More on the process
My origin piece, or the written work that inspired the entirety of this project began to explore the themes of self sabotage, a lack of self awareness, and the dread felt when finally gaining that awareness in my piece, “How to Play the Victim”, that was written in my winter 2022 creative writing class. The braided essay depicts a young girl falling apart with only herself to blame, a story based and inspired partially by the girl that I once was. My final project, the site that you’re looking at right now, is based around the piece
mentioned above, with my imagination creating a narrative where everything that could have gone wrong, does go wrong. The only tricky thing about that though, is that this story doesn’t really exist anywhere outside of my mind. Thus, I present a project based website that includes a book trailer and images inspired by a book, this story that goes by ‘Bleeding Escapades’, that isn't published, or even written in full. The only thing that I can give to you, is a piece of my wandering, imaginative mind that is based in a vision and various inspirations.
I have a sort of preoccupation with media that paints, what I believe as perfectly, falling apart. HBO’s Euphoria character, Cassie Howard and her traditional beauty and obvious brokenness, the demoralizing falling and rising of Taylor Jenkin Reid’s, Daisy Jones, the glamorized misery of Reid’s “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo”, and the depiction of self-hatred and loss of self in Taylor Swift’s Midnights (3 a.m) drove my ability to put the feelings that I wanted to convey into visuals and words. The aesthetics, themes, and visuals of these works can (hopefully) be found in each of the pieces on this site, as I attempt to piece together what I perceive as the terrifying realization that you don’t know how to get out of the situation you put yourself in.
Through these inspirations and the building block of my braided essay, I craved to create a visual and written experience for viewers that encourages further exploration on the tricky ethics of romantic and platonic relationships. During my life, specifically in high school growing up in the ‘clean cut, new money suburban dream’ of Naperville, I oftentimes acted without thought of the balance between my own wellbeing, and consideration of those around me.
​
For example, ‘should him dating my best friend really stop us from being together? What if we’re meant to be? And he just happened to choose the wrong girl first? How could I pass this opportunity for love and contentment at the hands of unfortunate situational and circumstantial timing?’ Instances of these sorts plagued my mind, the answers living in such a gray area to me, rather than a clean black-and-white outcome that is seen by others. Realities of ‘if we’re meant to be together, it shouldn’t matter that he manipulates me’ didn’t ring a deafening set of alarm bells in my mind, and once again, the ethical principle of how we treat others and how we let others treat us failed me.
​
Viewing so much of my life under this lens, I knew I someday wanted to create art, or even a collection of art, that depicts what happens after we let these questions drag us lower than we know how to get out of, like weights tied to our ankles: the brokenness, the hopelessness, and the petrifying guilt of knowing that while sad, betrayal riddled relationships played a role in where you ended up, it was ultimately the toleration of those wounds that created all the destruction around you.