My Quiet Mind

When I was a kid I wanted to be a veterinarian and when I was a not so young kid I wanted to be an artist. 

My aunt laughs when she recounts the stories of my bouncy horse, who sat in a hard plastic shell wearing a black saddle on the corner of my parent's front porch. When my cousins would come over I would give them strict instruction on how bouncy horse liked to be handled and then I would randomly proclaim him sick and stop the play. 

When I entered middle school I wanted to be an artist. I printed out literature from the Kansas City Art Institute using my parent's dial-up computer and kept the papers in a neat stack in my room. I took oil painting classes from the neighbor on the corner and gifted my not-so-masterful pieces to my grandmother and great uncle. And at school, I filled my drawing books instead of speaking with my classmates. 

I think that period of time before teenage acne and push-up bras claimed me was a gentle truthful spot for my inner voice. I think it was able to communicate with me what it wanted before ideas of what is realistic and what is approvable crept into my mind. I think this quiet space in my mind was filled with anticipatory good before the not-so-good took hold. 

It is especially funny that I came up with the idea of being an artist. I had no artists in my life except the neighbor on the corner and I searched out an art school even though I didn’t know that college was a thing that most people needed to do to be successful. Nobody in my life had done it. 

Today I think it's extraordinarily funny that I needed to acknowledge the goals from my past sixth-grade life to feel the happiness I had been searching for. I needed to find that quiet place in my mind that I had not located for 15 years and ask it what it truly wanted. And not so shockingly, nothing had changed. 

My quiet mind told me that it still wants to create art and live a life not detailed by normalcy. It asked me to not live to work but to work to live. It reminded me that I love to learn, never want to have children, and still hate eating peas.

I love this version of myself that I find in my quiet mind and I suppose it's not a version of myself but the truth of what I am. 

To keep hold of my quiet mind I have decided to offer it what it wants and in return, it will let me keep hold of me. I paint pictures of fat cats with no expectations that they will make me money. I write with the hope that maybe someday my stories will find a place to be and if they don’t that’s perfectly okay. 

I make a list of all of the things I want to do with my time living and I am pleased that on this list I find to create every day and write some kind of book. This list came from the ageless depths of my quiet mind and I look at it with the same pride that I did the oil paintings I created in my neighbor's studio. 

This was all so easy but I made it so hard. The sixth-grader that I was did not need to die to offer me an adult life. Quite the opposite actually, I needed to let her live so I could feel complete. 

I have been in touch with a feeling lately that I have never before felt in my life. It is the confidence that if sixth-grade Christina was given a crystal ball to look into her future that she would feel proud of what she saw there. 

And all it took, was listening to her.