Oh yeah, it’s time to get serious about this anti-work journey by resuming all the creative projects I’ve been putting on hold. I’ve chosen content creation to be my escape vector from the indignities of racialized existence. While my coercion is set to end within two months, I’m putting my stolen time back to creative pursuits. Dealing with my mental health will also add to this difficulty.
I’ve already identified writing and drawing as my work. Sure, I’m not paid for it yet, but it makes me whole as a person. Creating has to be my work. For too long, I have been ignoring my work. I’ve allowed myself to be gaslit about how the world is supposed to work only to end up suffering.
The suffering stops today, and I begin my actual work. To create is to make myself whole and compel a record of the work I wish to bring into this world. I’ve already begun to keep this record by writing my posts and drawing pictures. It is only natural that I also add video making to my creative outlets.
For the last three years, I’ve been trying to make a youtube channel. The channel’s goal was to track my art skills and improve with time.
Without the destruction of booze and coercive labour, I can finally get back to that pursuit. What had brought me to making a channel was an advertisement on youtube for Jumpcut academy.
The origins of my channel
I was enrolled in a millwright pre-apprenticeship at the time. I was still desperate to get out of kitchen work, so I took the risk of trying a trade. I was apprehensive about this opportunity, however. Cultural stigma and the overwhelming whiteness of the staff and participants made me uneasy. I had dropped out of the Computer Engineering program five months before and was still beating myself up about that event.
I took the trades course because it was free, but I was still dealing with alcoholism, and I resented that I was now in education that I had been conditioned to avoid. I didn’t mind learning the theory, but the hands-on projects with manual machines bored me. I tried to motivate myself to keep going, but I couldn’t unlearn the stigma against the trades. I knew I didn’t want to work with my hands for a living.
Whenever there was a lull between classes, I would ditch and go out and drink. I already had to deal with the stigma of being Black, and now I have to contend with being around good ol’boy culture? Fuck that; I’m out.
I used some money that I had saved to purchase the jumpcut youtube Bootcamp. They guaranteed that if we didn’t make our money back within a year after going through the course, we could get a refund. I decided it was better to take that risk, and if I failed, I could always get my money back. It couldn’t hurt trying and making money doing something that interested me.
Art youtube channels are where I learned how to draw initially. I figured if I could show others how I learned to make art, I could be paid. Being an artist was always a childhood dream, but creative pursuits are often stigmatized within racialized working-class communities. We always had to choose an education that would make us more employable, even if it made us unhappy.
And you couldn’t complain about it because your parents had sacrificed everything to give you opportunities they didn’t have. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I ended up in the situation that I had always tried to avoid; a precariously underemployed and miseducated Black man. And thus, the drinking would continue.
Unfortunately, my alcoholism made this endeavour a flop as well. I resented being the pre-apprenticeship. Vocational training so damaged my ego that I was actively sabotaging myself by being around that environment by drinking nearly every day. I was caught in the loop of wake up, hate myself, drink, hate myself for going into more debt. It was a nightmare for my family and me.
Stopping alcohol
Around this time, my father was diagnosed with cancer, and I left the program and picked up whatever shifts I could at the restaurant to help out at home. I stopped drinking at this point. My family had tried for years to stop or reduce my consumption, and my father’s diagnosis was what made me stop.
Around this time, the season at the restaurant was over, and I had to look for different work. I was in sales for all but one week before I had quit. I hadn’t been drinking since September of 2019, and it was the first time I was tempted. Fortunately, I had finally qualified for benefits after working multiple part-time jobs for eight years.
It was also when I was accepted into NPowerCanada’s IT Analyst program. I received my A + certificate in 2021 and worked as an IT Technician for a year. It will be a year since I’ve obtained this certificate, and I’m now in a mental position where I can work in my channel again. However, covid and racial reckoning globally has added to that challenge.
Since the jumpcut courses were mine for life, I started working through the workshops. I had planned out my first fifty channel ideas, made my channel banner art and got proper equipment.
As of writing, I have made several playlists of me completing drawabox homework lessons and a reproduction of drawing perspective from Jazza’s youtube channel. Currently, I’m editing a video of my workspace setup.
How is the channel going so far?
Learning to plan out what to make was a challenge. I had always assumed content creation would come naturally to people who wanted to express themselves. This Bootcamp showed that planning my creative pursuits is necessary if I want to make it my primary source of income. The best way to improve quickly is to either teach or copy others’ success. This does not mean that I’ll be claiming others’ work. Rather, I’m to take inspiration from their ideas and add my own personal touch to the types of videos I want to recreate.
These videos are going to be bad, and that’s the point.
The content I currently have on my channel is intentionally amateurish because I’m still learning to improve. I want people to see where my skill level in creation is currently. As I get better, I hope it inspires others to pursue art themselves. I know I’m bad at art right now, and that’s why I’m starting this channel; to give others hope that anyone can learn to be a better artist. Learning art is how I plan to reclaim myself from the indignities of this world. It will not be easy, and it will be a very lonely process, but I can no longer afford to put this life on hold. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life wondering, “what if?”
So let’s start today. There are going to be days where I can barely get out of bed or the demands of coercion demand greater attention, but I can at least try to make myself free.
I hope you’ll join me on this life-changing journey and see where it takes us
Here’s the link to Kazexmoug Draws, constructive criticism and follows always appreciated.