Fear of drawing and creating

Hi there everyone!

A 'rambling post ahead' warning. Apologies for the length!

So, it is exactly how it sounds in the title - fear of drawing. Sounds funny, doesn't it? How can I be afraid of artistic creation so much that just a thought of taking out paper and a pen or a brush makes me break out in cold sweat? How can I want to cry or leave the room as soon as I look at a sketchbook? There are so many different difficult (and reasonable) phobias out there - so how can drawing, an inconsequential thing at the end of the day, make me so fearful?

What makes it worse is that I want to draw. I want to create. Yet, every time I try to pick up a pencil, a pen, a brush, paper, a mouse to make some digital art - I get completely paralysed. The number of things I drew in the last 4 years could be counted on fingers of my both hands. Not only that, but my chosen career makes it a necessity to draw or at least sketch well enough for the client to understand the general concept of the design. It makes me feel broken, in some way, this unreasonable fear - an architecture student that is scared of sketching and designing? What a joke! It's a basic skill, come on. I tell myself that I just need to get over myself and just do it... But it doesn't work. It never works.

Frankly, it's ridiculous. But I can't seem to help it. I want to draw, I really do - but I can't and it makes me feel like I'm at the end of my rope.

Summary of the reasons: attended an intensive drawing course for two years in high school, drew all the time including mornings, school breaks, afternoons and even some nights, burnt out but didn't realise it, started getting worse at drawing despite drawing as much as possible, was shamed on public forum due to poor works, was abandoned by mentors despite getting into university abroad, left the country, got depressed, passed the uni at the bottom of the class due to paralysing fear of drawing and creation, got some self-work done, improved in many areas, now looking for solutions to the drawing problem.

I used to like drawing. Love it even, at times. I could sit down with paper for hours and just sketch, sketch, sketch - it was so fun! 6 years ago, I would never guess that I would start to hate and fear drawing and art in general.

It started with a drawing course, actually, that I took for two years in high school. An intensive course that not only taught us how to draw, but how to do it well and fast, how to think like a designer, like an architect. It was difficult, frankly. We were expected to draw a lot, to create a lot, for at least a few hours every day, two half-day long classes each day and a staggering number of homework. It wasn't impossible, mind you, just difficult. One had to be commited and with an impeccable time management and organisation skills to keep up with both the course and the high school work.

Every lesson, we would begin by taking out all of the large-format drawings we did since the last lesson and putting them in view for everyone to see - and every time, our tutors would go one by one, judging and scoring them, giving advice, criticising at times, saying what was done wrong, what was done well etc. I remember that I was so pumped in the beginning, so energetic - and I was doing, to be honest, amazingly well. But then, I started running out of time between the course, the high school, the other additional extracurriculars. I started getting stressed and procrastinate, putting stuff off, then realising I wouldn't be able to finish and spending night studying and drawing, and working - I would start doing things quickly, badly and showing worse and worse drawings. My skills seemed to fluctuate at the time, I remember - I would show amazing work that I spent so much time on, then not have enough time to finish another and in consequence show awful works that were later ridiculed on the public forum by the tutors. I would jump between extremes, between 10s and 0s, between 'That's amazing' and 'Are you ashamed? You should be'.

In the end, I would keep working, keep drawing and painting. I would draw in the morning before school. I would draw during the school breaks in the corridors. I would draw at night, not getting enough sleep.

Everything so that the tutors of the course would only look at me and say that they're proud of my achievements. My parents were never very involved in my life, never really close, my childhood itself rather cold and loud - and these tutors, they became like mother- and father-figures to me, like mentors I could count on. Which is why hearing how pathetic some of my works were became so difficult and stressful. Why I started fearing each lesson.

Later, there came a suggestion that, maybe, we could try out for studies abroad. It became my new goal - I wanted it because it would mean leaving my home, something I really needed to do. I also wanted it because my mentors wanted it. In the end, I was mostly led by fear and hope in equal measures.

In the second year of the course and last year of high school we were divided into two groups: advanced and advanced+. In theory, both groups were supposed to be equal. In practice, my group was just deemed worse and put aside with work but little guidance.

I was an emotional and sensitive teenager with anxiety and anger issues at the time... and I felt completely abandoned by the people, I thought, were in my corner, that decided that I was not good enough. I didn't stop then, though, I kept pushing, learning as much as I could, trying to get to study abroad, to get into the program in the country just in case, to make them proud. But my drawing stopped improving. In fact, it started getting worse and worse. The more I would draw, the worse my works would get, so I would draw more to improve, but that would make it even worse. I was burnt out, yet too stubborn, blind and naive to realise it. That last half year was a pure struggle. I passed my final exams with an average of 85%, didn't get into the university in my country and while I did get to study abroad thanks to all that hard work... it seemed to be for nothing. I let them know that I got into the university after the course finished, but I didn't even receive a 'well done' or 'good luck'.

The summer after I spent like in a dream. I didn't touch paper at all. I felt off, on edge, with bouts of crying and panic attacks at the most silly of things. I left the country mostly on my own, got to the city I was going to study in, threw myself into a completely new culture, completely new school, completely new life. I experienced typical transition shock and university struggles alongside extreme cultural shock, poverty, poor working conditions, living in a dangerous neighbourhood and after the initial period of simple survival, I became apathetic.

Later, the uni doctors slapped me with pills and depression diagnosis and left it at that.

It took three years to graduate and while I did create some during the time, I drew, sketched and painted as little as possible and graduated close to the bottom of my class.

I still can't touch the pencil without feeling stressed and miserable.

I want the good feeling of drawing again. How do you get it back?