--- title: Community Connection: What Passes Between Us description: Support Does Not Arrive on ScriptThe First ObjectWhere I Learned the Rest of ItWhat Passes Between Us What the Keepers Did With ThemWhy It Stays This SmallOn Me url: https://kelliejoart.com/community-connection-what-passes-between-us date_modified: 2026-08-06 author: Kellie Jo Close language: en --- Chapters [Support Does Not Arrive on Script](#support-does-not-arrive-on-script)[The First Object](#the-first-object)[Where I Learned the Rest of It](#where-i-learned-the-rest-of-it)[What Passes Between Us](#what-passes-between-us-now)[What the Keepers Did With Them](#what-the-keepers-did-with-them)[Why It Stays This Small](#why-it-stays-this-small)[On Mental Illness, Since It Lives in This Category](#on-mental-illness-since-it-lives-in-this-category)[What Is in This Category](#what-is-in-this-category)[Write Back](#write-back)[See the Full Community and Connection Collection](#see-the-full-more-than-art-collection) **The week I started hearing voices, I told three people.** My mother brought flowers. My sister called to ask whether we had a carbon monoxide gas leak, since carbon monoxide can do this to a person. Jarimie, my husband, said nothing at all, and has not asked since. You could read all three as failures. You would be wrong about every one of them. ## Support Does Not Arrive on Script You have your own version of this. Somebody said the wrong thing at the funeral. Somebody sent food when what you needed was a phone call. And there is at least one person you wrote off for going quiet, who may have been doing something you never saw. My mother brought flowers because she wanted me to feel better, which sounds like the gesture you make when you have nothing real to offer. Put flowers in front of an artist and you have given her somewhere to put her eyes. I can sit with them for an hour, learning the shape of a petal and the way light moves through it, without ever picking up a pencil. That is an hour I am not staring into the abyss alone. The flowers save me. My sister asked about the gas leak, which could sound like she was reaching for any explanation other than my brain. She had read that carbon monoxide causes hallucinations and she wanted it ruled out before anyone assumed the worse thing. That is love with its sleeves rolled up. Jarimie has never asked me how I am doing with it, and I know how that sounds. Here is what he does instead. When I go to bed, he turns his game down low. There was a stretch where I was getting out of bed at night to check whether the television was actually on, because I could not tell from under the covers whether the sound in the next room was in the house or my own head. Nobody told him that was happening. He watched, worked it out, and quietly fixed the part that could be fixed. He has never mentioned doing it. I tell him things anyway, into the quiet, and he keeps turning the volume down. None of the three is what you would script. Every one of them is somebody paying attention and then doing the thing they were actually able to do. ## The First Object I made my grandmother worry dolls once. Small ones, [little charms](https://kelliejoart.com/charm-voodoo-art-doll-2-5-inch/), not what I usually build now. She told me she talked to them before she went to sleep, and that in the morning she felt better. Not nana’s, but similar. When she died I asked my mother to tuck them under the pillow in her coffin. The funeral home put them in her hands instead. Nobody instructed them to do that. They looked at what she had been sent to the ground with and worked out what it was for. I felt almost guilty for asking. Then I thought about who else was ever going to get out of those dolls what Nana had gotten out of them, and the answer was nobody. I could not have thrown them away. Now it comforts me. The body that carried my mother, and that helped raise Nana’s “*three girls*“, has company down there to help it rest. That was the first thing I made that did this job. It went out of my hands, it got used by somebody I loved, and years later it came back to me as something I needed. I did not understand at the time that this was the whole model. ## Where I Learned the Rest of It I started a blog called [Verbal Abuse Journals](https:verbalabusejournals.com) because I had stopped being able to trust my own memory. My then-husband and I would have a conversation. The next day he would be shouting at me for getting it wrong, so certain and so detailed that I would begin to suspect the problem was *my* head. That is the part people miss about [gaslighting](https://www.thehotline.org/resources/what-is-gaslighting/). You do not lose an argument. You lose the instrument you argue with. So I wrote things down as they happened. Not for readers. For evidence. And what the writing proved, at the absolute minimum, was that one of us was remembering wrong. He could have passed a lie detector on any of it. So could I. Only one of us was confabulating. I decided to study him like a lab rat, and that is when it stopped being confusion and started being data. He knew what he was doing. He was choosing it. I had believed that if he ever understood how badly he was hurting me and our boys, he would want to stop. He said, and I can still give it to you word for word: ***“I’m not going to change for you or anyone else. I like who I am!”*** Then the blog found people I never expected it to find. Around three hundred women over two years, and a few men. They wrote to say some version of the same sentence: I did not understand that what was happening to me was abuse until I read that post. They treated me as though I were wise. I was not wise. I was a step ahead of them in putting the nonsense into words, which is a different thing. Once I understood that what I was doing was mentoring, I built it into something that could hold more voices than mine. The first mentors I recruited were women who had left before I did. I soon trained them in what to say and what to avoid saying because one client told me something her mentor had said. I knew immediately it was wrong. I set up a secure database, because these were people’s lives. It became DASH, Domestic Abuse Survivor Help. Then I burned out. Two or three hours a day running the program, on top of a full-time job, on top of an ex-husband who could not stop. I handed it to Janet, my right hand, and she folded it into her equine therapy practice. If she still runs it the way we ran it, I do not mind at all that it carries another name now. I am no special case. I am a woman willing to filter pain through a different sieve. It keeps whatever can be used out of what happened to me, rape and domestic violence included, and lets the rest die. There is nothing to gain from holding the rest. What stays becomes writings and dolls. I break it down bit by bit until the pieces are small enough to fit through. ## What Passes Between Us The same work happens one doll at a time. When a Keeper [commissions a doll](https://kelliejoart.com/custom-spirit-doll/), it gets intimate quickly. She tells me what she wants. My job is to work out what she needs, which is not always the same thing and is occasionally the opposite of it. That takes more out of me than the building does. It is also the part I would not give up. All of it goes into the story that ships with her: what the Keeper asked for, and what I picked up that she never said out loud. Usually she writes back to tell me the intuitions landed. Here is what that does for me, and it took me years to see it. I lost my grip on my own perception once, and I got it back with a blog. That grip is not permanent. Depression takes it. PTSD takes it. There are weeks when I cannot tell whether I am reading a situation correctly or inventing it whole. Then a woman I have never met writes to say that the thing I sensed about her, the thing she had not told me, was true. That is evidence. It goes in the same file as the blog. So she receives an object built to help her trust what she senses, and I receive proof that what I sense still works. The same thing, moving in both directions. Neither of us could have handed it to herself. I want to be magical. I know exactly how that sounds. What I mean by it is that I want to be able to give a woman back her trust in her own sight, because you do not recover from what was done to you without it. ## What the Keepers Did With Them A doll leaves here built for one purpose and arrives doing something I did not plan. April keeps a container of affirmations next to hers and draws one out every morning while she does yoga. That was never my idea. It is better than my idea because Roberta helps her in a way April trusts.. > Please let your sister know that I am using my beautiful voodoo doll as a daily positivity exercise. I clipped out some affirmations and keep them in a container; I draw one out every day when I do my yoga! Then that is my mantra for the day!! What a wonderful gift you guys have given me. > **April** Karen’s doll was commissioned by a friend, so Roberta arrived without Karen knowing she was coming. > Kellie creates each doll knowing some qualities about you and lets each doll evolve as she creates it. Roberta is my doll’s given name. She is a reminder to me of my own personal growth, strengths, and creative abilities. I love that Kellie takes pictures of the creative process, and sends them to you along with her process notes of how your doll came to be. My doll sits on my bedside table in front of a large Amethyst, which somehow seems fitting for her. > **Karen** My sister Erin has bought four, one for herself and three for friends, so she has watched this happen from both ends. > Each and every time, I am blown away at the care, creativity, intuition, and thought that goes into each doll Kellie makes. Somehow, they are not only a gift of the doll, but you also get an experience when you open the package. > **Erin Chavez** ## Why It Stays This Small I can take people in short doses. My energy goes to my mother, my sister, Jarimie, and my two grown sons, and there is no reserve sitting underneath that waiting to be tapped. So there is no group here, no challenge, and no monthly call. That is not an apology for something missing. The exchange I have just described requires me to pay close attention to one woman at a time, and I cannot do that and run a room at once. You will not be asked to introduce yourself, post a photo of your practice, or prove you belong. There is also nobody in this line of work I talk to. No peer, no colleague, no one a step ahead of me the way I was a step ahead of those three hundred women. I would like there to be. Preferably someone who also communicates in limited doses, so neither of us ends up apologizing for going quiet. ## On Mental Illness, Since It Lives in This Category There is a story that mental illness makes artists interesting. That depression is a muse with a dark gift, and the suffering is the price of the work. That story is a lie, and it is insulting. Mental illness takes. It never, never gives. Depression sucks away the energy, makes everything feel pointless, and hands me dark ideas I want to put on paper while making it impossible to pick up the pencil. My Shadow is an ally and a collaborator. Depression is my mortal enemy. Those are two different things and I will not let anyone blur them for a better metaphor. I also live at an intersection most people want me to pick a side of. I have had [auditory hallucinations](https://kelliejoart.com/truth-about-hearing-voices/), and I have had paranormal experiences, and after decades I can tell them apart. Both are real to me. Neither is provable. I am not going to argue with anyone about either one, and I am not going to pretend one of them away to sound more credible. If you are somewhere in that same territory, you already know how tiring it is to be handled. You will not be handled here. ## What Is in This Category **[Mental Illness & Resilience.](https://kelliejoart.com/community/mental-illness-and-resilience/)** Depression, PTSD, psychosis, and the exhausting work of staying. Written from inside it, not about it from a safe distance. **Collector & Client Stories.** What the dolls did after they left, told by the women who have them. **[Shadow Seekers’ Dispatch.](https://kelliejoart.com/community/shadow-seekers-dispatch/)** Past editions and the work that only goes out by email. ## Write Back Nobody has ever replied to a Dispatch. I have also never asked anyone to, which I noticed for the first time while writing this page. So consider it asked. If something in one lands, tell me. What you are working on, what a doll is doing on your shelf, or something that has nothing to do with either. I read all of it. I answer slowly and not always, and I would rather say that now than let you wonder. Sign up and I will send you *Made to Hold: A Somatic Ritual Guide*, free, for the days when words stop working and you need something to do with your hands. If today is a hard one, read the mental illness pieces first. They were written on days like yours. **If you are in crisis:** In the United States and Canada, dial 988 for any mental health problem or question. You do not have to be suicidal to reach out, and the service is as anonymous as you want it to be. ## See the Full Community and Connection Collection