Collage 18

“On the right hand side is what I saw as the ideal – beautiful, what I should be like, expensive clothes and the dreamlike state, what women are supposed to be like. At the time I think I was just obsessed with being like everybody else. When I became psychotic it felt as though my brain was pulled from some sort of vacancy, from not really locking in to what mattered to me, and what I had been through as a child, and I don’t think I really was thinking about love in the right way. When I became psychotic – its hard to explain – my brain felt pulled by a whole bunch of men. I felt like there was going to be one faceless man that saw that I was bloody vacant and my views were a bit… my behaviour was exampling the want to be a well dressed and rooted cherry blossom tree, but in reality I wasn’t that at all.

Who I was became a question like the many mirrors. I started to see my own worth and everything else and I felt very ashamed by the end of it I felt as though my sex, my whole person as a woman, as a young girl was being pulled to pieces. I lost ninety percent of everything, going into wanting to be this special person. Some really bad things had happened in that period. At first I thought it was going to be this beautiful artistic creation and realistically I had been thrown to the wolves, and the psychosis got worse and I felt like my brain. I was in some very dangerous situations, and  I was getting more and more ill. I wanted to be everything the world expected me to be. I felt embarrassed by some of what happened, and so all of this was because I was concealing underground baggage this whole time. Wanting to be like the other girls and never being like them. The stairs? Well, sometimes I wonder if my paranoia started at a very young age because my mum became ill and all her secrets were kept for some time. My sister and I used to sit on the steps listening in, trying to pick up what is this big secret we’re not being told about?  The staircase is also meant to be representative of trying to get myself up, wanting to be somebody who has money and beauty and all these things, going up. But at the same time going all the way down because the baggage is just phenomenally there. To me it looks like a bloody mess”.