#probably less things about my sickly son and more idk fun stuff about dynamics/fractals/probability

[floralfractals]

Hi everyone, I wanted to write a quick update to you guys :)

I made this blog in March of 2021. At the time, I followed my first math course on fractals and dynamics, and had just discovered a tool to make my own awesome fractals. This blog started out as a place to share the art I was making as a coping mechanism during covid, but as I quit making them after a few months, this blog died pretty quickly. In 2022, I decided to start posting regularly again (mostly just shitposts though), just so that the effort I put into this blog wouldn't go to waste.

Then, in the beginning of this year, I started writing my thesis. I posted one (1) shitpost about him (my well-known and popular son), and got 10s of thousands of notes. Every morning I would wake up to another crowd of people who loved the graphs, or were baffled by them, and I got showered in asks to elaborate on him.

Truth be told, 2023 has been a very heavy year for me. A lot of things happened in my personal life, and I lost a dear friend to suicide. It became so difficult for me to keep writing on my thesis, and the project that should have been finished in June this year has now been taking 4 months too many. My mental health has suffered greatly, I haven't been able to take any breaks, and life has just been generally difficult. I have spent nights not being able to sleep because I wanted to finish my bachelor's thesis so bad, but my supervisors would keep demanding more work, more edits, and more drafts. At some point, I even considered quitting my studies and finding a job.

The community has helped me to keep going. Mathematicians and non-mathematicians alike who sent me genuinely interested questions, made me laugh in the notes, created fanart (??? I'm still baffled by this but the people who did this are the coolest in the world) and generally made me feel for the first time that mathematics isn't a universally hated subject. On some days, the only reason I was able to keep going and the only thing keeping me from experiencing burn-out was the support I got through this blog.

Today, 10/12/2023, I turned in my thesis. Thank you so much for your support!