Artists often talk about the struggles that they have when they first start out. Living in big cities, making ends meet, paying the expensive rent, but when your everyday obstacles are swimming around in your head how do you move forward from yesterday to live in today? A story of a young woman and her unwavering relationship with her mother who wanted to be an actress. The young woman shared this bond with her mother because her mother could never be an actress. Her mother suffered from schizophrenia and the voices in her head were living freely within her mind. Her mother would tell her the most amazing stories, and not just tell them but act them out as if she were on the biggest stage. Watching her mother was inspiring and soon, they were performing stories together. Why have a bedtime story when you can act out full scene with you mother every night? It was one of the most beautiful life connections. After being medicated she found her balance, but it was when she decided she was cured that her life took a turn in all the wrong directions. Her struggle with her mental illness soon come to a tragic end and much like the stories she told her daughter was left to figure out life alone. She is now an actress living in New York City, struggling like artists do but realizing that this life is better than the life she once lived. Through it all she continues to move forward battling with the things that are now swimming around in her head hoping one day to make it.
Countless Tomorrows
The life of an artist. This life that I’m living. I’m an actress, and I’m pretty good too. But I have a flare for the tragedies, not the drama, the true tragedies. It’s actually a pretty funny story how I got to be here. Not the typical funny but the, “Holy shit this is my life, ironic kind of funny.” So you might not think it’s funny at all. My mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia when she was a teenager, I think she was eighteen. She had been having hearing voices for years but I think my grandparents thought that she was just pretending to be “crazy.” Once my grandparents really came to terms with the idea that their daughter wasn’t perfect nor will she ever be, at least not in the way they wanted her to be, that’s when my grandmother made it her mission to assist and support my mother in any way that she could. When my mother was properly medicated the voices subsided. She was able to, for the most part, live a normal life. She worked a job, she had relationships and she became a mother, that moment changed her life.