A Letter to My Past Self

First Steps to Your Creative Journey

Mlky Way Across Your Map / Skull Verse Comics

I guess the first steps to any internal war of forcing oneself to move forward in life from what's been tethering them down, is to address it...

I still remember back when I was in middle school, my health teacher had us write a letter to our past selves, and I never really knew how to take it seriously. Growing up, I found some of my friends and soon people within the communities I joined, that found out how crushing the industry can be when you work in terrible work environments and tight deadlines, and how their methodology helped them power through and keep going in some of the darkest times in their lives.

Some of the things they fell more heavily into was music, traditional painting on the side, exercise, but among all of them, I had found a common denominator, writing a letter to their past self from when they were first inspired, driven, or even happy.

They say, try to siphon that same kind of energy you had felt when you were in that position and just let your heart spill onto the paper without worrying about cleaning up the mess left in its wake.

If you've felt drained, exhausted, on the legit edge of quitting because of hardship, jerks or bullies in the workspace, your life just pushing, and pushing, until you finally fall and hiut rock bottom, and then kicking you while you're down. Trying to force you to give up on your dreams, your passions, your livelihood and just settle for whats in front of you. I invite you to try the same.

Please remember, you are beautiful, you are smart, you are one of the most creative damned people I had ever met, and that's only from what I am able to see from the bright future ahead of you! You are one of the single most talented aspiring, professional, or even damn right legendary person in your field, and don't you ever forget that!

Yes, life has you trapped in a dark abyss where you can only see half of a chiseled, broken piece of debris left from the yellow brick road to success you once had strode on, but it's still there, and I pray you find your way back to where you aim and strive to be!

Just try to remember what got you into this in the first place, and try to hold onto that! At the end of the day, no matter what happens, no matter how bad thigns get or what is taken forcefully from you, there is no power, person, let alone thing, that can take away your hope, your dreams, nor any of your memories. No matter how cloudy and murky things get, the sun will rise once more and illuminate the clear skies ahead.

Welp, I guess here is my take on a letter to my past self on my creative journey...

Some early drawings I found from the past, when I used to make a comic for my mother called The Purple and Black Stick Figure

A Dream Turned to Life-Long Promise

Hey bud, any chance you remember when we used to stay up all night reading that book of monsters every night? I know it may have looked like we were just into the book like, to the outside world peering through a crpytic lense, but me and you both know it wasn't what was in the book itself, it was in the way the monsters on the page used to breathe and come to life as we imagined a knight or hero of some sort fighting epic adventures and hopping between pages as we flip through the book.

Tell you the truth, I can't find that book anywhere now a days and I know I blame my need for glasses on the fact we used to always read that book in the dark and how mom would tell us that if we kept doing that we'd need glasses soon, but I'm pretty sure sitting on the ground in front of the tv, getting lost in the vast climatic universe of cartoons and shows back then, didnt really help much with that either.

Do you remember how when you finally turned old enough to go to elementary school, how we didnt fit in, we were always picked on and we hated school? How we made it a habit to joke on ourselves in front of others so that we were laughing with the other kids instead of the other kids simply just laughing at us? It was a toxic state of mind that left us self-loathing and trying to hurt ourselves in the bathroom after it escalated when we were in that fat ugly teacher's class that made the entire school, including the counselor and principal in on it.

I still remember that one day we made a promise that we wouldn't quit, that me, an older version of you would have it together by now and finally bring all those vivid dreams we used to manifest when the lights went out, of all these stories, soon to be award-winning and world-renowned for generations. That even if the now present-day me wasn't wildly successful, that I wouldn't give up until our stories were on the big screen, so that you have something to live for.

I won't lie to you, things got hard for us bud. I am still keeping that promise through all the failures, all the heartbreak, the pain, no matter how much blood, sweat, tears, or fake friends I shed, I will continue to still refuse to give up, because you deserve better. You don't just deserve to have something to live for, you deserve to have something that makes you happy...

Tell you the truth, that's all I ever really wanted for you, that's why I still write, that's why I still draw, and that's why, no matter how broken I feel, no matter how many shards of former self are scattered across the floor and stepped over by others are cracked, crunched, and broken, I still refuse to quit. For you, and for the knowledge that someday, we are finally gonna make it!

I promise...

What's to Come

Tell you the truth kid, you're gonna fall in love with making art. You are gonna draw some amazing pieces of our own interpretations of SpangeBob SquarePants, Super Heros, Courage the Cowardly Dog, and soo soo many different versions of Deadpool. The other kids in school at first are going to say that we arent good at drawing until we get to a new school where we meet a friend named Robert, whos gonna tell us we are one of the best artists he's ever met in his whole life and make life just that much easier.

You're gonna be surrounded by kids in yet another school where everyone is tracing pictures off the computer screen and telling us that we don't draw that good unless we do as they do. You're going to try it but end up ultimately not enjoying the process of tracing online images, even if it's just to get an outline, and thats perfectly ok, remember, you may have given into peer pressure but at least you found your own path in the end.

Soon, you're gonna be sent to live with your dad in Florida at age 14ish and you are gonna have some of the most vividly, realistic, and immersive dreams of your entire life that will become your new and latest obsessions. You are gonna start sketching the characters on all your class work, home work, notebooks and such off the top of your head and you may find yourself actively trying to have the same dream, over and over again, each and evrey night, trying to recreate the same dream but ending up creating soo soo many other incredible dreams in its place until you finally learn how vivid dreaming works, and how to control your dreams.

Look, I know it sounds far-fetched, but I promise you that it'll feel like an epiphany when it finally happens. You are going to experience a whole lineup of fake friends, heartbreak, and failure but you are going to keep on until you hit high school and you're back to living with your mother and she buys you a brand new iPad for Christmas.

So at first you are going to try and draw on the iPad but it's just not gonna feel the same as drawing in all your notebooks and on paper, but you are going to keep trying and trying to get better at it until you are finally working on concept art for a very, very small study working on a video game. Your then going to get a little bit of a niche for it until you get kicked out the house by your sister and are forced to sleep in the laundry room of your friends place until they kick you out as well, working for a job that's not even paying you money anymore.

At the end of highschool, you father promises to help pay for college, and to just apply to see what happens, you get accepted to a few of them and about the time of your sister kicking you out, your father hears and ends up revoking that offer, leaving you with the first and the worst nervous, anxiety fueld, and depression filled breakdowns where those same thoughts came back buzzing in our ears we used to have as a kid when we felt like we didn't want to be in this world anymore. But you know what? We didn't lose everything, we lost a place to stay, we lost hope for going to college, we lost hope for a career in doing what we love for a living, but we kept trying anyways and pushing through all of the doubt regardless because damnit. This world isn't fair to the lot of us, but that doesn't give us any right to give up, it doesn't matter how hard we break, it only matters if we have the strength to put ourselves back together.

Soon your father is going to call for you to go down to Florida so you can go on tour for the college you wanted to go to even though he isnt going to help you pay for it anymore, leaving you without the ability to afford to go, but damn kid...

That place was stellar...

It was one of the single greatest places we had ever stepped foot into and I wish I had what it took to get us in.

Apparently, at that time one of our aunts was offering to help us stay with her in her house, help us get a job and even a car with the offer to help us even get into college. Unfortunately, she pulled that offer right from under us last second and we were sent to live with our father once more for the time being.

You're gonna keep drawing regardless, and trying to create all these stories in your head as the world around you keeps twirling around on an endless loop of false hope and regret.

Getting lost in the vast stories lurking in the back of our minds that we hope and pray to be able to create professionally alongside some of our all-time favorite artists we followed throughout the years.

Soon you start working four jobs, and then three, while teaching your friend how to draw and this one illustration you draw for them becomes the premise for your first official graphic novel, that I myself am still working on with our team. You eventually are going to land this job that pays you a ton, working from home and get back in touch with an old friend from middle school.

You are putting out two, some days even three pages, fully colored and rendered each and every day without stopping, without exhaustion, and literally using purely just our minds as reference, drawing everything from imagination without having to resort to the world around us as inspiration, only the universe living within our brain!

One day, biking home from playing basketball, you're going to get hit by a driver that doesn't stop to see if we are ok, all you're going to remember is the impact and blacking out for who knows how long until someone pulls over and sees if we are ok and calls an ambulance for us.

We tear every muscle in our body from upper back to ankles and we arent able to walk without crutches, we arent able to sleep at night cause our body is going to jolt us back away every time we start to drift off, we aren't going to be able to eat what we love like cereal and such because the bowl and the milk is suddenly is too heavy, we aren't able to play basketball because, welp we can't really move, we cant game because our wrists and fingers throb and hurt.

But worse of all...

We can't draw...

We can't write...

We can't do literally anything we love anymore because everytime we pick up that stupid friggin stylus our finger tips begin to sting and hurt and bleed from being scrapped on the sidewalk on our decent and I swear to you, I promise you, its going to be ok.

Dad is going to leave us the day or two after picking us up from the hospital to be with his new girlfriend because of some kind of issue shes having with our house so the majority of this recovery you are going to be faced with is going to be on you, and only you. Your cousin and your friend will check on you from time to time, and even though you can't really sit down for long periods of time, you start working again. At first those thoughts come back but you flush them out with anti depressants and finally go to therapy for a little bit. You start to force yourslef through physical recovery and dad finally comes back and helps a bit with the recovery process, or atleast with what he notices. Lawyers don't want to take our case, and the police are no help with finding out who did it, or atleast steering us in the right direction of who stripped our pride away from us.

But hey, that's ok, people have endured worse and survived, and I'm not saying that is any justification of what we endured but remember this, you survived...

So many families got their kids, their parents, their loved ones taken from them because they didnt survive what you did. I know you're gonna take things for granted because you are going to be too focused on the loss of what we used to have, but that's ok! Just rememebr to keep your chin up and keep on regardless!

Soon you let your fingers bleed and force yourself to draw regardless and have to learn how to draw all over again. You lose the ability to draw purely from imagination and are forced to use references with a lot of what you draw. You eventually run out of medication for anti depressants and therapy just isn't clicking, feeling rather surface leveled at the time. You take the absolute worse treatment from customers over and over and over again at work while struggling to cope in your personal life and you get on a call with soo soo many people, grieving, heartbroken, and distressed people that you try with every single bone in your withering body to help, but ultimately fall short due to company policies and the lack of being able to reach through the screen and simply give them a hug and promise everything will get better.

You start to become a bit of an alcoholic and find yourself downing bottles of vodka, spiked lemonade, white rum, wine, and really anything you can get your hands on after work so you don't have to cope anymore. But by the grace of god, you manage to get lost in creating series again, but you start to grow a habit of scrapping your ideas because you start to feel like nothing of what you do is ever enough.

Soon we have an emotional breakdown at work while speaking ot our manager and just start crying uncontrollably and she was soo understanding and professional and we ended up having to quit due to not being able to work there anymore while juggling what we were dealing with at work and at home.

You eventually start working two jobs again, dad's girlfriend helps us to quit drinking after she finds a bottle of vodka stashed in our closet, and we get a gym membership. We are motivated by some of our coworkers and start working on a series, Rooted Dream Adventures, which helps with that creative spark we felt like we were missing. It started on sticky notes for all of my coworkers to see btu then we bring them home and ink over them on our iPad! I know the quality wasn't as detailed as what we used to be able to draw but I was pretty damned proud of us bud!

You start going on jogs every morning, going to the gym regularly, working out at home, surround yourself with real friends, move out from your dad's, move back to New York, get a better job, and right now I'm working on about six or seven series with a small time I put together and I am getting closer and closer to finally achieving our dream! You got this, just never forget to remember why you got into this in the first place, and never, ever, quit. I don't care how bad things get, or may seem, you never quit, ok?

I appreciate everything you've ever endured for me so that I could learn and grow over time, I just hope you're proud of the man I've become and strive to be.

I promise to not give up

Love,

Mlky Way Across Your Map

How'd You Feel About Today's Post?

I went through what I went through just as you survived whatever hardships, no matter how small, and still continued! Writing a short letter to your past self of when you first got into the love of doing what you love with pride and joy, can sometimes be a moment of self reflection and venting in a way you sometimes don't even realize you had bottled up inside casue you forgot all the pain and resentment, tightly packaged and thrown in the back of your fridge, knocked over and hidden behind some of youre grocceries you just unpacked from the bagged you recently been lugging around.

I invite you to try this for yourself, see how far back you can dig and feel free to keep out some parts of your life you may not want to re-live. Just focus on what you'd feel as though you can handle so that it makes it just that much easier to keep on with less weight resting on your shoulders.

Some time in the future when you feel like giving up again, you can re-read the letter you wrote and gain a new wave of inspiration to keep on or maybe even feel inspired to write another letter from where you are now!

How did you feel about today's post? Feel free to share your stories, ideas, and opinions via email or even via the from on our homepage! We'd love to hear your thoughts! Of course you can leave a comment here as well ;)

See you guys next time!

-Skull Verse Comics