Artist reTreat: An Experiment (Patreon)

Magnanimous friends. How have you all been this past week? Because it's been a hella interesting one for me, that's for sure... Anyway, I don't want to waste your times or anything here (???) so if you'd like to skip over the rest:

ℹ️ tl;dr Took a stream break last week, taking another this week!

And now for the full rambling...

Some of you may know already that I decided to take last week off from streaming (and Twitch in general) in order to hunker down and get some shit done--and get shit done I did. The way I phrased it on Discord (which if you're not in, don't forget that there is a special channel for you lovelies!), "The boss says that team morale has been low and productivity abysmal, so they decided last-minute that the company was going on a 'retreat' the following week." (Actually, this is much more verbose, because that's just what I am lol.)

Anyway, so it was kind of a very impulse thing, but I was feeling my edges crisping up on the brink of burnout, so in order to preempt it for once and NOT just sink into the flames like I normally would, I took the week off and tried to put a focus on the things that I just kept saying I wanted to do but never "had time" to. The concept of "not having enough time" as a self-employed/freelancer/entrepreneur/whatever may sound laughable, but wow do things just creep into every minute of every day somehow. That's on top of all the life stuff that goes on too, of course...

ANYHOO. That was last week. I wanted to make this post with a huge glorious wrap-up of all the things I managed to get done, but honestly I'm a bit tired right now... Call it the post-holiday blues 😅. I hope that you will forgive me anyway for not sharing everything just yet that I got done, but please believe me that it was just what I needed. I didn't get everything done that I had written down, but I got a lot more done than I ever would have normally if I wasn't focused -- so I call that a win.

While I wish I could say that the week was enough to extinguish the kindling of the oncoming burnout, I don't know if it has. A number of personal issues also came up through the week, as well as just awful sleep and such, which kinda knocked me flat out so that I ended up sleeping all day Sunday again. I'll likely get back into a more regular stream schedule eventually, but for now, I think I am still at the stage where I need to be really digging deep and doing some introspection.

The way I put it in my journal today, I may have hated the whole business process of having to make reports and projections and quarterly planning while I was employed because I was doing all that work for somebody else...but I can apply the same tools and techniques to my own business, and maybe--just maybe--it'll suck slightly less. Guess we'll see how it goes this week!

Wow that was a lot of rambling. Anyway, I hope YOU are all doing well, wondrous Shining Stars, and please know that every single day, I think of each one of you. Yes, you. The fact that you enable me to even be able to do grand "experiments" like this Artist reTreat is something I will be forever grateful for. Thank you. 💖