...Leave Nothing But Footprints

Today, on October 3rd, as of publishing, I am presently in transit to begin my next chapter. This isn't how I wanted this one to end, but a small redirect isn't the end of the world, and I have higher aspirations than these.

Last time, I wrote pretty hard in the context of what I thought was the definitive end to the situation here. It was overall, pretty natural, and honestly if I had to leave in silence I would have. Unfortunately this is not how things work, and I have found myself getting caught up in just insane amounts of bullshit yet again. Having talked with a couple people over drinks, it appears the best approach I can perform is simply to externalize myself from the conflict and keep my head down. Ergo, I am getting out of here, and things are moving on the work acquisition front. It's awesome! Time will tell what the long-term results will be, but I am excited for what's next, and regardless of how I get stabilized, I think it's important to keep building throughout, so that's what I'm going to be doing.

I think generally I'm gonna start small as I start to heal. I have some photography and 3D art projects I want to do, as well as some infra I want to deploy for myself. Unfortunately, my hardware has taken a hit and I need to do a sanity check on both my OS install (arch btw) and the hardware it runs on. I will, however, be migrating certain services I'm presently hosting for myself (like Navidrome, Emby, etc) to a dedicated machine so I can maintain separation of duties. The art projects, in particular, are important for a number of reasons already mentioned in Enervation, but to reiterate, I initially got into both 3D art and photography to help bypass burnout and deal with emotional pain. The situation that I was living in enervated me so much that it was genuinely impossible to do those things because the situation was misrepresented and resources were constantly scarce. Getting out was the only path to shedding the emotional wounds brought about by any and all of it.

(Don't) Wake Me Up

I spent a lot of time, putting rubber to the asphalt, snapping images... feeling the recoil of my D300 reverb throughout my hands, pondering what I was gonna say here, The only statement I have, as anticlimactic as it is, is this: There are a million ways to manage the aftermath of this situation. I am choosing to take control despite everything that's happened up to this point, and I'm begging, even imploring you to have some grace and actually build something better than this.

The ball is in your court, folks. Let this be the wake up call.