The Journey Demands More of Me

Art has never felt optional to me. It arrived early and stayed, not as hobby or talent, but as shelter. When my mind begins to crowd itself with noise, when emotion stacks faster than I can sort it, creation becomes the one place where things slow down enough to be handled. I do not make work because I am inspired. I make work because without it, I lose my orientation. Painting and writing offer me a way back into myself when the rest of life feels scattered or too loud to interpret. They are less about expression than about survival with intention.

I often think of my creative life as a conversation with whatever is unsettled inside me. When something presses against my ribs, when grief, longing, or confusion refuse to stay quiet, I turn outward in order to listen inward. Art becomes a kind of translation. I take what is tangled and give it shape. I take what is unbearable and make it visible enough to stand beside. That process does not solve anything, exactly, but it steadies me. It reminds me that experience can be held without being destroyed by it.

Painting is the first language I learned for that. There is a physicality to it that feels honest. I mix color the way some people pace a room. My hands understand what my mouth cannot yet articulate. In abstraction, I am not trying to depict anything recognizable. I am trying to capture sensation. The pressure behind thought. The emotional temperature of a day. The way memory feels in the body rather than how it sounds in narrative. A canvas absorbs what I bring to it without asking me to explain myself first.

When I paint, time behaves differently. Minutes loosen their grip. The world recedes to edges. I become attentive in a quiet, muscular way. Color slides into form. Shape responds to instinct. I am not performing insight. I am following it. And afterward, when I step back, the painting often tells me what I was carrying before I realized I was carrying it. It reflects my interior weather with a kind of mercy. It lets me see myself without forcing me to speak yet.

Writing is different.

Writing asks for exposure in a way paint never does. With color, I can suggest. With words, I must confess. There is nowhere to hide inside a sentence. Every verb declares something. Every choice implies intention. When I write, I cannot blur feeling into texture. I have to name it. That naming feels intimate and risky. It strips me of camouflage. On the page, I am less protected by beauty and more accountable to meaning.

For a long time, that made writing frightening. I could share a painting without revealing its exact source. But a paragraph carries its origin openly. It points back to the mind that made it. When I write, I feel visible in a way that is both liberating and destabilizing. There is no distance between me and the reader. The words belong to my nervous system. They come from the places I normally manage quietly.

Still, that vulnerability is what has slowly changed me.

Writing has taught me how to sit inside my own honesty. Not the performative kind, but the practical kind. The kind that notices where I avoid myself. The kind that asks why I choose certain metaphors and not others. The kind that reveals what I soften, what I dramatize, and what I refuse to look at directly. Over time, I realized that writing is not about sounding wise. It is about staying awake to what is actually happening in me.

There are days when I open a document and feel almost physically exposed. My fingers hover. My chest tightens slightly. It is the sensation of stepping into cold water. But once I begin, once the first sentences find their footing, something steadier takes over. I stop worrying about how I will be seen and start listening for what feels true. That shift is subtle, but essential. It is the difference between performance and presence.

What both painting and writing ultimately offer me is grounding. Not distraction, but anchoring. In a life that has carried illness, uncertainty, and long stretches of internal negotiation, creativity becomes the one space where I am not reacting. I am responding. Instead of bracing against experience, I metabolize it. Instead of avoiding feeling, I reorganize it into something I can live with.

My work is not separate from my life. It is the record of how I have learned to stay inside it.

Every piece I make holds a history of attention. Not just what happened, but how I faced it. What I resisted. What I allowed. What I translated instead of buried. Over years, that archive becomes less about output and more about continuity. It shows me how many times I have returned to myself when leaving would have been easier.

There is also humility in creating. Every act of making risks misunderstanding. People will see what they see. They will bring their own projections, their own limits. You cannot control that. The risk is not just failure. It is being misread. Being reduced. Being overlooked. But the reward is connection. Not applause, but recognition. The quiet moment when someone else finds their own experience mirrored inside your work.

I no longer create for approval. That impulse fades with age and honesty. I create because it keeps me coherent. Because it allows me to participate in my own life instead of watching it happen. Because through paint and language, I remember what I value. Curiosity. Courage. Precision. Compassion for complexity.

There are moments when vulnerability still scares me. When publishing a piece feels like stepping out without armor. When showing a painting feels like revealing something unfinished about myself. But those are the moments that matter most. They tell me I am not repeating old habits. I am risking something current.

To create is to accept exposure as part of living. It is to say, this is what I noticed. This is what I felt. This is how I stayed.

My art, in every form, is less about talent than about attention. Less about achievement than about relationship. It is how I listen to the world and answer it honestly. It is how I keep my interior life from hardening into silence.

When I paint, I hold experience in color.
When I write, I hold it in language.

Both are ways of saying, I was here, and I paid attention.

And for me, that attention is not just creative.
It is how I remain alive to myself.