#20092019

2009 vs 2019

[20190920] day6kilogram update

I see people everywhere talking about the decade gone by and making comparisons of 2009 to 2019; how things have changed in the last 10 years. Now i’m here to do the same, I find it impossible to express in words.

I don’t remember the last turn of the decade. I don’t remember 2009 into 2010, and that’s strange because I’ve always been one of those people who invested a lot of emotional connections into dates and milestones. I remember being overwhelmed with excitement about the change of decade from 1989 to 1990, and of course the millennium bullshit that we were subjected to for practically three years before the actual event. But I don’t remember 2009 into 2010.

There’s a reason for that. I was dead on the inside. Speaking as someone who was depressed from the age of 5 onwards, I had never been so unhappy and deeply depressed in every way. There were many, many reasons for that, too many to go into, but the turn of the year and the decade wasn’t something to celebrate. Then again, nothing really was.

But I went through the motions and spent my life pretending, just as I had done as far back as I could remember. And the first few years of the decade grew gradually worse and worse until I hit the lowest point at the start of November 2012. I’ve talked about that night multiple times; saved by the Homestuck notifier going off, throwing my faith into tumblr to keep me going. I held onto one thought: that if something as unimportant as a webcomic updating could still make me feel excitement then there was still something to hold onto. That maybe I wasn’t completely dead on the inside. 

Now i’m looking back and realising, that was right near the start of the decade. That was over seven years ago. Seven years?! 

Tumblr is responsible for pretty much everything, in some way or another. People have different experiences everywhere but my experience here has been life changing in only positive ways. I first joined when I got into homestuck. I loved watching the chaos unfold after every update and seeing what the community was saying. But the more I got into blogging here the more I learned about the world, and the more I learned about myself. 

Through tumblr I learned more about gender and sexuality than I probably would have ever encountered elsewhere. It was here that I started to finally look at the gender issues i’d been burying as far back as I could remember. It was here that I started to question whether I was asexual thanks to learning about the difference between sexual and romantic attraction. And it was thanks to tumblr that I had a word to explain the sudden awakening of my sex drive upon meeting the love of my life at the age of 33: demisexuality!

It was through tumblr that I learned to not only accept but to love my body. It was through tumblr that I stopped being ashamed of my fetish and to embrace and enjoy it instead. It was through tumblr that I made some amazing friends and fun mutuals. It was through tumblr that I became terrified of peanut butter after a certain traumatic morning!!!

But above and beyond everything, it was thanks to Tumblr that I met Lucy. And here, I run out of eloquence. Words can’t cover what she means to me. Words can’t express the love, the like, the lust, the friendship, the hilarity, the passion, the laughter, the intimacy, the closeness, the warmth, the way every single day I spend with her feels as though I’m finally where I belong. 

And it all started because I recalled a friend who used to bring marmite and lettuce sandwiches to college every day and posted about my distressing memory <3

I think, that November night, that was when I started applying the brakes to my old life. It took a while for them to slow things down... exactly 4 months, to be precise. I was treading water, struggling still, drowning, turning the ‘fake’ up to a hundred. I’d already spent a lifetime pretending. Pretending to be happy, to be normal, to be a straight, cis girl, to be what i was expected to be. I just had to turn that up a few notches. I poured my energy into tumblr, faked being happy and confident, pushed myself so far out of my comfort zone that I needed a map to get back to it. But luckily, with time, my comfort zone extended out to meet me halfway :)

3rd March 2013, the brakes finally pulled my old life to a halt. Three days later, the engine started and the journey towards a new one began, thanks to an ask about organising randoms ;)

The path to where I am now hasn’t been easy. Escaping years of abuse leaves lasting scars. But now i’m sitting at the end of a decade that changed everything and there’s something very important that I want to share.

It is never too late. Never. It doesn’t matter how many bad years are stacked up on one side of the scales, it is never too late to begin redressing the balance. Any day can be the day you decide to be true to yourself. Any day can be the day you embrace a part of yourself you've tried to keep hidden. Any day can be the day you escape. And, any day can be the day you meet someone who can change your life. A friend, a lover, a confidante, a colleague, a stranger, someone on the end of an anonymous message. Any day can be the day that everything can turn on its head and start again. You just need to make sure you’re still holding on when that day comes.

No life is perfect. It’s been a rough year with health, money and the boat flooding twice. But there’s a phrase that sums things up which I can’t help feeling i’ll eventually have placed beneath my skin with ink:

Even the very hardest of days now are a hundred times brighter than the very very best of days before.

There’s no comparison. 2019 wins, every time.

Thank you for being a part of this journey. Some of you i’ve followed on here from my very early days on tumblr, some of you i’ve only met in the last few months, but all of you help to make my dash a brighter place and put a smile on my face. Tumblr has its faults, but it’s the site that changed my life.

Goodbye 2019. Goodbye 2010s. 2020, be good to me. Be good to all of us. 

Well, my take on mermaids: Seaweed Mermaids!

2009vs2019