NOT ENOUGH

Medium: Oil on Canvas | Created: March 13–15, 2025

Created during a moment of unexpected grief.
This was my first experience with oil paint—unplanned, unresearched, raw.
The paint took days to dry, much like the wound it came from.
I sat with the child inside me, the one who once believed she wasn’t enough.
This piece was her voice, her exhale.
And when the paint finally dried, something in me whispered:
I am enough.

Not Enough

by Mai Wells

I didn’t mean to paint this.
I just meant to breathe.
But the ache moved through my hands
before I could stop it.

I was talking to the moon and trees that night—
telling them I’d come so far,
asking why I still hurt
in places I thought had long gone silent.

The moon didn’t answer.
But she stayed.

So I picked up the brush.
No instructions.
No plan.
Just oil paint and a whisper:
Try.

The paint moved like grief.
Thick. Slow. Unapologetic.
It wouldn’t dry,
just like I couldn’t yet.

What poured out
was a face I didn’t know
but somehow had always been.
Eyes wide.
Roots rising.
A wound, dressed as a tree.

It was ugly.
And it was sacred.

I called it Not Enough,
because in that moment
I believed the lie again.
And I let myself feel it—
the whole, horrible weight
of not being worthy.

But as the paint dried,
so did the shame.

I sat beside that younger version of me,
the girl who had been told to shrink.
I let her speak.
I let her cry.
And then I whispered back:

No, love.
You are more than enough.
You always were.
Even when no one saw it.
Even when you forgot it.
Even now.

The painting didn’t change.
But I did.

And that,
I’ve come to learn,
is what healing looks like.

This painting wasn’t for display.

It was for survival.

But maybe someone else needs to see it, too.