Now I Know! - An Artistic Search for Borderline Personality Disorder
My name is Josie Koznarek. I am an artist. I’ve known that all of my life.
My name is Josie Koznarek. I have Borderline Personality Disorder. I figured that out six months ago.
Sometimes it takes a person longer to learn certain truths about themself than others. But usually, once they figure it out, they can pinpoint signs of it all along their life’s journey.
I’ve always known that I’m a very emotional person, and that I express my emotions much more openly and intensely than other people. I also knew that those emotions tend to pop up in my art in unexpected ways, which I’ve always enjoyed and appreciated about my own work.
But since receiving my diagnosis for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) this past July, it’s given me a totally new and extremely clarifying lens through which to look at myself and my emotions. And when I pointed that diagnostic lens toward all of the art I’ve made in the last five years, it’s been striking to see how my art carries the physical evidence of just how long I’ve been trying to pin down the
(Ephemeral, not really ephemeral, more like hard to grasp, the experience of experiencing emotions so intensely then no longer relating to them and then being stable then not at all stable but not being lucid enough to track your own fluctuations…)
befuddling experience of living with BPD, even when I had no idea what it was.
Let me show you some of what I’ve discovered looking back at three of my favorite pieces;
1. Sea
I consider this piece the start of my second artistic evolution, leaning away from quick ink sketches and tapping into more serious pre-planning and detail. Here we see the face of an anonymous white woman looking upwards through a rolling plane of flowers. All of the flowers are native to the plains of Illinois, and the fingers of a lightly outstretched hand can be seen surfacing near the left of the face.
In general, I make art pieces without thinking of my own personal experience. I make them because they “look cool” and “feel right,” then usually a year or so later I become conscious of what the piece was actually pointing toward in my unconscious mind.
When I made this piece, I was deeply involved in a church that was slowly going under. The pastor was found to have repeatedly bullied, shouted at, and manipulated other church leaders behind the scenes. As months of emergency leadership meetings dragged on, it became increasingly clear that the pastor felt that he had done nothing wrong.
Now that I know I have BPD, the unsurety of the expression on the face slowly sinking into flowers resonates deeply with this period of my life. The dissolving of my church and my Christian faith was slowly removing the mental structure that was keeping my undiagnosed disorder in check, though I certainly did not understand what I was going through.
“Lots of people recover from this kind of thing, and life is still so beautiful and worth living even without religion. But if that’s the case, where’s the bottom of this pool? I should be ok, so why don’t I feel so good? Is this normal? Should I ask for help?”
2. Equinox
The second piece features an anonymous East Asian woman floating almost vertically in a curving wall of flowers that extends to the right into tunnel-like darkness. The flowers featured were chosen for their meanings; blue roses for mystery, baby’s breath for innocence, and lotus and daffodils for new beginnings.
This piece was made for a gallery show that premiered around the Spring Equinox of 2020. By this time, the aforementioned pastor had worked around the church’s bylaws to close the church I was attending within 24 hours in late January, opting to notify the congregation only after he had completed this task.
I tried attending another church (shout out Wicker Park Lutheran Church), but Christianity wasn’t resonating with me anymore. On top of that, an apparently serious breath-transmitted virus was beginning to close in on the United States. It hadn’t reached us yet, but if it did it would probably impact the country for at least a few weeks.
In spite of all of this, I remember feeling mostly free, optimistic, and ready to step into the next chapter of my life. But “Equinox” tells a much different emotional story. A similar expression of mild confusion floats on the face of the half-submerged woman, hearkening to the tone of its predecessor “Sea.” The wall of flowers takes on a more active and overwhelming role as it coils around the subject, threatening to collapse or trap them there forever.
This imagery describes something beyond just feeling adrift. This is existential helplessness in the face of something I couldn’t quite figure out (spoiler alert, it was BPD). There’s obviously nothing you can do if you don’t know what the problem is, especially if you don’t know how to feel about it. But something had been cut loose all around me, and there was nothing I could do but ride it out.
3. Rest
This final piece features an anonymous Black woman in a red bathing suit resting in a clear circle float tube. She sips on a rainbow colored drink through a straw as she floats on a surface full of violets, chrysanthemums, daisies, and peonies, her feet clearly visible in the blackness below.
I finished “Rest” in December of 2020, and boy howdy had a lot happened in the world by then. Historic protests broke out in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and the pandemic took a frightening number of lives in its first nine months. In my personal life, I had just survived a dramatic friend break-up, and I began seriously considering therapy for whatever it was I was going through.
2020 pushed me to learn a lot about myself and the world as quickly as I could, and I am a better person for it. But at that point, the work of Tricia Hersey was resonating strongly with me; in a white supremacist culture that pushes for constant perfection and eternal output, “Rest Is Resistance.” Know what work you have to do, and when it’s best to put the work down.
It’s pretty clear looking at “Rest” that I still hadn’t figured out what the underlying thing going on was, though I had the wherewithal to tie the thought to my two previous pieces. These three flowerscapes have always been a trio in my mind, even if I never explicitly labeled them as such.
But “Rest” comes to a tentative conclusion within the trio’s thought process, a state of acceptance in the midst of beautiful but ominous circumstances. I wasn’t going to solve this mental mystery in a day, and this piece was my permission to take breaks and enjoy the little things as I continued to exist in the unavoidable in-between.
So there you have it! To me, these three pieces are some of the most explicitly linked art in my portfolio to the years of mental circling I did before landing on my BPD diagnosis in 2023. They are strongly informed by their own moment’s circumstances as well, which makes their interpretation all the more interesting to me.
Even though I now see my intense self-searching within these pieces, I also see a reaching for connection throughout them too. There’s a reason the individuals featured aren’t self-portraits or portraits of any kind; I wanted others to be able to relate to the emotional pictures I was creating. That way none of us had to be alone in our complexly lived experiences.
Yes writing that made me feel emotional. Because it’s honestly the most true motivation I had for making those pieces for myself in the first place.
❤️
The comments are open on this blog, so let me know what you think about these three pieces! What comes to mind when you look at them together? Which one do you relate to the most?
Any and all thoughts, I’d love to hear them, so sound off and let’s chat.
Tata for now, and I’ll tell you another art story next month,