MY STORY

For many years art was something that had to be calculated, precise, and perfected. It became something that I resented and lost my love for due to the immense amount of stress that it caused me, and never being able to live up to my own unrealistic standards and expectations of myself. 

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I have had a long and gruelling battle with my mental health, in one of my admissions to a treatment facility in 2023,  I found myself sat in an art therapy group. The group was a space where our art was meant to be expressive and free, something my art had never been. For the first few sessions, I sat there in silence, refusing to pick up any materials. No matter how hard I tried to follow the brief, I was held captive by the chains of my perfectionism and self-criticism. As the weeks went by, I was pushed by an incredible woman, the art therapist of the group, to challenge myself, put down the pencil, ruler, and eraser and slowly push myself beyond the limits I had created for myself. After much resistance, ripping up and throwing away many sheets of paper, and considerable efforts to try and steal back my eraser, I began creating art in a way I never had before- I was guided by my heart instead of being ruled by my brain. The rest, as they say, is history. I will never be able to express my gratitude to that art therapist. She saw something in me that my controlling ways blinded me from seeing- the stories art could tell. Most importantly, the stories my art could tell that my words couldn't. I still have a long way to go in my personal healing journey, but art has now become one of the most important parts of not only that journey, but of my life. My art has helped build a bridge between my inner world and the outside world. 

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I still battle my perfectionism every time I am creating, but I never could have imagined being able to produce art that I haven't spent hours planning, sketching out, or restarting 50 times over. Above all, I never could have imagined the immense peace I could feel from creating things without planning them first. My art was always something so private, something I felt too ashamed to share with the world through fear of it not being "good enough", a thinking pattern that spills out into every aspect of my life. Recovery has taught me that growth doesn't happen within my comfort zone- the only way to change my beliefs, is to challenge them. 

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I have fallen in love with art again in a way I never believed would be possible, it has truly been one of the greatest gifts of my recovery. I have learnt that by loosening the grip of my perfectionism and desperate need for control, I can unlock simple beauties of life that I otherwise would never get to experience. Losing myself in my paintings has momentarily silenced the world around me, even on my most difficult days. I truly believe art has saved me, that without it, the noise of the world and my mind would have won on many occasions. 

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My wish is that other people may be able to find that same sense of peace and reprieve from whatever noise is going on in their world, through my art too.