I hope this isn’t odd to say, but comics where you’re getting along with your fursonas (the ‘it’s done’ comic with needle, dupes painting, Juno’s gender euphoria) are some of my absolute favorites. We all go through self hatred but it’s so much more rare to find the ones depicting self love, and you do it incredibly. Thanks Grey!
thank you. i’ve been recommended a handful of comics that are really kind of like... knee-jerk self-love? they are a reactionary performance of recovery solely to flex on people who openly hate themselves, with the most logical extreme being refusing to even acknowledge that self-loathing conceptually exists in the first place as if it’s like psychological poison to do so.
it’s hard, and i don’t really know if self-love is always the answer for everybody. many people successfully hate their anxiety or depression into submission and i dunno if just the mindset or the ativan is why they sleep better at night than i do. i do know that having a poor reaction to conceptual self-hatred is at least not abnormal for my specific disorder. there are many times where i have to think about engaging with a part of my brain that’s said or done a lot of hostile things to me and i have the option to consider whether i want to practice forgiveness or just say i’m the biggest, i’m the baddest, i feel best when i’m being a dick to somebody threatening me, and it must suck that the shoe’s on the other foot now!!! i thought forgiving or not forgiving were the only 2 options until recently, but i’ve realized that 1) the parts of my brain i’m dealing with very possibly already considered long-term consequences for whatever they did before even doing it, and 2) therefore, don’t see their actions or thoughts as a mistake. it might be on me for considering that i needed to forgive myself for the different ways i already exist. sometimes comics that show an attempt at self-love might also be rebuffed or “ruined” by the other half simply because practicing overt self-love can suddenly make one aware of how much you have never shown it before; nonetheless that’s also a part of the same process. like i said, it’s hard, it can be something you’re scared will be taken away as soon as you’re not having a good time anymore, or something you’ll fuck up practicing and it won’t work, or you’ll let yourself go off the rails and make too many mistakes if you don’t keep the collar tight, not to mention how strongly other people retaliate against that change in behavior and mindset when they see it (because you learned to hate yourself from SOMEWHERE). it’s been more prominent in the diary strips recently because i moved away to total no contact with any of my family and i’m just living with myself, my wife, and a roommate now. many of the behaviors and thoughts i have don’t have anything to bounce them back to me again now, so i’m finally feeling around for what kinds of things will improve my quality of life.
tl;dr: thank you, it’s a really hard skill to master and i don’t blame anybody who doesn’t want to approach their brain problems the way i do, either, but i’m happier trying to be kind and understanding as much as i can be the other stuff
