I'm going to finish up the three pending requests, and then I'm formally bowing out of commissions for the foreseeable future. After the current Etsy listings run their course, I'm not renewing them either. I really appreciate y'all trying to help me get ready to hit the scene again, and when I reopen commissions, I'll rekindle the offer to help me spruce up my listings.
Part of the decision comes from orders greatly slacking off over the years and by 2020 I only had one person ordering regularly until they got upset I gradually increased my prices from $2/hour in 2017 when we met to $8/hour in 2023.
The rest is that I am beyond burnt out. I had gotten my life kind of stable despite dealing with domestic violence for years and doing commissions, being a small business owner, and a job that had me working part-time at multiple hospitals, and then I got taken out in 2021. In May 2021, my ex ran off with the kids and demanded double child support or else I couldn't see them, the transmission went out in my vehicle when I was in the process of moving home in July with my parents since I couldn't afford to live by myself, my grandmother got diagnosed with stage 4 cancer in August (and died last August), my dad got also sick in August and three weeks later died of COVID pneumonia in September, and my income got cut in half in October when I was fired from my job because of a heart condition that made it too dangerous for me to get the COVID vaccine, and yet my ex demanded I continue paying double child support. After I helped my mom get through the worst of her grief, I just shut down in June 2022. I just had so much deeply ingrained fatigue, anger, shock, and grief that I buried up in the physical world of martial arts because I just couldn't feel or process any more. Things were semi-stable with my ex, but then he started threatening me again in January 2023 and scaling back my access to my kids, and then it blew up for the last time in May 2023 because I would not let him move back in with me and I would not tolerate a forced romantic relationship again, so he cut my access to my children down to the bare minimum of the 1st, 3rd, and 5th weekends of each month. No phone calls, no emails, and completely cut off from anything related to their school or medical stuff. The divorce finalized in 2019, I went on my first date with somebody else in May 2023, and my ex got considerably more hostile even though he's the one who filed for divorce. (My dumb butt was trying to "just be quiet and make it work for the sake of the kids", as I had been shamed to do by society and the legal system, otherwise I would have ditched him in October 2011 when the death threats began.) The double child support and inability to find a job to replace the one I lost drove me deep in debt, and after he abandoned my kids in October 2023 because I bought them a phone so I could talk to them, and they started telling me what they were going through, I finally hired an attorney to push for full custody of my kids to protect them, and I've been in court ever since.
I have a very, VERY long tale to tell you guys about the police, CPS, the school system, my kids' therapist, and our legal system as soon as this case concludes. Despite my ex abandoning my kids and telling me to "keep them forever", and many other things going on, the judge sent my kids back to my ex in December 2023. My son worries me the most because last year he had three hospital visits. He's had to have surgery to put plates and screws in his arm after the ulna and radius were completely snapped in half at school by a bully, another visit over mental health concerns from what he's going through at school and home, and then yet another visit to the hospital after he came to my place with multiple bruises on his arm and legs. He got suspended from school because even after surgery the school refuses to acknowledge he's being bullied or that it's serious, he lashed out at one of his bullies that had been tormenting him for years (and that kid's sibling and others have been threatening to break more of my son's bones and laughing at him for having had his arm broken by a different kid), so they suspended my son and still won't do anything about the bullying. They removed my contact information early last year when I sent them a letter stating that bullying should never end in a child needing surgery and neither they nor the department of education were answering my phone calls.
So, yeah. I am so very sorry, but I just don't have the energy to do commissions right now. If, by some miraculous stroke of luck, this case concludes and I get my kids and get rid of my stalker, I'll open commissions back up. Right now, running the tax office is all the work stress I can handle in addition to personal life stress. I didn't even realize it'd been a month since my last sketch updates because I've been busy with attorney correspondence, a spider bite, file recovery after the hard drive crash, and heat exhaustion because I am not built for summer at all.
Thank you for the support and I'll come back as soon as I can.
