Hello,Posts lately, especially on the plural subreddit, have been pretty positive, and I think maybe it leads to a rosier picture than is completely honest. A lot of the times we will draw a bunch of cute stuff just to distract ourselves, like animals with fairy wings.We drew and colored so many over the holidays. (I will collect all the fairy winged animal drawings and post those next time).But we also did a bunch of little bad feels. We have a tiny sketch book, and when we feel bad we draw out the bad feeling as a tiny little sketch.A lot of the feels are about feeling worthless, or even toxic and burdensome. We feel empty and adrift, self loathing and hopeless. We think, people are never going to understand. Or we think we are never going to be enough. We let our fears chase us around and around.It is a really boring, and really terribly merry-go-round. But we haven't quite figured out how to make it stop all the time. It might stop for a while, but somehow it seems to start spinning again, no matter what.So we draw the little bad feels.This one is "I'm a hedgehog. All I do is hurt the people in my life."But when she turns, you see, the hedgehog is just a very injured little kiddo.Sometimes we feel small and unimportant and like it would be nice to just disappear.Sometimes we feel like a complete freak, just totally embarrassed and ashamed of who we are. We feel like no one could ever understand, like we just shouldn't exist, cause how could there possibly be a place for us in this world?It is really hard to be different, and to be still struggling with a history where you didn't always feel safe or seen or supported. We all have those shitty days when old feelings come back to get us, those days when we feel like we are just never going to be enough. Those feelings are real and valid and important, and the more you run from them, the more they will just keep getting you. So when they come for us, we stop and we draw them out.Maybe we just finally had to come out and realize we were plural because all of our cumulative bad feels finally caught up to us. I don't really know, but I do know when we are all working together, the bad feels feel a bit smaller, and not quite so scary.Maybe we don't quite fit in the world, but when we work together it feels like we can make a little spot in the world where we belong.And that brings us to the title of this entry.. Our thumb.We nervously pick at our right thumb. WE have ALWAYS done this, and it occurred to Mak that this thumb has been in some stage of healing FOREVER. It is almost never completely healed, because as soon as it gets close, some little bad feel pops up and we end up tearing it up all over again, without even noticing we are doing it.This poor thumb is like a metaphor or a manifestation of our emotional healing journey. We are ALWAYS healing, always getting better, but never completely healed. Our emotional hurt is so varied and complex and old, even when we finally get to that place where we can metaphorically stop tearing the old wounds open, and finally let them heal, there is still going to be a scar (just like on our poor thumb...). But right now, thinking this all out, I think that's okay.And until the day, we have a tiny notebook for drawing out the bad.Thank you for reading. Take care of yourself/selves. We are wishing you all the best.-Mak & Kai