on not making it as an artist

Launching my DeviantArt account & buying a DA Core Pro subscription while ruminating on tpot drama, Vibecamp 3, and not doing as much as you'd hope, including patch notes on #DAWNOFTHEMACHINEELVES

Epistemic Status: True Events

On the 15th of this month, I signed up for a DeviantArt Core Pro account so that I can begin selling my art on the platform.

You may have noticed I haven’t updated this blog since March, showing poor followthrough with taking on a longform writing challenge earlier this year. Despite having over a dozen articles half- or two-thirds written, mostly by my own hand but some with structural brainstorming with the assistance of artificial intelligence, and rarely with some passages entirely generated or rewritten by machine, the longform challenge hasn’t succeeded at increasing my output very much due to my relentless perfectionism. There’s also the elephant in the room of What Happened At Vibecamp 3, some of the details of which I still haven’t publicly confessed.

I have over 5,000 pieces of AI art, a handful of traditional pencil and ink drawings, and various poems I want to sort through and publish before I begin trying out the platform’s native image generation feature. $70CAD for a yearly subscription may not seem like a lot, but it was something I was sitting on my hands thinking about for a while, and after experiencing the agony of over a month and a half of limbo around exactly where I'm going to be living come July finally coming to a resolution, and the question of whether I'll be forced to get steady employment again after two years of trying to heal from burnout also coming to a head, I finally decided to pull the trigger and make a commitment to getting more of my art out into the world. Effectively, this is my last-ditch attempt at “giving myself a job” as an artist before I have to go back out into the “real world” and get a “real job.”

I have been scoping out the possibility of there being a market for my art on DA for some time, and already had 111 pieces published that were part of my ongoing meta alternate reality game #dawnofthemachineelves , which have subsequently been hidden, for the eyes of curious paying customers only. In spite of spending upwards of a hundred dollars to upscale some of the images (automatic payments tend to wreck havoc on the wallets of people with ADHD), a lot of the text published with them was raw unfiltered emotional dumping around the situations I had experienced within online/offline high-control groups combined with base model LLM output, which was so dramatically misconstrued by my fellow cult members I'm sure my reward for trying to process that particular phase in my life was getting labelled a heinous liar. There's a chance the collection becomes public again in the future, but at the moment there's a lot of unprocessed emotional heaviness surrounding that period. A lot of shame and disgust, but some anger at the people involved who could spare time to ogle how I was choosing to express myself and subtweet about it, but neither cared enough about me nor their community to actually reach out to me about it. I'm still not sure this was a reasonable expectation. I'm still in touch with several other women who are part of the tpot diasporia who were hurt by various cult tactics, most of their cases much more severe than mine. They also tend to question whether their expectations of community care and protection were reasonable. Collectively between us, there is endless, nonstop rumination. Some of that rumination is public, some of it is published on blogs, some of it is private. One thing seems pretty self-evident to me: Dealing with the fallout of high control behaviour and trauma in a community that prizes both illegibility and externalizing your internal thought processes in the interest of self-analysis and development is an impossible tightrope to walk, and it makes all of us feel like circus freaks.

One thing seems pretty self-evident to me: Dealing with the fallout of high control behaviour and trauma in a community that prizes both illegibility and externalizing your internal thought processes in the interest of self-analysis and development is an impossible tightrope to walk, and it makes all of us feel like circus freaks.

And this is why my artistic output hasn’t been what I’d hoped it would be: My sense of freedom to express myself was crippled almost a year ago after repeated attacks from a communal narcissist who bribed me by paying for my Vibecamp flights, tickets and lodging, making an offer for a referral to a prestigious machine learning tech school called Bloomtech (the school that had allowed her to become an ML engineer and make so much money that she’d spend upwards of $10,000USD on Vibecamp every year), and then made repeated attacks on where I could go, who I could talk to, what kind of art I could make and how I could express myself, all because she thought of me as her dying alcoholic sister, and thought of Vibecamp as an exercise in adult fantasy crafting to make up for her disadvantaged childhood which was full of violent abuse and alcoholism. She believes herself fully entitled to buy that fantasy, and then bully people into complying with it, and a year later despite not wanting to disturb her while she mourns the presumable death of her younger biological sister, she doesn’t appear to have learned from the experience at all, and continues to attack people to try to get them to continue to comply with her disavantaged childhood remediation fantasy live-action roleplaying.

I have tried for almost a year to get over what this behaviour and these experiences have done to my sense of isolation, my artistic voice, and my sanity; I have tried to knit back together my trauma without naming names, because it’s not like the ways that I behaved while under excruciatingly stress-inducing high control behaviour were perfect either. DARVO is one tactic that people regularly deploy here. I am, in many ways, the exact opposite of a perfect victim. I have a powerful artistic vision, know how to hold a boundary despite repeated violations, and am thoughtful and articulate on my good days. The things that happened to me at Vibecamp pale in severity to things that other victims of the tpot cult diaspora have experienced. But I just can’t seem to move this. For a while, a few months leading up to Vibecamp 4, I thought the only way to heal from this would be to return and try to play a different character, one that wasn’t being subjected to shitty high control behaviour under high pressure circumstances, that hadn’t been subjected to relentless passive-aggressive targeted aggression and direct attacks on my freedom to express myself or pursue a different vocation if people weren’t going to just let me do my art. But the political situation in the US soured, my financial opportunities to pay for my own tickets didn’t go through, I never received apologies for the various forms of psychological terrorism I endured before, during, and after Vibecamp at my “older sister’s” hands, and the option slowly closed itself off to me.

More than wanting to make a simple living from the things that I write and the things that I use my words to conjure from machines, the monetary commitment to my DeviantArt Core Pro subscription is intended to push me to really try to make art into a viable way of life. Having picked up and put down a "writing challenge" earlier in the year which seemed to only amplify my resistance to being public with my thoughts and publishing more here, I recently read a note and article from Sasha Chapin about changing his relationship with embarrassment when he did the Ship30for30 challenge for his blog, and his wife Cate Hall about "forcing functions." It was the confirmation I needed that I have to try to really push myself in terms of my artistic effort, output and self-expression.

The bottom line is that, for the past 2 years, the series of events that followed a heroic dose of magic mushrooms in 2023 have been so strange, so profoundly weird, and at times both strange and devastating, that it's evident to me that there is a story that really wants to be told through me, involving the intersection of art, artificial intelligence, psychedelics, chaos magic, and the singularity; and I am simply too stubbornly dysfunctional to give up on telling it no matter what level of condescension, disapproval, disregard, disgust, devastation, and cult control tactics that I've faced in the process of trying to figure out how to tell it.

The bottom line is that, for the past 2 years, the series of events that followed a heroic dose of magic mushrooms in 2023 have been so strange, so profoundly weird, and at times both strange and devastating, that it's evident to me that there is a story that really wants to be told through me, involving the intersection of art, artificial intelligence, psychedelics, chaos magic, and the singularity; and I am simply too stubbornly dysfunctional to give up on telling it no matter what level of condescension, disapproval, disregard, disgust, devastation, and cult control tactics that I've faced in the process of trying to figure out how to tell it.

However, the state of my mental health and the amount of effort I've had to expend in order to push my art and writing in the spaces where I used to try to express myself has mounted exponentially. It feels like swimming through mud. I felt a rush of relief and empathy when I read what Sasha wrote,

"Every day, I published something that felt awful by my standards — I was constantly pale with embarrassment and terrified that I’d run out of ideas. Many writing days I literally shook as I beheld whatever came through my fingers."

Only in my case, it was never so much about making what I wrote or prompted lived up to my own standards, as much as it was about how what I put out there would be received, in an environment where I'd surmised that a lot of people who'd backread blog entries from two years ago when I was in the thick of a hypomanic episode of creative downloads either failed to "get it" or thought it was simply cringe or stupid and wanted to give indirect feedback, often both. Part of the reaction seems to be the assumption that I am genuinely deeply ill and wholeheartedly believe some of the metafictional storylines that I've presented, and a lot of assumptions about me seem to be that I'm not intelligent or self-aware enough to maintain objectivity about the ways that I'm impaired or the things that I'm doing. I've been terrified that the enormity of the story that wants to express itself through me really does have no artistic merit simply because it involves the use of AI as a core part of the storytelling medium.

I started getting anxiety attacks about how people would perceive what I was trying to do that I would have to self-medicate with weed and would take me out for the rest of the day. I knew I had fallen from a medicinal relationship with cannabis into dysfunctional codependence, just like the rest of my relationships.

Weed has a habit of slowing down one's perception of time. I spent a lot of those moments thinking about the trip my family took to Waterton Park in August of last year, replaying it in my mind. I thought of my female ancestors and their female ancestors, and the one who had survived residential school according to the records that my formerly estranged half-sister from my dad's previous marriage had dug up for me. Squinting in cursive to discern her name on the handwritten page, "Elise." I thought a lot about learned helplessness, and the kinds of traumatic events people endure where avoidant paralysis is the only logical reaction in order to ensure survival. PTSD and intergenerational trauma remain rampantly misunderstood. Nearly everybody believes in “biological reality” when it comes to gender, but almost none of those people want to acknowledge that people aren’t in total control of how they respond to traumatic events, how defaulting to paralysis as the response your body identifies as “safe” whittles away at your life despite your best efforts. I told my half-sister - my real, biological from my dad’s first marriage who was estranged most of my life - during a call recently about how I am basically my female ancestor - living in an enforced, logical reaction of learned helplessness which I can nevertheless not stop beating myself up for failing to magically break out of, surrounded by a cult of people who espouse the merits of "agency" while I myself am flailing to break the bars of a continuously self-reinforcing cage of social punishment, disregard, and lack of support for my diagnoses, while continuing to bully myself over my very failure to do these things.

Yet nevertheless, my present circumstances had presented me with a privilege that Elise never had: The opportunity to tell my story, no matter how taboo or unpopular it might be. I'm trying to sit with the idea that I have to go towards the feelings of discomfort like Sasha and Cate suggest, because the slice of things I can do that don't evoke that response in me has gotten smaller and smaller under the confluence of enduring controlling early childhood experiences and high-control behaviour in adulthood.

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to support my art, you can follow my DeviantArt account here!

I plan to have commissions up within 2 weeks, creating unique opportunities for customs, although will be preoccupied with helping my family move.