I see a lot of people who remind me of me when I was a kid, who get their hearts set on a breed that obviously don't suit their needs. Learning more about the breeds I love has really shown me what my limits are. I could not offer a CAO a fulfilling life, I could not offer an Anatolian a fulfilling life, a Tibetan Mastiff, etc.... I cannot presently offer a Dogo a fulfilling life, nor any other working hound.
It's not a matter of "I will never be able to" but a matter of "I am unable to now and in the foreseeable future." I do not have property, I do not have stock to guard, I do not hunt. Reconciling that has been hard. Maybe one day I will be able to give a Dogo or a CAO a fulfilling life, but today is not that day, nor is tomorrow or the next day.
On the other hand, I had given up on Beaucerons a few years ago as a pipe dream, because I had been told time and time again that they were Too Much dog... like a 100-lb WL Malinois. And then I met them and realised oh, no, this IS the perfect breed for me. This is a breed that checks almost all of my boxes (except some aesthetic ones which aren't as important to me). This is a breed I can offer a fulfilling life to.
(Someone told me they were a "step up" from a Lab... I would agree. Maybe not a "step up" but certainly a little to the left... probably because of the difference between sporting and herding breeds.)
I don't know. The list of breeds I want in the future is insanely long, but I do my best to have no illusions about these breeds and about myself. I love herding and I love conformation. I don't enjoy hunting, and I probably never will. I like ringsport and rally/obedience. I don't like agility, and I probably never will.
Thinking a lot of thoughts this morning I see.
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Slowly more and more glad I waited so long to start working on Motley, because it is much much much easier to draw these characters consistently now that I've been doing it for so long lol. Simple artstyle + silly designs = I can bust out 10 panels in, like, 10 minutes, easy peasy.
I was worried about making long chapters time-wise but maybe it'll actually be fine lol
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Holy shit. Thank you guys for all of the asks. I got exactly 50!
I meant to respond to them when I got home from work last night, but I didn’t have enough energy by the time I was done reading these. I’m still incredibly exhausted today, it’s like all of the energy is completely sapped out of me since I was in the emergency room the other day.
The heavy ache in my chest definitely lessened while I was focused on reading what you guys wrote last night. The reminders that my TF F/Os still love me is something I really need to hear, something I probably have to tell myself multiple times... I spent so long being conditioned to believe otherwise.
A few of you also reminded me that Starscream had gone through heavy abuse, and he wouldn’t support someone who treated me the way Megatron treats him. It helped me feel better... I think that’s what got through to me the most. I’ve seen so many commissions/fics my ex-friend showed me where she was being manipulative, and that she would be loved for it. Seeing all of that visual representation of her being so tenderly loved by these characters while she was hurting me at the same time, for so many months, it really did some damage and made me internalize the belief that all transformers characters would want to hurt me the same way and love her for it. Especially when the characters she commissioned and talked about the most often were forming into PTSD triggers. For almost a year now, I have just assumed that all of those characters she wrote and commissioned, including Starscream, would encourage her to hurt me and that they would love to see me getting hurt. I don’t choose to feel this way, it’s just... trauma.
But a few of you wrote about how... canonically, Starscream was so fucking pissed when he was abused, especially in RiD2015!! He was so broken up and angry just like I am!! His entire 3 episodes focused on him repeating how unfairly he was treated, how much he wanted to hurt Megatron for all the times he was put through emotional/physical pain, how years had passed since he escaped being tied to his abuser and yet he was so, so angry and still worried that he wasn’t strong enough bc that is what he was conditioned to believe for millions of years. I want to think that same bot would look at me and see himself in me, and hold my hand through this and tell me it’s gonna be okay and it’s gonna get better and he’d never want to treat me the way my abuser treated me. How could he bear it if his little starflower looked at him the way that he looks at Megatron? I don’t want to think he would support my abuser’s actions, no matter how many fics or commissions she has stating otherwise. When I escaped a toxic situation with someone else 3 years ago, I turned to Starscream for this exact same reason, I looked to him for support. He helped me get through it. Now, I need him again after facing treatment that was absolutely horrific, except I’ve been conditioned to believe he would hurt me too; I just feel so sad when I look at him and I wish I could feel loved by him again. It’s been really, really, really hard. Hearing other people tell me that he loves me and would never want to hurt me really helps, I need to be reminded of that, because I absolutely can’t believe it when I try to tell myself.
I’m sorry I’m not able to respond to your asks at the moment, I’m extremely exhausted from. everything. Today has been difficult as well so I will be offline for the rest of the night. I don’t know if I’ll be online tomorrow.
I’m not 100% sure when the commissions will open up, I was really hoping it would happen this week but I didn’t expect to have that panic attack Tuesday, it really drained me. I am hoping that I’ll have comms open by next week, it all depends on how I’m feeling. I might spend more time offline to limit seeing any potential triggers bc I’ve been very fragile since I went to the emergency room, things that normally wouldn’t make me spiral before are probably things that I will have more trouble handling right now, at least until I can calm down again. Normally it takes me about 3 to 5 days to calm down from a severe panic attack like that. But I gotta spend another $400 on new glasses tomorrow morning so... I really do need to open comms soon :’) They will absolutely be open within the next 2 weeks, I just don’t know exactly when. Anyway, thank you guys again for the nice messages, I really needed them and you helped me feel less alone last night ❤
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Six things I wish you knew about chronic migraine
(By a person who’s lived with the condition for the last eight + years)
While it’s true that migraine is more common than you think (something like one in five women, one in twenty men), it’s also true that there are lots of different kinds of migraine. Optical migraine (“aura”), vestibular migraine (vertigo), and abdominal migraine (lots of nausea and vomiting) can and do frequently coexist, but only a fraction of the people who get “migraine” experience all three all the time. Complex migraine has symptoms similar to both a seizure and a stroke, frequently in addition to some/all of the aforementioned. A person with chronic complex migraine (like me) and a more normal person who gets an acute migraine every month or so (like my mom) might as well have two entirely different conditions.
Corollary to the above: migraine advocacy needs to cover both breadth and depth of sufferers. Naturally, resources and up-to-date research ought to be available to anyone who experiences migraine symptoms, but there also needs to be acknowledgment that even some people for whom the condition is technically “chronic” (eight days a month) might have it relatively easy in the scheme of things. I often tell people that I have a seizure condition (closely related to migraine) in order to be taken seriously in lieu of a thirty minute lecture.
Migraine is under-researched and poorly understood. I have one of the most expert migraine neurologists in the US and yet frequently, when I ask him questions that seem like they should have simple answers, his response is “good question.” Lots of meds/treatments are new and experimental and thus not covered by insurance. There is a LOT of migraine-related misinformation in the milieu. I cannot overstate this. Immense truckloads of misinformation. It’s incredible. Take anything a non-neurologist tells you about migraine critically.
You would be astonished by how many needles and hospital visits severe chronic migraine entails. There are periods where I’ve had to get painful injections 3x daily and had hospital visits every other week. IV steroid infusions are also a pretty common occurrence and they suuuuuuck.
Most people who get migraine take either OTC drugs or Imitrex/Sumatriptan pills, and if a person gets any kind of nausea/vomiting with migraine, this is pretty much insane. The body can process migraine like a physical trauma and as a result the stomach stops working (gastric stasis). As a result, if you take a pill after an episode has already begun, it won’t actually get digested until the migraine is basically over already. Injectables are much better if you can get them and it’s absolutely crazy to me that most doctors don’t prescribe them across the board. Doctors have known about the gastric stasis thing for decades now and it really ought to be common knowledge.
Not specific to migraine, but the longer you suffer with chronic pain the more sensitive your body becomes (barring improvements in treatment). This is kind of counterintuitive- you’d expect to get used to the pain over long exposure, but actually your nerves get hyper-attuned to it. This goes double if you have any kind of allodynia. If you have long-term chronic pain—you’re not going crazy if you think something/everything hurts more now than it used to.
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I want to apologise in case you already tried it. But I've seen many people with ehler danlos say that shapewear helps. Do you think it's something you could use?
Ive tried pretty much every otc method of keeping my joints in place including shapewear, with the execption of like 1 or 2 that has slightly too many steps for me to muscle thru the executive dysfunction and do (ring splints -_-). I dont actually know if there is a way to keep my joints from subluxating or dislocating with almost every movement but if there is its gonna have to be like. Complete imobilization except in the direction that said joints are actually supposed to move.
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