#reef-shork.post

This is also the pic where I put too much of myself on a character.

I really need to get back into traditional arting. It's fun.

For me, this is how it came to be.

Like my previous big text post, this was supposed to just be narration for a short comic, but it ended up as much more than that.

The inner story of how I accepted myself, and how I got my shork.

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I always had trouble falling asleep.

Always took more than 40 minutes.

Sometimes it took hours.

So I needed to find some way to fill that time.

Maybe to silence anxiety sometimes.

Tried forming a Mind Palace at some point.

Didn't really help my memory, but it was something to do. To slowly imagine and carve out some rooms, some decoration, retrace old sections.

A low effort thing to tire the mind.

But eventually they started moving in.

Little characters that I had drawn. They already lived rent-free in my head, so this seemed like a good place to put them.

Give them their own rooms, their own routines, their own interactions.

A good thought exercise to fall asleep and flesh out characters.

Even interacting with them sometimes. Vent, approach problems from different perspectives.

Even though I kind of always felt like an intruder in the little mind-space I had carved out for them. I didn't even have a room there.

But at some point I slipped.

She started out as a booze-fueled little post-it note sketch.

And slowly, before I knew it, I had put too much of myself on a character. I didn't even notice right away.

But I started to want to be her. Why shouldn't I? It's my mind-place after all.

Could I even be her?

Could I even be her?

I would sometimes traverse the place as her.

But it felt weird. Like I was committing some taboo.

Was replacing her with myself wrong?

So I made another little room. A small simple one. With a wall just simply being a mirror.

I would talk to her, as her.

I couldn't face her as myself.

Slowly throughout the weeks and months , I started accepting myself more as her. After all, I had put too much of myself into her. I was her.

Replacing her was never the problem.

It was admitting that I was her. A her.

And so, the me beyond the mirror did the only thing she could.

She broke it.

She reached past it.

I reached past it.

To comfort myself.

To hug myself.

And, in a shower of mirror shards, crying, both in my bed and in a small room in an imaginary corner of my mind, hugging myself as hard as I could,

You don't remember when you first felt it.

The first time you looked in the mirror and noticed that it hurt.

You didn't know what it was. And you didn't know what to do about it.

But it ached. Painfully so.

Time doesn't truly heal all wounds. Some you just need to live with. Years of aching dulls the pain, and everything else around it.

Power through it. Force a smile. Overcompensate with trying to grab as much happiness as you can. Maybe some day it'll go away.

Be happy, have friends. How can you complain.

There are people around you that love you. Life's pretty good. A little pain can't stop you. Sometimes you still notice it, but you can ignore it. You're mostly numb to it by now. There's a layer of numbness around it all, but it's fine.

You're fine.

You finally see them. Someone else had gone through the same. They healed it. It can be healed. It's hard, but it's an option.

But you bore it this long. You know you can keep going. There's no need to put yourself through that. You can live just fine. Your life is pretty good. You got your lemons, and you made your lemonade.

You're not fine.

It's hurting again. Making you notice it more and more. But still you bear it.

You're strong. Bearing it had become an easy, familiar path. Healing would be hard. An unknown road to an ideal destination you can't even really imagine.

You still bear it, but the pain is now bigger than the numbness.

You start making excuses.

This is the hand you were dealt, and you played pretty well. No need to risk ruining the game. It's been days, weeks, months, maybe years. The numbness rises, but so does the pain.

It hurts. It hurts so much. More than it ever did.

And eventually… it's too much.

You prepare yourself the best you can. It takes a while. Everything takes a while. Too many damn whiles. Too much damn waiting. And now that you've acknowledged the pain, it's worse than ever, and all you can do is wait.

Some people say you shouldn't heal yourself. It could be dangerous. There's unknowns. Will you even like where the road leads? A lot of people want to block that unknown road. But at this point, you don't care. You've grown so strong from the pain you went through that everything pales in comparison.

And suddenly the wait is over.

It was so easy. A couple of pills. Maybe a little patch. Maybe some cream. Maybe an injection. Barely an inconvenience.

And just from that, you start healing.

It no longer hurts when you look in the mirror. You instead notice the healing.

Little by little.

The numbness is gone. You no longer need to overact your joy. You feel it.

Bit by bit.

The numbness is gone. Not all emotions are joy, but it feels good to feel them. Turns out you missed them.

Piece by piece.

You look in the mirror.

And you're… you.

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This started out by being a couple of lines for a short comic. A metaphor of dysphoria as a wound.

Instead, it turns out there was a lot I needed to vent out. So I did.

It's messy and takes maybe a few too many tangents, but it's just what I needed to say at the time.

...and decided it needed a part 2

...and decided it needed sound