New Jersey woman Michelle Pecorini has spent her life painting her own artwork, and she’s had to overcome a long and storied history of mental illness.
In fact, Pecora has been hospitalized several times since the age of 13.
She was once diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
Pecora told NBC News in a phone interview from New York that she’s spent her entire life dealing with anxiety and depression, but her life has been shaped by art.
“I’ve been a painter since I was 12 years old,” Pecorah told NBC.
“I had to learn how to draw, how to paint, how do I paint without a canvas, how does that work?”
Pecorani told NBC that she came into art through the love of painting, and in her early 20s, she began to paint in a way that was more self-conscious.
“When I started to paint my artwork, I would say, ‘You’re painting with my anxiety, and my depression, and the way I feel about life,'” Pecori said.
“So I wanted to get away from that and paint something more positive.”
As a child, Pechorani painted with a white canvas, which was meant to represent a world without borders, and her parents would often bring her to the doctor to ask if she was okay.
“You know, when I was younger, you know, it was just all about the painting, I guess, and I remember sitting in the hospital and my parents would just tell me, ‘Just get the canvas away from the doctor,’ ” Pecoro said.
“They just wanted to show me how beautiful this world is, and so they showed me that world, and when they took me home, they painted me this white canvas.
It’s the only time I ever saw that painting.”
Pecoro’s artwork was painted in her native New Jersey, where she grew up in a small town called Newark, New Jersey.
But it wasn’t until Pecoris younger years that she really began to understand the mental illness that had plagued her family and community.
“At that time, my mother was very afraid of the mental health community,” Pechora said.
She remembers the day she first saw a psychiatrist at the age 18.
“She was a young, young lady,” Pekora said, “and she just said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on.’
And I remember thinking, ‘Oh, my god, what am I doing?
I don’t want to see this guy.'”
Pecori says the first thing she noticed was that her mother had become very quiet and she felt that she didn’t belong in her community.
She said her mother began to struggle with eating disorders and depression.
“And I guess I was very scared of my mom because I had the same problems that she had,” Peca said.
Pechorini’s mother was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia.
“My mother, when she got diagnosed with the mental disorder, was very, very anxious and depressed,” Percora said.
“She started to talk to the counselor that she met with and she started to see that therapist who was a psychiatrist and she was very supportive of her mother.
But when the psychiatrist asked her, ‘Is there anything else you need to do?’ she said, no, I don, I have nothing.
So she left the room.
And she said that, you see, she had nothing, that she was not coping.”
The psychiatrist was not the only person who was questioning Pecorcini’s mental health.
“There were a couple of other people in the room,” Pocori said, referring to the psychologist who treated her mother’s mental illness, who said she had been taking antidepressants.
“She was not going to listen to my mother.
She would just look at me, like she was just another piece of furniture in the house.”
Percora says that was not helpful, and that her therapist told her that she would need to see a psychiatrist.
Pekora says Pecorelli’s therapist called her at home, and after a few phone calls, they eventually had a diagnosis.
“So we were like, ‘We need to talk,'” Pechori said of her therapist.
“And I said, OK, so I’ll call you back.’
And she called me back and said, I’ll be right there.””
I’m not here to be in this room with you,” Peporini said.
“‘Cause I’m not in this house with you, so you’re going to have to call your mom back.
So I said OK, I’m in the right place.
I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The therapist was a woman named Joanna.
She told Pecorici that she felt like her mother was “losing her mind
