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Joy and sorrow tell a story unique and profound. The broken heart, yearning for solace. The sun's rise and fall, like the ebb and flow of our emotions, brings with it a new day, a new perspective. And in the quiet moments of wakefulness, when the world slumbers, there lies a space for introspection, where happiness is not the absence of sadness, but the acceptance of it as part of the whole.

"My heart is broken; mend it in two. Day sees the sun, night sees the moon. I'm wide awake; make me come down. One way to think is that maybe I'm happy."

Painting is therapeutic for me. I express my trauma, recovery, fear of improving, hope, despair, profound shame, anger, true joy, newfound sexuality, and qualities in myself I never knew existed. I am breaking through and processing. I love seeing my artwork evolve with my mental health. Sometimes, I imagine breaking through a black-painted window and escaping a dark room, a lightless place filled with razors and broken mirrors. Outside, there are shards of glass everywhere. It is still painful, but I finally escaped. And the wounds will heal. They are healing. I pour my soul into my paintings because I must stay grounded. My parts, my emotions. I urgently and compassionately create visual representations of them because if I don't, the...