ART STARTED ME ON MY JOURNEY TO WELLNESS
Unable to work for several years due to severe depression, my journey towards healing and recovery began the moment I picked up a paint brush and painted the first stroke onto a blank canvas.
Artistically, I had no skills whatsoever and could barely draw a recognizable stick figure, but I was determined to use any means that made it possible for me to communicate my thoughts and feelings since I rarely ever confided in anyone. I had internalized a great deal of self-hatred and self-directed anger along with the residual after-effects of the traumas I had experienced. On May 20th, 2006, life as I knew it began to change for the better when I ventured into the unknown and attempted to create something out of nothing but thin air and my feelings.
A local artist, Louise Lierschaft, helped me that first day when she demonstrated how to mix paints for painting in oils; how to clean brushes and she taught me the basics of sketching a picture onto canvas using a grid. My first painting depicted a vase of flowers and a sunhat and, while the colors were great, the painting itself was not, but I felt a sense of pride and accomplishment in producing my first painting; something I hadn’t felt for a very long time. This lit a fire under my butt as I explored the possibility of creating paintings that would tell my story so that I wouldn’t have to tell it to people out loud.
Determination to get well drove me to overcome the deep depression I was in, even when it took tremendous effort just to get out of bed and dress myself daily. Painting an ugly picture was not something I was afraid of because my life already felt ugly, pointless and not worth living.
At first, the colors on my palette and canvas were dark with disturbing subject matter. I painted the loss of my stillborn son and a seven-painting series on the Faces of Discrimination which were not only representative of societal discrimination but also my internal distorted view of the many facets of who I was and the way I saw myself as a broken person. My outlook on life and self-care was dismal at best and suicidal at worst. Resisting the overwhelming temptation to commit suicide daily was a tremendous fight in the struggle to survive when everything inside me begged me to kill myself. I refused to succumb to another one of the many suicide attempts I had previously tried.
This is difficult for people to understand because of the stigma surrounding mental illness and people’s propensity for telling you to just get “over it” and “that’s the coward’s way out”! Let me emphasize that when you reach the point of suicide, you are not in your right mind because a person in their right mind wouldn’t ordinarily do that. My instinct to survive lay dormant during my severe depression. People tell you to “get over it”, that “life can’t be that bad”, “sleep it off and it will be better in the morning”. That’s like telling someone with a broken leg to just get up and start walking and get over it and ignore the pain and suffering it causes and tomorrow will be a better day only to find out that tomorrow is a repeat of the day before and the day before that and so on. Mental illness is not easily understood nor tolerated very much by society, but I can assure you, for me, it is the most brutal illness imaginable.
The more I painted, the more I healed, and my paintings became lighter and more vibrant. I continued to explore different techniques and methods of self-expression. As a bonus, my talent as an artist began to emerge.
Depression though, always manages to creep back in with my moods cycling rapidly, fluctuating between tremendous highs and deepest lows. During high periods, I feel invincible and capable of doing anything and I experience grandiose thoughts like problem-solving world issues. I loved the highs or the manic states, and I felt that my brain was on fire and ideas would come in rapid succession, so fast that I could barely get them down in writing before it would cycle to the next brilliant (to my mind) idea. It was like my brain was firing on all cylinders and the higher I felt, the more creative I became but also the more disturbed I was about social issues and their injustices.
When I think of the letters I wrote during one manic period of my life, I cringe in embarrassment but also erupt into laughter because I fired off letters to presidents and prime ministers giving them hell for violating human rights and breaking laws to prevent something that may never occur.
I punched through boundaries and dared to do things I normally wouldn’t. I’m sure if I go anywhere near the American border they will throw my ass in jail for giving President Obama a sound reprimand for the new security measures imposed at airports which sets back sexual assault laws and violate our most basic human right to say no when strangers are given permission by the government to pat you down and run their hands all over your body including your genitals is taken away from you. Privacy invading ex-rays where your whole body and genitalia are visible and defined to complete strangers is another violation. This still pisses me off today! I sent the same letter to our prime minister Stephen Harper. Then I would paint some more or write until I could write no more.
Writing and painting became my go-to release from tension, anxiety and panic and, through this journey, I continued to heal from the past which allowed me to start functioning again as a productive member of society.
Living in self-imposed isolation, I immersed myself in silence and darkness and rarely left the house and had very little human interaction outside of seeing my brothers, sisters and parents. The noise of being with people was unnerving and disconcerting to me and going into crowded places caused me to panic and have anxiety attacks but my determination to overcome this and return to a state of wellness coupled with my stubbornness helped me to gradually expose myself to these elements progressively every day until it was no longer so uncomfortable to go out in public. Unfortunately, to this day, I still have problems when noise levels increase due to large groups of people. The chaos of so many voices coming at me from all directions continue to cause panic and anxiety and I must leave immediately.
Volunteering had always been important to me, so I began to help at the Women’s Crisis Center, an organization devoted to helping women who are experiencing domestic abuse and/or sexual assault.
The Lord’s Kitchen was another charity where I volunteered at and found that the more I volunteered, the more it took my mind off my problems as I endeavored to help others instead of focusing on myself. This was a two-fold benefit because it helped others but also helped me to re-integrate with people and get used to having people around me.
While I continued to adjust to being around other people, I persisted with painting and writing and began one of several blogs where I uploaded pictures of my paintings which documented my healing journey. One blog I titled “Paint Your Blues Away”, a twist on blues being a metaphor for depression. Unfortunately, after sinking back into depression and being angry with everyone and everything, I deleted not only my painting blog, but also the social justice blog I created where I wrote about and explored social issues on a global scale. I could kick myself in the ass for that. These were blogs I had worked on for several years and so much work was destroyed with one bad decision in the self-destructive phase of my insidious, unforgiving and all-consuming mental illness.
Reality began to blur and during one of the many manic episodes I experienced, I had convinced myself that I was living in a real live game of Alice in Wonderland being played out in my home town and to this day, a lot of what I felt at the time as a very real experience still feels the same to me today. I only wish I had read the story of Alice in Wonderland first before I experienced it in real life. That rabbit hole I fell into was a very deep abyss.
On the other hand, my creativity was at an all-time high and went into over-drive when I produced one painting after another and continued to write my story every day. When I look back on some of the writings I did, it is like reading something a stranger wrote while I was just an observer whose fingers typed the story. Life became weird and unpredictable and so did I.
Eventually, the process of painting what I felt and writing about what my experiences were began to produce positive results and 13 years ago I was able to return to work on a full-time basis with an employer who is very understanding and patient. He is someone who gave me a chance to demonstrate my abilities while knowing upfront that I was bipolar, and he understood the unpredictability of mental illness and particularly bipolar illness. He continues to support me in my quest to heal while understanding that this is a life-long illness.
This and That 
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