Summary: Here's the thing: nobody ever deserves happiness. There isn't any law laying out what crimes merit the permanent loss of happiness as a punishment, or what penance must be done in order to regain the ability to smile and laugh and enjoy your life. Sometimes you think the world would be easier to accept if there were such a law. Background Terezi/Karkat/Dave. (1,275 words)
Note: This fic was written for Cotton Candy Bingo Round One in response to the prompt: healing, and to the following suggestion from Asuka: could be terezi post breaking up w/gamzee & throwing away addiction and/or fixing her bonds with dave and/or karkat? all about how she likes herself better now and is happy with how her life is going?
[ETA: the AO3 crosspost is now up!]
( The mind is its own place, and in itself )
Well, that ended up being unexpectedly personal. *blinks*
Hi, my name is Liz. I have periodic clinical depression and spent several years in the early 2000s thrashing my way free of some screwed up thought patterns that repeatedly shoved me into guilt spirals, made it impossible to catch up on any work or relationships I let slide during depressive episodes, and convinced me that I wasn't allowed to be happy even for a minute unless I had done everything right that day. (Protip: doing everything right is impossible.)
It was a deeply weird feeling to look at my life one day and realize that A) I was happy, B) I'd been happy for a while, and C) I felt no need to justify this to anyone, least of all myself.
...
On a completely different note, this fic makes my second single-line bingo on this card. (Yes, I have filled seventeen prompts -- that's 2/3 of the card -- with only two bingo victories. *sigh* And this one doesn't even count since both the round and the amnesty are long over. I'm just doing this for personal satisfaction at this point.)
Note: This fic was written for Cotton Candy Bingo Round One in response to the prompt: healing, and to the following suggestion from Asuka: could be terezi post breaking up w/gamzee & throwing away addiction and/or fixing her bonds with dave and/or karkat? all about how she likes herself better now and is happy with how her life is going?
[ETA: the AO3 crosspost is now up!]
( The mind is its own place, and in itself )
Well, that ended up being unexpectedly personal. *blinks*
Hi, my name is Liz. I have periodic clinical depression and spent several years in the early 2000s thrashing my way free of some screwed up thought patterns that repeatedly shoved me into guilt spirals, made it impossible to catch up on any work or relationships I let slide during depressive episodes, and convinced me that I wasn't allowed to be happy even for a minute unless I had done everything right that day. (Protip: doing everything right is impossible.)
It was a deeply weird feeling to look at my life one day and realize that A) I was happy, B) I'd been happy for a while, and C) I felt no need to justify this to anyone, least of all myself.
...
On a completely different note, this fic makes my second single-line bingo on this card. (Yes, I have filled seventeen prompts -- that's 2/3 of the card -- with only two bingo victories. *sigh* And this one doesn't even count since both the round and the amnesty are long over. I'm just doing this for personal satisfaction at this point.)