Nikki Terry, mended, 2023, Watercolor, oil stick and graphite on arches paper, 22 x 30 in
Bold Journey: Nikki, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?
Nikki Terry: My resilience comes from two women: my mother and my paternal grandmother.
I grew up as an adult child of addicts, always attuned to emotional shifts and unspoken danger. As the only girl and a middle child, I learned early how to make myself small, how to anticipate conflict, and how to smooth things over before they built up. That instinct followed me into adulthood as a people-pleaser and overcome with self-doubt. My mother lived most of her life undiagnosed with Bipolar Disorder, and for years I felt tethered to her mental health, learning boundaries only after I had already been depleted.
Art became the place where my resilience began to take shape. Before returning to making work, I felt emptied out. The first time I encountered a Mark Rothko painting, I felt an immediate stillness from the scale, the color, and his quiet emotional weight. His work taught me that feeling deeply is not a weakness, and that healing comes from allowing emotion to exist without explanation or defense. Through art, I learned how to sit with myself and redirect pain into care.
My paternal grandmother, born in 1925, was our family’s matriarch. A devout woman of faith, she raised seventeen children with discipline, compassion, and unwavering belief. Her strength was quiet and constant, shaped by responsibility and endurance rather than recognition. Watching her taught me that resilience doesn’t always look like resistance; sometimes it looks like survival carried with grace.
Today, resilience means reclaiming my voice. It means interrogating inherited silence and choosing to speak anyway. Writers like bell hooks helped me understand that healing is both personal and cultural, especially for Black women. My resilience exists so that the women who came before me are remembered not only for what they endured, but for the strength they passed down. Through my voice, my art, and my healing, I offer recovery to their stories — and to my own.