“Not every silence is empty.
Some are echoes of words we’ve carried too long.”
The Story
Some pieces you draw with your hands.
Some you draw with your history.
Faded Echoes was one of the hardest for me to create because I was not just sketching a family.
I was drawing the family I lived. The distance. The words left unsaid. The love that sometimes-looked like control.
I grew up around conversations that were not really conversations just echoes bouncing between walls.
Affection mixed with expectation. Approval that felt conditional. And that strange, hollow feeling: being surrounded by people, yet somehow entirely alone.
I used to think I was the only one who felt that. But I have come to see it is more common than we talk about.
Faded Echoes is for anyone who has sat in a room full of loved ones, feeling like they are a stranger in their own life.
Why It Exists
I made this piece during a time when I was trying to understand why certain patterns followed me into adulthood why some relationships felt hard, why some parts of myself stayed small.
And the truth is, a lot of those patterns were not mine.
They were echoes. Of words I heard when I was too young to question them.
Of expectations that were never mine to carry.
The more I faced that, the more I realized:
We do not outgrow our family dynamics.
We learn to see them.
And in seeing them clearly, we get to decide which echoes we’ll let fade, and which ones we’ll choose to speak for ourselves.
Artist’s Note
“The hardest walls to break are the ones you built to survive.”
The figures in Faded Echoes are not villains or heroes. They are human.
The parents want to love, but their love is tangled in unspoken tension.
The child wants to be seen but every reach for connection meets a wall of misunderstanding.
This is not a piece about blame.
It is about the cost of silence and the courage it takes to break it.
Reflection
If this piece finds you ask yourself:
Which echoes, are you still carrying?
Which ones no longer serve you?
Healing begins the moment you hear the difference.