The Portrait That Helped Me Move Cities

I was fifteen and terrified.

My family was moving to a new city and I was doing what fifteen year olds do best: catastrophizing. My imagination, usually a good friend, had fully switched sides.

We went to an exhibition at El Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. The show featured Dr. Atl, a painter obsessed with volcanoes and landscapes, specifically the Paricutín volcano in Michoacán. Which happened to be exactly where we were moving.

I walked in hoping the paintings would reassure me everything was going to be okay. The landscape paintings didn't do it.

A portrait did.

Carmen Mondragón, known as Nahui Olin. Big green eyes, curious and soft and a little sad, looking straight back at me like she understood exactly what I was feeling.

I wondered who she was and the little white card on the wall shifted everything: Nahui Olin wasn't just a muse. She was an artist herself, one whose story was still waiting to be fully told.

Something clicked in me that I couldn't name yet.

That portrait didn't make the move less scary. But it gave me something harder to explain: companionship. The sense that uncertainty is part of becoming, not a sign that something has gone wrong.

Moving to Michoacán turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me. I just couldn't see that from inside the fear.

Art has a way of showing us what we can't see yet. But only if we slow down enough to actually look.

Have you ever experienced something, a painting, a book, a song, that helped you move through a transition?

I'd love to know what it was!