I stumbled across a post on a blog the other day that featured an artists interpretation of various mental health diagnoses as images or ‘monsters’ to be more specific. The drawings were wonderful and the idea inspirational.
I started thinking about monsters, an idea I probably haven’t considered in the physical sense in many years. When someone mentions the word monsters I often think of dark shadows and thoughts and feelings rather than a physical monster itself.
I had an image in my head of a few child- like monsters, I started to draw them out in all different colors. They all looked fairly non-threatening and bubbly albeit slightly ‘strange’ and ‘weird’. I initially had the image of a pile up of monsters and someone fighting there way out of them, but my imagination ran thin pretty quick and I was fair few monsters short of a pile up. So I gave them a rock, or an island, and left them all there instead. I captioned the image ‘friend or foe?’ unsure of how I felt about the presence of these monsters.
I then began to think about monsters inside someones mind, pulling at cables and wrecking circuits and pulling the person all out of sorts. This seemed fairly accurate to me and an image I’d like to have tried to draw. But those bubbly monsters just weren’t going to cut it here.
So, that is when this figure started coming into play. Originally I saw a man type figure with long hair holding dozens of reins in his left hand, all linking to parts of my brain and a whip in his other hand (as is in this picture). I then saw the man on a 6 legged creature similar to the one in the image holding reins over that, instead. I’m not sure how the man or creature are controlling the mind now, since they’re not actually attached, but I imagine they still are somehow.
I suppose the thing I like about this, is now the man can be removed along with his creature from the brain, where before he was attached.
The man remains faceless for one because I couldn’t decide what emotion to put on his face. But also because as I drew and rub out various versions of his face I started to see a blurred image of all occurring and I kind of liked that. It made me feel as though the monster was more universal and could be inside anyone’s head.
Borderline Personality Disorder 