Hey, it’s a GoFundMe, because I thought maybe people would appreciate the transparency of a goal ticker.

I am working on setting up a PayPal account that isn’t a business account and a Venmo that isn’t just aggressively my legal name. They have kind of the opposite problems as each other.

Anyway, it is this right now, and it would be cool if this was a thing you considered! I have tried really hard to do Everything. I don’t think I’m capable of taking on more commission type work right now. I am just juggling too much and I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to handle it all properly. I found the notice on my door today after walking - at normal speed and without a cane or crawling - to and from my mailbox on the front of the house for the first time in literal months. To say this has been an intense whiplash of feeling is woefully inadequate!

Anyway, the details are inside the link. If you feel like helping an artist with a malfunctioning spine and the weirdest luck distribution in the universe, that would be extremely cool of you. If not, I understand! I can’t help anyone right now either! :D

I wish you all a strong spine. Good luck out there!

Have you been thinking that there’s a real lack of hopeless strangers on your dash asking for help lately? ☆Congratulations, I have arrived!☆

I feel obligated to a certain level of jesterdom while doing this, like perhaps I can earn my keep by entertaining people. It’s bleak and humiliating, but we’re gonna Have Fun With It! :D This is perhaps more a note to make to self and to a therapist rather than note here, but it segues well into the important point of:

~.•°¤.°•○~☆ I Can’t Afford Shit ☆•*.°○.•°*×

let alone a therapist

I’m currently stuck in a weird position, both physically and situationally, because I have some sciatica scoliosis spinal bone spur nonsense that decided that now was its time to shine. I’m in pain all the time at every angle and position, so I’m not doing Great?

I’m in the middle of the process of filing for disability and if you’ve ever applied for a job and been frustrated that you gave them all of your information and then the application asked you to give them the same information all over again, applying for disability is like doing that, but times 40, and with information you don’t have memorized the way you have your phone number and home address. They also insist on doing it through the mail. My next step is to be evaluated by some kind of impartial physician. My appointments are in mid to late July. I am unsure what they want me to do with myself until that time.

The work I’m trying to do is not enough. I’m making buttons like crazy but in the end they are just buttons and they sell for 2 to $4 and so you really need to be someone who is absolutely psyched about buttons and buys 40 of them or I need to tap into a market that is Larger in order for this to be reliably sustaining. I do not know what that market is. I was the weird kid in school - what is popular, I don’t know, I was never meant to know, it is a mystery.

Do not get me wrong, I am currently holding my face above water because of some really enthusiastic fans of buttons.

But I can’t sell a month’s rent worth of buttons. I don’t even think I have the supplies to make that many.

My rent is USD$670, which is hiked up an extra $70 from where it was last year because my landlord wanted to bleed me dry while the world is on fire. Despite how poorly insulated and badly maintained this house is as a structure, I do enjoy having even a badly insulated roof and a place to put all my shit.

If you’ve got a need for $700 worth of buttons for some reason, hit me up.

If you don’t, then hey, I’m another artist in crippling pain on your dash hoping people in better situations than I can help out. I would love to cover my rent to remove that anxiety for myself for another month, but Every Bill keeps happening, so more beyond that it going to my electric which hasn’t been paid since February, and my internet which will keep me afloat in nearly every way possible. I’m also almost at the bottom of the bag of Science Diet food that keeps my beloved cat, Onyx, healthy. I do not know how best to keep a ticker tape of a goal, because there isn’t one? I need to survive until at least July. It’s June 17th as I write this. Two months rent and some cat food? Don’t know, I’m five minutes from a phone call which will determine if they will still allow me food stamps.

SO.

Ways in which I can dance for your amusement so that you may throw coins in my direction:

Art Commissions! I can paint like a motherfucker! I have an extremely ill-advised expensive piece of paper saying I can do it!

Check it out, man. There are COLORS and everything.

Radical.

I have a Patreon where you can see Secrets!

And a Ko-fi! I sell buttons on Ko-fi, in case you were wondering when that plot point would come back. It’s not very satisfying narratively, I am sorry. Thinking about offering prints there, as well!

I have other options in my sidebar - RedBubble, Society6, etc!

There is also paypal.me/ladyyatexel if you just want to give money to my literally actually broken ass without getting a cool item in return.

And yes, if you’re thinking this all looks and feels kinda familiar, I had to dance and beg on the internet in Dec 2021, and I made that go as far as I possibly could. It’s six months later and everything I’m trying to do to better my situations is just taking Forever. I’m trying to come up with a way to stay afloat while rescuing myself takes its time.

Thanks for reading if you made it this far, friend. Even just knowing someone listened to you yelling for a minute is helpful.

No need to feel obligated, especially if you don’t feel I deserve a second round of help, I understand. But if you wanna spread this around and let me ‘Will Art For Food’ on someone else’s dash, that would be sick.

Take care of yourselves, friends, it is brutal out there.

So here is the shit, as it stands, in something of a list format. Because this is the internet and we like a list:

I have been partially disabled since January of 2021! (It is December of the same year as I write this.) It has involved some real Grade A Terrible Shit about my spine like bone spurs and scoliosis and has been stressful and painful.
One time, I got an injection into my spinal column that accidentally set off a nerve and set my leg flailing like one of those dancing tube guys at a used car lot. I can’t recommend this on the whole.

I do not currently have stable employment. This is rad for my mental health but really not great for most of the other stuff I have going on. Weird how that happens. I’ve applied to work at a real lovely collection of strange places including a funeral home up the road which I don’t think my cover letter sufficiently conveyed my enthusiasm for.

There’s a rental assistance program in my county, but they are Taking Time, hooboy. My landlord has texted me threatening eviction a few times before I calmed him with screenshots that I had applied for this program, but it is still Alarm. The program’s last month is the one I’m currently sitting in and I don’t know what next year is gonna look like.

My laptop, car, and phone all broke within three weeks of each other in October and I had to repair/replace them all, which was basically all of my US$1,500 of emergency savings.

I have an event coming up in February which sounds superfluous and not something I should be asking for, but I’ve been going for ten years, it’s the one chance I get to see some dear friends every year (which didn’t happen this year because of The Plague), I usually sell art there, and this coming year I had promised as a graduation gift to bring along my 18 year old cousin who just got ejected from my aunt and uncle’s house for not being cisgender. We could both really use the trip. We already have our tickets, we just need to get the other stuff to make it happen.

I have, uh, 600 dollars. To last… WHO KNOWS? It’s a surprise! So it’s, also a little spooky. I would need like another 2,000 to not lose my mind or my apartment into February.

I got my food stamps card the other day and was So Fucking Psyched. I’ve definitely eaten some expired food in the last few months so this was real exciting.

I lost insurance and so am coasting by on what’s left of the medication I need. Two of them have already run out and I miss them terribly! Anxiety and insomnia meds were really critical to me functioning well, who would have thought! Me. And my doctor. And like anyone who knows me. ha.

Anyway, I don’t know what’s gonna happen in the next few months.

• If you enjoy me being on the internet with you and want to throw a coin in the wishing well of my future, that would be rad of you.
• You can commission me and get something out of it, even. I can paint like a motherfucker and I really like colors.
• If you are not fussed about what you get in return but like the idea of getting Something, I am Patreon-able. Witness behind the scenes messiness, fanwork from the depths of my harddrive, and really nerdy doll stuff.
• If you have more direct money throwing desires, I can be Ko-fi’d.
• If you want Even More Direct, you can skip the middle man and PayPal Me. Just look at my profile picture there, man. Worth the price of admission, surely.

I’m buying nothing but bills and other household needs with the money I have. (Two days ago I bought a white board for a dollar at Dollar Tree so I could leave myself reminders about what foods I need in the kitchen.) So I’m not doing something like buying a laptop or anything.

Some of this fuckery is my fault, some of it isn’t. I’ve been trying really hard to tell myself I deserve help even if I fucked up. I’m hoping some other people feel similarly.

Anyway, I tried to make this at least somewhat entertaining to read. If you felt like donating to me not suffocating in anxiety while waiting for someone to hire me to do something, that would be amazing of you. No ill will if you don’t want to, it’s not my business what you have going on. If you wanna boost this, though, since Tumblr isn’t gonna let it show up anywhere, that’d be pretty cool also.

Thanks, friends! Have a good one!

-Lady