On the Road to Somewhere, Part 1

I've been doing much mulling over the past few months, trying to figure out who I am as a creative individual, what that means for a career and how do I carve some form of path for myself. There have been some major roadblocks, some that are purely my fault for letting fear hold me back, and others that were completely out of my control. This is the first part of my thoughts regarding this, and I'll be back on Monday with the second.

I left my last full-time job four years ago now, with the aim of leaving the world of web design and development behind and moving solely into graphic design and illustration. It wasn’t until this past summer that I actually really took more than a baby step in this direction.

For almost three years I kept taking the easy road. Illustration was something I loved to do, but I wasn’t very good; I had barely drawn something since high school. I was a little more confident with graphic design as it more closely related to web design, but still I was at best an intermediate; good but nothing special. Due to my fear of failure, rather than do the hard work to improve my abilities and try to become what I wished, I kept accepting web design contract after contract.

I earned a good living, but I didn’t enjoy the work. I had thought that if I kept it on a few days a week, then the rest of the time I could do the training I desperately needed to change careers. Good intentions often don’t work out. The days I had hoped to spend learning, I ended up doing work for web design clients, even though they usually weren’t time sensitive. Or even learning new things in the world of web design, as I was coming from a higher level of experience compared to where I was with illustration and graphic design. The times when I did have time to spend, I ended up feeling too tired and deflated to do any learning, or I felt like I was grasping at straws and had no idea of what path I needed to follow to get where I wanted. I always had an excuse to do the easy work or little at all rather than force myself to face the hard tasks. I even used the fact that I was making enough money to tell myself it was okay to take a day off rather than working towards my goal.

If I was going to stop using web design as a crutch, I knew I had to do something drastic.

Cut What You Can’t Untie

So last summer I stopped taking on any web work. I told any clients I worked with that after the current projects we were working on, I would not be taking on anything new. I updated my online profiles and portfolio site to put the web behind me, and strike out as an illustrator and graphic designer in training. I stopped paying attention to new developments in the world of web so that I would quickly find myself out-of-date in that realm, making it harder for me to dip back in as time went on.

With the money I had made and saved over the past few years, and support from my partner, I bought myself some time to just focus on learning and practicing.

So I finally started properly, three years after I wanted to. I produced piece after piece of poor work. I would get despondent over my lack of talent, before pulling myself up again as I knew the concept we think of as talent is nothing other than hard work, and thousands of hours of it. Almost any one can do anything; the difference is those with the ability to do something love it so much that they are willing to spent a great amount of time and effort to get good. Of course what I was producing was crap. I still hadn’t put in the hours.

So I kept trying. And things were going well. My skills were shaky, but they were becoming honed.

And then I had three months stolen from me.

Moving down the path, steadily until …

Everything on Hold

I woke up one day at the start of August and fell out of bed. I couldn’t travel around my flat without walking into a wall. I couldn’t go out without a chaperone, and I would get tired very quickly from any effort. I rarely got a chance to do anything other than sit in the house. Talking could even be a difficult task; I would confuse my words and lose concentration very quickly. I slept a lot. Even reading could be too tiring a task. Anything that required hand-eye coordination went right out the window. I couldn’t write properly, let alone draw. Using a computer and mouse, it took me three tries to hit something onscreen. The only thing I could use with reasonable ability was my iPad as things were much larger and I could use my fingers.

Vertigo. Oh, it’s horrid. How a viral infection in your ear that has gone bad can affect one.

After a bit, I could produce a few simple things on the computer, such as several of the products in my Etsy store. But those three months still feel like a lost time for me.

And suddenly, over the period of a week, I improved suddenly and greatly. My brain was finally able to deal with the fact my body was unbalanced. I’m still not perfect (it can take up to a year to fully heal); the hearing in my right ear is not up to the power of my left, I still sometimes get a wave of dizziness, or tire quickly, as my brain is essentially having to work harder than normal even at everyday tasks. But I have control over my coordination, and an MRI scan seems to show that everything is okay with my brain and inner ear (though I still have to see a neurologist and another appointment with my ENT doctor).

But those three months did give me time to think, and a new prospective on things. And time to miss what I had been doing.

And there is a good stopping point. This is mostly a little exercise to get this train of thoughts out of my head and onto paper, but if you read what I have so far, thank you! Maybe it will help someone out there who is somewhere down the same path as I am.

The photos used in this post were taking by me during a rather cold and foggy November
trip to Paris.
I’ll hopefully be sharing more of these soon