ADD can sometimes cause depression. Often through fear of failure. It can appear as thoughts like “Why bother finishing?”, “nobody will like it anyway.” This stems – for me, anyway – from growing up in a small town that didn’t see artistic talent that was different.
Two memes recently popped up on my FaceBook feed:
The first one said “When you are very, very different, people don’t just not understand you, they misunderstand you. They try to understand you from inside the confines of their own paradigm and so; they can’t really see you or hear you or feel you or interact with you. They can only interact with their own conceptualizations (mostly projections) of you.”
The other:
Society: “Be yourself!”
Society: “No, not like that.”
When I was a kid, I entered a Bicentennial poster contest in my hometown of Raleigh, MS, with a drawing of Molly Pitcher I’d found in a National Geographic. I included the original on the back of the poster to show the article on her involvement in the Revolutionary War. I didn’t even place in the contest. I was told I traced it. The original was a 4×6 print, my drawing was a full-sized poster board.
I’m not digressing, but making a point. Politics and not understanding a person that doesn’t fit into your norm can hurt a budding talent. It can make you not try. I did give up trying to be an artist, I’d rather be a cartoonist. As a cartoonist I can thumb my nose at society. Yes, George Carlin, Robin Williams, G.B. Trudeau, and Berkely Breathed are my idols.
This all comes together on Haze Gray, in my thinking why finish it? Nobody will probably like it, anyway. What’s the point? So, I watched what I’ve done so far on the first short episode. It’s damned good. I have YouTube subscribers with only a few clips up so far. I have sailors that actually like what I’ve shown, that bug me to show it off. So, I’ll finish because I’m good at it. People DO like it and wanna see it finished. And the point that I never stopped drawing after I should have won that contest.
BTW, the winner was a colored graph of some sort.
That is all.
