There was just a locked post about something that hit me two months ago, but is now hitting me again as the real-world implications of it catch up to me. And that's stressing me the fuck out, but it's an old stress, now. I can deal with it.

Darkside was there for me five minutes after it hit me, and dealt with me gibbering and trying to cry but failing, dealt with me starting to slip into shock, dealt with me laughing in very disturbing ways as my universe flipped upside down and started raining bits of mental foundation down upon me. Figment was there for the aftermaths, and was the first person I allowed to touch me after the first shock started to slip away.

Incidentally, I should never be given bad news when there isn't someone trusted around who can physically hold me, because I can and will start slipping into shock. I've learned to recognize the symptoms, and will dutifully get something to drink and wrap myself up in a warm blanket, but if my mental processes have been derailed, my safety features may have been affected too.

I'm a social creature, but no company is preferable to bad company in a time of stress. I need someone I can safely fall apart around. I trust myself to do that around very few people. There are far more people who would offer hugs and shoulders and their company -- and say the wrong thing when I was vulnerable, and run the risk of planting something in my psychsets that would grow there and trigger off things that would have been better left untouched, or touched only by someone who could successfully read from the Black Book and banish the fishy tentacled thing into rich black fertile soil instead of a slimy, writhing mass of venomous self-doubt. When I'm vulnerable, I shrink back from physical contact except with people who are known to be safe.

I become Disturbing when the foundations of my sanity shake. I keep telling myself that I've been to the rock-bottom, and there isn't any less sane I can ever get, and then someone tosses me a shovel, and I just keep on digging... Paradoxically, the further down I dig things, the more stable I get, because I know where so many of the faults lie now, and I know how to brace them and compensate for them. And people who haven't explored their own sanity in such depth get very scared when someone talks conversationally about where all the holes in their head are...

Freud didn't get it all right. Childhood builds the base structure for the personality, so if there are any down-deep flaws, the mistaken ideas kids get about the funkiest things, it's going to be in the childhood. But some of the deepest damage can happen when an adult earthquake shakes the foundation, or worse, pulls chunks out of the foundation and sets them on fire. If you're lucky, at least, the foundation gets removed before it's set on fire. And the teenage years are just as crucial to the adult personality as the childhood years are to the base personality. Some forms of adulthood are the mask we wear when we pretend we don't want to have fun anymore; those are the bad ones. Some forms of adulthood are figuring out that we don't have to do stupid and dangerous stuff to have fun. I like that kind.