BLAQUEER: a self-care attempt

January 1st, 2017: an attempt at being more “active” about my own well-being à la microblogging finally gets off the ground. i’ve been thinking about making something like this for myself for a while, but have always dragged my feet about it.

BLAQUEER will be devoted to any and everything that i find helpful for myself personally re: navigating queerness, mental health and self-care as a black person. at the moment, i envision that as including, but not being limited to:

• photos, artwork, etc of queer black people existing: because goddamnit, be it on Tumblr or out in the world at large, i never see that without actively search for it. i want a place where i can see people like me existing without having to hunt for it each time. i also want to curate what i see because i’m tired of wading through hypersexualization / hypermasculinzation when i do hunt for representation / visibility.
• the positive and negative of dealing with poor mental health issues: be it my own blatherings about it or the writing of others, be it misanthropic comics or suggestions for everyday coping methods– i hope to put a lot of mental health (and general health) related stuff here without feeling the need to withhold my negative feelings / experiences in favor of more positivity. if i can find things that others have made related to mental health and being black / queer simultaneously all the better, but i’m not holding my breath. might get up the nerve to blurb about that myself eventually.
• resources & random commentary on my own (failed) self-care: resources in the form of reblogs, links to things i find online, my own commentary on things that have and haven’t worked for me etc, as well as a lot of random thinking aloud about things in general that i’ve usually reserved for Twitter but have grown annoyed with the inability to go back and find things afterwards.

while i do try to touch upon all of these things on my main blog, @queerascat, i often feel like i can’t actually go into depth about these things there for various reasons. while Queer As Cat will continue to be what it has always been, i’m hoping to be able to be more inwardly focused with BLAQUEER.

anyone is welcome to follow BLAQUEER, but please only do so bearing in mind the potentially “”heavy”” nature of some of its content. i will tag try to tag for triggers and you are free to ask me to tag something in particular, but…. yeah. the goal is to try to uncensor and unrestrain myself. “followers beware” and all that jazz.

starting out, i will be digging through QAC and reblogging old content to this blog, but hope to start posting “newer” things very soon. cheers.

– Vesper

p.s. also, just to put this out there and get it off my chest because it’s making my anxious, i was really hesitant to use a photo of myself as the header image on the blog, but in the end it’s there as a constant reminder to myself that the blog and its contents exist for me… i often need reminding that i can even do something solely for myself, so… i might change it, iono.