The Cutprice Guignol

The Ninth Year: The Haunting of Swill House

Category: personal shit

A Rant on Chronic Pain

Alright, sometimes I plan what I’m going to write here, and sometimes I just wake up and it hurts and I need to talk about it, alright? Alright. Alright!

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An Asshole’s Guide to Not Hating Yourself

Hi! I’m Louise, and I’m an asshole.

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Why I Don’t Talk About My Eating Disorder

Trigger warning for discussion of eating disorder behaviours.

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Self-Care, But Unironically

It’s Saturday today. It’s the day off I force myself to take; I slept in, did an hour of yoga, sipped on my fancy tea. I call it self-care, even though it’s somehow more stressful to think about taking care of myself than it is to think about work.

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How to Handle Life (And Your Own Mental Health) When Your Partner is in a Psych Ward

(trigger warning for discussions of suicide, hospitalisation)

In March of this year, at about eleven in the evening, I sat down on the edge of my bed. My partner, of six years, who I had met in the smoking area one Halloween when he was dressed as the wrong Doctor from Doctor Who and I just had to pass comment on it, had just voluntarily left our shared home to go to hospital for a psychiatric evaluation after a suicide attempt. From there, he would be committed to a mental ward, where he would stay for the next month (note: would it be funnier if I had titled this article “in the month of madness”?).

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Do It Anyway

Do it anyway.

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Why I’m Not Vegan Anymore

I’ve been vegetarian for pretty much my entire life. I’ve just never really liked meat, and did the usual baby-vegetarian thing of looking at my cats, looking at my chicken nuggets, and figuring that I didn’t want to put things in my mouth that came from another animal, something which had the figurative ability to snuggle on my lap during Saturday morning cartoons. For a long time – about fifteen years, aside from some brief breaks – I was just vegetarian and I was just fine with it and I politely ate my Quorn chick’n chunks in relative peace.

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Coming Out: A Timeline

Alright, y’all gay-ass (and other queer-adjacent terminology-ass) motherfuckers: it’s Pride month, and that means I’ve got to squeeze in some LGBT content amongst my searingly incisive deep-dives into how shit Gotham is. I mean, I already have, just a little, but there’s always room for more.

For me, and for everyone else I know who’s had to do it, coming to terms with and coming out with your non-straight, non-cis-ness is usually a long, drawn-out, painful, exciting, scary, affirming dream-nightmare of a process. So I thought I’d give you a little poke around my own self-serving fascination with storifying my own history to indignantly boring effect everything that led to me coming out! I’ve covered some of my experiences previously here, but this time I just want to get stuck in to all the weird little details that turned me into the unstraight I am today. Let’s get to it!

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Not Sick Enough

Honestly, I’m going to get back to the fun stuff soon, I am. It’s just that Riverdale has been off air for three weeks and maybe it’s the only thing giving my life meaning, you know? Well, time for one more introspective bungee-jump before it’s back tomorrow.

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The Acceptable Eating Disorder

Trigger Warning for discussion of anorexia, bulimia, and general eating disorder behaviour.

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