July 12, 2026

The affirmation that sparked this blog post- “I’m not healed and I’m not broken. I am somewhere honest and in between.”

Not everyone is willing to face their shadows. Not everyone is willing to deep dive into their trauma, feel it all again and then find a way to reconcile with it and let it go. And some people may never be ready. After all, the abyss is familiar and predictable. It becomes both a prison and a sanctuary.

Healing means unlocking all the doors in your heart and mind. It means taking a good hard look at the truth and taking accountability for the role you played. Facing the false truths your ego feeds you about it being other people’s faults or worse- all your fault. It means facing the doubt, fear, hatred and insecurities fed by your ego. The ego, that nasty little voice in your head that stops you from expressing yourself, from connecting with other people, that tells you, “you’re not good enough” or “you’re too much”.

Healing means forgiving yourself, and sometimes others. Forgive yourself for acting from a subconscious triggered place. Forgive yourself for accepting less than you deserve. Forgive yourself for building walls to protect the soft parts that the world tries to destroy. Forgive for not trusting yourself and others. Forgive yourself for listening to that voice inside that tells you lies. Allow the light of unconditional self love to fill you. Because we need to love and accept ourselves, faults and all.

Is healing hard? Yes.  Is it worth it? That is something only you can answer for yourself.

For me it is.

Every painful memory. Every time I let people treat me badly. Every time I stood up for myself only to get knocked back down harder. Every time I ignored “red flags” and stayed. Every time I walked away. Every time I opened my heart, was vulnerable and trusting, only to be hurt again.

At one point it became too much. I was doing the best I could at the time with the survival tools I learned to use. For me that was building walls so high no one could see past the cold mask. Disassociation. Detachment. Isolating. Ignoring. Headphones on, music blasting into my brain on repeat. Because that was the only thing that blocked that nasty little ego voice.

From the moment we are born until the time we leave this world, we are given lessons. And sometimes these lessons cause deep wounds. Sometimes these wounds are given to us by others who are living with trauma of their own. And often, those “others” are the family we are born into. Childhood wounds shape every aspect of our lives. Especially when they are unrecognized and unhealed.

When we are children we can’t just walk away from what isn’t good for us. Perhaps we don’t even recognize how toxic it is until years later… When our lives follow the same patterns. When we are surrounded by the same type of people. When we attract people who are abusive and hold out hope for them to change. When we back away from what feels stable and open because chaos is all that we know. When we react from subconscious wounds and hurt people that don’t deserve it.

For so very long, I refused to allow myself to feel anything. If I didn’t feel, I couldn’t be hurt or ridiculed for being too tender-hearted, too hopeful. I blocked it all, becoming a walking dead woman. Except when I would have dreams about Hide.

But emotions are meant to be felt. They keep us human.

If I didn’t feel all the emotions I couldn’t be a decent writer, paint the way I do, feel music so deeply or connect with people. I still have my shadows and demons. They will always be there. However that doesn’t mean I can’t find joy or feel love. I’m still here, I’m still the “me” that was buried deep inside.

So yes, to me, it was worth facing all of it to remember who I am, at the very core. Because I hated what I had become. When I came back to Iowa, I tried to put everything behind me. But with the release of NUL’s first album, Tribrid Archive, cracks started to form in the armor that had served me well all my life.

I didn’t translate the lyrics for months. I didn’t want to know the meaning of each song, because I think some part of me knew I wasn’t ready to hear a lot of it. The English parts of Cube already had me wishing for things I thought I didn’t deserve. And I wasn’t ready to put in the work to break my own Soul Cage. The first song I was really drawn to, though, was Ground Zero.

When I did finally do a rough translation, I put the document in a folder and thought it good enough. Except one line wouldn’t leave me alone. From Another Face. It reverberated through my head on a loop.

トラウマという名の赤い衝撃

torauma to iu na no akai shōgeki

A red shock called trauma

It was the first line from a NUL song that inspired me to create a painting because it resonated so much. The other paintings before that were just based off the colors Hizumi used in the creation of the album cover.

Stark. Minimal. Half black, half white canvas with a bright red line down the center and blown into each half. Trauma bleeding into both the dark and light of my soul. Because that’s all I had in me. And that’s as vulnerable as I was willing to be at that point in time.

In the blog I wrote about this particular painting (over 3 years after its creation), I didn’t go into great detail about why I felt called to create it. But I think that this painting was the very tiniest first spark of healing. May 31, 2021. I had the audacity to post it online and tag Hizumi in it. Because I knew he would be the only one to understand exactly what that painting felt like and meant.

When the second album’s title track PV was released, I watched it numerous times trying to write down the lyrics to the best of my ability. Evila frustrated me to no end and when I wanted to give up, Hizumi encouraged me to keep going. So I did.

When I bought the album on iTunes, I found the lyrics online and began translating using Google Translate. Which we all know is not the best and sometimes gets things really wrong. To this day,  I haven’t finished translating the entire album to the best of my ability, though I now have a different program to use.

I have translated Yatagarasu with its troublesome last lines. Because the first time I heard that song, I was driving to the corner store to get a few things… and all I wanted to do was turn into a crow and fly far away from the existence I was only surviving. Instead I went home and began working on translations. And for the life of me I could not get the last part to translate right. Until very recently.

奪われたものなど捨て去り夜を駆けろ

空白を埋めるように彷徨った闇

光を掴む様に翳した黒い羽を

忌まわしき瑠璃の眼光に今　焼き付けてみせよう

Ubawa reta mono nado sutesari yoru o kakero

kūhaku o umeru yō ni samayotta yami

hikari o tsukamu yō ni kazashita kuroi hane o

imawashiki ruri no gankō ni ima yakitsukete miseyou

Cast aside what has been taken from you and run through the night

Wandering through the darkness, as if to fill the void.

Reaching out with black wings to grasp the light,

burn them forever now into that accursed lapis lazuli gaze. 

When the song was first being recorded, Hizumi said- “Today we recorded a song! This is the core song of the album. The theme is crows.”

When a Japanese man you communicate with frequently writes such a descriptive line about someone’s blue eyes… and you are someone who has blue eyes… it’s hard not to wonder if it’s directed at you. But I’m sure I’m not the only person with blue eyes that he’s ever talked to that has suffered immense trauma.

I had some help with the analysis of those last lines because I don’t always pick up nuanced context and I felt it was a deeper meaning than the simple translated words on the page.

In Japanese mythology, the Yatagarasu is a legendary three-legged crow that represents the will of heaven and acts as a divine guide. By invoking the Yatagarasu, the song frames the narrator as a dark, powerful bird-like entity.

These lines tell a story of grief, desperation, and dark transformation. Someone has been stripped of something vital (innocence, a loved one, or humanity). Instead of mourning, they are urged to abandon what is left of their past and flee into the dark. This is a point of no return.

The loss has left a massive, painful emptiness (“the void”). The character wanders aimlessly through a dark world, desperately trying to find a replacement for what they lost, though nothing seems capable of filling that emptiness.

This is the turning point where the wandering victim transforms into a creature of myth (the Yatagarasu). They grow “black wings,” embracing the darkness they were once fleeing. Instead of waiting to be saved, they aggressively reach out to seize “the light”—which could mean salvation, hope, or their target’s soul. (depending on interpretation)

This act seals their fate. By taking the light and burning it into those striking, cursed blue eyes, the narrator creates a permanent, inescapable connection. They are searing their own dark existence into the consciousness of the person with the blue gaze. By calling it “accursed,” the narrator implies that looking into these blue eyes brings suffering, obsession, or an inescapable fate.

In another interpretation- the speaker finds the person’s blue eyes incredibly beautiful, and impossible to forget. But looking into them is destined to cause destruction and emotional pain or heartbreak.

Do you all understand now why this man’s mind fascinates me so much?

At the time of the release of this song, I could see myself as both the Yatagarasu and the one with the cursed blue gaze.

When I lived in Texas, every morning I would go out to the back porch for a cigarette. And every morning the crows would come visit me. Sometimes only one or two, sometimes a whole murder (flock). Every single day. I wanted nothing more than to turn into a crow and escape. Instead, in April of 2019, I created the first flip cup painting I was really proud of… named Karasu because it has a crow in flight at the bottom left of the canvas.

It was ridiculed, called ugly, stupid, a waste of time and money. This was the first time I tagged Hizumi in a painting. I don’t know why I did. But I will forever be grateful for his reply. Because that is when I began to realize I could no longer tolerate or ignore how I was being treated. And three years later he wrote a song about crows that spoke to me on a visceral level.

When I heard the song Higanbana, I didn’t need a translation for one of the lines.  I haven’t completely refined the translation or put a lot of work into the overall meaning behind the lyrics. But it feels like profound grief. Especially since the one line I didn’t need to translate is part of the nickname Hide would call me when we met in dreams so many years ago. Before NUL was even an idea.

きれいな青い目 kirei na aoi me. Beautiful blue eyes. 

So yes, I still grieve the loss of those dreams. Because even though it was never real, it felt real and brought me comfort and ease. And every time I hear part of that old nickname in that song, my heart bleeds and grief washes over me again. Because I haven’t dreamed about Hide since leaving Texas. Except for the time almost 2 years ago when I woke up because I saw a brief flash of him and heard him say, “Kirei na” before he disappeared. That was August 30, 2024. And I think that was his goodbye.

And now we are to October/November of 2024.  The release of NUL’s third album AVA. My previously chaotic life was nothing compared to what poured out of me when the walls were decimated. Decades of pain and heartache. Layer upon layer of masks, ripped off and leaving me bleeding and broken open.

That was the turning point for me. I typed dozens of pages in multiple documents. A torrent of guilt and grief. Blame and realizations. I didn’t hold back, left it all there in black and white. And I shared some of it in previous blogs.

The affirmation at the beginning of this blog? “I’m not healed and I’m not broken. I am somewhere honest and in between.” That’s where I can finally say I am after over a year and a half of facing my shadows and demons. Holding myself accountable for my part of everything. Working through the grief of losing so many. Grieving the loss of some dreams, and finding new ones.

I will not apologize for all four of NUL’s albums being what has kept me going, and will continue to do so, far into the future. The brief interactions with Hizumi (where he made me feel seen and good about myself again), and all of his music has kept me human.

If what I write can help just one person, then I will consider it worth bearing my soul to the masses. I am no longer afraid to have an open heart in this often cruel world. Being vulnerable isn’t weakness. Love is never something to be ashamed of or hidden away. Kindness is never a waste. Hope should never be sacrificed.

You are worthy of love.  You are enough, wounds and all.

Always,

Amanda