Written after attempting to transform grief into something tender, again.
I create to stay above water. I create through anything that lets me rearrange the noise. Images, textures, sounds, even silence. It’s about expression and containment. If I can turn something ugly into something shaped, I can stand to look at it. I know how to sculpt pain into something structured, something even beautiful. What I don’t know is whether that process actually lessens the pain, or just disguises it in prettier colors. Most days, it doesn’t feel like healing. It feels like an exhumation. Like digging up the same body again and again, wiping the dirt off, speaking to it gently:
I’ll try to make you into something else this time. Something someone could look at and say, I know this ache.
I don’t know how to process my emotions without turning them into something. Burying them has never been my way. I feel like I need to look each feeling directly in the eyes, even the ones I can’t name yet. Maybe it’s my need to summon whatever hasn’t fully surfaced. Sometimes I feel so far from myself it scares me. When people ask me things, I answer in a way that doesn’t feel like me. Maybe documenting my feelings and memories is my way of drawing a map back to myself, little by little.
There’s comfort in it. Control, even. But there’s also this… slow erosion. Each time I make something out of the grief, I feel both a little lighter and a little less like myself. Like I’ve extracted something permanent from my own bones to feed the art. A kind of self-cannibalism that still feels better than silence. And then August comes. People say “Happy birthday” with warmth, with celebration, and I smile. Because my loved ones’ need to celebrate me evokes joy in me. Yet, I am really embarrassed to say that something in me shivers out of confusion. There’s a version of me that doesn’t quite believe I should still be here. She wakes up around summer time every year, speaking to me with a strange certainty:
You weren’t supposed to make it.
Like the fact that I’m still alive is a mistake no one has caught yet.
So I create. Because it’s the only way I know how to hold both worlds at once. The joy and the grief, the weight and the reason to carry it, the birthday and the disbelief, the living and the part of me that’s still waiting to dissolve.
Maybe creation won’t save me. Maybe it never has. But it’s the only thing that’s ever made me feel like grief didn’t win completely. And I can at least hold it up to the air and say, “See? I carried this. And I made it mean something.”
You might also enjoy the rest of my Mirrors collection.
