Hi, I’m Angie

I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin the youngest of four kids. My childhood was filled with playing on the beaches of Lake Michigan, and swimming and boating throughout Wisconsin. Water has shaped who I am today. I love water and am filled with peace just being around it. One of my greatest joys is swimming. Someday I hope to surf in the ocean.

Water inspired my art style

Creating art gives me a child-like sense of joy and wonder, like exploring an infinite playground. I’ve enjoyed all the mediums I’ve tried, but my main passion is oil painting. I get a special delight in blending colors and watching the transition as they merge, like water flowing on the canvas.

I fell in love with art in high school and pursued it with a romanticized vision of working part-time, dead-end jobs while “Living for my art!” (Cue: clasping my chest and a gust of wind blowing through my hair). My hope was to attend San Francisco Art Institute and prepared my portfolio to be reviewed by their recruiter. That same week, in my senior year of high school, I found out I was pregnant. 

Life had other plans for me than going to art school, and I’m so glad it did.  After high school I moved in with my boyfriend, now husband of over 25 years, and together we fumbled through Sudden-Onset Adulthood as young teen parents. I continued making art in bursts, going long periods without creating and coming back to it in treasured pockets of time. Art became cathartic. It was a way for me to process my emotions and let myself experiment and play. 

Starting over in Austin, Texas

In 2008 we uprooted our family of five from the small town of Mukwonago, Wisconsin and moved to Austin, Texas. We needed a change. I was feeling isolated in the country, my husband’s career as a software engineer had stalled… and we were sick of shoveling snow.

The move to a thriving city filled with sunshine, great food, new places to explore, and people to meet enlivened us. We bonded as a family. Even a trip to the grocery store was a thrill. “I’ve never seen peppers like this!” New spices! New flavors! Prickly pear cactus!

However, it quickly became clear that these new experiences would not override my past. I hadn’t left parts of myself behind like I thought. As I sunk deeper into a “funk” of depression, my husband became increasingly concerned. I didn’t know the cause, and it was such a familiar feeling that I didn’t fully recognize it until I saw how it was affecting my family. I had so much to be grateful for – a healthy, loving family, supportive husband, beautiful house, I lived in Austin – a city I loved…what do I have to be depressed about?

Confronting my past

It wasn’t that I was just “depressed”, although that may have been how this feeling manifested. I felt disconnected from myself like there was something deep within me that couldn’t get out – or I wouldn’t let out. I always believed I could achieve great things. Yet I had a hard time following through with anything. It was like standing on the edge of a cold, barren cliff, and across the gap was a lush emerald green land calling me over. But I was too afraid to make the leap. So I just kept spinning in circles.

After months of trying to help me, my husband suggested I see a therapist. It pained him to feel so helpless and see me so down. Maybe a professional could break the spell? As much as I was suffering, you might think I would be the one asking for help, but these feelings were all I knew. There’s comfort in pain when it’s been with us long enough.

Eventually, I did see a therapist and this is where my healing journey began. I didn’t go there with any intention of telling her what happened to me when I was 12, but that’s exactly what I did. Somehow I knew that if I wanted to get out of this rut it was something I would need to disclose.

My secret revealed

I was sexually abused when I was 12 years old over a period of several months. The abuse ended just as unexpectedly as it began, but the effects of the abuse continued on. I was so overcome with fear, shame, and guilt that I didn’t tell anyone.

The stomach aches I already endured became more regular and prominent. I quit the swim team, which I really loved. My self-esteem plummeted. I became bitter and cynical. Much of my attitude was written off as “teen angst” which makes sense because I had built strong walls around my true feelings to keep that secret hidden.

There was a time when I thought telling my secret would be the worst thing in the world…

I believed as much as I trust the sun will rise again tomorrow, that if I kept the abuse a secret it would go away. If no one else knew then it never happened. It couldn’t affect me if I just buried it deep enough.

So the undiagnosable stomach aches are just the food I’m eating, right? Ok, I’ll try a restrictive diet and learn all I can about nutrition to cure this unrelenting nausea. For over 20 years I went from one diet to another thinking my digestive issues were purely physical. Many of them helped – until they didn’t.

It turns out, burying a secret is hard work. I started to numb the pain with self-harm and alcohol shortly after the abuse ended. This was the beginning of a cycle of addiction that continued for the next 28 years.

From post-traumatic stress to post-traumatic growth

I’ll be honest, things got a lot messier before they got better. It’s like cleaning out a closet you haven’t seen the back of for so long you aren’t sure what’s there anymore. I was diagnosed with PTSD – Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I was plagued with frequent panic attacks, nausea, anger, outbursts of rage, and depression.

One therapist called it being “emotionally raw”. I became highly sensitive to everything around me. I stopped listening to the radio because I was too unstable to hear a sad song. Many days I couldn’t take care of my family well. I briefly became agoraphobic, not wanting to leave my house, because so many of the panic attacks occurred in the car.

You may be asking yourself, “Why would I want to go through this?“

Living with trauma is like being wrongfully imprisoned. We’re not meant to silently suffer from shame and guilt for a crime committed against us. I was tired of feeling stuck and not understanding why. I wanted to be a better mom, spouse, and friend. Also, I wanted to live more vibrantly, how I knew deep down I was meant to live.

So I made it my mission to break free from the bondage of addiction and trauma. I read everything I could find about sexual abuse, trauma, and substance abuse (just as I had with nutrition). I’ve also learned many techniques to curb panic, calm anxiety, attune to my emotions, reclaim my voice, reconnect with my body, and heal my frazzled nervous system.

My Greatest Gift

While all that learning was helpful, there was still something missing. I didn’t know it until one day the consequences of my past actions caught up to me. My “rock bottom” had come, and I’m so grateful it did. I stopped trying to live based on my own strength, knowledge, or false belief that the answers were all within me. In desperation, I reached out to a God that I didn’t know was there, and didn’t know would answer if he was.

But he did answer, as he always promised. I reached out to a few people and started reading the Bible with someone. My husband and I started meeting with a small group of Christians who loved us by listening and offering help where we needed it. We began going to church and eventually got baptized together on Father’s Day in 2017.

My greatest gift has been escaping the lies that it was up to me to fix everything, when in truth I couldn’t. I stopped white-knuckling through life thinking “If I just do more I will heal myself”. What a relief to realize that I can’t do it all in my own strength!

Spiritual Development

Over the past 5 years, I have completed a 9 month Systematic Theology program, and a 4 month Gospel-centered Recovery program. The Systematic Theology course helped me better understand who God is and what the Bible says about certain topics. The Recovery program helped me take all that head knowledge and bring it into my heart. For the first time, the gospel message of grace wasn’t just a concept I understood the meaning of, but actually believed it pertained to me. All of me, despite what I’d done in the past, and what I was still struggling with today.