Life After Manufacturing

I've worked at a Toyota factory in Princeton Indiana for the last 11 years of my life.

I'm 33 now. Everyone in my family, my mother, father, and two brothers, can draw. I don't know why but we can. For the longest time non of us did, at least not with any regularity or ambition.

Music took a hold of me when I was in middle school and served as my primary outlet for expression until my middle twenties. I became disenchanted by my inability to write a song I could feel proud of.

I dropped out of college at the University of Southern Indiana after my 3rd year. I majored in biology. I settled for the comfortable pay and benefits that automotive manufacturing provided.

I bought a house, I got married, I had a kid.

None of these things allowed me to reconcile with the line of work I was in. I started writing fiction. I steadily wrote things that mimic poetry. I played video games with audiobooks running to try to ground my mind somewhere.

About a year and a half ago I connected the dots that my spaciness, my chronic disinterest in doing normal things, and the difficulty I had sticking with any one endeavor or hobby might indicate a "neurodivergence". (That was also when I found out that neurodivergent was a word.)

I talked with a counselor who helped me with talk therapy and helped me start a supplement regimen that seemed to quiet my adhd a bit.

This granted me just enough focus to finish an ink pen doodle during my lunch break at work.

For the fist time in my life I found something that I had made, to be striking. I still go back to those first pictures and I still love them. That sensation still grabs me today, with every work that I finish. I put in my two week notice at less than a year after.

Today is the first day that I have spent since I was fifteen years old unemployed and unenrolled. I want to get better at illustrating, I want to learn about design, and I want to find a sense of community through art. I feel like an alien most of the time. I just want to find some other aliens. I will update this blog 4 times weekly. I'll talk about how life goes after breaking a way from working all those tedious hours. I hope that you join me, I hope that you see this, and I hope we can feel like aliens together. Bye bye febuary 23 of 2022. I'm out on a limb here but it's been a while since i've felt this good.