Mental (interlude)
August 2017,
I was attending a small trade school for computer sciences, specifically programming and networking. The school was in the downtown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My first time being on my own, the size and plethora of things to do in the city mesmerizing to my young self, having only ever lived in small towns in the countryside.
Things weren’t so great however, the trade school was not an exemplary form of education, and reflected more of American high school education than that of College level. The classes were short, there were many different classes per day, the homework was piled on. The school enforced a business dress code for “professionalism”, there was only one teacher for each subject. The classroom was small, dry, and always way too hot for the suits we were required to wear. There was no food or cafeteria at the school, so we had to figure out food ourselves somehow, and figure out how to get the money to eat in the first place.
The dorms were small, white rooms with no windows. The bathrooms were shared across the whole floor and rarely seemed to be cleaned well, and each room had a small kitchenette with a sink, fridge and stove. The winter months were harsh in the city, from the downtown dorms to the school the walk took roughly 20 minutes to and back. This included going over one of the rivers and walking over a bridge, where the cold winds traveled across the frozen river in negative degree windchill.
Besides that, it was a time filled with memories. I met some of my closest friends I still have today. Messing around as a bunch of college dorm boys made the whole experience more stomach-able, we played tons of games together, explored the city together, and even all got hired at the same small Noodle Restaurant and practically ran the place together.
The 20 minutes walks gave tons of time for music, which helped me gain my love for experimentation and new types of songs, genres, and artists. One of the major albums I listened to at that time was Chloe Burbank Vol. 1 (An album that doesn’t actually exist, as the songs have been buried by the artist as a scrapped debut album and only a few have surfaced since he became famous. In my opinion, it still remains his best work to today. The song above is related, as it’s one of the only songs to make it to official release)
When I listen to this album, I feel an overwhelming nostalgia hit me. I feel the bite of the cold, the sound of the streets of downtown Pittsburgh, I can remember the route I took everyday now, the faces I’d see, the album to me hits a perfect melancholy note of the mixture of the hard time I was going through and the memories I cherish from that time. A interesting mix and contrast of emotions.
After roughly a year of being at Bradford School, we were called into a general assembly and told that the school was shutting down due to enrollment. Essentially, it was an exit scam, the trade school was never really considered an accredited institution in the first place, it relied on stealing money from young people who were unaware while providing minimum education and amenities. They gave us the option to continue as the last class at the school, but the head teachers had already left to new opportunities and we were stuck with temporary faculty that didn’t even know our subject.
Considering where I was, I consider this one of the lowest points in my life. I was heavily depressed, hated programming and school, my attendance and grades dropped, and I felt trapped. My parents didn’t support me leaving, I had almost no support or people on my side, but I did it anyway. I went home, and worked at a gas station for a year. Life wasn’t getting any better, and I needed to make a change. I searched around for ideas, I played with ideas such as moving to Japan and teaching English, becoming a flight attendant, maybe YouTube? I was desperate for something, and then I landed on going back to school. I was very hesitant, of course, due to my previous experience. Then my life changed forever when I started at Edinboro in the Graphic Design Program.
Throughout the last packet, I think I expressed a tone of doubt and feeling of unsatisfaction in what I was doing. Truth be told, I think that most of those factors came from outside influences that were personally affecting me. There's been a fair bit of struggle with my moms health, my own personal health, coming to terms with the worlds problems, and more to name just a few of the many stresses life puts us through. I think because of that I had a heightened sense of anxiety and stress last month, leading to a low self-esteem that what I was working on was worth it in the end.
I’m calling this packet Interlude, because for me it has been a sort of mental reset, and a moment of breath and calm post-vacation where I feel more stable and ready to take things on. Don’t get me wrong, everything is still on fire on the outside, but at least I feel like I’ve got a little bit more control. I guess I’m gonna dedicate this writing to small stories or details about my life recently or in the past, just to get it all out there and hopefully feel a little better.
Last year before I started here at VCFA I was actually in the hospital for a week due to my gallbladder developing stones which then blocked my liver and pancreas from being able to function. The major attack that almost killed me happened to come the day that I was moving into my new apartment, and I rushed to the hospital. I spent 5 days without being able to eat or even drink water, and it led to a quick surgery getting my gall bladder out.
Since then, it’s been hard to eat the food here. America has a very high affinity to dyes, oils, preservatives, and pesticides that pump out the most produce possible at the cheapest quota available. Unfortunately this sacrifices the quality and healthiness of the food, and most of these chemicals (which are illegal in almost any country with a decent food and drug administration), actively cause me to feel sick since having my surgery.
Because of this It’s been stressful to even eat here, I barely find myself having the time to cook every meal from scratch no matter how much I love to cook, but no matter where we can go to get food I can basically guarantee I’ll be paying for it later. When we went to Denmark, to my surprise, I didn’t have a single attack no matter what I ate. We went to many restaurants in our time there, ate greasy Italian food, steaks, ice cream, fried desserts, and yet I never found myself needing to take medicine once when there.
Is it really such a reality that what we put in the food in America is that bad? How can I even begin to escape that reality, besides moving away to a place like Denmark? The idea that things can get better for us is comforting, however it has both me and my significant other scrambling to figure out how exactly we can escape from here, and how long it will take. The yearn for a better life, where people are treated like fellow humans and taken care of, where the culture is connected and community centric, where we treat the environment with the respect it deserves, where our kids can be taken care of both educationally and physically, and where the food both tastes better and is better for you. From our perspective, America feels like a hell, a prison keeping us from living our best possible lives. Where stress is a constant, and every persons decline around you is the product of a failing system on the brink of collapsing entirely.
So needless to say, we absolutely loved our trip to Denmark, even if it did make us feel desperate for some positive change in our home lives.
I think often about the song Mental by Denzel Curry. The entire album Melt My Eyez See Your Future acts often as a simple and quick mental reset for me, when I feel anxious about something, music can often help me calm and sort through it easier. The soft, instrumental Jazz and Soul of the tracks bring about calmness, and then the harsh hip-hop lyrics chime in with reality, illustrating the details and problems with the world while maintaining a understanding and composure towards those issues.
The album, for Denzel, was a way of processing traumas and facing inner demons through his work. The album was produced and written during the Covid-19 Pandemic, where many people lost their lives to sickness, as well as riots broke out across the country for the Black Lives Matter movement. I can really feel the connection to self reflection and the want to better yourself. When talking about his process of making the album, he talks about the constant comparing yourself to others and what others in the industry are doing, and how he tried to make the album disconnected from that and his own thing, a raw vulnerable piece of his self translated into music. I feel there’s a lot to take away from that, I’m just not quite there yet.
The idea of “imposter syndrome” is really no stranger to graphic designers, I don’t think I’ve ever met a student in undergrad who wasn’t in some way feeling that pressure. To top this off, we then compare ourselves to our peers around us, he’s better at logos, she’s really good at illustration, and it takes a mental tool on our self esteem and ability to create at our 100%. Mentality and Ego can be large factors in ability, if a person doesn’t believe that they are capable of something, they won’t be able to do it. You have to push past those mental roadblocks and challenge yourself to go beyond both your own expectations and others.
For me, my struggle has always been traditional art. I learn mediums such as drawing, painting, pottery, etc. at a much slower rate that digital forms of art, and because of that I always feel the pressure that what I’m doing is a waste and I’m never truly happy with what I’m making. I’ve built up strict walls and defenses as safeguards to protect myself from damaging my own ego, and because of that I am actively hindering and limiting my own artistic freedom. It’s so easy to stay within your “safe space” and not want to venture out. Nobody likes to be in pain, even if pain is a learning experience.
Because my ability in traditional art has always been lesser than others, I find myself comparing myself to those who make similar work very negatively. The lack of ability to do proper thumbnails or sketches, or to create detailed illustrative guides or concepts, makes me feel imposter syndrome the same way. The walls I build up made me attach myself only to digital means of making, where I was proficient and able to learn fast and make good work using type, shapes, motion, or anything outside of sketching. Molding a square into a chair in blender is much easier than sawing and nailing together some planks of wood. I think I need to address this problem and face this inner demon in my time at VCFA.
Something that I’ve decided to pick up, both for my mental and physical health, is Climbing at our local bouldering gym.
Both my girlfriend and I have realized that due to our general lack of activeness and our sedentary lifestyles, that we’ve become pretty out of shape. As people who want to travel a lot, eventually hiking and walking all around the world, we know that we can’t really afford to let ourselves stay unhealthy.
I wanted something that could be a considerable full body workout while simultaneously being engaging and fun, for me, running on a treadmill or lifting weights is just too boring and feels more like a waste of time no matter how good it is for you.
On top of this, finding a physical activity to dedicate time to is great for my mental health, as it lets me go work things out and think for a little. The benefits of having a physical hobby or discipline is clear, but spending some more time together, getting out of the house and away from my office, and using our graphic designer style personalities to problem solve the boulders in the gym should prove to be great for both of us.
We have classes once a week now, and after the first one I have sore muscles that I didn’t even know existed, but I really enjoyed it a lot and actually found out a lot of fellow Alumnx climb there too. (Graphic Designers apparently like climbing a lot? I guess it makes sense due to the problem solving nature, but it still surprised me!)
Considering I’ve been sharing a lot of songs from my past or that mean a lot to me, here’s a song that represents perfectly my days at my old trade school. “why we never host the pregame” has always been a representation of that feeling of nostalgic times with friends in the city, young teenagers being dumb and immature and living together in a small space. I’ve grown a lot since then, and I’ve changed completely from who I was. Back then we didn’t record or document much of our lives together though.
Overall, moving forward I feel a lot better about what I’m going into. I want to be more experimental, more weird, and more fun in what I’m doing. I want to enjoy my work but still find it meaningful and important, and most importantly I want clear the mental walls I’ve built up in my head.
Having a writing session to sit down and sort through all this in my head has helped out a lot, as sometimes it’s hard to collect my thoughts and ideas with my ADHD. I always have a hundred thoughts, ideas, notes, and etc. knocking around in my head at a time, so when I talk in meetings with others I can sometimes get sidetracked easily, or completely misrepresent what I’m thinking.
But you’re the only thing I wanna get better for for real
So I’ll read another book that tells me exactly how to feel
I’ll keep writing my goals down so I have something to read
This list of unchecked boxes is my work of fantasy
I’ll give myself a name unrecognizable on the shelf
So I can go and pass the blame to someone other than myself
And if you find it I hope that you read it through and through
And I hope that it’s as pretty as you
This was my kind of just my mental spew, maybe just a glimpse into who I am, and where I’m at. Hopefully this didn’t bore or feel like I was trying to give out an autobiography, or maybe it wasn’t even enough. I just am glad to sort it though, and now I’m ready to reset back and get back to work.
