Within The Eastern White Cursed Mind

Creator’s Statement -The Eastern White Cursed Mind

The Eastern White Cursed Mind came to life because I first had to live it.
This graphic novel is a symbiosis of every self I have come to embody through my lived experience: mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. It continues a conversation I first began with myself through Eastern White, my autobiographical animated short film, which I wrote, directed, and produced.
Eastern White was born from a need to process and externalise my experience as a first-generation immigrant from a developing country in Eastern Europe. It explores homesickness, loss, grief, fractured identity, racism, political instability, and the peculiar fragility that emerges when language itself becomes a barrier to connection. It is a work about displacement, but more importantly, about what displacement does to the architecture of the mind.
Making that film became an act of healing. It allowed me to clear space within myself, to open the crowded rooms of my mind that had become filled with years of accumulated memories, contradictions, and unresolved emotion. Some things we carry cease to serve us, yet continue occupying space. To welcome something new, room has to be made intentionally. I value the unexplored, so through that film I invited myself, and, in turn, the audience, to begin decluttering together.
The Eastern White Cursed Mind follows that same philosophy, but reaches further inward.
I am making this book first and foremost for myself. It is an opportunity to sit longer with the guests gathered around the table of my mind, the many selves that continue to coexist within me. They are family: old and new members of the same bloodline. Some are ghosts of who I once was; others are fully embodied versions of who I am still becoming. They argue, comfort, interrupt, contradict, and mourn. Their voices echo beneath my own, carrying grief, humour, tenderness, fear, and desire. Their conversations shape not only my inner world but inevitably the world I create outside of myself.
I believe that the more honestly we confront our own truth, the more sincerely our work can approach the rawness of life.
To me, art is both a process and a destination. The strongest work often comes from a place that is unapologetically personal. Every piece asks us to carve something from ourselves, sometimes with precision, sometimes by tearing away imperfect handfuls of what no longer belongs. It is an act of removing what has begun to rot so that wounds can close, heal, and make room for a lighter version of the self. There is something profoundly artistic in the desire to understand what remains when flesh is separated from soul, and soul from flesh.
Self-exploration asks us to step beyond the physical body, if only momentarily. It asks us to inhabit the immaterial, to examine what has accumulated, intertwined, and overgrown within the tissue of the mind. In doing so, we begin an act of alchemy, transforming both body and soul through honest observation.
The Eastern White Cursed Mind is the continuation of that alchemy. It is not simply a story I want to tell, it is one I need to uncover. If readers recognise fragments of themselves within these many selves, then the conversation that began with me will no longer belong solely to me.