Hey everyone, it's been some time since I had last tweeted and wanted to put some life updates to follow up some earlier statements regarding my past toxic behaviors with previous roommates / close friends from 2014-2016.

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I decided to take some time away from social media once again to reflect on where my life has gone in the last 5-10 years and ensure that I am staying true to fixing all of my toxic behaviors / interactions from pre-2016.

My biggest reason for posting this thread is I want to keep myself accountable publicly and ensure that none of this ever happens to anyone I interact with again. I want to outline what I plan to do about this moving forward so that I can continue to be a better person.

I greatly appreciate the support my friends and followers have given me amid this, but I must stress that I absolutely want to be held accountable if I am ever being out of line, toxic, manipulative, manic, rude, abusive, and please continue to challenge me to do better.

For those who felt deceived by not knowing any of this information about my history, I want to offer my sincerest apologies once again. It is never my intent to pretend this all never happened. If this means you no longer wish to interact with / follow me, I fully understand.

As mentioned previously in my statements, between 2015-2016 I had already been trying to go through therapy to resolve previous mental issues that had caused these behaviors so that I could try to prevent them. Progress was slow and at the start I deflected from the root issues.

Around October 2015 was when I started to finally make progress and uncover a lot of repressed abuse from my own childhood. Over the past few years I have tried to resolve the remaining emotions from that time. I am learning to live with it the best that I can.

Unfortunately progress to resolve my own behaviors was still slow and I can't say that I started actively changing my behaviors until mid-2016. It was a slow process that involved prescriptions, more therapy, and some life changing experiences with close friends.

From late 2016 to today, I have been dedicated to being a better self and have not allowed for any of those same behaviors to happen in any of my interactions with others. While I know I will never be perfect, I feel that I have come a very long way from where I started.

There is a lot more detail to what I have done to try to mitigate myself between 2016 and now, but this is the shortest summary of it. I want to fast forward to this past month to go over the steps I have taken to make sure I am still on the right path:

1. I recently reconnected with a therapist and scheduled a few sessions to review with me on 3 factors:
- Where I have been.
- Where I am at.
- What I have done and will continue to commit to.

My goal was to ensure that I have professional perspective on my personal growth...

...to ensure I am still on the right path. I laid out to them the full extent of my previous toxic behaviors and the effect they had on others around me at the time. We also further examined root causes and my own personal development past 2016 to now.

While I wouldn't expect a therapist to be able to fully speak on my behalf to say that I am doing well compared to where I had been, I used the most of the time and learned more about myself and what I can do from here to stay the course of positive life choices.

2. Between 2017-2020, I had already been delving into self-help resources to better educate myself about mental disorder and how to better handle repressed abuse issues than how I had been dealing with them previously. I recently spent some time reviewing these resources again.

3. I chatted with friends and loved ones who had kept me accountable throughout the years and helped me through a lot of my worst self. My intent here was not to get ass-pats, but to have an honest and truthful opinion regarding myself and how I could improve.

4. I spent time self-evaluating my interactions with friends to make sure I was not anywhere near revisiting toxic patterns or mentally abusing anyone around me and keeping a healthy level of communication with loved ones.

5. Going off point 4, I found opportunities where I could better improve relations with some friends as well as my partner. We have had deeper conversations on a 1 on 1 basis to make communication better where needed and make any needed changes.

6. I have been sending apologies directly to those affected by any of my actions pre-2016 where possible. I do not expect forgiveness, but simply wanted to do the right thing where I could. I regret that I had taken so long in some cases to send any type of apology.

I acknowledge that a few individuals that I have effected do not wish to be bothered any further after talking to mutual friends and I will continue to respect this. I have no intent to cause any further harm or bother anyone who does not want to hear my apologies or see me.

This is not to say that these 6 things is the end of any growth or personal development. I will continue to do whatever is needed to improve myself to have healthy interactions with those around me and to respect those who I have the privilege to befriend.

Beyond this, I am making a commitment to continue using my platform to speak out about civil rights issues and to be a better ally for BIPOC individuals and to repost opportunities to self educate. I will have more on what I plan to do in a separate post in the next few weeks.

There is a lot more I could and want to do for the betterment of our community and raise awareness to important issues both inside and outside of furry. Even if it only results in educating someone else about it, it's still more effective than doing nothing or staying quiet.

To conclude, I'm not proud of my history pre-2016 in the least bit. I remain incredibly regretful and apologetic for my own actions and will continue to improve myself and treat everyone with the respect they deserve. I will not let these promises be empty.

Thank you for reading through this thread. I know it will take time to establish my words into actions and hope that this post serves well as my own devotion to continue to be a better me for myself and for anyone around me.

Link to original statement: https://twitter.com/ovenotter/status/1282809091774017538

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