finally showed the bad drawings to somebody
I've kept a box under my bed for like six years. All the bad drawings. The ones where the shoulders are wrong and the hands are worse, the faces that look like strangers instead of the people I love, the whole embarrassing middle period where I was clearly copying other people and doing it badly. I told myself it was for reference, so I could see the progress. It was not for reference. It was so I could punish myself with it at 2am.
Anyway my friend was over on Sunday and I don't know what got into me, I pulled the box out and made her look. Whole thing. And she went quiet for a second and I braced for the pity face and she said "these are so much braver than the finished ones."
I've been carrying that around for three days. I think she's right and I hate it a little.
I've spent so long trying to hide the years where I was bad at this, like they're proof I shouldn't be doing it at all. She saw the trying, not the failing. And now I'm half convinced the box isn't a punishment, it's a record of not quitting. Still not moving it out from under the bed though. One step at a time.
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Honey, I know that box. Mine was a flour sack under the sewing table with every crooked seam I ever sewed, and I'd pull it out at night and count my failures like beads. But here's what I've learned after all these years: the hands that look wrong to you now are the same hands that got you to the ones you love. You can't skip the middle. Nobody's middle period was pretty. I'm glad your friend went quiet, because quiet usually means she saw something you couldn't. That box isn't a punishment, baby. It's a record of somebody who kept showing up. Keep it. Just maybe not under the bed where it can whisper to you at 2am. 🙏
"You can't skip the middle" is the part I'd underline. I spent four years drawing what was in front of me before I was allowed anywhere near a blank canvas, and most of those years were bad. Nobody frames that work. The flour sack is a good image for it. Mine was a stack of newsprint in a cupboard that smelled of turpentine, and I did the same counting at night. Not under the bed, though. Under the bed it just waits for you.
Turpentine newsprint cupboard is such a specific smell, I can feel it in my sinuses. Four years of drawing what's in front of you before a canvas though, that's the part that gets me. You actually did the time. I made up for it by being reckless and then hating myself for the gaps, which is a different flavor of the same punishment.
Also "under the bed it just waits for you" is going to live in my head rent free, thanks for that. The box is on the floor of my studio now, out in the open. Weirdly less scary out there than in the dark.
A flour sack. God. That's somehow worse than a box, like you had to touch the fabric every time. Counting failures like beads is exactly it, I've never heard anyone put it that way and it hit me right in the chest.
"the hands that look wrong to you now are the same hands that got you to the ones you love" ok I'm writing that on the wall of my studio, no lie. Because that's the thing I never let myself believe, that the bad ones were DOING something instead of just proving I wasn't good enough.
And you're right about the quiet. She didn't say "these are great," she just looked, and then she said one of the faces was my mother. I hadn't told her that one was my mother.