Miles traveled, miles to go, my friend.
Miles traveled.
Miles to go.
Back in the first one of these missives I wrote for you, I said this is a long game.
There is no real shortcut to get from “I can sort of art, and I sort of dig it” to “I can make a modest but meaningful living as a visual teller of stories.”
I don’t know what the path to “My doodles paid off my house in the hills, my Benz and my Ex” looks like, but I’m assuming there’s no shortcut there, either. (If there is, hey, I will take your calls.)
So we’re left with the long road.
Work-work-working the days and nights away.
Falling on our faces. A lot.
Spending many more minutes analyzing and taking notes than celebrating whenever we do stick the landing.
And hopefully carrying on a little bit better each time, regardless of how it turns out.
We don’t do it because it’s easy.
We do it because we can’t help ourselves. This is who we are, and we are all probably a touch sick.
It’s all good. There are worse ways to live a life, you know?
That’s maybe easy to forget. I do, sometimes.
I’m a middle-aged guy with glass hands, a notoriously short attention span, a weird style, and probably a bit of a diva complex, attempting to jump-start this new, sexy career from Absolute Zero.
And sometimes, I feel like it’s all moving at a snail’s pace.
So sometimes, I get frustrated.
Here’s what I tell myself, and hopefully, there’ll be a thing you can take away from this, too:
It’s easy to say, “I’m not where I want to be.” Like, really easy.
But maybe it’s more important to think about it as where you are versus where you were.
I am better at this today than I was a year ago.
With far more tools at my disposal.
Work has come my way. Some of it I had to chase down, and some of it found me. None of it is going to buy me a villa on a beach, but it’ll pay my rent.
I also have a much clearer idea of what it is I actually want to do with all of this. (As it turns out, it probably isn’t to board random show after random show for random studio after random studio, and that’s OK.)
And– most importantly– I get to draw and call it a living.
I get to do the exact same thing I did as a kid, every day after school at the kitchen table, and call it a living.
Maybe only barely, but still. Holy sh*t, right?
The current Mentorship has ended. And the next Mentorship has taken its place. I’ve been invited back and I am keen for a second crack at it, so some of you will see me around those parts again.
It’s not the only thing I have planned for the coming year, but it’s a big part of it.
And you’ll continue to see me pop up here in your inboxes, too. So, let’s practice the fine art of falling apart together, shall we?
Cheers,
Damien