This is my first journal with the new journal ratings and it feels weird. I also switched to the retro look thing on FA settings because I was one of the 4% who still used classic and whilst i really miss how comfy classic was to me, with the knowledge that this website isnt a democracy and no amount of appealling is gonna make them keep classic because its hard for them to maintain so for once I jumped before I had to be forcably pushed. Classic is going and I may as well just start getting used to the new stuff earlier rather than later. I don't like it, but equally I'm not gonna get upset or bent outta shape over it.

The journal rating thing feels weirdly oppressive to me I think because i've always just been able to type whatever popped into my head without trying to censor myself, but now as I type I notice in the back of my head a worry about whats appropriate to say or not. How many kids read my stuff. You can be 13 and have an account here and whilst I always had that in my head around the artwork and what i posted in that sense, for some reason it never applied in my head around journals. So that's gonna take some getting used to too, and I wonder how much extra work mods are gonna hafta do now they're also watching for journal content?

I'll probably be posting some mature themed journals in the not too distant future about some stuff that's been going around in my head around recent stuff that's been going on for me but i'm gonna leave that for a different day.

In a bit of positive news, I mentioned it on bsky but failed to say here that I got an email from my tutor to say I had graduated from my course and im invited to the graduation ceremony in January. I am waiting for my diploma to come through the post but yeah it feels safe/official enough to say that I have finally finished that chapter of my training and im officially a qualified counsellor. The type of counselling I do if non-judgemental/open minded/person centered and I am looking forward to setting up my private practice and start taking clients. The way the internet has been going recently I'm not sure how much longer a lot of stuff will stay around so i'm kinda grateful to my past self of 3 years ago who suddenly decided to do some training for a profession that can be done offline/face to face. Once I have my diploma I'll be able to register for a place on https://pinktherapy.com/ as well, I really want to attract GSRD type folk so need to work out the best way of doing that.

So. I've been trying to end with my therapist for a while now, but we officially have a date of the 15th of Dec being our last session and basically working on endings is quite a tricky thing for me which is why I wanted to dedicate a fe weeks to that process (i often tend to cut and run prematurely before an ending can happen so forcing myself to stay to the end is..um mostly new and really uncomfortable actually)

But this weeks session dredged up something I was mostly unprepared for which revolved around my prescence here accidentally.

This week I've been waiting for an email to officially tell me if I have finally passed my diploma. It's been such a palava, a saga...a longer than I expected drawn out process that I've found myself almost compulsively refreshing my emails waiting for the email to come in. We talked about the 3 year long qualification and I started talking about how lucky I had been with the tutors and marks they had given me and when challenged on the 'being lucky' thing I did have to swallow that and admit that there had been hard work involved too and that trigged a massive exploration on my inability to accept that I deserve to be recognised when I do a good job or work hard etc.
This absolutely stems from my childhood where I'd be made to feel guilty or shamed for any feelings of being proud, or often if I had done something well it was largely dismissed as not well enough, or again guilt tripped or shamed that because I had done something well that had somehow had a detrimental effect on my younger siblings.

I've mentioned a few times over the years that I wasnt really allowed to touch anything art related when I was a child. The first time I really started drawing was when I had left home. This was mainly because my sister did art and my parents didnt want me competing with her, yet I never wanted to compete with anyone.

I just wanted to draw.

So over the years through my childhood I grew an almost fear of being good at anything or worry that if I was better at something than someone else it would somehow make me a bad person.

I think thats why being here, I use to do so much promoting of other people, of pointing folk in the direction of other commissions and largely downplayed most of my contributions. This came to a head a few years ago.

I was just browsing FA one day and noticed someone had drawn a picture of Star. Some fanart, completely unprompted and I went to take a look and to leave a comment and generally gush about how generous and sweet the person was for doing that, I noticed a few folk had already left comments and read those as I scrolled. and someone (I genuinely dont remember the username it doesnt really matter) had written

"I am so sick of seeing this character everywhere."

Instant shame/guilt spiral engulfed me in a way that still makes me breathless thinking about it. The concern of hogging the spotlight or of my hard work and successes being detrimental to those around me, just really swallowed me. I vowed to try to be quieter here, to be less obvious, to tone myself down and so I post my comics and very rarely anything else. Scared to flood the site with anything else. I stopped writing journals so frequently stopped doing raffles or big group pics but with that also came the stopping of promoting newer artists and sharing crowdfunding things and I just sorta retreated as much as I could without it making anyone suspicious.

That one comment.

I'm angry at myself because it was only at mondays therapy session that I suddenly collated the two experiences. my parents scorn as a small child being shamed for overshadowing my siblings in some way and the balance of being a bigger name on here. I want everyone to have an equal share of the pie. I always have done. Ive always wanted people not to look at me with fear or like some kind of rival because im not a rival. Im not playing that game.

I just want to draw.

So look...I want to be more active here. I realised its been that fear of shame/guilt that's really made me retreat quite a lot from the site and the community and I want to also accept that I work bloody hard, it's not just a luck thing. Theres skills involved and truthfully mostly perseverance. But I just wanted to apologise for well..letting it get this far before I noticed. But I'm here now.

Stuff here is going okay. Just wanted to check in with folk and say hi.

I've been in a weird fluctuating kinda energy level place for a month or so now where I get high bursts of Oh I should organise some meets and connect people together and do all these really cool ideas I have, to then...heck I dont wanna get out of bed but I have client work to do and people need help etc etc etc....

Last weekend I did a full 2 day course on mental health first aid, which basically qualifies me to go up to strangers and say "hey are you alright?" It was intense, I'm not gonna lie, and put me in quite a reflective place afterwards thinking about people I've lost through their mental health struggles. Wanting to kinda wrap everyone in blankets and keep everyone safe and knowing what an mammoth task that is.

I'm also trying to end with my current therapist. I'm done with her, Ive been with her 3 years and want to find someone new to explore the difference and try different types of therapy, but she keeps twisting stuff so that I stay just a little longer over and over, so I'm trying to do this gently for her but um....thats where im falling I think, im trying to do it for her....That's not how therapy should work, so im gonna have to be firm with her and say no. im not coming anymore we're done. BUt I think she needs the money and I've somehow made that my problem. So yeah gonna hafta be blunt with her on Monday and see how that goes. I can already feel the challenge there as a people pleaser, but I also recognise that the powerplay here is that in a way she's being quite manipulative. It's tricky.

Ive also noticed an uptick in my little side, like she feels much closer to just popping out of me these days I dont know if its because of the resumation of my other comic Found, or what's going on, but I just feel small a lot at the moment, possibly due to feeling mentally drained a lot recently. A lot of rl friends knowing i have counselling training are suddenly telling me a lot of personal stuff and im having to go "whoa there I'm not your therapist should you really be telling me this intimate detail about your sex life?" and they're just like yehyehyeh its all good....and im thinking folk are just chosing to hear what they want...
So I feel quite..yeh...fizzled.

I started playing FFXIV as a way to grind/stop thinking for a bit and thats been a nice distraction. and I feel quite cosy there no one telling me confidential stuff though I realised in a way doing fetch quests is still helping folk out...its just quicker easier dopamine lol Less stress if i cancel a quest.

It's all good I hope its going okay for you.

I'm going away, just for a little bit. Until Monday.

Originally this was going to be a little celebration holiday where I can put my course behind me having completed it, throw away adult me for a few days and be small...

I havent finished my course yet. All sorts of shenanigans happened, I'll spare you the details of various establishments messing me around, and basically I am 2 hours away from completion, so next week if both my clients turn up I will finally have almost all of the ingredients to pass the course. (Still need a supervisor report) but anyway that's just the way that's happened and thats kinda out of my control.

So yeah this little holiday was supposed to be a goodbye adult me for a few days so it's a little preemptive but I'm really looking forward to just forgetting about reports and counselling paperwork and yadda yadda for a couple of days.

That does mean that I'm AFK on Friday though (im not taking my laptop with me cause im too small for that) so No shine on Friday. You can read extra pages on my website for free (you need to sign up for an account but its free to do so) Its about 3 pages of shine ahead free on there https://squiggles.ikklespace.net/ the other comics are all ahead on there for free too, and if you want the $10 sub then it gets you even more ahead pages. Theres also art perks at higher tiers. I havent managed to do much in the way of opening main commissions here this year mostly due to my coursework and counselling client workload but with that all finally finally winding down I am gong to start having more time for art which excites me quite a bit. So hoping in the next couple of weeks to start ramping up my productivity here.

I am really looking forward to some small time though, I got a litle bit of small time back in March and other than that I havent had any this year and I def feel like I've been running on empty for months and months so hoping to maybe just reconnect with that bit of me a little. I dont know about you but it often feels like a super power to me, that when my small side gets validation it's like a powerup, like after having quality small time I can tackle anything, suddenly im crazy productive and focused and like could take on the world and win. Throughout my three years on my course I felt if I got too bogged down in stuff I could just get some little time and that would help me tackle anything too heavy but actually none of that happened, if anything I had even less little time, like almost non existent so a lot of the course I kinda struggled through, but I got through it without that power up. So I guess that proved to me that I can do things without that...but truthfully it would have been so much easier if i could have had some.

Ive been trying to work with my own therapist about how I could give that to myself, how I could look after little me by myself, the problem with me though is my little side struggles to exist without a caretaker person and that person cant be me, because i feel a large part of why Im a little was because i was neglected my caretakers didnt want very much to do with me so I kinda had to fend for myself a lot, so trying to look after little me by myself feels very much just like my real childhood and I dont really wanna go there. So I feel a bit stuck when it comes to small me, and it's okay to be stuck, it's what it is, but I havent really worked out a solution to how to nurture that part of me by myself, i'm sure I'll get there but it's eluding me right now.

Another ramble...

I am dreaming a LOT at the moment and dreams are one of those things that Gestalt Therapists can really get into. I've always been interested in dreams and I used to practice triggering Lucid dreaming when I was a teenager but that all came to a stop once I found a partner and was sharing a bed with someone else.

Anyway one of the big dreams this week was me trying to tell a bunch of folk who I care about very much that I needed personal space. I need to be left alone and given some air, and they were just laughing at me saying I was a silly baby and getting really up in my personal space right in my face and crowding me. So I was getting more and more flustered and upset and angry that people werent listening to me telling them what my boundaries were. So I grabbed a baseball bat with nails in it and started swinging it in a large arc to show where my personal space was telling people dont step beyond this. Making it really clear you'll get hurt. So one of the people stepped across and instantly got clocked by the swinging bat. Guilt immediately swamped me, I dropped the bat apologising profusely, this allowed all the other people to get back into my personal space. Then I woke up.

I took this dream to therapy so I could work on it in the gestalt way, where we pick the most important focus point in the dream and retell the dream from that figures point of view. So I picked the baseball bat with nails in it.

It turned out the bat was angry at me for dropping it. It was doing its job making a very clear point where my boundaries lay and being very deliberate with the threat of if you step here you will get hurt. It didnt feel guilt when I hit my friend, my friend stepped into the line of fire of their own choice after being told what would happen. It was angry however at me apologising and angry at my guilt. It wants me to have a backbone and to stay firm and deliberate with my boundaries rather than being this weak thing who drops their boundaries worried more about other people than myself.

The thing is my boundaries ARE pretty weak when it comes to my friends and art. I suck so so hard at making rules and then if someone goes, oh but could you just add this extra little thing, or yeah I know i approved the sketch but could you just sketch it again...or hey I know I said this thing but do you mind if we do that thing instead....I always yield. And then I get burnt out because im sacrificing something of me in order to make someone else happy. This is common for me. Very familiar. I'm like a sack of potatoes that can just be throw anywhere that has space for me, I don't need any special consideration. I know through therapy that this stems from the way I was raised, to think of myself last and it is very much conditioned into me.

The thing is if i change, if I start holding those boundary lines people are going to notice. I feel I will come across as unkind, and yet at the same time, sometimes, if I had just stuck to my boundaries then people wouldnt be confused where my boundaries lay. Its not peoples fault pushing their own needs into my space when Ive always allowed it before when ive always stepped aside to allow them in

As a counsellor I dont have this problem and the people I see as clients they're strangers so setting those clear boundaries at the start feels easy as its a green field site. But setting boundaries now with friends or art commisisons feels so much harder because ive let things slide for decades so trying to establish new things here feels much harder.

The dream was really useful in exploring my feelings around these boundaries and just opened up a different awareness around how I am creating my own problems by not staying firm with where my boundaries are.

This is just a bit of a ramble...feel free to ignore.

Here, I am me. Folk here know my deepest shames, it's odd really and a bit backwards to most places I am, in that here, I show and interact and connect through the things I mostly hide from the vanilla world. I know the kinky and quirky and build relationships around folk knowing this stuff about me first and eventually if enough trust is built between the parties finally I know someones real name, but in the vanilla world we start with someones real name and work all the way down and if we trust someone enough we reveal this stuff.

This place is a safe haven for me, ive been able to talk about my asexuality here and my relationship with my gender etc in a way I don't really talk in the real world about it, aside from in my therapy class which I was using to test waters about talking about this stuff with folk who weren't kinky.

My class is over now, it finished in July, (though, annoyingly, Ive still not qualified but thats for a different journal) and with the way the world has been getting more aggressive around differences I have felt a stronger and stronger pressure to stand up and be counted I guess.

I have facebook. I HATE facebook with a passion. BUt it seems to be the only way my family communicates and quite a few of them are quite vocal about where minorities of all types should go. I generally call them out on their BS but I also think some of them are that blinded by misplaced anger or whatever is driving their assumptions about LGBT+ ideas because they dont realise that they know folk under the umbrella.

SO I'm thinking about just telling everyone on my facebook about me being non-binary and asexual, because i've used my privilege as someone who is married to a man to look just like a straight cis couple, thats peoples assumptions about us and it means we're invisible we blend into the norm and I'm feeling more and more disgusted by that. Years ago when my previous engagement to a woman ended and Daddy was then on the scene, my folks thought of him as some golden child who had turned their daughter ungay...I never corrected them on that assumption and I've always regretted that, and feel like I need to fix that, now feels important.

I spoke to Daddy a lot about this and he supports me saying stuff because obviously this affects him too,
I'm not sure why there's this pressure to do it now, maybe because being here and being open about this, and being in my therapy class and being open about it, feels like this is just the next natural step, or maybe because the divide between the two sides is getting wider and I can't really sit on the fence anymore?

So the past few years mainly because of my course and my Daddy's stress with his jobloss we generally havent been to any events or well done anything furry OR little related in frikkin ages...Like our last proper holiday was in 2019...So next year the plan is to squish as many conventions in as possible and so far these are the ones I have my eye on...

Scotiacon - 6th-9th Feb Glasgow https://www.scotiacon.org.uk/ Registered and confirmed

Nordicfuzzcon 18th-22nd Feb Malmö, Sweden https://nordicfuzzcon.org/ NOT confirmed yet but really wanna go

Ainmhicon 11th-12th April Dubin, Ireland https://ainmhicon.ie/# Registered and confirmed

Confuzzled 22nd-26th May Birmingham, England https://confuzzled.org.uk/ confirmed


So thats whats on our list so far. So we're essentially going from one extreme to the other of a famine feast kinda plan. Not gonna lie I'm excited already, but also theres probably a million conventions I dont even know of that we could go to, so if anyone knows any cons that are good please recommend.
I want to say this now though, as long as Trump is president I cant really go to America. I have had too many friends be turned back at border control that I'm not gonna chance it, but generally yeah looking to add more to the list if anyone knows any fun ones.

That isn't a very polite title...I'll go stand in the corner once I'm done here...

I just wanted to do a little check in cause I haven't for a while and wanted to let folk know where I am at.
Anyone who has been keeping up with these will know that I'm at the tail end of my course. It's dragging on a little bit as I get my final few hours into the system (im at 84 now) so should hopefully be mid September if all my clients continue to turn up. It's been a bit of a slog this final bit, it's been a bit isolating and odd as the course part of the course is over so not seeing my peers and being able to bounce problems and exacerbations off each other has been a bit of an odd experience. But I'm so close to the end now it feels it keeps just edging slightly out of reach. It's all just formal paperwork now so I think I'm getting impatient.

In other news im also being a bit unwell at the moment. I've developed an allergy to the cold of all things, so basically if i touch anything cold I puff up/break out into hives/get all itchy and a bit asthmatic, this includes just going outside if its cold, which i guess is fine in the summer months but with winter coming that could be kinda problematic. SO been getting tested for stuff at hospital and popping a million antihistamines and trying to avoid the cold as best I can, zero icecream for this squig..boooo. My plan is to just live in a snowsuit from october onwards, but it is a tad inconvenient I mean who heard of a scottish person being allergic to the cold??? Bloody ridiculous.

Other than that trying to get back on track with art and posting more here other than just comics. The UK with its new pornlaws and trying to sanitize the world has been impacting my creativity and really gotten in touch with my anger and made me realise the online world is very soon gonna be hard to inhabit, as they're now looking at putting restrictions on VPNs (im not sure they understand how hard that's gonna be) but yeah the UK is cooked I think so trying to squeeze as much out of my time as I can.

If I do disappear from here I will find a way to make sure Shine continues. It will get to its conclusion I promise.

I hope folk are doing as well as they can be in this climate

So this weekend is my final weekend at my course.
Cant believe 3 years came and went so quick. I am very much a different person to the person i started with. I mean we all change over time but it feels like therapy training is kinda like being forced to flip alot of your dark stuff to the outside and show it to folk.
My classmates are all very different to me and ita rare to have to be stuck with a group of folk who have different views and have to see them each week and navigate how you feel when they challenge you. Its been really valuable in that sense as i have a tendency to flock to folk with similar interests rather than opposing one. Its helped build my tolerance to my own feelings of discomfort and allowed me space to challenge myswlf in certain aspects, like when do i stay quiet qhen do i speak out, when do i get angry, etc.
Its forced me outright at times to see clearly how i organise my own sense of reality, what my brain holda onto and what it ditches in order to maintain my sense of core beliefs. Some of those core beliefs have been smushed and ive felt untethered and frightened by that deconstruction at times, and im still here.
I feel more relaxed with my anxiety and more accepting of my anger, i am more in touch with greif and more flexible with my disorganisation. I feel like i know myself more and thats what contributed to me being able to give up alcohol and really start working hard on my health (ive lost 2 stone since march with nothing other than exercise and healthy eating and not drinking alcohol)
Having to counsel other people means youre sat every day listening to some hareowing life stories and often conflicting views to my own im working with people from all over the world because london is super diverse in that sense, hearing so many different life stories, cultures, religions etc puts a lot of my own into perspective, gives me a renewed sense of being grateful for where ive come from and where i am now. Grateful for friends and the family i do have and just really grateful for this place.
Im glad youre here and im glad im here too. Thank you

Super sorry ive been quiet
Basically last week i discovered my final assessment for my course was due on the 19th of june which is way earlier than i anticipated and i hadnt started work on it. So suddenly study writing transcribing all that jazz alongside building client hours suddenly swallowed my life.
Good news is i am submitting it tomoro and then thats most of the work done ( so long as it passes...which actually theres a strong chance ot might not but ill worry about that if that happens)
But it meant i havent drawn anything for the past few days.
This is the last level of disruption i promise and then i will shower folk with shine and ctn and pacified perfection and found and all the good stuff.
Im sorry ive been away so much. I really have missed drawing folk and will be catching up on everything soon

It's the most 4's a person can be but on Wednesday I get to be 44. I am working the whole day seeing therapy clients for my placement so I dont think I'm gonna be actually doing anything on my actual birfday on Wednesday due to how frizzled I'll probably be after listening to peoples problems for 5 hours but I've been thinking on how I can celebrate in some way or another.

Normally what happens is I run a freebee sketch stream or a charity fundraiser and I've been thinking I could do something like that, and then alarm bells go off in my head going "WHOAWHOAWHOA" you KNOW you have the final essay for your diploma due in a couple of weeks thats easily about 8k in words once you've transcribed the 20 mins of audio with embedded process comments and you really need to be spending significant time on that do NOT take on 100 headshots or a million freebee doodles" and im like...crap back in the previous years I was good at ignoring that voice and then seriously burning myself out trying to juggle everything...But that was then and this is now and I am slowly being replaced by a responsible adult (help)

So I'll make you a deal, when my course is finished and suddenly I am free from the shackles of education (so I think we are talking end of Augustish if all goes to plan...um..which i dont wanna jinx) I will do a big sketch celebration/fundraisery type thing (so some free stuff and some charity stuff) to make up for my lack of participation in any of that sort of stuff recently.

In other news I'm still alcohol free and still losing weight (down 22lbs now) and walking about 8 miles a day in the morning before I work. I have also managed to grow some strawberries and trying to grow some sweetcorn, courgettes, aubergines, peppers, cucumelons, sunflowers, kiwifruit, tomatoes, gem lettuce and pumpkins, which is kinda exciting, I've also been doing quite a bit of crochetting whilst ive been travelling to and from my therapy placement so I've made a blanket and in the middle of making a sweater scarf (cause theres a huge call for those in June) so ive been productive in a lot of physical ways recently but not so much digitally at the moment

I've got 9 weeks left of the base of my course. 9 weeks out of three years of study.
I havent completely finished, I am hoping to be properly done and dusted with my course by september, but I've got till Jan to actually build the last of my hours and hand in my portfolio of work, but the actual final class session is in 9 weeks.

It feels like I've been doing this forever and at the same time it feels like I've only just started. I've learnt a lot about myself and the person who started this course and the person I am now are very different people. That's not a bad thing, more I've just expanded, grown bigger in my awareness of how I am in the world.

I still havent been drinking alcohol, not even a wobble since March. I've lost 15lbs in weight, been walking and crochetting and doing gardening. Being out in the sun, breathing.

The world is a mess and I can't really do much about most of that, but I can look after myself, and if i look after myself that means I can help the clients that I see manage their anxieties and depressions and thats largely what I'm doing to help. I recently helped a guy find his spark in life again after he was struggling with a masturbation addiction and that made me feel like I was doing good work, actually helping folk, one person at a time. Chipping away. Now i'm helping a girl with her childhood trauma and another get in touch with her inner child to find ways to help parent herself. One by one, piece by piece, hoping that if/when i leave this world the place might still be burning but there will be pockets of people who are doing ok.

I've been thinking quite a bit about my gender as well. I think I spoke a while ago about being 'gender disconnected' Like I absolutely get body dysphoria when i look at my boobs or it's that time of the month, I will happily hand all my plumbing to any of my transfem friends because I really dont want any of it, and sometimes I think its gender related, and other times I think well...maybe it's age related.

Like if someone calls me ma'am or lady or woman I absouletly bristle, like it feels so wrong I recoil and that's how I've always felt since the first time someone called me lady Blerugh.... but being called girl doesn't get that same reaction. Boobs and periods are a sign of being grown up and maybe it's all lodged in my want to be babied/my little self being faced with the fact that I'm indeed not little.

Then another train of thought (and I'll admit that this is messier and just in relation to myself) was very much not feeling like a woman because i don't like a lot of stuff that women do, and I dont relate to a lot of women, so it makes me wanna step away from that and yeah stand in the non binary camp somewhere or like I said...gender disconnected. But maybe thats because i dont see many women like me, mainly because women like me have stepped away like ive done, said hey this isnt for me because I don't recognise this as who I am and so carved their own path away from what a woman is. Maybe if I stayed, it could change what a woman is more women like me would see representation and feel more connected with their gender? I dunno Its something i've been thinking a lot about. Like its society thats broken right? society gets to largely make the rules around what is and isnt a woman so like if those that dont conform to that stay in that category and show diversity within that category would that be enough to shift what a woman can and cannot be?

Some crazy stuff happened this week that resulted in my husband pretty much saving a friends life, where no one had heard from a friend of ours for the best part of a week and...well..we don't normally talk to this friend daily or even weekly, or actually even fortnightly so we had no reason to think anything was up, but hearing that noone else had heard from them for a week (including folk who do normally talk to them daily) We were like...this isn't right. So Daddy phoned the police to do a welfare check and the police broke into our friends house and found our friend had collapsed and had been on the floor of their bedroom for 6 days unable to reach a phone and seriously dehydrated. They're alive and hopefully gonna be out of hospital in a few days but..yeah any longer would have been a different story.

That was Thursday last week and I've been with this pent up buzzing energy ever since. The what if's and the How to stop that happening again, buzzing around in my head. Not just that but the thought of all the people I dont talk to daily, or weekly or bi weekly or monthly. Heck when was the last time I phoned my mother?

My brain has gone into a weird tug of war, between must contact absolutely everyone to make sure they're ok, to there's just so many people i worry about that there's too many so I wont contact anyone.

Then there's me and paul, we're actually kinda quite isloated really, like if me and paul got into a car crash and got wiped out, or if there was a carbon monixde thing in our house, pretty sure it would be weeks before anyone noticed. I think 2 missed shine days would be enough for folk to start asking questions but by that point...2 weeks down the line, i'd probably be doomed.

We don't really talk to people, I think people think im constant in contact with folk but the truth of the matter is i'm really really not, I draw pictures, I post pictures, thats pretty much me at the moment (and even the posting pics is kinda stuck with fa's R.O.M right now LOL, so very little in the way of social interaction. Like there is literally no one i talk to daily. or even weekly. And our friend almost dying on their bedroom floor really kinda woke me up.

So maybe i need to write more journals like make at least 2 a week so there's some kind of contact, and between that and shine posts maybe that'll be nough for someone to think...hey she hasnt posted in over a week i wonder if she's ok?

Also. If you speak to someone daily and suddenly they're not in contact after a couple of days without having said they're off on holiday or something, maybe give them a poke or check up on them. My friend was lucky the story could have ended differently.

Hey so it's friday. It's a shine page and as we're all aware I can't actually upload here today but fear not. There is an alternative place to read the comic. HUZZAH!

You can sign up for a free account at my website
https://squiggles.ikklespace.net/ There you will not see just one new page of comic but two DUNDUNDUUUUUUUN

I know exciting right?

And hey if that's not enough to satiate your shine needs you can sub to my $10 tier and gain access to the magical early comic access...okay maybe magical is over selling it....but you get to see Shine all the way up to page 597 Thats an additional 3 more pages. Oh be still my beating heart.

Not only will you get access to shine but additional pages of CTN, Housebroken and Pacified perfection and well as other comics I've done.

There are other tiers that get you artwork and comics and ref sheets and all sort of jazz actually. and I never really talk about any of this because I suck at business and I dont wanna shove my website down folks throats but if you needed a free shine fix today signing up to the free account on my site is certainly a good place to go for that.

(disclaimer: if anyone has problems accessing the site or signing up or having issues seeing stuff..please please please contact me and I can help work out what the issue is and fix it)

This is just some self exploratory type stuff, a bit of a ramble.

I've been making some positive life changes the past few weeks after a couple of big things happened to me. Wake up calls I guess you could call them. In all honesty they paint me in a pretty poor light, but if there's one thing I've been learning quite a bit on my course is that we all spend a lot of time and energy trying to ignore or compensate for what we see as shadow qualities. I learnt about two of my personal shadow qualities in very quick succession a couple of weeks ago and one of those literally changed the very core of me, which I didn't think was a possibility in all honesty.

As anyone who's been following me for however long here you may or may not know that I come from a family that was pretty neglectful of me, not in terms of food or being clothed but in terms of being used as a extra parent, not having much of a childhood and generally being left to my own devices, expected to parent my younger siblings and expected to be independant. Being seen to be needing help would automatically be a dangerous thing for me to do, I got beat quite a bit, and generally psychologically abused quite a bit growing up if I needed anything.

Anyway that's just for context, fast forward to 43 year old me, who struggles to ask for help, for fear of imposing myself on folk, it still creates an anxiety in me that its a dangerous thing to do, to ask for help...
So a few weeks ago just before handing in my essay I braved asking my class if anyone would read over my essay before I handed it in. I didn't expect anyone to say yes, the push for me was asking for help in the first place. Well...That's what I'd convinced myself of.
I went away feeling satisfied that I had asked for help, but had gotten the response I expected. No one helped me. I went home feeling self sufficient, robust, independant, the core of me felt safe. For these were the things I had learnt were important to survive.

2 weeks later I talked about my self sufficiency in class and one of my colleagues said..."I offered to read your essay" I was shocked as I thought back to the experience and remembered that she had indeed offered and I had immediately made a decision that I couldnt impose my essay on her as I knew she still hadn't finished her own essay and I didnt want my stuff to eat into her essay time. My brain had then completely dismissed the interaction. Up until that point I had honestly convinced myself that I'd got through it alone.

Shocking, and it left an awful taste in my mouth, it had all happened completely out of my awareness, I'd completely sabotaged myself, my needs hadn't been met, not by the others in the room, but by me. I had dismissed my colleague so easily. What was worse is that I realised that if EVERYONE in my class had offered to read my essay. I would have found an excuse not to send my essay to anyone.

Because my core belief that Im robust/resilient/self reliant is important to maintain, to be anything other than that threatens how I built the way I work in the world. And I had to just stare that right in the face and admit to myself that it had all been created by myself, and suddenly recognising that as a pattern throughout my entire frikkin life. I changed.

Feeling like I can get things done by myself, I mean self resilience IS of course important, but in moderation. Being part of communities, leaning on friends, asking for help, they were drummed into me as being things to avoid, weaknesses, potentially dangerous, and that couldnt be further from the truth, and so I feel awakened by that experience, that It's my choice to feel isolated and unsupported and that if I can just look beyond my internal conditioning theres a whole range of new choices rather than the same stuck pattern right there ready for the taking.

The second awakening came literally 3 days later, I had 2 days of my course where a Doctor comes and talks about addictions specifically for if we go into working with drug addicts or alcoholics, eating disorders etc etc. We got talking about alcohol, and this doctor works in an addiction clinic helping other doctors and stock market professionals with their various drug/alcohol addictions, people who are super high functioning in their day jobs but are really falling apart off the clock due to the stress and their addictions. It's virtually invisible because they're all successful, turn up to work on time and do everything non addicts do, but have serious health/mental problems.

I learnt that at 35 alcohol units a week you actually do damage to your brain. I looked at how many alcohol units I drink. only 2-3-4 pints a night...every night...the beer I drink is usually 3.6% a pint...so thats around 4-8 units a night....every night. So on a bad week thats 56 units a week......I have a problem. I thought you know since I can get up for work, do my job, function, I dont even suffer hangovers, then everythings fine. It is NOT fine to be drinking 56 units a week, thats like an entire months worth of recommended units it one week. Ow.

So that day I quit. I downloaded an amazing app called reframe (which also teaches you the psychology behind addictions and why it's not about willpower but by how your brain has been wired by the alcohol). 10 days sober and I do not miss it. Not even in the slightest. That's already the longest I've gone without alcohol in 20 years (again i realise this doesnt paint a good picture of me, but I'm being honest)

Luckily your brain is amazing and can repair/heal itself so hopefully any damage i've been doing is already on the road to repairing itself. Ive been going to the pub still every night, but drinking non alcoholic options, (which incidentally are also waaaay lower in calories and in the 10 days i've stopped drinking I have already lost 7lbs, I have way more energy and already feeling much more positive about life, because my dopamine levels aren't being skewed by alcohol any more)

So yeah just really wanted to share these things. I'm not proud of either of these sort of revelations I guess, theres some shame there about both of these things, but the fact that both things have shifted and I'm making positive changes, which already I feel is energising my work. I've been exercising more, drinking more water, sleeping better and planting vegetables in the garden and generally doing a bunch of self care in a way that I don't think I've ever really done quite in this way before. Long may it continue.

I just wanted to share some more positive stuff. Anyway if you read this far have a cookie.

I hope you're doing okay.

The past few journals have been quite sad/stressy and youve all listened and helped me with such kindness and patience that im very blessed to have such lovely folk here.
But its also important to share some of the good stuff/sucesses with you too.

You know that essay i was really panicking about that was basically 5k words on any topic but weaving a bunch of therapy theory into it...well it took me many weeks to complete it and genuinely i thought it was a mess of an essay. I really got stressed and worked myself into such a tizz.

I wrote it about asexuality in the theraputic space and handed it in on time thinking it would be handed back to me marked before the easter break so id be able to work on a resubmission during the break. I was convinced it was a fail.

Anyway it came back with a pass mark of 80% which means its in the distinction section. I burst into tears. Proper proper sobbed my heart out. Ive said all throughout this course that acedemia is a weak point of mine so to see such a high mark when all my other marks have been so close to failing... I just wasnt prepared for it. I now have something that really forces me to face that im not actually rubbish at this stuff. Its almost been a week since my result and its still not properly sunk in.

Anyway 2 more essays to go and then im finally done with this course and can get back on track with throwing myself into art. July cant come quick enough. We are gonna hafta have a party

(this is kinda a depressing sort of journal so you dont really hafta rea it if you dont have the spoons)

Sorry for lack of CTN updates recently...A lot has kinda been going on and It's mostly burn out related.
I know I'm not american or anything but the stuff going on in the US really kinda swallowed me whole a bit. Like I dont even live there but seeing the stuff going on, doom scrolling at lightning speed...like...I dunno. It feels silly to say but I just see a bunch of school bullies getting away with being awful and hurting so many folk for the lulz. You know at school being taught cheaters never prosper, bullies never win...but seeing exactly that playing out in real time feels really hard to watch. Like the villians arent supposed to win.

And I'm seeing it with the clients I'm working with in my counselling placement, people feel hopeless with the world and I'm having to hold that with them and it's hard, just it's impacting everyone and everything, the poison seeps into areas you dont expect. Suddenly people get to be even more racist and homophobic and awful here in the UK because they're emboldened by whats going on in America.

It's just really depressing and trying to draw or be creative in that environment is quite hard.
I've been properly sick this past week in a way I haven't been since my first bout of Covid back in 2020. I tend not to get properly ill too often but this really messed me up, so I missed classes yesterday which maybe wasnt a bad thing as it also happened to be the 1 year anniversary of my dad dying, which kinda took my breath away in that a year went past so quickly.

It's all just been a tad overwhelming recently. All we can really do is be kind to one another, try and help our local communities and try to be strong for one another and I've been trying to do that for a while but what i've also not been doing very well is looking after myself and so I think it's important to do that too. Look after yourselves and be safe as you can be. I'm sorry it's hard out there right now and I love you all.

Apologies for lack of shine this week ill be uploading on tuesday along with the next housebroken.
Im in the middle of this four day group therapy learning workshop thing (think 120 people sat in a big circle talking out their feelings and process from 930am till 530pm) and feel really mangled by the process at the moment, of having to be up crazy early to get in on time and then by the time i get home its past 8 by which point im so fizzled that picking up a laptop to upload stuff just really isnt a priority.
Theres been a lot of hard topics to contend with, grief/death being the first and biggest and that has permeated the entirity of the work for me so far. Im hoping today that the energy is different (im currently sat on a train going into london) i feel im bringing a different energy today so theres hope in me that today can be energising rather than energy draining. I wont know until i get there and get stuck in i guess.
Anyway, thats where i am, i havent read notes i havent done any art since this thing started and itll all pick up on tuesday, sorry for the delay

This week is going to be tough. Im out all day today for therapy studying, then Tuesday im out a chunk for therapy supervision, then wednesday im out all day to talk to the head of counselling at my placement then doing my placement, thursday im at home, then fri, sat, sun, mon im at a 4 day conpulsory group therapy training thing that i did last year which was fairly horrific so sorta already feeling exhausted just thinking about the coming week.

A lot of folk were generous in taking up the ych fundraiser thing for i took on way more than i should have but balancing getting them done in a timely fashion with doing the comics and the commission for patreons...and trying to meet essay deadlines for my course...

I feel a bit frizzled, but also in a productive way. Sometimes being overwhelmed by work makes me work brighter/harder, it feels like such an insurmountable blockage of stuff that it becomes really...i dunno, competitive. You tell me something cant be done, ill do it to spite you.
But that attitude does come at a cost and im thinking tuesday next week im gonna crash in a spectacular way.

Ive done 35 of the ychs, with at least 15 more to go so should hopefully have them all done by middle of next week. Please bear with me on those, and folk from squiggles waiting on sketches for things should get those tomoro. Feel free to poke me if youre waiting for stuff, i know a lot of you are kind and give me space, but i want to make sure you get art rewards that youre owed

Hey. It feels like it's been a while.

I'm not sure if anyone really noticed my absence because i was pretty good at still uploading art, but in terms of interaction, engaging with folk, I largely fell off grid from like..Mid november really. A post here or there on bluesky to show im still around, kinda sneakily hiding in a way cause i didn't want to be seen to be absent, but mostly withdrew and hid. We're calling that resilience fatigue people.

2024 largely wasn't a kind year for me, My Dad dying, then my Mum being hospitilsed with bipolar for months, my husband losing his job, our car breaking, our cat almost dying and eating our savings as a result, all the while trying hard to study for my Therapist qualification and Keep comics going on time.

I put a lot of the emotional baggage of 2024 on hold, the processing of most of that just sorta stacked on top of one another, and then when November came along with the wind down of the school semester I was suddenly like...oh maybe I can stop, take a break....And that's when I broke.

It's a classic of mine. I got sick because I had time to be sick and I hit a wall and as always rather than looking for support I curled inwards and sorta emotionally hibernated, zombified until I felt strong enough to weather the storm.

And so hi. I am back. But not because i'm feeling stronger....Well maybe there's a bit of that, but it almost feels like a necessity.

I don't think I really need to tell folk that life is gonna get progressively bumpier in the coming years, it feels like a large chunk of the western world is racing to the right depending on who throws how much money to whomever and it's fucking terrifying and I don't want to stress or scare people and it's been a big factor of what's been making me feel overwhelmed and helpless/hopeless so that's then fallen into inaction. I've buried myself in games, or art, trying to ignore the world is burning because i feel like i can't do much about that.

That's the opposite of what I can do though. Look. More than ever we need to be a community. Look out for one another, support each other because it's clear the countries most of us live in don't care about us at all, so all we really have is each other. Online life is gonna get trickier, net neutrality laws and porn laws and A.I....It's important we learn ways to shore ourselves up, look after ourselves and those around us.

I'm done with feeling helpless/ineffective/inept/hopeless

If there are fundraising things going on. I can use this page and my bsky etc as ways of boosting things, I've not done a lot of that this past year. I can do fundraising, I can pick folk up with art, i can just be here. Hopefully im getting to the end of my course and this time next year I should finally be qualified to offer counseling too. In a world thats trying to pull everyone apart I want to resist that, connect people. And also feel more of that connection myself. I'm going to put more effort in this year to do that.

Carve out my own little bunker here to survive the storm on the horizon. You're all more than welcome to join me.

I just wanted to say i hope 2025 brings people peace....

That feels like thats a tall hope this coming year, so maybe i might wish more for making sure we check on each other, maybe and learning to be gentler/kinder to ourselves?

I want to do more things, see more people, be kinder to myself too perhaps.

2024 wasnt great..is probably an understatement, im glad i made it thru but it was tricky at points.

I do hope this year will be smoother.

I am glad youre here with me, and i hope that we just get stronger together

Love gem/star/sam

There's a delay in shine this week due to the fact I am not near my computer to post it until Tuesday at the earliest...
Which means if you super want to see the pages you'll need an account on my website squiggles (it's free and you can see today's page in the comic section for free there)

https://squiggles.ikklespace.net/

Super sorry. I could have posted yesterday but I was so busy I genuinely forgot and now I can't. Sorry sorry.

I am at my in-laws doing an early Christmas thing.

Also whilst you're here lots of folk keep asking about when curious comics get updated so here's the schedule...

Shine every Friday(except today cause I screwed up )

Housebroken every 1st and 3rd Tuesday

Cottontail every 2nd and 4th Tuesday

That's how it rolls from here on in.

So next week will be a housebroken

So...I've been doing this essay all on bringing the inner child into the therapy space and in therapy today I came across something i realized about myself.

The inner child in me, is not the same as my little side. Not even in the slightest. I always thought I was in touch with my inner child what with being a little/AB/DL/agere, and it being a huge part of me...But no. It's really not the same thing at all for me. I think what i've been doing is trying to chase a childhood I never had, fill this new adult childhood with good/healthy memories so that I can then sorta overlay the bad memories and missed loved in my real childhood.

So I've actually been neglecting my real inner child whilst I've been off chasing something to fix her.

I tried to talk to my inner child during some of my therapy and she totally shut me down, like she doesnt want to talk to me, because she's fine by herself. She doesn't need me, she's so used to being by herself, she doesnt trust me...or any adults actually, and she certainly doesn't like that I want to talk to her now, when shes been trying to talk to me but ive not been available to her, so now that I want to talk to her, she's giving me the silent treatment. It feels very childish, like a tantrum. Shes being uncooperative so I get a taste of how its felt to her for all these years. Or maybe its just the mistrust, like... once i get what I want will I just leave her alone again?

I get it. My mum was emotionally unavailable to me and I've just been perpetuating that cycle to myself. No amount of good memories now are going to undo the trauma of back then and I really should stop trying to do that.

Im not sure im getting rid of my little side or anything, but just that...these are actually two seperate things and ive been fooling myself for decades thinking if i found this perfect family experience, if i found someone who would love little me unconditionally that somehow it would fix me..but it's all a distraction from working on that real inner kid version of me who feels very abandonned and very mistrusting and has just been neglected for so long that it feels normal.

Its been a while since I wrote here...

Five weeks ago I officially started my final leg of therapy training which involved building one hundred client hours to then write a 5000word essay thing by june. Before that I have another 5000 word essay to sort out about gestalt and a topic of my choosing.

Originally i was doing it on Asexuality, but as ive been doing the research, trying to piece an essay of that length onto that very specific thing is proving to be a bit of a headache. I suck...like so so badly at essay writing already that I think ive found a tricky topic to weave into gestalt theory.

So I think I may backtrack and write this specific essay on working with the inner child in a therapy setting, which feels like a much much broader and easier subject to thread lots of theory around. But ignoring the essays, the placement for working my 100 hours is really kicking my ass, mainly because my clients aren't turning up. (in 5 weeks of client work so far I have managed to build exactly 3 whole hours of client work instead of the 15 I was expecting to be at at this point.)

So all day monday I go into london to do my therapy and attend classes, and then all day wednesdays I go in to do all my client work. Fridays I travel to speak to my clinical supervisor which eats 3 hours...
Which leaves me tuesday and thursdays to draw comics and commissions and the weekend (if im staying home I can squeeze more commissions and do some reading for the course and my essays.....)

I am not doing a very good job at juggling all these and im hoping because its early days of getting settled into this new routine of working with real clients that it'll sort itself out. If im being honest I am floudering a bit, and I apologise if folks commissions have been late or my communication has been a bit naff of late...well more naff than normal...because frankly im a tad burnt out....hooooly heck that is an understatement...

My school breaks for xmas on the 2nd of dec so at least Ill have the whole of dec with my mondays mostly back, so that'll give me time to reorganise and hopefully do one of my essays to get it out of the way..and recharge a little.

BUt this is me basicallye xplaining why im being quiet and a bit rubbish recently

I’ve been thinking about what to say after the latest FA update and what’s been going on on social media about it all. I haven’t read every single thread cause…Well…There’s a lot, I can only talk from my personal experience and how I feel about this. I’m not going to go into rumours or speculation, because I don’t feel that helps me....or anyone really.

Being suspended for a week hurt. I have been known to struggle with my little side and being suspended just really triggered all the self doubt and self hate I feel towards myself about being a little. It made me very emotional and made me feel very shut down/silenced and felt like it confirmed to me that I was inherently wrong for being who I was. Those are easy places for me to go to. They’re familiar. It was when I saw other people echoing those sentiments that made me snap out of my self loathing spiral, I wanted to pick those people up, tell them they were okay.

That being a little or enjoying wearing diapers, or just expressing yourself in the way that you want when it’s not hurting anyone is and should always be fine. That’s what I’ve largely been spending my days doing on social media, helping folk to understand that etc.

Damage was done when the 2.7 policy was updated. Some folk left, some folk took their whole galleries with them, trust was shattered, and as someone who has been building their pages here since 2010 it suddenly felt hostile and unwelcoming. I was heartbroken for myself and my community, but I knew I wanted to stay. A lot of us have put so much heart and soul here that it’s hard to walk away, but more importantly, as someone who lives in the UK and was taken out of the EU by Brexit, one thing is abundantly clear, you only have a voice if you’re inside the system. Once you leave, you lose any power you may have had. I want to stay here and help work out a way forward, a compromise or a chance to grow something good from the carnage that happened.

What does the latest apology do? How has that affected me? I was already on the optimistic side of the camp, despite how hurt I was feeling. I know I’m a builder, I’ve learnt quite a bit about myself recently and feel best when I’m in a support role. If I can aid people I will. This apology felt like a bridge and a step to addressing people's feelings and fears. It feels like an opportunity and a promise, and we still don’t know where that is going to go yet, but it feels hopeful to me.

FA is listening to members of our community now, there is a group of folk talking to sciggles about potential ways to move forward, and for transparency I was invited into that group. What that currently means I don’t know, but what I do know is that it will take time, because this time they want to get it right and this time they are listening.

A few things I want to say in regards to the FA apology :
‘We would also like to remind everyone that harassment of anyone is not allowed on Fur Affinity; this includes attaching negative implications to people because they enjoy particular types of art.’
I’ve seen lots of folk saying , hey we can report the babyfur DNI accounts now due to this update. I would argue that’s not the case. Someone having boundaries on their page, doesn’t mean they’re harassing you.

Someone saying ‘all babyfurs are P*dos’ however would be open to reporting.

People are allowed to not like us, hate/despise us even, and as much as you may want to be loved by everyone you’re going to have to work out a way to understand that some folk simply will never like us and want nothing to do with us, please focus on the folk who do like you and move on.

Secondly and again this is my personal opinion, and I am super gonna get fire for this as I’m sure it’s gonna be unpopular but mass reporting the gofundme feels like an own goal. There are hundreds of thousands of artists on this website who use this place as their business, even if things don’t fall in our favour, even after all the work we’re doing to find a compromise falls flat and all the babyfurs get thrown off this site, would you feel good if we took the site with us? Burnt it all to the ground and just ruined so many other artists' lives all because we didn’t get our way? If we’re not welcome that’s fine. We’ll find somewhere else. We always do, and whilst I agree it’s okay to be frustrated with admin and mods and people who make the rules, please don’t punish all the other folk who use this site. Babyfurs are blamed for everything in this fandom, usually unjustly, but please don’t make the fall of FA our fault.

Ultimately I feel that we can do a lot with building not just the site, but also each other. Kindness, compassion and calmness I feel has to play a large part of that, and not just from within our own little niche, but through helping others outside that niche too. We can show that we can be mature about all of this, and through positive representation perhaps peoples views/misconceptions of our niche can change, that maybe everyone can grow from this. I don’t know if that’s unrealistic to hope for, but I also know that I can’t give up trying.