Yes I Can

Starry Night (June 1889) Vincent Van Gogh

“I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.” Vincent Van Gogh

Lately, I have been catching glimpses in many things I’ve been reading and listening to about our earliest memories of when another said that we were not good at _______(fill in the blank.) Or perhaps we were the ones, with an over active inner critic doing the comparing, and uttering that to ourselves?

I recall vividly my mother’s dream of becoming a ballet dancer. She was a natural, yet she had a teacher who squashed her dreams saying that she was not ‘tall enough.’ She went home, hung up her ballet slippers, and never danced again.

My high school boyfriend, Greg, could not even draw an amoeba in science class. I teased him terribly. He was living in his older brother’s shadow, of being an accomplished artist at an early age. He did not allow his early years to diminish his curiously and pursuit of painting. What made all the difference for Greg, was to incorporate different mediums and surfaces. Not just a canvas, perhaps wood, metal, he discovered his choices to be vast and endless. Thus, the comparing critic in his head to his older brother, took a back seat. He’s had his work shown in galleries on the east coast.

Sometimes when someone expresses that we can’t perhaps they are seeing something within us that we may not yet. However, more times than I can count, no one knows us as intimately as we do, and their opinions are just that. Conjecture, not fact, and it’s up to us to be doing our own inner excavating and truth telling.

Oh, my goodness, I have something to rat myself out on that I said as an eight year old or so. I sat beside a girl in the church choir who I will call, Isabelle. She sang her little heart out and was tone deaf, truly. One day at practice I told her to please stop singing that I just couldn’t take it a moment longer. Ooff! Not a proud moment, and one I wish I could take back, yet once said, those words are out there. I often wonder if Isabelle is singing with the enthusiasm that she once possessed? I hope my careless and hurtful remark didn’t diminish her love of singing. Deepest of sighs…

I can still hear my mom on the phone with her mother. I made my amends to Isabelle, and bless my mom. Rather than scolding or shaming me, we brainstormed alternate choices I could have made. Such as asking the choir director to change my seat, coming home to discuss it with her etc. Yet, the damage was done, and Isabelle’s family eventually moved, so I lost track of her. Why I include this is because those comments we heard in our youth by other children, adults in our lives remain within us, until they are worked with and released. Lather, Rinse, Repeat, as often as needed.

Here’s to bringing forth if we have not done so, those untrue statements that landed, which had nothing to do with us. They were always more about the giver.

*No one can ever tell anyone who they are. It’s an inside job.