Back rolls?!

I can still remember the absolutely blinding pain of the metal bar on a spring-loaded trampoline snapping open onto my bare foot. I fell to the floor, keening and howling like a trapped animal, absolutely terrified to look down and see just how bad the damage was. This was early on enough in the pandemic that cloth masks were considered “good enough” and local hospitals were over-capacity and out of ventilators, and the thought of having to risk a COVID infection because I had been too lazy to put on closed-toe shoes was sending me into a tailspin.

Fortunately there was no broken skin and the damage seemed to be localized to my big toe. I wasn’t sure yet if it was broken, so I wrapped it up and started the cycle of icing and monitoring it for the next 72 hours. This also meant that I had to spend as much time as possible with my foot elevated, ideally above my heart, and so I was staring down an indulgent amount of couch and TV time.

In an effort to make a big batch of queer lemonade out of the lemons I had inflicted upon myself, I finally started on my RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR) adventure. There’s a lot to love about RPDR¹, and between the US series, All-Star series, multiple international series and various spin-offs, it would take a lifetime to watch it all, making it the perfect way to distract myself from the mental gymnastics of “if it’s broken then I have to go to the hospital and then I’ll get COVID and I’m not sure my insurance covers a ventilator and besides who would take care of my cat?².”

I’m trying hard to reign myself in here because while I could easily write 150,000 words on RPDR, there’s an actual tie-in with my animation experience I’m trying to get to.

The general flow of an episode of RPDR is some kind of mini-challenge followed by a maxi (almost always runway) challenge, with the episode closing out on critiques from a panel of judges — oftentimes individuals with a deep level of industry knowledge who, along with RuPaul, give each of the queens feedback. And it goes without saying that at least once a season there’s an early cut in the episode where a queen looks straight into the camera and talks about how proud they are of what they accomplished that week, how hard they worked, and how they know they did their absolute best, only for the judges to unanimously point out all the ways in which the outfit and//or performance fell flat.

Upon hearing this news, some contestants crumble and start crying, others get defensive or defiant, and others take it on the chin. Regardless of the response, the underlying message of the critiques is always: we’re giving you feedback because we believe in you, we see your potential, and we want you to learn and grow and get better.

You did this to yourself

–an alum, after looking at the state of my assignment during a tutoring session

With every new quarter of school comes a new mentor, who is for all intents and purposes the primary instructor and point of contact for the term. Last quarter I had a lovely mentor who was brilliant at giving feedback to all of us baby animators. Her entire philosophy hinged on finding at least one thing that was working in your animation, and using that to give feedback on improving the piece as well as a point of comparison to show how other parts of the animation weren’t working. She was also an incessant and sincere praise machine, and as someone who thrives on attention and external validation I would lay down in traffic for her if she asked.

This quarter I have an equally brilliant mentor with an entirely different style of feedback. While I will occasionally get a compliment, the majority of the feedback I get is a laundry list of what’s not working, why it’s not working, and how I should go about improving it. As a sensitive little bean, the first feedback session I had was absolutely devastating and compounded by my classmates enthusiastically sharing their (significantly higher) grades in Discord³.

I am one of those kids who found things I was good at early on, excelled at them, and did not invest in developing the skills to keep going with something if I was initially bad at it. This makes animation challenging for me, because I am at the middle of the pack on my best days, but most of the time I’m tripping over myself and flopping around in the gap between my killer taste and mediocre talent. I have a desire to excel at animation, it’s just turning out to be a lot harder than I imagined.

Throw all of this together and the shame spiral I was sliding down needed to come to a halt before I did something weird and reactionary (like switch schools, again), so I chose to try and distract myself with the latest season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, hoping for some life advice. Before the hour was up I found it: you have to know who you are and deliver it at all times.

You have to know who you are and deliver it at all times

I reflect about my life a lot, and lately my experiences in animation school take up an inordinate amount of brain space. While I still struggle to really understand who I am, two things that I do know about myself are that I enjoy swinging for the fences, and I'm not in any particular hurry to finish my animation program. I have a good job and a career that I'm proud of, and while I'd like to eventually be a working animator, I’m not in any hurry to get there. Heck, I don't even know if I want to be a full-time animator, or if instead I'll be folding animation into my current work⁴!

It’s hard not to get caught up in the fervor of finishing an 18-month program on time, especially when everyone around you is stressing out about completing on time, but releasing myself from an arbitrary completion date has led to the realization that the absolute worst thing that could happen to me in my program would be to repeat a course. That’s it. Who cares if I repeat a course? If I don’t end up mastering the principles of the course, I should repeat it!

But swinging for the fences on an assignment brings up the thorny issue of grades. Ah, grades. You stupid, arbitrary means of comparison, how I hate thee. I have a lot of baggage and trauma around grades, and we can unpack that another time. I know that I could play each assignment “safe” and execute exactly what’s outlined in the assignment, no more no less, and pass every class by a safe margin. Easy peasy.

Alternatively, I can fully commit to the risk and go for it, taking an assignment and pushing on it so that it’s challenging (and maybe not doable!) and exploring the limits of what I’m capable of, knowing full well that I could strike out and fail the assignment. Because if I miss the mark, I’ve got a mentor there who’s more than happy to point out what I’ve done wrong, why it’s wrong, and how to address it.