Scientists! Hypothetically if someone were to ceremonially burn this Pocahontas doll, would they choke to death on poisonous fumes? Asking for a friend.
[Ravi] As I pretty much expected the network doesn't come out this far, so even though it's Wednesday afternoon I guess it's actually Thursday. Strictly speaking I'm not sure I'm supposed to be playing on a tablet, but then the first time I did this I ended up sitting in Wolverine's tent with him telling me a story about my father (not that he knew that), so mostly I just go with whatever happens.
Have you read Helen Keller's autobiography? She was amazing. Very smart, very determined… but mostly very lucky. She wasn't unique. She mentions meeting other blind and deaf people. But she, as well as her teacher Anne Sullivan, was at the centre of a perfect confluence of events and if any one of them had been different we might well have never heard of her. I'm the same way. No one from any of the other universes similar to mine knows who I am and it's really not a surprise. I was… for a while, in a place after my father died. Well, no, firstly, he was murdered. I was in the ambulance when he died. Before that I relied on him a lot, he didn't like the government, didn't trust doctors, I didn't go to school. No one knew very much about me. I could lipread a few people who I knew well best and didn't have much practice with strangers, I knew a lot of Plains Indian sign language but no ASL and I spoke aloud a little. A doctor my mother took me to as a toddler, through the IHS, had decided I was brain damaged or mentally disabled or something along those lines, so that's what people thought.
Anyway, I didn't end up with Wilson straight away. For starters he was white, and white people can't just adopt Indian children anymore without going through a court process. Instead I was in this institution, I'd just lost my father, I was traumatised. I stopped looking at people, so I couldn't lipread, and over time I just… shut down. Two years of not being able to connect with anyone and no one knew how much was going on inside my head. I get Helen. She was an unholy terror as a child - that much intelligence and drive and not being able to express more than a few basic things, that's hell. Real hell. And to finally get to the point… Storybrooke wasn't quite that bad, but I understood so much less of what people said, very few people knew my first language, even in writing my English wasn't wonderful. Obviously, not the best associations for me. Being abandoned and aloneIt's hard for me to rely on other people too much. If they leave me And then remembering this whole other life, even beyond that, when who we are is shaped so much by our experiences. There's a lot of reasons I went by Echo as a codename and one of them is this struggle process of trying to understand who I am, not in relation to anyone else, but at the core. Like… looking at animal tracks and trying to imagine what it looks like, when all you have is a footprint.
I don't know. I'm not sure I'm making much sense, I've been awake for three days and this is probably all a terrible idea to write out like this, but… context. Always context, I do deranged things sometimes without it.
I don't like feeling… alone. It scares me, There. That was a long, meandering way to say that, but it's imprecise. It's not like saying "oh, I don't like mushy peas". I don't think peas drive many people into a mire of existential dread. But what do I know? [/]