We had this picture in our house when I was growing up. It is called The Crying Boy by Italian artist Angelo (Giovanni) Bragolin. In the 1950s, Bragolin worked in Venice after the Second World War, painting Crying Boys and selling them to tourists.
As a child I can vividly remember the picture. It often un-nerved and confused me. Why is the child crying. Is he being punished for doing something wrong. Will someone come and heal his pain. Why is he on our wall?
In fairness, our house, like all good Catholic houses in the early 1970s, had the standard issue of crucifixion pictures with Jesus dying on the cross. I found those pictures difficult, ghoulish even. It confused me to see his mother Mary, forever frozen in time and powerless, as her son's life expired.
Walt Whitman, the famous poet once said 'I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious'. I can see how that might be true in myself, at least in theory. The idea that I too may contain multitudes and hidden depths. That I deserve to be kind to myself, to find myself a worthy person and to face life with luscious optimism.
Would that it be true. But my journey has not been on a clear road. Like The Crying Boy I have often been frozen in an expression of fear as I traversed the road less travelled.
I wasn't to know as a child that my internal wiring was faulty. From childhood I was hypersensitive to criticism and abandonment. I was terrified of bullying and being attacked. I had a private little world in my head where I retreated at times of most stress.
Moving forward 35 years, I was recently diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD). It is the first time in my life that I feel I have a compass to understand my co-ordinates. I know now that emotions can be my sworn enemy. They rise and fall like wars, with the power to destabilise and overwhelm.
BPD is an illness that has taken me to the edge of my existence. As I once wrote in a story 'I don't think much of myself but I am all I can think about'. Each new day is another challenge to get out of and stay out of the bed.
So The Crying Boy is like a mirror for me when I am not feeling well. Why am I crying? What did I do wrong to end up coping with a mental illness? Can I ever climb out of the picture and melt the frozen ice that locks the moment in time.
Because I too have felt frozen in a look of sorrow. My fear of bullying was punished fully in a job which I had to leave after 23 years. The scars of that battle will never fully heal and I experience panic attacks and heightened stress.
But at times I also see hope in The Crying Boy. While the picture has frozen him in a fixed point of time, that in itself is an illusion. The boy deserves to have broken out of the frame years ago to follow his dreams, dote on himself and explore his multitudes.
And that is why I am trying to let go of 'The Crying Boy'...
