Trauma can eat my entire ass. (Patreon)

Hey fam. <3

I've had a really bad couple weeks. Issues related to my cPTSD came up and left me extremely depressed and burned out. I lost all capacity to draw or work & there's about a week of time I can only sort of remember. Put a bunch of extra therapy appointments on credit and took care of myself as best as I could - my partners did a great job taking care of me.

Today I'm feeling better, and am therefore attempting to climb back on the metaphorical horse. But I need to make some adjustments to the demands I make on myself, which starts with recognizing my needs and limitations. Doing this is scary for me - I'm an abuse survivor with very little experience in setting healthy boundaries or asserting my needs. But I've come to a place of compassion for myself, so I'm gonna try my best and hopefully I'll learn as I go.

For starters, I gotta accept that commissions are my main job right now. I deeply want to grow my own body of work, and I hope that in time this Patreon campaign helps me devote more time to that. But I can't promise original content of any kind, especially comics, on a regular schedule. All a promise like that does is give me performance anxiety and push me towards burnout.

I worry that you will all grow bored of the commission material, or be disappointed when I can't put out a new comic for what might be months and months. I worry I've gotten your hopes up and then let you down. If so, I'm really sorry.

I hope that by admitting my limits I can set more realistic expectations and work at a more stable and sustainable pace, and thus be a more stable and happy person. I'm trying to remember what Stephen King said:

Art is a support system for life, not the other way around.

So, yeah. I'm going to make some edits to the front page and the tier descriptions to hopefully clarify what content to expect and how often to expect it. Then I'll probably set some goals on the campaign that more accurately reflect what to expect if and when I get more support.

I'm also going to narrow the scope of rewards so that they are specific and definable. I'll make another post with that later.

Thanks for reading, much love.

-Xero