The photo above was taken in January of this year at Lake Huron when the ice sheets and mountains of snow kept us from the water’s edge. The sky was huge. I feel warm looking back at those photos because of how clear my head feels on that rocky beach, surrounded by the sound of silence. Mostly that’s how my mind feels when I have ample alone time to get out of my head and just work with my hands in the ways they know how. Yesterday Mar and I went to a library and I brought some old National Geographics to cut up for collages. We’re still apartment hunting today and I’m wearing a new pair of overalls from Lucy and Yak. They’re black cordouroy. I had pancakes for breakfast with sunflower butter and syrup. This morning I was thinking about the discrepencies between the ways an artist views their work and the way others perceive it and how vastly different they can be.

In both my writing and my art I think I give parts of myself away that I would rather keep hidden in an effort to remain comfortable. And still the work compels me to be vulnerable in ways I would prefer not to be. Self disclosure is an interesting thing, especially when it’s coded and encrypted in the language of the artist themselves.

I think about times when I was a student and my work felt like it was a self portrait of my headspace at a point in time and naturally that felt like way too much transparency. It’s like I’ve always been unable to separate my current internal state from what is being presented externally, even though neither needs to be connected necessarily.

Tomorrow is Monday and I’m nervous for another week of interacting with people and being in my own mind too much. I get nervous about how much of my insides seem to seep to my outside, and maybe it’s okay that they do. I just need to be okay with the fact that when people interact with me, they are only interacting with the outside of me, even though it feels like they have access to all of me. They don’t. Sometimes I just feel like a little snail without a shell. Last week I wrote big notes for myself to refer back to when I forget important things: