Please- if you know or have any influence over young artists in your life, tell them that pain does not automatically mean growth.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned working in animation is that suffering does not equal good art. There is this weird idea that in order to create something, or learn or get better, that it should be painful. That you should hate yourself and torture yourself, even when you’re losing sleep and doing everything you can to become better at your craft.

The animation community is filled with difficult eccentrics, but there are also tons of nice, helpful people who are willing to mentor or hire young artists. In my late teens and early 20s I endured horrible treatment (sometimes from myself), and I put up with it because I believed being a better artist was worth the emotional and psychological abuse. Looking back now I would much rather have had a healthier outlook on things, even if it meant learning and improving at a slower rate.

I wish that someone had told me when I was younger that I had the right to be self-critical without self-hating, and that notoriety did not give someone the right to treat me poorly.