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Story time! Very long story time. About this time last year, I was finishing up my Bachelor's Thesis. It was a very rough sketch of a novel -- a gonzo contemporary urban fantasy thing set in an alternate universe version of Anaheim, California. It's something I want to revisit someday when all the mess that's going on for me personally right now is over.

There are many things I am extremely proud of in that draft, but the crown jewel in that project for me was the narrator/main protagonist I developed, Olivier. I imagined Olivier in my early drafts to be a kind of reptilian humanoid, but it took me awhile to really figure out what he was supposed to look like, and as his personality evolved over the drafts so did my mental image of him. I wanted him to be cute and not too threatening, and I soon realized that he would look kobold-like. So I ran with that idea. And even now looking back, knowing all of the glaring errors in that draft, I am shocked at just how deeply and vividly the reader got to know Olivier as a person and the magically messed up situations he found himself in.

A year later, and life has taken a bad turn. My master's degree has felt like a trainwreck beginning to end. Though I was excelling in it until this past semester, getting a taste of what it means to work in this field full-time has caused me to seriously re-evaluate my future career. Full-time teachers often work an average 60+ hours per week according to some recent research, and that overtime is not paid. And at that level, it is literally killing me. As in, my mental and physical health has seriously declined over these past few months, and I'm now under the very watchful eye of my doctor to keep me alive and stable.

During these problems I felt that I was losing my identity. I had been reduced to this robot who had no life or even the ability to think about anything else than what I had to do tomorrow. I started feeling a desperate hunger to reconnect with that old spark, that feeling that I am alive and that my existence can mean something, if only to myself. I felt myself reflecting back to those moments in undergrad which first gave me the spark for developing Olivier as a character... those endless nights where I would put on some album I really liked, and took my little kick scooter on adventures all around Anaheim and Orange, and all of the vivid things I would imagine along the way as I discovered new streets, parks, and restaurants. I felt a deep need to reconnect with those feelings, because they were the happiest times of my life. I wanted some way to remember what I had been through and what it all meant to me, and my mind kept thinking back to Olivier.

While this was going on, I found Maim's account, and I saw that he had a rather interesting commission type. Maim likes to draw kobolds. Like, really likes to draw them. If you look through his accounts, you will see hundreds of examples of kobolds, each one looking so different from each other, and all of them pretty cute as well. He has a deal where, if you pay a nominal sum, he will quickly design a kobold for you off the cuff based on as many or as few details as you provide as a warmup to working on one of his larger, much more expensive commissions. So I took a risk. I took the description of Olivier I wrote in the novel, simplified it down to just the facts, made a few last-minute edits and suggestions that I left up to the artist, and sent it off. And a week and a half later, during what may have been one of my worst days in my semester so far, he sent me this.

This was almost exactly how I imagined him back when I was writing him, finally now come to life. This was the perfect reminder to me that, no matter how ground down this world gets me, I have achieved some real things which mean something to me. That I have a right to re-find happiness, even if it means I give up the upper middle-class, keeping-up-with-the-joneses lifestyle that my family and school system drilled into me. That I am free to build my own life exactly how I desire it, and that I can regain my sense of humanity by continuing to be creative in the face of all of these challenges.