Reflections and a New Project Start!

Given the events of my last post, I've debated for a long time about a lot of things when it comes to cosplay. 

So... here I am to talk about my recent updates, new projects, and all the efforts being done to make this very successful cosplay season to start with.

A Time of Reflection

Since the summer of 2019, I began to think... about what cosplay had become for me.

No, it was never about quitting, but it was about needing time to reflect after the events of our Chaldea project. I needed time (and technically got plenty in the most globally miserable way possible) to really process my experiences in cosplay, and what that ultimately meant when it came to how I approached skits and competitions. 

Some of my realizations were tough pills to swallow, such as things like the fact that I have spent a lot of years compounding cosplay crunching stress on top of my work schedule and before 2020, my full-time school schedule. I had been doing a lot with so little time to the point where I was making time. 

Then came other conflicting things, such as reflecting on the socio-economic forces at play when it came to cosplay, and thinking back to various ways I had conditioned myself to make my imposter syndrome even worse even when I was actually improving and doing better than where I started.

Before 2019, I was plenty aware of these things running in tandem with my cosplay experiences, but I didn't want to acknowledge them. I felt like there was no time to, not without addressing them at the worst moments possible: right before hitting the stage for a masquerade.

I did notice some of these emotions trickle through however, such as in 2018 when my friends and I had dropped out of a large skit at the very last second because ultimately we were so burnt out and tired of working on it between our final exams and our jobs. Even though we'd been told afterwards that we would've won something, it just didn't matter at that point compared to the exhaustion we collectively had.

Then came 2019, and it just went exactly how I wish it hadn't. While there's a lot of external factors that contributed to the situation at large, I really needed the time, more than I wanted to initially admit, to think about my role and the difficult spot I was in of trying to campaign and work towards something knowing that the road was going to be a bumpy one. 

As a student, I lacked resources that I know I need to do more complex cosplays and compete at larger events. As a cosplay partner, I can do all I can to be a campaigner and visionary, but I think it's hard to do that when you're also doubting yourself a lot along the way. 

I didn't want to admit it then, but I felt an immense amount of pressure that if I failed, I wasn't worried about failing myself, but rather everybody else around me who'd supported me up to that point.

Once the dust settled however, I realized that I did actually fail myself by ignoring my own feelings and experiences throughout this. I needed to heal so I could remove that doubt and fear away from one of my favorite hobbies.

So, by 2020 there I was trying to compete again. We had a new skit in mind, and I began rethinking of how while duo competitions hold a certain kind of prestige, I wanted to try to retake control in my own cosplay journey. 

Yet unfortunately, time and resources caught up as by then I had been starting a new job in the field I had graduated for, along with matching up our schedules to work on this idea together.

Ultimately, we didn't get to perform that skit come Anime LA 2020, but of our trio, my friend Amanda and I did manage to spruce up a skit together that we ended up enjoying the process for.

Then came March of 2020, and with other priorities like health and safety taking the forefront, cosplay got sort of pushed back in my life. I didn't have events planned to cosplay at, nor did I feel safe enough to attend any of the ones that were beginning to pop up late 2020-early 2021.

In that time, I got to focus more on my work and improving my craft in that field, which has always been important for me. At the same time, since it's a creative field, I have been able to inject a lot of my creativity and love of stories into that space, which was something that I didn't have before 2020 except through cosplay.

Late 2021 however, we began to revisit the idea of not only attending ALA now that it was going to be in-person again, but we decided on trying the skit a second time. Yet once again, we had to postpone our idea given the lack of time it would take to create everything, even if we had started work on it in late 2019. 

We didn't feel so bad however, since we had another idea we quickly fell in love with that was feasible enough for us to have fun with and would be a safe entry for us to understand how masquerade would work in a pandemic world. 

To our surprise, it was actually quite a fun experience. Personally, I enjoyed it, even with all of its challenges. I had to last minute change some structural elements to my cosplay that weren't quite true to the original concept, but I loved what we had come up with because it embodied the sort of identity that had been missing in the more recent skits when I felt like I'd lost control and joy over them.

My Cos-Healing Process

In some ways, I still feel like I'm oversimplifying the reflection and healing process I had to go through to enjoy the cosplay and skit process again. The issue was never about conceptualizing things or being creative about them, but rather about allowing external forces to create this bubble that I didn't want to pop, or else it'd make me seem like a failure.

I'm a bit shy about explaining everything because I don't want to give anybody the impression that this was something that a specific person or cosplayer did, because it's not.

It was an opportunity to exam how some of my cosplay behaviors are projections of other behaviors and habits that I needed to sort out. 

In cosplay, I think it's a given how much the community appreciates hard work and effort, but perhaps it might even be to the point where we even praise situations where people are suffering for their work, whether physically or mentally. It's still pain, and it still affects you.

Because several of us choose to only show the brighter sides of these moments, we may face the issue of creating situations where we think people can only appreciate us and our work when we've absolutely destroyed ourselves in the process to make our masterpieces.

Somewhere in all this chaos, I suddenly became extremely aware of that. 

Not just in cosplay either, but in my own career field, in my personal life... everything.

And that's not how to live life, not especially when there's already things like social media that can already makes us feel a sense of disconnect between our own perceptions of our successes and failures. 

That's why in this situation, I don't blame people for not seeing past the veil of a glossy post saying how much I slaved over something. I needed the time to have a hard look at myself and take action to stop romanticizing the pain and suffering put into art.

Instead, I'm actively trying every day to focus on the positives.

That doesn't mean that I don't chronicle my bad moments, or that I shouldn't make a post here and there admitting when something takes effort. It just means that I need to be mindful of not letting myself revert back to that thinking and let it dominate my efforts or expectations for cosplay.

I needed time to admit that maybe right now, I don't have the money to make certain lavish projects, but that shouldn't take away what I can do, or get crafty with the things I have.

I needed time to admit that maybe there are certain experiences I've had that might've contributed to this, such as sometimes having judges who might not realize that certain questions during judging might come off as demeaning to people for not having the means to afford a more expensive material or technique. 

I needed time to admit that I did have some run-ins with cosplayers who perhaps didn't realize had made me feel like I wasn't as good as I thought I was, and that it hurt even more when they happened a time when I was putting my most effort on something. 

I needed time to admit that while my friends are very supportive and well-intentioned people, they might've unknowingly said things that reinforce certain issues surrounding the cosplay community in terms of inclusivity. At some point, I began feeling like I needed to be grateful to even have a sliver of a chance to do the things that I had been doing up until that point, yet I began realizing in time that this is very similar to a lot of my other experiences as a cosplayer of color, and particularly someone who may come off as ethnically ambiguous.

Lastly, I needed time to admit that I should be only cosplaying if I truly love it, feel it, and envision it as something that complements my identity, but not something that is my entire identity.

My identity is being a storyteller and a creative artist, and cosplay is just one vehicle of many other things I do for that. So, cosplay should fit in the way it can, as an outlet and expression, but not something that prevails over my other activities. 

That means being okay to participate in other hobbies whenever I want to, and taking the time to self-care during and between projects. 

Cosplay now~ 

Thankfully, my current cosplay experience within the past year have been very promising for me in terms of my goals. 

ALA was extremely fun and embodied a lot of the things I was envisioning towards my improved outlook on cosplay. I noticed it helped me work in a more balanced manner, a blend between the visionary and pragmatic, which is something I had less of the latter for coming into the new decade.

Fanime came next, and with there being no masquerade happening this year, I took advantage of the opportunity to just make cosplay plans for myself and buy everything if I had to just to enjoy the thrill of actually cosplaying and being in the moment.

For the most part, that seriously helped me to get into the motions again without the dread or anguish that I needed to perform all this for someone else. I truly just went out there and did it for myself.

Next Project... Start!

So all of this now has been culminating up to this point, where now I begin my process working on my next big project, the one we had been trying to get off the ground since 2020.

Right after ALA, we knew this was going to be our big skit to work on for the rest of the year, yet it's been taking me this long to realize that the nerves had resurfaced when thinking back to what this project meant before the pandemic, and what it means to me now.

So in the spirit of things, here's what it means to me:

As a writer and lover of all stories, I think I'm afraid to admit that I love this idea so much that I want to do everything possible to keep it from failing my expectations.

At the same time, I can sense the adrenaline whenever I think of it. It's like a story I just want to write down immediately so I can experience it all over again every time.

I'm so humbled to have a cosplay group who share my love and aesthetic for this skit, that we don't want to create things that just make sense on the surface. We want to explore an idea as deeply as we can through these costumes.

I feel like this is our chance for us to really share our voice, perhaps more loudly for the first time since feeling like we have always had to ask for permission to share these things loudly and proudly with the community.

And in all of my posts, my chronicles, my every experience, I want that joy and enthusiasm and intellect to reflect in each and every of those words and images.

And so....

I'm super proud and excited to announce that our trio will be sharing our love of fairy tales and Jungian archetypes in our upcoming skit, The Spirit in the Sky.

Stay tuned for all the progress WIPs and discussions, because I'm making it a goal to be more candid and enthusiastic about what I'm working on. 💙