Pen and ink by Karin Webb

I am tired. Weary. Sore. I feel as though I have been shouting into a void and no one is hearing. I know this isn’t true. I have people in my life who value me and tell me so, but I feel overwhelmed. So overwhelmed. Barely surviving type overwhelmed. It’s a feeling I know well, a lifelong of anxieties surfacing. Yearning for somewhere safe and warm. I do not know where that place is. I cannot seem to find it in my mind or my body lately.

The terrain of fear is an insidious pull at the fabric of my armor. Little by little I unravel. Holes appear. They grow larger. Sewing, over and over again these little voids, patches over the larger ones. These are improper fixes and unsustainable courses of action. By the end of my time I will be a thing of patches and mismatched threads, not a whole and happy, well woven piece. These are also my fears. Fear that I grow old and change against standards which keep me superficially afloat — but there are days and weeks where afloat of any kind is still above the waterline.

Thereby, perhaps, my methods are incorrect. Or the supplies and skills and time I have are inadequate to make new, to make whole, to make. Perhaps I am in a time which mismatches my inner reality. “Not of this era”. Though I have a lot to be grateful for.

I dream of simple, and I don’t know if simple is what the United States provides. The math of social proofs are clear to me. Struggle is clear to me. Rage against the machine is clear to me. Love for my friends and family, and empathy for strangers is clear to me. Helping others is clear to me. Helping myself is not.

And I am stingy with self love sometimes.

There is a museum show I want to do. Does anyone I know know programmers at museums who would be open to sexually explicit performance? I have math, a proof to demonstrate, I want to perform, connections to make clear to an adulting public.

I need people who can help me with the red tape of my life. I feed hearts and steady the guts of others well, but filling out paperwork and advocating for myself through forms is not a thing I feel capable of.

Spring. I need more exercise and for the cold grey to end. It’s been a week too long already, and I don’t want this for another month.

I want friends and neighbors I can pass by and smile around. I need not to coop myself up. I wish I had a car.

I am teaching dance to a friend right now. That keeps me balanced on days we meet. I am teaching a few others about their bodies and about devotion. That helps me too. When I can touch in some way my friends who reach out to me, it centers something inside of me also.

I suppose this is my way of reaching out. I don’t know the direct channels. I can’t see my path right now.

Someone stop by with a bottle of red wine and offer to touch my body. With no words tell me it will be alright.

Play On My Friends,
~ Creature

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