Tag: authenticity

  • The Freeze

    The Freeze

    Every so often, I experience what I call the freeze.

    Artists will know exactly what I mean. It is that moment right before you begin a new piece, canvas blank and supplies ready, when something inside you locks up. You want to move, but you don’t. You know what to do, but suddenly you can’t do it.

    It’s not laziness and it’s not a lack of ideas. It’s more like a quiet paralysis, the sense that whatever you do first will somehow be wrong, wasteful, or irreversible.

    I experienced that tonight, and it surprised me. I haven’t frozen like that in a long time.

    Maybe it is holiday stress. Maybe it is the cumulative weight of life, reality, and empathy for a world that feels perpetually on edge. Maybe it is something smaller, or something that would sound completely absurd to anyone watching from the outside. But absurd does not mean invalid.

    Any time we experience something like this, there is a reason… and I am the kind of person who looks for it. I look inward and outward, I sit with the discomfort instead of trying to bulldoze through it, and I pay attention to what is actually happening in my body and mind.

    I find that process purposeful, and sometimes even enjoyable, not because it’s comfortable but because it gives me agency. When I understand what is happening and why, anxiety loses its grip. I can experience it and coexist with it at the same time. More often than not, that approach resolves the issue in a deeper and longer-lasting way than simply forcing myself forward.

    So this is the internal conversation I had tonight, and how I talked myself through it once I reached a clearer understanding of what was really going on. This is where my professional training in psychology meets my self-taught training in art, I suppose.

    If you have similar experiences to what I’ve described above, I hope some part of this is useful to you.

    Step 1. Pause for a moment. Not to analyze or fix anything, just to name what is happening. Once something is named, it tends to lose a surprising amount of its power.

    What you’re feeling when you experience “the freeze” as soon as you pick up a brush or a palette knife, or face whatever in life it is that makes you freeze in a similar way, is not a personal flaw. For artists and creatives, it’s not proof that you are bad at being creative.

    It’s a very specific nervous-system response, and it shows up most often in people who actually care about what they are making. In psychology, this response is often described in a few overlapping ways.

    It can be understood as a conditioned approach and avoidance conflict within you, where the part of you that wants to create is simultaneously held back by fear of loss or failure.

    Funny story: I wrote an entire 23-page research paper on this in my junior year of undergrad. In my opinion, it was incredibly boring, personally insulting, and the worst three months of my life at the age of 21, but somehow I shockingly got an A.

    I digress.

    It can also appear as performance anxiety, though not in the social sense, more as an internal pressure to do it right. For me, it is absolutely perfectionism as a defensive strategy, a way of protecting myself from imagined mistakes or wasted effort (thanks, Mom, may you rest in peace). In many cases, it can even be the brain or your physiology responding to dorsal vagal activation, which includes fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, but we will not go that deep here.

    To put it in easy, normal language, this reaction almost always appears right before commitment. Any commitment, but especially one that means “if it goes wrong it’ll really cost me.”

    In the art scenario, up until this point, the work has existed only in imagination. In that space it is infinite, perfect, and safe. The moment you are about to touch the canvas, it becomes finite and real. Something is chosen. Other possibilities fall away. Your (my) system hears that as loss, and it tries to protect you by freezing you in place.

    That feeling that it has to be a certain way to be right is not creativity. It is internalized surveillance. Somewhere early on, many of us learned that mistakes mean waste, mess means failure, and a wrong choice causes permanent damage. Even when those rules no longer apply, the body remembers them. So when you are free, your body does not quite believe it.

    That is not weakness, or incompetence. It is conditioning that has simply outlived its usefulness.

    At the center of this response is a quiet lie: “If this turns out bad, the supplies are ruined.”

    That is just not true. Acrylic can be scraped, painted over, sanded, cut up, or turned into texture. A canvas can become a foundation rather than a final statement. Materials are meant to be used. That is their purpose. Paint that sits untouched out of fear is already wasted.

    Canvas is not sacred. You are. Please remind yourself of that immediately, and lock it in.

    Another lie slips in just as easily: “It has to be a certain way to be right.”

    Right for whom? There is no audience in the room, no rubric, no grade. There is only motion, pressure, color, and the physical relief of making contact with the surface. Art does not exist to behave! Remember?

    This kind of freeze does not happen to people who do not care. People who are shallow about creativity do not spiral like this. It tends to happen to people with depth and sensitivity, to people who were corrected more often than they were encouraged, and to people who learned how to perform before they learned how to play.

    The nervous system is not sabotaging anything. It’s trying to protect something precious: the ability to feel and express. It’s simply using outdated rules.

    Step 2. A small reframe helps here. You are not making a painting right now. You are making the first layer of a surface. Nothing more. Not meaning, not outcome, not art with a capital A. Just noticing what happens when color moves downward. That layer is allowed to be ugly. It is allowed to be scraped away. It is allowed to disappear entirely under the next thing. You are allowed to stop at any time.

    There is one gentle but important rule I follow that can helps me quiet the pressure. Say out loud that nothing you do in the next fifteen minutes counts. Set a timer. When it ends, you can walk away with no obligation to continue, fix, or judge. This is not about pushing through fear. It is about making fear irrelevant.

    And finally, this matters. The experience, the art, and your simply being. But also, the fact that you sometimes freeze. It’s not invalid. You do not need to get over it already. That voice was built over years. It softens through safe repetition, not self-attack. Every time you begin anyway, tentatively and imperfectly, you rewrite it.

    You are not broken. You are unwinding.

    I hope this helps someone…

    xo.

    c.

  • Unhidden

    Unhidden

    entry nineteen — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
    Lumix GX7 + DistressedFX + Mextures

    I’ve been thinking about how easily we overlook what does not bloom on command. How quickly we decide something is less valuable when its rhythms are quiet or unusual or slow to reveal themselves. How we are conditioned by convenience to turn away from what requires a different or more tender kind of attention, unless we are its mother.

    As mothers, the expectations begin to pile up, even as the help quietly disappears… if it ever shows up to begin with. It showed up for me recently, with my son’s diagnosis of autism, and then the weight shifted again. The label alone added a layer of juggling and balancing that feels impossible, even in ways that his father may never fully know…

    …but these small remnants of #lovelydeadcrap in my backyard have been teaching me how to package it all and express what’s inside.

    Lumix GX7 + DistressedFX + Mextures

    In their faded textures and fragile lines, I find a gentler truth. Beauty is not always loud, nor peace immediate. Sometimes neither are easily interpreted. Sometimes they appear in the very things the world has already dismissed as unremarkable because they do not fit the desire or expectation.

    When my son was diagnosed with moderate to severe autism, the world tried to hand me a script of loss and limitation. But the more I sit with the reality of who he is and what I know he has experienced in his life, the more I understand that nothing essential has been diminished.

    Lumix GX7 + DistressedFX + Mextures

    Not unlike #lovelydeadcrap, the reality of his story simply asks to be read with a different kind of seeing. The light lands from another direction. The beauty moves at its own pace. That is what this winter season is teaching me:

    To honor what does not conform. To stay open to the quiet forms of life and value that do not perform for anyone’s comfort. To recognize that some truths require presence rather than projection.

    Lumix GX7 + DistressedFX + Mextures

    My son is not less. He is not broken. He is not something to mourn. He is fully himself, unfiltered and unhidden, and there is a sacred beauty in that.

    May we all learn to truly see what stands before us, not merely what we were taught to expect.

  • Revelation

    Revelation

    entry seventeen — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
    iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX + VSCO

    The full moon always finds me in that thin place between ache and awakening. The heart softens, the past stirs, and the light insists on touching what I thought I’d hidden.

    It doesn’t shout. It simply rises. And in rising, it reveals.

    This full moon of these last few days felt like a mirror tilted by something wiser than me: clear, unguarded, almost tender in the way it offers back the truth of who I am becoming.

    Every full moon asks for release, but this one asked for understanding. It offered an opportunity for a quiet recognition of what’s been shed, what’s been carried, and what still longs to be held with gentler hands.

    Under its glow, my fractures stopped pretending to be wounds. Instead, they shined… faint, but deliberate. And grace slipped in when I wasn’t looking.

  • Coldness

    Coldness

    Coldness has arrived and with it the pull to go inward, to rest in the quiet places that rarely see the sun. Winter has always been the hardest season for me. It settles deep and stirs up everything I have tried to set down, everything that has followed me long after the caregiving ended. Two years have passed and I am still carrying the weight of those long nights, the vigilance, the grief that lives in the body long after the moment of loss.

    iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX + VSCO

    Yet even now there are small reminders of life that keeps reaching for the light. These plants on my windowsill keep growing with a kind of quiet courage. The morning sun touches them and they respond without hesitation, without guilt, without a single thought about the expectations of others. They lean toward whatever warmth they can find and allow that to be enough.

    I am trying to learn from them. I am trying to believe that rest is not weakness. It is restoration. It is the slow and necessary work of returning to myself after years of tending to everyone else. Winter makes that lesson feel sharper, but it also makes it feel truer.

    Some days I am tired in a way that feels ancient, but I keep growing in small ways. I keep reaching for light in whatever form it finds me. If these green and fragile things can thrive in the coldest season, maybe I can too.

    xo…

  • Exhale

    Exhale

    entry fifteen — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
    iPhone 17 Pro + VSCO (L6 +1) + Lightroom (watermark only).

    The sunset this evening caught my eye as I glanced up from the command prompt to rest my eyes.

    “cmd —> DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth” be damned, I forgot the problematic machine.

    I gravitated outside as though an unseen force beckoned me… and instead of me capturing a backyard moment, the moment froze me in place and then swallowed me whole.

    It happened quietly, the way revelation always does: when the day was no longer sure of itself.

    The horizon drew one long, trembling breath, and the sky exhaled light like a confession, soft and burning all at once.

    For a few heartbeats, the forest became a cathedral. Oaks turned to stained glass, every vein of every leaf catching the final ember of the sun’s breath.

    The air itself seemed to glow with a kind of surrender, as though heaven was remembering how to let go and reminding me all over again.

    I stood beneath it, small but aware, suspended in that thin seam between the living, the leaving, and the memory of the already gone.

    The colors didn’t ask to stay; they simply poured through the cracks of the canopy and into me, as if to say, “grace doesn’t vanish when the light fades. It only changes hue.”

    When the sky went gray again, it felt less like an ending and more like an exhale finished.

    And life went on…

    catacosmosis // 2025

  • Tipping Point

    Tipping Point

    It would seem I’ve waken up to yet another extreme of the obvious hypocrisy in what’s being demanded as “reality.” Some people genuinely still do not “get it,” while others still willfully refuse to see.

    Either way, and from all sides, there is an overarching question: Has society reached a true tipping point?

    Based on the reaction to a black man in white face, it would seem double standards have finally outstayed their welcome overall.

    Notice the general pattern of double standards over the last several years:

    Women can mock men.
    Trans can mock cis.
    Non-whites can mock whites.
    Gay can mock straight.

    Flip any of that around and you’re cooked.

    Look at the standards a little more deeply:

    The most obvious example is how men putting on “woman-face” or women putting on “man-face” isn’t just accepted — it’s demanded that everyone affirm it as their literal reality and “respect” it.

    So, logically, if that’s celebrated and that’s “reality,” then picking on any culture in jest for their quirks, failures, or oddities should be just as acceptable.

    That sums up what people are really upset about re: this skit that’s been circulating the last couple of days: it’s the double standards.

    And it’s not just white people who have had it.

    Yes, this particular skit has a lot of white people speaking out — they’re tired of being singled out as the only group not permitted to joke back, and then accused of lacking a sense of humor when it’s done to them.

    But consider society as a whole:

    Non-whites and whites alike are fed up with their own people acting like ungrateful, entitled fools — wasting the opportunities their ancestors fought to provide them and destroying the respectability they strove for.

    By now becoming loud, lazy, and disrespectful criminals, people make a mockery not only of their rights and the many opportunities they have if they would simply show up, but of their entire communities.

    Whites are fed up with Karens and Chads.

    Legal immigrants feel the same way about illegals trashing the opportunities they earned by doing things the right way — respecting the privilege of coming to another country, rebuilding responsibly, and treating that privilege with honor.

    Instead, illegals cause even legal immigrants to take the flak, lose opportunities, and be punished for things they didn’t even do.

    Masculine men are tired of being told they’re assholes instead of protectors, simply because masculinity is constantly mistaken for toxicity.

    Men of every race and personality type are sick of women parading around declaring they don’t need men, accusing and blaming men for everything wrong in the world — while in the same breath lamenting absent fathers, complaining that men don’t “show up” in general, and then demanding applause and respect for a world women absolutely didn’t build without the strength and masculinity of men.

    Women of all races and personality types are sick of being pressured to accept men in dresses not only mocking them and what it means to be a woman, but especially a mother, and having their spaces invaded and reclaimed as “everyone’s space,” only to be labeled ‘phobic’ or hateful for feeling that way.

    This isn’t only racial. It’s far broader than that, and these are only a few of many examples.

    Most, if not all, “everyday people” — all of us who are not filthy rich or sitting in positions of power — are fed up with war, crime, cruelty, and double standards. We just want to work hard, add meaning to the world, and reap the fruits of our labor: enough to survive, and enough to live — to enjoy a healthy, peaceful, happy existence.

    When did that become an unrealistic or unacceptable dream to have? It’s one that has echoed through the ages.

    Society as a whole is at a tipping point — fed up with hypocrisy, nonsense, and the double standards that no longer make sense.

    The solution, as I keep attempting to remind people, is simple across every aspect of society — yet seemingly impossible for most: for all people to embody empathy for others while taking accountability for themselves, existing in and acting from discernment.

    It is to embody some semblance of morality overall, respect nature, the planet and all its people, but especially ourselves. If we do that first — embody true self-love and self-respect — the depths of it, and not merely the mask — all the rest falls into place on its own.

    Will that be impossible for you? Or will you make it possible for yourself, and thus for others?

    Good luck out in the world today. Much love from me to you (no matter who you are).

    💜

    xo,

    c.

  • Offline, On Purpose: Life Beyond the Algorithm

    Offline, On Purpose: Life Beyond the Algorithm

    There’s a quiet kind of healing that happens when no one is watching. It doesn’t perform. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t need a platform. That is where I was when I was away—not just from social media, but from this space and this blog.

    A young woman named Jillian, in a YouTube video I stumbled across recently, captured this so simply and so beautifully: what life looks and feels like when you’ve stepped away from social media—and stayed away long enough to actually notice the difference. What struck me most, though, was hearing her perspective as someone going through this process for the first time.

    It’s lived in my thoughts and I’ve contemplated this post ever since. It was so interesting to me because I’ve taken breaks from the internet many times over the past two decades, always for the same reasons—and always with this same depth of understanding about the psychology of it, and why those breaks were necessary.

    This most recent (and longest) season of removal hit different. After the last caregiving stretch, after Roshi Ralph’s death, after the silence that came when others (who had no real understanding of the compound caregiving and loss I’d just lived through—and in many cases, never will) rushed in with attacks and projections and judgments, as if my grief was theirs to dissect—I pulled all the way back. And I’ve stayed back.

    I’ve stayed away from social media not because I needed a break, but because I reached the point where it just doesn’t matter to me. The truth is, it never really did. The performance of it all—the curated personas, the noise, the performative alliances, the hollow outrage, the likes-as-validation—means less than nothing. I never played the game anyway, and when I tried to be real, I was punished for it—called out for oversharing instead of respected for being honest. So now, I simply choose not to engage.

    That’s the decision, and it’s permanent. I stick to my own space—my blog(s)—now. I share some of my creative work on YouTube and Instagram, but I don’t engage socially. The work is there for anyone who wishes to enjoy it, just like my writing: simply because I’ve made it—and it feels like a waste to let it collect digital dust on my hard drive or memory cards. That’s it.

    And what I’ve learned—what I’ve earned—is this:

    Own your own thoughts. Own your own opinions. Stop looking to the crowd to inform you of what you feel, believe, or need. If you want to share your truth, explore your voice, or process your experience—do it in your own space. Even if that space is digital.

    Quiet is not the same as silent. Solitude is not absence. Privacy is not erasure. And just because the crowd isn’t clapping doesn’t mean the work isn’t working—or that it’s not sacred, necessary, and deeply alive.

    A hike on Flagg Mountain.
    Flagg Mountain is part of Weogufka State Forest.
    My favorite place in these woods…
    …is where you’ll find my favorite tree (a post all about her is coming soon).
    A few photos from where I’ve been this past year, instead of online…

    Mirrors, Screens, and Silent Knowing: Personal Reflections after Watching Jillian’s Journey

    Part One: The Slowness That Saves You

    Jillian talked about how, in the silence of that first year offline, she realized she wasn’t who she thought she was. That her sense of self had been filtered through algorithms and aesthetics for so long that she didn’t know what parts were her and what parts were just performance.

    She said she didn’t want to be a cottagecore girl, or a vanilla-beach-aesthetic girl, or even a tomato queen—she just wanted to be Jillian. And that’s what life offline gave her space to rediscover: the Jillian aesthetic. Not a genre. Not a trend. A person.

    That kind of reclamation doesn’t happen in front of a ring light. It happens when you’re still. When the feedback loop breaks. When your body and soul finally stop bracing for the next notification, the next birthday story repost, the next dopamine drip that doesn’t land right.

    She didn’t pretend her life suddenly looked different. In fact, she said:

    “Does my life look any different from this… to this? No. But how I live is what’s different.”

    That line stuck with me because it’s the same thing I’ve experienced. The world outside didn’t change. The people didn’t change. The pain didn’t vanish. But something in me stopped handing over power to what others might think—or worse, what they might not think if I didn’t stay visible.

    Part Two: The Real Cynicism Is a Smile That Lies

    There was a comment I wrote recently in response to someone who was tired—tired of being called negative for telling the truth. Tired of being cast as cynical for not dressing pain up as purpose. I told them this:

    “People will call the truth pessimism and negativity because they’ve either never seen true rock bottom—or they’ve never experienced it (yet).”

    Because the people who have known real loss, real chaos, real collapse?

    We don’t need false light. We need real clarity.

    That’s why toxic positivity is so insidious—it masquerades as hope, but it’s really just fear dressed in bright colors. It says: Don’t go there. Don’t feel that. Don’t name it. But the truth? The truth sits with the mess. The truth makes a chair for the grief and the rage and the complexity and says: stay as long as you need.

    “It’s madness to try to be sane in this crazed world… You can just quietly speak your truth.”

    That’s it right there. That’s why I’m not interested in “engaging” anymore, and why I’ve stopped posting where people feel entitled to misunderstand. This world has enough noise. Enough image management. Enough hollow back-patting in the name of “support.”

    Part Three: Stillness Is Not Stagnation

    Jillian said she thought she was going to return to social media after a year. She even looked forward to it. She imagined her big return, her “look how I’ve changed” content. But then the new year rolled around… and she didn’t want to go back. Because the more she paid attention to her real life—the one where she wasn’t performing for anyone—the less she needed to curate it.

    That’s a shift I understand at a soul level.

    Sometimes we don’t need reinvention. We need to not be witnessed for a while, so we can see ourselves clearly again.

    And no, it doesn’t mean becoming some pure, evolved aesthetic monk who never has insecure days. Jillian was honest about that too—she still compares timelines, still feels the pressure. But she said something I think most people miss:

    “I still have those moments. But I’m learning. And that’s enough. I’m having a great time.”

    A great time—not because everything is perfect, but because she’s present. Because she’s not outsourcing her attention, affection, or identity anymore. And because she gave herself the gift of being nobody for a while, so she could become somebody real again.

    Closing Thoughts: Your Life, Your Lens

    So no—this isn’t a how-to guide. This isn’t a five-step digital detox plan. This is just a reflection on what it means to live inward in a world obsessed with being outward.

    It’s a reminder that your worth isn’t measured in visibility. That your healing doesn’t have to be documented to be real. That privacy isn’t a lack of connection—it’s a form of spiritual hygiene.

    Social media isn’t evil. But it’s not sacred, either. Use it if it serves your soul. Leave it if it steals your peace. And if you ever wonder whether your absence would be noticed, ask this instead:

    “Would I still feel whole if no one saw me for a while?”

    If the answer is no, then maybe it’s time to come home to yourself—quietly and on purpose.