THOUGHTS
A few months ago, I wrote an essay for a zine I'd been planning to make, called "I Used to be Ableist". I say, "used to", but I'm still struggling with it. Certain events over the last few weeks have led to me feeling really angry about, well, lots of stuff. I was planning to write a really ranty post about triggers, microaggressions, street abuse and body shaming, but I'm too tired now, both physically and mentally. Virgie Tovar wrote recently about feeling really angry, all the time, for years, and having to let it go because she wanted and needed to direct her energy towards taking care of herself instead. I've been trying to do this for a long time, but sometimes it's hard. When situations and incidents converge to keep it at the top of your mind, it's hard. Things that you can do nothing about can be really hard. Ordering clothes supposedly in your size and they're so small it's laughable; a woman in the street who snorts derisively while looking at your stomach; more simplistic news pieces based on outdated and biased studies.
I used to be ableist. Perhaps I still am, but I'm aware of it now, and I talk myself through it whenever I notice it happening. I expect more from my body than it's able to give. (And I expect other people my size to be trying as hard as I am, but that's for another post.) It's hard to come to terms with it. I had started to become more and more tired over the last few weeks, and I slowly began to realise that it was probably because I'd run out of iron tablets about a month ago and forgotten to replace them. I started taking them again a few days ago, and suddenly had a lot more energy. My body suddenly felt like doing more again! I went out a bit hard, walked up that hill a bit fast, and my knee started hurting. You know, the kind of pain where you know that if you go to the doctor, he'll just say to lose weight, and you know that, so you don't bother going.
It's different to any other kind of injury I've had before, though. I've sprained my ankles many times, but that's a discreet injury. There was one cause. As much as I'm terrified by that kind of incident, I know it well and know that I'll heal up in a couple of weeks. With this, there's no one cause, it just came on, insidiously. I don't know what to make of it. I don't know how long it will take to heal. I don't know if it will heal. It's scary. I refuse to believe that your body just nosedives once you hit the age of 40. I refuse to go out like that.
I still cling on to what other people think of me. I've realised in the last couple of years it's not because I want to please people. It's because I want to control what other people think of me. I've never thought of myself as a perfectionist, but it seems like a very perfectionist trait, doesn't it? To want to control other people's thoughts so they think I'm better than I really am. It seems quite cold and calculated, and out of character for me, but it explains all the strange behaviours and thought patterns I've noticed in myself over the years. At the moment, for example, because I can't walk as fast as I want to, I have an urge to yell out to people on the street: "I have an injury! I'm not always like this! I'm actually much fitter than this!"
OTHER THOUGHTS
The artists' circle thing and the other thing are going quite well. I suppose. I still haven't actually done any art. It seems to be an ongoing bugbear. I haven't done any craft or any sewing or tidied up the house either, so it's not like I'm just avoiding doing art. Or am I? I don't even know. I don't have time to think about these kinds of things anymore/right now.
Today I decided to catch up with rosieleizrowice.com (it's easy to fall behind as she posts nearly every day) and the first post I decided to read had my brain pinging already: Secrets to Happiness, point 6 in particular. In Forget About Goals, Focus On Habits, she says that the most successful and prolific artists, writers, etc, are that way because they don't have an end point in mind. They make it a habit to do their thing every day, until it's unthinkable to not do it.
I thought, perhaps that's why I haven't done any art since the exhibition back in January. I percieved that as being an end goal. I saw it as a stepping stone, but my creative brain saw it as an end point. Then it switched off. I had thought that perhaps finding another exhibition to enter into (and therefore having a deadline) would stimulate my creativity again, but I was too scared that, now I'm working full-time again, I wouldn't be able to pull it off and it would be too stressful. Perhaps it would be more helpful to cultivate the kind of attitude that Rosie writes about in her post. I'll try that.
