I started drawing when I was a baby. Like most of us, I’m sure it was just scribbles on napkins and used paper plates in the beginning. I’m not sure when it changed from being the chicken scratch of a child to art, but it happened somewhere along the way. Somewhere, control and execution became important—spiritual, really—and I believe that’s when the art was born, leaving the limitations of the doodle species and entering the artistic one.

Somewhere it evolved, and I followed it wherever it took me, like a single molecule in a river. Unable to stop, it soon became the driving force of my life; that uncontrollable river powered my existence, hurling energy and emotion through my body. I sailed. I was a ship on the smoothest waters; ironclad gates fell to my sides until nothing else existed. I saw things, I felt things, I knew things—but none of them were real. They were all fragments of my mind, as I am of yours.

Here the river turned. I must have been 13 or 14 when I realized I couldn’t stop—when my body left the confinements of a child’s and grew into something more. It did not grow into that of a woman’s; it grew into art.