witnessing

There was something ceremonial.

Not performative. Not curated for the sake of aesthetics. Not the kind of “healing” people package into soft colors and inspirational captions. I mean ceremonial in the oldest sense of the word. Like something inside me was being witnessed by the earth itself. Like I stepped into a grassy yard one version of myself and walked out another.

A shoot called Love & Rage.

At first, I thought those words existed in opposition to each other. I more or less thought rage threatened love. I thought tenderness made anger less valid. I thought I had to choose which parts of myself deserved visibility. Which parts of myself were acceptable.

But standing there covered in paint and sweat and sunlight, I realized:
love and rage often come from the exact same place.

You rage because you love.
You grieve because you loved.
You survive because somewhere inside you there is still love for your own life.
Even healing itself is an act of love.

And maybe rage is not always destruction.
Maybe sometimes rage is proof that your spirit refused to die quietly.

The entire shoot felt like an altar to contradiction.

There I was in white lace, looking almost ghostly, almost bridal, while smearing paint across canvases with reckless hands. Some moments felt soft enough to cry inside of (and I did). Other moments felt animalistic. Primal (and they were). Like I was clawing something ancient out of myself and placing it into the open air.

The paintings became messy almost immediately. I became messy almost immediately.

Paint dripped where it wasn’t supposed to.
Colors collided.
Brushstrokes lost control.
My hands stopped trying to create something beautiful and started trying to create something true.

And I think that is the closest I have ever come to understanding art.

Art is not cleanliness.
Art is evidence.

Evidence that someone was here.
Evidence that someone felt something enough to leave a mark behind.

The older I get, the less interested I become in perfection. Perfection is sterile. Untouched things rarely change anyone. The things that move us most are usually fractured somehow. Honest somehow. Human somehow.

The trembling voice.
The cracked sculpture.
The unfinished poem.
The person who falls apart and keeps living anyway.

Especially that person.

There was one moment where I stood balancing barefoot on a stool with one leg lifted into the air, and I remember feeling suspended between collapse and transcendence. Like one wrong movement could send me crashing down, and yet somehow the entire point was that I kept balancing anyway.

That image feels like my whole life.

Trying to become while still shaking.
Trying to remain soft in a world that rewards numbness.
Trying to hold grief and joy in the same pair of hands without dropping either.

I think healing is often misunderstood because people want it to look clean.

They want redemption arcs.
Finished stories.
Linear progress.
They want the version of survival that ties itself up neatly at the end.

But real healing is inconsistent.
Sometimes you dance in the sunlight.
Sometimes you sob in your car.
Sometimes you create beauty out of your pain.
Sometimes you make a complete mess of yourself.
Sometimes you backslide.
Sometimes you stand back up again with paint-stained hands and no idea where you’re going next.

And all of it counts.

All of it is part of becoming.

There was clay on my feet during this shoot.
Paint under my fingernails.
Sweat in my eyes.
At one point I laughed-cried so hard I forgot I was being photographed at all. And in another moment I looked at myself and felt almost unbearably vulnerable. Not because I was exposed physically, but because I was exposed emotionally. There is something terrifying about allowing yourself to be witnessed honestly.

No performance.
No polished persona.
No pretending to have everything figured out.

Just:
Here.
This is me.
This is what surviving looked like on this particular day.

And maybe that is why these photos affected me so deeply when I finally saw them.

My amazingly talented friend, the photographer, but more importantly someone who truly saw me in those moments, said something while we were viewing the gallery together that settled directly into my chest.

She said these photos made her want to know who I was.
That she imagined someone finding them fifty years from now and sitting in awe of them. Wondering about my story. Wondering what kind of life I lived. Wondering why I made this art. Wondering who this woman was that stood in the grass and turned her own becoming into a ceremony.

I don’t think she understood how profoundly that moved me.

Because what greater purpose could art possibly serve than that?

To outlive explanation.
To make someone curious about the soul behind it.
To make someone feel presence decades later.

Not because the images were perfect.
But because they were alive.

That is the thing I keep returning to:
alive.

(Most of) These photos do not feel posed to me.
They feel inhabited.

They feel like proof that a person can be simultaneously grieving and hopeful.
Soft and furious.
Unfinished and worthy.
Fragile and powerful.
A mess and still sacred.

Especially sacred.

I used to think I couldn’t be seen or loved until I was whole again. And I used to think becoming whole meant removing the messy parts of myself. After experiencing the past year, and after this shoot, I think wholeness is allowing every part of yourself to be witnessed by others. I think wholeness is allowing every part of yourself sit at the same table without shame.

The rage.
The tenderness.
The fear.
The joy.
The loneliness.
The desire to be witnessed.
The desire to be loved.
The desire to disappear.
The ache to create.
The exhaustion of surviving.
The unbearable, persistent hope.

Love & Rage.

Not opposites.
Not enemies.

Just proof that the human heart is capable of holding tenderness and fire in the same breath.

And maybe healing is not choosing one over the other,
but learning how to honor both without letting either consume you.

Thank you THANK YOU to my beautiful friend, Katelyn. I can’t wait to create more art together.