hey, welcome to another chill art hangout. a topic came up elsewhere where people expect to have it
all figured out in their 20s, when in reality, nobody really knows what we're doing at any given
moment. and the challenge was to come up with five things you wish you could change in your 20s,
and me being 35 and counting, i don't think i'm actually far enough out of my 20s to
have an opinion on all the things that i've done wrong, because i never did anything in my 20s. i
just went to work to pay off our little mortgage. so is there something that i wish i can go back
and tell my younger self? first on my list of five things i wish i could change: i wish i could
have known to aspire to more realistic examples. i didn't really have any role models to demonstrate
goals: going to college, being something that's high wage earning, blah blah blah.
an art career definitely wasn't a thing because we just think of art as something that existed
thousands of years ago that nobody does anymore. i mostly just resolved to do nothing with my life,
so when i saw examples of really popular youtubers who actually make a living doing their art,
it first made me think, wow, regular people can do this? but unfortunately, you're looking at people
who are so far into it, who got so lucky that they can pretty much just do whatever they want,
that it seems like it's impossible to actually reach that stage. you don't know how they got
there. i definitely cannot just livestream myself playing video games and pay my bills, so looking
up to certain people that i really admire, it just makes you feel like it's unattainable,
like it's just something that happened to them. it was really hard to keep hopeful. i feel like
i've missed the boat on a lot of things, and i'm sure a lot of people feel that way. and i
know that i say this a lot, but i'm very thankful for the person who turned me on to rafi and klee
because they are artists that just do their own thing, but they make just enough to survive and
that's all that most of us would be happy to do. and to be able to see people doing that, i think,
is a much healthier thing to aspire to. i would have been way less hopeless and depressed going
to work every day, knowing that the divide wasn't quite as wide as it seems when you're looking up
at a star that's just so high. that was quite a lot. oh my god, the second thing that i wish
i could change in my 20s, and i don't think i'd be able to, is to demand more! a lot of my
perceived problems with how i've lived my life so far all seem to stem from upbringing. i definitely
felt ashamed if i ever needed anything. if i ever needed help, if i ever needed clothing, food,
a ride to a friend's house, it came with a lot of shame, and so as an adult, i'm constantly just
employer-centric. i just do whatever my boss wants me to do, and i never took vacation, i never asked
for weekends off, i never went to events or booked anything, i never did craft fair weekends because
i knew i have to work them. and what ended up happening is that i have zero memory of anything
that i really did in my 20s. it's all just a blur of different jobs. i missed so many opportunities,
and my path to focusing more on my art and building that art space was incredibly stunted.
i just never prioritized it because i could not ask for help. i did not prioritize myself
at all in my 20s. i feel a little bittersweet about it because now we live in an apartment that
is paid off, so maybe that's just the way it had to be. and that's kind of just how i view a lot of
things that happened in my life that are negative and i hate, but at the same time, well, where
would i be? would i be a less nice person? would i have a lot of debt? if i lived a different way,
it could have been worse just as much as it could have been better, you know? number three is to
try to reduce my shyness and general evasion tendencies. i wish i could have done something
in person. i wish i didn't have so much hope placed on just posting things on the internet.
i used to be too afraid to tweet directly at people on social media because i thought that
i would be annoying them, but that's actually just how social media is supposed to work! i
think that's made the biggest difference honestly in getting commissions for example. maybe i would
have had a stronger attachment to the community if i'd been more bold and brave in volunteering
for the arts councils and talking to people and just meeting people. i wish that i could have
gotten a bigger head start on meeting people, because people really want to help. i spent so
much time just feeling alone for no reason. number four, i wish i could have loved more proactively.
everything that we do is selfish. all of our motivations are very much what can i get from
this, and i feel like it would have been easier to be connected with other people if i had plainly
seen the value and enjoyment of being the person in someone's life that they want to be around. and
this is the one that i'm kind of stuck on the most explaining or working out, because again,
i'm not so far out of my young adult life. there were so many times where i used to try to be
a joy in someone else's life. if i felt lonely on valentine's day, i would be the one to send
out valentines, but i kept getting kind of caught up in the lack of return. no one would do that
for me, what do i get out of this? and i kind of wish that i was better at just enjoying the ride,
enjoying the effects of doing things like that for other people and just making them happy,
being the person that they want to be around. how more rich would your life be
if that was the way that you are, you know what i mean? i still have to work on that a lot.
the final and fifth thing that i wish i could change in my 20s is so superficial and unique
to me that it's not going to be helpful to anybody, but i kind of wish that we'd
shopped around a little bit more when it came to finding our home. i live in metro vancouver,
which is obscenely expensive to live in, and we were previously renting a basement suite.
it was a dump. the electricity was going to be shut off and we needed electricity so we had to
find a place really fast, and we moved into this apartment. the difference in living in a building
full of condos was just like night and day. and literally six months into it, our landlord decided
to sell the apartment, and we were so afraid. we definitely were not thinking that we would be
able to own a place to live at all. this apartment was not that expensive at the time, and we already
knew what it was like to live here because we had been here for six months, and so we just kind of
jumped on it and took what we could get. and i'm very happy that we did, because that's literally
the only reason why i was able to stay home during the pandemic is because i didn't have to pay...
i don't even know what the rent would be right now! but at the same time, i kind of wish that
we could have looked around a bit more, maybe found something with lots of windows?
it would have been nice to have a second bedroom. it would have been nice to have
in-suite laundry. i think that this is probably it for us unless we move to some tiny town that
i've never heard of. that's just a tiny little thing that i kind of wish that we could have
changed a little bit, i wish we would have known housing cost would double
in five years, not in our favour, because i feel like we maybe could have been a little bit more
picky thinking that this was going to be the last place we could realistically move to, you know?
that's such a superficial dumb thing, because what's the lesson from that? don't jump into
something just because you can? but if i didn't jump into something just because i can,
we wouldn't be very well off right now i think. so that's kind of it. those are my five things
i wish i could change in my 20s. let me know what your five are in the comments below, but
while we're wishing for things that we could have changed, also consider
how things would have been different if you didn't make the choices that you made,
because you really don't know how things would have turned out. it might not have been better,
you know? take it easy guys, i will see you in the next one.
i also sell original art sketch books really nice prints handmade calendars pet commissions and even
some one-of-a-kind wearable art jewelry i also have a sketchbook club on patreon where we fill
our sketchbooks according to a theme and some tears even get original sketches mailed to them