Back before I became the worrier and perfectionist I have been for so long, I was a very little girl with a big box of crayons.
There I am, at three or four, sitting on a shiny wooden floor, with my 48 Crayola crayons strewn around me, and one or two sheets of paper. I am drawing. I am putting shapes and colors, squiggles and dots down there on that paper.
I am drawing my brother who is four years older than me. I make a big round circle and I put his eyes in and a v for his little pointed nose and somehow I've got his mouth down and then I take my brown crayon and make many, many dots all over… those are his freckles. I gasp. It is perfect! It looks just like him.
I decide to put emerald green nostrils on the lady’s face I am drawing because they will make her face perfect. Perfect... those beautiful jewel-green shapes. I put two more emerald squiggles on her ears. There! Now her nostrils and her earrings match. The world is happy and bright, and emerald green figures largely in it. Ahhhh.
At (too many) times in the past 3 (or 30) years, I'd get overtaken with panic and doubt about my work. It could get pretty bad. My angelic therapist told me:
She said, "Think back to a time when you loved what you were doing, when you painted and drew with complete joy and no self-consciousness." That's when I found myself again... me and my box of crayons.
Here I am, a bit younger than the little Laura with the 48 crayons, but can't you just tell there's going to be lots of crayoning in her future?
She's still there, when I'm not lost or hobbled with worry, and she's calling the shots, the colors, the shapes, and the dots.
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