The Girl Who Felt Too Much

Soul collaging the fragments back together to remember the wholeness we already are.

I began writing my journal at age eleven.

Maybe you had them too- spiral-bound confidantes, diaries with locks, napkins scribbled with dreams. Maybe you, too, found ways to hold what no one else seemed to know how to hold for you.

Mine are tucked in boxes now, their pages yellowed with time. They hold moments of joy, but mostly they carry the ache of my becoming—the pain, the confusion, the resentment, the longing, the sharp shards of grief. And the last thing I want is to leave behind a giant Sterilite bin of anger and heartbreak as my final words to the people I love.

Then it came to me to me- make them into art.

So I cut some pages up. Words I once whispered only to the page were sliced and torn and rearranged like puzzle pieces of my soul, collaged with painted scraps I had created over the years.

Maybe you’ve done this in your own way. Not with scissors and glue, but with your life, trying to make something beautiful out of the broken. Trying to make sense of all the pieces. Trying to remember who you were before you learned to doubt what you knew. Becoming an artist of truth in your life.

Creating this piece was the perfect soul assignment for me.

Because I was the artist-child in a family where expressing ourselves could be dangerous. A girl who felt everything in a lineage that had learned, generation after generation, that feelings were a minefield to be avoided at all costs.

Conscientious provision was abundant. Feeling loved was an occasional treat. But emotional safety was scarce.

In families shaped by trauma and addiction, even when the substances are long gone, the silence remains. It’s a kind of inheritance that says:

Don’t name what might break the fragile peace. Don’t speak what’s true for you. Don’t add to the problem. But mine found a way to leak out.

While the family watched television, I went to my room and created. Paint, words, paper, pencils, glue—anything I could shape. I drew what I loved. And I wrote what I wouldn’t dare say out loud.

Art and writing became the place where I could be freely and fully me—loving what I loved, feeling what I felt. It was the place I learned to listen to myself, to love myself, to trust myself—long before I had the language to name that as healing. Because art was not just something I made. It was a sacred conversation.

The words in this piece came from a journal I wrote in my early twenties. I felt lost. I was confused. But what struck me as I cut them into strips, decades later, is how much wisdom those pages held.

I saw that I knew the way of my soul. There were Bluebeards and wolves on my path, no doubt. But my inner compass was wise. She knew, even as she struggled to trust what she knew. Because no one told her she could.

No one had said: Your feelings are not too much. Your knowing is not dangerous. It is the path of your soul.

And you?

Who was the girl inside you who knew?

Who felt the world so deeply it poured out of her—in whispers, in drawings, in journals, in dances, in dreams?

Who is she now?

She hasn’t left. She’s been waiting. Waiting for you to feel her again. To pick up the thread.

To remember what made you you, before the world told you to be something else.

Let her speak. Let her guide you. Let her create with you.

She knows what you need, who you are and who you are not. She always has.