TL;DR at the bottom for those who don’t want to read a text wall. Just life updates!

Been a hot minute, hmm?

It probably goes without saying that a lot has happened in the last five years. I’ve hopped between three jobs, moved across the country right before the start of the pandemic, escaped a toxic relationship, changed houses three times, caught covid, stuck a ring on my canine partner-in-crime, and officially began my transition (which was probably easy to see coming for a lot of you). It’s a lot to unpack in a sentence, let alone a journal, but I’ve been saying for a while now that I wanted to put it to words. There’s just been a ton of volatility in the last decade of my life, and now that it seems to be settling into a relative sense of normalcy, I feel like I’m in a good enough place to more openly reflect on it all.

My first draft of this journal is something I decided to keep private, but even that took a while. It was fueled by a bitterly-concluded relationship that pulled my life across the country, and wound up reinforcing a lot of existing insecurities, reclusive tendencies, and unhealthy habits. While I want to open up about the entirety of what went on there, I also can’t ignore the fact that some of the things I want to say might provoke a reaction, either from them, or people who might want to retaliate on my behalf. I don’t want that. I’ve finally reached a point again where I feel like I can comfortably express myself without looming anxiety tempting me to silence. I’m not overwhelmed by unjustly accrued debt anymore, I’m not putting out drama-fires every other night or constantly spiraling in a cycle of personal neglect and burn out. The family and partners I have constantly love and encourage me; I’m not being gaslit on a regular basis by a person I thought I knew and looked up to. I’ve started going to therapy again, and I’m getting back into the swing of managing productivity and time on myself, though that’s not been without its challenges. While my current job has recently been taxing on my personal time, I’ve come to expect my industry is just the kind where long hours and stressful crunches every so often are just par for the course. That aside, I’m in a place where I feel like I can get back to casually engaging with the community again. I don’t want to jeopardize any of that just to air my dirty laundry in public.

So, yeah. I’m going to be purposefully vague in a few spots in my overview of what’s been going on. I don’t mind opening up to friends on the matter, but I’m not looking to start shit. I just want to move on with my life, and this journal is kind of my way of turning the page.

One other thing to clarify before I give a rundown of what I’ve been up to, it’s worth reminding something that I would frequently mention back in the day. I know I have not been great about keeping up with friends. I have a tendency to bite off more than I can chew with my time, and I over-estimate how much I can take on before I burn out and simply can’t engage. I have fairly unreliable memory, and I lose track of time easily, which makes it that much harder to follow-up with folks I promise to. My memory’s like a dart-board in terms of what sticks and what doesn’t. To compensate for all this, I have historically used notes and personal organization apps to help fill in the gaps with reminders and tools to help me follow through with plans, but the problem with that strategy is that it relies on constant maintenance. When that falls apart, so too does my ability to keep up with people. Those crises create a cycle of perpetual anxiety which exacerbates the difficulty of maintaining my relationships as it is, and the stress makes even less stick to memory as a consequence. I’ve had people time and time again presume my lack of initiation or attentive response is an indication of disinterest or indifference. It’s usually a sign my dumb shox brain got distracted by whatever hypnotic spirals were being swept in front of me at any given moment.

I’m not going to be upset if you prod to remind me about something. I don’t get annoyed when someone prompts me again for something I promised. It helps when folks give me patience and reminders to work around that personal short-coming. If there’s something that’s important to you that you believe I’ve forgotten, I promise I won’t be angry in the slightest if you bring it up again.

With all that out of the way, here’s a brief run-down of what’s been happening since the last time I posted a journal, back in 2018.

The Rundown

Back then, Leila and I were living together in the US mid-west, both working tech jobs for local companies. I was juggling a lot of stress with work along with the aforementioned toxic relationship, which had until that point been long-distance. Husky and I saved up for a while on the premise we would eventually move out to live out on the west coast together with this other individual, along with a few others, and while there were some indications at the time that making such a move wouldn’t be a wise decision, the biggest inhibitor was finances (and our jobs) preventing us from investing in it as an option. Around late 2019 however, I managed to land a position as a software developer for a well-known shopping/logistics company based out west, and that’s where the opportunity to move seemed to come at the perfect time. A former manager who joined with the org recommended me, and the offer they gave would cover the cost of moving most of our stuff. It seemed like an amazing opportunity, and we snagged it, with Leila accompanying me at the end of that year searching for a place for our new, intimate household to live together.

After we moved all our things across the country, to a fairly cozy and spacious home for rent, problems began to surface between multiple members of the household, and not the kind that were easily solved with a group chat —and there were plenty of those. Like I mentioned, I won’t go into detail about the interpersonal and financial issues that began to add up, but the circumstances lead to several violations of trust that only worsened as time went on. At the same time, I was working for a company infamous for shipping packages across the world, on a system underlaying their e-commerce platform, a couple months before the pandemic started…

I was working. A lot.

My social life ground to a complete stop. Unlike before, where I kind of pumped the brakes on being public to spend what personal time I had on friends and family, at this point, I was splitting my time between three things: burning the midnight oil to keep up with workload expectations, putting out the growing fires of drama going on at home, and squeezing what time was left into self-soothing, reclusive habits to offset the stress. I lost two grandparents during the pandemic as well, and the factors at home wound up driving me into depression, which completely fucked my ability to keep organized. It wasn’t until early 2021 that I left that hell-job, and instead joined on with a much smaller company through a good friend of mine in the furry community. While my time at that position was relatively short, I can’t emphasize enough how much it helped to have a lifeline out of the miserable position I was in. I’m grateful for the opportunity they afforded me by taking me on, and loved my time there while it lasted. If any of my former coworkers happen to be reading this, much love to you all!

With the worst source of stress being handled, attention soon turned toward the systemic problems that were deepening the divide between members of the household, and that came to a head on two separate occasions over the course of 2021. The first was the event that drove Leila from the household, after the abusive, manipulative behavior perpetrated against her reached a tipping point, and she moved out. The second came a few months later, where my privacy in the household was violated in an attempt to ascertain my partners’ new address, and I no longer felt safe or comfortable living in my own home.

Again, a lot happened here that I wish I could describe without consequence.

When I moved in to live with my current roommates, it was in a home that wasn’t big enough to fit everyone comfortable, and I wound up partitioning half of the living room as a temporary living situation for the better part of a year. As stressful as it was to split my life between the two houses on a dime, the fact I was now working from home on a permanent basis gave me more flexibility when it came to starting to catch up. At this point, I was less focused on engaging with a social life as I was stabilizing emotionally. Picking up the pieces was all I could really handle, but there were a lot of matters with the former household that wound up taking months on end to finally conclude. We moved again in 2022 to a my current home, with relatively enough space to relatively fit everyone’s needs —though the house definitely shows its age.

I’m sure a couple folks noticed mid-way last year that I picked up on some activity, getting the occasional commission, popping into chat rooms and VR, and showing up at AC. There have been periods of ramp-up where I thought I could handle getting back into being more social again, and I was dipping my feet in the water to see what I could reasonably handle without shutting down. I had a few jabs in quick succession that set me back: one, the water heater spilled all over the carpet in my room at the new place we all moved to, requiring much of my stuff to be taken apart and moved to let the floor dry without mold; second, I wound up getting laid off fairly late last year, and spent a while emotionally rebounding after that. It wasn’t until the end of November that I picked up my current position, and since then, I’ve been building up slowly to getting my shit together in earnest.

It was also during this time that I married the gal I mentioned to several of you I proposed to ages ago,  leilasnowpaw. It was a bit of a kneejerk response to some of the judicial fuckery going on in the US right now, and we wanted to make sure we had our foot in the door before the possibility was taken away from us altogether. Regardless, she’s a hell of a dame who’ll always have a piece of my heart.

There's a little more I want to mention on the note of my personal relationships, but I'd rather save that discussion for its own journal, not sandwiched between a ton of other updates.

My transition subheading

I also want to set aside a little section to bring up the point on my transition. I officially started HRT a few months back, but it’s been a decision that had its roots from way beforehand, since long before I even wound up in the Midwest. While I still think calling myself ‘genderfluid’ is pretty accurate, I’ve found with time that through the vast majority of my interactions, I usually default to a more effeminate presentation, and the windows where my desire to be presented in a masculine fashion are usually followed by periods where I deeply fetishize the shift from male to female. Hell, most people I know were calling me Scarlett before I was even seriously considering hopping on the medication. Being in an environment where I feel like I can freely express myself has opened a lot of doors that I thought would have to remained closed due to societal pressures.

I won’t get upset with whichever pronoun you use with me, since there is still a bit of flux in how I identify, and I don’t expect others to keep pace with that. I do, however, think I’ve reached a point where it’s safe to say I’d prefer folks defaulted to feminine pronouns (she/her).

Other platforms and moving forward

In the coming months I’m going to start spreading out to other platforms and back-posting the metric fuck-ton of art that has been sitting in queue, waiting for me to toss it up. There are so many concepts I wish I could devote time and energy into building up, but I’m not sure how realistic it is to expect that kind of churn-out from me, after how slow I’ve been historically. That being said, I do anticipate at least a few stories making their way accompanying pictures, and down the line, I'm building up a website to follow some of the writing I hope to produce.

For now, I intend on primarily returning to posting on this platform, and I’ll make an announcement when I’ve made a few new accounts. There’ll likely be a few Telegram channels where I’ll post things, but there are other social media platforms I haven’t kept up with that I'm curious to try.

TL;DR

The last half decade has been busy as fuck and tainted by a toxic relationship, which wound up crumbling a couple years back and worsening very reclusive habits. I moved between a few houses and jobs while trying to pick up the pieces, and now feel like I am in a better place to actually re-engage with the community on a more regular basis. In the meantime, I got married and started my transition relatively recently, too. There will be more to come in the coming months about where I’m spreading out to beyond just FA and other personal news in my life (and of course, a ton of backlogged art).


Anyway, thanks for attending my TED talk lol

See some of you all at Anthrocon real soon!