A Traditional + Digital Art Combo Featuring A Cat Creature 🌸🐱

merry christmas to the people who have to pretend to be someone they’re not for their families, who don’t have family to celebrate with, who have bad past experiences with the holiday, who are having a rough year and just want to reach the end of it, who couldn’t afford gifts this year and feel guilt over it. merry christmas to everyone but especially those of you who are feeling down.

Having a senior dog with cancer is so hard. 😢I made this to help me cope — and if you’re going through anticipatory grief of any kind, I hope it helps you, too!

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov Chapter 4: A Hymn and a Secret (1880)

despite everything.

A necessary reminder for you and for me. I will allow myself to hurt but I will not let it consume me. I will feel everything I need to and still, in the end, pick myself back up.

Healing is also realizing you're going to have trauma reactions even after you decided to be healthy. That even after saying: "I want to heal, and rest, and I'm going to try to get better," you still let yourself reject help, struggle with trauma reactions, and unhealthy habits. That it's okay, and it's a part of healing. As long as you try to get better.

It's not going to happen immediately. If anything, at first, it's going to get way worse, horrible, even. And then better, and then bad again, and then you'll start getting relapses. And that's okay.

Relapse is a part of healing. Feeling all the bad stuff is a part of healing. Allowing yourself to be traumatized is a part of healing.

-host

Things that are easy to forget:

some days are just bad in every way, but one bad day doesn’t mean your life is bad.

there are good days and good people too.

it’s easier for your brain to focus on bad things so do your best to concentrate on the little things that make u happy.

mistakes and no obvious progress doesn’t mean you’re not improving.

things do get better. bad things are temporary.

you deserve to relax, it’s not a waste of time.

you are more loved than you know.

“Healing doesn’t mean the damage never existed. It means the damage no longer controls our life.”

— Akshay Dubey