How One Safe Person Can Give You the Courage to Begin Again

 



The rhythmic clatter of the espresso machine at the back of "The Daily Grind" was the soundtrack to my unraveling. I sat hunched over my sketchbook, the pages as blank as my mind. My dream had been to be an illustrator, but after a year of rejections and countless hours of feeling inadequate, the dream had curdled into a hollow, painful ache. I was on the brink of packing it all away—the pencils, the charcoal, the hope—and finding a "real" job.

Every day, the same routine: I'd order a black coffee and nurse it for hours, staring at a blank page. The cafe owner, an older man named Mr. Lee, always seemed to be watching me from behind the counter, though never in an intrusive way. He had a gentle face lined with years of quiet observation.

One afternoon, in a moment of frustration, I crumpled up a half-hearted sketch and tossed it towards the bin. It missed. As I went to retrieve it, Mr. Lee’s voice stopped me.

"Don't throw that away," he said simply, his English accented but clear. "It's the first step. The first step is always the hardest."

He didn’t tell me I was a great artist or that I should never give up. He just acknowledged the difficulty of the process, the small, agonizing beginning. He pointed to a small, framed watercolor hanging on the wall near the register—a simple, elegant depiction of a teacup. "That was my first drawing," he said with a small smile. "It took me three tries to get the handle right. But I didn't throw it away."

From that day on, I didn't feel so alone. Mr. Lee became my silent confidante. He'd never pry, but sometimes, as I was leaving, he'd nod towards my sketchbook and say, "Keep going." Or he’d point out a detail in the light outside and say, "See how the shadow falls? A good lesson."

He was my one safe person. He didn't offer a grand solution to my creative block or solve my financial worries. What he did was far more profound: he gave me permission to struggle. He created a space where my failures weren't an indictment of my worth, but just part of the process. He saw the artist in me even when I couldn't see it myself.

I didn't become an overnight success. But I kept going. The blank pages slowly began to fill with lines, then shapes, then stories. I learned to love the imperfect sketches, the ones that taught me something, just as Mr. Lee had.

Years later, with my first commissioned piece hanging in a gallery, I realized that the real turning point wasn't when I finally sold a drawing. It was that day in the coffee shop, when a quiet, kind man saw my struggle and, with a few simple words, gave me the strength to begin again. That's the power of one safe person—they don't change your path, but they give you the courage to walk it yourself.

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