I'm not sure where to start with this update.

It's been years since I posted anything here.

And even back when I was posting, my inspiration was sporadic.

Realizing that I did so much art for Zmeydros, but I was never really sure what I wanted to do for myself, deep down.

How much of my past creative work and social life on here has been me, and how much has been trying to live up to others' expectations. And what parts of it, regardless of origin, do I want to continue into the future, now...

My relationship with Zmeydros has changed. We are... still close emotionally, but we're no longer romantic partners, and no longer living together, and no longer working very closely together on creative things.

Because of ...a whole bunch of interconnected financial, social and medical things, I've had to move back to Minnesota, and Zmey has moved to New Mexico.

It's not anyone's fault, just the way the world and our lives have gone.

But I'm still mourning what I had there in California. Because that group of housemates, in that city, felt like the first time I had a taste of the life I really wanted to live.

It wasn't stable, I know that. Everyone there was in a transitional time of their life, and we were probably always gonna grow apart. But while it lasted, it was everything I ever wanted.

I am trying to build something like that of my own, here.

But it's slow going, and it's not going to be the same.

And I am slowly, slowly working on trying to figure out what I want my online creative presence to be.

(All of these things are much more complicated than what I've said here. I'll go into more depth about them at some point, but right now I just... don't have the energy.)

I am trying to reconnect with Minnesota Furs, but that is also going to be slow, because the entire social scene here has changed since I was last in MN. I've grown a lot, and learned to understand a lot more about people, as I've gotten older... but turns out I'm still extremely socially anxious about settings where the rules may be different from what I'm used to.

And there are so many of those, with so many differences.

So... I know better than to promise anything, about how active or how responsive I'm gonna be on here.

But I have some thoughts about what I want to do. They'll include some reworking of my fursona, probably. And probably some new creative projects that will be more mine than anything else I've posted here before.

But a lot of that remains to be determined.

I've missed you. But at this point in life I'm still a little bit lost.


Update: To clarify a detail here:

When I said Zmey and I are "no longer working very closely together on creative things," I meant that it's been a very long time since we did a really collaborative project, and that our "working together," lately, has been limited to very light proofreading.

I didn't mean to imply that I hate doing that, or that I would never want to work together with Zmey again on anything more in-depth.

But there are reasons why things have become the way they are. They are serious and important reasons. Some of them may change as I work on myself some more. But I am very much not sure what exactly will happen.

Which is why I tried to say that about our changed relationship. Because I want to make it clear that at the moment I cannot promise any specific kind of project, with or without Zmeydros. Things are just too uncertain in my life right now.