Fragmenting Yourself to Be Digestible Is Its Own Kind of Violence

That day so many years ago when someone called me crazy, I could feel myself fragment.

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.