Art Therapy & Releasing “My So-Called Delusions”
Starting off spring with sparks of creativity.
CW: transphobia in a mental health setting
It’s been two weeks since I’ve blogged because I’ve been incredibly busy, as usual.
To begin, I’m going through a lot right now with a variety of issues like terrible allergies making it hard to breathe, anxiety keeping me from falling asleep, severe arthritis pain, a broken door-buzzer and broken elevator that make living in a building like this very stressful, some triggering noise pollution that drives me into a rage at times, and I just found out that my therapist of the last thirteen years still thinks everything I told her is a delusion or a lie when I’ve been spilling my honest guts to her for over a decade, but she apparently sees me as a delusional woman who thinks she’s a man. I feel sick to my stomach that I trusted her with so many secrets and she doesn’t even believe me. I told her I was thinking of looking for a new therapist and she went on to call me a “he-she” later in that session, so I am in the process of leaving her but I have no new therapist lined up because there are none available, and as a person with Complex-PTSD and almost every diagnosis in the DSM, this is concerning me. In most ways I am doing well though. I have a lot of healthy relationships, I’m doing and selling art, working on my spirit, etc. I’m working my ass off, but giving myself time for fun. All in all I’m in an okay space. My anxiety level is going down with the help of a non-addictive anxiety pill I recently started, and it’s Spring, so I’m getting out a little bit and getting fresh air and sunlight. All of this makes me feel that I’m generally on the right path, moving forward.
To cope with all the shit I have going on, I like to create. It helps to keep me moving in the right direction.
As of yesterday, I just re-published my first book “The Godchild”, that I wrote in 2013 and self-published in 2020. It has a 4.7 star average rating and about twenty reviews from the original publication, but this new and improved version should be even better. I worked my ass off trying to perfect it and turn it into what I felt it should have been from the beginning; an exciting psychological thriller about my experience with Bipolar Psychosis, not long after my transition. It’s now called “The Godchild 1: My So-Called Delusions” and it’s available on Amazon.
The book in the above photo is a sample book and has “not for re-sale” tape around it, but books for sale will have the full cover, which I designed.
I’ve been busy with other stuff too.
I am slightly agoraphobic and almost never leave the house but I got out to see the ocean and the lake recently, and I went for a walk to collect sticks to make an Easter Tree for a way to welcome Spring and all its holidays…
Some nature I enjoyed…
It was great to get outside. Part of my motivation to get out was from the book “The Artist’s Way.” I’m about to start Week Ten of a twelve week program. Technically, it could be done at any pace, but it’s written to be done like a twelve week course and I’m doing it with my partner one week at a time. It’s been exciting to see all the creative shit I come up with.
Here are a couple of my homework assignments…
The first one was to do a collage of things we want out of life and our future. We were supposed to include a photo of ourselves but I didn’t have any recent photos. The one I used is about sixteen or seventeen years old now; from my early transition.
We also had to write a poem about ourselves as if we were a color. I did two… green and orange…
I did this picture of birch trees in the snow to say, “Goodbye winter. I won’t miss you.”
I had an artist friend over a couple of nights ago and we had a couple of mini bottles of champagne and smoked some weed. I cleaned off my table and it looked so nice and uncluttered. I said “I’m gonna paint a still life of this…” and that was where the idea for this came…
I’ve done a little bit of spring cleaning and I cleaned out my closets. I found a portfolio of some of my art from 1996 when I was seventeen or eighteen years old and these were some of my favorites…
Some history about my signature: I didn’t start going by Jymi until I was about 23 years old, but the name was given to me as a nickname, after Jimi Hendrix, as early as 1993. I immediately took it as a pen name for signing my art and poetry. My mirror image signature is usually found in the bottom right corner of my art, unless I think it would take away from the art to put it there, and then I try to find somewhere else to put it.
As difficult as things have been, I’m looking forward to the weather getting nice and hopefully having some happy times ahead. I hope people decide to pick up my book. I’m busy at work on the next one. I just got a copyright on it so I could give it out to some beta readers. So far they seem to be enjoying it and have given me some helpful advice on little improvements I could make in my next edit.
Overall, I am grateful. What more can I even ask for?