“I … yearn … for a Delaware … license plate,” my professor mused, almost to himself.

It is easy to downplay the importance of art in day-to-day life as luxury when both the practice of art-making and curating an authentic aesthetic experience actually do have meaning. I love the honesty expressed by so many mentors in my life in celebrating what a difference art and design make to their feeling of being whole.

Poet Matthew Arnold once wrote “resolve to by thyself: and know, that he who finds himself, loses his misery.”

I have written before about emotional injuries sustained during a period during which my then-boyfriend’s team controlled much of my career several years ago, but one element of healing that quarantining has brought front of mind has been the myriad ways one can remember to feel truly oneself.

During my experience working for this team, I remember wondering how I would ever experience joy or a feeling of wholeness or safety again, but I knew this had to be possible. I longed to be able to find a person or personal account I could turn to as a road map to restoration from such an experience, but I couldn’t find one. My resolution then was to rebuild my life, find a true sense of restoration, and then to write a book about how I did it for others.

As years have gone on, and even though I have experienced countless blessings, I have often wondered whether I would ever heal from this experience. Even though survivors of worse challenges have meant well, I have noticed that, at least in public outreach, such heroes tend to emphasize that it is impossible to be the same person one was before. But, increasingly, I feel, and feel it important to express, that this isn’t true.

In a particularly trying moment during my most painful years at cnn, I reached out to a childhood friend and asked him what he had done in order to heal from difficulty, and I will never forget that in the kindest and most well-meaning tone, this kind man told me I needed to do “Megan things.”

While I do not believe he fully understood the severity of my situation (having known me as a kid, he expanded that by “Megan things” he meant eating candy and watching cartoons, which, admittedly, I do still enjoy), this loving guidance stuck with me and has proven to be so worth pondering.

While, in the past, I have felt the need to make things beautiful and immerse myself in beauty, I sometimes considered this such a secondary kind of endeavor as to warrant being hidden. (While working in a drab-looking nonprofit, I felt the need to drive to an artfully-designed cafe quite a distance away for a mini lunch almost every day just for the visual nourishment but never mentioned it to anyone). During quarantine, even although it has involved many challenges, I am grateful for the ability to be intentional about the joy and beauty I welcome into my experience each day.

Being able to write, paint, and draw almost daily has been most helpful. It has long been my opinion that art is, in many ways, akin to sawdust in the process of working through new ideas, but it has greater value in its ability to accentuate inspiration.

Especially in writing and art-making more in recent months, I have noticed something heartening: out of nowhere, I find myself remembering, even in day-to-day tasks, what life felt like before agreeing to work for the Larry King team. This is what chocolate cake tasted like before. This is what putting on earrings felt like before, I find myself remembering.

It has felt important to acknowledge not just how the completion of a planned work of art has figured into the frequency with which I am able to remember, and experience, the feeling of simply being myself and doing “Megan things,” but how often these activities are buoyed by the production of art and all this involves.

I have long been grateful to know the meaning of my name – Warrior Pearl Storyteller – and the significance of each portion has been helpful to me. I don’t remember ever imagining in that windowless office in Atlanta all those years ago that my healing would be less a matter of figuring everything out and then putting it all in a book, and more a matter of writing a book and realizing, little by little, that the process would involve my whole, creative self.