-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
not so common
Got around to making a new paper journal yesterday. I decided at age 30 to start keeping my paper journals instead of burning them, which is what I always ended up doing before. Now I have filled about one composition book a year, give or take, and have a stack of these, each with a weirdly similar collage on the cover of each.
Out with the old, in with the new. My own personal holiday. I wrote less in this last one than any of the others. Not a surprise. 2020 was truly the worst year I've ever experienced. I know for a lot of people, they feel the same.
I didn't write much, partly because I was moving back and forth again and again. Even though that journal was always one of the things I had with me in my backpack.
Reminder to self: WASH BACKPACK.
But I also didn't want to face things as they were happening, and I don't want to look back and relive them, either. I try not to look over the old journals often, but when I get around to needing a new one, I usually flip through it for comparison. I was thinking about this past year, my own personal experience of this past year. May 2020 to May 2021...I have no idea how I kept it together and how I am doing as well as I am. I wrote enough to get the jist of the shit.
I do know that I am thankful to be somewhere mostly mellow. Where I feel like I can walk around wearing headphones without worrying someone is going to come up behind me and try to grab me, hit me, or set me on fire. Thankful to live where I DON'T see people taking a shit against a building or passed out with a needle in their arm every single time I leave the house. I am thankful I'm not dealing with daily garbage fires and psycho neighbors that bully and intimidate me daily with the full support of the local police force. I am thankful my husband is off meth and I hope he starts to feel better soon.
It's hard enough existing through my own addiction, but to have to exist at the whim of another person's addiction at the same time is maddening torture. Add some severely untreated mental illnesses and it's like living in the mirror of a broken image. Everything is distorted. Up is down, left is right, but it's not even as logical as opposites. There is no explanation to what is, what is not. It was a nightmare, but was real, and it felt like it was never going to stop. It felt like it couldn't possibly be happening, but it was.
I sit here and gather some strength, because I can't go through all that again. Not for anyone. And I am thankful for any moment of peace. My cat sits behind my computer on my art desk in my art studio and I am so grateful to have my own space again. Grateful for having so many supplies and tools to make pretty much anything I want whenever I can. And paper. I'm thankful for paper. If I didn't have these paper journals to take with me and sit somewhere alone and get the feelings out, I don't think I'd be around anymore.
I don't get too involved with the art on them, because they get fairly beat up from me taking them around with me. I just go with intuition and have some fun and make something pretty to look at, kind of a theme for the year to come.
This year I put words on it. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. This year it reads "You are are are here."
I also found a really cool stamp in the box of stamps that were in this hoard. There was a stamp from the confederate united states. I put that on there too. Just a weird random piece of history to add to my own losery piece of history that ends up in a stack of composition books on a shelf in my studio space.
12:38 PM - Thursday, May. 20, 2021
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------