Free Month/Pausing Payment for One Month!

Hi all! This'll sort of be the newsletter for the month, I guess.

I'm currently dealing with some back pain, and, alongside expecting a very busy April personally and not meeting some of the expectations I promised to Patrons, I'm gonna pause payments for a month (or, if you've already been charged, you get a free month in May I believe)

To be real with you, I've been kinda having a weird one for the past couple months! Before everything, I was kind of a ghost on the internet. I have a bit of social anxiety and usually keep to myself. I take long walks with no headphones every other day. I just like being alone with my thoughts often.

So to be completely honest, there's a small part of me that kinda wishes I was still a ghost on the internet, but making the same cool stuff I do now. I just show up out of nowhere, drop a banger, and disappear. It's been a little hard always being in people's periphery vision. It's new to me. I think it weighs on me a lot more than I expected and is affecting my mental health a little bit.

Alongside all of that, I work full-time outside of the channel, and probably put too much on my plate recently -- not just Patreon, but everywhere. I kind of overcorrected and went from just doing videos to doing videos + streams + Patreon + Discord + Merch. All individually very fun and I enjoy all of it immensely, but combined it can be a lot! None of it seemed crazy to me because it's all just stuff I've observed from other channels. But I'm learning that it doesn't quite fit in my current lifestyle, even though I think it will eventually.

I think the channel's early success was in part because I was only doing stuff that brings me joy, not quite trying to meet everyone else's expectations. I have a habit of setting expectations for myself that seem to be completely forgetting that I also have to exist as a person. Eat, sleep, exercise, etc. For perspective, after working 9-5 weekdays, I take a walk, eat a meal, and then work on Doodley 7pm to midnight every day. Weekends are working pretty much all day.

If you factor Doodley stuff in as a second job, I'm pretty regularly pulling 80-100 hour work weeks minimum. To be completely clear, I enjoy this for the most part and want to do it forever. I see Doodley as a break from my full-time work, which is quite different. But when combined with everything else, it can be a bit more taxing than usual!

(If you are thinking "your back pain are probably a result of this", yeah probably!)

What's been frustrating though is that, because all of that is split between a lot of different little things, all of that work doesn't really feel like it's resulted in anything meaningful for a few months, at least to me. There's a feeling that I should just focus on one of those things primarily for a while, and that's definitely videos. And then eventually, I can come back to the rest when I have the time for it.

I am also putting in the works to get help from other people, as I've detailed a couple times. One of the things I'm hoping to do is stream a proper tutorial soon, and then have an editor friend cut it up for a video. I think that would do quite well and fill in some of the quiet gaps in the channel. I have done tutorials much like the one I'm planning semi-professionally (summer camps, workshops at studios, etc.) so I'm pretty confident in it.

Ultimately though, I don't want to rush anything. The best thing I can do, since I'm already expecting a busy April as I've said, is pause for a month. That'll give me time to myself like I want and lets me think for a bit. Then we can have a cool May and figure out what we wanna do.

Thank you again everyone for your early support! As I've said, I'm still new to all of this, so I'm still figuring everything out. I appreciate your patience with all of it and don't mind whatever decisions you make as a result.

-- David