Alice sat in front of her laptop, fingers paused above the keyboard. Her code editor was open, a project deadline blinking in the back of her mind, but she couldn’t shake the heaviness in her chest. Not sadness exactly, more like a quiet resistance. A question, half-formed: What am I really building?

Art, for me, is a form of communication.

It’s the way I try to tell the story of my inner world: how I see things, how I live them, how I feel them.

I just took the girls out to go for a bike ride with their grandfather. I’ve got a bad headache, I’m struggling to focus, and right now I just can’t manage to work. 

It makes me smile thinking about how their grandfather said it would just be fifteen minutes, just taking them down to the river nearby where he’d ride with them.

I’d love to be able to paint a portrait of the psychologist who ran the test on my neurocognitive abilities.

After the tumor, I’ve had, and still have, constant issues with memory and focus.

Even now, while I’m recording these words, I have to close my eyes to find them in my mind. I push myself slightly ahead of what I’m actually saying.

I think courage has to do with the ability to listen to yourself, to be self-aware, and to follow what you feel inside. In my case, I don’t think that those who do courageous things are breaking rules that don’t belong to them. I believe courage is something deeply tied to your own nature, to your identity. 

To be aware, you need self-knowledge. To be brave, you first have to know who you are. Otherwise, you’re just being stupid.

Right now, I see before my eyes exactly some brushstrokes of the painting I want to create. I can feel their density, their thickness, the roughness with which certain lines are drawn.

I imagine the palette knife, the palette knife with which I’m spreading the paint. I hear the sound of the knife scraping against the canvas, and I already see the painting complete, I see it finished. I see the image. I see the person I’m telling the story of and what I need to tell to fulfill my purpose, to be who I want to be.