Beauty from Sadness

       The thing about truth is that there isn't one.  It is the same with reality.  Reality only exists within yourself.  How real do you think you are?  How accurate do you think your experience in life is?  Your reality is simply your perception of events that cause a reaction within you that then remains in your memory as your truth.  Maybe your perception was wrong, maybe your reaction was wrong, maybe there was a lapse between when the event happened and when it became a memory.  Maybe your reality is a very skewed version of what really happened.  Likely.  Yet, the only way that we can continue living and not fall into a crazed delusion is to believe ourselves.  To believe what we are feeling and what we remember and how we identify with our self.  Without our reality we lose our self.  Which in some religions is considered the final goal of enlightenment, losing self.  I feel like I need to find myself before I am able to decide whether I am ready to let that person go.
     My story begins with me as a person that knew my reality, then had that reality collapse under my feet creating a spiral into a confusion so deep that I wasn't sure who was going to come crawling back out. I still have times of doubt between the reality I see now and the one I was hidden in before.  I go back and forth between which one I was better off in.  As of now, I always end up believing that I chose the right path out of my confusion and am starting to settle into my new sense of self.  While telling my story, I constantly have moments of doubt thinking that I am feeding not only myself but everyone else a series of lies.  My paintings begin at the beginning of my realization, my true awakening.
       This painting is titled "The Loss of Hope."  I painted it five months into my one year stay in France.  If you were to look at my pictures of my year teaching English at Lycee Lumiere in the quaint town of Luxeuil les Bains, you would never imagine that something so dark was stirring in my soul.  I appear happy.  I skied, snowboarded, mountain biked, rock climbed and hiked the French Alps.  I sea kayaked in the ocean off of Cassis and climbed the cliff sides of les Calanques.  I spent a week in Amsterdam smoking some of the best herb known to man.  I spent hours sipping coffee and eating almond croissants at the perfectly intimate cafes.  Yet, on the inside my world was collapsing.  Ever since I was 16, I had been on the run from something, moving from country to country, state to state, school to school trying to find the place that would finally give me peace.  My inner turmoil followed me everywhere.  Was I running from societal norms?  America?  My friends or lack there of?  Until this moment, one week after Christmas, while sitting in my little white painted cement block room in the teacher housing of Lycee Lumiere, I never knew what was making me run.  My own family.