Hello, My Name Is Crystal Marie . . .

A follow up to yesterday's post and an introduction

Crystal Marie, Deeper is a bi-weekly, sometimes more, newsletter/blog. If you’d like to support this publication and have access to excerpts from my new book as I write it, along with some other cool perks, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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I’ve been struggling with gut issues the past few weeks, suspected diverticulitis and some related symptoms that it’s brought up, and trying to heal my gut enough to get by while waiting for the appointment with the G.I. doctor recommended by the local chapter of my EDS group.

The medical trauma and unnecessary debt and expenses I’ve occurred from seeing doctors who don’t understand the complications of someone with this disease and how it effects each system, coupled with the added layer of mast cell disease, makes me very cautious about finding doctors with high recommendations from the community who does get it.

I started a new med for a related issue and figuring out what foods I can tolerate without inflaming everything further, and what gut healing protocol my system can tolerate and that will get everything *ahem* moving smoothly, has been pretty consuming. I’ve nearly went to acute care several times in the process, but I finally think I found the right combination between food, meds, and gut healing to wait for the appointment with the doctor with EDS knowledge.

The fundraiser, while being an absolute godsend, has left me feeling raw and achy and overexposed. It’s a hugely vulnerable thing to do to stand up and say you need help in such a public way in a society that can be so divided on these things. Even more so in the face of very real push back and judgement. And there has been plenty of that happening.

The last time I shared about my health and the fundraiser my friends had started directly in a post on Facebook, I wound up having to block an artist who took the opportunity to let me know that I was deluded if I thought anyone was going to rescue me and that I needed to learn to suck it up and deal with it on my own. His persistence in letting me know exactly what he thought of me, then somehow blocking my ability to respond to his comment was a vicious outward display of the underlying message “suck it up” that so dominates our culture. Trust me when I tell you, that most people have no clue just how much sucking it up and dealing with it on my own that I’m capable of, and how much I actually do before letting on that anything is happening.

I don’t know why it still shocks me when it happens, but it does. And as shocking as that incident was, it’s even more hurtful when it comes from people who are close. Some in very overt ways, which helps me to at least know where I stand, and some in very subtle shifts, letting me know through increasing distance or coded language that I’m not behaving the way they think I should, or taking the actions they would take if they were in my shoes based on their own experiences with health and work/life balance.

I’m still working through the internalized shame messages this has stirred up and still working on finding my own voice as an artist, writer, and a human in all this. Three things that I see as essentially connected to my mission of helping others find their own Intuitive Voice, which I translate to be the truest, most authentic version of ourselves, the part of us we are underneath all of the experiences of life that have convinced us to hide behind more acceptable exteriors in order to fit in, when what we really want and need as humans is to belong.

Sharing my human experience with my readers and students has always been a part of my practice. Regardless of what the workshop techniques are focused on, I spend a great deal of time on coaching how to discern which internal messages are part of our own Intuitive Voice and which are part of the group of messages that I call “The Critic” or “The Art Critic”.

That aspect of my teaching has consistently been the thing that has brought me the most feedback from participants, in the way of having breakthroughs in understanding what their own blocks are when they come into the studio. For me, working from this authentic connected place is essential to creating anything meaningful or impactful as an artist. It can’t be separated from how it relates to the shaming messages and lies we believe about ourselves through family of origin, life experiences, and social conditioning.

Using the word “shame” seems to be a trigger for so many of us. Ironically even the acknowledgment of addressing shame and its impact on the human spirit seems shameful. When I talk about my own shame issues and share what I’m discovering in the process outside of the context of how it relates to the artistic process, it becomes painfully obvious how uncomfortable we are as a whole with the subject.

We have been taught well, how to hide anything unseemly and here comes this woman putting it all out there on the table. Doesn’t she know better? Who does she think she is? We have been taught so well, that we don’t even recognize how much shame we carry and how our rejection of acknowledging it as a society and within ourselves as individuals, can cause us to project it onto others and divide each other according to arbitrary categories.

Healing systems within the family and our communities, and in society as a whole, has to begin with healing our own faulty ideas and conditioning. These are the things I refer to as “lies” because indeed they lie to us about who we are and prevent us from really connecting and listening to our own dang voice, let alone each other. No one has gotten away with growing up without some degree of scar tissue covering their voice.

I’m still in the refining stage of finding and using my own voice as a writer. It stirs up many of the same messages that I call the voice of the Art Critic that my art practice did when I was first working through finding my style as a collage artist. I am a beginner again, with all of the same old messages being stirred up when I show up to write, as I encountered when I would sit down to practice piecing elements together with paper and glue.

As so often happens when I am in the process of working through these things, what is happening in my life outside of my artistic practice serves as a living metaphor to help me understand and breakthrough the resistance I’m experiencing in my art practice. When I don’t pay attention to the necessity of adding detox support to my healing protocol, I experience a number of debilitating symptoms from the bottleneck of toxins it causes, I wind up sicker then I was to begin with.

Working through purging my studio of the papers I knew were adding to this load, without acknowledging the emotional aspect of letting them go and addressing those toxic messages it stirred up, would be equally as debilitating. Locking it all up inside doesn’t serve the mind or the body. It is every bit as toxic to the system as unchecked bad bacteria to the gut.

Recognizing the connection between these things was a lightbulb moment for me. I could suddenly see how it related to the blocks I was having in my writing practice. I hadn’t realized how I was carrying the shaming voices from all of the recent judgements I’ve encountered to the table with me when I sat down to write. I was tiptoeing around sharing what I wanted to say in the way I wanted to say it out of fear of further judgement. Even yesterday, in my attempt to write about these things, I did so with caution. It muddied my voice and lacked the clarity of the message I wanted to impart.

So here I am back at the table. For those of you who are new to my community, or those of you who weren’t quite clear on who I am or why I write, this post is something of an introduction.

Hello, my name is Crystal Marie. I’m a recovering people pleaser, approval seeker, and life long learner in the process of finding and using my truest, most authentic voice. I’ve learned a few things along the way about how we lose our voice and have led many people through the process of discovering their own in their art studio practice. Now I’m relearning what it looks like to go through that process and find my voice as a writer. I share my own lived human experiences as an illustration and an example and it is my earnest desire to help others understand how to find and stay connected to their own truest, most authentic version of themselves too.

I understand that this may not be what you thought you were signing up for at whatever point you wound up on my newsletter list. Grace and so much loving grace to you if you decide to unsubscribe.

And for those of you who are here for it, so much gratitude 🙏 and love ❤️ to you.

Crystal Marie