Being Back

I stumbled upon this old blog post on a blog I don't use anymore and I thought it was nice to see the contrast of how I was feeling when I wrote it. That was more than a year ago and I feel so much more grounded and comfortable and less confused. A year ago, I felt so strange coming back to Pomona after living and going to school in the bay area for four years. 

I was so angry with myself because, creatively, I wasn't doing as much as I thought I'd be doing. At the same time I missed being around my peers, all the wonderful people I met in school and in the bay, and I missed my mentors, my teachers, and friends that motivated me, that gave me so much energy to make work. It was hard because I didn't have anyone that had the same kind of creative drive and energy as the people I was around everyday in school and out of school. 

It's nice to be able to go back on old things in the past and see how much you've changed. I've grown so much from that time, I've met so many new people that have become this support system and I've also learned how to be more self-motivated. I learned that my art will go as far as I want it to go and I'll be happy with it if I just continue to make art on my terms, and if I continue to be honest with art making.

Here's the blog post that I found. 

january 18, 2011

being back.

being back.

being back has been sort of a constant surprise to me. it feels like one of those surprises that you knew about so it wasn’t really a surprise at all but you still wanted to be surprised so you just kicked it out of your mind. you deleted it from your memory so you could feel surprised. yes. my fingers feel like jello, my arms feel light- instead i want the exact opposite. i want to feel how i felt in the photo up there. that was the year when i spent every possible amount of “free-time” in a big room by myself, listening to noise, following the black lines on the white surface until i couldn’t feel my entire body.

i want my hands to hurt again.

i haven’t done what everyone thought i would do. i haven’t been doing what i thought i would be doing. it wasn’t some joke she told us when she said that being out of school and trying to make art on our own was going to be one of the biggest challenges that we will face. except, i always thought i would be the one exception to that. and how i’ve been wrong. 

it feels like the support has been ripped from my backbone, it feels as if no one can relate, but i want to believe so many people go through this when they move away from their support system. i want to believe that this is a phase and as i’m writing this trying to make sense of it, i’m thinking to myself, i can’t be alone, i’m not the only one, i will pull through, i will find my support system, i will continue. 

being back has been a surprise, but it’s a surprise i will no longer ignore.