The struggle for my rusty dream is enacted in day-to-day life (amongst the tides of mundanity) but like how those days accrue and coalesce into months and years, the struggles coalesce and instead become one's very self.

There are problems that accrued long-ago, which I now find necessary to confront in order to go any further, whether to take another stride in this drawing dream or the life outside these meager pages. Perhaps what follows is tedious, but a clumsy foundation is better than none...

It goes back eight years ago, when a deep melancholy–not the first, but this one distinguished by its all-encompassing nature–welled within me. Along mental cracks premade and weaknesses wildly neglected, it burst and I became acquainted with the newest invention of my mind: a perverse, indulgent sadness that was some time later diagnosed as depression. At first the 'depression' sensation was agonizing and miserable because I was unfamiliar with it, but over time what had at first been lightning pain morphed into a dull slog. It was simple day-to-day reality–alas, nothing is like the first time experience. In retrospect I am surprised how poorly I handled those first cycles of unhappiness, but in retrospect I also somewhat long for the searing sensation of their virgin torment. It was much more invigorating then the dull, daily pallor which later came and even now haunts.

Woe and all that, but in truth seven years and change of unhappiness brought me close to self-destruction, or so I think: after failing a semester of college, not attending classes past January and drawing from Fun with a Pencil in lieu of, I worked an unskilled job August through October (school ending in April) and then quit, spent two months and some weeks in a car by day, pretending to go to my former unskilled job each day. In January I found a place to draw instead of sitting in the car and sometimes walking nearby. Since then, my situation has become halfway righted, but the shadow of these failures and the feelings underlying them still persist...no doubt this stuff is pedestrian to people who know true suffering. The only suffering I know keys me in that I don't know what suffering really is.

Anyhow, that anecdote was an aside more than anything else. The real problem I've identified was that those long years of unhappiness left me unable to feel emotions very well. I'd become, by the sixth and seventh year, very angry and irritable, and to prevent it from showing I became numb to feelings somewhat. In those days I'd hit myself quite often–although not very hard, the harder ones only had me ringing in the ears. I despised myself, the world around and every situation I came into. So numbness and detachment came to be. It was a way to function and a product of the unhappiness, which encouraged it. For a while only anger, irritation and impatience would come. Excitement, pleasure were rare. Sadness the rarest. I'd notice it and wonder, why don't I feel anything?

Very tedious, the point finally arrives: years of unhappiness naturally wrought me a kind of psychological damage and now I struggle to feel emotions. A handful of days ago I mentioned a deep desire to recapture my former ability to think and my suspicions are that emotions are part of that puzzle. Precipitated by last night reflection, my hypothesis is that without feeling unhindered emotions one cannot write, draw, think or live well.

Quickly, peek at another angle in the prism of this misshapen stone: it is easy to reflect on things and identify problems, but taking action is a different affair. I identified this problem nearly a year ago, but my pathetic days have coalesced and still it is unsolved...now, finally I feel I can be this person no longer!

There are other, more straightforward changes to make, to set a standard bedtime at last and set aside a nook of time in every day to draw instead of doing so late at night without schedule. So I ought to do those and practice feeling things.The easy work, the relative banishment of misery and acclimation to daily routine, has been done. Now the hard work begins, except for animating that episode of Sound! Euphonium which is still all but unbegun; the draft of a single background was done at one point...

On display: another 30 minute, 10 30 second pose, 5 1 minute pose, 2 5 minute pose and 1 ten minute pose figure drawings. This figure drawing is poor, but it's a surefire exercise nonetheless. It's important to remember to make every line count, and to supplement figure drawing with longer studies of the figure, in order to understand the structure of the body. Additionally, all the figure drawing done has been thirty minute interval sessions, at the longest. Exploring longer interval sessions would help with studying the body, and are worth exploring in the future–that's the self-critique.

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Spit in the pool of filth that I am and let these obnoxious, overwrought reflections be done. And smile, the night drawn to a close.