I haven’t painted in over a decade. That sentence feels dramatic and also not nearly dramatic enough.

I studied art in college — a BA, not a BFA, because I wanted to learn everything. And I’ve always expressed creativity in sideways ways: through spaces, through writing, through aesthetics, through conversation.

Through how I raise my son. Through how I build businesses and homes and rituals. But the actual act of painting — of brush, oil, pigment — that part of me has been sleeping.

This weekend, it woke up.

There wasn’t some grand moment.

There was just a quiet window — a couple of hours between responsibilities, before I had to be back on mom duty.

I was tired. Foggy. In the early days of my follicular phase, when hormones dip low and everything feels just a little less sharp, less sure. I knew I needed to move something — and not in the “go to yoga” way.

I didn’t want to sweat it out. I didn’t want to talk it out. I needed to make something.

So I turned my office-slash-wellness-space into a studio. I grabbed some oils, some India ink, no real plan. Just movement. Just texture. Just emotion with nowhere else to go.

It wasn’t for a project. It wasn’t for Instagram. It wasn’t even for me, not in the beginning.

It was just… something I had to do.

And the moment I started moving the brush across the surface, I felt my system settle. My breathing slowed. My thoughts softened.

And I remembered: this is how I metabolize emotion. This is how I regulate. This is how I stay tethered to something when everything else — identity, motherhood, middle age, hormones — is shifting underfoot.

Painting, for me, is creative hygiene for the nervous system. It’s not a luxury. It’s not a cute hobby. It’s the way I clear static. The way I make space inside my own body again.

I think a lot of women — especially moms, especially those of us navigating midlife and hormonal change — are carrying things we can’t even name. Tension. Grief. Unmet needs. Unfinished sentences. Energy with nowhere to land. And we’re expected to hold it all, gracefully, while smiling. While cooking dinner. While texting back. While managing.

But sometimes what we actually need is solitude. Ink. A brush. A blank surface. A window of time.

Sometimes what we need isn’t more clarity or more words. We need movement. We need to make something that doesn’t require explanation.

This is what that looked like for me.

It was messy.
It was simple.
It was exactly what I needed.

If you’re in that foggy space too — where your mind feels a little sideways and your energy has no outlet — I invite you to pick up something that makes a mark. A pen, a brush, a piece of chalk. See what comes through.

Let it be bad. Let it be beautiful. Let it be yours.