Anghraine

I was feeling a bit gloomy about how, in many respects, my life is only just beginning at 38.

Meanwhile, in an article I was reading for my dissertation, there was a reference to the early seventeenth century pop culture concept of Lucrezia Borgia, with a footnote about Actual Historical Lucrezia Borgia (aka Lucrècia). I don't think it actually listed her age at death, but I already knew what it was, and reading about her reminded me of everything that happened to and around her before her premature death at age 39. At that point, she had already outlived most of her brothers and one of her two sisters.

This isn't an "everyone was dying of old age in their 30s back then" thing, which is a wildly inaccurate take on the human lifespan (the greater likelihood of dying young =/= 35-year lifespan). Lucrècia died young. She struggled through years of difficult pregnancies, including after providing her husband with an heir, and eventually died a few days after delivering a daughter who also died. Sarah Bradford's biography observes that Lucrècia had essentially emerged triumphant over the incredibly complex and daunting obstacles she was faced with throughout her life as a political figure, navigating them all, only for childbirth to kill her as it killed so many other women.

In her life, Lucrècia experienced luxury on a scale that is unimaginable to most people today, or ever. This isn't meant to downplay that, but ... it didn't save her. She was at once influential, resourceful, and profoundly exploited throughout her life in ways that hinged on her gender and culminated in her death, only for her name to be trashed for hundreds of years afterwards. This isn't unique to her, or to her region of the world, or her time, even though there were culturally specific elements at work.

And for all the awful, shitty elements of my life thus far, I'd much rather be facing the beginning of life at this age than the end of it.

I thirst for another direct P&P adaptation. T_T

Tagged: #there is other austen and even other regency coming out #'other' regency anyway #but at the end of the day my great love is pride and prejudice #and i want something new! #i know i know some people only get one adaptation of their fave ever if at all #and it might have major issues (*cough*) #but i'm petulant and spoiled so /shrug #look. it's pride and prejudice. do something vaguely interesting and print the money #(i was going to say a straight adaptation but i mean like... not zombies or someone's glorified fanfic #not 'heterosexual' #f/f pride and prejudice would be amazing if done remotely right ... /sigh) #imagine ... new gifsets ...

yavieriel replied to this post:

Ugh, that therapist sounds super unhelpful. Good luck with finding a new one! In theory I would say that if there are multiple therapists available, they should understand a request of "I didn't find [therapist] a good fit, is someone else available?" but I realize in practice that might be less workable.

I replied (on Jan 24th):

Yeah, definitely very unhelpful. I wish I could remember her name so I could specifically request not to have her, lol.

yavieriel responded:

They might have a staff page with pictures and names, if that would help.

tree said (on Jan 23rd):

this is the kind of thing that the "just ask for help!" brigade never seems to understand. it's work and it's hard and it never stops. *solidarity fistbump*

I replied (on Jan 24th):

Exactly!

southsidestory said (on Feb 10th):

I'm bipolar II like you, and I also have PTSD and GAD. EMDR therapy was literally life changing and life saving for my PTSD recovery. But. I've found therapy very minimally helpful for my bipolar. Medication is the only thing that has truly improved my mood swings. So I understand your hesitancy, and also, that last therapist you had sounds incompetent at best and invalidating at worst. I hope you find somebody better! ❤️

I replied (on Feb 17th):

Thank you! And yes, that’s largely my experience—when I had severe disassociative depression, therapy helped some, but it kind of reached a point where the depressive side wasn’t as bad, but nothing except mood stabilizers+antipsychotics really seemed to prevent it. And in general, it’s pretty well under control these days unless there’s some significant strain (as now). I mean, knowing I could snap into cycling at any moment isn’t a fun way to live—even setting ASD and GAD aside—but it’s much better than before, therapist or no therapist.

Re: the last therapist … yeah, exactly. Thanks!

Tagged: #honestly therapy has been most useful when there's some insight that doesn't actually make my symptoms better #but lets me recontextualize them in a way that makes it easier to live with them #i think that's part of the reason i liked my previous psychiatrist so much #even though she wasn't a therapist per se

My uni’s Zoom teaching advice is like “create eye contact with your students :)” and shit, and meanwhile the autism brain is just RED ALERT RED ALERT

They were explicit this semester that not having any synchronous meetings isn’t an option, and of course, not teaching isn’t an option, so … the special hell awaits :)))

Tagged: #accommodations are ... band-aids basically #necessary! when you need them you want them on hand! but there's a wealth of situations they don't cover! #aghhh

1) This chapter is a monster (~12,000 words at this point with a long way left to go), mostly because I have so much to say about one specific play (one of three that inspired the whole dissertation concept to begin with), but it's only one of many texts under discussion overall. I'm tired, but also too obsessed opinionated interested in my topic and in doing right by my guy a very relevant playwright to cut it short. On one level it's fun and another aghhhhhhhhhhh

2) One of the fun/exhausting aspects of studying early modern literature (mostly plays for me) is that there's typically 400 years of accumulated scholarship to discuss in the course of positioning my argument and, well, actually making my argument. I actually enjoy the 50s-80s early modernist scholars quite a bit because they're less infected by Victorian traditions than the earlier ones, but less entrenched in fixing on One Theoretical Lens To Rule Them All and saccharine semi-corporate bullshitting that infects a lot of modern academia. So if they think someone's argument is bad, they'll just say so. Like, I kind of love this debate over the incestuous subtext (barely subtext) of The Duchess of Malfi where Louis Giannetti snaps out in a footnote, "Finally, he [F. L. Lucas] concedes that incest might be a possibility—'a suggestion, and an inessential one' (p. 34). How Professor Lucas can dismiss incest as 'inessential' staggers the mind" (307n14). Tell us what you really feel, Professor Giannetti!

(F. L. Lucas himself was a truly remarkable figure in Webster studies and also 1930s British anti-appeasement and anti-fascism. His Webster takes are a little wonky but it kind of feels less significant in the grand scheme of things. He didn't have the focus of later Webster scholars but given that his extremely varying interests included raging at the British press and government, helping refugees, putting fascist hate mail from Ezra Pound on display, and ultimately running an intelligence cell to fight Nazis, it's hard to care that much. He also wrote a sci-fi novella about overpopulation and, apparently, global warming in 1937.)

3) Anyway, I was going over The Duchess of Malfi and some of Ferdinand's many creepy, purity-obsessed speeches/threats to his sister, and stumbled over this one:
me, wearily: Okay, Horde Prime.

tbh … sometimes pride, guilt, and sunk costs are all that keep me in academia

Tagged: #i respect a lot of academics but there is SO MUCH that i'm disaffected with and have 0 interest in doing #and even stuff i genuinely need to do seems kind of intolerable yet unimportant #i know some of it is brain stuff but some of it is Not

[ETA 4/13/2024: The "brain stuff" was my extreme depression in 2021. I was not exactly wrong about academia, but the impact of COVID-19 + poorly controlled bipolar mood swings + grad school + difficulties of my field made for a particularly grim experience of that year. So that's what the depression tag is about, even when the post is not specifically about depression.]

...which is helpful for mostly focusing on my dissertation all morning, but I have a break now and it's still very laggy on my desktop. And when it finally does manage to load it jumps the screen back up to the top in a really annoying way.

At first I thought it might be my connection, which can be a bit erratic, but everything else works fine.

I guess further motivation to keep crossposting before it crumbles completely but wahhh.

It's always kind of morbidly fascinating how much online Tolkien fandom is so powerfully shaped by the Jackson LOTR films, widespread Silm fanon based on brief and usually ambiguous scraps (if based on anything other than "stuff fandom BNFs came up with"), and bits and pieces from random documents Tolkien actually wrote (including things he explicitly discarded). And it's like—there's nothing wrong with liking the films, for all my gripes with them. I disagree w/ a lot of particular takes on them and resent their stranglehold on the fandom and the incessant glorification of that stranglehold, but they're powerful movies and I myself likely would have taken much longer to get into the book if not for the atmosphere created by the films.

But the posts about how wonderful it is that Tolkien fandom has moved past those silly days of yore when fanon spliced with the films spliced with decontextualized scraps wasn't the main mode of Tolkien fandom engagement, and how the Peter Jackson filter on everything Tolkien is right and good and maybe even a matter of social justice (?????) and so on are definitely frustrating. Without even getting into specific discourses, Tolkien fandom can be profoundly alienating if you're not into 1) the Jackson films or 2) popular fanon. And yeah, ultimately that's just a fandom misalignment between my personal interests and that of much of the larger fandom, and obviously they can and will do fandom in whatever way makes them happy. That's fine. But the active celebration of fandom pressure to conform to the interpretations of people who had no more impact on Tolkien's work than me is pretty deeply grating, ngl.

And the idea that incorporating popular bits and pieces of Tolkien material to augment the fanon+PJ!LOTR version of Middle-earth just proves that Tolkien fandom has left their movieverse days behind and is really about love for the books these days is like ... what. How does that even make sense? Fandom does not have to be about love for a specific source material and there is plenty to criticize and correct in Tolkien, yes. But there's a way in which I can respect people who say "I'm here more because I love the LOTR movies and the material created by the Tolkien fandom community than for most of what Tolkien actually wrote" (something I have seen people say!) far more than these saccharine celebratory posts about how Tolkien fandom has come so far by driving out book fans and, idk, desperately searching for a woman to blame for everything that goes wrong in the First Age.

(I recently encountered the theory that Celegorm's actions towards Lúthien are not driven by anything stated but by a desire to avenge Aredhel's rape/imprisonment by Eöl. Silm fandom quickly seemed like the Mirror Universe version of the Silmarillion when I got into it years ago, but at that point, I was just like "okay, Celegorm trying to rape Lúthien is actually Aredhel's fault? Sounds like a perfectly typical Silm fandom take.")

Anyway. There are definitely corners of Tolkien fandom that aren't like this and mutual disaffection is how I met most of my friends in the fandom, etc. But BNFs patting themselves on the back over how fantastic the current atmosphere is for everyone who matters :)))) does absolutely set my teeth on edge.