ANDREW BURKE

Description: 
When I started thinking about what this piece would be, my young nephew was going through a phase where he was asking all sorts of questions about reality: he wanted to know what was real and what wasn’t.

It made me think about how porous that border between the real and the imaginary is when you’re young. As a kid, for me, the negotiation between the two was complicated by the fact that I had depersonalization- derealization disorder where you have these prolonged episodes where you dissociate, and you essentially feel like you’re dreaming. At the time, I had no term for this, and no one around me did either. It could be a very lonely feeling — feeling like you’re off in your own strange reality.

Looking back what it made me realize is how important it is to have validation from others on our own perceptions. Reality only feels as real what other people will agree upon. What You Thought I Thought might be thought of as a strange sort of lullaby across time to my former self.