Photo taken at the Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand
Permanent Letter
I once had a teacher who changed my life forever, and not in the way it might sound. To be honest, this isn’t an easy topic for me to delve into, and yet I feel that I must, one reason being that it is a common experience I believe all creatives undergo at some point in their lives.
In the pursuit of making things, you can expect to encounter the inevitable: rejection. It’s not exactly a secret—the number of times one must bear the swift and deliberate pangs following the word “no.” Oftentimes, just the sound of it carries the potential to bring back painful memories from the past.
At first, one could hardly find anything positive in what can feel like a gut-wrenching sensation, particularly for someone harboring similar tinges from previous matters in need of processing and release. Rejection hurts, and for some, it can be excruciating.
It’s no wonder how quickly it triggers feelings of failure, so much so that you could hardly avoid questioning any sense of worthiness. Maybe some are fortunately blessed with genuine mentors who understand them on a personal level, enabling them to intimately see into the workings of their creative drive and form of reinforcement.
Sadly, I wasn’t so lucky. But I get this strange inkling that this wasn’t such a bad thing.
Now I question if what I initially perceived as the biggest shame-filled experience of my life was actually something else in disguise. Sometimes, words and labels get tossed in the air with such speed and automaticity that we might fully accept and fail to reconsider in habitual complicity.
I share all of this now because this is what happened to me. It happened over the course of one high school English class led by one unforgettable teacher with an unforgettable style of teaching, especially when it came to the written word.
Rewrite after rewrite, I struggled to match the specific structure of prose she upheld as fundamental to the craft. With every rough draft I wrote, more and more red marks showed up on each page, seemingly shouting at my inherent disability for following the rules.
The possibility dawned on me that it appeared as if I were deviating from her desire on purpose. But that wasn’t the case; I poured my heart into the task, and every single time, she beat it to a pulp, finally shattering it in pieces after numerous drafts and her version of constructive feedback sitting below the corner of my paper.
I saw them after she slammed the whole thing on my desk in front of everyone. Underlined in three strokes, the words read: get help.
It was the first time I got an “F” on any subject. But it wasn’t for a lack of trying; it was because nothing I did managed to fit her standards that I eventually lost the will to turn things around.
Eventually, I gave up. I stopped entirely even though I knew the grade was a curse, a permanent letter that, unbeknownst to me, already set the course of my future.
Guiding Lines
In retrospect, it only makes sense why rules and boundaries show up in the world of creativity when we consider one of the very first lessons we go over at school: lines.
There’s just no avoiding the topic; it’s everywhere. We encounter it in all sorts of places, so it’s understandable why we end up developing a relationship with it.
Perhaps it started from the moment we learned to connect the dotted specks shaping the characters of our language. Perhaps it started when we strived to make something beautiful in our coloring books and became acquainted with the importance of shading within the lines.
Either way, lines represent order and structure. After all, did not many of us get drilled with the social formality of the quintessential queue?
Did we not practice lining up at the sound of a bell and embody what it means to stand patiently and wait our turn? Of course we need lines.
There’s no denying their purpose. I just wonder if in the realm of artistry and authentic expression, they can get in the way a bit.
This makes me think about drawings I stumbled on as a kid in which the person meticulously traced another image to make a perfect duplicate. While it looked nice overall, something about it felt off to me, like somehow the maker was robbed of the gift of creativity itself.
Nowadays, it’s no secret how nonlinear the creative process can be. One step forward might require two steps back. What works wonderfully well for another might greatly dampen the approach of someone else.
Maybe the boundaries we draw up give us the space to find collaboration and ideas within; the structure that allows the content to shine as long as the lines provide actual guidance as opposed to immovable rigidity.
One of the greatest artists of all time also had a contradictory relationship with lines. While Leonardo da Vinci believed in applying a mathematical linear perspective, he rejected the existence of lines in other contexts.
In Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci, he writes:
“There was no such thing in nature as a precisely visible outline or border to an object. It was not just our way of perceiving objects that made their boundaries look blurred. He realized that nature itself, independent of how our eyes perceive it, does not have precise lines.”
Happy Accidents
Perception clearly plays an important role in how we approach art, and one of the most problematic ways it shows up for me is in perfectionism.
The strange thing is that I don’t always realize when it’s happening. But it definitely sneaks up on me now and then.
For a long time, this very vice revealed itself through the pattern of my behavior, which interestingly enough, runs parallel to the demeanor of lines as well. Except in this specific case, they were less about borders and boundaries and more about progression and movement.
You see, the more I noticed my improvement, the more I became fixated on making my former efforts reflect my up-to-date methods. The more I got better, the more I sought to match every detail of my previous work to my current style.
It was almost as if I were tampering with timelines, fixated on leveling up the line of my past self with that of my present. In simple terms, I somehow preferred the horizontal line over the ascending line.
But it’s nonsensical when you think about it because the steady incline carries all the markings of growth, development, and transformation. The slope is natural.
It means you’re moving in the right direction—onward and upward, as one might say. The slope is meant to be.
It took me a long while before I eventually reckoned with myself that I was suffering from a perfectionist mindset. The past is already done. We can’t change it; we can’t change our mistakes.
Hopefully, in the long run, we can focus less on the rough, asymmetrical edges and more on the little moments of lessons they bring to bear; the “happy accidents” that beloved landscape artist Bob Ross taught us to treat with kindness and compassion.
In Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga’s The Courage To Be Disliked, it is written:
“Do not treat it as a line. Think of life as a series of dots. If you look through a magnifying glass at a solid line drawn with chalk, you will discover that what you thought as a line is actually a series of small dots. Seemingly linear existence is actually a series of small dots; in other words, life is a series of moments.”
Never Touches
Of course, as artists, the longing to grasp at something ever so elusive has its allure no matter how far a certain point appears from our distant reach. It’s not unlike the phenomenon you go through in striving infinitely for limitless progress.
One metaphor that captures this never-ending journey is the infamous asymptote, the mathematical occurrence involving a line that a curve approaches closely but never touches. Philosophically, this reminds me of the pursuit of mastery in that the work never ends.
You never actually “arrive” since the very act of claiming a final destination would mean the end of evolution and expansion. Yet, even though an ideal is an ideal, it doesn’t mean that our efforts go nowhere.
In reaching for something meaningful, nothing ever gets wasted. The challenge of overcoming our inner resistance is a common obstacle we will come across again and again.
Sometimes the mere fear of failure is all it takes to keep us down for a longer period than we’d like to admit. But one lesson I’m beginning to understand is how often our experience depends on the way we choose to define it.
Similar to how we label things blessings or disasters, do we actually know objectively? Doesn’t the angle of how we see things depend on the very point from which we stand?
I find it so confusing. Maybe success leads to failure and failure leads to success, one event a result of another, over and over again.
In creating anything within this constantly fleeting environment, maybe just the choice to show up anyway, regardless of the outcome, matters more than anything. In I’ll Have What She’s Having, Chelsea Handler writes:
“So often, we are ready to give up or throw in the towel when, right around the corner, there is a pocket of sunshine we hadn’t known was headed straight for us. Even in my lowest moments, I keep my head geared toward the sky, because I’m no longer in the business of missing rainbows. Everything can change in an instant. And more importantly, it doesn’t matter how many people say no. All you need is one person to say yes.”
Line Dance
The word “rejection” stems from the meaning “to throw back.”It sounds so innocent, the act of returning an object to the owner whose life clearly stayed just as it was. In reality, nothing actually changed.
Yet, why does it sting all the same? It’s almost as if the sheer idea of reaching for something, only to be turned down, is all it takes to make one feel so foolish; as if a bystander stood watching you the entire time, mocking you for even daring to dream.
Maybe everyone experiences this differently. Maybe things change over time.
But what I know for sure is that failing my sophomore English class hurt like hell. The pain was something new for me.
It’s easy to respond to such a harsh blow with righteous anger and bitter resentment. In actuality, though, I felt nothing but sadness. If you could believe it, what I was experiencing internally had zero to do with getting approval or the grade I believed I deserved.
I can’t recall when it finally hit me, but somewhere down the line, it became undeniably clear just how much this work mattered to me. The pain was the very first marker of my passion, and the unbearable heartache it brought only signified how much I cared.
It’s not easy getting knocked over and over again, but I keep going because of something important; because I know what it was like to be that kid in the corner of a room, struggling to get by with nothing but the chosen words of a stranger. I know what it’s like to have your back up against the wall, finding solace within the written thoughts of those belonging to a distant past.
Words can hurt, but more than anything, I’ve come to understand just how much they can also heal. It’s why I’m learning that in the world of boundaries, limits, and rejection, the ability to throw it right back out there also belongs to you; a co-creation of courage in this unceasing, unpredictable line dance with the universe that might one day root for someone like you.
