My name is De'Janay Rootues,  I  am 34 years old, I have three amazing children,  and an incredibly talented mother,  all that I love very and live for. I am applying for the Melissa Lewis scholarship,  because I am an emerging artist, I appreciate and love participating in Artability sessions in my community.

My mental health journey is far from over. Within the last 30 days, I’ve battled with finding resources to help me to move, because I’ve been fleeing domestic violence, criminal assaults,  which resulted in having to leave everything that I owned behind, for my family’s safety. No matter how unsafe my home was, nobody seemed to care or have any answers for me and my three young children, and we are now homeless.

The last holiday that we shared in that house was Easter. Even though I spent that day feeling hopeless and defeated from being violently stabbed the night before, my children found comfort from all of the crafting projects that I had prepared for them in their Easter baskets. “Mommy, can you help me with this?” snapped me out of my constant daze and helped me to focus on loving my family. That day, art pulled me out of a deep depression, followed by fleeing to my mother’s home for safety.  Which was a one-bedroom apartment, full of art supplies, crafts, and my old paintings hung on the walls; it reminded me of the talent that I used to have. As anxiety and depression set in, my mother watched me melt away. She fought back with a $3 paint kit from Target.  She said, “I got you something. “Her sing-song voice rang out through the darkness I was trapped in on her couch.  It was a color-by-number canvas butterfly.  It took her three days of prompting me to start and on the last day, when my broken heart felt the weakest,  I decided a Black butterfly would be better than the numbered art they created. I finished in less than an hour and finally felt accomplished again.

I looked around my mother’s home and remembered how talented I am…not was. Most of my paintings and greatest creations were always fueled by my pain, anxiety, joy or some type of trauma I’ve experienced.  Art therapy was introduced to me while I was inpatient care at Fairview hospital when I was a teenager they had everything there to use for art. My mom still has my “Pair of Dice” painting of a tropical landscape, which I created while I was in middle school.  Every since then I have learned to use art as an outlet or escape mechanism from torment and trauma bonds. I release and cope with the process often, starting off with crying myself into a deep focus, into a proud, happy, confident, accomplishment once finished. Art has saved my life multiple times. It's kept me from self-harming, from harming others, and taught me how to cope in ways that my African American culture isn’t used to. They're not too hip on mental health in the Black community where I live. It seems like they are just starting to seriously acknowledge that mental health exists outside of developmental delay diagnosis. So most Black people are still learning about all of the different disorders that they suffer from, thus, they couldn’t phantom how to identify, cope with or get treatment for them.

My goal one day is to teach art therapy to others, young and old, and open an inpatient and outpatient community-based facility in our community that implements group strategies and personal plans that work in our healing process.

Art therapy has brought me greater coping skills, hope, and peace than any pill or psychological session that I’ve ever been in, because this is what works for me.

De’Janay Rootues Artability 2025