Hiatus until May (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

I’m going to be on hiatus until the end of April. This means that Patreon will be on hold and my store will be in maintenance mode starting at the end of February. All outstanding orders will be shipped when I get the required merch to ship them (still waiting on a pin restock to arrive). After I get the current Patreon content done and shipped, I probably won’t post much art or be too active during this time and any work I am doing will be for outstanding projects.

I’ve been beyond burnt out since the start of the pandemic, correlating with my college graduation and my start as a freelance artist. The expectations I put on myself to succeed during this time were unreasonably high and my fear of failure during COVID was intense. I made it through at the cost of developing an extremely unhealthy attitude towards work and art.

I haven’t talked much about this on any of my socials since I don’t want to be a huge downer but all of this has been affecting my mental health pretty severely. The only break I really allowed myself to take during COVID was when I was forced out of working for a few weeks while recovering from GRS, and even then I was working two weeks later and up and dealing at a convention a month and a half later. I have a second round of GRS coming up in April that I need to mentally prepare for and I was dreading that being my only real break for the past few years. After an amount of convincing, I decided to just take the entire stretch of time off between now and the end of April since the alternative is me stressing myself to death trying to wrap everything up in March.

All of this is to say that I still deeply want to love art. It’s one of my longest standing interests and I attribute a lot of who I am as a person to my art and my ability to express myself. It hurts that my level of burnout has gotten to the point where I can't even engage with art without feeling intense anxiety. I’m hoping that after taking this break I’ll at least be able to shake off the worst of it.

I’m truthfully a bit terrified of taking a break this long as I’ve never really done it before. Thank you all for the support over the past few years – it means the world to me. Seeing all the positive feedback that gets left on my work is one of the big things that kept me afloat. I’ll see you all in a few months.