justnick's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Does anyone else think Islamabad sounds like a member of Public Enemy? I've been trying to draw more lately. It used to really be my thing, you see. I mean, it was the reason I woke up in the morning and what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I wanted to draw comic books and live with the animals. Then my hands got all fucky (could you use it in a sentence?), and my fingers couldn't keep up with my brain, and bit by bit, the pictures got replaced with words. Don't get me wrong, I love writing. I still get that thrill of creation once it's done. But it's really not the same. I used to sit in front of the TV with a stack of hundreds of sheets of paper, and go through the whole lot of 'em. I'd have characters, I'd have set pieces, everything. When the neighbors would come over to play pretend, it usually consisted of me making up a superhero they could pretend to be, drawing him, and then improvising a little drama for us to enact, line by line. In retrospect, I suppose I was a bit of a little egomaniac, but I wasn't forcing those kids to come over, you know? People liked it. One way or another, that's always what I've been good at, because that's always been the way my brain works. Telling stories. That's why I drew, that's why I write, and that's why it took me years of mental discipline, emotional self abuse, and burned bridges to learn how to stop constantly lying to people. My issue with reality wasn't just that it was just so mundane, it was that it could so easily be fixed. A tweak here, an alteration there, and boom. My day goes from 'I don't believe in the schooling system, so I didn't go to class today. Instead I smoked weed and ate pizza,' into a real event. A story people would want to hear. All art stems from cripplig insecurity, I'm positive of it. If we didn't have a needy child yelling 'please, look at me, love me!' inside us, none of us would bother. But I digress. The writing and the talking were what my brain grew into. It was drawing that really spoke to me on such an elemental level, before I was comfortable with words. I would lose hours of every single day doing it. At home, in school, everywhere. One day, my friend Marc came over and we decided to draw. He was really rather good. He looked at my drawing and laughed. We were just entering puberty. Not old enough to know why you care, but old enough to feel that other people's opinions are inherently more valid than your own. That was one of the first times I felt ashamed of what I had created. When I was about five, my mom found a drawing I had made of two people kissing, which, at the time, was the psychological equivalent of her finding a horse porn collection in my sock drawer. She handled it well, she told me there was nothing wrong, she just saw two people that loved each other. My mom handles everything well. I wanted to just die, but it wasn't the same kind of shame as Marc gave me. He shook my faith in myself, and everyone who knows me can tell you I have precious little of that to spare anyway. I've always been petrified of failure, but until that moment, I had never thought of drawing as something you could fail at. After that, when I tried to improve, when I inevitably compared my stuff to other peoples, all I saw was 'not good enough.' I never did get shading right. Hands always fucked me up, too. And I could never get the two eyes lined up perfectly. It stopped being about creating and started being about... I don't know, school, essentially. The idea of grading. The idea that if you aren't improving your skill or knowledge or doing something in the professional way, then you don't deserve any credit for it. And of course it's easy for me to pin the blame on society. on everyone else. But the fact is I stopped of my own accord, and I knew there wasn't a future in it for me. And issues or no issues, my hands just don't work properly anymore. I'll probably never live with the animals either, I suppose. But like I said, I'm trying to at least get some more doodling done. It really isn't like riding a bike, unfortunately. And even if I did become a fantastic artist, I really don't think I'd ever be able to separate the thrill of bringing a cool idea to life from the academic exercise of perfecting the aesthetics. You know how it is. Excelsior. 3:10 a.m. - 2008-11-23 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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