I AM ALIVE : A Testament to Healing, Creativity, and the Quiet Force of the Human Spirit.
My new book, I AM ALIVE - Creating Resilience and Healing Trauma through Art is coming out this Autumn and I want to share behind the scenes of making the book (which took a whopping 16 years)… yes, you read correctly 16 years.
The book was described as, “An unflinching and luminous account of illness, faith, resilience, and the transformative role of art in finding one’s way back to life.”
The story begins in 2009. This is the first chapter to give you an idea of how the story kicks off:
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The doctor clicks her pen, looks down at the worn carpet where her feet
follow the swivel of the chair. She doesn’t look me in the eye. “You have
Stage 3 cervical cancer.”
Then she tells me in a matter-of-fact manner, “We do not know yet if the
cancer has spread to your lymph nodes. If it has, the survival rate is low.”
I can no longer feel the chair beneath me.
What else is she saying?
A roaring silence fills me.
I am free-falling through the sky. No parachute. Nothing to hold onto.
Is this it? I am 39 years old.
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The book is primarily drawings that I began in hospital, the night before brachytherapy (radiation for cervical cancer) and I continued to draw over the following 7 years as I navigated through the depths of depression, physical healing from very intensive radiation and the tricky pathways or recovering from PTSD. Until I slowly, every so slowly returned to life. Drawing was an urgent lifeline, my witness that I still existed in this world.
By the time I had forged my way through the seven year journey of returning to life, my drawings had changed profoundly. Drawing became an opportunity to spend quiet time with myself (which I really appreciated). These times gave me access to listen to what my soul wanted to draw, to express.
The reader essentially gets to see this arc of 14 years of drawings within 184 pages, along with a text that gives context to the drawings.
Below, is the book cover which is a self portrait of me during brachytherapy radiation. It may look like a very simple drawing. However, the experience of radiation was so traumatising that it took me 3.5 years before I could draw this image of my experience.
So now is the time to share this work… so I will be posting more! Stay tuned!
