Wow. It's been 2 weeks since I updated. Life has been a crazy mix of difficulties & things out of left field. Sickness and craziness and death (three separate things!). Sobbing in a funeral home and holding hands as another deals with bleakness in their life.
Art has been my life saver. It has been keeping me afloat, barely, with quickly sketched drawings and frantic messes made in the studio. Whatever I painted came out as an awful mess of color that mixed too much, and harsh, deep marks into the paint. I think I used the sharp point of a palette knife at some point to cut up pages in my journal.
Life, grief, and stress are curious things.
Last night, I wrote in my journal, "Fibromyalgia hates stress, but that's all I've been feeding her lately."
And the night before, "My life feels like the thread stringing together odd moments."
The thing no one tells you is what to do after.
When all the stressors are gone and you've broken the surface and taken that deep gasp of air, when you're back on dry land...what do you do now? You're different than before, full of hard-learned lessons and new scars on your heart, and don't easily slot back into your own life. It's incredibly disjointing and causes a kind of emotional vertigo.
This morning, I stood in the kitchen, knowing I had to eat breakfast, but had no idea what to do with myself. My life has been care-taking and crying and holding hands, and now...now there are threads to pick back up, like paintings to list and emails to answer and classes to write and film. I need to head to the studio to get back into things and make notes, yet I feel not the numbness of the previous weeks, but the overwhelm of all that i dropped. The spinning plates have crashed, and I don't know how to put them back together.
No, wait. I do. You sit down and gather all the splintered pieces and a tube of super glue and work one junction at a time, slowly, steadily, and try not to cut your fingers. And if you're lucky, and have friends who have weathered it all with you, they give you gloves to protect yourself from sharp edges.
So that's what I'm going to do. Sit down, gather bits, squeeze on some glue, and remember that amazing quote that's given me so much peace:
"The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are stronger at the broken places." - Ernest Hemingway
I certainly hope that's true.