A couple of years ago, I entered the labyrinth of my own healing. I didn’t know the shape of the path ahead, or even if I would make it out. I only knew I was determined to dissect the shadows clinging to me. What I discovered was not gentle. It wasn’t just my silence, it was ancestral silence, the kind that suffocates generations. My voice had been stolen before I knew it belonged to me. A lifetime of distrust, taught that pain was imaginary, and that speaking truth invited punishment. So I learned to whisper nothing, to become a ghost in my own home.

Through therapy, I began summoning the parts of myself that had been locked away. In the dim corridors of memory, I found them; my forgotten selves, shivering in dark corners. The most vivid was my seven-year-old self. She roams the halls of an old Victorian house, lantern in hand, its flame small but unwavering. She is my guide, leading me door to door, part to part, shadow to shadow. Trust was not immediate, even my own younger selves required proof that I would protect them. Slowly, they came forward. Slowly, I earned them back.

I had inherited silence and fear, but I chose not to pass it on. As a mother of three I did not want my children to be bound by chains of obedience or shame. I want them to speak. I want them to feel. I want them to be safe.

Healing has not been delicate. It arrived as panic attacks, floods of memory, and a diagnosis of CPTSD that broke me.

On January 1, 2025, I created “Get Off Your High Horse,” the first piece in my Heart in the Lantern collection. A piece that shed light on my own power. Why can’t I stand on this high hill? Why can’t I journey through life not living small? I have been carrying other people’s darkness, their unspoken rage and grief. My silence was not weakness, it was a vessel. It became fire.

Now, I wander the halls of my inner Victorian house with steadier hands. Each door I open reveals shadows long denied, and each piece of art I create gives them rest. My silence, my survival, my shadows, they were never accidents. They were preparing me to become a conduit.

I am mother. I am artist. I am the keeper of the lantern. What was once a haunted house inside me has become a gallery of transformation. And I am only at the beginning of what I was always becoming.