📖Written by: MSY

🗓️ Published on: December 15, 2025

✨ A personal reflection on my journey, challenges, and the passion that continues to guide me.

When Passion Meets Reality: My Health and Life After Losing Platform Income

📝Introduction

For nine years, running my manhua online was more than a hobby — it was the heartbeat of my days. Updating chapters, managing series, and sharing stories gave me purpose. My mission was simple: allow readers to enjoy manhua freely, without barriers. That mission guided me for nearly a decade.

But in 2023, everything changed. My platform income was suddenly reversed, forcing me to rethink not just my work, but my health and life. This is the story of how passion collided with reality and the lessons I learned along the way.

💔The Compromise and the Price Paid

From the beginning, I held one belief close:

“Everyone should be able to enjoy stories without financial barriers.”

It was a promise I repeated to myself and my readers countless times. For years, I dedicated day and night to keeping my platform active and materials accessible. That belief carried me through thousands of hours of content management.

But then my financial foundation crumbled. The financial support sustaining the platform was abruptly lost, leaving me scrambling for a way to keep the project viable and meet my obligations.

In the middle of this intense financial stress, a difficult opportunity appeared. The head of another collaborative online team offered me a paid-access system for the content. At first, I resisted—it felt like a complete betrayal of everything I believed in, and the moral conflict became an immediate source of overwhelming stress.

Yet the financial pressure was immense, and I knew people, like one single mother on my team, were relying on the income from our efforts. The thought of letting them down, combined with my own mounting debt, forced my hand. I felt intense guilt but accepted the paid-access system, believing it was the only way to keep the project alive and support my team.

In early December 2025, however, the platform was closed due to low sales and ongoing external pressure. The decision was final. The sheer stress and guilt from having to break my promise to my readers, combined with the financial failure, became a profound emotional weight. This period of moral and financial turmoil directly preceded my major health diagnosis.

🩺 The Diagnosis: Prioritizing Health

In early 2025, I went for a routine medical check-up and received a diagnosis that changed everything: hyperthyroid.

Suddenly, my body felt foreign. Energy I once took for granted disappeared. Simple tasks became exhausting. Concentration slipped away, and fatigue was constant. The intense content work that I had once enjoyed—managing uploads, updating the platform, interacting with readers—became difficult, even overwhelming. The concentration loss made continuing my management duties monumental.

Along with the physical challenges came emotional strain. Sadness and discouragement settled in, partly from illness, but also from the weight of broken promises and financial uncertainty. The stability I had relied on for years felt gone.

💼 Work and Stress

Just as I was adjusting to my health condition, another setback arrived. My company, where I had worked for 5 years, closed down unexpectedly. I found a new job soon after, hoping for stability, but it brought relentless pressure: tight deadlines, court appearances as a witness for a project I handled at my previous company, and a superior who offered little understanding or support.

Every day felt like a battle just to keep up. Eventually, I realized that continuing would further harm my health. After careful consideration, I made the difficult decision to resign.

Now, I am still searching for work. Some days are hopeful; others feel heavy. Yet, even amid uncertainty, I remind myself that this is just one chapter in my life—not the ending.

😢 Emotional Struggles and Loss

Losing my platform income was one of the hardest blows I’ve ever faced. The nights after the news, I couldn’t sleep—my mind kept racing about how I would pay for the platform developer, the hosting server, and some of my team members. The weight of responsibility felt like a knife stabbing at my heart.

Telling my team members that I had to stop their work was one of the most heart-wrenching moments of my life. I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt and helplessness, knowing how much time and effort they had invested and how much this work meant to them. Some of them were financially secure and contributing simply for the love of the project, but one single mother of two children, including a child with autism, stayed constantly on my mind. I kept telling myself that I needed to find a way to help her. Even so, the closure left a lasting impact. The weight of responsibility and loss pressed heavily on my heart, dragging me into a deep sadness — a shadow of depression that lingered for months.

🌟 Reflection: Passion Refined and The Path Forward

The past year has tested me in ways I never anticipated. I lost an online platform built from nearly a decade of passion, faced a hyperthyroid diagnosis that drained my energy and clarity, and experienced unexpected professional setbacks that forced me to pause and reassess my direction. Each challenge carried its own weight, and together they reshaped how I view work, responsibility, and myself.

🔥 Core Lessons Learned

• Health is the True Platform Foundation: I learned the hard way that you cannot sustainably support a project if you do not support your body first. The intense stress directly preceded my hyperthyroid diagnosis; burnout is not a badge of honor, but a failure of self-management.
• Redefining Moral Responsibility: While my core belief remains that content should be accessible, I must accept that sustainability requires financial viability. True responsibility means finding a way to value creators and readers while also valuing my own mental and financial well-being.
• The Power of Resilience is Quiet: Resilience does not always announce itself loudly. Sometimes, it is simply the quiet, difficult decision to continue, one day at a time, at a sustainable pace.

✍️ Why I Wrote This: An Anchor Against Fog

This blog was created as my personal anchor. Because of my hyperthyroid illness, I struggle profoundly with brain fog and memory lapses, and I am genuinely afraid of forgetting what I have been through.

More than that, I fear forgetting the people who walked this journey with me—my team members who stood by me for years, and the loyal readers who supported the platform with their trust and presence.

Writing these experiences down is my way of preserving those memories and honoring everyone who was part of that chapter of my life.

For now, my focus is on regaining my health, rebuilding stability, and moving forward. The path ahead may look different from what I once imagined, but the purpose remains unchanged: to share stories responsibly, to value both creators and readers, and to continue finding meaning through storytelling—even in a new, quieter form.