I've started uploading my music to my new YouTube channel!

I’ve decided to start rewatching the entire ATLA show from the beginning, and I cannot explain how much I love this show. The beautiful animation, the story and characters that bring me to a sobbing mess every single time. I have no intention of ever watching either of the live action remakes (I’ve actually done a good job at convincing myself that the one that came out when I was 10 was a fever dream). I will never get tired of this cartoon.

She runs to me with her skirts billowing in the wind
Free as the air now that she has fled from her kin
Away from our fathers who swore we’d never be together
Her hair flies around her just like a phoenix feather
She tells me that we would make the loveliest pair of brides
As she grows her herbs and brews in her cottage in the countryside

I am the little fairy who clings onto the witch
A lifetime with her is worth more than all our families’ riches
I’d give up everything just to feel her kiss
Because no man could love me like she does and G-d knows how I’d miss her

We walk by the riverside with her soft hand in mine
We sing by the stream and she picks her flowers all to pass the time
She is a magic woman, and she is my home
When we’re together, nothing could go wrong

And I’m her little starlet whom she has summoned from the sky
With her love oh I feel like I could fly
I’d give up everything if I could just feel her lips
And there’s nothing I could trade for love as sweet as this

And I’m the little fairy who clings onto my witch
A lifetime with her is worth more than all the world’s riches
I’d give up everything if we could only kiss
Because no man could love me like she does and I don’t wanna miss her

Discovering ACOTAR in my 20s is probably the biggest mistake because now it’s going to be my only personality trait for the next year. I loved this book, I can’t explain it. It reads like a spicy fairytale. I’m so excited to continue the series but at the same time, I almost don’t want to because I know I’m going to cry harder than what I did with this one.

I know people have a lot of qualms about this author’s writing style. And I totally get it; to me, it feels like she underexplains a lot of things, and breezes through the story. World building clearly isn’t her strong suit.

It doesn’t matter how many times I replay the Wind Waker, the sound of Link’s grandmother audibly breaking down into sobs when she realizes that Aryll is really gone never fails to break something inside me.

It’s been four days since I decided to leave Tumblr, and it’s been so quiet around here. It’s been peaceful, but I had become so used to checking my notifications every day, that now I almost don’t know what to do with myself now that that’s gone. I guess I’ll be writing a lot more on here. Which is good. I don’t keep a physical journal anymore because I’m afraid of it being found. I’ll go to start one, and find myself holding back because of what happened when I was a teenager.

What I miss the most is the fanfics and the engagement I would get on mine. Some of my favorite writers were only on Tumblr and nowhere else. I also miss the Jumblr community I was in. Lots of people were super funny and gave me a good laugh when I needed it the most. But it wasn’t worth the dread that I felt every time I logged on there.

Shortly after that though, I ended an online friendship that lasted nearly six years and I’ve been upset about it for the past couple of days. I cried the first night, and shortly after that, I just felt numb and tired. I’m not going to go into the details of why it ended or what was said, but I’ll just say I’m never letting anyone online get this close to me after this.

Anyway, I’ve been trying to do a lot more reading now, and social media was a large part of why I kept feeling too distracted to finish a book. I have like three books now that I’ve put to the side and plan to restart because it took me too long to get through them. ADHD and social media doesn’t mix well.

As of right now though, I’m reading A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas. And so far, I’m loving it. I have a little more than a hundred pages left. I’ve fallen so head over heels for Tamlin, but everyone keeps telling me that Feyre ends up choosing Rhysand. From what I can tell so far, Rhys is a sadistic sociopath??? So I’m really curious as to how Sarah is going to convince us that’s a good idea. Though given my history of falling hard for the villains of every story (Loki, Lezard, etc…) maybe I’ll fall for him too. But if Sarah ends up doing to Tamlin what Stephenie did to Jacob in Twilight… I’m going to be very mad.

I did it. I got tired of the toxicity, the constant negativity and terrorist worship that the staff could not bring themselves to do anything about. The constant doomscrolling that I couldn’t seem to stop doing.

I left Tumblr. Just deleted my blog. Poof. Gone. Luckily, all of my fics are on the Archive and I copy and pasted the DMs I had with my online best friend that I met on there. It feels weird deleting something I spent four years on. But it’s over now. I’m cutting back on a lot of social media (I already deleted my Reddit) and this was just the final thing to do. It feels like a weight has lifted off my shoulders.

Making shitty art (not really shitty, just low-effort and mindless) is kind of cathartic because it feels like when I was a kid and didn’t have access to the internet, and would just draw or write whatever the hell I wanted in my notebooks. Drawing trippy-looking flowers was a very calming and relaxing process. Writing my daydreams down into stories was a very satisfying experience. I would look back on my drawings and reread my stories because I didn’t have anything else, and I wrote those for me.

And the truth is that I wasn’t in a a good place mentally when I did these pieces of art. I had no friends, was isolated in homeschool, and it was the one comfort I had when my parents took everything else away from me (they did eventually take those too when I was 17.)

When I finally had the freedom in adulthood to start doing this again, I stepped into the online community and was so intimidated by everyone else’s art and writing because they were just so good, and I felt like I would never get to that level of skill so I just quit doing it for a long time, and was overly critical of my work when I did do it.

But I recently came across my old sketchbook from when I was 12-13 years old. And while these did look exactly like a child’s drawings because that’s what they are, I remembered the joy I got out of creating this art at that age, how I put in my headphones and just doodling away was my favorite way to dissociate from the world, from my life. I remember looking at these with pride because while it was clearly nothing but experimental doodles, I was thinking “this is something that’s mine.” And I just decided to do it again last night and it was the most at peace I’ve felt in such a long time. I did another drawing today outside while listening to full albums on my phone, and it was even more soothing doing this out in nature.

And it just feels like being online and comparing my works to others’ really prevented me from releasing my creativity like I did when I was a teenager. I remember by the time I was 14-15 years old, I would write “novels” on notebook paper and would have this huge growing stack in folders, and would read back on them because I truly did write for myself. Of course, it was probably horribly written, but that didn’t matter because again, this was something that was mine and no one else’s.

And rediscovering creating just for the sake of enjoying the process and the experience is such a freeing feeling. “Does it look good? Probably not but you can touch it up after it’s finished.” “Will other people like it? Who cares? Do you like it? Yes? Good, then that’s all that matters.”

And that really is all that matters.