When I Get Stressed Or Depressed, It All Comes Out As Creativity

I have being having problems getting along with my grandfather lately but he can't possibly be in the wrong so I have taken a few days off to cool down and not talk to him. I drove by one of the houses he is working on today and when I saw him, I got a little angry so there hasn't been enough cool off time on my end.

My uncle Jim put it perfectly when I asked him how he puts up with my grandpa and he said "Well, you only get one Dad." Which I guess is also true of grandparents in my life (single Mom family here and I haven't seen my Dad/Dad's family since I was 4. Well, with the exception of my only cousin on that side. He's awesome and he found my brother on the internet and reconnected.).

Well, anyway. I get really listless and pathetic when I don't have a purpose. When I do have a purpose, nothing in the 'verse can stop me. When I have a purpose AND I have a problem, I get super creative. No purpose? No art, no writing, no cleaning, no exercising, nothing. I watch a lot of TV and I eat a lot of random things that I can find around the house. Like I said, pathetic.

Usually I sketchbook like I have an addiction. I draw constantly. For the past year, I haven't been. I think that may be part of my problem, that I'm not drawing enough. Actually, since I started working on my art show, my sketchbooking has been going down hill in quality and quantity. I was encouraged in college to not draw everything that I wanted to because when I draw for fun, I usually draw comics. That wasn't the path that my art teachers wanted me to go down and so I hyper focused on doing portraits, which I love doing. It's just that my teachers weren't satisfied with just portraits.

When I did a painting of my grandmother that I took from an old photograph, my teachers kind of freaked out about it and got me to do a bunch of them. I said okay because I wanted to graduate and because I really liked finally having their approval. I didn't actually like doing the paintings. I mean, I didn't hate it but there was zero creativity in doing them but there I was, every waking hour that I wasn't in class or at work, painting from these photos.

I could tell you that my painting technique was what was creative about my art but that is sort of a lie because I just paint without thinking about it. A guitarist doesn't think about which position his hands need to be in to get the note out, he just does it. Same with painting. I just do it without thinking that if I used a dry brush in this corner then I can get this effect and if I use wet in wet here then the colors will do this and get this effect. No. I just instinctually know and my hands just work toward the image I've got in my mind. When working from photos though, the image was really static and right in front of me. I don't really want to do that again. I love working from life instead. Or just my imagination, I haven't done that well in a while.

Anyway, the work that I have done most recently from my imagination and under stress are these sketches I did in my business class. They are illustrating a story that came to me while my grandfather was in and out of the hospital last fall and I was cleaning his house so that he could live in it when he got back home. He's a hoarder and I spent hours and hours all by myself over at that house trying to give him enough room to roll a wheelchair though it. I was so successful that I made way into rooms that hadn't been accessible in years. Of course, when my grandfather finally got home, he was just mad about everything I had done and accused me of throwing stuff away and losing all sorts of things. We have gotten into another one of these arguments lately and I don't know how much more I can take of this mental illness that is eating away at his life and now, my life as well. That's what the pictures are about.

What really got me through some tough times while I was alone at my grandpa's house was imagining that I would turn the corner and I would find that there was a magical path to another world. It was sort of like the junkyard in The Labyrinth but it opened up onto this old-timey circus, the kind with a bearded lady and a strong man and a completely tattooed human. The kind with the world's smallest horse and dogs dressed up as elephants. There would be tightrope performers and sad clowns, not with crazy hair and polka dot costumes, but the kind with tears and tailcoats.

And then my grandpa went back into the hospital while I was working over there at the house and all of a sudden my circus imaginings seemed so stupid.

I felt lost and like I was adrift in this black pool where there were creatures and shifts that I couldn't see because I was looking up, floating on this black pool.

And then I was pulled down into the blackness and my life's blood, my essence, was drawn out of me and I lost myself and I became part of the darkness.

That is what dealing with someone who has a mental illness, like hoarding, is like. You want to escape but they draw you back in and then they suck out everything you are and you become part of the illness. It consumes your life like it has done to them.

I don't really know what to say after all that. I do feel a little strange that the thing that my imagination conjured up for me to escape to was the circus but it was a dark and scary kind of circus, like it didn't seem much better than the place I already was.