When LaNia Roberts walked into an after-school art class in Louisville’s West End, she had a lesson plan and something else to say.

Roberts, a full-time artist, author, speaker, educator and content creator, volunteered for the class at Brandeis Elementary School after being asked to help. The lesson was called “Self(Love) Portraits,” and she knew many of the girls would be making their first self-portrait.

Before they started painting, Roberts wanted to make one thing clear. Perfectionism did not belong in the room.

“I walked into a classroom full of little girls who looked just like me at their age, and who came from the same neighborhoods I grew up in,” Roberts said. “The West End of Louisville is where I’m from, a predominantly Black area of town where hardship is more familiar than I’d like to admit. Perfectionism there isn’t just a mindset; it’s a survival mechanism.”

Roberts said she saw herself in the students in front of her. By that age, she said, she had already started developing the perfectionism that later caused her deep pain through her teenage years and early adulthood.

“I wish I could have gone back and said to my younger self the words I spoke to that class,” she said.

“When I reminded those girls, ‘It’s just a painting,’ it wasn’t because I wanted them to lower their standards,” Roberts said. “It was because I wanted them to breathe, to actually enjoy the process of learning something completely new and difficult. To have the kind of freedom that creativity needs in order to truly take root.”

By the end of the class, Roberts said the girls had plenty to be proud of.

“Not because it was perfect,” she said, “but because it was theirs. And at the end of the day, that’s all that matters.”

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