My Story

Memoirs of an Artist

A note before you continue. These pages speak plainly about domestic violence, children affected by harm, a night I nearly ended my life, surviving a natural disaster while pregnant, and chronic illness. If now isn’t the right time to read them, that’s okay. The art is always here.

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Where I Begin

Before there was a marriage, before there was Florida, before there was paint — there was a girl growing up in Slidell, Louisiana, in a house where love wasn’t always steady.

I did not have a roadmap for healthy love. I didn’t know what tender was supposed to feel like, or what safe was supposed to sound like, or what it looked like to be loved on an ordinary day when nothing was wrong. I learned love the way most girls learn it — from what was around me. And what was around me did not always teach me what love actually is.

That is not a confession. It is context.

When you grow up without ever seeing healthy modeled in front of you, you don’t recognize unhealthy when it arrives. It just looks like life. It just looks like Tuesday. And you walk straight into it — because how would you know to walk around it?

This story is not about blame. It is about a girl who did not yet know what she would have to learn, and who learned it the hard way, more than once.

“You can’t recognize the storm if it’s the only weather you’ve ever known.”

The Art Was Always in the Blood

Before the storms — the literal one and the kind that walk through your front door — there was art. It runs in my family.

My grandfather, Louis Karno, was a gifted artist who worked across several mediums; one of my favorite things he ever made was a small portrait of my Chihuahua, Trè Bug. His sister, Mollyne Karnofsky, was an artist as well, and there were others in the line I never got to meet — generations of people who reached for paint, charcoal, and clay to make beauty out of what they saw.

My sister, Stephanie Karno, is one of the great loves of my life and one of my greatest inspirations. She works primarily in acrylic and oil, and her paintings carry a fearless soul that has shaped me as much as anyone in this story. I grew up next to a sister who painted — which meant I grew up next to permission.

And there was Momma Kim, a second mother to me, who nurtured my artistic spirit when no one else did. She encouraged me to explore, to create, to trust what came naturally. The seed was planted early.

I grew up between New Orleans and the Northshore, inside a kind of creative gravity I didn’t yet have a name for. I took a few art classes in high school, but at the time art was simply something I loved — not yet something I understood.

That understanding would come later, when I needed it most.

Seventeen

I was seventeen when I became pregnant with my oldest son. I moved with his father from Slidell to Jacksonville, Florida, into a part of town harder than I knew how to navigate. My son was born in November 2001, just after I turned eighteen.

It did not work. Two very young people, neither of us with the tools, tried to build something neither of us was ready for. The days I spent waiting for someone to come home to his own son taught me a truth I’ve never forgotten: loneliness inside a relationship is still loneliness.

When my son was eleven months old, I packed what I had and went home to my mom in Slidell.

That was the first time I left something I was not supposed to stay in. It would not be the last.

Marriage, Motherhood, and the Storm

Back in Slidell, I began dating someone I had known since the eighth grade. By 2003, we were married. Over the next several years we built a life and a family — three more children, a home that moved between Louisiana and Mississippi.

And in the middle of all of it, Hurricane Katrina.

Katrina, August 2005

I was seven months pregnant with my daughter when Katrina hit. At home I had a one-year-old and a three-year-old. A tree came through our house.

For nearly a month after the storm we lived without running water or electricity. The house filled with whoever needed shelter; everyone slept in the living room with the doors and windows open, a generator running, a single fan pushing at the heat. I bathed in the backyard with a gallon of water poured slowly over my head. My children got impetigo from the conditions. We ate MREs day after day, and I did whatever I had to do to keep going.

That season changed me. It taught me what survival feels like in the body — how quickly a life can become unrecognizable, what it means to be vulnerable and responsible at the same time, and how much a mother can carry when there is no other option.

The Years After

After Katrina, we kept going. Our fourth child arrived in 2011. We tried to make a marriage work that did not always know how to be one. I won’t spend pages picking it apart, because the simplest, most honest thing I can say is this: the marriage wasn’t healthy, and we both deserved better.

In 2012 we moved to Gulf Breeze, Florida. He worked offshore, and I told myself a beautiful place would be a good place to start over. But the truth I carried privately was that the marriage was already over. I had tried to leave before and lost my nerve every time, afraid I couldn’t make it on my own. I had spent years quietly disappearing inside my own life.

We separated later that year. The divorce was final in 2015. For the first time since I was a teenager, I was a single mother of four — and the only person deciding who I was, was me.

I thought I had survived the storm. The real one was still ahead.

“There is no part of a mother that gets to set it down.”

The Hardest Chapter

In 2013, I met a man who would become the hardest chapter of my life.

He presented himself as stable. Successful. Put together. The kind of man who looked like the answer to everything I had never had. I believed in what I thought I saw — I fell for the version of life that seemed possible. Then he moved in, and slowly, everything began to change.

I want to be honest about what came next, because too many women are taught to be vague about it. Vague keeps you alone. Vague is how you start to wonder if you’re imagining it. So I am going to name it.

What I survived was domestic violence.

It was emotional. It was verbal. It was financial. It was psychological. It was physical. It was isolation, control, and gaslighting woven so tightly together that I lost track of where one ended and the next began.

It was not one moment. It was thousands. It was the way the air in my own home changed when his key hit the lock. It was the way I learned to make my voice smaller, my needs invisible, my truth easier to swallow. It was questioning my own reality so often that “what really happened” stopped feeling like something I could answer.

I know now that this is what abuse does. It is rarely visible from the outside, and rarely the one big cinematic thing people imagine. Sometimes it is the way someone holds your money. Sometimes it is the way they make you doubt the friends who used to know you. Sometimes it is the way they teach you that your truth is dangerous and your voice is too much. Sometimes it is all of those things at once.

People who have not lived through it ask why women stay. I will tell you. We stay because we are afraid. Because we are exhausted. Because we are isolated. Because we have children. Because we do not know who we would be on the other side of leaving. Because the man we leave is sometimes more dangerous than the man we live with. And — this is the part no one says out loud — we stay because we have not yet learned how to be alone.

I had two more children during those years. They were born into my fiercest love from their first breath. They did not deserve any of what was around them. Neither did my older four. Neither did I.

There is a part of this chapter that costs me the most to tell.

By 2015, the abuse in our home was reaching my children — more and more, in ways I could not always stand between. So I made the most impossible decision of my life: I gave their father primary custody of my two oldest children from my marriage, because a life away from that house was a better life than the one I could protect inside of it.

I want to be plain about what that was, because shame loves silence and I am done keeping it. That was not abandonment. That was a mother finding the only exit she could and standing back so her children could walk through it. It broke me in a place that has never fully healed. And it is one more thing abuse takes that no one talks about — not just your voice, not just your safety, but your mornings with your own children.

By the summer of 2017, my body began to do what my heart had not been allowed to. In August I was diagnosed with cutaneous discoid lupus. My immune system, after years of cortisol and fear, had begun to attack me from the inside out. I understand that diagnosis now as my body finally refusing to keep his secret.

There is one more night I need to tell you about, because leaving it out would make my survival look simpler than it was.

On September 17, 2017, at three o’clock in the morning, I sat down to write a goodbye letter. I had come to believe that the only way out of that relationship was to leave this life entirely. That is what sustained abuse does — it shrinks the world until you cannot see a single door.

And then, out of nowhere, a stranger reached out to me on social media. I answered. We talked for an hour and a half — about life, about what was happening in mine. He saved my life that night.

I put the letter down. And in its place, I began building a plan. I knew my abuser’s patterns. I knew he was building toward an explosion — he was already threatening to make me and my children homeless. So I decided something in the dark of that morning that I have never gone back on: my children were not going to lose their mother. They were going to watch her leave.

On November 3, 2017 — the day I now call my Freedom Date — I left.

I did not look back. I did not go back. It was the bravest, most terrifying, most necessary thing I have ever done.

“When the heart can’t carry it anymore, the body picks it up.”

The Mirror and the First Paintings

The first weeks after leaving were quiet in a way I had not felt in years. Not peaceful — that would take longer — but quiet. For the first time in a long time, no one was deciding my reality for me. Which meant I had to learn, again, how to decide for myself.

I started by writing affirmations on my bathroom mirror. Small things. Sentences I needed to hear because no one else had been saying them to me.

You are safe now. You are good. You deserve this.

My children noticed. They watched their mother stand in front of a mirror and try, awkwardly and bravely, to speak life back into herself. So they did what children do — they took the marker and added their own.

I still have that mirror. I keep it because it was the first time I understood that healing was not just for me. It was for them. They were watching how I survived, learning in real time that pain does not get the final word.

That same season, two organizations stepped in when I needed them most. FavorHouse of Northwest Florida met me with counseling, support, and a kind of safety I had not believed was actually available to women like me. Gulf Coast Kids House cared for my children through one of the most difficult chapters of their young lives. I will never forget either of them.

And then, that winter, a friend looked at me — exhausted, hypervigilant, beginning to recognize the shape of what PTSD does to a body — and said the words that changed everything:

You should paint. You should draw. It will help you.

So I did.

The first paintings were not for anyone else. Not for a gallery, a buyer, or a show. They were for me — for my hands, for my survival, for the part of me that had been silent so long it had almost forgotten how to make a sound. And little by little, the woman I had been before all of this and the woman I was becoming started to meet each other on the canvas.

“Art is not separate from healing. It is healing.”

A Love That Stays

In 2019, I met Kevin.

I want to be careful here, because this is not a fairy tale and Kevin is not the rescuer of this story. I did the rescuing. I left. I rebuilt. I painted my way back into my own body. What Kevin did was something different — he showed up, steady and patient, and stayed. He met me already on my own two feet. He did not have to save me, because by the time he arrived, I had already saved myself.

That same year, my diagnosis deepened: what began as cutaneous discoid lupus in 2017 was confirmed as systemic. My body was still carrying what my mind had not yet had time to put down. Kevin met that too — the chronic pain, the flares, the days my hands won’t cooperate — without flinching.

We got engaged in 2023. On October 18, 2024, we married.

Today our family includes eight children — six I gave birth to, and two bonus daughters Kevin brought with him. All of them ours. All of them loved fiercely. Five are grown now, out in the world building lives of their own. The three youngest are still home, being raised in a house where love is steady, where no one walks on eggshells, where the air does not change when a key hits the lock.

That last part matters. I lived a long time inside houses where the air did change. To walk into my kitchen now and feel the same quiet whether he is home or not — that is not a small thing. That is the thing I did not believe was real.

It is real. I built it. I get to live inside of it.

Why I Paint the Way I Do

When I sit down to paint now, I begin with the light. Always.

Before there is form or shadow or feeling, there is light — and I lay it down first. Everything that follows is in service of it. I do not paint figures into being; I find them already there, underneath, waiting to be uncovered.

That is the technique. It is also the truth. The light comes first. The darkness may cover it, distort it, press against it — but the light is still there underneath.

I paint as the woman who lived all of it. The teenage girl in Jacksonville. The young wife bathing in a backyard with a gallon of water. The mother of small children pretending to be okay. The survivor of a thousand smaller silences. The woman whose Freedom Date is November 3rd — who picked up a brush that December and has been painting ever since. All of them are in every figure I make.

Every painting says the same thing in a different language: I am still here. I was not erased. I was not ruined. I was not reduced to what happened to me. I became something more layered, more luminous, and more honest.

That is also why I give back. A portion of proceeds from every sale supports FavorHouse of Northwest Florida and Gulf Coast Kids House — the two organizations that stepped in when I needed them most. They are not a marketing line. They are the reason I am still standing.

If you have ever sat in your own version of the dark, hear this from a woman who has been there:

The light was always there. The darkness never owned it. And it never owned me.

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This is the whole arc — but not the whole story. In the posts that follow, I’ll be going deeper into these chapters one at a time: Katrina, the leaving, the mirror, the first paintings. If you want to walk through them with me, follow along here or on Instagram.

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If You Need Support

If anything in this story has surfaced something for you, please know — help exists, it is free, and you do not have to explain yourself to use it.

📞 If you are in immediate danger, call 911.

FavorHouse of Northwest Florida

Counseling, shelter, and advocacy for survivors of domestic violence in Northwest Florida. 24-hour hotline: (850) 434-6600 · Administrative: (850) 434-1177 Website: favorhouse.org 2001 West Blount Street, Pensacola, FL 32501

Gulf Coast Kids House

Child-focused advocacy and support for children affected by abuse, neglect, and trauma. Phone: (850) 595-5800 · Email: familyadvocate@gulfcoastkidshouse.org Website: gulfcoastkidshouse.org 3401 N. 12th Avenue, Pensacola, FL 32503

National Domestic Violence Hotline

Free, confidential support 24/7, in 200+ languages. Call: 1-800-799-7233 · Text: “START” to 88788 Website: thehotline.org

988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline

Free, confidential support 24/7 for anyone in emotional distress or crisis. If it is your 3 a.m., you don’t have to wait for a stranger to call. Call or text: 988 Website: 988lifeline.org