I am Unwritten…

We all work hard to find our “thing”. That something we do, say, write or create that brings to life all that we have within ourselves. I have been creating with words since 1989, which is thirty-five years…more than half my life. I created this piece in portions over a ten year span. The mat came first. It was an experiment over a weekend when all my friends were out of town. I was single, bored, alone in my house and needed a distraction. I color arranged all my collected marbled paper scraps then glued them to two spare pieces of mat board. This is the larger of the two. That mat board sat in my studio (spare bedroom) for more than eight years. I did not know what to do with it…

Fast forward two more years and Natasha Bedingfield wrote the song UNWRITTEN. I moved into a new house, and found myself wondering what came next. The lyrics inspired me to create something as they expressed how I felt. I remembered that now ten year-old, dusty mat with the glued paper scraps and decided to put the colors and lyrics together. This final piece hangs in our main hallway as a reminder that sometimes finding your “thing” takes longer than you expect.

Here is a portion of the song lyrics that struck a cord with me:

 I break tradition, sometimes my tries are outside the lines. We’ve been conditioned to not make mistakes, but I can’t live that way. Staring at the blank page before you, open up the dirty window, let the sun illuminate the words that you could not find…

– Natasha Bedingfield

I hope this serves as an encouraging reminder that everyone struggles with becoming, changing, growing into the person they are meant to become. Being you means things will take time, easy and hard lessons have yet to be lived and learned. And, no matter your plan there will ALWAYS be deviations, unexpected adventures and disappointments. Life is a marathon, not a sprint – so give yourself grace to learn and grow each and every day. Which means forgive your mistakes, absorb the wisdom from each lesson, and work hard not to continually make the same missteps over and over again.

We are all unwritten, our future is there for us to create one day at a time. I am unwritten and still creating who I am even more than twenty years after I finished this piece.