things are turning - 18/09/24
I think I'm at a turning point in my life, for the better, I hope.
Yesterday I opened up and talked to my mom and one of her friends about what troubles me and why. To sum it up, I'm not sure that I care
enough about programming as a job to search for a contract that will probably have me move far away from my hometown, and I also don't have
the financial means to keep going to that school without a contract since it'll be far too expensive.
My mom pushed me to talk to the general practitioner, to at least get him to justify my absence from school for a couple of days, in short he
is concerned that if I continue to slip like this, I may spiral into a full-blown depression, and asked me to consider: seeing a therapist,
trying medication and to think about what I want to do now (Stay the course or do something else).
Moving on, I want to talk about about, well, moving on.
From middle-school to high-school, I actually wanted to be an artist, but I quit due to two main factors:
I didn't actually have or maintain much of a contact with fellow artists or mentors, leading me to be quite self-critical and stuck in my
own head. For that, there's no magic shortcut, I'll just have to learn to actually connect with other people without too much fear.
And the other reason is that I didn't believe my intentions were "pure", that is to say, I initially started drawing to impress the people
around me, familly and friends, and that I couldn't really call myself an artist if I wanted validation from others, or for other people to
like my work. Of course this is absurd, and it implies that people who do commissions are somehow not real artists, but that's what a lack of
self-worth does to a mfer.
I want to take an honest shot at it again.
Of course, I will have to think about the specifics, my mom wants me to look up art schools, but even assuming they take people without
high-school diplomas, I'll still have to build up a sufficiently impressive portfolio. In the meantime, I'll try to get a good grasp of the
basics again, and for that I'll probably go through Radiorunner's Curriculum for the
solo artist, which contains a bunch of online resources and exercises to be done in set amounts of time, which will be useful since I'll
need some amount of structure. Of course I won't just be grinding lessons, I'll try to have fun and do personal projects. I shouldn't also
forget to seek out peers both online and offline.
In the meanwhile, I'm also working on the non-rambly essay, at the moment I'm trying to figure out the general outline, and I've also done a
small first draft for the intro paragraph. Most importantly I'm trying to figure out what the actual point of it is gonna be, because I don't
want this to be me whining about how technology ruined my life and how helpless I am, I want to actually figure out a way to have a more
positive relationship with online creations.
That's all for now, peace.