october 2018

hey folks. last month was bad, not gonna beat around it.
i really didn't like it, so i'm not taking a week off at the beginning of this month. mainly i'm doing so because the recovery process for this takes months, but this month will probably be harder than the following as i start to escalate my calorie intake from 500 to 2,500.
so i'm already expecting that i'm not going to stick my landing even if i tried here, and i'm just going to assume that it'll probably even out as a week off in terms of what ends up updating as scheduled or not.

re: the anorexia... i've had it since i was a teenager, but i honestly don't even know when i started actively restricting my intake to almost nothing. it's hard to explain why it's so hard to pull yourself out, but, i don't know. anorexia is by far the deadliest psychiatric disorder in terms of numbers, and only 1 out of 5 of those deaths are by suicide. about 10% of people who develop it around their 20s die within 10 years of starting to show symptoms, so if i guess that i've been struggling to get ahold of it for about 7 or 8, i can vaguely grasp why i feel like i'm at my limit lately.
either way, i don't feel like i'm all better now at all, but i've at least stabilized myself physically again. i've felt a little more lucid over the last couple of days now that i'm increasing my energy intake instead of just trying to balance my blood's capacity to actually process it at all. i sat down and wrote out a meal plan with my wife, it's been going well so far, i do feel like having a very clear routine and numbers has helped me understand what's happening with me and what i'm supposed to do.
still, it's... years and years of damage. and it's hard not to apologize profusely for being this way or not explain it away like it's not a problem anymore. i'll be getting a stress test for my heart sometime this month, which will hopefully check out fine.
i was very uncomfortable taking that random blip off, not doing anything really, i'm not allowed to exercise or even pace around, so, i'm just going to continue doing my job and try to keep it "within reason" in the meantime.

the illustration here is an attempt at "inktober" -- i'm not gonna attempt to do actual ink, but i'm considering trying to do a little illustration that emulate the je-ne-sais-quois of ink with black-and-white of different kinds of food (and some kind of sona thrown in to make it a little interesting to look at). this one was a simple "everything bagel" with an egg and cream cheese.
what i did was made a new binary brush with very extreme pressure-sensitivity settings, and tried to reject using the undo button as much as possible and building off of the lines i'd already made, and then touching it up with a little white like i might with a gel pen or white-out. it was... interesting. i used to do really complex ink drawings to pass time in school, so refreshing at the very least.
i'm not really sure if i'd post each day of inktober here, it feels like it'd get annoying.

that's about it. that said, the side comic page meant to go up today might be late due to needing to draw an illustration and needing to spend my whole day yesterday taking care of the issue with my mom taking my phone, my dad's phone, and my wife's phone when she left. i never knew how needlessly time-consuming it was just to get a phone line, BUT, it's done. poll will be up shortly, sorry and thanks again.