I Followed My Dreams, Now What?

When I woke up the morning after graduating art school, I was met with two years’ worth of art supplies scattered across my bedroom floor, hauled back from my studio in cardboard boxes and plastic bins. Last night, ChatGPT told me not to be overwhelmed. It reassured me that I do not have to have everything figured out right now. Still, even the thought of sorting through it all feels impossible.

Unused art papers. Old photographs I once thought were genius, now slightly embarrassing markers of growth. Half-empty bottles of alternative printing chemicals that were far too expensive to throw away, though I know some of them probably expire. Boxes waiting to be labeled “art supplies,” “archive,” or “discard,” as though deciding where these objects belong might somehow determine whether I still belong to this version of myself.

Am I even still an artist?

I keep telling people I plan to get my MFA after taking a year off, but people make plans all the time. Life changes. Bills pile up. Dreams become impractical. The life I sacrificed so much for, financially and emotionally, could still slip through my fingers. My Starbucks addiction certainly is not helping, despite my complete lack of effort to stop buying overpriced coffee as though caffeine and routine can temporarily substitute for direction.

"I made something worth making simply because it contained love and grief and humanity."

My BFA thesis project feels nowhere close to finished. Sometimes I wonder if it ever will be. What if one day I become an ancestor and my great-great-great-grandchildren stumble across a half-finished handmade book tucked into some attic box and wonder whatever happened to her?

Lately, I think a lot about Vincent van Gogh. Not because I am comparing myself to him, but because I wonder if there exists a certain breed of person who feels things too deeply to function in the world the way everyone else seems to. People whose sensitivity becomes both their greatest gift and greatest burden. And maybe if I could stop measuring success by everyone else’s standards, I could finally find some semblance of peace. Not through praise or money or numbers or validation, but through the quiet knowledge that I existed, and that I made something worth making simply because it contained love and grief and humanity.

Then I think about love itself.

I think about how I met this man who, on paper, represents everything I should want. Stability. Kindness. The possibility of an easy life. I imagine us settling into the suburbs, going to Costco on Saturdays, raising children in a house with a white picket fence while I continue making art quietly in the background.

And yet the image fills me with dread.

Not because I do not want love, but because I fear becoming too comfortable inside a life that no longer asks anything of me. I want adventure. I want to travel recklessly, make mistakes, lose everything and rebuild it. I want the kind of romance that changes me irrevocably. The kind that leaves me heartbroken enough to make something beautiful from it afterward.

“Part of me worries that without heartbreak or instability, the art itself would disappear.”

Maybe that is unhealthy. Maybe I have romanticized suffering to such an extent that I no longer know how to separate chaos from meaning. Part of me worries that without heartbreak or instability, the art itself would disappear. That peace might make me ordinary.

But maybe that is the real contradiction I am left with after art school: wanting softness and intensity simultaneously. Wanting stability while fearing stagnation. Wanting love while protecting my freedom. Wanting a meaningful life while still craving external proof that it mattered.

All I know is that this morning, my alarm went off, I looked around at the wreckage of my former studio practice scattered across my bedroom floor, and for the first time in years, there was nowhere I needed to be.

I followed my dreams.

Now what?