Creativity Quote by Tracey Emin

Survival is doing well until it becomes an identity you have to defend. Tracey Emin’s line lands with the blunt intimacy that runs through her work: confession as both material and shield. “I’ve got over so much” isn’t triumphal; it’s a kind of inventory, the weary accounting of someone who has had to metabolize trauma into function. The verb “got over” is deceptively casual, like she’s downplaying the scale of what happened because naming it too precisely would reopen it.

Then she brings in “Mum” - not as sentimental ornament, but as a moral witness. Emin’s mother becomes an internal audience, a private standard that turns personal boundaries into something almost sacred. It’s a clever move: the speaker isn’t just protecting herself; she’s honoring the dead, keeping faith with the person who once anchored her. That borrowed authority also hints at vulnerability. If you need the imagined permission of a parent, you’re still negotiating with the past.

The sharpest word here is “fragile.” It frames tenderness as risk, not richness. Emin isn’t rejecting love or new experience so much as the version of herself that could be undone by them. In the context of her autobiographical art - where pain is repeatedly translated into public object, and intimacy becomes spectacle - the quote reads like a refusal to let life (or a relationship, or the gaze) turn her back into raw material. It’s self-protection, but also self-curation: resilience as a line in the sand.