Monsters are Real Quote Art

Content warning: Anxiety, panic disorder

     Today's post is not a typical craft post.  Sure, there is a craft, and if you just want to print this quote art I designed and use it for your personal use, it's at the end of the post.  However, I wanted to use this space to tell you a little about how this art came to be.
     The beauty of Stephen King's "Monsters are real..." quote is that it resonates with many of us, even if our struggles are different.  We all have our own monsters and ghosts that we are grappling with.  When I see this quote, my mind goes to the main monster living inside of me: anxiety.

My Anxiety Journey

     Before we get into my inspiration, I want to give you a brief overview of my anxiety journey.  Feel free to skip this section if you already know what it's like to live with anxiety and don't want to be reminded of how much it sucks.
     I have exhibited symptoms of anxiety from a young age, but it took me until I was in my mid-20s to piece together what was going on with me.  Up to that point, I thought I was just cautious and a bit of a worrier.  I didn't realize that there was something atypical about the way I reacted to the world.
     Everything changed during the summer of 2014, when I had to get my wisdom teeth removed.  During the weeks leading up to the surgery, I had to attend a couple of consultations with my oral surgeon.  Something about these appointments triggered in me not only anxiety, but also panic.  To quote from my old anxiety blog I started that I never did anything with, "I would sit there in the waiting room sweating buckets, my heart hammering away a mile a minute as my stomach churned like a washing machine, wanting to flee to the safety of the car and feeling trapped and helpless because I couldn't."
     In retrospect, I had probably had many panic attacks before this series of events.  Since I did not know panic disorder was a thing, I thought what was happening to me was a physical ailment.  I have dealt with bouts of gastrointestinal unrest since childhood, and these instances often seemed to correlate with events happening in my life.  For example, during my first two years of college, I would feel sick for the first week of the semester, missing some, if not all, of the classes that week.  I was afraid each time a new semester approached that I would get sick and - lo and behold - I would then get sick.
     So the issues had existed long before my wisdom tooth extraction, but what happened after my surgery was that any time Brian and I would go somewhere, I would feel anxious, and that anxiety would quickly escalate to panic.  We would get three quarters of the way to our destination and then it would become too much and I would be on the verge of tears, begging Brian to turn back.  This was when I finally realized that I wasn't getting sick all the time; I was having panic attacks.
     I've been in treatment twice for my anxiety and hopefully will be back in treatment again here soon.  I was hoping that once I finished my Ph.D., I'd finally be able to relax and get things under control, but then the world turned upside down and here I am, as anxious as ever.  I was rereading my old anxiety blog as I was writing this post, and even though these entries were from four years ago, so many of the issues I was experiencing then I'm still struggling with.  Anxiety sucks.

The Meaning Behind My Quote Art

     Anyway, that's enough about my anxiety.  Now let's talk about what this quote art represents to me.  I wanted to find some way to visually represent my anxiety.  Since it is a part of me, I thought I could achieve this by having two Ambers in the image, one to represent me and one to represent my anxiety.  The Amber that's curled up behind the tree crying?  That's me in the throes of a panic attack.  The Amber with the red cape is the physical manifestation of my anxiety.  To me, anxiety is red.  It is screeching red, alarm sirens blaring ad infinitum red.  That's why anxiety is wearing a red cloak and red lipstick.  Anxiety can bring with it feelings of helplessness and despair, which I envision as pitch black, the hopeless color of a starless night.  This is why the rest of anxiety's outfit is black.  I'm sure there's a lot more symbolism you can read into this image, but if there is anything else there, it probably wasn't something I consciously invoked.

Printable Monsters Are Real Quote Art

Materials:

*Printed 8.5"x11" "Monsters Are Real" Quote Art
*8.5"x11" photo frame.

Directions:

*Print out a copy of this quote art, ideally on matte photo paper.

*Place the image in the photo frame.