It's been a while since my last post. Hello, to the few of you who read this!
Some life updates: I'm in therapy, and slowly unpacking some life things.
Creatively, I've been foolishly attempting to sketch/thumbnail the rest of my comic before continuing to make pages, too. My justification being that I'd like to try to make a sprint to finish this arc by the end of the year. Will it happen? Who knows. But I'm enjoying the process and it helps to see it all actually going somewhere and slowly wrapping up.
I enjoy the process of watching my characters take over while writing dialogue and seeing their poses and expressions come alive somewhat.
It's odd realizing that I'm getting comfortable and settling into a semi-permanent place.
Nothing in life, be it people places or things are actually permanent. But I've now reached the point where I mostly get to choose how permanent certain aspects of my life are.
I've got a job that will take care of me for life, if I so choose, and I can choose where to live and who I want in my life and what I want to pursue.
After being in so many temporary places and knowing so many temporary people its odd to see the rest of my life stretched out in front of me and knowing I'm in charge of it from this point on.
There's a speech that Toni Morrison gave where she discusses the act of becoming an adult as something you must work toward. "The adulthood that is the span of life before you. The process of becoming one is not inevitable. Its achievement is a difficult beauty, an intensely hard won glory, which commercial forces and cultural vapidity should not be permitted to deprive you of."
For a long time, I dreaded what seemed like an inevitable fate we were all doomed to. That drudgery and hating my job and being saddled with responsibilities that robbed me of friends, hobbies, and interests was what awaited anyone who lived past 23. I thought that responsibility was a curse, but really I'm coming to realize that it's freeing.
With that responsibility comes the luxury of choosing who and what I want to shape myself into. My life until this point has been those in power over me shaping me into what they thought was best. I don't say this as a bad thing. Teachers, parents, and authority figures usually don't look at a child and choose to fuck them up. It usually happens on accident.
But now I have the responsibility (and freedom!) to do the rest of the shaping for myself. How do I choose what to become? What is an adult? I'm going to be thinking about this a lot in the coming years.
Anyway, now that spring is here I'm getting out more. I want to be in the sun again, and have a clean house and eat fresh fruit and go on long walks in the pleasant weather.
And finally, unrelated to the rest of that, I might be getting back into fencing soon! I've missed it since covid struck. I'm way out of shape but knowing that I'm going to be in the area for the next several years at least makes it a bit easier to commit to the hobby again.
Things are looking up! Being alive is good and I need to make the most of it!