To Thrive Even
I keep starting somewhere and I like where this is leading me.
Dearest Doodle Soupsters,
Where do I begin?
It feels like there’s this giant thing that I need to express, but where do I begin?
How do I start?
This is how I felt my whole life. I’ve been carrying around so many secrets that weren’t ever mine to keep since I was a young child. I thought I was a monster because I had to deserve it somehow. Kid logic … blaming yourself for the failures of the grown ups. Kid logic … no other way to make sense of what you’re experiencing than to think, I’m bad. I must be bad.
I’m not bad.
And I don’t have to be perfect to not be bad.
I’m learning this now, as an adult.
I’m learning how to let myself be human and at the same time, I’ve been human this whole time.
Every moment I was hurt and abused, I was human then too. It’s hard to accept that. That I’ve felt and I feel so much pain.
What do I do with all this?
I am living my life the way I’ve always wanted to live my life. Bit by bit, I let myself simply be who I am. Bit by bit, I release the burden of suppression, hesitation, and fear. Bit by bit, I let myself live. Live how?
Moment to moment and letting myself also believe in the future, to let myself hope, to let myself dream, to build toward
Generously
Compassionately
Creatively
Honestly
Playfully
Joyfully
Letting myself feel whatever I feel, no emotion off-limits, hidden, cut off from
I get to spend my life making art, observing the world around me, healing, and sharing my art with others. I get to help others learn and explore the arts too. I get to garden. I get to spend time with people who truly love and care about me — real love. And I get to love them back. I get to continually grow, explore, learn. I get to exist without constantly fearing that I don’t even have the right to do that because my existence must be harmful somehow. Because if I’m allowed to exist, if I’m allowed to be me, how do I explain the past? Why couldn’t I be free before?
The child part of me feels so, so angry and sad because she wanted this. She wanted this so badly. To be truly loved. To be safe. To be free to be herself. And I think it’s hard for her (me) to observe and sit with that dissonance between what my life was and what it is now.
Next Friday, on August 14th, I will sing and play guitar surrounded by my tapestries, drawings, paintings, collages in my Whispers Among the Trees series, a project all about healing, letting myself play and imagine and feel. As I’ve mentioned before, Whispers Among the Trees is a dialogue I wrote between a strange human (sweet child of the universe) and a woodland fairy named Existence. The human asks Existence about the mysteries of the universe, about free will, about the nature of time … a deep pain co-exists with a vibrant, eager curiosity about the world around her. This human asks, “If pain is the reason they hurt me, why am I unlike them? I have pain.”
Existence replies, “Pain is not the reason they hurt you and you know that. The avoidance of pain is another matter, though.”
Human: "Still, how could they? How could they not want to change? For me? To stop such callous and cruel behavior toward a child? Toward me?"
Existence: "I don’t know."
Human: "You don’t know? You know everything!"
Existence: "I don’t know everything. I am everything. There is a difference. And when you’re everything, individual feelings can become hard to understand. Individual behaviors can become hard to understand. I am free will. And yet, I do not cause free will and I cannot take it away. I just am. I know that’s not a very satisfying answer for you. However, as I’ve told you before, I will tell you of all the secrets and mysteries, as much as your puny little human brain can grasp. That is how I put it."
Human: "I know. And my mind influences how I hear you, I know. You are existence itself. And that doesn’t mean you control existence, You just are. Yet, what is free will, then? If we just are, then don’t we have just about the same amount of control as you do?"
Existence: "Maybe. However, you are a piece of the universe, not all of it, like me. The fact that you are a part and yet still whole on your own allows for different results than being everything. And no one said that I do not have any free will over anything concerning myself."
Human: "If you had free will over something concerning yourself, wouldn’t that mean having some choice regarding the entirety of existence since you are in fact existence?"
Existence: "Yes and no."
Human: "What?"
Existence: "The foundation of existence is the coexistence of opposites. Darkness and light. Stillness and movement. Air or space and physical matter. Measurability and also something embedded in everything that is immeasurable, transcends measurement. Language and wordlessness. Life and death. Change and constancy. Yes and no. Everything and nothing."
Is this even true? What I’ve written? Is the foundation of existence the coexistence of opposites? I have no way of knowing. I don’t know. At the end of the day, yeah, I really don’t have a clue.
Yet, this is healing. Letting my imagination roll back and forth and through. And so my curiosity and awe toward existence coexist with my grief, my ache for how things are, how they have been too.
The very fact of existence is how my traumas happened. They couldn’t have happened without existence. Being human is so wonderful and so deeply painful.
And it is healing to acknowledge this. To simply let that be what it is.
So much of my pushing against, my running away, my twisting of what could possibly be the reason I feel what I feel is an avoidance of this acceptance. Because acceptance means putting the blame where it belongs … letting the truth be what it is.
And that means acknowledging that from the beginning of my life through my early adulthood, the people closest to me hurt me the most. I felt like being myself meant hurting others simply because of how my caregivers reacted to me moving toward what deep down I knew was the path to my healing.
Yet, the path to my healing has always been bound up with severing ties that I didn’t want to sever, a process of revealing, exposing these relationships for what they already were … the whole time. I wanted to believe them over myself. I tried so hard to believe them over myself. And ultimately, I found that road could only lead to me somewhere between half-dead or totally dead. I couldn’t be fully alive and deny my memories. I couldn’t keep running from myself. I am me. There is nowhere to run.
Being in my body is still hard some days. Just letting myself pursue what is so natural to me can bring up so much fear and pain inside. And still, the only way is through (just like the title of one of my artworks in the Whispers exhibit).
Watercolor and colored pencil on paper. 8 x 6 inches. 2026.
Photo by Alexandra Galvis.
And I’m so glad I’m still here. The past few months, I’ve been doing more markets in Staten Island — the conversations I’ve had with people have been so encouraging.
Being an artist and sharing my art with others — I knew this is who I am and what I want to do with my life all along … Three-year-old me who couldn’t get enough of crayons knew. Nine-year-old me writing poems and stories, illustrating them, knew. I always knew.
And I was told I couldn't be me … because if I was me, then I would heal. If I was me, I would finally believe myself and I would confront my memories. If I was me, if I was fully alive, I would fight for myself and I would leave. I would name the abuse. I would leave that old life and those old ways of existing behind. I would leave them behind.
I could be more direct, I know. I don’t want to be more direct about the abuse. This newsletter isn’t about “them” or what “they” did. It’s about the life I chose. It’s about how I choose to exist in this world. It’s about me letting myself be me … sharing myself, and what I create, with you.
I’m so glad I chose myself. And I will feel every bit of grief I have to feel. I will feel all the pain that I need to feel, all the anger.
Because the old ways don’t work anymore — I can’t pick and choose which emotions to let myself feel. Because the old ways were about surviving abuse. Because I want to give myself the chance not just to not be dead, but to be alive. To thrive even.
Oof, how scary is that to even write? What right do I have to thrive? And still, I know this is an old question. This old question has everything to do with keeping myself small to keep myself safe.
I don’t need to hate myself anymore. I don’t need to blame myself anymore. I don’t need to protect myself from the truth.
So, where do I begin?
I keep starting somewhere and I like where this is leading me. It’s the way forward. I know it is. It is a path full of so much grief and so much love and so much creativity and freedom and wonder and beauty and play and … I am here. I won’t hide what I’m holding inside. I live now. I love now. I speak now. I won’t rush. I won’t hesitate. I won’t live in fear. Anymore. Anymore.
The only way is through. The only way is through.
Here we go …
into the space between
the realm of the physical and the realm of the physical, overlapping and intertwined
How many times will I say that I’m fine until I say what I really mean?
My song lyrics flowing, mixing …
all the insecurity, all the doubt … is this all you see in me?
tell me, what I am, searching for, searching for …
sweet child, listen …
listen to the whispers among the trees
do you hear that?
your voice, our voice, gentle and wistful and strong
listen, listen
With and in courage,
Nicole Sylvia Javorsky
P.S. Can’t wait to share my mystical, musical performance on the last day of the Whispers Among the Trees exhibit at T.O.L.K. Gallery on August 14th at 7pm …