i cut off my hair

Or should that be I cut my hair off? Or i just cut it? anyway whatever it is, I did it. and it was looooong and now it is long and gone. And hair is probably way too symbolic for my voodoo aesthetic but i must say sometimes things have to change. and so you change them.  Whatever. Hadee, my dog didn't mind. I think he liked it.


This is some random sculpture I saw in someone's yard. I kind of love it.

Beloved

Easter Sunday I visited my grandmother's grave. I don't know if other people take photographs of graves but we do. I have a photo of my grandmother laughing and sitting on her tombstone  -  she bought it years and years before she died. Anyway she had a wicked sense of humor. I miss her tremendously. She taught me to drive a car. She pierced my first boyfriend's ears. She showed me me how to do long division.

Mourning rituals. He said I was grieving, I drank vodka. My aunt she built little shrines to her dead daughter all over the house. I wore Donna's clothes for two weeks after she died. Sister says the pain never fades you just get used to it...grow up twisted around it like a vine. My dad says wounds heal on their own.

I can't imagine your pain and I don't want to. But secretly, I do. Grief is sacred. No, it isn't. Its as universal as dirt. but not like this. Yes exactly like this. I dream her all the time. I don't want to do this again. I will have to do this again. It's not the same for everyone.

I Post Pictures bc one day i am going to forget. and i am going to look back and say oh, i was there. and you were there with me.

Me, My Sisters and My grandma, 1984

The Con

Today was a Wednesday

Yesterday i came home and fell into a deep sleep full of nightmares and woke up in my clothes all confused at 6 this morning. It was another day. I gathered up my dog and went to the park. On the ground beneath the giant old live oaks that are dripping with curly gray moss, this little cardboard heart cut out was waiting for someone to find it. I did.

When i stopped to photograph it, Ellie calmly laid on the dew covered grass for a few minutes....then broke out in a mad dash of snarls and barks and tried to attack a friendly retriever who was coming to say hello. In her animal protective fury she pulled me over and my coffee splashed everywhere. The guy with the dog was looking at me like I was an alien. In a crashing confusion of leash, dog, coffee-mud, and grass I managed to not smash the camera and not get hurt except for my knee which now has a nice bruise. Good morning world. Good morning park. Good morning, cardboard heart in the grass.

My dog is looking at me all proud like she just saved us both from a dragon or something. "Are you effin kidding me?" Yeah, I said this out loud to the dog.

I wish she could learn to tell the difference between friend and foe, but I wish this for myself as well. The friends I have made here may as well be enemies, but that retriever was pure gold. Maybe i should have been a non-human, then maybe my species would make sense to me. So, we go home both wet and muddy and climb back into bed. I start drawing my foot.

At lunch, I walk down the street to be in the sun. There is a hospital nearby and I walk past. I hear water hitting pavement. Glancing to my left, I see a nurse squatted down peeing beside her car. Seriously.

There is birthday cake at the office later and i eat a small piece. I am struggling to be normal. Afterward, I want to throw up. I don't.

Today was a Wednesday. Life is funny, but I am too tired to laugh.
The End.

Me at Work

This is me at work. I am saving an endangered mantle. I wish I was saving an endangered species... but oh well.

I have a cool job. I am not sure why my internal and external worlds meet in tornados....keep it together, girl. We got miles to go before we sleep.

exhausted...

that is all.

What else can i say?

I don't take rejection very well why don't you just make this easier on everyone and fall madly in love with me. And, of course, you know that by 'everyone,' I mean me. I have slipped back into self absorption lately and it is not very becoming.

Bc life is not that simple or easy and you can rarely choose who you love. You can decide to continue to love someone and be there but you can't just make someone want you despite all the bad lady mag advice in the world. and why would you even want to? I just want something real, but you see, i don't even believe in love, love is a dragon I slayed long long ago so why does it continue to rise up inside me like a starving beast driven by nothing more that a primal need to survive by feasting on touch and laughter and kisses and hope and companionship and someone to go to the goddamn park with. I mean not really. I'm not really that desperate just confused about they way we all interact with each other.  And how nothing lasts. Nothing lasts so you have to get good at being okay with loss. And that is not easy bc it defies logic. The need for other humans is some animal thing i hardly comprehend. People say animals don't "feel" things like we humans do and so, fine, they don't. but they feel. I have seen a mama cow mourn her dead calf for days. literally days, walking around wailing a god awful cry. Chimps will carry their dead around with them sometimes. It is like a version of the connection is broken but the beast can't let go. Dogs that are raised together will sometimes go mad when separated...crying, chewing their fur off, becoming lethargic.

Is the point to experience as much as you can, go as far as you can, learn as much as you can, see, feel, make, become and breathe and do all you can for this flickering moment we are alive or is it to surround yourself with the people you love and cherish them every second that they are breathing? because you can't have both, sweetheart. But you may want to quit being such an extremist.

there are missing pieces

The more people i meet down here the lonelier i feel. What is that about? feeling lonely? not understood? just the absence of anyone that cares or knows you?

Its okay, I mean this experience is what it is and I will be fine....I didn't expect much when I moved here. I expected to work and go to school. I wanted things to change. and they did. because i changed them. whatever, you know. I just wasn't prepared for the endurance...of being here. I prepped for the move, for the adjustment, but now that i am here and all these people are so transient and moving about and no one is tied to anything that makes sense to me. And they like it that way. I don't -  but then again I hated feeling trapped and smothered, too. All i ever wanted to be was transient. I listened to ramblin man when i was little and i wanted that song to be about me. What is all this pain about? All of our pain? Is this chemical nightmare depression anxiety crap? Or is this Just Living. Does Living mean learning to gracefully lose things you love. (or in my case, not so gracefully...yet)

I Circle the Fish

fish swimming circles inside my skull, i am.
right, wrong
write wrong
words.
say them.

Distracted. Not liking myself very much. I want OUT of my SELF.

bad things are everywhere.

good things are everywhere, too right? promise me this.

No promise good enough to keep. How long til i get over losing you? 

yes you. all of you.

 Mistakes were made, fallen flowers landed incorrectly...near your stare.

stony stare- silent creaking stairs at midnight. Careful.

I dream about my grandmothers house so often. She died in July. The day before my 32nd birthday. I haven't been back to her house since that day. My heart is so heavy with generations of loss handed down to us so we would not forget but this is heavy how do i move? Carrying all of your hearts on my back, blood drips twirling in such cataclysmic patterns over my calves and thighs and spatters over the stars on my feet down to the earth. the dirt i want to be.

I did it all for love, but sometimes a horror down inside me suggests that I did it all for obsession. a bundle of sick chemicals. buzzing outward toward your brain circuits and empty chest.

I miss you like you are dead and since you aren't i feel as if i am cheating the beloved dead by the comparison of mourning rituals. I am not. I am not.

I miss my mother and my father and the tree outside the dirty window in the house i grew up in. I need more adjectives for my clumsy chunks of words falling like drunk fish and landing like those platform black shoes from the nineties that were so good for stomping down streets littered with paper and vomit and broken glass and the flyers from the show we drove 5 hours to see.
we were never disappointed.

I have this overwhelming desire to cry your eyes out. starve your heart out. splinters for my bone machine rusting away under waves of flesh ebbing and reaching up for the moon. something is going to change and one day it is going to be better than this.

The box i came in

My wedding dress

So I am driving with a friend through some rural area and we pull over to check the map. I see this clothes hanger on a branch..."LOOK! Its my wedding dress! I found it!" is the first thing that pops out of my mouth. My friend insists on photographing me with it. It's perfect isn't it?

I am Patchwork

 

Stiches and scabs. This is where the healing begins. This is where you make it happen, how you keep going how you swear to the sky you won't give up. I want to give up. i want to dig a shallow hole in cool damp earth and feel it press against my back and shoulder blades and dig in and relax and sink. I love the earth, when i was younger, I  would happily dig up worms and roots and marvel at the shades of black and brown and tan and sandy grain and fluffy soil and how it felt soft like my mother. Under my nail and between toes, it felt like home all over me.

Nothing feels so good and real and whole and honest and that is where i want to be, every particle of me wants to dissolve back into it, every particle but one.

and that one particle has your name it, whoever you are.

i love you.

i am patchwork. i am pulling it together.

i am reaching for the sky now.

We are going to make it we are going to be just fine just fine just fine this fleshy vessel is made of psychic steel and it can contain all the burning sorrow that you can give me.

every inch, every ounce, every day.

I am going to be just fine.

we are. all of us.

what I am doing

is what i said I was going to do, right? I moved here for the job, I went back to school, I live alone. This is fine, this is okay -  I am going to be okay. I did what I said I was going to do. It hurts, it sucks. Whatever. I don't know why I suddenly reverted back to a weaker version of me, but I feel like I may collapse if I have to feel one more drop of pain. Anyone's pain. I'm a sponge, im a goddamn sponge for other people's pain. I don't know why. The people that I get close too, i get this overwhelming sort of empathy or something...I don't know why I am so emotional -  I always have been -  it makes everything much more difficult and for no real reason. I am frequently in an enormous amount of psychic pain and i just really want it to stop and the more people I meet the more pain I feel.

I am not sure what is going to happen next.

over me

well that ended quickly.
and honestly.
 I always end up liking people too much.
He was merciful at least.
I find other people's pain overwhelming and i feel it. i feel it
          i have too much schoolwork to drink but all i want to do is drink.
seriously. xanax and beer.

pretty web of confusion and lies and then shiny sleep

tie me to something pretty

I met another boy. I swear to god i wish i could quite falling in love with people...with their voices and eyelashes and stupid dirty boots and movements of index fingers...



 I know I'm not over the other situation.   

I am terrified of this heart

I miss A.N.

this is chaos

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't afraid.

I am drinking again 

Try to Remember

"For life is the best thing we have in this existence. And if we should desire to believe in something, it should be a beacon within. This beacon being the sun, sea, and sky, our children, our work, our companions and, most simply put, the embodiment of love."
— Patti Smith

So this boy used a battering ram on my vaulted heart until it busted open, and then he got this look of disgust and walked away. Seriously, and im fucking sick and tired and my  doctor just called me in a script to klonipin which i SWORE i would never ever take again but i started school and its overwhelming and im working 40 hours and i am always alone and this city is all concrete and cramped and steel and i tried not to like that guy but he just convinced me that he wanted to like, live with me and know me and "make our own memories together" and could see me having his kids and the whole time i was begging him to not lie to me but he was lying the whole time and the second i believed him he was done with me and i swear to god i have never been used before but now i have and it is quite dreadful and shocking and some part of me believes i deserve better than this and another part of me just wants the poison to sink in faster

Last One

This was written on the wall of one of the abandoned houses I surveyed in NOLA. Squatters had been living there even though it was in deplorable condition.

I see the remnants of desperation in these houses.

So what happened was...

I met a boy and I like him. Right, I know -  its like a total dis to my Spinster librarian dream. I say that lightly -  but seriously I never thought I would do this. Not Again. Anyway I'm not so good at controlling emotions and I wanted this.... so I went with it. Stick around for the break up blog, guys. So I have sort of been in a romance chemical induced haze for 6 weeks. I drove back home and talked to my T about it, and she agreed that chemical X is intense and strong. Dopamine and she named another one. I can't recall. Yes they are strong but are they REAL? You know I am obsessed with the REAL. Anway, I've been busy with some amazing work, as well. I love my job even though I feel like I am on egg shells quite often. So that is where I have been. I hope you have somewhere blissful.

I must go back to do more work now, but does anyone do Tumblr? i just made this:http://stellarscar.tumblr.com/

October 2010 half moon

Too Much Too Dream

St Louis Number One.
I drank again last night and then I fell asleep and my brain churned dreams like mad. I dreamed of the dead. My dead friends. In these dreams, I am always trying to ask them questions.....I never get answers. It doesn't matter. It was good too see them.

Be Here Now

This is my sister and I a couple years ago. At Tybee. So her wedding was this past weekend and it was marvelous and beautiful. I was excited and then on the way back home (8 hour drive) I got really sad about how far away I am from her..and her new family but no matter where I am, I am always far from someone I want to be close to. And...the thing is I still don't feel like I belong anywhere. I know this is a process and a journey and all of that but sometimes i feel like I have been progressing towards something and I am ready to be there. But I can not actually define what the this thing is. Sometimes I feel like if I hurry up and get this done I can go home.  But I don't know what that feeling is really about bc when i am at my parent's house, in the forest I grew up in, I feel as if I am wasting time and I need to be in the real world making some sort of life for myself. But then Im out here and I just feel like a sugar cube dissolving in hot acid. Not that I am particularly sweet but it seems like the best parts of me just keep getting wasted.
And that just seems really unfortunate and I am not sure what to do about it.
Also, at the wedding someone asked me if I had been on a date in this city yet. I haven't been on a date in five years. And i never really thought about it. Then I got bothered by the fact that I have not been bothered by this fact. I don't go out bc no one ever asks and I never met anyone that I wanted to ask. It is very simple. Someone asked me to marry them 8 months ago and I said No because I didn't want to be married. It is very simple.
And of course in reality NOTHING is really ever that simple.
I love history and I have a past doing research on architecture and art. I got this  great job as an architectural historian in an interesting city. Chance of LIFETIME in this drab economy. Im sitting at work today and get this smell like turpentine. I want to cry bc I want to be in the painting lab so bad. THERE IS NO PAINTING LAB ANYMORE. I suddenly think "I hate architecture and I hate history"
Now of course I don't really, but it seems like no matter where I am I feel like i ought to be somewhere else...doing some thing else.
I was about to be an art teacher but I stopped. I stopped. teaching. It was too much. This is better. This has to be better bc it is what i decided to do.
But ART was not something I DID, It was who I was.
and now...i feel like a worker bee in this giant swampy nest of moss and steel and wood and glass. And the sad thing is, the city is quite Old and Slow in terms of lifestyle. I don't know what is wrong with me, I woke in a fairytale and then the inevitable tragic twist and then I got to be me, i guess. I got to be here.

24s used to be loose but now 28s are too tight.
I always said I would not use exact numbers or weights on this blog but i feel so foreign and detached from it all now that it doesn't seem to matter. I am shopping in a sea of women and girls and they are all different sizes and shapes and wildy different in clothing and hairstyle and a few of them look thin enough to break in half but most of them look physically healthy and happy to be chatting about colors and fits and The Saints and their dogs over racks of used clothing. They appear happy, but I understand that most people are walking damns for a river of pain. Anyway, I want to fit in. Not in size 0 but in with healthy happy people who are doing things. Like sewing and going to concerts and volunteering at the SPCA animal shelter and growing plants and having friendly conversations over coffee....

I feel like a stray that has been wandering in the bone yard and howling prayers to the moon for visible ribs...alone for so long i began to go mad. Masochistic and sad. I have inched nearer to the town and I am watching distrustful and longing. This venture has taken years and years and really i just want to go back. dig in the dirt for skull of an ex lover and mourn the marrow. However - There is no going back.

It has occured to me  that -  what if i have gained too much? gone too far? I am alone in this, no one is there, there is no advice. I need a balance and I need a safe place to run. There is a Fine Line somewhere and i must find it... Looking healthy does not MEAN healthy. I know this. I have made the path. I have made the choice. And it feels quite right. and quite wrong.

Under Lock and Key

Suddenly the internet seems full of spies. Maybe bc I am in a city with so many more people, maybe bc of all the OMG FACEBOOK PRIVACY....news stories about how so and so didn't get a  job bc they posted a drunken pic on myspace 2 years ago. WTF, man this isn't cool at all. I found a LOT of support for some very personal issues on internet forums and in blogs but the idea that they are being catalogued in the library of congress makes me ill ( somebody told that was the fate of all tweets).

Not sure WHY this just occured to me with such force but I know that one reason is because i have more to lose now, than before. Now, my job is really laid back and cool and this is NOLA so drinking is not only normal but encouraged...but still. What do i do with the mental issues and the recovery/recovered process. Hide them? i wanted to advocate but that seems harder than i thought....the insults about "crazy' drippping from mouths is a bit much when you already feel desperate to hold onto what you have.

Of course its not like i am going to run for SENATE or anything. But the idea that my future husband's divorce lawyer (lol) could use a myspace blog from 2008 as evidence of my mental instability is unsettling. Who knows, man? Who knows where this internet social networking thing may lead. A lot of the starved caffeinated rambling poetry i posted on myspace in 2006 was GOOD imo, but I don't want everyone to see it. Or steal it. And i set the privacy controls to " friends only" but does that really mean anything? like locking the front door....or closing a curtain. Probably not much.

So yeah that is one reason i have suddenly been hesitant to blog....Yet i don't want to delete anything. (i have been told repeatedly that "deleting" does not really make it go away. Google has a file on you somewhere.....) I don't want to LOSE anything or anyone. I really just want the world and the internet to be a safe place. And it isn't.

blink of an eye

It is a good sentiment but it isn't true. Not for me anyway, and i had thought of it years before. In that moment when i was hoping to know an answer, all I usually felt was panic...bc i really didn't know. But i knew how much it MATTERED.

One eyes sees light

So i downloaded the browser Firefox instead of Safari as Blogger Help suggested and now I can post pics again. Hmmm.... who knew? Anyways, Here is a picture of an old friend that I made up and that I miss.

broken blog

I keep trying to upload pictures and they never show up. This is unbelievably annoying. Like how the digital clock in my car went out....that is much more annoying that you may think....this whole world is going to smother under an avalanche of this electrical shite that don't work....

OMG the Big Easy

so i made it and i am pretty much finally settled. I have internet and a bed and stuff. This is crazy adjustment time. I pretty much have a new body, a new place, a new job and a new city. and thousands of more people that I have ever been in contact with for an extended period of time and that, my friend, is absolutely bizzaro-land to me. All these people....like, 20 feet away -  all the time, even while I am sleeping. Seriously, I have visited cities bigger than this, of course, and even stayed a while, but to build a semi permanent Nest in the middle of more than a million people is against my natural instinct. But I am okay. I like it, it is new and different and hopefully a step toward a better career path bc the small town newspaper was crushing my soul to bits. I understand that for some people a city can do the same, and maybe I won't be here forever but for now, I am soaking it all in and remaining relatively sane...no real panicky stuff or anything. Well, except for the body which has gotten massive and foreign and uncomfortable. I won't allow myself to dwell on it, though. That is not easy, but I have been rather stern with myself about it. One thing I have realized is this has been an exchange. I had to gain this weight to make this move. Really, I did. I was too weak physically mentally and emotionally before. The super underweight sick symptoms are different for different people, but my brain suffered first and worst. The panic was so strong. The extreme cold and joint pain and all that was there but my thinking was so strange and twisted. I could not have been vigilant enough to live in a city this dangerous. Anyway the odd thing is, I feel like I am in Recovery 20.0 or something but the people at the new job have already commented that I am thin and I never eat. On the other hand, people who knew me before have commented on how much "bigger" I am now. So strange how the (my) body is SO PRESENT. I have a painting of a mangled abstracted  body that says this body is my battlefield. And so it is.
This city was a battlefield too. More than once. The post-katrina stories I hear are  horrendous...unbelievable. That horror is still there and I can feel it. Panic swells inside me when co-workers re-tell the story of the evacuation and the fire fights that took place here after most residents left (most of those stories remain unreported bc a lot of illegal things happened) However, living here is worth it, returning to this city was worth it for so many, and the recovery is worth it. Recovery of the city and of me.

Our Recovery In Progress

Moving to New Orleans

I am moving to New Orleans on Tuesday, starting new job on Thursday and bringing all the big stuff down Saturday.

Amazing and crazy and wonderful.

I have been needing this change for so long. I got a job with a company that does Cultural Resource Management.

I weigh more than I have in years and I just keep telling myself that it is worth it bc I feel stronger inside than ever.

I am continuing phone sessions with my T since I will be 7 hours away from her.

My first memories of New Orleans, are the 1984 World's Fair. I was four years old. I loved it, and later I always sort of planned to live there, but love and life and school and money and health and mental stuff and broken hearts and bone lust got in the way..all that but yeah. So now i am almost out of this old tiny town and..well almost. Cross your fingers that i can pull this off!!
s

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

Recovery #4 - Rely on Reactivation (Rusted & Busted)

 So i went to austin this weekend (for the first time in years) with 2 friends and let me tell you. I hate being carsick. but other than that ( 7 hours) it was pretty cool - I went to an antique car show. Okay, No, I have never been to a car show before but i love an antique and i love improvisation and i love expression. So there you go. St-st-steeeeeped in rockabilly culture  - it was. Pretty cool. Weather was perfect and everyone had a dog, seemed like. Very inspiring to see women with their own booths selling vintage clothes and shoes and handmade purses, photographs, handmade corsets. Female make- up artists were selling sessions.....I was thinking okay i could DO this. I could Do art fairs and stuff. Usually, um, the thoughts i have about myself are not so proactive....Anyway, here are pics from the show and! How brave am I for wearing a striped skirt that accentuates my new poundage? Right, bc i am at the point in Uber recovery where i look down and have no idea whose body this is but it sure ain't the one I've been carving on for years....so then i freak out and begin obsessive rituals. One way i combatted this was thinking about how cool it would be to function as an artist (this takes energy) - promoting myself ...doing stuff for the Animal Rescue group i joined, getting a job i like (i hate my job btw in case i have not mentioned that ha ha) or going back to school.. i can NOT function when i am curled up hiding away nurturing addictions....

 some people can still live and GO and DO in that state... but not me. sigh. Ive proved it.
So i was surrounded by a lot of activity and i found it more inspiring that than gnawing pain. for once. heh.

a disordered past...an addiction..is...like slipping on old painful shoes...the familiar ache, sharp pinching is an old friend, throbbing ....such comfortable agony... forcing yourself forward every step, a movement, an orchestra of hurts....
Let it go. Shut it Down. Time to run.....

Rusted and Busted!!!

iam in austin blogging from my phone. someting i have never done but i got a fancy new phone....traveling is stressful right.i get excited to leave my normal environment but having a jumbled routine with people u have never traveled with ups the anxiety. generally i am laid backbut i am used to traveling with my girls and i miss them. it is comfortable bc we understand each other. anyway god hotels ick me out id rather go camping....

sneaky post

New blogger lay out is like, frrrrreakin me out,man. I have to upload pics to picasa first?
been really really  busy hatin' my job. My work environment has plummeted....it is loud and obnoxious....the management is terrible and it just trickles down. This place is a perfect example of how hard work is rewarded with long hours and more work. On the other hand vapid, thoughtless chatter and non productivity is rewarded with praise as long as the worker dresses provocative and flirts mercilessly with management. Things have changed for the worst...unethical....to say the least. I work til 7 some nights....and I am not valued here at all.
To add to my feelings of frustration - there are no jobs that I am qualified for in a 200 mile radius. I am broadening the search but even so...
I really want to go back to school but nothing I want to study is in a employable field in the ENTIRE REGION. (art, folklore, material culture, museums, oral/written traditions) We have a RICH assortment of these things, but no money to support the study or preservation.

Still sortin through inherited items from my friend donna, who passed away. drawing but not completing anything. I have missed the blog world and i am ready to catch up. I figured i would be forgotten but I had received several lovely comments that were truly meaningful to me and much appreciated. I have many blogs to read but! I am currently packing for a road trip to austin this weekend.... a break I feel I need. Chin up! **This post brought to you by SneakyBloggin Atwerk

Tending the Ghosts

 I am sleepy and old. My room is messy and I need some coffee and some cartoons and some colored pencils and my dog. Color makes me feel better. So does sugar. Most people probably don't believe that your mental illness, the one you take pills for, is real. Oh well. The Pharmaceutical companies can have my soul. Sell it to jesus.
Saturday I tried to clean my room. It is coated in clothes and shoes and drawings and cheap makeup and stuff. I went through the box of clothes that Donna gave me before she died. I try them on and take them off and put them back in the box and sort them out and then mix them all together and stare at the mirror. I stare closer at my pores and eyelashes and beginning wrinkles and lines and acne and scars and hair and I sort of dissolve into a reflected mass of tiny pieces.

I take clothes off and put her clothes on and apply lipstick carefully. My hair is dirty. Her clothes fit and yet they don't. They are her clothes formed to her shape. I laugh bc her shirts are too short and my belly shows. She was sooo tiny and shorter than me.

I don't know if it is healthy or normal to keep re arranging her stuff but I suppose there is not really a "normal" for grief. In another era it was normal to make lockets of the deceased's hair and take their photos. In a study across cultures, I suppose, the death and grieving rituals could fill  libraries. So I wear her shoes. They are too big but I wear them anyway. Walk a mile in your shoes, lovely lady.

People like me rearrange pain, also. Maybe you do it, too. I fasted the week after she left. It was part of  - grieving, i guess but another part of me relished the hollow shield of protection. the dizzy numbness...this is not real, this is not real....
Tied my hair up too tightly, needles and pins and little blades...

I go home. I stare at this huge house that IS my parents...flesh bone cedar and soul....with lots of windows. Am I suppose to MANAGE this one day? Im lost in a no-where generation between a butter churn and instant messenger. Someone has to feed the cows. I don't know how to make money. I wonder what New York is like. I pull the laces tighter. A thousand memories are my sweetest friends and I rearrange them carefully in my mind, I tend the ghosts.

Live and Luna

I have not had many words lately so here is a picture. I inherited some casein from Donna. It is this opaque creamy water soluble paint that i have never used before. It is so different from acrylic but i really like it.
Honestly i have been down, but I am fighting....some days there is just this deathlust. I am exhausted from trying NOT to want to DIE everyday. And its not like I  - well it is not this adolescent angsty rage. Really, living seems so impractical sometimes. Living as in SURVIVING in capitalism with this - my-  particular set of values, brain chemicals and upbringing. haha... "I am not longed for this world"
Well instead of climbing into my starry coffin, im making coffee. walking the dog, continuing the job search...drawing painting...

But as many negative experiences as people have with therapy, I will say that the time I spent in counseling and hospitals when i was a kid ...has kinda paid off. It sucked then and didnt seem to matter one bit but now that i am older and sober so many of the things i learned back then are still in my head. Oh yes i can do THIS (positive) instead of this (exacerbate pain) It took a long time, for real y'all, a long time, but listen dont give up. and don't stop now. Bc you don't know what kind of treacherous landscape (lifescape) lies ahead. Gather up all the psychic tools you can while they are available....and of course be skeptical. Live and learn, right?

i have missed you

I inherited colored pencils from my friend Donna, who passed away.
This is the first drawing I did with them.

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.

Tea cups and fish: a death story

Death makes me feel....


panicky
terrified
horrified
overwhelmed
distressed
nauseous
regretful
mournful
sorrowful
reflective
paranoid
resentful
confused
shocked


for starters. and the emotions roll in like tidal waves. You steady yourself...and then there is another. You know you have been in therapy too long when you  grab a pen and LIST your EMOTIONS by name..or wait Are those feelings? gah. nevermind. I think i failed Therapy.


So who falls in love with a dying woman anyway? not love. but love., that is


i do. i did. Bc i need her and i don't want to her do die.
but she is going to.
I almost met her by accident. we seemed to love the same men. not in the girly catty way, but really -  we found the same gold souls and by touching them, touched each other. I held her hand in mine just last night and was so reluctant to let go..to see her slip away into the forever. 


It was HER art that saved me...that stopped me from giving up. When no one could understand what i was trying to express...when i was so lost, and scared and shy and ...One of the professors showed me a few images of her work. After the intense shock of just how GOOD it was (better than textbook-art-history-museum-stuffs and this woman lived an hour away?!?)I was eerily aware of our similar images. Mine were like, crayon scribbles, compared to her excellent technique but holy mary. Tea Cups and Fish. i mumbled, "tea cups and fish....and bones, she paints bones"
Symbols that mean more than words can say. Symbols that came so naturally to me, that when asked for an explanation i would just make one up. To protect the actual meaning. Nothing stronger more intense or strong or fucking fragile than teacups and fish bones. And she thought so too. she understood.
So i suppose her work gave me strength, and it let me know that what i was Painting,Seeing, Expressing, Feeling, was not  WRONG. It was Art.
Years and years later i fell for a person who was, unbeknownst to me, her best friend.
So we all became friends. And it felt like a family that i fit into even when i was covered with ghosts and paint.
And i have to remember. i HAVE to remember the strength i saw in her
bc that is the strength that is going to get me (us) through this...strong like teacups and fish.

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.

It's where she lies