Trauma's a bitch ...
2018, that was my last post. I've been doing a lot of soul searching the past few years. Life's been hard, but who here hasn't felt the that things have gotten rather tough?
So what the excuse for the absence? Why did I stop drawing) why did I let my comic ROT! Just good old trauma. You know the saying that the grass is always greener on the other side? Well I guess I fell for that old adage. I took a job, closer to home with better pay and seemingly better prospects, and within 18 months it began to eat away at me from within. All my flaws left magnified, my every step under scrutiny. At first you tell yourself to grown up and get on with it, be an adult and learn to cope. But it's taken until now to truly understand that a part of me knew something was wrong and that I was hollowing myself out.
I got pregnant in 2018, had my boy in 2019 which was classified as a traumatic birth. We both nearly died and mainly due to noone hearing my concerns, I knew something was a miss and I was right. I won't get lost in the weeds. Tired and in survival mode I trudged on, went back to work.
Then you spot it, the same pattern, the way the company likes to remove people they don't think are a good fit. No meetings addressing the issue, just cutting their involvement in mainline projects, assigning their work to others, cutting their dept budgets or assigning them unreachable goals and then you see it happening to you, and you KNOW what comes next. It either a 'redudancy' or an off-site sacking followed by a fake ass company wide email about how YOU decided to leave the company to pursue your passions.
I get pulled into a manditory 6 months review meeting to check how I'm doing after coming back from maternity leave, only to be served a redundancy marked the same day as my birthday. Happy birthday to me! 🎉
I saw it coming, but it STILL stung. "It's not you, it's just business" but you know that's not true. These smiling assassins have performed this play by the book to everyone else who wasn't well received or who didn't play ball. But they don't like confrontation, they'd rather the problem just disappeared. They want me to disappear...
Cue COVID!
The chaos, the stress, the fear, the isolation. The world changes, but you're still hurting. The healing doesn't really come. You feel broken and damaged but you have a child to look after, so you're stuck survival mode.
I had not found joy in my creations for sooooo looooooong, and that hurt. The guilt, the anger, the sadness trapped in a loop.
But in the past year or so, I've felt that spark start to ignite again. The path to healing hasn't been straight forward but similar to that of an artist. The wobbly line that climbs upwards so you progress. with leaps and setbacks along the way but the healing is happening and I am starting to recover, I'm starting to feel 'me' again.
Why'd it have to take years? Who knows, but looking back on this blog, my deviantart account, my comic, I'm feeling that enjoy again. That cruel voice in my head quietening. I've lost so much time, or have I? Is this what was needed, this very painful journey or growth? Had that toxic job consume too much unnoticed and this was what was needed to repair? Who knows.
What I do know is that I took a look and decided on what I wanted to be not want people expect. I did the same for my art. The worse part was that I ever let them make me believe my art wasn't good enough. Perhaps I wasn't the right fit, but I and the art was still good.
Getting this out has been healing. And once I hit post it'll feel real. And even if noone reads it, I'll know it out there in the void, it's been aired and I can move on finally and stop dwelling on the past and get on with it all!
If you stuck it out this far, kudos! Give yourself a pat on the back! That was a long read!
