CPTSD ~ PAINTING FOUR

This is the fourth painting in my CPTSD series. And it's one of the most significant. It’s taken way longer to complete than anticipated. But after some major matte medium malfunctions and issues with haziness on papers I used, painting over said papers, changing colors, and then finally finding the correct glue for the mirror pieces, it is finished!

The summer I turned eight I had a traumatic brain injury. At the time it was confusing and all I really remember are flashes of what happened. Being carried into the emergency room by a family friend. Blood pouring into my eye. My sister screaming “don’t let her die.” The sound of the MRI machine and being told repeatedly not to fall asleep, despite complete exhaustion coming over me. Later that night I was woken up every hour to be asked my name, what month it was, recite the alphabet. I vomited blood and it was horribly painful, that part is still clear. My head felt like a vise squeezing around it, like I was swimming under water for too long.

Symptoms of the TBI didn’t show up until a few weeks later. I was indescribably terrified, no amount of words can really do it justice. I had no idea what was going on. I struggled with daily functioning. Did my feet always feel like that on the floor? What was I supposed to do with my arms? They felt funny hanging by my side. How did I breathe again, was it something I needed to monitor and pay attention to? Why did my saliva pool in my mouth? Did I always have to consciously make an effort to swallow it?

I didn’t understand and I cried more in those first few months than I ever had before in my life. I was too young to know it was from my head injury. I thought I had done something wrong. And all I wanted was for everything to go back the way it used to be. I started doing things in repetitive patterns, walking in circles, breathing in and out in a rhythmic fashion, swallowing my spit every time I counted to four. I tried desperately to undo whatever it was that caused all this. But not matter what I tried, nothing worked.

I lived in agonizing silence about what was going on for almost a year. Until I was no longer able to hide it. Then I was taken to endless specialists and had numerous tests. Sleep studies, EEGS, medications, more doctors, more tests. Something in my brain was broken. My childhood came to an abrupt and painful end.

It took me decades to openly speak about it. It’s something I just now have gotten to the point of fully accepting about myself. And this painting revealed so much to me that I hadn’t been aware of on a conscious level.

My brain felt like it exploded, my life like it had shattered. And in a way it did. In to so many fragmented pieces that I could never fully put it back together again, not how it used to be.

But that’s where the beauty of it revealed itself to me as I was creating this artwork. Because those pieces are all still there, but only in the being broken did it make space for bigger, grander, more marvelous things to grow.

The mirrors are reflections of myself, who I was, who I have become, who I am waiting to be. The blood is now coated in gold, because despite the life-altering and completely horrifying experience of my brain “breaking”- especially at such a young age - I survived. Not only the injury itself, but the rebuilding of my life and who I was, who I had to fight tooth and nail to become. And that’s a kind of metamorphosis not many people have lived through to tell.