so long, and thanks for all the fish

40+ hours (spread across the past 2 weeks) later, I have finished my preboarding training for work. all I have left to do is take the certification exam, and then I start my new job on Monday. absolutely wild.

it has been VERY cool to challenge myself to complete this course in the 13 days I had available for it, even if it has eaten up a good amount of my time and meant that I've been offline more often. it's good practice for when I'll have to be offline for the actual job itself. but also I know I haven't been on here much while the website's been winding down, and I hope y'all are dealing with the transition well. I hope to be more present on discord as I settle into the new work routine 💜

once I get my photo taken I will officially be recognized at both the federal and state level by my new name no matter what... very exciting for me; I am excited

last night I was sitting with my partner and metamour, and we were talking about various memories and life experiences. and at one point my metamour told a story that unlocked a childhood memory I forgot I had.

the funny thing is, my memory was of my abuser. it was from long before the abuse started, and it was a happy memory. it also came in conjunction with a flashbulb image memory I have of the bedroom my abuser lived in when I was a child-- which was the place he used to most commonly abuse me. in the past (i.e. before I did trauma therapy/EMDR), this specific flashbulb memory has Triggered me and my PTSD; it used to bring a feeling of intense anxiety with it and very often would bring up other problematic memories related to the abuser I suffered. most often I would have to interrupt whatever I was doing to suppress the memories and to regulate my emotion, which was a difficult task when I was younger.

but this time... none of the trauma. none of the anxiety. I had reprocessed that specific flashbulb image of my abuser's bedroom back in EMDR. so this time around, I only experienced the happy memory that my metamour's story had unlocked. I simply had the flashbulb memory for the purposes of remembering what one wall of my abuser's bedroom looked like, and then my brain put it back away without any distress or compulsive behaviors. and when I realized this had happened, I was so relieved I almost cried. I have literally NEVER before in my life had that memory without needing to immediately self-soothe and interrupt the PTSD process, and here I was just quietly having a memory with zero distress.

I'm just so grateful for my therapists. I'm so fucking glad I finally sought out trauma therapy. it feels really incredible to be at a completely different place socially & mentally than I was when I first found cohost. all I can say is, if you have a good therapist and you have the opportunity to process your trauma in a safe environment, please take that opportunity it is so worth it in the end

it's strange-- I'm kind of at peace with the fact that cohost is ending. I'm bummed about it obviously, there's no other place like it out here; but at the same time I'm not... devastated, as many others seem to be. as I assumed I would be when the news dropped.

cohost has felt like such an incredible lightning-in-a-bottle moment, and I feel really incredibly lucky that I got to be here for it. I've made some really great connections and friendships, and I really hope that we can all find each other again in other places. at the same time, I'm sort of excited to see where I go from here-- I'm starting a new job, I'm getting a lot of my health concerns figured out, and I'm repairing my interpersonal relationships, and like... it's actually kind of exciting now, to have so much to keep track of that's not social media. it's not overwhelming anymore; I'm coping and living and THRIVING, and I haven't felt this in tune with my own life since before the internet was even widely available.

I think there's much to be said for the fact that I got on cohost not long after my mental breakdown, and cohost has been here for me during my entire recovery period. I came to cohost in the middle of one of the hardest times of my entire life, when I was making a concerted effort to completely change my unhealthy relationship with social media. and I am speaking with full honesty when I say that it was this website's calming atmosphere and complete abandonment of algorithmic bullshit that helped me heal from the compulsion to seek numbers and validation from strangers. now that I'm in a much healthier place than I was 2 years ago, I feel like I'm that much more capable of letting go.

I'm gonna miss it here a lot. no other website has ever been like cohost, and I doubt there will ever be another place quite like it. but I'm also finding that as I develop my life skills, I have less and less time for scrolling through memes anyway-- and less motivation to, now that I've found so much in my offline life that's worth living for. I'm not afraid of what will happen to me next month when the site goes read-only, or at the end of the year when everything goes to archive. I think I'm going to keep on living, bigger and better than ever. I really hope that everyone I've met here does the same.