Color fills up our lives like air. Just the same way we breathe in we perceive light as color and translate it into beautiful scenes we are gifted to witness everyday. As an artist, it is internally rewarding to be able to recreate these images on my own. Through creative emotion, I am able to transmit a message in a passionate language that cannot be truly understood through words. This is no easy task; I have to make sure everything is placed to perfection. Placement is everything. A brush stroke too far in one direction could set me off track for a long time. One day, I noticed that my hands had started to slip. The clouds above were slowly darkening, and I feared the canvas in front of me would no longer be my comfort, but my downfall. As this fear gnawed at me, I raised my head and noticed the scenery around me was slowly changing and that and I was standing in the middle of a dark, thick forest. I had been walking for so long that I no longer recognized my surroundings. Why is it so dark out here? What happened to the sign I saw just a few minutes ago? When I found myself lost in this way, it was incredibly cumbersome to find the will to turn towards the right direction. Fear took over me and suddenly all the light had vanished from my eyes. When I found myself walking off track, my colors were all out of place. The green was mixing in with the orange, the purple mixing in with the yellow. It was all a muddy mess I was scrambling to pull my shoes out of. Splatters of paint covered my hands and clothes, and suddenly I could not even remember what type of scene I was aiming to paint in the first place. I was slowly losing sight of where I began walking from as the fog grew thicker with every step I took. As I walked on, I started feeling a heavier weight on my mind than I did on my body. My headache pressure increased as the forest grew deeper and the trees grew taller. I was intently focused on where I placed my feet instead of where they were taking me. After all, placement is everything. I never seemed to look back to see what color my footprints left on the ground behind me. Grounding myself became a skill I had to learn in order to breathe. As the air opened my lungs, I noticed the lush green on the trees above me. I heard a butterfly pass by my ears. I could smell the rain that had recently hydrated the nature around me. In this deep inspiration my fingers grazed the earth beneath my feet, I picked up my paintbrush, and I began to recreate the scene around me. I was reviving myself like the paints I added water to, swirling my brush around the color wells, and the color returned to my eyes and my skin. I am creating a radiant picture of all the good I can find around me. This forest of was not trying to swallow me up whole. It was a reflection of the complexities I faced within myself. I was not supposed to escape it, I was supposed to explore it. Once my mind was exposed to new areas of perception and knowledge, new self-discoveries became available to me, helping me piece myself together with new colors. I was able to discover new realms of interest, reinvigorating my soul and challenging myself to locate a sense of identity and independence, diverging with my prior, self-contained tendencies. Growth could not occur until my comfort zone was eliminated, exceeding customary expectations I previously held for myself. I can tug and pull at the edges of my soul, the same way I pick out my afro to make it bigger. My ego and identity can expand just the same, forming me into the successful and joyful woman I have always wanted to be. I have the power to change my life at any given moment, and I am prepared to make decisions that will lead me in the right direction, no matter how many times I have to paint over a scene again. I realized that placement really isn’t everything. Neither is picking the right scene to paint. It's simply about how you paint it.