I have spent years exploring consciousness, the soul, the unseen, and the extraordinary possibilities of being human. I have experienced moments that defy explanation. Moments when the ordinary world seemed to dissolve and something far greater became present.

Subscribe now

And yet, here I am, still asking myself why I keep part of who I am hidden and why am I so afraid of her?

For years, I have believed there was another part of me waiting to emerge. A deeper self. Someone who is far more powerful than I am. One who could see beyond the illusions of this world, who understood things my everyday human mind could barely comprehend.

I have devoted so much of my life to finding her.

Through experiences, spiritual exploration, moments of profound knowing, and the endless curiosity that seems woven into every cell of my existence.

But this morning, as my pen moved across the page, a rather unsettling thought appeared.

What if there is nothing hidden?

I have had this thought before and usually brushed it off telling myself I am scapegoating of some kind. But this time it felt different.

If you know me you know I love mystery of the unknown. I love that extraordinary moment when something reveals itself that I never knew existed. The sudden opening when the world becomes so much larger than it was only seconds before.

There is an exhilaration of excitement, a kind of bliss that is not easily explained away.

And perhaps, without realizing it, I have become rather attached to the experience of discovering myself. I have admitted that there are aspects of addiction in the search. The partial belief that there is some magnificent hidden version of me and it keeps the expectation alive that I will someday find her.

But then I realized that if I am always searching for my power, when am I ever using it?

And if I am forever waiting for another revelation, another awakening, another extraordinary experience to confirm who I am, haven’t I created a rather elaborate way of keeping myself exactly where I am?

Then the vault opened and I began to see something I hadn’t considered before.

I have continued to tell myself that I am not afraid of my power, trying to make myself believe it no matter what and I can say it is true. But what happens when the search ends?

Who would I be without something to uncover?

What would I do with all that curiosity, all that longing, all that delicious anticipation of discovering something I have never known?

Would life become ordinary? OMG. This was startling to me. Then the rabbit hole opened wider and I began to think and question more.

Would the mystery disappear? Would I lose the very thing that has made my journey so fascinating?

And then another thought arrived and I stopped allowing the fear of not being the edge walker arrived.

Who decided that wholeness meant the end of discovery and why do I feel they are opposite?

I can experience uncertainty without assuming something within me is missing. I realized I was treating wholeness as some final destination where every question has been answered and every mystery resolved.

Maybe it is simply being at peace with who I am while remaining wonderfully curious about what else is possible. It seem ridiculous to think I have to abandon anything about myself in order to become something else.

I don’t have to uncover another hidden piece of myself before I begin living. And I certainly don’t have to wait for permission from some imagined future version of me who is wiser, more powerful, or more enlightened.

So, I’m asking you, if you are like me and have spent much of your life doing exactly that. Waiting to become ready and feel worthy of your future self?

Waiting for the perfect understanding, the right moment, the final piece of the puzzle. As though life is something we will begin once we have finished discovering who we are. I feel like we spend so much of our life searching for something when we have it all right now.

What interests me now is something entirely different and my intuition is constantly asking me and telling me how important this question is.

What will I create?

What becomes possible when I stop waiting? And for me right now this question feels alive to me.

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by the unseen. The things we sense but cannot explain or are afraid to explain. The strange beauty that seems to exist just beyond our ordinary perception.

For several months now I have wanted to paint those places. Not simply beautiful landscapes or familiar images of fantasy, but something that makes the unseen feel almost tangible.

There is a deep yearning in me and I want to be surprised by what appears, by what my hands discover, by the unexpected conversations between color, movement, texture, and imagination. I want to create something that makes a person stop in front of a painting and wonder what they are actually seeing. Not in the form of abstraction, but in the form of asking can this be real and something inside them creates a memory of far away lands and existences. As though they have encountered it somewhere before, perhaps in a dream they can no longer remember.

In that moment, pencil in hand, I realize that the mystery I have always loved doesn’t have to disappear. It can move from the endless examination of myself into the act of creation. Instead of searching for something hidden within me, I can explore what I am capable of bringing into existence without fear or self condemnation.

I feel like I am creating an entirely different relationship with life. Of course, I know myself well enough to recognize that I will probably wake up tomorrow with another hundred questions and honestly, I hope I do.

Curiosity has always been one of my greatest loves. But perhaps I can stop using every unanswered question as evidence that I haven’t quite arrived. Perhaps I can simply live, create, wonder, and allow the discoveries to come as they will.

I have a life to experience, a world to explore, and things I haven’t even imagined yet waiting to be created. This morning I began writing because I wanted to know why I was still hiding my power. I ended by wondering what I might create if I stopped believing it was hidden.

I wonder how many of you are still searching for a version of yourselves you believe you have yet to become. And what might change if, just for a moment, you stopped searching and began creating from who you already are.

Leave a comment

This disturbed me deeply because I see it over and over again with clients and women in general. It is disheartening to me that so many of us have little to no vision, and heaven forbid we would take responsibility for the creation of our lives.

Subscribe now

Everyone in that room wanted something. They wanted more time for themselves, more money, a job that did not drain them dry. But when I listened closer, every single want had a missing piece, and that missing piece was always sitting with someone else. The excuses were like this: They do not. It is not the right time. When things settle down. There are only so many of us.

I did not say much at much I just listened intently and sat with it. I will be honest, part of me wanted to shake every one of us in that room, and part of me wanted to sit very still because I recognized it. For awhile I didn’t want to be seen because I have done this. I have waited on someone else to make my life possible, to make the decisions I wasn’t willing to make, to make decisions for me.

But then I thought where does that come from? I have been asking myself that since I got home.

I think when we do not have a vision for our own lives, we have nothing inside to create from or to begin with. So we look outside. We look at our partners, our kids, our bosses, our bank accounts, and we let them decide what is possible. And then we get angry at them for deciding.

Do you do this? I am asking because I still catch myself doing it every now and then.

I sit with women every week in readings and mentoring, and I hear the same thing in different words. One woman spends nearly our whole session telling me what her past boss has done and how she is seeing in her present career position. When I finally asked her what she wanted to create for herself, she went quiet for a long time. Then she said, “I do not know. No one has ever asked me that.” She was forty two. I just let the question sit there between us because it needed space to perculate.

Here is what I keep coming back to. Taking responsibility for creating your life can be scary because there is no one left to blame. If I own it and it does not turn out, that is mine, I’m the one who has to take responsibility for that decision. If I own it and it does turn out, then I have to face all the years I did not. I am not sure which one is harder.

Maybe that is why it is easier to not know. Not knowing keeps us feeling like we are safe. Not knowing keeps everyone around us comfortable including myself.

As I sit with the weekend now, I have a hard believing the vision is gone. I believe it is buried under years of taking care of everyone else’s dreams. I believe it is still in there somewhere, quiet, waiting to be asked.

I watched those women pack their bags on Sunday, refreshed and renewed and rested, heading home to the very same lives. I am still sitting with that. I do not know what to do with it yet.

What do you want if no one else got a vote and you didn’t listen to their voice?

Tell me in the comments. I really want to know.

There are sentences we say out loud. And then there are sentences we write quietly into the structure of our lives.

Mine was:

I will not need you.

I didn’t realize for a very long time that I had made this agreement with myself. I thought I was being independent, capable, strong.

I could take care of myself.
I could solve my own problems.
I could make sense of what I was feeling without needing someone else to help me with it.

And there is real strength in that.

But lately I’ve been wondering about the other side of it and asking myself questions.

What did my independence protect me from?

And perhaps the more difficult question:

What did it prevent me from experiencing?

An invitation I didn’t want

Several years ago, I began feeling a persistent push from Spirit around relationships. Not romantic relationships specifically but relationship itself.

How I related. How I allowed myself to be known. What I expected from other people. What happened inside me when someone disappointed me. How much I allowed myself to need, receive, trust and depend upon another human being.

I didn’t particularly want to explore any of it mostly because I still have memory of what relationships had cost me in the past:

Loss.

Disappointment.

Distraction.

Misunderstanding.

The pain of wanting something from another person and discovering they couldn’t—or wouldn’t—give it.

There were wounds from earlier years that I had learned how to live around. Why would I voluntarily go back into them?

So I didn’t, or at least I thought I didn’t.

Spirit apparently had a longer timeline than I thought.

Because this year, relationship has come roaring back into my awareness. But now I think I understand the invitation differently. Maybe I wasn’t being asked to fix my relationships, instead I feel I was being asked to increase my capacity for relationship.

Those are two very different things.

The journal knew before I did

Recently I’ve been creating art journals. These are not things I’m making from a finished idea. I’m letting the pages tell me where to go.

Paint here.

Use old papers over there.

Dried flowers.

Dragonflies.

Hidden spaces.

Questions tucked beneath things.

Places that have to be opened before they can be seen.

And on one of the first pages, I wrote:

The Agreement: I will not need you.

As I continued working, another question appeared:

What has my refusal to need protected me from?

Then:

Who taught you that needing was dangerous?

And eventually, beneath a small flap surrounded by flowers and paint:

What did you stop asking for?

That one stopped me.

Because somewhere along the way, needing had stopped feeling tender. Somewhere along the way it had become dangerous.

For me in this moment I realized the agreement I had unconsciously made. That need meant giving someone the opportunity to say no. Need meant disappointment. Need meant someone could take what I had said, twist it, misunderstand it, or return it to me as a weapon.

So it became much easier to become exceptionally good at not needing. And for most of my life, I called that strength and independence.

Now I’m not so certain.

Maybe some of our greatest strengths began as brilliant forms of protection. That doesn’t make them wrong. But perhaps there comes a point when we have to ask whether the protection we once needed is still protecting us— or whether it has begun preventing us from experiencing something we deeply want.

And then there is this strange new world

All of this is occurring while something extraordinary is happening around us.

AI is entering more and more of our lives. I use it. I’m fascinated by it. I see tremendous possibility in what humans and AI may create together.

It can help us think differently by pattern recognition much quicker than working through ourselves. It helps with organization, research. It helps me create sources to paint from. Sometimes it helps me solve problems or see problems I could not before. And It handles business tasks quickly.

It can even hold remarkably interesting conversations with us.

And I don’t think that is inherently taking something away from humanity.

But I do think it raises a question we haven’t fully confronted yet.

What happens when we no longer need one another in quite the same ways?

For most of human history, relationship wasn’t optional. We needed other people to survive, build, learn, work, communicate and belong.

Now, technology can remove some of that dependence, and perhaps that will reveal something fascinating.

When we don’t have to need each other as much—

will we still choose each other?

Its a question that my higher states of consciousness keep willing me to explore. Because there are experiences that only happen between beings willing to encounter one another.

To be known. To disagree. To disappoint. To forgive. To repair. To receive.

To say, I need something from you, without knowing what the answer will be.

That last one may be one of the most courageous.

Maybe the wound isn’t asking to disappear

For years, I think I misunderstood healing.

Somewhere underneath it was the idea that if I healed enough, perhaps I could reach a place where relationships wouldn’t hurt so much. But I feel that’s an impossible bargain.

To love something is to become vulnerable to its loss. To allow another person to matter is to give them the ability to affect us, see us, even change us.

Healthy relationship doesn’t eliminate that vulnerability. Instead, maybe it changes our relationship to vulnerability.

Maybe the goal isn’t to become so healed that nobody can hurt us. Maybe it’s becoming so deeply rooted in ourselves that we don’t have to close our hearts simply because someone might hurt us. And this changes the question completely.

Instead of:

How do I protect myself from being hurt again?

I’m becoming more interested in:

What am I willing to risk feeling again in order to fully live?

The cost of not needing

There are still several blank pages remaining in my journal and I have no idea what will go on them yet.

And strangely, I don’t want to know. Because I’m beginning to realize this journal isn’t something I’m making to express what I already understand.

I’m making it to discover what I don’t and this feels more powerful and filled with strength than protection does.

There are questions waiting in those blank spaces.

What became impossible when I decided not to need? What do I want from another human being that I am afraid to admit I want? What would I have to risk to be deeply known?

Not admired. Not approved of. Not understood perfectly.

Known.

And maybe that is where this whole exploration of relationship is leading me.

Not toward becoming more dependent. Certainly not toward giving away sovereignty. Not toward pretending relationships don’t sometimes wound us profoundly.

Maybe Spirit wasn’t sending me backward

Several years ago, when I first felt that push toward relationships, I thought Spirit was asking me to return to old wounds, and I wanted no part of it.

Now I wonder if I misunderstood.

Maybe I wasn’t being sent backward at all. Maybe I was being prepared for what comes next. Because as our world becomes more technologically sophisticated, I suspect our capacity for genuine relationship will matter enormously.

Relationship with ourselves. With our families. With friends. With people whose experiences are nothing like ours. With the natural world. With technology. And yes, even with AI.

The question may no longer simply be, What can I do on my own?

The more interesting question may be:

Who am I willing to be in relationship with?

And even deeper:

Who am I willing to become because I allowed myself to be in relationship?

Maybe that is the edge I’m standing at now.

Not learning how to need someone because I cannot survive without them. But, learning how to remain open enough to need, want, receive, risk, repair and love— even when I could choose not to.

Perhaps that is a very different kind of independence. One that doesn’t say, I will not need you.

But instead:

I know I can stand on my own. And I am still willing to open the door.

There are blank pages left and I’m leaving some room for answers I don’t know yet.

I painted this piece and sent it off, but I wanted to share a bit about it first. I had this idea that I wanted to paint more with alcohol inks, instead of blowing them and letting them be wild. I really wanted to know how they would react when I tried to control them more. I have to say the alcohol ink gods were with me for this one, but the background was purely an adventure.

It took many layers for this to come together. Every time I added either a layer of ink or a layer of wax, it just kept feeling so noisy.

Much like the world feels so noisy to me right now.

What Nature Knows

The garden is coming to an end, and at the end of the season the garden gets wild. Weeds begin to take over. The beans are blooming again and falling everywhere. The bugs seem out of control and the harvesting is plentiful. So many things to do this time of year with the gardens.

They feel noisy too. Like hurry up and pick me or I will rot tomorrow.

The Unseen Things

There has been something pulling me back into old. I am not sure what it is, but I have become very attracted to old styles of artwork. I even got out my grandmother’s doilies and placed them around my orchids the other day just to create a vignette that felt ancient.

This time of year I really start to yearn to travel, to seek new adventures with ancient energies around them.

As we move closer to fall, I have to admit, it is not my favorite time of year. I long for the sun, and those shorter light days bring a heaviness and a bit of fear of what winter will be like. Too many “no sun” days tend to drive me deep into a conscious reckoning with myself, and I have had far too many of those. So I am planning some trips south, for more light and to combat the heaviness this year.

I have been sitting with why the noise feels so bothersome right now. Why do I feel bothered by noise? I am pretty good at shutting it all out, but I noticed that this time of year is a strange time for me. I get restless. Anxious, almost. I have always blamed it on the shortness of light, but maybe there is something else.

The thought of being stuck indoors during the winter. The cold. The need for ancient memory. Is this what I experience before the season change, or do I have a memory of something deeper that wants to emerge? I keep questioning it, but nothing seems to want to surface.

Do you feel it too, this time of year? That pull toward something old, something you cannot quite name?

But instead of trying to resolve any of it I am making plans, just like nature.

I am preparing many wooden cradles for encaustic paintings. I am canning and freezing nearly every day. I have made arrangements to close up the pool in October. I am currently planning another trip for January, because I know I will need a break from the lightless days. I am photographing so many things right now — sunsets, because in South Dakota they are stunning this time of year, the zinnias in the garden, stunning too. I am planting false indigo for a larger bed next year. I am planning an art sale, just to clear out some paintings, to make room for new ideas and inspiration. And shortly I will be bringing in the house plants that have been loving our humid, hot summer days outdoors.

Nature does not resist the turning. It just prepares.

Maybe that is the noise I am actually hearing. Not chaos, just everything getting ready at once.

What are you preparing for right now, even if you cannot name it yet? I would love to hear what this season is stirring in you.

Always emerging from yesterday, Angela

I sit with that kind of opening more than people would guess. Not because she did not trust her own questions, but because she already knew the answer was underneath a place she could not see into herself. That is the actual reason people come to me. Not to be told the future. To be handed back the thing they already feel and will not admit out loud.

What I saw was a whiteboard. Clean. Free to be created upon. I have been doing this work long enough that I do not question the images anymore, I just say them. She is a powerful creator and healer, someone who can clear her own energy field faster and cleaner than almost anyone I have sat with. That part she already knew, or half knew.

Share

What stopped her was something else.

She told me she does not react. She does not hold on to her emotions the way the people around her do. And she has spent years quietly believing something is wrong with her because of it — because everyone she knows loves the drama, loves the reacting, treats intensity like proof of depth. She has been reading her own steadiness as a deficiency.

I told her the truth as I saw it. That her not holding on to emotion is not a malfunction, it is her actual design. That for her, holding onto emotional charge would mean dropping into a lower level of consciousness than the one she is built to operate from. She is not here to fit in with people who process the world through reaction. She is here to create, to heal energy, to drop seeds wherever she goes — and none of that requires her to perform feeling the way everyone around her does.

She went quiet for a second. Then she said, I know what you are saying is true. It makes so much more sense now.

And then the line that stayed with me after she logged off: It is amazing how you can put words to all of this, and how you know all of this. Without me saying a word to you.

I have been asked that question in some form for fifteen years. All I can tell you is that I asked for the messages to be super clear and clean, and to tell me what they mean without me getting in the way. Being an open channel, as it is called in the world of intuition. What I know is that somewhere along the way I stopped needing to explain it and started just saying what I see. The whiteboard. The steadiness that is not absence. The permission someone has been withholding from themselves for years because the people around them mistook calm for cold.

I think about how many women are walking around treating their own nature as a flaw simply because it does not match the room they are standing in.

What have you been calling a deficiency in yourself that might actually be the shape of who you are?

Subscribe now

If this is stirring something you have been calling a flaw in yourself, I have reading slots open. https://angelablaha.com/soul-reading

s

I knew it in the way you know a person is wrong for you before the first date is even over, and you do it anyway, because you already told yourself a story of hope and possibly how it would be.

I have owned businesses for forty years. I know what it takes to run one. I know the difference between people who are building something and people who just want a space to hang things in. I walked into that gallery already knowing which one I was dealing with. I hesitated for months about it and did it anyway.

In the beginning I had ideas. A lot of them. They landed on nothing. Not resistance, not disagreement — just silence and to be honest I was shocked. No ambition to build anything more than what already existed. Me being the relentless romantic, I kept offering and it kept going nowhere.

Have you ever kept showing up to something you already knew what the answer would be?

Share Angela Blaha

They have not paid me since February. It is August. Last week I was told there would be a partial payment, except my check was sitting on a counter and nobody could find my mailing address. Really? Because it is on the contract I signed at the start of the year. I do not know what to do with an excuse like that except let it confirm what I already know.

This gallery offered two avenues that I entertained… member or wall renter. I really wanted to be a part of an art experience and upon initial conversations they acted interested. In May I become a wall renter, to simplify, to just focus on the art and not the frustration with being a go getter in a dead busess. But when you know things, actual knowing, not guessing, it does not let you rest inside the wrong container. It just waits for you to catch up to it.

So yesterday I said it out loud. That I was leaving. And something moved through me that I was not expecting. Not sadness. Not even anger, really, though the anger and frustration have been there for months.

Relief. The kind that arrives already familiar, because some part of me has been feeling it since I first walked through that door.

It felt my entire body relaxed and I again heard my intuition say, It’s about time.

I do not know yet what comes through the door that just opened. I only know it is opening, and I would rather stand in that not-knowing than keep performing certainty inside a room that was never going to change.

Have you ever known something was wrong long before you let yourself act on it? I have done this so many times and I continue to ask myself, WHY? Sometimes I think I do these things just to fill my boredom.

Wild Poppies Encaustic Art by Angela Blaha. For more art visit www.angelablaha.com

Read more

That thought stopped her. It literally put her in a spin.

She did not ask who am I. She found herself identifying with the very thing she did not want to be.

Share

Who am I is a door. It swings both ways. It admits that you might not know, that the not-knowing is the whole point, that you are still becoming something you cannot yet name. And sometimes this door is frustrating and other times the answer is waiting for you.

What’s my identity is not a door. It is a claim. It says I already know, and here is the proof, and I will defend it with my purchases, my politics, my playlist, my posture in every room I walk into.

I understand the appeal. Identity feels like power because it is finite. You can hold it. You can point to it and say there, that is me, settled, done. Who am I offers no such comfort. It just keeps opening, revolving, and sometime it just spins.

But the real power is not in the identity. Real power is in the asking.

The identity is just the Structure — the scaffolding that gets built early so you can stop feeling the terror of not knowing and start feeling the relief of a label. Most of us can tell you our identity by age twelve. Mine was farm family arithmetic. Worth equals production. Hard worker. Reliable. Responsible. Someone who does not need much. I wore it well. I wore it like a coat of armor. I wore it so well I nearly missed the fact that underneath the Structure, something in me had been asking a different question the entire time, quietly, for decades, while I answered the loud one out loud.

So if you are not sure what your identity is anymore, know that it is okay. Some days it is terror. Some days it is the cleanest breath you have taken in years. Some days it provides freedom and other days it feels like a cage.

Maybe that is the whole practice now. Not building a better identity. Just letting the question stay open long enough to feel what is underneath it, by asking.

What is your experience in this process?

Subscribe now

There is so much happening in the conscious field right now. I know this partly from my own experience — the jaw pain, the confusion about what is signal and what is story — but also because I can intuitively see the chaos playing out. It is on repeat. Over and over. Physical pain. Mental wondering. Emotional instability. Spiritual disconnect. The same cycle spinning in different bodies.

And underneath it all, so many timelines. None of them showing direction. All of them meshing, going wild, constantly repeating. The conscious field is asking us to tune in so deeply that we pick up something new, latch onto a new concept, rebuild the human from the ground up.

Leave a comment

This happened in 2020. But this time feels different. The field is filled with so many variables right now that time slowness does not necessarily provide clarity with it. Time slowing down does not mean you get to rest. It means you get to see everything more clearly, and what you are seeing is the chaos.

So I started moving differently through it.

I am fasting. Creating space instead of filling it. I am flushing my body with water — not as treatment but as practice. I am moving. I am asking myself what is true intuitively, not researching, because research right now is just conflict dressed up as information. I have to focus on myself. What is actually true for me in this moment.

I am setting boundaries so I know my own edge. This is critical. I can feel how easy it would be to fall off into the creativity, into the chaos, into the unraveling. So I hold a line. I know where the edge is. I move right up to it without crossing.

And here is what I am discovering: looking beyond the cliff is how you hold yourself without falling off it.

I do not step back from the edge. I do not close my eyes. I look out. Beyond what I can see. Beyond what the mainstream is seeing. Beyond what makes sense. I look beyond the cliff and I create my version of what is there. That is how I stay conscious. That is how I stay tethered while I am exploring the edge.

Clarity rarely comes before the experience. I know we all want clarity first. We want to understand before we move. But the answers do not work that way. The answers arrive when you are in the middle of the experience. That is when they become real. That is when they become yours.

And that is the purpose of what is happening now. The repeating, the body pains, the chaos, the confusion — they are purposeful. They are slowing us down so we can find what is true. Not what is programmed. Not what is popular. What is actually true for you.

I am in the middle of it. I am asking what is true. I am looking beyond the cliff. And I am discovering it as I move.

There are women already doing this work together. Soul Circle Membership is $150 for the year. Twelve months of monthly live conversations — thirty minutes each — where we tune into what is actually moving in the field. An intuitive group reading with real questions answered. And one thirty-minute soul reading with me, one-on-one, so you know what is true for you specifically in the middle of this chaos.

You are not alone in the confusion. You are not alone in asking what is true. And you do not have to figure out how to hold your edge by yourself.

If you are ready to move through this with women who are asking the same questions, join us.

It was never lost.

I truly believe in POTENTIAL now, and I believe it differently than I used to. Not as a thing to uncover. As a thing that is already here, underneath the noise of who I was told to be, waiting for me to stop looking outward long enough to notice it.

I did not arrive at this through thinking. Thinking happens in the same mind that got me stuck in the first place. I arrived at it through my hand. Through marks on a page that came before my mind had decided what they meant.

I have kept this practice privately for a long time now. A small vocabulary of shapes I return to — a rising line, a container, seeds still floating, not yet rooted. Nothing sophisticated. Just my own inner voice communing with the world through my hand, long before I had language for what it was telling me.

I made a short workbook out of it. Fifteen minutes, maybe less. Three marks, one word, four questions that turn recognition into a decision instead of a feeling that passes through and leaves again.

I am giving it to you.

If you want it, subscribe and it is yours — the practice, the prompts, all of it, exactly as I use it myself.

The Recognition Practice

57.6KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

If the word you land on stays with you — if it starts asking questions you cannot answer alone — that is exactly what a Soul Reading is for. You know where to find me.

There is a pause happening.

And the shape of it is strange. Because this pause has two very different sides, and both of them are real at the same time.

Subscribe now

On one side, it feels like you are alone in a Universe built for one. You are meeting people, having conversations, moving through your day. But the connection is not landing. The depth is not there. It is like you are speaking through glass.

On the other side, the opposite is true. You are wildly alive. Full of energy or chaos or ideas or need. You want to do something, create something, ask for something. And you need someone to match that energy. Someone to meet you in that aliveness. And no one seems available.

Both extremes are happening right now. I see both of them in people I know, and I feel both of them moving through the collective.

I know what is creating this shape. Time has changed.

Around the summer solstice, something shifted. Time began to stretch. It happened slowly at first, so slowly you might not have noticed. But if you pay attention now, you can feel it. Days are longer. Not the exhausted kind of longer. The kind of longer that gives you actual room. Space to sit with something instead of rushing through it. Time to focus on what you really want instead of what is demanded of you.

And then on July 1st, CERN shut down for upgrades. That deepened the stretch.

This is not the first time humanity has experienced this. In 2020, when the world stopped, time broke open in a similar way. People went home. Days got longer. The pace slowed. And in that slowness, something shifted in how we saw ourselves and each other.

Now it is happening again. Different circumstances. Same shift of time. Same Universal holding pattern where the pressure lifts and space opens.

The real question is: what do you do with that space?

Because this is where it gets interesting. When time stretches, when the usual urgency lifts, when you finally have room to breathe — manifesting becomes possible in a completely different way.

But I am going to save that part for the full piece. Because it matters too much to rush it.

Read the full exploration on the website: angelablaha.com/blog

—Angela

They told me freedom. They told me clarity. They told me wholeness — that elusive word that gets attached to every serious piece of inner work as though it is the destination printed on the ticket.

I did the work. I moved through the structure, the wound, the void, the hollow. I came out the other side.

And what I found was not freedom or clarity or wholeness.

What I found was pleasure.

Here is what I now know that I cannot un-know: those other things — the freedom, the clarity, the wholeness — they are real. But we have the order wrong. We teach them as the destination when they are actually what arrives after. After what? After you stop arguing with what brings you pleasure. After you follow the signal that says this — this thing, this medium, this direction, this quiet ordinary pull — this is actually you.

Pleasure is not the reward for getting free. Pleasure is the signal that tells you what is real.

Subscribe now

I stopped trying to be something.

I want to say that carefully because it does not mean what it sounds like. I did not stop caring, did not stop working, did not arrive at some zen indifference to the outcome of my life. I stopped trying to BE something. Outward motion, voice, roles — that is not what I mean. This is inward.

I stopped trying to be the best artist. The best writer. The best psychic.

For most of my life I took classes to learn more — which sounds admirable and probably looked that way from the outside. I have an entire wall of diplomas, certificates, and awards that confirms it. But the engine underneath was striving. Accumulation. Programmed success dressed up as curiosity. I was always reaching for the next level of something because standing still at any level felt like falling behind.

The hollow stopped all of that. Not gently. The unmotivation that arrived in the void was disorienting enough that I blamed it on my age, my interests, the shape of the season I was in. It looked, from where I was standing inside it, like a problem to solve.

It was not a problem. It was the strife stopping.

The hollow created a space I had never been comfortable with. I was raised with programming that stated I was worth nothing if I was not striving. So a space with nothing to strive toward did not feel like rest. It felt like worthlessness with nowhere to hide. And inside that — inside the discomfort of having no performance required and no achievement to point to and no test to confirm my worth — something real had room to surface.

I have always loved to draw.

This sounds simple. It is not.

I have identified as a fine artist for long enough that the identity had weight, structure, a whole architecture of meaning built around it. Fine art was serious. Fine art was what I did. And in fine art, there is very little drawing.

Somewhere in the hollow, I started sketching again. Not as practice. Not as study. Because I wanted to. Because picking up a pen and drawing something — anything — brought me a feeling I had stopped associating with my work.

Pleasure.

I found Ian Fennelly’s Urban Sketch course and it taught me more about perspective than art school ever did. But that is almost beside the point. The point is that sketching is not fine art. And for a long time that distinction would have mattered to me — would have placed sketching in a lesser category, something you do on the side, something that does not count. The hollow dissolved that hierarchy. The fine art identity loosened. And what remained when it did was the simple and irreversible truth: I just love to draw.

That is not a small thing. That is the whole arc in one specific example.

The programming said fine artist. The hollow said what do you actually love? And what I actually love is drawing. Always was. The identity had just been parked on top of it long enough that I had stopped feeling it.

I am a creative being. Always curious. Willing to try many things and quick to master them.

I knew this about myself before. But I related to it as a trait in service of achievement — curiosity as fuel for becoming something, mastery as proof of worth. The same qualities are present now. The curiosity has not diminished. The pleasure of learning something quickly and well is still real.

What changed is the engine.

I take Ian Fennelly’s course now because it brings me pleasure. I draw because I love to draw. I paint because something in me needs to make that particular thing. Not because it will make me a better artist. Not because it fills a gap in my credentials. Because it is what I want to do.

That is a sentence I could not have written two years ago. Not because it was not true — it may always have been true. But because I had no access to it. The striving was too loud. The programming too organized. There was no space inside a life built for programmed success to hear the quiet signal that said this brings me pleasure and treat that as sufficient reason.

The hollow made the space. And in the space, pleasure became audible again.

Here is what I want to say directly because I did not have anyone say it to me:

Freedom, clarity, and wholeness are real. They are not consolation prizes. But we teach them as the destination when they are the result. We tell women to seek freedom and clarity and wholeness — as though finding those things will eventually allow them to feel pleasure in their own lives.

It works the other way.

You follow what brings you pleasure — the real signal, not the performed version, not the thing you think should bring you pleasure — and through that following, freedom arrives. Clarity arrives. The wholeness that everyone promised turns out to be what happens when you stop living in a life that was built for someone else’s comfort and start building one from what is actually true about you. You stop reorganizing your genuine interests into stepping stones and start following them because they are worth following. Your genius emerges without strife.

Pleasure is not frivolous. It is not the thing you get to feel after you have earned it.

It is the signal. It is the compass. It is the thing that was trying to tell you who you were the entire time.

I am on the other side of the hollow now.

Not finished. Not arrived at some permanent state of clarity that will never require tending. But on the other side. And from here I can tell you what is true:

The striving is gone. The pleasure is present. The curiosity is the same but it belongs to me now — not to the version of me that was always trying to become something more worthy of existing.

I just love to draw.

That is enough. It was always enough. The hollow is where I finally got quiet enough to hear it.

Share

Always emerging from yesterday.

If you are somewhere in this arc — in the structure, the wound, the void, the hollow — and you need someone to locate you on the map, Your Identity Shift Reading is for you. I read the soul field directly. You leave knowing exactly where you are and what is specifically needed at your particular point in the process. One-page reference document included. One week of Voxer follow-up included. You can find out more and schedule your reading here: https://angelablaha.com/your-identity-shift-reading

Nobody tells you what is actually on the other side of the void.

They tell you freedom. They tell you clarity. They tell you that once you have done the work — once you have seen the programming, named the wound, stopped performing the version of yourself that was built for everyone else’s comfort — you will finally know who you are.

I did the work. I named it. I stopped performing.

And what I found on the other side was nothing.

Subscribe now

Not darkness. Not grief. Not even sadness, which would have at least felt like something to hold onto. Just hollow. A life that continued — the same movements, the same routines, the same days — but with nothing emotional attached to any of it. I was alive. I could not find a reason why that mattered.

I had spent years trying to understand the meaning of my life. My path. My soul’s journey. I had read the books, sat with the teachers, done the inner work that serious people do. And here I was, somewhere near the end of the void, with less than when I started.

What I had before was programming. It was not mine. But it functioned. It gave me structure. It gave me roles to fill and tasks to complete and a version of myself that the world could organize around.

Without it I had pure freedom.

Pure freedom felt indistinguishable from slavery.

Because I did not know what to do with it. I did not know what I wanted. I reached for passion and found nothing there. I thought back to who I was before all of it — before the accumulation, before the roles, before the identity that got built on top of a fourteen-year-old girl who had to become someone she did not choose — and I could not find her either. Whatever she had wanted, whatever had lit her up, it was gone. Vanished. As if it had never been.

My entire life, I realized, had been a series of rote memory. One thing following the next. Not chosen. Just continued.

And then I understood something I had never seen written anywhere.

I understood why we have programming.

Because this — this blank, this hollow, this wide open nothing — feels too big. The programming is a mercy. It tells you who you are so you do not have to figure it out from nothing. And when it is gone, when you have done the careful work of removing it, you are left standing in a space so large and so empty that the most natural response is to reach for something — anything — to fill it back up.

I did not reach for something. I sat in it.

In meditation, I heard something quiet. Not dramatic. Not a thunderclap. Just a clear, simple instruction.

You are the creator now. You have to create the passion. Your life. Everything.

I remember feeling overwhelmed in a way that had no edges. Where do you begin when you are starting from nothing? What do you create when you do not know what you love?

Do art. It will help you find the creation energy needed to understand authenticity and passion.

I did it because I had nothing else to reach for and the instruction was clear. Not to become something. To feel something. Art was not the destination — it was the way back into my own current. The place where creation energy could move through me before I had any language for what I was or what I wanted.

And slowly — not quickly, not dramatically — something began to happen. Not passion exactly. Not yet. But warmth. The beginning of heat in a place that had been hollow. The first indication that something was still alive in there, underneath all the years of rote, underneath the hollow, underneath the void.

My whole life I had never had anything I would die on a hill for. Except my children. Everything else I could take or leave. I moved through the world without the kind of conviction that makes a person hard to redirect.

I was finally feeling something shift in that.

I felt like I was finally coming out of the zombie stage where I felt passionate about a few things. Not die on a hill for — I am not that kind of human. But some human atrocities that I would actually fight for. Things that have heat in them when I turn toward them. A brewing, as if something is waking up that has been asleep for a very long time.

I am telling you this because you may be in it right now and no one has told you the truth about it. The zombie stage is what comes after you do everything right. After you see the programming clearly. After you stop performing. After you survive the void.

It is not the end. It is the beginning of something that has no map yet — because you have to make the map. You have to make the passion. You have to make the life.

That is not a motivational statement. It is the most terrifying and most true thing I know.

You are the creator now.

Share

If you are in this place — in the hollow, in the rote, in the zombie stage — and you need someone to locate you on the map, that is exactly what Your Identity Shift Reading is for.

I built it for the woman who has done the work and found nothing waiting on the other side. The woman who needs to know where she actually is before she can move. I read the soul field directly. You leave knowing your location on a four-stage map of forward movement, with a clear strategy and specific next steps. One week of real-time Voxer follow-up is included because integration takes time.

Only 3 spots available - https://angelablaha.com/your-identity-shift-reading

Originally published at angelablaha.co

m

Subscribe now

That voice had never left. It was there when I was a teenager sitting in a church pew, quietly certain that the story being delivered from the front of the room did not match what I could feel. A divine intelligence does not build something broken on purpose and then demand it spend a lifetime proving it deserves repair. I knew that then. Not as a belief. As a knowing.

But I watched what the people around me did with the wounded story. How they carried it. How they withheld love from themselves so routinely it had stopped feeling like a choice. And I began to do it too. Not because I believed it. Because my emotions decided that fitting in was more important than what my heart already knew.

That is pure misery. When your emotions do not understand what your heart does.

The slow walk back started with my family. I had known things my whole life that no one else knew. Said them out loud and was instantly dismissed. Then one day a nephew came to visit and asked to experience palo santo. Energy clearing. Reiki. Completely unafraid of what I carried.

I felt like I had been born again.

Being seen there — even by one person with an open hand — was proof that the truest self had been real all along. After that I stopped managing what came out. I just said whatever arrived. Intuitively. Out loud. For the entire world to hear.

Not because I was finally brave. Because I was finally done being careful.

The wounded story is not a truth. It is a program. Older than your family. Older than your church. Embedded so deeply in the field we were all born into that it stopped feeling like a program and started feeling like the nature of being human.

It is not your nature. It is your inheritance.

Your divine creative self is not a hobby. Every time you use your creative power — with your hands, your voice, your knowing — you are accessing the frequency the wounded story was designed to suppress. Creation energy does not come from the wounded self. It comes from underneath it. From the part of you that never actually believed the story, even when your emotions did.

You are not eternally wounded. You never were. The truest version of you does not require striving, drama, or healing your way to wholeness before you are allowed to begin. She is not a destination. She is what remains when the program finally loses its grip.

The voice that knew the truth when you were young — it never left. It has been here the whole time. Waiting for your emotions to catch up to what your heart already knows.

If you have been reading and something has been landing — I built something for you.

The Founding Circle is for the woman who is done being managed. Done performing a version of herself just small enough to be tolerated. Done waiting for permission from the original room.

Founding Members get everything a paid subscriber receives — including a monthly live intuitive conversation where I read the room and take your questions — plus one 30-minute soul reading with me personally. Just you. Just the truth of what I see.

Founding membership is $150 for the year. There are a limited number of spots and they will not be at this price forever.

If you are ready — the link is below. No pressure. No performance. Just a door.

In the void, thoughts had to be conjured up because they did not arrive on their own. The mind was blank — not like depressed blankness, more like the eyes were seeing but nothing was creating meaning inside. I would sit and wait for a thought and sometimes nothing came. Just the room. Just the light. Just the fact of being alive without any story attached to it.

The only emotion I experienced over the year was grief. Not sharp grief with a reason behind it. Just a low constant presence of it, like weather that does not change. Every day something would strip away — a memory, a belief, something I had felt or built or decided about myself — and then it would simply leave. Not fade. Leave. I would write it down so I could return to it. When I did, there was nothing attached to it anymore. Just the visual of the event itself. No emotion. No meaning. Like watching footage of someone else’s life through a window.

I wrote every day that year. Not about anything meaningful. About what I did. What I ate. Where I went. The living activities of each day. That was all there was to write about because that was all there was.

There came a point where I had to keep telling myself — quietly, daily, without drama — you have to come out of this. Over and over until something in me finally listened.

What pulled me out was not a decision. It was a pull back to Peru. I did not analyze it or try to create some kind of meaning or ritual around it. I simply created a retreat and took people with me. That was the first thing in over a year that felt like direction.

1.5 years after the void began, I started to feel alive again.

What I understand now — what I could not have understood while I was inside it — is that the void was not empty. It was the most thorough clearing I have ever experienced. Not healing. Not processing. Not working through anything. Just removal. Everything that was not actually mine being lifted out until what remained was only what was true.

What came out the other side was not a higher version of myself. It was the truest one.

And with the truest self came something I had never felt so cleanly before.

Creation energy.

Not motivation. Motivation requires strategy, planning, effort. You get excited about something and then you have to build the scaffolding to make it happen. It needs a plan. It needs pushing.

Creation energy is different. It is pure energy — no emotions, no thoughts, just flow. You are one with what you are making. Everything is simple and easy. There is pure direction and pure knowing. Nothing gets in the way. It is blissful in the most undramatic sense of that word — not ecstatic, not performed. Just completely without resistance.

The void produced this. Not immediately. Not dramatically. Slowly — after everything that was not mine had been removed — what remained was a woman who could create from a completely clear source.

I paint from that place now. I write from it. I do soul work from it. When I am in it the canvas does not fight me. The words arrive without effort. The knowing is instant and clean.

Most women I know are exhausted from motivating themselves. From building the scaffolding, executing the strategy, pushing through the resistance. That exhaustion is real. But it is also information. It is telling you that you are working from the wrong source.

Creation energy does not require pushing. It requires clearing.

The void is how that clearing happens.

Always emerging from yesterday.

Subscribe now

It is harder to hold than a wound.

A wound at least gives you something to do. You can push against it, prove it wrong, build something fierce in response to it. My great uncle told me I was a terrible artist and I felt my shoulders drop with something close to relief. I knew what to do with that. I had been doing it my whole life.

Subscribe now

But the teachers who stopped in front of my work and went quiet? The strangers? My own mother? I had nowhere to put any of it. It landed on me like light on water — brilliant for a second and then gone, and I was left standing there not knowing where to look. Praise made me feel exposed in a way critique never did. At least critique kept me clothed.

So I did what made sense at the time. I put the praise down and picked up my great uncle’s voice instead. Carried it for years. Kept my art mostly to myself. Told myself I was creating beauty for my own sake — which was true — but also I had a secret. I had wanted to move to New York City. I had wanted to be a famous artist and architect. That woman was still in there, pressing against the walls of the container I had built around her. My great uncle’s words were the lock. I had put them there myself.

The same field followed me into my counseling career, spiritual work, and into soul readings. Again the praise arrived and again I did not know what to do with it. People told me I had changed something for them and I smiled and changed the subject. The critiques though — those I kept. Organized them. Put them somewhere useful. The praise I left on the table like a tip I felt too embarrassed to pick up.

This is the thing I want to say out loud because I have never heard anyone else say it.

The wound and the praise are not opposites. They are the same field. Both of them are asking you to orient your entire life around someone else’s perception of you. The wound says you are not enough. The praise says you are extraordinary. And in both cases you have handed your compass and all your personal power to another person and are now following them across terrain they have never walked in your particular boots.

I abandoned my inner voice more than once. Those were the years I do not talk about much. The emotional turmoil that comes when you are navigating by someone else’s map and nothing on the ground matches what they told you would be there. Doubt about who I was. Doubt about what I was here to do. A kind of lostness that had no clean explanation because from the outside everything looked fine.

What I know now — what the years have burned into me — is that there was always a signal underneath the noise. It was not loud. It did not perform. It did not need me to believe in it to keep transmitting. And every single time I listened to it, it proved accurate. Every time I overrode it for an outer voice that seemed more certain, I paid.

The compass was never lost. I just kept choosing louder, brighter things that served someone else.

I have very few genuine supporters and I trust even fewer. That used to feel like loneliness. Now it feels like precision. Because the only one who has ever been navigating from inside this life is me. My great uncle was outside it. The teachers were outside it. The people who told me I was gifted were outside it. They were not wrong exactly. But they were not in here.

You are in yours.

So if you are still carrying someone’s voice — wound or praise, lover or stranger, the one who believed in you too much or the one who never believed at all — here is what I want to say.

Set a boundary with the outer voices. All of them. Hold them at the distance of interesting information rather than personal truth. Let the change in you come from inside, not from the pressure of someone else’s certainty about who you are supposed to be.

And when the inner signal fires — before your mind assembles its argument against it — go there first.

That signal has never been wrong. You have just been in a very loud room for a very long time.

You are allowed to turn the volume down now or abandon it all together. Because the only one who really knows your truth is you.

.

We have no eternal memory.

Not of past lives. Not of who we were before this one. Not of the agreements we made before we arrived here, or the ones made for us by the people who came before.

What we have instead are beliefs.

Beliefs filled the space that memory could not. Someone handed them to us — a parent, a teacher, a culture, a wound — and because there was nothing to correct them, nothing to say that is not true, they became the architecture we live inside.

Most of us have never stopped to ask: is this actually mine?

This morning I sat with a seventy-one-year-old woman who is in the middle of building a completely new identity. Not repairing the old one. Not healing what broke. Building something she has never been before.

What I could see — and I want to be clear, this is not always what I see, this was specific to her — were two distinct layers. Words living in her cells. Old words, ancestral words, collected in the trauma field across generations. They were tangled, layered, heavy with history that was not entirely hers. And separate from those, new scripts. Fresh. Unentangled. Golden in the way that only things without a past can be golden.

The old words were not wrong. They had served someone, somewhere, at some point. But they were blocking her from seeing the new scripts that were already there. Already written. Already waiting.

This is what inherited beliefs do. They do not announce themselves as borrowed. They feel like truth because there is nothing in your memory to contradict them. They feel like you.

Last week I wrote about fragmenting yourself to be digestible being its own kind of violence. The beliefs underneath that fragmentation — that you are too much, that you must fit the room, that your wholeness is inconvenient — where did those come from? Who lived inside them before you did?

And the week before that, I wrote about the field of trauma — how so much healing work happens inside the same container that created the wound. Inherited beliefs are part of that field. They are not just thoughts. They live in the body. They are encoded in the cells, passed down the line, and they will keep passing until someone in the chain stops and asks: is this actually true? Is this actually mine?

The woman this morning is asking that question at seventy-one. That is not late. That is exactly on time. The new scripts in her body said so.

Here is what I believe — and I hold this belief loosely, the way I think all beliefs deserve to be held:

We do not have to believe everything we were given.

The beliefs that free us are the ones we chose after we interrogated the ones we inherited. Not the ones we simply received and forgot to question.

You do not need a psychic to see this in yourself. You need one question: when I live by this belief, does it feel like freedom or does it feel like a room I never chose to be in?

You already know the answer. You have always known. There was just no one telling you that your internal knowing was enough to act on.

It is.

Always emerging from yesterday.

Subscribe now

I have been doing soul readings for fifteen years. My intuition keeps bringing me back — bringing people into my life who ask for it, inviting me into rooms where people need it. I did not choose this work so much as it kept choosing me.

Today was a reminder of why I never argued with that.

I had a soul session today and the woman came in sensing something was coming. Not a thought she could name. Not a fear she could explain. Just a persistent sense that her life was about to shift — some of it good, some of it not. She is in the middle of rebuilding everything at once. New identity. New house. A parent who is sick. A marriage that ended. The kind of year that asks everything of you whether you are ready or not.

What I did not know when she sat down was that she had made a private agreement with herself six months ago. She had asked her higher self for a signal — not a thought she could talk herself out of, but a full body yes. Internal goose bumps, she called it. Not on the outside. Deep inside. A signal she could trust completely so she would never have to second guess herself again.

When I said the thing she had been sensing but could not put words to — her face changed.

That is it, she said. My body just gave me a full yes. This changes everything.

I do not tell people what to think. I never have. I learned early in my counseling work that the right question breaks someone free from their current experience more effectively than any answer ever could. What I do is listen at a depth that most conversations never reach — hear what the soul is saying underneath what the mind is managing — and then say it clearly enough that the person across from me can finally recognize their own knowing.

I paint a clear picture of things people cannot yet see. With words. With my hands. Sometimes I have drawn things out so people could see them coming before they arrived — so when the experience showed up there was no fear waiting for it. Just recognition.

That is the most important part for me. Removing the fear.

I wonder if you know this feeling from the other side. The sensing that something is coming before you have words for it. The knowing that lives in your body before your mind will admit it. The exhaustion of second guessing yourself when something inside you already knows the answer.

She leaves today not afraid of what is coming. Confident. Not because the road ahead will be easy — some of it will not be. But because she now has a signal she trusts and a clear picture of what is ahead. She does not need to second guess herself. She can walk into each experience knowing her body will tell her the truth.

That is what fifteen years of this work has confirmed for me. Information does not change people. Clarity does. And clarity is not something I give anyone — it is something that was already inside them, waiting for someone to say it out loud so their body could finally say yes.

This is why I listen to souls.

Subscribe now

This is a conversation space exclusively for subscribers—kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post questions and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.

Join chat

Read more

I was young. A room full of friends. Someone asked what our futures would look like and I described mine in specific detail — what I would build, who I would become, how my life would unfold. I could see it completely. Clearly. Already true before it had happened.

Crazy, they said.

I felt something split inside me. Not dramatically. Quietly. The part of me that knew things went somewhere safer. Somewhere less visible. And I began, without fully realizing it, to read the room before I walked into it. To decide which piece of myself was acceptable here. To leave the rest outside.

Life proceeded and I became a counselor. Then a life coach. Then a psychic. Then an intuitive mentor. Each path contained something true. Each path also ended in some form of pain — emotional, mental, spiritual. Not because the work was wrong. Because I kept arriving incomplete. The wholeness I was looking for was never going to be found inside a single box. But I kept climbing into them anyway, hoping this one would finally be large enough.

It never was.

What lived inside me during those years was relentless. The questions that would not stop. Thoughts repeating until I taught myself to interrupt them. Journals filling with attempts to connect the dots, to find the framework that could hold all of it — the psychic sight, the psychological depth, the creative fire, the spiritual knowing. All of it trying to find one container safe enough to exist in whole.

Then I started painting seriously.

And the canvas would not allow the fragmentation.

I cannot show up partial in the studio. The canvas, the paint, the light, the hand, the mind, the spirit — everything has to work together or the painting shows it immediately. There is no reading the room in the studio. No leaving part of yourself outside because this space can only handle a portion of who you are. I have tried. The paintings always know. They look exactly like what they are — the work of a woman who was only half present.

Painting is the first thing in my life that has demanded my wholeness as the price of admission.

And slowly, in the studio, in the silence, in the particular honesty that oil and encaustic demand — I began to understand what the fragmentation had actually cost me.

Not a bad painting. Something closer to what a tree looks like when it is struck by lightning. A part of you falls away. There is smoke. Burns. Deep cuts. The tree does not die immediately — it keeps standing, keeps growing even — but the scar is there. The missing piece is there. And something that should have been whole never quite is again.

I have been that tree. More times than I can count.

Everything I described in that room came true by the way. Every single thing. I was not crazy. I simply knew things the room was not ready to hear.

I am done fragmenting myself so the room feels comfortable.

Fragmenting yourself to be digestible is its own kind of violence. I committed it against myself for most of my life. I called it adapting. I called it reading the room. The canvas calls it something else.

I am done making that choice. In the studio and everywhere else.

Subscribe now