Me To Myself: Relax

#Mr. Cape is an icon

midnight miseries, muttered comforts

Pairing: Stephen Strange x Reader

Summary: Plagued by nightmares, you seem to be the only thing keeping Stephen tethered to reality.

Word Count: 920

Warnings: nightmares, hurt/comfort

a/n: the trailer really drove me to write for strange huh

It was some time close to four when you woke. The duvet had been inconveniently pulled from your body, leaving you exposed to the freezing air of the morning. As you blindly reached out in hopes of retrieving the blanket, and therefore some semblance of warmth, you felt the mattress shift beneath you.

“Stephen,” you whined. “Baby, it's too early for this.”

You'd grown used to him working late into the night, staying up to shift through books or study new spells and incantations. It was an integral part of who he was; despite being one of the smartest people you knew he always needed to know more.

You had tried to force him into something that resembled a healthy sleep schedule but given that your partner was as stubborn as an overconfident bull there was little you could do to intervene with his late-night, (or rather, early morning) work sessions.

With an irritated and tired sigh, you begrudgingly turned over with all the displeasure of someone who really wasn't thrilled to be awake before the sun was up.

However, the frustration that had already begun to forge the words on your tongue dissolved due to the sight you were met with.

Stephen's breathing was erratic, his skin pale and damp with sweat. His lips were slightly parted and each sound that passed them was pained and whimpered.

“Darling, wake up,” you tried. “You're dreaming.”

Although his brows were creased, the remainder of his features were surprisingly calm, as if he were attempting to maintain composure to make sense of what he was seeing unfold in his mind.

“Stephen–” Your hand met his cheek and the levee in his mind seemed to give way. He hissed as he began to convulse against the mattress. The soft linen sheets had snared around his body and his subconscious mind grew panicked as he failed to kick them off.

“Hey, hey shh, it's okay.” Your hands gently found his shoulders. “It's okay.”

He shot up with such sudden force you saw his muscles twist painfully beneath his skin. His breathing was as desperate as a man drowned and his eyes were wide. Your hand brushed delicately over the nape of his neck and promises that he was safe fell past your lips in hushed whispers. Slowly, he came back to you.

He swallowed harshly, his palms rubbing harshly at his eyes.

“It wasn't real,” you promised.

“But what if it was.” His voice was tight, pulled taut over each word.

“Then you don't have to concern yourself with it, not now.” You tried to comfort him, to soothe him with gentle words of solace. But genuine fear still clouded the blue of his eyes and his hands shook more violently than usual.

You drew them to you carefully, deftly tracing the coarse red lines and his scarred skin. With the slightest hint of applied pressure, you could feel the metal rods and bolts hidden beneath his flesh, each working to hold his bones together. Stephen sighed, the sound falling somewhere between calmed and defeated.

“You carry so much on your shoulders, Stephen, but not everything has to be a warning of our impending doom.” You kissed each of his knuckles. “Even you are allowed to have nightmares.”

He swallowed again and you frowned, seeing just how hard he was trying to hide the true extent of his fears. He carried the weight of the world, shouldering the responsibility of protecting reality and all those within. And never once did he complain. But you could see it, on nights like this more than any. You could see just how much all that responsibility bore down on him, how the pressure ground against his mind and wore him down; it left his eyes tired and dull.

You released his hands in favour of timidly brushing the stray strands of hair from his brow. “You're also allowed to not be okay.”

He wanted so desperately to lie, to tell you he was alright and you needn't worry. He didn't want to burden you with things he didn't yet understand and therefore couldn't protect you from. But your tone was so tender and filled with warmth he knew the softening of his expression had given him away before he so much as opened his mouth.

“Could you– could we just...” He trailed off, eyes growing misty. Knowing well enough what was being asked of you, you shifted closer to him.

He fell into your arms, the weight he'd been carrying finally giving way as he crumbled against you. You lay back on the mattress and his body was a welcome weight against you. His head fell against your shoulder and the combined efforts of his stubble and warm breath against your neck sent a shiver down your spine.

You toyed with the silver strands of his hair, delicately brushing your fingers down his neck and along his back. His breathing remained shaken, a low rattle that barely escaped past his lips. He still sounded so weak you were almost certain he'd break. However, with each gradual stroke of your hand against him, his breathing grew steady.

The sun had already clambered back into the sky, and its soft light filled the room. You couldn't tell how long it had been since you'd woke, yet neither of you paid it any heed. Stephen allowed his mind to fall silent and he fell asleep with the sound of your heart beating steadily against his ear, keeping him tethered to what was real.

Dissociation + Moonknight

disclaimer: this is a long post, I triggered myself slightly when talking about this and ended up going off on a tangent. There is discussions of ab*se, not in detail apart from one brief mention of a we*pon at the end, and also a brief mention of s*lf h*rm but other than that it is a discussion about people wanting to be just like Moonknight.

———————————————————————————

So, I’ve noticed some people on here and some others in marvel groups I’m in on Facebook recently commenting about wishing they had DID or another person in their mind to help them cope with the terrible things currently happening in their life.

I am not here to scold you, or aggressively condescend and talk down to you as someone who has trauma related disorders. I’m not here to make you feel ashamed for what can be seen as ‘normal’ thoughts when you see a show like this. However, please do be careful of what you say online in regards to mental illness, specifically trauma and dissociation. Those of us with these issues and disorders will see your posts, it is a very painful and invalidating for us to see what we perceive as people trying to romanticise and glorify our disorders. These disorders were born out of terrible, awful, scary things that have traumatised people for life, and should not be seen as anything but an unfortunate result of lifelong childhood trauma and not as a fun, “quirky” thing. It seems fun and stress free because you don’t actually have the said disorders and trauma so it is easy to play pretend when you can’t attach emotions and personal experience to it; when you actually do have these conditions it is not at all fun. It’s tiring both mentally and physically.

I do however understand the need and want to think this way at times because life is ultimately stressful for every single person on this planet; just existing is hard, but it is even harder for others who were forced to go through things as a kid that no child should ever have to go through. Life is even hard when you are a product of the brain dissociating from reality in order to protect itself.

Everyone at some point in their life has unknowingly activated their “auto-pilot” or “zoned out” brain function. For example; if you’ve ever been having a conversation with someone and completely spaced out part of what they’ve said to you, that is you subconsciously detaching from the current moment.

It’s a perfectly normal regular coping mechanism of the brain to be able to detach oneself from reality of the current situation in order to cling to something reassuring and avoid anxieties. Dissociation in general is normal, but when it starts to take over your entire life then it needs to be looked into by a professional.

In the case of DID, the traumatic event or events cause the self to fragment into a number of different selves, or alters. Some alters may be holding on to traumatic memories, while others are blocked from accessing these memories.

Dissociating often becomes the centre coping mechanism for traumatic experiences, anxiety, PTSD, or even depression. It can present unconsciously and will make you feel out of control of your own mind and body.

Dissociative Identity Disorder is not the only dissociative disorder, you can have DPDR - depersonalisation/derealisation disorder, and DDNOS (dissociative disorder not otherwise specified), amongst many others. The act of dissociation is also a symptom of many other mental illnesses, and sometimes in certain cases may not even be it’s own unique condition but rather a side effect of something else, for example BPD (borderline personality disorder).

It may seem really nice to be able to just “zone out” of stressful situations, but it really isn’t. You lose memories, you can’t trust your own mind, everything you remember is cloudy and foggy. I have very little recollection of my childhood, and what I do remember is mostly all negative. Mine started when I was roughly 11/12 years old. I came home one day crying from school when I experienced my first episode out of the blue with no warning ( I can not remember what triggered it, I can’t even remember how I got home, all I remember is the terrifying memory of laying on the floor at home) screaming that nothing was real and neither was I, I could see outside of my own body, I also couldn’t physically feel anything no matter how much I hurt myself, so in my mind this confirmed to me that my reality was not real and neither was I.

I spent the majority of my teen years fixating on this. Nobody ever explained to me what dissociation was or why it occurs. So, as an autistic person who struggled to identify what they were feeling and why to others, I couldn’t even explain it to myself, so I become obsessed with it. Because I was left untreated for so long, I kept telling myself none of this was real and neither was I, and because the dissociative episodes kept happening, in my mind it was solidifying it even further.

I genuinely believe, if someone had took the time to recognise what this was and talked to me, I wouldn’t have been as terrified, I would have learned to cope with it a lot younger and not fixated on something I couldn’t define so much, because a lot of the other trauma I have is from the episodes themselves, because they were utterly terrifying especially for an autistic child that doesn’t know how to say what’s going on.

I was told by my mother that it was normal to feel this way, that she use to be like that as a kid. Now as an adult I realise my mother was wrong, because my mother as I later learned during my own adulthood also had very severe childhood trauma, and what she was experiencing at my age, was not normal either and she should have gotten help at the time too.

For some reason, I would often have the worst catatonic episodes during school break. I would be unable to function for 2 and a half months and then entirety of summer. I wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t sleep, wouldn’t get up, I’d lay on the floor in the living room with a blanket and pillow and try to distract myself. It got to a point where I was so physically weak that I was underweight and I could not leave the home without weeks of planning and reassurance and an escort who had to let me hold on to them because I was so physically weak.

I am still not sure why at the time my worst dissociative moments occurred at summer time/break, I’m yet to discuss this weird set of foggy memories with my trauma therapist in a few weeks. Idk if something happened to me during summer one time that I don’t remember, or maybe it was just because the first episode roughly occurred around that time and was very traumatic so maybe that’s why that seasonal time was always a trigger for me thereafter. But it still doesn’t explain what triggered me the first time, because I still don’t remember.

I never got treatment for it, never got an explanation as to what it was and why, never had someone investigate and say “hold on, why is this 11 year old cutting themselves and dissociating surely somethings going on at home”, I got sent to neurology because I had a history of epilepsy as a child (also traumatic to go to sleep in your bed and then wake up connected to a monitor in hospital because you nearly died, which gave me enough trauma to give me a fear of sleeping to this day) so they believed it was a type of seizure or migraine, but they most certainly were not.

I started to understand at 18 by doing my own research as to what it was. But by this time, I dropped out of college twice because I couldn’t cope with dissociative episodes happening during class and feeling myself beginning to lose control of my body when I was trying to take notes. It’s only now at 25, after years of constantly being referred to CBT by lazy GP’s that I decided to speak to one of the CBT assessors on the phone. I mentioned to her that CBT doesn’t work for me, I’ve been doing it and counselling on and off since I was 13 years old and it would have worked by now. I plucked up the courage to say that it doesn’t get to the route of my problems, I admitted to her over the phone that I think I have unresolved childhood trauma from physical and mental abuse I suffered daily up until the age of 19 and that I need to speak to someone about that because that’s where all of my other problems are coming from.

And now, because I said that, I finally, after 2 years of waiting, have a trauma therapist who is doing EMDR with me.

I’ve only had 2 sessions with her and they’ve been introductions, dissociative tests, trauma tests, and some background into the neuroscience of it all, and even that has helped so much because I’m able to talk more about things even if we haven’t got to the actual trauma part in detail yet.

Having to cope with how terrifying it is to dissociate for some people, living with traumatic memories, avoiding triggers, still living with said abusers etc is not fucking worth being able to “zone out” when shits difficult. It’s not fun. At all. TV makes it seem fun and quirky because it’s TV land and you don’t have anything from your own life to identify with to understand, but my god I can not stress enough how “not fun” it is.

It is absolutely terrifying not recognising family members, “waking up” in a place you don’t even recall getting to, “waking up” mid sentence and not understand why words you’re not even saying are flowing out of your mouth, seeing yourself out of your body, not being able to feel anything physically, intense paranoia, night terrors, everything looking and feeling small and faraway, feeling like your floating and not actually tethered down, being beaten everyday, having someone run at you with a knife and press you against a wall. This is all shit I experience or have experienced - it’s different for everyone - but it is universally agreed that it is not fun.

Even when I think nothing has triggered me, my brain fucking dissociates anyway. I hate it. I hate it so goddamn fucking much. I’m always tired mentally and physically. I can’t do anything. I’m afraid and paranoid all the time, I avoid going outside in fear of it happening in public. I don’t want to let go or lose control around other people. I don’t like not having control.

Just please please be careful how you choose to cope with your current situation, maladaptive daydreaming can also be quite dangerous. Please try to think of others with these dissociative disorders before you say shit like this.

Do not even get me started on people on this site who literally pretend to have dissociative disorders.

It’s so goddamn hard and I’m so fucking tired.

I will never be able to settle for an MCU movie and less stylish than MoM

All the Phase 4 MCU shows have been a duo/two-person story. We have:

1) Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany playing a married couple with kids.

2) Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan playing frenemies-turned-brothers in arms.

3) Tom Hiddleston and Sophia Di Martino playing enemies-turned-friends-turned-lovers.

4) Jeremy Renner and Hailee Steinfeld playing a mentor and mentee with father-daughter vibes.

And now we have…

5) Oscar Isaac and Oscar Isaac playing an introverted British man being forced on a trip around the world by his American mercenary alter.

Moments (Steven Grant x f!reader, Marc Spector x f!reader)

Pairings:  Steven Grant x f!reader, Marc Spector x f!reader

Summary: There’s always been an unwritten rule in your relationship: Marc cuddles you, you cuddle Steven. But they’ve been talking, and maybe it’s time for that rule to change. Moments of softness between you, Marc, and Steven. ~1,500 words

Fluff, angst, hurt/comfort, general softness, not edited, not my GIF

A/N: I did my DID research, but I absolutely might have gotten something wrong. I’m working with the same creative ideas (e.g. reflections) that the show has given us. Please let me know if there is something I need to change in my representation of DID.

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You’re wrapped up in Marc’s arms the way you always are. He’s half-sitting half-laying in bed in nothing more than a pair of sweats while you are curled against his side, head on his shoulder, a leg tossed over his, an arm around his waist. His hand is just above your knee as his thumb draws small circles on the bare skin of your leg. With his other hand, he runs his fingers through your hair absentmindedly as he watches some show or another on the TV. Your eyes are shut, not watching with him, not even listening really, just enjoying his warmth, the rhythm of his breath under you, this rare moment of peace when he isn’t off fighting crime in a white suit.

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#Pick now 

i’m an introvert until someone starts talking about the moon or my favorite books.

Hii! I'm new to Tumblr and you're one of my first follows and I LOVE YOUR WRITINGS!!!💖

Also I'd like to ask 15, 21 and 61 from random asks😁

hey girl, welcome to the hellsite (affectionate) we're happy to have you here ;)

15. do you have any piercings/would you want to?

Right now I have my ears pierced. I really want to get my septum pierced but my school has a pretty strict and ridiculous rule about no facial piercings so I gotta wait a few more months

21. what is/was your favourite subject in school?

Definitely English :) Politics comes in as a close second because my classes vibe is ✨ immaculate ✨

61. where is a place that you’d love to visit?

I'd love to visit London, Edinburgh or Greece, (really anywhere with a dark academic vibe)