How everything started

Hello and nice to meet you.

I am so glad that you want to find out more about my story and how I decided to stop practicing medicine and instead become a painter.

First things first, I am Renata and I am on a journey of self discovery. This is not always easy.

I was born in Romania, went to medical school, moved with my husband to Germany, became an ophthalmologist (aka an eye doctor) and had two children. Already after my first child I knew I didn’t want to return to working in a hospital. But what could I do? Everyone in my life told me I was such a creative person so I left everything that I knew behind and started this journey because I got to one point in my life when I said ‘ It’s enough’ . I was never good at introspection and decision making although as a highly sensitive person (or just my learned coping mechanism from my childhood) I am very aware of everything that surrounds me. I notice every micro-expression and as I have been told I can never pull of a poker face.

So back to the original story, I have read and listened to many ‘self healing’ gurus out there and did many hours of therapy and I can’t really say anything helped. Don’t get me wrong, I think everything in this life has a purpose, but these techniques were just not working for me. Because deep down I never changed anything in my daily life. Days went by, I was unsatisfied with my job (mostly because it was not like I had imagined it would be, I always thought I would have time to treat my patients with respect and kindness but in real life you have 5 minutes for each person coming into the practice) and I was too afraid to change anything. Until I bought a book for my children called ‘The lion inside’ by Rachel Bright. I mean how?! I was shocked of the deep meaning of this story. If you are struggling with a major life decision I really recommend that book because it is about a mouse that was unsatisfied with it’s own life and decides to face the big lion to confront him and tell him, he is looking for a friend like him so that he can teach him how to be so confident. And there comes the sentence that struck me to my roots: If you want to change anything, you have to change yourself (excuse my translation if it’s not the best one but I read it in german).

So there I was, a tiny mouse with social anxiety, in a country where I didn’t know anyone, wanting to change something. So I did.

I finally closed the door to my medical career and started exploring mediums how I could express everything that was going on in my mind. So I started with photography, I always loved taking pictures. But I soon realised that this would be not enough to get everything out that had to come out. I was holing a lot of frustration inside me and all the staged sets soon became more like a cage for me. So I started painting.

I was always good with colours and drawings so I just started with a landscape of Lanzarote, and although it is not my best work out there, it is framed and has a special place in our home, because that was my stepping stone into this beautiful career that I am building.

If you want to stick around to see how change is not impossible, I will post one blog post every week about my journey, lifestyle and everything that interests me.