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My Art Therapy Journey

Even though the good times come, I wish they would stay longer.

 

I’m greedy with them.

 

I didn’t even share.  I was scared they would disappear.

 

Now they are gone and nothing to show.

 

Nothing to bring me back.

 

Just silent desperation.

 

And words.

 

 

How can I wish for this part of my life to be over when so much I cling to the loss of it.  What is done is done.  A child taken too soon who nobody sees take a last breath.  No casket, no belly seen and then suddenly unfilled.  Aloneness.  Deep depths of no return.

Pray Love take this void.

Pray hate to die in waiting.

Sometimes I get tired and seeking solace isn’t very solacing.  To expect is to work.  But still, I find myself doing it, even, or especially, in the hours of greatest exhaustion. Tiredness leads to forgetfulness.  And I don’t know what forgetfulness leads to…because I forget.

 

Growing is also work, but it is usually supposedly good for you.  Growing pains.  Is there anyone that doesn’t know about those?

 

I rise and fall.  I grow and seek solace.

 

My heart has a full ache and I try to fill it with more.

 

 

Some Struggles:

Paranoia/Fear

Shame

Embarrassment

Anger

Memory Lapses/Forgetfulness

Auto-Immune Disease/Chronic Pain

Body Image/Eating Issues

Some Miracles:

Breath/Life/I’m still here

Love

Friendships

Marriage

Children

Intellectual Understanding

Empathy

Hope

Grace

What if Light itself is a miracle?  What if all of everything is really a miracle?

Sometimes I get to thinking I have so many struggles, but to write them down makes them graspable.  I can narrow them down better that way.  Maybe sometimes the struggles list changes.  It can shrink or grow.  But the Miracles list is at least, I think, consistent.  The felt presence of miracles might wax and wane, but once they’ve made the list I think they are always there.  Miracles never diminish or go away.  And maybe struggles will always exist to some degree just because I am human, but when I run those struggles through the lens of a miracle that is always there to save me, I can trust they will be manageable.  To list it out takes away the emotion that can sometimes run away with my heart-my grounding and stability in this world.

I get thrown into tailspins, but today I will keep coming back to how many incredible crashes I have made it through.  If I focus on how the story has always eventually resolved, maybe I can eventually carry on from the end and skip the panic part.

 

There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.

Albert Einstein

I don’t know what to say.  For over 3 months I have not known what to say.  Coming here to write, I couldn’t even remember when the last time was.  I was scared to see where I was last time I was here.  I’ve only skimmed through my last post.  I saw mention of drugs and dependency several times.

It’s like a whole other world…those 3 months ago.  It was before I’d even officially turned 33. It was in another lifetime.

These days I think more and say a lot less.  I’m not sure if my therapist would agree with me on that statement, but it’s how it feels to me most of the time.  I’m starting to open.  It’s vulnerable and things change frequently within the span of one complete thought.  So to share a single thought is even more vulnerable.  The moment a thought breathes it’s like it’s written for eternity.  It becomes like a statue.  Now that I’m breaking out of that frozen place it scares me to go back.

 

I’m still into my art.  I haven’t painted for many, many months, but I have been active with clay and ceramics.  I have tables and shelves full of half-finished work to show for it.  Some is still in the form of hardened, dry mud that might some day become cups, bowls, and plates.  Some have seen the fire once and are more solid, but still in question about what their last role will be.  They are raw.  No glaze, no color, skeletons still.  But most of what I have is probably still in my heart and mind.

 

Two of my ceramic sculpture projects are on display at school that I made for class last semester.  I don’t know what to say about those even.  I can never seem to talk about my art much, but if you get me going I could talk about the impact of art and what it means to me for hours.  But right now it’s all a little airy.

Not empty air though.  More airy…like God.  A definite, invisibly visible shape.

It’s the shape my life seems to taking.  I look more, or at least more closely.  I wait before making judgments and tend to keep my judgments (about people, places or things seen or unseen) open.  It’s because I realize I know so little with certainty.  And how can I possibly judge another person’s heart when so many people in this world seem to not even know their own heart they live so near everyday? It keeps me open to others and focused on getting familiar with myself.

I’ll tell you, this isn’t always a pleasant endeavor for me.  Did you know there are feelings in your heart?  Real, complex feelings.  I didn’t used to know this.  My conscious being existed separate from my breath.  I was living a divided existence and calling it “Me,” and I thought and believed this Me was all I had.

It was never everything.

A shock.

A revelation.

A death and a new life.

 

For myself, several new lives.  I’m beginning to see how I cut myself off, one at a time or perhaps many at a time throughout my years on this earth-all 33 of them.

 

I keep coming back to how I used to know so much.

It makes me laugh now.

 

Sometimes I’ll laugh at something like that and sit in curious wonderment for hours in my mind, even when life is busy taking care of business with motherhood and family.  My mind simmers on how I knew things and how unwell I know those same things now.

Funny, isn’t it?

God, so funny.

 

 

Here comes a confession: I’m not tidy.  It’s funny, I know, but my subconscious works overtime to the extent that I actually can believe that I might be for moments at a time.  But I’ve reached a point, now, where I finally cannot, not for even one single moment, really believe that I am all wrapped up tight in a neat little package.  I know I’m probably the last to find this out, but I’ll be honest with me…I usually am the last to find things out.

I need a Xanax or I need sleep or I need both right now.  Yesterday I slept away an entire drug induced day, which in reality, is probably not much different from many other days I’ve had spent awake.  Things are starting to line up.  Getting cleaned up, it’s tempting to say.

 

I’ve never been one for drugs.  I’ve never been the dependent type.  I’m the one who loves to take shit and turn it into something else, like I’m a human compost or something.  Just give it to me, I’m totally unphased by shit and can turn it into something else.  Art or a poem or something.  Or a shapely body from all the metabolic processes it brings on within me.  I can take on anything! 

So here’s my next confession:  I’m also a liar.  I can’t deal with shit.  I can’t take it on or process it.  I bury it and it goes nowhere.  It does nothing useful and I put on make-up, in various forms, to face the world.  I’m shit-faced, I could maybe say.  I’ve been living my life as an addict.

I’m addicted to the part of not being human, not feelings my feelings or knowing who I really am.

I might have even married my perfect counterpart.

But then….

Shit really started happening and I saw shit.  And I said, “Oh shit!”  And shit hit the fan.

 

Our household has a nicely splattered decor of shit all over in it now.

 

But that’s not the best of it.

The best of it is yet to be revealed.

I’m up to  * here*  in shit.

*

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It’s not always necessarily a person’s exact fault when life has gone to shit.  It can start at such an early age, the age before choices are really clearly made.  It’s the age of instinct and survival.  The age of not knowing any other way.  Like the age when you shit in your pants and that’s just the way it goes.

 

Then all the sudden you get a knock on the door and holy shit you’re, like, going on 33 years old.

 

“Fuck, you mean the shit is still there?!  ”

 

I’m sorry for the expletives.  I’m blaming it on the drugs (that are helping me breathe) today, but it might be something else tomorrow.  We will all cope in the best (and first) way we know how until there is another way, I suppose.  So judge me if you must.  I might not like it, but it probably won’t make that much of a difference if you do.

 

I have judged myself plenty enough, you can trust me on that one.

 

I’m behind on all of my ceramics assignments.  And what do I say to that, “Shit!”  Yes, it compounds.  It grows.  It does not go away.

So, I’m working on breathing through all this shit.  There are not readily available lessons for this.  I may be swimming in it, but the local “Y” does not seem to back the demand for this type of training.

I am off to the pool of coping which I am surfacing in.

 

Cope cope cope.  Sometimes all that’s left is coping an hoping and keeping the faith that one day, whether subconsciously or not, things will be much better.

 

 

 

 

 

Cyan Twinge

I (do)n’t Need!

 

It is hard to feel needy.  The only thing I might wish is for it to be a little harder, though.  Hard enough so that I wouldn’t feel it at all.

I thought I was going to be able to write about this, but maybe the moment has passed.  I’ve been distracted.

It won’t be enough of a distraction to not get back to needing at 11pm or 3am, however.

 

Personal neediness doesn’t seem to pay much matter to personal convenience or sleep.  It rears it’s head in the darkest hours of aloneness when the heart is searching and aching to soothe itself.  Or it stomps its feet in the between times of trying to care for a hungry toddler or a hormonal teenager.

When do I not need?

In flash scenes from “What about Bob?” and the thought of seeking comfort from another human suddenly becomes the darkest of devils.  Especially considering the convenience factor of when the feeling is at it’s strongest, which for me right now seems to be nearly all the time.  Just not this moment when I’m trying to access it to write it out of my system.  No, now I am totally self-sufficiently ineffective.

My lips have been frozen all day.  I googled “cold lips” and the first thing that popped up was a link to Yahoo! Answers from a person asking:

“My lips feel almost constantly cold my doctor says it is anxiety but i don’t feel anxious?”

The most popular response was that this person was, indeed, anxious, regardless of being aware of it or not.

I guess denial can only go so far.

But not only have my lips been cold all day, they have also had that slight twinge of cyan.

So maybe my subconscious is trying to help me out by not breathing.  Because, hey, it’s not like life and death or anything.

Which brings me to the topic of death.  And life.

But that brings me back to neediness.

And I am not needy at all.