Bad Hijabi V Mind-Flayer
Bad Hijabi V Mind-Flayer
a visual story :: in which I’m a cartoon character
Happy Caturday! Today I have some lighter fare to offer you — the beginning of Adventures of Bad Hijabi, a weekly serial comic1, you know, like the Saturday comics from childhood, for anyone my age. If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you, wrote George Bernard Shaw. That’s sound advice I will take. Each Saturday will take you on a fantastical adventure in the terrain of emotional intelligence.
You should know that I am writing this whilst wearing a crocheted octopus hat, which I call my thinking cap, because I try not to take myself too seriously.
A Small Request
This is substack is a labour of love, a tribute to my mother who died in May just 2 weeks before turning 91 and who devoted herself to learning everything she could about the Holocaust and teaching me what she learned. This substack is a labour of love to humanity, whose spirit extremism and hatred corrupts2 + devours. This substack is a form of worship—it is my way of taking back God from extremists who have kidnapped + enslaved Him for their own unholy ends. The importance of the work means I cannot ethically pay-wall the content—it belongs to all of humanity.
Please donate if you can, and spread the word if you cannot. We would like to be able to continue doing this work, finances are a bit tight, we are entirely reader supported at this time. We appreciate you reading our stuff + sharing it. All donations welcome.
for Caturday, 14.1.2023, here is Adventures of Bad Hijabi :: Bad Hijabi V Mind-Flayer
In case you forgot what a mind-flayer is, here’s a quick reminder from yesterday—
Mind flayers … were sadistic aberrations feared by sentient creatures on many worlds across the multiverse due to their powerful psionic abilities. From their twisted lairs deep in the Underdark, these alien entities sought to expand their dominion over all other lifeforms, controlling their minds to use them as obedient thralls. They consumed their victims' very personality by extracting and devouring their brains while they were still alive.
My Encounter with a Mind-Flayer
A bunch awful + heart crushing stuff happened in my life, including death. I had many reasons to be angry, trauma clustered upon cluster until my life resembled a fcuking garden of rage and melancholy I would tend to like my children. My dad died and it was not a great end of life experience for us. Also, death transforms, whether you feel ready or not. I did not feel ready. I wanted to burn the world down. My rage could not be tamed—brain-gremlins I will call it.
The Mind-Flayer dropped gremlins into my brain whilst I hemorrhaged rage and despair. I lost myself in the deluge of rage—rage farmed by my own response to my enormous + solitary grief. My father had only one child—me. My father had estranged himself from his family deliberately. When he died a horrifying emptiness filled me. The painful realities of transformed grief and knowing my father in death felt like too much for one hooman to bear. I felt alone and I railed against my grief.
Being a thrall for a mind-flayer filled me up and gave me a warm belonging feeling for a while. Eventually, though, it became a painful bondage to serve the mind-flayer by allowing the brain-gremlins to feast on my brain, and I roused from my rage coma. When I woke up I found these brain-gremlins crawling around my mind, eating away at joy and hope. I plucked them out, one by one, trapped them into a receptacle and took them back to my lab to study them.
Extraordinarily challenging internal experiences drive hoomans to extreme thinking. Living inside an extreme + rageful contracted mindset feels like having gremlins in your brain. The grievances become those brain-gremlins and they eat the thinking part of your brain.
I think lots of people struggle with mind-flayers + rage-brain-gremlins. What if we, as a hooman society, could concentrate on cultivating some emotional hygiene?
the graphics, unless otherwise noted, are made in collaboration with midjourney ai
think the Tolkien world, in which Morgoth abused and tortured (ie corrupted) elves + men and turned them into Orcs