Why I Am Writing This
I have been thinking lately about what it means to heal in public. Rather than performing healing, which is something else entirely, but to simply allow the work of becoming to be visible while it is happening. For most of my life, I believed that healing was a private matter. Something you did quietly, in the space between appointments, in the early mornings before anyone was watching. You arrived at the outcome first, and then, if you chose to, you spoke about what you had survived. You spoke from the other side of it. You kept the unfinished parts hidden.
I have begun to question that assumption. And the reason I am writing this, honestly, is that I have begun to suspect the old belief was costing me something. It was keeping me silent in seasons when speaking might have helped me. It was asking me to wait until I had figured things out before I was allowed to say anything, and I am no longer convinced that figuring things out ever fully happens. I am writing this because I want to examine, out loud, what it means to live and write and create from inside the work rather than after it.
Title: Sweet Indulgence
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, April 2026
Why Public Healing Is Different
What I am learning, slowly and with considerable discomfort, is that healing in public is a different kind of work than healing in private. It asks more of you and asks for something different. In private, healing can happen in whatever order your body and mind require. You can be messy. You can circle back. You can unravel a belief on a Tuesday and rebuild it on a Thursday and change your mind again by the weekend. No one is watching, so no one has expectations. The work belongs entirely to you.
Public healing is something else entirely. When you write about what you are learning while you are still learning it, you hand the reader something unfinished. You say, in effect, I am still inside it, finding out. I am inside it with you. The ground shifts under my feet as well. That is a vulnerable offer to make, and for a long time, I thought it was also an irresponsible one. I thought people needed the finished version. The lessons learned, the wisdom arrived at, the neat closing paragraph that tied everything together and assured the reader that the writer had figured it out.
Title: The River Remembers
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, April 2026
Why the Unfinished Version Is the One That Helps
But the truth is that I have never been helped by that kind of writing. Rarely, if ever. The writing that has actually reached me in my life, the writing that has sat down beside me in hard seasons and said, “You are with company,” has almost always been writing from inside the process rather than from after it. It was unpolished. It made no claim to know more than it did. It simply told the truth, as honestly as the writer could, from wherever they actually were at the time.
That is the kind of writing I am trying to do now. I write a wellness column for the Kamloops Chronicle. I keep a blog. I share book reviews, reflections, and pieces of my art. Each of these is a small act of showing up in public with something unfinished, and each one asks something slightly different of me. The column reaches readers I will never meet, people pouring a morning coffee or picking up the paper on a Saturday, and I have to trust that something honest said in plain language might find one of them in a moment they needed it. The blog is a different kind of space, more interior, where the work can be messier, and the thinking can take longer to arrive. The book reviews are a chance to place myself in conversation with other writers and say here is what this book opened in me, which is itself a small act of showing my own interior. The art is the quietest of the four, and sometimes the most revealing, because an image can say what a sentence cannot yet articulate.
Title: Welcoming Wellness – Kamloops Chronicle
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, April 2026
Why I Share From The Middle Of Things
I share these things without having arrived at some wise vantage point from which to teach others. I share them because I am in the middle of my own unfolding, and I have decided, with some reluctance, that I choose to speak now rather than wait for the other side of it. The other side may exist differently than I once imagined, to imagine. I think this is the terrain. I think we are all, in our own ways, walking through something, and the question is when and how to speak, honestly when we do.
Title: Warm Light
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, April 2026
Why It Is Hard
What makes public healing hard, for me, is that it requires giving up a particular kind of control. I have spent decades curating how I am perceived. I am a careful person. I think about my words before I write them. I consider how something will land before I say it out loud. That is partly professional training and partly something deeper, something about having learned, early, that being understood required effort and that language was how I earned the right to be heard. To write from inside my own unfinished work is to relinquish some of that curation. It is to accept that a reader might meet me mid-sentence, mid-thought, mid-belief, and form an opinion about me based on who I am still becoming. That is uncomfortable. It is also, I am beginning to think, honest in a way that the curated version never quite was.
Title: One Step at a Time
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, April 2026
Why I Want to Be Careful About What This Is
There is a version of public healing that I want to be careful about, because it differs from what I mean. This is nothing like the kind of sharing that performs rawness as a strategy. This is also nothing like the kind of vulnerability that is actually a request of the reader. There is a great deal of writing online now that looks like healing and is actually something else underneath, and I choose to add nothing to it. What I am describing is quieter than that. It is writing that requires no response. It is writing that asks the reader for neither rescue nor admiration. It is writing that simply places a true thing in the world and then lets the reader decide what to do with it. It is a book review that says, “Here is what this book changed in me,” without pretending the change is complete. It is a column that names something most of us feel but rarely say out loud. It is a piece of art that leaves itself open.
Title: Present Tense
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, April 2026
Why It Matters
I think public healing, done well, is a form of service, though I hesitate to use that word because it can sound grand. What I mean is smaller. I mean that when one person tells the truth about what they are carrying, other people who are carrying similar things feel less alone. That is all. It carries no grand redemption. It fixes no one. It just removes one small layer of the isolation that tends to grow up around unfinished things, and that removal, multiplied across many readers and many writers and many honest small acts of saying what is true, is how cultures of healing actually get built. Through something other than experts arriving with answers. Through ordinary people, in ordinary voices, saying here is what I am learning, and here is what remains unknown to me.
Title: Unfinished and Perfect
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, April 2026
Why I Still Feel the Pull Toward Disclaimers
I remain somewhat uncomfortable with this. I notice, as I write, that there is a part of me that wants to stop and add disclaimers. That wants to assure you, the reader, that I have done the proper work, that I have the proper credentials, that this reflection is grounded in the proper literature and will keep you on sound ground. That part of me is the part that still believes my worth must be demonstrated before I am allowed to speak. I am choosing to set her aside today. She may have a point, exactly, but because her instincts belong to an older version of my life, and the writing I am trying to do now asks for a different kind of trust.
Title: First Light
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, April 2026
Why It Is Actually for Me
What I am coming to understand is that public healing is, at its core, about the self rather than the public. It is about me giving myself permission to exist in the middle of the process. It is about me deciding that my unfinished self is allowed to be seen. Other people may benefit from the writing, and I hope they do, but the first beneficiary is always the writer, because the act of saying a thing out loud, in front of witnesses, changes the thing. It becomes more real. It can no longer be tucked away and forgotten. Once you have written a belief down publicly and named what it cost you, going back to pretending you had no knowledge becomes impossible. The public piece of public healing is, in that sense, less about teaching others and more about refusing to let yourself off the hook.
Title: Still Believing
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, April 2026
Why the Column, the Blog, the Reviews, the Art
The column does that for me. The blog does that for me. The book reviews do that for me, in a quieter way, because to say honestly what a book has opened in you is to acknowledge that you were mid-process when you picked it up. The art does it most of all. A painting tells only truth. A drawing refuses compromise. Whatever I am when I sit down to make something visual arrives on the page, willing or otherwise, and there have been many times when I have seen something in my own work that I had kept at a distance from feeling. That is what it means to make things and to share them. You end up meeting yourself, in front of witnesses, and the witnesses become part of how you come to know who you are.
Title: Words Made Solid
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, April 2026
Why I Am Writing Inside Uncertainty
I have yet to discover how this chapter ends. I have yet to discover which of the beliefs I am examining will fully loosen their grip and which will remain with me, quieter but still present, for the rest of my days. I have yet to learn which of the identities I have carried will be set down entirely and which will be revised into something more spacious. I am writing inside uncertainty. That is what public healing is, I think. It is writing inside uncertainty, and trusting that the writing itself is part of the becoming, rather than a report delivered from safer ground, after the fact.
Title: The Colour of Making
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, April 2026
Why This Is for You Too
If you are reading this and you are in the middle of your own becoming, I want you to know that your unfinished work is welcome here. You are welcome to speak before you arrive. You are allowed to speak before it is figured out. You are allowed to be where you are, and to say so out loud, and to trust that the saying itself is part of how you get to wherever you are going.
That is the work. That is all it has ever been.
Title: Desert Fire
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, April 2026
Artist Statement
These works were made in the middle of things, mid-process, before everything settled, but inside the unfolding. Each piece carries the marks of where I actually was when I made it: the desert painting, with its blazing sky and reaching cacti, is about endurance and the beauty of surviving heat. The painted rocks are small acts of faith placed in the world, each word chosen because it was something I needed to hold. The unicorn figurines were rescued and repainted partially, because they were beyond full restoration, but their horns were worth saving, a reminder that the beliefs of childhood can be refined rather than abandoned. The photographs are witness pieces: a river I walked beside, a dog that looked up at me with complete presence, a pair of mismatched shoes I wore without realizing what they said about the day I was having. The salt lamp, the blue paint water, the newspaper page - these are the textures of a life that makes things while also living other things. I work at the kitchen table rather than in a studio or in my living room, between the sentences of other writing. These pieces are what happen when you allow yourself to make without waiting for the right conditions. They are the art of the unfinished person, which is the only kind I know how to be.
