Week Six: Hudson Part 2

The return to childhood. Everyone's desire. It was so safe then. It was so warm. It was simple. It was dreamy. Hudson describes his childhood as a playground of wonder. The Argentinian landscape giving him trees and rats to play with.

Reading these passages made me think of my childhood. It was not safe, and it was not that happy. It was rough, and blurry. I never felt happy as a child. A lot of traumatic events that I do not care to talk to caused me to grow up fast, experience raw reality too soon. However, I always managed to push, to strive, to seek happiness.

The drawing I made is small, looks like the page out of a journal. I write in a journal a lot. It keeps my head on straight. In this small picture, I draw my small little home. A yellow house with three small rooms that was always inhabited by at least fifteen family members. People sleeping on the floor. People sleeping on couches. Fast showers, overstuffed refrigerator. My house would get so hot during the summer. Sometimes it would be unbearable to sleep indoors. I remember sleeping outside on my lawn sometimes.

My childhood house is next to a self portrait. A cartoon of me looking a bit sad, a bit distraught. A headdress of shapes shoot from my brain. For me, depression has always been by my side. I try my best to use if for the good. To create. Those shapes sprouting from my head came to me at a moment of great depression. Focusing on the patterns was a form of meditation, it helped distract me. So, that is how I began to draw, to focus on the pleasure of creating a curvaceous line, of cross-hatching. My childhood constructs my headdress.