Coming to terms with my childhood has meant, also, coming to terms with a fearfully complicated mess of traumatic experiences that share a common attribute: they're all pertaining to creativity in some way.

In childhood I couldn't understand it. My parents, especially my mother, vaunted the arts and permitted my sibling and me to read widely and learn to appreciate the gifts of Western culture—but holy heck did she not want her kids to daydream about becoming artists or musicians or anything weird and bohemian like that. When Frisk changed their major to history in college, our mom was peeved about it, sputtering about the waste of an education. She wanted us to be "successful" in a vaguely defined way that excluded the arts.

It occurs to me that she might have had personal experiences to draw upon, maybe even tragic ones. She was a leftist in Chile under Allende, and the reactionaries maybe scythed down some of her artistic friends, people we never heard about because our mom simply didn't talk about those days.

~Chara of Pnictogen

It's Father's Day, we've been busy, but I feel as though I've hardly had any time to think about fathers. I've had a very difficult relationship with multiple fathers...we all have.

I don't know exactly what looms between Asgore and me. The whole issue of just what went down between myself, Asgore, Toriel, everyone...it's been too painful, too murky. And I suspect that resolution of the conflict is contigent upon a whole mess of other conflicts.

Monophylos Fortikos is doing what they can to fill the role, for now. I suppose Mono is a solider father figure than, well, Emiya Kiritsugu for example.

~Chara of Pnictogen

Processing child abuse has inflicted a number of very irritating behavioral patterns on us, patterns we're acutely aware of yet have been too weak or fuddled to avoid. Among the most annoying and heartbreaking is...how do I put this? we now have painful memories about stationery.

I went through a period of youthful explosion of interest in self-organization that achieved NOTHING, but at least I got a lot of pencil cups and little plastic clips I never used for anything. I'd have big plans for the system I was going to impose on myself, only to be undone by my erratic behavior.

~Chara of Pnictogen

I have tried to remember...the before-time. So far I can't. We can't. Going backwards, our sense of continuous memory craps out around 1981. There are curious lacunae and details that don't quite make sense. I thought I remembered watching a lunar eclipse in December 1979, for a long time, but no such eclipse exists; the nearest match is 1982. I distinctly remember news of the Pope getting shot in 1981, but not Reagan getting shot a few months earlier.

My RL parents, in their frequent arguments, occasionally alluded to past events that I should have remembered. Apparently I was injured in some sort of...incident that my mother held over my father's head for long afterwards, a la The Shining. Frisk, who's about two and a half years older, ought to remember more but I think they'd rather not.

What am I even trying to recall? If I could put it into the best words I have...I suppose I'd like to remember if I was happy at some point. I remember mostly being confused and baffled by the world, not hopeful or trusting. Surely there was some time, some extremely youthful time, when I experienced what "normal" children supposedly experience, the innocence that all the reactionaries scream about protecting. Those people's notions of childhood are a mystery to me because I cannot remember ever feeling that way.

But I must have...right? Nobody is born miserable, right?

~Chara of Pnictogen