My debt is getting dangerously high. I’m having nightmares about losing housing again. I’m trying not to jump onto the mutual aid train, in part because I know the Patreon recruitment efforts, and art sales are getting no traction. In part I think that's thanks to everyone bailing on Twitter, which yeah, I understand, (thanks Elon) but at the same time I’m watching my livelihood potential getting torched.
I get all my Patreon patrons from Twitter, so I am scrambling to find a less unstable social media platform, because slowly losing 10K followers makes it harder to keep the ~300 patrons around while bringing in new folks to replace those wonderful Patrons sadly lost to economic churn. I HATE using GoFundMe mutual aid requests, even though I will lose my house without doing something drastic.
Part of me thinks that maybe I can ride it out and just get a part time work from home job until I can’t use my hands anymore. Another part just wants to leave social media and the web altogether. To stop asking other people to buy or read my art or writing. I’m seriously looking at a low wage job that a person in a wheelchair can do. But most anything that is is in my wheelhouse wants a bachelor’s degree or onsite work with “flexible on call scheduling”
Maybe I shouldn’t be so ‘political.’ Or polemic. I really dislike the “activist” label, because mostly I’m just an artist and a writer who gets upset at stuff, and I feel like calling me an activist is absolutely a disservice to people who go out and march and protest and sometimes risk their lives to uphold and fight for their values.
Next to that, my work feels too trite. It’s important to me, but it’s not going to cure cancer or save the environment. I just want to be a writer and an artist whose work earns enough to pay the bills without needing to go to the foodbank. I don’t mind starving, personally, but now that I have type 2 Diabetes it can actively affect my health to not eat at regular times…and that’s on top of rationing all my meds so that I don’t go further into debt. (I’ve been doing that for a month + now) since I’m making about 23,000 USD pretax. So. This is where I’m at.