something to come back to
colored pencils, 2021
There are nights, like tonight, that remind me in ways of what it was like when I first moved to the city over 7 years ago. A fresh grad with a salary so low they had to increase the base pay for all entry level employees when minimum wage was raised because it didn't meet the threshold. At that time, I was play acting an adult, waking up each morning and soaking in every new experience with a smile a mile wide at work, spending nights berating myself for being so stupid to believe that I could do this, or anything, for that matter.
Being 21 really is giving yourself permission to be the most dramatic person in your head.
In the blur of all that, I decided to pick up the hobby that I had abandoned at some time between high school and adulthood, but is the reason why I'm here both in a blog sense and in an existence sense. Maybe it was an internet addiction, or maybe it was the distraction of college and shiny new drinks and boys and freedom, but at some point I stopped making things.
our beloved bag dog, Summer, pen, 2022(?)
It's true that I've been making things my whole life, but my college years are a black hole of abandoned sketchbook and empty promises to myself of making. And maybe if this were a different place or a different post I'd trace a lot of my purposelessness in those years to that misalignment of what I know to be true of myself now, with the privilege of age and retrospect. But, we're here and this is this post.
Back to 2018: I bought myself a sketchbook, something cheap. And spurred by so many factors - knowing only a few people in the city, having barely any money to do anything, living in a tiny room that had a single window that faced a wall across an alleyway - I spent those nights as I find myself spending the night tonight: blasting my Spotify on shuffle for hours, not saying a word, and drawing. Drawing and drawing and drawing, getting drunk in the feeling of it that one blurs into the next until I've lost all sense of time and I need to literally cut myself off.
the first ever self portrait I ever drew in that first 2018 sketchbook vs. tonight
In present day, a comment from a (new-er) friend from my ceramic studio sent me here thinking about all of this. She hadn't known that I drew at all, and when I explained to her that actually drawing is really the thing I love the most, I just get distracted by lots of other things (picture me as the mouse in give a mouse a cookie except the cookie is a new medium or craft). She responded with something that ultimately ended with
it's nice to try diff things! and to always have something to go back to
Something to go back to. It reminded me of the permanence of drawing for me, the safety blanket of it. The comfort of pencil on paper, the simplicity. You can't hide in a drawing. I love making physical objects - decorative or functional, but drawing feels personal. Drawing is intimate, every sketchbook a diary of sorts. They are more intrinsically linked with memory for me than any other piece of art in my home, as is true for probably many artists. They are beautiful, and ugly, and perfect, and despicable.
My sketchbook holds the things even my journal is too afraid to keep.
My friend's comment made me miss drawing, as if it was a tangible thing I could hold and feel distant from. It's true, it's hard to have nights like these now with more responsibilities and more interests to balance. But I guess that's the beauty of having something to come back to. It's still waiting for you when you get there.
Post Script:
the other drawing from tonight
