The One Thing That Never Left Me
I didn’t choose art because it was easy. I didn’t come to it because someone told me I had talent, or because I thought it would bring me success. I came to art because, in a world that often felt unpredictable and unstable, art was the one thing that never turned its back on me.
I’ve known abandonment, early, deeply. People I trusted left. Places I thought were safe weren’t. And somewhere in the middle of all that loss, something inside me reached for creation.
Art was there before I had words for my pain. Before I could explain what I was feeling, I was drawing it, painting it, expressing it in color and form when language failed me. And that has never changed. No matter how lost I’ve felt, I’ve always known how to find myself again when I put my hands to the work.
Someone once said (though I don’t know who, and I wish I did, because they deserve credit), “The artist’s life didn’t choose you, you were recruited.” And I believe that’s true. Art came for me. It found me. It gave me a role, a voice, a reason to keep showing up. I didn’t stumble into this life, I was called into it. Not by glamor or ambition, but by necessity. Art became my survival.
Even when everything else felt uncertain, art remained. Not as an escape, but as a home. A place where I could lay it all down: grief, rage, tenderness, longing, and not be judged for any of it. A place where I could make meaning from things that felt meaningless.
I don’t need to be perfect. I don’t need fame or applause. I just need this truth: art has never abandoned me, and I will never abandon it.
Because no matter what the world takes away, I will always have this, the sacred act of creating. And in that, I am never truly alone.
1997
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