What is about to follow has little, if nothing to do, with animation or film or video games or music… Nothing about an animated movie about demons in a house, though admittedly that concept would intrigue me…
I set this blog up as a personal one, that wasn’t just about animation opinions or thoughts on various media. I know you’re probably awaiting some opinion on an animated film or show or what have you from now or years ago, but I’m not here today to talk about any of that. As you all know, the world has been facing a pandemic. A lot of us are and have been trying to contain the coronavirus known as COVID-19, by staying home and not spreading it. This means a lot of things for many different people, and for me, a person who suffers from anxiety and OCD, it has been a largely internal, emotional roller coaster.
Many months, let alone weeks, in quarantine has not been good for my anxiety, and some days I’ve had anxiety attacks, long strings of bad thoughts, and a lot of reflection on where things have gone wrong in my life. All of this was and is exacerbated by a nasty election that left a lingering nastiness that refuses to subside, with frightening precedents set for my country going forward. Other things exacerbated and exacerbate it as well, from personal issues to awful news every week. Disheartening, demoralizing stuff.
Anxiety is different in everyone who may be its host. My anxiety can be a lot of things, but sometimes it can be of the “remember this thing you did?” variety. In many ways, that specific anxiety takes those things and pieces them together, showing you a pattern of sorts. A complete guide to where you went wrong and why you will never succeed in the future and why other terrible things will happen… It is terrifying, it is relentlessly upsetting, it fills you with such regret, and you often can’t come to terms with what happened in the past… You begin to rethink great moments from your past were actually not all that great, and indicative of something wrong… You take minor events that ultimately mean nothing and use them to piece this unappealing puzzle together. You think of other annoying or negative things you did as a child, especially the well-intentioned or innocent actions, as indicators of a general “wrongness”…
This has been affecting me since I graduated college more than two years ago, it is something that has been hitting me every couple of months… It has only increased because of my situation and having little-to-nowhere to go…
I need to talk about some things… I just want to air it all out. I’ve been meaning to since the spring…
If you have suffered from similar events in your life, it would make me very happy if you found a lot to relate to in what’s going to follow. Feel free to pull up a chair.
I pin most of my current problems at a certain year in my life… 2006… Specifically, early 2006…
I was 13 years old, in eighth grade, on my way out of middle school. Middle school was not easy for me. I had already alluded to a chunk of my middle school experience when I reviewed Ralph Breaks The Internet upon its fall 2018 release, because I felt that the titular character’s journey into a world he was unfamiliar with mirrored how I – an invisibly autistic individual – navigated the battlefield that was junior high, and just a more “grown-up” life in general. I was bullied, but not in the way you’d usually expect. No one really physically hurt me or shoved me or did anything like that, aside from one incident. Rather, it was largely verbal. I was laughed at, sneered at, I was told that I was annoying, I was locked out of a room once and laughed at for that, my mother even had to drag an assistant principal because my school had such a joke of a bullying policy. Can you believe that these officials would sit me in a room with the person who thought I was annoying or whatever, and it would be a two-against-one session against me because I couldn’t articulate too well what I was going through? That I was possibly being gaslit? And the person who had a problem with me would use that against me outside of the principal’s office? It was not fun, fellas. Having to deal with a neurotypically-inclined world as an invisibly autistic person wasn’t fun then, and it’s not fun now. Yet despite that, and other bull that I dealt with outside of school, I managed to remain a relatively happy and even creative person. Not really in 6th grade, but more 7th and 8th grade. Albeit a creative person who wasn’t truly unlocking their potential. I went over this more in my retrospective on DreamWorks’ Kung Fu Panda trilogy. See, even if this isn’t about animation, animation is my life. So it somehow relates…
In eighth grade, I was mostly with people who didn’t do that sort of thing, *including* folks who were quite popular and well-liked… and I relished every moment of that. I perhaps was with the cool kids for once? Some of them I’m still in contact with today, some 15 years later, which is quite something! I even reunited with one who moved away, and that was almost by accident! One of my life’s best coincidences. I never rejected my “nerdier” or “weirder” friends in 2005-06, because I naturally just wanted to be with people who wanted to be with me, people who gave me some kind of respect. No matter what would happen, I managed to remain confident in who I was at the time. To be fair, I was kind of an ass at age 13, there was still a lot I needed to reflect on in order to be better, but… Weren’t we all asses in some way or another at age 13? I was the socially unacceptable version of an ass back then.
One friend of mine was an unpredictable case. We hung out, sat together, did things friends did when in school, but sometimes this former friend would say things to me that I found… Well, kind of hurtful. He would say, outright, that I was annoying. Not being annoying in a moment, but actually annoying. One thing that is apparently common in autistic folks is a tendency to infodump, which means to passionately talk on and on about something that is interesting to you when it looks as if you have the other person’s attention. I understand that that can get tiring to a lot of people, especially when you’re 13-14 years old and already dealing with other things. I genuinely think this former friend of mine did have trouble, his own issues and whatnot. He would then get a little more cutting with his remarks, and would say that some of my friends found me annoying, if I remember correctly he implied that they were not really my friends, but pretended be because “they felt sorry for me” or something. He told me one girl “rolled her eyes” whenever I spoke to her, and that he saw it from a few rows up. However he may have worded it back then, it registered to me that maybe those friends of mine deep down thought I was annoying and stupid and weird, and were only leading me on. And this is not counting how he had sometimes treated a close friend of mine, who similarly was unlike most of our classmates, though I suspect his ways of “annoying” people had more to do with his old-fashioned, very “foreigner” European worldview. I don’t know if he is autistic or neurodivergent like I am. I’ll also add that this former friend put down the stories I was writing at the time, some of which are still in the works today and are radically different from what they were back then. In 2005, they were the ramblings and pieces of 13-year-old me, a kooky, socially-backwards kid with an idiosyncratic and not quite complete understanding of the world around me. Of course these stories needed a lot of work! But it did hurt. “If it gets published…” he would say.
One day in the cafeteria, he was acting a certain way for some reason, and I was already irritated about something and what he had said to me up unto that point… I kind of “snapped” in a way, and went to a guidance counselor. I recall asking this person to maybe “keep an eye” whenever they’re (referring to someone else I hung out with at the time) around me and the former friend, but he interpreted that as “put him in detention”… No longer were we friends, and I had a hard time explaining and articulating what had happened. I was in shock. My intentions were the exact opposite of what this counselor did, and once again another indicator of just how backwards the school’s attempts at dealing with this kind of thing were. Perhaps if the counselor didn’t react the way he did, my little “snapping” wouldn’t have lead to anything drastic. I still to this day can’t figure out why it happened, I never told this person “get him in trouble” or even “talk to him”. I recall saying “maybe keep an eye” on him. It was just so quick in and in an unfocused fury… He hated me, that was the end of that. This must’ve been the first time someone ever held a hatred of me, or at least that I knew of.
I should’ve just went about my day instead of venting incoherently to someone I barely ever consulted with…
I still didn’t heed it, though. I still lived my life, though I was indeed upset about what had happened. Perhaps I was just so miffed and so disorganized that day, it came out in a very immature outburst. Perhaps I was on this upward wave, I was finally being respected by a lot of my peers, and people weren’t ribbing me for something… And maybe I felt he – a person I had known since 2nd grade – was bringing me down. Maybe he feared that I was getting too cocky because I was with these more esteemed kids. Maybe I was getting cockier. Maybe he was right that I was annoying him and other people, and I should’ve just listened. Maybe I was a spoiled brat… No different from how I might’ve been in elementary school, if I truly was. Was I? I remember being super-confident back in 2005/06, and acted as if I was above some criticism. Maybe I was so indulged in what was going on and not being jabbed at, that I got a little too self-righteous.
However, this falling out wasn’t what truly made things go south… Before becoming a high schooler, I had made the dire mistake of posting something on a forum. My early experiences with this particular website were also negative, because I didn’t take well to criticism, I didn’t take well to being ignored, and I didn’t take well to other things. Why did I crave this kind of attention and spotlight? When I already had a family that cared for me and some solid friends? What kind of validation did I need? Naturally, I handled things like an obnoxious preteen who was perhaps mentally 3 age-years behind other people who were my age at the time. I actually had posted stuff I was working on back then, which was bad, near-rudimentary, and as expected… it all read like it was written by a hyperactive 5-year-old who downed a six-pack of Red Bull but also by a 12-year-old edgelord with a horrible sense of humor. I was defensive and angry (and even nasty) at the people who reacted negatively to it, but sprinkled in were genuine trolling people and bullies, so I couldn’t differentiate them. I had flashbacks to that former friend telling me that my stories weren’t good. I painted all of these individuals as bad. I paid dearly… This would happen concurrently with my transition into freshman year, and I already dealt with similar ribbing and such in my first few months. I was beginning to think that maybe the majority of my friends didn’t really like me after all, and that that former friend of mine was right. I never pursued those people I was with in eighth grade, I was convinced they faked it. I often blurted out that my personal work, all the stories I had been writing for years, including ones that are in the works now… Sucked. Back then, they certainly did. I didn’t know what made a “watchable” film or TV show, it was just a cuckoo-oblivious version of me coming out in spurts and me trying to piece that babble all together as if it were a “story”. Like I had chugged some [adult swim], some Disney, some random stuff, whatever whim I was on, and then barfed it back up. I should’ve never shared that stuff with that group, and I should’ve never reacted the way I did. Some of the biggest mistakes I made in life were in freshman year. Not committing to classes, especially some important ones? Bigger mistakes. Even my own work to a hit, and the general enthusiasm behind it began to fade…
I still hung on throughout freshman year, but sophomore year was when it really fell apart, because I wasn’t with my close friend anymore and I had truly taken everything to heart. Something bad was festering. I had felt that I was a bad person, and that was that. Instead of reflecting on what I did wrong in a meaningful way, I self-punished myself in such a crass, borderline babyish manner. I had only stopped doing that and having such a horrible outlook because it was making my mother miserable, and I felt that making her (and the rest of my family) upset was worse than what I said on a forum or how I got a friend in trouble. So that began a period where I was relatively anxiety-free. I started a new life in roughly August of 2008, maybe September. It was right around the start of the school year. After being mentally oppressed in a shell, I came out of it, like a still-to-be-developed larvae of sorts. It was a period where I was much happier. I had moved on, though that former friend still hated me and still tried to find ways to make me uncomfortable if I was ever around him, or he’d tell friends of mine how much of a bad person I was for what I did. Right up until graduation even. I haven’t really seen him since…
Yet despite how happy and free I felt in the fall of 2008 and into spring 2009, I regret things I said and did during that time, things I could only chalk up to “I was young and dumb and insecure.” I’ll go over a few of them… I think one of the worst things I ever did back then wasn’t even an attempt at defending myself or getting on somebody, but it was rather a really bad 3-minute “film” I made for a film study class, a class that otherwise helped shape my views on cinema, and helped me improve my own writing and storytelling. Whenever I remind myself of this (no one ever has, only me and my anxiety-riddled brain), it’s so damn embarrassing. I had 3 days or so to make a short film based on a concept our teacher gave to us, I had a partner who wasn’t quite committed to it, and I didn’t take any initiative… I made something really really bad, and it wasn’t like “bad”, it was nothing… Not even the bones to a short film. It makes something like Birdemic look like Citizen Kane. By the way, it doesn’t exist anymore. It only existed back then for a week or so, and that was it. I didn’t have a disc copy burned for me, I erased whatever trace there was of it.
How could I, someone who loves film and writes, let that happen? Why didn’t I commit to this kind of thing? Why didn’t I stay after school and see what I could do to make something? Was I too preoccupied with other assignments? Did I strangely just not care? I did tend have bouts of uncharacteristic behavior at the time. Or was I too sloppy to even make something as *simple* as that?
Well, my teacher still respected me and brushed it off. Some of my classmates brushed it off, too, no big deal, but I could tell that some others weren’t amused and likely viewed me as some idiot. I detected it in indirect and bizarre ways, and that too has kind of stuck with me… It was a taste of people I barely ever talked to not liking me, and at the time I had no idea what I did that was so wrong. This was the kind of thing I had dealt with before, and I *still* deal with it today, people just showing me how much they can’t stand me even though I didn’t do anything to really hurt them or upset them. And on top of that, never fessing up to me, telling me how I wronged them. When talking to and listening to other autistic people, it appears that this is a thing that neurotypicals often do to us invisibly autistic folks. We may come off a certain way that really rubs them wrong, and as such, they express their dislike or even hatred of you… And you’re stuck wondering “What did I do???” And you’re stuck presenting 5,392,318 variables internally… So, that all aside, the second short film project, I actually committed to. I got my good friend during lunch break, we shot scenes, I did all of the editing during study period or lunchtime. I was determined to not make another horrible thing like… That… But I finished it too late, and it wasn’t ever shown to the class. Only my teacher saw it, and he gave me a good grade on it. At the time I was rather happy with it, but looking back on it, parts of it were embarrassingly bad. But at least it was SOMETHING. It also doesn’t exist anymore, so you’ll never see it…
At that age, I was very all over the place. I sometimes committed to things, and sometimes I didn’t. I was almost like a big child, just always trying to be fun and happy-go-lucky, probably an extreme response to the utter sadness and despair I felt throughout sophomore year, it was perhaps a survival tactic… But I overdid it, I think. I have many fond memories of late 2008/early 2009, but like some of the kids these days say… I acted very “cringe” back then. I didn’t live like my peers. Sometimes I went over that close friend’s house, sometimes he came over mine, he was busy. I never really made an effort to go to other friends’ houses for whatever reason, I never really went out with friends, I didn’t own a cellphone until college, ditto a driver’s license. Most of my “out time” was with my parents or relatives, and while it was very fun, I sometimes wonder why I didn’t go whole-hog and actually try to hang out with my peers. Was I afraid of something? Did I think it wasn’t worth pursuing? Was I convinced that they still weren’t really my friends and actually didn’t want me around? Did I fear getting too uncomfortable being away from home like I sometimes am?
So why do I bring up the “film” and my non-committal to certain things circa fall 2008? I sometimes think that’s a problem with me, even to this day. I certainly committed to all of my projects, full-force, when I took up my art degree in college… But 2 years later, I’m a graduate, but I don’t think I’ve done enough. For a while, I made sure that everyday I do something, whether it’s write one of my stories or draw something (anything!), but I feel that I’m not doing enough… And I think that stems from my anxiety, and the various things my anxiety has affected in my decision-making… Namely driving. My anxiety, I feel, mostly stems from just navigating the world as an invisibly autistic person. The bullying, the things I’ve faced then and now, me thinking my ways of growth were wrong, it can be rough. The little “perks” of being invisibly autistic range from people thinking you’re unintelligent, to people thinking you come off as rude, when you aren’t doing anything at all to upset someone. You can even get this attitude from people who know neurodivergent people, or are neurodivergent themselves, as I sometimes have had. Your weird, idiosyncratic ways of going about life, and the unconventional ways you come to solutions (whether they are right or totally wrong) can be a target of ridicule, confusion, anger, and whatnot. You failing to keep up with the cryptic, neurotypical ways of “communication” can be disheartening, you think you are “socially inept” or something. The reality is, and I wouldn’t even realize this until much later in my life… It wasn’t that I was bad or wrong, but rather my ways of thinking are just who I am and how I’m wired in the brain… I, and many other neurodivergents, live in a world that should be for us, but the systems and social norms that people have created have made the world almost strictly for neurotypicals and the able-bodied. A lot of my anxiety stems from just not “doing it right” for so many years, and the consequences that ensued. I had become so afraid of upsetting others by accident, things that are out of my control. It’s part of why I had such a hard time driving, I hate pissing off other drivers when I should be the one telling them to “fuck off!” I can’t control how someone perceives me based on their ignorance of the kind of autistic that I am (informally known as “high-functioning autism”, a term that I think should be retired for good, one that hurts auties like me and other auties alike), but I hadn’t known that for a good 20-or-so years. I knew I was autistic since I was young, but not to that degree… Functioning labels are not good, and they deny you the truth and the compassion that you deserve. Just because you appear “normal” doesn’t mean that you are. They assume you’re like everyone else, and then get irritated when you show that yes, you are “not right” or “socially acceptable”. Like an everyday person going from respectable to doing something you think they wouldn’t have done. In some instance, I could literally misinterpret directions given by someone or be standing in the wrong place… and I’d be treated as if I wrecking-balled a house or committed some kind of crime. People would get so angry. This even happens well into my adult years. I’m just standing here WHAT DID I DO???
Being invisibly autistic like this meant you always had to be on guard.
Recently, I saw a meme that said something to the tune of “you knew an under-funded season one version of me in the past.” I feel that really sums up a lot of my situation in the 2000s. I didn’t grow or function like others, and I was thrown into a world that was not for me. After elementary school, it was like being a domestic farm animal and being thrown into a jungle, with tigers and other creatures ready to gnash you to pieces. Without the tools I needed, or even the guidance to help me fully understand the world around me (my parents could only do so much, ditto teachers working for an ever-so-flawed education system), I had to juggle a lot of things and I did not do it successfully: Be socially acceptable, get good grades, go to this building for six hours and try to be all those things and while also being your natural creative self that only comes out when it can. Me at my best, from roughly 2002-2009? Oh that was in spurts when I was alone. You didn’t see that version of me in public, and if you did (and you’re somehow reading this, hi!), consider yourself lucky. When I was alone and not focusing on a task or worrying about getting into some kind of trouble for merely breathing, I vibed. Vibed, hard. With no pressures or outside world sensory-intruding things, I was on another plane of existence. I’m still like this whenever I’m in the groove. When an autistic like me gets to have that time to shine with no interruptions, holy crap our brains are unstoppable! I couldn’t get that in public at the time… How was I supposed to be creative in school? With projects or my own stuff, even? Combine that with other fears and anxieties… Yeah, you have a cocktail for sloppy performance.
I really think my anxiety, and my OCD, took on the form it is now back in early 2009. If my fear of upsetting others stems from what had happened in 2006/2007, then everything else was finalized in 2009… upon the death of my grandfather. The first half of my junior year in high school was sloppy, but I genuinely think it was a time of healing and becoming happy again. I feel that my grandfather’s death rattled that progress. My grandfather had already fallen gravely ill during sophomore year, and throughout 2008 and into early 2009, it felt as if he was already dead. No recovery was in sight, and unlike the death of my grandparents on my father’s side of the family (whom I only saw on weekends), I witnessed his decline more, was more involved with helping my relatives help him, I visited the hospital to see him multiple times, I was at his house the day he died. This whole event triggered several things…
Made even worse when my sister had bought a kitten to cope with this tragedy. She got a kitten from a cat lady living in the countryside, and the animal was very unhealthy. It felt like the kitten fell apart whenever you would pick him up, he smelled bad, he was sick. My eldest cat didn’t play-fight or scuffle with him, he seemed to be trying to actually kill him. He had to be put into quarantine after a week or so of declining health. Naturally, my brain went into a frenzy. Made worse that the kitten possibly had rabies, and a horrible night at the ER. The kitten had to be put down. It was never really determined why this kitten had the problems that he had, but we always surmised that he was a runt of sorts, and had health issues from the get-go. My sister then bought another cat, who didn’t thankfully didn’t die as a kitten. My eldest cat picked on this new kitten, but didn’t outright assault her the way he did to the sick kitten. Maybe cats know when another cat is weak or dying, and thus feel the need to kill it. My shih tzu/maltese mix, who was 12 at the time, was getting really sick too. Was he going to die, too? Luckily, with the removal of his infected teeth, he went on to live for another four years. Tons of celebrities and well-known people died throughout 2009, from Michael Jackson to Walter Cronkite to even Billy Mays of all people. Naturally, my anxiety went wild once more. All this death! What did it all mean? What was going on?? If you witnessed me personally in the second half of junior year, March-June 2009, this is all very much why I acted so strange and weird in a bad way. I was really not right, my brain was in such a frenzy. Family drama that was going on made this even worse, including a relative who fell into cultish religious beliefs and tried to force them on some of us. I wondered if he was right and that we were all “evil” and not worthy of God. I’m an agnostic today with a willingness to believe in an afterlife, which was a development that sprung from this… But put that all together, and as they say, my mind was going to some truly dark places…
I didn’t have the courage to tell anyone that I was feeling this way, because I was afraid… So for months, I harbored all of these scary feelings. That was a bad summer. Relatives acted funny, I got anxious about their behavior. I was afraid of going down some dark paths, or becoming a “crazy”, that something bad was inevitable. I was making an idiot of myself on social media. I had gotten a Facebook account for the first time, after many years of swearing off having a MySpace account or anything like that. This whole revolving door merry-go-round of bad happenings and tragedies and school pressures made me a mess, but I didn’t devolve into self-hatred or depression like I had done in 2007. I instead did whatever I could to survive, but it was to the point where my grades fell apart once more, and I needed to be talked to. My computer addiction became a real problem, and it’s one I still fight to this day. I then got my act together, clawed through senior year, and graduated. I immediately enrolled into community college, my outlook on life was a lot different. All of those anxieties, all of that magical thinking which had now evolved into intrusive thought… It still happened, but I didn’t heed it as much. I felt free from high school, I felt more complete, I was happy…
But personal and artistic progress was slow, I had become too comfortable, to a fault. I fall back on doing repetitive, comfortable things when I’m afraid or when I feel that I don’t have it in me. That was shaken up once again when my grandmother passed away in the summer of 2011. That same summer, I got my license but later got into an accident, scaring me off from driving for a good while. I also took up summer classes, and outright failed one of them, which really upset me and added to my anxiety. It would continue well into 2012, when I transferred from community college to a state university. The old Kyle’s Animated World blog that I set up in February 2012 was my way of coping, really. Just writing and opining about animated movies, but almost without any direction and way too much self-consciousness. I should’ve spent that time honing my skills and being braver, getting better at driving, and so on. Not grousing endlessly about why the latest DreamWorks movie wasn’t Masterpiece Theatre. I didn’t budge much, and I regret that dearly. I let the most insignificant things bother me. However, I *did* make a big move when I had switched my major from “general studies” to “graphic design” in early 2013. Did I mention how during freshman and sophomore year of high school, I was dissuaded from drawing and making art because someone told me personally that I was not good at it? Yeah, another fun memory nugget from that troubled period… Anyways, I didn’t commit to drawing or getting better at making art. I always figured I’d get ahead on writing, but I had to better myself…
So I did it, I took on an art degree, anxiety/OCD/intrusive thought/etc. be damned. I saw it through, and graduated cum laude 2 1/2 years ago. After a rickety first semester in fall 2013, I put my all into my future art classes, though I think I **still** could’ve done more outside of school… But again, that was impacted by me not driving. I didn’t join groups or things at my university because of that, and feared that my refusal to drive would alienate friends and cause other assorted problems. It already had caused enough problems! Again, that “high functioning” pressure. Oh, if I could go out and socialize enough, then I had no excuse for not driving or needing my folks to give me rides. I got my first job in 2015, when I was turning 23, sad right? My job did help me in many ways, but it also caused a lot of anxiety. Upon graduating, I felt that I fell into a slump… I made lots of personal work between summer 2018 and now, but I feel like I’m still way behind. I see other peoples’ art, I see that people got into the animation industry in their early 20s, people much younger than me are making stuff that I’ve barely even scratched at. People did the things I’m currently doing when they were 10, and it just hurts… My art now is something someone had already mastered as a pre-teen. Why wasn’t *I* doing that in 2004??? Am I never going to be good at what I love doing???
…
2019 was a year of deliberate steps-taking… For one, I changed a lot of my diet and lost some weight, lessening stomach issues that I’ve had for years. Two, I got a new car and began to really commit to driving again. I was driving myself to work, finally! I stayed after to watch movies (I worked at a movie theater), I even made plans with co-workers to see movies and hang out afterwards! I was finally living in the way I should’ve when I was a teen and young adult, rather than retreat to what made me comfortable after school/college classes. Then I wanted a new job, because being in a retail/customer service job, I felt, was too much of a commitment and it was draining me of my creativity and spark. For example, my experiences keeping up with InkTober last year were hard, as were other things. I was ready to make a new leap…
Then COVID-19 came to the United States…
My drive to drive more and get a new job and possibly get up the ladder some more and get closer to the animation industry was spurred by me thinking about where I went wrong in 2018 after graduating… Being in quarantine and not really able to go anywhere and live life to the fullest, do anything, pursue new activities, and having alternating gumption to make things due to anxiety… It has made my anxiety SPIKE.
I continue to think about where I went wrong as a teenager, a young adult, and a post-grad… But I have to remember that I was working my way towards something better before this all happened. It might not have been much, but I was genuinely trying to make my life better. I fear that this current anxiety and bad feeling will demotivate me entirely once this all blows over, but I don’t want this to happen, but the temptation of “admitting” it “will” happen is massive when you have this kind of anxiety. Especially when you are 28 years old and it’s conventional wisdom that you are now over the hill, and that you should’ve had it all together two years ago. I should’ve been in the studio working on a feature film of mine or the TV show I’ve been working on since 2002… TWO THOUSAND AND TWO. But I’m not a has-been, and anxiety can’t drain me for good. Some people don’t get their start in any industry until their 30s, their 40s and 50s even… Now of course, I don’t want to wait THAT long, but it’s not too late and I made big efforts from September to early March. I’m smarter than I used to be, I think I know what some of the problems are and were. I’ve shed a lot of my old attitudes and insecurities. I want to continue that once the world is safe again, not be afraid to take initiative, get involved with more things, use social media less, and get exponentially better at what I do.
It means a lot of unpacking and healing though, and maybe through recognizing what I did wrong and why I did it, I could notice any problem coming up next time… And burst through it…
With that, I leave you with a more recent art piece I did about anxiety… I hope you like it!
