I Walked into Mordor. I Mean, I Used Photoshop.

My epic journey with photoshop in the realms of professional blogging continues straight from the Mac lab, where I am currently sitting, surrounded by people that I don't know.

This is a high anxiety environment for me.

Referring to my previous post, I spent all weekend trying not to dread Monday, where I would be using photoshop again in class on a computer that I refused to name Gerald. (My previous post is here if you're interested.) In fact, I spent all weekend off of campus and it was glorious.

When Monday rolled around, I tried very hard not to dread working with photoshop again. I told myself all of the things that my therapist told me, happy mantras like "you are not your anxiety" and "crying in front of your entire class won't kill you". I like that one. My mom is very fond of it.

"Beckett, you're not going to die. I promise you if you talk to this store employee, you aren't going to die."

I got my borrowed Macbook, opened it up, and waited with nervous anticipation for class to begin. My professor started out with an apology for the complexity of Friday's tutorial and told us that we had a new assignment; take an image and some text and put them together into a visual argument that had something to do with our blogs.

My initial thoughts: This is going to be fun. I'll make a really cool graphic. But what's my blog really about? It's obviously about England. But it's also about anxiety. I mean, it's really a whole bunch about anxiety. I should probably focus on that. Where am I going to get an image from? Google. Should I Google stock photos? Should I Google inspirational quotes? I should open up photoshop.

I found photoshop by myself, which was a personal victory. But when I tried to open up the proper version, CS6, it wouldn't let me open it because of my preferences. My professor told me just to use CS5 and if I encountered any problems, to flag her down. I resisted the urge to vomit at the idea but opened CS5 and Google to prepare for finding an image.

I spent a lot of time looking up things like England and English Coast and London Underground. I found some really cool pictures.

Oh the beauty of England!

(I wish to impress upon you how long it took me to put that image in my blog simply because I'm currently on a Mac and totally out of my element. But I still have feeling in my feet, I haven't cried, and my ribs have not metaphorically snapped.)

Most of the pictures of England were too busy for me to put text over and I spent the entire period contemplating them on Google. I never actually did anything with photoshop, I just lounged around on Google wondering on earth I could do. When class was over I went to the library and I decided that I was going to use a picture from my tumblr that really had nothing to do with England but more to do with anxiety. But what should I use? What text could I use?

I found this and thought Well, I could do something neat with this.

Lungs are my favourite organ and when I get really anxious, I sometimes have problems using them. I thought about doing something with these interesting flowery lungs. It was also in the back of my mind that there was a prize for the best image that was created, and I happen to be overly competitive. It's a problem. Whatever I did, I wanted it to be good.

After a lot of frustrated clicking, I figured out how to put text at the bottom of the picture. I wanted it to be nice and small and not very noticeable and I wanted it to align exactly between each flower lung. In class we discuss a lot about alignment and proximity and what those can mean. I managed to type in the word "breathe" and stick it at the bottom, exactly where I wanted it. I wanted it at the bottom so that it was the last thing that you saw; you could look at the flower lungs and ponder those first before you got to the word breathe.

There was a new problem: breathe was sitting there, perfectly placed. But it was just plain text. How uncool was that?

So I highlighted it and literally just clicked on everything that I could find to make it look interesting.

The finished product of anxiety and photoshop.

I had a lot of fun playing with the text. I wanted it to contrast with the cream coloured background and I also wanted it to match, relatively, the lung colour. The shading gave it some semblance of standing out and giving it a kind of 3D quality that the lungs had. I wanted it to match the lungs as much as possible so it didn't stick out too boldly. The focus was meant to be on the lungs. I also had the weird idea that the word "breathe" was going to be faded because breathing to me feels like a rather faded idea.

Leave it to me to come up with a strange English major metaphor that I can't fully explain.

So here I am, still in the Mac lab surrounded by people that I don't really know, typing this out and posting my final product of my first real foray with photoshop. I did not need to ask anyone for help. I told myself that I wasn't going to die and as far as I know, while I'm sitting here writing this, I'm not dead. I could ask the person next to me if I'm alive, but that would involve talking to someone that I don't know, and I'm not that good at that kind of thing.

My ribs feel a little bit like snapping. My feet are rather tingly. But I haven't started crying, I haven't hyperventilated, and I can focus clearly on what the rest of my day is going to look like outside of whatever anxieties came out of photoshop.

Have I conquered photoshop? Seeing as I still haven't managed to even open the latest version, I'm guessing that I haven't. But I think at this point, I've figured out how to play with it well enough that when I think about it, I won't want to curl up into a ball and cry.

One small step for Beckett, one giant leap for mankind.

Hopefully my next step is going to be to the Centre for Student Opportunity to look at graduate schools in England.