Have you ever tried out a new habit, but kept it a secret?

I first learned about The 100 Day Project when our founder and clinical director Adele did 100 days of Bijou Zentangle drawings in 2016. This year you can follow Adele’s 100 days of self-soothing on her Instagram.

The 100 Day Project is a free, global art project with a simple premise: choose a creative project or practice, do it every day for 100 days, and share your process online. 

This year’s iteration of the 100 Day Project started on January 31st, but the “rules” say you can start at any time. Turns out there aren’t really any rules. You can do your project for 100 days in a row, skip days--whatever works for you. You can change projects mid-stream. You can abandon it altogether once you’ve gotten what you were looking for. 

The concept intrigued me. Maybe a project could add some meaning to these long, tedious, pandemic days. Or maybe my life-chaos has finally calmed enough that I can enter the “new hobbies” phase of quarantine that everyone else experimented with back in May 2020. 

The project’s founder, Michael Bierut, said he’d always been fascinated with “the ways that creative people balance inspiration and discipline in their working lives. It's easy to be energized when you're in the grip of a big idea. But what do you do when you don't have anything to work with?”

If anything, the pandemic has left me fuzzy and maybe a little agoraphobic. I do not have any big ideas. 

I also like artist Sophie Blackall’s comment on beginning her own 100 day project this year: “I’m going to try to paint my hand once a day. I don’t know how long I’ll last. I’m hoping long enough to see most of us vaccinated and the beginning of the end of the pandemic in sight.” 

How much change can happen in 100 days? Will I look up from my canvas on day 100 and find myself in a better world? 

After a bit of consideration, I decided I was in. But even with all the freedom of having no rules to speak of, I started a 100 day project and didn’t tell anyone for the first week. And even as I was writing about Adele’s project for our newsletter, I didn’t mention that I was trying it out, too. 

I set out to do 100 days of landscape paintings. Not to finish a painting every day, necessarily, but to paint for 100 days. 

Why was I scared to tell anyone about my project? Well, for starters...I don’t know how to paint. 

I have some basic experience with acrylics from a “paint & sip” class I used to help run with a friend, but that knowledge is really limited to things like “how to wash your paint brushes so you don’t ruin them.” 

So. First. Not a painter. Second, as Nora McInerny recently put it, “there is no such thing as extra time, especially in a pandemic.” I work for Alexandria Art Therapy part time, and I take care of my fifteen-month-old daughter full time. In case you’re better at math than I apparently am, that leaves me...no free time.

What was I thinking? 

Well, for one, I was thinking I may have to wait a while before it’s my turn to get vaccinated, and we may still be in for some long winter weeks. I’ve also been chuckling at Austin Kleon’s advice for all creative pursuits: “To get good, you first have to be willing to be bad. Don’t practice to get good, practice to suck less,” he says. 

So here I am on day 25 of my 100 Day Project. Look at all those landscapes! I may not be great at math, but I do know that I’m 25% of the way through, and that this milestone deserves some celebration and reflection. 

What have I learned so far? 

THE WHOLE IS GREATER THAN ITS PARTS

Twenty-five days in, I’ve definitely stopped asking myself if my paintings are good. Individually, they’re not, really. (Though maybe they will be less sucky by day 60!) 

After the first few days, I started sticking the canvases to the wall by my desk with painter’s tape. Now the paintings almost touch the ceiling, and I can step back and see how each landscape is in conversation with the other. Color palettes developing, techniques evolving. Repeats and diversions from the norm. 

The paintings brighten up my workspace, sure, but more than anything, they’re a visual quantifier of time I have spent on myself. 

Each canvas represents an hour (sometimes more) of time I spent alone, usually in silence, entering a flow state of restorative calm. An hour I asked for help with the baby. Or an hour I chose to stop scrolling through social media and do something that settled my nervous system rather than amping it up. 

It’s kind of amazing to have a visual representation of the care I have given myself. So much self care goes unmarked (when it’s not skipped all together). But here is a whole gallery, in honor of myself. 

SPENDING TIME IN A FLOW STATE REALLY DOES MAKE YOU FEEL BETTER

As a Pandemic Mom ™, “me time” is extra hard to come by. Pre-project, when I got some time to myself, it usually took on a familiar formula: my partner encouraged me to get out of the house. I took a walk. Maybe I’d run an errand if I wasn’t feeling too panicked about virus variants that day. Maybe I’d sit outside and read for an hour. And then I would feel a little better. 

But now it’s winter. Sitting outside is a lot less appealing when it’s 25 degrees and ice is falling from the sky. And even when it’s not freezing, it’s probably raining. 

I needed a self care practice, not just the intention to get out of the house every few weeks. 

At first, taking an hour every day to paint felt a little selfish. My partner is taking care of the baby while I’m up here...what? Painting meadows? Making a mess? 

But then I started to notice how much calmer I felt when I was done. How ready I was to wipe pasta sauce off the baby’s face (and hands and chair and the floor and the walls), where before I’d felt annoyed. 

Spending time in a flow state really does make you feel better. The problem with so much of our pandemic lives is that everything is peppered with interruptions. Acrylic paints dry fast, so you can’t really stop what you’re doing and come back. The palette drives you to keep moving, mixing, dabbing. Keep paying attention to this small square in front of you, and let the rest fall away. 

WHAT’S NEXT? 

“I reserve the right to change my mind” has been a phrase I’ve leaned on in recent years, and I know it applies to this project, too. I still don’t feel fully confident that I’ll make it to day 100. But I hope to! 

If I make it to day 50, I’ll check back in with any new insights. 

In the meantime, if you want to follow along with my progress, you can join me here. 

Are you participating in this year’s 100 Day Project? Tag @alexandriaarttherapy on Instagram! We’d love to follow along.