Spirits In My Head And They Won’t Go

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"Tutorial" on how to draw an OC with dwarfism (well, some of it).

Boring tired disclaimer: Keep in mind that this is an introductory "drawing" "tutorial" and has some generalizations in it, so not every “X is Z” statement will be true for Actual People. Which happens to be true for everything in general.

You are heavily encouraged to do your own research because this does not contain everything you should know before making a character with any type of dwarfism.

Consider supporting me on ko-fi if you find this to be helpful.

"males and females" "AFABs and AMABs" "TMEs and TMAs" "You're TME, you'll never understand how scary it is to be a girl with a penis in the women's bathroom" (said to me, person who was literally beat up in middle school for being a girl with a penis in the girl's bathroom) "AMABs can never get cervical cancer, that's an AFAB only thing" "they won't let trans kids have hormones, but they'll give them to cis kids for free" "you can't be cis and trans at the same time" you can't be transfem and transmasc" "You can't be transfem if you were AFAB" "You can't be transmasc if you were AMAB" "RMAB and RFAB? Now you're just making things up" "All intersex people are biologically nonbinary" "I want to transition into intersex" "I'm such a b*eddel/f*ta/h*rm" "You're intersex? I'm so jealous, that means you get an easier transition right?" "I wish I was intersex, then I could get myself pregnant" "Trans people are brain intersex" "So what does it look like?"

put dates on everything

don’t believe digital stuff is preserved forever - if it’s really important (documents, photos, etc) print it out

name your files accurately I know it sucks but please

don’t destroy the original just bc you scanned it

rubber cement is the devil’s adhesive use photo corners and quit gluing shit

you will NOT remember write it down

if you staple things to the inside of a folder I will find you

2) any vegetable is better than no vegetable

The school system I grew up in put an absolutely ungodly amount of pressure on kids to Show Up Every Day No Matter What. Many schools are like this, but looking back, my town’s was borderline fucking dystopian. They asked me why I didn’t just “postpone” a surgery at one point— when I was fifteen— to give you an idea of how monumentally obtuse these people were.

So, in elementary school, I started having chicken pox symptoms, right? They were mild because I was vaccinated (yay!) but my mom recognized them quickly and took me to the doctor, because my mom is a reasonable human being with standards. The doctor said “yup, you’ve got those pox, it may seem mild but please for the love of god DO NOT take her to school, she is very contagious even though she may FEEL okay.”

So I had to stay home from school until I got clearance from my doctor to go back. I was an angry little gremlin the whole time, because I wanted to go to the school library and read books about the human skull, but my mother said, “no, you cannot leave this house, and do not scratch the bumps please.” So I sat at home and tried not to scratch the bumps, like a good little gremlin.

A few days into my Chicken Pox Related House Arrest, we got a letter from the school. I was far from the only person with chicken pox, as it so happened. Like… a tenth of my second grade class had Confirmed Pox. We all fell ill within DAYS of each other.

So how did this happen, you ask? Well, a kid had chicken pox, and he came to school anyway. “Ah, well perhaps they didn’t know,” you may very well say. “Maybe his parents didn’t notice!” No. No, they noticed. In fact they KNEW it was CHICKEN POX. They sent him to school anyway.

The kid’s parents…….. were, in fact, teachers at the school. And they KNOWINGLY made him go to school sick, because they didn’t want to risk hurting his precious “perfect attendance” record. They figured that since he wasn’t, like, Literally Dying, it was better for him not to miss school. Never mind the fact that they were actively endangering hundreds of little kids.

Fast forward to my freshman year of college. A kid came to class with mumps because he ‘couldn’t afford to miss’. Guess what happened? Mumps outbreak! Diseases are, as it turns out, good at being diseases! Vaccinations are phenomenal, but they can only do so much, and some people rely on herd immunity to not be killed by preventable illness.

This entire attitude needs to die. It’s dangerous. Food service workers are forced to show up sick, little kids are forced to show up sick, college students show up sick because they’re afraid of flunking out.

The reason for this was very simple and very practical. In the very early AVEN and immediately pre-AVEN days, back before my time when the disparate ace communities were first finding each other and creating a public online network, there was a fair lot of exclusionist discourse. There are a lot of ways to be asexual, and the early community of course fell prey to the usual infighting about whether someone with a libido counts as asexual, whether someone who chooses to have sex can be asexual (usual tiring Purity Brigade Bullshit), whether someone without a libido counts as asexual (after all, if you have no sex drive, are you sure it's a matter of sexual orientation?), whether ace people count as lgbtq, all the usual nonsense. This worked out the way it pretty much always does -- the inclusionists "win", because exclusionists always break off into smaller and smaller communities so the largest group is, of course, the one where all different kinds of people stick together and welcome each other. And that was AVEN.

And when you're trying to have a strong community and somebody shows up at the gates saying, "hi, I think I'm asexual", it's a fucking horrible idea to start doubting their credentials. They saw the public definition and started calling themselves asexual; they're here, and now they're under the internal definition. An asexual is somebody who calls themself asexual. Sometimes, these people would be frustrated allosexuals, or people choosing to swear off sex, who might not fit the external definition of the term. We made sure that everyone knew the external definition, and there were always conversations about asexuality and how it affected our lives, if they asked us directly what we thought then we'd say "only you can know for sure" and then give our thoughts on the matter for as long as they asked for them, and other than that it wasn't anyone else's fucking business or anyone's place to judge. If people weren't nasty and didn't create problems, they could stay and call themselves whatever they wanted.

Many of these people who didn't fit the strict definition eventually left after receiving support and discovering more about themselves. Some stopped IDing as ace but became allies to the community. Some people who came in with the most "I'm a heterosexual girl who is angry at my boyfriend" intro posts you've ever seen in your life discovered that they were in fact ace and that the messages that society had taught them about sex and romance were simply not for them -- these are people who, in a gatekept community, would have been incorrectly ousted immediately.

And then there were people -- a LOT of people -- who found themselves in grey areas. People who said "okay, this community makes sense to me and is useful to me and I have so much in common with a lot of you, but not EXACTLY like you. However, what I experience may not be the strict default definition but it's an awful lot like these other members on the forum." And they formed sub-communities. The grey aces. The demisexuals. The aromantics and greyromantics. Through these dialogues, between subgroups who in a more exclusionary community would be arguing about who the "real" asexuals are and splintering off into their own communities away from all those stupid cishet fakers, we developed language to describe our similarities and differences. The sexual/romantic/aesthetic attraction model came out of these dialogues and it became so massively important to our understanding of asexuality that basically everyone in the ace/aro community describes themselves by it, as do a large number of people outside the community. The community made massive leaps ahead in just a decade or two by, well, being a community. By being a place where anybody who called the place home, and didn't bully other people in the home, was right. By being somewhere where anybody who saw "asexual: someone who doesn't experience sexual attraction" and thought "that sounds like a term with some use for me" was allowed to use it.

An asexual is somebody who does not experience sexual attraction.

An asexual is somebody who calls themselves asexual.

These definitions are not in conflict -- they are both, in concert, fundamentally necessary for a safe and vibrant community where we can protect, support, and learn about each other and ourselves.