for what?

All day I’ve had the feeling you get when you are waiting on big news, but you don’t know when the call will come. Your productivity is total ass because your mind is in hurry up and wait mode. It didn’t help that I was also trying to finish my online shop, which for some reason was like pulling teeth. All the strategies I use to trick my brain out of its inertia were countered by my mind assuming the form of a stubborn 4 year old. She was like Mei from Totoro waiting and waiting and waiting at the bus stop. Usually I can out-patience her but not today. She wouldn’t even tell me what we were waiting for. 

I’ve been trying to figure out how much of the friction I’m experiencing setting up the business stuff is fear, and how much is determining what specifically I’m aiming for. I worry that to make it in such a competitive field, you need to have an innate hunger for a certain career path. Quite often I think about the vidcon panel the trio did in 2019. One question they got was, “what made you want to do comedy?” Danny’s answer was, “Well, I wanted to be a YouTuber, and comedy seemed like the way to do that.” That tracks, looking at the arc of his career – the comedy was always adapted to a viable YouTube strategy, and not vice versa. 

 If you asked me when I was twelve what I wanted to do for a living as an adult, I probably would have said “artist”, but if you pressed me more specifically I wouldn’t have an answer. Do you want to have a painting in a gallery? Do you want to animate for Disney? Do you want to illustrate for magazines or book covers? If I was being honest about what I actually wanted, the answer was none of those. In reality, I just wanted to be the best artist in the room at all times. I wanted to have the skill to draw anything and everything exactly as I saw it in my head, and the creativity to make work that would stop people dead, so they would say “wooooow that’s sick! Honestly you seemed like a boring, shy type of girl, but actually, you are pretty cool.” It all comes back to validation, doesn’t it?

As I was trying to organize my prints, which I`ve had to redo a third time now, I got sucked into drawing rather than sorting. I realized I wanted to share some of this recent work, but nowhere seemed satisfying. Putting my drawings up on a site to get an arbitrary one or two digit number next to a heart icon, in exchange for that art now being used to train ai, or just straight up ripped and put on redbubble? Honestly that sounds as much like throwing it into the void as posting it here. 

 “Why are you making all this?” My friend would ask me. “Really think about it, what’s the point? Are people really gonna buy this? Does it make sense in a museum? Is it interesting to anyone but you? No shade if you just wanna doodle whatever you want, but it sounds like it should be a hobby, not your job.” I really, really resented her saying that, but there was some wisdom in it. When I take the ego out of it, and realize my ability to find professional success is not a direct indictment on my artistic skill, it’s worth considering keeping it a hobby. Not to say I couldn’t still do art markets or work on my comic, but release the pressure for it to someday become a full time income (while leaving open the possibility). It does definitely feel like “losing the game” in some sense. The copium I cling to is that, even the gold medal in that game won’t give me what I’m really looking for –  permission to call myself a “good artist”. At this point, that’s not going to come from getting a commission or selling a few prints, it’s going to come from therapy and shadow work. 

There is still the question of sharing that work in a meaningful way, even if it’s not to sell — every online platform sucks so much butt rn. Maybe the answer is what my internal Mei is waiting on. I’m gunna keep actively looking and trucking along, but I think I’ll let her cook.