I was supposedly good at drawing as a kid.

Not really, though. My human figures did not have necks and, really, I did not have a grasp of how things really looked like.

In reality, I was just a prolific drawer. I doodled newspapers by hand, which meant I drew the "photos" in by hand. But I drew more than that. I would be on the lookout for any piece of paper with enough space for me to draw on.

My grandfather worked for a paper factory, so every year, just before classes start, we would get lots of paper products. Crepe paper, mostly, but at some point we got pads of paper - and not the ones with rules. Perfect for me as I drew malls and gas stations and, really, buildings. Elementary-looking ones, but I drew a lot of them. If I got old calendar pages, even better. Much bigger space to work with.

I wanted to be an architect as a kid. It was the second thing I decided I wanted to be when I grew up. But somewhere along the line I dropped that ambition. It wasn't enough that I liked to draw, I think I was told. I should be good at making calculations. I should be good at math, essentially. That scared me, and I dropped it.

That exact thing happened with the first thing I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to be a veterinarian. A relative told me I would have to operate on cockroaches. That scared me, and I dropped it.

I wonder what would have happened if I didn't? Veterinarians are doing well, although apparently they don't earn as much as they're supposed to - or I'm reading only one account of things. Architects are also doing well, judging from Dale's tweets, at least. I mean, I still get a thrill about visualizing the insides of a room. Or outside of it. I still play SimCity and Animal Crossing, after all. Those little projects tweaking at the sides of what already exists, for some reason, excite me. But then, they're just computer games. Reality's a little more complex than that. As a kid I genuinely feared there would be no land left for my buildings to be built on. Of course, there's a lot more land to acquire (just ask the Villars) and, in any case, people do demolish old buildings to create new ones. Just look at the Ayala Triangle area.

What I am now, for some reason, is a writer. Again, yes, reality is a little more complex than that, but that's the skill set that I present first and foremost when talking to people. I can write, and more importantly, I can articulate. When I decided I wanted to be a journalist, nobody really scared me off, perhaps because they realized they shouldn't be doing it. Let the kids be who they want to be, and all that.

Well, I did get some opposition, but only when I decided I would take up a communication course in college. My father gently advised me to not pursue that plan. I was good at computers, he argued - why not take computer science instead? It earns more, after all! Well, joke's on all of you. I am an underpaid marketing "professional" with crippling anxiety and self-esteem issues.

I still draw. Occasionally. Only when I have to. Arguably, I don't really have to, but as the editor of a magazine - and writer, and editorial designer, and everything else, really - I can say that this article should be accompanied by an illustration. And why not? I do have the tools. Well, Shalla does. I'll have her iPad for half a day and attempt to do something. I did that a few days ago. I did one illustration for the magazine we just released. It was the very last thing I had to do, and honestly, I was dreading it, because the idea I had in mind was a bit more complex than what my non-existent skills can handle. You may say digital art is easier because it's "automatic", as someone I know dismissingly said, but it really isn't, especially not when you don't have much of a grasp about what your software is capable of, and what adjustments you physically have to do to make it all work.

"You have to move your whole arm," Shalla once told me. I wish I remembered that when I found myself making lines that just aren't as straight as I want them to be, or wondering why my fingers are drawing in places where the stylus isn't.

We were watching this video of a Korean illustrator over the weekend. It's an ASMR video, supposedly; just the tapping of the stylus on the tablet, and the strokes they make, sounding extra satisfying because of what we think is a Paperlike screen protector. But we were watching for the drawing. The techniques were familiar, in part because I have attempted some of them (well, save for the "use your whole arm" thing) in putting together that last illustration. I have experienced some of the agony, and yet, I am familiar enough to have finished the whole thing in roughly an hour, to both my and Shalla's surprise.

"I would have adjusted the brush size," I told her, "especially with the smaller text."

That was it. That was all I had to offer as some sort of constructive criticism. I was never good at drawing anyway, so why would I?