The time I started to draw
hot goss on turning over a new leaf.
I hit a mental low around May 2020. Imagine yourself in a pit of despair, maybe in the form of a small apartment with dull grey walls, slightly too low ceilings, a dog constantly barking in the distance, and not enough 3-prong plugs in your apartment. Now, imagine you have adhered so strictly to rules for fear of imagined symptoms that would cause all imagined death and destruction caused by you if you experienced said symptoms.
I have a tendency to take things too seriously. Rules in particular. I love rules. They keep order, and guide people with how they are supposed to operate in order to survive. I love clean operation. I love that when you are driving on the freeway, you’re supposed to pass on the left. I love that as you merge further to the left lanes, the lanes get faster as you merge. I hate that nobody knows these rules.
I was driving on a cross-country road trip with my girlfriend this summer. We were driving from California to Florida to see my family, and as I drove across the country, I noted how the speed limits would change from state to state. How some states required you to only use the left lane for passing. How nobody else was reading the signs as we changed states. How cars would drive by, changing lanes left and right, going 100mph on a two-lane blacktop freeway. It was chaos to me. It was unreal. I had learned about spirituality in rush hour on the 101, the 134, the 405, the 110, the 10, and the 5. I learned there is no way to beat traffic. It is best to become part of the wave of everyone, rather than stick your neck out and risk danger.
It took me roughly 29 years to realize that my take on “rules” in the world were different from the rules by which the world actually operated. Maybe the Catholic school upbringing built a system of rules that were meant to be followed to please God. The lightness always attracted me because of the lack of worry of if I am doing something the right way.
Most of my life I have been obsessed with doing things the “right way” aka following the rules aka not getting yelled at aka being invisible. I loved school because it was the epitome of being able to do things the right way. School came easy to me, and I brought a lightness to my life with my curiosity and willingness to do anything. I felt like a wise old wizard without even realizing it at 9 years old. I set my sights on going to Notre Dame like my grandfather, and saw nothing that could get in my way. My cousins had tried and failed before me to go to Notre Dame. But they weren’t me. I excelled in school, taking as many AP classes as possible in high school, and somehow earning a 6.0 honors GPA my senior year. I have mentally blocked out the amount of homework, studying, paper-writing, and reading that was done.
I became confident in my academics so much so that I set my sights on Columbia first, with Notre Dame as my fallback, because I thought that New York City was the place to be. I was starting to discover a creative side of myself with a creative writing class, and learning guitar. I always sucked at drawing, even though my brother was extremely talented at drawing, though uninterested. The only friends that I made played music and asked me to play bass in their band that covered Kings of Leon, The Strokes, White Stripes, and The Killers. We were called The Denim Jackets. So naturally New York seemed like a better place for where I was going in my life. I could go to Columbia and be a writer if the whole music thing didn’t work out.
Looking back, I’m not sure I would place the same importance on going to college, but it crushed me when I got rejected from Notre Dame and Columbia in 2009. I moved to Gainesville and started school at UF. The only thing I could hold onto was music and writing, but I felt like an alien gollum in a new world. I felt like I couldn’t trust my assessment of self in any other way. After breaking up with my high school girlfriend, I felt even more dead inside. I started drinking, which is something I hadn’t done in high school. I had never done drugs or drank in high school despite some access around me. This always made me feel othered. I loved the rules. I didn’t know how to act around people at parties, but the feeling of everything felt new and distracted me from the everything else.
I began to aimlessly wander through the next 11 years of my life. I did acid in 2013 for the first time and discovered that during the early stages of discomfort, I look for order in my environment. I look for ways to control the disorder by organizing my environment. If you focus on what you can control then you can control what you have control over. I clean up little lint balls on the floor around me or on the sleeves of my cardigan. I collect every pen or marker around me and organize it by tip fineness. I test each marker and pen, and begin to notice an unconscious attraction to some of them based on the way the ink comes out of the device. The ink is interesting as it runs out of the marker. Words flow easily as if it’s an extension of my self. Images get drawn. It’s weird. They’re not great drawings, but somehow my style of organization influenced the outcome.
Despite the loosening of some rules around drugs and alcohol though, I still felt a deep fear of the world. I feared its complexity and chaos without rules. Working jobs did not provide much comfort in knowing the world operated properly. Trump being elected in 2016 showed me that a great deal of people cared about the functionality of our country a lot less than I did. I wondered what those people cared about, if not the functionality of the government. I feared chaos and complexity in abstract, and one day began to open the door of the fear to try and begin to understand it.
During the first few months of 2020, I began looking into and trying to understand the parts of the internet I’d avoided. The parts filled with negativity and scamming and scheming. I saw ways to scam the stock market on reddit long before GME went to the moon. I imagined a world that speaks in code to sell drugs or child brides. Had I watched Catch Me If You Can too many times? I felt alone. I didn’t know how to operate in a world like that. I’m not a scammer, right? I follow the rules so as not to be a scammer. I don’t want any scammers knowing anything about me. I began to imagine and obsess about imaginary possibilities of the world that seemed too real to be imaginary.
I flew to Florida to get out of my apartment, to be with my family and the outdoors and the water. I was so unwell at this time. I was so scared of covid beyond normal means for concern. I was scared of the connection of the internet and the Old Testament style of ungodly power it gave the hive mind of anonymous users. I felt like I could barely function. I felt like I was not able to parse reality. My dad gave me a book called The Power of Positive Thinking, which I think was supposed to inspire me into being more positive, religious, and worry-free.
After reading it, I realized what a crock of shit the whole world is. I realized how ridiculous and meaningless so many things are. I realized I needed to go back to Los Angeles and start putting things back together and not be afraid of the world. I got a therapist, I read The Corrections, and purchased two green markers and two packs of drawing paper from Michaels on the first day that in-store shopping opened again.
I went home and attempted to draw a leaf.
I started off just testing out the marker to see how the ink came out of it. The marker organization from 2013 had been tattooed on my brain. I hadn’t felt any excitement or distraction from the world like this in a long time. This lit me up in a new way. I understood that each page of paper could be a new experiment to try and draw a leaf. Suddenly I would never run out of things to draw. I began to collect these mostly green drawings in a pile on my desk, then on the walls of my bedroom, and served as a reminder of my self.
Now almost 3 years later drawing has become my meditative practice. I am very good at squiggles, lines, and color patterns. I have developed a unique style of abstraction and expression through experimentation. This year, I’ve begun making comics. I didn’t realize how badly I wanted to do this until I started. I’m still not very talented or skillful in proper techniques, but I have developed my own style that I love and am proud of.
