Long day. Lots of start of the month things. Bills, schedules, planning, public liability insurance for my new Studio at Sabine Street (purchasing that felt both very daunting and very exciting), feeling overwhelmed, and in between it all still finding time to visit with two of my closest friends, one by one, the way I like it, and talk in-depth about all sorts of things including cats (one must always talk about cats), art (one must also always talk about art), and in a late night conversation that threatened the few hours of sleep I can look forward to before my trip to Beaumont tomorrow, the stories we tell ourselves about the things that happened, which are sometimes hard to pry apart from what we know for a fact to be true. Our interpretations merge with reality. We infuse memories with the emotional baggage we subconsciously choose to weigh them down with. What someone said gets distorted into what we imagined them to mean. A simple gesture acquires mythical proportions. It takes a very patient friend to sit down and try to detangle hurtful memories from the even more hurtful inner discourse projected onto them. Luckily I have such a friend. And no, I have not figured anything out I didn’t quite know before. Neither have I slain all my inner monsters. I’m just more aware, maybe, of the fears I tend to project onto certain experiences, of the negative ways in which I sometimes see myself. I’m obviously not sharing it all here because it would be oversharing. I just drew this sad horse as a symbol of the distorted gloomy alternate reality we all can sink into at times, the self-sabotaging stories we can tell ourselves.
