Today I am going to talk to you about what I believe led me to become an artist. I am not a psychologist; this only reflects my own view of things, my own experiences, combined with my reading and research on my own traumas. I do not claim to be someone who knows, but someone who feels. That is why I have entitled this article Art, Trauma, Catharsis.
I hope that you will find something in this account that resonates with you, or that it will pique your curiosity.
A troubled childhood, the birth of trauma
When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a writer or a painter. From a very young age, I always had things to say, as if a huge universe was contained in my head and wanted to come out. I had more than just things to say; in fact, I felt like my head would explode if what was inside didn’t come out. And to cope with that, I often entered a state where I did nothing. I slept through entire afternoons.
A chaotic life, art as a rock
So, not knowing what to do, I lived several lives, trying to find meaning, serenity, and peace. I travelled despite myself, tossed about by a life I couldn’t control. I was a laboratory technician, a graphic designer, a computer developer, and even a bookseller for a week. I lived in several cities in France, England and Belgium. I became a mother, worked in more than a dozen companies, and clung to life and normality in an attempt to calm my inner storm.
When art and trauma come together
Then, because normality didn’t suit me, I threw it all away. I left my old life behind, and the alternation between moments of intense living and months of withdrawal increased to such an extent that I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
And I decided to be myself. I became a painter.
Then I started a company and released a narrative video game.
I thought I had found a kind of refuge, far from others, in my own world. I believed I had found a kind of peace. Not every day, not all the time. But sometimes. After 36 years of wandering and suffering, life had become bearable.
And yet…
A step backwards
Recently, the nightmare has started again. I am unable to generate enough income from my art and must once again confront reality and normality.
When I spend too much time conforming to normality, facing reality, shopping, cleaning, looking for a job so I can eat, I feel like my head is going to explode if what’s inside doesn’t come out. And I relive those long, strange periods of emptiness where I do nothing and want nothing. I’m not really unhappy, or at least not all the time. It’s just that my body doesn’t want to do anything. Even when my brain wants to. It’s not laziness or fatigue. I just CAN’T.
I’ve also been plunged back into my childhood demons, which I had forgotten, by force of circumstance. Family obligations. But this time, the adult I’ve grown into decided to tell everyone I had to interact with about it. My family, my carers. I stopped keeping quiet and telling myself I had a problem, I said how I felt. And it was accepted, heard. That had never happened to me before.
The beginning of a new start, perhaps?
So I moved forward. With the help of my psychiatrist and a psychologist friend, I discovered that the summer when my body refused to do anything even when my mind wanted it to was probably a state of shock. Shock is apparently caused by traumatic events. I will skip some details as they would take too long to explain here, but my reflection led me to believe that it is childhood trauma, perpetuated by certain unfortunate professional experiences, that causes this state of shock.
I do not have access to the part of my psyche where this trauma is hidden, even though I can perceive some fragments of it. My childhood memories help me. I have flashes of anxiety where I perceive a few ideas, a few words, a few fears. I try to capture them to extract the information. It’s tiny, but it’s a clue.
I have explained all this to you in order to arrive at my current view of my irrepressible need for expression, which led me to paint in order to express myself and, at the same time, to finally feel like an artist. Beyond the technical aspects, some of my paintings are genuine messages.
Art, trauma, catharsis, where I am now
I realised this thanks to the psychologically violent events I experienced last summer, which plunged me back into my past. I now believe that this intolerable need to express what is inside me through images is due to one or more traumas, because I have not yet had the opportunity to access these traumas. As they are not verbalised, but are intolerable, it seems imperative for me at times to express them. Like an overflow. That’s it, or a state of shock. Hence the alternation between moments of vitality and intense creativity – the feeling of living at 300% – and moments of depressive shock.
I have often been told that I am ‘too much’.
I need to reclaim my own way of functioning. I am not ‘too much’. I am. That’s all.