Until then, I hadn't really thought about the paintings belonging together. Most of them had simply started with an idea, a feeling, or something I wanted to try.

Now there was going to be an exhibition.

And, more importantly, there was going to be a date.

That part was quite deliberate. I knew myself well enough to know that an actual deadline would give me a reason to keep going instead of letting everything slowly turn into another collection of unfinished projects.

So I agreed to exhibit at Bistro Rijster Bosch on 28 August.

I still didn't really have an exhibition.

I had a magpie that still wasn't finished, several paintings in different stages, old canvases I was changing into something new and a growing pile of ideas.

But when I started putting the works next to each other, I realised they did have something in common.

There was Letting Go, a girl watching a bird fly away. There was New Life, a girl with a horse, made partly from a broken Aloha garland and gold paper. A girl looking out into the distance. A girl with a dog behind her, looking back over her shoulder.

None of those works had been planned together.

But apparently I'd been putting quite a lot of what was going on inside my head onto canvases without really noticing.

So the exhibition started becoming personal.

The title took a while too. I knew it was about getting back to art, but the more I worked on it, the more I realised that wasn't quite it.

I wasn't really trying to get back to the person I'd been before.

I was figuring out what was still there, what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to do differently.

Eventually, that became Finding My Way Back.

And once I'd given it a name, I did what I tend to do and made the whole thing slightly more complicated.

I started writing poems to go with some of the paintings. I thought about the order people would see them in. I reused more materials, added three-dimensional elements and kept changing things that probably could have been considered finished.

There was also Deciphering Reflection, an actual mirror rather than a painting, with the words:

Don't get distracted by external beauty.

And later, I painted a self-portrait without looking in a mirror.

I called it Without a Mirror.

I wasn't trying to paint what I looked like from the outside. I just painted the face as it came to me. Only afterwards, looking at it, I recognised something of myself as a child in it.

And that added another layer to Finding My Way Back.

Apparently, finding my way back wasn't only about creativity, or about finding myself again. Somewhere in the process, I was also finding my way back to my inner child — to parts of myself that had been there all along, but hadn't had much room for quite a while.

I hadn't planned that either.

It just showed up on the canvas.

Not everything I started actually made it into the exhibition.

The Water Lilies were part of the process too. The background was an unfinished painting my ex had made. Instead of painting over it, I glazed what was already there and started using it as the background for new ideas of my own.

The water lilies themselves came from photographs I'd taken at the botanical gardens in Jersey that summer.

It wasn't finished in time for the exhibition.

And that was okay.

By then I was also starting to realise I didn't have to choose between painting and all the other things I liked doing.

I could build onto a painting. Use plaster. Paper. Hair. Wood. Keep something that was already there and turn it into something new.

Which, in a way, brought me right back to the magpie.

The piece I'd started because I didn't know how to paint its feathers had sent me through months of practising, experimenting and finding out what happened when I stopped worrying so much about what a painting was supposed to be.

By August, there were enough finished works to fill an exhibition.

On 28 August, Finding My Way Back was actually hanging at Bistro Rijster Bosch.

People came.

I had made the paintings, written the words, put them on walls and invited people to come and look at something that had started during a period when I was mostly just trying to figure out how to deal with myself.

That was slightly terrifying.

It was also really nice.

And the magpie?

Still not finished.

At this point I'm starting to think that's part of the story.