My Art Helped Me Liberate My True Identity
Which came first? The toxic household or the creative child trying to escape? I can’t help but always wonder whether it was my dreamer personality that infuriated my father, or whether my creativity stemmed from needing an outlet, a world into which I could run off to in order to cope with the suffocating reality of my childhood.
In any case, my identity and my art feel as though they are one. They’re intertwined and very much a part of each other, like veins embedded into muscle. You could try to tear them out, but what good would either one be without the other? Still, I have lived two separate lives inside one body and I only have my father to thank.
My father didn’t specifically target my imagination with an aim to stifle it, but he did make me afraid to express it. To offer him an idea would’ve been to suggest that you knew better than him. It was to suggest that you had a mind of your own. An insolent move in his eyes. To suggest purple and yellow in a world where he believed things to be black and white would’ve been to set yourself up for abuse. I learned quickly how much easier life was if I silently nodded and let him believe I had submitted to his totalitarian will.
Inadvertently, out of an inherent fear instilled in me by my primary authority figure, I began to apply this self-made rule to everything else in…
