To Be or Not To Be

There are days where I’m a bit ashamed to be the kind of person that thinks that entertaining myself by spending time drawing might be time well spent. Drawing is a fairly pointless activity and arguably I probably should be doing something more constructive with my time. I’m not the best at it, nor am I, by most people’s standards, particularly any good at it. It doesn’t help pay any bills, and there’s more crickets in my imaginary audience than people clapping, but I like how drawing makes me feel. It lets me feel hope, hope that a piece of my world will continue to get bigger as I push out my boundaries and I’ll get to grow with it even as I lose my ability to keep up with most of the rest of the world.

The reason that I say that I feel ashamed that I use drawing to entertain myself, is because there are days (like today) when I meet someone who takes making their work very, very seriously, yet has nothing to say with their work, thinks highly of themselves, and still doesn’t give much thought to the others around them. It’s not all that difficult to imagine the parallels between this person and myself. The kicker is when the work doesn’t back up the rhetoric in any meaningful way. Stepping back, it all appears hollow and narcissistic, leaving me feeling like it’s probably best if I just picked up my pile of drawings and quietly dropped them in the trash. There’s a bit about the imposter syndrome that people neglect to speak about out loud, that most of the people that say that they feel like impostors actually are just that, they are people that think and say that they are something that they technically are not… they are imposters. It’s when I run into someone who’s sense of self importance that has seriously short circuited their ability to be self critical that I’m left feeling seriously in doubt as to whether I am more similar to this delusion than I’d like to believe. It’s probably a act of self honesty to accept that it’s a true reflection and take a few moments to decide what I really want from the work. It’s no longer helpful to just show up to blindly practice, I need to make decisions regarding direction before implementing another set of challenges to move the work along towards an ideal.