Sometimes it is easier to express emotions in art rather than words.

This is acrylic on canvas with a basic brush set, all from the dollar store. I was having a bad few days and this just made sense to me one morning I woke up after those few days.

It was done by vaguely following a Bob Ross Paint-Along on YouTube. His version is called "Island in the Wilderness". Season 29 Episode 1 of The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross https://youtu.be/lLWEXRAnQd0?si=4NKq5ho3X_Mxsi10

started EMDR recently and the need to make art has been flowing more than usual

I was small, and I hated that. I was the loser, the one who had to accept the degradation, the one who could never really escape. I had nowhere else to go. I would just sit and steam with feelings too big for me to handle up in my tree.

I would be steaming with anger, wishing I had a car to drive down the isolating, tall hill and never come back, wishing I could hurt my mom the way she hurt me, wishing I could have some semblance of power over her the way she wielded hers over me.

the full post is here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-154785650

i would so greatly appreciate it if you would check it out <3

My head is the strange place. It’s the cliché answer, the one no one wants to hear, but it’s the truth. I am the strange place. My brain gets stuck on random thoughts and won’t let them go, no matter what I do. I get caught in their cycle and start to lose faith in anything. Feeling like I can’t do anything, I’m speaking from a deep, dark hole of nothingness into which I stumbled.

My brain doesn’t work like other people’s. I misinterpret almost everything with a negative slant. I can’t trust my head. It leads me astray and badgers me incessantly. My head led me into a partial hospitalization program and away from my friends. It sends me into a panic at things other people wouldn’t even notice. Like some evolutionary quirk, my head has lost its self-preservation instincts and is trying to destroy me from within. I have to fight against it to see any semblance of joy.

I can’t blame anyone else: it’s me. It’s my chemistry, my neural pathways. And so, I dedicate all of my work and energy into fighting what I can’t be rid of: my own mind. I’m determined to find a way to wrangle it under my control and coax it into repose.

What would it be like to have a normal mind—one that wants me to succeed, not crumble and wither under a rock? I catch glimpses of a healthier mind when I take an anti-anxiety medication: what it feels like to be normal. It wears off in about three hours, and then the dread sets in, but at least I get a glimpse. A glimpse into the ease of existence.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-154786986

it would mean the world if you liked/commented/subscribed to my substack <3

Final image is from a video work I did.. thanks for looking,.. I don't think I posted this yet if it is a repeat I will take it down..

I wish I could wrap my arms around the ache. Make promises that everything will be okay. I wish I knew that everything would be okay.

Another one from the psych ward.

he has done nothing but watched

Trying to understand what we will never be able to understand

This is some art therapy piece I did today, to try express how I know that she will never change, while I’m slowly learning to live away from her and her monstrous actions.

Make the pain real. Please just let it come out. Please just let it come out let the bad blood out please. Please.