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Dedicate a huge chunk of your young life to learning all the delusions designated elders wish to better make seem solid, and if you can't make this solidification of air seem lucid enough with basic lexical usage, resort to spewing gallons of arcane terms-of-art onto every surface.
Don't sleep. A paintbrush is too clumsy. Use a sprayer. And as many layers as you can afford. Publish or perish. Sneer at members of the great unwashed when cornered, but preferably just plain don't be seen with them.
An acronym undercoating is pivotal, but don't forget to mix it with all future layers or your entire air sculpture preservation endeavor will melt into the ooze of time and people might start acting as though all your work has been an idiotic accumulation of toxic slimes. You and your teachers will be humiliated.
When this catastrophe seems to be looming, double down, cop a 'tude, go balls to the wall on the offensive. If you have to realize, let alone admit, this life has wrung all this out of you for fiction, for self-aggrandizement, for vanity, you might have to work on a farm or take up hunting, wield a hammer or live in a tent.
Maybe some sort of regulatory polymer will pull it out? Declare that you have a database sufficient to prove hallucination has quantifiable density, that a drop of anyone's blood can lead to a good-enogh-for-government-work portrait that is not merely a fancy Wilma Flinstsone for generations millennia into the future and can be hung proudly in any museum.
They'll NEVER muster the will to defeat you.
EVEN when they know your reinforced air is killing them.
pipe up any time....
