I was not raised in comfort. My earliest memories are of a home ruled by fear — a father wrestling with bipolar disorder, a mother carrying the weight of silence, and a childhood where love often disguised itself as chaos. The walls of my house trembled with storms, and the neighborhood outside offered little mercy. It was a place filled with bullying, with problems that felt endless, and yet — those challenges became the forge that shaped me.

I am grateful for hardship. Grateful, because difficulty is not just suffering; it is instruction. Every scar is a teacher, every sleepless night a philosopher whispering, “This is how resilience is born.”

I left that city. I left that country. I crossed continents — more than three, more than four — walking in markets in Africa, tracing footsteps in the crowded streets of Europe, breathing the heavy air of Asia, and finally settling in America. Along the way I failed in businesses, lost money I did not have, but each mistake was an education. I studied art not in classrooms, but in the chaos of life itself.

Yet I did read — endlessly. Psychology fascinated me. I devoured the works of Carl Jung, whose exploration of archetypes still haunts me; Viktor Frankl, who taught that meaning is what saves us from despair; and even B.F. Skinner, whose strict behaviorism seemed to me both brilliant and terrifying. I found myself pulled equally by Freud’s unconscious and by the existentialists who argued that freedom is our greatest burden.

At the same time, I fell in love with art. Van Gogh was my first wound: a man who painted madness into sunflowers and skies that swirl like storms. Edvard Munch showed me that anxiety itself could scream on a canvas. I studied Impressionism, Expressionism, and the quiet geometry of Minimalism. Every school of art was a mirror to human struggle.

Eventually I arrived in New York City. It was winter. My pockets were nearly empty, the nights brutally cold, and I found myself sharing a small room with an African-American youth who told me stories of survival. That night I decided: I will never return to a psychiatric ward.

Months before, I had been discharged from St. Joseph’s Psychiatric Hospital, my body heavy with medication. For six months I swallowed pills designed to silence the storms of bipolar disorder. They helped many, including my father, who still depends on them. But for me, they felt like chains. Two years ago I put them down, and I have lived without them since.

I am not anti-medicine. I know medication saves lives. But I also know that not everyone belongs in that endless loop of pills. Psychology is larger than pharmaceuticals. Cognitive-behavioral therapy, lifestyle change, conversation, safety, community, and nature — these are medicines too. Yet the industry convinces millions that pills are the only path. It is a profitable lie.

ExitRoom101 was born from this conviction: that life is not a diagnosis, and art is not decoration. Art is survival. Art is philosophy painted on canvas. Each piece you see here carries both beauty and burden: the weight of depression, the isolation of exile, the fragile smile of a child playing in the rain.

I want to correct the myths. Not every person with mental illness is a genius like Newton or Van Gogh. And not every patient is a danger to society. Sometimes, a person with bipolar disorder is just a father, or a daughter, or a neighbor — trying to find safety in a noisy world.

I created this project to remind myself — and anyone who enters — that we can be grateful even for the darkness. Because it is the darkness that makes light meaningful.

ExitRoom101 is not just an online store. It is an archive of struggle, resilience, and human truth. I sell limited edition canvas prints, but I also sell fragments of my story, and perhaps fragments of yours.

If you are here, it means you are curious, searching, maybe even restless. My hope is that you find not just a piece of art to hang on your wall, but a reflection of yourself, your survival, your own forgotten names and shadows of December.

Because art does not decorate life. It saves it.