Hello and welcome to my little workshop here. I am Carrick, my spirit is Mustelidae Taxidea taxus, I was branded by the Moth named Polyphemus, and I am a Storyteller. This thread is where you can talk about the stories in your life: ~~~Have you recently read or seen something that helped you understand yourself better or helped you cope with Stuff? ~~~Have you been triggered or squicked by something? Come vent about it, cuss its maker’s name, or seek shelter in the blanket fort for a while. ~~~Have you encountered a story that you’re finding very challenging to fully get into/let into you, but you want or need to fight through it or change the way it’s impacting you? I’m here to help you do that. ~~~Have you found a place in fiction whose darkness gives you strength? Pleasure? Catharsis? Are you into some pretty fucked-up shit? Tell us about it! ~~~Do you have characters running loose in your head, making a mess of the place and changing the settings? Call them Muses, Soulbonds, Puppets, Kin, whatever they are to you… use this space to talk to them. Or to let them talk to you. There used to be a lot of communities for this over on LiveJournal — things like “dear_puppet” and “dear_mun” and the like. It was good for letting off steam and getting your thoughts straight. Fictional constructs are welcome to post here. Your own original characters and stories are equally important as anything official or published by someone else. Think of this as the ultimate crossover customer care thread. Jokes and memes and shitposting is all welcomed and wanted. My first tale of psychoanalysis is in a reply below.
~*~*~*~TFW your first major step forward in dealing with your mental illness comes not with the help of your therapist, but with the help of the rapist pedophile shitlord character who narrates the story it just took you almost a week to get through because fuuuuuuck that subject matter is AWFULLY uncomfortable… ~*~*~*~ Spoiler: “Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lolita…” This was written on December 20th, 2016. At the time of writing, I had seen the 1997 film as part of a quest to see everything Jeremy Irons has ever been in, and I was still trying to figure out how to process it. I found it… challenging. So I got hold of the book and said “CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.” What happened next is described at length under the cut. I’ve gone through and put in a few notes to update or clarify information, and I’ve taken out a few irrelevant digressions. {CONTENT CUT: Long first part that deals with the 1997 film and my feelings and challenges encountered while watching it.} All of this preamble has been leading to my main point: I just finished reading the book. Bottom line: I give the book a 10/10 with accolades. The book is EXCEPTIONALLY good. I plan to listen to the audiobook again, because Jeremy Irons’ narration is splendid, but this time with a paper copy at hand, so I can mark my favourite passages and highlight the outstanding instances of wordplay present throughout. This author makes love to language like poets do; and while there are times when the narrative devolves into very Victorian-sounding simpering and sappiness, it’s clearly calculated and entirely appropriate to the narrator’s character. Ah, our friendly neighborhood narrator — Humbert Humbert (the name IS intentionally ridiculous, as I’d wondered from the start!). It is for other scholars than I to pick apart his psyche and give specific names to his brand of fucked-upedness. A 5 second Google search assures me that analysis of his charming self can be easily found at whatever degree of complexity one might wish to examine him. Some of you will understand best when I say, hearkening back to my old LiveJournaling days, that if the games were still around, I would play the HELL out of Humbert. He is precisely the kind of muse I would absolutely LOVE to take for a test-drive around a clamoring arena of other people’s hijacked souped-up fictional persons. I’m sitting here imagining the Milliways mods’ reaction to an application for dear old Hum, and wondering just how eloquently I would have to argue my case for his being allowed in. And how much fun it would be to drive him and his ridiculous car around the greyest of grey areas of allowable content. When you get right down to it, I identify a lot with Humbert. NOT… I shouldn’t need to specify… NOT THE PART OF HIM THAT PLANS (AND COMMITS) MURDER, KIDNAPS HIS OWN DUBIOUSLY-ADOPTED CHILD, MAINTAINS SOCIOPATHICALLY ONE-SIDED RELATIONSHIPS WITH WOMEN FOR NEFARIOUS REASONS, RESORTS TO SECRETLY DRUGGING THEM INTO WHATEVER BEHAVIOR HE CAN’T MANIPULATE OUT OF THEM ANY OTHER WAY, AND GOES ON A CROSS-COUNTRY TOUR OF RAPE. I have never done nor would ever do any of those things. As far as any of you know. But I mean… I get where he’s coming from, rationally (or irrationally). I adore his weird little dreamy meanderings. I feel a kindred spirit in his maniacal need to process events over time to degrees of exactitude that surpass the measurement abilities of most ordinary household chronometers. I enjoy his casual relationship with factual truth. I am totally with him vis a vis emotional self-absorption that carves canyons of distance between himself and other people that aren’t worth his time to try to bridge until he gets literally locked into a situation where he ceases to have any choice but to start communicating. I completely understand the kind of compartmentalization that lets him be an utterly unforgivable shitstain waste of humanity whilst simultaneously being ultimately rather pathetically sympathetic. Experiencing the story as HIS story is, in a way, cathartic. And here’s where I have to go back a little on my capslocked disclaimer up there. It was a lie. I have a type of OCD commonly (and ridiculously) called “Pure-O.” Here is a link: http://ocdla.com/obsessionalocd Basically, although I have never done anything so cruel or criminal as Humbert’s confession details, I have absolutely done every one of those things in multitudes of increasingly horrifying ways to every person I have ever met more than once and to an uncountable number of people I have never met at all. I never heard of this disorder before I was diagnosed with it two years ago during my stint in the detox/psych ward (lol ~~~sanatorium~~~). Learning to define the previously nebulous miasma of fuck that is my brain, and having that diagnosis further cemented when the pills they gave me for it radically decreased the severity of symptoms, was such a mindblowing and life-altering thing to me that I’m still not sure how to process it. Which is fine — it’s one of those things I’m quite content to leave alone to exist quietly as the new status quo of incontrovertible reality in which my participation is allowed, but not (yet?) obligated. Humbert is my little incubus. All of that nebulous dark in me has become, through him, something I can begin to communicate with. In the string theory of my soul, he is a bow that may, with practice, coax songs out of my quantum cacophony. Stumblingly, sweetly, not minding that the notes he plays are devilish to hear and dangerous to dance to, unapologetic of his nature, a gypsy moth that flutters towards a fire with one erratic wingbeat and flees it the next, somehow simultaneously divinely unaware of its seducer’s intent and driven by some wisdom about the sun that is outside our understanding, he has painted his eloquence onto the first words my illness has ever spoken to me. May my mental lodger lead us to an happier ending than he got in canon.
