Bluesky Post - Where I've been

(CW: Vent, Depression, Addiction)

I'm tired of my own self-imposed social isolation, I'm tired of sabotaging my own mental health, and I'm tired of feeling like I no longer have a space where I can feel happy being myself. I just want to go back to feeling the way I did two years ago, where drawing was exciting and made me happy and I could share my passions and interests with friends who love me for who I am, despite my many flaws. The last two years have been hell for me, and I just want it to be over.

This'll be a long post, I just want to explain where I've been for the last 2 years, how things got to this point, and what my plans are moving forward.

Going back to the beginning, the problem initially started when I was way too ambitious and took on an overwhelming number of commissions during my summer break back in 2022. My long-distance partner of several years at the time was going to be visiting the US for their first con (giving me my first opportunity to meet them), and a lot of my close friends from two separate friend groups I was in were also attending, so I felt a desperate need to make the situation work and attend the con as well despite being a broke jobless college student at the time. It was mid-July, about a month and a half before summer was over, and I had thought that so long as I could keep up pace at around 1 commission every few days or so, I'd be able to make it work.

But that didn't happen. Instead, I worked on comms rather aimlessly during that time, only getting a handful done and leaving me with a huge backlog to work through right as I started up my second year of school (it was right around this time I sought out psychiatrist and got an ADHD diagnosis/briefly got on medication which hadn't really helped much). Of course, my course load for the first term ended up being much harder than any of the 3 previous terms I had, which only made the situation worse as I couldn't afford to spend as much time on art, and even still I ended up losing my 4.0 GPA as I struggled in the timed final with my CS class.

From there, despite the disappointing term, I finally had some time to dedicate to working on artwork again as my free time opened up once more with winter break going on and the con soon approaching. And during this time, I did make some progress getting a couple pieces done, right before the big trip to ANE where I'd finally meet up with my friends (sometime in December, a month or so before the con, Woof and I both decided to split up and stay good friends, so the context and my reasons for attending had changed slightly, but regardless the excitement was the same). But literally the night before flying out to the con, a power surge had come through and fried my computer's motherboard and CPU, requiring an expensive repair. This left me in a really volatile situation as I was already struggling to afford to even attend the con, but now upon returning, I'd end up having to dip into my student loans to pay replace the parts for my computer since I was going to school as a full time student, relying on my loans to cover my living expenses. That's not to mention the fact that it was my main PC for both working on comms and doing my classwork. And finally, I had once again struggled with my classes, this time from falling behind while attending the con since I was unable to get as much work done as I'd hoped while attending ANE (Mine and Woof's mutual friend group had rented out an AirBNB in Boston for 10 days surrounding the con). But after struggling to catch up for a few weeks, I eventually decided to just call it quits for the term, cut my loses, and use the remainder of my term to focus on getting the comms done and just retake my classes when I wasn't dealing with commissions piling on stress from the side anymore.

This was my second big mistake. It had seemed like a great plan at the start, I finish up a series of tasks that had been plaguing me for half a year, and then I can move forward towards focusing on school. What I hadn't been aware at the time was that simply not attending classes, even if the term was already more than half-way over, was grounds to have my student loans revoked. And just a few weeks later, I had received the letter in the mail asking me to repay $3k in student loans, unable to sign up for any classes until it's paid off.

The letter came just a couple weeks after I'd started removing myself from social media to focus on drawing up the pieces, I had continually felt guilty about chatting with friends on my AD twitter account. "If you have time to be goofing off with friends, you should be drawing" I'd tell myself, retreating away from social media and friend groups as I tried to buckle down and get serious about finishing them. But when the letter came in, with only a a couple hundred dollars currently left in my account, my stomach plummeted and I found myself slowly slipping into a depression that was spurred on by the following month.

I started each morning waking up with the resolve to work on commissions. However, whenever I'd go to sit down and open up a blank canvas it felt like my body would immediately enter into fight or flight mode. My heart rate would elevate, and I'd feel an intense urge to get up and walk around or be doing literally anything else. I'd push myself to start drawing, hoping that the usual trick of drawing for a few minutes until I get into the groove of it and lose track of time would work, but I could hardly stand to keep myself in my chair drawing for more than 15 minutes at a time. I'd spend the whole day thinking "I need to work on comms", "It's been several months, you don't have an excuse for taking this long", "Why can't you just sit down and work on it like a normal person". I begun to slowly lose confidence in myself and my artwork with the more times I would sit down and fail to draw. And as the days wore on, it just felt like I no longer had any drive, any willpower to get things done or improve my life, and the lack of progress in the singular area I was meant to be focusing on, the one reason why I'd ended up $3k in debt, just made me feel like a failure.

Without a doubt, the next month and a half afterwards was the lowest point in my depression. I spent it alive, but I wasn't living.

During that April, and some of early May, my days had become a blur of just keeping my mind busy until it was time to go to bed. Not having fun, not chatting with friends, not enjoying life, not even taking basic care of myself, just simply waiting out the clock till I could go to sleep again. It's stupid how silly it sounds describing it, despite how bleak the reality of it was, but I still remember how it got so bad to the point I'd just do random jigsaw puzzles online for 14 hours straight till bedtime to keep my brain busy.

Eventually I realized that my isolation hadn't worked for me as intended, and perhaps only poured gasoline on a burning fire. I tried briefly to rejoin and start posting in the community a little bit around this time (late may/early June 2024), but mostly stuck to engaging in my friends' discords again. I felt such a strong sense of awkwardness, guilt and shame that made it hard for me to want to be back in public eye. I mean, how do you reply to a commissioner asking for an update with "Sorry I've been extremely depressed lately and I haven't even started your piece you paid for x months/years ago"? Worst of all, it felt like opening up about my problems I'd been facing would just come across as an excuse for my poor behavior, which is the last thing I wanted. In the end it felt like the only option was just to somehow get myself to just do the work and get all the pieces finished up on my own and then I'd be able to come back to the community, open up about what had happened, and everything would hopefully be okay again and I could move forward. It's not an insurmountable number of commissions, if I could just dedicate myself to working on them for a month and a half, I'd be fine.

But that summer passed by the in the same manner, turning into fall and finally winter with only a bit of progress on comms, struggling at this point to do anything productive with my time, and just slowly drawing less and less (not just comms, but in general) as I felt worse and worse about myself. Eventually I got a minimum wage job locally and finally felt my feet getting back on some steady ground again. My monetary problems didn't evaporate, it would take time to pay off the loan after all, but the money problems were no longer an omni-present distraction in my mind. Instead it was replaced with a new more difficult problem to overcome.

From December of that year to May of the next year (2025), Of that half-year's worth of time, I had spent only a few weeks of it sober. If I wasn't at work, I'd be high on an edible, or eventually a THC vape after switching to using those, from morning till evening. As I started hating myself more and more, and enjoying my days less, I'd reached out to the same substance I'd been using to de-stress from my college courses on the weekend, just to experience a moment of reprieve. But this became my third mistake as I began to develop a heavy addiction to THC that I still struggle with somewhat to this day, (although I haven't been nearly as dependent on it lately as I was back then). At that point, the addiction was so bad that I kept continuing to take it despite not wanting to, just because the cravings had become so intolerable and the behavior so automatic. During this time though, I still did attempt to draw, in fact if anything THC helped in encouraging me to draw, as drawing became more enjoyable the less I was focused on the how the results turned out. But that's just the thing, nothing I'd draw while high would ever turn out good, it would be horribly disproportionate, and have numerous flaws with the form & anatomy that would make the sketches I produced unsalvageable. Eventually even those attempts had stopped and I had gone from drawing daily just a few years ago to barely picking up the stylus every few weeks. Worse yet my social anxiety from my high doses of THC had made me become a recluse even around the small group of friends I'd managed to stay in contact with on discord.

Thankfully during this time, I still had my one ray of hope that I'd been looking forward to all year. After having isolated myself for so long, and been estranged from my friends. I was going to be attending my 2nd con, FWA 2025, this time having saved for it properly ahead of time. I didn't care if the money could be better put towards the debt, or if it didn't make financial sense to attend, I had just been so desperate to feel happy again that I didn't care.

I think FWA was the first time I'd noticed just how corroded my mindset had gotten. In the months leading up to the con, I had once again put the pressure on myself to get all of the commissions finished up, having a genuine fear that if I was unable to finish them in time before the con, that I would be confronted by others there and derided for spending time at a con when I hadn't even finished the commissions I owed yet. As the date approached and no updates were made, my anxiety built and built, I had started to doubt whether I even should attend. That was, until I got to the first room party there. What was waiting for me wasn't what I had built up at all in my mind, instead of people tearing me down, I found a group of loving, kind, and compassionate friends and acquaintances that were worried about me, and wanted me to be happy and come back to posting again. I had started to hate myself so much to the point that I thought it was natural that others would hate me as well, and it took that moment for me to realize that something was deeply wrong with my thoughts.

Since then, I've been trying to do my best to fix my mental health and move forward with my life. There was a bit of a stumbling block from mid-July to October when I got laid off from my job I was working at while they remodel the store (won't reopen till like, the middle of the next year), where I fell into a bit of a depressive slump as I was struggling to find a new job in this dogshit economy. But since then, I've found a new job and I've just been trying to rekindle an interest in drawing again after being burnt out for so long. It took a couple months of just drawing alone each night with no expectations, despite how bad all my rusty half-finished drawings would turn out, just to feel like I could draw confidently again. And it's only been within the last week that I've genuinely had fun and lost track of time while drawing sketches up for my friends.

If there's anything I've learned over the years, but the past 2 especially, its that art has always been a very social thing for me. I am not the type of artist who can draw alone in a room by myself without anyone seeing my work and feel satisfied just from the act itself. I've always had the most fun drawing up my friends in dumb/cute/huffy situations and feeling inspired to create upon seeing their happy/flustered responses. And so for that reason, I don't think I can keep up this act anymore of pretending I'll magically solve all my problems while forcing myself to be alone. I've always just wanted to be able to return triumphantly with all the commissions finished up and none of it hanging over my head constantly anymore. But if I can't return triumphantly, then I may as well return honestly.

I don't know how I'll make finishing up these comms work, my attempts at solutions thus far have not been great. Perhaps maybe the solution is just streaming myself working on them, I know the last couple times I tried it, it seemed to help keep me on track, at least the times I worked up the confidence to stream anyways. But even if that fails, and I need to seek out a different solution I at least want to go back to failing publicly and feeling like I have others to rely on for support.