There's a lot of people quitting HARPG atm (you do you, guys) and I just thought I'd hop on considering I'm a notorious absentee when it comes to HARPG and I did say to someone that I was taking a little break from my own art.
I'm still here! I want to let you guys know what's been happening and maybe vent a bit, but I'm not gone yet
My own art is on hold because I don't feel a great muse atm to really draw, or even write that much, so I'm just taking a breather before I dive back in. I love my characters, I love what I've built for myself here, and I love the community that's around me, so I'm not going anywhere for the foreseeable. I'm slow and behind on my groups at the minute, including HARPG-ShowCircuit and AngelusWarmbloods, but rest assured new imports will be coming soon and the admins over at SC are getting in gear to make a return, so fun stuff is coming! Summer-Dressage-Show is running as it should, with the usual drying up of registrations that comes after the first couple of weeks, so I'm pretty comfortable over there SO. What's been happening? You guys all saw my statuses, I guess. Enough of you posted encouraging words to me. Sorry my inbox is kinda full at the minute with not many replies coming from me, I always, always, read all of your messages and I appreciate every single one of them. If I don't reply sometimes, it's because social interaction is really really hard for me.
Which sort of leads me on to what's happened lately. Making friends is hard for me anyway, but in real life it's even harder. I have no friends in my immediate vicinity, no one to talk to or hang out with or do things with, so imagine my joy when, in September, I found someone I thought I could hang out with in the form of a person who worked on the very same horse yard that my friend of ten years owns. We hit it off, she was kind and funny and we went to the cinema together a few times, we even went up to Hull to do some shopping and hang out with Zeus and his gang. I was invited around to her house a few times, something that has never happened to me, and overall I thought I'd found myself a new best friend, in REAL life!
Totally stoked. For an autistic person, this was a big deal. She had depression too and she seemed really understanding, so it looked as if she accepted my illnesses and dealt with them accordingly.
When she started telling me bad things about my other friend, someone who I've known for 10 years but I don't really get to talk to much lately, she had built enough trust in me for me to listen to what she was saying. I stupidly believed her. I thought there was reason in what she was saying, I thought this other friend hated me, I thought that I was annoying to her and that she wanted nothing to do with me. I thought her mother was a bitch and had it out for people, that these two didn't care for their horses. Day after day all this pointless shit was poured into my ear. And I fell for it. For the second time in my life I fell for such behaviour.
Many of you might know that from about 2008 to 2014 I was in an abusive relationship, from the age of 17 until i was 23, right through university. He followed me there, made sure I cut all ties with my friends and my hobbies, poured poison in my ear against my best friend until I stopped talking to him and cast him out of my life (we're talking again now, btw. He's fab.)
So as I was sitting there the last few days listening to my friend of 10 years and her mother tell me what had been said about me... I realised it had happened again. I had been manipulated. I had been tricked. I had been deceived in the most vile and evil way I've known since my ex. Right now, I'm furious.
She has been saying, for months, that I'm stupid, that I'm annoying, that I'm useless. This only got worse after the last two weeks where she has said that I'm incompetent, that I needed removing from the pony club Sundays that I have enjoyed so much, where she has blamed me for things that I have absolutely not done. I spent an entire Saturday helping her out, until I had blisters and my fingers were bleeding, and mucked out one of the barns completely by myself. She now insists that I didn't do enough, even though I volunteered and the work was supposed to be hers to do. She also insists that I broke someone else's pitchfork, which I found out yesterday, and my shock that I was being blamed for something I had nothing to do with was immediately enough to clear me of that particular crime. But this is not the first thing she's blamed me of, apparently.
Since that Saturday when I helped out, we've had a pony club session, after which I was accused of numerous things, including, of course, being stupid and incompetent. That day, she asked the manager of the yard to get rid of me because I wasn't doing my job right (again, I volunteer). The manager, the mother of my friend of 10 years, believed her at first (she didn't trust her but she thought in this case she was telling the truth), and told my long-standing friend that she was going to let me go. Luckily, that friend said "wait, no, just give it a little time. Something's not right"
Thank god she did. Because while my new 'friend' had been weaving her web behind my back, I realised that I was being used and manipulated. I realised something wasn't right. I might be gullible but I'm also in tune to how people behave around me. I'm always acutely aware of whether I'm annoying people or not. I got the impression that Saturday that I was annoying her, and it got worse on the Pony Club Sunday. So come Monday, I text my old friend and tell her I want to talk.
And oh, how it's unraveled for that bitch now. Now that those of us who were almost caught in her web have started talking to each other and I have found out the absolute shit she's been saying behind my back. She's still trying to act normal to both me and my old friend, but now we both know the truth. We both see the manipulation, and so does my friend's mother who is mostly in charge of who is hired and fired on this yard.
She is very close to being unstuck, so very close, but I'm sure you can all imagine how gutted and stressed I am. I feel like I can't trust anyone, I feel like I have no friends and no ability to make friends. I can't trust myself to make meaningful friendships. All this has built into some horrible funk that I just can't shake. All I've done for the last few days is watch Elementary and go to the yard to ride Sooty briefly. I'm exhausted and upset, I cried for a good hour the first day I came back from talking to my old friend and her mother, the day I found out the sickening truth.
So... this is all still going on. It isn't over yet. I know there'll be some backlash and a lot of messiness. I know everything is going to suck and I'm not out of the woods. It's so very, very tiring and I'm trying my best to find the energy to at least empty my inbox on here but it's super hard.
If you've left a message for me, I'll get around to it soon. If you need me to do something then I'm sorry but it'll have to wait a week or so. I have some new medication for my newly diagnosed fibromyalgia, so hopefully that'll help with a lot of the symptoms I'm feeling now.... or it'll leave me even more tired, we'll see.
So, I'm sorry for the delays, I'm sorry for going quiet. Don't worry, I'm still here, I'm still running SDS and trying to keep SC ticking over. I'm still entering AUSe and trying to write Burn Eternal. I love you all and hope to be back amongst you soon
For the next 24 hours this journal has been commandeered by Firelight's resident Bubble Butt, Ryan Reid. Any comments you post on here will be responded to by him. If he likes your question enough he might even respond with a picture! 
Yes, yes, mostly this is a character building tool for me but I figured it could be hilarious anyway 
