100 in 150 days

100 in 150 days

It has been one heck of a year. This weekend I am getting away from it all and I’m on my way to pick up my friend Kait. We are driving to a cosy apartment on a horse farm in the middle of nowhere. Well, what I consider the middle of nowhere… Kait is from the United States and anything that’s only an hour away from Leiden doesn’t feel like the middle of nowhere to her. Fortunately we are both longing for a getaway and we are overly excited about this ‘of the charts’ roadtrip.

Covid has fucked up many if not all of my plans for the year. It has made me think and rethink everything that I considered a given in my life. It’s made me long for some alone-time, it has made me despair when yet one more thing got cancelled and it even made me cry when I couldn't go to the store to buy a pritt marker for arts and crafts with the kids. I know, my life is really hard…

At the moment I just feel excited. This trip probably would not even have happened, if covid didn’t come knocking. Kait is a new colleague of my husband and they normally would have spent most of their time together during drinks and parties in and around the office. As those were not happening we ended up meeting her and her husband Andrew on a regular basis, and became close friends with them.

I feel lucky to have found such great friends during these weird times and am looking forward to spending this girl’s weekend with her. We start talking the moment she gets in the car with me and we don’t stop.. Well, basically until I drop her off back at her place, two days later. In one of these conversations she asks if she can show me something. It is a video of a talk she did about a challenge she gave herself some time ago.

I know her both as a colleague of Eelco and as an amazing artist. Something she wouldn’t have described herself as before this particular project. She liked drawing, but didn’t feel she was exceptionally good at it. Maybe a little above average, maybe.. She couldn’t see herself as an artist and therefore didn’t feel justified to spend a lot of time making art. She stopped herself from doing the one thing that brought her so much joy. 

That is, until she read a book about the pursuit of happiness that made her rethink the way she was looking at herself and inspired her to come up with a wonderful and absolutely crazy challenge. She decided to get over her fear of identifying as an artist by drawing a portrait of one hundred, randomly selected, facebook friends in 150 days!

The video of her talk showed some of the portraits she made and how they got better every single time she drew one, which was absolutely amazing to witness. It was however not this progress that made me tear up at the end of her talk. It was her growth in confidence and the sheer joy she felt when making art, that got to me. How she stood in front of the audience and announced: I am Kait and I am an artist. 

Right there and then a seed was planted in my brain, because like Kait before her challenge I struggle with making time for my art, with showing it to the world, and with calling myself an artist. An unnerving feeling crept right in the spot undernerve my chest. What if I did the same thing with my art? What if I wrote one hundred stories in 150 days and shared those with the world? What would happen then? Somewhere I knew that whatever happened would be absolutely amazing ánd I was scared shitless. So I put the thought away and focused on our conversation.

Today, it is the Tuesday after our trip, and the little seed in my brain has grown to a tiny seedling. I have just written this story and feel even more nervous than when the thought about my own challenge first popped in my head. If I finish this story, if I post this on facebook, if I announce that I will do this insane and exciting challenge to the world, I won’t be able to hide anymore. I will have to stand tall and tell the world: I am Didy and I am an artist.

I think about Kait, for whom I have written this one story in English so she can read it. I think about my storytelling coach and mentor Yvette, who has taught me so much about telling stories, being brave and following my joy. I think about the one thing that brings me so much joy and I take a very, very deep breath and press post.

Hello world. I am Didy and I am an artist.