Hi all, it's Eir. I've been wanting to write a "normal weblog post" for quite some time, feeling guilty or embarrassed by how many posts on this weblog are just health updates. But I could never come up with a solid topic to write about. I've had this idea floating around that we could write about games again - I have a few thoughts to share on some games, but I also had in mind that Sunny could be the one writing that post. But I'm not sure if Sunny even wants to do that. I might have put that expectation on them by mistake.
I think gaming related posts are indeed in the near future, but for now, I want to write a normal weblog post for once. I'm gonna be reflecting on... just how we've been doing, and what our life is like now vs earlier this year, aside from these health things.
How this year started
My wrists got bad enough to close my 
Figura commissions last year in October, and that was still in effect. I was relying on my wrist braces heavily, but my main focus was on getting stuff done as fast as possible now that you-know-who is in office in the US. One thing I did right away was go out and get a passport. I already knew updating my driver's license would be impossible, but, at the time, I was planning to visit my girlfriend sometime later this year, and since she's overseas, I would need a passport. I went to the effort of scouting out a specific passport office that had high reviews with mentions of kind employees - it took me to a little office about an hour's drive away from home. But it was extremely worth it, because there was no transphobia at all, the staff merely never have to deal with name changes on passports. But after a long and exhausting day of driving back-and-forth to get many variations of forms, I got everything worked out. And a few weeks later, I got my passport. They did "correct" my gender marker to "M" instead of "F", though, but from what I read online around that time, people working in the relevant positions were being forced to do this kind of correction, it wasn't all transphobic all the way up.
I was also dealing with a pretty annoying technology issue. I wrote about it briefly here, but basically, I had foolishly opened a port to the public internet that led to my serverbox getting hacked. A botnet broke in and installed malware that was causing my machine to spam-ping a specific IP in China so rapidly that our entire home internet would die if the machine was on. It took months to figure out, on top of recovering from my first surgery this year. You have no idea how happy I was when I finally figured out the problem and fixed it.
Around this time, early 2025, I was... a different person than I am now. I was... obsessive, depressive, kind of wistful, for lack of a better word, and extremely anxious almost all the time. It would keep me up at night, and it made it hard to look away from any upsetting politics news. I was feeling pretty gloomy, especially around the time my arms became almost unusable this year. I desperately sought out emotional support. Up until then, that support had come from my personal discord server. There's a vent channel there, and I posted in there when I was upset and distressed. Our birth mother was also dishing out a lot of undeserved emotional and verbal abuse, as she does, so that often ended up in the vent channel as well. I was under so much undue stress that I was posting there almost every day. But my friends stopped responding. It quickly became only a few people who would listen to me, and I ended up going to their DMs instead. A very excellent best friend of mine would stay up late into the night calling me, to keep me sane and grounded. At first it was very one-sided, because I was always the one in distress, what with my arms failing and being bedridden and such. But I did my best to give back to them too.
How it's going
The decision to leave was absolutely the right one. Our new servers, groups, and friends, have been amazing, and so sweet and kind and accepting. Nothing like some of the people I thought were my friends before. This ended up being the perfect place to let Sunny take their first steps, so to speak, and get situated with the new dynamic of us sharing a body. It's been very healing and important for Sunny to have real friendships, deeper and more vulnerable than the ones they grew up with, and very important for me to meet people I know I can trust.
I wrote previously about the impact of 
plurality on our life, but the gist of it is, Sunny's influence has caused me to grow as a person. The constant anxiety and worries I used to feel started to melt away as I learned to accept and love Sunny. I feel as if I've begun to blossom, to truly come into my own, and I love the person I'm becoming. Sunny taught me strength, confidence, and assertiveness, which I can't live without now. Before Sunny, these things were forced from my end - I acted out the part, but anyone paying attention could tell they were paper-thin words, and I was still so scared. Whatever I was missing, Sunny is now providing, as the other half of our soul. I've been able to not only set more firm boundaries, but stand up to our abusive mother face-to-face and tell her what I really feel about her. Not "lashing out" like you might expect, but still, my speaking this way surprised her so much she was left speechless, multiple times.
Speaking of her, I came out as a system to her. To my absolute surprise, she believes me, and not only that, she listened intently to what I was saying, and learned about the split, and me vs Sunny. She followed along surprisingly decently, considering it's her, and even let me switch to Sunny in front of her. She helped the both of us talk to our biological uncle over the phone, actually. But that isn't to say things are smoothing over with her. She still sucks, greatly - she just knows the truth now. She's even been helping keep it a secret from our brother, which surprises me still. That being said, she still doesn't know how to tell the two of us apart, or, really, any differences between us...
I want to talk to you all about Sunny. We've been working out ways to make our situation "fair". The go-to for a while has been me letting Sunny out at least once a day, for however long they want to be out. Sunny would then stay out for as long as they could, enjoying their time with games they enjoy, and watching shows they like (like The Owl House) with friends. Sunny even found one game they're really good at, much better than me! But we're running into some problems. It seems that going by this approach, Sunny's been getting exhausted. Sunny's already been training to come out more and for longer with just... general practice. But we're hitting a roadblock, once again, that this body considers me the primary fronter, and Sunny secondary. It's something that really affected Sunny in the past, but I think it's something we're going to have to live with. So Sunny will be out of commission for at least a day, maybe a few.
That's not the only thing I wanted to touch on, though. We've had this understanding for a while that technology and technical things are my job, and casual enjoyment, games and chilling are mostly reserved for Sunny. Like I'm a caretaker of them, of sorts. I've been doing everything I can to play my role straight. It is true that, when Sunny tries to code and gets too in-depth, our mind automatically switches over to me. So our mind clearly prioritizes me as the one for these tasks. And yet, I've felt a little... drained, from these, lately. It's like, yes, before Sunny, I loved doing these silly technical things. And I've still been doing some of them, even now. But it's less fun in situations where I'm made to do it, and on top of that, now that we're sharing happier experiences together such as gaming, I'm starting to feel like these techy things aren't all I'm interested in. I feel a little like I'm missing out on something. It's almost like I've started to feel a bit ashamed of my "technical things" obsession, and I've lost interest in it somewhat.
Our day-to-day life
Sunny's been having a little bit of a journey regarding gender. I won't speak on their behalf out of respect, but they found they weren't ready to use she/her pronouns just yet, but are fine being called a "girl" or "one of the girls". They initially felt body dysmorphia when in our body, because of the whole "being buried away for a decade" thing, but now they've gotten used to it, and I catch them posing at themself in the mirror. They clearly like how the body looks now. Even better, we've been taking biotin for about a month now. It's a supplement that improves the health of your hair and fingernails, and makes your hair much longer. Our hair has grown by a few inches over the past month, and I love watching the progress!
Sunny watched through The Owl House and loved it to pieces, and we both have been rewatching Ben 10 (the original show). I also got mildly into House MD this year. And in terms of games, Sunny played Hi-Fi Rush (I played it first 2 years ago), both Ori games (I played those first too), we started a replay of Bug Fables, I got into B3313 (it's a long story), Paper Mario 64 TTYD (a romhack), we started replaying Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, and I set up Partners in Time for Sunny, who wanted to play that one alone. We also tried this super cool 2d Zelda-like called Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, which has extremely good gameplay and mechanics, cute graphics and styles, great music and vibes. Overall, I've been trying to show Sunny some good experiences, and Sunny's been reminiscing over some of their favorites from their time.
This year, we also had some unique experiences regarding art. Before Sunny, it was just me, and I made efforts to learn pixel art, then some "2d furry art", although still using 
Aseprite. When Sunny came along, they tried their paws at art too, and quickly found their own style, unique from my own, much more freeform and less bogged down by details. They hung out with Nero, a lovely artist friend of ours, and with their help, they learned a lot. Sunny did some studies of humanoid and furry forms, learned the first steps to deconstructing bodies and objects into shapes for drawing, and gained much more confidence in themself. Their art is beautiful! All of Sunny's emotes are made by them, not by me. I actually made a new emote (
) just yesterday, after not having made any art since February. It only took about half an hour tops, I found myself very confident in my skills and knowledge, and I'm proud of the end result. I think some of Sunny's practice and training has rubbed off on me somehow, or it's part of the stuff that's "shared" between us.
Regarding the website, I did a bunch of work this year, especially over the past few months, once we got some functionality back in our arms. For one, I added email notifications for anyone who has an account on this site. I did my best to improve CSS styling on the site, especially to make everything look decent on mobile. I added a spam filter and ban system (which might have caught a few false positives...), and of course, the About us page has been massively reworked and retooled. I'm always on the lookout for bugs, and always jotting down improvements I could make and new features I can add. Please let me know of any suggestions for the site! I'm actually in the process of migrating our website to Typescript, but since I've never worked with it before, I'm basically fumbling in the dark.
Oh, yeah. the new dog that arrived last month. We've... gotten used to each other, more or less, but Sunny and I still have a bone to pick with her. Baby has at least learned to leave us alone, but still stares at us endlessly anytime she sees us, which at least makes me feel self-conscious and annoyed. She's still leaving trails of drool and drinking water all over the floor. She's started to be less of a bother with her howling when she's all alone, I think. Some part of me does want to at least be on good terms with Baby, and not have to be mad at her, but the rest of me has learned to put up boundaries and state our needs, so we aren't shy to let our family know when the dogs are being nuisances. And Baby leaving water on the floor is still really gross. If it's in our way in the kitchen, I toss a rag on the ground and move it with my foot.
switchI just typed a lot of stuff. Is this really still a "normal weblog post"? It's more like a summary of how the past half a year has gone. But I guess that's fine? For now, it's time for some
Closing thoughts
There's this habit I used to do, especially towards the beginning of this year, where in the evenings, I'd put on some calm music, and try to give myself the space to zone out, let my mind wander wherever it may go, in an effort to relax. I'm doing some more of that lately, including tonight, but it's only been as Sunny ran out of energy over the past few days. Tonight, writing this, this "calm music session" is making me look back on how my life was before Sunny showed up. It was kind of shocking to remember that, before disaster struck in March, I was PC gaming with mouse and keyboard, playing Risk of Rain 2 with my girlfriend, still had my constant anxiety, and was thinking to myself as constantly as I do now about how much I've "grown" (although evidence shows now that what I was actually doing around that time was slowly unmasking Sunny's feelings, not growing myself). I also hadn't turned my weblog into a health posts update thing yet, especially because before our arms collapsed this year, I wanted to lay all this health stuff in the past and just enjoy my day-to-day life.
I also want to close this off with one of the most personal and important thoughts I've had over the last few months. I think I might be aromantic. I tried romance time and time again, and even just mentioned my girlfriend in the last paragraph, but... hear me out. I think what I was actually seeking from romance, for all this time, is someone who can help me "complete myself", whether that's by acting as a duo, or by helping me "grow the rest of my soul". Whenever Sunny showed up and demonstrated they have all the complementary parts to my personality, that need was instantly dispelled. Now, my interest in romance is... almost none. I've found that in every instance of romance I've been in, it's changed the way I viewed someone I genuinely cared about, to the point of causing unhappiness and disaster that would've been avoided if we just stayed friends.
I don't think my girlfriend is reading this, or going to read this (and I've avoided identifying her on our weblog to respect her privacy), but for the record, I want to "break it off peacefully". It's just... she has a history of being involved in near-constant stress and anxiety, to the point that no time is ever a good time. Right now she's in the process of a stressful move to a new flat. I've known her for a few years now, and yet I still can't tell when she's available, let alone when it's a good time to approach her. Either way, I'll figure it out, I just need some time, both to get used to the idea, and for Sunny and I to get further along in our rehab.
