This was originally sent as a newsletter for Of Pens & Paintbrushes. If you’d like to get this directly in your inbox, you can sign up here, at the Newsletter sign up page.
Hey you.
First off: Thank you to everyone who has ordered Stacking Bands – the tumbler is full of them, and they should be going out shortly. There’s room for more, and for reasons I’ll go into shortly, I deeply appreciate having a lot of them to make. They’re a comforting, easy kind of work (which is why they’re only $25) and I am grateful for that right now, to keep me busy and not thinking so much.
Second: I have one painting currently hanging in House of Shadows for their ‘Sweet Death’ show, and will have two paintings hanging (for one night only) with Popoloum at the Heartbreak show and (grown up) Prom event this Saturday. (I’ll be there for that one, too.) If you come by, do introduce yourself. I’ll be in white.
And off we go.
There are times when you don’t know where you’ll find the strength to put one foot in front of the other. It’s not a lack of want, it’s not bored, it’s not even really tired. It’s more as if even the air you breathe has become corrosive, eating away at you slowly, like rust on steel, burrowing through you, one breath at a time.
The first problem with inhaling corrosive air is that it feels like that’s all you have to exhale, and it pushes people away. It also just hurts – it never quite stops hurting, a stinging bite in every bone and vein. Distraction, and particularly work that doesn’t require much thinking, is your best bet. It doesn’t work well, but it’s better than nothing, and in time, the fumes clear, and you can start to heal a bit.
The scars remain, however, and scars aren’t stretchy or flexible, and this is problematic for things that need some flexibility to work well, like lungs and veins. How long before they can’t adapt to the pressure from having all that scar tissue?
I am at the point where I am just working on putting one foot in front of the other, and probably will be doing that for the rest of the month, based on past rounds. I have a lot of practice at ice skating on momentum through these periods, relying on the velocity from the good periods to get me through the hard ones. I lean hard on the habits I frantically built when things were good (or at least better) to keep things afloat, systems I built knowing all too well this was going to hit again. I’m really good at this, as much as I wish I didn’t have to be.
I am not so great at asking for help or trusting people to help. I’ve been let down too many times, by too many people, to do that anymore. It’s not a thing you can tell me to just learn to do, or try to do again. I’m turning 40 this month, and the pros and cons of trusting new people without deep caution, to willingly risk getting hurt and setting off a rough patch, they just don’t fall on the side of continuing to trust people who haven’t proven their word is backed with action and consistency. I don’t like that, but what option is left? My survival depends on my being strong, stable, and flexible enough to adapt to the changes in a volatile economy,and I work in fields that require creativity and flexibility as my primary skills. I can’t do that if I’m hurting from being let down yet again – or from being terrified a hard patch is going to cause me to let other people down, undoing years of work and relationships. It is extremely difficult for me to show up authentically when the sun sets on me like this and my inner stars that guide me home haven’t come out yet.
I hear this often from some of my most brilliant, gifted, creative, innovative friends. We tap each other at these low points, just so we know where everyone is, even if we know there’s nothing to be done. It’s a refrain, a chorus of: hang in there, I know you want nothing more than to not wake up, to quit, to call it done, but hang in there, hang in there, don’t make me do this without you.
I am surrounded, in my darkness, by a chorus of Hang In There, and despite wanting nothing more than to let go, I hang on for one more round. It won’t be this time.
Hang in there.
A.Markov
PS: I say this with all the kindness I can muster: Unsolicited advice is not welcome on this subject – ever. It’s genuinely more exhausting to have to field it during a time I’m already running on empty. I’ve heard the same from everyone who has ever been through this kind of thing with any regularity. Writing this is about all I have in me, and fielding advice would take more energy and time away during a time I’m already struggling to find any for the basics, like breathing. When someone is hurting, you don’t ask more of them so you can feel useful, even if you mean well.
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This was originally sent as a newsletter for Of Pens & Paintbrushes. If you’d like to get this directly in your inbox, you can sign up here, at the Newsletter sign up page.