AP Art

Developing my Inquiry Question

I started the year with the idea of fears. I have been greatly shaped by a past two years of utter isolation and had realized that my anxiety disorder isn't a misdiagnosis and can't be ignored. For most of my life I've lived in fear of poverty, of the people who should love me, of the state of the world, of myself, and have faced this all with desperate attempts at being understood. Befriending lost causes that I still can't refuse to give up on even when they gave up on me. My question started as an exploration of other people's fear in an attempt to find something I saw in myself and in an attempt to finally find that sense of being seen. But I realized my fears were so much deeper than what I could express with metaphors in pieces about normal fears. Spiders heights and the dark didn't dig into the root of my fears in the way I wanted to. I worried that people would see my art and only see the surface. I felt that anyone who would identify with this work would be lied to in a sense. It was around this time my mind went back to "The Bell Jar" By Sylvia Plath. I was fascinated reading the creative expression of a woman who committed suicide soon after the publication of this book. Not only that but I felt comforted in some sense that this woman plagued by loneliness in a busy room could be seen and understood and thought about after her death. And I felt selfish because of it, because I wanted to be seen and wanted my work to do something  similar focusing so much on myself and processing my life, for using my creativity to express something I can't in words. I've been severely mentally ill for as long as I can remember and I'm safe and am better than I have been and know I can get through so much, but that doesn't erase my history. It doesn't erase the summer I almost died in my room because I refused to eat, it doesn't erase my mother's worries about me as she chased after me along the highway while I had an episode, it doesn't erase my sibling or my best friend worrying about my life constantly. I talk to people now and I'm medicated but PTSD makes it hard to ever feel safe. Even if circumstances have changed so much I can't let go of the people and events that keep me in a chokehold. And so I decided to be selfish. To focus on myself and using my art to process and heal and validate myself in my pain by trying to depict my worst memories. Not in a literal sense so much but from the distorted view of time and youth and being anchored by my expectation that people will hurt me. I realized however that I can't afford to focus solely on the past and that for me it wouldn't lead to any progress in healing. I thought about my life and what I care about and what keeps me alive and saw how deeply rooted in helping others and changing the world with activism that it is. In my Freshman year of high school I organized a walk out by myself to try to prevent the overturning of Roe V Wade. It is one of my proudest achievements seeing everyone I had grown up with united under one cause shouting with all they had about reproductive rights. For many people it was their first protest or even interaction with political activism and it set my soul on fire. I realized that this is what I am meant to do. My pain, my struggles, my tragic backstory, shaped me into a person who cares with everything in them and I am going to use it to unite people for actual change. Which has led me to the idea of radical pain and radical change using my art both to process myself and past and to inspire myself and others. To show the rawness that is oppression and trauma and how to turn it to compassion and anger instead of hopelessness. In simple terms I want to demonstrate that the fuel for radical change is pain and the outcome is a better and achievable world.