After 30+ years of chasing perfection, I’m finally learning what it means to create for myself.
For the past 30+ years, I have been approaching art from a place of perfection.
“What?! 30+ years? You’re not that old!”
Well, first off, I’m 41. Second, I’ve been drawing since I was a kid. And even back then, I was determined to get everything just right.
I remember being around 10 years old when I drew a portrait of Fiona Apple. I worked so hard on that drawing. I was proud of it! So, naturally, I showed it to my then-stepmom, who happens to be an amazing artist.
She gave me some excellent pointers on how to improve it. She explained how the inner corners of the eyes should line up with the edges of the nostrils and how the corners of the mouth generally align with the irises.
My initial reaction?
“UGH! I worked SO hard on this, and now it’s WRONG?!”
But once that frustration passed, I took her advice to heart. I adjusted the features, and sure enough, the portrait improved.
Looking back, I realize that moment was about so much more than learning facial proportions.
It was another lesson in trying to get something perfect.
When Being Good Enough Never Felt Like Enough
Here’s where things get a little personal.
When you’re a child who loses their mother to suicide at the age of four, and then spends much of their childhood being bounced between foster homes and family members, you tend to develop a pretty complicated relationship with your own self-worth.
At least, I did.
Unconditional love wasn’t something I grew up knowing.
I had a grandmother who was the closest thing I had to a mother figure, yet she made it painfully clear that I wasn’t her favorite.
Imagine being a child and feeling rejected by the very people who were supposed to protect you, love you, and make you feel safe.
I’ve moved more than 29 times in my life.
Twenty-nine.
When you’re constantly being moved around, you begin to feel like you’re disposable. Like you don’t really belong anywhere. Like maybe, just maybe, if you were better, smarter, prettier, more talented, or more agreeable, someone would finally decide you were worth keeping around.
So you perform.
You try to be good enough.
You try to be perfect.
You look for approval anywhere you can find it because you haven’t learned how to give it to yourself.
And for me, art became one of those places.
If I could draw something that looked exactly like the photograph, people would be impressed.
They would tell me how talented I was.
They would tell me how beautiful my artwork was.
And for a brief moment, I would feel worthy.
I lived for the “likes” long before social media even existed.
The problem was, I wasn’t necessarily creating because something inside me needed to come out.
I was creating because I needed something from the people looking at it.
I wasn’t just chasing perfection in my artwork. I was chasing acceptance through it.
And I didn’t even realize I was doing it.
A Conversation That Changed Something
In my last blog post, I talked about a conversation I had with my sister, Gwynnie, and how we are both exploring what it means to discover who we really are, outside of everyone else’s opinions and expectations.
What do we actually enjoy?
What makes us happy?
What would we do if nobody else ever saw it?
That conversation has been sitting with me.
And today, I think something finally clicked.
I’ve attempted art journaling a few times over the years, but I never really understood it.
If I doodled, I didn’t feel it was worthy of showing.
Why?
Because it wasn’t realistic.
It wasn’t polished.
It wasn’t the kind of artwork I thought I was supposed to create.
Or, more accurately, it wasn’t the kind of artist I thought I was supposed to become.
Enter Sketchbook Skool
While browsing YouTube, I stumbled across a channel called Sketchbook Skool.
I watched several videos, and something about the way the instructor explained sketching and art journaling finally made sense.
For the first time, I started to understand that drawing doesn’t have to be about perfectly recreating what you see.
It can be about capturing what you feel.
It’s about making marks that feel right to you. Choosing colors because you like them. Capturing a moment without worrying whether every single detail is accurate.
It’s about looking at a reference photograph and asking yourself:
“What about this image do I actually want to capture?”
Maybe it’s the repetition of a fence.
Maybe it’s the way palm trees overlap.
Maybe it’s the colors, the shapes, or simply the memory attached to that moment.
Not every detail needs to make it onto the page.
The instructor also explained something that really appealed to the graphic designer in me: composition matters.
Instead of just throwing things onto a page all willy-nilly, think about the layout.
Do I want a title? A subtitle? Where should the text go? How large should the lettering be? Where will the illustration sit?
Suddenly, art journaling wasn’t just random doodling.
It was storytelling.
It was design.
It was capturing a little piece of my life in a way that felt authentic to me.
And the best part?
It didn’t have to be perfect.
Holy crap.
Here I’ve spent decades creating from a place of perfection when what I really needed was to create from a place of exploration, authenticity, and vulnerability.
So, I Broke Out My New Art Journal
A little backstory.
I recently purchased these adorable travel-sized watercolor art journaling kits for my sisters and me for our trip to Saint Augustine.
I found the starter kits on Amazon, and they have almost everything you need to get started! I’d also recommend grabbing a pencil and some waterproof pens, just to have the basics covered.
And seriously, look how stinking cute these little travel kits are!
During our trip, we took SO many photographs. Some were just fun memories, while others were taken specifically because we thought they might make interesting references for our art journals.
Fast-forward to today.
I’ve been sick, and after my medicine finally kicked in, I started feeling a little less like a wet noodle.
So I decided to give art journaling another shot.
I filled my water cup, grabbed my brushes, opened my brand-new sketchbook, and…
Skipped the first page.
Because apparently I’m still not ready for that kind of commitment.
Baby steps, people.
I chose one of the photographs Naomi took during our trip. What caught my attention wasn’t necessarily the subject itself, but the repetition of the fence and palm trees, the pinks and greens. The shapes, colors and patterns were beautiful.
So I started sketching.
First with pencil, then I went over the lines with waterproof pen and ink. I figured out where I wanted my text to go, and then I started painting.
And something amazing happened.
I didn’t care that it didn’t look exactly like the photograph.
I wasn’t trying to make it look exactly like the photograph!
I wanted to capture the repetition.
I wanted to create an interesting composition.
I wanted to include text.
I wanted to capture a memory.
And most importantly, I wanted to create without spending hours obsessing over whether every little detail was correct.
That was the whole purpose.
And guess what?
I accomplished it.
Not because the finished page was perfect, but because I genuinely enjoyed creating it.
I enjoyed the process more than I have enjoyed painting in quite some time.
So much so that I immediately created a few more spreads from our trip.
I wasn’t thinking about whether someone would buy them.
I wasn’t thinking about whether they were good enough to post online.
I wasn’t even thinking about whether someone would consider them “real art.”
I was simply enjoying myself.
And I cannot tell you how freeing that felt.
Maybe I’ve Been Asking Art to Do the Wrong Thing
For years, I’ve struggled with what I should be doing as an artist.
Should I paint more?
Should I focus on realism?
Should I create a cohesive collection?
Should I sell originals? Prints? Digital art?
Should I open another Etsy shop?
Should I be posting more?
Should I be trying to get into galleries?
Should I be making art that people want to buy?
Should, should, should.
Good grief, I’m exhausted just typing all of that.
Somewhere along the way, something that brought me joy as a child became another way for me to measure my worth.
And when I wasn’t selling enough, creating enough, or receiving enough attention, I felt like I wasn’t succeeding.
But succeeding at what, exactly?
Convincing strangers that I’m talented?
Proving to myself that I’m worthy of being called an artist?
Trying to fill a hole that was created long before I ever picked up a pencil?
Oof.
That’s a hard one to sit with.
But I think it’s an important question.
Because here’s what I’m beginning to understand:
I don’t need art to prove that I’m worthy. I need art to help me remember that I already am.
Maybe Art Was Never Supposed to Be My Career
I’ve said this many times, and I’ll say it again.
I love my job.
I genuinely love what I do, the people I work with, and the organization I work for. I don’t have some burning desire to quit my job and become a full-time artist.
So why have I spent so much time pressuring myself to turn my artwork into a successful business?
Why have I been so concerned with sales, website traffic, social media engagement, and whether people like what I create?
Don’t get me wrong. Selling a piece of artwork is an incredible feeling.
Knowing someone loves something you created enough to spend their hard-earned money on it is pretty darn special.
But I am starting to realize that selling my artwork cannot be the reason I create it.
Because when the sale doesn’t happen, what does that mean?
That I’m not talented?
That my artwork isn’t good enough?
That I’m not good enough?
No.
It means the artwork didn’t sell.
That’s it.
But when you’ve spent most of your life connecting approval with love, it’s surprisingly difficult to separate the two.
I’m learning.
Slowly.
Creating to Heal
I’ve heard of art therapy before, but I never really explored what creating art could mean for my own emotional well-being.
I’ve been diagnosed with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD), which, in my case, is connected to multiple traumatic experiences throughout my life.
I’ve also participated in trauma exposure therapy.
Part of that process involved writing about specific traumatic experiences for 30 minutes at a time, repeating the exercise across five sessions for each trauma.
It wasn’t easy.
Not even a little bit.
But after working through three specific traumas with my therapist, I noticed something.
I felt lighter.
Not magically healed. Not suddenly free from everything that happened.
Just…lighter.
And now I’m wondering whether art journaling could become another way for me to explore the thoughts and feelings I’ve carried around for so long.
Not as a replacement for therapy, but as another outlet.
Another way to process.
Another way to understand myself.
Another way to give that little girl who spent so much of her childhood feeling unwanted a place where she doesn’t have to perform.
A place where she doesn’t have to be perfect.
A place where she can just be.
Maybe that’s what I’ve been missing all along.
Maybe art doesn’t need to be about creating something beautiful enough for someone else to hang on their wall.
Maybe sometimes it just needs to be about creating something meaningful enough to help me understand what’s going on inside my own head.
Maybe the real masterpiece isn’t the painting.
Maybe it’s the healing that happens while creating it.
So, What Does This Mean for My Art Business?
Excellent question.
I have absolutely no frickin clue.
Do I keep my website the way it is and start sharing my art journal entries alongside my traditional paintings?
Do I keep the journals private and create something that’s truly just for me?
Do I open another Etsy shop and sell art journal-inspired pieces?
Do I continue selling my original paintings?
Do I completely change the direction of my artwork?
I don’t know.
And for once, I’m trying to be okay with not knowing.
Part of me wonders whether sharing this new chapter might help someone else.
After all, channels like Sketchbook Skool and The Unexpected Gypsy have inspired me to think differently about art and creativity.
What if sharing my own journey helps someone else realize they don’t have to be perfect either?
What if someone else has spent their entire life trying to earn approval through the things they create?
What if seeing my messy little sketchbook pages encourages them to pick up a pencil and create something just because it makes them happy?
Wouldn’t that be worth sharing?
I think so.
But I also recognize that I need to be careful not to turn this new discovery into another performance.
Because that would kind of defeat the whole purpose, wouldn’t it?
I don’t want to start art journaling only to find myself worrying about whether the pages are Instagram-worthy.
I don’t want to replace one set of expectations with another.
I want to give myself permission to make art that nobody ever sees.
And if I decide to share something, I want it to be because I genuinely want to share it.
Not because I’m hoping someone will tell me it’s good enough.
The Art of Being Enough
For 30+ years, I’ve been trying to create artwork that was good enough for everyone else.
Good enough to show.
Good enough to sell.
Good enough to impress.
Good enough to earn approval.
And maybe, somewhere deep down, good enough to earn love.
But I’m 41 years old now.
And I think it’s about time I stop asking my artwork to prove my worth.
I want to create because I’m curious.
Because something catches my eye.
Because a memory makes me smile.
Because I’m feeling something I can’t quite put into words.
Because I want to explore.
Because I want to heal.
Because I want to discover who I am when I’m not trying to be who everyone else wants me to be.
I want to make art for my soul, not for applause.
Does that mean I’ll never create another realistic painting? Absolutely not. I still love realism, and I still appreciate the skill and patience it takes to create it.
But I don’t want perfection to be a requirement for enjoying the process anymore.
I want to be free to explore different styles, different mediums, different ideas, and different versions of myself.
And maybe, just maybe, I can learn to extend the same grace to myself that I’m finally learning to extend to my artwork.
Because neither one of us needs to be perfect to be worthy.
So, where does this leave me?
I don’t know.
Maybe I’ll journal about it and get back to you.
In the meantime, write a comment below if this resonated with you. I hope you feel as inspired as I do about your own art journey.
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