Red Dwarf - Blog Posts

The sun and the moon

(Took me a while to gather the courage to draw these. Took me a while to draw them too. The effort I put into them is only matched by the love that drove me.)

Just you wait, it gets gayer.

Truly I have been hardwired by having tumblr throughout my teen years and into adulthood to look for every single gay shipping opportunity no matter what. Often when it's not even there. I literally cannot turn this part of my brain off that begins looking for conspiracy-level reasons that the thing I'm watching is actually gay.

And like, I wonder what future generations will be like?

If you have real actual queer rep as a kid do you still spend all your time imagining it with your friends? Or is this particular brand of deranged a tumblr-specific thing?

I have no regrets. We had crumbs and made ourselves feasts in any way we could.

Anyway, this is just to say that I am not yet three seasons in to the 1980s absurdist British sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf about two chicken soup machine repairmen and a man-cat stranded alone in space and I am literally unable to stop my brain from forming an earnest and rabid argument for why the chicken soup repairmen are in the midst of an enemies to lovers arc. One of them is dead and a hologram. It doesn't matter. They are going to fall in love. I know it.

Because commenting on the site doesn’t feel right.

Because what I want to say feels too much like making things all about me.

http://archiveofourown.org/works/6919726 Yep, back on a bit of a Red Dwarf kick.

The more I think on it, the more I have mixed feelings about this one. Although, maybe I’m slightly emotionally burned-out right now and am having trouble connecting. Or it’s just because the OCD portrayed doesn’t fully fit with my experiences. But that’s the problem with OCD, it’s different for everyone. Heck, as a teenager, for a while I was seeing a psychiatric nurse that specialzed in kids with OCD, and some of what I told her about my problems at the time kinda threw her for a loop.

Honestly, I’m wondering why this fic doesn’t reasonate with me more- the number of times in my teenage years, being locked into ritual behaviours that were part of my pre-bedtime routine. The times I’d mess up a step and have to start it over before I could proceed to the next one, or worse, have to go back to an earlier step and start from there, in tears because I had to start over, and all I wanted to do was go to bed and sleep.

Maybe it's the "voices" part. It's never been voices for me, heck, it's not even really words as the intrusive thoughts, it's never been that structured. For me, it was feelings. It was all coming from my own brain, just a part I couldn't control. And as it turns out, couldn't defy. ...Not without repercussions.

For years I was trapped in the glass maze, running the same paths over and over. "Normal" was outside the maze, I could see what it was like, but I couldn't experience it. Pounding against the glass only hurt myself.

My psychiatrist got me out of the maze when he gave me something else. The Dragon The Dragon has rules, if I obey the dragon, I stay safe under it's belly. But if I challenge it, I get stomped.

Different psychologists, all sorts of therapies. All to appease my mother. But that, it was all challenging the dragon. And I got stomped. And afterwards, for daring to challenge the dragon? It's rules got more strict.

Still, I kept following my mother's battle cry. Every different therapy a futile attack, every new therapist or psychologist a new lance. And all the while, me getting stomped, because even though I'd learned about it's punishment, I was still trying to appease my mother first.

So now, I'm effectively housebound. For a while I was bound to my bed, but even my parents had learned not to fight the dragon, and instead of a lance, gave me something better- my own cozy resting place under the dragon's belly. -A granny flat in the backyard.

I'm still living at home, but I have my own place. I pay rent, but it's covered by my pension, and I gain so much more than I could lose. The dragon's punishment is heavy- I can't touch anyone with bare skin, but I can afford the gloves that let me pat our dogs.

And best of all? My psychiatrist is not a lance, not a challenge to the dragon. More a Sage, from whom I purchase tributes for the dragon. ....I'm getting too into the metaphor thing, aren't I? - I'm medication only. The dragon's fine with medication. It's not an attack, it makes the dragon happy enough to rescind a few rules.

Translation being, behavioural therapy only made things worse, but meds and finding ways to work within the boundaries set by my OCD is not only fine, but has seen some small improvements for me.

So yeah, what was going to be a short post in place of a comment didn't work out, I put out a standard wall-of-text attack instead. -But I was right, it was all about me. Which is why I just left kudos instead.

Have I said too much? Probably. Luckily, no-one will ever read this. ;)