#while the physical parts of Covid sucked it destroyed my mental health worse than all of it

[manhattan-gamestop]

I think tumblr is better at talking about the severity of Covid than a lot of platforms, but the posts I see on here do a terrible job at highlighting that you can do everything right and *still get it*. And I don't say that to be a pessimist, but because it can be incredibly invalidating for people who have been masking, up-to-date on boosters, etc. and got Covid bc even though we did everything we could, it still feels like our fault that we had it. So if that describes your experiences with Covid I just wanna say I see you, I feel you, and you are not alone

[robogreaser]

This is a Long Time Coming...

It’s been a relatively hard task to sit down and make sense of, well, a lot of things as of late. I could chalk it up to the state of the world, but it’s been troublesome for significantly longer than that.

Long Story Short Version: I’ve been in a hell of a place, mentally, physically, and otherwise.

The proper story is a hell of a lot more involved than that and I know damned right well it’s going to take me a fair bit to explain myself and my various professional and social failings over the past... while. I’m gonna try to contain this under a read more, of course, but I apologize to mobile users if tumblr fucks that up.

Okay. That took a fair more bit of effort to figure out than I remember. Which, I suppose, is a fair enough bit of a segue into one thing that’s happened to me.

Tumblr has been deteriorating.

Whether I like to admit it or not, tumblr has been my go to social media platform since... 2011. Yeah. I’ve spent the vast majority of the decade here. I’ve seen a lot. Sure, I’ve lurked elsewhere, but I really cannot stand the interface and nature of a lot of other social media, especially the likes of twitter. Unfortunately for me, this place has been in constant decline for years now at this point. It extends well beyond the porn ban, but that’s a whole separate discussion.

I’ve lost touch with a lot of people I care about, some vanishing into the ether, some ghosting me, some just drifting into other communities or onto other sites. I’ve come to terms with the majority of this. It’s been happening for a while. It’s the very nature of digital relationships. It hurt, and I do think it’s contributed to a fair bit of stress and depression that has resulted in my... withdrawal from online spaces. It’s not a major factor, but its here, it’s present, it’s a factor in all of this.

I’ll be honest in that, well, I’ve tried to make this post several times over the past several weeks and months. It’s hard. Talking about my issues, using ‘I’ and ‘me’ so much in a post... it’s a bit jarring. But I’ll try to suck it up.

It’s been ten years (god I fucking hate time) since I’ve graduated high school. Yeah. It’s a fair thing to say that, on reflection, that’s incredibly jarring. The vast majority of that time has been... relatively unstable. I spent a fair few years working on my book and my publishing journey, now all but scrubbed clean from this blog (more on that later) and... well... Trying to be an adult. I’ve applied to, gotten accepted, and had to withdrawn from my dream school twice in this time. I’ve had a fair few jobs, nothing worthy of my resume, and lost all of them in one form or another, whether being fired for retaliating to my shitty work conditions, or, well, quitting for the sake of my own health during this pandemic. There has been a lot of family troubles. I’ve been through a lot of... ‘varied’ living situations, some horrendous, some just stressful, some, like now, actually really good compared to the others. And for the past few years in particular, it’s been constantly one thing after another, nonstop.

In short, progress is slow, but it’s happening. I don’t care to delve into a lot of these sorts of personal details lest this get to a ridiculous length, but that’s the short of the stuff I’d rather gloss over.

I’ve been on a health... Let’s call it a journey. I’ve been on a health journey. Over the past few years I’ve gone through the long processes of being diagnosed with ADHD, discussing my options regarding my depression and anxiety, and finally getting myself on a medication regimen that works. And then, because the health care system is a joke, I was without insurance. I had been off my medication, an absolute lifesaver and release of burden on my garbage tier brain, for eighteen months. Until last week. I think it’s fair to say, between my revolving door of living situations, employment, and then being un-medicated in a continually more stressful environment... That this is the main reason I’ve been absent. I’ve had no focus. There were weeks where I had no drive to do anything outside of routine that others depended on. I had not only gone back to how I was before situating my mental health, but in some ways, found a worse state.

Finances have been slowly eating away at me. I had been working a part time retail job until November, which made decent enough money, but not nearly for the amount of work and responsibility I was handling. I got fired. I found work with one of the big, corporate postal services. The pay was phenomenal, but it began to actively destroy my health, mainly physically, but also mentally, especially considering I was working a graveyard shift. Eventually when I began having prolonged health issues there, and then a whole lot of the symptoms of covid-19, on top of them turning me down for an entry-level position outside of the package handling, I had to quit. This was shortly after the lockdowns, in early April, and I refuse to look back despite people like my parents insisting on me trying to get work there again. Sure, the pay was phenomenal compared to anything else I had until then, but I cant continue to sacrifice my health. As of now, I’m unemployed, and... well...

I’m working on my commission queue. It’s art. It’s stuff I’ve owed friends (luckily those who are incredibly understanding and good to me) for an embarrassing amount of time, even before moving to and from Oklahoma at the end of 2016. I’m terrified of being the person who is known for taking commissioners’ money and running.

I know, I’m not good at giving updates. I’m not good at a consistent work schedule. I’ve had numerous tech failings over the past few years that constantly slow my roll on any progress I have made. Hell, I’ve had files corrupt despite being two thirds of the way complete when transferring from one computer to another. I’ve lost my cable for my external hard drive. I’ve had my tablet go to hell and back multiple times. But I am working. I am trying. I am sitting down as often as I can between looking for work and managing family nonsense to try and get my workload tidied up.

Which... brings me to my next point. And one I’m rather... ashamed about.

I have used trello, infrequently, since taking on a large load of commissions, and despite not being faithfully updating it and checking back on it, and using it to it’s fullest potential, I had kept, at the minimum, a list of all the work I did owe people using it. Well. Dumbass me attempted to use a mobile app. In short, in an effort to try and make myself tech literate and allow me easier access to my queue, I ended up deleting it. Somehow.

I’ve gone through and slowly flagged all my paypal notices and various emails concerning my commissions. I’m putting it together again. I’m trying. Granted, I am damned sure I am going to be missing someone, somewhere, somehow. I know it. I’ve got a shit brain, and despite my need for organization and minimalism, I don’t put it past me to have missed something along the way.

If you have commissioned me, please, do not hesitate to reach out and contact me regarding your commission. I owe every last one of you a massive apology for my continued failure to produce what you have paid for.

More likely than not, I have a wip already started somewhere, and if not, I have a slew of reference and thumbnails already compiled together somewhere on my computers. I am not ignoring this work. It’s been painfully, embarrassingly slow. It’s been one obstacle after another. But I have every intention of doing this work, and, likely, upgrading the quality of the finished piece past what my commissioners have paid for simply because I do feel bad about the wait time.

I have been inexcusably unprofessional. I know this and I am working as best I can with the time and resources I have to correct it.

In a similar vein, as I mentioned before, I have slowly been cleaning up my rather unimpressive publishing attempts. I’ve gone through and cleaned this blog recently, deleting reference to my work by name and the process of trying to get myself published. I may have missed a few posts here and there, but for the most part I would like a clean slate in regards to building a social media platform surrounding my written work. And this is the part where... I am probably going to be the most upfront and honest with you reading this than I have been publicly before.

I am not ashamed of who I’ve been online these past ten years or so, but it reflects only a sliver of my personality, a sliver of who I am as a whole. I catered to a very specific subset of who I am in pursuit of finding acceptance in communities much larger than myself. I’ve learned a hell of a lot about myself in that time. I figured out what’s important to me, my health, my sexuality, my relationships and my long term goals. I’ve found a very important group of friends. I’ve found people who understand and empathize with a lot of the things I have been through, experience, and am at my core.

But the fact of the matter is, this hypersexual, sci-fi aesthetic-oriented, very open person is only a singular facet. And it is not nearly enough of a reflection of who I am, or who I want to be as a professional, public adult. Will I always be gay for robots? Yes. Will I, when time permits and creative energies are present, continue to make nsfw art? Absolutely. Will I always have a toe dipped in erotic literature and the like? Most likely.

But a lot of me, a lot of my emotion and strife and feelings regarding most things in the world, are completely separate from this. It’s separate from me liking porn on twitter or having a homestuck roleplay blog. It’s separate from who I am in real life, with my boyfriend or with my family or with my work. And I have been dwelling on this, sincerely, for a while. I need to allocate more energy into my life. The separate life offline and online too, where I am pursuing an actual professional career, because, at the end of the day, I want to be an author. I want to have a career telling stories. And, in my time online, I’ve found a lot of skeletons in authors’ closets, the kind that really put mine to shame, and the kind that will always be a footnote to their work. You know the ones.

I want my creative work to speak for itself. I want people to be able to enjoy what I do without a specter, without my time and energy having to explain to a future audience why it is I had explicit thoughts about x,y, and z. I want to be able to write a book, write many books, and have people enjoy them without a footnote about me, a person with a sexual life and a history exploring it through years of depression and isolation, clouding it. It’s not fair to my work. It’s not fair to a future reader. It’s not fair to me.

I’ve got several social media accounts made and slowly coming to life that I need to spend more time with as I try and pursue this new, second leg of a very long journey into publishing. I’m not going to link those here, now or in the future. It’s likely a few people I know and trust have access to them. But I am, effectively starting over from scratch trying to build a platform as a writer. And it’s hard. Juggling that, alongside all of the things in the world today, alongside family and my relationships, alongside my commission queue? It bears down on me and if I didn’t have experience handling more than one thing at a time, I might trip up more frequently. Hell, I forget to post and use those new accounts regularly.

But I’m trying.

I’m not moving away from my current social circles or hobbies or anything like that. I’m not abandoning any fandom or friends or communities. But I am going to be trying to balance myself more thoughtfully moving forward, past just commissions, past just writing.

I’m here. I’m moving forward, slowly but surely, and I am making an effort to improve.