This was a college project, The title was ‘Food’ & the aim was to create a set of 3 visual posters of what food means to you personally. I ended up going on an unexpected emotional journey with this project, as someone who has struggled with food their whole life this project really shook me up. For everyone in the class the thought of food filled them up with joy & happy memories, For me I was full of anxiety & dread & darkness. It took me back to my childhood where I couldn’t eat food because of the way it looked, or if it turned cold & when different foods touched each other. As a child I didn’t have the emotional intelligence to communicate why I couldn’t eat the humbling food that was sat before me, as a result I would get shouted at for not using a knife & fork or using my hands to pick off the parts of food that had been touched by the other food, this really irritated my farther (who I now see as having emotional regulation problems), I would receive verbal threats & loud shouting that would make me cry or feel sick, meaning I was even less able to eat. At times I would be made to sit at the table to finish my plate of food, I physically couldn’t, it is not that I didn’t want to, it was that I couldn’t, it was so frustrating as I was always hungry but paralysed by what was in front of me. This Project made me realise that I had disorder eating & always have, I ended up coping by picking up alcohol at the age of 14 & regularly using it to skip meals, this then led to drugs & cigarettes. For 20 years I had been doing this, although my eating did improve, I still used to avoid the stress when I couldn’t cope. Ironically doing this project led me to relive & process something I hadn’t had words for before & that ended me up in rehab last year (May 2024) for a month before college had even finished, but luckily I had already done enough work & got a distinction anyway. Now I am a year sober, imagine of what I will be capable of now.