Four years ago, I moved to Costa da Caparica. I chose a small apartment because it had a beautiful ocean view and it felt right. Too small for most people, for sure, but hey, we all have different priorities. We just have to know ours, and be true to them.

Friends who came to visit would say the apartment was too small for them, or that I'd get tired of the view in a few weeks, like everyone does.

But they were wrong.

Four years later, I still wake up, look out, and feel calm and in peace. Some mornings the water is still, some mornings it's wild, and I still stop and look every single time.

It is without a doubt, one of the biggest parts of my happiness.

Not everyone gets to be right about you

I think about this a lot, because most of the people who said it meant well. They weren't trying to talk me out of anything. They were telling me what was true for them, or for someone they once knew, and assuming it would be true for me too.

That's the part nobody warns you about: a lot of what we're told about what will or won't make us happy isn't really about us. It's someone else's experience, handed over as a general rule. And sometimes it isn't even that. Sometimes it's what society, or the people around us, or the whole shape of the culture we grew up in, has quietly decided is worth prioritizing.

Space over view. Career over closeness. Wedding over good, real communication. Money over time. More over enough.

We absorb these priorities so early and so gently that we start to think they're our own, when really they were fabricated somewhere outside of us and just never questioned.

I chose a small apartment so I could be near the ocean, and I have never regretted it, not once, not on the days I wished I had more room. What's true for someone else doesn't have to be true for you. That sounds obvious written down. It's much harder to actually live by, especially when the people telling you otherwise love you and think they're helping. 

Where I go when things get hard

Some of my hardest days are the ones when I doubt myself completely, when the voice in my head says I made the wrong choice, that I should have picked something safer, when I think about how worried my father was that I couldn't make a living from art, and wonder if he had a point.

When my mind won't stop circling that, there is nowhere I trust more to bring me back to the present than standing in front of the ocean, huge and immense and incredible, doing exactly what it's always done, completely unbothered by whatever I'm carrying that day.

The noise quiets down. And my problems feel appropriately small.

I feel the same in front of fire, or at the base of a big mountain. Nature at that scale has a way of putting us in our place, gently. It reminds us we're part of something so much bigger than whatever is stressing us out right now.

It's exactly the feeling I painted in Deep Blue, one small figure, held by all that immense blue. I tried to capture the calmness and peace it can bring us.

Why the ocean keeps showing up in my paintings

A lot of my recent work looks straight down at the ocean from above, water in motion, the light shifting across it, that particular stillness that is somehow also never still. It's my attempt to hold onto that feeling long enough to get it onto canvas.

I also surf, and that gives me a different kind of relationship with the ocean, not just watching it, but being inside it, feeling its power directly. That's exactly what I was trying to hold in The Search, the surfers scattered across the water, waiting, watching the horizon for the right wave, close enough to feel how much power the ocean actually has.

In some of the pieces, there are small human figures too, floating, surfing, just being there, like in Paradise. I don't paint them as the point of the piece. I paint them small on purpose, because that's the truth of it. And that's something that can bring us a sense of being part of something bigger than us.

You can find these and the rest of the Ocean series in my Ocean Inspired collection, each one an original piece. My goal was to bring a little bit of the Ocean inside someone else's home.

What I hope you take from this

Not everyone needs to live by the water.

That was true for me, it might be something completely different for you.

What I hope you take from this isn't “move to the coast.”

It's this: pay attention to what actually keeps making you happy, years in, not just in the first excited weeks. And stay a little suspicious of anyone, including me, who tells you with total confidence what should or shouldn't matter to you.

If you want to know more about how I got here, and how the ocean found its way into my work, you can read more on my About page.

Let's keep choosing the things that actually make us feel alive, even when everyone around us is sure we'll grow out of them.