If You Could Paint Your Picture
There is a corner most of us know very well. Small. Familiar. Safe enough. The kind of place you walk yourself into so quietly you do not even notice it has become the whole world. It is where we make ourselves small on purpose. Where we learn to need less, want less, expect less. Where we convince ourselves that this. Right here. Is as far as we go.
We did not build it alone. We were taught.
Our ancestors built walls against the weather. Against danger. Against the unknown. And that was wisdom. That was survival. Those who built the house made it through the winter. Those who did not, did not.
So we learned. We watched our parents build their walls and we built ours. Society handed us the blueprints. Humanity has been passing down this architecture for so long that we forgot the walls were ever a choice.
But somewhere along the way we took the tools we were given for physical survival and we turned them inward.
We built walls against feeling too much. Against wanting too much. Against being seen too much. Against hoping too much.
We took the wisdom of staying warm and used it to stay small.
And so we settled into the corner. Because even inside the house we built, the rooms felt like too much.
We built the house to keep the weather out.
The problem is the weather is not inside.
But we forgot that. So we made our own.
We took the fear that built the walls and we carried it indoors with us. We manufactured storms from memory. We created cold from stories we inherited. We built weather systems out of beliefs that were never even ours to begin with.
And then we stood in the corner of the house we built to survive a storm that was never coming.
Calling it reality.
Calling it wisdom.
Calling it just the way things are.
* * *
Step outside.
Everything is there. Not the safe version. Not the managed version. Mountains that take your breath and storms that take everything else. People who arrive and can change the whole story. The sense of loss that hollows you out completely. The feeling of joy so overwhelming it has no language. Just pure feeling. Grief that rewrites everything you thought you knew. The whole beautiful reality of being truly alive. Real and entirely yours if you are willing to turn around and claim it.
We do not stay in the corner only because we are afraid of what could destroy us.
We stay because we are afraid of what could transform us.
* * *
And all it takes to leave is the simplest and most terrifying thing in the world.
Turn around.
Not to fix anything. Not to have a plan. Not to be ready.
Just turn around and see what is actually there.
Pause.
Breathe.
Inhale.
Exhale.
And when you are ready.
* * *
We have spent seven weeks together doing the quiet necessary work of clearing away what is not yours. The borrowed fuel. The voices that were never yours to carry. The obligations that masqueraded as identity.
That work was not the destination.
It was the preparation.
You have been clearing space inside yourself. Making room. Putting down what was never yours so your hands would be free for something else.
And now I want to ask you something.
If you could paint your picture in any way, what would it look like?
Not the responsible version. Not the version that makes sense to everyone else. Not the one that fits neatly inside the walls you inherited.
The real one. The one that has been living quietly at the back of your mind waiting for permission to exist.
Sit with it. Let it come. Do not judge the first thing that arrives.
And when you are ready, tell me in the comments. I genuinely want to know what you see.
Because next week we are going to talk about something that has been whispering in your ear about what that painting should look like.
And whether that voice is actually yours.
Inward. Onward. Go.
With you,
Bonnie
