Searching For A Save Point (Continued...): Let's die for Art (part 1)

Today I swam 44 laps. My physical therapist has been working with me the last month & a half to help rehab my dilapidated physical vessel. Spine, Hip, Muscular, joint, tendons & nerves. I feel wonderful after sessions, but I end up undoing the progress we make when I’m home & zoned in trying to be productive as an artist. This has been a loop as far back as I can remember, there’s always an urgency & pressure to perform & always be putting in the100k hrs well past the 10k mark. Even with no external pressure, I’m just wired to always want to be in create something out of nothing mode. Easy to justify the trade off in my head doing what I love but we’ve entered into this very dystopian, dysfunctional & demoralizing pocket of time in the world where any & everything beyond the actual process of creative expression feels really really bad. I have 3 decades of bleeding & sacrificing for that process already woven into the akashic records…. You know what I’ve never experienced? Sacrificing being artist long enough to just exist as a human. To be honest, there really hasn’t been a time in my life where i ever wanted to slow down as a creative. Even now, where I see the warning signs being manifested as physical & mental trade offs. I quite literally don’t know how to shut off my urge to create/express/transmute.. I think it’s possible for me to find a balance & heal in a meaningful way, but the world is terrifying right now. If my future survival is dependent on my perceived worth & my perceived worth is a warped normalized expectation to keep showing up, participating, compromising, sucking it up & playing the content / streaming game.. then I’m trapped in a hostile environment, exposed to energies & entities that traumatize my spirit & taint everything about human connection through a digital screen. I’m too isolated to view the human lens through post 2016 algorithms & Internet culture. There is no one at arms length to help counter my virtual experiences. There’s no one to bounce ideas, inspiration, fears off of. No one to help me move around the house & clean after I over work my body trying to perform & obliterate my mind logging into share.

I’m making progress but not at the speed demanded by a wacky world that keeps turning & churning non stop variables…

I’m proud of my progress but wish all my previous accomplishments & achievements up to this point were valuable enough to allow the grace of being able to be present & private long enough to breathe w/o constant visibility for survival sake being the one normalized act of self harm that has us now questioning, Survive? For what?

Keep swimming <3