She Asked for the Story. I Lied.

Her wallet was already out.

Ready.

All she wanted was the story behind the painting, and I froze like someone had just asked me to strip naked in public.

"Is there inspiration behind this piece?"

Such a simple question.

The kind every artist gets asked at every awkward conversation where someone tries to understand why you do what you do.

I looked at her. Looked at the painting. Looked at the money she was willing to spend.

And lied.

"No."

She walked away.

I watched her leave, knowing I'd just chosen silence over rent money.

Hiding instead of connection.

The safety of being misunderstood felt easier than the risk of being seen, so I took it.

Because the truth was too personal for a DC vending show.

The truth was that painting came from months of sitting across from a therapist, finally naming patterns I'd been carrying since childhood.

Recognizing how I kept choosing the same kind of pain in different packaging.

The slow, uncomfortable work of untangling myself from cycles I didn't even know I was trapped in.

A breakup that cracked me open enough to see what I'd been avoiding.

How do you explain that to a stranger with a wallet?

This was maybe six months after my last therapy session. After I'd done the hard work of looking at myself without flinching. After I'd learned words for things I'd been feeling my whole life but couldn't name.

I was finally free from patterns that had been running my relationships, my choices, my entire way of moving through the world.

But I didn't know how to talk about it yet.

Didn't know how to say "this painting is about the moment I realized I'd been choosing emotionally unavailable partners because that felt familiar" without sounding like a walking therapy session.

I didn't know how to explain that colors on canvas sometimes hold truths we can't speak out loud.

So when she asked for the story, I panicked.

Said no and watched her walk away with her money and her curiosity intact.

I was still learning that healing stories are the ones worth sharing.

This was 2014. Nine years of carrying that moment like a stone in my chest. Nine years of wondering what would have happened if I'd been brave enough to trust her with the truth.

What would have happened if I'd said: 'This painting is about learning to love differently than I was taught.’

Would she have understood?

Would she have seen herself in that painting the way I was just learning to see myself?

I'll never know.

But I know this... that moment taught me something about the cost of hiding from your own work.

The cost of treating your deepest truths like secrets too dangerous to share.

Fast forward to 2023.

My stepfather is dying of cancer in the Dominican Republic.

I was in the U.S., watching him slowly fade through pixelated WhatsApp calls.

The man who first showed me magic was possible when I was three years old, watching him paint like he was having conversations with God.

Even dying, even thousands of miles away, he could still light up a screen. Making everyone on the call laugh until their sides hurt. Then he'd hang up and the laughter would disappear with him, leaving the rest of us staring at our phones in sudden silence, wondering what had just happened.

That's presence.

And… that's what I was losing.

A mentor I hadn't seen in person in twenty-five years since my mom divorced him. The person who saw artist in me before I dared use that word. The voice that had been whispering "you can do this" across decades and distance every time I doubted myself.

From his bed in another country, through a phone screen, he gave me the clearest advice he'd ever given me:

"You have to develop your style. Pick something and stick with it. You can do this."

He saw something in me I still couldn't see.

But there was something else he'd been telling me for years, something I'd been too stubborn to hear: 'You're an artiste, be one. You need to share the story for them to get it.'

I'd always resist and he'd shake his head like I was missing the point.

'The story is what makes it art, not just pretty colors.'

He knew I was hiding from the very thing that would set my work free.

Three weeks after his funeral, I painted.

First piece after his death. Abstract. Emotional. Colors that felt like the inside of my chest during those final WhatsApp calls.

When I finished, I couldn't make sense of what I'd created. Just shapes and movement and something that felt true without being literal.

I called my sister.

"What do you see?"

She looked for maybe a minute. "I see a door. A red door."

I'd painted a door without knowing I was painting a door.

Red like blood, like birth, like the color of being fully alive.

Once she said it, I couldn't unsee it.

The next day I took a walk and asked God why my hands had painted a door when I thought I was just painting grief. What was my unconscious trying to tell me now?

Then I looked it up.

Red doors. Symbols of safety. Places of refuge.

In the Underground Railroad, a red door meant sanctuary. Meant you could rest. Meant you'd found people who understood what it meant to be running toward freedom.

I sat with that connection between my therapy breakthrough and this painted door.

Both about finding safety and recognizing patterns. The courage to step through doors when you can't see what's waiting on the other side.

Art has always been my red door. When the world becomes too much, I go there to process what I can't yet speak. I always leave feeling held, even when I don't remember what I was working through.

The woman at that DC show ten years ago wasn't asking me to perform my pain for her entertainment.

She was asking me to trust her with the story that made the painting possible.

She was offering to meet me in the place where art and healing intersect.

And I said no because I thought my story was too complicated and personal.

But here's what I'm learning... the pieces that touch people most are the ones that come from the hardest places.

Not because suffering makes better art, but because truth does.

And truth lives in the spaces we’re most afraid to show... until we do.

We're living in times when creatives are being called to the front lines. Not to make pretty things that match people's sofas, but to be witnesses who translate the untranslatable. Who paint what it feels like to heal in real time.

Abstract expressionism was born after World War II. Artists pouring trauma and transformation onto canvas because traditional forms couldn't hold what they'd experienced.

The chaos.

The beauty.

The terrible wonder of rebuilding yourself after everything familiar has been destroyed.

We are the red doors for a world that's forgotten how to rest.

We’re the caretakers of this world.

The translators.

We take inherited pain and turn it into art that heals.

My stepfather saw this calling in me before I could see it myself.

Now I see it everywhere. In artists afraid to share their healing stories. In creatives who think their breakthroughs are too personal for public consumption.

I'm learning not to hide from my own work anymore. Not to apologize for the stories that shaped me or pretend my healing isn't also my gift.

That woman nine years ago was ready to buy my breakthrough.

She just needed me to trust her with it.

“Porte Rouge (Red Door)” Acrylic on 16×20 canvas. Artwork by Tarra Lu