Friendly reminder that the living things around you deserve respect just as much as you do.

The spider doesn’t know that your house is your house or that any land is off limits at all.

The deer doesn’t know that there are roads stripped out daring it to die. It only knows that it needs to cross the earth to get to another part of the earth.

The mouse doesn’t know that a kitchen isn’t where it’s supposed to be. It doesn’t know that it isn’t supposed to eat the food on the ground it scurried across.

The fly doesn’t know that touching your food is wrong. It knows feeding and staying fed. The same as we all do.

Lving things besides humans don’t owe humans getting out of the way. Be mindful of the dead rabbit in the road. It ate crop and lived as you did. The only thing it lacked was a human body.

(We won’t get into bacteria and organisms smaller than the eye can see for today but they’re worth talking about).

Sometimes growing up is being given a large left boot all polished and pretty but nothing else and being told that “You’ll grow into it someday.” they’ve given you nothin’ but a boot and expect you to hobble around barefoot until it fits.

So you stuff it in your drawer for that someday while walking around barefoot waiting for the day the shoe fits. It’ll fit you someday. And you’ll fit it back someday. Someday.

You open the drawer over and over again thinking “Maybe today is the day.” but it isn’t. You sit there wanting to cry because your feet are sore and tired with your skin begging to finally fall off the bone and you’ve been waiting for the damn shoe to fit all this time. To just fucking fit you. Fucking fit you because you were told it would and you’ve only those words to trust.

Years go by, and the shoe still don’t fit. Either it’s too big or too small for your foot. You’ve torn holes into it trying to force it to fit your foot and it’s holding on by string and leather. It’s far from the perfect boot it was when you first got it. And a whole lot closer to a single torn sole of a boot left in some small town backyard.

All you know is that it’ll fit you. And you’ve had nothing but the focused pain in your scabbed feet to carry you around. It has to fit you. It has to. It has to or you’ve spent all this time waiting for it to fit and it never will. Then you focus on the never will part. Really, what if it never does? If it never does and you’ve spent all the time in pain waiting and waiting and waiting for nothing? Dese God you hope that’s not it.

It’s been decades and there’s all kinds of shoe stores in your area with good boots looking real pretty in the windows. You hold out. You refuse to buy them because your boot WILL fit. It WILL. You go home and look in that drawer one last time. Dig the left boot out and put it on your begging left foot. There are two ways this can go although those two ways can lead to different things in the future. Way one, it doesn’t fit. Again, it’s too small or too big. You sit there frustrated because its been decades and you’re not sure if the boot has decades more to go based on how worn it is. You’re not sure if your feet have decades based on how worn they are. You’re not sure if you have decades. Now what? Way two, it does fit. It finally fits. But, you only have a single left boot. You’ve waited all this time and there’s no right boot to fit your worn and torn right foot. Now what?

Those two ways can lead to plenty of now whats. You waited decades for a single boot to fit you and for a single foot to fit it back. And it was all in vain. You have no shoe you can depend on now because it’s all frilled leather and frayed lace that’s one try on away from turning into dust. And it was all in vain. You wonder for the rest of your life about that boot. There’ll be plenty of other boots and but they’ll never be that boot. Solace is both found and not found.

That’s it. Sometimes your childhood is a boot that you’re waiting to fit so bad it becomes a religion and that’s all you have to go off of. This is a 10:38 rant so yeah. Yeah that’s it.

Growing up neurodivergent coupled with abuse (mainly emotional) definitely shaped the way I see myself gender wise and existing in general.

I felt like a frankenweenie of a person. A stitched up creature in the shape of a dog that wore a shirt and pants.

It felt like my main abuser, my creator, didn’t want me to be a human. That for some reason other children were stitched up with love and fresh flesh in the shape of a human while I was stitched up and patched together with wooden screws and dead flesh in the shape of a dog. And when people asked what the smell was she always pointed to me as if I’d chosen to wear a rotten suit.

I sat stuffed with organs that didn’t belong at the table with my creator and others like her and tried to pretend I was made up of the same stuff. Everyone tried to pretend too. But there’s a difference between a human’s company and a dog. My tail always hit the table in loud thumps until it fell off and I would crank my head to chew while everyone else ate normally. Something always ruined the already horrible disguise. And then the whole table would point out how truly horrible the disguise was. I would retreat to the ground with my ears folded in.

My creator wasn’t afraid of telling me how the green mold and cracking of bones were becoming too much of a problem. Most days it felt like she had given up on even looking at me. She had a dog for a child and I knew myself that I was in no way better than a real child. I was a dog. No dog made up for a human. And no human wanted a dog for a child.

I see myself in the mirror and try to imagine a version of myself that’s human. A womanly me, a manly me. But I still end up poking and shoving that dead flesh back into its stitch before I get dressed. I know I’m human. I know I’m human, but here’s a disconnect between the words me and human.

(Most of my posts have been me talking about my experience with being neurodivergent and having cptsd since Tumblr for me is a place where a bunch of skrunkly humans join and be skrunkly humans for however long this site stands up so here’s another post about that.)

Anyways, that’s it for tonight I got to scroll all the way back through my last searched tag since my Tumble crashed.

Sometimes I look back at my memories and think “Yeah no, my childhood wasn’t that much it was pretty normal.”

Cue someone asking me what it was like and the complete dread that passes through me as my brain intentionally tries to sift through the river for normal memories because you don’t share some messed up shit with most strangers unless ya’ want to and everytime it comes up really blurred or practically nonexistent. And that makes me realize that yeah, my childhood wasn’t actually normal. Does someone with a normal childhood need to search every nook and cranny of their memories for a single memory that they can comfortably share with someone and come up short each time? Probably not.

Alone I can convince myself of having a normal enough childhood but that’s because my brain accepts a single moment out of hundreds that was relatively normal enough to count and then immediately takes it as a “Yeah that works, it was a good childhood.”

Hell my brain can barely remember most of my childhood not because of a lack of memory but because it just won’t show up. I search and search and it’s all a blurry mass of “Yeah I was alive at that point.” But like, that’s not what I’m looking for. I’m looking for what I did when I was alive. But yeah, brains are flippin’ weird.

I will never understand the narrative that people have to stay the same throughout their life when it comes to orientations and identities.

Hey, it’s almost like people change constantly and things don’t have to be set in stone?

Isn’t the expectation that we change and stay changing since we have plenty of life lived and unlived?

People can be queer and not have their identities be forever, cishet people always question about whether queer people are sure about it or if they’ll change their mind and it’s like, maybe, so what? How is that the worst thing? When it comes to genderqueer people most understand surgery and what it means in the long run but so what? What’s it to you, the person that isn’t in their skin? Dear gods give it a rest.

My favorite dynamics firstly include lovers to friends except the relationship is stronger and or friendly and does not come in the way of any relationships they have after (points if they’re aspec).

Secondly, people who decide to raise children together platonically biological, adopted, or so and so (points again if they have separate lives that do not interfere with each other, spend literally every waking moment together, or live the world’s best and ideal romantic and sexual relationship would seem but aren’t romantically involved).

Thirdly, “I have a car.” “Cool, I’ve been wanting to leave this place since the moment I breathed the air here want to hop in and ditch?” “Yeah that works.” (It’s leaving home for bigger and better things, that’s it).

Beau is Afraid to me is a perfect representation of the abusive relationship between a parent and child.

The panic attacks and disassociation are no new story to the people watching it and at times it feels like it’s happening exactly to you the way the movie draws you into the shoes of Beau himself.

The phone call between Beau and Mona is perfectly drawn out. The nerve in Beau’s voice and the immediate disconnect between them emotionally are perfectly done. The silence tells you what you need to know, Beau is terrified of Mona and Mona has a hate for Beau that she can’t even grasp herself. Disappointment not at the situation but at Beau. At Beau simply because he’s her son and she’s his mother.

When Beau hears Mona finally admit to hating Beau we see Beau snap. He loves his mother, he believes that she loves him even when he confesses his frustration and concerns in their relationship. He hears the person that practically controls his throughts, his emotions, his living situation, what stree he’s on, the money he spends, and even the color shirt he wears hates him. He believes that Mona was protecting him from the outside world in some way he’s finally understood that his mother wasn’t protecting him. Mona wasn’t helping him and she didn’t even love him. He trusted her with his life and she hated him. He goes from kissing her legs begging to be forgiven to do anything to be forgiven to choking her.

When Beau is screaming for help from anyone, literally anyone. We see his eyes perfectly reflect the moment he knows no one will help him. He’s trapped dying the death his mother planned for him with his feet stuck in the boards and not a single person believes that he’s worthy of help or willing to help him. He’s completely and utterly alone. Like the version of himself that was curled up crying on the forest ground because he searched for a home and comfort (interpreted family being comfort for him in general) in every corner of the world that the okay in his head could think of and it left him cold and hungry with just the hat on his head. Take this moment as a parallel to him sinking in the boat. He’s searched in all the places his mother allowed him to search for some form of comfort from her and he’s left without her love or her help in the end. Deprived of love, blamed by his mother for every emotion she felt raising him and accused of not caring at all. The masked woman telling him about his sins and guilts could be the voice in his head that agrees with his mother or the voice of his mother in general. Finally, we see him drowning and struggling under the pressure he’s been convinced he created for himself and the story ends. And it’s the perfect ending. It’s so fucking horrible and perfect at the same time. My fucking God this movie was amazing.

Shoutout to all the children of parents that are abusive one way or another that sat their parents down and watched a movie that was a clear plea for those parents to realize that you needed them to be more of a parent and not an abuser. Sorry if it failed and congrats if it changed something if anything. Y'all did a good job speaking out even if it wasn’t your voice speaking!