I am a child of the water and the woods, as were generations of my ancestors before me. I swam free in the ocean at two years old, leaping off the family boat into the deep and pulled back to safety by startled adults. I lived on a little pond where summers were endless days of walking alone in the woods eating wild blueberries and swimming from morning until well after dark, always imagining myself a beautiful mermaid, and where winters were endless days of skating until the cold became too painful to bear. I grew up surrounded by nature, often pretending to be a horse running solo through the wild, and learning the names of all the flowers and trees, of the birds and their calls, as did my family before me.
I lived a fanciful and lonely childhood, spending hours by myself when my mother didn’t allow me friends. In that lonely life I developed a rich fantasy world where I was happy. I created make-believe friends to keep me company, a cocoon that made me feel loved and wanted. Special. When still a preschooler I told strangers I was born in a gumball machine because the colors were so pretty inside. For many years I really did speak in rhyme.
I remember, vividly, my mother at my morning bedside, telling my three year old self as I still lay on my pillow, to listen to the birdsong. And when I became quiet, listening, she would tell me to pick out the chickadees. They were the vickie birds, she told me, calling my name “vic-kie, vic-kie.” A rare memory of something even rarer in my world: a mother’s pure love.
Born the youngest in a horribly fractured little family of four, my childhood was both sweet and terribly painful, in not so equal measure. My father, who loved me unconditionally and with his whole heart, died when I was young and the mother with which I was left did many, many terrible things, including the completion of what she had begun many years earlier: the calculated destruction of all that remained. The repercussions from this broken childhood are still rippling across the waters of my soul, creating wounds that will never heal.
This journal is a work in progress. It is divided into chapters and each chapter illustrates a particular aspect of my life; some mere moments of a specific event and some representing longer periods of time. Each chapter contains (or will eventually contain) four portraits, one for each member of my broken family, except in this perfectly curated little world I have created, the four individuals complement each other. They are connected and intertwined. They work together in harmony and remain loyal to one another. If they were alive they would support each other. They would build up and not destroy. They would all love one another with their whole hearts, as it should be. The titles of both the chapters and the works are purely autobiographical, reflecting the truths of my life as I have lived it: my joys, my pain, my fears. The palettes used within each chapter are evocative of specific people and places from my life, as color has always dominated every aspect of my world. The repetition of elements, themes, and color is intentional throughout this visual journal. I like the familiarity and safety of repetition and the rare feeling of security it brings.
I am a child of fearlessness and fear in unequal measure. I am a child of unbridled joy and unbearable pain. I am noisy and nervous, flawed and fractured, forever in mourning for what was never mine to hold.