UPDATE 25/5/26: Hi! Um. How's it going? TL;DR; you can now find me on virtualfriend and vampirecult. I don't remember SHIT from back in the day, whether we were friend or foe, so this is a fresh start to me. But if you want the long version...

Holy SHIT it's been 500 years. I've rejoined the community on and off here and there over the past... decade... and never quite stuck around, for a lot of reasons. The biggest one is that the game itself is, um, shall we say, difficult to stick with on its own these days! It was originally a screensaver, after all... there isn't much to do if you aren't 15 and rabidly roleplaying with your friends 24/7 xD

Another reason is that for a long time I really wanted to separate myself entirely from who I was as a teenager - "Dannii", in other words. Partly because I turned out to be trans and I hated seeing the "girl" version of myself from back then, deadname and all, and partly because I also turned out to have DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) and I am quite literally a different person now. I mean, fuck, it's been nearly 15 years so I'm sure we're ALL different, but with DID it's um. It's a little more extreme than your usual "I grew older and changed". You know? Not only is my sense of identity/self different, but DID comes with amnesia. A lot of it. My memory is extremely fragmented, if not entirely blank in huge swathes, up until about 2016 - and even then there are still huge gaps for a few years after that due to various traumas. I don't remember most of the people I knew here. There are blogs, comments, roleplays and such that I have no memory of at all; entire friendships that from the looks of it seem to have been very close and intimate, and yet I don't remember it. The only knowledge I have of it is from the few comments and blogs that remain on the site. And so I'm so sorry if we knew each other in the past and I don't recognise you as I once did!

I'm sorry, too, for how rude I've occasionally been in the years since I left, both in here and in the TEF discord. As you can probably imagine if you also spent your teenage years on here, I have a lot of unresolved issues with the way parts of the community were back then. Not specific members, to be clear! I am talking about a cultural issue that existed in the 00s-10s where the boundaries of appropriate behaviour towards younger teens on the site were very blurred... It was not, in many ways, a safe place for a child to grow up. It has done lasting damage not only to me but to many people who grew up here - many of whom I'm not friends with, or even actively avoid, but whose suffering and experiences I still recognise and resonate with. At the same time, TEFc was my escape from a traumatic childhood/adolescence, as it was for so many others as well. It is complicated! And that's not even getting into the issues with the actual development of TEF/Project Greenleaf/the "remake"...

But moving on from that:

I'm so thankful to all the people I played and roleplayed with back then, especially those who were patient with and kind to me when I was--well, a very obnoxious, traumatised teenager (as were we all, really). I had some truly wonderful times, even if I don't remember many of them now. I'm heartbroken that I deleted so many old blogs that I can no longer go back and look over, but grateful that I never had the heart to delete this one. It will remain up, embarrassing moments and all, until TEFc finally succumbs to the inevitable.

Currently, you can find me on virtualfriend and vampirecult on the community site, though I might switch to another account as my 'hub' account at some point, similar to the way this one used to be... I think I wouldn't mind going by 'Dannii' again on here, but I'm not sure. I go back and forth on that. I've never actually been able to find a name that stuck for me, even now! It's part of why I've account-hopped so much over the past decade. Generally, my stance on names (because I've had MANY of them) is "call me whatever you know me by". So if you knew me as Dannii, feel free to call me that! Or MoonlitStar, or Rutilus, or whatever else. It doesn't matter too much to me. Chances are I'll end up with a new username and we can all call me that instead xD

As a note though: virtualfriend and vampirecult are both technically run by different alters - we're all the same person, but my "personality" and typing style and such are likely to be different between the two, we might forget things between alters, and you're probably not talking to 'me' most of the time (the "me" writing this blog, I mean). If that makes any sense. If you're familiar with DID you probably don't need any explanation, but if you're not then... um. Good luck!

In many ways getting a DID diagnosis makes SO MUCH of my behaviour on TEFc as a teenager make much more sense. There are a lot of characters I made, or blogs I wrote, or ways I behaved where, looking back at them, I can very clearly see the through-line of "oh, I was dissociated/a different part here", or "oh, these characters were me trying to express parts of my dissociated self", etc. For a good chunk of time I really thought it was just me being trans that caused that "disconnect" from my past self, but... No, not quite. Hah.

Anyway, if you read this, thank you. Perhaps I'll see you in-forest sometime; if you see Rut's pictogram around, you're always welcome to come and sit next to him. ^^ Same goes for any of my deer, really; I largely play the game only semi-IC/my deer are generally an expression of my moods and self at any given moment, the way most people played back when I first joined. But I do still love designing characters for this game, I can't help myself LOL.

<3

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