So it's been about a year and a half since my last journal post. The car crashes my last journal entry mentioned basically took every positive thing in my life away from me and I went into a serious depression. Well, more than I was already in. I crawled up inside myself and never healed because I was stuck in some seriously toxic surroundings. It took quite a bit of change to get me out and to the point of healing.

I had been going to school in 2010 with designs on Media Arts & Animation. My car wreck in August also wrecked my ability to work more than one day a week for a few months and then my job wouldn't give me my hours back so I couldn't pay for school so I got a whole 2 quarters of school with nothing to show and even more debt without a way to pay for it. Great.

On top of that, my dad really made things more miserable for me. He's always been an asshole but he made me feel worse and worse about myself. Really kicked it into high gear. Finally a violent (vocally, not physically) confrontation got me to move in with my grandma.  I took care of her, worked my stupid bakery job that I hated for one day a week and looked for a full time position without finding anything for awhile.

Since I had quite a bit of free time, I was really amping up my activism for freedom of speech and preventing censorship on the internet. In late January, the day before it ended, I got an email about a scholarship award to attend a media reform conference in Boston. So I whipped up an essay and applied for it. What do you know! I wound up getting it and a free trip to Boston to participate in a National Media Reform Conference. At the same time, one of my internet buddies I've known since high school moved to Boston so I got a free place to stay.

The conference was in April. While there, I found out my friend and I really connected well and we wound up dating without any prior intentions. Kind of. I had started developing feelings the previous fall but ignored it until this happened. I know I have a really bad track record with relationships but bear with me. Since *high school* he and I have known each other. This was actually the first time we had met in person. Before we admitted anything to each other, we were riding the subway train to go somewhere when the train jerked around a corner and I literally fell into his lap. I won a scholarship I applied for on the last day before the deadline the same month he moved to the city the scholarship took me to. This is the plot to a bad rom com right here, people!

A mutual friend of ours got married in June so I came back out for that. While out east for that, it was kind of confirmed that there was really something to our relationship. It took a lot of planning and thankfully I had gotten a job in February so I was able to afford that trip as well as the move across the country. I now live with him and we're 9 months strong!

And get this. I did a lot of hoop jumping and finally got the Colorado School of Mines to release my credits so I got those transferred along with my Colorado Institute of Art credits into the New England Institute of Art. I'm back in school as of this winter semester! My god, it's surreal saying that. I am finally on track with my life again. I'm again going for Media Arts & Animation, with a concentration in Video Game Graphics.

I re-read my old journal entries and they're almost alien to me at this point. It's almost impossible to claw your way out of depression when everything in your life continually smacks you over the head with a tire iron and tries to bury you a little bit further. So many negative things happened to me because of my family, because of things out of my control, because I was stuck and couldn't get help. I feel slightly ridiculous typing all of this out when I've been gone from dA for so long and the last time was just a brief check in as well. All of my momentum as an artist was completely lost; I had so many problems to face that that issue got left by the wayside.

In short... I am now in a positive environment with someone who truly loves me. I am in an environment where I can learn and seeing people whose artwork is better than mine inspires me to try harder and get better as opposed to give up. I haven't really fully typed this out so I'm kind of tearing up writing all this and I left so much out. I just want to thank the cosmic powers that be for giving me the opportunities to get to this point and I want to thank anyone reading this for doing so.

<3