5 foot dreaming

I saw an interview with singer/songwriter Regina Spektor the other day and thought it was interesting how she described her old dream of being a classical musician. She compared it to a person whose dream is to be the tallest person in the Guinness World Records but only grows to be 5 feet tall. While she admits that that kind of dream fades away on its own, she insists the first dream doesn't have to be the last one. Or even the right one.

I'm guessing most people can relate, at least to some extent. Sometimes it just seems like there's a natural dead end to what you're doing, and I'm not just talking about a limitation of innate talent (neither was Regina Spektor, I don't think). Maybe you just grow out of it, or you get stolen away by a new passion. But for a lot of people, it could be what some psychologists call the O.K. plateau.

This is when you come to a point in your growth where reaching the next echelon would require an amount of focus, passion and hard work that you're not willing or ready to commit. Whatever your rationale may be, you're content to stop. It doesn't mean you can't ever start again, but sometimes you just know when to leave it behind, even if it's disappointing.

For me, for five or six years I was devoted to animation, comics and illustrated poems. For most of that time, that was where my dreams were. But I exhausted where I could go with all of them.

It came down to the fact that I'm a doodler, not a full-fledged artist. Anything beyond the simplest poses and drawings were complete agony for me, and I had little to no interest in actually developing my skills to make it less agonizing. Sometimes I'd just think of the headache of it all and procrastinate forever.

This severely limited the kinds of stories I could tell, and before I knew it, I felt like I'd used them all up. I hit 5 feet, and you can only go so much farther with your high heels of Photoshop know-how.

I won't say I'll neverevereverevernenevnenreever make a comic or animation again. If it's a side dish, I don't care as much about pushing my limits. But I know what I loved best about both was the writing. They were perfect playgrounds for an insecure writer to cut his teeth because the visual charm can be so disarming and what you write never has to stand alone.

I'm more than ready to just write now though. I'll try, anyway. I'm not so naive as to prematurely assume this is the right dream, but It's already better in that I crave to work at it every day.

So let's hope I can be a little taller this time! Or at least fatter. I'm tired of being skinny.