Hello again, after another lengthy absence.

Months ago I ostensibly returned to the community, at that time eager to share a selection of my personal Arda Legendarium headcanon. Then I suddenly vanished once more into thin air. What happened is a pretty silly reason to disappear, but I'll explain how that reason was enough in a bit. What happened is this: one of my headcanon posts was a phylogenic organisation of the languages of Beleriand and their descendants, and that particular post was so riddled with apparently blatant errors (really it was just that I posted it as I had typed it in my notes, and failed to explain my trains of thought) that the sheer embarrassment of my screwup drove me away.

Now this kind of incident relates to the reason I had to step down from being an Artist on the server. This requires me now to share some personal information, which I've recently come to realise is important for people to know about me so that I can feel less like I'm constantly in social crosshairs. Thing is, I'm quite heavily autistic (but actually passably good at masking [which is to act the way I think people would expect a normal person to behave]). My exact experience is extremely complex, and a lot of it is a mystery to even myself, and is thus very difficult to explain, especially considering that part of that experience is that explaining things is a very difficult thing for me to do. A gross oversimplification would be to say that I'm ridiculously fragile. I withdrew from Artist duties because the (almost entirely imaginary) pressure to channel creative labour into a public project with such high standards petrified me, and resulted in a lot of (self-imposed) anxiety. Then, feeling as if I had let the server down, I faded into the backdrop, and then vanished altogether.

Yet then and now I still badly want to be part of this community, because of the art, the friendliness, and the love of Tolkien's world and mythology. And also because I still feel this might be the place to share with others my Tolkien-related hyperfixations.

That is another aspect of my autism: hyperfixations, which are basically oddly specific, but often fleeting/periodic, obsessions. One thing us autistics (typically) love is to share our hyperfixations with others. I did so those months ago by sharing my Tolkien headcanon (which had existed as a collection of notes on my phone). I have a lot of projects I've been working on on-off for many years, stemming from my hyperfixations. One of these projects is essentially the culmination of my Tolkien hyperfixation, which I wanna talk about next (and will be making a post about soon).

On-and-off for many years now, I've been working on merging all of the Professor's writings set in and pertaining to the Legendarium into one enormous concise work. For me, someone with debilitating information-processing issues, this is an extremely challenging task. Before I had acquired HoME, I had already managed to merge all of The Silmarillion, Children of Húrin, Unfinished Tales, and the Appendices to LotR, into one big text (a work which I'll be sharing for those interested), but once I began with the HoME material, I realised I had gone about the project all wrong, and had to start over. I can't do this alone, but I refuse to give up on my vision of a concise unified Legendarium. Mostly, that's what brings me back now: to seek assistance. An in-depth post about this project is coming soon (perhaps even later today).

So there you have it. Why I disappeared (again), why I'm back, and a bit of who I am.

I sincerely hope y'all will still have me.