#'we've been watching your mental health decline for months'

[saederkrupps]

looking at my old art sucks bc you can see when i'm having a bad mental health time. i cant really seem to look back at it and think "well i made it out".

[antiendovents]

Slides in, very slowly and cartoonishly Honestly. Kinda mood with the mental health stuff, even if mine is.. not a decline. More like a hailstorm, or solar flare. Been having alot of stuff to think about.. (Includes syscourse by like.. 13% lol. Kinda cause I met some syscourse in a discord serv) Personal opinon; take as long of a break as you'd need. Maybe grab a journal to write or draw feelings down to better decipher them. (For all of ya, Bug.) It helped me yesterday (of the date this was asked) But if you feel so inclined to come back it's gnawing at you; take it easy & slow. Don't overwhelm yourself and make stuff worse, k? Cause burnout stinks, I'd know. Here's a little something to maybe make you smile, cause it certainly entertains me; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y13AuWKJaFU And with that I'm out. Evaporates 🧩👁

hey! Yeah, we're (sorta) getting better now, but it's still quite bad. I mean our mental health (and our mood) has always been "jittery" with lows and highs that usually happen within a few hours to days, but like, we've always had a sort of "general" area. We lost that for a while, so we were either doing horrible or doing great. Now it's getting a bit better, but the lows are horrible still and the highs are okay at best. The most fun I've had lately is playing Dandy's world or staying in bed. We appreciate your words though, we're hoping to start posting a little this month, or maybe a little after Christmas, we're trying to be slow with it and we're trying to work out a schedule so we won't fuck ourselves over again. Though maybe a schedule might be more stressful??? I'm not sure honestly. Maybe we will try writing a bit, it's always been a hobby of ours, so it might be nice to try using it to help ourselves for once, we're not sure. Maybe we'll try draw things (when we clear up our storage first.. since it's way too full for us to draw on our drawing app lol).

Anyways thank you! I appreciate the video too, it cheered me up a little ^^

[prozac-shaped-urn]

💌 (pretend i am asking this from my side blog)

*snap* *clap* *finger guns* sooo

i did a small dive into the passion side blog because i know what we have in common, but i wanted to look a little closer and find things that maybe surprised me or made me have to stop and think, and i wanted to give those some thought before i responded. i'm the kind of person who likes to take my time when i'm asked about what i learned during a new experience / what i like about someone / things along those lines. i even take my time with answering that question about my bestie and we've known each other for two whole decades.

anyway.

i won't go too in depth on mental health mainly to respect your privacy, but also i don't feel like tagging this post with a million trigger warnings, SO THERE. what i will say is that we fight a similar battle. no two manifestations of mental illnesses are the same, but from what i know of my own diagnoses and what i gather from your experience, we're very alike in the specific demon we battle with literally every second we breathe. you're still here. you're still fucking here. whether we wanna be here half the time is a different story for you and me both. but you're still kicking ass and taking names, and that makes you extraordinarily brave and strong. moving on before i start crying.

i will confess i haven't read the OC thing you posted but i will get to it and when i do get ready for feedback akin to this response. brain hasn't been braining for a month and i'm not pushing myself to turn the lights back on before i'm good and damn ready.

YOUR ART??!!?!?! HELLO?!!!????? HOLY FUCKING JESUS BRO!!!!!!!!!!! it baffles me how people can see shit in their head and then make it a thing on the page. visual artists never fail to make me shake my head with wonder. i bow at your exquisitely talented fangirl feet.

your thoughts on gender surprised me. (in a good way!) i haven't given my own gender any kind of in-depth thought, but now i kinda want to. i also don't feel like a girl, and i don't feel like a boy, nor do i feel like a woman or a man, or really any specific binary or non-binary affiliation. i'm just ~whatever~ i'm just ME dude idfk. i've always been this way and i don't really think about it that much. i like the fact that you took the time to examine that aspect of yourself. whether or not you have firm answers for the prying minds of strangers is irrelevant. it's your fucking gender, do with it whatever you want.

"nothing prepares you for the grief that hits when you realise there are things you can no longer do or have access to. that in order to prevent your slow decline you might have to give up your previous joys and watch enviously from the sidelines" is such a raw and painful insight. holy hell dude.

thank you all for coming with me on this little joy ride. i hope it made sense.

[jimkirkachu]

you’ve been afk for a while, are you alright? what happened? 🥺🥺 (੭ ･᷄﹏･᷅)੭ु⁾ any Kitty updates?

Hi hon, thank you for your note and your lovely emoji guy!! Those sparkles...... they're so magical......! 👀✨

(Sob story follows)

(Disclaimer: I promise I'm not deliberately trying to gain sympathy or pity!!!)

So........ it's been a rough few months. I've had an aunt and a cousin pass away; my longtime mentor retired but I had to, well... avoid the huge celebration that was thrown in his honor because The Abuser was there (thankfully I knew ahead of time so I wasn't blindsided, but it still sucked not to be there); and I've sort of been having a whole identity crisis, trying to figure out if I'm non-binary, gender non-conforming, gender confused for sure, then trying to communicate that to my family, and everyone I've told has been very supportive (for which I'm extremely grateful!) but it's just stressful trying to get up the nerve to talk about such personal things when you have no idea how it's going to be received. Especially when you're accustomed to never talking out loud about Anything personal because you've been conditioned to understand that your feelings are Too Much to dump on any one person and every time you've slipped up in the past and even obliquely talked about your feelings, you've gotten in trouble for it. (Let's just put it this way: I'm in a text message group chat which is active every day, and I got to a point where it was making my mental health so bad that I muted all the notifications--and I now have 709 unread messages as of this writing.)

On top of all that, there's the unfortunate kitty news. My cat (the big black one, Ensign Kittycat) is doing just fine (and my dearest anon, you have reminded/inspired me to come up with a new kitty/Trekky post sometime soon 🤔🥰). My mom's cat, however, is rather old and has been in declining health for the last couple of years. It's been at least a year since she lost whatever was left of her hearing (she's always had bad ears), but about 3 months ago she also lost most of her sight, and it was actually an overnight change, which was really freaky and scary. One day she was deaf but otherwise pretty much fine, the next morning she walked directly into the light from my bedside lamp and stared up at me with her eyes Fully dilated, and ever since that night/morning she's gotten around by memory, possibly by sensing light/darkness, but mostly just by feeling her way with her whiskers, which means she gently bumps into everything (walls, furniture, people, other cat, etc.) and it's just... really sad. Our vet confirmed that she is definitely in kidney failure, so we've started her on a whole plethora of medications, and I know it sounds like a weak excuse for being emotionally exhausted but it's really taken a toll. She wails about a dozen times a day/night (loud enough to be heard across the house and/or to wake us up) any time she goes to lie down somewhere and feels... pain? loneliness? who knows? I know she's "just" a pet, and she's technically not even my pet. But she's been part of our family for 17 years and being essentially incapable of helping her, having to watch her health/comfort/quality of life slowly decline is devastating. 😔

Otherwise, it's been the same old song and dance with the multiple mental illnesses, the unemployment, the constant comparisons between self and more-successful friends/peers/family members, the fantastically inconvenient sleep phase problems, and the overall feelings of worthlessness/hopelessness. 😕 It's all been something of a hindrance to my writing and creativity in general, which is a frustration in its own right, but... I think I've whined enough for one post (yikes).

I'm so sorry anon, I wish I had better things to report. 😔😣 But I really appreciate you checking in 💜💜💜 Thank you for caring; I hope things are going more smoothly for you than they are for me!