Acintya Shenoy, Week #2: The Art of Stories

It first began with art—a gifted sketchbook for my fifth birthday and a battered pencil, then a clean, fresh pack of crayons from Walmart, then Elsa stencils, then more markers, then words— flying into my hands, arming me with the ability to bring whatever I wanted to life.

With the newfound freedom my art supplies gave me, creating stories with them seemed only natural. I saw stories portrayed beautifully in my favorite movies, comics, and books, from the regal stance of Bambi’s father to the lush green lands of Varanasi. It baffled my young mind that something so beautiful could be conjured up by the human hand. I concluded that if professional artists and animators could do it, I could too.

Throughout my early childhood, I was intimately acquainted with being uprooted and moved around. Born in Austin, then moved to Chennai for a year, then Plano for six months, then South Pasadena, then Fremont. Each move came with the familiar awkwardness of being plopped into a new class in the middle of the year, watching people who’d already sorted themselves into friend groups either puzzle over what to do with me or simply not care at all, eating lunch alone in the playground, my only “friends” having a median age of thirty-five years.

Between all of this change, one constant remained: my stories. Tales of mermaids and dragons and princesses and gender-swapped Greek heroes flooded the pages of my numerous sketchbooks. Each new page was a new beginning, a new book I’d publish one day, a new story I wanted to tell. While the outside world brimmed with uncertainty, I could rely on my sketchbooks as a source of comfort, a diary in which I could unapologetically be myself no matter where I was.

As I entered middle and high school, finally settling in one place, the pages of my sketchbooks began to collect dust. As I formed lasting friendships and finally a sense of belonging, the lifeline that held me through the more difficult periods of my life began to go limp. It would become an element of some forgotten memory, stuffed into the back of my closet or bookshelf for years until I’d hopefully decide to clean my room one day.

Yet, through everything, my love for storytelling has remained. It’s taken the form of the creative writing assignments and poems written in English classes, the Pinterest moodboards and Spotify playlists curated for different fictional characters and universes, the addiction to reading books. Although the medium has changed, the effect rings the same as something constant, something worthwhile, something that survives.