“To all the me's I've loved before...”

Give an artist a blank canvas and they’ll see endless possibilities. My challenge as a Libra is deciding on what idea to actually bring to life. Before calling myself a printmaker, I would draw and paint. Painting and drawing was my safe heaven growing up, my way of escaping and processing the things I was feeling.

My mom would tell me that art was a gift or “don” inherited from my maternal lineage. My abuelita’s mom, Tere, baked and decorated cakes and her brother, Manuel, would draw and paint. Many of my cousins and family members also have this same gift or “don.” The ability to turn nothing into something.

“To all the Me’s I’ve Loved Before…” is a painting that has transformed many times over the course of 3 years. I had the canvas for a while and at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic I was looking for ways to process all of the feelings.

The first iteration of the painting was inspired by the concept of home. With the COVID-19 pandemic, I, as well as many people in the US, were encouraged to stay at home. At the time I lived with 4 of my closest friends in Santa Cruz in a 3 bedroom house. I had lost access to the studio and began to build my own in our garage- this studio became my safe heaven.

The concept of home is one that I think about a lot as someone who had spent the first half of their life moving a lot. As a kid I lived in different parts of Mexico for several months to a year, Southern California, Chicago, and Oklahoma where I spent a good chunk of my childhood on my fathers ranch. The closest I have come to a “stable home” is San Francisco, the only place I know I can come back to. Because of all the moving my concept of home is very fragmented and I’ve learned to create my own stable version of home within myself.

I began painting during the pandemic, letting myself flow with the paint but felt unsatisfied. My mind being flooded with the thoughts and images of what I felt and feeling like I needed one image to encapsulate it all - which really restricting my possibilities.

One of my favorite painters, Sin, or Giselle Mariell Ibarra, paints the most beautiful skies. However, if the painting does not match her vision she paints over them, and starts again.

I did the same. I painted the canvas white then yellow. It felt very freeing to do so. A clean slate with the history underneath the layers of paint.

Three years passed. In those 3 years I ended up being displaced from Santa Cruz after graduating due to wild fires. Saying goodbye to yet another home, and moving back to the only one I’ve ever known- San Francisco. I went back crying and screaming, I had moved away for school because I no longer had space to live and grow in my families home. I held on to the yellow canvas, and when I finally got my own place, I kept the yellow canvas in sight for the moment that inspiration hit.

At the end of 2022 I began therapy once again. I am no stranger to it, I’ve been in and out of therapy since I was 16. I had just turned 25 and after reaching a point of “stability,” I began to realize that I had never actually felt all of the feelings from my past trauma’s. The feelings would be triggered almost out of nowhere or for no reason at all and all of a sudden I would feel the same fear I would feel as a kid. Having studied psychology I self-diagnosed myself with anxiety and knew that the only way I would be able to move past these feelings was to feel through them- but I wasn’t sure how. 25 years and all I’ve learned to do was how to intellectualize my emotions so that I did not have to feel them.

“To all the me’s I’ve loved before…” started as a digital drawing after a therapy session. With the guidance of my therapist we began diving deep into my memories and current day experiences and reactions. Before therapy I thought I was healing and doing inner child work. I’d buy myself all the toys I’d wanted (squishmallows) and would justify it as a way to heal my inner child. But when the actual inner child healing started, it went deeper.

The real inner child healing was no longer all squishmallows and rainbows, it turned into deep realizations of experiences that taught me to shrink or stay quiet. Experiences that taught me that I could not count on others, that I was unsafe, or that crossed my boundaries- that I did not know existed or could be enforced. Growing up as the oldest Latina daughter I felt a lot of responsibility for not only myself and my siblings but for the adults around me pushing me to become “mature” and abandon my child-like self.

Some days in therapy I felt a general feeling of sadness and others an endless pit of rage. It was and continues to be a rollercoaster of emotions. One day feeling very proud of myself for all that I’ve been able to endure, and the other feeling angry that I even had to be put in those situations.

Once the sketch was done I knew that this piece needed to come to life and the timing lined up perfectly with a show at Southern Exposure for their summer youth program and educators they had worked with throughout their programming. The theme for the show was identities of the past, present, and future and I knew that I had to submit this piece.

I began slowly working on the painting and found it challenging. As an adamant printmaker I was having a hard time with pacing myself. With printmaking majority of the work goes into preparing to create your work, then the act of creating or printing (if all the prep goes well) feels faster with a lot more physical movement involved in printmaking. Halfway through painting I even considered screenprinting it instead to be “faster” but I knew I did not have enough time to actually execute it the way I wanted to.

I had also made the decision for this piece to be a painting because I felt like I needed more intimate time with this piece. Up until this piece I could not claim any of my drawings as self portraits even if they looked like me or if the “assignment” was to do a self portrait. I never created these pieces with the intention of capturing myself just capturing my thoughts, emotions, and present experiences but only saw them as extensions of myself. Feeling like I was never going to be able to capture all that I am and can be into one piece. But yet, I was fascinated by artists like Frida Kahlo that dedicated so much of their work to themselves by creating self portraits. Maybe I never saw myself in my pieces because I was not ready to see myself?

“To all the me’s I’ve loved before…” is a love letter to myself. To all the different versions of myself that I may not have been able to extend love to in the moment, but am doing so now. At 25 I feel like I have lived many lives. The life of the quiet respectful daughter, the responsible one, the oldest, la Muñeca, the cowgirl, the different one, the sensitive one, the child that just wanted to draw, la princesa, the rawr xD, the scholar, the rebel, etc. I used to feel broken into all those pieces unable to see who I really was. I made myself fit into so many boxes; boxes that other people wanted me to fit into so that they could make make sense of who I was and am. All these boxes did was limit me and my perception of myself. As others continued to categorize me I gave up- which is probably the best thing I ever did for myself. In doing that I surrendered the need to define myself or explain myself to others and allowed myself to just be who I am. Only through that process have I actually been able to get to know myself. Even if that meant that at times I did not know who I was, the mere act of existing and being present is more than enough.

I realize and accept now that I am everything and nothing all at once. A living breathing paradox of love and confusion. And often times an ambiguous quirky flawed human being. And my experience in being all of these versions of myself while constantly discovering who I am and who I am not can be the most thrilling part of this lived experience.

I also have learned that I am not my perception of myself but the person doing the observing.

As I dig deeper and explore further the more it feels like I am digging myself into a hole. But I have also done this long enough to know that this “digging” is a necessary part of growth. From these questions and thoughts I am able to tap into this flow of creativity that has quite literally kept me alive, and actually do the healing necessary to hold myself and others with the love and compassion that we so desperately need.

To all the me’s I’ve loved before, I still do.