Did I Really Just Write That?
And other things that keep me up at night
Most people don’t know this about me, but every time I hit “publish,” I want to hide. Maybe you know that feeling—the one that says, Did I say too much? Not enough? I like to take it one step further and say, Maybe I should just shut up. Why do they even let me out of the house?
I’m in awe of people who make vulnerability look effortless. For me, it’s something I have to practice — and every time I do, I slink back into myself, feeling too exposed.
And yet, I keep writing and posting. Why?
According to Brené Brown, vulnerability is at the core of shame, fear, the struggle for worthiness, but it is also the birthplace of creativity, joy, and belonging. To find our creativity and sense of belonging, we must face what it means to be vulnerable: shame, fear, and the struggle for worthiness.
Maybe that’s why I keep writing anyway — because every time I peel something back, I find another layer I’ve been hiding from. And lately, those layers have been coming undone in ways I never expected. Maybe you’ve felt that too—the pull between wanting to put something out there and wanting to stay safe.
See Me, Don’t See Me: The Architecture of Safety
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to feel safe.
It sounds like such a simple thing — but for many of us, that word carries a lifetime of history.
Last week, I shared that my father was killed. Grief has a way of unearthing things you thought you’d already buried — not just memories, but truths you couldn’t face before. It cracked something open in me. It made me wonder: what does safety really mean? Not just the kind that keeps your body from harm, but the kind that lets your heart stay open while you live.
Imagine being a child in a home filled with chaos or violence. You can’t protect yourself, so you learn fast: you hide. Now imagine growing up around adults so lost in their own pain that they can’t see you. What’s the one thing you crave most? To be seen.
Put those two things together — the instinct to hide and the desire to be seen — and you have a recipe for lifelong confusion. You grow into someone who wants to be visible but feels in danger when you are. That contradiction becomes the invisible architecture of your identity — a pattern you live inside without even realizing it.
For me, that realization felt like a fault line running straight through my life.
I’ve spent decades dancing between “see me” and “don’t see me” — craving visibility while bracing for the cost of it.
And honestly, it makes perfect sense that I ended up building a career behind the scenes in film. I could create entire worlds, make people feel something, and still remain hidden in the shadows — the unseen hand painting beauty into someone else’s vision. The people on set saw me. The public didn’t. I became a ghost of sorts — orchestrating painterly magic from behind the scenes.
There’s something haunting about realizing you’ve spent a lifetime helping other people’s stories come to life while quietly silencing your own.
When you grow up equating visibility with risk, you learn to dim yourself. You learn to take up less space, to speak softly (or not at all), to read every room before entering. You become fluent in protection — the art of not being too much or too noticeable. You learn to survive by shrinking.
And yet, deep down, another voice keeps screaming: Look at me. I’m still here.
That’s the hardest part — learning how to let that voice come alive. Because for people like us, safety isn’t a given; it’s a practice. It’s something we have to rebuild from the inside out, one act of self-trust at a time.
Psychologically, it makes sense. Every human nervous system is wired to seek safety before anything else. Without it, the brain stays in survival mode — scanning for danger, holding its breath. Creativity, love, connection — all of it goes quiet until safety returns.
And the truth is, many of us are still walking around with bodies that don’t realize the danger is over. The world outside changed, but the body still remembers. It’s the same with grief but that’s a whole other post.
That’s why this conversation about safety matters. Because when we start to rebuild it — not as a concept, but as a lived experience — we stop performing life and start living it. We stop surviving and start belonging. And what does that mean? We start becoming the active creators of our lives.
That’s the alchemy — turning fear into freedom, vigilance into presence, and survival into creation.
Sometimes I look back and ask myself, How was I ever supposed to know who I was in that situation? I wasn’t. I was too busy staying alive.
“See me, don’t see me” is a hard way to live. It’s a hard way to love. It’s a hard way to build a life. But awareness is the beginning of release. Once you name it, it starts to loosen its grip.
I’ve spent a lifetime excavating myself, digging through layers of identity, thinking I’d found the treasure, only to realize I was still standing on the ruins. But each time, I got closer. Each layer peeled back another version of me I’d once needed to survive.
When I painted Taos, I found the desert in my own soul — dry, cracked, but still standing. I had to let the sun set before I could see the beauty in what was left. That’s when I realized vulnerability isn’t weakness — it’s the moment the light finally gets in.
Maybe that’s what safety really is. Not a place where nothing hurts — but a place where you no longer have to hide from what does. Maybe that’s what all of this has been about — not just safety, but becoming. The slow work of remembering who I was before the hiding began.
The Alchemy of Becoming
There are seasons that strip us down to the bone — where everything we thought we were gets dismantled, dissolved, or burned to ash. And that’s where I’ve been lately — somewhere between collapse and clarity.
Somewhere between the end of a story and the beginning of something unnamed.
Grief has a way of rearranging the furniture of your soul. You think you’re being strong, but you’re just tired. You think you’re broken, but you’re actually becoming clear.
I’ve carried so much — love, loss, memory — that my heart feels both ancient and alive. There’s a tenderness to standing in the tide of your own becoming. To realizing that every ending, no matter how devastating, eventually becomes an opening.
And then it happens again.
Healing isn’t a grand entrance. It’s a slow becoming — a surrender to the emotional landscape we create within ourselves.
It’s realizing that the heartbreak doesn’t define you anymore, that rest isn’t weakness, and that love can exist without reopening old wounds.
One by one, the layers fall away and what’s left is a heartbeat — steady, honest, enough. One that I can listen to and when I do it tells me what is not mine to fix.
The cost of being human is knowing we will someday exit this world. Not everything is meant to be soothed or solved. My light isn’t here to convince — it’s here to illuminate. I can offer warmth without losing heat.
There’s a certain peace that arrives when solitude stops feeling like punishment and starts feeling like sanctuary. The world looks different from here. Softer. Wiser. Less about proving and more about tending — to my art, my body, my home, my feelings, my becoming.
The waiting is over. The ground beneath me is steady. The only reason I know this is because I have lived the opposite truth. Funny how it that works.
✦ For Subscribers: The Origin Story Behind This One
If you’ve been following my journey, you know I often write about transformation — how collapse becomes clarity, and how chaos can turn into something beautiful.
But the deeper story behind that? It began long before this season.
Three years ago, I was featured on a national blog for one of the hardest — and most honest — pieces I’ve ever written. It was the first time I told the truth about where my art really began: how creativity became both my survival and my salvation.
It all started with a book that changed everything — the way I saw myself, my past, and the entire world around me. It moved me to reach out to the author, to share my story, and eventually to be chosen for their blog.
When they asked if they could publish it under my real name, I hesitated. What if being honest about my story changed how the people I love saw me?