My Story
Hey, my friend!! 😉🫶 It's Angie again!
Aawww, thank you for taking your time to get to know me, my muse, and my story 🥹🩷. It means a lot to me and I'm so excited to connect with you too 🤗. If turns out we click, then welcome to my little corner of the internet 🏡. You're free to come here anytime 🩷.
When It Started & What Happened
Honestly, I can't quite decide when it actually started in the first place. Right now as I'm writing this, I have some mixed opinions. Part of me is telling me to write from my 2023 burnout, while another part of me is suggesting that I start with my childhood and teenage years. But I think they're connected and actually are parts of the same story. Maybe I'll start with that burnout, then, because that was the first time I started questioning what success and worthiness mean.
Before the burnout, I was this ambitious young girl who used to pride herself in “preparing my future ahead of time". It might sound cool and responsible, but I swear it wasn't like that from the inside. It was exhausting, like I was constantly walking (well, sprinting) on thin ice while waiting for the other shoe to drop. I never thought something was wrong with that lifestyle at all. For my younger self, it was simply… life, adulting, reality. And then that burnout happened.
There was this numbness and scepticism I felt towards everything in my life, and anger, and honestly… sadness and disappointment too. I knew I was exhausted, and I desperately needed a pause button. Yeah, that was the first time I admitted that. And although it felt “unrealistic" at that time, I prayed for a life I truly enjoy and don‘t need an escape from. Yeah, unrealistic, that was what I used to think of it. And from here, we can tell that I was deep in survival mode and surrounded by people who believed in hardship.
Actually, I've written about my burnout story (and what led to it since my childhood and teenage era) here. Feel free to read it sometime 🤗🩷. I hope it can help you feel less alone and see that you're not broken 🫶.
Since then, God has been guiding me to dive into myself. And it was crazy, lol. There were a lot of things I wasn't conscious of, and also things I was resistant to face. It wasn't clean or powerful like what social media shows. It was messy. Sometimes, I had a breakthrough that made things easy in my life, and sometimes I hid from the truth because it was too painful to face. It's a cycle of getting to know myself and face things as they are without denials, blame towards myself or others, and rationalisation.
My Muse & What Inspires Me
If you asked me what inspires my art in general, I'd say this: “a softer reality”. I used to believe in the "life is hard" idea, and that was the limiting belief that I didn‘t know was blocking my way to everything. It influenced the types of people I was close with, the types of projects I chose, my career aspirations, the opportunities I was drawn to, how I made decisions, and even mundane stuff like my perception of everyday house chores. It made my life exhausting, like I had to keep proving myself to some invisible critics and hustle hard because otherwise my life would fall apart if I didn‘t.
As I'm tracing my past deeper and deeper, I find a lot of unhelpful things I need to replace (yeah, present tense, because the more I dive into it, the more I find the deeper layers). It goes beyond just tying my worth to how hard I work and how much I produce. It touches on… the idea of belonging and safety for my nervous system. I used to have disorganised attachment, so these two things were horribly shaky. I didn‘t know what a real home really felt like, so I relied on things and people that kept reinforcing the belief that I needed to fight so hard and prove myself just to keep them close.
Throughout this process of relearning what's normal, I found myself expressing my feelings, the insights, the breakthrough, the spirals, etc in my art. Lol, sometimes it ends up becoming a poem. Sometimes, it's a song I end up drafting in my recording app. Sometimes, my heart tells me to open the writing app and pour it there too. Lol, it depends on what God wants it to become. That's how I noticed that this specific muse lights me up. And honestly, it feels good too to share this new reality to others 🩷.
Through this work, I'd love to share my first-person point of view of what happens in my head, my nervous system, and reality as I'm rewriting my stories. I'd love to share the hope, the grief, the light, the storm, the growth, the messy parts, the newfound meanings, the loss, the healing, the pain; this journey realistically. And I hope by doing this, I get to be there with you as you're processing your own story. If my crafts help you see yourself more clearly, name a feeling and pattern that's way too subtle to name, or hug your emotions with patience, then that's a success for me. Whenever you need to borrow certain feelings from my crafts to help you feel, then go ahead, my friend. May God heal you too 🤗🩷.
Let's walk this journey together, my friend 😺🤝😺
Love, Angie 🤍