A Concept In My Head That Been Rolling Around A Lot:

A concept in my head that been rolling around a lot:

Hanahaki, but instead of it being triggered by unrequited love, it's triggered because all the love you have for a person turns inwards because you're too afraid to show it.

So it kills you, not because someone doesn't love you back, but because you don't let it out and all that love you have stored, that could grow into something beautiful, turns on you and turns your insides beautiful.

Love is growth, and without any place for it to grow outside, it grows in. If you confess, reciprocated or not, the disease goes away because it's no longer trapped. It gives self-destruction a new meaning.

Does anyone else picture a Destiel small town au while listening to this song?

I remember we were driving, driving in your car Speed so fast, I felt like I was drunk City lights lay out before us And your arm felt nice wrapped ‘round my shoulder And I had a feeling that I belonged I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone

FAST CAR, TRACY CHAPMAN

Women have always been a part of our stories, although mostly got treated as villains worthy of punishment.

Don’t believe me? Let’s start with Lilith whose crime was refusing to submit to Adam’s will, asking to be treated as the equal she was. Or perhaps I should mention Eve who often gets blamed for the banishment from paradise, however Adam also ate from the forbidden fruit, yet nobody ever judges him, just Eve.

Maybe we should move towards the Greek tradition. Nowadays certain retellings about Persephone make a villain of Demeter. Why does the only way that story gets told now is by villainizing the mother who just wanted to find her child? Sound familiar? Unforgiving for the abduction of her daughter, she took away all crops and threatened to barren the earth as punishment for her loss while she kept looking with Hekate’s help. Demeter was in such uproar that it forced Zeus’ hand and made him; the king of the gods; go down into the underworld to bring Persephone back with her mother.

What about Aphrodite? Usually reduced to vain and envious, the story of her infidelity to Hephaestus often gets remembered, yet most that condemn the affair tend to forget that he was the one who demanded for her hand, that she didn’t want him and it was Zeus who practically sold her to him.

Perhaps we could talk about Alcippe who was attacked by one of Poseidon’s sons and when her father killed the perpetrator, he was the one put to trial, for seeking justice for his daughter. On the note of Poseidon, let’s not forget that he cursed Pasiphae to lay with the bull and bear the minotaur in payment not for a crime she committed but for her husband’s crime, she was punished for a man’s actions. What about Medusa? She was assaulted by Neptune inside Minerva’s temple and then punished for his actions; or perhaps a blessing to make sure no other man would ever touch her without consent.

Helen of Sparta (yes, Sparta and not Troy) was abducted not once but twice, first by Theseus and later by Paris, however she usually is the one getting blamed for the Trojan war.

The disregard and mistreatment of women are not new but they aren’t old news either. Mothers searching for their children get judged and women forced into roles they never asked for themselves get criticized, but how would we feel? It’s not okay that these stories, these myths can represent the experience of so many women nowadays.