The Year-Long Hiatus, 3rd Anniversary and General Life Yappings

Content Warning - Discussion of mental health issues, as usual :')

Strange times we are in. Not only for the world but for my life as well. It has been a while since I've written a personal essay, and after returning from my unintentional year-long hiatus, it felt appropriate to write something.

It's funny because yearly retrospective essays have been a tradition I've kept in myself for years, but I seem to have missed both this year and the last. I suppose that the expectations I set for myself, paired with how overwhelming the past years have been, just so happen to combine in the perfect cocktail that causes me to become overwhelmed and write nothing at all.

And it almost feels appropriate. In my mind, if I don't post or write about something, it almost feels like it never happened. And with how the year 2023 was easily the worst year of my life, mental health-wise, the fact that I never managed to bring myself to write a 2023 retrospective almost makes my brain erase all the traumatic events that took place that year. And even then, I suppose that "erase" is an awkward word used to describe it.

Somehow nothing will ever beat the first-time pain of teenage grieving, when your heart is still young and inexperienced in how much everything hurts. Pain in my mid-20s now is heavier, yet it hurts much more comfortably the more I've grown accustomed to it. And often it's hard to fully understand the level of pain I was in until I'm able to look at it from a better place and learn to empathize with a version of myself whose pain I've done nothing but dismiss as simple "overreacting".

I could go ahead and talk about 2023 for my own archival purposes, but I see nothing to gain out of talking about the way my eating disorder worsened with how I'd stop eating out of money anxiety, or the way I grew further disconnected from my family, or the way I'd have daily near-constant RSD episodes, or even the way I relapsed so badly about my abuser that I couldn't go a day without spiralling about things that happened years ago. That could easily be a summary of it, and revisiting the thoughts brings no sense of closure whatsoever, no matter how much I wish it did.

Meanwhile, 2024 was a shift, I got a job in content moderation, which although left me in this state of permanent fatigue which strained a lot of my relationships, still marked a positive shift in my understanding of myself in a "wow who knew having knowledge about gaming and internet culture could be a valuable skill (?) to have?" sort of way.

Alas, one year later my contract didn't get renovated, due to multiple factors both in and out of my control. Because during the time I had started the job, which was one of the most stressful times of my life, the toxic relative with whom I had been living, had decided to kick me out with little more than a month's notice.

It was an ugly time, and although my family has regarded me as being spiteful for cutting contact with this relative, I stand further rooted in my belief that blood means nothing to me. It has only ever been used to avoid accountability for shitty behaviour. Because if the person has to excuse everything you do because you're blood-related, then you have nothing to lose by acting shitty.

And I'm done constantly making excuses for those who actively choose to hurt me and those around me.

But complaining about my current family situation is not the point of this entry. I mainly just wanted to talk about the website! February 14th marks this website's 3rd birthday, and as someone who absolutely hates the other holiday that takes place during this day, I feel very content in the knowledge that this is a form of reclaiming it for me.

Prototypes for NEØNbandit Street existed long before Neocities, under different names and layouts. The website was originally a forgotten portfolio made for college, created in one of those free website-creating tools for people who didn't know how to code or simply wanted a quicker more streamlined way of creating a website. I had that website's URL printed on my artist cards at the time, which were given away during artist alleys.

At some point, I realized that it was a bit odd to have my artist cards link to a website whose layout and visuals left a lot to be desired and hadn't been updated in years. And, although I understood on a professional level that a simple quick-to-the-point website with just my portfolio and contacts would be the most appropriate, it just did not ring true to who I am as an artist.

I didn't grow around the original Geocities era, however, I did grow up with Neopets, and the Petpages of the time shared much of a similar vibe to what we call "old internet" nowadays, planting this seed of "websites as a form of creative expression" long before I ever even considered this was something I'd grow up to love doing.

I've learned so much ever since I first began making this place, not only in the literal learning sense of HTML, CSS, etc. but of learning about myself and how I'd rather have my work be expressed, and and how to go about organizing it.

Last year, due to the fatigue of the job, the stress of getting kicked out, dropping out of the web design course I was taking, all while adjusting to antidepressants and still trying to make time for my friends, I experienced my love for coding fading out, and this website became untouched as a symptom, thus the year-long hiatus.

Despite feeling awful about being unemployed again, I'm grateful to feel my creativity return to me. It felt like pulling teeth to even think about updating the site. The mere thought of the Deltaring submissions pilling up and having to explain why I was closing the ring was horribly overwhelming, and I think the only proper updates I did throughout the year were written in the logs and mainly consisted of fixing links which had been broken due to Discord no longer become viable as a file hosting service. (Not like it ever was intended as such, but I still used it in that way)

But I became afraid that my passion for this place was gone for good, and the rest of my creativity being at an all-time low only further accentuated that I really was a nothing-burger of a person when I didn't have my own art to stand behind of. And that's fine and all until when my creative juices dry out, it causes intense self-esteem issues. But that's just what being an artist has always been like for me and I don't know if I'll ever know a different way to feel content.

Having an income did not fill the void left by my lack of creative work. Yes, it is nice and I did develop an addiction to buying Pokemon TCGs and was unable to get by without at least 3 coffees per day and the occasional energy drink. But to just Exist, living one day at a time, unable to create anything, unable to derive meaning from my existence, it saddens me that that feels like the only alternative to staying home creating.

One brings me money anxiety (followed by its friend eating disorder), while another brings me a void that I'm far too exhausted to fill, a body that feels too heavy to get out of bed, and an unforgiving brain that even during free time won't ever allow me to rest.

It's a frustrating existence, and I can only imagine the hell it would have been if I had gone through it while unmedicated. During an adjustment period from last October to December, I somehow managed to lose nearly every memory I had of those months.

Other than a few core memories such as sobbing in bed while begging an indifferent family member to take me to the hospital, or selling during an artist alley where I was dissociating so much I could barely focus on the people speaking to me, unable to read words in front of me, being ghosted by a friend and that causing a whole relapsing episode when I was already horribly on edge, to writing down every single stage of my RSD episodes so I could understand what was happening and to let my friends know what was going on with me, I can't remember much of anything else...

Other than that, I think I somehow induced amnesia in myself? My doctor said it was "normal" and "just a symptom of stress", but considering how all my traumaversaries take place in the last months of the year, how winter depression comes knocking every year, signalling my brain that it's time to think about ending it, and how this never happened before to such an intense level, I have a hard time believing any of it to be "normal".

I still haven't recovered, and although my episodes have improved and I actually have memories of the past month, I'm happy to say that my drive to work on this site not only returned, but I have this massive urge to overcompensate for my lack of content on it during the past year!

The idea of the website has remained the same, which is for it to be a hub for all my creative content and also double as a portfolio, as well as a sort of Wiki type of archive and library of my characters and stories.

This past month, I've fully returned to working on this website, and have been making plenty of updates, which can be seen on my Neocities profile for those who have been keeping track of it.

Revisiting the website with fresh eyes has helped me tackle some more important issues that I've been meaning to get to for a while, particularly in terms of Optimization. The site is very image-heavy, with the trade-off being that most of the pages struggle a lot with lag.

Although some pages still haven't been updated to reflect this change, I've been going through the process of optimizing the images on the website, which essentially involved a lot of downscaling images that were needlessly massive, but more importantly, setting up thumbnails for the gallery pages, which were easily the biggest and laggiest culprits in the site :)

Setting up thumbnails was something I've neglected to do primarily due to the amount of time it would take to create said thumbnails, but since then I've managed to settle on a practical way of doing it :) Turns out there is a program named IrfanView Thumbnails, which allows you to generate thumbnails of images in bulk with whatever format, size and naming you desire. It's been an absolute life and time saver and I'm just feeling so glad I don't have to go through the work of resizing every image one by one.

I cannot recommend this program enough if you were like me and were loading pages with several images nearly all over 2MB and such. The difference in loading times on the art pages is embarrassingly noticeable, and some of them are STILL laggy. That's how bad it was LMAO

Optimizing the pages and noticing the difference was really embarrassing, like wOW somehow people think I'm good at this? Have people just been politely ignoring how slow the site is? LMAO The commission prices page is one of the few left to optimize, so if you want to experience that wonderful terrible lag while it's still there, give it a good hard refresh hehe

Speaking of commissions, yeah I do need to reopen them soon because of my current lack of income. But for the time being, my mental health has to take priority, and as I've been deprived of a proper creative outlet for a year, I don't want to ruin this current flow and want to see where it will take me. And the fact that I now get really bad fatigue episodes where I have to spend a full day in bed if I dare do something a bit wilder the day before like going out to buy snacks doesn't exactly make the most adept at work :(

But yeah, I added the page for my 3D Modelling work since I had a bit of a Blockbench phase last year and made enough models I was proud of to justify creating a page for it.

And after optimizing the character profile for Candi, I've gone ahead and set up a profile for my fursona Jay :) They mostly serve as my avatar and don't really have super fleshed-out lore, but feel free to give them a visit anyway!

I also spun a randomizer wheel on my original OCs to figure out whose page to start making next, and it landed on one of the characters from my original world Drimare Universe, Astra! His page is practically finished but that's primarily due to the fact that he already had a fully written profile from around 2021.

Those who have been following me pre-Deltarune Ch2 know that I used to maintain an OC wiki that I updated religiously. That wiki still exists, kind of in this weird lost-in-time state, and the plan is to recreate its pages right here on Neocities! Fandom Wikis are notoriously hard to navigate nowadays and having my OC profiles cluttered with Marvel ads is just embarrassing :')

Alas, the Drimare Universe wiki migration project is more of a long-term project rather than something I'm going to be actively focusing on. When it comes to OCs, Deltacable continues to be my main universe and I also intend to continue fleshing out that section of the website :) I'm just a bit lost on how I'll organize things in a way that's simultaneously fun, informative, and without spoiling parts of the story that I wish to share when the time is right.

I don't really function with setting strict to-do lists for myself and I do still have other projects outside of this website so I'll work as my body and mind allows me. Knowing myself, I never know if I'll get some crazy idea or obsession all of a sudden that takes all my focus (Last year I had like 1-2 months where I was really into cross-stitching for example heaheahea)

That is all I'm comfortable with sharing for now :) Which is already a lot. It's been a hectic start of the year but I hope and pray that life treats you kindly.

Be gentle with yourself as you would be with others, and don't let the cruelty in the world wash away the goodness in you.