Goodbye 2024

I was honestly dissociated most of 2024 because I didn’t have the energy required to not have a foggy brain. What I do remember of the past year feels like soup in my brain:

  • allergic reactions
  • autistic burnout
  • legitimate physical illness
  • ongoing allergies
  • physical pain
  • survival mode
  • stress and dissociation

This past year, I put a lot of effort into ignoring my needs and personal limits. I knew they existed, but I let other people decide how valid they were or if I was “just lazy” or “being a baby”.

I’ve had to unpackage and unlearn some internalized ableism I didn’t realize I had. As it’s a process, I’m continuing to learn how to identify, accept and honor my personal limits when I cannot accommodate them.

Relationships

2024 felt like a year where all the patterns continued on even as I tried to avoid them from continuing.

I’ve been feeling like an accessory to other people a lot lately, which has been depressing. Instead of honoring my own limits and needs, I sought to meet other people’s expectations even when they conflicted with my own values and needs.

Healthy relationships are so…easy. It’s weird AF. It’s sooo uncomfortable…and yet, I want more healthy dynamics with people. Meeting people who see and accept me for who I am is so powerful and mind-altering. It’s like a flip switched in my brain so I can now believe that YES, I DO deserve healthy relationships.

I’ve been recognizing toxic relationships and dynamics that fuel my anxiety and drain my energy, especially when they feel manipulative or controlling. The kind of unhealthy relationships with power imbalances. Like, I don’t want those anymore. I want healthy dynamics.

So…I realized the boundary work I performed wasn’t based on “true” boundaries. Healthy boundaries aren’t petty or snarky; they’re not quick-witted quips. Boundaries are not about making someone understand the consequences for their actions, but about how I will behave in response to my own limits and their actions.

Prioritizing my own needs helps me trust and value myself, which helps me be available to other people. I’m learning to recognize when I need rest or space and not push myself, for I accept my energy is finite.

No relationship between two people can be healthy if even one of them engages in unhealthy behaviors. To have a healthy relationship with another, the other person needs to also be interested in a healthy relationship — even if it’s hard.

This is the hardest part of what I’ve learned this year, because it requires me to be more aware of codependent behaviors, trauma bonding, and myself.

Someone I met earlier this year said I’ve definitely changed a lot in the time she’s known me, because I doubt myself less and am leaning more into healthy behaviors.

I stood up for myself a few times in situations an older version of myself would not have. It’s hard because it’s uncomfortable…but it also feels good, because I’m not succumbing to the pressure to feel a specific way — I’m not compromising my own values or character.

Books πŸ“š

I read 50 books this year! I challenged myself to read 24. By mid-November, I was only at 9. I checked out a bunch of books from the McKinney library system and wound up reading mostly graphic novels…

Between mid-November and today, I read 41 books.

41 books.

I didn’t think I could do it. I didn’t think I’d hit 24 in time, so hitting 50 is twice that amount plus two!

I maintain a list on my blog, but I also have my year-in-books via Goodreads.

Notable books I read last year:

  1. “Bergamot & Sunny Day” by Lyee Kitahala, a cozy BL manga that made me cry
  2. “Dinosaur Sanctuary, Vol. 1-3” by Itaru Kinoshita, a manga series about dinosaurs in zoos for educational purposes (not entertainment like the Jurassic Park/World franchise)
  3. “Welcome Back, Aureole” by Misaki Takamatsu, an angsty teen BL manga
  4. “The Deep Dark” by Molly Knox Ostertag, a sapphic graphic novel about the importance of accepting yourself and keeping people in your live who don’t expect you to give up a core part of yourself
  5. “Pixels of You” by Ananth Hirsh, a sapphic graphic novel about living with your insecurities
  6. “A Guest in the House” by Emily Carroll, a horror graphic novel challenging the reader to question their perspective and expectations
  7. “The Third Person” by Emma Grove, a memoir graphic novel that managed to depict some of my experience having DID
  8. “The Marble Queen” by Anna Kopp, a sapphic graphic novel ft. an arranged royal marriage, swords and a coup

Movies 🎞

I watched 27+ movies this year. I didn’t track them all — I forget to do that. πŸ˜…

My yearly tradition used to be to watch 100 movies a year, which I’ve not been doing. Many new streaming opportunities I’m interested in are instead released as series. Instead of watching 1-2-hour movies, I end up watching ten one-hour episodes.

My blog

I posted 75 new blog posts this year. I don’t have any feelings about it specifically — like, I’m neither “pleased” or “disappointed” with that number.

I had 60,379 total page views last year, which is a number I’d like to read this year on this blog. 😏

My top 10 most popular posts this year were:

  1. DID alter roles
  2. Being autistic and not wanting to be perceived
  3. Autistic burnout quiz
  4. Autistics estranging their parents
  5. How DID alters communicate with each other
  6. DID protectors
  7. Extreme hunger in eating disorder recovery
  8. My views on Minnie Maud
  9. Dormancy in DID
  10. What is allism?

I recognized this year that I need(ed) boundaries where I didn’t have them, but kept feeling it was too late to establish boundaries…so I didn’t. By the next time something came up, I thought the same thing. This cycle continued.

I don’t know how to explain to people who don’t understand the distinction between using social for personal reasons and using it on a more professional level. I use mine for both, to an extent.

An old issue keeps arising for me as a blogger: People see me post online and assume my availability/energy for them, because I posted online…these are completely different things. Sometimes, they’re scheduled. Even when they’re not, I’m entitled to choosing how I spend my time.

I haven’t figured out how to deal with this, but I do know I’m not listening to people I don’t ask for advice from or people who don’t understand. I learned about something called “inappropriate advice”, which is to where people give you advice even though they have little to no idea of the situation. It’s open to personal definition, as what is “appropriate” is deemed by your boundaries.

If someone gives you inappropriate advice, you can mentally dismiss it as inappropriate and continue on. πŸ€·β€β™€οΈ

Favorite Sims this year

I played The Sims 4 more this year. It’s been therapy for me. Sometimes, I’ll open it up when I’m feeling stressed like, “What trauma am I working through today?”

Super cathartic.

Street corner view from Yamazaki residence on Lia's upstairs bedroom balcony, ft. fall trees, leaves scattered on the ground, lampposts aglow, brick roads; diagonally in the distance: a small park with bathrooms, a grill, a seasonal concessional stand, and two Monkey Bars
View from Lia Yamazaki’s (3rd gen) upstairs bedroom balcony (Sims 4/EA)

Lia Yamazaki

I love all the Yamazaki kids, I really love Lia Yamazaki. She’s the spitting image of her mother, with some of her father’s characteristics added in.

I try not to favor my skinniest Sims because of my eating disorder struggles. I also have a rule where I cannot cheat them skinny or use a potion. However, she loves Fitness, mastered the Fitness skill early on, makes Garden Salads a lot, and stayed that way naturally.

Mixed white and Asian teen Sim wearing a white-to-orange ice skating dress with tennis shoes; blonde medium-length hair parted to the side with a braid; sitting in an aqua bar stool that looks like a chair with long, light brown wooden legs; writing in a journal that sits atop a light pink mushroom-style circle bar table with a long aqua leg in the center; outside her cozy balcony ft. flooring that looks like a grassy meadow with white flowers, a boho ceiling chair to the right, behind her, and a ladder dΓ©cor item; next to the Sim is a large ceiling-to-floor window with her blush pink bedroom curtains; on the black brick wall in front of her is a neon lightning bolt; next to which there is a wooden door with a square window divided into fourths by wood, through which her yellow bed is visible at the angle the screenshot was taken
Lia Yamazaki, 3rd generation, journaling on her balcony (Sims 4/EA)

Bella Pettit

I also love a newer Sim I made and have been playing recently in a new save. In this save, I’m trying to see how many generations it takes generational trauma to exit a Sim legacy.

White Sim with brunette hair slightly past shoulders, grey beanie, light blue camisole, light blue jeans with blue-and-white plaid button-up tied around waist
Download Bella Pettit from the Sims 4 Gallery

It’s harder than I thought, though. Even with Parenthood, negative interactions with parents do little else than decrease green bars and increase red ones in the Relationships panel. I wish interactions between parent Sims and their kids had more weight regardless of whether they’re from the Parenting section of the social pie menu.

I’d hoped Parenthood would do that. Instead, it makes having abusive parents impossible without mods or depleting the relationships and making them hate each other. Like, I want complexity. πŸ˜‚ I’m working through my trauma here! 🀣


A quote that feels right ending the year with and has debated origin:

No matter where you go, there you are.

You can change your environment, but you take with you your attitudes, behaviors, beliefs, experiences, feelings, thoughts and all the ways you played a part in interpersonal and intrapersonal conflict.

Genuine change comes from within. Changing your environment may “work” for a while, but issues float. The work we need to do on ourselves will continue to arise until we engage in it.

I found this quote a few weeks ago when I searched “you are everywhere you go” because it felt like a revelation to me as someone with DID.

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