Why did you start drawing? And why it seems like you completely forgot it.

These days I came across a tweet made by an ex-follower of mine that drew my attention. I sometimes check who followed and who unfollowed me on Twitter to gauge the kind of profile that usually loses interest in what I have to share and also out of sheer curiosity. Luckily for me, I have been receiving more new followers than unfollowers, so the list was pretty short.

While checking some of their profiles, this specific person had tweeted the reason why they had unfollowed not only me but several other people:

This hooked me because it hits sorta close to home. In a few ways, I can relate to this person! Being constantly online seeing people's edited lives where we see all their successes without knowing the failures they had to go through, constantly comparing ourselves to seemingly flawless artists that apparently draw hit after hit with no exhaustion. The impotence that strikes, the feeling of worthlessness and the inability of competing, of reaching this unrealistic standard established online.

After drawing for several years and being inserted in a professional environment where a lot of the people around me are a hundred times better than I am, I learned how to cope with this a little. I still feel like an impostor every now and then, and after seeing some amazing pieces doing lots of numbers here and there, the impotence does strike and deal some damage to my motivation and self-esteem.

It's unfortunately pretty common nowadays when we are constantly connected to the network. It's like we completely forgot why we started doing it in the first place.

Of course, every single artist started their journey for a different reason. I cannot speak for all of them, but I certainly can speak for myself. I used to draw all the time in school because it was fun. At some point, I stopped because my grades started to drop as I would be constantly drawing during classes and I got called out on that. 

At around the age of 14, I started watching Adventure Time, and I fell in absolute love with it! The characters were so appealing, I deeply cared about what would happen to them and how their relationships were going. The world was interesting and full of secrets that made it alive. 

That cartoon fueled my imagination and filled it with inspiration, and I started creating my own stories inside my head all the time. I remember loving bedtime because that was the time I would take the ship to the other world I had created. I went on adventures, I met people, I created relationships, and I wanted to tell these stories.

That takes me to what I think was the most important thing about Adventure Time for me: it was hella simple. The art style was simple enough for me to get started, and so I did. My artistic journey started with me drawing crappy Adventure Time style to tell stories I created in my head.

I didn't care if I wasn't the best artist on the internet (which I knew I wasn't)! I wanted to make my own cartoon!

Eventually, I did make a small animation that was just a shot of one of the characters I had created at the time saying a dialogue line. That was the shit! It felt amazing.

So how about now? Well, I developed my artistic skills to a professional level and started getting some attention online, and I think that's when things started to take a twist. It stopped being just about telling stories that I've experienced in my head. It became about being seen, admired and better than others. It became a competition. An unfair competition.

I started comparing myself to other very talented artists and getting very frustrated when things didn't turn out as I expected based on the standards I've seen in the community. I couldn't help feeling that way even though I knew that those amazing artists probably had a lot more years of experience than me, have done a shitload of garbage drawings that have never been made public. I knew that they have completely different personalities, life experiences, conditions, etc.

This crisis reached a peak after Art School when I saw some of my classmates getting jobs and I, who was praised by several instructors and peers, could not get a mere interview. My sense of worthlessness skyrocketed, and my urge to give up was almost irresistible. I sort of did for a while. Drawing became torture, and it was painful to go through it. So I didn't do it much. This lasted for roughly a year.

I slowly recovered from that hit and things started to get better. Eventually, I started getting job opportunities here and there. It started with a 2-day gig in a startup game studio, to some big commissions, then to some awesome freelance gigs for videogames, until I finally got hired by an animation studio as a part-time junior designer. Now I am a full-time artist being constantly blessed with opportunities from every corner.

Even with all that, I still haven't completely recovered from that big hit. I still do unfair comparisons of myself to others, and I still struggle to do good and big art pieces for fun.

The bad part about getting good at something is that you start realizing how much you don't know that a lot of people do much better than you, and that can damage your confidence if you're not careful. When we just started, we didn't care. We knew we sucked! When we started improving, we thought we were the hottest shit on the block! Then we start realizing how much we are lacking and this cycle kind of repeats over and over again.

Also, we want to be seen! We want to be noticed, we want those numbers. We want it because it feels good! We want it so much that we make the mistake of letting it attribute value to ourselves, completely forfeiting any control we have over our self-worth.

But when we started, we didn't want any of that, right? We had a far more pure and innocent passion. I believe it's in these times of crisis that we need to hit the brakes, take a step back and remind ourselves of why we are doing all of this in the first place.

My reason was telling my stories. Why did you start drawing?