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30 Days of Sandy Sue Altered: 27
21 Aug 2016 Leave a comment
in art, bipolar disorder, humor, mixed-media art Tags: blogging challenges
30 Days of Sandy Sue Altered: 25
19 Aug 2016 Leave a comment
in art, bipolar disorder, humor, mixed-media art Tags: blogging challenges, pessimism
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Ask Already
15 Aug 2016 10 Comments
in art, bipolar disorder, cats, creativity, distorted thinking, family, friends, mental health, mental illness, relationships, video Tags: communication, stigma, support
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I forget that neuro-normals don’t always know how to bring crazy into a conversation. I also know other folks with mental illness aren’t always as open as I am (i.e. in-your-face TMI) and have real reasons to keep their condition private. So I grok that asking me how I am might be intimidating. Old taboos, stigma, Midwestern Nice—for whatever reason, some folks are more comfortable asking other people how I am.
My sister told me about one mutual friend who said, “I know I’m not supposed to ask, but…”
Whaaaaa?
I guess it’s possible, during one of my Swampy Brain days, that I might have sprayed venom like a velociraptor if a human being invaded my space (which varies depending on the amount of Swamp). Or muttered an F-word-laced answer to a direct question. Or maybe just burst into tears. It’s possible.
Gosh, I hope not. I want people to ask after me—especially on those Everglades days. When my hold on Reality is shakiest, I need to know people haven’t written me off or (horrors!) forgotten about me. Kindness makes me cry, but I hope that isn’t a deterrent.
Come to think of it, inquiring directly about my state of mind could get pretty messy what with all the spittle, and weepage, and colorful expletives. It might take someone with a HAZMAT suit and no sense of propriety.
I can live with second-hand concern. I’m still touched by it. And I apologize if a squirting, prehistoric potty-mouth responded to anyone’s approach. I hope they try again. I’ll use my words next time.
30 Days of Sandy Sue Altered: 20
14 Aug 2016 2 Comments
in art, bipolar disorder, mental health, mixed-media art Tags: blogging challenges
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30 Days of Sandy Sue Altered: 19
13 Aug 2016 3 Comments
in art, bipolar disorder, humor, mixed-media art Tags: blogging challenges
My End of the Sanity Spectrum
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Brain-Sick
06 Aug 2016 12 Comments
in art, bipolar disorder, distorted thinking, friends, gratitude, management, mental health, mental illness, mixed-media art, mixed-state Tags: acceptance, rapid cycling, support
There’s nothing new to say about rapid cycling mixed states. I’ve railed against them and given in, pulled out every tool in my toolbox and given up, called for help and stayed silent, pushed against the maggoty words they whisper in my ear and believed every word. My response to the turmoil in my head has been as varied as my illness.
But if anything is new, it must be the time it takes me to accept, breathe, and allow whatever my head and body chemistry need to do. And I’ve gathered a larger support network around me, so that when I call for help (usually a few texts back and forth) I don’t have to burden the same few friends over and over. Spread the Horror, that’s my emergency motto.
Thank you, all my Go-To People, who get those scary/sad/frantic texts and respond with such kindness and love. You make all the difference.
Thank you for riding shot-gun on my Adventure.
Purging
15 Jul 2016 15 Comments
in bipolar disorder, books, mental health, quality of life, writing Tags: purge, small apartment living
In the continuing effort to make my apartment a spiritual and creative Haven, I’m concentrating on my bedroom this summer. I fixed up and painted an old dresser when I first moved in. Now that I have my Dad’s nice chest of drawers, that pretty piece of crap got carted to Goodwill. I also pruned a ton of esoteric reading from my Past Life, so another falling-apart bookcase will soon go as well. And the old magazine rack/end tables I used as night stands are also on their way out.
Five Years of Journals
I tossed my spiral notebook journals yesterday. I had thought I would use some of the pages as art background, but I realized there was too much pain, misery and confusion captured there. Why would I use something so disheartening in an activity that brings me such joy?
Journaling is a process for me, a way to See the lies my brain tells me and to release the emotional steam in my physical pressure cooker. I don’t need to keep the details of my day—I won’t remember them. Electroshock created a tidy black hole where my memory used to be. Eventually, everything slides over the Event Horizon. I was given the gift of living in the moment.
So when I read about my past, I can’t connect to the words. At best, a fuzzy snippet, a dream-like shadow, might dislodge from the Void. It’s enough to remind me of what I’ve lost. And, again, why would I do that to myself?
So, into the dumpster they went.
I’m pulling everything off my bedroom walls, cleaning and patching holes. Soon, I’ll paint, then shampoo the carpet. I found a sweet cabinet and a set of night stands at Ikea that will boost the feminine, dreamy quality I’m creating.
Of course, my Romance Wall will be reconfigured as will all my Pretend Boyfriends.
I knew I needed a peaceful, calming image across from the bed, and found the perfect piece when my friend, Robert, posted some of his new photographs. A large print of Blue Astor is forthcoming.
I’m looking forward to making my bedroom as clean, efficient and lovely as the rest of my apartment. In the meantime, I have all these books to get rid of. Below is the list. If you’re interested in any of them, leave your address in a comment (it won’t go public), and I’ll send the books you want.
Oops! Too Late! Taken to the Library on 7/21. But you can still see what you missed.
- A Treasury of the World’s Best Loved Poems (no editor listed. Avenel Books, a division of Crown)
- Almaas, A.H., Diamond Heart, Book One
- Armstrong, Karen, A History of God
- Bennett, J.G., Deeper Man
- Broch, Janice & Veronica MacLer, Seasonal Dance: How to Celebrate the Pagan Year
- Cameron, Julia, The Vein of Gold: A Journey to Your Creative Heart
- —Walking in This World: The Practical Art of Creativity
- Cooper, J.C., The Aquarian Dictionary of Festivals
- Dacyczyn, Amy, The Tightwad Gazette: Promoting Thrift as a Viable Alternative Lifestyle
- Dahlke, Rudiger, Mandalas of the World: A Meditating and Painting Guide
- Damasio, Antonio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness
- Dickinson, Emily, Final Harvest
- Estes, Clarissa Pinkola, Women Who Run With the Wolves
- Farrar, Janet and Stewart, A Witches Bible Complete
- Ferguson, Diana, The Magickal Year: A Pagan Perspective on the Natural World
- Ganim, Barbara, Art and Healing: Using Expressive Art to Heal your Body, Mind, and Spirit
- Gearhart, Sally and Susan Rennie, A Feminist Tarot
- George, David L., Ed., The Family Book of Best Loved Poems
- Knight, Gareth, The Secret Tradition in Arthurian Legend
- Kramer, Gregory, Insight Dialogue
- Linden, Eugene, The Parrot’s Lament: And Other True Tales of Animal Intrigue, Intelligence and Ingenuity
- Moore, Thomas, Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationship
- Murdock, Maureen, The Heroine’s Journey
- Pearsall, Paul, The Heart’s Code
- Pearson, Carol, Awakening the Heroes Within
- Phelps, Kimberly Lilith, McMillian, Teresa and With, Barbara Lee, Diaries of a Psychic Sorority: Talking with the Angels
- Rilke, Rainer Maria, Selected Poems
- Rinpoche, Sogyal, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
- Robbins, Rossell Hope, Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demons
- Ruiz, Don Miguel, The Mastery of Love
- —The Voice of Knowledge
- Silverstein, Shel, The Giving Tree
- Stewart, R.J., Celtic Myths, Celtic Legends
- Tart, Charles, Waking Up
- —Living the Mindful Life
- Thich Nhat Hanh, Teachings on Love
- —Present Moment Wonderful Moment
- —Peace is Every Step
- Vaughn, Frances, The Inward Arc
Soothing The Troubles
12 Jul 2016 17 Comments
in anxiety, art, art journaling, awareness, bipolar disorder, creativity, distorted thinking, mental health, mental illness, mixed-media art, poetry, TV and Movies Tags: art journaling, Haven
I’m finishing up a Haven marathon. If you’re not familiar with this SyFy Channel show that got cancelled last year, think Stephen King (it’s based on one of his stories) when he’s not at his best. Hokey, repetitive and, at times, incomprehensible, but with enough great characters and moments of genius dialog to keep my attention. Gloria, the smart-ass coroner, is worth it all by herself. And Dwight, the Chief of Police, isn’t hard to look at either (This GIF is from an episode where they switched bodies—one of my faves).
The folks in Haven, Maine have Troubles—like attracting bullets, or talking to the dead, or blowing up anything they touch. I always liked that understated description for the load of misery the townsfolk suffer. Troubles. I’ve unofficially adopted it this summer. As in “my Trouble is flaring up.”
Which it did today. I got a naggy, creepy-crawly feeling that something bad was about to happen, sort of a Stephen King version of anxiety. Everyone looked suspicious and a little dangerous. And I was worried about screwing up my art projects.
However, I finished a couple of things without unfixable mishaps. I put together my first art journal in over a decade. Even though the memory of making those first ones got lost in the ECT void, I kept the written instructions and assembled all the ingredients over the past couple of weeks. I watched the Dark Fret try to stop me from finishing today, but pushed on. Somehow, it helped to have this new journal done. I did it. While Troubled.
Front Cover
Back Cover
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I also finished a new piece for my front door. The text comes from Stephen Dunn’s poem, Reversal, which I loved so much I posted it a few days back.
I worked on this for weeks, waiting after each coat of paint or bit of grunge to see what would arise. Working with matte medium and fabric for the first time, I panicked over the result, then took sand paper to it and loved the effect. Yesterday I tore apart an old alarm clock for the gears. Today, I finished it with gloss medium and hated it. My Trouble screamed, “Ruination!”
The negativity and fear my Trouble conjures up slips into my body like an old, familiar song. But, practice helps me turn down the volume and remember there are no mistakes—just unexpected detours. Art work, fiction, life may not turn out the way I envision them, but they turn out. Most of the time, those detours are the best part of my day. Troubled or not.
Second Helpings of Joy
04 Jul 2016 12 Comments
in art, art journaling, bipolar disorder, creativity, mental health, mental illness, mixed-media art, music, video, writing Tags: joy, Martha Beck, therapy
I’ve been reading Martha Beck’s The Joy Diet, a self-help/Life Coachy recipe for uncovering and going after your Heart’s Desire. If you haven’t been in therapy for decades, and feel like there’s something missing or off in your life, this would be a decent place to start.
I started therapy when Ronald Reagan was President, so none of the material is new to me. Still, I like hearing things presented in a new way, especially when the author has heart and a sense of humor.
Take her chapter on Treats. These are the things/experiences we’re to reward ourselves for taking a risk toward that Heart’s Desire. Very Pavlovian. But Beck also wants her readers to give themselves at least two other Treats a day, just because folks generally don’t do that enough. I liked that.
And Beck’s definition of “Treat?” Anything that makes you feel like smiling. Since most of us are programmed to grimace automatically in public, she gives homework to help the chronically repressed find what actually warms their cockles. I like how she takes her readers by the hand, breaks each step to Nirvana into tiny, measurable actions instead of leaving them stranded in nebulous Woo-Woo Land. And I like how she compares us to pigs.
So some of these ideas percolated in my hind-brain as I played with my art journal this weekend. I worked on a cross-over spread, taking characters from a short story I’m writing and doing cool things with letters they’re writing to each other. I adapted a Dixie Chicks song that I love and made it my character’s. I treated pages from an antique, hand-written journal to use as their stationary. It thrilled me to come at these characters and their story from a different angle, and to make something so gorgeous.
But, when I tried to write my new lyrics on this scrumptious paper, no marker or pen I owned made a consistent mark. I worked for hours, going over the blotchy, ragged letters again and again. It still ended up looking like a serial killer’s tease for the FBI.
I stopped when my hand cramped too much to hold a pen, and I was willing to let it go. Some experiments don’t work. That’s why they’re called experiments.
But as Henry walked across my shins in bed this morning, I got one of those lightbulb ideas. The problem wasn’t with my pens, it was the paper. I’d made it too slick. How could I give it a little bite?
I jumped out of bed and went to work, mixing matte medium with a few drops of gesso, adding paint, then taking fresh pages out of the hand-written journal and applying this concoction with a roller and paper towels. I tested one corner with a gel pen before spraying the pages with fixative. It took the pen beautifully.
The whole process filled me with joy. Setting a problem aside, receiving the answer as I passed through the Creative Gold Mine between sleep and wakefulness, using media I didn’t own two months ago, and actually creating a thing the way I imagined it in my head.
When I finished the spread, I couldn’t stop grinning. Here was everything I loved—my writing, my art, my music, Richard Armitage. . . Layers of meaning overlapped like the layers of paper (I love a metaphor you can actually touch), and color fed some hungry animal inside me.
Probably a pig.
My Brain Hurts!
30 Jun 2016 27 Comments
in art, art journaling, bipolar disorder, blogging, creativity, distorted thinking, mental health, mental illness, TV and Movies, video Tags: courage, Julia Cameron, Monty Python, Shakespeare
“What ‘real artists’ have is courage. Not enormous gobs of it. Just enough for today. Creativity, like breathing, always comes down to the question, “Are you doing it now?” The awful truth is that there is always one small creative act for which we can find the courage. As with housework, there is always something, and all the little somethings add up, over time, to a flow. Courage, after all is a matter of heart, and hearts do their work one beat at a time.” — Julia Cameron in The Vein of Gold: A Journey to Your Creative Heart
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Blogging is so incestuous. I read David Kanigan’s post from Monday, and knew I had something to say about courage, comfort zones and whacking the scales off our sclerotic dendrites. At least I thought I did. Or I wanted to think about those things. Or my ego wanted to jump up and down screaming about them. In public.
I feel pretty brave. Except when I don’t. Driving out to Artfest in Washington this spring didn’t feel particularly brave. Except when I got home and spent the next two months rapid cycling and ducking from my brain’s suicidal dodge balls. Latching onto art journaling to keep from getting hammered by red rubber didn’t seem brave, just a case of self defense. It never occurred to me that drawing and painting when I used to be too scared to do either might be stripping some of the plaque off my craft.
What really felt brave was buying The Hollow Crown and sitting down to over eight hours of Shakespeare. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt so dumb. I listened to the pretty words, knew they were an old form of English, but couldn’t translate them. I could feel my brain straining, flabby gray-matter-muscles forced to climb a junior high fitness test rope.
Oh, but, the music of the language! That was the liniment for my bruised brain. Plus, Great Performances emptied out The Royal Shakespearian Theater to cast these four plays, so all the British actors I adore speak this unintelligible music.
I take comfort that I’ve never read Richard II, Henry IV (either Part One or Part Two) or Henry V. I have no bits of them embedded in my hind brain next to the passages of Romeo and Juliet Mrs. Christensen made us memorize in ninth grade.
And, yet, it feels brave to be dumb, to be a Monty Python Gumby shouting, “My brain hurts!”
Sometimes, being brave means finding the right anesthesia. Sometimes it’s embracing my full-out Gumby-ness. Either way, my art benefits.
And now for something completely different.
SandySue Altered
