The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.
-Raymond Chandler
Drawful the Awful is now available through Amazon on Kindle and in paperback! Get a copy in your preferred format here!
In a bit of perfect timing, the artwork for Drawful the Awful was finished and the paperback copy was finally ready to go up on Amazon a week ago, on March 30th. I started my new job the following Monday.
It feels good wrapping up my time between jobs with a completed project and a gorgeous physical copy of my latest completed work in hand. I’m really proud of the finished product, the art is full of heart and gorgeous, and the story is one I’m deeply happy to share with you all. One friend who read it said it was “a story I’d want my daughter to read someday,” it’s the highest compliment I could have hoped for. Thus, I release Drawful the Awful to you all, my work is finished, I hope you all love it.
With Drawful being finished, I started work last week with greater peace of mind, as I discussed in my last post a couple weeks ago. The first week of my new job had me traveling cross country for training at an east coast office, so there was a unique flavor to this new beginning. The physical displacement made the sense of goodbye and ending I felt approaching all the more profound.
More than just the end of my old job, this period since January that I was unemployed was a major moment for me to pause, take stock and look at where I am, what I’ve become, and where I want to continue to go and grow. It was tough at times, heart breaking in other ways, but all around it was beneficial.
I start at my actual, local office tomorrow. It’ll be a new chapter with a whole new company. It’s more than just a new job, but a new lease on my self-worth thanks to my experiences these past couple months. My last job was only partly responsible for this (I shoulder the blame for this myself), but I struggle with believing I’m a worthwhile person in any regard.
As Eleanor Roosevelt said, no one can make you feel inferior without your consent, and I gave that consent for a very long time- and only these past few months did I really start to push back on it, only these past couple months did I really take the time between jobs to take a hard look at myself and dare to believe I’m worth a damn in a number of ways I used to tell myself I couldn’t possibly be.
I owe many people thanks for that, some of whom I’ll never give that thanks to because their “help” came as a result of them trying to hurt me (case in point: I wouldn’t have found a significantly better job if I hadn’t been fired to go looking for it). Others, plenty others, so many I really don’t deserve and can’t possibly list here were genuinely good friends, caring and kind. I love you all, and I’m so grateful for every ounce of friendship, attention, time and care that you gave me.
This blog is going to be a lot less active in the coming weeks and months, very likely a weekly post schedule. I still plan on keeping up my writing around the new full time gig. I still need this outlet for my thoughts and voice, and I still have another 95,000 word beast of a novel I drafted that I’m not going to abandon. However, this is still a change, it’s still a new chapter, and it means some farewells. How lucky I am to get to say such goodbyes, how lucky I am to have known such times and people. Much love.
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