An update on the spline video & burnout (Patreon)

Hey everyone 💗

I just wanted to give you all an update of how things are going.

As some of you might know, I made a video about Bézier curves a while back. Over the past months, I've been working on a sequel

The Spline Video

My upcoming video is a deep dive into splines, where we'll go on a long journey exploring what splines are, why they are useful, what properties are interesting about them, which ones are commonly used, and how they work!

Broadly, I will cover Bézier curves, Bézier splines, Catmull-Rom Splines, Hermite Splines, B-Splines, and finally, NURBS.

It's an extremely broad topic, and in hindsight this was a mistake. I'll probably not make videos this long going forward. It's bad for my mental health, as well as for my channel, and by extension my income (sites like youtube generally favor frequent releases).

The good news is that the animations for the video are about 80% done, which means I'm pretty close to the home stretch!

The bad news is that I got hit very hard by burnout.

Burnout

In case you don't know what it is, burnout (in the clinical sense) is widely regarded as a form of clinical depression. This is not a "I'm a little tired of work" situation, it's a near complete shutdown of executive function, especially around work.

The thing that makes burnout especially insidious, is that it's hard to tell when it will hit you. In the beginning you can push through and convince yourself to work anyway, and you'll get some results. It's easy to shrug it off and call yourself lazy and just, go for it. But sooner or later you might hit a full stop, which, happened to me a few months ago. It's also more likely to happen if you've been burnt out before, as I was back in 2018.

As a result, I've had to stop streaming, cancel the D&D campaign we've been running for a long time, and stop working on all of my projects. Everything came to a halt very quickly and very suddenly.

I think an often misunderstood thing about burnout is just how similar it is to depression. It's not that I'm just tired of work, I struggle to find joy in general. Nothing is fun, nothing is interesting, all I can do is distract myself, or just sleep a lot to avoid being awake and feeling garbage. It's starting to affect not only me, but everyone near me as well, which is increasingly hard to deal with.

I've started seeing a therapist for the first time to try and get it sorted. We haven't been able to have that many sessions yet due to the summer break, but we've had one session giving me some guidelines on how to start getting better. The first three points are applicable to just about anyone who is dealing with this:

1. Don't work (if possible)
2. Go out at least once per day for a change of environment (I try to go out with our kittens every now and then)
3. Keep up physical health (regular exercise, proper diet and sleep)
4. Set aside time to being on your own (this is more of a personal need of mine)

I don't know when I'll feel better. I'm doing what I can, but I can't predict it whatsoever, so I can't make any promises as for when the video will be out. I wish I could.

What this means going forward

I'm incapable of working the way I used to, and I'm struggling to live up to any kind of expectation around being some sort of Content Creator™ right now, and this is likely to continue for at least another two weeks, likely more.

Your support here on patreon is half of my income, the other half being all other places combined (youtube, twitch, unity asset store). I completely understand if you don't wish to support me while I'm unable to give anything back, but I hope you'll stick around. Your contribution is literally what enables me to continue doing what I love. 

Meanwhile, I'll be doing whatever I can to get back on track

Thanks for all your support and patience 💖

// Freya