there’s not really much discussion of child neglect on here so i guess i have to do it
p l e a s e don’t shame neglect survivors for not knowing “basic” things like how to eat a balanced diet, when to go to the doctor, how to drive, etc. you know these things (usually) because a caring adult taught them to you. we didn’t have that. we often enter adulthood knowing jack shit about how to take care of ourselves. we know we’re missing information, and we feel so fucking lost.
it’s okay to, if you have a friend who’s experienced neglect, try and help them learn how to take care of themselves. saying things like “hey, do you think you could try to eat at least one vegetable per day?” or “that infection looks pretty bad, do you want to go to a doctor?” is genuinely helpful. but belittling us for not already knowing these things is completely unproductive and unnecessarily cruel.
don’t be a dick to survivors.
How does one know when to go to the doctor though?
Oo I know this one! If some part of your body hurts or doesn’t seem to be working right, and you think posting it to Facebook, or texting people, or whatever, will result in people being jackasses (or you have another reason you don’t want to ask them), then you google what’s happening.
Try phrasing it in different ways, until you find articles or posts that sound like they’re talking about roughly the same thing you’re experiencing. IME, for any potential symptom, there’s a bunch of articles out there telling you some potential causes, and telling you whether you should go to the doctor.
If you have health insurance, google the name of the insurance and “advice nurse” to see if there’s a phone number you can call to just tell them what’s going on and see if it’s a concern or not. They will know what else to ask you about, and they are paid to not be assholes about it.
Either way, if you find out that it could be an actual condition/problem, you can do more googling until you find places where people who actually have that problem are talking about what it’s like and what has helped. Searching for it on Tumblr can be really helpful.
This also is a good thing to do before talking to a doctor, because it can really help you advocate for yourself in some situations. Like, if you think you might have ______, and you read a lot of people saying that they have it and their doctors didn’t believe them at first, you’ll often find specific tests to ask for, or specific symptom to explain, that might help you if your doctor is like that too.
Also, if you do have helpful friends but they don’t know for sure what’s going on, or they tell you what could be happening and that you should go to a doctor but you’re scared to learn more, you can ask them to do that googling for you, and you can see if anybody is available to come to a doctor’s appointment with you for support.
Oh, and to everyone, re the original post: you generally won’t know if somebody has been neglected, and often they won’t know that what they experienced was neglect. Don’t be a contemptuous jerk to anybody, and don’t make fun of people in the abstract about stuff like this.
(Like, don’t post or comment things like “who doesn’t know ______?!” or “can you imagine being that clueless” or whatever. Just assume, by default, that people have good reasons for saying and doing things that you think are foolish or ridiculous. It’s generally true.)
Peter Parker, part of gen z, understanding how bad this country is: god I hate America
Steve Rodgers, literally “Captain America”: god me too
the fic writer’s eternal question: am I feeling stuck/unmotivated/etc. because of internal factors that I can control to some extent (tired, disorganized, busy with other things, general mental-health issues) and that are up to me to fix, or is it because I’m not getting enough attention to make the work feel worthwhile
and if it’s the latter, what the fuck do I do about that, considering I have never found a reliably effective way to advertise and I don’t have a big audience, so it mostly depends on whether someone who does have a big audience happens to reblog me…which pretty soon won’t even be a viable way to reach people because fuck Tumblr
(I will say, if you’ve ever thought one of my ideas or WIPs sounded cool, commenting on and reblogging fics I’ve already posted is THE BEST way to motivate me to write more)
in which there is absolutely no room for him at all,
Christ comes uninvited.
But because he cannot be at home in it,
because he is out of place in it,
and yet he must be in it,
His place is with the others for whom
there is no room.
His place is with those who do not belong,
who are rejected by power, because
they are regarded as weak,
those who are discredited,
who are denied status of persons,
who are tortured, bombed and exterminated.
With those for whom there is no room,
Christ is present in this world.”
– Thomas Merton
man, @loxxxlay and @portraitoftheoddity getting into Doctrine of Labyrinths makes me want to reread the series (and maybe understand things better this time because SORRY I AM DUMB AND IF SOMETHING ISN’T EXPLICITLY SPELLED OUT, CHANCES ARE I WON’T GET IT)…but I have other things to read and now isn’t a good time for physical books to devour my life…and then @ameliarating’s amazing Mildmay fic made me want to write something too but a) writing is hard and I get little enough attention when I’m writing Loki, let alone a tiny book fandom, and b) I don’t actually have any…ideas…plus there’s the whole thing where I’m honestly not sure I understood it all well enough 😫
He swallowed up my name like it was covered in honey. “Mild-May-Your-Sufferings-Be,” he started and just like that it was his. And then he smiled wide as Don Escobar with the shepherdess, and laughed like him too. “At-The-Hands-Of-The-Wicked? Darling, what does that make me?”
In the Bastion, Mildmay slips.
Notes
So much thanks for the support and betaing rendered by @veliseraptor, without whom I never would read this quartet (and you all should to!) and probably wouldn’t be writing at all.
I'm a defeatist but I don't have to be 