Some people live more life in one lifetime than most of us live in three. Mikki Hoogendijk is one of them. She survived a bomb attack. She lost people she loved. She built things and watched them fall apart, lived in cities she had to leave, and carried grief that would have stopped most people. And every single time, she didn't move away from the pain — she moved through it, and turned it into something you could see, touch, and feel.
In this episode, artist and author Mikki Hoogendijk joins Charuka Arora for a conversation about loss, fear, reinvention, and the quiet freedom that waits on the other side of the things we're most afraid of. Mikki's mother handed her a camera a month before she passed — and that gift began a lifetime of creating through grief, from photography to clay to eight-meter bronze sculptures. Now, with her memoir The Art of Letting Go, she shares what all of it taught her.
We talk about:
Why grief is never about a single moment and what it asks of us
How to keep creating when your life is falling apart
The seven-year-old self she keeps on her phone and why that child runs the show
Why she stopped making art for anyone's approval
Reinventing yourself at any age, while everyone else settles
Why letting go isn't losing it's making space for what's next
This one is tender, honest, and quietly freeing. Whatever you're holding onto, or afraid to let go of, this conversation is for you.
Because the other side of fear, it turns out, is freedom.
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