Art as a Hug: An Unglamorous Entry, A Luminous Beginning
24 January 2026, Saturday
Hey there and hola!
This isn’t a glamorous entry. There’s no blood, no physical violence, yet harm is real. You are welcome to move on or stay with me to the end. Grief, suffering, and displacement carry weight, and this account reflects what I truly lived.
October 2025
Since returning to the U.S. from Mexico last October, I’ve felt anxious, drained, and trapped in overthinking. This state of mind has made restarting my art far harder than it should be. I’ve finally settled into a new place, trying to create a sense of a fresh beginning. Now, life is just me, accompanied only by my two Mexican chihuahuas, mis niños de 4 patas.
What the heck is going on?
I need to restart my art, but I’ve delayed it. I don’t really know what’s happening with me. Even the simplest act, like setting up a workspace in a cramped room, figuring out where the acrylics go and where the brushes should be placed, brings me to tears. What the heck is going on?
The Weight of Upheaval
Over-thinking here is a response to cumulative trauma and disruption.
My mind seeks to regain order in a life that has been repeatedly destabilized. Paradoxically, this drive blocks the very creativity and presence I need to resume art. Even small decisions, where a brush goes or how to arrange supplies, echo the grief and disruption of a time when life felt more secure.
Overanalyzing and hyper-vigilance drain my energy. Constantly in fight-or-flight mode, I lack the clarity to make art.
Creativity requires freedom, presence, and a sense of safety, conditions grief and upheaval have stripped away. Painting will wait until the emotional weight I’ve endured loosens its grip.
Building a new life after so much upheaval is emotionally complicated. My emotions feel unruly, at times out of control. Rather than paint, I feel compelled to seek comfort and weep until I run out of tears, like squeezing a soaking wet sponge dry. I do not recognize this version of myself, and perhaps I do not need to.
I am exhausted from seeking clarity or closure. My fixation on resolving the past has quietly taken over my creative life, turning art as play into problem solving, an attempt to force coherence where none may exist.
What I Mean by “The Past”
When I refer to the past, I mean more than my relationship with my beloved husband when he was alive. There are still too many things there that still leave me at a loss to this day.
The past also includes 2025, a year shaped by sustained loss and displacement. The timeline I’m referencing occurs between May 2025 and October 2025:
In May 2025, I sold the home my husband and I had built together, a place full of memories.
Shortly after, my first move attempt ended in disaster: my belongings were packed and then unpacked without ever leaving the house, and the moving company broke its contract, causing me to lose my deposit.
I also faced canceled airline tickets and a car rental, leaving me to navigate a chaotic situation alone.
Later in May, I moved locally from the house into a five-month rental.
Finally, in October 2025, I relocated from the rental to Texas, beginning the process of building a new life.
Each of these transitions required urgency and resolve. With every move, possessions that had once shaped my daily life were gradually left behind. Adaptation became relentless, and the emotional and practical costs mounted quickly. The first attempt to move internationally was by far the most destabilizing. The moving company’s willful negligence placed me in legal jeopardy and left me fearing life without a country to call my own. Their actions shocked me emotionally and physically. I felt morally betrayed, exposed, and utterly vulnerable, with fear, anger, and disbelief washing over me all at once. Friends who witnessed the situation were equally stunned. That experience pushed my internal alert system to its limit, and my body has remained in fight-or-flight ever since.
This constant upheaval did more than disrupt routines. They crept into my creative life, making it impossible to approach art as play. Before I could paint again, I first need to survive the emotional weight of what I had endured. But how?
F@%k meaning!
After living through so much in so little time, I’ve realized in writing this piece that searching for meaning only deepens the struggle. What I need now is simpler, though not easier. I need to outlast this state of emotional confusion and accept my humanity. I’d like to treat my art as a space for under-thinking, not for forcing meaning. As TherapyJeff advises, when certain bad things happen, F@%k meaning! He’s spot on as far as I’m concerned. There is no need to search for meaning when justice cannot be restored or when there is unresolved trauma. In my case, putting emotions on hold allowed me to solve the problem of moving back to the US. That decision to relocate basically prevented me from taking that first moving company to court. I can live with that choice; but in the end, the bad guys got away. There’s a void inside me that my mind can’t compute and body can’t mend. The hit to my self-confidence and trust in humanity set me on an errant quest for answers. The truth, however, is that there is no higher purpose waiting. No transcendent lesson to be found. Not even false positivity will come to the rescue.
It is no wonder the tears flow.
I want to move on in other ways too. I’m thinking of approaching art as an embrace. Something felt, not reasoned. A self-hug of sorts, as Dadhugsforyoursoul describes in a reel on moving on effectively.
Following Light
Amid this emotional weight, I have recently begun noticing small moments of comfort that offer clues to resuming my creative life. I draw warmth from the sun, much like my dogs do, whether we are indoors or outside. This instinct to be nurtured keeps asserting itself, and I am curious to follow it in my work. The interior and exterior spaces I inhabit daily are now part of this exploration. Light, both inside and outside, has emerged as a quiet focus. I cannot yet explain why or how this will fully take shape, and I am allowing that uncertainty to remain.
The contrast between my life in Mexico and my life near the Texas Gulf Coast feels like a meaningful place to resume my practice. Here, sunlight behaves differently than it did in the semi-arid landscape where I spent the last decade. The atmosphere is heavier, more saturated. It feels important to record these early impressions as I try to locate a sense of home in myself again.
Belonging to Oneself
At this point, I want to explore light in both interior and exterior spaces. The work grows out of my emotional responses to my new life in Texas. One guiding question is: what does belonging to oneself look like? I am beginning to understand belonging, in this context, through light and its many gradations. Light feels like the most honest way to express degrees of warmth within a house, in nature, and among a community.
Light reveals how a space is inhabited, where warmth gathers and where it thins. Inside a house, it settles on walls, corners, and thresholds, marking moments of shelter, exposure, unrest, and rest. In my new home, the morning light in the dead of winter barely reaches the bare wall facing the windows. The summer light might elongate the reach of the light.
In nature, light shifts with time and season, shaping orientation and continuity. The softness of shade in a patch of flowers at a parking lot distinguishes one bloom from among many. Within a community, light is reflected through shared spaces, gestures, and presences. The shade cast under a tree canopy at a dog rest offers comfort from the blazing sun to my dogs.
I am still learning how to adjust to myself in these new surroundings. These variations in light offer a way to register warmth, intimacy, and distance honestly, allowing belonging to remain fluid rather than fixed.
Finding My Ground
I am unsure how these responses will take shape, and that feels appropriate. Ideally, the work will resist prettiness and perfectionism, remain unfinished, unresolved, raw. It will be closer to a journal entry than a finished piece. At this stage, it asks nothing of me. Once my ground feels stable, once I am no longer shrinking my life to survive, art will find me.
Final Thoughts
What is your body trying to tell you that your mind has been ignoring? At times, survival demands ignoring the body’s pain to act. Other times, one must listen fully. Finding balance is the work.
Hasta pronto!