What I'm Looking Through

I can't see what I'm seeing in fact
I only see what I'm looking through
-- Fiona Apple "Window"

Originally submitted back in January of 2008, when I decided that I wanted to draw something that would fill the whole canvas, not look like complete crap, and be decent enough that I could submit it to dA and consider it relatively finished (I never rule out the idea that I may have to go back some day and retouch something). I set the constraint that the entire thing had to be finished and submitted in one day.

I, like many people, suffer from a mental disorder which I will not go into detail about here. But part of it is depressive tendencies. Unlike most though, my symptoms began to show up at a very young age. I can remember very distinctly that I was never really happy, as far back as my memory goes into early childhood. Until my late teens, I lived with a serious problem that made me a miserable person, a very ill person. Then I got treatment, and I am so grateful for that. I can say with certainty that I am a completely different person when healthy and treated than I am when untreated and mentally ill.

Part of depression, as many victims of it know, is that it clutters the mind with horrible negative thoughts. Constantly. It's like a film of unhappiness between us and everything we perceive about the world and life. It's difficult to think of anything past those little nasties, and even when we do, whatever we're thinking is distorted by them anyway. This is a portrait of that depression.

Fiona Apple's song "Window" is about something different, but the two lines above apply to the allegory I tried to create here.

Image © Kate N.Y. (=kerosenekate)
Texture from Mayang