InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "More fun than Shark Week."

Ren Waugh-Solo (behindthemask) wrote in thedisplaced,
@ 2018-02-03 17:33:00

Entry tags:

!network post, kylo ren / ben solo, meetra surik (legends), sam wilson / captain america (616)

(027) Kylo Ren
[Meetra Surik]

You'd said something before about pointers.

[Sam Wilson 616]

Hi.

Quentin said that you would talk to people about stuff.

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	Kylo/Sam captcommunist 2018-02-04 04:38 am UTC (link)
	Outside of hurting people, it all stays secret. On my side, anyway, obviously you can tell whoever you want. Well if you know anything about me you can probably guess I've fought a few literal monsters, and I haven't actually met many people who are completely irredeemable. Most of them would never even think they needed to be. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	Kylo/Sam behindthemask 2018-02-04 04:44 am UTC (link)
	Good. [...] That's good to know. Not like there's not a lot of it people know, but not all of it. I actually don't know much of anything about you, other than Quentin gave me your name and said you could help with interpersonal stuff ~~and trauma~~ and I don't always trust myself with things. People here seem to [...] respect you. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

Kylo/Sam

captcommunist
2018-02-04 05:14 am UTC (link)

Yeah, but they don't know how you feel about things or what you're thinking.

That's fair, you didn't really grow up with comics. Back home I'm Captain America. A lot of the other hero types swap names around a lot but that's one you don't really get to just claim, it's got a lot of moral responsibility behind it that I spend a lot of time trying to live up to. But before I started dressing up in silly costumes and fighting people I came from a kind of crappy neighbourhood, so I've seen a lot of the normal kind of shit as well as the big world-destroying kind of shit. One of those places where more people go to prison than college. I know a lot about low expectations and how they can mess you up just as bad as high ones. If everyone expects you to never even reach the level of decent person and will find anything to be proof you failed, what point is there in trying?

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Kylo/Sam

behindthemask
2018-02-04 05:40 am UTC (link)

No. That's almost definitely true. [...] I watched the movie and they don't really cover it at all.

I've heard of Captain America. There's the [...] Steve right? Rogers? Or something? I've not really talked to him, but ~~Quen~~ I know of him.

I didn't grow up in a crappy neighborhood. My Mom was a Senator. So [...] But also my mom was a Senator and a war hero and this is all going to seem ridiculous to you because I had private tutors and shit. [...] Like, how do you miss the mark of what people consider to be decent person when you have all that right?

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Kylo/Sam

captcommunist
2018-02-04 07:01 am UTC (link)

They usually don't.

Yeah, Steve was before me. I was his partner for nearly fifteen years before he retired and I took over. The Steve that's here, his world's not been at it as long, I've probably got ten years on him easy.

See, I don't think there's really so much difference between rich people and poor people. If anything, growing up with that much money cuts you off from the rest of society. You might be learning about the philosophy of ethics from your private tutors, but you're also learning rules about the world that are completely different than the ones poor kids do. The consequences of pretty much anything when you're rich and well connected are much smaller than they are for other people. You might get told it's bad to be selfish or rude or ignore people who need help, but if you act selfish and rude and ignore people who need help, nothing bad is really going to happen to you. Hell, you might even be better off for it. But in a poor neighbourhood being rude to the wrong person, like a police officer who thinks he's surrounded by criminals, can get you arrested or killed, and on the other hand helping out your neighbours might mean that when you need help they'll remember it and have your back because they know how important just that small amount is. Honestly I could probably write a whole entire book about this, but the really, really short version is that when you're rich you can get away with things that other people can't. We don't learn best by being told things, we learn best from results and consequences, and if you get protected from consequences you aren't going to learn as well. It's all just theory.

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Kylo/Sam

behindthemask
2018-02-04 07:50 am UTC (link)

I guess it was good to know what other people think they know about me.

I think you've thought about that more than me. [...] Obviously you have.

I never wanted to ignore people who needed help but I don't know if that matters. You're right about being cut off though. Between mom's job, and their reputations, and my abilities - it's not like there were that many people who had anything that resembled my life. I never felt like I got away with things, but I [...] probably did. I don't know.

[...] The past is what it is though. I can't go back and change any of it. I mostly tried to bury it, but that's been difficult to do.

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Kylo/Sam

captcommunist
2018-02-04 08:50 am UTC (link)

I studied some of this in college, so thinking about it was a big part of my life for a good few years.

That's the thing of course. A lot of people don't like to accept the idea because of course being rich or white or a man or any of the other things that makes life easier doesn't necessarily make life easy. Bad stuff still happens. It might not happen as much or as visibly, so you don't have examples of how to deal with it, and if you ask for help people can sometimes look at the money or whatever and think that because you have that you don't need help, so when it does happen it can seem like it's even worse when it happens to you. I don't really like to use qualifiers like better or worse for that sort of situation though. If you have problems, you have problems. If only the person who had it worst could complain then that's going to be one single person in the whole world and they're probably not physically capable of complaining. Half the time it would be an endless debate on what counts as worse anyway because one person's complete nightmare is another person's paradise.

Funnily enough I actually know people who mess with time travel on a semi-regular basis, but it's pretty much led me to the same conclusion. Even if you technically can change the past, you shouldn't. It's just gonna create more problems. What you can do is try to understand the past. If you know why things happened the way they did, it can do a lot to change how things happen in the future, and that's especially true when we're talking about interpersonal stuff and how you react to situations. You see a lot of really dysfunctional behaviour in people who were abused as kids. If you're expected as a kid to always make sure your parent never has bad feelings because bad feelings mean screaming tantrums and having things thrown at you, you're going to learn that you can never be honest about problems because that hurts people's feelings. You're not going to know how to actually solve issues, just how to say the right thing to make the other person feel better. Or, if you get punished whenever you answer a question wrong and told how stupid you are, you're never going to extend yourself and learn from your mistakes. Mistakes are the end of the world, so you stick to what's safe and you give up at the first hurdle. You're never going to change that behaviour unless you look at it and consciously realise what you're doing. The one big thing I learned in college wasn't actually anything that was written in a textbook or asked in a test, it was just the basic fact that if you're asking "how can I make things better?" you really need to go back a step and first ask "why are things like this now?"

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Kylo/Sam

behindthemask
2018-02-04 09:19 am UTC (link)

I wouldn't ever say I had it worse than anyone else. I'm not blind. I just hate it when people act as if it should have been easy to be whatever it is they think I should have been.

So you're saying that we have to talk about the past stuff? Because I hate talking about it and I wouldn't know where to start really. ~~I do~~

[...] But my Mother's here now, and I don't want to hurt her more. And I don't want to hurt Eliot at all. But people keep asking me what happens if he leaves, and I don't know cause he's the only person I've ever been able to talk to without [...] believing he's judging me for what I'm saying.

I just want to be able to trust my own judgement on things. There are things I've done and I thought it was the right call at the time, it was the only thing that made sense. But I look at it now and I think it was a bad call. I don't want to live second guessing everything I do. I don't know that I can be who my parents ~~or Uncle~~ thought I should be, but I don't want to be who Snoke wanted me to be either. I don't want to be selfish or self-centered about things. I don't want people to look at me and just see a monster. But if I've gotten it wrong before, how do I know I'm getting it right now?

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Kylo/Sam

captcommunist
2018-02-04 07:49 pm UTC (link)

I don't think anyone really enjoys talking about their mistakes or the bad things that have happened to them. It's a pretty big part of who you are though, I'd wager.

When you look back and think it was a bad call, do you mean it was a bad call knowing what you know now, or a bad call with the information you had at the time? Because those can be very different things. The first one's a problem with acting on incomplete information, the second one's a problem with how you make decisions or how the consequences you expect match up to reality.

Living up to what someone else wants you to be is always hard. It can be easy to get lost in it, until the things you want become so small and unimportant that you can't recognise them anymore. Being able to say what you don't want is a good first step on figuring out what you do want though, it's more things you can rule out.

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Kylo/Sam

behindthemask
2018-02-04 09:17 pm UTC (link)

I mean the former. At least I think I do.

[...] I don't know what you know about the Force, but I ended up self-choosing a Master that was using me for his own means. Or at least I believe that's true now. At the time though, it felt like he was the only person who wasn't afraid of my potential. I didn't feel like I could trust my parents, and I certainly couldn't trust my Uncle, who was the Master they selected.

What you said before about mistakes being punished? It's not that mistakes weren't allowed, but more that every time I didn't give the right answer or every time I got emotional I could feel that they were uneasy. So I'd try to figure out the right answer or just try to stay calm all the time - which I'm not great at. It felt like a constant performance that I was always failing and we all knew I was failing but nobody would acknowledge it. We just didn't talk about why I was failing.

And eventually I found out that my actual Grandfather was Darth Vader, they didn't tell me any of that, and I guess I started thinking that maybe there was a reason I couldn't succeed. So when things blew up I went to Snoke, because he said I could reach the full potential of my Skywalker bloodline with him. And initially it felt like freedom, but ultimately it was the same - certain things would set him off, particularly anything that showed I still cared about my parents, or questioned any of the things the First Order was doing. And Snoke did punish, so I learned to just turn it off, or bury it till later. I thought he understood me, but I think now that he just saw me as Vader's heir and he wanted that. I'm not sure it was ever about me.

[...]

Eliot more or less said the same thing to me a few months ago, that sometimes we only know who we are when we look back and see who we aren't, or something like that. I don't like who I was when I came here. ~~I was~~ It was lonely. But there's a reason why I tried to rid myself of every part of Ben Solo too, because I hated it too.

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Kylo/Sam

captcommunist
2018-02-04 10:06 pm UTC (link)

That makes a lot of sense. Our own expectations, or the expectations we think other people have, can be just as hard to deal with as the ones they actually have. And when you're coming after someone who's made a big impact, whether it was a good one or a bad one, it's a lot of added pressure. I definitely feel that sometimes, Steve's boots can be pretty hard to fill. It's even worse when it's a family member like a parent or grandparent too because we tend to see who they are as part of us. You can sort of expect that if you don't live up to the good ones it's a personal failure because you should have the potential, or that you can't out-run the bad ones because whatever made them do the things they did is in you as well. And it only makes it worse when things are kept secret and you have to find out on your own later. Teenagers and younger aren't known for reacting to things completely rationally anyway. It sounds like you were being pulled in so many different directions that you never had the chance to just sit with yourself and figure out who that is.

It's not really too late to do that though. Right now you've actually got a lot less people expecting things of you so you've got some breathing room to figure things out. Eventually that's going to mean really looking at the bad parts as well as the good parts, but you don't need to jump in right at the deep end like that.

Have you ever thought about a journal? Some people find it helpful to write down things just for themselves so they can look at how their thoughts and feelings change over time, or try to understand what affects their behaviour.

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	Kylo/Sam behindthemask 2018-02-04 11:14 pm UTC (link)
	I haven't even touched on the politics, but they're all wrapped up in it too. It's definitely one of the things that's different here. But you aren't wrong about the expectations. I know people know things, but mostly they don't bother me much. I haven't kept a journal for years. I did keep a diary when I was a teenager. [...] Do you think I should again? (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	Kylo/Sam captcommunist 2018-02-05 04:17 am UTC (link)
	That is one of the good things about this group, I think. When so many people have something special about them you get knocked back down to normal. Normal can be severely underrated. You could try it. It might make it easier to work through things if you're getting it down on paper, but without as much need to actually make sense. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	Kylo/Sam behindthemask 2018-02-05 04:28 am UTC (link)
	Honestly, I don't think I've ever been such a fan of normal as I have been these past few months. Right. I'll pick up a notebook. [...] So, is this what we do? I mean, I guess, just talk? Is there some trick beyond that? (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

Kylo/Sam

captcommunist
2018-02-05 05:02 am UTC (link)

I'm not surprised. It's a chance to just be that a lot of people haven't really had before, even with the attacks and weird events.

Not really. I'm trained to spot warning signs of bigger problems but most of what I do is just active listening. Taking what you say and reframing it or asking questions so you can look at things in different ways without tripping over all the mess. I tend to think most people have all the information they need already, it's just lost in a big pile of stuff that's so overwhelming it can be hard to know where to start. Sometimes I teach coping strategies, like when I was talking about working through anxiety and panic after the battle, but mostly it really is just having someone neutral to talk things through with.

If you want we could schedule some time to get together once a week or so and see how that works. You might want less or more or prefer writing to talking so we can adjust things until it feels about right.

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Kylo/Sam

behindthemask
2018-02-05 06:12 am UTC (link)

When Eliot invited me to move into the cottage, even before we were together, it was the most like a home - a real one - that I think I'd ever had.

Yeah. Hopefully I make sense. I'm not sure always where to start or what to cover cause I don't know what you know. But I guess probably not so much if you haven't really watched films and things.

I think I'd like to try that if that's all right. I think I could do face-to-face anyway.

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	Kylo/Sam captcommunist 2018-02-05 06:48 pm UTC (link)
	It's okay if you don't always make sense. We can figure it out. How about we shoot for Tuesdays? About 2 o'clock's a good time since it's easy to find an empty classroom on the school deck. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	Kylo/Sam behindthemask 2018-02-05 07:59 pm UTC (link)
	Tuesdays are good. And 2 is fine. It's not like I have much of a schedule right now. Thanks. (Reply to this) (Parent)

Kylo/Sam

behindthemask
2018-02-04 10:05 pm UTC (link)

[...] Except with Dad.

That was a bad call with the information I had at the time too. I think I knew it. I just convinced myself Snoke knew more than I did, and I had to do it or risk not being anyone of any importance.

And the thing is, when I say that, it feels right, but then I wonder how many of the other calls I made when I was working with Snoke, are the same way. I should have done differently, but I convinced myself he knew better?

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