Crooked Growth

twisty spine like vine. Growing like you lean, move, walk. You are the operater? or the operated? I start physical therapy next week. The hip has not improved. I have put it off for six months but now I am like, okay, this needs to happen because I can't make it stop on my own.

I imagine my bones, but not as much as I used to. I am just not obsessed with them anymore, strangely. I would imagine them crooked and causing pain and now, I may still picture it, but the picture floats away and is replaced. Predictably, Flesh has become very enjoyable to paint. The stick souls still show up in my art, but painting layers of flesh has taken on a new life. a spark. We are a continuum, I reckon. Mind Body Brain Hand Canvas Soul. Sleep.

My dog is curled at my feet, a little piece of night sky, black and sweet.

I just imagine all thes butterflies fluttering around my head. While the wars wage and my work and bills pile up. It will all just be fine. Sometimes you have to make your own magic.

August Again

There is a delight in writing that only comes after banging ones head against a wall for weeks prior.  Refusal to just do it while that grey lump of brain insists...do it. The same with painting. you can resist but eventually you give in. And you drink. And you smoke because it is all tangled up together.

The therapist suggests I make lists. So that I can survive in real life and, like, know what day it is and do my job and pay bills. I forget things. Some sort of anxious mania takes over. buzzing and moving about. I should set up a schedule she says. But the thing is...i like the energy. Bc i get it so rarely and when i do, it just feels so good to be alive.

I've started walking. Jogging. My hip is bad. No doctor can tell me why, it just hurts. I suppose f'ed it up when I was not eating and running a million miles a day. I dont know. Take it easy take it slow. It is just five pounds, but it is five pounds that need to go.

I am painting the city. I didn't mean too. At first I painted the live oaks. But now it is the city and the bridge and that weird tragic dome. All patched up with the light show and all.  I need to sell these paintings. My bank account has dwindled to nothing. I dont even know why, its so frusterating to keep up with money. Numbers floating around, they come and go. Not as pretty as insects or leaves. Seasons and dollars measuring it all.

I am older. You will be too. You think you know honesty but when you become invisible is when you know the truth. and when it knows you.

Soul Implosion

This is the flyer I made for my Graduate show several years ago. I found it digging around in the digital ash of my past. I have decided to revamp  my other blogger blog, which is solely artwork with very little commentary.
If you are interested, you can follow me here  shawnaatkinsart.blogspot.com


I desperately want to keep this blog going, just lately it has been difficult due to job searches and my volunteer work at out animal rescue group.

I hope all of blog-land is peaceful......

Shake out the Ghosts

 i feel the keys beneath my fingertips....swirling.... words are senseless. I am at my parents house deep in the woods and when i am here i feel like I don't exist...like i have transferred to another realm. The only safe place on earth.
There are some things i have always suspected and one was that God didn't like me very much and the other one was that I was meant to be alone. Quite possibly, I made this up. Regardless, the adventure of The Self Fulfilling Prophecy can NOT be denied.

I have been writing stories in my head but they don't make it to paper. Or pixels. Stories about Stella and a chance meeting with an old friend at a cofeeshop downtown. In a town i have never been to. She criss-crosses an unsmoked clove cigarette between her forefingers in an effort not to smoke and has a sandwich in her purse in an effort not to eat. Over strong coffee she discussed the possibilities of a strange love that she has been denied. He leaves her alone with her sketchbook. In the story i can't decide if hot tears splash down her face, if a girlfriend texts her, or if she shrugs him off and sketches his stupid fading face.

So I just leave her there. Sitting at the table...with messy hair and a dark haired boy heading toward his car in the parking lot..after squeezing her shoulder on the way out. "Take Care, Stell" are the words he leaves her with.
Stella and her sister Gypsy Rose. Hanging out in my head reliving their childhood and their parents' death and the old pick up truck and the dusty road and countless fruitless love affairs...an overdose and  walks in the cemetery.

oh well. Sometimes i mash my fingers into my face to feel my cheekbones and jaw bones. My babyfat face has gone. Sometime in the past 4 years it flickered away. Sorry you didn't get to see it, she was a sweet girl. I feel my father in the bones in my face. My cheekbones match his. and I remind myself that i want to become Wise like him. and Just. and Fair.

In a few minutes, I am going with my mother. We are going to clean my grandmother's house. My grandmother is 90 years old and she is coming home from the hospital soon. My heart is heavy. I love her so much. She is 90 years old and she is tired and I know this.

Her father worked in the oilfield. and so did her husband. and her son. and so did my father. and my husband was supposed to, I'm sure, but i left without him. Left  the idea, i guess. It wasn't what I wanted, and hey, it's not my fault that he didn't exist. That times changed so fast and I wanted paint and poet and rock n roll. My future is so unknown. I want to go to New Mexico. The farthest thing i can imagine from a swamp. I have no idea what i am doing and i feel the past slipping away ..years, decades, a generation gone....the stories I forgot to gather have scattered away...i drip paint like tears down my face in an effort to remember what we have all lost.

I didn't fit the mold or follow the path. My heart pumps out love and hate like oil and water.

obsidian

Let me make one thing perfectly clear as obsidian.
I have no idea what I am doing....but I am glad.
My (godawful) job has taught me what i am NOT....and I don't fit in there and I am so HAPPY. If i can withstand this without gettin' bitter or losing my shit, then i can possibly, hopefully become a better person..right? RIGHT?
Making money has not ever been an obsession of mine...sorry I guess i'm a  bad capitalist. whatever. Maybe that is a luxury.... that i was able to not be obsessed with money but these suit and tie guys with there 8 jillion rules JUST FOR THE SAKE OF MAKING A RULE just depress the living hell out of me. How can we get anywhere meaningful? I made the mistake of an internal journey instead of an external one. But i will tell you one thing.
i am liking what i am finding...after i dug through the gore and pain...there is something in here. something worth saving.
inside of me.
s

You mean nothing to no one but that is nobody's fault.

"I had a lengthy discussion about The Power of Myth / With a post-modern author who didn't exist
In this fictitious world all reality twists / I was a hopeless romantic, now I'm just turning tricks"

In our last conversation she mentioned the word "empowerment" as a way to get through life

i had heard it and read it in all this therapy/recovery stuff. empowerment. It's like sometimes you skim

the words that can't apply..(which is why i always have to re-read.) It is an Action word. something you have to DO.

Move. Act. Change. Being really avoidant,...well its a problem. I'd almost rather be terrified, frozen, prepared and

ready to fight this imaginary THING. You can't see it and i almost always can't see it but I know it is there and I have to obsess and do all these THINGS to like starve, for instance, and count and place things and cover them (ocd what have you)

suddenly you drop all that and go join an Animal Rescue Program. And you are thinking that you neglecting a small dark world that

is SCREAMING and begging for you to return but you say NO. I am putting on normal clothes and brushing my teeth and going

to pay a bill. or sign up for a class. or join an acting troupe. or actually make a friend and hang out with them and drink tea and NOT

become codependent and twisty and obsessed with their past and present and soul and brain. I am being normal. this is normal. great. now i am obsessing about being normal.

So, you know, what better way to be empowered that to be an activist for this thing you are recovered FROM?

Well, you know what? It is really hard to be an activist for a condition that no one believes you have. or had.

it is really hard to be surrounded by people who say they love you but when you form words your mouth is just

numb bc you cant make words that covey the slightest accurate portrait of what is inside you.

so you draw it and you paint it and your parents can't bear too look bc the painting are painful and 

most of the time i don't even think my therapist believes me. Anxiety. i have anxiety and i have fear.

Oh. Sorry. I thought it was God. (i really did)

i don't understand how anyone can love me if they don't know me. and i don't feel known.

i don't want to die unknown, but then in another way i kinda do. just crawl up and disappear. go away as if i never was.

that kinda sounds okay sometimes. That last love, he said, "you cant leave me bc no one knows you but me"

and it sounds like some controlling bs but the thing is, he was right. It was true. So sometimes he called me crazy but sometimes he

said My god there is nothing wrong with you. he said it so much. i got angry. i stopped taking my medicine. i stopped all of it. i didn't tell anyone. after a few months my skull was a living torture chamber for my brain. I tried to tell him what was going on.

"ohmygod see this is the shit you don't need to say. to anyone. this is the shit that is gonna get you back in the hospital.and you need to stop it bc there is nothing wrong with you. i'm going to call your parents... do they know how you are"  

i got back on my meds eventually but, like, i think everyone just kinda thought i was lame for doing so. So after that i just you know shut most people out except for my few obsessions. and he moved on and all which is great bc he was an amazing human being even though the was, of course, not equipped  with the skills to handle what the hell ever ever was wrong with  me. (NOTHING)

i "recovered" i eat. i got a job. it has been years now, since i recovered from nothing.

 i look an my paintings and  cry. i am numb and no one knows who i am.

muffin tops are cute, sorry but

i think they are. I am not totally comfortable with my body or whatever but...it is annoying that people think of names for body parts just to be jokes. like why is that funny? or bad? now 8 million lil girls are terrifed of the "dreaded muffin top." lame. I think muffin-tops are cute and i think my spider veins are pretty like lavender threads holding together the network of blood and hope that is me. Sorry Mrs Vanity. I still hate my saddlebags if that makesyou feel any better.
love,
me

A Solitary State

Sometimes i wonder what it would be like to have like 89 people telling me how awesome and spectacular and cool i am just so like, i could make it to my measly job. I'm pretty sure, knowing me, it would get real annoying real fast and im probably spill my coffee on someone and then curse. I forget that like, most people frown on cursing. I kinda invent a new curse word every time a pencil lead breaks. So once im going on and on to my theRapist and she said something like, you never really had a real support system. and i kinda trail off like...what? My family is all knitted close like a sweater. But...there was a lot of hiding there. No one knew or knows most of what i did or do. I went to therapy and all that to deal with it. I have a friend in rehab. I am freaking out, ya know? talking to her and calling and worrying and i think how come no body ever did this shit for me?
No body ever babied me. Of course for years I held my girl friends away and was like a parasite on some dude i was demanding be my BEST FRIEND until they demanded i be a WIFE. (um oops no sorry bye) Did i push people away? do I? To engage in an eating disorder and a self injury obsession and even a magical thinking twisted up depressive episode you have to hold people BACK. bc they can't know. bc for one - You cant continue the behavior without their judgement and 2 - well it is embarrassing. Or worse no one will believe you. Most ED sufferers think they are waaaay too fat to have an E.D.
When i opened up about things, very early, it was met with awkward rejection. so i just learned to stfu ya know? I had to hold on to some sense of self - I didn't pretend to be something i wasn't i just refrained from revealing much of anything...to anyone.
until art school.
that paint brush was  a wand that did not lie.
No one understood really,but that was okay.
This was my reality. soooo confusing to critique a painting that the professors thought was abstracted reality and I thought it was ACTUAL REALITY.
I see dead people. ha,ha no really. i am dead.
I will not allow myself to ever get that depressed again.
Will I have to sacrifice my art? creativity? i don't know but when people compare mental illness and creativity like it is some novelty i get real aggravated.
bc it is hard to say if was worth it. I did some of my best work in a horrible state of
starved paranoid stoned death lust panic....
was it worth it?
i wont do it again. if i cant help it, i wont do it again.
was i healing? yes. was it cathartic? yes.
Was the suffering and fear unimaginable to the point i feel terror at the thought of going back?
yes. Am i much better now? yes and more open with people, too.
I still won't admit things that happened. to anyone. ever. hardly.
but the thing is  - i mean no one really cares anyway.
sometimes that is a good thing. the anonymity of modern life.
im okay with it ,i have a thousand gods inside me.

Is this my Mask?

Sometimes I feel so tired..inside
This painting is old... a few years.
But it still rings true.

my brain is churning and these waves
of panic keep going over me.

I have to figure something out
I have to figure out whose mask this is

Sometimes i mourn the loss of each day
I know you have to look forward and
everything...
but i remember who I used to be and
it seems like that person is dead somewhere

the good of her
and thebad of her

life is about lettin go, i keep learning that.
I keep learning that i HAVE to let go...
 i have not learned how to do it and not let it HURT.
Do you just let the pain wash over you? do you just sit with it? it hurts SO bad.
I told someone two days ago that i was not depressed anymore but...
I think i was just not depressed at THAT moment.
each moment feels like a whole new mood. This is very exhausting.
I see the doctor tomorrow.