Reality has a way of hitting everyone sooner or later. When you’re young, worry and fear feel distant because someone else carries the weight—your parents, or whoever raised you, shield you from the sharp edges of the world. But eventually, that childhood buffer begins to crack, and you realize you alone have to answer for your choices. For me, that reckoning arrived on my final day of high school in June 1994. It happened in math class—my absolute worst subject. I was just getting started with my art but I was also faced with having to graduate highschool. I had struggled with numbers my entire life and was consistently placed…