When I got sick, I honestly believed my life was over. At the time, all I could see was loss. I lost the job I loved, my independence, my physical strength and the certainty that I could make plans without wondering whether my body would let me follow through. Before that, my life looked completely different. I was working in a residential home for abandoned children, and I truly loved what I did. It was exhausting, emotional and sometimes heartbreaking, but it gave me a sense of purpose. If someone had asked me back then what my future looked like, I would never have imagined the life I’m living today.

For a long time, I hated the idea that people say things like “everything happens for a reason.” I still don’t believe that’s true. Illness isn’t a gift. Trauma isn’t a lesson. Pain isn’t beautiful. If I could go back and erase everything my body has been through over the last few years, I would do it without hesitation. I don’t think suffering deserves to be romanticised, and I don’t think we owe anyone a positive ending just because we’ve been through something difficult.

But time has a strange way of changing the questions we ask ourselves. At first, I kept asking, “Why is this happening to me?” Eventually that question became, “What can I still build from here?” It wasn’t an overnight transformation. It happened slowly, through countless days of frustration, fear and uncertainty. As more and more of my old life disappeared, I realised I had two choices: spend the rest of my life trying to get my old identity back, or start discovering what my life could become now.

That was the beginning of something I never expected. ULY KHAOS was born during those years. Holy House slowly started taking shape. I began writing again, studying music and giving myself permission to imagine projects I had never had the time to fully explore before. None of these things happened because illness is inspiring. They happened because creating became the way I knew how to move forward when almost everything else had stopped.

Looking back, I don’t feel grateful for being ill. What I do feel grateful for is reconnecting with a part of myself that had always been there. Long before I worked in residential care, I had been a photographer, a graphic designer, a videographer and even a DJ in my early twenties. Creativity had never disappeared from my life. It had simply moved into the background while I built another career that I loved just as much. Illness didn’t turn me into an artist. It forced me to slow down long enough to find my way back to one.

Sometimes life doesn’t offer you a new path. Sometimes it closes the one you were already walking. You don’t get to choose that. What you do get to choose is what you build in the silence that follows. I still wish I had never become ill. But I also know that if my life hadn’t been interrupted so dramatically, I probably wouldn’t have found my way back to the creative life that had always been part of me. You don’t become a better person because you suffered. You simply become someone different. Sometimes that different version of you has the courage to return to dreams that had been waiting for years.