5 year acknowledgement

I made this triptych for my office at my old job. It features one of my favorite lines by Emily Dickinson from one of my favorite poems: "Each life converges to some center, expressed or still". Seeing this on my wall every day helped me stay grounded in my true passions and values amidst a job that continually encroached on my life and pressured me to conform to a workaholic mindset.

When I was laid off and had to clean out my office, I carefully stacked these canvases in a garbage sack and stuck them in my closet when I got home. There was a lot to process in those early days -- figuring out what to do with these was the least of it. And honestly, the wall space in my house is limited and I wasn't sure where to hang them even if I wanted to. They've been there ever since.

Tomorrow marks the 5 year anniversary of that day. Or, as I choose to call it (and have written about here before): Brittney Liberation Day. So much about my life has changed since that day, so much of it for the significantly better. So much about me has changed, too, also for the significantly better. And I've been thinking about this quote a lot this week, both in what it meant to me then and what it means to me now.

Which is probably why I pulled them out of the closet today, like clearing out my old work clothes last week to pass them on to someone who can use them. I didn't even think of it in terms of this 5 year mark, it just happened organically, as if I subconsciously knew it was time.

I've been contemplating a piece for the entryway for awhile, and I had the idea a few days ago that these would be a good foundation for that new work. I'm still mulling over how I want to repurpose them, but in the meantime, I'm going to hang them up in the entry way. Not as a commemoration of that old life, but as an acknowledgement of the personal truth that helped me create my new one.