so long, and thanks for all the fish

getting into contact with my younger self/selves through EMDR has been thoroughly revealing. it's so wild to have 20-year-old emotions wake back up in a safe environment... teenage me was so righteously angry all the time, but never felt safe enough to express those feelings in a healthy way before. having the power to engage with myself and my emotions through immersive visualization is indescribable; I wish everyone had the access to this sort of therapy

they are tagged with "LGBTQ+" and "Transgender" so honestly I'm surprised I haven't come across them on PsychologyToday before now. might have even sought them out for help, if not for the fact that we would DEFINITELY recognize each other and that's a no-no in therapeutic relationships lmao. fuckin good for them though, I'm so glad they're out there helping other folks like us who need it!!

I've been wanting to try out Bob Ross-style landscape painting for years, but never got around to it for various reasons (impostor syndrome, executive dysfunction, neurodivergence in general). and then last year I wound up in a mental health crisis service unit for a week, and one morning, our group therapy was an art therapy practice where we each got an 8"x10" canvas board and were told to paint our "safe space."

whenever I close my eyes and try to picture a time and place when I was most at peace, I think of the sort of mountainous lakeside campground that I used to spend my summers as a church youth at, where the air is fresh with pine and recent rainfall and the surface of the lake is disturbed only by an occasional breeze or the ripple of a fish coming up to eat a bug. so I painted the lakeside from the site my family went camping at this year, where I had spent several minutes at the water's edge meditating on the transient nature of ripples in the water. like I mentioned, it's the first landscape I've ever painted, but I've watched so many episodes of The Joy of Painting that I felt myself channeling the man himself as I laid brush to canvas that morning. I still feel a profound sense of calm when I look at it, and I use it for reference when I'm returning to my "safe space" at the end of trauma therapy each week.

anyway, I'm really fuckin proud of it. personally I think it fucks severely and the next landscape I paint will be even better. I hope y'all enjoy me sharing this with you.

this is what I get for picking and peeling it off the last time I painted them lmao. I know better than to literally pull layers of healthy keratin off my nails, but nevertheless my obsessive-compulsive tendencies persisted

just gonna have to suck it up and have short painted nails at some point this week or next, since it's looking like I won't be able to grow them out any longer for a while otherwise. the nice thing is, I've taken such good care of my nails over the past 3-ish years that they don't give me weird hand dysmorphia anymore when I paint them short. why have I, a transmasc, historically had weird dysphoria around having short painted nails even into my transition? couldn't fuckin tell you, and yet here we are