Language is important. It helps our society function and makes our lives easier, but symbols, I believe, are vastly more powerful. They are universal. You could place thirty people who speak different languages in a room, and every one of them would recognize that a smiley face is good and a sad face is bad. We carry on full conversations using emojis across the world. Long before written language, symbols shaped how humans understood the universe. At the same time, symbols a

I used to think healing through art meant focusing on subject matter—putting your emotions into a piece and depicting how you feel in a given moment. And while that can certainly be true, I’ve come to understand it in a different way. I check the clock and it’s 4 a.m. The world is dark and quiet. My dogs and my husband are sound asleep, and the only sound is my pencil scraping against the paper. I blink and it’s 5:00, and suddenly it hits me: for an entire hour, I had no thou

I began drawing pet portraits about 14 years ago. I was 23 years old and just needed a cheap birthday present. I kept this as a “side hustle”, doing maybe five or six drawings a year for mostly trade. This very quickly began an emotional roller coaster I did not get off of until recently. In hindsight, I was experiencing textbook fear of success. Every drawing I did sparked another request, and every request sparked a tiny part of me that would tell itself, “You could do this