Not to make peace with it. That felt too tidy, like surrender dressed up as acceptance. Wrestling felt more honest. I would make a quilt using every variety of purple I could find, and I would work with it until I understood something I didn’t before.

I pulled out the tumbler template. A traditional quilt block with a cup (tumbler) shape in the middle. When repeated, it makes clean geometry and syncopated rhythms, completely under my control. Yes, I was going to control purple.

Colors of Awareness

Purple was the awareness ribbon color of MCAS and Sarcoidosis long before I got sick. The way yellow is for cancer awareness. When I finally connected those dots — that both MCAS and Sarcoidosis were flying the same purple flag — my first thought was: of course they are (you should read all the sarcasm and irony into that you can).

I grew up a redhead and, in my mind, purple and red looked horrible on me. My mother dressed me in red dresses with red patent leather shoes. She called it “style.” The neighborhood called me “fire feet.” I understood red though— it had power, heat, something to push against. Purple felt like the opposite. One value, no depth, and nothing to grab onto. I didn’t buy purple fabric when I first started quilting and I didn’t miss it.

Getting two rare disease diagnoses and discovering their awareness color is purple felt like being handed a jersey for a team I never chose, in a color I never liked.

Screw Tradition

I had sewn about twenty tumbler blocks together and then sewn those to make an hourglass shape. When I stood back to look at those blocks, they screamed “Boring.”

Too static and predictable. The pattern was doing exactly what I told it to do, which was the problem. That wasn’t my life anymore. My life had been cut up and rearranged without my permission, and here I was trying to impose predictability on this quilt.

I needed to add some improvisation to these traditional blocks. Improv Quilting emphasizes spontaneity and personal expression over traditional patterns and templates, allowing quilters to make design decisions in the moment and follow their creative flow. This creates unique, abstract art-type quilts where play, color, and shape are centered, which means it’s about the process. I’d taken Sheri Lynn Wood’s improv quilting class and had her book. I decided to create my own “score” for these tumblers.

I stacked the tumbler blocks on top of each other, sliced through them in the middle of each tumbler creating four pieces out of each block. Then I randomly mixed and matched the pieces back together into mosaic blocks. Some kept the hourglass shape in the middle, while others were parts of the hourglass. But that wasn’t enough. Together the blocks lacked contrast among that sea of purples.

I cut thin lime green strips and pieced them between the sliced blocks. This yellow-green was so close to purple’s complement it practically vibrated against it — and I let some of those lines run all the way to the edges of the quilt across an expanse of deep plum. The green wasn’t purple’s friend, instead it was the interrupter. It was also, I realized later, the thing holding all the pieces together by making space between them, so each one could be seen.

I didn’t have enough purple in my stash when I started this quilt, and it was lockdown time during the pandemic. A spectrum of purple arrived in the mail from a somewhat local quilt shop. I hadn’t let myself consider this array of purple before — blue-violet, magenta, wine, deep plum, toned purples (gray purple). The color of one piece was so lush I wanted to lick it like ice cream.

I still didn’t love the pastels. But they were adding light values and keeping the center from collapsing into itself. They earned their place even if I still didn’t like them.

Caregiver Quilting

When the quilt was finished, I asked my friend Megan to long-arm quilt it. My machine wasn’t big enough for a piece this size, but that wasn’t the only reason.

Megan had been one of my first caregivers when I got sick, before I had even heard of MCAS or Sarcoidosis. Later, she drove me to my EEOC hearing against my employer at the time. She knew what those early months looked like and how far I’d come. Asking her to quilt it was a way of keeping her in my illness narrative and journey.

Her hands are in this quilt. That’s not a metaphor. The quilting — the stitching that holds the top, batting, and backing together — is her work moving across every one of those purples I wrestled with.

When I stepped back and looked at the finished quilt, I didn’t feel transformed. What I felt was space. Room I hadn’t had before. Making this quilt gave me somewhere to put the wrestling while the wrestling was still happening. The wrestling with the two diagnoses, a pandemic, a new self I only half recognized at the time. This quilt let me tell that story in color and shape without knowing that’s what I was doing. And without having a tidy ending for the story.

I have never been a writer. Color, shape, and texture is how I tell stories.

Uncomfortable is a Skill

One of my MCAS doctors once told me to “get comfortable with being uncomfortable.” She meant my symptoms. Things were going to get worse before they got better and there wasn’t much anyone could do about that. I followed her advice, but didn’t fully understand it until I was elbow deep in purple fabric I didn’t want to be touching.

Uncomfortable emotions work the same way. Anger, grief, fear, the frustrating exhaustion of a body that isn’t predictable — we learn to route around them the same way I routed around purple. It’s efficient but it’s not growth.

Purple means something different to me now. I have claimed the deeper values — the wine, the plum, the blue-violet, the purple tones. They mean advocacy, pacing, listening to my body. The pastels still don’t do much for me. But I understand their purpose.

This is one thing art did that nothing else could at that point. Not fix or resolve but expand. Make space for something else.

Try it Yourself

Find a color you’ve been avoiding. Not the one you dislike mildly — the one that makes you say “yuck” inside. Spend time with it the way I spent time with purple. Put it next to other colors. Notice what values suddenly become interesting, what combinations make you want to sit with that color a little longer, what surprises you.

You’re not trying to love it. You’re just getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. It turns out that’s a skill worth practicing.

This work is sustained by this community. If this work resonates, here are ways to continue:

Go Deeper
Register for a workshop or book a 1:1 creative practice arc for more contained support. Workshops offer a structured creative arc. 1:1 sessions provide personalized containment.

1:1 Sessions Learn More

Abstract Watercolor Windows Workshop

Join Wayfinding
Become part of the ongoing creative practice circle with access to all workshops, monthly Open Studios, workshop recordings, community gatherings and access to the Low Histamine Compass and other resources.

Subscribe now

There will always be a free Unfolding Path tier with short therapeutic practices, studio reflections, and arts & health insights for women navigating chronic illness.

Because healing isn’t linear — and neither is art.

I thought I would be using red paint for this emotional painting. Instead, during the check-in, I visualized avocado green edged with mint and balanced with green gold.

If you had asked me that morning what I was feeling, I would have said anger. It seemed like the right word.

My paintbrush disagreed.

I was annoyed and my body knew it before I did.

Emotional Painting & Visualizing Emotions

If you’re new here or to this series: this is the second in a two-part emotional painting practice. We use color, brushstroke, and motion to give one of our emotions physical form outside the body, not to illustrate it, but to find it. No plan, no rules, no finished product required. The previous post in this series, The Color of Dazzled, walks through the full approach if you want the longer introduction (See link below)

What matters for today: emotions and feelings aren’t the same thing. Emotions are the body’s fast, pre-verbal responses to what’s happening inside us or around us. They’re information, not verdicts or “good” or “bad.”. Feelings are how we perceive those responses in our bodies. The same emotion can feel different depending on the body it moves through, the context when it happens, and the emotional or mental load that’s already there.

This practice asks you to let color and motion reach the emotion before language does. Which sometimes means arriving at a different word than the one you started with.

The Feelings Wheel we use here doesn’t come pre-colored. The assumption that grief is universally blue or anger is universally red doesn’t hold. Color meaning is personal, cultural, and somatic. We’re building your personal visual language, not confirming someone else’s.

One more thing worth naming before we start: annoyed is an emotion many of us have been trained to dismiss. Too small for attention. Not dramatic enough to count. But annoyance that goes unnamed doesn’t stay small. It accumulates in the body, in the day, in the places where energy was spent and not replenished. This practice takes it seriously.

Subscribe now

SUPPLIES

For emotional painting, you’ll need:

• Acrylic or watercolor paint

  • Three primary colors: red, yellow, blue

  • Make sure to have white, Paynes Grey or black paint

If you have other paint colors, have them handy. You won’t know what color you need until after the Check-in. But red, yellow, and blue, make all the colors on the color wheel.

Red+ Yellow= Orange

Yellow + Blue = Green

Blue + Red = Purple

• Some tools to make marks:

  • Brushes, sponges, q tips

  • Palette knife or hotel card key

• For more control, you can use watercolor pencils, oil crayons or water-soluble scribble sticks.

• Painting surface or substrate:

  • for acrylic paint you can use a canvas board, acrylic paper sketchbook, watercolor paper, or a piece of cardboard with gesso painted on it as a primer

  • for watercolor, you’ll need 140 lb weight watercolor paper

• Water for watercolors and cleaning brushes

• The Feelings Wheel handout

• 1 pencil, and 1 piece of paper for the check-in

You may want something underneath your paper to protect the table you are working on.

You can support Crooked Path Studios by using our affiliate links. We receive a small commission on each sale at no cost to you.

Blick Art Supplies

• Watercolor supplies: visit the watercolor list

• Acrylic Paint supplies: visit the Acrylic Paint list

Amazon

• Downloadable Amazon Art Supply List with Links

THE PRACTICE

Check-in

As part of our check-in today, we’re going to do some square breathing. Puzzled? Let me explain.

We take a breath in for four counts, hold it for four counts, then exhale for four counts, and pause for four counts before starting that over.

And as we breathe, we draw our breath pattern on the paper.

To get started, I invite you to get comfortable in your chair or laying down. Close your eyes or focus on something in front of you. We’re going to do a series of 3 square breaths just to practice.

Here we go:

• Breath in, 2, 3, 4

• Hold 2, 3, 4

• Exhale 2, 3, 4

• Pause 2, 3, 4

Do this two more times.

Now, pick up your pencil and paper, and as you inhale, draw a line. Without picking up your pencil, change the direction of that line when you hold that breath. And change again when you exhale, and again when you pause after the exhale.

Continue drawing your square breathing for 3 more breaths.

Continue deep breaths and think about an emotion you had this week. Remember emotions aren’t good or bad, they are information. They are your body telling you to listen, pay attention.

You don’t need to name the emotion right now, focus on the feeling you had.

Imagine that emotion in front of you. What color is this emotion for you? Are there any other colors with this emotion?

Don’t judge it and don’t second guess it; just note that color or colors.

What kind of movement or motion does this emotion have—fast, slow, or short stops and starts? Is it undulating or flowing?

Note what you see or feel.

Take one more breath and open your eyes. Make some notes of the colors and movement and motion you saw in your mind.

Don’t write the name of the emotion, just write down what you saw in your mind.

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Create

We are going to work for 15 minutes. I recommend setting a timer.

Start with the main color you saw during the check-in visualization. Make one mark — just one — that represents the emotion and its movement. Then follow it. Add brushstrokes, marks, and color, letting the motion lead.

We’re not drawing a picture. We’re moving media across the surface the way the emotion moves through the body.

Notice the physical quality of your marks. Are you jabbing? Dragging? Pressing hard and scraping back? These aren’t accidents or mistakes; they’re texture in the making.

Texture is what happens when pressure and repetition accumulate on a surface. It’s one of the few visual elements you can feel as you create it, in your hand, your wrist, your shoulder (For me, line is another one I can feel). A surface that’s been worked looks and feels different from one that’s been touched lightly once and left alone. In painting, it’s what gives something physical presence, weight, resistance. It tells you something has been there, pressing, returning, building.

Your body already knows what texture this emotion has. The marks will show you.

Pay attention to how your body is moving. Big gestures from the shoulder or tight controlled marks from the wrist. Fast or slow. Whether the motion wants to repeat or changes each time. These differences are part of your visual language. Your intuitive self already knows the quality of this emotion. Stay curious about what it’s showing you rather than redirecting it toward something more composed.

Respond to what’s already on the surface. Add layers. Let your texture build.

When you’re ready, add a small amount of Paynes Grey or black to your main color.

Watch what happens to the surface. Does the dark add depth, creating dimension, pulling some marks forward and letting others recede? Or does it compress the surface, adding weight, flattening texture rather than enriching it? In the last practice, darker values held lighter marks in place and created form. That’s one thing dark values can do. But it isn’t the only thing. Notice what it does here, with this color, on this surface, with this emotion.

Notice whether a pattern is forming. Pattern is the repetition of a mark, a motion, a color that accumulates across the surface. In design, pattern creates rhythm and structure. Does the same mark keep appearing? If so, does the repetition feel generative or like something that can’t stop? In the body, it’s the motion that keeps returning, either the same gesture, the same pressure, or the same direction. The painting makes that visible before we have language for it.

Paint a little longer with the darker value. Then add white and continue.

Watch whether white opens the texture or resists it. Whether it introduces breath into the surface or sits on top of what’s already there. Does it change the pattern or does the pattern absorb it? The last practice found space in the lighter values. This practice may find something different. Both are information.

What you’re tracking across these layers is texture, pattern, and the weight of repetition, and how they build or release. We’re noticing what they look like when they’ve been given room to accumulate without being managed or dismissed.

If you get stuck at any point, return to one motion and one color.

Stop when the timer goes off. Or don’t. While the painting dries, move to the Feelings Wheel to find the word that fits what you found while painting.

Join Wayfinding
Become part of the ongoing creative practice circle with monthly Open Studios, 2-3 workshop series a year, workshop recordings, and other community gatherings.

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Feelings Wheel

Often the Feelings Wheel is already colored but those colors may not match our personal language. So, this Feelings Wheel needs your personal colors added to it.

Start in the center and decide which of these big bucket emotions you felt and painted. Then move out to the next ring and determine which of these emotions best fits what you felt and painted. Move on to the 3^rd ring and see if any of those emotions are true for you.

Color in those parts of the Feelings Wheel that match your emotion using the color you painted.

Reflection

Take a step back to look at your painting.

• What do you notice about your experience making this painting?

• How does the shift in light and dark values carry different emotions or levels of emotion?

• How did it feel to visualize an emotion?

• How did it feel to name that emotion beyond the center of the Feelings Wheel?

• How do you want to respond to that emotion?

Process Notes

The first color that surfaced during breathing was avocado green, edged with mint and something almost metallic, a thin streak of green gold.

I had woken up assuming I was angry. That seemed reasonable. Anger is easy to name. It has a clear shape, and a recognizable heat. But avocado green wasn’t anger. I didn’t know what it was yet. I just knew it wasn’t red.

I put down a layer of green gold with the paint shaper, then reached for the closest thing to avocado green and began jabbing at the surface with a makeup sponge. Short, insistent dabs. The paint built up quickly. It didn’t glide.

I picked up the palette knife and smacked thicker paint across the surface. Dragging and scraping. The surface accumulated rather than opened.

There was nothing gentle about my movements.

When I worked Paynes Grey into the green, the dark strokes kept pulling downward. They didn’t create depth the way darker values had in the Dazzled painting, pulling marks forward, creating space and dimension. They just added weight. Gravity, it turns out, has its own opinion about certain emotions.

The texture built with each layer. Not the texture of something being worked through, but of something being pressed repeatedly into the same spot. The center grew dense, congested, and overworked. The white I added didn’t open it. It felt abraded.

Pattern was everywhere. The same jabbing motion and pressure returning with the same direction. The repetition wasn’t building toward anything instead it was just accumulating, the way a surface does when the same force keeps arriving without release.

On the Feelings Wheel, I went to Anger first. I expected to move outward toward Furious or Infuriated the emotions I associate with “grumpy.” But the outer rings of Anger are wider than that. Annoyed sits there. So does Disrespected, and Ridiculed. Emotions I had never thought of as connected to Anger. The painting had already found that territory in the jabbing marks, the weight that kept pulling downward, the texture of something pressed repeatedly without release. Annoyed wasn’t a mislabeled anger. It was anger at a register I hadn’t been taking seriously.

Stepping back from the painting, I could see the pattern more clearly than I’d been able to feel it that morning.

There is a kind of domestic labor that doesn’t announce itself. The invisible tracking of who needs what, when, what hasn’t been done, what will need to happen next. The anticipatory remembering. The constant background planning that runs underneath everything else. In many households this labor distributes unevenly, often invisibly, often without anyone deciding that’s how it should be. It’s structural, not personal. A pattern that develops over time and becomes the texture of daily life.

When you’re living with chronic illness, that labor has a cost that’s no longer abstract. Energy is finite and trackable in a way it isn’t for a healthy body. The friction of this invisible load lands differently when you’re already managing a body that requires constant negotiation. It’s not rage. It’s the steady accumulation of small expenditures that were never replenished.

The painting showed me the effect of those expenditures before I had words for it. The jabbing marks. The surface that couldn’t absorb white. The pattern that kept returning to the same motion without release.

Annoyed, it turns out, isn’t small. It has weight. Texture. A pattern of repetition that builds across the surface until the center is congested and the lighter marks can’t find room.

And beneath the green, darker streaks of something else. Grief, maybe, that hasn’t finished moving through. The painting held that too, without resolving it.

Since making this, I notice the physical difference more precisely. Anger spikes. It’s loud and burns out. Annoyed layers the same friction returning on itself, the same small expenditure, until the surface feels overworked and something finally spills out verbally that has been building for days. Sometimes that’s loud and sounds like anger and sometimes it’s quiet and sounds like sarcasm.

Naming it didn’t fix it. But it gave it form. And form created enough distance to ask a different question — not why am I so irritable but what has been accumulating, and what does it need.

That’s where a different story starts. Not with a resolution, but with recognition.

Check out

Let’s do a quick checkout activity before we go. Find a comfortable position and focus your gaze softly in front of you or close your eyes.

Identify 3 different sounds you can hear right now. Slowly open your eyes and name 3 colors you can see around you.

Now, without moving your hands, notice what you can feel touching them. The texture of your chair, the table edge, your lap. How does it feel?

Without moving your body, touch 2 other objects nearby. How do they feel?

Take a breath before you move on.

Until Next Time

If you painted today, I’d love to know what you found — the color, the motion, what the Feelings Wheel confirmed or surprised you with. Post an image or a fragment in the comments. You don’t need to explain it. The painting already did that work.

And if you didn’t paint today, that’s fine. The check-in alone is a practice. So is reading this and noticing where your emotion lives in your own body, and what you’ve been calling it.

The next Field Note in this series stays with color and emotional painting, but the conditions change. I filmed the next practice during a flare-up. So we’ll see what color brain fog is.

A Few Words We used Today

These terms came up in the practice. They’re here if they’re useful — not as vocabulary to memorize, but as handles for things you’ve already been noticing.

Hue — the color family itself. Avocado green, green gold, mint. The pure color before anything modifies it.

Value — how light or dark a color appears. In this practice, value told us whether the emotion deepened into dimension or simply got heavier.

Shade — a hue mixed with black. In the Annoyed painting, adding Paynes Grey to the green didn’t create depth. It added weight. Not all shades behave the same way.

Tint — a hue mixed with white. What the lighter marks did — or tried to do — when the surface was already congested.

Texture — the way a surface feels or appears to feel. Texture is what happens when pressure and repetition accumulate. It’s the only visual element you can feel as you create it — in your hand, your wrist, your shoulder. In life: how flares feel, how friction accumulates in a body managing too much.

Pattern — the regular repetition of elements across a surface. In design, pattern creates rhythm and structure. In the Annoyed painting, pattern was the same jabbing motion returning without release — accumulation without variation. In life: the behaviors and responses that keep arriving the same way until we can see them clearly enough to change them.

Movement — the path that guides the eye through a composition. In emotional painting, movement is also how the body moves while making — the gesture from the shoulder, the controlled mark from the wrist, the drag of the palette knife. Both kinds of movement carry information about the emotion.

This work is sustained by this community. If this work resonates, here are ways to continue:

Go Deeper
Book a 1:1 creative practice arc for more contained, personalized support.

LEARN MORE

Join Wayfinding
Become part of the ongoing creative practice circle with monthly Open Studios, 2-3 workshop series a year, workshop recordings, and other community gatherings.

Subscribe now

There will always be a free Unfolding Path tier with short therapeutic practices, studio reflections, and arts & health insights for women navigating chronic illness.

Because healing isn’t linear — and neither is art.

This spring I’m teaching this creative practice for the first time.

Abstract Watercolor Windows is a five-week mixed media workshop for women with chronic illness — MCAS, POTS, EDS, Long COVID, Sarcoidosis, and other rare or complex conditions. The workshop includes four pre-recorded lessons to watch and make at your pace, two live Zoom Open Studios to support your creativity and create in community. The practice is designed to work around your body, not against it.

This is a therapeutic creative practice built around nervous system regulation, decision-making, and the particular kind of attention that comes from making something small and contained when everything else feels large and out of control.

It’s also genuinely fun. And the results are beautiful.

The workshop begins April 20. First cohort is capped at 15. Cost is $65.

Need More Details?

Registration is open now through April 13.

Register Here

The workshop will be hosted in Wayfinding. If you’re already a Wayfinding member, this workshop is included in your membership. Watch for the Trail Guide in your inbox.

If you’re not yet a member, registration gets you three complimentary months of Wayfinding — the therapeutic arts membership that includes workshops like this one, monthly Open Studios and Art Hives, and the full archive. After three months you can stay on as an annual member for $150/year, or not. No pressure either way.

Or subscribe to Wayfinding now

Subscribe now

Questions? Post them in the chat or DM me here in Substack.

Crooked Path Studios · Because healing isn’t linear — and neither is art.

Peach layered into it. A warmth that wasn’t harsh, nothing like the grocery store orange from the color walk. Softer. Luminous.

The motion that followed was circular. Counterclockwise. A steady turn that felt like gathering rather than spinning out.

The word came later.

Dazzled.

Emotional Painting & Visualizing Emotions

Most of us have been taught to manage emotions — to name them quickly, contain them, and move on. For those of us living with chronic illness, the stakes feel higher. Emotions register in bodies that are already loud. Grief sits in the joints. Anxiety tightens a chest that’s already tight. The line between emotion and symptom can feel impossible to locate.

Emotional painting doesn’t try to resolve that. It does something quieter and, I think, more useful: it gives the emotion somewhere to go outside the body.

When we paint an emotion — its color, its motion, its texture — we are externalizing something that has been living entirely inside us. Research on affect labeling shows that naming and representing emotions through non-verbal means reduces their intensity without suppressing them. We aren’t bypassing the feeling. We’re giving it shape and form. And that creates a little distance. Enough to look at it. Enough to ask: what is this, exactly?

That distance is where reflection becomes possible. And reflection — as we’ve been exploring in this series — is where self-story starts to take shape.

Emotions and feelings aren’t the same thing, and the distinction matters here.

Emotions are the body’s responses to what’s happening — inside us or around us. They’re fast, often pre-verbal, and not good or bad. They’re information. Your body registering: pay attention to this.

Feelings are what we perceive from that response. The emotion is the signal; the feeling is how we interpret it in our nervous system. Nervousness as an emotion might feel like butterflies, or the jitters, or a sudden urge to leave the room. Same signal, different sensations depending on the body it moves through.

For those of us with chronic illness, this distinction is worth sitting with. We’re already expert interpreters of physical sensation — we’ve had to be. What emotional painting asks is that we extend that attention in a different direction. Not is this a symptom but what is this emotion doing in my body right now, and what color is it?

A note on the Feelings Wheel. The standard version comes pre-colored, with a universal color key. We’re not using that. The assumption that grief is always blue or anger is always red doesn’t hold because color meaning is personal, cultural, and somatic. My dazzled is coral. Someone else’s might be gold or grey-green. In this practice, we’re building your personal color language, not learning someone else’s.

Emotional painting asks for spontaneity, play, and trust in the process. We’re not drawing pictures. We’re not following rules. We’re moving media across a surface the way the emotion moves through the body — and then watching what that tells us.

There are no mistakes here. When something unexpected happens, Sherri Lynn Wood suggests we shout “Whoopee!” and keep going.

SUPPLIES

For emotional painting, you’ll need:

• Acrylic or watercolor paint

  • Three primary colors: red, yellow, blue

  • Make sure to have white, Paynes Grey or black paint

If you have other paint colors, have them handy. You won’t know what color you need until after the Check-in.

Remember, red, yellow, and blue, make all the colors on the color wheel.

Red+ Yellow= Orange

Yellow + Blue = Green

Blue + Red = Purple

• Some tools to make marks:

  • Brushes, sponges, q tips

  • Palette knife or hotel card key

• For more control, you can use watercolor pencils, oil crayons or water-soluble scribble sticks.

• Painting surface or substrate:

  • for acrylic paint you can use a canvas board, acrylic paper sketchbook, watercolor paper, or a piece of cardboard with gesso on it

  • for watercolor, you’ll need 140 lb weight watercolor paper

• Water for watercolors and cleaning brushes

• The Feelings Wheel handout

• 1 pencil, and 1 piece of paper for the check-in

You may want something underneath your paper to protect the table you are working on.

You can support Crooked Path Studios by using our affiliate links. We receive a small commission on each sale at no cost to you.

Blick Art Supplies

• Watercolor supplies: visit the watercolor list

• Acrylic Paint supplies: visit the Acrylic Paint list

Amazon

• Downloadable Amazon Art Supply List with Links

The Practice

Check-in

As part of our check-in today, we’re going to do some square breathing. Puzzled? Let me explain.

We take a breath in for four counts, hold it for four counts, then exhale for four counts, and pause for four counts before starting that over.

And as we breathe, we draw our breath pattern on the paper.

To get started, I invite you to get comfortable in your chair or laying down. Close your eyes or focus on something in front of you. We’re going to do a series of 3 square breaths just to practice.

Here we go:

• Breath in, 2, 3, 4

• Hold 2, 3, 4

• Exhale 2, 3, 4

• Pause 2, 3, 4

Do this two more times.

Now, pick up your pencil and paper, and as you inhale, draw a line. Without picking up your pencil, change the direction of that line when you hold that breath. And change again when you exhale, and again when you pause after the exhale.

Continue drawing your square breathing for 3 more breaths.

Continue deep breaths and think about an emotion you had this week. Remember emotions aren’t good or bad, they are information. They are your body telling you to listen, pay attention.

You don’t need to name the emotion right now, focus on the feeling you had.

Imagine that emotion in front of you. What color is this emotion for you? Are there any other colors with this emotion?

Don’t judge it and don’t second guess it; just note that color or colors.

What kind of movement or motion does this emotion have—fast, slow, or short stops and starts? Is it undulating or flowing?

Note what you see or feel.

Take one more breath and open your eyes. Make some notes of the colors and movement and motion you saw in your mind.

Don’t write the name of the emotion, just write down what you saw in your mind.

Create

We are going to work for 15 minutes. I recommend setting a timer.

Start with the main color you saw during the check-in. Make one mark — just one — that represents the emotion and its movement. Then follow it. Add brushstrokes, marks, and color, letting the motion lead rather than a plan.

We’re not drawing a picture. We’re moving media across the surface the way the emotion moves through the body.

Notice how the brush responds to pressure. A hard press, a light one, a drag versus a dab. Notice how your body is moving — big sweeping gestures from the shoulder, or small controlled marks from the wrist, or something that keeps changing. These aren’t accidents. They’re information. Your intuitive self is already speaking. The job is to stay curious about what it’s saying rather than redirect it toward something more composed.

If the thinking-and-planning brain takes over, come back to the motion and the color. One mark at a time.

Respond to what’s already there. Add layers. Let the painting talk back.

When you’re ready, add a small amount of Paynes Grey or black to your main color.

Watch what happens — not just to the color, but to how it feels. Does it deepen into shade? Shift into something unexpected? Some colors darken gracefully. Others change hue entirely when you add black. Notice whether the new color feels heavier, quieter, more contained. Whether it changes what the emotion is doing.

This is where value enters — the lightness and darkness of a color. In painting, value is what creates form. It’s what makes something feel like it has weight and dimension rather than existing flat on the surface. Without shifts in value, everything registers at the same intensity. Nothing can come forward or recede. Without foreground and background (space) everything seems flat.

For those of us whose nervous systems have been trained toward vigilance, that flatness is familiar. When everything is equally urgent, there’s no depth. No foreground and background. Just the steady overwhelm of same-plane sensation.

Letting a color get darker — deliberately, with a brush — is a small practice in something larger. Letting some things carry weight without letting them consume the whole surface.

Paint a little longer with the darker value. Then add white to your original color and continue.

Notice what shifts. White can open space, soften an edge, introduce breath into something that had been pressing. Making a color lighter is another way we register emotional movement — less intensity, more air, sometimes the particular quality of numbness that isn’t absence but distance.

What you’re building now, across these layers, is range. Dark that holds the light in place. Light that keeps the dark from flattening everything. That relationship between values is what gives the painting form and space. And it’s what gives the emotion somewhere to exist with dimension rather than just weight.

If you get stuck at any point, return to one motion and one color. That’s always enough.

Stop when the timer goes off. Or don’t. Let the painting dry while you move to the Feelings Wheel.

While it dries, we’ll move to the Feelings Wheel — not to explain what you painted, but to find a word that fits what you found.

Feelings Wheel

Start in the center and decide which of these big bucket emotions you felt and painted. Then move out to the next ring and determine which of these emotions best fits what you felt and painted. Move on to the 3^rd ring and see if any of those emotions are true for you.

Color in those parts of the Feelings Wheel that match your emotion using the color you painted.

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Reflection

Take a step back to look at your painting.

• What do you notice about your experience making this painting?

• How does the shift in light and dark values carry different emotions or levels of emotion?

• How did it feel to visualize an emotion?

• How did it feel to name that emotion beyond the center of the Feelings Wheel?

• How do you want to respond to that emotion?

Reflecting on Process

The first arc of coral went down wide and confident. I kept circling, letting my arm follow the curve. The center stayed lighter — peach and white holding space — while the outer rings deepened into rust and maroon.

The darker values didn’t mute the brightness. They held it in place. Without those edges, the glow would have flattened into something pleasant but weightless. The dark gave the light somewhere to be.

That’s what value does in painting. And I’ve been thinking about what it does elsewhere.

Chronic illness compresses range. Not always, but often, and in ways that are hard to name while they’re happening. When the body is managing a lot, emotional experience can flatten toward the urgent end of the spectrum, or go numb at the other. The capacity to hold light and dark at the same time, to let something be both difficult and luminous, both heavy and in motion, requires a kind of spaciousness that exhaustion and vigilance make hard to sustain.

The painting didn’t resolve that. But it demonstrated it. Here, in coral and maroon, was evidence that dark and light could occupy the same surface without one consuming the other. The darker outer rings didn’t threaten the center. They defined it.

As the circular motion built, it felt less like excitement and more like momentum. The painting didn’t flare outward, it gathered toward the center, then pressed back out. There was activation in it, but not chaos.

On the Feelings Wheel, I went to Happy first. None of the emotions radiating out from that center fit what I’d painted. I moved to Surprise. Dazzled sits there, leaning toward Eager and Energetic. I’d never thought of Dazzled as an emotion before. But it clicked, not as a word I chose, but as a word the painting had already found.

That distinction matters. I didn’t decide I was dazzled and then paint it. I painted something, and the painting told me what it was.

This is what the series has been building toward: the idea that visual language can reach something before verbal language does. That color, motion, and value can hold an experience while we’re still catching up to it in words. For those of us whose illness stories have often been told in the language of symptoms and management (the “and then, and then, and then” of a body under siege) finding a different language for our interior life is not a small thing. It’s the beginning of a different kind of story. One we’re telling, rather than one that’s happening to us.

What had precipitated Dazzled was this: friends had reframed the last six months for me. Seeing my transitional work of closing my consulting practice and starting something new from a new angle made me eager rather than exhausted. Not happy, that would have been too smooth, too resolved. Surprise. The specific quality of a perspective shift that opens something rather than closes it.

The painting caught that before I did.

Since making it, I notice how Dazzled lives in my body. A glowing feeling, especially on my face. My eyes feel bright. My sternum lifts. It creates motion without agitation, regenerative rather than depleting. That’s a useful thing to know. Not just as information, but as something I can now find my way back to. I have a color for it. I have a motion. I have a word that the painting gave me.

Coral holds that.

Check-Out

Let’s do a quick checkout activity before we go. Find a comfortable position and focus your gaze softly in front of you or close your eyes.

Identify 3 different sounds you can hear right now. Slowly open your eyes and name 3 colors you can see around you.

Now, without moving your hands, notice what you can feel touching them. The texture of your chair, the table edge, your lap. How does it feel?

Without moving your body, touch 2 other objects nearby. How do they feel?

Take a breath before you move on.

Until Next Time

If you painted today, I’d love to see what you found — the color, the motion, the word the Feelings Wheel gave you or didn’t. Post an image or a fragment in the comments. You don’t need to explain it. Just share what’s there.

And if you didn’t paint today, that’s fine too. The check-in alone is a practice. So is reading this and noticing what it brings up.

The next Field Note in this series stays with emotional painting — same practice, different emotion, different territory. We’ll look at what happens when the color that arrives isn’t the one you wanted.

A Few Words We Used Today

These terms came up in the practice. They’re here if they’re useful — not as vocabulary to memorize, but as handles for things you’ve already been noticing.

Hue — the color family itself. Orange, coral, red. The pure color before anything modifies it.

Value — how light or dark a color appears. Value is what creates form — the sense that something has weight and dimension rather than existing flat on the surface.

Shade — a hue mixed with black. Adds depth and weight to a color.

Tint — a hue mixed with white. Opens space and introduces breath into a color.

Tone — a hue softened by gray, or by the colors surrounding it. How context changes what a color does.

Saturation — the intensity or purity of a color. High saturation is vivid and immediate. Low saturation is muted and quiet.

Form — what emerges when value shifts create the illusion of depth and dimension. In the Dazzled painting, the darker outer rings gave the lighter center somewhere to exist. That relationship between light and dark is what created form.

Space — the illusion of depth in a composition. Foreground and background. What comes forward and what recedes. In life: the distance that makes reflection possible and thus makes our self-story possible.

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There will always be a free Unfolding Path tier with short therapeutic practices, studio reflections, and arts & health insights for women navigating chronic illness.

Because healing isn’t linear — and neither is art.

All you need is:

• A black marker

• A tissue, scarf or handkerchief

We’re going to make blackout poetry from some ironic sources:

• 1920s medical literature about women who dragged themselves from specialist to specialist without getting better, and what their physicians thought about that. (I’ll send these)

• Recent wellness blogs about “cozy culture” written for people who can choose when to be “cozy” and stay in bed. (I’ll send these or you can bring your favorite)

• Your own junk mail--Insurance correspondence, medical newsletters, wellness catalogue, supplements marketing materials, pharmacy informational insert, and any other found text you collect.

• Any text that arrived uninvited and proceeded to have opinions about your health.

Here’s what the evening looks like:

We check in as we do in our videos—this will be a group activity to take advantage of Zoom.

We create our poems and get to know each other.

Then we share (or don’t) and reflect.

Then we check out.

I’ll be working alongside you the whole time.

Pajamas welcome, bring your safe snacks and drinks, and if your fur babies want to Zoom bomb us, that’s great.

About an hour total. Unrecorded. Just the people in the room.

When

• MARCH 25 at 7PM ET Free.

Open to all Unfolding Path subscribers.

Please sign up and register HERE

In the week before we meet, I’ll send you a small packet of texts to print and use during the Open Studio.

—Kelly

For me, this moment hit in a doctor’s appointment, where I dissolved into tears and blurted, “My life is over!” And, in some ways, it was.

The version of myself I’d been building toward was suddenly gone, and I had to become someone new. That “who am I now?” limbo is where many of us realize that navigating this alone isn’t going to work. Whether an Unfolding Path post helped you name something you hadn’t been able to, or a free Open Studio showed you a glimmer of a new self emerging, something spoke to you.

And I’m glad it did.

Wayfinding

Wayfinding is a therapeutic arts membership built for exactly this — the “who am I now” question, and the long, nonlinear work of living inside it. Here, we make things together over time, in a space designed for bodies that don’t cooperate on schedule. Monthly Open Studios on Zoom. Multi-week workshops two or three times a year. Multi-step creative practices you can return to between sessions, whether on a flare day, a good day, or a day when you just need your hands to be doing something.

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Read more

I assumed I’d notice it mostly in the produce section: citrus, sweet potatoes, carrots. Maybe a stray label here or there.

The store had a different vision.

Orange was everywhere. Not the orange of fruit. The orange of packaging — repeated across boxes and plastic containers, the same hue, the same saturation, shelf after shelf. Bright. Uniform. Artificial. The color of boxed mac and cheese and cheesy puffs. A color with no variation.

I began photographing it.

At first I thought I was collecting color. But I was tracking something else: intensity, repetition, and the way my body responded to both. Before I had words for what was happening, I had a sensation. Halfway through the store, I could feel the difference between produce and processed food, between variation and flatness, between color that breathes and color that doesn’t.

By the time I reached the register, I’d been in the store forty-five minutes longer than planned. Not because I was distracted. Because my attention had been taken over.

The Walks

Grocery Store Orange

Before I walked into the grocery store, winter had settled in my body.

We’d had a snowstorm then an ice storm then more snow. Ending with two weeks of sub-zero temperatures. My joints hurt. My feet were cold, in fact most of me was cold. I wasn’t doing my daily walks. With icy roads, we also weren’t going anywhere.

I wasn’t unhappy about it. I call it forced nesting. More rest, hot chocolate, fewer decisions, no FOMO. Unlike a flare, a snowstorm doesn’t single you out — everyone was stuck inside too. The isolation came with company, which is its own rare thing.

When I chose orange for the color walk that morning, I was thinking about warmth. Corals, peaches and the beach. I wanted something that would shift winter just slightly.

Inside the store, I’d spot another orange package and veer toward it without thinking. Stop. Examine. Photograph. Then return to my shopping until the next one caught my eye and pulled me across the aisle again.

I was moving faster and slower at the same time.

At first the orange energized me. It felt active, bright — almost what I’d been looking for. But the repetition never varied. The saturation never softened. The same hue repeated from noodles to snack foods to dish soap. And after a while, that constancy accumulated. The color acquired a sound in my head — a low, steady hum. Like a broken air conditioner.

Here’s what I noticed later: I hadn’t been aware of my breath at all. For those of us living in chronically ill bodies, that kind of narrow, driven attention is familiar. We learn to scan for change, for escalation. Anything that might need a response. The Grocery-Store-Orange pulled on exactly that reflex. What had started as curiosity had shifted without my noticing into something that felt more like surveillance.

I could feel how effectively it captured my attention. And I could feel the precise moment my body had had enough.

Noticing that threshold felt new. It suggested that my attention wasn’t only reactive. It could be shaped.

When I got home, the relief was immediate. Very little of that orange lives in our house. I hadn’t made that choice consciously, my body had made it long before. The hum stopped. My attention widened again.

Outside

A few days later, when the snow began to melt, I took a walk outside.

I didn’t expect to find orange. Winter strips color down to its essentials. But it showed up anyway: berries clinging to tree limbs, a small lawn ornament flag with coral flowers. A traffic cone against the snow.

My body responded differently.

The same hue that had narrowed my attention in the store felt spacious out here. Not because the color had changed, but because everything around it had. The orange appeared in pulses — one thing at a time, with white space between them. The brightness was amplified by sunlight on snow, but it came and went. I could notice it. I could keep walking.

What the grocery store had given me was rhythm without variation. The same beat, the same volume, no rest between repetitions. What the outdoor walk gave me was contrast — orange against white, warmth against cold, the occasional against the continuous. And with contrast came something I hadn’t felt in the store: space to notice, and then move on.

This is what the principles of design actually are, underneath the vocabulary. Rhythm isn’t just a visual term. It’s the pattern of intensity and rest that a body can sustain — or can’t. Contrast isn’t just about opposite colors. It’s what allows one thing to register against another without everything demanding equal attention. Space isn’t only the illusion of depth in a composition. It’s the room between things that lets perception stay curious rather than overwhelmed.

Chronic illness teaches the nervous system to close that space. To treat every sensation as potentially significant. To sustain attention without rest. That’s not a character flaw. It’s an adaptation. But it’s also a narrow way to inhabit the world — and a narrow way to inhabit yourself.

The orange in the store had pulled on that narrowing. The orange outside released it.

Color, Attention, and the Body

What I was responding to wasn’t meaning. It was effect.

Research on how the brain processes art describes this clearly: color is light energy, and the body registers it before the mind interprets it. Heart rate. Respiration. Alertness. Perceived temperature. These responses don’t wait for us to form an opinion. They happen, and then we catch up.

For those of us whose nervous systems have been trained toward vigilance, this matters. The same sensitivity that makes chronic illness exhausting — the body’s constant monitoring of sensation for signs of escalation — is also what makes aesthetic experience available to us in a particular way. We already notice. The question is what we’re noticing, and whether we have language for it.

When I entered the store, I had what researchers call an aesthetic mindset: attention that is curious, open, and exploratory rather than urgent. I was playing. But saturation without variation eventually closed that down. Curiosity became monitoring. The orange stopped being interesting and started being a lot.

Outside, the aesthetic mindset held. Not because I was trying harder. Because the conditions supported it. Variation. Rest between repetitions. Contrast that invited comparison rather than demanding vigilance.

That shift from monitoring to noticing, from urgency to curiosity is also the beginning of something else. When we can observe our own patterns of attention, we start to build a different kind of story about ourselves. Not the story that illness writes on us: fragmented, reactive, “and then, and then, and then.” A story with some distance in it. A story we’re telling, rather than one that’s happening to us.

Visual language is one way to start building that distance. Not as therapy. Not as cure. As a practice of noticing that, over time, gives sensation somewhere to go.

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Color Walk Practice

You choose a color at the start of the day and let your eyes follow it.

One day or two — your call. As you move through your day, notice where the color appears, how often, and under what conditions. Does it repeat? Does it shift in value or tone depending on where you find it? Does your attention linger or move on?

You’re not collecting meaning. You’re noticing the pattern of your own attention.

Slow looking is part of this — sustained attention without urgency. That’s a different ask than it sounds, for those of us whose attention has been trained toward sensory surveillance. The practice isn’t asking you to stop monitoring. It’s asking you to add something alongside it: comparison, variation, curiosity about what changes.

You don’t need to take beautiful photos. You don’t need to take any photos at all. All you need is a color and a day.

If you want a fuller guide, you can download my free Slow Looking Guide with additional slow looking activities.

Slow Looking Guide

Reflection

If you tried a color walk over the last two weeks, here are a few questions for noticing, not interpreting.

• Where did you first register the color: in your eyes, your body, or both?

• How did your attention change (speed up, slow down, or alternate between the two) in different environments?

• If there was a moment when your body said “enough”, what did you do?

• How did the color behave differently depending on where you encountered it, indoors or outdoors, alone or next to other colors?

• What changed for you once the color was no longer in front of you?

This is where we start: with attention, before interpretation.

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CLOSING

Over time, patterns like these begin to take shape. Not as design rules or meanings, but as a record of how your body organizes attention — what steadies you, what overstimulates you, what you return to without knowing why. That record is your visual language. You’ve been building it longer than you know.

If you tried the color walk, I’d love to know what you found — an image, a sentence, a fragment is enough. Drop it in the comments. And if you didn’t try it yet, pick a color tomorrow. One day. See what pulls your attention and what your body does with it.

The next Field Note is about what happens when these patterns begin to hold memory — how visual language becomes the early architecture of a self-story that can include illness without collapsing into it.

A few words we used today:

These terms came up in the essay. They’re here if they’re useful — not as vocabulary to memorize, but as handles for things you’ve already been noticing.

Hue – the basic color family (orange, blue, red, yellow etc.). Think of it as the purest form of a color.
Value – how light or dark a color appears.
Saturation – the intensity or purity of a color. How much of the hue is present on a scale from 0-100%.
Tint – a hue mixed with white.
Shade – a hue mixed with black.
Tone – a hue muted by gray or by surrounding color context.

Contrast - opposing elements of art arranged together in an artwork, allowing them to register against each other. For example, contrasting colors, geometric and organic shapes, light and dark values, smooth and rough textures.

Rhythm - the variety and repetition of the elements of art that come together to create a visual tempo or beat. In visual work and in the body, rhythm is what we can sustain — and what breaks down when there’s no rest between beats.

Pattern - the regular arrangement of repeated elements of art (color, texture, value, shape, form, space, line)

This work is sustained by this community. If this work resonates, here are ways to continue:

Go Deeper
Register for a workshop or book a 1:1 creative practice arc for more contained support. Workshops offer a structured creative arc. 1:1 sessions provide personalized containment over three sessions.

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Learn More 1:1 Sessions

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There will always be a free Unfolding Path tier with short therapeutic practices, studio reflections, and arts & health insights for women navigating chronic illness.

Because healing isn’t linear — and neither is art.

You already have a visual language.

You’ve been using it long before you ever thought of yourself as “creative.” You use it when you arrange your memory objects on a shelf or instantly feel at “home” in a new space. You hear it when a color or texture stirs up emotions or a fond memory.

Most of us were never taught to notice this sensory language.

And for those of us living with chronic illness, sensory awareness can become intense but narrowed toward symptom surveillance. Pain, inflammation, dizziness, fatigue: the body becomes something we track, report, and compare, rather than something we inhabit with curiosity and playfulness.

So, when we start making art, or return to it, we often carry that same orientation with us. We assume we’re missing something or not doing it “right”. We look for instructions or rules on design and composition. But that approach starts with our cognitive rational self.

For this series, I want to begin somewhere else. We’ll start with our senses noticing how we respond to color, line, shape and the rest of the visual language lexicon to build our personal visual language from there.

What I Mean by Visual Language

When artists talk about visual language (or the principles of design), we usually mean things like line, color, shape, texture and balance, rhythm, focal points, grids. All the things that make up a composition intended to communicate ideas and emotions. Those words can sound like academic criteria you might be graded on, or worse a set of rules untethered from their purpose (communicating emotions).

That’s not how I’m using them.

When I say visual language, I mean the way we experience those elements and principles from our senses first, whether it’s in our environment or the act of making. This is somatic information the body notices, tracks, and responds to before the cognitive mind explains it.

We don’t just see colors, lines and spatial relations, we experience them. We experience how a room feels and how it makes us feel. How visual patterns and repetition create a rhythm in our bodies, and how color and brush strokes convey mood and energy and emotion. We notice how sharp, softened, or contained edges make us feel safe (or not).

A visual language isn’t just design rules or decorative choices. It’s sensory information about safety, tension, emotions, speed, capacity, and attention. Whether it’s furniture in a doctor’s waiting room, an installation at MoMA, or the collage papers on your floor.

Learning visual language isn’t about decoding colors and symbols or learning Fibonacci design-math. It’s about recognizing how you respond to sensory patterns, and their stories, often before you have a visual story to tell. That’s how you begin writing new visual sentences that become paragraphs.

Why a Personal Visual Language Matters

Color, shape, and other visual elements are not neutral or universal in their meaning.

That’s because design elements are cultural, historical, and personal. Black might signal grief in one context and formality in another. White might feel clean, sterile, sacred, or empty depending on where and how you learned to see it. Blue can soothe one nervous system and depress another. The emotions, sensations (feelings) and memories these elements generate are not the same for everyone.

Meaning does not live inside the object or art. It is constructed through your experience such as how your body responds, what it remembers, and what it connects.

A piece of art may not carry meaning for you right now. Meaning accumulates over time. It requires lived experience, noticing, and reflection. The same piece of art can hold multiple meanings, depending on who is looking, where, when, and with what lived experience.

Neuroscience describes our default mode network (DMN) in our brain that helps integrate memory, identity, and imagination. It is active when we reflect, when we remember, and when we make sense of ourselves. Sensory experience feeds that system along with curiosity and playfulness (aesthetic mindset).

Chronic illness and the chaos of symptom surveillance rewrite this network and our self-story. But developing a personal visual language strengthens the integration between memory, identity and imagination. It gives us a way to organize sensory experience into pattern, and pattern into memory. Over time, those patterns become part of how we understand ourselves and how we tell our own story—our self-story.

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Becoming Fluent

Fluency, in this context, means:

• You begin to recognize your own visual linguistic tendencies and expand them

• You can describe what’s happening to your senses as well as what’s happening in your creative practice

• You can make intentional creative choices, including letting intuition lead on purpose

• You can talk with others about process without rating or fixing

For those of us living in bodies that fluctuate, this kind of fluency becomes a stabilizing skill. It allows you to notice without panic, to differentiate between sensation and story, and to respond rather than default to sensory surveillance.

This is why I’m using Field Notes, not lessons for this series of essays and accompanying creative practices.

Field notes are self-reflective observations made in real conditions. They’re longitudinal, changing as the terrain changes. Most importantly, they belong to the person doing the noticing.

The Series

This series will move slowly through the basic elements of visual language:
color, line, shape, form, texture, and composition.

Each Field Note will focus on one element of visual language and be paired with several creative practices using different arts modalities to engage our senses, our curiosity, and playfulness. These are invitations to create, not assignments or challenges (remember, our lives are challenging enough).

All the practices are low-barrier and do not require special skills. They are designed to expand your personal visual language while also offering regulation and reflection.

Remember, process over product.

We’re noticing our response to different colors, shapes, lines, and compositions and what they mean to us. We are equally noticing what our body returns to and avoids over time.

Color Walk Creative Practice Invitation

To get us started, I invite you to do a Color Walk with me. Pick one color you’ll follow for one day. The day and color choice are up to you. It could be tomorrow or next week. The color could be the first color you notice in the morning or a color that represents how you want to feel that day.

Let your eyes lead and as you move through your day, notice this color wherever it shows up. Whether you’re at the grocery store, picking up kids, or at work. As you look, notice different values of the color (light and dark) throughout the day. Does the color show up in unexpected places? Does your attention linger on the color or the object?

Take photos of the objects you find with this color. If you want you can create a digital collage with your photos. Remember, this is a noticing practice, not a photography challenge. You don’t need to take beautiful photos, or any photos at all, to participate. We’ll share our Color Walks in the next post (early March).

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Why This Matters for Community

As you begin to recognize your own visual language your self-story emerges. Our ability to reflect widens and symptom surveillance becomes secondary. What felt chaotic starts to show structure.

That recognition is the first act of self-witness. You begin to see how you understand your experience through color, shapes, repetition, and composition.

When we bring those patterns into a shared space, we aren’t comparing meanings. We are witnessing how each person’s body and history shape their visual story.

Community grows from that kind of seeing.

A Beginning

This series isn’t a course or a system.

It offers the building blocks of visual sentence structure, an expanding vocabulary you can use to build or reclaim your own voice through your creative practice.

Mastery isn’t the goal here. What matters is staying curious, being playful, noticing how our senses engage and change as we develop our creative practice or observe arts.

We’ll begin with color. Not because it’s easy, but because color is one of the fastest ways the nervous system organizes sensory perception and our attention.

In Conversation With

This essay is in conversation with the research synthesized in Your Brain on Art by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross regarding the aesthetic mindset and the role of the default mode network in shaping memory, identity, and meaning.

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Decision-making costs energy. When your energy is limited, even small preliminary choices like choosing a color palette can quietly drain the part of you that wants to make something. I’ve learned the hard way that if I don’t protect that energy, I don’t make art at all.

I think of this as decision fatigue. And art is about making decisions. But too many small choices, too close together, before I even start and the practice collapses under its own weight. So, I started looking for ways to offload decisions without flattening the work or making it feel generic.

Like choosing a color palette.

Two Ways I Offload Color Palette Decisions

Option 1

The first thing that worked was surprisingly ordinary. Whenever I’m in a hardware or paint store, I grab the pre-made color palette cards in the paint section. You know, the ones designed to help someone choose coordinated wall paint colors for their entire home without overthinking it.

I don’t have to decide if these colors “work” together. Someone already did that, and that’s the point.

The video walks through how I use these color cards.

Pre-made color palettes usually contain some version of the primary colors: red, blue, and yellow. If these colors happen to mix together on my project, they will make happy accidents by turning into secondary colors: orange, green, and purple. This is especially true for watercolors and part of their fun.

The paint cards often contain a variety of values, a light, a medium, and a dark, along with at least one neutral color like grey. There is enough variety to explore on the card, and you don’t have to use every color on the card in one project.

Option 2

I keep a Pinterest board of color palettes that I’m drawn to because they convey a specific mood, like Sea Glass or Fall, or they are colors I would never put together. Some are monotone (variation of one color) with a pop of a contrasting color that stands out.

How I Use the Palettes

For acrylics, I buy paint that roughly matches the colors on the palette. I do very little color mixing for acrylic paint. They dry too fast and, especially if I am Gelli printing, I want to grab the color without having to mix it first.

When I work from a Pinterest palette, I don’t try to recreate it exactly. I match what I already have as closely as I can and let the palette act as a boundary, not a rule.
The constraint is what makes starting easier.

Both of these options do the same thing for me: they remove the first energy barrier so I can spend my energy on the creative practice. What comes next is just about making that decision stick.

Creative Freedom

We’re taught to think of color choice as creative freedom. But for many of us, too much freedom becomes friction. Or worse, we freeze and can’t make a decision.

When energy, attention, or cognition are limited, every extra decision asks for more than we can reasonably give. Over time, that’s how practices quietly fall away. Not because we’ve lost interest, but because they ask too much at the wrong moment.

I have also used these methods to challenge myself to use colors I generally do not like. In many cases, exploring a palette across several projects has changed my understanding of a color and my appreciation of it. Because limiting our color choices to only the colors we “like” means we are limiting our self-expression.

Making color palette selection easier isn’t about lowering standards. It’s about designing a practice that can survive real life: flare days, brain fog, grief, and the rest of life (chocolate, cats, friends, and walks).

I use Pinterest as a decision-saving device, not an inspiration machine. The palettes I work with live on the Crooked Path Studio Color Palettes board, if you want to make this step easier.

Crooked Path Studios Pinterest

Practical Applications

After I choose a palette, I set things up so future-me doesn’t have to think about it again.

Not only do I roughly match the paint, but I will also go through my other media and select crayons, oil pastels, collage papers, fabric and other media that match the color palette.

This way everything within reach on my desk is from that palette and I know whatever I make the colors will “go together.” Not only does this save me from hunting for supplies (a.k.a. energy), but it also means the materials can inspire me because they are in sight.

I will also do a page in my palette grid journal to see how the colors play together. Each color looks different when juxtaposed with another color. I find this a great way to learn more about how color works. If I am working on a quilt, I match the color palette to the fabric in my stash.

I used pre-made color palettes for all the quilts below.

I hang the paint card palettes and Pinterest color swatch palettes on the wall in my studio because that removes any friction of selecting a palette. I can let my mood or curiosity lead. And I make sample color swatch cards for each of the paints I buy, both acrylic and watercolor, and for the other media. I make these swatch cards while watching hockey and find them very therapeutic. They save me time (and energy) matching media to color palettes in the future.

Staying Curious

This is one of the ways I build a practice that can survive my real life. We’ll keep layering these kinds of shortcuts as we go. The next few might focus on color mixing for watercolors, or other ways to stay curious without getting technical.

You don’t need all of them. One is enough to start.

If this post resonated with you, I appreciate you sharing it with your friends here on Substack or other social platforms. Don’t forget to restack this post!

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Crooked Path Studios is completely community supported. Here’s how you can support this work and other women with rare chronic illness.

There will always be a free Unfolding Path tier for short therapeutic practices, studio reflections, and my reflections on the latest arts and health research and its implications for those of us with chronic illness.

Be part of the community and have access to all upcoming workshop series, live virtual community events, group sessions, and other community events by joining the Wayfinding tier.

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Alternative Support

But behind the warm glow is a harder question: cozy for whom?

Today’s cozy culture romanticizes slowness as an aesthetic choice—intentional, mindful, curated—while quietly erasing the people who live slow because their bodies require it. Chronic illness and disability don’t allow you to “embrace” slowness. They impose it.

What gets framed as wellness is often privilege in soft focus.

Trend analysts describe a growing “cozy web”: small communities, long-form writing, slower media, and sincerity positioned as an antidote to algorithmic chaos. During and after the pandemic, “slow living” content surged, marketed as a corrective to burnout and digital overload—a gentler way to be human in an accelerated world.

Cozy culture works best when slowness is optional—and collapses the moment it’s mandatory.

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How Did We Get Here?

Hygge, Analog, and the Business of Intentionality

Cozy didn’t appear out of nowhere. It has a lineage and like most lifestyle trends, that lineage runs through translation, simplification, and profit.

One major ancestor is hygge, a Danish concept rooted in togetherness and shared presence. In context, hygge wasn’t an aesthetic or a personal brand. It was social, relational, and supported by material conditions that made collective ease possible.

Exported into global lifestyle culture, hygge lost that context. It became a mood you could buy: candles, soft textures, curated calm. What had been about collective conditions turned into something private, performable, and marketable. Cozy followed the same path, less about how we live together, more about how well we curate our private refuge.

Around the same time, cozy found a close cousin in the analog revival. Film cameras, journals, vinyl, longhand writing are all marketed as intentional, grounding alternatives to digital overload. These practices were framed as resistance, but they were also monetized. Slowness became a premium feature. Imperfection became a selling point.

And, I can’t help thinking cozy is, in some way, a cultural appropriation of the Nap Ministry’s rest is resistance ethic and call to escape grind culture. (See for yourself, Nap Ministry)

Cozy absorbed this logic wholesale. It promised refuge without confrontation and comfort without changing the conditions that make comfort necessary. Instead, it branded the logic and a vibe.

Slowness as a Credential

In cozy culture, slowness isn’t just a pace. It’s a credential.

Slow means intentional.

Slow means regulated.

Slow means you’ve figured something out the rest of us haven’t.

Slowness becomes proof of moral alignment; that you’re living correctly.

The problem is that cozy depends on slowness being voluntary.

It works best when slow is a choice you make, cultivate and can reverse. When you can opt out of urgency and opt back in later when it’s convenient.

Which brings us to the people missing from the picture.

Access Gets Mistaken for Aesthetics

Here’s where the category error happens.

Care and programs designed for chronically ill and disabled bodies often get labeled gentle, slow, or cozy. Not because that was the intention, but because our “productivity” culture doesn’t have adequate language for these kinds of illnesses and the “lifestyle” they thrust upon people.

And this makes accessibility aestheticized, and no longer recognizable.
Instead, access gets mistaken for a vibe.

And the same pace praised as mindful in one body is treated as failure in another. The same slowness celebrated as intentional (i.e. voluntary) becomes suspect the moment it’s mandatory.

That’s a power play, not a misunderstanding.

The Missing Bodies in Cozy Culture

Chronic illness and disability expose the flaw in cozy culture and slow-living ideology immediately.

Some bodies don’t get to choose slow. They are already there. Permanently. And very unpredictably, often at great cost.

When slowness is framed as a lifestyle upgrade, those bodies disappear. They become cautionary tales about what happens when slow goes too far and becomes inconvenient.

And then friends and social connections disappear.

Cozy as Ableist Infrastructure

Ableism doesn’t require cruelty. It runs just fine on assumptions.

Cozy culture assumes bodies tolerate candles, textures, ambient sound, warm lighting. It assumes energy that’s predictable enough for daily routines. It assumes consistency in output, presence, participation.

Cozy asks very little of the body except that it behave.

For chronically ill and disabled people, this creates a double bind: manage symptoms so your body behaves and perform wellness. Be attractively unproductive, yet financially solvent even though you’re bed-bound. Be slow, but legible. Rest, but don’t disrupt the mood.

Being bed-bound is not cozy. It’s never had that level of branding.

Designing for Inconvenient Bodies

The creative practices and therapeutic arts facilitation I do looks slow or cozy because it has to be.

Crooked Path Studio exists precisely because most in-person and virtual arts programs are designed for fast, reliable, stable (normal) energy bodies that can show up on time, stay upright, tolerate stimulation, and produce something recognizable at the end on an hour. Or 10 days. Or 100 days.

Ours are inconvenient bodies.
Variable bodies.
Bodies that don’t scale.

Designing for them is about access and dignity.

And access is not a trend or a brand. It’s a value.

The Political Comfort of Cozy

Cozy is comforting — politically.

It privatizes distress. It relocates coping to the home. It aestheticizes survival while leaving the structures that produce exhaustion and overwhelm and inaccessibility intact.

Cozy doesn’t ask why so many people are burned out, sick, or overwhelmed. It asks how nicely they can arrange themselves around what’s causing the distress.

That’s not resistance or rest. It’s containment and compliance.

What I’m Actually Interested In (Not Cozy, But Dignity)

I’m not interested in romanticizing slowness.

I’m interested in dignity without performance. Comfort without virtue. Care without aesthetics. Rest that doesn’t require a redemption arc.

For people living with chronic illness and disability, slow is not a lifestyle. It’s the baseline condition of the body. And any culture that treats slowness as aspirational while erasing those realities is doing quiet harm, no matter how soft the lighting.

So no, I’m not chasing cozy.

I’m interested in telling the truth about bodies that don’t comply and building spaces and communities that don’t pretend these bodies don’t exist.

That, to me, is the real quiet rebellion.

Learn more about MCAS, POTS, EDS, Sarcoidosis and other rare diseases by visiting the foundations that support research for these rare chronic illnesses.

Crooked Path Studios is completely community supported. Here’s how you can support this work and women with chronic illness.

Subscribe and be part of the community. There will always be a free Unfolding Path tier for short therapeutic practices, studio reflections, and my reflections on the latest arts and health research and its implications for those of us with rare chronic illness.

Join the Wayfinding tier and have access to all upcoming workshop series, live virtual community events, group sessions, and other community events. These are designed for us.

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As someone living with a chronic illness who uses a creative practice to support my wellbeing, I feel this pinch between my limited income, medical bills, and the rising costs of groceries and other necessities.

To continue my creative practice, I got radically resourceful about finding art supplies on a budget. I want to share a few of my strategies and take you to one of my favorite places—one of the creative reuse centers near me (I am blessed with 3).

I see these strategies as an act of reclaiming materials, reclaiming creative power, and reclaiming budget space.

Rising Material Costs

The cost of art supplies, like everything else, has increased since the pandemic. Reports from artists, small studios and craft-businesses suggest that raw material and import costs have jumped significantly between 2019 and 2025.

Several sources report that artists in the U.S. are feeling “rising material costs” thanks to new tariffs, especially now that materials imported from China, Mexico, and Canada incur 20-25% tariffs. The Art Newspaper+2MakerFlo+2

Another source shows art supplies like pens and markers are up 13% from June 2019 to June 2023 (WTXL ABC 27 Tallahassee News). A blog post points out “raw materials to produce paint have increased between 50-100%” (in the UK) over the “past few years” (beechhousemedia.co.uk). While another article notes that prices on back-to-school supplies (think glue, crayons, colored pencils, markers and paper) have gone up ~30% over five years (Axios) and general craft/art-supplies are ~18 % higher (What’s Up Newp).

And my own conversations with fellow makers and staff at Blick Art Supplies backs this up. Not only that, but many art supply stores have empty shelves or are closing down, making it harder to source supplies.

Why This Matters

For those of us with chronic illness, the squeeze is two-fold: financial + energy/health bandwidth. We are already squeezed for finances whether from medical costs or employment issues. But the ripple effect is the increased physical and mental energy cost of sourcing materials when we don’t have energy to spare.

Those ripples expand creating anxiety about “wasting art supplies” either by not using them because of a flare up or not wanting to play and experiment. These ripples put product over process, which is not healthy for anyone’s creative practice (or mind).

Ultimately, we end up not engaging in a creative practice and not experiencing the health benefits that come from creative activities. Benefits like reduced inflammation, building a new sense of self, and increasing social connections (which fights off dementia; I’ll post about this new research soon!).

So bottom line: we need to reduce the barriers to developing a creative practice. And that means sourcing low-cost art supplies that are easily available.

Affordability Strategies

Four key strategies worked for me in building my art supply stash on a budget.

Strategy 1: Mindset

The first one is a mindset or perspective shift that I have used for many things since I got sick:

1. Do the best you can with what you have where you’re at now.

You don’t need professional grade art materials to play, immerse yourself in the process, or create something that you enjoy. Instead, you need to reframe everyday objects and see them in a different light. As an example, my Unpredictable Marks post on making your own brushes out of sticks, yarn, and grasses shows how you can make excellent mark making tools out of things you find on a walk or in your house. Cost: free.

And bonus, they make marks that are unique to you! Click the image to view the practice on making your own brushes.

Strategy 2: Upcycle

The second strategy builds on this mindset by looking differently at items around your home. And upcycling them.

2. Collect what you can from what you already have around your home.

Free art supplies can be found around your home, and especially in your mailbox and recycle bin. These supplies are especially good for collage, experimental printmaking, found object sculptures, drawing and painting, and whatever else you can think of. Here are a few items to look at differently:

• Security envelopes, like the envelopes bills come in with the pattern on the inside. That pattern is collage gold and comes in a variety of colors and patterns.

• Brown paper from Chewy or Amazon boxes are excellent for drawing, especially bilateral drawing.

• Old greeting cards and cereal boxes make excellent bases for collage or paintings. Just cut them into 5x7, 4x6, or 6x8 rectangles—or any shape you want.

• Tetra packs or the silver lined cartons you find on juices are etching plates in disguise.

• Styrofoam, textured plastic containers, plastic clips, string, yarn, rope, ribbon, wine corks, caps and more can be made into stamps to make your own collage papers or use on a Gelli plate (Unfolding Path creative practice coming soon).

Here are a few other things you can scavenge as art supplies from your home:

Rubber bands, pens, pencils, markers, acrylic house paint, fabric, magazines, scrap paper, netting, brochures or other junk mail, packing material, cardboard, cardboard tubes from wrapping paper or toilet paper, index cards, old business cards, old calendars.

Just hold up the object, and ask yourself—what can I do with this or how can I alter it to use it in my creative practice? Cost: free.

Strategy 3: Virtual Markets

You may not have paint, brushes, pastels, or heavier papers laying around your house. For these types of supplies, I have two low-cost sources and a runner up. My third strategy (but not my favorite) is:

3. Facebook Marketplace, Ebay and similar virtual markets often have used art supplies for sale. Sometimes even locally so you don’t have to pay shipping.

Cost: varies. Please be aware that some sellers charge equal to or more than the retail price of new supplies, so I usually check the price listed in Marketplace or Ebay against the price listed in Blick or Amazon. This has a physical and mental energy cost, so this strategy is not my first choice.

Runner up:

Walmart sells new Plaid brand acrylic craft paint (Folk Art and Apple) and a variety of brushes, papers, and sketchbooks. They are fairly low-cost and a good source if you want new supplies.

I use Strategy 4 more than 3.

Strategy 4: Creative Reuse Centers

Creative reuse centers can be found across the US. They are local nonprofits with a brick-and-mortar store that accept donations of gently used art supplies, recyclable objects, fabric, craft supplies, sewing machines, and more, then resell them at low cost.

They not only provide low-cost art supplies, but they also keep all these materials out of landfills, making your creative practice more environmentally friendly.

Here’s the catch: You never know what you will find at one of these centers. You need to treat this as a treasure hunt because the stock changes constantly based on donations.

What I source at these centers:

• Acrylic paint, stamping inks, India ink, brushes, pencils, watercolors, oil pastels, chalk pastels, gouache, printing ink

• Paper of all kinds: maps, scrap booking papers, prescription pads, ledgers, wallpaper, watercolor paper—seriously a lot of paper.

• Primed canvas and canvas boards (usually have a half-finished painting on them, but just paint or collage over it).

• Materials for collage, including old photos, negatives, old postcards, magazines, greeting cards to name a few.

• Materials for collagraph and Gelli printing—things with texture, plastic sheeting for making my own stencils, glues and acrylic mediums.

• Sculpture and found object materials like wood, puzzles, plastic flowers

• Storage containers.

• Fabric, ribbon, yarn, old buttons, and anything else that looks fun.

I recently visited one of the creative reuse centers near me and brought my vlog camera to give you a glimpse inside. They were crazy busy that day with two classes, and lots of kids, so I did voiceovers on some of the audio.

On this trip, I got some of the all-natural acrylic paint, some cording and roping and other textiles for future collagraphs, some rice paper, a set of the Faber Castell oil pastels, and some things to use as stamps for Gelli printing, like the film strip wheel (Photo on the left).

Tips for Building Your Affordable Art Supply Stash

Here are a few easy steps you can take now to start building your art supply stash:

• Treat your home and neighborhood like a creative reuse center. What little odds-and-ends could become material for an experiment in your next creative practice?

• Create a “reuse materials” bin to hold found objects, recycled papers, magazines, cardboard, and odds-and-ends for future use. Once the box is full, sort it and store the items for easy access.

• Reflect on what materials you are “saving” that make them too precious to use. I am guilty of this. My solution is to cut or save a piece of that material and literally hang it on the wall. Then use the rest in a project.

Tips for Visiting a Creative Reuse Center

It is easy to be overwhelmed when you walk into a creative reuse center. The “stock” changes daily, sometimes hourly. While I was in this center, five people came in with donations that the staff priced and put on the floor while I was there.

Here are some tips for shopping at these centers so you don’t become overwhelmed when walking in:

• Set a small budget (e.g., $15) for one visit. When I do this, I take cash, so I don’t go over my budget.

• When you enter the store:

  • Strategy 1: Walk the entire store so you can see what they have. Then start over and select the items you want. This is what I did on my recent visit.

  • Strategy 2: As you walk the store, grab what looks interesting to you and put it in your bag or basket. When you’ve seen everything or feel tired, thin out your bag and keep the items you truly want to use and stay within your budget.

• Make sure to include at least 1 new-to-you item that you’ve never used before. Being able to experiment with new supplies is the beauty of these centers.

• Follow your local creative reuse center on Facebook. They often post what’s new to the floor. Many also hold classes.

If you have art supplies you aren’t using or don’t like then donate them to your local creative reuse center on your next visit.

Why These Strategies Work

These strategies work for four reasons:

• Cost‐savings: You’re getting materials at a fraction of the new cost. And sometimes they are barely used. I have purchased brand new paints on several occasions.

• Trying new supplies: Because the cost barrier is lower, you can experiment with materials you might not buy new. Maybe a specialty paper or print plate, a new brush type, a stack of vintage negatives.

• Environmental‐consciousness: Reuse, diverting from landfill, embracing imperfect/donated materials aligns with a more sustainable creative practice.

• Creative Agency: This isn’t just about cost; it’s also about accessibility, dignity, creative agency.

Just as our bodies may need to reclaim space, adjust pace, repurpose energy, our creative practice can mirror that: we repurpose materials, we adjust our pace (shopping, sourcing), we claim our space (studio, stash) on our own terms. (List of creative reuse centers in the US below)

Crooked Path Studios is completely community supported. Here’s how you can support this work and other women.

Be part of the community with access to all upcoming workshop series, in-depth practices, live virtual community events, group sessions, and other community events by joining the Wayfinding tier.

Subscribe now

If you want to support this work without a monthly subscription, join workshops a la carte, or schedule a 1:1 therapeutic practice, then please visit my Crooked Path Studios shop by clicking the button below.

Crooked Path Studios Shop

There will always be a free Unfolding Path tier for short therapeutic practices, studio reflections, and my reflections on the latest arts and health research and its implications for those of us with chronic illness.

This will take you to a list of all the creative reuse centers in the US. But more are opening, so check in your area.

Creative Reuse Centers List

And I thought, why do we say these things and what makes us think like that?

So, I put on my research hat, and I found out why.

Art Scars

Most people don’t remember learning they weren’t creative.
They remember the moment it was taken away.

A sentence said in a classroom.
A laugh that landed wrong.
A comparison made out loud, in front of other kids.

You don’t forget those moments because they don’t stay in your head.
They settle in your body.

Years later, they show up as certainty:
“I’m not an artist.”
“I can’t draw.”
“I don’t play music.”

Those aren’t preferences. They’re scars.

Brene Brown calls them “art scars”—moments of shame when we were young that convinced us we weren’t creative.

Brown’s research shows that 85% of the people she interviewed experienced such shame in school that it changed how they thought about themselves forever. And more than half of those people reported these memories were about creativity— being told they weren’t good at drawing, singing, writing, or other forms of self-expression (The Gifts of Imperfection, 2010; Daring Greatly, 2012).

At the same time, arts-and-health research has demonstrated repeatedly that creative practice supports wellbeing by reducing stress, improving memory, deepening social connection, and strengthening resilience (A good overview is Your Brain on Art).

But if art scars have already taught you to say, “I’m not creative, I can’t make art,” you may never step into those benefits.

For women with rare chronic illness, this is more than discouragement. It can mean being cut off from practices that help us orient to the uncertainty and interruptions of chronic illness. That help us regulate our very unregulated autonomic nervous system. That build neuroplasticity, social connections, and manage pain.

What we don’t talk about as much is where those scars live.

More Than a Memory

Art scars don’t just live in memory.

Like a scar you might get from a cut, they live in our bodies. In shoulders that tense when supplies come out. In hands that hesitate over a blank page or screen. In a chest that tightens at the idea of being seen trying.

Or in a moment of panic when you are told you’ll be playing music for a certification.

They flare up—just like our illnesses—whispering “you can’t” or “you’re not good enough.”

Art scars shape how we approach creativity. When ignored, they keep us from the wellbeing benefits of creativity. When named and set aside, they lose their grip, and we can create freely.

Because art scars and other emotional scars live in our body, I invite you to do a somatic body mapping activity with me to map our art scars. We’ll locate our art scars physically—where they sit, what they feel like, what colors or shapes they carry. We’re not fixing anything. We’re not reframing for productivity. We’re listening. We’re opening doors.

Because once a scar has a location, it can be addressed.
Once it has a shape, it can be worked with.
And once it’s on the page, it stops pretending to be the truth.

Supplies

For this activity, you will need:

• A printout of the body mapping handout below. You can draw your own just make sure to include a front and back of the body.

Art Scars Body Mapping Template

42.4KB ∙ PDF file

Download

The handout includes the front and back of the body map.

Download

• Any of the following art supplies you have:

  • Colored pencils, oil pastels, markers, crayons, pastels, paint pens

  • Collage materials (magazines, recycled paper, ribbon, yarn)

  • Glue, glue stick, scissors

• A noise maker found around the house to use as a musical instrument. For example:

  • Tupperware and a wooden spoon

  • A jar with some beans in it

  • A metal bowl and a rubber spatula

  • A cheese grater and a spoon

  • Two spoons to bang together

As an Amazon Associate, I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases at no cost to you. It is one of the ways I support myself and this community.

If you are taking part in the Not Buying It campaign, you can purchase supplies from my Mark Making List on Blick. As a Blick Affiliate I earn a small commission from each sale at no cost to you.

The Practice

Check-in

We’re going to start with a body scan. I invite you to move your body in any way that feels empowering to you now and then get situated in your chair or bed so you are comfortable.

You can close your eyes if that works for you, otherwise find a point to focus on just in front of you.

Feel your body against the furniture. Let your body sink into it.

Scan your body starting at your feet and moving upward. As you move upward, notice where you feel any uncomfortableness, tension, or other sensations.

Think about that moment when someone said you weren’t creative or made you feel less-than for something creative you did like a drawing, music, dance or other creative expression. Or say to yourself “I’m not creative” and notice where you feel that statement in your body.

I know that might be uncomfortable. You can always ground yourself during the body scan by identifying a sound you hear in the room or a smell.

As you are moving upwards, notice where those feelings, those art scars live in your body? Is it in your stomach, chest, shoulders, hands; maybe your back?

See if you can name those feelings. There might be more than one feeling

There’s no right answer—there’s just your answer.

Explore those locations where your art scars are sitting. What color are these scars? Do they have any shape or movement? Maybe they have a sound.

Let your body speak to you.

Now open your eyes. Take a deep breath in through your nose and push it out through your mouth.

Make a note or two about the colors, shapes, and any feelings you named during the body scan and where they are in your body. This is helpful for those of us with brain fog.

We’re going to map those sensations onto the body drawing using colors, shapes and symbols to represent the feelings around that experience.

Create

I invite you to choose a media, a color and begin mapping your art scars onto the body drawing.

My art scars are music related because I was always told I was creative, and good at visual art, but I was simultaneously told I was not so good at music and couldn’t sing. As a result, I never really did much music although I would love to learn how to play the cello. These are the art scars I mapped in this practice.

I decided to do some collage and oil crayon. You should choose supplies that you have and are comfortable with.

I started by marking where in my body I feel these musical scars and the colors that I saw during my body scan. I don’t know if I would have ever called these feelings shame before Brene Brown. I think as a kid I took it as fact that I couldn’t sing or wasn’t musically inclined. I might call it rejection or feeling like I didn’t belong. I had several friends who were in orchestra and choir, and I seemed to be the only one who wasn’t. And there weren’t that many of us in the art studio.

As I thought about this, I decided to reframe these feelings. I put my favorite flower on the body map and continued from there.

Continue mapping your art scar/s onto this figure until you feel you are done.

If your art scars start talking to you, then look around your room and name something you can see, something you can hear, and something you can feel. Give yourself a hug by wrapping your arms around your shoulders. Take a breath and go back to mapping.

Reflection

Step back from your art scars map and reflect on the following questions:

• What did you discover about your art scar while doing this activity?

• What name would you give your art scar and why?

• As you were mapping your art scar, what physical sensations did you notice in your body?

• How does your body feel now compared to when you started this practice?

• How has your relationship to this art scar shifted, even slightly, by giving it shape and color?

My Reflection

When I finished the body map, I didn’t look at it as artwork. I looked at it the way you look at a map after getting lost; checking landmarks, noticing where the terrain gets rough.

What I discovered first was location.
My music scars don’t live in my head. They live in my chest, my back, and my hands. That surprised me. I had always treated those old messages—you can’t sing, your not good enough to be here—as facts I believed, not experiences my body was still carrying.

The qualities of the scar became clearer as I worked.
These scares aren’t loud. They don’t’ yell. They are small, persistent, and corrective. They tighten things. They make suggestions that sound reasonable: Why bother? Other people are better at this. Stay where you’re competent.

The red that showed up in my hands felt like an alarm at first: heat, frustration, longing. But as I kept going, that meaning changed. My hands are where I learn. Where I make sense of things without using words. They are part of how I communicate. That red wasn’t just warning; it was activity. Motion. Desire to try anyway.

Naming the scar mattered.
I gave my art scar a weak name. Something small and apologetic. The kind of name that invites pity instead of respect. Seeing that on the page helped me understand how often I’d been relating to it from a place of pathos instead of authority.

Collage changed the relationship entirely.

I used musical notes cut from one of my husband’s music magazine—ironically he’s a musician. I placed them inside the body instead of outside it. That felt important. Music wasn’t a forbidden territory anymore. It was something that had always been near me, even when I pretended it wasn’t mine to touch.

How do I feel now compared to when I started?
By the end, I felt less exposed and more oriented than when I started. And I was eager to try the music sessions of my certification program.

The scar didn’t disappear, but it stopped masquerading as the truth. And it felt different.

That’s the physical change this practice makes possible.

Not erasing the scar.

Not overcoming it.

But seeing it clearly enough to decide if and how it gets to speak; if at all.

Check Out and Closing

Check Out

To end this practice, let’s make some music with whatever you found that can make noise. I have a glass jar with some beans in it.

Shaking it is like putting a salve on my music scars and making them less noticeable.

Like any other scar, art scars don’t disappear. But creative practice lets us name them, give them shape, and get to know them. And once we know them, it’s easier to see them as part of a larger map; a way of navigating interruption, uncertainty and claiming space for our own path.

Crooked Path is not about erasing scars or forcing progress. It’s about meeting you exactly where you are, honoring both the chaos and the quest, and opening a door to creative practices that nurture dignity, resilience, and solidarity.

I would love to hear from you about what arts media you want to explore, or any emotions or experiences from your chronic illness you want to address together.

You can pop those ideas in the chat.

Remember, anytime you hear those art scars speaking to you, set your body map off in a corner in timeout and jump into your creative practice.

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Crooked Path Studios is completely community supported. Here’s how you can support this work and other women.

Be part of the community and have access to all upcoming workshop series, live virtual community events, group sessions, and other community events by joining the Wayfinding tier.

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There will always be a free Unfolding Path tier for short therapeutic practices, studio reflections, and my reflections on the latest arts and health research and its implications for those of us with chronic illness.

A friend highly recommended it, swearing it creates beautiful translucent layers in collage. So, I sat down with my paints, sponge brushes loaded with coffee and other mark making tools expecting the liquid to run and bloom the way it does on other paper. Instead, the water vanished. The teabag paper drank it straight into the underlayer papers, leaving dried coffee and pigment on top.

It was disorienting in the best possible way.

One of those quiet moments when my assumptions got checked in real time.

There’s a particular kind of mindfulness that arrives when we pick up materials we don’t know—materials that refuse to follow our well-worn habits, refuse to let us coast. When something is unfamiliar, we can’t rely on technique, memory, or muscle habit. We have to be fully present. We have to listen. We have to trust the process.

That’s what this teabag paper became for me: a small reminder to trust the process, to return to curiosity and welcome happy accidents. And recognition that stepping outside our comfort zone often gives us the most honest access to ourselves.

Energy Rating

The energy rating for this practice is a 6 or 7 because stepping outside our comfort zone can spend some emotional energy.

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Process over Product?

Process over product doesn’t mean the product doesn’t matter. It means we stop leading with the product.

The focus on product lives in the left brain. The part of us that plans, judges, solves problems, verbalizes, rationalizes, and often tries to control. It is also the side that lies (lying is deeply connected to controlling and rationalizing).

Process lives in the right brain. The part of us that speaks in metaphors, shapes, symbols, marks, and colors. The part of us that is more reliable about expressing emotions and experiences. It is also the unfiltered side. Some might say the honest side.

When you engage in a process-oriented practice, your right brain engages in a conversation with your materials. A collaboration. And that’s when surprises happen. You trust your own responses as part of the process, including your somatic responses or felt sense. You stay curious and playful even if you’re outside of your comfort zone.

For many of us living with immune-related chronic illnesses, putting process over product is how we rebuild self-trust after long stretches of medical interruption, cognitive disruption, and identity erosion.

If you’re interested in how our right brain helps us express emotions, you might want to try bilateral drawing with me.

Supplies

Choose at least 1 media or surface that is new to you.

If working on a new surface (like me), gather a variety of media and tools to make marks, maybe even something to cut, poke, or scrape the surface.

If working with a new media, gather a variety of surfaces to experiment on (paper, cardboard, wood, fabric, plastic), along with other media and water to see how it plays with different elements. You can pick dry media (pencils, charcoal, pens etc.) and fluid media (paints, inks, etc.) or even clay.

Here’s what I used:

New to me: Teabag paper

Media I used before and thought I knew:

• Coffee, watercolor, India ink and/or acrylics

• White crayon

• Brushes and sponge brush, string brush

• Slo-dry acrylic medium

• Conte crayon

Water and palette knife

Paper towels, sponge, spray bottle

As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases at no cost to you.

If you are taking part in the Not Buying It campaign, you can visit my Mark Making list on Blick. As a Blick Affiliate, I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases at no cost to you.

The Practice

Check-in

Before you begin: what assumptions are you walking in with today?

Not about technique. About yourself. About what you will create. Just note these. And set them aside. That’s all.

Create

This is a completely self-directed activity. If you are working with a new surface, pick a media you feel very comfortable with first and see what kinds of marks it will make on this new surface.

If you are working with a new media, maybe pick a surface you know and use well. Something familiar. Notice when things become unfamiliar.

If something feels really uncomfortable or you feel stuck, notice where that feeling sits in your body. Step back or look away for a minute. Then try a different surface or media, or crumple up the surface and then smooth it out and make some more marks.

I started with the white crayon because I like to rough up the paper first—make some marks so it is not as precious. It’s no longer a blank white (or in this case beige) paper staring back at me. And I love layers, so adding a resist bakes some layering into the process from the start.

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Reflection

When you are done, put your playful mark making up against something so it stands up. Take a step back and reflect:

• What do you notice about your experience making these drawings?

• When did the materials become unfamiliar?

• When did unfamiliarity turn into curiosity?

• What surprised you about the new media or surface you tried?

• What conversation did you have with these materials?

Conversing with Teabag Paper

That teabag paper became a powerful teacher—not because it worked beautifully, but because it didn’t.

When we work with materials we don’t know, or materials that unnerve us a little, our attention shifts. Unfamiliarity demands our attention. It dissolves autopilot. It interrupts the part of us that tries to control the outcome; our left-brain product-centered mind. Suddenly, we’re not thinking five steps ahead—we’re right here with the surface, the mark, and our response. We are in the moment. We are in flow.

Using an unfamiliar material snapped me out of my default settings. I couldn’t lean on experience. I had to feel my way through—brush by brush, layer by layer. I had to watch how the paper absorbed, resisted, buckled, dried. I had to respond instead of impose.

That presence—forced by discomfort—is profoundly mindful. It’s a somatic practice disguised as a creative practice.

And for those of us living with chronic illness, that kind of sensory grounding is more than a creative technique. It’s a survival strategy. Trusting the process—making friends with uncertainty—is about trusting ourselves.

It’s how we come back into our bodies after multitudes of symptoms, fear, and/or medical chaos make us not trust ourselves. It’s how we reclaim a sense of agency when so much of our lives feel interrupted or out of our control.

Working with unfamiliar materials becomes a rehearsal for uncertainty. Not a metaphorical one. A real, felt, embodied rehearsal where we practice not knowing how something will turn out and we keep going.

It’s a quiet form of rebellion: letting curiosity lead when everything in the world tells us to be predictable, perfect, and tidy.

Closing

Check-out

Let’s take a moment to literally move through uncertainty at the end of this practice.

Sit or stand in a way that is comfortable for you.

Then stretch out your arms wide to the side and wrap them around yourself like a big hug. This self-hug is one way to ground ourselves when we can’t jump into our creative practice.

Last year, I needed more self-hugs. I will do more of them this year.

Crooked Path Studios is completely community supported. Here’s how you can support this practice and other women like you.

Become part of the community with full access to all upcoming workshop series, live virtual community events, group sessions and any other community events by joining at the Wayfinding tier on Substack.

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If you want to support this work without a monthly subscription, join workshops a la carte, schedule a 1:1 therapeutic practice, or purchase digital art kits and downloads, then please visit my Crooked Path Studios shop by clicking the button below.

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There will always be a free Unfolding Path tier for short therapeutic practices, studio reflections, and the latest on arts and health research for chronic illness.

I’d love to hear from you! Please share your work in a comment or the chat.

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Starting 2025

January was all sharp edges. Early days of the new regime, the kind that tighten your chest before you even open the news. Everything felt brittle—democracy, funding, decency, civility, my own nervous system. Rage gave us a helmet, a bat, loud music, and permission. Permission to swing. Permission to break things that were already broken.

I remember the sound more than anything else. Glass doesn’t shatter delicately. It explodes. It announces itself.

Computers are harder to destroy with a bat than you’d think. They absorb the blows. You have to work for it.

I left that day lighter. Not healed. Not fixed. But emptied out enough to breathe again.

Sometimes mindfulness isn’t about stillness. Or sitting cross-legged in silence or breathing away the storm. Sometimes it’s not about calming down or finding your center or whispering affirmations into a body that does not believe you.

Sometimes mindfulness is about motion. And safely smashing things.

About finding safe, intentional ways to release what has been building inside. About giving rage a container so it doesn’t turn inward. About letting your body finish a sentence your mind doesn’t have the energy to complete.

This year brought anger, anxiety, grief, and trauma. And while body scans and meditation have their place, there were moments—many moments—when they weren’t enough. When my body needed to move. When rage needed an outlet. When smashing stuff felt like both destruction and liberation.

Ending 2025

Now it’s December. The year is ending. And I am not angry in the same way.

I am grieving.

I’m grieving the closing of a business I built after getting sick. Carefully, stubbornly, against the odds. A business that wasn’t just a business, but part of my professional identity. Part of my illness narrative. Proof that I could still think, analyze, problem-solve, make decisions. Proof I could earn a living after MCAS and Sarcoidosis rearranged my life, and I had to rewire my cognitive functioning.

That business was evidence. Evidence that wellness didn’t mean returning to who I had been before, but finding a way to work, think, and contribute differently. Evidence of the new me.

The new me returned to what I did best—program evaluation. But with a new focus. I helped nonprofits and federally funded programs assess their impact, tell better stories with data, and strengthen their work in the communities they served. It mattered. And it brought me real joy.

And now it’s gone. Not because the business failed. But because the economy shifted, programs were eliminated, funding was cut, and good work — work we had the data to prove was making a difference — became collateral damage or banned.

I’m grieving my clients, brilliant, committed organizations, losing funding and being forced to stop work that mattered deeply in their communities. I’m grieving the conversations that ended mid-sentence. The programs that will never get their second year. The people who did everything right and still lost.

I’m grieving for the animal rescue where I volunteer, where the surrender list keeps growing. Perfectly healthy, well-behaved family pets surrendered because their families can’t afford vet bills anymore. Or food. Or rent. Or the pet deposit at whatever temporary place they’re landing after losing a home.

This grief isn’t theoretical. It’s stacked up in my body like unsent letters.

And here’s the thing I don’t hear said out loud very often: I have not had the time or energy to cry about any of this.

I closed a business. I started new ones. I pivoted. I adapted. I turned 60.

And I did what I always do. What I did long before chronic illness entered the picture. I planned. I solved the problem. I panicked about earning a living, about paying a mortgage, about keeping things from collapsing.

When stress hits, I hide my illness. I pretend it isn’t there so I can push through. Rest later, solve the problem now. I know exactly how disastrous that pattern is for my physical, emotional, and mental wellbeing — and I do it anyway.

Crying requires space. Crying requires time. Crying requires a nervous system that believes it will be held.

Right now, what my body keeps saying is: move.

Not gently. Not symbolically. Physically.

My creative practice has helped immensely, yes. Art always helps. But this grief has weight. It has velocity. It wants momentum. It wants sound.

It wants a baseball bat.

Full Circle

So, we’re going back to the Rage Room. Ending the year where we began.

Not because I’m still angry, but because I understand something now that I didn’t fully understand in January. That mindfulness doesn’t always look like stillness. That grief doesn’t always look like tears. That sometimes the most honest thing you can do is give your body a task it understands and doesn’t have to think about.

Swing. Yell. Sweat. Break something that is already meant to be broken.

There is something profoundly grounding about putting on protective gear and being told, explicitly: please smash this to bits. There is no right way to grieve here. Just sound and impact and follow-through.

A baseball bat meeting a car door.
Glass breaking under the weight of everything I’ve carried.
Punk rock loud enough to drown out the voice that says, “I need to fix this.”

There is a kind of quiet that comes after impact. A pause where your breath catches up to you. Where the adrenaline fades and you realize you are still here.

That’s the quiet I’m after.

Not the kind that asks me to calm down.
The kind that arrives because I finally let myself move.

Permission Slip

If you’re ending this year heavy, angry, grieving, numb, exhausted then this is your permission slip to stop trying to process everything neatly. To stop assuming that stillness is the highest form of mindfulness. To stop believing that crying is the only legitimate expression of loss.

Sometimes the most mindful thing you can do is pick up a bat and swing.

Sometimes you need loud music.
Sometimes you need motion.
Sometimes you need a room designed to hold what you can’t.

I’ll let you know how it feels afterward.

When the glass breaks, my body finally registers the impact. Not because it was easy, but because I worked for it.

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Free art tutorials, nerdy arts and health science reviews will return in 2026 plus some paid workshops.

I’m closing a successful consulting business, not because it failed, but because the political landscape shifted so dramatically that continuing would have required a contortion of my values I do not want to attempt. At the same time, I’m building something new here on Substack and completed my therapeutic arts certification.

This moment of transition has its own cognitive (left brain) and emotional (right brain) language. And for me, the emotional language often gets subsumed under the cognitive.

To help both sides of my brain communicate, I frequently turn to bilateral drawing. Like I did recently to process 2025.

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What Bilateral Drawing Is and Why It Helps

Bilateral drawing is a guided expressive arts practice where you make several drawings using both hands at the same time. You aren’t drawing a picture, but rather the movements, rhythms, and sensations inside your body which are often mirrored, abstract, or free-form.

It comes from Cornelia Elbrecht’s Guided Drawing approach which uses art to synthesize all three forms of information processing:

• Kinesthetic or sensory

• Perceptual affective

• Cognitive and symbolic

Bilateral drawing begins at the sensory–kinesthetic level where embodied experience leads rather than cognitive analysis.

Here’s what that means in plain terms:

• You draw with both hands based on movement and sensation in your body, not from ideas. You follow changes in pressure, speed, and direction of the rhythms inside your body. (Kinesthetic)

• You use color, shapes, and lines to represent what the feeling, movement, and sensations inside your body look like. You repeat them mirroring the rhythm inside your body. (Perceptive)

• You write “I am” statements on each drawing after you complete them expressing what the emotion, movements, and sensations are trying to say. These statements craft a story. (Cognitive)

Bilateral drawing engages both hemispheres of the brain, creating a bridge between sensation and interpretation. This bridge has many benefits:

• Emotional Release: engaging with sensory materials (crayons, paper, chalk, etc.) through movement externalizes feelings in a drawing allowing for expression without words, which begins healing.

• Somatic Awareness: connects us with our body sensations promoting awareness of emotional and physical states, facilitating the release of stored emotions and trauma held in the body.

• Empowerment: by drawing your body movements, feelings, and sensations you are better able to recognize and manage emotions, listen to our bodies and respond to their needs creating a sense of agency and self-compassion.

• Integrates Brain Functions: using both hands engages both sides of the brain—left and right, logical and emotional. This enhances coordination between physical movement and emotional processing. Yes, by moving we are processing emotions. This promotes emotional regulation.

The movement itself is the therapeutic practice.

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Why this matters, especially for people living with chronic illness:

Chronic illness often forces us into analytic mode—tracking symptoms, troubleshooting flares, explaining ourselves to medical systems that require justification. I attempted to negotiate with my body using spreadsheets and logic because I needed some control. I tracked everything: symptoms, test results, what I ate, sleep, and my dramatic weight loss (90 pounds in 6 months). I made graphs. I made a searchable histamine food database.

I reacted like the social scientist that I am. I needed to rationalize and understand. But when the body starts speaking in signals we don’t immediately understand (and can’t control), analysis alone can’t translate them.

Bilateral drawing is a way of learning the new language of our bodies and our emotions by communicating with both sides or our brain simultaneously. It’s simple and surprisingly powerful.

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SUPPLIES

• Oil crayons, regular crayons, colored pencils or pastels (be careful if you are doing this standing up as pastel chalk will fall to the floor and stain).

• Large sheets of newsprint or packing paper or flip chart paper

• Painter’s tape

• Optional: gloves, if sensory needs require

A quiet space to listen inward

RECOMMENDATIONS:

I recommend taping the papers to a wall so that you can use your whole body. But I know that’s not possible for everyone, so here are some modifications:

• If you are doing this from bed, you can use 2 sheets of 8.5x11 paper, one for each hand. I recommend taping them to a lap desk or cardboard to hold them still.

• If you cannot stand up for 10 minutes, then use a stool or chair to sit on.

We will do three drawings. Make sure to set up your paper and have your drawing media out before starting the check-in. You will want to jump straight into drawing afterward.

Energy Rating

• 5: If you do this standing up

• 3: if you do this sitting or lying down

THE PRACTICE

Check-In

Before beginning, do a few stretches or easy movements to get your body moving a little.

Then settle into a position that feels as comfortable as possible for you right now. You can be sitting, lying down, or standing.

There’s no need for perfect posture—just find a way to be still without strain. We will do a modified body scan to tap into the movements and sensations of our bodies.

I know many of us have internal rhythms, movements or sensations that feel “off” or “wrong”. We’re not judging the quality of any sensations today. We are noticing all of them.

Take a slow breath in… and out.
Let your attention turn inward.

Step 1: Notice

Gently notice what’s happening inside your body.

Ask yourself: Where do I feel the emotion, energy, or movement most clearly?
It might show up as an irregular heartbeat, pins and needles, feeling dizzy, or extreme fatigue. It might feel similar to a wave lapping back and forth, making a swooshing feeling or a warmth in your limbs, or something else entirely.

Just notice.

Step 2: Listen for Subtle Signals

Pay close attention to internal rhythms—your breath, your heartbeat, or any movements beneath the surface. Do you notice changes in these? A sense of flow?

If images, colors, or movements come to mind, let them in without judgment and observe them. What shapes do you see, what colors?

Step 3: Compare and Contrast

You might find that your body’s right and left sides hold things differently, Maybe one feels heavier, or more alive, or carries a different sensation. Notice these differences without trying to change them. Just observe.

Step 4: Approach with Openness

Allow yourself to experience these sensations with curiosity and openness. There’s no need to analyze, interpret, or try and fix. Just notice what’s there, as it is.

Take one more slow breath.
Hold this awareness as you move into your bilateral drawing, letting your body’s rhythms guide your marks on the page.

Create

Drawing 1

Open your eyes and select the drawing media you want to use. Try to choose the colors you saw during the body scan or as close as you can get. You can hold different colors in each hand.

Approach your paper and begin moving your body to the inner rhythm you felt or observed during the body scan, drawing the shapes and movements you saw using both hands.

Your hands should move together like they are mirroring each other. Try not to pick up your drawing tool. Keep repeating that motion finding a rhythm that matches what you feel inside.

Stop thinking; just move. Rhythmic repetition allows you to connect with body memory and embodied biography instead of verbal stories.

As you do this your body might signal to you that the drawing needs to be bigger or smaller; slower or faster. Follow the instructions from your body. Let your body be the guide not your brain.

Let your body tell you when to stop this rhythmic movement.

Now finish this sentence: “ I am” by writing the emotion, feeling, or sensation that your body spoke to you. Write that on the paper along with the number 1.

Drawing 2

Move to your second piece of paper.

Check in with your body’s inner movements and ask it what movements does it need to resolve this tension, emotion, or physical feeling? What resources does it need?

Do you need to make circular shapes, vertical shapes, push things away or bring them closer? Or do you need containment?

Begin drawing that movement on paper. Repeating the movement. Listening to your body and taking guidance from it.

Continue until you feel a change in your body rhythms. Notice if and how the rhythms are changing and what movements or emotions it has now.

Stop when your body tells you to. Look at your drawing. Notice how the drawn shapes resonate in your body

Now finish this sentence: I am . . . .

Write that on the paper some place and put a number 2 near your I am statement

Drawing 3

Move to your third piece of paper.

Check in with your body’s inner movements and ask it movements will help release these emotions and blockages.

Begin drawing that movement on paper like you are a massage therapist. Repeating the movement. Listening to your body and taking guidance from it.

Continue this rhythmic massage until your body says it has what it needs. Look at your drawing. Notice how the drawn shapes resonate in your body

Now finish this sentence based on the drawing: I am . . . .

And write that on the page some place and put a number 3 near the I am statement.

REFLECTION

If you did not do these on a wall, then tape them up on a wall in the order you did them or lay them out on your bed. Step back. Use any of the reflection questions below to expand your “I am” story.

• Where in your body do these drawings resonate or echo back to you?

• What shapes, marks, or movements repeat across your drawings, and what might they be trying to say?

• How do the rhythms of your marks—speed, pressure, direction—relate to your internal energy today?

• What shifted in you as you released these movements onto the paper?

• Which drawing feels closest to the person you’re becoming right now?

  • What qualities does that person hold?

• When you compare your first and last drawings, what changed—in movement, mood, or meaning?

• If these drawings were part of a new language your body is learning, what words or meanings are beginning to emerge?

My “I am” Story

This is what emerged for me as I reflected on the drawings and my experience.

Drawing 1 — “I am decompressing and restarting.”

In the first drawing, my hands moved in loose, overlapping loops—almost like unspooling. The mark-making felt circular, chaotic, and soft all at once. My body chose lime green and magenta without hesitation.

At the end, I wrote the phrase that emerged during the drawing:
“I am decompressing and restarting.”

This is the truth of this year. I was forced to close my successful consulting firm because DOGE banned my “culturally responsive” approach to working on arts and health, and STEM education programs. Being culturally responsive means, I meet folks where they are; I’m aware of power imbalances; I pay attention to history and cultural contexts. Being culturally responsive in the work that I do (did) is one of my core values. I don’t change those.

Drawing 1 landed in my chest, shoulders, and jaw—the places where I hold pressure during long periods of stress, anxiety, and uncertainty. And this year those emotions were overladen with a heavy dose of responsibility: for clients and for my own family. The loops felt like the unspooling of a year defined by political upheaval and the unplanned decision to close a business I built over a decade doing work that I love.

My body was saying: You’re allowed to stop bracing.

Drawing 2 — “I am growing, expanding, taking up space at my own speed.”

The second drawing changed direction. The movement rocked back and forth at first, then stretched upward and outward, layering horizontal curves with vertical lines. The colors shifted to orange and green. The rhythm felt more intentional—less like decompression, more like emergence and growth.

At the end I wrote:
“I am growing, expanding, taking up space at my own speed.”

This felt connected to launching Crooked Path Studios, stepping into my therapeutic arts training, and allowing my work to widen in ways that honor my MCAS and Sarcoidosis pacing.

Drawing 2 moved to my arms, shoulders and torso. The upward marks felt like scaffolding—something sturdy but flexible. They matched the feeling of stepping into a new venture here, one that blends art, story, chronic illness, and truth-telling.

My body was saying: You’re allowed to expand, take a risk—even slowly.

Drawing 3 — “I am flowing, balancing.”

By the third drawing, the movement smoothed significantly. The marks became elongated, rhythmic, and almost symmetrical. The color shifted into two shades of blue. The shapes look like rounded puzzle pieces that fit together.

At the end I wrote:
“I am flowing, balancing.”

This drawing felt like an internal exhale—the sensation of integration rather than resolution.

Drawing 3 reached my legs and back. The rhythm was even, almost meditative. I even noticed how I was moving differently in the video between the three drawings.

It felt like a reminder that balance is not a state; it’s a movement, an action. My chronic-illness body taught me that years ago, but I’m relearning it in a new context now.

My body was saying: You can hold both: growth and pacing, fire and rest.

Across all three drawings, ellipses and loops reappeared. They reminded me that pathways—whether creative or medical—are rarely linear. They curve, return, widen, and narrow. They spiral. They shift. They repeat until the body feels understood.

If these drawings are part of a new language my body is learning, then the first words are clear:

Restart. Expand. Balance.

Not as separate phases, but as a single sentence still being written.

Closing

If you try this practice, I’d love to see what emerges for you. I invite you to share your drawings or your reflections in the chat or simply keep them for yourself as a private conversation with your body.

You don’t need to understand the language yet.
Your body will teach you.
One movement at a time.

If you want to explore practices like this more deeply, subscribe to my Substack, it’s free. In 2026, we will start the Wayfinding tier with paid workshops and focused projects.

You’re not lost. You’re on a Crooked Path to wellbeing.

This work is sustained by this community. If this work resonates, here are ways to continue:

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There will always be a free Unfolding Path tier with short therapeutic practices, studio reflections, and arts & health insights for women navigating chronic illness.

Because healing isn’t linear — and neither is art.

You’re curled up on your couch, laptop balanced on a pillow, attending a poetry workshop with people scattered across the country. You laugh, share stories, and feel that spark of belonging.

Here’s the kicker—according to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), 75% of those surveyed reported consuming arts virtually or digitally (NEA 2024). Yet, when these reports (and funders) talk about “local arts,” they still mean zip codes and street addresses.

So, let’s ask the question: If most of us are engaging digitally, why do we still define “local” by geography?

What Is ‘Sense of Place’?

Scholars have wrestled with this for decades. Sense of place is the emotional, identity-based, and functional bond we form with a location. Yi-Fu Tuan called it topophilia—love of place. Edward Relph warned about placelessness in a globalized world.

Modern frameworks, like Scannell & Gifford’s Person–Process–Place model (2010), break it down into:

• Place attachment (emotional bond, our social and physical attachments to it)

• Place identity (how a place shapes who we are and how we relate to a place)

• Place dependence (how it meets our needs, its physical characteristics)

Traditionally, these ideas orbit around physical geography. But here’s the twist: what happens when “place” isn’t physical at all?

NEA Data Shows the Shift

Two NEA reports tell a clear story:

• Digital arts engagement is dominant—three out of four adults consume arts online.

• Home-based creation is rising—more people are making art at home than attending galleries, museums, and in-person art classes.

• Arts engagement reduces loneliness and boosts belonging—people who create or attend arts events report stronger social ties. And BONUS, social connection is the cure for the loneliness epidemic (NEA SPPA 2022). (There’s a ton of literature out there on this besides the NEA reports, see Project Unlonely and Jeremy Nobel’s work for a start)

You might think this is a “pandemic bump” because one of the reports looks at data from 2002 to 2022. But the other report is from 2024. It shows that digital consumption of creative experiences and performances have increased while in-person attendance at arts events, classes and performances is down across the U.S. This is a trend, not a bump.

The issue with these reports—and most cultural policy frameworks—is they dismiss the data on virtual engagement and default to geography—zip codes, counties, and street addresses.

This definition of local leaves a lot of us with chronic illness out. Because—at least for me—I don’t want to pay for an in-person class and then either not be able to go because of a flare up or get there and be triggered by smells from the materials, or another person’s laundry products and perfume (don’t get me started on dryer sheets!).

Beyond this, limiting the definition of local and place-based making to only geography denies the communities that can be—and have been—created online (e.g. online gaming communities). If belonging and identity are the heart of sense of place, then virtual spaces aren’t just valid, they’re vital.

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Virtual Spaces as Local

I started rethinking the idea of local during the pandemic. In April 2020, I sent a Zoom invite to several college friends scattered across the state to join me for a virtual happy hour that week. At the end of happy hour, someone said, “See you next week” and Pandemic Happy Hour was born. We met on Zoom every Friday at 5pm.

FOR THREE YEARS y’all.

We celebrated birthdays, did trivia nights, made puppets, reviewed books, supported each other through job losses and family illnesses and personal health issues. We grieved together over the loss of pets and family members.

Zoom was our town square. We were in everyone’s living room, kitchen, or yard every week. Pets made cameo appearances. Ironically, I saw these folks more during the pandemic than I had in about 25 years.

In 2021, we rented a beach house, and all went on a vacation together—first time ever! It was glorious.

We still meet virtually, one Sunday a month. We help each other through family stuff, retirement, hip replacements, and the loss of other pets and parents. This week we’re celebrating someone getting a publishing deal for their book.

Building a virtual place allowed us to overcome geography and schedules that had prevented us from gathering prior to the pandemic. It allowed us to be back in each other’s lives again at a time when the world felt most isolated.

Evidence: Virtual Programs Build Real Belonging

Research backs this experience up:

• Virtual gallery visits reduce loneliness and foster reflection (Cotter et al., 2025).

• Virtual choirs and dance programs foster strong belonging, reduce anxiety (Draper & Dingle, 2021)

• Online dance programs reduced loneliness and built group identity (Finn et al. 2023)

• Online art engagement improves mood and wellbeing—even with just a few minutes of exposure (Trupp et al., 2022).

• Virtual art tours for older adults significantly boost positive emotions and life satisfaction (Averbach & Monin, 2022).

• Programs like Virtual OMA connect generations and break isolation barriers (Lokon et al., 2024).

Bottom line? Virtual art spaces don’t just mimic in-person benefits, they often expand access for those excluded by geography, mobility, or health.

And this is where my vision for Crooked Path Studios is rooted.

Our “neighborhood” isn’t a block—it’s a community of condition: women and caregivers navigating chronic illness. Our town square? Substack, Zoom, and shared rituals.

We build continuity not through buildings but through rituals and creative arcs: Unfolding Path → Wayfinding → Practice. These are our cultural trail markers.

For those of us with chronic illness, this redefinition of “local” matters because

• Validation: Making art from bed isn’t isolation—it’s community.

• Transformation: From fragmented YouTube tutorials to structured, identity-based creative practice.

• Liberation: A digital commons dismantles the invisibility of chronic illness.

Sense of place isn’t about sidewalks—it’s about meaning and connection. When people gather online to share art, they’re not floating in placeless space—they’re rooted in a shared narrative and identity.

Our Local

Crooked Path isn’t tied to a city or a street. Our “local” is the body we live in, the flare days we navigate, the creativity we reclaim.

So, before I go feed my herd of cats, let me ask you:

• As someone with a rare chronic illness or a caregiver, how do you want to reframe local to support your wellbeing?

• Where does belonging live for you—in your body, in your art, in a community?

• And what does your home studio look like right now? I invite you to share a glimpse in the discussion. (As you can see, mine’s a mess.)

And remember, Crooked Path Studios is our neighborhood, and you’re a local.

—Kelly

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But I also forgot I had MCAS now, and one of my main triggers is dyes—like pigments in paint.

Lesson Learned

I started Crooked Path Studios so those of us navigating rare chronic illness and their caregivers could develop a creative practice in a space that fit our needs.

And that includes using safe art materials and taking precautions for our chemical sensitivities. Which is what I didn’t do on that first day of Gelli printing.

At the time, I was working on a community-based arts and health project with a group of art therapists, and they introduced me to Gelli plates. I immediately ordered one from Amazon.

When the Gelli plate arrived, I was so excited. I set aside an entire Saturday giving myself plenty of time to set up and not expend all my energy in one day.

I dove in with both hands—literally. No gloves, just pure joy.

For a few hours, I felt like myself again. I was in flow—a concept developed by Csikszentmihalyi (chick-saint-me-high) to describe what happens when we get into the meditative creative state, and focused on the present moment:

• Time slowed down

• I was focused on the process not the product

• It was just enough of a challenge to stretch my skills but still feel familiar

• I was learning new things, taking risks, saying “What if?” and experimenting

• My actions, movements, and thoughts were like music responding to changes on the Gelli plate

I had more energy than I had experienced in a few years.

(Read more about Csikszentmihalyi’s theory and the optimal conditions for entering a flow state here and here).

I was so focused on the process, I totally forgot that one of my biggest MCAS triggers is dyes and chemicals like you find in acrylic paint and slo-dry extender (which I used to keep the paint from drying too quickly).

The next day started with serious brain fog and got worse from there.

Had I eaten a high histamine food?

—No.

Had I been in the sun?

—Nope.

Then I realized I had printed with bare hands and washed the brushes with bare hands, getting paint on my skin.

The flare lasted a few days. But the joy of creating lasted much longer. And I realized I needed not just safer art supplies but better protocols to handle all art supplies.

History of Toxic Art Supplies

For centuries, artists have pursued vivid, lasting pigments often at great personal risk. Lead white, one of the earliest synthetic pigments, was widely used from ancient Greece through the 19th century for its brilliant opacity, despite its severe toxicity. Known to cause “painter’s colic,” or lead poisoning, it was absorbed through the skin or inhaled as dust when making the paints (paints in a tube began in 1841). Or the lead was ingested sometimes even from licking brushes. Artists like Vincent van Gogh and Francisco Goya are believed to have suffered neurological and psychological symptoms linked to chronic lead exposure (Art Is Beautiful. It Could Also Kill You. Here Are 7 Deadly Art Materials to Watch Out For; Cleveland Clinic).

Similarly, cadmium-based pigments, introduced in the 1800s, offered intense reds and yellows but posed risks of kidney damage and lung disease when inhaled as dust or fumes. Arsenic-laced greens like Scheele’s Green and Paris Green were used in paints, wallpapers, and textiles, and are now known to be highly toxic, capable of releasing poisonous vapors (VOCs) and causing illness or death through skin contact or inhalation (CAMEO, Museum of Fine Arts Boston).

“The Strawberry Thief,” 1883, by William Morris. Morris’s family owned an arsenic mine and his wallpapers were infused with the chemical to create the bright Scheele’s green colors (Photo from Art is Beautiful article; by Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images)

Printmakers and painters alike faced additional hazards from solvents and powdered pigments. Turpentine and benzene—common in today’s paint thinners and cleaning agents—were often used in poorly ventilated studios, leading to respiratory issues, neurological damage, and increased cancer risk. Benzene, in particular, is now classified as a known human carcinogen linked to leukemia and other blood cancers (American Cancer Society).

Dry pigments, when ground or mixed, created airborne dust that could be inhaled or absorbed through the skin, compounding the danger. Despite early warnings from physicians like Bernardino Ramazzini in the 18th century, it wasn’t until the late 20th century that widespread regulation and safer alternatives began to emerge. Today, many traditional pigments have been reformulated or replaced, but those of us with chemical sensitivities must take extra precautions.

A Guide to Today’s Nontoxic Alternatives

Making art and creativity are embodied, somatic experiences. We use our whole bodies and all parts of our brain when we create. Being able to feel the different media and surfaces as you make marks or brush strokes, and being able to move in certain ways is important to the experience.

But for those of us with chronic illnesses, like MCAS, that make us sensitive to smells, chemicals, pigments and even friction or vigorous movement, the arts can be a minefield of triggers. The materials we use and how we use them in our creative practice matter.

I figured out how I could continue my new creative practice in a safe way and still make it an embodied practice. I’ve put together a Safe Art Supplies Guide outlining the toxic art ingredients to avoid, especially for chemically sensitive bodies like ours.

But more importantly, I’ve also included a list of safer alternatives and simple ways to protect yourself. For me that means wearing gloves. I can still smear things, but it doesn’t cause a flare up the next day. I also avoid anything with Cadmium (like cadmium red or yellow), Titanium (like titanium white), or other metals as ingredients.

You can download the Safe Art Supplies Guide after subscribing. The Guide includes links to products. At this time, I am not an affiliate for these companies, and I have noted which art supplies I tend to use.

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Start Your Crooked Path

if you’re ready to reclaim or start your creative space, join the Crooked Path Studios Substack community for women with rare chronic illnesses, including chemical sensitivities.

Get access to a supportive creative space designed for us and begin your nonlinear path to wellbeing. You don’t have to be an artist or consider yourself creative to play here, you just need to be curious.

And if you’ve found safe art supplies that aren’t on the list, please share and I’ll update the list.

Thanks for reading Crooked Path Studios! If you know someone who would enjoy or benefit from a creative practice, please share Crooked Path Studios with them.

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References

[1] theartbog.com

[2] science.googlexy.com

[3] www.artpublikamag.com

[4] www.jstor.org

[5] www.americansforthearts.org

Join me for the second workshop in the Playful Mark Making series using fluid media like watercolors or acrylics.

Energy Rating

4 if you are not making your own mark making tools.

7 if you are making your own mark making tools. (See the supply list below).

• There are some materials to gather and set up

• This practice is about letting go of control, which may be challenging for some people

• This practice ask you to make some decisions throughout the process

• Not suitable for bed

Supplies

For this mark making activity, you’ll need any of the following fluid media:

• Watercolors, acrylic inks, acrylic paint, gouache, India ink (aim for 3 colors and maybe a white or a black)

• White crayons

• Concentrated liquid coffee, tea, or other beverage that stains (be careful)

• Pastels, watercolor pencils, conte crayons (these are all water soluble, so they will smear, bleed, and spread with water. I consider them semi-fluid)

Something to apply the fluid materials like:

• Brushes in different sizes and shapes

• Q tips, make-up sponges, regular sponges

• Sticks, old toothbrush, bamboo skewer, chop stick, plastic fork, plastic spoon—anything that you think might make an interesting mark that you can dip into the fluid media and drag, splatter, stamp, brush or move across a surface.

BONUS: I made some paint brushes out of sticks, grasses, dried echinacea seed pods and some pine boughs. You’ll see how they worked out in the video. I’ll have a separate tutorial on making these tools, Unpredictable Marks.

You will need two different surfaces to mark on, get creative and experiment, and remember we are getting things wet:

• Watercolor paper, mixed media paper

• Brown paper, cardboard

• Fabric

• Anything that can get wet and accept paint or ink

Also make sure to have

• A palette to mix your paint—I use a heavy paper plate. You don’t need anything fancy.

• Cup of water

• Spray bottle with water or eye dropper with water in it

• Your gloves

• Rag or paper towels

• Blue painters tape or masking tape if you want to tape your paper or surface to something to keep it steady (or pick it up easily)

You may want something underneath your paper to protect the table you are working on. A plastic trash bag or plastic tablecloth works great. I have a plastic shower curtain covering my art table.

The Practice

Check-in

We are getting silly today in the check-in and doing some air painting to get warmed up.

Create

Select about 3 colors and maybe black and white for this practice. If you have trouble choosing colors, then select a red, a yellow, and a blue.

I am using Rose Madder, Yellow Ochre, and Paynes Grey (a very blue grey) acrylic paint, India ink, coffee, a white crayon and conte crayons. I added some light grey acrylic paint at one point.

Set a timer for 10 minutes.

If you’re using the white crayon as a resist, then begin by making some marks on your surface like we did in the Playful Animals Mark Making tutorial. Then wet your paper with the spray bottle or a clean brush. If you’re using watercolor, add water to your paint. If you’re using acrylics, then put some paint on your palette and add water to your paint. Select your mark making tool and dip it into the paint. Begin with blobs, brush strokes, and making marks on your paper—maybe even using your non-dominant hand.

Explore different mark making tools with different media. How do different shaped brushes make different marks? What kind of marks do they make in wet media versus any dry areas on your surface? What if you tip your surface in different directions? What kind of mark does the bamboo skewer make or can you scratch into wet paint with it? How can you make some splatters? If you used the white crayon, what is that adding to your mark making after adding the paint? What happens when the colors run together?

This is intuitive, fluid mark making. There’s no plan and there’s no wrong way to do this. We’re playing and experimenting. We’re listening to our intuition. We’re paying attention to the sound of the tool moving across the surface, the shapes that form, the colors and the density of the colors. We’re focusing on process over product—we’re not trying to make a masterpiece. We’re being spontaneous and responding with curiosity.

Notice how you’re feeling at the start and then about 5 minutes into the process. How uncomfortable are you with the fluidity of the materials and lack of control?

Try responding to your uncomfortableness with curiosity—about the materials, what you’re feeling, and how to play. I am always a little anxious at the start of any creative practice—especially staring at a white page. Roughing up that page, even with a white crayon helps me move into curiosity and let go of control.

Continue asking “What if” and playing and experimenting until the timer goes off.

When the timer goes off, put this first drawing aside and let it dry and begin your second painting on a different surface. You can change the paint colors if you want.

Set the time for 10 minutes again. Make another playful fluid mark making drawing. Keep working until the timer goes off again, then set this drawing aside.

Return to your first drawing. Do you want to add anything or take some creative risks with it? Add to the first drawing for a few minutes, then look at your second drawing and see if you want to add anything.

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Reflection

Reflect and answer any of the following questions about your experience today:

• How did it feel to let go of control and watch the fluid media take on its own agency?

• How did that feeling change throughout your practice?

• Which of your media was more expressive for you? Why?

• Which of the media or surfaces were more frustrating for you?

• How did your drawings change as you let go of control?

• What did you discover about yourself doing these drawings? How can you use these discoveries going forward?

• What did you discover about the materials doing these drawings and what do you want to carry forward and explore in your creative practice?

Look at both of your drawings—the shapes that emerged, the lines, the energy.

• What do you think each of these drawings represents for you? What part of your story does each one tell?

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Transformation

I tend to let go of control more as I settle into the process. By the time I returned to the first drawing, I was more willing to take some creative risks with it than when I started. Using the handmade tools supports focusing on the process; they always give agency back to the media. Discovering my Cromolyn Sodium vials were ink and paint pens transformed them symbolically—they are now part of my creative identity and not just my MCAS identity.

Not all my handmade paint brushes worked—the echinacea seed pod shot seeds all over the place instead of making interesting marks. Surprise! I consider that a laughter learning moment. And my second drawing was such a major reminder for me to stay curious and collaborate with the materials that it needed its own video.

I used tea bag paper—a new surface for me—and I made assumptions about how it would react to water. I was wrong. This material pushed my curiosity and made me sit with uncertainty. Don’t miss that video.

What I notice about this drawing:

• The gestural and expressive quality of the drawing; its movement and tension and emotional intensity.

• The marks are dynamic and layered: sweeping arcs, jagged scratches, and splatters of pigment. Angular scratches and intersecting lines cut through the softer curves, introducing conflict or disruption.

• The energy feels raw and unresolved, with directional strokes pulling the eye diagonally across the page.

• There’s a contrast between fluid washes (beige, peach, and muted tones) and aggressive linear marks (black, deep red), suggesting a push-pull between calm and chaos.

• On the one hand, the circular shape at the bottom left reminds me of an organic, bodily contour—almost like a torso or a curved vessel. It’s not literal, but the rounded shape and inward curves evoke containment or protection. Maybe against that chaos.

• On the other hand, that dark cluster with the scratches and intersecting lines almost reminds me of a core or a wound.

This drawing is a moment in my story. It is this year’s story: inner conflict, embodied experience and transformative rupture. These forms feel corporeal, mapping sensations of rupture and resilience, vulnerability and defense as I dismantle one identity and struggle to shape another. This year, at the age of 60, the cuts to the US government forced me to close a successful consulting business. It was 8 years of a 25+ year career helping organizations assess the effectiveness of and improve their programs. That professional identity was one of the few that remained after I got sick. It is a tether to my past. I decided to semi-retire and returned to school to get my certification as a community therapeutic arts practitioner (CTAP). This new adventure bridges my creative identity with my knowledge and experience of arts and health. And while it is exciting and emergent, the year has been traumatic and overwhelming. A year of contrasts and emotions that have not worked themselves out yet visually or verbally. I still don’t have words to express this drawing yet. I only know what it is pointing toward.

These moments of creative play help us build neuroplasticity while allowing us to process emotions visually through the act of creation rather than language. And fluid media, for me anyway, are the best teachers for learning to live with uncertainty and unpredictability. It’s one of the reasons I say that art is a rehearsal for the uncertainty of chronic illness. And years like 2025.

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Closing: Haiku Poem

To close out today, I invite you to select one of your playful mark making drawings that resonates with you. What emotions does this drawing evoke for you? Let’s write a haiku poem about that emotion using this structure:

• Name the emotion

• Say where it lives (this could be anywhere inside or outside your body)

• Then say why it lives there or how it came to be there

The haiku in the video is based on the second drawing I did (on tea bag paper) that needed its own video. I decided to leave that poem in this video. Here is the one I wrote after writing this post:

Rupture lives in my belly

A hollow carved by endings and beginnings

Born from breaking open

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The studio smells like pine. You create your own visual language.

And you bring in hitchhikers.

If you have any phobias about spiders, you may not want to watch this video. Just stick to the post to get some inspiration on creating your own mark making tools.

Energy Level: 7

I invite those of you with chronic illness to split this activity up into small pieces. You don’t have to do all of this at one time.

• Walk in nature

• Making the tools

Supplies

• Sticks, pine boughs, pine needles, long grasses, pine cones, leaves anything from nature that might make an interesting mark or impression.

• String, wire, duct tape—something to hold things together. I used wire and painters tape.

• Scissors, wire cutters

• Some sort of bug catcher

Create

I like to create my own mark making tools, especially from things that I collect on my walks because it helps me create my own visual language. They also push me to focus on the process, be curious and play during my creative practice.

But nature comes with bugs. And spiders.

So, as you put your sticks, leaves, and grasses together, keep an eye out for the hitchhikers.

I invite you to combine the materials you collected on a walk in any way that makes sense to your hands and how you hold things. I find wire and tape the easiest method to hold bits and bobs together.

Reflection

As I mentioned in the video, I started walking as a way to create my own form of wellbeing living with MCAS and Sarcoidosis. In the beginning, both affected my lungs, so I could not walk far without collapsing out of breath. And MCAS caused post exertion malaise and severe brain fog until I got on medication (I still get this but not after walking). In those early days, I would just walk onto my front porch and sit.

Eventually, I could walk to the mailbox, then around the block, and finally onto the walking path through my wooded neighborhood. Then the pandemic started and I got to stay home longer. I did more walks, twice a day, and I documented my walks with the phone. Photos of lizards, butterflies, flowers, moss, bugs, and seasonal change fill my phone. I still document my walks, and now that includes easy hikes in state and national parks near my house.

These photos remind me that I am resilient. I can find my own “normal” under uncertainty. I can do hard things.

Closing

Now that you have made your own mark making tools, I invite you to make some marks. You can create along with the Marks of Reinvention tutorial or experiment on your own.

I would love to see your handmade tools. Just post a photo in the comments or chat, or tag Crooked Path Studio in your Note.

And if you know anyone who should be on this crooked path with us, please be sure to share this post and the publication.

See you next time!

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In 1986, I was an art student wandering galleries in New York City. I stood in front of a set of Rauschenberg drawings at Acquavella gallery marveling at the layers of magazine transfer images, mark making, and color. Rauschenberg is why I embraced collage, and telling stories with layers, messy risk taking, and the unexpected.

In November 2025, I returned.

Same city, same month—but a different body.

A chronic-illness body negotiating inflammation, fatigue, pacing and pain, and the gravity of brain fog.

I didn’t expect slow looking to collage these two Novembers—two selves—together into a new story.

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What Slow Looking Is (and Why It’s Different)

Slow looking isn’t just about time—it’s about attention. The term first appeared in museum education research through Shari Tishman, Philip Yenawine, and Abigail Housen at Harvard’s Project Zero and Visual Thinking Strategies (Tishman & Palmer, 2006). Today, Claire Bown (@adventuresinslowlooking) offers a definition I return to often: “slow looking is a practice, mindset, and approach involving the study of something with intention and attention.”

This means moving beyond first impressions, resisting the urge to name or judge, and instead noticing, really noticing, what’s there. It’s immersive and patient. It asks us to take different perspectives, sometimes literally, by shifting our angle and our assumptions.

Slow looking is deliberate: spending time with one thing, allowing meaning to emerge rather than forcing it. In a culture of speed, this feels radical. It’s not passive; it’s an active choice to let discovery and meaning originate in looking (Bown, 2023).

But slow looking doesn’t just change how we see.
It changes the body’s biochemistry:
inflammation, cortisol, and the brain’s autobiographical network.

Let me explain.

Why Slow Looking Works

A quick, grounded tour of the science.

Slow looking is simple: spend time with one thing—art, an object, a view—long enough for your attention to soften and deepen. But the science under that simplicity is profound, especially for those of us living with chronic illness.

1. Slow looking can reduce inflammation.

Inflammation sits at the center of so many rare chronic illnesses—sarcoidosis, MCAS, EDS, autoimmune syndromes, Long COVID. Cytokines like IL-6 and TNF-α drive fatigue, pain, brain fog, joint swelling, and flares. Studies out of King’s College London and the Art Fund (Worrell et al., 2025) found that looking at art—especially original artworks—can reduce circulating IL-6 and TNF-α, suggesting that aesthetic engagement shifts immune activity.

This isn’t metaphor. It’s measurable. Looking at art offers a non-pharmacologic ant-inflammatory to complement steroids or an anti-inflammatory diet. And wouldn’t you prefer an art prescription?

2. Slow looking lowers cortisol.

Cortisol fuels fight-or-flight responses keeping the body and nervous system on high alert. In chronic illness, high cortisol or flattened cortisol curves can worsen fatigue, pain, and inflammatory load.

A 2016 study showed that 75 percent of participants had lower cortisol after a 45-minute art-making session (Kaimal et al., Art Therapy Journal). Other research shows that viewing original art improves heart rate variability, a marker of parasympathetic regulation—the “rest-and-repair” state (Law et al., 2021; Worrell et al., 2025).

If you’ve ever felt your breathing slow spontaneously in front of an artwork or nature, your physiology was shifting to regulate your nervous system.

3. Slow looking activates the Default Mode Network (DMN).

The DMN is the brain’s autobiographical circuit where identity, memory, and meaning live and emerge. Research shows it lights up during self-reflection, memory, identity, and meaning-making, especially when looking at art that resonates deeply or personally (Weir, 2025; Vessel et al. 2013). Even if it’s a small or ordinary object in our home, the DMN activates.

For those of us with chronic illness, whose identities often feel fractured, erased, or redefined by symptoms, DMN activation is not trivial.

Slow looking is repair.

It’s remembering.
It’s the collaging and layering of self across time.

This is why looking slowly at art and nature in 2025 could bring back the art student I was in 1986—not through nostalgia, but through coherence.

Why slow looking matters for chronic illness

Most of this research was done with “healthy adults,” but the mechanisms—cortisol shifts, inflammatory modulation, DMN activation—are likely even more relevant for chronically ill bodies already living with dysregulation. When you’re inflamed, exhausted, and overwhelmed, nonpharmacologic interventions often feel out of reach. But slow looking is accessible from a bed, a chair, a hospital room, a window.

My take—and what I’m advancing as original reasoning—is that slow looking is a form of autobiographical immune support: a practice that can help reduce inflammatory tone, regulate stress chemistry, and rebuild the fractured timeline of self that illness disrupts.

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How Slow Looking Became My Way of Making Meaning in NYC

Day 1 — The High Line and Chelsea

On my first morning, I walked the High Line—something that didn’t exist during my art-school years. Starting at Hudson Yards wandering down to Chelsea, rusted steel met ivy. Autumn leaves arched over the path. Dried ornamental grasses and summer flowers blew in the wind. A cat slept in a sunny window at eye level, 15 stories above the city. The city roared below with audible and visual noise, adding to the city’s pace. But up there I could linger visually and physically, letting my eyes lead. A new perspective on the city revealing personal details and glimpses of nature.

Descending into Chelsea, I wandered galleries until I reached Data Consciousness: Reframing Blackness in Contemporary Print at the Print Center. The prints in this exhibit take the early visual language of W.E.B. Du Bois’ “data portraits” of African Americans post-Reconstruction and reformulates it for the present “big data” moment through printmaking. Their spirals and arcs are layered with pattern, color, and texture, pulling the viewer into a more embodied kind of data consciousness. Instead of disappearing individuals into charts, these prints insisted on presence, identity, and complexity.

Standing there, comparing Du Bois’s spirals to the contemporary artist’s spirals, I realized slow looking isn’t passive. It’s a way of paying respect. It’s a way of telling and hearing a story.

Day 2 — Tactile Slow Looking

Visually overwhelming, Dick Blick art supplies and fabric shops in the Garment District require a different kind of slow looking.

Tracing the grain of handmade paper. The weight and texture of ribbons and trims. The fold of African cotton prints. The seashell-like sounds of buttons in a drawer.

I touched everything slowly, noticing texture before intention.
This kind of tactile mediation is its own form of DMN engagement, merging sensory detail with memory and emotion. I texted my mom. I remembered going to fabric stores with her as a kid, marveling at the wall of buttons and ribbons. Picking out a pattern for my next outfit she would make.

Day 3 — The NOAH Conference

At the National Organization for Arts and Health (NOAH) conference, Harvard physician Jeremy Noble spoke about loneliness as a brain-rewiring condition. Trauma, illness, aging, difference, modernity—the five biggest drivers of isolation—create “loneliness spiraling” that adversely affect health outcomes and increase the risk for suicide.

I know how illness creates loneliness.

At NOAH, I practiced group slow looking during the “Data Vandals” workshop, building social connections and meeting new people. Asking questions about the sticker dots of data points and how they connected to our own health.

Noticing light shifting on boxed lunches, the shadows cast in Washington Square.

Attention is often the first thing illness takes from us.
Slow looking gave some of it back.

Attention becomes connection.
And connection becomes regulation.

Day 4 — A Flare, the Rockettes, and MoMA

By the final morning, my pacing was off. My joints were on fire. Fatigue felt bone-deep.

I stayed in bed, practicing slow looking from the window—clouds sliding between buildings, the everyday choreography of the apartment inhabitants across the street.

That afternoon, I rallied for the Rockette’s 100th-anniversary Christmas Spectacular—a parade of pattern, symmetry, and light.

Later at MoMA, lying beneath Mike Kelley’s installation of stuffed-animal bundles suspended from the ceiling, I reflected on that 1986 trip. I spent several hours at the Acquavella gallery slow looking (I didn’t know it then) at the complexity of the drawings/collages with the solvent transfers, mark making and paint. These collage drawings were gestural; they had movement and energy. I realized how much influence that show had on my own collage practice then and now. As other memories of that trip surfaced my focus returned to the colorful bundles of fluff gently swaying from the ceiling above me.

Looking up, the discarded stuffed animals gathered from thrift stores speak of memories from previous owners. Both happy and traumatic. Each cluster is one color mass; cells floating in the room. Cells in my body. On the walls are deodorizers that spray a piney-woodsy scent every few minutes to tamp down the stale smell of the stuffed animals. In 1986 this smell wouldn’t have been a problem. But today this MCAS trigger has my lying on the floor; the only safe place for me to view this sculpture.

It was like holding the 1986 version of myself in one hand, and the 2025 version in the other.

Slow looking reframed the whole trip.
It turned effort into meaning.

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You don’t need a museum. Your world counts.

The science is clear: your nervous system does not differentiate between “art” and the everyday.
It responds to attention, not labels.

Here are three equal “sites” of slow looking:

1. Art made by others

Paintings in galleries.
Public sculptures.
Hospital artwork.
A photo in a waiting room.

Original works hold texture and mark-making that anchor attention better than reproductions.

2. Art made by the world

Rust on a railing.
The way a leaf catches the light.
A patch of sky framed by buildings.
The texture on your coffee mug.

These are aesthetic experiences available to anyone who pauses long enough.

3. Art made by you

This is the most radical category—and the most powerful.

A collage from a hard week.
A stitched square made on a flare day.
A photo you snapped just to remember how the light shifted.

These are what I call autobiographically saturated artifacts. They hold your gestures, your pace, your decisions, your endurance.

Looking slowly at your own work activates the DMN in a way tuned to your story.

Every mark you make remembers you.

One Thing You Can Try Now

1. Slow looking is anti-inflammatory (yes, literally).

Pick one object—your own art, a coffee mug, a leaf, a view.
Spend 5–10 minutes with it. Let your gaze soften.
Notice color, texture, and light before naming anything. Trace the edges of the object with your eyes. Let your eyes lead you to different places on the object.

Ask yourself: If this object could tell you a story, what would it say?
Your nervous system will follow your gaze into rest-and-repair mode.

Want a deeper practice?

Download the companion guide:

The Slow Looking Guide for Living with Chronic Illness

A flare-friendly, trauma-aware, guide you can use anywhere—bed, home, clinic, outside, or your own studio. Slow looking practices are grouped by energy level with additional suggestions for looking at everyday objects and your own creative work.

Download the Guide

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More therapeutic arts tutorials coming next week and a 4-6 week series of art sessions coming in the new year!

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