You are an utterly amazing artist and I was utterly enthralled by your streams of this and your new work in progress!

Oh, and just to note because this always surprises people when I tell them: the watery blue background is STILL jelly gouache, no watercolors were used for this painting! Fun fact! I actually found these paints REALLY enjoyable and dynamic to work with.

has been especially prevalent in my life while surrounded by people with toxic communication habits. I've spent a lot of time weeding these people out, and it looks like I have more weeding to do yet. I don't need weirdly passive aggressive people in my life, sucking up my energy and resources.

Part of this has been struggling with my autism diagnosis and the "fair expectations" I have versus what others expect -- learning that people lie and withhold while taking was a hard lesson. The weird shunning, things-they-didn't-say-out-loud, "we're ignoring you now unless forced to acknowledge",

It's been a really hard lesson to learn that I always invest more in people than they invest in me, and that people are happy to feed off my energy and labor while giving very little in return. I find myself frequently surrounded by people who take a lot, and give very little.

It's taken a lot of self-reflection and conscious work on learning to set healthy boundaries for myself, to realize these things -- to not waste all the love and labor I invest in others, and instead invest it into myself instead. Going forward, I will no longer be doing free labor for anyone.

It's really weird behavior to watch people who will pretend to like you to your face and then do very little outside of that to actually attempt to support you, and I've caught myself offering free love and labor to these kinds of people more than once, only to realize I was being used.