Pachurz Was Here

FIRST OF ALL: My statements made here about certain places aren’t umbrella statements about how I feel about every person involved in things and in fact I still love and wish I’d stayed in better contact with some people! For those people, I open up access to me on Skype under the username Pachurz. Just tell me who you are when you send a request!

My second to last year of college I started helping someone who I thought considered me a friend with an art-based RP shop. With my personality and a desperate need to please already running in my blood, I found myself throwing all the energy I had into this shop and it resulted in me neglecting my actual art studies at college and in retrospect I wonder how I managed to graduate with that kind of work under my belt. 

It wasn’t entirely bad, however, and for the first few years it was even GOOD - I met many great people, made some great characters I’m even now carrying over into my own personal projects, and had ideas for so many stories that ultimately would never get used in their original context and may never happen in my own writings. For the first several years I created HAPPILY and furthermore I felt like, to some extent, I was listened to and appreciated.  

As the environment got bigger and full of more people, however, I soon lost both of these feelings. This was also coupled side by side with my graduation from college and having to find a job nearly immediately under the scorn of my parents. As if by fate, the beginning of the downward spiral began - real life and online-life both wanted my attention and it began to eat at me. I desperately wanted to keep pleasing this group of friends I had made, but I also had other responsibilities. I ate this time out of what should have been my ‘down’ time and I went from having responsibilities plus a relaxing hobby to two ‘full time’ jobs and slowly losing my mind.

So at this point: Full time job so I could pay my bills (most of my money went to my parents to pay them back for bills they’d covered for me), Full time job to ‘people please’ which I was slowly resenting, no social life, no time I’d dedicate to myself. There was more than this, but I’d basically filled all my hours up with responsibility to others.

Several personal incidents happened in an environment I thought was full of people that were my friends but I started to find myself getting tossed under buses - and then when I’d finally crawled out from under them being told I’d ‘deserved’ to be there or ‘earned’ that treatment somehow. People who had once actually listened to what I was saying no longer did to the point where I’d be told I could do something, get ready to do this thing and set aside a good portion of my ‘me’ time to get it prepared, then have that ripped away from me. Or I’d ask to do one thing and they’d give me a completely different task that I didn’t actually have the time for handed to me. But heaven forbid, everything was ‘my’ fault - and to some extent, I’m not saying I’m completely innocent in any of this. I could have gotten out at any time, but I felt somehow like if I just left all the time I’d spent on the inside would be invalidated and nobody would need me anymore.

It was my most abusive relationship and I couldn’t even keep up with what it was doing anymore - I was drowning in it.

On the outside, tensions were rising between a real world job that was making me want to kill myself and parents who didn’t care as long as I was making money to give them (There was an incident where I told my mother I was so low I wanted to drive my car off an overpass into oncoming traffic to kill myself and she replied with ‘But that’s not your car.’ and that was her only concern) and feeling like I didn’t really have a way to get away from either of these issues. My mother consistently reminded me that I’d never make a living with my artwork and frankly at the given time she was right - It’d been almost 2 years since I could dedicate any significant amount of time into artwork nor did I have the DRIVE to work on anything.

I was drained all the damn time and 200000000% done with everything. I was frankly only kept from suicide by my responsibility to my cat and a weird responsibility to my earlier mentioned abusive-relationship.

It was only with the help of a dear friend who said she’d help me support myself while I got set up on the art front that I was convinced to make a cut from my first ball-and-chain - my job. It was an immediate freedom, but my other ball and chain still stood - I still felt obligated to it, but it was with some difficulty I talked myself into a ‘break’. It was only a few months, I told myself. It’d still be waiting for me to come back and I’d still be just as far behind as I was when I started my whole mess of getting my life back together and feeling like it was worth living again. I also cut my normal internet hangouts I had associated with either thing out of my life at this point too - tumblr being the big one.

A month or two turned into three. Four. Five. Ten. A year. 

I made new places to start posting artwork and hesitantly set myself to working on art. I made new friends. I found people who constantly wanted me to work on things for them (for money, even!) and even despite that appreciated me and wanted to be in my company. I found a new drive to wake up in the morning and do something that was worth waking up for. Furthermore than that, I made friends in REAL life - people who share recipes and dumb cat videos with and come over to cook dinner on Monday nights while we talk about real life drama, and I met the love of my life - someone who never lets me go to sleep feeling unappreciated and wakes up with me and makes me start off my day feeling absolutely adored even when I have the worst bedhead seen on this side of the Rocky Mountains. He was also there for me when things with my parents got to such a head that I was kicked out of my living situation to catch me and give me somewhere new to live. Someone who takes good care of my cat even though he doesn’t even like cats (because he knows I love my baby and he loves me <3).

My need to be appreciated was filled up by people who never expected anything free from me and listened to what I say and I wanted to hear what they said instead of dreading the workload. The pit of despair in my stomach was replaced by butterflies, sunshine, happiness, and good people filtered out those I felt had needed me.

But I’d never truly vanished from my abusive relationship. It could have pulled me in at any moment. I made myself available at a moment’s notice and told them exactly where they could find me while telling them ‘if you ever need me, I’m here’. In the time I was gone, I didn’t hear a single peep from these people. I only heard from people who wanted to genuinely be in touch with me.

I felt validated. I turned off my instant messenger and closed that chapter in my life and even now after considering potentially going back to them with this new validation and these cleaner and better for me relationships under my belt I decided that my time was better spent completely dedicated to me and the things that made me happy.