Living with chronic illness can be isolating. The Wayfi…

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One side is the art. The other side is the message. The edge of the card is where your creative practice meets the distance between you and someone else — and decides to do something about it.

With chronic illness, that distance can accumulate without anyone meaning for it to. You cancel enough plans, miss enough gatherings, spend enough time managing your body instead of your relationships, and the gap between you and the people you care about starts to have its own shape. This practice is about making something in that space.

We’re using the postcard format — small, complete, sendable — to work with positive and negative shapes on a scale that is manageable and a little bit fun. And we’re going to let the negative space lead for once.

ENERGY RATING: 4

Shapes & Social Connection

This is Part 3 of the Shape series. In the first practice, we made a shape journal and a simple collage to look at the boundaries in our lives—the ones we hold, the ones placed on us, and the secondary shapes that form in the space between two boundaries. In the second practice, we pushed some of those boundaries by layering cut shapes over a familiar collaged background. This practice builds directly on both, so it’s worth reading or watching the first two practices.

Watch on YouTube

Using Shapes to Explore Boundaries in Chronic Illness

Pushing Boundaries

A quick note on shape and space

A shape is a two-dimensional area defined by its edge—a boundary. Space is everything around, between, and within shapes. Positive space is the shape itself; negative space is what surrounds it. In this practice, we’re going a step further: we’re using the paper left over after cutting a shape as a shape in its own right. The negative space becomes positive. The leftover becomes the point.

We introduced composition in the second practice—the intentional arrangement of visual elements in space—and you’ll keep using that instinct here. If something feels off, move it. Follow your intuition.

But this isn’t just about visual language.

Loneliness and isolation are some of the most common—and least talked about—parts of living with chronic illness. Many people assume they’re the only ones feeling this way, when in reality it’s something most of us experience at some point. Recent work from researchers in the arts and health field, like Project UnLonely, Your Brain on Art, and The Art Cure all point to the same thing: making art, even in a virtual community, can help rebuild social connection. Not by fixing everything all at once, but by creating moments of expression, recognition, and sharing. This practice sits right in that space.

We’ve been talking about boundaries in the first two practices—but boundaries don’t just define us. They also create space.

And sometimes, that space fills with things we didn’t choose: distance, silence, missed time with people we care about.

In this practice, we’re going to work directly with that space—not as something to fix, but as something to notice, shape, and maybe gently begin to bridge.

SUPPLIES

For the check-In

• Pencil

• Marker or crayon

• Shape journal from the first practice, or a fresh piece of copy paper

For the creative practice

• 2-3 index cards 4x6 size

• Colored paper: solid colored paper like construction paper or colored copy paper. You can also use any emotional paintings that you may have done, old drawings, the inside of security envelopes, magazine pages that are mostly color.

• Scissors or exacto knife

• Glue or glue stick

• Clear packing tape and some postage stamps

If you need supplies, please consider purchasing from my affiliate links. I may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases (at no cost to you).

Blick Art Supplies

• Collage: visit the list

THE PRACTICE

Watch on YouTube: Bridging the Distance

Check-in: Shape journal

Open your shape journal to a blank box — or draw one on copy paper.

Draw the shape of your current social network, or the gap between you and someone you haven’t been in contact with for a while. Not a diagram, just the shape of it.

I drew something that looks like a cell dividing and stretching.

Create

In this practice, we’re not just working with shapes—we’re working with absence.

The negative space you’ve been saving—the paper left behind after cutting—is the shape of what isn’t there anymore. And for a lot of us, that space doesn’t just exist on the page. It shows up in our relationships too.

People we haven’t seen. Conversations that stopped. Connections that shifted without us meaning for them to.

Today, we’re going to make something from that space.

Step 1: Pull from what you already have

Go back to the shapes you’ve already cut in the first two practices — the leftovers, the offcuts, the pieces still sitting on your table. If you’ve been keeping them, this is their moment. If not, cut a few new shapes from your colored paper and save the negative shape.

The instruction for this practice is simple and worth sitting with: cut shapes in order to use what’s left.

When you cut a shape out of a piece of paper, you have two things. The shape itself — positive space, declared edge, the thing you meant to make. And the paper it came from — negative space, the outline of an absence, the shape of what’s no longer there. Both go on the card.

Notice which one you’re drawn to—the defined shape, or the one that holds the outline of what’s missing.

Sometimes absence has a different weight to it.

Step 2: Work on your index cards

Take one of your index cards and begin auditioning shapes — positive and negative — onto the surface. Work without gluing at first. Use your intuition to move the shapes around and see what you like.

A few things to try:

• Pair a cut shape with the paper it came from. Place them near each other or overlapping. Notice the echo — the same edge, read twice, in two different registers. That pairing creates rhythm.

There’s something happening at that edge—the same boundary, holding both presence and absence.

It can feel a little like holding a connection that’s still there… and not there at the same time.

• Let shapes overlap each other to create foreground, middleground, and background. Something comes forward, something recedes. Depth appears in the relationship.

• Use the remaining paper — the piece left after multiple cuts — as its own compositional element. By the time you’ve cut several shapes from one piece of paper, what remains is a record of every decision you made. It has its own complex edge.

You can work on one card at a time, or work across two or three cards simultaneously. Shapes that don’t work on one card often find a home on another.

• Repeating a shape creates rhythm.

It’s not unlike reaching out more than once—connection rarely happens in a single moment. It builds, or it fades, over time.

As you work, notice where shapes feel connected… and where they don’t.

That tension—the space between—is part of the composition too.

Step 3: Compose and commit

When a card makes you happy or feels resolved — or at least interesting — glue everything down.

Step 4: Finish for mailing (optional)

If you’re sending these, cover the front with a strip or two of clear packing tape, overlapping the strips slightly to cover the surface and wrapping them to the back of the card. Smooth out any bubbles. This stabilizes the collage and protects it in transit. A standard 4x6 postcard stamp is all you need. The post office will handle the rest.

Reflection

Before you analyze anything, just look at what you made.

What do you notice about the negative shapes — the ones that appeared from absence rather than intention? Do they feel different than the shapes you cut on purpose?

When you paired a positive shape with the paper it came from, what happened at the edge between them? Did they feel like one shape, or like two separate things?

The distance between people has a shape too. What does yours look like right now — and what would you want it to look like if it could shift?

Conversation

I’ve been doing the Index Card a Day challenge — ICAD — with Tammy at Daisy Yellow for a couple of years now. I can never finish all the days. That’s a boundary I’ve made peace with. The prompts are interesting, the format keeps me playful, and I end up with a stack of small pieces that are exactly postcard size.

I’m also part of a handmade postcard club. We send each other postcards with original art — real mail, handwritten, made by hand. Some of the people in my club I see regularly. Others I haven’t been in the same room with in years. Chronic illness has a way of making distance the default, even with people you didn’t mean to lose touch with. The postcards are one way I push back on that.

Sometimes it’s not even a clean break.

It’s just… time passing. Plans canceled. Energy rerouted. Conversations that get a little farther apart each time until the space between you holds more than the relationship does.

That’s the part I keep thinking about in this practice—the way absence accumulates. Quietly. Without announcement.

And how making something, even something small, can interrupt that.

This practice was easier than the first two. Making postcards is familiar. The small format lowers the stakes — whatever happens on a 4x6 card is contained, complete, and going to someone who will appreciate it regardless. That made it easier to play, and playing made it easier to push.

What I pushed was the negative space. I started using the paper left over after cutting shapes — not as scrap, but as the shape. When you pair a cut shape with the paper it came from and place them together, you get an echo. The same edge, present twice. It adds rhythm in a way that a single shape on a ground doesn’t.

I’ve also come to appreciate what the clearly defined edge does that I’ve spent most of my practice trying to avoid. My work usually tries to blur foreground and background, to keep things ambiguous, to resist the declared edge. These cards don’t do any of that. They’re clean. Simplified. Easily read. And there’s something that works about that — a composition that doesn’t ask the viewer to do much work, that just sits there and holds its shape.

Now look at the three practices as a whole.

In the first practice, the secondary shapes — the zones that formed in the white space between cut shapes — appeared without being planned. I noticed them after the fact and couldn’t stop looking at them.

In the second practice, I started working with them deliberately — placing shapes to create specific relationships, watching where boundaries blurred and where they held.

In this practice, the negative space is no longer what’s left over. It’s where I’m starting. The leftover paper, the outline of an absence, the shape of what’s no longer there — that’s the material.

That arc matters for chronic illness. So much of what we navigate is already bounded — by diagnosis, by capacity, by the distance that accumulates when your body makes showing up unreliable. But there’s something else in the negative space that I keep coming back to. The paper left after cutting isn’t just absence. It’s not empty. It’s specific. It holds the exact contour of what was there.

And maybe that’s why it feels familiar because the relationships we’ve drifted from don’t disappear. They leave a shape behind. It still has edges and you can fill it.

Check out

Look at the shape you drew during the check-in.

Then choose one person. Someone who’s a little farther away than you’d like. And decide which postcard they should get.

You can write whatever you like on the back. I like to write a 4x4 poem on the back of mine. Four lines with four to six words each. In the first line, I usually describe something I can see in the distance. For the second line, I describe something close by me, maybe something I can touch. For the last two lines, I describe the last time we were together or a memory that we share.

You don’t have to mail this. Keeping it is still a complete practice.

But if you do send it, notice what shifts—because sometimes closing distance starts with something this small.

Until Next Time

In the next creative practice, we’ll keep building our visual language—this time by exploring form, working with three dimensions.

Until then, if this idea of distance—and trying to stay connected in the middle of it—feels familiar, I’d love to invite you into my Wayfinding community.

It’s a therapeutic arts space for women living with chronic illness, where we’re not just making things—we’re finding ways to stay connected to ourselves and each other, even when life reshapes what that looks like.

Inside Wayfinding, we gather for monthly open studios, workshops, and shared moments of making alongside people who understand what it means when showing up isn’t always possible—but connection still matters.

You’ll also get practices like this in your inbox, along with my Life Lessons essays and members-only practices that go a little deeper.

Join us if you’re looking for a way to create social connection with women who understand.

Stay on your crooked path

Share Crooked Path Studios

Crooked Path Studios is completely community supported. Here’s how you be part of it.

Join Wayfinding — monthly open studios on Zoom, workshop recordings, a private chat space, and creative practices like this delivered to your inbox along with my monthly Life Lessons essays and members-only practices.

Subscribe now

Go deeper — workshops à la carte and 1:1 therapeutic practice series are available through the shop.

1:1 Therapeutic Arts Program

Make a Donation & Feed My Cats

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

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

So, this time, I cheated. A little. On purpose.

I started with something familiar before I moved into something unfamiliar. I built a floor I could stand on before I pushed anything. And what happened when I layered the unfamiliar on top of the familiar turned out to be more interesting than either one alone.

That’s what this practice is about — not eliminating the boundary between comfort and discomfort but working right at the edge of it. The place where one thing bleeds into another and you get something new.

ENERGY RATING: 4

Shapes Part 2

If you’re just joining us, this is Part 2 of the Shape series. In the first practice, we made a shape journal and a simple collage to explore what boundaries look like visually — the shapes we hold, the ones imposed on us, and the secondary shapes that emerge in the space between two boundaries. This practice builds on that directly, so it’s worth watching or reading Part 1 first.

[ADD LINK TO SHAPES 1 — SUBSTACK AND YOUTUBE]

A note on composition

You may notice as you work with shapes and collage that you start making decisions beyond just what shapes to use — like where to place them, how they relate to each other, which ones come forward and which ones recede. That’s composition: the intentional arrangement of visual elements in space.

Composition is a full visual language element on its own and we’ll give it its own practice later. For now, think of it as the moment when you stop placing shapes randomly and start noticing relationships. When you move something because it feels wrong where it is. That instinct is composition. Follow it. It’s part of your visual language.

SUPPLIES

For the check-In

• Pencil

• Marker or crayon

• Shape journal from Shapes 1, or a fresh piece of copy paper

For the creative practice

• Pencil

• Found paper in neutral colors that has a pattern or text on it: old maps, magazines, junk mail, the inside of security envelopes, old book pages

• Colored paper: solid colored paper like construction paper or colored copy paper. You can also use any emotional paintings that you may have done. Any paper that is in contrast to the found paper you will use in the background.

• Scissors or Xacto knife

• Glue or glue stick

• Sketchbook or art journal

If you need supplies, please consider purchasing from my affiliate links. I may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases (at no cost to you).

Blick Art Supplies

• Collage: visit the list

THE PRACTICE

Check-in: Shape journal

Open your shape journal to a blank box — or draw one on copy paper.

Draw a shape that represents your most annoying symptom right now. Not a literal image of it. Just the shape it has in your body or your day. Don’t deliberate. Let your hand make the call.

If you’ve been around for a while, you know mine is brain fog, but that is followed closely by post exertion malaise or PEM. My PEM shape is a blob. If I were working in form instead of shape, that blob would be horizontal on a sofa. You know the one.

Create

Step 1: Build your floor

Draw a rectangle on your sketchbook page and mark the edges with painter’s tape if you have it. Working within a defined boundary — a frame — can make starting easier. It’s also a way of saying: this is where the work lives. Work small if your energy calls for it. A 5x7 space is plenty.

Using your found papers, collage a background that fills the rectangle. Tear or cut the papers and layer them until the background feels full. This doesn’t need to be precious. Think of it as putting together a puzzle made from torn paper — each piece with its own edges, its own text or pattern, its own weight.

This is familiar territory for me. Ripping paper, building layers, responding to what’s already there. It’s where I start most of my work. And starting there made the next step possible.

Step 2: Audition your shapes

From your shape journal or colored paper, draw and cut out several shapes. Pull from the shapes you already know — the ones from your library — or make new ones. Cut the negative space too if it interests you; the hole left behind is its own shape.

Now lay your cut shapes onto the collaged background without gluing anything yet. Move them around. Let them overlap each other and the background. Slide them to the edges, into the center, on top of each other.

This is auditioning, not committing. You’re noticing relationships before you decide anything.

Step 3: Notice what’s happening

As you move shapes around, pay attention to a few things:

Where shapes overlap the background, boundaries blur — the edge of your cut shape is still there, but it’s in conversation with the text or pattern underneath. One boundary doesn’t erase the other. They negotiate.

Where shapes overlap each other, you get depth. Something comes forward, something recedes. A new boundary forms at the overlap — a secondary shape you didn’t cut, one that appeared in the relationship between two things you did.

Where shapes leave gaps between them, secondary shapes appear in the negative space. These are the in-between zones. The territory that nobody drew, that emerged anyway.

Respond to what you see. Cut more shapes if you need them. I went for a walk midway through and came back with shapes I’d borrowed from vines and moss. The practice doesn’t have to stay at the table.

Step 4: Compose and commit

When the arrangement starts to feel right — or at least interesting — glue things down. You don’t need resolution. You need enough to work with.

As you finalize placement, you’re making compositional decisions: which shapes come forward, which sink back, where the eye travels, what gets emphasized. Composition is just intentionality about relationships. You’ve been doing it already.

REFLECTION

Before you reflect, just look at what you made.

Which boundaries in your collage feel chosen — and which ones appeared without your planning them?

When two of your shapes overlap, what happens at the edge? Does one dominate, or do they negotiate?

With chronic illness, we often have to get comfortable operating at the edge of our capacity — not pushing past it, but not shrinking from it either. What did this practice tell you about where your edge is today?

What stories do you tell yourself that create boundaries you didn’t consciously choose?

Conversation

Here’s what I noticed: starting with the collaged background wasn’t cheating. It was scaffolding.

The familiar underneath made the unfamiliar on top possible. I wasn’t abandoning my way of working — I was using it as the floor I stood on while I tried something I wouldn’t normally do. That’s a different thing than starting from scratch and hoping for the best.

Once the shapes went down over the collaged background, something shifted. The cut shapes — with their declared edges — started blurring those edges the moment they landed on the layered paper beneath. The boundary of a shape is absolute when it’s sitting on white paper. Put it over a map fragment, patterned paper and a music score, and suddenly it’s in conversation with three other sets of edges simultaneously. It doesn’t disappear. It just gets more complicated.

And where shapes overlapped each other, something new appeared in that overlap. Not the first shape, not the second — the relationship between them. A secondary shape with its own boundary, one I didn’t draw or plan.

I kept thinking about the secondary shapes as the spaces where the rules haven’t been written yet. The places between established boundaries where there’s still room to maneuver. With chronic illness, so much of what we navigate is already bounded — by diagnosis, by capacity, by what other people think is possible for us. By what we think is possible for us. The secondary shapes are the spaces that aren’t claimed. Nobody’s labeled them yet.

The composition — where I placed things, what I let overlap, what I kept separate — was its own act of boundary-setting. Intentional this time. Chosen.

Check out

Add one more shape to your shape journal: the shape of your energy right now. Not representational. Just the shape it has.

Until Next Time

Next up in the Shape series: postcards. Cut shapes, small scale, something you can actually send someone. A different kind of boundary — the edge of a card, the distance between people.

Where are the edges you’re curious about pushing — in your practice or somewhere else?

Keep on your crooked path

Share Crooked Path Studios

Crooked Path Studios is completely community supported. Here’s how you can be part of it.

Join Wayfinding — monthly open studios on Zoom, workshops, a private chat space, and members-only creative practices delivered to your inbox along with my monthly Life Lessons essays.

Subscribe now

Go deeper — workshops à la carte and 1:1 therapeutic practice series are available through the shop.

1:1 THERAPEUTIC ARTS PROGRAM

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

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

An edge is a boundary — where one thing ends and another begins. A circle doesn’t bleed into the background. A triangle holds its corners. Even an organic shape, irregular and uneven, still has a line that says: this is where I stop.

That’s also what makes boundaries hard. They require you to declare an edge. To say out loud, or at least to yourself: this is where I stop.

With chronic illness, boundaries operate on two levels simultaneously. There are the ones we choose — pacing, saying no, keeping distance from people who cost us energy we don’t have, listening to our bodies when they say “I’m done.” And then there are the ones imposed on us: labels, assumptions, the invisible line a diagnosis draws around what other people think you’re capable of. Those boundaries didn’t ask our permission.

In this practice, we’re using shape to look at both kinds.

ENERGY RATING: 3

Shape, Form & Space

We’re exploring shape, form, and space across the next few practices as part of building our own visual language.

In art, these words have specific meanings. Shape is two-dimensional — it has height and width but no depth. It’s flat and defined by its outline. Shapes can be geometric (circle, square, triangle) — precise, nameable, mathematically describable. Or they can be organic (irregular, uneven, curved or angular), no official name but often suggestive of something.

Free Motion Drawing

Slow Drawing

Form is shape’s three-dimensional cousin — it has volume, depth, and weight. A circle drawn on paper is a shape. Add shading and a shadow and it becomes a sphere. Form can be literal (sculpture, clay, stuffed animals) or illusory (a drawing that creates the sense of three dimensions through light and shadow). ’s drawings are a great example here on Substack.

Space is the area within, around, and between shapes and forms. Positive space is what you made — the shape itself. Negative space is everything around it. Both matter. The relationship between them is where things get interesting.

Shapes create boundaries. And when two shapes meet, they create something new in the space between them — a secondary shape, an edge neither one planned. That’s the territory we’re working in today.

SUPPLIES

For the check-in, you will need:

• Pencil

• Marker, colored pencils or crayon (whatever you feel comfortable coloring with)

• Paper: copy paper

For the practice, you will need:

• Pencil

• Colored paper: multicolored copy paper, old maps, magazines, construction paper, emotional paintings, old drawings or paintings, security envelopes

• Scissors or exacto knife

• Glue or glue stick

• Sketchbook or art journal

If you need supplies, please consider purchasing from my affiliate links. I may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases (at no cost to you).

Blick Art Supplies

• Collage: visit the list

Amazon List

Crooked Path Studios Amazon Supply List

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THE PRACTICE

Check-in: Shape journal

Take a piece of copy paper and divide it into a grid — roughly 20 to 25 small boxes. Draw a shape in each box, whatever comes first, and color it in. Mix geometric and organic. Don’t deliberate. Let your hand lead.

This becomes the first page of your shape journal — a reference and starting point for your visual language. You can make more pages whenever you want, or carry a blank one with you through the day.

When you’re done, look at what you made. Notice which shapes you were drawn to. Whether one keeps repeating. Notice the shapes you colored — that’s positive space. Notice the white areas around and between them — that’s negative space. Those are your inside and outside boundaries, already there in what you made.

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Create

Pick two or three shapes from your journal that feel like they represent a boundary in your life. Maybe one you’ve chosen — something you hold to protect your energy or wellbeing. Maybe one that was placed on you, a label or assumption that doesn’t quite fit. Maybe one that’s medically imposed, something that shifts depending on what your body is doing that week.

Using your colored paper, draw these shapes in whatever sizes feel right. Cut them out.

Now you have two things: the shapes you cut, and the paper they came from. Both matter. The cut shapes are positive space — your declared boundaries. The holes left behind are negative space, the shape of what’s absent.

Arrange the cut shapes in your sketchbook. Overlap them or set them side by side. As you place them, notice what forms in the white areas between them. Those in-between zones — the spaces created by two boundaries meeting — are secondary shapes. They weren’t planned. They emerged from the relationship.

That space between two boundaries is its own territory. It has its own edges. And it’s worth looking at.

Notice the contrasts in what you’ve made. Some shapes may have sharp points or spikes — those might be the boundaries that cost you something to hold. Others may have rounder, more fluid edges. Some may have holes cut through them — a boundary within a boundary, layers you didn’t choose and can’t fully control.

Reflection

So let’s reflect on our shapes and our boundaries. Look at what you’ve made before you name it.

What boundaries do you want to hold — and which ones are you ready to push?

Which boundaries were placed on you by others, and how well do they actually fit?

What do you notice in the secondary shapes — the space that formed between your boundaries? What could happen in this space?

Conversation

I have colleagues who are genuinely good at setting hard boundaries. Clean edges, clear limits, no negotiation. I admire this. I have watched them do it for years and I still don’t fully understand how.

What I do know is that I don’t work that way — in life or in art.

I don’t start with shapes in my creative practice. I begin with color, gesture, torn paper, layers. Shapes emerge from that process — from blurring foreground and background, from what’s left when I step back. Or I add them at the end, after everything else has found its place. The one exception is my improv quilting, where I’m working with cut shapes from the start.

So when I set up this practice and started cutting shapes, I quickly became frustrated. More than I expected. It took me a while to understand why.

Cutting a shape forces you to commit to an edge before you know what you’re making. You decide where the boundary is before the work tells you. That’s not how I move through the world, and apparently, it’s not how I make art either. I come to edges from the inside out, not the outside in.

I took a few collage and Gelli printing classes over the past couple of years. All of them started with cutting shapes. All of them frustrated me in the same way, and I never quite figured out why until now.

The frustration is information. It’s telling me something about how I relate to defined edges — in my creative practice and probably elsewhere.

Now look at the finished collage. My intuition is still in this work, even though the process felt foreign. Those coral shapes are cut, but they move the way I move — loose, organic, reaching. The scissors followed something. And the white space isn’t neutral. It never was. The secondary shapes in the white — the zones between the coral and the green — are as visually active as the cut shapes themselves. That’s three layers of shape happening simultaneously: the green, the coral, and the white forms that appeared in the relationship between them. A few of the shapes from my library also have holes cut into them, including two of the coral pieces here. A boundary inside a boundary — a shape that declares its own interior edge. I tried adding slow drawing into the white space during the process. It flattened everything immediately. The white was already doing something, and the line competed with it rather than adding to it. That was its own piece of information: sometimes the space between boundaries is already full. You just can’t see it yet.

What surprised me more was what happened once I started placing the cut shapes on the page. The secondary shapes. The space created between two boundaries, the areas that weren’t part of either shape but were formed by both of them. That’s the part I couldn’t stop looking at — not the shapes I made, but the new edges that appeared in the relationships between them.

That’s where I want to keep working.

Check out

For our checkout, we are going to draw the shape our energy has today.

In your shape journal, find a blank box and draw the shape of your energy right now. Not a representational image — just the shape of it. In two dimensions.

Mine had a spiral shape.

Until Next Time

The next shapes practice is going to be different. I’m going to try to bring my way of starting — gesture, color, torn paper — into the same space as cut shapes and see what happens when those two approaches meet. Where are the edges you’re curious about pushing — in your practice or somewhere else? That’s where we’re going in our next shapes practice.

Keep on your crooked path

Share Crooked Path Studios

Crooked Path Studios is completely community supported. Here’s how you can be part of it.

Join Wayfinding — monthly open studios on Zoom, workshops, a private chat space, and members-only creative practices delivered to your inbox along with my monthly Life Lessons essays.

Subscribe now

Go deeper — workshops à la carte and 1:1 therapeutic practice series are available through the shop.

1:1 Therapeutic Arts Program

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

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

He walked over, hand out, friendly smile — the way you greet a stranger at a family gathering. “Hi, I’m Richard. How do you know Kim?”

I looked at him for a second. Then said, “Hi, I’m Kelly. Your oldest daughter. I’ve known Kim since the day she was born.”

Everyone standing around us burst out laughing. I’d said it the way you’d deliver a punchline, which it kind of was. He laughed too, that relieved laugh when you realize what just happened. And then his face changed.

“You look really sick. What kind of cancer is it?”

I had lost 90 pounds in eight months. Everyone assumed it was cancer, even my doctors. Because when a 53-year-old woman loses roughly eleven pounds a month without trying, there is exactly one story most people tell about that—cancer. Turns out, it was another rare, hard to explain chronic illness.

The Alarming Symptom

My new internist asked me a question at our first appointment that nobody had asked before.

Not what are your symptoms. Not how long has this been going on. She asked: “Which symptom are you most concerned about?”

Not annoyed by but concerned about.

The answer was the unexplained weight loss.

In September of 2018, I weighed 215 pounds on a five-foot seven-inch frame. I was obese by all standards. Eight months later at the cookout, I weighed 125. My exact weight in high school. Every menopausal woman is told the belly fat is coming and there’s not much you can do about it. This was not that; weight loss was not a goal. This was my body eating itself and nobody being able to tell me why.

My body changed in stages. Throughout the fall, I tightened my belt, then tightened it again. My tops went from fitted to draping off my shoulders. My wide calf boots bought specifically for my wider legs now slipped loose at my ankles. My wedding rings slid off my fingers. And my face, which had become full as I gained weight over the previous twenty years, was returning to its sharp, angular shape. I knew it was time to buy new clothes when my belt holding up my pants slid to the floor. I went from an XXL/18W to a medium in two months. When I held up an old pair of pants next to new ones, there was room for two people in the old pair.

By December, I had the MCAS diagnosis and started cromolyn sodium. I was reintroducing low histamine foods with the support of a nutritionist. I was not exercising because I couldn’t: the post-exertion malaise (PEM) was severe enough that exercise other than walking to the mailbox would put me down for days.

And still: ten pounds a month.

My new team of doctors wanted data and recommended a calorie counting app. I set a goal of 1800 calories a day and I was hitting it, sometimes exceeding it, with the help of my nutritionist. I brought the graphs to appointments — neat, color-coded, dated. Some doctors looked past them. I could feel myself being labeled, that particular dismissal reserved for patients who come in too prepared, who have done too much homework. But this was data they asked for, and I was a data person. The graphs said what they said.

And the weight kept dropping.

Cancer Would be a Relief

My dermatologist was the one who said it plainly, “Have they checked you for cancer?”

“Yes,” I told her. “That diagnosis would be a relief compared to not knowing.”

I heard myself say it and knew it was true. There’s something that happens when you’ve been symptomatic and undiagnosed long enough — when every test comes back normal and you can feel doctors quietly categorizing you as a problem to be managed rather than a patient who needs care. You start to understand that the medical system needs a name for what you have, or you don’t really exist inside it. Cancer has a name, it’s something people recognize at a cookout.

Not fitting into any of the medical boxes means you are, in a specific and terrible way, unknowable. And being unknowable means you get set aside.

So yes: I had started to hope for a diagnosis that terrified me, because at least it would make me medically real—knowable.

Several cancer tests had already come back negative before I was diagnosed with MCAS. So, first team of doctors had stopped testing.

When I told my new internist I was most concerned about unexplained weight loss was the most disconcerting, she said, “We’re looking for the rare and the weird.” And got to work. She thought it might be a rare type of neurological cancer because despite the cromolyn, most of my neurological symptoms continued. She ordered an MRI with contrast dye and a nuclear medicine scan of my chest. She sent me to a neurologist who specialized in rare neuro cancers.

In March, I did the MCAS prep for contrast dyes—a week of prednisone. Then the prep for the nuclear medicine scan—another week of prednisone. The neurologist was frank, “Your doctor sent you to me because she thinks you have a rare cancer.” I like frank doctors.

We Found Something

I was at home working when the calls started coming in.

The first call was from the doctor reading my nuclear medicine results. He told me they had found something. That my lungs, my lymph nodes, and my liver had all “lit up like a Christmas tree.”

They found something.

About twenty minutes later my internist called. She was scheduling me with the pulmonology clinic at the university.

Twenty minutes after that, my neurologist called. “It doesn’t look like cancer,” he said. “But it could be Sarcoidosis and possibly neurosarc.”

Three doctors. Sixty minutes. We found something. Each with some excitement in their voice, happy to have solved a mystery.

I cried. Not from fear — from relief. Pure, overwhelming relief. After nine months of every test coming back normal, not being believed, and wishing for cancer: something was there. Something real that you could see on a scan. Something knowable. I began researching Sarcoidosis.

The pulmonologist was cautious about jumping to conclusions and preferred to confirm anything through a lung biopsy. My bronchoscopy was scheduled at the university hospital. I have never been so excited for a surgery.

The nurse came in to give me the line and asked if I had any allergies. I said I had MCAS. She nodded and mentioned, almost in passing, that I was her third MCAS patient that week — then suggested we skip the numbing agent, since the agent itself can trigger a reaction in MCAS patients. She knew. Without me explaining. Without me advocating. She just knew.

Her. third. MCAS patient.

I don’t know if she understood what that meant to me. To be in a room where my condition was ordinary — where the nurses knew the protocols by heart because they saw this regularly — was a specific kind of relief I hadn’t known I needed. This is what a research hospital does, I thought. This is why it matters.

She put the line in without any numbing agent.

After the procedure, when I was coming out of anesthesia, they told me the biopsies had confirmed Sarcoidosis. Three organs: lungs, lymph nodes, and liver.

Sarcoidosis (Sar-koi-dosis)

Sarcoidosis is another inflammatory disease where your immune system overreacts. The result is lumps of white blood cells called granulomas that can develop anywhere on the body, most often the lungs and lymph nodes. This is your immune system trying to protect you from something by smothering it with white blood cells that calcify. If the granulomas are big enough, they can cause fibrosis and permanent damage to an organ.

Because Sarcoidosis can appear anywhere on the body, some of the symptoms overlap with MCAS: fatigue, joint pain, muscle weakness, shortness of breath, blurry vision, red swollen eyes, irregular heartbeat, and heart palpitations. I had all of those. But a few symptoms are unique to Sarc, like unexplained weight loss. Extremely swollen lymph nodes is another. Most days my arm pits were so bruised from the swelling it looked like someone punched me and I could not move my arms. Several of my neurological symptoms could not be explained by MCAS—the weak facial muscles and random palsy and, apparently, the increased thirst and frequent trips to the bathroom.

Sarc is more common in women and certain ethnic groups, especially African Americans, northern Europeans, and Puerto Ricans. African American women represent the highest risk group. You are at higher risk of getting Sarcoidosis if you work in environments exposing you to dust, mold, and chemicals. You would think that would limit the risk to people working in agriculture, manufacturing or construction. But people working in healthcare, teaching, and offices are also at high risk (my money is on the mold). The World Trade Center first responders are the highest risk occupational group ever studied. First responders (and dogs) working on the debris pile have 4 times the expected rate of sarcoidosis. This provided evidence supporting the theory that genetically susceptible people develop sarcoidosis after exposure to environmental or occupational triggers.

A few days after my bronchoscopy, I checked the pathology report on my biopsies. It showed the biopsies had been tested for mold. Quietly without any announcement. The institution that finally believed me had tested for the thing previous doctors had dismissed as impossible. But it wasn’t.

The Sarcoidosis clinic at the university scheduled of string of new appointments and tests. My neurologist called to schedule some MRIs for neurosarcoidosis testing. Neurosarc was never confirmed on the scans. My neurologist called it para-sarcoid syndrome—when you have all the symptoms, but they can’t find anything in the MRIs. I get scanned every other year now just to make sure.

Again, I almost fit into the medical box. Almost.

And Then

That’s two rare diseases diagnosed in less than a year, if you’re keeping track. I knew how lucky I was and felt like I had a way forward.

That changed in the weeks that followed.

I had been working from home the entire time I’d been sick, starting in September. Every report delivered on time, accurate, and every deadline met. I had helped ten faculty members win grants using institutional data I’d identified for them. The illnesses were invisible to my employer because I had made them invisible. I showed up in every way that counted except physically, and nobody had asked me to do otherwise.

After the Sarcoidosis diagnosis, I sent a letter informing my employer that I had been diagnosed with a second rare disease and formally requested accommodations.

They responded by demanding I “return to work in the office.” No accommodations would be considered. I was instructed to report in person by July 1st — about a month away — or consider myself terminated.

My doctors had told me to reduce my stress. And my employer had just told me: show up or get out.

I had a different plan.

Visit the Foundation for Sarcoidosis Research to learn more and help find a cure.

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Watch the Practice

Like last time, we’ll be drawing slowly. The slower you draw, the more information your hand gets and the more space opens up internally for everything else.

Today we’re getting our inspiration from Amy Maricle’s slow drawing practice, plus one I made up. Unlike the free motion drawings, these drawings are more contained. They are not designed to repeat across a surface but to stay in a small space.

What is Slow Drawing

This mindful drawing technique draws from the work of Amy Maricle of Mindful Art Studio, whose book Draw Yourself Calm and YouTube channel I’ve been working through to build my own sampler pages.

Slow drawing as a practice — drawing lines very slowly to create simplified, nature-inspired motifs — appears across multiple artists and traditions. Amy’s work is where I landed, and I keep coming back to it.

No surprise, I’m drawn to the more abstract motifs. But I learn something from each of them.

Like the free motion drawings, these translate well into altered books, art journals, collage, cards, and other mixed media work. This is one of the ways I’ve been extending my own visual language recently.

Supplies

For the Check-in and Practice:

• A fine tipped pen or marker (for example .02, .03)

• Paper: copy paper, cardstock, watercolor paper or a sketchbook

If you need supplies, please consider purchasing from one of my affiliate links. I may earn a small commission (at no cost to you) from qualifying purchases.

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• Mark Making: visit the Mark Making list and look for black pens like Sakura or Blick Studio Pigment Liners

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The Practice

Check-in

We’re going to draw our breathing today.

Square breathing has four steps: inhale, hold, exhale, and hold — each to a count of four. If you have lung complications from your chronic illness, hold each step for two counts instead. I worked my way up to four counts, and on a flare day I go back to two.

I invite you to practice the breathing once or twice before we add the drawing:

• Inhale, 2, 3, 4

• Hold, 2, 3, 4

• Exhale, 2, 3, 4

• Hold, 2, 3, 4

Now, using a marker and your paper, make a continuous line that mirrors your inhale, your hold, your exhale, and your hold. Keep your pen moving as you breathe.

Notice the lines you’re making and whether any patterns are forming. My overlapping lines created a secondary pattern that had a 1950s mod feeling to it.

Create

Today I’m demonstrating four motifs from Amy’s slow drawing practice plus one I made up. Because this is her work, I’m only doing four. If you like doing these kinds of drawings, I encourage you to visit her YouTube channel for more. She also offers a free class every Wednesday at 1pm ET.

To get started, divide your paper into 2x3” or 3x4” sections. Working small keeps these drawings manageable and makes them usable in other work.

All five motifs are built from the same basic marks: dots, circles, straight lines, curved lines. Once you know these, the patterns follow.

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Dot

The dot is the most basic mark. It’s where a line begins. Dots draw and hold our attention and can be surprisingly powerful in a composition.

1. Begin by making some dots in your small square. Group some close together and others far apart.

2. Notice what happens when dots cluster densely in one area and then spread out.

3. See if you can create a shape or rhythm just by varying the density of the dots.

Whatever shape starts to emerge, go with it.

Cloth

This motif looks like a torn piece of cloth or mesh screen. Cloth has a warp and a weft— vertical and horizontal threads that create the weave. Look at your own clothes for a moment and notice the weave.

1. Decide where you want the tear or hole to be in your small square.

2. Draw the vertical lines of the weave first, stopping where the tear or hole will be in your cloth.

3. When you are done with the vertical lines, turn your paper or sketchbook 90 degrees.

4. Begin to draw the horizontal lines (they will be vertical now; it is easier to draw vertical lines that horizontal).

Edge

Edge is one of the most dramatic and most straightforward of the motifs. You’re echoing a line and letting it follow its own curve, which creates depth, space, and texture.

1. Draw a jagged line diagonally across one of your small squares. It should have peaks and valleys.

2. From each valley, draw a line down to the edge of the square. These lines should not converge in one spot. We are dividing up the drawing into its natural shape.

3. Starting at any of those lines, draw another line next to that one.

4. Keep echoing these lines as you make your way to the next valley and another line.

5. Follow any natural curves that happen. It’s OK if some of the lines go over top of each other. It will create a natural fold like in fabric.

Nook

This is a cluster of circles that expands outward with gaps or empty spaces — almost like foam or bubbles.

1. Start by drawing a small circle.

2. Then draw several more clustered around that first one.

3. Keep expanding your circle mass.

4. To create a hole or empty space in your circle mass, draw your circles around the shape you want to leave empty. It doesn’t have to be a circle; it could be an organic shape.

You don’t have to fill the entire small square. Your circle mass can be small or only take up a part of the square.

Create Your Own

Combine different lines from these motifs or the Free Motion Drawing from May to create your own design. Break your idea into the basic lines: circles, dots, straight or wavy lines.

If you’re looking for some inspiration, you can check out my Slow Drawing Pinterest board for more motifs.

Pinterest Slow Drawing Board

Technical Note

We started with line, but we didn’t stop there. As lines accumulate, they begin to converge, cross, echo, soften, repeat—and suddenly we’re no longer just drawing lines. We’re working with texture, pattern, repetition, and rhythm. And creating shapes.

These aren’t just formal design concepts. They are also somatic cues for the nervous system to recognize safety, stimulation, predictability, novelty, and flow.

Texture: refers to the surface quality of the mark, paint, or other media, such as density, layered, soft, gritty. But texture is also how these marks feel in the body while making them and when looking at them. Our brains map visual texture onto tactile memory.

Pattern: Pattern is an organized repetition of visual elements—lines, shapes, marks, or textures—that creates structure and continuity. Patterns can be regular and predictable or irregular and evolving. Pattern helps us orient through predictability or notice when that predictability changes to uncertainty.

Repetition: when an element—line, shape, gesture, or mark—is used again and again. It’s one of the primary ways an image builds coherence and emphasis. But it is also a way to soothe and regulate, and allow sensations and meaning to unfold over time.

Rhythm: Rhythm is the sense of movement created by repeated elements with variation—changes in spacing, direction, pressure, or intensity. Rhythm guides the eye the way a beat guides music. Visually, it guides the eye. Somatically, it reflects pace, breath, and the body’s sense of flow or strain.

Shape: refers to two-dimensional art specifically and emerges when lines enclose space. Visually, it creates form and boundary. Somatically, shape relates to containment—how the body senses edges, support, and where one thing ends and another begins.

A visual language is, at its core, a conversation between your hand, your eye, and your body.

Reflection

Let’s take a step back from our work and reflect on the process.

Which pattern held your attention? The one where you lost track of time.

Losing track of time means you’re in flow — and that’s where the processing happens: memories, experiences, identity.

What memories or ideas came up for you while you were drawing? How did drawing help you connect memories, ideas, and maybe a new sense of self?

How might slow drawing be helpful during the day? Maybe a waiting room, a long afternoon at work, or a flare?

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Conversation

Flow is a state of complete absorption. The psychological researcher Mihály Csíkszentmihályi spent decades studying it, beginning with painters who forgot to eat while they worked. In flow, time disappears, self-consciousness drops, and action and awareness merge. The hand moves intuitively or from memory without waiting for the brain to direct it. The default mode network (DMN) — the part of the brain that processes memory, meaning, and identity — activates. You’re not thinking. You’re making, and the making is doing something else underneath.

Slow drawing opens that door. What walks through isn’t sorted by category or weight.

During filming, two memories walked through for me. One was from the early days after my diagnosis — new challenges I hadn’t anticipated, and the friends who showed up not with casseroles but with legal strategy and transportation. The second was a foster dog, a misread cat, and a screened porch that didn’t survive the misunderstanding. One memory carried grief and gratitude in the same breath. The other made me laugh out loud in an empty studio.

Flow doesn’t sort memories or identities.

What I didn’t share in the video is why I started fostering animals in the first place. In 2024 I began working with Green Dogs Unleashed a rescue that specializes in special needs animals — blind, deaf, medically complex, traumatized, shut down. I work mostly with the traumatized and shut down ones. The ones that arrive frozen, unable to move or look you in the eye. Their world is very small because, to them, the world is not safe.

Chronic illness has a way of shrinking your world too. Not always dramatically — sometimes just incrementally, one cancelled plan at a time, until you look up and realize your local connections have quietly thinned. Fostering was a deliberate choice about what kind of life I was going to build with this changed body. Something that fit within my capacity.

You can’t rush a shutdown animal. You sit with them. They set the pace. And I know a thing or two about pacing. You wait for the moment they come to you, walking across the room, pushing their head into your hand, asking to be petted. And then their personality starts to come out. You see their joyful, loving self as their world gets bigger.

I recognize that negotiation.

Check out

As we did with the Free Motion Drawing, I invite you to add these motifs to the hand drawing we started in the last practice. If you finished that or didn’t start that drawing, trace your other hand and use these motifs.

Take it with you. A sketchbook and a pen go anywhere.

Until Next Time

Slow drawing is one way to build your visual language — through repetition, body memory, and letting the hand lead. Through flow state. The motifs are simple. What surfaces while you draw them is not always.

If you’re part of the Crooked Path Studios community on Substack, I invite you to share your work in the chat. It’s a reflective sharing space — we recognize each other and our creative practices here, not a critique space. We create in community because that’s one way to push back against the isolation that chronic illness builds around us.

If you’re not yet part of the community, come find us.

Until next time, stay on your crooked path

Crooked Path Studios is completely community supported. Here’s how you be part of it.

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The room smelled of hand sanitizer and bleach, aggravating my hypersensitive sense of smell—one of the new symptoms. I also couldn’t taste anything (this was two years before COVID). I had a constant tingling and nerve pain across my scalp and face. Periodically one side of my face would go numb and not move for a few hours. My vision was blurry even with my glasses on. I was slurring my words and having trouble swallowing. The racing heart and unpredictable bowels were still happening.

My doctor walked in—white lab coat and colorful four-inch platform heels. I always appreciated her shoe style and marveled at how she could be on her feet all day in them. I described the new symptoms. She said she was going to do some cranial nerve tests. She asked me to take a breath in, puff out my cheeks and hold it. She poked me in the cheeks. They deflated. Her face said that’s not normal. She did it again. Same result. Several other tests produced the same expression—somewhere between consternation and curiosity. She left the room.

From the hallway, I heard someone say, “I thought you said she was faking it.”

To which my doctor replied, “I thought she was, but you can’t fake this.”

She came back with a nurse and ran the tests again. Same result. She ordered cranial nerve scans for C1, C2, C7, C10, and C12.

Of course, I researched what each cranial nerve governs when I got home. My symptoms mapped precisely to the five cranial nerves scheduled for scans.

The cranial scans came back negative.

Once again, I was faking it.

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All the Fake Symptoms

When I made that third appointment in September of 2018, I brought a lot into that exam room. Some of what I carried were symptoms I had quietly normalized since childhood and never thought to mention to a doctor. Others were new and frightening and impossible to ignore. Looking back, the two sets were always related. At the time, I had no way to know that.

What I did know was this: I had been told, directly and indirectly, that I could not possibly have all these symptoms. So here they are.

Historical Normal

Growing up, I thought everyone’s body reacted like mine.

As a kid, I would feel sick and exhausted after physical activity, especially if it involved running. I still participated in sports, but ones that didn’t involve running. I did ballet for many years and played on the varsity volleyball and softball teams at school. These activities made me feel like I had the flu, gave me dizzy spells and muscle pain, and fatigue. This would last for the entire season or with ballet for days after a performance. I now believe I’ve had post exertion malaise (PEM) all my life.

I always had three constants in my life. First, my nose ran continuously even though I took antihistamines all year round. Second, I cleared my throat nonstop all day. It felt scratchy and I sounded hoarse—or sexy depending on your perspective. Third, my eyes watered throughout the day to the point that it looked like I was crying all the time.

I have always been able to write on my skin with my finger (dermatographia). I thought it was just another facet of having fair skin like being prone to rashes, rosacea, and sunburn. I had angioedema even as a skinny teenager —my swollen ankles looked like I was nine months pregnant. Makeup always gave me an itchy face and eyes. After switching brands multiple times, I gave up and stopped wearing it in my thirties.

I was diagnosed with endometriosis in my thirties. Despite the surgery, I continued to experience bloating, cramps, and diarrhea. The bloating was like being pregnant; I even looked pregnant on some days. The cramps were like giving birth and came with diarrhea. In my forties, doctors diagnosed me with acid reflux and GERD but the symptoms continued. Many of these symptoms ended when I stopped eating tomatoes in 2006, an extremely high histamine food as it turns out. I was diagnosed with Meniere’s Disease and tinnitus in my forties. The symptoms were the worst every spring when I had such severe vertigo that I could not get out of bed.

None of these, by themselves, pointed anywhere. Together they were a pattern no doctor had ever assembled.

New and Undeniable

The fall of 2018 was when my body stopped being something I could normalize.

Neurological

The new neurological symptoms were the most frightening. Anxiety seemed more like bouts of rage and hyper-activity—two words no one would ever have used to describe me before this (especially at work). I could not sit still anymore and had to get up and do something mindless every forty-five minutes—pacing or cleaning usually.

My memory and focus were gone, which made work as a researcher impossible. Analysis methods I had used for decades felt foreign and I created check lists for each task of my job. Reading a page in a report, I would forget what I’d read before I reached the bottom.

I could not remember how to get out of a grocery store I had shopped in for years and had to use my GPS to drive locally. But some days I couldn’t remember left from right. By September, I had stopped driving entirely and was working from home.

I had constant jolts of electricity and pain that traveled across my face, scalp, hands, chest, and feet. Every afternoon and after any physical exertion, I would “go comatose”—I could see the world happening around me, I could tell that I was talking, but everything was in a fog. I felt like I was slurring my words. I didn’t remember anything when I came out of it a few hours later.

My friend Megan was with me one afternoon after one of these episodes. I asked her if I had been slurring my words. She said no, but “your eyes go dim, like all the light goes out of them.” My primary care doc with the platform shoes was not concerned.

Respiratory

In the fall of 2018, walking a few feet required me to sit down and catch my breath, which was more like panting and wheezing for five or ten minutes. I had never been out of breath like this in my life. Despite my obesity at the time I was still in pretty good shape. But I could not walk five feet from the living room to the kitchen without needing a rest afterward (and I might “go comatose”). My throat swelled a few times a week, usually when I was the furthest away from a medical facility or alone.

Gastrointestinal

I was having new food intolerances—not allergies according to several allergists and their prickly tests. Some foods sent me to the hospital in anaphylaxis even though I wasn’t allergic to them, while others made the brain fog worse or intensified the feeling of glass shards in my joints. The list of foods I could tolerate was getting shorter and eventually consisted of six foods.

Cardiovascular

Many days I thought I was having a heart attack; the tachycardia was so intense. These episodes usually happened at 3:00am and came with a sense of impending doom (neurological symptom). The rapid heart rate and chest pain would be followed by extremely low blood pressure leading to lightheadedness and fainting. I had never experienced this before. In fact, I’d had the opposite problem—high blood pressure because of my obesity. But by September, nurses were asking me if I was still breathing because my BP was 88/56 regularly.

Skin, Musculoskeletal, Ocular, Otologic and General

New skin issues began, including hot, red patches and streaks on my legs and arms, and I itched constantly despite all my antihistamines. My joints felt like glass shards were going through them most of the time. My vision was blurry even with my glasses on and my eyes were dry, scratchy and sensitive to light even while watering constantly. The tinnitus was so loud I could not hear, while vertigo happened while sitting still. I grabbed my desk frequently to keep the room from spinning. Vertigo while driving was the other reason I stopped driving.

Because I was 53, hot flashes were a regular occurrence. But so were cold flashes. I would suddenly get so chilled and shivering would reach for a fleece jacket in August in one-hundred-degree weather.

Extreme fatigue is not the kind of tiredness you get from doing a hard day’s work—that goes away with rest. I know that fatigue. This was different—a clinical condition that doesn’t resolve no matter how much rest you get. And fatigue that comes on even if you haven’t exerted yourself. A fatigue that makes moving hurt in your bones if you can move at all.

I was losing weight faster than made sense even for someone who couldn’t exercise and was eating only six foods. On my first emergency room visit in August 2018, I weighed 215 pounds. By December 2018, I was 154 pounds. That’s 28% if you’re doing the math. I started tracking calories in an app because a doctor had used the word anorexia. A psychological condition.

Caregiving and Appointments

By the time Magda arrived, I couldn’t drive. I’d described what was happening in a text a few weeks before. She asked one question after the first text, “Do you need me to come?” I thought about it for twenty-four hours before I said yes. Magda is a friend from high school who lives in Germany.

I gave her a huge hug when she got out of her car and then nearly fainted because of the dryer sheet smell. Scents had become a major trigger: grass, dryer sheets, cleaners, citrus, perfumes. All had the capacity to make me faint. We immediately washed every piece of clothing she’d brought using my unscented detergent and then we went straight to a doctor’s appointment. She took notes during the appointment; something she continued to do for the next three months. We came home with a large plastic “hat” and an orange container for a 24-hour urine test. Magda looked at the container, looked at the fridge, and true to form, said something snarky that made us both laugh for five minutes. It was the first time I had laughed in weeks.

Magda lived with my husband and I for three months. She drove me to every doctor’s appointment, took notes, and reviewed them with me when we got home. She cooked for my husband and herself, cleaned my house, helped with the laundry, made Thanksgiving dinner, and became best friends with our most ornery cat, Nutmeg. She asked some hard questions about the future and kept me laughing at the same time. She was also witness to the gaslighting.

It’s Just Menopause

Several allergists told me it was just menopause. Natural. Nothing to be done. Many MCAS symptoms overlap with menopause symptoms, I had enough that didn’t. Every time this happened, Magda had some fiery phrases about malfunctioning men’s penises being natural so why do we need Viagra.

Tests and More Tests

That October, I was checked for asthma, alpha gal, Lyme, eosinophil esophagitis, ANA autoimmune tests, rheumatoid factor and anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide test, Sjogren’s, several forms of cancer, and the list goes on. Magda and I were regulars at the 6am opening of the lab thirty minutes from my house where I was jabbed for a blood draw twice a week. The only tests that came back “abnormal” were the inflammatory marker tests. Everything else was borderline. All my CT scans came back normal too.

The MCAS Specialist

My primary care physician, the one in the four-inch platform shoes, referred me to an MCAS specialist at a university hospital two hours away. I thought finally, I’ll get a diagnosis. We drove two hours then waited an hour. He spent five minutes telling me my tryptase levels weren’t high enough to warrant his attention. He left the exam room.

Tryptase is a mast cell mediator—one of those chemicals the cells release when they get excited. And (at the time) it was the main diagnostic criteria for MCAS. I had my tryptase levels tested three times. But this mast cell mediator quickly dissipates in the body, and you must do the blood draw within thirty minutes of a symptom. I live thirty minutes from the testing center. Do the math. The test is notoriously inaccurate even if you meet the time window.

Functional Medicine & Mold

The functional medicine doctor I tried next was the first doctor who believed I could have all these symptoms. She tested me for mold and some other mast cell mediators, not tryptase. These were my first positive tests. She started me on the Neil Nathan protocol outlined in his book Toxic and the low histamine diet, then asked where I had been exposed to mold.

My university office had documented mold every year, and students posted photos on social media of black mold growing on their dorm walls. But I had been working from home since September. I had our house checked. They found mold in the subflooring under the refrigerator—a psychedelic colored mold that I didn’t know was possible. A tiny pinhole in the waterline into the fridge had been leaking for years. The ceiling in the family room under the fridge looked perfectly fine. No stains. But it was spongy to the touch, and the subflooring was about to collapse sending our fridge into the basement.

Magda, my husband, two cats and I moved out for a month while the remediation happened. I couldn’t afford the functional medicine doctor anymore.

A New Team

My brother-in-law is a retired Navy nurse. He called to check in one afternoon and I told him my doctors didn’t believe me. Holding back the tears, I described how it was impacting my life. He said: “When the trust between a patient and a doctor is gone, it is time to find a new doctor.”

One sentence that made the obvious feel permitted.

I reached out to friends for recommendations on new doctors, someone who liked to solve mysteries. A former colleague called me immediately to say she had a connection with the Dean of a different university health system, one closer to my house. She made a call. Within an hour I had an appointment with a midlife gynecologist. I thought we should start with a specialist in menopause and test the “it’s just menopause” theory.

The midlife gynecologist listened to my symptoms and did her own exam and tests. Then said, “No, not all of that is menopause.” She referred me to a nutritionist to help with the low histamine diet, and an immunologist who specialized in MCAS, both at the university.

During our first appointment, the nutritionist asked me if I’d read Neil Nathan’s Toxic. I nearly cried, Magda practically hugged her. Although I had researched the low histamine diet, I needed help figuring out the reintroduction phase— I was down to 6 foods, the elimination phase was done.

The new immunologist did the most detailed patient history I have ever experienced. He asked about my childhood illnesses and symptoms. He told me that it was not normal to feel sick after playing or exercising. Most people cannot write on their skin. My nose should not run all the time, and “sexy voice” was not normal. He asked about my parents and any symptoms they had (my father had a few, now my mother does). He asked about overseas travel. I described every bug I had while working for Peace Corps and USAID—nobody had ever asked me about that. He asked if I was double jointed anywhere—yes, my knees and elbows (like my dad and his brothers).

He interviewed Magda too. She told him this:

“Kelly is not someone who normally asks for help. She is very self-sufficient and believes she can do it all on her own. So, when she asked for help, I came immediately from Germany — because I knew this was serious.”

He concluded I probably had MCAS and a mild form of Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (EDS) then explained the tests for these are very invasive and often inaccurate. His practice was to prescribe cromolyn sodium and if it helped, it would confirm his diagnosis. After a week on the drug, I added five foods back to my diet and could walk to the mailbox without collapsing out of breath.

My brother-in-law had recommended I find an internist that liked to solve mysteries. A neighbor said she had just the doctor, one that was also at the local university. My first appointment was in January 2019. She reviewed all my records then asked me, “Which of your symptoms are impacting your life the most and which ones are you most concerned about?”

Nobody had ever asked me that.

I told her the neurological symptoms had the biggest impact, and I was most concerned about the continued weight loss despite adding foods back to my diet. She replied, “We’re looking for the rare and the weird. What I don’t see in your record are imaging tests with contrast dyes or nuclear medicine scans.” She scheduled those for February and referred me to a neurologist.

The Difference

My MCAS diagnosis took five months. The average is ten years. I strongly advocated for myself and used my network to find a new team. But I also think my new team had a different approach.

They believed something was wrong even when four month’s of labs said otherwise. And they didn’t keep repeating the same labs expecting a different answer.

Instead, they asked a different set of questions—historical and patient-centered.

They were collaborators, not authorities. They were willing to entertain MCAS, even Lyme, because they understood how unreliable the labs are for these diseases. They were willing to be vulnerable by communicating something’s going on here and I don’t know what it is — let’s figure it out together.

That built trust instantly.

The doctors who didn’t believe me trusted their instruments over my body and my experience. When the instruments showed normal results, I became unverifiable. The doctors who believed me trusted my body first — and used their instruments to keep looking. They stayed curious and kept collaborating.

That is not a minor clinical preference. It is the difference between ten years and five months. And it is not a story about exceptional doctors. It is a story about what medicine owes every patient who walks through the door.

December 2018

Magda returned to Germany the first week of December, right after I was diagnosed with MCAS. I still have her notes from every appointment.

By the time she left we could do short walks in my neighborhood and even ventured a slow walk in the woods in a state park. She left before Nutmeg, her new best friend, passed away in January. And before the first appointment with my internist, who did indeed find the rare and the weird a few months later.

To Be Continued

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By drawing them repeatedly, I didn’t have to think about them to quilt them— my hand followed a rhythm. That’s the thing about body memory: the hand knows what the brain has stopped tracking.

Today we’re slowing down and drawing some of those patterns. I call it Free Motion Drawing.

Energy Rating: 2, and this practice is portable.

Free Motion Drawing

Free Motion Drawing is what I call the practice drawings I do before I quilt the pattern onto a quilt. I have filled many sketchbooks with these drawings and usually repurpose them into collage fodder and backgrounds in my mixed media work. Recently, I’ve been appreciating the line quality in them and purposefully drawing them onto mixed media pieces.

Free motion quilting is line drawing with thread across the quilt top. For this machine quilting technique, the needle remains stationary and you move the quilt underneath the needle in all directions to create the motifs and patterns (a.k.a. the drawing). This allows you to draw curves, loops, flowers, swirls and all sorts of line designs with thread in one continuous line drawing.

Free motion drawing helps me build body memory for these patterns. Body memory is a form of implicit memory meaning the memories are unconsciously encoded, stored, and used without awareness. For example, learned motor skills like writing or the flight, fight, or freeze response. Body memory is automatic; it flows from procedural, sensory and emotional information all at once. And it builds self-awareness, emotional regulation, and resiliency to adapt to new experiences.

We won’t be stitching these, but we will be drawing some of my favorite patterns. Here are the ones we’ll draw today:

• Wood grain

• Effervescence

• Leaves

• Ribbon candy

• Flower

Because the dot and the line are the most basic visual elements, they are deeply connected to creating your own visual language through texture, shape, rhythm, pattern, and other principles of design.

Supplies

For the Check in:

• paper: copy paper or a sketchbook

• pencil

• 3 objects you can drop onto your paper ( I used some seashells)

• 1 object you can easily push around your paper (I used a roll of washi tape)

• A scrap piece of paper that you can tear

• Something you can trace around the edges that will fit on your paper (I used a rectangle about 1.5x2”)

• Black marker or brush pen if you have it

For the Practice:

• A fine tipped pen or marker (for example .02, .03)

• Paper: copy paper, cardstock, watercolor paper or a sketchbook

If you need supplies, please consider purchasing from one of my affiliate links. I may earn a small commission (at no cost to you) from qualifying purchases.

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• Mark Making: visit the Mark Making list and look for black pens like Sakura or Blick Studio Pigment Liners

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The Practice

Check-in

Heads up, this check-in could be a practice unto itself. Take your time, explore and be curious, full demonstrations are in the video.

Exploration 1: Pressure

Use your pencil to make dashes and dots on your paper using different levels of pressure. What kind of emotions or energy are these dashes and dots saying to you?

Exploration 2: Movement

Place an object on your paper and push it around with your pencil without letting it fall off. Notice the lines this makes. Notice when it starts to feel like a game.

Exploration 3: Pattern

Pick any shape and repeat it until it fills the page. It could be a letter, a geometric shape, an organic shape. Notice what happens to your attention.

Exploration 4: Shape

Drop three objects onto your paper, trace where they land, then remove them. Does the shape remind you of anything? What happens if you fill the shape in?

Exploration 5: Edges & Contrast

Tear a scrap of paper and place the ragged edge on your page. Make short scratch marks starting on the scrap paper and flowing onto your sketchbook page. Then lift the paper. Reposition and repeat. Notice what the drawing becomes.

Exploration 6: Pressure & Position

Use your brush pen or marker to make lines with different widths by changing the pressure, your grip, and angle. What happens when you hold it at the very end?

Exploration 7: Positive and Negative Space

Trace an object on your page and remove it. The shape inside the line is positive space — leave it blank. Fill the space outside with squiggles or hash marks. Notice what happens to the shape inside.

Create

All five motifs are built from the same basic lines and shapes — once you know these, the patterns follow. Here are the basic lines and shapes:

• Circle

• Curved line

• Loop

• Arch or Tear drop

• Swirl or spiral

Wood Grain

This is a series of curved lines and half tear drop or arc shapes to create a wood grain pattern.

1. Make a gently curved line and stop about halfway down your paper.

2. Now make a half tear drop or arc shape that curves back up that first line but don’t close the tear drop.

3. Make a smaller half tear drop shape that curves back down but don’t close the tear drop—this should look like a squished hook or flattened concentric circle.

4. Now follow the first line you made out to the top of your tear drop. You now have a wood knot.

5. Echo the curved line back down the page. Continue echoing on both sides of your wood knot and adding more wood knots as you like.

Effervescence

This is a series of lines and circles that look like champagne bubbles.

1. Draw a sort of straight line.

2. And then draw some more.

3. Now draw different sized circles over the lines.

Seriously, that’s it. It’ll surprise you.

Ribbon Candy

This can be open or closed and looks like wavey candy cane candy.

1. Draw a backward S.

2. Then mirror that same shape on the other side so you end up with a bulbous U.

3. Then repeat those motions until you find a rhythm and a string of ribbon candy.

To close the ribbon candy, make your lines touch at the top and bottom of each bulb (see photo below and video).

Flower

This looks like a zinnia or marigold.

1. Make a swirl.

2. Then follow that swirl back out to where you started.

3. Now add little arcs along that swirl line.

4. Continue until you reach where you started your swirl.

5. Head back the other way making your small arcs. You can make as many rows of small arcs as you want.

For a single flower, start in the center and swirl outward creating a circle. Then make your rows of little arcs.

Leaves

This looks like a basic leaf and you can fill it with other patterns.

1. Make half an arc.

2. Then make the other half and close it at the top. You should have a squished circle that looks like a leaf.

3. Draw a line down the middle of your leaf.

4. Fill your leaf with other patterns.

As you do these free motion drawings, see what happens when the movement leads and the pencil follows. Notice when you find a rhythm with one of them. Sometimes the practice is just staying with something a little longer than usual to build that body memory.

Technical Note

We started with line, but we didn’t stop there. As lines accumulate, they begin to converge, cross, echo, soften, repeat—and suddenly we’re no longer just drawing lines. We’re working with texture, pattern, repetition, and rhythm.

These aren’t just formal design concepts. They are also somatic cues for the nervous system to recognize safety, stimulation, predictability, novelty, and flow.

Texture: refers to the surface quality of the mark, paint, or other media, such as density, layered, soft, gritty. But texture is also how these marks feel in the body while making them and when looking at them. Our brains map visual texture onto tactile memory.

Pattern: Pattern is an organized repetition of visual elements—lines, shapes, marks, or textures—that creates structure and continuity. Patterns can be regular and predictable or irregular and evolving. Pattern helps us orient through predictability or notice when that predictability changes to uncertainty.

Repetition: when an element—line, shape, gesture, or mark—is used again and again. It’s one of the primary ways an image builds coherence and emphasis. But it is also a way to soothe and regulate and allow sensations and meaning to unfold over time.

Rhythm: Rhythm is the sense of movement created by repeated elements with variation—changes in spacing, direction, pressure, or intensity. Rhythm guides the eye the way a beat guides music. Visually, it guides the eye. Somatically, it reflects pace, breath, and the body’s sense of flow or strain.

A visual language is, at its core, a conversation between your hand, your eye, and your body.

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Reflection

Which of these patterns held your attention when you drew it? The one where you lost track of time while you were doing it.

Losing track of time means you are in flow, and that’s where the processing happens—memories, experiences, and identity.

Conversation

Before I got sick, I sketched these patterns over and over, filling up sketchbooks. That practice built my body memory for them. I could “automatically” draw them on my quilting machine.

After I got sick, this body memory was one of the few things that survived because my hand did all the thinking. The repetition gave me space to reflect, to process emotions and self-regulate. It took a long time before I had the coordination to free motion quilt again. The drawing came first. And the body memory of drawing these connected me to my old self but also let me create a new self.

Since getting sick I have gravitated more toward improv quilting—a form of modern quilting that doesn’t use patterns, rulers, or traditional blocks. But I continue to use these free motion quilting patterns and it’s like one continuous thread from pre illness story to now.

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Check out

I invite you to trace your hand on a page in your sketchbook or copy paper. Then use these Free Motion Drawings and any other doodles or Zentangle-like motifs to fill in your hand.

You can return to this hand drawing whenever you want. This drawing is also portable. A sketchbook and pen fit in most bags.

Until Next Time

Free Motion drawing is one way to build your visual language — through repetition, body memory, and letting the hand lead.

In the next practice, we’re going to slow that down even further. Same principle, different pace.

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

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Lately, on the drive home, I’d feel the roof of my mouth start to expand and tighten. Like my throat decided it was done with the whole open-airway breathing arrangement. Then the hives would start.

Today was one of those days.

I reached for the Benadryl I now kept in my bag and opened it while driving, which is as dangerous as it sounds. I took one without any water. To stay awake—also as dangerous as it sounds—I opened the window and got a hot blast of oven air that is Virginia in August and turned up the radio. I calculated how far I was from the only hospital within three counties, which was almost always too far.

I drove toward it anyway. The nurses knew my name.

When I got home, I typed into Google “suddenly allergic to everything“

Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS) appeared at the top of the search list.

Research Mode

I spent my career as a social scientist, specifically a program evaluator and applied researcher. I had worked for the Peace Corps assessing the impact of programs and then for the Obama administration designing evaluations for girls’ education and violence prevention programs. At the time, I was Director of Institutional Research at a university — data collection, analysis, reporting to state and federal agencies, and providing leadership with evidence-based recommendations to address challenges and opportunities.

Regardless of employer, my job was to hold complexity, find the pattern, and report accurately what the evidence showed, make recommendations, and speak truth to power. I trusted process. I knew what good evidence looked like—both quantitative (numbers) and qualitative (experience) evidence.

I am used to asking research questions and not stopping at the surface level of data.

So when MCAS appeared at the top of that search, I did not close the laptop.

I opened twelve more tabs.

Rabbit Hole

What I learned over the next few hours was this:

Mast cells are part of the immune system. Their job is to protect you — to sound the alarm when something harmful enters the body and to release chemicals that trigger a response. Thousands of chemicals that act as mediators. The most well-known being histamine, cytokines, prostaglandins, leukotrienes, and heparin. In a body working as designed, that system is a defense mechanism. In MCAS, it is an assault mechanism.

When mast cells misfire they release histamine and other mediators in response to things that are not threats: a fragrance, a temperature change, stress, certain foods, friction from tight clothing, a filler ingredient in a medication, sunshine, fluctuation in estrogen, venom (bees, spiders etc.), infections, pain, exercise, something in the air on a particular afternoon that nobody else in the room registers at all.

Basically, anything.

Anyone with an allergy is familiar with anaphylaxis. Mast cells react immediately after you are exposed to the specific allergen causing anaphylaxis (an IgE reaction). But an MCAS reaction can happen cumulatively, over 3 to 72 hours (an IgG reaction), especially for Idiopathic MCAS where there isn’t a known allergen or other condition causing the mast cells to activate. In other words, your mast cells degranulate (shoot out inflammatory chemicals) for no known reason and with minimal provocation. You just went for a walk in the sunshine. And so, it seems there is no clear trigger.

Watch mast cells degranulate

Learn more about MCAS

What most people don’t realize is that anaphylaxis isn’t just your throat closing and blood pressure dropping. It’s any combination of hives, swelling on your face, hot itchy patches of skin, difficulty breathing or shortness of breath, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, fainting, dizziness, confusion or— and I want you to know this is the actual clinical term — a sense of impending doom (my favorite). Any of these reactions can happen without your throat closing and it’s still anaphylaxis. The body behaves as though it is dying because some part of it genuinely believes it is.

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Internal Recognition

As I read the symptom list, I recognized almost everything on it.

The reactions happening on my commute home — check. The hives and the swelling happening on the commute to work — check. The shortness of breath all the time — check. Feeling faint when standing up and in some cases, fainting—check. Severe cramps and diarrhea after eating tomatoes or avocados—check.

But then the list went into territory I hadn’t connected to the drives home: the cognitive symptoms that had been building since January—confusion, memory issues, severe brain fog—and vertigo, dizziness, extreme fatigue, random red patches on my skin, a constant runny nose, blurred vision (even with my glasses on) and a racing heart. Tinnitus—could this be the hiss in my ears? And that sense of impending doom, which I called panic attacks (clinically not the same).

I had other symptoms that didn’t fit my research, like electric-shock sensations traveling across my body, unexplained weight loss, strange tastes in my mouth, and a sudden lack of coordination—I could no long throw or catch a ball and I tripped all the time. Not the norm for a former athlete and dancer.

The MCAS diagnostic criteria require symptoms in at least two organ systems simultaneously. I was running the full inventory: skin, respiratory, gastrointestinal, cardiovascular, neurological. And then some. I kept reading.

Women with MCAS tend to have endometriosis at a young age (30 for me). They tend to be “allergic” to aspirin (since age 11). They tend to be diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome (since age 30) and/or GERD (since age 40).

Somewhere around the third or fourth tab I stopped being a researcher and became a woman sitting very still in a quiet house, late at night understanding something she could not yet say out loud. How long has this been going on for me?

External Recognition

The diagnostic criteria for MCAS were first formalized in 2010, when a group of international specialists finally named what they were seeing. It took until 2016 to receive an official ICD-10 billing code — the code that tells the insurance system a disease exists, the code that allows a physician to document what they’re treating in a way the medical establishment will recognize. And pay for. A code that validates your experience and says it’s real, not in your head.

I got sick in 2018.

Even with the code, my research showed the average time from first symptom to MCAS diagnosis is ten years. Let me restate that TEN YEARS.

I turned that number over for a long time. Ten years. And while the disease is still considered rare, researchers now believe it affects a meaningful portion of the population. But for most of those years, the disease didn’t have a name the system could stand behind. Doctors were not taught to look for it. They still are not taught to look for it. Labs come back normal. Patients are sent home. And all the while the body keeps staging its assault, and medicine keeps calling it something else.

Anxiety. Menopause. Stress.

I had heard some version of those words already, in the months since January. I would hear them many more times before this was over.

“It’s just menopause. It’s natural, go home.”

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Hypothesis

I read until late that night. By the end I had a working hypothesis, a list of questions, and the specific dread of someone who has researched her way into a corner she cannot research her way back out of.

I thought: I cannot have this. My life will be over.

I was right about one of those things.

Keep on your crooked path . . .

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If this story is yours too

Crooked Path Studios is an online therapeutic arts community for women navigating rare and complex chronic illness — MCAS, Sarcoidosis, POTS, EDS, long COVID, and the others that don’t have easy names and hide in plain sight.

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You don’t have to explain yourself here.

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Because healing isn’t linear and neither is art.

In Practice 2 we built the windows and put down our first marks. Today we paint.

This practice has built-in rest stops — the paint needs to dry between colo…

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This is the written companion to the Practice 1 Orientation videos. They are embedded below or you can click the button to access the full playlist via YouTube.

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That’s how brain fog works for me — a window of partial function before the fatigue takes over completely and I have to go to bed. I knew it when I woke up. The cobwebs were already there: thoughts visible somewhere in the distance, memory slow to arrive, my body present but my mind lagging behind it like a signal with too much interference.

I set up the camera anyway.

A month earlier, I’d made a rough plan for exactly this kind of day. Not a script. Just enough structure to lean on to create a path that can be followed without the need for improvising. Brain fog doesn’t improvise.

Purple arrived during the check-in before I had time to question it. Brain fog is always purple for me, a color I had to learn to like. Though that’s a longer story, and it belongs to a different post.

I pressed record.

Emotional Painting

This is an emotional painting practice. The third focused on color and part of an ongoing series on developing your own visual language. If you’re new here, The Color of Dazzled and The Color of Annoyed are good places to start (Links below)

What’s different about this practice is when it happened. The other posts in this series were filmed from relative capacity, my ‘normal.’ They had a chosen practice and a deliberate setup. This one was filmed during a flare-up.

Not every flare looks the same not just across people but also across time. My cognitive flare-ups arrive in different forms. Sometimes they’re narcoleptic — sudden, overwhelming sleep, often after eating and frequently when driving my car. Sometimes they’re blackout quality. I appear to be fine — talking, completing tasks, going about my day. But I remember nothing, like a day that happened without a witness. And sometimes they’re this: cobwebs. Thoughts are present but distant, fuzzy, or partially hidden. Memory “as slow as molasses in winter,” as my mother would say. A dense, close fog where something arrives without warning, right in front of you, the ways shapes materialize out of fog when you’re about to walk into them.

This was the cobweb kind.

I’m naming these not to inventory symptoms but because many of you will recognize your own version. Cognitive flares don’t get talked about enough in chronic illness spaces. They’re harder to describe than pain, less visible than physical symptoms, and often the most disorienting because they interfere with the very tools we use to make sense of our experience. Language and memory. The ability to follow a thought to its end.

There’s another reason they go unnamed. Admitting to cognitive symptoms carries risk. People make assumptions. They discriminate. Describe the cobwebs or the blackout quality to the wrong person and you’re suddenly someone who needs a psychotherapist rather than a neurologist. Someone whose account of their own illness becomes less trustworthy. So, we describe all of it as “brain fog.” We learn to hide it, to compensate, to perform competence while the fog moves in. Which means we also lose the chance to witness it honestly, even to ourselves.

This practice was an attempt at that witnessing.

For me personally, the cognitive symptoms have been the hardest part. My sense of self has always been built on analytical thinking, systems seeing, the ability to hold complexity and move through it deliberately. Brain fog doesn’t attack something peripheral. It goes straight to the center.

Which is why painting during a flare is a different kind of practice than painting about one afterward. This isn’t interpretation or reflection. This is what it looked like in real time.

SUPPLIES

For this practice, you’ll need:

• Acrylic or watercolor paint

  • At least the 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.

• Some tools to make marks:

  • Brushes, sponges, q tips

  • Palette knife or hotel card key

• 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

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

• The Flare Wheel handout

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 for art supplies. We receive a small commission on each sale at no cost to you.

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THE PRACTICE

Check-in

A note before we begin.

Thinking about a flare can be activating. If at any point during this check-in your heart starts racing or anxiety moves in, use the grounding pause in the middle. It’s there on purpose. You can also stop entirely and come back another day. This practice will wait.

Get comfortable in your chair or lying down. Take a few deep breaths and fully exhale. Maybe you want to do Lions’ Breath for this.

Recall the last flare you had. How long did it last?

What did your body feel like during that flare? What physical sensation stood out most?

What emotions came with it? Notice whether it’s the same emotions each time, or whether they change.

If this is making your heart race or bringing anxiety with it, pause here.

Open your eyes and name 5 things you can see right now. Then name 4 things you can hear. 3 things you can smell. Take a breath. Return to slow breathing when you’re ready.

Now give this flare a name — whatever arrives first, without editing it.

Ask it what color it is. Notice if there’s any movement in it, or if it suggests a kind of movement. Is it organic and soft-edged, or does it have hard geometric edges? Is it slow-moving, or does it vibrate?

Whatever it’s showing you, let’s bring that into the painting.

Make some notes of what you saw. No explanations, just descriptions.

Create

Set a timer for 15 minutes. Or don’t — if timers feel like pressure today, let the painting tell you when it’s done.

Start with the color that arrived during the check-in. Don’t question it. Don’t reach for a different one because it seems more accurate or more appropriate. The color your body offered is the right one. That’s the whole practice.

Make one mark.

Just one, to start. Let it represent the flare — its movement, its weight, its quality. Then follow it. Add more marks, more color, letting the motion lead rather than a plan.

This is where hue does its work.

Hue is the most basic element of color — the pure color family itself, before value lightens or darkens it, before saturation intensifies or mutes it, before tone shifts it in context. Red. Blue. Purple. Orange. Hue is color at its most elemental. What the eye registers first. What the body offers when the mind is moving slowly.

When cognition is reduced, hue is often what remains. Not complexity. Not the subtle relationships between values or the way saturation shifts across a surface. Just color. Present. Immediate. Already there before you had to choose it.

Trust what arrived.

Notice the quality of your marks as you work. Are they slow? Soft? Are you pressing lightly or dragging the brush without much force? Or is there something sharper underneath the fog — short insistent gestures, pressure that wants to land somewhere?

Both are information. Let the marks tell you.

Working during a flare means working with what’s there rather than what you’d planned to bring. A pain flare has different color and movement than a fatigue crash. Your body already knows the difference. The practice is simply giving it a surface to work on.

Notice whether the shapes that emerge are organic — soft-edged, irregular, the way clouds or watercolor blooms form without being directed. Or geometric — harder edges, more defined, angular. The check-in may have already told you which. Follow that. Let the shapes be what they are rather than what you think they should look like.

This is not a limitation. For this practice, it’s the method.

When you’re ready, add a small amount of Paynes Grey or black to your main color. Or add a slightly different version of your main hue. I did both, adding Paynes Grey but also making purples that were more red and others that were more blue.

Watch what happens to the hue. Does it deepen into a darker version of itself, a shade, the hue mixed with black? Or does it shift character entirely, moving toward a different color family? Purple mixed with Paynes Grey can move toward indigo. Notice where your hue goes when darkness enters it.

Does the darker value feel heavier? More compressed? Or does it create depth, pulling some marks forward, letting others recede?

In the previous practices, we watched how dark and light values create form, space, and texture. Here, notice what darkness does to the hue itself. Whether it intensifies the color’s character or mutes it.

Paint a little longer. Then add white to your original color.

Watch whether white opens the hue or washes it out. Whether it creates a tint, the hue mixed with white. Does this feel lighter in emotion as well as value? Or does the lighter version feel distant and diluted.

Notice what the hue is doing across these layers. Whether it stays recognizable or becomes something else. Is the color your body offered at the start still present underneath everything you’ve added?

If at any point you lose the thread — the motion, the color, the mark — return to one simple gesture. One color.

Stop when the timer goes off. Or when the painting tells you it’s done. While it dries, move to the Flare Wheel to expand your visual language.

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Flare Wheel

This is not a standard tool. I made it because nothing like it existed, at least that I know of. It is a simple way to give a flare its own visual record, specific to the person having it.

The Flare Wheel has two tiers.

In the center, write the name of your flare. Whatever you called it during the check-in, the word that arrived first. Brain Fog, Pain, Whatever is true for you.

In the outer ring, write its characteristics. The sensations, the qualities, the movement it had, the images it conjures for you.

Then color it in using the hue you painted with, adding darker shades and lighter tints where they feel right. The Flare Wheel becomes a color record of this particular flare, on this particular day, in your particular body.

Over time, if you return to this practice, you’ll have a visual document of how your flares look and change. Whether the same flare always arrives in the same color. Whether the characteristics shift. Whether the hue darkens or lightens depending on what else is happening.

That’s your data. Nobody else’s.

Reflection

Take a step back and look at your painting and your Flare Wheel together.

What do you notice about the shapes that emerged — were they organic and soft-edged, or did harder geometric shapes appear?

Did the hue stay consistent across the painting, or did it shift as you added dark and light?

Was there a moment when the painting surprised you — when something materialized that you weren’t expecting?

How did it feel to give this flare a color, a name, and a form outside your body?

What does it mean to have witnessed it?

Check out

Let’s do a check-out activity. I invite you to pick up a pen and a piece of paper.

You’ve already asked your flare what color it is. Now ask it a few more questions.

• What does it eat or drink?

• What pets does it have?

• What does it wear?

• What does it do with all those spoons?

Let the answers come without editing. They can be serious, absurd, grief-soaked, or wryly funny or some combination. The flare gets to have a personality here and you’re the author, which means you’re the one in charge of the story.

Now write a poem that starts with “I am” and answers as the flare — using its name and the answers to these questions as your lines.

Here’s mine, as an example:

I am the queen of brain fog, cobwebs, and a narcoleptic-like sleep that hits without warning.

I use all those spoons to eat the ice cream, avocados, and dinners out that you cannot.

Now I am fat and slow.

I have a pet rock.

Yours will be different. See how it feels to speak as the thing that has been speaking over you.

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Process Notes

The outline I’d made a month earlier was sitting on my desk. I didn’t have to decide anything — just follow what I’d left for myself when I was thinking clearly. That’s the only reason the camera was running.

I opened the paint without much deliberation. The color was already there — purple, arrived during the check-in, not chosen so much as received. That’s how it works for me in a brain fog flare. The analytical mind that usually weighs options and makes decisions was moving too slowly. The body just handed me a hue and I followed it.

A wet brush. Color meeting water. And then the painting started making its own decisions.

What I couldn’t plan, the water did. The purple bloomed outward from where the brush landed, spreading into soft organic shapes, cloud-edged, irregular, no hard boundaries. The lighter washes of lavender and pink spread first, and then the darker pools arrived: indigo, blue-purple, something almost grey in the center where the paint had concentrated. The shapes materialized the way things appear in fog. Not gradually. Suddenly present, right in front of you, when a moment before there had been nothing.

I didn’t direct them. I followed them.

The dry brush marks came without deciding, leaving those radiating lines outward from the center. Looking at the painting now I can see them as the flare expanding in every direction at once. Or as the effort of reaching through cobwebs toward something just out of range. At the time I wasn’t interpreting. I was just moving.

When I edited the video afterward, I had to turn the volume up and lower the background music. My voice was that soft. That’s what fatigue sounds like from the outside. From the inside it felt like floating on an innertube down a river while my brain walked through a forest that was damp and close and dark. Body present. Mind lagging behind it like a signal with too much interference.

Then I wrote the I Am poem.

Something shifted in my relationship to my brain fog. Giving it a voice, a diet, and a pet rock meant I was the author. I was deciding what kind of character it was in my self-story.

That’s the particular cruelty of a cognitive flare for someone whose identity has always lived in her thinking. It’s not a peripheral disruption. The tools you rely on to make sense of experience — the analytical reflex, the ability to hold complexity and move through it — are exactly what goes offline. And yet the painting was there along with the Flare Wheel. A small absurd poem about a pet rock and stolen spoons was there too. Evidence that even inside the fog, something was still making meaning. Still deciding what story this was.

That’s not resolution. It’s witnessing. And sometimes witnessing is what comes before the story as the necessary first step of seeing something clearly enough, and with enough wry distance, that it can eventually be told.

Until Next Time

If you painted today — or wrote a poem, or just did the check-in and stopped there — I’d love to know what arrived. A color, a name, a line from your I Am poem. Drop it in the comments. You don’t need to explain it.

And if today wasn’t the day for this practice, that’s fine too. The flare will come back. So will this post.

The next Field Note is a different kind of writing — a personal essay about what happened to my thinking when I first got sick, and how a creative practice became the structure in which a new self-story could begin to form. It’s the longer version of what this painting and this poem are the short version of. It’s also, I think, why this series exists.

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. Purple, indigo, lavender. The most elemental level of color — what the body offers when the mind is moving slowly.

Value — how light or dark a color appears. In this practice, value showed us what darkness does to a hue itself — whether it deepens the color’s character or simply adds weight.

Shade — a hue mixed with black or Paynes Grey. Where the darker pools arrived in the painting — indigo, blue-purple, something almost grey at the center.

Tint — a hue mixed with white. The lighter lavender and pink washes that spread first, creating the ground the darker shapes materialized out of.

Tone — a hue softened by gray or by surrounding color context. How the purples shifted against each other across the surface — more red in some places, more blue in others.

Shape — a two-dimensional area defined by an outline. Shapes can be geometric — hard-edged, angular, defined — or organic — soft-edged, irregular, the way clouds or watercolor blooms form without being directed. In the Brain Fog painting, the shapes were entirely organic. In life: the difference between what chronic illness imposes and what the body finds on its own when given room.

Texture — the way a surface feels or appears to feel. In the Brain Fog painting, texture arrived differently than in the Annoyed practice — softer, less driven, the way the brush moved when the body was present but the mind was lagging. In life: how a cognitive flare feels from the inside, damp and close and resistant.

Pattern — the regular repetition of elements. In the Brain Fog painting, pattern was the soft bloom repeating across the surface — organic shapes arriving without direction, each one distinct but recognizable as part of the same family. In life: what becomes visible when we step back far enough to witness rather than inhabit.

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

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:

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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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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

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Crooked Path Studios Amazon Supply List

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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.

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

Subscribe now

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.

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.

VISIT THE SHOP

LEARN MORE

Join Wayfinding
Become part of the ongoing creative practice circle with access to monthly Open Studios, 2-3 workshop series annually, 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.

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.

Subscribe now

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