The Biggest Myth Ever: “I Can’t Draw.”

When you have the urge to create, within that urge is every moment of counter-create that you’ve come up against over your entire existence.

Counter-create?

Yes.

And it looks like this.

You’re five years old and you create a finger painting to show your Dad.

You bring it to him while he’s in the kitchen drinking his morning coffee, about ready to go to work.

You show it to him and he looks down and says, “That’s great Bunny, but the sun should actually be yellow, not orange.”

He messes up your hair, gives you a kiss on the top of your head, and off to work he goes.

When your Dad, who you love more than your soul can comprehend at age five, tells you you got it wrong on the color of the sun, immediately something happens inside of you that is quite puzzling.

That sense of joy, happiness and that feeling of elation you had five minutes ago has somehow disappeared.

You cannot explain this feeling, really.

You were all excited walking into the kitchen to present your Dad with your miniature masterpiece, and now you’re standing motionless and a bit spinny.

You instinctively look down at your painting still puzzled as to why you feel this way.

You look at the sun you painted up in the left hand corner.

And then your five-year soul realizes something.

Your elation about your painting is gone.

And you are bummed that your Dad wasn’t as excited as you.

I mean this is your Dad. He’s bigger than God to you, and you really don’t even know anything about God yet.

Let me introduce you to counter-create.

A creation that is counter to yours.

Now, let’s fast forward to your teens.

You create pancakes for breakfast.

Your Mom exclaims, “Great pancakes!”

You smile, and go back to the frying pan to cook more. Mom’s approval makes you feel warm inside and gives you that spiritual oxygen to keep on creating.

Your big sister walks into the kitchen, sits down and says, “Geez, Robin, these are a bit thick. Can you thin them up a bit?”

Guess what?

That’s create too. It’s her creation, is it not?

Yet it is a very subtle counter-creation to yours.

You introvert ever-so-slightly but are anxious to please your big sister, so you thin up that batter and things are good.

Five minutes later your brother walks in and takes some pancakes and says, “Geez, sis, these are a bit runny. Can you put a bit more batter in these bad boys?”

You stop for a billionth of a second.

You have just experienced the moment when your creative fire has taken another shot. It’s beginning to ebb.

It’s slight, but it’s there.

It made you pause.

You go over to the stove, thicken up the batter and inside you think to yourself, “I think these might be the last pancakes I will make for awhile.”

Every creative person has been up against this in varying degrees.

You dismiss the counter-create and keep creating. You get too much counter-create and you begin to doubt whether you want to create anymore, at all.

No one ever told you you’d get these subtle ninja stars from friends and family that seem to graze your neckline when your creative juices are flowing.

But this is how it begins to unfold and manifest in your life.

And when you entered school, possibly grade school, your teacher said “Okay, I want you to draw a dog,” and your first reaction was:

“I can’t draw.”

That’s actually not true.

I’m here to tell you.

That is just not true.

The first impulse of every living being is to create.

You started creating by taking that little jar your mom left on your baby chair, tipping it over and painting your first little masterpiece with “Gerber Applesauce Baby Food.”

You took your Mom’s red lipstick and created your red lips like hers, except you embellished the rest of your chubby little baby face too.

Then you took your big brother’s Magic Markers and saw that big ole blank living room wall and created your first life size work of art at the ancient age of five.

And each time you were creating.

Considering the above, what if your Mom or Dad said, “Dang, that Gerber Baby Food looks like you’re the next Picasso!” 

You would have been ecstatic.

Magic Markers on the living room wall?

“Wow, honey come in here and look at what Robin created!”

You would have been beaming.

But, if you were told it was bad or wrong or “That’s not what we do in this house with our food young lady,!” your innocent young universe would have possibly spun out of orbit.

And that part of you that inherently knows what elation feels like is gone-gone.

If you were admonished for your version of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper created in multi-colored Magic Markers, there's a good chance you never picked up Magic Markers, crayons, or even a paint brush ever again.

Gradually you became acutely aware that when you turn on the afterburners on your create, your spiritual radar picks up the incoming missile of cynicism and criticism in masquerade mode.

But you have learned.

You are now better at sniffing out that counter create before it introduces itself.

It’s like a bad sci-fi movie where you think you’ve whipped all those bad-ass spider robots, and then you hear another hundred of them coming down your chimney and a hundred more coming up your basement stairs.

Just to get you to stop creating.

If the battle with counter-create wasn’t ever-present, you’d see more art by practically everyone you know.

The fact is, that in the end with many it will manifest across life with a default setting of, “I can’t draw.”  

The truth is you have been convinced you cannot, which is an entirely different matter.

And listen. Counter-create does not have to be evil. It does not have to be ill-intended. Unfortunately, often it is.

Sometimes it’s just Dads being Dads and trying to make sure their daughter gets the color of the sun “right,” when in fact that’s a purely subjective experience.

But create carries with it this germ of potential counter-create in it.

It’s there lying latent.

The whole “draw inside the lines” was just more of somebody else's version of how the drawing is supposed to be done.

And then finally, creatives revolted.

As the five-year old turned ten, and the ten year old a teen, they just internalized their protest and said:

“I love you Dad, but fuck you. The sun is orange.”

Eventually the counter-create against drawings and paintings and such became like Area 51. You couldn’t really go there.

So, in their silent fuck-you protest, they got a brilliant idea.

Robin decided to take that color orange that her Dad loved so much, and do something constructive with it.

She colored her hair orange at fourteen.

She looked in the mirror and thought, “Yeah. Let’s see how they like this finger color painting!”

As Robin prepares to leave the bathroom, she recalls the same feeling of walking into the kitchen as a five-year old, to show her Dad her finger color painting.

Robin thinks to herself, “Well, he’s probably going to give me shit about my hair, but it’s my hair!”

Did I say create carries with it the germ of counter-create?

And sure enough, fourteen year old Robin walks into the kitchen happy as a raccoon and greets both her Dad and her Mom sitting having breakfast.

They look up at her in horror.

“Robin, what in the world did you do with your hair?”

Robin stops for a billionth of a second.

Finger paintings and pancakes and drawings of stick-dog figures flash through her amped up teenage mind.

This time she decides she’s not going to let her create get extinguished.

Not today.

Robin figured out the perfect reply which will elicit from her parents whether they can they tell her the truth about how they really feel or not.

“I colored it! You like the orange?!” she says enthusiastically.

Now her parents freeze for a billionth of a second.

They now have to decide as her parents to answer with a counter create reply or a create reply.

“You go back upstairs and wash that out right now! You’re not going to school looking like that!

Or…

“Well, I liked you blonde, but you know I love you no matter what your hair color is, Bunny.”

Dang.

I’ll take Door # 2 response.

The whole subject of whether you can paint, draw, color, sketch, or even take a slab of clay and make an ashtray, is buried under millions upon millions of tiny strands of DNA recordings that tell you that you can’t or you didn’t get it right.

From finger painted suns to teenage pancakes.

And in the end you realize you need to grab back your crayons. You need to take back your paints and make broad vibrant strokes with all the colors of the palette across the canvas of your life.

And knowing that there will always be those who wittingly or unwittingly tell you that your drawing, “Does not look like dog,” or that your first homemade pie, “Was not like grandma would make,” your inner William Wallace from the movie Braveheart emerges with a silent war cry.

You decide with every fiber of your fiery and passionate soul, that at the first sign of restriction, invalidation, or restraint on your ability to create and put more beauty and aesthetics into the world, you will invoke your own personal policy in two words:

Fuck that.

And keep on creating.

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