When I post a painting, I feel sick. When I see my blog appear “published,” I want to hide. Did I say too much? Not enough? I should just shut up. Why do they even let me out of the house? Vulnerability. The sound of the word makes me cringe. I am in awe of people who can be vulnerable. I have to try for it. And every time I do, I slink back into myself because it feels unnatural.
According to Brené Brown, vulnerability is at the core of shame, fear, the struggle for worthiness, but it is also the birthplace of creativity, joy, and belonging. To find our creativity and sense of belonging, we must face what it means to be vulnerable: shame, fear, and the struggle for worthiness.
Here is my share. Imagine you are a child growing up in domestic violence. You cannot protect yourself. What one thing do you learn fast? How to hide. Imagine growing up and the adults around you are so much in their pain they cannot see you. What one thing do you want the most? To be seen.
What does this create? A person who wants to be seen but feels in danger if they are. This revelation alone looked like a huge crack down the middle of me. I was constantly making decisions based on see me, don’t see me. And most of the time, it is doing both simultaneously. I ask myself now, how the hell was I ever supposed to know who I was in that situation? It just wasn’t possible.
See me, don’t see me is a hard way to live a life and a hard way to develop a career. It fits to me that I found myself in an arena working “behind the scenes.” At least the people in the film did see me. But to the public, I was just another body in the background—a ghost of some sort, orchestrating some painterly magic along the lineage of a production.
I have spent a lifetime excavating myself to find the real treasure within me. I thought I had uncovered the lost city of self several times, only to find I was merely at the top of the ruins. Writing this has helped me peel back some of the layers to be vulnerable at least in my paintings.
In my painting of Taos, I found the desert in my soul, a place that was arid and starving for the truth. It took the sun setting for me to see the natural beauty of that tree and to understand that vulnerability is not a weakness but a strength.
Until next time,
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