hmmm. this is hard because, up front, i have never been in a seven year relationship, or anything approaching a seven year relationship. so please understand that i am speaking from that perspective.

my advice is: you are a new person now than you were when you entered into that relationship. the person you are now is informed by that old person, but isn’t that person. so don’t hold yourself responsible for that person’s decisions.

at the same time, sit with that feeling. what feels weird about it? why? figure it out before taking any steps. something i’m working on with my therapist is letting myself feel bad and weird things. usually my instinct is to be like, “oh! that’s a bad and weird feeling! gotta shut that down RIGHT now.” but something she’s said, which has been really helpful to me and might be really helpful to you, is to say, “okay. here is this bad and weird feeling. let me sit with it and figure out why it’s here and what it’s about and why, and then decide what to do about it.”

so i think in this case, it might be useful for you to just kind of sit with your feeling of weirdness and figure out where it’s coming from. are you anxious because you worry it might be too soon? are you hesitant because you see things in this potential new relationship that echoe things that hurt you in your old relationship? are you holding back because you are a human person who has made mistakes and you worry you will make new mistakes?

Yup! Well, my friend made two of them, but she’s on Etsy anyway. Her shop is DreamsofYore, but I think she’s got it set to vacation mode right now while she moves. The third is from idiorhythmic, also on Etsy. The major draw for all three of them is that they stand up, imo. Stops me from spilling all my dice everywhere!

holy SWEET MOTHER OF A TINY HERD OF ELEPHANTS!! i want to sit you down and buy you an age-appropriate drink. or like several age-appropriate drinks. 400 miles!!!!! 400!!!! i would drive 400 miles and i would drive 400 miles just to be the one who drove 800 miles to vote right at your door!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i’m completely blown away by your dedication and determination to make your voice heard, holy shit. you’re an american hero, buddy. i say that with absolutely no sarcasm at all. you are for real an american hero.

so something that you have to understand about my mom is that she loves animals. like you know that girl in your middle school that was like I FCUKIN LOVE HORSES *___*!!!! and always interrupted every conversation with some Cat Facts? that’s my mom. my mom feeds wild deer, which—as anyone who lives in the country will tell you—is a TERRIBLE IDEA, BECAUSE DEER, WHILE BEAUTIFUL, ARE ESSENTIALLY TALL RODENTS. my mother feeds geese. i shit you not, we have a pack of geese that live on our farm.

as like. pets.

when my parents went away for christmas, i stayed home to look after things, and my stepdad was like, DON’T FORGET TO FEED THE GEESE! he wrote it down. so i wouldn’t forget.

"geese are wild animals," i said.

"THEY’LL STARVE, THOSE LITTLE ANGELS."

"they won’t. they’re wild geese."

"IF WE COME BACK AND ELVIS IS DEAD, SO HELP ME GOD."

elvis is the goose whose all white except for a strip of black on the crown of his head.

get it? get it? elvis?

life on the farm is weird and has gone a long way toward preparing me for the weirdness that is adult life.

ANYWAY, the point of all this is that the year i lived abroad, my parents had no one in the country who could talk sense into them, saying things like, “domestic animals are for cuddling, and wild animals aren’t pets because they are wild animals,” so my mother adopted a wild boar.

here are some fun facts about wild boar:

they are a problem, environmentally, because some asshole brought them over without THINKING about why america maybe DIDN’T HAVE WILD BOAR and why just introducing them WILLY-NILLY might be a PROBLEM for an ENVIRONMENT THAT WAS NOT EQUIPPED. FOR WILD BOAR.

they will kill you.

wild boar will kill you.

they don’t give a shit about the family you have to feed, they will kill you until you are dead.

They can smell people. “We are predators. We smell like a predator in the food chain,” Loftus said. That doesn’t mean they won’t turn and fight, especially to protect piglets.

“They’re mean. They’re aggressive. They’ll charge you. They’ll cut you or stab you with their teeth. They have big tusks, or cutters, as we call them,” Loftus said.

Wild pigs can rip open the femoral artery in a person’s leg, causing massive bleeding. (x)

in wild boars’ defense, i would also probably attack something that i viewed as a threat to me & mine. in my defense, this is my home?? it’s like you broke into my home and then killed me for being in it because you feel you should have the right to sit on the couch whenever, even though i don’t even know you and didn’t invite you here???

we literally had like “wild boar drills” on the farm where my mom would shout BOAR! WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN YOU SEE A BOAR? and i would snap to attention and shout CLIMB A TREE! CLIMB A FENCE! BOARS CAN OUTRUN YOU BUT THEY CAN’T CLIMB BECAUSE OF THEIR HOOVES, A-HA!! NOT TODAY, BOAR!!

i have this vague but uncomfirmed memory of my mother telling me that once she was out in the paddock with some of the horses and saw a boar and got scared so she climbed a tree but then the boar didn’t go anywhere so she had to call my stepdad to come get her in the tractor.

if you’re like “why the SHIT would your mom adopt a wild boar” after reading all that, you are asking the RIGHT QUESTIONS!

the answer is: my mom’s old, retired curmudgeonly showhorse, herb, who loves nothing and no one in this WHOLE WORLD, found a wild piglet while he was turned out one day. and when my mother went to bring him back to the barn he looked at her and said with his sad horse eyes, “this is my pig. i found it. it’s good. it’s little, and ugly, but still good.”

my mom: herbie, no. 

herbie: listen lady, i carried u on my back 4 like a smooth half-decade, and you are going to deny me this??? this baby is my new best friend and i love nothing in this world except this baby.

my mom: ……A BABY?? YOU DIDN’T SAY IT WAS A BABY???? I AM GOING TO CARE FOR THIS BABY LIKE IT IS MY OWN CHILD. NOTHING ELSE MATTERS NOW.

"HEY GUYS!!!!!!!!!! I AM GOING TO EAT FUCKIN EVERYTHING!!!!!!!!!!!”

they named the pig charlotte, nickname “yum yum” (we are not subtle people) because she was a fuckin’ lady. lookit that snout. lookit those eyes. she’s unimpressed by your outfit and thinks you chose the wrong perfume for the ~mood of the occasion. 

charlotte slept in the stall with herbie, ate with herbie, and generally made a nuisance of herself:

"omg guys i came out to have a good time and i am feeling SO paparazzi’d right now."

"you know what i wanna do right now?"

what?

"STRUT."

"excuse u did i say u could touch me, paltry human?"

anyway, it was all a big happy family until charlotte grew up a little and started having ~sexual urges~ and becoming territorial (wild boar live in a matriarchal society where the females are the aggressive ones because wild boars think males are garbage) and disappearing for days at a time.

then one day my mom and stepdad were cleaning stalls and charlotte decided that she’d had just about eNOUGH of being a SECOND-CLASS CITIZEN in this unjust patriarchal human society, and started charging them, so they had to hide in the stalls while she patrolled the barn. it took them like… four hours before they could escape.

literally nobody was surprised at this turn of events.

"i mean i guess we should have seen this coming," said my stepdad. "she is, after all, a wild boar," agreed my mom."DID I SAY THE PRISONERS COULD SPEAK???" shouted Prison Guard Charlotte, snuffling and shaking her snout at them. "SEVEN POINTS FROM GRYFFINDOR."

the thrilling conclusion of this story is: DOMESTIC ANIMALS ARE FOR CUDDLING, AND WILD ANIMALS AREN’T PETS BECAUSE THEY ARE WILD ANIMALS.

sounds like a fun movie that you have never seen before…. not once… ever…