What to do if you have multiple passions...?

My whole life i've loved anything creative. In my early years, I loved singing, dancing and drawing. I thought I wanted to be a singer. As I got older, I got more and more isolated and realized being a singer "wasn't for me". I still sang and made music but I didn't view it as an actual option and started focusing more on my art skills. I knew quickly that I wanted to be involved in the cartoon world. I've always been obsessed with cartoon characters. I used to imagine what they would do in certain scenarios. I drew them all day on the weekends from moring to dinner time. I was 15 when I realized I wanted to be a cartoonist. So I focused on that. Oh god that was 10 years ago now...I drew comics, created characters, wrote stories, obsessed over comics and cartoons that I liked to figure out why I liked them. I had a whole comic series that no one read except one of my friends.

But in this day and age of needing a "niche" has taught us multifacited people that we need to focus on one thing and one thing only to be succesfull. I love animation obviously, but I still find myself crying about my childhood dreams of being a singer. I thought I needed to completely give up music to pursue cartoons. That actually couldn't be further from the truth. I've just been conditioned to think that we are one thing. You are not one thing, humans in general are never just one thing. We are complex beings with multiple things we enjoy. And animation itself was built upon music in the early days. MOst old cartoons are characters animated over music composition.

Now the problem is, I never seem to be succesful in any one of those things because of how jumbled I am. I have a passion for music, animation, fashion, baking and even being a barista. Animation takes a lot of time to perfect so me wanting to make an animation one day and crocheting a hat the next, doesn't get much done. At least not quickly. There'll be an animation I'll come across from months ago and finally decide to finish it. Or I'll rush my animations to be done in one day because I know myself, if I put it down, it might not get done.

So, what do you do? Do you give up and only focus on one thing? Or do you still find a way to monetize all of your interests? Well, in my opinion, the option that shoud be considered is marketing yourself as the product. Lemme explain! Intead of branding yourself as a cartoonist, brand yourself as yourself. Your journey as an artist whatever that may be. It may take a long time to grow that way, but you'll stay true to yourself and gather an audience that appreciates your personality and journey rather than the end result. I believe it could be done I mean, the most famous youtubers and creatives market themselves as the content.

Now here's another problem, I have social anxiety. It's debilitating to where I can't even call the doctor to make an anppointment by myself. It's like pulling teeth to get me to have conversations with people. I can say the usual "Hello, how are you?" but anything further than that, I fell like I'm going to explode. If you can relate to that, let's take baby steps. I started by making animatics on youtube. Then I went live with no face cam. Then I made commentary videos about cartoons. I even made one about my fears about getting older and this capitalistic hell scape we call "normal life". The next step is naturally to show my face more often right? I guess if you feel comfortable doing that. With my trauma I'm kind of cautious about showing my face online. But I do it little by little these days. Even if if it's in drawing form.

So I guess you can take away that we artists are humans and should try to pursue all of our passions that we want to. Even if you need help from other artists. That's actually even better, not only will you make more friends with artists, but build your network. DO WHATEVR YOU WANT I GUESS.