That Big Kid Ellen #29: Paint a self-portrait
I’m currently two weeks into a 12-week creative program. The program isn’t focused on a specific creative expression (we have writers, print-makers, designers, small business owners, and everything in between), but rather its focus is on uncovering the parts of ourselves that are blocking us from freely and confidently creating.
As our creative excavator/leader says:
“You’re not here to dream of a make-believe future when you ‘have enough time,’ throw wistful side-eye at creative people, and die nobly with your gifts trapped inside.”
Just in these first days, I’ve dug into a heavily-internalized belief structure around not being a creative person (as I lay out in this piece) and how this belief holds me hostage. The techniques I’ve used in the past to keep my creative side at bay were perfectionism and procrastination, a darling yet deadly couple. I tamped down my own creative intuition, not allowing anything to escape the twists and turns of my highly doubtful thoughts.
But, as I have come to learn, being creative and being seen as a creative person is so much more important to me than being seen as perfect or put-together or organized. I even felt inspired to make a little doodle about it!
I fully subscribe to the belief that creative ideas are fleeting, and all they want to do is find a human partner to make them a reality (concept by Elizabeth Gilbert in “Big Magic”). I’ve had so many ideas of concepts I’ve wanted to create, but I’ve rarely allowed myself to try them out, thinking that they had to be “successful” (what does success even look like?!). I want to start creating more of my ideas, irregardless of outcome.
Some examples of things that I’ve allowed myself to create without any expectations of success were a “fake” travel agency website called Y’all Be Tripping (really proud of that one 😂), a set of bodily functions poems that I wrote to my husband, and an entire business plan for a dating app called The Wallflower Hub (sorry, I already bought the domain). These were all ideas that popped into my head and gave me such electric creative energy, I didn’t want it to fade. Instead of overthinking how they could fail, I dove into each project and gave it my best shot at making them real.
It’s along this train of thought that I knew my next post had to be this one, a self-portrait. As I was completing other things on the list, I kept thinking about the self-portrait one. How I really wanted to do it, how I had so many ideas for it, how it would be challenging but rewarding, how it could fail.
A common topic of conversation in my therapy and coaching sessions in the back half of 2021 was self-image, specifically how my body has changed so much in the last 2 years that I literally don’t recognize myself in the mirror sometimes. After spending 10+ years in toxic restrictive-eating and binge-eating cycles (with some over-exercising sprinkled in for extra suffering), I’ve finally found myself in a healthy relationship with food. Which was *not* an easy thing to do, given my own history and my family’s history with food. But, this means that my body is now different, and I’m much more aware of her as well.
When I would restrict my calories or do multiple workouts in a day, I was turning an extremely cold shoulder to my body, effectively drowning out what she needed and wanted. I ignored her pleas for rest and recovery and instead went on long runs or did back-to-back Peloton rides (I once did 4 hours in one sitting). I ignored her urges to eat peanut M&Ms and drink orange juice and instead made protein smoothies with chia seeds and kale.
I’ve already discussed how I got out of these unhealthy habits — I didn’t move for about 18 months. I had traumatized myself so much through exercise that every time I would go on a run, I would immediately start crying and have to turn around. In those 18 months, I took the time to actually listen to my body. At first, all she wanted was rest. She wanted to do nothing except be held and be loved.
Then, she became sad. Really sad. And that was hard, but it was also okay. She was still strong and she had some great people to support her.
And most recently, she’s become a little restless. When this happened, I thought I could start up again with running or some workouts from “before,” but I quickly learned that she was done with endurance sports (at least for now). All she wanted to do was move and breathe. So I ended up in yoga classes. Hot yoga classes, actually.
I could write a whole freaking blog post on why I hate that yoga is the thing that got my body moving again, but let’s just say that while I’m bitter about it, yoga has truly done some magical healing, both of my body and mind.
Because I’ve been spending so much time listening to my body, I’ve also had so many ideas on how to depict her in a self-portrait. It’s actually a thought I had well before I even started this blog. And I’m really excited to share what I have created.
But first, some inspiration from little kid Ellen!
The first self-portrait is a classic and a true family favorite. It has been hanging in the upstairs hallway of my childhood house for over 20 years. I painted it in second grade and it’s just too good. Also, it’s the main inspiration for my new self-portrait.
I seriously (and sarcastically) love everything about it. The hair: lacking any depth but somehow still full of texture. The nose: how did I even know how to make a nose look so good?! The eyes: green, yes, but not exactly the right shade. The outfit: an exaggeration of my purple snowsuit and pink gloves that I wore all the time. The hat: placed lightly on top of my head instead of being burrowed down around my skull like it was in reality. The purple paint stain on top of the snowball: a reminder that I was not worried about perfection back then and mistakes are a part of the process.
Shortly after I painted that masterpiece, my family took a trip to Six Flags Great America, as was our tradition every summer. My mom’s company usually rented a pavilion for a company party, so we were there a lot. And that same year, I had someone else draw a portrait of me.
Well, more like a caricature.
Honestly, this is literally what I looked like at that age. The artist was spot on. But for a young girl, this broke me. I was embarrassed by my huge teeth, my glasses, my abnormally long fingers (“but I didn’t even do that when I posed, mom!”). I hated this drawing so much that I hid it in my room for years, not letting anyone see it other than my family.
I absolutely love it now. It embodies what I was all about at that age, and I look at it with unadulterated admiration. That girl is cute!! She’s got big, hazel eyes that peek through some trendy (for the time) glasses. She’s got on her sassy Tweety Bird sweatshirt (the artist did a loose interpretation on this one), letting everyone know that she ain’t got time for their drama. And she’s throwing up that peace sign — how absolutely cool for the 90s.
I know that I drew a lot more self-portraits throughout the years, but the most recent one, and another favorite, came in the 9th grade. It was created in the last art class that I ever signed up for, before choosing math and science and sports over drawing and painting and writing (why couldn’t I have it all?!). The assignment was simple but fun — take a picture of yourself, divide it into twelve squares, and then draw the photo using the grid to guide you as you reproduce each square as a drawing. It appealed to both my creative and logical minds. And it’s a freaking masterpiece.
I loved this drawing back then, and I love it even more now. It legit looks exactly like how I looked back then, down to the little mini basketball that I used to carry around and use as a stress reliever when needed.
I captured the swoop of hair on my neck from my heavy ponytail perfectly (I always had so much hair!), the piece of a pair of black tights that I cut up and used as a choker around my neck, and the outline of a Scotty dog that would appear on my cheek when I was flushed after a basketball game. The words around the edges a bit unnecessary, but I clearly wanted to add more creativity to this piece, almost like I predicted it would be the end of an era.
I started to carry around a belief around this same time that I couldn’t create “new” things — that I could only reproduce something that I was looking at. I think that’s why this assignment of drawing a photograph appealed to me. It felt creative but also logical. This belief grew inside of me so much that every time I’ve tried to create something since, I’ve had to have a guide photo or some sort of inspiration photo to base it on.
Now we come to the adult Ellen, big kid Ellen, and how she wants to represent herself in a self-portrait. My first thought was to reproduce a photograph of myself because I thought that I could do that best. But something else, another idea, kept appearing in my mind. It had bold colors — “vibrant” is my word for 2022 and I’m really trying to lean into it. I also kept seeing something a bit abstract — I am more than just how I look. I also thought about how I wanted it to be representative of the work I’ve done to take care of my body, listening to her and loving her. This couldn’t all be captured in a photo, so I created something totally new.
I know art is up for interpretation, but I’d love to share a bit more about this piece with you and how it came together. I took inspiration from my 2nd-grade self-portrait and chose to depict myself in the same position, but doing something that I love doing now — yoga. I really can’t stress enough how weird it is that I love doing yoga, but it’s true so I’m not going to deny it. This specific pose is the last one of the 26 postures that I go through in the Bikram yoga series — Kapalbhati in Vajrasana. It’s a breathing pose, and it’s my favorite.
I also knew that I wanted to pay tribute to the stretch marks that have appeared on my belly this last year. So often women are told that stretch marks are flaws, and we are bombarded with airbrushed ideals of what our stomachs and thighs should look like. I had a handful of them crop up, angry red, across my lower stomach. I would stare at them in the mirror, raging at myself for letting them appear, begging for them to disappear.
But then I realized that they kind of make a cool pattern, and wouldn’t it be even cooler to copy that pattern and make them into art? I wanted to reclaim my stretch marks! They are the pattern that you see around my body, and they are the chaos around the calm middle. The chaos remains, but I have accepted it more so than I ever have before.
I see this portrait as imperfect, with so many things that I want to change about it. But there it is, published on the internet. What a triumph! To share something that is imperfect is such a feat for me, and such a win for my creative side. (I will note that at some point the color of my torso in this painting looked a lot like a pickle, and I am glad that I changed it to its current color 😅).
I am making a promise to myself to create more imperfect things, to love my body as an imperfect thing, and to share these things more throughout this year on this blog. Imperfection for the win!
