College Exit and mental shift

College is done. That’s what I thought about when a series of events led to me making certain decisions that made massive shifts to occur. Let’s start with the reason for the exit….

The coursework and regular double shifts every week eventually started to tire me out after just a year already completed. Around early 2016 after the holiday season I recall needing to take more time off to calm myself since it seemed like I worked with no real rest. I planned time to visit my family twice a year at this time since I had moved the summer of 2013 and that Christmas of 2015 was the last holiday with my mom. In April of 2016 my mom passed away and this started the shift of events. I took necessary time away, which was like two weeks, but immediately went back into my normal schedule at first. This normal schedule failed miserably because of course I just lost a parent but I tried to keep myself moving. Instead of taking time away from college I continued to take my courses and my grades suffered for this. During July of that summer I moved back in with my dad to be closer to family and recall how confusing everything felt moving back to my childhood home. I tried to adjust again to college life since fall admissions was happening soon and planned to re-enroll again to finish more of my courses but as you can guess that backfired. Only taking some fall/winter courses my G.P. A. dropped so low I was put on academic suspension in 2018 and couldn’t return for another year since that was the school’s policy. As you could imagine stress/anxiety took hold and I started to focus on healing myself.

What’s in the box????

That year with no school scheduled allowed me to sit and think about what I truly needed to do with my life at that point. I decided after a year away from study that I would allow myself some time to explore my artist journey. I didn’t return to college even with the suspension lifted and that turned out to be the right choice.

The academic suspension year, as I call it, allowed me to get back to working on new art pieces. The amount of comfort I felt from holding a paintbrush again was amazing since it had been nearly 3 years. I bought myself a drawing tablet I could draw on with a stylus and started working immediately on illustrations. This time of working on all this new work paid off as I started posting regularly again online, even joining an artist community site to feature my work on often. This led to my work being seen and leading to several artist opportunities including magazine publications and showcases. If I had went back to school the amount of work and progress made artistically would have never been posted.

The opportunity came around September 2019 I would have enrolled in late August that same year. Funny how decisions can change some things around. I listed many opportunities in my publications section for reference.

That’s the start to my artist journey but working to create more memories always. Many more stories to share with you so please check in every once and a while. I did learn many valuable lessons from college that I use regularly now but I’m happy I went with my instinct because it turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

College days and urgency

Continuing from the previous post I mentioned how studying for a degree a few years back helped me to realize how precious the creative process is. Those long hours that resulted into more questions than answers when studying about design rather than actually working on something close to a comprehensive design. At this point, about 2 years in, studying was becoming monotonous and I started to crave a painting session.

Just a little insight to that particular time : Around fall of 2014 I enrolled into college and every weekend I was working doubles. Hours ranging from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m and on my days off was strictly class time doing coursework. There was never enough time as my schedule felt so cramped but I was determined to work to achieve some comprehension into what new skills I was learning. At this point I was not working on any paintings in my own free time and that went on until I dropped out. The drop out started with many key factors around 2016 which led to the decision to not return to college. Occurrences in my life just changed my mentality around this time and I became stuck in dreams/aspirations to understand real purpose for everyday life.

Robot in box (2023)

Some time after college I took the extra hours and focused on working on new pieces of art again; this was late 2016 - early 2018. I had switched jobs, no longer working doubles, and started to reimagine a clear path where I wanted to take my work to a more professional outlook. I had many pieces that were filed on my pc for archive reasons and I decided to start posting more work online. The next amount of coincidences led to more opportunities I could have never predicted.

To be continued……….