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Description
There's always this unconscious fear in the back of my head these days where I worry that I'll just stop drawing one day. In high school I almost consciously chose to stop drawing but a teacher (one of the few good ones) sat down with me when he saw I was upset and encouraged me to keep going.

In my adult life I went through a period in 2016 where I could barely draw and anything I did manage to finish wasn't up to my usual standards, and it felt like my dreams were finally dying. I tried other things to keep my creative flow running: I did photo manipulations, I took selfies, I tried to revisit some of my older work to find the thread that tied everything together. Eventually I started to softly come back. My life started changing radically: in the span of the last couple years, my grandma died, my years-long LDR finally closed the distance and started living with my partner, I changed from working retail to office life, I finally moved out of my parent's place at the ripe old age of 28, I got married, I tried and stopped therapy for the 3rd time in trying to pinpoint why I haven't reached a state of contentment... currently now I'm still working in the same department but a different office that is about an hour train commute each way for me, and I'm back in school! I'm taking ACCOUNTING classes, which (with my dyscalculia) means a lot of my waking life is spent toward work and work-related activities and a lot of my mental and emotional energy is sucked into that.

It's a weird kind of stress to be under because I know it's temporary--I'm taking these classes for about a year to go toward a work promotion, and after that I might be able to go back to working in the office that's only 2 miles from where I live, and the older I get the faster the years go... in-between all of this I've also been off and on dealing with little identity crises as I've been unraveling and weaving back together my family's history and genealogy and our ties to this continent, and adapting to relationship changes--we've gone polyamorous--and our shifting schedules and not a lot of free time... squeezing in a big freelance project somewhere in there that is yet to be released, everything kinda took a toll on my physical health. I get bouts of insomnia again like I used to when I worked retail. Some other stuff was going on more recently that has thankfully passed, but I'm now left feeling sensitive as I'm letting the last of the stress from that flow through me.

I needed to do something just for me, and the urge to draw came up. I wanted to do a self portrait. I needed something raw and personal to connect with what's been going on lately and for feeling like there's always this undercurrent of dealing with past trauma and present issues side by side, and it felt good. This didn't take me long to churn out, but it was exactly what I needed.

Additionally, at the end of all this with my work life being unrelated to art, I had to decide that this isn't the end of me being an artist. Once this temporary period of No Free Time passes, I'm feeling like I will have time to really blossom into adulthood and have more time for developing my illustrations and stories. I can be many things at once: I'm a fiscal tech, I'm going to become a fiscal analyst, but I have always been and always will be an artist.

Description
There's always this unconscious fear in the back of my head these days where I worry that I'll just stop drawing one day. In high school I almost consciously chose to stop drawing but a teacher (one of the few good ones) sat down with me when he saw I was upset and encouraged me to keep going.

In my adult life I went through a period in 2016 where I could barely draw and anything I did manage to finish wasn't up to my usual standards, and it felt like my dreams were finally dying. I tried other things to keep my creative flow running: I did photo manipulations, I took selfies, I tried to revisit some of my older work to find the thread that tied everything together. Eventually I started to softly come back. My life started changing radically: in the span of the last couple years, my grandma died, my years-long LDR finally closed the distance and started living with my partner, I changed from working retail to office life, I finally moved out of my parent's place at the ripe old age of 28, I got married, I tried and stopped therapy for the 3rd time in trying to pinpoint why I haven't reached a state of contentment... currently now I'm still working in the same department but a different office that is about an hour train commute each way for me, and I'm back in school! I'm taking ACCOUNTING classes, which (with my dyscalculia) means a lot of my waking life is spent toward work and work-related activities and a lot of my mental and emotional energy is sucked into that.

It's a weird kind of stress to be under because I know it's temporary--I'm taking these classes for about a year to go toward a work promotion, and after that I might be able to go back to working in the office that's only 2 miles from where I live, and the older I get the faster the years go... in-between all of this I've also been off and on dealing with little identity crises as I've been unraveling and weaving back together my family's history and genealogy and our ties to this continent, and adapting to relationship changes--we've gone polyamorous--and our shifting schedules and not a lot of free time... squeezing in a big freelance project somewhere in there that is yet to be released, everything kinda took a toll on my physical health. I get bouts of insomnia again like I used to when I worked retail. Some other stuff was going on more recently that has thankfully passed, but I'm now left feeling sensitive as I'm letting the last of the stress from that flow through me.

I needed to do something just for me, and the urge to draw came up. I wanted to do a self portrait. I needed something raw and personal to connect with what's been going on lately and for feeling like there's always this undercurrent of dealing with past trauma and present issues side by side, and it felt good. This didn't take me long to churn out, but it was exactly what I needed.

Additionally, at the end of all this with my work life being unrelated to art, I had to decide that this isn't the end of me being an artist. Once this temporary period of No Free Time passes, I'm feeling like I will have time to really blossom into adulthood and have more time for developing my illustrations and stories. I can be many things at once: I'm a fiscal tech, I'm going to become a fiscal analyst, but I have always been and always will be an artist.