No Safety Net - 9/13/19

My eyes welled and tears dripped onto my clay car model. The smell of sulfur from the Chavant clay was embedded into my fingernails and filled the tiny cracks in my sore hands from weeks of sculpting and pressing.

I hadn’t slept in days and my body was running on a meager diet of vending machine cheeseburgers, Del Taco, and Rockstar energy drinks for the last few weeks. It was the week before finals of my 4th term at Art Center, which meant not only sleepless nights but also increased competition from your peers. We were like starving hyenas, some sabotaging others for personal survival, others driven to tears from being bullied by seniors over priority equipment usage. 

It was a battlefield where the enemy was imperfection, but the price was compassion. This was not a war with two sides, but an all-out free-for-all. At least that’s what it felt like at the time.

I did the math on what I needed to do to finish my projects and it wasn’t looking good. Even after priming and painting my ⅕ scale car model, I still had to design my presentation, print it, and mount it onto foam core with perfection. There was no time for redos. That meant I had to drive home with having not slept, design my presentation, and hoped I had enough ink, paper, and a printer that wouldn’t crap out on me. 

Add to the equation my lack of sleep and diminishing response to caffeine. 

Conclusion: I was fucked.

There was simply too much to do.

After years of martial arts training and track practices, while balancing an insane high school life, I was no stranger to hard work, but back then I was still getting at least 5 hours of sleep a night. 

After passing the 76-hour mark, my body was caving in on itself. I felt the narcolepsy creeping up to me like a Kamodo dragon waiting for me to pass out from its poisonous bite. I was fighting a losing battle and felt myself losing control of where this collapse was going to happen. I didn’t want to risk it happening while driving, an outcome many Art Center students still fall victim to.

I recalled stories of people bending over to tie their shoes, only to pass out and not only miss final presentations, but also job interviews with companies that would visit. BMW. Toyota. Honda. Nissan. BIG companies. They passed out and didn’t wake up for days. I vowed to never let that be me and fought to keep my eyes open.

I teared up, put my clay tool down on the table, and blurted out, “I don’t think I can finish.” 

My classmate and friend, Derek, quickly reminded me, “Yes, you are. Because you don’t have a choice.”

He was half-joking, half not. Actually he wasn’t joking at all. 

He was right.

We didn’t have a choice. My parents made less than $70,000 combined and had four kids. Any chance of them footing the bill for my $120,000 education was a long shot. The days of getting a full scholarship had passed long ago and I decided against taking time off to work, not wanting to kill my momentum and miss the bonus of the communal drive of my peers. 

I had to suck it up and finish strong. 

Derek's situation was similar to mine but fewer siblings. 

We had no safety net. 

We had no wealthy parents to take us back in if we failed. We had no inheritance or trust fund waiting for us. This was it.

All or nothing.

Someone had turned the stereo to play “The Final Countdown” for all of us to hear. The song was a ray of sun at 4:00am that cut through the thick smoke of my depression and allowed me to see a bit more of the battlefield. 

It wasn’t over.

I wiped my tears, calmed myself down, and picked up my clay tool. I timed out the stages I needed to complete my model before the instructor walked through the door and kept working. I gave it my all during what remained of the week and it was by no means perfect, but the realization that I had no alternative helped push me passed the finish line. 

In hindsight, the fact I had no safety net WAS the catalyst that gave me my second wind. 

I regained laser focus knowing I only had one shot. 

In the end, after that grade, passing the term exams, and fast-forwarding to even graduation, the most important thing I got out of my time there were these realizations of how one performs when their limits are reached and what they do about it when they've hit them. I’ve become addicted to what one can accomplish when faced with these challenges and when there's no going back.

I’m not saying don’t be prepared. Preparation will only help you push that redline a bit further up and achieve even more. As I grew, I realized losing sleep was a result of poor planning. It was mashing on the gas pedal before outlining my strategy. I burned too much precious fuel too quickly on the wrong things. 

Only upon trying after so many years of teaching, I realize that this lesson cannot be explained to another person. It must be experienced personally and intimately. You can only provide the conditions and even then they can be artificial.

For those of us that look back at times where we did give up, it’s still not over. You get another chance. Every day you get to wake up and give it another shot.

But give it your best shot.

Fuck Yeah, it’s Friday the 13th!