I just finished reading the book Me, Myself, and Bob by Phil Vischer. It's about the rise and fall of Big Idea Productions and VeggieTales, which any autistic person raised on VHS would learn about, but this is a firsthand account from the company founder himself.
The entire book is a gripping read, but the final chapter is were I got emotional. The ride was over. Big Idea Productions went bankrupt. They were sold piecemeal to ClassicMedia, who would in turn fold into DreamWorks, in turn becoming a subsidiary of NBCUniversal. Phil was back to square zero after tasting the success he wanted all his life. He left behind many angry employees and even angrier fans. But rather than wallow in despair and renounce God, he reflected on all his mistakes and the warning signs God gave him in the past. He realized that his dream to be the Christians' Walt Disney became an idol that consumed him. God had to "kill" his dream to get Phil to return to Him, and only then did God give Phil a new direction as a children's book author for his new, smaller, manageable company. He had his dream, had it corrupted, lost his dream, but regained his relationship with God, learned to walk with Him instead of believing he knew what he wanted to accomplish for God. I am a Catholic, so of course that resonates with me on the offset.
He closed the book out on a list of the things he learned. Get a team that all rows in the same direction. Never forget to pay attention to your numbers. If you identify a need and create a product to fill that need, you are the expert. But the dream that snagged me like a fox in a snare was to give it up. Take [your] dreams and aspirations, and let them go, kill them. His exact words. After experiencing his dream, the thrill of building his own studio from a repurposed storefront into a household name, losing the dream to a series of unfortunate financial circumstances and poor, desperate decisions, he realized that the problem was the dream itself, not how he handled it. He got so caught up in filling Walt Disney's shoes that he neglected what was really important.
I mean...Wow. How long have we heard the same platitudes of "following your dreams" and "believe in yourself", now Phil is telling you, straight out, kill your dream. Your dream is poison. Do not follow that dream. Don't convince yourself of what your place in the world is going to be. Wait for your calling to come to you instead. I think that's beautiful. I think that's refreshing. If I had read this book years ago, I would have saved myself so much heartache.
I wanted to be...not quite a Walt Disney, more like a Lauren Faust. That failed. Oh, Lord, did that fail. How long have I wallowed in my own self pity about the way my dream fell to pieces and took me with it. Even reading this book, I thought, "at least Phil got to taste success". The failure of Lucky Dreams Kitty and so many other characters who I was sure I had down pat sent me crashing into the deep hole I find myself in now: depressed, unmotivated, living with my parents, unemployed because my stupid ass focused harder on a dream that was never coming true instead of learning business skills like my brothers, only a couple hundred dollars to my bank account when I didn't manage to blow through it all in a month, occupying my days with making snippy remarks towards people I found stupid-At least, until YouTube put me under the dreaded eternal shadowban for calling one person a "moron" too many. I have become a bitter, cynical asshole, not caring who I take my bitterness out on, envying everyone else's success. I have become the equivalent of a failed actor getting into bar fights in backwater taverns. I can't even really watch Multi Animator Projects anymore without that envy creeping on me. How else am I supposed to feel when I'm already halfway to my 30's and still under my mom's curfew, meanwhile people who are 19 get their own indie pilots?
The envy continued with every door that slammed in my face just for peeking in. My earliest fanfictions were met with mockery by some douche with a Mew profile picture who wrote a brief, but colorful comment about how he would rather shove a unicorn's horn up his rectum and so-and-so than read my writings about a Mareep's adventures in Pokepark. My DeviantArt page was met with 12, maybe 15 views on a good day, otherwise apathy and this one particularly arrogant user who told me bluntly to give up-she fancied herself a critic and enjoyed talking to young artists this way-then she jinxed me when I refused to, despite my apology for refusing to. When I took a class in art direction for cartoon series, the professor, a seasoned Cartoon Network animator, looked between the flat character art and the unfinished pitch I cobbled frantically together, then gently, but firmly confirmed in front of the whole class that I did not have what it took and would not make it in the industry. When I pivoted to graphic design, my professor showed faith in me, but still had to hold my hand through constructing those mockups, then those assignments still came out the weakest of the whole stack, even if I'd gotten the hang of kerning. Chicken Little Rehatched, which I was confident in being my big break at last, was instead a poorly edited, grossly mismanaged, nearly unwatchable mess, of which I was part of the problem as stress, inexperience and a lack of motivation led up to my single scene being two pieces of paper filmed on my dining room floor. Spoilers for Bee Movie Repollenated: My part there won't be looking much better. I actually tried to animate digitally with Tahoma2D this time, only to find out that Lenovo Yogas can only handle six months of daily use before the motherboard dies. So that's gonna be paper, too. I guess I'm a papercraft girl now.
The final kick in my butt came from my own local county fair. My mom pressured me to submit art a few years ago, and despite the risks, I submitted some art of the characters I still had. My concept work for Nhi Bao actually won first prize, and though the character would now have to be fully redesigned again, I considered it worth it at the time. Was this my springboard? Had my dream finally materialized after years of trying to pin it down? Nope. I kept going back to my piece all throughout the fair to see if anyone would stop to admire it, complement it, maybe realize that I was the artist, then promptly ask me about the ideas that led to it. That was when a very grim truth hit me as I watched people pass not just mine, but all the artwork right by; People came to that building to admire the photos, not the drawings. You see, they house the photos and the paintings in the same center, for convenience. All that effort and crying over the deadline just to be ignored. To add another injury to the injury, it only took two years after for the fair committee to get so sick of seeing my work that this year's piece was deliberately hung in the very furthest, darkest corner of the room, where no one could see it. I still have half a mind to write the fair committee an email to tell them that they could have just rejected me outright, and that would have gotten the message across just fine, while hurting a thousand times less than what they pulled. When I reluctantly picked up my piece after the fair, the committee member helping to return entries to their contributors told me that the best case scenario for my art would adorning a shelf at Goodwill for $5. Other people were selling their works from their own online stores for some $50, here I was with a "Goodwill gets $5 off my prints" prognosis. That envy bug of mine wasn't going anywhere, in fact, now it was bigger and heavier than ever.
If you visited my Steam profile-if you're the one who left the laughing emoji of shame on it, poo on you-you may have noticed I have "PopcornPie" listed as my past alias. This was the name I went by from around 2014 to I believe 2021. What led to the death of the PopcornPie name? That stupid Tumblr "Simpsons meme" I made that was really just my poorly-veiled way of unleashing my bitterness on Vivziepop for daring to have success where I failed. What did Vivzie have that I didn't have? (The sense to not steal someone else's kitten lamp design and slap a yellowface-style smile on it and call it a flagship character, for one, in case you're wondering how Lucky Dreams Kitty was the first domino that led to my downfall) No, Vivzie was a fraud. A sham. Someone who luckily stumbled into her success while I worked hard. Vivzie had what I deserved to have. She was the Homer Simpson to my Frank Grimes. I hated her. Yeah...That meme was not well recieved by Tumblr's users, to say the least. They left furious replies and ultimately ran PopcornPie off their turf. I rebranded to PunkyMaySnark to save face, I've made new and brighter connections with this name, and I've tested the waters for a second alias to offload any future creative endeavors onto while this one remains as my casual wear.
All of this misery and bitterness was rooted in the simple fact that I'd been conditioned by our media and our culture to believe that a dream was this ultimate survival kit you needed to make it through this world. Robots is a great film, but what are the odds that a real-life son of a dishwasher would achieve his dream as easily as Rodney Copperbottom did? All too easy to imagine someone in real life also wanting to become an inventor, and ending up a dishwasher. If you could take any of Danganronpa's Ultimates into the real world, could you imagine the shell-shock? Come to think of it, Judy Hopps had things fall into her lap, didn't she? Or maybe Ash Ketchum got to climb the ladder to World Champion a little too easily.
No, stop. I can barely take myself seriously suggesting that Ash Ketchum, with multiple famously close league losses beneath his belt, had it easy. He worked through eight regions to finally earn his World Champion title. But, you know what? He got there, he wondered what to do now, he saw Ho-Oh overhead, and he realized that his new title wasn't his calling. It was to be a Pokémon master. So he doesn't sit pretty on his new throne, he wanders off into the twilight with Pikachu. He was so focused on what he thought was his goal, he forgot about the more important goal that was laid out for him since before he had Pikachu. Phil's message from this book was already there in the media I was already fixated on and trying to ape.
From a fictional character's perspective, the screenwriter is their God. The end goal is written out for them since conception, then it's up to that character to find it and never lose sight on it or give up on it. And God can send little diversions or false feelings of success to test your conviction. Judy Hopps could have had a scene where she started working in car repairs, only to get left out in the rain when the garage went under, trudge a little ways down the street and notice a burglary in progress. In that scene, God would have let her fail in order to remind her what her calling was. Now, granted, my point assumes that there's a version of Zootopia where Judy Hopps was ever interested in car repairs first and law enforcement second.
That was the difference between me and Vivziepop. Vivziepop...Well, I'm not about to claim she believes in God like I do, I believe Tumblr would have a fourth round on me if I said that. But perhaps God secretly guided her through the creation of Spindlehorse and her two successful series and upcoming dinosaur movie. Whereas I tried to force myself into being the new Lauren Faust, I spread myself out through new characters and amateur fanfictions and whatever endeavors I could grab, none of it was guided by God. Without God's approval, everything I tried was doomed to fail. That's what she had that I didn't have. She wasn't a fraud. She didn't luckily stumble into anything, she fit a calling that was laid out for her. And that's not something I was ever warranted to depict her as Homer Simpson and myself as Frank Grimes over.
I bitch, moan, and bellyache about how I "deserved" to become the next Lauren Faust, just to get so chewed up and spat out that I don't even particularly like to draw anymore. I never "deserved" anything like that for myself. That's another great takeaway from Phil's biography, ignore the voice that tells you that you "deserve" the high life, especially when you do think you found your calling and your success. I didn't "deserve" to achieve the dream that I insisted to God was His calling for me. Look where that got me. How do I get out of this hole? Rather, how does God guide me out of this hole? Well, despite my messy schedule and poor sense of time management, I still like to write. I've found that I like to sing, even if I'm not very good. I even started dabbling in LMMS to make music. I've found little peep-holes into the world of voice acting that have yet to slam shut on me. When it was time to put my Lauren Faust dream to rest, I started to see the forest below the trees. I guess that arrogant girl from DeviantArt who told me to quit was right all along, she was my first real whisper from God, not that I'm particularly happy about admitting that her rude way of speaking to me and a handful of other fledgling artists was the correct one. (I recently decided to see whatever happened to her, and it turns out she ended up in the exact same stagnant hole as me, with an unused store page, an abandoned YouTube channel, and her final submission to Newgrounds left with a negative reception. Go figure.)
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