I painted this sometime around 2001/02. I had been stricken with an illness - mental illness - severe enough to keep me from enjoying life or even other people (although part of that is just because I'm very introverted, which compounded the problem). Severe clinical depression - among other things - just kept bitch-slapping me left and right, up and down. I love my home, especially my bedroom-studio combo, but it became just another form of solitary confinement and imprisonment. I had done nothing wrong! Hence the angel in distress. I had so much to deal with inside my head AND outside (the suicide of my aunt, my grandmother's aneurism that nearly killed her, dropping out of college AGAIN, and a multitude of other things) that I was paralyzed and found myself in my own private, lonely hell. I'm still here, actually. It's not always hell, but for the most part this is my "safe place" and when I leave it I become very paranoid and self-conscious, so it's easier not to leave.
I've been here too long, beyond my self-imposed sentence. When I came here, I was 23 years old. This year I'll turn 40.
I've been here since 1997. I've seen life pass me by from faraway, longing to leave my prison to join it, but still feeling trapped at the same time. The worst part of all of it is that I'm the one holding the key and I could escape any time, but haven't. Fortunately, my life began changing for the better in when my best-friend-turned-boyfriend from an art site online (we met in 2007) proposed to me in December 2010. We've been working toward a wedding plan since then, and we've had to postpone it a few times, but next year we hope to marry and settle in a new home, far from here. I'm about to be set free, to be with someone I love more than anything. And the strange part - I don't even think of it as a "prison break" so to speak...just a new phase of life.
This time of self-imprisonment will be over soon enough, and I have so much more to look forward to. I won't even realize I've left! I have so much life to live.
I won't remember this as a prison. I'll most likely remember it fondly, where my creativity had time to germinate and come to fruition. All this time, it's just been a holding cell, nothing more. Life will probably be harder (for someone like me), but it is so much more worth the trouble. I can't imagine anything better. I have so much hope. The "angel in distress"/prisoner of no crime doesn't have to watch life from afar anymore. I am a part of it, finally.
