Ariel Kivela
 
Early Worm Gets the Bird (Sisu)
 
Watercolor 
 
When my dad first told me I had “sisu,” I looked at him funny, like he was speaking Pig Latin or some foreign language. Sisü is a cultural concept from Finland. My Texan mother calls it “grit.” There’s no direct English translation, but it represents a kind of determination in the face of adversity... an almost irrational perseverance through hardship. A mixture of resilience, bravery, stubbornness, and guts.

For my 18th birthday, I begged my parents for psychological testing. After two weeks of waiting, the psychologist sat me down and told me I was in the bottom 1% of reading ability for my age group. “Dyslexia” was the diagnosis. What confused the psychologist most was that I was fluent in Spanish and Mandarin, and had somehow managed to skate through high school with decent grades.

The Early Worm Eats the Bird is all about sisu: sleep deprivation, waking up at 4 a.m. to do homework, always mixing up my lefts and rights, and feeling like a worm trying to eat a dead bird.
 
@captainkeevs, @arielkivela
 
 $300