Life as source material
Plus a comic on living through pain. CW: trauma
Last weekend I had the delight of meeting three other women artists from the Korean American Artist Collective, which I recently joined. We immediately shared worries and intimacies, made comfortable by our shared culture in the company of a chill labrador sleeping by our side. Fellow artist and Substack writer
told us about some difficult times she’s been going through with her family. “I hope some good art comes out of this”, she said. “But I don’t think I’m ready yet.”This sentiment reminded me of what my brain immediately thought after my car accident two years ago, as soon as I confirmed I was alive. During the months following while rehabilitating my injured leg, I shared in this newsletter:
One of the first thoughts I had after the car accident was wondering how this experience was going to change me. My brain is so used to fantasizing about novel situations to transform me into a more evolved person that I immediately wanted to utilize my trauma in this way, rather than sitting in suffering.
It can be such a comfort to transform our lives’ hardest moments into something of tangible expression and beauty. We take back power that we feel has been taken from us. And yet, this process cannot be rushed. Expecting ourselves to immediately extract the pain and funnel it into a grand creation is going to cause us more suffering. You are suffering already, enough!
Two years later, I have the distance needed to see if and how the accident changed me. I developed greater appreciation for my body. I observed myself nurturing and protecting my body that showed me my capacity for self-love during hard times. I saw the ways in which I pretended like everything was fine and well to make things easier for those around for me, because they thought enough time had passed, because they forgot, because they assumed I would be better by now. I noticed the friends and loved ones who kindly never made this assumption.
The following comic is loosely based on my learnings from that accident. It holds questions and new ways of thinking that I have to remind myself over and over again. I hope it can give you some tools for comfort too.
I will see you again in your inbox in two weeks for the second installment of Meet My Art Friend with artist Camey Yeh! Please subscribe if you haven’t already, and feel free to share with anyone who may enjoy posts on creativity and personal development.
Thank you for sharing your experience, and this is an inspiring comic! I just read the original post too and find your view on "self-sabotaging patterns" very relatable (the paradox of wanting yet afraid of being seen). And, agreed that genuinely transformative change must be driven by self-compassion. These are themes I broach in my private writing too, hopefully in some form to be shared later with others as a motivating force for the abundance mindset collective...