Do you know how many times you distracted me when I was hurt or lonely? Do you know how many times a line or a scene from fanfic marked me so much that I remembered years later, even though I can’t recall my own phone number?
Even if the fic isn’t perfect or popular or multi-chaptered… Sometimes there’s just one sentence that changed me.
It’s strange how Jamie and Claire come back to grab me out of the blue.
Last week, in processing the current state of the world (and my immediate world inside a virus hotspot with my spouse, a doctor who is in and out of hospitals each day), my optimism hit a brick wall. Whereas I’d weathered the previous several weeks somehow able to hope for light at the end of the tunnel, suddenly all I could feel was despair. All I could think about was the overwhelming sense of loss: of life, of sanity, and—perhaps most of all—of time. Will every month be like March, which seemed not even to have existed at all in some sense? Will the things I’d wanted for 2020 even be possible again, ever?
The most powerful tool I’ve acquired in the course of my mental health journey is the knowledge that the best thing I can do when my thoughts start to spiral downward is to write them down: put the mess into actual words on an actual page. Otherwise, they stay this amorphous force in my thoughts that I can’t seem to contradict or overpower, keeping me stuck on a cavern floor.
Before I knew it, something clicked and I was once again processing my own life in the language of my Flood my Mornings AU, something I haven’t done in well over a year.
Thank you for letting me share this with you. Here’s to hope and healing.
The soft tick…tick… tick…. seemed to fill every darkened corner of the living room. Two hours past midnight.
The roll-top desk was covered with the usual books, papers, and tea-things of a night’s hard study. The only novelties, to his eye, were the bottle at her elbow—a good sight emptier than last he’d observed it—and the tears on her cheeks in the lamplight.
For those (like me before finding out) who are wondering which painting is presented here : It’s The Meeting on the Turret Stairs by Frederick William Burton ! I adore it.
Hi, yeah, do you want to yearn and ache some more because OOF
(taken from the National Gallery of Ireland website)
Tori