A Week After Twelve Years

During the summer vacations last year, my best friend travelled to Ireland from the United States to see me. It was the first time we’d sat face to face in twelve years, twelve years of separate lives, separate countries, and separate versions of ourselves that the other had never met.

She stayed for a week. Morning after morning, evening after evening, I had the chance to know her again, to see beneath the surface and reconnect with the feeling I’d had from the very first day we met, almost twenty years ago.

What struck me most was how much we’d both changed, and yet how little the ground beneath us had shifted. Two women living entirely different lives, carrying entirely different burdens, yet through every phone call over those twelve years, we’d taken turns being each other’s steadying hand.

When her tide rose, mine receded. When mine rose, hers pulled back. Somehow, neither of us was ever truly alone in the ebb.

I didn’t paint at all that week.

Not until the day she left.

Same Sea, Different Boats

During our conversations, I realised that although we live different lives, in different homes, with different responsibilities and different struggles, we are all sailing the same sea.

Our boats simply look different.

We’ve each weathered storms. We’ve each stood beneath scorching suns. We’ve each learned to navigate the rise and fall of the tides. Back and forth, up and down, our boats have moved to a rhythm neither of us had ever spoken aloud, carried by the same current, even across oceans, even after twelve years apart.

It Isn’t Just You

All the untold stories we shared made me realise that, at some point, almost everyone asks the same quiet question:

Why me?

When difficult seasons arrive, it’s easy to believe we’re the only ones struggling.

But that isn’t the truth.

Just look at the world around us.

Consider gold: the fire and pressure it must endure before it becomes something worth wearing.

Consider bread: the dough that must be kneaded and pass through the heat of the oven before it can nourish others.

Consider a seed, buried in complete darkness, with no way of knowing that light even exists, until one day it breaks through the soil and finds it.

The more I sit with that question, and the more I observe the world around me, the less true it feels.

Struggle isn’t a punishment reserved for the unlucky. I believe it is often part of the process that shapes us into who we are meant to become.

If this holds true for gold, for bread, and for a single seed, then I believe it holds true for us as well.

The Qur’an expresses this beautifully in a verse about rain bringing dead earth back to life:

“He sends down rain from the sky by which He brings the earth to life after its lifelessness. Indeed, in that are signs for people who use reason.” (Surah Ar-Rum 30:24)

Even the earth lies barren for a season. It appears lifeless, yet when the rain arrives at its appointed time, it comes alive again.

Why should we be any different?

Perhaps our hardest seasons are not signs that we are broken. Perhaps they are preparing us to become exactly who we were created to be. They awaken strengths we never knew we possessed, inviting us to grow into the person we were always capable of becoming.

What My Workshops Keep Teaching Me

This realisation didn’t come only from that week with my friend.

I see the same pattern in almost every workshop I lead.

Women of different ages, different histories, and entirely different reasons for walking through my door often begin as strangers. Yet beneath the surface, I encounter the same quiet ache. The same tendency to become disconnected from themselves. The same instinct to place their own needs at the very bottom of the list while giving everything they have to everyone else.

Perhaps that’s why my conversations with my friend felt so familiar.

I’d heard echoes of them many times before.

So if you’re walking through a difficult season right now, hear this:

It is allowed.

It isn’t failure.

And perhaps the most important thing you can do isn’t simply to hope the season passes, but to hold on to yourself more tightly than ever before.

Don’t lose yourself inside it.

It may become the season that helps you find yourself again.

When the Canvas Answered

After she left, I didn’t paint straight away.

I sat with that week for days, letting it settle before I understood any of it.

Then, without consciously deciding, I reached for two canvases instead of one.

I simply began.

What emerged surprised me.

It took time to understand the philosophy beneath the painting—and longer still to recognise that it had been quietly growing within me through years of conversations, friendships, workshops, and shared stories.

Only when the two panels stood side by side did the painting tell me what it had known before I did.

We are mirrors of one another’s souls.

Not the same lives.

Not the same struggles.

But beneath the surface, the same humanity is reflected back, if we’re willing to look.

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Reflect

What season are you walking through right now that you’ve been carrying alone?

Perhaps you’re carrying it less alone than you think.

Mirrored Soul is available as an original textured blue abstract diptych. View the piece →

If this story resonated with you, you may also enjoy reading the stories behind my other paintings, where each artwork begins not with paint, but with a lived experience.