Stay wild, moon child.

I ended up staying up all night, last night - this was not what I had in mind when I took precious days off from work this week. I had planned on resting, going for walks in the forest, eating nutritious food and doing a ‘reset’. Instead, I’ve been working on art, catching up a bit on what I’ve missed online for the past year (yikes) and have absolutely sunk into my mind (as I usually do when I’m not working and when I have time for myself - I don’t know why I thought this time would be any different), caught in limbo between the past traumas of my life, paralyzed in childhood memories that get my mind spinning for hours until I realize it’s almost 5 am- and the absolute madness that the world feels like to me (the incessant wars, economic crisis, corporate greed, cruelty towards humans, animals and the environment, …); and then there is me, a tiny speck, trying to keep the simplest things of my life together, trying to sleep and keep sane enough to keep going so I can pay bills and survive and spending every minute of my time in a desperate pursuit of a dreamed state, moving butterfly images on a screen endlessly.

I’m not sure if I aim to make art, or if I’m simply in avoidance of ‘real life’, of society and capitalism, building an imagined mental escape and shelter. Away from it all, away from people and away from pain.

I’ve been trying to make peace with my choice of occupying my time this way this week - doing exactly what I promised myself I wouldn’t be doing, which is overworking myself in art projects instead of overworking myself at the 9 to 5. Today I thought “maybe doing art IS a way to rest, reset and self-care”; am I engaging in my patterns of avoidance or am I self-caring? I have no idea, truly. And the worst thing is, it is probably irrelevant. It feels silly and vain to be making butterfly collages while the world seems to keep on crumbling but I’m not sure what else to do, in all honesty. I feel 100 years old and like I just want to disappear from the world and curl up in the corners of my mind where I’ve added colours and stay here until my physical death. I do feel lonely here in the company of my one dimension butterflies but I do feel lonely as well in the world. Isolation and imagined worlds seems like the lesser evil.