The Cup that Survived Me
On Pottery, Anxiety, and Building Containers for Healing
This cup is not my best work. In fact, I made it—all of it, from the pottery wheel—during a season when deliberately choosing things I was bad at was part of my healing journey.
A few years ago, after my first panic attack sent me to the ER and into several months anxiety so severe I was experiencing dpdr daily, I found myself in structured group therapy (IOP) several times a week. When that time came to an end and I started reflecting on what I needed next, I realized something important: getting myself somewhere three times a week had been the most stabilizing part of recovery.
So, I did the rational (at least to me) thing. I signed up for a pottery class.
Now, let me make one thing perfectly clear. I am terrible pottery, sculpture, pretty much anything that crosses properly into being 3D. Give me paper, ink, layout, symbolism, I’m a native swimmer. Put a lump of clay on a wheel and ask me to center it? I think there’s a pottery teacher somewhere still laughing.
“It’s certainly not a heroic object. It’s slightly uneven, and the handle is a little too small, so even functionally, it’s questionable. But it has traveled. It’s held survival, humility, family supply chains, international logistics, addiction, rationing, normalization, and now ordinary rhythm.”
Which is exactly why I chose it. I needed something that would get me out of the house regularly and reconnect me to my creativity. And I needed that something to have no potential for becoming Mayura. Something where the goal was simply: show up, put hands in clay, and—no matter how I was feeling that day—stay.
This wasn’t the first time clay had shown up during destabilization. Years earlier, in art therapy, I was handed a small lump of clay and told I had sixty seconds to make something. I made a wonky pinch pot and then immediately disqualified it, saying, “That’s not me. That’s just what we learned in kindergarten.” My therapist looked at me and said, “Okay. But if you didn’t make that, who did?”
That pinch pot now holds the candle on the altar that lights everything else.
This cup came out of the later season.
I made an early one with birds on it and gifted it to a friend. But I loved the size (small, round, steady, about 6oz.) so I made a second one for myself. I painted it black like a night sky and added vertical stripes of rainbow down the sides. Two sides of me, sitting next to each other: darkness and full-spectrum, void and color, containment and signal.
At the time, it was just a cup.
Meanwhile, in a totally separate storyline, my husband’s family had begun ferrying Royal Chai into our house from several continents. His mom and sisters (located variously in London, Johannesburg, and Durban) started packing suitcases with instant masala. It was addictive and, at the time, impossible to find in the US. Every visit included a ceremonial handoff of bags of the stuff. Rationing became necessary.
Fast forward to this year: Royal Chai is now available on Amazon, and I realized something mildly miraculous. The sachet is the exact right strength for the volume of this gloriously wonky, storied, entirely “me” cup.
Now I drink 1–2 cups of this chai a day. Afternoon work sessions or post-dinner returns to the studio, sometimes both. This cup that was born in a season of nervous system triage has become a daily vessel for steady focus.
It’s certainly not a heroic object. It’s slightly uneven, and the handle is a little too small, so even functionally, it’s questionable. But it has traveled. It’s held survival, humility, family supply chains, international logistics, addiction, rationing, normalization, and now ordinary rhythm.
It began as proof that I could sit at a wheel (and with my nervous system) and not unravel. Now it holds chai while I work. There’s something about that arc that feels worth noting. Maybe not everything we make needs to be great, or even good. Maybe they just need to be real enough to outlast the version of us who made them.
