Pausing billing cycles for the foreseeable future

TLDR: Won't be billing Patrons for the foreseeable future because my brain is insane and monetizing my hobby was actually a bad idea

Hey everyone! This is a little embarrassing.

So when I originally made this Patreon, my idea for it was to use the money so I could spend a bit less time drawing commissions and a bit more time drawing stuff with my own characters and ideas. I assumed I would be on the ball and set aside time to draw something that I wanted to do, and I could post it here early and incentivize people to join, and hopefully just grow it from there and have more time to draw my own ideas. I also assumed that I would be able to just draw content for Patreon with no fretting or mental hangups.

Instead, I sort of got into a trap where none of my ideas were good enough for Patreon. If I wanted to draw something SFW for Patreon, I would shoot it down, because in my mind nobody wanted that, they were just here for porn. This would be doubly so if my idea was a bit weird or specific or personal to me. With NSFW ideas, everything was either too weird, gross, vanilla, or boring in my mind to be good enough for Patreon. If I just wanted to draw a sketch, I would agonize over the fact that I wasn't making it into a super fancy full-colour picture and just end up abandoning it entirely. Basically, nothing was ever good enough and it just ended up in me barely drawing anything at all for Patreon. Whenever I did do personal art, I would just post it straight to Twitter because in my mind it wasn't "good enough" to be Patreon content. 

I've also just been going through a lot of transitions in life, the pandemic has piled on a lot of stress and taken away a lot of things I enjoyed or was looking forward to in my life. I also graduated college earlier this year and I'm going through that whole "figuring out myself as a post-college adult" struggle (In the middle of one of the most rotten social and political climates in recent memory, no less!) This has made it a bit hard to do the whole "sexy fat kinky lion" bit as much as you'd all probably like. Drawing a big fat butt for Patrons isn't easy when I'm thinking about stuff like what my future will be, when I'll get to see my long-distance friends again, when I'll get to have some kind of return to normalcy, how I'm going to work on my mental health issues, etc.

I think I was going into this thinking "people enjoy it when I draw whatever I want, so maybe I can try to get paid a bit for it so I can do it more" but when you monetize your hobby it actually creates a lot of pressure to do it in a way that you think will please people the most. They paid money to be here, after all. I think by not charging patrons anymore I'll be mentally freeing myself a bit to draw what I want again, or even to let myself not draw at all if I want to. (I need fuckin rest yall! Lots of it, lately!!!)

Anyways... I'm sorry for being disappointing but I think the best thing to do is pack it in for now and stop charging patrons. I might bring it back if I ever get to mental state where I can pump out more stuff again, but for now I just want to have the freedom to draw what I want, or not at all, without having it be monetized.

Still going to be drawing commissions though, because I honestly still need the money and doing those is a more "open and shut" operation, which is more straightforward than having this pervasive cloud of "I need everything I draw to be in service of Patreon" hanging over me 24/7.