There is a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from doing too much, but from holding too much in.
This year taught me that.
I’ve spent most of my life circling the things that matter most to me — my art, my voice, my knowing — like a cautious animal around a fire. Close enough to feel the heat. Never close enough to be consumed by it.
Painting has always been the most dangerous of those fires.
People see the finished pieces and call it talent.
What they don’t see is what happens before the brush ever touches the canvas.
The noise.
The voices are never kind. They don’t praise or encourage. They dig. They accuse. They remind me of every doubt I’ve ever tried to outgrow. Sometimes they get so loud I can’t breathe through them. The only way to silence them is to push the brush down — hard — like an act of defiance, like pressing my pulse straight into the surface.
That’s the part no one warns you about.
Creation, for some of us, feels less like expression and more like self-destruction. And I’ve often wondered — quietly, bitterly — why God would give someone a gift that hurts to use, why the very thing that could save me is also the thing that splits me open.
It’s half the reason I have more unfinished work than finished.
Stopping feels safer than going all the way through.
But something shifted this year.
Not gently.
Not all at once.
It felt like another part of me stepping forward — older, steadier, done waiting. A knowing I couldn’t argue with anymore. A pressure that said: You can’t keep circling this forever.
Writing cracked something open. I didn’t mean for it to. I thought I was just letting words out, just giving myself somewhere safer to stand. But it unlocked a door I can’t close now. And whatever is rising inside me refuses to be managed or muted.
It wants to be met.
So I’m walking into this new year without a plan. No checklist pretending to be control. No polished vision of how this is supposed to look.
There is a destination — I can feel that much — but how I get there, and who I become along the way, has yet to be revealed.
And maybe that’s the point.
Maybe what’s surfacing now was always the reason. Not the product. Not the outcome. Not the proof.
But the reckoning.
I think we all carry something like this. A truth we orbit. A fire we avoid. A voice that waits patiently until we are finally tired enough, brave enough, or cracked enough to listen.
This year didn’t give me clarity.
It stripped me of excuses.
And now I’m standing here — not fearless, not finished — but willing.
And that… finally, feels like a beginning.