Tyom the Birthday Boy (Patreon)

Yesterday was my birthday (33!), and if not for the efforts of my kind wife Katia and the cheeriness of my friends, online and offline, I’d easily called the preceding days the worst time of my adult life (I’ve had way more shit happen to me as a teen, I guess). And I don’t want to be too much of a bummer on twitter, but as a typical oversharer, I think I need to vent it somewhere?

Comics work is going nowhere, nor do I really want it to; my recent zines will only be printed a month late because of how deeply publishing and printing pipelines got fucked by Covid. The only kind of work I really feel enthusiasm for is my commissions (and “luckily”, I still have a ton of commission I owe to you all) and I guess my videogame work - that is, when I’m actually able to get deep into the process.

The balcony we spent the entire Summer working on is leaking when it rains, and we have 2 separate companies who were involved with it now trying to shift the blame and responsibility to avoid repair works. They’ve been at it since the middle of October, and neither me or Katia had any moral strenght to deal with the bullshit to begin with. But luckily, the winters is finally on, and it’s way easier to just ignore the problem until the snow begins to melt, right? Also, the people living above our apartment are terrible fucking cunts with a habit of partying every night, and I don’t even remember when was the last time I was actually able to sleep without 2 hours of rolling around in bed and then 3 or 4 times waking up during the night because of overwhelming anxiety and completely innocent puppy/cat sounds.

I’ve been going to therapy for a few months now, trying ro reflect on my damaging work/life balance practices, overinflated sense of false responsibilities and fucked up magical thinking that makes every minor mishap feel like a plight aimed by God directly at me. But with all the shit going on it’s actually hard to focus on normal things and believe in comprehensible reality, you know? Like how for example you plan out a nice little birthday for yourself, just a day off, nothing special - few hours of videogames, maybe watching a movie, finish editing the podcast you and your friends recorded back in July, and do it as a treat for YOURSELF… and then you miss on 10 second of your deeply beloved puppy nibbling on the only electrical cord you left unprotected in your room, and the damage causes a short cicruit, and after dealing with the electrician who of course wastes four hours of your life on nothing and predictably scams you for a nice chunk of money you are finally able to see that because of power outages your work laptop is now in a completely unusable state?

So yeah. If it was me alone, I don’t even know how I’d be able to handle it all. My soul just left my body at some point, causing a complete dissociation between physical “me”, my thoughts and my actions. And 2 days later I still have no idea what to do exactly (except for backing up the work files, of course - all that is safe and protected), and if I will be able to fix the computer or need to just buy a new one (using the money I saved for taxes, haha!) because I honestly don’t trust FOURTH party of people in a row to “fix” my stuff.

Ghhhh.

For more than 2 years now, this Patreon been one of the pillars of my security and stability in life, and I am endlessly grateful to you all. So thank you for sticking with me, thank you for bearing with my bullshit, thank you for your patience and understanding when it comes to your commissions and your print goodies, and thank you for reading this.

Cheers!