I have been wrestling my career for the past decade.
During those years, I’ve experienced many abnormal blessings. To start off, born randomly under South Korean parents who could afford my full college tuition allowed me to start from an extremely rare financial ‘Ground Zero’. Native-like fluency of both English and Korean gave me much advantage and confidence to learn, network and grow over the years with relative ease. Through the severe Korean art cram school pipeline I built foundational skills early, then got accepted to the first animation high school ever created in Korea. Great things came with graduating from Art Center college of Design, a school famous for its militant preparation towards employment. Just a 15 minute drive from school was Burbank, the central hub of the current animation industry. Working professionals taught classes in person because they lived so close by. I crossed paths with many of my favorite artists during college. Over the course of a decade, I’d created genuine friendships with good hearted solid minded folks, also artists, that I trust and attribute the great leaps towards my wellness. On top of all this, somehow I was at the right place at the right time and knew the right people to be on a stack of great career booster projects that have served me compounding benefits.
Perhaps to balance things out, I’ve also a great talent for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Over the course of 10 years, I would come across interactions stranger than fiction with people that can only be described as ‘cartoonishly malevolent’ from both industry folks I know well and, even crazier, folks that I’ve never even talked to once. I have been wrongly accused and rumored to have blacklisted fellow colleagues, been uncredited still to this day for an identical copy of my work advertised as their original, was the scape goat for a team-decision and took full blame only to be reported to the union by the artist angered, was once told ‘You know my name will be bigger on screen than yours?’ by a professional I’ve looked up to, got yelled at by a friend I hadn’t seen in years to take down a post, and even had a Director put me down to his famous friend Directors not because of the years of work that I had done was bad, but because I did not willingly walk into to his cage of lies. I had many sleepless nights crying, not being able to eat or drink. The incident that got me undeservingly reported to the union took me down to 87 pounds. I saw my ribs sticking out from my back and chest, and so cruelly I had told my team a day before it all happened that my grandmother that I loved so dearly had passed on the other side of the globe. And like it was all planned, whenever these things would happen, my trusting friends would be just out of the perimeters of involvement from the situation to come to my aid. Funny enough, if you know how to read between the lines, all of the frayed threads of evidence has been sitting continuing to fray online in clear view. Some, as a form of email sitting in your inbox.
And now, again, here it is the truest statement I can make: I have been wrestling my career for the past decade.
I’d tried to quit numerous times, and successfully ran away to pursue film school, attending for only a month and a half in 2019. Don’t worry. I got a great rebate.
I had my active moments, asking people, professionals, friends, mentors, tarot cards, mediums. Then eventually, I had my less active and observant moments of asking, the Quaran, New Testament, the Tanak, and in the same manner, authors of historical fiction and non fiction alike. And, I may have not gotten a clear cut answer, but touched upon a thread that allowed me to gently feel the answer from afar!
The answer to why this all happened to me? It was for you. Yes, YOU who is glazing your eyes on my words now. You, who is searching for answers just like I was. It was all to help guide you to a more sensical fulfilling career, to clear the path for you to get us back to what really made us pursue this profession in the first place. TO GIVE CHILDREN WONDER.
You could be a student hopefully wanting to be employed at any of these big companies, a professional perhaps that is thriving, or not, and most hopefully, you could be one of the people that had actively attempted to make my life miserable. If so, please do not be worried because this was initially for you.
Why? Because I am just as flawed as you. Through my own pains that fill the empty space of all what I’ve written so far, I had once been mentally ill, miserable, and felt competitive, self-consciousness, desperate to be seen, gossiped, wanting to fill a void with recognition, felt unworthy or even unqualified, and worst of all, felt jealousy for the things I did not yet work for. I understand the pain of the things life gives us and doesn’t and breaking the thought of what is ‘deserving’ for ourselves. Yet, I did not have it in me to contribute to the death ant spiral that creates new beginnings on its own to trap others into a scheme that takes all of us away from our creative work and happiness, even when it was so easy to explode. With that combination of what it feels like swallowing explosions, I started learning and growing. And guess what? I started realizing things, and found things about me like this great example: The work of mine that was near identically copied, in the process of comparing the two, I had realized that I’d never credited the character designs that I had dropped in that very painting. I was seeing things that I did not see before. In others, but more importantly in myself! You had unwittingly given me your pain as a curse, a bastard child you shoved off to me, but deep inside it was a gift. I nurtured that child you left me. A mirror of many sides to look at myself, even in angles I couldn’t see myself before.
So here is my conclusion. I forgive you, because the only way to do this is with you. We have been fighting petty fights at the cost of the careers of future artists and creatives. More importantly, we have been spoiling the grounds that is animation, a medium created to share imagination, joy and wonder, for what? For our own personal offense or defense, fame and fortune. We need to work THROUGH our flaws not USING our flaws towards what is really important: Not to rebuild, but to guide the current state that is the industry to a healthier future. I have my doors open as I’ve already told some of you. I intend to eventually get to you with my heart open, to discuss, to heal, and to grow together.
For the hopeful people looking up to a career worth cherishing, I declare my mission: I will continue to experience, digest, and absorb all the yins and yangs that my career throws at me so I can continue to reinvent myself. I will share a better way, a more efficient way, a truly enjoyable way for you to walk through and experience. Here for free, for all of you to see.
All I hope in return is that once you’ve walked through that way, that you share your findings with me.
With absolute hope from the industry.
S