Luchita Hurtado has been painting for her entire life, but she never had any public recognition until now. The 98-year-old artist is originally from Venezuela but now lives in London. She started painting at night while everybody else slept, but she never imagined she would one day get recognition from the art world. Hurtado has a showing of her work at London’s Serpentine Galleries that runs until October — and it’s the first public recognition her work has ever gotten. If there’s something you want to do — or something you need to do — you can still do it. The best time to start pursuing what you love was years ago, but the next best time is today.
This is my private confessional; the truths I write often scare me
For me, writing is confession. A very private part of me is naked for you to see. I’m vulnerable and embarrassed at times — but what you see if the truth. If you want it.
If you read what I write here, you know a side of me which remains hidden from the rest of the world. Those who work with me have no idea about the things I confess to you. Those who meet me casually anywhere else would never guess about what I have to say here.
When I was young, I was very guarded, because I was afraid about what people might think of me. I wasn’t going to change who I was to suit them, but I was still afraid of their judgment. Slowly, though, that changed. I realized that I could be very open about who I am. Why?
Nobody else is paying attention to the things which I openly share — because they’re too busy being terrified about what people might think of them, too.
And so I engage in therapy here — by telling the truth — secure in the knowledge that almost nobody else will hear. And it makes me wish or hope that there are those among you who will understand and identify with my confession — who will silently say to themselves, “That’s the way I feel, too.”
Why are so many of us afraid of the love and happiness we want?
When I woke up around 6 a.m. Monday, I felt sick at my stomach. I hadn’t been able to get to sleep until about 4 a.m. and then I had awakened every few minutes after that. By 6, I had been sleeping long enough to feel disoriented but not long enough to feel any sense of rest.
Through the fog of exhaustion, I had a feeling so disturbing that I forced myself to wake up enough to make a few notes before I fell asleep again and forgot.
“I know how to feel terrible and something in me prefers that, because I know how to deal with it,” I typed on the iPhone note. “This is a terrible feeling, but as terrible as I feel, I have a strange sense through the grogginess that this is easier to deal with than being happy — because I know how to deal with what this feels like. I’m not entirely comfortable being happy, because I don’t have enough experience with it.”
I suspect that being exhausted and half asleep allowed me to consciously feel something that lurks unnoticed at other times. And I can’t quit thinking about that.

Briefly: What’s so important you’d do it even if you knew it would fail?
Briefly: It made me happy to get update about little friends from five years ago
Briefly: Joy turned to disappointment as I realized there was no one to talk with
We’re neither friends nor enemies, just strangers who share the past
Society needs storytellers to help make sense of a changing world
My bad teen poetry suggests I’ve always hungered for missing love
‘This path leads to somewhere I think I can finally say, I’m home’
When love finally dies, it’s like a fever breaks and the pain is gone