08/17/2026
Hi Facebook Family!
I wanted to pop on here and give you all another update.
The last 3 years have been quite challenging for me and it's meant that I've set my art aside for 4 years now. This is an incredibly heartbreaking story because if anyone knows me well, they know how much creating is intrinsic to who I am.
As many of you know, in 2023 I left my family and home in Alberta and traveled two provinces away to Manitoba to care for my mom, who was very ill with small cell lung cancer. I cared for her for three months.
After the funeral, and after clearing her house for sale, I came home to a family I hadn't seen in months. It was wonderful just to see them again.
We were already due to move — our 4th move in 14 years — and within a week or two, we were off to Red Deer to find a home to buy. A couple of months later, we moved and settled into our new home and city.
There wasn't much time to catch my breath in between any of it.
It wasn't until a few months later, in the fall of 2023, that everything caught up with me. My mental and physical health declined significantly. I was the thinnest I'd been in years. I wasn't sleeping. My body had kept score of everything I hadn't stopped to feel.
So I began grief therapy and EMDR. By the following year, I had mostly returned to my baseline.
But baseline was never fully solid. Underneath it was a chronic fatigue that never really lifted — a low hum of stress I got used to calling "fine" because I was still functioning.
By 2025, that low hum had become something I now understand as functional freeze.
Functional freeze is the art of disappearing while still standing in the room. You do the dishes. You answer the emails. You smile when it's expected. But you're not home — you left a while ago, and no one noticed because you never stopped moving.
And then the lights went out completely.
Five days in March, I couldn't get out of bed. Couldn't eat. Could barely talk. Could barely sit up. The body that had been quietly performing "fine" for so long simply stopped being able to perform anything at all.
This wasn't the checked-out-but-still-standing version. This was the floor giving way. My body had spent so long holding a shape it couldn't hold anymore, and when it finally let go, it let go completely.
I've since learned there's a word for this too — not functional freeze, but shutdown. Immobilization. The nervous system's last resort when everything before it has run out of runway.
It turns out you can't fake your way through that part. The body simply stops negotiating.
So I left again. Not the version of leaving that circles back — the version that doesn't.
I packed what was mine and walked away from a dynamic I couldn't keep bracing against. I found a place of my own. Quiet. A place where I felt completely safe to exhale, and let my body finally recover from years of my nervous system telling me what my mind eventually caught up to.
In my new home, I have an art studio and a garage where I've built a resin shop. My goal is to get back into creating again in a more consistent basis.
I have a goal to start joining markets with my resin art and also play with textures and painting and see what happens with that.
If you're reading this and you've been a fan, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. It's because of people like you that I've been able to see the value in coming back online.
In the meantime, I'm going back to school to become a life coach. So I will see you in between studying and self care 💝
And on to the next chapter.....
