motivation

At the start of this project, I was very intrigued by the topic of mending. When I was brainstorming for ideas, I thought about several good starting points related to metaphorical mending. One of them was

I am Lithuanian. I moved into the Netherlands for to study illustration a year and a half ago. Since I am a foreigner, it makes sense that I am feeling like an outsider. However, I realized that I feel that feeling in other parts of my life as well, even before I moved to another country.

Ever since I was a kid, I struggled with social anxiety, never quite fitting in with anybody. I was always the kid in the back, keeping to myself. In friend groups, I often felt like a third wheel. It felt like I was always living up to my surname as “the new one” (the root of Naujikaitė means new).

It was only natural that, when I moved to a different country, these feelings strengthened.

However, I didn’t quite know where I could start the “mending” of this problem. The topic was too broad, too all-consuming.

So, I decided to narrow it down to something to do with self-isolation.

Then I realized that I haven’t spoken to my friends back in Lithuania in months.

When I feel a lot of stress, I tend to self-isolate. It becomes very hard for me to reach out to other people, because I am bombarded with anxious thoughts. However, even when I come out of my stressed state, I have a habit of forgetting people. Even if I want to speak to my old friends back home, I get too anxious, too “I don’t want to be a burden”, too “what if I am bothering them?”, too “maybe I don’t matter to them anymore”.

The distance between us, which only increased as I moved to a different country, feels too vast.

So, I decided to breach that distance with letters.

In term 2.1, for an illustration project called “Taboo”, my project partner and I set up a “sorrow mailbox” – a mailbox where students in the academy could grab a form, write about whatever is bothering them at the time, whatever thoughts they feel they can’t share with others, and “mail” it to sorrow mail. Then my project partner and I would read these letters and respond to them with a little drawing, which we put back into a pocket in the sorrow mailbox for the letter writers to take.

This whole project I was fascinated with the physicality of sending and receiving something. In these corona times (and even before then), when everything is online and digital, receiving a physical response, a physical reminder that somebody is thinking of you, is very personal and intimate. It affects us differently.

So, my idea for this mending project was to write letters to several of my friends, trying to express my thoughts and feelings for them, and then send them. I am not very experienced with letter writing (in fact, I don’t think I ever sent a letter by mail), so it is a new experience for me.