Lost Drawings
Accepting deep change requires what? I don't know.
Ever since I started drawing, I was asked what it meant. Especially in my dark eras, as if the visual images didn’t speak for themselves. LMAO why would I tell you verbally when I cant—I drew it so I could “talk” about it.
I recently stumbled upon drawings I did in 2023. I cant recall the dates. But there were quite a few months where my dreams were relentlessly gruesome and I would lose steam trying to make a flowing narrative out of it to release the images in my head.
This was also the time where I stopped drawing representationally. This has been a years long fight in my life recently, as I spent decades obsessed with figure drawing and people. It was the core of who I was, the endless pursuit of realism. And I could not accept that something in me that felt so essential suddenly stopped meaning anything.
At first I thought it was a phase. It will come back. I just have to get mentally better and I will be there to greet myself on the other side. But now it’s been years. And just now I am seeing it more clearly: it’s over. That is no longer me.
Maybe Artists are the only ones who may understand this grief. The dissolving of the driving force of your creativity, curiosity, hope, inspiration. It’s not that the well is dry and will be refilled—its that the plot has been filled in, the water no longer runs here.
I think I was hurting myself more waiting for the Me I knew to return than to start walking the path to Acceptance that I have deeply, traumatically, changed.
When 2020 hit and Jiu Jitsu was not allowed, my coach at the time offered these words: “Its not what you cant do, but what you want to come back as.”
It was really comforting at the time. I believed in the phrase and put faith in it to carry me through. But it had a major blindspot: the idea that you can control the future you.
While I could make choices day to day, moment to moment, I could not account for where I would be taken. Come back as? I’m now a person I have never met before.
Nothing I’ve done, and nothing anyone has ever said or guided me to could have prepared me for what happened in my late 30s. Out of all the possibilities people have speculated or wished for my future—this wasn’t one of them.
What is the Art for that?