hello, hey there. good morning, good afternoon.
i dont expect many people to see this, really i dont expect anyone to. it will be a bit of a read, so i’ll try to focus on the most important details but do expect some rambling.
its now been over 10 years since i had adopted the ferricboat moniker and began uploading silly art on deviantart, twitter, and tumblr for all to see. my first tablet was an itty bitty wacom bamboo, and with a pirated version of SAI i changed my life, for better or for worse.
if you viewed my blog outside of tumblr, i had a brief addendum written about my sad little life and the relationship i had/have with art. that was written around two years ago and i wanted to leave it at that but this anniversary has some amount of merit to me and i still hold a small part of the ferric persona in my heart, so i suppose i can come back once more.. i’ll go ahead and combine what i’ve written here and from the addendum to make everyones lives easier.
i was 14 when i started uploading under the ferricboat name. throughout the 4 year period i jumped in and out of communities and fandoms, created over 100 ocs, made several stories, and looking back at it; grew a pretty okay-ish following. unfortunately it did get to me too much that i hardly got any interaction on most of my art. i'll blame a little bit of that on twitter and tumblrs godawful algorithiming but its mostly because of my godawful social skills. i just couldnt form a connection for shit. i didnt know how to grow my reach, i didnt really want to put in the work to try and learn how to do so either. i was slowly coming to terms with my adhd and autism and didnt know how to "balance" it per say. taking medication for adhd wasnt in the question (and still isnt, man i sure do love being uninsured!) and the autism... well, it helped explain a lot, but it didnt help that i couldnt do anything about it. my entire high school years + the 4 years i left i struggled navigating my life as a trans person. i've since detransitioned back to female, just wanted to put that out there for anyone that remembers me identifying as male at the time lol.
when i turned 18, graduated high school, and could finally move out of an abusive/destructive household, thats when i put it all to rest and left. deleted everything i had made, from all my accounts to every single image i had ever uploaded and everything i had ever written. lived on my own in several states, held a handful of crappy retail jobs just so i could stay afloat. all that traumatizing family crap followed me the entire time and still does to this day. i was alone the whole time, i didnt have anybody to talk to. you get used to the loneliness, but sometimes it became too much. the depression only got worse. there were a lot of unalive attempts. the wonders and happiness drawing gave me and being in art communities and making my ocs with their stories wasnt fun anymore. i had 'grown up' matters that needed my full attention that i could no longer put into art like i once used to (looking at my many entries from 2014-15 specifically is bittersweet... i remember all the exact feelings i had when i made them. god i miss being 14)
from the timespan of 2018-2022 i was hardly holding a pencil or tablet pen more than a handful of times every year, and when i did there was always something that happened to me along the way that ultimately soured my relationship with art even more. i tried many times to make it work like in the old days, but my life was plummeting to new lows and it wasn’t worth it to find the joys art could still give when i could center my energy on developing a more “useful” long term skill.
starting last year is when i can confidently say that i finally overcame my bitter, complicated, unorthodox relationship with drawing. im 24, and ten years later it almost feels like im back where i first started. i draw consistently almost every single day. i dont make new ocs nearly as often nor at the insanely stupid pace i did when i was 14, but its an art related thingy i’ve been able to take genuine enjoyment in once again. i feel i’ve strengthened my writing skills massively over the years so i can actually sit down with a new character and flesh them out. at the very least, while i wasnt doing much art from 2018-2022, i substituted that with a hell of a lot of writing. in all seriousness, drawing and writing are ultimately whats keeping me sane and in check.
thats more or less where i’ve been and what i’ve been doing. i almost didn’t think i’d be able to make this post after a pretty unfortunate breakdown i had a few weeks ago, but life is balancing out once more and presenting me opportunities to convince me to keep going. you know, play the cards im given and whatnot. i apologize for peacing out without a word, though i have to say that nsfw ban gave me and probably many people the perfect opportunity to disappear. funny, with twitter making arguably even worse mistakes i find we’ve all kind of circled back here?
finally, i’d like to talk about myself, and not in the way i just did for 5 paragraphs. i find myself thinking about everything i did and said in the past from time to time, and i never feel good about it. i was not a great person, there were more times than i can count where i acted nasty directly to others for years, to several different people. both people i knew/had relationships with and to complete strangers. yes i was a teenager and yes i was coping from abuse and mental illness, but no matter the reason i absolutely knew better than to say horrible things and push people around, i fully had the understanding that alternatively i should have talked it out instead of yelling and throwing accusations around, but i didnt. i put my own friends under a ton of stress and then had the audacity to act offended when they had to walk on eggshells around me, and it was entirely my own doing. my memory is awful and i dont remember what i said, but i certainly remember that what i said had hurt.
im really sorry. i’d like to write more, but it wouldnt do enough justice as the people i affected will most likely never stumble upon this and unfortunately it seems like they’ve moved away from the handles they used years ago so im stumped on where to go from there. you know who you are, and if you’d like to give me the chance, i’d like to talk it out with you. sincerely.
i’ve had a lot of time to work through my issues and behavior, and while theres always going to be room for improvement, i’ve taken steps to mellow out and catch myself from repeating my past mistakes. i despise the way i treated people, and realize fully how much it negatively affected them, especially when said people were in situations similar to me or even worse.
i think… thats all i’ve wanted to say? i wont reveal what i go by or where you can find me openly in this post, not that im particularly difficult to find anyway, but i’ll be more than happy to give my socials to anyone who messages me. i probably wont log onto this account again for a very long time, so if you message me like a month after this post is published i may not get to it for awhile OTL sorry.
thanks for reading. please take care of yourselves, and have a good day.
