Demons

A colorful world full of Demons 

         The subject of my image is myself and the demons that live whiting me that no one sees. Everyone sees me as the happy, playful and smart girl that hast her life together, no one sees the real me. In this self- portrait I tried to show myself putting a gun in my head which is the results of the demons that fill my mind with negative thought that sometimes led me to hard myself.I decide to talk about them because sometimes I just want to give up and sometimes when people see me sad or like i'm about to give up they don't believe me, they think I'm doing it for a show. Because no one knows about my mental illness and not a lot of people know about my past. Doing it was fun because everyone would ask me why do you have a silhouette of a girl pointing a gun to her head, and I would laugh and said it was a project and they would ask me to see it when I was done. Everyone was so curious about it that it made it even funner for me to do. When I came up with the idea of my project the teacher told me to research Louise Bourgeois, an artists that made this big spider that represented her demons, which symbolized her trouble with men and her family. Bourgeois used autobiographical and personal memories as a source of inspiration and I did the same. Se inspired me to talk about my personal issues. This image attracted my friends to learn more about what was about the whole "gun" concept was really deep for everyone. My midterm was more about the female body and the male gaze but now I decided to talk more about myself and the things that no one sees. Seeing the work of different artist and representations of themselves inspired me to talk about the Michelle that only the people closer to me know.

I wrote this to explain my demons and i wanted to share it :)

I decided to put a semicolon in my life and continue my story, a semicolon is a promise to myself that I would never willingly end my sentence, and end my story. A semicolon is a reminder to open up conversations between myself and other humans about mental illness because as difficult as it is, what’s more difficult is feeling stigmatized, or like you failed, or like people are feeling sorry for you. There is no question that the stigma surrounding mental illness inhibits struggling humans from finding the help they need. I find this absolutely heartbreaking because I know I am not alone when I say that depression destroyed my childhood, my relationship with friends, my involvement in school, and much, much more. So if one out of every four people struggle with mental illness, why did I feel like I was the only person who had experienced this before? If 25 of every 100 people I pass on the street have clinical need for psychiatric care, then why did I feel like I had to hide my shaky hands every time I would panic. It would hit me harder than a train or feel like I had to shove every suicidal thought on a shelf behind old dictionaries and behind every classic novels where no one could find them. Nearly 30,0000 people die from suicide every year and that’s more than twice that of HIV and AIDS. But still I am embarrassed to tell you that sometimes I can’t get out of bed in the mornings, that some nights I cry myself to sleep because I don’t want the thoughts of suicide to take over me. Let me make his clear for those who don’t know me well: “I am not who you would expect to be depressed.”

    “I am not who you would expect to be depressed”. You cannot put me in a box decorated with black nail polish and frequent trips to Hot Topic  because you don’t wear depression like a necklace or put anxiety on like a hat. You cannot spot depression because of what you see. I am depression and I am not the silent girl dressed in all black hiding in the back row of your lecture hall. I am depression and I am the perfect picture of a 21 year old sorority girl in NJCU. I am depression and I am oversized sorority t-shirts and jeans that I have to hold with a belt, starved hips that the greek girls envy so much. I am depression behind a stylish hair that cover half of my face most of the times and beautiful makeup that takes me hours to do.

No one ever knew that my illness had crippled me so severely that I spent 20 hours a day wrapped in blankets in my bed, trying desperately to fight away the bitter cold that had taken over my heart. I hid myself in a social life, I call 15 women on my campus by the name of sisters, but sometimes I’m still laying at the bottom of a lake unable to breathe while effortlessly everyone around me grow gills. Because no one tells you what to do when your life becomes a 10-car pile up during rush hour traffic, because no one tells you to tell the very people who framed your life and hung it up on the wall for everyone to admire the girl who has it all together that nothing is right anymore. No one tells you what to do when good days fall so severely that you can’t remember the last time you woke up and didn’t want to die.

Every 16.2 minutes, someone takes their life. In the time you’ve been listening about the crippling disease that made me want to take my own life, someone took theirs… And still, we shame and stereotype and stigmatize the people who need the most help and teach our children that having to ask for help is something we should feel bad about, when in fact sometimes strength is admitting that you don’t have any left.

Oftentimes I feel like depression ruined my life. It took so much that it’s become a desperate desire for something good to come out of this. My hope is that because of my experience, I can be an advocate and a champion for mental health awareness, that I can start a conversation with girls in my colony and students on this campus and hopefully influence someone’s life for the better. I am lucky, yes I am lucky because I live in a beautiful home with a beautiful family. I am lucky because I have a stepmother who raised me as her own daughter and believed me when I said I was depressed and didn’t make it sound like my fault. I am Lucky because I have people that supports me. The problem is that people struggling for worse than me don’t have half the support I do.

For the people who cannot champion for themselves, every day that I say no to the dark thoughts depression tried to tangle my mind with, I am winning a battle that society has not made easy to win. I’ve learned a lot from my struggle with depression. Every day is another day of endless waves of transformation and as much as I wish it didn’t hurt so bad when it hit me, I can’t say that I’d change who I am, the struggle I went through. I decided that my story wasn’t over yet, and let me tell you, you do heal, you do become stronger. I don’t know what it would take to frighten me, but it will have to be something big. I am, in fact a survivor.