Part 1
Young Irina in Romania
First of all, I just want to say that it’s an honor to write something for this blog, and to join the high caliber of women who have contributed. With their stories, and what I share about my own journey, I hope to inspire someone else out there to pursue God’s calling on their life. Thank you for reading.
I can’t fully describe how I got to being totally me without talking about who I used to be. So I’ll just start at the beginning. If you’ve read my bio then you know that I was born in Romania during some very different and difficult times, which had a great impact on me. Romania in the 1980s was under communist rule and things were starting to fall apart. The country was in heavy debt to other nations, and in order to pay their debt, they sold off their own electricity and water supplies. This meant that we would only get hot water on certain days of the week, and only for a few hours at a time. Our electricity would go off every night at a certain hour. We boiled water for baths, and lit candles and oil lamps for light. Staple foods like flour, sugar, coffee, and oil were also rationed, and we waited in bread lines ever since I can remember. My grandparents had farms and they grew most of their own food, and we took part in the seasons of sowing and reaping. It was beautiful, and hard. In many ways it was like a window back into a past world that most countries in the west had left behind many generations earlier. This is probably why as an adult I now favor impressionist paintings from the late 1800s as they remind me of those early childhood memories I treasure.
It was in Romania when I was about 5 years old that I fell in love with drawing. I caught my aunt sketching my portrait one afternoon after waking from a nap. She had started sketching me while I slept, and to her dislike, I interrupted her work when I woke. I got a quick glance at the drawing and was left stunned. It amazed me that human hands could create something like that with just pen and paper, especially someone in my own family. I resolved there and then to be a great artist myself. I poured my heart out into art, pursuing it with a fervor, and it was soon noticeable that I had a gift. It brought me great joy, and lots of praise, which I thrived on. However, this dependence on outside praise in connection with who I was as an artist would become an Achilles heel for me.