To commemorate Inktober, a month-long artist celebration for ink during October, the local thriving comic book store, Famous Faces & Funnies, hosted a challenge event. The challenge: Within 24 hours, create a 24 page comic.

The event started, the room full of a dozen artists, laughing and having a good time. I joined, a bit self-conscious.

Now, before going into the event, I had made the beautiful mistake of reading the gorgeous and layout rule-bending comic, Sandman: Overture… The story is about dreams, timelessness, other dimensions, and the universe ending, so… Let’s just say that as a comic-making novice, I may have set my bar a little too high.

A year ago I wanted to die.

Or maybe a better way of saying it is that I was so overwhelmed with anxiety, stress, guilt, and tragic loss, that I wanted to alleviate the pain that I was being crushed under at every moment. Ending it all seemed like a potential solution. It would mean that I wouldn’t feel these horrible things anymore. All of my problems will disappear…

What saved me was holding onto the reality that this also a way of abandoning my family and loved ones, whose problems were very much so real. This minute long clip from the show The Blacklist explains this better than I can, and it’s a powerful piece of acting.

Suicide is a long-term and permanent solution to short-term and temporary problems.

Ending it all also doesn’t just mean preventing a future of negative experiences, it means preventing a future of positive experiences as well.

It comes down to a choice between committing to life or committing to death.

I committed to life.

Taking two months to complete, building and designing this website has been an educational and rewarding process. Here’s how I got it done.

Similarly, read New Beacon to see my purpose with blogging.

Here are the reasons that made getting this website up and running more urgent:

• I’m bursting at the seams with content that needs to be shared. I compulsively write blog posts that average 2,000 words in length, and come up with supporting illustrations and graphic concepts. I have a backlog of over thirty new and partially fleshed out posts… I wish I was exaggerating!
• I want to focus on completing the biggest project I’ve undertaken to date, the Lion Poem Animation, but I have no place to chronical my works-in-progress and learning, let alone a place to share the finished project (except the brevity of YouTube).
• Accountability: I want to finish what I start. Sharing goals publically adds some needed social pressure.
• Experiments: I don’t want to only leave a string of finished projects in my wake, but also behind-the-scenes and lessons learned from making them. I change things up frequently, lately oscillating between researching, writing, drawing, web development, and playing the ukulele, and I’ve been letting this playful and experimental nature lead my work. The results are rarely uninteresting.

Now, let’s get into the logistics, the What and How of making the site.

In examining skill development, I decided to go a step beyond the generic ‘slow and steady wins the race’ advice. Instead, I decided to dive into how mindset shifts can lead to massive gains quickly. I didn’t just want to be the tortoise, but the hare as well.

The following are lessons I’ve gained from experimenting with mindset shifts in respect to the skill I’ve been developing in my life, drawing people, but these insights can be applied to any skill you’re developing.

Choose: Make mistakes or Give up

The past seven months, I’ve been rigorously studying how to draw human anatomy: how to capture a person’s personality and expression while they are going about their business in the public. I’ve been attending weekly three-hour nude figure drawing classes, and have been people sketching in public places.

Here’s some recent work:

For seventeen months outstretched over 2014 and 2015, I wrote for my blog that I called Cheating College. I gave it this slogan: lifelong learning without lifelong debt.

Cheating College was a way for me to chronical my alternative education pursuits and to dispel advice I learned while on my journey. It was also a great way for me to build the habit of writing regularly and creating content with the intent to be read by a specific audience.

It empowered me to figure things out for people, to study problems and present solutions, and to make myself of value to others.

During that time, I wrote over 30 articles, totaling over 54,000 words, and made over thirty custom graphics/ illustrations.

I shut the blog down when I hit a number of brick walls in my career and family lives (which I will share once the emotions aren’t so raw…) When I shut down the blog, at first it felt like I had removed a part of myself from existence, the beacon that had been letting the world know “I am here, and this is what I do” had been extinguished…

In the uncomfortable darkness, I eventually learned more about myself and how I want to start again: better, stronger, wiser.

Here’s a list of what I learned from the entire blogging experience, and how I will do things differently this time around.