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.

The Thrill of the Chase...

Remember the first time you had to stand up in class and recite something or read an essay you wrote or whatnot? You don't remember?
Well, good, because I remember my first time, and thinking about it traumatizes me now.

1982. Bronx, NY, Parkway Elementary School, Kindergarten.
We had to do that repulsive Show-N-Tell and I had a whole spiel ready. But when it came my turn, I froze. Absolutely and irrevocably frozen.
My teacher yelled at me. At 5, I couldn't understand WHY she was so angry with me. So I wouldn't dance like a puppet? Like the other kids?
I cried and stewed in a corner for the rest of class.

Fast forward to junior college, and I'm in the first course in Creative Writing.

I'm about 18-19 years old.

In the past, the only class coursework involving ANY of my stories has been relegated to that short span for which they devote a minute time to the ART OF FICTION (said like a bass-voice narrator speaking through a bullhorn).

Now we are in a circle, our desks to form a ring, and each session, the professor chooses who's to read the next story. She comes to me. It's my turn. My limbs are shaking. I am becoming frozen. My chin trembles so that I forget how to form words. Most every one's gaze is on me.
I can't feel the paper, and I clench it tightly. It's pastel yellow, printer paper that was once used on a dot matrix ('member those?) printer, and later, through an inkjet.
I begin to read.
I'm the only student that writes about gangster dogs in suits and fedoras.
I have a classmate who writes from the perspective of flowers in a meadow, but one can guess I am pretty much the oddball in the class.
My professor, the only one impressed by what she saw as natural talent and skill.
I continue to read.
I finished the scene when my protagonist chases a rival into a New York subway, the rival slips off the platform and into the tracks the same time a train arrives, killing him.
My protagonist looks at his watch and says, "Hm..Well what do ya know? It's right on time!"
I'm finished.
I look up. Everyone watches me and I mean EVERYONE.
I swallow as I turn to my professor. My mouth is dry but she nods, her confidence in me confirmed.
A classmate, "Whoa."
I hear, "That was the most incredible thing I've ever heard!"
"I was literally shaking."
"I'll never look at dogs the same way again."
More and more words of praise and admiration.

There's already a hater, who never liked my stuff and often criticized my work before I would even finish. She looked away. I don't care.

The words of encouragement are enough, and thank God, because this was my last stop, pun definitely intended, before I decided I may give up on writing.
From that class, from that experience and many afterwards, I decided to pursue writing, no matter how long it took me.

A classmate explained that as I read the piece, my speech became faster and faster, thereby intensifying the action but also making it difficult for some to understand me.
However, the class heard what they needed to hear to give me feedback, and I walked on air the rest of that day.