Fandomstuck Positivity and Communication Center

Then in my twenties I hit my adult metabolism and didn’t fit into any of my old clothes anymore. I gave my old dresses to my foster mother, who sells costumes for a living, and the green dress sold. It entered the local medieval re-enactment secondhand economy.

Every time I go to an event, someone different is wearing my green dress. It draws my eyes because it’s a lovely colour and the fabric—real wool and enough of it—moves beautifully with the wearer’s body. I never recognize it at first, because every wearer has worn it a different way; it can be mixed and matched, dressed up and down, moved around a good century of history. From ten feet away its lacing looks elegant, its embellishments beautiful gracenotes. I think: Oh my god, that dress looks beautiful. Wait a minute, that’s MY DRESS.

That dress teaches me, every time I see it, to stop looking at myself through such critical eyes. That dress doesn’t just look good, it looks better than most other dresses in its category, because I put in the time and the effort (including using pliers to force a needle through six layers of wool) to make sure it was done right.

Maybe some of you are in a place where you need to hear these things. Trust me, it does turn out okay. 💛

you are so so strong - look at all of the things you’ve gotten through

like you can wear red lipstick and a leather jacket and sip tea and dance in the rain and go to the gym and curl up in bed and get turnt the fuck up and go to church

you can literally have it all sis

1. Try to understand where it came from. Why do you demand so much of yourself? Do you have tendencies towards perfection or self-hatred? If so, where do these come from?

2. Practice self-compassion. Everyone deserves to be loved and understood, to be allowed to make mistakes, and to take the time to grow. Give that to yourself. Don’t attack and hurt yourself.

3. Deliberately focus on positive self-talk. Being negative, impatient, critical and overbearing becomes so automatic that we don’t realize it’s a habit. So, interrupt that habit and be kind and positive.

4. Decide not to compare yourself to others. We tend to judge ourselves by the people who excel, or have an easier life, or who face fewer obstacles. It’s not a level playing field so don’t compare yourself. Remember you ARE changing, and you have a lot to give.

Sure, someone might be more technically accomplished than you - you might not be able to colour as nicely or craft a sentence that rings as poetically - but art is only really secondarily about that. It’s firstmost about what you, uniquely, have to express, and how the precise way you express it might be what others need to relate to it - even if it’s less flashy, less “beautiful”, and gets fewer notes.

I promise you this: there are obscure fanfics with only a handful of notes that are the read-and-re-read favourites of someone too anxious to comment. There are drawings done by 14-year-olds in poorly-blended markers that are someone’s favourite because they spoke to something that nothing else did. There are covers of songs where your voice cracks and you cringe every time you hear it but someone thinks the way it cracked just at that moment added beauty to the song. There are angsty three-line poems you wrote at 4am that someone once called “pretentious emo trash” that are loved by someone else going through the same thing as you.

And I guarantee you, there is something unique about your art. Even if you’re “saying something someone else has said”. Even if you’re the thousandth person to take on the subject. Even if you feel like you’re not at all unique. You’re bound to express something, however subtle, that didn’t exist until then.

I remember looking at the list of all the colors I’d need and thinking I’d literally never heard of most of them. What was yellow ochre? Burnt umber? Sienna Brown? Why on earth would I need a layer of green? 

This was too complicated, I thought. It would take years of practice. I didn’t have that kind of time or patience. 

Flash forward to now: I’m 35, I own just about every color prismacolor makes, and somehow I managed to get in years of practice doing fanart for fun without even noticing. I’m trying a lifelike portrait in colored pencil and lo and behold–I think it’s working? 

It may not be the best thing I’ve ever done but it’s leaps and bounds ahead of anything I thought I’d be able to do back then, as a teenager sprawled on my bedroom floor staring morosely at the instruction book and the 12-pack of crayola colored pencils I had at the time. 

I don’t know if there’s a moral to this post, other than practice doesn’t have to be boring, I guess. Doing what you like will still help you get good at what you want to do. There’s no such thing as ‘time wasted’ when it comes to pursuing artistic abilities and you’ll end up learning without realizing it. I was watching another tutorial on youtube about how to blend, and the guy said, “I can’t really teach you that, it just comes with practice” and I realized I’ve done that practice. I know how to blend. I know how to layer and be subtle with my pressure and how to avoid lines between colors and how to get smooth, natural gradients. Not because I sat down and said to myself “I’m going to deliberately learn to do These Things” but because I just…drew a lot, and colored a lot, and the learning came with that as a side effect.

If you’ve found something that you can talk about for hours, that makes you so happy and excited when someone brings it up, that’s not annoying. That’s amazing and beautiful and you’re adorable.