Agnes the Alien

(Nus Braka Voice) how's that for a trauma loop?

2026-03-03T00:00:00Z

Content warning: childhood sexual abuse & trafficking.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my creativity. I don’t do a lot of original work – Ice Dancer was my first poem in… way too long, maybe a YEAR? – I’ve only been focusing on fanworks. I do have ideas for original works! Many, in fact! But every time I sit down to write, there’s a block. I don’t really know why.

Maybe it’s that I feel like my original writing is futile.

I’ve been published before. But because I was suicidal for so long and genuinely didn’t plan on being alive for it to matter, I never really learned how to separate my fandom persona from my professional writing self. And that was a bad idea. When I started to finally heal – around the time I started using dark fiction to cope with past trauma – I realized that the people I surrounded myself with would try to ruin my career and life if they could tie me to that pen name. So I had to rebuild, and none of my previously published works could be tied to my current pen name. I had to remake everything – my author site, my itch.io, etc. Some of my favorite creations can no longer be tied to me because of this, including a piece of interactive art that means… well… just about everything to me. I had about 2k followers on those accounts; now I barely have 200. It all just feels utterly useless.

I also feel like a lot of my original work is just horribly repetitive these days. I use the same metaphors and the same pains and the same words and the same events, over and over and over again.

I’m stuck. And not just creatively.

I’m chained to these things. I’m living a time loop where I’m forced to re-experience them over and over again every day of my pitiful damn existence. I’m being buried alive and when I suffocate I’ll wake up in a television show but for me I really have run out of time!!! Or at least it feels that way. I try not to let fiction write my story for me but it is a little bit easier that way.

Even my fanworks, honestly, to a lesser extent. I find myself hyperfixated on portrayals of childhood sexual abuse in fiction, and finding ways to project my experiences with it onto characters who haven’t explicitly been through it but also have backstories that would realistically involve it. Take Caleb Mir from Star Trek: SFA for example; he’s been on his own, on the run, and in and out of prison since age six. You don’t escape that unmolested.

I find myself projecting onto him deeply. I find myself getting unhealthily attached to him. I think about this stuff way way too much. I see myself in him, even if I shouldn’t, even if my life has been paradise compared to his. Thinking about characters having the same pain I have, and overcoming it, gives me some illusion of hope’s tangibility. Illusion, delusion? I don’t know. It just makes me feel like healing can be in reach for me if I try really hard enough – like maybe if I squint really hard and believe and click my heels together I can imagine up a portal into a world where I’m not in this much agony.

I love SFA because it’s the first time I’ve seen a show with a cast of characters that I feel like would genuinely accept me as a person if they knew me. I relate to SAM so deeply; to see her accepted by everyone – loved by everyone – makes me soar. Caleb comforts fat anxious cadets (even if I have beef with Pickford now.) People are given space to deal with their traumas, given empathy. I’ve never wanted to live in a show more than this (except maybe Doom Patrol, for ficto reasons.)

But as I go deeper and deeper into escapism here, I find myself just ouroborosing my trauma. Like I just keep throwing it up and then eating the vomit and then throwing it back up and eating it again and so on and so forth, like my dog did when my dad died. The projection helps me cope, but it also keeps me trapped there, in a way.

And then I wonder if there is a key to release the trap anywhere when you’re a trafficking survivor, or if it’s sort of like how sometimes when people get shot they have to leave bullet fragments in the body because it’s too dangerous to try and remove them. You know? Like, maybe it’s just something you have to carry inside of you as you try to move forward, because going back through it would just make things worse. Maybe coping with fiction is as far as I’m going to get.

I am in therapy. I see two therapists! I do ketamine therapy twice a week. I literally have appointments 4/5 days a week. Yet here I remain, just barely hanging on, handcuffed to the pole.

Sometimes I find myself getting confused. I forget that Star Trek technology – and Star Trek peace – isn’t real. I forget that it isn’t that easy. I forget that the peace in Star Trek is just as precarious and blood-soaked as it would be in real life. But it’s easier to live somewhere I feel accepted than live in this universe where the only hobby I’m truly capable of having is retraumatizing myself.

I want to write about something else now.

Fandom Sucks Now, and Other Laments

2026-03-14T00:00:00Z

Content warnings: child sex trafficking/PTSD.

You know, these days, I am getting sort of tired.

I don’t really know how else to describe it, so we’ll just go with the simplicity of I’m really just kind of tired. And the worst, most unsightly aspect of it all is this: I don’t really know what I’m tired of.

I can give you a list of reasons without hesitation:

I spend my entire time in fandom, because fandom is my passion. I run a fanfiction archive with ~360 users and around 500 different fandoms. Fandom is, quite literally, what I have dedicated my life to for the past fifteen years. And fandom, apparently, fucking hates me. Yeah, so it turns out that if you’re different from what is considered Normal and Acceptable in any way, you deserve to die and are subhuman, according to others. This widespread harassment is reminiscent of my days being beaten up and nearly murdered as a child at my Waldorf elementary school—unfathomable, needless cruelty fueled by a hatred of anything they don’t want to understand. So what if I like to cope by writing dark fanfiction? So what if I just fucking like dark fanfiction? What are you going to do about it? Stop me?

But unfortunately, there are actual repercussions for openly liking dark content. People can and will try to ruin your life, your source of income, your relationships, your safety. And I’m a sensitive alien, okay! I’m a goddamn child trafficking survivor and to be called a pedophile over fictional aliens shatters my soul in ways no one can even begin to comprehend unless they’re in the same situation.

I shouldn’t say that, probably. I shouldn’t let people know about that weakness. It’s like a KICK ME sign taped to my back, a big red arrow pointing right to my Achilles heel. Come and cut me. But I am in a human body in this life, and so I am human. And as a human thing, the comparison still will never leave me. It haunts, vivisects. I know who I am, and I cannot control how others perceive me, and I cannot handle being seen as a being of the same depravity of the people who hurt me. I just can’t.

I think this is a valid reason to be tired. It is still only one facet of the crystal.

I do so much for fandom. What does fandom do for me? It brought me my beloved. My amazing friends. But what else? What lately?

I just do nothing. I have nothing to do all day. Oh, sure, I have tons to do, actually. I have ideas and I have projects and I have embroidery supplies and music software and cute little $5 kits from the store where you knit an ugly ass ladybug. I simply never have the wherewithal to actually do any of them. Is it the fatigue and pain I am constantly in? Am I just depressed and unmotivated because everything seems worthless? Is my psychosis acting up again? Do I need to have my meds adjusted, is what my family will say, if I tell them I’m struggling with motivation, so of course I don’t tell them.

I can’t ever get the spark going. Like a wind-up toy that just gets tighter and tigher until it snaps, never moving forward. And I have no goddamn idea why.

I’m tired of being so tired.

My family is aging and ill and my mother will not go to the doctor because she is scared. She’s sixty one, her thyroid is dead, she needs to be on medication for it (hypocritical of me perhaps, since my thyroid is also dead and I don’t take my synthroid, but I’m going to start!!!), but she refuses to get a perscription. I’m terrified about what will happen when her body can’t take it anymore.

My nana has anxiety worse than mine. It’s so bad she stays up multiple nights having intrusive thoughts. She refuses to take any sort of medication for this or bring it up to her doctor. I’m terrified about what will happen when she gets too terrified.

I’m tired of being so scared.

Oh, yeah, and there’s that whole I-have-dissociative-identity-disorder-and-CPTSD thing. I’ve been having flashbacks almost every day lately. I’m tired of feeling broken. I’m tired of letting it break me, but I just don’t know how to stop thinking about it, writing about it, recreating it in fiction, thinking about it, throwing up about it, obsessing over it, thinking about it. I’m obsessed with it all, the pain that I went through and the siphoning of my innocence and the portioning of my body and so on. It’s all I ever think about. When will it stop? When will I stop feeling it?

Torturing fictional characters in the same way makes it feel better for a little while. Like a band-aid over an autopsy incison.

I guess maybe I’m just tired of all of it. Of this frozen life I’m living. I keep thinking something needs to change, and I keep trying to make small changes to my daily routine, you know, build new habits, start a schedule, but it’s all futile, I fall out of everything eventually. I really need to start preparing for my future, because I guess I’m going to have one? And preparing for my future is not sitting here writing toxic yuri fanfiction all day, as fun as it is. I don’t know. I keep clawing at the walls of my brain, trying to find a solution.

I see a lot of my friends taking steps back from fandom these days. A lot of them are also creatives, and they’re choosing to focus more on original works instead. I find that option more and more appealing with each cruel post I see pass my Tumblr dashboard. I can’t decide if I really want to step back from fandom, or if I only feel a need to do so because still being so deeply entrenched in fandom when everyone else I know has moved on makes me feel a little self-conscious, and I feel like I have to follow suit or I will be left behind. But I suspect that while my insecurities are probably a factor, it has more to do with the harassment I’ve been facing over being a Nahla/Caleb(/Anisha) shipper, and the terrible things people have said about me because of it.

I don’t want to enjoy things in fear. I have my own personal archive using the AO3 software now; I rarely post to AO3 outside of exchanges. I keep my fics locked down to my friends and people I trust not to judge me. And… I’m someone who loves attention! I kind of need it to survive, clinically. But I just struggle to stay sane when horrible accusation after horrible accusation is thrown at me, and all I’m trying to do is enjoy myself in peace. I don’t want to have to hide or water myself down to be accepted, but unfortunately that is the reality of the world. We’re all paranoid, we’re all pointing fingers and pointing fingers and gnawing off fingers, we’re all cruel. I just can’t take it anymore.

The issue is that I run that aforementioned somewhat-popular fanfiction archive. And I enjoy running this archive! I want to do so much more with it! And the people I have met through it are absolutely wonderful. I don’t want to step back from Sunset and I don’t see myself doing so in the future. At the same time, though, I think Sunset and Dreamwidth and my tiny little Discord server will be the extent of my fandom participation for a while.

I want to focus on my original works and build a real career in writing. I want to make video games and finish my novella I’ve been working on for a year now that is still only at 4,400 words and I want to make music and I want to learn how to hand quilt and I want to have more things in my life than just television and fictional characters, but it’s kind of hard for me to focus on anything besides them. Or – it has been in the past. Maybe I’m finally so disillusioned with fandom that I’ll be able to focus on something else for a change. I don’t know.

I don’t really know how to talk to people outside of fandom, and in all honesty, I don’t know a lot about myself outside of it just in general. I don’t have much of an identity beyond that, at least in my own perception of myself, and that’s… well, obviously unhealthy. I want to go back to school and go to writer’s groups in the city and I want a life worth living. I want to make websites that aren’t AO3-based or shoddy things I threw together based on outdated Rails guides; I want to actually know what I’m doing with web development, because it’s something I find very fun and rewarding.

I just so desperately want things to change, but I don’t know how to change them. The only thing I can think of for now is that I must focus on building a life for myself that isn’t attached to a fictional character. It’s long overdue.

I Cried At My Birthday Party

2026-06-27T00:00:00Z

Content descriptions: contains implications of abuse and discussions of suicide attempts.

I was born in Muskegon, Michigan on June 27th, 2001, in a hospital that got torn down the very next year. Sometimes I think that's a little bit ironic, how both my essence and my place of birth were demolished shortly after I entered the world. It's just a little bit too fitting, you know? But the thing about demolishing something is that it is often done to build something new in place of what once was. DID is a little different than knocking down a building---what was demolished was actually a bunch of cerebral Spaghetti-Os souping around in my brain, just waiting to form a coherent solid frozen block of mushy personality--but in most other ways it is exactly the same. It's just like if you destroyed the bricks and wood and nails you were going to use to build said building before you even started building it, just because you could, just to feel some sort of shitty power over something that was going to tower over you, had it been allowed to grow. It's just the same story on different paper, a hospital and a body and a destruction. I'm a little tired of writing about that, but I haven't gotten to the "building something new" part quite yet, so I'm still chained to that wall.

To pull back a little bit from metaphor, though: today is June 27th, 2026. It is my 25th birthday. And the harsh damn truth of reality is this: I'm not a demolished building and I'm not a tool to be used or a decoration to hang or a "tell me where" doll to position --- I'm actually the hospital itself, all of the years it spent in service, helping people and saving lives and delivering children. You'll notice I'm diving right back down into the deep end of metaphor; it's just hard to face it, and it's hard to say it out loud or write it down or stop long enough to think about it.

I'm actually not broken at all.

I have hated myself for two decades, you do the math, and in the most inexplicably intense ways possible. Yesterday I told my mother that self-love isn't even a nothingness--it's an absence of something, a hole someone punched into the wall, a dent in the side of the car, most aptly a family photograph with one member's entire body scribbled into a dark, intangible mess of Sharpie. It is noticeably gone. Sometimes my mom and I joke about how being abused means you get I HATE MYSELF; ABUSE ME HOW! tattooed on your forehead in bright firetruck Comic Sans with ink that is visible to everyone but you. It isn't very funny, but that's what makes it funny; when you can't squeeze the tragedy into something sweeter, you laugh at it instead, hoping that turning it into humor will defang it, put the monster to sleep so you can sneak on by and grab the treasure. I'm still looking for the gold.

It's really hard to confront. It's hard to look at yourself after being intimately aware of all of your flaws and kissing your capacity for harm passionately under the moonlight and all of the things you are supposed to do when you're a problematic person and go: well, maybe I'm not as bad as I thought I was. That capacity for harm is there, but instead of pointing the gun in front of me like I thought I had been doing, I was actually holding it to my own head, and not looking at myself from the proper perspective. In Russian Roulette there is a bullet, yes, but there are also five chances to live.

I try my best to be the best person I can be, and though I make mistakes, I do my best to correct them. That's more than I can say about a lot of people. But the point of this post isn't that I want to seem like a good person; the point is that I'm finally beginning to understand that I am a person... just, you know, in general.

I've tried to commit suicide ten times. My pets alerted my family five of those ten times; the other times I was either not successful or was hospitalized. I can't remember a time in my life where I envisioned myself alive at a quarter of a century, and hopefully beyond. I can't remember a time in my life before now where I would have attached that last part--"hopefully"--and meant it with true sincerity. But I think I mean it now.

Yesterday was my birthday party. All of my favorite cousins came over to spend the day with me. My mom ordered me a rainbow custom cake and planned party games and put so much effort into making it an amazing day, just because she loves me. My cousins came over because, for some reason, they love me and want me around. I got to meet my cousin's boyfriend for the first time and I didn't even have a New Stranger Panic Attack. It was an extremely fun day and it is the first good birthday I've had in eleven years and in the middle of it I broke down crying.

I don't know why. I guess it just...

It occurred to me in the middle of the party that I have the life I always wanted. I have people in my life who love and care for me. My family is wonderful (the accepting members, anyway), my friends are wonderful, my partner and pets are wonderful, and I finally feel like I have a real future. I am surrounded with more support and love than I have ever had before. I don't really get it yet, for aforementioned reasons, but there is something about me that people like and want around. And - independently of this, but it did help - I realized that they actually have a point.

A lot of people say that you can't truly be loved until you love yourself, and I've always hated that phrase, because it really does not take into account Shitty Life Circumstances. I never loved myself because I never had a myself to love. How could I have loved myself when I only saw myself as an extended amalgam of Badthing? How could I have loved myself when I felt like I was living in a cocoon of scar tissue?

The funny thing is that I developed this amazing life while I was still living in that cocoon. I pulled myself out, but it was the love and support from the people around me that cut the damn thing open so I could emerge. You know?

I am so deeply appreciative of the people I have in my life, and at times I worry expressing it too often or too intensely makes me seem clingy or annoying, but how can I not be constantly taken aback by how lucky I am to have what I do? It's like when you discover a shortcut in a really long pathway; you don't know how you ever made it home when you had to walk the long way round, because things are so much easier now.

So I'm not broken, and I'm wanted, and I'm loved. This question has been on my mind: "Now what?"

What do I do now? It's like I'm finally starting my life for the first time at 5 years from 30. I finally get to live.

I think the answer to that question might be "anything I want to do." I don't know.

I guess we'll find out.