Screams, terror, and inescapable chaos.

What happens when you're trapped in a mind that tries to suffocate you? A mind where the ghosts of your past become your shadows, where thoughts of the future tighten like chokeholds, and severed hands you thought you'd cut off become your anchors.

You don’t want reality—you want peace. Your brain isn’t searching for truth; it’s searching for relief. So it departs. It dissociates.

When the Titanic sank in 1912, it was the band that played on amidst the chaos that fascinated me most. Remy the Artist’s painting “And the Band Played On” captures exactly that: the quiet resilience of continuing on when the world around you is falling apart. You just keep playing.

Dissociation is the essence of trauma and, for some, the necessity for survival. It’s how many keep functioning when everyone and everything around them and in them is running, screaming, crying, hyperventilating, breaking, sinking, drowning.

Dissociation is the band playing on