richardegansey:

gansey displays so many alarmingly unhealthy and toxic mental processes and rereading it so painful like. the kind of person who says ‘i’m being self-pitying. ignore me. i’m almost done’ is someone who considers every negative emotion they experience as invalid. 

when he says stuff like ‘what good is all your privilege, you soft, spoiled thing, if you can’t stand on your own legs?’ not only suggests worryingly low self-esteem, but also spells out that he genuinely think he has no ‘right’ to ever voice his internal or mental suffering and must therefore stifle its existence. (and lets not forget what a gendered word ‘soft’ is and what it implies about his self-perception of fulfilling standards of masculinity)

as soon as gansey feels upset or sad or angry (regardless of how fair or reasonable those emotions might be in his circumstances – and particularly when it’s directed at his friends, family or himself) he reflexively blames himself for feeling like this, and then swiftly redirects and inwardly inflicts all this self-generating negativity on himself and pretends it has vanished

gansey basically has absolutely no idea how to effectively deal with his own emotions and he is woefully unequipped to express them. this systematic repression is undoubtedly something that has been ingrained into his upbringing (’everyone’s face is mirror, Dick – endeavour to make them reflect a smile’) and has most certainly exacerbated his mental illnesses. somewhere inside gansey there is a pit of probably a decade’s worth of straight-jacketed negativity and it’s only a matter of time until it erupts.