A little more in depth about me and what I'm being through (Patreon)

Hi.
I'm sorry if you're a recent patron and have to read this. If you're having a good day skip this and keep the good mood.
Most of the people here know a bit of what I've been going through. But I need to somehow externalize this. It's 4 AM where I live now and I feel like I need to organize my thoughts to be able to sleep.

If you don't want to know about my past and wish to understand what is going on in the present, skip to "present section" bellow.

Because of how much I've dedicated myself to what I've been doing, my life has pretty much become this AI artist job/hobby.

And I mean it, even talking to friends and relatives is difficult, so that's why I'm venting here.

I've met very kind people here and I value them more than just 'client' relationship. That's because of how I am, I've been an artist  since I was a child and I only started to receive recognition in the past few years.

I was never really into drawing real people, I used to draw dragons and very complicated monsters with many details to them. I was a character artist at some point. And it's funny because at that time I was a musician and had composed around 200 songs that people only listened to 1. Drawing was always a very distant hobby.

I went to the college, learned Biomedical Informatics while also studying in another college (yes two at the same time) that was a generalistic game university, we can call it Game Design.

My passion since I had 7 years old was to create my own games and when I discovered tabletop RPG I always preferred to be a game master.

After I graduated at game design I had an opportunity to work in a 3D printing company as an artist, because I was good at 3D art. I've locked the other college and then after some months I gave up my job because of how much I was being exploited. The depression from that didn't help me finish the other college and Covid-19 came in to slam everything to the ground.

I had a small property which I sold so I could pay for one of the best courses in the world for game art.
I was enrolled in distance learning, but it was a very good course nonetheless. I had classes with people from very famous movies/series/games like Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Destiny, Control, Warframe, etc.
I wasn't the best student, my reality check could teach me that about other talented people, but I surely wasn't near the worst. I studied around 100 hours a week because of how passionate (and desperate) I was to succeed.
The results came early. I've won an art contest against people who were even Seniors in their own companies and I started working for a very small indie company for 25 US$ an hour. (Around 3000$ per month).
Well that was good. Almost paid my course until the owner of the company disappeared while leaving me and other people without payment for the last 15 days. Then I received an invitation to work as artist for marketplace in very big company. It was a freelance contract, but way safer.

That's what I thought, the expected time for the project to end was 3 months. It was around september/october when I started it and I could only finish it last month (July). By around february/march I started learning about AI as much as I could out of interest and that was my enjoyment at the time.
I had to refuse some job offers because I didn't finish my other project. I was trapped.
Then I started working with AI trying to get a little extra money while also publishing things that I was making.
Yeah, now I'm here, I started publishing on April, but it feels like it's been much more. That's because I didn't have much free time since I started studying on that online course I mentioned, lol.
I thought that after finishing my other project I would have some free time, but now things got really busy.

Present Section

I'm losing my perspective. I've been trying to learn how much other AI artists are making and I absolutely sad because they work way less than me to get around 5-10x more.
Everytime I try to make something to receive people will see my company name and as you know, 'real' artists hate AI artists. I didn't want to be directly related.

I see a lot of people who joins and leaves to grab what they want. While I think that's ok, because not everyone can pay. I really don't know how to keep more people in here while being healthy and receiving at least enough money to not be "barely living". My idea initially was to keep things cheap and have a lot of people in here so everyone could win. Me and you. As it happens, I'm certainly doing way more content than most (if not all) NSFW AI artists and I get paid way less. Considering how many requests I'm making.
Being honest. More than once people were charging around 3-5$ average per image of their packs. And sometimes the images were very simple.

I'm here trying to talk with you so you can also help me find a solution that works for you too. I think I just can't be working this much anymore because I humanly can't work more than this and I need to receive more for what I do. 

One thing that is possible, is to close all cheap commissions on patreon or reduce what I'm doing for the price. I don't feel like it's fair what other AI artists are charging, but yeah, I feel like it's not fair to me how I'm living. I'm considering many things here. One is also to give up this illusion of living as NSFW artist because I don't feel good leeching money from people.

I'm sorry. This post image is there to show that art is not only what you draw, but what you tell with what you're showing.
I'm trying to get my ko-fi to open, but everyhing that is related to help me receive money is very slow, even paypal is holding my money from that job I mentioned :c

Thank you if you read this, it means you care about me more than most people already do and I'm very grateful. I hope I can get past this grief.

Sorry for any english mistakes, it's 4:40 now here.