Our featured artist for May is Cory Ruiz. Here is the artist’s story in his own words.
"When I was a baby, my mom left me at the hospital. Growing up my life was so hard, going from foster home to foster home—I was in a total of 32 of them. I have been adopted twice, and rejected both times. I was so confused that nobody really cared for me. My school years were so tough, and I went through Special Ed. I had severe depression and was suicidal for a while because of all of the pain inside of me from being mocked all of those years. People always called me retarded and stupid, and I am still dealing with all of this hurt today.
Over time I turned to drugs and booze to try and kill the pain that I was going through. But that did not work at all and I was really lost in my life with nowhere to run to and nowhere to hide. I decided to go to a men’s recovery program in 2009, and I graduated a year later. After some time I even got my own place! But a year later I started hanging out with the wrong crowd again, and started drinking and smoking crack pretty much every day. I stopped going to church because I had let other things control my life.
A friend of mine told me about the art studio at Heartside, and so I started to draw and paint. I hadn’t drawn since I was 9 years old, and it felt great to make things again! When I came in the studio, it made me feel really warm, like a big happy family. People would say ‘nice work!’ and it made me feel so good! My self-esteem improved and I started to look at the rest of my life. Now I am 5 ½ months sober and I am going to AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) and NA (Narcotics Anonymous) meetings once a week.
I’m getting to where I need to go, but there are still so many struggles in my life. It’s pretty sad that sometimes I feel like I can’t trust myself and I sure as hell feel like I can’t trust other people either. Right now I am dealing with depression and trust issues. But I am going to church every Sunday and started reading the Bible again. The major holidays are really hard for me to deal with, because I still wish I knew my real parents. I always picture my life as me coming home and telling them that I love them and telling them about the day that I had. It’s hard for me to sleep at night because of all of these things going on. I have so many questions for my family—about why they left me, why they didn’t care about me. Sometimes I feel like I don’t have confidence in myself, and at times I haven’t cared if I lived or if I died.
But right now I finally have God in my life again. I have art on the wall at the studio now, and have sold four pieces already. It feels so good to sell my work, and makes me feel like I have talent and gives me the confidence I have been needing. I feel like I can actually call myself an artist now! I am also just started going to college at GRCC to be a Substance Abuse counselor. For the future I’d like to find a girlfriend and get married, and be a counselor so that I can help others who struggled with the stuff I went through."
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