I Feel Like I’m Butterflying A Little / Anonymous, Artist & Teacher

I’m really excited that you asked me to participate in this because I have just, as of the last year, really started to incorporate my chronic pain and my anxiety into my artwork in a really intentional way. I think it always leaked into my work. I think you could glean notes of anxiety and you could glean notes of pain, but it wasn’t something I was doing intentionally or even was willing to talk about. And so I’m really excited to talk about it with you today because the more that I talk about this, the more I am able to shake my own shame around having a disabling anxiety disorder and daily chronic pain and migraines. And I think getting it out into the world and getting to talk about it, I’m also able to advocate for myself in a way that I wasn’t able to do before. This summer, actually, was the first time I ever went through an ADA office, and that was incredibly powerful for me. I was able to get accommodations I didn’t even expect were possible and that I didn’t even really realize were going to make my life easier.

And then I was able to talk about it with the people I was working with, the people around me in a way that also I didn’t expect to be as unemotional as they were. These conversations, these are just facts about me. And this is how I move through the world. And people were game to just work with me where I was at, and I didn’t have to push myself into spaces or into situations that just made my chronic pain and my anxiety worse. And so being able to talk about this stuff has actually been really healing. So that’s just an opener for me is that I’m happy to talk about this and it’s definitely not easy, but it is something that is exciting to me. So, I’ll start from the beginning, which is that… And I never know how much to get into this because it’s not fun to talk about. But for me, I’m going to tell you all the things, because that’s just how I am learning how to process it right now.

But also you can cut whatever you want because I also know that my story is not one that is casual. And so if at any point of it you feel like needs to be cut, it can be, because I don’t want other people to be re-traumatized by my story. So, from the beginning, when I was a kid, my biological dad was very, very emotionally abusive. He was an angry guy, really angry. And physically what my mom refers to as “rough”. And so I would call that physical abuse, right? My mom, who is still processing it, calls it “rough”. And so I was a really scared kid, really easy to scare. My mom always says that when I was a kid, when I was first born, I was really happy and really funny. She could never get mad at me because I would cross my eyes if I did something wrong and make her laugh and that’s how I got away with things. And I think that’s probably true to this day.

But then as I got a little bit older, I think I went into my dark period. When my parents were getting a divorce, because my mom was like, “Enough is enough. I’ve got three kids. I need to get these children out of this situation.” So she decided to get a divorce and I think I was in fourth grade at that time. And when my dad finally agreed to leave the house there was a whole kerfuffle. I remember the first morning he was out of the house I spilled my cereal on accident, and I was so scared. I just started crying hysterically cause I thought I was in trouble. When he would get mad, he would grab onto both my arms and shake me, so I would have bruises on my upper arms sometimes. And, so I was crying. I’m crying now thinking about it. But I was crying and my mom, she came to me and she goes, “Blair, no one’s going to get mad at you. No one is going to be upset. No crying over spilled milk,” is what she said. I don’t know if that’s a saying, I think because she said it to me I think it’s a phrase. Maybe it’s not a phrase people say. But there’s no crying over spilled milk. And we still say it to each other today.

But I think that’s just a good example of I, as added from a very young age, developed an anxiety disorder. And then when my parents got divorced and we went through court-mandated family therapy and my mom got 90%, my dad got 10%, which is something I’m also kind of interested in exploring in my art practices. What does it mean to be a child who doesn’t like someone and has to spend 10% of their body time with that person is re-traumatizing. And it really screwed me up. I just was this really scared, really anxious kid. And it wasn’t until, honestly, I stopped talking to him during the pandemic that I started really processing all of this. I always knew I had anxiety, and I always knew that I had panic attacks, and I didn’t really know why. I always knew I had trouble with being in crowds.

If somebody raised their voice, I would get kind of jumpy. I always knew that, but I didn’t really let myself process it until I stopped talking to him. And you would think, “oh, someone has made your life difficult. Why would you talk to them?”, but I think because it was court mandated from fourth or fifth grade until I was 18, I had to go see him once a month, legally. I had developed some coping mechanisms for being around him that sort of lasted until recently. I always knew it was not fun to go see him, not fun to talk to him, and I would get really anxious and my whole body would freeze up, and I would be a mess a few days afterwards. And I have a lot of guilt around not talking to him, but I am finding myself healing a lot in this time that I’m giving myself. So, that’s one thing.

And what happened with my pretty much-unaddressed anxiety disorder is that because I didn’t address it in a way that was real and meaningful, I developed some body symptoms. So my anxiety went from just being something that existed in what it felt like was my head, but probably was my whole body, into a chronic pain disorder where I started getting really bad migraines. My panic attacks started to last more than 24 hours where I would hyperventilate on and off for, I don’t know, forever. What felt forever, and it was really scary.

So I think it was about two years ago when I finally… I’ve always been in therapy ever since I was a kid, and I love therapy. I’m really good at talking about my feelings, but I finally was like, “Okay, I need to be on medication”. So, I think it was about two years ago that I got on this drug called Cymbalta that’s like for anxiety and for nerve pain, which is so wild because it felt like I went to a doctor and was like, “here’s all my problems”, and they were like, “oh, we just whipped this up in the lab based off of what you said, here’s this drug”. And the difference has been life-changing. And I know medication’s not for everybody, but I was in this place where I couldn’t even address what was going on with me because it was so ingrained.

Something that had been happening since I was such a young kid that I really needed something to jolt me out of some of my habits to get me to where I am right now, which is, and I’m crying because I’m so proud of myself. Which is, I don’t rehearse conversations anymore before I have them, and I don’t relive bad moments of my life before I go to bed. I can sleep now, and I am able to make work about this. And I don’t know, I don’t procrastinate. I don’t get so anxious for a piece of writing that I don’t do it until an hour before it’s due. It just changed my whole life. I am so proud of myself, though. I don’t know. The last two years have been really, really huge shifts, and I feel like things are getting to where I want them to be.

I talk to my mom who always says that she feels like she didn’t know who she was, or didn’t feel like she could advocate for herself until she was 40. Use that as a marker. I’m a little ahead of the game. My mom has been through so much shit, and she’s so amazing. She raised three kids by herself and just got us into a life that was better. And so she’s just like, we’ve talked about her before, but she is my idol. She has fought for me and my siblings so hard, and I just look up to her so much. She’s gotten me to a place where I can advocate for other people, where I can be in this job that I’m in now and fight for other people to have better situations. Not just for myself.

I think this is what drives so much of what I do, and it’s not something that’s fun to talk about. I wish I could tell everybody. I wish I could be like, “this is my situation. And this is why I’m doing what I’m doing”. Over the summer it was interesting cause this was part of my art practice. I started telling people I am a survivor of abuse, which is like… I’ve never called myself that before, and it still feels like slightly untrue even though it is true, factually. It’s so weird. I can’t. In my head I’m like, “that’s so hard”. It’s so hard to call yourself that when you still want to fit into a sort of guise of normalcy. I don’t want to call myself a survivor of abuse. I don’t want to call myself disabled or gay, and it’s just hard.
And then getting to say it has been so empowering and so amazing.

And I don’t know, I’m trying to combat my own internalized phobia of all my stuff. Not just for me, but so I can be better for other people. I mean like my students, I just want them to have the best time when they’re in my class, and I want them to be elevated in whatever it is that is their lived experience. And I want the students to come through the department to feel they can be themselves, too. I don’t know. And name their things if they want to. They don’t have to, but if they want to.

I don’t know. It’s kind of wild. I feel like I’m butterflying, a little.