I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while now but life started to get away from me. The weather lately has not been particularly helpful, nor has my overall health. I’ve been dealing with some pretty significant fatigue issues for years now, and it’s always a bit of a toss up on what will improve it or make it worse. I’ve slowly, achingly, managed to eek out small bits of increases in my reserves. Some of that has been very careful management of diet and exercise(which honestly I wish had more impact than it seems to), medications and vitamins, sleep tracking and adjustment, mindfulness routines, and much else. There is another thing too that’s been helping me significantly in this process, creativity.
I’ve had indications for a long time that the creative process is something intricately tied to my well-being and ability. Many years ago I used to be a professional circus artist. At the time I was deeply immersed in so many different forms of art. I drew, I did music, I trained daily to refine my circus arts, I danced, and plenty else that I probably just can’t remember. During those times I was near the physical peak that I have known in this life. I lived, breathed, slept all for the goal of achieving my dream of living as an artist who inspired others and made the world a better place through my acts. At the time the epitome of that was getting into Cirque Du Soleil as a main act for one of their traveling shows.
Then the fire nation attacked… Ok not really, but allow me the metaphor. A turn occurred and I needed significant healthcare quickly. This was before the ACA in the USA had been passed, which means at the time I had functionally no meaningful healthcare. I certainly couldn’t afford specialist doctors appointments on the meager wages I made busking and traveling around to do various shows in Michigan. I was given a very difficult choice, suffer without healthcare and the severe(likely deadly) consequences of that, or I could abandon my dream of living as an artist and pursue a career in tech in order to survive. There are choices and then there are choices. In my case I chose to survive.
I didn’t abandon my art overnight. I fought desperately to try doing both. However it became quickly apparent that my body couldn’t sustain the effort, and I eventually got quite ill from the attempt. I did manage to do well enough in tech to build a living for myself despite many difficulties, and I got the healthcare I needed. The work took nearly everything I had each day, but I would trickle art projects. But like a lake whose upstream has been dammed and redirected, my work and life as an artist evaporated, dwindled. Brackish creative waters drying up in the heat of mundanity.
Every now and then a new project would come by that would breath life back into me. Taking up DJing, a new drawing style, experimenting with modeling, fashion, makeup, and much else. They were not common or many, but each would help support me through living in the corporate cesspit that is working in technology and eventually infosec. I would rail against the walls that I found myself trapped inside. Each time I felt like I was given the option of “you can stay in your cage or you can leave and starve.” For better or worse my life’s work very well could be described as the persistent attempted escape from corporate living to find something better.
Somewhere in this journey I lost any hope that art could ever be a way that I could make a living. Living as an artist? That is something that only others were allowed to achieve. Ironically enough it had nothing to do with the sense of quality of art, but some mystical quality of circumstances meant that they could survive and follow their muse, but not me. I yearned for freedom and to do more than survive.
Over the years I tried many ways of escape. I tried to become a doctor(twice), I tried becoming a clinical sexologist, I started a couple businesses, and plenty else, but I found myself coming back to that cage time and again. Eventually the art projects became fewer between, and I reached a point of hibernation of just trying to survive. Chasing what pleasures and relief I could find but accepting no dream as mine.
Then VRChat happened. I was introduced to the platform in 2022, and honestly that deserves it’s own post. Simple enough to say that it utterly upended my life for the better. It gave me an avenue for exploring and expressing my creativity technically and emotionally, and I found my dried lake bed suddenly flooded by repeated monsoons. I eventually worked for VRChat and I can’t go much into detail on my experiences here, but I can say that during my time there I finally got to experience what it felt like to be able to be authentically myself in a profession for the first time in my life. My work bridged the technical and the artistic in many ways and I found it profoundly fulfilling, if also challenging to navigate at times.
Then suddenly it was all over, I lost my job there in summer of 2024 as part of the mass layoffs that occurred. My monsoons were gone, and I was left holding the knowledge of what good could feel like, and the despair of going back to what I had been doing. My lake bed began to dry up.
Then I had a whisper of an idea which eventually turned into a shout. What if I took all the knowledge I had gained in tech, in working in VR, in performance and media, and so many other things. What if I took that all and melded it together to attempt to establish myself as a VTuber? I took months reflecting on the potential of whether or not to try, and just as much time figuring out what I would be doing if I did pursue it. Eventually I decided yes I would give it a try in the background of everything else, and I settled on creating ASMR content for people as it’s a balm for so many when they’re hurting.
I’ll be honest that when I started doing it I expected to fail. I genuinely was braced for it to flop, for it to become just another project in the pile of failed experiments. But then something happened, I was good at it. Don’t get me wrong I wasn’t perfect by any means and I made plenty of mistakes, but I had a talent for anticipating what to change and experimenting/tweaking to always optimize and improve. Things grew and kept growing, and I was suddenly on the road to being able to monetize things in a way that I had been cautious to believe in. I felt like I could almost breath again, that the dam may one day be gone. The water was flowing.
Then the cage came crashing down. Life was too out of balance, I couldn’t sustain the activity in the way I had been doing it. I was told I needed to halt everything until things were better. So I did. I held my breath, I stopped the waters, I let everything go still so I could focus on what the essentials. And that is where I am now still. There are things I need to accomplish first that I sometimes wonder/doubt that I will be able to do, but obligated to them none the less. I sometimes let myself dream of life outside the cage.
Also that is where this blog comes in ironically enough. In many ways this blog is life support for my creativity, giving me a chance to keep the waters flowing somehow, sustaining myself in whatever little way I can manage, until maybe I can take on something bigger.
And so that brings us to now. I am in limbo, attempting to keep moving. I have Hope and much else, but it’s hard to make such a change in life when already so tired. Time will tell on where things go. But I know that my life is better for when I can give myself space for my creativity.