Every blank canvas asks you the same question: are you brave enough to begin again?
Not necessarily start over — though some days it feels exactly that way — but to find the courage to enter the process one more time. I think about this constantly as it relates to my painting practice, because painting, for me, was born of starting over.
I've had to begin again a few times in my life. The hardest was my divorce. I moved back in with my parents with two children under the age of three, no income, enormous student loans, and an anesthesia residency that demanded everything I had left. I knew, even in that fog, that the financial weight of raising my kids was going to fall largely on me. The grief wasn't just the marriage ending — it was mourning the life I thought I was going to have.
There are photographs of me from family holidays during that period that I simply don't remember. I'm in them. But whatever part of me shows up in a memory wasn't present that day.
I didn't have an art practice then, and honestly I don't think there would have been room for one. What got me through was a remarkable therapist, a family that held me up, and the stubborn knowledge that there was no going back. I had to finish what I started.
A few years later, a custody battle cracked that wound back open. It landed in the middle of COVID — a particularly brutal combination for those of us working in healthcare. But something different happened this time: I found painting. And slowly, unexpectedly, I developed a practice that gave me a place to work through the fear of change.
That practice has moved with me. It helped me navigate a job change, a travel position, scaling back my hours, and now — building an art business from the ground up. That means sharing work publicly, teaching students, learning marketing, and putting small pieces of my inner life into a world that doesn't always respond with kindness. It means being exposed. It means being vulnerable on a fairly regular basis.
But here's what I've come to understand: the act of facing a blank canvas over and over is its own kind of courage training. Every time you begin, you're practicing the willingness to not know how it ends. You're rehearsing the ability to move forward anyway. And that skill — that muscle — turns out to be useful far beyond the studio.
I don't think courage means the fear goes away. I think it means you learn to start anyway, even when you can only see a little bit of the road ahead.
Everything you want is usually waiting just on the other side of your fear. I'm still learning to walk toward it. But I'm walking.
