Today I painted my bathroom, the one in my room that stares out at me when I'm lying in my bed.  It was yellow before.  Bright sunflower yellow and I hated it; maybe hate is too strong a word, I loathed it.  When we moved into this house a year ago I fell in love with the place but definitely not for the colors on the walls.  I remember our bedroom was red and before I could actually live here I had to paint the bedroom walls.  I left the bathroom the way it was not because I liked bright, loud, in your face yellow, but because I was just too darn tired to change it.

So today I decided to paint my walls a different color, spiced cocoa to be exact.  It's warm and inviting and it makes you want to just go in there and stay awhile.  As I climbed up and down the ladder trying not to make too much noise while my babies slept, I kept thinking, this is harder than I remembered.  Not the painting, the changing something you've grown accustomed to.  When I was young it was easy to reinvent yourself with so little effort but now, it takes more than paint on your walls to make you look different than you did yesterday.  I guess it still surprises me how you can grow comfortable even when it's something you can't stand to look at.  I suppose I did that with my job, the one I had three weeks ago.  I used to love my job but for the last year since all the faces changed I felt much the same way as I did about those yellow walls in my bathroom yet somehow, I was comfortable there.  How can misery reside in the same space as comfortable?  I believe many people probably ask that same question with no apparent answer in sight.

As I lay here now in my bed, the warm 'spiced cocoa' walls in my bathroom gaze out at me casting a glow of something...maybe it's hope.  I know that sounds ridiculous that painted walls could actually give someone hope but  these days I'll take hope wherever I can get it.  Maybe it's that in a little over two hours I transformed something unpleasant into something I'm not afraid to look at anymore, something that actually makes me feel the ugliness has gone.

One brush stroke at a time...