This piece reflects a formative period in my early adulthood, before titles, frameworks, or career clarity. It explores how creativity resurfaced during a time of uncertainty, identity search, and emotional vulnerability; and how the act of making sense of life through art became a catalyst for personal direction.
It is not a story about becoming an artist, but about how self-discovery often begins when certainty dissolves.
When Identity Emerges Through Uncertainty
The person I am today was not the person I thought I would ever come to be. I knew I always had a passion for creating visual narrative through illustration as a child. Somehow though, my dream was lost in translation from my move between middle school and high school. I moved from a city 20 miles outside of Washington, D.C. to the a small town in Indiana constantly looking for my niché therein. I graduated with the standard high school experience of going to football games, weekend parties, prom, and experiences of failed relationships. After high school I felt it was time for me to grow up and find my place in the world. I moved out of my parents house at seventeen years old less than a year after graduation. I then became just another ornament in the landscape of Indiana, moving between apartments and customer service jobs following the lead of my friends, who where doing much of the same thing. After a year and a half living in less than favorable situations with roommates I could only hope I never see again I began living with one of my best friends from high school Ken.
Ken was a cancer survivor who lived in Indiana all of his life somehow disconnected from the influences of people in town that had evoked in me feelings of constant pity for their irreversible situations. He was strong and very mature for his age, becoming my influence of reason in the chaos of my impulsive thoughts. We worked together at local restaurant as line cooks, and protected each other like brothers. A few days at the restaurant had passed and I met her, a plain girl with hazel eyes, long brown hair pulled up in a bun, and no make-up. She was pale from being indoors at the restaurant drive-thru under its fluorescent lights since high school. To me Jessica was the most beautiful person I had ever seen. Her smile was something I could not get enough of, forcing me to play the role of a goofy boy willing to do anything to get her attention. My friend Ken, being the matchmaker he was, played the middle man in telling both Jessica and myself what we thought about one another. Jessica and I began dating shortly thereafter. We went to restaurants and met one another’s friends giving us more insight into who the other person was and who we identified with in their lives. Jessica’s friends were very religious in their practice of Wicca. I even witnessed her and her friends burning herbs in a circular garden and taking pictures of each other’s oras with a Polaroid camera. Fortunately, this did not frighten me at all and I began to appreciate her more for it. I felt blessed that she was comfortable enough to share her beliefs with me. We began renting an apartment together in a town about 20 minutes south of where I lived at the time. Shortly thereafter, I was introduced to Jessica’s dog Mercy a chocolate colored Weimaraner and began living with the two of them. Things were great, at that point I began to fall in love with someone for the first time in my life. I started working two jobs and took it upon myself to do anything I could for Jessica financially and emotionally. However, my mind began to believe that this was enough to make Jessica forget all that she knew in that small town and be my companion for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, this was not exactly how things worked out, we started to get older and our true beliefs began to emerge.
Eventually things began to work themselves out. We both understood that we needed to work with each other so that we could be happy together. Verbal arguments were still a regular occurrence in our relationship but we always seemed to come to a consensus at the end. We began to appreciate one another as individuals and started sharing our outlooks on life with each other. One day we were sitting on our bed talking and began sharing our philosophies on life with each other. Jessica told me, “Life should not always be about work and money, I just think that we have our whole lives to grow up. Why do people think that we should spend all of their youth learning how to perform grown up tasks for the future when we should just enjoy our youth while we still have it.” I looked into her eyes after she told me that and began to understand her point of view. I then looked within myself, something I am not used to doing unless forced, and realized that my life up until the time had been experienced from the opposite spectrum of reality. I was working hard and trying to pick up the pieces of my life, when in reality, life will never always be perfect. My life was always a work-in-progress. I said, “I never thought of it like that. I feel like if I don’t achieve and grow up now, I will never have the energy to do it as I get older.” She just smiled at me with that dimple-ridden smile and said, “I know.” At that moment I realized the type of drive I had in my soul in wasting no time to find who I was and devote my life to becoming the person I wanted to become.
As our conversation continued I remembered that Jessica had a set of tarot cards on top of her dresser drawer wrapped in a purple cloth with a gold symbol on top of them. I asked her if she would read my tarot cards in which I received an immediate response of, “No.” I began to press the issue harder asking, “Please, why won’t you read my tarot cards?” She told me that she did not want to because of the fact that she was afraid of what the information may tell her and that it may reveal bad news. “It’s not going to say anything bad, please just read them to me, just for fun,” I said. Reluctantly, Jessica brought out her tarot cards and made me split the deck as she grabbed them back from my hands and began to organize them on the bed in a square pattern. She began to turn certain cards over, one by one. Concentrating on the cards with intensity her head fell in frustration as her hair enveloped the cards on the bed in front of her. She looked up at me with tears in her eyes and told me, “See I told you I didn’t want to do this.” I looked at her flabbergasted, having not a clue what the detailed color illustrations on the cards where telling her to make her so upset. “What do they say?” I asked sympathetically. She looked back down at the cards and continued to turn them over, one after the other. She began to calm down slightly through the reading and become very interested in what the cards had to say. Finally, she turned over the last card and looked at me with a little pain and confusion in her eyes. I waited for her emotions to come to fruition and gently said, “Honey, if you don’t want to tell me what they say it’s OK, I’m sorry I asked you to read them, I was just curious.” “No, I’ll tell you what it said,” she said politely with an upset look in her eyes. “It said that you are going to meet someone else, me and Mercedes are going to be out of your life and you are going to leave us.” “That’s not true,” I said, “I love you more than anything in the world, there is nobody that I love more than you and I would never leave you, I don’t believe it.” Ignoring what I had just said she went on, “It said that after you leave us you are going to move to Chicago and go to school.” The moving to Chicago to go to school part made sense to me, my parents had been living in Chicago during this period of time for three years at that point. “Well the going to Chicago for school thing sounds pretty accurate, but I don’t want to leave you so how could that be true if I can’t leave you.” Disregarding my reaction again she asked, “Are you good at drawing?” Trying to reassure her that the cards were wrong I said, “Well I used to draw cartoons all the time in my room while I was in elementary school and started making cartoon characters and stories. But I haven’t drawn anything in a very long time. I don’t even think I can draw anymore.” She then told me, “Well they said you are going to go to Chicago and become an Artist.” I was in complete disbelief, I had no idea how to respond besides looking at her in awe and confusion. “Did they say anything else?” I replied. “They said that you were going to become a successful Artist.”
I was in total disbelief and felt like I had heard the most ridiculous thing in my life. I had never even thought of becoming and Artist after I had failed from the Visual Communication program at IUPUI, it wasn’t for me. I always had a love for art as a child but never dreamed that I would pursue it after the horrible experience I had when I began college. The classes did not contain any art in them what-so-ever, it was all computer programming and business, everything I hated to do. I figured it just wasn’t for me. I thought to myself for hours about how I had no idea how to becoming an artist even if I wanted to. I asked myself, if I was an Artist what kind of art would I create? I didn’t want to think about it, I was happy where I was at, living the simple life with the woman I loved.
Six months went by and Jessica bought me a sketchbook pushing me to start drawing again, but there was nothing I could do, I lost all of my drawing abilities I had as a child. We continued to fight back and forth with our problems and frustrations with one another until it was time for the relationship to come to an end. Our opposing views on life did not allow us to coexist any longer. I was searching for answers on how to prepare for the future while Jessica was trying to make the best of the present. Jessica had just started a new job that morning when we said our good-byes. I drove my 1989 Toyota Corolla down a straight, flat road to her new job at 9 a.m. on a Monday with her favorite breakfast in hand, biscuits and gravy. I handed them over while her brand new coworkers stared at a distance and I said, “I love you.” Then I drove to Chicago.
