I’ve been writing and making art for as long as I can remember, and I constantly return to creative practices as a through-line, a stabilizing constant in my everyday life and through transition and hard times.

I grew up a 90s kid in the midwest, the oldest daughter of eight children in a Christian fundamentalist home. I worked really hard to live up to the pressures and expectations of my family and the church.

Because of this, I lived in a constant state of fear and shame, but became quite skilled at achieving success to prove that I was okay, that I was good.

In school, I was called “smart girl,” and at home, my nickname was “strange.”

Despite working really hard to fit in, I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere. I was a misfit, an outsider.

As a child, I found friends in books and solace in my silver-glitter journal that had a lock and key on it, and stayed in a place hidden beneath my bed where I swore no one would imagine searching.

I filled the journal with musings of life at school and home, and wrote short stories with imaginary characters created from scratch-and-sniff stickers and magazine clippings. I drew pictures of myself when I felt floppy, and too tall, and designed colorful outfits for my hand-drawn misfit monsters with funny names.

My journal was my sacred space, the home inside myself.

Because I was studying art, psychology, and yoga all at once, I began to see how creative practice embodied much of the same teachings of the mindfulness practices I was learning.

I realized that I engage with creative practice in the same way I engage with yoga or meditation - to slow down, to be with my breath, and to come back to the wholeness that is the most REAL, with a capital R, me.

My work now is an ever-unfolding path to finding home within myself. From my own experience, I now understand that underneath the noise, chaos, distractions, and overwhelm, there is a sacred space, a quiet force that is ever-present and always accessible if we learn how to enter into it.

For me, creativity is a way in.