I am important respect me because I am.
All my life respect was a foreign concept to me, my parents did not respect me, hence I did not respect them and I never learned to respect myself.
Initially I sought respect by working hard at school, this along with the old fashioned box earring aid I wore and my lack of social skills resulted in me becoming a social pariah. In addition it failed to get me the respect of my parents, whatever I did fell short of what was needed, they constantly told me how I could have improved anything I did. Maybe this was meant to help but to me it felt like belittling my efforts that nothing I ever did was quite good enough. Which deep inside I translated to I was not good enough.
So I sought respect from the out group by becoming a rebel. Becoming sexually active, shoplifting, you name it I did it. But even the outgroup didn't accept me, I was named slut, whore, weirdo. With no self-respect I failed to gain the respect of others.
Even the men I married did not respect me, they needed me for a while, maybe in a childish way they loved me, but they did not respect me, Yet still I knew respect existed and I wanted to find it, to feel it.
And one day I realised that respect would have to come from within. I went back to studying, slowly becoming a stronger person. I gained formal qualifications, a degree, a post graduate qualification, I started building a business. Other people began to respect me but still I felt a fraud, felt that any moment now people would see beyond the mask, to the failure inside.
It took 2 newsgroups to help me start to open my eyes. One for recovering offenders which I visit to try and understand why and how both my daughter and I became victims and by understanding offenders better be in a better position to protect my other children. And the other for survivors of abuse.
The insights I gained over the months from these groups helped me to see that I felt like a failure, a fraud, because I was being fake, being dishonest to myself. That I had followed the path that I believed would be valued by my parents rather than the one that I desired to follow.
Slowly I got stronger, dropped the business all the trappings that prevented me from being true to me, and became what I wanted to be, a stay at home mum. spending far more time discovering and expresing my creative side. Slowly discovering that I have dreams of my own. That I deserve respect not because of who or what I am. But simply because I am.
I lose sight of that often, but I always get it back, I struggle with self respect but as I nurture this fragile plant it grows daily. But only when I give myself the freedom to be me. Staying true to myself and my dreams.
I always find it easier to work on any aspect of myself when I can give it a visual symbol. Thanks to the strange combination of colour and concept for this project I can now visualise my self esteem metaphorically as a young tangerine tree, If I deny it food, or bind it's limbs by denying or refusing expression to my creativity then it will wither or grow malformed. whereas if I continue to nourish it with the food it desires and expose it to the sunlight it will continue to grow and will produce sweet fruit.
About The Project
As soon as I saw the project I started to write about respect. I decided I wanted the writing to be an important part of the project and the image I was going to try and create was suggested directly by the writing.
I started by sketching the tree that I could see from my front room window, I then scanned in this sketch, traced over it in psp and digitally coloured the tracing. For the leaves I created a tube using a teardrop shape and several colours of green, I traced around the outline with the tube and used the tree I could see as a reference as to where the leaves should be denser and where more sparse. The tangerines were just tiny orange and red ellipses.
I chose to portray the tree on a tiny island in the midst of a sea of water to symbolise how my self respect grew amidst a sea of confusion and despair taking root on just the tiniest piece of solid ground. I used Flaming Pears flood filter for the water.
I drew the clouds with an airbrush set at varying densites and opacities, starting with quite a deep grey and working up to white
I finished the image with a sunburst effect to represent self esteem and respect being nourished by positive actions and input
