Dear Best Friend,

07Jun08

You gave me quite a scare with your text.  I thought the bottom had fallen out entirely.  I know you are in a major bout of depression right now.  Words I say won’t matter because you need to mourn.  But I meant what I said in my email to you this morning. 

You will always be one of my heroes because you are brave enough to pursue your dreams. 

Not many folks can say that.  I know for a fact that I can’t.  I’m scared shitless at the fact that I’m not gainfully employed in a position that equates the extra letters that are supposed to go after my name.  And even though I know I will work with students and be quite happy doing that job.  A piece of me wants to do something else for a living.  Write, paint, craft, who knows.  But I fear that it will always be left in the hobby realm, the side realm, the 2nd business realm.

But you, you are not taking that route.  You are taking a tremendous leap of faith pursuing animating as your career goal.  And fuck.  I know you’ll make it.  It will take time, but you will.  You are one of the most talented people I know.  And I’m not paying you lip service.  You really are.  When we were kids the only thing you ever seemed to want to do was draw.  Everything you did had some kind of artistic flourish.  It’s made you who you are. 

And while you could’ve finished with a sociology degree or you could have been the greatest office manager known to the world.  You didn’t follow that map.  As I use the cliche, you paved your own path.  It’s true.  You did.  You always will.  And that it why I look up to you.

That’s why a lot of people look up to you.  Your brother, your cousins, your friends, even strangers look up to you.  People you don’t know look up to you.  Granted they may be short people, very very very short people because you are not that tall, but still, short people nonetheless look up to you.  Well…because they have to.  But damn. it.  you know what i mean. 

How can pursuing a dream be wrong?  Maybe if the dream is a heroin infused nightmare or a coke littered daydream, but that is not your dream.  It isn’t a haze of narcotics!  Yours is a real dream.  A goal oriented dream.  A dream that will get you far in life.  A beautiful reverie that can not be duplicated because only the pencil sketchings of your own hand tell the story. 

Best friend Jen.  You will make it.  There is too much passion within you for it not to happen.  And I say passion, not talent.  Because we all know how immensely talented you are.  But talent can only get you so far.  Look at my cousin Charlie.  He’s talented as fuck.  The member of the family who can wow you with his musical ability, making all us cousins angry at him for making us look bad in front of Mr. Able, our piano teacher.  The music sounded so beautiful coming from his hands, but it was an empty beauty, a hollow beauty, a perfect replication of soul without soul.

So to get to the point of my familial metaphor.  You are not a replication of soul.  You are soul.  The passion in your work bleeds soul, eminates soul, kicks soul’s ass.  You make soul hang its head in shame because of your abundance of passion. 

It’s true.  You know it.  We all know it.  Passion knows it.

You’re amazing.  Believe me.  Believe it.  I do.

L

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