Word Therapy

I started Word Therapy as a coping mechanism. I have had a lot of people in my life that are gaslighters and liars. They have lied about what happened and misquoted me. From a young age I felt like I had to make record of interactions and things I saw so I could refer back to them and defend myself. Sometimes making that record was just repeating it over and over in my head. Sometimes it was writing in a diary. Sometimes I couldn't stop thinking about it until I wrote it down somewhere to get it out of my head.

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During the pandemic I felt trapped with my husband and separated from my friends. Simply writing things down once wasn't enough anymore. I had to write them multiple times by hand. I started having conflicting thoughts and furiously wrote them down. The positive and negative thoughts began to argue on the page. When I calmed down, I started drawing on these pages of words piled on top of each other. I found different shapes between the words and exaggerated them. The words began to no longer look like words. I felt relief when the words were gone and only shapes were left. This slow process of transforming the words became my nightly therapy while watching tv with my husband.

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In 2022 I started taking an SSRI because I was stressed out. It helped with my stress but it also took away my need to write things down. While bingeing House I re-watched an episode with a woman who had memory hoarding OCD. The character's symptoms were different and more extreme than mine but I looked up the symptoms and found it perfectly described what I had been doing. I was so caught up in the reason I was hoarding memories, to be able to defend myself, that I didn't even realize it could be something a medication could fix.

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Almost all of them are on Bristol or multi-media paper. They vary in size. I have played around with different color ink and painting on them. On the back of each of the pieces is a list of the original words and the date I finished the piece. I title them with a portion of those words.