fanfic: The Hunger Games: The Girl in Gold

[matsushima]

Title: The Girl in Gold
Fandom: The Hunger Games
Characters: OC - Penelope Fuller; OC - Mrs. Fuller; OC - Paisley Webster; Canon - Cesar Flickerman
Warnings: Implication of canon-typical violence
Word Count: 333
Prompt: tenminutesaday Challenge 434: "Write a scene where one person is watching another person and making comments about what they're seeing. The target person cannot hear the comments being made." & fandomocweekly "Unspoken"
Summary: Penelope watches Paisley's pre-Games interview with Cesar Flickerman
Notes: I stayed home sick today and spent my day rotting in bed and reading Hunger Games fanfic TV Tropes pages…
Notes 2: I took the idea of Clear (the wealthy(ier) section of the city, like how 12 has a merchant neighborhood) from Quell, a 2014 fanfic about the 25th Hunger Games
Notes: I'm not a visual person so I did some searching and I picture Paisley's gown looking something like this but a more garish gold-gold color

( “They took away Paisley and replaced her with an entirely different person.” )

annotation: Self Care for People with ADHD

[matsushima]

 

If given the choice of whether I want ADHD or not, ten out of ten times I would pick the latter. … I dream of the simplicity of a life where my brain wasn't moving ten thousand miles per hour all the tme.

I picked up Self Care for People with ADHD for something easy to read while I was home sick from burnout and instead this short passage hit me with a deep existential dread. Later, the author says, "ADHD is not who I am" and, of course, she is allowed to have her own thoughts and feelings about her disability but ADHD is who I am and the idea of giving it up is horrifying.
There are three true things about me: I am a lesbian; I am a half-orphan; I am neurodivergent. Change any of that and I am an entirely different person, unrecognizable to myself. (Obviously, you can guess which of the three I'd be willing to gamble or give up.)
It feels like such an unkindness, this internalized and apparently unexamined ableism against herself - and, you know, all the readers with ADHD (which is, presumably, all of them, given the title and content of the book).
Is your brain "broken" (also a quote) is is society? Of course it can be a bit of both, but… woof.
It's past my bedtime or I'd unpack this more but I couldn't sleep without saying something.