I'm guessing most of you have seen the movie, The Lion King. There's a moment in that movie where

Simba's father, Mufasa, is in the clouds and he says, remember who you are. And in that moment,

I think there's probably two types of people that see this movie. One type is just like, this is a pretty

cool kids movie. And then the other type is like that lady in Napoleon Dynamite with the

ship in the bottle and turns to her husband and it's like, I want that. Like I want that. I want

a being from my past in the clouds to show up and be like, remember who you are,

Andy, because I have a sense that I have often forgotten who I am.

I don't know if it's because I'm neurodivergent and I'm ADHD and I feel the need to mask

everywhere I go often to hide weird ways that I am

or ways that I feel like I'm going to be judged. And so I do that. I have that mask on so often

that I can forget that that's not me and I can lose touch with who I am. And that's a huge

problem just in life, but it's an even bigger problem if you're an artist.

Because what you're trying to do is be yourself on purpose and then repeat it. Like Dolly Parton

said that art is being yourself on purpose. And I feel like that's hard to do if you don't know

who you freaking are. And I can look back on hard to do if you don't know who you freaking are.

And I can look back on myself early on in my creative journey and look at the videos from

my first Kickstarter and be like, I don't even know who that guy was.

And he was a person that had spent several years trying to just like get rid of all of this and just smush it down

and be normal and it wasn't working. But it did work enough to where I lost sense of myself.

And now I look at these kids books that I make and this work that I've created and And I feel like this is me.

I mean, it's not like it's perfect.

But there's something about this that just feels like I have remembered something of who

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