Apparently I'm Still Super Pissed About the Pandemic LOL.

Also, I'm starting a new Society6 Shop!

Please Note: This post briefly mentions suicide.

A selection of items from my new Society6 Shop.

I’ve written extensively here about the struggles of the past few years. Yesterday, I was texting two of my brilliant friends from grad school about how we all seem to be in a state of duress for varying reasons. Lissa, Milana, and I were an inseparable trio in grad school. We were best friends and I miss them incredibly (they live in Baltimore and Oceanside now). We completed the MFA program at The University of Pennsylvania together. Me because I wanted to be a college professor at the time, them because they wanted to be professional artists. They collaborated a lot at school and made really incredible work, mostly video art and installation that involved some element of performance. I concentrated mostly on painting and drawing so I never got to make anything with them.

Sometimes when you tell people you studied art at an Ivy League school they treat you like you did something stupid and superfluous. I’m not going to take any of that energy, so if you’re thinking that right now stop reading and come back another day. Art is important to study and is important to fund, even at fancy Ivy League schools for a number of reasons. Think about what you do with you spare time. Do you watch TV? Do you listen to music? Do you read? Do you scroll over beautiful images on Instagram? If so you’re benefitting from someone who took time to develop as an artist. Many of these people studied art or acting or a trade of some sort, whether in school or in studio practice. These industries fuel a huge part of the global economy and drive literally all our free time pleasure. So by no means is seeking an art education stupid, superfluous, pretentious, or a sign that one is just a privileged arrogant asshole (quite the contrary, at both Cornell and Penn I encountered a number of art students from lower income backgrounds - it wasn’t just a playground for rich kids who didn’t know what they wanted to do).

I’ve definitely received the “what can you expect you have an art degree!” comment more than once in my life. But I also have a degree in Government and a degree in Graphic Design. I don’t see Ivy graduates with those type of degrees getting the same amount of degradation art students seem to get. If you think art is stupid and not worth studying, don’t watch movies. Don’t listen to music. Don’t consume anything that requires creativity. See how fun your life would be if everyone who went to college studied economics. Then get back to me and tell me how fun your life is, how fulfilling your free time is, how vibrant the world feels. It’s time we stopped shitting on artists, art, and its study as something stupid and meaningless and respected that nearly all of us benefit from the pursuit of creativity - it’s what we consume in our free time that makes us feel heard, seen, and less alone. It’s what makes life feel fun, interesting, and worth living. Full stop.

Anyway, I just went on a major tangent. One thing that’s resulted in my writing online for so long is that I often hear peoples’ critiques of my life and words before the words are done being typed into the computer. So if you wanna shit on how impractical my art education is, go somewhere else. Go sit and stare at your bank account or look at an algebra book because literally everything fun in the world requires some degree of creativity (not to say that math isn’t creative, it’s just not entertaining to most people).

After Penn, I ended up deciding academia, especially at the obnoxious Ivy League level, wasn’t really for me. So I pursued a job in graphic design in LA, where I worked for a year before the Great Recession of 2008 led to my layoff.

In chatting with Lissa and Milana yesterday, I mentioned that a lot of people around my age, people 37 - 43, seemed to be in a similar state of flux as me. I’ve wondered why this was happening, as everything I’m seeing on Instagram and in the news seems to be saying things are getting better and people (especially in the U.S.) are healing post pandemic. And then something occurred to me. People exactly my age, basically elder millennials, have aged at EXACTLY the wrong time for financial stability.

In 2001, when I was a sophomore in college in the first few weeks of being an RA (one of three jobs I held at Cornell while taking 24 credits a semester and getting nearly perfect grades all while having severe undiagnosed ADHD), 9-11 happened. That completely changed my generation’s understanding of security and how the world worked. It also totally fucked up travel and the economy for quite some time. When people my age got out of school, the economy wasn’t great. So the Great Recession in 2008 was a huge blow to an already tough job market.

These setbacks meant that it took elder millennials a really long time to get our footing. And many of us were just finally starting to find stability around 2018. When I look back at my adult life, the only stable years I remember financially are 2018 and 2019. Then the pandemic knocked all of that down.

This is not to say that elder millennials own pandemic trauma. It was horrible for everyone. I think about kids in kindergarten who will never really know how normal stable school is supposed to work. Or kids in college who missed out on being on campus at schools they may have worked themselves to death to get into. Millennials don’t own pandemic trauma, but I do have a lot of friends who seem unhinged and frazzled right now. They seem like they’re having a really hard time keeping up with their personal, professional, financial responsibilities. And I think the series of events that hit people my age exactly when it hit us is one reason people my age are feeling crazy and unstable right now.

We were JUST FUCKING GETTING THERE. Then the pandemic threw us back down the stairs. Again, in saying this I do not mean to discount anyone else’s experience. We can all have empathy for each other’s struggle without discounting our own. For example, my parents, who were just entering their seventies when the pandemic began, lost precious time with their grandkids. We all got fucked by the pandemic in different ways, I just wanted to explain how I think people my age were affected.

The pandemic setback, added to having a life dream (TV show) squashed which led to financial ruin for four years, hasn’t left me with the most energy to continue to share my life and invent income streams (which is essentially my job). I’ve been depressed and struggling to get out of a hole. However, as depressed and anxious as I’ve been, I haven’t lost my ambition or my overall optimism about my financial future. And that’s what I’m here to talk about today.

This year I decided to take some time off Instagram for the first few months of the year. I did this mainly because I haven’t truly had a day off in over a decade. I haven’t had a day where I wasn’t worried about what a stranger thought about me since I was in my twenties. And I was completely burnt out, given the setbacks mentioned above, having complete strangers give me unsolicited, almost always irrelevant, advice and judgement day after day after day, year after year after year.

For the first month of 2024, I really just concentrated on working out. I had gained fifty pounds of misery in 2023 (after losing and ganging that same fifty pounds countless times during the pandemic) and I was determined to get my health back, even if it meant sacrificing my career for a bit. Taking time off Instagram isn’t a smart financial decision, it’s my main form of self-promotion, which I need for all forms of income I have (mostly sponsorships and product collaborations). But I took that time anyway because I knew I could die if I didn’t. I had high cholesterol and was on my way to a heart attack or a stroke. I could feel it in my body.

I think a lot of people think this way and so did I: just work hard, don’t be a baby, no pain no gain. But that’s bullshit. The same people who expect you to work non-stop and kill yourself to get stuff done will turn around and judge you for getting fat. The same people who harass you to finish their thing ASAP will be like “Oh no, you had a stroke?!?” when the relentlessness of your work causes health issues.

I’m the type of person who trusts other peoples’ opinions before my own. So if someone tells me I need to do or work on something I will trust them before I think about how that will affect my physical or mental health. But getting to the edge, knowing I was months away from a heart attack or stroke (which I learned when I did my end of year physical in December), I learned it was kind of on me to be like NO FUCK YOU I’M DOING ME BEFORE I DO ANYONE ELSE. There is no reward for killing yourself for work, as much as hustle culture and this American idea that we can all make it if we just work hard tries to tell us. That’s all bullshit, by the way, designed to blame poor people for being poor and convince people born rich and privileged they somehow deserve the wealth and privilege that was handed down to them.

I scaled way back and cut out as much noise as possible. I let depression wash over me. I had days where I was too anxious or depressed to do anything. And I wrote about it here, mostly to save lives because many people I know have killed themselves over similar stresses or feelings of hopelessness. I will absolutely not be a victim to that. I fucking refuse. (I’m also not a suicidal person because I know how it can destroy whole entire families and communities).

It may have seemed if you followed here that I was wallowing. But while I was wallowing I was also working strategically to improve my future - I’m no idiot. I have been building the numbers on this newsletter in hopes that it will be a more stable, sustainable means of supporting myself, building community, and helping people. My goal is to get the profitability to around $100K a year by the end of this year, and I am currently at $42,000 annual revenue here. The way you increase revenue here is posting consistently, creating content that matters to people, and sometimes paywalling content to encourage subscriptions. I also plan to add subscriber-only extras eventually when I have more time to work on them (or can use some of the revenue to hire support). Those include a podcast and more professional photo shoots featuring home styling tips (that kind of content is expensive to produce which is why I haven’t been producing as much of it lately).

In addition to this newsletter, I’ve also been working to get my Airbnb profitable. While we’ve had a number of setbacks and unexpected costs, it is on its way to being solvent by summer so I am feeling optimistic about it. My main goal in taking time off Instagram was to diversify my income streams so that when things dry up on Instagram sponsored posts (as they tend to every year until around May) I have other stable incomes I can rely on. I couldn’t have worked on these other endeavors while also doing shoots for Instagram every day. So it was an active choice to take a break from an endeavor that felt like it was sucking my soul and making me feel like shit about myself.

Now, before I move on I want to explain something. Just because I got burned out on Instagram doesn’t mean I hate it forever. It just means I spent four years doing back breaking home makeovers alone while having a bunch of people tell me that it was fun and that, in addition with being socially isolated, got really old. Show me a 41 year old in your life that wants to do all their own home construction and labor. Yes, it’s fun to watch someone else do that. But also yes, I feel like I’ve earned the right to not have to do entry level work, alone, all the time and have people tell me it’s fun. It’s not, it’s manual labor. I hate being dirty and sweaty, a lot. Sometimes I’d like to have someone else do the labor so I can concentrate on bigger picture things. I think it’s natural as you progress in your career to want to move up, so doing intern level work (moving furniture alone, getting filthy doing so) alone has gotten old. Way old.

Another way I’ve decided to diversify my income is through making and selling product. Something I have been doing for a few years to a decent amount of success. I started an online shop in 2020 and it actually helped sustain me for the first part of the pandemic. But I found that over time, it’s been hard to maintain. Basically, in order to have inventory I need to design, produce, and store product I’ve paid for that may or may not sell. I also have to purchased product-specific packaging and try to keep up with mailing it. It’s not always possible to know what will sell and how much, so I’ve ended up with a lot of extra product I paid to make that can be hard to get rid of.

This is why I decided to do a Society6 Shop. Society6 is basically a print-on-demand company that produces high quality art and objects designed by artists. With Society6, I can make prints available without having to pay for, print, pay for packaging, pay for shipping, wrap, and ship out product out of my apartment. It’s just an easier way to make and sell products.

There are some downsides to Society6, mainly that you can’t control EVERYTHING about every product. For example, there are some paintings I don’t want available with black frames because I don’t think they look good in black frames. But I can’t take that option away so they are available with black frames. You pay a bit for convenience by losing some design control, which is why I’ve kept the offerings a bit limited to start with.

Society6 lets you put your art on just about anything. The art below could be on pillows, clocks, credenzas, rugs, etc. I will likely be adding more of these over time but I want to order samples before I do so to make sure the quality is what I want for each category before I do so.

I’ve quality-checked all the items seen here, and I loved the quality when they showed up. I’ve been working on this for about a month now. It took some time to pull the art together, get it scanned, edit the imperfections out, upload it, figure out pricing, order samples, and check quality. So I’m really pleased to be able to share it with you today! This is a way for you to get great art and decor for your home at a great price. Some of these pieces may seem expensive but keep in mind things like materials and construction can be expensive so there’s gonna be some items that seem like they cost a lot (framing always adds so much - I wish it were cheaper!).

Below are some of my favorite items from today’s launch! And coincidentally, there’s a sale going on until March 18th - up to 30% off! So buy away!

Curly Wave Framed Canvas

Zig Zag Guy Canvas Print

Spikey Wave Framed Recessed Framed Print

Finger Wave Art Print

Too Tied Up in Knots Framed Canvas

Hair Wave Pillow Sham

I’m a Pretzel Wall Clock (Shown in main post pic in Maple Finish)

I’m sharing this new product line, along with all that led to it, to encourage you to take the time you need as you navigate these crazy times. To take time off to let yourself mourn the past few years before you amp yourself up to build your life back. I wouldn’t have had the time or space to design all these products if I hadn’t let myself wallow on the sofa for a long time, wondering how I was going to get myself out of this financial mess. This product line isn’t likely going to singlehandedly save me (though you never know!) but it’s one part in a cog of a machine I’m hoping will help give me more financial stability long-term.

I know this post may have seemed a bit angry to some of you. That’s because I am angry. I am angry for the kids in grammar school who entered it at one of the scariest times in history. I am sad for elderly people who missed out on seeing their families for fear of getting infected. I am sad for people who have lost family members at a time where they couldn’t mourn properly. And I’m sad that my generation keeps getting thrown back down the stairs the second we seem to be getting our footing.

Fuck all that. You do you first. The rest will figure itself out.

Check out my Society6 Shop here!