ten years

i started planning this at the end of november, as i expected that a month would be more than enough time to finish a single piece. in most cases, it would be (even for me), especially as this particular piece has a lot of value to me, for reasons i will explain shortly. unfortunately, health issues have led to a gradual drain on my energy and well-being since october, and have only worsened since, and so i wasn't able to work on this, or the gift art i had planned for my close friends.

[ medical / health / weight details in this paragraph] i am not healthy right now. i have a doctor's appointment booked in early january that can hopefully begin the process of finding the cause of the symptoms and resolving it. i'm trying to stay positive, but i am beyond exhausted. i've never been the best at keeping a balanced diet or choosing healthy snacks, but this has absolutely floored me. i've lost a lot of weight. i was already underweight to begin with, as i was recovering from disordered eating patterns, but this has completely erased those months of progress and then some. nothing i do has any effect on it. it comes and goes at random, though at this point there's very little 'going'. i can't find anything with symptoms that match up, and admittedly, i am scared that it's going to be something genuinely dangerous, something that has been overlooked because my medical needs haven't been taken seriously for so long. i desperately hope that it isn't. there's not much else i can do, aside from keep track of what's happening and hope it's proof enough to convince my family doctor (who has ignored me in the past) that i'm telling the truth and something needs to happen.

until then, i don't know how active i'll be; as i mentioned at the start, this has absolutely throttled what energy i do have. holding a pen is hard. typing is hard. sitting up is hard. keeping my eyes open is hard. i'm really fucking tired. i'm alive, and i hopefully will be fine - and i am somewhat reassured by the knowledge that if i enter a crisis, at least canada's emergency room is free - but for right now i am very much out of it. (i wrote this description in stages in advance)

this piece - this sketch of a piece - features the characters i've directly or indirectly represented myself as through the past ten years. as it's only a sketch, it's somewhat hard to tell who is featured: Lion, as the largest character and my current sona, is most easily recognizable; the small dragon that's lined is Ice (of Waterflock!) the namesake of my account here and my first true OC, the protagonist of a dragon series i wrote when i was younger; the other two medium-sized dragons on the 'viewer's side' are Ice v2, the one who is partially lined and who i used in my middle teens, and an unnamed dragon i used as my sona when i was around 17-18; the two anthro characters on Lion's back are Icarus, an ambiguously-speciesed vent sona from my teenage years and CK, a lion who i used in my first adult years; the wingless dragon-like character on the opposite side of Lion is Aloopah, who was less of a self-insert but explored my feelings about alienation in my grade school years; and the two characters closest to the 'viewer' are Ice, a My Little Pony-verse Changeling (created before the episodes about their reformation) and my grade-and-high-school ponysona, and Chimera, a completely original oc from slightly before Ice-the-Changeling who i put into the MLP world for an ask blog on Tumblr (that later became my main blog) that helped me branch into digital art, oc-insert fanfic, and fandom as a whole.

all of these characters - and many not featured - were integral to my experiences growing up both as a person and as an artist. the ways i wanted to visualize myself, and the aspects of myself that i liked, changed drastically through the years as i grew older and, in turn, realized i was not cis and not straight.

ice, the first version, was my first foray into original fiction and my chance to flesh out a world and characters that were all my own. i invited friends to the space - printed out fill-in-the-blanks sheets for them to design their own characters with - and included them in my stories. i started conceptualizing, ungracefully, the more complex feelings i had about relationships and friendships and family; reading them over now as an adult makes me realize how remarkably personal the fears are that i reflected in my storylines, and wonders if my friends remember what kind of things i wrote in the 150-page, binder-clipped-together 'beta copies' that i printed out and gave to them. (i hand-drew the same cover on each of them, of course, as i didn't have a scanner). Aloopah followed this, though i never wrote his story down to paper; an escaped lab experiment who ended up found-family-ing with another experiment as a husband and their two adopted children, a human who ran away from home and a third experiment. it's worth noting i wouldn't realize i was gay for years after writing this.

as awful as the brony fandom was (overall and to me personally) my time in it allowed me to see people creating and promoting content that featured lesbians. a lot of lesbians, really, since the show had so many more female characters than male ones. i won't say the representation from the fandom was done with the good of lesbians in mind, or that it was even good at all, but seeing it be so widely accepted made things a lot easier for me than they could have been. (different parts of the fandom, on the other hand, made things many magnitudes harder). i won't lie; i did a lot of not-very-subtle shipping of 'characters i saw myself in' and twilight sparkle (and, because this was bronies, i will clarify: not in that kind of way.) my writing scale also ballooned in the mlp fandom, as it gave me a platform to share a lot of work and get a reasonable amount of feedback on it. bronies sucked, cannot state that enough, but god were they ever a receptive fanbase.

Ice v2 was designed in my later years with mlp, as i started to distance from the source material. i still thought i was cis at this point, but was having trouble dealing with that belief; Icarus was designed shortly after for vent art, as a character with no defined gender and no defined species. parts of Icarus are reflected in Lion's abilities; a conscious choice and a reclamation of the shit i was going through at the time. Ice v2 was followed by the unnamed dragon, the era in which i realized i was nonbinary (though i decided on agender at the time). i had accepted i had attraction to women, but wasn't ready to accept that as an exclusive; i changed sonas to CK at around the same time that i recognized i was a Whole Lesbian - and nonbinary, as i strove to demonstrate with CK's short mane and tufted tail. CK lasted a little while, but wasn't used very frequently; i spent a lot of time making new designs and not clicking with them.

and then we hit Lion, where i designed a wofsona on a whim and went 'oh actually this is all i need' and they've stuck since. i like to think they're permanent, more or less - they feel more permanent than other recent sonas have - and i'm sure a part of that is because Lion was designed when i was an adult comfortable in my gender and my lesbianism. i know who i am in order to reflect that in a character, more than i ever have before. but it's been a long journey.

and that's what i wanted this piece to be about; the journey. all of these characters, all of these times in my life, have all been me. i can't leave them behind or erase them; they're integral to who i am, who i have become, and who i'll be in the future. i can reflect on and appreciate the parts of my past that were good, and also be the adult i needed to comfort and protect me back then in the times that were not. it's been a long and difficult decade, but i'm moving forward; i can still carry the difficult parts. i wish i had been able to complete this piece before the decade closed, as a true sign-off to the past ten years, but no version of me would choose a drawing over my own health. i'll finish it when i can; after all, i have many more of these ahead of me if i'm lucky.

to all of you reading this; you've made it this far, and you'll keep going. it'll be alright.