So I've struggled to draw for a while. I was doing sort of all right a couple years ago, then my life collapsed repeatedly and I've not been able to get back to where I was. Once there was a week where I drew a YCH every day for like five days straight. Now I struggle so badly with composition and remembering how to do anatomy right that it feels impossible to do anything for anybody on any timetable.

The reason I've been focusing on music and calligraphy is that those are what I can still do without overwhelming, debilitating shame. Drawing is harder now than it was then, and I don't know how long it will take my mind to heal from what I've been through. Even just controlling the shaking in my hands is harder because the PTSD is worse now.

I cannot give any ETA on the YCHs. I don't know how long it'll be before I feel ready to draw for others again. For now, what I dare to draw, I need to draw for myself, so that I can heal. I used to think that maybe I could draw enough for others that maybe if I focused on it as a full-time thing I'd be able to do it consistently and reliably, but...then my life collapsed again, and I couldn't do it. I don't know what I'll do now. Build tube circuits that make weird noises while I lick my wounds and try to survive, I guess.

How to draw figures!

1. Start with a gesture or action line to define the pose.
2. Suggest the rest of the pose with further gestures.
3. Refine the figure with more detail.
4. Break down crying, give up due to crushing shame because you can't seem to do it right anymore. You can't even manage these embarrassing attempts daily. You're hopeless.

I keep hearing progress isn't a straight line, but the bastard isn't even continuously differentiable. It feels more like -|Γ(z)| going left on the real axis, repeatedly almost reaching something positive before I fall back into an infinitely deep hole--slowly getting closer each time, yet never crossing the axis.

The good news is that after a year I'm finally starting to regain art motivation. Also, I am working on the first edition of a Rŭ dictionary. The bad news is I sprained my thumb on my drawing hand. One of these days I'll have motivation and two usable thumbs, and just you wait! and wait and wait and--

In April I was able to secure safer housing, so that I will no longer be in a stressful and dangerous domestic situation. Unfortunately, the toll it took on me is heavy. Last year, I was in the depths of the fourth major burnout of my life. What I needed last year, above all else, was peace and space to recover. Instead what I got was several months of relentless screaming and drunken violence as my erstwhile friend and his screaming psycho bitch girlfriend repeatedly re-enacted the Jerry Springer Show outside my bedroom. He had several violent, enraged outbursts in which he smashed things, beat his head violently against things, threatened me with physical violence, and mentioned repeatedly that he had a gun (invariably whilst in a drunken rage.)

The worst such episode of screaming drunken violence, which I alluded to in my previous journal, was the one that happened after he drank some Fireball on the night of Saturday, October 7th.

It broke me, and I was already broken. And when somebody needs--desperately, actually needs--peace and recovery and gets screaming and drunken violence and threats of literal armed force instead, that does deep, long-term damage. So that's where I'm at. The fifth major burnout, along with the loss of neurological functioning it entails, within the depths of the fourth. Recursive burnout amplified by domestic violence.

I will not be able to finish my current queue before the end of the year, and I do not expect to open for commissions again for at least two years. It will take me at least that long to recover (enough to draw again with any regularity--full recovery is unrealistic) from what has been done to me and what it has done to my mind.

A combination of complex trauma from child abuse, many years of unsustainable workloads, and having the peace I needed to heal taken away from me when I needed it most has left me an utterly broken dragon and essentially obliterated my ability to function as an artist--or anything else, for that matter. My only hope is that this time, I will be allowed to heal, insofar as I ever will.

So when I opened for commissions, things were going great. I was drawing something every day, I was getting things done, and I was feeling good.

Then some severe stressors (and, in some cases, very forceful and hamfisted activation of PTSD triggers) repeatedly slammed that against the wall until it was smashed into myriad little shards, and I can once again barely focus, barely draw, and barely remember to even prepare breakfast before the sun goes down.

So I have been unable to get much done since October 5th. That was two days before a domestic violence event that (re)traumatized me and lit the rest of the month on fire with incessant flashbacks that left me exhausted. The burnout all came roaring right back as if a year of recovery didn't even matter.

I seem to only get two steps out of this hole before something or someone throws me back down it for another month.

So I'm starting from a dead stop, again, and trying to build up my pace and my confidence again, because otherwise if I sit down and try to work on a commission when I'm feeling like this (for an entire month, again) I just can't focus. Nothing comes together, I can't even get a sketch done. Everything goes all janky and ugly and it's demoralizing. So...I gotta step away from my queue now and then and work on other things until I no longer feel so afraid of the canvas and so ashamed of myself for not being able to make pictures come out. So if you see me posting personal work while I owe you commissions...yes, I know, believe me, I am way ahead of you on feeling guilty about it. But I've realized that if I just try to grind at commissions when I can barely even cook breakfast, I don't get practice--just unproductive frustration that destroys my confidence and takes the wind out of my sails every time I look at the damn thing again. So I gotta break out of that and then get back to it.

ETA: I have no fuckin' idea, man.

Okay, I seem to be functional again. I also somewhat overdid it and need to give my hand a rest for a few days. (As usual, I was setting my brush too small, using too much pressure, and forgetting to take breaks.)

Anyway. I am actually resuming the neglected pile of YCHs from last year. I am also sort of opening for commissions again. I'm keeping the number of slots small so I don't implode myself with anxiety by taking too many again. For now, just one at a time until the YCHs are done, but eventually more. It's been so long since people submitted the info for the YCHs that I have probably forgotten things, so let me know if I got your pronouns wrong or such when I uploaded it. Half of them are done, eight to go.

My ability to draw is gradually recovering now that my brain is no longer being puréed by tech-industry capitalism and drained out of my ear five days a week. There's actually more left inside now than a television tuned to a dead channel at maximum volume.

Right, I'm slowly recovering from burnout reinflamed by moving and I seem to be drawing things again. More updates soon.

I need to know--for those of you I still owe one of the "Putin Khuylo" YCHs--do y'all still want these?

I have had a difficult time picking back up on these after work burnout basically crushed the entirety of the momentum I had going last spring. A couple of the characters also proved remarkably difficult to draw in the requested pose--especially in the context of rising burnout. Slot number eight is...maybe two-thirds done? I struggled with that one the worst and have made several attempts over the winter to buckle down and finish it, to no avail.

So I still owe nine of them, and frankly I am so intimidated by them that it demotivates me. It's really hard to draw these when I've lost confidence in my ability to complete the remainder after more than half have gone unfinished for 14 months. It also makes me feel guilty about working on anything else, so I can either feel guilty practicing or feel overwhelmed by these YCHs because I'm out of practice because I lost all of my momentum and it builds back up only slowly and painfully.

I should absolutely NEVER have opened more than six slots, but I felt an intense pressure to open more because of the immense popularity of #artforua and the fact I got signal-boosted by a prominent artist on Twitter. It felt shitty to just go "sorry, everybody who saw this tweet, but all my slots are already full"--but that is exactly what I should have done.

I would refund these if I could, but all of them were in return for people donating to United Help Ukraine--I can't very well tell them to refund donations from over a year ago. So I really don't know what to do about them. It weighs on me, and I feel imprisoned by it--and that, in turn, beats down what little motivation I have left between work burnout, the stress of preparing to move in May, and staring at my towering queue of mistakes.

At the same time, a lot of people made donations to a nonprofit because of my YCH, and I feel like I'm screwing them over if I don't complete these. So...I will put the question to you, the commissioners. Do you still want them?

Of course, I had to get SOME practice for the sake of my sanity. But most of what I have drawn in that time, I have not even posted here, because I felt ashamed of posting anything personal when I still owed so many YCHs. Working on personal things with no sense of obligation or pressure takes away the crushing anxiety and keeps me from falling completely out of practice--but I also cannot do it without guilt.

If I can wipe the queue clean, then I can continue recovering on my own until I'm ready to properly open for commissions again. (And I will never open more than half a dozen slots at once again.)

I recently quit my job for mental health reasons. I have been fighting burnout for years and it has finally caught up with me. I cannot continue this way. I cannot go back.

So I am taking an unspecified number of months to do absolutely nothing. Do not ask me what I'm doing next or whether I have anything lined up--that is precisely the kind of noise I need to silence in order to heal.

Sorry about the pause, folks. March was a pisser of a month for me, so I didn't get a hell of a lot done. I oughta start getting back on track this month, now that I'm not totally burnt out by work shit. (It's a whole thing.)

Update: And so was April. Today is the first day in three that I haven't had a migraine. (Yet.) Bad allergies -> lots of migraines -> head full of fuzz, cannot think straight or look at tablet screen without pain -> no progress.