Donna’s Daddy revised to What Erika Wants to Talk About
Materials: Canvas, acrylic paint, frustration, appreciation for the effectiveness of visual aids, growth, peace, acceptance, a childhood steeped in the value of self-awareness and communication.
Dimensions: 30x40
Series: None
Year: 2023
Price: $3,333
It’s potentially embarrassing to share one’s relationship dysfunction but perhaps being afraid of sharing one’s truth is precisely why this diagram had to be drawn in the first place.
This diagram was penned into my notebook as an illustration, a visual aid if you will, for my then boyfriend. We’d been together for over two years and I still felt uncomfortable with the dynamics of our intimacy, or should I say lack thereof.
I needed to spell it out for him that the level and amount of things he discussed with me was unacceptable, and not just by my standards. I realized “I love this man and he wants to marry me, but I have more open and vulnerable conversations with total strangers than with him, this isn’t right”. So I started to draw what felt natural to me, what expressed the quantity of topics covered by different relationship groups.
The bar farthest to the left represents the amount of things my boyfriend wanted to talk about, the next bar shows the amount of things that strangers share, the middle bar showing the shared topics between friends, the bar second to the right being the typical relationship and all its intimacy and knowing of one another, and to the farthest right is the slightly more robust and deeper connection and intimacy level I strive for in a relationship (because I want to be able to know and care for my parter and all their facets down to their human core).
Needless to say, the gap between us was too vast for me (or him) to bend or meet in the middle. And when he finally began to try it was far too little, and way too late.