Becoming Without Arrival

Becoming was not a word I understood easily. Becoming what? Toward what? Into what? For a long time, the word felt foreign to my system, as if it belonged to another language pattern. I understood doing. I understood learning. I understood creating. But becoming felt different. It seemed to suggest that I had to turn into something, as if there was some version of myself waiting ahead of me.

It took years before I understood the word differently. Perhaps becoming was not about turning into something else. Perhaps it was about entering what had been there all along, untouched.

Painting taught me this before words did.

I paint abstracts, not because I begin with an image, but because something begins before the image. There is an ache, almost a command, a need to move the paint before I fully know why. The colors appear first. They come before thought, before explanation, before any plan. I know the colors I need to work with, and then silence comes.

The paint is poured, and I begin to breathe with it. I exhale and move the paint with my breath. My breath slows, and my body enters a rhythm the mind cannot control. There is a slow sway to it, though even that does not quite say it. I move the paint, and then I watch as the paint begins to take on a life of its own.

There are things words circle endlessly but never quite touch. Painting reaches before language does.

When I am in the studio, time disappears. I pack food, but forget to eat. The phone is on silent. Hours pass, six, seven, sometimes eight, and I do not feel them passing. I am not trying to make something beautiful. I am trying to hear what I do not yet know how to say.

The canvas does not lie when it is not asked to perform. Perhaps that is why I return to it. It does not flatter me. It simply shows me what happened when breath, color, and silence were allowed to move. Slowly, I began to see that the painting was not the only thing changing.

For years, I did not think of myself as becoming. I was living, working, writing, raising, serving, doing what needed to be done. But somewhere after forty-five, something began to shift. By fifty, I knew I was not the same person I had been.

I had spent the first half of my life as someone’s daughter, someone’s wife, someone’s mother. Those roles had shaped me. I am not dismissing them. But I could no longer remain only someone’s. I wanted to know who I was when I was not being named through another.

One of the largest layers to fall away was the need for permission. Permission to take up space. Permission to have dreams. Permission to spend hours inside color and breath without having to explain why it mattered.

Painting gave me that space. In the studio, I did not have to be useful. I did not have to be needed. I did not have to answer to a role. I could pour color, breathe, move the paint, and watch something within me appear.

As layers fall away, I do not find simplicity. I find depth. And depth is not always quiet. There are moments when I meet parts of myself I did not know were there. Not hidden exactly. Simply untouched. I think I had been afraid of that intensity, afraid of what it might ask of me. But when I let myself feel it, it did not frighten me. It opened a door I had not known I was allowed to enter. It was beautiful. It was liberating.

This is what becoming has come to mean for me. I am not arriving somewhere. I am not trying to become a finished version of myself. I am shedding what has kept me from fully entering my own life. The fear loosens, and what was waiting within has room to breathe.

The question remains: Who am I? I do not think it asks to be answered. It asks to be lived.

Each painting deepens the question. Each return to the studio deepens it further. When I leave the canvas, I do not feel finished. I feel richer. I wait four or five days to see how it has dried, what has settled, what has changed, what has revealed itself without me watching.

Perhaps that is true of me too.