The earliest fragments of self I can recover belong to a version of me that no longer exists.

An empty vessel of a former self, perhaps.
One that spent years collecting different forms of creative expression without ever knowing what she was searching for.

Music.
Fashion.
Drawing.
Writing.
Making things simply because something inside me needed somewhere to go.

Somewhere along the way, creativity stopped being something I did and became something I used to understand myself.

My identity began to cling to artistic expression.
Every new medium became another language. Another way of translating something I couldn't explain normally.

Sometimes I wonder what remains when you strip all of that away.

If I wasn't creating, who would I be?

I don't know if I discovered art, or if I simply kept returning to it because it was the only place I recognised myself.

Maybe that was the first signal.