Hey.

So this year has been a lot for me. In many ways, it’s been something like a renaissance. This year I’ve gotten a ridiculous amount of commissions of my characters. I’ve obtained several commissions that have been on my wish list of things I’ve wanted for years. I went to MFF and met people I’ve admired, worked with, and followed—some for years and others only for months—and every one of them added something good to my life. I’ve had genuinely wonderful, soul-filling conversations and moments with people that reminded me why I love being in this space.

But I also want to be honest about where I’m at, because trying to pretend everything’s fine hasn’t helped. This has been one of the most mentally difficult years I’ve had in a long time, not because of any one big thing but because of the slow and quiet buildup of things I’ve tried to ignore or push through. The troubles weren’t catastrophic. But they were cumulative. Slowly compounding since around this time last year, slowly piling up. I’ve gone through a handful of low points this year—admittedly deep ones—and every time I thought I’d climbed out, I found myself slipping back in.

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The root of it, ultimately, has been commissioning. I started commissioning a little over a decade ago, and at the time it was a way to bring characters who existed in my mind and in collaborative roleplays into something concrete, something “real”. I was proud of them (and still am). Sharing those pieces with a wider audience wasn’t the point at the start, it was a bonus. Giving these characters, these pieces of myself, a body and presence.

However, as time passed on, as we grew and got jobs and as life went on, we slowly stopped RPing in the same capacity we used to. From there, commissions began to become less about collaboration and more about comfort and self-indulgence. For a while, that was okay. But somewhere along the way, it became more than that. Commissioning, and the sense of visibility that came with it became tangled with how I saw myself. The feeling that other people liked my ideas, finally feeling seen in a space that I could call my own, a place in a community. My sense of worth. Whether I was “doing enough.” Whether I mattered.

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This year I’ve realized just how deeply my sense of self has become entangled with visibility and comparison.

Being in spaces with people I admire—especially people whose work or social circles overlap with mine—made me start measuring myself against others without meaning to. In hindsight I never should have started keeping score, but I did. Quietly, to myself, I’d see if I would hit a certain follower milestone before someone else. See who got shared. Who got more attention, more art, more traction. Even when I liked those people, their characters, their ideas—and I genuinely do—admiration turned to comparison before I could realize what had happened. And comparison sits in your gut and corrodes from the inside out faster than you can treat it.

Over time, I started internalizing the belief that if I wasn’t getting the same response, engagement, momentum, “success”, then I must be doing something wrong. Maybe I wasn’t good enough. Maybe my characters weren’t appealing enough. Maybe my ideas were generic. Maybe I was just forgettable. That spiral made me second‑guess my work, my place in these spaces, and even my reasons for being here at all.

Commissions, which had given me joy when I began, also became caught up in that. They turned into a way to measure if I was seen. If I mattered. When no one said anything, when not even art-scraping bots picked it up for the boorus when I commissioned a popular artist, when the response I got didn’t match my internal hopes, it reinforced a feeling I’ve wrestled with for most of my life: that I’m easy to overlook. Easy to forget.

There have been times where I’ve waited years for a commission to be completed while watching other clients get theirs finished in weeks or prioritized. Times when an artist said they’d post my commission themselves and they never did. Times when I’ve tried and failed repeatedly to commission certain artists while watching friends get piece after piece from them. I know none of this is malice on anyone’s part, but when you already struggle to feel visible, it doesn’t take much for your brain to start creating patterns where they don’t exist. Was my character not appealing enough? Did I ask for too much? Was I…just not the kind of client they would feel excited about?

I kept that pain to myself. Let it grow. I didn’t want to make others feel uncomfortable. I didn’t want to seem petty or self-centered. But bottling up didn’t make it go away. It just made it fester.

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I know comparison is a trap. There’s a comic about two cakes. About one person comparing their cake they’re presenting to another’s and lamenting about how the other cake looks so much better than their own, and then the audience is delighted that there are simply two cakes to enjoy. I understand the message of this comic, and how what I’m doing is exactly what the comic’s message is about. With that said, the struggle isn’t that I think my cake is “less than.” I feel like I put my cake on the table, and those who come to taste are only doing it out of politeness. Another cake is put on the table and people cheer. It’s not that I don’t think the cake deserves the praise—I’m going back for extra helpings myself—but moreso that I start to wonder why my cake seems invisible. When it keeps happening, it stops being about comparison and starts to feel like disconnection. Like I don’t belong at the table to showcase my cake to begin with.

This year, between comparisons, unmet expectations, and the pressure I put on myself, I ended up taking some pretty severe psychic damage to my self-worth. Some of it came from comments I saw spoken in passing about others that stuck far harder than they should have. Some came from watching others succeed where I felt stuck. A lot came from within. From setting impossible standards and then punishing myself for not meeting them.

I coped by commissioning more. I went overboard to a frankly absurd degree. I thought that maybe the next post, the quick succession of commissions after one another, maybe something could spark a reaction, get people talking, maybe propel me to the point where I was at a similar trajectory with my peers I kept comparing myself to again, to resume my one-sided friendly rivalry by keeping neck-and-neck with them.

Instead, the result of all this is I’m sitting on about $10,000 of debt.

It’s frankly embarrassing to say it out loud. But it’s important for me to externalize, because if nothing else it is a huge wake-up call. That alone means I need to slow down and reassess how I engage with this space.

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I’ve started taking steps to course correct. I’m seeking therapy. Working with my doctor to explore adjusting medication. But this process, this taking back control, means stepping back. Pulling away from commissioning. From putting pressure on myself to be constantly visible. To try to compare myself to others who are running in an entirely different race.

I’ve made some big financial sacrifices already, and I had always planned for MFF to be a sort of swan song. Something big, emotional and beautiful, but a coda all the same. I’m not a suspiciously-wealthy furry with infinite disposable income. I work as a checker at a grocery store. I have a degree that isn’t being used. I’m just someone who got carried away, who used commissions as a lifeline, who now has to face the cost—both literal and emotional. I don’t believe in asking for a handout to help with the hole I dug for myself. I’m lucky enough to be in a position where I’m not at risk of catastrophe from my actions, and I want to pay off my debt on my own. It isn’t going to be fast, but I can do it.

So, for the foreseeable future, I’m stepping back. I’ll still be around. I’m still waiting on a few owed commissions, and there are some people I’ve promised work to that I still want to follow through with. But I’m not going to be commissioning actively or regularly for a while. I need to focus on healing. Financially, emotionally, mentally.

I’ve thought about what my life might look like if I never entered this space. Would I have a down payment on a house? A better job? More savings? Maybe. But I also would have missed out on so many people I’ve met. So many friends. Creativity. Stories. Fun and good times shared together in chats or in games. Even with all of it, I don’t regret being here. Not entirely.

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As much as I want to say this isn’t a goodbye and just a break, I don’t know if that would be honest. There are stories I want to tell and I still want to share them. There's still things I can do in the near future. But right now, I feel like I’ve hit a wall. I’ve been talking into the void, hoping something will stick, and I don’t know how much longer I can keep doing that without it hurting. I’ll still exist in some form. I’ll still care about this space. But for now, I need to stop running myself into the ground to try to keep pace in a race I invented in my head.

Maybe I’ll come back stronger. I hope I do.

Writing this hasn’t been easy. I’ve cried multiple times during. But this felt important to say.

I’m grateful for the people I’ve met and the experiences I’ve had. For the wonderful people who gifted me fanart that still blows my mind and for which I’m eternally grateful. But I just need some breathing room.


Thanks for reading.