RENÉE UBA, BA
Renée Uba is a graduate student at the University of Southern California completing her MS in Marriage and Family Therapy. As an undergrad, she double-majored in Psychology and Studio Arts because she did not want to miss out on either path. Little did she know her identity as an artist would be the bridge between them both. She is currently a trainee and falling in love with the therapeutic process. Her work tends to explore themes of Blackness, identity, intimacy, connection, mental health and wellness (all of which - she would argue, are inextricably interconnected). Although much of therapy occurs in dialogue, she often prefers to say more through images than she does with words.
Mentally (Ill)uminated
(Giclée Print, 40” x 60”)
An excerpt from Mentally (Ill)uminated
The first time she attempted to take her own life was at nine years old. You may think nine sounds a bit young, but how old were you when you had to sit with your first bout of negative emotions? A decade would go by before she would be diagnosed with her first mental health condition.
A second decade would go by before she would begin to master the practice of self-love. You see, she had unwittingly learned that self-preservation was the modus operandi and that it looked like cultural assimilation, which expressed itself as an identity disturbance, which resulted in a deeply misaligned internal dialogue.
She read somewhere that most people spend the majority of their adult lives trying to rebuild the faulty foundations of their childhood. The thought of being in the majority did comfort her. However, the term “displaced anger” had taken root in her psyche as she began to unravel the societal pressures, which she had realized that she and so many around her had succumbed to.
She began to think that maybe the anger directed inwards could be redirected towards the state of the Motherland, whose political, social and economic well-being, had been dismantled and manipulated for capitalistic gain.
In other words, colonization or colonialism, well it’s both really, but whichever you prefer, had left its mark way before she had even had a chance to appreciate the dysfunction that would be her saving grace.
p.24
#mentalhealthawareness #blackgirlshealing #trusttheprocess