I cried for hours that day.

At four years old, I sat in my seat in my preschool classroom and cried. My hair was pulled back into little blonde braids. I can’t remember what I was wearing, but I’m sure I’d entered the classroom with a smile like always. The teacher diligently tried to ask me what’s wrong, knowing fully well she wouldn’t get an answer.

“Finish your journal entry and then you can come join the rest of the class in the next activity” The teacher told me kindly.

I did not finish my journal entry. I sat and I cried. I refused to work. Some might have called me obstinate, a bad kid. Luckily I had a more understanding teacher. She moved me to the art station, where I silently cut out a paper snowflake, tears streaming down my face. I went to a full day preschool. The silent tears continued all day. Nothing was hurting. Nothing bad had happened to me that morning. Nobody I knew had died. I just had to go to the bathroom, and I couldn’t find my voice.

That was the day my mom taught me sign language for bathroom.

To be voiceless is a feeling beyond explanation. I’ve tried for ages to explain in words how I felt in this instance and many like it. Trapped? Lonely? I can feel the words sticking in my throat. They’re heavy – too heavy to escape. They jumble in my mind. At first they’re clear. I know the answers. I know what I’m supposed to say, I just can’t say it. But the more the silence consumes me, the more tangled the words become. The more I freeze. The more I forget. It’s strange to know you’re intelligent – that was the first year they tested me for the gifted and talented program after all – but to somehow not be able to make your words work, or sometimes even forget them entirely. I could even want to answer the question from time to time, but I can’t remember, I can’t make the answer materialize for me. Not even the simple ones.

“What does anxiety look like for you?” My therapist asked me in our last session. And I couldn’t remember. I’ve been living with this diagnosis for eighteen years, and I can’t remember. Of course as soon as I’m home, as soon as the pressure is off and the expectations are done the words come flooding back. Fear. I’m frozen. My heart is pounding. My hands are shaking. My words feel like rocks in my lungs. I can’t cough them out. My head is spinning. I’m dizzy. My stomach knots up then drops. I feel sick. I need to move. I claw at my skin in an effort to ground myself. To feel present. To not leave my body and watch from somewhere else in the room. To stay in control. I can’t grasp the words. I can’t stop my mind from spinning. I don’t move. I freeze entirely. I smile and nod, my eyes glazing over. I’m lying compulsively just to end the questions. Yes, it’s fine. Everything is fine. The world moves too fast. Everything is too bright, too loud, too rushed. I laugh. I think, perhaps if they think you’re happy, if they think you’re OK, maybe they’ll stop asking these questions you don’t know how to answer.

I switched schools for first grade. Maybe a change of scenery would make it easier for me to become more comfortable with my voice. Maybe it would give me a chance to start over. It did and it didn’t. I met my best friend in second grade. I latched onto her like a lost puppy. She was outgoing, vocal, not afraid to ask for what she wanted, and full of brilliant ideas. My perfect match. I chatted for hours with her. We played dolls, rode bikes, made funny videos, sang along together to the radio… I was not alone with her. I did not feel like an outsider. I no longer felt like an alien when she spoke to me. We made friends together – not many, but they were enough. I was not stuck in my bubble – instead she had joined me inside of it. And as long as she was around (our moms pulled some strings – we were in class together through the rest of elementary school) I felt less afraid. I read aloud to her in class. I spoke to our other friends. I went to sleepovers with the other girls, but only if they were at her house – at the other houses I felt instantly sick. But the anxious mind has strange rules. Even before I met her, I’d been able to speak freely outside of the classroom. At home I’d always been a chatterbox. I learned soon after that the play therapy and the medicine and my best friend hadn’t eliminated my bubble, just widened it.

“Do you remember when you used to not talk in school?” Mom asked me one day. I was around ten. I nodded yes in response. “Do you remember what you were feeling? Why you didn’t talk?”

I froze.

They were doing some sort of study, she explained, about kids like me. She took a DNA sample to send in, and I was supposed to answer these questions.

“I don’t remember” I lied. How could I put a word to something so voiceless? I kicked myself internally many times, trying to think of a way I could have answered that. Guilt flooded my body. I wanted to help other kids – I wanted to help the voiceless. But how could I if I too had no voice?

It was a few years later that I discovered art. Well, I shouldn’t say “discovered.” I’d been drawing since I could hold a crayon. See, drawing was my escape. My expression. My passion. I didn’t realize until adulthood that drawing was my voice. What I couldn’t say in words, I could put down on a page. I drew everything. I drew when I was angry, when I was sad, when I was scared, when I was happy. I gave drawing after drawing to my parents, teachers, and siblings in a desperate attempt to communicate this ball of twisted feelings that I couldn’t tell them about, I couldn’t show them. At three I was already giving my mom a drawing every day. They ranged in subject from portraits of the dog to my little sister eating a giant banana. But they all gave me a voice. They were mostly terrible, as childhood drawings are, but it didn’t matter because to me it was freedom. I couldn’t vocalize my feelings of sadness, but I could color in blue. I couldn’t tell my classmates I was excited about the new puppy I’d gotten, but I could draw her next to me, smiles on our faces.

For a voiceless kid, finding a way to communicate is like stumbling upon heaven. I can’t say I wouldn’t have found art anyway. I can’t say I wouldn’t have found another voice without art. But to me, art is as much a part of my being as breathing, speaking, eating. It wasn’t until I was thirteen that I decided I wanted to be an artist when I grew up, but it had been an integral part of my being for long before that. Everyday I’d go home and draw for hours after school. Art pulses inside me, rumbling around, invading my veins. I breathe it. I feel it, filling me, giving me a power I didn’t believe I had. For me, art cannot be a hobby. It’s my life. My first language. Art is my voice.

I can’t say I didn’t find my words, or at least some of them. I was as bubbly and outgoing as any preteen girl. I spent hours on the phone with my friends on the weekends. I went to the mall. I was in the choir. I even joined theater, but soon discovered I much preferred set design over acting. But underlying all of it was anxiety. The notion that I was an alien, out of place among all these other girls rattled around in my head. I cried many nights without knowing why. I had trouble connecting with other students. That’s not to say I wasn’t generally happy, because I was. But I had a fence up that no one could enter. Not my teachers. Not my best friends. Not my family. Because deep down, I suppose, I didn’t think I was good enough. I wasn’t perfect, and for some reason I believed I needed to be. And I was different, or I thought I was at least. I was slightly overweight, awkward, and became interested in boys later than most of my friends. I actually liked school, while other kids groaned. I liked math. I liked numbers. I felt more at place in the GT program than in my general ed classes I suppose, but it still didn’t feel quite right. I knew some of those other kids were smarter than me. Maybe, I thought, I didn’t belong there either. And so I lived my life like an impostor, trying desperately to fit in everywhere I went, convinced that somehow I needed to validate my existence. I became incredibly skilled at reading a room and reading people. I observed in silence and took mental notes. I practiced conversations. I came up with formulas in my mind for how to build responses and conversations. I learned people’s interests, but more importantly I learned the things they hated so I could avoid the topic. I was a good and loyal friend, a wonderful listener, and quite proud of the fact that I had no enemies. All the adults loved me. I was respectful, they said. I was so sweet and happy. My peers said the same. You’re always so nice. Even those who bullied my friends never spoke ill of me, at least not to my face. But what fun is it to tease a girl who just stands and stares at you smiling while you do it? The coping skills I’d learned in childhood in some ways would save me. But I couldn’t speak my mind. My bubble had widened, but there were still times I felt frozen and those rocks for words rattled around in my chest.

But then there was art. I never felt out of place in an art room. I never felt like I wasn’t good enough. I knew I was a good enough artist for now. I knew that art was a skill and you had to practice to get better. And boy did I practice. And somehow in art it didn’t matter if the work turned out perfect, because I knew I could always fix it or start over or do another.

I’d spend hours drawing, designing characters. They were all misfits like me, but they were all happy and bold and proud to be. I didn’t share their boldness, but when I was creating I was OK with that. I let the art speak for itself. And in doing so, I could speak through my art.

The year I started having depressive episodes was the year I almost quit art. I was seventeen. My brother, one of the rocks and constants in my life, had just moved away for college. I missed him terribly but didn’t know how to express it. I had a “friend” who was taking advantage of my kindness, and even more so of my poor self esteem and need for perfectionism. I was moody, but I’d always been a bit moody. I had no appetite – I lost fifteen pounds off my already average weight body. My life was changing. One of my best friends in the world, who I considered an extra big sister, was a senior. I came to the horrifying realization that she would leave soon just like my brother. I too would be leaving for college in not too long, leaving everything I knew behind. My world began to spiral. I hadn’t been in therapy for my anxiety since I was five, and hadn’t been on medication for it since the sixth grade. I’d been surviving. But now it came back, rushing in at full force. Everyday was a battle for me. I’d swap rapidly, one week reeling in constant anxiety, the next in a flood of depression. It felt like drowning. I got in fights with the people I cared about most. I spent hours crying and not even being able to understand why. A few years later when I finally went back to therapy they suggested that perhaps the constant anxiety got to be too much, that’s where the depression kicked in. I couldn’t handle feeling everything, so I went through regular periods of feeling nothing. I can’t say it was better, but it wasn’t really worse either. Just new. And terrifying. In all of this my friends and family were a blessing. They helped me through so much. I had friends who helped me learn that it’s OK to not be OK. It’s OK to open up from time to time. It’s OK to ask for help. I had a mother who dragged me back to the doctor to get the anxiety medicine I desperately needed. And despite it all, despite feeling constantly powerless. Despite freezing and losing my voice, I found the ability from time to time to speak up. I told some friends about my anxiety. I explained to them a little bit of my history. I said, voice trembling, to a circle of friends that for my first two years of public school I took a vow of total silence.

But what about the art? I struggled significantly with my favorite class that year. I had a lower grade in art than I did in English or Math or History. I couldn’t mesh right with my new art teacher. He wanted us to tell the class the meaning behind every piece. My work didn’t have meaning, or at least I didn’t think it did at the time. I just drew what I felt. I drew what I wanted to say. I struggled with myself, trying to change my work to fit some kind of meaning I could make up. I hated having to vocalize it. I felt voiceless and here I was in my safe space being asked to force out these words that were rocks in my lungs. But I couldn’t. And I hated most of the pieces I came up with. I almost stopped drawing entirely. I took up photography, which was another blessing and became a quick second love. But my drawings just weren’t satisfying. The few pieces I did like were done on my own, not assignments, that followed my own rules and once again gave me a voice. Yet when asked to speak about them, I felt frozen.

I don’t really know why I’m telling you all this. Perhaps it’s an attempt to explain myself. Why I got a degree in painting. Why I never gave up on art, despite it’s reputation of being an extremely un-lucrative field. Perhaps I feel that finally, after all these years, I need to speak. That’s not to say I’m not constantly afraid. That’s not to say I don’t feel frozen and forget answers and lose my words all the time. Because I do. I was never “cured” of this disorder, my bubble just widened, and continues to widen with every step I take. Every phone call. Every time I say “yes” when invited out. Every time I risk it all and admit how I really feel. Every time I share a bit of my story, my bubble widens. A year ago I did a show on Mental Illness.

My current series of work I’m creating is a painting series intended to portray the sufferers of mental illness in a positive light. Each portrait is an individual person who suffers in some way or another from some form of mental illness. The portraits, because they are actual people there to tell their story, give a realistic representation of the “faces of mental illness” as our friends, family, coworkers, and peers. In addition, their suffering is recognized through fantastical and nightmarish backgrounds dissolving around them, while their strength is shown through positive, even joyful, postures and facial expressions. Each portrait is not intended to represent an individual disorder (though the model’s experience with mental illness influences the imagery and some portraits may lean more obviously toward one disorder than others) but instead to represent the individual struggle of the person afflicted. For this reason, I spend time asking the models about their personal experience with their disorder(s) and then translate those individual demons into the backgrounds.

The scars/physical side effects (though most pieces are, not all are actually scars) portion of the series builds off the portraits by giving viewers more insight into the everyday struggle of living with mental illness. While the portraits show the strength of an afflicted person, the scars show physical evidence of how taxing it can be on a human body. The paintings of scars/physical side effects fight the stigma that mental illness isn’t real or serious, because it’s largely invisible, by displaying those symptoms that are visible. Each work is modeled after a real scar/physical side effect from a variety of different people who will remain anonymous. Some scars have been slightly enhanced to make them more visible (because scars fade over time) but only in a realistic way from a combination of looking at other similar scars and information from the models. With this series, I hope to start a conversation about the topic. I intend to give sufferer’s and survivors a chance to tell their story both to create discussion on the stigma of mental illness and to give hope to those currently suffering in silence.

I used my voice, my art, to finally do what I wanted to at age ten. I spoke out for those feeling voiceless. I didn’t do it with spoken word, and I may never be able to do that. But I was able to do so in my voice. In my own way. In my first language. It was perhaps some of my best and most meaningful work. I had countless models volunteer – more than I was able to actually paint. I heard all of their stories. I made friends and grew closer to those I already knew. I received anonymous responses, with people telling me how much they related to the show. How wonderful it felt to see their feelings materialized. People admitted to holding back tears while looking at the show. They felt. They connected. They related. And that was exactly what I had wanted them to feel. Finally I could speak, finally I got my message out.

“Your art really spoke to me. I have battles daily w/ mental illnesses and understand the struggle. It is interesting to see it from this perspective!” “Your work is very meaningful. It takes courage to express your true inner feelings on a canvas. I enjoyed it.” “These canvas’s are very powerful and I know how much courage it takes to express these feelings. I felt a connection and each message through this beautiful work of art.” “For a while, I also dealt with depression and self harm, but have gotten better. Your art really spoke out and connected with me. Your art is so terrifyingly real and beautiful. Thank you for making art. Keep it up.” “Thank you for this. It’s wonderful knowing that someone feels these things too.” “Keep doing art for something greater than yourself” “I enjoyed walking and just admiring your art work. It reminded me of a dark time that I faced and overcame. It reminded me to keep on trying and push forward. Thank you.” “So wonderful to see the things I struggle with daily brought to light in such a beautiful and clear way. Thanks.” “You used something so beautiful to bring attention to an issue, an ugly issue, our society tends to overlook. All of this gave me goose bumps. Thank you for creating it.” “I appreciate you using your abilities to bring awareness to an issue that tends to be swept under the rug. I very much resonated with the paintings “Cutting Out my Flaws” and “My Dirty Secret”. I am currently recovering from a multitude of illnesses and recently I am three months self harm free.” “I loved this. I suffer from depression. I also know others who suffer from various illnesses and it’s powerful to see it on paper. Do more like this!” “This is probably the best interpretation on this topic that I have seen all my life. Very beautiful work. Do you ever think about painting immigrants to this country?”

I wish I could explain to you the meaning behind every single work, but that would take far too long and I don’t feel I could do it justice with my words. But this is a battle that we can stand together in. For someone who has struggled to speak her entire life, to be able to use art to speak to others is a gift. To have them understand? To have them pick up these countless drawings and painting and sculptures I’m throwing at them and say

“Oh, I get it!”

That… That’s a feeling beyond words. My frustrated tears of a childhood without communication have turned into tears of elation. So to all those who had the courage to write responses, even anonymously, I thank you (and yes, I do want to do a show on immigrants one of these days!) I wish I could thank each of you individually, but unfortunately I do not know most of you. The quotes posted above are just a selection of the pages of responses I received for this show, and I’d imagine there are even more that felt the weight of understanding but weren’t sure what to say.

I suppose this is the end. This is my reasoning for sharing this with you. I have been inspired by the courage of the people who modeled by me. I have been touched beyond words by those who came to the show and could hear my voice. And now it’s my turn. Maybe I’ll pick this series up again one day, but for now this ends it. This is my final message. I wanted to share my story. To explain why I create – why I must create. I wanted to explain to you all why, for me, it was so urgent that I find a way to speak about this topic. I wanted to be open for myself, because the more I open up about my past the easier it is for me to cope with it and continue to move on and speak in the only way I know how. I also did this for you, for the person struggling in silence. Each of the people who modeled for me spoke up, shared their story, painful as it may be. Now it’s my turn to do the same. So please, hear me. And I hope that for some of you you can find comfort in the knowledge that you are not alone.