This is a piece I worked on for a while in an attempt to create something that was representational of my anxiety. Sometimes my anxiety creeps up on me, but a lot of the time it's a very sudden sort of attack, and I feel paralyzed with fear, panicky, and I have trouble breathing. I usually cry hysterically, and sometimes it's over nothing. Once I had a horrible attack because I found a Junebug stuck in my sleeve. I had them quite often my first semester of grad school because it was difficult re-adjusting to student life, and the workload was overwhelming, which is partly what prompted me to finally seek help. I had one last night because there was a bug in my bathroom sink (you can sense a recurring theme here. I suffer from a paralyzing fear of bugs). Oh, and social situations! I still haven't learned to handle them beyond a "grin and bear it" sort of attitude. But I feel so immensely uncomfortable and anxious when surrounded by lots of people. I can't tolerate crowds most of the time. I do have good days, where everything is okay, but most of the time I just try to quietly excuse myself before I totally flip out.
Anything that overwhelms me can trigger an attack. But sometimes things that should by all logic turn me into a crying mess do nothing, and vice versa. So I attempted to create a piece that showed this sort of unpredictability, and showed it as a frightening, shadowy sort of thing that looms over me most of the time.
It's a digital piece, created in Photoshop with my graphics tablet. There's not really a title. I've just been calling it "that abstract thing" in my head, haha.
Making things that are non-representational is very hard for me. I usually do very figurative stuff, so this was outside the box in a big way.
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