Rachel Eliza Griffiths

I knew what mattered to me, which was storytelling and visual art and listening to other people and being in community, and yet...

I was feeling estranged and isolated, but I also was self-isolating because I was afraid that I would be seen as an imposter or not authentic or that I perhaps wasn't fitting all the boxes, checking all the boxes correctly.

As to what authenticity meant.

But now at this age, I'm like, I get to decide how authentic I am.

I get to define my authenticity because who was defining that and making that definition in the first place?

Who can tell me I'm authentic or not?

I didn't know that back then, but I know it now.

When you glamorize tortured poets or tortured artists,

There's an injustice is that they become silhouettes and cutouts.

Their humanity is removed from them.

They're not seen as three-dimensional.

And I think as a writer, as a poet, as a visual artist, there's such a carousel of, you know,

talent gone too soon, voices gone too soon, and that people focus on the horror and trauma and devastation of those people, it kind of is an erasure.

And when I think about Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, or even Amy Winehouse, there's just so many names, Whitney Houston, there's just so many names of

Of people who we need them here and then, you know, their pain becomes the engine that drives the ship rather than how they flew, you know, and I just think for me, I knew that it would be a bad idea for me to glamorize that.

these aspects of myself because I was more in a category of shame and panic and anxiety if anyone would find out these things for me when I was younger having no money you know being broke being defeated being depressed that didn't lead me to write my best work I was in survivor mode

Once I was able to get stabilized and start to do the inner work and start to heal, I'll always be healing.

You know, I'll always be healing.

But this feels like one of the first steps for me in a new life.

And I'm really grateful for that.