cw: child abuse
this has been in my head for a while now, so i decided i wanted to make this post.
all of this last year, but specially these last days, i have been slowly learning about all of the different specific ways in which i suffered childhood abuse and neglect, and all of the many, many ways it screwed up my life, my sense of self, and my self image. and how it caused me quite a few very real impairments, that then were only exacerbated when they were blamed back on me, and i was made to believe i somehow didn’t do my best on purpose, because i was a bad child, and a bad person.
it took me 26 years to even start to believe that what had been done to me was, in fact, abuse, and not something i just deserved because something was wrong with me. you know what gave me that first spark of wanting to maybe believe it, even a little while before i started on therapy, and that gave me strength, and helped me understand what i was learning through it? jace herondale.
jace helped me understand, handle, and accept, all the many subtle ways in which i was neglected, manipulated, abused and plain expected to be an adult before i had any conditions to be one. jace helped me deal with understanding how hard it is to accept what’s happened when it’s done to you by people you love, and that in their way, love you back, and how it is to accept that you BOTH hate and love them. and jace made start to think about the way he saw himself, and the way the fandom saw him, and how he was anything BUT what he thought he was, and how angry it made me that he, and so many others in his and our real life, would think he was indeed bad, broken, and unfixable. and the angrier i felt, the more a little, very little, thought, started to occur to me, that if i was so willing to fight for him, and to see how good he truly was, why wasn’t i willing to even give myself the benefit of the doubt?
jace has been with me through this journey, and through a flurry of pain, confusion, and trying to come to terms with the fact that i’d spent my whole life blaming myself for what had been done to me, so fiercely, that when someone finally pointed it out to me four years ago, i didn’t believe them. but i believed jace’s journey, and i believed in him. because it’s ONE thing to have someone point that out to you, that you think can’t possibly know what your life really is like, and it’s another to see it written down in words that finally make sense of those loose puzzle pieces in your head, and resonate with you so much, you can no longer deny them.
and the sole reason i am making this post, and writing all of this down, is to ask you, beg you, to please, please, do not erase jace’s abuse journey from him.
much like me, i KNOW there are others who this character has helped the same, and others that it might help still, and it’d break my heart if someone’s so tenuous willingness to start to believe in themselves, and on what was done to them, was snuffed out, because they were made to feel that they were relating to a character that had never actually been through all of those things at all, and it was all just in their heads. don’t. i know it might feel like text interpretation to you, and like it doesn’t really matter, but trust me, it does. jace herondale matters for many reasons, but ALSO, for this one. he mattered to me, and i just KNOW he can help so many others yet, if they just get a chance to let him.
trust me, there is more than enough lack of validation in most of the lives of people that have had similar stories to mine, and when you erase that part of him, you might just be making someone doubt that little spark, and take away their hope that they are NOT unfixable, and that they are not to BLAME, and that they are not destined to live their lives this way. that it CAN get better.
maybe i would still be at this point of my journey without jace, perhaps i would, but the truth is, it’d have been a lot goddamn harder without him. and that is why i’m here posting this, right now, because i don’t want anyone else whom he might help, to have to go the journey without him, and without another source of hope, whatever that may be. even if it is a character in a fantasy book.