When I was born, my mother wanted to give me the name Felicia, derived from the latin Felix, because of its meaning: “happy”. Later on, I was told I wouldn’t be such a melancholic child had I been gifted with that name. Sometimes, Felicia seemed like a doppelgänger to me, someone I needed to aspire to be, someone whose life, unlike mine, wasn’t ravaged by debilitating anxiety and mental health issues. Most importantly, I saw her as someone who was free, but eventually, my freedom didn’t come from making myself more like her; it came from letting her go.

As an avid reader and writer, most of my life I’ve followed a path in literary education until ending up in doctorate school, where I was focusing on trauma texts, especially in young adult fiction. Meanwhile, I was always drawing on the side-lines, and I spent a year studying illustration and graphic design. However, trying as I might, I felt out-of-place in art school, and I had to realise that my main incentive for drawing had never been commercial work but self-therapy. All my life I’ve been drawing because it brought me closer to myself, and my studies of trauma and mental health narratives helped me find a more focused approach as an artist, as I kept trying to capture my inner life through art.

All my work is heavily influenced by Asian culture and philosophies, especially Japanese art and architecture. As a child, I started drawing because of my love for manga and manhwa, which led to a life-long devotion to Japanese and Korean languages, aesthetics, cinema, and fine arts.

The name Flowers for Felicia was inspired by the wonderful book Flowers for Algernon, written by Daniel Keyes. Through exploring the clash between emotional and intellectual life, this novel has always resonated with me as someone who felt trapped in her head most of her life, trying to find a way out. It also helped me realize that self-compassion holds the key to self-healing, and the reason I’m sharing my thoughts and art online is ultimately about connecting to others on the same mental health journey, on the way to acceptance and empowerment.