creative identity

“I’m teaching a self-portrait class.” A sentence I never expected to say. Years ago, I completely stopped painting people.

A Painting I Never Finished

I always dreamed of teaching art and design. It’s actually why I first found myself in graduate studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

During my time there, I was working on a painting that meant a great deal to me. It wasn’t about technical perfection. It was about sitting with the idea of aging. I was watching my grandmother enter her nineties. I was trying to understand what it means to move through time and hold both loss and gain at once.

So I painted myself backed up against a future version of myself. Not as an exercise in skill, but as a way of processing that complexity. It was tender and unresolved, and that was the point.

I was about halfway through when a professor made a comment about my anatomy. About my “lack of skill.” About what I was doing wrong.

It landed hard enough that something in me shut down. I never finished the painting. And without fully deciding to, I stopped painting people altogether. I didn’t announce it. I didn’t process it. I just quietly redirected. I still painted. I had a deep love for life drawing and painting. But this made me pivot in a way that is only clearly visible from the far end of it.

And Yet, Here I Am

Here I am, teaching a self-portrait class for high school seniors at my daughter’s school. I’m guiding them as they learn how to look closely, how to notice, how to translate what they see and feel about themselves onto the page. And alongside them, I painted the first self-portrait I’ve made in over fifteen years.

That’s the part that has surprised me most. Because most of the time, we don’t stop doing meaningful work on purpose. We don’t wake up and decide to abandon something that matters to us. It usually happens slowly—a comment here, a piece of advice there, a suggestion that makes sense on paper. Somewhere along the way, our own knowing gets a little quieter.

I never want to reject feedback. If you know me, you know I value critique. I rely on data. I care deeply about refining my work and growing in skill. But I’ve learned there’s a difference between feedback that sharpens your vision and feedback that subtly reroutes it. And sometimes that rerouting isn’t obvious until years later.

Another pivot

In 2015, I opened my home for a local studio tour. Original paintings on the walls, prints laid out, everything ready. It was joyful. It was meaningful. It was not particularly lucrative. Afterward, a close family member asked me why I would spend so much energy on art when I could make more money doing web design.

It wasn’t a harsh question. It was practical. Logical, even. And I paused on fine art for a while—not because web design wasn’t meaningful work, but because I’d let someone else’s logic override my own knowing about what I needed in that season. That wasn’t about anatomy. That was about value.

It took until 2020 for me to pick it back up. And what’s interesting is that during those five years, I never stopped being creative. I was still drawing. Still designing. Still seeing the world through that lens. But I had quieted a part of myself because I had let someone else’s logic override my own.

What Holding Your Vision Actually Means

When I talk about holding your vision, this is what I mean. Not recovering from a busy season. Not shaking off creative fog after a big project. I mean returning to the parts of your work you quietly set down because they didn’t feel efficient, validated, or strategically sound at the time.

Busy seasons do this too. You’re moving fast. You’re making decisions all day. You’re listening to feedback, analytics, advice. You’re showing up for clients, students, your family. You’re holding a lot. You can get so good at responding that you forget to check in.

You don’t lose your vision all at once. You just stop visiting it.

Teaching this class has brought that into focus in a new way. I’m asking students to look closely at themselves and translate that onto the page. At the same time, I’m noticing patterns in my own life, where I stopped trusting my own voice years ago. It’s humbling. It’s also strangely freeing.

Learning to Filter the Noise

There’s so much input now. Data, performance metrics, thoughtful critiques, marketing advice, personality tests, formulas that promise clarity. Some of it is genuinely helpful. Some of it is noise. The hard part isn’t rejecting it. It’s learning how to stay anchored enough to decide what actually belongs.

I’ve started asking myself two questions when I need to recalibrate:

Would my 7-year-old self be proud of this work? What about my 80-year-old self?

These two points of view—the one who creates purely for joy, and the one who has lived long enough to know what mattered—tend to agree on more than you’d think. And when they do, I usually trust it.

Picking It Back Up

Returning to portrait painting after all these years has reminded me that meaningful work doesn’t disappear just because you set it down. If it’s truly yours, it tends to circle back. Sometimes it waits for you to mature. Sometimes it waits for you to care less about being validated.

I don’t think this is about having a perfectly articulated five-year plan. I think it’s about getting honest about the kind of life you’re trying to build and letting your work serve that life, not the other way around.

For me, that has meant aligning my clients more closely with what genuinely lights me up. Creating projects because the process feels meaningful, not because they make the most financial sense in the moment and accepting that not every good idea deserves my time. The ideas that keep resurfacing usually tell me more than the loud ones.

If you’re in a season where you feel slightly off, or unsure, or like you’ve drifted a bit—it might just mean you’ve been listening to a lot of voices and need to hear your own again. I’m still learning this too. Still learning when to protect something tender instead of immediately optimizing it.

But I do know this: sometimes the most meaningful progress isn’t pushing forward. It’s circling back and picking up what was yours all along.