The Art of Creation:

When Survival Had No Words, Expression Became the Bridge

Some of us are not born into language.
We are born into survival.

My nanny was an orphan.
She learned early how to endure without being held, how to keep going without being witnessed.
My mother did what she had to do to survive too. She sold her body so we could eat, so we could stay alive. Survival was never a moral question in our home. It was instinct. It was necessity.

I grew up in and out of foster care, carried from place to place like a story no one wanted to finish reading. Emotional safety was not something we were taught. Regulation was not modeled. Feelings were either dangerous or irrelevant. Expression was a liability.

When you come from a world like that, you learn quickly that emotions are weakness. You learn that truth can be weaponized. You learn that silence is safer than honesty. You learn to say, others had it worse, I should be grateful I survived, it wasn’t that bad.

Never mind the nights you almost didn’t make it.
Never mind the fear that lived in your bones.
Never mind the child who learned how to disappear to stay alive.

Those don’t count, right?

But here is the truth no one teaches trauma survivors:
Every time your mind says stop complaining, your heart hears your pain meant nothing.
Every time logic dismisses your wounds, your nervous system relives the betrayal.

Your heart whispers to your brain,
Why would you abandon me like this? Don’t you know how hard it was to survive? Didn’t you feel it too?

And the answer is not that others had it worse.
The answer is that others had it different.
Not better. Not worse. Different.

Pain is not a competition.
Pain is an experience.
And if you felt it in your core, it was real.

I became a mother while I was still a child myself.
I had my son at fifteen.
My daughter at seventeen.

I was still unhealed. Still fragmented. Still carrying generations of silence in my nervous system. And because of that, I was not good with emotions. I didn’t know how to name them, hold them, or regulate them. Without meaning to, I passed that confusion down.

But my daughter…
She refused to let the cycle stay intact.

She would come to me and say,
“I don’t have the words… but this song will tell you how I feel.”

Sometimes it was a TV show.
Sometimes anime.
Sometimes a painting, a poem, a melody, a photograph.

“I don’t have the words,” she would say softly,
“but this will explain my soul.”

That little girl was building bridges where language had failed us. She was reaching across generations of silence and saying, See me anyway. She was teaching me that expression does not need permission. That truth does not require grammar. That healing does not wait for logic to catch up.

I learned more from her than she will ever realize.

You see, trauma does not live in logic.
It lives in the body.
It lives in sound, sensation, memory, rhythm.

We think we can think our way out of pain. We try to reason with wounds that were formed through emotion. But logic cannot heal what logic did not create. The pathways shaped by trauma were carved through feeling. Healing must travel the same road back.

This is where creation saves us.

Music allows us to enter a world an artist has already made safe for us.
Art lets our hands speak when our mouths are afraid.
Stories hold our truth without demanding explanation.

Creation does not ask you to justify your pain.
It does not rush you toward forgiveness or closure.
It simply says, You can exist here as you are.

When words fall silent, expression becomes sacred.
When survival stole our voice, creation gives it back.

And sometimes the most honest thing we can say is,
“I don’t have the words… but this will tell you who I am.”

A Gentle Invitation

If you feel called, try this.

Choose one form of creation. Music, drawing, writing, movement, collage.
Set a timer for ten minutes.
Release the need to make something beautiful.

Ask yourself quietly:
What have I survived that I never got to express?

Then let your body answer.

You do not need to explain it.
You do not need to understand it yet.
You do not need to share it with anyone.

Creation will hold it for you.

Because healing does not begin with logic.
It begins with allowing yourself to feel.