"where."

published September 4, 2025

This is a weird artwork compared to usual. i been going through some stuffs....

I just felt like drawing something, since I've been taking a break from "the usual" today. The usual being playing the same single video game every single fucking day for 3-4 hours per day like a fucking lunatic. Because, even though fall semester's ongoing, I'm actually taking a break from school for the next few months, which is a whole trainwreck that's WAY too big and personal for me to break down in general, much less in a blog post to strangers and friends and demi-strangers online. But I'll try to sneak in little tidbits in as I attempt to blather on about this post's particular artwork.

The part where I blather on about my artwork

So I really wanted to draw something since it's been a fucking eternity since the last time I drew something this big and elaborate or whatever. And I really wanted to draw a night scene. I've been enjoying nights in Pokémon Platinum (FANTASTIC game btw go play it), and also nights in the real-world. It's weird that night can feel so different from the daytime. Which is probably a weird thing to say, but I can explain I promise I swear 😳💦

Ok like, I'm going to assume everyone closes their blinds/curtains and turns on their indoor lights once it gets dark, right? I sure hope you do 🤨 I don't leave the house much lately, and so, when I really think about it, I never really get to experience night. Seeing the blue sky and clouds and stuff during the day is a regular experience, but to leave the blinds open and the lights shut off as light turns to dark, and as the sky turns dark blue and then black, and as the light coming from outside darkens to the same poignant color...to just allow that change to happen, instead of interrupting it with blinds and lights, is a whole different feeling.

So I wanna draw that, right? The idea I initially had in my head, this vague initial idea, was to have a cabin or smthn in the bottom-right corner of the drawing, with someone relaxed-ly sitting/leaning over a railing and looking out at a twilight sky. But...something kinda felt wrong about that. I'm always drawing figures. I wanted to try doing something different. But at the same time, drawing just a landscape felt...kind of pretentious of me, or smthn?? Like, lots of big famous painters make landscapes, but is that really my thing? It just felt weird. So I figured I want there to be a person, but they've gotta be insignificant enough that the surrounding landscape outweighs them, creating that balance I want.

Then I started roughing out the mountains and stuff. I had a cool idea for how I wanted to color them, and wanted to try out my idea to see if would get me the effect I wanted. If you take a peek at the bottom-left of this older artwork, you'll see a little island with shrubbery and stuff, with this two-tone kind of lighting. I made a second attempt at doing lighting of terrain in this artwork, but it ended up being WAY off the mark, and I think that's because I put in too many colors. So I thought I had this landscape-shading style figured out—a method that works consistently in a variety of situations, that fits my style, and that I like—and sure enough, it turned out how I wanted it to 😁

Phew, what a digression...sorry, you'll probably be experiencing a lot of those in these blog posts of mine 😓 Though I mean, I'm just glad if you read at least a few paragraphs, so if you've actually made it this far...I salute you 🫡 Anyways...where was I?

The part where things get a bit personal? Slightly? Maybe? 🤷🏽‍♂️

Right, roughing stuff out. Doing the cliffs and mountains was all good, but where would I put that figure I wanted? A cabin felt too weird, it's not minimal enough and feels like it'd probably attract too much attention away from the landscape. So I went with something extra-small, and also isolated: a boat. I wanted to put a river in between all these mountains, so...I did that. And what's interesting about it is that, because this is a night scene, the river is absolutely pitch-black. The only color in it comes from these little ripples that reflect the moon, and also this tiny lantern that's sitting on the boat.

And...that's where this kind of became a feelings drawing. "Feelings drawings" are something I haven't done for many, MANY years, just because I was tired of baring my every thought and emotion to the Internet void, and wanted to actually draw interesting things outside of myself. Feelings drawings used to be something I did to try to make myself "feel better" about the anxiety disorder I was struggling with back then. It didn't really have the intended effect though, I had a much more limited understanding of what a "coping mechanism" is and so I didn't know that this wasn't supposed to somehow magically cure me of my feelings.

High school me was a stupid, stupid fucking idiot for that. Dum-dum high school me rationalized a whole bunch of complicated ideas that could fit together the things I wanted to believe in—some things good, but also some things poisonous specifically to myself—with the desperation to feel better that I was concealing from myself because I thought strength meant holding out on all your personal feelings so you can live for the sake of other people. I made up all that in my head, trying to follow a faith verbatim while also doing the clearly-right thing of seeing what's right in front of me with my own eyes, mixing it all up with my anxiety-brain absolutist thinking...and I thought it meant I had "complex world views". Foolish, stupid me. I was nowhere close. Even now, I'm still only climbing a few steps up that ladder at a time. Back then, I was really only just getting started, and I had no clue because I was trying to understand things that I'd never let myself FEEL first-hand. There was nothing real there, and I had convinced myself for sure that there didn't need to be. That...was a long time ago. I was a fool back then, yeah....

Diversion #2!!! However shall I get this rambling train back on its tracks, lemme see.... See, is this not pretentious?? Please let me know if this is pretentious. Use the damn comments section. (It's the green thing with the speech bubble background on the right-hand side of the page. On mobile, press the yellow arrow button in the upper-right corner.)

Yes, feelings and whatnot. Been going through a lot of them. What does that have to do with this artwork? Right...the boat. A person in a boat all by themselves on the water. Distant from safety, the marginal threat of capsizing or drowning in the surrounding waters ever-present...yet, the boat rocking...somehow, it feels simultaneously threatening and soothing. It reminds you that you're being pushed around by even the slightest ripples in the water, that if ripples were to increase then you'd be naught but at their mercy...yet, they also rock you to sleep, like a rocking chair or a swing. I feel like this could describe either a toxic parent-child relationship or "radical trust" or whatever, but tbh...what are the odds of a boat just straight-up flipping over like that in gentle, near-still waters?? Surely only a paranoid fool would feel threatened by ripples. Though both have water and waves in them, a river is not an ocean. Ripples are not riptides, you could say (but that's cringe, don't say that).

And so, as I was drawing the tiny little boat with its even-tinier lantern, I unexpectedly felt like it paralleled this limbo I'm in right now. For context, my second semester of college was...a domino effect of disasters, failing grades and MASSIVE wasted expenses, the consequences so large that they felt impossible to comprehend, what the fuck have I done I'm a fucking unforgivable BASTARD what the FUCK IS WRONG WITH ME. And until I finally got to see a therapist, I was stuck with people who could, at worst, not even begin to comprehend how I was feeling, as "supportive" as they were trying to be. It was awful. But that was a decent while ago. I'm set to return to school next spring. As for now...now I am here...in between two springs...in between where I was and where I want to be...and there are specific things I need to do to get where I need to be, but I barely understand them, and I just wonder if I'll really be able to make it in time, to be better in time. I have months to do things on my own terms, and really understand the extent of what I can do, what I can control, and remember how much power I really have to accomplish the things I want to accomplish. But above all that...I think I also have to remember what I really want.

And so, I find myself on steady ground, the steadiest I've been on in a while...and yet, there's still the faintest of ripples underneath. Like one of those things you see in videos, where there's dirt and mud is resting on top of water, hiding it, but if you were to walk on it you would absolutely still feel and see the ground beneath you waving and shaking, perhaps even momentarily breaking to reveal the liquid underneath.

I suppose, if you look at this whole ripples metaphor from a different angle it's kind of what anxiety is like, too. Ripples are not riptides (I am cringe, kill me /s), but even if you think this logically and objectively, the feeling of extreme fear takes precedence, because in truth we are all bags of emotions and not rigid machines that feel nothing. I can recall the feeling of being torn between what I wanted to be thinking, and what the extreme anxiety was so desperately BEGGING me to believe, and feeling like I must be insane, fearing myself and believing that I was in a state where every decision I made was a coin flip between a good, reasonable outcome and a bad, unreasonable outcome, and the coin was rigged against me every single time (even though this doesn't even have anything to do with coins in the first place). I am VERY glad that I am in a MUCH better place now.

But despite that, I now know that I've still got a bit further to go. Actually, even since high school, I fantasized about taking a gap year before diving straight into college. So maybe high school me did have the right idea, but got shut down because I had these ideas that I had to do this and this and this to be "responsible", and that if I'm gonna become an adult I have to "get real", whatever the goddamn fuck that means. Now, I have what I'd always been wanting deep down, and I know not only that I wanted it but that I NEED it. And that I DESERVE it. I didn't deserve to rush myself straight back into the miserable grind I thought I was expected to go through as soon as I "felt better". Not until I understood what works for me.

Sometimes I think about how much I was lacking before, and how much support I have now, and think "I must be privileged." I feel like the correct response should be to take what I can get and appreciate what I have and stuff, but I just can't help but feel ashamed by the fact, and I don't know exactly why, but.... There are people who can't afford therapy even if they want it, even if they need it (which let's be honest is like 90% of people). There are people who don't even KNOW they need it, who are probably cranking their way through life believing that the "big questions" are just sappy nonsense. Which, yeah, saying all this makes me sound SUPER uppity. And I'd rather die (this is hyperbole, please do not ever die) before I become a "spoiled brat" type of person. It's not like I'm even qualified to say anything at all about other people's lives, I hardly know that many people that deeply and personally. This blog post has already turned into an absolute rambling mess, and it's fucking midnight of the day after I meant to publish this goddamn post, so everything I'm saying has probably just become scattered and incomprehensible now. But seriously. I genuinely hope that everybody can have the opportunity to be supported like this, to have a therapist in their corner. We all deserve it. We're all worth it.

And that's how I turned my silly little drawing into a metaphor for my personal life that no one will ever understand 😄 I was gonna say something about the moon reflection and the lantern reflection, and how this big natural object is indirectly touching this small man-made object, something something therapy. But I've said enough, and none of it makes sense anyways probably. I wouldn't be surprised, it's fucking past midnight, and I think I'm coming down with something, so I need to FUCKING SLEEP AAAAAAAAAAAA—

Oh yeah, I'm doing sketches and stuff!!! So now that I've satisfied myself with this "different thing", I'll probably get back to working on those sketch ideas I have. So that's something to look forward to. I'll drop a sneak peek here~