Art as a Way Back to Myself
In 2022, I started making what would become The Untamed Project. It didn’t feel like a project—it felt like survival. The world was loud, my sleep restless, the culture outside my window screaming. Inside, everything was crumbling. I wasn’t making art. I was fighting to stay honest, to breathe.
The work just appeared. I started with scraps—paper, notes, pieces of old paintings I should’ve thrown away. The mess was me: unresolved, raw.
Around that time, I was reading Glennon Doyle’s Untamed. Her image of the cheetah raised in captivity kept coming back to me. I kept picturing the animal trained to run in circles, its instincts squashed. The image felt uncomfortably familiar. I started to notice how I had shaped my life to be acceptable—how I tried to make things easier for others before thinking about how they treated me.
…the cheetah raised in captivity stayed with me—an animal trained to circle a small track while its instincts slept.
Outside the safety of my studio, things were falling apart—family conflict, political anger, relentless pressure. Even home was chaos. The chaos outside mirrored the chase inside—the relentless drive to control what could never be tamed.
The Untamed Project was impulsive and emotional. I created each layer by instinct. I worked quickly and with feeling. I used scraps and old materials because they already had a story. They were not pretending to be new. There was no plan for where anything should go. The paint moved as feelings do: not neat, not controlled. I followed it. This was not about the final product. It was about staying present until something honest appeared.
I wasn’t thinking in therapy terms or trying to diagnose myself. This work bypassed thought and went straight to feeling. I wasn’t fixing—I was letting myself feel, untouched and unedited. My body knew before my mind did. Art helped me listen.
I was not trying to solve anything. I was trying to feel without editing. The body knows before the mind does. Art gave me a way to listen.
Many of the early pieces were reactions. They carry anger, grief, fear, and the undeniable feeling of being unheard. The world felt shaky, and so did I. But as I kept working, something changed. I started to see that reacting is not the same as living. If I wanted peace in the world, I had to practice it in private. If I wanted truth in public, I had to accept it in myself. The studio became less a place to protest and more a place to find balance.
Each piece started to show small personal choices: where I stopped pretending, where I admitted something hard, where I chose to be present instead of performing.
The Untamed Project was never supposed to be neat. It holds emotion like real life does: messy and unfinished. It marks the moment I stopped shaping my life around approval. Glennon Doyle writes about living uncaged. For me, that looked messy, but I allowed myself contradictions. I let myself take up space without saying sorry for it.
This project became my way to discover real honesty with myself.
If this work offers anything, let it be this: permission to feel deeply and honestly, without performance or apology. To leave things unfinished and alive. To step out of the old loops and remember the wild pulse beneath the noise. Real movement is not about being louder or flawless—it’s about reclaiming the part of yourself that refuses to be tamed. May this work be a reminder: you are allowed to be wild, whole, and true.
