Imagine God Loves Art and Psychosis is a Painting

Depression is watercolor, while anxiety is acrylic. What piece in the gallery would catch your eye? On mental illness and regaining our voices.

Imagine God loves art. Sometimes, he paints a sad, melancholic painting. The painting has deep blues, pale reds, and dark purple, and two woman on separate docks, staring across the water. God paints sadness to show how important love is in the world. If we didn’t accept the fragility of life, the coming and going of time, the truth of birth and death, maybe life would cease to have meaning. Without sadness, there is no joy; if we couldn’t shed tears would we even care when someone died? To want someone, we must feel someone’s absence, and also their presence.

The art of balance, or color balance holds true in God’s painting of sadness. Too much depression makes life not worth living, but a little sadness lets us remember how beautiful our deceased friend or mother was to us. A splash of color to show dwindling sunlight in God’s painting makes people hope for better days when they are together again. People stop in wonder to stare at the two woman on separate docks in the painting, wondering if they will ever be reunited. They wonder, too, if sadness can be measured in pale red or dark purple.

God said then, let me paint fear, so that people know when they are in danger, or even when they have to be on time to a meeting. God paints a man walking along the waterbeds beside a crocodile. A little fear gives you the ability to run, but too much fear keeps you frozen like a deer in headlights. Fear is painted in the man’s silhouette and his staunch shoulders. Fear is revealed in a grey color palette to make known the shadows in the man’s eyes. Anxiety keeps us humble. A balanced amount of fear lets us know we are all deer in God’s eyes, walking beside a crocodile.

By his 3rd painting, God decided he had to get more creative to impress the universe’s clientele. He said, I will paint a person with multiple heads, to show the importance of loving yourself and all parts of the personality. And so God sets about creating his painting with multiple pigments and multiple heads, each head a different color. In the painting, a black and white hand holds the moon, while a colorful hand holds the sun.

God painted this and people gaze transfixed, while others remain confused, wondering about the part black and white color scheme. They ask, why is there color in only one half of the painting? God wonders about what kind of example to give to explain. A little dissociation can be good when focused on needing to get a task done, God explains, like when a person goes to work for eight hours a day. He tones down the color in his brain for a time, shutting down his phone, and ignoring all the different voices in his head that are vying for attention.

But too much disassociation can lead to forgetting you exist, and at its worst, seeing you rip yourself in half to protect the fragile child inside, who was no longer loved, and knew nothing but rules. Suddenly there are multiple personalities or multiple heads, all needing proper love but too shy to show their faces.

Visitors to the art gallery applaud God for the details on each head, from the smiles to the disconsolate frowns. Many passer-goers stop to debate the technique and effort behind the work of art. Perhaps this painting is what happens in the face of a traumatic childhood, when a child is forced to be a laborer. Little light workers come to earth and face imaginable horrors, and grow up having to heal their ancestors’ trauma all on their own. Knowing they would never want their own children to disassociate like them or have to work like they did, the persons from the painting are tasked with relearning the lessons of love and balanced self-acceptance. They do this through loving all the personalities in their head — the colorful ones, the deep-orange ones, and the black and white ones. This is sometimes called multiple personality disorder or dissociative identity disorder. God almost won a society award for this painting, with its elaborate mystery and healing and ongoing passion.

Psychosis is like a new art form the universe cooked up. This time God became even more creative. Just like with DID, God had to step up his game with this painting in order to appeal to the masses, or to be accepted into another prestigious art-gallery. This time he used over ten different colors for his painting, which might have made it look complicated. He painted fantastical things, words, and places in the sky all surrounding one giant man.

God said, this time I will paint one soul with one mind in a painting. He puts brush to paper and there appears a head high in the clouds, and feet deep in the mud. The painting is to show the importance of self-compassion, self-trust, and self-belief. The head in the clouds is scared because the head can not feel its feet in the mud. His whole being is stretching, trying so hard to feel both his mind and his feet without being ripped in half.

The man fears everyone can see his feet except for him, and his feet are very large. People stop to stare at the confused man in God’s painting, who keeps trying to look at his feet but can not seem to see them through many dark storm clouds. A splash of salmon red, amber yellow, and teal blue color other strange things in the sky, like dragons and castles and pirate ships. A little self-consciousness can be good, God explains, as he continues to paint. Self-consciousness is especially helpful in public places where manners and good taste are required. Too much of it though, can give rise to hysteria, paranoia, and irrational fears.

After the man in the painting goes long enough without seeing his feet, the man even wonders, are these feet even my own? God points to the black clouds around the head in the sky. God says, accepting that your mind, your body, and your thoughts are your own, and don’t belong to others, is an important life lesson. The man’s arms are flanging themselves about, searching for something to grab, not knowing the sky and mud are more than enough to hold him up. That he is enough. This is called Schizophrenia, or split mind, God said.

If your life was a painting, what would it show?

One day I decided to frequent God’s art gallery. The days and nights when my psychosis originated left me sleepless and disoriented. The whole experience appeared, spur-of-the-moment, completely out of the blue. Like Chicken Little assuming the sky is falling, I ran this way and that way frantically in the ensuing months, convinced I had done something seriously wrong but with no evidence to prove that uncomfortable feeling. My psychotic break was strange, and in a way, fantastical, spinning a story in my head that I couldn’t seem to shake.

Schizophrenia often tells tall tales to its victims — the devil is out to get you, perhaps. Or, less plausible, there are people that live in the sky, and if you don’t knock thrice on the door of your house before midnight, the people that live in the sky will kill you and all your family. Some psychosis sufferers purport that spies are out to get them, that the government is full of birds listening in to their conversations, or more irrationally, the general population are secretly not humans, but guinea pigs. I’ve heard of many people who are convinced that there are always people talking about them in public, or in private too. Their experiences dictate a paranoia so strong, that anything could be happening behind the curtain of the stage of life but you just can’t see it. Truly, no one is safe.

All of these irrational beliefs tend to fall under the same umbrella of paranoia. Through a combination of sensitive genes or exposure to negative stimuli (i.e. abuse, trauma, you name it), psychosis sufferers start to believe irrational things about the world. It is very possible that psychosis is a coping mechanism for distress or emotional disturbance. For example, after a highly stressful experience, where you are repeatedly beaten by your husband, you begin to believe the world is no longer a safe place. The devil or God is now after you, or you now believe that houses that are green (like your ex-husband’s) have to be avoided at all costs.

Accordingly, researchers say those to experience emotional abuse in childhood may be 3.5X more likely to develop psychosis. Being repeatedly criticized, belittled, or ignored by someone can lead to disordered thinking. Psychosis sufferers are so convinced that someone is judging them, trying to hurt them, or trying to control them, that they feel they’ve completely lost their sense of agency, or lost their voice.

Going along with this hypothesis, now God must have condemned psychosis sufferers to listen to the opinions of other voices or people for all eternity, until they learn to have one of their own. They scream, where are my feet? I can’t see my feet! Flailing around while dark storm clouds envelop their minds. Some passer-bys grow sad, not understanding God’s painting. How dare he paint such a dreadful, morose painting yet with so many bright colors in the sky? Can the man with his head in the clouds ever find his feet again?

The man doesn’t have to find his feet, says God. They have always been there. He only has to develop faith.

A lay person might think schizophrenia sounds scarier or more difficult than other illnesses, but only because developing faith is scary. God must have used very tiny brushes with this painting, and small brush strokes are harder to see with the naked eye. Art lovers can stare at the painting for hours and still not understand the meaning behind the whole thing. When they complain, God answers, you are supposed to give it your own meaning.

For some reason, it seems that people look at schizophrenic obsessions and do not see the same thing as with other mental illnesses. Why do we make schizophrenia seems so mysterious and complicated? Why don’t we listen to a man’s hallucinations like a therapist might listen to a person’s heart in the midst of depression? A failure to properly come to terms with uncomfortable feelings can easily lead a person straight off the edge of society, and right into the abyss — this could include developing anxiety, depression, or even DID and psychosis.

I stopped to stare at this painting of God’s for hours on end too until I almost fell in. Certain painting in the gallery of life relate more to certain people. I wondered what kind of meaning I’m supposed to take from it. I can’t stop looking at the glorious pirate ships in the clouds, alongside the dark faces of monsters and dragons.

Some researchers argue, after years in the field, that schizophrenia is a way of being possessed or haunted by demons. They even swear by it, despite a decade as a trained doctor in the medical field, or years existing as an atheist. They explain that their schizophrenic patients enter the emergency room and are told not to seek help by their voices. This must speak of demonic activity. Others researchers, conversely, argue schizophrenia is the exact opposite, nothing but pure enlightenment, or possibly over-enlightenment, like seeing too many angel numbers, or having too much meaning in life.

Is it possible that schizophrenia is exactly what it shows up to be, as something in between those two opposites, unable to remedy itself? A darkness and a light inside ourselves that haven’t yet joined forces, an elusive search for meaning, a lotus flower trying to bloom from the mud, a spiritual illness that shows up in the thoughts and not in the feelings?

What drives us to believe in the devil anyways? Aren’t negative emotions like fear and hatred the same things as demons, which haven’t yet been able to find a way to express themselves in the open air? I digress.

I wonder about deep fears and unexpressed anger, and how they express themselves in this painting. I look for the owner of the art gallery to ask more questions, but I haven’t yet found him.

So I sit down on the floor in the art gallery after hours, as all the lights are slowly being turned off. I keep my eyes trained on the painting of the man with his head in the clouds. I wonder why I’m so attracted to this painting and not to another. There are many paintings along the walls just like there are many lessons and paths to walk in life. I look harder.

Is there a reason certain people go insane? Am I too sensitive or too something else? Too prone to worry about other’s opinions? Too easily taken advantage of ?

Psychosis is in my genes, just like the fact that I’m left handed. Maybe this painting appeals not just to me, but also to my ancestors. What had happened to them? Could it be that my ancestors were persecuted for their beliefs or their existence, and now I must learn how to develop faith in their wake?

My experience with a psychotic break was quite literally related to stress or trauma; what happened was sort of like a crux or a culminating moment. After a series of very stressful events, I was pushed over the edge, at an absolute extreme speed, as if a psychotic break was the only way to cope.

It certainly didn’t feel fair, what happened to me. I wish I could say I was happy with the owner of this divine comedy of an exhibition, but I’m not. God mentions daily to all his artists and art lovers alike that mankind is painted in his likeness, but it’s tiring to stare at the painted sky and believe I am just like God.

Mainly I glimpse this painting and I think about my visit to Dante’s seven rings of hell. I think about the way my existence decided to let me in on the secret that is the cosmic joke. Did God ever dance through the seven rings of hell? I bet he is there right now, doing the hula, while reciting Plato’s theory of forms. God exists in the sky and in the mud, in heaven and in hell, in circles and in squares, in portraits and in parallel lines.

Psychosis must be a disease of faith, I relent. Even if it is in my genetics, the lesson remains the same. Be it paranoia or pronoia, I must learn how to develop self-belief, just like the man in the painting.

In the painting I can see long, wavy brush strokes leading a pirate ship out of the clouds, as if the ship is riding a flourish of pink, light green, and gold. This is definitely my favorite part of the piece— precisely what gives it meaning for me. In the dark mist of the clouds the ship could be anything. But eventually, after the storm clears, you realize that it was indeed just a boat in the sky. You realize that all adults secretly live on pirate ships too, they just don’t say so.

If God were an artist and psychosis was a painting, what would your favorite part be?

What piece in the gallery would catch your eye?