My Brain is Doing That Thing Where it Works All Weird and Tells Me to Share It

Shane helped me breathe through the latest round of art related panic attacks. He's very good at finding a balance between sopping up the liquid mess of my ego and telling me to cowgirl up. I'm in a weird head space tonight where I am looking at myself and my process and wondering why it's identical to printmaking or painting class critiques. I know since school I've had phases when I felt genuinely confident and there was some uncomplicated pride in my work.

I think the problem here is that I haven't made time to work regularly, so I have to psychologically start from scratch. I'm feeling sort of wiggy about blogging, too. I'm just not in a good rhythm and it's not fitting in between real life stuff. Shit Hesse's calling profane at this point in The Glass Bead Game. And if I hadn't read in the intro that the protagonist is going to kick that crap in the teeth later, I'd probably be throwing the book across the room.

I'm in a funk about art as a privileged activity. I don't want to buy the bullshit that art is somehow separate from real life, that I can't be regular human creature with a spouse and a child and a bills-paying, community-building job and be a creator of beautiful things. The flipside is my feeling sulky because I don't have time for the sublime because of the mundane. Time = Luxury. And find me a working mother with enough time.


Being me in this mental atmosphere and trying to navigate a world of other very complicated human beings is stretching my brain to its limits. I probably need to lock myself in a room with my journal for a few years hours.

There's no logical neat ending here. I could go flippant & ask for donations for a maid? Or I dig back into Blake and find something about these contraries meeting in some alchemic way? Faeries sing and my mothering makes me a better artist and my creativity makes me a happy worker but in reality it's all feeling very messy and real and non-poetic. It's cognitive dissonance to switch from analyzing line and shape to screaming for five blessed minutes alone to poop without a four-year-old audience.