“Collage can be therapeutic,” he mumbled through sips of coffee. “It doesn’t have the stress of painting, and there is something about having complete control of the objects, even when they’re on the paper.”
Frankly, I thought of Tetris.
Four hours into the assignment, the mess started coming together. But it wasn’t enough. In front of me were the waste products of the semester. Receipts taken out of the trash, pills stolen from medicine cabinets, and Scan-Tron testing cards were glued to the board. It’s not making something out of nothing, I tell myself, it’s understanding. Dipping the wrong paintbrush in a deep black, I drew a figure on top of the collage. He wasn’t made of sticks, but created with awkward, overweight circles. Dan and Bethany identified it with a penguin, but they didn’t see the word self carefully covered, concealed in the array of text. Looking back at me from the canvas stood a man, face constructed of a McDonald’s receipt, waiting firmly in the American slush-pile.
Therapy is progress.
This piece I’m writing this semester in an honest reflection of growth and maturity. Though, to keep the jigsaw together, I am attacking the people once closest to me. I owe it to myself to fight ignorance. And it’s about cats…
Stage Fright 