Project: 2020
Falling to Pieces
Artist Statement:
There are two main types of Autistic meltdowns. The most common one people talk about and see depicted as a temper meltdown, but the one that isn't discussed as much is a depression meltdown. A temper meltdown is usually short-term, lasting an hour up to a day, but depression meltdowns can last days, even weeks. Much like Autism, depression meltdowns are hard to describe. They put you in a very dark, intensely crippling state with mental and physical side effects, such as sickness and exhaustion. They can be triggered by many instances of stress or grief, in my case, the degrees of these instances can vary, and I will still fall into them. Most books say it's triggered by feeling powerless, to me, one of the most common feelings with Autism. It can be pretty difficult to distinguish my symptoms of depression from that of a meltdown.
The following excerpt is my favorite explanation of what it is like from the first book I read about Autism after being diagnosed:
"I will feel like I've been hit with a baseball bat. I'll feel it in my belly and my head. Immediately, I'm dizzy, like the world has shifted off its axis. It's that swooning feeling right before you faint. It's the feeling you have when you receive terrible news; now freeze that and stay there for hours, days even. Once this happens, it's very hard to stop ourselves, "going down the rabbit hole." We go down quickly, and we go down hard. We will cry a lot, sometimes to the point of hyperventilating and choking. We will despair of anything ever being right again. We are paralyzed with grief." (Pg. 169, Aspergirls, Rudy Simone)
For most of 2020-2021, I have been in and out of this state of a depression meltdown. They have been the worst I've ever experienced so far in my life. I have panic attacks multiple times each week, or they are just part of the meltdown. As I mentioned, it's hard to say. The hardest part is I can't take a break and deal with them; I just have to keep pushing through and hope they don't get worse. I have felt completely and utterly hopeless. I wanted to create something that describes what I'm feeling and going through.
"Falling to Pieces" (2020) was initially intended to be scanned and shaded digitally with words and statements. Each piece was representative of a core emotion I was feeling during this meltdown; anxiety (yellow), anger (red), depression (blue), and fear (black). I had given myself a long free-write of my thoughts and feelings and sorted them into these categories. I wanted the words to be overwhelming and chaotic; I also didn't want them to be fully legible as most of these thoughts were critical and personal. I also thought these overlapping thoughts would represent how these emotions flow into each other.
I had fun with the ballpoint pen and decided to do an entire ink drawing that I'd scan and reprint with the words. I had difficulty getting good scans of the drawing without losing detail in the pen work. I then thought of the chaotic word ball in the middle of the installation view with all the phrases marked by color. I figured I'd paint the pieces with watercolors to get a more emotional feel to them, but the pen lines started to blur as I applied clear gesso over one. My last resort was using an airbrush for the first time to color the pieces.