Hi everyone, my name is Spottius or Spots if you prefer. This is my first post. I’ve never really done any posts on here or Anthrowear before but I’m going to try posting more, especially so that I can transparently update you all on what I am currently going through and everything that has led up to this point. For now, I just wanted to take a little time to let you know my role and history with Bearmods and then who I am on a personal level.
Spottius is my fursona name but my real name is Kent. I founded Anthrowear Feral Apparel in 2012. In 2016, I founded BearMods.
Since starting BearMods, I have hired one crafter named Kris, who has been hand-sewing for us for a number of years. My ex (Gianni Cerbo, @Stryps, StashPanda) attempted to fire Kris, a woman in her 70’s with great work ethic. My ex then took the workshop equipment out of state and contact between him and our business and between him and customers was almost non-existent and I was forced to do what I could and rebuild our workshop/materials/equipment and re-hire Kris in 2020. To this day, I am so grateful to have a stellar worker and am so ashamed about what my ex did. Her and I are both confused as to his actions.
So far, we have attended Biggest Little Furry Convention (BLFC) in Reno pretty much every year it has been open with an Anthrowear booth and every year since starting BearMods. I am primed and ready to attend the con this year and I hope I get to meet lots of cool people and have some great moments like every year. Doing conventions is one of my favorite things as a furry/plushie business owner.
A little bit about me personally: I am a 42 year old homosexual male. I have been relatively poor my whole life and am still on the brink of financial collapse with no family or safety net. When I was 15 years old, my life changed and a host of neurodivergent mental disorders emerged, namely: Panic Disorder, Agoraphobia, General Anxiety Disorder. I was dependent in many ways until my mom died when I was 28 and my first boyfriend abandoned me. When I met my ex-husband in 2012, he basically saved my life. We both had housing insecurity and formed the foundation of our relationship being homeless during the Occupy movement. Over 8 years, we worked together to build two businesses and acquire a mortgage. Gianni/@Stryps was my best friend and we spent pretty much every single day together. I never felt safer with anyone. We hugged each other and said we loved each other almost every night for 8 years. Thanks to a consistency of trust and commitment, I was finally starting to get some breathing room to unpack and deal with the trauma from before I met my best friend. I started to realize that aside from the anxiety I had been diagnosed with at 15, I had spent over 20 years with executive dysfunction/ADHD, Obsessive Compulsion Disorder, and Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Since my divorce which started in November 2019 and concluded in December 2021, I have been at one of the worst points of my life. I miss my ex every single day of my life and my stomach hurts every single day when I think about 8 years of a relatively amazing relationship with someone I loved and felt safe around. Someone who I did everything I could to protect. I stopped someone from sexually assaulting us while we slept. I made sure to help you every single time you had a cluster headache. I woke up every single day and despite severe executive dysfunction and despite even up to the month you divorced me you again reminded me how proud you were of me of all the progress I made fixing my anxiety, I did what I had to to do advance our life, our business, our goals. I don’t feel inadequate or ashamed for loving you and advancing my life for the betterment of yours, even if it was at the expense of finding myself.
In the past 4 months, I have been back in therapy. I’m finally getting treated for ADHD and executive dysfunction and OCD and CPTSD. I can barely handle working 30-40 hours a week with my regular jobs but I also now have to not let two businesses crash and burn that ideally require a person working 30-40 hours each. I now solely own the debts and obligations that two people were barely handling. I have made a lot of progress over the last 3.5 years but I still have so much more healing and grieving to do. I’m going to try to start making regular posts and doing my best to improve the site. A part of my healing process is going to be starting a standalone blog as a testimonial to my life with my ex, which was amazing and beautiful, even if flawed and showing with evidence what we went through and comparing all of that with the words and actions he chose to do after November 18, 2019. He completely destroyed and tarnished true and beautiful things we experienced together. To this day, the person he moved in with and who volunteered to help set up our websites, has an online comment claiming I usurped the business from my ex. When served with a cease and desist letter asking him to show his evidence, he apologized and promised to stop talking about me yet the comment remains attached to his business. On another online board where people advertise their furry/plushy hobby, Rex Raccoon, who is intimately involved with my ex, tells people not to buy from Bearmods due to what I did to get the business. Just a generic lie with no evidence. This guy is oblivious to the fact that the way I went from owning 50% to 100% of Anthrowear and Bearmods and 50-100% equity in a house was by first, having my husband file for divorce against me, then wait until the trial where the judge just divides everything 50/50 and we sell everything and I get a chance to show the judge all of our emails/communications. Except, it never even got to that point because I sent an email to my lawyer asking her to send a letter to his lawyer asking him to settle the divorce where I get: 100% of the businesses, 100% of the house, 100% of the marital debt. HE ACCEPTED THIS OFFER! There is no usurping. I didn’t unlawfully take the business from my ex. If Gianni/@Stryps had evidence that I did something illegal during the divorce, he would have told his lawyer who would tell my lawyer and then he would make a beneficial-to-him offer that I would either have to accept or wait until trial date where they would show the judge. I plan to start posting what I’ve gone through with the hopes that certain things might happen to help ease my stress and anxiety and the transparency might force some people to set the record straight.