A very long time ago, I was going to therapy sessions weekly over some stuff that happened in my life that I will not go into because it's very personal but it was a very bad time in my life and I was borderline suicidal over it.
I was lost and didn't really have anyone to go to save for a handful of friends locally who were, thankfully, happy to pick up the pieces every time I shattered. It was a messy situation and part of why was how little I felt in control of it and how poorly I grasped the reasons why it happened in the first place.
Struggling to explain to my therapist, in words, how I felt prompted her to give me an 'exercise' which was, since I was an artist, to put it on a canvas instead. Paint how I feel. If I try and put a sight and face and vision to this problem, what does it look like?
This is a series of 4 pieces and I'm not posting the first three because, again, they're very personal but the last piece, as I explained it to my therapist, was being lead into the library of my mind. Somewhere there is an answer in here, for why I felt like this, for why I'd gotten myself to this place, for how to escape. The answer is here somewhere, I just don't know where, and the weeks that had passed felt like me opening every book one by one hoping the answer was in there. The progress of trying to 'find' that answer felt grueling and the understanding there was essentially an endless library ahead of me made the task feel insurmountable.
I think about this art a lot because I think it's the closest I've ever gotten to fully crystalizing a thought in my head onto a canvas. This is pretty much exactly what I imagined in my mind, still all these years later, and that feeling is so rare. I try to remember it every time I feel like I'm not capable of doing what I do because I am, I did that with this, and I did it in a way that's unique to me.
