I'm going to do something I pretty much never do: I'm going to talk about myself, my life, and the personal things that have been going on. I almost never use this account anymore, but this is the most appropriate place to put this, since it does pertain to my work, but is too personal for the savageturtlestudios account.

Some awful things have been happening, lately. This is the kind of shit you see in news stories, and it makes you lose your faith in humanity. I honestly am not sure why I'm revealing this information here, especially since I doubt most people will read it. I don't know what I hope to accomplish by it. Maybe I just want to get it out. Maybe I just want someone to say "that's terrible, but it is not the end of the world."

To start off: I come from a horrible family. I've distanced myself as much as possible from them because of what horrible people they are. Drug addicts, alcoholics, abusers, thieves and liars. Most of my family has been in and out of jail for various offenses, the most amusing of which is my cousin and uncle, who tried to rob a bank. My immediate family, they're not too bad. They're alcoholics. They're drug addicts. They were abusive. Not gonna lie, according to my psychiatrist, I've got PTSD from the crap I went through growing up. But for the most part we had stability: my father always held down a job, and though we were very poor, we never really went hungry or got evicted or had our utilities shut off for failing to pay our bills.

My sister started getting pregnant when she was 14. I say "started getting pregnant" because, barring a few dry spells, she pretty much never stopped. At the age of 32, she now has seven children, and it's only limited to those seven because she finally got her tubes tied. I grew up around her first two children, Chris and Tyler. I loved those children. But my sister began getting into drugs pretty hard, and left her husband. Eventually, when they were around 9 and 7, she finally lost custody of them to her ex, and we have not been allowed to see them since. Almost ten years later, I still have dreams about them. I dream that I see them again, and I get to hug them and tell them that despite what their father said, my family and I never stopped caring about them, and we never stopped thinking of them. I still hold out hope that one day they will find a way to contact my family again.

After leaving her first husband, my sister had a few horrible relationships with various abusive assholes. She eventually settled down, though, with a man who in our small town is a known Piece of Shit. He's pretty well known for drugging and raping women. In fact, he did this to my ex-girlfriend. She started hanging out with my sister, got into drugs. Despite my trying to keep her out of it, anyone who's had a loved one descend into that lifestyle knows there is pretty much nothing you can do. We got a call early one morning from this man's grandmother, saying that my girlfriend and my sister had both overdosed at his house. We found them both passed out, my sister naked and my girlfriend naked from the waist down. Despite all of the blatant evidence, the police failed to file charges against him, because my girlfriend could not accurately remember all that had happened. All she could tell them was that she'd had a headache and he had given her a pain killer for it, and that's the last thing she recalled.

My sister was in the hospital for about four days. When she got out, she went right back to this Piece of Shit. Eventually, she got pregnant. Eventually, they got married. And despite the rape, despite him beating her up, despite him beating on the children, despite him trying to run her off the road with his car to kill her and her children, they stayed married for a good while, and they ended up having five children together.

After a good long while of him being a generally poor piece of shit, refusing to get a job or do more with his life than beat up his family, she got tired of it and left him. A lot of bouncing around happened, a lot of bullshit and drama. For the most part, my parents have been raising her five children. My sister lived with my parents for a while before taking the kids and moving in with some 36 year old man who is, surprisingly, worse than the rapist piece of shit.

Which brings us to today. She'd been living with this man for over a year. She's been prostituting. She's been addicted to crack. And as of a few days ago, she is in jail for child neglect and failure to report a crime. The crime that she witnessed that she failed to report? For the past year, this piece of human excrement has been raping my three nieces, as well as the child of a neighbor that the children would play with. All of these children are under 9 years old. The youngest is 4. Four years old. Despite all that has happened to her, my oldest niece has been a straight-A student, and has taken on the role of mother to her younger siblings. Unfortunately, the same can not be said of the oldest of the five, a young man who has been taught by his father to use and abuse women in the same way he does. I won't get into all of that, but I will say... I honestly fear for the safety of his younger siblings, especially the girls, as he gets older.

Today, the Department of Children and Families decided that the best course of action, with my sister in jail, would be to give these five children to their father. And because of the bad blood between him and my family, we will likely never see them again. My mother can barely talk for three minutes without breaking down into tears--despite her problems, she loves those children, and has done better for them than for even her own children.

What really breaks me about this entire thing is that all of this began to come to a head right in the middle of my Anthrocon crunch time. I kept thinking I had time... just finish these two suits, and I can go down to visit them. I can hug these girls and tell them that everything will be alright, and that despite all of the horrible people they've had in their lives, they will ALWAYS have a person who loves them. And now I can't. We'd planned for the older kids to come and spend a week at my house over the summer--it's somewhat of a tradition at this point. Now they won't be able to. When they found out they would have to go live with their father, they cried. They said they didn't want to. They asked "what about uncle Jake, when will we get to see uncle Jake?"

My heart is broken.

Now I'm stuck here. I haven't slept in days, and when I do pass out from exhaustion, I either wake up from nightmares or to a phone call giving me more bad news.

Another topper to this is that my mother-in-law just lost her house today to foreclosure, and has to be out in two months' time. She has nowhere to go, and we have to worry about helping her find a place to live (she may end up moving in with us), and pack up all her things to put into storage, or sell, or transport to... wherever she ends up. So there's that added bonus of stress.

Oh, and I can't forget: I had to go to a dermatologist to get a mole looked at. He said that it "didn't look good," and I still haven't heard back on the results of the tests, despite it being past the two week time frame. No one ever answers the phone for the number they gave me for the results, and I haven't received a call back. So I additionally get to worry that I might have god damn skin cancer.

So... I'm literally at the end of my rope here. I don't think I've ever been so stressed in my entire life. I teeter between total numbness and complete breakdown. I'm not sure if I want to push myself and finish these suits and meet my deadlines, or just... say fuck it all and give up because I can't take it anymore. I don't even know what to do at this point.

EDIT: Just in case anyone wants to know, I heard back from the doctor this morning. I don't have cancer, but I do have precancerous cells. I have to go back in to have more of the surrounding tissue removed in the hopes that we get rid of all of the dangerous cells in the area.