(1) If you got a fellowship, that means you're special, so doing your job isn't enough, you actually have to excel, or else you're a freeloader who's thieving from the institution
(2) If you're struggling in any way, you will be encouraged to quit so that they can stop financially supporting a slacker (our assistant program coordinator let me know that my severe anxiety is totally relatable, she gets overwhelmed filling out contracts and scheduling meetings sometime too, but it's no excuse for failing to meet their standards). Your efforts are unimportant if they are not producing results. You are there to be an asset to the university, and what they provide for you (a meager salary, and at least in theory I'm supposed to be able to maintain my sanity) is just a nice bonus.
(3) Evidently I cannot actually be fired? They can stop paying me after five years, or fail me on one of my exams, and I can be subjected to endless ridicule and shame, but I guess that since I can't find a better position, my current advisor will have to deal with me for a while longer. Genuinely don't know if they'll ever let me graduate, but I guess remaining employed for now is *something*.
You'd think phonetics about your own native language would be easier than this... I need a break from studying so gonna get back to some YR song analysis 🤭
How do you not run out of motivation as an artist?
I could’ve just typed it. More or less, I could’ve not drawn anything for the answer at all. But the answer just wouldn’t have any weight on the scale, would it? :’)
I feel like all I do anymore is talk about teaching (but at this point it's pretty much all I do), but today I had one of my adult students tell me he's learned more in 2 days of my class than he has in his entire life of painting, then showed me all the paintings he's been able to go back and fix thanks to my class, so it's nice to know all this work is important to the people I'm working with.
When you get a notification that tacotime posted the next chapter of the water queen at the same time you’re writing the next chapter of your Namuri fic and for a split second you wonder why you even try.
And then you remember that it’s not a competition. It’s not about the views or the praise. At the end of the day we’re all trying to create stories and art for a thing we love because we love to. And doing what I love is more than enough of a reward for me.
I love animating I love drawing I love shading things to be overwhelmingly bright I love making things look cool or pretty I love creating I love animating
I should go to bed, but I'm thinking about stories and fanfics and treating my favorite characters in AUs and whatnots the same way you would treat a stress ball and making OCs and starting small woth a story so I don't end up doing to my brain what Big Anthony did when he used a magic pot to cook pasta for the town without knowing how to properly stop it
I really should go to bed though
Yet I'm watching Bionicle and also realizing how much I shot myself in the ass with being a writer because now I can pojnt things out in shows and movies like "the inciting incident," Chekov's gun, a twist villain, who the love interest is, who dies, the moment everything goes to hell, the lead up to that moment, what kind of ending will be in store and how likely it is to happen, stuff like that
People think writing is so fun until you're cringing at where the story's going rather than how bad the acting is, and I mean that in the least insufferable way possible
You know, I want to one day be one of those fan fic authors that everyone in the Byler community knows about and I can't believe that's my most significant life aspiration.