It became habit for Gilda to sit down each day with her books and to pose herself questions and challenges the same way she might do with a patient. It was equal parts alleviating boredom and keeping track of her own mental state. Her dreams had changed, losing the empowering aspect of them and changing to something more anxious and desperate, always running from something or worse making an embarrassment of herself. Everything was also underpinned with the deep dread that her companion, her only companion would turn out to be nothing more than a backstabber, that she had been fooled into trusting an inmate when she should have known better. She didn't let her dreams have him treated any differently, trusting in her controlling manner with the man to keep him in line and distant enough from her that he could not impact her emotions.
She set the ink blots out on the table and chose the one that caught her eye most of all, staring at it until the shapes took on meaning and clarity to her. When they did, her cheeks blushed red and she almost wanted to look away from the lewd image that coalesced. On her ink blot she saw an open mouthed woman laying back on a pillow with her hands either side of it, breasts exposed as she was spread legged seemingly in a state of ecstasy. The dark blot at the bottom of the image became a strange phallus and overall the whole thing made her pulse quicken in scandalised panic that her mind would conjure up such a twisted image. She couldn't be sure what it meant, if perhaps her mind had resorted to sexuality as a coping mechanism to handle the danger they all faced and the inevitable destruction of society as they knew it. Perhaps it was some reversion to a primal and primitive state in her, even her mind suffering a backwards drift into a prior state.
She pushed this one away too, lips tight and thin as she eyed it, trying to see something else, something more reasonable, but once seen the figure would not resolve itself back into the blots which had been there before, if anything looking longer made it worse, the figure became a porn star with her hands not under the pillow but clasped around... and the blots at her knees became...
No. She shook her head. Enough. She flipped over the card. Something was wrong with her, but she could not adequately assess or treat herself and she could not trust anyone with the world the way it was. The only option was to endure.
Reluctantly she turned her attention to the ethics question for the day, still shaken and unsure what was going on inside her head.
3. Someone has said something against your particular choices in life. Do you confront this person? How does the interaction proceed?
Someone saying something against her choices in life? Well they would be right wouldn't they? That was the first thing she thought, they would be correct, she had made innumerable bad choices in life, always pursuing the same thing, always chasing her own gratification and satisfaction without much heed for anyone else. The rules she lived by were rules she had made up. People complained about them sometimes, all her attempts at relationships fell apart when the complaints came up. She argued often, but the real kicker, the dealbreaker which ended her past relationships was the fact that though she might argue, she would never budge an inch on what she thought. She lived for herself and no one would change that fact.
The interaction would proceed - as they always did - to a stalemate, where the other person realised that they would get nowhere and that they might as well discuss their grievances with someone else. And then, also as always, they would leave and she would once again be alone.
She would not change for anyone, people didn't change, they medicated, they learned to work around things, but they did not change.
