GOOD MORNING PARTY PEOPLE!

(Part 2) (Part 3)

A lot to go through today, so please bear with me and read it all!
This post is a LONG one, but I hope it’s the last update on ANY of this shit I need to make! As always I love you all and thank you so much for your continued support!

Part 1: Mental health, 3 years of Bullshit, and 2025 Progress

As of my last update I was working on a LOT of stuff to make sure 2025 got started hard and took off.

That didn’t really work out, as I’ll explain; When starting this section I wrote out a massive page and realized it was just TL;DR, so I’m gonna give a synopsis.
Anyone following me for any amount of time has probably seen how stressful the last few years have been, and I honestly just don’t want to keep talking about it at this point.

But the last years were full of everything from close friends dying to multiple evictions, to being forced into situation after situation where my art had to take the back seat and commissions piled up on my table, and over those years I fought to get a therapist and a psychiatrist so I could get myself on meds and get he professional help I needed- all the while, pulling myself further and further away from having any kind of personal life, social life, etc.

Every day had been work because it was the only thing I could keep myself doing, and that became more and more true until this last year where I ended up burning out so fucking badly that I can’t even remember half of the year. I missed entire MONTHS due to dissociation, and I have art in my portfolio that I don’t remember doing.

By sheer luck and happenstance, after losing the entire month of November I remembered that I had been trying to get back on insurance for most of the year, and kept being derailed by them telling me I needed to submit paperwork I had already submitted LITERALLY ten times; And it happened on a day when that realization and drive all clicked into place in just the right way that I found the phone number to call Medi-Cal and get it fucking handled.
I was on the phone with them for like 2 hours and got everything I needed submitted- I was approved fr insurance the next day and had an appointment with a Psych set up by the end of that day.
I spent SO long on the phone in December making sure EVERYTHING was in order, and had my first appointment on Dec 14th.
I got prescribed an antidepressant, and even that little bit of progress kickstarted me back into motion- but I was barely able to focus and ended up doing like 3 weeks of side-quests after I got the meds. They didn’t really change anything or even affect me for that first month on them- then in January our house flooded out twice- one of which was on my birthday, and I had to fix my room for like four hours before my psych appointment.

I did not seek a psych for depression though, I needed treatment for ADHD, and I had sent her all the paperwork I needed without response in December, and she tried to rush past all that and just leave me on the antidepressant, but I strong-armed her into slowing tf down and listening to me, reviewing the paperwork I sent her, and prescribing the meds I actually needed.
Then on Jan 27th I finally started them, and it was like being hit by a truck of everything from the last 10 or so years flooding back to me.

I won’t dive into all that, because it’s a LOT, but I ended up journaling for something like 8 hours a day, every day for three weeks, just trying to process it all.
It was insane suddenly realizing with perfect clarity how much time had passed and how little progress I had made stuck in that time- and also feeling all of that progress suddenly hit me at once. It was crazy waking up feeling excited and happy again, and having the energy to do more than just One Thing per day.

It was a lot to take in and do, and it took me around a month to normalize on the meds but some massive changes started overnight.
I stopped binge eating immediately.
I stopped needing caffeine just to exist- and didn’t have caffeine withdrawals coming off of it.
I started exercising effortlessly again, and have continued to do so almost daily.
I stopped ordering takeout and started keeping easy food to make around the house
I was able to clean my entire living area to a point where I was DONE cleaning, and I’ve been able to keep it clean ever since.
I was able to start deep cleaning in the shower again, brushing my teeth and all the other basic hygiene shit I’d let slip- and that may sound gross but even picking up the tooth brush felt like an insurmountable task for most of 2024, and it made me fucking hate myself- and that alone should give people enough perspective on how bad everything was last year.

And then, like I said, I had all this shit from the last ten years to process- guilt, grief, loss, past mistakes, the progress I’ve actually made, and just so much other shit. Things I”d left behind that I missed about myself, how disconnected I’d become to everyone who had previously been in my life, how LITTLE I’d been able to do for myself in that time and just how absolutely fucking BAD my quality of life had become.

So it wasn’t just the side effects I was normalizing from, but EVERYTHING coming at me all at once.
Then, partway through February, right as the ADHD meds started to even out, I started having BAD double vision from the depression meds- and that kept me from actually getting back to everything as the ADHD meds started to finally let me.
I can’t really draw if I can’t see more than 6″ in front of me- and even now I’m having trouble typing because there’s a bit of residual double vision still left after I stopped that particular medication on Feb 19th.

Now, this is becoming way longer than I meant it for the first part, so I will wrap this up but here’s the thing:
This sudden change, while it’s halted everything else for me for the last month and a half, is the best fucking thing that could have happened to me.

I do not know when I will be FULLY back to work with art again- it could be tomorrow or next week, it just depends how fast everything locks in- but I DO know that everything I was fighting the last couple years is finally off my fucking table. My executive dysfunction is gone. My inability to socialize is gone. My burnout is gone. The brain-fog comes and goes but it’s like 95% gone. The dissociation vanished entirely for a month and then has slowly started slipping in and out again- but I can actually manually kick myself out of it again.

And a lot of this may be repeat info if you are in my Discord (Which, so sorry friends, for having been so MIA there as well during this time, but social media has been SO hard for me now that I’m not also doom-scrolling for hours daily) but I will be back to ALL of it soon, I promise!

But that leads into the next part, so go check the next post out- it’ll be live within the hour, I think.

(Part 2) (Part 3)