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I’ve written before about going back through my old journals and sharing what I find. I want to do this for the story and the art. I want to share how I’ve managed to live my life, learned to appreciate it, with a long term degenerative illness. I didn’t get a correct diagnosis until I was 57, so for most of my life I’ve had a mystery disease, or a diagnosis that wasn’t quite right.

I’ve kept a journal most of my life, but I haven’t kept the journals. I’ve moved around a lot, and I’ve destroyed what I saw as unnecessary baggage.

I remember going for a long time without keeping one, almost a decade. And when I started again, I felt so paranoid about writing down my thoughts, when I finished each journal, I would burn it. But then I stopped burning them and started to see them as friends, trusted places to share my fears and tell my stories. I was always afraid someone would read them. I had a terrible incident with my mother when I was a teenager, and she found a diary in which I talked about her alcoholism. Lord have mercy, she screamed the skin right off my bones.

Now, even after she’s dead and I’m a 60 year old woman, sometimes I worry that she’ll find out what I think, and be hurt and angry.

A journal or diary is a place to express sorrow and anger, as well as joy and triumph. Parts of my journals deal with my ongoing bi-polar disorder, with trauma, and with heartbreak. These are things we’re encouraged to keep to ourselves or to just get over. Some of us have histories we can never talk about for fear of depressing others. What do you think of that? I know that a burden shared is a burden lightened, but sometimes people just don’t want to hear about the more complicated and sorrowful parts of life.

I’m starting with the oldest journal I have, from 2005, when I was 45. I’ve kept it because it’s the journal where I started using a kind of personalized prayer to help me cope with my disability. And it’s the one I started using illustration and art as a way of calming and expressing myself. I’ll post highlights from it in the coming month, or however long it takes, then skip 10 years into the future.

Here are the first entry and illustrations:

Sunday

March 6, 2005

7:10 pm

I haven’t been able to write in my journal for the past few days, since Thursday.  I had my appointment with the neurologist Dr. E, and got my diagnosis of possible Multiple Sclerosis changed.  He found no evidence of it, but found a spinal cord injury.  My 9th thoracic vertebra has an old fracture and is compressed.  We don’t know what caused it, how long it’s been there, (long, long time) and it’s not repairable.  The fact that I’ve degenerated over the years could be a combination of the injury and a malabsorption problem that has weakened me.  He wants Dr. M to give me a malabsorption workup.  The test Dr E gave me for Celiac disease came back negative, but, he said, I may still have problems with digestion and to NOT start eating wheat again.  There is really nothing he can do for me.  

It’s all very puzzling.  I know I fell out of the back of a pick up truck just as it was starting up when I was about 11.  I was sitting on the open tailgate with some other kids.  I wasn’t hurt enough to go to the doctor, but I wonder if that was the cause?  Or was there some violence from my father I’ve forgotten?  I remember throwing myself down some stairs at my grandmothers to get attention.  I think I was around 7.  My sister had really fallen, and she was getting all kinds of special treatment, I thought. (She was probably miserable.  All my fall did was make my mom mad.)

But if it was one of those old incidents why didn’t I start limping and having seizures til I was 16?  Why did it take so long for my bowel and bladder to deteriorate?  Why do I get these hot spots and tingly feelings up and down my legs?  Why are my reflexes so hyperactive?  Why am I so tired?  Why is it so hard to walk?

It’s so hard to deal with.  I made up this prayer:

Oh Great Spirit

Give me the strength

To live the live

You’ve given me.

Amen

Not that I have a real sense of who God is.  I just use prayer as a way of comforting and strengthening myself, of that feeling as a child that someone all powerful is taking care of me.  I remember after Amen, we touched our head, heart and shoulders: father, son and holy ghost.  I’ve made my own

Acceptance

Love 

Forgiveness

Awareness

I wish I knew what it was like to be, to be alive without having to first overcome so much, just to be at a normal level of life.  But this isn’t my fate.  Not today.

~~~

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This blog is brought to you by the generosity of people who support me on Patreon , buy my art, and who support me in so many different ways. 

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Cards and prints on some of my art is available on Redbubble.  

If you find a typo, let me know, and I’ll send you a postcard.

One of the great bits of luck I had as a young woman was to meet and learn from Memphis poet Etheridge Knight. He gave workshops called the Free Peoples Poetry Society. He encouraged creativity and showed us how to work from the soul.

He truly wanted everyone to find that bit of themselves that flowed into words, rhythm and strength. Here’s a description of his from the Poetry Foundation:

“Etheridge Knight was born in Corinth, Mississippi. He dropped out of high school while still a teenager and joined the army to serve in the Korea war. Wounded by shrapnel during the conflict, he returned to civilian life with an injury that led to drug addiction. Knight was convicted of robbery in 1960 and served eight years in the Indiana State Prison. According to Terrance Hayes, Knight’s “biography is a story of restless Americanness, African Americanness, and poetry. It has some Faulknerian family saga in it, some midcentury migration story, lots of masculine tragedy, lots of soul-of-the-artist lore.” While in prison, Knight began to write poetry, and he corresponded with, and received visits from, Black literary luminaries such as Dudley Randall and Gwendolyn Brooks. His first collection, Poems from Prison (1968) included the following text on its back cover: “I died in Korea from a shrapnel wound, and narcotics resurrected me. I died in 1960 from a prison sentence and poetry brought me back to life.” Knight’s work was immediately lauded as “another excellent example of the powerful truth of blackness in art,” wrote Shirley Lumpkin in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. “His work became important in Afro-American poetry and poetics and in the strain of Anglo-American poetry descended from Walt Whitman.”

“Knight was married to poet Sonia Sanchez, and both were important members of the poets and artists connected to the Black Arts Movement. His work should be read in the context of that movement’s goals to inspire collective action and develop Black cultural identities distinct from dominant white power structures. As Craig Werner observes in Obsidian: Black Literature in Review: “Technically, Knight merges musical rhythms with traditional metrical devices, reflecting the assertion of an Afro-American cultural identity within a Euro-American context. Thematically, he denies that the figures of the singer… and the warrior… are or can be separate.” Knight went on to attain recognition as a major poet, earning both Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominations for Belly Song and Other Poems (1973). Knights honors and awards included fellowships and prizes from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Society of America. In 1990 he earned a bachelor’s degree in American poetry and criminal justice from Martin Center University in Indianapolis.

“Etheridge Knight died in 1991.“

Etheridge was a great storyteller and he encouraged everyone to write. He was kind and encouraging to writers of all races, including me, a 17 year old nerdy white girl trying to find her voice in a city muddled by race and class problems. One of his beliefs was that poetry should be spoken and we went to public places to recite our poems, including bars. We did readings a club called Bill’s Twilight Lounge, often to the bewilderment of the customers who had come to drink, relax and listen to the juke box.

A person who supports my art on Patreon told me she was inspired to write poetry when Etheridge visited her school. I was so happy to find that we had both been inspired by Etheridge that I painted a portrait of him for her, based on a photograph on the cover of his book Born of A Woman.

It was such a spiritual experience working on this portrait, remembering Etheridge, his poetry group, the belief we held that finding your voice would bring you to life. I pulled out phrases from his poems to add to his portrait. He seemed at times to be a walking poem. In a difficult world, living a difficult life, his poems loved us all.

You can find out more about him and read some of his poems here at the Poetry Foundation.

~~~

Thanks for reading my blog. Feel free to share it, if you’d like.

This blog is brought to you by the generosity of people who support me on Patreon , buy my art, and who support me in so many different ways. 

If you’d like to make a one time donation, you can do so at paypal at my email address joyzmailbox @gmail.com

Cards and prints on some of my art is available on Redbubble.  

If you find a typo, let me know, and I’ll send you a postcard.

One of the strangest things that happened to me personally in 2020 is that I stopped keeping a journal. I’d written daily, first thing in the morning for about 10 years. I think it had to do with the all social restrictions, so I wasn’t doing much. There was a lot of doom and gloom in the air. There was a lot of injustice that was not moving any closer to justice. I stopped a few weeks after the execution of George Floyd. I kept giving myself deadlines to start the habit up again, but I never did much.

I worked on my visual journal/sketchbook some. But all I really wanted to do was sleep. During the summer I spent a lot of time working on my porch garden, and wandering around the neighborhood. As it’s gotten colder, I’ve gotten less mobile. My adult son is living with me for awhile to help me out while we wait out the COVID pandemic. I also had surgery on my Achilles tendon in November. I’ve had a number of other procedures on my feet trying to correct damage from decades of limping.

When I was a child, I learned how to deal with trauma by living in my head — daydreaming, making things up, creating. It was a good enough technique, but I have a tendency to think if I’ve done something in my head, it’s done, then I don’t have to do it in reality. I know that makes no sense, but it’s one of those challenges I have. We all have things we have to overcome to get our work done. I get to a point where I think I’m on top of it all, I’ve got myself totally together, and then I don’t.

I wake up in the morning late, late. Drink coffee in bed and watch the garden. It grew in the summer, it died back as winter progressed.

But I’ve painted. Not in the disciplined, daily way I wanted, but I got quite a few finished this year. (You can see them here.) And I’ve sketched and I’ve written some, just not in a way I can brag about and pretend I do it every day no matter what. That puritan work ethic messes with my head. We all need time to reset our pace, refill our creative well.

I have threatened this before, but I think now is the time, to start going through the old sketchbooks and journals and sharing what I captured. I want to give you a schedule, say I’ll blog 3x a week, but I know I’d just set myself up for disappointment. So, I’ll keep being sporadic.

When I first started making art in my 30s (a response to the chronic fatigue that is a symptom of my degenerative disorder) I discovered how little bits of time spent on something, builds up. So we’ll see what happens as I set a course for myself. A course of self-acceptance, a life long lesson.

As a college student, I got to have a conversation with the great poet W. S. Merwin. I started my creative journey writing poetry. I was terribly insecure. I asked him how do you know if you’re really a poet. He said try to quit.

I think in 2020, I tried to quit. But it’s so ingrained in me, I can’t. So I must be REALLY something creative. I feel so fortunate that I have you, my friends and followers, to keep me aware of that. That I’ll keep coming back to this joy.

~~~

This blog is brought to you by the generosity of people who support me on Patreon , buy my art, and who support me in so many different ways. 

If you’d like to make a one time donation, you can do so at paypal at my email address joyzmailbox @gmail.com

Cards and prints on some of my art is available on Redbubble.  

If you find a typo, let me know, and I’ll send you a postcard.

December and January, even in normal years, are not my best months. I miss the sun, I often feel cold and tired. I handled the holidays well, they were toned down and I avoided the gift hysteria that grips so many of us.

I’ve been napping and reading a lot. My life coach is not so sure about the reading, but he’s all about the napping.

Napmaster Vladimir Von Floppingcat, Life Coach

I had two commissions during the holidays. This one was fun because I was painting spring flowers while the weather was gray and cold. I’ll do more of that this month.

This one was another Tree of Exuberant Dreams that my client wanted for her husband’s 70th birthday. It’s in the same spirit but there are differences.

After that, I got back to my napping. Then we had some sunny days. I am working on pieces for the people who support me on Patreon. I’m also ready to start blogging again.

One day, in the far far future, January will be over and February will bring new problems, but a little more light and hopefully some relief from the various viruses that are infecting us. Maybe even some cooperation and caring. That’s my hope anyway. May we all have a hugapalooza in the coming year.

~~~

This blog is brought to you by the generosity of people who support me on Patreon , buy my art, and who support me in so many different ways. 

If you’d like to make a one time donation, you can do so at paypal at my email address joyzmailbox @gmail.com

Cards and prints on some of my art is available on Redbubble.  

If you find a typo, let me know, and I’ll send you a postcard.