Underpainting: The First Layer of a Life Told in 12 Pieces

Everything hurts today. I don’t have a softer way to say it, and I’m not going to try to make it more acceptable than it is. My body is struggling, and I am still waiting on my wheelchair—waiting since January—which has made basic movement and basic living far more difficult than they should be.

I was born a “blue baby,” and I have been sick my entire life. Illness is not something that arrived later for me—it has been present from the beginning. Over the years, it has taken different forms, different labels, different crises, but it has always been there underneath everything.

At one point, I was moved across the country on doctors’ orders in an effort to prolong my life due to a severe lung condition that developed from mold exposure—hypersensitivity pneumonitis, also known as farmer’s lung. I was also living with evidence of a heart condition and having had heart surgery that I was repeatedly told I should not have survived. But I did. I kept going. I kept living through things I was told would have ended me.

And then I arrived here, expecting continuity of care and stability, only to face something else entirely: dismissal of illness, loss and deletion of medical records and diagnoses, and a pattern of being unheard in systems that were supposed to help. Case management support has fallen away. One by one, the structures that were meant to support care have dropped out, and I am left trying to navigate all of it alone.

There is no simple way to carry that kind of experience. It is not just illness—it is also the weight of not being believed, not being documented properly, and not being supported when it matters most.

And still, I painted a little today.

What exists right now is only the underpainting. The first layer. The structure beneath what will become a 12-piece series—an autobiography told through fine art. These early marks are not the finished work, but they are the beginning of something I consider deeply necessary. A way of mapping what has been lived when so much of it has been fragmented, dismissed, or erased in other forms.

This series is, in many ways, how I am trying to stay present inside my own life. A way of holding onto it. A way of making sure it is witnessed somewhere, even when I feel unseen elsewhere. It is not only artistic work—it is survival translated into image. A record that cannot be deleted.

If I am not able to complete every piece in the way I intend, the story will still exist in what has already been created. The beginning is already here. The truth is already in motion. These underpaintings are part of that permanence.

I pray daily for strength to continue—to see this through, to keep building each layer, to keep going through everything that is still unfolding.

For now, this is where I am: at the beginning layers, still here, still creating, still telling the truth as it comes through me in paint.