How Art Helps Me Process Medical Trauma, Mortality, and Anxiety

What happens when you suddenly realize that life is fragile?

Many people arrive at that question after a life-threatening illness, a serious accident, a heart attack, a stroke, cancer, a car accident, or another traumatic event that forces them to confront mortality. For me, it happened after a medical emergency that left me facing questions I had never seriously considered before—questions about death, uncertainty, and how quickly life can change.

Like many people who experience medical trauma, I developed anxiety afterward. I still live with an anxiety disorder, and I still attend therapy. Healing is not a straight line, and one of the most valuable things I've learned is that it doesn't always happen through talking alone. Sometimes it happens through creating.

My artwork has become a place where I can explore fear, mortality, uncertainty and grief without having to explain everything directly. In therapy, I often find myself searching for words. Some experiences are difficult to describe. Some fears feel too large, too abstract or too strange to fit neatly into a conversation. Art allows me to approach those feelings from a different angle.

Instead of saying, "I'm afraid of death," I can paint a smiling pigeon sitting next to a skull. Instead of describing existential anxiety, I can create a world filled with cute creatures, strange food and quiet reminders that life is temporary.

My paintings rarely look dark at first glance. They're colorful, playful, cute and sometimes even absurd. But beneath the bright colors lives a recurring theme: mortality. Not because I want to frighten people, but because I don't want to avoid the subject anymore.

For a long time, I believed that healing meant pushing uncomfortable thoughts away. Now I think healing sometimes means allowing those thoughts to exist without letting them take over. That's where the bees, strawberries, pigeons, smiling snacks and candy colors come in. They're more than decorative elements. They're companions—tiny emotional support creatures that help me walk through difficult subjects without becoming overwhelmed by them. They remind me that joy exists alongside fear, sweetness alongside decay, and life alongside death.

When people look at my artwork, they often notice the contrast between the cheerful imagery and the darker themes underneath. For me, that contrast is the entire point. Life is contradictory. The same person can experience gratitude and grief at the same time. A person can survive a frightening medical event and still laugh at a ridiculous pigeon eating pizza. A person can think about mortality while also appreciating strawberries, sunshine, friendships and silly little animals. Those things don't cancel each other out—they coexist.

My art gives me permission to hold both realities at once. It allows me to acknowledge mortality without becoming consumed by it, to face fear without surrendering to it, and to talk about death without losing sight of life. Perhaps that's why I keep painting cute things. Not because they distract me from difficult truths, but because they help me carry them.

If you'd like to see where that process leads, take a look at My Candy Decay Art Process, or browse the original artworks these feelings turned into.