I’m still not painting, yet I’ve been working. Days rush by, and my To-do list is getting smaller, but I can’t seem to get off my ass to paint. It’s really bumming me out. It’s making me feel like a lazy bum. I feel like I used to paint every day. I mean, I did. Maybe I just didn’t have a shitload of other things to do at the same time? I don’t know. Getting the show prepared is all that’s going on right now. I have no time for anything else.

I’m also not getting much sleep lately. I wake up every two hours and it’s hard to go back to sleep. I guess I’m under stress. Yet, I think I don’t have a right to feel stressed because my life is easy. The stress of my life is really in the past. I’ve been essentially stress-free since forty-one years old. Before that, yes. I lived with more stress than I can describe, which began at birth and just kept going.

Many key factors came into my life that significantly helped, but it took almost a decade for everything to sink in, and that’s a long time. My thirties wooshed by, and I feel like I didn’t really experience them at all. I was mainly trapped in my house and couldn’t move. Frozen. It was more than stress. It was …I don’t have the words.

But during those years, I made a lot of progress, thanks to Hannah, thanks to therapy, thanks to keeping in my boundaries, even if haphazardly. It gave me a better outlook on some of my relationships and myself, what I believed in, who I might be, where I stood in the universe, etc. I had to figure it out.

Art began to slow down a little by the time I hit forty. My parents died that year. That was a stressful year because I was partly caring for my mom, even after all that water under the bridge. Eight months before, my dad died, I’d reconnected with my brother for the umpteenth time, and we stayed together in my dad’s hospice room. Heavy shit. I was glad to turn forty-one, and it was finally behind me. No further damage could ever be done by either of them. I would try to pick out fond memories the best I could and live my life.

Since then, what have I had to complain about? I make art, and life moves on. I work like a snail, though. I wish it wasn’t like that, but I feel no more urgency, I guess. Any real stress is brought on by myself. I tell myself to work faster. The art world is passing me by. Get more work done. You’re falling short! I’m not sure how I can change my spots at this stage. I’m just too slow and may always be mad at myself about it.