Hello world! How’s it hangin’? This is the first blog post on my site. I figured I could make this public since it could spark up a conversation in my email, or at the very very least resonate with someone regardless of the potential social aspect of it all.

Anyways, I just finished up co-writing the first chapter of something unannounced but pretty cool. I personally am not someone who had a lot of creative endeavors as a child, which is rather uncharacteristic of me considering how much I do nowadays. I mean, sure, I did a lot of crafts. I’ve been bracelet making and weaving since I was seven, if you could believe it. But I’ve never really done a whole lot of writing or drawing, which is where my efforts are being primarily focused nowadays. It’s weird to be so confident in one artistic area and so helplessly afraid of failing in another.

When I say “never” in reference to the amount of writing and drawing I’ve done in my years, I feel like that’s a bit of a stretch. I doodled here and there, and I colored here and there as well—but hell, I distinctly remember being given coloring pages in after-school care and then making origami with them instead. I just hated crayons that much!

I didn’t really grow fond of the process until I was about 13, when me and my partner started co-writing stories together. I also watched Gravity Falls and that was a whole extra jump-boost to my artistic journey. I’m sure that series will be mentioned plenty of times on this website. Many of my artist friends, however, have been going at it since they were the age that I was learning all my tactile crafts—so… pretty young! I feel really inexperienced despite writing and drawing on a more serious level for six years now. Maybe that’s how everyone feels, I don’t know.

All this to say, I wish for that feeling to stop. I have noticed a tendency in myself to beat myself up after writing—EVEN WHEN there were no noticeable mistakes anywhere. I’m not even critiquing my own work, for God’s sake! I’m merely completing a task, and then proceeding to tell myself “dear lord, that was TERRIBLE! You’ll NEVER catch up to people who have been doing this since childhood!”

It’s a bit of a pickle to me. Is that true? Obviously if someone has been practicing a craft since they were a wee one, they’re going to be better at it than the guy who just started. But what’s the real harm in having a skill gap between two people? Is there a need to catch up? Is the less-experienced person considered dead weight? I mean, if I were collaborating alongside someone less experienced than me, I would not consider them dead weight, so I reckon that’s just a backwards logic issue in my head. What’s the deal? I think I should give myself some grace.

There’s this one song called Tho I’m A Tortoise by Elio Mei. I think about that song a lot whenever I get to thinking about this sort of thing, although I don’t listen to it much anymore since I’ve been more drawn to midwest emo lately [I know. One evil traded for an arguably worse evil] but I cannot help but remember its message. It’s a pretty basic Tortoise and the Hare situation, but done in a melodic and more poetic way because it’s music of course. It’s also not really a cautionary tale by any means? It’s more of a “I may be a hare, and you may be a tortoise, but we’re different and we have nothing to prove regardless of how quickly or slowly we may reach the finish line.”

This is relevant, at least in my own head. I make connections very often. “Corkboard brain with the red string” is how I like to describe it. The message speaks to me because it tells me that I’m allowed to be a tortoise among hares, even when at odds with society about it. But gosh, how true is that really?

I was a kid who had to prove it. Prove I could do things that everyone else could do. Having a rare physical disability where the technology to treat it is new and heavily documented for all to see will do that to you. I was “special despite it all,” or something like that, and I basked in that idea when I was younger. It definitely didn’t help that on the mental side of things, I was placed in the gifted program. YEEEUCK! I have thoughts on that that I will not crack into at the moment.

But either way, my worth rode on my capabilities. So when my capabilities started waning later in life—namely middle school—things got far worse. My grades started slipping, so I wasn’t the smart one anymore. My physical disability got worse, so I wasn’t the one in gymnastics or sports. What was there to ride on when everything was stripped away?

Well, I still tried for years to ride on the “smart guy” concept for my own worth. It, obviously, did not work! I had one hell of an undiagnosed case of ADHD and there was nothing to do about it except be my own doctor through Reddit threads and trudge through high school the best I could. I’m surprised I made it. I have journals from that time that made it look like I would have been gone the next morning.

College rolls around and two years in, AKA one month ago, I was diagnosed with ADHD and I am now medicated! But my identity is quite honestly in shambles. You would think that having all your suspicions confirmed would be a very validating experience, but I think it somehow made me worse. I’ve had a lot of internal monologue about it being “essentially impossible for me to ever be what I used to be.” How fun!

“Well, Tape, how does this tie into art and writing again??? And that song???” Well, my friend, I am so glad you asked. I kind of rambled for a second there. So, with what is essentially an identity death that I have been recently experiencing AND the fact that my art has been slowly getting more and more experimental and slowly creeping into my identity like a parasite, it means that those negative thoughts regarding creativity are only getting louder and I feel as though it is best to address them.

I thought I was a hare in the past, but it turns out I am a tortoise. I am slow. That’s just a fact. I frankly prefer to take it easy. But can I be a tortoise and work among hares? Can I find new pieces of myself that were covered under my hare-like facade so I can shine as the tortoise I am? Only time will tell, I guess. I also fear change, as all good Tapes do, so y’know… metamorphosizing into an eldritch form that I cannot yet comprehend because my previous form was built upon the falsehood of expectation is rather horrifying! But I’m sure it’s fine.

I’m sure splaying my problem guts for all to see is probably supposed to be embarrassing, but I’m sure it’s alright. This is a little rambly. Maybe my next one will be less-so. I don’t have my email up on the site yet so either contact unreliabletape [at] hotmail [dot] com or yap in the guestbook if you wish to speak words about this topic. I will respond! Or just talk to me about theme parks. That works too.