Well That Got A Bit Long Eh - Blog Posts

💭 + what she wants the most in life

𝓗𝓮𝓪𝓭𝓬𝓪𝓷𝓸𝓷𝓼 — send 💭 + a topic to receive a headcanon about said topic

oh man, this was diiiiificult for chrissy to nail down until midway through high school. laura cunningham had a laundry list of short term and semi long term goals that she wanted chrissy to meet, and as the good daughter chrissy adopted them as her own goals. they weren’t what she wanted, though. 

she first starts thinking about long term to life during junior year. it’s when everyone is clamoring their way through college apps and visiting campuses and collecting patches from universities they like and bragging over where they think they’ll get in. for everyone else, college is a vehicle to thinking about what they’re going to do for the rest of their lives. chrissy knows her vehicle to college will be cheer, but goodness knows she’d rather not do that for the rest of her life. no way she could! teaching cheer, though, that could be something. actually.......

surviving the upside down sends her into a state of mental disarray for weeks afterward as she tries to come to terms with what it means to be peeled from the edge and come away alive. but once the fog lifts, a lot more clarifies in its wake. first, she wants to live. actually live and be happy. she doesn’t want to be miserable. figuring out how to do that is step one. step two is how to earn a living while getting better and becoming happy at the same time. something that helps people. she keeps thinking back to cheer coaching, but more and more layers of that are peeled away and she finds herself thinking about teaching. social studies or history or even math. she’s always been good at math and wonders if there isn’t a way to get a job helping kids learn the most challenging yet the most logical of subjects. problem solving. helping people. helping kids.

chrissy realizes the core of everything while knee deep in college, taking a somewhat ill-advised “elective” psychology course: she wants to stay close to the most difficult ages in youth and keep an eye out for who needs a little extra attention or an offer of help. there’s no time to wonder who could have stopped her from becoming weak enough to fall prey to vecna, but regardless if vecna still lives or not, she’ll be watching. and she’ll be happy. that’s her promise to herself, her greatest desire: to get out of hawkins and find what makes her happy out there. she can’t help others if she can’t see beyond her own discontent. and she’s going to help someone if it’s the last thing she does, starting with herself.