You Belong in the Room: Learning to See Myself as an Artist

If you’ve been here for a while, it may not be a surprise to you that I’ve been drawing since I was six years old. I’ve never taken a drawing class, although I have taken fashion sketching classes in my twenties. Drawing was initially something I picked up to express myself in a world where it didn’t always feel safe to. It took on a new meaning for me at eight years old when I was pulled from class to meet with my very first therapist. I learned early on that playing with lines and color not only could look pretty but could also feel good to me. I didn’t always understand how, but it did.

Although school was not the happiest of places, two of my favorite places to be were art class and English class. It makes me sad today when I realize that most kids today aren’t allowed an art education unless they pass a test – and that is a whole new rant for a different time. But I was blessed to be able to take classes in woodshop, ceramics, photography, videography, and design in school. I also took music composition and learned to play the trumpet and the saxophone – but please don’t ask me if I remember to play either of them today. 

Art and expression have always been an important part of my life; something I wanted to do all the time. When it came time for those high school “what do you want to do with your life” conversations, it was a no brainer for me. I wanted to do the same things I had done all throughout my childhood. I took the initiative to look up art schools in the Chicago area. I was excited. But then I was told by every adult that surrounded me that art was not a realistic career for me. I needed to choose something more realistic and stable

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Real jobs never looked very stable to me. I watched someone very dear to me dedicate 40 years to a position, only to get laid off so the company could save on money. But my teenage self trusted that everyone else knew what was better for me. I didn’t trust me, the one person who knew what made my heart sing every day. I ended up going to a school I wasn’t really interested in, majoring in something I could have cared less about, getting sick, and completely bombing.

What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I realize that I wasn’t meant to be an artist and settle down into a real job like everyone wanted me to do? As someone who had been an honor student my entire life and had scholarships thrown at me left and right, this was foreign territory, and it didn’t feel good. What did feel good was continuing to create and express myself when I had time away from focusing on “real life.” I even attended art school briefly, majoring in fashion design before life got to lifing again. But from my perspective, real life sucked. It wasn’t what I wanted because I had given my trust away. 

After some years had passed, I made attempts to tiptoe back out into the art world, but it didn’t feel very welcoming to me. This world can be exclusive, cliquish, and divisive, depending on who you’re attempting to connect with. For a person who was coming in with wounds regarding her own art and her own educational background, I was already walking in feeling like an insider. So, I retreated. I went back to simply making art in my bedroom that hardly anyone saw and denied to anyone that I was an artist at all.

To me, an artist had to be someone who was doing it full time, traveling the world. She had to be someone who had an MFA from a prestigious university and painted like the old masters. Some of those things were not who I ever was, and I wasn’t sure I even wanted to be that person. I never liked rigid rules, even when I was in school. Life had enough rules. I wanted to be weird, expressive, and different. And I didn’t think I fit into that world.

My first saving grace was having a coworker who was an artist and somehow discovered that I was too – no matter how much I tried to deny it. He started gifting me with supplies and planting seeds to get me back out there, and I must admit that it did help a little bit.  

My next saving grace came the first time I attended a visual artist meetup with the Black Creative Circle of North Louisiana. I had been involved with the group for a while as a writer and was initially just attending this meetup to support the visual artists who were there. To this day, I remember announcing that I wasn’t an artist and was just there for support. But as the day went on, people started sharing their work. I realized that these were regular people who weren’t showing oil paintings of the Mona Lisa or the Sistine Chapel, but work that was different, unique, individual, and weird (but in a good way.) I listened to their stories and saw that many of them were like mine. Some had art degrees, others didn’t, but it didn’t matter either way. It felt like a safe space.

It was then when I decided to pull out my phone and show some sketches and paintings I had saved. It turned out that I was an artist and had been the entire time. I was sabotaging myself repeatedly because I still repeated those voices in my head who told my sixteen-year-old self that it couldn’t be done. Those voices still pop up from time to time, but now I have a network of talented weirdo friends who don’t allow me to isolate and give into those limiting beliefs. The right friends around you can make all the difference in the world.

This past weekend was a mental graduation for me. I attended the closing reception for the exhibition of an incredibly talented artist. When I entered the room, I initially felt those feelings from my younger self – feelings that told me that I didn’t belong. I wanted to turn around and run, but I didn’t. I sat in front and asked questions, which was vastly different from what my younger self would have done – and I’m glad I did. I’ve come to learn that some of the people I’ve looked up to or felt intimidated by have the same insecurities. There are people with art degrees who can do all the technical stuff who still doubt themselves and resist putting themselves out there. Feeling a sense of not belonging, not wanting to promote ourselves and feeling as if we don’t deserve to be seen is something even some of the most famous artists in history have gone through. And many of those famous names don’t have BFAs or MFAs or any of that.

Being technical or having a degree does not make the soul of an artist – the courage to create does. You belong in the room because you exist and the difference between those who feel they belong and those who don’t is the choice to be confident. If you’re creating, feeling, and expressing, you belong. The canvas doesn’t care if you have a degree. It only asks, “Will you be brave enough to leave a piece of your soul behind?”