About me, as told by my husband

Sharla Miller-Baer is a professional artist who lives and works in rural Wisconsin. Her love of beauty and her creativity led her to express herself with paper and pencil from a young age. Sharla taught herself the basics of drawing before grade school and, as a teenager, advanced into charcoal drawings and acrylic painting. She specializes in emotive and deeply personal art pieces. Her love for art became even more important to her during difficult times of her life. Her belief that all of life is art spills into the other things she enjoys, such as music, gardening, and classic literature. Sharla invites you to see the world through her eyes.

About me, as told by myself

     People ask me when I started to create art. I am always uncertain how to reply, because I do not know the answer. I suppose there was a time, but I can’t remember it. I cannot remember when I wasn’t driven to pick up a pencil and show the world my thoughts and imagination.  I tried, once, to stay up all night to draw when I was about five years old.  Not much has changed.  I still have those aspirations, and I still sometimes fall asleep with my colors in my hands.

     The reason I want to be frank in my story is simple: I believe a lot of art is born through pain and loneliness. At least mine was. Sometimes we laugh at people who try to find a ‘deeper meaning’ behind every cryptic creative work. However, even as a child, I usually didn’t create an art piece without a deeper meaning. The self-expression I was denied, the words I wasn’t allowed to say, the things I wasn’t allowed to think— I expressed them all through my art, silently thinking and speaking. All my life I felt like a captive, unless I was creating art.

     I was raised on a farm in rural Wisconsin, where I learned to love all things beautiful. Nature was orderly and chaotically beautiful at the same time. The four seasons divided up the years, and since we lived on a farm, every aspect of our lives flowed with the seasons. As the seasons changed, so did we. We adjusted our lives to the time of year, until it became a way of living so engrained that it seemed impossible to change. Being close to nature as a child is something I will forever be grateful for; Nature taught me about life and later on, saved my life.

     I was also raised in the Mennonite church. Like nature, it was orderly. Every question had an answer, every belief had a reason, and everybody had a calling. As a child, I stored the beliefs deep inside me, wondering what they meant. Sometimes I questioned them, but I was never satisfied with the answers. Questions, I’ve discovered, are usually better left thought about and nuanced, rather than concretely answered.

     I didn’t have a single artist friend while I was growing up. On two or three occasions, I used an art book, but lost interest when they taught me the technical terms for things I already knew how to do. As a result, I am entirely self-taught.  I used to take my art to school and draw after my assignments were finished.  In those days, I never used anything but an 0.5 lead pencil. Being an artist was generally unheard of in my childhood community, and it set me apart from the beginning. When my need to create, learn, and make things beautiful spilled over into every single aspect of my life, it created a constant friction between the culture I was born into and myself.  Art and creativity open the mind, and in my culture, an open mind was sometimes viewed as a dangerous thing.

     From the beginning, I didn’t want a faith that was merely passed down to me.  I wanted my own.  I wanted my own beliefs.  I wanted to find the things that fed my soul.  I wanted to read classic literature, travel to new places, and listen to classical music. Reading, hearing, and seeing wasn’t enough; I had to understand.  I couldn’t look at life and explain it all through the lens of my faith.  When I looked beyond the surface of things, nothing could be explained in the concrete terms I was used to.       

     Most of these traits of mine were, in some form, inherited.  I grew up listening to my paternal grandfather recite poems and classic literature whenever the situation called for it. When I was twelve, I researched classic literature and determined to collect and read them all.  My mom and I shared a love for old books, and we frequented old bookstores often. I bought old hardcover classics I knew only by their titles and brought them home to read.  War and Peace, The Picture of Dorian Grey, Goethe’s Faust, and of course, Shakespeare.  My father exposed me to historical and presidential memoirs, which whetted my appetite for history and social science. Our family’s interest in classic literature wasn’t sanctioned by the church; we mostly read what we wanted to. The books I read kept my mind open when the church’s literature tried to poison it from the inside out.  

    Growing up Mennonite wasn’t easy.  I learned that being born Mennonite was a privilege few people had, and this privilege equaled extra responsibility toward God.  The Mennonites were God’s ‘chosen’ people, a cut above the rest.  They had extra discernment concerning the Bible; they knew which verses were extra important, and which verses weren’t important at all.  I was taught that women were responsible for the purity of the men, but women couldn’t be leaders because they were emotional and irrational.  I was taught that men had sexual desires that could make them act like animals, but their word was God’s law.  I learned that I was sinful, ugly, and dirty in God’s eyes, and if I failed at any little thing, he would send me straight to hell.

     I felt like I was already in hell.  The sermons I heard bounced off the walls of the church and settled into an ache in the pit of my stomach.  I watched abusive cycles repeat themselves over and over. All the pretty explanations and trite phrases didn’t work anymore.  Not when I was sexually assaulted, and then blamed for it.  Not when teachers were allowed to spank their students.  Not when a church of grown men and women objectified and demonized me.  Not when my abuser’s father was chosen to be a minister. Not when I was told that Jesus wouldn’t like to hang out with me because of how I dressed.  Not when I was blamed for a church split at age sixteen.

    I was jerked between two gods.  One wanted me to be a perfect Mennonite girl, quiet, submissive, and subservient.  He hated my guts and wanted to see me friendless and hellbent.  He was the god I was shown in the Mennonite church.  The other was the God I learned to know in nature.  The one who let things grow and be and exist.  The one who loved things for the simple reason they were.  The one who welcomed my pain and my anger and my grief. 

     My father had become a deacon when I was thirteen.  Being in the ministry meant being in the spotlight, and the church spotlight is utterly merciless. Dad resigned his position when I was sixteen, much to the benefit of our family.  After that, the church split, and we began attending a very small Mennonite church several miles away. I made new friends there—friends who were good for me.  My fear and confusion began to leave me when I started to realize I was valued in the new church.  I participated in church ministries and events, feeling as though I’d been given a new lease on life.  I discovered that not all Mennonites were the same, and for the first time, I saw the beauty in their culture that everyone else seemed to see.

     I met my husband there.  I seemed mysterious to him, and he liked how I carried my art everywhere I went.  His sense of humor was just as dark as mine, and he showed me his poems before anyone else. We began dating several years after our family began attending the new church. The way we dated wasn’t conventional by any means.  I was an artist, and he was a poet.  We were both loners, feeling as though no one completely understood us.  But we understood each other. His reaction to my story was unlike any I had experienced.  I gave him a journal I had written over the time I was being sexually abused.  There was church that evening, but when he came to pick me up after finishing the journal, he was crying so that we spent the evening driving long country roads instead.  Our relationship was an enigma to people who were used to seeing traditional Mennonite courtships. But we didn’t care what people thought. We were soulmates. We got married in October—the coldest, windiest, rainiest October day I’ve ever seen.

     After we were married, my trauma caught up to me.  I was sick most of that winter.  Going to church began to feel strange and alien. Often, my husband and I would drive to church, only to drive back again because I had a panic attack. This went on for several grueling months.  Saturday would be spent dreading church, Sunday would wipe us out, and Monday would be spent in recovery. It was a vicious cycle. Then, the 2020 pandemic began and delivered us.  Going to church wasn’t an option anymore.  I felt an intense relief.  Finally, no one could question why we stayed home.  No one could judge.  In the safety of my home, I started questioning my beliefs more than I ever had before.  I would talk for hours and hours, finally speaking the words I had never been allowed to say. Encouraged by my husband, I shared my story publicly for the first time.  I got everything from beautiful support to hate mail.  However, it was mostly support.  My speaking out allowed me to connect with a community of survivors, even some who had never told their story to anyone before.

    When the long, hard months of lockdown were over, I was still struggling deeply.  My mental health was very poor, and I had developed severe anxiety.  But I was still determined to make a difference in the Mennonite community. I had become involved with a ministry for sexually abused Mennonite girls.  I was incredibly passionate about this, and I wanted to support my fellow survivors in any way I could.  But when I showed support for abuse victims who left the Mennonite church, it was over.  My husband and I were asked if we would like to leave the board.  At about the same time, my husband and I received a letter from a concerned pastor.  He was tired about hearing how bad the Mennonites were and hoped that I could learn to support the church again.  The hope I had that I could make a positive difference in the Mennonite community withered up and died at that point.  Then, I felt grief like I never had before.

     This was the sort of grief that never entirely goes away.  The grief of knowing how hard you tried to believe in something, but you weren’t believed in return.  We went to church even less after that, until Christmas came.  That Christmas, all the excuses I had for staying were ripped away from me.  I quite literally chose between the church and my life.  I was dying inside.  When I realized what staying in the church was costing me, I chose to walk away. 

     I didn’t try to find another church to fill the gaping hole in my life.  I couldn’t even read the Bible without the voices of my ex-pastors coming back to me and throwing me into a flashback.  So, I let my mind rest from all church and all religious content.  It was then that I began to truly heal. The relationships that weren’t for me fell away.  I was incredibly lonely, but I was starting to feel happy again. 

     At first, inner peace terrified me.  The absence of conflict, stress, and hypervigilance was so foreign to me that I couldn’t understand myself without it.  It had become a part of me.  I spent days at a time on the verge of panic, when tension seized every muscle of my body.  There were days when I thought I would explode from it, days when nothing helped.  I hadn’t discovered healthy coping mechanisms, much less healthy life habits.  My husband was always there to support me, but I had to do the work myself.  Slowly, I discovered habits that helped me, like exercise, healthy eating, and meditative art.

    Around the time I left the church, my husband and I decided to go to college together.  He wanted to pursue a different career path, and college had always been a dream of mine I had considered unreachable.  In the church I grew up in, higher education was viewed as dangerous. Education in general was deeply connected with my trauma.  I had dropped out of high school because of the sexual abuse when I was fourteen.  Quitting school at fourteen was common in the church, but it was something that I never wanted to do.  My mental health was so poor after I dropped out that I couldn’t even finish high school at home.  Furthering my education meant so much more to me than just going back to school. My husband began college, and a year later, I joined him.  We have a lot of study dates and late nights.

    Nature has always been the ultimate luxury for me, but it surprised me when I discovered that I wanted to grow things.  When my husband and I built my art studio, I planted flowers around it.  What began as something small turned into a sort of obsession.  I designed and planted a flower garden and a vegetable garden, both of which are still in progress.  Growing things is a form of therapy for me.  It allows me to connect with my roots and my creativity all at once, something that used to be rare. That’s probably why it is so healing, because my heritage and my creativity have always seemed to be at odds with each other.

    The process of healing trauma is like the layers of an onion. My art has been with me through all those layers.  I will always love communicating through my art.  When I couldn’t speak, I made art.  When I couldn’t feel, I made art.  When I felt too much, I made art. Nature inspires me, as well as my past.  I use those elements to create art, to find common ground between people.  I’ve discovered that common ground exists between us all, more than we’d like to think.  Our different stories do not cancel each other out; they exist in tandem.

     This is the story of me and my art.  It will change over time, but I know I will always remember how it started—with a child who didn’t have the words to say what she felt. I want to honor that version of myself with my art, and I hope my art inspires you to have compassion for yourself as well.  I welcome you to my creative space and my journey.

sharlamillerbaerart@gmail.com
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