♛I bare my soul to you so thoroughly and so often for so very long and you want to put me on medication *sigh*

[X] My initial reaction is offense, you’re right about that, but I know you meant it in good faith. Perhaps it’s because Armand has suggested it so many times as an insult, and I detest that there’s a connotation that anyone “on pills” or “seeing a shrink” is somehow lesser for doing these things. Who the f&ck decided that wearing glasses to improve one’s vision was acceptable but needing extra chemicals to improve one’s brain functions was somehow an indication of being some kind of, I don’t know, freak of nature?! Oh right, wearing glasses will get you bullied, too *tosses up hands*

Here’s the thing that I maybe failed to convey to you or that some of you chose to misread.

I grew up with neglect and physical abuse on a regular basis. Directly proportional to any time I wanted to strike out and try to find what any child craves – affection, love, support. I had so little of those things. I starved for them. Do you know what it’s like to have to sit at the dinner table and be polite to someone sitting at the head of the table who less than an hour ago beat you to the ground, your face on the cold stone floor, and ridiculed you for crying about it? You’re wearing bruises from it, you have some bandages, you taste your own blood in your mouth from your split lip with each bite of the food that YOU brought home to this person? Trying not to shake or cry. This person who asks you to play chess with him after dinner as if nothing happened?

This person who then acts surprised when no, you don’t want to play chess or sit with him and hear about old family history, because all you would be doing is looking at his hands and thinking about how different they look when not folded into a fist. That you sometimes flinch when he gestures at all with them.

To go without praise or being hugged by a family member for months.

Fine, skip all that. Say that I should have grown some balls and a thicker skin and been beyond all that. 

Not sure if you remember this part, but I was an orphan when I was first turned into a vampire. My maker gave me the most intimate experience I’d had up until that point, life-altering really, and then left me the barest set of instructions, a big old box of cash, a big old musty castle, and then orphaned me on the spot. I’ve made several vampires of my own since then and let me tell you something else you may not know: the blood shared between a maker and a fledgling is binding. So even if I’d gotten over my shitty childhood, here I was freshly neglected, freshly wounded by this bond being made and destroyed in the span of less than an hour. Sifting through his ashes. Another shitty parent for Lestat.

I’m not rehashing the rest of my unlife for you but suffice it to say I don’t think my high-highs and low-lows are the result of a malfunctioning lump of fat and blood in my skull. 

I do see a therapist privately (and for couples therapy with Louis) and that’s been improving things gradually. Progress is not smooth, it’s erratic, but I’m learning and practicing tools to help me in many ways.

Nicolas, he might definitely have benefited from modern medicine in this regard. I wonder whether he would also have taken offense, or if he had really considered it and embraced the magic of modern science, would it have saved his life? I think so.