She wobbled. And it was the most beautiful thing.
I saw her on my walk this morning.
Blue dress, two pieces, curves moving with every step like she had made a deal with gravity and gravity worshipped her. She wasn’t performing anything. She was just walking her dog.
And I couldn’t look away.
Not because of what she looked like. Because of how she inhabited it. Like her body was a place she actually lived in, not a thing she was managing, apologizing for, or waiting to fix.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about body confidence. It’s not about loving what you see in the mirror. It’s about feeling yourself move through the world and not flinching.
Most women I know, most women I’ve painted , carry both things at once. The moment of feeling it, really feeling it, alive and full and exactly right. And then the next thought, the comparison, the correction, the familiar voice that says yes, but.
We are so good at interrupting ourselves. Turn ourself off.
The women who appear in my paintings, I call them my divas. Not because they’re perfect. Because they know what they want. They show up, sometimes fully formed, sometimes just a gesture, a curve, a shadow, and they refuse to be unseen.
They don’t ask permission to take up space.
I think that’s what I saw this morning. A woman who had stopped asking.
she is every woman who has ever felt it, that moment when the body stops being something to manage and starts being something to live in. Fully. Without the correction that follows half a second later.
You know that moment. The one before the mirror. Before the comparison. Before the voice that says yes, but.
That’s where my divas live. In turn on – land
They show up in the paintings because they refuse to be unseen. Not because they are perfect. Because they are done apologizing for taking up space.
She was just walking her dog.
And she was everything.
