Onward

 

Life was getting better for me. I moved into a nice two bedroom apartment with Lucy. I had a full-time, well-paying career. I lived really close to where I worked. I even joined a Star Trek meet-up group, where I’ve met quite a lot of interesting friends and even marched in my first geek pride parade. Then my company decided to switch directions and have all the publication builds sent out of the Edmonton office, which resulted in a large layoff.

 

I took this as an opportunity to try something new. I tried to go back to school to try my hand at VFX for Film and Television. I thought this is what I wanted to do, but after just one term, I realized that this was not for me at all and quit going. There was simply too much homework, and it wasn’t really what I thought I was going to be learning about. Plus, I really needed money.

 

It’s funny, because even though I was unemployed and collecting EI payments, which isn’t a lot of money, I found myself a lot less stressed out about the situation as I was when I was married with both of us making the same amount of money. Possibly because I realized that I was in charge of my own money, and subsequently could make the right choices for myself with regards to what was necessary to buy and what wasn’t.

 

In June of 2010, the Star Trek Convention came back to Vancouver after a 10 year or so hiatus. I had never been to a Trek convention before in my life and decided I really needed to experience this at least once in my lifetime. With the money I received back from my taxes, I bought a weekend pass plus a photo opp with none other than William Shatner himself. I had so much fun at this event — even making a new friend there — that I decided I needed to do this again, and they announced it would come again next year.

 

A month after this convention, I finally landed another job in print design. I had all but given up on the idea of getting a job in print and decided to go into web design and see if I could get funding to do so with this so-called “Stimulus package”. There was much paper work needed, and I found that I needed to conduct informational interviews in order to get this accomplished. I sent out a plea for an interview from someone on a meet-up site for graphic designers, and got contacted by someone who asked me if I was completely giving up on print or if I would be interested in working at her company. Long story short, I got hired on, but with much less pay than I was making before. In fact, it was pretty much entry level pay.

 

I have continued to work at this company and have had some success in my career with this job. Initially, I was hired on to work on the old stuff the company acquired from a now defunct company. After awhile, I got moved into the rest of the design company. They started to shift my career over to the production side of design.

 

In previous jobs, I would get frustrated every time I got the production designation, as for some odd reason I thought I had to be a designer to be happy in my career. After starting to work on production at this company, I came to realize that I am actually really good at production. I know the job really well. I continue to work in production, and indeed have even gotten a few promotions along the way, with raises, first to Production Coordinator, then to Project Manager. Basically, I finalize and checklist all art files going out to print, set up schedules for printing, and handle all communications between our company and the printers, which are all located in China, as well as many other things I do with this title. Now I am finally making a decent wage and am quite content to stay working here until I retire. Although, there is this little part of me that really wants to get into film or TV in some capacity. I have always had an interest in it, and would love the opportunity to do this, however I do not know how to transition.

 

I am also attempting to write a book about my life experiences, which is on my bucket list. As I am a fairly avid blogger, I noticed something about the process. I found myself constantly haunted by a certain event that occurred during my years of Hell in that crappy town. After years of remembering it with much anger and frustration, I decided to blog it out of me and write the whole experience down. I realized something quite profound about this. After I wrote it down on my blog, I completely stopped thinking about it. I wasn’t bothered by it any more and the thought never came back to me. I had purged it out of my system, so to speak. So now my attempt to write the story of my life has evolved out of the idea that maybe if I wrote it all out of me, I could finally put the pains of my life behind me and finally learn to move on with my life, and possibly finding happiness along the way.