Restickulous

Who are you, exactly?

Two years ago, I couldn’t draw much.

It was a lifetime personal feeling of failure for me, a graphic designer by degree and by trade, who couldn’t draw. It seemed like a missing component to my career, to my ability to call myself a designer. Illustration was an enigma to me, locked away on some far off planet I could never reach. There were so many times I needed that skill, and where not having it really limited me.

It made me feel like an imposter, to be a graphic designer and have to qualify when asked that, “I don’t do illustrations.”

More than that, though, I wanted to be able to draw. I wanted to be able to depict the scenes I could see in my head: the landscapes, the creatures and the stories that lived there. A lifelong writer of fiction as well, I have relied heavily on my writing to be able to express the worlds that my mind concocts, writing page after page to detail the shapes, the colors, the sounds, the emotions behind what I see and hear and feel every day when my mind drifts into “creator mode.”

Until two years ago, writing was the only way I could do that.

I had reached a point where, after the pandemic, after losing my job and feeling burned out in my field, I wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t know where to go. I knew I couldn’t go back to school–I didn’t have the mental fortitude to do that. I hated school, I had no patience for it, and what would I have gone to school for anyway? I was a designer, a printer, a photographer–it was my passion, my “heart work,” and I knew nothing else would suffice.

And so, on one particularly bad night, I started drawing.

Autodesk Sketchbook, a Wacom pen, and a 5 inch LG Wing phone screen got me started. I drew a couple of doodles of cartoon animals I’d perfected over the years–lineart only, nothing fancy, and certainly nothing new. I don’t remember exactly how it progressed, but I drew a couple more, a dog and a cat. I sent them to my friends, to my brother, and quickly realized the terrible drawings were making people laugh.

Why are you doing this?

When you’re upset, or feeling low, or feeling nothing, making someone laugh can entirely change your mood. At least, that’s how it is for me. My bad drawings of animals were bringing out smiles, and it was weirdly making me feel better too.

I’ve always been a fairly optimistic person. I try to stay positive, and try to inspire others. I consider myself an empath, which is both a blessing and a curse. I feel things deeply and I can usually understand why someone is behaving a certain way, or saying certain things, and I often have a pretty good idea of what someone is feeling even if they haven’t spoken yet. Science claims that’s a result of lifelong anxiety, that hyperawareness is a form of self-protection. But when people are down, I try to listen. Sometimes it’s hard not to feel compelled to jump in with advice or ideas for them. Sometimes, you don’t know what to say at all, so the only thing you can think to do is share terrible drawings of their dog.

Everyone has their imperfections. Their flaws. Their skills or lack thereof. The world is imperfect. Life is imperfect. After a point, you have to become okay with imperfection.

I think we need to get better at accepting these imperfections, at embracing them and using them to both help ourselves and help others.

The older I get, the more obvious it becomes to me that no matter how hard I try to be socially adept, no matter how hard I try not to be that awkward person who just stands there looking confused and uncomfortable when surrounded by, heaven forbid, people, it’s just not how I am. I am always going to default to keeping a six foot gap between myself and the nearest human. I’m always going to default to talking in excess about my current fascination, be it turkeys or trains or Star Trek–or not talking at all and weirding people out that way instead.

But the older I get, the less I care.

My quirks are what allow me to make people smile, to make people feel comfortable confiding in me about whatever is on their mind, to keep people engaged because “What the hell is this girl going to talk about next?” We need to focus on embracing our quirks–not on fixing them.

They don’t need to be fixed.

I hope that my art can be a source of not only inspiration for people who think they can’t do something, but a source of positivity and optimism. Our mental health is struggling on a generational scale, but we can take steps to help each other out of the hole by encouraging self-acceptance, self-care, and self-love. More than that, we can help by extending this acceptance and love to those around us. We can inspire others, not to change, but to embrace the individuality of every person, the uniqueness of every being, and all the quirks that come with it.

This is Restickulous. We’re all weird here. The magic is in the madness.

~ Bethany

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