Hi! A little life update.
At the end of October I wrote that I was deep in a depression spiral and due to unexpected occurrences I had been left with basically no income for several months. I had emptied my savings at that point and was feeling extremely stressed, sick and hopeless.
I just want to thank everyone who reached out and offered support or even looked up my ko-fi info and sent me a donation. It was an unfathomably kind thing to do and helped me tremendously. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I was at the end of my tether, I had 1,70€ in my bank account at that moment. I was sleeping four hours per night on average because my insomnia was so out of control, and had more or less stopped eating, after surviving on nothing but porridge, bread, apples and buttered pasta for close to a month. Things were kind of dire. No one has ever showed me that kind of unprompted generosity before, irl or online. Thinking that people I've never even met were willing to support me like that both warms my heart and makes me feel kind of guilty and undeserving. I'm not used to being treated like that. I hope I didn't make you feel pressured to get involved. It did genuinely help me put myself back together though. The next day I went and bought some essential groceries and getting to eat properly was a massive boost in terms of energy and mood. I'm doing a little better now. I finally managed to get the financial situation corrected, but it'll take months before my finances recover and I'll be able to go shopping without feeling paranoid about counting every cent and hating myself if I buy a small treat. I mentioned that my seven years old, well-served laptop is on it's last legs, so the remaining funds are going towards putting together a new PC, hopefully soon. I don't really have any product or extra content to offer you as a thank you for the ko-fi donations I received, but I hope it's at least nice to think that they're directly enabling me to continue making more art in the future.
I'm still struggling with intense anxiety every day, and it has caused me to develope some kind of impostor syndrome that is impacting my online presence negatively at the moment. I look at the things I try to draw and the asks I get, and feel like nothing I create, say or write is good enough or worth people's time and attention. I'm having hard time opening up like I used to, and I miss the interactions I used to have here, they were an immense source of inspiration and motivation to me. But I'm trying to work on that, and hoping that posting stuff will start to feel more natural again eventually. This got a little long, but thanks for reading! I hope life treats you well.
