This past year has been interesting for me. I have went through a mountain of changes and have had to accept a lot of things about myself. Some of those things I’m still working on trying to accept.
I spent more years than I should have working at a place that was not good for me. The money was good, but honestly not good enough for what I was putting myself through. I wasn’t myself for more years of my life than I would like to admit. I had put so much focus on this one aspect of my life that I couldn’t be there for those that needed me. I was becoming an angry and hateful person. And most of that anger and hate was directed towards myself. I was becoming a self-destructive mess. I’m still not fully back but I’m getting there.
So after leaving that toxic lifestyle I had to take some big steps and risks. Risks that I’m still not 100% sure if they have paid off. What I will say is that without our friends Christian and Hollie, none of the changes that we made would have been possible. I cannot express enough how helpful and amazing they both have been towards Nicole and I. I hope they both know how much I love them and appreciate everything they have done.
But like I said, I wasn’t sure if the changes I had made had paid off. I wasn’t sure if I had made the right decision. Covid had created a hostile environment in every aspect of all of our lives. Was I projecting a lot of the anger and depression from that onto my job and living situation? I’d like to think that isn’t true but I can say that maybe Covid was the final push.
Nicole and I moved in with Hollie and Christian at the end of last October and I started a new job. Things were far from perfect but the transition was in effect. The biggest obstacle I had to deal with was that my new job was in SC. This created a long commute daily and pulled a lot of time away from me each day. The other obstacle was myself. What am I now? What do I do?
One consistent thing that has been eating at me over the past 10 years is that there has always been this part of me that wants to write and my interest in that area has always leaned towards comic books. This urge came back yet again early 2020. I had worked on a few scripts and drafts in my very limited free time and I still have them but nothing will probably ever come of those. Once I moved I started working on a new story. A very personal story that I am still working on to this day. It’s a hard story to write but one that I feel like I have to finish. It’s became a way of digging deep inside myself and confronting the ugliest aspects of who I am.
Another thing I needed to focus on with myself was my passion in life. Finding the passion I once had for the things that I loved. And letting things go that I no longer had passion for. Burn Out is a very real thing and it’s very hard to repair. You like to think that once you have eliminated the very thing that caused you to be burnt out, you will feel refreshed and all that love you used to have for other things would just come back. It doesn’t work like that. Or at least, it didn’t for me. I still had that dark hole deep inside me that was eating me alive. So at first, I just let myself be distracted. I was laying in bed and either playing video games or watching trashy tv shows or movies all day. I was spending unhealthy amounts of time on twitter just reading nonsense and letting the distraction fill the void. It was keeping me from writing that story.
The need for constant distraction then pulled me in a very interesting direction. I started watching True Crime stories on Youtube and in-depth reviews and analysis of movies and comics. And those two things, strangely enough, started to give me a sense of motivation to write again and to get back to working on that story. On that long drive to and from work I started listening to podcast that covered similar things. Then I started listening to podcast that were used as a story-telling method and this really started to stimulate those creative juices again. Slowly, I started to feel myself pull out of that burnt out feeling. I bought a pack of notebooks and started filling them up with ideas and short first drafts of stories. It has been a very slow process but I feel like I’m starting to be myself again. Some days are better than others. Some days are so bad and I don’t even feel like I have made any changes. But I know that is not true.
Nicole and I were hit with a lot of curve balls this year as well while trying to adapt to these changes. We both had Covid earlier in the year. Two major car issues came up that cost us a good chunk of money. And then, the biggest of all of those, we almost lost Shibata. We were told he had to have surgery or he was going to die probably within the week. This surgery would cost 4 grand. Well, I’m happy to say that he is laying right next to me as I write this, sleeping away. A huge scar going down his chest and my bank account 4 grand lighter than before. It is here that I would like to say, without my friend’s Tash and Greg staying in constant connection with me and being amazing people, this year would have been a lot harder to take on. So, thank you guys so much.
So, to get back to the main point of all of this, what is the purpose of this newsletter? One thing I can promise you is that it’s not going to be long winded, self-reflective nonsense as this post has been. I wanted to write this as a sort of introduction and some perspective on what I am looking to gain from this and where I’m coming from. I need to get connected again with the outside world. I want to share my thoughts and opinions on things and possibly open up people to new things that they have never read or watched before. This newsletter will probably focus more on comics but at times I will probably address movies that I really love. I feel like I could go on for hours on the movie “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”. I’m looking into creating a series of essays where I ramble about those things I love. Those things that I have a passion for.
I also hope that creating a newsletter like this will be a good exercise in getting me into writing more often. Enough to where it will push me to finish that graphic novel I’m working on. I’m not sure how yet, but I would like to try to self-publish it sometime next year. But there are a lot of steps between then and now and that may or may not ever happen.
Also, I would like to note that I have not made a decision on if I’m going to charge for certain aspects of this newsletter yet. As of right now that’s not going to happen and any post I ever make that’s like this, or something that is an update on my book or anything random like that, that stuff will always be free. Maybe later I might add a charge feature on the essays themselves but at this moment that isn’t happening. I need to prove to myself that I can be consistent at this before I make that decision.
I’m currently working on an analysis of Scott Snyder’s and Jock’s Wytches. I hope to have that up by the end of the week, so look forward to that.
Anyways, thank you for reading all of this. I look forward at seeing where this can go and I hope that I can make something of it.
Michael Chance
The road will go on forever and story should never end..