It's President's day and fittingly bitter outside. I'm sitting in my studio right now, the hum of the heater purring through the floorboards and my mind feels like it's enveloped in the same fog that's outside.
I haven't journaled like this in years. Most of my journaling these days takes place in the morning, and it's all pretty mundane, lists of what I'm going to do with my day, affirmations to remind myself not to lie down in traffic. I don't really know when the switch happened, from the flowing prose and tangled ideas to the slow, methodical organizational planning. It wasn't on purpose, or for any purpose, really. It's just sort of what happened.
To be honest, I'm in a dark place. It's not like the low, slow place that I'm on when I'm unmedicated. The world is just harsh. I feel like I failed. I feel like I'm supposed to do something but there doesn't seem to be any clear answer as to what. Or, maybe there is, and I just haven't accepted what it is yet.
But I'm here, alone on a Monday. I'm just trying to write for the sake of writing; maybe that's embarrassing or unofficial, or makes my website look a little less polished, but that's okay. I'm an embarrassing, unofficial, and less polished kind of person. I feel like I'm falling through the world, and I'm starting to think I'm never going to hit the ground.
These are all the drawings I've done so far in February. I've played a lot with color and subject matter. Usually I like to make art that tells stories. I'm not sure what the stories in these objects actually is. Some of them have just been comfort illustrations; colors or subjects that I think are interesting enough or remind me of something better. Some of them are studies to push myself to be a better artist. It's the one consistency I have lately, my art.
Usually I make it a challenge for myself to sit with this feeling, this heaviness, this frog of sorts that's been living in my stomach, and try and coax it out. I try not to judge the feeling, just let it talk to me when it finally trusts me enough to tell me its story--that's where all those monsters come from, sitting alone, quietly, and waiting for the feeling I have to tell me its story.
But I don't think this monster is inside of me.
We're facing a really scary time, and for anyone who may be reading this outside the US, I guess I just want to say I'm sorry. It's embarrassing and frightening where I am. I live in Colorado, which is a pretty progressive and blue state, and there has been a lot of call to action and demands for change within our cities. Some of them anyway. The one I'm in for sure. It's just hard not to feel like, on the inside, that it won't be enough, and that I'm going to watch things collapse around me.
When things were going poorly internally, I made it a goal to write every day to try and give myself a direction, and I posted those blogs online once a month. They could be about anything. History I found interesting, philosophy, just some dumb funny stuff I thought of, whatever. I've always been glad that I did that, even if those blogs didn't survive. So I guess I'm going to try again. I'm going to write when I can, while I can, and hope it connects with someone. Even one person, even just a little. Thank you for reading. It's going to give me something to hope for.