Today was better than yesterday

Yesterday I had an anxiety attack at two in the morning and had to go rant in Rachel’s room until I calmed down. “This is hard,” she said. It is. I think somewhere I thought it was going to be easy, easier than working a deadening office job all week. I was wrong. I could do that even as a corpse. I was miserable, and that was painful, but I don’t know if it was hard. It certainly didn’t take any effort to maintain.

The source of the anxiety attack was the failed glass painting, only 2″ x 3″, that I had been working on all night, sometimes wiping away after having finished the entire thing (glass is handy in that way, and only in that way). There are started projects littering my studio and my computer desktop. I thought by this point, I was going to have something finished. But glass is more difficult than I expected, and I have spent so much time just playing with it, and everything so far seems to be shaping up that way.

“What if I have nothing to show for myself at the end of this experience?” I asked Rachel. Is that possible? Or what if all I have to show for myself is a conclusion that this is not what I am supposed to be doing? I came here for some reassurance of myself as an artist. What if I leave having discovered that I am not one? What would I do in that situation? I can’t think of anything else that I could be.

“Things will look different in the morning,” said Rachel. And it’s true. I felt a little better this morning. I retired the glass painting that I was working on last night, accepted it for what it was– a study– and moved on. And the next one worked better. And it is finished. It is not perfect. The glass distorts the color of the paint in a way I haven’t quite figured out yet and there are still some issues with outlining. I also made some drawing mistakes and the perspective is a little screwy. But I learned a lot, and it has set the tone for the series that I now know can get done.

After I finished my painting, we ate leftovers from our awesome Eid celebration (yesterday was the end of Ramadan, so Derya cooked and we all exchanged presents). And then for the rest of the night we did this:

Glow in the dark bowling, Papa’s, grow animals. Today was definitely better.

This is almost too pretty to be a bowling alley: