HOW CLAY HELPED ME HEAL

A Not So Brief Love Letter to Clay

Content warning:

This letter touches on grief, anxiety, and panic attacks. If that's not where you are right now — save it for another time.

My dearest Clay (seriously, can I call you Clay?),

I didn’t know I needed you.

Honestly, I didn’t even know you that well.

But let’s start at the beginning.

There’s a point in grief where fear moves in. Not sadness — her, you expect. But fear is sneakier. Louder. Like the bad fairy tale stepmother, she makes a grand entrance, sets down her bags, and starts rearranging your furniture.

After a significant loss, I found myself in a dark place. A place with a fear I hadn’t known before. A fear of losing again. I was well into my 30s when it happened. Until then, I had been spared the big dramas of life — or so I thought (I learned more about that in therapy later). I had absolutely no tools to deal with what came next. And so some force stepped in and took over the directing.

I call it the Drama Department. They had a full script ready for the theatre in my head: that I could not survive if something like this happened again. (And of course it would — that’s just how life works). That every single day could be the day I lost everything I loved. Everyone I loved. There were panic attacks. Days where I simply could not get out of bed.

The Drama Department had taken over.

A full production company living rent-free in my head, complete with special effects, a soundtrack, and an extremely committed cast. They don’t do small stories. Only catastrophes. Worst-case scenarios, delivered with the theatrical urgency of a season finale. Every day, a new performance. Every performance, completely convincing.

And for a long time, I didn’t know how to walk out of the theatre.

Then I found you.

Look — I love my people. And they were all there for me. But in the depths of anxiety, conversations about how you’re feeling can sometimes amplify rather than quiet the noise. You’re still in your head. You’re still narrating the fear.

It’s the opposite with you. When I work with you, I am forced to focus fully on the task at hand — rolling, shaping, building. It happens almost by itself: you pull me in so completely that there is simply no room left for the Drama Department.

You can’t be abstract. You are very much here, very much now, and you need my full attention. Presence is not optional with you. It’s you and me, right there in the moment. For my anxious brain, that’s actually a big gift.

One of the things anxiety does is collapse time. Everything feels urgent and catastrophic and ‘right now’. But you have a completely different relationship with time, and you’ve taught me to have one, too. An hour with you feels different from an hour anywhere else. Quieter. Less heavy.

What I know now.

I still have the occasional bad night. The dark, 3am kind, where the Drama Department decides to do an unannounced late-night performance and old fear comes back. Uninvited, she sits on my bed. I don’t think those moments will ever go away entirely. What changed is my relationship with them — and how quickly I can find my way back.

Therapy gave me the language to understand what was happening in my head. You gave me something else: a place to put it down. Not forever. Not magically. But for long enough to remember that I am also a person. A person who likes to make things.

And a person who is entitled to have a good time.

So thank you, Clay.

For taking my hand.

For never judging.

For always giving me a new try.

XO Femke

If you’re going through something difficult and you’re drawn to working with clay — you don’t need to be an artist. You just need to start.

If you’re going through something really dark right now please know that help exists, and you deserve to reach it.

Find a crisis line in your country at findahelpline.com.