This is going to get personal. And maybe heavy. In May of 2017, when I was 30 weeks pregnant, someone shot into our home - straight through our newly painted nursery and into the back of our bedroom wall (we were unharmed). The week that followed this incident was full of doctor evaluations (to make sure the stress of the shooting didn't cause any harm to my baby) and police investigations in and beside our home. My OBGYN, in an effort to calm me down in her office after the shooting, told me, “Honey, women get pregnant and give birth in war-torn countries - you will be ok.” Those words really stuck with me and made me realize that my situation sucked, but there are other women doing this motherhood thing in far worse conditions than I. So, I started to document the events after the shooting using photography as a way to try to grapple with my loss of control over the period of time I expected to be nesting. 6 weeks later, I started therapy and the week after that, I gave birth to our son, less than 24 hours after we had finished painting the nursery for the second time. My therapist, knowing that I was an artist, encouraged me to use art to help me process everything. We stayed away from any news media about the event; however, I knew that I needed a safe way to put my story out there as soon as I could so that I wouldn't feel like a victim of my circumstances anymore. In October of that year, the PA Governor's Awards for the Arts came to Lancaster, and the city of Lancaster had lots of special opportunities for artists to get involved. I decided to make and enter a piece that visually discussed how I felt about entering motherhood with PTSD into the Untitled Lancaster 10x10 show at Levengoods. I remember I picked up my 10x10" panel after our second court date since the incident. It was definitely difficult to balance being a new mom while working on this piece, but PTSD kept me up a lot of the night when I should have been sleeping anyways, so I wasn't really missing out on anything to get the work completed in time for the show. I have to say, it felt really good, but also very scary, to put myself out there like that, but it definitely needed to be done. I think I'm going to continue to use art as part of my healing process and mental health
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