…I’m in sort of a mood for writing, so… I think it’s about time I thought about school. This is really kind of… long and personal and me just sort of looking back at this year and talking to myself to try and figure it out.
This is… a really long post. And if you want to close this up right now, hey, that’s cool. I don’t expect anyone else to read this. If you do… ah… I guess… I sort of lay out a lot of my feelings about how I went through school this year, and then end up talking about what I need to do, and where I am now. It’s written like shit, too, I should warn you.
I don’t know… if I should tag this with a trigger warning for sexual harassment, but… I’m going to do it anyway. Just in case.
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I guess it’s kind of stupid to start a text post with a photo, but this is the entire reason I’m writing right now.
This isn’t my photo. It’s from the society of illustrator’s site. I wanted to see if they had any pictures of some of the pieces I saw, and they didn’t. But they did have a gallery of photos of the people who won awards that night. And so here this is.
The man on the left is the artist, Sam Bosma. He is a pretty amazing illustrator, and I think I’m kind of a fan~! The other man is the art director for that piece, Jim Burke. He was my illustration teacher in my second semester.
I fell in love with NHIA when I was in high school. It took me years to actually apply and get in. It took me so, so many years to come to the conclusion that I loved art enough to try and do it for a living, to feel confident enough in my art to apply, to just… do it.
And I loved it. I seriously, seriously love that school. The first semester I spent there… it was… aaah, I don’t even have words! I feel like I learned so, so much! I can SEE that I learned! I can look at physical pieces and go “YES, that is BETTER!” I respected all my teaches like crazy, and I WANTED to do really well and I tried hard and I really wanted to do well! I tried to keep schedules, and I did my best to take care of myself, and I managed my health better than I have in years!
Except, there was… a lot of fuckery this year. I don’t know if anyone’s reading this, but I guess some people already know. If not… welp.
…if I’m thinking about it, the time I stumbled was near the end of the first semester. And… and although every instinct I has says that it was my fault, that I should blame myself for this, that this was my responsibility, but… ah, fuck, I really… really need to not think that way.
A guy touched me. I was sitting in the lounge with my knees up, working on a project. A bunch of people were screwing around, and this one guy was shooting nerf darts. One landed near me, and I held it up and made some kind of remark about not giving it back if he was gonna shoot at me… and… I don’t know. He came over and reached under my butt and he just… touched me.
…it’s kind of blurry, I think. After that. I think I yelled, or… or cried out, or told him not to touch me agai—no. No, I pressed my head into my project. I hid my face, and curled up, and I think I said “Please don’t touch me.” I said it a few times, and… and I gave him back his dart, and… I don’t remember if he said anything. I don’t think anyone said anything. There were a few people there, no one said anything. He went away and I just stayed like that, and I was so close to finishing this 2D project but I couldn’t move and I thought I was going to cry, and the moment someone said they were leaving, I decided to leave to.
Sorry, I just… sort of remembered that.
Here… here is where I can’t… help but doubt everything. Maybe he just thought I was sitting on it. Maybe he didn’t mean to. Maybe he never had any intention of touching me. He… he was a guy I’d been wary of, in the past. He was kind of weird. Loud. Liked making rape jokes and showing off terrible porn of pokemon characters in the lounge. Sort of that kind of ‘loves shock humor’ stuff. I’d walked with him to a gaming store once, talked a bit about Dungeons and Dragons, but I didn’t think we were close.
But I don’t know… how much that intent matters, because I… I kind of broke down. I cried, a lot. The next day, I skipped class to talk to the Councillor, because I didn’t know what else to do. I wore the baggiest jeans and the biggest hoodie I owned and I still felt so… disgusting. I… couldn’t look at any of the men I passed. I was fucking terrified, and god it sounds so embarrassing when I admit this, just because it was so small..!
They took it seriously. Asked if I wanted to press charges, if I wanted to move, or force him to move, and I just… I explained I thought it was an accident, but… I needed someone to tell him what he’d done to me. Later, the head of student affairs contacted me to say she’d spoken with him. He’d apologized, but I still… avoided him. I avoided everyone.
That’s when I fucked up, for the first time. I remember crying in the middle of drawing class, and skipping lessons, and hiding in my room, and wanting to kill myself. I managed to explain… to a certain extent, at least, that something bad had happened, but… I still couldn’t get my shit back together. I fucked up every assignment that came after that. I barely managed my final projects.
When it came time to come back for the next semester… I… I really thought I was ready. I wanted to give it my all, and get back to how focused and happy I’d been before. And even though it was kind of hard, and I wasn’t the same, I tried…! I seriously… I thought I could do it… I even dropped one of my studio classes so that I could focus on everything else…
But… ah… my grandpa… he’d been really sick for a few months. And… he wasn’t getting better, and they couldn’t really do anything… and one day I got a call saying I needed to come home so that my parents could drive out to New Jersey to be with him, and…
He was… the first person in my family to die. I… don’t think we were… really close, but… but somehow… I just sort of fell into depression. I stopped showering, or leaving my room. I fell behind on classwork so easily, and it became so simple to just… skip a class here or there, even though I could fail if I missed too many.
But god, even then, I swore I could do it…! Even though I fucked up SO much, SO often, I thought I could make it right up until I couldn’t stop bleeding…! I just… started spotting for a week before my period, and then, just when I thought it was over, I started bleeding harder than I ever had in my life. And then when I thought that was over, it came back.
And then I was bleeding and I couldn’t stop, and… it all came down. I started missing classes because I felt so dizzy and tired. I slept, a lot. Just walking down to get food started to be more effort than I could manage. I stopped communicating with my teachers, because I was so, so ashamed of myself. In fact, I didn’t really talk to anyone who could have helped me, who needed to know.
I just stayed in my room, crying and wishing I could die, sleeping and skipping meals and getting worse and going on the internet because I needed SOMETHING to keep me distracted, and I did it for months.
I don’t think anyone would read this far, but… if anyone did, I just want to thank you. All of you, who supported me during that time. I really wanted to die, and… if you guys hadn’t been so kind and helped me, I don’t… know what I would have done.
A lot happened, since then.
Eventually, I found enough courage to try and explain what was happening to someone. I got some mental help, and told my parents, and saw some doctors, but… it was already too late. I had missed so many projects, and I hadn’t DONE anything, even though I really could have. Even though there were only a few weeks left of school… I took a leave of absence for medical reasons.
…I guess, here is where I stop just talking about the crap that happened in the past, and take a serious look at where I am right now.
First of all… I’m better. I’ve stopped bleeding thanks to birth control. I’m working on getting back onto my medication to help keep me from falling back into the hole. I… I don’t… blame myself, as much. I used to really hate how I was back then, I blamed my failure entirely on my lack of willpower. I thought that if I had just been stronger, I could have finished the year. I could have gone to class. I would have been okay.
But that really isn’t the case. I was physically anemic, I was mentally suicidal, and I had enough hormones flooding my veins that I couldn’t control my mood at all. It wasn’t a matter of me being weak. I was sick.
What I do still regret… is how I left. Looking back up at that picture… I loved Illustration class. I fucking loved it more than any other class I was taking. I really admired and respected Jim, and… and more importantly, he really believed in me. When I first started fucking up, he did so much to try and help me. He told me that he thought I had a lot of potential… fuck, for our first project, he actually suggested that I try to draw two illustrations. He challenged me, and I wanted so badly to prove myself to him. I wanted… I wanted to show that I could do it, but when I got sick, I never said anything to him. I barely talked to any of my teachers.
It was because I was ashamed, because I didn’t know what was wrong, because I was just too embarrassed to say that I was missing class because of my period. But I still… wonder what they thought. I should have said something, apologized, at the very least told them that I had been happy to be in their classes, and looked forward to seeing them when I was well, but I didn’t do any of that.
I barely said goodbye to my friends, to be honest. It was… too shameful. I couldn’t look them in the eye.
Right now… I’m okay. I can go days on end without breaking down. I have enough energy to go out and do things without needing to sleep for hours afterwards. But I’m stuck.
It’s halfway though June, and I don’t have a job. I can’t afford anything, and I know my parents are struggling, and I’m getting call after call from my credit card. I have a good idea of where to look, but I’m so scared that I’m paralyzed. And it’s pathetic.
I’m also stuck… when it comes to school. I missed my end of year review, I know. But… I haven’t contacted them since I left. And I haven’t really received much from them. I owe some money, and I need to pay it before I can begin to do ANYTHING else. But even when I do, I… don’t really no what to do. I want to go back, I want to return so badly, but I really don’t know where to begin, and I’m scared as hell that I can’t. I want to go back to NHIA, I want to try again, and I have no idea if I deserve that.
I really should just delete this. It isn’t anything that anyone really needs to know, but… I really want to have this written somewhere. All of this. My memory is bad, and I know that someday I’m going to forget what happened and I might start blaming myself again and I don’t know. I just want some kind of record.
