#I can actively feel myself giving up on myself

[lizardho]

Being at BYU after my mission was weird. Like. Bad weird. Everybody was still acting like missionaries but they had nobody to teach so it all turned into the holier-than-thou bs that missions always degenerate into over time. Just the forced establishment of some weird social hierarchy where value is based on how devout you are, with people digging and scratching and clawing their way around humanity in order to become even more devout.

And this bullshit was actively killing me. The attempts to stay Good Enough were scraping the remnants of my humanity out of my husk like a spoon scraping the last bits of watermelon from a rind - I was doing what I had always done, be Mormon, do what Mormons do, be as good a Mormon as I could be, only it was breaking me. Instead of healing me, making me whole, taking away my burdens, it was pulling the life out of me in exchange for nothing. I was just being squeezed dry of everything I had to offer and being given back shame and isolation and rejection because I didn’t do it first, or fast enough, or with a willing enough heart, or whatever the hell they could come up with.

But despite myself, because most people smarter than me AND dumber than me would have left already, I found myself trying over and over and over again to make it work with no success.

One day, I snap. I’ve had enough. I need answers. I’ve looked everywhere and done everything I could by myself, and nothing had come of it, so I went to talk to a faculty member. A teacher at the school. He taught religion classes and his lessons were powerfully and inspiringly honest, earnest, and filled with raw humanity. I figured if I could get a straight (ha) answer from anyone, it would be that guy. He wasn’t involved in the Mormon rat race. He wasn’t playing the stupid “I’m Worthier Than You” games that were so pernicious on campus. He was being real and open and vulnerable and I needed that from someone.

So I go into his office and I lay my cards on the table. I figure if I’m gonna get helped, I need to be honest. I share with him my weird feelings about dad leaving the church on my mission. About my siblings leaving the church. About my own doubts and hurts. I tell him about how hard it is to be in limbo like this without knowing what to do or where to turn. I tell him I need answers.

And he listens. And then he starts with the usual Mormon apologetics bullshit. And I say “no” because I’m done with that. That doesn’t fly with me anymore. And he sees and hears me say no and he puts a hand on mine, makes direct eye contact, and says,

“You know, you don’t have to go to church, right?”

I, being a person who was hurting, interpreted that as “if you have questions that I can’t answer you should fuck off.” I got defensive immediately and he again listened, put his hand on mine, and said,

“Not what I meant. You can stay if you want, but I want you to know you can leave too. Take a break. Give yourself time to heal. This isn’t supposed to hurt this much, and if it hurts you can take a break and come back when it feels good.”

I’m actually getting choked up just writing that out. Nobody had ever said that to me before. When I talked about my dysphoria to my parents, they said teenagers are supposed to feel like that a little bit. When I talked to people about my difficulties at church they had always told me that it was a sign that church was working. That I was doing it right. That growth was supposed to hurt, that excising the Natural Man from me was supposed to be difficult, that I was supposed to be feeling this anxious and sad and scared. I had never ever ever been told that pain and suffering were signs things were going wrong. I had actually explicitly been told by many many many many many many many many people that it was good, that the hurt and the heartache and the constant feeling of never being good enough and never being able to fit into my own skin or love myself in any meaningful way was desirable. That it was something they envied.

It’s not supposed to hurt. Some things can, and should. My parents were right that some body concerns were normal (although we later found out my specific concerns were more abnormal lmao, I got that tgirl swag). My family and friends were right that challenging myself with difficult assignments and ambitious goals was supposed to feel uncomfortable.

And at the same time, THIS was not supposed to hurt. I was not meant to have this gaping throbbing aching hole in my Me that never let up. It wasn’t supposed to hurt. IT WASN’T SUPPOSED TO HURT.

I don’t know when exactly I started crying, but I was crying the whole rest of the day. It was the first time in a while I had to actually take a Valium to clam down. It wasn’t supposed to hurt.

He also told me that if it ever stopped hurting I could always come back.

I think that was the day I really left. Others might say otherwise, I still tried to make it work for a few more months after that, but the idea that it wasn’t supposed to hurt really changed me.

If any of you are reading this - there are things that are supposed to be difficult. Things that are supposed to hurt. But if your faith or your beliefs about the world or yourself leave you feeling like you’ve been hollowed out at a minor mistake or setback, if your failures and setbacks leave you feeling raw and numb frequently, if the company you keep or the places you stay leave you feeling constantly inadequate with out hope or help, then I’ll tell you the same thing that professor told me:

You can go somewhere else. You can do something else. And you can always come back when you want.

But it’s not supposed to hurt.

[postmoderntongues]

I will fight a male 3x my size (usually not WIN, but still FIGHT) half a pitcher and three bumps into the night if my fight or flight gets activated and i feel like I have the option not to default to fawn. I am 5'10 260 and would not fight a four and a half foot dike with a double digit weight. I almost threw hands in a dive bar with my buddy's ex 22 minutes into the year i was hearing kill bill sirens i didnt live in that town and had nothing illegal on me i could get in a drunk new years bar fight and do community service county jail at worst and im the only one i know other than Chay's people and some college friends who hasn't been there and most likely if i was going anywhere itd be to a psych ward which i can do on my head and then her Dike intervened and I was like okay bro im not swinging its a free country and ima keep talking tho (and trying to get her to swing on me) but im not threatening anybody don't get the wrong idea (i wanted to be like *brother, my brother song form the first pokemon movie playing softly in the background* we are one in the same ive been you and you've been me so many times at this point in our lives you know how it goes doing the big bulldike thing pining after some reckless straight girl you know no woman deserves to be slapped by a man but be serious and tell me you know her as well as you claim to and there aren't a few things in her past where if another female just gave her a good old fashioned 3 stooges bop on her messy head on the deck of a dive bar it might not be completely unjustified).

Like the second this girl intervened i was like nope not doing this and then just yelled shit at the ex all night every time she tried to come back to the bar partially bc i was mad she was the reason my buddy wasnt there, i was mad she was the reason i couldnt hook up with this cute guy with more drugs and a tattoo gun at his place a few blocks away the night before bc he was the one who ruined their marriage, and also I was on a lot of stimulants for a few days in a row at that point and under stimulated and had nothing else to do to entertain myself because my people went to a drag bar and i didnt want to pay the $8 cover so i didn't know anybody and it was my first time in a bar as a single female and now i was totally unaccompanied and in a weird panicked way i thought maybe getting a little rambunctious or at least giving the impression i was ready to would keep me safe until my people came back and then later she came back and tried to intimidate me with 4 guys who were like 5'8 on their dating profile prolly and smaller than me mass wise and they were like you good? and i wa slike yea whats good you good and they were like no are you GOOD? n i was like yeah why are you good? and then i saw her and i was like you went and got dudes you really cant handle yourself as a woman and then some low blows im less proud of and then the bar closed and i got an invite to go to an afterparty and wound up getting into a great phone call with my cousin and didn't spend the night potentially joining the great majority in the same ER everybody would go for ODs before narcan because I didn't get into a dike fight that night.

I was flirting with this girl when we saw a movie together with some friends and she was flirting a lot back and like was holding my hand and sitting in my lap at one point and then my boy a few days later was like "u know shes married right" and i was like idgaf ill peg him and he was like "no she has a wife" and I was like dude if you tell a single soul what u saw at the movies ill straight up fist u, you do not say i bought her the fucking cup of tea, as far as you know she didn't get a single one of my gummy worms. In fact, both you AND chris sat between us. I don't fuck with other womens partners but i ESPECIALLY don't involve myself in dike drama. Most guys ive cucked are like kind of cool with it nd into it to some degree because males are lower animals and also perverted and fetishize lesbianism. The rest mostly just curse you out. A few will hit you. Getting shot or stabbed isn't something that's never happened in the history of lesbian fuckboys ignoring het relationships when pursued by a cute girl. Now look up the Shanda Sharer case and compare that to an infamous crime by male kids of the same age like most school shootings or even most male serial killers and ask which you'd rather die in. Best case scenario if you get involved creeping around on a lesbian your life becomes one of the bummer non-supernatural Junji ito comics but there's not an insignificant chance that your last moments will be a lot more Waita Uziga.

I fear no male. I fuck with no dike.

You're talking to somebody who once got back with a girl not in spite of the fact but literally BECAUSE she stabbed me through my jeans in the cafeteria with a pen or pencil or something (it wasn't like a big injury but the thing stuck upward in my leg and drew a miniscule drop or two of blood when i squeezed at it and put a hole in my jeans that my mom noticed but i have no doubt that when she did it she did it with the intention of driving the thing through to the bone if shed been physically able) and I was like wow thats passionate her feelings for me are strong and like 2 periods later i'd broken up with the girl i was rebounding with who she was jealous of and stabbed me over and was back with her.

I had a brief girlfriend freshman year who would literally just cut me like on the bricks in front of the dorm building where we'd smoke while she was drunk and i was either rolling or tripping or tweaking and all the punk guys i was friends with were horrified by it and then i justified it by comparing myself to GG Allen who I didn't even listen to i just know he cut onstage and these guys wouldn't know who Lucifer Valentine was so it was the most appropriate reference.

The most sadistic consensual lays ive ever had in my life were NOT cismales.

My ex's best friend also had a mentally ill bulldike doing the reverse-LUG college comphet thing as a girlfriend and she was the best but she'd make u put ur cig out on her if u smoked around her when she drank certain weekends bc she was always trying to top her score as were a bunch of the other rugby dikes who were like literally my favorite people ever to party with bc they were all heavy drinkers and i was an alcohol lightweight and i was heavy into club drugs and tripping so they were impressed by the quantities of that that i'd be on and it was like making contact with friendly foreigners but because the team captain was dating my ex's bestie we kind of shared territory and i was there for most of their first trip/roll and they taught me the fun drinking songs and a bunch of them were in the german program so i always had people on good terms to work with in a very socialization-based course and then a bunch of them started working at this evil strip club that had free womens wendsdays and a free salad bar so all summer us girls would go there for lunch every wednesday and talk to our friends who were there when it was dead and tip them like $5 or whatever we could manage a head for the salad bar since it was free and the place was empty other than us so we absorbed this large group of strippers most of whom were sapphic or at the very least so uninterested in sexual attention outside of work that they were mad fun to party with meanwhile the males all started working at this local bar and absorbed the townies including most of the bouncers and kitchen workers who also party like rockstars and the girls who came from there were also for the most part not straight and these girls were so nice and we had such a good time but also id apologize if i bumped into these fuckers in a dream i would not dare get wrong with one

again i regard no male, I disrespect no dike

[lycandrophile]

my coworkers are at it again and i’m so sick of it. how are you going to sit here in front of your trans male coworker and debate a trans male patient’s identity? have a whole discussion about the fact that he hasn’t legally changed his name yet and if you should still have to respect it in front of your coworker whose deadname is still on every piece of official paperwork in the office? scrutinize the fact that he hasn’t medically transitioned yet in front of your coworker who still had DDDs when he started working with you?

it might come as a surprise based on how i come across on here, but in person i’m an extremely quiet and deeply nonconfrontational person. just hearing the conversation was enough to damn near give me a panic attack, and i tried to push through it and say something anyway because it’s a conversation that absolutely should not have been happening and i knew i had a responsibility to do something about it for the patient’s sake, but i just couldn’t do it. they’ve shown me more than enough times how they actually feel about trans people, how they probably feel about me. no matter how badly i want to stand up for myself and my patients to them, i’m terrified of doing or saying anything that might turn them against me more openly and make the job even less tolerable than it already is.

so now i’m kicking myself for not saying anything, baffled that they would think any of what they said is okay to say in front of a trans person, and above all furious for the patient who has no idea he’s about to be brought into a unit full of bigots who are just good enough at faking acceptance that they can get away with saying the worst shit imaginable behind closed doors. i want to be able to Do An Activism and try to make people realize that the whole culture here is disgusting (and just plain unprofessional regardless of your political views), but i don’t have it in me. i don’t know how to be that kind of person in real life.

[shera-dnd]

Alright it's been a week since I brought back my ko-fi, so I thought it would be a good time to have an honest conversation with everyone about my situation

No sales pitch, no begging for money, just an honest retelling of my 2024 and how I ended up in my current situation

So at the very beginning of 2024 I, against all odds, won the fucking lotery

Yeah, fucking insane. I didn't even know that actually happened to people

Anyways I got 5 out of 6 numbers right and so I won the incredible prize of 70k reais (or about 12k-ish dollars at the time), which you know what. Not a fucking millionaire amount, but who fucking cares, that's still a crazy amount of money

So I gave 60k of it away to my family to help pay for some repairs around the house, replacements for some broken stuff, and like help us get a new car, since we haven't had a car since 2011

So yeah that improved my quality of life by quite a crazy amount and still left me with 10k (1.5k dollars give or take) in the pocket, which I was gonna save up so I could fulfil the dream of meeting my friends in the US and FINALLY see snow in real life

Unfortunately for me, my intestines had a different plan

somehwere around february I was probably cursed by a bog witch into having constant chronic explosive diarrhea FOR MONTHS!

As you can imagine that made most activities risky if not impossible due to my bowels being in a constant state of emergency and my body being severely weakened from losing fluids so fast

On the bright side my country has universal health care, so in theory I could get myself checked and hopefully cured without spending anything

On the not so bright side, health care around where I live has been fucking gutted and the wait times sky rocketed

And after a few months of waiting on the public health care people to get their shit together, I decided to dip into my savings and use that to go through private health care instead

so after 4 months, 3 blood tests, 2 stool tests, a colonoscopy, a biopsy, and half my savings... they found out just about close to nothing and no one has any idea what the fuck is wrong and they keep redirecting me from one doctor to another to another

And like at this point my physical health is already fucked, I'm constantly exhausted, and I haven't been able to do anything with myself for almost half a year

I was also approaching the one year anyversary of... well the last time I was able to write anything whatsoever.

Like writing was such a dream job for me. I wanted nothing more than to keep writing for the rest of my life, and the fact that my writing had somehow been able to sustain me for so long was a genuine fucking blessing

So not being able to do it, not even for fun, for nearly a whole year was kinda messing with me. Like I knew I had severe burnout, but that was turning into guilt for not being able to deliver on the one thing I saw myself as good at, which turned into even more guilt over being unable to do even this when people had it so much worse than me, WHICH THEN mixed up with all the actual health issues and the fact I no longer had the money to take that trip I wanted. And in the end this whole mess left me feeling utterly hopeless and like a burden on everyone

That's when I deleted my original ko-fi. Why? Because it was part of me getting my affairs in order before I could... you get the idea

Suffice to say that I survived that (well duh) and was sent to the 24 hour mental health center nearby

They helped me get my shit together enough to not try anything drastic again and trippled my dose of anti depressants just to be sure

Since my mental health was (and let's be real STILL IS) extremely unstable, they scheduled me for several group activities to help me keep my mind off things, socialize, and reduce the risk of me hurting myself

About 2 months later I finally found out what was wrong with my bowels. Turns out one of the stool tests gave me a false negative and I had to take one of those horse dewormers from the pandemic. Lol lmao this could have been avoided with barely 60 reais (less than 10 bucks for you americans)

But well I was already most of the way through my savings, had already attempted suicide, and was spending 4 days a week at the mental health center

Aaaand that's pretty much how the situation continued. I still spend most of my days there, I still have lapses, and I still can't bring myself to fucking write

And honestly it's fucking despair inducing to say that. That I've been taking care of myself for over half a year only to still feel like I'm not getting anywhere

But fuck it I'm actually trying to heal here. And I know it's gonna take a fucking while, but I want to keep trying here

Unfortunately my savings have now run out and I'm now officially flat broke, which is why I decided to relaunch my kofi

So yeah it's been a whole year since I won the lottery and now I'm back to asking people for money on the internet, because life doesn't give a shit and my mental health is trash

And I'll be real with you, I know most people who reblog this are broke as shit too, and god knows tumblr is the most mentally unwell website on the planet

So like if you can't help, I fucking get you. I'm not trying to guilt anyone or make this a sob story so y'all will give me pity bucks

I just think that if I'm gonna do this whole song and dance of promoting my kofi

The least I can do is offer y'all some honesty as to why I'm doing this and how I got here in the first place

Anyways my kofi is my pinned post, drop some change there if you want

[unclefungusthegoat]

.

[fisheito]

Me: Everything i make is garbage i shouldn't even bother

The eiden in my head:

Me: Sorry eiden you're right my efforts have value

[trustworthycinnamon]

howdy Dirk Nation how are we feeling about splinter parallels

[a-scary-lack-of-common-sense]

I am exhausted, good heavens.

[sysig]

Moving out of concept art and into what’s Actually Done! Showcased here are a couple expressions for both pets so far with their dialogue balloons - mostly pulled from NPC references, but I did get a screenshot of my pet in-game using it in reply, not just in Kinzchat! So cute <3

They’re both introducing themselves here with the names I’ve given them, but I really wanted the process to be as Webkinz-like as possible, with a few extras :)

Which started with being able to pick pet pronouns! Thinking about it now, Webkinz doesn’t ask for player pronouns, does it? :0 But I wanted that to be an option too! It was...something of a process to go from one set of adjustable pronouns to three, especially as I haven’t played with any Ghosts that give you the option to assign both the character(s)’ and player’s pronouns! I had to give it a fair bit of thought of what to check against and how to not have them interfere with or overwrite each other (which did happen early on lol), but I got it! Only took a couple hours of frustrated-sleepily hammering away haha

These screenshots were taken pretty much back-to-back - the only thing changed here is what shell is being used, and shell-checking has come in soooo clutch here ahh, thank goodness ♥ Many and big thank-yous again to @cherryistired​​ for helping me troubleshoot menu shell-switching! Exactly what I needed, am very grateful :D

My original concept sketch of this process was perhaps a little overconfident in what I could accomplish for my first time playing in code lol; I have seen custom pronoun-setting though! And I think I probably could do that, but multiple pronouns... Again, I think I could, but... The name of the game was limiting my scope (lol) to see how many Different things I could implement in short order, so I’ll gladly take my three sets of pronouns and pet names vs. player name and go haha

It’s also a bit funny to look back on this little Diamond - I really haven’t drawn her much! Kind of loosely following Webkinz’ style, her face looks especially silly I think haha

I’ve also got my main menu balloon looking rather fabulous imo ✨ Technically there’s two - More and Back - and most of the features are Very Much in the Coming Soon To A Ghost Near You phase lol, but they’re all {bracketed} up to be filled in as I get their assets made :D There’s still a few placeholder pieces here and there - especially since I haven’t gotten to inter-Ghost communication just yet. Everything in its own time!

I ended up having a lot-a lot of fun with naming and renaming, I went a little silly with Just How Many reactions the pets could have to their names haha

They’ll refuse to be named after any of the Hosts directly, and they’ll give you a side-eye if the name is Close To but not Quite a match haha

The mischievous expression has gotten an awful lot of use already! Although I’ll probably change the “Nu-uh!” expression to something else once I have an alternative that fits better - I need that gradient-to-mad expression set so bad!

And although they won’t accept NPC names, you can name yourself after a Host, and they’ll react! :D There really is so much flexibility for Easter Eggs like this ahh, it’s fun!

All told, I ended up playing the most in Bootend, Menu, Nameteach (hgh), and String, although I’m realizing now that maybe a lot of the stuff I put in String belongs in Word...? It’s all been OnFunctions anyhow, and it’s organized in a way that makes sense to me but is perhaps not as intended lol - nothing says I can’t go back in and move some stuff around, as long as it continues to function properly haha. I’ve kept my error log neat and tidy!! As many times as I’ve broken something, I’ve fixed it thereafter! :D It’s a very satisfying process ♪

[pilonciillo]

lol didn’t think someone giving money would give me anxiety

[thegreatyin]

to put a long story short: at the end of ffxiv's base game, literally Directly before the beginning of its first expansion (heavensward), there is a series of quests and story arcs that eventually snowball into an hour-long cutscene in which the entire thing comes to a head in the literal worst way possible. like, "the hero's plans all go horribly wrong and several major characters die onscreen, with others going missing (presumed dead), eventually culminating in the player character being framed for the murder of the leader of a nation-state and being Literally Forced To Flee The Country" wrong.

heavensward leads directly on from this plotline. you arrive at the major location of the expansion in the midst of seeking asylum whilst being a wanted criminal everywhere else in the world right now. it's like. A Whole Thing. the game makes such a big deal out of it all. the fandom does as well. and for good reason!! it's a really good moment!!!!!!

and then roughly 1/3rds of the way into heavensward you find out that literally none of it mattered. nobody important actually died, no changes were actually made to the status quo, and nothing comes of being literally kicked out of the country for (what is implied to be) several in-universe weeks, if not months. None Of It Mattered. None.

TLDR; the bloody banquet is a major, exciting, and very infamous twist that seems like it's going to segway into a MAJOR upheaval of the status quo and some really intriguing ramifications for the story as a whole... and then heavensward does away with literally all of that and practically writes the entire thing off as a waste of time.

you may be able to see why i'm so salty about it.

[gravesung-moving]

feeling a little bit weird and lonely tonight @_@ catch me on disco if u need me! ✌🏼

[selfinflictedgunshotwound]

sorry for only saying this type of shit lately but i kinda wanna drive a car straight into a brick wall at the highest speed possible

[princessmyriad]

.

[growling]

there is so much rage and hatred in my heart I don't think I'll make it out of this one chat

[edge-oftheworld]

when I was in high school there was a tendency whenever there was an attractive boy to simply fan over him. in a way that talked over everything he might say for himself and created a narrative that completely ignored, the fact in some cases, that he was really struggling—or if he was struggling, to pin all the blame on the girl he’s dating and completely ignore the thousands of other factors (no it can’t be mental illness or unaccommodated disability or systemic abuse or exploitation and if he is in an abusive relationship we won’t ever consider the factors that put him at risk for that)

and I’m not saying this fandom is like that. I get the need for privacy around some things and how in public conversations sometimes it’s a lot more respectful to stick to the positives (everyone who does that, I admire you) or even the struggles that are talked about publicly, show respect by not reading too far into them. there’s a time and place for that. but sometimes I feel like our only options are shitty and ableist gossip or totally ignoring the systemic and structural issues we know exist in something like the music industry until someone dies and then we’re looking for someone to blame. friends, there is a point where the respectful thing is to listen to what someone says and come together to make things better. and you can learn how to have that conversation respectfully. please do