I
never fit in real well in high school and began to experience some depression.
This worsened over my high school years. Years later I would be diagnosed with
Bipolar Disorder. If you are not aware of the symptoms of Bipolar Disorder, it
causes cycling in mood between manic highs and soul-crushing lows.
I was not aware that what I was suffering from was the
depression cycle of bipolar or what depression really entailed. My depression
symptoms worsened over the next couple years after high school. The next
several years would include bouts of severe depression (one suicide attempt
that landed me in the hospital) and periods of manic productivity and
happiness. During the worst times I began to draw as a mechanism of dealing
with the darkness I did not understand. These were not “pretty” or pleasant
drawings. They were what I would later term “soul dumps”. I never had any
formal training so this art was pretty raw.
The
next 20 years would include many severe mood swings that I did not understand.
Often they were not tied to any incidental stressors or external factors. The
up side is that during the manic phases I was very productive and very driven
and required very little sleep. I would work 50-90 hour weeks and I still
managed to climb all 54 of
Then in 2002 my life was turned upside down. I lost
everything. I lost my wife, house, church family, many friends, contact with many relatives, savings, credit, business,
cars, and had limited contact with my children. I then had a massive heart
attack and got to take a lovely ride in an ambulance and spend a few days in
ICU all without health insurance (first time in my adult life that I did not
have health insurance). I will not go
into details, but life as I knew it suddenly came to an end. I had everything I could want and lost it all
in a few months.
I spent
the next couple years mired in a pit of despair barely able to make it through
each day. I thought seriously about suicide several times every day and went
over a myriad of scenarios of how to do it. I climbed peaks over 12,000’ in
winter alone and in blizzards praying that God would take me. I once again
turned to art. I started to paint and draw in several mediums in an attempt to
express and perhaps grasp some meaning or purpose from what had happened. I
soon found that the art flowed out with ease even when I was completely
unmotivated to do anything else. The art I was creating was not pretty but most
of it was very expressive and very difficult to ignore.
People began to notice. Some liked it and some did not like
it at all but no one was ambivalent. Through my art I was finally able to
accept all that had happened and start to deal with it. Art continues to be a
valuable mechanism to express and understand what I am going through.
Blue Musician Acrylic on Foamboard 30” X 20”
Guitar Player Acrylic on Panel 30” X 24”