what dreams may come

There is just no helping it, sometimes, despite all your best plans and hopes and desires events go to pot. I started a painting last week and I just didn’t like it; something about it elicited some guttural hate filled response. After a week I went back to it, but still don’t like it. I don’t think at this point there is anything I could do to save it, the composition is uninspired, the choice of colours uninteresting, and there is just a feeling of inescapable blandness to the thing. I can’t help but wonder if this is the moment where my skill and desire inexplicably meet in a fiery crash. I know, on some level that the only way you can be competent at something is through the monotony of repetition, and that’s is not really an issue, but I have become dismayed with the results and have began to wonder if I am ever going to improve. I don’t really have an answer, I have more questions and that seems wildly unfulfilling. I like to paint and I want to call myself a painter, but can doing something for its own reward but enough. I want to also make money and be able to support myself doing the things I love, but it seems to be able to do that one has to be “good” and better that competent, and I have a hard time hitting competence let alone something that is objectively good. I have painted three things this year that I can say I like, and many more things that I just loathe; and that has made me suspect that I have reached the point where my skill and ambition have separated and I should just accepted it. It sounds horrible to say those things and feels horrible to write, because my identify as a person is inevitably linked to my want and love of art, and if I can’t find a way to express myself and passions then why do I have those feelings in the first place. Has my journey been for not, I have I risked everything for folly by following my dreams? I don’t want to have the answer to that question, it’s something I don’t even want to address but it keeps piercing through my consciousness and sooner or later I won’t be able to deny its awful presence. I don’t regret much in life, but the regrets I do I have are immense and soul crushing. I was accepted to SCAD when I was a spry undergraduate many years ago, I got a scholarship but for reasons that flabbergast me I decided to not attend. I think I was afraid, I dreaded the thought of leaving all the familiar things I have and psychologically lacked the bravery to just take the fucking plunge into the depths of the unknown. That decision reverberates today, because with each moment I feel like a fucking lightweight or phony, I had an opportunity to do something and chose to do nothing. There is no greater villain in my life than me, and it feels like that failure is going to be the mark of my character for all time. God knows how much I wanted it, how I dreamed of it, and held it in my grasp like a delicate glass menagerie and god alone knows how much I rue my stupidity. I feel like howling to the sky pleading for a redemption that seems unlikely to come. I admire my girlfriend because she has done more as an artist then I have, she has her MFA, she had her work exhibited, and has sold some of it. I’ll be thirty two in a few weeks and I don’t want to be an office drone anymore, I want something more. I want to go to grad school so that I can at least redeem the foolish mistakes I made when I was young. I feel I have finally matured to the point where I could somewhat safely navigate the murky water of adult choices, and now I wonder if my moment is gone. I applied to some last fall with hopes that I would get in for fall admission and got rejected, the window of opportunity is closing and again I just want to go back in time and punch the twenty three year old version of me in the teeth. It’s now just a matter of making someone from some weird admissions board see my worth. Which brings me back to my frustration of do I posses any skill or am I just a deluded jerg off.