Big Clown Tears

I remember when I first moved back to the Philly area and I joined a writing group that met downtown. I've been writing business articels and reviews for years but my short story skills were dusty. I pulled an old short story off the shelf, worked on it for a bit, and submitted it to the group.
We used to meet in a grungy, but amicable bar and I breezed in to bar apprehensive about meeting new people but confident in my overall creativity. Needless to say, they promptly ripped the story to shreds. I was crestfallen. Later that week, I lamented their cruelty and obvious blindness to great talent to my friend Jaene. In the midst of my tale of woe, Jaene cut in and said, "And all you can do is cry big clown tears?" I cracked up laughing. I pictured one of the ridiculous overwought crying hobo clown paintings you come across occassionally in flea markets and unfortunate homes. Jaene and I talked a bit more around writing and criticism and getting over it, but that image of the crying clown stayed with me.
Flash forward to now. Art has always been a hobby I enjoyed. I never attached a need to excell to it. If my still life looked liked a bowl of apples I was more than thrilled and if my landscape looked like a colorful cave painting I still enjoyed the process. But now at school I am being judged on my artistic ability and it majorly sucks monkey.
A few weeks I brought what I thought was a skillfully rendered example to transparency and color theory. My prof examined it thoughtfully and said, "Yeahhhh, that's not working." After a few more comments he recommended that my best course of action was to pry it off the illustration board.
I was literally vibrating with anger and disappointment. Tensely, I shuffled my overpriced Color Aid papers. Then I remembered my "big clown tears." It is criticism not vivisection. I can learn from it or give it the finger or both but it is still only criticism. I dried my big clown tears and reached for the Xacto blade.