[0:00]Look out the window. It's me. I'm trying to show people the experience of schizophrenia with a lot of people is that everything is alive. And you can't choose that perception.
[0:17]It's an artistic depiction of how it feels both emotionally and kind of overwhelmingly.
[0:38]I was in my second year of university and I remember I'd be in class and I was doing art school and I would have to leave the class and I didn't know why. But I just started going underneath like the staircases at the end of the building and just hiding. And I remember in those moments it wasn't voices yet, but it was intrusive like if intrusive thoughts had life to them. I started hearing just a little laughter here and there, like little shrieks and little things. And I just kind of thought to myself, "OK, well this is weird. I feel like I'm like is this tripping? Am I tripping?" And I got really confused.
[1:34]I dropped out of university because I couldn't deal with it anymore. I remember it ended up in me being homeless and traveling around my province in Canada. It's New Brunswick.
[1:53]My art with hallucinations started when I was homeless because I used to graffiti and I used to kind of have permanent markers with me everywhere. Schizophrenia feels like there's always a ghost around you. You always feel like there's something like haunting you or around you and you see things. It's such a weird experience that the only way I could express myself was by starting to draw the faces. Sometimes when I'm not hallucinating, I'll draw them more neatly. But right now, I'm hallucinating, so I would love for you guys to see the spirits coming out of my hand. It got to a point where I was drawing the faces and I'd look at them on the wall, the drawing that I did, and I'd start talking to it. And so I started building a relationship with this thing. I started to draw them more and more when I was getting out of the psych unit for the first time I was hospitalized. Because there was something about it that was so comforting and I felt like I wasn't as alone as I used to feel. When I'm making an art piece, I feel like kind of ethereal. Like, I'm making it, and I feel like I'm doing something for myself for other people. And it feels like a service.
[3:13]Do you see them like as people or are they stylized or are they You have to understand that schizophrenia is so much more complicated and multi-dimensional in how it works.
[3:31]We all have intrusive thoughts, OK? But just because I'm schizophrenic, it doesn't mean that I automatically have voices that are like, "Kill, kill, kill." It doesn't work like that.
[3:51]There's so many people that I met, especially through TikTok, who have schizophrenia, who are practicing lawyers, who are doctors, who are nurses, it's a spectrum. And there's such a thing as high-functioning schizophrenia. If you can watch my experiences and understand that, you know, all these things that people think about schizophrenia are mostly wrong, then you start to learn something new. And then it makes the world a better place because people are connecting again.
