So far I only read:

~ After the Monster by Marissa Lingen - 1*

Hated it. It's not a story. It's an essay. It's "poetry". It's metaphors. Not my reading preference.

author notes:
I am very, very tired of reading/watching stories where the mentally ill character is sacrificed at the end while everyone else gets a happy ending. I was watching a fun, positive movie that I was 100% ready to recommend far and wide... and then I got to the last five minutes. Where the schizophrenic character heroically sacrifices himself for everybody else's ""normal"" lives. And I saw my relative C on the screen. I saw my friend J. I remembered the book that gets lauded all over the place, that features a depressed person going out to the woods to die so everyone else can live, and I saw--look, I could put the whole alphabet here to stand for what friends and relatives I have with depression. With anxiety. With BPD. With so many other mental illnesses. All my loved ones who are living and shining and fighting monsters, most of which don't even have to do with their diagnosis, because the world is full of monsters, big and small. But we can fight them together.

So I wrote this story in a blue flame of fury, because my friends and my relatives--and my anxious self--are not expendable. And neither are yours.

Seriously do tip the pizza girl.