Updates, commissions and more

So, I think it was a good moment to give you a life update, future plans, how they will affect my schedule, etc.

Before I start I just wanted to mention to my Sticker tier members, just in case you missed the update in discord, that I uploaded all June stickers to their folders. I'm taking July as a short break and I'll resume activity in August.

Okay, long story short, I'm doing better mentally and I'm feeling more confident to take more steps. Thanks to your help I've been able to avoid taking jobs that only consume me. But now I need to either rent a store/office with an area were I could live (this is starting to happen more and more often) or rent a flat by my own.

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I'm still sharing a flat with people that I've never felt fully comfortable with or like at home. Living and working in the same small room has also been slowly burning me. Not to mention that I need to hide all the fat content from the rest of them cause I know they won't react well, and sometimes that makes it difficult to draw. I'm at a point where I seriously need to change my enviroment.
My financial status has improved a lot thanks to your patronage. But on today's economic state, I think we all know how outrageous living costs are. I've been saving for years, sacrificing a ton of stuff to make this possible, but I need one last push. My parents are immigrants with debts and no properties, my friends are going through their own troubles and aren't willing to share a flat with me, freelance taxes in S(pain) are the most abusive in Europe.... really all I have is my determination. So, in the next weeks I'll be realising a couple options to help me archive this goal:

- Finally I'll open commissions: if you're interested in them you can DM me, I want to start planning the schedule. The biggest change is that my prices from now on will be in euros... I'm sorry, I can't keep absorving the currency exchange between dollars and euros, it's too unstable. Again, I need to calculate a ton of costs.

- I'll sell some items in my Ko-Fi shop, like the bases and maybe physical stickers.

- I'll open a massive YCH for tons of characters to cover some costs and to make a cool poster.

- I might open a new tier for anyone that might be interested in having some drawing lessons or some kind of mentorship.

I'm thinking about other ideas but for now I think those are easy to execute.

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About my mental health
I'm going to explain it in more detail in case my story may help anyone that has gone through complex PTSD, existential anxiety and depression. I don't want it to sound like a downer... take it as an episode of House MD hahahasdsdkga

As I explained in December, I've been going through a really stressfull decade in many aspects of my life; abusive family members, friendship betrayals, exploitation, financial issues, etc. But last year in June something changed; an extremely toxic person that shared a room with me left after years and years of fighting. He was the egotistical/narcisitic/immature kind that is oblivious of his actions. I had to endure the most diffcult discussions but in the end he finally accepted to leave.
So, during the next months I thought everything was going to be better and I will finally find some peace. But around November an irrational fear started to consume my body. I became extremely vigilant about everything around me for no reason and the first symptoms appeared; tachycardia, severe insomnia, back/neck problems and a weird discomfort. I couldn't sleep a single minute for days for no apparent reason, and that only made me more scared and paranoic. I went to a psychiatrist that told me it was PTSD and gave me some pills, but the effects were very mild. I was sleeping only 3-4 hours at most and I started to fear sleeping.

For me the most scary part was that I couldn't find an explanation or a reason for why I was going through this. I've always managed stress and my emotions very well, I have no medical conditions (maybe undiagnosed ADHD) and my medical exams where good. Now that my life was in a better place I should be feeling exactly the opposite. And then, my therapist told me that it's very likely that I've been so focused in finding a way to escape from that person for so many years that now all the issues that I haven't been attending were starting to reappear. I understood what she was trying to tell me, but I didn't know what it implied.
Everybody was telling me that I just needed some rest cause I'm a bit of a workaholic when it comes to art. And during December-February I tried to take things as slow and easy as possible. Things improved a little but I still was feeling vigilant, distrustful, sick, and things got worse.... I started to fear drawing, my one and only refuge, and at the end of March I had a very psychotic panic attack.
That episode changed everything. I started to understand what my therapist meant about the issues that I haven't been attending.

For the past months I've been trying to identify all the mechanisms and thoughts that have been harming. I've been learning how to stop interacting with them, just let them exist. It's been a pretty tough process cause I'm adicted to overthink and after that panic attack I got scared of my own thoughts.
I've fallen in every mental trap, my anxiety has mutated in other irrational fears. I've gone to very very dark places in my mind, lots of frustation... But little by little I'm understanding that these are only thoughts and mechanisms that I learnt at some point that helped me to survive, but that I no longer need.

My health has improved since then and I'm sleeping almost normal. But now I'm trying to change the core that originates all these fears; the fact that I've never trusted myself despite everything I've archived. I have such a distorted view about myself that it has got to a point where I can't trust my own body...
I overthink cause I don't trust myself and I need to anticipate and control every possible escenario. So, an scenario where I'm actually feeling less stress was the perfect booby-trap. I was trying to control things that happen naturally like sleeping or relaxing. I tryied to control how I experience emotions. And that only led me into more and more existencial anxiety.

So yeah, it's been a journey... right now I'm in the phase where my brain is throwing me all those existential questions about if after everything I've improved I'll ever heal or feel happiness ever again. But, now I realise that those questions originate from me BELIEVING that my body is going to sabotage me any moment... I'm in the process of changing a negative attitude that I've been carrying since my childhood. And it's tough cause, damn, having those thoughts even when I'm having fun is hard, it's like being under a spell. But a part of me knows that I'll get through it. I'm looking forward to experience life from another point of view.