Time flies. In just 4 days, the new year will begin. Things are going well for me, art aside. I've been chosen for a fantastic position with a Fortune 100 company as a Web Designer, and assuming everything goes according to plan, my anticipated start date is January 10th. I am really looking forward to this.

I am so grateful to be able to say I have a career going for me months out of college. Sometimes I can't believe how fortunate I've been. Of course, good fortune is not something that is simply endowed upon us. It also takes a lot of hard work. I am finally gathering the proper gumption to be able to say that and not worry that I sound prideful, because the fact is, it's true. As Mike Shinoda put it on Fort Minor, "This is 10% luck, 20% skill, 15% concentrated power of will, 5% pleasure, 50% pain, and 100% reason to remember the name." I always found it appealing that he was so calculating about his success.

But the issue remains that it is my own calculating, controlling nature that seems to be at fault for my extensive art block. I recently reorganized by room, thereby going through all of my old artwork again. When I look at those drawings, I am filled with such longing to immediately pick up a pencil and start drawing. Of course, I never do. I'm too busy analyzing the problem instead of just tackling it head on. I kill spontaneity before it has the chance to breathe.

Yet, looking at my old work hasn't been entirely ineffective. I realize that a lot of the drive behind my art was the compulsion to tell a story, to indulge in various fantasies or to express my feelings, whatever they might have been at the time. So it's ironic that now, when I feel I've become so much more open and expressive of my feelings, at least verbally, that I can't put pencil to paper.

I have to find the story again. I have to remember to look for the story in every day, every moment, and convey it not strictly with words, but with art. Perhaps most importantly of all, I have to remember that the story does not have to make sense, that sometimes it flows like a bloom from the subconscious, fragments of a dream. Only once I can allow it to flow through me, unhindered, can I ever hope to cultivate it later. That is the beauty of imagination. This is creativity.