The Art of Becoming – Chapter 8
Paper Mirrors
Building emotional resilience is not a matter of learning how to stop feeling. It’s about learning how to feel without falling apart. And that kind of resilience is not born from perfection, but from presence; especially the kind of presence you can only build slowly through honest self-expression.
There’s a strange comfort in giving shape to something only visible in your mind. When your feelings are raw or shapeless or too large to hold, the act of putting them into color, sound, or words can be enough to make them bearable. Not fixed or solved. But seen, held, and understood.
You don’t need to be good at art to create. You don’t need to write well to begin writing. The act of creating this way is not a matter of performance. Your creations here are not meant to impress. They are offerings to yourself, ways of staying in tune with the parts of you that may not speak clearly but still long to be heard.
There’s something powerful about sitting with your confusion long enough to draw it. Or writing out your grief without worrying if the sentences make sense. Or dancing alone in a way that makes no sense to anyone but your body. It doesn’t matter how it looks. What matters is that you are moving the weight inside you to form something tangible.
This is not about curing yourself through art. It is about refusing to abandon yourself when you don’t know what else to do. It is about meeting yourself with curiosity instead of judgment, and exploration instead of escape.
And often, it starts with the smallest willingness to make something, even if it’s ugly, awkward, or doesn’t lead anywhere at first. Healing does not require mastery. Growth does not demand that you turn every interest into a skill. Passion is not a performance. It is a place to return to when the world becomes too sharp, too loud, or too much. And in that return, something inside you softens, and something opens.
You don’t have to call yourself an artist. You just have to be honest.
When you begin to express yourself creatively, you begin to reclaim your interior life. Not for others to consume, but for yourself to inhabit. You begin to build a relationship with your emotions, not as enemies to control, but as messengers to understand.
And with time, this becomes a practice not just of art, but of staying present. Of choosing to meet life with more than just reaction; with reflection, with creation, with care.
There is no rulebook for how to do this. No correct medium or perfect frequency. Some days it might be a journal entry. Other days it might be a song you hum while washing dishes, or a character you invent who feels more like you than you’d like to admit. What matters is not what you make, but that you make space to create.
One practice I quietly return to again and again is morning pages, a concept introduced by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way. It’s not always easy, but it’s incredibly effective: three pages of longhand, stream-of-consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. No editing. No censoring. No audience. Just a cascading flow of whatever is sitting at the edge of your mind. It can be mundane or emotional or entirely incoherent—it doesn’t matter.
I recommend this practice not because it guarantees insight, but because it creates space for it. It teaches you to show up to the page without waiting to feel inspired or articulate. It lets you begin the day in conversation with yourself, even if that conversation is full of fog and frustration. And over time, something begins to shift—not always dramatically, but reliably. You will find your thoughts become clearer. Patterns emerge. Silence softens. You begin to hear yourself again. You will find space to feel, space to explore, and space to begin again.
Even when you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re still doing something sacred: turning your attention inward without turning away. There is grace in that. There is resilience in that. And there is courage, too, in choosing to stay close to yourself.
So make something, even badly. Especially badly. Not to prove that you’re okay. But to remind yourself that you are here. That you are still a whole world inside a single body. That you are allowed to become without needing to arrive.
And in that small act of creating, you will find something in you begins to mend.
I urge you to ask yourself:
What recurring images or ideas have been appearing in my mind lately, even if I don’t fully understand them yet?
Do I allow myself to make things that feel unfinished, strange, or imperfect; or do I only create when I feel certain of the outcome?
What might I discover if I let go of needing my thoughts to be useful right away?
Brooke Desieus 