The Salmon’s Tale of Painted Scales: Our Story

I shared my illustrated story of “A Salmon’s Tale of Painted Scales” , but now I want to share why I actually made the piece to begin with. I made it because I’ve lived it, and continue to struggle with this idea, and I can see how all of us live it in small ways throughout our lives whether it’s for a brief moment or for years.

The life cycle of a salmon is a profound metaphor for our own lives. If you don’t know the life of a salmon it goes something like this:

She is born in a fresh river and swims out to the vast ocean. Eventually, she must make the arduous journey back to her birthplace to lay her eggs. This means swimming upstream against the current, leaping over waterfalls, and battling obstacles. Another important detail is that a salmon makes this journey alone, not in a protective school like many other fish.

For the purpose of this story, an important note is the color transformation: a salmon’s skin starts out dull and gray, but as she swims upstream, she develops the beautiful, vibrant orange salmon color (that we think of when we eat her) on the inside. Her life is, to say the least, difficult, lonely, and uncertain.

The Salmon Who Wanted to Be a Fish

My salmon thinks she is dull and gray compared to the other fish. Her life seems so much harder; she is always swimming upstream, alone, while everyone else drifts easily downstream, together in schools, with their beautiful, bright-colored scales. She envies them, believing their lives are happy and easy and she wants that life too.

One day, she sees an orange paint bucket at the bottom of the ocean. She douses herself in it, disguising herself as a regular orange fish. She then turns around, and begins to swim downstream with the school of orange fish.

But somewhere along the way, she finds herself just drifting. Despite being surrounded by other fish, she feels incredibly empty, sad, and broken inside. The crowd only amplifies the profound sense of aloneness. The painted life, which looked so good from the outside, did not feel so good on the inside. She was living the life of an orange fish, but she wasn’t happy like the orange fish.

As the orange paint washes off, bit by bit, she looks upstream. Her heart is pulling her toward the daunting, arduous, and lonely path of her origin. She has a deep longing, but also a deep fear. The path ahead is terrifying. Yet, she realizes she would rather feel challenged, fearful, and alone than empty, fragmented, and disconnected.

So, she turns around and begins to make her way back upstream.

The orange paint finally fades away, and she is back to her natural gray color. The path is harder and lonelier, but the emptiness is gone. She feels a sense of meaning, she feels like herself.

Finally, she makes her way back to the waterfall before the river where she was born. As she prepares to make the final leap, she realizes a beautiful truth within herself: She is glowing orange on the inside. The moment she trusted her journey, followed her heart, and allowed herself to be who she truly was, she started to shine from within.

She leaps over the waterfall to the top of the river, where she finds other salmon just like her, preparing to make their own journey into the ocean, she reminds them “Never forget who you are.”

The Deeper Meaning: Shame and The Path of Purpose

What I want to write about is how this has shown up in my own life—because this isn’t just a story I made up. This is my story. This is, I think, so many of our stories.

So much of what we call identity struggles, mental health issues, anxiety, and that fragmented feeling of not knowing who you are—it comes from this. It comes from coloring our scales and swimming in the wrong direction because it looks easier, because we want to appear a certain way, or because we are afraid of being the only salmon in a river full of fish.

We often don’t even know the salmon we are deep inside because we have told ourselves we are a fish simply because we want to be one, or society has showed us we SHOULD be one, not because we genuinely are one.

The “Orange Fish” Response

Making yourself into an orange fish can be something that lasts years, even a lifetime, but it can also be something that lasts for even a second. It is a reaction to discomfort:

It can be feeling really sad about something, and instead of sitting with the sadness, you jump to coloring yourself to make you feel better for an instant.

It can be embarrassing, so instead of accepting the embarrassment, you rush to cover it up.

It can be feeling uncertain, so instead of sitting with the uncertainty, you jump to something that is certain and makes you feel better for a moment—but isn’t what your intuition is telling you.

It can be feeling like your timing with things takes longer than those around you, you don’t have as many friends, you don’t have the relationship you want, you don’t have the job you want, so you rush into the wrong thing that isn’t actually aligned with you

The Choice

We can either choose to struggle but do so feeling whole, connected, and with purpose, or we can choose not to struggle and be challenged, but instead feel lost, broken, and disconnected.

The orange paint represents our shame. We all have shame around parts of who we are. We mask ourselves not because we lack something, but because we don’t believe in what we already have.

My Salmon Story

The salmon in this story isn’t really just any salmon—the salmon is me, and she’s also all of us. While we all have our salmon stories, I’d like to share a bit about mine. This is really the heart of a much bigger story that I am trying to tell.

Growing up I felt like a salmon. I had ADHD, I was highly sensitive, creative, weird, I didn’t find myself very attractive, and I got in trouble. I often speak of my parts (DAN vs DIDI) because they are so integral to our stories.

DAN was the salmon: the messy, the sensitive, the creative, the wild and energetic, the free-spirited goofball, the weirdo. I genuinely loved her deeply, but I also feared her deeply, because I knew her life was never going to be easy. She was quite unique and full of really difficult emotions and experiences that her outside world didn’t seem to understand.

DIDI was the girl I became to cover up this pain. If DAN was the salmon, DIDI was the salmon that dipped herself in orange paint and tried to swim with the other fish. She tried to swim with them because it was easier—because she thought her life would somehow be better.

I started taking ADHD medication so I could easily do well in school subjects that I never genuinely had an interest in. I knew they didn’t matter to me, but they seemed to matter to everyone around me, and I needed love and acceptance. I stopped caring about the things that brought me genuine playfulness and happiness. I stopped making weird and goofy videos because I didn’t want people thinking I was the “weird girl.”

I quit dance and soccer and started running instead, not because I liked running more—I didn’t at all—but because it was the sport that made me skinnier, the sport that made me look better on the outside, even though I didn’t actually enjoy it.

I started using the way I looked to get guys’ attention rather than the person I actually was. And the person I actually was got pushed to the background. This made it really difficult later on to be with guys that genuinely saw me for the “real me”—hence why I automatically labeled those guys “friends” who I “couldn’t actually be with.” I labeled them that because they were “too pure and respectable” for me to hold myself accountable to date. It was easier to make excuses for why I couldn’t just follow my heart, and to date guys who never made me confront my deeper problems.

DAN was so sensitive and emotional. She loved to do art, write poetry, she loved helping others, and her happiest moments were doing social work, helping people in hard situations, connecting to people deeply one on one, traveling the world and learning about other cultures. But she was taught that a lot of those things were not things you could actually do for a living—to live doing those things was irresponsible or not useful.

Every time I traveled abroad, I became DAN. I felt like I could leave my fragmented life behind in Seattle and go just be myself, the girl that was genuinely living the life that was right for her. It’s honestly a large part of why I knew I had to come to Israel. I felt like I could finally be DAN, finally be the person I knew I always was and live the life truly meant for me. But that decision, and getting here, came with so much uncertainty, fear, and challenge—and it still does.

The Return to Self

Like the salmon, after a life spent painted orange on the outside and feeling empty, broken, full of mental health issues—from eating disorder, to anxiety and panic attacks, to finally coming to terms with my life, breaking down, feeling depressed, experiencing hypomania but ultimately coming back to myself fully—I realized the most valuable lesson we can ever learn:

The beautiful orange that we’re chasing on the outside actually lives inside of us as soon as we choose the journey to just be ourselves.

It happened when I started to unconditionally love myself, to accept myself, to stand up for what I knew was right and what I wanted no matter how hard. To live MY life. That’s when I became the most beautiful of all. That’s when I shined the most. That is when I was my most radiant and passionate.

That is when I gained the strength to show myself, to tell my truth, to live my truth, to start walking my journey. To get off of a medicine that I felt was not right for me, to quit my job that wasn’t right for me, to tell my parents in fear what was really in my heart, what I really wanted to do with my life, to come to Israel, to find an amazing partner who finally saw and accepted me for me—the good, the bad, and the messy.

The Everyday Salmon

But being a salmon isn’t just a lifelong metaphor—it’s in everyday moments. It’s in the friends we choose, the job we choose, the relationship we choose. It’s being okay saying no to things that are right in front of you that could make you feel better for a moment but not for a lifetime.

It’s being okay having fewer friends, but friends who really see you and fulfill you. It’s being okay not having your life figured out, but actually questioning it in order to find your right path. It’s being okay not having a relationship when everyone around you seems to have one, because you are waiting to find someone healthy at the time that you are also in a place to attract it. It’s being okay not having instant success, but long-term growth.

Accepting the Unique Path

I realized I must accept my uniqueness. I must accept that I’m sensitive, emotional, and feel the world deeply. I must accept that my path may be longer and more winding than others, that I may feel deeper, struggle more. It may take longer, it may be lonelier, but it’s actually aligned with me.

When we sit with the pain, the loneliness, the longing, it actually transforms us to step into the right thing.

To me, it always seemed easier for others—to make friends, to find what they wanted to do with their life, to figure out who they were, to somehow just be okay. So it seemed easier to not care about things deeply, to shut off my emotions, to avoid my pain. But by choosing a path that is easier and misaligned, you actually end up feeling far more emptiness and disconnection than if you just choose to sit with the grief. I will choose short term pain and longterm meaning over short term relief and longterm emptiness.

And instead of choosing the path meant for others, I choose the harder and lonelier path, the one actually meant for me. The path of sitting and writing on my own, of feeling everything for myself and for others, of letting the right people into my life, of making space for the things that fill me rather than just fill my time.

I choose to write about topics so close to my heart that most people won’t read, let alone understand. I choose to create a project full of uncertainties, full of creativity, with no structure, no deadline, no guarantee. I choose a career full of grief, hardship, and loneliness. I choose to come to a new country across the world by myself.

To always choose the thing in my heart no matter the pain it brings is something I have learned is the most important thing in life. I know I have to because it pains me not to; my soul is calling me to do it, and the emptiness I get from not listening is far more painful than the struggle of doing it.

But we all have a path that is harder for us than others, one that is actually OURS.

A Note on Numbing

I speak a lot about ADHD medication, and I do this not to say no one should take medication, we each have our own stories, and we each have our own desires, but because for me, it is a metaphor for a lot of things. To me, it represents something that numbed and detached me from who I really am. But it’s not just the medication, it was the spot I was in and the things I was searching for by taking it. It gave certainty and took away my fear and doubts, but it also took away my beauty, belief in myself, and my true purpose.

I decided that I would rather live a life that is harder, messier, and more emotional, but also one where I feel truly connected to myself, to my purpose, to my sensitivity, and to my creativity. I want to push back on this culture where we try to rid ourselves of hardship and pain and numb ourselves from reality in order to survive. Whether it’s over-prescribed medications, drugs to avoid pain, weight loss pills instead of health, quick relationships, quick fixes to avoid our pain, we are so quick to turn to things that are “short cuts” or that dull us before turning into ourselves deeply and fully. I’m not saying this to judge because I really truly understand, everyone has experienced this in some way, myself included. And I’m also not judging how anyone chooses to live their life and the things they place value on, I’m saying it to simply share my own experiences.

There are still doubts, fears, tears, pain, uncertainty, and discomfort in my life now. But that is life. If you have yourself, you can get through anything.

It’s OKAY to be lonely because there is no one around you. It’s NOT OKAY to be surrounded by people and be lonely because you abandoned yourself.

Walk your path, the harder and more unique one, even when no one is there to surround you. Don’t leave yourself—you’re the most precious thing you have in this life. So treat yourself as such.