In the past months, the situation in our country didn’t help with my distress. Social media, news channels, and newspapers showed so much apathy and hatred, that it triggered anxiety. I started waking up in the middle of the night from chest aches. But through it, I started following more people and artists who spoke about revolution and change. About solidarity. I read boards people carried to protests and heard the slogans. It raised goosebumps on my skin and filled my chest with so much pride. To see people standing up for each other, for themselves, through fear and cold, gave me the strength to keep at it, doctor medicine food ache. And slowly, it mattered less what was going to happen, it mattered that I kept at it. I had hands to hold, shoulders to lean my head on, and people to yell slogans with.
Did you know that the sunflowers face the sun and when they can’t find the sun they face each other?
We don’t know precisely what Van Gogh’s illness was, but it had a huge impact on him. He tried to get better, admitted himself to a psychiatric hospital. The society looked at him scornfully, wanted him gone far. Things, hospitals, medication, people, helped and stopped helping again. Between episodes, he did his best to pick up the threads of his life. Throughout his life, he wrote letters to his brother who stood by him through thick and thin. “I well knew that one could break one’s arms and legs before, and that then afterward that could get better but I didn’t know that one could break one’s brain and that afterward that got better too.”
To Theo (his brother) from Arles, 28 January 1889
Hannah Gatsby
“Do you know why we have the sunflowers? It’s not because Vincent van Gogh suffered. It’s because Vincent van Gogh had a brother who loved him. Through all the pain, he had a tether, a connection to the world.”