I have panic disorder, agoraphobia, major depressive disorder, insomnia and generalized anxiety disorder. I have been showing symptoms since I was 8 years old. It took 12 years to diagnose what I experience. My thesis focuses on my struggle with mental health and the burden of trying to hide it from everyone close to me. Doing this project helped me to understand myself more but also pushed me further on my journey of continuing to try to fully understand… and so I ask myself, “Why Am I Like This?” 

“Why Am I Like This?” is something I say to people close to me when I’m trying to make a joke out of my illness. The best solution I’ve found to make myself comfortable is finding humor in this situation. If I say something jokingly, it means I don’t truly believe it, or so I tell myself. I have become incredibly self-deprecating over the course of my life and it continues to be reflected in the words I speak about myself. I find myself being vulnerable or really honest and that scares me so much that I immediately feel the need to turn my feelings into a joke. The title is a question I’ve asked myself or someone around me at least once a day since I was 18. This project was a start to question the why, I dove deep into my thoughts and feelings instead of trying to invalidate myself and hide this from everyone I know. I pay so much more attention to the way that certain things make me feel or react now after making these self-portraits.

Focusing my art inward was something that I never thought I would do. I swore up and down that I would never take self-portraits, especially not nude self-portraits. Doing this project was both therapeutic and triggering. It felt nice to finally share what I’ve been burdened with for so long but it also caused me immense stress to share such an intimate look at what I experience on a day to day basis, and to make myself panic just by showing my symptoms of panic. I specifically put myself in situations that would make me uneasy in order to show my deep discomfort in situations that are completely normal to other people. This project isn’t complete, and that’s because my disorder is ongoing. I continue to experience things despite my medication, therapy and all the countless other ways I am trying to cope. This project will span my lifetime.