Many of you who've followed me may notice that I haven't uploaded all that much. I would like to talk about that since I've barely uploaded anything all year. Truthfully, I've been quite burnt out for a long time. I've had a lot of personal dissatisfaction with my art over the years, and the process has come to make me very anxious or just plain stressed out. I'm trying my best to get help with that.
You may wonder why I keep drawing considering the toll it takes on my mental wellbeing. Many of you who've known me a while know the reason, but for those who don't, I'll explain (and if you do know, skip the next 2 paragraphs below):
3 1/2 years ago I started drawing again due to an incident involving a lot of popular Poképorn artists having their artwork DMCA'd off of various places back in 2019 (I want to say it was in July), predominantly on paysites. When that happened, I went to investigate the situation myself and see if I could help everyone out in that time of fear and uncertainty. For a while, I was doing that pretty well- people were having at least social media profiles restored, and things were looking up- whatever takedowns people got there were just a troll trying to ruin peoples' fun, so fighting them off was easy, it just required persistence. When I got to trying to push back on paysites, things didn't go so well. Turns out whatever takedowns people received on paysites were the real deal, Nintendo had actually stooped low enough to start attacking fan art. I wasn't having any of that and still pressed ahead. It wasn't so much the process of combating the takedowns from a theoretical, on-paper perspective, but getting the sites to comply and send the counter-notices they were given. Nintendo couldn't even see the content they were removing and thus couldn't review it, mind you- and under the DMCA, you must conduct review of the material to have a "good faith belief" when sending a takedown, so their takedowns weren't even legal- but their size made the paysites not want to comply with the requests to send counter-notices. That's when people just started giving up and not drawing Poképorn anymore. At that point, many common names in Poképorn had disappeared. I wasn't a fan of many of those people, but I at least respected them as artists. Their work was still inspiring to me, and while I wasn't an active follower of their work, I still missed them. They had in a sense become part of me and a bridge between me and others I could relate to.
By March 2020, I decided I'd hook up my tablet and try drawing again. I say "again" because I had quit for 3 1/2 years prior after burning out and giving up. I wanted to be like all of them- the people I sought to save- and take their places as a great Poképorn artist, to give everyone the hero I had promised. The other artists may have given up by their own decision, but I still felt responsible for not doing enough to save them. I've wanted to match their skill and do all the things they'd never do again, and keep a piece of those old times alive. The amount of pressure I've put on myself to be able to be as good as they were has been extremely unhealthy and has directly impacted my day-to-day functioning, some of these people had more than a decade of near-daily drawing experience that I've been trying to replicate out of thin air in a few years' time within my busy schedule.
It's drained me. Drawing has become a stressful activity for the pursuit of perfection and as a weapon in my on personal war against an ever-present enemy. It's become less about making what I want and more about becoming what other artists who aren't really a part of the Poképorn community anymore were. It's an absolute beatdown of comparing my work against the gold standard as a measure of its worth the whole time I started drawing again. I can't see the value in anything I draw, and the process just isn't worth it when compared to the end result. But I keep going on, since I don't want to break my promise of giving everyone the hero they needed.
Due to pressure from a friend concerned about what drawing did to my mental health, I've started seeing a therapist in hopes I can learn how to love drawing again, so hopefully things will change. I only ever started drawing because I was bored in class in middle school, and I enjoyed drawing pictures. It didn't even matter those classroom doodles didn't come out great, but- now that I have this feat of being the best of Poképorn artist in the world to accomplish- that simple joy went away. And I want to feel that joy again! I want to draw for fun again. I want to feel the joy the other artists around me that they get from the process alone. I want to draw with my artist friends and not feel stupid, and feel worth drawing alongside them. I don't want to have to be the best. I don't want to have to compete with all the artists in the world as my hobby.
My therapist has told me to draw something at least once a week. I'm supposed to draw it on paper in a sketchbook she gave me as she ironically enough has a son who's an artist, and that seems to be the first major step forward I'm to make. I hope that will be a step towards drawing my normal content again and uploading far more frequently. As such, I hope that explains my lack of uploads. I hope that changes soon enough and I'll be regularly uploading again. Thanks for bearing with me.
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5 months, 4 weeks ago
12 Dec 2023 02:00 CET
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