I want to be noticed, but I don’t know how to be seen. I want to be remembered, but I don’t know how to be known. I want to be missed, but I don’t know how to be significant. I want to be wanted, but I don’t know how to be worth it. I want to be extraordinary, but I don’t know how to be free.

I want to be an artist, but I don’t know how to paint

For years, I found myself stuck in this endless cycle of wanting things that I didn’t know how to get. Whether it was something as big as wanting a certain type of life for myself or as small as wanting someone’s attention when I was out and about, I didn’t know how to overcome the obstacles that prevented me from having all I wanted. At the time, I considered these circumstances the natural limitations on my life. Often having thoughts of “those things just don’t happen to me” or “I’m just not like that,” I assumed that life delivered gifts sparingly and the rest of us were destined to be ordinary. At least on some level, I was thankful for what I had. I realized that I had a good family, decent people in my life, and never had to go through true problems such as hunger, homelessness, or violence. But the truth, even if it was me being ungrateful, was that none of these things were enough. I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t living. I was simply fine and merely surviving.

I allowed myself to live life with a lot of questions about why such things were happening, and went to bed night-after-night making myself promises to change that I’d never keep. In some sense, my entire adult life to date had occurred during groundhog’s day. I was getting older, I was advancing in my professional life, but I still woke up to the same day every day. And that day was one where I had no control over myself, my life, or anything else. I might make a few good memories every now and then, get hope that things were changing, but nothing could get rid of the shadow that existed. Nothing could get rid of the underlying loneliness, self-hatred, subconscious depression, constant struggle to find happiness, and the feeling that I was never going to be one of those people who was just happy.

At some point, I stopped caring. I accepted the idea of living a mediocre life. On the surface, I was seemingly confident, funny, somewhat outgoing, and successful, but underneath I didn’t believe any of it. I didn’t feel any of it. Even more unfortunate, the surface me had a tendency to attract people. I was someone who always had friends, but the poor fate of my close friends was to get to know a very different me. At the risk of sounding a bit over-dramatic, let me explain that I don’t believe I ever projected myself as a deeply depressed and unhappy person. In fact, I think people would be surprised to hear that’s how I felt. Instead, I think I presented as someone with a lot of friction in her life. I maintained “friendships” that were wholly wrong for me, pursued relationships that emphasized my lack of self-worth, and often placed way too much pressure on random situations to satisfy the holes in my life that I didn’t know how to fill myself. In sum, I lacked self control in all things, and therefore my life was full of a bunch of square edges and rough surfaces trying to push past each other.

I bring this up because I think this is a very subtle and real problem that creeps up on people. We don’t realize we are out of control until we are way too far gone. For me, I didn’t even realize how bad it was until I decided to change it. All too often, I think we assume that things are good enough. We may not be happy, we may not know how to love ourselves or make the right decisions in life, we may have a lot of friction, but we don’t necessarily think we need a formal diagnosis and prescribed medication so we must be fine. Here’s a thought, though: maybe life can be more than fine. Maybe it’s actually meant to be extraordinary. 

I embraced the notion that I had the power to change my life very reluctantly. People say mindset is everything, but I was convinced that my mind thought what it wanted, whether I actually wanted to be thinking such things or not. I had no control over my mind- surprise, surprise- almost to the point where I thought of it as something separate from me. Guess what? It’s not. I am my mindset, and everything around me is merely the artwork I allow my mindset to paint. So now, I paint happiness. I paint self-love. I paint hope. I paint friendships that support and appreciate who I am as a person and how I want to live my life. I paint family moments full of love and belly-aching laughter. I paint a future of excitement. I paint music and dancing, success and creativity, brilliance and beauty. I paint smooth surfaces and rounded edges that glide past each other with ease. I paint me exactly as I want to be.

Changing my life has been hard, but it is the most rewarding hard thing I have ever done and continue to do every day. It is so incredibly freeing that all I want is to pass it along to anybody I can. I paint constantly and leave it everywhere, resulting in a very colorful path, and honestly…I just want to dance on that path. When people ask me to explain “the shift,” or the moment things fell into place, or how I figured out how to actually change, I find myself talking in circles. While the actual act of changing is hard and continuous, the decision to change was so unbelievably simple. I just woke up and decided my groundhog’s day was over, and I was finally ready to embrace tomorrow.

I invite you to pick up a paint brush and embrace your tomorrow. Because, you can do this. You can live the life you want. You can have all the things you need to be truly happy. You just have to decide you’re worth it. It will require you to learn how to paint. You will feel uncomfortable, the lines will be shaky, the colors might be off, but eventually you’ll realize that you’re a true artist. And your life, your artwork, is nothing short of extraordinary.