A Trip Into My PTSD Spaces

In an advanced typography course, I got to do a project that married type and image. I was exploring my sexual assault in my print work, and decided to use this project to explore my PTSD and the memories I was experiencing at the time. I played with type and making it either depict my emotional state, or interact with the imagery in an interesting way. 

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I chose to style this project after a children's book, specifically taking from the Little Golden Books. As with traumacore art, I wanted to explore juxtaposition as well as my experiences. I first worked with black and white to make sure the work functioned on some level, but when exploring color, I felt it did not work. Color can be hard to work with, and while I would have liked to make it work contextually, it just did not. One of the important things, the inversion of black and white on a few of the spreads, lost it's impact when color was added to the rest of the project. 

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When exploring being sexually harassed as a kid, I wanted to highlight certain words, as to give them the weight and power they had at the time. The words "gay" and "faggot" as well as the phrases about rape needed to be emphasized. I wanted to give special treatment to the phrase "I pushed you over, and shoved my dick in your ass, and you liked it." This particular quote has haunted me, bouncing around my brain. I felt arcing the words between a rabbit's ears worked well. The words are not ones a 10 year old should have had to hear directed towards them, so emphasizing that through the ears felt right. 

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For my sexual assault, I didn't want to hide it or avoid it. This was about my PTSD, the flashbacks I experience. I was forced to relive my rape over and over, and I wanted to show it. Be explicit, not hide or downplay what happened. I talked with both my therapist and my professor to make sure this was the right move for both my mental health and my grade. Inverting black and white highlighted the actions of my rapist, as he pushed me down towards his crotch. I wanted to show the confusion, thus I inverted the text, making it hard for a reader to read it. and then, with the turn of the page, everything goes black, as it did for me, with my horrifying realization set in place. I didn't need any image on this spread, the simple words are shocking enough. With the rape itself, I chose to make some words replace the line work where my mouth was, forcing the reader to look directly at it. There was no looking away for me. I could feel it in my mouth. 

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After that memory ends, the text is bowed downwards, as if a heavy weight is set on top it.