I looked at a thing and had thoughts

[feywood]

When I was 11 or 12, a local after school performing arts org came to my school. The drama people came to my class and introduced what they did.

I fell absolutely in love and begged my parents to let me go. From then on and all through secondary school, twice a week I went.
 

Two years of learning to breathe and enunciate and how to project your voice, then on to once a week drama (improv, games, sketches) and once a week poetry reading. Dramatic reading. Whatever you call it. Saying poetry at people. I loved it.
After another two years, I specialised to just the poetry class. I clicked really well with my teacher and I enjoyed working through the poetry to find what worked for me, where I could put the feeling, how to be on stage.

What I'm trying to get at is:

a) I can actually stick with things, I just need to love it

b) it took very little exposure to let me fall in love with something

Another thing about me is that I have also had an artistic side and a crafting side since about age 5. I think that's when I learned to knit for the first time. Then basic embroidery (at school! I had the best teacher in year 1), I loved my knitting doll, I took my macrame projects to school to work on (we were in after school care cause they didn't pick us up till late).

And I just think.

What if I'd been encouraged to do that more? Like I said, it didn't (still doesn't) take much.
 

I think my mother was mostly disappointed I couldn't draw, but she also didn't try to teach me. Maybe got me one of those cartoons for beginners books. She's very bad at teaching me things, gets too annoyed that I don't pay attention to what she thinks is important, I get annoyed that she lingers on the details.

So now I still can't draw, but I can knit, embroider, sew, all that. To some degree.

But then I look at the Royal School for Needlework and I look at the degree they offer and I wonder if, in another life, in a life where my mum had time for me, could that have been me?

I don't blame her. She worked a lot and my dad was often gone and my brother was around.

It's just disappointing to be in your 30s and finally realise that they never made time for you, weren't interested in the things you cared about, and were actually pretty emotionally abusive.

I know for a lot of people things get better once they're older and things did improve when I moved out, but that's only because she no longer controlled me and I no longer told her anything that mattered. It's been like a decade now, I still don't or only rarely tell her important things, especially not distressing or troublesome things because she'll just make it about her.
For now, I'll just have to accept that I am maybe not what I want to be, but maybe another parallel universe me is an artist.