Feel And Heal

     I have found transparency and vulnerability to be such gifts. It’s terrifying, the idea of opening up and letting anyone take a look at your insides, at all the ways you fit into yourself. Pointing a flashlight at all the cobwebs, in all the dusty corners. All the things that you’ve tried to clean up but no matter how hard you work at them they just won’t go away. It’s a huge blessing to find release in art because it gives you ways to be okay with all that you are. You get to learn that it’s not so much about cleaning up all that mess but opening doorways and windows to let more light in, to shine some clarity in the space and see that… it’s not really not that bad. It’s livable, and that’s a fact that you become surprised to learn even though this whole time you HAVE been living in it. Through honesty in art you get to learn that the things you used to be so scared and ashamed of are actually structures that shape you into who you are. And while some things DO ne...

     I feel light, so light I could just float up and be carried away by the wind if it wasn’t for my body tethering me down.      I am feeling this massive relief because I felt an important truth last night. It came to me SUDDENLY and from the passing of one second to the next I became almost a different person. It’s a truth that has been revealed itself to me before… I just keep forgetting. But conveniently my Highest Self and Power loves me enough to keep telling it to me to my FACE. I’m saying this here and now because I’m human and I might need this again later on.     That truth is the simplicity, authority and just plain audacity of the statement, “So what?” The last couple of weeks I had been feeling such a heavy. Fucking. Misery. I was finding it hard to do more than breathe some moments. I wrote about it. Trust me, I wrote different pieces of different lengths about what was affecting me but then I was still left with the...

       For as long as I can remember, there has existed a “Before” and “After” timeline in my mind. The “before” was me being fat, uneducated, unloved, unfunny, poor and just generally physically uncomfortable. The “after” would be the complete opposite of that! I LOVED letting my mind wander into the “after”. I would be 25 always. I would get older, of course, but pretty much just stay looking and feeling 25. I would be thin but not too thin. I would have a cute apartment in a cute red brick city like Pittsburgh. I would have a cute little animal friend, maybe two. I would have a real life, serious boyfriend who I may or may not have known in my “before” days but that wouldn’t matter because this is “after” and I would be perfect. In the after I would be famous and my job would be to inspire people with my bright cheerfulness.            I do not remember the exact thing that caused me to start thinking of my life in terms of befo...

     I have been in one single fist fight. It was the end of 5 th grade, and shit got real bloody. Little skirmishes with my siblings and cousins don’t count...no this fight was brutal, I was filled with rage and I broke the other girl’s nose and she had to go to the ER.      The rage was stemming from the fact that I became a bullied social outcast within a couple weeks or so of being in America and at Sandy Springs Elementary School in Atlanta, Georgia. I arrived in the US of A in April, 2002 a hopeful and happy girl, grateful to be reunited with my family. We had all been on a refuge journey for months before this and for about 6-8 months my mother, father and two baby siblings had been living in Atlanta while working on finding a way for me to fly here and join them. In that time I was passed around between family members and trusted friends in Europe, moving every couple of weeks.      But I arrived, I made it. I was excited t...