When I first walked into the art class I had registered for my Freshman year, I was apprehensive. When I went into that art class, I hadn’t touched paints in years, and I hadn’t drawn anything in months. I knew I wasn’t that good at art–whatever I thought art was–and I knew that I just didn’t have the same experience and talent that other people did. I came into the class with extreme insecurity for my art. I always feared not being as good as other people in all forms.

Now, looking back, my insecurity taught me an important lesson.

Over the semester, I learned there will be people in the class who come in knowing more about how to draw and paint than me, and I will definitely feel jealous of their talent at some point. I sure did when I walked around and surveyed everyone’s charcoal drawings. It was easy for me to get the full figure down on paper, but I could never get the pressure and the varied texture down right.

I noted things that they did better than me (which was mostly everything) and it lodged in my brain when I drew and held me back. Comparing myself to others wasn’t the true problem, but comparing myself to them negatively was driving me crazy. I kept getting frustrated and saying “my art sucks.” Because of that, I always felt dejected and disappointed, which meant I moved nowhere.

In this class, I learned that this was the wrong way to go about art.

So maybe my art does suck, but how can I make it better? How am I prepared to fix it? I kept comparing myself but in a positive way. I would look at the easel next to me and ask: what is she doing that I’m not? I learned new techniques and new ideas from the way other people created their art. In a way, it was an extremely visual version of being tutored. And I think the tutoring helped. In the end, I reasoned that I was lucky to be one of the least experienced in the class because it meant to me, improvement came the most easily.

I honestly didn’t expect this class to impact me as much as my other classes did, but I was wrong. In my other classes, I always thought about the world in terms of the way it works, but this class was a new experience for me.

I had always been focused on how the world works, and not on how the world looks. I’ve now become to see the world in the form of art theory. I look at trees and cars and my comforter and wonder what colors lie in it. I now look at my water bottle and see the little lines that make it up and not just the whole. This class made it easier for me to process the world around me. It’s even still weird for me to look at my view out the window, and wonder how it would break down in a canvas.

It’s a completely different way of looking at the world around me. And I genuinely enjoy it. I feel like I can “see” in a way that’s different than when I first started the class.

This “seeing” also translates to the way I see art in the natural sense of the word. I look at paintings, and I can see the pencil lines below the thick paint. It humbles the painting and the painter to me to think they had gone through the same process as me. The struggles of trying to match colors and get the right angle on someone’s finger are ones that all artists have gone through before.

Art somehow feels more down to earth than it ever has before. It’s a similar feeling to writing creatively and then reading a book. Once you have done the same labor, other’s labors become familiar. Only then can it also be truly understood and appreciated. I don’t think I have gotten anywhere near the true appreciation that other artists can hold, but I think I’ve gotten a little taste of it. And you should too.