Meet Starla Yilmaz

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Starla Yilmaz. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Starla below.

Starla, we are so deeply grateful to you for opening up about your journey with mental health in the hops that it can help someone who might be going through something similar. Can you talk to us about your mental health journey and how you overcame or persisted despite any issues? For readers, please note this is not medical advice, we are not doctors, you should always consult professionals for advice and that this is merely one person sharing their story and experience.

I have struggled with mental health issues for a long time. How much of it is from childhood trauma, my Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS), or having my POTS misdiagnosed as a psychosomatic disorder for 19 years is anyone’s guess, but one thing I have learned through extensive therapy is that the why isn’t always what’s important, but the result, and the result was that I was on a very self-destructive path that toook years of therapy and work to get me off of and stabilized. Not every therapist was helpful, but I am very blessed to have found two who were able to help save my life. So, therapy and doing the work, I highly recommend, but the other thing that really helped me was being creative. Specifically, cross-stitching. It is a mostly calming, repetitive activity that left me with something beautiful to share with others. That physical creation is something that, no matter how awful my brain tried to convince me that I was, I could look at one of my cross-stitches and know that if nothing else, my hands could create pretty things, and that meant I had value as a person. Therapy and cross-stitching have given me the strength to persist through my mental health issues.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I have been reading Tarot for over 20 years and cross-stitching even longer. An avid writer with numerous short publications, I am a two-time winner of the Prepublished Maggie Award for Excellence for my work in romantic fiction. I live with my family in Georgia. During an intense healing phase of my life, I began work on what would become The Butterfly Wisdom Tarot.

Perfect for life’s transformative periods, The Butterfly Wisdom Tarot is a gentle companion ready to guide your insights and uplift your spirits. Based on the classic Rider-Waite-Smith system, this charming deck features 78 intricately cross-stitched butterfly designs.

The Butterfly Wisdom Tarot offers comforting guidance for readers of all experience levels while providing support for life’s toughest moments. In the companion guidebook, discover allegorical short stories written both to inspire and delight, as well as questions to invite deeper interpretation.

With approachable card imagery and text that includes simple keywords and stories, The Butterfly Wisdom Tarot is a great deck for readers of all experience levels. The guidebook also includes six butterfly patterns so readers can create their own, using supplies from home.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

I think the three most important qualities that were most impactful on my journey were determination, recognizing my skills as transferable, and patience. All creatives face rejection, so my advice is that you have to create for yourself. That’s not to say ignore feedback and refuse to grow as an artist, but if you are creating solely because of outside influences, those outside factors will grind you down. Therefore, finding that inner drive and determination to carry on in spite of rejection will be the most important quality to develop for someone just starting a creative journey.

Next, I want to talk about transferable skills. Everything we do is a skill. Even when doomscrolling on social media, you are reading and practicing filtering information. Once you shift that perspective, then approaching new tasks isn’t as daunting because you have done at least some part of it in some way before. This also increases your confidence because you actually know how to do a lot more things than you realize.

Last, patience. Nothing happens overnight, and it is important to take the time to really develop yourself as a creative. Even those who are overnight successes, if you actually look at their history, you can see they have been grinding for a long time before they got their success. Think about it like this: a river was able to cut through the Earth and make the Grand Canyon, but it took millions of years. Most things are possible if given enough time.

What was the most impactful thing your parents did for you?

I think the most impactful thing my parents did for me was making me finish what I started. It seems a small thing, but that instilled a work ethic into me that I think many people are missing. It is a key factor that will often separate you from a crowd. No one is interested in something only halfway completed, and a mediocre finished thing is always better than a perfect quarter-done project.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://starlayilmaz.com/
• Instagram: starlayilmaztarot
• Facebook: Starla Yilmaz
• Youtube: starlayilmaz

Image Credits

Starla Yilmaz
RedFeather MBS