When Creativity Feels Like Fractions | A Lesson in My Own Color Theory.

Lately, I have felt a quiet but unmistakable pull toward my creative expression. Not dramatic or urgent, but steady, like a tide reshaping the shoreline of my inner being over time. With Neptune and Saturn beginning to stir my fifth house, the realm of creativity, joy, and self-expression, I can see now why I felt compelled to return to something simple and beginner-minded. Something that would allow me to explore creativity not as output, but as process. So I signed up for a beginner acrylic painting class.

I imagined play. Ease. Color for the sake of color. What I did not expect was to feel like I had walked into a math class.

The first lesson was color theory. A color wheel. Careful ratios. Gradual gradients. Precise transitions. Instead of freedom, I felt tension. Instead of joy, a familiar pressure quietly surfaced. My inner perfectionist came online almost immediately, scanning for mistakes, measuring what I should already know, comparing what was on my paper to some invisible standard of “correct.” I caught myself thinking, my teacher and fellow students are going to think I’m dumb.

What surprised me most wasn’t the difficulty of the task. It was how triggering it felt.

I know color. I sense undertones instinctively. My husband often jokes that I keep buying “the same lipstick over and over,” because to him they look identical. But I always insist, with great seriousness, this one is different. It’s warmer. Or cooler. Or softer by half a breath. I can distinguish warmth from coolness at a glance. Color has always spoken to me through the body, through sensation and intuition.

And yet, here I was, struggling to create a “proper” gradient, feeling a subtle but unmistakable disappointment in myself for not grasping it right away.

That was the moment I realized this wasn’t really about paint.

This first class wasn’t teaching me color theory as much as it was revealing my own. Not on the page, but within me. Fragmented hues. Varying intensities. Shifts in temperature. Places where I soften, places where I push too hard. Areas where I crave harmony, and others where contrast makes me uneasy.

What I thought was a technical exercise became a mirror.

The discomfort came from the collision between intuition and structure. Neptune inviting surrender, imagination, and fluidity. Saturn asking for discipline, patience, and form. Instead of blending seamlessly, they rubbed against each other, exposing something tender and unfinished.

Expressing myself creatively felt jarring because it touched an old pattern: the belief that joy must be earned through competence, that being a beginner is unsafe, that not knowing equates to not being enough. Creativity, which I had hoped would feel liberating, instead illuminated my relationship with perfectionism and self-worth.

What I noticed most was a warmth in my body, the quiet heat of disappointment rising from the depths of my stomach toward my cheeks. Not dramatic. Not overwhelming. Just present. And instead of pushing it away, I stayed with it. I listened. I asked what it was trying to teach me.

The answer was simple, and uncomfortable: I am still learning how to create without measuring myself.

The fifth house isn’t about mastery. It’s about expression. About allowing something to move through you without demanding it arrive resolved, polished, or approved. Neptune dissolves the edges of identity. Saturn tests where control still tightens its grip. Together, they seem to be asking me to redefine creativity not as something I perform well, but as something I inhabit honestly, without shame or control.

That color wheel didn’t need to be perfect. It needed to be felt.

I left the class realizing that healing doesn’t always arrive wrapped in softness. Sometimes it arrives disguised as frustration, revealing where we still hold ourselves too tightly. The jarring feeling wasn’t a sign I was doing something wrong. It was a sign I had touched a deeper layer of truth, one that revealed a more honest version of myself.

Turns out this wasn’t a class in acrylics. The first lesson became a class in the color theory of myself.

And maybe that’s what creativity asks of us first, not to get it right, but to see ourselves clearly as we are, in all our fragments, gradients, intensity, and temperature.

So here I am, present, ready to express into the world, the full, embodied hue of my soul.

☥