
Black Monday
London, October 2012. I’d just pitched a business at the London Business School, where I was finishing my MBA. I should have been working. Instead, I was pacing my room, unable to concentrate. I called Jonty, who’d mentored me over the summer.
“What’s wrong with me?” I screamed.
“You’re just tired,” Jonty said. “Why don’t you take some time to recoup?”
Relaxing was not my modus operandi. I’d spent the past fifteen years getting degrees and climbing the corporate ladder. Why would this have to stop now when I was launching a business?
“Why don’t you buy yourself a treat?” Jonty suggested.
I’d spent the summer living out of my suitcase between London, Shanghai, and France to visit family. I was exhausted from dragging the weight of my suitcase, but I realized, also from the weight of past traumas.
The weight
I grew up in Brittany, France, in a family where burying traumas was the norm. So, we buried, literally and metaphorically, my mother, my brother, father, grandparents, aunt, uncle, suicides, mental illnesses, depression, and abuse. I left France when I was twenty-one on an exchange program with the National University of Singapore, where I earned a Ph.D. and worked in Asia and the US. At thirty-five, I started therapy which was interrupted when a close relative suffered an accident. My relative got better, and I started launching the business, not realizing that therapy had opened Pandora’s box to childhood traumas that had festered.
Pencils and mandalas
In London, I ran to sweat a rage I didn’t understand out of my body. One afternoon, I was strolling Piccadilly Street when a longing came from deep within my heart, or maybe my soul: I wanted some color pencils. I hadn’t drawn for years. I couldn’t even draw, I’d been led to believe. I found an arts and craft store, stormed in, and bought myself a box of color pencils and a scratch book. No five-course dinner with the most expensive paired wines or luxury items from the neighboring shops could have made me happier than a box of color pencils. I spent the following days running and drawing mandalas I couldn’t explain.
Drawing had helped me before
While I doodled, forgotten memories surfaced. One Friday evening, when I was seventeen, my father came to fetch me from boarding school as usual. He was driving through the roundabout in the center of town, his eyes focused on the traffic when he said: “Alban committed suicide.” Alban was one of my cousins, also seventeen, attending the other boarding school in town. The roads merged into the traffic. “He jumped from the window of his dorm room.” My father added.
My father and I reached home and had dinner. My father settled in front of the TV. I went to my bedroom, sat at my desk, and without thinking about it, I opened my desk drawer and took a sheet of drawing paper and some pencils. I drew a window, in detail, on the left, the window from which my cousin had jumped. I left the right side void, the void he might have felt out there but also within.
Painting
After a week of running and drawing mandalas in London, I boarded my flight back to Boston, sat on the plane, and started crying the losses never grieved and traumas I’d fooled myself I’d been able to bury. I landed in Boston, still crying.
I started writing and painting. Painting complemented the writing. I painted dreams, a lot of them blue, the blue of the subconscious I was reconnecting with. I bought painting knives and often painted with a rage, pain in disguise, I couldn’t express with words.
Healing and letting go
Later, the pain would be transformed into beauty and pieces of art I would sell. Back then, doodling, drawing, and painting were ways to process pain. Creating was never to create pieces for others. It was for me to heal. I made the mistake twice of showing some pieces to friends when I was fragile. They didn’t get what I’d tried to express. I felt misunderstood.
I painted dreams that I would understand only years later. I believe the subconscious shows us in our art what will come to our awareness.
I remembered scenes of Buddhist monks I’d seen when visiting Tibet, spending weeks creating sand mandalas that they would blow away when finished. The pieces I made were a snapshot of pains that needed to be transformed. I wanted to let go of them. I threw away, tore, and burned all pieces created during those years.
Transforming pain into beauty
A few years later, I was spending time on Maui, writing, when my close relative had a relapse and was in the hospital again. I’d started collecting corals and branches of trees that the sea had washed away. The night fell. Instead of burying the pain as I’d done for years, I was drawn to the branches that lay on the floor the same way I’d been drawn to my color pencils after my cousin committed suicide. I spent most of the night building a mobile that occupied most of my studio. It was later exhibited in a juried exhibition and sold. I believe healing is transforming pain into wisdom and beauty.
I still doodle now
Occasionally, I still paint. But now that I am launching Akesa Health, I mostly doodle. I sit for five or ten minutes and draw amorphous shapes. It relaxes me, and while my hands are coloring, my mind and body relax. Insight sometimes comes. In any case, after a few minutes with colors, I feel more centered and happier.
I wondered over the years if this need to draw like a child was a way for the child I was to express emotions that she hadn’t been able to express. I believe emotions need to run their course one way or another, and art has been a way for me to express my feelings.