serenafromoculis

[serenafromoculis]

[serenafromoculis]

college kicked my ass for six months but i might put something clever in here again soon. be on the lookout

[serenafromoculis]

My Shadow Walks Forth Without Asking

Alternatively: The Power of Hope and Proper Medical Treatment

I've been depressed for most of what I can remember. Not most of my life, mind you, but I don't remember much before the depression. The point is that my memory has been tinted by a medically untreated shade of grey, not helped by the force with which the little colour I could actually see was remorselessly crushed and flattened back to a textureless sheet of emotional white; blinding light with nothing to say.

Amidst this monotonous world that offered me little I could grasp without simultaneously losing, I would often shut my eyes. During important times, in important spaces, it mattered little; all was just white cubes to me. With my eyes shut, I saw the darkness, and in it, I could see countless colours dancing to the beat of my heart. The colours showed me worlds I didn't know, they showed me emotions I couldn't feel, and they beckoned me closer, for every step I took towards them was a step away from the featureless plane of white squares I inhabited, and every moment I spent thinking about them was a moment in which their colours were a little more intense than the moment before.

I've been medicated for Major Depressive Disorder for almost two years now. During that time, I came to learn a few things, like what it was like to have strangers be nice to me, and what it was like to feel emotions inside of myself again. I can't say I'm non-depressed, as I don't think the experience of depression nor its blinding white abyss are guaranteed to be gone forever from my life, however I do think I can say I am in a state of recovery. And it is that recovery which awards me the hindsight required to properly discern the thoughts of the mentally ill teenager I used to be.

I rest in bed today, with a lot of work to be done, while also having done a surprising amount of work unrelated to the work I actually urgently need to do. Treatment for a particular mental disability I have very mixed feelings about has helped me recover my productivity, but the anxiety of having to actually get back to speed gets to me a little. I'm ready to have a really intense week.

Regardless, after finishing up some things regarding the work I actually did, I started thinking, trying to understand my own behaviour and instincts. It is then that a thought came to me.

A thought of shut eyes, colours dancing, and a world full of pure nothingness waiting for me when I reopened them.

And then I looked at the shadows on my computer screen.

I looked at my colours, I looked at my spirit. I looked at my creation.

The shadow was in front of me, and I had my eyes wide open in front of it. My shadow.

And, for a moment, I couldn't believe it wasn't being crushed into a blank sheet.

The hopes I had, the hopes that pulled me out of the world of white cubes and got me calling it "depression", recognising it for the first time...

Those hopes pulled, and pulled, and pulled. My shadow, the host of my very being, kept walking, and walking, and walking, until the day where I can almost say that I know what I'm doing, where I am working on my own projects and ideas. It saw the world of dark, colours dancing within it, and ran so fast that I had to sprint to catch up.

And only now I realise...

It never even bothered to ask.

The rotting world of white cubes and the world of shapes and colours do not even dare acknowledge one another, they exist in almost complete independence. And just like the blinding lights didn't ask if I wanted my life made worse, the dark didn't ask if I wanted it made better.

I just came out of the light, and I've been trying to catch up with my shadow ever since.

I don't really have a grand conclusion to this, just a swift comment:

It is, admittedly, quite tiresome to follow a sprinting shadow further and further back into the dark. I probably need to put in a little more effort to manage it.

That's all.

Thanks for reading.

oculis

[serenafromoculis]

I was probably getting to a point with this, but it's been so long that I no longer remember.

[serenafromoculis]

[serenafromoculis]

One important component of what art and the artistic process means to me, I believe, is the desire to feel like I can be understood and accompanied by some sort of... Entity. Even if my troubles are still alien and difficult to explain to those who surround me.

Oftentimes I feel like the only way I can express how I feel is not by talking about my emotions, but by recreating their context through art and analysing it. In a way, it's representative of my way of thinking (which I'm told is idiosyncratic), where reason and emotion aren't really things you can separate from one another, and where every science is a form of art.

I wish it was less lonely being me, is all.

Thanks for reading.

oculis

[serenafromoculis]

Recently (read: about 2 minutes ago) I discovered something that probably really made someone else happy and that for certain suplexed my mood into the floor with the force of a thousand suns and then just kept punching like a fucking nuclear explosion, and I realised something: a lot of the art I make comes from a question fundamental to my entire life. That is...

When is my turn to be happy?

At what point have I fought enough? At what point am I strong enough? At what point does my survival deserve to be recognised, or appreciated, or at the very least looked upon in a positive light by anyone willing to tell me I did a good job and show me human affection?

For my characters, the answer tends to be a realistic one, "I don't know, but it'll probably help if you get your problems sorted out first".

But, for me, oftentimes the answer seems to be... Never. Enjoy being Sisyphus incarnate, you broken shell of a woman.

And, I'm only left to wonder...

Can I make art about this very thing too?

The answer, as with every time I ask this question, is yes. But I'm curious how I should go about doing it.

That's all.

oculis

[serenafromoculis]

One thing I find is not discussed in explicit enough terms, perhaps due to how abstract and subjective a subject it is, is the all-consuming force of art and the way it assimilates people into itself. Being an artist is like having eldritch knowledge bestowed upon you and I'm not even joking about this. The endless pursuit of creative exploration, of decyphering the abstract concepts floating in your mind and urging to be communicated is one that slowly absorbs more and more of your soul into itself until you stop doing it for long enough that it rots away on its own or until it takes over your entire life and defines you as a person every minute of your life, and still begs for more, unsatisfied. I'm not trying to wax poetic about this or anything, I mean literally that there's a line I'm crossing where every day I become physically less capable of incorporating artistic interpretation or my own form of idiosyncratic abstraction into the things I witness on my everyday life. I wouldn't call it dangerous, I think it is one of the most marvelous things to ever exist, but like, holy fuck does it consume everything. Being an artist is less of a choice and more of a natural result of events guiding you down a certain path and making you unable to do anything *but* art, fashioning your body into a medium for the manifestation of a bunch of weird-ass abstract shit coming from the deepest pits of the universe and eternally echoing in your mind.

It is possible to survive this, but not unaltered.

oculis

[serenafromoculis]

Regarding self-doubt

I am pretty sure I am not even within the first billion people throughout this week to say that being an artist involves constantly doubting one's own ability to do... Anything. I am also pretty sure I am not the only person who's turned to look at their own work on ocassion and felt so viscerally frustrated that they find no choice left other than to cave in to self-loathing. "I'm a sack of shit", "I am going to starve to death", "My ex might have been abusive but she was the only one who truly loved me", etcetera, ad infinitum. This can suck, not only because it makes you feel like wet ass, but also (and more importantly) because it stops you from creating your delicious Art Soup!

Now, this is where this post gets personal: I have personally found a way to deal with this feeling, as of late, and it's a weird one. This might not work on everyone (that's the preface to basically all artist advice to ever exist), but I have immense amounts of spite for those who have wronged me and just about enough self worth for it to work on me. This technique is...

Externalising Self Hatred

What I mean by this is, remember when your abusive father told you that he wished you'd have been a phycisist? Remember when your friends looked at your drawings and ripped directly into your artstyle? Remember when some guy on the internet commented "looks like shit" after you posted something and refused to elaborate?

Maybe the specifics here are a bit personal to me. But I'm sure that, in a broad sense, most artists have had experiences like this. And I also want to clarify what I mean by this: I'm not talking about the time you got legitimate criticism. I'm not talking about the time someone saw a thing you wrote and told you how it could work better, so you tried it and your artistic vision felt even more realised than before. I'm not even talking about the time you heard something about your art that got you into a literal mental breakdown, but which implementing afterwards demonstrably helped you. I'm talking about the time Some Guy with no knowledge or curiosity regarding your artistic vision and with a knack for "constructive criticism" shat on you in a way you either immediately or afterwards came to realise was total horseshit. I'm talking about the time a friend said something hurtful and apologised afterwards because they realised it was unfounded. I'm talking about the time someone acted like your father.

Every time you feel the self hatred coming alone, every time your thoughts start diverting themselves from "I'll rewrite these past few sentences, I'll clean up these variables to make it run better" and becoming "I am a sack of shit and I deserve nothing but immediate death", every time your thoughts take the path that makes you feel like maybe you should have never made anything in the first place, imagine that rando who commented on your art saying it. Imagine someone else saying it to you, instead of you saying it to yourself. And, again, maybe this won't work on you, but I value my own opinions on my artistic vision extremely highly, and if someone came to me and told me some of the things major depressive disorder tells me, I would not be hurt, I would be LIVID; angrily defending my artistic vision and telling them not to critique me again until they were actually aware of what it was that I was trying to do.

Now, this is what works for me, but I genuinely do believe that in general, looking at your own gripes with yourself, artistic or not, from a different perspective than you usually hold is one of the key parts of actually realising what things you should keep in mind and get better at and what things are just mindless slop that you're better off dealing away with. Presenting perspectives to your brain as coming from the outside is really helpful because it forces you to scrutinise them and to check if they actually hold any substance or not.

That's it. Thanks for reading.

oculis

[serenafromoculis]

So. Another sideblog.

Hi. I'm Serena. You might know me from viral hits such as "Michael Quest" or "other shit". While it may seem at first glance that I dedicate all my time to nothing productive, that is actually true, but the "productive" stuff I'm supposed to be doing is art.

Here, I'll just post... Whatever comes to mind regarding specifically that process of making art. What it means to me, how I go about living with terminal artist disorder, and things I find help with it. Consider this, also, the main place to contact me not about me or my art, but just Being an Artist in general.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy whatever's to come next.