I'm fully vaccinated now, and aspects of life seem to be getting back to normal. My mental state is much better than pretty much since February 2020.

I'm still burned out, though, and I think it goes deeper than just the pandemic at this point.

For a long while I threw myself in a routine where I was writing nonstop. Log off work, maybe take a walk or make dinner, write until I reached a self-imposed limit, THEN get to relax. I was treating my free time as if it was a commodity, filling it up with writing stories and focused on "doing something" with it and being "productive" in a fruitless fight to avoid pandemic depression. Which, don't get me wrong, was good and productive for a while, but definitely contributed hardcore to me being drained.

Right now I feel good, but I think I need to completely redo how I do commissions. I need to stop an immediate need to "make more money" every time I open up, and I ESPECIALLY need to focus on stories I want to tell and stories that appeal to me. I enjoy telling stories for folks who want those stories, but I can't make myself focus on things I'm not immediately drawn to.

Unfortunately, I think I'm going to be nuking my outstanding commission list, outside of the story I left halfway done when I went on hiatus. This doesn't mean those ideas are never getting written, and if you've put in for a commission from me recently, please don't take it personally, you haven't done anything wrong. I just need to reapproach this fun hobby I've turned into an anchor of a "second job" in a way that leaves me fulfilled and not burned out. I'm at a point where my creativity has returned and I'm coming up with fun story ideas, but I don't have the will or the drive to turn them into stories - likely due to the aforementioned burnout from accidentally turning a fun hobby into a second job. I hope that once I've rebooted my thought process, this will change.

I'm going into an incredibly stressful six-week period at work, and as a result, I think this hiatus will continue until then. After that point, I'll probably come back with a YCH or two of story ideas that I really enjoy. To counter the part where I'm likely transitioning from commissions to primarily YCH and less consumer-oriented works, I'll be experimenting with ways to include more people in those stories and allow for collaboration between folks. I don't want people who want to commission me to feel left out or cold, but to be fair, I started writing here in earnest in 2016 and started taking commissions in 2017. I've changed a lot in the last five years, as has my life, and I need to reassess how I'm approaching furry. I'm not leaving, but I think I need to reorient myself for sure.

So, anyway - To Do list is going away. Commission applications are in limbo for now, possibly forever, but please don't take it personally. In the future I'll be working on one project at a time with no to-do list putting additional self-imposed stress and anxiety on my head.

To end, I recently read a thread about a guy who committed himself to work so hard that he literally broke how his brain processes things. Honestly, I think I did that to myself in the late winter with furry writing - once I was sitting in front of a Google Doc for an hour with maybe two paragraphs written in that time, it was hard to ignore. So here's to finding better ways forward, I guess.