As soon as I regained consciousness, the malodor of blood and the busted up battery of our Tesla hung in the air. The moment the car hit the ditch, I assumed that I, along with the rest of my family, was dead. Screams of my three-year-old cousin and grandma rang through my ears as I flung myself out of the car, inhaling the toxic fumes of the smoke that surrounded us. At that moment I didn’t cry, I didn’t scream, I didn’t talk as each pulsating breath became faster and faster; I just looked around in disbelief. After the dust settled, I glanced down at my white vans, swallowed in rivers of blood and debris.
Within the first week living in North Carolina, I bought myself a pair of crisp, new white Vans. Three weeks later, my first anxiety attack marked the first stain on my shoes and my mind: tarnishing my “new place, new start” mentality. I began to isolate myself from the rest of my family as they struggled to understand what I was going through due to their traditional upbringing in India, where mental illness is disregarded This was closely followed by hesitation to seek professional help, similar to the old beliefs of Victorian society: “put up a front to maintain a good reputation from others”. So there my new shoes lay in their shoebox, collecting dust until the school year started. However, distracting myself stopped these unsettling thoughts from clouding my mind. Weeks turned to months, and as I made more friends and directed my focus into classes, I began to understand how to cope with my anxiety.
That was until October came.
The image of the battered up metal wary towards the cemented ditch plastered itself into my mind that night. Suffocating feelings of guilt still hang over my shoulders today as I remember the cry of the ambulance that carried the night, the blaring red ER sign, the sinking feeling when I realized someone else suffered from my carelessness. The same anxious feelings I had felt weeks before introduced themselves once again but this time, more dragging and powerful than before. Ashamed and guilt-ridden, I isolated myself even further from those who cared about me. Expressing my feelings was difficult, especially with my parents, as their traditional mindset towards mental illness presented itself again. Although it was easy to mask them, it became difficult to find an outlet to unleash these buried feelings this time.
A curtain of dust and dirt lay over my once white vans as a reminder of the crash, however, I wore these shoes for the rest of the year like they were my second skin. Art became my outlet for expressing my feelings and my coping mechanism for my anxiety and trauma. Looking at my shoes, I saw opportunity. Opportunity to take something damaged and dirty and create the best version of it. That was the beauty of art: I had control over how it turned out. I painted my tarnished shoes with the Astroworld cover, an album defined by Travis Scott’s memories of a troubled childhood. Each stroke unblocked the repressing agony I felt and my feelings surfaced, allowing me to accept my mistakes and detach from my pain. I began to interpret music through artwork, as the loud sounds and bright, compelling colors of the album made it easy for me to unravel my overwhelming emotions. Music and art became physical manifestations of my emotions, giving me a healthy outlet to express them rather than continue to repress them.
No matter how wrecked I feel, I have control over my life. It is important to understand that our mistakes humanize us; all shoes start as clean but in the end, they all end up dirty. The difference is whether we throw them away or make them our own.