Army Veteran Finds Hope and Healing Through the Arts
The first explosion woke Naomi Czupryna up. The second changed her life forever.
It happened during her second deployment to Iraq; she was stationed at a base a mile south of Sadr City. “At the time, our base was getting rocketed once a week,” she said.
On the morning of June 6, 2011, Naomi remembers waking up “to the ground shaking. There was an explosion super close to where I slept. I remember when I woke up, seeing the clock said 5:34. I reached down, grabbed my weapon, put my shoes on and said, ‘Okay, I’ll go to the bunker.’ I remember walking to the bunker, and it looked like it had caved in on itself.”
Amid the chaos of the moment, she was talking to one of the Army sergeants on base when she “heard a whistling sound and something land, and then someone near it said, ‘It’s a bomb.’ I remember turning around and running back towards my room and that’s all I remember.”
Five of her fellow service members, including the sergeant she had been talking to, died that day.
She woke up as she was being medevaced out onto a helicopter. She was “very, very lucky,” ending up with a few broken bones.
“I pray to God or whatever universal being you can think of to tell him I’m grateful every day,” she said. “And I asked him what I am still here for. For a long time, I was trying to figure out what that is.”
She found that answer in, of all places, a fantasy novel — author Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns in which the main character, Feyre Archeron, turns to art after suffering from PTSD.
“It really interested me, that part of this character, so I went and bought some paints and bought a canvas and just tried it,” Naomi shared. “I remember six hours going by and realizing I had sat at the table and not felt angry. I hadn’t yelled at anybody. I let myself get lost in the painting. I told my husband I’m going to keep doing this.”
That was roughly three years ago.
Veteran Naomi Czupryna (left) served in the Army for nearly 7 years that included two deployments to Iraq. She has found hope, healing, and a positive outlet for her emotions through art. She was one of 15 artists to graduate from our Capacity-Building Program in May.
While the visible scars of her trauma had long since subsided, the inner ones kept resurfacing well after she left the army in 2013, and she and her husband Daniel — he is also an Army combat veteran — got married, started a family, and moved to the Cape nearly 11 years ago.
It showed up in short-term memory loss, a lack of productivity, anger, decreased confidence, and “lots of crying evenings where I’d get home and see my fiancé and didn’t know what was going on and didn’t know how to cope with it,” Naomi said. “He was dealing with his own post-combat issues. …In the Army, if you show mental weakness, you are considered weak and they’ll say, ‘We don’t need you.’ I had to keep faking it and keep trying to work on things by myself. It was very difficult. It was very isolating.”
It was through art, creativity, and self-expression that Naomi has found healing and rediscovered who she was prior to the day she nearly lost her life.
She paints mostly in oils. Her subjects lean towards nature — cardinals, flowers, whales, bunnies, butterflies, owls — though there’s one she shared on her Instagram of a red-haired archer, “the warrior woman. But today she becomes something more,” the post starts, perhaps signaling the transformation she has experienced since becoming an artist.
“I signed up for the cohort to put myself out there. ...When I got the call, I was dancing up and down and telling my husband how excited I was. I’ve got to say, I haven’t been prouder of myself.”
“I feel like art opened me up to being more like a normal person out in public,” she said. “I don’t feel that angry feeling deep down inside. My husband and I, our relationship is so much better now. I’m not creating drama just to create drama. I feel like I can be a shoulder to lean on.”
In a short time, Naomi has had her work showcased at separate exhibits at the Cotuit Center for the Arts and the Falmouth Art Center as well as digitally in Italy after graduating from the Milan Art Institute in the fall of 2024.
In January, she was one of 15 artists to be selected to the Arts Foundation’s Capacity-Building Program. She graduated with the cohort in May, leaving with a $1,000 grant as well as a business plan in which she has set forth this goal for her creative practice — develop art therapy classes for veterans like herself.
“I think art can go a long way to help and heal our veteran community,” she said, noting what it’s done for her: “I’m not broken anymore. I can say that with confidence.”