February 2019 Update (and Announcement)

Following the fan event I attended in January, I crashed.

Meeting Yokoi-san was an incredible experience that left me drained, around the EXACT same time that a bunch of pre-orders came in, and then I caught a cold, and THEN I had a bunch of personal matters come up which completely derailed my efforts to get myself back together.

It was so bad that I missed a Shining Live event for the first time, and I barely celebrated Ren's birthday. It's been really tough, and while I started the year taking better care of myself, it was under the impression that I wouldn't encounter any new hardships.

My once-clean apartment is currently filled with boxes, and I'm trying as best as I can to process shipping, pick up packing materials, and visit the post office while handling a full-time job, trying to find time to rest AND revive my presence on social media as a cosplayer.

This has led me to consider making a very tough decision, but I wanted to announce this as early in the year as possible.

I am considering towards going on hiatus from hosting UtaPri group orders by the end of this year.

I never expected so many people to rely on my services, and what started out as doing favors for a few people turned into a full-time hobby, to the point where I'm now treading in small business territory.

As I'm sitting here trying to figure out where to begin on filing my taxes, I realized that regardless of how carefully I've been tweaking and polishing this service, it still involves a lot of complicated financial matters that I was never prepared for.

So not only am I thinking of taking a break for myself, I'm considering taking a break just so I can  step back and figure out how all this works.

I have a couple of ideas on how I can scale back without quitting entirely, and I'll try to find time to  lay out those ideas in the next few weeks. I'll be asking for everyone's feedback as well.

Everyone's words of gratitude and appreciation is what makes it so hard for me to say that I need a break, because I still love UtaPri so much and I feel like this is the biggest contribution I can make to the fan community.

Knowing that so many people around the world could get the items that they wanted because of what I was doing made me feel so happy. I want to help as many people as I possibly can, but I realize that there's only so much I can do as one person.

Once I make a decision on how to approach this, I'll write another update. In the meantime, in case more merch is announced and I'm not ready to host a group order, I highly recommend using a proxy service (you can see my guide here). As far as trading items, I absolutely would like to continue helping with that, because it's the one thing that proxy services don't do.

Now that the recent Tokiya event on Shining Live is over (which served as my therapy for the past week), I'll get some proper sleep and then resume working on sorting out all of this stuff. I know I talk about this being a lot of work, but I really do enjoy looking at all this UtaPri merch before I send it off to everyone.

|￣￣￣￣￣￣ |
| UTAPRI |
| SAVES |
| LIVES |
| |
| ＿＿＿＿＿__|
(\__/) ||
(•ㅅ•) ||
/ 　 づ

— Blushface Tokiya@Top 1% (JP) (@bitchfacetokiya) February 20, 2019

As for my emotional state that I hinted about over Twitter, I'm happy to say that I'm feeling much, much better. UtaPri played a big role in helping me get back on track, and that's why I continue to dedicate so much time to it.<3