How I Drew Myself Back Into The World
Not gonna lie — not having friends for almost four years can really take its toll on you. I think the important thing is that now, almost two years later, I can semi-comfortably reflect on my college experience. It was lonely, and altogether not a time I want to think about too much, but it’s the key to understanding the way I am now and why drawing is so important to me.
I still remember the first time someone offered to get dinner with me at school. It was almost Christmas break during my freshman year. She offered me a piece of gum before we went our separate ways and I started crying on the way back to my dorm room because it was the first time I realized just how lonely I had been, and how grateful I was for her company. I saved that green gum wrapper until I graduated. In fact, I think it’s still somewhere in my room back home now.
I’ve spent a lot of time alone over the past several years. When I look back, I’m not even quite sure how I did it. I can count the parties I went to during college on one hand, and basically all the fingers I’m holding up are from my very last year there. Those parties usually involve me standing in a corner for an hour, drinking bubble tea and not knowing what to do with myself.
It was a mix of several factors — being a small fish in a bigger pond, spending nearly all my free time hanging out with my boyfriend’s friends and then losing them all when things went way south, not feeling brave enough to say hi to new people first, not clicking with my roommates. I ended up spending a lot of time alone in my private dorm room because it was easier that way. It wasn’t until I graduated college and moved back home that shit really hit the fan, though. My parents were disappointed that I didn’t fulfill their expectations of landing a full-time corporate marketing job right out of school, and they weren’t exactly welcoming me back home with open arms. Add a few hundred miles between you and most of the people that you feel comfortable talking to (count em, four), and it wasn’t pretty. That’s when I started drawing.
Staying inside my own room had been my default to feel safe and happy for the past several years, but at home, that strategy was creating even more anxiety. I made it a point to get out more and started going to a nearby, basically-abandoned amphitheater to sit in the middle of the stage and draw. To be fair, I’ve always loved drawing and painting, and I tend to forget how amazing it makes me feel once I get started. Most of the times I doodled, I illustrated myself. But in a sea of mundane living-at-homeness, other random drawings that I posted on Instagram allowed me to partake in some amazing opportunities that got me out of the house. I got to see Lorde perform at Austin City Limits after she selected my painted interpretation of her song to be awarded wristbands and an autographed handwritten copy of the lyrics to “Ribs”. I also spent seven weeks eating free and unlimited pasta at Olive Garden after submitting a pencil sketch of fettucine alfredo and breadsticks and winning a Pasta Pass. Seriously, I was a #pastaprincess ruling a table of one for seven whole weeks. Amidst heaps of job application rejections and interviews stringing me along to a bitter end, doodling made me feel valuable and gave me a reason to keep fighting my way out of this existential slump.
I almost always ended up drawing myself. At first, it made me feel a little vain — but then I realized why it made me feel so good. It was way easier to draw myself curled up and sulking on top of an abstract pink mountain or literally dying over text message-induced anxiety than to find someone to talk to about how isolated I tend to feel from the rest of the world. It’s way easier to think of myself as a really charismatic cartoon who is more outspoken and brave, whether I’m feeling horrible or completely on top of the world. Just a few peaceful hours with my watercolors and a couple Instagram edits, and suddenly I have dozens of people liking this totally honest self-portrait of myself. It’s like having 70 tiny “I understand you’s” and “I value you’s” lighting up my phone screen when I’ve spent so many nights feeling like a lot of people could care less about me.
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Starting a Tumblr full of my illustrations eventually led me to meeting people here in New York who have changed my life. They liked the cartoons I drew of myself and even commissioned my work! But they also valued the real me as I opened up about my post-grad anxieties over lunch dates in Brooklyn. They made me feel less afraid to pursue an uncharacteristically-daring dream of moving my life from Texas to New York — and instead of just drawing myself wishing I was there, I did it! I moved to Brooklyn three months ago, and things have never been better.
Since taking the plunge, I’ve found more artistic opportunities and met more nice people than I thought I would find in a lifetime. I never imagined that I would have a girl squad that would invite me along with them on Saturday nights. And, like, they keep asking me to hang out! Even though I feel totally sheepish about nearly everything I say or do!! It’s been a blast, but in those quiet moments away from ~the girls~, when my phone isn’t lighting up with texts, I’m really afraid that I’m the same lonely person who never knows when to speak up or what to say in social situations. I’m even more afraid that I’m the same lonely person who doesn’t totally believe that she deserves this joy because it’s been so long without it.
I’m still learning how to reconcile the years I lost to loneliness and the time I will need to take to know how to ease into group conversations, to feel comfortable at a bar and to not spend most of my train rides home wondering if people really even like me. But drawing has taken me this far — out of my cluttered room in Houston, and into an apartment in Brooklyn — feeling loved and hopeful about my future for the first time in years. Until I’m comfortable enough to express myself fully, I will carry a sketchpad in my purse at all times. I know that I can keep drawing the girl I’m still learning to become.
