Monday, August 19, 2019

Flora & Fauna: Why are root systems so hard to draw?

Dear Reader,

I'm coming to realize that my efforts to draw root systems for plants are not going so well. I don't understand it. I can draw Celtic style knotwork but drawing a tangled rootball is just this side of impossible for me. It is making it difficult to draw plants because the upper parts are not the focus for the current batch of plants I am trying to draw. I'm still dissatisfied with how Bear-Root came out. I am seriously considering doing character sketches for a little while. The problem there is I'm not so great at drawing hands or feet.

I feel poorly about the fact that I haven't blogged daily on here. I recognize that challenges like my children being finished with summer school, birthdays, and a family member having a medical crisis are all legitimate reasons for being stalled in my blogging schedule. I still feel bad about this. I apologize for my quietness. Life keeps throwing me curve balls and I keep striking out when I try to swing at them.

AW: Morning Blog 24

I've come to realize that my perfectionism is getting in my way again. I have ridiculously high standards for all of my creative work. I recognize it comes out of how I was gaslighted for 20+ years that the only thing acceptable was my best work. And even then, if the people who had been gaslighting me decided that the way I did it wasn't how they would have done it, my best work wasn't good enough. In short, I was told that my best was never good enough. They kept moving the goal posts on each accomplishment. As a result, I internalized this tendency to move the goal posts and keep striving for perfection in my first attempt.

This is not healthy for me on multiple levels. I am realizing that my perfectionism is a combination of a desperate attempt to win the approval of people who are no longer in the picture and fear that the rest of the world looks at me the same way.  I'm realizing that my perfectionism is a desperate effort to avoid being attacked for my work. It's painful to realize that I'm still so wounded by things that happened in my formative years that I work to avoid them.

When K. would "critique" my work, it wasn't usually at my request. She'd hold it up to a standard that was different from what my teachers expected. Failure to perform at K.'s preferred level brought me harassment, humiliation, and scorn. It wasn't just in my writing that this happened. The woman threw away a painting that I had worked on for a literal month at school saying that it looked like 'shit' because my colors blurred together. It was water color and I've never been great at keeping control over my paint with water color. But K. decided that because it didn't look like a photograph, it was worthless and threw it away right in front of me.

K. mocked me for my artwork. K. scorned me for my attempts to master anything musical. Mind you, when I took an interest in piano, K. got one and slapped up the Moonlight Sonata for me to play when I could barely read the notes and get the right keys. I gave up on piano after a month of K. telling me that my practicing was "inconsiderately loud". It was the same response that my attempt to learn violin got as did my efforts to learn how to play the recorder. There was never a good time for me to practice. Then I got verbally eviscerated for not performing better, for giving up on the instrument, or not practicing enough. Mind you, K. was always quick to undercut my efforts and I was damned if I tried to practice when K. wasn't around because K. would insist that  my practice time was just my screwing round and playing with the instrument.

The only time K. didn't give me grief for practicing was when I was in color guard with the marching band. I think that was because I was twirling around a flag on a piece of rebar and she wasn't sure what my reaction would be if she decided to try to rip it out of my hands and show me the 'right' way to do it. I have a tendency to be unpredictable when cornered.

Thursday, August 15, 2019

AW: Morning Blog 23 (Trigger Warning: Abuse of Authority)

I'm not sure what to write today. My confidence is pretty low right now. I'm mildly depressed. I'm quite anxious, which is contributing to the depression. I feel like everything I produce in any creative format is garbage right now. I know this is all a product of old trauma and people who had cut me down in the past. It still hurts. I'm not sure what to do with this feeling. After what happened ten years ago, I'm afraid to write about the 'bad' thoughts that go through my head. I'm afraid that someone will read them and use them out of context to destroy my life. I was going to keep a Burn Book, a brain dump for unhealthy and toxic thoughts which you then tear out and destroy. My fear that someone is going to find the Burn Book and use it against me stops me from even making the first entry.

Ten years ago, I was dealing with a bad case of postpartum depression and psychosis. Ten years ago, I had a psychiatrist lie to me about the purpose of a medication he was putting me on and didn't warn me of the dangers of going off it. He told me the medication was to help me sleep and insisted the reason why I was having the symptoms I was were due to sleep deprivation (because I was having problems sleeping at the time). I was put on a low dose of an antipsychotic medication. It didn't do anything for the hallucinations that I was having. (People screaming at me terrible things from the psychological abuse I suffered through out my childhood and much of my young adult years.) Then, one fateful day, I was out of refills. I called the clinic where the doctor worked. The doctor was on vacation and the LPN on staff wasn't "comfortable" prescribing the medication for me.

Two weeks later, the hallucinations had gotten far worse as did my depression. Not thinking clearly and suicidal, I was terrified. I called the suicide hotline. They hung up on me before I could even speak to someone. I called my therapist, desperate for some manner of help. Not much later a sheriff's deputy arrived on scene. He found me shaking and on the verge of sobbing with the effort to ignore the hallucination's commands that I kill myself and my young children. I was placed under mental health arrest and transported to a hospital in a relatively nearby city that worked with the clinic I was getting services at. During this whole time, I was journaling what was going on in my head and my struggle.

While I was at the hospital, some one from Child Protective Services showed up to interview me. I was desperate for help and for my family to get the help they needed in caring for me. So, when she asked to see my journal I turned it over. She said that they may have to take the children and I panicked. I called my husband and told him what she had said and tearfully asked what I should do. He talked me out of a good deal of my terror and then asked me to hand the phone over to the woman interviewing me. They spoke for a short time and then the case worker told me that my interview was over, handing me back my notebook.

I was in the hospital for a month. It took them that long to get the medications approximately right so that I could function somewhat. That was when hell started. I had to go to court. CPS tried to paint me as an unstable monster in the making because of what I recorded of the hallucinations. They tried to paint my family as indifferent to my plight and my husband as uncaring and ignorant. This was all lies. They tried to say there was no plan to support me after I got out of the hospital. Another egregious lie. When they gave their proposed plan, it was word for word the plan that my husband and the rest of the family had outlined. And then I was to be monitored for a year. Then it was ordered that I was to not be in the home unless I was supervised and I couldn't sleep there. The year passed and multiple agencies came into the picture.

There were a few good things that came out of this, like my children's autism diagnosis and their getting services to help them. But the price was heavy. CPS treated me as a criminal. The judge said that the only reason he was as lenient as he was was because he knew my father in law. I was traumatized by the oversight of CPS and the silent implication that if I didn't agree with their demands I was going to lose my babies. My memories of my children's early years are spotty now. My terror that someone is going to use my writing to destroy me is now even stronger. I'm now suffering emotional flashbacks when I hear small children playing or crying. Going to the park has become an exercise in willpower because of the fact that I encounter children the ages of my boys during that year.

Some of my memories are coming back. It's bitter sweet to finally remember my youngest child's first steps.I don't know how many more memories are going to come back. PTSD makes things a landmine in my head. Spontaneous memory recall may lead to a flashback. It's horrific and saddening. The bitterest part of this is the fact that I am in their database of 'dangerous' people until my youngest son is 28. This means even if I were not disabled, I would have no hope of reengaging my budding career in education. All because I was asking for help and desperately trying to do the right thing. The equally bitter part is I wouldn't be disabled if it weren't for the fact that they repeatedly traumatized me for an entire year and I was unable to do anything about it. I almost stopped writing all together for a while after this.

When I get depressed, the terror that someone is going to use my writing to hurt my family makes it very hard to write anything.

Tuesday, August 13, 2019

AW: Morning Blog 22

I've been struggling with scumbag brain again and the haunts of past derision regarding my dream to be a professional author when I grew up. I can almost hear K. telling me that I had no hope of getting anywhere with out a business degree and that I was going to need her to be my marketing manager. I was seven. I was still writing stupid and poorly executed stories about unicorns. I can hear G. telling me that I was wasting paper, resources, and time with my writing when I should have been working on something 'useful'. It was brutal to have them try to take control of my writing life. K. has always told me that I should be writing children's fiction. Apparently, in K.'s mind, children's fiction is easy to write and I should be able to crank out a whole series in a brief matter of time. And that the market is in such demand for children's fiction that I'll have a contract immediately. Especially if I let K. choose where things get submitted.

It was at K.'s insistence that I entered my first novel into a novel writing competition. Supposedly, the winner got a book contract and free copies of the book. You just had to pay a fee to compete. I didn't win. And I had to fight with them to get the manuscript back, despite the fact that I sent it with a SASE. K. told me that I shouldn't have done it and that I made a bad decision to try to enter that competition. Never mind the fact that K. picked the competition and pressured me until I finally entered my manuscript. K. decided that it was all on me that I didn't win and that I was going to be a failure as an author if I didn't write what she wanted me to.

That was when I stopped talking to K. and G. about my writing. I had a poetry notebook that K. would sometimes go through and read. She regularly commented that my poetry wasn't very good and that I was wasting my time writing it. It didn't help that K. was looking for my daily journal and not finding it in the stack of books that I wrote in on a daily basis. Sometimes the best way to hide something is in plain sight among a huge pile of similar things. K. only found my daily journal once and all hell broke loose because she didn't like what she read in it. K. retaliated in the only way she could think of, scathing verbal abuse. Now, I never wrote about K. and G. in my journal. They were on a list of people and situations that didn't show up in my journals. I had gotten into more trouble in the past when I was writing about them obliquely. Being beaten for writing 'lies' in my diary at six almost made me stop writing. I didn't keep a daily journal or a diary for ten years because of that experience.

I haven't spoken to K. or G. in almost three years. I haven't seen them in that length of time. It's been good for my mental health. I struggle some with guilt that I am a bad person for going no contact. But given how toxic they are and things like their propensity for gaslighting and manipulation, it really is best for me to stay away. I get angry when K. tries to say that she's always championed my writing. She didn't really give support until she realized that I could actually write a halfway decent novel. Then she saw dollar signs and decided that she was going to direct me in my writing career to topics she thought was best for me.

The funny thing is, I write a book and self publish it. Next thing I know, K. is talking about how she is going to write a book and self publish it. She's making all of this noise about how it is going to be perfect for the niche market she's picked out and that she's going to make some "real money" with her book. That was ten years ago. K. hasn't written even an outline or notes for it. While I was still in contact with K., she would tell me that she has all these plans for her book and tell me that she was going to do better and show me how to make a book that is profitable. I know that if K. had written a book, she'd have been crowing about it so loudly. She would have made a point of contacting me to rub her success in my face.

I may not have a big following. But I've written multiple books and made a little bit of money off of them. I'm starting to figure out how social media works. I'm blogging (which K. said nobody would read because nobody would be interested in anything about me). All of these things that K. said I couldn't do or shouldn't do because she was sure that I would be wasting my time, I'm doing them and building my audience. So, all in all, K. can go and be miserable wherever she is off at right now with G. And, if I happen to wind up on a best seller list or get established in bookstores as well as online, they can see how much I did with out their influence and eat their own hearts out with bitterness. Because I'm not an investment or a cash cow, which is how they treated me. I am an artist who is learning how to sell their art but working to perfect their art in the process.

Wednesday, August 7, 2019

Life Update

Dear Reader,

It's been a challenging month. August looks to be equally challenging for various reasons. I've been really struggling with my complex posttraumatic stress disorder over the last several weeks. It's been hard to nail down what has been triggering the flashbacks but I'm working on it. My kids have kept me busy with things like daily walks to the park when they get home from summer school and the general business of our daily affairs. Last weekend we celebrated my younger son's birthday (a little late because he had Fifth disease and was unwell for a week) and that party went well though it took some of the starch out of me.

Monday, I had my monthly appointment with my psychiatrist. We discussed my c-ptsd issues. He suspects that one of my anxiety medications is not working properly. He's ordered a test to figure out what medications work well for me and what ones we should avoid. Once we have the results, I suspect there is going to be a medication change. It's been a difficult time dealing with these flashbacks. It has been messing with my sleep and mood accordingly. I'm hopeful that this test will help me avoid something like hospitalization to adjust my medications.

But, suffice it to say, I have wanted to be posting but struggling to do so.