#i'm in the process of getting it out of my system

[cheerfulmelancholies]

Honestly—to me, at least—anger is often the start of me processing things. If I'm angry and I let myself feel it, it means I won't just compartmentalize it so it can boil over later. If I let it fester, it will only get worse. Allowing myself to feel anger in the now lets me get it out of my system and then I can start looking at why I'm so upset and begin working on that. I don't really know how to explain this better, but think of it like the stages of grief. You have to go through each one before you can move on. For me to process my trauma/stress/etc I usually have to work through the anger first before I can make any progress.

It’s not talked about enough that you are allowed to be angry.

It doesn’t mean you aren’t healing. It doesn’t mean you’re failing. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.

You are allowed to be angry at whoever hurt you. Your anger is a valid and real feeling. 

While it's important to be careful how we handle that anger, the feeling itself is completely valid. Anger doesn't have to be destructive and in some cases, can be used constructively.

You're allowed to feel how you feel.

[persepaien]

Hello would you like a lot of Katie McGrath for the price of less Katie McGrath? Of course. But let me sell it to you anyway:

I've been having a miserable year and I'm about to have to refinance my credit card bill, which goes at about a 300% yearly interest rate.

Last year, right after one of my cats had passed from FeLV-related complications, another one of my cats was diagnosed with cancer and after a lengthy battle had to be euthanised in January. A couple months later my grandmother, who raised me for half my life, caught dengue fever during one of the worst epidemics in recent history in Brazil, and passed away after a coma. I caught it myself a week after her funeral, a particularly nasty hemorrhagic strain that minced my immune system. I caught covid, for the first time ever, right after. I had barely began to recover physically a couple months ago and my check-up returned 2nd degree AV blocks in my ECG, which I need to follow up with a specialist, and I've got RSI in my dominant wrist and a significant loss of cervical lordosis, which has been causing me migraines, pain and numbness and I need physiotherapy for. And then, last month, my 14 year old dog was also diagnosed with terminal cancer and is in palliative care.

Physical and psychological exhaustion snowballed, it's been really hard to work, then it got harder with generative AI, and I've been drowning in vet bills, doctors, labs, meds bills.

Fortunately (¿) my currency is devalued 5:1 to the dollar, 7:1 to the pound, and 6:1 to the euro, so if just 15 people up there buy this bundle it will be enough to save me from financial ruin this year.

So if you can't afford it, please reblog so it finds those who can.

This is nearly every art of Katie McGrath I've done since 2012, a couple which aren't posted and you'll only find here, variations also exclusive to this bundle, sketches, linearts, old versions, pretty much everything I got.

Available on Gumroad and Ko-fi.

Check out some of the included art here.

And if you're wondering who the everloving even is that, I've got other art you might like, or if you just wanna throw some change my way you can tip me on Ko-fi.

Like the Katie bundle, these art bundles come with high-res files you can print as you wish, plus everything else I have of them, sketches, process gifs, WIPs, unpublished, exclusive variations, old versions.

I try to give you the best bang for your buck :]

You can also get physical prints directly from inprnt.

◎ Site ◎ Linktree ◎ Gumroad ◎ Ko-fi ◎ INPRNT

Here's some more art you'll find on my stores, and thank you for reblogging! 🫀🗡️

[drdemonprince]

i'd like to say sth abt the x gender marker thing. i've just started getting the paperwork done for it myself, and although its an exhausting grueling bureaucratic pricess, it's filling me w the kind of joy i last felt when i got my first hrt prescription. i know i will have constant difficulties in a system of institutions that have no official way of dealing w nonbinary identities, and i fully expect the openly white nationalist party in my country to become a significant influence in national government within the next 10 years. i also have an escape plan of sorts, but i'm fully expecting that i may be legally detransitioned again. i would still be betraying myself fundamentally and stealing joy from myself, something that i get to have very little of, if i didn't do it anyway, bc i already cannot access plenty of services including healthcare bc i'm simply too dysphoric and institutionally traumatized to show up and be misgendered. there is no such thing as stealth or passing for a nonbinary person in the society i live in, only erasure; i might as well exercise this tiny amount of power i have been given for a brief time to force them to acknowledge me as who i am. i agree that having one's gender be irrelevant to one's personhood, including legally, would be vastly preferable, but i don't see how me getting an x in my id detracts from or otherwise influences that. my government already has plenty of ways of getting lists of trans ppl if they ever want one. i may be painting a target on my back, but as far as i am concerned, it is already there bc i am already incredibly vulnerable and restricted as a trans person for whom passing or stealth is not an option. i might as well get marginalized for who and what i am and make them look me in the eye at a doctor's office while they awkwardly tell me they don't have the infrastructure to process me as a patient than cringe and stammer while i tell them that actually i'm transgender and i would prefer for them to address me as this or that while knowing damn well they just see me as a quirky woman that they may or may not humor for hashtag diversity's sake. they may still do that ofc, but for all the risks and trouble i am incurring, it also corrects the scales of institutional power just a tiny bit in my favor by giving me legal grounds to argue. i'm also terrified of the police for good reasons, but i'm more terrified of them as a misgendered and scared but not out trans person unsure if and how much to advocate for myself than i am as someone confident enough to at least get hurt for who i am, rather than for who i am not and hiding out of fear of worse punishment. i am not advocating for anyone else to do or not do the same bc it is a subjective and highly varied set of risks and rewards that must be personally evaluated, and above all i'm very aware that as a white (not us) person, for all the institutional violence i have previously endured, i would be risking far worse if i were not, but as far as i am concerned, it feels like one of the best, most powerful things i can do for myself right now is to get the damn papers even if in the worst case they end up taking them away from me again.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I remember that when I was nonbinary and not medically transitioning, I felt much the same way. I was ready to really throw myself on the pyre for the sake of just actually being seen as not the gender I had been forced to be, for once. And honestly? Nothing short of medical transition did that. All the changes to my personal style, hair, comportment, voice training, the pronoun pins, the asserting myself, the putting pronouns in my email signature, the changing my medical forms and documentation at work to make me nonbinary, none of it made what felt like any lick of difference in how i was treated, because nonbinary identities are so thoroughly erased. The ONLY thing that got people to start treating me as gender ambiguous or to they/them me was to begin to transition as a trans man and use he/him pronouns, lol. (And eventually, most people did switch over to actually gendering me correctly as a guy, tho I still do get the they/them once in a while which annoys me and it's always VERY telling who tends to do it).

I don't know your situation or if you have medically transitioned in any fashion or not, or if you even want to, and our stories are different, but all of which is to say, I know how immensely frustrating it is and how confining it is to interpreted as your assigned gender seemingly no matter what you fucking do, and that sensation of being willing to take on serious risk to be seen. if anything that was part of what tipped me over into self conceptualizing as a gender nonconforming man rather than outside the binary altogether. different risks that i chose to take on, but still, the decision to take on risk rather than be locked away inside how people saw me.

I think structural nonbinary erasure runs so deep that very few individual level actions can make a dent in it and it's maddening. Of course there's all the intersections with transmisogyny that also impact who is visible as trans and who is not and who finds themselves yearning for greater visibility and those for whom visibility is nothing but massive vulnerability that itself cannot be escaped. But I understand that you've considered everything carefully and are aware of the risks in what you're taking on, and I hope that it does mean you don't feel that confined unseen feeling anymore. Because as much as I'm qualifying things I do know how fucking awful that sensation is and how few avenues there are for doing a damn thing about it that people will take seriously.

[ursoftluminary]

This is sorta how I'm feeling, too. I've seen a lot of relatable posts about systemhood, especially the more positive and uplifting ones (which helped me cope with having found out about our systemhood) to be made by endos. It's scary to know I might get jumped for reposting something.

I hate discourse. I'm tired and I've been in the worse denial ever. I've withdrawn from almost everyone I know and stopped leaving my damn house. I feel completely out of control and - more than anything - I'm tired. I'm just tired and I really don't know what to do with such a huge development, so being caught in the middle of a war between what's valid and not makes me want to turn my back to the whole world- to throw my system in the can and dive as deep into denial as I can possibly go.

Endos are just so much more welcoming. Lately, I've had the thought process- what if I'm wrong? Oh, well, it's more complicated than that. There's no shame in enjoying my headmates company, even if it's more complicated than I know. It simplifies it. It cuts the cord. I don't have to worry about right or wrong. I can still love my in system headmates. I can still love my in system friends. I can still appreciate them. There's no pressure, no *competition* almost, to be valid enough. I can just be and... Well, after my whole life and all my experiences, that's all I really ever wanted.

So yeah, I agree with them! ^^ Thanks, endos, for calming my anxious ass down. It's a shame that a community that's been so wounded by hate (traumagenic systems) would continue to spread it. We aren't so different. It would be nice if people could come together more often.

I think a big part of the reason that I went from anti-endo to endo-safe was absolutely due to how starkly different the communities felt.

Anti-endo communities were hard to engage with. Sure, some of them would focus on their support for each other more than their hatred of endogenic systems. And that's great! However, when you are brought together by your dislike of a certain group, you can't help but feel the hate permiate into so much of it. It always happened eventually. Anti-endo communities had such a focus on systems who were "fake" that I couldn't help but worry I was one of them, no matter how much they told me it was "just endos" they were concerned about.

The endo community (at least the parts I've engaged with and were easy to find) were so kind and respected me as a system, no matter how I felt or my plurality presented. Simply knowing we could find joy in our plurality allowed us to strive for so much more than we had thought possible before.

As a traumagenic system, we've improved so much with our symptoms and communication as a result of the positivity and acceptance we recieved. When we joined communities where we could be authenticallly ourselves (no matter what), we came together and faced so much less conflict between each other. And the conficts we did have, we realized that we could solve them together rather than alone.

When you are constantly doubting if you are "actually a system", you start to push the others away, and that made our dissociation and amnesia so much worse. I understand being careful of self-misdiangnosis, it can put you on the wrong path for how you learn to manage your symptoms. At the same time, the sentiment I often heard from endogenic systems when I was struggling with doubt and denial was very simple: "So what if you're not a system?" In short, it was okay to be wrong.

And that was huge for me. I realized that, no matter if I was a system or not, the techniques I used to improve ourselves and communicate with one another beneficial to me. At the end of the day, even if I wasn't a system after all, the skills I had found we invaluble to my health and well-being. So when I fall into denial spirals, no matter what I think about myself, I now know that I don't need to deprive myself of what has helped me, even if it is a "system thing." I don't feel scared to use these skills anymore (even in denial spirals), beacuse the line between what systems and non-systems or singlets can/can't do suddenly wasn't a big deal or a battle of "who can do what."

Our plurality is no longer a burden or a scar to us. It is simply who we are. We've learned so much about each other and ourselves since we've been accepted in full, and since we've learned to accept others. Endogenic communities have helped us (a traumagenic system) probably more than they'll ever know, and we're forever grateful for that.

So thank you, endogenic systems.

[holder-culture-is]

Newly diagnosed trauma holder culture and recently only learning you have a system and not knowing what all these terms mean after years of everything being thrown at the wall to see what stuck with doctors. What is an Endo? Why is Traumagenic (me or us) a term? Are diction alters real or not? And why can't I know my alters the way others seem to define them as separate people? I'm all blurry all the time. It's so overwhelming learning all this stuff. Is it a bad thing to still mostly use singular pronouns when referring to ourselves even though I've been told there are about 12 distinct personalities? Is 12 a lot? It feels like a lot. What about the fear of being called a chronic liar? Am I bsing if I only just came to a name for my system?

(Can I be called 🦌🦇 sys anon?)

Woah okay ‼️ you’ve probably found answers to this by now cause this has been sitting in the inbox so long, but let’s take it one step at a time ^^

What is an Endo?: Endogenic systems (or endos for short!) are systems that claim to be formed by something other than trauma . Many traumagens don’t believe in endo systems, including us, but I don’t wanna tell you what to believe ‼️ do your own research on endo systems and plurality (cause I think there’s a difference ?? Idk‼️)

Why is Traumagenic a term?: has a lot to do with those that claim to be endos being more common‼️ it was created as a way to differentiate , but if you (like us) don’t believe in endos, there’s really no reason to use it . You still can , though ‼️ not here to police you ^^

Are [f]iction alters real or not?: I’m 90% sure you meant fiction and not diction , so I’ll go with this one . What you’re talking about are fictional introjects , also called fictives or fictites ‼️ And in that case, yes ‼️ They are real :3 introjection is a normal human process, but with the compartmentalization that CDDs cause , it takes that to the extreme with introjects ‼️ Fictives specifically can form if the media is a major player in a system’s life , and the brain believes an alter with the traits of a certain character could help the specific situation ^^

Why can’t I know my alters the way others seem to define them as separate people?: For starters, recognizing alters as alters instead of fully separate people is actually really good for healing ‼️ (NOTE: if you see your alters as separate people, that’s not inherently a bad thing ‼️ the fact is though , they aren’t . I’m not going to tell you what terms to use for your system , and you’re within your right to refer to alters as different people ‼️ I’m just stating a fact :>) and about knowing your alters , that comes with time . We’re still trying to figure out all of us ^^

Is it a bad thing to refer to ourselves with singular pronouns?: No ‼️ that’s your choice , and whatever makes you most comfortable is the correct option :> we use plural pronouns because that’s more comfortable , but using singular is just as valid ^^

Is 12 a lot?: That really depends ^^ your brain needed 12 separate alters to survive your trauma , so by that logic it’s not ‼️ and even if it was , that’s not a bad thing ^w^ take your time with your system :3

What about the fear of being called a chronic liar?: Denial is a huge part of CDDs ‼️ they’re meant to be covert, so discovering them is usually very difficult . And remember , you and your psychologists a know your experiences the best . Listen to your doctors , and evaluate your own experiences . If you aren’t a system , there’s no shame ‼️

Am I bsing if I only just came to a name for my system? Nope ‼️ you aren’t even required to have a system name , it’s just something a lot of us do :3 and if you mean just figuring out your experiences had a name , you wouldn’t be in that case either ^^ Either way , you aren’t bsing anon :3

Whew, this was a long one ‼️ hope you’re doing better now , anon ! Ik this took a while to get to :<

[lunarwednesday]

‘Again and again, you hid it behind a smile’

[feralforbeanix]

Man I love subtle characterization and representation

[silverquillsideas]

in between dreams and memories,

there lies a yearning so violent —

it chokes you.

The On1y One / Mou Mou (2024)

[bananonbinary]

as a certified Diagnosed Autist(TM) i cannot stress enough that i am not only pro- self-diagnosis, but also pretty anti- legal medical diagnosis. it is, at best, a cruel hoop we have to jump through so privileged people will deign to give us what we need. don't fucking do that shit unless you have to, it was disgustingly expensive, fucking humiliating, infantilizing, and dehumanizing, and would probably actively cause problems in my life if i didn't have some really good allistic (-passing) people in my corner and also wasn't so fucking disabled that it mostly doesn't matter.

literally get that diagnosis if you need it for job/school accessibility shit or SSI or whatever, and otherwise dont tell the government SHIT about yourself. there is zero good reason for them to want that information. that's between you and the people you want in your life.

[ruvviks]

finally got around making a proper outfit reference sheet for nathan! he likes wearing dark clothes which really emphasizes just how pale he is. he was a STEM developer at MOBIUS for nine years what did you expect </3 click for higher resolution and to get a closer look at all the details! outfits from left to right: his gear for the evil within 2, 1am convenience store trip, his mobius gear, and an improvised outfit for my own fictional the evil within 3 =^)

taglist (opt in/out)

@shellibisshe, @florbelles, @ncytiri, @hibernationsuit, @stars-of-the-heart;

@lestatlioncunt, @katsigian, @radioactiveshitstorm, @estevnys, @adelaidedrubman;

@celticwoman, @rindemption, @carlosoliveiraa, @noirapocalypto, @dickytwister;

@killerspinal, @euryalex, @ri-a-rose, @velocitic, @thedeadthree;

@jacobseed, @swordcoasts

[sylhorn]

I’m kind of baffled about the state of dawntrail discussions having two parties in regards to Living Memory, one being “shutting it down is amoral” and the other being “it’s moral and not at all like what Emet-Selch wanted to do with us”. It’s like a lot of people refuse to engage with the narrative from any other perspective other than their own when the game essentially hits you over the head with the message.

Yes, the existence of Living Memory is unsutainable and amoral and, frankly, pointless – you can make the very valid argument that the people there were just AI chatbots trained on the memories of a given individual, leeching off of the souls of others, their existence demanding the genocide of the entire universe in the end. I agree, in our eyes, Living Memory is an affront to life, sure!

Nobody seems to talk about that this is the exact same perspective Emet-Selch had about us, or when mentioned, people say that it isn’t the same. It is? He very explicitly tells us that the people living on the shards today are pale imitations to what he considered to be life, and thus shutting it down and trying to undo his mistake IS the solution (he is very much like Solas from DA in this regard), because in his eyes there’s nothing to lose but everything to gain. Emet-Selch saw us in the same light we see the people of Living Memory, and the game is painfully unsubtle in drawing this parallel. Even with the differences (we are not recreated memories but actual souls being reborn from the aetherial sea, etc-etc), the game WANTS you to make this connection between Emet and what we do. It is quite literally the point!

Yes, Living Memory has to be shut down because its biggest drawback is that it’s unsustainable and would continue to destroy what we deem to be lives. It is also arguably an affront to what we consider life and its natural end (directly opposing the message of Endwalker). The Endless aren’t even too hung up about this shutdown, bar Sphene. Shutting down Living Memory is necessary.

But you can’t say it was morally good and unquestionable if you can’t give Emet’s views the same grace. In the end, both his plans (and the Ascians at large, frankly) and Living Memory had to be stopped because that means survival for us, but to divorce the two narratives to maintain the WoL and co.’s moral superiority is disingenuous and does the story a disservice.

[fisheito]

snakes have something called a jacobson's organ that allows them to smell. they stick out their tongue, and then when it enters their mouth again, the jacobson's organ processes what they just smelled with their tongue. i say this to propose that, after yakumo licks eiden's dick for a good 10 minutes, he closes his mouth and processes it all like O_____O

when i TELL YOU that this message left me bracing the wall like

(overwhelmed with positive affect)

[icewindandboringhorror]

"We can get through this by working together, reach out to your friends, community is all we have, a social network will be your security in the world, now is the time to lean on others!"

I do agree, and it's scientifically sound (pretty sure there is data about how people with better social networks live longer and etc) but also....augh..... what about the severe social issues, difficulty to leave the house, physical issues which lead to like zero socialization energy a majority of the time, etc. etc. Social support can be a replacement for structural support, but.. I guess I just wish it didn't have to be. Community is extremely difficult to build, even moreso if you're someone who has issues with social cues or group conversations or even just being around others in the first place. And blah, nuance, of course I'm just complaining or maybe being too negative or maybe misunderstanding, but, I hardly have the energy to brush my hair once every 2 months.. how am I supposed to maintain a wide social network and be active in a Community and Join Groups lol... sometimes it kind of feels like "er.. well if thats my only option then...... ruh roh". It's overwhelming

[captainhysunstuff]

A reactionary comic about rereading a fic that I recently recommended that was way darker than I remembered, lol. I still love it for how they pretty much drive each other crazy, but that word choice and the consent issues... *cringes* At least there are valid warnings beforehand, and the first fic was pretty PG. Sorry. *laughs sheepishly*

[fiyr-cap]

it's a difference of taste, there is no right or wrong way to write. Just because I don't like it and don't understand it doesn't mean it's wrong or bad. I am chanting this to myself like a prayer as I write my feedback

[brown-little-robin]

AUGH