Art as a Survival Language

There are things I’ve never been able to say out loud.
Not because I didn’t want to.
Because I couldn’t.

The words either got stuck, got scrambled, or showed up way too late. Usually too late. But sometimes they never showed up at all.

Hand me a pen, or paint, or scrap paper and glue, and watch out, buddy, and suddenly the story gets out.

Not in neat little bullet points (I always begin with stream of consciousness).
Not in a caption-ready epiphany.
But in pieces. In colors. In symbols that made sense to me even if no one else could read them.

And sometimes, that was the point. I didn’t need to be decoded. I just needed to not disappear.

Art Is How I Stayed Alive

That sounds dramatic. Maybe it is. I can be dramatic. It’s part of my charm.
But it’s also true.

There were times I felt like I was drowning in everything I couldn’t process, explain, or make peace with. Verbal therapy helped in some ways, but I kept bumping into the same wall: What do I say when I don’t know what I feel?
How do I explain something I barely understand?

That’s when I start to realize that art wasn’t just a hobby.
It was MY way of communicating.

Art let me say:

• “I’m scared.”

• “I’m not okay.”

• “This is what it feels like inside my skin.”
  Without having to filter it into words that someone else could understand. Or, more often, misunderstand.

Words Are a Privilege. Not Everyone Has Access All the Time.

We assume communication means talking. That healing happens in the telling. That if you can't “just say something,” you're either hiding or not ready.

But some of us experience the world differently. Some of us lose language under stress. Some of us were never taught to name our emotions. Some of us grew up in families where words were used as weapons, not lifelines.

And some of us? We just don’t think in words. And even if we do, we sometimes CANNOT get them out.

So when we say "use your voice," what if we also mean:
Your hands.
Your movement.
Your color choices.
Your silence.

Art Makes the Invisible Visible

Burnout. Trauma. Shame. Sensory overload. Identity.

These are not easy things to pin down in a sentence. But you can feel them in a brushstroke. You can see them in a collage. You can move through them by scribbling your way across a page until something inside you unclenches.

Art doesn’t care if your spelling is wrong or if you burst into tears halfway through.

It just expresses.

And sometimes, that’s all we need.

This Is Why I Do What I Do

I created AuRTistic Expressions not because I think art is cute or fun or “good for stress relief.” (Though it can be all those things.)

I created it because I needed a place where people like me, and now I know like us, could show up fully without needing to explain ourselves first.

Where art could be a survival tool, not a side hobby.
Where your creative process is the work, not some extra step on the way to healing.
Where we don’t have to “find the words” to be valid.

Because maybe your art is your language.
And maybe it’s time we start listening to what it’s been trying to say all along.