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Your Skin, Our Guidelines
It didn’t take long for me to start having problems with the social media platforms I was posting my art on. During the first few months of working on the project, I was struggling immensely with posting and KEEPING my illustrations up on Instagram, because of one specific thing.
Community Guidelines.
WARNING!
Have you ever heard of freak shows? Those exhibitions or circus fairs where people with physical deformities and disabilities were put up on display for “normal” folk to look at and be disgusted, fascinated, repulsed by. Thankfully freak shows have been left in the past, at least for the most part. But even after their prime time, we have continued on to treat disabled and chronically ill people with the same kind of disrespect as that of freak shows. And while the exhibitionists during the 1800’s were often paid for their labor as a “freak of nature”, now in the 21st century, we don’t get those kinds of privileges. So, to some extend, things have gotten worse instead of progressing. But isn’t that the nature of things nowadays in general?
Life Update: New Winds
It’s been a while since I’ve made one of these Life Update posts, and I thought what better timing to bring them back than the start of a new era. This article is simultaneously the first being published on the now-finalized homepage of the art project, and the very last post you will be able to view on the original Blogger blog. After this point, we are saying final goodbyes to the starting point, and smelling the fresh air of the new winds, as we Finns like to say from time to time.
I Love You
Love truly is a miracle. For all my life, I know I have felt a lot of love for the people that have been close to me and important to me, and I know that some of them have truly loved me too, still do to this day, or have once loved me but no longer do. The funny thing about love, though, is that there are many different kinds, many different flavors of love out there, but we don't talk about all of them as much as we should. Maybe that's how you get confused oblivious idiots like myself, someone who does not see that they way they feel about the gender society tells them to be attracted is love, yes, but it's a different kind of love. Someone whose entire family have all known that their child is gay, while they are none the wiser. Someone who gets jealous of a dear friend of theirs when they tell them they have a partner of some kind, even though the two have never met in person.
You Don’t Have To Be Ashamed
It's taken a very long time for me to be comfortable with the act of sexual intimacy. I'm on the asexual spectrum, and sex has never been at the forefront of what I value the most in a relationship. It has never been a dealbreaker for me in any way, and lack of sex to me does not signify a failing relationship. But not all of that disregard is rooted in me being ace. A small part of it is due to learned – or taught to be more precise – patterns of thinking.
Girls?!
When I was eleven years old, I got my very first professional sketchbook. It was marketed to be specifically for artists that were looking for that authentic manga feel to their art – it even had a silly image of some anime boy on the cover. I was so excited to start drawing like a professional, to have a legit sketchbook with legit manga lineart pens, just for drawing all those pretty anime girls.
Even When I'm Alone
I think I was around twelve years old when I started to fear the shower. I remember taking showers when there was nobody home but me and our cat, just how scared I was of my surroundings. It didn't make any sense to me back then; I was home, and home was a safe place for me. But it's like that didn't matter at all, the environment was irrelevant.
Observing Eyes
I never understood why it mattered to them so much. If they truly hated being there just as much as I did, why did they spend all that energy on worrying about things that didn't involve them in any way? If they wanted to get out of there as much as I did, why did they choose to linger around and steal glances any more than was absolutely necessary or appropriate?