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Worse than I could explain.

S. told me that the moment he met me was as exciting as THIS moment.

And THIS moment is when Roberto Baggio scored a goal for Italy against Czechoslovakia in the first round of the 1990 World Cup finals.

When Italy WON the World Cup against France in 2006 my (then 33 year old) fiancé jumped out the first floor window of his home and ran in circles around his house screaming with joy for twenty minutes.

I am hoping we will be able to afford my move to Italy in April or May of 2008.
Tonight S. sent me an email saying, "Tomorrow will be the last day of the last year that we will have to live apart.":-) I miss you S. See you soon. yljc

My friend sent me this picture of her dog today.

This is Carmen. She is wild. I love this dog. Thanks Joyce. :-)

nausea

Today I was looking for an image on my blog that I could not find on my hard drive. While I was searching I came across this post that I wrote on August 2, 2007 and when I read it I felt like I was going to be sick. Literally.

Note to self and napping cats.

(garbage) day

This drawing is folded because I was working on one piece of it at a time and not wanting to see the rest as I worked. A sort of conscience dissociation maybe. Then I was going to throw it into the trash but I am trying to stop myself from doing that. Even if I do not like a drawing I am trying to remember that there must be a reason I made it. And also a reason I want to throw it away.... I know it is about my divided mind and the fact that my mind is so divided is really hard for me to accept and difficult for me to learn how to live with. Today I will work on another drawing and then continue to berate myself as I to try to learn Italian. It is a challenge because I am already so overwhelmed by all of the different ways of thinking that happen in my head and often at the same time.

a poem by Grace Paley

I needed to talk to my sister...

I needed to talk to my sister
talk to her on the telephone I mean
just as I used to every morning
in the evening too whenever the
grandchildren said a sentence that
clasped both our hearts

I called her phone rang four times
you can imagine my breath stopped then
there was a terrible telephonic noise
a voice said this number is no
longer in use how wonderful I
thought I can
call again they have not yet assigned
her number to another person despite
two years of absence due to death

Florence.

(this) christmas day.

This is a detail from a drawing I have been working on for the past few days.
I feel terrible that Sam is gone and the house feels totally weird and awful without him. I decided to make a drawing of him but then it seemed too sad to have a large sheet of paper with just a little image of him on it so I drew him right into this drawing I have been working on. I will post a picture of the whole thing when it is finished.
I feel so sad about his death.
I will draw him again now.

Goodbye Simmer-Hummer.

This is a picture of Sam on his favorite blanket. He had to leave us tonight.
Good-bye little Simmer-Hummer. You will be missed.

Next Christmas we'll be in the same country.

And in 2008 our Christmas card will look something like this:
I love you S. Merry Christmas. See you soon.

a few of my drawings.

http://flickr.com/photos/artconstellation/show/

a poem by Billy Collins.

Relive, recover, repeat.

I got home from my Friday therapy a few hours ago. It was a fifty minute session divided into two parts. For the first five minutes my shrink and I talked about the rugelach I had made for him as a gift. Then we talked for forty-five minutes about how my 'dad' would rape me even on Christmas Eve or Christmas night. Just before my birthday this year I told him how my 'dad' had raped me more than once on the night of my birthday. I went into this crazy little speech about how I felt I should have had nights like my birthday or Christmas night "off". Thinking about all of this makes me physically sick. I feel like my head is going to roll off. I want to write about how my mother must have known all of it was happening- but it is too much too much.This is the sort of day that seems impossible. It feels impossible to go on. This is of course 'just a feeling'. A feeling that makes me feel like I need to disappear. This is when it is hard to eat and I want to sleep but that does not feel good- nothing feels very good and I really wish I was already back in Italy with S. I will be going to back in thirty-four days. This morning before therapy I bought an orange toothbrush to take with me when I go. I would like to take Lloyd and Winston with me and stay there this time.

The drawing at the top of this post is titled "Notes to a Pedophile."

Cat Thursday.

Winston (on the left) and Lloyd (on the right) are not actually brothers.
There is a chance that they are not even from the same planet.S. has finished writing his thesis!!! Lloyd is not as excited about it as I am but I was able get him to yell "Congratulations" once. (Even though he was totally annoyed about the whole thing.)If you want to make a painting using the cool little widget (from widgetbox) that I put on the left side of my blog today and mail it to me that would be great. I am going to collect them and then put all of the images together into one 'image quilt'.

I have therapy tomorrow and I am already dreading it.

Quilting my brain (on paper).

Tonight I took pictures from a sketchbook I am working in and then put them together into one image using SnagIt (which I love). I have all of these loose drawings all around me and drawings going on in multiple sketchbooks and it feels chaotic. This is exactly how my brain feels. My ideas are all over but it is better when I just start trying to put the pieces of thought together(like the images) inside of my head even if it is still sort of a mess and still painful to read.
I save a lot of poems that I love in my sketchbook and there are two here in this image. The first is "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" by W.H. Auden and the second one is "In the Park" by Maxine Kumin. They are both excellent. (Another great poem by Maxine Kumin is "Morning Swim".)

merriness.

(both sides of holiday ornament for S.)

Does a fellow Entrecard user have the answer?

I need to figure out how to gain enough money to be able to move to Italy and I was wondering if people could give me their best suggestions or help.

I am an artist, a survivor of 17 years of incest, a good person and the owner of of two silly cats . The person who loves me, helps me and makes me feel better lives in Italy and we are trying to figure out how to gain enough money for me to make the move. I have been unable to work at a 'normal' job for the past three years because my real full time job is working to survive and recover from the abuse.

If anyone has any ideas that might help me or if you look through the archives of my blog and would be interested in either buying a piece of my art or trading a piece of my art for your help please contact me at artconstellation@gmail.com

Any help or suggestions would be very much appreciated. Thank you in advance for any ideas.

*note: I will post a new drawing tomorrow or Monday.

Therapy Friday reminds me of:

Here are a few more pages from the "our infant babe" project.

New.

Here is the 2008 ARTCONSTELLATION calendar.
Please click on the image below to see it in detail.

The Italian panda.

I took this photo of S. about five minutes after I met him. He is doing his WWF panda impersonation. Love is just funny like that. Maybe tomorrow I will post him doing "The Girl with a Pearl Earring".

A furry force.

Lisa will be home from her two week trip tomorrow so I am trying to get the house cleaned. I feel like there is an entire force working against me though....

*slant and twist

all over the faces (written)

A drawing by 'The Speaker'.

post before I start this day.

I feel bad right now. I had a nightmare. I wish it was a nightmare actually. Because it was really a memory from the past and the memory itself is not so terrible; what is worse is that the beginning and end of the memory are not there. There is just a middle part of a memory and I know what came before and after it is (was) worse. This is the memory that returned to me today: I remembered being fifteen years old and being in my bed, in my bedroom, at night, and urinating in my bed. That is all I can remember. Then there is just nothing. Black space. Me urinating in my bed and then black SPACE. A hard way to start the day. And I am sick to my stomach and can not eat this morning and I have therapy today. Everything is moving and changing in my mind; becoming so much more real. I spent one hour on the phone with S. this morning crying and telling him about all of this. I feel bad about that because he has a lot of work to do and I wish the first call of our day was not just me crying and being totally upset.
I feel like I can hardly even be mad at 'my father' right now or even think that it was really him who raped me- too painful to tolerate it all together like that yet. I feel mad because I wish I was in the same place as S. I want to be able to go to him so he can help me to remember faster that: this is is all just memories to me now.

A telephone with a picture.

Ok... I know I should be grateful that S. and I have Skype so we can talk for free as much as we want AND we can both see each other AND the sound quality is actually much much better than a regular phone AND so we can hear each other in a better way AND the sound is much more clear so it seems like we are closer. BUT all of those wonderful things about Skype aside... I want the real LIVE version of S. The first day we both had Skype I actually screamed for joy when I was able to see him in his study sitting at his desk and waving hello to me. It is much better than the regular phone and FREE, but it is still hard to be so far away. It is especially hard because when I was in Italy I was so happy and I felt better no matter what we were doing. And even when I did not feel great (like after a therapy session over Skype with my doctor) it was so much better to feel bad and be with S. I could talk about my dad sometimes or my sick family or the abuse from the past; I could say anything I wanted and I could cry or feel bad or whatever.... and then S. and I would move on. I would start to feel better and soon we were doing something else and it is not like I was ignoring the past but I felt like I could tolerate knowing about it in the present and actually be living my life in the present at the same time and that was wonderful and it made me feel really real and alive. It is hard because I miss S. but also because I really do feel better when we are together. A lot better. Hopefully by April maybe I will be able to move there but it just really makes me want to cry because I have so much pain from the past still and everyday is really such a struggle still and there is nothing in the world that I want except to FEEL BETTER. So while I try to be really really grateful that S. and I are together even when we are not in the same place; one of the hardest things about it for me is knowing that there is a place and a way that I can feel happier and get some relief from the pain of my past. It is just hard to have to wait to be together with S. again. I know it is just waiting, but it is still difficult. Sorry for complaining...
Sometimes the image of S. over Skype suddenly freezes on my computer screen and this morning it froze when he was blowing me a kiss- so I took a picture because of it because it made me laugh.

The damn Atlantic Ocean.

I got out my video camera just now (because I left my regular digital camera in Italy with S. and hopefully he will take some pictures that I can post on here...) to take a couple of pictures of the first snow this year and when I turned it on I found these OTHER pictures of me with S. which we took a couple weeks ago and I had forgotten about them and now I miss him even more if that is possible and damn that big f*cking ocean anyway.

A messy.

ha. Right from the beginning I can not even get my mind organized enough to agree on the title for this post. "A messy PLACE."? "A messy THING."? "A messy brain."? Nevermindnevermind. Just: "A messy." I was going to go to a funeral today and I spent all day yesterday from literally 6am to 8pm and then from 5am to 8:30am today worrying about going. I finally called the person I was to go with and said I could not go. It is snowing here this morning and my face is broken out with all of these 'messy' red spots and I don't know if it is acne from stress or what is going on- but my face (like the feeling my brain has) is a splotchy red. Four years of therapy and I am finally getting to the place where my therapist and I have been working towards but now that I am nearing that place I am looking at it and thinking, "Ew." When I started this blog I wanted to have a place to put my drawings, then a place to write about my therapy and telling the story as I tell it back to myself just exactly how I survived 17 years of being basically tortured by my 'father'. All I want is to sleep and I am not even tired. I am not tired at all but the alternative to unconsciousness is seeing my big ol' filleted strips of brain dangle in knots and balls of knowing. I am not sure if it is the weather... I guess it is the time of year but also the place that my mind is in, the place my mind has reached- where I can start to tolerate really knowing about the terrible things my father did- but EVERYTHING feels like it is reminding me of something related to my past and to my father's abuse. This morning I was outside just minutes after the snow started to fall and I was in my pajamas and a coat and the dogs were happy and acting silly because they have not seen snow since last year- so I was feeling sort of ok and still ruminating over whether or not to go to the funeral and I was filling up the bird feeders in the backyard when I remembered something from a long time ago. And it is weird the way the memories come back. I feel like what usually happens is that I am reminded of something from the past that is not really directly related to the abuse but only sort of connected- but I will have the memory in an extremely clear way. I will remember all of a sudden the smell and feel and taste of something and how everything looked and felt and seemed at that time and the memory will be so clear.... but usually not so bad at first. But the memory, while not really 'bad' troubles me... because of the clarity of it, I begin to realize. It is like my mind sends up something I knew from the past but had forgotten about and the point is not so much the memory but the extreme CLARITY of the memory and it is like a strange warning from somewhere in my mind to some other place in my head. It is a warning that if I remember in detail filling the bird feeders at my house when I was a child, if I remember the containers we poured the birdseed into, their color and shape and the feel of the lid as I unhooked it from the bin.... If I remember the rounded plastic edge and the little ridges on the top, the fact that there were two of them, the fact that each contained a different kind of birdseed and I can see them now and smell it all and I remember it being winter and my father being mad and the tv is on and he is screaming at someone in the house but I am outside and it is cold and I need gloves but forgot them and so I feel the seeds with my fingers... if I can remember the thistle seeds running through my hands, I am sure- I am telling myself this message now- that I am going to remember the details of terrible things from the past. And I pause for a moment and I can always watch him standing in the doorway of my room. I remember it from when I was three or four and I remember it from when I was sixteen and at last- seventeen. My 'father' comes to the door of my bedroom and it is night and he is enormous- both in real life and in the fake night light memory of my mind- the hallway light was always on and so he was always black in the space of the doorway. He is like a one-man paper doll and he is about to kill me. (In my/the memory, I mean.) p.s.- I am really in a hard place- I mean... I have come to a good and terribly painful place in the work of my therapy where everything in my life and brain is all shifting and sort of REALLY starting to come together. It is scary and confusing and weird but it is really too painful now to try to stand still anymore. I know I have to keep moving forward through this mess from the past and the problems I have in the present created by/from the fact that I live with a mind that thinks it is in more than piece... a mind that thinks there is more than one body for it or something sort of like that... Anyway- it is difficult to explain but my point is this: I have come to a painful crossroads and my choices basically are either to go forward or to go forward. So... I think I might try to use this blog to write about what my life is like and what my brain is doing/working/struggling/recovering/functioning and how/what I am working on in these the present days. I need to get better because I really want to start living my life in a real and AWAKE way. I want to move past the past and I want and need to heal my mind. One of my 'major concerns' since the very beginning of my therapy work four years ago was: IF I am able to survive this (recovering my mind, really knowing about my past and really getting better and healing from the trauma I survived)- Will I be able to explain it all? The recovery from the trauma, I mean. I feel like if there is anything I want to do in my life (besides make art and really be ALIVE and AWAKE and move to Italy and be with S. and walk out near the ocean almost everyday and be grateful and thankful that I survived and have great life now...) I want to take what I have 'learned' in my life and somehow use it to help some other people if I can. I mean: I feel like what happened to me is just insane. The amount and kind and degree of abuse that I survived by my father (and mother) is literally STAGGERING. I know other people have been abused to this same degree and probably even worse if it is possible but my point is this- If I really am able to recover from all of the terrible things that I have lived through I really pray and hope that I will be able to look back on both the past before my therapy and then the time during my therapy and the work I did to recover and I hope that I will be able to go through all of the art that I have made and will make and all of the writings that I have written and will write and I hope that somehow I can put it all together and either write a book or some other explanation of how I survived/recovered so that maybe, hopefully, my suffering and my struggle to get better and the fact that I was able to survive and the fact that hopefully I will be able to fully recover and move on far past the abuse that happened in the beginning of my life and go on and have a wonderful and great present and future... I hope that somehow I can explain how I survived all of the terrible parts and made it to a good life and I hope that my explanation of how I made it even when it seemed truly impossible or how I survived when I think or thought I couldn't; I hope that maybe I can help someone else who has to recover and move on from some kind of terrible trauma or horrific past. I hope that somehow I am able to put together all of the pieces of my story and that maybe my one little story about how I held on even when holding on was terribly painful- I hope that someone who needs help will maybe hear my story and I hope that maybe it can help them to hold on and get through the times that seem impossible so they can survive and just hold on until life will begin to be better for them too. p.p.s- I love you Evie, and The Speaker, and thank you to everyone who helps me to keep going and to keep working to stay alive and survive and recover and live a better and wonderful life. And to my S.; You are my greatest love, thank you, yljc.

The incredible flying Apple

.... is another proud sponsor.

Lloyd came up with a great idea this morning.

If you would like to support the "help me move to Italy" fund, Or you drink any sort of liquid during your day, Or you would just love to see Lloyd everyday, Or maybe you haven't found just the right Christmas gift for someone special in your life yet...
This is going to be just perfect for you.

from a few weeks ago...

forte.

I am back in the U.S. and I am feeling pretty sad. I need to figure out how to start working again so that I can afford to go back to Italy and then afford to move there permanently.

I am going to work even harder in my therapy now. I have to keep getting better so that I can be healthy and happy and live my life with S.