People continue to terrify me; they are unknown, enigmas, pieces of a puzzle that constantly shifts and never fits back into the same position. However, they each contain their own story, something I have learned in the past few years. Recently, I have begun to surround myself in people and immerse myself in their stories, their histories, their art, their words.
I used to dislike people. Whenever I talked, I was loud, and my mind worked a lot faster than my mouth could, leaving me stuttering and running my sentences together. Every time someone asked me to repeat what I’d just said, I’d articulate each word, holding it on my tongue for a few moments before releasing it. Because of this, I dreaded speaking with people I didn’t know well, and feared crowds murmuring about me because I couldn’t speak properly. However, through my writing, I found a voice that was clear, concise, and understood. A few years later, I discovered that I could combine my love of writing and passion for drawing in order to create literate expressions of myself and others. Through these word portraits, I have been able to investigate individuals, what they fear, what they hope to be, what their insecurities are. By asking to draw them, I have been permitted access to their deepest secrets, and have used them to produce works reflecting their personalities and the words they can’t articulate to others themselves. While I’m still undecided about people, I have loved discovering how similar our fears, hopes, dreams, and insecurities are, but how they unveil themselves in interesting ways. These literate expressions were originally created to let me think without speaking, but now they allow me to directly say what’s on my mind. They are physical representations of things I’ve always wanted to reveal but couldn’t find the words to say.
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