Well, after a few weeks of serious soul searching, I finally figured it out.
I know from experience that I don't want to get into a film program. As much as I love animation, the biggest rationale for those overpriced programs is the facilities. But I have facilities right here at home. And while I want to do animation, I want to do it on my own terms. I don't want to do commercials or stuff for Disney.
I also know that I don't want to do design. I realize fully what a hideous joke of a school Valley is. But the deeper problem is that commercial art is the exact opposite of what I'm seeking to do here. I can get creative with my own design but do I really want to churn out crappy web pages for tractor companies, because they see creativity and aesthetics as unnecessary, see web page design as no more than a glorified billboard? Most certainly not.
I thought about going back to my writing roots. It's what I've always been good at, and it comes to me as natural as breathing. But I'm already a good writer, and while there are some decent jobs to get as a writer, there's also a lot of really boring writing jobs that pay the bills. I'm not sure if I want to spend my days going over grant proposals and corporate newsletters while I wait for the novel to sell. Besides, while writing will always be a part of my life, I don't feel good about abandoning the visual arts.
Today, I woke up refreshed and knew what I wanted to do.
About two and a half years ago, I was accepted into a program for art therapy at Alverno College. Now most schools don't have undergraduate programs in the field. Most art therapists get degrees in the fine arts then go into the art therapy masters program. Alverno's program was a mix of art and psychology. I was going to go into the program. But, I didn't really want to go to an all women's college and at the time was thinking that I would be more inclined to go into design, which they didn't offer at the school.
I've often thought about becoming an art therapist, though the amount of education required and the average salary frightened me off. But I've started to reconsider this.
If anything is aligned with what I want to do as an artist, it would be this. My work has always had a deeply therapeutic value to it, and I'd love to pass that on to others. I like the notion that art can come out naturally, without technical considerations, as a way of coming to terms with problems. I would love to help others to discover art in this context, rather than perpetuating the notion that it's something you have to be very skilled at to be able to go near. Self expression can be a great tool and I think I would be good at helping people uncover that.
It's true that I had been very depressed about my recent disappointment with school. But it's really just a question of analysing what went wrong and what personal quality in me made my experience studying commercial art to be so stifling and defeating, then to figure out how I might use those qualities to my benefit.