It's unbelievable, but it's been like 5 years since I made this account. I'm gonna plough through the shame of slacking so much and explain a little of my situation. A lot happened during those 5 years, but most notably, I fell deeper and deeper into burnout, which started about that time, in 2020. The more time passed, the less I had energy for anything outside of work, my art suffered greatly.... and my project of recreating my DA gallery here was unwittingly put on hold because it seemed like uploading art and copy-pasting descriptions required too much brainpower somehow.

The truth is.... the days passed me by and became weeks and months, and somehow years slid through and I just watched them unable to muster the energy to do anything with them. You have no idea just how.... how easily this happens, and how permanent exhaustion can be. Those 5 years literally passed in a haze and I can barely remember anything from them (I have quite serious memory issues now), until I finally realized I have to put a stopper to it or.... I don't even know. And I only did because I had something fall on me from out of the blue and kick me in the face.

In short, last year I suddenly discovered I'm autistic and I began learning I've been doing massive damage to myself all these years. I began learning all the ways how. And I came to understand that I cannot go on this way and that.... because I'd been ploughing through like this for so long now I have some.... let's say limitations. I lost my job, but I gained a little bit of art back. My brain is still not what it used to be, I feel my cognitive abilities still very diminished compared to what I was before (i.e. I struggle to think, design and problem-solve), I am still living in a constant haze and I experience my brain's inability to form memories normally all the time. 9 months after I am no longer working I am still so exhausted that sometimes it hurts. But I am veeeeeery slowwwwly regaining the ability to do at least basic things. Things I had put aside in the closet even if I really really shouldn't have, simply because I had no energy whatsoever.

So.... here I am, trying to just resume stuff from where it sort of fell apart. I am sorry to say I still need more time to recreate my whole gallery from DA (the art, not the photos) ....but I am proceeding. Meanwhile I am trying to figure out how will I be able to stay alive in this world which demands having money to exist if I am not able to work fulltime anymore.... because I am pretty sure this is a thing of the past for me. At least if I want to.... you know, stay alive and reasonably creative.


Anyway.... that's just a snippet of my story. I've made it into a hobby of telling people about my experience in hope that it works as a warning to others.... Please do not do to yourselves what I have inflicted upon myself. Take care of yourself. Whatever the world tells you, take care of yourself, rest, do not neglect your needs and your drive to do art. Stay close to your art, if you find yourself letting your art go.... that's never a good sign for your mental health.

Take care.

So there's been a tiny bit of activity on my part here after some months of silence since I made this account. Here's the news.

I made the account in a moment of frustration with the pending changes on DA, but since those changes were still in the vague future, I postponed getting to know this place - and admittedly, it felt quite confusing at first, a whole new site, buuuut since it got a bit of redesign, it seems easier now (NOT like DA). Since now DA is being finally overhauled and is going to become this ArtStation-rip-off data-harvesting nightmare machine known as E(ww)clipse, I have an occasion, after circling in the air above FA for months, to finally touch down and settle a bit of my own den here. Besides, some paranoia has been chasing me, I never know anymore whether DA won't ban me for being so shrewd-mouthed, so duplicating the art part of my gallery here will be a valuable backup, you know, just in case. I say that because.... I don't know, before getting to know the place it's difficult to tell, but for the longest time I felt like my art would be.... kinda out of place here. I still do, partially, and that makes it difficult to take the leap. I'm shier than you know. But having a backup place is an incentive enough. That said, the last few days I have been wandering around, getting to know what stuff is like here, and even going after some favourite artists from DA to try find if they have accounts here. A pleasantly surprising lot of them do - serious, skilled and masterful artists that I look up to very much. That gives me more confidence that I, too, can find a place here.

So that's that. I'll be putting up my entire art gallery on FA as well (minus photography, that's just too huge). Because I am so OCD, I want to post things here roughly in the same order they have been posted originally, so I have been going through my DA gallery all the way back to 2010, marking dates so that I can arrange things correctly here. It will take some time. That's 10 years of art, drawing, painting, design, writing, and even poetry. I hope you stay patient with the older crappier works, but I want to have the whole history here as well. It gets more interesting later, I promise.


On a side note, it's actually fun here. I'm learning interesting things about artists I've admired for years.... and I'd lie if I say it isn't nice :D