Grae

Neurodivergent Artist 🎨 Art Therapist 🧠 Mental Health Counselor

[Grae @vividgrae]

Hawk
July 2020
Acrylic on canvas
12 x 16 inches
#art #artist #hawk #birdofprey #raptor #falconry #violet #leather #glove #flower #feathers #beak #talons #claw #wings #fly #flight #chiaroscuro #hood #jesses #painting

[⚕️✼kit ✼⚕️ @op0ppet]

returning to my roots

[Grae @vividgrae]

Healing means refusing to let trauma dictate your identity. The goal isn’t better masking, it’s reclaiming authenticity.

[Grae @vividgrae]

One of the cruelties of chronic rejection is that it can teach you to organize your life around the very values that wounded you. You isolate because authenticity wasn’t safe. You perform because belonging felt conditional.

[Grae @vividgrae]

When your natural way of being is repeatedly misunderstood, masking becomes survival and eventually, isolation can feel safer than connection.
I wonder how many autistic people would become more social if society made authenticity safer than performance.

[Grae @vividgrae]

A society that only teaches people how to compete eventually forgets how to care.

[Grae @vividgrae]

We need more people who can translate between worlds—science and art, psychology and policy, logic and compassion. The future may depend less on specialists and more on bridge-builders.

[Grae @vividgrae]

Sometimes healing isn’t adding a new piece to yourself. It’s realizing a part of you was never actually missing.

[Grae @vividgrae]

Peace isn’t just the absence of conflict. It’s the presence of enough safety that curiosity becomes possible.

[Grae @vividgrae]

We spend so much time asking, “Who am I?”
A better question might be: “What am I becoming through the way I pay attention?”

[Grae @vividgrae]

Some doors don’t open until you stop trying to be the one who opens them. You knock, then you wait, then you trust the wait.

[Grae @vividgrae]

Every color is just light that gave up trying to be all of them at once.

[Grae @vividgrae]

My third eye is open. It’s just also nearsighted.

[Grae @vividgrae]

People read Revelation like a horoscope and their horoscope like Revelation, then wonder why nothing lines up.

[Grae @vividgrae]

The opposite of fragmentation isn’t certainty.

It’s connection.

Connection between body and mind.
Connection between feeling and thought.
Connection between self and other.

Connection is what makes a life feel real.

[Grae @vividgrae]

Art doesn’t always heal because it helps us express ourselves.

Sometimes it heals because it helps us witness ourselves.

There is a difference between making an image and being seen by one.

[Grae @vividgrae]

Healing isn’t always an ascent.

Sometimes you descend into the places you’ve spent years avoiding. Sometimes you need the hospital, the therapy room, the sketchbook, the conversation, the grief.

Going down can be part of going up.

Wholeness isn’t perfection. It’s integration.

[Grae @vividgrae]

I spent years trying to choose between Eros and Logos, heart and mind, feeling and reason.

Now I think maturity is learning how to let them speak to one another.

A human being becomes whole not by choosing one side, but by integrating both.

[Grae @vividgrae]

My work keeps returning to the same question:

How does a human being become whole?

Not successful. Not productive. Not perfect.

Whole.

Every story, symptom, artwork, relationship, and crisis seems to circle back to that mystery.

[𝒹𝓇𝒾𝓏𝓏𝓎𝓁𝒾𝓉 @drizzylitfw]

My cat's interest in this room: Zero
My cat's interest in this room when door is closed: Nothing has ever been as important as getting in this room