For one month I sat for an hour and I focused on positive things first — things that made me happy. And I only focused on each one until they were completed. And I learned several things. All joy is different. The joy I have designing is the same feeling as the joy I have laughing with friends. So they are not going to affect me the same way and that is why the pictures looked different.
That is what I would do for others. I would not tell them to find joy. I would ask them what drew them — and then I would show them the works that pulled at that same place inside them. Because I learned that joy is not one feeling. It is a sanctuary. It is a guardian. It is the thing that guards over the feelings you had lost.
When someone selects a work in this exhibit, I am not selling them a painting. I am finding the sanctuary that was created inside them when they chose. The colors they picked, the emotional themes they kept returning to, the works that held their gaze longer than the others — all of that is the architecture of their joy. And I read it back to them.
I would tell them: you are becoming someone freer. Or someone seen. Or someone stronger. Not because I decided it. Because their selections told me. They chose the works that held the weight of visibility, of freedom, of strength — and those works carry the colors and the stories of someone who has already walked that road.
And then I would give them the journal entry that speaks to their becoming. Not my advice. My diary. The words I wrote when I was walking the same road they are walking now. Because the diary is the only honest thing — it was written in the pain, in the joy, in the confusion of the actual living, and not in the clarity of looking back.
This is what I would do. And I would let them choose to grow from it or not. I cannot make them grow. I can only build the door.