On Healing My Inner Child

When I was nine, I painted the sea.

Not the tidy school sea with perfect outlines. Mine was the sea as I felt it: soft blues folding into each other, shadows drifting quietly, shapes melting into the next. It looked like a memory more than a picture. I thought it was beautiful.

My art teacher did not.

She looked at it once, dismissed it, and dismissed me with it. I tried to explain that this really was how I saw the world underwater (a little blurred, I had actual sight issues), but she didn’t care. She moved on to the children whose lines stayed where lines were “supposed” to stay.

My parents, bless their first-time-parent trails (and errors), never knew to ask why their daughter suddenly believed she had no artistic talent. So I went home, nine years old and convinced I was defective. It was the first time I felt the private humiliation of seeing the world differently and realizing no one cared how I saw it.

I failed art class that year. A fact I still find both tragic and oddly impressive.

Left alone with the task of raising myself, I turned to magazines(whatever passed for psychology quizzes in glossy pages) and found a diagnosis for my lack of talent; I couldn’t paint because I had (dramatic pause) a left brain.

It was such a relief to know that a piece of my own biology could be blamed.

So I made myself a promise (very reasonable, very grown-up, very nine years old): I would abandon art entirely. I would be a smart person. A logical person. A facts-and-calculations person.

My very serious promise comforted me. It excused the failure. It also sentenced me. If the world insisted I had no claim to creativity, I would not fight it. I would leave art to the right-brained children who apparently saw the world correctly.

And I spent years keeping my promise and proving my left brain right. I learned facts like spells for protection, prioritized logic over joy, and grew up far too soon.

By the time I was old enough to choose a career, the choice was already made. Smart girls studied medicine or engineering. But coding calculators in high school had brought me joy. So I chose more joy, disguised as a serious degree: computer science. In lectures, I kept colorful notes(an indulgence, though no one needed to know that). My clothes were even more colorful, a contradiction I tried to ignore. I laughed too loudly whenever someone mistook me for art major, It was easier to mock the label than admit I wanted it.

Eventually I became a full-stack engineer. Databases, backend logic, the safe sterility of things that compiled neatly. But whenever a task required frontend work, something in me stirred. Arranging buttons, choosing colors, this was permissible creativity, creativity with guidelines and best practices. No one compared user interfaces to paintings. No one calls a frontend developer an artist. And no one could accuse me of being what I secretly feared I wasn’t allowed to be.

There were no brushes, no canvases, no teachers waiting to condemn the way I saw things.

It was a loophole.

A safe one.

Something I could love without threatening the promise I had made myself at nine.

So I slipped through it and stayed for a decade, building pretty interfaces and calling it clean code.

Then I met my husband.

He is, quite literally, a creative. Not just by temperament. By profession. People pay him to see beauty, to choose colors, to trust his eye. Watching him work felt like standing near a language I once knew and quietly forgot.

By the time we met, I had already gone through my entire hair dye era (blue, red, green, pink within two years). Someone once looked at me - really looked at me - and said, “You love color too much not to be an artist.” I found this offensive and ridiculous. Coloring hair was chemistry. Toners and ratios. Science. (I said this while walking around with cotton candy colored hair)

That same week, half out of mockery and half out of curiosity, I read The Artist’s Way for the first time. I read it with the tone of someone who believes she is above all this self-help nonsense. But somehow, despite myself, it lodged inside me.

The second time I read the book was after a breakup. The morning pages kept me together. The third time I read it because I wanted to heal, and healing requires commitment. I did the exercises, the artist dates, the morning pages, the uncomfortable permission-giving.

By the fourth reading, I had grown enough to fall in love with the man who would later hang my paintings on our walls.

And then came the kitchen.

We were picking colors and my husband suggested a sage kitchen.

Green.

A green kitchen.

I was horrified. What happened to beige? Beige was safe. Beige didn’t demand anything from me emotionally.

But he smiled and insisted, and I trusted him the way you trust someone who has seen the child you used to be and didn’t flinch.

When the cabinets finally arrived, I stood in that gentle green light and felt something open inside me. A warm, grown-woman joy. A joy that felt like breathing softer. I even started cooking just to stay in that light. Slowly, our entire home became a palette of us, our moods, our memories, our choices. It was the first place where color didn’t accuse me of seeing wrong.

Then, one day, with adult money and a strange sense of freedom, I ordered oil pastels. The kind we used in school before I failed art. I remembered how they felt-soft, smudgy, forgiving.

I sat down, nearly two decades after that first condemned sea painting, and began to draw.

And I loved it.

I loved it in a way that tied my whole life together: the blurred underwater vision, the hair colors, the UI screens, the sage kitchen, the husband who saw beauty in everything.

He framed my pieces. Hung them up with care. Called them artwork like the word had always belonged there.

My family notices each new painting. And I too call them “artwork” now, without flinching.

Somewhere between the sea-blue blur of childhood and the sage-green glow of our kitchen, my nine-year-old self came back. She climbed out from the underwater world she’d been hiding in and sat beside me, legs swinging, patient, proud, and healed.