A Very Monday Monday
This is our first Monday back from “Spring Break.” I put that in quotes because we didn’t go anywhere. BUT! We did all turn of our alarms and erase all “bedtimes” - not that they exist that much anymore in my teenagers. It’s mainly just a lot of me nagging, “I WILL ENFORCE A BEDTIME BY TAKING AWAY ALL SCREENS IF YOU DO NOT GET UP AND GO TO SCHOOL WHEN YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO.”
But I also has a really fucked up dream (I promise this is not about my dream, it’s about my state of mind when I woke up, the dream explanation is barely a sentence.) where my Mom was alive but in the hospital and things were terrible and her friends were yelling at me and then…I REMEMBERED SHE WAS DEAD. But that understanding didn’t make its way into an awareness of the dream world so then I just assumed I had been having a psychotic break and that is the energy I woke up with. The, “OH MY GOD, my mental health is fragile enough that I completely convinced myself my Mom is alive for several days.” And let me tell you…even knowing that was a dream after I woke up didn’t help considering I’ve already been a little uneasy about my mental health lately.
SO. MONDAY.
I’m going to try to take a social media break this week. Or, rather, a Facebook break. And not for the reasons most people do. I think I’ve been floundering so much around my emotions and feelings and grief lately that I keep just returning to posting things on Facebook about memories and sadness and…I think I’ve been using it as a place to garner up superficial emotional support as a temporary salve to the grief I’m feeling when - IN REALITY - I need to be spending more time with those feelings and quit trying to get temporary fixes from Facebook. I have a lot of good friends on Facebook and considering we’re in a pandemic and I have no job and no reason to leave the house anymore…I don’t get a lot of friend interaction and it occurred to me that I was doing some sort of, “Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?” treatment of those friendships. If I really need human support? I need to text individual people who love me, not do some sort of Facebook blast that then wait for the support to trickle in without asking anything of me in return.
SO! FACEBOOK BREAK!
I don’t really use other social media in that way so I think I’m okay still interacting with the rest.
I started playing around with my daughter’s old gouache paints this weekend. Gouache paints are “opaque watercolors” that were/are all the rage in some sphere of her art influence and so we bought her a set (they’re kinda pricey) but she’s a busy girl with a full academic load and so they started “drying out” so to speak. But since they’re watercolors, you can reactivate them and I watched a couple of videos and I’ve been playing around with them at night as a type of therapy. As I get certain colors moist/creamy again…I play around with them on scraps of watercolor paper and now I think I may do this every night. I don’t have good brushes but I’m really enjoying just playing on tiny pieces of paper every night and then coming to the dry pages in the morning to add some flair with a sharpie.
So, this morning, to try to negate the crazy, “Oops I had a psychotic break,” energy from my dream I worked on this piece. This is my favorite (and probably one of the most well-known) Edna St. Vincent Millay poems because it speaks to my soul with it’s recognition of the beauty of chaotic energy and it is exactly what I needed to meditate on this morning.
Anyway…here’s to a week of good energy and good mindsets. Happy Monday to you all.