Nostalgia is THE mind killer so please don't think I'm romanticizing the past at all by making a high school art page !! The current present version of me is the very best version and the future is BRIGHT ! Buuuuuuttttt I do find it very nice and fun to spend time with what I was up to my senior year of high school (2010/2011) and I thought I'd make a little tribute to the weird ass teen girl I was back then.

Mostly what I enjoy is just seeing how pure my brain was and how free my hand was when drawing. Untainted Ana. Looking back now I realize I left my little Rhode Island bubble for college and just lost all confidence in my art-making and have been slowly clawing my way back to that state ever since. I think those gap years were important for many other reasons, but it's just funny to see that in many ways I had it all figured out like 12 years ago.

A note on name / pronoun stuff : I was surprisingly in touch with my transness in this period and really wanted to talk to people about it but it felt so unprecedented and impossible that all I could do was journal about it. It would be three years until I finally started transitioning in any sort of way and even more years before I changed my name and started hormones and did all the other "traditional" trans milestones. So ! Some of these things had my deadname and the wrong pronouns and I decided to do some historically sensitive remastering to make everything correct. You know what I always say : It's my party and I'll affirm myself if I want to !!!!! ♥