I came to ceramics in an indirect way. I grew up in a very chaotic family. There was a lot of unpredictability in my early years, and I was often alone and under a lot of stress. I had frequent panic attacks throughout childhood and into early adulthood, before I had any understanding of what they were or how they might be treated. Throughout childhood and into my early adulthood, the choices I made were limited by whether or not I thought I could do a certain activity without having a panic attack. It wasn’t until much later in life that I recognized that the panic attacks were a response to my environment.
As a teenager and young adult, I was looking for something that could provide structure and make things feel more manageable. At nineteen, that search led me into a highly structured religious community that, over time, became increasingly controlling.
While I was in that environment, there wasn’t much space for individuality, and the pursuit of anything as impractical as a craft was looked down on within the group. At one point, between college classes, I made paint-your-own mugs with prescribed religious quotes, selling them as a fundraiser for the group. Looking back, it feels both absurd and resourceful. It was an odd use of my time because I was a full-time student, worked three jobs, and was required to participate in a consistent schedule of cult-activities. The mugs were time-consuming to make and only made a few dollars each for the group. Looking back, it seems like a very small way that I was able to stay connected to myself while in a group that intended for its members’ identities to stay focused only on their connection to the group.
I left that community in my early twenties, without much more of a sense of how to move forward in my day-to-day life than I had when I first joined the group, except that I was five years older and had a nursing degree. Deciding to leave felt terrifying and destabilizing. Without much support I immediately needed to learn how to function independently. Even though most of the time it was clear to me that the group was not what I had at one time believed them to be, life outside the group initially had moments that were so challenging I thought about going back.
Around that time, I began working with porcelain. There was a pottery co-op near the school where I worked, and it was something that I had enough experience in that I could do independently, and could imagine eventually building into a livelihood. Learning to work with porcelain required focus, consistency, and the ability to make and follow through on a series of small decisions that had concrete effects in reality. Over time, that became a way of building both a studio practice and a more self-directed life. When I became firmly grounded in my studio practice working with porcelain, my panic attacks went away.
I continued to work as a nurse while developing my ceramics practice, spending long hours in the studio and gradually refining both my technical skills and my approach to design. Within a few years, I established a studio in Boston’s South End and began receiving recognition for my work.
I later moved to Vermont, where I continue to live and work. What I had expected to be a relaxing life change, and a kind of relief or reward for all the work I had done and what I had endured earlier in life, ended up being enormously stressful. Shortly after I arrived, I began being stalked by neighbors in the community. After not having panic attacks for several years, they returned, and for the first several years I lived in Vermont much of my life became organized around managing that experience.
At the same time, I became increasingly focused on understanding what was happening, both in terms of the psychology of the kind of person who would engage in that behavior, and how I could respond in a way that was healthy and sustainable. I began to understand more about the people who raised me, as well as what was going on with the people who held power over others in the cult. Spending that time focused on mental health, combined with the recognition that there were practical therapeutic tools which would have been extremely helpful to me earlier in life, led me to begin training as a therapist.
I now maintain a counseling practice alongside my studio work, with a focus on ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy). Soon after leaving the cult I heard Stephen Hayes give a lecture describing the fundamental principles behind ACT. I recognized that if I’d been able to connect with a good ACT therapist earlier in life I might have been able to construct a meaningful path forward for myself that didn’t include giving up my autonomy to a coercive group. I work with the general public, and also maintain availability to help people who are rebuilding their lives after coercive or highly controlling experiences, such as cult or stalking situations.
My life now is deliberate and sustainable. I am a solo parent to a happy, thriving child, and much of my daily life is organized around steadiness, care, and creating a stable environment; things that were not available to me growing up. I appreciate my studio practice, therapy, and my connection with nature through gardening, all as ways that I was initially able ground myself and cope with the effects of abuse, that, over time, became how I was able to reconnect with the world and create a beautiful life for my daughter and myself.