Title: How my subconscious chose my living room art 3 years before I finally decoded my trauma (59 days in ICU/HDU)
Hey everyone, I wanted to share a pretty profound breakthrough I just had regarding my origin story and the trauma of how it all began.
The Crisis (21st June 2018) It started when I innocently walked into Aberdeen A&E, completely unaware that a sudden, violent medical crisis was about to fracture my predictable life into a million pieces. I was thrust into a high-pressure fight for survival that lasted 59 life-altering days across the ICU and HDU—navigating a dark, hallucinatory limbo where time had no meaning—before moving to Ward 206 and enduring three long years of rehabilitation and recovery.
The Subconscious Art Choice Fast forward to three years ago: my subconscious, carrying the quiet weight and memory of that immense trauma, guided me to buy three specific art prints simply because I "liked them." I had no idea why they called to me; they just did.
Connecting the Dots The true genius of the process unfolded just days ago when I finally sat down to transcribe my 60-page hospital diary filled with entries from my family and the nurses who kept me alive. By processing those raw entries, I realized the art had been a mirror all along. The images perfectly matched the three distinct stages of my survival:
Print 1 (Kandinsky's Several Circles): The deep, dark isolation and ICU delirium.
Print 2 (Pink Floyd's Dark Side Prism): The exact, violent moment of the medical emergency and surgery fracturing my life.
Print 3 (Neon Street Art Chimp): Moving to the wards, plugging back into music, and the raw, primal instinct to survive.
I just got the narrative professionally printed into a text block today, and tomorrow it’s going up on the wall right underneath the prints as an abstract monument to my journey.
I guess our minds process the trauma long before our conscious words catch up. Has anyone else found themselves subconsciously drawn to certain art, music, or symbols that represented your illness or surgery before you fully processed it?