visions of the present nexus (Patreon)

It's been kind of a wild month.

In some ways, I've experienced the worst mental health of my adult life. I have never wanted to die, get off the ride & go home, so wholly as I have in the past month. Not since I was a (developmentally appropriate) impulsive and hormonally imbalanced preteen. Facing that precipice of knowing, through which we all must pass, that is understandably overwhelming for anyone to pass through. I say this not to bring you distress, but to humanize the experience. If you've felt lost, know that it's not wrong or othering to lose your sense of direction and be consumed by darkness now and again. Especially now. There are events in motion that we have so very little control over, just like always, only faster, and bigger, and in our insulated society, with consequences we have never truly known.

A certain point-less-ness of existence I have always found joy and unbounded creative permission in has weighed heavier on me this year as the events of the recent past have finally had space to breathe. A lot has transpired over the past few years. The friends who also found joy in point-less-ness, who hid their grief behind drug use and absurd artworks and bouts of play, have lost their minds, their will to persist, their senses of self and selflessness, their devotion to coexistence in an interconnected web of playful candor. The pillars of divine existence have been crumbling all around me. How long does it take a tower to fall?

What happens after?

We can't wait to find out. I feel a sense of purpose in that imperative goal. What happens after? How do we build the web we need to persist? The web that is elastic and rated for despair? People will always slip through the cracks. Stressing the safety ropes with dead weight. Existing is exhausting. Is it better to fall quietly in peace, or in fits and starts, gripping desperately to outreached hands on the way down? Some of the hands you grip will recede. You are too heavy for one person to hold. You might be too heavy for hands holding hands holding hands holding hands. But you might not be. Especially with a little warning signal to your closest allies. It's easy to love somebody at their best. Who have you loved at their worst? Who has loved you at your worst? Who was there when you bounced back to rebuild? Who kept their promises, and did not promise too much? Those are the people you want in your web. When you catch them your arms should stretch, sometimes disturbingly far, not like taffy, but like tendons. It will hurt. But with rest, and in some cases a bit of emotional surgery, you will heal. The more people there are to support the catch, the less damage it does to your body.

The biggest struggle this year that I have finally been unable to ignore, is learning when to let go and watch them fall. That the more crumbling friends I try to catch on my own, the more unsustainably encumbered I become, the more unsustainable encumbrance I shift to the people who catch me. Whether I want them to or not. Sometimes there is simply not enough strength to bear the weight. Not like this. Not without boundaries. Not without respect for the boundaries that I discover and share, not without opportunity to respect boundaries clearly defined by others. Some people will simply ask you to hurt them until they cannot take it anymore, and then they disappear. Blaming you for the damage they sustained in secret. Some people will ignore your requests for presence or space, shrugging at your outcries, your explicit map of how to navigate feelings of safety, telling you they don't see why it matters, if they tell you anything at all. Over and over you find people like this. They are not as strong or as kind as they wish they were, and they are not prepared or willing to see themselves as they are. Only as they want to be.

The other big struggle has been how much like my mother I have truly become. A trajectory written in stars. I'm not a quiet faller. I screech and grasp and claw my way up as I fall to the bottom. Demanding to be witnessed, at the very least, even if it's all in vain. It's the only way I've survived. On the wounding of others, whether spread out in the form of art, or needled into the fabric of another. Reminding them that they cannot hold all of me and all of humanity in the same hand. Only part of me. The part that is inseparable from the whole of mankind.

_____

Many wonderful things have happened this month, too.

I feel that I can finally announce that Sara and I have acquired a studio space. Deposit payed, supplies moved. For now, it is a private, incubating space. A space for music to live. For relationships with our neighbors to develop. A space for painting, and sewing, and drawing, and staging plans for the next public installation. Perhaps someday it will have legs, and a face, and be open to house small events where people can feel safe enough to play and share their humanity with one-another. I appreciate the support you all have lent me over the past few years getting to this place. Good things take time, so I've been told. Tonight will be our first band practice in that dingy little basement studio. Tonight we will have our first guest, a yet-secret collaborator for our upcoming Halloween party installation. Artwork and announcements for that project will roll out in good-time. For now I can tell you to save the date: October 28th.

I have had some great bouts of inspiration in all of the heaviness as well. I wrote a new song, which I hope to share with you all soon. The working title is Lilac, after the overgrown beautiful tree in my yard. Also, I have a solid direction I'd like to take the last W-I-P painting I shared, titled "Already I was starting to forget.." I have always loved mixed-media and physical 3D manipulation of traditional 2D spaces. And, with this new boon of adequate space for larger projects, I can finally begin to collect the pieces I need. For this project, I will be spending an entire month's patronage on fiberoptics supplies, including 5mm RGB LEDs, maritime on-off switches, a soldering iron & solder, electrical wire, heat shrink tubing, end-glow and side-glow fiberoptic cable, resistors, battery holders, and an arduino uno.

And,

a nice man bought me a cabbage at the farmer's market this weekend. Then, another nice man asked me if I needed to take a break when I very much did, and did breathing exercises with me before I made his coffee.

_____

I hope you all know that I will persist. I always have, and I always will, until my meat runs itself out of juice. The shadows of my past will always haunt me, and a public honesty about that is part of the process of learning to live with them. They are a part of me. The shadows of our collective past haunt us all. They are a part of us, too. Protecting our shadows in the dark, in secret, is how we allow them to thrive. Shine a damn light in the corners once in a while, with a friend, when you know you're not alone. What happens after, is a question we should always be prepared to have curiosity for. As the world changes faster and faster, knowing what home feels like and where to find it is more important than ever. Please take care of your web. Ground yourselves in each other, and know that you are bigger than you think. Thank you for persisting, in the exhaustion and chaos of being, & don't forget you have to rest to resist.

Much love to you all. Pictures and audio blips on the rise. Big art and endless madness to come.

~amelia