The Gift That Changed How I see
Hot fuchsia pink Porche convertible.
Who would even drive that?!
Barbie, of course.
It didn’t matter that she cruised down old, brown, matted apartment carpet instead of Malibu streets. She had style, working headlights, and enough confidence to light up an entire room…until my cousin launched her car down the apartment steps.
It was the 90s. My room had plenty of pink plastic, my seven-year-old dreams were all about fashion, and Barbie was everything I thought I wanted to be: carefree with a little drawma on the side. Her favorite person wasn’t Ken. It was human Ariel from The Little Mermaid with a custom buzzcut and a beret.
With real working headlights…that stopped working after the crash!
And like most kids in America, my dreams were tied up in one question grown-ups loved to ask:
“What do you want for Christmas?”
The holiday quickly became less about meaning and more about the hunt for the perfect thing. And for years, my answer was easy:
Barbie. All things Barbie.
I loved her just as much as I loved climbing trees and digging through the trash for treasures. But around age twelve, I was no longer the “material girl” that Madonna exemplified.
The Year I Wanted Something Different
I don’t remember how I knew, but I discovered that the local art museum offered classes; real art classes. Adults attended them. Serious artists taught them. And I wanted a challenge.
But like most things, it required money.
Every Christmas, my step-grandparents handed us a crisp $100 bill. Back then, it felt like winning the lottery. Enough to buy a mountain of Barbie clothes or, as I realized that year, enough to pay for a session of summer drawing classes.
So I enrolled at twelve years old in an adult class. Cue the imposter syndrome (which still tends to stick around).
Where Frustration Turned Into Freedom
The class focused on chalk pastels which are messy, dusty, and can be hard to control. We practiced drawing still-life objects on large pieces of paper. And at first, I made the same mistake most beginners do:
I tried to get everything exact, like a tiny Michelangelo with a too-high ponytail centered on top of my head.
But mastery doesn’t begin with perfection. It begins with seeing.
One day, in the middle of my frustration, I looked over at the artist next to me. She was using colors I couldn’t “see”—purples in the shadows, greens in the browns, reds where I swore nothing but beige existed.
And suddenly, I had that Ah-ha moment!
Image from a workshop I took from Paige at Whole Self Creative.
I stopped drawing what I thought things looked like…
And began drawing what was really there.
Brown wasn’t brown, it was rich with dozens of hues hiding in plain sight.
A rusted watering can wasn’t dull, it was a reflection of unexpected color.
Art forced me to slow down. To pay attention. To notice the world the with depth of color, not just I rush past it to achieve a “perfect” result.
And writing this now makes me wonder:
How many things in our lives have that same hidden vibrancy, if only we’d pause long enough to see?
What Do You Miss Diving Into?
That class taught me how to fall into a flow state so deeply that time dissolved. It gets harder as an adult to reach that place…but the memory still calls me back.
How about you?
What did you used to “dive into” without hesitation?
What’s calling you back now: away from the phone, away from the noise, toward an experience that feeds you instead of drains you?
Maybe the real gift this season isn’t the thing wrapped in a box, but the experience that reconnects you with who you were before the world got so loud.
my daughter discovering color in her world.
Give yourself one hour this week to dive into something that lights you up.
Draw, write, cook, walk, notice color: anything that slows time and pulls you back into yourself.
You deserve that gift. And I’m writing this for myself as much as I am for you!
Want More to Explore?
Here are a couple of posts to deepen the practice of slowing down and seeing differently:
・Who Get’s to Be an Artist? Challenging the Lables that Hold us Back