Why I do Art?

Before you read this, understand that I am not seeking pity or sympathy. I am expressing the reason for my existence in this medium so you can understand my humanity and then form your own opinions. Those opinions are yours; they are not a reflection of who I am, though they are still appreciated.

You are welcome to share this—if and when we meet in person or through any other medium of your choosing—as I do not operate in black-and-white standards of good or bad. Those binaries are unequivocally not who I am. With that out of the way, let’s begin.

I have been asked many times why I do art, how I do it, why it is my primary objective, what my foundation is, and how I arrived at it. The list goes on endlessly. I do not really have an answer. I simply don’t know. It is as if art found me—more specifically, life drawing found me. I did not go looking for it. That has been the case throughout my life. Things find me, or feel familiar, long before I can describe them in language.

In recent years, I have been able to put words to this, as you may have read in the “About” section. But if we go back to the beginning, I cannot describe its origin. To understand this, we have to go back to the start of everything.

As a child growing up in India, I had no language—not in the sense of vocabulary, but in the sense of inner articulation. I was educated. I attended a private British boarding school. I was meant to become the “golden child” of my family—the one who carried respectability, honour, and image into the next generation.

I was none of those things.

I was shy—almost paralyzingly so. I was hypervigilant. I had discernment: the ability to see through people, to understand who they are beneath what they present, where they are in their lives, regardless of appearances. I have had this since childhood. How, why, or when it developed, I don’t know. It is part of my personality. It has often been labeled as “intense” or “too forward.” In the past, that bothered me. Now, I have embraced it.

People need definitions to understand the world. From my perspective, so be it. Their definitions are not mine. They do not define me. This shows up in my work and in how I speak with others. Some people love it. Some feel exposed or truly seen. Some hide or run. Some carefully calculate how to engage. I get all of it. I do not take it personally. In the past, I did—but we will get to why that changed.

I have no memory of my early childhood. From birth to roughly age eleven or thirteen, there are gaps. I would look at photographs from that time and ask my parents, “Who is this person?” They would laugh it off. When I asked again, I would be ridiculed or met with anger, told to stop being absurd. But the feeling grew stronger. I looked around at the people in my environment and felt that I did not belong. They were strangers I simply lived among.

During that time, I had recurring dreams: two hands pushing me off a high-rise building. As I hit the ground, I would wake up drenched in sweat. This happened on and off for about a year. Alongside this were persistent thoughts—call them words, sensations, or impulses—that I did not belong here. Not with these people. Not with who they were. Not even on this planet. It was relentless.

This is how my blueprint—my operating system—was formed. Without language.

I mentioned earlier that I was paralyzingly shy. The anxiety was overwhelming. I also had a stutter. Speaking felt like a life-or-death event. My heart would pound, my hands would sweat, my breathing would escalate, and I would feel dizzy, on the verge of fainting. This happened constantly. Panic attacks were frequent. The pressure from my parents—especially my mother—only intensified it.

I came from an upper-middle-class family. Expectations were high. Performance was required to be validated as a human being. I performed to survive, to avoid my mother’s wrath. In India, if you have the means, you can do almost anything to a child—or to another human being.

And she did.

She used violence: regular beatings, delivered however she chose. She used silence as a weapon. She used confinement, locking me in darkness for absurd lengths of time. She humiliated me in front of others to force compliance. This went on throughout my childhood.

I thought I had escaped when I went to boarding school. And for a while, I had. Even though there was corporal punishment, humiliation, and public embarrassment, it was still preferable to what I experienced at home. But it did not last.

A regional conflict broke out where we lived. Terrorist groups were demanding independence. My father was sent abroad. He was never the decision-maker in our household; that role always belonged to my mother. I was taught to be strong, not to express vulnerability, not to be weak. “What happens in the house stays in the house.” Obedience. Silence. Compliance. Do not be a problem. The list was endless—and absurd.

With martial law imposed, our main source of income—a sawmill—was handed over to my step-uncle. My father instructed him to share the income so we could survive. He didn’t. He had an ongoing feud with my mother over land, property, and power. He cut us off completely. He would walk past our house and spit on it almost daily. If I looked at him, he would scream at me, demanding to know what I was staring at.

As a child, I was powerless. He was stronger. He had resources. I did not. We starved. My mother had to call my father in Canada to send money so we could eat at least once a day. The fighting between her and my step-uncle was constant—almost daily.

School made no sense to me. I rebelled against it and against her. Under pressure and stress, she responded the only way she knew how: violence. This lasted for five years. I, in turn, took it out on my siblings. I once severed part of my brother’s finger. I punched my sister when she mocked me.

At the same time, I became suicidal—though I didn’t have the language for it. I punched walls. I rode my bicycle through traffic without brakes at full speed. I provoked fights with my mother to feel something familiar. Then I would shift into people-pleasing to restore a fragile sense of safety.

My hypervigilance escalated. I studied her—every micro-expression, every movement, every energetic shift—often before she herself was aware of it. That is how I was forged. This is where my attachment patterns were formed: the push-pull dynamic of a disorganized or fearful-avoidant attachment. I would feel drawn to someone, then subconsciously push them away once emotional closeness triggered my nervous system. I would be shocked by my own behaviour, then trapped in my head, intellectualizing everything.

I learned to believe that love was conditional—that it came through performance, pride, and approval. I lived in my head throughout childhood and adulthood. I shut down my emotions because they felt unsafe. I chased validation because I had never learned how to generate it internally.

This pattern continued in Canada. There were happy moments—I am not claiming everything was bleak—but this was the foundation of who I became.

I hated being fully seen. I hated people telling me who I was, trying to help me, or asking about my past. That exposure came with shame—shame ingrained as a condition of my existence. I ran from closeness. I sabotaged jobs, relationships, opportunities—over and over again.

I performed to be liked while keeping people at arm’s length. Emotional closeness felt suffocating. I avoided anything real because I could not tolerate myself. The world mirrored that back to me.

I sought emotionally unavailable partners—like me. When someone said they loved me, I froze or fled. Even in Canada, the war with my mother continued. She became more controlling, more critical. She couldn’t hit me anymore, so she used words: I wish you were dead. I wonder why you were even born. She hung up on my friends. She used shame and control relentlessly.

I left home around twenty-one or twenty-two, emotionally underdeveloped, still struggling with speech. I introduced myself using my last name. Public speaking, relationships, and visibility of any kind terrified me. I gravitated toward others who were hurt, who performed, who were emotionally unavailable. Authenticity existed in me—but I had not yet embraced it.

Everything shifted when I was expelled from high school. I lived with friends whose lives were destructive. Watching them made something clear: this was not my path. A voice—persistent and undeniable—told me I needed to go into the arts. I enrolled at Sheridan College, writing an adult entrance exam that I likely failed, yet I was accepted anyway.

At first, I couldn’t draw. Stick figures. My instructor suggested I switch to computer science. I laughed—loudly, involuntarily. Even I was surprised by it. A week later, I started drawing nude models. As if I always could.

That was the beginning of my healing.

I could go into the rest of that journey—how I moved from avoidant to secure—but that is a conversation best had in person.

Looking back, I once saw my mother as monstrous. I had to forgive myself first before I could forgive her. We no longer have a relationship, but I have forgiven her—not forgotten, but made peace. I understand now that she passed on what she was given. I chose to stop the cycle.

I will not pass this pain forward. What I can pass on—if others choose to learn—is my capacity for pattern recognition, hypervigilance, and real-time perception.

I did not write this for closure or validation. I made peace with myself long ago. I wrote this so people don’t mistake perception for mystery or intellect. I read deeply because literature captures human existence in its rawest, unperformed form. That honesty brings relief. It mirrors my own journey—and the person I have become.