This month’s art work is called Coming Out.

Coming Out can mean many things and for me it is an important and valuable concept.  This painting helps me celebrate the importance of coming out and the endurance and challenges it takes for any of us to do so. 

When I was 4 my grandparents were my main carers.  My grandfather died and my grandmother was moved away the same week.  In my world it was as if I’d been orphaned so I played in the shed they’d lived in, making their voices so I was still surrounded by them.  At 7 my younger brother was born and we moved house, leaving these ghosts behind and with it, I began to come out of a deeply spiritual, somewhat other-worldly-world.

When I was 9 I came to understand language with meaning and through the link with gestural signing and representational objects, came to move from ‘Donna-speak’ to use functional language in simple sentences and by 11 had reasonably fluent functional speech.  This ability to link into language with meaning woke up my mind and awareness, I became someone who could think, rationalise, not purely just react.  And that awakening was something of a ‘coming out’ from a more feral state.

With that awareness, however, Exposure Anxiety surged and I experienced surges of Selective Mutism which lasted weeks, sometimes months, each time coming back, coming out again to being a verbal child or at least a singing one.

I’d been bipolar since age 3 but by late childhood the usual chaotic rapid cycling gave way to long episodes of depression and finally, as these went deeper and deeper, I knew what psychotic depression was like.  At age 13 the worst of it hit and I lived in breakdown city for around 6 months, rather Catatonic and struggling to connect to will, to mind, to simple functioning.  I struggled to eat, dress, wash and was mute for some months.  People were miles away and everything they said and did seemed again meaningless, echoey, irrelevant and distant.  When I progressively came back out of that state, it was a whole other world in many ways, it was like I’d been a caterpillar, made a cocoon and emerged as a clumsy butterfly but eventually fly I did.  Unfortunately the sedation and painkillers the GP supplied (I also had a rheumatic condition associated with immune problems) together with the availability of alcohol all around me, were taking me down a whole other road.

At 17 psychiatry tried to piece together what was left of me and dominated my teens and early adulthood.  The many ways in which one comes out to one’s shrink, comes out to oneself.  The gradual unraveling of a tangled soul, a labyrinth of mind.   I came off the alcohol and pills cold turkey and faced up to addiction and the raging Agoraphobia it had kept hidden.  I now had to ‘come out’ like something raw, soul-naked and unsupported.  I was terrified, shaking, and had to dare myself to walk to the shop, to get onto the bus.  And eventually, I mostly won.

At 23 I realised I wasn’t strictly straight.  I thought I was gay and came out as a lesbian.   When I couldn’t cope with the emotional baggage of a woman-woman relationship I hung up my homosexuality and found myself attracted to an alcoholic.

I was 23 and it was 6 years since I’d thrown away alcohol and pills.  But after a two week solitary drinking bender I saw my future and it wasn’t good.  I put the breaks on and did what my alcoholic relatives had never done.  I took my terrified, socially phobic self to an AA meeting and came out as an alcoholic (and stayed off alcohol since).

At 26 I wrote out my life and handed it to a child psychiatrist to find out what kind of crazy I’d been.  A year later after a formal diagnosis of autism, I came out to the world as autistic and the patchwork quilt that was Donna.

By my 30s I was living in a gay relationship and had come out as a lesbian and then three years later, I realised I was as heterosexual as I was homosexual (but differently) and identified as bisexual.

So coming out means so many things and we all come out at some point in our lives, sometimes many points in our lives.

In the distance of the painting, is the moon, symbolic of one’s inner world, the unconscious, often even hidden from the self, the yet to be awakened mind.

The blue room before it is a larder, our conception, our birth, the world that nurtures and sustains us, still ‘our own world’.  A black and white world of simplistic absolutes and extremes.  The shelves are bare.  Necessity is one of the things which propels us to connect with the world and it was true of my life.

As she steps further into the world, she is out beyond her own world, yet access to her own world is still there.

But even out here, she holds something back, preserves a degree of privacy.  For however much we open up, open out, come out, its important to retain the sacredness of one’s own word.  It’s ok to have some secrets one keeps even from oneself.  These usually show themselves to us when the time is right.

I hope you like the painting and feel free to visit my many other paintings in my online gallery at my website.

Warmly,

Donna Williams,

author, artist, singer-songwriter, screenwriter.

http://www.donnawilliams.net