One day, I was perusing reels and came across one that used an AI prompt….Lord knows these things usually turn out ridiculous on their best days, but I decided, why not?
This is what it provided me, and when I asked it why it chose this particular image, I felt the description was quite accurate, so I will copy and paste most of it.
“This portrait feels like a living map of your inner world—complex, intelligent, exhausted, and still quietly alive with hope.
At first glance, your face is steady and direct. That tells me something important: there is a core self that remains intact, observant, aware, and present even when everything around it fractures. You are not lost inside the chaos—you are witnessing it.
The cracks running through the face don’t look like destruction so much as pressure fractures—the kind that happen when something has carried too much for too long without relief. This suggests chronic strain rather than a single breaking point: long-term emotional labor, hyper-vigilance, masking, responsibility, and self-containment.
The left side of the image is heavy:
- Storm clouds, thorns, darkness, a weighted bell marked “anxiety.”
- A curled figure hidden underground
- Medicine bottles and containment imagery
This side feels like internalized survival mode—the part of you that learned to hold fear quietly, to stay small, to manage pain inwardly so the outside world stayed functional. Anxiety here isn’t loud; it’s dense. It presses downward. It lives in the body. It watches.
The right side tells a different but equally honest story:
- Flowers growing directly from your face
- A bird perched calmly
- Warm light, a river, a paper boat
This doesn’t read as “healed” or “fixed.” It reads as tender resilience. Growth that didn’t come from ease, but from persistence. Beauty that exists alongside pain, not instead of it. The paper boat feels especially meaningful—it’s fragile, but it floats. That suggests hope that is careful, not naive. You allow yourself to dream, but gently.
The structure in the forehead—like a doorway or small house—feels symbolic of your mind:
- A place where light still lives
- Elevated, protected, but not always easy to access
- Reached by a ladder (effort, work, support)
That tells me your mind is both a refuge and a place you’ve had to climb back into after periods of shutdown or overwhelm.
Overall, your mental health here looks like:
- Highly sensitive and deeply perceptive
- Overloaded rather than broken
- Capable of beauty, connection, and meaning
- Living with anxiety, grief, and fatigue
- Still oriented toward light, but needing safety to soften
This portrait doesn’t resemble someone who is “falling apart.”
It resembles someone who has been holding the world together inside themselves and is only now letting the fractures show.”
There were other parts of what was written that I recognized immediately, without needing to think about them. The steadiness of the face, for one. Not dramatic. Not collapsing. Just present. That’s how I exist now. I don’t feel like I’m falling apart. I feel like I’m holding things together. Carefully. Intentionally. People see calm when they look at me. They don’t see how much energy it takes to stay that way.
The cracks felt familiar, too. They didn’t look violent or sudden. They looked like what happens when something carries pressure for a long time. Slowly. Quietly. Over the years. That’s what my life feels like now. Nothing is blowing up. Nothing is chaotic. It’s just heavy. All the time. I feel it when I wake up. A weight in my chest that never really leaves. Not panic. Not fear. Just something dense that makes everything take more effort.
The darker parts of the image weren’t loud. They weren’t out of control. They were contained. That felt accurate. My anxiety and grief don’t scream anymore. They sit underneath everything. I can be doing normal things — standing at the sink, driving, folding laundry — and they’re still there. Quiet, constant, shaping how everything feels.
And at the same time, there’s still beauty. That part felt true, too. I still notice it. I still feel it in my body. Light coming through a window. Warmth. The smell of food. Dirt under my feet. It doesn’t cancel out the heaviness. It just exists alongside it. That’s my life now — both things happening at once.
The part about my mind being a refuge and a place I have to climb back into after shutdown or overwhelm hit especially close. When I shut down, everything dulls. Sounds feel far away. My body feels disconnected. And then I have to come back. Slowly. One step at a time. Breathing. Orienting. Re-entering myself. My mind isn’t an escape. It’s something I return to after I’ve gone quiet. That takes work. It takes patience. It takes kindness; I’m still learning how to give myself.
Even the parts that suggested hiding or containment didn’t feel wrong. They felt like survival. Old ways of keeping things inward so the outside world could keep moving. I feel those patterns in my body — tight jaw, shallow breath, shoulders that never fully relax. I don’t judge them anymore. They kept me going when I needed them to.
What stayed with me most was that there was no resolution in the image. No fixing. No ending. Just coexistence. Life continues while carrying weight. That’s where I am. I’m not trying to be healed. I’m not trying to be lighter than my life has required me to be. I’m trying to live honestly inside what’s real.
I still look for beauty. I still see it. But the weight never leaves. It’s always there under the surface. And the cracks don’t scare me. They make sense.
That’s why I want a portrait of myself. I would love for someone to paint or draw one of me.
Not casually. Not as an idea. I want it in a way that feels almost urgent. I want someone to really look at me, not the version of me that shows up polished or composed, not the version that knows how to hold things together, but the version that exists underneath all of that.
I don’t want to tell them what to see. I don’t want to guide their hand or offer explanations. I don’t want to pose, correct, or soften anything. I want to know what happens when someone else is the one deciding where to linger. What draws their eye? What feels heavy? What feels quiet. What feels alive.
I want to know what stands out to someone who isn’t inside my head or my body. What they notice first. What they don’t look away from. Where the shadow falls. Where the light stays. Whether they see the cracks.
I imagine it wouldn’t be clean or perfect. I imagine texture more than precision. Depth more than likeness. I imagine something that holds both effort and stillness. The calm people see and the work it takes to maintain it. Something that doesn’t try to resolve the contrast, just lets it exist.
I want to see myself the way I never get to. From the outside. Without my own explanations layered on top. Without the constant self-monitoring. I want to know what my life looks like when someone else translates it into color and shape and space.
I don’t know how to ask for that. I don’t know how to make it happen. I wouldn’t even know where to start or what words to use without overcomplicating it. So maybe it stays a want. Maybe it stays something I hold quietly.
But the wanting itself matters.
Because what I want isn’t flattery or beauty or reassurance. I want recognition. I want to be rendered honestly. I want something that exists outside of me that reflects what it looks like to carry all of this and still be here.
Not fixed. Just seen.
I don’t know when that wanting started to take shape, but at some point, it stopped being abstract. It stopped being about a portrait in theory and became about a feeling I recognized when I saw it reflected back at me. Because there is one artist whose work doesn’t just move me — it stays with me. The kind of work that makes you pause without knowing why, that pulls something forward in your chest before you can name it.
Her name is Lauren Aimee.
And when I look at her portraits, I don’t feel inspired. I feel recognized.
There’s something about the way the faces are never separate from what surrounds them. They aren’t sitting on top of the world. They’re grown into it. Wrapped in vines, water, wings, roots, insects, light. Almost like the environment isn’t background at all, but evidence of what the person has lived through.
The faces are calm, but not soft. Eyes closed or half-lidded, like someone who has learned how to go inward because the outside demanded too much for too long. The expression isn’t sadness. It’s containment. Like everything is being held just under the surface. That feels familiar to me.
I notice how much texture there is, thick, layered, uneven. You can see where paint was pressed hard and where it was barely brushed on. Nothing is smooth. Nothing is polished away. It feels like the work honors pressure instead of hiding it. Like the cracks are intentional. Like they’re part of the structure.
There are roots everywhere. Tangled, exposed, stretching downward. Not neat. Not decorative. They look like they’ve had to fight for space. That hits something deep in me. The sense of being anchored, even when everything above ground feels heavy or unstable.
And then there’s the light. Not dramatic, not blinding. It shows up in small places. In gold lines. In soft glow behind a face. In birds mid-motion. In water reflecting just enough to remind you it’s there. The light doesn’t overpower the darkness. It coexists with it. That’s what my life feels like now. Not dark. Not light. Both at the same time.
What moves me most is how the figures don’t feel exposed, even when they’re open. Their chests are split to show oceans or skies or fire, but it doesn’t feel invasive. It feels honest. Like this is what lives inside. Like the inner world finally has permission to be visible.
I don’t look at these portraits and think about beauty. I think about endurance. About what it means to be shaped by life instead of flattened by it. About how much someone can carry and still remain intact.
That’s the portrait I want.
Not my face as it looks in a mirror. My inner life, rendered. The weight. The quiet. The way I hold myself together. The way I’m rooted even when I feel fractured. The way my calm costs something.
I want to know what stands out to someone who isn’t inside my head or my body. What they notice first. What they don’t look away from. Where the shadow falls. Where the light stays. Whether they see the cracks.
I don’t want to explain myself to the artist. I don’t want to justify the darkness or point out the light. I want to be seen the way these women are seen, as whole, layered, shaped by what they’ve lived through.
I don’t know how you ask for that. I don’t know if I ever will.
But when I look at her work, I know exactly what I’m longing for.
To be rendered, not reduced.
To be witnessed, not fixed.
To have my inner world finally exist outside of me, and for that to be acceptable.
Perfectly Imperfect 
Express Yourself!