yor tellig me a shrimp fried this ice???

[CW for eyestrain colors under the cut]

Text for those who won't be able to see it:

Panel 1: Speaker: You have no idea (background is a bright blue and text and cat are a neon green. The cat is made out of scribbles, which are densest where its brain and heart would be)

Panel 2: Speaker: No fucking idea (same colors as before. the text is capitalized and italicized. The main person now resembles more of some sort of abstract beast, with a sharp jagged mouth and raised talons. It's lines are crude and messy, with a wrinkled muzzle and scribbles over where the eyes would be.)

Panel 3: Speaker: How Badly I wanted to trust you (same colors as before. The word Badly is huge and capital behind the feline. The rest of the sentence wobbles and separates/falls down the page behind them. The cat is back to being a densely scribbled silhouette, with big despairing eyes that leak red tears, which flow down its body like blood. The claws it raised in the last panel is held more limply, and its other hand is clenched in a fist. It's tail is puffed, in anger or fear. Its ears are flattened backwards.)

...

[CW for eyestrain colors under the cut]

Text for those who won't be able to see it:

Panel 1: Speaker: You have no idea (background is a bright blue and text and cat are a neon green. The cat is made out of scribbles, which are densest where its brain and heart would be)

Panel 2: Speaker: No fucking idea (same colors as before. the text is capitalized and italicized. The main person now resembles more of some sort of abstract beast, with a sharp jagged mouth and raised talons. It's lines are crude and messy, with a wrinkled muzzle and scribbles over where the eyes would be.)

Panel 3: Speaker: How Badly I wanted to trust you (same colors as before. The word Badly is huge and capital behind the feline. The rest of the sentence wobbles and separates/falls down the page behind them. The cat is back to being a densely scribbled silhouette, with big despairing eyes that leak red tears, which flow down its body like blood. The claws it raised in the last panel is held more limply, and its other hand is clenched in a fist. It's tail is puffed, in anger or fear. Its ears are flattened backwards.)

...

[CW for eyestrain colors under the cut]

Text for those who won't be able to see it:

Panel 1: Speaker: You have no idea (background is a bright blue and text and cat are a neon green. The cat is made out of scribbles, which are densest where its brain and heart would be)

Panel 2: Speaker: No fucking idea (same colors as before. the text is capitalized and italicized. The main person now resembles more of some sort of abstract beast, with a sharp jagged mouth and raised talons. It's lines are crude and messy, with a wrinkled muzzle and scribbles over where the eyes would be.)

Panel 3: Speaker: How Badly I wanted to trust you (same colors as before. The word Badly is huge and capital behind the feline. The rest of the sentence wobbles and separates/falls down the page behind them. The cat is back to being a densely scribbled silhouette, with big despairing eyes that leak red tears, which flow down its body like blood. The claws it raised in the last panel is held more limply, and its other hand is clenched in a fist. It's tail is puffed, in anger or fear. Its ears are flattened backwards.)

(obscuring username as not to single anybody out + not negative. just in case someones shy) but this is actually what we did with our journals at first too. we used lighthouse for some time, alongside discord/simplyplural. but with simplyplural being left and not wanting to be as on our phone/computer, we switched to paper.

for people with higher system counts, there are actually really good paperback journal 'packs' you can get at most stationary stores. if buying a 10/15$ journal seems too intimidating, you can get these packs for like, 10 dollars total, and each one only has about 40ish pages.

this way if you have parts that dont front as frequently, you dont have anyone worrying about 'waste' while still providing them their own space. these are just a few examples.

something unexpected this ended up helping with was actually our individual memories too. i noticed some people asking 'how do you journal if you're blurry/have bad memory as a part?' and, well, that's actually why i started doing it. i wanted to remember more than just 'feeling bad' whenever i fronted, so i carry my journal with me and write down basically like, everything.

even just passing thoughts like 'i kind of wish we had beef strips at home for dinner' or 'im really excited for artfight this year'. when you're trying to recover as a system, especially as a part thats been heavily slotted with a lot of 'negative' emotions, its important to give yourself the space to express more than those things. if you only ever remember yourself as being 'angry/bad' then you wont develop much past that, and you start to internalize that shit and really hate yourself.

journaling has been a great outlet for me to vent and draw my own stuff, but it's also given me some dignity and the space to feel like a person outside of just being like. traumatized. i sort of use it as a vault of everything about me, good and bad, important and trivial.

the character