September 24, 2025

I've only drawn one page in the past three days.

One of the hardest things to deal with as an artistic minded person --besides the constant lack of funds AND the constant judgement on your intelligence--is when your own family, and the people you love most and think should (or at least might) be supporting you, betray you with words like "you have nothing to show for what you're doing" and "what you're doing is useless and means nothing." Both of which were phrases that I heard this past week. From family members.

"It becomes very hard to love your job when no one seems to like you for doing it." Wreck-It-Ralph

I am so excited about what I'm doing and what I've achieved in the past year and where I'm going. But at the same time, I'm so deflated. No one particularly cares about the hundreds of figures I've drawn in the past few months, or how amazed I am now when my pen suddenly leaps to life in my hand and creates things I never thought possible from me. All of these feelings of being in the right place and finally doing the thing I was meant to be doing mean nothing. Because other people aren't seeing results--keep in mind that they're not ASKING to see results, either, they just assume there aren't any--and therefore nothing that I've done means anything.

If this was coming from strangers, I could shrug it off. I always have. I don't care what people I don't know think about me. But hearing these things from family hits me where I'm most vulnerable, right in the soft cracks of the "I'm going to show everyone I'm actually a valuable human being" armor that I've been building so carefully for so many years. I haven't found the bridge back to my previous self yet. I find a picture that excites me, so I pick up my pen to draw it-- and suddenly I'm bombarded with their words. "Why are you doing this? It's useless. Do something that we think you should be doing, something that has results. Something that makes money. Something ELSE."

I would ask why anyone in their right mind would choose to be an artist. I'm not sure anyone chooses to be an artist. You have to especially sadistic to "choose" this. I have a feeling that most of us do it because it's such a part of us that we can't NOT. If I was after fame and money and a family that was always happy with what I'm doing, I'd have been a carpenter or an electrician. I'm terrible at carpentry (trust me, I would change that if I could) and my mind doesn't understand numbers. So here I am, glued to this chair of shame, pen in hand, drawing.

"To create one's own world takes courage." Georgia O'Keefe