It hasn’t been a week for drawing anything. Too much on my mind, I suppose. I’ve been looking for a job, i.e. full-time & salaried—down in the London area. I’ve been doing same locally for ages (this area sadly being of one of the country’s darkest & deepest pits jobs-wise), being that the lack of stability of freelancing has certainly caused me problems—and a lot of other people, during the recession, as far as I can tell. But, I thought, if I’m investing so much time into this, why am I looking round here? I don’t like it round here.
Well, yes, down south was littered with bad judgement calls last time. I messed-up repeatedly as far as places to live were concerned, and my mom’s death was still affecting my morale. It went badly. But in actual fact, I didn’t want to leave. It just became the only ‘sensible’ option under the circumstances. Even at that, the experience left me shattered enough to ask my GP for anti-depressants. They helped a bit for a while, but I stopped taking them back in January because they had clearly outlived their use. Doing so hasn’t left me in a worse mood, at any rate. Perhaps a touch better generally, once withdrawal had passed.
When I went to London in 2006, this was actually a pseudo pay-off on plotting to do so for ten years! But it was the wrong time. The first place I got down there was wrong; an expensive, two-bedroom house I had no business renting unless I had a rock-solid sharing arrangement sorted. I didn’t, and I didn’t find one. The four months that followed in Brighton were beyond abysmal (this is a place I still say is nice to visit—have no interest in living there), mostly due to horrible flat & then getting glandular fever. After that, the writing was on the wall.
And yet… if I wade into the dreadful times and pick out the decent or actually really good bits—it still had some, in spite of everything. Whereas, round here? Nope, no good times at all (meeting Tori Amos last September would be the sole exception). Unless I get away from here for a while. And I haven’t been outside the Brum area for 21 months now, dammit.
I guess all this means it’s a question of doing things right, and not being in a grief-stricken frame of mind kinda helps. The first thing is full-time employment. So I’m working on that pretty hard.
Too hard, I guess, to think about comics stuff ‘for fun’. But I might find myself in the right head space shortly. Stay tuned, my legion of adoring fans!