FINALIST 2018 Taylor A. Greene High School Contest

Fresh Coat of Paint by Jennifer Mouser

Genre: Nonfiction Sponsoring Teacher: Andrea Rodrigue, Berlin High School

I’m sick of the “yellow paint” mentality. Sick of paint chips, torn flower crowns, silvery scars, and Tumblr girls in their art journals begging to find their “yellow paint”. I’m sick of the “27 Club”, of romanization, of self-diagnosis, of

“problematic” culture. I’m sick of it.

Among all the famous tortured artists, Vincent Van Gogh seems to reign supreme with him allegedly eating yellow paint to make him happy, finding the colors, bright and wonderful, would curb the darkness within him. Young girls online write about finding their “yellow paint”, finding the very thing that will make them beautiful, or often use the “yellow paint” metaphor to speak of something they love so much that just consumes them. Googling it reveals a plethora of artists scribbling “find your yellow paint” with wonderful designs and paragraphs beside them. People regard it to love, saying

“you’re my yellow paint”, referring to the person as someone who destroys them yet makes them happy. They draw sunflowers, they make poems, they drown in their romanizations, drown in poetry, drown in their symbolism.

Paint stains their fingertips and bleeds onto their work. I stumbled upon it accidentally, but I found Alexandra Timmer and, by far, her poem was the most famous as she wrote, “If you were so unhappy that even the strangest ideas could possibly work, like painting the walls of their internal organs yellow, then you’re going to do it. It’s no different to falling in love or taking drugs. There is a greater risk of getting your heart broken or overdosing, but people still do it everyday because there was always a chance it could make things better. Everyone has their yellow paint” (Timmer). And while this is poetic and written all over Tumblr and Reddit, I think it’s utter bullshit.

Vincent Van Gogh didn’t eat yellow paint because he wanted to be happy. He ate yellow paint to die. During his stay at Saint-Remy institution, Dr. Peyton wrote that Van Gogh was trying to kill himself. He wasn’t allowed in studio, because he wanted to kill himself, teeth stained with yellow paint, organs rotted with lead, and turpentine flowing through him.

Yellow paint wasn’t his wonderful escape into a poetic void of happiness and opportunity. Yellow paint was his noose.

The romanticization of mental illness in our society is absolutely ridiculous. Once upon a time, mental illness was a terribly stigmatized topic. Now, the sting of it has arguably died down. I would know first hand. Mental illness runs in my blood, thick and painful. A ticking time bomb for those who are unlucky.

I was diagnosed at fifteen like my aunt with the very same disorders she possess yet. They misunderstood my aunt.

They placed her in institutions just for expercining grief. But, today, they understand me. Finally, I live in a society where individuals are telling me to come forward, telling everyone that it’s okay. I am given medicine without being bashed for it.

I am given treatment on my own schedule, on my own terms.

Two generations, each with different care, different scars of society on our soul, but, without a doubt, I believe my treatment has been much better. My aunt would certainly agree.

Now antidepressants are plentiful, soaring 65% in the last fifteen years as of 2017, psychology is considered a growing field estimated to grow 19% by 2024, and treatment is becoming more readily available. For me, these are good things. Finally, people are getting the help they need. Finally, people are coming forward when they need it. These are things that give me hope as I look at our society, but what doesn’t, what dashes my mood, is the “yellow paint” mentality.

And all I want to do is scream, because this mindset, this romanization, is so hindering. Don’t find your yellow paint.

Find a therapist. Find help. Find positivity. You do not want to love something so much it destroys you. You want to love something that makes you better, that builds you up, that makes you unstoppable.

I’m listening to “Higher” by Rihanna, feet kicked back, in a silver truck with a friend, Siobhan, next to me, and we are light and content with being American teens and the adrenaline of youth and the taste of blue raspberry italian ice on our tongues. Days like this leave me feeling a deep bittersweetness. If I had taken my life a few years ago, I wouldn’t have days like this. If I didn’t have hard days, I wouldn’t appreciate days like this. Things really do get better.

Lana Del Rey, a young singer known for an image revolving around sweetness and flower crowns but underlying darkness, sings into our speakers, into our ears. I’m not the biggest fan of Lana Del Rey, but “Don’t Let Me Be

Misunderstood” is playing and I nod supportively until

Siobhan changes the music after a beat, a sour look to her face.

I had been ranting about Amy Winehouse, dark beehive hair and thick eyeliner and pension for drugs and alcohol. I had been ranting of the tragedy of her death at only 27 years old to alcohol abuse with hit songs like “Rehab” under her belt and top of the charts. With the conversation still fresh on her mind, she turns to me for a brief second before her eyes return to the grey of the pavement.

“You know the 27 Club?” she says. I do know the infamous so-called club. It’s a series of singers, like Amy Winehouse, who had made it to only age 27 before dying. The main causes of death are typically drug overdoses as fame and its poison eats them alive.

I nod, and Siobhan continues, “Well, Lana Del Rey said in an interview that she wanted to be a part of it,” She must know my face is marked with horror, because she goes, “I know. I know. It’s horrible. And you know Kurt Cobain?”

Another tragic victim to the 27 Club. I nod again. “Well, his daughter reached out and said please don’t say that, that’s a horrible thing to say, and his death was really hard to deal with. And I get it Lana’s brand, but--”

“But she has young impressionable girls listening to her,”

I finish her sentence with the same grave understanding. With research, it’s easy to find the statement. She said it during an interview with The Guardian, saying exactly, “I wish I was dead already,” (Rey). I wonder if these are the words of a depressed artist or the words of aromatizer. Regardless, an uncomfortable feeling has edged it’s way into my gut. Dying young has been a fascination of the music industry and especially artists for a long time, and it’s no surprise, but this is the “yellow paint” mentality leaching into our artists, into our songs. And with it in our songs, it tracks and finds itself into the mind of the impressionable, and there’s nowhere better to see that impact than Tumblr.

The social media Tumblr is a cesspool of teenage girls and guys discussing their most private thoughts. With the anonymous blogging feature, teenagers can come out, can experiment with pronouns, can discuss events of racism and discrimination, and speak out on their innermost personal thoughts regarding mental health. It’s a liberal dream world.

With most teenagers having an account, it’s perhaps one of the only social medias in which you do not tell the world of it.

It remains a guarded secret. As random individuals of the internet follow you, the idea of someone in real life following your account can lead you to drastic measure like deleting your account at three in the morning in a blinded panic. It’s a weirdly personal thing to know a person’s Tumblr, but as I scroll through tonight I wish I knew the people who had wrote these anonymous posts. As part of my routine, I decide to go under the tag “mental health positivity” for some support and self-care tips. It’s nice when you don’t feel alone, but I am bombarded with messages that are not positive in the slightest but are tagged as such. I see messages like “I don’t know why I have to stay alive if I’m going to live forever sad” by a user going by long-sleeves-and-deep-cuts. I see self-care tips that are damaging, the romanization of alcohol abuse and drugs, people finding an aesthetic value to pictures of self-harm ignoring the dangerousness of it, and people wallowing in the darkness that builds up in them.

And I can’t help but think what if someone had gone to this site for help, had gone and searched “mental health positivity” because they were having a bad day and needed help, and instead they saw this, they saw long-sleeves-and- deep-cuts’ poetry and pictures of self-harm and a chorus made up of teenagers screaming into a void, screaming their anguish.

It’s important to talk about mental health issues. We need to talk about it. We can’t have people suffer in silence.

We’re past that as a society, but I think we are now at a point in which we must not just talk about mental health issues, but be able to appropriately discuss the severity of it and ways to help. We should not discuss it for the sake of talking about it. We should discuss it to educate, discuss it to help, discuss it to spread positivity. Let the “yellow paint” mentality chip away. We as humans deserve so much more than to wallow in the sadness. We deserve to understand the difficulty but understand that a mental disorder is not a death sentence. It’s an obstacle to go through, but things get better. We shouldn’t romanticize the struggle but praise the treatment.

So let’s put a new coat of paint to mental health awareness, because it’s important to leave this world better than we left it. Let’s leave the next generation with a better mental health care system and awareness than the one we have. We must continue to improve, continue to improve the way it has before, because, otherwise, what is the point to all this discussion and all this awareness? We must do better. We must be better. Not just for the future generation, but for ourselves because we deserve it. We deserve for things to get better. And things are going to. They have to.

Works Cited

“#63/125 Did Van Gogh Eat Yellow Paint Thinking That It Would Raise His Spirits?” Van Gogh Museum, www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/125-questions/questions-and- answers/question-63-of-125.

“A Quote by Alexandra Timmer.” Goodreads, Goodreads, www.goodreads.com/quotes/7464000-vincent-van-gogh-used-to-eat-yellow-paint- because-he.

“Exploring 3 Growing Fields in Psychology.” Exploring 3 Growing Fields in Psychology – Capella University Blog, www.capella.edu/blogs/cublog/3-fields-to-pursue-with-psychology- degree-online/.

Jonze, Tim. “Lana Del Rey: 'I Wish I Was Dead Already'.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 12 June 2014, www.theguardian.com/music/2014/jun/12/lana-del-rey- ultraviolence-album.

“Long Sleeves And Deep Cuts.” Long Sleeves And Deep Cuts., long-sleeves-and-deep-cuts.tumblr.com/.

Mundell, E.J. “Antidepressant Use in U.S. Soars by 65 Percent in 15 Years.” CBS News, CBS Interactive, 16 Aug. 2017, www.cbsnews.com/news/antidepressant-use-soars-65-percent-in-15-years/.