Over the course of this year, I’ve been shedding more and more the need to push myself creatively. To be real, this feels very strange.

Sometimes, I worry that I’m not doing enough. But at the same time from this space, I’m feeling like I’m doing exactly what I should be. Instead of pushing to do more, I’ve been rediscovering what has been lost.

Ever since I was eight, I knew I had lost an essential part of myself. Something that I needed to bring back, but didn’t know how. Even more annoying, I had a classmate who was with me from elementary school to high school, who would not stop reminding me of it. She was like, “In kindergarten, you had so much to share, and you had all of these stories—you’re so different from how you used to be.”

Part of me wanted to be like, “Of course, I’m different. I’m not five anymore.”

But we both knew what she was talking about went beyond age—or even my ability to tell stories, which is what she often pointed to. It was about the force of my expression in general, and the other more intangible qualities that were bundled along with it. I almost remember the day when I was seven and decided that my voice wasn’t worth hearing or sharing. I shut myself down.

I still loved to write and create art, but something essential slipped away from me at that moment—so much so that in my preteen journals, I often wrote about finding or returning to what I had before, although the exact dimensions of what that was eluded me. I knew confidence was a part of it—an inner belief in my expression—but yet that alone didn’t capture the fullness of what I struggled to reclaim.

I just knew that something was missing.

There were times when I could grasp it for a moment, but then it would just melt away like seafoam, revealing that I didn’t really hold that part of myself as truthfully as I thought I did. At times I found that I simply wore confidence as a mask. It wasn’t truly coming from me standing in who I was. I only felt confident when others were taking notice.

Recently, I dreamed of the house I lived in when I was around thirteen. In my dream, I needed to get back into the house because inside was a binder I needed to recover. However, it was being guarded by large coiled snakes and an unusually threatening looking, humanish salamander who sat on the porch and held exactly what I needed—the red and black binder I was looking for in the first place.

I wouldn’t dare fight him for it. I hoped that maybe if I waited, I could get the binder whenever he was done with it.

Also sitting on the porch, not too far away from the person-sized salamander, was a robot girl that almost looked human with long black hair. She was also holding and reading a duplicate red and black binder.

When I woke up, I knew there was something about that period of my life. Something important I couldn’t access at the moment.

I decided to dig through my files to revisit the art and stories I created when I was thirteen. As I did so, I thought deeply about my life experiences, what things I loved, and what I cared about. At that time I started to focus a lot more on creating directly from the force of my emotions and intuition, than simply copying my favorite characters or creating alternate versions of my favorite stories. I still did those things, but my emotions played a bigger role. It’s almost as if at that time, creating art and stories was my way of spinning the emotional pressures and pain into gold. Omnigirl, which I wrote at 14, was an emotional outlet for the deep loneliness I felt at the time.

As I was taking all of this in, one night I had a dream where I was rubbing my lower belly and a loaf of bread spontaneously appeared in my hands. Then I sliced the loaf and started handing out the slices to random people who weren’t visible. This is creativity that appears from my deepest intuitive, emotional, instinctive core—ready to share. It’s trusting that mysterious creative womb and using what’s born there to be my voice.

I had confidence in that when I was five, and I secretly tried to reconnect with it when I was thirteen, creating many emotionally driven stories and works of art that felt too raw or unsafe to share, hidden in journals and binders.

That’s what I had lost.

It wasn’t only confidence in general, but a steady belief in the worth of my creative vision and voice as they gave my emotions form. I lost an existence where I didn’t fear my creative uniqueness, but believed in it and loved it. One where I let my creativity transform my feelings towards the world and myself. Especially myself.

I trusted its natural wisdom.

I had spent an entire week thinking about this, and one night, I realized that it was time to give my brain a break because I was starting to feel a little overwhelmed.

I decided to listen to some music while reading. While I was listening to A Million Miles Away from the soundtrack of an anime movie entitled Belle (The soundtrack is amazing!), I zoned out for a moment.

And I just knew.

I knew that this part of myself that I had “lost” was no stranger.

In fact, it wasn’t that much of a mystery at all, and over the past year I had become extremely familiar with it as it danced through my fiction and dreams. I took notes every time it appeared—every time he appeared, teasing and guiding. The lore is extensive.

At that moment, I said to this part of myself, “You need to come back. This body, this life, is yours. You need to come back to it.”

Then after that short, emotionally charged moment, I returned to just relaxing and just…let all of that go. On some level I thought that maybe I was just being dramatic and weird. But my mischievous subconscious decided to one up this request.

My black gloved hands gripped the steering wheel as a young woman in the back seat poured out her relationship problems to me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t process much of what she said, because I was trying to drive. I didn’t know this lady at all—it was like I was a taxi or an Uber driver.

She finished by asking me, “What should I do?”

I stopped the car and turned in my seat to look back at her. And then it became clear that in this dream, I was the one who had returned—in a totally different body.

He was me. Or I was him. Either way I always kind of suspected that on some strange level, “we” were the same person all along. I recognized the long white hair that reminded me of ocean foam and the crisp black dress shirt, black pants, and leather driving gloves that were now mine.

So totally owning the taxi driver role, I told her, “What you do depends on where you want to go.”

And she could only stare at me wide-eyed for a moment before saying, “Oh…Okay. Thanks,” and shyly exiting the car.

My voice was his. My life was his. That was a first.

And after parking and walking some ways, another stranger, a man this time, approached me on the street to ask for advice.

It was shaping up to be a busy night.

I was back in my usual feminine form and was balancing myself on the top of a very large, sky blue shelf. This shelf was outdoors and up against a brick wall just under a high window ledge, so I could hold on to something to keep myself from falling.

In this dream I was a part of a collective artist studio, and I was busy cleaning the colorful vintage tea cups that were stored on the shelf as I stood on top of it. I wiped the dirt and dust off a bright yellow cup with cleaning wipes.

While I was working, a lady I apparently was familiar with in the dream came by and called up to me, “How’d it go with the gluten free cleaner?”

I told her that it went great and that I would have to show her the cup I cleaned with it later. (Gluten free cleaner? Really?)

Then another woman joined her, and they took a couple cups that I had already cleaned from the shelf and started drinking from them.

I grimaced a little knowing that I had only cleaned the cups with a cleaner. I hadn’t washed them yet with dish soap, so I didn’t think drinking from them was a good idea. But I felt like it was too late to stop them from drinking from the cups now, and they seemed to be enjoying themselves. So I took extra care to wipe the insides well.

I climbed down a little bit to reach the tea cups on the lower top shelves. In doing so, I found the glass I had cleaned with the gluten free cleaner. It was different from the other tea cups, being that it wasn’t a tea cup. It was a tall glass in a translucent purplish blue.

I wanted to show it to the lady that had asked me about it without having to climb all the way down, so I tossed the glass into a nearby trashcan that looked to be filled with paper and other soft items. Unfortunately, there was something hard in the trash can that I couldn’t see, so when I tossed the glass down, it hit a hard object as it landed in the can, cracking.

I was like, “Aw! I really wanted to show you the glass I used the cleaner on but now it’s broken.”

But the woman gave a dismissive wave of her hand and was like, “Don’t worry about it. You can share how it works with one of the other cups.” I agreed, but I was still a little annoyed that I had broken the glass.

Then at that moment, I heard music. Some other woman had set up her electric guitar nearby, and she was singing a country pop/rock song. She was like:

I was thirteen and

All I wanted to do was to party.

I was thirteen

And I didn’t know much about me.

Or who I was supposed to be.

(After singing some other indescript lines of verse she came to the chorus.)

I am exactly what I’m meant to be.

I am me.

I am me.

The tune of the song was literally a smash up of “Why Can’t I?” by Liz Phair and “This is Me” from The Greatest Showman (Way to be original, my crazy subconscious).

My emotional creative expression can be powerful and even insightful at times. But it’s also imperfect. But even if it’s not received in the way I expect—if it’s nothing more than cracked glass in a trash can—there are plenty more cups that I can polish and pour my creative voice into.

It’s okay.

I will always have more cups.

In recollecting the lost pieces of myself, the biggest lesson I’ve learned is that it’s okay if my expression isn’t pure and perfect. People will still drink from it and enjoy it—even if I feel like they should be doing otherwise. So I might as well just embrace that.

Failure isn’t an ending. It’s an invitation to pour my expression into a new vessel that can carry my message. Plus I have plenty of older “vintage” pieces that can do the same work, even if I have to clean them up a bit.

The cracking glass was like the filter of perfection breaking to introduce the revealing of truth through song. A breakthrough.

Even in imperfection, I am me, and my expression can still touch.

I don’t have to completely shut down from fear of being underappreciated and misunderstood, like I did when I was seven. I don’t have to hide myself vigilantly due to fear of people not getting my intuitive emotional expression either, like when I was thirteen. All I need to do is keep my eyes on the people who get it, forgive those who don’t, and create again.

Letting go of this fear puts me in the driver’s seat and connects me with the full range of my expression and my identity with control—from the powerful black shadowy depths to the white luminous crown of ethereal intuitive flow. From black holes to the stars, I contain a universe. But that shouldn’t be surprising. I’m just mirroring back the universe that contains me.

Accepting the invitation to reclaim my lost self and my voice got very emotional and very weird—very fast. Honestly , it’s still weird. But I’m glad that I didn’t dismiss this experience as losing my mind or going crazy. I just know that I have to trust the way that my brain and subconscious naturally wants to piece things back together.

When we get a cut or a bruise, the body’s first urge is to try to heal it. Like many people, my inner self was deeply damaged and was constantly looking for ways to heal and repair—even if the process was bizarre, strange, and mind-bendingly mythic. On top of that people kept coming into my life to reflect the unhealed parts of myself back to me, so this has been an unavoidable process.

My inner self desperately wanted to heal, and I just needed to get out of the way, trust it, and be curious about the alchemical process and the underlying symbolism as it unfolded.

I feel like I’m still healing and understanding, but more than ever before, I know exactly who I am and what I want with such deep rooted confidence, it’s almost vibrant.