2025 - The Year Of Teeth
Jan. 9th, 2025 01:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
critters_system[🕸️ Hey y'all, it's Silk here. So, we kinda intended for this to be a little more polished when we (/I) started writing this a few days ago. Plus, we kinda wanted to make this that first big attempt at adding something to our webpage too... But to be honest, we kinda slacked around on it a bit too long and now I just wanna get this out. Thanks for reading, if you do~]
So, with the new year just happening, we've been thinking about how we wanna do things going forwards. We're not gonna lie, 2024 was a rough time for us. Between some notable dysphoria episodes, the loss of one of our cats back in April, burnout related to the last month-ish of the classes we were taking, and then the major breakdown that basically lasted from mid-August to mid-late December (Including but not limited to: A major scare regarding one of our other cats that lasted a long time, the Cohost shutdown with all that entailed, close family significant health issues, and some personal identity realizations on our part among others), we basically spent last year in a cycle of barely processing one thing before the next happened. Things are fortunately better now, and we've had the chance to actually sit and think and recover. We have our plushie legs back under us, and we're ready to take a step or two again.
Which got us thinking about how to walk forwards. At which point we started thinking about themes.
Themes are something we got introduced to through some other cool creatures on this here interweb. The idea is kinda a variation on a resolution, but broader. Slightly more diffuse. More of a direction. Those creatures we linked to described it way better than we have the fluff to think right now, but basically, it's like setting a specific area you want to improve on without necessarily making it that concrete.
In our case, two different concepts came up as wants to focus on: Stability and Confidence. Two relatively gay-forward ideas, but still two ideas we find lacking in ourselves, and valuable goals to prioritize right now. So, of course, we immediately got way too clever with things.
The Year Of Teeth
Teeth are pretty cool, all things considered. Not only are they the bones in our body least likely to set off (Or be a subject of) our BIID, but they do things like make it easier to enjoy food when in the vibe for that. And we're pretty sure that though the number of monsters/monsterfuckers in here might be biasing us, a mouthful of sharp fangs? Pretty dang gender. That all said, teeth are also notorious for their care requirements, as we're sure you're all plenty familiar with. So, considering they're both tools for completing daily needs (With daily requirements of their own), as well as such notable signifiers? We couldn't resist it.
Yes, we might have half-jokingly thrown around the "Year of Teeth" idea before properly thinking out the two main themes. It's just cool, and if you don't like it, you can kiss our big fluffy tail. For practicality's sake we're focusing on the two mentioned themes above, but this is what we're naming the year.
So, what sorts of things do we want to focus on with these themes? Well, to summarize in our usual wordy way:
The Molars - Stability
In order to grow the self-confidence we want, we're gonna need to improve our personal stability. The foundation of our daily life needs to be there first, and there's several spots we want to shore up as the year goes on. And, to be fair, everything here is circular. This'll require fighting against old habits and executive function the entire way, but as we build habits, it becomes easier to build confidence in ourselves and those habits, which makes keeping to them hopefully easier, and so on.
Order in our daily life: Living is messy, and we have our ways of managing. This is more about sorting out what we do, and where we do it. Maintain some sort of exercise routine. Get better at setting daily goals and keeping to them. Clean up and organize some of the spots in our living area filled with years of messes. Get some of that stuff in order. Find some sort of employment soon, hopefully with a stable enough income to help us do stuff.
Keep up with health: Despite our annoyances with it, since we can't exactly leave, our hope is to keep our body going for a good long time to come. This'll require us taking a little better care of it than we have. Between building some better daily habits (Exercise, a more varied diet), and getting some long-term issues we've been experiencing looked at and possibly helped (Sleep issues, suspected ADHD), hopefully it'll make the daily life easier for us.
The Fangs - Confidence
Our brain has a nasty habit of lying to us. A habit we noticed got especially brazen during our mental health breakdowns the last year, and are less and less interested in keeping to. Listening to our fears of speaking out, of embodying ourselves (At least as far as a bunch of varied animals in a human-passing body are capable of)... Nothing good has come of that. We could, should, and can be louder.
Communication: We have a bit of a "Close ourselves off to everyone" problem. Some of that is old strategies to avoid unwanted stimuli or emotional turmoil, some of that is words having a tendency to leave (How much easier wouldn't this social thing be if we could just bump into or cuddle with other entities as a form of communication!), some of that is plain "Haven't quite practiced the social muscles and executive function is keeping us from starting" stuff. We yearn for better, and we want to do better. Talk with friends we're struggling to keep up with. Maintain a healthy social circle that's less parasocial than what we're doing right now. All the works. Get used to using our words.
Expression: This part kinda sucks for one reason in particular: All of us have different desires for how we want to express ourselves, and by extension our body. What makes one of us highly euphoric makes someone else dysphoric. Some of us (Cough cough hi Beryl, Nidhogg, and Luna) are at the point where they've gotten a good sense of their style with the possibility for modifying their outfits. The rest of us want to get there too, and we want to find ways to modify our body that work for all of us. Change our hairstyle and hair color possibly. Get some piercings, maybe some tattoos. Be comfortable with being visibly weirder, as long as safely possible of course.
Creativity: While we're gonna focus less on this for time related reasons (Everything else on this list is way more important for now), we're gonna keep up throwing out our weird creature-brained ramblings and drawings when we can. More short stories. *Weirder* short stories. Do some consistent work, and get a larger project we've got brewing towards a finished state. Get everyone in here their fursona on (Computer-based) paper. Communicate and express.
The Incisors - That Fucking Problem
And here comes what's become the closest to a classic resolution for us this year.
To those that follow us on either the Fediverse or the Website League, you may have noticed a long post we threw out the other day, about an at-the-time unnamed dysphoria-inducing problem. And, to be open, having that moment of intense dysphoria was the turning point that brought this entire theme/s from an idea we had bouncing around to something concrete. And it gets its own category because it is rooted in both stability and confidence, a spiral between both that, somewhat poetically, has become an expensive and significant problem explicitly because the younger us failed at what we're looking to improve. Even now, the idea of talking about it is somewhat discomforting, but it's like we've said above. Things won't get better if we don't talk about them.
Basically, we're looking at ways to solve/alleviate our hair loss problem.
To be fair, we've been relatively fortunate in regards to this compared to how bad it could be. Although there's been notable thinning along most of the top of our head, as long as our hair is clean, most of that can be easily obscured with all we still have (To the point that, depending on the angle, it's hard at times to even see loss has happened. We're deeply thankful about that). Our hairline also made it through the years without HRT reasonably well; It's somewhat high, and measurably higher than before the loss started, but it's still within what we'd describe as "High hairline (Feminine)" rather than explicitly masculine, to the point where if it doesn't recede any more it'll honestly just read as pretty natural in a few years, and as a result something we don't feel a drive to focus on. No, the spot in question is on our crown.
We lost hair there fairly early; Noticing the bald spot when we were 20 was also the trigger for us realizing we weren't cis. It then hit us like a tidal wave of dysphoria and intense body loathing. While seeing the spot *usually* doesn't have that effect on us, it still often leads to several days of strong dysphoria, with intensity generally somewhat random (Slightly variable depending on mental health, state of the body, etc.). For the most part, we can manage-ish through those episodes, albeit not happily and with a significant increase in our tendencies to withdraw away from others.
As we realized the other day, as we were going through another episode, we cannot rely on "Oh, most of them are usually endurable" forever. There's always the risk that we're set off when already in the middle of a major depressive episode, and that things become exponentially worse. None of us want to see what might happen then. Besides, even outside of the worst case situation, it's also a close enough to constant drain on our mental health/stability to notably decrease our ability to do other things.
So, we've started looking into ways to fix it. Fortunately the most sensitive area is... Well, for "Trying to look directly at it *would* immediately trigger another episode" reasons, we don't know exactly how large it is, but our current estimates are between the size of the hole in a toilet roll and the palm of our hand. Notable, but not unfixable. There is a place over in Sweden that does this stuff a lot, and from what we've seen and heard, they should be reliable about this. Depending on how the procedure goes, the recovery period is gonna either be somewhat uncomfortable or very uncomfortable and dysphoric, but we're talking "A year-ish of discomfort and then the worst of it should be permanently done" versus "A lifetime of wearing an emotional time bomb that has us terrified of having photos taken from behind". The math, at least to us, checks out.
This is gonna be expensive. We are in a fortunate living situation right now, so if we're fortunate to get a job close enough to here, we can stick around for a while longer and save a solid amount of what would otherwise be rent money towards paying for this. If things change, we're gonna have to make some other calls about the situation, but to be honest? With a bit of luck, we should hopefully be close enough by the end of the year to start making plans, if not better.
(And just to be clear: Yes, there are a hundred ways to do this thing that are less expensive or with generally less of a recovery period. Plus, it's perfectly fine to have hair loss- It's a part of our endocrine system. There's so many creatures, entities, and people out there of all genders who rock the hairn't. This is 100% because we're by now pretty confident that we're not one of them, and our brain doesn't want to consider anything less as a long-term solution. It's even kinda funny, the way we discussed internally the idea of using wigs to cover it and our brain just went "Yeah no, not gonna work. Many many cool people out there who absolutely rock doing that, but not gonna work here". So yeah. It's a little annoying that we don't seem to have a reasonable solution that's less impactful, but we also can't overstate how good it feels to go "We can fix this". This has been a drain on our mental health for well over half a decade now. We hope to stick around for at least another 50-ish years. If this can help alleviate that pain, it'll be worth it in the long run. And hey; if we find another way to cope before going through with this? Then we'll have a decent pile of saved-up money to use on something else! This feels right for us, and that's why we're going for it. We don't want the idea of someone taking a photo of us from behind to fill us with dread any longer.)
We don't know how this is gonna go. Neither the themes, nor our big goal. But we need to try. We might actually be able to say we're happier with who we are at the end of this year. Worst case, we're still us, and there's way worse things to be. Here's to the teeth.
So, with the new year just happening, we've been thinking about how we wanna do things going forwards. We're not gonna lie, 2024 was a rough time for us. Between some notable dysphoria episodes, the loss of one of our cats back in April, burnout related to the last month-ish of the classes we were taking, and then the major breakdown that basically lasted from mid-August to mid-late December (Including but not limited to: A major scare regarding one of our other cats that lasted a long time, the Cohost shutdown with all that entailed, close family significant health issues, and some personal identity realizations on our part among others), we basically spent last year in a cycle of barely processing one thing before the next happened. Things are fortunately better now, and we've had the chance to actually sit and think and recover. We have our plushie legs back under us, and we're ready to take a step or two again.
Which got us thinking about how to walk forwards. At which point we started thinking about themes.
Themes are something we got introduced to through some other cool creatures on this here interweb. The idea is kinda a variation on a resolution, but broader. Slightly more diffuse. More of a direction. Those creatures we linked to described it way better than we have the fluff to think right now, but basically, it's like setting a specific area you want to improve on without necessarily making it that concrete.
In our case, two different concepts came up as wants to focus on: Stability and Confidence. Two relatively gay-forward ideas, but still two ideas we find lacking in ourselves, and valuable goals to prioritize right now. So, of course, we immediately got way too clever with things.
The Year Of Teeth
Teeth are pretty cool, all things considered. Not only are they the bones in our body least likely to set off (Or be a subject of) our BIID, but they do things like make it easier to enjoy food when in the vibe for that. And we're pretty sure that though the number of monsters/monsterfuckers in here might be biasing us, a mouthful of sharp fangs? Pretty dang gender. That all said, teeth are also notorious for their care requirements, as we're sure you're all plenty familiar with. So, considering they're both tools for completing daily needs (With daily requirements of their own), as well as such notable signifiers? We couldn't resist it.
The Molars - Stability
In order to grow the self-confidence we want, we're gonna need to improve our personal stability. The foundation of our daily life needs to be there first, and there's several spots we want to shore up as the year goes on. And, to be fair, everything here is circular. This'll require fighting against old habits and executive function the entire way, but as we build habits, it becomes easier to build confidence in ourselves and those habits, which makes keeping to them hopefully easier, and so on.
Order in our daily life: Living is messy, and we have our ways of managing. This is more about sorting out what we do, and where we do it. Maintain some sort of exercise routine. Get better at setting daily goals and keeping to them. Clean up and organize some of the spots in our living area filled with years of messes. Get some of that stuff in order. Find some sort of employment soon, hopefully with a stable enough income to help us do stuff.
Keep up with health: Despite our annoyances with it, since we can't exactly leave, our hope is to keep our body going for a good long time to come. This'll require us taking a little better care of it than we have. Between building some better daily habits (Exercise, a more varied diet), and getting some long-term issues we've been experiencing looked at and possibly helped (Sleep issues, suspected ADHD), hopefully it'll make the daily life easier for us.
The Fangs - Confidence
Our brain has a nasty habit of lying to us. A habit we noticed got especially brazen during our mental health breakdowns the last year, and are less and less interested in keeping to. Listening to our fears of speaking out, of embodying ourselves (At least as far as a bunch of varied animals in a human-passing body are capable of)... Nothing good has come of that. We could, should, and can be louder.
Communication: We have a bit of a "Close ourselves off to everyone" problem. Some of that is old strategies to avoid unwanted stimuli or emotional turmoil, some of that is words having a tendency to leave (How much easier wouldn't this social thing be if we could just bump into or cuddle with other entities as a form of communication!), some of that is plain "Haven't quite practiced the social muscles and executive function is keeping us from starting" stuff. We yearn for better, and we want to do better. Talk with friends we're struggling to keep up with. Maintain a healthy social circle that's less parasocial than what we're doing right now. All the works. Get used to using our words.
Expression: This part kinda sucks for one reason in particular: All of us have different desires for how we want to express ourselves, and by extension our body. What makes one of us highly euphoric makes someone else dysphoric. Some of us (Cough cough hi Beryl, Nidhogg, and Luna) are at the point where they've gotten a good sense of their style with the possibility for modifying their outfits. The rest of us want to get there too, and we want to find ways to modify our body that work for all of us. Change our hairstyle and hair color possibly. Get some piercings, maybe some tattoos. Be comfortable with being visibly weirder, as long as safely possible of course.
Creativity: While we're gonna focus less on this for time related reasons (Everything else on this list is way more important for now), we're gonna keep up throwing out our weird creature-brained ramblings and drawings when we can. More short stories. *Weirder* short stories. Do some consistent work, and get a larger project we've got brewing towards a finished state. Get everyone in here their fursona on (Computer-based) paper. Communicate and express.
The Incisors - That Fucking Problem
And here comes what's become the closest to a classic resolution for us this year.
To those that follow us on either the Fediverse or the Website League, you may have noticed a long post we threw out the other day, about an at-the-time unnamed dysphoria-inducing problem. And, to be open, having that moment of intense dysphoria was the turning point that brought this entire theme/s from an idea we had bouncing around to something concrete. And it gets its own category because it is rooted in both stability and confidence, a spiral between both that, somewhat poetically, has become an expensive and significant problem explicitly because the younger us failed at what we're looking to improve. Even now, the idea of talking about it is somewhat discomforting, but it's like we've said above. Things won't get better if we don't talk about them.
Basically, we're looking at ways to solve/alleviate our hair loss problem.
To be fair, we've been relatively fortunate in regards to this compared to how bad it could be. Although there's been notable thinning along most of the top of our head, as long as our hair is clean, most of that can be easily obscured with all we still have (To the point that, depending on the angle, it's hard at times to even see loss has happened. We're deeply thankful about that). Our hairline also made it through the years without HRT reasonably well; It's somewhat high, and measurably higher than before the loss started, but it's still within what we'd describe as "High hairline (Feminine)" rather than explicitly masculine, to the point where if it doesn't recede any more it'll honestly just read as pretty natural in a few years, and as a result something we don't feel a drive to focus on. No, the spot in question is on our crown.
We lost hair there fairly early; Noticing the bald spot when we were 20 was also the trigger for us realizing we weren't cis. It then hit us like a tidal wave of dysphoria and intense body loathing. While seeing the spot *usually* doesn't have that effect on us, it still often leads to several days of strong dysphoria, with intensity generally somewhat random (Slightly variable depending on mental health, state of the body, etc.). For the most part, we can manage-ish through those episodes, albeit not happily and with a significant increase in our tendencies to withdraw away from others.
As we realized the other day, as we were going through another episode, we cannot rely on "Oh, most of them are usually endurable" forever. There's always the risk that we're set off when already in the middle of a major depressive episode, and that things become exponentially worse. None of us want to see what might happen then. Besides, even outside of the worst case situation, it's also a close enough to constant drain on our mental health/stability to notably decrease our ability to do other things.
So, we've started looking into ways to fix it. Fortunately the most sensitive area is... Well, for "Trying to look directly at it *would* immediately trigger another episode" reasons, we don't know exactly how large it is, but our current estimates are between the size of the hole in a toilet roll and the palm of our hand. Notable, but not unfixable. There is a place over in Sweden that does this stuff a lot, and from what we've seen and heard, they should be reliable about this. Depending on how the procedure goes, the recovery period is gonna either be somewhat uncomfortable or very uncomfortable and dysphoric, but we're talking "A year-ish of discomfort and then the worst of it should be permanently done" versus "A lifetime of wearing an emotional time bomb that has us terrified of having photos taken from behind". The math, at least to us, checks out.
This is gonna be expensive. We are in a fortunate living situation right now, so if we're fortunate to get a job close enough to here, we can stick around for a while longer and save a solid amount of what would otherwise be rent money towards paying for this. If things change, we're gonna have to make some other calls about the situation, but to be honest? With a bit of luck, we should hopefully be close enough by the end of the year to start making plans, if not better.
(And just to be clear: Yes, there are a hundred ways to do this thing that are less expensive or with generally less of a recovery period. Plus, it's perfectly fine to have hair loss- It's a part of our endocrine system. There's so many creatures, entities, and people out there of all genders who rock the hairn't. This is 100% because we're by now pretty confident that we're not one of them, and our brain doesn't want to consider anything less as a long-term solution. It's even kinda funny, the way we discussed internally the idea of using wigs to cover it and our brain just went "Yeah no, not gonna work. Many many cool people out there who absolutely rock doing that, but not gonna work here". So yeah. It's a little annoying that we don't seem to have a reasonable solution that's less impactful, but we also can't overstate how good it feels to go "We can fix this". This has been a drain on our mental health for well over half a decade now. We hope to stick around for at least another 50-ish years. If this can help alleviate that pain, it'll be worth it in the long run. And hey; if we find another way to cope before going through with this? Then we'll have a decent pile of saved-up money to use on something else! This feels right for us, and that's why we're going for it. We don't want the idea of someone taking a photo of us from behind to fill us with dread any longer.)
We don't know how this is gonna go. Neither the themes, nor our big goal. But we need to try. We might actually be able to say we're happier with who we are at the end of this year. Worst case, we're still us, and there's way worse things to be. Here's to the teeth.
