Maybe it would be a covered in flowers.  Or a luxurious Barbie dream house bedroom. Or a Manhattan skyline view.

In finding an understanding of the unexplainable, I portrayed the inside of my overstimulated adolescent mind that undergoes new experiences and emotion,  and capture those moments through a New York City Dive Bar Bathroom.

It holds the presence of the mind-bending thoughts and impressions of countless strangers who have entered and highlights how interactions and outside influence interfere with memories and emotions. Too much fun and too much fear can leave a stain on the experiences and adventures of living as a young adult. A room that reeks of beer and paint thinner, sticky floors, cigarette ash, sweat, perfume, and regret. A place of nights I don’t remember and mornings I’ll never forget.

I constructed four wooden walls and a floor like a little box for my deepest, darkest secrets - then it had it explode with what is the chaos of life. I attached personal items of hardships and high points. I dragged in relics of my recklessness: toilets and sinks scavenged from strangers, chains, fake pills, records, alcohol bottles, condoms, and Scrabble letters scattered into words that symbolize what I wouldn’t dare say out loud.

And then I painted. Messily. I threw buckets of paint and splattered the walls with my screams, laughs, and sobs.

 Colors for my current moods and thoughts on experiences. Red for rag. Blue for feeling like I was drowning. Black for sadness the memories of an adolescent who could not feel enough to experience them. Yellow for flowers, laughter, beaches, and the sun. Pink for the best nights, friends, and fun. Purple, orange, green for concerts, moody evenings, sick days, shopping sprees, fleeting highs, and crashing lows.

Each layer a confession.

I demanded I cover every inch perfectly messy. I splattered it in color beyond repair.

I doodled the way I did in classrooms as I overthought - spirals and Vogue editorial girls. And then my classmates added their presence through my processes, leaving graffiti while my paint still dripped. They gifted the walls with their presence and their decisions, just like how every person who i’ve met has left an impression on me. For the better or worse. 

I soon discovered at this point that this piece is also a resurrection. I  resurrected my black-and-white bedroom and added life to any past colorless state of mine - the minimalistic box where I once locked myself away and felt immobile.

  I am both. A girl who parties too hard, stays out too late, laughs until I collapse. Scrubs obsessively, spirals in silence, cries, counts every fear.Both alive and exhausted. Reckless and precise. Loud and a little broken. Bright, and also the shadow behind the light.

A Mess of a Mind is my body split open, my diary scrawled across walls, sinks, chains, paint, and artifacts. 

It is sadness, addiction, anger, laughter, obsession, joy, pain - all colliding in one impossibly crazy room.

It is a bathroom touched by thousands, marked by strangers, scarred and lifted through decisions.

Ugly. Absurd. Hilarious. Electric. Messy. Alive.

I had people walk in to feel that A Mess of a Mind is my confession:  My urge to scream, to laugh, to collapse, to breathe. To know what it is to have both a loud and a quiet mind. Survival is not clean, not polite, not quiet, but an experience of madness and life. It is me, giving in to my chaos and turning it into the proof of my life - and something unforgettable.