2025 06 12
My first term at Gnomon is finally over. I've woken up with some conflicting feelings. But I'll post the planned blog post I had written when I was in a better mood last night, before describing my current feelings:
Okay, update on mental health. I’d say I’m doing pretty good. I’m working out changing a lot of my triggers from negative associations to positive. This term at Gnomon I would say was kind of a failure, but I would say over the course of it I’ve produced some work that is a huge upgrade from everything I’ve done before (unfortunate it took this long to be at a place like this, as I already spent 4 years in art school incredibly frustrated with the lack of education I felt I was getting, but there is literally nothing I can do about undoing that. It was a waste of time, I put myself in prison, there was no reason for it. I gained nothing and it could of never happened. At least I didn't kill myself like I wanted so many times to!). I’m making more strategic plans this next term on how to follow the curriculum closer and produce better work, along with giving myself some time to be a human being and enjoy LA every once in a while. I am feeling very hopeful about where I’m going generally as I write this. I am going to spend some time with friends back in SF for a week in the next two days, but immediately after that is over I’m going to polish some of my final projects and prepare myself for the coming term.
I want to make myself proud, I have never felt like I have earned anything in my life, nor accomplished anything, and this feels horrible. I can’t keep letting the usual triggers get in the way (judgements based on my age and where I’m “at” and what I have “accomplished” being a huge one. In my critique for sculpture, I noticed a significant dip in tone when my instructor asked my age. He told me that when he was 23 and 24, he was already doing a lot of "work". There was hesitation in his voice following it, saying that there is no expiration date, which was an emotional blow to me. The thing is, there's no outthinking it. I have to accept that this is how people will perceive me until I can prove otherwise. I get it though, I don't like to remind myself of my age, because there is expectation that at my age I would be way farther along than I am. But I can't do anything about that, I can only use the days I have in front of me better than I already have been using them.). Less thinking, more doing. I’ll have something to be proud of if I keep acting this way. All of my Gnomon projects this term suffered from a lack of confidence in making decisions on my piece, staying in indecision for too long. I'm never going to let that happen again.
I’m starting to build a positive atmosphere for my life again, I need to stop wallowing in the misery and cynicism. Sure, It’s hard because I’m totally on my own almost all the time which results in these feelings taking over more frequently, plus there's I feel a lot of Reason to feel horrible about the state of things, but if I genuinely want things to get better, which I do, I need to keep reprogramming myself into more positive mental habits. The work will be uncomfortable, though, I can't expect things to be easy. But I don't need to put unnecessary weight of sadness on everything, I can undo all of these years of self-flagellation routines now.
I’m not perfect, my moods change drastically and can be set off by stuff I can’t get over sometimes just through thought. It’s very easy to wallow in my frustration with my life and how much I hate it and feel as if I lost so much I’ll never get back, and that I was smart enough to have done things differently but never did. I need to prove this person and these feelings wrong. I need to reprogram myself to stop letting these feelings take over so easily. Regret and stagnation should not be a constant, I should't be second guessing myself every second of my life anymore.
So...everything above I wrote when feeling oddly positive last night after a total breakdown I had just a few hours before. My emotions change drastically. And this happened once more in the morning as I woke up. In my positive state, I ended up finding some old sources of "motivation" I used to look at when I was in my mid teens, which were some artist biographies and milestones they reached at every age. What is frustrating is that I'm now a year older than some of the milestones I looked at for direction constantly, and feel as If I'm only now just at the start of what these people were doing in their late teens...
As a human being, along with my skills, I feel as if I have my hands in too many baskets, and that I'm still skipping many fundamental steps to consider in the production of Anything. I feel like I take classes that are like, step 13 and then step 85 and then step 3 all at the same time, instead of starting from step 1, then going to step 2, then going to step 3. I feel starting from absolute scratch with my art education is what I need to do in order to start retaining information and make real progress. I would say this goes as well in terms of being a "person." My life up until this point is a series of failures in relation to biting off more than I can chew.
Nobody likes someone who constantly plays the victim, I know I especially don't. I'm going to make sure that when I write these blog posts, that they will be positive going forward, and that I'll also have evidence that I am making progress. My mind is claustrophobic a lot of the times with negative thoughts of myself and expectations of where my life is going, I would say at the moment I still have no hope or idea of what I will be in the future. But in a week, or two, there will be something there that is positive, I'll make myself excited about being alive and continuing to be alive again. I would say that the past 6 or 7 years of my life was a manifestation of all the things I didn't wan't to have happen or become. I let my fears and self-hatred take over anything that was positive, and then made the person I feared of becoming so much when I was 16 the exact person I am now. It's awful, I want to die! And maybe I will...but lets keep going for a few more years, maybe if I keep reprogramming, keep doing instead of thinking, my will to live will return, I will have the things I always wanted, I can be proud to be me and feel like I really earned it for once. I'm in control of my life, how I choose to feel, what I choose to do.
2025 05 29
Finals are pretty stressful, signed up for way too many classes this term out of fear that I somehow had "little time" to improve on the things I was feeling like I lacked beforehand. I need to continue internalizing the patience required to improve on all the areas I'm struggling. I have clear goals for the short term at least now. A lot of the time I have this fear looming over me that deeply "fucked" somehow, or that I'm in a constant race against time itself. Everyone I talk to about this says the feelings aren't based in reality, and I believe them a little. The monkey brain in me feels before thinking in terms of this stuff. Need to strengthen the mental habits to out-think myself from this anxiety more.
2025 05 23
Today I decided to add this page to my neocities page. Not much actually happened today, its finals for the next three at Gnomon and the workload will just continue being as intense as it was for midterms last week. My free time is more limited these days, but that makes me more intentional with my actions.