Every week since she was in kindergarten, she attended her art class. It started as a joyous Saturday morning ritual that promised bright colors that felt like magic on paper. The first day she held a crayon, it felt like magic. She was praised for drawing so well for someone so young: “a prodigy in the making,” her parents called her. She was given sparkly stickers for finishing her art homework. They were badges of approval. To her, they were evidence that her hands could make something that people wanted to look at. Painting felt playful and lightweight to her. The feeling of the brush against the canvas was like swimming through the air. She didn’t think about the end result, only the individual strokes. The colors were characters she used to create a story on her canvas.

But that was before.

Now, she paints to get into college. Or, more accurately, she paints to get into the right college. Each portfolio piece needed to be carefully thought out and meticulously executed, with no room for error. It wasn’t a form of expression anymore; it was a transaction. Each piece had to “tell a story.” This was the phrase her teachers repeated to her; however, it never helped her form a new idea. It had to say something deep about herself and her growth as a person.

She started with a sketch, as usual. Her hand hovered over the canvas, drawing delicate outlines of faces and figures she knew well. It was easier to draw people she knew. Her friends’ familiar faces gave meaning to the pieces she felt emotionless towards while creating.

Her sketching was careful. She used a hard pencil on canvas so the lines wouldn’t smudge when she went over them with paint. She tried to erase the imperfections, but it never worked. Something was always wrong. The proportions were unbalanced, or one eye was too small, or a hand was misshapen.

In her mind, the small details no one cared about were magnified. She couldn’t see imperfections in other people’s art; she could only find mistakes in her own. The skin tones of her friends’ faces were never right either.

There came a point when all her paintings were grounded in reality, so they were accurate and impressive, but not to her. She tried to gain the approval of her art teacher, her friends, her parents, and, of course, the admissions board, but the paintings came out the same way each time. They were distant from her now. In her head, she knew that her friends wouldn’t care about her art in its current state. They never asked for the final portrait of their faces. Even when she’d make something uninspired, yet incredibly realistic, they’d look at it and say, “Nice, anyway,” or, “I love it, but that’s not my skin tone,” and that would be the end. But it wasn’t about them.

She stopped telling them that the paintings that included their faces were for her portfolio.

“Why do you always draw our faces?”

“Oh, it’s just for practice,” she stated. This way, there were no expectations, because practice pieces did not have to be perfect. She did not need them to like it, but a small piece of her always hoped they would. She constantly craved validation from others, partially because that is how she knew her painting was exemplary.

Her paintings did not receive the same praise that they did when she was a child. They weren’t incredible or amazing for someone her age anymore. Saturday mornings weren’t as exciting. They were just mornings of criticism by her art teacher now. Sometimes she wished she could have kept painting for fun, with bright neon colors and made-up ideas from her dreams.

One evening, as the sky bled into shades of purple and the shadows in the room lengthened across the floor, she stood before her latest painting while massaging her stiff hands from hours of focused work. Her errant brush strokes led to imperfect eyes and skin tones, but they were still hers. She had poured her emotions into this. She used her sadness, disappointment, and stress. To her, that was what this piece reflected. It was okay that the eyes were different and that the skin was not the right tone.

She stepped back from the canvas with a weight on her chest. The painting, like her, was both imperfect and full of potential. It wasn’t just a piece: it was a record of her growth, of how she had learned to navigate a world that expected so much from her.

She wiped the paint from her hands and closed her eyes. The work wasn't flawless, but she didn’t mind. The eyes didn’t need to be perfect, and neither did she.

And for the first time in a long while, painting felt like painting again.