This painting is about breaking myself down to the bones—stripping away the layers I had built around myself in order to finally confront who I was underneath them.

I made this work during a period when nearly every part of my life was changing at once. I was becoming a full-time caregiver, graduating from college, navigating the isolation and uncertainty of COVID, and trying to understand what it meant to become an adult while so much of my identity was changing around me. I felt completely lost. I was also battling a deep depression that made even the things I once loved feel difficult to reach.

Joy began to feel undeserved. I struggled to allow myself to rest, create, or do things simply because they made me happy. I had spent so much of my life putting other people's needs before my own partly because caring for others had become my responsibility, but also because I had learned to measure my own value through what I could provide.

For a long time, I believed I could only be loved if I was useful.

That realization became an important part of this painting. I began questioning how much of myself had been shaped by responsibility, expectation, survival, and the need to be needed. What remains when those things are taken away? Who am I when I am not taking care of someone, accomplishing something, or making myself useful to another person?

The act of stripping myself down became a form of reflection. Rather than trying to create a more polished version of myself, I wanted to confront the parts that were uncomfortable, vulnerable, exhausted, and uncertain. The painting became a way of sitting with myself without asking myself to perform a role.

This work is ultimately about learning that self-investment is not selfish and that my worth does not depend on how much I can give to other people. It is about rebuilding a relationship with myself after spending so much time believing that everyone else had to come first.

I was trying to find myself beneath all the layers—and, for the first time, understand that there was value in the person underneath them even when I had nothing to offer.