The Walls That Taught Me Self-Love: Street Art Around the World

I did not set out to collect photographs of walls. It happened the way most real habits happen. I started stopping, and then I could not stop.

After that I noticed how many of the messages were about being a woman. Not decorative. Not pretty. Instructive. Pieces on the side of a laundromat telling somebody to keep going. Words sprayed at eye level about love, mostly the kind you are supposed to give yourself and mostly do not. Faces painted the height of a building with the chin lifted. There is a whole conversation happening on the walls, wherever I stop to look, and almost all of it is women talking to each other, publicly, for free, with no permission asked.

Street art is a strange place to find that. It is wet, it is cold, it is on the wrong side of a fence, and it is temporary. Someone paints a wall that took her two days and it is gone by the next season, painted over by newer hands. Maybe that is why it says the honest thing. There is no client, no focus group, no reason to soften it.

I am not a muralist. I am not claiming to be part of that world. What I do is stop and photograph the walls. The photographs are mine; the work on the walls belongs to the people who painted them. That is the whole claim I am making, and it is a small one.

So here is what I actually learned from the walls, and it took years. Self-love is not a feeling you wait for. It is a decision you make in small, boring, repeatable ways until it is a habit. A bath when you are tired instead of a scroll. A door closed. Twenty minutes that nobody can have. You do not have to want to do it. You just have to do it, the way you would for a friend.

That is what the walls are saying, mostly. Not "be beautiful." Not "be fine." Take care of yourself. Somebody had to paint it on a wall to get me to hear it.