It's been bad bad for about a week now so I wanted to update people, especially those waiting on commissions.

I've been having a really big struggle with my mental health for the last week. It's affecting my art and my drive to do it. I sit down and start working but just feel too anxious to work, too anxious not to work too to be honest. "Relaxing" doesn't seem to help, even working on personal art or gaming or reading, watching TV, I feel extremely high anxiety doing literally anything but sleeping, and even when I lay down to go to sleep it's a struggle with my anxiety to get to sleep.

I'm not sure what's going on with me, I'm on medication but maybe not the right one for me? I've had full on panic attacks three days in a row now and I just don't know how to stop them, the anxiety builds and builds and builds until I have a panic attack, and then I just feel too drained to do much of anything, and once that resides I'm back to anxious. I have had acute anxiety disorder for most of my life, so I know a lot of skills to cope with the anxiety, I've been to a ton of psychs and therapists over the years, but none of my coping mechanisms are even touching it.

I'm not sure what to do because I need to work, I need to be making at least 1000 a month (250 a week) to keep up with my side of bills but with the way that I have been feeling I am finding myself all but completely unable to work. I used to be able to just push through it but lately I've not been able to. All of this to say, I guess, that I'm sorry that commissions have been slow and that I've not been streaming very much, or for that long if I do.

I'm really struggling right now guys, people have been telling me to take a week off and while I would love to, I don't have the luxury of taking a week off to try and reset my mind the way that I feel like I need to because not only do I have flat rates I have to be doing, I have to also do my PWYW commissions to get money in for bills. I hope that you will be understanding that work will be spotty, but I will do what I can to get commissions out and stream. I just need patience, more patience than I'm giving myself at least.

I hate that I'm feeling this way and I hate that it's affecting my commissions and therefore it's going to be affecting my family. If anyone has any tips on how to get the hell over this I'll take em, I'm willing to try pretty much anything at this point. I just need to be able to somehow focus on work instead of focusing on my anxiety. I'm going to try to reach out to my psych and see if there's anything that can be done as well, but any tips on how to get through it until I can talk to her would be greatly appreciated.

 Kitsunewaffles-chan posted this journal. and I feel very much the same so am reposting with permission.

It's pretty apparent it's here for the long haul.

Here are my updated feelings on the situation.

Do I like it now? Absolutely not.

Will I use it? Absolutely not.

Do I think it can be used a tool? For tedious tasks like data management
and quality of life tasks like calculating algorithms/storage/boring shit no one likes to do, sure.

Do I think it should have a creative use? Not really.

Really, my stance hasn't changed.

My only stance that's changed is that because of how pervasive it is on google, Pinterest, Imgur...really any media sharing site, I'll accept ref images that clients find on these sites. This is not an excuse to for clients to go type prompts into these programs and then hand them to me. Please don't use AI programs yourself. And if you do anyway, don't tell me about it lol. I will work off images you find on google or the any of the above sites mentioned.

I know it's difficult to tell the difference now for most people and I can't blame them. However I do appreciate that people still want to come to myself or my fellow artists to get something made just for them by a professional, by a real person. That I can 100% vibe on.

So I will accept AI images that I can take from to create something unique and meaningful for my clients that's personally hand drawn by me.



This info in this journal isn't really up for debate, so please don't try to convince me about AI's "benefits" or "creative ability". We will not agree and I'm not here to argue with you.