Long Overdue Update: The Art is Enough

Good grief, it's been a while since I've posted. About anything. I hate it when people do that. It's like starting a story and finding out the last half isn't finished yet.

So what's going on? Well, at the end of 2017 I moved to Waco, Texas. Long story short I got offered a job doing some retail design and decor work and thought "What the heck? I need a change." And I went.

I'm still trying to make art and build my portfolio. And be a grown up and make friends in a new town. *Spoiler alert: none of these things are working out like I thought.* Making art is the thing I most want to do and the thing I end up spending the least amount of time on. Go figure. I'm not going to touch the whole "grown up" issue. And the whole friends thing . . . Let me sum that up by saying that one of my sisters is going around accusing me of being a hermit (I'm still a little unclear as to the bad part about that). And the other one has stopped even pretending to pull her punches and is calling me a judgmental grump.

My brothers have recently been promoted to "Favorite Sibling" status.

YouTube videos are on hiatus. Obviously. I started them with the very nebulous idea that they would be some kind of glimpse into the life of an artist/illustrator. That would be something that I would like to see. But my life isn't really . . . going anywhere interesting. Yet. I don't know. They weren't all that interesting even to me. So I stopped until I could figure out something interesting. And I haven't found anything interesting.

Honestly I've started to worry that I'm using social media in general as some kind of "easy" substitute for real life interactions. I found myself getting a little endorphin high whenever I'd log on to Instagram to "see if anyone had seen my post". Or I'd go through the day feeling mildly depressed and wonder why, only to realize that some post for some unknown reason hadn't generated the response I'd anticipated. I got kind of disgusted with myself. I was being ridiculous. Which I hate. And I asked myself what was so much easier about social media? (Side Note: it's really not easier, in case you haven't already inferred that from the above rant. It's just as rife with conflict and messiness except your mind makes up most of it and then no one ever talks about it.) So I took a break.

The problem is, outside the interwebs, I have no art community. And even that isn't really a community. And is art art when there's no one to see it? (Side Note: yes, it is. But it's also complicated. I'll rant on that another day.) So I got back on Instagram. I don't know if I'll stay there or not. But I need to make art for my own sanity and even the small drive to "have something to post" is better than nothing at all right now.

I'm still a little disgusted with myself.

But sometimes you have to do things even if you don't feel like it, even if your motivations aren't sound or admirable, because it's the right thing to do. Making art is the right thing for me to do. So I'm using a bad crutch to do the thing I need to do. Eventually, hopefully, I won't have to use it because the art is enough.