Most people don't welcome change but I believe it is a very important step towards improvement and evolution. It can also be that extra push to get you to look down a new road you've never traveled before. Truly I'm the wandering type right now. My first career path didn't really go the way I wanted it to and I made the mistake of focusing too much on one career investment. I've met many others who have shared the same story, chasing passion, making it into a profession and burning out their "spark". I've learned that in order to keep a valued relationship with art, I can't make it a job. I've leaned entirely on my creativity to be an escape and I want to keep it that way. The moment I let go of the pressures of making things work, I felt a lot of weight off my shoulders.
After recovering from some hardships and cramming myself into the quickest source of income, I got back on my feet. However our lifestyles had to change when COVID-19 came into the picture. Prior to this, I was experiencing health issues that were making my immune system vulnerable so I kinda sunk into the "at-risk" category. This eventually pushed me to part ways with my job at a salad factory, where the higher volume of people plus cold climate was making things risky.
So, I was granted a bunch of free time. What was I to do with it? Thinking. I spent a lot of time thinking and reevaluating my life, my goals and the direction I was headed. I decided to give my personal project some attention, the one thing that inspired me to go to school and learn animation. I got in touch with my old self and asked her what drove her. I learned animation as well as a lot of really useful skills I could lean back on but I forgot why I started in the first place. I'm the writer, not the animator. You ever notice when you start to head in another direction, sometimes the universe just seems to pave the road for you? Yes! This is what started to happen for me! I've had a really tough mental chain of making decisions based on the approval of my parents. Every decision made with their influence made me MISERABLE. I wasn't making choices for me, I was making choices for them and it was MY LIFE I was paving pathways for. I kinda woke up from that and started to clear my head of their "noise". I was able to relax and work on my art without feeling guilty and this was a HUGE thing I needed to confront that was impacting my life and my work. I also made the jump and bought a program I had been wanting for ages which gave a major kick start.
I lost a bunch of emotional weight during this time and the fire started burning again. I reached out to my musical connections and got access to a bunch of unique music that I'm free to include in my project promotions. This included a song "Engineers" by Kitsune that I had eyes on for YEARS. I was ecstatic! I wanted to support a local musician I was a fan of and just like that, it happened. Things were going so smoothly in anything related to my comic project. I'm holding on to this goal now, I want to publish a comic on the side and see what happens. I want to exercise my animation interests on little short clips that bring the characters to life even more. Now I've got an animation program to do that! I've been doing little warm ups here and there, picking away more consistently at my project rather than hardly. I also got into gardening and I'm helping my boyfriend's mom with a greenhouse while learning tons of knowledge of plants. Rather than an art block, this was feeling like a life block that I just conquered with turning my head in a different direction.
