I have always been a fine line, detail-oriented, black and white, type of artist so I avoided paint like the plague growing up. It's lack of structure felt more like chaos than creativity to me. Flash forward to me strolling the halls of my community college, visiting my cousin's art class while I waited for my other class to start, and the teacher insisted I join the class and pick up a brush. I can't thank that teacher enough. Over the next few months, I made my way to that classroom to pass boredom, to see my cousin, to listen to art history, but what I was really doing was falling in love with painting. Blending new colors became like an artistic science experiment that bred life in ways I never thought was possible. I realized colors had no restrictions and neither did a canvas. Without me even grasping what was happening, I was learning the true meaning of art. That art is borderless and bounded, free flowing and structured, anything and everything, all at once. I was seeing the other side of its glory that I had cast off as fingerpainting child's play and chromatic nonsense. Art was trying to teach me even back then to love every part of myself by showing me every part of itself was beautiful. The only thing that changed was my own way of thinking and what a beautiful lesson that was indeed. Painting was always beautiful, it was my own judgment of it that lessened it in my eyes, and regardless of that judgmental mindset it was still beautiful the moment I truly opened my eyes too it. Our perception shapes things, molds them to fit our own misguided beliefs, but art has a way of ignoring your criticism and allowing you to love it in your own due time anyway. We should all be like art, so steadfast in our own beauty that we allow people to misjudge us and not take it on as our own truth, and so accepting that as soon as they change their mindset we welcome them with open arms.