The cold had moved down and settled in my chest.  My cough is mighty big, but at least I don't have weakness or a stuffed up head.  Yesterday my husband came home from work in the middle of the day.  I let out a little lady like shriek!  Poor man was sick not with what I have but with chills and a fever.  Occationally one particular tooth becomes infected and his whole body reacts.  I have to get the man to a dentist.  We need to make a pack that we will see the dentist together.

Art class today!  My painting is almost finished.  I'll bring it to class but don't think I'll get much done on it - the paint is still wet.  The final process on my art is always glazing, rubbing a small amount of transparent color on highlights and shadows, thus giving things a better 3D look, yellow where the light hits at high points and dark color where there is recession and shadow, rounding out the objects.  But the glaze has to go on top of dry paint.  If the paint isn't dry then it just blends with the color and spreads.  Eh, I'll probably be dumb and paint on it anyway.

I did a naughty and wrote on my canvass.  I wrote about the newly impregnanted virgin Mary, "You will be Holy whether you want to or not".  I don't think the virgin was given much of an option, just a Holy decree.

If I had planned the painting better then there would have been no blank space in which to write the words.  So my next painting is going to have no blank space what-so-ever.  Even the branches of the trees are going to interlace and knot around one another, blotting out the sky.  And I'll put birds in the trees.  And I'll put a lion carrying a turtle on it's back.  And there will be three naked ladies.  And there will be fiddlehead ferns growing.  And there will be garlands of flowers falling from the trees.  And there will be a man with the head of......of.....well I don't know for certain.

Posted by dignifyme at 7:24 AM EDT

Updated: Friday, 6 October 2006 7:55 AM EDT

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Mood:  hug me

This question was emailed to me yesterday from a graduate student.

How are you coping?

Posted by dignifyme at 8:25 AM EDT

Updated: Wednesday, 4 October 2006 8:26 AM EDT

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Mood:  hug me

I'm sick with a cold.  Had to call in to the museum on Momday to be excused from volunteer duty, was feeling weak and sounded bad too. 

Sunday night the cold started with strange feelings, I couldn't tell if I was getting physically sick or mentally sick.  I've had so much mental suffering lately that physical trouble seemed to be something all in my head too.  I love my life, I hate my life, all I can do lately on this blog is whine. 

Painted today, mostly sitting in a chair.

Reading a juvenile fantasy book.

I'm scared that people are looking at my artwork in the library, I'm scared that nobody is looking at my artwork in the library.  Tomorrow night there is a big lecture in the library and hopefully some of the people attending will come to my lecture as well.  Have to go back to the library tomorrow before their lecture, on Frank Lloyd Wright's later architecture and put little sticky numbers next to my artwork that makes it correspond to a title and price sheet.  Right now the numbers are on little purple dots.  I want to buy white stickers and cut them up into small white squares and write the numbers on that instead.  It is a small detail.  But white will be more inconspicuous than purple.

I wish I could drink a bit of red wine to combat the cold but I don't dare.  Geodone is working now, must not upset the chemical soup in my head.   Not feeling suicidal during the day, just a bit at night.

Answered a question today emailed from a graduate student.  The student is very nice but I felt dirty discribing what it was like to be a sick person.  I'd like to shut down the website and the blog and just paint.  It is just a temporary mood.  But I think I'm tired of the illness and being an ill person.  Tired.  Tired of being a cheerful educator.  My nose won't stop dripping and my throat hurts.

I'm going to have that bit of wine after all.

Posted by dignifyme at 9:57 PM EDT

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Mood:  spacey

I like using the color red for shadows in my painting.  It works especially well around green leaves.  I'm contemplating putting some writing on the painting that I'm working on right now.  It is a scene of the Annunciation from the Bible and God is saying to Mary "You WILL be holy."  It is pretty obvious from the pregnant woman's shock and uncomfortable posture that she didn't have much say in the matter.  It is rather horrible to muss up a perfectly good picture with words but I think in this case the choice was to put words around Mary's naked pregnant body or else shooting rays of light.  Stirickly speaking, shooting rays of light are rather visually boring.  In writting you get the loops and curls of my cursive hand writing, a little more horizontal as well as vertical strokes.

My goal is to finish the painting by next week.  I work on it every day.

Yesterday I hung my art show in the town's public library.  There were rules about how many works could be hung (8) and where they were to be displayed, but the woman in charge of the art show broke some of those rules in favor of flattering and highlighting my artwork.  Oh, there is a chance the show could run for an extra month as well, hope so.  Mistakenly I arrived with 14 works of art to be displayed.  Mike and I spent a hectic night putting together artwork and frames and wire hangers.  Although some of our effort was wasted, actually the 9 works that were finally hung in the library were just the best of the best, so it is a tight, impressive show.

I just re-wrote a press release for the town newspaper.  Hope they do an article on my show and lecture for publicity.  At any rate, there will be an item in the monthly calendar section of the newspaper.  Now the last thing to do for publicity is to tack the little posters I've made in area coffee shop's bullitain boards. 

I've got a tooth ache which means I need to see a dentist soon.

After I talked with my therapist we increased my Geodone to the maximum dose of 160mg and now I no longer feel suicidal any more.  I don't like myself very much, but I can live with myself.  Mike says I need more time taking care of my mental health then trying to paint and make us money.  I've been feeling very guilty lately that he makes all the money and I make hardly anything.  I'm inviting two gallery owners to my lecture. 

My therapist said that my laughter sounds different on Geodone.  Great.  My art has changed along with my laughter.  I didn't bother to ask her what is different. 

Posted by dignifyme at 4:41 PM EDT

Updated: Sunday, 1 October 2006 5:33 PM EDT

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Mood:  caffeinated

The emotional tempest has passed.  Mike had a marathon talk with London on Tuesday and both emerged relaxed and happy.  Mike says that our little family in our little apartment is going through "growing pains".

In his heart what Mike wants more than anything is for London to live here for a while.  He suffered a nervous breakdown when she was sixteen and wasn't able to help her much during the next two years.  Now he is in a position to offer her a safe roof over her head.  Although, as Reflection pointed out, she does have to put up with living with a crazy person.

I'm not a mean crazy person.  But I am fragile.  I can only imagine that during their talk Mike said to London, "If you are mean to Karen you can make her psychotic."  And it is true.  For several days I feared the anger that was in the house and I withdrew behind thick emotional walls.  It seemed like I was cold and emotionally distant but, as Mike explained, I was trying to preserve and protect myself.  I did long for London to ask me a happy question or engage in lighthearted banter - but fear made me avoid being the one to break the ice.

The day before everything was settled was disasterous.  London's boyfriend came over to visit, invited inside by Mike.  I was in bed resting when he said to me, "Throw some clothing on, we are going to meet Justin".  Mike had forgotten the rule that before someone comes into the house I am to be given a day's notice.  Not something that a normal person would need, I know, I know.  But, as my therapist has said, "schizophrenia is primarily a social disease."  What I think she means is that medication can control many symptoms but the person's maladjustment in social situations remains untouched.  People, their simple presence, affect a schizophrenic more than any other object.  People are our greatest challenge and our greatest fear, because they have the power to greatly aggrivate our illness.  I am not a shy person but this illness makes me behave as if I were indeed very shy.

Justin is a great kid who has a fast mouth and agile mind.  His most flattering quality is self confidence.  The visit went well although, according to Mike I "looked like a deer caught in the headlights".  I was stiff and frozen saying almost nothing.  After London and Justin left I became psychotic talking about "blue boats", "black ants" and "red turtles".  Mike felt that if he could just get me to bed and hold me that the physical contact would snap me out of it.  Apparently physical touch grounds me and returns me to a more logical state.  Luckily I also asked for his help in giving me medication as well, and took a bit of my narcotic and a fast acting old school anti-psychotic Trilifon. 

Mike said my reaction would not have happened while I was taking the anti-psychotic Seroquil, that it is because I am on the weaker Geodone that I am so fragile.  My greatest problem on Geodone has been feeling a mild pain of being suicidal that comes and goes every day.  I'm certainly not psychotic every day but at some point I do feel as if I wish to die and there is something wrong and abnormal in that.  Happily, the day after I took the emergency dose of Trilifon I was steady as a rock and had no suicidal feelings.  So last night when they started to return I took another Trilifon and this morning feel pretty strong and even tempered.

In several hours time I have an appointment to see my therapist.  I'm going to request that we add Trilifon to my drug cocktail.  I did once have a bad reaction to the drug where I couldn't focus my eyes, and honestly, all this morning I've been worried about it, testing myself to see if the focus is normal.  Something is a bit off.  I think the trick is to take the drug in the evening once every two days, and if there is a side effect it will only appear in mild form on the first morning.  I've got to also tell my therapist that since we've last met I've added 20mg of Geodone, doubled my anti-depressent, and now need Trilifon too.

Last night London was with me in my bedroom while I was painting.  On the wall there are two artist's easels.  She pointed to the painting that was created from when I took Seroquil and said, "new style" and then pointed to the painting I am currently working on and said, "old style".  Meaning, my art now is resembling the first artwork I ever made while on Risperdal.  I played the game and pointed to the dry Seroquil art and said, "strong medication", then pointed to my new wet painting and said "weak medication".  Mike says that I have lost all desire to make three dimentional space, everything is flat and two dimentional.  I just shake my head and look at what I'm doing and think, "brain damaged".  It is weird beyond weird to change medication and see your art change.

Posted by dignifyme at 8:04 AM EDT

Updated: Thursday, 28 September 2006 8:25 AM EDT

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Mood:  lucky

Karen; "I want to die."

Michael; "That time will come sooner than you want."

Karen; "I feel like I am in Hell.  I am in a cage."

Michael; "Once when I was 4 or 5 years old I was sitting between my parents in the front seat of a car.  We were driving through an industrial park and there were rows and rows of warehouses lit by blue mercury vapor lights.  I didn't yet have the words to say how the bleak landscape made me feel.  But I remember it made me feel depressed, even dispair.  So, I think I know how you feel." 

Karen; (nodding yes)

Michael; "But while I was feeling that way I remember that I was with my parents and they were gaurding me on either side.  When it comes right down to it, it is just you and me.  We have each other and I'm here for you, holding you."

Issues with London are making me sicker.   After a week when she only slept in her bed once or twice in seven days, we had a family meeting and put down the rule that she was only allowed two overnights at her boyfriend's apartment per week.  Mike and I tried to explain that we were feeling used, like a doormat, and that the sense of the home being a cohesive family unit was becoming badly fractured.  I needed to point out to Mike that London has been living pretty much free and on her own since she was sixteen.  We simply do not know what kind of lifestyle London is used to. 

For Mike and I there both came a time when we knew that we never wanted to live at home again.  Our need for freedom was too great.  Mike said that when he was living on his own in college he loved to listen to music.  But when he came home on breaks his Mom wouldn't let him listen to his music in the house even if he wore headphones.  The radio and record machine needed to be stored in boxes in the garage.  She objected because the music Mike listened to wasn't Christian.  In her Christian household she wanted rules of conduct that made her feel comfortable.   But it really steamed Mike.  After Mike's sophmore year it looked like the only way he could afford to continue going to school was to live at home for a year and work and save money.  The best work available in their small town was at a meat packing plant.  After a summer of working with dead animal carcasses and no music he was so unhappy that he quit and signed on with the airforce for four years.

If London's need for freedom is so great then she will have to live on her own.  Mike is worried that if she does go she then won't be able to afford college.  The effect of Mike never getting his college degree has been enormus.  In manufacturing he gets paid less than someone who has a degree to do the same job.   It doesn't matter how many years experience he has doing a job in manufacturing.  He is taken less seriously.

What happens to me is that when I anticipate a confrontation with London I can feel my adrenalin spike and the symptoms of my illness get worse.  Then I'm thinking to just stay steady and stay out of the hospital, and I take extra medication.  The type that works best in a crisis is a narcotic, and I have to be oh so very careful not to become dependent on it.   I definately do not want to Foster Parent, at least, not on my current medication.  My great hope is that newer medication will be invented within the next several years.  I am staying on Geodone because my appetite is now normal and I feel nausous when I over eat.  I have lost a little weight but am certain that I can and will lose more.  I am afraid to push my anti-psychotic higher because while I might then be strong enough to deal with London, I will start having side effects of sedation and maybe akathesia. 

Karen and stress is a bad, bad combination.

Posted by dignifyme at 8:28 AM EDT

Updated: Sunday, 24 September 2006 9:04 AM EDT

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Mood:  not sure

There is a website called America Oh Yes that sells folk art on-line.  They buy collections, and I thought to maybe sell my entire collection of art I've made so far to them. 

 I don't think anyone on the America Oh Yes website is particularly better than me.  Only thing is that the people there all have their own style.  That is partly why the dealer is looking for a collection, it confirms that the artist is productive and mature.  People stumble along looking for their own vision but those with the strongest vision don't have to look far.  They are themselves right from the beginning.

I am looking hard for my own style.  Artistic "style" is just the end result of a unique process.  I am spending so much time in a process that I know in my heart isn't giving me an end product I am happy with.  My art is not yet free, like what I see with some other established folk artists whom I admire.  In my Risperdal Days when my life had a rhrythem to it, then, all my early work is clearly all of the same group and it all thrills me the same way.  Now I am here in Brattleboro to stay for a long time and I want to start having a new group of art.  I want to find a rhythem to life again.  Now it is going to be the Geodone Days.

For a while now I am going to stick to a 16" x 20" format of working in oil paint on canvas.  I know yesterday I said that I wanted to return to oil pastel drawing but I think that I have been spoiled by oil painting.  You don't put glass over an oil painting so the picture and colors are immediate and kind of reach out and grab the viewer.  I want to paint more than I want to draw because the final product of painting always makes me happier.  Except, that is, what I did in my Risperdal Days.

I spent the morning working on a plan for the painting I am going to start in my class tomorrow.  I did a lot of drawing.  It would be wonderful if I got a relationship going with America Oh Yes website and then whenever I finished a picture I could just send it off in the mail for them to sell it however they see fit.  I'm really scared though of contacting them.  I'm also really scared of sending away all my artwork, the whole load.  It would leave me with my hands empty, feeling that I had nothing to show for my talent.  Right now since everything is in storage all I have to do is look and immediately I see concrete evidence that yes indeed I am an artist.  It is like a pirate's hoard of treasure.  The pirate doesn't go buy a castle and horses and nice clothing with all his jewels, no, he buries the treasure chest.  Then the pirate sails about the world and thinks about his buried treasure.  The wealth gives him satisfaction in a strange way.  My artwork gives me satisfaction in the same strange way.

Selling my entire collection would help me to become more productive in the future because I wouldn't have past glories to rest upon.  I would have to produce constantly to prove my talent to myself.  But selling the entire collection would do something else.  I would be able to start having a reputation.  The work has to be out in the public eye for me to be noticed.  Dealers need to know about me and that all starts with one, the first dealer.  If I sold the entire collection I would be entering the real world where people communicate with each other, strangers move in and out of your life, and you are only as good as the last painting you made.

Posted by dignifyme at 1:36 PM EDT

Updated: Thursday, 21 September 2006 1:50 PM EDT

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Mood:  quizzical

Getting warmed up for my art class starting this Friday.  I've been painting in oil for over a year and this is a return to craypas drawing.  Don't really know where the Geodone is leading me.   Am I scared I'm going to start producing crap?  Yes.  I'm scared that I've lost a creative edge. 

I'm happy with the tree and the three creatures under it but the bicycling couple seems rather indistinct to me.  I don't know if that is o.k., or if everything in the picture needs to be sharply defined.  But I wanted the bicycling couple to look like they had a lot of light shining on them.  When the eye sees a lot of glare or reflection the sum total of the image is blurry and indistinct. 

"It Land" looks childish but a kid couldn't have drawn it.  They just do not have the ability to do something so dense.  Maybe one or two figures by themselves, but not the whole combined and a kid definately couldn't do the couple on the bicycle.  The couple is fantasy but it is an adult fantasy, not a child's.  Ultimately a child wants to make something "real".  Adults can look at what was done with entire childish seriousness and feel amused because all the child is only capable of is a version, or approximation, of what is real - but the child doesn't know that.  I guess this picture is dense too in terms of color changes and texture changes.  It started with a loose pencil sketch where I didn't commit myself to too much detail, hoping that once the craypas was in my hand the detail would come straight to the paper with the color.

If I saw this at a flea market I'd probably buy it for five dollars.  But it doesn't resemble any artwork that I'm currently aware of.  Maybe that is a bad thing.  Artists who draw like this get ignored.  Maybe someone who is locked up in a mental institution draws something like this in their art therapy class.  I can't shake the shameful feeling that my illness is somehow coming out on paper here. 

This piece took three days to make and shows the "direction" my art is going to go in the near future.  If I'm going to make more drawings like this one I'd better get my courage up today by looking at some outsider or primative artwork in books in my library.

Posted by dignifyme at 1:31 PM EDT

Updated: Wednesday, 20 September 2006 1:32 PM EDT

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Mood:  mischievious

Yesterday Mom, Mike and I tried to climb the mountain again.  We saw several groups of kids going up and down along with a whole gaggle of other hikers.  Did we make it?  No.  We went up further than I'd ever been before but at one point we turned a corner and I saw a long, steep rocky climb ahead and I lost my nerve.  Said I didn't want to go any furthur.  On the way down my Mom said that I had held out for a long time and had done really well.  It felt like I was a kid again and being rewarded with kind words and milk and cookies.  This illness really makes me seem juvenile I guess.  Mike and Mom were twittering back and forth like two birds, one making a silly joke and the other laughing.  Good thing that they had each other because I was mostly stoney and silent.  Not that I was in a bad mood, it was just that it took all my mental effort to keep the physical effort going.  We had to turn back not because I was physically spent but because I had no more emotional endurance to push myself. 

Now Mike and I are wondering if London might leave us sometime soon.  She has a new boyfriend.  We are wondering if she is going to get an apartment with him.  I guess we both sense that freedom is a big thing for his daughter right now, but I think there is something darker here too.  At her age I was always moving around, so much so that I ended up in a homeless shelter twice.  And this morning I've thought about it, in ten years I've gone through three significant relationships that I was committed to and intended to last forever and moved through six different towns.  I've got a problem with perminence, and it has finally dawned on me that the running around and changing my life from top to bottom is now getting me ragged around the edges.  I have got to, absolutely, stay put for a number of years. 

What is the same about me and London?  Trauma.  I got really traumatized with the onset of my illness and the two years I spent locked up in an Institution.  London has her own history which I won't go into on this blog.  I've always felt like I was an adventurer, a risk taker and gambler who always came out winning on the bet I made, be it on a man or a career move.  Well, now I've finally got the right man and I've got a little bit of a career as an artist and writer.  But I also feel like a dog with gaping wounds that just wants to curl up and wait for healing to occur.  This energy and need for change must be directed into creative product.  In the arts it is restlessness that makes you paint the next painting.  I despise the feeling of any glory lying in past accomplishment - I'm always looking to do the next "big thing" that will top the rest.  My mind wants to go searching, and too often the daydreams of mine are of a different town with a different life. 

But if I think about what was the happiest time of my life, it is always these two narrow pockets of time in my twenties when I was deeply involved with and commited to either writing a book or producing art.  I would go on walks and think about my project, the days revolved around my project, and peak hours were always devoted to furthering it's accomplishment.  My happiest memories are of times when I was walking a lot and working a lot.  I felt free and alive.

Posted by dignifyme at 7:47 AM EDT

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Mood:  celebratory

This is the final part of the essay that will be published in Schizophrenia Bulletin.  The beginning of the essay is in the previous blog entry.  As part of the legal agreement I signed I can publish it in it's pre-print form on my personal website.  Eventually this essay will be published on my main website, schizophreniaandart.com.  Now that the publishing bug has bitten, I'm thinking of writing an essay for Schizophrenia Bulletin titled "Portrait of a Marriage" about what it is like to have a person with a mental illness married to a person who doesn't have a mental illness.

Ability and Disability, Part II

A small gallery owner and I once had a friendly acquaintance that lasted several years. He professionally framed several of my painted canvasses. When I visited him in his shop I was always at my most attractive. Showered, rested, and a paying customer. The new car I parked in his lot had been bought for me by my husband. This man couldn't "see" anything wrong with me.  My creeping rate of artistic production baffled him. And I think he was curious about my new marriage, why would a man willingly take an unemployed, sick woman as a wife?            

One day he said to me, "You have a nice personality. You would interview very well.  Why can't you get a job at the kennel down the road?" What the gallery owner hoped to do was to prove my status of being disabled wrong.  His theory that I was strong enough to become a contributing member of society, earning a wage, was intended as a compliment.  In an attempt to find a normal place in the world for me he had thought of a menial job that required no education and minimal intellect.  What I would be doing at the kennel was vague, but the implication was that I should clean up after caged animals.    The intent was to prove that my psychiatric disability could be overcome by simply finding the right task for me to do.  He imagined that a job that was purely physical, washing excrement off concrete floors, wouldn’t tax my brain or invoke the disability of schizophrenia.             

Perhaps for several hours every day I could use my best hours of clear thought and concentration working at a kennel.  Here my acquaintance was also challenging my resolve for recovery.   If I declined to apply for such a job then the fault must lie with me and my personal values and not my illness.  But the assumption that physical labor somehow bypasses my thought disorder is incorrect.  In my world of pennies and necessary cost, the act of directing my body in coordinated movement is just as mentally fatiguing as sitting in front of a computer and typing.  Bending language, as I have done in this essay, and bending my body are two very different tasks but they both involve my person as a whole.              

A good friend once said to me, “Karen, you become the book you read.”  It often seems that my mind is like a light switch that can only be turned on or off and it is seldom able to roam in-between.  Sometimes I wonder if the main feature of my illness isn’t just an abnormal intensity of experience.  I am too much in the world, concerned with the world, and consumed by the world.  In my household I am the slowest dishwasher and the slowest with the vacuum cleaner and the dust rag.  However, I am also the best dishwasher and the most thorough cleaner of every nook and cranny.  One might say that I take life, and everything in it, too seriously.  But to be more accurate, perhaps I burn out so fast because I am not splintered into parts, lacking the agile ability to project or withhold concentration.  My existence isn’t filtered out into more important or less important parts, and so, I am vulnerable to life’s abundance of stimuli. 

My choice is to use what limited mental power I have to the utmost.  I have chosen a career in making art because I find painting to be a joyous wedding between the concrete and tactile and the abstract and intellectual.  As if I were conducting a musical symphony, when I work all parts of my brain are engaged, connected, and coordinated.  There is nothing, ever, boring about making art.  Technical problems concerning color, shape and the painted surface are very real to me, and the adventure to solve them is exhilarating.  Some of the pictorial mysteries I’m involved in, by studying what other artists have done, will take years to unravel.  Don’t many people secretly dream that they could one day find work that they feel passionate about?  The balance of my life is fair and good because in the midst of disability I have found moments of ability that are sought after, cherished, and repeated from one day to the next.

Posted by dignifyme at 9:01 AM EDT

Updated: Saturday, 16 September 2006 9:05 AM EDT

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