The Box I Haven't Opened Yet – A Carotid Dissection and the Story Behind My Style

It started with a fall. Not a dramatic one. In ju-jitsu I was practicing a roll over another person and landed on my neck. I didn't hit my head, nothing looked bad, and afterwards I was basically okay. Just that quiet thought in the back of my mind: that was not good.

That's the creepy part for me now. It was such an ordinary moment.

Over the next two days I started feeling off. Dizzy, strange, not quite myself. Then everything happened at once. My eyelid started to droop. I had a migraine unlike anything I knew, my neck hurt, the left side of my body felt weird in a way I still can't describe properly, and one of my pupils was suddenly bigger than the other.

I went to the hospital. And then someone told me my carotid artery wasn't okay.

I remember hearing it and not really understanding it. I was moved straight to the stroke unit and hooked up to machines around the clock. Over the next days I got weaker and weaker. In the end, my carotid was 90 percent blocked.

Strangely, I still haven't really processed that time in hospital. I just couldn't make it real that this could end badly. My brain simply refused to go there.

Coming home was the hard part

Being home didn't feel like safety. In the first weeks the risk of a stroke was higher, so I was on strong blood thinners. I often felt really strange, and sometimes I had sudden dizzy spells. Those spells triggered panic attacks so intense that I ended up sitting on the floor, shaking.

In the first days I couldn't even walk 100 meters. Somewhere in there, I developed an anxiety disorder.

Then the foxes came

At some point I started painting again. The first things that came out were foxes. Foxes in the afterlife. They look quite young, and somehow that was what I needed. The paintings are sad, but they also have a calm to them, and maybe that calm was exactly what I was looking for back then.

When I started feeling better, the colors came back. Brighter, louder, sweeter. But the transience stayed. It was in every painting, even the cute ones.

That's when I noticed how much I love contrast. Life itself is one big contrast. Living and dying. Neurodivergent and neurotic. Sweet and rotten. Calm and panic in the same body, sometimes in the same afternoon. That tension is where Candy Decay comes from.

The professional feelings avoider

I'm writing this because I need to work on it again.

For a long time I sat on my couch like the cat in Not Today, The Feelings Are Huge: surrounded by comfort things, very professionally avoiding every feeling that came near me. And honestly, sometimes that's what you need to survive a while.

But I think it's slowly time to open the box. The one with all the things inside I haven't dared to look at yet. Not all at once, and not perfectly. Just the lid, for now.

If you're sitting on your own couch right now, avoiding your own box: same. You're not the only one.

If you'd like to read more about how this shaped me, there's How a Carotid Artery Dissection Changed My Art and How Art Helps Me Process Medical Trauma, Mortality, and Anxiety. And the cat lives here as a hand-signed print.