Having a Traumatic Brain Injury is a real drag. Of course it is. Mine was not the worst kind, as we so often sadly see in war, car accidents, shootings.
I was brain injured in stages, blow by sickening blow, at the hands of a man who had pledged to love and cherish me. It is not to discuss him, or my past that I bring this up. It is the aftermath.
I had many concussions already when I suffered a series of falls in 2013 where I suffered another head injury. After that one I experienced vertigo “on steroids”. After coming home from the hospital, I went to bed, hurting from a broken ankle but otherwise ok. I had to get up and pee, so I teetered on my crutches towards the loo. Lo and Behold! I was so dizzy I toppled sideways into the closet doors and crashed headfirst into them, knocking them off their track! And knocking me off mine, you might say.!
Detail of “Flashback 937”, a biographical work about my journey out of domestic abuse…
Long story short, its been 8 years. Initially I had Physical Therapy for a span of about 2 years. The vertigo I was experiencing is called Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo, or BPPV. Usually a quick maneuver by the therapist, turning one this way then that, is all that is required for a full recovery. In 99 percent of cases. You guessed it… I was not cured. So I have bouts of cross-eyed misery on a bi-monthly basis.
“Unplugged” a digital finger painting showing my brain’s misfiring connections…
You don’t realize how sick vertigo can make you till you endure this joy ride. First I want to puke, then I nearly fall, then I’m overcome with a fatigue so profound that getting out of bed is a monumental feat. And this Rollercoaster just keeps going round. The problem is that I feel so sick that I don’t recognize the BPPV right away. Until I snap a selfie and realize my eyes are out of whack again. Oh, I forgot to mention the blinding headaches… Yeah, those. Ok, the light is hurting my eyes… Back to bed.
Another Night blurs into Day…and on, and on, and on…
Did I ever tell you my nickname as a small child? It was ‘Paper Factory’. Not Kissy Poo, not Huggy Bear…no, it was Paper Factory. The reason being that I was always sitting, round-tipped scissors in hand, with a swath of construction paper scraps strewn around me. It was like the Saturn’s rings, little pieces, big pieces and lots of Elmer’s. Along with buttons and bits of ribbon and whatever small rodent pelt I happened to have skinned off that day…I like fur, what can I say? So, I guess they could have called me Buffalo Bill, or Hannibal Lecter…Paper Factory was strange enough…
Some of the 3D Stuff I’ve made…
(As a side point, I did not kill the fuzzy little animals, I left that up to Munson the cat. And I especially liked mole fur… )
Anyway, I liked to build little art items, and I still do. Assemblage. What an excellent word. Assemblage. Not gluing stuff together, not making doo-hickies…Assemblage. Very noble.
My fondness for construction had few outlets in public school, except for my advanced art class with Mr. O’hara. I hated him for being critical of my work, and I loved him for pushing me to new heights. He sent one clay sculpture I made to a show in New York City, along with some other kids, and he helped me believe in myself. Even if I was a dope smoking, quaalude eating burnout. The aforementioned sculpture was a handbuilt piece, which I built on my own hand, with the palm morphing into a face and the wrist and forearm becoming a cloven hoof, and for good measure, a rat climbing thru the guy’s eye and out his mouth. Or perhaps into his mouth and out his eye. Interestingly, I cut up one of my Dad’s fine Chinchilla fur gloves and glued it to the bull’s leg…I can’t remember if I furred the rat… Anyhow, I was able to hang onto that piece into adulthood till I broke it in one drunken rage, or another. The next assemblage was a piece using syringes I heisted from Mother’s veterinarian stockpile (no needle) and vitamin tablets and capsules from Dad’s medicine cabinet. Adding a razor blade and some baby powder to my collage, and an image of an unconscious teenager, I was pleased with the result, and all Mr. O’hara did was give me an A+ and a raised eyebrow. Unfortunately, the Principal didn’t appreciate low brow art and my masterpiece was removed from the senior art show. (That’s OK, cause the vitamin E capsules had melted…)
There was a lull in my assemblage repertoire as my scholastic career ended and my addictions progressed. I don’t recall building any art for about 23 years, although I did build a long list of failed relationships, a few arrests and some stints in detox and rehabs.
KODAK Digital Still Camera
KODAK Digital Still Camera
Fast forward to 2014…It was four years after my Mom died, after a long depression and inability to create anything but poems, when I answered a local call to artists. I had never shown any art, but this call launched my formal art career and catapulted me into the local limelight. The call was about Treasure. The east coast of Florida, down around Melbourne to Stuart is called The Treasure Coast because of the mother lode of shipwrecks yielding tons of loot. This particular year was an Anniversary, so they wanted treasure themed art. This was for The Best of the Best show at The A. E. Backus Museum, an international juried season opening show. I knew nothing about the significance of any of this.
My piece was a sculpey carved cat head, which was made in high school 20 years prior , and left out in the garden to moulder. I brought it in, bleached it, and painted it like my deceased Mom’s beloved cat, Munson. As a huge fan of pirate movies when I was a kid, I loved the idea of a treasure chest. So I took all my jewelry, treasured hand-me downs, costume and fine, and proceeded to encrust this cathead like it belonged to the Ali Baba himself. It was a wonderment in its glistening splendor. (no, I don’t have an ego). I even put a rhinestone collar on it and a tag saying, ‘Munson, a Treasured Friend.’ It took an Award of Merit, which was pretty impressive for a first effort. And thusly, my noted career in assemblage began.
It was the tip of the iceberg, and a flurry of 3-D work ensued. A famous dragonfly made of a discarded patio table, curtain rods, gutters , roof decking and a couple of spaghetti forks came next, and a gutter snipe at it’s heels.
MerSea the Maid-Horse
So, you see, my MerSea the Maid-Horse is part of a history of Assemblage excellence, by a little girl called “Paper Factory”.
Paper Factory
PS: Mer Sea’s framework was built in 2015, while I was my Dad’s caregiver. She was all white, with an ironing board frame and wore a prom dress. I kept her in the living room after the show she was in and Dad, in his dementia, loved that horse like it was real. He would pat her on the nose and laugh like a schoolboy. I lost him a few months later. So Mer Sea holds a lot of meaning for me. Seems like everything I create does. But that is as it should be. Because it all began at the feet of the beloved one’s who first put the glue and scissors in my tiny hands. And called my Paper Factory.
Hello again, and welcome to the big show! I have begun what will become a Major Series of New Works entitled , “INSIDE VOICE” a series of works that speak to my inner battle with Bipolar Disorder’s lows and maniac highs, my way to shout out how the battle rages on inside even when silence prevails outside.
Many people who meet me may be uncomfortable being near a person diagnosed with mental illness, such as Bipolar Disorder. However, they are often surprised at how “normal” I seem. It has been my experience both with my current diagnosis, and with my original diagnosis of Chronic Depression, that friends and family are amazed that I don’t run around slathering at the mouth, or beating my head against the wall. They often try denial on, “No…not you…” or, ” You seem so happy, normal, well adjusted, calm, smart …”
Some have even gone so far as to comment on my family tree, as in, ” Well your Grandpa was a little odd.” Or the opposite, “Nothing like this has ever been on my side of the family…” In my family, on my Mom’s side, my Grandpa and his Brothers had come to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from Woodbury, Tennessee because there were good jobs to be had at the State Hospital, which was what insane asylums were called in the early 20th Century in the U.S. The treatment of mental illness was a whole different ballgame back then, my relatives saw many terrible and terrifying things, indeed.
Their positions within these huge hospitals required them to live on the Hospital Grounds in Dormitories, where they could hear the “lunatics” screaming and carrying on all day and night. It’s no wonder they were aghast at the idea that their kin were somehow linked to those poor souls in the “Looney Bin”. I am so glad to live in this century, and I am very grateful to all the poor souls who were the subject of many ghastly experiments and treatments, who helped behavioral science and the Mental Health Community to become what it is today. As a “50 Something” woman who was not properly diagnosed till the age of 32, my life now is a dream compared to the suicide attempts, the self medicating, the self debasing promiscuity, the manic spending, the jail time, the fate-tempting, death-defying thrill-seeking, mayhem-causing pain I lived thru before. The sheer energyit would take to put up a happy, smiling front…man, I needed a eight ball just to keep it up for a weekend.
But it would all unravel in the end. I was not OK. I was really, really not OK. Inside my head I was screaming, and my thoughts were rolling at warp speed. I was that cat on the electric floor in that Steven King movie, running up the walls. I would try to hold down a job, and this is after a year of sobriety, after a few hours I would go to the loo and hide, shaking like a leaf. After about a year and a half clean and sober, I got my hands on my first credit card and inheritance at the same time and bought 5 acres in the wilderness, had it cleared and levelled, had a well dug, fenced it and then went to the mall and purchased a bunch of tanzanite and diamond jewelry, winding up spending over 20 grand in 2 weeks(and ultimately filing a chapter 13 bankruptcy).
Mania Illuminata, sold
Interspersed between those bouts of mania, where I seemed so “normal”, I would cry. And cry. And Finally I just couldn’t take the pain anymore, so a dear friend said I should go to a local Mental Health Facility, called New Horizons. I was given this ancient psychiatrist who looked wizened, emaciated and nearly blind. But, bless her heart, she had me pegged. With her help, with my determination to stick with my med trials, with a great therapist and social worker, I have been able to stay alive there past 23 years, now clean and sober for 21 of them, come September.
. So, anyway…(whew, that was quite a tirade!)…I am painting this series to let you look inside a person with this illness, look into this inner world and I promise I will use my “INSIDE VOICE”.
. You know I like to keep working on my paintings, don’t you? I believe it comes from not having enough money for canvases , as well as not sketching out my paintings first, as well as total and complete impatience to put my idea down fast, for gratification. So I thought I would make a brief compilation to see what this work has gone thru on it’s journey to fruition… I will make a better video tomorrow… No sleep for me (again) last night…Can you say, “MANIA!!!!” It may Hurt later, but right now it’s SO EXCITING!! PAINT PAINT PAINT!!!
. This project was a couple years in the making for me, and was born from the bottomless grief I was dealing with then. As caregiver to both of my parents after a 23 year-long active addiction, and after a devestating breakup of my marriage when my ex went to Federal Prison, I was an emotional train wreck. I had not been creating visual art except for private sketches and some mural work, but I made a smart move during those early years back home with my parents by purchasing a Surface Pro in 2006 with all the bells and whistles. As a result, I did have a creative outlet in the new digital editing and photographic capabilities of this amazing device.
. During the long illness of my Mom, who was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer in 2007 (after years of passing blood but afraid to get a colonoscopy!!!!), I had much pent up emotion to release. Any moment of freedom I had was spent exploring the new medium I now possessed. I think I was at an advantage due to the fact that I knew no rules about photography, so I was very free to experiment and play. As a computer illiterate during my long years away from civilization, this was both hell and Utopia as I navigated thru the most basic techie stuff. But I was enthralled. I could take a photo and make it a work of art!
. Alas, my next 9 years were so pain-filled, as Mom’s cancer progressed she and I had to navigate colostomy’s and ileostomy’s and her suffering was so acutely mine that I wanted to die with her. And a huge part of me did, on the first day of spring in 2010, her birthday and day of death. I wrote endless prose and poetry, keeping her alive in words and rivers of tears.
. That seemed like a joy ride compared to nursing my father until his death. Dad developed dementia even before Mom died, and it became full blown Alzheimer’s afterwards. He also had prostate cancer which had been diagnosed 20years before but had never been treated. Years of violent outbursts and vile language and hate filled conversation poured out of my Father for the better part of Six years, and out of my warped sense of love for my mean Dad I determined in my heart to never let him go to a nursing home.
During those years I had a catastrophic fall which injured my brain, neck, back, shoulder, hip and knee, causing me to undergo a 12 hour double neck and back operation so that I would only have one recovery and could be up and about within weeks to caregive again. Wow. Five levels in my neck were fused and a previous 3 level lumbar fusion was repaired and taken up another level. I had torn major cartilage in my hip, needed arthroscopic surgery there and in my shoulder, and also was left with a type if vertigo that still effects me on a regular basis 7years later! Oh, my. Need I mention my mental illness battles with rapid cycling Bipolar Disorder and PTSD from a history full of childhood sexual abuse, violent sexual assault and rape as an adolescent and severe emotional and physical abuse due to 7plus years of Domestic Violence? No, I really had given myself a heavy, heavy load to carry with Daddy. But somehow I did it.
. I cannot describe the last weeks of his life, as there was a lawsuit and a non disclosure agreement with the establishment that hastened his death. But his last night was spent in a hospital bed at home, alone with me, while he screamed and pleaded with God and me to help him. For hours. And hours. The morphine did absolutely nothing so I covered my ears with my fists and screamed with him.
. During this unimaginably daunting, heart-wrenching and overwhelming time in my life there was a story on the news that just planted itself in my brain, because it was so horrific. A group of 27 immigrants were being smuggled into this country from South America. My video is my interpretation of what they went thru, and also a cry for compassion towards all who suffer such indignities and trauma.
You open your eyes in the morning, and briefly it feels like a regular day. A “before” day. We need a name for that now, something catchy, that we don’t mind saying. I do mind saying “before the Pandemic”, “before Covid”, I suppose because I am on sensory overload about the ” situation”. I want to be safe, follow the guidelines, but I also want to talk less about it!!!
I am getting used to the “new normal”, a phrase that seems to be a paradox. If it is “normal”, the very definition suggests it is not “new”. I just want to ‘breathe’, and ‘let go’ of all the must do’s and need to’s, to float above it all mentally. Isn’t that a lovely thought?
. Remember the movie “UP”? I hope you’ve seen it, if you can be your inner Child while you watch; you will love it. The whole premise of a bunch of balloons carrying one away into the sky… Did you ever have a scary moment as a kid when your older brother told you to hold onto something or you’d float away? I kept imagining that I wouldn’t be able to hang on when I was so high the fall to earth would smush me, and that I’d be afraid to let go when I was still low enough to survive. What a lack of confidence in oneself, even in an imaginary setting!!!
. Who was the cartoon character who said, “What a Maroon!” every time the main character did something ‘dumb’? I’m thinking it was Barney on the “Flintstones”. It was said so often that it became this background sound, and up until today I couldn’t figure out what he was trying to say about Fred. Now that I sounded out the word to type it, I am thinking he was calling Fred a Moron.
I’m a wee bit disgusted about not being paid my winnings yet for recent painting, nor have I received payment for the sale of it. The Show and sale ended May 30th, and here it is July whatever…Poo. The organizers must know we are all starving.
. Anyhoo… I still have time to draw a line or make a dot. So I’ll write words again afterwards. Words. Just not the “P” word, or the “C” word, or “19”. I’m going to share some of my digital art with you tonight, hope you crack a smile or frown a frown, just have a thought about the wonderful gift of creativity! Goodnight all.
Out of the Gutter Art 
You must be logged in to post a comment.