I am an artist.
I create art that represents a fractured mind.
I have a mental illness.
I believe art and madness are fatefully intertwined.
It’s not like one day I woke up and knew I was insane. No. It was a gradual development that the world around me was not right. I needed things need to tell me this. Shit had to happen. A lot of shit. Bad shit.
Only then, when I was at my lowest, when I thought I couldn’t survive another day alive, when I was at my breaking point, I asked for help. But that’s the difference, isn’t it? I didn’t break. I didn’t leave this world. I got help.
I had to figure out what was wrong with the world. But I found out the world was working the way it was supposed to. My brain was working wrong. It, in itself, is not wrong. No. The chemicals are off. The balance is wrong. There is a reason for all of this pain and confusion.
Sure, it took decades for me to find the things that made it work right. I spent countless days and nights in hospital wards, nights and days lost to madness, friends and opportunities snatched from me, years of my youth wandering through life unaware that there was something much better.
But, when I found it…
I got life.
Art has always been there for me. Late nights avoiding social gatherings as a teenager, days trying to ease my mind from my diseased thoughts by creating worlds in which things are the way I wanted them to be.
It’s funny. People say something is their drug. Like “Oh yea, music. It’s my drug.” Like they need it or it gets them high. Like they are addicted to it. But art can be a real drug. It is pharmaceutical gold. It is a true way to self-medicate in a non-destructive manner. It was for me. It still is.