My art skills came back, but the joy didn’t
I remember when I was a teenager—drawing came naturally and was fun. Time flew, and I made good art. I won awards, got scholarships, and even got paid for commissions. As an ADHD kid with lousy grades, those external rewards became my identity and, in some ways, shaped my career path.
Later in life, I started using speed to reach that same level of concentration. Over a decade of it, I became less and less patient. I stopped paying attention to details, to the point where I could barely spend an hour on a single drawing. That made my professional life unsustainable. I realized speed was ruining my ability to draw, so I spent a year and a half sober, trying to fix my brain.
Now I can focus on details again and spend hours drawing. The quality of my work has improved—but the joy hasn’t come back. Every day, I procrastinate for hours before going to my drawing table. When I finally draw, it feels like agony—like forcing myself to eat rocks. I draw because I have to, and because I can, not because I want to. When I see my peers still having fun and achieving great things because of that joy, I feel jealous, and I feel nostalgic.
Sometimes I think this is the price I paid for chasing achievement and trading my brain to speed when I was young. Other times, I wonder if this is just what growing up feels like—outgrowing something I once loved, which feels even sadder.
When I tell this to close friends who care about me, they say, “Maybe it’ll come back to you in another way.” But what does that even mean? Nobody seems to have an answer.