[ID: a half-body digital artwork of a man with a blue robe and scars on his face crossing his arms. he’s looking off to the side with a sullen expression.]

artfight attack on CrystalConstellation

A couple photomanips!

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about where I’m going. I didn’t feel fulfilled working retail, I don’t feel fulfilled doing what I’m currently doing... but what I’m currently doing is the start of what I think will ultimately be fulfilling to me. Growing up I always said that I’m going to do art, I’m going to be an artist, and that hasn’t changed for me. I am still an artist no matter what my day job is. I contain multitudes. Coming to terms with that put me a bit at ease for the decisions I’m working towards right now.

(LONG POST UNDER THE CUT, CW EMOTIONAL ABUSE/NEGLECT/CHILD ABUSE)

What I do at work is clerical stuff for the fiscal unit in the state, for children’s administration. Here I am, the neglected child grown up and reading about other neglected children. I even got rickrolled by my own trauma when I stumbled into the intake that I made against my ex-friend’s stepdad when I was trying to see where I could change my demographic information. Whoops!

Right now this is the path that I’m looking at: take at least 18 credits in accounting classes, work my way up to fiscal tech, keep working as a fiscal tech full-time while finishing my AA degree (switching from studio art to a direct transfer in Human Services), finish AA, participate in the university program to get a BA in Social Services, move from fiscal tech to... social work. The first level is 18 months and very supervised and you’re automatically promoted to level 2 after that point. From there, I want to be level 3. That takes about an additional couple years in the level two position.

I want to focus on ICW (Indian Child Welfare). This... comes with the full knowledge of precisely how the state has behaved with Native children, and one of the big problems I’ve read about what happens here is there is not a fast turnaround in identifying children who fall under the ICWA. Being Métis and knowing what happened to my ancestors, I can’t NOT be aware that this is a kinda controversial choice. However, being Métis and fully dipping into this identity has kind of given me a sense of purpose of what I can do with this idea and this position.

Here’s why I made this piece though. I already have some college credits under my belt, but I entered college straight out of high school when I really was not emotionally and intellectually prepared. I was still suffering greatly the aftereffects of my emotional abuse and neglect and did not have the right mindset to adopt skills I could use to work with my previous trauma history while succeeding. So, I didn’t. Three years of community college for what was supposed to be a 2 year degree and I didn’t even finish. I ran out of money and not long after that, about four? months later, I started working at Target. At least there I got a lot of job experience because I stayed on for about four and a half years. I had a one day window of leaving Target for my current job (literally, closed my last shift at Target, had Sunday off, and started working at the state on Monday), so really I’ve been working quite a lot since leaving college.

What I started to unpack a lot through my work life thus far is that I am not a failure. I was a kid grieving for their dead sister, struggling with dyscalculia (and I think ADHD, and again the aforementioned emotional abuse and neglect). I was treated like a failure though, and began to believe I was a failure, and I carried that with me for several long years--leading to me not finishing a 2 year degree in 3 years and not motivated enough to keep my grades up anyway. The costs of emotional abuse and neglect are steep.

OH AND MY LIFE-CHANGING PTSD NUCLEAR BOMB DROPPED IN 2011 WHILE I WAS IN COLLEGE SO THAT SUCKED, followed in 2012 with being assaulted (DABS)

(i really shouldn’t use humor talking about this)

But my life shifted. I got into some new interests, I met new friends, I fell in love with Zack, I worked. I WORKED, BITCH and through this I learned that if I’m attached to an idea and I take a lot of pride in it even if it’s just a shitty retail job, I work hard. I was convinced I’d fail out of Target and I’d be fired but that never happened.

And with my job at the state? My boss is encouraging me to go for these accounting classes because I have my foot in the door, and we want to keep it there. And through my job in the state, I kinda see first hand out children’s administration works. It brought me to a level of understanding about what I went through. Should CPS have been called for me? Probably, yeah. I don’t think I would have been removed from the home because home removal isn’t always the option. Through my job, I learned about the various services that CPS offers for struggling families, and we really could have used some of those at the time.

I had to grieve all over again not just that I was abused, but that there were many MANY people in a position to just notice and give enough of a shit to try to look into it further, and nobody did. I had my grandparents and my aunt close by, and earlier this year when I wrote about what I had went through in detail on facebook, my grandpa admitted he had no idea that all of this even happened. With my family I can kind of understand why (we were all dazed after my sister’s death) but my teachers? The school administration? Fuck ‘em. I didn’t let them down, THEY let me down. They reduced my self-worth and belief in myself as a functioning human being down to dust. By 14 I could no longer envision a future for myself and I was already exhibiting some small PTSD-adjacent symptoms like having a sense of foreshortened future. I guess I just kinda thought I’d stop existing by 18, which was the age my sister would have been two days after she died. 14 years old. (EDIT: This is a confusing sentence structure. “14 years old” as in “jesus tapdancing christ I was only 14 and already given up on life” whereas my sister died 2 days before her 18th birthday)

So it’s been a long damn fucking climb out of this mess. I’m turning 29 years old this month and I finally found a compass that can point me in the right direction. The thought of going back to school kinda scares me because I’m worried that maybe I AM a failure, but what’s different is that back then? I was not worried about failing because I already thought I was there to begin with. My mindset has shifted now. Putting in the work is going to be tough, being a social worker is going to be even MORE tough (can’t fucking believe after the shit I went through I’d willingly spend the time, energy, and money to get involved again but I will have power this time), I just. I have this need.