Sticking Around

painting, The Work, being alive

I haven’t felt much like writing…..for, well, a long time. I did so much writing and blah blah blahing and talking for a couple years there and it’s been so nice to enter a public semi-dormant stage and just live and chill and heal and continue the slow, prodding, hardest, and best work of trying to be a content human.

I’m still me, of course, so I’ve been doing a ton of journaling — scraps and fragments of ideas; very personal stuff and deep cut memories that I am low key afraid of exploring even by or for myself; numbered lists of Things That Happened; doodles and tiny maps of places I’ve been and feelings I have.

I am finding continued solace and joy in watercolor painting — I started painting flowers back in January of 2023, then got into landscapes, and now I have found a very niche hobby of painting portraits of NBA basketball players. Who knew? I definitely did not.

I love painting these portraits because it feels very specific, small-scale, and human. I look at pictures of people, I read wikipedia entires about their families and their background, I look at pictures and consider their many hairstyles over the years, I read their year and career stat lines, I get really into their injury histories and how they have come back, whether they pivoted their game and developed new skills because they can’t go back to who they once were. (See, who needs me? The metaphors, they write themselves!)