Letter from Lisbon: On Routine, Fear, and Small Beginnings

Back in Lisbon, the holidays already feel like a breath I just exhaled — gone too quickly, leaving only the faint memory of stillness. Tomorrow, I return to work, to the office, to routines that both protect me and suffocate me.

These days away gave me space to dream again. I came back with wishes — to paint more, to grow, to start something meaningful. But wishes alone are light, almost too fragile. What I fear is whether I’ve prepared myself for the sacrifices: a full day of work, and then, at night, if there’s still strength left, to sit in front of the canvas.

Some days I feel like I am on a small boat, floating without a compass. I know land is near, but I can’t yet see the shore. I want to begin a new painting, but I don’t know which one or for what purpose. I want to start a new project, but I don’t know where to place my hands. Since childhood I’ve grown up with Nike’s “Just Do It” echoing in my head. I believe in it. I know the hardest step is to start. But starting, without knowing what, is its own weight.

It is late at night as I write this, and I know I could have been painting — but I didn’t. Instead, I sat here, drained by this little office. My office is also my studio, the same chair where I spend my workdays is where I sit to paint at night. Perhaps that’s why it feels heavy. I feel an urgent need to separate my worlds: work from creation, duties from dreams. A clear space might bring a clear mind. Maybe it’s time to clean, to throw some things away, to move others around, to create room for new ideas.

Another thought keeps haunting me: my weakness with drawing. I’ve always traced the main lines before painting, and it works for me. My art is about expression, about brushstrokes, about color and intensity, not about the perfect accuracy of proportions. Still, I can’t help but envy those who can sketch from imagination, who can summon entire faces out of nothing but memory and vision. I know it’s not my strength, and I’m not afraid to admit it. Yet part of me wants to practice, slowly, maybe fifteen or thirty minutes in the morning before work. A little discipline, like my Duolingo streak — almost 800 days of Japanese now, without even realizing how it became part of me. If I could bring the same persistence into sketching, who knows what might happen in a few years?

I’ve been painting for almost four years. I didn’t plan to, it just took me. Now, I can’t stop. I don’t know if this path will make me a “full-time artist,” or if my paintings will ever find their rightful place. But I do know that when I paint, I stop thinking. I enter that trance, that meditation where everything disappears — fears, work, even time. That alone is reason enough not to give up.

So, I tell myself: trust the process. Clean the room. Pick up the brush. Start small. Let each line and each color find its way. The rest will come, even if today I don’t know how.