By DEB SAINE
Sept. 3, 2018
im2insaine@mac.com
I'm not sure exactly how old I was — nine, maybe 10 — when Mom asked me if I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. After I told her I wanted to be a writer, she laughed and said, "Oh, Debbie, you'll never make any money."
She'd been right about that the same way she would be right about so many other things over the decades to come. But what she failed to understand then was that being a writer was what would make me feel whole, make me feel complete. Writing was something I did well and that would eventually give my life a sense of purpose.
Two years after that conversation, life threw me what felt like nine-innings worth of curve balls. My parents divorced, Mom and I moved out of the neighborhood and into a two-bedroom apartment and I started junior high as a seventh-grader.
As if adjusting to life in a new home, a new neighborhood swarming with mostly retirees and a new school environment weren't difficult enough, I also had to deal with the man I fluctuated between referring to as The Sperm Donor and Big Daddy Dirt Pile. To my classmates, he was Mr. Saine, the vice principal. To me, he was a physically and emotionally abusive alcoholic that I wanted nothing to do with.
That also became the same year I learned what a valuable tool writing could be in helping me to survive. One of my teachers realized how much I was struggling and threw me a lifeline by suggesting journaling as a way to work through what was going on inside my head and my heart and just maybe help me to make sense of what was happening around me.
I also fell in love with creating art that year. Art class was a requirement and it proved to be a subject that allowed me to get lost in whatever I was making without having to think or worry about anything else.
Fast forward to 1988, 10 years after graduating high school and picking up college degrees in English and journalism, and my life centered around words. There were no paints, no drawing pencils, no blank sheets of paper begging to be covered in colors. I had started working at a small-town daily newspaper about 15 miles west of where I'd grown up and life became all about the writing.
I loved my job. Eventually I moved from writing obits and filing clips to writing features and turning out a weekly column. I was good at what I did. But I couldn't have picked a worse profession. The newspaper industry back then was fast-paced and deadline-oriented. I was a recovering alcoholic who eventually was diagnosed with manic-depression.
Getting up and going to work became more and more difficult. The stress was taking its toll and exacerbating my mental illness. Almost 18 years after my hiring, I was fired. And I was devastated. Who was I if not a reporter? What was I if not a writer?
Depression took hold and pushed me into a deep, dark hole that would swallow me up for about four years. Writing no longer provided any solace and so I stopped putting pen to paper as well as sitting in front of a blank computer screen and clacking away on a keyboard forming sentences.
At some point, I remembered how easy it was to get so absorbed in creating something with my hands that my brain would shut up and leave me alone. Drawing has never drained me emotionally the way that writing can.
Somewhere among my gazillion books was one titled "Draw Squad" by Mark Kistler. The target audience? Three- to eight-year olds. The goal? To teach kids how to draw using challenges that were right up my alley: fun and imaginative and nowhere near realistic. Kistler, a cartoonist, illustrator and art educator, knows how to relate to kids.
And so that's what I did. I worked my way through Kistler's book and filled sketchbook after sketchbook with the challenges. Here are a few of them that I've held onto:
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