While this is an old project from my senior year in high school, it still holds a lot of relevance to me today. This was around the time I started to become more aware of mental illnesses and their prevalence in people who may not fit the stereotype of somebody who is affected by mental illness, and as I have learned more, I am finding more and more meaning in my own work and finding more inspiration.

 

This piece is about depression and how things may look okay on the outside but somebody could be feeling a lot of pain on the inside, so it's important to treat everybody with compassion. At the time this was made, it wasn't really obvious in my life, but I decided to focus on depression because it is a very common condition and I figured that it was an important message for people in general.

 

Now that I am in college and I have gotten to know a lot of different people and their personal stories, I've learned that depression affects many of my friends that I would have never expected it to. I realized how close to home depression actually is, but I see how much more true this piece of art is for me now. In a way, it's sort of evolved with me and it's even more important to my beliefs and my life now.