Heather ⬢ Flowers

people sometimes remark on my game titles because they're all wild shit, like EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER or GODKILLER BRIGADE TEN TRILLION or IF YOU WORK VERY HARD EVERY DAY FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE YOU TOO CAN BECOME AN ORB

and part of that's an aesthetic choice, but the other part is that my brain is just a constant stream of screams, an organ whose purpose is to constantly think BLOOD WORM HELL FUCK CRIME HELL SHIT GODDAMMIT ETERNITY CRYSTAL NOTHING GORE MUSCLE COWARD WORM FUCK

this is something that i obviously don't talk about much, partly because it's my own damn business and partly because i'm a trans game developer, and the worst possible thing you can do as one of those is admit weakness

we try so hard to stay calm, stay steady, stay perfect, because publicly admitting you're fucked up and hurting is a fast way to losing contact with the community

but basically everyone i know has got some kind of trauma, something broken inside of them. every person on this earth has a part of their life story worth breaking down sobbing over. we hide it from each other, but it's there.

i've got trauma so bad i can't remember anything before 2015. there are so many basic-ass things i can't do for reasons i can't remember. my brain is extremely fucking bad at being a brain.

there's so many scars there i don't think there's anything underneath them. i don't think there's ever been anything but scars there.

a brain is a pile of scars dating back millions of years, evolutionary processes and deaths and maladjustments shoving together something that kind of works, almost. "good enough."

and we're all dealing with these broken coping mechanisms for a world completely unlike our own. we feel like shit all the time because we're surrounded by more people than we're ever meant to know, all of whom are better than us.

we're rats living in a giant machine, constantly dodging between gears, finding little chunks of food where we can, surviving another day, another day.

but if we're made of the scars, if that's all we are, then... shouldn't we be proud of them?

that we've kept going for all this time, broken coping mechanism on broken coping mechanism, slowly learning to build a life as, well... people made of scars.

some scars are fresh. some hurt, deeply. some are difficult to find pride in. but they're a part of us.

i don't really have an ending to this. fuckin... be kinder to people. not nicer, KINDER. learn to recognize when people are hurting, and learn what you can do beyond checking in. build communities where people feel safe being hurt and expressing that hurt.