a project to better myself

A collection of digital art, paint, sketches, collage, photography and my words: a way to track progress, a way to cope. Hailey-21- •disclaimer: most of the art is of copy i take no credit unless stated otherwise•

[goldensprout]

I've been in a longterm toxic relationship that has isolated me and has brought me to a place where i dont know who i am any more. i dont feel real without them. ive lost connections with others ive lost nearly everything. they are in the shape of bottles, cans, fuzzy months and years of drowning myself in them. ive spent time, and every cent on being able to be with them. addiction comes in many forms and mine is in losing myself any chance i get. those who know me like this loss. i am fun. dancing and full of life. but i am mainly full on vodka or anything that is there. this addiction shows people a light in me that is simultaneously diming my life light, my heart light. i am in pain and the only ease is this relationship with addiction that fills me and empties me. the addiction stays and people always leave. as they should. i am full of toxins, physically and mentally.

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[goldensprout]

Notes to a survivor

You may feel like laughter is lost

but joy will find you and you must

hold on

to the small victories of beauty

life is still offering.

Like amber light dancing

on the walls of your room

you might not want to leave.

Find those who you find comfort

in with just their presence

and know that we are all trying to get through.

Grow together, help each other hold

on to the strength that pumps your heart

forward.

Yes, there are bad days that are bad

months or years

and the heaviness of experience

might make you feel it would be so easy to

drown.

We all end up survivors in this life and know that you will exceed your own expectations

in becoming far more than whatever

unworthiness anyone has put on your shoulders.

Resilience is grown through darkness

and let me tell you how god damn beautiful

you look in the light you bring to this world.

Stay because you are not a victim of a label stamped in long term memory

you are a self preserving creation made to make a difference.

Talking about it is the foundation of healing so

throw up your survivor story

until it is no longer a curdle in pit of your stomach.

Those that are meant to listen

wont pity or judge or feel burdened,

I don’t believe people exist to connect without lack of purpose.

Connections are everything we must hold on to.

Dear survivor,

I hear you, I believe in you, you are valid

and I love you.

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“I’ve been trying to go home my whole life—”

Chelsea Dingman, from “Psychogeography,” published in The Los Angeles Review

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I am as much alive as I am dead. 

I have lived far too many lives to not be in an in between,

to not endure more than i should,

to not feel a thing

and everything as much as I do.

If only I knew what it was I did

for this life time to be so heavy

and arduous and

spiteful.

I try to be kind;

selfless, humble.

but what karma makes this

existence a grey scale when I feel as though

I see colors that don't exist.

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I’m dangerous;      there’s little left               inside this body — that hasn’t wanted      not to subtract               from the world.

Eloisa Amezcua, from “Self-Portrait,” published in The New York Times Magazine

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i want to tell you i love you. i want to say it with every breath that i take. it is just like how i always need you to kiss me first. i need to know that this truth, that i love you i love you i love you, will be want you want. but my god the only truth i know is that my whole heart is yours.

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I’ve cried, and you’d think I’d be better for it, but the sadness just sleeps, and it stays in my spine the rest of my life.

Conor Oberst 

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i seek

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i wish ive never met anyone in my whole life. i wish i were born in a house and never left. not once father than the surrounding grass. never let people effects me as they do. never experiencing this amount of trauma. never feeling things from different lives. everything i feel, i wish i were never capable of feeling. above all i wish my last life was the last. there's a raft that I'm forever trying to get to. a lifetime of drowning. when will i be free?

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My soul-silence too is architecture;

Paul Valéry, tr. by Derek Mahon, from “The Seaside  Cemetery,”

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I hunger for the me with all of the feelings and then some

for you.

i wish i were buck wild

with feelings and i could reciprocate as you need.

don't get me wrong, anything i feel

is for you.

but that is only best when fire erupts when finger tips

and lips meet

and not when you say

is it fine?

we are opposites

but in the way magnets

can not help but gravitate toward each other.

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“It haunts in silence, this ghost of loneliness.”

— Greg Sellers, journal entry, “Notes from Neruda’s Ghost,” 21 October 2018

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often i feel that there are numerous sides of me,

many not fully expressed.

i feel an endless potential to be many things

mostly to create and

create.

constant beauty.

I need to protect

to teach and nurture

those who are already in the world

fending for themselves.

A side, a mother.

i hurt at the guilt i would feel bringing another form of my dna

into this harsh fucking world.

but, what i would give to hold something

that is home.

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“(…)the violence of a last goodbye.”

— Simone De Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed