I was just a college student studying politics and economics. I had been painting for one year. I didn't believe that I could be an artist. However, after my study abroad trip to London, it changed my life forever. I had just arrived in London, and I only cared about one thing—the sketchbook. Nothing in my life excited me, and now I was not near anybody I knew, near anything I knew, including not knowing who I wanted to be. I would go to cafes and just sketch. I would go to parks and sketch. Sometimes, it didn't matter the quality; it just mattered the vibe that I would get. For instance, there was one time when I was walking behind an old couple who were holding hands, and I just wanted to capture that feeling of love between them.
I felt like I was getting better. I went out this night and tried to capture the light. Started to feel like the pencil was just moving without me really thinking, like it was just becoming second nature. I never felt like I had to make things perfect since it was just a sketchpad, so it helped me grow my confidence to do whatever I wanted, like the self-portrait I made in the mirror in my bathroom. As I traveled around, I filled the sketchbook, like this dog walker in Paris. After a few months, it started to feel like second nature. It was so fun and exciting. Each painting was like a little punch of life. Every picture I made felt like the fish that the fishermen brought home. Like it was my reward and my purpose, as my journeys continued, I kept sketching, but I started to paint more. The feeling from the very beginning of just taking my sketch pad out and like converting life and the energy of what I'm doing and feeling into just a quick sketch is so unmatched. I had such an appreciation for the fact that a few months before, I was studying things at school that I didn't care about, and now the thing that I could care about every day was just making these silly little sketches.
I gave myself the freedom to not care about whether it was good, but just to care about whether I cared about it. Only to draw what I wanted to draw in the way that I wanted to draw it. That's it. Dating it, giving it a title, and making it part of my personal journal. Giving myself this time and opportunity to start some kind of artistic journal gave me the beginning of self-belief that I could even do this and helped foster the importance that I put on my own personal journey toward always making a better, more honest picture. This trip is what sparked even more journeys, which turned into even more journeys that I'm on now.
I am writing this story because I was inspired by all the college applications we are going through in our senior year. I wrote this so I could remind myself to be open to new ideas and experiences, that you're not stuck doing the first thing you chose, and that it's never too late to switch majors or even take a whole different path in life. I chose someone to draw a sketchbook because I thought that, before art, especially art that is just small and meaningless, can be more profound or even more meaningful to us than the things we attach values to now, like money and other materialistic things. Art is the most human form of expression, and it reminds me to keep creativity and ideas like that in my life because if I look back at my younger self, I don't think I would be happy at all if I became an accountant or someone who just sits in an office staring at a screen.
This story reflects ideas like change and fear of change. It addresses these issues by contrasting a normal college student who flips his whole life by choosing art on a random trip. It addresses those who keep waiting, who wait for the perfect time or for opportunities to come running to them. It reminds everyone that we need to begin our path and we need to start our journey ourselves because we are the only people who can truly change ourselves. It also addresses the issue of anxiety because the character uses art to not care so much about the things surrounding him as much as he did before.
One of my choices was to write the story in the first person. I chose this because I wanted to directly express the feeling of people watching and the way we mimic what others are doing, and I tried to show this mimicking whenever the character would draw a person, or especially a feeling. First person allowed me to write the perspective of the character, so it showed how much he yearned for love or for some of the feelings he was trying to capture on paper.
My writing process was very weird. I had recently been scrolling on Instagram, and I found a couple of stories about sketchbooks. Around the same time, I had just finished finalizing my college essay and writing about how I wanted to go into finance to change the never-ending cycle of work. These combined to let me write about something that I had always taken less seriously. I know that I have the bad habit of putting other people's occupations or hobbies below myself. But I realize that putting those things below me gives me an ego or sense of arrogance. I realize that just because I don't care about those things as much doesn't mean that those things are inherently worse than what I care about. I don't remember using a mentor text all that much. I think I may have used some ideas from the beginnings of some of my peers' stories that we wrote down in our journals in some of the classes before.
One particular passage is when the character is following an old couple and trying to capture the feeling of love on paper. I don't think I wrote this passage to the best of my ability, but I think I wish I had a slower pacing to my writing because that moment shows a lot of the character. It shows so much and how much we long for feelings we lack. The absurdity of trying to capture the feeling of love, which is so profound and complex, and trying to transfer that onto a piece of paper with a pencil, shows the lengths that we go to for something we care so much about. I think if I had changed the pacing to be slower and dwelled on the ideas more, I could have led the reader to better understand the character and how he is feeling deep down inside. I think the scene would have reminded me of that one scene from Ratatouille where the food critic gets transported to his childhood when his mother would cook him the same dish. I think that scene shows us what art could do; the simple sketch my character could have made could have reminded us of something like that.
I learned that I need to be more creative not only as a writer but as a person, and that change is not something that we need to be scared of. These are my takeaways because I believe that I am a very systematic person, I like to go by the rules, numbers, etc., but this is not always the best answer to life. Creativity is one of the pillars of life, and whenever we lose that ability, we almost become soulless. I imagine like a person living in black and white, creativity is the color to our painting, and without it, everything in our life turns bland. I also took away the feeling that change is okay. It showed me that not everything has to be about money or comfort, because as long as you love what you're doing, it is enough.