I don't really have anyone to talk to about this, so I'm just kind of here to vent.
I'm pretty sure that I've had anxiety for as long as I can remember. I recall being as young as 4 or 5 years old and experiencing major existential crises that turned into breakdowns. I was scared a lot, slept on my parents' bedroom floor a lot. Feelings of death and doom have always kept me up at night. There was one bout when I was about 14 where I spent around 3 months sleeping in my parents' room until they got us a family dog to keep me company in my own room at night. I was generally always able to keep busy and had a very active social life. I was always the funny one, outgoing, had lots of friends, and nobody knew what I was dealing with when I was alone. I was able to distract myself by keeping a busy social life, playing sports, studying, focusing on my hobbies. My anxieties were always brushed under the rug by both me and my family members, we all just thought I was quirky and would get over it. We never addressed my issues as "anxiety" or any kind of mental health issue.
I'm older now (31F) and my anxiety has snowballed to the point where I don't know what to do or how to be truly happy anymore. Any second I'm left alone with my own thoughts, it's darkness. My friends and family wouldn't know I'm struggling because being with them, socializing, doing activities are what tend to keep me sane and my mind off the stress of it all, so I probably appear happy. When I'm distracted and with my loved ones it's like I'm taking a break from my mind and I can finally take a breath.
I've always had an overwhelming fear of death. I'm terrified of dying and I'm terrified of my loved ones dying. With this comes extreme health anxiety, which has resulted in ER visits, being probed, having my blood drawn, being hooked up to IVs. When I think that something is wrong with me health-wise, it's all consuming. The blood rushes from my face and I panic, cry, and shut down until it's resolved. It could be something as simple as a lump in my throat or back pain. Simple things that come along with aging send me into a spiral and no matter how hard I try to tell myself "it's just your anxiety" it doesn't help. This constant stress tends to cause me physical symptoms which is like a vicious cycle when it comes to health anxiety. I've experienced shortness of breath, the feeling that my throat is closing (apparently this is called globus), tension everywhere, ice pick headaches, constipation, blurred vision, fatigue, chest pains, numbness, dry mouth. To name a few.
At this point, any time spent alone without a distraction is unbearable. I don't remember the last time I actually relaxed without my mind going crazy. It's starting to bleed into my relationships at this point, I get these compulsions where I can't stop engaging in what my therapist called "checking behavior". I am constantly asking my husband if he thinks I'm dying, then when he reassures me I'll move onto asking my mom, then I'll move onto my best friends, and then my other best friends. It's like I lose all self control and become to convinced that whatever this issue is will FINALLY be the thing that kills me, so everyone needs to listen. It got to the point where my mother begged me to consider medication because I was causing her so much stress, so I just stopped talking about it. Stopped checking (with people, I still google everything), stopped talking about my feelings, and now I just feel like I'm so mentally exhausted and miserable all the time that I don't find joy in the things I used to anymore. It's like a cloud of darkness over me all the time, with a looming feeling of doom in the back of my mind 24/7. I don't even know if I'm scared of death anymore, I just don't feel anything.
I sought conselling last year and spoke with a therapist for the first time, and it felt nice at first, but after 4 or 5 sessions I felt like I couldn't truly open up to them. Maybe I need to try a new one.
If I was being honest with my therapist I would have told them that I feel doomed. My partner wants to have kids and I've always wanted children, but there's a voice telling me that I'll die soon so what's the point. I would never harm myself, I just feel like something bad will happen to me. At night when I'm trying to sleep I sometimes imagine myself dead and in a morgue, and the thoughts won't leave my brain until I grab my phone and start scrolling TikTok. I sometimes have moments where I look at my husband and see a stranger and feel like I'm in an alternate universe. I'm not sure what that's about.
I feel like there's a chemical imbalance in my brain that can only be fixed with medication, but I'm terrifired of going on meds. Talking about my feelings isn't helping me, and anything a therapist can tell me or any CBT methods won't work. I felt like I already knew what my therapist was going to say before they said it, I could finish their sentences, I had the answers to all of their questions. I know what exercises I need to do to help myself and it doesn't matter. Nothing helps.
Anyway, that felt nice to write. I'm not sure what's going on with me, if it's anxiety, depression, both. I was diagnosed with PCOS last year and apparently depression and anxiety can be a symptom, so maybe that's where it comes from. Not really sure where to go from here, but I don't think I can take feeling like this anymore. I am mentally exhausted. Should I try medication?
Thanks for reading.

Kinda feel embarrassed asking but I‘ve thought about writing a fluff romance centring a character with zero inclination towards romance (a „too angry to die“ type if you will). Most fics doing so seem to change the character quite fundamentally in order to make it happen, any tips on how it can be done more naturally?

My Grandma recently passed away. Her estate wasn’t complicated and so was set up (with the guidance of an Estate Lawyer) with NO will and NO trust - everything was set up POD/TOD/Beneficiary with me (last of kin) 50% and 50% Aunt (by marriage, divorced uncle/grandmas son who died in 2020). I am the next of kin as both of my Grandmas children preceded her in death and I have a (Colorado) small claims affidavit entitling me to any assets discovered under $82K which entitles me to funds but not account access/details/changes/statements. I do not have any Personal Representative or Executor paperwork as there was no will/trust. The intent was to avoid probate through POD/TOD/Beneficiary.
Two weeks after Grandma’s passing we discovered a local credit union checking + money market account that no one knew existed. A statement was sent to my Aunt (by marriage, since divorced, Uncle passed in 2020) showing two accounts (checking and money market) and a ~$2400 ACH transaction from the credit union to an unknown Wells Fargo Mortgage account. No one knew this credit union accounts existed. There is no TOD/POD/beneficiary. No one had any idea to check this account or that these deductions were coming out. Credit union confirmed the ACH originated at Wells Fargo.
My grandma had no mortgages. She did bank with Wells Fargo but they confirmed in writing that she has no open accounts there (Aunt and I already closed her accounts at that institution) and never had any mortgage products, including co-signing. Grandma is in no way associated with this Mortgage account, from what Wells Fargo can tell. Last I heard, Wells Fargo was working on their end to identify who signed the authorization for the monthly mortgage ACH withdraw and how a red flag didn’t pop up indicating the payee and payer accounts have different names. We have also been to the tax assessors office who confirmed Grandma owned no other property or had no other mortgages in the state. My Aunt and I are the last living members of the family.
From what little I’ve been able to gather (given that I do not have personal representative or executor paperwork), the credit union account once stood at $40K (a new banker accidentally shared this info not knowing it was privileged) and has been depleted down to $1K since the ACH deductions began in June 2022. Grandma was in an assisted living & memory care facility beginning January 2021. I assume that Grandma’s dementia diagnosis would have negated her ability to sign for a loan/cosigner of any kind if some sort of “authorization” DID occur? I am also highly suspicious that Grandma had no knowledge of this, she didn’t authorize anything, and this is all in error or her info was stolen from the assisted living facility or elsewhere.
It turns out Grandma’s tax accountant who has done her taxes for many (10 ish?) years did know about the existence of the Credit Union account, but only through annual interest earned statements, meaning there was no visibility to total account value. However, with this, we can be relatively certain that my Grandma owned this account for many years, it was set up and maintained by her, etc.
I have visited both institutions multiple times over the past week. Wells Fargo is opening a case and will assign a case manager today. Theoretically they will then call me to get any info and begin their investigation. I am told they are “working on” stopping the ACH on their end, but my personal banker contact isn’t able to provide a timeline or process for what this looks like. The banker I’ve been working with indicated this may take a year or longer to resolve. I don’t know if he is trying to “under promise and over deliver” or if this is a genuine possibility for the resolution timeframe?
I brought the paperwork from Wells Fargo confirming no accounts/mortgages in Grandma’s name to the Credit Union yesterday in hopes they can stop the ACH on their end. The next withdrawal will be June 2 if neither institution is able to stop this, putting the Credit Union account negative and accruing fees as a result. I am unable to dispute transactions from the credit union side (no PR paperwork) and have basically been told that it’s in legal’s hands.
I’ve been told the Credit Union account must legally be closed within a year of Grandma’s passing and I’m hopeful we can get the funds returned to this account within that timeframe. Otherwise my understanding is that any funds may be provided via check to the “estate” thus requiring expensive and time consuming probate, which we very much hope to avoid. I’m reluctant to remove the existing $1K in the account for fear they will auto-close the account (a very real possibility according to my banker at the Credit Union) and this will cause additional hurdles in recouping any potential funds from Wells Fargo in a timely manner.
I have reached out to our Estate Attorney who helped us with Grandma’s paperwork prior to death/dementia, but they said this isn’t their area of expertise and they can offer no help or advice. So I’m hopeful trying to get wisdom from you all. Any wisdom would be appreciated! I’m out of my depths here…
I know this is a super rare and strange situation, but it is infuriating bouncing from Wells Fargo bank to Credit Union and back and getting no further in the process. I’ve now spent 22 hours across 4 business days at banking institutions trying to resolve/stop this. So, my questions to those savvy with these situations are:

1. What is the likelihood of recouping these funds? Potential timeline?
   
2. What is the likelihood stopping the ACH? Surely (perhaps I am naive) these banking institutions have some sort of obligation to investigate and stop fraud if it is identified?
   
3. Are the banking institutions required to report this to authorities if fraud has occurred?
   
4. Should I notify authorities (police, Attorney Generals office, other?). My assumption is that the victim (Grandma) would typically report this crime but since she has passed away, do I meet necessary thresholds to report this as her next of kin? Is there a value or risk to making this notification sooner than later?
   
5. Should I be seeking some sort of fraud attorney here?
   
6. Is there anything else I can or should be doing to be proactive about this situation?
   

Thanks in advance!

The foremost claim that (so called) libertarians make for their model of society is that it respects and promotes individual liberty, and allows people to pursue their own lives, in their own way, without the interference of others. Further they argue that other non-libertarian political ideologies, and personal beliefs, can be accommodated. Those who wish to be socialist, in a libertarian society, can band together, buy a parcel of land to live on and then set up a socialist society there, free from the interference of others. Likewise for religious groups and people with other beliefs.
Libertarians claim that the only economic order that respects individual freedom, is the free market. To them the free market is an exemplar of freedom in action. At the heart of the free market, is the voluntary bilateral exchange. If two parties exchange some goods, voluntarily, or make some contract voluntarily, then so long as this does not involve the violation of another's rights, no one has the right to interfere in it. According to libertarians the free market is the sum of the voluntary exchanges, and contracts going on in a society, nothing more and nothing less. Any distribution that occurs in the operation of a free market, is therefore just since at no stage has anyone's rights been violated, and all the exchanges were voluntary.
It seems to me that the above view ignores an important fact. The people involved in a free market must accept the rules of its operation, namely the rules that forbid attacks on others, using another's property without their consent, trespass, and fraud. This means that the free market has to include the mechanisms for deterring crimes, and mechanisms for compensation and punishment should such crimes be committed. The amount of coercion required to prevent such crimes, depends on the level of acquiescence of the population to the free market rules. In other words, the market is in fact the exchanges that go on as mentioned above, plus the policing, arbitration and legislating mechanisms required to ensure its operation. Hence, like the state, the market is a social institution, and the distributions of goods that result from its operation are therefore the distributions sanctioned by a libertarian society.
Libertarians are unanimous in viewing coercion as a violation of liberty, thus if you are forced to give money to the government to provide welfare, then you are being coerced and your liberty violated. The only legitimate use of coercion, according to libertarians is in enforcing people's rights. Libertarians legitimise coercion in these circumstances, and the amount of coercion required to enforce these rights depends on how willing people are to respect them. Hence it cannot be the case that a free market is free from coercion, unless everyone voluntarily respects these rights and abides by the law. For a libertarian to claim that a libertarian society is totally free in this sense, and justify it by saying that they expect everyone to respect property rights in this way, is on a par with a socialist claiming that a socialist society is free from coercion, because they expect everyone to be willing to accept the socialist's laws. Arguing that the free market they depict is an ideal that is free of coercion, but the practice requires some coercion to prevent people from violating rights, doesn't help either - the socialist can argue the equivalent point in defence of their position! A libertarian may concede that coercion is required to protect rights, but that other than that, the free market is free of coercion, and will be freer of coercion than a non-libertarian society.
However, as I said before, the amount of coercion required depends on how willing the citizens are to accept a free market order. If the citizens of a society do not want a libertarian order, it may require a lot of coercion to impose it, likewise if the citizens want socialism it won't require as much coercion to get it. In other words, what determines the amount of coercion required in a society, is the extent to which people are willing to accept the rules imposed on them, and this is as true of a libertarian, society as it is of any other. Thus, it is debatable that a libertarian society would have less coercion in it than a non-libertarian one. The libertarian can argue that at least the use of coercion is legitimised only in explicit circumstances where rights have been violated, but then a non-libertarian could argue the same for their proposed model of society too.
You will notice that I have supposed that to prevent someone from doing something he wants to do is to make him, in that respect, unfree; I am pro tanto unfree whenever someone interferes with my actions, whether or not I have a right to perform them, and whether or not my obstructor has a right to interfere with me. But there is a definition of freedom which informs much libertarian writing and which entails that interference is not a sufficient condition of unfreedom. On that definition, which may be called the rights definition of freedom, I am unfree only when someone prevents me from doing what I have a right to do, so that he, consequently, has no right to prevent me from doing it. Thus Robert Nozick says: “Other people’s actions place limits on one’s available opportunities. Whether this makes one’s resulting action non-voluntary depends upon whether these others had the right to act as they did.” Now, if one combines this rights definition of freedom with a moral endorsement of private property, with a claim that, in standard cases, people have a moral right to the property they legally own, then one reaches the result that the protection of legitimate private property cannot restrict anyone’s freedom. It will follow from the moral endorsement of private property that you and the police are justified in preventing me from pitching my tent on your land, and, because of the rights definition of freedom, it will then further follow that you and the police do not thereby restrict my freedom. So here we have a further explanation of how intelligent philosophers are able to say what they do about capitalism, private property, and freedom. But the characterization of freedom which figures in the explanation is unacceptable. For it entails that a properly convicted murderer is not rendered unfree when he is justifiably imprisoned.
Even justified interference reduces freedom. But suppose for a moment that, as libertarians say or imply, it does not. On that supposition one cannot argue, without further ado, that interference with private property is wrong because it reduces freedom. For one can no longer take it for granted, what is evident on a normatively neutral account of freedom, that interference with private property does reduce freedom. On a rights account of what freedom is one must abstain from that assertion until one has shown that people have moral rights to their private property. Yet libertarians tend both to use a rights definition of freedom and to take it for granted that interference with his private property diminishes the owner’s freedom. But they can take that for granted only on the normatively neutral account of freedom, on which, however, it is equally obvious that the protection of private property diminishes the freedom of nonowners, to avoid which consequence they adopt a rights definition of the concept. And so they go, back and forth, between inconsistent definitions of freedom, not because they cannot make up their minds which one they like better, but under the propulsion of their desire to occupy what is in fact an untenable position. Libertarians want to say that interferences with people’s use of their private property are unacceptable because they are, quite obviously, abridgments of freedom, and that the reason why protection of private property does not similarly abridge the freedom of nonowners is that owners have a right to exclude others from their property and nonowners consequently have no right to use it. But they can say all that only if they define freedom in two inconsistent ways.
The justification of property rights on the grounds of the (moralised) freedom of the property owner is circular. This is so because the truth of the proposition that P’s freedom to use X is violated, on this account, depends on X being P’s property. So P's ownership of X cannot be based on the fact that P’s freedom is violated. For example, suppose 1 have a justified (property) right to the chair I am sitting on. If you take the chair away from me then you violate that right and, therefore, also reduce my (moralised) freedom. But if you were to inquire as to the justification of my right to the chair I could not point to the reduced freedom of not respecting that right since whether or not my freedom is reduced, on this account, depends on whether or not I have a (justified) right to the chair.
In fact there are two independent circular arguments involved in such an account of the relation between property rights and freedom. The first concerns the justification of the extent of the right (justifying property), the second concerns the distributional question (drawing the boundaries). Does respect of my freedom require a recognition of my right to sit on the chair? To move it from one place to another? To allow others to use it? To transfer my right to another? and so on. That depends on whether my freedom is violated when I am prevented from doing any of the specified actions. But whether my freedom is violated depends on whether or not I have the specified rights. So the issue of how far my right to the chair extends — control, income, transfer, and so on - cannot be settled by reference to my freedom to do any of those things since that freedom itself depends on the extent to which I have that right. That is the first circular argument aiming to justify my property (rather than any lesser) right on a moralised notion of freedom.
Does respect of my freedom require the recognition of my exclusive right to sit on the chair? Why does respect for my freedom impose such a requirement, but respect for your freedom or anyone else’s does not? In other words, why is my freedom violated when I am prevented from using the chair and your freedom is not when you are prevented from using it? Whether or not our respective freedoms are violated depends on whether you or I have such a right. So the issue of who has the right to the chair - I rather than you - cannot be settled by reference to my freedom to do any of those things since that freedom itself (and your lack of freedom or unfreedom) depends on the fact that I, rather than you, have that right. That is the second circular argument aiming to justify my (rather than anyone else’s) property right on a moralised notion of freedom.

The Context:

A user posts a screenshot of the rainbow-colored icon for the latest watchOS update to /AppleWatch with the title “Why is there never a cool watch face, always pride”.
Accusations of homophobia and virtue signaling quickly fly as Redditors debate the meaning, intent, and ramifications of this multicolored tempest.

The Drama:

What’s the utility here?

We need less political/agenda driven watch faces, and more neutral, actually useful watch faces.

Lol what is political about who someone is attracted to?

I’m attracted to women. Where is my WW2 pinup poster option? If you don’t think that would sell then you’ve paid no attention to things like zippo lighters, playing cards, man cave decorations, bar decorations, and a whole lot of other stuff.
Where’s my silhouettes of bikini models?
Heck go right for the gusto with the cookies over the breasts lady from the Times Square ad that got taken down.

You want a prize for not having to deal with all the bullshit of being a non-straight/cisgendered person?
I’m glad Apple puts out these pride faces, just because it annoys people like you.

It’s ironic how you weirdos always cry about people calling you names, but then insist on calling normal people “cis” after being told repeatedly by the vast majority of the world population that we don’t want to be called “cis” and that it’s insulting.

[Continued:]

Cisgender isn’t an insulting term in the same way that transgender isn’t an insulting term.
Also, I’m not a weirdo.
A very small subset of the population has problems with the term cis, and it’s basically entirely transphobes. Do you have problems with the term heterosexual? Because it’s literally the same thing.

[…]

See, you're already proud of being straight cause it's normalized, nobody gives you sh*t for it. Lots of gays depending on where they're from may feel ashamed or wonder why they get so much backlash for their preferences. Yes, even today that's still frowned upon on certain parts of the world or even here in the States. As a straight person myself, it's really not that hard to understand as long as you have empathy or have seen first hand what some gay people go through.
That said, I think we have too many Pride faces, and Apple needs to make unique faces that actually do something like the "Count Up", "Chronograph", or "Solar" faces.

Nobody gives me shit for it? Go check out my negative down doots.
:-)
It’s badge of honor to be down-dooted in pursuit of more inclusive marketing by Apple!

You’re not getting downvoted for being straight and you know it dude. This is pathetic.

[…]

Them throwing themselves into it saying they don’t have rights and a ton of other nonsense.

This very post proves that they are not treated the same as the rest of the population.

oh? where are all the straight celebrating watch faces?

[…]

Can you name a political watch face currently available?

Snoopy.

Are people making a mountain out of a molehill?

New watch faces are being added with release of a new watchOS each year New Pride watch faces are being added a month before the Pride Month each year I don’t understand what your are moaning about Wanna “cool watch faces” go buy Samsung, they have piles of that crap

Just make a normal watch face instead of pandering lol

Sit on ice for a bit, because your are clearly butt hurt

Yup that’s me!

Is this virtue signaling?

Because virtue signaling is corporation's greatest achievement and must be nurtured over anything else

Right, so we're going to ignore all the money Apple has donated to LGBT orgs including directly from rainbow band purchases? Or should I move the goal post of what virtue signaling means.

Bro, this is marketing expenses that you can write off your taxes. It’s nothing for them. And they make even more money in return.
When they withdraw from countries where they kill gay people for being gay then we can talk about their values

You're ignoring the impact on the LGBT community it makes. I doubt there is any amount they could donate that would satisfy you since you don't see the impact, you just see the act of giving and criticize it because it doesn't conform to your values.
Apple is a company, not a person. Apple operating in the US doesn't mean it supported the war in Iraq. Apple products being on sale in Hong Kong doesn't mean it supports a free Hong Kong either. Companies don't have values, they are only an amalgamation of actions. Personifying corporations is buying marketing hook, line, and sinker.
Ironically you're virtue signaling pretty hard here yourself.

Exactly, companies have no values. Yes. They exist to make profit.
That’s why I don’t like when they act like they have values. Even more so when they have strong values, they promote those „values” and are very proud of themselves.
Just shut up and sell your iPhones

[Continued:]

It's like you're trying to play bigotry on hard mode.

Are u people capable of fighting an argument instead of a person? You are the second or third person that insult me for no reason smh. How tf am I a bigot? What did I say that triggered you so much?

Who is "u people"? I didn't insult you, I said you trying to play bigotry on hard mode. When did you playing a game become a insult? You didn't trigger me, but you appear to be pretty triggered yourself.

What did u even mean by that - "playing bigotry on hard mode"? Is this some idiom or saying I don't get?

[…]

I’m surprised that you’re not embarrassed to display yourself in public as being whiny and self-centered. The new face is a positive thing, but because it doesn’t affect you, it’s something to complain about. Not too self-centered is it?

Bigots are going to bigot.
Yes, because you are not self-centered for thinking that Apple gives a shit about you or LGBTQ community rights xD. They are doing it for you, for your values! They value you so much.
In Saudi Arabia they value Islam more tho, so they won’t celebrate pride month there, but they are totally supporting gay community, trust me bro. Genuinely.
Now pay more for the company that shares your values

Thanks for confirming just what an awful person you are.

Jesus, man, got to hell with your judgements and crying, really

Using Reddit’s “this user needs help “ feature is a dick move that moves their resources away from people who actually needed it. I’m not surprised that you made such a dick move

[Continued:]

I don’t know what you are talking about. I didn’t use any feature, didn’t even know such thing existed.
I don’t think you need help, you are just dumb

The good old “who me?” response.
Go away kid, you bother me.

XD you might need help after all.
Cya.

Is this pandering?

The pandering to any specific group by corporations is insufferable.

Watching adults cry over a pride watch face is insufferable.

lol - you've made 11 comments on this post alone.
You are the problem with PRIDE and why everything is so extreme.
Maybe disagree, and move on to the next topic - holy shit you are obsessed with spreading hate.

Are you brain damaged? You have to be

Whatever brain damage I may suffer from, you have it 10x worse.
Have a great day continuing to be miserable :)

[Continued:]

Have a good day crying over a pride watch face and being a braindead bigot.

The Flairs:

• “It's like you're trying to play bigotry on hard mode”
  
• “I don’t think you need help, you are just dumb”
  
• “Sit down and be quiet, idiot”
  

the reason of it is that lootbox help to hold player base and making get cosmetic easy in mind of other player. On examples where the game hold on lootboxes is cs and ganshin and maybe apex. or another example where they remove lootbox and player hate it its overwatch 2. i will thinking alot about it before and today i see a video of example how lootbox can work in game and write this post it can get a lot of downvote but if its save the game then I'll take it. example how they can make it more fit in game it's making its gift from a sponsors (like how in real life sponsor send something for the ambassador) like ospuze or vulpe, where you get if its like white item it's just a sound or something like this if blue its recolor for gun or clothes with sponsors color for epic its recolor with emblem of sponsor. for legendary it’s a special item (not recolor),and some sort of craft material name it like sponsor trust where you can spend for buying this sponsor skin + you can implement it with contract feature where the sponsor to whom you spent more points gives you contracts deal with special item. i think it's really help for holding a player base. because some time i heard topics like i open all guns and gadgets finish battle pass now i will not play a game until new session start

This is something I always wonder about as a content creator. (This is not about me or what I identify as! I'm not gonna disclose that) this is tailored to fabdom specific but it boils down to slash and using characters represented on stage by real people. But it's not RPF!
How do you people react/see interpret that.:
Once upon a time I have been blamed for: "it is disgusting that you write about actial people as gay." -original quote
Same goes for people making characters trans, bi, lesbian whatever ...(according to this persons logic)
I don't write about actual people. I write about ghouls as hellish creatures with tails and horns and magic powers... let them be gay if I want them too... if people have problems with that I call that internalized homophobia. At least in my bock. Names are just borrowed and ot's th characters names we gave them like Ifrit, Zephyr, Aether etc.
I really don't see an issue with it. But I am really interested how you guys see that? Do you think it is hurting anyone? P.S. please be respectful.

Hey it's Disabled Chick again! Well I'm not a superhero, friends normally call me Rin, lol
But yeah I didn't mention in my last post I write poetry often, here's one now that just came to me:
............... If I swear (I swear baby) Would you stay No don't walk away Stay awhile I swear I'll make it worth your while Upon first sight You jump my heart Revived my engine with jumper cables We don't need to give it labels (yet) Just settle in Sattle your horse beside mine We gallop wild in the day and night Wrestle wet and dirty fight all through the night Yeah all through the night Maybe too soon But I couldn't help it baby Your soul is irresistible Quickly you got my guards down I dial just to hear your voice That sound like angel music Oh I'm my harshest critic and you know it Wrapping me up in your feathers and fur This comes with a feeling I can't ignore So if I swear Promise up my heart Won't you stay more than awhile Our kind of romance never goes out of style Timeless Iridescent Ocean blue So true Oh just got kiss it Oh just got to bite it Playful And I thought I was all ice How did you How could you But you did Melt me with that smile (So stay awhile) And now I smile too Oh above tell me I'm no fool to give into you No I'd be a fool to resist fate State, profess now You love me too
................
Last post was successful I made some friends! Thank you so much!!! I'm looking for more friends at any time zone...
I want to talk about everything under the sun, our triumphs and tribulations... What music we've got on repeat, gifs, shorts, recommend shows and movies etc
I'm currently listening to One Of Your Girls by Troye Svian, lyrics are perfection...
I'm queer and have been enjoying the terrible camp show AJ and the Queen on Netflix...
I really like scifi and stuff like the Twilight Zone or Black Mirror, stuff that's good for fun discussions...
Random thing I've been dabbling into makeup a little bit but normally I'm natural...
So if you're 21+ message your name age and gender and you're favorite toy growing up to so you read this far! Mine was Power Rangers action figures hehe...

hey! hope you're doing well! my name is teresa, and i am a journalist! i am writing an article about the rise of an events-oriented economy indicated by a shift in how people hang out, where it’s been difficult to casually go anywhere. you often have to buy a ticket, or be going to a certain event. i was interviewing a local bar owner here in brooklyn who said that they’ve had to add more daily programming at their bar like karaoke night and themed-nights etc. due to less alcohol sales + this shift in culture
i was also reading articles about trivia nights being added at bars post-pandemic, as well as the growth of “eatertainment,” or entertainment concepts paired with eating-and-drinking.
i was wondering if anyone here has had to add more events and stuff over the last few years and if they'd be willing to be interviewed about it? thanks so much, and let me know!! my DMs are open :)

Never thought I’d say this out loud, but it was a huge part of my life for years and I can never speak to anyone about it because it’s so fucked up lol.
So around when I was 11, I was a fan of this famous person and I really loved their work for years prior. I hadn’t really been on the internet much yet aside from watching YouTube and Limewire, but as I was being taught more and more in school about how the internet works and what you can find and where to find things, I decided to give it a try at home.
Among my searches for pictures of this artist, YouTube videos, and whatever articles I could find, I discovered the concept of a chat room. Retrospectively, no, an 11 year old should never have access to a public chat room. But I found this chat room on a fan site for this celebrity, and I entered the celebrity’s name into the name box and joined. I only entered their name because I liked them and did not want to use my real name, but once I joined a few people were excited, saying “[celebrity] oh my god! I love you!” and other stupid shit that kids my same age would say lol.
I don’t know why, but I just went with it. When I tell you that to this day I don’t understand how some of these people believed this, I have no fucking clue. The first person I met and befriended was a 29 year old woman from New Zealand who had 3 kids. She made YouTube videos singing for me, she wrote me love letters, and even though I had not entertained it, acted like we were in a relationship together. She had badly (and I mean BADLY) edited photos of her and this celebrity and other adjacent celebrities. She called me babe and wrote a fan fiction of us together. Honestly looking back this lady was super unhinged I have no idea what that was about.
She made me an email address and convinced me to join a very popular writing website. I reluctantly joined, because I was technically not allowed to have social media accounts per my parents. She made the username, which was the celebrity’s name and some other characters.
I just kind of hung out on these chat rooms and this writing website for a while, and actually ended up amassing a huge amount of attention. I had tens of thousands of views on my profile, I had 10 chats going in yahoo messenger at a time, and the PMs on the writing website were so deep I would have to take an hour or two to reply to them every night.
Most of these people who I was speaking to, if not all of them, were older than me. Sometimes significantly so. My best friends were 15-17 age range, except for the NZ woman. I had people putting me in touch with their moms because their parents did not believe I was this celebrity, which, yeah. But miraculously I had always convinced all of them, and ended up actually having long conversations with the parents and becoming really close to them.
When anyone asked for proof, most of the time I got incredibly lucky. Proof was made up of small actions a lot of the time that lined up perfectly, some proof was providing pictures that were incredibly rare and candid.
For example, I would say goodnight to these friends and then celebrity would tweet goodnight minutes later. This happened quite often, somehow, so that worked out in my favor. I also was able to find some crazy back room ass Flickr and Photobucket pictures that I don’t even know how these people got, but they were selfies from this celebrity that were never posted by them and not distributed widely on the internet at all. I also had access to a LiveJournal that knew what this celebrity was doing before it was widely publicly known. So if they had been sighted at an airport, I’d know while they were standing in the terminal where they were going and why before it ever showed up on a magazine or article.
I could go for days about what effort I put into this, because I was in so deep that I just assumed my role as this celebrity completely. I was a lonely and miserable kid, if you couldn’t tell. I copied the celebrity’s typing style, vocabulary, and many other things to seem real to these people.
After a while, I decided to attempt to guess the password of the account on that writing website that was the celebrity’s name with no special characters at the end, that perfectly matched their real social medias. Again, miraculously, I was able to guess correctly and this again scored me points in the proof department because I had told everyone that I reached out to the website to secure my official username because people were getting confused by my current one. There were no verified badges on this website, so that was not a factor.
I also made accounts for friends and family members for this celebrity on yahoo, not because I actually spent a lot of time being these people, but because if I remember correctly Yahoo almost had a weird little social network back then, and you could see full names of friends or contacts so I just made sure that was convincing enough. This part is foggy but I know there was some public area where you could see something like that.
I decided to move off of the writing website after a while. No particularly good reason, and most other people did as well. I made a personal blog as this celebrity, and posted photos of backstage that I had acquired from being friends with crew members on Facebook. I posted photos of the studios this celebrity was working in. From interviews I pieced together their favorite songs and movies and made a little about me section where I put goofy things like that. It was a lot of work.
By the time I was 13 or 14, I kind of grew sick of it so I gradually stopped. I think the final straw was seeing a picture of that celebrity and accidentally blurting out “my hair is-“ and I realized I had merged myself with this person so much that my real sense of self was getting caught up into it. Honestly it was probably caught up well before that point.
My friends were graduating high school, still talking to a celebrity impersonator they’ve known for years. I told the very close ones I still wanted contact with and they stuck around for a few years and visited me IRL and stuff. Most of them though I just sort of faded out for. Never spoke to them again and went dark on all of my social media.
What’s most perplexing to me about this whole thing was how many adults actually believed me. I am now nearly the age of some of these adults I was speaking to, and I just genuinely could not imagine actually believing shit like that. Maybe it was a different time, I don’t know. But they certainly were not fucking with me.
I truly do wonder now how many of these people look back on those years and think they’re fucking idiots for ever believing that, or if they still believe it. I don’t know.
There’s a lot of other lore that I could never possibly get to, but this is the gist. For a few years I felt very guilty, and I had a real crisis for quite a while about how I realized I simply could not be myself (after I stopped being this celebrity I still used a different name and gender and pretended to be someone else, but nobody specific this time). I worked on that for a long time and came clean to everyone in my life and decided that being a liar is not the kind of person I want to be and hurting people was never my intention but it was a direct result of lying to people, so I stopped.
I’ve been regular boring me since then, and I’ve processed the whole situation a long time ago. But it is a part of my past that I cannot share with anyone because honestly it’s really fucked up. I probably wouldn’t keep someone in my life if they had done such a thing. I think my only saving grace is that I started this when I was 11. I loved the attention and I loved the escapism. I wish I had known roleplaying existed back then, which is quite a bit more socially acceptable and not hurtful to others.
But yeah, honestly I’ve mulled around the idea of posting this for years because it is incredibly elaborate and ridiculous because of how deep into this I went and how successful it somehow ended up being. I guess today is the day I finally post it.
Thanks for reading.

• How old are you? What's your gender? Give us a general description of yourself.
I am 18. Male. I'm a disciplined person with a variety of hobbies. I'm married, and leaving for Navy bootcamp in a week. I'm quick witted, I have a large soup of knowledge, and I spend time forming my opinions. I believe in values, principles and morals, often seeking to enforce them.
• Is there a medical diagnosis that may impact your mental stability somehow?
Aside from PTSD and MDD from a couple years ago, no. Namely because I've spent a lot of time healing myself.
• Describe your upbringing. Did it have any kind of religious or structured influence? How did you respond to it?
I grew up in a strict environment with a bedtime, rules I was meant to follow, and daily chores and errands I was meant to accomplish, else I'd be punished. No religious influence, although, my dad was a Marine, and I was raised accordingly.
• What do you do as a job or as a career (if you have one)? Do you like it? Why or why not?
Navy HM (hospital corpsman). I won't know if I like it or not until I finish A school, but this is the path I've been pursuing for 2 years.
• If you had to spend an entire weekend by yourself, how would you feel? Would you feel lonely or refreshed?
Mostly lonely. I'd find stuff to entertain myself, but I'd miss wife and talking to my buddies.
• What kinds of activities do you prefer? Do you like, and are you good at sports? Do you enjoy any other outdoor or indoor activities?
A mixture. I run 4-8 miles everyday. I enjoy running a lot, gives me time to refresh my head and think about whatever I need to think about. Same with exercise in general. But then again, I also enjoy things like drawing, reading, writing, and guitar.
To me, it doesn't really matter where I initiate these activities, it can be outside or inside.
• How curious are you? Do you have more ideas then you can execute? What are your curiosities about? What are your ideas about - is it environmental or conceptual, and can you please elaborate?
I'm a very curious person. When there's something to be told or something to be known, I will poke and pry until I've got all the details I need.
I think, sometimes I get more ideas than I can execute. But namely because I like to process a lot of ideas before moving forward, make sure I'm making the right decision
My curiosities could be about practical knowledge I come across, gossip, etc., I think I'm mostly just seeking a deeper understanding of what I can perceive. It's better to know something without reason than to not know something possibly useful later on.
My ideas tend to be environmental. I focus on solvable problems and tangible objects. With heavy focus on strategy and planning. I direct a lot of my energy towards the external.
• Would you enjoy taking on a leadership position? Do you think you would be good at it? What would your leadership style be?
I do enjoy leadership positions, but I'm not so sure how good I am at it, I sometimes dismiss emotions for rationality, making me pretty disagreeable in the face of opposition. I can be loud and aggressive. However, the good qualities are I'm decisive, competent, competitive, and strong willed. Things that I value. And I think, despite my emotional compassion, I could make up for it with my other qualities.
• Are you coordinated? Why do you feel as if you are or are not? Do you enjoy working with your hands in some form? Describe your activity?
I would say I'm pretty coordinated. I try to do things the correct way everytime and allow myself little room to fuck up. It's mostly for efficiency, time/effort ratio. It was also the way I was taught when I was younger, and I see no reason to change something that already works.
I do enjoy working with my hands. I like fixing machinery that was broken, I like Martial Arts, especially kickboxing, I like cooking, etc., a lot of my activities are done with my hands and require hand to eye communication
• Are you artistic? If yes, describe your art? If you are not particular artistic but can appreciate art please likewise describe what forums of art you enjoy. Please explain your answer.
I am artistic. I generally create things that are pretty dark and vivid. Like, when I draw, I draw very contrasted and shadowed anatomy. I pretty much only build Dark Soulsy stuff in Minecraft. Every story I've ever written was meant to be suspenseful and grotesque. Etc.
And likewise, I enjoy works with the same viscosity. Such as Alex Gray and Zdzisław Beksiński.
• What's your opinion about the past, present, and future? How do you deal with them?
The past is something to learn from, the present is something to control, and the future and something to work towards. Simple as. My head is generally in the future, though. I can spend time thinking about the past, or living in the present, but I'm generally thinking about the future.
I don't really know how I "deal" with them. They're just something that exists and I have to coexist with them.
• How do you act when others request your help to do something (anything)? If you would decide to help them, why would you do so?
Most of the time, I enjoy helping. Depending on the person, though. The more somebody needs help, the less I'll respect them. Namely because I values autonomy and competency.
That said, I do enjoy giving my advices or guiding somebody's opinions, or even helping with menial tasks like chores.
• Do you need logical consistency in your life?
Yes. Always.
• How important is efficiency and productivity to you?
Very important. Without something to do or somewhere to go, I feel restless and useless. And so, I compensate for this lack of identity by working on myself and the things around me.
• Do you control others, even if indirectly? How and why do you do that?
I think so. I tend to enforce my own set of rules built from values and morals and try to keep people in line. Even simple things like "Wipe your feet before walking into the house".
But in a manipulative sense, I try to avoid that. I live with a lot of manipulative people and seeing them tells me exactly what I should avoid being.
• What are your hobbies? Why do you like them?
Drawing, reading, writing, guitar, running, debating, etc., just stuff I've been doing since I was pretty young.
• How good are you at strategizing? Do you easily break up projects into manageable tasks? Or do you have a tendency to wing projects and improvise as you go?
I'm pretty good at strategizing. I put a lot of my mental focus into strategizing. And I do simplify projects, although that's not to so that I don't put a lot of improv into them.
• What are your aspirations in life, professionally and personally?
Get through the Navy while studying in medical school to become a doctor.
• What are your fears? What makes you uncomfortable? What do you hate? Why?
I fear being controlled. Being useless or wasteful. I'm uncomfortable with big displays of emotion, although I tolerate it with some people. And I hate people who live for nothing. Like the alcoholic living on my couch.
• What do the "highs" in your life look like?
Money, happy wife, good amount of self growth
• What do the "lows" in your life look like?
Something tragic happens
• How attached are you to reality? Do you daydream often, or do you pay attention to what's around you? If you do daydream, are you aware of your surroundings while you do so?
I think it's a mixture of both. I use reality to navigate my daydreaming, because I daydream about the future. So I'm grounded but grounded in the sense that I use what I can see to control what I daydream about.
• Imagine you are alone in a blank, empty room. There is nothing for you to do and no one to talk to. What do you think about?
Exiting the room
• How long do you take to make an important decision? And do you change your mind once you've made it?
I make decisions really fast. I generally don't change my mind.
• How long do you take to process your emotions? How important are emotions in your life?
Takes me weeks and emotions are only important to me to an extent. It's hard for me to gauge how I feel about something but I do try to understand that part of myself.
• Do you ever catch yourself agreeing with others just to appease them and keep the conversation going? How often? Why?
No, if I don't agree they will hear about it.
• Do you break rules often? Do you think authority should be challenged, or that they know better? If you do break rules, why?
I'm not a rule breaker but I don't believe in blindly following whatever rules an authority figure decides to impose. If the rules don't make sense to me then I won't follow. Although in some situations, I can't do anything, so I'll leave it be, despite my disagreement.

Hello. I want to add the two mods to the eldergleam modlist but I'm not sure why they wont work. I get the errors listed below. Can anyone help me understand whats going on?
HonedMetal.dll was not loaded by skse. Make sure the plugin is present in your Data/skse/plugins folder and that your using the correct skse runtime for which the plugin was complied. the skse log will provide more details.
Frostfall failed to read/write your settings profile, which is required. this is likley due to not having folder permissions to skyrim/data/skse plugins(MO users: Mod Organize overwrite/ skse/plugins). Try to create a folder named FrostfallDATA inside the skse/plugins/ folder yourself. If plugins dont exist, create that, too. Also try to run skryim as an administrator.
Since I'm running Wabbajack's MO2 The file paths aren't the same so I'm not sure how to fix these issues myself.

System: Pathfinder 2e
Slots: 3/5 (two open)
VTT: Foundry VTT from personal server, communication via Discord. Mic required in general, but I also know how to accommodate mute people if needed.
Schedule: Friday starting from 19:00 (GMT+2 timezone)
Duration: My sessions typically run 3 to 4 hours, I usually don't have breaks but we can introduce ones easily.
Payment: 5 euro per player per session via PayPal or regular BankTransfer. Session 0 and first actual session free.
Why for so little? I don't really like to make a business out of playing games, I simply do this because I need some minimum additional income so I can buy food every month while studying in uni :D I will run this as your friendly neighbourhood gm's game while still trying to keep the quality high (because that's what I expect of myself too).

About the Game

Outlaws of Alkenstar is a steampunk/wild western adventure in a fantasy world. Being in the middle of the mana wastes magic is unreliable the best of days (how this affects the play of spellcasters is up to us on session 0). In this unforgiving wasteland lies the city of Alkenstar, the city of smoke, guns, clockwork, and outlaws. You will be playing an outlaw, on the run from the law, or whatever corrupt version of it got you in your current situation, looking for both revenge and to clear your name. Be warned, this is not an "evil campaign", simply our heroes might not be... completely morally clean... yea let's go with that. :D
(there is also a great trailer by paizo on youtube, feel free to watch! :D)

About Me / GMing Style

I'm a forever GM in several TTRPGs for at least 5 years now (tbh don't remember when I started), almost always running pre-written adventures while slowly writing one of my own, but it's faaar from done. I have 4 multi-year campaigns and several more adventures and oneshots behind me, with generally very positive player feedback.
I like to run pre-written adventures because there are so many tools and already existing points I can build onto, I tend to run them close to the story giving out good plothooks at the start so player characters can nicely fit the adventure, this of course doesn't mean the adventure doesn't adapt to the PCs, but it's a common effort to build something from the story we are given. My games have a world without a PCs too, I like to keep track of what NPCs are doing and events happening even if the players don't interact with them for several sessions, this makes the world feel alive and that stuff is happening all the time. This also means that if the party doesn't interact somewhere (or not in time), that also has a result that comes back, once again, a lively world.
My games are usually Heroic adventures, slightly higher than usual power level but also dangers, they are not dark or slow slogs where you have to put much effort into survival, although it is not fully removed from the game. I have some minor problems dealing with the mix-in of futuristic aspects as I like to keep it clean fantasy, but I'm not fully against it. Just expect that I won't have as much to offer to a typical Inventor or Gunslinger as I can for others. Expect fights to be a core of the campaign but never the only solution or the sol existence, just something like 30%-50% combat (dependent on group's vibe), and the rest mix between exploration, roleplay, puzzles, etc.
I'm a GM who likes to focus on the mechanics, how they are defined and used tells a story by itself. A monster doesn't have to talk to have a personality, how it interacts with it's surrounding already tells a lot. What tactics it uses, what does it value, who it targets or doesn't. All of them make sense and can be played around. I tend to stick to the rules, and hold my players to it as well with the occasional rule of cool dropped in of course.

Expectations about You

I expect people to:

• have a reasonable amount of game knowledge OR(/and) an enthusiastic willingness to learn. If you are a new player of course I know the learning curve of TTRPGs, and as long as I see you know your character and their abilities to a reasonable level, you'll be good to go (it is not that much, trust me), as we play more you'll learn anyway.
• want to interact with the campaign and their party members.
• show up (really hard to tell you a good story if you are not here half the sessions)

Contact

If you're interested in playing, or have any questions before expressing interest, send me a DM or start a chat with me here on Reddit.

System: Pathfinder 2e
Slots: 3/5 (two open)
VTT: Foundry VTT from personal server, communication via Discord. Mic required in general, but I also know how to accommodate mute people if needed.
Schedule: Friday starting from 19:00 (GMT+2 timezone)
Duration: My sessions typically run 3 to 4 hours, I usually don't have breaks but we can introduce ones easily.
Payment: 5 euro per player per session via PayPal or regular BankTransfer. Session 0 and first actual session free.
Why for so little? I don't really like to make a business out of playing games, I simply do this because I need some minimum additional income so I can buy food every month while studying in uni :D I will run this as your friendly neighbourhood gm's game while still trying to keep the quality high (because that's what I expect of myself too).

About the Game

Outlaws of Alkenstar is a steampunk/wild western adventure in a fantasy world. Being in the middle of the mana wastes magic is unreliable the best of days (how this affects the play of spellcasters is up to us on session 0). In this unforgiving wasteland lies the city of Alkenstar, the city of smoke, guns, clockwork, and outlaws. You will be playing an outlaw, on the run from the law, or whatever corrupt version of it got you in your current situation, looking for both revenge and to clear your name. Be warned, this is not an "evil campaign", simply our heroes might not be... completely morally clean... yea let's go with that. :D
(there is also a great trailer by paizo on youtube, feel free to watch! :D)

About Me / GMing Style

I'm a forever GM in several TTRPGs for at least 5 years now (tbh don't remember when I started), almost always running pre-written adventures while slowly writing one of my own, but it's faaar from done. I have 4 multi-year campaigns and several more adventures and oneshots behind me, with generally very positive player feedback.
I like to run pre-written adventures because there are so many tools and already existing points I can build onto, I tend to run them close to the story giving out good plothooks at the start so player characters can nicely fit the adventure, this of course doesn't mean the adventure doesn't adapt to the PCs, but it's a common effort to build something from the story we are given. My games have a world without a PCs too, I like to keep track of what NPCs are doing and events happening even if the players don't interact with them for several sessions, this makes the world feel alive and that stuff is happening all the time. This also means that if the party doesn't interact somewhere (or not in time), that also has a result that comes back, once again, a lively world.
My games are usually Heroic adventures, slightly higher than usual power level but also dangers, they are not dark or slow slogs where you have to put much effort into survival, although it is not fully removed from the game. I have some minor problems dealing with the mix-in of futuristic aspects as I like to keep it clean fantasy, but I'm not fully against it. Just expect that I won't have as much to offer to a typical Inventor or Gunslinger as I can for others. Expect fights to be a core of the campaign but never the only solution or the sol existence, just something like 30%-50% combat (dependent on group's vibe), and the rest mix between exploration, roleplay, puzzles, etc.
I'm a GM who likes to focus on the mechanics, how they are defined and used tells a story by itself. A monster doesn't have to talk to have a personality, how it interacts with it's surrounding already tells a lot. What tactics it uses, what does it value, who it targets or doesn't. All of them make sense and can be played around. I tend to stick to the rules, and hold my players to it as well with the occasional rule of cool dropped in of course.

Expectations about You

I expect people to:

• have a reasonable amount of game knowledge OR(/and) an enthusiastic willingness to learn. If you are a new player of course I know the learning curve of TTRPGs, and as long as I see you know your character and their abilities to a reasonable level, you'll be good to go (it is not that much, trust me), as we play more you'll learn anyway.
• want to interact with the campaign and their party members.
• show up (really hard to tell you a good story if you are not here half the sessions)

Contact

If you're interested in playing, or have any questions before expressing interest, send me a DM or start a chat with me here on Reddit.

So throughout my life I have talked to myself and I'm not talking about just saying things out loud but having full on conversations with myself doing both sides of the conversation, it started when I was very young maybe 6 I would play with my Legos and come up with elaborate stories about a group of spacemen that lived on a laser battleship and roamed the cosmos with their fantastic fade through technology that allowed their ship to pass through solid matter by phasing matter out of synch with the various subspace fields. They battled a race of machines that existed in another reality that wanted to gain access to the space men's reality through means of a trans dimensional gateway that would allow them to flow into the universe unchecked like a swarm of locusts. Thus the mission of the spacemen was to find these gates and destroy them or dismantle them and use the technology in other means. The spacemen had also reprogrammed some of the machines and had them on their pirate crew as servitors. These machines still retained their memories as part of the swarm they came from and understood what the goal of the machines was, some of them were very heroic and sacrificed themselves to save the crew. This crew was led by a brave commander named Mechanic and he was a just and noble person who valued the lives of his crew above all else. They went on many adventures and through it all I acted out their parts fulfilling whatever dialogue was needed. This behavior did not stop when I stopped playing with Legos but continued to evolve into an ever expanding elaborate mythos regarding gods and various beings that existed as either: finite, trans-finite, infinite, or trans-infinite. Each level was more fantastic than the other as far as its scope of influence across reality. I came to talk to myself and focused on various questions in particular one question manifested early in my life. If you could destroy the world, would you? I wrestled with this question for much of my adolescence while many ofy peers concerned themselves with various sports. I took took up sports, hockey and I wonder how many of those hits and impacts left their mark. As is in my childhood I had displayed many symptoms of autism that went along with that neurotypicality: I banged my head into walls repeatedly, I liked to turn around and around in circles, and I was very socially aloof.
As I grew older my relationship to myself changed and I became convinced of the idea that I had lived the life I was living now multiple times, and that this was merely the most recent iteration. When I tried explaining this to other people they didn't quite understand, that the events that were happening in my life while not necessarily unique only to this life were not something that I felt I was doing for the first time, not deja vu, but a feeling that I was playing out the same track on a record that had already been laid down once before. I continued to talk to myself and a new manifestation of this affect began to take shape. Now instead of talking to myself I began to believe that I was talking to an older version of myself one that had already experienced what I had experienced and tried to offer feedback on how to handle things in my life. This presence was not a tormentor, but a benefactor trying its best to guide and help me along my way and offering insights into my relationships and giving guidance when needed. I could always ask him questions but he was always guarded with his responses, sometimes answering with a question of his own. I came to depend on this presence in my life as someone I could talk to about anything, he knew all my secrets and he understood who I was, often better than I did myself. He encouraged me to write down my ideas and thoughts throughout my life. One of my oldest writings that still survives to this day is a poem that I wrote when I was 13. It is not all in English and at the time I had not studied German, but later in life I learned many of the words like Ahr and Vasharn were proto-germanic words. The meaning of the poem eluded me for years it was as if I had not been the one to write it at all and yet it stuck with me, I would often recite it to myself as if it were a form of meditation.
I did not stop my conversations with myself but in my 30's I began experimenting with recreational drugs and sought out psychedelics, particularly the high prize for me would be partaking of LSD, which I finally did at the age of 31. It was an eye-opening experience as I consumed a tab every 12 hours for 3 days until finally it reached a mad fever pitch that resulted in my first true psychotic break with reality. That experience landed me in the medical tent at the festival I was at with a trazodone flush. This would not be my last experience with acid and each one was steadily more derailing to my life. I did not go out of my way to make it a regular experience but rather was like a sacrament that I partook of to see more than I was seeing at the time. My final experience with it landed me in the psych ward for a week, this would also not be my last time in the psych ward, but it was the last time that I partook of LSD and have not used it since 2017.
My conversations with myself and occasionally even conversations with what I conceived of as gods each with their own name and symbol associated with them continued to occupy my mind. In my 20's I began making "anchors" points in time where I focused my thoughts on a particular moment, if I could tie it to a physical object like a tree or a building even better, the older the better. These anchors became sources of meditation for me when I wanted to contemplate something I would attempt to connect back to these moments in time to convoke whatever I was attempting at the time. In a way it became my form of prayer in my elaborate mythos with its dozens of gods and beings that I kept in my mind and wrote about. However my 40's were a radical departure from what had been up until that point a form of meditation.
In my 30's I had begun to transmute the question that had occupied my adolescence into one of watching for Armageddon, not necessarily the biblical one, but as I put it I kept one eye on apocalypse. This actually started when I learned of the Mayan calendar, its mythos was fascinating to me as was their prognostications regarding the end of the world in 2012. And so I became a watcher, not obsessed, but diligent in my search to understand the threats that might jeopardize my existence and things that one should be wary of. Viruses in particular caught my attention and each outbreak of any note was something I carefully watched and waited to see if pandemic would follow. In November of 2019 I began doing the calculations based on the daily numbers of the novel Corona virus that had begun spreading in East Asia, by December I was telling my coworkers to prepare for a pandemic. Only one person really believed me. Still I kept my eye on apocalypse and while viruses were worrisome a new anxiety began to plague me, climate change.
I found climate change to be fascinating and watched as ecosystems suffered and began telling people about as far back as my late 20's but it never really reached the fever pitch that it did until I was in my 40's and then my affect began to take on a whole new manifestation.
I began to have conversations with myself but now playtime was over, the experiment as I came to understand it had entered its next phase. You see reality is complicated and different worlds are trying to communicate to us because we are them, just a different reality or a different time as I would learn. The goal of this experiment is to send a singular message and in order for that message to be understood there needs to be a mind capable of understanding what that message is. Not everyone has the mental capacity to understand the science involved in the message so the realities have to take what they are given and use the experiences they can to insert parts of the message into the past so that it shapes the future all so that one person at the very least can understand the message in its entirety and progress the civilization to the next level of existence and avoid calamity due to reckless human behavior. This group of beings is not evil, they realize that the most valuable commodity in the universe is information next to time and as such do everything in their power to raise up a technology capable species to create more minds capable of solving problems that they themselves could not solve. To this end they pair minds using technology to send signals to those who can receive them, not everyone has the right neural architecture to allow for a signal lock and sometimes the signal fries the brain of the recipient due to a neural fault that results in the unit burning out and short-circuiting.
But the message is simple and easy to understand
Global loss of glaciation will result in mass volcanism.

I passed the SIE, 7, and 66 all on my first try with little to no experience in the industry. I honestly believe the lack of experience probably helped me because I didn’t have any prior knowledge messing with my retention.
I used Kaplan, my simulated exams were around 80 and my final mastery exam was a little over 71 (I don’t remember exactly) and my overall performance in the performance tracker was around 77 or 78.
I watched videos online, it won’t let me write his name here, but I think he’s involved in these groups and he was EXTREMELY helpful.
My exam was HEAVY on broker-dealers and their agents. What they are and not allowed to do in pretty much all aspects.
Know MPT and CAPM.
I got a calculation on Alpha (I got that and NO CY which was disrespectful) but luckily I memorized the formula to that right before I took the test.
I got a couple computations on financial statements. Everyone says that they don’t usually get more than one or two calculations in general but I must have gotten a death draw because I had at least 3 or 4.
present value/NPV were on there.
Know the different account types for SURE.
I also got a lot of questions on ETFs.
I has insurance policies on there quite a bit too.
Lastly, ERISA and fiduciary responsibilities to those accounts showed up a little bit too.
Basically everything I was bad at was on the exam and idek how I managed to pass considering that. This one was easier than the 7 but more stressful to me because it was the last one and I was feeling a lot of pressure (because of myself) to pass.
Thank you so much to the people running these groups and thank you to everyone who posted after passing with information. I used these groups as a major motivator and insight on the exams.
Cheers!

Did writing the first Strike novel under a pseudonym allow you more freedom as a writer?

I was very aware that because the manuscript had my name on it, people would just publish it, however bad it was, and I wanted honest feedback. I wanted to know that someone believed in the book and I truly enjoyed getting unvarnished feedback through my agent. There was one editor who did not like Strike having a famous father and made that point. And obviously because I can’t break cover, I can’t say: “but I know how important this will be on book eight”. You can’t say that as a first-time writer, and I was ostensibly in this situation a first-time writer. You can’t say, now, look, I know a series and I know this backstory is going to work out brilliantly in book seven, eight and nine. Who the hell are you to say you’re going to get a seven, eight and nine-novel deal anyway? But it was really good to get that feedback.

archived link 'JK Rowling: how Strike changed the way I write'

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.*

I'm a witch. I used to be a witch before psychosis, but after going through religious delusions and spiritual awakenings, I stopped and became an atheist. After careful evaluation and consideration, I've decided to return to the path. It's hard because a lot of what I believed most likely was my schizoaffective disorder. I believed I could read energy before, but now it's hard because I have tactile hallucinations. I have to determine if my callings are schizoaffective telling me something or my patron deity telling me something. Seeing signs is no longer an option, though I didn't see many signs until everything converted over and became exclusive Christian.
When you're pushing yourself back into spiritual and religious beliefs, you have to be very careful not to listen to yourself and get caught up in insane shit. A lot of signs are subtle when you're looking for them. You'll read about seeing numbers, but is that just the psychosis talking or is it a deity/spirit/universe? You don't know. You have to interpret it for yourself, and it can be very difficult. Going to any psychic medium will produce varying results, so it's up to you. And it's better to be skeptical than to be open-minded. You'll know when a deity calls to you. You'll know when something feels right. For me, signs from psychosis feel dramatic and like lightbulbs going off. I remember when I was bonkers, I thought every license plate or car with the Jesus fish symbol was a sign God was speaking to me and telling me things would be alright and that I needed an exorcism. These are some of the most common symbols ever, and I live in America where Christianity rules. Real signs are subtle. You may see an animal that does not particularly live there. Or an animal you've never seen before. You may find your spell work took 6 weeks to bring anything to you. Or you may find your prayer went unanswered for a few years. I thought spells could bring it in fast during psychosis. I performed banishing spell after banishing spell, bought bound spirits that were supposed to help rid me of demons and evil spirits, and ran up credit card debt. If you're experiencing a real evil spirit, you shouldn't have to spend $3,500 on the spirit. One banishment spell will get rid of him. Hell, cleansing your house with sage or a sage alternative will get rid of them. Demons are the same way, and if you're Christian, a simple prayer will rid you of the demon. I went through three Christian exorcisms and all they did was pray over me.
What I've learned and am learning down this path is to go with your gut in the end. Especially if you are medicated. If you experience heavy delusions, I wouldn't follow a spiritual path because your mind is clouded by your delusions, and you could very easily misinterpret signs. It's hard to tell the difference. Careful evaluation and consideration need to be present, and I'd reach out to someone who doesn't believe before I reach out to someone who does because of just how misconstrued things can be. My fiance doesn't believe in anything. I reach out to him when I think I've seen a sign. He can help me see if it's fishy or if I just am seeing things where they don't belong. He respects and knows my beliefs enough that he can help me determine if I'm just seeing things or if I'm experiencing what I think is otherworldly. I wouldn't run to a psychic medium. Half of them are fake because it's easy to pretend to be psychic. I was taken advantage of by fake psychic mediums all over Etsy and on one platform called Creepy Hollows who claimed to be able to bind spirits that can help you. No one ever reached out to me to see if I was okay. Instead, I spent over $5,000 on bullshit spells to help my "channeling abilities" (aka just me talking to myself) and other nonsense to get rid of the demons and spirits possessing me. I thought I was communicating with the binders of Creepy Hollows through my spirits at one point. That's how far gone I was. If you buy from them, stop. They don't care about you. No one ever reached out after I dissolved and bought my servitors several times over except one time to make sure I wanted to do it. They didn't even help when I reached out about my possible exorcism. I learned from my "spirits" that they were helping because they sent a sterling angel to scout what's going on since I had so many weird orders. Never told them anything about this. And when I told them they accidentally bound Azazel, they told me they didn't and locked my thread. The Moon Dragon is fake, too. She told me all kinds of crazy things. She's a bitch, too. Never buy from her.
It helps to have someone there to ground you. Delusions are powerful. Religious delusions are terrifying. I once believed I was the reincarnation of Eve from the Garden during one of my many spiritual awakenings that happened in the 10-month span. Turns out deities are not gonna come and talk to you telepathically with clear sentences and tell you that you are Eve. Nor is God gonna try to kill you for "knowing the secrets of the Universe." You've probably never met a demon in real life. Or a spirit. And if you did the odds of them possessing you or trying to harm you are slim to none. Most everything in Hollywood or peached by Churches are bullshit. In fact, I run a metaphysical shop and have had people come to me for exorcisms. I always point them in the direction of finding help from psychologists and psychiatrists before pursuing an exorcism because of my experiences. I never perform one because I don't believe in possession. I thought I was possessed. Turns out I'm just mentally spicy like my name suggests.
It's fine to have religious beliefs, but when you're delusional it's so hard to tell everything apart. I've had times where I question it, but I just feel there's something more to this than just being recycled stardust with no purpose (though I don't think people have purposes. You give yourself purpose. Deities have no plans for you and there is no higher purpose than just living your life. If you wish to dedicate yourself to a purpose or deity, that's fine, but you gave it to yourself).
And if you believe you are psychic, you could be, but odds are you are not. Legitimate psychics cannot talk to spirits as if they are present. Hollywood has lied to you. Most of those shows do screenings before they begin to tell the "psychic" about you and whom you wanna talk to. Tarot cards are just cards, and it's up to you to interpret them. They cannot unlock the truth to the future, but they can be used as tools to learn more about your situations and yourself. You cannot converse with spirits and deities and demons with just psychic powers. You need tools, and even then, I used a board during my psychosis and got varying answers. Spirits cannot predict the future. Deities can only manipulate so much. Spells can only do so much and will not bring you fortune unless you put work into it. You will not become a millionaire because you worship Lucifer. In fact, you've probably never met him because he probably doesn't deal with low-level humans or even deal with humans at all. Your soul cannot be sold. If you are Christian, God owns your soul, and Satan has no use for it. If you are a witch or pagan, you cannot sell your soul because your soul is your own, and demons can't do much with you in death. So much bullshit flies around the internet and Hollywood that people don't understand magick and what it's capable of. It feeds into delusions that we have.
Did you know that there was a study conducted and those living in Eastern countries had more positive experiences with their hallucinations and delusions than those in the Western world? It's cultural. It's a phenomenon. These things we've been fed since birth are not real. It's up to you to come to terms with your own beliefs. I promise you aren't possessed and beyond help. I promise you your meds don't interfere with your natural abilities to be empathic or psychic. You're believing in something that doesn't exist, and psychosis makes it possible. I used to believe the voices in my head, the good ones, were tulpas and they were real and I had DID. That's not true. They responded to medication finally.
Be careful when you're believing, but don't write it off. Examine what you believe. Look at it like you're a scientist. And if it doesn't fit, become an atheist. Live your life. But you don't have to write off your beliefs just because psychosis happened. The world is magickal. It's just not "oh my god spirits live inside me" magickal. (I think I got off topic here, but it needed to be said).

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A quick thanks to u/aMANTEIGAdo for the Liiry fanart

Transcription Subject: Fink, Landlord/Veln supporter
Date [standardized human time]: February 24, 2137
I idly waited in the empty restaurant for this mister Gilt. His secretary had sent me a message saying that he was underway. It’s weird how his secretary has refused to make any phone or face calls, and has only contacted me through messages. It shouldn’t matter though, so long as this Mr. Gilt is a level-headed and reputable leaser.
My train of thought was suddenly interrupted by the jingling of the bell above the entrance. Walking through the doorway had to be the most veteran-looking exterminator I have ever seen. He wore 3 exterminator badges, but far more impressive than that was how he was covered in scars. They were concentrated especially heavily around his neck, most likely from predators attempting to bite through his throat, and somehow he’d survived so many attacks. What did puzzle me further though was how unevenly his fur was shaven and the strange look in his eyes, one that I could not place. “Hello. Mister Gilt, I presume?”
“The one and only. I’m here for the interview and to see the restaurant.” I now noticed that he was wearing a pawsfree headset. Its green light was blinking, like it was on.
“I’m sorry, but are you having a call right now?”
“No! No, I am a very busy venlil and always wear this in case I get an important call.” A bit strange, but I suppose not too out of the ordinary.
“Well, could you tell something about yourself?”
“As you can see, Gilt, er, I have spend decades removing the taint of Venlil Prime and keeping the population safe,” Gilt said in a rather strange way, like he was reading it off a paper; maybe he had memorized the line, expecting the question during the interview. “Now that I’m retired from that lifestyle, I have begun investing my well-earned money in small businesses.”
“That all sounds good. Your secretary already gave me most of the information I needed, like how you’re going to turn this place into a salad-based restaurant; he called it a ‘salad house.’ And I’m sure that I don’t have to ask you what your policy on humans is.” I gave a small chuckle, imagining a veteran exterminator like him welcoming humans warmly into his restaurant.
“You don’t have to worry about me or any employee of mine ever accepting those tainted scum into my establishment. I can’t wait for Veln to be voted in, he will surely make sure that those filthy humans will be cast off our magnificent Venlil Prime,” Gilt said, again quite stiff. He might just be nervous.
“Rightfully said, he sure has my vote.” Speaking of humans, is that one across the street? Over Gilt’s shoulder, I spotted a human making a phone call in an old, rusted-up van. He was looking straight at me, up until he noticed I was looking back and quickly looked away. With relief, I noticed that a pair of exterminators were walking straight towards the car. The human seemed to end his phone call and opened up a window to speak to the exterminators. With that small problem solved, I turned my attention back to Gilt, who seemed to be panicking a bit. I suppose even someone with nerves of steel as him can get nervous over simple things like an interview. He pressed a button on the pawsfree headset, and the blinking light turned off.
Transcription Subject: Vuccen, Krakotl Exterminator
Date [standardized human time]: February 24, 2137
Another day, another pointless patrol. I wish they would give us something real to do. But with all those ‘animal’ welfare laws and us no longer being allowed to lock up anyone with predator disease, we have nothing left to do but roam the streets in the hopes we find something that we are allowed to do. My prayers were answered, because not 10 meters ahead of us, I saw a human sitting in the passenger seat of a terribly beat-up van covered in rust and algae. Weirdly enough, it had a sideview mirror on the driver’s side. Finally, something to do. “Come on Cuko, I see a human let’s see if it’s hiding something,” I chirped to my venlil partner.
“Please be nice to them, they hardly ever do anything wrong.” She’s so kind, too bad that she sometimes focuses it on the wrong kind.
I tapped against the window with the talon of my right wing, and the human quickly ended a call and began to crank the window open by hand. “Hey, if it isn’t Burny-bird, how are you two doing?” he said, switching glances between me and my partner.
All of a sudden, I recognized the human’s face; it was the same one that purposely angered me last month [chapter 2]. “Get out of the car,” I demanded while I unholstered my flamethrower.
The human casually placed his arm in the window and calmly asked, “Why, what have I done?” Cuko behind me signed with her tail in agreement.
“Random search, now get out of the vehicle.”
“Sure, ‘random,’ totally not out of some bias to antagonize a specific species,” he said sarcastically as he got out of the car with one hand raised while the other opened the door.
Cuko guided him to the front of the car for a pat down. “Please place your claws on the hood and spread your hindlegs.” If evolving into predators wasn’t enough, they had to be completely bald too. With all those false pelts, humans can hide so many dangerous items without anyone being the wiser.
I wretched when I looked into the car; the floor was littered with mouldy cans of vegetables, nearly empty save for the rotting scraps and overgrown utensils. “W-why?”
The human spoke up while he was being patted down by my partner, “I know what you’re looking at —ough, careful with those nails— and those are not mine, all that junk is from the owner, my friend. I have been urging him to clean it up, and I’ve even thought about doing it for him, but he really should learn to take care of himself.”
I began to sift through the junk, relieved that I am covered from talon to neck in a rubber fireproof suit, not having to coat my feathers in this filth. Outside, I heard that Cuko hadn’t found anything dangerous or illegal on it, and that its name was ‘Maarten.’ I was about to give up on finding anything until I pulled a lever on a small rectangular object I found in the glovebox, and a small knife flipped out. “Aha, got you now filthy predator. Why do you have this?”
“That’s a pocketknife, that’s just a tool. I have it in the glovebox with the rest of my tools to keep this hunk of rust running.”
My partner spoke up with a concerned look on her face, “It’s not illegal to own a knife that small. You probably have bigger ones in your kitchen drawer, we can’t arrest him for that.”
It looked away from me and continued looking at Cuko, as it did before I spoke up. I shudder imagining what predatory thoughts lie behind those binocular-eyes.
Transcription Subject: Maarten de Groot, Human Refugee/Meat dealer
Date [standardized human time]: February 24, 2137
Don’t pet her, don’t pet her, she has a flamethrower.
Transcription Subject: Vuccen, Krakotl Exterminator
Date [standardized human time]: February 24, 2137
Giving up on finding anything in the front, I slid open the side door, revealing even more junk. At least these look more promising…and not covered in mould. Why is there a dishwasher and 5 blenders in here? “I noticed that the wool on the top of your head is a lot more puffy then on most venlil,” the human carelessly remarked. Of course, it’s going to point out her insecurities, typical predators.
“It is, you don’t have to mention it,” Cuko replied in an annoyed tone.
“It looks good on you, it’s cute.” What?!
“Oh, er, thank you…very much.” I can’t listen to this, she’s to naïve to understand that it’s just tricking her. I continued searching the back of the van for anything, traces of meat, weapons, dead venlil. I opened up one of the 3 large boxes that were hidden behind a piece of plywood that was haplessly placed there. There was a cool box inside. Jackpot! To my disappointment, it was empty, and so was the next one, and the one after that. Stil,l though, why would anyone have these hidden away like this?
“Why are there 3 cool boxes hidden away in the back in back?” I asked, demanding an answer from the human and interrupting it from its conversation with my partner.
“I don’t know, why is any of that stuff in there? On our way over here, we saw a dishwasher on the side of the road and he threw it- well he asked me to throw it in the back.” This is going nowhere.
Transcription Subject: Fink, Landlord/Veln supporter
Date [standardized human time]: February 24, 2137
“And that is why you should never combine drain cleaner and aluminium in a metal canister,” Gilt said, finishing his strange explanation.
“Huh, I never knew how to make an acid bomb. Shall we begin with the tour?,” I asked, finally cutting off Gilt’s rambling about chemistry. What a strange person.
The dining area wasn’t much to look at, it was completely empty save for a bar that was bolted to the floor, hence why the previous renters didn’t take it with them. Gilt walked around seemingly at random, looking at the outlets and taking a glance at the empty shelves behind the bar. “Are these taps pressured by gas?,” Gilt asked while he pulled on a lever and being briefly disappointed by the lack of alcohol.
“Yes, I think there was room for 2 canisters, but I have to look that up. May I ask you something? Why do you know so much about chemistry as an exterminator?” Gilt’s tail suddenly began flicking nervously left and right.
“Uhhh, uhhh, I uhh, studied it, yes, I studied it, but I was better cut as an exterminator.” I was unable to get a proper read on him; he sounds like he’s lying or at least nervous about something.
“Shall we take a look at the kitchen?”
“Yes!” Gilt nearly yelled, and he instantly got up and speed walked through the kitchen door. When I walked through the door, he was fawning over the industrial freezer lined against the wall. “This thing is big enough to fit a body inside…hypothetically.”
“…Yes, it would be very useful for you for keeping your vegetables preserved. There is also plenty of counter space, and even a strayu-oven,” I said, doing my best sales pitch.
Gilt immediately took a liking to the oven. “Can this thing make other stuff too?”
“Well, it’s a strayu-oven. I don’t know what else you want to make with it, especially in a salad-house.”
“I don’t know! Perhaps other food that needs to be warm?” Gilt said dismissively, his tail nervously flicking left and right. I think he’s just very nervous.
“I am quite glad you’re an exterminator,” I said, trying to relieve the awkwardness. “I really don’t want to have any humans in any of my buildings, especially not after what I heard on the news not a quarter claw ago.”
He gave a confused ear flick. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s all over the news. Some humans blew up the front of the exchange program headquarters. Those dangerous predators should have never been allowed to stay on our planet.”
Gilt his ears folded back and showed a snarl, something hardly any venlil did and combined with the fact that he looked so dangerous made me instinctively back up. “Those sons of farsuls, I will make them pay! Humanity First is making the humans’ reputation even worse!”
“Calm down sir, you’re no longer part of the force.” He really takes this personally. You can take the exterminator out of the guild, but you can’t take the guild out of the exterminator. “Hey, you seem like a good leaser for this place.” And the only participant. I quickly said, hoping to change the subject. He was a bit intense before, but now, he was starting to scare me. It’s not like I trust this man, but I need to lease this place out too not go under. To many leasers and renters pulled out after going bankrupt, after Venlil Prime left the Federation. All because Tarva wanted to sleep with a predator.
Miraculoisly this seemed to work miraculously, “Oh, great, where do I sign?” His ears lifted up again into a happy expression, though only for only a short moment until his pawsfree headset went off and he immediately answered it. The green light began blinking once again. “What?...No…No…Yes…I already did it, without your help…bye…bye!”
Transcription Subject: Vuccen, Krakotl Exterminator
Date [standardized human time]: February 24, 2137
I noticed Cuko was looking a bit confused at a piece of paper with some venlilian writing on it. “What do you have there?”
“That human from just then, gave me his phone number for some reason.” She’s too naïve for this line of work.
A/N:
As always I really appreciate comments, it gives a lot more satisfaction than a few up arrows.
A special thanks to u/InstantSquirrelSoup for proofreading. Check out his fic: Arxur Hospitality
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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.*