You are not a work of art.
Has the Mona Lisa ever breathed? Did the Venus de Milo blush the first time a sweaty shaking nervous palm slid into hers?
No;
The girl with the pearl earring never laughed so hard her stomach hurt. Klimt’s gold-shrouded lovers never heard a song so beautiful it was hard to speak.
But you?
You have lost yourself in the pages of a book. You have felt gravel shred the skin of your bare knees, cried when your goldfish turned belly-up in its glass bowl, extracted a sliver from your thumb. Last summer when the night seemed to stretch a million miles in either direction you sat in the backseat of your best friend’s ****** car, windows open, your eyes closed as the music and the soupy August air washed over you.
When you took that painting class you studied the swirls and whorls of Starry Night and traced the careful strokes of a master painter. What your teacher never told you to do was stare at your eyes in the mirror and do the same.
You spent all those years in awe of the lounging picnickers formed by millions of miniscule spots so close together they formed a whole. You never marveled at your own skin, at the pores and goosebumps and freckles that make up your flesh.
So begin.
You are more than marble. You are more than brushstroke. You are soul and sweat and skin and blood and life. There was something so important that the greats always failed to capture: that awful, aching, breathtakingly beautiful thing keeping your eyes blinking, your synapses firing, your heart beating and feeling.
You are not a work of art. You are so much more than that.