F2025: arm hurty

embracing cringe

When I woke up this morning and sat down to drink my coffee, I realized it was December 31st. Where has the year gone? How did we get here? I wonder if this memory loss is a result from not being present, more absorbed inside my mind where I’m coming up with made-up disaster scenarios or replaying past moments on loop. Or maybe this is just a natural consequence of getting older. Or a secret third reason (aliens).

A couple weeks ago I turned 30. The last ten years was fraught with emotional ups and downs and a lot of pervasive feelings of loneliness that I still haven’t necessarily found a solution to. Yet there were also many moments of happiness and joy. I don’t think things get better, I think you just learn how to deal with things better. Like learning how to be patient, learning how to be grateful for things even when there are so many things to feel bitter about, appreciating things while they are still here. A long repetitive process of learning, unlearning, and relearning.

One of the things I had to unlearn and relearn is my relationship with art. I used to enjoy art, you know. Crazy to think about. In recent years, art was just something I do for money. I was so disillusioned from working in the industry that I treated my work like how the industry treats it; expendable assets. I stopped engaging with art entirely, no longer looking at others’ art or going to museums. I stopped painting and listening to music, singing, reading, even watching movies. Day in and day out it was just work work work, and once that’s over, indulging in the finest escapist tricks and techniques until you can’t even tell up from down. You can even see it in my work, the several-year-long stretch where my work felt like I gave up before I even started. As I saw it, art was already fully and totally absorbed by capitalism, and there was no way to wrangle it out of the hands of the bourgeoisie. All art is now a commodity, a product to be purchased for revenue. The most ironic part is that I kept getting work, as if rewarded for thinking this way. I was grateful I still got work, and I never wanted to complain so much, but deep down it all felt very meaningless.

I’ve tried for a long time to recapture my enjoyment for art. But every thing I did, I ended up approaching it with the same mindset I did my assignments. That this had to fulfill a purpose, had to mean something or say something. It had to print-ready, in a standard size for easy framing, marketable for audiences, a contender for awards and recognition. The composition had to be good and the lighting unique. It felt less like creating and more like trying to think of another product to sell, an asset for someone to use. How do I just doodle? How do I just chill tf out? Is this what being an adult is, being angry and bored simultaneously?!?

What finally made me pause and reconsider my approach to art was an accumulation of many factors, the main thing being the development of chronic ulnar tunnel syndrome. Pain that would start from my elbow and would radiate down to my wrist, ring and pinky finger. At first it only affected my drawing arm, but then, from overcompensating with my other arm, both my arms were in pain. For months I would wake up in the middle of the night and find that both my arms had lost sensation and gone completely numb. I worked with braces and couldn’t go to the gym anymore. All of a sudden, what I could do became limited.

The direct cause of the pain was from using a blunt knife in the kitchen, but it was the months that followed that prolonged it and took it from a temporary injury to chronic pain. Unable to reject jobs (because who can reject jobs right now?), having to work on a game with no knowledge on how to do it (resulting in scraping all the progress and restarting again and again), having to continue on with whatever I was doing before because life for poor fucks like us can’t just stop. The way I worked had to change. No longer can I cram 8-10 jobs in one month, or just pull several all-nighters in a row, or work in the most horrendous position on a plane/bus/Amtrak. Ending work at 5 or whatever hour I set for myself had to be strictly honored, not for a work-life balance, but because if I didn’t the pain would flare up.

I realized at this moment that whatever I do from now on needs to actually be important. And so I had to finally ask myself, what is important to me? It’s not editorial illustration, that’s for sure. As much as I enjoy editorial illustration, I am not dealing with a week of pain just to make an image for a NYT OpEd with a mediocre take. I can no longer just give my time away on unpaid projects in hopes that it maybe goes somewhere. If I’m going to be in pain, I would like it to be worth it. And what’s “worth it” to me is either: lots of money, or lots of fun.

So, I started indulging in things that I’ve always wanted to make, but was hesitant to for whatever reason. Stupid anime fanart, weird mechano almost-smut, making my own comics, painting frames from the Sopranos. Being able to indulge in unsavory, unprofessional, very stupid art in some ways revived my love for art. Being able to be silly with friends and make dumb memes reminded me that the whole point of making art isn’t to win awards or get recognition, though it’s a huge plus when those things do happen. Sometimes it’s really just about making anything at all, enjoying the process of doing so, and using it as a medium to connect with others. Making silly drawings to laugh at with your friends, or to draw together to spend time with each other, or to use it as a way to say thank you, I’m thinking of you, I appreciate you. Art can do so much, bring communities together, rally people, tell stories that leave impressions and teach people new ways of thinking. The industry may treat it like nothing more than asset-generation, and in many ways, in this current era, it is, but it would be doing everyone a disservice to believe that that is all it is.

We are often told that greatness is something important and worth striving for, that the end goal of art or just living in general is to be Great. Your LegacyTM, so to speak. If you collect 15 years of awards maybe you’ll get your picture framed in some building in Manhattan, and if you’re lucky you’ll get into their Hall of Fame 150 years from now. These days I’m so hopepilled that I’m starting to think maybe the end goal of art is just to enjoy yourself and connect with others. Of course there are other factors we have to consider, “real life” is challenging and demanding, but I like to think joy is important and something everybody should feel and experience whenever they can.

This quarter I painted a lot, I got a printer, got a tattoo, went to a wedding (so many weddings!!), and spent my birthday in New Jersey. There’s so many exciting things lined up for 2026 already- my very first comic (collaborating with the incredible J. Marshall Smith), zines, a solo show- and I’m so excited to show you all! I hope you all have a wonderful New Years, now lets do this shit!!!!!!!!