Hello everyone.
It looks like, as of January 2013, I'll be going back to school for a BFA in either Graphic Arts or Illustration.
It took me a long time to make up my mind, but I think the final straw was realizing that I wasn't really going anywhere with my current life. It didn't hurt when my dad and I had a long talk about goals; his exact words to me were "At this point in your life, if you're not doing what you really want to do, you're wasting your time." That might seem harsh, but he's exactly right.
Being an artist is what I want to do; that I've let stress and other obligations push me away from that for the past several years has hurt me in ways I can't even begin to describe. I'm correcting the problem, slowly but surely, and I'm also freeing myself up, pushing away a lot of old expectations and rather limiting opinions that I used to hold. Going back to school will simultaneously force me to concentrate on my work, and will also put me back in among the sort of people I really need to be exposed to more frequently: the creative, artistic crowd. Whether or not I like/approve of their work is besides the point.
I've been practicing a lot more the last couple of weeks than I have in most of the time since my last post, here. Right now, it doesn't matter what it is, or who I'm expecting to reach. I just need to create again.