My Journey to Self-Acceptance as an Artist

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When I was a kid, I was so clumsy that my pediatrician told my mom he didn’t think I was going to survive to the age of five.

Dancing the “twist” one time led to flying into a coffee table with my face.

Dancing around the kitchen led to a burnt hand from sweeping it across the stove.

I did wild stunts on my bike, leading to chipped teeth, used my tetherball pole to pole vault across the driveway, and did flips off of picnic tables. This led to a lot of trips (pun intended) to the doctor for stitches.

They might have labeled me ADHD if the label had existed back then, but, since it didn’t, I was just “clumsy”.

One thing’s for sure — I never stopped moving and never stopped to look and pay attention to where I was going.

I just didn’t seem to use my eyes when I was little, not much anyway.

A Rocky Start

As a kid, I was like most other children - totally open about making art in any way.

But, unfortunately, when I was in kindergarten, I was scolded for making a mess while painting and watched my teacher throw my painting away in the trash. I was left wondering – what had I done wrong?

A couple of years later, my school had an Easter Hat parade. We were told to make our own hats without help. So, I grabbed my markers and a paper bag and went to town.

But when the other students showed up wearing elaborate fruit baskets and solar systems on their heads, I knew I had really done something wrong.

I hid in the closet for the entire parade.

After having such negative experiences, pretty soon, I just stopped trying to make art altogether.

In art class, I stopped paying attention, and instead, got sent out of room A LOT for talking to my friends.

And later, in middle school, I stuck mostly to music, dance, and gymnastics instead of fine arts – which became healthy outlets for all of my excess energy.

I felt good about myself doing these activities and ended up playing several instruments, singing in the choir, performing in shows, and even teaching dance in high school.

I enjoyed them so much that I dreamed of becoming a Broadway dancer! But instead I went a different direction – I joined the army.

Yep, the army, at age 18.

Uncharted Territory

You might wonder why I ended up signing papers that landed me in Alabama in the dead of summer for basic training.

It was an impulsive decision that I made after my best friend joined and said it was a great way to meet guys and save money.

That sounded pretty good to me! So, off I went.

It was helpful that I’d always been so active – I could out run and even do more push-ups than some of the guys – but, really, I was emotionally ill-equipped.

I’d always been a girly girl and never played in the mud or even played team sports. I definitely didn’t fit in.

If you’ve ever seen the movie, Private Benjamin, then you have seen my basic training story!

No one would have predicted that I would end up becoming a military police officer.

In MP school, I learned something important that started to change the way I saw myself.

In our training, we had to watch films and be a “witness” to crimes, writing down our observations afterwards. But I couldn’t seem to remember anything I saw other than the gender of the person committing the crime!

I wondered “Do I had a memory problem, or what?”

But the problem was that I had never learned to pay attention visually. I remembered the sounds and what people said but nothing about what they looked like.

I was starting to realize that I wasn’t a visual learner – I was an auditory learner.

But then, when I turned 25, I started to lose my hearing.

A Bump in the Road

Losing my hearing, to me, meant I was beginning to lose my way of connecting to the world around me.

I always thought hearing loss was just like turning the volume down, but I was wrong. Turns out, I could still hear people but couldn’t make out the words they were saying.

I finally worked up the nerve to go to the audiologist, afraid he’d tell me it was my mind going, and I was actually relieved to find out it was only my hearing.

After I got hearing aids, I could hear consonants again! And elevator beeps, and so many other sounds I hadn’t even realized I had lost.

But ultimately, hearing aids don’t fix your hearing completely.

And so, I decided to learn American Sign Language.

But signing is visual. Something I knew I wasn’t very good at.

It was very hard for me to learn, not only because my eyes were pretty lazy, but my visual spatial skills were not very developed.

When I watched people fingerspell, I felt like a letter tornado was coming at me and going right over my head.

Over the years, my hearing aids kept getting stronger and stronger…but ultimately, I was still struggling to hear.

Finally, my audiologist recommended I get a cochlear implant – which meant that any of the natural hearing I had left would be wiped out in order for the device to work.

I figured it was a loss, but more of a gain.

But this meant, for the first time in my life, I had no choice.

I had to start using my eyes.

I had to use them to read people’s lips to connect with people.

I had to start watching their facial expressions and body language.

You might be wondering why, since cochlear implants are supposed to improve hearing, but the truth is - my brain still had to learn to hear in a whole different way.

I had to get better at this eye thing.

Reconnecting to the World

True to my childhood self, I wasn’t one to sit idly.

I decided to get a nice camera and start taking pictures on my daily walks.

I soon found that taking photos was helping me to slow down, really focus on what was around me, and be more visual.

It also helped me to be mindful for the first time in my life.

After that, I decided to do another visually stimulating activity. I took up painting – which was a pretty scary endeavor, considering I hadn’t painted since kindergarten!

It was learning how to paint that started me on a quest that has changed my life.

I started out just trying to learn how to paint flowers, because I thought, “Hey, that should be pretty easy.”

Hah! It wasn’t. It was actually pretty hard!

But pretty soon after that I started going to art retreats with some of my favorite artists: Carrie Schmitt, Flora Bowley, Susan Nethercote, Alena Hennessy, Faith Evans-Sills, and Mati McDonough.

I signed up for as many online classes as I could and bought millions of art supplies.

But most importantly, I started putting paint on the canvas!

I found, once again, a new way to use all my energy to express myself and was slowly starting to heal from this idea that I did art “wrong.”

I don’t know how many times in my life I told people I didn’t have an artistic bone in my body.

Like many people, I always thought that people were either born artists or not.

But what I’ve learned is that we all have an artist inside of us. All you have to do is nurture it and give it a voice.

And really, there are learnable skills in making art. It’s not all inherent.

Making art has helped me slow down to focus on the fine details of objects, to experience and appreciate them more fully.

For instance, did you know that the inside circle on flowers (whatever they’re called) are sometimes hundreds of other tiny flowers?

Now, as an artist, I feel like I’m just starting to really see the world for the first time, and I’m wondering if becoming deaf was life’s greatest gift.

Be well everyone, and thanks for reading!

--Rebecca

Learning to See