Safe Here Now is a short animation that began life as a little set of visuals in my head over ten years ago, before I ever even worked in the arts. As I began to heal in my early twenties, I started therapy and through that I quickly got back in touch with my creativity. Growing up I was always creating things, poetry, art, stories, it was a survival method. Creating worlds to escape into. As I became a young adult I had stopped creating, my brain was completely blocked. I struggled with learning new things, I couldn’t write anymore which was extremely painful for me. I was grappling with the extremity of symptoms of severe untreated C-PTSD and major depressive disorder. After finding safety for the first time in my life, my brain had just simply blocked. I could breathe in and out freely now but my body hadn’t caught up with that yet. It would be many years of suffering terribly with symptoms before I could finally start writing, painting and dreaming up new worlds again.

Through therapy as a young woman, after my whole story up to that point was heard by someone else, the easing of that pain of it all untold inside me, my brain started to unblock. I picked up paints again, this was how Complex truly began all those years ago as initially just an idea for a series of paintings that would later grow and grow into what it is today. One of the very first ideas I had as I began creating again was a short animation, I called it The Journey Home. It was about an inner child returning home to itself. In the visual in my mind the adults would be holding a baby, they were a family now. This was before I had had my son, but the baby briefly seen held by the parents in my mind was him all along.

Ten years on, after working as an actress and writer for a long while, I started looking for someone to help me bring The Journey Home to life. During the worst years of my adult life I would return to this little concept, if things felt scary and I couldn’t face the enormity of my own trauma and what it would mean to bring Complex to the world, I would come back to this simple idea, The Journey Home. Something happier, simpler, children coming home to themselves and the acceptance and love that follows.

When I suddenly found myself in a position to bring this idea to life I reached out to animators I respected. As I was writing my creative brief for it for some reason I changed its name, it became Safe Here Now. I see now how perfect the name is for it and I’m so glad I followed my instinct and renamed it there and then. I am also so grateful that I was put in contact with an extremely talented animator that would help me bring this concept to life. Zoe Kahana as the animator has brought so much of herself to the story, she saw things in my skimpy creative brief I hadn’t visualised yet and some of my favourite little moments in the animation came from her. I am very lucky to have found a true creative partner in this project who could bring this all to life.

Throughout the years, I have lived what is depicted in Safe Here Now, a lost child wandering, a new life and family created, and I have returned home, been lost and returned and lost and returned again over and over. Whether you’re a trauma survivor or not, everyone has an inner child and inner child healing is some of the most important work we can do here, I hope Safe Here Now can help inspire you to let your inner child come home to you too, she or he is always with you and I bet they’re really really proud of you. I hope everyone enjoys the animation Zoe & I have put together, it means a lot to me to see one of my first ideas from so so long ago while I was still so lost come to life in such a beautiful way. You are Safe Here Now.