[the draft of family heraldry]
[ this bruised heart]

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Aug 1 (5 days ago)
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Jul 30 (7 days ago)
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I began at once somewhat more steady work on the subjects and books which I should have to lecture on. I now first hit upon the diagrammatical device of representing propositions by inclusive and exclusive circles. Of course the device was not new then, but it was so obviously representative of the way in which any one, who approached the subject from the mathematical side, would attempt to visualise propositions, that it was forced upon me almost at once.
—John Venn
[I have not taken them out of their bags yet, have not held them.]
[the beginning of a painting about projecting the warehouse heart]
I tried to call you in the hospital, but just once, after I talked with _____ as I sat in the hall and considered the titles of the books on the shelf in front of me. The phone rang some, and then it shifted, to something like a fax, but different, harmonic almost, trance inducing. I listened to it, and then went into the room that was my room and, still listening, stepped over the boxes and bags and piles in the room that is not my room anymore, and almost, almost recorded it, the sound of that phone not being answered.Then the room overwhelmed me and I thought about how nothing is simple and things always take longer than I think they will, and how my life is full of scraps. I have a video of me driving and talking about how I was driving past the place where we played music in the grass, at that hospital, and how I needed to call your mother.I was on my way to the airport.I cried about you on the way home, but not much. I only let loose a single tear, as I lay on my side at Gate 42, waiting to go home in the night.I am glad to hear from you.
Aug 5 (1 day ago)
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8:52 PM (2 hours ago)
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– This is a very wide scope to me. I think that articulating – at least in a concise way – the way that my story has changed with the way I tell my story, what significance and meaning I might ascribe to particular events or attributes of this assemblage I call my life…well, it would be challenging. For me, what was clinically referred to as psychosis was very much an unraveling and imploding of previous central narratives of self, and a process of radically reframing my story as a response to what I was experiencing as untenable realities within my consensed upon reality as a walking talking ex-wife and mother with a traumatic mental health history. I have extensive notes on the evolution of my shift in narrative and worldview. It wasn’t just that my narrative about myself changed. The story of the world changed, too, and how I experienced that story/those stories was altered.
– One example, within which there are many other examples, was that I was consciously aware of the phenomena at work when my spiritual emergence and numinous salvation in a reclamation of myself as an artist (in the wake of a disappointing and painful life lived in appeal to the rubrics of normative intelligence and interests) was seen and treated as less a matter of my mad brilliance, my core vitality, rising up to explode the world with meaning and sense, awe-struck beauty, and more a matter of having “imbalanced chemicals” – a real serious problem, that required my pants to be pulled down by men, shots administered. I understood that there were many ways that the situation with me and my transformative crisis, the world inside me rising up, the way it manifested, with me doing art too much, and taking too many pictures of clouds, talking about postmodernism, and not caring so much about the pettiness of daily demands, with the world screaming and pleading, the sky exploding in my bones. I understood that it could be seen as crazy, that I was considered to be psychotic.That was a lens that I navigated through writing to myself, about precisely why it made total sense that I (and others) should experience such things, why it was not bizarre at all.Another example is that my experiences as a young person with atypical intelligence and sensory/social integration issues that was struggling were deemed to be a “mental illness” rather than, “Oh, a really smart, sensitive kid who has no idea what normal is or why she feels so different.”
– That’s 3 questions, all of which have complex answers. I wrote a lot of emails to myself, the universe arranged certain opportunities for perspective exploration and skill-building, luck. It just now occurred to me that the idea of feeling/believing that the universe (multiverse, metaverse) has aided me in these relational transitions, that there has been both luck and design involved, somewhat undermines my own sense of agency in my orientation to navigation. However, it would be arrogant of me to say that I forged the opportunities to reclaim myself by myself. I was lucky. I did a lot of work though. Wrote a lot of letters, to myself, to others.I still write letters. I am writing a letter right now. It is reminding me who I am.
– I feel things in my body, hear things, have strong visual discernment and field range. I get sensory overload and that impacts my experience. I don’t know what other people’s realities are, and so I don’t know the precise ways that my experiences may be non-normative, what the criteria for normative are. I seem to experience things differently than other people…I guess. I get the sense that I see things differently in an objective sense of spatial sensitivity, I hear small non-human noises, am unable to hear well and become agitated if there is too much human noise…I sometimes hear things, just points where the waves of sound converge to form patterns that sound like voices or singing or drums or crying or code.
– Double bookkeeping and mindfulness, as well as emotional regulation techniques, hope-not-fear orientation, and the concept that most anything can be anything and there are often multiple explanations have proved to be very helpful. Note taking helps me keep track of this mess of a story, to hold onto some thread, some reminder.I have a fragile narrative.
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11:09 PM (1 minute ago
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Hi –
I was trying to paint the kitchen wall and felt strongly that I should write you and _____ a letter, or that I wanted to write you and _____ a letter, that maybe it was important that I do so. I tried recording me speaking the intended content of the letter, but that did not go as I intended. There were many long stretches of silence.
I began to write the letter by email, but then it would be another long email.
I think I will write it on paper and send it. Would that be okay?
I am not sure how to say what I need to say anymore. Other times, I have been certain, and have said it plainly and with great conviction. However, I find myself believing that if I am able to tell you why it is I think that I happened to find myself at your home this morning, if I can explain…but, I don’t have to explain…
If I were ____ maybe I would pause abruptly, and then just be out with it:
“So, here’s this person, whose first home was a government-subsidized Carnegie mansion on an island where feral horses and burnt down buildings ruled the show, the bones of the dead in the water…and she didn’t know how to see correctly, everything except what was within her spinning arms range was blurred and furred at the edge. There were no clean lines.”
“This person, she was so daft in how she was that she had no idea that she could not speak correctly, and was confused when the people at the school explained that she could say her last name correctly, and hearing her mother say, ‘Yes, we know.'”
She had not known.
Today I sat on a porch, and I said, “If I had been born 20 years later…”
_____ interrupted, “Well, it would have been something different…some other…”
“Yeah, some other designation, some rigmarole.”
For a period of time, the demands of the work that had presented itself to me and the requirements of attention and time that intensive documentation and study of anything requires, my presentation and functionality within the expectations of my life and roles, c. consensus reality, led to significant concerns within my family. They had a right to be concerned. They also had a responsibility to be realistic about the situation, there I was, this person whose life had been so difficult already, not to indulge in difficulty or to create a narrative of struggle, when a narrative of privilege and blessing would be just as true, but this person, who was a kid, who couldn’t talk, who fell hard on Christmas Day at age 6, and almost died, who was in all those hospitals, who had pins in her arm, who stuck needles in her skin, swallowed all those pills, made that cut, had fought through so many days of wanting to die, from such a young age, this person who used to be a genius…this person who had gone to such lengths, trying to stay alive, who’d been friends with ghosts for her whole life…and this scenario in which this person, who learned how to swim in the salt marsh rivers and grew up living in a glass geodesic dome house designed and built by her father, and who had memorized the words to punk rock lyrics because they told the truth, and lost her mind so many damn times, was on medication her entire adolescence…and then she had this crisis, this marriage, the children whom she loves and who love her, for whom she will never die…and then the marriage turned cruel and the children were crying and, finally, after the loss of a dog who was likely a saint, they – too – would be taken from me.
It was a very traumatic time. It made perfect sense that I – of all people – would finally just explode and crumble.
I kept notes. I was drawing a picture everyday for a year, and then a series of events, both internal and external, physical and metaphysical, resulted in me losing my mind in a particularly transformative way and coming upon a specific knowledge. I think I might have died. I don’t know.
I do know that when ____ sat on the porch and said that his life was involved with beings, in another dimension, well…I understood that…they move in forces, are also here, in this world. They are not separate.
To me this does not seem insane.
I am a high-school dropout, ex-psych patient, activist,
[message truncated, due to life interruption]
