It all started when…
I joined Passion to Paid in 2018, an online class created by Lauren Hom, where you learn how to create, promote and make a living out of your passion projects.
Back then, I had been in an LDR for 4 years and combining my experiences with my artistic skills, “When Together, When Apart“ was born: a series of illustrations that covers all aspects related to long-distance relationships through story telling.
To launch this project, I joined 36 Days of Type, an IG challenge that happens every year around May. 4 years in a long-distance relationship encompassed A LOT and I had so much stuff to talk about and express through art that I didn’t know exactly where to begin. Having some rules provided by the challenge helped me set the right framework for my project: I had a whole alphabet and numbers from 1 to 9 to work with. It took a little while to come up with relevant and interesting concepts but it worked out both with aspects pertaining to LDRs in general and personal experiences too.
WTWA ended up exceeding my expectations. It brought positive consequences from many aspects:
It helped me connect with other people on social media from a very genuine perspective. My audience found my stories relatable and comforting—and they shared their own experience with me, which in turn helped me and made me feel comfort too.
It was therapeutic. Putting some opinions into words, after so many years, helped me feel relieved and understood. Apart from bringing love into my life, this unconventional relationship made me realize that not everyone in your life will be welcoming of “out of the box“ lifestyles. There were a lot of judgmental comments and questions I had to deal with plus unsolicited advice. I think apart from being cathartic, this project helped me shed some light on the fact that LDRs are real, romantic relationships and not some virtual whim we daydreamed of.
It got way more support than I expected and I’m so grateful for this. People I hadn’t talked to in months and members of my audience who had never talked to me before reached out both publicly and privately to say congratulations and to tell me how much this series resonated with them (even people who are not in an LDR!) Thank you so much to everyone who encouraged me while I worked on the series and told me to turn this into a book sometime.
It made my experience in the distance a lot more manageable because I had this supportive net to count on and all these stories turned into art to remind me of everything my now husband and I went through.
Now this project exists as a blog.
