I walked into an art store yesterday and was surprised to find that there are still package designs of mine on the shelves: a number of drawing and sketch pad covers, some watercolor tablets, boxes for pastels and oil pastels, and packaging for canvases. I'm sure there was more but I didn't explore the whole store in search of my work.

It's hard to quantify my response to seeing my work in a random art store two years later in a different city and state than where I worked on all of it. In some ways it is bittersweet to see it. Even though that company was really bad for me in terms of stress and psychology, I was doing big things. I had an inventory of 50,000 items where it was only a matter of time before I would have had them all at my desk for a package redesign. They were distributing those items to thousands of art stores in the US. They are all nationally recognizable art brands like Canson, Pentalic, Connoisseur, Strathmore, Rembrandt, you name it.

Yet when I see my work in art stores I sometimes wonder at my uneasy, dark response to it. I see the "what-if" part of everything. It was good, but it was also bad. That company was part of my downfall when it came to my health problems and stress levels. Tom had very real anger management issues. They had management and deadline problems and supervisors that would lie about what they had told you if it meant saving their ass from Tom's anger. It also bothered me the way they nosed around my health problems when I was too sick to walk on my own let alone work their insane deadlines.

I am such a different person than I was back then. I was on this huge career path and it was all I truly wanted. I have different priorities now and a different sort of wisdom about what is truly important in life. Believing you may die really knocks some perspective into a person. Right now all I know is that I want to maintain my health, I love to do art, and I'm still interested in design though not on a level where I'm willing to whore myself out just to get picked to create a logo design for someone who's rude because they don't want to pay for your skills yet can't do it themselves.

Right now I find myself at a crossroads where I must figure out what I want to do with my abilities and what opportunities to search for or create. It's not the career I had, and yet I don't know what it is that I do want. I feel like it's just out of my line of sight right now.

I guess... I guess seeing that stuff in the art store is sort of like seeing a ghost. I can look back and see an entirely different path and life and it would have led me to such a different place than I am right now. For the most part, I do not want anything to do with where that other path would have led me. But sometimes it's hard to still the voice in my head that wonders if I have lost the one big career opportunity of my lifetime. Is my potential lost? Will I find a new path? Will it be something I love? Do I already have that now?