A Vulnerable Story

It’s been almost three years since I started painting regularly and I finally feel like I’m at a point where I am okay being a bit vulnerable and sharing why I started painting and why I needed to paint. NEED sounds dramatic but I assure you it was an absolute necessity for many years (and still sometimes is). 

21 year old me was starting my junior year of college after a wonderful/terrible summer. I had an exciting internship in Boston but at the same time was severely struggling with a series of chronic health issues causing me pain and nausea 99% of the day. I had been dealing with it for years but it had never been this bad and to be honest, I was spiraling. The only time I was mostly pain free was when I was starving myself. Needless to say it turned into a bad pattern pretty quickly. I developed severe anxiety, depression and became obsessive about eating—if I even ate at all. I was across the country from my family having panic attacks & calling my mom crying from work almost daily. At the same time I was holding myself to impossible academic standards, even for a non-chronically ill person. 

When I started back at school I agreed to go to therapy for help managing daily life with chronic pain. During one session my therapist asked me what parts of my day I actually enjoyed. I couldn’t think of a single aspect of my day that didn’t feel like a chore to simply “get through”. We sat in silence for awhile and the only two things I could remember that genuinely brought me joy were waking up at the beach and painting. Since I obviously couldn’t re-locate to the beach I was given the assignment to paint every evening for 30 minutes. Being a Type A personality, I was more than happy to set the timer every night because I’ll be honest, I loved homework. I had always enjoyed art (I even won a painting contest through the library when I was 10), but I hadn’t allowed myself the “indulgence” in years. It felt like a waste of time. I told myself I had so many other things I should be doing. But this permission was what I needed to break out some old art supplies and allow myself a little respite, a way to turn off my brain for 30 minutes a night. 

Picture 1: The library art contest- mine is the owl!

Picture 2: My painting set up in my college apartment

I have continued painting almost every night since then. I can’t say painting was the thing that “cured” or “saved” me, (there have a lot of other hard work behind the scenes). BUT I can say that painting helped make a lot of very hard times a lot more manageable. Painting has continued to serve me as a welcome escape and my personal form of meditation. I am happy to report that today I paint for fun and joy and not because I NEED to anymore. I continue to choose to pick up my paintbrushes almost every night and let the hours hum by.

xx.

Ella