Wolf comic chapter 2: wolf is exploring the forest when it starts to snow. The snow comes heavy and white and soon covers the whole forest as they get lost. They don’t know where they are and feel scared and alone. They start to cry and howl from sadness, and the crows hear and come fly to them. The crows lead them to the wires and the wolf can follow the wires back to the temple. As they walk the crows tell them whenever they feel isolated or have lost their way, they can always call out for help because they are not alone.

Wolf comic chapter 3: wolf finds theiy way back to the star temple. the crows tell them that the stars give the wolf the ability to calm any storm by understanding it. The star temple reflects the fear of being lost alone in the dark, and the wolf shapes it into a tiny star which floats into a constellation reflecting the lesson learned to reach out for help when you feel lost.

Wolf comic chapter 4: The crows tell the wolf that they can not only turn storms into friends, but they can use their own stardust to create new characters too. Their stardust is the same as what makes up the storms, and it can be drawn from to breathe life into new creations. The wolf creates a new character who initially is a mirror of them, learning that all new creations start as a reflection until they’re further shaped.

An earthquake hits and the ground buckles and splits.

Well, mom told me she and dad are getting a divorce. Dad has been living downstairs for a while so I am not that surprised, but I’m still sad that now it’s official. Not much will change for right now, but eventually we will move to a new house and dad will keep the old one. When that happens we will visit him on the weekends and spend the rest of the week with mom at the new house. I am excited to live in a new house, but I feel bad for dad.

My middle school graduation is coming up, and I have to admit that I’m really scared about going to high school. This means college is only 4 years away now, and I’m one step closer to having to figure out what I want to do for the rest of my life. That’s not enough time to decide what I want to grow up to be, and what if I don’t even want to pick something in the first place?!?! I had a meltdown today and cried with mom because it’s just too much pressure. It’s not fair, I shouldn’t have to have a midlife crisis at the age of 13!

I wish I could just receive my letter to Hogwarts, or discover that I’m a shapeshifter that can turn into animals, or that I can airbend like Aang from Avatar, or find out that I’m a demigod and go to camp Halfblood and learn to use my powers. It feels like the fictional world in my mind is where I’m supposed to live; not here. With reality and politics and boring adult office jobs. I want to go live in the woods and do magic and have animal friends!

The stress has been getting to me I’ve been feeling kinda braindead lately in terms of my creativity. Between benchmarks, finals, math tutoring, meetings about IEP and 504 plans for my ADHD, and my usual assortment of homework and after school activities, I’m at a total loss for muse in my roleplays. Hopefully things will look up…..eventually…..but yeah. I haven’t been as active online as I used to be.

I’m slowly working on a drawing in Microsoft Paint of all my current rp charries, since there is a big battle coming up and I plan to kill off a lot of them since I haven’t been able to keep up with them all recently. I will keep Matsi active though because she was one of the first characters I made on Neopets, and it feels like she’s more of a representation of me than the others.

Wolf comic chapter 5: The wolf communes with the earth and learns that this is due to the fear and unrest of the world changing as they transition from childhood into teenage years. Change is a natural part of life and nothing lasts forever- you have to appreciate the present while it’s here and be prepared to accept whatever the future brings. The earthquake subsides and the wolf returns to the star temple and their mirror character. They give him the ability to shapeshift, letting him change into a new form to adapt as the world changes around him.

ZOMG OKAY! SO….Halloween was coming up and I was thinking about what to go as (I SHALL DRESS UP AND SCARE CHILDREN UNTIL I CAN PHYSICALLY DO SO NO LONGER!!!!!!) and my friend and I were talking about Death Note and I decided I wanted to be Light, but it’d be kind of…..hard to pull off. ‘Cause I’m definitely a GIRL. >.>

But THEN I remembered a conversation I had with ANOTHER friend about how we’re not REALLY girly girls and feel more like guys anyway, and I thought “To HELL with the fact that I’m a girl. I’m gonna be an effin’ GUY for Halloween!!!!” >8D

So I proceeded to completely ignore my homework and instead made a compression….bra….thing so that I can wear normal shirts and my….chest…..area would look flat enough to pass for a male’s. MWAHAHAHA!!! Go me. ^^

But a few days later, mom started practically INTERROGATNG me, like “Honey, I want to talk to you about how you feel more comfortable in boy’s clothing. I just want to say that whatever you decide to do in life, I fully support you. Some people feel like they weren’t born into the right bodies, and feel more at home as the opposite gender.” And by this point I’m already embarrassed like “OMG is this The Talk?!??” And she continues “Is this something you’ve seen in yourself and felt for a while now? Do you think that you would rather be a boy? Do you have any preferences in what gender you like?”

So I’m here like, trying to get a word in edgewise ’cause this is super awkward and end up saying “no, not really” and ending that conversation as fast as possible. XD

But in all seriousness, I really have no idea what my orientation is. I think I’d be fine with almost anything, as long as people don’t discriminate. For now, I just think I’m a straight girl but if I were a guy I’d be bi. I DID take one of those “which gender are you” journal quizzes and scored 4 on the girl list and 18 on the guy list, so maybe that means when I turn 18 I’ll become a man LOLOLOL XD

*turns into a man and flies away before remembering I can’t fly* *falls and crashes into the ground* I’M OKAY!!!!!

Oh also, I’m going to be visiting dad this weekend so I won’t have any computer access until Sunday night when I get back. Dad is dating a new lady named Evelyn so we go over to her house to visit for the weekend, but I don’t feel particularly close to him anymore and honestly don’t really care to have anything to do with him or his new life. She lives an hour away, too, so we have to spend a lot of that time just traveling, and then they go to bed at like 8pm so there isn’t even that much opportunity to visit with them in the first place. Having to go over there takes away from my own life and I can never get any homework or anything done on those weekends, so I’m not looking forward to it.

Wolf comic chapter 6: the wolf asks if there will be any more storms, and the crows say that there will always be storms and forces of nature threatening this place. It’s part of the nature of life. The crows teach the wolf how to craft entire worlds for characters to inhabit, building their story through connections with others. A cloud of smoke arises from a volcano on the horizon.

Vent art to go with a vent post, I guess. I was listening to a sad song on repeat the whole time I was drawing this.

So, my mood swings seem to be getting worse. I used to just think it was my old ADHD acting up, but I realized that my random depressed episodes happen when I’m stressed, not just when I’m sad about something small or stupid. When I’m under pressure and have a lot of work to do and I don’t have enough time to finish it (because I procrastinated…again…) then it feels unbearable and I get sulky and emo-ish.

Like last night, I was talking with one of my friends on MSN when it suddenly hit me how much I HADN’T gotten done that weekend because I was at dad’s house the whole time, and I got all stressed because I realized how much work was left to do and it was already getting late. I said that I had to go because I was suddenly in a bad mood, so I left my laptop and tried to focus on starting homework.

It took a long time to get started but I finally managed to finish one assignment, so I checked back online and saw that my friends were talking in the group chatbox but no one had messaged me to ask if I was ok or what was wrong. The only message was my friend’s reply that just said “ok hope you feel better” but no follow-up or anything. Between the impossible amount of homework I still had left to do, how late it already was, and the fact that my friends didn’t seem to notice or care that I wasn’t ok, I ended up playing with my pocket knife and seriously considered hurting myself. I came really close to actually cutting my wrists (it’s never gone that far before,) but suddenly snapped out of it because I was scared by how close I had come to actually doing it.

I don’t know why I react so strongly when I see my friends talking with each other but not me. I KNOW it’s self-centered to be jealous of them but it still hurts when it happens, and then inevitably my mood crashes and I end up lashing out. God I hate this. It’s too much for me and I feel like a shitty person but I don’t know what to do. I’m not ok.

Wolf comic chapter 7: The volcano on the horizon explodes and covers the sky with smoke. The crows tell the wolf they should go face it before it can do too much damage, even though it seems far away. The wolf says they don’t want to deal with more storms, they just want to stay here and create. The crows tell them that they’re intertwined: creating can help navigate the storms, and the storms can provide inspiration to create, but the storms can also stand in the way of being able to create more if the storms do too much damage. The wolf takes off towards the fire.

This is the first time that I’ll have a character that’s a HOOMAN so I’ve got to actually start practicing how to draw them so that he looks good. >.> At least I know how to draw canines, so his fox form won’t be an issue. Thank goodness for younger-me’s obsession with wolves or I would never have gotten into drawing them for the past few years!!! But so far my attempts to draw people have all looked ugly, so this will be good practice to learn how to draw people who look actually halfway decent. HE’S SUPPOSED TO LOOK HOT, DAMMIT!!!

Speaking of drawing, I’m taking AP computer graphics class this year! I already know how to use Photoshop so it’s really easy for me, but I’m getting some good experience with other types of graphic design, and this class also counts towards my college credits. It’s too soon to be thinking about college anyway, but if I do attend art school this will at least be one less class that I have to take and pay for. I’m also taking a forensics class this year that I really like, so maybe if art doesn’t work out I’ll go into crimonology and help solve crimes like on those forensics shows? There’s an AP forensics class that I can take next year so I can get some more college credit from that, too.

In other news, I’d forgotten that during computer graphics class today we were going to be taking pictures of ourselves for a new project we’re working on. Something along the lines of drawing over ourselves and putting us in a hand drawn setting. So…I’m realizing that we’re taking these pictures today and I haven’t decided what I want to make my project about. So I really quickly settled on a pose with crossed arms, leaning back slightly. My initial idea was that I’d duplicate the same picture and flip it horizontally so that it looked like I was leaning against myself, and then turn the other picture into a photoshopped version of Alex looking cool. I think it’s going to look really awesome so I can’t wait to start working on it in class tomorrow!

Wolf comic chapter 7: the wolf runs through the forest towards the volcano, racing through burning trees and thick smoke as the trees start to catch fire around them. They reach the heart of the forest fire and lava flow, where it’s so white-hot that they are consumed in the heart of the storm.

Lately I haven’t felt like myself, and I think I might take a hiatus for a little while. I’m really stressed out, my life at the moment is messed up, I’m messed up, and it’s too much for me to handle. I know I’ve been really whiny and ranting lately and I bet everyone’s tired of hearing me complain.

I’ve come to realize something. The world is a bitter place, and even if things are going your way now they’re going to eventually equal out with something bad. Optimism is just lying to yourself to be happy by not considering what bad things might happen tomorrow. Everything in my life was going really well earlier this week and I felt on top of the world, but in the span of a day it’s all gone to hell. I’m so god damn tired of the ups and downs.

We went to portfolio day at the art institute on Friday because I was thinking about applying next year, but everyone else’s work was so much better than mine that I know I don’t have a chance to get in. I ended up so embarrassed showing my portfolio because everyone else had  charcoal figure sketches and life studies and full sketchbooks that looked so professional, meanwhile I just have laminated printouts of my crappy wolves and what barely passes for human characters. I realized how stupid I was for thinking I had a chance pretty quickly, but unfortunately I still had to go through the humiliation of showing my work to the reviewer. It’s obvious that I’m not good enough compared to the other artwork I saw, and the person reviewing my portfolio said I had potential but I know that’s just them being polite. I don’t want to apply to go there anymore, or even any other art schools, because I clearly don’t have what it takes to be a professional artist. It’s probably for the best because art degrees are apparently a joke anyway.

On the way home mom asked me how it went and I shut down because I didn’t want to talk about it. She kept pressing me and I knew she was just trying to be encouraging but it got me in a bad mood anyway. I hate that it affected me so much and ruined the whole rest of the day.

Then later that night she and my brother got into yet ANOTHER fight over nothing. I can’t stand to hear them fighting and it stresses me out so much whenever they do, which is pretty much every day. She’s so patient and tries to listen but he just walks all over her and she doesn’t deserve to be treated that way. It’s not fair that a ten year old can get away with making his mother so stressed and depressed. It made me start sobbing when I heard them fighting because it feels like he’s just tearing our family apart, and I got so angry that I was about ready to go out there and physically fight him in order to make the point that he can’t. Keep. Doing. This. I get so violent, but I know it would make mom even more upset, so I have to just sit here angry that I can’t fix it and make him shut up.

And then to top it all off, when we went over to dad’s for the weekend Evelyn and I got into a fight because I wasn’t hungry for breakfast at 9:30am on Sunday. EXCUSE ME for wanting to sleep in on my day off and then not feeling hungry right when I wake up- I almost never eat breakfast anyway because I’m just not hungry that early in the mornings. She got mad and said I should be more like my brother who gets up earlier and has breakfast on time. It spiraled out of control and I don’t even remember what we argued about after that, but at one point she got mad that I didn’t invite her to my 16th birthday party (I went laser tagging with my friends and I didn’t even invite my dad??? You guys got married right away without inviting or even telling us first so what do you expect!!!) and then she asked if I was some kind of dyke. No one has ever said anything like that to me, and I’m not even a lesbian in the first place. I told her to stop making me mad because I was this close to hitting her and she told me to do it because she’d just call the police and get me arrested. I was so upset that I was shaking and crying but I controlled myself and went downstairs to call mom and have her come pick me up. I don’t care what the divorce arrangement is, I refuse to go back over there ever again. The irony is that now she’s denying ever calling me that word because she ‘has friends who are lesbians so she’d never say something like that,’ but my brother was right there and remembers it clearly. She tried to tell him he mis-remembered because he is ‘young and impressionable’ but we both know what we heard, so at least he and I are on the same side of a fight for once.

I’m so done with all of this stress. All these issues keep piling up and it’s like having a mid-life crisis at the age of sixteen. I can’t put up with it anymore, but I’m too much of a wimp to actually kill myself so I have to find some other way to vent it all out. I hate this.

Wolf comic chapter 8: the wolf confronts the heart of the storm. They realize that their fear of losing their friends and being left behind is making them sensitive to their perception of their social standing. Charged emotional fights happening around them can feel like it’s happening to them. They are feeling such strong emotions that overwhelm them and cause them to lash out, but should instead learn to identify and control their own emotions to not explode and hurt themselves or others. They reign in the control over their emotions, practice emotional awareness to identify what they’re feeling, and the fire dies out. They realize that the way they see themselves is not reflected in how they look, and understand that this is something they can change.

So, time for an update.

My display name on Shelpey has been Alex pretty much ever since the site opened because he’s my main character, and new members who don’t know me personally have been referring to me as Alex and using ‘he’ while out of character. It caused a bit of confusion because most of my long-term online friends know I’m a girl in real life and met me when I used Astar as my online name, but anyone else who hadn’t met me before wouldn’t know who they were talking about. But at some point I realized I really actually liked it when people called me Alex and referred to me as male, so I asked my friends to switch and now it’s been a few months and I really feel like I AM Alex, he’s not just a character that I play. I mean, obviously I’m not a fox shapeshifter, but I mean about being called male. It feels correct?

Now it’s my 17th birthday, so I’m going to take the next step and have an official ‘online gender change’ across all the sites I’m on. I’ve already had my gender set to male on deviantArt but nobody looks at that anyway and it’s just sorta seen as a joke to have it say male if you’re not actually, so I’ll need to make a post about it. I’m just changing it online: I’m still a girl (unfortunately) in real life, but I can control what gender I am on the interwebs, at least. I don’t expect everyone to be as accepting as my friends on Shelpey, but I don’t care what they think and I’ll just hide any hate comments if someone decides to flame me.

People can keep calling me Astar or Matsi on deviantArt if that’s the name they know me by, since those are more like a username or a nickname/fursona name anyway. But everywhere else I think I’m going to just start using Alex because it’s easier.

I’m trying to branch out my artwork and draw things that aren’t wolves all the time, but it feels like I’m getting less and less feedback on my art when I do. Half the people who follow me on deviantArt are inactive and I barely get any comments or favs on my work anymore, and it makes me wonder if anyone even thought my art was good in the first place? My older stuff looks so bad and I can’t believe I was ever proud of it, but I thought that I’d at least improved and that my newer stuff was better.

A few nights ago I had a nightmare about going off to college and all my friends leaving me behind, which pretty much sums up how I feel about it. It’s a huge stress, but I know I can’t run from it forever. I don’t really need my dreams to tell me that.

I’m unhappy with my life, my art, my moods, with the way things are in general, and also with my outlook on it all. Every now and then there are little things that brighten up my day, but they’re sparse and generally only help cheer me up for a few minutes at a time. My moodswings are completely out of hand, my reactions to even minor things are far too extreme, and I KNOW it’s unhealthy to let every little thing affect me so much. I’m tired of crying so much and feeling like my life is worthless.

I also feel like I’m going to end up pushing my friends away if I keep being so scared of losing them that I let myself get upset when they don’t pay attention to me for one minute. I have to stop seeking validation and reassurance when they so much as talk to other friends besides me, because they have their own lives too and I know everything doesn’t revolve around me. It still hurts to feel left out, but I know deep down that they’re not doing it on purpose and it’s fine if they don’t spend every minute with me. I have to learn to deal with it.

In other news, this will be my senior year of high school, and I’ve already come out as transgender to mom so I’ll be starting school as male in the fall. My friend and I went through a bunch of cool-sounding male names and I decided on Alister, since it’s similar to Alyssa and also Alex since I got so used to going by that in the meantime. Mom helped me tell the rest of the family to make sure they’re on board, and we’re going to email my teachers before school starts to make sure they will use my new name and gender when school starts up again. Unfortunately there are people in my grade who knew me beforehand so I won’t be able to have a perfectly clean slate, but I’m going to try to dress as masculine as I can and wear a binder and come across as male as possible so I slip under the radar from anyone who hasn’t already met me.

It feels like I’m starting a new chapter of my life, but it’s more like a new chapter of myself? A new version of myself. Maybe a better version.