This is something of a follow-up to my art journaling article, Reanimated From Journal Pages, and yet another personal piece I hoped to release only after my much delayed spatial horror special interest article (oops). At the time of writing, it’s October 4th, 2023, a full year after I started my second art journaling volume as well as the day where I allowed myself to claim the ‘artist’ label. This acceptance was the final piece that, once slotted in place, finally had living make the barest sense. Though my skills were still poor, I had banked 327 days worth of entries consisting at minimum of the most generously defined doodle which amounted to a complete physical artifact I could revisit at my leisure. The routine practice of documenting my days through drawing radically transformed my perception of life to the degree that I couldn’t stomach the thought of letting it go. To live, I realized, was to create. To create as much and as recklessly as possible.

 What follows is a sloppy (i.e. unedited stream of consciousness), deeply personal account of my reflections on this year of real living after healing from a devastating bout of pandemic-related burnout enough to really inhabit the self I’d finally unearthed after years of treatment and sickly survival struggles. This article exists as an open offering in exchange for all the kinship I felt consuming wonderful similar pieces of personal content from other struggling creatives out there. This article also serves as an invaluable form of venting these weighty reflections that come along with any anniversary of this ilk that I lack any other outlet for apart from embarrassingly splattering bits and pieces all across social media. Better to keep it all in one place if I am to make it public at all.

 Now, for some history: I was a temperamentally creative child prone to short-lived flights of fancy too easily stomped out by negative feedback. My bursts of creativity flared to life in a web of, to onlookers, incomprehensible complications such as guilty hangups over using some specific supplies or a strict, convoluted series of rules that must be strictly adhered to in the process Or Else. Little me would fixate on fledgling concepts fiercely and fail to articulate the details of why these rules existed or why I was so afraid of evolving them any further into a proper project. It was never a matter of perfectionism or even the basic fear of doing anything I wasn’t immediately good at, rather it was the idea that these (creative) things had a life entirely of their own beyond my control that I am subject to the whims of. Characters in story concepts were their own beings I was to act as a vessel for seemingly at random just like my capacity to produce basic marks on a page that just might blossom into an entire piece I’d obsessively overwork. The unshakable idea that I was so out of control within the realm of something I so deeply wanted to practice eventually became so stressful that I was unable to do anything creative outside of compulsively doodling in the margins of school notes or as a performative exercise to attempt to engage with others socially. The majority of my childhood friends were either art kids themselves or enamored with anyone who could draw so I naturally slid into the “draw-er” role as a means of connecting with them. I never consciously tried to get better or do a “good job” with any of my drawings at the time because it never occurred to me that was an option. Drawing was something that just happened and only under precisely the right conditions. What those conditions were was totally beyond my youthful imagination. This line of thinking carried on through most of my school years broken up only by the occasional impassioned urge to learn seriously how to draw that never managed to survive contact with an anatomy book. The only deviation came in the form of internet roleplay platforms and fandom. These formative experiences are worthy of their own future article with the appropriate space to tackle the nature of this roleplay being largely Homestuck fantroll roleplay that shamelessly follows me to this day. What is relevant to this creative historical recap is that I then had a more focused subject for my doodle indulgences and a clearer motivation. Since I was investing so much of my free time and energy into OC roleplay on the internet there were people out there with an interest in my characters who wanted to see what my characters looked like. If I took more time outside of notebook doodles on drawing these characters, I had people I could immediately send them to for positive feedback with the added social benefit of deepening these online bonds (I had a very mechanical view of social relationships at the time forged from a childhood of confusing social failures). I only ever drew my characters in more or less the same style in a very rigid similar pose, but I enjoyed it immensely. I never tired of drawing the same image of even the same character over and over again to positive reception from my few trusted online friends. I tended to be very secretive in real life about this practice. While I was seen as an artistic child by my family to the point that I was gifted a drawing tablet in my early teen years, I hardly ever showed anyone anything I’d drawn. I was deeply ashamed of how much time I spent on my characters, as massive of a part of my life that they were, that I harbored this entire piece of myself away even from romantic partners later into my teens and college years. This hugely impactful part of my life that irrevocably defined the lens through which I perceived myself and interests was kept eternally shrouded outside of rare occasions where I’d demonstrate drawing ability or voice my aspirations of being a writer despite never doing any writing. True changes, outside of gradually more frequent week-long attempts at taking any of my creative pursuits more seriously, only came about with the start of my art journaling practice as detailed in my art journaling article.

 My creativity now still suffers the lingering scars of some of my past pitfalls, namely those tendencies to fatally think that creativity is something I am subject to by random chance and not something I possess any control over. Oftentimes I find myself staring down at a page incapable of forcing myself to put pencil to paper in a classic textbook executive dysfunction style to produce a single mark. I remain particularly guarded about most of what I create, though now this secrecy is more due to the pacts I make with myself not to share xyz piece or sketchbook as a means of motivating myself to more confidently work on it. I have the frequent thought of needing to share more of my work or at the very least make work that is sharable, though I never know if this is a genuine desire of mine or something born out of societal pressures to monetize one’s skills or at the very least only invest time in things for the benefit of others. Being creative, completely divorced from any career or product, is a core facet of who I am as a person and what living life day by day looks like for me. As far as I can tell, I have no genuine desire to make money off of my art nor do I need this to validate my wish to be an artist. I could be perfectly content spending all of my energy fully immersed in creative pursuits kept entirely out of any public eye. In fact, even the mere idea of making a name for myself with my art and being known in some distant future as an artist by a wider audience is a terrifying nightmare to me. While I might be able to stomach the idea of selling the things I make in the form of specific products or commissions, the idea of having to sell myself as a brand and do any form of marketing is nothing short of nauseating. But even so there’s this nagging little voice that since I have no other proper career aspirations I can content myself with, I have to do something with art because I spend all this time with it. What am I even doing with myself if I’m spending all this time going nowhere? What’s the point of doing anything creative if it’s not going to amount to anything? Even if I do decide to make money off my art, whether I want to or not, what’s the point of even bothering at this stage when I still have so much to catch up on to get to the level where my work is worth spending money on? These kinds of thoughts come and go with the typical depression tides, though they’ve surfaced more frequently as I continue to engage with my art class peers at their different stages of life and art skills. I constantly find myself afflicted with the feeling of being awfully late to it all. Not just art, but to living in general having lost so many years to illness and memory voids. At these times, there is always the dangling idea of giving up and doing something else. Though I truly do not know what something else might look like for even when art becomes so wretched of a task that with all the massive amounts of free time I have at my disposal I cannot possibly force myself into doing it, I cannot see myself structuring my life around anything else. It’s no longer even just because I’ve invested so much time and resources into it as is, even as a measly beginner, there is just simply no other way for me to really live.

 All that being said, I feel that I haven’t done enough creatively in this real year despite having so much free time as an unemployed sometimes student. For all the strides in treatment and recovery that I’ve made, the process of making goals and reaching them remains insurmountable. I struggle even to conjure up the idea of goals I could pursue and even when I do, I need to get painfully specific when formulating them otherwise the abstract nature of how to complete them becomes too much to withstand. In addition to my journaling practice and outside of classwork, I’ve managed to complete my first ever non-journal sketchbook, a daily drawing challenge, plenty of studies for house decorations, two cosplays, a solo journaling ttrpg still in refinement stages, a handful of miscellaneous craft projects, redesigns for nearly all of my old characters, half a NaNoWriMo novel, lots of linocut stamps, and a couple of other things here and there. None of which I quite feel comfortable sharing just yet (though in time, I plan to release my ttrpg). Even though I haven’t made as many things as I would like, I have made undeniably massive amounts of improvement in my year of artmaking. I have tackled projects and subjects I would only have ever dreamed of attempting before while allowing myself to be earnest in the process. I managed to continue creating even in small amounts during depressive episodes and other strife which I must remember I am not immune to just because I feel real and have a higher standard baseline of feeling most of the time. There is no imminent deadline on my creative passions I am soon to reckon with. For all practical purposes, I have all the time in the world to refine my skills and make things that I find meaningful at my own pace. The writing projects, game concepts, comic ideas, and illustration visions I shied away from are not personal failings. There is not only so much left to learn in the realm of art, but also about myself. A self that I cannot hold to strict neurotypical standards nor that of the longer timescale stories of other artists out there with experiences unlike my own.

 Life, outside of creative pursuits, has become significantly easier and less nebulous. My memory has far more substance to it, recalling the events of any given week or month with natural ease. While still distorted with the perception shifts that come with aging and the pandemic, time makes considerably more sense. I am less often faced with gaps in my memory or displacement of events. My days pass with greater structure that withstands routine disruptions as long as I can get my basic journaling done and concrete tasks are easier to achieve. Critically, my interests have become a lot healthier and far longer lived as I am able to retain more information on them over longer periods of time. It’s easier for me to articulate the why of my fixations as well as how I am engaging with them. I can more easily remember facts when discussing what currently occupies me with others. Speaking of, I am a lot more social now more than ever before and securely so. I no longer feel the crushing need to have some kind of romantic entanglement in my life to focus all of my social attentions on as improvements in memory have solidified my sense of self enough that I can discerningly seek out social gratification in more friendships without having to attach my identity to anyone. Anxieties still run rampant at times, so does the awful temptation to resort to sacrificial people pleasing tactics to not lose the few bonds I have carefully built with my unmasked self. Less and less I feel that I am wasting time with the things I do. Not to the degree that used to swamp my every thought and action several years ago outside coursework.

 I have even less of a plan for my future now than I did a year ago. Not at least in terms of career or other long-term aspirations. But I am more than ever capable of being content with that uncertainty of what comes next. I have a steady, stable routine in a wonderful living situation beyond my wildest dreams with all signs pointed toward inconceivable future improvement and potential pursuits. If I can power through pesky mental health hurdles in the present, I have a number of plans for site-specific content ranging from interest-related blog articles to minor coding experiments/games. Further, I also plan to attempt NaNoWriMo again this year with an exciting new concept I am already in the process of worldbuilding for.  I am currently doing a daily art challenge for the month of October that I hope to refine one or two pieces from into a painting and actively working to keep up with several sketchbooking habits to experiment prolifically with. Vaguer ambitions of mine include producing some zines (perzines, interest-related, short fiction/poetry, art, etc.), dabbling in hypertext fiction again, finally making one of the video essays I’ve been vowing for years to make (braces lisp be damned), and perhaps even trying my hand at a game project again. With my art specifically, I intend to work actively to understand 3D forms and perspective so I no longer shy away from more demanding concepts and produce less flat-looking images. Anatomy study, of course, will follow as I attempt to resurrect my old pretty consistent daily gesture drawing habit. While I should probably rein in my eagerness to try out every medium I can, I nonetheless hope to more seriously try digital art outside of pixel art and get back into painting with acrylics. My understanding of basic color theory and how to mix paints is truly woeful (blame my lifelong goth “aversion to color”). The jury’s still out on the topic of sharing my work. I no longer think forcing it is the best course of action, but I don’t think keeping everything private is either when this is such a huge part of my life. The trick would be finding the safest possible avenues to share my work without feeling like I’m peeling off all my skin. Currently, this site seems the best platform for this as I can silently post anything I’d like to at any time without having to necessarily alert anyone and any friend I have in-person contact with that has vague knowledge of its existence knows there’s a minimum three month period before they can say anything about what I’ve posted to me without risk of me immediately bursting into flames. Thus concludes my reflections article, an update on all the motions of “getting there” without any idea what that “there” might look like. I hope that anyone who happened to stumble upon this article and read it through felt something, whether it be satisfaction of nosey curiosity about someone’s personal life, relatability of the struggle of coming to something “late,” or merely that reading was time decently spent. Coming next article-wise should be my spatial horror exploration and recommendations article or some other interest related piece should the spatial horror beast continue to bloat even further.