art Archive

My experience in the mental hospital

Trigger warning: Involuntary restraint, abuse from hospital staff.

I was passing by an elderly man in a wheelchair, and he grabbed at my arm. I shook my arm free and pulled away from him. All of a sudden, two nurses and a tech were yelling at me, telling me to go to my room or sit down. Admittedly, after they said that, I became quite defiant, but not a danger or threat to myself or others.

I Swear This Is Not My Best

Trigger Warning: Description of bulimic purging.

Romance
This is not romantic this is not beautiful
Fuck anybody who tells you it is

The Proof is On Her Arm

Trigger Warning: Art involving themes of sexual assault and self-harm.
A painting i made while thinking about how NOBODY FUCKING BELIEVED THAT I WAS RAPED BECAUSE PEOPLE IN AUTHORITY NEEDED PROOF…

On Being Different – a poem

i am the perfect target
daylight sparkling off my teeth as i laugh too loud, sing too deep, be too much…

OCD (a poem)

the same thing
day in and
day out
as i beg
and plead with
my brain
to stop

Pansexual Erasure vs Support

“Stop trying to be so different!”
Erasure has never hurt so much.
Now I know how my pansexual brothers and sisters feel.
Erasure. Phobia. Hatred. Confusion.

Painting from the Psych Ward

I painted the beginning of this painting while inpatient at Aurora Las Encinas during arts and craft time. It is my first abstract piece. I was surprised to discover how creative I felt there, digging among old board games like Monopoly for collage material and working in child tempuras instead of my usual oils. I kept the piece of overworked construction paper through my stay, oddly proud of my first artistic effort in a year of multiple psychiatric hospitalizations. When I got out of the psych ward, I mod podged it to a canvas and added a border and purple feathers. I call it Inpatient, Forgive.

Art with Mental Health Detritus

I enjoy using pill bottles and Saphis casings as frames for my mixed media oil paintings. Stockpiling and creating from the detritus of my illness makes me feel as if I am doing something positive and healing. In so openly declaring my illness in visual art, owning it, I feel I am working towards destigmatization. These three paintings were created in the same series of recent work.

Identity

I have pretty much always identified as female. Cis-gender. I have never thought about anything else, really. I have never been aware that there are other options out there, much less considered them. But I’ve also been on the tomboy side of female, right from the get-go. I hung out with boys, I beat up boys, I followed boys into the bathroom and watched them pee. I really really wanted a penis, and I tried as hard as I could to grow one. I remember when I was little I’d sit in the passenger seat of the car as I went with one of my parents on an errand-running mission, and I would feel a certain friction between my legs or against my groin from the way I was sitting on the seat, the way the seatbelt fit or my pants were tugging, and imagine a penis growing between my legs.

End of an Era

Tomorrow is my seven-year anniversary of sobriety. Well by the time it’s posted it’ll be ‘today’ or ‘yesterday’. But y’know what I mean. It’s weird. Seven years. It’s a long time, and then it’s also not. It also goes very fast when life passes by and one is not mindful or living in the present. I can honestly say that most of my recovery has been one big, long panic. Will I get loaded? Will I find a job? How am I going to pay the rent?