Foundations of Nature

I've started my Etsy page—Foundations of Nature. It's nothing major, but it's fun and has been a real useful tool to keep me on the beaten road when things are feeling a little monotonous. Creating this beautiful thing of mine has helped me to make sense of things when I feel overwhelmed. It's a reframing exercise, and the Etsy page itself is a means to let you in.

How did I get here?

I'm not sure when, but at some point, I completely lost my sense of self—I just wanted to be accepted, and in doing so, I wrapped up all the weird and wonderful things that manifested in my mind, and I stored them in Pandora's box. I didn't appreciate that these were the things that made me ME, and instead I wanted to be like them, "because they had it better", "they were normal", "they were attractive and beautiful".

This last year, I've been doing a lot of shadow work—and no, that's nothing to do with magic. Shadow work simply means working on yourself, with a focus on some of the areas of yourself that you may ignore or be scared of. It's difficult work, and you find out a lot about yourself that isn't comfortable at first. Through this work, I've started to strip away all of the layers of me that simply wasn't me. One of which was my desire to be "perfect"—whatever that means, and that was the most liberating thing I could have done.

As well as my family and my closest friends, dance, therapy and connection groups, such as Connection Café have helped me make sense of a lot, as well as art. Art has been a tool to reframe difficult areas of my shadow work to be less painful to look at—in fact, I've made these areas 'beautiful'.

A lot of this work has been rooted in the foundations of nature, and it's natural cycles—things like life and death, survival, evolution, sex, my toxic masculinity and femininity, and even intergenerational trauma. You can visit the page here—and whether you want to buy something or not, I hope it inspires your growth too.