I'm Not Scared of God. I'm Scared He was Gone All Along. - 9/30/2026

Listen to Inbred by Ethel Cain if you want to know where the title of this painting came from. What is the saying? Art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed? Yeah.

I'm a young woman, but I've already lived through a lot. My life has had a pretty consistent theme of turbulence and self-preservation. I think it's fair to say that everybody lives an unpredictable life. However, my life started with that unpredictability when I was very young.

For a long time, I was very emotional about this. I held a lot of resentment and confusion because why did all of these bad things happen to me? Why me and not any of the other kids? What did I do differently that made me deserve this? And the most important question was always: Why was God okay with doing this to me?

Every adult who saw me, a child, living through these difficult things would say the same thing: "God has a plan for you." And after the hundredth time of hearing that and faking appreciation, it pissed me off. I resented what God had done to me and my family. I could not believe in Him because what kind of savior would do that?

But that was then.

Time is so healing. Every wound becomes a scab, and every scab becomes a scar. My scars don't hurt anymore. I'm not mad at God anymore. God is the reason things got better.

"I'm not scared of God. I'm scared He was gone all along." is such a perfect lyric/ phrase to me. The words feel like you're one step away from being hopeless. I'm not God-fearing. I fear what could've been if God was never there.

I made this painting on a day when all of the feelings from all of my bad seasons came to revisit me. Those days are weird, but at least I got a cool painting out of this one.