Not long after I lost my father, I walked into an art studio with a picture of a lion on my phone.
I cannot tell you exactly why I chose that lion.
There were probably hundreds of images I could have painted that day, but something about this one kept pulling me back.
So I chose it.
Then I looked at the picture.
I looked at the enormous white canvas in front of me.
And suddenly, choosing it felt like the easy part.
I had no idea how I was going to make that blank space become what I could already see so clearly in my head.
I remember asking my teacher how I was supposed to paint something like that.
What if I could not make it look like the picture?
What if I got halfway through and ruined it?
What if what I created was simply not good enough?
“Just paint. You might accidentally make something even more beautiful than the original.”
I still remember how different I felt after hearing that.
Nothing about my ability had changed.
The canvas was still blank.
I still did not know exactly what I was doing.
But somehow, the fear had lost its authority.
For the first time, I was no longer trying to arrive at a predetermined ending.
Maybe it did not have to look exactly like the lion on my phone.
Maybe I did not have to know what it would become.
Maybe I could simply begin.
And that small shift changed everything.
I started playing with the materials. I watched what happened when one mark met another. I changed things. I made mistakes. I followed ideas that had not been part of the plan.
At some point, I stopped asking myself whether I was doing it correctly.
I was simply inside it.
Creating.
Curious.
Having fun.
Creativity becomes very small when we decide too early what it is allowed to become.
We imagine the perfect result before we have even started.
Then we compare every imperfect beginning to that finished picture in our minds.
It should look like this.
It should be better.
I should already know how.
I should not make mistakes.
And without realising it, the thing we are trying to create becomes a test.
That day, one sentence turned the test back into an adventure.
What if it becomes more beautiful than the original?
When I look at these photographs now, I see much more than an afternoon spent learning how to paint.
I also see a version of myself I was slowly becoming.
At the time, I had recently lost my father. I was not thinking about becoming an author. Nouve House did not exist. The Year Seven did not exist.
There was no grand plan connecting one chapter to the next.
Life rarely works that neatly.
But I have come to believe that we are often being shaped by experiences long before we understand why they matter.
Years later, the canvas would become a page.
Paint would become words.
And I would find myself facing the same mysterious emptiness again.
A story does not exist yet.
A character has not spoken yet.
An idea has no guarantee that it will work.
But somewhere along the way, I had already learned another way to approach an empty space.
Not with:
What if I get it wrong?
But with curiosity.
What could this become if I stopped trying to control it before it had the chance to exist?
I thought I had gone there to learn how to paint a lion.
Maybe I did.
But perhaps I was also learning something else.
How to trust the beginning before I could see the ending.
How to leave enough room for surprise.
And how sometimes, the most beautiful thing we can do for an idea is simply stop telling it exactly what it has to become.