The Answer (Part 2)

 

Sometimes you just have to close your eyes and press the button anyway.

A couple of years on from all of that I still mourned quite a lot.

I hated seeing daughters with their elderly mums at the supermarket. A song, a thought, a photo, a memory would upend me and shake out tears without warning. But my work had started to change. It was beginning to become something more positive.

Even though I am someone who mainly dresses in black — and that’s a story for another time — my paintings were still full of those bright slashes of colour. And they were starting to become more hopeful.

When I looked back at the work I had made during that period it became clear that I had painted the stages of my grief without realising it. Feeling lost, unanchored, uncertain, angry, consumed by emotion and just wanting a moment’s relief. The newer work was about trying to pick up the pieces and move forward into whatever came next.

What I decided came next was to build a business around all of it.

At some point right in the middle of the earlier chaos I bought myself a ring that said I Am Enough. Not because I felt enough. Because I didn’t. No matter how much I was holding together for everyone else, I couldn’t see it. I just continually beat myself up for not doing more, not being better, not being enough. But in my more lucid moments I could allow myself to see that I was doing my best. And that had to count for something.

Inspired by the ring I painted my first piece of word art — I Am Enough on a loose graffiti style heart. I call it soft graffiti. It’s very feminine but it does look like the thing you want to spray paint on a wall somewhere just to be defiant.

Then I painted one for a friend who was also going through a hard time.

And something clicked.

I realised it wasn’t just me. It wasn’t just my friend. Other women felt like this too. Lost and unsure of who they were, needing to give themselves permission to believe that they were enough.

That’s who I built this business for.

And that’s why I can’t quite push the button. Because pressing it means all of this — everything I just told you — goes out into the world. The paintings, the words, the story behind all of it.

It turns out that building the website was the easy part.

I still had all the doubts, the fears, the imposter syndrome, the whys and hows.

But sometimes you just have to stop thinking, take a deep breath, press the button and then close your eyes so it doesn’t feel real.

I pressed the button. 

— Jewels