i have returned!

Hello, all! It has been a minute since my last post, which is exactly what I expected would happen. I quickly lost interest in creating blog posts and instead have resorted back to my diary, which in all honesty is much more satisfying that writing a blog post. The act of physically writing my thoughts down is incredibly soothing and makes me slow down a little bit, instead of fighting with my keyboard (it. does this weird thing where it adds periods after every five or six words and it really. pisses me off). Also, I've started to write in cursive which has added a new excitement to journaling. I highly recommend learning how to write in cursive. Once you get comfortable with it it feels like your words are flying out of your brain and down your arm and out of your pen. I've always been frustrated by the different rates that my handwriting and thoughts move; my brain is racing but my hand is dragging. Cursive/script is much quicker (the National Cursive Advocacy Association is paying me millions of dollars to say this).

Anyways- today's post will most likely be a disastrous thought dump. Lots of exciting things have been happening in my personal life, new things with old people and new things with new people, and new places, and new music, and new interests, and new news.

I am feeling likely the most optimistic I have ever felt in my early-adulthood. I have felt quite an extensive amount of uncertainty since graduating high school, and my ambitions have been incredible scattered. To be fair, they still are, and also I think I will always be a generally scattered person. However- this newfound passion that I have for art history and librarianship has provided a wonderful feeling of stability and purpose. I know exactly where I'm going and what I'm doing for at least the next 8 years of my life, and it's amazing. I'm going to be busy and learning new things and connecting with new people and building a foundation for my life.

When I first moved to New York, I scored all of these cool photography gigs, most of them unpaid or dead ends, but they were exciting. I had all of this momentum from making the first big solo move in my life, and I put all of my energy exactly where I needed to put it. And then I burnt out. I blew through my savings in three months, then I got trapped in the cycle of working at a shitty cafe to pay rent, and no longer had any leftover energy to work on photography. And then I started looking down the Tunnel of Freelance, and at the end of the tunnel is the Land of Full Time Freelance, but in order to reach the land you need to trudge down the tunnel via the Service Industry Road. And every time you pick up a photo gig you get a tiny little speed boost towards the end of the tunnel, but it will take years, or forever, to reach the end of the tunnel. Unless you constantly sell yourself on social media or somehow get discovered by someone who wants to hire you full time, your feet turn to stone and you are stuck on the Service Industry Road forever, longingly looking at the distant Land of Full Time Freelance. Currently, I'm standing close enough to the entrance of the tunnel where I can turn around and leave. I was worried about leaving the tunnel at first, but the job market for freelance creatives is just way too terrible right now.

The service industry will always have a huge place in my heart, and I will be a part of it for at least the next 5 years until I finish my master's degree, but I am so very excited to be starting the journey to leave it.

Other than that, I've been writing a lot, worrying about AI (will dive into this in a later post), listening to lots of good music (currently listening to "Vegetable" by Radiohead like 8 times a day), and getting ready for the semester to start next month :-)

Thank you for consuming my stinky pile of word-garbage!