Magic Under Construction: TOMU #496
Mar. 30th, 2011 12:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinStarted: 6:00 a.m., 3/30/2011
Status: In progress.
Last updated: 2 a.m.
Word Count: ~5300
Hours writing: 2.75
Note: This is what will be the last chapter of the first volume of Tales of MU. It's intended to do three things. Two of those things are to wrap up the first year and set the stage for the second year, but more so than either of those is the third thing: being a bridge from "now" to "then".
[Another hour of writing. Holy shit, I'm just going to preserve the word count from the past updates: 2400, 3600, 5300. 5300 words in under three hours of writing. Obviously a lot of time has passed in between the hour-long spurts of writing, but that's because my body's pretty messed up right now. Spirit is willing, flesh is weak.]
Callahan showed up at the salle on Thursday wearing an eyepatch. She said she had a special prize for the first person who asked her what happened.
Nobody took her up on it that I saw.
She seemed to be in a bad mood, but it was hard to say since most of the time she seemed to be both incredibly pissed off and having the time of her life. It was also hard to say if the speed and directness with which she got down to business was part of her mood, or part of the curriculum... she'd made it clear in our previous classes that we'd reached a sort of tipping point and the pace was going to pick up.
She started calling names and setting people to exercises and moved around the room with an efficiency she'd never shown before. I
Callahan's style of teaching had never exactly been "no-nonsense", though her threatening manner could give you the impression it was. The thing was, there's a difference between "no-nonsense" and "in your face". Nonsense can get in your face pretty easily. It's not necessarily big on personal space.
"I'm surprised to see you're still with us, Emo Kid," she said to me at one point during the class.
"I told you I'd be here and ready to learn," I said.
"Well, at least I know your weekend was worse than mine," she said. Cold prickles ran down my spine as another interpretation of her opening line presented itself in my mind: still with us. Had she had some reason to think I'd be gone after the past weekend?
"Why do you say that?" I asked her. Not "How do you know?", which was the first thing that popped into my head but which didn't seem to be able to pop out of my mouth.
"Because your life sucks," she said. "Keep it up. The learning, not the sucking."
Those were the only words she had for me personally during the class, apart from a few shouted directions. By next Tuesday, she'd had her eye regenerated or otherwise taken care of, if there'd ever been anything wrong underneath the patch at all.
The next day was my third session with Teddi.
"I have a note here to remind you to talk about Puddy," she said.
"Puddy," I repeated. "I was kind of hoping you would have forgotten about that."
"Not a chance," she said. "If you don't want to talk about Puddy, we can talk about why you don't want to."
"What if I don't want to talk about that?"
"Then there is going to come a point when there's no longer any purpose in you being here," Teddi said. "I'm sorry to put it so bluntly, but I know you're predisposed to think in those terms. We're not there yet, and there's nothing unusual in taking time and a few sessions to really open up... but, well, it's an active process. You have to participate. You have to open. I can reach out all I want, but it won't do any good if you don't reach back."
I sighed.
"Do you know who Puddy is?" I asked. I wasn't sure which answer I was hoping for here. If she did, then maybe I wouldn't have to go into things as deeply. If she didn't, then maybe I could spend more time working my way up to the real issues. Not that I wanted to stall, exactly... more like build up speed.
"Who is she to you?" Teddi asked.
"Well... she was my roommate," I said. "And I suppose she was my friend, in some ways. I mean, in a formal sort of way. I don't think she was actually friendly to me. But she called herself my friend, and I felt... well, that meant something. It probably sounds stupid to say that I let her treat me like shit because she was my friend. I mean, it would be one thing if we had a whole big history together where she'd earned some kind of trust or slack and then abused it, but I literally just met her at the start of the semester."
"That sort of thing is really not uncommon," Teddi said. "The mind contains concepts, labels that we use for relating to the world around us, and the people in it. Even with people you've known for years, there are limits to how well you can 'know' them. So you sort them into boxes. Someone who gets labeled 'friend'... they are a friend, emotionally. You'll react to them through that filter."
"There's probably more to it than that," I said. "I mean... well, I didn't have a lot of friends growing up. After I, you know, turned, I didn't have any, but it wasn't like I lost friends. It was like I went from not having any friends to having no friends, if that makes sense."
"You're talking about active animosity," Teddi said. "People treated you differently."
"Yeah," I said. "They were different people, but it was definitely a different reaction. I went from being the weird quiet kid to being the scary dangerous one."
"Were you lonely?" Teddi asked. "Before that, I mean."
"I was pretty happy as a kid. Content," I said. "I had my imagination, and I had my mother. On some level I sort of labeled everybody in my class at school as being my friends. I saw them every weekday. We did things together... at school. I wasn't completely shunned, at any level that I could tell. Though I've never exactly been the most socially aware person. I was just starting to get the picture before I left my old school."
"What picture was that?"
"That the other kids... they did stuff together outside of class," I said. "They hung out. They shared secrets that weren't the property of the playground. I was tolerated, but not liked. At least, that's how it seemed to me later on when I thought back on it... but I also thought that I'd go back to that in a heartbeat. It was comfortable, at least."
"It can be a bit of a double-bind," Teddi said. "If you're not a social person, I mean. If you don't learn to recognize the cues early on, you don't know when you're missing them."
"Well, lucky for me, people aren't very subtle about how they feel about me these days," I said. "Anyway, Puddy seemed friendly enough, when I first met her."
"Did she?"
"Well, she kind of pressured me into telling her my racial background," I said. "I hadn't exactly planned on doing that. Though maybe it wasn't realistic to expect to keep it a secret."
"Realistic or not, it was your decision," Teddi said. "What sort of pressure did she use?"
"Nothing bad, then," I said. "She wasn't violent about it. She just said that I should trust her... really, I think it was my eagerness to have a friend, to be a friend."
"She took advantage of that?"
"I don't know if I'd put it that way," I said. Why was I defending Puddy? I thought I was just trying to be accurate, but it came out like I was trying to convince myself she wasn't all that bad. "I mean, okay, yes, she benefited from it, but it's not like she knew my background, or planned to have a roommate who would be a pushover."
As soon as I said it, I realized that Puddy had planned exactly that. She couldn't have known about my friendless years, or my submissive streak... but she'd set about establishing dominance anyway. I doubted Puddy thought of people in terms of dominant and submissive, or outgoing and retiring, as personality traits or states. These things were actions to her. Dominate, or be dominated... be big and loud or risk fading into the background.
"You look like you don't quite believe what you're saying," Teddi said. "Would you like to share your thoughts?"
"Puddy's goal is to be the 'big dog'," I said. "It's like she's always got to be the most important person, the leader, the center of attention. She's not happy if she doesn't feel like the biggest, baddest, and strongest person in the room. She was learning how to trigger my wards from the beginning, but after she learned what I was... well, she really kind of swung from hot to cold, you know? Like she was afraid of me, but that just made her push me harder."
"Can you give me an example?"
"I woke up and she was holding a pillow over me," I said. "I mean, over my face. She tried to laugh it off... I don't think she was actually trying to kill me, but I don't think it was just a joke, either. She waited until I was awake to start pressing down. I think she wanted to see what I would do... how I would react. I guess to see if I was a threat.."
"How did you react, then?"
"I panicked... flailed around. I lit up a little, but that was involuntary," I said. "And after she let me up, I yelled a bunch but I didn't exactly stand my ground. I still did what she said. Things just got worse from there."
When I'd decided to talk about Puddy at the end of my last session, I'd thought that it might give Teddi some useful background on where I was now, and that in some nebulous way it would help me work through some non-specific issues... I hadn't really thought about what I would say or how it would help me. I didn't really know what my issues were.
But once I got moving, I ended up telling her about the hitting that happened when I'd tried to switch the burned pillow back from my own, Puddy's attempts at "leadership" of the cluster of people that formed around us, the disastrous pizza night... we were just getting to Barley when we ran out of time.
Spilling everything about Puddy, and the way she'd made me feel... even without a clear agenda, it did help. Not only did I feel better about the experiences, after the initial discomfort of talking about them, but I felt closer to Teddi afterwards. She didn't know me. She'd spent less time in my company than Puddy had. But she knew these things about me, she knew about the things I'd gone through.
It wasn't like I'd never told anyone about Puddy before. Amaranth knew. But... in some ways it was good to have a near-stranger to talk to.
Outside of the healing sessions, it seemed like there was a shift going on in all of my classes that mirrored the increased pace in mixed melee on an intellectual plane. Part of it might have come from my own outlook changing, though I knew that the semester really was gathering speed. The instructors in my more complicated classes... the labs and my logic class... started to give both more work and more complicated work. Assignments started having more requirements and fewer instructions.
After mid-terms, we even got past the basic stuff in thaumatology and I had to start doing reading in order to know what Goldman was talking about.
When the homework really started to pile up for the first time I wondered how I would cope with all of it on top of everything else in my life, but in the end the fact that I had to deal with it meant that there was less of "everything else in my life". Well, maybe that's not giving myself enough credit... I could have ignored it. Other people did. I overheard Trina talking on the mirror to Gladys about how badly her grades were slipping, starting around the middle of the term. Did she do anything different in response to this? Not that I could tell. She treated college as a strictly social arena and wondered why her grades didn't reflect her general awesomeness.
That wasn't to say that college ever became a purely academic environment for me during my freshman year. I was still dating three people. Sooni still managed to seriously distract me on at least a weekly basis, at least through the end of the first semester. I felt conflicted about her... I'd become so confident about my decision to shut Puddy and my father of my life.
I did completely yield to the idea that he was my father, after the conversation with Art Kent. That didn't mean I felt any differently towards him. He couldn't be trusted to do anything except what he pleased, and to try to frame what he wanted in terms that made it seem like he was on my side. At his most charming he'd never managed to conceal his basic inherent creepiness, with the slaughter imagery and the talk of humanity as insects.
He didn't come back into my dreams for some time after the night where he'd said he would leave me alone for a while. I figured he was afraid that if he pushed me I'd get serious about shutting him out. He didn't know that I already was... after Teddi's suggestion, I started working on waking myself up whenever I realized I was dreaming. Well, not quite every time... some dreams were worth staying in. But his dreams were always very lucid, so I figured that as long as I had some practice flexing the right "muscles" I'd be able to break out of them.
It took some effort, but when he showed up a couple of weeks after midterms I was able to throw him out, or throw myself out. The fact that I could feel him actively resisting my attempts to wake up only underscored how little regard he had for me and my wishes. It made it that much easier the next time.
Dealing with Sooni was more difficult. I knew she meant well, deep down inside... though it really was very deep. But we did have some common interests. I couldn't say that she added nothing to my life.
Especially since the busier I got and the more pressure I felt in my classes, the more my earlier dreams of her recurred. They'd disappeared around the time I learned just how naive Sooni was, sexually, but my sleeping mind seemed to think that her and her giant sandals of doom were the perfect metaphor for whatever else was stressing me out at the moment. I felt guilty about these dreams, but there was so little feeling of control in them that I wasn't able to wake myself up from them or stop them. I would have felt even more guilty dreaming about someone who I'd pointedly cut out of my life.
The other downside to erotic nightmares as a stress management technique was that the more I had them, the less comfortable Two was sharing a room with me. After the night I gave myself a screaming orgasm so intense that it woke me up, she became the most enthusiastic proponent of the suite idea for next year.
At the semester break, she officially became Dee's roommate again. I didn't take it personally. They suited each other better. They were both quiet. Neither of them had an active sex life, Two being asexual and Dee being uninterested in taking on any other lovers while she was on the surface. Two's crying spells and insomnia... the main reasons she and Dee had split in the first place... had been mostly resolved, and Dee's experience guiding her in meditation meant she could be more help than I or Amaranth could when Two did wake up in the middle of the night.
The sticking point with Sooni wasn't how she treated me... that had become better over time, though it wasn't ever perfect. It was how she treated her nekoyokai "friends", and even more, the fact that she had them. Whether it was more economically enforced indentured servitude or a caste system or what, it was still little more than slavery. That she didn't know better wasn't really any excuse. It didn't make the lives of her companions any better.
But at the same time, I couldn't say that any of the three of them didn't want to be at MU. Maliko was scarily devoted to Sooni. Kai wanted the chance to be educated. Suzi had a bullying streak in her that still came out from time to time, especially when she was with Maliko... but she alone among the three seemed to be genuinely making friends outside their original circle.
In the end I decided that it couldn't be my job to inspire Sooni to change. I wouldn't seek out her company or her friendship, but whenever she wasn't actively being awful I wouldn't spurn it, either.
Was I cutting her slack because found her attractive? The thought troubled me from time to time, but I didn't think it was the case. I wasn't actively or consciously lusting after her any more. I had seen Sooni at her most confused and vulnerable, the night of our "date"... I think that made me more disposed to like her even as it made me less disposed to "like" her. Sooni had attacked me, but Puddy had beat me. They were both violent assaults, but somehow the distinction mattered.
I talked to Teddi about this and didn't make much progress in sorting out how I felt about Sooni, or what to do about her. We ended up drifting apart by default as we both got busier. I couldn't say if she was as involved with her classwork as I was with mine, but she did stick with the clothing design idea long enough for it to pay off... though it was really more of a costume design business than anything else.
I had to admit I'd been wrong to try to steer her away from that. I thought her fashion ideas were good, but people were apparently willing to pay serious coin for her character outfits. She got the ball rolling by putting some of her older Pretty Neko outfits up for sale on a tapestry.
My involvement in the project was practically non-existent. I started helping her make a weave site because I had, in fact, agreed to do that... but I only had the bare bones of it started before Kai stepped in and took over, to my relief... I had the impression she'd started learning by watching me, but she was a quick study. I would bet she also handled the business side of the business... I doubted Sooni had anything like a head for that.
Apparently they did well enough that Sooni either impressed her parents into reinstating her glamour allowance or she could afford to pay for it herself, because her previous flawless appearance was back well before winter break. She ended up completely changing her schedule for the spring semester at the last minute... during registration she'd contrived to be in three of the same classes as me, her best friend and rival, but she was so caught up in the costume business that she switched to a schedule heavy on glamour and design courses. She officially changed her major to that, keeping a minor in applied enchantment.
I kept my commitment to continue to do my best in mixed melee. The format we'd adopted, of working in small groups and critiquing each other, had its advantages and disadvantages for me. On the one hand, it suited me to have a more analytical approach, where I was fighting some of the time and standing back and thinking about what I'd done and what I was seeing other times. On the other hand, there was the inescapable social component.
Being one of the less capable fighters in most of the groups I cycled through didn't do wonders for my confidence, when it came to giving criticism or even encouragement... and what Amaranth called my "two volumes" problem came up more than once. There were days where I pretty much had to get myself worked up just to speak up. Amaranth wouldn't have been impressed, but Callahan was... letting loose verbally seemed to leave me better prepared to cut loose physically.
Teddi didn't push me on the journal thing, since I was making progress without it. No matter how many times that she told me it wasn't a homework assignment, though, I had a hard time letting go of it. It bothered me that I wasn't able to just sit down and write. I couldn't say that I'd ever been a great writer, but I had been a writer of some sort during high school and now I was finding it hard to sit down and even compose my thoughts about what was happening to me from day to day.
Teddi told me not to worry about it, but after we established that it wasn't the inability to write the journals in particular that troubled me she didn't mind talking about it.
"If it bothers you, then it's a problem," Teddi said. "Are you having trouble with papers for your classes, too?"
"No," I said. "Well, sometimes finding the time to myself for them... but I manage that. I just have a hard time getting going when I sit down to write in the journal. And when I do... well, I know nobody's necessarily going to read it but me, but I find myself feeling like there's a lot of context missing when I try to describe what I'm feeling."
"Then wouldn't the solution be to describe the context?"
"Yeah, but... I mean, that would basically mean going back to the start of the year," I said. "Going back over everything I've been through."
"Is that something that gives you pause?"
"Well, not really," I said. "I mean, I wouldn't want to live through a lot of it again, but that doesn't mean I can't think about it, and that means I should be able to write about it. At that point, though, isn't it kind of past a journal and straying into an autobiography?"
"Well, like you said: you're the only one who has to read it," she said. "It can be whatever you want."
"The other thing is... it would be as much about the thoughts and emotions that were in my head as the things that happened," I said. "I'm not really sure how to write that."
"What do you mean?"
"Well... okay, um, this is going to be kind of personal," I said, blushing as I realized what the first example that had popped into my head was. But once it was there, it was so big and obvious and such a perfect example of the difficulty of writing about the past months that I couldn't think of anything else.
"That isn't ever going to be a problem for me, and I hope it won't be one for you," Teddi said.
"Well, I'd never... I was a virgin when I came here," I said. "And the first time I, um... you know... had an orgasm... first times... I had no idea what was happening. It was like I didn't have any frame of reference for what I was feeling. I could try to describe how it felt and what was running through my head, but... how do I write about that? Obviously it would be past tense, because I'm recording something that happened weeks ago... but then... well, from the perspective I'm writing it, I do know what happened."
"Your concern is about tenses?"
"It's about honesty," I said. "Emotional honesty, I guess. I mean, if I'm going to do this right... and I know you're going to tell me that there isn't a right or wrong way to do it, but if I'm not doing it in a way that makes sense to me then it isn't right... I'd need it to capture the way I felt in that moment. You know?"
"That makes sense," Teddi said. "Do you think talking your way through the problem some more might help you get around that block?"
"I guess. Maybe... yeah," I said. In fact, in putting it into words and saying it out loud, I felt like I was getting closer to it.
"It seems to me like you're coming at this from the point of view of a writer more so than a journalist," she said. "A storyteller, I mean."
"Well, all the writing I've done in my life so far has either been fiction or course work," I said. "And I can't really view myself as an academic subject, you know? This is my story we're talking about."
"So let's talk about it."
And we did. I left that session feeling a little more confident of my ability to write about what I'd gone through... it seemed like the most emotionally truthful way to do it would be to use past tense, but keep things mostly centered in the "present" of the story rather than on how things looked in hindsight.
I gave it a try that evening, writing out a short account of my arrival at MU. It was... well, it was kind of startling to recall how painfully awkward my first day was. It wasn't like I was Ms. Suave these days, but remembering the feeling of burning with embarrassment at having walked into the nexus thinking it was Harlowe's front door... and all the other minor missteps... well, I wondered how I'd ever managed to apply to a school or get on a coach by myself.
"I suspect you did what you had to," Teddi said when I shared that with her in my next session. "Sometimes we do things that seem impossible to us because the alternative is even harder."
"It seems like a huge overreaction to me now," I said. "Though it's not like I'm not prone to those... still, I can't imagine beating myself up quite that much for stopping on the wrong floor these days."
"Are you celebrating your progress or castigating your past self?" she asked.
"I don't really think I'm castigating," I said. "I'm not like, 'Oh, how could I be so stupid?' or anything... except on maybe on a practical level. I'm wondering how I functioned."
"As best as you could, I would bet," Teddi said. "You know, I was ready to suggest you give up on the journal-writing, but I suspect this will be good for you in the long run. You seem to be very centered in the present."
"Isn't that a good thing?" I asked. "I mean, if I were all stuck in the past, wouldn't you be telling me to live in the moment?"
"Very possibly," Teddi said. "But I wouldn't rate the past, present, or future as a better place than the others to be 'all stuck in'. A healthy perspective integrates all three."
"It's not like I never think about the past," I said. "I mean, I can't really get away from it, can I?"
"Well, there's thinking and there's thinking," Teddi said. "I've got the sense that you deal with things by thinking them through, sometimes at a level that approaches excessive... but when it comes to the past, it seems like you're more bounded by feelings than thoughts. When you 'think' about mistakes you've made in the past, it's really the feeling that comes up, and your 'thought' is a response to that. Did you really think that you were a loser for turning off on the wrong floor your first day, or did you feel like a loser and give that feeling shape as a thought?"
"I suppose it's more the latter," I said. "I mean, when I wrote it out... or when I try to talk about it... I really can't explain why I feel that way, and I can think of all kinds of reasons why it's silly. I still feel it, though."
"Feelings happen," Teddi said. "They aren't everything, though. What you think about your feelings... how you think about them... and what you do about them are important, too."
"It's funny... Amaranth and Steff told me that I think too much," I said.
"I believe I know what they meant. Words are imprecise for dealing with these things," Teddi said. "Telepaths have a 'language' to describe thought processes that we've been sadly remiss in translating into verbal terms, probably because we usually don't need to... I can really empathize with you struggling to put things into words, because I usually don't have to. Anyway, just as it's not intrinsically better to dwell exclusively in the past or the present, thought isn't necessarily superior to feeling. It's possible to be trapped in a circle of thought. I wouldn't call that 'thinking too much', though... it's more like 'thinking not enough, over and over again'."
"Words really aren't precise for this," I said. "I had a thought one time about talking about emotions as a way of processing them... the things I feel seem so big and complicated, and words are by definition limited. I mean, that's what 'definition' means, right? Limitation. Boundary."
"I'd never realized that, but I suppose you're right," Teddi said. "De-finite."
"So... when you put what you're feeling into words, you have to shrink it down to fit," I said. "Talking about feelings doesn't just help you make sense of what you're feeling, it helps it make sense in the first place."
"That's very perceptive," Teddi said. "And it's among the reasons why I think this journaling project... or autobiography, if you prefer... could be good for you. You're becoming a lot more articulate when talking about your emotions, you know."
"I just chalked that up to practice."
"I'm sure that's part of it," Teddi said. "Looking for single causes is tempting in this profession, but it's important to remember that people and life are both complicated. For instance, your grandmother did you no favors with regards to your socialization, but that doesn't mean you'd be a social butterfly if not for her."
"Yeah," I said. "I guess... to be honest... my mother didn't really push me towards socializing, either. But she did a lot more for my confidence."
[Another 45 minutes-ish of work. There was a brief phone-based interruption. Still, with another ~1200 words to show for it I figured it's worth an update. I'm still just letting things spill out; probably won't go back to fill in the gaps until the last update. But the thing's definitely starting to take shape in the direction I want it to.]
Callahan showed up at the salle on Thursday wearing an eyepatch. She said she had a special prize for the first person who asked her what happened.
Nobody took her up on it that I saw.
She seemed to be in a bad mood, but it was hard to say since most of the time she seemed to be both incredibly pissed off and having the time of her life. It was also hard to say if the speed and directness with which she got down to business was part of her mood, or part of the curriculum... she'd made it clear in our previous classes that we'd reached a sort of tipping point and the pace was going to pick up.
She started calling names and setting people to exercises and moved around the room with an efficiency she'd never shown before. I
Callahan's style of teaching had never exactly been "no-nonsense", though her threatening manner could give you the impression it was. The thing was, there's a difference between "no-nonsense" and "in your face". Nonsense can get in your face pretty easily. It's not necessarily big on personal space.
"I'm surprised to see you're still with us, Emo Kid," she said to me at one point during the class.
"I told you I'd be here and ready to learn," I said.
"Well, at least I know your weekend was worse than mine," she said. Cold prickles ran down my spine as another interpretation of her opening line presented itself in my mind. Still with us.
"Why do you say that?" I asked her. Not "How do you know?", which was the first thing that popped into my head but which didn't seem to be able to pop out of my mouth.
"Because your life sucks," she said. "Keep it up. The learning, not the sucking."
Those were the only words she had for me personally during the class []
[]
"I have a note here to remind you to talk about Puddy," Teddy said.
"Puddy," I repeated. "I was kind of hoping you would have forgotten about that."
"Not a chance," she said. "If you don't want to talk about Puddy, we can talk about why you don't want to."
"What if I don't want to talk about that?"
"Then there is going to come a point when there's no longer any purpose in you being here," Teddi said. "I'm sorry to put it so bluntly, but I know you're predisposed to think in those terms. We're not there yet, and there's nothing unusual in taking time and a few sessions to really open up... but, well, it's an active process. You have to participate. You have to open. I can reach out all I want, but it won't do any good if you don't reach back."
I sighed.
"Do you know who Puddy is?" I asked. I wasn't sure which answer I was hoping for here. If she did, then maybe I wouldn't have to go into things as deeply. If she didn't, then maybe I could spend more time working my way up to the real issues. Not that I wanted to stall, exactly... more like build up speed.
"Who is she to you?" Teddi asked.
"Well... she was my roommate," I said. "And I suppose she was my friend, in some ways. I mean, in a formal sort of way. I don't think she was actually friendly to me. But she called herself my friend, and I felt... well, that meant something. It probably sounds stupid to say that I let her treat me like shit because she was my friend. I mean, it would be one thing if we had a whole big history together where she'd earned some kind of trust or slack and then abused it, but I literally just met her at the start of the semester."
"That sort of thing is really not uncommon," Teddi said. "The mind contains concepts, labels that we use for relating to the world around us, and the people in it. Even with people you've known for years, there are limits to how well you can 'know' them. So you sort them into boxes. Someone who gets labeled 'friend'... they are a friend, emotionally. You'll react to them through that filter."
"There's probably more to it than that," I said. "I mean... well, I didn't have a lot of friends growing up. After I, you know, turned, I didn't have any, but it wasn't like I lost friends. It was like I went from not having any friends to having no friends, if that makes sense."
"You're talking about active animosity," Teddi said. "People treated you differently."
"Yeah," I said. "They were different people, but it was definitely a different reaction. I went from being the weird quiet kid to being the scary dangerous one."
"Were you lonely?" Teddi asked. "Before that, I mean."
"I was pretty happy as a kid. Content," I said. "I had my imagination, and I had my mother. On some level I sort of labeled everybody in my class at school as being my friends. I saw them every weekday. We did things together... at school. I wasn't completely shunned, at any level that I could tell. Though I've never exactly been the most socially aware person. I was just starting to get the picture before I left my old school."
"What picture was that?"
"That the other kids... they did stuff together outside of class," I said. "They hung out. They shared secrets that weren't the property of the playground. I was tolerated, but not liked. At least, that's how it seemed to me later on when I thought back on it... but I also thought that I'd go back to that in a heartbeat. It was comfortable, at least."
"It can be a bit of a double-bind," Teddi said. "If you're not a social person, I mean. If you don't learn to recognize the cues early on, you don't know when you're missing them."
"Well, lucky for me, people aren't very subtle about how they feel about me these days," I said. "Anyway, Puddy seemed friendly enough, when I first met her."
"Did she?"
"Well, she kind of pressured me into telling her my racial background," I said. "I hadn't exactly planned on doing that. Though maybe it wasn't realistic to expect to keep it a secret."
"Realistic or not, it was your decision," Teddi said. "What sort of pressure did she use?"
"Nothing bad, then," I said. "She wasn't violent about it. She just said that I should trust her... really, I think it was my eagerness to have a friend, to be a friend."
"She took advantage of that?"
"I don't know if I'd put it that way," I said. Why was I defending Puddy? I thought I was just trying to be accurate, but it came out like I was trying to convince myself she wasn't all that bad. "I mean, okay, yes, she benefited from it, but it's not like she knew my background, or planned to have a roommate who would be a pushover."
As soon as I said it, I realized that Puddy had planned exactly that. She couldn't have known about my friendless years, or my submissive streak... but she'd set about establishing dominance anyway. I doubted Puddy thought of people in terms of dominant and submissive, or outgoing and retiring, as personality traits or states. These things were actions to her. Dominate, or be dominated... be big and loud or risk fading into the background.
"You look like you don't quite believe what you're saying," Teddi said. "Would you like to share your thoughts?"
"Puddy's goal is to be the 'big dog'," I said. "It's like she's always got to be the most important person, the leader, the center of attention. She's not happy if she doesn't feel like the biggest, baddest, and strongest person in the room. She was learning how to trigger my wards from the beginning, but after she learned what I was..."
[]
"I woke up and she was holding a pillow over me," I said. "I mean, over my face. She tried to laugh it off... I don't think she was actually trying to kill me, but I don't think it was just a joke, either. She waited until I was awake to start pressing down. I think she wanted to see what I would do... how I would react. I guess to see if I was a threat.."
"How did you react, then?"
"I panicked... flailed around. I lit up a little, but that was involuntary," I said. "And after she let me up, I yelled a bunch but I didn't exactly stand my ground. I still did what she said. Things just got worse from there."
When I'd decided to talk about Puddy at the end of my last session, I'd thought that it might give Teddi some useful background on where I was now, and that in some nebulous way it would help me work through some non-specific issues... I hadn't really thought about what I would say or how it would help me. I didn't really know what my issues were.
But once I got moving, I ended up telling her about the hitting that happened when I'd tried to switch the burned pillow back from my own, Puddy's attempts at "leadership" of the cluster of people that formed around us, the disastrous pizza night... we were just getting to Barley when we ran out of time.
Spilling everything about Puddy, and the way she'd made me feel... []... it did help. I felt closer to Teddi afterwards. She didn't know me. She'd spent less time in my company than Puddy had. But she knew these things about me, she knew about the things I'd gone through.
It wasn't like I'd never told anyone about Puddy before. Amaranth knew. But... she was Amaranth.
It seemed like there was a shift going on in all of my classes. Part of it might have come from my own outlook changing, though I knew that the semester really was gathering speed. The instructors in my more complicated classes... the labs and my logic class... started to give both more work and more complicated work. Assignments started having more requirements and fewer instructions.
After mid-terms, we even got past the basic stuff in thaumatology and I had to start doing reading in order to know what Goldman was talking about.
When the homework really started to pile up for the first time I wondered how I would cope with all of it on top of everything else in my life, but in the end the fact that I had to deal with it meant that there was less of "everything else in my life". I was still dating three people. Sooni still managed to seriously distract me on at least a weekly basis, at least through the end of the first semester.
I felt conflicted about her... []
But, Sooni meant well, deep down inside... and we did have some common interests.
I decided that it couldn't be my job to inspire her to change. I wouldn't seek out her company or her friendship, but as long as she wasn't being awful I wouldn't spurn it, either.
Was the difference only that I found her attractive? I didn't think so. I had seen Sooni at her most confused and vulnerable, the night of our "date". Sooni had attacked me, but Puddy had beat me. They were both violent assaults, but somehow the distinction mattered.
I talked to Teddi about this and didn't make much progress in sorting out how I felt about Sooni, or what to do about her. In the end, we drifted apart by default as we both got busier. I couldn't say if she was as involved with her classwork as I was with mine, but she did stick with the clothing design idea long enough for it to pay off... though it was really more of a costume design business than anything else.
I had to admit I'd been wrong to try to steer her away from that. I thought her fashion ideas were good, but people were apparently willing to pay serious coin for her character outfits. She got the ball rolling by putting some of her older Pretty Neko outfits up for sale on a tapestry.
My involvement in the project was practically non-existent. I only had the bare bones of her weave site started before Kai stepped in and took over, to my relief... I had the impression she'd learned by watching me, but she was a quick study. I would bet she also handled the business side of the business... I doubted Sooni had anything like a head for that.
Apparently she did well enough that she either impressed her parents into reinstating her glamour allowance or she could afford to pay for it herself, because her previous flawless appearance was back well before winter break. She ended up completely changing her schedule for the spring semester at the last minute... during registration she'd contrived to be in three of the same classes as me, her best friend and rival, but she was so caught up in the costume business that she switched to a schedule heavy on glamour and design courses. She officially changed her major to that, keeping a minor in applied enchantment.
I kept my commitment to continue to do my best in mixed melee. The format we'd adopted, of working in small groups and critiquing each other, had its advantages and disadvantages for me. On the one hand, it suited me to have a more analytical approach, where I was fighting some of the time and standing back and thinking about what I'd done and what I was seeing other times. On the other hand, there was the inescapable social component.
Being one of the less capable fighters in most of the groups I cycled through didn't do wonders for my confidence, when it came to giving criticism or even encouragement... and what Amaranth called my "two volumes" problem came up more than once. There were days where I pretty much had to get myself worked up just to speak up. Amaranth wouldn't have been impressed, but Callahan was... letting loose verbally seemed to leave me better prepared to cut loose physically.
[]
Teddi didn't push me on the journal thing, since I was making progress without it. No matter how many times that she told me it wasn't a homework assignment, though, I had a hard time letting go of it. I couldn't say that I'd ever been a great writer, but I had been a writer of some sort during high school and now I was finding it hard to sit down and even compose my thoughts about what was happening to me from day to day.
Teddi told me not to worry about it, but after we established that it wasn't the inability to write the journals in particular that troubled me she didn't mind talking about it.
"If it bothers you, then it's a problem," Teddi said. "Are you having trouble with papers for your classes, too?"
"No," I said. "Well, sometimes finding the time to myself for them... but I manage that. I just have a hard time getting going when I sit down to write in the journal. And when I do... well, I know nobody's necessarily going to read it but me, but I find myself feeling like there's a lot of context missing when I try to describe what I'm feeling."
"Then wouldn't the solution be to describe the context?"
"Yeah, but... I mean, that would basically mean going back to the start of the year," I said. "Going back over everything I've been through."
"Is that something that gives you pause?"
"Well, not really," I said. "I mean, I wouldn't want to live through a lot of it again, but that doesn't mean I can't think about it, and that means I should be able to write about it. At that point, though, isn't it kind of past a journal and straying into an autobiography?"
"Well, like you said: you're the only one who has to read it," she said. "It can be whatever you want."
"The other thing is... it would be as much about the thoughts and emotions that were in my head as the things that happened," I said. "I'm not really sure how to write that."
"What do you mean?"
"Well... okay, um, this is going to be kind of personal," I said, blushing as I realized what the first example that had popped into my head was. But once it was there, it was so big and obvious and such a perfect example of the difficulty of writing about the past months that I couldn't think of anything else.
"That isn't ever going to be a problem for me, and I hope it won't be one for you," Teddi said.
"Well, I'd never... I was a virgin when I came here," I said. "And the first time I, um... you know... had an orgasm... first times... I had no idea what was happening. It was like I didn't have any frame of reference for what I was feeling. I could try to describe how it felt and what was running through my head, but... how do I write about that? Obviously it would be past tense, because I'm recording something that happened weeks ago... but then... well, from the perspective I'm writing it, I do know what happened."
"Your concern is about tenses?"
"It's about honesty," I said. "Emotional honesty, I guess. I mean, if I'm going to do this right... and I know you're going to tell me that there isn't a right or wrong way to do it, but if I'm not doing it in a way that makes sense to me then it isn't right... I'd need it to capture the way I felt in that moment. You know?"
"That makes sense," Teddi said. "Do you think talking your way through the problem some more might help you get around that block?"
"I guess. Maybe... yeah," I said. In fact, in putting it into words and saying it out loud, I felt like I was getting closer to it.
"It seems to me like you're coming at this from the point of view of a writer more so than a journalist," she said. "A storyteller, I mean."
"Well, all the writing I've done in my life so far has either been fiction or course work," I said. "And I can't really view myself as an academic subject, you know? This is my story we're talking about."
"So let's talk about it."
And we did. I left that session feeling a little more confident of my ability to write about what I'd gone through... it seemed like the most emotionally truthful way to do it would be to use past tense, but keep things mostly centered in the "present" of the story rather than on how things looked in hindsight.
I gave it a try that evening, writing out a short account of my arrival at MU. It was... well, it was kind of startling to recall how painfully awkward my first day was. It wasn't like I was Ms. Suave these days, but remembering the feeling of burning with embarrassment at having walked into the nexus thinking it was Harlowe's front door... and all the other minor missteps... well, I wondered how I'd ever managed to apply to a school or get on a coach by myself.
"I suspect you did what you had to," Teddi said when I shared that with her in my next session. "Sometimes we do things that seem impossible to us because the alternative is even harder."
"It seems like a huge overreaction to me now," I said. "Though it's not like I'm not prone to those... still, I can't imagine beating myself up quite that much for stopping on the wrong floor these days."
"Are you celebrating your progress or castigating your past self?" she asked.
"I don't really think I'm castigating," I said. "I'm not like, 'Oh, how could I be so stupid?' or anything... except on maybe on a practical level. I'm wondering how I functioned."
"As best as you could, I would bet," Teddi said. "You know, I was ready to suggest you give up on the journal-writing, but I suspect this will be good for you in the long run. You seem to be very centered in the present."
"Isn't that a good thing?" I asked. "I mean, if I were all stuck in the past, wouldn't you be telling me to live in the moment?"
"Very possibly," Teddi said. "But I wouldn't rate the past, present, or future as being a better place than the others to be 'all stuck in'. A healthy perspective integrates all three."
"It's not like I never think about the past," I said. "I mean, I can't really get away from it, can I?"
[First hour of work. I was on a roll when I wrote this, so there are a lot of omissions and skip-overs... anywhere you see a "[]".]
Callahan showed up at the salle on Thursday wearing an eyepatch. She said she had a special prize for the first person who asked her what happened.
Nobody took her up on it that I saw.
She seemed to be in a bad mood, but it was hard to say since most of the time she seemed to be both incredibly pissed off and having the time of her life. It was also hard to say if the speed and directness with which she got down to business was part of her mood, or part of the curriculum... she'd made it clear in our previous classes that we'd reached a sort of tipping point and the pace was going to pick up.
She started calling names and setting people to exercises and moved around the room with an efficiency she'd never shown before. I []
Callahan's style of teaching had never exactly been "no-nonsense", though her threatening manner could give you the impression it was. The thing was, there's a difference between "no-nonsense" and "in your face". Nonsense can get in your face pretty easily. It's not necessarily big on personal space.
"I'm surprised to see you're still with us, Emo Kid," she said to me at one point during the class.
"I told you I'd be here and ready to learn," I said.
"Well, at least I know your weekend was worse than mine," she said. Cold prickles ran down my spine as another interpretation of her opening line presented itself in my mind. Still with us.
"Why do you say that?" I asked her. Not "How do you know?", which was the first thing that popped into my head but which didn't seem to be able to pop out of my mouth.
"Because your life sucks," she said. "Keep it up. The learning, not the sucking."
Those were the only words she had for me personally during the class []
[]
"I have a note here to remind you to talk about Puddy," Teddy said.
"Puddy," I repeated. "I was kind of hoping you would have forgotten about that."
"Not a chance," she said. "If you don't want to talk about Puddy, we can talk about why you don't want to."
"What if I don't want to talk about that?"
"Then there is going to come a point when there's no longer any purpose in you being here," Teddi said. "I'm sorry to put it so bluntly, but I know you're predisposed to think in those terms. We're not there yet, and there's nothing unusual in taking time and a few sessions to really open up... but, well, it's an active process. You have to participate. You have to open. I can reach out all I want, but it won't do any good if you don't reach back."
I sighed.
"Do you know who Puddy is?" I asked. I wasn't sure which answer I was hoping for here. If she did, then maybe I wouldn't have to go into things as deeply. If she didn't, then maybe I could spend more time working my way up to the real issues. Not that I wanted to stall, exactly... more like build up speed.
"Who is she to you?" Teddi asked.
"Well... she was my roommate," I said. "And I suppose she was my friend, in some ways. I mean, in a formal sort of way. I don't think she was actually friendly to me. But she called herself my friend, and I felt... well, that meant something. It probably sounds stupid to say that I let her treat me like shit because she was my friend. I mean, it would be one thing if we had a whole big history together where she'd earned some kind of trust or slack and then abused it, but I literally just met her at the start of the semester."
"That sort of thing is really not uncommon," Teddi said. "The mind contains concepts, labels that we use for relating to the world around us, and the people in it. Even with people you've known for years, there are limits to how well you can 'know' them. So you sort them into boxes. Someone who gets labeled 'friend'... they are a friend, emotionally. You'll react to them through that filter."
"There's probably more to it than that," I said. "I mean... well, I didn't have a lot of friends growing up. After I, you know, turned, I didn't have any, but it wasn't like I lost friends. It was like I went from not having any friends to having no friends, if that makes sense."
"You're talking about active animosity," Teddi said. "People treated you differently."
"Yeah," I said. "They were different people, but it was definitely a different reaction. I went from being the weird quiet kid to being the scary dangerous one."
"Were you lonely?" Teddi asked. "Before that, I mean."
"I was pretty happy as a kid. Content," I said. "I had my imagination, and I had my mother. On some level I sort of labeled everybody in my class at school as being my friends. I saw them every weekday. We did things together... at school. I wasn't completely shunned, at any level that I could tell. Though I've never exactly been the most socially aware person. I was just starting to get the picture before I left my old school."
"What picture was that?"
"That the other kids... they did stuff together outside of class," I said. "They hung out. They shared secrets that weren't the property of the playground. I was tolerated, but not liked. At least, that's how it seemed to me later on when I thought back on it... but I also thought that I'd go back to that in a heartbeat. It was comfortable, at least."
"It can be a bit of a double-bind," Teddi said. "If you're not a social person, I mean. If you don't learn to recognize the cues early on, you don't know when you're missing them."
"Well, lucky for me, people aren't very subtle about how they feel about me these days," I said. "Anyway, Puddy seemed friendly enough, when I first met her."
"Did she?"
"Well, she kind of pressured me into telling her my racial background," I said. "I hadn't exactly planned on doing that. Though maybe it wasn't realistic to expect to keep it a secret."
"Realistic or not, it was your decision," Teddi said. "What sort of pressure did she use?"
"Nothing bad, then," I said. "She wasn't violent about it. She just said that I should trust her... really, I think it was my eagerness to have a friend, to be a friend."
"She took advantage of that?"
"I don't know if I'd put it that way," I said. Why was I defending Puddy? I thought I was just trying to be accurate, but it came out like I was trying to convince myself she wasn't all that bad. "I mean, okay, yes, she benefited from it, but it's not like she knew my background, or planned to have a roommate who would be a pushover."
As soon as I said it, I realized that Puddy had planned exactly that. She couldn't have known about my friendless years, or my submissive streak... but she'd set about establishing dominance anyway. I doubted Puddy thought of people in terms of dominant and submissive, or outgoing and retiring, as personality traits or states. These things were actions to her. Dominate, or be dominated... be big and loud or risk fading into the background.
"You look like you don't quite believe what you're saying," Teddi said. "Would you like to share your thoughts?"
"Puddy's goal is to be the 'big dog'," I said. "It's like she's always got to be the most important person, the leader, the center of attention. She's not happy if she doesn't feel like the biggest, baddest, and strongest person in the room. She was learning how to trigger my wards from the beginning, but after she learned what I was..."
[]
"I woke up and she was holding a pillow over me," I said. "I mean, over my face. She tried to laugh it off... I don't think she was actually trying to kill me, but I don't think it was just a joke, either. She waited until I was awake to start pressing down. I think she wanted to see what I would do... how I would react. I guess to see if I was a threat.."
"How did you react, then?"
"I panicked... flailed around. I lit up a little, but that was involuntary," I said. "And after she let me up, I yelled a bunch but I didn't exactly stand my ground. I still did what she said. Things just got worse from there."
When I'd decided to talk about Puddy at the end of my last session, I'd thought that it might give Teddi some useful background on where I was now, and that in some nebulous way it would help me work through some non-specific issues... I hadn't really thought about what I would say or how it would help me. I didn't really know what my issues were.
But once I got moving, I ended up telling her about the hitting that happened when I'd tried to switch the burned pillow back from my own, Puddy's attempts at "leadership" of the cluster of people that formed around us, the disastrous pizza night... we were just getting to Barley when we ran out of time.
Spilling everything about Puddy, and the way she'd made me feel... []... it did help. I felt closer to Teddi afterwards. She didn't know me. She'd spent less time in my company than Puddy had. But she knew these things about me, she knew about the things I'd gone through.
It wasn't like I'd never told anyone about Puddy before. Amaranth knew. But... she was Amaranth.
It seemed like there was a shift going on in all of my classes. Part of it might have come from my own outlook changing, though I knew that the semester really was gathering speed. The instructors in my more complicated classes... the labs and my logic class... started to give both more work and more complicated work. Assignments started having more requirements and fewer instructions.
After mid-terms, we even got past the basic stuff in thaumatology and I had to start doing reading in order to know what Goldman was talking about.
When the homework really started to pile up for the first time I wondered how I would cope with all of it on top of everything else in my life, but in the end the fact that I had to deal with it meant that there was less of "everything else in my life". I was still dating three people. Sooni still managed to seriously distract me on at least a weekly basis, at least through the end of the first semester.
I felt conflicted about her... []
But, Sooni meant well, deep down inside... and we did have some common interests.
I decided that it couldn't be my job to inspire her to change. I wouldn't seek out her company or her friendship, but as long as she wasn't being awful I wouldn't spurn it, either.
Was the difference only that I found her attractive? I didn't think so. I had seen Sooni at her most confused and vulnerable, the night of our "date". Sooni had attacked me, but Puddy had beat me. They were both violent assaults, but somehow the distinction mattered.
I talked to Teddi about this and didn't make much progress in sorting out how I felt about Sooni, or what to do about her. In the end, we drifted apart by default as we both got busier. I couldn't say if she was as involved with her classwork as I was with mine, but she did stick with the clothing design idea long enough for it to pay off... though it was really more of a costume design business than anything else.
I had to admit I'd been wrong to try to steer her away from that. I thought her fashion ideas were good, but people were apparently willing to pay serious coin for her character outfits. She got the ball rolling by putting some of her older Pretty Neko outfits up for sale on a tapestry.
My involvement in the project was practically non-existent. I only had the bare bones of her weave site started before Kai stepped in and took over, to my relief... I had the impression she'd learned by watching me, but she was a quick study. I would bet she also handled the business side of the business... I doubted Sooni had anything like a head for that.
Apparently she did well enough that she either impressed her parents into reinstating her glamour allowance or she could afford to pay for it herself, because her previous flawless appearance was back well before winter break. She ended up completely changing her schedule for the spring semester at the last minute... during registration she'd contrived to be in three of the same classes as me, her best friend and rival, but she was so caught up in the costume business that she switched to a schedule heavy on glamour and design courses. She officially changed her major to that, keeping a minor in applied enchantment.
I kept my commitment to continue to do my best in mixed melee. The format we'd adopted, of working in small groups and critiquing each other, had its advantages and disadvantages for me. On the one hand, it suited me to have a more analytical approach, where I was fighting some of the time and standing back and thinking about what I'd done and what I was seeing other times. On the other hand, there was the inescapable social component. []
Status: In progress.
Last updated: 2 a.m.
Word Count: ~5300
Hours writing: 2.75
Note: This is what will be the last chapter of the first volume of Tales of MU. It's intended to do three things. Two of those things are to wrap up the first year and set the stage for the second year, but more so than either of those is the third thing: being a bridge from "now" to "then".
[Another hour of writing. Holy shit, I'm just going to preserve the word count from the past updates: 2400, 3600, 5300. 5300 words in under three hours of writing. Obviously a lot of time has passed in between the hour-long spurts of writing, but that's because my body's pretty messed up right now. Spirit is willing, flesh is weak.]
Callahan showed up at the salle on Thursday wearing an eyepatch. She said she had a special prize for the first person who asked her what happened.
Nobody took her up on it that I saw.
She seemed to be in a bad mood, but it was hard to say since most of the time she seemed to be both incredibly pissed off and having the time of her life. It was also hard to say if the speed and directness with which she got down to business was part of her mood, or part of the curriculum... she'd made it clear in our previous classes that we'd reached a sort of tipping point and the pace was going to pick up.
She started calling names and setting people to exercises and moved around the room with an efficiency she'd never shown before. I
Callahan's style of teaching had never exactly been "no-nonsense", though her threatening manner could give you the impression it was. The thing was, there's a difference between "no-nonsense" and "in your face". Nonsense can get in your face pretty easily. It's not necessarily big on personal space.
"I'm surprised to see you're still with us, Emo Kid," she said to me at one point during the class.
"I told you I'd be here and ready to learn," I said.
"Well, at least I know your weekend was worse than mine," she said. Cold prickles ran down my spine as another interpretation of her opening line presented itself in my mind: still with us. Had she had some reason to think I'd be gone after the past weekend?
"Why do you say that?" I asked her. Not "How do you know?", which was the first thing that popped into my head but which didn't seem to be able to pop out of my mouth.
"Because your life sucks," she said. "Keep it up. The learning, not the sucking."
Those were the only words she had for me personally during the class, apart from a few shouted directions. By next Tuesday, she'd had her eye regenerated or otherwise taken care of, if there'd ever been anything wrong underneath the patch at all.
The next day was my third session with Teddi.
"I have a note here to remind you to talk about Puddy," she said.
"Puddy," I repeated. "I was kind of hoping you would have forgotten about that."
"Not a chance," she said. "If you don't want to talk about Puddy, we can talk about why you don't want to."
"What if I don't want to talk about that?"
"Then there is going to come a point when there's no longer any purpose in you being here," Teddi said. "I'm sorry to put it so bluntly, but I know you're predisposed to think in those terms. We're not there yet, and there's nothing unusual in taking time and a few sessions to really open up... but, well, it's an active process. You have to participate. You have to open. I can reach out all I want, but it won't do any good if you don't reach back."
I sighed.
"Do you know who Puddy is?" I asked. I wasn't sure which answer I was hoping for here. If she did, then maybe I wouldn't have to go into things as deeply. If she didn't, then maybe I could spend more time working my way up to the real issues. Not that I wanted to stall, exactly... more like build up speed.
"Who is she to you?" Teddi asked.
"Well... she was my roommate," I said. "And I suppose she was my friend, in some ways. I mean, in a formal sort of way. I don't think she was actually friendly to me. But she called herself my friend, and I felt... well, that meant something. It probably sounds stupid to say that I let her treat me like shit because she was my friend. I mean, it would be one thing if we had a whole big history together where she'd earned some kind of trust or slack and then abused it, but I literally just met her at the start of the semester."
"That sort of thing is really not uncommon," Teddi said. "The mind contains concepts, labels that we use for relating to the world around us, and the people in it. Even with people you've known for years, there are limits to how well you can 'know' them. So you sort them into boxes. Someone who gets labeled 'friend'... they are a friend, emotionally. You'll react to them through that filter."
"There's probably more to it than that," I said. "I mean... well, I didn't have a lot of friends growing up. After I, you know, turned, I didn't have any, but it wasn't like I lost friends. It was like I went from not having any friends to having no friends, if that makes sense."
"You're talking about active animosity," Teddi said. "People treated you differently."
"Yeah," I said. "They were different people, but it was definitely a different reaction. I went from being the weird quiet kid to being the scary dangerous one."
"Were you lonely?" Teddi asked. "Before that, I mean."
"I was pretty happy as a kid. Content," I said. "I had my imagination, and I had my mother. On some level I sort of labeled everybody in my class at school as being my friends. I saw them every weekday. We did things together... at school. I wasn't completely shunned, at any level that I could tell. Though I've never exactly been the most socially aware person. I was just starting to get the picture before I left my old school."
"What picture was that?"
"That the other kids... they did stuff together outside of class," I said. "They hung out. They shared secrets that weren't the property of the playground. I was tolerated, but not liked. At least, that's how it seemed to me later on when I thought back on it... but I also thought that I'd go back to that in a heartbeat. It was comfortable, at least."
"It can be a bit of a double-bind," Teddi said. "If you're not a social person, I mean. If you don't learn to recognize the cues early on, you don't know when you're missing them."
"Well, lucky for me, people aren't very subtle about how they feel about me these days," I said. "Anyway, Puddy seemed friendly enough, when I first met her."
"Did she?"
"Well, she kind of pressured me into telling her my racial background," I said. "I hadn't exactly planned on doing that. Though maybe it wasn't realistic to expect to keep it a secret."
"Realistic or not, it was your decision," Teddi said. "What sort of pressure did she use?"
"Nothing bad, then," I said. "She wasn't violent about it. She just said that I should trust her... really, I think it was my eagerness to have a friend, to be a friend."
"She took advantage of that?"
"I don't know if I'd put it that way," I said. Why was I defending Puddy? I thought I was just trying to be accurate, but it came out like I was trying to convince myself she wasn't all that bad. "I mean, okay, yes, she benefited from it, but it's not like she knew my background, or planned to have a roommate who would be a pushover."
As soon as I said it, I realized that Puddy had planned exactly that. She couldn't have known about my friendless years, or my submissive streak... but she'd set about establishing dominance anyway. I doubted Puddy thought of people in terms of dominant and submissive, or outgoing and retiring, as personality traits or states. These things were actions to her. Dominate, or be dominated... be big and loud or risk fading into the background.
"You look like you don't quite believe what you're saying," Teddi said. "Would you like to share your thoughts?"
"Puddy's goal is to be the 'big dog'," I said. "It's like she's always got to be the most important person, the leader, the center of attention. She's not happy if she doesn't feel like the biggest, baddest, and strongest person in the room. She was learning how to trigger my wards from the beginning, but after she learned what I was... well, she really kind of swung from hot to cold, you know? Like she was afraid of me, but that just made her push me harder."
"Can you give me an example?"
"I woke up and she was holding a pillow over me," I said. "I mean, over my face. She tried to laugh it off... I don't think she was actually trying to kill me, but I don't think it was just a joke, either. She waited until I was awake to start pressing down. I think she wanted to see what I would do... how I would react. I guess to see if I was a threat.."
"How did you react, then?"
"I panicked... flailed around. I lit up a little, but that was involuntary," I said. "And after she let me up, I yelled a bunch but I didn't exactly stand my ground. I still did what she said. Things just got worse from there."
When I'd decided to talk about Puddy at the end of my last session, I'd thought that it might give Teddi some useful background on where I was now, and that in some nebulous way it would help me work through some non-specific issues... I hadn't really thought about what I would say or how it would help me. I didn't really know what my issues were.
But once I got moving, I ended up telling her about the hitting that happened when I'd tried to switch the burned pillow back from my own, Puddy's attempts at "leadership" of the cluster of people that formed around us, the disastrous pizza night... we were just getting to Barley when we ran out of time.
Spilling everything about Puddy, and the way she'd made me feel... even without a clear agenda, it did help. Not only did I feel better about the experiences, after the initial discomfort of talking about them, but I felt closer to Teddi afterwards. She didn't know me. She'd spent less time in my company than Puddy had. But she knew these things about me, she knew about the things I'd gone through.
It wasn't like I'd never told anyone about Puddy before. Amaranth knew. But... in some ways it was good to have a near-stranger to talk to.
Outside of the healing sessions, it seemed like there was a shift going on in all of my classes that mirrored the increased pace in mixed melee on an intellectual plane. Part of it might have come from my own outlook changing, though I knew that the semester really was gathering speed. The instructors in my more complicated classes... the labs and my logic class... started to give both more work and more complicated work. Assignments started having more requirements and fewer instructions.
After mid-terms, we even got past the basic stuff in thaumatology and I had to start doing reading in order to know what Goldman was talking about.
When the homework really started to pile up for the first time I wondered how I would cope with all of it on top of everything else in my life, but in the end the fact that I had to deal with it meant that there was less of "everything else in my life". Well, maybe that's not giving myself enough credit... I could have ignored it. Other people did. I overheard Trina talking on the mirror to Gladys about how badly her grades were slipping, starting around the middle of the term. Did she do anything different in response to this? Not that I could tell. She treated college as a strictly social arena and wondered why her grades didn't reflect her general awesomeness.
That wasn't to say that college ever became a purely academic environment for me during my freshman year. I was still dating three people. Sooni still managed to seriously distract me on at least a weekly basis, at least through the end of the first semester. I felt conflicted about her... I'd become so confident about my decision to shut Puddy and my father of my life.
I did completely yield to the idea that he was my father, after the conversation with Art Kent. That didn't mean I felt any differently towards him. He couldn't be trusted to do anything except what he pleased, and to try to frame what he wanted in terms that made it seem like he was on my side. At his most charming he'd never managed to conceal his basic inherent creepiness, with the slaughter imagery and the talk of humanity as insects.
He didn't come back into my dreams for some time after the night where he'd said he would leave me alone for a while. I figured he was afraid that if he pushed me I'd get serious about shutting him out. He didn't know that I already was... after Teddi's suggestion, I started working on waking myself up whenever I realized I was dreaming. Well, not quite every time... some dreams were worth staying in. But his dreams were always very lucid, so I figured that as long as I had some practice flexing the right "muscles" I'd be able to break out of them.
It took some effort, but when he showed up a couple of weeks after midterms I was able to throw him out, or throw myself out. The fact that I could feel him actively resisting my attempts to wake up only underscored how little regard he had for me and my wishes. It made it that much easier the next time.
Dealing with Sooni was more difficult. I knew she meant well, deep down inside... though it really was very deep. But we did have some common interests. I couldn't say that she added nothing to my life.
Especially since the busier I got and the more pressure I felt in my classes, the more my earlier dreams of her recurred. They'd disappeared around the time I learned just how naive Sooni was, sexually, but my sleeping mind seemed to think that her and her giant sandals of doom were the perfect metaphor for whatever else was stressing me out at the moment. I felt guilty about these dreams, but there was so little feeling of control in them that I wasn't able to wake myself up from them or stop them. I would have felt even more guilty dreaming about someone who I'd pointedly cut out of my life.
The other downside to erotic nightmares as a stress management technique was that the more I had them, the less comfortable Two was sharing a room with me. After the night I gave myself a screaming orgasm so intense that it woke me up, she became the most enthusiastic proponent of the suite idea for next year.
At the semester break, she officially became Dee's roommate again. I didn't take it personally. They suited each other better. They were both quiet. Neither of them had an active sex life, Two being asexual and Dee being uninterested in taking on any other lovers while she was on the surface. Two's crying spells and insomnia... the main reasons she and Dee had split in the first place... had been mostly resolved, and Dee's experience guiding her in meditation meant she could be more help than I or Amaranth could when Two did wake up in the middle of the night.
The sticking point with Sooni wasn't how she treated me... that had become better over time, though it wasn't ever perfect. It was how she treated her nekoyokai "friends", and even more, the fact that she had them. Whether it was more economically enforced indentured servitude or a caste system or what, it was still little more than slavery. That she didn't know better wasn't really any excuse. It didn't make the lives of her companions any better.
But at the same time, I couldn't say that any of the three of them didn't want to be at MU. Maliko was scarily devoted to Sooni. Kai wanted the chance to be educated. Suzi had a bullying streak in her that still came out from time to time, especially when she was with Maliko... but she alone among the three seemed to be genuinely making friends outside their original circle.
In the end I decided that it couldn't be my job to inspire Sooni to change. I wouldn't seek out her company or her friendship, but whenever she wasn't actively being awful I wouldn't spurn it, either.
Was I cutting her slack because found her attractive? The thought troubled me from time to time, but I didn't think it was the case. I wasn't actively or consciously lusting after her any more. I had seen Sooni at her most confused and vulnerable, the night of our "date"... I think that made me more disposed to like her even as it made me less disposed to "like" her. Sooni had attacked me, but Puddy had beat me. They were both violent assaults, but somehow the distinction mattered.
I talked to Teddi about this and didn't make much progress in sorting out how I felt about Sooni, or what to do about her. We ended up drifting apart by default as we both got busier. I couldn't say if she was as involved with her classwork as I was with mine, but she did stick with the clothing design idea long enough for it to pay off... though it was really more of a costume design business than anything else.
I had to admit I'd been wrong to try to steer her away from that. I thought her fashion ideas were good, but people were apparently willing to pay serious coin for her character outfits. She got the ball rolling by putting some of her older Pretty Neko outfits up for sale on a tapestry.
My involvement in the project was practically non-existent. I started helping her make a weave site because I had, in fact, agreed to do that... but I only had the bare bones of it started before Kai stepped in and took over, to my relief... I had the impression she'd started learning by watching me, but she was a quick study. I would bet she also handled the business side of the business... I doubted Sooni had anything like a head for that.
Apparently they did well enough that Sooni either impressed her parents into reinstating her glamour allowance or she could afford to pay for it herself, because her previous flawless appearance was back well before winter break. She ended up completely changing her schedule for the spring semester at the last minute... during registration she'd contrived to be in three of the same classes as me, her best friend and rival, but she was so caught up in the costume business that she switched to a schedule heavy on glamour and design courses. She officially changed her major to that, keeping a minor in applied enchantment.
I kept my commitment to continue to do my best in mixed melee. The format we'd adopted, of working in small groups and critiquing each other, had its advantages and disadvantages for me. On the one hand, it suited me to have a more analytical approach, where I was fighting some of the time and standing back and thinking about what I'd done and what I was seeing other times. On the other hand, there was the inescapable social component.
Being one of the less capable fighters in most of the groups I cycled through didn't do wonders for my confidence, when it came to giving criticism or even encouragement... and what Amaranth called my "two volumes" problem came up more than once. There were days where I pretty much had to get myself worked up just to speak up. Amaranth wouldn't have been impressed, but Callahan was... letting loose verbally seemed to leave me better prepared to cut loose physically.
Teddi didn't push me on the journal thing, since I was making progress without it. No matter how many times that she told me it wasn't a homework assignment, though, I had a hard time letting go of it. It bothered me that I wasn't able to just sit down and write. I couldn't say that I'd ever been a great writer, but I had been a writer of some sort during high school and now I was finding it hard to sit down and even compose my thoughts about what was happening to me from day to day.
Teddi told me not to worry about it, but after we established that it wasn't the inability to write the journals in particular that troubled me she didn't mind talking about it.
"If it bothers you, then it's a problem," Teddi said. "Are you having trouble with papers for your classes, too?"
"No," I said. "Well, sometimes finding the time to myself for them... but I manage that. I just have a hard time getting going when I sit down to write in the journal. And when I do... well, I know nobody's necessarily going to read it but me, but I find myself feeling like there's a lot of context missing when I try to describe what I'm feeling."
"Then wouldn't the solution be to describe the context?"
"Yeah, but... I mean, that would basically mean going back to the start of the year," I said. "Going back over everything I've been through."
"Is that something that gives you pause?"
"Well, not really," I said. "I mean, I wouldn't want to live through a lot of it again, but that doesn't mean I can't think about it, and that means I should be able to write about it. At that point, though, isn't it kind of past a journal and straying into an autobiography?"
"Well, like you said: you're the only one who has to read it," she said. "It can be whatever you want."
"The other thing is... it would be as much about the thoughts and emotions that were in my head as the things that happened," I said. "I'm not really sure how to write that."
"What do you mean?"
"Well... okay, um, this is going to be kind of personal," I said, blushing as I realized what the first example that had popped into my head was. But once it was there, it was so big and obvious and such a perfect example of the difficulty of writing about the past months that I couldn't think of anything else.
"That isn't ever going to be a problem for me, and I hope it won't be one for you," Teddi said.
"Well, I'd never... I was a virgin when I came here," I said. "And the first time I, um... you know... had an orgasm... first times... I had no idea what was happening. It was like I didn't have any frame of reference for what I was feeling. I could try to describe how it felt and what was running through my head, but... how do I write about that? Obviously it would be past tense, because I'm recording something that happened weeks ago... but then... well, from the perspective I'm writing it, I do know what happened."
"Your concern is about tenses?"
"It's about honesty," I said. "Emotional honesty, I guess. I mean, if I'm going to do this right... and I know you're going to tell me that there isn't a right or wrong way to do it, but if I'm not doing it in a way that makes sense to me then it isn't right... I'd need it to capture the way I felt in that moment. You know?"
"That makes sense," Teddi said. "Do you think talking your way through the problem some more might help you get around that block?"
"I guess. Maybe... yeah," I said. In fact, in putting it into words and saying it out loud, I felt like I was getting closer to it.
"It seems to me like you're coming at this from the point of view of a writer more so than a journalist," she said. "A storyteller, I mean."
"Well, all the writing I've done in my life so far has either been fiction or course work," I said. "And I can't really view myself as an academic subject, you know? This is my story we're talking about."
"So let's talk about it."
And we did. I left that session feeling a little more confident of my ability to write about what I'd gone through... it seemed like the most emotionally truthful way to do it would be to use past tense, but keep things mostly centered in the "present" of the story rather than on how things looked in hindsight.
I gave it a try that evening, writing out a short account of my arrival at MU. It was... well, it was kind of startling to recall how painfully awkward my first day was. It wasn't like I was Ms. Suave these days, but remembering the feeling of burning with embarrassment at having walked into the nexus thinking it was Harlowe's front door... and all the other minor missteps... well, I wondered how I'd ever managed to apply to a school or get on a coach by myself.
"I suspect you did what you had to," Teddi said when I shared that with her in my next session. "Sometimes we do things that seem impossible to us because the alternative is even harder."
"It seems like a huge overreaction to me now," I said. "Though it's not like I'm not prone to those... still, I can't imagine beating myself up quite that much for stopping on the wrong floor these days."
"Are you celebrating your progress or castigating your past self?" she asked.
"I don't really think I'm castigating," I said. "I'm not like, 'Oh, how could I be so stupid?' or anything... except on maybe on a practical level. I'm wondering how I functioned."
"As best as you could, I would bet," Teddi said. "You know, I was ready to suggest you give up on the journal-writing, but I suspect this will be good for you in the long run. You seem to be very centered in the present."
"Isn't that a good thing?" I asked. "I mean, if I were all stuck in the past, wouldn't you be telling me to live in the moment?"
"Very possibly," Teddi said. "But I wouldn't rate the past, present, or future as a better place than the others to be 'all stuck in'. A healthy perspective integrates all three."
"It's not like I never think about the past," I said. "I mean, I can't really get away from it, can I?"
"Well, there's thinking and there's thinking," Teddi said. "I've got the sense that you deal with things by thinking them through, sometimes at a level that approaches excessive... but when it comes to the past, it seems like you're more bounded by feelings than thoughts. When you 'think' about mistakes you've made in the past, it's really the feeling that comes up, and your 'thought' is a response to that. Did you really think that you were a loser for turning off on the wrong floor your first day, or did you feel like a loser and give that feeling shape as a thought?"
"I suppose it's more the latter," I said. "I mean, when I wrote it out... or when I try to talk about it... I really can't explain why I feel that way, and I can think of all kinds of reasons why it's silly. I still feel it, though."
"Feelings happen," Teddi said. "They aren't everything, though. What you think about your feelings... how you think about them... and what you do about them are important, too."
"It's funny... Amaranth and Steff told me that I think too much," I said.
"I believe I know what they meant. Words are imprecise for dealing with these things," Teddi said. "Telepaths have a 'language' to describe thought processes that we've been sadly remiss in translating into verbal terms, probably because we usually don't need to... I can really empathize with you struggling to put things into words, because I usually don't have to. Anyway, just as it's not intrinsically better to dwell exclusively in the past or the present, thought isn't necessarily superior to feeling. It's possible to be trapped in a circle of thought. I wouldn't call that 'thinking too much', though... it's more like 'thinking not enough, over and over again'."
"Words really aren't precise for this," I said. "I had a thought one time about talking about emotions as a way of processing them... the things I feel seem so big and complicated, and words are by definition limited. I mean, that's what 'definition' means, right? Limitation. Boundary."
"I'd never realized that, but I suppose you're right," Teddi said. "De-finite."
"So... when you put what you're feeling into words, you have to shrink it down to fit," I said. "Talking about feelings doesn't just help you make sense of what you're feeling, it helps it make sense in the first place."
"That's very perceptive," Teddi said. "And it's among the reasons why I think this journaling project... or autobiography, if you prefer... could be good for you. You're becoming a lot more articulate when talking about your emotions, you know."
"I just chalked that up to practice."
"I'm sure that's part of it," Teddi said. "Looking for single causes is tempting in this profession, but it's important to remember that people and life are both complicated. For instance, your grandmother did you no favors with regards to your socialization, but that doesn't mean you'd be a social butterfly if not for her."
"Yeah," I said. "I guess... to be honest... my mother didn't really push me towards socializing, either. But she did a lot more for my confidence."
[Another 45 minutes-ish of work. There was a brief phone-based interruption. Still, with another ~1200 words to show for it I figured it's worth an update. I'm still just letting things spill out; probably won't go back to fill in the gaps until the last update. But the thing's definitely starting to take shape in the direction I want it to.]
Callahan showed up at the salle on Thursday wearing an eyepatch. She said she had a special prize for the first person who asked her what happened.
Nobody took her up on it that I saw.
She seemed to be in a bad mood, but it was hard to say since most of the time she seemed to be both incredibly pissed off and having the time of her life. It was also hard to say if the speed and directness with which she got down to business was part of her mood, or part of the curriculum... she'd made it clear in our previous classes that we'd reached a sort of tipping point and the pace was going to pick up.
She started calling names and setting people to exercises and moved around the room with an efficiency she'd never shown before. I
Callahan's style of teaching had never exactly been "no-nonsense", though her threatening manner could give you the impression it was. The thing was, there's a difference between "no-nonsense" and "in your face". Nonsense can get in your face pretty easily. It's not necessarily big on personal space.
"I'm surprised to see you're still with us, Emo Kid," she said to me at one point during the class.
"I told you I'd be here and ready to learn," I said.
"Well, at least I know your weekend was worse than mine," she said. Cold prickles ran down my spine as another interpretation of her opening line presented itself in my mind. Still with us.
"Why do you say that?" I asked her. Not "How do you know?", which was the first thing that popped into my head but which didn't seem to be able to pop out of my mouth.
"Because your life sucks," she said. "Keep it up. The learning, not the sucking."
Those were the only words she had for me personally during the class []
[]
"I have a note here to remind you to talk about Puddy," Teddy said.
"Puddy," I repeated. "I was kind of hoping you would have forgotten about that."
"Not a chance," she said. "If you don't want to talk about Puddy, we can talk about why you don't want to."
"What if I don't want to talk about that?"
"Then there is going to come a point when there's no longer any purpose in you being here," Teddi said. "I'm sorry to put it so bluntly, but I know you're predisposed to think in those terms. We're not there yet, and there's nothing unusual in taking time and a few sessions to really open up... but, well, it's an active process. You have to participate. You have to open. I can reach out all I want, but it won't do any good if you don't reach back."
I sighed.
"Do you know who Puddy is?" I asked. I wasn't sure which answer I was hoping for here. If she did, then maybe I wouldn't have to go into things as deeply. If she didn't, then maybe I could spend more time working my way up to the real issues. Not that I wanted to stall, exactly... more like build up speed.
"Who is she to you?" Teddi asked.
"Well... she was my roommate," I said. "And I suppose she was my friend, in some ways. I mean, in a formal sort of way. I don't think she was actually friendly to me. But she called herself my friend, and I felt... well, that meant something. It probably sounds stupid to say that I let her treat me like shit because she was my friend. I mean, it would be one thing if we had a whole big history together where she'd earned some kind of trust or slack and then abused it, but I literally just met her at the start of the semester."
"That sort of thing is really not uncommon," Teddi said. "The mind contains concepts, labels that we use for relating to the world around us, and the people in it. Even with people you've known for years, there are limits to how well you can 'know' them. So you sort them into boxes. Someone who gets labeled 'friend'... they are a friend, emotionally. You'll react to them through that filter."
"There's probably more to it than that," I said. "I mean... well, I didn't have a lot of friends growing up. After I, you know, turned, I didn't have any, but it wasn't like I lost friends. It was like I went from not having any friends to having no friends, if that makes sense."
"You're talking about active animosity," Teddi said. "People treated you differently."
"Yeah," I said. "They were different people, but it was definitely a different reaction. I went from being the weird quiet kid to being the scary dangerous one."
"Were you lonely?" Teddi asked. "Before that, I mean."
"I was pretty happy as a kid. Content," I said. "I had my imagination, and I had my mother. On some level I sort of labeled everybody in my class at school as being my friends. I saw them every weekday. We did things together... at school. I wasn't completely shunned, at any level that I could tell. Though I've never exactly been the most socially aware person. I was just starting to get the picture before I left my old school."
"What picture was that?"
"That the other kids... they did stuff together outside of class," I said. "They hung out. They shared secrets that weren't the property of the playground. I was tolerated, but not liked. At least, that's how it seemed to me later on when I thought back on it... but I also thought that I'd go back to that in a heartbeat. It was comfortable, at least."
"It can be a bit of a double-bind," Teddi said. "If you're not a social person, I mean. If you don't learn to recognize the cues early on, you don't know when you're missing them."
"Well, lucky for me, people aren't very subtle about how they feel about me these days," I said. "Anyway, Puddy seemed friendly enough, when I first met her."
"Did she?"
"Well, she kind of pressured me into telling her my racial background," I said. "I hadn't exactly planned on doing that. Though maybe it wasn't realistic to expect to keep it a secret."
"Realistic or not, it was your decision," Teddi said. "What sort of pressure did she use?"
"Nothing bad, then," I said. "She wasn't violent about it. She just said that I should trust her... really, I think it was my eagerness to have a friend, to be a friend."
"She took advantage of that?"
"I don't know if I'd put it that way," I said. Why was I defending Puddy? I thought I was just trying to be accurate, but it came out like I was trying to convince myself she wasn't all that bad. "I mean, okay, yes, she benefited from it, but it's not like she knew my background, or planned to have a roommate who would be a pushover."
As soon as I said it, I realized that Puddy had planned exactly that. She couldn't have known about my friendless years, or my submissive streak... but she'd set about establishing dominance anyway. I doubted Puddy thought of people in terms of dominant and submissive, or outgoing and retiring, as personality traits or states. These things were actions to her. Dominate, or be dominated... be big and loud or risk fading into the background.
"You look like you don't quite believe what you're saying," Teddi said. "Would you like to share your thoughts?"
"Puddy's goal is to be the 'big dog'," I said. "It's like she's always got to be the most important person, the leader, the center of attention. She's not happy if she doesn't feel like the biggest, baddest, and strongest person in the room. She was learning how to trigger my wards from the beginning, but after she learned what I was..."
[]
"I woke up and she was holding a pillow over me," I said. "I mean, over my face. She tried to laugh it off... I don't think she was actually trying to kill me, but I don't think it was just a joke, either. She waited until I was awake to start pressing down. I think she wanted to see what I would do... how I would react. I guess to see if I was a threat.."
"How did you react, then?"
"I panicked... flailed around. I lit up a little, but that was involuntary," I said. "And after she let me up, I yelled a bunch but I didn't exactly stand my ground. I still did what she said. Things just got worse from there."
When I'd decided to talk about Puddy at the end of my last session, I'd thought that it might give Teddi some useful background on where I was now, and that in some nebulous way it would help me work through some non-specific issues... I hadn't really thought about what I would say or how it would help me. I didn't really know what my issues were.
But once I got moving, I ended up telling her about the hitting that happened when I'd tried to switch the burned pillow back from my own, Puddy's attempts at "leadership" of the cluster of people that formed around us, the disastrous pizza night... we were just getting to Barley when we ran out of time.
Spilling everything about Puddy, and the way she'd made me feel... []... it did help. I felt closer to Teddi afterwards. She didn't know me. She'd spent less time in my company than Puddy had. But she knew these things about me, she knew about the things I'd gone through.
It wasn't like I'd never told anyone about Puddy before. Amaranth knew. But... she was Amaranth.
It seemed like there was a shift going on in all of my classes. Part of it might have come from my own outlook changing, though I knew that the semester really was gathering speed. The instructors in my more complicated classes... the labs and my logic class... started to give both more work and more complicated work. Assignments started having more requirements and fewer instructions.
After mid-terms, we even got past the basic stuff in thaumatology and I had to start doing reading in order to know what Goldman was talking about.
When the homework really started to pile up for the first time I wondered how I would cope with all of it on top of everything else in my life, but in the end the fact that I had to deal with it meant that there was less of "everything else in my life". I was still dating three people. Sooni still managed to seriously distract me on at least a weekly basis, at least through the end of the first semester.
I felt conflicted about her... []
But, Sooni meant well, deep down inside... and we did have some common interests.
I decided that it couldn't be my job to inspire her to change. I wouldn't seek out her company or her friendship, but as long as she wasn't being awful I wouldn't spurn it, either.
Was the difference only that I found her attractive? I didn't think so. I had seen Sooni at her most confused and vulnerable, the night of our "date". Sooni had attacked me, but Puddy had beat me. They were both violent assaults, but somehow the distinction mattered.
I talked to Teddi about this and didn't make much progress in sorting out how I felt about Sooni, or what to do about her. In the end, we drifted apart by default as we both got busier. I couldn't say if she was as involved with her classwork as I was with mine, but she did stick with the clothing design idea long enough for it to pay off... though it was really more of a costume design business than anything else.
I had to admit I'd been wrong to try to steer her away from that. I thought her fashion ideas were good, but people were apparently willing to pay serious coin for her character outfits. She got the ball rolling by putting some of her older Pretty Neko outfits up for sale on a tapestry.
My involvement in the project was practically non-existent. I only had the bare bones of her weave site started before Kai stepped in and took over, to my relief... I had the impression she'd learned by watching me, but she was a quick study. I would bet she also handled the business side of the business... I doubted Sooni had anything like a head for that.
Apparently she did well enough that she either impressed her parents into reinstating her glamour allowance or she could afford to pay for it herself, because her previous flawless appearance was back well before winter break. She ended up completely changing her schedule for the spring semester at the last minute... during registration she'd contrived to be in three of the same classes as me, her best friend and rival, but she was so caught up in the costume business that she switched to a schedule heavy on glamour and design courses. She officially changed her major to that, keeping a minor in applied enchantment.
I kept my commitment to continue to do my best in mixed melee. The format we'd adopted, of working in small groups and critiquing each other, had its advantages and disadvantages for me. On the one hand, it suited me to have a more analytical approach, where I was fighting some of the time and standing back and thinking about what I'd done and what I was seeing other times. On the other hand, there was the inescapable social component.
Being one of the less capable fighters in most of the groups I cycled through didn't do wonders for my confidence, when it came to giving criticism or even encouragement... and what Amaranth called my "two volumes" problem came up more than once. There were days where I pretty much had to get myself worked up just to speak up. Amaranth wouldn't have been impressed, but Callahan was... letting loose verbally seemed to leave me better prepared to cut loose physically.
[]
Teddi didn't push me on the journal thing, since I was making progress without it. No matter how many times that she told me it wasn't a homework assignment, though, I had a hard time letting go of it. I couldn't say that I'd ever been a great writer, but I had been a writer of some sort during high school and now I was finding it hard to sit down and even compose my thoughts about what was happening to me from day to day.
Teddi told me not to worry about it, but after we established that it wasn't the inability to write the journals in particular that troubled me she didn't mind talking about it.
"If it bothers you, then it's a problem," Teddi said. "Are you having trouble with papers for your classes, too?"
"No," I said. "Well, sometimes finding the time to myself for them... but I manage that. I just have a hard time getting going when I sit down to write in the journal. And when I do... well, I know nobody's necessarily going to read it but me, but I find myself feeling like there's a lot of context missing when I try to describe what I'm feeling."
"Then wouldn't the solution be to describe the context?"
"Yeah, but... I mean, that would basically mean going back to the start of the year," I said. "Going back over everything I've been through."
"Is that something that gives you pause?"
"Well, not really," I said. "I mean, I wouldn't want to live through a lot of it again, but that doesn't mean I can't think about it, and that means I should be able to write about it. At that point, though, isn't it kind of past a journal and straying into an autobiography?"
"Well, like you said: you're the only one who has to read it," she said. "It can be whatever you want."
"The other thing is... it would be as much about the thoughts and emotions that were in my head as the things that happened," I said. "I'm not really sure how to write that."
"What do you mean?"
"Well... okay, um, this is going to be kind of personal," I said, blushing as I realized what the first example that had popped into my head was. But once it was there, it was so big and obvious and such a perfect example of the difficulty of writing about the past months that I couldn't think of anything else.
"That isn't ever going to be a problem for me, and I hope it won't be one for you," Teddi said.
"Well, I'd never... I was a virgin when I came here," I said. "And the first time I, um... you know... had an orgasm... first times... I had no idea what was happening. It was like I didn't have any frame of reference for what I was feeling. I could try to describe how it felt and what was running through my head, but... how do I write about that? Obviously it would be past tense, because I'm recording something that happened weeks ago... but then... well, from the perspective I'm writing it, I do know what happened."
"Your concern is about tenses?"
"It's about honesty," I said. "Emotional honesty, I guess. I mean, if I'm going to do this right... and I know you're going to tell me that there isn't a right or wrong way to do it, but if I'm not doing it in a way that makes sense to me then it isn't right... I'd need it to capture the way I felt in that moment. You know?"
"That makes sense," Teddi said. "Do you think talking your way through the problem some more might help you get around that block?"
"I guess. Maybe... yeah," I said. In fact, in putting it into words and saying it out loud, I felt like I was getting closer to it.
"It seems to me like you're coming at this from the point of view of a writer more so than a journalist," she said. "A storyteller, I mean."
"Well, all the writing I've done in my life so far has either been fiction or course work," I said. "And I can't really view myself as an academic subject, you know? This is my story we're talking about."
"So let's talk about it."
And we did. I left that session feeling a little more confident of my ability to write about what I'd gone through... it seemed like the most emotionally truthful way to do it would be to use past tense, but keep things mostly centered in the "present" of the story rather than on how things looked in hindsight.
I gave it a try that evening, writing out a short account of my arrival at MU. It was... well, it was kind of startling to recall how painfully awkward my first day was. It wasn't like I was Ms. Suave these days, but remembering the feeling of burning with embarrassment at having walked into the nexus thinking it was Harlowe's front door... and all the other minor missteps... well, I wondered how I'd ever managed to apply to a school or get on a coach by myself.
"I suspect you did what you had to," Teddi said when I shared that with her in my next session. "Sometimes we do things that seem impossible to us because the alternative is even harder."
"It seems like a huge overreaction to me now," I said. "Though it's not like I'm not prone to those... still, I can't imagine beating myself up quite that much for stopping on the wrong floor these days."
"Are you celebrating your progress or castigating your past self?" she asked.
"I don't really think I'm castigating," I said. "I'm not like, 'Oh, how could I be so stupid?' or anything... except on maybe on a practical level. I'm wondering how I functioned."
"As best as you could, I would bet," Teddi said. "You know, I was ready to suggest you give up on the journal-writing, but I suspect this will be good for you in the long run. You seem to be very centered in the present."
"Isn't that a good thing?" I asked. "I mean, if I were all stuck in the past, wouldn't you be telling me to live in the moment?"
"Very possibly," Teddi said. "But I wouldn't rate the past, present, or future as being a better place than the others to be 'all stuck in'. A healthy perspective integrates all three."
"It's not like I never think about the past," I said. "I mean, I can't really get away from it, can I?"
[First hour of work. I was on a roll when I wrote this, so there are a lot of omissions and skip-overs... anywhere you see a "[]".]
Callahan showed up at the salle on Thursday wearing an eyepatch. She said she had a special prize for the first person who asked her what happened.
Nobody took her up on it that I saw.
She seemed to be in a bad mood, but it was hard to say since most of the time she seemed to be both incredibly pissed off and having the time of her life. It was also hard to say if the speed and directness with which she got down to business was part of her mood, or part of the curriculum... she'd made it clear in our previous classes that we'd reached a sort of tipping point and the pace was going to pick up.
She started calling names and setting people to exercises and moved around the room with an efficiency she'd never shown before. I []
Callahan's style of teaching had never exactly been "no-nonsense", though her threatening manner could give you the impression it was. The thing was, there's a difference between "no-nonsense" and "in your face". Nonsense can get in your face pretty easily. It's not necessarily big on personal space.
"I'm surprised to see you're still with us, Emo Kid," she said to me at one point during the class.
"I told you I'd be here and ready to learn," I said.
"Well, at least I know your weekend was worse than mine," she said. Cold prickles ran down my spine as another interpretation of her opening line presented itself in my mind. Still with us.
"Why do you say that?" I asked her. Not "How do you know?", which was the first thing that popped into my head but which didn't seem to be able to pop out of my mouth.
"Because your life sucks," she said. "Keep it up. The learning, not the sucking."
Those were the only words she had for me personally during the class []
[]
"I have a note here to remind you to talk about Puddy," Teddy said.
"Puddy," I repeated. "I was kind of hoping you would have forgotten about that."
"Not a chance," she said. "If you don't want to talk about Puddy, we can talk about why you don't want to."
"What if I don't want to talk about that?"
"Then there is going to come a point when there's no longer any purpose in you being here," Teddi said. "I'm sorry to put it so bluntly, but I know you're predisposed to think in those terms. We're not there yet, and there's nothing unusual in taking time and a few sessions to really open up... but, well, it's an active process. You have to participate. You have to open. I can reach out all I want, but it won't do any good if you don't reach back."
I sighed.
"Do you know who Puddy is?" I asked. I wasn't sure which answer I was hoping for here. If she did, then maybe I wouldn't have to go into things as deeply. If she didn't, then maybe I could spend more time working my way up to the real issues. Not that I wanted to stall, exactly... more like build up speed.
"Who is she to you?" Teddi asked.
"Well... she was my roommate," I said. "And I suppose she was my friend, in some ways. I mean, in a formal sort of way. I don't think she was actually friendly to me. But she called herself my friend, and I felt... well, that meant something. It probably sounds stupid to say that I let her treat me like shit because she was my friend. I mean, it would be one thing if we had a whole big history together where she'd earned some kind of trust or slack and then abused it, but I literally just met her at the start of the semester."
"That sort of thing is really not uncommon," Teddi said. "The mind contains concepts, labels that we use for relating to the world around us, and the people in it. Even with people you've known for years, there are limits to how well you can 'know' them. So you sort them into boxes. Someone who gets labeled 'friend'... they are a friend, emotionally. You'll react to them through that filter."
"There's probably more to it than that," I said. "I mean... well, I didn't have a lot of friends growing up. After I, you know, turned, I didn't have any, but it wasn't like I lost friends. It was like I went from not having any friends to having no friends, if that makes sense."
"You're talking about active animosity," Teddi said. "People treated you differently."
"Yeah," I said. "They were different people, but it was definitely a different reaction. I went from being the weird quiet kid to being the scary dangerous one."
"Were you lonely?" Teddi asked. "Before that, I mean."
"I was pretty happy as a kid. Content," I said. "I had my imagination, and I had my mother. On some level I sort of labeled everybody in my class at school as being my friends. I saw them every weekday. We did things together... at school. I wasn't completely shunned, at any level that I could tell. Though I've never exactly been the most socially aware person. I was just starting to get the picture before I left my old school."
"What picture was that?"
"That the other kids... they did stuff together outside of class," I said. "They hung out. They shared secrets that weren't the property of the playground. I was tolerated, but not liked. At least, that's how it seemed to me later on when I thought back on it... but I also thought that I'd go back to that in a heartbeat. It was comfortable, at least."
"It can be a bit of a double-bind," Teddi said. "If you're not a social person, I mean. If you don't learn to recognize the cues early on, you don't know when you're missing them."
"Well, lucky for me, people aren't very subtle about how they feel about me these days," I said. "Anyway, Puddy seemed friendly enough, when I first met her."
"Did she?"
"Well, she kind of pressured me into telling her my racial background," I said. "I hadn't exactly planned on doing that. Though maybe it wasn't realistic to expect to keep it a secret."
"Realistic or not, it was your decision," Teddi said. "What sort of pressure did she use?"
"Nothing bad, then," I said. "She wasn't violent about it. She just said that I should trust her... really, I think it was my eagerness to have a friend, to be a friend."
"She took advantage of that?"
"I don't know if I'd put it that way," I said. Why was I defending Puddy? I thought I was just trying to be accurate, but it came out like I was trying to convince myself she wasn't all that bad. "I mean, okay, yes, she benefited from it, but it's not like she knew my background, or planned to have a roommate who would be a pushover."
As soon as I said it, I realized that Puddy had planned exactly that. She couldn't have known about my friendless years, or my submissive streak... but she'd set about establishing dominance anyway. I doubted Puddy thought of people in terms of dominant and submissive, or outgoing and retiring, as personality traits or states. These things were actions to her. Dominate, or be dominated... be big and loud or risk fading into the background.
"You look like you don't quite believe what you're saying," Teddi said. "Would you like to share your thoughts?"
"Puddy's goal is to be the 'big dog'," I said. "It's like she's always got to be the most important person, the leader, the center of attention. She's not happy if she doesn't feel like the biggest, baddest, and strongest person in the room. She was learning how to trigger my wards from the beginning, but after she learned what I was..."
[]
"I woke up and she was holding a pillow over me," I said. "I mean, over my face. She tried to laugh it off... I don't think she was actually trying to kill me, but I don't think it was just a joke, either. She waited until I was awake to start pressing down. I think she wanted to see what I would do... how I would react. I guess to see if I was a threat.."
"How did you react, then?"
"I panicked... flailed around. I lit up a little, but that was involuntary," I said. "And after she let me up, I yelled a bunch but I didn't exactly stand my ground. I still did what she said. Things just got worse from there."
When I'd decided to talk about Puddy at the end of my last session, I'd thought that it might give Teddi some useful background on where I was now, and that in some nebulous way it would help me work through some non-specific issues... I hadn't really thought about what I would say or how it would help me. I didn't really know what my issues were.
But once I got moving, I ended up telling her about the hitting that happened when I'd tried to switch the burned pillow back from my own, Puddy's attempts at "leadership" of the cluster of people that formed around us, the disastrous pizza night... we were just getting to Barley when we ran out of time.
Spilling everything about Puddy, and the way she'd made me feel... []... it did help. I felt closer to Teddi afterwards. She didn't know me. She'd spent less time in my company than Puddy had. But she knew these things about me, she knew about the things I'd gone through.
It wasn't like I'd never told anyone about Puddy before. Amaranth knew. But... she was Amaranth.
It seemed like there was a shift going on in all of my classes. Part of it might have come from my own outlook changing, though I knew that the semester really was gathering speed. The instructors in my more complicated classes... the labs and my logic class... started to give both more work and more complicated work. Assignments started having more requirements and fewer instructions.
After mid-terms, we even got past the basic stuff in thaumatology and I had to start doing reading in order to know what Goldman was talking about.
When the homework really started to pile up for the first time I wondered how I would cope with all of it on top of everything else in my life, but in the end the fact that I had to deal with it meant that there was less of "everything else in my life". I was still dating three people. Sooni still managed to seriously distract me on at least a weekly basis, at least through the end of the first semester.
I felt conflicted about her... []
But, Sooni meant well, deep down inside... and we did have some common interests.
I decided that it couldn't be my job to inspire her to change. I wouldn't seek out her company or her friendship, but as long as she wasn't being awful I wouldn't spurn it, either.
Was the difference only that I found her attractive? I didn't think so. I had seen Sooni at her most confused and vulnerable, the night of our "date". Sooni had attacked me, but Puddy had beat me. They were both violent assaults, but somehow the distinction mattered.
I talked to Teddi about this and didn't make much progress in sorting out how I felt about Sooni, or what to do about her. In the end, we drifted apart by default as we both got busier. I couldn't say if she was as involved with her classwork as I was with mine, but she did stick with the clothing design idea long enough for it to pay off... though it was really more of a costume design business than anything else.
I had to admit I'd been wrong to try to steer her away from that. I thought her fashion ideas were good, but people were apparently willing to pay serious coin for her character outfits. She got the ball rolling by putting some of her older Pretty Neko outfits up for sale on a tapestry.
My involvement in the project was practically non-existent. I only had the bare bones of her weave site started before Kai stepped in and took over, to my relief... I had the impression she'd learned by watching me, but she was a quick study. I would bet she also handled the business side of the business... I doubted Sooni had anything like a head for that.
Apparently she did well enough that she either impressed her parents into reinstating her glamour allowance or she could afford to pay for it herself, because her previous flawless appearance was back well before winter break. She ended up completely changing her schedule for the spring semester at the last minute... during registration she'd contrived to be in three of the same classes as me, her best friend and rival, but she was so caught up in the costume business that she switched to a schedule heavy on glamour and design courses. She officially changed her major to that, keeping a minor in applied enchantment.
I kept my commitment to continue to do my best in mixed melee. The format we'd adopted, of working in small groups and critiquing each other, had its advantages and disadvantages for me. On the one hand, it suited me to have a more analytical approach, where I was fighting some of the time and standing back and thinking about what I'd done and what I was seeing other times. On the other hand, there was the inescapable social component. []