There was a time when everything I knew had shifted.
My mother had died.
I had left an abusive marriage.
I was adjusting to a new family dynamic.
I wasn’t sure what I believed spiritually anymore.
It felt like I was thrown into a cosmic shift.
I didn’t know how to land.
I didn’t know where to land.
I didn’t know how to move forward.
The void and darkness consumed me.
That was around the time I first encountered Carl Jung’s work.
My professor, Tanya Tewell, introduced it to me — the symbolism, the way he spoke about the self: ego, consciousness, the unconscious, the shadow, the collective.
I didn’t fully understand it then. But something in me recognized it.
When everything external had fractured, the idea that there was structure within the psyche felt grounding. If there was a shadow, then the darkness wasn’t meaningless. If there was an unconscious, then what I couldn’t explain about myself wasn’t failure — it was depth. If there was a collective, then maybe I wasn’t as alone as I felt.
Art and psyche began to fascinate me in a way that felt almost primitive.
I didn’t want neat conclusions.
I didn’t want to explain myself.
I wanted to think without thinking.
I wanted to feel.
I wanted to express what I couldn’t illustrate in words but could in mark making, in color.
At the time, I thought I was just surviving.
After spending the last six years in therapy, I’ve intentionally worked on becoming more self-aware. But revisiting that early introduction to Jung made me realize something I hadn’t fully seen before:
The awareness didn’t begin six years ago.
It began back then.
What felt like chaos may have been expansion. What felt like darkness may have been space forming.
Now my awareness feels wider.
Not because I have everything figured out.
But because I can see the arc.
And that feels steady.
