Hello, Tumblr! It’s been a while. (Over a year, to be exact!) I have very little news to repor

Hello, Tumblr! It’s been a while. (Over a year, to be exact!) I have very little news to report on, yet I have a lot on my mind; I’ll go ahead and toss the text under a cut so as not to clog up your timelines, but please enjoy the above sampling of my 2021 FFXV art from Twitter that never made it over here! ଘ(੭ ᐛ )━☆ﾟ.*･｡ﾟIn my early twenties I blogged nearly every thought and mundane detail of my life over on LiveJournal; sometime after turning thirty I came to the conclusion that I had been vain to do so, that talking about myself was only interesting to me and that sharing my innermost thoughts equated to begging for attention, and I essentially stopped sharing anything personal because I didn’t think anyone was interested in reading about it. As we enter our third year of the pandemic, I realize I might’ve been a little off in that conclusion, because I have made many friends through the internet and I have always been interested in what they had to say, so it stands to reason that they might be interested in what I have to say.So here is what’s going on with me: I am in a very weird place right now. I think a lot of people can understand what this feels like, having been locked up in their homes for two years with no end in sight. I am not in a bad place, per se; I am still married, still plugging along with IRL work, still have headcanons and fanfiction ideas swirling around inside my head (mostly of the FFXIV variety at the moment). But with my 37th birthday a couple weeks away, and a pesky lack of money and stability and, well, anything to show for in terms of significant accomplishments/milestones, I find I’m feeling rather depressed at where I’m at in my life compared to where I thought I would be at this point (the pandemic only adding to those stressors).In the past, I’ve used my passion for art and video games to outpace my depression. When I failed to get the book I wrote in 2016 published, I turned to writing fanfiction. When my dad died in 2017, I buried myself in Episode Ignis. When I felt like the world was burning in 2020 (literally and figuratively), I organized a few charity events to try and put some good out into the world to counteract the bad. FFXV was a steady source of inspiration for me, and I leveraged every ounce of motivation it afforded me.Sometime around August of last year, however, I just… ran out of steam. My love for FFXV is never in doubt, but I’ve lost all motivation to do anything. Maybe I took on too many projects at once, or maybe playing FFXIV during peak Endwalker hype has impacted my ability to get back into a proper creative headspace. I did draw a couple of XIV-related pieces thinking it might get the creative juices flowing again, but even now I am still struggling with the desire (or lack thereof) to draw, write, or do anything, really. I feel a little like an amorphous blob just kind of existing as time passes by. Some days it feels hard to even get out of bed, let alone accomplish anything of measurable value and importance.Even now as I write this, I find myself wanting to delete this whole post, afraid of coming off as whiny when there are people in the world who are actually suffering. But I want the people who care about me to know I haven’t disappeared so much as I’ve simply switched to lurker mode; I love the friends I’ve made through fandom as much as any friend I have in real life, and I want them to know I’m still here and think about them even if I’m not as active as I once was.Related to that, I do hope I will be more active in 2022. I have a ton of FFXV-tober prompts that I didn’t finish last year that I would like to complete, and I have several art trades for people that I still need to fulfill (looking at you, @dizzymoogle, @limito-breaku, and @leslieann1313​!). And then there’s the FFXV KupoCon event in LA that I desperately want to attend (provided I can secure a ticket and that covid doesn’t impact it). There’s still plenty of art and fanfiction, both XIV and XV-related, I’d love to tackle. I hope that sooner rather than later I can shake off this depressive episode and get back to what I’m best at—thirsting over Ignis, of course! (And maybe a little Urianger on the side.) -- source link

More pics about