“Urghhh!” She groaned, dragging the eraser across the page until the paper nearly tore.

An hour no, maybe half a day gone, and still nothing looked right.

The strokes were either too thin or too thick, too rough or too curved.

Nothing felt right today, even when she kept sketching the same character over and over.

It was like chasing a shadow that always slipped through her fingers.

Lizi let out a deep breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding.

“Today is not the day,” she muttered to herself.

“Maybe I should take a nap.”

She lay down, staring at the ceiling.

As if the pale, blank space above her might somehow whisper the answers she needed.

But instead, her eyes began to glisten, and a tear slid down her cheek.

“Urgh… why?” She wiped it away quickly, frowning.

“I’m not even sad… so why am I crying?”

Her voice wavered.

She covered her face with both hands, but the sobs broke through anyway.

“Why am I going through this again? I thought I was done!”

Her words were muffled against her palms.

“It’s just… one of those days. When I can’t get it right. Not every day… just..”

Her voice cracked.

The tears came harder, until her face was damp and her nose was clogged, and the ache in her chest made it hard to breathe.

Minutes passed. The storm inside her slowed, leaving a hollow quiet in its wake.

Her hands, still trembling, reached for the pencil again.

This time, she didn’t think about perfection.

She didn’t care if the lines wobbled, or if the pencil smudged against her skin.

The paper didn’t feel like an enemy anymore. It was just there, waiting.

She didn’t think about the rules.

She didn’t chase symmetry or measure proportions.

Her hand moved in quiet defiance of everything she’d been taught. No careful planning, no erasing, no overthinking.

The lines came uneven, but they came honestly.

They curved when they wanted to curve, broke when they wanted to break.

Every stroke felt like an exhale she’d been holding for months.

And before she realized it, she was sketching again. But it wasn’t the character she had been forcing all day.

It was… her.

Her own face began to emerge from the paper and not the polished, smiling version she showed to others, but the one she had just seen in the mirror of her tears.

The trembling lashes.

The swollen lids.

The curve of her mouth, caught between breaking and holding on.

Even the shine of tears seemed to live in the strokes, as if the pencil had soaked them in and refused to let go.

She stared at it for a long time when she was done.

It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t neat.

But it was true, so painfully true it almost hurt to look at.

And in that truth, she found something she didn’t know she was searching for.

For the first time in what felt like forever, Lizi felt a small, unshakable certainty rise inside her. She had drawn something real.

And when she looked at it again, it was more than what she had hoped for.