Sol's Art

Last year didn’t start off great for me because my grandfather’s health was rapidly declining prior to Covid really spreading around the US. He had Dementia, and my mother spent a lot of time trying to help him and my grandmother out, which meant I spent a lot of time helping her out. He ended up passing away in March, right before the lockdown went into effect in our state, so we were able to have the funeral as a family. Honestly, as much as we miss him, it was inevitable and he would have had a difficult time with the pandemic.

Pretty soon after that, though, I lost my one stable job. Like most people in the art industry I work as a freelancer, but my stream of jobs is inconsistent at best. I haven’t had a big breakthrough or anything, but I was getting decent work doing set design for children’s theater. However, when the pandemic hit, all of that work I was getting went out the window. I was in the middle of interviewing for a higher profile theater in my area, and then nothing. Theaters are still closed in my area and I don’t know when they’ll actually reopen.

It... really hurt to lose all that, and I’ve been scrambling to figure out what to do next. I tried getting a certificate in UI/UX design, I’ve tried to get work in graphic design, I’ve pulled all my connections to get me anything, but the best I’ve been able to do is odd jobs here and there while doing some knitting for extra cash. The only relief I get in this is that I know I’m not alone in this, but it doesn’t change the fact that even when the pandemic eventually passes there are millions of other people out there in the same situation scrambling to get work too.

So I’m currently living with my parents in a very full house because other members of my family also cannot afford to live independently. I’m being accosted by other people in my family for not having my act together and living away from home, along with other family drama that I will not be getting into.

The icing on the cake for everything is that my computer has been failing me this year! I bought this computer with all the money I accumulated post college, fixed it up and added parts to it, but over the past 6 months I’ve noticed it slowly failing me. I was hoping to hold out on buying a new one until I got a new job, but not it’s getting to the point where it crashes whenever I try to open up a game and lags terribly when I open up any art programs. That’s a problem that I need to address, though it means really cutting into my savings.