words

I just want to thank everyone that responded to my post the other day. I read all the replies and I even read all the things people put in the tags of their reblogs. I'm so touched by a few of them I had to take a moment to gather myself . I'm happy there are so many kind-hearted people following me. I'm happy my art has attracted that kind of audience. It's a very wonderful and validating feeling. I appreciate each response very deeply.

I have always felt that it's extremely valuable for artists to talk openly about their mental health, trauma, and just things that are going on in their life. Personally I've always gotten a lot out of reading personal posts from artists I like. It feels like a thing that people do for posterity. It's good to be reminded you aren't alone. It occurred to me recently that, while this is my art blog, it's also... you know, my blog. You are allowed to just say stuff on a blog, I think.

The kind of work I've been resonating with a lot lately is work where the artist puts their personal struggles directly into it. I've been seeking to make more of this kind of work. I've been holding myself to some arbitrary standard for a while now that I need to be aloof and mysterious and quiet, and "just let the art do the talking". I don't think it's that important to me after all to be so aesthetically appealing or consistent. I am a very messy person. My path through life has been messy and my identity itself is messy. I'd like my work to reflect this more. I'm still figuring out how I want to do that. If you've been following me for a long time you know I've had this realization before, and that my life is a kind of cycle.

I've also realized that I love writing. I love reading. I love words. I will be working with words more in every way. In my art, and on my blog. It may turn out, in fact, that I'm more into writing than drawing. I guess we'll see.

Anyway, thank you. :)

Felt a bit compelled to make contact after that reblog from your personal, though not sure what to say. I remember following you before you made the klaufir username, though tbh I can't even remember what your older handle was anymore. We never interracted but I always really liked your work, and I was really happy to see you on Tumblr again, and to poke around your page and see how much you've made since then, that you're transitioning, that you made a game and made a ton of comic pages. Even as someone who is largely invisible in your life, I still remembered your art even after all this time. Even a total stranger doesn't forget and is cheering you on.

Thank you very much. ;;

What's stopping you from moving back to Oregon? Why are other people's reactions to your mental health issues such and big deal when the only person who can actually help you is you? Why can't you express both joy and pain completely in private?

Money.

I don't understand the question.

I don't understand the question.

On Mental Health and Cosmic Embarrassment

I don't usually make a post in the aftermath of one of my spirals, so I bet most people see some of the vent posts I make, and assume I am just off my meds or something. I am on them but I might not be on the right ones. This is a thing that happens to me sometimes. I have psychotic episodes, where it feels like the things I am saying are completely inconsequential and I genuinely believe no one cares what I'm saying or, worst of all, that it cannot scare anyone that cares about me. I get too tired to fight my intrusive thoughts and I just ride them out. Most of my thoughts are not ones I enjoy having. I have trouble parsing what is real sometimes. For most of my life, out of a kind of primal shame and terror of being perceived or judged, I beat myself into believing that I just roleplayed as a crazy person online because I wanted attention for it, but it finally clicked for me at some point in my 20s that I was, and am, genuinely very mentally ill, maybe in ways that make me not-entirely-functional in the culture I inhabit. Also, I want attention for it.

Life is very embarrassing. I think embarrassment, shame, et al. is probably the most cosmic feeling of them all, because being embarrassed, for me anyway, leads invariably to my OCD extrapolating the embarrassment, no matter how slight, into its natural extreme, becoming a full-blown existential meltdown and often manifesting in some self-punishment. Or a lot of self-punishment. Instead of saying "everyone wants attention, it's not a big deal", my brain will overwhelm me with shame and make me vow to be quieter about the whole thing next time. Good emotions are meant to be expressed, I tell myself, and Bad ones are not. I think it's very unhealthy for people to not express their negative emotions openly. Or maybe I'm psychotic. I mean, I am psychotic. But maybe right now, too.

Ultimately this feeling peaks with the realization - again - that I'm a eukaryote. I live on a spinning ball of stardust in the aftermath of what had to have been a colossal disaster and waste of time. But it happened, and so now there's a bunch of stuff floating around, and some of that stuff started moving for reasons I don't personally understand and the implications of which scare me. And the moving stuff that moved faster got to stay moving longer. And so a chain reaction escalated, and eventually there were very large moving things whose survival adaptations had evolved in such a way that they could conceptualize and communicate complex information about the world around them, but they were also able to conceptualize themselves. This gave them a lot of grief. They wanted very badly for there to be an answer to why they were able to do that. Surely it served some purpose. But we never found one, and here we are.

I don't have a god to turn to. I have tried - earnestly, sincerely, and desperately - to reach out; I never hear back. I don't want to be an atheist, it's heartbreaking. Honestly. I want someone to be up there, or out there. Knowing there isn't, is just... cruel. It's horrifying and it wrenches my heart. Look at us, look how much we're suffering, where the fuck did you go, what the fuck is your problem? Help us!

In spite of everything, I am still not sure what I believe.

Don't you ever just cry about the world? Like, broadly? Don't you ever just have to take off your glasses and wipe the brine from them because you caught a glimpse of what people, as a species, could be capable of? And I get angry at myself, too. What am I doing about it? What even can I do? I can barely hold down a job. I am barely an adult. I am often mired in this feeling. It permeates everything. I'm living in a tragedy - not just my own, but millions and millions of others'. This is a nightmare. It's a nightmare and I'm an embarrassment, and my brain doesn't work right, and I'm living in a terrible reality that is shared by everyone, and yet somehow equally isolating and alienating to all of us. Does it have to be that way? Aren't we all lonely?

When I am spiraling I really do think that the end is near, either for me, or for everyone, or for both. To be fair, my confidence about humanity's future is not promising even when I am at my most sane. But in this kind of emotional place, the stakes are too high for me to care that what I say might come off as upsetting. It is completely overwhelming. I see my life up to this point, and I see how long I've been alive and realize I'm very Not Normal and I look and sound different than everyone around me and I'm an embarrassment. It's embarrassing to exist. It's embarrassing to be transgender, too. It's really, really embarrassing to be mentally ill and fully aware of it all the time. It's shameful. I am ashamed of how my family likely sees me. How my peers see me. I'm just a walking disaster. I feel like this bars me from leading a happy life or finding some success in art - It doesn't seem like you're allowed to be quite this much of a problem and "get away with it", does it? There's a bit of social sanitizing at work there - you are only allowed to be a certain level of messed up and if you pass that you're sort of a pariah. I don't think I've ever done anything pariah-worthy, but I can only see things from the inside of my own head, and there's a lot of unwanted noise in here.

I painted this when I lived in Oregon. I don't know how. I could not do art like this again if asked.

I'm not in a good place, generally-speaking. It could be worse - and it was for a long time- but it's still just not great. There are two reasons for this. One is that I'm very homesick. The other is that I found - and subsequently lost - my twin. But I only want to talk about the first reason right now - I grew attached to the Pacific Northwest in a way I've never really grown attached to any other place. It had a quality that exists nowhere else. It resonated with me immediately and I knew right away from the moment I first set foot there that it was my home. I grew to be a part of it, and it's the only place I felt I somewhat-belonged... I have been away from Oregon for 2 whole years as of next month. I feel like I'm a fish out of water, or a sapling in the wrong soil. I can't and won't say that the place I live currently is a bad place, but it isn't my place, and the disconnect has been maybe the nastiest shock to my system in all my life. Finding the place I loved, and living for over 12 years there, only to be wrenched away from it so suddenly, left a shock on me that I think has yet to surface in my work. I'm excited to see what form it takes when it does. Location is very important to my mental wellbeing, more than I think it is for most people. Maybe I am a plant. It's also very important for my art. I've struggled to find inspiration since I moved here. That said, I've had the very precious opportunity to just work on myself - on my transition, as well as my personal issues. I think I'm getting better, gradually, in some way. I have a job now, at least. So it's not entirely bad. I even grew sunflowers last summer.

Around this time I got banned from twitter, but I don't feel any shame about the reason why because I believe in my message. But it forced me to be a lot less active online for a long time. It also made me lose a lot of support. That's been something I've grappled with a lot these last 2 years - that people really don't like people like me, for reasons that are mostly not our fault. I will likely always be something of an outsider for being who I am now, but I was one before anyway. It's still worth it. I like the person I'm becoming. I feel like only recently did I allow myself to feel this self-love. I was too embarrassed of myself. It took a lot of patience and a lot of de-tangling my self-worth from a lot of trauma. So it's likely I would have needed to go through all of this regardless of where I was.

I still slip up. It's an uphill climb and it's slippery. I like to be transparent about these things. It's a relief - feeling like I need to hide things is my default state and it's lovely to just let go of stuff so I don't need to keep it in my head all the time. I have a lot of hangups still. I get discouraged about my art still - I fear I'll never build myself back up to where I was before, and that there will never be a time when I can really pay the bills with it. Or worse-still, that it just isn't special enough to last. That it isn't remarkable enough to survive after I'm gone. But I think a lot of people who make stuff feel that way, and it's not our fault. There's some relief in that. I'm happy to have even a few people that care about me and my work, and something I've been trying really hard to remember in recent years is to take time to appreciate them. I'm not actually alone. I have a lot of people that love me. I'm not an outsider. I'm very lucky to know the people I do, and I hold a deep regret for all the connections I've let go of because I was just too sick. Deep down I really do wish I could love everyone. I have no ill will towards anyone, not really.

I still don't know what I'm doing. I am just doing my best, I think. I'm really, really tired. I don't want to get any older. I'm scared of the passage of time. My memory is so bad, it feels like time is taken from me without me realizing. I am 33 years old. I do not have 33 years worth of memories. There are huge leaps. Gaps where suddenly I was just older and in more pain. Being adrift in time like this is horrific - one day I will blink, and the present moment may be completely forgotten. It can't go this fast. It just can't. Something has to be wrong. I don't want to die, I don't want to miss out on so much life or be unable to remember it. I don't want to find myself on my deathbed someday way sooner than I think and be unable to string together any kind of coherent thread from my memories. What is it all for? It has to mean something right? Why am I doing anything?

I think I finally understand that love is why. I don't know much more than that. Love is real, and it's the answer. If you find love, don't take it for granted, ever. No love is perfect. Take it with all its flaws. You don't have time to bargain with it. Love like you'll never love again, love like it's your last day alive, love like it will keep you alive forever, because it will. Every year closer to death you get, you will feel the regret of all the times you did not follow your heart. Life is short. I'm finding this out entirely too late. It goes by so fast, and what you have at the end are people and memories of being loved. To be loved is to live forever. It's the thing that connects us to everything else. It's the source and the answer to everything. It makes more sense the older I get. It used to sound cheesy, but I believe it with more sincerity every day.

Our love is a ghost that the others can't see.

I kept my last promise to you - there are no new scars on my arms, or bruises on my head or face.

bug

bug

she had hearts in her eyes, she was rooting for me all the time

madagascar hissing cockroaches

no matter how anyone tries, grief is untranslatable