I’ve been on a medication for Bi-Polar disorder for a month. It was one of several I’ve tried over the past few months, but this one seems to be keeping me steady, has few side effects, and gotten me to feel like myself again. It’s a quite wonderful feeling.
I started this journey years ago, really, but this most recent bout of depression started in October. Then it was hard to be creative or to see any point to painting, writing or anything. I’ve done some work, but getting into a routine, finishing things – it’s been next to impossible. For this painting, I just started splashing paint on a canvas, cleaning brushes by smearing leftover paint on it, and letting it collect color.
But since I started this medication, I found some direction and a composition emerged. It became a sort of journal of my recovery. And then, one day, it was a finished painting. I hope it captures the way the treatment of a mental disorder, and the journey to brain health, is a process.
What do you think?
A Bird Will Tell You, by Joy Murray, 16×20″, acrylic and ink,
I hope to continue to be inspired to paint. I have already come up with ideas for two more. Getting back to a creative state of mind is a pure delight. I really appreciate my doctors and therapists who have helped me during this bout of dysfunction, who helped guide me back to good brain health. I also did a lot of reading on mindfulness and ways of maintaining brain health in a world that seems fragmented and in a constant state of mania.
If you’re having struggles yourself, I hope you find the kind of help you need. And remember it’s a journey. Just because one treatment doesn’t work for you, don’t give up. There are lots of options for our complicated brains. Keep searching for a doctor you trust, keep trying different treatments, until you find your way back to yourself.
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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
Cards and prints of some of my art is available on Redbubble. Also T-shirts and stickers and other odds and ends. When you click an image, in the lower right hand corner you’ll find a link to all the various products that these are printed on. If you have any trouble finding what you’re looking for, let me know. joyzmailbox@gmail.com
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Joy Will Return, by Joy Murray, watercolor on paper, 2023-2024
This is an illustration I started in my journal over 2 years ago and only recently finished. I remember a time when I could fill a journal in a month with drawings, paintings, observations – and looked forward to getting my ideas onto paper. Slowly, over the past few years, I have felt my sense of creativity diminish, and with that, my sense of self.
In 2022, I was sent by my doctor to the emergency for an extreme salt deficiency. I was very resistant to going. I didn’t feel bad, but the doctor explained all the dire consequences of hyponatremia, including coma and death. And that the salt deficiency may explain my ongoing fatigue. So I went. In the near future, I’ll write up the experience of being a patient in the emergency room 2 years after the pandemic started, but for now, I’ll just say they found out the thing draining the salt from my body was an anti-convulsant I was on, not for seizures, but to control muscle spasms, as well as neuropathic pain.
An unexpected side effect of that drug was that it virtually eliminated many of my bi-polar symptoms, including suicide ideation. For the first time since I was a teenager I didn’t have a voice in my head that said, you can always end your life if you can’t handle it. This kind of thought process is not uncommon for people with long term illness, and I have had one since I was 16. In my late 50s, it was such a delight to have that voice silenced. Poof. It was gone.
But when they took me off this drug, I wasn’t given an alternative treatment for bi-polar and I didn’t advocate for one. Like many people with mental health issues, I was pretty sure I was “cured” and I would be able to manage any symptoms that came back with my art, creativity and social support network. That was not a good plan, though no one at the time could have talked me out of it.
Slowly symptoms have returned. Especially feelings of worthlessness, and that insidious feeling that nothing I created was important. The negative voice came back and undermined everything I was doing in my life. The joy was slowly being drained out of me.
Last October, I had to admit that I needed help. I had a new doctor who put me on a small dose of the medication I was taking before and it bumped me out of a particularly dark mood. But it also made me feel physically terrible. Thus began a journey to find a treatment that would help me get back to a balanced mental state.
I have a lot of respect for mental health care. I don’t know why we think the brain is any different than our other organs and body parts — that the brain doesn’t need medical care sometimes, just like the eyes, teeth, lungs, liver, bones and heart. But even though I am a strong advocate for mental health care, I still feel the stigma of being on mental health medication. I feel that if I was strong enough, I would just work through my mood problems and not need any help, that medication is a crutch. But damn it, if you break your leg, you need a crutch. If your brain is unhealthy, you need care. I need care. This is a lesson I’ve had to learn over and over. This time, though, I think the lesson will stick.
This last month, I’ve started a new medication, and I am beginning to feel like myself again. I’m determined to keep working with my psychiatrist and therapist until I can create art at a level that makes me content. I have had to take things that made me worse off, but instead of just quitting, this time I went back to the doctor instead. I tried other options – there are dozens of options. I enlisted the help of friends to make sure I don’t listen to any of my unreasonable thoughts about suicide or my life being worthless.
It’s starting to work. I’ve started painting again. I’ve started doodling — how I missed doodling. I’m feeling pleasure in my art and other peoples art. I want to read more. I want to be around people more. A chemical deficiency in my brain is being filled, like salt being restored to my body. It’s making life more than functional. I can see the full richness and I think I’ll be able to start contributing to that richness again.
I so appreciate all of you who read this blog and have continued to follow it, even though I’ve been so inconsistent in the past few years. I hope now I’m ready to get back to a weekly schedule, share art, books and the observations I make on this confusing and beautiful world.
If you’re struggling with emotional or mental health issues, talk to your doctor. You don’t have to go it alone, even though you may have to try different doctors and head meds before you find the right one.
The number for the National Suicide Prevention hotline is 1-800-273-8255. You don’t have to be suicidal to talk to them. I’ve used them just to talk things out that are hurting me that I don’t want to share with friends or family. Take care of your brain. It really does want to keep you alive.
And if you want to know more about various mental health conditions, I found a YouTube channel for Dr. Tracey Marks, “Mental Health Doesn’t Have to Be a Mystery,” which is informative about all mental health conditions and includes a lot of information on how to take care of your brain with and without medication – natural care, good sleep and good nutrition. The videos are short but informative and have been very helpful to me. You can watch them here. https://www.youtube.com/@DrTraceyMarks
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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
Cards and prints of some of my art is available on Redbubble. Also T-shirts and stickers and other odds and ends. When you click an image, in the lower right hand corner you’ll find a link to all the various products that these are printed on. If you have any trouble finding what you’re looking for, let me know. joyzmailbox@gmail.com
You can subscribe to this blog by email in the link below this post.
If you find a typo, let me know, and I’ll send you a postcard.
I received a very special gift from a friend — this M’shikenh Turtle Palette from Beam Paints.
“Turtles have a special place in the legends and stories of the Ojibwe people, in our creation story the turtle carries all of us on her back, and her shell has 13 main segments representing the lunar calendar. This turtle carries 16 colors of watercolor, Spring Green, Pine Green, Dreamers Gold Wet Grizzly, Fall Poplar Yellow, Pumpkin, turtle Belly, Mars Violet, Grey Ultra, Timberwolf, Orca, Prussian Blue, Milkweed, Rainforest, Boreal 5.5″x4″ pine palette”
Anong Beam created Beam Paints:
“…the result of a multi-generational love of pigment, paint, colour, and innovation. I was raised by my artist parents, Carl Beam and Ann Beam, and was taught from a young age how to harvest hematite pigment in the LaCloche mountain range near our home in M’Chigeeng First Nation on Manitoulin Island. Beam Paints draws on my early educations in Indigenous pigment and expands it to encompass all paint traditions. A focus on high quality pigment content creates sublime artist materials, with plastic free packaging. Beam Paints is 100% Anishnaabe Kwe owned, and operating in our home reserve of M’Chigeeng First Nation, we are happy to employ paintmakers and woodworkers, men and women from our communities including M’Chigeeng, Sagamok and Wikwemikong.“
I couldn’t wait to get started on a painting with them, but I’ve been in such a mental health slump, I couldn’t think of anything special enough to use these beautiful paints on. I was talking about my art with someone, and they reminded me that when I get stuck, I can always paint trees or turtles.
That reminded me that I had not painted a flying turtle in quite some time, at least since 2000. It used to be a regular practice, putting wings on turtles and fish, let things fly that are earth and water bound. This one was painted in acrylic on canvas:
And now, in the midst of a slump, this little turtle palette came into my life, to urge me on. I forgot how much I loved playing with watercolor.
Turtle leaves the planet behind, 8×7″, watercolor and ink on paper, Joy Murray, 2024
I had so much fun working with these colors. Many of them have naturally sourced mica, which makes them gleam in the light, but I can’t really capture that on the computer. I was surprised at how highly pigmented the colors are.
I love watercolor that seeps into the paper, that granulates, and asserts a personality – that adds vibrancy to a painting that I could not have predicted or imagined. Painting this cosmos/sky was a delight – working very wet, spraying the colors with water, blending puddles, shaping hard edges.
Because of the way the palette is shaped and each paint cup is filled almost overflowing with paint, I found it wasn’t a good idea to spray water on it, the paints bled into one another. It works better just putting a drop of water in each well, and to be careful when loading your brush with paint. By the time I use all the paint in this palette, it will be more of a work of art than it already is. Stained with color, I’ll probably hang it on the wall. Beam sells what they call paint stones, color wrapped in waxed cloth. All of their products are plastic free, which is lovely and necessary for all our futures.
I hope this is the beginning of restoring a more productive art flow for me. (I’m also seeing a psychatrist and working on getting my head meds straight — the brain does occasionally need a tune up).
This little painting is a good beginning, I think. Good medicine.
Check out Beam Paints, and support them if you can.
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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
Cards and prints of some of my art is available on Redbubble. Also T-shirts and stickers and other odds and ends. When you click an image, in the lower right hand corner you’ll find a link to all the various products that these are printed on. If you have any trouble finding what you’re looking for, let me know. joyzmailbox@gmail.com
You can subscribe to this blog by email in the link below this post.
If you find a typo, let me know, and I’ll send you a postcard.
Towards the end of last year, a friend commissioned a painting as a gift for her sister, Cindy Arp, a columnist for KnoxTNToday.com, a news site for Knoxville, Tennessee. She is a tree lover like me, and also an avid hiker.
I never know when I start a painting what direction it will take. It’s an odd form of inner communication between my ideas, the way things look on the canvas, my skills as a painter, and the inspirations of everyday life.
These days, I often use canvas to wipe my brushes on instead of a cloth, then I squirt the paint with water and manipulate it a little bit. I don’t always want to start with a blank white canvas. In this case, I’d already had a canvas with some colors smeared on it. So I did some more deliberate color washes, letting the colors bleed into one another.
I find this method loosens up my imagination if I’m stuck for ideas, which has been happening a lot lately, but that’s another story.
My studio is in my bedroom so I position the canvas where I can see it when I first wake-up, and thus begins a communication process between me and the painting. I knew I wanted a forest, so this is how it developed.
At this point, my plan was to add some plants to the grassy areas under the trees and paint a hiker on the trail. But then Cindy wrote this article, Stardust and a Dose of Quantum Mechanics, on how we are all stardust, and I was so impressed by it, I began painting an interpretation of stardust, and the communication between the earth, the sky, and each of us hiking our life path. I didn’t take anymore process pictures, but this is the final painting:
A Hike in the Stardust Forest, by Joy Murray, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 20″x24″
It’s as much a mystery to me, as it probably is to you, how a painting goes from what I start with to the finished work. I always like that the colors of the original tinted canvas peek through the finished painting.
I enjoyed painting this very much. The stardust was there from the beginning, but it took reading Cindy’s article for me to really see it and let it shine through. She was kind enough to send pictures of how it looks on her wall — the stardust really comes to life there.
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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
Cards and prints of some of my art is available on Redbubble. Also T-shirts and stickers and other odds and ends. When you click an image, in the lower right hand corner you’ll find a link to all the various products that these are printed on. If you have any trouble finding what you’re looking for, let me know. joyzmailbox@gmail.com
You can subscribe to this blog by email in the link below this post.
If you find a typo, let me know, and I’ll send you a postcard.
joy murray art~stories~life 