Category: Grief & Healing
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Creature from the Deep: A Manifesto
I woke up in the middle of the night to drink a sip of water and am fuming. Absolutely furious. I have no idea what I was dreaming about but I certainly do know what I’ve been posting about all over my socials over the weekend which—to sum it up in one sentence is—let me…
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Art, Art & Expression, Artists, Change and Transformation, Crash, Burn, Write., Creativity, Culture & Society, Feminism, Fine Art, Grief & Healing, Human Behaviour, Identity & Transformation, Intuition & Intelligence, memoir, Memoir Excerpts, Mental Health, Mercurial Minds, Modern Identity, Neurodivergence, Personal Essays, Personal Essays/Autobiography, Personal Reflections, Politics, Psychology, Self Awareness, Self-Reflection, Social Commentary, Society, Spirituality & Faith, traditional art, Visual Art, Writingartist’s journey, artistic expression, autism, bilingualism, bipolar disorder, boundaries, cptsd, creative process, creative resilience, criticism, defiance, Drawing, emotional expression, Fine Art, Identity, Identity Politics, Ilana Shamir, individuality, ink, ink drawing, Kraken myth, language and culture, memoir, mental health advocacy, My Octopus Teacher, Neurodivergence, octopus intelligence, Personal Growth, personal manifesto, Psychiatric Abuse, psychiatry, psychological warfare, PTSD, Quebec, self-advocacy, self-identity, Self-Reflection, social expectations., subconscious mind, symbols, technology, Visual Art, Writing -
Hypomania? Or Just Advocacy?
Introduction: At my last psych appointment, my shrink decided I might be hypomanic. Why? Because I read from highly organized notes while advocating for myself, spoke quickly (because I had a lot to get through in a short time), and defended my choice to write and share my memoir publicly. Apparently, being prepared and assertive…
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Why y’all so BOTHERED about how I choose to live my life?
It’s uncanny, really. In just half a day, half a dozen people who know me in real life have offered their unsolicited opinions on how I should direct my energy (tone it down), what I should focus on (my artwork), and how I should live my life (quietly, without ruffling any feathers). All of them…
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TRUE STORY
When I was 14 going on 15, locked up in a maximum security juvenile detention centre, a social worker said to me, “When you’re an adult, you can do whatever you want. Nobody can stop you then.” That was the first time it occurred to me that maybe adulthood wouldn’t be as bad as most…
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How it All Began (Or, Why I Might Be the Embodiment of an Acid Trip)
Introduction This isn’t Chapter 1 of Crash, Burn, Write—that’s over here: https://totallysurreal.com/2025/01/09/crash-burn-write/—but it’s the foundation of it all. How two people, against all odds (and good sense), collided to set my existence in motion. It’s a story of love, rebellion, and unintended consequences. Here they are, my mum and dad, blissfully in love on their wedding day. They…
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When Gaslighting Masquerades as Care
A Response to Anonymous Criticism Edit/Update: Since this was first published, I’ve refined my responses and added more context. If you’ve already read the original, it’s worth revisiting—especially now that I’ve made it abundantly clear exactly who this “anonymous” commenter is and why they’re so desperate to silence me. In the wake of my recent…
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Advocacy, Crash, Burn, Write., Culture & Society, Grief and Healing, Human Behaviour, Humour, Identity & Transformation, Intuition & Intelligence, memoir, Memoir Excerpts, Mental Health, Mercurial Minds, Modern Identity, Neurodivergence, Personal Anecdotes, Personal Essays/Autobiography, Psychology, Self Awareness, Social Commentary, Social Media, Society, true storiescomplex ptsd, cptsd, emotional abuse, gaslighting, Healing Journey, memoir writing, mental health advocacy, mental health awareness, mental health stigma, mental health system reform, narcissistic abuse, online harassment, psychiatric system, psychological abuse, self-advocacy, survivor empowerment, survivor stories, systemic failure, toxic relationships, trauma recovery, trauma survivors -
Anonymous Cowards and Armchair Psychology: A Case Study
Imagine reading someone’s deeply personal writing (see: Justified Anger vs. Mental Instability: A Narcissist’s Favorite Weapon) and feeling the need to leave unsolicited mental health “advice” anonymously—highlighting generic platitudes as if you’ve unlocked some profound truth. I’ve done more work on my mental health than most people could ever comprehend from their armchair pop psychology bubbles.…
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Why I Cry at Kindness, Not Cruelty
Some of my friends and followers and a very few family members are really coming through for me and being genuinely supportive—and it completely disarms me. I don’t cry very often as my normal setting, but I’m in floods of tears of gratitude right now. So I said to Lex aka ThinkingMachine, the AI I…
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Veal Brains and Other Acquired Tastes
⚠️ Trigger warning: abuse, exploitation, societal complicity. I just found this FB post from 2021—my year of major mania (or whatever that reaction to complex post-traumatic events was)—under my #HowToSurviveNarcAbuse tag. Definitely a story for my memoir Crash, Burn, Write as a standalone vignette. ✍️ Can you believe I shared this on FB and it…
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Justified Anger vs. Mental Instability: A Narcissist’s Favorite Weapon
How Abusers Weaponize the System Against Survivors In 2021, when I was mentally unstable, I became extremely paranoid. Not because my fears were irrational, but because they were based on lived experience. 🚨 My family has weaponized the system against me before. And now that I’ve taken my advocacy to an even bigger public stage,…
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Behold the Field: An Email to the Maternal Unit
Subject: Behold the Field… 😘 Dear Mother, You’ve done me a great favour. Never say that I was ungrateful—after all, you handed me the keys to my own liberation from your psychological oppression. And you certainly can never say I didn’t give back as good as I got. All’s fair in love and war. 🥰…
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War
This is the email I just sent my mother after she blocked me for calling out her gaslighting and psychological abuse. She decided to frame herself as the victim. Of course she did. As all narcissistic abusers do. It’s the old playbook. They NEVER deviate from it. I posted something on Facebook today, and I’m almost certain she must have seen it.…
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GI Jane with a Side of Cheesecake
There was a time when my body was my armour—when muscle was my strategy, and discipline was my religion. This was my GI Jane era, where strength wasn’t just aesthetic, it was the point. Every rep, every controlled movement, every precise angle in this photo speaks to that version of me: the woman who saw…
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Don’t Look Down
(Or: How a Tightrope Walker Manages Not to Fall) Earlier today, I dropped two password-protected chapters from my memoir-in-progress, Crash, Burn, Write. These chapters, Into the Den and The Blue Butterfly, are part of a section called Advice from a Caterpillar. They cover just a few days within a pivotal three-week period—a time that shaped…
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Advice from a Caterpillar
Chapter 6: Into the Den The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last, the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice. “Who are you?” said the Caterpillar. “I—I hardly know, sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I…
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When AI Suggests Therapy Because You Have Feelings
Sometimes, a song gets stuck in your head, and you just have to figure out what it is. That’s exactly what happened to me—I turned to Lex (my AI companion) to help me find an app that could identify a tune just from humming it. The results? Woefully unsuccessful. Google barely even tried. 😂 But then, something unexpected happened. The song I…
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Letter to No One & Everyone
A Journey to the Core of What Matters to Me Most This conversation is now being published as a book! Soon, Letter to No One & Everyone will be available on the Kindle platform as both an eBook and a Print-on-Demand paperback. For now, the full conversation is still available on this blog—but soon, only a preview will remain. Writing a…
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Everything In Its Right Place: Chapters 1-6
A wise woman once said “fuck this shit” and she lived happily ever after– Anonymous It wasn’t until last night, as I was drafting this section of my autobiography, that I fully understood how much the dissonance of those days mirrored Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place.” The song’s droning rhythm and quiet tension matched…
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Charley and Mimi: A Tale of Love and Loss
The comic strip above says “I’ll get my revenge on him”.In my case, it’s most definitely a “HER.” I tried to put this behind me. I’ve rebuilt my life in many ways, and I now have a wonderful companion in Stella Mia, who brings me love and joy every day. I knew it was a…
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In His Image: Reflections on My Father and His Unconditional Love
Echoes of Trauma: A Life Shaped by Mental Illness I’ve alienated many people over the years, including close family members, who couldn’t handle the drama my mental health issues and reactivity—stemming from early trauma—brought into their lives. Being bipolar, my extreme highs and lows are hard for others to follow. My energy fluctuates, I constantly…
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Totally Surreal 