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"it is a curious fact, which anyone may notice, that a soldier wounded in action always thinks the affair is lost and imagines it to have been a very bloody fight."

sevastopol in december, tolstoy

about two months ago, after i'd finished my first pencil drawing, my art teacher requested that i complete a self-portrait.
"it'll be just fantastic for your portfolio," she said. "maybe even your best piece. and don't worry, after you get going you won't even think about the fact that you're drawing yourself."

i went home and leafed through all the pictures i own. my faces smiled up at me in various postures and places, crying out through squinted, asian eyes and warped, toothy smiles, "pick me! pick me!"
they all appeared so foolish.


after i finished the portrait, i found it rather difficult to show to anyone else. "it's beautiful," people would exclaim. "you're beautiful."
but that was hardly what i meant to portray. in fact, it made me feel like i had captured a fake, a hollow shell, and had thoughtlessly splattered her across a sheet of 80 lb paper.

there i was, seemingly staring up from the page.
a masterpiece?
hardly.
an accurate depiction of my physical characteristics?
questionable.
an accurate depiction
of what i think of myself?

certainly not.

captured in that way, forced into two-dimensional form, i suddenly realized how small i am. how trite my life must be. my story is not one in a million, but one of a million; a single microcosm of the same patterns that have been playing out since god placed man on the earth. i might be wounded, i might be bleeding and dying inside, but the world marches forward. the sun continues to rise.

i am not the first person to have switched her major. i am not the only person to have ever struggled, to have felt she is stumbling. i am not so important that my fate determines the final outcome of the world's events.
placed just so, i appear as ridiculous as the next person, my mannerisms suddenly shallow and cheap, my concerns and conversations so trivial. if you were to study me for a day or two, you could easily identify my favorite phrases and my repetitive concerns. time after time, you'd begin to wonder how i could be satisfied with so little, how i could be so cozy in my favorite sins and guilty pleasures, so easily and even eagerly tempted.

perhaps man is foolish. perhaps we are all ridiculous.

but somewhere, deeper, hiding, there exists something infinite. something so beautiful, so pure, something that chose to come to the earth, to suffer these horrible trials and make these terrible mistakes in the hope that it could be sanctified. that it could attain exaltation.

i know i'm ridiculous at times, i know i'm just like the next man, believing my wounds and failures to be the result of a desperate and bloody battle. but perhaps, just as my self-portrait acts as little more than a depiction of my face at a single point in time, carrying little depth or trace of the person inside, my worldly exterior hardly mirrors that inner spirit that knew so much and chose so wisely.
perhaps i can learn, slowly, to leave a bit of my ridiculousness behind, forget myself, and plunge into that greater work that is without beginning and without end, and finally
become.