For as long as I can remember, anxiety has shaped my life. A persistent sense of feeling unsafe, insecure, or just generally afraid has been there. But after 20 years of diving into the self-help rabbit hole, I’ve come to realize that there’s nothing inherently wrong with me. My brain and body have simply done an incredible job of keeping me afloat through turbulence.
People have often seen me as macabre, both in my personal and professional life. For years, it felt like my lips were stapled shut—I had been blackmailed into secrecy, carrying the weight of family secrets that festered inside me. They clawed their way to the surface in intermittent spurts through my artistic expression.
I don’t find dark art appealing to create anymore though—not since I made peace with my past. Getting to this point has been emotionally gory and violent, like a Quentin Tarantino film.
It took me a long time to understand that, while I didn’t consciously choose what happened to me as a child, as an adult, I am in full control of how I choose to feel and think about myself and my life.
For years, my fear of being hurt built a massive wall between me and others. I saw the world as unsafe, a battlefield where I had to go through life with my guns blazing—always on guard, always ready to strike first so I wouldn’t be the one wounded. But in trying so hard to protect myself, I inevitably hurt others along the way.
Art has always been my therapy—my form of psychoanalysis, my mindfulness practice, my way of soothing gnawing anxiety (which, funnily enough, I later realized was exacerbated by my carb-phobic family diet culture... but that’s a story for another day). I wish I could say I create beautiful art just because it’s pretty and makes people smile. But that would only be half the truth.
My artistic process is like the swamp and the lotus. From the depths of pain, I’ve learned to bloom in the open air and fresh spaces—because I took the time to sit with the drudgery, to understand it, to assimilate it. Over 20 years, I’ve kept returning to myself through art, refining my ability to still my mind and direct it toward something favorable, rather than letting it spiral into panic and chaos.
I am not perfect, and neither is my art. But both represent hope—the possibility of finding peace in a life filled with tragedy that often feels impossible to understand.
Sometimes, when I zoom out, I can see the patterns. I can see why things happened the way they did, why certain people behaved the way they did. And in those moments, all I’m left with is a deep, compassionate sadness for the human condition—for the eons of hurt we’ve inflicted upon one another in our delusion of separateness.
My heart has been a battlefield. And I choose, as best as I can, to smooth away the wounds with love and grace—for myself and for others, no matter how difficult it may be.
The legacy I want to leave behind is one that inspires confidence in those who feel too afraid to let the warmth of the sun touch their face. I want people to remember me as the little girl who not only survived—but thrived. And through it all, my art carried me forward.