a dream I had about being an artist and some thoughts it made me have

I was 9 years old when I said to my parents I wanted to be a professional artist, I made a series of drawings called "My Cat Molly". I was very proud of it. Above is a drawing I made at the end of the series on MS Paint, unlike the rest of the drawings which were made on paper.

I joined deviantart near my 11th birthday but not quite, I got banned before that, but it wasn't that bad,  after all, my old drawings suddenly seemed ugly in comparison to what I wanted to achieve. The perfect curvy anime eyes with sparkles, the equally sized toes in each animal's paw, the cute expressive faces and bodies. I couldn't achieve it, but I kept trying. Something about my brain didn't know how to copy very well, I saw something I wanted to recreate just as I saw it and my brain jumbled the information and when I spat it out, I could tell it was a bit different but not how.

My best friend already knew how to tell something was wrong and correct it so she tried again, and again, and kept getting better. She tried to teach me and my brain hurt from trying to understand, blaming myself but not wanting to show shame, I owned it. From that day since then, I owned everything. My art was always perfect, unless I decided it wasn't, then everything I did was ugly, so what? I loved it like that, it was on purpose, I hadn't failed at anything, never, ever. It wasn't a perfect philosophy, it was just repressing a lot of insecurities and a secret perfectionism, but I was happy, and I drew everyday, everytime, all the time, no matter what.

My brain still has a hard time understanding processes and the logic behind a lot of important art basics, but after copying a lot, the correct outcome became muscle memory, I cannot explain to you the process of how I got where I am art-wise, but I can tell you about all the practicing, and having fun, that's the important part, and sometimes, I forget it.

When I was 16 years old I was diagnosed with a very vague hormonal chronic illness, I was told it affected everything in my life, since then I've had so many medical issues and they can only be explained by that. My body became weaker, my mind easier to trigger, and the things I wanted to achieve suddenly seemed physically much more our of reach than I thought. By 2021 I was a 20 year old animation student barely sending assignments because everyday I had near-fainting episodes from being on my computer, I felt dizzy and sick, and then the tics started, I'd start screaming and howling and hitting things, those seemed to be signs of stress because of everything going on so I'm on heavier medication now, which lowers the symptoms but they're still here.

Now everytime I draw, I count to 30 minutes, and my lineart gets horribly shaky. Sometimes drawing for more than 2 hours makes me lose some of my sight for brief moments, I used to draw for days I think, and now look at me, look at it, the proportions are all over the place, the anatomy is just pitiful, and don't get me started on that horrid attempt at symmetry, the lineart is shaking, the face is screaming, I feel sick just looking at it!

I had a dream tonight

I was in class, as a college student, but not for animation. I had to listen to boring essays and watch movies I didn't care about and see movies on subjects I didn't like. But the teachers let me draw, and that's all that mattered, somehow the part of me that drew and the part of me that was in class were separate, one was a forever child who just wanted to have fun, and the other was an adult who needed to protect the inner child and the body. Our minds are the same and we have the same desires and feelings but we were still almost 2 different beings in one body doing different things, when the teacher questioned me about drawing I said "I'm not drawing, it's the artist, she's just a kid leave her alone" it was a funny dream, specially how our pronouns and personalities differed at times.

Then at some point, my drawing hand got physically stuck on a piece of cloth, and adult me started to panic, the drawing wasn't done, she didnt finish, I didn't finish, and the teachers wanted to take my drawing away, how could they think I was done? My hand was stuck I couldn't draw please I just wanted to get it out and then

It was out

And my drawings were gone

And I was calm, and a single thought came into my head

What matters is I had fun

I woke up trying to understand what that meant, it felt important somehow, I thought if I drew something it'd become clear but as the day went on many daily life and disability stressor got in the way of that. Only by the end of the day did I sit on my drawing chair, put on the drawing glove and turned on the drawing tablet. I decided to draw my wife's fursona, I asked what she would like and she said "anything!", this frustrated me but something blinked in my head then. Something that I only understood after finishing the lineart and leaving the room exhausted with frustration at the result, the one that looked so shaky, dizzy, screaming, bad and bad and bad bad bad bad bad I remembered

Why I kept drawing when it was hard, when I thought it wasn't good enough, when people said it wasn't good enough, when I had no reason to do it

I did it to have fun