Okay, I’m going to start by saying this is a text post that I really didn’t want to type up. The extra personal crap most are gonna want to skip is under the cut. I’ll say what I can outside of it first.
The BIG thing is that I am working on getting things fixed with commissioners I lost contact with.
* A lot of you guys I have literally lost all contact with / commission details due to hard drive failure. This means IF I OWE YOU WORK, PLEASE CONTACT ME. I may have lost details and I have been freaking out trying to figure out what I’m missing / still owe. *
I have also started a new SSRI, and this will hopefully give me back a bit more energy to work at things faster. The Italy stuff will be posted soon, once I can go through what I’ve posted already. I finally have a functioning scanner, but there’s a lot of clutter due to ongoing construction to my house. More under the cut.
The past two years have been a hell maelstrom of things being crazy and out of control. I ended things in the most horrific fashion imaginable with my ex-fiance, who broke my computer (intentionally or just a shit shipping job, I don’t know or care at this point,) and bricked my hard drive in the process. This also ruined my only chance at salvaging my psychology degree, and still pursuing the grad school plan I’d had in mind, since I was given the wrong degree for the masters program I wanted to be a part of… (This is a very long story, largely relates to my ex-fiance, and I don’t want to get in to it in detail.)
Understandably, this means I’ve been super emotional, and as I already suffer from Major Depressive Disorder, I’ve been barely functioning. The last year, especially, has been a spectacularly Sisyphean production, wherein I would finally get some momentum going, start to fix things, then a new calamity would come along and kick my still wobbly legs out from under me. You can imagine what that does with a bolder the size any of the depressive D/Os tend to be.
I was left in a position where I couldn’t actually use the degree I’d graduated with, couldn’t get in to grad school for the program I’d been working toward (because I had the wrong psych degree,) and oh, yeah. That student loan debt was now active and I had to find a way to start paying it back. More accurately, I had to find a way to start putting money back in to my bank account since it was being drained rapidly by automated loan payments. After months and months of being so utterly broken and drained from depression that I could barely leave the bed, (I think I was sleeping around 14 hrs a day at that point,) I made the decision to go back to school for a second degree. This proved a good thing, as loading me with work, while stressful, makes my depression less noticeable, to a point. I started to take on some more commissions around this point, and made good on most of them, but unfortunately when I shelled out 2k for data recovery to my hard drive, I was not able to get all files back. Most, not all. I’ve finished the commissions I could immediately locate information for (and having learned my lesson, opted to keep my spreadsheets in DropBox, instead.)
After my first semester back in school went well, I wound up going for a semester abroad in Italy. See, already having a degree means I can’t get scholarship now, even though my degree is one I can’t already use. So until grad school, I am now wholly loan dependent. An exception to this is trips abroad, wherein every student going on the trip gets a scholarship to help pay for the trip abroad. End result, going to school in Italy was… almost half the cost of going to school for the same semester in the US.
Italy was very good to me as far as my depression, but it kept me so busy my progress on commissions was slow. I only took on a few additional commissions, but wasn’t able to dent my old list as much as I liked. Then the worst possible thing happened. Something went horrifically wrong with Dropbox, and all of my files were lost.
You see where this is going. Somehow on the Dropbox site they were flagged as having been deleted over 30 days ago, so I couldn’t recover them conventionally.. Yay.
I got in touch with the Dropbox recovery team, and they got almost everything back. Yay!
….my spreadsheet for commission info was corrupted.
So I’m back at square one again. Great. On my return from Italy, I got in to an online mayterm class. This turned out to be a colossally bad decision. The workload was so horrible that in order to turn things in on time, I had to eat, sleep, and breathe this class. I would wake up, immediately get to work, and work until I went to bed. There was a paper due every day. No, not the usual short response / paragraph mayterms like to have due. A full 3-4 page essay. Weekly, we had 4 additional 1 page equivalent forum responses we had to type to other students in the class. Then of course there was the reading (2-4 chapters a day, + additional lecture notes we had to read online,) additional weekly assignments, and a test at the end of each week to study for.
And by “until I went to bed…” I was sleeping less than four hours a night. For three weeks. I essentially had a breakdown a week. Like. Full on meltdown style. Screaming, crying, nonsensical babbling. I don’t know if it was more the sleep deprivation or stress, but either way I do not recommend. Following the mayterm I slept for almost 18 hours, and could barely pull myself out of bed for a few weeks. Ick. Ick. Ick.
So, I’m finally starting to feel better after all of that, and have recently put myself on an SSRI. It’s over the counter due to being herb based, but I’ve done my research on its effectiveness and safety. I’m starting on low dosage, and will see how I’m doing after a few weeks. In any case, I’m back to “functioning” enough to get things done, though I’m not working as quickly as I like. We’ll see if the SSRI peps me up a bit.
I’m working to try and manage stress better, and I’m trying to find a good work/play balance because I am woefully prone to self punishing cycles where I refuse to do anything enjoyable because I haven’t gotten “enough work done” to stop. The end result is, you guessed it, burnout, where I get nothing done at all except for being exhausted and staring in to space a lot.
It’s a learning process.
But the big thing I have the energy to start putting things back on track for the first time in a long time. If you’ve commissioned me and are still waiting, please contact me ASAP. I need to recreate my commission files. I’m… going to use GoogleDocs now for everything in hopes that THAT doesn’t get wiped somehow. I don’t seem to have a good track record with data.
Chimaeric Archive 