#a bunch of personal mumbo jumbo cuz hey its been a little while

[penname-artist]

I went through my own personal memory lane today.

As far as I know, you can't get to them anymore, now that my old DeviantArt is deactivated and destroyed, but I dug through the physical drawings I'd posted to that site from 2015 through to 2022 or so.

About half of them are ponies (I was a brony freak, man, don't ask), and the rest where all kinds of things. Original projects, characters, doodles, animals, zentangles, fan works of other materials.

A few things I forgot I'd kept. One I didn't have the heart to look at. The roads of memories have two sides: the nostalgic, and the haunting.

And yet despite that, I'm again faced with this really weird sort of look-back. For probably the first time in my life, I feel entirely disconnected from this era. It seems so far away now. Even though it hasn't been that many years, it's still been so many seasons. So many parts. So many chapters of my life that have gone past this time capsule of colored history.

The things that happened then, they changed me. CoVid was, of course, one facet of the insanity. 2020 was not kind to any of us. But for me, that time struck me for a very different reason. A much more personal reason, that I'm continuing to uncover parts of in therapy today.

None of us are perfect people. None of us have clean slates. We've all done things poorly, embarrassingly, wrongly, and with guilt or shame that it was not just. That doesn't justify the bad, but it does help us forgive ourselves, when we know we're not the only people that screwed up.

I left my previous account, and my old name, for a personal reason. A reason relating to identity, to everything I was and everything I wanted to become, that had been shattered by the reality of what I was doing. What I was causing, who I was hurting.

From each small step I'd taken since that moment in time that the door had been shut, I began to disconnect from it. I cut my hair. I changed my name. I dived further into another fandom. I got a tattoo. I broke off a toxic relationship. And then several more, down the line. I worked on myself. I explored the mental health world, found a therapist and a medication setup that works for now. Made peace with the mistakes I'd made. Moved forward, however slowly.

Now, in just a few months I'll be passing the four year benchmark of when it happened. And I feel as though I don't know the girl I remember, sitting at her desk staring blankly at a note she didn't expect. The beginning of a long, long line of mistakes and problems and struggles and pain. I still remember her, but I don't know her. I was her. But I'm not, now.

But I know that I used to be. And it used to all be different. And though it'll never go back to that time, it'll never come back to those days, they're still here, preserved in a piece of paper with every pencil stroke.

It's a funny feeling, nostalgia.