The Year I Couldn't Draw

As quarantine and lockdown forces me to have enough time to draw and even some wee hours to write, I remember when I couldn't draw.

It's not that I would not draw or lost the ability to do so. I just COULDN'T. 

Throughout 2000, many pivotal events happened. I finally freed myself from college. I had already graduated but remained, my excuse was I had a campus job and I felt comfortable. But I didn't want to remain there in case I grew stagnant. 

I also started to substitute teach, which wasn't something I wanted but I just couldn't figure what else to do with an art degree. My mother had to undergo cataract surgery, and I was constantly sick from catching colds and other viruses from little to young students. My body was always weak, my immune system always compromised. I was a sickly kid. Oftentimes, almost to ER-deathly ill. 

This same year trying to figure things out, I ended up in ICU twice. 

And then as the year drew closer to its end, my only grandparent became ill. We spoke on the phone as she was overseas in my parents' country, letting me know she wasn't doing well. She died weeks after, her oldest daughter, my mother, holding and watching her take her last breaths. 

This was also the same year my first short story was published and I knew I wanted to write if the artwork didn't work out. All this happened in 2000. Though my mind was on fire with story ideas, I became lost in what to draw... The ideas dried up. Inspiration and necessity left me. Looking at art supplies caused me to vacillate between anger, frustration, and sorrow. Now I know this was depression but I didn't wish to speak its name. I gave up my art, fearing that the dry-spell would cause me to lose my illustrating abilities once I felt able to pick up a pen or pencil. 

That painful 2000- and the Year of the Dragon, no less. My animal year under the Lunar calendar! -forced many questions. I yielded to few answers. I needed to get back into myself. I wondered if it were possible and I missed my chance. 

There are the people who see your works and feel it flowed to you. That mystical ease of expression. But just as hard as it became for me to create, when 2001 came around, something unclasped and I was able to look at a blank sketchbook page again. I remember drawing a new idea as the tears fell, spattering the colors. 

I had started diving more into my writing by attending workshops, registered for more classes, and attend more writer conferences. 

The effects on my year-long artist block collapsed but with it, pain, rage, and grief for my lost grandmother, my lost ideas, the loss of fear of a parent's health, the loss of my body's autonomy. I had to accept it in order to give it up. And with that, I was free to illustrate once again.