I do not recall when I started keeping a daily journal. My memory does not serve me as much as I'd like it to. I know it was shortly after I read “The Artist’s Way” and decided to implement the author’s advice to write three pages every morning of every day. This type of journaling goes beyond recording daily events; it is an emotional “check-in” which aims to help me feel present and centered in my body. This practice is crucial for someone like me who had spent most of her life feeling disconnected and/or numb as ways to go through life.
I would say it has been five years since I picked up this practice. I also followed the author’s instructions to not go back and read the journal entries, or at least not yet. I have a box full of these notebooks in the basement, and every time I complete one, I put it away in this box. Sometimes, I fear a sudden death and leaving this box behind for my family to read. The best option would be to give them to my English professor who writes memoirs. Maybe she can turn my stories into a piece of literature.
Here is a quote I find myself writing over and over again: “I have been postponing a long session of weeping. I fear that if I weep, the whole world will drown in my sorrow.”
Choosing the title for my art collection came long before I realized how much it resonates with my drawing practice and to my own inability to process my emotions. Drawing has been my way to cope because I am unable to use language to tell my stories. When I began drawing, it was my body’s way of creating a space to grieve. It was my way of weeping internally. Since I was forced to leave my home back in 2004, it felt like I have gone through sudden death. Everything I knew of home came to an end: My house, my friends, my cousins, my grandparents, the streets of Bethlehem, the Nativity church, my school, my dad’s grocery store, my grandma’s afternoon coffee…
As if I died and came back to life but into a foreign place, a different time zone, and a full load of traumatic and joyful memories.
During the first thirteen years of living in Chicago, I kept hearing phrases like: “ Move on,” “ Let it go,” “Do not think about it,” “ it will get easier with time,” “ It is your fault,” “ Why are you stuck in the past.” I have heard enough of that to master the practice of numbing my emotions through staying distracted by work, school, and everything else but my own wounded self. Later I realized that whoever had said that to me, they themselves are repressing their own grief and therefore, cannot acknowledge mine. If they do, they would have to face their own.
Like many people, I lived in a household where painful emotions were not okay to discuss, process, or reflect on. It was not normal to do any of that. When I was a child, I used to see my mother sob often as she prayed the rosary. I was always the one who tried to comfort her, but my attempts would always fail. I often blamed myself for her pain as any child in my place would do. With time, I learnt that if I cry, I am being needy, annoying, or dramatic. So, internalizing my pain and withdrawing from my parents and later myself seemed like the right thing to do.
Grief is a natural process to any traumatic and/or painful experience/s we, as humans, ought to fully experience in order to get past that experience/s and heal. The word trauma comes from the Greek language which translates to “wound”. Contrary to common belief, time does not heal wounds that are unprocessed, denied, neglected, and suppressed. We carry them upon our shoulders until one day, the body responds by a variety of chronic illnesses.
Imagine living all your life postponing grief. Most of us do that because we were socialized to fear “painful” emotions, and therefore label them “bad” or “negative” and therefore, push them away. No one taught us that our emotions are our ultimate guide to pay attention to the parts of ourselves that need the most attention and care. This is a byproduct of living in a capitalist/consumerist society where “The pursuit of happiness” is the ideology that runs the show. Therefore, it is an act of bravery to be vulnerable and learn to befriend our emotions in a world that teaches us the opposite.
Saying no to grief means remaining stuck in pain. The resistance to pain creates more of it. Saying yes to grief means that we are in motion, we are holding ourselves with tenderness and moving to the other side of whatever experience we are dealing with.
What my art has the ability to do is invite the viewer to look inward and connect with how they feel. The messages I get from people who have purchased my art are what keeps me going despite all the mental health challenges I live with. I remember one time after I finished giving a talk about my art at a conference in LA, a young woman walked up to me and asked if she could give me a hug. I said yes, and as we hugged, I realized that she started sobbing and said: “Thank you. No one has ever told me that it is okay to feel broken. I am tired….” At that moment, I held her pain and she held mine, and as simple as this sounds, it was a crucial moment that created a shift in her consciousness since she felt that her pain was validated.