The Climax and Cost of Accomplishments

Once upon a time, I never finished anything I started. It was easily a painful time of my life for more reasons than that, but more so because I was both angry with and willing to concede that I was full of wasted potential while doing jack shit about it. Focus was not something that came easily and new ideas would lure me away from the old. Abandonment was a pattern I couldn't quite escape, even when it was in my hands.

I'm going to ditch the "What Writers Should Blog About" advice and not attempt to make the whole concept a general one we can all get chummy and 'me too' about. I'm going to dance over some of my own history, but I'm going to apply the evidence of changing that attitude.

The first thing I ever completed wasn't high school; it was getting my GED. I did it so I could get into college. However, the arrangement was difficult since I had a lot of things piling up on me--

• I'd quit working as a pizza cook. No financial independence, but I'd started moderating in share hubs and learning how to operate a computer, including hardware installation. I also ate a ridiculous amount of hotdogs. When you're 19 with the metabolism of a hummingbird, that seems like a foolproof diet.
• I hated riding the bus and was even followed off of it a couple times. I can't tell you how many days I pretended I needed to shop at the grocery store at the bus stop, just to make sure I wasn't being followed home.
• My grandmother was lecturing me about money, which is insulting in most cases, but especially so given she was wealthy and I was quite aware of how to pinch a penny. Enabling was frowned upon, unless you were my mother. Someday, I'll memoir all about that double standard, but I'm not bitter enough to care to dwell on that these days.
• I wanted to enjoy being a 'new adult'. I reunited with a friend I fell out with in high school(a sort of soul mate). When the old college try didn't pan out, she actually got me a job at Subway until I worked for Border's and then worked with her again at Target.
• The counselor that signed me up for courses screwed up my major and basically told me I'd have to 'lock in my position' and take classes which wouldn't credit towards my major (and after having my grandma snap at me for finances, I was mortified of bringing that up). Seriously, government needs to crack down on the deceptive practices colleges are allowed to use. Keep in mind, this was University of Cincinnati, a public college, not a private one. And these are supposed to be the 'good guys'. One girl was in limbo for three years waiting for a coveted space to open up in Photography.

A lot of things that just added up to walking away from a shitty liberal-arts-that-should-have-been-fine-arts degree. I did get a single credit in the elective basic drawing class I took, so guess what it takes to get me to the finish line?

*Back then, I didn't realize that my confusion and moods were related to BPD and ASD. lol Back before these were on the radar, my sort were just kind of the clowns, court jesters, off-color, or eccentric sort. It's not really unfiltered or even brutally honest, but social acceptability tends to fall pretty low on the list of why I should probably not share something. Either way, I like the adjectives over the letter crap, but the letters were a good baseline for understanding what dumb shit triggered me. It took a lot of lost jobs and hospital visits before I realized that I have to approach life Mission Impossible style. I kind of have to risk looking dumb to show I know what I'm doing.*

Me, except setting the alarm with my boobs.

Either way, I learned then that 'winning' isn't really a pattern or a streak. That everything that reaches an end is a battle with time, priorities, self-doubt, even isolation. Again, life started piling on against my aspirations. I started college again in my mid twenties, this time online so I could take the pain in the ass of transportation out and just focus on the work. A few months into it, I had a breakdown (again, memoir-- this one had to do with more toxicity and abuse). Just woke up in the middle of the night thinking I was having an heart attack because it felt purely physical. Even though my BP was in stage 2 hypertension, the culprit was a panic attack. On medication, I just got sicker, which led to another ER visit. I admitted to a nurse I was fantasizing about how I wanted to kill myself. Sure, that wasn't exactly new, but it was the first time I ever told an adult as an adult myself.

I don't know; goodbye, cruel world?

What tipped her off is that I was very matter of fact about it. I was numb to everything, just going through the motions. I signed myself in to psych, spent a week looking for where I left myself. Disassociation is a weird bitch. You're sharply aware in a way, but you kind of feel like you're a placeholder for yourself, holding your seat until you get back. I ate well, drank a lot of juice and watched people. Nosy as fuck, I'll admit, but I wanted to know what put us there and since *I* was a placeholder, things like reputation and self-consciousness were out to lunch too. Essentially, I was more like my childhood self, the me before trauma started its uneven layers, surrounded by more child-adults. Were we weak? Broken? Did we get a scarlet letter now? But no, they were mostly just people pushed too hard on one side of life and couldn't avoid a face plant. Most of us were kind of in a state of shock when we first got there, like when blood is gushing out of your nose and your first instinct is to try to put it back in. I wouldn't say the bullshit little groups we had to go to were actually valuable, but I think ultimately, they knew that too. It didn't really matter if we participated. We were herded around so we could relearn the basics of function. Really, they could have talked about how to make grilled cheese with Elmer's glue, but instead they told us how to breathe and scribbled on a whiteboard. I also remembered I was still a college student, but we'll get to that.

My new friends for the week. Some I'll never forget. I like three-story-verbatim guy and his rivalry with the sniveling angry guy who kept asking if he could call home to ask his wife if she let the dog out. They both wore their shorts and socks too high and I'm convinced this is why they were rivals. Three-Story kept going on about baseball (he was a friendly dude, just a broken record on a nostalgic loop) and the other guy was flipping his shit because he couldn't take the repetition. When my dad and brother came to visit, I whispered to my dad 'shhh, watch this' and repeated the next two sentences of the guy's story when he said them. I'll never forget my dad's face because there are few times my quirkiness can genuinely surprise him. I think it was mostly relief that I'd gotten my weird sense of humor back.

What happens after you lose your shit is often this laser focus on the order of things. I started to say this when I brought up the groups, but it's pretty important to how all people 'work'. It's never more true than after a breakdown. In fact, the morbid aftermath isn't just embarrassment or disorientation, but an underlying sense of relief that the simple things are still there after the chaos blew everything else to shit. I was in reboot with a bunch of people reorganizing their life code. When I ate, it wasn't about enjoyment (even though the food was good)-- I took a bite of everything in a clockwise direction one time. Another time, I worked on eating all of something before eating anything else. It wasn't even because of the limited stimulus or boredom or burn-out; it was more akin to reprogramming ourselves with conscious attention to ritual. There was no indoctrination here. We still had to go it alone, but we didn't have to explain it to our audience-- there was a cathartic understanding that we were all on training wheels. For me, every day was on autopilot until I was able to update. It took a lot of fruit juice and some pretty amazing nurses too, but I graduated from placeholder to person again.

When I found part of myself (again: group activity-- what were you most proud of?), I immediately panicked. I had a big project due in a 3D modeling class and if I failed, I'd have to retake it. They let my dad bring my laptop and watched me in an observation room while I scrambled to turn in a passable final project. I got a B.

Appropriate share time! A room modeled from a source picture. I was in my 20th week of school and finishing my model creation class. Side note: the rest of my models from that class are in my FaceBook photos, so add me and check them out!

I wasn't yet hip to the scam that private schools are, but I don't think you could have stopped me from doing it anyway. My credit was already shot to hell and I didn't think school was even possible. So when I got in and got through a mental breakdown but kept my head above water, I think my intent to fight was just stronger than my vulnerabilities at the time. They sprung on me that I needed to pay several thousand to make up for what financial aid didn't cover. When I got into this school, I made it clear that I had no income so I was devastated. I didn't want to give up! It was one of the few things that made me want to stay alive at the time. Instead of dissolving, I started looking at transferring to a more affordable school. I couldn't find another animation program, but I switched to graphic design. It wasn't exactly a downgrade either since the idea of getting better at digital painting was appealing too (and turned out to be what pushed me into learning how to publish my work).

I worked my ass off and nabbed my associate's degree, but financial aid was dancing on some more deceptive crap. In order to get my AS (which I achieved cum laude honors on), they wanted more money I didn't have. I applied for grants and decided to continue for a bachelor's and this covered it (somehow-- I think that legally they're just allowed to lie to some extent to extort you). Financial aid kept shitting on my doorstep throughout. The stress of busting out my best work was hard enough, but add to that the dreaded phone calls every few months that needed me to maneuver through loopholes to plug their loopholes. I had taken on a part time job even though service jobs never worked out well for me. It still wasn't enough when FA decided to bend me over again shy of that second degree. I wrote an essay writing contest and secured a grant that let me walk away with two degrees (and $60K in debt).

Another personal victory was achieved. Petco was the longest job I've ever had, at 20 months. And I didn't get fired for acting out/insubordination. For the first time, I handed in a formal two weeks notice and got to leave with dignity.

After college, I still wasn't 100 percent what I wanted to do. I had a lot of teachers that asked to use my projects in future classes, graduated with honors-- I knew I was damn good at what I do. It felt... Beyond gratifying to be more than just a job monkey for once in my life. A writing teacher told me I'm organic, deep, funny and faithful to my ideas. I'd already begun reviving the longest story I'd written to date-- sixty pages-- after I found it while rummaging for old word docs prior to rewriting a fairy tale for that class. That book became The Truth about Heroes: One of Many. It became seven books by the time my mom died.

I've already talked about the impact of death over the course of writing those books. I was able to bend my mind around finishing the series at nine books. I'm currently working on my 11th book. If you've been reading my blog, you know how much my mom was a part of the process, so I won't go into that again. I grieve best when I don't let it paralyze me, so stopping was never an option.

Huh, what? You mean these books? How ever did they get on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and digital retailers all over the world? Could it be... sheer stubbornness?

There isn't a turning point to nail down here. Over time, I even stopped imagining what things would look like when done because I stopped believing they would be. I don't regret going to school and it wouldn't have mattered if it were Yale or some rusty shack out of Deliverance-- my instructors and my knowledge are irreplaceable. It taught me how to trick myself out of a pattern of walking away. Because I was so fixated on 'the end' being years away, I was amassing a body of work after each class, finished work, and before I could self-sabotage, it was too late. I couldn't pretend I was destined to flounder because I'd found the mental shortcut, a way to finish by always putting the end out of reach.

The downside here is that my victories are something almost transient, more like an orgasm than a trophy or a tiara I can wear everywhere. In a way, I became a sort of Daenerys, Collector of a Million Titles, a character more about adapting and determination than pride. What I did is something I still fail to connect to at times because it's also a mind-altering drug. I'm addicted to seeing big projects through so the victories pass when the next idea twinkles ahead. I finished things, but what else am I capable of? Again, mobility towards my goals was possible because I always keep a big fat carrot on the end of the stick, but it almost means I am TOO far-sighted creatively. For now, it's enough that I am actively working towards goals, but it does need some work.

I'd be lying if I didn't say the obstacles are there. There are a lot of people that assume what I'm capable of as a woman or a white person (we're unfashionable in identity politics and trends these days) or presume to tell me what I could or should write about. There are people who don't realize that my drawing style is intentional and not because I can't keep up with the trends in realism, that I love exploring ways to incorporate realism into my style, but am still a comic book artist and fucking proud of it. And yes, people swear by one discipline in their career but what makes my talent so healthy now is that I know how to feed it.

Drawing, nom, writing, nom nom, comics, nom nom nom. Notice the one cookie dangling juuuuust out of nom.

The cost of accomplishment is exposure, which creatives are wary of in its many forms. People will either swear you can't do better or can't do worse (AKA you suck). You're naked to this, but once I've broken through my prison, my hell, my tormentors, there's this thick extra layer, air tight and a perfect fit, this layer that de-weaponizes words, silences trolls, tunes me into my purpose. I can take in what I need to realize my vision, to share it, but it doesn't really matter how precious people think their tastes are. It doesn't get to decide if we're worthy of seeing it through.

Get around to reading my work sometime, if you haven't already. I'm learning to be a bit less humble about it. It's a very different creature from my blogs-- I have a lot of fun with fantasy that is worth a try. While I have to admit, it's a dream of mine to write for a video game company some day, I'll stress again that I use THIS medium to ITS benefit-- my books are books, not just the basis of a show, movie or game. They'd have to be reworked into those mediums because I optimized them as books, first and foremost. I know my way around a story. And yes, swearing and sex happens in my adult books, but just like their appearance in my blogs, they're not accidentally there. Them being there at all seems to be 'gratuitous' without exception to some people. On the upside, they're... not really that long. Maybe someday I'll do a page/paragraph count just for the hell of it.

There's a market for me. And one of these days, I'll look for it. I keep saying that, but someday I'll mean it more than the other times.

You know... now, when I think of that stupid interview question 'where will I be five years from now', I can feel a secret smile twitch at my cheeks. Just me, you, and my ceiling... chasing dreams.