I don't consider myself an artist, and I don't think I ever have. I'm just someone who paints or draws pictures every once in a while when I feel the need to express some sort of emotion that I don't feel that I can express in any other way. I haven't finished a painting or piece in years, it feels like. This art thing isn't really part of who I am anymore. I've moved on since I was 15 to become a more mature and more directionally-based person. I'm a Mechanical Engineering major at one of the best research institutions in the country. Art is/was a hobby. I don't think a lot of people understand this about me, particularly my family and some of my friends. This is why I can never produce paintings or commissioned work that is of the same quality as some of my other works that people (and even sometimes I) consider to be great. It's not that I was selfish or lazy, I just wasn't emotional enough about a topic or person to substantiate a piece of artwork out of thin air. No one seemed to understand that. I never even considered what I had to be a talent, but I know that you can't just tame talents whenever you want them to.

The best paintings, the best pictures I ever produced, I produced when I was immensely sad or depressed. To see these pictures again and to be reminded of them only reminds me of those sad points in my life when I felt compelled to express myself via artistic medium. And it's not to say that those moments still don't happen, I've just found other ways to deal with grief or despair for the most part. I'm a happier person than I used to be, and I have more of a future than I ever thought that I would. I don't like to display anything I've produced in real life, because I hate self-promotional marketing bullshit. It's narcissistic and I can't stand it. I posted things here on the internet because I felt that there might be other people out there who could possibly relate to whatever I was feeling at the time. And I found a lot of interesting people this way, I don't regret any of it.

That being said, I'm not proud of nearly anything about myself. Pride is not one of my strong suits, because it displays an arrogance which represents all that I despise in other people. It portrays a false confidence in a world in which I now know absolutely nothing is certain. Or rather, the burden of proof is on the absolutist, and I'm not one. The few things I am proud of are my sanity and my rationality, and maybe an accomplishment here or there. But not this work. I look at an old piece of artwork and I see my 15 year old self, naive and misunderstanding the world. People like to reflect on childhood as a time of innocence, but such an existence is always fated to be temporary.  I didn't know anything about life then, and I don't know anything about it now. The only difference is that now I'm wise enough to know that I don't know much.

I'm a humble person at heart and I have never liked the spotlight and showmanship. I hate it, really. I hate the spotlight with a burning passion. I like recognition, but I don't like admiration. I would prefer to be respected than adored. I'm not going to stop doing artwork or stop posting artwork here. I'm not going to take anything that I've posted down, because I know there are other people who might be able to relate to it, no matter how trivial I consider the piece to be. I need people to know that they are not alone, in their grief, in their introversion, or (especially lately) in their godlessness. When you reach out to someone, directly or indirectly, you help them. You let them know that they are not alone in their doubts and their fears. That's all it takes to provide comfort to some people, and that's all I wish to do here, really.