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Keeping People from Being Creative Drives Them Crazy
My mother is a brilliant watercolorist. She’s also a trauma survivor from an abusive family that treated her like garbage.
She was also at one point a divorced, single mom who desperately needed to work to keep her family from ending up out on the street, except that she was mentally ill, and when you’re significantly mentally ill, holding down a job is next to impossible. When you’re suffering from something like PTSD or a personality disorder, getting along with other people can be difficult, especially in a rigid business setting. Getting yourself out of bed, showered and dressed, and being functional day after day is difficult for every single human being, but depression, anxiety, and paranoia can make it ten, even a hundred times harder.
Like most artists, my mother wasn’t a businessperson, so she had no idea how to market herself, and in the 1980s, it wasn’t as easy as it is now. On top of that, her watercolor supplies weren’t cheap. Good quality brushes, paints, paper and framing was expensive. She needed a regular job to keep the lights on and us fed, and though she’s an intelligent woman, she could never keep a job for long because of her paranoia. Every job ended after a year or two because she’d become convinced everyone there was out to get her. It happened every single time. She could never paint while she was…
