07/2022

From the journal: 7/2022

For an artist, there is no separation of personal life and your art there is no way for there to be. We feel so deeply that it spills over into everything we do especially our art, art is love, art is heartache, art is time. Art is hate. Art is revelation, art is hardship. Art is fast. Art is slow. Art is confusing. Art is life. I’m still having a hard time calling myself An artist in the sense that I create a product for people with means to purchase, but I’ll never have a problem calling myself an artist with respect to how I see life and how I live life. Honestly, I don’t know if it’s because I am neurodivergent or my anxiety or my depression or my OCD. It’s probably all of it that makes the way that I see the world moving and at times it can feel, so overwhelming and the overwhelm can hit me out of nowhere and it is always from the least expected thing. I just never know what I’ll experience in a day and that’s part of what makes art so beautiful to me because creating art is living in the moment, it’s a meditation on humanity. My humanity and humanity as a whole it’s way I’ve discovered to accept imperfection as a virtue and confusion as an opportunity.

It’s helped me, not stress about the outcome and instead focus on consistency and showing up and doing the work and in doing that success will always be inevitable. Art has given me the permission to show up for myself in ways that I thought I never could. It’s giving me permission to be imperfect to be ugly to be shortsighted to be confused and not have to fix it to just live with it and understand it’s what makes me beautiful because that’s my humanity. Art has taught me that my wounds are going to open and close multiple times in my life. they are going to heal and then be ripped open again by something I didn’t expect. different things in life will heal those wounds and different things in life will reopen those wounds. the purpose of this work is to understand that healing, and how to ride through these phases of life how to rise up and be open and understand that I’m not doing it wrong if it still hurts and that if hating myself brought success, I would already be where I wanted to be. it’s taught me how to hope, that the reason hope is so scary is it requires a belief in myself. the confidence that I have what it takes to wade through the mess. it’s taught me that not relying myself like I did in the past is not what I should be doing that relying on myself and trusting my intuition is the best gift that I can give myself. and that expressing my fears, hopes and dreams doesn’t make me too much. It makes me strong. And that the growth doesn’t happen in getting an answers to why the growth happens in learning to accept that I may never get the answers Art has taught me that I’m actually pretty fucking amazing. I just never saw it because I was knee-deep in insecurities that aren’t real most of my life. I show up, I try and  I fight for myself every day. I make mistakes and it’s messy, but I’m still beautiful I am choosing to repair my relationship with myself I’m choosing to focus on how I build myself up rather than tear myself down. we as women are so gifted at destroying ourselves and I mean, annihilating ourselves with our insecurities and our inner narratives but at some point, you have to decide to do something different. You have to decide your life is worth more than the boundaries you set for yourself to feel safe. Life is not about safety. It’s about living and living requires bravery and the bravest thing I’ve ever done is to lean into my insecurities and made them my strengths I finally decided that along with the other things that make me happy I am also worth choosing. I had to stop taking ownership for things that were never mine to own. I am not in control of the things that other people do to me nor is it my responsibility to carry the burden of that pain anymore. It’s OK to give myself grace and compassion and I’m always doing better than I think. I had to learn to forgive myself for the way I allowed myself to be treated when I didn’t know better. And then I cannot hold old me to the standard that I have now 20-20 vision is not a tool to beat myself up. And just because things still hurt doesn’t mean I haven’t done the work to heal. It just means that the cut was so deep that it’s gonna take time. and most of all it’s giving me a place to sit in and experience my emotions in the moment to sit with the uncomfortability of all of it to sit with the happiness of all of it to sit with the sadness of all of it to sit with the frustration of all of it.

Poem from the journal entry:

My Lens

For an artist, there is no separation,
no neat division between the pulse of life
and the wild brushstrokes of creation.
We feel so deeply,
it spills over, a torrent,
flooding every corner of existence—
art is love,
art is heartache,
a heavy cloak we wear,
a burden and a blessing,
art is the ticking clock,
the frantic pace,
the slow unraveling
of time itself.

It is the confusion,
the beautiful chaos,
a mirror reflecting the myriad
colors of life,
the mundane made extraordinary
by the act of seeing.
I wrestle with the label—
artist—
as if it were a shackle,
a badge of honor,
clinging to me like a second skin,
but I find solace
in how I perceive the world,
each moment a brushstroke,
each breath a canvas,
my existence a meditation
on what it means to be human.

Neurodivergent, anxious,
depressed, obsessive—
these are the lenses
through which I view the light,
the shadows,
the overwhelm that creeps in,
uninvited,
a thief in the night,
and yet,
it is this very overwhelm
that births the art,
the creation born of chaos,
a testament to the beauty
found in living
in the moment.


Art is my permission slip,
a sanctuary where I can be
imperfect,
ugly,
shortsighted,
confused—
each flaw a thread in the tapestry
of my humanity,
my wounds opening and closing
like doors in a haunted house,
each scar a map
of battles fought and scars earned.