Commonplace

gabor maté

“We readily feel for the suffering child, but cannot see the child in the adult who, his soul fragmented and isolated, hustles for survival a few blocks away from where we shop or work.”

Gabor Maté has been a major influence in my life as a person, but as a writer, this quote settled under my skin. We as readers are far more lenient on children’s and YA fiction, which is possibly why it’s so popular amongst all ages. Both genres give us space to overlook character flaws. We expect the youthful naive hero to grow as we read and have an arch into “maturity” or finding their strength to overcome the antagonist. When we read adult fiction, we hold far less space for moral or behavioural flaws. Often, the antagonist in adult fiction is a version of people we know in reality. We criticise adults in fiction more openly, harshly, because we do it to each other in the light of day.

Truth is, most of us have unhealed child aspects stuck in the fascia of our jaws and hip flexors, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. (I often enough hope Freud rolls around in his grave, but his iceberg I dig.) 

“Trauma is not what happens to you, it’s what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you.”

This stands for characters as it does with people. If a writer only gives you surface level change, then the story means nothing. I believe the best stories are written for us to relate to a character’s journey through transformation in the wake of self discovery or some kind of revelation.

Now, I’m not a harsh judge. I know and love that some stories are meant to take us outside of ourselves, like fantasy, children’s picture books, and science fiction can distract us from the harshness of adulthood and reality. I love them for it. However, there are these other stories, these invasive intoxicating ones, that get under our skin.

Some books are meant to meet us where we’re at; some stories remind us to not loose our innocence to trauma and time.

carl jung

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”

I wish I agreed with this. I love Jung’s work, but in good faith, I’m going to debate this.

In 2023, I had my second run in with NPD and Cluster B personality types. (NPD, EUPD, Sociopathy, Psychopathy, etc.) I’m not attempting to diagnose these people publicly, nor am I naming them, but sometimes, you just know what you’re dealing with. The social abuse from it lingered in my psyche till the end of 2025 when I met new people who are still helping me rewire my brain chemistry back towards some level of trust in others.

I had just moved into my new dorm, and upon meeting him, I immediately became a target. The goal was to turn me into his first choice of ‘live-in’ supply. At first his charm was convincing, but I quickly sensed the deception beneath the surface. I ignored it for the sake of practicing empathy and people pleasing. This unfortunately led to limerence and fawning responses to cruelly deceptive flirtatious attention. I didn’t submit as easily as a fellow roommate of ours did (I hope she’s well and free from him too, truly). Because she was the more willing supply, I quickly became plan B. He still tried to ensnare me, but attempted to hide it behind closed doors. When that didn’t work, I became the villain and he was the victim. He must have sold the victim mask well enough, but like all lies, it eventually unravelled. I never got apologies from the people he manipulated to treat me poorly in his absence, but most victims of people like him don’t. Shame is a powerful thing. 

In the same year, because the universe is particularly thorough in teaching lessons, I met a “friend” with similar traits. She was saccharinely fake and so giving. But she very much hated me beneath the mask. I felt it early on, saw it plain as day, and ignored it for the sake of not being left out. My inner child craved a different ending to a story that I’d deeply outgrown but had yet to step away from.

Some folks have a dangerously high level of patience. But, as with many peace focused individuals, the inner polarity shifts when under enough pressure. We can turn away from kindness as easily as we once sat inside of it. I drowned in a newfound, and somewhat stealthy, impatience with the injustice of it all. Yet, I continued to let certain things unfold, even provoked them without conscious intent to do so. My desperation for peace at any cost turned to unbridled rage that I was swallowing, until it began distorting my authenticity. I took all my rage out on the ceiling, shouting at gods or deities who had overlooked me. Apparently, spiritual bypassing like that is more common than people like to admit aloud, but we do it to protect ourselves from further abuse. In situations like mine, it’s the safest way to release the anger. However, that restriction on expressing justified emotions is often enough why I was chosen by narcissistic people as supply. They thought I was submissive, or at least, they saw I gave others a hefty dose of bad behaviour allowances.

When I blocked them both on every platform of social contact, publicly and privately, what happened after was textbook. A dangerous level of obsession which led to stalking and character assassination, or the classic Cluster B driven smear campaign of my character to anyone weak-spined enough to listen. I’ll say this, if someone isn’t in the room to speak for themselves, maybe ask yourself why the hell you blindly believe the information in your ear. One day, it could be your name coming up that person’s throat. 

Isn’t it odd how they all do the exact same thing in the end? “I can’t be seen as I truly am so I’m going to destroy you instead.” This is the act of a child-mind. While narcissism and its development potentials is still understudied, I have (possibly divisive) theories of my own. It often felt like I was dealing with a child who was given either far too many allowances, or given none at all and was made to compete for attention with siblings. Either way, it seems like both of them were living in a desperate need for something no one was capable of giving them the way they wanted. The acted like kids who were raised as either objects of entertainment for others or ignored completely by them, and they want people like me to finish out that story differently. Sadly, I don’t write revisions like that,  your lore is your own. When people like me hold up mirrors in front of them, no wonder we become their enemy. 

If you have ever seen narcissistic collapse in someone, it is not a sight that brings about a smile. There was no joy or satisfaction of vengeance to be found. Instead, I watched as two very broken adults grappled with their own incapacity for change inside themselves. Instead of seeing these people’s fallout and laughing at their misfortune, as they had done to me, I felt sorry for them. 

I still do. There is no satisfaction in witnessing someone who cannot bear the truth suddenly be forced to see it. Watching someone cage their shame deeper inside delusions of their own grandiosity as their only method of surviving this world is devastating to see. It happens to all of us from time to time. Meaning making is how we survive being human, but ultimately, we must escape the infinity loop of stories we tell ourselves to get by. We have to live in the truth in order to heal. 

Still, in a small effort to not live my life like some bleeding heart, and have some sort of balance… when I see folks who remind me of my past run ins with Cluster Bs, and I see that their struggling to stand up for themselves, I try to remember: naivety is nothing more than innocence being manipulated by a scum bag who doesn’t know how to heal their own shit.

Society needs to stop socially shaming real victims. The only way to do that with 100% certainty is to stop shaming people in general. Let folks be what they are, over there (points into the void).

Your ego doesn’t need a boost off of anyone’s misfortune.

“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”

This is true, and if I had been incapable of looking at my own bull shit that year, I would never have come up for air. Drowning is easy, but living in the lowest frequency possible feels like being in a cage with the door left open. Fear, envy, and even hatred can fracture us, hold us by the throat so strongly we wish our opposition to disappear from the earth eternally. But what follows thoughts like that for most good folks is guilt, self forgiveness of our own darkness, and then… healing. Sometimes it doesn’t pass in that order, it can form a globular membrane around our psyche, move about like a blob of messy emotional energy, until one day your laughing with both feet on the ground again. You rarely notice how it faded, or the reasons it left, or when it really ended. Eventually, the therapy starts working, and your body has felt everything there was to feel about it, as dark and ugly as it might have been.

Because I had help with a well educated therapist, who did their best to keep researching for my sake, I was finally able to sit safely inside rage. I got out the heartbreak, didn’t close my eyes, and embraced all the things I thought had trapped me there. With a little hand holding, not from guidance, but from presence of a willing professional, I evolved.

Turns out there are no actual monsters in the darkness of our mind; only we think our thoughts. 

Pro Tip: Stop giving power to the untouchable demons in others when the most painful battle actually dwells in the veins you inherited from the family tree. 

zora neale hurston

"Gods always behave like the people who make them." 

This shouldn’t delight me as much as it does, but this is the truest and most relatable quote on this page for me. I write historical and mythology inspired fiction, but in my research of women rewriting folklore, I realised that it’s an ongoing trend because we are finally tearing apart the past. I desperately want this world to see that there is a gigantic glaring = sign between us and our gods. Something akin to synonymousness.

God = Us

We = God

We are only as great as the way we wield the power we have over others. Be it age, parenthood, career, education, or anything else that exists in a form of hierarchy, we are only as profound as how we leave people feeling in our wake. As an agnostic, I even question the new aged idea of collective consciousness, but it makes more sense than other theories if I’m honest. Since science can explain it to some degree, I guess I can get behind it.

While I can’t speak for men, nor do I view them as a moral/immoral hive-mind, I feel like it must be therapeutic in some sense for men to witness the destruction of gods made in their image too. Such a small group of people wrote stories bigger than themselves, then watched as their governments place their books on pedestals, and asked all mankind to live up to idealised marble and storybooks.

Now, women are knocking these statues to the ground alongside the men who are equally taking their hammers and trying to break each other out of stone prisons. (Hello anti-manosphere podcasters. I see you.)

Turns out humanity was never made of clay. Some men are kind, some are not, but I do fear there are still far too many who have forgotten they are made of the same flesh and blood as a woman.

If she is his mother, then it is a double entendre of a sentiment.

“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”

The hardest part of overcoming an enmeshed family structure is doing so without offending and disrupting the entire world you were born of. It may seem counterproductive to suggest that was my goal for the last several years.

I realised at some point it would only make me behave as the same outdated patriarchy I claim to denounce. To tell my mother, grandmother, or aunts, you are living poorly and what you believe is wrong… I mean, I may as well be an old man. Be quiet so I can teach you that my opinions are more correct than yours. That kind of disrespect is gross to me, but even in 2026, it’s sadly common.

As long as they do not attempt to obstruct, control, or do harm, everyone can live and believe what they want. Even if you think their nuts or dead wrong. The problem arrises when you come from a family that feels entitled to dictate to you their politics, sociology, and religion as if you are somehow misinformed and must be educated. I have seen it go so far as to evoke a type of shaming ritual; seen people’s own family mock them into belief submission. Weird behaviour.

This quote doesn’t really suggest anything about what I’ve said here, (ADHD be like that) but what it does suggest, is that family can unintentionally destroy your truth, confidence, and hold your free will of sharing your ideas hostage, all while they convince themselves it was out of love and concern for you instead of what it really is.

Controlling the narrative.

Again, love and respect do not live at the end of a leash. Gotta let people be who they are.

carl sagan

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

I fully believe Sagan was beyond his time intellectually. By pointing out our humble position in the vast cosmic arena, as he puts it, Sagan brought so many things in me down to the kneecap. Religion, politics, and the many silent social pleasantry agreements humans have with one another; all of it was made to look unimportant after hearing this speech. Pale Blue Dot is a remarkable use of language. It will likely always be my favourite speech. Sagan frames humanity's pain and struggle as being tucked warmly beside our euphoric love and joy.

This entire speech swells in my chest every time I hear it. There is something almost unavoidably emotional about it. It is the ultimate reminder that humanity is young; in comparison to the expanse of the cosmos, we are still kinda like kids in this universe. (Yes, I just said I’m against infantilization… two things can be true at the same time. Treatment versus symbolism.) Human’s often seem to me like the pre-teens of the galaxy, playing like titans or small gods over one another. We build massive industries where animals are bought and sold as property, though, in a horrific twist on reality, some are treating other humans in the same way. (Epstein files reference, which too many folks ‘forgot’ about too quickly for my sanity, but alas.)

bell hooks

“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.”

No notes.

Until we all walk away from an outdated system created and run by broken men, it will continue to distort our reality in its favour.

Basically, the entire species needs a major French Revolution. But who am I to suggest such a violent thing.

“Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognise your power – not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist.”

People used to call my mother Sandra D. She was always beautiful and if we know anything about beauty, it can be both used as a powerful tool or a weapon, both by that person or against them. My mother often overlooked her beauty and found it a burden because of her sensitive demeanour. She felt shame around it and rarely got to enjoy it in full. As with most beautiful women in this world, unfortunately.

I thank my mother for how she left certain people behind who treated her poorly, even if it took her a while to see it plainly. No matter our misunderstandings in my youth, I am lucky and grateful she held herself to a higher standard of respect as a woman and single mother. She imbedded that small sliver of self respect in me as well.

Unfortunately, no matter how many good examples are set, nothing can prepare a person for a narcissist. When the most broken types of people target you or aim to destroy your very essence as a soul, there is nothing to prepare anyone for such a “spiritual” battle. For me, instead of physical beauty, this poor treatment came about when I started to share my writing. People would suddenly turn on me, even folks I wasn’t close to. There were rumours about my mental health, how I’m a bitch, or that I’m fake, most of which I only heard about later. Granted, sometimes, I was a bitch. (Oh well.)

Battling any type of Cluster B personality is not about confidence, it is truly about energetic and emotional stamina. You must know yourself deeply to survive it once you get dragged in. To not submit to their projections of you is a feat. In that, garnering the courage to remove yourself from harmful environments and groups of people willing to listen to gossip and don’t think for themselves, it is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to accept about humanity.

So many people severely underestimate their level of discernment, and overestimate their level of intuition.