Today I've got my spread for the DOCUMENTED LIFE prompt from February 14 to share with you. The theme for February was "Layers You Will Love", the art challenge was "Cover Up Good Stuff", and the journal prompt was "Going Undercover".
Here's what I made:
"The hardest thing you will ever have to do is to let yourself feel alive."
I got the words for today's spread from this song "Time to Leave" by Melissa Ferrick:
I used lyrics from this song in another spread recently, but these ones are so good, I figured it'd be alright...
Do you see the theme in the images?
When I thought about the prompt "Going Undercover", images of people shrinking back into themselves came to mind...of people hiding...all kinds of negative connotations.
For me, this spread is about the things that hold us back from being "alive"...from being our true selves.
On the left hand page, there's the girl who's constantly looking to someone else for the answers. Then there's the girl who's always looking back on the past with regret (although I do love that artwork, she looks so melancholy). And at the bottom, the girl who's always longing for what she can't have (Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth...one of my absolute favorite pieces ever). On the right page, there's the girl who's constantly finding something else to do so that she can ignore what needs to be done. And then the little girl hiding herself away because she's afraid. And lastly, there's the girl in the swing...she's got it all figured out: to be exactly who and what she wants to be.
I think sometimes we (or I) make things harder than they have to be...we over-complicate what should be simple. Like the song alludes to, it takes time and making up our own mind to see things clearly.
It's not easy...it should be, but it's not.
For me, I think that's why it takes us being...not brave (or not only brave)...but fed up...to be so sick of something that it's literally a knee-jerk reaction to have to make it change. And then the challenge is to not let those nagging doubts or bad habits creep back in and push us back into our little holes.
We only get one go round in this life...I don't want to spend any more time shrinking back or covering up. I am working on being the girl on the swing, boldly being whatever it comes to my mind to be.
I've been adjusting (more on that later) and I actually managed to do a couple of art journal pages, so I thought I'd share them with you...as proof that I'm not dead and all that...
The first page is for JOURNAL 52...week 5...the television prompt, posted way back in January...yes, I am that behind...shame of shames!
"You spent half your life trying to turn the other half around." -Kathleen Edwards
What does that page have to do with TV you ask? The words are from this song by Kathleen Edwards, called "Six O'Clock News":
I am not a TV watcher by nature...even when I do, I've got to do something else while I watch...and I wasn't really feeling the TV prompt...until I remembered that song and the line "You spent half your life trying to turn the other half around." Which I really like and had more to do with where I'm at right now than any other TV related thing, so I just went with it.
And then there's the DOCUMENTED LIFE spread...also from way back in January...I feel so behind! (Probably because I AM THAT BEHIND!) The Art Challenge for this spread was "writing" and the Journal Prompt was "words with friends" and here's what I came up with:
You can't see it very much, but I used writing as my beginning layer...it only shows through in a few places.
I got the words on this page from this song, "Time to Leave" by Melissa Ferrick:
And I think they are some wise words indeed:
"You can't fix anyone else, babe."
"Being a friend means knowing when it's time to leave"
Aside from getting a little art journaling in, KAT MCNALLY'S APRIL MOON (still time to join!) has started, and I've been pondering the prompts in my head...she's got such a knack for helping you get to the meat of things, instead of just fluttering on the surface...she just asks the right questions, I guess.
Kat's Reverb14 prompts last year had a very profound affect on me. In fact, they are part of the answer to the first April Moon prompt:
"That's when I knew that this chapter of my life had ended. And now I was free to..."
The thought of leaving my husband is something that had occurred to me many times...but there was always a reason not to...me talking myself out of it with one thing or another. Because it's wasn't something to do lightly. So I stayed and things just kept piling up and piling up and I stayed and things piled. And for years of my life, I waited and hoped things would change. But they didn't change. And so I decided that maybe if I changed, then it would be an inspiration to others and then they would change too. But that's not what happened.
There was a point last year, during Reverb14, where I was sitting there typing my answer to one of the prompts and I thought to myself 'I don't want to live this life'. I was so, so tired of trying and trying and having nothing to show for it. I'd worked hard to make things better...but I was the only one who was changing...everything around me stayed very much the same...despite my needing it to be otherwise...despite my pleas for something/anything to be different.
And something in me just snapped...I knew that nothing was ever going to change. I knew that I was always going to live this same sad existence every day and have that for my life. And I knew that I did not want to live that life forever. There had been so much opportunity for things to have ended differently between my husband (Andy) and myself, but Andy was comfortable with the way things were...he didn't want anything to be different, and he didn't seem to care very much about what I wanted. This is not different from the entirety of my marriage...the difference is that I was not ok with it anymore, and I was not willing to keep trying. He made his choice, and I'm not mad about it...I just wasn't going to let him make my choices anymore. I needed things to be different and I wasn't going to be the only one compromising any more. One person can't hold up the world.
And so I left, and I've been staying with my mom since January. And in some ways, I feel in transition still...not settled...because this is not the end of the line for me...I will get my own place eventually and have my own space and take care of myself completely by myself...and so as I sit here and type away on mom's computer, in mom's house, I feel like a bit of a transient.
But the thing is, I know now that I am free to do things differently. That I won't always have this feeling of unrest...that I will find a place to put down roots. I don't have to do the same things I've always done. I can make another choice. I can forge my own path. And I'm working on it.
And that leads me to the second prompt for April Moon:
"Knowing what I know now, I would tell my ten-years-ago self:"
Not to damn wait.
Ten years ago, I was a year and a half into my marriage, and had pretty well already started to have doubts about it. Instead of listening to my gut, I listened to other people. People, who despite having the best of intentions, didn't really have the right to decide what I should do. I chose to listen to them, and I lost a lot of time and opportunities.
I would tell my former self to get it together...pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get to it. Nobody in life is going to hand you what you want, and you don't get anything by sitting there wishing for it. If you want it, go work for it. Don't let anybody tell you who you are and don't let anybody guilt you into being something that you don't want to be.
I'd tell her the same thing I am telling myself today: Figure out what it is that you want and go get it. Knuckle down, quit your whining and make things happen. You don't get to blame anyone else ever again. Whatever you end up with, good or bad, is because of your actions or lack of them, so whatever choice you make, you better be ready to make it work.
And on that forceful note, I'm done for today...
I'll leave you with some cuteness...Frida the adorable (and growing like a weed) puppy dog:
Had to trick her with treats next to the camera so as to get her to stay still...
...the paw on the leg is the last ditch effort at patience...half a second after I snapped this pic, she jumped up, head-butted me and stole the treat...
There's so much repetition happening in my life right now. Some good, some...less than good. I am a repeat offender in regards to art, good music, obscene levels of milk drinking, being generally hilarious...purposefully or not, and collecting weird stuff that I don't really have room for but that's too cool to pass up. That's all generally good stuff. But I'm also a repeat offender for stinky stuff...cigarettes, junk food, staying up too late at night when I have to get up the next day (ending in the zombification of me during daylight hours) and of caring too much about people who will never care about me.
I've talked about that last one before...like I said, I am a repeat offender and I know it. I haven't been able to help it so far...once you get into a habit, it's easy to stay in it. Maybe it's something everybody does at some point...loving someone who will never love you in return. You know their feelings will never change, but it's like an addiction...you feel powerless to resist the pull they have on you, despite the fact that the entire thing is one-sided...even when you finally see that it's one-sided, you still try to make them love you. Relationships shouldn't work that way. Real relationships don't work that way.
Unfortunately for me, I am an expert at finding these one-sided love situations. I've always been that way. I find the person who will take and take and take because I'm willing to give. I don't think that it's a bad thing to be willing to give, or to take a leap and hope that this time will be different from all the other times you've been let down. Hope can be a terrible and dangerous thing sometimes. But I want to love and be loved in return, and the only way to do that is to put your love out there.
Since I've been art journaling, which has pushed me to get in touch with how I really feel about things in my life, I've come to see that I don't have to keep letting people steal my love. That's not a requirement of love at all. Love is too valuable to be wasted on people who don't appreciate it. The feeling that my love is too valuable to be wasted is new to me. I mean, I've understood the concept, just not as it applied to me. Now I think I'm beginning to understand. You, me, whoever...we're all worth so much more than our desperate need for affection. We have to love ourselves first, before we can expect anyone else to love us. We have to have enough self-respect not to jump into things with both feet and not try to get back to shore when we realize we're swimming in leach infested waters.
So I've got that part down...the part where I know that I need to make a break. The next step, I'm not so sure about. Now that I've unleashed my emotions, I have a tendency to feel very...passionately... Passionate love is what I've got...but the downfall is that I have the opposite problem too... And the opposite of passionate love is passionate hate...actually, that's not true. I really think that the opposite of passionate love is apathy...in my eyes, having someone hate you is much better than having someone be indifferent toward you. But I haven't learned how to be apathetic yet...I really don't know that I'm cruel enough to ever be apathetic toward a person...so what I have to work with is passionate hate. That's my solution for now.
I know, I know...that's not a solution. But it's what I have to let (or make) myself feel for now. It's the only way to break the cycle of too much unhealthy love. Therefore, if I happen to see a certain person and set my jaw, roll my eyes, or comment to a friend that I hate said-person's stupid face, it's only because at one point I loved too much. I have to replace the love I felt and the pain of rejection with the feeling of general disgust toward the person I formerly cared for. And if I fake it often enough, eventually it will become how I really feel. And maybe at some point in the future, I will be wise enough to let that disgust fade into not caring at all.
And that's the thought I had in mind when I made this journal page:
"Repetition creates a habit. Repetition breaks a habit too." -Melissa Ferrick
Here's a live version of the song that the words on the page are from:
If somebody has a better idea of how I can skip the feelings of hate and disgust and go right to not caring, I would love to hear it...I don't want to hate people, but I don't know any other way to make myself stop caring too much. I've thought about trying to pity the aforementioned non-returners of love...you know, because I am pretty awesome and they are missing out big time...but that's not worked out so well. I really kind of want to hate them for now. And that is a feeling...even if it's not a very nice one...and it is one of my goals to accept what I am feeling... Can you tell I'm trying to justify my longing to hate? ...really, I'd feel much better if I just got to throat punch the non-requiters...and then say, 'Now you know how I felt'...but I don't think violence is the answer...or, really, I just can't afford the lawsuits... So, for now, until some better choice comes along, I'll be repeatedly telling myself that I am above punching people...but not above hating their stupid faces...and maybe eventually I'll break the habit of caring about people who don't care about me.
