I’m grateful for drowning because it taught me how to swim to find the light
I’m grateful for drowning because it taught me how to swim to find the light
acrylic and resin on canvas
48 x 60 in / handmade oak wood frame
2025 I made this painting during a really difficult time in my life. Somewhere in the middle of it, I stopped feeling like a victim of what was happening to me. I started to feel resilient. I began to see the role I was playing in my own suffering.
There was this growing sense of, I’ve got myself. I can do this.
I had already been through things I thought would break me, and somehow I was still here. I had drowned before. I knew I could swim.
That’s where the title came from: I’m Grateful for Drowning.
Not because I’m grateful for the pain itself, but because I began to see what surviving it had given me. I trusted myself differently. Even when I couldn’t see the way out yet, I knew I could keep moving until I found the light.
Unfortunately, while I was falling apart, my painting decided to as well. After it dried, I covered the painting in resin. But the resin didn’t cure properly. The entire surface was covered in bubbles. Everyone told me to sell it anyway. I couldn’t. So I put it away for six months, knowing I would come back to it when the time was right.
About six months later, I decided to sand the entire surface down. I spent nearly 20 hours sanding it by hand. I would wake up at 6 AM and sand before teaching yoga, then come back at the end of the day and keep going.
Crazy? Maybe.
You can see in some places, I sanded all the way through the paint. But at that point, the painting was more than something I was trying to finish. It was more than just a piece of art I had to sell.
I had lost a relationship, friendships, and a lot of confidence in myself during the time I was making it. I didn’t know how to feel better, how to show up for the people i loved, how to show up on social media and my business. There were moments when I genuinely didn't know how I was going to keep going.
So I kept sanding.
Little by little, the painting changed. And so did I.
and then then most beautiful thing happened...
When hits light touches the painting, the resin throws ripples of reflected light onto the walls and floor around it, almost like sunlight moving across the bottom of the ocean.
So the painting went through the same lesson I did. The words written underneath the painting says “I’m grateful for drowning because it taught me how to swim to fight the light”…
The part I thought was ruined became the part that made it beautiful.
