iveymakesart

[iveymakesart]

legends 

[iveymakesart]

[iveymakesart]

Everyday I try to explain just how painful it is to be alive and how hard it is have to try to even feel a little bit ok and even somewhat normal and functioning and the first reaction I get from anyone listening is how I can take steps to make everyone around me less uncomfortable like this is a temporary experience I’m having. It’s been almost a decade I have felt this way and all I’ve gotten is apathy and tips on how to shut the fuck up.

So fuck it: if I ask for help if I extend my hand and get empty air in return I’ll just act however I want then. I take the supplements I do the routines I clean and I groom and engage my mind and I reach out to whoever will listen and stick around and it hasn’t worked out. Everything else is trapped behind a paywall I have been locked out of since birth. So who really gives a shit how considerate I am as I go up in flames over and over again in front of your face.

Fuck I’m so done.

[iveymakesart]

Yesterday I almost cried because my baby cousin ran up to my grandmother and was like. “Ha! Buhbuh ba ha.” And she said okay you want to show me something? And he led her over to the garden patch and crouched down and pointed at rocks and plants and was like. “Ah. Habah ba ah” as she listened attentively.

And I was like that happened 1,000 years ago. Probably 10,000 years ago. Maybe 100,000. The youngest human in a group went to the oldest one and said to the best of their ability “come see.” And the adult went.

[iveymakesart]

Advice I gave someone today was: 'do it stupid.'

She wants to learn photography. Do it stupid. Take a million photos. Don't think about why they're not good. Enjoy the process of taking photos.

Pick out tge ones you like the most and figure out why you like them. Is it because the subject is centered? Is it because you caught them doing something cool? Is it because the light made cool shadows?

Do it stupid. If you try to do it smart, youll get stuck. If you think too much you'll never get to doing. Do it stupid.

[iveymakesart]

[iveymakesart]

i wish i was a cishet guy so that i could start a podcast and go to the gym and allow that to fulfill me spiritually. but instead i have these visions

[iveymakesart]

how do draw good

fill 14 sketch book

bad stuff is good stuff bc you made stuff

do you like sparkle???? draw sparkle

draw what make your heart do the smiley emote

member to drink lotsa agua or else bad time

d ont stress friend all is well

your art is hot like potato crisps

don’t let anyone piss on your good mood amigo

if they do

eat

them

[iveymakesart]

[iveymakesart]

[iveymakesart]

[iveymakesart]

[iveymakesart]

[iveymakesart]

When I was a kid, we moved into a house that had a huge lilac tree out front. It was mostly rotten, and it needed to be taken down before it fell. It took a while, but eventually, it was gone.

Mostly. A couple years later, little lilac babies popped out of the ground in its place. My mom was determined to get rid of them, because she'd planted a beautiful flower garden there, and the lilac trees would overshadow and kill the whole garden. I insisted on saving at least a few saplings. She said fine, but I had to dig them out and put them in pots myself.

So, I did. I spent days digging little lilac bushes out of the ground and putting them into pots. Some couldn't be saved, but some could. When all was said and done, I had five brand-new lilac saplings. Seven or eight years old, and it was my absolute pride and joy.

Three died due to sun scorching, severe drought that no amount of watering could save, and perhaps just being moved from their place in the ground. But two survived, and I was awfully proud of them! I'd go out and talk to them every single day. I watered them by hand and made sure they were fertilized properly. I learned all about their favored environments, and I was determined to make sure they lived.

One of my mom's friends saw what I was doing with the lilacs. She asked if she could have one to put in her backyard, and I agreed on the condition that she take very, very good care of it.

It's now fucking enormous. I'm talking ten feet tall and bursting with beautiful purple flowers every spring. My mom still gets updates each year as they start to bloom, which she forwards to me. And all I can think is, "That's my friend! Thriving some twenty years on, there it is."

The other tree nearly died, too. It lived in a pot for far, far too long. I wanted to plant it somewhere in my parents' yard, but my mom was reluctant. Eventually, we agreed to put it in the far back garden. It grew okay for many years, despite the shade, but in all these years, it's never bloomed.

Last year, the massive tree casting massive shadows over the lilac and the garden cracked in half and fell. It tumbled into the garden, crushing part of the nearby shed and destroying a few plants beneath it.

It missed my lilac by inches.

The clean-up is long done. The rest of the tree has been cut down, and my lilac has full sunlight for the first time in fifteen years. It won't bloom this year, I know. But it's got new shoots up. It's taller than ever. I spent half an hour a few weeks ago praising it for surviving all this time, dreaming about its future and telling it how I believe it'll become the tall beauty it's always been meant to be.

I think next year, I'll see flowers.

[iveymakesart]

Trump is the most dangerous piece of shit you've ever seen.

[iveymakesart]

[iveymakesart]

I was also technically homeless as a kid. My family doesn’t like to phrase it like that but I keep calling it homelessness because we don’t have a home. For like six months after my dad let our mortgage lapse and go into foreclosure during the 2008 housing crisis due to his drug use and siphoning all his money to his side piece, my mom, my sisters, and I all had to pick up our whole house and move in with my moms best friend and her own nuclear family complete with a family dog. The house was nice and we never went hungry but a lot of people looked at us funny. My mom found a new job and my older sister who was only like 12 hunted online for a rental within our price range. And it’s not even like my mom was a waitress or retail worker she had just earned her masters degree and had a wide and influential network of people. She was working two office jobs. By all means she seemed like a put together and professional person and homelessness still affected her and her children. It was a short spurt of instability that has followed me my whole life and has affected how I view money and housing deeply. If it weren’t for the selflessness of our friend who opened her doors for us we totally would have been living in a motel or a van or something. We had no place to go and happened to have a great loving friend. We were lucky and it was still a shock to my 10 year old mind. It’s a landmark in my memory and I use it as context for a lot of my childhood / teen hood events. Homelessness affects more people than you know. My mom has always made a big deal of “appearing” better off than we are so when I told people they thought I was exaggerating. We’re educated and seem to have it together on the outside but at any moment I know it could happen again to anyone. Most people don’t have a great savings account I know I don’t. One major life event or natural disaster could swing your world into chaos scrambling to find a roof over your head. So… have grace is all I’m saying you never know what’s going on in peoples lives.

Me: I guess I was technically homeless for awhile as a kid, but we weren't, like, really homeless? After we got evicted from our rental house, we had to stay in a small industrial warehouse that was being rented for storage by some family friends. Like, it sucked, and I wasn't allowed to go outside, and it was a huge secret I had to keep from everyone at school because my parents were terrified I'd be taken away by CPS, and if the cops or property owner had found us we definitely would have been in trouble, but, like. We had a roof over our heads. Does that count as homeless? I dunno.

My friends who have genuinely never been homeless, ever: ....that is not normal, holy shit!?!?!?!?!

Me: ...okay so I guess I was homeless, then.

Anyway, this is a reminder that homelessness encompasses more than just "lives in a box under an overpass." Like, yes, that is definitely a real experience with homelessness, but it isn't the only one. Homelessness can look like couch surfing, living in your car, living illegally in a rented storage unit, living in a tent at a campground, living in a motel room, or any number of other things.

(Also, impostor syndrome around homelessness is just about the weirdest feeling in the world, tbh. The "was I suffering enough to say I was suffering?" thoughts are eternal.)