FA+
Shop
Levelling Up with Lucca / A Better Birdy
3 years ago
Hamha!
Things are progressing well for Lucca and I. There is still much to do, but we have more than enough time to do it.
The most notable part of having Lucca in my life is how he is so able to be open and honest without ever coming off like I am a burden. This is something I am not used to. I am used to having critiques that later resurface as a means to remind me of how flawed I am. Lucca is different. He may get annoyed by some of my less desirable quirks / blindisms, but is very quick in sharing with me how it is just a part of our relationship moving positively forward.
Yesterday was a particularly eventful day for our relationship. Lucca had taken a call where the individual was quite rude and condescending. This call ended fairly quickly with my beloved leo lover proclaiming, “I deserve to be treated better than that individual treated me! I will not accept being treated like a lesser person by anyone.”.
The above is a paraphrase, but it hit me like a coconut to the head. I realized that, for so many years, I have allowed people to treat me like a lesser person. I’ve allowed myself to accept that getting things done requires my nonstop calling, e-mailing, and waiting for outcomes that may never come at all.
As this all sunk in, I began to overthink on so much that has transpired over the past 10 years. How I’ve spent so much time bending over backwards in order to get what someone without my particular disability takes for granted.
Thanks to this self revelation, I asked Lucca if he would join me on my forthcoming call with my therapist this coming Thursday. I never realized how long I’ve allowed myself to be stuck on a plateau that was far more toxic to my mental health until Lucca made me aware through his statement. I now desire to build upon this revelation to improve upon the following…
1: Feeling a need to explain everything I do. (I lose so much time and energy from a terrible need to justify what I do and why I do it. This is making me lose out on time I could be writing stories, talking with friends, loving Lucca, etc. I simply must curtail this toxic habit. Especially as it can be annoying to anyone who, like all my close friends, do not require an explanation for every action I take. This insecurity must go.).
2: Not asking for help. (I have become so used to doing things for myself that I am now very stubborn when it comes to openly asking for aid that would save me time and frustration while also being respectful to those, like Lucca, who do ‘not’ judge me for needing assistance for those things that my blindness makes more difficult. Even if it is just finding a can of soda, locating an item I dropped on the floor, etc. I need to know that asking for ‘sighted assistance’ is not making me appear as less of a person.).
3: Allowing others to do things for me. (Going 100% blind has made me, for lack of better words, ‘sloppy’ when it comes to many daily activities. This includes cooking, eating, and cleaning up after a meal. I’ve really allowed myself to fear people treating me like a helpless infant when, in all honesty, there is no shame in someone providing assistance for such things that I just cannot reliably do without making a mess / additional work for others that could be easily be avoided if I just allowed someone else to do it in the first place.).
4: Self destructing to meet goals and standards that are not reasonable for me to complete given my physical limitation. (So much of the stress I put myself through is self-imposed. I have wanted to ‘fit in’ and ‘have relevance’ for so long that I have failed to realize just how much I need to just ‘be the best ducky I can be’. This lifelong desire to achieve unrealistic standards has been a major bane on my mental health. It has also made a lot of the previously mentioned points as bothersome to me as much as they are to those around me to become exponentially frustrating with each passing year I continue to set myself up for failure by living up to what I, for reasons that are beyond my control, are just not realistically possible.).
I look forward to introducing and exploring my new OC, ‘Celest Nuthatch’, as I further remove ,myself from feeling like a lesser person. Lucca is the best boyfriend I could have ever asked for and I love him for his patience in getting me to become a better birdy.
Your Pal:
---Yosh E. O'Ducky ;)
Things are progressing well for Lucca and I. There is still much to do, but we have more than enough time to do it.
The most notable part of having Lucca in my life is how he is so able to be open and honest without ever coming off like I am a burden. This is something I am not used to. I am used to having critiques that later resurface as a means to remind me of how flawed I am. Lucca is different. He may get annoyed by some of my less desirable quirks / blindisms, but is very quick in sharing with me how it is just a part of our relationship moving positively forward.
Yesterday was a particularly eventful day for our relationship. Lucca had taken a call where the individual was quite rude and condescending. This call ended fairly quickly with my beloved leo lover proclaiming, “I deserve to be treated better than that individual treated me! I will not accept being treated like a lesser person by anyone.”.
The above is a paraphrase, but it hit me like a coconut to the head. I realized that, for so many years, I have allowed people to treat me like a lesser person. I’ve allowed myself to accept that getting things done requires my nonstop calling, e-mailing, and waiting for outcomes that may never come at all.
As this all sunk in, I began to overthink on so much that has transpired over the past 10 years. How I’ve spent so much time bending over backwards in order to get what someone without my particular disability takes for granted.
Thanks to this self revelation, I asked Lucca if he would join me on my forthcoming call with my therapist this coming Thursday. I never realized how long I’ve allowed myself to be stuck on a plateau that was far more toxic to my mental health until Lucca made me aware through his statement. I now desire to build upon this revelation to improve upon the following…
1: Feeling a need to explain everything I do. (I lose so much time and energy from a terrible need to justify what I do and why I do it. This is making me lose out on time I could be writing stories, talking with friends, loving Lucca, etc. I simply must curtail this toxic habit. Especially as it can be annoying to anyone who, like all my close friends, do not require an explanation for every action I take. This insecurity must go.).
2: Not asking for help. (I have become so used to doing things for myself that I am now very stubborn when it comes to openly asking for aid that would save me time and frustration while also being respectful to those, like Lucca, who do ‘not’ judge me for needing assistance for those things that my blindness makes more difficult. Even if it is just finding a can of soda, locating an item I dropped on the floor, etc. I need to know that asking for ‘sighted assistance’ is not making me appear as less of a person.).
3: Allowing others to do things for me. (Going 100% blind has made me, for lack of better words, ‘sloppy’ when it comes to many daily activities. This includes cooking, eating, and cleaning up after a meal. I’ve really allowed myself to fear people treating me like a helpless infant when, in all honesty, there is no shame in someone providing assistance for such things that I just cannot reliably do without making a mess / additional work for others that could be easily be avoided if I just allowed someone else to do it in the first place.).
4: Self destructing to meet goals and standards that are not reasonable for me to complete given my physical limitation. (So much of the stress I put myself through is self-imposed. I have wanted to ‘fit in’ and ‘have relevance’ for so long that I have failed to realize just how much I need to just ‘be the best ducky I can be’. This lifelong desire to achieve unrealistic standards has been a major bane on my mental health. It has also made a lot of the previously mentioned points as bothersome to me as much as they are to those around me to become exponentially frustrating with each passing year I continue to set myself up for failure by living up to what I, for reasons that are beyond my control, are just not realistically possible.).
I look forward to introducing and exploring my new OC, ‘Celest Nuthatch’, as I further remove ,myself from feeling like a lesser person. Lucca is the best boyfriend I could have ever asked for and I love him for his patience in getting me to become a better birdy.
Your Pal:
---Yosh E. O'Ducky ;)
I hope you and Griff are still doing most poggers. I also hope to be able to get myself back together in a way that will allow us to talk more and, in the near future, meet again with Saphy, wayward, and our other pals from 'BronyCon' and beyond. :)
I hope we can travle to the US soon! We for sure want to try to go to anthrocon sometime. But with covid we need to be careful and keep an eye :)
Also you have reminded me that it's good to remember that someone can be annoyed at someone else-- and it's no the end of the world. No one is gonna agree on every single little thing!
Onward and upward!
***
It has been tricky getting used to letting 'Papa Lucca' do more things for me. He doesn't do anything to put me down nor feel worthless. However, I still put myself down for how I 'should' be doing more despite there not being proper tools to do so given my lack of physical eyesight.
***
May we keep growing, learning, and serving as positive change agents for a better tomorrow.
This sort of thing ties into that whole "bootstraps" argument. There are situations where people simply MUST ask for help if they want to succeed, but this mindset is so pervasive that it seems like people would rather fail on their own rather than "succeed with help."
Moreover, this mindset is infectious. Onlookers don't want to feel like they're parasites. They don't want to feel "weak for wanting to ask for help." All this I believe is purpose built to create a society where only a certain type of person is encouraged. One who is self sufficient, doesn't complain, doesn't think about their situation, and doesn't support others who are also struggling.
If you share how happy / excited you are it is socially perceived that you are being 'self-centered', 'egocentric', etc. The flipside is how sharing life challenges / traumas is 'weakness', 'attention seeking', etc.
While being too happy is more of a shot against allowing you to feel proud of something that brings you delight, being depressed is often viewed as something that 'someone has it worse than you' along with the stupid 'bootstraps' lecture. Toss in how getting any sort of in-person help to cope with life's difficulties is as hard as getting Dental Insurance and, well, Anxiety & Depression quickly are allowed to fester while fear of 'shame' and 'negative outside judgment' slowly destroy what little bit of genuine self-worth is left. What remains is a husk of a human-being that harms themselves and/or others. It is only at this time that society shows interest as blame is assigned to anyone and everything except for the broken system that prevents modern society from being all that we claim it is supposed to be.
If I'm 100% honest you make me feel that I need some of that stuff in my life too, making me feel a bit jealous and in some sense also "a failure" for not being able to reach that still. But well, one of the worst things on me is how I constantly compare myself with others, making myself feeling easily miserable... I'm working on that, I promise...
***
Right now, I am 42 years old. This is pretty old for someone in the furry community. I know there are other middle-aged people in our community, but I do know of people who leave the community upon reaching a stage in their life that they feel ready to move on to something else.
I share this to help illustrate how success comes through building self-esteem, a support system of friends, and knowing you have something very valuable to give to others through your special talents.
Special talents are often things we do not believe are all that special about ourselves. We each feel what we do could be done by everyone else. The worst part is how this type of thinking then results in you believing other people do what you do better than you ever could.
It takes a lot of time and a very specific set of events to be able to realize that only you can do what you do. That you only have yourself to rank against when it comes to doing that in which you love to do.
***
The reason I, along with other people, follow your work, comment on your work, and share your work is a direct result of how you do what thousands of other artists cannot do. We follow you because only you can make content that makes people, like me, feel what we need to be happy and inspired.
Have a most quacktacular day!
And have a great day to ^^