Gratitude

I was always a strong reader and writer. So much so that my school formed a special group of myself and 2 other kids that skipped a couple of years of instruction in these subjects.

However for the longest time I just wanted to draw. Looking back, I think I had (perfectly reasonable) doubts about anyone wanting to read things I wrote. Writing wasn’t cool. Drawing seemed more immediate. You can hand a picture to the girl you have a crush on and she can recognize it immediately.

I’ll say right here — I am monumentally bad at two things: cooking and drawing. Cooking mostly because I don’t have patience for it (seriously, why spend an hour cooking when you can order a pizza and use the time you saved working on getting all achievements in GTA5?) and drawing because…well…I just suck. No reason to try and sugarcoat it.

So yeah. In my misguided desire to become great at drawing I found one of those “Learn to Draw at the Art Institute!” things in a newspaper or something. These were basically scams - they asked you to draw a certain thing and send it to them, where they would evaluate it and decide if you were good enough to send them more money for their study-at-home course.

The picture was supposed to be a turtle. Mine was a lopsided circle with some sticks jutting out of it at odd angles. A head-like…thing…attached to the body through a crooked little line with a smiley face on it. If it’s true that drawing something causes it to manifest as reality in some other dimension, I certainly created a suffering impossibility whose only thought in its brief nanosecond of life was that it wished for oblivion.

I sent it off, strangely confident that I’d be getting the call any day that I had thoroughly redefined the boundaries of the test through my technical brilliance. Strangely, this mirrors how I feel these days in those fleeting moments between the time that I submit poetry to a journal and get rejected.

You can guess how this goes. One thing I was surprised by, however, is that some unfortunate soul had to give detailed feedback on my drawing-blob-thing. They had done their job diligently and did not completely crush my spirit. Their feedback was a masterclass of letting someone down softly.

So, I just want to yell this into the void…if that was you that had to critique my drawing, I’m so sorry. You did a good job. You can rest easy at night knowing that I abandoned drawing and never aspire to anything more than stick figures.

You gave me enough softness to try again — just in another medium.