My Own Death

Artist Statement for a Series of Digital Paintings

I once made an attempt on my own life, nearly ten years ago. I have this thing where, once I start bleeding, I bleed a lot. It can be the smallest cut, and the blood just does not stop. Thin blood, I guess. When I realized I was losing blood and getting dizzy, I saw a flash before my eyes of what would happen once I was gone. After seeing that vision, that short horror movie before my eyes, I somehow managed to make a tourniquet. I had no idea how to stop an open vein from bleeding. I improvised whatever I thought had to be done in that moment and went to bed with a tourniquet on, covered in blood, staining the sheets, everything, saying to myself, this is it. I was either going to wake up in the morning or not. I did wake up the next morning. Surprise, I’m still here. Cutting a vein is not exactly a certain ending anyway, but it gets you close enough to have to come back, I guess. As a Virgo rising, and the clean girl I am, I thankfully avoided infection, though it was quite a bloody experience.

Years later, I found myself in a similar situation again, with a sharp object before me, except this time I had a plan for how to bleed out faster, which I will not disclose here for the safety of others. I asked myself, are we ending this now, or are we continuing to be the piece of shit I am, living the piece of shit life I’m living, trying to make it a little better, if it can even be made better? Or do we die right now, right here, as the piece of shit that I am, inside this piece of shit of a life? I decided to live, as the piece of shit that I am, and try to make a better piece of shit of myself and of the life I live. So I did not take the blade. And again, the flash of what I had seen the first time came before my eyes. I do not understand why I feel pain so intensely, and why I feel happiness so intensely, and why I feel love so intensely. I refuse to be branded with an F diagnosis because every time I think of it, I hear in my head the famous psychiatrist from Dobrota, Montenegro: “Ne postoje normalni, samo nepregledani” (“There are no normal people, only those who haven’t been examined”). And I completely agree with him.

After a series of horrible decisions, drug abuse, SA, mental issues, and many other bad choices that enriched a past already full of disappointment and pain, I made the choice to change everything and start again, to try to make my own path far away from home. Because at home it is nice, it is comfortable, I have everything. I have everything I need to live decently, but I did not want only to live decently in a familiar space. I wanted more. I wanted to go somewhere else, where I do not know anyone, to meet new people, to speak a different language, to learn a different language, to fall in love with someone different, far more different than what I am used to back home. Home came with me, definitely, and I cannot erase who I am, but I wanted to know more. I wanted to experience more. I wanted to see more. I wanted to become someone new, somewhere different. I wanted to have a different surname. I wanted my children to speak a different language than my own. I wanted my children to be raised differently, perhaps even in a different faith. I wanted everything to be different from what I know.

But the problem is, when you are far from home, you are far from everything familiar. And when you fall, you fall on your knees. Or you faceplant hard onto the pavement in a very embarrassing way. I am lucky that I made friends here, but not all of them are here with me. Lately, I’ve been alone, and I blame transiting Saturn through the house, hoping it is just a phase. When you are alone, everything depends on you. This kind of loneliness is unfamiliar to me, because back home I have known people my whole life. There is always someone. Here, things feel different. Where I come from, when you know people your whole life, you consider them close. And when you meet someone new, there is always a certain kind of reserve in the connection you have. I believe that is typical for Montenegro. I guess I was following the same pattern, even though I am quite open. At least I consider myself open. Of course, there are instances in which you form a certain connection and are not afraid to open up completely, because you consider that person your own, but those connections are rare. I thought I had that kind of connection with someone, but apparently I lost it. Perhaps I imagined it. Or perhaps there was never anything there from the beginning except me and my loneliness. And in this loneliness, I lived day by day, especially after losing a connection that felt close to home and to what I know. I felt weak.

I felt very weak in a way I had not felt in a long time. I do not want to go back home. I want to stay here. I want to make a life here. I want to build my life here, if it is God’s will. Maybe patience was never my best friend. And when I do not see results quickly, I start to think they are never going to come. After intense pain, weakness sets in, and when that happens, depression consumes you, and once it does, you feel nothing anymore. It rips your heart out, and you do not even know what is keeping you alive anymore. In those moments of numbness, in the aftermath of pain, I started imagining myself dead. I already felt dead on the inside. I had no wishes. I did not want to love. I did not want to fall in love again. And I love love, I want to give it, and I want to receive it. But it just stopped. I felt nothing. I watched my days pass. I ate only when I needed to leave the house, just so I would not faint. Nothing gave me pleasure anymore. I wanted nothing. I wished for nothing. I hoped for nothing. I saw life happening before my eyes, but there was none inside of me.

And then, in order not to kill myself, because I made a promise that I would not, I started killing myself through art. And in killing myself through art, I started analyzing death and what happens when one dies. Analyzing death, I became aware of how easily it can come upon me and how fragile my life actually is. I would capture images of myself in moments when the pain became so intense that it felt like I was dying. And then I would make a digital painting of that exact image, but as me, dead, with all the life left out of my physical body. How would I look if I died here, at this spot? What would I look like? And surprisingly, I found it beautiful. But it is not me anymore. It is not me

.

Death, especially suicide, is often accompanied by a text in which someone spills everything out before saying goodbye. I found myself reading some of these letters, and Virginia Woolf’s last letter to her husband stayed with me deeply. Even saying that feels disrespectful to the person who wrote it, so I cannot fully explain what I felt or how it resonated with me. But it remains one of the texts that affected me most. I kept thinking about such texts, about Japanese death poems, and about what comes out of people before they leave. Why those things? Do they define the ending, the psychological state, or the reason for leaving? I cannot know for sure. I do not think anyone can. But I kept thinking about it.

I found livor mortis interesting in an artistic sense. The patterns it makes on the body after a person dies, when all the blood settles into one place, fascinated me. That is something that can only happen to you once, when you die. I will die. I cannot die many times. I can die only once. And I will not get the chance to witness my own death. But in a way, I witnessed it now, through my so-called mini-death. And I think it is beautiful, no matter how painful it is. It is beautiful, and I look beautiful. This is how I would look if I died now, if I had actually died in those moments I mentioned before. I only hope I will not die young.

I did not want to make more images of my death. I made three, and I did not want to make more because I am a magus, in a way. If I see things too clearly, I might turn them into reality. For that reason, I had to stop, to stop myself from actually dying. If I had continued at the pace I was going, I fear something might have happened to me, even if I had done nothing. So I stopped at three images of my death. Life will not spare me pain, I am sure, but there is a limit. There is always a limit in life, and when you cross it, it is like stepping into a river with a strong current. If you go deep enough, it might carry you away. In a way, you might not return. And for that reason, and that reason only, I stopped at three. Perhaps I will continue, perhaps I will not. But I know God and life itself will not spare me pain. For now, I had to stop.