My Story

Growing up, I often found it hard to express myself.

Emotions felt messy. As someone who always strived for perfection, emotions felt like something I couldn’t “get right.” They felt overwhelming, hard to name, and they didn’t come with clear solutions. When I struggled to find words, I learned to push my feelings down. I tried to make my emotional needs smaller, quieter, and easier to manage. I thought that if I pretended they weren’t there, maybe they would go away.

Of course, that didn’t happen.

My emotions found other ways to show up. They took the form of spiralling thoughts, stomach knots, fatigue, the desire to isolate, and eventually, emotional burnout. I learned that what we avoid doesn’t disappear, it just finds new ways to reach us. Emotions, in one way or another, demand to be felt.

By trying to push away all that felt messy and out of control, I found my inner world feeling increasingly cluttered and confusing. My body and spirit became exhausted by holding everything in all the time.

It was only when I began to create, through writing, music, and art, that something within me shifted. Creativity offered a container for my emotions. It allowed space for messiness, exploration, and release, without needing to find any answers, solutions, or end point. I could let emotion move through colour, sound, or words until something made sense. Creativity allowed me to make sense of my experiences in a way I had never been able to before. I started to see my emotions less as “messy”, and more as information with which I could better understand myself.

Art making taught me that healing happens through curiosity, not control. It happens when we listen to the parts of ourselves that we have learned to quiet, and let them speak in their own way.

This realization has inspired my work as a therapist. Now, I help others explore their emotions with the same openness and compassion that creativity offered me. We work in a space where mess is welcome and expression leads to understanding.

For me, healing and therapy are not about control, organization, or fixing. They are about creating space for all that has been held inside, and allowing it to finally be felt.