theres plaster under my fingernails. plaster and a little Hope.

Hope source #1:
A few days ago I hung out with my friend Lorissa. This is big because lately Depression has kept me as a prisoner in my own home, grimly allowing me out only for serious obligations like work or class.
Lorissa does my hair in the basement of the trendy apartment she shares with her husband and their record collection, and when I grow up I want to be just like her. She always gives me a healthy, loving dose of reality, and I left feeling Understood.

Hope source #2:

My classes have been going just okay. But after some students noticed that I seem to be just a shell of the happy and hardworking person I once was, I set up a meeting with the Chair of the Sculpture Department to discuss my new direction, considering my new Situation (clinical depression). It was incredibly enlightening, and provided me with a small dosage of artistic hope. As long as I’m trying, each day, to function like a normal human being, I might as well surrender to the Emotion. I could use it, in my art.

Hope source #3:

The next day I met with my therapist, who told me the battle is all inside of me. I don’t trust myself to not lose the love of my life again. Depression keeps me home, safely away from falling in Love again and fucking it up again and being alone and miserable again. But it’s all so futile, isn’t it? –because I’m alone and miserable now. I just have to indulge my self-destructive side in my Art, though the therapist prefers the word “channel” over “indulge”.

Hope source #4:

Then the day after that I sat and had quite a long discussion with my Ceramics teacher, a Welsh woman with blond and fushcia hair and glaze under her fingernails. I told her that I felt so lost as an artist: I’m so terrified of producing something cliché, I psych myself out before I even begin. Her advice was to allow myself to “play”; to take a day or weekend in which I make art simply for the sake of making art, devoid of any intention besides the pursuit of my own pleasure.

Hope source #5:

The world seems to be echoing the same sentiment: that I am to embrace myself, my Self; all parts of me can coexist within me, I don’t need to try to drown one in order to Not Get Hurt. If I’ve learned anything, its that Love is risky that way. But you see, I HAVE learned.

Hope source #6:

So I visited the school library and stocked up on books on Victoriana, tossed in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius on the bus ride home where I ate cheap sushi while listening to Cyndi Lauper sing the blues with Jonny Lang. This is much more like it J

This weekend, in terms of me and my Self, anything goes, everything is okay. I won’t judge myself, I will embrace myself. And I will share with you the results.

Current mood: duh. hopeful.
Current music: the black keys - tighten up