Easy to Love

In February of 2020, a man who wasn’t my husband told me I was “an easy person to love” as I sat in wide-eyed silence beside him at a bar. Exactly one year later, I decided to paint a self-portrait.

These two events were not connected, but they are anyway.

This impulse to paint a self-portrait would have made more sense if I had ever in my life painted the likeness of a human being on paper. In fact, I had hardly ever painted anything at all, having taken up an extremely fair-weather interest in watercolors only six months before, deep into the summer of 2020.

In the first days of the pandemic, I had reached almost instinctively for any art supplies at my immediate disposal, which turned out to be a hefty inventory of hand-me-down embroidery floss and a few scraps of muslin. I repurposed a pair of kinked eyebrow scissors, unearthed what I thought were embroidery needles, and compulsively stitched raw-but-competent expressions of the loneliness that settled on me—on many—like a leaden blanket.

When the pandemic hit, my husband and I had watched our one-way international flights get canceled, our intended April relocation from New York to Paris for my job suspended like a helium balloon lost in the rafters of a gymnasium, string trailing but unreachable. From March through mid-summer, we were practically barricaded in our 400-square-foot apartment in Harlem, braced at the leading edge of COVID’s advance across the U.S.

Then in July, our pleading lease extensions finally, really, seriously-this-time ran out, and our visas went belly up with no chance of renewal until the French border reopened to Americans. Unable to sign a new lease in case that did happen, my husband found us two off-season vacation rentals, first in Vermont and then Maine, through the fall. We packed up a borrowed car with our three cats and as much of our lives as we could cram around their carriers and abandoned the rest of our things in the basement of our apartment building. One item that made the nomadic cut was a half-decent palette of watercolors I had ordered off Amazon in order to add color to some of the muslin I’d embroidered. I had found layering the splotchy backgrounds on the fabric kind of entrancing, and it put a bug in my head to try watercolors proper when we got to Vermont.

By then, our marriage had entered a kind of delicate holding pattern, kept aloft by heartrending therapy sessions and the hope that when we could indeed start our lives in France, all of this would fade like a bruise. This, of course, was what we had discovered under the rock flipped by the emotional affair I had had with the man who told me I was easy to love. Up until then, my husband had felt that our marriage had been working perfectly well, thank you. The fact that I had told him I felt a growing distance between us, that I felt both alone and somehow crowded out by him in our relationship didn’t seem to register until we had passed a crisis point.

Perhaps embarrassingly, the full revelation of what had developed between me and this other man only occurred for me in that wide-eyed moment at a bar a few weeks before the world ground to a halt. Until then, it had been easy enough to tell myself that I had a fast and intimate friend, someone with whom I enjoyed the rare gift of the space to be my biggest, most unadulterated self. Why simply talking with him felt like being offered an oxygen tank while free-diving, I didn’t dare ask. Because either I was ignorant to all the ways I was drowning in my life, or I was being a selfish, duplicitous partner. Or both.

In any case, the implications were unbearable. I refused to stare them down until my husband’s increasingly pained and angry questions matched pitch with the urgency of a world working itself up to tumble down as the pandemic rolled like a blackout through New York City. And though it sounds almost hyperbolic now, in March of 2020, it was easy to catch the almost giddy, contagious thought that anyone could be dead tomorrow because more and more people suddenly were. There was a leveling to be done. An airing. And there was not a single second longer to wait to do it.

As restaurants were shuttering and offices started mandated remote work—but, surreally, before anyone even knew to wear a mask—this man and I met up one last time. The premise was simple enough: to meet, to eat takeout, to say exactly a lifetime’s worth of everything, and then to excise ourselves from one another’s lives with one blunt cut.

It felt like a funeral.

***

I took up watercolors via YouTube tutorials as my husband and I settled into five weeks at a wholesome, unpopulated ski town in Vermont. I don’t know if this is true year-round, but at least in August, Vermont has the most incredibly zaftig, storybook clouds. I found myself pulling the car over to the side of the shoestring highway just to gaze at the clouds like I’d been locked in a basement since childhood. Truly, an ideal place to start experimenting with watercolors. And probably mushrooms.

I followed the painting tutorials for hours at a time—mostly florals and invented landscapes—on the covered front porch of our little townhouse. I would crowd my paper, supplies, and laptop on a tiny side table, a podcast squawking out of my phone while the muted tutorial played on my computer. Usually, I had a glass of wine or local cider lost in the mess, tempting me to wash my brushes in it. (While I managed to never swish a brush in my drink, I did, on one occasion, sip my cloudy brush water.)

The roof of the porch was, strangely, made of plexiglass, and on clear days it became a noisy, grotesque insect detainment camp. Every kind of fly—black, butter, crane, dragon—slammed its fragile, tremulous body against the clear plastic, striving for the sky until it would drop out of midair, dead or nearly from exhaustion. Clever birds would perch nearby, surveying the impotent skyward traffic jam, and take turns swooping in. Often, I would have to slough a small pile of desiccated, glitter-winged insects off my seat cushion from one day to the next.

Unsurprisingly for someone who had never seriously attempted any kind of 2D visual art, I wasn’t great. While I had always fancied myself an “arts-and-craftsy” person, any foray I’d ever attempted into drawing or painting just felt so much more effortful and so much less rewarding than, say, making jewelry or doing cross-stitch or playing with clay. It seems obvious to me now that this was my toxic perfectionism and hypervigilant self-image management at work, but back then it made sense to tell myself that I just wasn’t good at that kind of art and stop trying.

Perhaps because my self-conception had so thoroughly unraveled in the ongoing dismantling and renovation of my marriage and my own therapy, I had more patience for my initial utter mediocrity at watercolors than I otherwise would have. Or perhaps the meditative nature of applying translucent layers of paint to damp paper, watching the colors fuse, bloom, and crawl unpredictably, relinquishing precise control of the final image, provided my mind with some much-needed respite from the campaign of terror I was waging on it hourly. Painting offered the perfect liminal ground between necessitating engagement in the present moment and requiring zero expectations of who I was “supposed” to show up as in said moment. Because my grip on who, exactly, I even was had become distressingly loose.

***

On the occasion I spent the longest number of consecutive hours with the man I had convinced myself I absolutely, definitely, obviously wasn’t falling in love with, we took a long, indulgent walk through the city. It was a jarringly pleasant day in December of 2019, just two months before the night at the bar that broke the game for good and three before we ceased all contact. On our walk, he told me about a traumatic near-engagement in his mid-20s, an event that would shape his wary, arm’s-length approach to relationships for the next decade of his life.

Already deep into the easy, confessional intimacy of our friendship, I was shocked this story hadn’t come up sooner and said so. He responded that I hadn’t rooted around much for information about his previous relationships, which was accurate. I said that I thought people generally shared as much as they were comfortable telling you once a sensitive topic was broached, and further questioning would constitute prying.

“I don’t think that’s true,” he said, frowning.

We were strolling—as much as New Yorkers are capable of the act—along the river, and at his response, I felt my buoyant mood flicker in the chilly wind of shame. Here I was, basking in his curiosity and attentiveness, and the implication that I was failing to reciprocate upset me. Specifically, it upset the misguided, fear-driven part of me that believed I was responsible for micro-managing the pleasure others took in my company.

It was the same part of me that over the past nine years had backed down, again and again, from anything I said or did if it upset my husband—or if I suspected it would upset him—who, for his part, reacted to any expression of me that wasn’t warm, pleasant, and supportive like it was something I was doing at him. I often felt like a promise that was either broken or upheld. Deviation from relational happiness was betrayal. There was no space for my humanity and no room to grow. Eventually, I had pared my self-expression down to the safest, most comfortable version of myself, repressing the exhaust of resentment I was emitting from the effort.

I had grown up almost overcrowded by nonspecific affection from my extended family. The philosophy seemed to be: Why do you need to know someone if you already love them? Or maybe it was simply that most of them just had a lot more in common with one another than I felt I did, because I definitely felt “outside” it all, especially as I got older.

Every jabby comment or eye-roll about my dedicatedly nerdy, self-serious personality, “frivolous” esoteric and artistic interests, or apparently alienating ambition I received as an indictment of the parts of myself I actually liked most. So I believed I was an obnoxious know-it-all. A chilly elitist. An aloof snob. And worst—an overreacher. I was raised by a crush of warm, loving, generous people who didn’t understand a single thing that was important to me. And I felt debilitatingly guilty for wanting to be seen, known, and loved differently.

As I reenacted, to a more subtle and insidious extent, that same dynamic with my husband, I told myself over and over that if I wasn’t being treated how I needed, then I just had to deserve it harder. Be a better partner. Be more attentive. More giving. More thoughtful and anticipatory. I just had to merit the kind of love I was asking for, and I would get it.

Yes, I hear myself now, too.

I've become someone who feels most loved when I receive laser-focused, bespoke attention—when I feel like someone wants to turn me inside out. Given that this other man’s communication style could be best described as “star prosecutor performs forensic cross-examination,” it’s no wonder I felt utterly illuminated by him.

“Ok, then,” I replied, the edge of my voice sharpening as we walked on, “what’s something you’re just dying to tell me that I haven’t asked you about yet?”

We glanced at each other then, and he almost broke stride. For the briefest moment, his face wore the expression of a mountaineer whose rope had just zipped through his hands. I wish I could say I wasn’t gratified at witnessing his instant of freefall. It occurred to me that we were perhaps both people whose composure normally got the better of us, and I wished, not for the first time in my life, for a larger measure of recklessness in my soul.

I wished for the condemnable daring to tell him in that moment, Yes, yes. Me, too.

***

As mediocre as I was when I began painting, my supplies were worse. Unthinkingly, I had bought generic, spiral-bound watercolor paper without even a perforated edge, which meant that I had to cut my rudimentary landscapes free with a pair of scissors. The paper was so cheap that even dry colors would smear instead of layering, the paints themselves would pill on the surface of the paper, and my brushes would shed, leaving faint curlicues trapped in my inept mountains and seascapes.

Encouraging me in the only activity that seemed to bring me peace at the time, my husband bought me a high-quality watercolor sketchbook and some new brushes. Even so, I could sense that as I kept painting, I was straining against the limitations of both my skills and materials. By the time we were in Maine, lurching through a dazzling, devastating autumn in a shabby-cozy house on its rocky northern coast, I had mostly ditched the tutorials and was attempting to paint from reference photos of the landscape around us.

While my efforts were slightly more aesthetically successful, I didn’t paint nearly as much. I was staving off the feeling of being sucked into a frigid, more profound level of despair. My deepening depression was despite—or, actually, maybe because of—the fact that France’s borders had creaked ajar, and with the type of visa I was eligible for, we could squeak through. As the stalled engine driving our logistical plans finally turned over and then hummed along with paperwork and passports crisscrossing through the postal system in October, I realized I was losing the medicinal limbo my marriage had been in, like being startled out of an induced coma.

The open-ended suspension of our move, while maddening, had also been a fantastic excuse to drop everything and turn inward—toward ourselves and the relationship. Now, it felt like a put-up-or-shut-up moment loomed: Will you take this man across an ocean, to have and to hold, since it probably can’t get much worse, for definitely poorer based on your adjusted salary and his underemployment, til death or additional self-discovery do you part? And, like, does he even want to go with you anymore?

Much to my husband’s frustration and dismay, I insisted on going to Paris by myself for the month of November to find us a new apartment for an intended January 2021 move. The gorgeous two bedroom that had been waiting for us, signed and first month paid with an electric bill already in our name, had long been released back into the wild, and I was loathe to perform an international move with seven suitcases and three maladjusted senior cats only to land somewhere temporary again. Plus, after eight months of playing 24/7 emotional one-on-one, I was dying to be alone.

Then, less than a week before I was supposed to fly, France entered its second strict confinement period of the pandemic. When I landed, there would be no shops, no restaurants, no museums, and no office to go to, which meant no coworkers and no ability to have human contact. There was a 6 pm curfew, and I would be restricted to a 1-kilometer radius from my apartment, which I could only leave for specific reasons that had to be documented on an electronic attestation—or else be fined and maybe then deported.

Though I had spent the entire pandemic up to that point in states that had taken it seriously and imposed restrictions on “nonessential” life from the beginning, France had, from May through October of 2020, been enjoying something that approximated normal life—minus concerts and soccer games. My timing was impeccable. A colleague called me “brave” for pushing ahead with the move at that time, which is something we love to say to people we like whose decisions nevertheless baffle us.

I brought my watercolors with me knowing that except for trips to the grocery store and my questionably permitted apartment viewings, I would be sitting alone inside for a month. I still tried to paint from reference photos, but I ventured further away from the given, abbreviating street busyness, inventing textures, refocusing the composition, or fudging the precise number of pigeons arranged like finials on the little orange chimneys of the rooftop opposite mine. In these small deviations, I discovered a kindling confidence in my choices.

It was a confidence that didn’t extend past my painting. When I got back to the States in early December, Parisian apartment secured, I felt entirely unmoored from myself. The choices that led me to this untenable juncture in my life felt like they had been made at random by different people entirely—or not even by people, but by some insouciant hand spinning a cage of bingo balls and letting this one or that spill out at odd intervals.

Did I still want to move to France? Did I want this career, which I fell into after my freelance life proved unstable? And after surviving a recent round of layoffs and my sixth manager change in 12 months, did I even want this job? Did I want to stay married to my husband? Did I actually want to be married to anyone at all? And if the answer to any of those questions was no, the fact that no alternatives seemed more appealing was even more disorienting.

I suppose I could say that that’s just depression for you. Or I could say that that’s the pervasive disruption and trauma of the pandemic, which robbed so many of so much more than their choices and preferences. But instead of feeling as lucky as I knew I had been, I simply wanted to stop existing. I feel the need to clarify here that I didn’t want to kill myself or even necessarily die; I wanted to just be unalive—if such an existential cessation were possible.

The closest I came to the blissful obliteration I was craving was the open, empty presence required to paint.

***

After a COVID exposure scare that meant we couldn’t see our families on Christmas and living for a while in a dim basement apartment where the heating struggled to hover at 60 degrees, we did indeed make it to Paris in January of 2021.

My proclivity for Googling watercolor tutorials over the previous six months meant I was being bombarded with ads on social media for online classes. Most of these seemed to cover the basics I had already learned from YouTube, but then a portraiture class caught my eye as I whizzed through Instagram. My birthday was coming up, so I treated myself to the 20€ class, which turned out to be pre-recorded lessons in Spanish with a featureless English voiceover. Truthfully, I just liked the teaching artist’s style, and I was sheepishly hopeful that I could learn to imitate it. (Spoiler: I could not!)

The class taught me a technique called grisaille, a way to paint primarily in shades of gray by layering complementary colors in order to build structure and volume. I couldn’t imagine insulting any of my friends or family by cutting my portraiture teeth on their dear faces and painting a stranger felt pointless. So I decided that I would be my first subject. Though I cringed at the perceived narcissism, I realized that I was, in the emotional arena of my life, scrabbling to take up more space and, not to put too fine a metaphor on it, redefine myself by myself for myself. It became a pitch-perfect project.

I found a photo I liked of my face in strong light, looking up and off to the right of the viewer. It was a little cheesy, a little 2008 Obama “Hope” poster in aesthetic. But it had the angle and contrast the teacher recommended, so it became my reference.

It was purely by coincidence that I decided to paint my first self-portrait almost exactly a year to the day from that unexpected yet unsurprising conversation with the man in the bar. I had been in low spirits and high stress, and I was telling him that now even having a simple drink with him had become a complex negotiation with my husband—how much time and when and where and whether anyone else would be around. While I was out, if I didn’t answer his texts promptly, it became a fight when I got home. If I tried to go into any detail about what had been talked about, I was cast as suspiciously enthusiastic. If I tried to avoid talking about it at all, I was suspiciously quiet.

“My life,” I said, with my head in my hands, “is an optics nightmare.”

“You’re an easy person to love,” he said then, as if this sudden admission explained everything—which, of course, it sort of did. I looked up in shock. In the warm, low light of the bar, his eyes were swimming, a wistful searching in his face.

In the glaze of the moment’s gravity, already post-wine, I don’t remember all that was said over the next few moments. But I do remember him saying, his eyes again welling, “Maybe it’s better for me, too, if we don’t do this anymore.”

And before we could really unpack it, before we could even fully acknowledge what had just happened, I had to go. I had dinner plans downtown—one of the last meals I’d eat in a restaurant. I squeezed his arm on my way out in lieu of any kind of goodbye because nothing seemed like a sensical thing to say, and then I practically ran down the block in the sharp winter air to grab a taxi. During dinner, I excused myself to the bathroom and sobbed urgently and breathlessly.

I’ve thought about that moment many, many times in the intervening year and change. But even then, on first hearing, something about his words hit the wrong part of the gong, producing not a sonorous crash but a tinny ring, the mallet bouncing off skew-ways. And it shook something loose, though I wouldn’t realize what until I started painting my portrait.

***

When I attempted my first self-portrait, I painted this:

It’s, pretty objectively, a mess: the one bug-eye, the sea witch hair, the crunched head and off-kilter chin… I was still using cheap materials, which you can tell from the muddy blending and the straight-up streaking across the bottom of the neck when I went to rewet my paper—a move that high-quality materials can easily withstand.

But honestly? I was thrilled with it. Something about the process touched two live wires together in my head. And the fact that whatever I painted was at least recognizably human—even if this resembled me in intention only—was just a bonus.

Not long after, I tried again:

More mud and worse streaking, but the proportions and shading were much improved. This is when it became something like a game. What if I painted the same thing over and over to see how “good” I could get it? What could I learn from each subsequent iteration? When would I obviously, unquestionably have captured myself? And not just if someone saw the reference photo and then my painting, but actually be able to look at my work and see me?

For my birthday, my husband took me to an art supply shop in one of Paris’s charming covered passages. (Shopping in covered passages and markets will never not feel magical to me, a suburban American girl who grew up doing laps at the local mall.) I picked out two blocks of the, according to the shop owner, “best paper in the world”—a French brand, naturally—and a small palette of honey-based watercolor paints, which I had read were great for intermediate painters. I rounded out my brush collection, too, and selected a scalpel for slicing the bonded paper free from the block.

The supplies were so gaggingly expensive that I didn’t want to “waste” them on my sophomoric self-portraits—but I was itching to try. For my next attempt, I split the difference, painting with my new paints on old paper.

I was especially pleased with the nose and the shading. And—praise be!—the colors blended without becoming muck.

Now, through repetition, I was learning something critically important: About halfway through every portrait, I believed it was going irredeemably poorly. Like rip-it-up-and-don’t-tell-anybody-about-this poorly. But each time when I approached the ending stages, layering in the final details, I could see that this version was not only clearly more competent than the last, but was even, maybe, possibly, a little bit good on its own.

My husband insisted that I was being silly for not using my good paper—and he was right—so I did for my fourth and fifth attempts:

Attempt four, now plotted on the much larger paper, felt weirdly too zoomed in and, let’s all agree, much too purple. While I’d found my light for the first time, I’d also given myself an unfortunate five o’clock shadow in the process.

Attempt five was originally where I decided to stop, having quite decidedly improved from my first attempt and worrying I was becoming unattractively obsessed with painting my own portrait every two weeks ad infinitum. It seemed like something someone would do who would later be found crushed to death under their own pathological collection of The New Yorker in a crumbling walkup in Alphabet City.

Painting these two portraits was the first time I truly noticed the total impact of my tools. The paper held water beautifully. The bonded blocks stayed flat without fiddly, damaging tape. Colors stayed “live” longer, allowing for more play, better blending, and more interesting effects. I had always done the best I could with the tools I had at the time, but now I was finally getting a taste of what it could be like, marveling at how any natural ability I had and whatever skills I was acquiring were being amplified by the materials instead of forcing me to work around and against them. It felt like therapy, frankly.

What hadn’t changed was the feeling that between the 20% - 70% completion marks, it belonged in the garbage. I would get in the weeds, in my own head, and my impatience would lead me to paint sections haphazardly to “get them right” instead of in the loosely methodical light-to-dark process that watercolor technique is known for.

But then suddenly a nose would emerge. Or I’d notice that the eyebrow had flexed just right this time, or that an eye was looking particularly lively. These small moments of competence became not frequent but at least extant. I could count on them to be there when I stepped away for more wine and a little perspective. I began trusting that I was arriving at them, even when I couldn’t see them.

Had I not taken another online portraiture class, this one geared toward more realistic skin tones instead of grisaille, I might indeed have stopped with self-portrait number five. But something I now know about myself—had, in fact, forgotten about myself—is that of course I was going to take another class because I am not someone who is content to settle for the skills and knowledge I have. Nor for the person I am.

I used to judge myself for this tendency—condemn myself for it, actually. What kind of monster or machine was I that I felt most invigorated, most alive, only when I was in the relentless pursuit of more or deeper or different? Wasn’t I sentencing myself to a life of exhaustion and unhappiness, always chasing some kind of ephemeral “better”?

I realized that that was only true if what I was yearning for was a destination and not a never-ending journey. It was only true if I didn’t architect my life to support fluidity and change and growth. It was only true if I judged instead of honored that spirit in myself. So I could fritter away my life in anxiety and torment, trying to mete my nature into submission, or I could choose to love that person, clear obstacles from the path of her impatient exploration, and send her into the world like an arrow.

***

Just last week, I painted this:

It’s me. Or at least, it’s finally recognizable as me. I love it, and this whole project, unabashedly. And it is not done. It is not done. I will keep painting self-portraits.

I know now why I haven’t been able to let go of those words—"easy to love." I know now why my marriage made me feel small and fragile, something gossamer dried to a husk.

I don’t want to be easy to love. Fuck being easy to love.

I want to be me—all of me—and be loved.

While I was writing this, I pulled out my portfolio to photograph all six portraits I’ve done to date. I noticed that I had only signed attempt number five, when I originally thought I was done with the project.

I grabbed the nearest pen and signed them all.