Learning to create from where I am
I never expected my life to change in the ways it did.
Living with multiple sclerosis has meant learning to navigate changes I didn’t choose. There were things I had to leave behind, plans that no longer made sense, and a version of my future that I had once taken for granted.
I had to stop working. Eventually, I had to stop driving. And as familiar parts of my life changed, I found myself grieving not only what I had lost, but also the person I thought I was supposed to become: the future I had expected, and the person I had hoped I would be.
For a while, it was difficult to know what came next.
Then I began to paint.
Painting gave me somewhere to place my attention. It helped me step outside my own thoughts and into the process of making something. A color, a line, a flower, a woman taking up space on a canvas.
Little by little, I began to understand that creating from where I was did not mean giving up on who I had been. It meant discovering what was still possible.
Learning to see change differently
My experience has changed the way I see the body and the passage of time. Our bodies change. Our circumstances change. The lives we imagined for ourselves can change.
Sometimes those changes are welcome. Sometimes they are painful and arrive without asking.
But I have come to believe that change does not make us less worthy of being seen. It does not erase our beauty. It does not erase our stories. And it does not take away our dignity.
That understanding has become part of my art.
The women I paint
The women in my paintings are not trying to become someone else. They are allowed to take up space and to be seen. They carry their histories without needing to explain them.
I paint them surrounded by flowers, butterflies, hummingbirds, bees, and dragonflies. These have gradually become part of my visual language and my way of exploring life, change, resilience, connection, and becoming.
I do not paint these women because I believe they require transformation.
I paint them because I believe they already deserve to be seen.
Creating from here
I no longer think of growth as leaving an earlier version of myself behind.
Sometimes growth is learning to make peace with who we are now. Sometimes it is noticing what remains. Sometimes it is making something new from circumstances we never would have chosen. And sometimes, it is simply giving ourselves permission to begin from where we are.
That is what art has given me. A place to pause and to create. A place to see myself differently. And perhaps, a place to remind someone else that
beauty does not disappear simply because life changes us.
This is where my work begins.
