The hand that relearned to draw after the crash drew a picture book

Before the crash, Lan was an illustrator, and her right hand was how she paid rent.

After the crash the nerves in that hand were damaged. She could hold a pen for three minutes before it started to shake, and the lines came out crooked. The doctor said the degree of recovery would depend on luck and on practice. She tried to redraw. A straight line took ten minutes and still looked like a worm. That day she put the drawing tablet in a drawer and told herself to stop.

She stopped for eight months. The turn came from a stranger's comment online. She had left her old pre-accident work up on her profile, and one evening a mother wrote to her: my child is in the hospital, and he falls asleep looking at your drawings every night. When is the next one?

Lan read that comment many times. She did not reply. She went and took the tablet out of the drawer.

She began drawing with her left hand, like a primary school student, horizontals unsteady, verticals leaning. Then she tried the right hand again, one stroke at a time, pausing between each. Both were ugly. She wrote a line on the first page of a new notebook. Draw ugly if you must. An ugly drawing still beats a blank page. Three hours a day, rain or shine. When the left hand shook she drew short strokes and joined short strokes into long lines. When the right hand gave out after three minutes she drew for three minutes and rested for one. She posted all of it honestly: crooked cats, deformed trees, a moon that was nothing but an outline. I'm going to serialize my recovery, she wrote. It doesn't matter if it isn't good to look at. The fact that I'm drawing is the good part.

The recovery serial took off. Tens of thousands of people watched her go from crooked to legible, and from legible to something with a bit of life in it. The comment section turned into a strange place. People described their own recoveries. One wrote, watching you draw, I quit smoking for the third time. Another wrote, I'm studying for an exam, and every day I watch you make one stroke and then I study one page. Her comments became a check-in point for a whole crowd of strangers.

Two years later her right hand was at seventy percent, and she made her first complete piece since the accident: a small fox climbing out of a well, with a date carved into every course of the stone wall. Each date was a day she had practiced. That drawing became the cover of a picture book.

Recovery has no miracles, only one pawn moved forward each day. Hope is taking the word recovery apart into a single stroke a day, and drawing it somewhere you can see.

The book is called Slowly, Finish It. It is about a bird with a broken wing learning to measure the sky again by walking. Her publisher asked about the idea behind it. She said, "I want to tell the children in hospital, and everyone in recovery, that you don't have to hurry back into your old shape. You can draw new drawings in a new way."

The last page of the book shows two hands, left and right, holding one pen together. At the foot of the page there is a small line, the final version of the sentence from page one of her practice notebook: draw ugly if you must, because ugly drawings grow, and blank ones never do.

Lan draws with both hands now, and her style is looser and freer than it was before the crash. An illustration student asked her how she got through the rehabilitation. She photographed her practice notebook and sent it over: more than two hundred pages of crooked lines. "These are my ugly drawings," she said. "Ugly drawings aren't what's frightening. What's frightening is drawing one ugly page and announcing that you're finished."