The Landscape of Project Mongoose

2016 - 2019 were some of the worst years of my life.

2020 had its share of problems.

2021 just perpetuated the 2020 issues.

And here I am in 2022, where I feel like I’m still digging my way out of the lasting effects of marrying the wrong person, someone who would ultimately force me down a path of control and abuse as well as emotional and physical harm.

I can’t talk about what’s happening in 2022 without looking back to decisions that I was conned into back in 2014, decisions I originally embraced with a significant amount of anxiety and misplaced pride. Those decisions wouldn’t have been made by someone who was in a good place at her day job or who was in a good place in her relationships. Those decisions would ultimately result in the destruction of my independence, happiness, self-efficacy, and productivity until everything came to a slow, almost disintegrating halt.

As someone who has always suffered from depression and who has been emotionally abused her entire life, I’d learned to build walls to protect myself. I learned to draw lines to protect myself. And those barriers became ever-higher in 2020 and 2021 until I started EMDR therapy. That therapy saved my life and I couldn’t have gotten there without trusting a few select people who I learned truly loved and cared about me.

I felt so liberated in 2020 when he was finally gone and could not control me. But he stalked me, broke into my home, and then drug me through a long divorce process where my attorney did not adequately represent me and the court did nothing to see or stop the rampant emotional and financial abuse I was suffering.

And of course COVID. Which meant no more conventions, no travel, and that I was, once again, forced by powers beyond my control to live a life that I didn’t want to live, sequestered and isolated.

I lost the trip to Japan that I’d longed to take for the majority of my life.

My depression worsened.

I tried to get employment to see me through the pandemic. This result in more physical injuries and more stalking (from my boss this time) and I decided that I would just focus my best on my business, on my art. In fact, most places would not hire me because I either did not have a degree or I was over-qualified. One prospective employer actually asked me to “dumb down” my resume because I would “intimidate” the men in their office.

But COVID had significantly changed my work’s landscape, too. I could no longer go to conventions and sell. Convention sales accounted for 85% of my business’ revenue. And it was gone overnight.

I tried to pivot to online sales, but failed at this repeatedly. I simply did not understand how to put my products out there in the world and then share those products with people who might be interested in buying them. Fortunately, I saw the writing on the wall and decided that the only way to learn these skills was to return to school.

So I re-enrolled at the Florida State College at Jacksonville with my 1.2 GPA.

I had to take a math placement exam. This terrified me. I felt like I couldn’t succeed, so I had a tutor help me. This person would be the same person who would later see me through the EMDR therapy and be there for me during some of the hardest parts of my life.

I thought I would be terrible at math because that’s what I’d been made to believe. I’d been told by many people that I wasn’t good at math, that I would “drown in algebra” (per a math teacher). My abusive ex frequently told me that “women were too emotional” to do math and that men were more “suited” for the subject. FSCJ’s advisor told me that I should just take the remedial math credits (up to 3 classes) because there was no chance that I would test into college algebra.

Prior to taking the exam, I thought I was bad at math.

I thought I was a bad test-taker.

But I practiced and practiced. I studied. I learned.

And I found that I liked math. I really, really liked it! I wanted to learn more. So I studied with my tutor multiple times per week. And it was fun.

The first part of the exam consists of 10 questions that assess if you’ll need to take remedial classes. If you get through those, then you can take the questions that will assess if you should be in higher level classes or start with algebra. The test is adaptive, which means that, the better you answer, the harder the questions get. Regardless, you still have to take College Algebra or CLEP out of it, but I wanted to do my best. I saw it as an opportunity to show people they were wrong. I saw it as an opportunity to show myself that I could do it.

At question 12, the proctor stopped me. He sounded confused, like he didn’t understand what was happening. He asked me to wait a second and paused my exam. I’d been really confident with my answers, so I was also confused. I was also confused because I’d studied the materials so much that I knew question four was from the algebra section, which meant that I probably skipped over half of the remedial content. He brought on another proctor and discussed my progress with her. At one point he said “but Karen said this one wouldn’t go past nine questions. Do we have enough time?”

Karen. My FSCJ advisor. She had told them that I couldn’t do it.

They had to keep giving me the test though. They couldn’t stop it.

So the proctor told me that I’d already tested into college algebra and that, if I wanted to I could stop. I just smiled and said “no. I want to finish the test.”

You can’t “ace” a placement exam. But I got the highest score the proctor had ever seen.

I tested into Calculus and Trigonometry. I only missed one question.

It was my first major success in years that I felt I had achieved and earned. I’d overcome something from my past and something the abusers had told me was true, that I knew was false. This set the stage for me to start believing in myself again. I’d rediscovered confidence and I started to see the me I knew I was. I wasn’t some stupid, “emotional” girl or child. I was smart. Somehow, in all of the years of abuse, I’d forgotten that.

If you ever see me wearing teal socks at an event, odds are those are the socks my tutor bought me ahead of me acing the exam. He knew I was going to demolish it. He believed in me. I believed in me. And I did it.

This started the period of my life where I wanted to learn how to fix myself, fix my life, and learn everything I could. I was curious again. I wanted to know what I was missing out on in life because I was forced into being isolated and forced into believing that I was incapable.

But FSCJ wasn’t where I was supposed to be.

After one semester of summer classes (for a total of about 12 credit hours of condensed classes), I knew that FSCJ was not right for me for a variety of reasons. Namely, their advisors had no idea what they were doing so they cost me what little financial aid I could receive through the Pell Grant. They even failed (every semester!) to accept my student loans from Sallie Mae and, instead, ousted me from classes without even a warning. I took up to 15 credit hours every semester.

While at FSCJ, I had to do pretty much all of my own representation for the divorce because my attorney failed to even do basic discovery efforts. He failed to file timely motions and do as I asked. He even failed to ask for the right kind of alimony.

In 2021, I lost everything. I got no alimony. I was essentially evicted from my home within 4 days. I lost my childhood piano.

That’s when I started the EMDR.

I wasn’t well.

Through those years, I streamed periodically on Twitch, but not very consistently due to my depression. I often hid behind “school” as the reason I couldn’t stream, but the real reason was that I was too depressed, too sad. I simply could not turn on a camera, fake a smile, and try to connect with people. I’m forever grateful to the people in my community who stuck with me through this dark time.

In the fall of 2021, I struggled through EMDR therapy which involves digging up past traumas and processing them using visual and sensory stimulation. It involves reconnecting with your younger self who believes that they are still stuck in those traumas and that they cannot come out. It involves connecting the present version of yourself to the past version of yourself so that you can realize who you actually are and start living the life you were supposed to live. My traumas were so deep, so hurtful that I could not even start into EMDR after a few sessions because it would be too traumatic, and my therapist wondered if I could even benefit from it without significant medication. But I knew I could handle it and she decided to help me.

Before we could start, I had to spend about 3 months doing something called the Sight-Sound Protocol to calm my nerves. This involved being in a calm state about an hour prior to the therapy and then enlisting the help of a loved one to be there while I listened to 30 minutes of this warped, almost eerie lo-fi music of popular songs. While listening, I would do puzzle activities with this person and I had to focus on maintaining a smile. There were many days that this therapy broke me. I’d cry and shake. I’d get sick. There were times I felt like throwing up. There were times I wanted to run and hide. The worst part was that I couldn’t sleep right after. I had to stay awake to finish the processing for at least one hour. I fought the sleep so hard and then, once I was able to drift off, I would be out for anywhere from 3 hours to a day at a time.

There were days I couldn’t even move.

There were weeks I nearly slept through and probably would have if I didn’t have tests and assignments due.

And still, I studied and I got through school.

During this time, I cut off contact with everyone. I lived in complete and total fear. Every sound made me jump. Every trigger broke me. This went on for months until, one day, I wasn’t jumping as much. It still happened, but I could tell that I was getting better.

Then the EMDR started. At first, I was only going for one time every two weeks. But the traumas kept flooding in. They kept haunting me day after day and caused me to be unable to do anything. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t think. I started binge eating again. I started harming myself again. So I increased my therapy sessions to once per week for two months, forcing myself to endure it so that I could heal.

Through all of this one person was there to witness it, to hold me, and to pick me up.

One person told me I would be ok and I just had to believe him. Because, in that half-year, I was relieving every horrible thing I’d experienced at the hands of people who I thought loved me and I was moving past it.

During those months, I did what I had to do to survive it.

And still, I studied and got through school because I knew that, on the other side of that hell scape, I would be a better person and I would be able to accomplish my goals without all of this baggage and hurt holding me back. The people who had harmed me would no longer be able to hurt me or affect my life anymore.

I remember my last EMDR session better than any of the others.

Or, rather, I remember the way I felt 20 minutes after it ended. I remember walking outside my therapist’s building and seeing color again. I could appreciate the breeze and the smell of the salt in the air. I sat in my car and I smiled so brightly. I changed that day.

On that day, I became who I am supposed to be.

For the first time since 2016, I felt creative again. I started writing again, I started drawing things that I enjoyed. And, for the first time in a long time, I lived and I was better. I no longer jumped at car horns or slamming doors. I wasn’t living in constant fear.

I was better. Truly better.

But, when I came out the other side, there were tons of new challenges waiting for me. I had conventions on the horizon and, because I had not been able to produce new art to sell in years, I had nothing new. I didn’t have a new issue of Game Over either.

I started working as hard as I could. I started doing arts markets. I started putting myself out there again and trying to network with people. I started streaming again. I started organizing my life. I started thinking about the future again.

I got into the University of Florida.

I achieved my goal of getting into the University of Florida’s online business program. I’d pulled my GPA up from a 1.2 to a 3.4.

And then I got into Anime Expo.

But I was so behind. So I pushed and pushed.

I took the skills that I was learning in school and applied them to my work. I conducted experiments with my time management for the past year because I simply wasn’t happy with who I had been or how I was handling things. I wanted to do better.

I wanted to be more reliable.

But I had to break out of some of the old time management habits.

I had to change how I worked, how I thought about work, and how I delivered the work. I’d developed a lot of bad habits between 2016 and 2019 because of how I had to cope with the abuse and how I had to constantly try to meet the demands of another person who, quite frankly hated me. I had to learn how to trust again and not just trust others, but trust myself. I had to develop new best practices and, unfortunately, throwing myself back into conventions (which was necessary) and adding commissions and school and streaming and arts markets and now actually having a life and wanting to live and experience it meant that I would have to make huge changes.

This is who I was and where I was going into the summer of 2022.

And because summer 2022 was so busy and so overwhelming, I failed to adjust quickly enough to that landscape.

After Anime Expo, I thought I would be able to hit the ground running on commissions and new projects.

Unfortunately, I was unprepared for how my new art style and dedication to my education and living a life would change what those outputs would look like. I found that I could not work the same way I used to because it was incredibly unhealthy, unrealistic, and did not afford me any freedom. Back when I used to work in such a way, I wasn’t allowed freedom anyways so it didn’t matter.

But I wanted to be happier and more fulfilled. So, I had to figure out how to do that.

I also wanted to be able to deliver work timely to those who commission me. And I needed to figure out how that fit in with other work requirements like developing products for arts markets, actually exhibiting at arts markets, and developing new products for online shops while also streaming and making sure people on Twitch were having a good time too.

It was a lot to take on and I thought that I would be able to just revert back to my old ways to get everything done. I thought I could be the “old me” that would spend 15+ hours at a desk every day, just plowing through art.

But that person wasn’t me. Not really. That was some zombie created by someone who didn’t even love me. And that was no way to live and it was no way to produce better art. I discovered that, the happier I am, the better art I produce but that I also couldn’t simply manufacture those feelings.

Over the next few posts I’m going to talk about each of these things and share with you want I learned in the hope that, if you come on hard times, you may find some solace in my words or that they might help other artists understand some of the things they might be experiencing and, maybe, I can help you skip a few of the exploratory steps and save you some time in getting to a model that works better.

Future posts will be shorter, but I wanted to share at least this part of my story in long form because it’s important to understand who I was and how that shaped what I produced and how I produced it as well as who I am now and why I can’t be that person again and, ultimately, how that has changed my ability to deliver on the same timeline that I thought I could deliver on.

Thanks for joining me on this journey.

Thank you for supporting me.