Composting the Old, Returning to Creativity

Begin again. Create again. Mother through collapse.

For the past seven years, I’ve been in recovery.

Not from a single trauma, but from a slow collapse—a dismantling of life as I knew it. An abusive and toxic divorce. A move to a new state, to a small rural town where I had no family, no community. Just me and my two children—then small, now teenagers.

At first, it was survival.

Get a job.

Find a home.

Figure out how to mother in a place where I knew no one.

Unresourced. Unheld.

I was stitching together a life with trembling hands and a scraped heart.

I lost my art practice in the process—not all at once, but in pieces.

In the tiny, accumulating compromises that come with being a single mother in a culture that expects women to do it all.

I’ve had to carry both the masculine and the feminine, disproportionately—the provider and the nurturer. I’ve had to show up for work with a full-time face while holding the full weight of a household, childhoods, dinners, doctor’s appointments, healing.

There’s so much resentment in that truth.

So much silent grief women carry when forced to abandon their softness, their intuition, their inner spaciousness—just to keep going.

The creative paralysis that comes not from lack of inspiration, but from lack of space.

Lack of support.

Lack of breath.

I’ve lived with anxiety like a second skin—its weight making it hard to move, let alone paint. The thought of “just make something” sometimes feels like an insult when you’re hanging on by a thread.

And yet, I’ve kept making.

Not always in the ways I used to.

Sometimes it’s a fermented jar of asparagus.

Sometimes a shadow on the wall.

A photograph.

A garden full of summer strawberries, eaten by the kids within hours.

A meal cooked with love, even when exhausted.

These are still acts of art—even when the world doesn’t call them that.

But I’m tired of hustling.

Tired of measuring value by visibility.

Tired of upholding systems I no longer believe in.

What I want now is to live slowly, richly.

To place my creativity at the center, not in the margins.

To enjoy being a mother while my children are still under this roof.

To make our home beautiful.

To grow food.

To infuse love and ritual into the ordinary.

To make art that comes through me like a pulse from the ethers—something I’m finally quiet enough to hear.

I’ve tried running PlantLust full-time.

I’ve tried building an art career from this rural outpost in Vermont, but it hasn’t been easy. Still, I return to the work.

I write.

I photograph.

I paint.

I offer what I can.

In an attempt to calm the nervous system, return to a steady calm—a return to the bones of my artist self I'm excavating. Creating a digital retrospective on Patreon and updating my website to be a living archive.

If you’re reading this, maybe you’re excavating too.

Let’s keep going.

Returning to creativity.