Painting In High School

Painting is a process. When I paint, there comes a time in every piece where I take a step back, assess my work, and feel the sudden urge to chuck it into the nearest dumpster and scrap the idea entirely. More often than not, however, that canvas will be abandoned and left to sit untouched like a foreclosed house across the street- vacant, staring, and waiting. Artwork with stories like this serve as a resonant metaphor for my high school career, seen as the “scrapping” phase dominated my sophomore year. I resented going to school, mostly because the atmosphere among students was not unlike newly hatched sea turtles scrambling across a beach towards the ocean: competition is ingrained their DNA, and only the strongest survive.

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I barely showed up to class; when I did, I spend most of my time in the bathroom trying to suppress a breakdown. The school’s atmosphere exacerbated my depression tenfold. The sense of guilt and inadequacy that was thrust upon me for not achieving and maintaining perfection could only be compared to Atlas’s burden, I sunk beneath the pressure of my peers’ opinions and my teachers’ expectations. The feeling of being ridiculed for not measuring up against impossible standards whittled down my resolve to finish out school where I’d started kindergarten thirteen years prior.

The moment my pen was poised over administrative transfer papers, the affliction that my efforts at school were just like the neglected canvases I’d seen so many times made me pause. Just a scribble of ink, and off I’d go to different school- a new project, a blank canvas. One brushstroke and a future in front of me would open, another behind me would seal shut. But I

Alleviated by months of therapy, my depression evolved into motivation. After drowning in negativity for so long, I sought solace in bettering myself. B’s became A’s. A refocus on academics, a venture in cross country, and joining clubs I’d rolled my eyes at previously helped me recommence on my figurative canvas. I learned that instead of looking for perfection in my work, I should look for progression instead. A gloom-filled painting, brushstroke by brushstroke, metamorphosed into a masterpiece; something that could be constantly edited and in progress, something that could only be defined as perfect by my standards alone. I became Renoir, redemption my