Her nose is teal, her skin turns from blue-green to purple at the edges, and her hair is the color of a struck match, so much of it that it falls across half her face and keeps it there. What’s left uncovered are her eyes, lowered and half-closed, as if she’s still deciding whether I can be trusted.
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I painted her a few years ago and tagged her #arttherapy without thinking much about it, because that’s simply what she was, something I needed to make before I knew why.
When someone asked me recently who she was supposed to be, I reached for words and kept coming back with ones that almost fit: future, alien, angel, ethereal, confused. Each of them touched some part of her, and none of them could hold all of her at once.
We’re taught that naming a feeling is how we come to understand it, and most of the time that’s true. But some feelings arrive in colors that were never meant to sit together, the way a teal nose was never meant to sit on a face, and the moment you give them a name, they shrink to fit it.
She’s one of those. On some days she looks hopeful to me, and on others she looks lost, and somewhere along the way I stopped needing to decide which.
Lately, I understand her better than I used to.
I still don’t know her name, and I’ve stopped looking for one. She doesn’t seem to want to be explained. She seems to want what all of us want, to be looked at long enough to be seen.
Is there something in your life you’ve stopped trying to name? Tell me in the comments. And if this one stayed with you, subscribe below so the next one finds you.
My mind runs. Lists. A conversation from four days ago replayed with my side improved. Plans nobody has agreed to yet. If your mind is endlessly going like mine does, you know that “just relax” is advice from someone whose mind isn’t.
I meditate, and it works. Sit, breathe, let the noise settle. I keep doing it.
What I didn’t know is that there’s more than one door into that room.
I’ve painted in acrylic for over ten years. Less than a year ago I switched to oil, and I did it to make things harder on myself. Ten years is long enough to get comfortable. I wanted a medium that would take something out of me.
It has. I just didn’t expect it to give this back.
I finished my second oil last week. A beach at sunset, sea grass bending in the wind, footprints going down to the water. I worked from a photo I found. My husband and I love the ocean, so any beach would have done. This one had the sky I wanted.
The switch is what changed it. Acrylic dries while you’re still deciding. You mix a color, and by the time it’s on the canvas it’s already drifting somewhere darker than what you mixed, so you’re always working a step behind yourself. Oil stays wet for days. The color you mix is the color that stays. You can push a cloud around, walk away, come back the next morning and move it again, or scrape the whole section off and start it over.
I didn’t expect that to matter as much as it does.
Here’s what happens now when I paint. The brush is on the canvas and then it isn’t, and I load it again, and the whole of me is inside one small decision about whether this cloud is dark enough yet. That’s it. That’s the entire contents of my head. Is it dark enough yet.
No list running underneath. Nothing waiting for a reply.
I look up and two hours are gone and I couldn’t tell you what I thought about, because I wasn’t thinking. I was mixing a color, getting it wrong, and mixing it again.
The sky took the longest. All that weather sitting low and heavy, the sun behind it, the light having to find its way through the gaps. In acrylic I’d have had one pass at it. In oil I got to keep asking.
It’s the same quiet I get from sitting and breathing. It arrives by a different road, that’s all. I don’t have to be still to get there. My hands are busy and my shoulders come down anyway, and I don’t notice it happening until I stop.
That surprised me. I’d been treating stillness as the price of admission.
I gave the painting to my husband for our anniversary and it’s going up in his office. He works with patients all day in a room without much of a view. I wanted something on that wall worth looking at, for him and for whoever’s across from him having a hard day.
And I’m proud of it. It isn’t perfect and I’m still learning, and I’m proud of it anyway. I painted a sky I like.
I’m not doing any of this alone. My teacher is Katayoon Moghaddam-Soroush, and she’s the reason the switch to oil didn’t beat me in the first month. She makes the impossible feel learnable, which is a rarer thing in a teacher than it sounds, and somewhere in the last few years she became one of my closest friends. She teaches classes, workshops, and camps on Long Island, all ages, all levels. If any of this is tugging at you, she’s where I’d send you.
If your head doesn’t stop, don’t go looking for the quiet. Go looking for the thing small enough to hold all of you. One cloud. One row of stitches. One line of a song you’re learning badly. The quiet comes in behind it.
Mine turned out to be a brush. I wouldn’t have guessed.
There is a kind of grace available to you right now, in this very moment — no perfect morning needed. Just a willingness to pause, breathe, and notice.
There is wisdom in the pause.
Starting your day sitting in gratitude with intention, allowing yourself to really feel it—invites one of the highest frequencies there is into your life.
Not for the big moments or the ones worth celebrating, just for this—-the breath in your body, the ground beneath your feet, the simple grace of still being here.
There’s something almost sacred about real gratitude. Not the kind you perform, but the kind that finds you — in the way morning light falls soft across a room, in that first sip of something warm, in the simple miracle of an ordinary day.
Here’s what we know — the words you speak and the thoughts you carry have energy. They shape the way you feel, the way you move through a room, the way your day unfolds. Choose them wisely. Choose them kindly. Especially the ones you say to yourself.
Gratitude is one of those choices. And it might just be the most powerful one you make all day. We don’t always get to choose what the day brings. But we get to choose how we meet it. Open hand, not clenched fist. You don’t need a ritual or a perfect morning or the right words. Just these two, meant sincerely, before the world asks anything of you: Say thank you.
And mean it.
This moment, this breath, this life — it’s all worth the gratitude.
“The grief no one warned you about — and the woman waiting on the other side of it.”
The day we moved our only child into her Boston dorm, my husband and I drove home through five hours of tears and highway and not enough words. We’d done everything right. We’d raised her well. And when we walked back into our own house, the quiet that greeted us was unlike anything I had ever felt before.
I thought I was ready. I had packed the boxes, bought the shower caddy, done everything a mother does. I had been preparing for years.
I was not ready.
“Empty nest grief shows up dressed as pride, as gratitude, as relief — all the feelings you’re supposed to have — and so you almost miss it.”
You smile through it. You let other people’s “you must be so proud!” paper over it. But then — usually quietly, usually alone — it makes itself known.
For me, it was the first dinner without her. I looked at her empty chair and felt something crack open so completely I had to put my hands flat on the table just to stay upright.
She wasn’t gone. She was growing up — living her life with the enthusiasm of someone raised to do exactly that. She was fine.
I was the one who wasn’t fine.
Her flourishing and my grief existed in the same moment, made from the same event. That was the thing no one had warned me about.
“No one gives you language for this. You just walk around with it, unnamed and heavy, wondering if something is wrong with you.”
People ask cheerfully: “So what will you do now?” As if the answer is obvious. As if years of yourself didn’t just walk out the door.
But that surface question is almost never the real one. The real question lives one layer deeper, and it’s harder to say out loud:
Who am I, now that she doesn’t need me in the same way?
That’s the one that wakes you up at 3am. That makes Sunday afternoons feel impossibly heavy.
I won’t pretend I have an answer — because I don’t. What I found instead was that sitting with the question taught me things I didn’t know I needed to learn.
I had given myself away in stages — first to my career, then to my child — until the woman I’d started with had quietly disappeared beneath the weight of all that devotion.
I now see that she had been there all along. I was the one who had walked away.
I think of my mother now in ways I never could before. She stood in this exact silence once — watching me walk toward my own life — and I had no idea what it cost her. I understand now, Mom. I finally understand.
I’ve spoken to enough women in this season to know what’s possible. The one who went back to school at 54. The one who finally started the business she’d sketched in notebooks for thirty years. The one who simply decided to learn what she actually liked — quietly, just for herself, for the first time in decades.
I don’t have my answer yet. I’m still in it — still learning to sit still without calling it failure. But I’ve stopped apologizing for that.
The quiet house isn’t absence. It’s space. And space, when you stop treating it like a problem, turns out to be something you can actually use.
Dear woman in the quiet house—
All those precious years of yourself went into another person — willingly, fiercely, without regret. And now that person has walked out the door, suitcase in hand, and into her own extraordinary life.
The woman who comes next has already earned everything she needs.
Start with her.
— With love, from every woman who has been where you are.
—-If this resonated, there is more waiting for you at styleandserenity.com
