January 2022 (and a ramble about my situation, future)

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to do very much this month. I still feel I am maintaining an upward trend though; I've started making and sharing personal art again publicly, and my attitude on drawing hasn't felt as good as it does now since back when I was first "on the rise" so to speak.

As for what's in the little .zip, I have a couple extra pics I did of that nanachi drawing, where I kinda used CSP's new "liquid deform" tool to try and make a simple gain sequence out of a single drawing. It doesn't look great, but it was a fun experiment. (^◡^")
A few of the doodles I particularly like too. Especially the simple round eevee one, where they look so full they seem almost ready to pop. I love pics like that, I devilishly wanna just give them a squeeze.

But enough fun,

If you've caught my couple journals on FA or tweets about my situation a couple days ago, you'd know January wasn't the best month for me. Especially the last few days. You can skip reading all of this, but I want to write my thoughts down somewhere, and since you're the people who are most interested in my stuff, you might as well get to know what's going on with me, personally.

However, if you'd just want the end of it, tl;dr: I'm actually now in a better situation than I've been in for years, so you'll hopefully be seeing more of me. 

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But, as for how we got here, I can skip telling you my entire life's story and just tell you the relevant portion of how I've been living with my dad for about a year now, I think. (A bit of a content warning, because I'm going to talk about my pretty awful "home life" I've had now.)

I didn't grow up around my dad, I only was around him a little bit when I was really young. I don't recall doing many things with him, or what he was like back then. I spent most of my time after I turned 6-7 in different places, and he never moved with us. 

I think the end of 2020, after I was starting to lose a lot of steam on art because of many experiences I had with some pretty bad people I met through the community, I had to move away from the place I was living in with my brother and a friend of mine because we were all in pretty bad situations in life and couldn't afford it there anymore. I moved in with my dad at the house he'd always lived in, and later my brother followed, even though my dad seemed to have something against him which nobody understood.

Because my dad doesn't seem to actually ever show any care for anybody including my mom, or even really anything at all, needless to say my mom's relationship with him had started to fall apart after she'd really held it together for the sake of raising me and my brothers, but we're basically all "grown up" now. She divorced him some time in late 2019, but not very much really changed, because she still has some attachment to him that I don't understand.

Over the past year of living with him, it's become difficult to be around him at all. I have honestly felt trapped. He is disrespectful to everybody, seems to openly look down on us all, and doesn't seem to understand basic courtesy like not blasting music at the loudest possible volume through the house at 3AM, screaming for literally hours at a time about minor inconveniences like not being able to remember what channel a TV show was on (at 3AM), or not scattering marijuana leaves all over the house amidst random shreds of paper and other nonsense and literally never attempting to clean it up. All the while, essentially completely relying on my mom to pay for quite literally every expense, as he no longer does anything for income and hasn't for years. Despite all of our best efforts to respect him as our father, he still looks down on us.

Now, after explicitly telling my dad and basically asking for his permission, which he "granted" without seemingly any issue, my mom is seeing new people, because she'd like to have somebody to "spend her life with," as she puts it. But a few nights ago, when he found out that she actually went and did find somebody, and was now spending time with him, he just completely snapped.

Me and my older brother woke up a few nights ago to him absolutely furious, screaming about how we have "two dads." My older brother came out of his room to see he had a gun by his side (I think), was holding a knife, and he began screaming about how he was going to murder the new guy. He started going into extremely graphic detail about how he'd kill him. My dad started shouting directly to my older brother about it, holding the knife right up to his face at times. My brother opened my door and wanted to know "if" I wanted to leave. Obviously, I left. We went to my mom's house where my younger brother was, got him and my mom's dog. Spent the night at different friends' houses.

Despite everything, I actually remained pretty calm. I must be really desensitized to everything about my dad at this point, because because more than anything, I felt like this was just "the end" of my experiences with him, than a real problem. He can't clean a desk when he's screaming bloody murder about how it's messy, let alone actually find somebody he doesn't know and kill them. He never got up from the chair he's always in. 

A day later, we went back there to get our things as fast as we could, and move elsewhere. We'd all organized places to stay with our friends to move to the night before. We ignored all the random stuff he was saying about us, making it clear how little he ever cared for any of us, even my mom.

I don't know what's really going to go on with him now. But, I'll likely never see him again. This incident really seems to have changed everything, regarding how my family really thinks of him, if not because of the outburst of murderous threats, for the things he actually said to my brothers and mom which I won't repeat. (As an aside, for some reason, I was basically completely left out of the insults. I don't understand the reason why, and I'm not really thinking about it.) The police may be involved somehow if anything continues. The situation is mostly in my mom's hands now, and despite her weird principles about still wanting to care for him somehow, even she knows she should never put him above her in any decision she makes ever again. And like I said, the rest of us will likely never see him again. He will just sit in that house probably for the rest of his life, and we won't "bother him."

As for me personally, I'm really happy living with my friends now. I don't really care that my dad "doesn't love me," or anything like that. I didn't grow up with him, I don't really feel attached to the idea of familial bonds being inherently important, and as far as I'm concerned, this complex problem of my dad has been "solved," in my personal life. You don't really continue to consider the subjects of a problem after you've found the solution, right? It's just over.

I'm a lot happier about where I am now, than upset about any of that. My brothers and my mom are all well too. She seems to really like the new guy and it's given her even more self-confidence recently, and my older brother is living with his girlfriend again.

While I'm sure there's more that will go on with my dad as he's obviously not just been left completely abandoned, like I said, that's behind me personally. I have to try to be more independent again, and this arrangement with a couple of my friends is temporary for just a couple months, before I continue with plans I already had to move with another friend of mine. I'm pretty excited about where I am right now, even if I had to be thrust into it uncomfortably. But it's ultimately a good place to be right now. The situation I've been in, in retrospect, was obviously not good for me, and was not helping my ability to pursue my interests or enjoy my life. So, I'm hopeful that the rest of 2022 will be great. 

There's a lot of details I've left out about this, but I've probably went into far more detail about these personal life things than I need to or even should.

Thank you for continuing to supporting me, despite me having been always trying to get out of this low point for a year or two. Things have been looking up for a while, and are continuing.