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Update on life and art (Commissioners please read)
4 months ago
Hey, so this has been something I've been thinking on posting for a while but it's hard to write. At the same time, putting it off doesn't make it any easier, so I've just decided to come out and talk about it now and get it over with.
If you've noticed over the past few years, I've become a bit more inactive. If you've commissioned me, you might've noticed that my output slowed down quite a bit, or that I've more or less disappeared from sharing things. This has been a hard few years, and I've found that every time I've tried to pull myself deeper out of the hole I end up just digging it deeper, and I've become completely overwhelmed by it. I think part of the problem has been how I've kept it all to myself, though, which has more or less made it look like I've just been neglecting my work.
My husband Nico/dirtypaws talked about it a bit more over the past year than I have, so you might've already known this, but back in 2019 we had some really awful stuff happen with people who we trusted were good friends, and it completely disrupted our lives and upended our workflow. When you're juggling stress and trauma AND financial burden, you find sometimes that just knuckling down and trying to get your work done doesn't always work out the way you wish it would. I really struggled with my queue during that time, and I fell behind in my work.
We moved in 2020 and regrouped, and over the next few years I started to get my things back in order. My backlog was pretty bad, but I was catching up on it and the ball was in motion where I was managing to take on new slots and keep up with them fine. I also got a part-time job during that time, which helped offload some of the financial burden and kept me mostly at pace with my commissions. In late 2022, though, things ended up falling through with my job and I fell back into doing commissions full time. I was in a better headspace at the time, though, and I kept pace on both my commissions and some other projects I was working on fairly well all the way through to 2024. Nico had a full time job, I had my commissions, and the ball was rolling pretty smoothly for a while.
In early-to-mid 2024, though, Nico and I got into the local furry community again, and it helped us a lot mentally. It was exciting at the time, because neither of us had really had a social life with any furries since what happened in 2019, and it was very refreshing at first to be constantly getting outside and offline and interacting with the community again. There was a while where I think we were doing pretty well, being inspired by a healthy offline social life in this community.
Where things really started getting hard, though, was in September of last year. Nico's grandma fell in the middle of the night and had to go the hospital with several broken bones. It immediately put our lives on pause and our workflow was totally upended again, and we went from getting to work on art and hang out with furries to suddenly having to both step up and help more around the house but also help his grandma get moving again. We live with his grandparents, and over the past year or so we've become a lot more involved with helping care for them, and most of the time that's no trouble at all but during this time it almost felt like a full-time job.
Then, in January of this year, our closest local furry friend committed suicide very suddenly. This was someone we were hanging out with 3-4 days a week, staying over at his place, going on trips with him. We were really close to him and, not only was I hit with the grief of losing a friend but the trauma of what happened really triggered Nico bad, and he started having severe anxiety attacks for the first time in years, and we found that we really had to take a lot of time away from the computer and focus on ourselves in ways we hadn't before. This was the first time that we absolutely just could not try to put our heads down and push through it. Our whole lives came to a screeching halt, and we were making no money on top of having to juggle the grief and trauma of the loss. On top of that, our car broke down the day our friend died, and I had to take emergency commissions for over $1,000 in car repairs.
Every time I feel like I've started to crawl out of the hole, something happens and we sink back down. We're resilient, though, we push through it, and we're getting better by the day, but I feel completely drowned by my queue at the moment and I am doing the best to catch up on it, but it's admittedly made me a bit of a recluse with what feels like an inescapable feedback loop of commissioners wanting updates while I'm working on other commissions, or whenever I post a personal piece. Don't take that the wrong way, please. I think it's perfectly fair to want updates on your commissions, and I'm not upset with anyone for wanting updates, but I find that I've been so completely overburdened by never feeling like I can get any of it caught up in time. I feel like any time I post a commission, I get five commissioners asking for updates, and when I work on one of those, it just means the others get put on backburner for longer. Then I have to take new slots, and then they start asking for updates while I'm working on old slots. Personal art has all but stopped entirely, because I can't post anything without people asking where their slots are. You might have noticed how little I post nowadays. That's why.
It is admittedly very hard to navigate grief and trauma while also having people banging down your door for work updates or commission changes, which is why I finally wanted to say something about it instead of hermiting away and trying to just quietly keep playing catchup. I'm obviously sympathetic to people wanting work they paid for, but I also have to be sympathetic to myself in talking about WHY it has been so hard to catch up on owed work. Being in a place now where I feel like I can't even post my personal art or talk about my project ideas hasn't helped, so I want to talk about it and focus on fixing things moving forward.
Moving forward, I really would like to restructure how I make art online. For my current queue, I am still working on them. I work on commissions almost every day. That said, I want to start issuing refunds and getting my queue entirely cleared before I take on any new work. It's much easier to work through 1-3 slots at a time than it is something like 15, and it's much easier to handle life's issues as they arise if you aren't already backlogged with tons of work. Nico is working part time again, and we have the Lavender County patreon, and I am in contact with Patreon to open my own page as well. I actually tried to do this three years ago and my page has been stuck "under review" since then, so I think it just ended up getting ignored by accident. I've been up their ass trying to get it reviewed, though, so I can open my page and start focusing on a different form of art income.
My top priority is still getting my queue completed or refunded, of course, but after that I think commissions are going to be fewer and farther between and I'm going to be more focused on getting my personal art out into the world again. I have project ideas that I've been excited to show everyone! I've been making TTRPG systems, among other things. I've got a lot in the works that's just kinda sitting behind this roadblock of my queue, so I hope that you all can stick around and see what I've got planned. I'd like to post up some of the personal stuff I've not been posting as well, to show you I've still been making art amidst commissions. I'm hoping that my Patreon gets approved, and I hope that the Lavender County one continues to grow, but overall we're moving toward a system that will help us remain financially stable while also working on art. If Patreon doesn't work out, I'll go find part time work again too. Overall I just want to get things caught up, and I realized it was time that I come forward about WHY it's been hard instead of just hermiting away and hoping that I can find my footing without ever admitting that it's been a hard few years.
Regardless, I appreciate you all so much. I appreciate my followers and my commissioners for supporting me, I especially appreciate your patience. I appreciate my friends, and I appreciate this community. Thank you all so much. I want to get back into the community and be active again, and I think this is the best way to start that.
If you've noticed over the past few years, I've become a bit more inactive. If you've commissioned me, you might've noticed that my output slowed down quite a bit, or that I've more or less disappeared from sharing things. This has been a hard few years, and I've found that every time I've tried to pull myself deeper out of the hole I end up just digging it deeper, and I've become completely overwhelmed by it. I think part of the problem has been how I've kept it all to myself, though, which has more or less made it look like I've just been neglecting my work.
My husband Nico/dirtypaws talked about it a bit more over the past year than I have, so you might've already known this, but back in 2019 we had some really awful stuff happen with people who we trusted were good friends, and it completely disrupted our lives and upended our workflow. When you're juggling stress and trauma AND financial burden, you find sometimes that just knuckling down and trying to get your work done doesn't always work out the way you wish it would. I really struggled with my queue during that time, and I fell behind in my work.
We moved in 2020 and regrouped, and over the next few years I started to get my things back in order. My backlog was pretty bad, but I was catching up on it and the ball was in motion where I was managing to take on new slots and keep up with them fine. I also got a part-time job during that time, which helped offload some of the financial burden and kept me mostly at pace with my commissions. In late 2022, though, things ended up falling through with my job and I fell back into doing commissions full time. I was in a better headspace at the time, though, and I kept pace on both my commissions and some other projects I was working on fairly well all the way through to 2024. Nico had a full time job, I had my commissions, and the ball was rolling pretty smoothly for a while.
In early-to-mid 2024, though, Nico and I got into the local furry community again, and it helped us a lot mentally. It was exciting at the time, because neither of us had really had a social life with any furries since what happened in 2019, and it was very refreshing at first to be constantly getting outside and offline and interacting with the community again. There was a while where I think we were doing pretty well, being inspired by a healthy offline social life in this community.
Where things really started getting hard, though, was in September of last year. Nico's grandma fell in the middle of the night and had to go the hospital with several broken bones. It immediately put our lives on pause and our workflow was totally upended again, and we went from getting to work on art and hang out with furries to suddenly having to both step up and help more around the house but also help his grandma get moving again. We live with his grandparents, and over the past year or so we've become a lot more involved with helping care for them, and most of the time that's no trouble at all but during this time it almost felt like a full-time job.
Then, in January of this year, our closest local furry friend committed suicide very suddenly. This was someone we were hanging out with 3-4 days a week, staying over at his place, going on trips with him. We were really close to him and, not only was I hit with the grief of losing a friend but the trauma of what happened really triggered Nico bad, and he started having severe anxiety attacks for the first time in years, and we found that we really had to take a lot of time away from the computer and focus on ourselves in ways we hadn't before. This was the first time that we absolutely just could not try to put our heads down and push through it. Our whole lives came to a screeching halt, and we were making no money on top of having to juggle the grief and trauma of the loss. On top of that, our car broke down the day our friend died, and I had to take emergency commissions for over $1,000 in car repairs.
Every time I feel like I've started to crawl out of the hole, something happens and we sink back down. We're resilient, though, we push through it, and we're getting better by the day, but I feel completely drowned by my queue at the moment and I am doing the best to catch up on it, but it's admittedly made me a bit of a recluse with what feels like an inescapable feedback loop of commissioners wanting updates while I'm working on other commissions, or whenever I post a personal piece. Don't take that the wrong way, please. I think it's perfectly fair to want updates on your commissions, and I'm not upset with anyone for wanting updates, but I find that I've been so completely overburdened by never feeling like I can get any of it caught up in time. I feel like any time I post a commission, I get five commissioners asking for updates, and when I work on one of those, it just means the others get put on backburner for longer. Then I have to take new slots, and then they start asking for updates while I'm working on old slots. Personal art has all but stopped entirely, because I can't post anything without people asking where their slots are. You might have noticed how little I post nowadays. That's why.
It is admittedly very hard to navigate grief and trauma while also having people banging down your door for work updates or commission changes, which is why I finally wanted to say something about it instead of hermiting away and trying to just quietly keep playing catchup. I'm obviously sympathetic to people wanting work they paid for, but I also have to be sympathetic to myself in talking about WHY it has been so hard to catch up on owed work. Being in a place now where I feel like I can't even post my personal art or talk about my project ideas hasn't helped, so I want to talk about it and focus on fixing things moving forward.
Moving forward, I really would like to restructure how I make art online. For my current queue, I am still working on them. I work on commissions almost every day. That said, I want to start issuing refunds and getting my queue entirely cleared before I take on any new work. It's much easier to work through 1-3 slots at a time than it is something like 15, and it's much easier to handle life's issues as they arise if you aren't already backlogged with tons of work. Nico is working part time again, and we have the Lavender County patreon, and I am in contact with Patreon to open my own page as well. I actually tried to do this three years ago and my page has been stuck "under review" since then, so I think it just ended up getting ignored by accident. I've been up their ass trying to get it reviewed, though, so I can open my page and start focusing on a different form of art income.
My top priority is still getting my queue completed or refunded, of course, but after that I think commissions are going to be fewer and farther between and I'm going to be more focused on getting my personal art out into the world again. I have project ideas that I've been excited to show everyone! I've been making TTRPG systems, among other things. I've got a lot in the works that's just kinda sitting behind this roadblock of my queue, so I hope that you all can stick around and see what I've got planned. I'd like to post up some of the personal stuff I've not been posting as well, to show you I've still been making art amidst commissions. I'm hoping that my Patreon gets approved, and I hope that the Lavender County one continues to grow, but overall we're moving toward a system that will help us remain financially stable while also working on art. If Patreon doesn't work out, I'll go find part time work again too. Overall I just want to get things caught up, and I realized it was time that I come forward about WHY it's been hard instead of just hermiting away and hoping that I can find my footing without ever admitting that it's been a hard few years.
Regardless, I appreciate you all so much. I appreciate my followers and my commissioners for supporting me, I especially appreciate your patience. I appreciate my friends, and I appreciate this community. Thank you all so much. I want to get back into the community and be active again, and I think this is the best way to start that.
At least we're friendly pervs here.