It is important to me that I am in charge of my destiny. My life is like a painting. I am the artist, and my life is the canvas. The color palate holds my thoughts, opinions, and decisions. I don’t have control of everything, but just like I choose the dark and light colors, I am able to make my own decisions. Just like green, a mixture of yellow and blue, some decisions have an equal amount of good and bad and are difficult to decipher. Over time, life experiences overlap. They all blend together which create diversity in our lives. Similar to how an artist decides which brushes are best to use, I have to choose which people will help me rather than hurt me. Their influences on me are the brush strokes that give texture to my painting. In life if we make a mistake we can’t go back and change it. It is the same with painting. Once it’s down on canvas it can’t be completely removed, but we can create something beautiful around the original mistake to represent growth, maturity, and a lesson learned. We end our lives with a grand masterpiece full of trials and tribulations, loves and losses, failures and successes, and highlights and shadows. Everyone’s picture is different. Not one of us is the same. We are each a unique artist who is given the power to design our destiny. We are the painters of our lives.