ᴛʜᴇ ᴀʀᴛ ᴛʜᴀᴛ ʙʀᴏᴜɢʜᴛ ʜᴇʀ ʙᴀᴄᴋ

The Art that Brought her back

Disconnecting can be a slow gradual change or it can be in the blink of an eye. For Maris, distancing from those around her was the first one, a gradual change. She slowly stopped hanging out with the people in her life, giving them shorter responses, using excuses like; I have no more energy, I'm too tired, just didn't feel like it. It took them even longer to realize the change in her behavior. Her family noticed first, how she was locking herself in her room, only coming out for meals and school. Then it was her friends, most of them didn't seem to mind and just decided to make it easier for her and her new introverted tendencies and stopped talking to her all together. But a few still tried to get conversations out of her. It didn't help that the whole cause of her new persona kept everyone from seeing each other in person after all you shouldn't be in person through a pandemic. But now that Covid-19 is settling down a little and they can now go to school in person but with masks the few friends that cared are getting worried.

Maris herself was rather down even though she got happy feelings from reading it somehow felt like fake happiness to her as she was merely reading about things rather than experiencing them herself.

That's where art came in for her. Maris had always loved sketching but now she decided to put more effort and hours into it, even going as far as to make a few paintings. She always felt like she was taken to another world when she made art. Letting her hand do all the work as she got lost in her imagination. The world she was taken to was unlike anything she'd ever seen before. She always felt more lost when she came back than when she left. Feeling even more disconnected from the world she was born into, spending more time wandering in her mind. The mechanics of the world she always ran to to escape was just too enticing. All the little things that made it tick, every meticulous detail that worked in it's own way to create something beautiful.

However much she loved the world made of her own creation she still knew in the back of her mind that she couldn't live like this. Subconsciously she slowly started trying to redesign her habits, going outside every once in a while, engaging in a conversation here and there at school and home, and visiting the world in her mind less and less. All in an attempt to find her spark for the outside world again, so she did one of the things she had started doing to calm herself, sense her disconnecting, she painted, but this time instead of painting other worlds from her imagination, she painted the one she lived in physically.

Finally she had found a way to express herself and show how she was feeling, though not everyone understood what emotions she was trying to put into her paintings and sketches. That was okay though. She was satisfied with it herself as it was her own.