Is it really terrible that I’m having such a hard time motivating myself to do anything? And I mean anything. I went home this past weekend, full of hope that I’d come back to school with something amazing. Instead, I had a horribly exhausting weekend at home with very little satisfying production. I spent my entire Saturday and Sunday photographing and I’m not pleased with any of it. Usually, I’d use my frustration with my parents as a guide to help me focus on my work. I’d channel it so that I could create work that meant something to me, and that would legitimately and genuinely communicate how I’m feeling. But now I only feel drained. I’m exhausted emotionally and physically and no matter where I’m taking photographs (yes, even at home) I am stuck. I try to relax and I can’t. I try to open up and not think too hard about what I’m photographing. I experiment, but everything that comes out of that says nothing to me. Perhaps I’m just incredibly disillusioned. Perhaps I’m starting to feel like I’m intentionally putting myself through the gauntlet so that my work comes across legitimately. I feel like I’m losing touch with myself as an artist. I’m losing control of what I’m doing in all aspects of my life. It is such a task to gather myself enough so that I can sit and think clearly. There are so many things going on and I’m having a very, very difficult time concentrating on my work with all this going on, on top of the pressure I feel to produce for this class. I’m going to vent, whether anyone likes it or not.
My parents are still feuding through myself, Michael and Hayley. They mutter accusations under their breath thinking we can’t hear them. They say the other is “planting ideas in our heads,” taking their frustrations about one another out on us. They have no shame. They put us on guilt-trips. I don’t feel like arguing. I don’t have the energy to challenge their point. I’m not heard, anyway-they don’t listen, thinking I’m acting/speaking on part of the other. So, I have to give in and take it. I let them accuse me of things I have no control over, they complain to me about the other like there’s something I can do about it. They say they don’t mean it that way. I’m too tired to care, yet I do and it hurts. I just wish everyone would stop arguing, nagging, speculating. I can’t find any space to relax without feeling guilty about it. Richmond sucks, home is falling apart. I don’t know what to do with myself.
My dad lives in an apartment down the street from my house; literally, a 2 minute walk. I am the only one that visits him, and I visit him out of the guilt-trips he puts me on and because I feel bad for him. My brother and sister don’t return his calls or his texts and he often doesn’t see them for 2-3 weeks at a time, and even then, it’s only for an hour or so when my mom makes them go over there. He complains about this to me like I’m supposed to do something about it. He and I both know that I am the only consistent person between him and the rest of my family, so he tells me these things so that I’ll be the messenger and take it back to the house. When I bring this up he accuses me of being defensive and “ridiculous.”
My parents cannot be under the same roof.
My dad didn’t come to my 21st birthday party that my family and friends threw for me.
When you’re wrung like this it’s hard to recollect. I should be able to focus all this into my work like I’ve always done, but something is stopping me short. I tell myself it’s all in my head, and maybe it is, but it doesn’t feel that way. It would be so nice to blame all of this on myself so that I could realize and overcome my ridiculousness and move on. But I am unreservedly lost and perplexed within a vacuum of things I cannot control.
“But even as I felt crushed and broken -- walking around the neighborhood in a fog, trying to grasp what was happening, unable to listen to music or watch TV or go to the movies but only able to stare at the wall in the evenings as the information sifted into me, grain by grain -- the first of many dim and distant inklings of light was the idea that I was understanding, for the first true time, what people mean when they say that we do not know the future.” (Excerpt from May Through September [by] Aimee Bender)
Edit:
Much better. I apologize if that was inappropriate. However, having divulged all that, I can think a little clearer. Hopefully, Tom or Jeff (or both!) can help me condense all of it and channel it into something productive, as the divorce has become more distracting than it is useful. I've never told anyone the gritty details of the divorce and by doing so I seriously hope either instructor, as well as my peers, will have a better idea of how to help me focus and organize my concept/work.
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