let lemons be angry

When you're in art school you run your untrained fingers over millions of dollars worth of equipment, make shoddy films, do art experiments that occasionally surprise even yourself, and are so pushed to create that everything uncreative falls by the wayside: astronomy tests, management lectures, sleep.

It was these extra, uncreative activities that made me impatient to end school. I thought that working life was the beginning of the ideal artist's life. Such a delusion. Uncreative activities can't be left to the last minute anymore, much less ignored; they are the fuel I depend on to survive, and if I survive, I might have enough left in me to create. Most of the time I don't.

I stayed up late last night to finish an illustration that I've been working on in drips and drops for weeks. Everything in my body told me in its pragmatic, sisterly voice to sleep so I could wake up the next day. What logic is that? We sleep so we can wake up? But it was the most captivating activity I'd done all day, topping even dinner. These days, good meals are the only highlights. And so I refused to sleep until the coloring was done. And then there was that feeling I had when it was done and I looked at it, all hazy and newborn on my computer screen. That full feeling I often had after finishing school projects : that I had grown new feathers, and had something to show the world again.

Can I break free and be that unafraid anti-corporate loner in no need of a stable cashflow and an office to march into? Can I follow my own advice and start with nothing, in order to do something that is fulfilling in itself? I'm terribly timid when it comes to fighting my own lions.

I'm 23 and a half. Much too old to have done nothing for myself, much too young to be timid.