DAY TWENTY-ONE: WHAT YOU HOPE YOUR FUTURE WILL BE LIKE

The actual entry thing for this was grammatically incorrect and I won't stand for it. "How you hope your future will be like" is an incorrectly structured sentence. It's either "how you hope your future will be", which is a weird sentence even if it's sort of technically correct, or "what you hope your future will be like". One or the other.

Anyway, I hope to get my shit together someday. I don't have very specific plans because I don't know what I want to do. But I want to work in a field that's fulfilling and where I can use my few talents or somehow help other people. I want to be someone with a proper schedule and who sleeps decently. I want to be able to walk my dogs regularly and exercise and eat right. I want to get into shape and get all of my various health problems fixed. I want to be able to drive, and to know how to pay my bills and taxes. I want to cook dinner for my family at least twice a week and keep the house clean and organized.

I want to learn to do lots of things and do a thousand artistic projects. I want to learn to speak Spanish fluently. I want to be able to travel the world and try new things and collect cool souvenirs. I want to have the energy to go out to do fun stuff on a regular basis instead of sitting in the same spot on my couch all the time.

Then I want to take care of my mom. I want to get the house fixed up nice for her, any way she wants it, and get her the surgeries she should have for her back and her constant pain. I'd get her access to nice narcotic-free pain remedies, like spa treatments and that CBD product with no THC in it.

Chances are, none of this will happen for me. I'm already running out of time. But I can dream, right?

DAY TWENTY-TWO: YOUR ACADEMICS

I'm not currently in any form of schooling, but I can talk about my history with it, I guess.

I spent my whole life at a tiny private Christian school. I chose to stay there even when I could have gone to public school and had to work off my tuition for my whole senior year. The school was tiny and had all of the people I'd known since I was six and couldn't bear to leave them behind, so I stayed even when the administration was unfair to me and I didn't fit in.

It was like a cult in a lot of ways... We were all somewhat brainwashed, only exposed to extremely biased and often downright inaccurate information. I was literally taught that being gay is a sin and morally detrimental to a society, and taught that gay marriage will destroy the country and that homosexuals are basically the same thing as rapists and pedophiles. So I protected myself with a shield of really toxic homophobia for a long time. Hell, for a while, I dealt with the fact that people said snide things about immigrants and Hispanic people by joining in on it. I was a terrible person and never knew any better.

I got good grades in elementary school because I had a photographic memory. This fucked me over in middle school and high school, because my memory went and I had never learned how to study or how to focus. I crawled my way through school and never really reached my full potential in terms of grades. I didn't have the motivation to do my homework half of the time. And a lot of my time was taken up by my tuition duties. I was basically in charge of all art for the school and never got paid for any of it.

I scored well on my SATs— a 1950. I don't have documentation of it, though, because I lost the papers and can't remember what day or year or whatever I took it in. I would probably have to retake them for college admissions. Anyway. It's a really high score, and I got literally every single question right in Reading Comprehension. But I scored ABYSMALLY in math, and so some schools will totally ignore that in favor of looking at the "whole picture". Literally fuck math.

I'm not sure what I want to study in college. I know I don't want to study art as a career because I was miserable in senior year when I had to draw for my tuition, and I'm a very slow artist. Also there are twelve year olds a thousand times more talented than me. And art is a difficult living these days. Working in animation or video games might be cool? I dunno. Some fields I've considered are sociology (kinda wanna be a social worker), nonprofit work, journalism, and editing. But as for now, I have no fucking clue.

DAY TWENTY-THREE: SOMETHING THAT YOU MISS

I miss my artistic motivation! (Fuck me I wrote a much better version of this whole thing and Wattpad just went and ATE IT)

I used to love to draw and did it all the time. I had an entire comic series and did other artwork on top of that. I drew constantly. But as the years went by, I got slower and slower. These days I only draw once a month at most and complete maybe two pieces a year. That's because drawing eventually felt like a chore. I worry sometimes that writing will feel the same way some day.

I don't have any problems with inspiration or ideas. I have tons of project ideas in my head at all times. For instance, I want to draw like ten more dryads (you can see the first of the dryad project in my art book). I want to finish the RPGMaker facesets I started making years ago. I want to redraw lots of old pieces and "de-reference" them. I tend to reference way too heavily, and as I've gotten older and learned more about it, I've grown to understand that some people would call me an art thief as a result. I also have some ideas for comics and fanart for smaller Youtubers that I follow.

I wanted to draw all of my covers when I first joined Wattpad, too. I have an idea for the cohesive art style, and each one would have a slightly different color scheme. Instead I only ever drew one of them, and it's way too sloppy-looking and heavily referenced and I plan to just replace it with a cover from a shop. I also invented a character to use as an avatar, and intended to draw her for my profile picture, my art book cover, and my review book covers. Instead she only exists as a pencil sketch on a sheet of the pink paper we use to print EBT balances at work.

Every time I get into a new show or game, I wanna draw fanart. Voltron has been especially hard on me in this regard because I LOVE SPACE. Artistically. I like to keep things simple where I can and just draw busts or portraits, and with Voltron, I could just do pretty stylized busts or waist-up shots of everybody with pretty space backdrops. I could even draw them floating dramatically in space, hands outstretched, or maybe holding a little glowing star in their hands and aaaAAAAAAAAAA I LOVE SPACE. I wanna draw literally every single main character.

So as you can see, ideas aren't my problem. I just never have the motivation to draw. It's especially hard right now, as my iPad, which I use for digital art, isn't cooperating with me these days and I still have to learn to use my laptop.