#t4e

[misscammiedawn]

Closure is something that prestige television invented to sell finale episodes.

In reality people are messy, emotional and varied entities. Even if they could answer "why?" that would be an answer based on their emotional state in the morning. Truth is subjective. Motivations are unknowable, even to the person who acted.

All we can do is accept what is, remember to keep trusting and try learning lessons. Even if we don't understand what we're supposed to take away from things.

[boy-titties]

i want to hold her down and fuck her senseless <3

[misscammiedawn]

I want to hear about Catra in the middle ❤️

Well then. Given that every vacation begins with sizable travel time, I can answer this before I become thoroughly distracted for the next week.

Catra is a very good representation of who we are behind all our posturing.

Sure we can 'Hey Adora' all we want, we can puff our chest out and take on inordinate amounts of responsibility, climb the ladder, betray, pretend we don't care. We may even be successful at times. Get some solid connections.

But we're a prickly and insecure mass of exposed emotional nerves. Prepared to betray ourselves and others for a scrap of familial affection. To get that which we are long denied; even years after escaping that environment and finding new solid connections.

Catra in season 2 and season 3 of the show gets a measure of success that she self-sabotages.

She could have kept Shadow Weaver locked up but the idea of a mother's approval and affection caused her to betray herself. An act we know we would have done.

...an act we did in our early 20s... our own unforgivable action. One of many reasons a blood relative despises us and is right to do so.

In season 3 she could have been happy with Scorpia in the badlands but she couldn't sacrifice the identity that she had built up in her head, she couldn't let go of her bond with Adora, she couldn't choose to be happy.

The bridge with Scorpia and Entrapta is burned at the end of all, even after she goes through 'therapy' and actually manages her emotions. Scorpia may never forgive her and is RIGHT to never forgive her.

Sometimes accepting what happened and acknowledging the damage done is the ending.

There are people in this world we love so much it literally hurts and we hurt them in ways I am certain will never be fixed. In ways what we did is justifiable. Context states that it may have even been objectively the correct thing to do in our circumstance; but the fact is we took the most stable relationship we had ever deliberately constructed over a decade and deliberately burned the bridge to the ground because our ALL OR NOTHING brain couldn't handle the idea of anything less than 100%. Somehow it would have been better if that was in any way romantic in context but it was Chosen Family. We actively decided that if we could not be Family then we would be Nothing. Knowing what it would do to him.

Not even our cruelest act. But the one we regret the most.

Catra displays every single diagnostic criteria of BPD. (Copied from the DSM-5)

Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment (Note: Do not include suicidal or self-mutilating behaviour covered in Criterion 5)

A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterised by alternating between extremes of idealisation and devaluation

Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self

Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g. spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating) (Note: Do not include suicidal or self-mutilating behaviour covered in Criterion 5)

Recurrent suicidal behaviour, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behaviour

Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g. intense episodic dysphoria, irritability or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days)

Chronic feelings of emptiness

Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g. frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights)

Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms

Honestly out of every character we have seen in fiction she is the most nuanced depiction we have ever seen because we get so much of her in posturing and isolation moments to see the way her identity diffuses. We see her build and destroy relationships.

We even get that therapy scene with Double Trouble. One of the most heartbreaking sequences for someone who at the time of airing was knee deep in destructive cycles and unable to find any direction at all.

We also match pretty much every one. Officially we are diagnosed with 7 out of 9, though we have done enough therapy to reduce it to 4 within a clinical setting. No further details.

Also, yes, there is a lot of overlap with DID, isn't there?

Both conditions are on the dissociative experiences spectrum and can be covered under CPTSD with differences in severity.

Here's the thing, though.

We are not evil. We are not good. We are not redeemable or any other single evaluation of a person that one can make.

We're a scared child who has been pretending to be an adult for so long that the masks are just our face. Beneath my flirting bravado, beneath Wynn's measured anger, Cammie's desperation to be loved, Craig's desire to be accepted internally and externally at the cost of his own identity, Camden's terror lf being abandoned and alone?

There's just this ball of emotion trying to manage itself and not fall apart.

We are trying to be better. We are trying so fucking hard. Every single day.

But beneath everything we're an ugly and broken thing. Maybe that's too hard on us, but we carry the weight of every sin we have committed, every relationship we broke, every home we have been expelled from, every mask we have worn and discarded.

I always ask myself, 'what would the people from our past think of us now we've done the hard work of therapy?' and we are convinced that every single one of them would assume we're faking, that we're a relapse away from ruining it all again... but we know the answer. It's the same as it ever was.

Silence.

Why?

[misscammiedawn]

This might be an unfair assumption for the ask game because it's somewhat subjective — but I assume you are extremely harsh on yourself / hold yourself to much higher standards than you hold others

TRUE

Always true. Pretty much across the system, too.

As much as we kink on being able to control others and have an air of manipulation and seduction about us (me?) - I am the one thing in life I can control and thus I am responsible for my thoughts, decisions and actions.

Which... can ring unfair. I am mentally ill and have put in a lot of work to mitigate that (this weekend proved that... there is still work to be done) but am I truly in control of my thoughts and emotions?

I am able to mitigate the fall and limit the damage, but I wouldn't do this and be this if I could truly control it.

And so really, especially with being plural, 'controlling myself' is as much soothing, appeasing and making space for me as it is for others. I am as able to stop myself from having a mental/emotional breakdown as I am from stopping my girlfriend having an anxiety attack.

I need to be okay about not having that control and forgive myself for being imperfect.

...but I have to live with the consequences of my failures...

Nothing will bring back the families we walked away from. Nothing will stop the voice (not always Camden) saying how we could have and should have done better.

So... we hold ourselves up to the highest standard...

Because to not do so makes the Worst Outcome, the evidenced outcome an inevitability. Unless we hold ourselves to The Standard.

[misscammiedawn]

We've typed a bunch about how our dissociation causes attachment and association to fade in and out

This gets weird when it comes to sentimental attachments to trinkets

As a system we do not enjoy attachments to items-- Dawn typed about that here but here's the thing?

I do!

A lot a lot a lot!

Camden and Dawn especially HATE the reminders because we have burned out our roots and have no connection to our biological family or the family we created for ourselves in the US, of whom we miss increasingly much as the months roll on

To them it's like every time we look at our former best friend's art on our bookshelf (as I type I looked over and it's once again been removed) we are reminded of how much we fucked up and it hurts them-- but when I look at it or the bookmark he gave us a decade ago-- I just feel fondness for the memories we shared and gratitude for the time we had, even if the ending was-- not what we'd hoped

They want to tear out the page from our favorite book that has a written note from our mother, 2 months before we stopped speaking to her, I use it as a reminder that she cared enough to know what book series we loved and wanted to get us the brand new book on year of release

It's so weird to have these totems that connect to the absent shape of a person, the lack of a connection, and see what emotion it conjures

Camden is afraid of items like that-- afraid that one day my beloved Precious will become a painful reminder-- but I can't even understand how we as a human would EVER think that about this wonderful plushie!! It's my most cherished item in the world! It is a vessel for love-- it contains love! All the love I put in and the love that was put into it when it was given to me

How can that EVER be a bad thing? The love never EVER dies!!

It's so so weird to me that sometimes "I" forget that or fear/resent that the love remains

[misscammiedawn]

So, it's been long enough I feel I can speak about this.

Based on last reblog, I wanted to talk a little about the complete coincidence of the time we prior to discovering our condition made a plural character with 5 character sheets.

In fact this is the character who Wynn took her name from. She opted not to elaborate on the details while when she explained that in the past.

Bluebeard's Bride is a horror themed tabletop game using Powered by the Apocalypse rules. To copy the description from the Wiki page:

Bluebeard's Bride uses the popular folktale as its base: A young bride marries an older man despite some question of where his previous wives have gone. He leaves her alone in his sumptuous castle but warns her not to open one door. Eventually through boredom or curiosity, the young wife opens the forbidden door and discovers the corpses of the previous wives, whom she soon joins when Bluebeard returns. The gamemaster is called the Groundskeeper. Players do not play an individual character, but a specific piece of the Bride's personality: Animus (hostility), Fatale (seduction), Mother (selflessness), Virgin (vulnerability), and Witch (deception). As the Bride wanders through the castle, she meets both wonders and Horrors that tell her about Bluebeard, and to some extent, about herself. As RPG historian Stu Horvath noted, "Each room is a psychological ordeal for the Bride to confront, and the players must struggle to find different ways to cope." As the Bride works her way through the castle, her personality will edge towards becoming either fully Faithful or fully Disloyal. If either happens, the Bride arrives at the fateful door. If the Bride is defeated by the Horrors of the castle, she herself becomes a Horror haunting the castle.

I'll skip the off-table drama that complicates this story and say that our best friend at the time was going to be a test DM at GenCon and wanted to run a few test games and invited us over to play as he trusted us above all other people at the table to treat this seriously. He wanted us to make a Bride with sheets for all five personality fragments to represent a full table of 5 people sharing the role of playing The Bride.

We created Owynn Pierce (technically we adapted her from an existing character). A maritime history/fantasy character that was a female version of our main Slasher tabletop character at the time Owen Pierce, a serial killer who was being forced to learn empathy. We broke down Owen's character into the 5 archetypes:

and from there the setting for the tabletop game began and we refined and polished this idea of "Owen if he were 5 personalities inside of a bride" into Winnie.

I'll avoid talking too much about the plot because as far as I know our friend is still using characters and concepts born from this time in his Lead Into Gold stories and I'd hate to betray his trust and post spoilers by mistake. Suffice to say we had a prideful young woman who apprenticed wood working under a father who died (while Winnie watched, callously and uncaring) before being adopted by an uncle who hated her and wanted to put her to work but take all the credit for her superior woodwork.

She's discovered by the Bluebeard analog who sees this precious and cunning young thing and wants to keep her.

Owynn's "Court" is made up of the Animus, Fatale, Mother, Virgin and Witch.

Animus is passion and pride in work, a love of woodworking and a complete and utter security that she is accomplished and capable. Fatale is the one who sits and watches people and gets to know how they tick, knows how to push buttons to get what she wants. Mother is the storyteller, the one who goes to a bar and befriends people. Extroverted, outspoken. Virgin is the intense heart that beats under that chest. A desire to be loved, a torrent of passion that can overwhelm and break down barriers of coldness and mistrust. Witch is the one who can shut off emotion. The one who sees the worst in people. Who watched her father die. Who whispers dark intention of all around her.

We have several recordings of "The Court of Sisters" discussing the plot together.

Now, it'd be funny if I said "Animus is Dawn, Witch is Wynn, Virgin is Cammie, Mother is Craig, Fatale is Camden" but that's not true.

[3/7/2026 edit: have listened to the voice files again and Fatale is quite obviously Craig, speaking with a more loose and casual cockney twang. Which would make Camden the Mother if we were subscribing to this theory. We have emotions about listening to the voice files again... stuff we can't really air out in public.]

There are elements of us in those 5. But it's not us. We didn't even know we were plural back then. Plus a lot of the pride and arrogance that Winnie displays is born from me, Dawn, the one at the table during that.

BUT.

I do believe that on some level I did take the most disparate parts of our heart, the contradicting elements of our soul and turn them into that character. But all from my perspective. Which is why Fatale is a manipulator. Why Virgin is less "soft" and more "paralyzed by emotion" because from my perspective, pre-discovery, Cammie was not her own person, she was the thing that overpowered me when I was riding high, the moment feelings overwhelmed me and I lost all my me.

It's absolutely fascinating to see this character, hear the voices that we gave her (pre-transition, too) and read the months and months worth of stories we wrote with her from the lens that we were doing our best attempt at playing a plural character with 5 distinct parts while not realizing that we ourselves were plural and had 5 distinct parts.

Honestly I get worried when I think about Owynn.

On one hand she's proof that this is something that existed before everything. But she's also in a way able to be used as proof we are "faking" because the way that we 'pretended' to be plural in a tabletop ends up being so similar to how we present as actually plural now that we're diagnosed and out.

We miss so many of our characters from those times. They're lost to us now. Even if we could use them again, an Owen/Owynn without their partner in crime is just half a character.

Nice to think about them, though.

[misscammiedawn]

*Lights a candle, closes eyes and just listens to Blurring Time by Bells Larsen*

Something about an album by a trans man who recorded harmonies with himself pre-T and post-T reflecting on life before and after transition is just...

Woke up at 4:45 to start a fire outside And burn my alibis Mourning past versions of me, wading through good grief Smoke circling the skies I've moved through time But somehow I'm exactly the same Maybe it's time That moves through me inviting change My voice might get deep And I might bruise my knees My voice might get deep And I might bruise my knees I'll make my old stories new, saturate shades of blue And pretend I don't care Trying to turn the clocks back, watch my shadow contract A stranger with long hair I've moved through time But somehow I'm exactly the same Maybe it's time That moves through me inviting change My voice might get deep And I might bruise my knees My voice might get deep And I might bruise my knees It's quite the life transition, this undercover mission I'm calling my own bluff 'Cause I'm not gonna bet on this Russian roulette I'm a gambler with bad luck My voice might get deep And I might bruise my knees My voice might get deep And I might bruise my knees

yeag...

[misscammiedawn]

Wouldn't life be easier if we deserved it all or deserved none of it...?

Alas. The nuance...