#mprant

Every now and again. I'll find myself sitting in my room with a weird "empty anxiousness". I have an urgent feeling to do something but no specific task comes to mind. It's just this weird sense of need. 

I didn't have any class today, so lots of free time. With me that usually means I don't really do anything unless I need to, like homework that's due on monday. Otherwise I do smallish chunks if it's mildly urgent or nothing at all if it can wait. But all day I usually have a tiny smidgen of a sense of urgency. It's not unbearable and alone, it wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for "the lock".

The lock is whenever I sit down and try to do something extracurricular and sometimes even with homework, my body just locks up. My muscles tense, not too tightly, but enough to stop me from moving. With the lock usually comes a sense of dread or shame. To make a long story short, I once had an art class where everyone else was better and the teacher, a person whom I respected, seemed to be disappointed with me because of what I drew and how I did it.

Don't get the wrong idea. This was about 3 or 4 years ago, before I started the animation program, back when I was working on getting general ed out of the way, this was drawing 2 and back then I was in the middle of the "weeaboo" phase with no sign of growing out of it on my own. It was a wake up call I really needed but ever since I've felt unworthy of calling myself an artist.

I've felt like I wasn't ready to be drawing or writing anything that I wanted to do. I was no longer qualified to write the story I'd been writing for years before and I wasn't ready to be drawing my own characters yet and every time I try is an insult to people out there who are and to the art forms themselves.

Since then I've been practicing. Which is hard, as expected, but not really fun. That's the other half of it. People do those things for fun. It's bizarre for me to think about something like this and the people I know who get up everyday and have this urge to just do it and they love it. A friend of mine said it was how he communicated ideas. To me that says he's done it so much, he likes it so much, it's become such an integral part of his life that it's like a second language to him. That's completely amazing to me.

In recent years, I've tried to draw for fun, to not care about the technical skills and knowledge I still lack and just draw for fun but every time I do something goes wrong. I disgrace the idea I had in my head and I punish myself by practicing what I was doing wrong. This might sound like a good plan, at first, but then drawing becomes a punishment in itself and I just get more and more turned off by it over time.    

It's a similar process with writing but different motivations and forces so that gets saved for another time...