Letter
To My Younger Self
Alex Beauchamp
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There is the old saying that there are years that ask questions and years that answer them. It will take you twenty years to understand this.
In a few days, you’re going to be given a challenge to create a large and magnificent painting for a competition. You’ll smile when you hear this because of your passion for painting. Holding a brush is as natural to you as breathing and you use every moment you have to create. Your fifth grade teacher will hand you two sheets of paper; one with rules and one blank for your drawing. You’ll take these both home with excitement and set to work on it quickly.
You’ll draw your B bird, you decide, because it’s currently your favorite image to draw. You take the letter B and transform it into a bird. The colors you use will come from your imagination and not any from any actual bird. You’ll spend hours on it but they’ll pass like minutes as your hard work feels like play.
When you finish your drawing and have your parents and fellow classmates ooh and ahh over it, you’ll hand it to your teacher whose face will turn and her voice will get loud. She will tell you how horrible it is, how your work disgusts her, and how you shouldn’t be allowed to enter such a piece into a competition that is for real artists. Her words will speak louder than anything you’ve ever heard. In fact, when you win first place in the competition a month later, it won’t mean a thing. For that teacher’s words meant more than any trophy. Years later, you’ll have forgotten the trophy but remembered the words. Those words will paralyze you for years.
You’ll try to fight the insults as you grow older, but you will fight less and less. You’ll drift further and further away from art, and eventually regard yourself as a linear soul instead of the creative one you once were. At first the drift will hurt, but then the further you are from remembering who you once were, the easier it becomes to be someone else.
Fifteen years later you’ll flip through your old childhood drawings and remember that B bird you once drew and the smile that crossed your face as the pencil met the paper. You’ll ask yourself why you failed when you drew it, why you failed as an artist and why you failed at creativity. You won’t have answers. That’s okay – these are the years that only have questions.
It will be five more years before you pick up a paint brush again and have it feel comfortable when you start to paint. You’ll browse art supply shops and feel more at ease in them than office supply shops. You’ll start to remember what you used to love to do. You’ll become less afraid of who you were and who you’ve become as you realize that growing older is the gift of growing into yourself. And that self is an artist.
When you call yourself that, it won’t make you cringe or fill you with regret; it will fill you up like nothing ever could. You’ll paint more and more and start to show your work again – this time without critics and fifth grade teachers. This time, you’ll hear the praise and remember the trophy, although now it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you can’t imagine never painting again, no matter what.
Your passion will show. You’ll sell artwork, become known for it, people will want it because it makes them smile. This is a bonus to you. All you needed was your own smile. And you have it.
You realize that without the pain, the joy wouldn’t mean anything. Without the lost years, the found ones wouldn’t have such importance. And the answers you have now you wouldn’t understand without the questions.
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