I always had to hide the fact that I like to draw at home.

First because I was doing kinda cringy anime drawings and didn’t want the ridicule, but at some point I actually got pretty good in a “classical art” sense. I couldn’t let my family find out even more after that, because my mother had already claimed drawing as “her thing”. She would have been absolutely awful to me due to jealousy (because that’s exactly what happens every time).

She wasn’t even good at it, she just traced designs from the Internet because she has never been willing to take the critique & feedback that is necessary to actually become good at art. Her stuff literally looked like AI art nowadays, completely soulless and disinterested. She was always just after the praise of having drawn something, no matter the integrity of her work.

At least it was easy to hide my interest. I’m still baffled how people can be such control freaks but also care so little? Like they found my graphic tablet in the back of my closet at some point, but totally accepted the excuse of “oh that’s just a thing to digitally sign pdfs”