Very Tired (trigger warning - my apologies)

Hello DeviantArt family. Bit of an honest one here, so here goes…

Been a long time since I’ve written a journal post. Pretty slack of me to be honest, I just run short of time and for some reason I don’t give it the attention it deserves. I’ve not been posting so much lately either, both on my subscription pages and publicly, for which I apologise and extend my gratitude to those who have stuck by me even so.

Here’s a little towards why…

Lately, we’ve been having some difficulties with our son, who is on the more severe end of the autistic spectrum and has hit his teenage years. His communication is limited, and he’s having a tough time dealing with this stage of life. As such, his frustrations are more frequent and his challenging behaviour has been amplified more than usual, which means it’s also a more testing time for the rest of the family. He’s currently refusing to go to school and will self-harm to hammer the point home. Not easy viewing as parent. We’ve kind of readjusted our life and work patterns around this so that we’re able to have him at home whilst we start a gentle program of reintegration back to school. This has meant a bit more travel at various times to and fro the school, and has so far been pretty successful, but it takes a toll.

As such, I’ve been signed off work for the first time as a result! Kinda funny, you’d think that’d mean I’d have even more time for drawing!😄 (At least I’ve still got my sense of humour!) But honestly, I need it for recovery.

So, basically I just wanted to explain to everyone, friends and followers, clients and customers who message a lot, why my replies are even fewer and further between. I’m still here, I’m still grateful, I still read the messages - I’m just very tired. And even responding to emails, messages, notes, texts etc, sometimes just gets a little overwhelming, and an attitude of, ‘I’ll batch them all together and do it all in one hit’ takes over. But then that gets put off and the ‘window of acceptable response’ gets bricked over altogether. (Okay, that was a weird analogy- sorry.😄) But you get the point.

I’m currently not taking on commissions (even though I’d like to) - I’ve got some sequential pages that I’m finishing off for the good guys over at NRGComics (which is looking really cool by the way) and other than my subs page stuff, I’ll be taking things a little slower until my family and I can acclimate to this ‘new norm’.

But I am still here - still hopping onto DA frequently. I really wanna hit that 10K watcher mark too!😂 So I’m not going anywhere. Thanks for reading, apologies for any upset if my situation is close to yours. Peace, love, empathy and respect.

Bambs