Sorry to repost and delete, I was super super excited and posted immediately but honestly I kinda want to do something special since all my other pals have done that once they reached 1k

ALSO BY THE WAY WARNING this is going to get VERY sappy. Also no I'm not drunk!!!!!

SO!! Now that I have you here, lemme tell you a story

This is not to be taken as pity, in fact please don't apologize for me cause I have no idea how to respond when I get stuff like that. It's all good now, I don't let it define me and I've certainly moved past it

Picture a 13 years old girl, entering highschool for the first time. Very nervous but excited!! (actually here's a photo from this year for funsies lmao)

that was ME!!!!! time is in fact linear and I was once a baby man!!!! woah!!!

then I realized I had 4 classes with one boy. I gave him a note one day asking if he wanted to play league of legends lmao so dumb, but that same boy I went on to date for 7 years. Without any exaggeration, those were some of the saddest days of my life. It started off dysfunctional but not THAT bad, progressively getting worse and worse until around 6 months in, a very traumatic thing happened in my family. That kickstarted not only being stressed from this relationship I got myself into, but now my whole family being torn apart.

I don't say this by the way to be like WOE IS ME I am sad LOOK AT ME!!! Here's the thing: everything is fine now! I'm just painting a picture to describe what kind of person I was.

Basically, you can see that I wasn't exactly in the highest of spirits for a very long time.

I wasn't allowed to be friends with guys, if I were I were shamed and called tainted.

As you can imagine, because of this, I was a very anxious and self-conscious girl. At this point, I had also been trying to do art for a while. I had a Deviantart account, but I wasn't satisfied with it for a myriad of different reasons so it was at this time I tried branching out to different sites. Pixiv, tumblr, toyhouse, reddit, artstation, conceptart.org, wysp, you name it. Any obscure art site you can find, I probably have an account there with crappy art from 2015 lmao

Then I got to Newgrounds. "Oh, but this is a porn site." Despite many other 15 year olds, I was scared of porn lmao. Can you believe it? After a quick browse though, I realized it wasn't as shady as I thought. I thought "Frick it, what's the worst that'll happen" and made my account.

Of course, all of this buildup means nothing because I had made an account a year prior LMAO

Anyway, I had decided to make my first forum post. Forums were nothing new to me, my warrior cats roleplays (I WAS 11 SHUT UP) and time on the Deviantart forums made me understand how they functioned.

"Can I Have Critique on my Art"

It was at this point in time, despite everything I was going through, that I finally found a place where I felt at home. And I didn't even know this until much later.

Fastforward to 2018. I had made a Discord account back in 2015 for league of legends and eventually, as Discord became more normalized, I had switched over a year or two later from Skype.

I find out "oh crap there's a new unofficial Newgrounds server" bam, joined. From this point, I had met the coolest people I've ever met. I felt guilty and disgusting, since most of them were guys, but my ex was less authoritarian at this point in time so I was allowed to be friends with these people. I meet a guy named Henryeyes and get invited into Hotbun. I can honestly say, I'm so thankful and grateful that I was able to be a part of this because this was truly the happiest I'd been in literal years. Thank you all for being there for me, for giving me advice, for giving me a place I could truly call home. I'm sorry I had taken so long to get to this point in this newspost, but I wanted to articulate how I felt and as a result, how happy I was to make so many friends so close to my heart.

I even met my fiancé @matthewlopz in there who is so god damn special to me. That's a whole other piece of lore right there!! I could talk about how we met and how happy he makes me feel for ages but then this would go past the word limit ehehehe

He really did change my life though too, I've learnt so god dang much just from being with him and feeling so happy!!

Thank you all, best friends, close friends, acquaintances, the Newgrounds community. I want to send my thanks to everyone, without a doubt my life has been changed for the far better which may have never happened if I never joined Newgrounds.

And to my good friends

From the bottom of my heart, whether we still speak regularly or whether it's been months, you'll always be important to me. Thank you all for being here with me on this crazy wild ride, I really do truly mean that.