One of the goals that often comes up in art classes, journaling workshops, or creativity courses is to “return to and create from your childhood — the time when you felt most happy and free.” That’s never been a useful exercise for me.
I feel more happy and free now, as a 53-year-old woman, than I ever did as a young girl.
According to my mom, I exited the womb and spent the first year of my life practically inconsolable. Back then, it wasn’t uncommon for a pregnant woman’s labor to be induced because the obstetrician was going on vacation. Maybe I just wasn’t ready for this world.
My entire first-grade school year was filled with anxiety. Things that most kids experienced and processed stuck around for me. I was afraid of riding the bus, substitute teachers, going outside at recess, getting lost, dogs, bugs, being away from my mom, the dark, sleeping alone, nightmares — and those are just the things I remember off the top of my head. No one would have mistaken me for a “normal kid”. I called my mom from the school office weekly with headaches and stomachaches, needing to go home. It all felt like too much.
Then there were the deaths, moves, and switching schools — things that regularly show up on psychological life stressors lists. I lived in at least five different homes and went to three different schools before I was 12. Two relatives that I was very close to died by the time I turned 10. I learned that people can disappear, no matter how much I loved them, and never felt like I had an anchor of a friend group as I passed in and out of school systems every few years.
I was brought up with religion, but it was the kind full of stories of being tormented by demons in an endless fire pit if you don’t believe in the same way that they do. Needless to say, for an already anxious kid, a religion that mixes love alongside potential fire and damnation isn’t particularly soothing.
So, no. My childhood was not the time when I felt “most happy and free.”
And that’s okay if yours wasn’t either. I used to my roll my eyes when those exercises came up, even though there were plenty of happy memories in my childhood too. Especially when I was a teenager…I loved being a teenager! I had so much fun and an amazing Esprit wardrobe.
But that time in my life was not my happiest or my most creative. That time for me is NOW. Today. More specifically, after I turned 40 and after I had my son. That’s when I became an artist — when I felt secure and open enough to explore my own history, spirituality, and life through painting.
The hypersensitivity that felt overwhelming and burdensome in childhood eventually morphed into empathy and creativity, subsequently serving me (and others) well. Sure, it made a few other psychological stressor checkbox stops along the way — more death, divorce, constant moving and searching, postpartum depression and anxiety — but still, it changed.
Now that time has passed I can look back and see how many of my experiences shaped me and helped me become the person I am today. How some of these moments that I considered awful at the time actually led me to where I am now.
And I truly, genuinely love this version of me — this sensitive, creative, mother artist woman.
I’m so grateful for my own journey.
Thank you for supporting my art and sharing my work.
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