Drawing Just Because, No More Art Challenge ~ & Learning To Inhabit The Body I Live In Now…

I had a multi-faceted reckoning. It all started last Thursday when I had to go to a grueling 4 hour doctor’s appointment.

I was very frightened because since I have become so badly disabled my daughter has taken me to my doctor’s appointments but she has just had a new baby, my precious, wee granddaughter Sabine. I had to go alone. First of all, being already disabled, and needing to wear a fall pendant at all times because my fall risk is so high, and having taken a bad fall in October which led to in home physical therapy which I loved but had to be curtailed because I was in increasingly worse pain and then turned out to have a blood clot in my left leg (the second blood clot in that leg in 3 years which seems to mean that I will be on blood thinners for life) my life had become very difficult. Mobility was seriously difficult as I had a hard time just getting up out of a chair. At the time of my doctor’s appointment it had gotten worse again, and I had to drive myself which terrified me + I had to get my new rollator walker into the back of my Honda Element which is very hard for me. And then there was a 90% chance of rain. When you have a lot of trouble getting around anyway, and have to get yourself and your walker out of the car, and get into the clinic which entails a lot of walking, in the pouring rain which means you can’t even use an umbrella because you need to hold onto the walker with both hands, well, I cried for days. I didn’t know how I could manage it.

Thankfully my daughter told me to call the clinic to see if there would be anyone there who could help me in and thank God there was. That made me a little less afraid and I thought I could manage a doctor’s appointment that shouldn’t even be an hour long. If I’d known it would be 4 hours I would never have even tried. And yet I had to go. My blood thinners had to be refilled, I needed various tests done, I needed my 2nd Shingles vaccine and I also needed a cortisone shot before I left. And that’s the short list. And all of these things I needed done weren’t the problem. The problem was twofold. First of all I am agoraphobic and terrified to even leave my house which I seldom do. Next, normally if someone was taking me to the doctor I would take my anti-anxiety medication to ease the panic of having to leave the house. But driving myself alone it wouldn’t be safe to take the medication and then have to drive, so I had to drive there with my agoraphobia in high dudgeon and I made it through the first two hours pretty well but then I just broke down. It was twice as long as I’d thought it would be and we were only half way there. I started to cry and I couldn’t stop.

My luck was that the doctor, nurse practitioner, and nurse who worked with me were the kindest, gentlest people in the world, I have never known medical personnel who were so genuinely kind and caring. At one point I had to go to the rest room and the nurse took me. It, again, was a long walk for someone who can barely walk at all and needed the walker to get there but she stayed right with me. By now I was a wreck, but here is the hardest thing of all — even knowing that I am now seriously disabled (as a lifelong gardener I can no longer even garden anymore, I took two bad falls in the garden and couldn’t get up and the EMT’s had to come) it has never really sunk in that I am as disabled as I am.

In my small cozy cottage while I still hurt I can manage the short distances to get to things. I don’t move about a lot but I can manage what I need to do. The dishes might go undone for days but I can get simple meals together and take care of my little dog Molly and my parakeets and mostly I am here at my work table writing, drawing, and working on my book. I hadn’t realized, until I was out in the big world on my own, with everything more difficult than I ever dreamed possible, and then barely making it around the clinic with my walker and the help of kind people, just what truly bad shape I am in, and it was a terrible shock. I cried all the way home, shaken and shaky, and when I got home I got Molly out, got us something to eat, and literally fell asleep in my desk chair with Molly in my lap until 11 p.m. I was so completely exhausted my system just shut down. That was the real beginning of me having to face that things are so much worse than I ever imagined, and they weren’t going to get any better.

Some people are playing tennis in their 90’s, Grandma Moses didn’t start painting until she was 78 and painted until she was over 100. I will be 68 on April 30 and I can no longer garden, I can only hold my new granddaughter sitting down (I babysat her 17 year old brother Lucas when my daughter was in graduate school. I carried him around, and had a ball with him. This is something I can no longer do.) There have been so many losses my heart has been broken, but, finally, after Thursday, I hold no false hopes about things “getting better” but must look at my life in a whole new way.

I am an intelligent woman. I can write, I can make art, I will write my book, but not in the way that I used to, full steam ahead, producing tons of work on the regular. Now snails are passing me on the road of life. It was, for example, ridiculous for me to try to do a 100 day art challenge. Oh, I can do 100 pieces of art, but over how long a time I have no idea. And by pushing hard to try to do one every day I developed such terrible eye strain I was in dreadful pain for a week. This is new to me. I’ve worn glasses since I was 40, gradually moving into bifocals and then trifocals, but I’ve done just fine with them. The thing is I have cataracts that aren’t real bad but are there. I was supposed to get cataract surgery right about the time Covid started. And this year instead of getting cataract surgery I got a blood clot and put on blood thinners and could barely move. THEN my glasses broke and for 6 weeks I saw the world as if through a fog. When I finally was able to get an eye exam and new glasses my doctor said, ‘I’ll give you the best prescription I can but until you have the cataract surgery you won’t see as well as you should.”

When I first got my new glasses I was so relieved because I could see much more clearly again. I didn’t realize until I set up the art challenge and pushed to get a detailed drawing done every day what a toll it was taking on my eyes. I didn’t have eye strain that bad when I was without glasses for 6 weeks! I was stunned, and then sad. There goes one more thing. Hopefully in the fall I can get the cataract surgery, but I’m no longer counting my chickens or much of anything else, and yet I’m not giving up, I never give up.

I wrote to my Patrons last week that this period of my life, of change and transition, and uncertainty, was a series of constantly having to course correct. I can’t do that anymore so now I will do this. If I can’t do this, maybe something else is possible. If there are some things I can’t do at all I have to pray and come to some sort of acceptance. And that’s hard. Really hard. But there are still a great many things I can do, I just have to do them in a whole new way.

Added to all of this of course is that I have suffered from lifelong mental health issues and the physical disabilities and limitations that I now have don’t help. I get teary. I get frustrated. I almost want to give up at times, but I won’t.

For me the only answer is to be very, very kind and gentle with myself. To appreciate the things that I can do, but not to push. There is no way to rush anything, no way to handle the pressure of 100 day challenges, and to try to do more than I can to prove something to myself or others is simply cruel. But there is still so much more to me. So much. This is the period of my life when I have to discover what and who I am now and act in accordance with my new reality.

I can’t go to sleep very early at night and I get up very late in the morning, more toward lunchtime. I am writing this at 12:45 A.M. My Circadian Rhythms are all askew but I’ve stopped fighting it. I sleep when I sleep, I work when I work, I eat when I eat, and one way or another they make a day for me. A new kind of day, a different kind of day, but a day wherein I can still get quite a bit done, and only because I have stopped judging myself. Stopped feeling that I needed to do things the way I used to. That ship has sailed. I am on a whole new journey.

Trying to do the drawing challenge everyday was beginning to feel like a shotgun wedding. And when you dread doing one of the things you love most to do in the world you have gone really awry and you got to figure that shit out and fix it! My eyes have been so tired and strained I haven’t drawn at all in 3 days but I drew the picture above today. It took all day and I just relaxed and took breaks and I absolutely loved it. And I am writing more now than I have in a long time, and my thoughts, about my book and work in general are coming clearer because I have stopped pushing, have stopped having unrealistic expectations about what is possible, or how it is possible. I am not competing with anyone, I am not trying to be the best whatever, I am simply allowing all that is inside me to come as it will, and gently allow it to surface and flow out of me. Now, and only in this way, can I live a life in which I can feel whole, and okay. And I choose to be okay in whatever way that comes.

So I move slower than ever, but I move. I draw at my own pace and I love it more than ever. I treasure the thoughts that are coming when I am writing because I’m not trying to be anything or write anything in a certain way, a certain genre, according to rules set up by people I will never know. I am coming to a kind of acceptance of who I am, right now, whatever that happens to mean, and in this there is a kind of relief and peace that has been a long time coming.

So yes, I will be making art, and yes, I will write my book. I have always worked steadily, it is who I am, but it will come about in a new way, a way I am just discovering, better put, allowing, and somehow or another I know that everything will be okay.