Paint Release is an interactive form of art therapy that turns personal trauma into a talisman—a painting with an energetic imprint unique to you. Each session takes place in a safe space where it’s okay to express any pain, fear, or stressor. There’s no right or wrong “thing” to share. You choose what to release. Each paint release varies upon the individual - and each posted painting / quoted excerpt remains anonymous.

"It's easy for people to get by surviving, but for some reason it feels hard for me.

I feel like I’m on very unstable ground. If I’m not doing a thousand things, working super hard and people pleasing every day... I’m not going to have a place to live or be able to eat.

When I moved away for school, I bought Little Caesar’s pizzas and survived off a slice a day for an entire week. Even now, it’s easy to look at my bank account with $7 in it and feel an overwhelming sense of scarcity. I’ve been working hard to reassure myself that it’s okay, it just means there’s more room for money to come.

But we live in such a physical world. There’s a concrete understanding about the way things work. I think the world works however you believe it works. I want to believe that whatever I want is going to come to me, that I deserve the necessities in life, that I shouldn’t have to fight for them, that I deserve to be alive and that I don’t have to fight for that.

We were super poor when I was little. My parents were on fixed income. I put myself in a place of scarcity as a form of empathy to my mother. I told myself I didn’t deserve things because they would take away from her… and I think I still believe that.

I had this goal to heal and turn into a golden version of myself that takes on adulthood.

Then I realized we reincarnate because we'll never figure it all out in this life. It's a good goal to reach a point of feeling comfortable and not depressed or tortured by your own mind… but even if I did every affirmation in existence, I’d keep uncovering something else.

And that’s okay. We’re in this life to go through it, to allow the process to unfold. We’re going to die one day and wake up as a completely different person with different trauma and a different level of understanding. It's kind of intense. It’s a lot to think, “oh, it literally never ends.”

Maybe spirituality isn’t something you dedicate your life to. Maybe it’s something you experience after death. Life gives exactly what you need. It’s ugly and dirty and stupid but beautiful and amazing at the same time."