Anna McKeever is fresh off the adrenaline of a hugely successful 'Anam' exhibition of her paintings, her first such display.
If anyone should know how to keep that adrenaline in check, it's the former doctor from Belfast who has switched tack to pursue her true passion in art.
Having travelled around the world for a decade, returning home ion 2016, Anna worked for five years in psychiatry and then trained in public health.
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She told Belfast Live though that despite her head winning the day when it came to choosing medicine, her heart never stopped yearning for a more creative outlet.
"I painted all through that, all through my working life as a doctor, through night classes and that," she said.
"Then basically during the pandemic, I went from painting just in the evenings to starting my Instagram account.
"It was more as a means of distracting myself from the stress of everything and how scary everything was.
"It just exploded and the thing with Instagram is that there's a real international flavour to it and it seemed to resonate with those all over the world."
The 'Anam' exhibition (Irish for soul) gave Anna her first shot at displaying her work and it also marked a turn away from the safety of the vibrant and colourful landscapes she had become so adept at creating.
She instead focussed on the events that have shaped the history of the island of Ireland the impact they have left.
"I do feel very connected to the landscape here, particularly Belfast," she said.
"I'm very proud about being from here and I love the kind of hardened exterior of the people and landscape here.
"But I do feel sometimes we're kind of sanitised as this almost caricature of what it is to be Irish or Northern Irish - but there's so much trauma in our history.
"Yes it has been peppered with suffering, but there's a joy and a kind of humour and resilience that makes us very unique."
She said the transition from "doctor, with art on the side" to "a full-time creative" has not been without its bumps and setbacks but that ultimately it has been worth it.
"I worked in psychiatry for five years and I found myself increasingly disillusioned prescribing medications for people where I felt medication was trying to fix something which is fundamentally a non-medical issue," she added.
"It was more unhappiness and unease or generalised anxiety or discontent rather than metal illness.
"The problem was you're basically prescribing medication for lifestyle or social problems and that didn't sit very well with me.
"There's a lot of evidence around the benefits of art, not even painting it yourself, even just from looking at it and enjoying it.
"It's the same way you listen to music, where you can't explain why a certain song impacts you, that's the same with looking at or painting a piece of art."
Anna said she reconnecting with art in that way during the lockdown periods of the pandemic had allowed her to refocus her life.
"Painting for me has always been a very grounding experience, it's always made sense, it's not something I've ever had to force, which sometimes medicine was," she said.
"If anything, my medical training has taught me to really focus on nurturing the parts of yourself that make you feel alive and calm and focus on the things that really ground you.
"I feel very lucky to have that and it's something I've used all my life to deal with my own anxieties and it's been very beneficial in many ways."
Having come through her first exhibition with a positive response and boosted confidence, Anna says the plan remains very much to focus on doing what makes her happy, even if other options are beginning to present themselves.
"A lot of the pieces actually sold overseas, one sold to America and one to Kuala Lumpur, so it's not even specific to people who live here, it can be generations who have moved overseas," she said.
"There has been some traction in America and I'm having a few interesting conversations with galleries there.
"But I got good advice, which was to keep your main thing the main thing - I started this was just because I love it, so whatever comes of it is not as much the focus."
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