(new post - art) tear in the spacesuit
(view on the blog: https://cerberus.bearblog.dev/art-tear-in-the-spacesuit)
relieved to be done with this one! this piece was a bit of a struggle - i even ended up scrapping the first version after putting down flatcolours for this newer composition.
there's a good amount of emotional background for this piece. during a rough trauma night around a year ago, i found someone talking about how some people with early C-PTSD learn to experience life through a "spacesuit", where they interface with the world with a highly adapted internal system that works around their traumas and gives a sense of control; there's a risk of this spacesuit eventually being ruptured, which leads to the system collapsing and a loss of that manufactured control, leading to breakdown. i can't find this comment again, but i heavily resonated with this metaphor.
for my entire life, i've felt like i was an animal in a cage making the most of it. i internalized that i was created wrong or was handling myself wrong, that i needed to be controlled, and so many beliefs and ways of attempting to make myself comfortable in my spacesuit sprung from that understanding. i was isolated, and subconsciously padded my mind with magical thinking and dissociation to try to make myself happy despite it; eventually, a realization about my life situation 2 years ago punctured my suit, and i was utterly unprepared for the way it unmoored me. finding this interpretation of that breakdown process forced me to further reckon with how i'd existed until that point in my life - how i'd been stuck in a rhetorical cage that convinced me in a million ways that i didn't deserve to be myself, and was forced to try to be happy inside it by different experiences in my life. it was so painful to realize that i had something of a stockholm syndrome with my own mind; i'd known deep down that some of the comforting beliefs i held were simultaneously suppressing me. but i wasn't convinced that it was possible to have what i wanted in life without that suppression, and when i finally gained that understanding, it shattered my facade. i've been surviving of course - but i wanted to put visuals to that desperation, the realization that the loneliness and ignorance didn't make me safe or special after all; the way it felt like i was losing my lifeline in the void.
(thanks for reading! comment and upvote on the blog post if you like. t’oyaxsut ‘nüüsm 🧡)