Becoming Holographic: From Creative Exile to Creative Wholeness

It is through the experience of creative exile that we can uncover the depth of power in our creative gifts.

I’m not a creative in the way that I think a creative is supposed to look.

I don’t have beautifully worn out journals.
I don’t have a consistent creative practice that I show up to every single day.
I don’t have an aesthetic IG page full of beautiful things I’ve made.
I don’t have one medium I’ve claimed and made my own.

And so, I’ve spent years of my life reaching and folding into what I think a creative person is supposed to look like:

I’ve been the Substack essayist.

I’ve been the collage-ist.

I’ve been the zine maker.

I’ve been the Procreate illustrator.

I’ve been the singer, the dancer, the actor, the baker, the chef, the pianist.

Bending myself into shapes trying to find what version of my creativity I belong to. Begging different mediums to accept me as theirs.

It took my whole life collapsing around me to finally settle into these two truths:

1. Creativity is a birthright. Belonging is irrelevant when it’s been written in your DNA as a sacred prophecy from every ancestor who came before you.

2. When you live truth #1, everything becomes a creative medium.

I feel in every wisdom bearing piece of myself—heart, bones, intuition—that it’s time to share my story of creative redemption and liberation.

Because this story is as much mine as it is yours.

You, too, know what creative exile feels like. You know what it feels like to long for something you cannot name. To yearn for a part of you you didn’t realize you’d abandoned.

Perhaps you’ve been shamed or bullied out of expressing your gifts, or you’ve chosen the path of “practicality.”

Maybe you’ve always thought “but I’m not creative,” or maybe you’ve abandoned this piece of you in the process of running from other parts of you.

You know the push and pull of duty, obligation, social conditioning against the alluring current of your effervescent possibility, creativity, imagination, and desire.

Let this essay melt the shame around your creative exile.
Let it be the catalyst to your creative resurrection.
Let it be the thing that unfurls what you’ve unknowingly folded.

I hope you take what you read here and turn it into an axe: one that feels heavy in your hands but greets your palms like an old friend.

Like your hands remember the power and provocation they’re capable of wielding.

And when you’re ready, bring this axe to the cages in which you’ve imprisoned your power, creativity, desire, and truth.

Hack at those cages with the ferocity of a starving animal chasing its food. Feel the sting in your lungs as you gasp to catch your breath.

Your creativity will set you free.

So set yourself free. Relentlessly.

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holo- means whole

-graph means depiction or expression

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HOLOGRAPHIC PRINCIPLE #1: CREATIVITY AS COMPANION

Your creativity is your constant companion, even when you don’t realize it’s there. Trust that it can hold and alchemize your pain and your joy.

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As a child, my creativity was my best friend.

It was there for me when I started a new school in a new state. It showed me how imagination can connect us with others. I told a girl at school that I had a giant castle in my backyard with an endless ball pit. She came over to see it and realized I had made it up—but we became childhood best friends anyway.

It was there for me when my parents got divorced and remarried new people. It took me to new worlds where I had the space and safety to process what I was going through. At age 13, I wrote an entire story about a girl who dies and enters the afterlife. What happens when the life you wanted is stolen from you? Is it possible to heal that wound—and is it possible to find another life that you want to live? Turns out, it is.

It was there for me when I got rejected by my first real crush. It took me deep into my longing and desire to be seen and loved. I poured my heart into writing songs on the piano. This lyric still stays with me: “And all I am is the silence between the notes.” Very moody, very middle school. I love her.

It was there for me when I felt like a social outcast in high school. It took me onto a stage where I could pretend to be a character who had confidence, who was liked, who felt at home in her skin. I remember getting the role of Dawn in a short play called Seven Menus. Dawn was the life of the party: she was funny, took up space, had lots of friends. She got the loudest applause when the play ended.

My creativity held me through the hardest times of my childhood. Reminding me that I always have somewhere to go when I need a safe space to process the trauma and beauty of being alive.

It told me over and over again that my authentic self-expression is my medicine. A balm I always have access to that can soothe anything—as long as I am real and honest and true.

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HOLOGRAPHIC PRINCIPLE #2: CREATIVE EXILE AS INITIATION

Creative exile happens when we abandon our creative self, whether by our own hands or other external forces making us feel like we have no other choice.

If you have ever been told that you shouldn’t pursue singing, writing, dancing, art, and then subsequently decide to cut off the part of you who so honestly expressed themselves that way—that is creative exile.

Because that part of you still sings, wherever they are locked up. And it is your responsibility—to yourself, to the world—to go into the depths of that exile to find your creative power.

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I’m sure you’re familiar with the Sirens of Ancient Greece: they sang to Odysseus on his journey home, seducing him and his men to their watery deaths. The archetype of the Siren is inherently creative: using the powerful gift of voice to move someone so deeply that they are compelled to bend to your will.

But the story of the Siren is inherently a story of creative exile.

According to Pausanias in Description of Greece, the Sirens rivaled the Muses in creative talent. One day, they were persuaded by Hera to enter a contest with the Muses to decide whose singing was best. The Muses won, plucked out the Siren’s feathers (given to them by Demeter,) and banished them to an island. This is how they became the Sirens we know in The Odyssey and stories like Jason and the Argonauts.

The Sirens could have moped on their island and chose to never sing again, after hearing from the Muses and a whole ass Goddess that their talents didn’t measure up.

But they kept singing—and not just pretty ballads.

They sang with the full force of their creative power.

The story of the Sirens illustrates that it is actually through the experience of creative exile that we uncover the depth of power in our creative gifts.

My creative exile began in college.

The freedom should have been liberating but the reality is that I didn’t know who I was without someone else writing the rules for me (Virgo eldest daughter probz)

And because I didn’t know how to be myself, I immediately transformed into who I thought I was “supposed” to be in order to make friends, in order to look cool, in order to prove that I was thriving.

So I buried my authenticity, and my creativity followed suit.

Because the deal I made with my creativity is honest self-expression. This is the covenant we are bound by, that was foretold long before I was even born.

And for most of my college experience, I was so fucking scared to be myself.

Unconsciously knowing I’d broken our agreement, I turned away from my creativity out of shame. And on the occasion I did try to access it, I resented how utterly awful my creations were.

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HOLOGRAPHIC PRINCIPLE #3: CREATIVITY AS RECKONING

When you build a life based on what you think you “should” be doing rather than what you actually want and what actually feels good, your authenticity, desire, and creativity will eventually combine forces to send a tidal wave of grief after you.

Their grief of not being fully and wholly expressed and lived by you and through you.

Every time you fold yourself into a shape for someone else, every time you abandon your dreams in exchange for what’s familiar, every time you ignore your instinct to create, their grief deepens.

But this grief is a map. Follow its thrumming ache through the labyrinth of your psyche and you will find exactly where these parts of you have been imprisoned.

Set them free.

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I thought having a baby would grow my heart three sizes like the Grinch. Turns out, that’s not what happens.

Having a baby actually broke my heart completely open. Shattered everything I knew about how to love, how to be a human. I didn’t know how to live in a world where something I created lives outside of me with a heartbeat borne out of my own.

The day he was born ignited every cell in my body and blood, as expected. But what I didn’t expect was that his first breath of air in his lungs, the frequency of his first cries sent a crack straight into the rock I’d buried my creativity beneath.

And it slowly began to leak out.

As soon as I felt its trickle again I became a fiend, lapping up every drop of it, always hungry for more of this magic I’d forgotten. I bloodied my hands tearing at its cage, summoning superhuman strength trying to break the calcified crust keeping it inside, slowly releasing it back into my blood stream, but not quite able to fully let it out yet.

Every free moment I had as a freshly postpartum mother I spent writing. Words poured out of me and it was ecstasy.

Now looking back, I know why my son was this catalyst.

For years I’d built my entire adulthood based on an inauthentic vision, a life made up of choices I’d made out of fear and denial. Taking the shape of someone I thought others wanted me to be instead of just being myself.

But one night, staring at my sweet baby’s face, sleep-deprived tears diving down my cheeks in the lonely darkness of 3am, I suddenly felt the room flood with the ghosts of desires unchosen. Every abandoned creative impulse. All of my inauthentic decisions staring at me like mirrors.

The resounding echoes of the truths I’d buried growing louder as they came closer.

What had I done to myself? How could I have exiled this part of me? How could I have possibly built a life I’d be happy with when both my creativity and authenticity had been buried deep beneath mountains made by my own hands?

Kissing that sweet angel baby with a prayer that he’d sleep longer than 45 minutes, I promised to return to myself.

For him. For me.

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HOLOGRAPHIC PRINCIPLE #4: CREATIVE RESURRECTION

It doesn’t matter how long you have been in creative exile: creative resurrection is always possible and available to you.

But in order to be reborn as the most potent version of you, you must leave behind the identities you took on during creative exile. You must leave behind the people pleaser. The person who folded into shapes instead of taking up space. The person who chose duty over desire.

This will probably feel like grief before it feels like liberation.

So let yourself grieve, and know that all those versions of you aren’t villains that need to be banished. You can keep them in your heart, and send them the love and comfort they deeply craved and deserved.

But you must commit to no longer existing as them.

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Although my creativity had started pouring back into my life, something was still… off. One big stubborn rock I couldn’t move that prevented its full-force return.

In the Spring of 2025, I had an underworld experience. My life suddenly felt like a prison, one I had somehow consented to being put inside of. Every time I could have said “no,” I said “yes” without realizing the consequences.

My relationship was falling apart. My partner was also having a severe health crisis so I was taking care of him and our son. We were extremely financially insecure. My business was barely bringing in money (because I had very little child care help and was only working nights when my stay-at-home mom brain was fried.) I had no time to myself.

Beyond just feeling trapped, I felt like fate had seen my choices and dropped me off in the middle of the underworld. There were no lamps to light my path, only a single glowing thread of resolve I somehow managed to keep intact, a hope that told me it was possible to find my way out of this.

But fate knows what it’s doing, and the gift in journeying to the underworld was that I found exactly where I’d exiled my creativity.

Before, I was outside of the cage, clawing to break it free.

Now, I was inside the cage with it.

And in confronting it, after years of neglect, broken covenants, a tenuous relationship with it, I collapsed on my knees. Sobbing apologies for having locked it in such a place. Begging it to help me navigate this underworld, to help me find my way out.

And while it took time for us to understand each other again, for me to understand our shared language, it did help me.

But first, it told me:

Make me a part of everything you do. Lead from me. Live from me. Bring me out.

So I listened.

Not only did I become creatively prolific, staying up until 2am to make zines, collage oracle cards, write essays, but I started weaving it into my work. Supporting creatives with astrology, tarot, and my six years of magazine editing experience.

And in return, it gave me everything I asked for.

But I had to sacrifice every piece of my life that was inauthentic. Anything that broke our covenant.

My child’s father and I ended our relationship in the Fall of 2025, and the final piece of the mountain under which I’d buried my creativity finally collapsed.

An unstoppable flow of creativity. An unstoppable flow of grief.

How beautiful. How devastating. How liberating.

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HOLOGRAPHIC PRINCIPLE #5: CREATIVE WHOLENESS

When you journey into creative exile and back again, you will settle into the truth that your creativity is the medium through which you become whole. It opens every doorway, creates every pathway, reveals every possibility of what your life can look like when you live as yourself.

Trust it. Lead with it. Unapologetically. Relentlessly.

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I am not exceptionally talented or gifted. I don’t have a published book. I don’t have my shit together. I’m still grappling with financial insecurity, difficult relationship dynamics, and trauma (big T and little t)

But my creativity has blown open my capacity to show the fuck up for life.

It swims in the dark waters with me, buoys me as I navigate the hardest shit I have ever faced.

It pushes me deeper into my authenticity. I always thought happiness would bring me fulfillment but my creativity has shown me that authentic expression is what makes me feel alive.

My creativity set me free, and it continues to show me every single day that orienting my life around it is going to bring me everything I could ever ask for.

I sold out my first ever group program last month.
I’ve had two collaborations go viral on Instagram this year.
I’ve been featured on six different podcasts of people I highly respect.
I actually let myself be supported, held, and witnessed in community.
I’ve never felt so confident and whole in myself, my worth, and my work.

I don’t need a creative medium to choose me as theirs.

I am the creative who sees everything as a medium—and by engaging with each one, I meet more versions of myself.

The smutty fanfic writer is different from the essayist.
The digital artist is different from the KPOP dancer.
The podcaster is different from the cyanotype maker.

It’s all me, still whole—but the mediums become the light of a hologram, revealing the vast possibilities within my own three dimensionality.

My creativity made me holographic.

Holographic as in expressing every single one of my dimensions in its fullest expression. Creative possibility at every unfolding.

Holographic as in giving myself permission to change and shift when it feels right while still maintaining my wholeness. (Take any slice of a hologram and it contains the full picture. Cool huh?)

Holographic as in looking for new angles, perspectives, and possibilities around every corner.

Holographic as in exploring and pushing my creative edges.

Holographic as in wielding my creativity as my greatest ally to bend reality around me.

Holographic like the scales of a Siren who found the depth of her voice + power while in creative exile.

Holographic as in not compartmentalizing my creativity but living from it as fundamental to who I am.

Not just a thing I turn on when I’m in the mood to make something.

A sacred merging.
A covenant with my truth + desire.
A prophecy foretold in my ancestors’ wildest dreams.

HOLOGRAPHIC.

Your creativity will set you free.
So set yourself free, relentlessly.

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If this essay stirred something within you: Good. Use that. Pull that thread, ride that wave. Let it take you where you need to go.

I’ve spent all year writing this essay and distilling my creative exile + resurrection journey into HOLOGRAPHIC, a 10-week group program creative playground where you, too, will become the prolific, holographic creative you know you’re meant to be:

→ Multi-medium experimentation (smut writing, zine making, oracle card crafting) to meet your own creative edges

→ Co-create sessions to work on (and even finish!) the projects you care most about

→ Live astrology hot seats to support and nurture your creative expansion

→ Creative community to support you

Runs from September - November 2026

Currently open for enrollment [and you can save $300 by enrolling before July 31] 🫧