Artist Recovery Podcast

Artist Recovery Podcast is Bringing Light to the Darkside of Art. I’m Rich Wright, your host — and here we're redefining recovery as Renewal, Resilience and Creative Transformation. Because for artists, it’s more than survival… it’s Remembering.
This show is about the real journey of being a working creative — the highs, the lows, the pivots, and the reinventions that shape who we are. Together we’ll explore how setbacks can spark transformation, how loss can open new paths, and how resilience fuels the heart of every artist’s story.
If you’ve ever faced doubt, setback, or the call to reinvent yourself, you’re in the right place. Let’s recover — and create — together.”

Want to be a guest on Artist Recovery Podcast? Send Rich Wright a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/artistrecovery

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Artist Recovery Podcast

Artist Recovery Podcast S2 Ep. 17 | Kirsten Rudberg: Banned, Becoming & the Art of Living Slant

April 24, 2026 • Rich Wright • Season 2 • Episode 17

0:00 | 2:00:30

What happens when the thing they punish you for turns out to be the very thing that saves you?
Kirsten Rudberg: author, screenwriter, producer, and host of the Bite-Sized Blessings podcast has lived most of her life outrunning a label she didn't yet have: artist. Born in Illinois, raised across continents of Guyana, Pakistan, and the American Midwest, Kirsten grew up navigating worlds that didn't share the same rules, the same language, or the same idea of who she was supposed to be. That early exposure to multicultural landscapes, hand-embroidered pillowcases, and the vivid chaos of Lahore's streets wired her for something.

In eighth grade, school officials banned her from the library. She'd been reading 94 books a year and winning competitions. They were worried she wasn't developing socially. The girl who graduated class bookworm would graduate high school four years later as class clown and not in spite of being forced out of her sanctuary, but because of it. That's the kind of story Kirsten tells. The kind where the wound and the gift are the same thing.

This episode follows her through decades of invisible creative laboring the ideas that percolated while wiping tables and busing dishes in Portland, the corporate Jumbotron moment that sent her packing her entire life into a U-Haul bound for Bellingham, Washington, the 700-question seminary personality test that finally named her an artist and gave her permission to become one. And then the pandemic arrived, the muses sat on her shoulders, and everything she'd been holding for twenty years started pouring out.
Rich and Kirsten go deep on hyper-vigilance as a childhood survival tool turned creative superpower, the Catholic concept of charism: the sacred gift you're born to bring into the world, the liminal space between what science calls real and what the rest of humanity has always known, and why art, at its core, is always about becoming.

Topics covered:
~Growing up across continents: Guyana, Pakistan, and the American Midwest
~Cultural identity, belonging, and learning to "speak the language" to survive
~Being banned from the library — and why it changed everything
~Creativity suppressed by trauma, survival, and the 9-to-5
~The seminary personality test that finally said: you're an artist
~The pandemic as a creative awakening
~Charism — your sacred gift and your only real job
~Hypervigilance, highly sensitive creatives, and complex PTSD
~Why art dies when you take it too seriously?

Connect with Kirsten:
Website: https://bytesizedblessings.com
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirsten-rudberg-2021361ba
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/edisonsucks1

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