juushika

I promise that everything only looks like a last-minute decision; I'm just never sure if things will actually come together until ... the very last minute.

The cats and I are moving up to the house! It was driving me crazy to work on it only a few hours each weekend (and it meant that our progress was, unsurprisingly, slow). Moving up with just the bare necessities (me-bed, cat-beds, something to sit on) means that I can tackle cleaning, painting, floor polishing, etc. while the house is still largely empty. Devon will handle moving the furniture in a few weeks, and will join me by the end of the month.

I will have internet, but minimally (via a phone plan). I pre-loaded, oh, a million books and podcasts and Netflix shows. I've always liked brief periods of inconvenience, like the days before the internet gets put in or a snow storm knocking out power. I'm a little less excited about not having AC, in summer, while living alone, while doing new-to-me house things, but! I believe in myself, and the truth is that anything I can get done will be a faster timeline than we have been getting things done, so the bar is low.

I did so much pre-packing of media/linens/etc,, but the last 48 hours before moving people and animals turns out to be ridiculously busy despite that; amazing how many objects feel like invisible parts of daily life but are, in fact, physical goods that need to be transported.

Because of my limited internet access, I expect I'll be more absent than usual in the the coming weeks. See y'all on the flip side, I suppose!

"I told [my sister] that the second half of October is easier, once the actual death-anniversary has passed, but that doesn't feel like it's proving to be true" I said, and was right. Fantastic, quiet Hanukkah of Devon taking half-days, homemade pizza, not-great latke but picture-perfect homemade babka, and lots of time to do nothing. Christmas and New Years as an excuse to make another two rounds of pizza. Playing a lot, and I do mean a lot of Animal Crossing while catching up on Critical Role. But I feel, constantly, like low-grade shit. It makes a lot of sense that a new death in the family would turn the yearly sad time into a full-on depressive episode. But knowing that hasn't made experiencing it easier, or given me more tools to combat it. And it is a depressive episode with all the hallmarks of anhedonia (and wow does that exacerbate the food-fatigue of the pandemic) and not wanting to wake in the morning and not wanting to talk to anyone or ever be perceived; each time I discover that while I've gotten better at mitigating these things they haven't gone away, probably never will go away—I feel just so, so tired.

Thus I'm big behind on book reviews and, consequently years-end stuff. But I'm catching up and, who knows, maybe doing a best-of in early February is easier! There's less pressure to be done at/by a specific time when that time has long passed.

Devon's fine, cats are great (they got heated beds for the holidays, so actually the cats are phenomenal); still in regular contact with my sister, which is a surprise and a blessing, and she's okay; still house-hunting, but when they say winter is the slow season they really aren't kidding. I'm in a place where even the bad times are okay, on the day to day—few additional stresses; plenty to keep me occupied. All very pleasant except that I am still sad.

Anyway, I'll be dumping a lot backlog of book reviews.

These last two weeks I've been learning toki pona. It's a constructed language intended to be minimalist and subsequently easy to learn, with a vocabulary of 140-ish words, limited phenomes, and simple and consistent pronunciation and construction. (This Langfocus video is a nice introduction.) The language is highly contextual and referential. ( For example... )

thus the limited vocabulary with interconnected/connotative meanings means that a lot is conveyed through context. toki pona is inspired by Taoist philosophy and intended to promote simple, positive thinking; not gonna lie, I picked it up because someone in a discord server mentioned that Sonja Lang/jan Sonja created toki pona as a coping mechanism when dealing with depression. Because, like, mood.

I love autumn a lot, I'm grateful that my dad died in autumn because it's the right time to process death each year—and because the season offers joy and distractions when the processing is too difficult. But the processing-death hit early and hard this year, probably because of my cousin's passing & recent memorial. So I need all the mindfulness or distraction I can muster, and this is both.

And it works! mostly in the sense of "actively learning a thing which is relatively simple and shows swift, obvious improvement engages my brain & makes me feel like I'm achieving something, as only a Not Sad Person™ could do," but also because it's at least not harmful to focus on simplifying and contextualizing language; to enter that focused-but-flow state of teasing out the connotative/contextual meaning of a word while still being willing to skim a confusing sentence because, it's fine, I'm still learning.

Also toki pona is intended to be and does sound cute. I feel bad = mi pilin ike. With the excuse of language practice I've been narrating a lot of stream of consciousness, mi pilin ike tan ni: mama meli mi li moli. tenpo pini la insa ona li pakala. Things which are hard to talk about, so big and yet so small, rendered into lilting almost-babytalk sentences where they are so big and small, simple little words but everything is context. Talking to my cats, mi pilin pona tan ni: sina pona tawa mi—just as cute, simple, silly, little/big, contextual.

I'm really enjoying it.

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Anyway here's how I've been learning toki pona, recorded because troubleshooting the how of learning has been almost as rewarding the thing itself, and in case anyone reads this and goes, woah, sign me up for whatever this is!

( Read more. )

Ideally "talk to other actual people in the language" should be my next priority, but I'm doing this to cope with mental health issues, not to create them, so I give myself time and grace. taso sina toki ala toki e toki pona? mi wile toki e sina a! If you speak toki pona, hit me up. If you want to learn, I encourage it.

Sure am still writing reviews for books I read in February/March 2020!!!! Kudos to all y'all who managed your catchups and yearly wrap-ups at the beginning January, because it's taking me an age. But let it be a message to future-Juu: I will almost definitely get to those reviews someday, so I may as well take notes for them, which I did not do for Air Logic and then came to regret. TY to this Tor write-up which goes into enough depth about both plot and themes that I could pick out which memories and reactions belonged to that book in particular.

Star ratings are always meaningless, but especially for ambitious and longer works which will almost invariably attempt some things that fail—but which can attempt so much. This series is very much a "sum greater than its parts" experience in that regard, and warrants the recurring recommendations I've seen in my reading/online environment. Reading it carried me through (*pauses to google "when did lockdown start"*) the beginning of COVID, which is part of why I didn't find the energy to review it, but what a blessing to read then: it provides the escapism of a compelling secondary world and magic system, but it recognizes, engages, but doggedly finds hope in the face of cultural trauma, which I certainly needed at the time. And now.


Title: Fire Logic (Elemental Logic Book 1)
Author: Laurie J. Marks
Published: Small Beer Press, 2013 (2002)
Rating: 4.5 of 5
Page Count: 350
Total Page Count: 349,215
Text Number: 1263
Read Because: multiple recommendations, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: This is slow to start: the opening is long and disjointed, and finding the throughline (in the protagonist; in the setting) is a struggle. But once it gets going, it's ambitious and fascinating.

It does three things which are particularly interesting and mostly successful: 1) A trauma study that reminds me of Hartman's Tess of the Road, Cashore's Bitterblue, and Sweet's The Pattern Scars for the female protagonist and for a long, intimate, worldbuilding-engaged exploration of trauma recovery that makes a sometimes-flawed text so much greater than its limitations. (Thus it's even more disquieting that physical disability, while also present and meaningful, is given magical cures; this feels erasing and thematically discordant.) 2) Queer found family and slow-burn romance that dovetail with the above, echoing the long, slow investment in character that then supports the plot's larger issues of nations, histories, war. It feels like wish-fulfillment, but in a productive way. 3) A fascinating study of prophecy in fantasy, particularly the relationship between intuition vs./as prophetic insight: predicting the future becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's smart, organic, and thought-provoking; so, indeed, is the entire book.



Title: Earth Logic (Elemental Logic Book 2)
Author: Laurie J. Marks
Published: Small Beer Press, 2014 (2004)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 410
Total Page Count: 349,625
Text Number: 1264
Read Because: reading the series, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: This picks up after a five-year timeskip that allows the relationships and society to progress at a reasonable pace, and it expands its focus from a central protagonist to her entire family. That feel-good core encompasses a larger and increasingly troubled/politically-ambiguous cast, building on the first book's successful balance between character-level investment and meaty worldbuilding. The magic I find less successful; it's bigger, more physical, which set against expetations built by the first book makes it feel metaphorical and thus (no pun intended) ungrounded.

But this sticks the landing—sticks it precisely when it seems it will falter: the political conflict differs from real-world analogs, and just when it seems to use its basis in fantasy to perpetuate tired equivalencies between the violence of oppressor and oppressed, it instead makes vocal, necessary space for anger and reparation. This series is good—not flawless, but it successfully balances its narrative elements and it approaches its themes with a persistent, thoughtful nuance. I may not have loved this as much as Fire Logic, but it's still satisfying.


Title: Water Logic (Elemental Logic Book 3)
Author: Laurie J. Marks
Published: Small Beer Press, 2007
Rating: 3.5 of 5
Page Count: 330
Total Page Count: 349,955+400
Text Number: 1265
Read Because: reading the series, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A weak book in a strong series. It interweaves three plotlines in gimmicky, cliffhangery ways, and there's enough mirroring across plotlines to render the cliffhangers virtually interchangeable. I also continue to struggle with the elemental magics, which are increasingly concrete despite their figurative roots in the first book—and by this point that means literal time travel. In retrospect, I think it works: by the end of the series, the various branches of magic (and relationships between them) span figurative to literal, delineated to intuitive, creating a dynamic whole. I wonder if that impression will carry through to rereads and inform my future reactions to this book.

The overall strengths of the series persist, in particular its gradually expanding cast and scale underpinned by strong emotional investment. I particularly appreciate the ongoing insistence on cost (albeit continually undermined by the uncomfortable role of magical healing): the personal is political, and vice versa.


Title: Air Logic (Elemental Logic Book 4)
Author: Laurie J. Marks
Published: Small Beer Press, 2019
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 400
Total Page Count: 350,355
Text Number: 1266
Read Because: reading the series, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A satisfying book, which is a running theme of this series and especially important in the finale. And if some elements of the resolution are transparently satisfying and borderline feel-good, then it's earned that—in no small part because the journey there isn't easy. This is as plotty as Water Logic, but, though some plots spin sideways, better avoids narrative repetition. Reveals are rendered effective and antagonist characterization (particularly difficult with an evil mastermind) succeed based on the novel's central strength:

Air magic is beautifully realized. It meets the first and middle books halfway: as distinctly a personality, aptitude, and worldview as fire magic, but concrete and non-metaphorical in a way that encompasses the showy magic of earth and water. It makes the middle books more successful in retrospect and sells this book's plot. The personality-typing aspect of the magic system is linked to theme throughout the series, illustrating the diverse experiences of and solutions to cultural trauma; that air's logic creates conflicting but equally absolute worldviews epitomizes this and forces the resolution to find difficult solutions to complex problems. None of the sequels captured me in the same striking way as the first book, but the finale comes close to bringing things full circle—and what it encircles is original, thoughtful, indomitably nuanced, and hopeful. That outweighs intervening weaknesses.

CW for wildfire talk, COVID talk, dead dad talk I guess.

• The city I'm living in entered green/"get ready to evacuate" status in the first week of the Oregon wildfires (specifically the Lionshead fire), but thankfully never progressed beyond that and de-escalated after ~5 days when the rain came. Air quality was a worse problem for longer, but has since improved thanks in large part to more rain. On one hand, taking photographs of all your valuables, organizing all your important documents into one box, and similar emergency prep work isn't bad to have done; on the other hand, staring into the reality of "these are my physical possessions which, like huge swathes of my state, could be gone forever" is terrifying, and it's just a lot of process on top of the everything else which is also just a lot to process.
  
  
• Example: I had library materials due during the fires which, lol, no. But when I checked the library website they were like "we're extending our already-extended checkouts because the state is literally on fire and we're closed so please don't come in"—which is lovely, their communication and accommodations and safety perceptions have been consistently great, and tbh I wish the checkout periods and no late fees were always this generous. But. "The library, which just reopened after the plague-related closure, is closed again because its entire district is on fire" is so ridiculously indicative of this fucking year and I hate it.
  
  
• The only thing that can make quarantine worse is an air quality advisory! ...Honestly, I appreciate temporary moments of isolation, struggle, deprivation, that power outage/snowed in feeling. But the apocalyptic moodlighting, that "weekend home in Lothric*" feeling, isn't the same. It's claustrophobic, it's heavy; it made me feel trapped in a way quarantine hasn't, given my native agoraphobia.
  
  * Lothric is the city in Dark Soul 3 and I actually have a lot of feelings about living in Dark Souls, which is effectively one of my hearthomes even tho hearttype/hearthome language doesn't usually appeal to me. But when you live in Dark Souls you are part of the lifecycle of Dark Souls, which I've written about in depth before. I find that framework cathartic and productive ... but I don't wish it upon this nation and this planet in 2020; indeed, the dystopic fantasy of burn it down, start over is actively counterproductive. Our world (our people) can't be recreated from the ashes; our world shouldn't be liberated from that endless cycle of staving off destruction; that fiction distracts us from the necessary of work of healing. My point here is that my vacation in Lothric was bittersweet. It was in many ways a concrete externalization of the existential fear of global warming et al.: look ye, look ye, for the world is literally on fire, the sky is red as if the eclipse hung in the heavens!! But the cause and solution are markedly different, and the closeness of that fictional framework isn't a comfort—it's terrifying.
  
  
• We emerged from wildfire haze to discover that autumn was here? ??? It's picturesque in comparison, these bluegrey rains and yellowdead leaves. August, who has been a little standoffish because of summer heat and her general wariness since the introduction of the overly-social babyboy cat, has begun to insist on daily snuggles in a warm lap. I've already made one batch of apple sauce, which came out closer to stewed or even caramelized apples, deep brown and caramel savory/sweet, without losing their chopped texture. I'll start on the next batch when I'm done with this post. I have pumpkin bread planned! It's great.
  
  
• And Speaking of Toby! The fur he lost at the humane society from the combo neuter surgery and collar has all grown in (and probably his winter coat is coming in, too), and he is again transformed. It turns out that's where he was hiding all his fluff. His cheeks in particular have grown a little lion mane. I didn't think there could ever be another cat I might love as much as August ... but things seem to be developing in that direction. I'm so proud of the gradual improvement in interactions between Toby and August, and glad that I taught him tricks off the bat because having "good boy" as a way to provide instant feedback on his behavior is so useful. I love cats every day, love mine every day, would not be complete or happy without them ... but I love them most in autumn, the most picaresque season to have two black cats, one coincidentally named October.
  
  
• My dad died in October, and I hate & am grateful for that timing. Anticipating that anniversary contaminates my favorite season, but loving this season offsets that dread. And as little spiritual as I've turned out to be, that autumnal cycle of death still resonates in a way that makes it feel like a natural time to mourn.

So, adopting a cat during a pandemic sucks.

( Adoption backstory. )

And, reader, despite that the cat was broadcasting "I want nothing to do with you, pls fuck off," I adopted him. There was no immediate click! I don't know if I was doing it because it felt like this cat or no cat. It just felt right to take home someone so scared, to give him a quiet place to become himself. I brought home "Orlo" on May 22.

This was his listing:



lol what a terrified face. When he came home he didn't leave the carrier until I tipped him out and set it up as a den, and he absolutely shat it in on the drive home, poor creature.

( A dozen cat pictures under this cut. )


(August on right, then left, then left in last.)

Because I was meeting a new cat every day, it took a long time to decide on a name; I didn't make my final decision until I was in the parking lot waiting for his first vet appointment. He's October, for the same reason August is August: because they look so alike; because my dress, my sail. He's mostly called Toby, or Tober; sometimes Crime Boy.

He does many crimes! Adjusting to a new cat is always hard; adjusting while grieving for another cat is worse, because any time I felt uncertain I would wish to have Gillian back. He's an energetic, lively cat; August has to enforce her boundaries, I have to keep him stimulated. Honestly this isn't the type of cat (or household dynamic) that I was looking for.

But I was right, that they all have stories. I took my grief and loneliness as impetus to conduct a scary, exhausting cat-hunt. I took a risk, and gave a scared cat the room to find himself. And he did! They're each of them, every cat, a person—complete, individual, dynamic. The longer he lives here, the less skittish he is but the better he's able to entertain himself; he tests his boundaries but also learns them; he accepts more and more touch; he's evidently happy, brilliantly happy. And you can be overwhelmed in a household with a cat like that, and I am; these are overwhelming times (I say as if it encompasses COVID, BLM, my grandfather dying) and nothing can alter that. But you can't be lonely. Tober leaves no room for loneliness, little room for sadness. He overflows love.

Toby is about a year old, the vet confirms. He wasn't neutered until then, so he has moderately robust jowls and shoulder muscle. His background is a mystery; his health is great. His face and chest fur is shorter than August's, his side and back fur shorter and darker than hers, and ridiculously glossy as he adjusts to his daily fish oil. His tummy fur is curly and long, scattered with red, grey, and white; he has white hair in his ears. His tail is unconscionably plush and fluffy, and so emotive. His eyes are mostly yellow with just an inner rim of green, where August's are mostly green with just an outer ring of yellow. His toebeans are unexpectedly light, almost purple. Before I met him, I told Teja that October "looks a lot like August, but is that the boring choice aesthetically????" and what a fool was I, because having two cats who look deceptively similar but have a million perfect differences to love and memorize is actually the best aesthetic choice. He's beautiful.

And thus I have another cat! A very very good cat.

( CW food. )

⁂

As I've mentioned, I've been borrowing video games from the library. The holds are long and the checkouts are 7-days, so only certain titles work and it creates a unique gameplay experience. It's perforce a title I'm not hugely invested in, something with a limited length, something not worth owning—but then I play the whole ~35 hour game in a week, with more focus and therefore immersion than I might give to a title I purchase and play for longer. I played Let's Go Eevee that way, which tbh is the only way to play the game. Most PKMN games are for me 200+ hours because I'm big into breeding and shiny hunting, but the central gimmick of Let's Go leans heavily towards overpowered single-Pokemon team and the shiny hunting mechanic is cute but the endgame is otherwise shallow; it's very much a 35 hour game.

And I just finished Super Mario Odyssey, which is my first Mario title! and which I only played because it has assist mode! which mitigates health management and largely does away with dying to void-outs. I love Nintendo's gentle/exploratory platforms but hate actual platforming because I can't spacial reasoning or operate under pressure, that's just not fun. So bless assist modes & may this be a thing in all future titles—it's never the wrong time to increase accessibility. 7 days were just enough time to do 500 stars worth of exploring with that satisfied feeling of every curiosity and corner offering a reward, and the due date came when I was hitting hard, unfun content I didn't want to play anyway.

I still contend that core franchise Mario titles are ugly AF with bad world aesthetics and (non-musical) sound design, and that the way gender issues are handled in the endgame cinematic is the worst of Nintendo's too little, too late methodology: something about the high-rez art style makes the forced marriage & objectification of Peach even more glaring, and you can't do that—play it straight, play it at length—for the entire game and then critique it in endgame and expect a cookie for your progressive vision. (The high-rez style also makes the cap-control mechanic feel weird, like ... it's an innately ridiculous game, I shouldn't be considering issues of consent and autonomy, and yet here we are.)

Petition that the next Mario title pulls a Metal Gear Solid 2, opening with Mario in the tutorial levels and then staring Peach for the entire rest of the game with no option to switch characters. Maybe she even rescues him, tbh I don't care. I hope the fanboys will be as mad about it as they were about MGS2.

⁂

The pattern of playing a lot of condensed game leads naturally to not playing almost anything afterward, to recover from burnout and rest my wrists. I've been reading a lot! Some very good books! But I'm fatally behind on reviews and honestly should be writing those right now, not this.

It's funny that after reading so much last year, I'm not burned out on books—just on writing about them. My reading distinctly hasn't been a passive thing, lately, in no small part because discovering OpenLibrary/the Internet Archive has made accessible some of those obscure feminist SFNal works which have been on my TBR for years and years. It's active, sometimes even combative reading, but that means I exhaust my reading-energy both in that engagement and at the mere thought of trying to write all of it down. Not writing reviews isn't an option for me, but as well as relearning the art of longer, messier reviews when a condensed one is impossible, I should also embrace the adage that anything worth doing is worth half-assing (rather than not doing at all) and just ... not write book reports, maybe even of things that deserve them.

⁂

Incredible and borderline-unmanageable spike in back pain over the last ~2 weeks. This flare is remarkable in part for its duration, which is generally a sign that it's not a flare but a new plateau in my fun experience with a degenerative condition. Also remarkable because it's been interfering with sleep, particularly waking me up after ~4 hours & sometimes making it impossible to go back to sleep. That combo is utterly terrifying. I already do seven million things manage pain for sleep, so there's nothing I can do to improve things; sleep is already hard because of my brainweird; poor sleep is a trigger for ... more pain.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

These plateaus are always worse when I'm still adjusting to them. In a few months, it'll be background noise, just ... noisier noise than the old noise. But when I frequently don't feel pain, only symptoms of pain—when the bar of "distressing" and "disabling" is constantly shifting upward to hover at whatever level of pain I've grown used to—it makes me wonder: what is a pain scale, objectively (is there such a thing as "objective"); where do I fall on it; when will I tip over to an un-adjustable level. I hope this isn't it.

I'm hardly the only one to say this, but the joy of Untitled Goose Game is that it's the "be naughty" equivalent of "do murder" in most games: I'm not supposed to do this IRL, it's probably best that I don't do this IRL :(, but it's very cathartic to do the thing in lovingly-rendered detail in game space. Anyway, I really enjoyed it.

* * *

I'm sorry that 100% of my updates have been book reviews, and that there have been so many of them.

I ran into something of a wall in processing life. I had to dump some stimuli (RIP Shakespeare project, trips to see my family, talking to almost anyone ever) & meanwhile delved deep into other stimuli of the self-discovery/-actualization and repairing my relationship with my partner after seven million years of stress varieties. Arguably these activities are also intense work, but they're less taxing and more indulgent (because sometimes they mean Acquiring Physical Goods) and just ... easier to process, especially while interfacing with the rest of the world is too hard.

So all my time has been Devon Time or Me Time or Quiet Time—

—and then I realized that I'd read [as of drafting this, numbers have since shifted] ~260 books this year with ~95 days left in the year, which means that at just over a book a day I could hit my arbitrary and ridiculous goal of 365 books in 2019. I was on track for that a few months ago, but then stopped reading Animorphs and started reading novel-length SF/F as well as playing video games and stuff.

So I went back to shamelessly inflating my numbers via children's books and manga, and now 365 is again become an achievable goal. I like it because it's (for me) not tenable, so I will never compare another year to this year & maybe learn the more general lesson that statistics are silly. Given the upcoming Macmillan and Blackstone embargoes, I imagine that 2020 will be a whole new shitshow for library users and I can only guess how it'll impact my reading—maybe it will be a year of decades-old doorstoppers to spite both publishers and statistics while avoiding holds.

I am meanwhile mostly caught up on writing reviews! ...I am still very behind on posting reviews! Between that and this rock I'm hiding under, that's all I've had the energy to post.

TW for dead dad talk, mental health


I've noticed that I've become way more sensitive to character deaths, particularly in visual media, which may be the most predictable result of grief—seeing grief echoed everywhere, until even media becomes a reminder rather than an escape.

I find this funny because I usually struggle to invest in character death. It feels like an absence rather than an event—I don't miss things when they're gone, including fictional characters, and deaths have weight only when processed by remaining characters. Because I myself don't process, don't miss, don't feel bereft of anything except narrative potential.

And some of that lingers. My sad emotions are easily accessed now because that's my new, ever-enjoyable default, but under the tearjerker-sad I mostly see character death through a narrative lens, and it's rarely flattering. The three major narrative categories of character death: 1) We decided to kill off this character, probably because the actor is leaving, and the entire foreshadowing of/build up to that event will occur in the episode where they die. 2) It's midway through an arc/season/series, and this secondary character is likable but not core to the story's premise, and so their death can ramp up tension without creating narrative difficulties. 3) It's the end of the arc/season/series, so we can kill off this major character for drama without needing to follow through on the effect it would have on the story's core premise.

When my sad feels stick around past that immediate tearjerk, it's probably because some attempt is being made to depict the remaining characters's grieving process, and my sad feels are almost always angry-sad because so many grief narratives are about forcing the protagonist to grieve correctly. They're burying their grief under anger/alcohol! They need to make peace and let go in order to continue the ongoing plot! They need to be bullied into an appropriate emotional response, then into a ceremonial farewell, after which they'll naturally shift their focus to other narrative elements. Inappropriate grief is unhealthy for the protagonist and harmful to the supporting cast.

Is this because most of the shows I watch are SF/F and have episodic or action elements, so there's probably a Grief Episode and after that only occasional callbacks? Are depictions of the grieving process in non-speculative/drama shows more diverse, or just the same but belabored? And does it matter, when everything in fiction—from the plot justifications for needing to move on now to the antihero-esque protagonists with legitimately asocial/damaging forms of grief—is a construct?

I hate feelings these feelings, so I begrudge that all tearjerks suddenly effect me, but the archetype of Correct and Healthy Grief (that should be forced on you for everyone's benefit) is proactively harmful. I am just now, 10 months in, moving from frantic and effective repression and towards unprompted crying jags and flashbacks. It is in every moment miserable, but it's worse for seeing my family process at more rapid rates and in more conventional forms, and worse still for second-guessing myself. A lot of my trauma comes from other people's active refusal to recognize my "inappropriate" or "antisocial" feelings, which took baby's burgeoning depressive disorder and turned it into emotional abuse via gaslighting, so I'm hypersensitive to this and excessively mad about it. But I'm still right: these archetypes for grief, the idea that someone can force breakthroughs in another person's suffering, make it difficult to process grief organically, healthfully, individually.

Anyway this has been a vagueblog about Wynonna Earp s3, but fuckin' every show does it and I will see it everywhere forever from now on.