2017-present

The Van Gogh Project, in theory, still exists, and it comprises a dream of helping my sister get her art out into the world, and improve the quality of life. What is yet to be accomplished is a trip to NYC to draw, a trip to Paris, to draw, and a trip to the Van Gogh museum followed by painting the countrysides that Van Gogh painted.

While I have fully recovered from complex-PTSD, and the plethora of things that go with, my sisterʻs path has been quite different. The difference between private care in a container of love and in a safe place, and being an artist under an LPS conservatorship being bounced from facility to facility.

One of the driving factors of my recovery journey was to work hard, to one day, be a resource to my sister Leilani, and work hard I did. 

After attending a conference for survivors who had also experienced extreme abuse, and realizing, goodness, their psyches organize just like mine, I canʻt be making this up, same psychology, same stories, resulting in the biggest denial block easing up. 

I noted that most of the survivors identified with their mental health condition. Something spoke to my heart and said, there is another path. An understanding blossomed that I could identify with my passion, my then sense of life purpose, and simply ignore the labels and the stigmas of complex-PTSD, and what was then known as a multiple personality disorder, and use THAT to be my healing drive.

For nearly a decade I had NO contact with my family, because the terror of connection, that they might still be engaged with the "cult" communities connected to both sexual trauma, trafficking, torture, with memory of medical experimentation. Yes, extreme trauma. A part of it, I realize, was racist in nature, and a part of it economic, things my parents felt were necessary to pay the mortgage and put food on the table. 

We all worked. My brothers sold golf balls. The daughters were sold for other things, all three of us, and the health issues were a consequence.