Don't Wander Alone

“It is dangerous to wander alone!” – one of my auditory hallucinations, 2025

Author: Sasha Janíce

  • The Wasp and The Hole I Carry

    I didn’t mean for this blog to become all about my horrible childhood, but it’s been a persistent theme. I did see some cool movies recently and I do want to write reviews, and I will, but unfortunately it seems that my PTSD seems to be the most interesting thing about me to write about.

    I live a standard, routine life with little variation otherwise. It keeps my anxiety low. Any uncertainty tends to send me spiraling so I rarely step out and take risks. I have many friends but only a few people truly know much beyond the surface, and even then I’ve learned through a lot of betrayal to limit what I share about my inner world. Writing here for me has been exposing and uncomfortable, because anything on the internet is permanent and can be seen by anyone (including some people I really don’t want to deal with), but it helps when I remind myself that this blog only has maybe three regular viewers.

    Today I just wanted to talk more casually about current day things and use less of the annoying artsy style that I tend to gravitate toward, although there will still be plenty of that in the future.

    My mother has been reaching out to me recently. I’m not sure why. Her motives are always shrouded in mystery unless something big and revealing happens and exposes them without her consent, which it is rare. After trying to ask if I did anything for my birthday to no response from my end, she sent me several posts, the final of which was a Facebook Reel by Tania Khazaal. If you don’t know who dear Tania is, she’s an author and an influencer. She once sold courses on how to do essential oil-esque wellness startups despite not being a doctor, but now sells courses on family estrangement despite not being a mental health professional. So definitely a trustworthy person. She’s critical of the children that cut contact with their families and has a large following of these sad, confused parents desperately hoping to reconnect with their kids.

    Anyway, she’s a rant for another time. The Reel was about how she asked ChatGPT of all things what it would do to ruin America, and it said it would break up families. So now, not only am I a…

    • Demonic possession victim
    • Narcissistic abuser
    • Future homeless prostitute drug addict (I’m 25 and it’s yet to happen, although I guess it’s still a possibility given I still have at least 40 years left on the planet)
    • Impulsive liar
    • Witch

    …and now, the downfall of the United States of America, the big USA, is on my shoulders because I don’t speak with my mommy anymore. That’s right. I have more responsibility than Donald J. Trump for turning our nation over to Satanic forces. Go ahead and blame me for the high gas prices while your at it.

    I’m making fun here, of course, but we are talking about a mentally ill woman. To her, it is a perfectly plausible premise and no amount of denying will make her snap out of it. She’s basically been in perma-psychosis since 2009, the earliest I can remember her disconnecting from reality, although it could’ve started long before and I was just too young to realize it.

    For as goofy as things like this can be, my mother is a scary person. She has almost been to court multiple times in her life. Once, she was or almost was sued by the FDA for selling an electrotherapy device that she claimed cured people of cancer. (Yes, she did use this on me as a child, but once more that’s a story for another time.) She was sued by a spray-on siding company for libel, which almost made its way to–I shit you not–the supreme court. The only reason why it didn’t is because the company went bankrupt and dropped the suit as a result. She has lied to police in order to file false reports against people whom she perceives as threats. If I had a nickel for every time she’s harassed or threatened a fourteen-year-old child, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t very many nickels but is quite alarming with that particular circumstance tied to them. The last five years have been highly productive for her, as she has been stalking and harassing multiple people from a club she used to be involved with. Every single Facebook post that isn’t vaguely about me is about them. She is not to be messed with. Even if everything she says is a lie, she’ll still find a way to tear your life apart. Despite not being well-connected to reality, she is not disorganized. She is an incredibly intelligent woman. When I say it’s hard to tell where she as a person begins and the insanity ends, it is more true for her than possibly anyone else on the planet. As fascinating as all that is, it’s because of this that whenever she contacts me it puts me in a lot of distress. It’s like having a wasp hovering near you, and no matter where you go in the yard it finds a way to follow, the wind from its wings passing over your skin as it decides whether or not to attack.

    And it also reminds me that I am alone in the yard, and that she’s supposed to be there with me swatting away the wasps. Regardless of what the FDA thinks of her, she’s supposed to be protecting me. I’m her kid. A connection so integral to the development of a human, a connection I never really got to have. I have no one to fall back on when life goes south, no one who wipes away my tears, no one who cares for me.

    She sent another text soon after the one blaming me for the fall of the US:

    “There is a hole where I hoped you would be as my daughter.”

    Sometimes my mom has these moments of clarity where she suddenly talks and reacts normally to what’s happening around her. I’ve even seen displays of sudden, seemingly impossible levels of self-awareness that seems so totally incongruent with how she typically behaves that it feels like I’m peering into an alternate reality. They’re rare, but they give me hope that there is a mom in there somewhere. A real one. One who will protect me and love me in the way that I always needed her to. Who will be my fallback when life goes south, who will wipe away my tears, who will hold me when no one else will, who will care for me and finally bring an end to the feeling of permanent loneliness I’ve felt my entire life, fill the mom-shaped hole that I carry with me everywhere and put in front of other people, begging them to fill it somehow.

    It hurts even more to see that sliver of sanity than it does when she’s going crazy. Instead of walking away from a toxic person spewing lies and hatred, I have to walk away from the possibility of who she could be, the idea of the mom I deserved, because I’ve seen enough by now to know that sudden clarity won’t be permanent. There’s no way to build foundation on something so small and temporary. It’s only a moment. It always passes. Like a dementia patient.

    So I put on bug spray and block her.

  • Warzone

    This will probably surprise those who know me in real life, but as a young kid, I was a social butterfly. You may now gasp in disbelief. From the moment I learned to speak, I wanted to speak with everyone. When another child entered my field of vision, in my head I would instantly decide that they were my friend, even if they didn’t know it yet. While no one was exempt from Little Sarah’s friend status I was especially interested in the quiet ones. I was reminded well into my teens of the many occasions when, as a little kid, I would have the shyest of children giggling and running around with me within ten minutes of meeting them. Back then I had no fear of people, I had not discovered any reason to be guarded.

    Despite this natural social nature, my mom decided to homeschool me. Unlike me, my mom wasn’t social. Her whole life with other people, perhaps my father being one of the only exceptions, was a cyclical confirmation that humans were scary and untrustworthy. She sensed danger everywhere she went as a woman, as a mother, as a Christian, and as any other identity she held. As her belief of eventual persecution became more extreme, she withdrew us more and more from others until we were together alone most of the time, my time with others replaced by time with her. My dad travelled for work, leaving us alone in a house together most of the year. We became inseparable; I was never allowed to be far away from her and she couldn’t bring herself to ever be far away from me, even when dad was home.

    As I grew, I began to pick up on a dichotomy of good and bad days. On good days, my mom would wake me up and we would spend the day learning dead languages together and listening to history audiobooks. For lunch, we would watch TV on the couch while eating chips and sour cream. We would get up and dance together in the kitchen when a good song came on the radio. She would rate my cartwheels and exasperate herself into laughter trying to explain why I couldn’t marry Abraham Lincoln, a childhood dream of mine.

    However, on the bad days, she would get unpredictably, wildly angry and distressed at me over things that made no sense to get so upset about. Every day her triggers changed and I struggled to keep up. Some days if I asked a question she didn’t like that could be all it took for me to end up standing in the corner for three hours. On other days she would be fine with the dumb question, but if I forgot to clean up a mess that would be the breaking point and she would destroy the house, ripping everything out of place while screaming and crying at me. I felt safe telling her that I didn’t like her salads whenever I had to eat them, until one time she broke down sobbing and told me she knew I secretly didn’t love her and that’s the real reason why I hated her salads, before running to her room and locking herself in it all day. If I failed to thoroughly blowdry my hair after a bath, I would get lectured long into the night on how my lack of ability to follow basic instructions would mean I’d become homeless in the future. When I apologized I was sometimes not sure what I was even apologizing for, but I was made to apologize again and again and again because to her I always sounded like I was faking it.

    As the bad days started to outnumber the good ones, I began to dedicate most of my energy to making sure that she felt happy and safe. I listened to her describe her symptoms of anxiety and depression, to her rant about her grudges against her siblings and my dad’s side of the family. I listened to her monologue about her increasingly extremist religious views and paranoia of the government. I listened to her talk about her relationship problems with my dad. I listened to her recount her first marriage. I listened to her tell me way too many details about her childhood trauma, much more than I should’ve known at that age. Throughout these listening sessions, I tried not to disrupt her view of reality because that was the only trigger that stayed constant. While I was too young to understand what was going on in the bigger picture of our relationship, I found myself understanding her as a person. I stretched my child brain beyond its years, developing emotional skills that went farther than what was normal, all just to understand her. I thought it would help with the bad days. Everything would be fine if people could only understand her, but they didn’t, so it was up to me to keep the peace by being the one who could. I tried to show her that I loved her, but I’m not sure she ever believed it.

    As I got older and more bad days happened despite my efforts, I began to realize the hard way that this emotional availability only went one way–from me to her. She had so much pain and fear going on in her head that she didn’t have space for my troubles, which were quickly mounting in an emotionally chaotic environment. There were times where she was appeared capable of listening to me, and as a naturally open person who was talking to their mother of all people, I was eager to share. Who can you open up to if not your own mother? A mother is psychologically programmed to fall into unconditional all-consuming love with you the moment your first cry as a baby rings out. If your own mother doesn’t love you, what does that tell a child about themselves?

    Through her, I learned many different reasons to fear people. I found the things I had opened up about headlining those bad days. The things I had told her, that I thought were understandable because I understood them about her, were being repackaged and shot back at me like bullets, twisted into a personal attack or evidence of my inherent problematic nature. Any emotion I talked about feeling, any problems I felt I was having, and the thoughts I had on something would be used as evidence for my impeding life of destruction and failure, or as someone who was incapable of being loved, or as someone who didn’t love or respect her. Every piece of information on myself as a person became a weapon on her side of the battlefield and I had no defense built up. I had wrongfully expected the same understanding that I freely gave to her to be freely given to me as well.

    Before I went to college, my mom added a new phrase to her collection of lower-impact bullets–the rubber ones, if you will–the kind she only fired during the better days or in front of other people:

    “You used to be so cheerful. You had a real heart for people but you seem so closed off now. I miss the old Sarah. What happened to her?”

    Now, as an adult, the little Sarah never left me. I feel her move around inside trying to guide me, but there was a time up until recently when I didn’t let her move too much. I had my own arsenal and I fired it when I felt threatened, but what I considered to be a threat was skewed.

    Every time someone asked about me or my inner world–if I was okay, if I was zoning out, how my day went–I would fire at them. I assumed the information I gave would be used in their arsenal later when their own inevitable mother-style Bad Day happens. Even though I had never seen them behave like her, I felt that any moment they would turn on me and everything I had told them in confidence, even the simple things, would be melted into bullets and tear through my sense of emotional safety with them. I held everyone at a comfortable distance by coming across as defensive and snappy. Despite this, I loved them, but with the distance I had created with my attitude I felt deep down that nobody loved me as much as I loved them, or understood me as much as I understood them, just like how my mother didn’t understand me as much as I understood her. In retrospect, every time I treated someone poorly I felt that tug in your psyche you get when you’re doing something wrong but can’t put words to it, but instead of introspecting I let it slide. I couldn’t apologize because an apology was like freely handing the other side a bomb; an admission of wrongness is something that would ruin my side of the war when their inevitable Bad Day happened, the weapon that would give them the victory no matter how wrong they were. They could always throw that back at me, use it as evidence that I’m riddled with flaws and can’t be correct.

    It’s ironic how I often compare getting away from that house to swimming off of an abandoned island, only to now live in the middle of the woods miles away from others, hiding in the foliage from the society I had such a passionate love for as a kid.

    So, recently, I’ve been asking myself, have the people I’ve surrounded myself with given me a reason to believe that they are going to hurt me?

    And, well…no.

    I’m not at war. The people around me love me just as much as I love them and I had been treating them like imposters. I had been keeping them at a safe enough distance that no ammo could be gathered, no weak points exposed, but in doing so I cut myself off and hurt many people, even lost some that were so important to me. For that, I’m sorry that I’ve caused so much harm.

    My sole focus for most of my life was escaping my parents, so much so that recovering from them became an afterthought. I thought I was aware enough to somehow avoid perpetuating cycles, that the behavior I endured was so obvious to me that I’d immediately catch myself if I started doing it. But really, how much of ourselves is simply a collection of the people around us? Thirty percent? Fifty? One-hundred? Does that percentage go up if you’re a child? Does it decrease as an adult? Is our minds baseline really only made up of stories and memories and the traits of the people we’ve been around the most, gathered throughout our lives? Maybe not entirely, but also probably to some large extent yes. Since I know that extent cannot be completely determined and also that the majority of my experiences in my currently short life of twenty-four years have been filled with sad stories, bad memories, and harmful people, I should’ve known better and been more self-aware.

    Like everyone else, there’s no way I could ever be totally separated from the way I was raised. That presents a unique set of challenges I’m still learning about, but once in a while, I’m reminded of how it’s all worth it. The newfound realization that nobody is out to get me and that people love me as much as I love them has lifted a weight off of me I didn’t know I was carrying. I’m not cured and never will be, but the world seems a bit brighter for now, and I’ll take what I can get even if it means I’m the idiot once in a while. The war ended a while ago and now I accept that it has.

  • Review: Morbius (yes, i actually watched it)

    I think the short length of the movie was one of the few things the creators did correctly, as if I had to actually sit through two hours of Morbius, there would be no review because I would not watch it. In the spirit of the movie, I will not waste too much of your time with this, either. I won’t even bother explaining the plot because as far as I’m concerned, you’ve had several years to watch this and realize it was bad on your own.

    So, let’s break this down into an numbered list. The numbers don’t matter that much, but I know Buzzfeed made everyone love numbered lists. Hopefully there are enough millennials here that it’ll satisfy those ancient neuro-synapsys enough to balance out the frustrating material in them.

    Number One: The Slow Motion Scenes

    So, when a film has a slow motion scene it typically serve a purpose: to draw you in to the details. What details does Morbius want you to see? A few mid-tier bullet dodges and characters literally just running by the camera with swoopy shapes trailing around them. There is nothing interesting going on, no ornate detail the scene is drawing your focus in towards, just…Morbius being fast. Out of the many slow motion scenes I saw, I only recall thinking two were cool, and both were during the final fight between Morbius and Milo. Another slow motion scene sticks out in my mind but only because it was close enough that I could see the plastic sheen of the prosthetic vampire teeth they stuck onto Jared Leto.

    Number Two: Literally the Biggest Plot Point

    The whole reason why anything in this film happens is because Morbius is a sick genius. That’s not me saying he’s cool; he’s literally sick. He has a disease that requires three blood transfusions a day to survive. But since he’s also a genius, he’s trying to find a cure by studying vampire bats and eventually mixes his DNA with vampire bat DNA to cure it. On the surface, this logic makes sense if you don’t think about it too much, but unfortunately, I thought about it too much. Why would you, a person who needs an external source of blood to live, mix your DNA with a mammal that also requires an external source of blood to live and come out expecting to not need an external source of blood to live? That’s really all I have to say about that.

    Number Three: Martina

    Near the beginning of the movie, we hear Morbius brag about her capabilities; she’s apparently overqualified and brilliant. However, we never actually see her be overqualified and brilliant. We only see her follow Morbius’ instructions and fall in love with him. She never does anything to help him or herself that would be seen as a testament to her smarts, talent, or strength that Morbius says she has. She is totally dependent on Morbius to describe her to us and make her do things. The only ounce of personality we see from her is that she has a cat. I get the movie isn’t about Martina and I’m tired of the all-pink girl power “of course I run like a girl” trope as much as the next zoomer feminist watching Roe v. Wade crumble to dust in real time, but my complaints aren’t that she’s not outshining the men around her while in heels and on her period. My complaint is that she’s a tissue paper thin character that can’t stand up on her own without Morbius being there to give her a reason to exist. He doesn’t even have chemistry with her, she’s just the only female he interacts with on a consistent basis. Rather unfortunate when you have possibly the most gay-coded character being Morbius’ best friend. I honestly thought those two would be the ones to ride off into the sunset together after punching each other around a bit. But alas, all writers have a persistent, all-consuming urge to make the effeminate metrosexual-types the villains and the stoic masculine protagonist purely interested in his robotic boob-having companion. After I eventually get my writing degree, I expect the chip they put in your brain after handing you the diploma will force me to endure the same urges and I will be subjected to write my male characters within the context of this tired tropey dichotomy to appease the capitalism gods for the rest of my life. Pray for me.

    Side note, but when the police go to her apartment, why does that guy think shaking the litter box will call the cat? Don’t you shake the cat bowl to call them? What do I know, I only live with seven cats.

    Number Four: Artificial Blood vs. Real Blood

    Why is this an ethical debate? It is shown multiple times in the movie that Morbius can get real blood without killing people. There are literally entire packets of it hanging in his laboratory freezer. Nobody has to die for him to rely on it, so why does he insist on only drinking artificial blood like it’s some moral high ground? If relying on real blood would cause him to grow a hunger that would result in uncontrollably killing people (as is a plot in some vampire stories), that would be understandable, but that is never shown to be the case. In fact, it seems like relying on the artificial blood is more dangerous considering it doesn’t sustain him for a consistent amount of time and is thus far more likely cause him to go into uncontrollable homicidal hunger hysterics at the wrong place and wrong time. Milo is the only person we see relying on real blood consistently, but he was a jerk with little regard for others from the start, so it’s impossible to know if he’s at the whims of an uncontrollable blood lust or just being his silly queer-coded villain self. It should be noted that the only times Morbius succumbs to bloodlust is when he first awakens with the bat DNA in him, although some level of control is still implied because he did not kill his hot research assistant, Martina, and even shows anger at the man who shoves her. However, this is the only time in the movie that consuming real blood is explicitly implied to be something out of one’s control and never at any other time, even with Milo and all the people he kills. For the most “Tell, don’t show” movie I’ve ever seen, this is a rather odd thing to never tell us.

    If you want to create a hero character with a moral high ground that gives them a slight disadvantage–like Batman choosing to not kill–it needs to be explained in some fashion why that chosen moral high ground is important in the context of the story. This sort of idea isn’t one that needs to be stated, it’s sort of an intrinsic thing you pick up on after consuming enough media, so it’s rather surprising that this isn’t expounded upon in any way.

    Number Five: The Train Scene

    If you’ve seen the movie, you know the exact scene I’m talking about. I have to give credit where credit is due: I have not laughed that hard at a movie in years. I wasn’t sure where the surprisingly somewhat decent subway fight scene was going when Milo started running at Morbius while he stood there on the train platform, feeling the wind poetically rush by as watercolor streaks around him. I sincerely thought he was just disassociating. But when he suddenly jumps in front of the train and starts flying in front of it like a furious orange kite, it looked so insane and silly that I cry-laughed. I ironically, and somehow unironically, love it. I wish I had a recording of my initial reaction, but unfortunately it’s a moment in time I’ll never be able to get back. I’ll always think of it incredibly fondly.

    Number Six: Slideshow Allegations

    Simply put, the pacing and the way everything unfolded felt less like a story and more like a slideshow. I have seen true crime YouTubers put together a far better constructed storytelling aspect about someone’s real-life murder. I don’t even know how to describe what went wrong in the writing process to make it feel so dry. By the time the movie was approaching the final obligatory end-of-movie fight scene, it felt like nothing had happened even though things had been happening. It felt like a presentation about Dr. Michael Morbius instead of a story about Dr. Michael Morbius.

    Number Seven: Jared Leto

    I want to criticize him because I don’t like him as a person, but with the quality of the movie itself I’m not sure if I can. An actor can only do so much with what is given to him. If I see Jared Leto in a movie, he’s usually the villain, especially if that villain has a wild sociopathic streak. I’d say he’s usually okay at this if he doesn’t have to move his face around too much or do any extreme over-exaggerated gestures, which is also known as acting. I must say, this role worked for him in that regard. Morbius doesn’t really emote except with anger, and even then the anger is usually obscured with a flash of CGI bat face. I thought that was a weird choice on behalf of the writers, because wouldn’t someone who spent their entire life disabled have a lot of feelings about suddenly being able-bodied? Even if the movie didn’t want to be a commentary on disability and chronic illness, Morbius could’ve been an interesting character by even dipping a toe into the feelings a disabled or chronically ill person might have. The closest we get to said toe-dip is when it’s revealed that Morbius calls every one of his childhood friends Milo because they all end up dying, painting every boy who gets the sick bed next to him as a temporary presence that is ultimately meaningless as they succumb to the illness one after another. Isn’t that even a bit powerful? That consistently watching your friends die would make a child grow to not form serious emotional attachments? But it’s never brought up again. It never comes up in the conflicts the characters have. As a result, Morbius doesn’t feel like a complete character. Milo feels more fleshed out because he at least has a sense of humor and his villainy gives him a streak of complexity, this righteous anger towards the way he’s been mistreated as a disabled/chronically ill person.

    My theory is the writers were just saving Jared Leto from actually acting, which is understandable.

    Well, that’s the end of it. I know it’s low-hanging fruit to criticize a movie that’s been criticized by just about every multi-celled organism on earth, so in order to somewhat balance the wildly tipped scales I will give it one compliment:

    My roommate’s cat, Juno, loved Morbius. Barely took her eyes off the screen for the entire movie.