Eclipse

It happened, I burned out.

It's okay, I'm alive :)

For several weeks, when I sat down to work, I felt an unpleasant storm of emotions: despair, unwillingness to do anything, apathy, fear, sadness, and it was difficult to persuade myself to spend a couple of hours at work. I took too long breaks from work during the day and it got to the point where the last straw was that I stretched out 2.5 hours of work that started in the morning until late in the evening.

As soon as I realized that I had crossed the burnout line, I decided to do something about it because I really like my job and I understand that all the negativity is just temporary and from fatigue.

I realized that I needed to rest somehow. Before coming to this decision, I was very worried and thought that no, now I can’t rest, I need to do everything: this and this and then this at the same time as this... In the end, we discussed this with my partner and it was he who offered me the option of rest, where I would do a little work in the morning and rest the rest of the day and do this during the week. Based on the results of this easy week, I am writing this post :)

I feel a little better, I can’t say I experienced catharsis, but I’m not as emotionally sick at the thought of sitting down and working.

There are several reasons for this:

1. I worry a lot about the fact that I need to earn a living, since at the moment my financial well-being depends only on me

2. I take on too much work, which reinforces point 1 xD

A significant contributor to my burnout was my unwise approach to Patreon rewards. The set with three Narsil swords, which I published recently, turned out to be not as simple as at first glance. Imagining future work on the project, I thought that nothing would be difficult, since all 3 swords are very similar and differ only in small details. But in reality it turned out that these were 3 independent files and each one needed to be allocated a certain amount of care and time, and given my perfectionistic approach, I invested many times more of my resources into this project than before, and in the end it felt like I had done the work for Patreon for 3 months instead of one. And now I'm making Barrow Blades, where there are 4 swords in the set xD

I intend to make them on time, but in the future I propose to break into parts such projects that involve more than one model in the set.

Very often it happened that during non-working hours I thought about work and was very worried that I would not be able to submit orders on time and do work for Patreon. Over the past month, in addition to working for Patreon, I have been working on 1-3 orders at the same time, because I really need money and want to earn as much as possible in order to reach the level of comfort in life that I want. I also want to be able to pay for visits to doctors, which I introduced into my life relatively recently (nothing threatening my life is happening, I just started monitoring my health after many years of my neglectful attitude towards it).

Today I have come to the point that I gave myself two days off a week instead of one and during the week I worked 2.5 hours a day and feel a little better :)

Starting from the new week, I plan to increase my work time by 2-2.5 times, as I want to publish Barrow Blades for you on time and complete the current commissions. Because in the future I have plans to do marketing for my work so that the need to take commissions becomes less influential on my life.