If I’ve learned anything over the course of 2020, it’s that I CAN in fact paint and that painting is an extremely liberating experience for me.
I’ve spent a lot of time telling myself that I can’t draw, that I can’t paint, that I’m not good at artistic things, but I’ve realized that I am all the things that I tell myself and by telling myself that these things were things that I couldn’t do, I literally made them into things that I just wanted doing. If you don’t do something, then how will you know if you can or cannot and how, if you’re unwilling to even try, will you ever get better at it?
In 2020, I wrote out a list of things that I was going to do and a lot of them were centered on traveling, because I noticed that I have this block and this fear basically that has prevented me from traveling to my fullest extent. Obviously that ended up being something I couldn’t do in 2020 and it wasn’t because of my own doing. This led to me throwing myself towards the things that I felt was within my grasp and painting was something I could do.
I ended up buying the mini canvases from the dollar store and I found that I wasn’t intimidated because of the smaller size (5x7) and it led to some of my favorite cathartic moments. I’d set a date to paint with friends over FaceTime or they’d be up to something else and I would be painting. The more that I played with paint, the more that I felt my confidence grow. I won’t claim that I’ve improved extraordinarily, but I never thought that painting could be for me.
If you think that you’re not artistic and that you can’t do it, I hope that you give these potential hobbies a try, it might end up really surprising you and you may be much better at those things than you believed.
We are the product of the words that we use to describe us. Try to scale back and saying what you aren’t and instead be completely open to the possibility that you could become all the things that you’ve never tried!
Good luck.
