I'll be honest with you about something.
The Within series is the one I struggle with most.
Not because I don't understand it — I live here more than anywhere else. But because what lives in this layer is hard to put on a canvas without flinching. The Fire paintings come out bold and declarative. The Bloom paintings have momentum, something opening. Within is different. Within asks you to stop. To sit. To feel the full weight of everything you've been carrying without immediately doing something about it.
That's harder to paint than fire. And it's harder to live than most people admit.
I spend a lot of time in this layer. More than is probably comfortable to say out loud.
It's not depression. It's not a crisis. It's something quieter and more complicated than either of those words. It's the particular state of an individual who has built something real — a life, a work, a self — and still sometimes sits in the middle of all of it and feels the weight of how much it cost. The accumulation. The things you held when no one was watching. The version of yourself that kept going when keeping going was the only option, and never got to stop long enough to ask how she was doing.
Within is for them. For me. For you, if you know what I mean.
Here's what I've learned about going inward — the real kind, not the bubble bath kind:
You have to let yourself arrive there.
Most of us resist it. We stay busy because busy is safer than still. We fill the silence with noise because silence has things in it we're not sure we're ready to hear. We call it productivity. We call it being responsible. We call it taking care of everyone who needs us. And some of it is that. But some of it is avoidance dressed in very practical clothing.
The moment you actually stop — really stop, no phone, no list, no next thing — something comes up. It's been waiting. It's patient. It has nowhere else to be.
That's the vulnerability part. The part nobody warns you about. You thought solitude was going to feel like rest, and instead it feels like finally sitting across the table from everything you've been outrunning. All the feelings you didn't have time for. The grief that got postponed. The question you're afraid to answer. The version of yourself you haven't checked in on in months.
It's uncomfortable. And it's the most honest thing you can do.
What you find on the other side of that discomfort — if you stay, if you don't pick up your phone, if you let yourself actually feel it — is something I don't have a clean word for.
Strength is too simple. Empowerment sounds like a bumper sticker. What it actually feels like is more like: oh. I'm still here.
After everything. After the hard year, the hard season, the hard decade. After the thing you weren't sure you'd get through. You got through it. You're sitting here right now, in the quiet, and you're intact. More than intact — you know things now that you couldn't have known any other way. The kind of knowing that lives in the body, not the mind. The kind that makes you steadier than you were before, even if you don't look any different from the outside.
That's what I'm reaching for in the Within paintings. That specific texture of being worn and strong at the same time. The depth that only comes from having been somewhere difficult and stayed present for it.
I haven't found the perfect Within painting yet. The one that holds all of this without explaining it.
I'm not worried about that. Some paintings take longer to arrive than others. And honestly — the searching is part of it. The Within layer isn't something you paint your way through quickly. It resists. It asks for time. It refuses to resolve on your timeline, which is, of course, the whole point.
I'll know it when it comes. It will probably arrive on a gray day when I wasn't trying to make anything in particular. When I just showed up and let the canvas have whatever I was carrying that morning.
That's how the honest ones come.
In the meantime: if you're in your own Within layer right now — in the uncertainty, in the weight of it, in the sitting-with — I just want to say this.
You don't have to come out of it faster. You don't have to have something to show for it yet. You don't have to be further along than you are.
You've been carrying a lot.
And you're still standing.
That counts for more than you know.
— Kim