My childhood gave me a very powerful sense of being spooked. I didn't know whether what I was seeing were sensory images of other people's unhappiness. Perhaps that was just the way the world manifested itself to me.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
When I was a kid, I used to see apparitions and have hallucinations, and my entire perception of the world was badly disoriented. And I had kind of a chaotic childhood because of that. I've really hung onto it, though. Because I actually like those feelings.
The spookiest thing for me is when I think I see something, and then nothing is there. I always imagine I see something, or I'll catch movement out of the corner of my eye, but nothing is really there.
I've always been drawn to spooky things, to the unusual, to things that are dark but in a friendly way.
As a kid, I was scared of losing my mind. In Terrell, Texas, where I grew up, there was a guy that would walk down the street talking to himself. And I used to watch him and feel uneasy. And there was a sanitarium where people would say, 'That's where all the crazy people go.' It really sort of frightened me.
As a child, I was consumed with a near-obsessive curiosity about what the world felt like for other creatures.
I had these experiences as a kid; I remember certain things happening in school that were horrifying that I would see, certain things of violence or certain things of cruelty, but around that, something might happen afterwards to cause everyone to laugh, and that always blew me away.
I'm always interested in the spooky repurposing of everyday things.
My mother had been blind as a child. And so, blindness was something that has long fascinated me, but also it's something I find really, really scary.
That thing of briefly losing sight of a child happened to me when the kids were younger, and you can't see them in the supermarket or wherever. It's a terrible, terrible moment... the most unimaginable horror.
Even as a kid, I saw the world in my own way and thought most things that were different were beautiful and magical. Even things that other people thought were horrifying and disgusting and weird.