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📓 Tuesday, August 12, 2025
10:06 a.m. – USC Campus, Jefferson Boulevard
Workout Type: Guest pass session at USC gym
I’m sitting here taking notes in my workout journal before the workout — writing how I feel, responding to my Aunt Beatriz, my mother’s youngest sister from Mexico — while a girl pushes a cart in front of me. These carts are for moving all their stuff into their dorm apartments.
Students are coming back to school after summer. After you stop going to school like me… summers just feel like a couple of hot months.
I smell the grass. I see a man to my far right pressure washing the concrete, making it look spotless. I want to say shiny, but it’s concrete — concrete can’t be shiny. I guess I’ll still say shiny.
The sky is blue, but not quite — a rather light blue. Sirens in the distance — a fire department ambulance — turning right on Jefferson.
I’m on the USC campus. I’m not a student. I wish I would have been, but I’m not. I’m about to head to their gym — I have a guest pass.
Mood right now: calm but curious. Energy feels steady.
8:28 p.m. – Later that day
“Pissed — that’s why I used to self-implode. Now I just go for a walk.”
By the evening, the calm had worn off.
I want to be an illustrator — but I’m not one yet. Not a paid one, anyway. Tonight I’m frustrated. The kind of frustrated where you want to say F this and slam the lid shut. But I don’t.
Today I decided to add an illustration to my journal entry. I sketched it — not quickly, because following the instinct to draw when you feel rusty takes time — but I finished it. That part felt good. Then I hit the wall: I couldn’t figure out how to upload the image without it appearing on every single post.
If this computer wasn’t so expensive, I might have thrown it like a frisbee.
That was problem number two.
Problem number one was starting the illustration in the first place.
I can draw. I can recreate anything I see. But I don’t want to just recreate — I want to illustrate from instinct. For a long time, I’ve avoided it.
When I went back to school at Cerritos College in 2015, I bought into the idea that education was the path. I earned my A.A., then my BFA from CSULB in 2022. The fundamentals were valuable, but the structure felt like a box. I got too caught up in the technical side, and thinking became exhausting. Every time I thought of illustrating, I’d feel tired before I even began.
Writing has shifted that. It’s made me want to push through the static, to stop questioning myself long enough to take the next step. A problem is only a problem if you refuse to break it into pieces — though those pieces can still piss you off.
I took a break. Spaghetti and meatballs. A Marc Maron interview. Now David Blaine. In between, I’ve been thinking about how to stop my thoughts from crashing into each other — the mayhem of a lifetime of low self-belief.
That lack of belief has been my crutch. My mind has called it a curse. Really, it’s been bad communication with myself. If something didn’t work out, or I didn’t think I could do it, I’d cut myself down before I even tried.
The tech problem will get fixed in the next few days.
The bigger challenge is this: to keep illustrating, writing, and posting — even when my own head tries to get in the way.
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