#1y

Happy 1st birthday to Stoli 🥺 the easiest puppy in the world besides crate crimes. He's 21" at the shoulder and 32 lbs!

In one year he has:

- chewed only 1 shoe

- destroyed 0 human belongings

- counter surfed 0 times

- earned 1 title (trick dog novice)

- went to 2 shows

- practiced racing 3 times

- gone on 4 road trips

- went on hundreds of walks

- gave a thousand kisses

Oh you know what time it is, 1x tiktok comp YEAHHH ( ft a little bit of 1Y )

Greetings from the frozen north, @guttertongue​!

It’s been a wild year, hasn’t it? Can’t say it was good, exactly, but I’m writing to you today from a place of joy. A year ago, I adopted a tiefling from you (barely!), and I wanted to write to say thank you because that ended up being the big journey of this year for me...

He goes by Dharys now, and as a character he’s just been kind of simmering on low heat all year. I did write about him explicitly in one of my prompt fills, where I formally came to terms with him as a self-insert; just a funky little horse boy nervously making his way in a world that isn’t quite sure what to do with him. There’s a bit more backstory in scattered private messages and discarded drafts, and I think 2021 will be a real character development year for the boy ^.^

(The horse is named Vincenzo and your boy loves him very much~)

More than that, though, he’s been a wonderful persona for me to inhabit on this side of the internet. It seems so obvious now, but it was more or less a coincidence; I adopted him on a whim. (I mean, there was a reason, but it’s convoluted and doesn’t make a lot of sense.) At that time, I had already decided that I was going to try to get back into writing for fun, but I was still undecided about how exactly I would do that. Well, one thing led to another and I decided to start this blog, and since he was already around, I decided to make him my icon.

I’m not sure when exactly I started associating the name Dharys, which I was using for this side of my internet self, with the tiefling. But it was definitely sometime before April, when I ended up taking the dive into the exophilia community. That has been a truly rewarding experience, and if that had been all I’d gotten from this whole thing, it alone would have been more than enough.

But Dharys as persona has also lent me a lot of confidence. This takes a bit of explaining. Dharys was many firsts for me: the first time I had purchased from an artist online, certainly my first character adopt, my first *ahem*SFW*ahem* monster-related purchase. He was an early step in my ongoing process of learning to spend money on myself. As Dharys I purchased my first commissions, and made my first donations to the arts. As Dharys I’ve been able to recognize “spending money on myself” as a way that I can support artists I love. (And I’d like to think those were stepping stones in my willingness to evaluate my priorities and loosen my purse strings epsecially re: COVID and BLM— Shoutout to the Black COVID Relief Fund.)

In the back half of the year I’ve been less active on this side of the internet for work reasons. During that time, Dharys morphed into a muse and a sort of fictional second mod for this blog.

He’s a little bit immature in that role— mod!Dharys spends most of his time running around to my favorite artists for glamor shots. But he’s not totally absent; he does help me brainstorm, and even comments sometimes, mostly in the tags.

I could go on, but the point is— I feel so blessed that I’ve gotten to know your little tiefling boy, and our time together has truly been a highlight of my year ^.^

I hope that this note finds you well, and here’s to better days ahead!

— | Dharys

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Our baby is ONE !!!