Mistletoe - it's on your head!

[andcontrarywise]

*You're walking along, doing you're business... enjoying the season, or getting decapitated or however you deal with December, and then you have a hat.

It's a lovely, well made top hat that seems to fit perfectly.

The hatband is a wreath of mistletoe.

You're welcome.*

((I was told to make a mistletoe post, okay.))

Comments

[needsahandjob]

I knew I shouldn't have bothered today.

[mind_over_metal]

*not smiling, but his expression is one of solid confidence and faith*

Yes.

[needsahandjob]

For all you know, I could turn around and stab someone with it. I'm dangerous, you see, a risk to us all.

[mind_over_metal]

Julian, if there's anyone among us who's a risk to us all, it's me. But sometimes we have no choice but to trust. And sometimes we do have other choices, but we choose to trust anyways.

[needsahandjob]

You're not even listening to me.

[mind_over_metal]

Then tell me, Julian. Convince me. What is this danger that I should be aware of?

[needsahandjob]

You're a telepath. You know what I did. It doesn't even matter if it was the only thing to be done, she's still dead isn't she?

[mind_over_metal]

Yes, she is. You still haven't convinced me.

[needsahandjob]

What, is this when you convince me of how open minded you are? I don't care. The only reason I went out at all today is because I hate that room too.

[mind_over_metal]

You said that I wasn't listening. So I'm saying that you should tell me everything that I should be hearing. That's all. If you want someone open-minded, I'd suggest going elsewhere, because I'm notoriously hard-headed. But what I can do is challenge you to tell me something that I haven't heard before. Because... you're not alone, Julian. In what you're going through.

[needsahandjob]

And what do you think I'm going through.

[mind_over_metal]

...well, to start out with, I know that you're in a lot of pain. I'm not talking emotions or mental conditions or anything, just... your body. Always. You do an impressive job of hiding it, and most people would never know. But it's tiring. Very tiring. None of which is helped by the fact that you haven't been sleeping or eating well. Maybe there are some things that could help, maybe not. There's always drugs, but the payoff of relief versus the side effects doesn't end up being worth it, particularly when it's a constant thing. And it's not fair that your life has ended up like this, because this is no way to live.

[mind_over_metal]

You're also very depressed. Which is related, since it affects how you take care of yourself. Or don't, as the case may be. It's a tricky condition. It... changes you, the same way any other illness changes you. Except that you can't feed this one chicken soup and have it be gone in a couple of weeks. It can make it difficult for other people to deal with you, which is hard, because you don't even know how to deal with yourself like this. It's like you don't even know yourself, but at the same time, it can be impossible to remember how things used to be or imagine that things will ever be anything different.

[mind_over_metal]

-Julian, just hear me out, depression, clinical depression, is not how you feel, it's what's happening in your brain. The term is ambiguous, which helps no one. There's being depressed in the sense of feeling sad, and then there's being depressed in the sense of your brain physiologically malfunctioning. It's taken medical science, to say nothing of society, many years to reach that understanding. Years beyond where I've come from, but what I've read here aligns with what I've been experiencing from other people for my entire life.

[mind_over_metal]

Most people can't go through life, particularly lives like ours, without getting at least a little broken. But broken things can be fixed. And we can't heal until we acknowledge that brokenness. We won't be the same as before, but we shouldn't be.

[mind_over_metal]

You've thought about killing yourself. You've decided not to. There isn't an awful lot keeping you from doing it, but you've decided not to. Still, it's always there. That edge.