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you’re doing. You’re wasting – “
    “My potential. I know. God, don’t I know. Trust me, as disappointed as you are in me, I’m about 1000 times more disappointed in myself. You think that I like myself this way? Do you think that I want to stare at an empty canvas night after night? You have no idea what it’s like to be an artist. To want to eat, drink and breathe creativity and art. But realizing that there really is no air. There’s no air because you’re suffocating. I can’t breathe art, because I can’t get past my mental blocks.”
    My father shook his head. “What happened to you, Dalilah? What happened to the fearless little girl who created some of the leading urban expressionistic paintings and sculptures in the world?”
    I just stared at him, and then simply said “I guess I’m not fearless anymore. I can’t silence my inner critic, so I’m…paralyzed.”
    I looked down at the floor. My dad understood. I knew that he did. He, too, was an artist, and an amazing one at that. But he never went anywhere with it, even though he had some early success, for basically the same reason I quit. And that is the haters. The haters who exist to tear people down. They might be jealous or they might have mental issues. They might merely be trolls. But for somebody with an artistic temperament, they can be devastating to creativity. So, my dad mainly painted for himself and my mother. And he ended up working for The Man. With all of his absolute genius and artistic prodigiousness, he still ended up working as a soulless bank president for many years, before he finally found his passion in working with animals.
    Again, my father had zero authority to talk to me about anything. He gave up his own dreams of being an artist. He had a serious drug addiction when he was my age. Everything that he would be saying to me would ring hollow. It would be a case of “do as I say, not as I do.” And if there was one thing that I couldn’t stand, it was a fucking hypocrite.
    As for my mother. Well, I guess she had a little bit more authority to advise me than my father. She had managed to avoid serious substance abuse, except for those two weeks after she was raped all those years ago. But her hands weren’t clean, either. She was a goddamned cutter at my age. As for her career, she pretty much rode the coattails of my father. If it weren’t for him, she would be some kind of two-bit lawyer just scraping by, because that was what she was when she met my dad.
    I looked at them, well aware of my defensive posture. If I could read their minds, I would imagine that they were either regretting the fact that they both were such fuck-ups when they were my age, or they were regretting telling me exactly how much they were fuck-ups. They sat me down when I was very young and told me all about their idiot mistakes, mainly because it was all chronicled in a People magazine, and they figured that I would come across it sooner or later. My mom’s drug addiction wasn’t in that magazine, though, as it happened later. So her telling me about that was a bonus, I guess.
    “Dalilah,” my father said. “You have to get over it. You have to set aside your fear of failure and realize that you have a gift. You have an amazing gift, no matter what that goddamned Henry Jacobs might have said.”
    Henry Jacobs. Just hearing that name made my blood pressure shoot. He was the one who destroyed me. And, what’s more, I still believe that it was intention to do so. He didn’t do an honest review of my work. There is no way that what he wrote could have ever been considered to be honest. It was motivated by his daughter, who was pedestrian at best and couldn’t stand the fact that I was only 11 and was already attaining international acclaim. My Parisian showing at the Magda Danysz , which is one of the most renowned galleries in the world, was the final straw for the little witch.
    But Henry Jacobs was like a Pied Piper. He was one of the