Hurr... Sorry for the clickbait title, but its still true, I just needed to put a bit of a bright spin on whats been happening to me.

For the past 7+ years I've been fully supporting a family that wasn't even mine, while my own family was very rapidly declining in terms of mental and physical health.

Now you may ask "But Bru, why would you do that?" and the answer is... "Because I was younger and terrified".
I had been threatened by one of the people I was living with. A complete waste of space and time who never paid anything and had two kids. He turned around to me and said "If you ever move out after I've moved out and you leave my mother, I will hunt you down". This same mother being the one who said "What you're gonna move out and replace me with another mother? Screw me over? No fucking WAY" when my mother had her ex-boyfriend break into her house and burned all her identity documents. I just told her I might have to go down and help my mother because she even had a rat infestation. Like I said, things were getting bad for my family.

Every day they made sure to make me feel like absolute human trash. The guy who didn't pay any bills, pay any rent, he didn't buy his own food, he didn't cook his own food (for him or his kids), pretended he was killing himself so Mummy would buy him a motorbike (he was slashing his throat with a broken cup, he's also like... nearly 40) while I was reassuring his 6 year old crying son that Daddy was going to be okay, has made multiple court appearances for being caught by the police and made sure his whole family supported him by screaming at them relentlessly... even his own mother called him the "seed of the devil"...
Well, this guy made sure to make me feel that the artwork i'd been doing for 15+ years was absolute shit and I was in the wrong area of work and should be working for him doing decals for cars and posters and stuff. He made sure to make me feel like I was the one wasting my life when he couldn't even hold down a job for more than half a year. I'd paid insurance and tax on his car after his girlfriend crashed the car, (So I could get to the job he forced me into with him) and still made sure that I was never happy.

A-anyways, thats just... thats just the tip of the iceberg of shit I went through in that house. Once a certain even happened I actually had a mental breakdown. I left them all. I got out of that evil house, away from those evil people, and I'm back in the countryside in a simple Irish cottage by the sea. I feed and look after horses everyday, and I help my grandmother with her Animal Rescue center.

In the last 3 weeks though... things got bad.
On Monday 21st of August, my mother fell off her bike and cracked her ribs, Tuesday I helped my grandmother at her Animal Rescue Center and then went to the pub to help my mother with the heavy lifting.
Wednesday I helped again in the pub, doing the heavy lifting, then my 20 year old dog died, and I had to watch him go on my own.
Thursday I dug a grave for him and put him to rest, on my own.
Friday my grandmother collapsed and got taken to hospital. I suddenly had to be taken up to her place and do the whole rescue center on my own, with only a basic working knowledge of stuff from the year I'd been helping her. I got caught out in the middle of a storm for 6 hours and ended up getting ill by the end of the week. I looked after that place for 5 days. I nearly collapsed from exhaustion myself.
Once my grandmother was out of Hospital, someone reported my mother and my grandmother for animal cruelty out of pure spite. I'm still convinced the evil people I was living with sent some reports to the Animal Rights people here, because they tried to blackmail me into coming back by threatening my family. I'm sure they thought that I wouldn't say anything, but if you're reading this Matt, your brother deserves all of this and so much more, and you too, for continuously throwing up your hands and going "I don't wanna be a third man in this" and just threw me under the bus to your family every time. You were my best friend of 14 years and you never once showed that to your family that made sure to make me be the lowest I'd ever been in my life.

Anyways, then the Animal Rights people came along and forced my family to put down three different horses in the space of a week or two just because they were old.

They also threatened to come pick up my grandmothers rescued pigs and slaughter every last one of them for meat.

Urf... A-anyways... I'm... I had a very bad mental breakdown, and I had way too much thrust on me. Supporting a 7 person family on my own with artwork was nearly impossible. At most I'd have €20 each week to live on. Sometimes my money would be gone as soon as I got it, because of outstanding thousands of euros worth of electricity bills from that family that only my ex-friend was helping with.

I'm coming back around now, I'm trying to reintergrate into everything that I can, but its being quite difficult and I'm breaking down far more than I would like to admit on a daily basis, but I'm honestly trying. I'll be drawing again, finishing off outstanding commissions that I've been delaying people on for over a year now, I'm so sorry.

I was forced to do artwork just to survive, and my quality was getting worse and worse. I felt awful for half the commissions I was giving/"finishing" for people. The quality was awful, nothing made sense and the colouring was just fucking disgraceful. So I'm rebuilding myself, getting back to normal.

If I've done all this on my own, I know I'm a strong person, I know I can do it. And I'll carry on doing it while making sure to look after myself.

If... if anyone even cared enough to read all of this, I really can't thank you enough. I had thought that my life was over about 7 years ago. That was it. I was done. Nothing else was coming my way, I'd done my bit and that was it. This was life now, to be mentally abused every single day until I landed in a grave.

But I'm building myself up again, I'm building up my confidence again, I'm getting a life again. I haven't had one for quite a while. So... for those friends that have stayed by me and held out and just... had faith in me... I really can't thank you enough.

For those I've lost contact with... any of you I lost contact with, I honestly didn't mean to disappear, I just... I just... couldn't... do anything... with anything... I had nothing to me, I thought I wasn't even worth knowing, I thought I'd just fade away, noone remembering me, noone caring, noone really... knowing... because thats how much I'd had "You're useless" beaten into me by those evil, horrible people.

So again, uhm... th-thank you. I don't know if I'll upload all the stuff I've done here, I'll just start uploading like nothing had happened, a time skip, if you wanna call it that. And I'm gonna just... carry on, haha. Hopefully come back to where I was before. Maybe even better, that would be lovely.

U-uhm... th-thank you for reading, you're awesome if you did.

Lots of love
~BruBearBrown