Hello everyone

I am severely burnt out.

I thought what I needed was more organization, more consistent social interaction, and to interact with people on here/bluesky/discord more, but since starting to try for that at the beginning of the year it's become very apparent that what I really need is to TOUCH GRASS (lol). I revamped my discord server so I could use it to try to practice talking to people more, but all it's done is make me feel like I have even more responsibilities to take care of when I barely had the energy to do everything I needed to do before I made changes. Interacting with people online helps beat back the loneliness, but I need to go out and do things IRL and meet people locally. For my own sanity.

Art hasn't been fun for me for a long time. I'm still an artist, I still feel that innate drive to create things, but the joy and satisfaction I get from it have been slowly dwindling for ages now. I've tried lots of things to renew my passion for art, and some of them have worked temporarily, but it's still catching up to me. I rarely draw my own OCs anymore, and when I do its mostly just quick little things. I don't draw for *myself* anymore. I think too much about social media, about pleasing algorithms, about what I can do to gain more followers, because more followers = more commissions = more money so I can survive, and it just isn't healthy. I want to make art for the fun of it again. I want to post just to share, like I used to when I was a kid posting my shitty warrior cats fanart, not... whatever I've turned this into. My art profiles feel more like a brand to me than anything else at this point and it sucks. I feel like I've become the social media user I used to hate, constantly self promoting and chasing numbers.

I LOVE making furry art, I LOVE making freaky fetish art, but if I want to continue loving it, I need to take a break from it all for a while, ESPECIALLY from social media and the pressures that come with it. I have one commission left in my queue right now, and barring anything financially devastating happening, I'd like that to be the last art I make for anyone else for the foreseeable future.

I do have a part-time job outside of art, and I'm going to try to focus more on that this year. I'm going to keep commissions closed as much as I can possibly afford to, and I'm going to try not to worry about making sure I have something to post every single week. You'll get art from me when you get it, and I know the real ones will just be happy to see it, not disappointed that I'm not posting at exactly 39 seconds after 3:17pm every second Saturday or whatever the fuck.

I have spent the past few days being very sick and having a mental breakdown at the same time and it's really unfun. Would not recommend. Last night I snapped a bit and set some pretty strict screen time limits on my phone as well as deleting some apps because the constant stress/stimulation/pressure/negativity of being on my phone 24/7 for YEARS is finally catching up with me.

In the interest of reducing my workload as much as possible so I can try to focus on building connections IRL and still have energy left over to take care of myself, I'm going to be making a few changes to the way I run my accounts:

1. I will be merging my SFW account (@salicos) into this one. This also applies to bluesky. I rarely have SFW stuff to post anymore and it doesn't feel worth the effort to maintain two separate accounts. I was keeping them separate so people IRL wouldn't find my NSFW account, but that ship has sailed long ago lol.
2. I may not have something to post every week, and that's okay! I'll post things when/if I have them. I will likely still schedule posts in advance, because without that I will forget to post at all, but it might be less consistent at times. When I have art to post, I will continue to post weekly.
2a. I will likely stop posting WIPs as I usually just use these as an engagement boost and to fill space when I don't have anything else to post.
3. I will not be hosting any further art shares on bluesky. I like seeing everyone's art, but ultimately it feels like an extra responsibility/demand, and since it's lower priority than a lot of other demands in my life at the moment, I'm axing it.
4. I'll probably also stop doing free art (raffles/giveaways/etc.) for a while, right now I do these to celebrate follower milestones, but my heart just isn't in it. Maybe again in the future though!
5. This one is kind of embarrassing because I made SUCH a big deal out of revamping my Discord server a few weeks ago, but... I'm probably going to archive or delete the server. It's still pretty inactive despite my efforts and managing it and trying to plan events has been more stress than it's worth. I can't remember how to talk to people or interact offline, I was going to use the server to practice talking to people but at this point I don't think more online interaction is the solution.

Some of these changes might happen slowly, as I have the time/energy to get around to implementing them. For now, if you have anything on the Discord server that you want to keep/save, do it now. Still not sure if I'm going to delete it outright or just shut down messaging permissions in all the channels, so go save whatever stuff you may have floating around on there just in case.

I have no idea how permanent any of this will be, it might just be for a few months, it might be for the rest of the year, it might be forever. I don't know. I might feel differently/better about some of this stuff later on, once I've had time to recover.

Lastly, I just want to thank you all for sticking with me for so long. Honestly, I feel like I have been rude to all of you by chasing numbers like this instead of seeing people, and I'm so sorry. Thank you for sticking with me, thank you for supporting me, thank you for enjoying my art, thank you for sharing your ideas and OCs with me and for being so gosh dang nice to me all the time.

I hope you'll continue to stick with me even if I don't have anything to post for a while. And of course, thank you for reading this long-ass post.