Spare Some Change for a Struggling Artist? – Equipment and Student Funds

Hello there. My name is France but obviously you can see that, so saying my name here is counter-intuitive but a nice formality.

Before I go ahead and ask for the obvious, I'd like to tell you a bit of my story. I've been working for my parents since I was a child about 10 or so. It's been about 9 years since. Throughout that whole time, I had a washed-up alcoholic father and an infuriatingly busy mother. Why is it infuriating? Because it always feels like we work for absolutely nothing. I'll get back to you on this.

Now for about that time, whenever I got home from school, back in the times before COVID-19, my time would be spent working at a storefront at our house. Looking back, I see how it would have stumped my ability to keep learning when almost all of my free time was spent working for them yet they have the gall to continuously say to this day that I should study more. Overtime, I grew more tired and less willing to work, because if they're just going to keep calling me lazy and stupid and talk as if I have no clue about anything, why not give them what they expect?

That's not to say I don't love them. I do, but that's what makes this hurt me all the more. Being given such negative words and then they provide meager false hopes of goodness to make me cling on; its a mental gymnastic that adds more turmoil that I bottle up always. They expect better of me yet they also push me down. My father loves to do this, drunk or otherwise and it just adds more and more turmoil to everyone with how he acts like the king of the goddamn world.

As much as I'd like to say my mother is better and in some cases, she is, she still is an instrument to all this dysfunction. My older sister, who I am thankful for for paying for my student fees, recently proposed to our mother about opening a second store beside ours for clothes. And my mother of course, agreed. So now I have to work at two places at once, further fragmenting the time I'm supposed to use for working at these two areas. I'd like you to know that we have no hired employees. It's just me, my mother, and my father and we're all just about terrible when it comes to being employees, especially considering the fact that we essentially have no home life anymore. It's all eat, work, sleep.

And thus, this brings us to why I feel like none of this work amounts to anything; I don't get paid. I never have and most likely never will. It doesn't help that my mother continuously changes the price for what we sell to the point that she corrects me every time I sell something with the "wrong" price. And now she's starting to hide what money we make. It feels like it's always being hidden somewhere different each day. She says it's all business and I hate that stupid reasoning so much. I don't know too much about business but with a business model like this, no wonder we've never expanded.

There's no trust in this family. I am made to respect them but they don't respect me as someone knowing and capable. And to that, I say "fuck all of this." Because of this mental distress, I flunked out of second year senior high... and am now retaking it.

Which perfectly segues into the purpose of this campaign. I'm an artist. Or at least, trying and learning to be. I had wanted to get into coding so I went into senior high for that specific strand yet they didn't teach anything of that sort but that's a story for another day. What they did teach, barely at least, was traditional art and animation. It was a gateway to a sense of happiness and accomplishment that I had thought I'd never have. And if I don't get anything out of this campaign, I may never will. I've shown examples of what I am able to do, at least in terms of digital 3D graphics with the help of some online tutorials. I wish to expand upon it and hopefully develop myself into a person capable of attaining a career out of digital art and graphics.

I would like to humbly request for any support you can provide. All funds will go towards purchasing the tools and equipment necessary as well as future tuition fees for my school of choice; perhaps a school with digital arts in Cebu. Ateneo? UP? I heard of there being a robotics school in the country so maybe I can go to a school that will actually teach me how to code. I guess I'll just have to see.

If you got to the end of this and read through it all, thank you. I greatly appreciate it.

UPDATE: Welp, my old computer's now starting to shut off on it's own and needs to be taken apart and put back together repeatedly to turn back on. That's not good at all. Please if anyone reads this, any charitable donation would be greatly appreciated.