The beginning of a life-changing journey from writer to painter—

Fourteen years of studying writing, including earning an MFA in Creative Writing, and I sat paralyzed two hundred pages into writing a memoir about my traumatic childhood.

Fear stopped me cold.

My heart raced out of my chest.

I inhaled, but my lungs would not fill.

My sweaty, shaking hands, the chair beneath me, the walls, the floor, the maddening glow of my laptop’s screen blurred into a distant world.

I inhaled.

But I did not breathe.

I began to cry. I was not ok. Nothing was ok. Panic rushed through my veins. I was dizzy. I was terrified.

In my mind a message played on repeat:

I can’t breathe.

I am going to die.

I can’t breathe.

I am going to die.

Bewildered, my husband tried to help me by demonstrating how to take slow, deep breathes, but nothing stopped the freight train of fear, the out-of-control panic, the feeling of eminent death. My husband took me to the hospital. In the emergency room the heart monitor showed two hundred beats per minute. My fear, panic, and elevated heart rate did not slow until I was administered a tranquilizer. My pulse slowly returned to normal, but I felt numb, as if I had left a crucial part of myself behind. I had no idea this attack was just the beginning.

Imagine being plagued by these attacks several times a week, for many months, and the resulting changes to your life as you knew it.

Panic attacks ripped apart my life.

(I had never had panic attacks.)

Weekly emergency room visits.

(Doctors checked me for heart attacks. Negative.)

Crippling anxiety, the doctors told me, was responsible for my racing heart. Fight or flight activated deep in the subconscious. I lost twenty pounds in one month. Could not tolerate music, crowds, or bright lights. Cried daily. Feared climbing the basement stairs, my body and mind weakened seemingly overnight. The counselor I started seeing after I began writing my memoir assured me, I was not losing my mind. Trauma surfaces, she said, when we are ready to face it.

I did not know how to resolve my childhood trauma. Soon after I had my first panic attack, I was compelled to enter an art show. It was called Chroma and it was dedicated to color. I had no background in visual arts other than countless hours spent in my youth attempting beauty on notebook paper with crayons or colored pencils. Cherished art classes from elementary and high schools. Long had I admired artists of all mediums but believed their talents far beyond my abilities. Still, I bought a small canvas and cheap acrylics. Painted the surface with colorful circles. Easels were for real artists. I completed my piece on my dining room table.

I called my painting, Wholeness: Parts of Self

A friend upon seeing my painting called me “the writer formerly known as Cristina.” In his eyes I had already transformed from writer to painter. I signed my painting in the lower, right-hand corner, WFKA.

A week later the notification arrived. Chroma accepted my submission. Stunned, I knew I would never stop painting.

They say one never knows when the hand of God may touch your life. I do not know if God touched my life with art before I was born or after, but from within came the call to paint, the images flowed without thought, organic, breathing renderings of moments birthed. Gifts from the omnipresent fell to canvas: cities, monsters, terrifiers, aliens, the alien, but also rainbow-colored landscapes of fluid geometry, a known yet undefined hope. Grit shone whole-heartedly across the faces of chunky-toothed canvas. Healing blossomed.

Believing at first the themes were spawned by my unresolved grief, anger, and childhood abandonment I came to see universal meanings within each painting. Imagery revealed to me dual consciousness. Though months away the pandemic's messages of good versus evil and hope versus despair channeled through my works. Viewers were drawn into my paintings for reasons they could not articulate. Together we moved beyond formal language to a place more powerful, a place of intuitive understanding, a place of Oneness.

I explored the expansiveness of Oneness with the guidance of a meditation teacher, Susan, at the yoga studio in my neighborhood. Eyes closed, I sat and allowed quiet to fill my aching soul. Susan said when thoughts entered our minds to push them away like clouds across a blue sky. Through this clear, still sky doors opened. Surrendering to the universe gave me a bird’s eye view not only of the greater purpose of my life but that of all living things.

Over the span of a year, I searched my soul. Deep inside I found and embraced my inner child, led her by the hand through the frozen hell of the past and into the present moment.

It was the hardest thing I have ever done. It was also the most important.

Embodying the child allowed the wound in me to speak. Overwhelming fear, anger, and sadness reverberated through every cell in my body. There were days when I felt such all-encompassing sadness and deep, painful aches in my chest that I thought I would indeed die. Convinced there was something wrong with my heart, I got tested by a cardiologist. I expected the doctor to reveal my heart’s defect and prescribe medication or surgery. Instead, he told me my heart was healthy, yet I could not function. I was not supposed to. I was to stop living in the adult-now and be fully present in the now of my childhood. I was to sit with that hurting child. I was to feel the hurt in my heart until all hurt was acknowledged, all suffering held with utmost tenderness. Only then could my soul replace those spaces with joy, love, and acceptance.

Vulnerability places us perfectly into moments, which needs the soul’s review. We fear vulnerability because it fills us with raw emotion. Vulnerability in a child can bring compassion and courage for oneself and others. The Adult in us says most things are impossible, but the Child knows anything is possible. Pain is possible. Death is possible. But so are love, happiness, and laughter—all that makes us whole in the here and now, with and within God.

Loving acts of service guides us on our paths as spiritual beings learning through human experiences. I have developed a series of workshops that teach students how to find and channel their authentic artistic voices. With gratitude I seek opportunities to inspire and be inspired as we collectively manifest human experiences into art. Today, my inner child and I paint the human condition. With intention we create visualizations of how things are and how they could be. Good versus evil. Hope versus despair. We offer to humanity these parts of our healing journey in hopes of inspiring higher consciousness.

The world is changing.

We are changing.

Now, more than ever Love and Light matters.             

Our interconnected, indisputable ONENESS matters.

Peace be with you,

Cristina Chopalli

wfkapainter@gmail.com