It’s summer, and I have soft hands and feet.
I can’t walk down to the garden without my shoes on yet. I just watched the most incredible instrumentalists on a live stage but I haven’t had the time to dust off any of my instruments during the year, so the meat on my fingertips is soft.
Making calluses takes time and friction.
But it’s summer, and I haven’t found the time to pursue the plot lines that result in the friction between my life and my dreams. I can’t skip the season where every step is sharp, and every plucked note stings all the way up my arm. But I also can’t make room for it.
In college, I used to pick off the extra skin that had built up from rock climbing. I imagined when I shook hands with someone, they would think “she must be a rock climber.” Despite being short and stocky and everything that climbers aren’t.
My hands were my ID. Look, I’m one of them, they said to the world. Proof right here with my ripped skin.
I want proof that I’m tough. I want to know the friction of habit is making me into the person I want to become. I want the friction to add up until I’ve blistered into whatever it means to be tough as nails.
Because that’s what they call you when you’ve built up resistance to friction. Stop when you start to peel, and you’ll go right back to smooth skin.
You know when Jesus told Thomas to see his hands? And then he believed? But he needed the proof that this wasn’t an illusion? And it was the new wounds and old calluses that convinced him. See my hands, Thomas? Now do you believe it?
But since I’m not in a resurrected body, I’m stuck with the old me, the cobbled-together me. Because if you’re trying to follow Jesus and his example, then you have to somehow be tough but soft, empathetic but disciplined, motivated to change the world and also drift above it because your church denomination thinks it’s all going to be destroyed anyway. Do your job, make your calluses, but don’t get too involved. Your worth isn’t in your work, but your work is your vocation.
I introduce myself as an illustrator and cringe afterward. Still. After two years of working in the field. When my friends are occupational therapists and nurses and teachers, I feel like the imposter who fudged the results of the vocational job quiz to get her selfish calluses from her selfish hobby-job.
Go back to work. Destroy that right ring finger from how horribly you hold your pencil. That’s the callus that’s important. That’s your vocation, your identity, your new ID when you shake people’s hands. Forget your climbing calluses. Old wounds and new calluses are what will convince everyone—that is, everyone but you.
Time and friction.
It’s summer—the third summer out of college. I’m an illustrator. I’m also a doubter.
I look at my hands every day and think, now do you believe it?
Gabrielle Eisma graduated Calvin with a BFA in studio art and writing in 2022. She’s from Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she now works as a writer and illustrator for books for (mostly) children and middle grade readers.
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*Hi! fellow selfish hobbyist-job holder. Hmm I wonder if people will know I am a graphic designer when I get arthritis in my fingers?
Relate to this so hard. Especially the paradoxes of “ tough but soft, empathetic but disciplined, motivated to change the world and also drift above it because your church denomination thinks it’s all going to be destroyed anyway.”
Thank you for sharing