The Return to Myself
Originally posted on substack.
The most vulnerable I have ever been online.
The other day, a friend of mine asked me why most of the women I create have their eyes closed. I sat with that question because, at first, I thought the answer was obvious. Closed eyes mean going within. They mean sitting in the dark. They mean listening to the voices, the hidden messages, and the quiet language the body has been trying to speak for a long time.
Soul Sisters
Twin flames kissing through the dark,
mirroring each other, yet worlds apart.
The one who’s always near,
yet just out of reach.
An ache of recognition,
an echo of love
that never quite belonged to this world.
This is something we are rarely taught to do. We are taught to look outside of ourselves. To be loud. To get attention. To value what is tangible, what is visible, what can be measured, explained, or understood through logic. Everything has to make sense in the 3D. Everything has to be productive, impressive, or easy for others to understand.
Going within does not work like that. Feeling does not work like that. Understanding the emotional body is often seen as strange because it is quiet. It is private. You cannot show it off in the same way. You cannot perform it for attention without eventually lying to yourself. To truly sit with your emotions, you have to be honest. You have to be transparent with yourself. And that can be terrifying because it may trigger the very thing you have been avoiding. That reaction is already a message.
I have been through multiple dark nights of the soul. I have had moments where I thought I would never be enough for others. I have had moments where I felt I had to dim my own fire so other people could feel comfortable around me, because that felt easier than being fully seen. What I did not understand back then was that my fire was also reflecting something back to people. It was triggering what they did not want to look at in themselves.
Higher self
The one who lives in the hush beneath the chaos,
the part of me that doesn’t flinch,
that doesn’t chase.
She waits.
Thriving in flame,
draped in silence,
she speaks not in words but in waves.
A goddess of the in-between,
she rises from the dark.
When the world gets too loud,
I return to her.
I return to my higher self.
So when I could no longer hold the performance, I became the weird one. The difficult one. The one who asked too many questions. The one who could not be controlled. And yes, my heart broke. It broke through relationships, through systems, through the quiet realisation that so much of my life had been shaped around making myself acceptable.
I cried my soul out. I isolated myself. I cut cords with people who were no longer aligned with who I was becoming. I stopped performing for others and went within. I went into the void. I sat with the thoughts, the overthinking, the rage, the grief, the confusion, all of it. I kept asking myself, what is this feeling? What is this emotion? How did I get here? What is my body trying to show me?
That period became a moment of deep unlearning. I started to question everything I knew, from academia to spirituality, from family expectations to the way society teaches us to build a life. I realised that so much of what I had been doing was never truly for me. I was trying to fit into a world that was never made for the fullness of who I am.
Then I started drawing again. Quietly, in my small Moleskine. I was drawing symbols I did not even understand at the time. Geometric forms. Ancient Egyptian symbols. Marks that felt like they were being channelled through me rather than planned by me. I knew I had a connection with the ancient world, but I did not fully understand what that connection meant yet.
The more I went inside, the more I surrendered to the unknown. The more I descended, the more I ascended. Slowly, I started to understand my own soul’s purpose. I started to push myself to express more openly. I started to understand that drawing had always been one of the ways my body and soul knew how to speak before my mind had the language.
And it is not always pretty. When you go within, you start seeing people more clearly. You feel when their energy no longer vibrates with yours. You start questioning why you are still entertaining certain dynamics. You start calling out what feels false. You stop agreeing with methods, systems, and approaches that do not sit right in your body anymore.
When you dance with fear, you summon your freedom.
And in freedom, you rise - unbound, untamed.
The shame you carry was never yours.
It was woven into your flesh,
A curse spoken by those who fear what they do not understand,
A leash forged to keep you obedient,
A veil cast to blind you from your own power.
And by power, I mean your truest form -
The one they fear,
The one they tried to bury.
The choice is yours:
Will you tremble beneath their gaze?
Or will you embrace what you were always meant to become?
Eight months ago, I was laid off from my corporate job. In that world, when you speak your mind too much, you can easily become the one they cast out. I knew it was coming in some way, because I had stopped saying yes to everything. I had stopped performing obedience. I had stopped making myself easy to manage. So they called me difficult, and then I was laid off.
In that moment, I was shocked and not shocked at the same time. Shocked because I no longer had income coming in. Shocked because survival became real very quickly. Rent, food, bills, all of it. Yet I was also relieved. Relieved because I no longer had to perform in a space that was draining my life force. Relieved because I finally had more time to create, to listen, and to ask myself what I truly wanted to do.
And what I wanted was to draw. To let my soul be free. To let her speak without asking for permission, without shrinking beneath the judgement of others. Because people will always talk. They will talk when you hide, and they will talk when you rise. So you might as well give them a good show.
Two months after being laid off, I launched my art website. I did not fully know what I was doing. I just knew I needed to create a space that represented me. I wanted somewhere my work could live, somewhere that felt honest. It did not have to be perfect. It did not have to be performative. It simply had to be me.
Today, I get to be more myself than I have ever been. That does not mean everything is easy. Some days are hard. The lack of monthly income is real. The uncertainty is real. Figuring out how to pay rent or even buy food is real. I do not want to romanticise that part, because survival pressure is not poetic when you are inside it.
Still, there is an inner peace I did not have before. A quietness inside me. A knowing that I would rather build something honest from the unknown than keep abandoning myself for a false sense of security.
So when you see the women in my work with their eyes closed, they are not absent. They are listening. They are turned inward. They are in the void. They are feeling what the world taught them to suppress. They are remembering the fire they were taught to hide. That, to me, is the dark feminine, the unapologetic self, the self that no longer performs, no longer shrinks, and no longer asks for permission to exist in her full truth.
My wildness is protected by what you fear. My feminine exiles nothing.
Thank you for reclaiming what was hidden with me. If you feel a pull toward this work, you can support my practice by welcoming a print into your space or helping fuel the art.
Your presence keeps this work alive.
Melvina
