Something I've been considering this week is how I would go about expressing mental illness, specifically my own anxiety disorder, through image. My work has never been about putting myself on the paper, always instead taking from my visual environment, and what I've come to realize after mulling over what I appreciate in others' work is that the really meaningful images do both at once. The logical next step would be trying to do so myself, but in taking that step I run up against the insuperable barrier of my mental life. I don't want to relate my history, because it would end up self-pitying in the telling and it's really beside the point, so glossing over that to the bigger question...

How do you express, through the common medium of image, emotions that are not at all common, emotions that are out of proportion with what most people feel. On the most basic level, how do you communicate something personal in a way that will make it personal to someone looking at it later? It might be easier to do something simpler, to express more basic things, but simpler feelings are not my mental reality and attempting that would be... erroneous, verging on self-deceptive. I don't want art to be an escape. I don't want any part of my life to be an escape if facing myself head-on is what it takes to grow beyond the person I am now.