Our deepest wounds often shape us as much as our greatest joys. The pain we carry—and the ways we learn to move through it—can define who we become. We asked community members from a broad array of industries to reflect on their defining wounds and have shared the responses below.
Monteque Pope – Le Beau
The wound that has profoundly shaped my life is the loss of my mother; it was a devastating moment for me. I had never known life without her, as she was my rock and my support. You could say I was the Golden Child, as my arrival was unexpected—given the challenges she faced with prior pregnancies that ended in miscarriage. Read More>>
Melissa Holman
One of the most defining wounds of my life was born in the ballet studio. As a young teenager, I trained seriously in ballet, even though my body was never built for the traditional ballerina mold. I gain muscle easily, and “skinny” was never in the cards for me. When I was about fourteen, I auditioned for the American Ballet Theatre school. Read More>>
Pamela Pulido
I’ve had lots of painful moments. My first wound started when I was 4 and my parents got divorced and in the same year an Earthquake hit Mexico City and destroyed almost everything. It was devastation all around me, but I still wanted to go to school, even though it was all destroyed. Read More>>
Stephanie Schwiederek
Like so many women, experiences of sexual assault and sexual harassment have been defining wounds in my life from an early age. Healing hasn’t been linear, and is often a practice that comes and goes, but art has been essential in my life. I believe it even saved my life; I thought so little of myself in my teens and early twenties. Read More>>
Beth Carroll
The defining wound was the overwhelming loss of identity and debilitating shame I carried after my husband left. I crumbled. The marriage was only part of what was gone; I also lost who I believed I was. I learned that this was beyond what thinking logically could fix. Read More>>
Jessica Bell
One of the defining wounds of my life has been the fear of not being enough: not calm enough, not strong enough, not agreeable enough, to keep the peace. In creative industries, rejection and comparison are constant companions. But the deeper wound wasn’t professional. It was personal. I lived through years of emotional abuse and coercive control while trying to mother through a storm. Read More>>
Anna Ferreira
I do not believe we ever fully heal all our wounds, simply because we are alive and always evolving. We are works in progress, and I hold that very deeply. What I have come to understand, though, is that many of my defining wounds have also become my greatest sources of strength. Read More>>
Alexander ‘Al Mega’ Perez
The defining wounds of my life came from learning very early that love didn’t always come with safety, and strength didn’t always come with guidance. I grew up fast. Too fast. I learned responsibility before I learned softness, survival before I learned peace. I became the dependable one, the protector, the one who kept moving no matter what was breaking inside. Read More>>
Heather Gibson
One of the defining wounds of my life came from being a foster parent. It was incredibly difficult to witness the trauma my children had experienced before coming to us and watching how deeply it continued to affect them afterward. Read More>>
Chad Barrett
I struggled with depression a lot growing up and into early adulthood. In the early days making video content and short films was my go to coping mechanism. The problem was video or film requires other people. It wasn’t easy to decide one day ‘I’m depressed, I need to create something.’ Then go call a bunch of people to create something on whim. Read More>>
Jeanette Harrison
The defining wounds of my life center on family and belonging. It’s difficult to explain what it does to a child to hear that their biological mother and biological family did not want them. That is a pain no child should have to carry. For me, it wasn’t a single moment; it was a story repeated over and over again. It began in foster care. Read More>>
The Bulitts
One of our daughters experienced behavioral and mental health challenges from a very young age. As she grew into her teen years, things became particularly difficult as addiction was layered onto the mental health struggles. Read More>>
