Looking toward the future.
Lately I have been feeling a lot of uncertainty regarding the direction my life is going to take. September 2024 marks a pretty big upheaval in my life; I lost my job of 6 years (the longest I'd had up until now) which has had some pretty serious knock-on effects in my personal life.
I used to work for one of the biggest companies in the UK and, as you can expect, they did not treat me particularly well. I went through several managers in my time there and they were all some flavour of liar, manipulator and bully and certain of my colleagues also took every opportunity to lie about and disparage me to management, other colleagues and even customers. I was frequently condescended to and patronised (presumably, though not explicitly, because I'm trans) and disrespected in any number of ways you'd care to mention but I put up with it because I could handle lies and insults and rudeness and it was a job I believed in. Not a company I believed in, but I believed in the work; it put me in a very unique position where I had the power to help people who otherwise couldn't afford the service I offered, Bicycle Repair, without too much oversight into what I was doing, which lead to some very happy customers, if you follow.
Throughout this time there were multiple attempts to either fire me or get me to quit, I had colleagues tell me they were trying to get me "managed out", multiple previous managers levied false accusations against me in an attempt to frame me for gross misconduct, my last manager even admitted to me that he had been advised by the guy he took over from to do this (which, eventually, he did). A year later the guy who advised this was fired for allegedly soliciting sexual favours from colleagues in exchange for overtime.
Anyway it turns out that trying to do something you believe in while dealing with all this and later being fired at the end of a comically evil confluence of lies is quite stressful; a stress which took its toll on my ability to maintain my relationships, my hobbies and do ... just about anything? In short; my self-esteem was completely shot.
And then Cohost shut down.
Which sucked.
A lot.
I wasn't super active on cohost, to tell the truth, but I really wanted to be. It felt like, finally, if I could just work on myself and my cripplingly low self-esteem I could, after years of trying and failing, make something of myself online; become an artist people respect, enter into community with my peers and all that. I had hoped I'd be able to do this with other social media platform but you probably already know how that goes. Cohost felt like the first place where people were thinking about it as a place to interact with others and actually get to know them as people instead of just another arm of their personal branding. Cohost felt like the first social media website I'd used where people actually cared about the things I made, not just as a thing they liked looking at as it scrolled across their feed but as a piece of labour that a person worked to create, a person they were actually interested in outside of how big their number was. Cohost, to me, was a place of potential. The possibility of a brighter future on the web.
So when Cohost announced it was shutting down at the end of the month I took it pretty hard. In a way that I didn't fully fathom for the better part of the waiting period between the 9th and the 31st.
It felt like the future had been ripped away from me. It felt, and still feels, like I'd lost my last chance at ever being anything; in the sphere of digital art, it feels like you have to have a recognisable presence online to ever be noticed (not that I think I've ever been good enough to be noticed but I'd hoped that the boost to my self-esteem from cohost would finally get me out of my rut artistically) and it was already so difficult to build that presence before mainstream social medias basically nuked themselves so it really did feel like cohost was the last chance for me.
It feels really silly now that I'm writing it out but for my whole life the only thing I've ever really wanted to be was part of a community of respected artists. And hey, I want to use this blog as a way to reckon with my feelings and that's just how I feel.
So yeah; I had, inadvertently, pinned my hopes for a better future to 2 big external factors and now they're both gone.
So where does that leave me? Apart from feeling like a complete failure both professionally and socially, anyway.
Well, it should go without saying by now that I have some personal growth to do and I want to do it; I'm on the list for a therapist, I've started this blog as a way to get my feelings out and share the things in my life that I want to talk about. I want to try and focus on my art again as a source of internal validation this time, rather than hoping for the validation of strangers.
Its going to take a lot of time and therapy but I want to use this upheaval as a catalyst for sorting myself out.
And things aren't as bad as they have been in the past; I got another job pretty quickly in a small bike repair shop purely off the back of my ability to fix bikes which would have seemed impossible to me even 5 years ago (previously losing a job meant many depressing months of unsuccessfully applying to literally anything I could find) so its not like there's nothing I can pin my new hopes to.
I want to build up my self-esteem again.
Anyway this is getting cumbersome now so I think I'll wrap it up.
Thanks for reading.