You’re Not Alone

Brene Brown’s book “Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging” she shares: “Art has the power to share experiences and transform despair into hope... and art has the power to transform something or someone when it is shared. When people share art, it becomes a whisper to that person: “You’re not alone.”

What does this mean for you?

I share this with you because I want to challenge you to look in the past to those things that you enjoyed doing when you were younger that involved a form of art that you no longer do. Then visualize yourself doing the activity and see how the passion or desire may still live within. 

Does it light you up to recall this time and place?

As a young girl, my passion for the arts included painting, photography, calligraphy and playing the piano.

I would watch endless hours of Bob Ross on PBS creating those amazing landscapes, I was the pianist at many recitals, choirs, and weddings, taking pictures endlessly, and writing poems in calligraphy.

When I read Brene’s book, the connection to belong resonated in a way that I didn’t realize.  The power and impact of being able to perform through an art is truly a sense of belonging. I haven’t considered my artistic pastimes in a long time and was intrigued about the rediscovery of my gifts after reading the book.

During my personal work around self-care I started to recall those things that brought me joy and realized I had stopped all those artistic pastimes.

I reactivated my gifts by attending a few local painting classes, pulled out music books and began to tickle the ivories, photographed some amazing sunsets and wrote a poem in calligraphy.

The magic in revisiting these simple tasks, of something I once did endlessly, is now transforming me back to a younger version of myself.

Now I ask — Why did you stop?

Is it that you just didn’t have time? Is it just not as exciting? Maybe you don’t believe you’d like to do it anymore.

From my experience, if you allow those passion for art to resurface, you begin to align your heart with something only you knew to bring you pure joy and happiness.  As Brene says it “art has the power to transform something or someone.”

Self-care can transform you in many ways by resetting your mind, raising your vibration, enhancing your mental attitude, and just simply offering pure joy and happiness.  

Give yourself permission to find things that bring you the same feeling you had when you were younger. This feeling is never lost, just quitted and fads over time, but when you can allow it to rise again, you will discover how passionate you are and the love you hold through art and know “you’re not alone.”