
Fun note on her inspiration, she is likely inspired by a cross between the western Greek Goddess Nyx as well as the Ancient Chinese Goddess and "Mother of the West" Xiwangmu. The Mother of the West's earliest mention is found inscribed on oracle bones (1766 – 1122 BCE). She is one of the most ancient and powerful goddesses in the Chinese pantheon. She has complete control over life, death, creation, and destruction. She is married to the Jade Emperor(aka God with a big G). So I think we can say The Night Mother is the most powerful being we "know" of currently in game, and yes, she is the abyss...the one thing all other gods seem to fear like hell itself, is her. However, us freedom-loving idiot humans seem to think we can use her and still claim our destiny from the clutches of divine fate while throwing off the shackles of the Gods' heavenly principles....we are indeed fools.
Back to "God" power levels - let's start ranking Gods based on how much willpoweself identity they have after being able to split themselves into lesser beings or after they give some of their power away to empower other entities.
probs goes something like Night Mother >Phanes=/>Primordial One>Dragon King>Pale Princess>4 Shades (since it took 4shades+PO to beat Nibelung that the shades are weaker than dragon king) >3 Moon Sisters > Morning Star (twins)>Dragon Sovereigns> Seelies >Jinn>Adepti>illuminated Beasts>humans...unless those humans interact with the abyss/Night Mother which makes them sorta the same as her(eventually).
I ranked the Morning Star twins based on their full power lvl pre-game. This list is also assuming base power levels and does not factor in enhancers like Gnosis or visions because those come later and are mostly for surveillance purposes (eyes of god and what not).
More hot takes and wild speculations! The First betrayal of the Gods was because the Grand Unified Civilization, from the book Before Sun and Moon, wanted to know more about the greater existence/ universe, and so they succumbed to the "sweet honey wine temptations" of the unknown (aka abyss/forbidden Knowledge/Night Mother). They essentially fell into the craving cycle of "Yeah but what if?!" They knew that the Primordial One understood secrets from beyond and that the Seelie envoys weren't telling them shit about the greater cycles or about prophecy. So likely, some of the ruling class got afraid that their rule would end and they decide to give the scholars, witches, and alchemists the go-ahead to start probing the boundaries. They likely came into contact with Abyssal Corrupted Nibelung (Night Mother Controlled/ pulling the strings and empowering The King Dragon as her avatar). They made a deal with him/her, the humans would let him get vengeance on The Primordial One and his shades who are now turned Moon Sisters, if the Dragon would teach them how to become Gods and master the Abyss. The humans may have been the Original Sinners (Surtalogi and the precursors to the Hexenzirkel) who made this dark pact with the Dragon avatar of the Night Mother (or the Original Sinners may be someone else, I'm just theorizing). They came up with a clever plan to first weaken Celestia and the Primordial One before the Corrupted Dragon's attack. They did this by wedding crashing. (total fanfic moment here based on the union between the Seelie and the "traveler from afar"). I think that one of the Original Sinners may have poisoned the mind (with forbidden Knowledge AKA the Night Mother) of the person who went to Celestia and made a union with the Seelie.....This person's "data signature" (unsure of this term) would look to the gods as if they were an alien or outside traveler from afar...but since they had no reason to doubt humans at this point, they thought this "space" husbando was legit.
30 days after the "wedding," the forbidden knowledge spreads out from this unsuspecting host, maybe through a red or blue gem they were wearing. The data corrupting red abyss shit starts wreaking havoc on Celestia's machinery and partially corrupts One of the Moon Sisters (the Sustainer of Heavenly Principles) and fully corrupts one of the others. God-level fighting breaks out, and the third totally un-corrupted sister gets killed and becomes the moon of Teyvat. At the same time, the Abyss avatar dragon version of Nibelung attacks, and The Primordial One is left to struggle against (him/her) solo. The partially corrupted Sustainer of heavenly principle's sister manages to kill the fully corrupted Moon Sister and casts her corpse down into the abyssal waters of the ocean (this is the moon we see in the spiral abyss in game - it's the corrupted sisters corpse). Finally, The Primordial One (PO) kills the Abyss Dragon but has suffered unrecoverable amounts of damage in the process. Also, the World is almost completely Destroyed and the forbidden knowledge corruption is spreading everywhere. The PO and the Sustainer of Heavenly Principles try dropping a bunch of cleansing nails, but it's not enough.....The Primordial One decides to make the Ultimate Sacrifice for the world and uses his power level to fully give his body to the recreation of Teyvat...losing his memories and self in the process and becoming the very land we game on. Also during this time the Morning Star Twins got yeeted to the chasm and knocked out, and the precursor people to Khaenri'ah kidnap them.
This leaves the partially corrupted Sustainer of Heavenly Principles as the only God left in Celestia. Her moon body form is tainted red from the forbidden knowledge corruption, and she now swings from her Aspect of Themis into Nemesis. She opens her one traumatized red baleful eye and watches humanity for any signs that they will repeat this betrayal, this arrogation. She requires strict Order and surveillance...She initiates the Archon war to cleanse any remaining corrupted gods and to centralize her power and authority. Also because the PO body wasn't enough energy, and she sorta needs to... ya know reuse some of the creation materials that are locked up in minor deities' forms so that their elemental power can go back into the laylines and help re-balance Teyvat. Next she tells the Archons to lock the fate of the ambitious humans to that of Celestia by presenting them with an eye of god (a vision) so that she can forever watch and pass extreme vengeful judgement on the mortals who forced her heavenly family to sacrifice themselves and kill each other due to the betrayal of power hungry humans. During this time she may even have been leached on via alchemy by the furtive Crimson Moon Dynasty of Khaenri'ah as a secondary source for Forbidden Knowledge. All the while their Civilization hides underground from her all seeing eye! Over the centuries, many human kings and god kings attempt to reach for forbidden Knowledge (King Deshret, Remuria, Khaenri'ah) all to gain their freedom from the ever tightening grip of fate, and in time the Baleful Red Moon finds them all and destroys them.
As her own corruption progresses her judgments become more extreme...as she loses herself to the Night Mother's influence. By the time of Kaenri'ah cataclysm, her curses and hate culminate in a heinous act that even the Archons disagree with. The Sustainer of Heavenly Principles, Teyvats last celestial god and the crimson eye'd moon, massacres Khaenrian humans without discrimination. Her extreme acts vengeance are of retribution (not justice), an eye for an eye. If she has to live forever remembering the loss of her people ....then they should have to as well! She curses the pure bloods with immortality and lets the lesser ones lose their sense of self and become nothing more than husks(Hilichurls), just like her seelie sister had to while she watched forever...with her mind eroding. This is the last cycle of Teyvat because soon the last God in heaven will be fully corrupted by the Night Mothers Forbidden Knowledge and she will let the walls of the eggshell fall....and the Night Mother's Star Beasts will consume all life and light. The Traveler and their twin are the last Celestial hopes for ascension....but their Moon sister is so corrupted that she didn't even remember them, instead she attacked them on site. Remember the start of the game...her Celestial energy is tainted with black and red forbidden Knowledge - you can see the black and red pixels in her arm...she is focused on only one thing: "The arrogation of mankind ends now!"
and that's my fan lore speculation book dump for now, hope you enjoy your stay at Wendy's and enjoy that baconator!

As the title states, (and despite the existential risk to myself - as I am disabled, impoverished, and my survival is reliant on the room I rent in her attic - given her recent threat to have have me thrown out by the police because she could not handle the feelings she had during the argument that she initiated), I have finally drawn a bright red line in the metaphorical sand regarding her treatment of me. This is the culmination of 8+ years of sustained, one-sided, unreciprocated, and unsuccessful effort on my part to sustain, salvage, repair, or improve our "relationship"
 
I've learned a lot from the stories and people on this subreddit, and I know if anyone can understand the way that I'm feeling about this it's you guys.
 
Any input, commentary, criticism, insight, commiseration, etc, is very welcome, and I appreciate anyone who takes the time to read it.
 
Anyways, enough preamble, here's the letter in all of my ridiculously-verbose inglory (the square-bracketed disclaimers, etc, were part of the letter as delivered to her, since she is selective illiterate whenever there's something she doesn't like):
 
[START]
 
[This document begins with a 382 word AI-generated summary (titled "AI- GENERATED SUMMARY:" below the square-bracketed opening remarks), estimated at 1m23s time required to read. If you are unable or unwilling to make it through even this brief summary, then there is literally nothing else I could possibly do to assist in your comprehension of my positions. The full message following the summary is approximately 2100 words, estimated at approximately 8 minutes to read.]
 
[If you would like assistance in understanding things I've written that you're struggling to interpret or comprehend, you can go to chatgpt.com (no account necessary), or download the ChatGPT app from the Google Play Store on your phone. You can simply interact with the chat in natural language (in other words, type as though you were texting another person) and it will understand what you are saying. If you are struggling to understand how to interact with it effectively, you can simply inform it of that (in any wording you choose) and it will assist you with altering your approach to receive more effective results.]
 
AI-GENERATED SUMMARY:
 
Your son's message is a powerful declaration of his boundaries, grievances, and intentions within your relationship. Here's a breakdown to help you understand:
 
Preface: He advises you to read with an open mind and, if needed, with assistance due to the emotional complexity.
 
Declaration of Disengagement: He firmly states his decision to disengage from any form of interaction or acknowledgment outside of essential landlord-tenant matters.
 
Condemnation of Abuse: He accuses you of perpetuating a cycle of abuse that has deeply impacted his health and stability.
 
Rejection of Coercion: He dismisses the idea that being evicted is a viable solution to the abuse, highlighting the coercive nature of such a choice, and how it leaves him vulnerable to further harm.
 
Criticism of Your Behavior: He unreservedly condemns your actions, particularly your exploitation and manipulation, emphasizing the gravity and effects of your conduct.
 
Challenges to Your Claims: He directly confronts your claims regarding his efforts in the relationship, asserting that he has consistently made extensive attempts to maintain it, despite your accusations to the contrary.
 
Commitment to Compliance: He unequivocally affirms his commitment to compliance with all landlord-related demands, demonstrating his unwavering respect for your authority as the homeowner.
 
Demand for Clarity: He demands clear and unambiguous knowledge of the requisite terms when any changes to living arrangement paradigms are demanded, underscoring his willingness to comply with any directives you may issue.
 
Defense Against Gaslighting: He firmly asserts his unwavering commitment to respecting your property and authority, preemptively refuting any attempts to accuse him otherwise.
 
Insights into Your Behaviour: He offers insights into patterns in your behaviour, linking them to moments of vulnerability or distress in your life.
 
Call for Self-Reflection: He urges you to seek professional help for your narcissism and unresolved childhood traumas.
 
Caution Regarding Gravity: He states that failing to address your responsibilities would be a missed opportunity for both of you to salvage the relationship and resolve underlying issues.
 
Reiteration of Hope: Despite his current stance, he leaves the door open for reconciliation if you undergo necessary personal growth.
 
Closure on Unequal Effort: He firmly states that he can no longer sustain the one-sided effort in the relationship and won't continue to do so.
 
It's evident that he's deeply hurt and demanding acknowledgment, change, and resolution in your relationship.
 
[end of AI-generated summary; my full, non-AI-generated message follows below]
 
[I recommend that you read this in its entirety at a time and capacity level where your literacy and comprehension are at their highest level, and preferably with the interpretational assistance of a knowledgeable and competent support person or technological assistant.]
 
[Presumably, after reading a few sentences or less, your defense mechanisms will be activated and you will eject. However, as with the vast majority of the things I have said to you that have gone unacknowledged, I am completely certain that the contents are cogent and comprehensible, and I believe that with competent support and vulnerable effort you undoubtedly have the raw cognitive capacity necessary for comprehension if you are able to stabilize your emotional reactions and put real effort into the actions necessary for you to understand my words.]
 
I will not talk to you.
I will not look at you.
I will not approach you.
I will not acknowledge you.
 
If you attempt to interact with me on any interpersonal level not related to your role as a landlord, I will reserve the right to express just how fucking despicable it is to treat such a vulnerable person with such utter disregard and abuse for so fucking long.
 
The cycle of abuse you have maintained to destabilize me for your own pathological reasons has caused - and continues to cause - extensive damage to my health, stability, and existence. However, since I know your response to this would likely be some variation of "you're not a victim here [my name], so if I treat you so bad, just leave", I'll preemptively and unequivocally condemn such coercive and abusive tactics, and state again (as I did the other day), that the forced choice between your abuse and life-threatening-homelessness is obviously no choice at all, and leaves me perpetually subject to your coercion and abusive control.
 
Such exploitation by you is absolutely disgusting, and honestly I understand why you run away from yourself at every single instance where you're in danger of having your lifelong house-of-cards ego even slightly threatened. I know if I treated another human being the way you treat me for even a moment, let alone for the literal years you have done so, I would not be able to face myself in the mirror either. You should be fucking ashamed of yourself.
 
You say I "don't want to be your son anymore", as though it has been someone other than me making hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of efforts and attempts in order to try and single-handedly keep our relationship alive, and as though it has been someone other than you who has stonewalled me for years about every single legitimate and valid time I attempted to gain even the slightest foothold as a full human being in the owner-pet relationship you have fought so hard to maintain. You siphon, in fact demand, emotional supply whenever you so choose, and then fucking discard me as soon as it appears that I might do anything that would result in you losing even a fraction of a percent of the 99% to 1% imbalance you believe is an immutable part of our "relationship".
 
I will do my absolute best to be in my room as much as physically possible when you are home, so as to minimize the need to be physically adjacent to you in the course of our respective activities of daily living.
 
I, again, remain unequivocally committed to my position of deference and compliance towards any rules/demands related to my existence, presence, or activities as your tenant.
 
As you refuse to provide any sort of unambiguous guidance or clarification whatsoever regarding your shifting demands affecting my ability to access/perform basic activities of daily living, I will continue to act in good faith with respect to my adherence to all previously-established arrangements and protocols (whether codified or de facto) regarding such activities. To the full extent of my abilities, and to the extent that it is physically possible, I will immediately and unequivocally comply with any alterations, additions, or excisions you choose to impose regarding the nature of our physical coexistence as landlord and tenant, regardless of your disregard or intent for any harm to my stability that will ensue as a result.
 
If you intend to attempt to manipulate or threaten or gaslight me to illegitimately and dishonestly accuse me of failing to comply with your rights and demands as the homeownelandlord, then I can assure you that such efforts will be ineffective and inadvisable. The extensive history of my genuine, documented, and unwavering commitment to absolute respect of your home, property, and landlord-tenant authority is unassailable, and nothing has or will change about the good faith nature of my efforts to simply live peacefully and work on stabilizing my health and continuing to attempt to develop basic protocols that offer me the opportunity to seek the ways and means required to sustainably exist, survive, and seek meaning and fulfilment as a human being.
 
To try and make it a bit more bite-sized (without warranty as to the efficacy of said efforts), since I know when your ego is threatened you conveniently - and dishonestly - become completely unable to read a couple thousand words:
 

• I have never been more disgusted by the actions of anyone or anything more in my entire fucking existence.

 

• I will continue to be an absolute model tenant, despite the harmful effects of your constant abuse, and I will unequivocally comply with any demands you make with your authority as my landlord. I will explicitly and aggressively defend against any attempts to gaslight me, or attempt to dishonestly accuse me of failing to comply with any such demands.

 

• Feel free at anytime in your life to decide that maybe it might be time to face the fact that - though skillful in your delusion - you are the same scared child you were 40 years ago, and if you ever want to truly and meaningfully experience what it's like to be secure with yourself beneath the false veneer of superficial and ego-protecting interactions you surround yourself with at the exclusion of true and honest existential vulnerability, then you need to seek, engage with, and be honest and vulnerable with, professional clinical care for your intractable narcissism and the lifelong effects and deficits associated with same. In other words, to reductively and rhetorically restate what you disgustingly told me the other day as a means of deflecting from the fact that you couldn't go more than two seconds without contradicting yourself, “get your fucking meds adjusted”.

 

• When faced with any sort of challenge to your control or authority, your lifelong fear of abandonment has caused you to push people away before they have the opportunity to leave you, resulting in premature, self-created, and misdirected sabotage of significant relationships at the first sign of disturbance or genuine vulnerability. I know you're terrible at recognizing or interpreting patterns or facts, but think, for example, about when your efforts to remove me from your life and/or house have been at their most intense:

 

• (a) in 2016(ish) when conflicts about my role in helping with the [redacted address][job of cleaning out my grandpa's apartment after Alzheimer's took hold] triggered feelings of grief and fear in you at the decline of your father's health and the inevitability of his then-upcoming death,

 

• (b) in late 2019 through 2020ish, in the leadup to and aftermath of your father's death, where you threatened or demanded my removal from your house during damn-near every single minor conflict about utterly insignificant household disputes. The vulnerability and grief you felt surrounding his death triggered the core-level unresolved sense of abandonment you carry as a result of the lack of parental affection you received because of, inter alia, the level of care required by your [editor's note: dying of CF as a teenager] sister and resultant lack of parental support available to you as a result,

 

• (c) in 2021ish, surrounding your mother's acute medical events and her subsequent death, where your treatment of me followed effectively the same patterns and underlying causes as the item above (sans explicit threats of eviction, opting instead for the more oblique and covert references that have been your MO until the recent regression to explicit threats within the past few days).

 

• (d) in 2024, surrounding the final decline and subsequent death of [dog], where all of the same behaviours described above returned and steadily escalated, culminating in telling me to get the fuck out of your house because I wouldn't stop moving some boxes for 30 minutes, and then telling me that you were going to call the police to have me removed from your house as a result of your inability to force me to stop making accurate statements that damaged your ego and need for unquestioned interpersonal control in your self-appointed role as the sole ruler of the relational hierarchy you fought so hard to maintain.

 

• You need to actively and vulnerably seek and participate in professional clinical treatment for the lifelong effects of the hollow narcissism that has maladaptively protected you from your deepest childhood injuries and vulnerabilities, at the expense of truly genuine connection with, at the very least, your firstborn and only son.

 

• [note that the contents of this bullet point are neither a threat of suicide, nor an indication of any intent whatsoever to harm myself or others. I am including this disclaimer to preemptively remove your ability to selectively manipulate my words in order to further gaslight me]
  If you want me gone from your house, and life (and possibly my own life, given the extreme existential risk posed by homelessness for a vulnerable person with the significant disabilities I am faced with), then you will have to have me physically removed from your house in cold blood, and until the day you (or I, depending on the order) die you will live with that being the last time you ever saw the son that you took for granted and abused for 32 fucking years while he groveled at your feet begging for even scraps of affection or humanity from the person who constantly love-bombed and discarded him at her convenience to serve her own narcissistic desires worth no regard for the whole entire person she was subjugating to the role of, barely, a pet.
  

 

• Be aware that if you choose to remove me from your life as a pathological and assuredly-ineffective avoidance mechanism to try and preemptively shield yourself from the fear of abandonment that is triggered in you as a result of my overwhelmingly valid and necessary actions to demand that you cease your lifelong efforts to subjugate me in your self-created hierarchical position at the top of our unequal relationship, then you will be doing yourself an irreparable disservice by extinguishing whatever sliver of opportunity might remain for you to get the help you need to allow you to finally see me as a real person and begin making real decisions and changes and efforts to participate in efforts to salvage whatever scraps of hope might remain for us to have a relationship before both/either of us die.

 

• Feel free to ignore and/or conceal the tens of thousands of words of documented history in order to share contextless excerpts of this text within your self-serving echo chambers in your efforts to receive false validation of your delusional victimhood. Or, alternatively, feel free to vulnerably share this in its entirety - along with the full corpus of my messaging regarding the severity of the harms caused by your behaviours - with a competent and knowledgeable mental health professional(s) for the purposes of seeking treatment for your underlying pathologies and working towards genuine growth.

 

• In the unlikely (though incomprehensibly-or-perhaps-delusionally-still-hopeful) event that you are still reading, I will conclude by saying that the possibility for any hope of salvaging our relationship lies firmly and solely within your control.

 

• After over 8 years of significant, relentless, documented, often-vilified, and absolutely unreciprocated efforts to single-handedly to put 100% of the effort into a relationship that you reaped the benefits of while remaining unwavering in your abdication of even the slightest of responsibilities, I have run out of ways, means, ideas, and capacity to continue unsuccessfully trying to do both of our parts.

 

• I am not closing the door to the possibility of reconciliation if/once you have undertaken the extensive individual work you need to do if you are ever going to be able and willing to put the necessary effort into repairing our relationship. But neither am I continuing to continue working outside your closed door hoping that one day I might be able to do enough to influence you to treat me like a full, real, EQUAL, human being.

 
I love you, and goodbye for now. I hope to see you on the other side, but I cannot force you to undertake the journey.
 
- [name]
 
[/END]
(any edits are fixing formatting/copy&paste errors)

Have you ever had trouble processing or interpreting the manga's art in some way, shape, or form? Apparently, it's not that uncommon in the community, as I've seen quite a few people express this, and hopefully I can alleviate that to some extent with posts like this going forward. These posts aren't intended as a replacement for the chapters; rather, they're intended as a page-by-page point of reference and a log of details that you can hopefully reference as you read or reread the manga. Without further ado:
p1-3: Hoping to improve Denji's mood by feeding him, the group leaves the now-destroyed apartment and heads to the train station. As they approach the station, Denji looks down and is shocked to see the body of a deceased chainsaw cultist just lying in the open, though nobody else in the station seems to pay any mind to it. Asa and Fami continue to walk ahead of the group, but Denji slows down, looking back at the body as he tries to process his thoughts; seeing this, Haruka and Nobana choose to lag alongside him. Denji asks them if he's seeing things right—if that really is a dead body. Nobana stays silent, clearly uncomfortable around the body, as he anxiously grabs his other arm. Haruka, on the other hand, confirms that it is, in fact, a corpse before assuring Denji that an attendant will come by to remove the body sometime later. Taken aback by his casual response, Denji stresses that a person died—implying it should be a bigger deal—but Asa responds that seeing dead people is to be expected at this point before telling Denji to hurry up so they can board their train. As the train pulls off, the group sits down and silently listens as Fami begins listing off nearby sushi restaurants ranked in descending order of quality. As she lists them, though, she has to disqualify many of them because they have closed due to the ongoing crisis; through the process of elimination, she eventually narrows the choice down to Sushishi, a budget sushi restaurant. Recognizing the restaurant, Nobana excitedly mentions that he's been there once before, and though he admits that he only bought tea from them, he states that it was good. Oblivious to the conversations around him—as if he was in a trance—Denji stares at the other side of the train, where he sees a mother and her child—sleeping and bandaged from injuries—as well as the seemingly endless landscape of damaged buildings that can be seen from the window behind them.
p4-5: Depressed and trying to understand his situation, Denji asks Asa to clarify why she's so adamant about fighting him suddenly. With a sense of responsibility, Asa cryptically states that if she fights him and wins, it will save Denji. After a brief pause, Denji asks if she's still brainwashed by the Chainsaw Man Church, embarrassing her. Abashed and exasperated, Asa declares she's not brainwashed before asking Fami to explain the plan to Denji. Turning to face each other, Denji and Fami share a look before Fami turns away. In detail, Fami explains the nature of Denji's existence, specifying that his power comes from his contract—that Pochita would become his heart so long as he lives a normal life—and that breaking that contract causes Pochita to manifest in his true form. She clarifies that if Pochita can be defeated, simply swapping Denji's chainsaw heart with a human heart will allow him to become an ordinary human again.
p6-7: Overwhelmed by her explanation, it takes Denji a moment to process what she said, but when he does, he's overcome with suspicion. Denji asks why she knows that much about him, but Fami tilts her head and refuses to respond. Turning to face Asa again, Denji angrily asks if she really believes Fami, pointing out how shady she is in the process. Flustered, Asa attempts to defend Fami, pointing out that she helped rescue Denji from the detention facility. She continues, stating that even if she's done bad things in the past, her heart is in the right place right now because she just wants to help someone. Leaning out and looking at Fami, Asa asks her to confirm her good nature. As the whole group turns to look at her, silently waiting for a response, Fami says nothing at all; instead, the awkward silence is only cut by her rumbling stomach. As the group continues to watch her in stunned silence, she lowers her head in embarrassment.
p8-11: Turning back to Asa, Denji dejectedly asks what she means when she says he can return to "normal". Giving him a frustrated look, she explains that it would let Denji return to his old life. As she states that he could go to school and have a home to return to, she realizes that she accidentally said something insensitive, and her eyes widen in response. Quickly trying to smooth over her mistake, Asa states that she's sure even Nayuta will turn back up, theorizing that she's safe and is only missing because she doesn't have a way to reach out to him after the apartment burned down. Asa assures him that everything will return to how it was before, but Denji tilts his head in thought. Barely turning in her direction, head still tilted, Denji asks if Asa has ever had to eat toilet paper. With no response, Asa only looks at him, confused, as she waits to see where he's going with this question. Continuing, Denji explains that he had so little to eat when he was a child that he'd often eat the toilet paper from a park's public restroom. Despite feeling empathetic towards Denji, Asa can't say anything in response to this revelation, leaving her to sit in stunned silence. Looking away from her, Denji elaborates that once he finally achieved food security, he found out he couldn't bring himself to eat toilet paper anymore. Turning to face her again, he asks if Asa understands what he's trying to say, but she responds that she has no idea since his metaphor is confusing. Lowering his head even more and facing the floor once again out of depression, Denji explains that he can never go back to the way things were before. Behind them, smoke can be seen pouring out of still-smoldering buildings. Stunned into silence, Asa takes one glimpse at Denji's depressed expression and is overcome by emotion. As she lowers her head to match him, she assures him that she'll give him his life back, promising to save him, no matter what.
p12-14: Lighting up a cigarette and taking a drag, Katana Man draws Asa's attention by smoking. As he exhales, he mocks Denji and Asa, saying that kids these days whine "like women". He continues to emasculate Denji, saying that his grandfather would never be avenged by killing "Chainsaw Woman". Asa jumps to Denji's defense, indignantly stating that Katana Man needs to cut him some slack since he's hungry and depressed over Nayuta's uncertain fate. Adding on, she scolds Katana Man, explaining that smoking is prohibited on the train. In response, Katana Man drops his cigarette to the floor; as it continues to burn and release smoke, Asa chides him again. Ignoring her, Katana Man states that he has a better idea than getting sushi; according to him, it's guaranteed to restore the spirit of any man. As Denji turns to face him out of curiosity, Katana Man exclaims that they should take him to a soapland brothel since—according to him—nothing can cheer a man up faster than having sex with a woman.
And that's that. A pretty emotionally heavy chapter this week, but I really like when Fujimoto digs into character's emotions. Off topic, I guess, but there's also no break next week, so that's nice too. Until then, I hope this transcript can help anyone who wants or needs it.

Before going into it, I want to mention how this post was inspired by three things. One was user u/HastyvonFuego2 and their post on going down the rabbit hole on the Kendrick sub last week. It was also inspired by Childish Gambino’s first album release in nearly 6 years where I have been sitting on this idea for a while but he inspired me to finally post this week like he did (never posted on Reddit at all before so be gentle if I am not doing it right)! I was also inspired by an interview Bino gave to GQ about breaking down his most iconic characters. In this interview he says how This is America started out as a Drake diss but then he realized the song was too hard for just Drake so he kept working on it. He also talks in this interview about how all culture is about compression. Which means that yes, This is America is about the gun violence and police issues in America, but compressed in this video is also more about where that culture comes from which he shows is from a small handful of rap moguls, namely Drake, Diddy and Jay-Z (bear with me on this long post, I think/hope it will be worth it). At the end I talk briefly about how Little Foot Big Foot might be in this same vein of cultural compression.
[Intro: Choir]
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah, go, go away
The beginning of this song has no background music yet, which really gives it an ‘in the beginning’ feel. Then Gambino starts doing his dances with weird facial expressions. I will explain as we go through his video how those expressions and dance moves represent different famous rap moguls. One easy look to pick out right away is Jay-Z’s famous lip curl/growl look that Gambino gives with a head nod repeatedly. The colonial pants have been a hot topic, but since it’s only the pants that are colonial, Gambino is saying the bottom or basis for this violent culture in America is ultimately colonialism. The lyrics ‘Go Away’, are likely foreshadowing the rap moguls wanting other popular rap rivals to ‘go away’ or they will make them (aka murder them) for profit.
[Bridge: Childish Gambino & Young Thug]
We just wanna party
Party just for you
We just want the money
Money just for you (Yeah)
Usually you want money for yourself and to party for yourself, so this is a bit odd. But what Gambino is referring to is similar to these Diddy ‘freakoff parties’ we are hearing about where people who want to be famous are really partying for these rap moguls so they can get close to them. Where they suck up to them saying that they want to earn the mogul money from their songs.
I know you wanna party
Party just for free
Girl, you got me dancin' (Girl, you got me dancin')
Dance and shake the frame (Yeah)
Then this almost feels like the Diddy rebuttal where he’s like ya I know you want to party and you want to do it for free. Like Katt Williams says, “you gotta tell Diddy no”, it is never free to go to those parties. There are always consequences. When you are partying you are dancing, but shaking the frame could refer to how those boundaries/edges are being crossed, lines are blurred, etc.
Then in the video, the fellow who was playing the guitar gets shot and things turn dark from happy music. I believe that this guitar tune is meant to represent 2Pac and Nas’s song Thugz Mansion. It’s one of the original greats from ‘in the beginning’. Nas famously has always had major issues with Jay-Z too (More on why 2Pac and Nas later). It also represents how it was these moguls who murdered 2Pac like Jaguar Wright and Katt Williams keep saying. Where these murders only lead to more money and fame for the killers when the dead artists’ and their music are exploited more easily.
Also note that the gun gets taken away by a school kid after the shooting, more on this later as well.
[Verse 1: Childish Gambino, Young Thug, Blocboy JB & 21 Savage]
This is America (Skrrt, skrrt, woo)
Don't catch you slippin' now (Ayy)
Look how I'm livin' now
Police be trippin' now (Woo)
Yeah, this is America (Woo, ayy)
Guns in my area (Word, my area)
There is a song called Guns in My Area by Lil Weiner and Baby Chapox that paints a vivid picture of the everyday struggles and conflicts faced by those living in communities affected by gun violence. More compression of other songs and the American gun culture.
I got the strap (Ayy, ayy)
I gotta carry 'em
I am almost certain this line is referring to 2Pac’s song Changes. Throughout This is America, Gambino takes lines from Pac’s song: “They get jealous when they see you with your mobile phone” (referred to later in this a Celly, that’s tool) “That's the sound of my tool, you say it ain't cool, My mama didn't raise no fool”
“And as long as I stay black, I gotta stay strapped, And I never get to lay back” It seems like Gambino broke up these lyrics and scattered them throughout his song. This plays into the theme that everyone is using 2Pac and enriching themselves off of his image and music. I show below how this particular section of the video represents Diddy meaning that Diddy himself is exploiting his music (and alleging that Diddy killed Pac?). We could see this exploitation play out at length with how much Diddy milked the death of Biggie like in Every Breath You Take.
Yeah, yeah, I'ma go into this (Ugh)
Yeah, yeah, this is guerilla (Woo)
Yeah, yeah, I'ma go get the bag
The song Gorilla War by $uicideboy$ and Ramirez talks about getting a bag repeatedly in the course. Also in Otis with Kanye and Jay-Z their lyrics talk about going gorilla (I talk about this song more further down), so it could be referring to this as well. It seems like Gambino is trying to pull out lyrics from all across the rap culture and embed them in his song to highlight the ‘cultural compression’.
Yeah, yeah, I'm so cold like, yeah (Yeah)
I'm so dope like, yeah (Woo)
We gon' blow like, yeah (Straight up, uh)
I think that all of the school kids in the video represent all of the rappers that are signed with these big labels. Which is interesting because they are the ones facilitating the guns for the moguls in the video. You can see that the mogul is really focused on the kids and gets agitated and directs them to follow him whenever they stray off a bit like they are his pupils, or like he owns them. Then all of a sudden the camera comes into a scene where you can see more kids shooting a rap video and all shooting money from a Supreme gun. The camera zooms out almost to show you that this is the mogul’s whole rap empire they are looking over, all of their kids in one place (this empire already includes some chaos in the background). It’s subtle but hilarious, Gambino puts fricken chickens on the ground where the kids are filming the rap video. He is directly calling all of these rappers complete chickens for playing up this lifestyle and being the cause of so much chaos rather than coming out and telling somebody what’s really going on. Trying to get their money over everything else.
[Refrain: Choir & Childish Gambino]
Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh, tell somebody
You go tell somebody
Grandma told me
Get your money, Black man (Get your— Black man)
This is where things start to get interesting. Gambino is literally saying, go tell somebody about this! We all know what’s happening, why don’t you go let people know how bad it is? But like Jaguar Wright said, who do you tell when these moguls have the cops and feds paid off? This video is literally Gambino putting it all out there in this extremely popular song for everyone to see but yet we still just see the dancing and the violent chaos of people and police in the streets and not the root cause that is hidden in plain sight.
The vast majority of those who reviewed this video until now think this scene represents the tragic church shooting in Charleston in 2015. I think it does, but we also have to look at this from an angle of compression.
The people in the choir are all of the people who are currently singing the rap mogul’s praises and who are focused on going and getting what’s owed to them, get their money (who are also profiting off of the dead fellows music since it goes back to the original tune). You can see that each choir member has a distinct look to them. Think about who you are hearing about now who is about to be implicated in these freak offs and evil deeds. Is that Will Smith in the back left corner!? The short bald fellow in the front left maybe Kevin Hart? Rick Ross or TD Jakes maybe the bigger guy towards the back right? When the camera zooms in on the choir right at first to show their faces, doesn’t the guy in the bottom middle look like an uncanny version of Jordan Peele? Or is that meant to be Cuba Gooding Jr? Then just like the guitar fellow at the beginning, bang. You may be singing Diddy’s praises now, but he will cut you down whenever he suddenly feels like it.
I think almost for sure this initial section of the music video is Gambino acting as Diddy, because right after he shoots the choir, he does the elbow pump/chicken dance. At 3:14 in Diddy’s video for P.E. 2000 he does the chicken dance (he is up first in the video and I think Gambino is trying to say here I first present to you the first public enemy of 3 in this song). That elbow dance signals that it was Diddy and this is the end of his section.
[Chorus: Childish Gambino, Young Thug, Slim Jxmmi & Quavo]
This is America (Woo, ayy)
Don't catch you slippin' now (Woo, woo, don't catch you slippin' now)
Don't catch you slippin' now (Ayy, woah)
Look what I'm whippin' now (Slime!)
There have been many accounts of celebrities being given fancy cars after suffering abuse at the hands of these moguls. So these lyrics are saying that you better not slip up and tell people what’s really going on. And if you don’t look at this sweet carecord deal/movie contract I am going to give you. Beiber told this story about Diddy wanting to give him a luxury car.
Now suddenly, the dance switches from the chicken dance to a sudden bicep flex to signal us that we have now moved on from Gambino representing Diddy to our next mogul.
[Verse 2: Childish Gambino, Quavo, Young Thug, 21 Savage & BlocBoy JB]
This next chunk of the video is all about Jay-Z. I think this is the case because he throws his arms up in a bicep flex just like Jay does in the Otis music video at 2:38. And it makes sense Gambino would pick a dance move from a video with a huge American flag in the background to fit the ‘This is America’ theme. Gambino is mocking him saying, who are you really, the pretty guy or this hard gangster like Gambino shows in his dancing. Also right before they pan to the kids on the balcony, Bino also does Jay-Z’s signature lip curl look a couple times so we know it’s him and to signal the end of his section.
Look how I'm geekin' out (Hey)
I'm so fitted (I'm so fitted, woo)
Jay-Z is famous for making the fitted Yankees cap famous, it’s his signature look. More signs this verse is about Jay.
I'm on Gucci (I'm on Gucci)
Jay-Z has been seen in full wallpaper Gucci sweat suits but could also be referring to Gucci Mane who he hung out with at Beyonce’s tour around the time this song was released.
I'm so pretty (Yeah, yeah, woo)
I'm gon' get it (Ayy, I'm gon' get it)
Watch me move (Blaow)
These lines are probably referring to Jay-Z having a hidden preference for men, especially with the way Gambino flicks his wrist in the video when he says I’m so pretty.
This a celly (Ha)
That's a tool (Yeah)
On my Kodak (Woo) Black
I think that “this a celly, that’s a tool” harkens back to 2Pac’s lyrics in Changes where he sings, “They get jealous when they see ya with your mobile phone” then shortly after that he sings about the sound of his tool, referring to shooting a gun. But Childish flips these lyrics on their head. He is saying that it’s really the phone that’s a tool to be using, not a gun. And pans up and shows (the school kids specifically) on the balcony filming everything going on below. He’s telling the kids/other rappers, use your phone as a tool, you can record these bad deeds when you get blackmailed into being at the freak off. That’s how you can kill them and their career, not with a gun. Go tell somebody! There is also the reference to Kodak which plays into the picture taking theme, but also because Kodak Black has been accused of assaulting a teenage girl in a hotel room. So we have a good idea of what Gambino suggests all the kids start filming and collecting evidence of.
Ooh, know that (Yeah, know that, hold on)
Get it (Woo, get it, get it)
Ooh, work it (21)
Now we are onto Drake’s part. In the video Gambino starts doing the BlocBoy JB dance called Shoot. Drake is known for doing these little viral dance moves like in Hotline Bling. But not only that, this dance is also used in the song that both BlocBoy JB and Drake collaborate on for their video Look Alive. It starts at 2:07 in the Look Alive video. So this is Drake’s dance to signal his part is now starting.
Note this is where the pale horse rides by also potentially saying that Drake is one of the horsemen of the apocalypse. Interestingly, Drake’s collab with BlocBoy JB was pretty much the apocalypse for BlocBoy’s career, who hasn’t had a hit since.
Hunnid bands, hunnid bands, hunnid bands (Hunnid bands)
Contraband, contraband, contraband (Contraband)
I got the plug in Oaxaca (Woah)
They gonna find you like "blocka" (Blaow)
Again, we know this is Drake’s section because his song 10 bands starts out by saying “10 bands, 50 bands, 100 bands” almost identical to Bino’s lyrics here. Also Blocka was famously used by Biggie in his song Gimme the Loot which could be referring to Biggie's demise like Pac’s and making money from his death. Everything in this industry originates from pushing drugs, which has been alleged through the trafficking that Diddy, Jay-Z and Drake do through their private jets likely connected to their bosses, the Clive Davises and Lucian Grainges of the world. This escalates rap beefs and the whole culture to the next level where murder is often a consequence for young rappers in their prime when international drug lord money is involved.
An interesting point is this is the only time where Childish was about to shoot someone in the video, but where he didn’t have a school kid either handing him the gun or taking it away carefully from him. (Maybe also a diss at Drake that even though he acts hard he doesn’t shoot, he gets his horseman of the apocalypse to do his dirty deeds for him instead perhaps?). This is the beginning of the end for the rap mogul as he no longer has his kids doing his bidding for him. A simple message to show how the violence can be stopped, that these shootings can end when the kids stop enabling them. So then as soon as he can’t react in that moment and shoot someone his anger is forced to chill out, as shown by smoking a J, and to go back to exploiting the dead man’s music instead. If you don’t put a gun in someone’s hand when they are heated, those feelings too shall pass - kinda feel.
[Refrain: Choir, Childish Gambino, & Young Thug]
Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh, tell somebody
America, I just checked my following list, and
You mothafuckas owe me
Whose voice does that sound like!? It sounds a lot like Diddy to me, public enemy #1. This is basically saying that the moguls are the ones who we all owe it to for all of this glorified gun violence in America. That we owe them way more follows and likes for what a massive influence they have had on the violence and chaos we see in America today.
Grandma told me
Get your money, Black man (Black man)
(1, 2, 3—get down)
In Moneybagg Yo’s song 1, 2, 3, he also has a line that says “1, 2, 3, let’s go!” in a similar vein.
But something interesting I came across was Nas’s song Get Down where they use a sample from James Brown's “The Boss” that sounds extremely similar to the way Gambino screams “Get Down!” Which would fit well if the guitar singer from the beginning is meant to be Nas and Pac doing Thugz Mansion.
Also make sure you check out Nas’s song Get Down so that you can hear how much Jay-Z outright copied this song for The Story of OJ. From the musical structure with the piano and interwoven samples right down to the theme reiterated by the sample at the end of Nas’s song: “If that’s how our people are gonna get down, how are we ever gonna get up?”
SZA
Finally to wrap up the video, I have been stumped for a long time as to why SZA is randomly at the end of this video sitting on one of the cars. But I think I finally know why and it reconfirms that this last scene is all about Drake. If you watch Drake’s music video for Worst Behavior (not very Canadian of him to spell behaviour that way I might add) you will see Drake rapping and dancing with a few cars surrounding him and one of those cars has other rappers making cameos in it. In Gambino’s video SZA represents that car with a famous cameo. I think this is further confirmed when the black edges of the video start closing inwards at the end of This is America, the exact same way that Worst Behavior ends. So why SZA as the cameo then? Cause it reminds people that Drake is a p*do.
This is from an article in the Rolling Stone: In 2020, Drake revealed publicly that he and SZA had dated over a decade ago, well before she was an established artist (her earliest music goes back to around 2012; her critical breakthrough, Ctrl, came in 2017). On 21 Savage’s “Mr. Right Now,” Drake rapped about a newer fling who was a fan of SZA’s: “Yeah, said she wanna fuck to some SZA, wait / ‘Cause I used to date SZA back in ’08 / If you cool with it, baby, she can still play.” A few days later, SZA responded, corroborating Drake’s claim with a slight correction: they dated in 2009, when both would have been over 18. Since SZA would not have turned 18 until late 2008, she wanted to set the record straight. “in this case a year of poetic rap license mattered 🥴lol I think he jus innocently rhymed 08 w wait [sic],” she tweeted. “I just didn’t want anybody thinking anything underage or creepy was happening . Completely innocent . Lifetimes ago . [sic]”
If you have to specifically say something isn’t creepy and distance yourself from it being lifetimes ago, it usually is creepy. Drake would’ve been 22 when she was 17. Metro Boomin also happens to be on the Mr. Right Now track. He is currently in trouble for resurfaced old tweets showing how Metro used to tweet disgusting things about what he wanted to do to underage girls. Interestingly, Metro Boomin is also now beefing with Drake.
Drake doing his dance on the car of the original musician’s music seems to be accusing Drake directly of stealing 2Pac’s music. Orlando Brown recently said the cryptic statement that “Drake is Pac” which likely means he stole 2Pac’s approach/style/audience after his death. Gambino did some good foreshadowing here too with the recent AI release Drake put out of 2Pac.
This dance scene also signals that the Drake section is now over.
[Outro: Young Thug]
You just a black man in this world
You just a barcode, ayy
You just a black man in this world
Drivin' expensive foreigns, ayy
You just a big dawg, yeah
I kenneled him in the backyard
No, probably ain't life to a dog
For a big dog
The outro lyrics speak to how these gatekeepers keep black men down and control them with things like being forced to wear a dress to become famous or to submit to homosexual/p*do acts.. In the video, as I mentioned above, the black edges close in on Drake’s dancing scene in This is America. But they don’t completely close and end things like they do in the Worst Behavior video. Instead, in Gambino’s video, the camera pans to show the mogul running for his life with Young Thug’s lyrics almost like a quiet echo in the background. He isn’t running from the cops though, he’s running from the kids and from the public. When I mentioned earlier that the kids not handing over the last gun before Drake’s scene signalled the beginning of the end for the moguls, this is that conclusion. Where it is showing that if all the kids come together to stop enabling and rather expose the moguls, people will be chasing these bastards down once we realize what has been going on behind the curtain. Then the song that Young Thug is singing can just be a quiet echo of the way things were in the past.
If you don’t think Gambino would be this deep and that I went too far down the rabbit hole, do a Google search on the calculations that he came up with for why he sings about loving until 3005 in his song. He seems to go real deep with his lyrics. So a big question this leaves us with is, what did Childish Gambino witness in the rap industry? His whole rap career plays out like he is trying to avoid industry norms.
Even in Sweatpants, he has lyrics like:
No hands like soccer teams and y'all fuck boys like Socrates
You niggas ain't coppin' these, niggas ain't lookin' like me (Nah)
Nah, I ain't checkin' I.D. (Nah), but I bounce 'em with no problem
Seems like he is trying to make it really clear across his catalogue of music that he isn’t a p*do but that other rappers are. Where he is saying that he doesn’t need to ID his potential partners because he can tell they are obviously too young and that’s not hard to do.
Tell 'em, Problem (Problem!)
I'm winnin', yeah, yeah, I'm winnin' (What?)...
Rich kid, asshole, paint me as a villain
So who was trying to paint him as a villain, Drake? And that’s why the diss was originally meant for him?
Don't be mad 'cause I'm doing me better than you doing you…
Better than you doing you
Fuck it, what you gon' do? (What?!)
He’s taunting the other rappers cause he knows they can’t say shit if they are creeps. He has the same sentiment in Bonfire “It’s a bonfire, turn the lights out, I’m burning everything you mother fuckers talk about.”
Childish Gambino has always refrained from talking about the meaning of This is America whenever he is asked, and I can only assume that all of this is why.
Little Foot Big Foot
Now with his new release, Little Foot Big Foot and applying cultural compression to it, it has me wondering if he is referring to Megan Thee Stallion and the Nicki beef? People like Nicki (calling Megan Big Foot) have been claiming for some time she wasn’t even shot in the foot by Tory Lanez. There were many people laughing and making fun of Megan over getting shot. Which could be an interesting story for Childish to tell to represent how crazy this violent culture has gotten that people just laugh and blame the victim now when you get shot. Also a good metaphor for things like ‘shooting yourself in the foot’ for not having a lawyer look over potentially predatory industry contracts like in the beginning of his video. That you want to get in the cool kids club so bad you overlook it. Not as sure on this one though since the song just came out and I have only heard it a few times.
One last thing that is really interesting, there have been tons of artists on podcasts like Shay Shay talking about the strings these ultra rich moguls can pull. Like buying awards or gatekeeping people from being in the industry at all. There was even a story, I think maybe it was Gene Deal who told it, that when Killer Mike won at the grammys that Jay-Z was so angry he made sure to mess up his night by getting him locked up as soon as he left the awards stage. These moguls are extremely powerful and have an incredible amount of sway in the world/industry. If you check out Gambino’s profile on Youtube, his old music videos keep getting taken down, like Bonfire for example is just gone. Fans have been having to upload the videos themselves. There is a reply to a comment, on one of the fan uploaded vids, from Gambino’s account himself when someone asks why the videos are being taken down. His account just replies “Noone knows why :(“ Seems a bit odd all things considered and like maybe he has been at the mercy of these gatekeepers for going against the system.
I am so curious to know what the rest of you think about all of this!

if anyone is interested, my last post on here was just me pointing out the symbolism w/ daryls wings/vest so i decided i would like to point out some more or you could add your own if you would like! (idk if any of this is rlly cannon but the creative writer in me just wants to share)

• the use of storm imagery/metaphors when referring to the whisperers. i think its really something i noticed recently but its super cool to me how the whisperers themselves appear together like storm clouds do in the sky, they bunch together and you just know something bad is going to happen or something is coming when you see them. also how they named the episodes “The Calm Before” and then “The Storm” in season 10 (or 9, my memory is a bit foggy sorry)
  
• the trauma bond between daryl and michonne is something that i dont see talked about much! this could go for many scenarios (the throat biting scene, the governor, glenn and abe) but im mainly referring to when jocelyn kidnapped the alexandrian kids and then branded daryl and michonne. i know its not really something to be noticed but i just think it really emphasized how daryl and michonne became eachothers wing-man after rick’s “death”
  
• abraham. literally his whole character to me is tragic. he had one goal and one reason for living (getting eugene to D.C.) and it all turned out to be a lie. and just as he found a purpose and a reason to go on, he gets bashed in. it was just very upsetting to see him explode after eugene’s lie was revealed, not because i cared about eugene being punched (idgaf lol) but because you could tell he felt like he was outside that supermarket with that gun in his mouth again.
  
• carol will always be a mother. i know that every child she cares for ends up dying, but she has always been the mother for the entire group. she has saved them so many times no matter the circumstances. its almost like shes destined to be the one who brings them togetheprotect them (i know rick also has that job and was called mother goose but they are both mother geese)
  
• shane’s death. i know this show has a lot of deaths but shane’s was one that changed the entire story. there are still remnants of him sprinkled throughout the later seasons but just in less obvious ways then “i had a best friend” and rick’s hallucinations. anytime rick has killed/hurt (the red machete, biting out joes jugular, the saviors in that dive bar, beating the hell out of pete, etc) he has a certain look in his eyes. his signature head tilt, the squint when he looks at his next kill, the deep breath in. the first time we see this is when he and shane were out in the woods together.
  

idk i feel like im just restating a lot of things that might have already been said, so feel free to add with whatever!

Apparently Judy and Sherman are not getting along in this passage. Campbell is their daughter.

Judy broke in. "Let me try."
"Well ... all right."
"Darling," said Judy, "Daddy doesn't build roads or hospitals, and he doesn't help build them, but he does handle the bonds for the people who raise the money."
"Bonds?"
"Yes. Just imagine that a bond is a slice of cake, and you didn't bake the cake, but every time you hand somebody a slice of the cake, a tiny little bit comes off, like a little crumb, and you can keep that."
Judy was smiling, and so was Campbell, who seemed to realize that this was a joke, a kind of fairy tale based on what her daddy did.
"Little crumbs?" she said encouragingly.
"Yes," said Judy. "Or you have to imagine little crumbs, but a lot of little crumbs. If you pass around enough slices of cake, then pretty soon you have enough crumbs to make a gigantic cake."
"For real life?" asked Campbell.
"No, not for real life. You just have to imagine that." Judy looked to Sherman's father and mother for approval of this witty description of the bond business. They smiled, but uncertainly.
"I'm not sure you're making it any clearer for Campbell," said Sherman. "My goodness...crumbs." He smiled to show he knew this was only lunch-table banter. In fact...he was used to Judy's supercilious attitude toward Wall Street, but he was not happy about ... crumbs.
"I don't think it's such a bad metaphor," said Judy, also smiling. Then she turned to his father. "Let me give you an actual example, John, and you be the judge."
John. Even though there was something ... off ... about crumbs, this was the first real indication that things might be going over the edge. John. His father and mother had encouraged Judy to call them John and Celeste, but it made her uncomfortable. So she avoided calling them anything. This casual, confident John was not like her. Even his father appeared a bit on guard.
Judy launched into a description of his Giscard scheme. Then she said to his father, "Pierce & Pierce doesn't issue them for the French government and doesn't buy them from the French government but from whoever's already bought them from the French government. So Pierce & Pierce's transactions have nothing to do with anything France hopes to build or develop or ... achieve. It's all been done long before Pierce & Pierce enters the picture. So they're just sort of ... slices of cake. Golden cake. And Pierce & Pierce collects millions of marvelous" - she shrugged - "golden crumbs."
"You can call them crumbs if you want," said Sherman, trying not sound testy , and failing.
"Well, that's the best I can do," Judy said brightly. Then to his father and mother: "Investment banking is an unusual field. I don't know if there is any way you can explain it to anyone under twenty. Or perhaps under thirty."

Disclaimer:This is a part 2 to my story. Here is part 1:https://www.reddit.com/Crushes/comments/1cr3c21/my_mom_found_my_love_lette.
I met my crush when I was in high-school. I was 13 and she was 14. When I set eyes on her, I knew that she was the one for me. Her reflective skin was like gold waiting to be rubbed and loved. Her luminous eyes were like marbles designed for gazers. Her hair was like a sari, but as soft as silk, waiting to infatuate onlookers who fall in its honey-sweet trap. An example of the above is me.
I decided to test my valour via generating and sending a love letter to her. Unfortunately, at the time, she just said 'Thanks', which had left me devastated. Moreso, I had to duplicate my letter while pooping out biryani I ate on Sunday, in the highschool toilet, since my mother had stolen my original letter. I thought I did the needful to destroy it. Unfortunately, it was all in vain, which caused my letter to be found by my father.
My father was about to beat me with his belt, which was the worst thing that could happen to a 16 year old Indian teenager. However, fortunately, somebody in uaeteenagers gave me advice, which I used. I dissembled my stories and weaved a lie that states that my friend dared me to give my crush a love letter, and that I was not in love with her, which persuaded my father that I was not in need of a thrasing.
I was relieved, and to make my amygdala, my insula, my insular cortex, and my periaqueductal gray even more elated, she had put a love letter in my bag that apologised for her lacklustre response towards me. She has requested a date that will be taking place tomorrow, and since my parents will be out, of the house, I saw eye to eye with her metaphorically, to ensure that we could literally see eye to eye with each other tomorrow.
I am currently, very elated by this, and am thrilled by a new experience that I will be experiencing. Until now, the only acquaintance with dates I had seen so far were in Hollywood pictures, which cater to a westenr audience, and therefore, until now, have led me to believe that us Indians cannot get dates due to our conservative nature. However, I was proven wrong, and will extract the moral of the impossible being possible from this memorable episode.

Disclaimer:This is part 2 to my story. Here is part 1:https://www.reddit.com/UAETeenagers/comments/1cr3fiq/my_mom_found_my_love_lette
I met my crush when I was in high-school. I was 13 and she was 14. When I set eyes on her, I knew that she was the one for me. Her reflective skin was like gold waiting to be rubbed and loved. Her luminous eyes were like marbles designed for gazers. Her hair was like a sari, but as soft as silk, waiting to infatuate onlookers who fall in its honey-sweet trap. An example of the above is me.
I decided to test my valour via generating and sending a love letter to her. Unfortunately, at the time, she just said 'Thanks', which had left me devastated. Moreso, I had to duplicate my letter while pooping out biryani I ate on Sunday, in the highschool toilet, since my mother had stolen my original letter. I thought I did the needful to destroy it. Unfortunately, it was all in vain, which caused my letter to be found by my father.
My father was about to beat me with his slippers, which was the worst thing that could happen to a 16 year old Indian teenager. However, somebody in this subReddit gave me advice, which I used. I dissembled my stories and weaved a lie that states that my friend dared me to give my crush a love letter, and that I was not in love with her, which persuaded my father that I was not in need of a thrasing.
I was relieved, and to make my amygdala, my insula, my insular cortex, and my periaqueductal gray even more elated, she had put a love letter in my bag that apologised for her lacklustre response towards me. She has requested a date that will be taking place tomorrow, and since my parents will be out, of the house, I saw eye to eye with her metaphorically, to ensure that we could literally see eye to eye with each other tomorrow.
I am currently, very elated by this, and am thrilled by a new experience that I will be experiencing. Until now, the only acquaintance with dates I had seen so far were in Hollywood pictures, which cater to a westenr audience, and therefore, until now, have led me to believe that us Indians cannot get dates due to our conservative nature. However, I was proven wrong, and will extract the moral of the impossible being possible from this memorable episode.

I've exclusively played TW3. Haven't touched the books or the previous games yet. Given the limited context I have, Yen still feels quite normal. I understand how Triss feels more flowery and fairytale-like which is completely fine. But calling Yen "rude" in contrast to her seems absurd.
Have you seen those old couples who roast the shit out of each other? Yet they show care through the little things they do for each other. Yen has Geralt's loan covered at Vivaldi's in case he's unable to pay it back. She left 2 beautiful armor sets for him in Vizima. She is the mother figure to Geralt's adoptive daughter. She prefers only Geralt clean her up. She yeets away the bed with Triss' hair. She's quite possessive. She kisses him goodbye each time he embarks on a challenge. Even though she knows about what happened with Triss, she kisses him as they're about to leave Vizima which tells that she is forgiving and still has feelings for him. She knows he won't mind if she kisses him without asking. That's proper wife material.
Even after all this if the player chooses Triss, it's completely fine and reasonable. I just want to clarify the misunderstandings people have about Yen.
I understand why such a relationship might feel abusive to a third person as many have made such remarks about my IRL relationship as well. Except those who know me and my real life partner since the beginning, everyone else thinks we have a toxic relationship because we are not polite to each other in the traditional knightly sense. That's our thing. Behaving in any other way seems pretentious and unrealistic. We call it banter, not nagging.
The moment when we first meet Yen in the game, if you listen her tone carefully, there's a subtle hint that they have a lot of history together. It instantly tells the player that Geralt and Yen are used to each other, no matter what the player feels personally after meeting Triss.
There's a love scene which can happen even if the player doesn't choose to romance Yen. This means she is already involved in Geralt's story irrespective of whomsoever the player chooses. I'll use this opportunity to complain about how big of a let-downer is Triss' main love scene. The player mostly stares at shadows and planks of wood while, in comparison, the scene with Yen is a frickin' visual metaphor of wolves and deer!
Just like there are red herrings in every quest where certain dialogues and clues try to pull us away from the truth, there are dialogues from multiple characters which brand Yen as rude and Geralt as henpecked. The player must look over these red herrings to find the truth in Yen's actions rather than words. Once the player establishes how much she cares for Geralt and is not so haughty on the inside, now they must choose between her and Triss - both of which are correct options.

[I wrote this article about Macbeth for my college's newspaper, and I thought this subreddit might enjoy reading it!]
I have joked before that Shakespeare’s two favorite subjects–surpassing love, murder, madness, and crossdressing–are botany and birds. If you’ve been to New York City you might be aware of the “Shakespeare Garden” in Central Park, whose theoretical aim (though it proves nigh-impossible in practice) is to house specimens of all the plants which Shakespeare mentions in his plays. As it turns out, Bard quotes make for quite a diverse garden: there are roses which assuredly would smell as sweet by any other name; there are daffodils, that come before the swallow dares, and take the winds of March with beauty; there’s holly, heigh-ho; there’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance, there’s pansies, that’s for thoughts, there’s fennel for you, and columbines–no word on whether or not they could find any violets, though. I suppose there’s no objection to be made against those who complain that Shakespeare’s language is “flowery”; even as vicious a villain as Iago deigns to express his philosophy on life by way of botanical metaphor: “Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners.” And, of course, the plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream revolves around a magical flower which makes people fall in love.
I doubt anyone will object to my claiming of birds as Shakespeare’s other poetical fixation: I suspect that the majority of falconry knowledge which most non-falconers have today comes from reading footnotes in their copies of Shakespeare plays, explaining exactly what Richard II means by “How high a pitch his resolution soars,” or why Hamlet says “Hillo, ho, ho” to Marcellus. But while plants are so common in Shakespeare that I don’t know of one play which we might say is especially densely forested with references to them, there is one play that stands out as particularly full of birds in comparison with the rest of the Shakespearean canon. That play is Macbeth.
This is the sort of thing that one only notices after having read a play so many times that the actual events of the plot become akin to the meter of a poem–beats which must be hit, and which start to feel so natural that one hardly notices them–and one’s attention drifts away from the big, important speeches and toward the more utilitarian words and odd little moments that bridge them. I am not the first to point it out, but it is, all the same, a delightful quirk of the play, and could be a good way for Sophomores to throw their classmates for a loop in seminar [Note: Students at our college study Macbeth during their Sophomore year.]: why are there so many birds in Macbeth?
KING. Dismay’d not this/Our captains, Macbeth and Banquo? SERG. Yes,/As sparrows eagles… -Act I, Scene II
LADY. …The raven himself is hoarse/That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan… -Act I, Scene V
BAN. This guest of summer,/The temple-haunting martlet, does approve/By his loved mansionry, that the heaven’s breath/Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze/Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird/Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle… -Act I, Scene VI
LADY. Hark! Peace! It was the owl that shriek’d, the fatal bellman… -Act II, Scene II
LADY. I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry. -Act II, Scene II
PORTER. …come in, tailor; here you may roast your goose… -Act II, Scene III
PORTER. ‘Faith, sir, we were carousing till the second cock… -Act II, Scene III
LENNOX. New hatch’d to the woeful time: the obscure bird/Clamour’d the livelong night… -Act II, Scene III
OLD MAN. …On Tuesday last,/A falcon, towering in her pride of place,/Was by a mousing owl hawk’d at and kill’d. -Act II, Scene IV
MACBETH. …Light thickens; and the crow/Makes wing to the rooky wood… -Act III, Scene II
MACBETH. If charnel-houses and our graves must send/Those that we bury back, our monuments/Shall be the maws of kites. -Act III, Scene IV
MACBETH. Augurs and understood relations have/By magot pies and choughs and rooks brought forth/The secret’st man of blood. -Act III, Scene IV
LADY MACDUFF. …the poor wren,/the most diminutive of birds, will fight,/Her young ones in her nest, against the owl. -Act IV, Scene II
LADY MACDUFF. How will you live? SON. As birds do, mother. LADY MACDUFF. What, with worms and flies? SON. With what I get, I mean; and so do they. LADY MACDUFF. Poor bird! Thou’ldst never fear the net nor lime,/The pitfall nor the gin? SON. Why should I, mother? Poor birds they are not set for. -Act IV, Scene II
FIRST MURDERER. What, you egg! -Act IV, Scene II
MACDUFF. …there cannot be/That vulture in you… -Act IV, Scene III
MACDUFF. …O hell-kite! All?/What, all my pretty chickens and their dam/At one fell swoop? -Act IV, Scene III
MACBETH. The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!/Where got’st thou that goose look? SERVANT. There is ten thousand– MACBETH. Geese, villain? -Act V, Scene III
Above I have listed every ornithological reference that I’ve found in the Scottish Play; as we peruse them, we certainly cannot conclude that every individual reference is of the same kind, or carries the same import. I will not pretend, for example, that, just because geese and ravens are both birds, the Porter’s invitation for the imagined English tailor to cook his goose in Hell merits as much attention as Lady Macbeth’s ominous declaration that “the raven himself is hoarse”. Nor do I think that any individual reference particularly demands explication; by itself, any one of these bird-invocations seems perfectly natural. Shakespeare’s talent is such that he can repeat a motif in such a way that on the macro level it is obvious yet on the micro level it hardly feels present. But that macro level is what interests me here: what impression is created, on the whole, by the presence of so many birds in this play? I have a theory, which, though it may seem far-fetched, I think merits at least some consideration, and which, at the very least, I have not seen stated elsewhere, and so may make a novel contribution to the conversation.
Macbeth is both Shakespeare’s most supernatural tragedy and his most Sophoclean; these two superlatives are inextricably related. The appellative Weird given to the opening scene’s three Sisters–derived from the Old English wyrd, meaning destiny, and famously given its more familiar connotation by Shakespeare himself in this very play–is, among the Bard’s works, unique to Macbeth; and just as that word appears nowhere else in Shakespeare, so is the concept it represents absent in all tragedies but this one. Though Hamlet may cry out against outrageous fortune, and though Othello may rhetoricize about how no man can control his fate, it is only in Macbeth that we truly feel that the events we see play out before us are fated, predestined, inevitable. [See Note 1.] The ghost in Hamlet commands his son to revenge his foul and most unnatural murder, but does not tell him it is certain that he will succeed; indeed, would not the drama be sapped of its intrigue if that level of certainty were present? Meanwhile, the supernatural interlopers in Macbeth offer the Scottish thane not a mission, but a prophecy: All hail, Macbeth! that shalt be king hereafter! From its mystical opening word–When, not If–the Scottish play makes us aware of the certainty of all that is to befall our tragic antihero. Macbeth is thus a different sort of tragedy than Shakespeare’s others, and it works by an inverted mechanism. While the tragedy of, for example, Desdemona’s death is that it may have been prevented, the tragedy of Macbeth’s destruction is that it represents the fulfilment of fate; and this is the very same mechanism by which Oedipus Rex operates, complete with its own “Weird” character in the form of the seer Tiresias. Though Calvin managed to accept that some men are destined for greatness and others for ruin, this idea is, to Shakespeare and Sophocles, nothing short of agonizing–the stuff of tragedy.
Now: what does all of this have to do with birds? Consider these words from Antigone, spoken by Tiresias to Creon:
You shall learn, when you hear the indications of my art! As I took my place on my ancient seat for observing birds, where I can mark every bird of omen I heard a strange sound among them, since they were screeching with dire, incoherent frenzy and I knew that they were tearing each other with bloody claws, for there was a whirring of wings that made it clear… (Lloyd-Jones translation)
Consider next these words from Oedipus Tyrannus, spoken defensively by Oedipus to Tiresias:
Why, come, tell me, how can you be a true prophet? Why when the versifying hound was here did not you speak some word that could release the citizens? Indeed, her riddle was not one for the first comer to explain! It required prophetic skill, and you were exposed as having no knowledge from the birds or from the gods. No, it was I that came, Oedipus who knew nothing, and put a stop to her; I hit the mark by native wit, not by what I learned from birds. (Lloyd-Jones translation)
The practice of divining the future from birds–be it from their behaviors, their cries, or their innards–was, to Sophocles and his contemporaries, not superstitious hokum, but a practical science at which one could be skilled or unskilled, and it bodes ill for Oedipus that he is so quick to disregard it in favor of his own native wit. [See Note 2] By Shakespeare’s day, the practice had long been relegated to the realm of outdated hocus-pocus, but the Bard still saw some truth in it; in Macbeth, there is a recurring sense that, when the world is sick with some great wrong, its first symptoms manifest in the behavior of birds. When the “fatal bellman” the owl shrieks in the night, Lady Macbeth takes it as a sign that her husband is about his bloody business. The day after the murder of Duncan, as Ross converses with an Old Man about the strange things they’ve seen the previous night, “unnatural/Even as the deed that’s done”, the killing of a falcon by a mousing-owl–an omen straight out of Sophocles–is mentioned before the madness and cannibalism of Duncan’s horses, even though the latter would surely be more immediately noticeable and ghastly than the former.
These are the most obvious examples of birds as ill omens in Macbeth; yet even the more innocuous invocations of birds throughout the rest of the play continually turn our thoughts back to the ancient Greek understanding of fate and prophecy, and thereby remind us that, however savagely he may fight at Dunsinane, Macbeth’s fate is as fixed as that of Oedipus. The birds have already foretold all.
Note 1: The closest thing there is to this kind of fatalness in another Shakespearean tragedy is the several superstitious occurrences in Julius Caesar–both the soothsayer’s message of “Beware the ides of March” and the bestial portents such as the lack of a heart in an offering and the whelping of a lioness in the streets. Still, I will insist that these omens do not convey a sense of fatedness to the audience as strongly as the Weird Sisters in Macbeth by virtue of their being told to Caesar himself, not to Brutus, the play’s true protagonist, and by the fact that Shakespeare elsewhere uses dialogue to throw some doubt upon the idea of predestination: "Men at some times are masters of their fates:/The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/But in ourselves, that we are underlings." -I.ii
Note 2: The Liddell-Scott Greek Lexicon identifies at least two separate verbs referring to bird-based divination, both of which are present in the quoted passages: Tiresias uses ορνϊθοσκοπέομαι, observe birds, interpret their flight and cries, while Oedipus uses οιωνίζομαι, take omens from the flight and cries of birds. The latter term comes from οιωνος, a large bird, bird of prey, such as a vulture or eagle, and so distinguished from a common bird, while the former comes from ορνις, which more generally refers to a bird, including birds of prey and domestic fowls. Birds of both kinds are present in Macbeth; there are οιωναι, such as the “falcon, towering in her pride of place”, as well as ορνες, like the Porter’s goose and cock. I therefore see little value in interrogating the kinds of birds invoked by Shakespeare, the specific cultural associations and significance of the owl, the raven, or the wren; rather, if we reduce them down to their barest existence as birds, animals of the class Aves, and consider them in an ancient Greek light, then things become a bit clearer.